A Thousand Words For Stranger (10th Anniversary Edition) (52 page)

“There’s always potential,” Medya growled. “It’s spring, for Grasis’ sake. One minute we’re huddling around heaters, the next there’s mold growing over my butt.”

Vasi shuddered quietly. The Queeb roared with laughter, disturbing the canid’s sleep. Its brown eyes puzzled at the three of them, then closed again. The beast had better manners than some, Vasi admitted to himself. Despite his initial skepticism, it obeyed the signals he’d been told to use and would stay curled on the floor until required for its task. Curled on the floor as close to his boots as possible, but Vasi had learned nothing would discourage its desire for such proximity. If ordered to lie by the doorway, the creature would pretend to comply, then somehow be lying nearer each time he checked until almost underfoot. The creature only seemed content when in imminent danger of being stepped on—or, as now, when the Triad began to move. Vasi found himself fascinated by how the sound of Medya clearing off the map table was enough to bring the canid’s head and ears up to attention, its furred body tense with anticipation, eyes riveted on him.

That anticipation shivered through the bio’face— likely both ways. Vasi preferred to be outside and active himself and, though he had his reservations about the weather, he felt his own ears stiffen with excitement. The find they could make today? What questions might it answer about the Hoveny? How many more might it raise? He couldn’t wait to see.

Three hours later, Vasi settled his hip against one walking pole and stared, aghast, at what waited for them.

Fieldwork wasn’t tidy or without hazard—that’s what he liked about it—but the aircar hadn’t left them on a mountain slope. This was the icy tongue of a monster ready to lick them from the face of the planet. The spill of ice, wrinkled and split by black, water-slicked crevasses, groaned and snapped as it moved. Chunks larger than Medya rattled free from its face to join the jumble already damming a glacial lake.

Above? Vasi shrugged his loose hood to his shoulders and tilted his head back. The mountain’s peak leered down, baring cloud teeth that ripped through what blue sky remained. It might be calm here, but the wind at those upper elevations would strip flesh from bone.

“Ah, who has the lunch pack? Vasilo, do you recall where it’s packed?”

“Lunch?” The Tidik couldn’t believe his ears or eyes. He must be misreading the Queeb. No rational being could stare at this—this death incarnate—and ask about food. It must be a valiant effort to shore up their spirits, so close yet so far from possible treasure.

The canid didn’t need help with its spirits, busy prancing around their feet. It appeared to disregard anything higher than its eager nose, and began pushing that supposedly tender organ under a loose rock.

“I’ve got the lunch,” Medya said, shouldering the harness for the larger of the two grav sleds. Ebbet already had the smaller tethered to his back, secured by straps that took advantage of his naturally hunched shoulders.

“Then lead the way, Finder,” the Queeb ordered, pointing at the preoccupied canid. “We’ve no time to waste with the weather this unsettled. I won’t leave a promising site to be buried under the next avalanche without at least an autosampler in place. And our Triad’s marker.”

“Very well,” Vasi replied, abandoning hope that the Queeb was playing another trick on him. He summoned the beast with a tap of one hand against his leg, watching as it leaped forward with delight in every body part and surging through the bio’face. It sat before him, waiting for instructions.

Vasi hesitated before giving the “find” signal with both hand and thought, his uncertainty plain to read in the faint shuddering of his neck flaps, had any of his companions the perception to see it.

Strangely, the beast hesitated as well, its face lifted to one side as though it studied him, ears perked upward.

“Find,” Vasi said quietly, sure his voice could carry no emotion to confuse the animal.

The canid whirled on its haunches and headed for the glacier, looking back over its shoulder as if to be sure they followed. Vasi grabbed his poles and settled his pack, then started moving. The first part of their climb would be simple enough. As soon as winter had eased, Ebbet had hired a crew of laborers to blast a ramp up one side of the glacier’s face. Gravel and debris, melted clear this spring, formed a roadway from the valley floor to the top of the ice sheet. A good, steady slope. They were all fit and trained for this—the First expected their Triads to be able to cope with fieldwork. Vasi resolutely kept his eyes focused on the happily wagging tail ahead of him, between glances at the instrumentation festooning his left arm and wrist.

He’d grown up on mountainsides, and his every instinct told him this was the wrong time to be on this one. The sooner he and the beast found the suspected Hoveny site, Vasi reasoned coldly, the sooner they could start running for their lives.

 
Every Hoveny find on Aeande XII had been made in these mountains, old upthrust seabeds now eroded to reveal their former life as city-lined coasts. Their low altitude was a gift. Even the canid panted comfortably, and Medya was able to make a running commentary of their trek into her recorder, much of it laden with cheery-sounding phrases in her own tongue, as though she too found Comspeak inadequate. Vasi thought he might ask her, when they were back in camp. If they got back to camp. The wind had tilted over the peak and was spinningcolumns of loose white snow, catching sparks from the sunshine. A warning.

They were now traveling on the ice sheet itself, lint on the mountain’s blue-white shoulder. There was a path, beaten into the snow and smoothed by the same crew who had provided the ramp. It saved the Triad’s strength for what mattered—if they found it. The orbital and aerial surveys only located possibilities. It was up to him, Vasi realized as he moved one foot carefully ahead of the other, never trusting a path he hadn’t made himself.

And the canid. The beast wore boots on its feet as well today, a necessity as the sun’s warmth softened the snow into a glue prone to stick and accumulate on any surface. It had only taken one such excursion without the boots to prove their value to both canid and Vasi, who’d had to use his bare hands to melt the hardened ice balls trapped between the beast’s sore and bleeding footpads. The bio’face had shared the discomfort—and the easing of it.

The discomfort hadn’t slowed the beast. When on the hunt, the canid was determined, Vasi had to admit. Its keen senses of smell and hearing were their guide, not as accurate or sensitive as instrumentation, but exquisitely more discerning. Humans had finally convinced the First that their beasts were able to distinguish true Hoveny ruins, with their characteristic construction materials, patterns of decay, and faint sounds of hibernating technology, from those of other civilizations.

Vasi flexed his six-fingered hands around the handles of his walking poles. He should be towing a sled himself, laden with sensors. He’d packed one this morning, but Ebbet had dismissed the need for such equipment, along with three years of Vasi’s training and skill, with one flick of a gloved tentacle. The scruffy beast, the Queeb asserted, was all they’d need. Since Professor Emeritis Y Ebbet of the 114th Siring by Raken was the being with a reputation to risk, Vasi could hardly protest.

Yet. The beast might work for food pellets and carry itself, Vasi thought bitterly, but if it failed to locate anything worthwhile, he’d protest, in writing, with enough adjectives to make his feelings clear even in Comspeak.

They walked, single file, the canid leading and Vasi behind, for the better part of another hour. The Tidik divided his attention between the clouds skittering by overhead and the crosshairs on the locator strapped to his right wrist, which would let him know when they were standing on the suspected Hoveny site.

Suddenly, Vasi’s pole went deeper into the snow than he’d expected, and he pulled up short. The beast stopped as well, head cocked toward him. A hand signal and the canid eased down to its belly, chin on its paws. It seemed glad of the rest.

“Are we there?”

“Don’t move,” Vasi snapped, raising his arm to bar both his companions. He took a step back, then another, before probing the path ahead ever-so-gently with his extended pole.

Snow crumpled away, as if he’d touched some area of rot. The resulting hole was small, but intensely dark, promising depth. “Crevasse,” the Tidik said tersely. The path continued beyond, its surface unmarked and innocent.

There wasn’t talk of turning back. Instead, the Triad pulled out safety lines and tied themselves together at intervals long enough to prevent all three from dropping into the same hidden crack. Even the canid was leashed. When ready, Vasi signaled it to move forward and they continued, going around the crevasse, testing every foot-step. The Tidik and Queeb planted their walking poles deeply into the snow as emergency supports each time Medya, their heaviest and so most at-risk member, followed them across any chancy area.

Midday, but the air temperature was plummeting. Vasi didn’t need instruments to tell him so—he watched the frosty beard forming along the canid’s jaw and a single icicle grow from the dribbling of its moist nose. When he felt it shiver, he halted their procession to adjust the warming rings strapped around its middle and chest. Its natural covering was useless in this environment, little more than short wiry hair, white with random blotches of black too small to soak up appreciable radiation from the sun. The beast, for all its lack of brain matter, appeared to understand and stood patiently, tail swaying side to side.

“We should be almost there,” Medya mumbled around the nutrient tube stuck between her teeth. The cold couldn’t touch the Brill through those layers of blubber and thick outer skin, but she suffered from the demands of steady movement, far preferring quick bursts of activity followed by naps. Ebbet was almost impossible to discern within his bulky thermal suit, with its broad faceplate instead of the goggles worn by his two-footed and two-eyed companions. He bounced impatiently from foot to foot. Protected like this, even an old Queeb like Ebbet could outmarch them all.

“We’d better be,” Vasi said without taking his eyes from the cliff in front of them. They’d turned to parallel the leading edge of the glacier, cutting across what would someday be a valley if the climate of this world continued to warm as predicted. “I don’t want to move any closer to those—” he used his pole to point.

Overhangs of snow draped each dip and ledge along the cliffs face, beautiful and ominous. The wind played with them, pretending to carve but really building the edges out farther and farther. Gravity would ultimately win, Vasi knew. Best not be anywhere downslope when that happened.

“Storm, avalanche, or crevasse,” Medya laughed. “You suggesting a bet, Sai Vasilo, or just being your cheery self?”

The Tidik felt the flaps on either side of his neck rising with fury. “You mock me,” he accused, wishing his voice was anything but calm, so the others would for once realize how much he meant what he said. “I know mountains as you do not.” The canid made a strange noise—a growl deep in its throat, as if agreeing with Vasi and sharinghis temper. It could, perhaps, through the bio’face. An odd ally.

And, strangely, one the Queeb respected. He bent over to look at the canid, then straightened to direct his faceplate in Vasi’s direction. “My apologies, Finder Vasilo,” Ebbet said. “Yes, I’m aware of your expertise. It was one of the reasons I requested you for my Triad.” Before Vasi could do more than blink, the Queeb continued. “The spring avalanches will bury this potential find, but I’ve no wish to join it. Do you feel we have time to find it and plant our markers, or should we leave— now? You decide.”

Medya made an unhappy sound but said nothing more.

Vasi studied the peak. The wind still whipped the clouds up and away, though he didn’t doubt that could change on an instant. A cautious being wouldn’t be on this glacier today. Cautious beings didn’t make major finds. “Another hour, no more,” he decided, splitting the difference between his common sense and his desire. “After that, this site will have to wait until melt.”

 
Vasi knew they were close by the jolt of excitement through the bio’face. He signaled Ebbet and Medya to hold position, giving the canid more leash as it began coursing back and forth over the same area. The tech manual had described this behavior, but he hadn’t seen it before. His own thrill as they closed on their prey would have been just as obvious to another Tidik. Vasi couldn’t control how his frills opened wide, venting pheromones of hunt and happiness. The canid wagged its tail as though sensing his reaction, but didn’t stop its feverish examination of what seemed only a slight bulge in the glacier’s surface.

“Could be a rock outcrop under the ice, something hard enough to force it up like this,” Ebbet said, his voice rising as though urging the Finder to contradict him.

Vasi consulted the one sensor he’d been able to bring, a detector discriminating enough to reveal if a vein of ore or refined metal lay beneath them. “No,” he obliged, unable to make his own Comspeak anything but flat and even. “Whatever’s down there isn’t natural. I’m detecting traces of Barsium III.” He didn’t need to remind his Triad that the substance was rare in this part of space, and favored by the Hoveny in their structures.

The canid didn’t need confirmation. Its tail whipped madly back and forth, surely chilling the blood flowing through the appendage; then the beast rolled in the snow as if this could somehow smear the scent it so adored into its fur—a quirk of its nature Vasi was quite familiar with, following those too-ripe fish parts thoughtfully left outside his sleeping quarters.

Still, ridiculous as the beast looked, staggering joyfully to its feet, Vasi longed to express his own satisfaction as clearly. The Queeb and Brill, patting one another wherever they could reach with rather incoherent shouts of joy, both took turns to look at him as though waiting for some sign. Vasi sighed inwardly. If they really looked at him, if they smelled the air as even the beast knew to do, they’d know this was the happiest moment of his life.