Rift (12 page)

Where were they headed?
Where Lithia tells Mam to go
, came Spar’s answer.

And where does Lithia tell Mam to go?
Here and there, by the soil, boyo
.

What does the soil tell her?
Whether she can eat
.

Who is Mam?
Child of Lithia. She’ll kill us, by and by, Lithia will. But her own children, she’ll give suck. Mother Lithia’s good and tired of Earth and all her critters
.

Why does Mam eat soil?
They all eat soil, boyo. It’s all that’s left
.

Who else eats soil?
The others like her
.

Where are the others like Mam?
Where Lithia tells Mam to go
.

Where’s that?
Yonder, by the soil, boyo
.

A few rounds like that and Marie was ready to strangle the fellow, but there was no getting coherence from him, except in some quirky gestalt. It was as though you had to listen for meaning between the words, or blur your eyes to see the shape of his thinking. The girl—Loon was her real name, Marie had discovered—spoke hardly at all, and Reeve suspected she was slightly retarded; thus the genesis of her name. He wasn’t sure where she was leading them, except generally westward, which suited Reeve’s intention, for the Rift Valley was west of the Forever Plains. Likely it was very far west, perhaps hundreds of miles, and Spar pronounced it was likely farther than what he called a
zerter
could walk, especially ones as frankly stupid as Reeve and as old as Marie.

Spar often frowned as he looked at Marie, squinting his eyes as though trying to pry the truth from her. She was the key piece of evidence that kept Spar from spearing them for the abject liars he seemed to think they were. For Marie was undeniably
old
. Her face, though still attractive, had its share of lines and
creases, and her hair was gray as sheet metal, except for a few swirls of dark brown. And if she was
fifty-four
, as she claimed, then she likely had led the pampered life of a zerter, a fat Stationer, where it was known people lived off canned air and the last of the world’s medicines and where their lives could go to 120 years. Even the technology in Reeve’s pack—the beam of light, filament rope, food pouches, and breathers—could not sway Spar the way Marie’s gray head did.

And oddly, it was their possible Stationer origins that Spar seemed to like best about them. He took obvious relish in instructing a high-and-mighty Stationer, and in Spar’s estimation Reeve needed teaching about practically everything. It also helped that they shared a common enemy: Spar alluded to his and Loon’s journey down from the Stoneroot Mountains, hiding from clavers themselves.

Up ahead, Spar stood on the crest of yet another hill, a scraggly tree of a man, with the field pack a growth on his back like a burl. He turned to Reeve and Marie, pointing out in front of him. They trudged up the slope to join him.

Before them lay a gigantic flatness, a burnished chartreuse plate, edged with distant rumpled hills.

“The Inland Sea, by the Lady,” Spar said, gazing out.

In this land of untidy jumbles, the uniform flatness of the terrain seemed an anomaly. As Reeve stared, he noticed a surface disturbance, a slight, rolling swell like the shivers of a mighty green-skinned monster. From Station, portions of the Tethys Ocean were patched with great kingdoms of rampant phytoplankton this very chartreuse color. But up close, the effect was startling.

“I never thought to see a green sea,” Marie said in a rare show of wonderment.

“Think this is somethin’?” Spar said. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Lithia’s just tryin’ on a new coat.” He
crouched down, dropping his arms in front of him like an ape, and gazed out at the lime sea. “People used to say Lithia’s going through a phase,” he said, still staring ahead. “Not a
phase
at all. This here, this is the real Lithia, like she was before Terrans came along and mucked things up, the way they like to do.”

“You yourself, Mr. Spar,” Marie said, “are a Terran.”

He nodded, chewing on the insides of his cheeks. “That’s right. I don’t deny it. And I’ll die like a Terran, no way around that. But it don’t blind me to the deeper things, and I like to think I get a glimpse of the Lady’s purpose. Now and then.”

“What deeper things might those be?” Marie sat a couple yards away, mesmerized by the seascape.

Spar looked sharply over at her, squinting suspiciously. After a moment he said, as though to himself: “See, Lithia’s got her own life, same as you or me. What you see on the surface … well, that’s just the expression on her face, so to speak. You think you’re seein’ everything on this here hilltop. But underneath you got the live muscle of the Lady herself.”

“The Lady?” Marie’s raised eyebrow and doubtful voice threw Spar into agitation.

“Yes, the Lady! The planet herself, you damn fool! Solid ground, you think. But nothin’s solid. It’s all in flux. Terra firma turned to terra deforma. Heh!”

“Basic geology, I would say,” Marie commented dryly.

“Geology!” Spar grew agitated. “You and your big tech! You don’t understand a thing, old woman. The stony world is alive, I say. And she’s turnin’ over a new leaf.” He nodded a few times, looking at Marie. “You arrived just in time to watch her flex her muscles.”

“You have a charming way of seeing the world, Mr. Spar,” Marie said with elaborate politeness.

Downslope a few feet sat Loon, arms wrapped about her knees, looking out at the sea. Tired of Spar’s
mutterings, and wishing to rest from the morning’s hike, Reeve joined her.

Loon was marginally cleaner, he noted, than in the first days of their acquaintance. The heavy rain had peeled at least a few layers of grease and dirt from her body. Her hair—what there was of it—proved to be pale blond. One evening Reeve had seen Spar use a dagger to saw off her hair in short, artless clumps. Then she used the side of a blade on Spar’s beard, giving the pair the look of chimps grooming each other. But the girl still smelled like a gym, never availing herself of a bath at the streams they encountered.

Her hand was idly scratching in the soil by her side, where her fingers had traced two deep grooves. She held up a pinch of soil to Reeve’s lips.

He turned his face away, but she scooted in front of him, hazel eyes intent upon his mouth. “I don’t eat dirt,” he said, annoyed by her habit of proffering tidbits of dirt, then acting hurt if they weren’t accepted.

Unfazed, she poked at his clenched teeth.

“I
said
, no dirt!”

Something hit him hard in the back and he toppled over. Spar stood above him.

“Mind your manners, boyo.” His voice was calm, but his foolish, superior attitude needed shaking down.

Reeve sprang to his feet. “Teach the
brat
some manners then! And don’t call me boyo.” He stepped forward, reaching out to shove Spar in the chest.

Spar snatched his arm, twisting it and forcing Reeve to his knees. Reeve butted his head into Spar’s groin, wrenching his own arm in the process but causing Spar to stagger on the slope. Reeve was on top of the fellow in an instant, meaning just to cuff him a time or two, but his swing hit home, square on Spar’s jaw.

Despite sitting on Spar with his full weight, he felt himself heaved up and over as Spar leapt from the
ground, tossing Reeve downhill, where he rolled, smashing his head into rocks for several full turns. Then Spar was skidding down the hill after him, leaving Reeve one ineffectual, flailing kick before Spar had him by the shoulder, shaking him until his head rang.

Spittle flew from Spar’s mouth as he sneered, “I could crack your head like an egg, boyo, and see what comes out besides feathers.” His long, skinny hands formed a circlet around Reeve’s neck, cinching to the choking point. “Or you could choose the easy way, and say sorry to Mam.”

Reeve managed to shove out the words: “Mam’s a filthy animal, and crazy too!”

Spar smiled, showing his few good teeth. “Good choice,” he said. When the blow came, it knocked Reeve senseless. As Spar stepped off him, he rolled downslope a few turns and couldn’t stop himself from tumbling off a ledge of rock. He fell so hard the breath left him. For long moments he lay there, the sun glaring through his closed eyes, his lids popping with light-show squiggles. Before long a huge, hulking shadow fell over him, which finally resolved itself into three figures standing together, one tall, one middling, one short.

“No manners,” the tall one said.

“Sky Clave,” the short one said.

“Even so, he’ll learn a civil tongue.”

“You plan to beat him until he eats dirt?” the middling one asked. “What’s the mannerly way of saying
No thank you
?”

“Ain’t heard
No thank you,”
the tall one muttered. “Ain’t heard
Thank you
, neither, come to that.”

Reeve heard himself moan. He rolled onto his side, pressing the hot side of his face into the grass, spitting out a salty wad of saliva. Marie was next to him, pressing something cold onto his jaw.

“The scarecrow’s stronger than he looks,” she said.
“He could kill you. So make nice, Reeve. We
need
these people.”

“We don’t need them. They’re crazy; they’ll slow us down.”
Yonder, by the soil
, indeed. The compass of a half-wit.

“So what’s the hurry? You got a hot date?” Her face was coming into focus, her short hair framing her face in a bright back-lit nimbus against the sky.

Got nine weeks left
, came the thought.
Then he sinks the pellet. World’s end
.

Marie’s tone turned earnest: “Listen to me, Reeve. We
do
need them. They know the land, the clavers, the edibles. They can fight, and, sorry to say, all your scrapping on Station never taught you to kill. Until you learn to kill, don’t insult the killers.”

He hauled himself to a sitting position. Spar and Loon were heading down to the shoreline.

“Whose side are you on? He damned near took my teeth out.”

“Lord above, for a fool! It’s not about sides, it’s about survival.”

“Shit.” Reeve staggered to his feet. “I can’t believe you sometimes, you and your old-woman worries.” He stomped off down the hillside, aiming for the shore but avoiding Spar and Loon.

The beach was wide and covered with green slime. His boots made squishing sounds as he strode out across the festering mass of algae, rank in the midday sun. He shouldn’t have said
old-woman worries;
that was as rude as he’d been to Marie his whole life. The words had just spewed up from deep in his body where he’d stored a week of grief and fury. Grief for his father, and all they had said to each other over the years—and all they had not said—and grief for all his lifelong companions on Station. The fury was for Bonhert. He breathed deeply, drawing in the putrid air, fanning the coals in his heart. He walked faster,
slapping his feet down into the green muck, watching its surface part with gelatinous surges.

He was helpless. On foot in a poisonous land without maps, sidelined by a chance encounter with an addled crusader and his loony-queen. It made a mockery of his vow to stop Bonhert, to expose him for a murderer and traitor. Spar was right—he was just a boyo, now mucking about a rotting shore, stamping his feet.

Turning to face the pulpy water, Reeve gazed out over the Inland Sea, letting the breeze pull some of his anger away. He found himself wondering if perhaps they
could
devise a seaworthy craft and navigate this place. He strolled down the long slope of the beach to the edge of the water. If he remembered his Lithian maps, the Inland Sea jutted into the continent at least five hundred miles from the Tethys Ocean. At its western terminus lay the outfall of the Tallstory River, from whence they might navigate to the Gandhi River, one of the great rivers of the world, cutting down through the Rift Valley. So waterways led him to his goal, or within reach.…

His eyes caught a hump of motion a few yards down the shoreline and he wandered toward a small object draped in scum. It rolled forward and backward with the waves. He bent down and with both hands scooped up a heavy ball in his hands. Dripping with algae, the ball looked like a deeply pitted rock, perhaps a geode of some kind.

A slopping noise behind him. He spun around. There, moving slowly toward him was a whitish upright figure, carrying a sack over its shoulder. An orthong, by the Lord above. Reeve froze, staring. It wore a long belted black coat that glistened in the sun like a chitinous shell. The coat parted in front to show a snowy white hide.

It had no face.

His heart knocked against his chest wall. The creature
began loping toward him, in great strides that brought it to Reeve quicker than he could have turned and taken even one step to flee. It stood a full head taller than he, and there seemed to be two eyes peering at him from the deep ridges of its face. With supreme irrelevance, Reeve found himself thinking,
It does have a mouth—a tiny vestigial mouth
 … Then, in the next instant, the creature extruded its one-inch claws and slashed down the front of Reeve’s jacket, slicing the material and skimming Reeve’s skin in a cut he hardly felt except for the rush of cold air. Reeve staggered backward and fell into the muck.

The creature threw down its sack. Through the net of rope that made up the sack, Reeve saw a few large, perfectly round rocks. The orthong advanced, noiseless except for the slap of its great feet through the algae.

For a moment the creature was distracted, looking over Reeve’s head, down the shoreline. Perhaps, he saw the others, Reeve’s companions. In that moment’s hesitation, Reeve stood, still holding the rock, and offered the geode to the monster.

It was a stupid thing to do. He was the creature’s next meal, yet he was giving the orthong a gift. His wits had left him.

They stood unmoving, the orthong and Reeve, for what seemed a long, mind-bending minute. Reeve’s arms grew tired, holding the rock out at arm’s length, knowing for a certainty that if his arms dropped it would be his last movement. The ridges of the orthong’s hide were hard-looking, not the soft folds he’d thought they’d be. Over the back of the creature’s elongated hands, a gray discoloration spread and disappeared up the coat sleeve.