Zenn Scarlett (22 page)

Zenn laughed at this. It was true. Hamish did avoid physical exertion whenever possible. The odd thing was that generally speaking, Liam was just as bad, except when it came to lending Hamish a hand. She watched him go. She thought of Hamish’s friendship with Liam. Whatever it was, Hamish had Liam wrapped around his little finger. Or little claw-digit. She imagined the towner boy lugging bales of straw, Hamish reclining nearby, complaining about having too many chores.

Hamish owes me one
, she told herself as she again made for the scriptorium. Then she allowed herself to consider the scent of new-cut alfalfa once more, and Liam’s smirk-now-a-smile, and the sight of his broad back beneath his torn red shirt as he had walked away from her. She forgot about Hamish and what she was owed.

TWENTY-THREE

Early the next morning, Zenn muttered to herself as she moved at a rapid clip toward the cloister’s treatment and nesting pools. She was running through the details of the in-soma insertion one more time. Rather, she was attempting and failing to concentrate on this all-important second test in the end of term trio. Her mind was on the verge of grinding to a gridlocked halt. She felt under siege from all angles: her increasingly disturbing interactions with the animals; Ren Jakstra’s alarming news about the cloister lease; and the unexpected, entirely unintentional way her opinion of Liam Tucker was evolving, like some newly emerged life form. All combined with the usual roster of studies, and chores…

In the end, desperate, she’d resorted to talking to herself out loud to clear her head of anything besides the day’s upcoming trial.

“…and keep a light touch on the polycilia throttle,” she intoned, calling up an image of her lecture notes on the subject. “Engage propulsion only when forward progress has ceased. Toggle regularly between bow and stern view screens to maintain locational awareness and gauge proximity to internal organs…”

She found Otha pushing the wheelbarrow of rhina grub and sweetbark paste down to the edge of the largest treatment pool. It was chilly that morning, causing thick fingers of fog to drift like phantom hands reaching out over the collection of shallow ponds where various aquatic species were housed.

“Sure you’re ready for this?” Otha nodded at the in-soma pod, its sleek, downy surface shimmering in the slanting morning light.

“Ready? I can’t wait,” Zenn said, wanting to let Otha hear in her voice that she was focused and confident. She had spent all her free time during the past week studying the digestive tract of swamp sloos and practicing with the in-soma controls. She was ready now to show Otha the disaster with the hound was just a fluke. Yes, she was ready for this test.

Mounted on a pair of old, reclaimed railroad tracks that led down into the sloo’s pool, the in-soma pod was about seven feet long, barely three feet wide, and shaped like an elongated pumpkin seed. The streamlined surface displayed the silky sheen of artificial polycilia – a layer of microscopic hair-like filaments. Beating in unison, the cilia would silently propel the pod through the interior of whatever gargantuan creature happened to be the subject of the in-soma procedure. Today, that would be the interior of a female Tanduan swamp sloo.

Otha went to the edge of the pool, kneeled and slapped the surface with his open palm, as he did whenever he fed the sloos. A splashing sound came from the distance and the animal appeared, paddling into view from a great cloudbank of mist on the pool’s far side. This sloo was roughly two hundred feet long, and about forty feet tall. With its slender, tubular snout and long, graceful neck mounted on a body propelled by four, big paddle-like flukes, the sloo struck Zenn as resembling a prehistoric plesiosaur mated with a giant anteater. In any case, it was ideally adapted for invading the huge hive-mounds of the human-sized insects it fed on in the coastal swamps of Tandua.

The sloo looked on with interest as Zenn and Otha prepared the pod for insertion, tilting its great head this way and that as it watched.

She knelt to activate the pod’s door mechanism and it split open, hinges squealing. Inside was a padded bench.

“Sounds like it could use a little oil,” Zenn said.

“Well now, this unit has served both your mother and me well enough over the years.”

It occurred to Zenn the pod was a good deal older than she was.

“It’s been through a lot though, huh?”

“No worries there,” Otha said, shifting the wheelbarrow closer to the pod. “Hull plating and software are all fully functional. Truth is, these early Gupta-Merck models were built better than anything on the market now. You can’t get this kind of craftsmanship these days.” He patted the open lid of the pod to demonstrate its soundness, but his touch only made the hinges screech even louder.

“Changed large animal medicine forever, these first in-soma units,” Otha went on, attempting, Zenn assumed, to distract her from the pod’s age. “Before in-somas, major surgery on the big animals was a real nightmare. You should’ve seen it. Took four, five exovets at once. Incisions twenty feet long and yards deep. Of course we lost most of the patients – massive bleeding, post-op infection, shock.”

Otha pulled the pushbroom out of the wheelbarrow’s load of watered-down grub bits and smeared the substance on the side of the pod.

“And the experience of it. An in-soma run is like nothing else, I can promise you that.”

“I guess today I find out for myself,” said Zenn, trying not to sound giddy.

“That’s the spirit. So, how are you feeling now, about being inside?”

“I feel good,” she said, nodding her head and doing a fair job, she told herself, of looking self-assured. “This past week, I spent lots of time in the pod. Closed the lid and ran through procedures. Piece of cake.”

Otha patted her arm. “You are your mother’s daughter, true enough.”

A high, fluting cry came from the pool. The sloo’s mate was calling to it from somewhere inside the wall of fog. Otha stepped over to a control pad mounted on the side of the small tool shed next to the pond and flipped a switch, activating the energy fencing behind the female. This would keep her penned up where they could work with her.

She watched the creature’s long, tubular nose waving in the air. The sloo had picked up the scent of the paste-covered pod. Zenn was only mildly reassured by the fact that sloos had no teeth. They devoured their prey whole, licking them out of their hives with a sticky, thirty-foot tongue. This animal was selected for Zenn’s in-soma exercise because it was both larger than the male and relatively docile. As she contemplated being swallowed by a two-hundred-foot-long insectivore, however, “relatively” was a word that carried little comfort. Still, she was thrilled to be on the verge of her first in-soma run. She stepped into the pod and lay face down on the bench.

“Otha.” The shout came from a short distance away. Zenn raised up in the pod and saw it was Ren Jakstra. He stood beyond the tool shed, eyeing the sloo. “Is it safe to come down there? Got these for ya.” He held a sheaf of v-films aloft.

“It’s safe, Ren,” Otha said, waving him on. “This big girl’s gentle as a baby.”

“Glad to hear it,” the constable said, watching the sloo as he approached them.

“So, what’s this all about?”

“The cloister mortgage docs. Bank in Zubrin sent them via my office. They’re gettin’ antsy.”

Otha took the films from him and scowled.

“I’ll look these over later. Our novice here is about to take her first in-soma run.”

“That so?” Ren gave the pod a skeptical look. “Hmph. She really gonna go inside that behemoth? All the way in?”

“That’s the idea,” Otha said. “You’re welcome to stay and watch. In fact, I wish you would.”

“Oh?”

“It’s something I’ve been mulling over lately,” Otha said, rolling up the v-films and putting them into his back pocket. “I think we could be doing a better job of reaching out to the community. You know, get folks in Arsia more familiar with what we do out here. I’d like to have some groups come out and observe now and then. Might defuse some of the… well, might make people a little more comfortable with having us as neighbors.”

“Yeah, couldn’t hurt, I guess,” Ren said, not convinced.

“If you’d mention the idea to the council I’d appreciate it,” Otha said. He gestured at a nearby bale of hay. “So, have a seat. You can be our guinea pig.”

“Not sure I like the sound of that,” Ren said. But he sat down on the bale. “Can’t stay long, though. And speakin’ of pigs, I hear your novice here has quite a talent with sandhogs.”

“Oh? How’s that?” Otha said.

“From what Gil Bodine says, she does indeed.” Zenn looked at Otha, who just raised an eyebrow at her and turned back to Ren as he continued: “Gil says that big sandhog boar of his was about to come down on you like a ton of bricks. He says…” Ren smiled. “He said little Zenn here put the evil eye on that hog. Turned the thing meek as a puppy, just like that.” He gave her a sly look. “Quite the talent.”

“Gil is a bit of a storyteller, as we all know,” Otha said. “That hog just moved a little slower than I could run, that’s all. That and some bad feed.”

“Well, whatever happened out there, it didn’t do you any good, with the council, if you get my drift. A sandhog boar on the loose? Bad timing for something like that.”

“What are you getting at, Ren?” Otha said, frowning at him.

“Just that you people out here might want to…
re-evaluate
your priorities. Far as selling the cloister. Council votes against you, your rights to the land get revoked. Leaves you all in a bad way.”

“Our priorities are just where we want them, Ren,” Otha said, leveling his gaze at the constable. “You know where I stand on selling out. And I’ve done some thinking about what you said, about talking to the council. If Warra could do it, I guess I can too.”

“Well, the council will be all ears.” The constable looked around then, surveying the surroundings, seeming to measure the weight of what he was about to say. “About Warra – look, I understand what he went through after Mai… after the accident. But your brother’s making some people pretty unhappy. With what he’s up to out on Enchara.”

“What do you mean, ‘what he’s up to’?” Otha said, squinting at him.

“You know. Refusing to let things go. Stirring things up, making the Authority look bad, just when Earth is trying to get back into contact with the other planets in the Accord. And with Mars. It’s politics, Otha. Big boy politics. People are noticing, and not in a good way.”

“So, you're in direct contact with the Authority on Earth now? Didn’t know that was in your job description. Ren.”

“Hey, I’m a public official. When higher ups on the food chain ask me questions, I give ’em honest answers.” He lowered his voice. “Do Warra a favor. Tell him he’s in over his head out there.”

“Warra’s a big boy, Ren. I don’t see how he needs any advice from you or the Authority. They may run things on Earth. But they don’t run things on Mars.”

“No, they don’t... yet.” He sucked his mustache. “But,” he gestured at Zenn, “don’t let me hold ya up. On with the show.”

Otha gave Ren a look, seemed about to say something, but instead turned to Zenn.

“You all set?” he asked her, kneeling by the pod.

“Yes. All set,” Zenn said, though she could do without Ren’s presence. Still, the prospect of the coming procedure outweighed that minor irritation. She lay down again, rested her chin on the bench’s forward cushions, tested the tension of the seat-belt harness and made sure the two view screens were functioning. One screen could be switched between the view straight ahead of the pod and behind the stern. The other screen’s signal came from a camera mounted on the roof of the tool shed, and showed a wide-angle shot of the entire pool. This allowed the one piloting the pod to see how the patient was reacting from the outside.

“Take it slow, don’t rush,” Otha told her. “Let the peristalsis action carry you whenever possible. Only engage the cilia if you have to.”

“Yes, Otha, I know,” she said, her voice breathy with excitement. “See you on the other side.”

“You mean ‘at the other end’,” Otha said, grinning.

“Yeah… right,” she answered, in no mood for his breezy exovet humor about the obvious conclusion to a two-hour journey through a sloo’s intestines

Zenn toggled the lever next to her right hand and the pod lid closed, hinges complaining all the way, the wrap-around cushions gripping her body in a firm embrace. Otha slid the pod down the ramp’s tracks. Zenn watched the outboard monitor screen, and saw the sloo respond to the pod’s motion, raising its head for a better look.

The pod hit the water, and the bow screen darkened momentarily as the nose cam was submerged, then brightened as it bobbed to the surface. She lost sight of the pod’s position in the pool when the sloo’s body blocked the outside cam view, but the next instant, she knew the sloo had seen her.

With a powerful jerk, the pod was lifted free of the water by the sloo’s muscular tongue and pulled into its mouth, as if a huge rubber band had been stretched and snapped back. The viewscreens went black and flickered on again, the pod’s bow light switched on, and Zenn saw the sloo’s oral cavity displayed on the view screen, yawning ahead of her like a narrow, fleshy cave.

The sensation of being crushed hit Zenn almost at once, and she reminded herself this was normal, everything was fine, no problem. But it didn’t help that the pod was jammed up against the roof of the sloo’s mouth, the huge tongue trapping it.

“She’ll hold you there a moment,” Otha’s voice in her earpiece was calm and reassuring. “She’s just making sure you’re something worth swallowing. Doing alright?”

“I’m good,” she told him. It was a lie. Her mouth was dry, and she had the distinct sensation of being suffocated. She made herself breathe slowly, regularly. In, out, in, out. The trapped feeling subsided… a little.

Zenn focused on the instrument readings. Her hands reached out until they contacted the controls, unseen beneath her on either side. She’d spent hours memorizing the pod’s instrument layout, testing herself until she could visualize every detail. Now, she conjured up an image of the control surfaces and manipulators of the various instruments.