AT THE END OF NINE AND A HALF WEEKS, MANKA Warlock felt as if
she’d done as much as she could.
To properly complete the group’s training she needed more
than the poor simulations that Star Eagle had managed to conjure
up, she needed to be in the field where she would be no more
experienced than the rest of them. There was no practical way,
however, to take everyone down to the surface for a few days and
bring them back; each time someone was inserted into the world or
withdrawn from it, they ran the risk of detection no matter what
the safeguards and timing. Silent Woman’s very presence had
suggested one thing to her, though, which she carried out and
imposed during the last two weeks. She worked out a series of codes
involving finger snaps and clicks made with the mouth that could
convey basic information, and then imposed a rule of absolute
silence. Everything was by gesture and sign, with even the audibles
used only when necessary. It was difficult at the start for all
except Silent Woman, but after two weeks they hardly needed speech
to function efficiently.
It was Vulture finally who emerged from isolation. “We are
as ready as we can be,” she told Hawks. “I’m
still a bit nervous about the Indrus women, who are tough
enough but perhaps still too civilized, and the two from
Espiritu Luzon, who have done well but who I’m not
sure I want to depend on in a crisis and may have to. But we can go
no further here.”
Hawks nodded. “All right, then. Are you really sure you
need so many of us, though? Even at this stage it looks like we are
committing a large number to unknown risk for no purpose except
covering you.”
“I need covering,” she assured him. “We all
do. In the end, this caper might be as intricate as
Janipur’s. The only way to know is to go in and find out. Do
we have the duplicate ring?”
Hawks nodded. “It’s the same size, shape, weight,
and general composition as the Janipur ring, and we have placed on
its face the consistent design taken from your mindprinted memories
of the carvings on the truth-bearer’s charms and staff.
It’s to scale and in the same style, but there is no way to
know for certain if it’s able to fool anyone until the two
are physically compared. We’ve made a housing for it inside a
bone charm so it looks like a single piece. We’ll show you
how to get it apart. Don’t lose it, or you’re going to
have to come all the way back for a new one.”
“I’ll take good care of it. Anything else you want
to say to them before we go ahead with the mindprinting?”
“We’ll cover the details when it’s done. Good
luck.”
“We’ll need it,” Vulture responded.
They stood there in silence, already looking the part of a
savage band. All now had colored dye markings in their brands
indicating the pecking order; Silent Woman wore the marks of
firebearer. The most marked change was an expected one; Warlock had
developed some woolly facial and body hair, and while her body was
still female in shape there was a definite difference even in how
she moved or carried herself. When she said, “We are ready.
Let’s get it over with,” her voice was still
Warlock’s, Caribe accent and all, but a half octave lower and
definitely male.
Only Warlock and Vulture did not plainly show that they were
nervous, even a little scared.
Star Eagle would handle the process automatically, but it was
decided that China would give the basic briefing. Although Clayben
had been the major human participant in creating the programs, it
was thought best to leave him out of the actual performance of the
printing process for political reasons.
“Basically, we took the information and experience of
Uraa’s life and analyzed it,” China told them.
“You will all receive the same basic print, minus some of the
more personal items that would have no bearing on you down there.
We don’t know what might trigger the activation of the
defenses, but if it is keyed to alienness, then just hearing a
non-Matriyehan tongue would be enough and we want no slips, but we
also want you to have full memories and knowledge. As a result, we
have instituted a filter of sorts. The Matriyehan tongue is simple
and not geared to the creation of new words or concepts, but it is
adequate even if you might have to use approximations and fifteen
words to describe one thing. The filter will simply not permit you
to vocalize anything except the native tongue. It will be your
primary language. You will think in it and it will take effort to
access another, even internally, and impossible vocally. You will,
however, still understand all the languages you know now, so you
would still understand me. Language shapes a culture more than
anything else. Master System knows this, which is why this was
imposed. The more you relax, don’t fight, and use this
language exclusively, the more native you will become. The terms
are holographically linked. When you hear
‘daka’ for example, you will instantly think
of the huge lava snakes.”
The language was in fact compact, but relatively versatile.
There were no ambiguities allowed, and every term had just one
meaning; most words, like the names, were no more than two
syllables. The native name for the world, mystical and important
because it contained three syllables, was pronounced
“Mah-treh-yeh.”
“You will respond only to the names we give you,”
China continued. “That is also for security. People’s
names are also legitimate words and might be descriptives of
personalities, but there don’t seem to be any hard and fast
rules, so we tried to keep it close if we could. Maka means
‘high tree,’ for example, so we can use that for you,
Manka. Similarly, Mari means ‘pretty dirt.’ Not a great
name but close to Maria. Suni is ‘Gray Rock,’ Midi is a
kind of plant, Taeg, which is close, is—sorry—a kind of
bug, and we chose Euno for Silent Woman because it means
‘quiet hand.’ Lalla, your name is unpronounceable in
Matriyehan, so we selected Aesa, which means ‘strong
branch.’ ”
She paused a moment, then continued. “We also must take a
number of security precautions considering the close call on
Janipur. You won’t have laser pistols and you’ll be
practically defenseless against something like a Val. We doubt one
is there now, but if anything goes wrong, you can be sure one will
show up faster than we could. Now, listen well. Any attempt to
probe your mind, hypno you, or in any way gain information about us
will trigger an automatic dormant program in your mind. It will
block off any knowledge, any memories, not Matriyehan. For all
intents and purposes, it will erase anything not in the programming
we are about to give you. Only we know the code that will erase the
so-called worm program instead of triggering it. Only the machine
that creates it can remove it. It’s an idea we took from the
SPF, and we’ll be using it from this point on in the field.
If you get separated from the group for any reason, try to retrace
the route to the fighter. It will be there unless it is discovered
and destroyed by the enemy. Just give your name. It will recognize
you and then notify us to set up transmission and reception. If you
return for any reason and it is not there, use the map references
that will be imprinted in your mind to go to the alternate points
where pickup might be made in order. That’s all there is,
except, good fortune guide you all.”
Only Vulture did not need the mindprobe; she already had an
identity and experience below, and had been designed to fool and be
impervious to any of the standard devices. This also made her
valuable in one other respect: she alone would not be bound by the
limitations of the program.
Unlike transmutation, the mindprobe process was neither quick
nor without some difficulty, and it took several hours to process
them all.
Maria Santiago, like the others, awoke with a headache and
slight dizziness that took awhile to go away. She
felt—strange. Strange memories and stranger landscapes filled
her mind, and she felt oddly cramped, closed in, and threatened by
the room. In the back of her mind she knew who she was, who the
others were, where they were and why, but it seemed suddenly
remote, even alien, and hard to grasp all the complexities of it.
She tried not to think of those things; thinking of them confused
her and frightened her still more. There was only the tribe, only
the People, her wife-sisters and their chief. Security lay only in
the tribe, and so long as she was one with them she had nothing to
fear.
Maka led them down to the place where they would return to open
and the People, and they followed, eager to be away. Uraa went
first, to scout the way, then the rest followed with Maka last.
They were transferred first to Lightning, with Raven
piloting, and made the short jump from no-space to the carefully
precalculated angle and orbit that would bring them in at the
“dead” spot, where the ship could attain geostationary
orbit long enough for them to transmit down to the fighter without
being picked up by the monitors.
One by one, they stepped out on the surface of Matriyeh and
formed up. They carried the crude stone-tipped spears, and stone
axes and blow guns hung from their vine belts.
Although they all had memory-pictures of the Earth-Mother, they
all knew that, except for Uraa, they were seeing it for the first
time. The heat was great, the humidity almost as bad, and the air
had the fault smell of sulfur and sulfuric compounds that took some
getting used to.
The landscape was rough, barren of life, and filled with
grotesque rocky forms; black lava frozen in place like a great wave
locked forever in stone, and beyond, a burnt wasteland of reds and
oranges and gray ash like thick sand. The place had great beauty to
it, but it was dead and threatening, as well, and no place for
people to live. The sky above was thick with clouds swirling in
demonic dances, and here and there in the distance thin fingers of
lightning lashed out and struck far off, bringing occasional
distant explosions to their ears.
Maka, too, was affected for a moment by all this, but she knew
she had the responsibility and that the day was more than half gone.
She nodded to Uraa, the scout, and she turned and led them down
from the burnt and blackened side of the great volcano, its cone
invisible in the clouds, and finally on to the gray sands. They set
off at a run, the only sounds those of distant thunder and the
sharp breathing of the others. They ran for more than an hour
without a break, until they were within sight of the edge of the
ash field and the first, green growth, which began abruptly. Now
they slowed, but still Maka kept them to silent speech.
The jungle floor was quite dark and filled with vegetation; the
great fronds far above captured most of the light and rain, but
enough trickled down to the floor or was stored as excess in the
great trees to support a variety of lower plant life—mostly
vines and creepers and spindly bushes with sharp, thorny leaves,
and various mosses, algae, and fungi. The jungle also teemed with
insects of all types, but there was no sign of birds or animals.
They reached a swift-flowing, shallow river, in the center of which
rough water rolled about protruding rocks. Uraa took them down one
side of the muddy bank for almost a kilometer until they came to a
bend in the river where the water flowed more quietly through
transitory islands of silt. There they were permitted to kneel in
the mud and drink, and then Uraa spoke, breaking the silence.
“Maka tribe spear fish in river,” she said.
“Else eat bugs. Uraa show,” She picked up her spear,
examined it, then walked very slowly into the water at a quiet
point and out near one of the mud spits. As they watched, she stood
there, absolutely motionless, spear ready, eyes only on the water.
She remained there in hip-deep water, like a statue, for what
seemed like forever, but then, suddenly became a blur of motion,
bringing the spear down swiftly and forcefully, plunging it all the
way down, twisting, then lifting it up with both hands. On the end,
neatly speared but still wriggling, was a large fish. She waded
back to them, looking very satisfied, as indeed she was. Her
biggest concern with this show was that there would either be no
fish in the area or that she would miss.
The creature was certainly ugly, with a wide mouth, enormous
feelers all around it, smooth purple-and-white skin rather than
scales, and two large fins that seemed almost like protoarms.
Silent Woman suddenly grinned, nodded, and waded out into the
river. It took her even less time than it had taken Vulture, and it
was clear that it wasn’t the first time she’d done this
sort of thing.
Now it was the others’ turn to try.
They didn’t do nearly so well, although both Uraa and
Silent Woman tried to show them how. Absolute stillness was
required in this water, and the position in the water was also
critical. These fish did not so much swim as walk along the bottom
rooting through the mud, but no matter how muddy the water became
they gave off small, telltale bubbles as they cleared themselves of
river-bottom debris. Ultimately, Suni and Midi each caught one,
after several failures, but the rest came up empty. Uraa and Silent
Woman made up for it as darkness began to creep onto the
surface.
The fish were gutted and expertly skewered by Uraa and Silent
Woman. It might have been possible to gather enough dead wood from
the nearby forest floor to make fire, but it was forbidden. This
was not uninhabited territory. No place that could provide food
with little physical danger, even for amateurs and novices like
them, would be unclaimed.
It was very difficult for some of them to face eating the bloody
meat raw, and Maria and both of the Indrus women looked
distinctly nauseated, but they choked it down all the same. Manka
Warlock didn’t like it but ate her share, and Midi and Taeg
had less problems. Uraa and Silent Woman ate with unreserved
relish.
“Camp here to Great God’s light,” Maka told
them. “Uraa know this place?”
Vulture nodded. “If other not here, will not come in dark.
This place of big tribe. Many more than Maka tribe. Must go far
next light. No bad things near. Safe camp to light.”
Demon-things prowled the darkness looking for lives and souls;
Matriyehans moved in darkness only when forced to do so.
Tonight there would be little need for a guard; later on there
would be, and it was understood that those who didn’t pull
their weight in food gathering by day would not sleep much by
night. For now, until they were fully blooded and well experienced
in living here and had learned the practical means of survival,
allowances would be made.
They cleared a dry but protected area near the river and lay
down close together to sleep. There would be better, less austere
camps later, when they had made what was necessary, but for now a
spartan camp was all they could manage. Highly uncomfortable, and
with the tension creating somewhat sour stomachs, sleep was not
easy to come by. So far, though, it hadn’t been as bad as
they had feared it might be, but there were memories from the
mindprinter of harsher things and harder places on this world and
they had a long distance to travel, much of it in areas that even
Vulture had never seen or heard about.
Isaac Clayben frowned. He’d called Hawks and Cloud Dancer
to his lab, and China was already there. The blind woman looked
slightly shaken.
“I’ve been analyzing these mindprinter recordings of
the group we sent down,” he told them, “using Star
Eagle’s capabilities and some proprietary programs I
developed from analyzing what Master System did with the records it
took from all of us periodically. No major surprises, although I
don’t think anyone would ever like to sample Warlock’s
sadomasochistic fantasies, which are a bit hard to take even in
data form. Although she’s probably the one best able to keep
them alive and maintain success, I feel sorry for the other poor
women down there whenever she gets in the mood for sex, which I
think will be often. No surprises, that is, until I get to Silent
Woman. We took her print routinely on Melchior, and I vaguely
remember being given a report that the results were highly unusual,
but there were so many other things to occupy me that she
didn’t rate a very high priority. The data was simply
overridden by shock and psychosis, looped back over and over, so it
was just meaningless garbage. China tried to read it with the
printer and almost went mad herself.”
“An endless loop, over and over,” she said weakly.
“Incredible horror and sadness, the same terrible images
again and again, and through it all a chilling scream of her soul.
I know they’re your people, but to me, those medicine men set
a new standard of human cruelty. I never imagined that such as they
existed. It wasn’t just a necessity—they
enjoyed it. They forced her to
watch . . . ” She trembled and choked up
for a moment. “To watch . . . the ritual
disemboweling of her baby while it was still alive. To be held
close, your face pushed into your baby’s
wounds . . . I was kept intellectually
distant, a watcher in her mind, and still I will have nightmares
forever.”
Cloud Dancer shivered, as well, and even Hawks felt the horror.
“They are not our people,” he said defensively.
“The same race, yes, but they are not our people. They are of
a different nation, and religion, although this does not sound like
Illinois work, either. It smacks of demon worship in the way it was
carried out, although it was still policy.”
China’s head snapped up. “Policy? Whose?”
“The child was deformed—”
“The child was not deformed! It was a perfect
baby girl!”
There was shocked silence at that, and Cloud Dancer gripped
Hawks’ hand and squeezed it hard. Hawks thought of the fat
pig of an Illinois pirate chief telling him that story, knowing it
made perfect sense and had the full ring of truth to it and thus
saved his miserable life.
“There is more to this, then, than cultural beliefs and
practices. Can you get beyond it? Can you filter it out?”
“What do you think we’ve been trying to do? It
isn’t easy with a trauma of this magnitude,” Clayben
responded, “and I’m no psychiatrist.
Thunder’s computers are good, but they aren’t
specialized for this sort of thing. You know how many
cross-referenced memory bytes there are in the average
forty-year-old brain? Quadrillions. The human brain is an
incredible natural indexing system we can only approximate in Star
Eagles and Vals and the rest. The combinations create both data
flows and holographic images. What we have here is basically a
self-imposed worm program. I know she didn’t know it or think
of it that way, but that’s what it is. The trauma was so
great that she shut off access to everything preceding a period of
perhaps a couple of weeks after they cut out her tongue. Any
attempt to access anything prior to that runs into the trauma loop
and there is instant recoil. After a while it’s like electric
shock conditioning. You just don’t go there any
more.”
“The language that she has is her own,” China
explained. “It was created in her mind after the trauma. The
very concept of language is in the blocked-off regions.
She thinks in ideographs, much like a deaf-mute would. She simply
doesn’t have a self-image; it must be supplied by those
around her. Even her dreams are mundane things about what she did
the day before. She does, however, retain many basic skills that
indicate that she once led something of a wilderness life. It is
incredible that she survives at all, given the strength of the
trauma. Suicide or catatonia would be more likely. What it really
comes down to is that she is a very strong person—perhaps the
strongest among us.”
“The thing is, we’ve suddenly given her cause for
developing a totally new self-image. She cannot totally escape the
old one—she is still the prisoner of her past in
that—but we gave her one hell of a body and good looks. In
fact, at Vulture’s urging we strongly emphasized the female
sexual attributes and added some additional nerve links to increase
the intensity of feeling there. He was afraid of her psychosis
coming out very strongly and violently in a setting more like she
was used to and, with her wilderness skills, taking command from
Warlock. Not knowing what we were dealing with, we went along. I
think we struck the right balance, anyway. Warlock, of course, had
intercourse with her in order to establish Matriyehan chemical
bonding, and I suspect that will be sufficient to control her. But
she is still a strong and violent personality, which of course, we
need down there. If she is redeveloping a whole new internal
personal image, that’s probably fine, but we must know more
about her past. If the violence and cruelty down below begin to
trigger the old traumas—we don’t know what she might
become.”
“It seems to me you’re a little late thinking of
this,” Cloud Dancer noted acidly.
“Huh? What?”
“Suppose you discover that she might become a raging
homicidal maniac who can be stopped only by death? How could we
warn them? What could we do about it?”
They had been on Matriyeh for seven weeks, and if their harsh
existence wasn’t getting any easier, at least it was becoming
more routine. They were always busy, hunting for food and tools,
and all the while moving slowly and cautiously toward their goal.
They avoided the many dangers by being ever alert, surviving by
thinking only of the moment at hand. There were snakes large enough
to swallow people, and leathery-winged beasts with sharp teeth that
could dive at any moment on unsuspecting prey; there were vines
that could trip the unwary, and twists and turns in the ground that
might break an ankle.
And even when at rest they were always tense, listening for
potential dangers. The only real pleasure came late at night or
just before dawn, for the lucky one favored by Maka’s
attentions. The coupling was animalistic—raw lust and
gratification—but the tensions built up to the point where
they all craved relief.
And because only Maka could give this pleasure, all behavior was
aimed toward pleasing Maka, serving Maka, obeying Maka. If
they’d had the opportunity and the motivation to think about
it, they all would have been shocked at how quickly the veneer of
civilization and their own diverse cultural standards had been
stripped away. They all were killers, bound to each other and their
leader—literally no one or nothing else counted.
At dawn, they preened one another, washed themselves if some
water was available, finished off anything left to eat from the
night before, and the cycle started all over again.
Manka Warlock was comfortable with her role, although the
overall responsibility for them all was a heavy burden.
At the start, when she’d first studied the system, she had
been upset that a male figure dominated packs of women, but
she’d come to realize the logic in it. It was, after all,
democratic; any Matriyehan had the potential to be chief, if they
had the will and the personality to do so and a vacancy came their
way, and only one male figure was biologically necessary in the
system. She often wondered, though, how many women a chief could
serve in a day. Some of the tribes here were a hundred or more
strong.
Warlock was also pleased if somewhat surprised that as yet they
had not suffered any serious casualties: some sprains, a number of
bruises, and a number of near-serious incidents, but nothing really
severe. She knew, though, that the luck wouldn’t last forever
even though they were skilled at primitive living. They were
getting so proficient at hunting the tuka, an animal
resembling a green-haired wild boar but with a long snout,
razor-sharp teeth, long tusks, and the temper of a shrew, that when
they found one, it seldom escaped. Both Suni and Mari had been
slightly gored by one when they first tried to catch one, and
Silent Woman still had teeth marks on her right arm, but they
hadn’t been crippling injuries. Unless it received a mortal
blow or a major compound fracture, the Matriyehan body had a
tremendous capacity for self-repair equaled only by its enormous
toleration for pain. They did, of course, have the knowledge to set
simple fractures if necessary and use certain jungle herbs and
leaves as medicines. That had been included in the program.
But for the landmark-based maps in their heads, they would have
had no idea how far they had traveled, and even that was an
approximate measure. The Matriyehan language had only the concepts
of short and far, and the definition of far translated out as
“horizon.” Nor was there any long-term sense of time;
the day was measured by light and shadow because it was necessary
to know where you stood compared to what was left to do; no other
time was relevant. Even now it was impossible for them to tell how
long they had been living this life, and every day it seemed more
and more their only reality, that existence before some kind of
wild dream or vague religious view of heaven.
Vulture, however, could tell that they were averaging less than
six kilometers a day, counting the amount of time they would spend
having to find bearings when lost and the necessary diversions for
hunting and gathering, which almost always took them in the wrong
direction. This meant that they had covered, at most, a quarter of
the distance. The life and the absolute requirements that her form
imitate a Matriyehan exactly were also taking their toll, more, in
fact, than they had the first time. She was as chemically bound and
devoted to Maka as the rest, and if Maka suddenly proclaimed that
they would build the tribe, remain, and forget the mission, it
would have been instantly accepted. That devotion, and the
collective mind-set of the tribe, had almost trapped Vulture here
the last time.
Already Maka had fallen prey to one of the potential traps in
the Uraa-based program and the language. She had begun first to
refer to, then to pray to the various spirits and demons of the
world. These had been left in the programming because to edit them
out would have marked them as somehow different and could have
betrayed them; now the theology was taking on a shadowy reality of
its own.
About nine weeks out, they had taken shelter in a lushly
overgrown lava tube against one of the incredibly frequent and very
violent storms that swept the world. They had caught a
tuka early and had drunk its blood for strength, and so
were well prepared to sit out the rest of the day. Often they had
seen, but managed to avoid being seen by, other tribes, although
sometimes that had meant hiding in deep water using the blow guns
to breathe or covering themselves in mud and lying very still. In
spite of the complications that would result, Maka would have been
impossible to stop from taking a smaller group than they, but these
were all much larger—which, at least, made them easier to
detect.
In the cave, considering the storm, they had risked a small fire
to cook the meat, a rare luxury in this life. Fires caused smoke,
of course, but in that sort of storm it was a reasonable risk.
But a lone figure did approach through the roar of the storm,
and Midi, who was on guard at the mourn of the tube, didn’t
see her until the stranger was almost inside. Then she leaped upon
the figure and wrestled it to the ground in the rain, while barking
a single word of warning to her wife-sisters within. They responded
instantly, dropping whatever they were doing and running to
Midi’s aid.
Midi had the stranger well in check, arm around her throat and
stone ax poised to bash in a head if any resistance was offered.
None was, and it was soon clear why when Maka arrived, looked down,
and ordered Midi to release the prisoner.
“Hold, sisters!” The newcomer gasped, rubbing her
throat. “Truth-bearers serve all tribes.”
She was quickly offered a hand up and taken inside the cave.
Maka was undecided just what to do and looked to Vulture for
advice, but got none. The leader decided that it was a good, and
perhaps inevitable, test, and that the traveling priestess could
always be killed later if she proved a problem.
So they offered some tuka and examined the stranger.
Truth-bearers were the only Matriyehans who wore any sort of real
clothing, although it was more of a great cape than a robe or true
garment, made out of what looked like tuka hide dyed a
dark red. Her face and her entire body were covered with tattoos of
varying colors and designs, although a bird and bee seemed to recur
in many themes and variations. She also had a polished bone ring in
her nose running through a perforation and with no visible break,
and similar earrings, although a carved charm hanging from the left
earring was a tree and the one from the right, the bird. She had no
hair save eyebrows; the head didn’t look shaved, either. It
genuinely appeared that no hair had ever grown there.
When Silent Woman saw the incredible tattoos covering the
newcomer’s body she gave something of a gasp, and thereafter
couldn’t take her eyes off the truth-bearer. Warlock saw it
and was unnerved by it, but could do nothing. “What spirits
bring truth-bearer to Maka tribe in storm?” she asked. This
was, after all, decidedly not the normal way you got one.
“Maka tribe near spirit ground next hill,” the
stranger explained. “We go to spirits to get strength,
storm come, know cave, Maka tribe here.” It was as simple as
that.
Matriyehan society wasn’t really made for small talk, and
there was little to talk about. The truth-bearer asked about the
unusually small size of the tribe and Maka gave the official story,
that she and two others had been separated in a storm from a larger
tribe far to the south—Uraa’s tribe, which was real and
where they said it was—and had not been able to contact the
tribe. They managed to survive, and Maka began developing the
chief’s aspects stimulated by the mental acceptance that they
would not again find their chief. She then “took” the
other two, and they began to wander, picking up other isolated
people from various tribes until they had the current eight.
Neither Maka nor Vulture liked the skillful interrogation, although
the individual cover stories seemed to stand up. The mute Silent
Woman was not considered all that odd; this sort of mental
withdrawal was relatively common, particularly among individuals of
a tribe separated from it and their children for great lengths of
time. It was attributed to being alone against an onslaught of
demons; no single person was strong enough to ward them off for
long.
Vulture glanced uneasily at Silent Woman, who continued to stare
at the visitor and show no other expression. What was going through
the strange woman’s mind when she saw someone rather ugly and
tattooed in a way that had to bring back memories of her old self?
But Vulture also continued to check Maka for a signal. Here was a
gift from the gods—a truth-bearer alone and close to one of
the holy places, the sort of place Vulture would love to get a look
at. She suspected that Maka believed the gift too good to be true;
that this might be some sort of trap. Vulture hoped her suspicion
was true. The other alternative was that Manka Warlock had gone so
native that she could not bring herself to order a mortal sin and
ultimate heresy. That could be a real problem, since in this form,
Vulture was committed to obedience and service, yet because it was
not a mindprint, she also was more aware than the others of their
true nature and mission and was thus more critical of their current
situation.
“Good spirits guide truth-bearer to Maka tribe,” the
truth-bearer was saying. She took out her magic sack, which was wet
and muddied but appeared dry inside, and brought out a handful of
what looked like volcanic sand and ground leaves. “No danger
here,” she said. “Truth-bearer protect Maka tribe.
Bring wonder of gods.” Without waiting, the priestess
sprinkled the material in her hand slowly in the small fire. Smoke
billowed forth, which startled them all at first, but which they
could not avoid breathing in the closeness of the cave. It was
neither acrid nor unpleasant; indeed, breathing it in brought a
sudden rush of great pleasure, and after the first inhalation, they
settled down and wanted only to breathe in more. All pain was gone,
all cares, all thought—they felt as normal as before, but
knew the joy of the gods.
They rose out of their bodies, and their souls stood upon the
face of the Earth-Mother and became aware of all the spirits and
demons of the Testing Place. The Earth-Mother was below them,
holding them with mystical bonds that were beautiful and erotic to
the touch, and above them the Great God’s hand could be dimly
seen, wearing a great and mystical ring with the symbol of
life—the bird in the tree. Through Her light of glory, and
only dimly perceived, was Her smaller firebearer Topakana,
and the lesser gods of heaven, whom the People called stars,
looking down on them. It was so wondrous, so exactly like the
teachings, so exactly as it should be.
And then the Earth-Mother spoke, a gentle whisper that sent
chills of ecstasy through them all.
“We show Maka tribe this because tribe fall to doubt
demons,” she said. “Maka tribe not believe truth. Maka
tribe not worship us.” No, no. Earth-Mother! Maka tribe believe. Maka tribe good,
holy!
“Now you see truth. All but this be false. All else be
demon thought. Throw demon thought from soul. Clean soul. Be born
as new baby. Grow as new tribe, no demon thought, no doubt, only
truth. Only then be all with us.” Oh, we will, we will!
The vision faded, but not the pleasant feeling and the wonderful
glow of the experience. Truth was Matriyeh; there was nothing else.
Truth was touching the Earth-Mother and the spirits at all times
and taking the tests of life. All else was false, lies from clever
demons seeking to make the strong fail. There, in the dark, damp
cave, as the storm died down and darkness fell, they believed.
Of them all, only Silent Woman had not seen the visions nor
heard the talk. She had heard talk, but it was the chatter of the
tattooed stranger and meant nothing to her. The smoke had made her
feel good, though, and she did not question what had happened,
although she was not aware of what the others believed they saw and
experienced.
The truth-bearer could not stay; she had to answer the summons
of the spirits and they understood, but they allowed themselves to
be blessed at dawn and then watched her depart. They did not
follow; that area was holy ground, forbidden. But each received a
small amount of the magic sand for their pouches, with instructions
to smoke, inhale, or eat it if they ever found themselves beset by
doubts or their way invaded by demon thoughts. They were told what
to chant as they took it, since such chanting would reinforce the
truth and drive away the demons and close their ears to demon
speech.
The change in the tribe was immediate. They no longer spoke of
strange things and all seemed to have lost their drive to journey
someplace. They still had their memories, but they no longer
believed them; here, on Matriyeh, which was the only place there
was other than heaven, such strange and bizarre concepts could only
have come from the minds of demons. They had been failing the
life-tests, but now the Earth-Mother had shown mercy upon them and
corrected their descent into demonic heresy. But if they were no
longer on a journey or quest, then they had to find a territory in
which to live, and that meant building their strength, creating a
true tribe that could hold its own.
Now, instead of avoiding other tribes, they began to seek them
out, but silently and in stealth. Then, when they could, sometimes
with great daring, they would take the wife-sister of another tribe
and bring her to Maka where the new one would be tied down with
vines and taken in the rite of transfer. Within a week they were
twelve, and within three they were twenty strong. Some of the
newcomers were pregnant, and by now it was clear that of the
original tribe all save Uraa were pregnant, too.
It had been so easy to simply let the Matriyehan personality
take over, so exhilarating to build the tribe that little of the
magic sand had been used, save by Uraa, who felt somehow cursed
because she alone was not with child and therefore not fully
contributing. There were many more wife-sisters for Maka to take
now, and her favors to Uraa had almost ceased, which was another
reason for her to use the magic sand.
Silent Woman, on the other hand, was very confused. The slight
bulge in her belly filled her with enormous joy and excitement, but
she also knew something was wrong. The chiefs of the heaven-ship
village had not sent them down here for this, and watching Uraa
with the magic sand, she seemed to grasp that the sand was at the
heart of what was going wrong. She had no power to make it right,
but Uraa did. Among all the others, there was something very
different about Uraa, something she sensed but could not
define.
She knew, however, that there were poisons, like the old
chief’s firewater back in the river village, that could do
strange things to people, and there were certainly machines that
could do the same. She loved these women, even strange Uraa, and it
was almost a duty to her to protect them if they could not protect
themselves. Such a thing would not go against Maka’s wishes,
for Maka wasn’t using the magic sand anyway.
It was very simple to pick up some sand the next time they were
near a volcanic area and put it in her pouch unobserved, then add a
pinch here and there of leaves to make it look just right. And
then, in the dead of night, it was almost a thrill to remove what
was left of the magic sand from Uraa’s pouch and scatter it
in the forest and replace it with her mixture. Uraa would be angry
the next time she used it, but Silent Woman was experienced enough
to know that she would be the last to be suspected, and that Maka
would find it funny. They had all contributed some to Uraa out of
sisterly sympathy and respect for her as a warrior, but they would
part with no more. It was a gift from the gods, after all.
The first time Uraa took some of the ersatz magic sand out of
her pouch and popped it into her mouth, she immediately spit it
out, gasping and choking, and headed for water. She was very angry,
but because of her lowered status within the tribe there was
nothing she could do about it.
It took another two weeks for the effects to completely wear
off, and even then it was in Uraa’s dreams that the
demon-thoughts came and would not be denied, no matter how she
tried. Again and again, she could see the face of the demon,
leering, grinning at her from in back of some dark shield, laughing
as he made her inhuman and horrible and
monstrous . . .
And, one night, in the middle of the late watch, Vulture
suddenly sat up, wide awake, and said the name of the demon.
“Clayben,” she whispered.
Because Vulture was not mindprinted but had become Uraa through
a process even she could not understand, the shock of
Clayben’s image had jolted her mostly free of the hold the
truth-bearer’s drug had on her mind. It took many nights of
thinking and concentrating to bring her submerged memories out and
put them all together.
The first problem Vulture had to consider was whether the
truth-bearer had really suspected them or had simply happened on
them by accident as she’d claimed. It had to be the
latter; they would have known if anyone had been spying on them all
this time.
All this time . . . How much time? Midi and
Suni were farthest along in their pregnancies, so they had probably
gotten pregnant while still aboard ship. They looked to be in their
seventh month now; Taeg, Mari, and Aesa looked to be a month behind,
give or take, while Silent Woman was just beginning to show,
reflecting her later start.
And suddenly it was clear what had triggered the
truth-bearer’s suspicions. None of them had stretch marks
save Uraa who had no children with her. That’s twice now
pregnancy has complicated a mission, she thought sourly, although
this time it was unavoidable. If they were to be down for a very
long period of time then it was necessary. Any wife-sister would
wonder at a tribe that had no children and no sign that it had ever
had any. Well, since they hadn’t had a program to work from,
they’d had to write one from Uraa’s genetic code. Even
the greatest of computers made mistakes. Because Vulture was by
nature sterile, fertility had been interpolated—and
wrongly.
She wondered, though, about the magic sand. Truth-bearers had
appeared in the tribe she’d joined on her reconnaissance and
no such drug had been used that she was aware of. Insurance? A new
tool for keeping the People on the straight and narrow? Was the
static system not quite as static as it was supposed to be? Or was
Master System playing the long odds? It knew they had transmitters;
such a campaign would help the faithful and reinforce the system
even if none of the rebels came here as Matriyehans; however, it
might just catch anybody who did—and it had.
The problem was rescuing the rest of them from the drug’s
influence. They already had a larger group than was
manageable—twenty-six now—and Maka was insatiable about
gaining more. The upward limit was around a hundred, but the
average tribe was usually fifty or sixty. Maka was in fact building
her strength while searching for another smaller tribe, one that
could be conquered and absorbed to give her real power while also
gaining that smaller tribe’s territory. That meant a war and
a war was not in their best interest. They had already lost three
members—fortunately, none of the pirates—as
Maka’s greater strength made her seek bigger and more
dangerous game, and the chief seemed willing to take more risks and
even risk herself needlessly to demonstrate her bravery and right
to leadership. A war might well cause the deaths of Maka and the
other eight, and, just as bad, they might lose and the survivors be
absorbed into the other tribe.
When Vulture had become part of Uraa’s tribe, it had been
incredibly hard to exert free will, to break away when the time was
right, to get back to the fighter and to Thunder. How to
wrench the others back to their senses again? And Maka—could
she be brought around, or would she have to die? Vulture wondered
if she could force herself against all the instincts of a
Matriyehan to take and become Maka. She didn’t want to do it,
not only for those reasons but also because it would reduce their
number by one and a key one at that. Still, it would be only months
until Vulture had to feed once more—or begin to die. It was a
two-year cycle that could not be changed, much as she hated the
idea. It was the onset, the slight beginnings, of that need which
helped Vulture to regain almost complete mastery over the Uraa
personality.
And with that came the realization that Maka tribe wasn’t
going to roam from this territory, and was still within a
week’s walk of that lava cave area where the problem had
started. She knew this tribe well; she most certainly could find it
again if she was not taken by another tribe. The question was,
could she find that forbidden holy place where truth-bearers might
come for whatever it was they got in such places? Could she stand
being alone and eating at what might be starvation levels until one
of them showed up?
Curiously, of all the tribe, it was Silent Woman who seemed to
sense the change in Uraa, the return of Vulture, and her torment.
Vulture was shocked to realize this, and even more shocked when she
realized that only Silent Woman could have brought her out. She had
checked all the others and there was no glimmer of their old selves
there. Now at last she understood. By the very nature of her trauma
Silent Woman had been immune. That was easy to understand from the
beginning. The fact that she had realized that something was wrong
and picked the only one capable of overcoming it was astonishing.
Just how much did go on in that mind?
Vulture only hoped Silent Woman would understand that if Uraa
vanished it was not desertion, but hope.
During the next several days Vulture prepared, weaving a net out
of the strong vines that were the staple of this culture’s
primitive technology then waiting until they camped near a
bis grove. The bis fruit grew very high in its
trees and had a hard, smooth shell, but inside were seeds and a
pulpy yellow mass that was extremely filling. So long as the shell
was not cracked they traveled well and were one of the few food
staples that could be harvested and carried for several days by
tribes. That harvesting wasn’t easy, though; bis on
the ground were already overripe and spoiled. The only way to get
them was to climb a smooth-barked ten-meter-tall tree and select
only the ones that were ripe. This was not only very dangerous in
its own right but the harvesters were effectively alone and
defenseless and were sometimes targeted by the leathery-winged
misum, which were all teeth and tentacles.
Harvesting bis, however, allowed Vulture to get her
bearings and also to survey the land. She intended to take no more
bis fruit than she had harvested herself, but she knew she
had to move quickly. This small valley between two volcanic ranges
was the home of Sosa tribe, with about thirty-five adults and
fifteen children. Sosa knew that Maka tribe was in its territory
but was large enough that so far there hadn’t been a
confrontation. Now Maka was being faced with a possible showdown as
Sosa tribe searched for them. Maka would have preferred at least
equal numbers, and Vulture felt that she would avoid the fight as
long as she could but she saw no advantage to moving on. Vulture
very much wanted to act before such a battle took place. The idea
of Maka losing her male attributes and the tribe becoming absorbed
into Sosa tribe was only slightly more daunting than the idea of
having to deal with the mission and a tribe of seventy.
It was still difficult to leave. The darkness itself was
threatening on this world, and safety lay only in numbers, but the
sudden, overpowering feeling of loneliness, of being somehow
incomplete and empty, was just as bad. She had picked her route for
maximum safety and did not intend to go far. The fact was, Vulture
wasn’t sure what would happen if she were snared by a
strangler vine or attacked by some of the animals that might prowl
at night. Could she eat the animal and, if so, would she then no
longer have human reasoning, or could she be digested by the
strangler plants and die? Falling into some pit or mud hole would
be just as bad. It was not until Matriyeh that she had ever had a
sense of her own possible mortality.
Early the next day she began the climb over the mountains. It
was treacherous going, the landscape hostile enough that it had
kept the valley pretty well isolated from other marauding tribes.
Hot fumeroles hissed at her, spewing foul gases, and there was the
strong stench of sulfur and occasional hot spots in the rocks. A
steady rain made much of the lava field slippery and dangerous. She
was relieved to finally make it to older rock, and she could see a
small pass ahead, perhaps another two or three hundred meters up
the mountainside. She stopped for a moment and sat, trying to
muster enough strength to make it to the top.
The lava snake was not in the ideal position but when prey
stopped, it moved fast. Most of the time it lived in its lava tube,
head pointed so that only the eyes, set in the skull then but
capable of protruding on stalks when needed, looked out.
Lava snakes could live on rock, particularly high-sulfur rock,
but they preferred supplementing their diet with living meat. At
more than ten meters long, and all mouth at one end, they could
anchor themselves in their dens and shoot out straight ahead with
enough speed to snare an unwary misum and sometimes an
unwary person as well. There had been a few the tribe had faced
when crossing into the valley. They had been lucky because
they’d come down between two dens; the lava snakes had
attacked at about the same time and it had been quick reflexes that
saved them, causing the two snakes to go after each other
instead.
Vulture heard it and rolled away just in time. The great jaws
snapped shut less than a meter from her. There was no time to
prepare weapons, and none of the weapons she had would be much use
singly against such a beast. She rolled, came up on her feet, spear
ready, all supplies tossed away, and quickly eyed an area about ten
meters away that was out of range of the snake if it kept itself
anchored but which ended in a sheer drop. The snakes were
single-minded eating machines and she depended on that. She’d
probably kill the monster if it ate her, but that wouldn’t do
her much good.
The field became suddenly alive with great, angry hisses and
roars, and several more snakes revealed themselves but did not
emerge from their lairs. Anchored, the snakes could lunge at an
incredible speed, but if forced to move freely and crawl they were
slow and ponderous. She could outrun one, but it would do little
good if she just ran into the jaws of another. The easiest way to
the top was past the first creature’s lair, and now it was
her task to empty it or die.
She stood almost on the edge of the precipice and held her spear
high in defiance. “Ho! Snake! Come! Uraa be snake dinner!
Easy meat! Come!”
The snake roared in anger and began to emerge from its hole. Its
back end was quite small, almost tentaclelike, good for gripping,
but useless now that it was free of the lair and slowly coming
toward her. The rock actually hissed as the beast traveled, thanks
to a secretion it left as it moved.
She was suddenly afraid she had miscalculated, and fear of death
was not something she was used to. The great Vulture, the creature
that could become anyone and could fool even Master System, was,
here, no different from the most ordinary of Matriyehan women.
The snake approached but stopped five meters short, one eye
stalk on the spear. Clearly this one was an experienced hunter.
Vulture saw the small, tentaclelike rear gyrating back and forth,
trying to find something to grip. If it did, she was dead meat, so
she had to force the issue.
With a fierce, steady scream she ran straight for the head of
the snake, spear ready. The action confused the snake, which did
nothing for a moment, and she let the spear go with full force. It
struck the head area and sank in a bit; a superficial wound, but
painful. The snake roared in fury and lunged at full speed at
Vulture, who jumped to her left and rolled flat. The snake in its
fury had forgotten it didn’t yet have an anchor, and it went
straight on past her and over the edge of the cliff. Its hind end,
however, managed to catch a jagged edge of a lava outcrop, and it
hung there for a moment, then slowly tried pulling itself back
up.
Vulture wasn’t going to give it a chance. She ran straight
past the now-empty lair and made the top before she dared stop and
look back.
The great snake was indeed pulling itself back up, but its
relative helplessness had not gone unnoticed by its kin, who were
converging on the spot where the great head was oozing back onto
solid ground. She decided to let them fight it out.
The exhilaration of surviving the encounter quickly gave way to
concern. What am I celebrating? she asked herself.
That I’m smarter than a damned snake? Of more
concern now was that she had no reserve food supply, no spear, and
not much else except a sharp knife-stone, the blow gun, and a
supply of dart thorns. It was a long and dangerous trek down the
other side, and there were more snakes and other dangers. She would
be easy prey should a misum pass by and get curious.
Worse, she would have to cross dozens of tribal territories,
perhaps more, to reach the point where she wanted to be, and she
would be in no condition to resist warriors if one of those tribes
found and then adopted her.
It was her worst nightmare. The mission was in shambles before
it even had a chance to begin, and she was alone and relatively
defenseless on the surface of the cruel planet Matriyeh.
AT THE END OF NINE AND A HALF WEEKS, MANKA Warlock felt as if
she’d done as much as she could.
To properly complete the group’s training she needed more
than the poor simulations that Star Eagle had managed to conjure
up, she needed to be in the field where she would be no more
experienced than the rest of them. There was no practical way,
however, to take everyone down to the surface for a few days and
bring them back; each time someone was inserted into the world or
withdrawn from it, they ran the risk of detection no matter what
the safeguards and timing. Silent Woman’s very presence had
suggested one thing to her, though, which she carried out and
imposed during the last two weeks. She worked out a series of codes
involving finger snaps and clicks made with the mouth that could
convey basic information, and then imposed a rule of absolute
silence. Everything was by gesture and sign, with even the audibles
used only when necessary. It was difficult at the start for all
except Silent Woman, but after two weeks they hardly needed speech
to function efficiently.
It was Vulture finally who emerged from isolation. “We are
as ready as we can be,” she told Hawks. “I’m
still a bit nervous about the Indrus women, who are tough
enough but perhaps still too civilized, and the two from
Espiritu Luzon, who have done well but who I’m not
sure I want to depend on in a crisis and may have to. But we can go
no further here.”
Hawks nodded. “All right, then. Are you really sure you
need so many of us, though? Even at this stage it looks like we are
committing a large number to unknown risk for no purpose except
covering you.”
“I need covering,” she assured him. “We all
do. In the end, this caper might be as intricate as
Janipur’s. The only way to know is to go in and find out. Do
we have the duplicate ring?”
Hawks nodded. “It’s the same size, shape, weight,
and general composition as the Janipur ring, and we have placed on
its face the consistent design taken from your mindprinted memories
of the carvings on the truth-bearer’s charms and staff.
It’s to scale and in the same style, but there is no way to
know for certain if it’s able to fool anyone until the two
are physically compared. We’ve made a housing for it inside a
bone charm so it looks like a single piece. We’ll show you
how to get it apart. Don’t lose it, or you’re going to
have to come all the way back for a new one.”
“I’ll take good care of it. Anything else you want
to say to them before we go ahead with the mindprinting?”
“We’ll cover the details when it’s done. Good
luck.”
“We’ll need it,” Vulture responded.
They stood there in silence, already looking the part of a
savage band. All now had colored dye markings in their brands
indicating the pecking order; Silent Woman wore the marks of
firebearer. The most marked change was an expected one; Warlock had
developed some woolly facial and body hair, and while her body was
still female in shape there was a definite difference even in how
she moved or carried herself. When she said, “We are ready.
Let’s get it over with,” her voice was still
Warlock’s, Caribe accent and all, but a half octave lower and
definitely male.
Only Warlock and Vulture did not plainly show that they were
nervous, even a little scared.
Star Eagle would handle the process automatically, but it was
decided that China would give the basic briefing. Although Clayben
had been the major human participant in creating the programs, it
was thought best to leave him out of the actual performance of the
printing process for political reasons.
“Basically, we took the information and experience of
Uraa’s life and analyzed it,” China told them.
“You will all receive the same basic print, minus some of the
more personal items that would have no bearing on you down there.
We don’t know what might trigger the activation of the
defenses, but if it is keyed to alienness, then just hearing a
non-Matriyehan tongue would be enough and we want no slips, but we
also want you to have full memories and knowledge. As a result, we
have instituted a filter of sorts. The Matriyehan tongue is simple
and not geared to the creation of new words or concepts, but it is
adequate even if you might have to use approximations and fifteen
words to describe one thing. The filter will simply not permit you
to vocalize anything except the native tongue. It will be your
primary language. You will think in it and it will take effort to
access another, even internally, and impossible vocally. You will,
however, still understand all the languages you know now, so you
would still understand me. Language shapes a culture more than
anything else. Master System knows this, which is why this was
imposed. The more you relax, don’t fight, and use this
language exclusively, the more native you will become. The terms
are holographically linked. When you hear
‘daka’ for example, you will instantly think
of the huge lava snakes.”
The language was in fact compact, but relatively versatile.
There were no ambiguities allowed, and every term had just one
meaning; most words, like the names, were no more than two
syllables. The native name for the world, mystical and important
because it contained three syllables, was pronounced
“Mah-treh-yeh.”
“You will respond only to the names we give you,”
China continued. “That is also for security. People’s
names are also legitimate words and might be descriptives of
personalities, but there don’t seem to be any hard and fast
rules, so we tried to keep it close if we could. Maka means
‘high tree,’ for example, so we can use that for you,
Manka. Similarly, Mari means ‘pretty dirt.’ Not a great
name but close to Maria. Suni is ‘Gray Rock,’ Midi is a
kind of plant, Taeg, which is close, is—sorry—a kind of
bug, and we chose Euno for Silent Woman because it means
‘quiet hand.’ Lalla, your name is unpronounceable in
Matriyehan, so we selected Aesa, which means ‘strong
branch.’ ”
She paused a moment, then continued. “We also must take a
number of security precautions considering the close call on
Janipur. You won’t have laser pistols and you’ll be
practically defenseless against something like a Val. We doubt one
is there now, but if anything goes wrong, you can be sure one will
show up faster than we could. Now, listen well. Any attempt to
probe your mind, hypno you, or in any way gain information about us
will trigger an automatic dormant program in your mind. It will
block off any knowledge, any memories, not Matriyehan. For all
intents and purposes, it will erase anything not in the programming
we are about to give you. Only we know the code that will erase the
so-called worm program instead of triggering it. Only the machine
that creates it can remove it. It’s an idea we took from the
SPF, and we’ll be using it from this point on in the field.
If you get separated from the group for any reason, try to retrace
the route to the fighter. It will be there unless it is discovered
and destroyed by the enemy. Just give your name. It will recognize
you and then notify us to set up transmission and reception. If you
return for any reason and it is not there, use the map references
that will be imprinted in your mind to go to the alternate points
where pickup might be made in order. That’s all there is,
except, good fortune guide you all.”
Only Vulture did not need the mindprobe; she already had an
identity and experience below, and had been designed to fool and be
impervious to any of the standard devices. This also made her
valuable in one other respect: she alone would not be bound by the
limitations of the program.
Unlike transmutation, the mindprobe process was neither quick
nor without some difficulty, and it took several hours to process
them all.
Maria Santiago, like the others, awoke with a headache and
slight dizziness that took awhile to go away. She
felt—strange. Strange memories and stranger landscapes filled
her mind, and she felt oddly cramped, closed in, and threatened by
the room. In the back of her mind she knew who she was, who the
others were, where they were and why, but it seemed suddenly
remote, even alien, and hard to grasp all the complexities of it.
She tried not to think of those things; thinking of them confused
her and frightened her still more. There was only the tribe, only
the People, her wife-sisters and their chief. Security lay only in
the tribe, and so long as she was one with them she had nothing to
fear.
Maka led them down to the place where they would return to open
and the People, and they followed, eager to be away. Uraa went
first, to scout the way, then the rest followed with Maka last.
They were transferred first to Lightning, with Raven
piloting, and made the short jump from no-space to the carefully
precalculated angle and orbit that would bring them in at the
“dead” spot, where the ship could attain geostationary
orbit long enough for them to transmit down to the fighter without
being picked up by the monitors.
One by one, they stepped out on the surface of Matriyeh and
formed up. They carried the crude stone-tipped spears, and stone
axes and blow guns hung from their vine belts.
Although they all had memory-pictures of the Earth-Mother, they
all knew that, except for Uraa, they were seeing it for the first
time. The heat was great, the humidity almost as bad, and the air
had the fault smell of sulfur and sulfuric compounds that took some
getting used to.
The landscape was rough, barren of life, and filled with
grotesque rocky forms; black lava frozen in place like a great wave
locked forever in stone, and beyond, a burnt wasteland of reds and
oranges and gray ash like thick sand. The place had great beauty to
it, but it was dead and threatening, as well, and no place for
people to live. The sky above was thick with clouds swirling in
demonic dances, and here and there in the distance thin fingers of
lightning lashed out and struck far off, bringing occasional
distant explosions to their ears.
Maka, too, was affected for a moment by all this, but she knew
she had the responsibility and that the day was more than half gone.
She nodded to Uraa, the scout, and she turned and led them down
from the burnt and blackened side of the great volcano, its cone
invisible in the clouds, and finally on to the gray sands. They set
off at a run, the only sounds those of distant thunder and the
sharp breathing of the others. They ran for more than an hour
without a break, until they were within sight of the edge of the
ash field and the first, green growth, which began abruptly. Now
they slowed, but still Maka kept them to silent speech.
The jungle floor was quite dark and filled with vegetation; the
great fronds far above captured most of the light and rain, but
enough trickled down to the floor or was stored as excess in the
great trees to support a variety of lower plant life—mostly
vines and creepers and spindly bushes with sharp, thorny leaves,
and various mosses, algae, and fungi. The jungle also teemed with
insects of all types, but there was no sign of birds or animals.
They reached a swift-flowing, shallow river, in the center of which
rough water rolled about protruding rocks. Uraa took them down one
side of the muddy bank for almost a kilometer until they came to a
bend in the river where the water flowed more quietly through
transitory islands of silt. There they were permitted to kneel in
the mud and drink, and then Uraa spoke, breaking the silence.
“Maka tribe spear fish in river,” she said.
“Else eat bugs. Uraa show,” She picked up her spear,
examined it, then walked very slowly into the water at a quiet
point and out near one of the mud spits. As they watched, she stood
there, absolutely motionless, spear ready, eyes only on the water.
She remained there in hip-deep water, like a statue, for what
seemed like forever, but then, suddenly became a blur of motion,
bringing the spear down swiftly and forcefully, plunging it all the
way down, twisting, then lifting it up with both hands. On the end,
neatly speared but still wriggling, was a large fish. She waded
back to them, looking very satisfied, as indeed she was. Her
biggest concern with this show was that there would either be no
fish in the area or that she would miss.
The creature was certainly ugly, with a wide mouth, enormous
feelers all around it, smooth purple-and-white skin rather than
scales, and two large fins that seemed almost like protoarms.
Silent Woman suddenly grinned, nodded, and waded out into the
river. It took her even less time than it had taken Vulture, and it
was clear that it wasn’t the first time she’d done this
sort of thing.
Now it was the others’ turn to try.
They didn’t do nearly so well, although both Uraa and
Silent Woman tried to show them how. Absolute stillness was
required in this water, and the position in the water was also
critical. These fish did not so much swim as walk along the bottom
rooting through the mud, but no matter how muddy the water became
they gave off small, telltale bubbles as they cleared themselves of
river-bottom debris. Ultimately, Suni and Midi each caught one,
after several failures, but the rest came up empty. Uraa and Silent
Woman made up for it as darkness began to creep onto the
surface.
The fish were gutted and expertly skewered by Uraa and Silent
Woman. It might have been possible to gather enough dead wood from
the nearby forest floor to make fire, but it was forbidden. This
was not uninhabited territory. No place that could provide food
with little physical danger, even for amateurs and novices like
them, would be unclaimed.
It was very difficult for some of them to face eating the bloody
meat raw, and Maria and both of the Indrus women looked
distinctly nauseated, but they choked it down all the same. Manka
Warlock didn’t like it but ate her share, and Midi and Taeg
had less problems. Uraa and Silent Woman ate with unreserved
relish.
“Camp here to Great God’s light,” Maka told
them. “Uraa know this place?”
Vulture nodded. “If other not here, will not come in dark.
This place of big tribe. Many more than Maka tribe. Must go far
next light. No bad things near. Safe camp to light.”
Demon-things prowled the darkness looking for lives and souls;
Matriyehans moved in darkness only when forced to do so.
Tonight there would be little need for a guard; later on there
would be, and it was understood that those who didn’t pull
their weight in food gathering by day would not sleep much by
night. For now, until they were fully blooded and well experienced
in living here and had learned the practical means of survival,
allowances would be made.
They cleared a dry but protected area near the river and lay
down close together to sleep. There would be better, less austere
camps later, when they had made what was necessary, but for now a
spartan camp was all they could manage. Highly uncomfortable, and
with the tension creating somewhat sour stomachs, sleep was not
easy to come by. So far, though, it hadn’t been as bad as
they had feared it might be, but there were memories from the
mindprinter of harsher things and harder places on this world and
they had a long distance to travel, much of it in areas that even
Vulture had never seen or heard about.
Isaac Clayben frowned. He’d called Hawks and Cloud Dancer
to his lab, and China was already there. The blind woman looked
slightly shaken.
“I’ve been analyzing these mindprinter recordings of
the group we sent down,” he told them, “using Star
Eagle’s capabilities and some proprietary programs I
developed from analyzing what Master System did with the records it
took from all of us periodically. No major surprises, although I
don’t think anyone would ever like to sample Warlock’s
sadomasochistic fantasies, which are a bit hard to take even in
data form. Although she’s probably the one best able to keep
them alive and maintain success, I feel sorry for the other poor
women down there whenever she gets in the mood for sex, which I
think will be often. No surprises, that is, until I get to Silent
Woman. We took her print routinely on Melchior, and I vaguely
remember being given a report that the results were highly unusual,
but there were so many other things to occupy me that she
didn’t rate a very high priority. The data was simply
overridden by shock and psychosis, looped back over and over, so it
was just meaningless garbage. China tried to read it with the
printer and almost went mad herself.”
“An endless loop, over and over,” she said weakly.
“Incredible horror and sadness, the same terrible images
again and again, and through it all a chilling scream of her soul.
I know they’re your people, but to me, those medicine men set
a new standard of human cruelty. I never imagined that such as they
existed. It wasn’t just a necessity—they
enjoyed it. They forced her to
watch . . . ” She trembled and choked up
for a moment. “To watch . . . the ritual
disemboweling of her baby while it was still alive. To be held
close, your face pushed into your baby’s
wounds . . . I was kept intellectually
distant, a watcher in her mind, and still I will have nightmares
forever.”
Cloud Dancer shivered, as well, and even Hawks felt the horror.
“They are not our people,” he said defensively.
“The same race, yes, but they are not our people. They are of
a different nation, and religion, although this does not sound like
Illinois work, either. It smacks of demon worship in the way it was
carried out, although it was still policy.”
China’s head snapped up. “Policy? Whose?”
“The child was deformed—”
“The child was not deformed! It was a perfect
baby girl!”
There was shocked silence at that, and Cloud Dancer gripped
Hawks’ hand and squeezed it hard. Hawks thought of the fat
pig of an Illinois pirate chief telling him that story, knowing it
made perfect sense and had the full ring of truth to it and thus
saved his miserable life.
“There is more to this, then, than cultural beliefs and
practices. Can you get beyond it? Can you filter it out?”
“What do you think we’ve been trying to do? It
isn’t easy with a trauma of this magnitude,” Clayben
responded, “and I’m no psychiatrist.
Thunder’s computers are good, but they aren’t
specialized for this sort of thing. You know how many
cross-referenced memory bytes there are in the average
forty-year-old brain? Quadrillions. The human brain is an
incredible natural indexing system we can only approximate in Star
Eagles and Vals and the rest. The combinations create both data
flows and holographic images. What we have here is basically a
self-imposed worm program. I know she didn’t know it or think
of it that way, but that’s what it is. The trauma was so
great that she shut off access to everything preceding a period of
perhaps a couple of weeks after they cut out her tongue. Any
attempt to access anything prior to that runs into the trauma loop
and there is instant recoil. After a while it’s like electric
shock conditioning. You just don’t go there any
more.”
“The language that she has is her own,” China
explained. “It was created in her mind after the trauma. The
very concept of language is in the blocked-off regions.
She thinks in ideographs, much like a deaf-mute would. She simply
doesn’t have a self-image; it must be supplied by those
around her. Even her dreams are mundane things about what she did
the day before. She does, however, retain many basic skills that
indicate that she once led something of a wilderness life. It is
incredible that she survives at all, given the strength of the
trauma. Suicide or catatonia would be more likely. What it really
comes down to is that she is a very strong person—perhaps the
strongest among us.”
“The thing is, we’ve suddenly given her cause for
developing a totally new self-image. She cannot totally escape the
old one—she is still the prisoner of her past in
that—but we gave her one hell of a body and good looks. In
fact, at Vulture’s urging we strongly emphasized the female
sexual attributes and added some additional nerve links to increase
the intensity of feeling there. He was afraid of her psychosis
coming out very strongly and violently in a setting more like she
was used to and, with her wilderness skills, taking command from
Warlock. Not knowing what we were dealing with, we went along. I
think we struck the right balance, anyway. Warlock, of course, had
intercourse with her in order to establish Matriyehan chemical
bonding, and I suspect that will be sufficient to control her. But
she is still a strong and violent personality, which of course, we
need down there. If she is redeveloping a whole new internal
personal image, that’s probably fine, but we must know more
about her past. If the violence and cruelty down below begin to
trigger the old traumas—we don’t know what she might
become.”
“It seems to me you’re a little late thinking of
this,” Cloud Dancer noted acidly.
“Huh? What?”
“Suppose you discover that she might become a raging
homicidal maniac who can be stopped only by death? How could we
warn them? What could we do about it?”
They had been on Matriyeh for seven weeks, and if their harsh
existence wasn’t getting any easier, at least it was becoming
more routine. They were always busy, hunting for food and tools,
and all the while moving slowly and cautiously toward their goal.
They avoided the many dangers by being ever alert, surviving by
thinking only of the moment at hand. There were snakes large enough
to swallow people, and leathery-winged beasts with sharp teeth that
could dive at any moment on unsuspecting prey; there were vines
that could trip the unwary, and twists and turns in the ground that
might break an ankle.
And even when at rest they were always tense, listening for
potential dangers. The only real pleasure came late at night or
just before dawn, for the lucky one favored by Maka’s
attentions. The coupling was animalistic—raw lust and
gratification—but the tensions built up to the point where
they all craved relief.
And because only Maka could give this pleasure, all behavior was
aimed toward pleasing Maka, serving Maka, obeying Maka. If
they’d had the opportunity and the motivation to think about
it, they all would have been shocked at how quickly the veneer of
civilization and their own diverse cultural standards had been
stripped away. They all were killers, bound to each other and their
leader—literally no one or nothing else counted.
At dawn, they preened one another, washed themselves if some
water was available, finished off anything left to eat from the
night before, and the cycle started all over again.
Manka Warlock was comfortable with her role, although the
overall responsibility for them all was a heavy burden.
At the start, when she’d first studied the system, she had
been upset that a male figure dominated packs of women, but
she’d come to realize the logic in it. It was, after all,
democratic; any Matriyehan had the potential to be chief, if they
had the will and the personality to do so and a vacancy came their
way, and only one male figure was biologically necessary in the
system. She often wondered, though, how many women a chief could
serve in a day. Some of the tribes here were a hundred or more
strong.
Warlock was also pleased if somewhat surprised that as yet they
had not suffered any serious casualties: some sprains, a number of
bruises, and a number of near-serious incidents, but nothing really
severe. She knew, though, that the luck wouldn’t last forever
even though they were skilled at primitive living. They were
getting so proficient at hunting the tuka, an animal
resembling a green-haired wild boar but with a long snout,
razor-sharp teeth, long tusks, and the temper of a shrew, that when
they found one, it seldom escaped. Both Suni and Mari had been
slightly gored by one when they first tried to catch one, and
Silent Woman still had teeth marks on her right arm, but they
hadn’t been crippling injuries. Unless it received a mortal
blow or a major compound fracture, the Matriyehan body had a
tremendous capacity for self-repair equaled only by its enormous
toleration for pain. They did, of course, have the knowledge to set
simple fractures if necessary and use certain jungle herbs and
leaves as medicines. That had been included in the program.
But for the landmark-based maps in their heads, they would have
had no idea how far they had traveled, and even that was an
approximate measure. The Matriyehan language had only the concepts
of short and far, and the definition of far translated out as
“horizon.” Nor was there any long-term sense of time;
the day was measured by light and shadow because it was necessary
to know where you stood compared to what was left to do; no other
time was relevant. Even now it was impossible for them to tell how
long they had been living this life, and every day it seemed more
and more their only reality, that existence before some kind of
wild dream or vague religious view of heaven.
Vulture, however, could tell that they were averaging less than
six kilometers a day, counting the amount of time they would spend
having to find bearings when lost and the necessary diversions for
hunting and gathering, which almost always took them in the wrong
direction. This meant that they had covered, at most, a quarter of
the distance. The life and the absolute requirements that her form
imitate a Matriyehan exactly were also taking their toll, more, in
fact, than they had the first time. She was as chemically bound and
devoted to Maka as the rest, and if Maka suddenly proclaimed that
they would build the tribe, remain, and forget the mission, it
would have been instantly accepted. That devotion, and the
collective mind-set of the tribe, had almost trapped Vulture here
the last time.
Already Maka had fallen prey to one of the potential traps in
the Uraa-based program and the language. She had begun first to
refer to, then to pray to the various spirits and demons of the
world. These had been left in the programming because to edit them
out would have marked them as somehow different and could have
betrayed them; now the theology was taking on a shadowy reality of
its own.
About nine weeks out, they had taken shelter in a lushly
overgrown lava tube against one of the incredibly frequent and very
violent storms that swept the world. They had caught a
tuka early and had drunk its blood for strength, and so
were well prepared to sit out the rest of the day. Often they had
seen, but managed to avoid being seen by, other tribes, although
sometimes that had meant hiding in deep water using the blow guns
to breathe or covering themselves in mud and lying very still. In
spite of the complications that would result, Maka would have been
impossible to stop from taking a smaller group than they, but these
were all much larger—which, at least, made them easier to
detect.
In the cave, considering the storm, they had risked a small fire
to cook the meat, a rare luxury in this life. Fires caused smoke,
of course, but in that sort of storm it was a reasonable risk.
But a lone figure did approach through the roar of the storm,
and Midi, who was on guard at the mourn of the tube, didn’t
see her until the stranger was almost inside. Then she leaped upon
the figure and wrestled it to the ground in the rain, while barking
a single word of warning to her wife-sisters within. They responded
instantly, dropping whatever they were doing and running to
Midi’s aid.
Midi had the stranger well in check, arm around her throat and
stone ax poised to bash in a head if any resistance was offered.
None was, and it was soon clear why when Maka arrived, looked down,
and ordered Midi to release the prisoner.
“Hold, sisters!” The newcomer gasped, rubbing her
throat. “Truth-bearers serve all tribes.”
She was quickly offered a hand up and taken inside the cave.
Maka was undecided just what to do and looked to Vulture for
advice, but got none. The leader decided that it was a good, and
perhaps inevitable, test, and that the traveling priestess could
always be killed later if she proved a problem.
So they offered some tuka and examined the stranger.
Truth-bearers were the only Matriyehans who wore any sort of real
clothing, although it was more of a great cape than a robe or true
garment, made out of what looked like tuka hide dyed a
dark red. Her face and her entire body were covered with tattoos of
varying colors and designs, although a bird and bee seemed to recur
in many themes and variations. She also had a polished bone ring in
her nose running through a perforation and with no visible break,
and similar earrings, although a carved charm hanging from the left
earring was a tree and the one from the right, the bird. She had no
hair save eyebrows; the head didn’t look shaved, either. It
genuinely appeared that no hair had ever grown there.
When Silent Woman saw the incredible tattoos covering the
newcomer’s body she gave something of a gasp, and thereafter
couldn’t take her eyes off the truth-bearer. Warlock saw it
and was unnerved by it, but could do nothing. “What spirits
bring truth-bearer to Maka tribe in storm?” she asked. This
was, after all, decidedly not the normal way you got one.
“Maka tribe near spirit ground next hill,” the
stranger explained. “We go to spirits to get strength,
storm come, know cave, Maka tribe here.” It was as simple as
that.
Matriyehan society wasn’t really made for small talk, and
there was little to talk about. The truth-bearer asked about the
unusually small size of the tribe and Maka gave the official story,
that she and two others had been separated in a storm from a larger
tribe far to the south—Uraa’s tribe, which was real and
where they said it was—and had not been able to contact the
tribe. They managed to survive, and Maka began developing the
chief’s aspects stimulated by the mental acceptance that they
would not again find their chief. She then “took” the
other two, and they began to wander, picking up other isolated
people from various tribes until they had the current eight.
Neither Maka nor Vulture liked the skillful interrogation, although
the individual cover stories seemed to stand up. The mute Silent
Woman was not considered all that odd; this sort of mental
withdrawal was relatively common, particularly among individuals of
a tribe separated from it and their children for great lengths of
time. It was attributed to being alone against an onslaught of
demons; no single person was strong enough to ward them off for
long.
Vulture glanced uneasily at Silent Woman, who continued to stare
at the visitor and show no other expression. What was going through
the strange woman’s mind when she saw someone rather ugly and
tattooed in a way that had to bring back memories of her old self?
But Vulture also continued to check Maka for a signal. Here was a
gift from the gods—a truth-bearer alone and close to one of
the holy places, the sort of place Vulture would love to get a look
at. She suspected that Maka believed the gift too good to be true;
that this might be some sort of trap. Vulture hoped her suspicion
was true. The other alternative was that Manka Warlock had gone so
native that she could not bring herself to order a mortal sin and
ultimate heresy. That could be a real problem, since in this form,
Vulture was committed to obedience and service, yet because it was
not a mindprint, she also was more aware than the others of their
true nature and mission and was thus more critical of their current
situation.
“Good spirits guide truth-bearer to Maka tribe,” the
truth-bearer was saying. She took out her magic sack, which was wet
and muddied but appeared dry inside, and brought out a handful of
what looked like volcanic sand and ground leaves. “No danger
here,” she said. “Truth-bearer protect Maka tribe.
Bring wonder of gods.” Without waiting, the priestess
sprinkled the material in her hand slowly in the small fire. Smoke
billowed forth, which startled them all at first, but which they
could not avoid breathing in the closeness of the cave. It was
neither acrid nor unpleasant; indeed, breathing it in brought a
sudden rush of great pleasure, and after the first inhalation, they
settled down and wanted only to breathe in more. All pain was gone,
all cares, all thought—they felt as normal as before, but
knew the joy of the gods.
They rose out of their bodies, and their souls stood upon the
face of the Earth-Mother and became aware of all the spirits and
demons of the Testing Place. The Earth-Mother was below them,
holding them with mystical bonds that were beautiful and erotic to
the touch, and above them the Great God’s hand could be dimly
seen, wearing a great and mystical ring with the symbol of
life—the bird in the tree. Through Her light of glory, and
only dimly perceived, was Her smaller firebearer Topakana,
and the lesser gods of heaven, whom the People called stars,
looking down on them. It was so wondrous, so exactly like the
teachings, so exactly as it should be.
And then the Earth-Mother spoke, a gentle whisper that sent
chills of ecstasy through them all.
“We show Maka tribe this because tribe fall to doubt
demons,” she said. “Maka tribe not believe truth. Maka
tribe not worship us.” No, no. Earth-Mother! Maka tribe believe. Maka tribe good,
holy!
“Now you see truth. All but this be false. All else be
demon thought. Throw demon thought from soul. Clean soul. Be born
as new baby. Grow as new tribe, no demon thought, no doubt, only
truth. Only then be all with us.” Oh, we will, we will!
The vision faded, but not the pleasant feeling and the wonderful
glow of the experience. Truth was Matriyeh; there was nothing else.
Truth was touching the Earth-Mother and the spirits at all times
and taking the tests of life. All else was false, lies from clever
demons seeking to make the strong fail. There, in the dark, damp
cave, as the storm died down and darkness fell, they believed.
Of them all, only Silent Woman had not seen the visions nor
heard the talk. She had heard talk, but it was the chatter of the
tattooed stranger and meant nothing to her. The smoke had made her
feel good, though, and she did not question what had happened,
although she was not aware of what the others believed they saw and
experienced.
The truth-bearer could not stay; she had to answer the summons
of the spirits and they understood, but they allowed themselves to
be blessed at dawn and then watched her depart. They did not
follow; that area was holy ground, forbidden. But each received a
small amount of the magic sand for their pouches, with instructions
to smoke, inhale, or eat it if they ever found themselves beset by
doubts or their way invaded by demon thoughts. They were told what
to chant as they took it, since such chanting would reinforce the
truth and drive away the demons and close their ears to demon
speech.
The change in the tribe was immediate. They no longer spoke of
strange things and all seemed to have lost their drive to journey
someplace. They still had their memories, but they no longer
believed them; here, on Matriyeh, which was the only place there
was other than heaven, such strange and bizarre concepts could only
have come from the minds of demons. They had been failing the
life-tests, but now the Earth-Mother had shown mercy upon them and
corrected their descent into demonic heresy. But if they were no
longer on a journey or quest, then they had to find a territory in
which to live, and that meant building their strength, creating a
true tribe that could hold its own.
Now, instead of avoiding other tribes, they began to seek them
out, but silently and in stealth. Then, when they could, sometimes
with great daring, they would take the wife-sister of another tribe
and bring her to Maka where the new one would be tied down with
vines and taken in the rite of transfer. Within a week they were
twelve, and within three they were twenty strong. Some of the
newcomers were pregnant, and by now it was clear that of the
original tribe all save Uraa were pregnant, too.
It had been so easy to simply let the Matriyehan personality
take over, so exhilarating to build the tribe that little of the
magic sand had been used, save by Uraa, who felt somehow cursed
because she alone was not with child and therefore not fully
contributing. There were many more wife-sisters for Maka to take
now, and her favors to Uraa had almost ceased, which was another
reason for her to use the magic sand.
Silent Woman, on the other hand, was very confused. The slight
bulge in her belly filled her with enormous joy and excitement, but
she also knew something was wrong. The chiefs of the heaven-ship
village had not sent them down here for this, and watching Uraa
with the magic sand, she seemed to grasp that the sand was at the
heart of what was going wrong. She had no power to make it right,
but Uraa did. Among all the others, there was something very
different about Uraa, something she sensed but could not
define.
She knew, however, that there were poisons, like the old
chief’s firewater back in the river village, that could do
strange things to people, and there were certainly machines that
could do the same. She loved these women, even strange Uraa, and it
was almost a duty to her to protect them if they could not protect
themselves. Such a thing would not go against Maka’s wishes,
for Maka wasn’t using the magic sand anyway.
It was very simple to pick up some sand the next time they were
near a volcanic area and put it in her pouch unobserved, then add a
pinch here and there of leaves to make it look just right. And
then, in the dead of night, it was almost a thrill to remove what
was left of the magic sand from Uraa’s pouch and scatter it
in the forest and replace it with her mixture. Uraa would be angry
the next time she used it, but Silent Woman was experienced enough
to know that she would be the last to be suspected, and that Maka
would find it funny. They had all contributed some to Uraa out of
sisterly sympathy and respect for her as a warrior, but they would
part with no more. It was a gift from the gods, after all.
The first time Uraa took some of the ersatz magic sand out of
her pouch and popped it into her mouth, she immediately spit it
out, gasping and choking, and headed for water. She was very angry,
but because of her lowered status within the tribe there was
nothing she could do about it.
It took another two weeks for the effects to completely wear
off, and even then it was in Uraa’s dreams that the
demon-thoughts came and would not be denied, no matter how she
tried. Again and again, she could see the face of the demon,
leering, grinning at her from in back of some dark shield, laughing
as he made her inhuman and horrible and
monstrous . . .
And, one night, in the middle of the late watch, Vulture
suddenly sat up, wide awake, and said the name of the demon.
“Clayben,” she whispered.
Because Vulture was not mindprinted but had become Uraa through
a process even she could not understand, the shock of
Clayben’s image had jolted her mostly free of the hold the
truth-bearer’s drug had on her mind. It took many nights of
thinking and concentrating to bring her submerged memories out and
put them all together.
The first problem Vulture had to consider was whether the
truth-bearer had really suspected them or had simply happened on
them by accident as she’d claimed. It had to be the
latter; they would have known if anyone had been spying on them all
this time.
All this time . . . How much time? Midi and
Suni were farthest along in their pregnancies, so they had probably
gotten pregnant while still aboard ship. They looked to be in their
seventh month now; Taeg, Mari, and Aesa looked to be a month behind,
give or take, while Silent Woman was just beginning to show,
reflecting her later start.
And suddenly it was clear what had triggered the
truth-bearer’s suspicions. None of them had stretch marks
save Uraa who had no children with her. That’s twice now
pregnancy has complicated a mission, she thought sourly, although
this time it was unavoidable. If they were to be down for a very
long period of time then it was necessary. Any wife-sister would
wonder at a tribe that had no children and no sign that it had ever
had any. Well, since they hadn’t had a program to work from,
they’d had to write one from Uraa’s genetic code. Even
the greatest of computers made mistakes. Because Vulture was by
nature sterile, fertility had been interpolated—and
wrongly.
She wondered, though, about the magic sand. Truth-bearers had
appeared in the tribe she’d joined on her reconnaissance and
no such drug had been used that she was aware of. Insurance? A new
tool for keeping the People on the straight and narrow? Was the
static system not quite as static as it was supposed to be? Or was
Master System playing the long odds? It knew they had transmitters;
such a campaign would help the faithful and reinforce the system
even if none of the rebels came here as Matriyehans; however, it
might just catch anybody who did—and it had.
The problem was rescuing the rest of them from the drug’s
influence. They already had a larger group than was
manageable—twenty-six now—and Maka was insatiable about
gaining more. The upward limit was around a hundred, but the
average tribe was usually fifty or sixty. Maka was in fact building
her strength while searching for another smaller tribe, one that
could be conquered and absorbed to give her real power while also
gaining that smaller tribe’s territory. That meant a war and
a war was not in their best interest. They had already lost three
members—fortunately, none of the pirates—as
Maka’s greater strength made her seek bigger and more
dangerous game, and the chief seemed willing to take more risks and
even risk herself needlessly to demonstrate her bravery and right
to leadership. A war might well cause the deaths of Maka and the
other eight, and, just as bad, they might lose and the survivors be
absorbed into the other tribe.
When Vulture had become part of Uraa’s tribe, it had been
incredibly hard to exert free will, to break away when the time was
right, to get back to the fighter and to Thunder. How to
wrench the others back to their senses again? And Maka—could
she be brought around, or would she have to die? Vulture wondered
if she could force herself against all the instincts of a
Matriyehan to take and become Maka. She didn’t want to do it,
not only for those reasons but also because it would reduce their
number by one and a key one at that. Still, it would be only months
until Vulture had to feed once more—or begin to die. It was a
two-year cycle that could not be changed, much as she hated the
idea. It was the onset, the slight beginnings, of that need which
helped Vulture to regain almost complete mastery over the Uraa
personality.
And with that came the realization that Maka tribe wasn’t
going to roam from this territory, and was still within a
week’s walk of that lava cave area where the problem had
started. She knew this tribe well; she most certainly could find it
again if she was not taken by another tribe. The question was,
could she find that forbidden holy place where truth-bearers might
come for whatever it was they got in such places? Could she stand
being alone and eating at what might be starvation levels until one
of them showed up?
Curiously, of all the tribe, it was Silent Woman who seemed to
sense the change in Uraa, the return of Vulture, and her torment.
Vulture was shocked to realize this, and even more shocked when she
realized that only Silent Woman could have brought her out. She had
checked all the others and there was no glimmer of their old selves
there. Now at last she understood. By the very nature of her trauma
Silent Woman had been immune. That was easy to understand from the
beginning. The fact that she had realized that something was wrong
and picked the only one capable of overcoming it was astonishing.
Just how much did go on in that mind?
Vulture only hoped Silent Woman would understand that if Uraa
vanished it was not desertion, but hope.
During the next several days Vulture prepared, weaving a net out
of the strong vines that were the staple of this culture’s
primitive technology then waiting until they camped near a
bis grove. The bis fruit grew very high in its
trees and had a hard, smooth shell, but inside were seeds and a
pulpy yellow mass that was extremely filling. So long as the shell
was not cracked they traveled well and were one of the few food
staples that could be harvested and carried for several days by
tribes. That harvesting wasn’t easy, though; bis on
the ground were already overripe and spoiled. The only way to get
them was to climb a smooth-barked ten-meter-tall tree and select
only the ones that were ripe. This was not only very dangerous in
its own right but the harvesters were effectively alone and
defenseless and were sometimes targeted by the leathery-winged
misum, which were all teeth and tentacles.
Harvesting bis, however, allowed Vulture to get her
bearings and also to survey the land. She intended to take no more
bis fruit than she had harvested herself, but she knew she
had to move quickly. This small valley between two volcanic ranges
was the home of Sosa tribe, with about thirty-five adults and
fifteen children. Sosa knew that Maka tribe was in its territory
but was large enough that so far there hadn’t been a
confrontation. Now Maka was being faced with a possible showdown as
Sosa tribe searched for them. Maka would have preferred at least
equal numbers, and Vulture felt that she would avoid the fight as
long as she could but she saw no advantage to moving on. Vulture
very much wanted to act before such a battle took place. The idea
of Maka losing her male attributes and the tribe becoming absorbed
into Sosa tribe was only slightly more daunting than the idea of
having to deal with the mission and a tribe of seventy.
It was still difficult to leave. The darkness itself was
threatening on this world, and safety lay only in numbers, but the
sudden, overpowering feeling of loneliness, of being somehow
incomplete and empty, was just as bad. She had picked her route for
maximum safety and did not intend to go far. The fact was, Vulture
wasn’t sure what would happen if she were snared by a
strangler vine or attacked by some of the animals that might prowl
at night. Could she eat the animal and, if so, would she then no
longer have human reasoning, or could she be digested by the
strangler plants and die? Falling into some pit or mud hole would
be just as bad. It was not until Matriyeh that she had ever had a
sense of her own possible mortality.
Early the next day she began the climb over the mountains. It
was treacherous going, the landscape hostile enough that it had
kept the valley pretty well isolated from other marauding tribes.
Hot fumeroles hissed at her, spewing foul gases, and there was the
strong stench of sulfur and occasional hot spots in the rocks. A
steady rain made much of the lava field slippery and dangerous. She
was relieved to finally make it to older rock, and she could see a
small pass ahead, perhaps another two or three hundred meters up
the mountainside. She stopped for a moment and sat, trying to
muster enough strength to make it to the top.
The lava snake was not in the ideal position but when prey
stopped, it moved fast. Most of the time it lived in its lava tube,
head pointed so that only the eyes, set in the skull then but
capable of protruding on stalks when needed, looked out.
Lava snakes could live on rock, particularly high-sulfur rock,
but they preferred supplementing their diet with living meat. At
more than ten meters long, and all mouth at one end, they could
anchor themselves in their dens and shoot out straight ahead with
enough speed to snare an unwary misum and sometimes an
unwary person as well. There had been a few the tribe had faced
when crossing into the valley. They had been lucky because
they’d come down between two dens; the lava snakes had
attacked at about the same time and it had been quick reflexes that
saved them, causing the two snakes to go after each other
instead.
Vulture heard it and rolled away just in time. The great jaws
snapped shut less than a meter from her. There was no time to
prepare weapons, and none of the weapons she had would be much use
singly against such a beast. She rolled, came up on her feet, spear
ready, all supplies tossed away, and quickly eyed an area about ten
meters away that was out of range of the snake if it kept itself
anchored but which ended in a sheer drop. The snakes were
single-minded eating machines and she depended on that. She’d
probably kill the monster if it ate her, but that wouldn’t do
her much good.
The field became suddenly alive with great, angry hisses and
roars, and several more snakes revealed themselves but did not
emerge from their lairs. Anchored, the snakes could lunge at an
incredible speed, but if forced to move freely and crawl they were
slow and ponderous. She could outrun one, but it would do little
good if she just ran into the jaws of another. The easiest way to
the top was past the first creature’s lair, and now it was
her task to empty it or die.
She stood almost on the edge of the precipice and held her spear
high in defiance. “Ho! Snake! Come! Uraa be snake dinner!
Easy meat! Come!”
The snake roared in anger and began to emerge from its hole. Its
back end was quite small, almost tentaclelike, good for gripping,
but useless now that it was free of the lair and slowly coming
toward her. The rock actually hissed as the beast traveled, thanks
to a secretion it left as it moved.
She was suddenly afraid she had miscalculated, and fear of death
was not something she was used to. The great Vulture, the creature
that could become anyone and could fool even Master System, was,
here, no different from the most ordinary of Matriyehan women.
The snake approached but stopped five meters short, one eye
stalk on the spear. Clearly this one was an experienced hunter.
Vulture saw the small, tentaclelike rear gyrating back and forth,
trying to find something to grip. If it did, she was dead meat, so
she had to force the issue.
With a fierce, steady scream she ran straight for the head of
the snake, spear ready. The action confused the snake, which did
nothing for a moment, and she let the spear go with full force. It
struck the head area and sank in a bit; a superficial wound, but
painful. The snake roared in fury and lunged at full speed at
Vulture, who jumped to her left and rolled flat. The snake in its
fury had forgotten it didn’t yet have an anchor, and it went
straight on past her and over the edge of the cliff. Its hind end,
however, managed to catch a jagged edge of a lava outcrop, and it
hung there for a moment, then slowly tried pulling itself back
up.
Vulture wasn’t going to give it a chance. She ran straight
past the now-empty lair and made the top before she dared stop and
look back.
The great snake was indeed pulling itself back up, but its
relative helplessness had not gone unnoticed by its kin, who were
converging on the spot where the great head was oozing back onto
solid ground. She decided to let them fight it out.
The exhilaration of surviving the encounter quickly gave way to
concern. What am I celebrating? she asked herself.
That I’m smarter than a damned snake? Of more
concern now was that she had no reserve food supply, no spear, and
not much else except a sharp knife-stone, the blow gun, and a
supply of dart thorns. It was a long and dangerous trek down the
other side, and there were more snakes and other dangers. She would
be easy prey should a misum pass by and get curious.
Worse, she would have to cross dozens of tribal territories,
perhaps more, to reach the point where she wanted to be, and she
would be in no condition to resist warriors if one of those tribes
found and then adopted her.
It was her worst nightmare. The mission was in shambles before
it even had a chance to begin, and she was alone and relatively
defenseless on the surface of the cruel planet Matriyeh.