Ammonite

Chapter Three

MARGHE WOKE FROM a nightmare of drifting off the ground, spinning away from a planet with a gravity low enough to allow the muscle jerk of a sneeze to provide escape velocity.

The wind had died to a whisper and the night was quiet and inky soft. Dry ting grass scratched against the spun fibers of Marghe’s nightbag as she wriggled onto her back. The cloud cover was thin and veil-like, allowing tantalizing glimpses of the moons and what might be stars, or satellites.

She closed her eyes. Meet Jeep, she told her senses, a new planet. One by one she sorted out the Earth smells: the grass-stained rubber of their shoes; the hot rotor and ozone of the sled; the thin perfume of shampoo and insect repellant; the dyes of their clothes; the metal and plastic of coiled cable. She tuned them out. The rest, the mineral-rich water vapor in the clouds, the hollow, juiceless ting grass, the sharp chalky soil under her back, was Jeep. Jeep, with its animal musk and light spice. She listened to the wind, and to the faint burrowings of unknown insects tunneling around the roots and bulbs and pods of next spring’s flowers: to the breath and heartbeat of another world.

She opened her eyes again. The cloud cover over the moons had deepened, but even so their light was of a visibly different spectrum. Away from the Earth-normal artificial illumination of Port Central, her eyes would adjust in a few days. Without looking at her wristcom, she tried to judge how many hours there were until dawn.

The twenty-five-and-a-half-hour diurnal cycle was just abnormal enough to be confusing. This latitude and time of year meant only eight or nine hours of full daylight; like dusk, dawn would be a lengthy affair. At least the year was shorter; winter would not last as long.

She listened to the steady breathing of the cable technician, Ude Neuyen, to the double breath of Sergeant Lu Wai and Letitia Dogias, the communications engineer, and wondered how it had been for the first colonists: listening to the breath of someone close by, waiting for the onset of the cough that meant a lover or child was going to die. How had it been—how was it—living on a world without men? From test results, she knew that the first colonists had been adept bioengineers: genetic material from Earth flora and fauna was present in indigenous species, and vice versa. The colonists had created viable crops and livestock. How long had it taken them to find the answer to their own reproductive puzzle?

From the other side of the sled, Lu Wai or Letitia sneezed and Marghe jumped, then jumped again as a pale seed drift floated by. Here, any movement in the corner of her eye flooded her with adrenaline and slicked her hands with sweat; she could not name or recognize a thousandth of the plants or animals. Or insects. She scratched the bites around her ankles, cursing under her breath as a scab came off and leaked blood. At least the insects she had encountered so far were not dangerous. As far as anybody knew.

She pushed her nightbag down around her waist to let the light breeze dry her sweat and watched the clouds scudding overhead. Gradually her heartbeat slowed, and her breathing. She slept.

She woke at dawn to a spiderweb, prismatic with dew, hanging across a clump of ting grass a handspan from her face. It was large, more than three feet across, and the strands were too thick for a spider’s web: like fine, peach-tinted glass tubes. She sat up slowly, looking for the spider.

A mustardfly, whining over the tips of the ting grass, came too close. The web rippled slightly, and a strand touched the fly’s triple wing. The fly struggled, and wherever it touched, it stuck. Then it stopped fighting and seemed to collapse in on itself. Marghe squinted in the cool light: the fly was dissolving, shriveling. The strand against which it was caught darkened and swelled. Within four minutes, the fly was subsumed: nothing but a glutinous lump.

The web convulsed, splitting the dark patch into hundreds of peach-colored corpuscles that pulsed in different directions down the hollow strands.

Digestion. The strands were both the spider and the web.

Cautiously, Marghe touched one of the outer strands with a fingertip. It stung.

Some kind of acid, or alkali. She wiped her finger on the wet grass and wondered what would have happened to her face if she had rolled over into it while asleep. She went to wake the others.

The morning was heavy and still and the sled hummed over a carpet of ivory olla flowers. The wind of their passage churned up a perfumed haze of golden green pollen; they all wore scarves wrapped around their noses and mouths. Marghe sat in the flatbed playing chess with Lu Wai on the Mirror’s traveling board. Ude was at the stick and Letitia scanned the horizon for the cloud of kris flies that the pollen made inevitable. Marghe found herself looking, too.

“Your move.”

Marghe studied the board, thinking about kris flies. Their stings were unpleasant, and some people were allergic. She moved one of her pawns. Lu Wai made a small sound of satisfaction and reached out for her rook; she nearly dropped it when Marghe’s wristcom beeped a reminder.

Marghe took out the vial of FN-17 from her thigh pocket, popped the cap, and swallowed one.

“Can I take a look?”

Maighe hesitated, then handed them over. Lu Wai tipped one out onto her palm.

“Such little things,” she murmured through the scarf. She rolled it back into the vial, closed it, handed it back. She watched Marghe slide it into her pocket and double-check the pocket seal. “I’m glad to see you’re being careful. Just make sure you’re at Port Central when that stuff runs out.”

“You think it would make that much difference?”

“With a one in five chance of not surviving, you need any edge you can get.” She tapped the medic flashes on her shoulder. “Someone like me can make a difference.

Your move.”

Marghe moved her bishop.

Lu Wai sighed. “You’re not concentrating. Check.”

Marghe pushed the board aside. “Tell me about the virus.”

“You’re resigning?”

“I’m resigning.” She felt restless and it was hard to breathe. Her head itched. She pulled her scarf off, let it hang loose around her neck. “Tell me about the virus.” She wanted to know how the Mirror felt when she tried to heal people and they died; she wanted to know how it was to get sick and not know whether or not you were going to die. She needed to know what to expect.

Instead of switching off the board’s field and pushing the pieces flat to close it up, Lu Wai pulled each piece free one by one and laid them down carefully in some pattern Marghe could not follow. “The virus has a long incubation period, very long,” the Mirror said, intent on the little pawns and castles, “so we’d all been down here a while and settled in before anyone got sick. The first one I saw was called Sevin. He was a plastics engineer. Started coughing one day out by the perimeter, and didn’t stop. I gave him, tried to give him, emergency CPR, but he died. Took just six hours. His death was the easiest I heard of.” She examined the pieces critically, closed the box, ran her finger along the seal, and slipped it into a belt pouch. She untied her scarf, began to fold it into smaller and smaller triangles. “The next one I dealt with was a woman, named Margaret. She liked to cook, she told me.

I remember that because I hate to cook. That’s all I could think of, how I hate to cook, while she coughed and her eyes swelled up and she screamed with a headache not even mycain would help. She survived, though.” She tried to smile. “Made me a thank-you dinner.

“By then we knew it was some kind of virus that integrates with human cell DNA, a bit like a retrovirus. People, mainly men, were dead all over the planet.

Communications were bad, still are, so we couldn’t call everyone in for medical attention. Lots of people are still officially missing, that’s how we lost such a lot of equipment, sleds and such, but we know that most of them are dead. We tried everything against that virus we could think of, but none of the usual nucleoside analogues made a dent in its multiplication. We tried the interferons and synthetic analogues of 2’,5’-oligoadnylate; nothing worked. When we figured out that the female mortality rate was around twenty-three percent—”.

“I thought it was less than twenty.”

Lu Wai smiled again, but this time it was a hard sliding of muscles like tectonic plates. “Officially it is, if you don’t count those ‘missing.’” She paused. “You want me to go on?”

Maighe nodded. Her skin was tight and cold, as though someone had rubbed her down with a handful of ice. It was different down here, in the close, perfumed air, with the clouds massing overhead; Lu Wai had seen it on a scale Sara Hiam could not even imagine.

“So, we saw that more men than women were dying; we tried hormones. Didn’t work. Maybe it’s some kind of estrogen metabolite that inhibits the virus, but we don’t know which one. There might even be more than one. We were desperate. We tried isolation. It didn’t work, of course—Jeep’s a hard, mean little virus, uses everything and anything as a vector: air, water, saliva, sperm, food, feces… everything.”

“Does it affect animals?”

“Doesn’t seem to.”

“So where does it come from?”

“That’s what I’d like to know. If we had the records of the first settlers, maybe it would turn out that it was a genetically altered virus that got transferred from an animal to a human, and became something else.”

“It would have to have had much more than one crossover point. That seems to preclude accidents.”

Lu Wai smiled, that hard sliding of muscle again. “You haven’t seen a man stuck out in the boonies for weeks on end. He’ll fuck anything after a while.”

Marghe wanted to believe this was Mirror humor, but Lu Wai did not seem amused. “I didn’t know there were any large animals here.”

“I haven’t heard tell of any. Maybe they all died, too. But it doesn’t matter to me where the virus came from. I’d just like to know how to kill it so we could all get off this planet.”

“I didn’t think you were so unhappy.”

“I’m not. I’d just like to be able to go home, leave this place where so many friends died.”

There was nothing Marghe could say to that. She thought about the Kurst riding in orbit, some young officer with her or his finger on the button that would detonate Estrade. If Hiam was right, none of them would ever go home.

“You haven’t told me how it felt when you went down with it,” she said.

Lu Wai leaned back against the side of the sled and stared at the clouds.

“Everyone’s symptoms are different. Mine started with a rash on the underside of my arms. A couple of hours after my arms started itching, my eyeballs began to hurt, then I knew. I didn’t bother with the medical station; I went to my mod instead. I figured if I was going to die, it may as well be in peace, away from all that hustle. It’s only about a mile from the station to my mod, but I had difficulty walking those last few yards, it hits that fast. My joints ached, knees and hips mostly, though they didn’t swell up like some people’s do, and then the headache started, and the itchy eyes and throat. Then the cough.”

“How long were you sick?”

“Three days. I was weak much longer.”

Marghe wanted to reach out and take the Mirror’s hand, something, but Lu Wai had them both clenched around her scarf, remembering. “If I got it, ”she asked her gently, “what would you advise?”

The Mirror looked at Marghe speculatively. “I saw the vaccine specs; it’s your basic artificial antigen, but weaker than killed virus, because it’s not very specific.

The adjuvants should make up for that. It should work.”

“But just suppose it doesn’t.”

“Complications are almost always respiratory. Make sure you’re warm and dry, move your arms around a bit, give your lungs a chance to pump out any phlegm that might collect. Drink lots of fluids. Water’s best, but boil it. Dap would be okay because of that, but remember it’s a stimulant—not a very good idea when your body’s already weak. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables if you can get them.

Commonsense precautions.”

Marghe nodded her thanks, but the Mirror was not finished.

“If anything happens, if you lose your pills, or it doesn’t work, get back to Port Central, to a medic. Don’t mess with it. That’s the best advice I can give you.”

“Kris flies!” Letitia called, pointing.

Marghe pulled her scarf back up and tightened the knot. She breathed steadily through her nose, in and out, and followed Letitia’s finger. They were dark on the horizon, like smoke. She breathed more deeply.

Lu Wai squatted next to her and unfastened her medical roll. “Are you allergic to any of the antihistamines or bronchiodilators?”

“No.” She watched the swarm grow bigger.

The Mirror nodded, satisfied. “I’ve never heard of a swarm attacking without cause, but there’s always a first time. If they come close, curl up and expose as little of yourself as you can. And try not to panic.”

“I won’t.”

Letitia had already altered course to the shortest route off the olla carpet, but the kris flies were getting closer. Marghe hunched down and concentrated on her breathing. If she did get stung, she was confident she could neutralize the worst of the venom herself, or at least keep the effects localized. She closed her eyes and listened. A thousand, a hundred thousand pairs of wings beat the air, whisking it to a whining froth that blew into her ears and made her throat itch. It sounded wrong, and Marghe realized she had been expecting the drone of hornets or bees. The volume did not increase. She raised her head cautiously.

The swarm poured by almost close enough to touch, undulating and shimmering in the diffuse light like a silk scarf in the wind, gold, green, and black. The colors did not trigger Earth-learned fears; they were beautiful. All four women watched the swarm pass over the horizon, and were quiet a long time afterward.

The early morning sky was mother-of-pearl; in its light, the chevrons and gray medic flashes on Lu Wai’s shoulders shone almost silver as the Mirror pointed a free hand westward. “Look over there.”

At first Marghe could see nothing different; then the grass changed from yellowish green to black. Letitia put down her schematic and clambered up into the front. “The blasted heath,” she said. They watched the black plain spread out to their left like a pool of charcoal dust.

Marghe leaned out to take a closer look. She thought she saw fresh green shoots pushing through the withered remains. “I’d like to go in closer.”

“Not advisable,” Letitia said, “at least in the sled. It’s not a good idea on foot either, unless you’re with someone who knows about burnstone.”

Burnstone could smolder under the ground for years before sighing into ash.

Company had triggered several serious burns before they had learned to listen to the indigenes and avoid these unstable areas.

“This is the big one,” Letitia said. “The one that got SEC’s knickers in a twist.”

Marghe nodded. The Jink and Oriyest v. Company case. “I wonder what happened to the owners.”

Letitia leaned against the waist-high siding of the sled and watched the ruined grass flow beneath them. “Nobody owns this land,” she said.

“For now, the journey women are letting Jink and Oriyest use some land to the north and west,” Lu Wai said. “Not for from here.”

“If it’s not far, I’d like to visit.”

Marghe felt the women in the sled tense. Letitia and Lu Wai almost looked at each other but did not, and in the back of the sled, Ude sat up. No one said anything.

“What have I said wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s just that they’ll be busy right now, getting in their flock,” Lu Wai said easily, without taking her eyes from the horizon.

Letitia nodded. “We’d waste a day or two tracking them down, and we need to get these cables laid and the relay in place before the weather turns. You’re operating under a tight schedule, too.”

Marghe looked at them one at a time. They had closed ranks against her, but why? What was going on? “Are you saying you refuse to take me to find Jink and Oriyest?”

“No,” Letitia said, “just that we’d search for days and more than likely not find them.”

Which meant the same thing, Marghe thought bitterly. If they did not want her to meet Jink and Oriyest, there was nothing she could do. She was angry, and did not bother to hide it. “I don’t know why you don’t want me to find them, but I’m not stupid enough to waste my time trying to force you. Perhaps on my way back.”

She pushed her way past Letitia and stared out across the burn. A faint speck hovered over the western horizon: a herd bird. Marghe watched it for a long time, feeling like an outsider again.

The wind was strong, driving tall, sail-heavy clouds across the gray sky. Lu Wai and Ude were both asleep, and Letitia was making notes on her wristcom.

Marghe held the sled’s stick in both hands. In the west water flashed silver, surrounded by large dark shapes. She eased the stick left and the sled veered. Letitia looked up.

“Ah. The river Ho.”

Marghe ignored her. She was still angry.

“The people around here call those tall things skelter trees. When you get nearer, you’ll see why.” She must have sensed Marghe’s hostility, and went back to her calculations.

The Ho was broad and flat but the banks were steep. Long-fronded water plants trailed downstream like bony green fingers. Something leapt into the water with a plop, Marghe slowed the sled to an easy glide and cruised up to a skelter tree. It was tall, over fifty feet, and she could see where it got its name: branches of uniform thickness grew in a spiral up and around the charcoal black trunk, like a helter-skelter. The single-fingered leaves were arranged symmetrically along both sides of the branches and were broad as Marghe’s outstretched hand, the delicate green of lentil sprouts. They hardly moved in the wind. She brought the sled to a hovering standstill and reached up to touch one.

Something shrieked and chittered, shaking the branch until the leaves shivered.

“It might be a wirrel,” Letitia said. “I think they live in these trees. They’re small, but they’ve been known to bite.”

Marghe wondered if Letitia was waiting to see if the SEC rep wanted to touch an alien leaf badly enough to risk a bite from an equally alien animal. Well, Letitia would be disappointed; there were other trees, and she would not always have an audience.

She backed up the sled.

“The river winds a bit, but it runs all the way to Holme Valley,” Letitia said. “If you want to see lots of wildlife, just follow the bank.”

“No.” Lu Wai was awake and looking at the sky. “That would add hours to our journey, and I don’t like the look of these clouds.” She clambered into the front and gestured Marghe aside. “I’ll take the stick. Things are going to get rough.”

Clouds gathered on the northeastern horizon, greasy and heavy, an army wearing unpolished mail. Marghe relinquished the controls. Lu Wai slammed the stick as far forward as it would go. Marghe lurched and had to cling on. Once again she felt like an outsider, a stranger who did not know what was happening, what to expect.

Letitia scrambled into the front. “I don’t think we’re going to make it to Holme Valley before the storm.” Marghe wondered why she was grinning so hard.

The wind grew stronger. It flattened the grass and slid its hand under the sled, tilting it sideways on its cushion of air until it skittered like a bead of water on a hot skillet. As they headed north, outcroppings of gray rock became more frequent and Lu Wai had to ease back on the stick to maneuver safely. Ude woke up, took one look at the sky, and started to tie down the cable coils and clip lids on the storage bins.

They raced over the grass; the rotor hum deepened and the sled slowed as they began to climb a steady incline. Halfway up, the turf was scattered with rocks.

Lu Wai hardly slowed. She took them right over the first few, cursed as she swerved around the boulders. Letitia tapped Marghe on the shoulder and pointed ahead to a grayish red clump of rock.

“See it?” She had to yell over the wind. Marghe nodded. “She’s making for that crag. We’ll ground the sled there, take shelter.” She grinned again. “You’ll get a good view.”

A good view of what?

They both clutched the siding as the sled bucked and twisted and narrowly missed scraping its hull on a jagged overhang. The incline was steep now, and the sled groaned and rumbled, vibrating through Marghe’s bones and making her teeth ache.

They edged past a tumble of broken boulders and between two leaning stacks of sculpted and striated stone; the wind followed them, thrusting its tongue into every hollow and crack, making the rock sing and scream like a crazy woman in restraints.

Lu Wai backed them right up against the rock. Then the wind died.

“Do you feel it?” Letitia sounded eager; her head was tilted back as though she were drinking rain.

Marghe began to say no, but then she did. It was like being lowered slowly into water, feet first: the hairs on her ankles lifted, then on her legs, her stomach, her arms, the back of her neck. Electromagnetic disturbance.

“We’re far enough from the epicenter to be safe and sheltered here,” Lu Wai said as she cut the power. In the absence of the wind, the tick and sigh of the plastic settling slowly to the ground was eerie. An insect hummed past in a blur of wings, hovering over the tiny yellow flowers amongst the brown spikes of moss that spilled from the crevices at the base of the rock.

Letitia jumped down and scrambled up and around the overhang. Lu Wai and Ude slid covers over the instrument panels and clipped them down, then began securing the plastic storage bins with all their supplies. They were quick and efficient; there was nothing Marghe could do to help. She hesitated, then climbed up after Letitia.

The technician was lying on her stomach behind the remains of a dead tree that pointed up from the sparse soil like a bony finger. She looked up and grinned when Marghe joined her.

The sky was slippery with cloud massed in ranks of zinc and pewter. Lambent.

Marghe could feel the atmosphere curdling, twisting in on itself, pulling the air from her lungs like a fire. She was slick with sweat. The static grew, crawling through her hair until she thought her scalp would creep right off her skull. An ache started behind her eyes and in the hinge of her jaw.

The world lit up like a silent photograph, flat and grainy, limning the tree stark as a charcoal slash against a parchment sky. Lightning exploded like blue-white cat-o’-nine-tails until sound rolled and cracked and splintered and Marghe could no longer tell if it was the ground shaking or her muscles; she felt deaf and blind and exposed to her core. Electricity and exhilaration surged and hissed over her bones.

The storm held its breath a moment and she heard Letitia laughing, whoops and rills and great ringing ululations, and when the lightning cracked again Marghe laughed too; they held each other with heads back, mouths wide and open from the throat down to the stomach, laughing and shaking with exultation.

The storm dropped to silence, leaving Marghe blinking and Lu Wai shouting up at them. “Get down! The wind will hit any minute.”

Marghe looked at Letitia; the engineer’s grin had stiffened to a muscle spasm and her eyes were rolled back in her head. Marghe heard the rattle and scramble of the Mirror climbing the scar. Without letting go of Letitia, she peered over the edge.

“Get her down. Please, Marghe, get her off there right now.”

Marghe took a slow, steady breath, “All right. I’m all right. Letitia’s… If you’re steady where you are, stay there. I’ll see if I can lower her over the edge.”

Lu Wai’s face was pale and indistinct. “Go as fast as you can.”

Marghe wrapped both arms around Letitia’s waist. The technician was stiff and unresponsive but still fizzing with silent laughter. “Letitia. Letitia, can you hear me?”

She tightened her grip and half lifted, half trundled her to the edge of the rock. She changed grip, holding Letitia under the arms, and closed her eyes. Breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth, in and out, harder now, deeper. In, out. In.

Out. She pumped strength around her body. She would pay for this later.

“Hurry, Marghe. Please.”

Marghe opened her eyes, then walked Letitia off the edge of the cliff, holding her up using the muscles in her legs and back and arms. She lowered her as fast as she dared; bending a little, going onto her knees, then down on her elbows until only her back and shoulders and arms held the technician’s weight. She lay on her stomach and hung Letitia down like a plumbline.

Lu Wai reached up and took the stiff woman by the hips. In the quiet, the Mirror’s grunt was loud as she steadied herself and the engineer. “I have her. Get yourself down. Fast.”

Marghe swung herself over the edge, hung for a moment, then dropped. The grass was dry and prickly, the yellow moss flower sharp smelling in the still air. She helped Lu Wai drag Letitia into the shelter between the crag and the sled.

The wind hit like a sledgehammer swung low and slow and easy, thudding into her ribs and roaring over her ears until all she could hear was air. A heavy plate of tree bark flew out of nowhere and smashed down onto the sled; the plastic storage bin burst open and the wind tore the packaged rations to shreds, whirled them away. Her traveling food.

Marghe did not dare move. The rock under her shoulder shuddered as boulders rolled and crashed against its other side. She hunched down into the warmth of bodies. Someone put an arm around her waist; she leaned her forehead against a shoulder. She no longer felt like an outsider. The boiling clouds brought rain that pattered, then drummed on the torn food wrappers.

Marghe woke to the distant thunk of a mallet. A wooden mallet. Her coverlet smelled comfortably of use and herbs, tempting her to stay in bed a while longer, resting the muscles she had overused the day before. Ude’s bed was empty. She looked around, wondering how late it was. The ceiling was low and domed; its longitudinal rib arched from the floor, over her head, and back down to the floor at the other end of the lodge. Lateral ribs of black wood were chinked with wattling and daub, decorated in earth tones. Morning seeped through the weave of the door hanging and filled the lodge with air and sunlight. She sat up. Sunlight.

She swung herself off the sleeping shelf and pushed aside the door hanging.

Beyond the trees, Jeep’s sky was Wedgwood blue. Sunshine poured into the valley, filling it with a light like rich yellow cream, sliding over her skin, turning the hair on her arms to gold wire. She just stood there, letting the sunshine push sweet, warm fingers into her aching muscles.

Under her bare feet the grass was cool and luscious with dew; still early, then. She could see no one, but the sound of mallets floated downstream like underwater knocking, and from one of the stone-walled barns near the bank she heard the soft hiss and thump, hiss and thump of threshing.

The edge of a cloud veiled the sun and shadow raced down one side of the valley, blurring the wide glitter of the Ho to a dull gleam, then running up the other side, Her feet were wet and cold. She turned to go back inside. And stopped.

Last night she had been exhausted, and the hot swirling torches of the women who escorted her and Ude to the lodge had only smeared the dark with red. She had noticed the roughness of the roof and walls but assumed it was thatching. She had been wrong. The outside of the lodge was alive with greenery. It looked like a small hill nestling amongst the trees. She reached out and touched a pale green leaf. Cool and silky. Another leaf fluttered as a beetle the size of her thumb skittered out of sight. A wirrel shrieked, then another. This time she did not jump.

Curious, she ducked inside the lodge to take another look at the central rib and the branching lateral spars. Branches. The structural skeleton was a skelter tree.

She dressed, then prowled the lodge, picking up the wooden bowls, polished with use, looking under the table, noting the way the underside was not planed but still rough with black bark, the leg joints fastened with wooden pegs. There was a knife on the table, its blade made of a smoky, vitreous substance: olla, named after the flowers that grew over the raw olla beds. She tested it against the hair on her arm. It was extremely sharp. The pitcher of water was made of red-glazed clay; the cutting slab was stone, like the pestle and mortar. A shelf ran around the lodge at waist height, piled with neatly folded clothes. She ran her hands over them, under them, between them. They were smooth and rough: cotton and canvas, leather and wool.

They were warm. Her knuckles bumped on buttons of horn and wood, caught in ties and laces—no cold shock of metal fasteners. The door bar slid back and forth on greased wooden blocks that were glued and pegged into place.

Marghe followed the winding path between lodges toward the river and, she hoped, Lu Wai and Letitia. She popped a memory chip from her wristcom, inserted another, touched RECORD, and continued her notes from the day before. “Holme Valley has a population of about four hundred women and children. Sometime in the next ten days this will swell by another hundred or so as the community north of here drives their herds down from the pastures to winter in the valley. The women of Singing Pastures and those of the valley form two distinct communities. They even use different calendars dictated by different moons: the valley people divide the year into fifteen months of eighteen days each; the women of the pastures reckon with a ten-month calendar, each month twenty-seven days long.”

She hit PAUSE. She wished she could spare the time to stay and observe the mingling of the different populations, watch how they interacted. It would be like being able to go back in time and observe the early symbiotic interactions between people from human history on Earth.

A wirrel shrieked. Marghe went very still. This was not Earth; this was Jeep, a planet of alien species, a place where the human template of dual sexes had been torn to shreds and thrown away. This was something new. She knew these people had evolved cultures resting on bases very different from those of any Earth people; she did not know whether that made these women human or something entirely Other.

She shook herself. The question, What was humanity? was as old as the species, one she never expected to answer. She resumed her walk through the trees, but more slowly, thinking and occasionally making notes.

“If skelter trees grow at approximately the same rate as Earth trees, then to shape such a tree into a dwelling place must take forty or more years.” She imagined a family group selecting a tree, bending it, pruning it judiciously as babies were born, girls grew, and old women died. Did the lodge retain its integrity when the tree died?

She exited RECORD and looked up botanical records. Skelter trees lasted two hundred years. “The use of such building methods must be indicative of the social temperament of these people: patient, planning for the long term. Also willing to experiment.”

The trees ended a few yards from the river in a grassy slope, hammocked and tufted here and there where it grew over old tree stumps. Marghe wondered whether the tree fellers had used axes with stone or olla blades.

Someone was walking through the trees toward the path she had just left. Color flashed. Marghe recognized the fatigues.

“Lu Wai!” She waved and the Mirror saw her. “How’s Letitia?”

“Angry with herself and a bit shamefaced for making you risk yourself like that.

Otherwise, she’s fine. I was coming to see if you’d join us for breakfast.”

“I’m breakfasting with one of the women who farm the biggest field here. Cassil.

I hope to trade for some travel rations. But thank you.” She paused. “This thing with Letitia, I gather it’s happened before.”

“More than once.”

“Is it organic?”

“I haven’t been able to find anything.” Lu Wai shrugged. “Which doesn’t mean it’s not there. The diagnostic tools we have are primitive.” She sighed. “But what do I know? I’m only a medic.”

Marghe heard the hours of tests and record-searching in the Mirror’s voice and could find nothing to say. She watched Lu Wai walk away and wondered if Danner knew about Letitia. Yes, the Mirror commander would know; she would have to know everything in order to make Jeep work. She would know, too, that Lu Wai would do everything in her power to keep Letitia safe.

Cassil had hair the red-brown of strong tea, and gray eyes. She also had a baby on her hip, which, judging by its fair hair and brown eyes, was not hers. She looked tired and utterly human. She spoke slowly and with much repetition for Marghe’s sake.

“What we have isn’t mine or my kith’s to give.”

“But you farm the land?”

Cassil sighed, as though she had tried to explain this many times before and failed. “My kith farms well. Everyone sees that. So the journey women give us more land to work. We work it well, produce more food, leave the land fresh for the next season’s growing. Everyone benefits. We use the food to feed ourselves, and for trata.” The word she used did not mean trade, exactly; it meant trade as the first step on a journey whose outcome was uncertain—an opening gambit in a game that might continue for generations. Trata could be between two people, between two or more kiths, or between several communities. Frequently it was all three, each exchange resonating with another in the web.

The baby squirmed and Cassil switched it to her other hip. “If I give you food, or good boots, a woman might say to me, ‘Cassil, if you had given me that food, I would have made you two fine hangings for your lodge, and given you first pick of my next catch. But you gave it to that stranger woman and neither of us has gained anything from each other. Tell me, Cassil, what did this stranger woman give you in return?’ And what would I say to that?” The baby wriggled again, more determinedly this time. Cassil jigged her up and down, gave her a finger to suck.

Marghe was acutely conscious of her fatigue, the ache in her muscles, as she opened her empty hands. “My kith is large and very powerful.”

Cassil regarded her a moment. “Then why not return to your large and very powerful kith for more supplies?” Because they might not give me any more, because Dormer might not let me go again, Marghe wanted to shout. Because I am utterly alone on this world. She had nobody; no kith, no kin, no community.

Danner, Letitia, Cassil… they all sat in the center of a webwork of colleagues, friends, lovers. Family. She was alone, and scared. All she had was herself and her breathing exercises and her FN-17. Sitting here, across from a woman secure in her own community, all of that came home to her. She was alone on a strange and dangerous world, and she knew it showed on her face, Cassil tilted her head. “You are an orphan here,” she said softly, and touched Marghe’s cheek with the tip of one finger.

The warm, dry finger against her cheek pulled memories up from the well: her mother laughing and throwing away a batch of burned bread, saying, Never mind, we’ll buy some; ripping the computer plug from the wall, furious with some review; making her a fan from yellow tissue paper when she had a fever, then folding it up into a paper hat when she realized it wouldn’t work. Her mother singing a nonsense song, telling her stories of Macau, and of Taishan where she had been conceived; trying to smile before she died. It hit her all over again: she could never come back from Jeep and tell her mother how useful her organizational techniques had been in analyzing her notes for publication; she and her mother could never share tea and a funny story of misunderstandings with an alien people. Her mother was dead.

Marghe found herself hunched over, arms wrapped around her stomach; they were wet. She was crying. Fatigue, she told herself; her blood sugar was down. She breathed, hardly hearing Cassil moving around, tucking the baby into a blanket on the sleeping shelf, poking the fire into a blaze, swinging the dap kettle over the flames. Busy alien sounds. Water rumbled in the stone pot.

She felt the warmth of Cassil standing over her and turned her head, then took the worn square of cloth and wiped her eyes in silence. She thought about Danner saying I don’t know how else to prove my faith, of Kahn saying I know how rough it is, coming down alone. She had thrust their offers of friendship back at them.

Then she thought of Hiam, and of the Kurst, and of Danner’s unspoken certainty that the Mirrors would not be leaving Jeep. Here, now, with Cassil, she had a chance to help them, in her own particular way, at the same time as she helped herself. Trata was the key.

Cassil put two steaming bowls of dap between them. “So,” she said quietly, folding her hands, “you’re an orphan.”

Marghe did not want to distract them both by trying to explain the concept of father. She nodded. Her face felt hot and swollen. “But not entirely alone. I have been… adopted, into a rich and powerful kith, but I’m new to their ways, and yours.” Cassil smiled as if to say that was not news. Marghe chose her words carefully. “Someday, they—we—may be your neighbors. We could be useful to you.”

“There’s no burnstone in this valley, but perhaps your friends will find some other way to hurt a land they don’t understand. How will that be useful to us?”

“We’ve learned a lesson, and how to listen.”

Cassil appraised her. “Perhaps that’s so.”

Marghe opened a pocket and slid out a thin strip of copper. She put it next to Cassil’s bowl. Cassil picked it up, rubbed it, weighed it in her hand, but Marghe could not tell what she was thinking. She opened another pocket and took out a similar strip of iron. Cassil compared the two, then put them back on the table. She looked down at them a long time, then nodded abruptly. “Talking is thirsty work.”

She drained her bowl, refilled it.

They ate breakfast, and they talked, and ate lunch. It was late afternoon by the time they agreed: three months’ travel food, a pair of fur leggings, and a small sack of dap in exchange for one kilo of copper, two of iron, and guaranteed special consideration—if not quite friendship—from all Company personnel presently at Port Central. Trata. She would need to bargain for furs and a horse from the women of Singing Pastures, if they were amenable to trade.

“The trata must be witnessed by a viajera.” A journeywoman teller of news, Marghe translated, though obviously with some ritual function. “We expect T’orre Na soon.” Cassil’s face rounded with pleasure, and perhaps a little worry, “She comes to lead the pattern singing for Rhedan’s deepsearch. I’m Rhedan’s choose-mother.”

Marghe mentally compared this with Eagan’s notes: the ritual name-choosing by pubescent girls, and the concept of different mother roles within a kith. But what was pattern singing, and why did it give Cassil cause for concern? “Congratulations,” she said cautiously. Perhaps she could observe the ceremony. But her time was limited, and there would be equally interesting ceremonies on Tehuantepec. “How soon do you expect the journeywoman?”

Cassil shrugged. “Not before the women of Singing Pastures drive their herds down. She’s a few days down the windpath, with Jink and Oriyest’s flock, and that one of your kith, Day.”

Marghe did not know what she meant. “Who?”

“Your kith who is called Day, the one adopted by Jink and Oriyest. The one Jink saved when the burn went.” She looked at Marghe curiously. “You don’t know the story? It’s a good one. T’orre Na could sing it for you.”

A woman called Day, her kith. A Company woman… It made sense now. This was why Lu Wai and Letitia had not wanted her to meet Jink and Oriyest. Day would be there. Day, a Mirror who had gone AWOL. One of the many missing, presumed dead. How many of the others were alive?

She would have to talk to Lu Wai about this. Later.

“I can’t wait for T’orre Na. Perhaps one of my adopted kith can witness for me.”

It would take several days to get the relay up and working. Lu Wai could be her proxy.

It was another two hundred miles north to Singing Pastures. While Letitia and Ude worked on the relay, Marghe rode north with Lu Wai on the sled. She watched the Mirror’s gloved hands gentle on the stick, her indecipherable face beneath the quilted cap, and wondered what would drive a Mirror to go native.

To go native. She rolled the phrase around her mouth. It tasted of scorn. And fear. Why did the idea make her so afraid? And how many, how many Mirrors and technicians were out there, living in these strange cultures? They could tell her so much.

“How many people know about Day?” she demanded when they stopped to eat and relieve themselves.

“Officer Day is listed as missing, presumed dead,” Lu Wai said calmly, and carried on peeling a goura. She cut the fruit and held out half. Juice ran over her wrist. “Want some?”

“I want to know what happened to Day. Have you seen her since she… since she left? And are there others?”

Lu Wai put down the fruit. “I haven’t seen her, no, but Letitia saw her last year, and she leaves messages now and then. Usually written ones, but sometimes message stones, or a knotted string. She does that as a joke, I think. She knows we can’t read them.”

Marghe thought she sounded wistful. “Would you like to go, too?”

Lu Wai thought about that, then shook her head. “I think she gets lonely.”

Perhaps she was lonelier before, Marghe thought, among a people who did not understand her.

“Tell Danner,” she said suddenly. “Tell her about Day. She needs to know.” She thought of the Kurst, of the vaccine ticking away like a bomb in her pocket. ”And if there are any others, find them, talk to them. You won’t be betraying them. Persuade Danner to offer them amnesty, even let them go back to where they’ve been all this time. Just get them to talk to you. You’re going to need what they know.”

And the connections they’ve forged.

At least she had been able to set trata in motion, for Danner, for Lu Wai and Letitia.

For all of us.

She wondered what this woman Day was like, and where she had found so much courage.