Raising Caine - eARC (36 page)

Chapter Thirty-Six

Southern extents of the Third Silver Tower; BD +02 4076 Two (“Disparity”)

The water-strider stared down at Caine, leaned slightly closer. Riordan watched the extraordinarily wide mouth of the creature, held the futile axe ready, but did not move it.

The water-strider snuffled at him, then blew out a great, surprisingly sweet, breath—a mélange of lilies and ginger—and swayed unevenly away.

Caine forgot his fear as the creature’s unsteadiness caught his attention:
is it weak or—
?

And then Riordan noticed that the ground around the creature was not just wet from its steadily dripping pelt; there was a faintly iridescent maroon spattering that did not readily mix with the water. Caine traced it, found that it was streaming down one of the water-strider’s immense, bowed legs, which was quivering. Riordan looked more closely—

Pirhannows, by the scores, had worked themselves into the creature’s short fur. And now that he knew what to look for, Riordan saw them everywhere, writhing along the water-strider’s belly, around its mouth, up near its hips, and at a few points on the strange, almost antennalike protrusions that lay along its back to either side of its spine.

The water-strider took two more staggering steps away from Caine, revealing the pulverized remains of several orange water lilies stuck to its far flank. The strider crouched low and slowly slid on to its side, where it preceded to roll fretfully to and fro, apparently trying to cake dirt on its innumerable wounds.

Unfortunately, the soil under the cone tree was too sparse and too dry to stick. The protuberant roots gave the strider surfaces against which it could squash a few tormentors, but the main infestations were not concentrated where the rolling routinely crushed them. Some did fall off, though—

Caine leaped closer to the water-strider and smashed a handful of the pirhannows into mush with the back of the axe head. The sight, and the smell, was not unlike stamping on corpse-bloated maggots.

The water-strider started, stopped its rolling, focused all four eyes on Caine, snuffled lightly—then seemed to catch the whiff of its dead tormentors. It stopped, stared at Caine again, and then began rubbing its broad flat face along the roots that radiated out from the trunk of the cone tree. A dozen of the worm-fish were scraped off, still squirming. The strider leaned back its head—and out of pure instinct, Caine pulped them with the back of the axe. Savagely. He didn’t know if it was for Mizuki, or out of gratitude for being twice-saved by water-striders, or something more primal.
Or possibly
, he wondered, standing back,
this is an example of the Slaasriithi process of Affining one species to another.
But despite the chilling implications of that possibility, Caine Riordan realized that there was simply no arguing that he had become, well,
fond
, of
this powerful yet gentle creature.

Riordan resumed his strange partnership with the water-strider, lethally grooming the pirhannows from its pelt for another fifteen minutes. By then, the remaining wormlike tormentors were located in anatomical regions that the creature could not reach, and which Caine had no way of approaching without seeming like a new threat. The water-strider looked at him—it recalled the patient, steady stare of a grateful horse or dog—and rolled its mass a bit further away, the margins of its mouth not only caked with its own blood, but dry and cracked.

Caine rocked back upon his buttocks, sat, reflected on the surreal circumstances in which he found himself—and, for the first time, heard his collarcom paging steadily. Clearly, Gaspard had used his command-level authority to unlock the devices. Riordan tapped it. “Riordan.”

“Captain Riordan! We had given you up for—never mind. We are delighted that you have answered. But where are you?”

“I believe I’m directly across the river from you, Ambassador. Can you see a large cone tree on the opposite bank, the only one for hundreds of meters in either direction?” As they spoke, dusk was making its final surrender to night.

“I do not see—” Eager exclamations behind him suggested that others had better awareness of their surroundings. “Ah—yes, yes. Your position is known. But—”

“Ambassador, first things first: is everyone all right?”

“Happily, and improbably, yes. Ms. Veriden and Ms. Betul covered our retreat up the rocky outcropping by greeting our pursuers with a flurry of bullets. One was killed, two were wounded. That was enough to convince them to flee. But you have found shelter? Even though we saw you pursued? And you are safe?”

Caine stared at the water-strider; it may have been sleeping fitfully. That, or it was an awfully noisy breather. “Frankly, Ambassador, I doubt I’ve been safer since I stepped foot on this planet.”

“I am confused, Captain: how could you be—?”

“Ambassador, it would take far too long to explain. For now, let’s concentrate on arranging the safest way for me to rejoin you tomorrow. Have Mr. Xue and Ms. Veriden make their way over here to escort me back one hour after dawn. They should both be armed with rifles. After last night, if those predators are still in the area, they will hightail it the other direction if they take more fire. Other than that, I think we should save the batteries of our collarcoms.”

“Very well, Captain. You seem to lead a charmed existence.”

Caine looked at the strider. “A very unusual one, at least. Good night, Ambassador. Signal me when Xue and Veriden leave tomorrow.”

“Very well.
Bon nuit
, Captain.”

“Likewise.” Riordan turned off the collarcom.

* * *

The water-strider fell into a restless slumber, judging from its phlegmy susurrations, but its bleeding increased steadily. Riordan wondered if—following the apparent intent of the water-strider—he might have more success at making mud to cake its wounds. But the pirhannows had pulped the large animal’s hide in so many places that it was difficult to discern the worst sources of the bleeding.

The other problem—beyond Riordan’s innate reluctance to touch the large creature without its express toleration for such contact—was the lack of mud or suitable soil. Caine searched around the sub-biome that existed beneath the cone tree’s canopy, but the ground cover was thick and the dirt somewhat sandy: it crumbled when he tried to pick it up.

So maybe the answer was to make one’s own mud, or, better yet, to bring it in from the shore that crept right up to the margins of the tree. Armed with one of the tree’s large, spatulate leaves, Riordan moved through the arch the strider had used to enter under the canopy—

And recoiled: the riverside shallows were choked with orange lily-pads. Well, that answered why the gargantua had not returned to its natural environment after confronting the predators. It had probably been run ashore by this immense colony of lily-pads and its attendant swarms of pirhannows. Which also made it impossible to get enough river water to make mud. Walking back into the microecology under the canopy, and into what seemed like a growing mélange of sickly-sweet scents, Riordan looked for other sources of water.

The search was made easier by the bioluminescent clusters that were nestled in the high reaches of the under-canopy. One of the clusters, a helix of puff balls interlaced by tubules filled with a lighter-than-air gas, had detached from its bud and was descending in a slow spiral. As the glowing lavender and violet lei rotated and the play of light changed, Riordan noticed a glistening, sloped root that ran in under the canopy from outside.

As Caine guessed, the root emanated from the cone tree’s invariable botanical partner, an adjacent bumbershoot. Early evening condensation was accumulating on its bole, which sent the runoff trickling down microgrooves that ran onto this angled root.
It’s a tiny natural aqueduct
, Caine realized, tracing how the run-off spread slowly throughout the microecology huddled beneath the cone tree and was further distributed by the capillary actions of ground mosses and day-glo lichens. Along with a thick, mown-grass smell, the flow increased as he watched. With any luck, there would be enough water to make a mud plaster for the water-strider. But even if he was able to create a serviceable mass of the slop, he was still confronted by the initial, troublesome questions: where should he apply it? And was that really what the water-strider had been trying to accomplish? All of which begged the question: would the water-strider allow him to do so?
One way to find out.

Riordan approached the behemoth carefully. After two complete orbits of its side-slumped form, he remained uncertain about where to treat it. Almost a quarter of the its body and legs were covered in bloody bore-holes, and no spot seemed any worse or better than another. Ultimately, Caine’s attempt at veterinary assessment yielded only one useful result: a better understanding of the water-strider’s physiology.

In addition to the four eyes that bracketed its wide mouth like corner-points on a rectangle, the creature was dotted with a vast array of light sensors that had no eyelids, no irises, no protective bone ridges. They were simple, possibly expendable, and probably essential to the animal’s safety. Whereas terrestrial herbivores tended toward opposed ocular arrangements—one eye on each side of the head, often furnished with fish-eyed lenses—to increase the total field of vision and hence watchfulness, this creature had evolved a different solution to the same challenge: more eyes. The quality of vision was probably vastly inferior, but the increased awareness was likely to be a good trade; the long-legged quadruped had a lot of potential blind spots. Audial sensing seemed to be more rudimentary, probably because the water-strider spent much of its time submerged: two small bony tufts at the front of its membranous backsails answered for ears.

Its four primary eyes still closed, the creature uttered a sharp, startled snort-hoot that sent Caine back upon his haunches. The water-strider was suddenly awake, its many eyes open and roving fitfully. It worked its mouth; the dried edges cracked anew and bled freely. Several of what looked like feelers split away, fell off in gory clumps. Ignoring Riordan, the strider worked its legs feebly against the ground, trying to push its body in the direction of the water running in from the neighboring bumbershoot’s root-aqueduct. After several heavy shoves, the creature gave up and seemed to deflate, a low, rolling groan coming out of its dorsal respiration ducts.

Caine rose, went over to where the run-off was now audibly trickling along the root: maybe not enough to make mud, but certainly enough to drink. Riordan harvested one of the cone-trees’ spatulate leaves, curved it into a crude basin, and pushed it against the current of water washing close along the surface of the bumbershoot’s root. Slowly, like holding a cup beneath a dripping faucet, the hollow of the leaf began to fill. As it did, Riordan noticed that, in addition to the cloying scents being emitted by the cone-tree, the run-off was strongly aromatic as well. Probably from airborne spores and pollens that stuck to the wet bumbershoot and were then carried along by the run-off, which apparently seeded as well as irrigated the area under the cone tree.

It took ten minutes for Riordan to collect the one-and-a-half liters of water he carried back to the water-strider, moving cautiously as he re-entered its field of vision. The creature’s eyes focused, swiveled towards him—it was unnerving to be the center of attention for four eyes—and the behemoth snuffled tentatively. Then eagerly. Its tongue—an immense, blue-grey anaconda covered with slowly waving polyps—slipped outward, moved toward the water like a blind man’s arm extending toward an expected door handle.

Caine brought the water closer, shielding it with his body so that the strider’s tongue wouldn’t slap at the leaf and inadvertently knock it apart. The strider’s tongue retracted, Riordan brought the water to the edge of its mouth and the animal drank, partly slurping at it, partly allowing the human pour it in.

When the water was done, the tongue explored the leaf carefully, being equally careful not to touch its human bearer. The strider sighed: a deep, bellows grumble of relief and comfort. Riordan almost reached out to pat the great stricken beast, thought the better of it, and instead returned to the root-aqueduct for another leaf-full of water.

Caine became quite adept at the process over the ensuing hour. Five more times he gathered the run-off; five more times the strider consumed it. By the end, they had it down to a cooperative pour-slurp-pour routine that wasted a minimal amount of water.

But when Caine returned with the seventh leaf-full, the water-strider closed its eyes and turned its body so that its wide face nestled into the soft mosses and lichens of the ground cover. It emitted a long sigh and was still.
Well, if the poor critter can get some rest despite all those wounds—
Caine crept away, trying to ignore the queasiness brought on by the growing riot of aromas under the cone tree. It was easy to imagine that he was locked in a closet with thousands of scented candles, each one different, each overpowering odor vying with all the others.

Resolved to get some sleep himself, Riordan found a soft, rootless patch of ground a few meters away from where the glowing puff-lantern had finally landed, near the edge of the canopy. As he watched, a small, scurrying creature edged under the leaves and tore it apart, devouring the tubules and puff balls before darting away again. Caine smiled: so that was how the cone trees’ oppressive canopies managed not to prevent their own repopulation. Their fragrant, glowing fruit baited in small raiders who also worked as seed dispersers. Keeping an equal distance from the edge of the canopy, and the hulking mass of the water-strider, Riordan lay down on the soft spot he had found. If he could just rest a bit—

Riordan awoke from a sound sleep, startled by the strider’s sounds of distress. The hoarse elephantine bleating increased, along with a thick odor that cut through the cone tree’s own olfactory chaos: it was the strider’s musk, but amplified. Caine moved quickly to where the creature’s head was still mostly embedded in the moss. Its eyes were roving blindly. It snuffled when he came closer: not an aggressive sound, but one of recognition, maybe need. Riordan jumped away to get more water, returned with less than a liter. The water-strider closed its eyes allowed him to pour a little in between the great grinding ridges that were its version of teeth, and then stopped, as if something was confusing it. It lifted its head slightly, quaking, and two of its eyes opened, focusing on Riordan as it inched toward him. Caine anticipated that it was going to vomit on him, but instead, it released a great, musk-reeking breath: a surprisingly sweet smell that was part grassland breeze and part old leather.