CHAPTER 4
Beyond the hills south of Ayaviz, the forest began; a strange, two-dimensional forest. The trees ran in a line, just east of the road. They were a species found nowhere but on Syavusa: very tall, with straight trunks and branches sticking out in matched pairs at right angles, spaced closer as they went up the trunk. The leaves were long dark ribbons hanging from the branches.
Though tall, the forest was very shallow. Behind the first rank of trees was a second row of taller trees, and behind that was a scrubby growth of low ones, catching the scraps of light that passed between the trunks, waiting for a taller one to fall. Behind that last row the ground stretched back in permanent shadow, covered with years of accumulated snow which got thicker until it met the ice cap.
Arkad opened one corner of the freight wagon canopy and watched the landscape pass. Baichi did the same. Ree unrolled her sleeping bag and tried to rest, and Jacob produced a device like a tube with a right-angle bend in it, stuffed the large end of it with shredded plant matter, held the small end in his mouth, and set the shreds on fire.
The sight sent a thrill down Arkad’s spine. It was a pipe! He had read about them in half a dozen stories but had never actually seen one. None of the species in Ayaviz ever inhaled smoke, although the Pfifu did enjoy absorbing aromatics and psychoactives through their skins. He wondered if Jacob would blow smoke rings, but he didn’t.
Jacob sat and puffed the pipe until the stuff inside it stopped burning, then looked intently at Arkad. “All right, now I want some answers. Where are we going?”
“We are going about a hundred kilometers south,” said Arkad. “There’s a camp of AaaAa there, and they can help me figure out where the ship is.”
“Ah-ahs?”
“AaaAa,” said Baichi, making Arkad start in surprise. “An intelligent species originating in the Sagittarius Arm and widely distributed over all the portions of the galaxy we know about. They are nucleic acid-based life, oxygen-breathing, with an internal skeleton. AaaAa are known to settle in small enclaves on worlds inhabited by other species. Selected individuals travel between enclaves every few decades to maintain cultural and genetic continuity.”
“They sound like interesting people,” said Jacob. “But if they know where the Rosetta is, why do we need you?”
“The AaaAa don’t know,” said Arkad. “But I think they can help me figure it out.”
“And you don’t know? Arkad, I don’t mean to sound suspicious, but I don’t like being lied to. Do you know where the Rosetta is, yes or no?”
Arkad swallowed, and then said, “I don’t know where it is. But I think I can figure it out! I have a book.” He touched the pouch around his neck holding WOL and other treasures. “It has pictures of me and my mother from when I was little. Some of them are in different places, not around here. I think the AaaAa can tell me where the pictures were taken, and from that we can trace the route my mother and I took.”
Jacob was silent for a moment. “That’s…rather clever, actually. But why didn’t you just tell us?”
“I don’t know.” The boy shrugged, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “I just thought…”
Jacob didn’t say anything, and the moment drew out agonizingly.
“I mean,” Arkad began again, but still couldn’t think of a way to end his sentence.
Jacob finally took pity on him. “Let’s just keep it simple: never lie to me again. Understand?”
“I understand,” said Arkad.
“Jacob, don’t frighten the boy,” said Ree. “He made a mistake, and now he’s sorry.”
“Mmm,” said Jacob, and said nothing more.
Outside, the landscape moved past at a steady twenty kilometers per hour. As the road train traveled, the forest to the left gradually got younger. At first the trees were massive, full-grown specimens thirty or forty meters tall with trunks two meters across rising from thick undergrowth. A few kilometers down the road and the trees were only twenty meters high and a meter thick. Twelve kilometers from Ayaviz, they rode past spindly little saplings no taller than Arkad and no thicker than his wrist. Between the little trees were blackened pits where enormous tree stumps had been burned. And then, very abruptly, the new planting ended and they were passing old trees again.
“What do these AaaAa do, anyway?” Ree asked him. “How do they live out here?”
“They harvest the trees,” said Arkad, pointing at the forest line. “And in the lands where the trees grow, there are plants, or things like plants. They grow underground and feed on things that rot. The AaaAa know where they grow, and tend them.”
“You mean fungi?”
“I think so.”
“How do you know about them?”
“They are valuable. The…fungi…are medicines for a couple of species offworld somewhere. When a ship comes in from those systems, traders come out to bargain with the AaaAa. As soon as they set a price, the AaaAa begin the harvest. They pull long strings out of the ground, with bunches of little round pods on them. They keep the strings to plant again, and trade the pods. They don’t harvest until the pods are worth their weight in rhodium.”
Once Zvev had managed to wangle a job for herself, Arkad, and a Pfifu named Fuee helping a young and hungry Vziim trader. They loaded and unloaded his trade goods, and filled sacks with the valuable fungus pods. The work had paid well—Arkad had earned enough to buy himself a new blanket—but Zvev had poisoned future relations with the trader by trying to pilfer some pods for herself. The trader had found out, confiscated the stolen fungi, and kicked the three of them out of his power-wagon twenty kilometers from the city.
Ree still looked puzzled. “How are a bunch of mushroom and timber growers going to help you find the Rosetta?”
“Oh, they do much more than that! The AaaAa preserve and share knowledge. They remember everything and keep no secrets. People come from all over Syavusa—and from other worlds, too!—to stay in their camps and learn from them. And the students teach each other, too. That was how I learned Itooti when I was little.”
“So we’re going to a school.”
“Sort of like a school, only there’s no buildings. Just the AaaAa camp, and those move along the forest line. The one we’re going to is a couple of hundred kilometers from here.”
The conversation kind of died down after that. Jacob got absorbed in a smart-paper map of Syavusa, Ree watched some entertainment beamed into her eyes from the device on her wrist, and Baichi wordlessly watched the forest roll past. Arkad thought of climbing along the top of the wagons to the tractor to spend some time watching Hupepuh drive the road train. But the maudlin old Pfifu was kind of boring.
He moved to the back end of the wagon and found a spot between the helium tanks and the canopy where he could have some privacy. Only then did he take WOL out of his pouch and turn it on. He called up his book’s file of pictures, as he had done at least two thousand times before. Every time he did so, he held his breath, fearing that this time the little machine wouldn’t be able to find them.
WOL jumped directly to the list of images Arkad looked at most often: a collection of pictures of the boy and his mother. A few were simple flat images taken by WOL itself. Most were more elaborate three-dimensional pictures, from some more sophisticated device.
Usually Arkad looked at the pictures just to remind himself of his mother, but now he paid more attention to the backgrounds, and to his own changing size and face. He was trying to work out where they were taken and in what order. The ones taken by WOL had dates, but the three-dimensional images only told when they had been transferred to WOL’s memory, which had happened all at once, before the flat pictures were taken.
Arkad was smallest in three-dimensional images taken indoors, in some place with pale gray walls and tiny, cluttered rooms. He suspected that was the Rosetta itself, but wasn’t sure. In those pictures he progressed from a tiny baby to a toddler walking on his own. Some of the images had other adults in them: his mother had identified the white-haired man as his grandfather Jules, and the big man who always seemed to be smiling was Yavuz. His father.
If he concentrated, he could remember a little about his grandfather: the scratchy feel of his beard, the sweaty smell of his clothing. But no matter how hard he tried, Arkad could remember nothing of his father. There were no pictures of the two of them together, either.
Nor could he remember what led his mother to leave the Rosetta, her little son on her back or trotting alongside. She had never spoken of it. If only she had told him more!
During the course of their journey, Arkad’s image changed from that of a toddler to the small boy who had been awestruck by their arrival at Ayaviz. The trip had taken a very long time; his mother hadn’t been traveling with any specific goal, just wandering across the planet in search of someplace the two of them could settle. Now Arkad had to put the images in reverse order. He worked silently as the wagon bumped along, and eventually created a sequence of five that showed useful background detail. In reverse order they were:
Arkad, skinny and suntanned, standing on a cliff, with sky behind him and a pair of Itooti whirling in the background.
Arkad, smaller and chubbier, in a stone-walled room, wrestling with a young Vziim.
Arkad, smaller still, and his mother standing in front of an immense ground vehicle, with tall mountains in the background.
Arkad, a naked toddler with dimpled knees, asleep in a small boat on a river, with tall rock walls on either side.
A very young Arkad standing on a vast flat plain of some dark substance.
He looked over the images a few times, trying to recall any fragments which might help. The cliff picture did bring up a definite memory: he could remember being unhappy that the wind didn’t pick him up the way it lifted the Itooti. But he couldn’t remember anything about playing with Vziim, or traveling in the mountains aboard a vehicle.
The river image brought back a smell: the stink of the water. He knew it was somehow connected with the Psthao-psthao, which worried him.
He closed WOL and put the book away, then wedged himself against the helium tanks and let himself relax. The ride was smooth at the moment, and he dropped into a dream almost at once. In the dream he found an entire archive of pictures he’d never seen before, and he knew they would show him wonderful things. But he couldn’t make WOL show them to him.
* * *
Eight hours later Arkad peeked around the canopy and called to the others. “There!”
To the left of the road was a line of recent stumps and crushed underbrush. Beyond the stumps a boggy meadow stretched nearly a kilometer, covered with fast-growing little trumpet-shaped plants taking advantage of the warmth and sunlight. At the south edge of the meadow, about half a kilometer ahead, Arkad could see a cluster of dark triangles and some large shapes moving around.
“What are those things? Draft animals?” asked Ree.
“Those are AaaAa. Haven’t you seen one before?”
Jacob was silent, staring across the meadow at the beings they were going to visit. Finally he chuckled. “Cute little beggars, aren’t they?”
Even from half a kilometer away, the AaaAa were impressive. A fully grown adult stood more than eight meters tall, on two legs so thick Arkad could not have put his arms around them. Their bodies were huge ovals covered in shaggy fur, with three manipulating trunks on the front which hung down to the ground. Each AaaAa had a single eye atop its body on a short stalk, which swiveled around constantly.
The camp of the AaaAa was centered on a single tall pole, a good thirty meters high, driven firmly into the boggy soil. Ropes stretched from the pole, each one supporting the triangular tent of an AaaAa. There were a dozen tents in all, radiating out from the pole in a semicircle facing the sun. South of the AaaAa camp was a scatter of other tents and even some temporary cottages where other beings stayed while they studied.
Hupepuh brought the train to a halt near the camp of visitors, but did nothing to help his passengers disembark. They had paid for a ride, not a stevedore. He walked around his train, tightening up some loose canopies and inspecting the wheels, then clambered down the rocky slope to the seashore so that he could splash some seawater over himself before starting up the turbine again and rumbling off down the road.
Jacob selected a dry(ish) spot at the southern edge of the AaaAa camp to pitch a single tent and set up the little stove. Arkad did his best to help, in part because he was fascinated by all the gear these humans had.
When there was a small fire of brush burning in the stove, Jacob asked, “Well, here we are. What now?”
Arkad looked over at the main camp. A dozen AaaAa stood in a group off to one side, evidently having some kind of meeting. It looked to Arkad like they were trading or negotiating—each AaaAa shifted between partners after exchanging just a few words. “Wait until they finish, I think,” he told Jacob.
“How long will that take?” asked Ree.
Arkad just shrugged, which actually got a smile out of Jacob.
While they waited, Arkad took the opportunity to explore the camp. He stayed away from the AaaAa, as one of them could crush him with an inattentive step.
The belt of tents and shelters on the south side of the camp was the most interesting. Arkad saw Pfifu tents made in the shape of comical fish or giant fruit, topped with spinning wind turbines and streamers. In front of one made to resemble a heroic Pfifu in a spacesuit, a small knot of assorted beings watched an elderly Pfifu deliver a lecture on the conservation of energy.
Not far away a domed shelter made of carefully fitted stones betrayed its Vziim origin, and he could see some slapdash tents which had to be Itooti. But there were offworlders in the camp as well, and those drew Arkad’s attention.
He saw a trio of Roon, tall and mournful-looking in their hooded robes, and a single massive Tkekta with elaborate gold and platinum decorations on its shell, being polished meticulously by a squad of small servitor beings Arkad didn’t recognize. A pair of Ka sat by a campfire taking turns doing problems on a computer, and whichever one wasn’t using the device retracted all its limbs to become a featureless sphere.
From a burrow under a boulder came the carrion scent of Psthao-psthao, which made Arkad hurry past, trying not to run.
Between two tents Arkad glimpsed a flash of paper-white skin and a neutral gray cloak. It was Baichi. Where was she going? He decided to find out. She was moving quickly, with evident purpose, so he kept to the concealment of the tents, staying hidden as much as he could.
At the end of a row of Vziim-built shelters of timber and stone, there was a clear space, where a single black sphere a meter across stood on three legs no thicker than Arkad’s little finger. The equator of the black sphere was a line of grainy laser light.
A Machine! He felt a twinge of alarm. The folk tales and legends of Ayaviz were full of accounts of dealings with the Machines that went catastrophically wrong for the hapless organic protagonists. A careless wish, a misinterpreted prediction, a poorly phrased question—all could bring disaster. Why was Baichi deliberately courting danger?
He watched as Baichi approached it. She stood for a moment about a meter away from the sphere, neither of them speaking. Then she raised one hand, palm facing the Machine. A sharp black spine emerged from the surface of the sphere and extended until its needle tip touched Baichi’s palm and punched right through. The tip emerged from the back of her hand a centimeter, but she didn’t flinch. A single drop of red blood formed on the tip of the spine and hung there. The girl and the Machine remained motionless for about half a minute, then the spine retracted and she lowered her hand.
And then, without any words or gestures of farewell, she simply turned and walked away from it, back toward Jacob’s campsite.
Arkad watched her go, then ducked back around behind some tents to stay out of the Machine’s sight before crossing into the main AaaAa camp. The big beings were still involved in their discussion, so Arkad found a spot safely far away from them and watched for a time. When that got boring, he followed Baichi’s path back to their tent. Jacob was dozing on a blanket with his hat pulled down over his face. He pushed up the brim and looked at the boy. “Well?”
“They’re still talking.”
“Wake me when it’s over.”
It took about an hour. With no warning or ceremony, the AaaAa simply ended their discussion and drifted apart. Some of them headed out to the forest shadow to gather snow, others withdrew to the tents. One of them came toward the four of them and stopped, its eye fixed on Arkad.
“I will ask it if we can stay,” said Arkad. He switched to the speech of the AaaAa. “AaaAAA-AAAaa-AaaaaA-AaAaaA…” he began. The speech of the AaaAa relied on changes in volume and duration, and speaking it for any length of time was very hard on a human larynx.
It looked at them for a moment, its limbs still. Finally it spoke, making a simple tone by blowing through its middle trunk and varying the volume. “One AaaAa. One human. One memory. Two humans. Adulthood. Infancy. One AaaAa. One welcome. Four humans.”
“It welcomes us,” said Arkad to Jacob before turning back to the AaaAa. “I’m going to tell it we’re here to learn.”
“Not technically a lie,” said Jacob.
Their conversation went on until Arkad was hoarse, partly because his command of the language wasn’t nearly as good as he had boasted. Arkad and his mother had stayed with the AaaAa for an extended visit—he couldn’t remember how long exactly, but it must have been at least a quarter of a year—but even a five-year-old’s sponge of a brain couldn’t learn a language that quickly. As a result, more than half of the conversation consisted of halting attempts by Arkad to explain what he meant, interspersed with patient guesses and brief vocabulary lessons from the AaaAa.
After about half an hour, he managed to establish that this AaaAa remembered Arkad from the time he and his mother had lived among the huge beings.
He gulped some water. “Its name is AaAaAA.”
“I hope to God it didn’t take you thirty-five minutes to find that out. I’ll be dead of old age if you have to ask it anything complicated. Did you ask it about your pictures?”
“It’s busy for the next twenty hours. It has to work for a while and then teach, but it promises to help me when all that is done.”
“Great. Looks like we’re going to be here for a while.”
“We ought to eat and rest,” said Ree. “I’ll warm up some food packs, and Arkad can share the tent with me.”
“Told you we should have brought a spare,” said Jacob.
“I can sleep out here,” said Arkad quickly.
“No, you can’t,” said Ree. “How long has it been since you’ve slept indoors? You deserve it.”
“Never mind. I’ve slept in worse places than this”—Jacob waved his pipe around at the field—“and Baichi doesn’t sleep at all, so there’s plenty of room for the two of you.”
The food packs were filling but dull, and when Arkad finished eating, he went behind a boulder to empty his bowels. When he returned, Jacob handed him a packet of damp flimsy sheets with a sharp smell. “Know what these are for?”
It took Arkad a moment to figure it out. The sheets were considerably more comfortable than scraping himself with leaves or pieces of stone.
“Don’t forget to clean your hands, too.”
It seemed a monumental extravagance to waste one cleaning his hands, but Arkad was happy to do so. The grime embedded around his nails and the lines of his palm was impossible to get out, but for once his hands could be called clean. He waved a little awkwardly to both Jacob and Baichi, then crawled into the tent.
Ree was already inside, wrapped in a shiny sleeping bag. Arkad watched her for a moment. He could vaguely remember watching his mother sleep. He remembered cuddling up next to her and feeling warm and safe. It had been a very long time since he had felt that way.
Would Ree mind if Arkad slept next to her? Arkad didn’t know what was proper. In his stories there wasn’t much about how people slept. In the end Arkad wrapped his blanket around himself and took a place on the ground just next to Ree. If they happened to bunch up together, well, he was just trying to share some heat.
Her shiny bag didn’t let much warmth escape, but a little bit was better than none at all, and Arkad dropped off quickly.
For the next twenty hours, Arkad was able to indulge in something very rare in his life: leisure time. He didn’t have to hustle for food, or guard a sleeping place, or avoid potential threats. His next meal was waiting in one of the backpacks, he could crawl into the tent and sleep whenever he chose, and if anything tried to give him trouble, Jacob had a device he called a “dangerous laser tool.”
Ree spent her time playing an elaborate game with her own computer. Baichi sat for long periods on a huge granite boulder at the ocean’s edge. Jacob was restless and took long walks around the camp. He spent a couple of hours chatting with the Tkekta, doing a fair imitation of its chittering speech.
“Fascinating fellow,” he told Arkad afterward. “He’s a political philosopher, studying different forms of social organization. I think he’s trying to come up with a set of universal principles for optimizing all forms of government, no matter what species.”
“What kind of government does your home world have?” asked Arkad.
“My home planet was invaded by aliens and is ruled by conquerors and quislings. The habitat where I live is supposedly a direct democracy but in practice it’s an ad hoc meritocratic oligarchy.”
“Were you on Earth when the Elmisthorn took over?”
Jacob put his hands in his pockets and walked toward the road. “I was just a kid then, barely out of my teens. For some reason they shipped me out to join the multinational force based on Rhea. That’s a moon in the outer Solar System. Our job was to protect the gas mining operations. Fat lot of good we did anyone: the Elmies bypassed us and went straight for Earth. Took them eighty-seven days to conquer the planet.”
They crossed the road to the slope leading down the sea, and Jacob continued. “On Rhea, my unit spent six months rationing calories and arguing about when to surrender, and then a ship managed to sneak in past the blockade and take some of us out of the system. We got out just before the Elmisthorn hit the base on Rhea with relativistic projectiles. Made a big shiny new crater.”
“My mother said the Rosetta was one of the last ships to escape Earth,” said Arkad. “She said she didn’t think they would make it past the Elmisthorn fleet.”
Jacob looked puzzled. “That’s what I don’t understand. All that was fifty years ago. Unless you’re a hell of a lot older than you look, there’s about thirty-five years missing.”
“I know I was born on this planet,” said Arkad. “I remember my mother said so.”
“But was she born here?”
“No,” Arkad answered slowly. “No, she talked about when she was a girl on Earth.”
“Hmm. Okay, assume she was a young adult fifty years ago when the Rosetta left Earth. The ship was on the run from the Elmisthorn, bouncing around this part of the galaxy, for about two years. Then nothing. Now without some serious medical help, your mother can’t have had you in her late sixties or early seventies. Rejuvenation drugs can do a lot—Lord knows I wouldn’t be running around an alien planet right now without them—but they can’t extend women’s fertility that long.”
He sat down on a large rock about twenty meters above the surf. “So what was your mother doing for forty or fifty years? Were they in cold sleep for some reason?”
“I don’t know.”
Jacob eyed him for a moment. “Well, if you don’t know, you don’t know. When we find Rosetta, the ship’s log will probably explain it all. Want something to eat?”
Arkad followed Jacob back to camp and ate another meal, and then when the twenty hours were done, all four humans walked over to AaAaAA’s tent in the center of the encampment.
“Four humans, one shelter, one entry,” said AaAaAA when they arrived. It opened the tent flap and let them in. Inside the air was almost as chilly as outside, but at least there was shelter from the wind and a layer of springy foam and waterproof cloth between them and the ground. The front part of the tent, where it was tall enough for a grown AaaAa to stand, was open space. Beyond was a kind of nest made of inflatable cushions, and in the narrow pointed end of the tent was a miscellaneous pile of food and goods. The sickly bitter-sweet scent of the AaaAa was strong inside the tent.
The fabric of the tent glowed on the inside, about as bright as the dim sunlight outside. A sheet of smart cloth was stuck to the tent fabric at eye level for an AaaAa. It currently displayed a series of lines crossed by strokes of varying lengths, which Arkad recognized as AaaAa script, but he didn’t know how to read it.
Arkad and AaAaAA resumed their conversation from twenty hours earlier as if there had been no interruption. “It says it is willing to share wisdom,” Arkad said to Jacob.
“It?”
“The AaaAa are each both male and female.”
“Simplifies things, I bet. Okay, show it your pictures and let’s see if we can find that ship.”
Displaying pictures from WOL in a way that AaAaAA could see turned out to be difficult. Arkad’s book couldn’t talk to the smart-cloth displays stuck to the tent, so finally AaAaAA just reached down with one trunk and lifted the boy onto its shaggy domed back, so that he could hold the book close to its single eye.
They went through the pictures over and over. At first AaAaAA just looked, then it began to make brief comments, and finally it delivered its opinions about where they might have been taken. When it seemed satisfied, it lowered Arkad to the floor again.
“And?” said Jacob.
“I know where the Rosetta is. It’s somewhere in the Black Land in the middle of the noon country.”
“East of the Sun and west of the Moon. Only there’s no moon here, is there? Are those actual places? Can you show me on the map?”
First Arkad had a long drink of water to soothe his chafed throat. Then the four of them sat down on the floor of the tent around Jacob’s map and Arkad showed them the pictures from WOL while he traced the route that AaAaAA had described. “These cliffs are on the peninsula south of here. AaAaAA thinks it’s one of the towns near the western end. My mother and I probably crossed over from the main continent there. The Vziim could be from one of their towns in the mountains, past these swamps and the forest. Probably near one of these passes. This land cruiser is the kind of vehicle they use on the plains beyond the mountains. There’s a huge canyon with a river in it that cuts through part of the desert west of there, and AaAaAA is sure that’s where the picture in the boat came from. And here, right in the center of the dayside of Syavusa, is the Black Land. That’s the oldest picture, and that’s probably where my mother and I started.”
“What if you just passed through there on your way from someplace on the other side?” asked Ree.
“The Black Land is the hottest and driest place on the planet,” said Arkad. “Nobody goes through it.”
“Explain the name,” said Jacob. “Are we talking about a land that’s actually colored black, or is this some kind of metaphor?”
“No, it’s really black. I can even remember it. The ground is covered with a kind of carpet as dark as soot. I think it’s some kind of plant that grows there.”
“That’s good. I thought maybe it was where the Lord of Evil lived. That’s kind of traditional when you’re going on a quest.”
“We are on a quest?” asked Arkad.
“Of course we are! We’ve got an unlikely crew of misfits, a treasure map, and a long way to go. What more do we need?” Jacob laughed, then zoomed in on the map to show the location of the AaaAa camp. “Our first order of business is to figure out where to go next. This peninsula you visited—can we catch a boat there to get across the strait?”
“I think so,” said Arkad. “I know the Itooti there have fishing boats.”
“Never mind that,” said Ree. “How are we going to get to that peninsula? It’s at least five hundred kilometers from here. And it looks like that far again to the end.”
“There’s a fuel station on the road south of us,” said Arkad, pointing at the map. “We can try to get a ride on another road train there.”
Jacob touched the map at the site of the camp and the fuel station, then translated the measured distance from standard Machine Civilization units to kilometers. “Huh. About a hundred klicks.”
“We’re going to walk a hundred kilometers?” asked Ree.
“To begin with,” said Jacob.
Arkad stood and turned back to AaAaAA. “Four humans. One AaAaAA. Assistance. Information. Twenty-seven thanks.”
It didn’t reply, and after a moment they left the tent and went back to their own campsite.
They ate a big dinner and slept a long time before setting out. When Arkad woke inside the tent, Ree was already sitting up, and had adjusted the fabric to let in enough light to see by.
“Sleep well?” she asked him, and then lowered her voice. “Before we start packing, there’s something I have to tell you. A little friendly warning. About Baichi. You may have noticed she’s a little…odd?”
Arkad shrugged. “I haven’t seen that many humans.”
“Well, she’s not entirely human. The Machines made her. Some kind of experiment, I don’t know the details. I think they were trying to make an improved version, but…the Machines don’t think the way we do. Anyway, don’t expect her to act like a normal girl. She’s a very nice person, don’t misunderstand me, but she’s not quite…real. Remember that.”
Ree unsealed the tent and went out. Arkad thought a while before following.
They packed up the gear, and this time Jacob distributed everything into four packs. He handed one to Arkad. “Time to take up the load, young man. We’ll cover more ground if Ree and I aren’t as heavily loaded.”
Arkad hefted the pack. “I can carry more if you can’t,” he said.
Jacob laughed at that. “I’m not that infirm! Tell you what—if I get tired, you can just carry me and my pack. How about that?”
“I don’t know,” said Arkad seriously. “You look pretty fat.”
He expected Jacob to laugh, but instead the man’s expression turned serious.
“I didn’t mean—” Arkad began, but then he realized Jacob was looking past him. He turned to see AaAaAA approaching. The huge being stopped and began speaking without preamble. Arkad realized it was telling a story, and he translated for the others.
* * *
The past. Many years. One mother. One youth. Size. Age. Departure. One mother. Advice. Work. Peace. Truth.
One youth. One desire. Cunning. Idleness. Fraud. Trickery.
One road. One meeting. One traveler. Size. Age. Equality. Friendship.
One journey. Fatigue. Hunger. One garden. One hundred sweet vines.
One vine-tender. One greeting. One offer. Exchange. Transport. Water. Two stomachs. Satiation.
One youth. Two buckets. Transport. Water.
One other traveler. One suggestion. Eating. Idleness. Two buckets. Two holes.
One vine-tender. Two buckets. Two leaks. Repairs.
One youth. One other traveler. Twenty sweet vines. Satiation.
One vine-tender. Two buckets. Two patches.
Two youths. One departure. Haste. Idleness. Congratulations. Cunning.
One day. One road. One trader. Two baskets. Abundance. Merchandise.
One other traveler. One suggestion. Numbers. Strength. Threat. Violence. Theft. Baskets. Merchandise.
One youth. One memory. One mother. Advice. Peace. Reluctance. Consent.
One youth. One other traveler. One trader. One threat.
One trader. Fear. Two baskets. The ground.
One youth. One other traveler. Two baskets. Merchandise. Congratulations. Strength. Cunning.
One day. One road. One other traveler. One suggestion. Mating. Children. Double-siblings. Friendship. Two lifetimes. Flattery.
One youth. Desire. Mating.
One youth. One discovery. One other traveler. Pregnancy. Scent. Disguise. Children. Double-siblings. Impossibility.
One youth. One other traveler. Accusation. Dishonesty.
One other traveler. One statement. One vine-tender. Fraud. One trader. Robbery. One youth. Expectation. Honesty. Foolishness.
* * *
When the story was done, AaAaAA turned and lumbered away again without waiting for a response. Arkad borrowed Jacob’s water bottle and took another long drink.
“Well, that didn’t make any sense at all,” said Ree. “What did it mean by that?”
“It’s a fable—you know, like Aesop,” said Arkad, handing the water bottle back to Jacob.
“Who?” asked Ree.
“A Greek guy,” said Jacob. “Never mind. I’m not sure I got the point of that story.”
“Don’t you see?” Arkad was surprised. It was an old story; he’d seen Pfifu puppet-show adaptations and heard Itooti poems on the same theme. “The youth was willing to rob and cheat other people, but then got all unhappy when the other traveler tricked it. The other traveler was already pregnant so their children wouldn’t be double-siblings after all.”
The other three just looked at him blankly.
“It’s a warning about choosing bad people as your friends,” he said.
“Maybe your AaAaAA friend doesn’t like our looks,” said Jacob. Arkad wondered what he meant by that, but didn’t say anything.
They drank water before refilling the filter bottles, adjusted their packs one final time, and then set out on the road to the south, with the sea on their right. They soon separated into two pairs: Baichi and Arkad moving ahead briskly, while Jacob and Ree kept a more easy pace and fell behind.
Arkad was determined not to let Baichi show him up. She might be quick and strong, but so was he, and he had lived for years by hard work and swiftness at running. He resolved that anything she could do, he could match. Despite the chilly breeze off the ice cap to the east, he was soon sweating. A couple of times he glanced over at her, to see if she was also breathing heavily, but her blank white skin showed no trace of flush or sheen of sweat.
Twice in the first couple of hours, road trains rumbled past them, but despite all of Arkad’s waving and shouting, neither of them stopped.
“Going to be a fun walk,” Jacob shouted after the second one passed.
“We’ll have better luck at the fuel station,” Arkad shouted back.
The four of them stopped to rest every two hours, and made camp when the map showed they were halfway to the fuel station. Ree made a soup by boiling some food bars in water from a nearby stream until they disintegrated. Arkad volunteered to show Baichi some edible plants that grew among the rocks by the ocean.
“See the brown fibers that cover the rocks on the sunlit side? That’s the mother plant. They make round seeds about as big as the tip of your finger. They’re hollow so they can float, and let the surf spread them around. Here, try one,” he said, picking one out of a cluster on one rock.
She put the little ball in her mouth and bit, then smiled. “They pop!” she said.
“You can dry them out in the sun and they get all crunchy, too,” he told her.
Watching her move around on the wet rocks with perfect balance, Arkad thought of what Ree had told him. Was Baichi really human? Being graceful didn’t prove anything. He had seen Pfifu standing on metal pipes in heavy rain with equal ease. Nothing unreal about them.
The two youngsters used Baichi’s cloak to carry a mound of the pop-seeds back to camp, where they shared them around. Ree tried a couple but was doubtful. Jacob found them enjoyable and added some to his soup.
When the meal was finished, Arkad found a place to sleep at the edge of the forest. He thought he should let Jacob have a turn in the tent—and he had a faint vague hope that maybe Baichi would sleep near him. Possibly even huddle together to keep warm. Just imagining the possibility was enough to give Arkad an erection, and he was glad nobody was nearby to notice. He had never worried about anyone noticing before; Itooti were always showing off when they were aroused and Pfifu didn’t really have any visible signs. But now he felt as secretive about it as a Vziim.
He need not have worried. Even after walking fifty kilometers, Baichi didn’t sleep at all. She sat again on the rocks by the sea, her face to the unmoving sun. Arkad wrapped himself in a borrowed blanket, covered his head against the wind, and slept alone.