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West of Isumfast
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“Move the pinky.”
Outish twitched the finger on his left hand. “Feels stiff.”
“It will,” said Baryy. “You need to exercise it and work the neural pathways. But we’re done with the regen unit.”
Outish held the hand up. It was whole, instead of a mangled mess where only the index finger and thumb remained, all five fingers wiggled in the antiseptic light of the repair bay. Halorite fingers. The regen unit was programmed to use Outish’s Halorite genes, and so the regenerated area of the hand was covered in his natural, sandy brown fur in odd contrast to his thumb and wrist, which were distinctly Human. Fortunately, the fur on his hands was thinner than other body parts, but fur it was, nonetheless. Outish sat up. After three days of lying next to the regen unit, drifting in and out of consciousness as the regen drugs and builder cells coursed through his system, he felt woozy, almost sick. He stood up and then bent double and vomited. Having not eaten anything solid for three days, only water came up. Baryy stood back, trying to stay clear of the spume. An autobot the size of a toolbox sprang out of a wall compartment and scuttled over to the offending goo. It bleeped when it reached Outish. When the intern, either too numb or too ill to notice, failed to move out of the way, the bot said in a scratchy voice reminiscent of an Avarian accent three centuries past, “Move please, you are obstructing. Service to perform. Service to perform.”
“Huh, oh.” Outish stepped gingerly out of the way.
“Sorry about that, Outy. You feeling okay?” asked Baryy. “I’m not a med tech, but the injection learning course did say the patient might feel ill after the operation.”
The astrobiologist wiped dribble from his mouth with a towel Baryy handed him. “Yeah, well, they were right about that.” He shook the restored hand. “Wow, it tingles, sort of like it’s asleep.”
Baryy nodded nervously. The experience was as new to him as it was to Outish. “That’s the sensory nerves coming alive as the drugs wear off. Supposedly, it may throb or hurt for a while, but you have a nano-antigen solution that will guard against any rejection symptoms, which there shouldn’t be since the builder cells were bonded with your natural Halorite DNA, but with the gene therapy treatment that morphed your outward appearance to Human it’s hard to tell, at least for me.”
Outish looked pale as he staggered to a bed and lay down. “Oi, the room is spinning.”
Concerned, Baryy grabbed the autodoc and wheeled it over. He hit the scan/treat button. The autodoc immediately went to work, and a robotic arm extended from the frame and deftly clasped a band connected with tubes to the intern’s wrist. A pneumatic hiss came from the band as it sunk hypodermics into the wrist. Liquids began to flow through the clear tubes.
“Great,” mumbled Outish, “more drugs,” and then he was asleep.
“Everything okay,” Achelous asked when he came in.
“Kernetic repulsoid shock,” Baryy read the diagnosis off the autodoc display.
Achelous blinked. “What’s that?” he asked, concerned.
Baryy shook his head, reading the changing display. “Don’t know; it wasn’t covered in the regen injection learning course.” He hit the further info cell on the hologrid. “It’s all medical gobbledygook to me. I’m a sociologist. But it says recovery time is four to six hours. So I say we let him sleep.”
Achelous bent over the bed and looked at the regenerated hand. “Fur?”
Baryy’s face split into a smile. Then he shrugged at Achelous’s consternation. “Hey, at least it’s a hand and not a claw!”
“He’ll have to work in-country with a furry hand?” Achelous exclaimed. Baryy kept his mischievous smile even in the face of the chief inspector’s vexation.
Achelous paused. “Did you do that on purpose?”
Baryy laughed. “No!”
“Spirits, his Timberkeep friends will never give him peace over that, first his big ears and now his furry hand.”
“He can wear gloves.”
Achelous shook his head slowly, the corner of his mouth quirked. The look of fatherly patience plain. “He’ll have to shave it. Regularly.”
Baryy looked down on his friend. They’d not always been friends. Outish had been as green as new grass when he’d first come in-country with Baryy and the chief. In many ways, the astrobiologist intern was still green, but during the Battle for Wedgewood, the kid had shown guts, dumb or otherwise. He was credited for standing in the shield wall in the retreat from the Main gate, where he was first wounded and knocked unconscious, and then in his solo attack on the Scarlet Saviors burning the granary. It was in that desperate combat that he had earned renown in Clan Mearsbirch. If his Timberkeep friends mocked him for a fury hand, and Baryy was sure they would, he was equally sure it would be out of respect for the terrible wound Outish received in that lonely, smoke-choked, flame-scorching melee.
Baryy rechecked the autodoc settings and then asked, “Were you able to get Marisa back to Tivor without any problems?” Secretly, Baryy was relieved to have Marisa away from Isumfast and the repair bay. She was learning too much, too fast, and it unsettled him. There were too many new variables emerging. He had Jeremy, their AI, plug the parameters into the sociology risk models for mission success, and in several areas, they were into yellow and, in one case, red, as with the appearance of the Matrincy in Wedgewood.
“Yes,” Achelous replied, though he refrained from alarming Baryy with Marisa’s latest exploit. He had received a stark surprise when, earlier that day, he had left the repair bay to meet Marisa in Isumfast and take her to the shift zone.
He’d led Echo, his eenu, out of the repair bay through the narrow, hidden opening to the outer cavern. They had managed to clear the cavern with an excavator Baryy had somehow got running and recommissioned.
Riding into the daylight and trotting down the barely discernable road, obfuscated with tall pines, ferns, and errant boulders, Achelous had been brought up short at the sight of Marisa sitting on a huge granite slab. She was—of all things—sketching a picture of the river gorge, wearing tight-fitting riding breeches, a dark blouse with the upper buttons undone, and her black hair unbound. His breath caught. Against the wild and pristine background, she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
“How did you find, er how—” he stuttered, searching for the right word.
“Find?” she asked innocently. “I haven’t found anything. And how are you doing? It’s been a whole day since we saw each other. Aren’t you happy to see me?”
“Well, of course I am, it’s just a—”
“Surprise?” she finished for him, smiling. “I love the mountains. I’ve often thought of building a new hall on Mount Epratis, but now the Timberkeeps are doing it for me. I can’t wait to visit them. It will be so much better.”
“Mmm, I see. And how did you conveniently and coincidently come to be sitting here, sketching? Not that I am complaining, mind you.” He rode close, his gaze taking in her drawing and other things. “It’s just—you know how I am with surprises.”
“You were coming back to the inn, so I thought I’d meet you halfway.”
Achelous sniffed, “Halfway? How about all the way.”
“I have something to show you.” She stood, placing her parchment and quills in a pack, and jumped nimbly to a lesser boulder, then another, and then to the ground. She opened a saddlebag on her tethered eenu and withdrew a package wrapped in a brown sheepskin bound with twine. Achelous dismounted. “What is it?”
“Something I borrowed.”
The package was the size and shape of a folder, similar to the one she carried to hold her loose sheaves of sketches. Undoing the twine and unfolding the skin, he held up the plastic-coated picture she’d acquired from the innkeeper.
His face became solemn, and he turned to look back up the mountain. In the picture, a wide, gravel road ran along the left bank of the Gracopherous, now concealed. A broad opening showed in the mountain where now a boulder scree lay with hundred-year-old trees growing amongst the verges. He turned back to her. “You found it,” he hesitated, “by this?”
She pointed at a distinctive basalt chimney peak to the right of the river gorge and then back to the same edifice in the picture. “The innkeeper says Beehive is a well-known landmark. He said he came up here once with this picture, just like I did, but was unable to find an opening. Lucky for you,” she said, dropping her voice.
“Lairliear Gamerhau gave you this?”
“Yes,” she echoed his tone. “I thought it odd they have so many Ancient artifacts at the inn, and yet he and his family aren’t molested by the Paleowrights. I know Lairliear is devout, but I didn’t know that was a license to create your own Ancient archive.”
He shook his head. “It’s not. Lairliear is an Inquirer for the Church,” he smiled at her, a wry twist to his grin. “All the Examiners from here to Tomis and south to Faldamar report to him. They display the pictures at the inn on purpose. It’s a honey trap, if you will. Anyone seeing the pictures and boasting they’ve seen similar or bragging they have an Ancient artifact like it is marked by the inn’s staff, who are all Paleowrights. The place serves as an acquisition house; those in the trade know to go there to barter their goods. Baryy wasn’t pleased with me putting you up at the inn, but as you may have surmised, it is the only decent place within leagues of...” and he hooked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the old avalanche scree.
“Why was Baryy worried about what I might learn?”
Achelous shrugged, “Perhaps. This presents a problem,” he said, holding the picture. He looked around, peering into the woods, suppressing an urge to open his multi-func and scan for life signs. “We can’t risk the cavern being found. Return this to Lairliear and complain to him the canyon has changed so much, with avalanches and all, that you couldn’t make sense of it.” He began carefully to wrap it when Marisa asked, “Dearen—”
He looked up at the gravity in her tone.
“What is mind-wipe?”
He mentally grimaced. The thought of explaining it a pain in itself. He looked around, sensing this wasn’t to be a short conversation. He handed her the picture and found a smallish boulder covered in orange and rust-colored lichen. Sitting on it, he asked, “You’re afraid of what they might do if they should catch us?”
She nodded silently, her dark eyes keen with worry. “I don’t want to forget you and Boyd—” she turned away so he couldn’t see her face.
He put his hands around her waist and pulled her to him, resting her warm back comfortably against his chest. She sat on his leg. Rather than try to console her, tell her it would never happen, he decided to tell her the truth. She could decide in her own mind as to the real or imagined risks. “We or I should say the IDB, can only do a mind-wipe if you are found guilty of an offense.” He smelled her hair, admiring the deep, black luster. “And you are not guilty of anything.”
“But why are you and Baryy worried about mind-wipe?”
“Well, because we, him and I, might be guilty of something.”
She understood some, not all, of the possible transgressions he might be culpable of, like consorting with her and fathering Boyd, which angered her immeasurably if she dwelt on it. “But why does Baryy not want me to learn anything?”
Achelous swallowed. “That is a point of contention between him and me. I agree that strictly enforced ULUP doctrine could dictate that all provincials that we have associated with and have learned information through us could be subject to mind-wipe in an attempt to unwind the impacts of what ULUP would call extrasolar influence.” He waited, then, “But it’s not practical in implementation, particularly if the provincials plausibly learned the information on their own. What Baryy keeps forgetting is that ITA, the old Interstellar Transportation Authority, already polluted the Dianis culture! Over three hundred years ago! The ITA engineers, who dug that cavern behind us, had roamed around on Dianis, unhindered, for seventy-five years before ULUP was established. True, it was only in the last five years of that time that they were here in any significant numbers. I suppose that at their peak, they may have had two hundred engineers on the planet, but you can see from Lairliear’s inn they made their mark. Their influence had an outsized impact because they were like gods to the provincials, with all of the technology and machinery, and in some well-documented cases of abuse, they purposely acted like gods.”
“So it’s true.”
“What is?” he asked, worried.
“What the Paleowrights believe.”
He snorted. “Lace, those Ancients, those ITA engineers, are long dead. They won’t be answering any prayers for enlightenment or strength or wealth.”
“But they were here. They walked our world and did those things that the priests preach.”
He let out a long sigh. “Yes. Much of that is correct, to a point, particularly the stuff that they use from the books the engineers left behind, but I guarantee you the Diunesis Antiquaria clergy is not beyond substantial embellishment and context perversion.”
“So why do you think I won’t be mind-wiped?” She kept her back to him, sitting on his leg.
He didn’t know if she was crying, and he was afraid to know. “Because you are learning the information on your own, mostly.” He thought, except for now, where I am telling her way too much. But they were practicing a rudimentary form of memory disassociation with her looking at the forest and not at him. He hoped it would be enough. “And because so much of what you are learning, even from Baryy and me, can plausibly be intuited from the artifacts, like the books engineers left behind. And because a case can be made that everything you are learning is in defense of Dianis against extrasolars. I believe,” and he felt this fervently, “that if it should ever come to it, the ULUP board of control would accept that all Dianis provincials have the right to defend their planet from outside incursions and to establish those protections in whatever way they can. Including researching and bartering for information from Avarian galactics.”
She turned, looking over her shoulder, a damp but teasing shadow in her eye, “Barter? I didn’t know I was bartering with you? And what am I bartering with?”
He grinned. “Okay, poor choice of words. How about spy?”
“I don’t like that word either. Will they mind-wipe you?” She stood up and turned to hold his face in her hands. “I will never let them mind-wipe you. We will fight them. If they come for you, we will fight. We may just be provincials, but we have power. They want something from us, and they will never get it if they hurt you. That’s my promise.”
Standing there in the repair bay, he remembered the passion in her eyes and the soft strength in her hands. He had no idea how she would make good on such a promise, but he had no doubt as to her conviction.
