Reclamation (18 page)

How far gone am I when a portable shelter is civilized?
he wondered irritably.

He shoved the door aside. Without pausing, he ducked out into the canyon. The door slapped shut behind him.

The canyon’s darkness folded around him like another cloak. The rain had stopped, leaving nothing but puddles with crusts of ice forming rapidly. The sun was over the walls of the main canyon, Jay knew, but the night’s unforgiving cold and dark lingered for hours longer in this side crack. Still, Jay felt his breathing ease, not just from the change in the weather, but from getting away from Lu. It was always easier to think on his own.

It’s so close to finished, I’m getting nervous. And I should have had word by now. Uary’s had plenty of time to find out what that woman is.

Just check the transmitter and get back where you belong, Jahidh,
he ordered himself.

All three of the team wore the neckline terminals commonly called “torques” that worked in conjunction with their translator disks to allow them to keep in touch with each other over limited distances. But offworld transmission required more power and a lot more circuitry. When Jay had suggested that the spare transmitter should be set up somewhere away from the shelter, Lu and Cor had both agreed. The reasoning he’d used on them was that if the weather, or a hostile native managed to destroy the shelter, there’d still be a way for the survivors to get word out. His real reasoning had been that the communications system needed a weak link he could exploit.

Jay switched the lantern on and strapped it to his arm. He pointed the beam up the rocky cliff, tracking the handholds Lu had so carefully gouged into the stone. He took a deep breath and flexed his hands before he hoisted himself up the rocky cliff. The rock hadn’t had the chance to absorb any heat from the new day. It was like climbing a ragged block of ice. Jay gritted his teeth and kept on climbing.

About ten meters above the canyon floor, the cliff broke away. Jay swung his leg over the lip and dropped down into a pocket-sized valley. Places like this were called “flood cups” by the inhabitants of the Realm because they could sometimes fill up with water and spill out into the canyon. This one, however, had several drainage holes drilled in it. Jay only had to splash through a few shallow puddles to reach the transmitter.

The unit was a stack of squat boxes. Everything they used on this planet had to be sheltered against the torrential rains and freezing cold that came with night.

Jay undid the straps holding the lantern to his sleeve and hooked it onto the side of the transmitter so he could see what he was doing. Then he lifted back the cover on the main unit. All the keys and displays glowed with a steady amber light and were completely blank.

Jay touched a series of commands he had memorized weeks before they landed here. No response came from the unit. No messages from the Unifiers, then. No change in status to report to their people down here stirring up trouble. Cor and Lu spent a lot of time cursing about the lack of attention their project was receiving from the bureaucracy back on May 16, even with the Vitae so interested in the Realm. Jay suspected both of them were on somebody’s mud list by now for failing to make scheduled reports.

Neither side knew how many messages were being “lost” during transmission.

Jay touched the keys again in a sequence that Lu and Cor had no idea was valid. The transmitter responded by scattering what could have been a random series of symbols from a dozen different alphabets across the screen. Jay took his translator disk out of his ear and slipped it into the download slot in the transmitter. The screen cleared instantly. Jay reclaimed the disk.

As soon as he had replaced the translator in his ear, Caril’s voice spoke to him. “We have released the artifact Stone in the Wall. She and Eric Born were allowed to escape confinement twenty hours prior to my sending this message …”

Jay sat in his tiny pool of light, feeling the cold seep into him as he listened to the details.

Blood, blood, blood!
he cursed.
Now we
have
to hunt down her family.
He thought about Trail and her eyes, but couldn’t work the brief glimpse of a resemblance into a full-fledged hope.
How could those idiots have done this! They
know
I’ve got nothing to work with down here!
For a brief moment, he knew how Lu and Cor felt, bereft of resources and support.

He tried to tell himself it was only a setback, not a dead end. And it would have been very bad if the Assembly had found out how Stone in the Wall functioned before they did, but it was still bad enough. If the Imperialists didn’t have a thorough grasp of how the artifacts functioned by the time the Assembly parties came over the World’s Wall, the chance to win the Home Ground would be gone.

Of course, the two Unifiers thought that was the deadline for having the Realm’s power base reorganized under a monarch who wanted to join the Human Family.

None of which leaves any more time for sitting around here.

Jay climbed out of the flood cup and down to the canyon floor. The sky above him had turned smoky grey, but its light hadn’t yet traveled far enough over the Walls to show him his way, so he kept the lantern on and picked his path between the fallen rocks and frozen puddles as fast as he could.

After about three miles, the darkness ended and Jay stepped out of the canyon’s shadow into the filtered, hazy glow that passed for daylight in the Realm.

The Teachers said that Broken Canyon was where the Nameless Powers had argued about the word for “stone.” The entire breadth of it was a mass of jagged promontories, caves, cups, and gashes. The Walls didn’t even stand up straight. They sloped open like the canyon was yawning.

When the Nameless had finally come to an agreement, went the story, they made up for the botched job by painting the canyon in a spectacular fashion. The rain hadn’t made it out here, so the colors were still dry. Veins of silver and quartz shot through bands of crimson, rust, vermilion, violet, and sparkling sandstone. Here and there you could even catch a glimpse of a slick, greyish patch of exposed silicate.

Jay could remember the tremor of excitement in Lu’s voice when he’d discovered that the slick, grey “rock” was really a manufactured silicate lying under the dirt and gravel of the Realm. It meant that MG49 sub 1 was not just a failed colony, it was a fallen world, and who knew how much of their technology might have survived under the ground?

Broken Canyon measured three miles wide at its base, but he still felt hemmed in by the walls that were too huge to be taken in with a single glance. It got worse when he remembered that these were the smaller walls, and that the black, ragged stretch where the horizon should have been was a hundred times bigger.

Four years, as Jay and his two companions measured time, had passed and he had never gotten used to the sight. Jay looked at the ground and started down the slope through the screen of scraggly trees and underbrush. The spectacular colors of the walls almost compensated for the tan, grey, and olive green of the stunted trees and spiky reeds that poked out of the skimpy patches of soil. Moss and lichens gave the rocks coats of fuzz.

The sounds of life drifted up to him on the back of the omnipresent wind. Hooves and skids clattered against rock and sank into mud. Voices bounced off the boulders in an incoherent babble that seemed to come from all directions at once, all mixed up with the thousand little noises that came from constant motion. Jay shoved his way through a thicket of thorny trees and finally got a clear view of the muddy, pockmarked road.

King Silver had told him, rather proudly, that forcing the Narroways Approach across the canyon floor had cost a thousand lives. The lichen-covered mounds of boulders heaped alongside the roadbed gave a lot of credence to the body count.

A flood of travelers poured down and around the wide road today. Clear, dry spells were not to be wasted, war or no war. Even in the traffic, though, they clung together in knots of their own kind. Caravans of Bondless shouted over their creaking sleighs and snorting oxen. They gave a grudging berth to a gaggle of Bonded trotting along with their overseer. An enclosed sledge that bore the ribbons of some Noble house rattled along at the center of an entourage which shoved an impartial path through the rest of the traffic.

Along the side of the road, framing the scene, the bundles of Notouch women in their ragged motley picked weir own paths between the rocks and the weeds. The girls who could walk struggled to keep up with their mothers, aunts, and older sisters. The babies were carried on the stooped backs of the oldest women.

Jay frowned at them. Those roving bands were what was making it so impossible to track Stone in the Wall. If only the Ancestors had been a little more obvious in designing their servants, but, aside from the trained telekinetics, there were no differences between these walking artifacts that could be seen without a gene scan. Uary had theories. The Notouch might have been the “untouched,” blank slates that were the control group for the Ancestors’ work, or kept to use for later modification. That the telekinesis could crop up anywhere lent credence to the story from their “apocrypha” about the war against the Teachers that drove the power-gifted into hiding and humiliation until they’d learned their lesson.

Or until the others learned they couldn’t live without them,
thought Jay, watching the ragged parade of so many men and women and so few children.

But none of these theories explained what Stone in the Wall was, or why her family was relegated to the Notouch caste. The traits that made her what she was were not shared by the caste in general any more than the telekinesis was shared by all the Nobles. Cor had met Stone in the Wall in Narroways. She came from a cluster of huts that had no name, and probably wasn’t even there anymore. Like most Notouch women, she spent her time roving between cities and farms as a “hired” hand while the men stayed in the village and kept the place from being washed away. By the time Cor had tried to track her family, Stone in the Wall’s band was gone and no one would admit to knowing anything about her. Trail and Cups hadn’t even been willing to say they’d come to Narroways with a work band.

Chaos, it was all chaos. This was what happened when there was no vision, no conscious plan. Entropy laid hold of individual minds, and everything that had been built … collapsed.

Jay squinted over the Notouch’s heads toward the longest of the caravans. Its masters, at least, weren’t completely oblivious to the hostile state of affairs between Narroways and the Orthodox world. Men displaying the tin helmets of hired guards balanced on the overfull sledges, clutching their axes and metal-studded clubs so anyone who glanced toward them could see they meant business.

The sight didn’t say much positive for what the local feeling was about the Seablades coming across from First City. Jay forced the frown out of his features and scanned the roadside for Cor.

She was easy to pick out because she was almost the only still figure in the canyon. Cor leaned against the driver’s perch of her sledge, watching the parade. Her oxen chewed the tree branches nearby and she patted the slablike side of the one closest to her absently.

Jay sidestepped toward her. His boots loosened a small scree of stones and Cor tilted her head up.

“You’re looking grim,” she said as he picked his way down to her.

“I’m feeling grim. There are no messages from May 16 and it’s getting later by the second.”

Cor glanced at the sky and at the slant of the shadows. “In more ways than one. I’ll cuss the Vitae and bureaucrats out later.” She unknotted the oxen’s reins from the tree branch. Her hands had been marked with the broken triangles of the Bondless class. Unlike his Noble swirls, her marks were real tattoos. But then, it was her job to immerse herself totally in the local culture. That way, she could bring an intimate picture back to the Family and she could get the locals used to the idea that the odd-looking strangers coming to their world were just like them, really.

Jay clambered into the back of the sledge.

“It’d be easier if you’d just learned to ride,” she remarked, watching him with an amused smile playing around her mouth. “The oxen are slow and quiet. It’s not that tough.”

“I am from an overcivilized and decadent people,” said Jay blandly as he settled himself on one of the boxes that served as seats in the awkward construction. “I just can’t do it.”

Cor shrugged, hollered at the beasts, and they all lurched forward.

The countryside crawled past them behind the jostle of fellow travelers. A path cleared in front of them and closed up behind as people recognized them as Skymen. Jay tried not to wince as the unpadded box jounced against his backside. A river of sweat began to trickle down his cheek. Now that the sun was full up, the day was turning as hot as the night had been cold.

After about an hour, the scraggly wilderness began to give grudging space to tamed patches. The Narroways farmlands were strange places, more cultivated wetlands than fields. Yards of seine nets covered the grains to keep the plants from the worst of slashing sleet and hail that could come at night. The nets were rolled back in places and the Bonded worked in teams, chopping weeds and mucking out the trenches so water could flow between the rice plants and keep them from shriveling into dormancy. Behind a low wall, Bondless carefully tended their orchard. Each precious tree was carefully tented and you could only see the shadows of the workers underneath, pruning and grafting. Fruits and root vegetables were delicacies in this world of grains, grasses, and fungi.

The war did not touch the farms, or the oxen and pigs in their pens. Food and animals would be needed by whoever won. But the houses that could be seen from the road sported red flags, proclaiming there had been war dead there.

Beyond the farms the canyon walls shrugged and shifted and so the world bent toward the left and tilted down a sharp gradient. Cor whistled shrilly to the oxen and hauled back on the reins to check them to a walk as the road sloped sharply in front of them. An overturned sledge had spilled its contents onto the roadbed and the Bondless owners shouted obscenities at each other in between barked orders to the Notouch women scrambling to retrieve the canvas-wrapped packages before they were trampled under foot or hoof. The walls drew closer here, leaving less room for traffic overflow. Even with the wind, it felt more like being inside than outside.