CHAPTER 3
He got off the elevator a few floors above the ground, went out a window into an Itooti house literally glued to the skin of the building, and from there climbed up a rope to a power cable extending across the street. Arkad walked on the power cable, avoiding places where the insulation had peeled away, and hopped down onto the roof where it ended. From there it was a straightforward journey back to the South Shaft where he usually slept.
The South Shaft was a perfectly hexagonal pit about a hundred meters across. Nobody knew how deep it was because the air coming out was hot enough to scald unprotected skin. Supposedly there was something far down that glowed purple-white, but you needed a mirror to see it because you’d go blind if you looked directly at it. Small objects tossed into the shaft were lifted high over the city by the rising air; heavier things caught fire as they fell.
Pfifu had built heat exchangers all around the edge, and suspended turbines in the air flow, so that the neighborhood was full of workshops and the sound of power tools. All the surfaces near the shaft were covered with a thick spongy white growth which left powdery spores on Arkad’s hand when he touched it.
The area around the shaft was too busy to be safe for a lone sleeper, but there was a narrow dead-end alley leading off to the seaward side where the inhabitants didn’t usually mind Arkad as long as he stayed out of the way. He found a dry spot in front of the kite makers’ place, wrapped himself in his blanket, and tried to sleep.
But even though he was very full and very tired, Arkad was too excited to fall asleep. Finally, to calm himself, he pulled his book out of the blanket. The book was called WOL, and it was a plump, bright blue disk ten centimeters across covered with soft cuddly plush designed to be indestructible by any human infant. Two eyes and a stylized mouth made a simple face on one side. It could beam text and images directly into his eyes, or play audio.
WOL had taught Arkad languages, mathematics, science, and history, and it stored hundreds of text works, videos, music, and interactives. But WOL was dying, its memory slowly corrupting from physical abuse, ambient magnetic fields, and sheer age. Every time Arkad turned it on, the list of works available was shorter. He had started rationing it out to himself, going for two or three sleep cycles between taking it out again.
“WOL, tell me a story,” he told it.
“What story would you like to hear?” The book’s voice was soothing, androgynous.
“I don’t know, pick one.”
WOL’s voice changed to that of a long-dead professor. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit…” it began. Arkad listened to the very familiar words and felt himself starting to doze off. The story continued but WOL’s voice grew softer and softer until Arkad’s pulse and breathing told the little machine he was asleep. Arkad dreamed, as he often did, of his mother. In his dreams, he could never see her face.
He woke up a long time later with a stiff back and a full bladder. After stretching one and emptying the other, he considered the problem at hand. He needed to find the Rosetta, but all he really knew was that it was somewhere on Syavusa, and the more he thought about it, the bigger the planet seemed.
Arkad knew more about the city of Ayaviz than nine out of ten others—gossip, secrets, people and places. But he realized he had little understanding of how it really worked. He knew that cargo came down from space to the spaceport, and entered the city via the rail line, and eventually made its way out across the world by ship or road train. In the other direction, bioproducts, refined resources, and craftworks flowed through the city on their way up to ships in orbit. Somehow that all paid for Vziim to build towers and Pfifu to repair machines and Itooti to run grooming parlors and all the other myriad things people did in Ayaviz. The deals of Vziim and Itooti merchants had something to do with it, but beyond that he knew nothing.
Ayaviz had been his home for longer than he could remember, but now he found himself looking at it like a stranger. Suddenly it seemed very odd to build a city in and around ancient machines of unknown purpose, and odder still that four major species plus individuals or families from a dozen more could live and work there peacefully. Mostly peacefully, anyway.
When the sense of how big everything was became almost overwhelming, he climbed up to an elevated walkway that wound between towers. On a footbridge spanning the street where mechanics repaired broken vehicles, he stopped at a Pfifu vendor’s cart. The cart was a sphere on wheels, painted in a detailed globe of the planet. The bottom half was all black, except for the burner controls, but the top was a patchwork of bright blue ocean and continents in shades of brown and red, all lightly streaked with white clouds. Where the hemispheres met was a white fringe of ice cap, edged with lakes where it didn’t touch the sea.
Arkad spent some time peeling fruit for the vendor in exchange for a roasted sea crawler still in its shell, stuffed with fruit paste and ground seeds. The seeds made his mouth itch but he didn’t mind. While he ate, he looked at the globe cart.
Ayaviz was there, right at the easternmost boundary between light and dark hemispheres, the spot worn down to bare metal by too many pointing claws and tentacles. Northward, the coast stretched a thousand kilometers, following the boundary between light and dark, cut by wide estuaries. The land was boggy and the sunlight weak, but some determined Pfifu farmers struggled to raise slow-growing plants that concentrated sea salt for harvesting, and there were a couple of Itooti fishing colonies by the rivers.
To the south, the land passed between forest and sea, then curved westward into the sunlit side, becoming a mountainous peninsula dotted with mines and more fishing villages. The peninsula ended at a wide strait, and beyond that was the main continent which sprawled across most of the dayside of Syavusa.
The dayside land had three lobes surrounding a central larger land mass. Two lobes on the eastern side were separated by a long curving rift, and the third, far to the northwest, was almost separated from the main mass by a pair of shallow gulfs. Beyond the largest ocean, over on the southwestern side of the world, a smaller continent was half covered by ice.
Somewhere in that huge hemisphere was the Rosetta. If the city made Arkad feel small, the thought of the whole planet made him feel nonexistent.
He placed his hand on the warm metal hemisphere, covering half a continent with his fingers, and wondered what those places were like. There were other worlds, other painted carts in the heavens. If he wanted to see them, he couldn’t hide himself away here in Ayaviz.
He needed to talk to someone who had traveled a lot. He didn’t know any sailors—and lately some Pfifu toughs had been making it clear that they regarded the docks as their private preserve. That left tractor drivers; some of them roamed pretty far across the surface of Syavusa, and they traded stories with others. One of them might know something.
Arkad licked the inside of the shell clean and handed it back to the vendor, then let himself down from the walkway onto the roof of a repair shop and headed away from the sunlight.
The road trains usually assembled in the open plaza right in front of the rail terminus. It was not far from Aviiva’s tower. Arkad didn’t want the other humans to spot him, so he avoided the plaza and headed for one of the bathing-houses nearby.
Inside the bathing-house, the air was chokingly thick with steam and the eye-watering reek of cheap imitation plant essences. The interior of the house was a single large pool, with a walkway and lockers around the outer edge and a stage lit by reflected sunlight in the center. At the moment a nearly life-size puppet of a Vziim swayed and danced as it issued dire threats to a much smaller Pfifu puppet. The movements of the puppets made a set of complicated puns in Pfifu gesture language.
The audience were all submerged in the pool, with only their tentacles above the surface, watching the performance and sometimes making gestures that played off the dialog on stage. Occasionally one of them would wave to the snack vendor on the outer walkway, and she would drag her cart over and sell dried fruit or cured fish. She simply tossed the requested snacks into the water near the customer; there was a momentary maelstrom of tentacles, and the food was gone.
Arkad made his way around the walkway to the vendor. “You tell me where Hupepuh is.”
She pointed at one tentacle sticking out of the water, about a third of the way around the edge of the pool and close to the stage. Arkad couldn’t reach far enough to poke it, and he didn’t want to pay to enter the water, so he simply sat on the walkway with his back against a locker and waited.
He had come in about halfway through the puppet show, so the plot was a little hard to follow. A male Pfifu puppet formed a partnership with a female who apparently worked for the menacing Vziim. The partners opposed a lone female who seemed to be the heroine of the story, trying to turn others against her and making insulting remarks about her designs for advanced submarines.
But a wealthy partnership of older Pfifu eventually learned that the heroine had created the fastest and most efficient submarines, and hired her to construct one for them. She became their friend, though they also had dealings with her enemies, and seemed unaware of the feud.
The Vziim returned and flattered the older Pfifu by dances (which included a visual subtext which had the audience churning the water with their own gestures of amusement). The old Pfifu partners hired the Vziim’s allies to create a new submarine for them, and the Vziim in turn bullied the poor Pfifu heroine into helping them in secret.
The puppeteer could not show the actual submarine, of course, but instead showed the various characters reacting to the design. From their poses Arkad gathered that it was supposed to be both beautiful and technically sweet. However, the heroine’s enemies changed the design for egotistical reasons, and the heroine, in an elaborate tragic ending, blew up the batteries and destroyed both the sub and herself rather than allow it to be completed. The show ended with the older Pfifu partners taking on a new designer and telling him to create a submarine unlike any other.
Only when all the puppets had been brought out for a final display and the audience had waved vigorous approval did the show end and the bathers begin to emerge from the water. Hupepuh was one of the last, lingering to the end of the time he had paid for.
Arkad waylaid him as he opened his locker. As Hupepuh pulled on his shoes, his transparent tentacle protectors, and a warm wrap for his body, Arkad made his pitch. “You tell me if you want to gain some wealth.”
“No,” said Hupepuh, and with two tentacles, the old Pfifu gestured, “I am certain your promises are as insubstantial as wind-blown foam.”
“Some folk like me have come here, and they will pay a lot for a ride. If you tell me what I need to know, I will make sure they hire you.”
Hupepuh aimed three tentacle tips at Arkad, studying him from multiple angles. “Do not seek to cheat me, or I will thrash you like great waves breaking a rocky cliff,” he gestured with his free tentacle. “You tell me where they wish to go.”
Arkad spoke casually, not trying to seem secretive. Just business as usual. “They can tell you that. I need to know if you have heard of a space ship which came down on this world, some four eights and six more years past.”
“I saw a ship crash once, out on the ice near the port,” said Hupepuh, and gestured, “It dove, rose on a wake of fire, then tumbled and fell. The fire slashed the ice like a blade, and then the ship exploded like sunrise in the perpetual night.”
“You tell me how long past that was,” asked Arkad, feeling a little queasy. If the Rosetta had blown up, there was nothing to offer Jacob and Ree.
“It was when I still had a job at the gas mine. Eight and six more years in the past.” He accompanied this with a sad gesture. “I was strong and brave then, and my partners were quick and clever. We had plans as grand as the galaxy.”
Fourteen years was too recent. “You tell me if you know of more that were more in the past than that.”
“I did not fill my brain with such things,” the Pfifu driver said, and gestured, “I should have gained an anchor of knowledge, but instead I let myself drift with the currents of idle pleasure until my partners were lost to me.”
The conversation was turning a bit too maudlin for Arkad. “You tell me who might know that thing.”
“The AaaAa know all,” said Hupepuh, and gestured, “Their brains are as vast and rich as oceans.”
“You tell me if you drive a train south soon. I can get you good pay to let me and three of my folk ride.”
“I wait for a load to come by rail. It should come in two or three eights of hours. Then I head out,” Hupepuh said. “I swim endlessly against the current of toil just to stay off the deadly reef.”
“Four like me will pay to ride with you.”
“Tell me how much you pay,” he said, while gesturing, “In the treacherous waters I see a rich bed of sea plants.”
Arkad held up his most valuable possession: a centimeter of thick silver wire. “Seven eights like this.”
“More,” Hupepuh said. “If I am to brave strong currents I need a strong line; pay me eight eights and two more eights of that.”
“Eight eights,” said Arkad. There was a long silence and then he said, “Eight eights and four.”
Hupepuh waited for a few seconds and then gestured, “I must snatch up any swimming prey, even if it is not as fat as I would wish.”
“All of us must,” Arkad agreed, then went out of the bathing theater. He decided to check for any messages from the visiting humans.
The red stone slab stood balanced on end in the middle of the street behind the terminal. It was a good five meters high and three meters wide, and more than a meter thick—which was why nobody had ever moved it out of the street. The slab looked as if it had once been part of some building, though nobody remembered what it had been or who had built it. The stone was from someplace far off to the west, and had been cut into an elongated hexagon shape and polished glassy smooth. Time had broken away the corners and covered the smooth surface with a patina of scratches, and on the bottom half, it was coated with layers upon layers of graffiti.
Arkad recognized the lines and crosshatches of Vziim ideograms, the swirls and curves of Pfifu script, and the colored dots of Itooti writing. Here and there he could see writing he didn’t recognize. Some long-ago alien visitor had used a cutting device to inscribe a meter-long symbol with lots of branches, crossed by shorter lines of varying lengths; the lines were only a millimeter wide but at least ten centimeters deep. Another had marked the stone on the darker side with a glowing spiral of tiny polygons that somehow shone through all the layers of paint and charcoal on top of them.
But nowhere did he see any of the characters he had learned from WOL. He felt both relief and disappointment. Had the other humans decided not to take him with them after all? Or had something happened to them? Maybe he should go check on them.
About fifty meters past the slab he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. A familiar-looking pale cloaked figure was keeping pace with him, staying at the edge of the street. He slowed, and turned into a side passage. He made a couple of turns and then stopped to wait. She appeared a moment later.
“Why are you following me?” he asked her.
She was silent for several seconds before replying, then said, “Jacob asked me to watch the stone and report if I saw you.”
Arkad reached up and pushed back the hood of her cloak. She didn’t blink, Arkad realized. Her all-black eyes remained open all the time. He wondered briefly if she closed them when she slept, and then he wondered if she just stayed awake all the time the way Pfifu did.
“I was just checking. Would you like me to show you around the city?” he asked on a sudden impulse.
“Yes,” she said.
So he led her on a meandering path westward across town, generally heading for the harbor. Along the way he tried to think of things that an offworlder might find interesting. “That is the place where the Vziim burn their dead,” he announced as they passed one of the few open plazas in the city. “They keep the bodies until they are dry and then make a big fire of corpses. It angers the Psthao-psthao because they cannot steal them. That tower over there is controlled by a syndicate of Pfifu; they took it from the Vziim who built it by force of arms and the others didn’t intervene. Those cables overhead used to carry cargoes all over the city but gangs of Itooti began robbing the cable cars and so it was abandoned. That shaft leads to the deepest levels.”
“Where do you live?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “Everywhere,” he said. “I like to sleep by the South Shaft because it’s warm. If it rains I have to go down to the lower levels but I don’t like that. Sometimes I trade work for a place to sleep. When I can’t do that, I stay with one of my friends.”
He pointed across the street they were following. “That building shaped like a big sea creature over there is a school where Pfifu learn arts and tech. There’s a rival school in Veva’s tower, and sometimes they play elaborate pranks on each other. Last year a group secretly put power jacks under the building and raised it up ten meters.”
“Who are your friends?” Baichi asked him.
“There’s Zvev, she’s a Vziim. She says her mother and aunts were once powerful matriarchs who had three towers, but some of her relatives murdered them and took over. She’s working on a plan to reclaim her rightful property. Tiatatoo is an Itooti. I’ve known him since he was born. Fuee is a Pfifu; Zvev found him. He doesn’t talk about his family.”
“What do you remember about your family?”
“My mother died,” he said. “Hey, come on up here. You’ll like this.” He climbed up a rope, entered a tower five levels up, and the two of them used the hand-cranked elevator to go up to the roof, ten floors higher. He emerged onto the open roof and looked up at the spire across the street, which loomed twice as tall. There was a crane on top of it, operated by a Pfifu in a transparent bubble.
Arkad used two fingers in his mouth to make a piercing whistle, then gestured with his arms. “Sometimes when he’s not busy, old Pippeef will give people a ride.”
They were in luck: the two-meter steel ring at the end of the quadruple cable swung down to the roof where they stood, and Arkad caught it. The massive ring dragged him halfway across the roof before he could halt it. “Come on!” He seated himself inside the ring and wrapped his arms and legs around it.
Baichi joined him, squeezing in beside him back to back and taking the ring in one hand.
“Hold on as tight as you can!” said Arkad. A moment later the hoist lifted them up and swung out over the city as Pippeef rotated the crane. The steel ring in which they sat flew out, pivoting from side to side; as it did so, they saw sky and then buildings below and then sky again.
Arkad loved the mix of feelings riding the ring gave him. There was fear, of course, but it was also exhilarating, as if he had wings like an Itooti and could fly over Ayaviz. Young Pfifu enjoyed riding the ring, too, but Vziim loathed it. He risked a glance over his shoulder at Baichi and saw that she was sitting still with her cloak flapping about her, perfectly composed as if she was in a chair on the ground.
But she was smiling. Arkad grinned at her and let out a whoop. She answered with a loud shriek of her own, and then the two of them screamed together as Pippeef brought the crane to a halt and then reversed it, so that for a moment the end of the hoist whipped out almost horizontally before beginning the big swing back. It snapped out again in the other direction when the crane stopped, and then the two of them hung on through a steadily diminishing series of swings until the ring was moving slowly enough that they could jump off and roll to a halt on the roof.
Arkad lay sprawled on the roof, laughing, then got up and had to rewrap his blanket around himself. After sitting on the cold ring and being swung through chilly air, he needed the warmth. Baichi watched him, showing no expression as usual.
“You are healthy,” she said at last. “How do you get food?”
“I do jobs for people, I pick up scraps, I find stuff I can trade. Sometimes I catch animals.”
“How do you know what is safe to eat?”
“I try new things and find out if they make me sick. Most foods are all right if you cook them enough. My book helps me remember what is safe.”
“And there are no diseases you can catch here,” she said.
“There are some. My mother and I both got sick with something, and she died. I don’t know if it was a disease or something we ate. When the wind comes from the south, I get yellow circles on my skin. They itch like mad and then flake off. Pfifu get it, too, sometimes.”
“I know a cure for that,” she said. “Come back to the room.”
He followed her back to Aviiva’s tower, curious about how she would treat the yellow patches. He could dimly remember having a tube of ointment for cuts and scrapes during the year after his mother’s death; he had used it up while learning how to get around the city on his own.
They used the upstairs cable to sneak into the tower, and she led him to the room the humans shared. Jacob and Ree were surprised to see him, but Baichi cut off their greetings by handing Arkad a brush and a cake of something white that smelled like plants. “Wash,” she said.
Arkad did so, peeling off his blanket without a trace of self-consciousness. Baichi even heated some water for him, which was a wonderful sensation when he rinsed with it. Jacob watched the whole proceeding with amusement, but Ree seemed a little shocked for some reason.
She did pick up Arkad’s blanket and gave it a sniff, then winced. “There’s absolutely no point in getting him all cleaned up and then letting him put this on again. And those horrible layers of garbage he’s been wrapping around his feet are even worse. We have to find some clothing for the boy.”
“I can’t give that up,” said Arkad. “It has all my things in it.”
“New clothes will have to wait,” said Jacob. “We still don’t know where we’ll be going.”
Ree wasn’t willing to give up completely. “Well, even if he can’t give up that nasty blanket, we’ve got to do something about that stuff on his feet!”
“Mmm. His feet are too big to use any of your shoes, and way too small for mine. I think I can put something together though.” Jacob took a pair of very thick socks from his own bag and had Arkad put them on. Then he found a sheet of heavy smart foam, apparently part of a spare sleeping pad, and traced the outline of the boy’s feet as he stood on it. He cut out the two soles and then glued them to the bottoms of the socks.
“There! That should hold. The glue and the cloth are both Machine Civ stuff, so we’ll just have to replace the soles as they wear out. How do they feel?”
Arkad walked around, savoring the sensation of having feet which weren’t numb from cold. The plastic foam felt absurdly soft. “They’re wonderful!”
“Great. Maybe I can open up a cobbler’s shop and settle down here, eh? Will you stay for lunch or dinner or whatever you want to call it?”
The offer of food was too much for Arkad to pass up. Jacob gave him some limp starchy disks with shredded meat inside them. The meat made his mouth burn, and for a second he was afraid he might be having an allergic reaction, but the hot sensation passed.
Jacob passed him a second disk wrapped around meat. “All right then. You won’t tell us where the ship is. We still need to be able to make plans. Would you mind suggesting a direction we should go that might lead us generally toward it?”
“You will need a vehicle.”
Ree looked unhappy at that, but Jacob only chuckled. “Unfortunately, I didn’t bring along an ATV in my pocket. How do your more budget-conscious travelers get around on this planet?”
“I think we will need to buy space on a road train.”
“What are those?” Ree asked.
“I don’t know what else to call them. There’s one or two big tractors, usually slaved together so they only need a single driver. They pull six or eight wagons. You can buy space inside, or just sit on top. They run up and down the coast road, and sometimes the whole train gets loaded on a ship to cross the ocean.”
“How far are we going to be riding?” asked Ree.
He did some quick converting of Pfifu units to human ones. “About two hundred kilometers. Ten hours. It costs about five kilos of copper for one person. More if you have a lot of cargo.”
“We can afford that,” said Ree, after consulting her wrist computer.
“I’ll find out when there’s a train going in the right direction,” he told them, even though he knew they would use Hupepuh’s train. “Can you be ready to leave in a hurry?”
“Of course we can,” said Jacob. He was still watching Arkad with narrowed eyes, but his mouth was half smiling.
“Then I will go right now to arrange things. Can I have some metal? A meter of silver wire would be enough, or maybe twenty-five kilos of copper.”
There was a pause when nobody said anything, and then Jacob spoke. “Ree? If we’re going to trust this young man there’s no reason not to give him what he asks for.”
Ree tapped a device on her left wrist, and for a moment her eyes unfocused and glinted green as it beamed images directly to her retinas. She made a few gestures with her free hand, then tapped the device again. “Here,” she said, digging into one of the packs piled in the corner of the room and pulling out a roll of thick silver wire. She measured seventy-five centimeters of wire and snipped it off, then handed the length to Arkad. “I checked the exchange rates posted at the spaceport. This should be about right.”
“I will come back soon,” said Arkad. And then, feeling very awkward, he said, “Please don’t follow me.”
“I won’t follow you,” said Baichi before either of the adults could answer.
“Good luck, kid. Don’t spend it all in one place,” said Jacob as Arkad left the room.
Arkad had never before carried so much wealth at once. The silver wire wrapped around his upper arm felt heavy. He found a position atop a nearby building and watched the rail line, hoping to see the cargo Hupepuh was waiting for.
After fifteen minutes, Tiatatoo dove at him from behind, scoring an unblocked tail slap on the crown of Arkad’s head. He banked around in a curve and perched neatly just out of reach on an antenna.
“Foppish Arkad looks grand in his new foot covers,” he said. “With the help of skilled tailors and expensive materials, he may at some distant time be nearly as handsome as an ordinary Itooti male.”
“Sadly, unfortunate Tiatatoo will never manage to be an ordinary Itooti male.”
“Perceptive Arkad admits that glorious Tiatatoo is truly extraordinary!” gloated the Itooti. He glanced around suddenly, as if fearful. “Extraordinary Tiatatoo wishes to ask powerful Arkad’s help.”
“Busy Arkad wonders what vital task demanding Tiatatoo needs performed.”
“Lovelorn Tiatatoo wants accurate Arkad to help eliminate two dangerous rivals. Persistent Tattat and vengeful Utto conspire to keep handsome Tiatatoo away from beloved Atett. Two or three well-aimed rocks may persuade cowardly Utto and fragile Tattat to seek female companionship elsewhere.”
“Surely fearless Tiatatoo can defeat two inferior rivals without alien help.”
“Cunning Tiatatoo does not want to risk the blissful love of fertile Atett on the random chance of close combat. Nor does fragile-boned Tiatatoo wish to suffer incapacitating injury which would interfere with prolonged and repeated copulation.”
“Strong-armed Arkad will help talkative Tiatatoo. Can devious Tiatatoo tell resigned Arkad where his two hated rivals can be found?”
“Ingenious Tiatatoo has planned a clever ambush. Faithful Arkad and bold Tiatatoo will wait near the charming home of industrious Atett, and strike at the two blunt-tongued interlopers as they attempt offensive courtship.”
“Dependable Arkad will meet ruthless Tiatatoo at the comfortable house,” he agreed.
Tiatatoo jabbed Arkad’s bare shoulder with his tongue, hard enough to draw blood. “Virile Tiatatoo will remember loyal Arkad forever for this vital aid.” With that, he flipped backward off the antenna, extending his wings to convert his fall into a dive, then swooped away.
Arkad stretched himself, then climbed down to ground level. He wanted to have a full arsenal of things to throw, and the best place to find ammunition was by the pottery kilns, where Pfifu craftsmen discarded their failures. The kilns were over on the west side of town, so that the breeze would carry the smoke from the furnaces out to sea.
He had just reached the ground when he heard the squeal of brakes from the rail terminal as a train pulled in. Tiatatoo would have to wait, he decided. He hustled over to the stretch of road next to the tracks, where tractors were already pulling up. Arkad spotted Hupepuh’s vehicle, several places back in line.
No time to lose! Arkad hurried over and swung himself up to the cab of the tractor. “I have wire,” he said. “You tell me if you can give four like me a ride south.”
“I will do it if you can get back here soon. When I have my freight I will leave, and I will not wait.”
Arkad sprinted back across the plaza to Aviiva’s tower. He rode the elevator up and knocked on the door of the room where the other humans were staying. Jacob answered this time.
“I was starting to wonder what happened to you,” he said.
“I have got us transport,” said Arkad. “A road train leaving town soon. We have to go now.”
“And this is going to take us to the Rosetta?” Jacob asked.
Arkad hesitated, then decided to be truthful. “Not exactly. It will take us to someone who can tell me where it is.”
Jacob raised an eyebrow. “I thought you knew.”
“I will take you to it,” Arkad answered. “I promise.”
Jacob regarded him for a second, then smiled. “Okay then. I hope you’re a man of your word. How soon does this train leave?”
“Right now, from the road by the rail terminal. It’s not far.”
“Any hoops we have to jump through before boarding, or do we just show up?”
“Just get on board. We don’t have time to waste.”
“Good. Ree? Baichi? Time to pack up.”
They began stuffing clothing and gear into bags. Arkad was amazed at how many things the three of them had: each had a large backpack and at least one shoulder bag. Baichi, small and slender as she was, carried as big a load as Jacob. They had multiple sets of clothing, at least ten kilos of food each, bedrolls, a small stove, monofilament cable, power supplies, extra shoes, a water purifier, medical supplies, and tools.
One thing caught Arkad’s attention in particular: his new companions had a lot more metal for trade than he had realized. Ree had several spools of silver wire, and both she and Jacob also carried heavy bundles of iridium strips, neatly scored to break easily into one-gram squares. They could practically buy a road train if they needed to. Yet they seemed to think they were poor.
When they were all packed, Baichi and Arkad led the way downstairs. Jacob sauntered along at the rear of the group with a faint half smile on his face.
Three road trains were making up in the plaza. Arkad saw Hupepuh standing atop his tractor, gesturing angrily at the crews using small tracked movers to push the wagons into position behind it and hitch them up. “You move like a high cliff collapsing! Valuable freight will be smashed and lost, and you will labor until you are old to repay the owners.”
Arkad showed the three of them to a freight wagon. It was the typical mix of locally built and offworld tech: a simple steel frame with a bed of sheet steel and a canopy of waterproof cloth, but the suspension was made of whiskerlike struts of smart carbon fibers and the wheel bearings were diamond-surfaced. He helped lift the bags up to Baichi, who stacked them neatly next to a big tank of compressed helium. “I have to go pay the driver,” he told Ree. “You might as well get comfortable because it’s going to be a long ride.”
“Don’t worry about me,” she told him. “I’m just glad to be on our way.”
He swung down and helped secure the canopy, then walked over to Hupepuh’s tractor and waved to get his attention. By now all four freight wagons were hitched and the old Pfifu had a couple of tentacles inside the engine compartment, inspecting it before starting.
“I have the wire,” Arkad called up to him.
“You give it to me now,” said Hupepuh, and with one free tentacle, added, “Do not churn up more silt and make this water even murkier.”
Arkad climbed up, handed him sixty centimeters of wire, and stayed to watch.
First, Hupepuh fired up the butanol burners. Once the boiler had a chance to heat up, he opened a valve and let water flow through the pipes. He kept one tentacle tip close to the pressure valve, and when it reached the proper level, Hupepuh turned the valve to let the steam flow into the turbine driving the generator. As soon as the noise of the turbine rose to the right pitch, he fed power to the motors and the tractor began to lumber forward, the wagons rolling along behind. Hupepuh touched one tentacle tip to the telescope attached to the dashboard to make sure the way ahead was clear. Without visual aids, a Pfifu could barely see more than a few dozen meters.
Arkad dropped to the ground and let the road train go by until the freight wagon he had put the others into passed him. With easy skill born of many previous free rides, Arkad swung himself aboard.
The tractor and its four wagons rolled through the crowded streets south of the plaza. Hupepuh never let his machine stop completely, but it was maddeningly slow. As they approached the Ring, some merchants spotted the passengers and came over to offer fresh fruit and hot cooked meat.
But among the throng Arkad spotted a familiar four-eyed face. It was Zvev, and she gestured to him using a private sign.
“I need to talk to someone,” Arkad told Jacob, and dropped down from the wagon to the street before he could answer. He pushed between a couple of vendors to Zvev.
As soon as he was within reach, she lunged at him; her powerful body hit him like a battering ram. He bounced off the side of the freight wagon and fell to the ground, and then Zvev was on top of him, her four thick arms pinning him down.
“Tiatatoo is hurt,” she said. “He fought two and they beat him. You tell me why you did not help him.”
“I could not wait. We leave town now.”
She released him and reared up, but her claws were still ready and very sharp. “They broke his wing,” she said.
The news made Arkad feel cold. No female Itooti would accept a male who could not fly. “You tell me how bad it is.”
“It is bad. He will not fly for a long time, if at all.”
“I did not know.”
Zvev had recovered her composure a little; she folded back her arms so that her claws were no longer pointed at him, but the weight of her long body still rested on his legs. She bent down until her face was just above his, and her four little eyes spaced evenly around her mouth looked into his own.
“Your new friends are rich,” she said. “They can do more for you than your old friends can. You are wise to go with them. I would do the same thing.”
“You tell Tiatatoo I am sad to hear he is hurt. You tell him I wish I could have been there. You give him this.” Arkad reached into his blanket and took out the fifteen centimeters of wire he had saved on the deal with Hupepuh. “You help him buy food and stay warm so his wing can heal.”
She slithered off him and let him stand up. “You are not as wise as I thought. You should not waste your wealth on those you will see no more.”
“You take care of him. And I wish you good luck,” he told her.
“When I am old and rich, I will think of you once or twice,” she said, and then slid away through the crowd.
Arkad watched her go, then looked after the road train, which had crossed the Ring and was picking up speed on the bridge out of town. He hesitated for just a second, then he turned and sprinted after the train.