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by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller Copyright 2005 by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller One On the ground, Star 475A Mission time: 3.5 planet days and counting JELA CROUCHED IN the dubious shade of a boulder at the top of the rise he'd been climbing for half a day. Taller rock columns on either side glared light down at him, but at least helped keep the persistent drying wind and flying grit from his lips and face. At the forward side of the boulder, down a considerably steeper slope than the one he'd just climbed, should be the river valley he'd been aiming to intersect ever since he'd piloted his damaged vessel to the desolate surface four days before. Overhead and behind him the sky was going from day-blue to dusk-purple while—on that forward side of the boulder—the local sun was still a few degrees above the horizon, bright over what once had been a ragged coastline. In theory he should be watching his back; in theory at least one of his guns should be in his hand. Instead, he used both hands to adjust his cap, and then to slip the sand-lenses off. He used them as a mirror, briefly, and confirmed that his face was not yet in danger of blistering from the sun's radiation or the wind's caress. Sighing, he replaced the lenses, and craned his head a bit to study the mica-flecked sandstone he sheltered against, and the scarring of centuries of unnatural winds and weather. The purpling sky remained clear, as it had been all day, and all the previous days—no clouds, no birds, no contrails, no aircraft, no threats save the featureless brilliance of the star; no friends, no enemy spiraling in for the kill, no sounds but the whisper of the dry, pitiless, planetary breeze. So certain was he that he was in no danger that the rescue transponder in his pocket was broadcasting on three frequencies... He sighed again. Without an enemy—or a friend—it would take a long time to die in the arid breeze. Friends. Well, there was hope of friends, or comrades at least, for he'd drawn off the attacking enemy with a reflexive head-on counterattack that should not have worked—unless the attacking ship was actually crewed rather than autonomous. He'd fired, the enemy had fired, his mother ship had fired.... and amid the brawl and the brangle his light-duty vessel had been holed multiple times, not with beams, but with fast moving debris. Both the enemy and the Trident had taken high speed runs to the transition points, leaving Jela to nurse his wounded craft into orbit and then spiral down to the surface and attempt a landing, dutifully watching for the enemy he was certain was well fled. There was no enemy here, no enemy other than a planet and a system succumbing to the same malaise that had overtaken a hundred other systems and a hundred dozen planets in this sector alone. Sheriekas! Sheriekas. They'd been human once, at least as human as he was—and even if his genes had been selected and cultivated and arranged, he was arguably as human as anyone who didn't bear a Batch tattoo on both arms—but they'd willfully broken away, continuing with their destructive experiments and their ...constructs... while they offered up a grand promise of a future they had no intention of sharing. They'd named themselves after their own dead planet, which they'd destroyed early on in their quest for transformation—for superiority. In their way, they were brilliant: Conquering disease after disease, adjusting body-types to planets, increasing life-spans.... They'd been driven to achieve perfection, he supposed, having once known a dancer who had destroyed herself in the same quest, though she hadn't had the means to take entire star systems with her. And the sheriekas—they achieved what his dancer had not. To hear them tell it, they were the evolved human; the perfected species. Along the way, they'd created other beings to accomplish their will and their whims. And then they'd turned their altered understanding back along the way they had come, looked on the imperfect species from which they had shaped themselves—and decided to give evolution a hand. So they had returned from wherever it was they had gone, sowing world-eaters, robot armor, and destruction as they came.... It had been a big war—the First Phase, they called it, fought well before his time—and the after-effects spread over generations. That those refusing the initial offer of sheriekas guidance had supposed they'd won the war rather than a battle meant... It meant that Jela was here, fighting a battle centuries later... and that there was no pretense from the enemy, now, of benevolent oversight. Jela blinked against the glare, pulling his mind back from its ramble. There was a real danger, with your Generalist, of feeding them so much info they got lost in their own thoughts, and never came out again. He couldn't afford that—not here. Not yet. He had time, he had duty. All he needed to do was get off this planet, back to a base and... His timer shook silently against his wrist. Water. He leaned into the warm boulder and dug into the left leg pouch, fingers counting over the sealed bulbs. Ten. That meant that there were still ten in the right leg pouch. He always drew first from the left, ever since the fight where he'd broken his right leg. The leg ached in sympathy with the thought, as it sometimes did, and M. Jela Granthor's Guard, Generalist, finished his water, uncurled himself, stretched, and danced several fight moves to bring up his attention level. Feeling considerably refreshed—his was a resilient Strain—he moved around the boulder, heading down. Behind him, his shadow was flung back across a day's walk or more as he strode across the ridge, but there was no one there to notice. FROM ORBIT IT had seemed clear that something... unusual... had been at work on the world, and that a good deal of time and energy had been spent in this, the last of the river valleys likely to have retained life under the onslaught of meteor-storms and radiation bursts. After concluding that his vessel would not in fact leave the surface in its current state, there'd been little left to do but sit and hope—or explore the structures on either side of the river. Being a Generalist—and an M—he'd naturally opted for exploration. Moments after stepping around the boulder and moving on his way, he realized that, somehow, he was not exactly where he thought he should be. He was not overlooking the valley that led to the tip of the former river delta, but was instead on the rim of a side valley. Curiosity drove him to check his position against the satellite sensors—and he sighed. Gone, or down to three and all but one on the wrong side of the planet at the moment. They hadn't had time to get the things into stationary orbits. "Can't triangulate without a triangle...." The breeze took his voice along with it and rewarded him a moment later with an echo. He laughed mirthlessly. Well, at least that ranging system worked. It was, alas, a system he'd never learned to use, though he'd been told that on certain worlds the experts could say a song across a snowy mountain range and tell, from the echoes, distance as well as the safety of an ice pack. Ice pack. Now there was a dangerous thought! Truth was that this world used to have an ice pack, but what it had now for all its trouble were two meteor scarred polar regions and a star with so dangerously and preternaturally active a surface that it could be a candidate for a nova in a million years or so. His ship's geologist had speculated that in the height of planetary winter—five hundred or so local days hence, when the planet was nearly a third more distant from its star—there might be enough cold to accumulate a water snow to some significant depth—say as deep as his boots—on the northern plains and cap. Checking the magnetic compass for north he saw a nervously twittering display as the field fluctuated, and he wondered if there'd be another round of ghostly electric coronas lighting the night sky. As he walked across the rocky ridge, anger built. Within historical record—perhaps as recently as two thousand Common Years—this world has been a candidate for open air colonization. In the meantime? In the meantime the sheriekas conceived and mounted a bombardment of the inner system, setting robots to work in the outer debris clouds and targeting both the star and this world. Kill. Destroy. Make life, human, animal, any—already improbable enough—impossible... The sheriekas did this wherever they could, as if life itself was anathema. Overt signs of sheriekas action were an indication that a planet or a system held something worthwhile... And so here was Jela—perhaps the first human to set foot on the planet, perhaps the last—trying to understand what was here that so needed destroying, what was here that the sheriekas hated enough to focus their considerable destructive energies upon. It wasn't useful to be angry at the enemy when the enemy wasn't to hand. He sighed, called to mind the breathing exercises and exercised, dutifully. Eventually, he was rewarded with calm, and his pace smoothed out of the inefficient angry stride to a proper soldier's ground-eating lope. Suddenly he walked in near darkness, then out again as the defile he'd entered widened. In time of snow or rain this would have been a dangerous place. It was as convenient a walkway as any, now that the plants were killed off or gone subsurface, now that the animals, if there had been any, were long extinct. After some time he found himself more in the dark than otherwise, saw the start of a flickering glow in the sky to the north, and stopped his march to take stock. Underfoot was windblown silt. Soft enough to sleep on. He ran through his ration list mentally, pulled out a night-pack, selected his water, and camped on the spot. Overhead the sky flickered green fire until well after he went to sleep. THE FOOTING HAD become treacherous and Jela half-regretted his decision to travel with light-pack. The dangle-cord he carried was barely three times his height and it might have been easier to get through the more canyon-like terrain with the long rope. On the other hand, he was moving faster than he would have with the full pack, and he'd have had no more rations anyway.... Now that he was below the ridges rather than walking them he found the grit and breeze not quite so bad, though the occasional eddy of wind might still scour his face with its burden. Too, not being constantly in the direct rays of the local star helped, though that might be a problem again as it approached mid-day. For the moment, though, he was making time, and was in pretty good shape. Rations now. Rations were becoming an issue. It was true that his rations were designed to let him work longer on less, and it was equally true that he'd been designed—or at least gene-selected—to get by on less food than most people ate, and to be more efficient in his use of water. Unfortunately, it was also true that he did require some food, some water, some sleep, and some shelter—or he, like most people in similarly deprived circumstances, would die. Bad design, that dying bit, he thought—but no, that was what the sheriekas had thought to conquer—and perhaps had conquered. No one seemed to know that for sure. Meanwhile, he—Generalist Jela—had been designed with human care, and he approved of much of the design. He could see and hear better than average, for instance, his reaction times were fast and refined—and he was far stronger for his size than almost anyone. It was this last bit of design work that had got his leg broken, despite it, too, being stronger than average. He just couldn't hold the weight of six large men on it at once. He'd gone over that fight in his mind many times, and with several fighting instructors. He'd done everything right—just sometimes, no matter what, you were going to lose. He was rambling again. Deliberately, he brought his attention back to the job at hand. The next moment or two would bring him to the mouth of the canyon and into the valley proper; soon he should have sight of the structures he'd spotted on his recon runs. The possibility that they were flood control devices had been suggested by the ship's geologists, as well as the idea that they were "cabinets" for some kind of energy generating stations that needed to be able to survive both flood and ice. Dams—for water conservation? Even the idea that they were the remains of housing had been suggested... His stomach grumbled, protesting the lack of wake-up rations. He figured he'd be hungry for awhile. No reason to break that next pack open quite yet. He slogged on, cap shading his eyes, watching for the first sign of the— There! There was one! It was silted in, of course, and beyond it another—but the form of it, the details of it, the stubs— He ran—a hundred paces or so it was to the nearest—put his hand on it— Laughed then, and shook his head. And laughed some more, because he didn't want to cry.... Two On the ground, Star 475A Mission time: 9 planet days and counting THE TREES HAD been magnificent. Their crowns must have reached above the canyon rim in spots, and together they may have shaded the valley below from the direct light of the local star. An entire ecosystem had no doubt depended upon them. No wonder the ship's geologists had thought them constructs from orbit.... What remained was still impressive. The base diameter of the downed trunk he touched was easily six or seven times his own height and he hesitated to guess how long a board might have been sawn from its length. The shadow caught his attention then as light began filling the area in earnest. It was time to move downstream. If there was water left at all, it would most likely be at the ancient headwaters—too far by days for him to reach—or downstream. Downstream, he might make in time for it to matter. HE WALKED, BECAUSE he'd chosen to explore, and explore he would. At night, he stopped when his augmented vision blurred, camping where he stood. He went to short rations, cut them in half, and in half again, stinting on water as much as he dared. So far, the rescue transponder had guided no one to his position— friend or foe. So, he walked, and he strove to be alert, spending part of the time analyzing his surroundings, part watching the sky, and part in an on-going argument with himself—an argument he was losing. "Not going to do it, I bet. They can't make me!" "Will, can." "Won't, can't." The argument concerned the growing fashion among the newer troops of putting their ID markers on their face. Fashion was something he didn't deal with all that much, and besides, he felt that a commander should be making these kinds of decisions, not a troop. And yet, he had to own it was convenient to be able to tell at a glance which unit, rank, and specialty defined a particular soldier. "Shouldn't!" He'd said this loudly—definitively—just before Tree Number Sixty-four, and it was while using the base of that tree as shade—and checking the angle of its fall—that the position locator in his pocket chuckled briefly. He grabbed the unit, watching the power-light—but there, that was silly. Unless things improved pretty soon the unit's power would outlast him by quite some number of years. After all, it had been three days—four?—since he'd last had heard that sound.... Live now, the sensor showed him to be somewhat closer to the pre-marked goal than he had expected; the map roughed in by the original orbital photos showed that he'd managed to miss an early valley entrance—likely by refusing to walk quite as boldly as he might have into the teeth of the gritty breeze—and had thus saved himself a half-day or more of trudging down a much longer hillside. The big question was becoming "saved" for what? There were no signs of life that was still alive; nor of water. The trees— Maybe the trees were worth the walk, after all. There was a theory growing in his head—that he'd come in part looking for great works, and he'd found great works. In the days he'd been walking with the trees he'd found evidence of purpose far beyond the probability of happy accident. For one thing, in places—not random places but specific kinds of places—the trees had fallen across the ancient watercourse, high ground to high ground, just where there was no marching forward to the ocean on that bank. They seemed to have preferred the left bank—which was generally wider, when it existed at all—and they sometimes seemed to have rested from their march and made a small grove, while at other times they'd hurried, stringing a long line of solitary trees. Too, they were getting smaller. It saddened him, but the later trees.... sigh. Sloppy thinking. He didn't have dated evidence. For all he factually knew, the first tree he had encountered was the youngest, not the eldest. And yet he persisted in believing that the trees had marched from the high ground down to the sea, and with purpose. And what other purpose could they have but to live—and by continuing to live fight the purpose of the sheriekas? "As long as there is life in the Spiral Arm, especially intelligent, organized life, the sheriekas will not easily reach their goal!" The memory-voice rang in his ears, for the moment obscuring the sound of the wind. That had been... who had it been, after all? Song-woman. Right. Jela closed his eyes, saw the small troop of them standing on a hilltop like so many ancient savages, singing, singing, singing. He'd been part of a survey team then, too, his very first, and he'd laughed at their belief that they were fighting some space-borne invader by standing there singing, singing in the light and long into the night. In the morning there had been three fewer of the singers, and word eventually came down from the frontier that three sheriekas world-eaters had simply vanished from tracking—gone, poof! The timer on his arm went off. He reached for a water bulb.... and stopped before his hand got close to the pocket. Not yet. He'd been waiting a little bit longer of late, and longer still if he could. There wasn't a whole lot of water left and he'd stopped counting. That he was in the valley helped, since the cutting wind—though noisier—was much less in evidence here among the fallen trees at river height. But he'd been thinking about something.... Trees. That was it. Like the singers, the trees had helped hold off the sheriekas, he was sure of it. But why then had the sheriekas not taken the planet and the star system, the trees being dead? Why did they skulk about the edge of the system, rather than occupying the place, or blowing up the star, as they had become so fond of doing the last decade or two? The singer-woman and her ilk were every bit as needed as was his ilk, if they could sing or pray or startle the enemy to a standstill. The trees, too, if they were on their own inimical to the scourge. The trees. Why if the trees, without human help or human thought—had fought the sheriekas to a standstill he should have them—he should take a piece for cloning, plant them throughout the Arm and— He sat, suddenly, not noticing that he landed on rock. There was something here to be thought on. If worse came to worse, which it rapidly was, he would need to write this down, or record it, so that the troop could see this new ally in its proper light. Before writing or recording anything, he reached to the left leg pouch and took hold of the water container. Beneath, in the next down, was one more. And then of course there was his right leg, with its water.... He gently squeezed a drop or two onto his fingers first, carefully rubbing them together, then wiping his upper lip and clearing some of the grit away from his nose. Then he sipped. As he sipped, he thought. There had to be a connection between the trees, the pattern of their flight, and the attack from which the sheriekas had withdrawn. Almost, he had it, that idea of his. Almost. Well. It would come. One more sip for the moment. One more right now for the soldier. He sighed so gently a lover sitting beside him might have missed it. So he was a soldier. In various places humans saw the fighting and withdrew, saw the fighting and played the warring parties against each other, fought as these trees had fought to draw every bit of water from the dying world, fought to hide and survive and perhaps outlast the madness of the battle. In the end, the powers-that-were had permitted the experiments to resume. To fight augmented humans, one needed special humans. Not quite as adjusted and modified, perhaps, as the sheriekas or their manufactured allies, and perhaps lacking the power to sing away the death of worlds, but fighters who were more efficient, stronger, and often faster. Did he survive this world and a dozen more he'd not live the life nor die the death of an ordinary citizen. Retire? Quit? "Not me!" His voice echoed weirdly against the grating of the wind. He sighed, louder this time, sealed the partial bulb and replaced it in its pocket. Then, he staggered—truly staggered—to his feet. He centered himself, felt the energy rise—somewhat, somewhat—danced a step or two, did the stretch routine, settled. Things to do. He had things to do. With or without his ID on his face, he was M. Jela Granthor's Guard, a Generalist in the fight to save life-as-it-was. Who could ask more? He laughed and the valley gave his laugh back to him. Heartened, he followed the march of the trees. HE'D MANAGED TO wake, which he took for a good thing, and he managed to recall his name, which was something, too. Eventually he bullied his way through a two-day old partial ration pack, knowing there weren't many more left at all, at all, not at all, and glanced at his location sensor. The map there seemed clearer and his location more certain. There were still just three satellites working instead of the ideal seven, but they were working hard—and all on this side of the planet at the moment, by happy accident, building exactly the kind of database a Generalist would love to own. The trees he'd been following for the last—however long it had been—now were downright skinny, as if they'd been striving for height at the expense of girth, but that was only six or eight times his own paltry height rather than a hundred times or two. Some of them were misshapen, short things, as if they'd tried to become bushes. He tried to use one as a bridge from the right bank back to the left, as he had done several times during his hike, and it broke beneath his boots, both frightening and surprising him since this was the first such bridge that had failed him. He'd landed in the silted river channel, not too much worse for the fall, knowing he was at the delta he'd been aiming for since he first stepped put of his lander.... He climbed, slowly, onto the firmer soil of the bank, blinking his eyes against the scene. Had he the water to spare he would have cried then. He'd come through the last bend of what had been a mighty river; before him the channel led out into the dusty, gritty, speckled plain of what had been a vast and shallow salt sea. Here and there were great outcrops of boulders and cliffs, and when he turned around he could see the distant hills. There were a few more trees ahead of him, lying neatly in a row as if each had fallen forward exactly as far as it could, and a new one had sprouted right there and— There was nothing else. Wind. Rock. Grit. Three thousand two hundred and seventy-five of the trees then, since he'd started counting—maybe one or two more or less as he'd walked some nights until he could see nothing. "Finish the job, soldier." He was the only one to hear the order, so it must be his to carry out. Dutifully, he walked those few steps more, to see it to completion. To honor the campaign, well-planned and well-fought, which had nonetheless ended in defeat. After, he knew, he'd need to find a shaded spot down in the dead channel. Above it he'd build a cairn, set his transponders to full power and put them on top—and then he'd settle in with his last sip or two of water to wait. The hill wasn't all that bad to look at, and he'd be comforted by the presence of fallen comrades. It was a better death than most he had seen. Reverently, Jela stepped over the last tree—like so many others it had fallen across the river, across the channel. It was hardly thicker than his arm, and had scarcely reached the other side of what had been a skinny riverlet, where its meager crown lay in a tangle over a rock large enough to cast a shadow. His boot brushed the tree, snagged in a small branch, and he fell forward, barely catching himself, the shock of the landing leaving a bright flash of sun against pale rock dancing in his head, and a green-tinged after-image inside his eyelids, strange counterpoint to the speckled brown and dun of the ex-seashore. He closed his eyes tightly. Heard the sound of the wind, heard the rattling in the branches that still graced the dead trunk, felt the sun. I could stay here, he thought, just like this, sleep, perhaps not wake— He opened his eyes despite the thought, caught movement across the way, keeping time with the beat of the wind. There at the root of the rock, just beyond the meager crown of the downed tree, was a spot of green. A leaf—and another. Alive. Three On the ground, Star 475A Mission time: 14 planet days and counting DUTY WAS A STRANGE thing to think of in this moment, for he was giddy with a joy totally beyond reason, and he knew it. He felt as he had when he'd come back to the troop hall after serving seventeen days in detention for his single-handed fight against the squad from Recon. He came into the hall to absolute silence. No one spoke to him, no one said anything. He'd been so sure he'd be sent off— And there on his bunk was his personal unit flag—wrapped around the haft of it were green and blue ribbons of exactly the shade Recon preferred. When he had it in his hands and held it up and looked out at them, they cheered him. And that's how he felt, looking across at the green life dancing in the wind—as if dozens stood about it, cheering. And then, there was duty. Though the tree was alive, and mostly green, some of the leaves were browning, and his first thought was to give it water. Of course, he didn't have enough water to rescue it, really, just as he didn't have enough rations to rescue him. But he gave it water, anyway—the last of the partial, and a fourth of a new bulb, the same as he drank himself. Duty made him wonder if the tree was poisonous. It was a scrawny thing, barely half his height, with a fine fuzzy bark about it. Perhaps he could suck on a few of the leaves. There was something else, among those leaves, and he knew not if he should consider it fruit or nut. He knew not if he should eat it, for surely anything that could live in this environment was— Was what? He was living in this environment, after all. For a time. The fist-sized pod was high on the tree, its weight bending the slim branch on which it grew, and he saw the thing now as yet another soldier carrying out its duty. All of the trees he'd walked beside had marched down to the river and then down to the sea, each with the goal of moving forward, each after the other bearing the duty of taking that seed-pod, high up in the last tree this world was likely to see, as far forward as possible. Duty it was that made the little tree grow that pod.... And duty told him that this tree was far more important than he was. It and its kin had preserved a world for centuries, as the report he'd carefully written and repeated into voice record told those who would follow. At this point, even with the tree withering in spots, it would—like the satellite sensor he carried—outlast him. Duty dictated that he should help keep it alive, it being life and he being sworn, in essence, to help things live. He sat down, finally, for standing was taking its toll on him, and leaned against the rock where he could touch the tree, lightly. He was tired, for all that it was not yet noon, but he had shade—green shade—and could use a rest. If only his pick-up would come. He'd grab the tree up in a heartbeat, and take it away, for there was nothing to keep it here, or him. He'd take it someplace where water was certain. Someplace with good light and good food, and dancing girls. He was partial to dancers and to pilots—people who knew how to move, and when. They'd have a great time, him and the tree, and there'd be room for a dozen more trees—and why not?—dozens of dancers.... He fell asleep then, or passed out, and dreamed a dream of storms and floods and trees lying across swollen rivers and falling in the depths of snow, and of landers coming down from the sky, unable to rise again—and behind it all both a sense of urgency and a sense of possibility. He dreamed of his dozen dancers, too, recalling names and lust. HE WOKE WITH the smell of food in his nostrils, and a clear sense that he'd made a decision. He opened his eyes and saw the leaves rattling in the breeze. He knew he'd die soon, but if he drank the last of his water and then—rather than going to shelter in a cave or a hole—arranged himself to die here, beside the tree, so he'd not be alone, it was likely that his fluids and remains would nourish the tree for some time, and that would be the best use of what duty he had left to him. And then maybe, just maybe, that seed pod would sprout, and the soldier born of it might have the chance to be found and taken away, to continue the fight. Food. The smell of fruit. He eaten the last partial rations—when? A day ago? A year? And the smell of the pod so close left him hungry... Guiltily, he got to his feet and moved a few steps away from the tree. No, he couldn't. It would have been one thing if he'd found the pod beside the tree, with no chance of it growing, no rainy season to hope for at this latitude any longer, no winter. But now, at best, what could it do? Give him another hour? Or kill him outright? He was hoping that his eyes deceived him, for the leaves around the pod looked browner now than when he'd first spotted the tree. He didn't want it to be failing so quickly. He didn't want to see it go before he did. The tree moved slightly, and the leaves rattled a bit in the breeze. There was snap, sudden and pure. Aghast, Jela watched the leaves flutter away as the pod tumbled to the silty soil. The pod sat there for a dozen of his accelerated heartbeats. It seemed to shiver in the breeze, almost eagerly awaiting his touch, his mouth. Jela pondered the sight, wondering how long such a pod might be fresh, considering how useless—and how senseless of duty—it would be to let it lie there unused and uneaten. He moved carefully and bent to the pod, lifting it, cherishing it. Feeling the sections of rind eager and ready to peel away in his hand, he wondered if he had waited too long, and was even now hallucinating in the desert, about to eat a pebble found next to a dry, dead stick. He sniffed the pod and found an aroma promising vitamins and minerals and, somehow, cool juicy refreshment. He saluted the tree, and then, dragging from memory the various forms he'd learned, he bowed to it, long and low. "I honor you for the gift freely given, my friend. If I leave this place, you will go with me, I swear, and I will deliver you into the hands of those who will see you as kin, as I see you." Then his fingers massaged the pod, and it split into several moist kernels. With the first taste, he knew he had done the right thing. With the second he recalled the joy of rushing water and spring snow, and the promise of dancers. And then, considering the promise of dancers yet again, weighing the fragility of the inner kernels, Jela pushed aside the restraint which suggested he try to save one kernel out, just in case... and he devoured the entirety. * * *
THE IN-BETWEEN PLACE—the plane of existence between sleep and consciousness—was a place Jela rarely visited. It generally took drugs or alcohol to get him there, and even achieving there he rarely stayed, as his optimized body sought either sleep or wakefulness, the latter more than the former. His dreams, all too often, were also optimized: explicit problem solving, pattern recognizing, recapitulations of and improvements on things he'd actually done, or actually attempted to do. So this was unusual, this feeling of being comfortably ensconced below wakefulness. Odd in the security of it, though he had a right to be tired, having laid out an arrow of rocks—actually a double row and more of his tracks and a row of the whitest stones—pointing to the tree and his fox-den nearby. Perhaps it was completion he felt; he'd done the best he could, all considered, and if he were now to fall into the fullest sleep and never wake it would not have been for lack of trying to do otherwise. Certainly, he was not one who might call to him ephemeral magics and gossamer wings to fly to the edge of space and command a comet to carry him, cocooned, to a place where others of the sheriekas-bred might find and thaw him... That briefing came to him now, of how certain of the others created by the sheriekas as spies and weapons were able to move things so easily to their wills... That such were rare, and as erratically dispersed as the killer things was to the good... But there, the doze was both deeper and lighter now, and he had truly not meant to sleep. Not dream, he'd nearly said, all the while hearing the wind and its acts: the slight rustle of leaves near his head, the sound of gritty sand-bits rushing to fill an empty sea, perhaps an elegant thunderstorm distantly giving impetus to waves on a beach and wings that beat. Perhaps the distant tremble of air as some flying thing cavorted... Now here there was comfort, for there had been flying things once, of many sizes, and if they'd fought amongst themselves at times, they'd done their work, too, moving seeds and pods about, taking away loose branches, warning of fires and off-season floods, sharing a measure of joy in the world until they were vanquished by some short-term calamity beyond the thought of trees. What an interesting idea... In his mind's eye he soared with great wings above a world populated by trees and quiet creatures, above seas willing to carry rafts of the flood-swept for years, rafts where nests and young might travel in the shade of those still green, growing, and accomplishing. Very nearly he could feel the weight of such a pair, singing and calling, perched in his crown at sunrise, answering the call of others across the canyon, and those passing on rafted currents along the sometimes untrustworthy coastal cliffs.... No! He knew he had never had a crown of green, nor had creatures perching in it! His mind took that thought, rejected it as it might a bad element in a dream, came back to the sounds, things that he might measure, rather than ones that might keep him comfortably immobile. The sounds he was hearing were old sounds, echoed off of canyon walls last week or last month or last year or... or when? If he'd been half asleep moments before, now he was one quarter asleep. His muscles still lounged, and his eyes, but his ears recalled a distant mammalian heritage and would have twisted like those of a fox if they could... for there was something there, something that hadn't been there in the days of his walk, or the nearer days of his hibernation—something he was hearing as if through a template. He agreed with himself somewhere deep in the near-sleep: a template. A template not of sight, but of sound and vibration. An old template that shuffled a million years of experience and separated the sounds and shifted other templates to form a nearest match. Flying thing. Not a fox's template though. Not usually heard through ear, but through branches. Flying thing. He willed his eyes open, did Jela, who found his name then, and his duty, but his lids remained closed, so he listened harder, for this was a template recently used, despite its age, and he must connect it to the sound in the root and branches and— Then there was thunder enough to open his eyes, and his ears were his, and to his wakeful mind the pattern came: sonic boom. He shed sleep entirely then, and glanced at the tree, which had been shading him as best it might. "Flying things, my friend? And dragons?" He laughed, to hear his voice sounding remarkably like the dragons of the dream. "Dragons and now spaceships? What a fine delirium you bring!" His eye caught the line of a single narrow contrail in the sky, floating with no obvious sign of an attached craft. It looked like they were heading away from him—to the place he'd touched down. Else they were headed in the other direction. Directly for him. Sighing, Jela the soldier reached for his sun shades, tapped the knife on his belt for comfort, and drew the gun to be sure the barrel was not full of sand, nor the charge useless. "Field of fire," he remarked to the tree, "favors both of us. If it isn't someone we know and they can read the signs, they'll have an idea where I am, so I'll be just a little bit someplace else. If they're bright, they'll expect it, but hey, I've got the rescue beacons on. "You... I'm going to camouflage as best I can." His handiwork, when admired from a distance, appeared to be another random pile of debris, though his tracks around it were hard to disguise entirely. He'd used his vest to sweep the more obvious tracks into smudges, and left the beacon on. He took one transceiver, leaving all the other powered items in the den, where they'd either not be noticed or, if detected, where they'd serve to convince anyone oncoming that he was sensibly in the shade. He was not exactly sensibly in the shade, though he had some of it. That wouldn't be a problem for much longer today, in any case, since the sun would soon be on the horizon. His choice was a gully where the meandering of the stream bed had made a short-lived branch; there, looking across at the tree, he laid out his pistol and his backup, and emptied his pockets of anything that might weigh him down if he needed to move fast. He laughed mirthlessly, no doubt in his mind that he was running on adrenaline and hope, knowing too that his chance of moving with speed or stealth was pretty slim, this far into no rations. It was then that he felt the ship, as if large welcome wings were overhead. There was a whine of the wind, and some slight hissing—remarkably like that of the CC-456s he'd known for decades. It swept in low over the tiny campsite, its wings not all that large—indeed the ship itself was not all that large!—did a half-turn, displaying a single black digit on each of its stubby maneuvering wings, then another half turn—incidentally bringing the nose cannon to bear on the campsite. Then it hissed itself quietly into the empty ocean, and was still for very nearly eight full seconds, at which point Corporal Kinto jumped out the open hatch, slipping on the shifting sand with an obscenity. |