Fall of the White Ship Avatar (30 page)

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[Fitzhugh 3]-FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR

Like the flash of insight he'd had at the crest of the dunes, Floyt understood clearly in an unexpected instant. Some strong bond had come into being between the man and the gawk; Floyt didn't hesitate.

He took the last two spare pliabamboo sheaths. They were calf-size, too small for the female, so Floyt jammed his own feet into them. While his boots didn't fill them, their length wedged into the round segments fairly well. He eased himself down from Pokesnout's back, using his lance for balance, as Alacrity screamed at him from the top of the hill.

The feel of sand devils lunging against the plia-bamboo, gnawing at it, trying to climb to the tops of the sheaths only to fall back and try again nearly made him scramble back up onto Pokesnout or stumble madly for the top of the slope.

But Pokesnout snuffled softly at his ear and gave him a restrained nudge forward. Floyt swallowed his terror and started for the female, catching himself with his lance once or twice but perservering.

Pokesnout was droning, Verities style, in the background.

She still had her exposed forelegs up, the whites showing all around her rolling eyes, but she was having more and more difficulty keeping her balance. Floyt went in close, just ahead of Pokesnout's backing rump.

She was nearly the little male's size. Floyt pushed up on her forelegs and chest with the lance, not because his strength would do much good but to show her what she had to do. She came to herself a little, and cooperated.

Then Pokesnout was in under her, jacking her chest up with his croup, still droning Verities. She listened, then struggled to maintain balance.

Holy Spirit of Tellurian Places
! it came to Floyt.
He's inventing a Verity on the spot, to tell her what to
do
!

Pokesnout dug in, legs spread for stability, trying to help her without losing his own balance.

Floyt assisted as much as he could, and batted one devil trying for the female's lashing tail. Then the two gawks were moving, but with poor coordination and maddeningly slow. Floyt shuffled and crutched along, keeping a hand on the female's flank as a comfort if nothing else, while sand devils assailed all three. The top of the dune saddle loomed in the dusk, a corona of sunset igniting the sky beyond. Floyt's soul seesawed from hysteria to exaltation and back between one instant and the next. But he looked at Pokesnout's stubborn lion-heartedness and felt a wash of fierce loyalty.

Then the female's starboard hind leg missed its footing for a moment, her weight threatening to shift and bring them all down. Floyt grabbed her port foreleg to pull, on the long chance that the extra bit of file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20krui...%20-%20Fall%20of%20the%20White%20Ship%20Avatar.htm (152 of 242)23-2-2006 17:03:13

[Fitzhugh 3]-FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR

leverage might make some difference. A part of him could right well not comprehend why the life of one more gawk maiden he'd never noticed before had become so vital to him all of a sudden.

She regained her balance and centered on Poke-snout's back by dint of furious pedaling and some fancy maneuvering on the bull's part. At just about that same time, Floyt—he never figured out just how—lost his equilibrium and fell.

Pokesnout couldn't possibly have seen, but somehow he knew. The gawk managed in some way to keep things stable with his other five legs and cocked his near-midships leg up and out, an altogether unprecedented maneuver from his kind, trying to arrest the Earther's fall.

Floyt lurched, scrabbling, against the leg and just barely missed saving himself. He slid and rolled off, landing on his back, beginning a pliabamboo segments-first slide down the slope as warm sand coursed around and under him.

The scuttle-death were on him at once, first a few, then a dozen. Oddly, he felt little pain—the bites were less than the single bee sting he'd received on a field trip on Earth as a boy. He didn't know if that was because of his emotional blaze or a numbing secretion of the scuttle-death.

But numbness spread fast, even as Floyt was thrashing and tossing, trying to get to his feet. It occurred to him that a toxin that could knock over a gawk in a short time would quite probably kill a human without very much waiting around. Still, he swiped and ripped away at the sand devils that clung to him, beating at others with his lance, furious that he was being slingshot into the afterlife with so much left undone.

He was back on his feet again, free of them for a wonder, but too late. "Isn't this
just like
the fucking universe?" he asked Lebensraum's sky unsteadily; laughing was so much effort as to be out of the question. His head wobbled. Things became cloudy for a second, then unnaturally clear as he concentrated, feeling like he'd slept. He brought all his willpower to bear, knowing no one else could save him.

Concentration did no good, not even for his posture; he tilted backward, unable to get a foot into position to stop it, beginning a fall into a bed of sand devils who'd set up an eager feeding scent he'd hate forever. He waited for his back to hit the squirming, biting mass because he couldn't do much else.

A surprise, then, when he landed on something rather less yielding and felt distinct pain in his upper back and across his buttocks. Very large teeth bruised and lacerated him, teeth bigger than a whole sand devil. It also felt hot and was rather smelly. Too, there was something large and slimy-slidey under him.

The Floyt was immobilized by another enormous weight/surface from the top. Woozily, he understood file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20krui...%20-%20Fall%20of%20the%20White%20Ship%20Avatar.htm (153 of 242)23-2-2006 17:03:13

[Fitzhugh 3]-FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR

that he was in Pokesnout's mouth like a duck in a retriever's.

Raised high above the sand, head bobbing on a limp neck, Floyt blearily watched the sand devils running around to no effect a million kilometers below. Dusk was deeper or his vision was going. He coughed and spat out sand, chuckling to himself, immensely amused. Pokesnout was carrying the female as well as Floyt, sand fountaining back from his sheathed hooves.

Floyt decided to nap.

Much later, he came around for a few moments to find himself laid out on leaves and branches layered over hard stone, close to a fire. Gawks were gathered around him curiously; Alacrity and Paloma Sudan were moving sprightly to keep them from singeing their muzzles while investigating the blaze. Verities

—and New Verities, he supposed—were droning in the background. He was so woozy, he could hardly feel how saddlesore he was.

"Hobie! You're
back
!" Paloma cried, dropping to her knees near him and kissing his brow, cradling his head with her hands.

"Good. We were just gonna dock you pay." Alacrity winked. He flung an arm out in a grand gesture.

"Long way to go. And some water waiting along the way. Listen, d'you happen to remember what you were telling me about Lake Fret? Your solution?"

It was the first Paloma had heard of it. "Hobie, you never cease to amaze me."

Floyt looked around sleepily, moistening his dry mouth. "We'll
walk
across."

His face lolled against Paloma's bosom and he was out again.

CHAPTER 14—WHO'RE WE TO ARGUE?

"Big lake."

"A
too-damn-big
lake, Paloma," Alacrity commented. "The map says Lake Fret's—lemme see—

something like twenty-five kilometers wide at this point, and this is as narrow as it gets."

Lake Fret was too choppy to reflect the sky, too shallow and silty in most places to have a true color of its own; it was an unhealthy gray-black. Alacrity lay back watching it with his head pillowed against Pokesnout's ribs, patting them absently, scratching his own various bites. The gawks had attracted a new air fleet of vermin eaters, who seemed to accept the humans as part of the gawks, but the assorted tiny pests were a constant bother nevertheless.

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Floyt's beard was still fairly well maintained, thanks to the survival tool's scissors. Alacrity had no need to shave, having put a hold on facial hair growth years ago, for the same reasons of convenience that had moved Paloma to stop her menstrual periods soon after she'd begun getting them.

And both men had let fingernails grow, finding them utilitarian, as other primitives did.

Alacrity studied the sky but saw no patrolling aircraft. The herd had taken careful concealment under heavily leaved candelabrum trees along the lakeshore, where they'd lain doggo for two days while the human trio sallied out in an effort to deal with the obstacle of Lake Fret.

Alacrity, Floyt, and Paloma had lit no fire since their second night down off the high desert, and chosen the route to the lake to maximize cover and minimize the dust the herd raised, taking every precaution to avoid detection and the air strikes it would draw.

There was a fair amount of traffic on Lake Fret, mostly ore barges. But none of it was likely to stop where the human and gawk expedition hid under lake—side foliage. Paloma, closer to Pokesnout's head, gave his chin a brief, thorough scratching with her red duraglaze glamornails. Pokesnout closed his eyes blissfully.

Humans and gawklegs were worse for wear, but Floyt was, after fifteen days' additional Long Trek, having fewer and fewer nightmares in which sand devils devoured their way into his eye sockets.

More than twenty additional gawks had died since the herd left the high desert. Alacrity confidently predicted that the human fatality rate over that same ground, given the prowling jackjaws, the flash floods, the bogs, zap-frosts, cruising dragon-kites, rockslides, and brush-fiends, would've been right around 100 percent. Throw in a personal convoy/bodyguard of two- to three-ton gawklegs evolved to thrive on Lebensraum, though, and all the equations changed. The humans had suffered no casualties but the gawks had, and Paloma, Floyt, and Alacrity were painfully aware of the connection.

Things between the humans had changed, too, but in ways that were hard to define.

At the end of the first day's journey down from the high desert, Floyt accepted Alacrity's and Paloma's word that there must be no more campfires after that night; the humans had thrown in their lot with the gawks irrevocably, and detection would likely mean death for all.

So Floyt stared into the last fire, exhausted and still a bit bleary from the scuttle-death toxin, feeding the tiny blaze while Alacrity was off trying to get a location fix from surrounding land features and Paloma was gathering some menu extenders.

Then Floyt realized Paloma was standing at his shoulder. She put down a meager double-handful of file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20krui...%20-%20Fall%20of%20the%20White%20Ship%20Avatar.htm (155 of 242)23-2-2006 17:03:13

[Fitzhugh 3]-FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR

hardscrabble up-country nuts and roots on a flat rock, took her much-repaired camp stool, and joined him by the fire.

"Just tell me this," she said suddenly. "Tell me what makes
him
so cocksure, huh? What're those little signals between you two? Why's Alacrity so smug about this White Ship business?"

Floyt stared into the flames, debating where the next piece of wood ought to go, despondent about the nights that were to come, when there would be no light or warmth, but especially no light, and knowing he would miss, as well, his station as Keeper of the Flame.

At last he sighed and gestured to the fire with the stick he held. "You think this is much of a light? Or that a bonfire is? God, Paloma, you should've seen the causality harp!

"It was a Precursor artifact—at least I
think
'was' is the right word; I'm fairly sure it was blown to oblivion. It was a—I don't know; a nebula, a living fire fifty meters high that sang and revealed Verities of its own, and what is to be."

Paloma's face had clouded. "So what are are you telling me? You found some kind of Precursor crystal ball?"

Floyt looked around at her suddenly, paused to consider, then nodded slowly. "That's exactly what I'm telling you; that's exactly what happened. Except that the crystal ball is more like some sort of wind chime that registered … well, I'm not sure
what
in creation it registered.
Causality …

"And Alacrity went out to it—almost into it—and asked it a question, asked it whether he'd be Master of the White Ship."

"It told him yes, of course." Paloma frowned, on one knee by the fire. "And so now he figures he's got Destiny by the ass, hmm?"

Floyt wanted to tell her everything but wasn't sure where to start, or how much it was fair to tell her about Alacrity's delusions in view of the fact that Floyt hadn't worked up the nerve to tell Alacrity himself.

"S'right," Alacrity drawled, coming out of the dusk to balance on his teetering camp stool.

Paloma looked him over. "And why should you control the Ship? Are you so much better than the Ghh'arkt? All
they
want to do is find the Precursors so they can pray to them. The rulers on Egalitaria claim they're going to administer all findings to benefit all life forms if they crack the Precursor mysteries. The Interested Parties want to show a profit, but at least they're a committee, or whatever, with some checks and balances. What makes you so special?"

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[Fitzhugh 3]-FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR

Alacrity made a sour smile. "Because I've been getting ready for it my whole life, and I don't owe anybody anything—no government, no god, nobody. Because the Ship's gonna be the greatest source of power of all time, and she's not to be controlled by the people who
rule
and the people who
own
!"