The Seeds of Time (53 page)

“I remember.”

He unhooked her rope from the wall and tugged on it. “Come on, we’re going for a little walk.” He tugged on it again. “Here, doggy, doggy.” He lit the torch with a match. Shook the matches in her face. “All the comforts of home, see?” He held the torch in one hand, rifle in the other, and pushed her into the cave recess, with the ankle rope trailing behind her.

“If they come for my treasure, they’ll have to get past old hot shot.”

“You call this cave a treasure, Teeg? I call it dark and cold.”

“You cold? Wait here.” He turned back, poked through his pile. Brought her a reeking blanket. She draped it over her shoulders, gripping it in readiness to douse his torch.
“There are secrets in this cave, Clio. Secrets the Voo Doos are after, and now the army comes looking.” He giggled. “I outsmarted them. They won’t find it, no sir, won’t find it.”

“Who’s the Voo Doos, Teeg?”

“The ones you been fighting out there. The ones that want the same thing you do. The ones that kill with their hands.” He prodded her with the rifle butt, and she stumbled on. “They all want their Faster Than Light.”

Clio kept moving, barely breathing.

“Same as you, you all want your Faster Than Light.”

“Yeah, we all want it, I guess.” The light from the cave entrance leaked away as they moved deeper. Now the passage walls wavered with torchlight.

“Me, I don’t care,” he continued. “You know why I like it? I like it ’cause it’s pretty.” He giggled. “Ain’t that a kick? All the powers of the universe come looking, and it’s my freeping objet d’art!” That sent him into a long streak of giggling, coming up from his chest.

They were in the big cavern again.

“Over here,” Teeg said. His voice came to her as though from a great distance, from someone else. He tugged on the rope and Clio staggered to follow. Somewhere a moan of wind, and then a shattering cold airstream sluiced over her legs. Teeg dragged her toward a dreadful sighing of what surely must be a wraith roaming in the deepest cave domains. Finally, as an exhalation of ice slapped into Clio’s face, Teeg ordered, “Stop here. Kneel,” he said.

Clio went down onto her knees.

Teeg had laid down the torch, which now flickered wildly in the moaning breeze. She felt him press a fist-sized rock into her hand.

“Toss it,” he commanded.

“Where?”

“Into the crack!” he said, grabbing her hand and swinging it forward. The rock sailed out toward a line of shadow darker than the rest, blacker than the mere black of the great cave.

Then nothing.

After a few moments, Teeg said. “Hear that?”

“No.”

“No! Of course you don’t, you cow! Know what this is? The deepest crack in the world, that’s what! Goes down so far, all the way to hell! Throw a torch down, it burns to a crisp before it hits bottom, that’s what! Critters know better than to come near here, Teeg knows better!” He yanked on her rope, and they backed away. “I call that the Hell Crack. Don’t ever be coming in here without me, Clio.” Teeg’s voice sounded almost tender.

“I won’t.”
Unless it’s to push you in, you slime
.

They shuffled through the blackness with the sputtering torch illuminating only their faces. Clio’s feet resisted walking on a ground she couldn’t see, with crevasses nearby. But she moved on, prodded by Teeg, just behind her.

The torch burned lower now, its pungent smoke catching the firelight in a hazy nimbus around them.

“Here,” Teeg said. He fixed the torch in the cave wall. In the dimness Clio saw a thin stream of intense white light. Then another.

Before her on a ledge lay a short array of sparkling lights, ignited from the coals of the torch. At first it seemed to Clio that she looked on a book with a jewel-studded cover; some treasure of buried knowledge, bedecked with the embellishments of a secret priesthood. As her eyes adjusted in the cooling light, she saw that it was more common and more strange than this. It was a circuit board. A computer circuit board, flat as a wafer, and, at intervals, clustered with clear fragments of glass, crystal, or diamond.

“My treasure,” Teeg said. He ran his fingers over the board in a light stroke. “Treasure,” he repeated, turning back to Clio, half his face glowing from the torch. “Look! Go ahead and look!” he shouted.

“I see it, Teeg.”

“Yes, yes,” he giggled, “now you’re in on it, sin on it, been on it.”

“So it’s pretty. You want to tell me what it is?”

His voice dropped the giggle, became eerily normal. “Weren’t you listening, Clio?”

“Trying to listen.”

“Good for you. This is the treasure, the FTL treasure you all are busting your asses to find, that you won’t find, ’cause it’s buried, see?”

Clio took a breath, let it out real slow. “This circuit board is the FTL hardware from the ship?”

“Bingo.”

“You sure?”

Teeg slapped her so hard she reeled backward. He lunged for her, pulled her by her jacket close to his face, and releasing, with his words, a fetid miasma. “Don’t contradict me, woman.” He pulled her to her feet. Clio measured the strength of his grip, weighing her chances. “I won’t be hitting you unless you make me mad. Toe the line, Clio. You got to learn to toe the line.” Clio rubbed the hot welt on her cheek.

“I’ll tell you, but not because you asked. I was going to tell you anyway, now that we’re together again. How I know about the FTL? I caught me a Voo Doo man, first time they came around my caves. They looked for him, snooped everywhere, but they never found him. I buried his body way back in, because I didn’t want him rising up again. Sometimes he does anyway, glowing.…” Teeg swiveled to look off to the side. Took another torch from the wall and lit it from the embers of the first one.

In the explosion of light, Clio saw the unmistakable planes of crystal embedded in the circuit board.

“I had to hurt him real bad, and for a long time, but he finally told me they were looking for their crashed ship, which I knew where it was, see? And I took him there, secret, and when he showed me the FTL hardware, I pulled it. Took his rifle, too, the kind Niana doesn’t eat. I shouldn’t have killed him after everything he went through and the promises I made. But he wasn’t human. He didn’t count.

“That’s enough for now,” Teeg said. He spun her around and herded her back through the cavern. “I didn’t really want to leave Ashe-trash alone out there, but you had to see the treasure. Now that you’ve seen it, you can’t ever leave. This was your initiation, Clio. Now you’re New
Merican, like me.” He giggled, joined by ricocheting voices, giggling too. “Bet you wish you hadn’t seen it, don’t you?”

Something pulled at her rope, a critter scampering after the trailing cord.

“Oh, it’s you again!” Teeg feinted toward the creature, stomping on Clio’s rope in the process. She stumbled. “I didn’t give you permission to hassle her yet. You need permission.” He spun around, screaming at the ether. “You need—you all need, permission!”

As Teeg turned to address his creatures, Clio pulled again on the knot around her ankle, as she had done repeatedly. It was loosening.

Ashe was sitting up when they returned to the first cave. Clio bent down next to him. “How are you doing?”

“Well enough,” Ashe answered. But his face was as pale as Teeg’s.

Teeg fastened the torch and returned to stand in front of them. “This guy’s a pussy,” he said. He was frowning and nodding.

Clio sidled closer to Ashe.

“Move away from him, Clio.”

“No.” She huddled close to Ashe, bringing her hand down to her ankle, ready to slip the rope off.

“Oh, you’re going to get punished for this. You don’t go against old Teeg. You’ll learn that. I just got to remember to hold my temper. Now move away, Clio.”

“No.”

Teeg lunged for her leg rope, yanking it away, and as it slipped free of her ankle, he fell back, sprawling.

Clio was on him in an instant, straddling him and striking his rifle arm. The gun fell to the floor. She scrambled toward the weapon, but he threw her away from it with a thrust of his hips. From a prone position he grabbed the weapon and raised it to point at her chest while scrambling to his feet. Clio froze. Teeg swung the rifle to the left, covering Ashe in a slight sweep. But Ashe was gone. Teeg turned to sweep behind him. Ashe was standing there, already reaching down for Teeg’s neck. Ashe’s fingers pierced
flesh, sinking deep, and then Teeg made a small thrust upward with the rifle, followed by a murderous chopping movement, pounding the rifle butt into Ashe’s solar plexus.

As Ashe doubled over, Clio dove for the weapon, knocked it out of Teeg’s hands, and grabbed it as it clattered to the cave floor. Teeg was backing frantically out of the cave, waving her off, as Clio aimed straight for his chest.

“You don’t get to use guns!” Teeg shrieked at her. “You don’t get to!”

“Stop right where you are, Teeg,” she said.

Teeg was backing swiftly toward the edge of the cave lip and the river chasm below.

“Stop, Teeg!” Clio ran into the glaring sun, not realizing that Teeg took that for a hostile move.

He stepped into the thunderous air, and fell.

As Clio watched, still yelling “Stop,” Ashe grabbed her from behind, pressing his arm under her chin. She dropped the rifle. He forced her to her knees while he picked up the weapon. “So that was Harper Teeg,” Ashe said. “The legendary Harper Teeg.”

Clio stood up, bones and flesh aching. She looked into Ashe’s face, smeared with dirt, wisps of hair falling around his face. “The scar,” she said, “It’s not from getting hit with a ski, is it?”

“No.”

A battle wound then
, she thought.
Ashe has seen a few battles. Not a botanist, of course. Knew that much, goddamn it, knew that two days ago and held my tongue. Why? Stupid fool bitch
.

She walked slowly to the edge of the river canyon. Teeg was lost in the boiling white soup. She turned to face Ashe. “Now what?” she asked.

“We’re abandoning this mission, Clio,” he said.

“I figured that much.”

She shed the heavy jacket Teeg had given her. Here in the brilliant sun, the tropical heat removed even the memory of the cave’s frigid air. “We’ll cross the river just upstream.”

“Where are we going?”

“My camp.”

“Your camp.”

“It’s our main tactical camp. I guess you’d call it Nian headquarters.”

“What would
you
call it?”

“My camp.”

“I take it you’re not asking me if I want to come?”

“No.” He nodded toward the cave entrance. “First we search the cave.”

He motioned her forward, and they entered the dark arch of Teeg’s labyrinth once more. As Ashe poked through Teeg’s personal belongings, he kept a firm grip on Clio’s arm; a grip like a robotic industrial vise. She knew what he searched for, and knew where it was, and kept her silence.

Ashe looked down toward the deeper black of the passageway. Then he seemed to reconsider the hopelessness of one man searching the immense reaches beyond.

After a moment of indecision, he guided her out of the cave.

Clio nodded at the rifle. “Is that to make sure I don’t run?”

“No.” He checked the chamber for shells. “This is for army, if they pursue us.”

“Am I on the honor system, then?”

Ashe compressed his lips, struggling to say, or not to say, something. Then he put his large hand on the back of her neck and guided her—firmly, no mistake—onto the shelf of rock at the cave entrance, and then off to the right where a gradual slope of blistering rock dove from sun to shadow and into the jungle brush.

Clio scrambled over the roots and woody vines that formed the rumpled floor of the jungle. Behind her, Ashe silently urged her onward, following, to one side, the roaring path of the river. His eyes found hers glancingly, enough to point her onward, but then slid away as though he were reluctant to look at her—even, perhaps, ashamed to look at her. The rifle was slung over his bulky shoulder. He
no longer threatened her with
that
, at least, but still, he had forced her into the deep shroud of the forest as his prisoner, had shown himself at last, revealed his identity as spy, enemy, liar, alien. He was all those things, all those months shipboard, yet he pretended to care for her, for Petya, and never was ashamed, never let his eyes slide away from hers in that hooded way. But now. Now that she knew him for what he was, his disguise missing, a shame of nakedness came over him. Clio snorted. A miserable thing it was, to be such a liar and only feel shame when discovered. And shook her head at these musings. Why did it matter any longer what qualities Ashe had or lacked? She was his prisoner, as she had been Teeg’s a moment before. He saw her as Teeg had seen her—someone to use. Teeg’s purpose was clear, but what was Ashe’s purpose in this forced march? As the
Galactique
’s Dive pilot, she was worth something. So, ransom, then.

As though mimicking her sudden clarity, the forest floor now revealed a narrow path crossing theirs. They followed this new direction, down a well-trampled line of mud to the brink of the river where a giant fallen tree trunk formed a crossing. The river surged through the ravine of jungle, lashing at times against the underbelly of the tenuous bridge before them. Following the command in Ashe’s quick look, Clio scrambled up onto the tree trunk. The top surface had been scraped flat to a width of nearly a meter, revealing thready turquoise fibers which now caught the overhead sun in a sparkling, hairy glow like the hide of a dew-drenched animal.

She picked her way over the river’s crash and flow, feeling Ashe at her back, even as the spray whipped her fatigue pants and sent a boiling mist into her face. The crossing was the boundary of safety. Now she was in enemy country.

Ashe’s voice pushed against the river’s own. “Do you want to rest?”

In answer, Clio turned to the clear trail disappearing into the tangle at the end of the tree bridge and strode into the dark thicket.

An hour’s silent march from the river, a nearby shout stopped Clio in midstride. Ashe moved up behind her and spoke the password, apparently, since they moved on then without further challenge until Clio could just see, through the forest web, the tops of tents camouflaged the very color of Niang.