Rift (13 page)

The creature was looking over Reeve’s shoulder again, its eyes sunk in their sockets like emeralds in snow. Then, slowly, it clutched its giant fingers over the geode and plucked it from Reeve’s trembling
hands. Finally, with a swift punch, it thumped Reeve in the chest, sending him sprawling onto his back.

When Reeve gathered himself up again the orthong was loping down the beach, its sack riding easily over its shoulder as though it contained oranges and not a bunch of fifteen-pound stones.

More splashing, and then Marie, Spar, and Loon were at his side, staring after the creature. Marie and Loon crouched down to examine Reeve’s bleeding chest.

He couldn’t speak. The day gleamed preternaturally bright, and the breeze sang with the rich, deep smells of the world. He looked into Loon’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he heard himself saying. “For what I said.” He turned to look into Marie’s worried face. “Sorry,” he said again.

Spar reached out a hand and pulled him to his feet.

Reeve felt a sharp stab under his fingernail. Swearing, he yanked out a half-inch splinter of wood.

Spar laughed silently, showing his crooked teeth. He continued lashing the pieces of framing wood together, using a length of salvaged rope.

Reeve sucked on his hurt finger, glaring at the claver.

Shaking his head, Spar said: “Guess they don’t teach you how to build rafts up there in the sky, now do they.”

That comment needed no response, or not the response that came immediately to mind. Marie was right. No sense killing each other, no matter how the older man goaded him.

They had spent the morning and half of yesterday combing the beach for scraps of washed-up or abandoned refuse that could be used for the raft, and their efforts were hugely successful. The beach was strewn liberally with the castoffs of colonist and colonist-turned-claver
civilization; though the rare scraggly trees of the plains offered slim pickings for timber—especially without benefit of an ax—the beach was a storefront of spare parts that might be cobbled together.

They sat on the beach next to a great stack of their gleanings, including sections of half-rotted wooden skiffs, broken sheets of ceramic matrix and scraps of metal, wire, glass, and various broken gadgets that Spar called doodads. They made several hauls, stuffing their finds into the field pack that it was now Reeve’s duty to shoulder. In front of them, the frame of a three-square-yard raft was beginning to emerge from the mound of detritus. Loon and Marie, meanwhile, were off foraging for roots and berries, which might have had less to do with cultural gender roles than Spar’s desire to keep Reeve under guard himself.

A short way down the beach lay the ruins of a great terraform factory, the first he’d seen on his journey. Its emission stacks were still pointing skyward, but overgrown with an ominous-looking vegetation, glowing ruby red in the sun.

His finger hurt like hell. He examined the fiery path the sliver had drilled under his nail. Add that to the welt on his jaw from Spar’s fist and the furrow in his chest from the orthong cut, and his body was becoming a record of mishaps. And he worried about that orthong wound, with infection a distinct possibility. It hadn’t been a knife the creature used, but a
claw
. Even liberally doused with antibiotics, the biotics involved might remain unfazed. He pressed his hand against his chest, feeling the throbbing wound under the layers of his clothes.

“Thong gave you a fair nip there, Reeve-boy,” Spar said, fashioning a rope knot with alacrity. As Reeve watched him, he noticed that the claver’s fingernails near the base were tinged with blue, probably a sign of chronic oxygen deprivation.

“It nearly killed me, I think.” In truth, Reeve had expected it to.

Spar nodded, intent on the framing knot. “That was your first life, there, with that thong.”

“First life?”

Spar gestured at the stockpile. “Another of the big four-bys, Reeve-boy.”

He clambered through the pile, dislodging another framing piece. They had graduated to
Reeve-boy
—a decided improvement—but it still rankled, coming from a mere claver.

“We all got eight lives,” Spar continued. “Cats got nine, so figure we humans come in just below cats. Don’t be thinking human’s something more, Reeve-boy. Humans, why, they thought they were more, and now look.” He waved at the pile of scrap. “That’s what’s left of
human
. That, and the pile of metal yonder.” He glanced down the beach at the outpost of bristling, twisted metal. “Thought they’d create a new world from the old. Never occurred to them, old Lithia’s just waiting for her chance to bust out.” He laughed in his silent way, clearly enjoying his observations on human folly.

“We’re not done yet,” Reeve countered.

“You got more fight left in you, I can see that.” Spar cut a length of rope with his knife and moved to lash the next corner. “Well, you go ahead and fight. You and your big-tech zerter friends, you got fight left, yes sir, after resting up there in your big fancy wheel of fortune.”

Reeve set his jaw. “We weren’t
resting
. And nothing was fancy. It was repair and jury-rig and fix and worry and reengineer and recycle until even our dead bodies were food for ponics. Everything was breaking all the time. We lived in danger like you can’t even imagine!”

Spar had stopped, screwing his mouth into thoughtfulness and gazing at Reeve underneath bushy eyebrows.

“And now it’s gone,” Reeve went on. “Blown to hell. And everyone’s dead.” He stood up, shaking. “So much for
fancy
.” He glared down at this ignorant claver, with his fantasies of Station life and his preposterous stance of superiority.

They resumed their work in silence. Reeve pitched in as he could, but Spar was done talking for a while except to mutter once, “That was the big flash in the sky that day, then. Your Sky Clave burning up.” He nodded to himself, but kept his eyes on his task.

He set Reeve to extracting nails from the salvage, using a notched metal bar that half-worked to pry the metal spikes up.

Over a lunch of jerky and cooked roots left over from last night, Reeve thought again about his orthong encounter. Though a shock at the time, it seemed to have earned him a modicum of respect. “I think the thong would have killed me, except for that round stone I gave it,” he said.

Spar narrowed his eyes and moved his head to the side, gazing at Reeve with more of one eye than the other. It was his gesture of skepticism. “Well, that was smart,” he said, “for a zerter. Your thongs, they like a pretty rock. Trade for ’em. Only thing they understand except for a sharp sword.” He patted his sword, sheathed at his side in its accustomed leather scabbard. “How’d you know to trade him a good rock?”

“He was collecting them. Had a bagful.” Reeve worked on chewing the jerky, hard as boot soles. “What do you know of the orthong, Spar?”

“Know?” He spit a wad of saliva to the side for emphasis, one of the disgusting habits that Loon shared. “We don’t know the least thing about ’em. Live up north. And they look like humans from a distance. Up close … well, you saw up close. Don’t often come this far south, I’ve heard. The bigger the group, the more dangerous. You see a group of, say, twenty … kiss your be-hind good-bye, Reeve-boy.”

The sun was as warm today as it had been since his arrival. Reeve took off his jacket and examined the deep scratch of the orthong.

“Any group of clavers out travelin’, they’ll be carrying pretty rocks—the bigger the better, usually. Anything unusual, that’s what the thongs like. You meet up with the thongs to trade, and first thing is, they don’t talk, so we use sign.” Spar brought his hands up in front of him and executed quick, deft movements using fingers, palms, and wrists. “Bet you don’t know what I said, now, do you?” He grinned at Reeve and repeated the movements. “I said,
Reeve’s got seven lives, Spar’s got three.”
He laughed, his hoarse, body-shaking laugh. “Reeve’s got seven lives, Spar’s got three.”

“How’d you learn their language, then?”

“Didn’t. Us and the thongs manage our hand sign, but nobody knows their real language. ’Cept maybe the women they steal.”

Reeve stopped chewing. “They steal women? Human women?”

“Hell yes, human women! Sex-crazed, they are.” Spar stood up, wiping his hands off on his clothes. “Know why? Know why they like our women, Reeve-boy?” He paused for effect. “Because their own women, they look like just what you saw yonder!” He glanced down the beach, shuddering in mock horror. “Ugly! Yes, sir.” He laughed at this witticism, and Reeve, thinking of cuddling up to a wrinkled white hide without a proper face, laughed too. They laughed for no good reason, until, looking up, they saw Marie and Loon returning down the beach.

Marie approached them with a wry look on her face. “Share the joke?” she said, putting down her carrying sack.

Spar turned away, wiping the smile off his face and acting busy with the raft.

“Well …,” Reeve began.

Marie stood, waiting.

“It wasn’t worth laughing about. Pretty crude.”

I see
, her expression said, eyes flicking over to the claver who just the day before had nearly shoved Reeve’s teeth down his throat. But a small smile played at the side of her mouth.

Loon carried two rabbits on a cord of braided leather, more evidence of her prowess with a sling. To his surprise, Reeve found himself looking forward to cooked flesh. As repulsive as the thought was, his stomach had a different leaning. He smiled at Loon as she handed them over. “Thank you. Mam.”

She grinned in response. “You skin these,” she said, nodding at the carcasses.

Reeve turned to Spar for help in explaining that there was no way he was going to cut the skin off these creatures.

The older man tossed him the Station knife he’d been hoarding. “Reckon you could use that fine zerter knife to do those rabbits,” he said.

Marie, watching Reeve, piped up with, “Don’t faint on us, Reeve. Give them to me—I’ve got to learn eventually.”

As Marie reached for the brace of rabbits, Loon said, “No. Reeve will.”

He stood there holding the rabbits and could easily have just given them to Marie, who was being a sport, but he caught Spar’s firm expression and knew it was yet another test of courtesy. By which
courtesy
Spar meant that the dirty creature’s every whim was to be satisfied. He looked down at the knife. Lord of Worlds, he didn’t even know where to begin. And there would be blood.

Everyone was watching him. Shit almighty. He spun around and stalked off, furious at how Loon could ruin a perfectly good afternoon, same as yesterday with her little eat-my-dirt routine.

He took the rabbits up to a piece of driftwood that
would do for a workbench and made a start with a hunk of fur toward the neck, cursing as blood smeared on the cuff of his shirt. Time was wasting away. While he was learning to skin rabbits his days were ticking off, and they had come south, not west, and if Bonhert and crew were even within a prayer’s distance, he was moving
away
from his goal, not toward it. His father would have found this a familiar pattern in his son. That, and not having any goals at all. But he had one now. For the first time in his life, he aimed further than seeing what he could get away with in the midst of Station rules and regs. And still he was showing himself incapable of making decent progress, even in the right
direction
.

Nor was he likely to have any effect on the outcome. He hadn’t thought much beyond getting to Bonhert; hadn’t thought about how to convince the Captain’s followers that he was a murderer—that he planned not terraforming but terrorism. And if Bonhert’s people were all in on it … then his next steps were as unreadable as orthong sex. He only knew that first he bloody well had to get to the Rift Valley.

The skinning operation was a mess. Meat clung to the pelt, the pelt lay in chunks. Blood everywhere. He stabbed at his task again.

Spar had come up, watching. He shook his head. “What they teach you up there in that Sky Clave? Anything worth knowin’?”

Still doggedly slashing at the carcass, Reeve snapped. “They taught me about electrical systems, astral spectrography, resin-welding, and computer matrices. I also know advanced mathematics and a bunch of literature, history, and the Revised Code of Station, forward and backward.”

Spar nodded. “Like I say, anything worth knowin’?”

Reeve let the comment pass by, studying his bloody hands for a few moments. “Why does she bug me like this? Why doesn’t she like me?”

Spar picked up the other rabbit and made a quick slice around its neck and around all four legs at the feet. “You got a funny view of
like
, Reeve-boy.” He cut down the center of the animal’s belly and tugged the skin away from the underside, then made a cut up the legs, pulling the pelt away in quick rips. “She gives you gifts, and you don’t much seem grateful.”

“A chore like this is a gift?”

Spar paused in his work, narrowing his eyes at Reeve. “Food is always a gift. Used to be in Terran days, if stories are true. Now, when food ain’t much around, it’s a
precious
gift.” In a final, deft slice, Spar had the skin off the rabbit, all in one piece. The tips of his fingers were bloody, but not a spot else clung to him. He glanced at Reeve, keeping his gaze. “This rabbit here, it don’t mean a meal for her. She won’t touch it.” He cleaned his knife in the sand and rose. “I reckon she figured you’d be happy to have rabbit stew. Maybe she’s not as smart as I took her for.”

Reeve watched Spar walk away with the cleaned carcass, then glanced down at the garbled mass of blood, bone, and butchered meat. Looking more closely, he saw that a thin membrane of fat separated the hide from the muscle. Copying Spar’s sawing motion, he pulled the skin, separating it cleanly. He finished the job in short order, thinking hard on whether he really had spent his whole life learning nothing that mattered.

Spar had built a small fire and was boiling roots in a rusty, salvaged pot. He accepted the carcass from Reeve and quickly disposed of the entrails.

“One other thing I can do,” Reeve said, as the other three looked up at him from their seats around the fire. Spar affected not to hear, but Reeve continued: “I know how to be invisible.”