A Thousand Words For Stranger (10th Anniversary Edition) (53 page)

He tried. “I am honored to be present at such a discovery, Professor Emeritus. Thank you again for your faith in me.” Vasi paused then added honestly, “And for the opportunity to operate the bio’face.”

 
“Grasis’ glory.” Medya turned her great head almost completely around on her shoulders to gauge how far they’d already paced away from Ebbet and their sleds, trying to locate the outer boundaries of the site. “This wide? Are you sure, Finder?”

Vasi studied the canid. He’d given it food and water, and as much rest as any of them dared in this place of hazard. It was weary, yet its willingness came through the bio’face, a willingness to strive as long as he, Vasi, the present center of the beast’s small universe, asked for the effort. “He’s sure,” the Tidik answered, gesturing to how the canid’s nose hovered about the snow, nostrils dripping so the hairy lip below remained crusted with ice. Its small body pulled on the leash, as though impatient for them to follow.

Medya followed, step by ponderous step, watching, as he did, for any sign of another crevasse. “You realize if your beast is accurate, Vasi,” she said with a cheery wheeze, “this must be one Grasis-sucking ruin.”

Vasi didn’t try to puzzle out her reference. The canid had paused, nose up and working at the air. Then its unreadable face turned to his and he felt a sudden, formless anxiety through their link. “Something’s wrong,” he warned without hesitation, his neck and chin flaps snapping closed with dread.

Time seemed to stop and listen to the words, as if as frozen as the wasteland of ice stretching on all sides. It hardly budged as Vasi whirled around, somehow sensing the direction of their danger. It scarcely started again before the cliff shrugged off its winter load of snow and ice, sending the avalanche toward them as a wall of shattered white.

 
There was a saying. His father had been a mountaineer and used to drill this saying into a younger Vasi, day after day, trip after trip, upslope or downslope. The present-day version fought to remember it in the darkness, spitting out snow to mouth the words: “Mountains get so big because they eat fools.”

Fool? Maybe. Deaf and blind, but not mountain-food. Not yet.
Vasi struggled to focus. First, assess himself. Nothing broken, but he was completely disoriented. Buried, but he’d instinctively curled his arms over his face and ducked away from the onrush of snow. His arms had some room to move. He could breathe.

Joy! The bio’face filled with warmth as his return to full consciousness must have reached the canid. Warmth and pain. Vasi pushed aside snow until his left hand could reach his right wrist, fumble for the leash attached to it. He found it and pulled, dismayed as the tension disappeared. A clamp or the leash itself had given way. Waves of imposed joy and pain and fear alternated in his head, but he didn’t have the heart to scold the poor creature. There was comfort for both in knowing they weren’t alone.

Comfort, but what he really needed was to know which way was up. His locator couldn’t help him. If anything, it added to the confusion as the indicator lights reflected from the snow, overwhelming any dim natural light that might penetrate and give the Tidik a clue where to start digging. He fought away panic, the real enemy. His environment suit would protect him from the cold. There was a distress beacon built into it. He could feel its vibration against his ribs, so it must have been activated by the force of the avalanche. But he couldn’t stay buried like this, waiting for some possible rescue. He had to get out, find the others.

Hunt. Find. Not the words, but sensations rippling through the bio’face. Vasi smelled his own fear and tried to control it, concentrating on the link, sending back what he hoped was encouragement. Could the beast be free? Its body was small and light. It might have floated to the top of the torrent of snow.

Top.
Vasi’s mouth was dry. He bit viciously on his own tongue, tasting the sweet flatness of blood. He kept his lips closed and didn’t swallow. After a moment or two, he parted his lips very slightly. The warm liquid flowed out the left side of his mouth and over his cheek, stinging the sensitive tissue lining his neck flaps.
So.
Vasi reached to his right, and started to dig his way to the surface, refusing to doubt.

Minutes or hours? He couldn’t be sure without checking his wrist chrono, but didn’t give in to that impulse. It would take as long as it took. One gloved hand reached up to carve deeper into what was now a tunnel the width of his shoulders, the other taking the snow and carefully pushing it back and under him, patting it firm. He inched his way farther up. Steadily, patiently. He would defeat the mountain.

He didn’t battle alone. The bio’face surged with another’s determination. Somewhere above him, two small paws were churning through the snow, two more shovingit back and away. Exhaustion, fear, pain. Echoes of his own or the beast’s? It no longer mattered; both were sustained by their common need, to reach each other. They were brothers, bound by more than the device in Vasi’s head.

The Tidik had almost fallen asleep, though still digging, when a flare of joy roused him. There was a pressure, then a sudden chill on his right hand. As he realized what had happened, he cursed happily.

 
Finder Sai Vasilo Aris pulled his feet free one at a time and fell rather than sat down, his lap immediately filled with writhing canid. Fortunately, its paws stayed away from the more sensitive parts of his anatomy. Vasi hugged the creature to his chest to still it, then looked around himself, trying to understand what he saw.

It was as if the glacier had been stirred by Medya’s giant god. The sunlight struck at chunks of blistered ice and shattered rock protruding through the snow, sank into lines and drifts of blood-red dust. Nothing remained of their equipment or the trail. Nothing of Ebbet or Medya.

There was something else. Almost absently, Vasi noted the gleaming bronze of what could be the tip of a pillar or corner of a wall, close enough to touch. The Hoveny site Ebbet had so feared losing beneath the avalanche had, with the perversity of the mountain, been revealed instead.

He paid it no further attention, pushing the weight of the canid from his lap in order to stagger to his feet. A hand signal. “Find them,” Vasi ordered desperately. “Find them.” He did his best to picture the other two members of their Triad for the beast, unsure if that type of information could pass across their link.

The beast stared up at him, head tilted to one side in apparent confusion. It was panting heavily, the warming rings intact, but blood streaked its white flanks. There was more wherever its worn front paws stepped; blood also stained the snow it had dug away to save him.
He
asked the impossible again,
Vasi thought with despair, and didn’t even know how to phrase the question.

His neck flaps opened with stress, pumping useless pheromones of hunt, need, anxiety into the frigid air. “I can’t find them myself,” he pleaded nonsensically, as if the beast could understand the colorless words.

Its nostrils worked at something. Vasi stared, then relaxed his flaps further, the way he would to communicate his urgency to one of his own. “Find them,” he whispered, repeating the hand signal.

With a hoarse yip, the canid turned and ran, its tail up and wagging, a limping run leaving a trail of dappled red. It couldn’t run quickly—a mercy, since neither could Vasi. Not only was each step a study in either too-soft snow or upturned ice, but every part of his body hurt when he moved. Nothing broken, he told himself bitterly, but several things definitely bent.

The canid stopped by a rock larger than its body and made the same howling sounds it had on the transport. Forewarned by this and the unsettled feel of the bio’face, Vasi expected what he found as he brushed snow from the figure barely visible beneath the boulder. Professor Emeritus Y Ebbet, of the 114
^th
Siring by Raken, would never analyze the secrets of this Hoveny site, or any other.

Vasi hesitated, wanting to pay proper respect, but minutes counted if Medya was injured. “Find her,” he ordered the canid, standing up and giving the signal.

The canid looked from the snow-covered corpse to Vasi, then back again. The Tidik repeated the signal, frantically. He waved in the direction he thought Medya might have been swept.

Abruptly, the beast seemed to understand. It began to push and jump its way through the loose snow in the direction he’d indicated. Vasi followed, worried by the feeling of exhaustion through the bio’face. He had no idea how to tell it to slow down, to conserve energy. He couldn’t stop his own urgency from passing to the beast.

He should have tried harder. He should have reattachedthe leash. He should have remembered even half of what his father had tried to tell him about mountains and their appetites.

Because the dog ran straight over the crevasse before either of them could suspect this latest treachery, the snow dropping from beneath its wounded feet. There was time for Vasi to throw himself forward and flat, his fingers unable to reach even that stupid rope of a tail; there was time for the creature to yelp in terror, the emotion pouring through the bio’face until Vasi shouted as well.

Then, a searing flash as if a light had lanced through his brain. And, nothing.

Not nothing. A weak, terrified sound echoed upward. “Is—Is someone there?” More strongly. “Watch out! Don’t come closer! Who fell?” this in a hoarse whisper, as if the speaker feared having lost her rescuer. “Is anyone there?”

“I’m here, Medya. Vasi.”

“Who fell?” the voice asked, confused and querulous. “Was it—Ebbet?”

“Just the damn dog,” Vasi told her in his calm, emotion-free voice, licking tears from his lips, hands gripping the snow.

 
Waiting rooms seemed unsettled, like weather over a mountain’s peak: welcoming but never comfortable, friendly but never personal. Vasi didn’t care for them, especially when he was surrounded by aliens.

He didn’t like the room, and the aliens, two male and three female Humans, probably didn’t like him. At best, they likely suspected he was spying on them. At worst? Could they tell he was here without permission? Without authorization from the First? Vasi kept his back straight and flaps courteously closed—as if a Human might notice—and tried to remain as inconspicuous as the only non-Human on this world could be.

The door opened. A pair walked out, a Human female and a dog. Vasi was startled to see such a different beast. This one was heavyset, and darkly furred with a coat that rippled like issa-silk. Its head was larger than the entire body of that damn dog at the bottom of the crevasse. But the soft brown eyes surveying him curiously, the wet moving nose, were the same. Vasi opened his mouth, wanting to ask—

“Sai Vasilo Aris, please.”

He closed his lips and answered the summons, stepping past the pair.

The Human behind the desk—there was always a desk after a waiting room—stood when Vasi entered the room. Another Human remained seated, a frown on her face. “Welcome, Finder Aris,” the standing Human said in a pleasant voice. Comspeak, of course. “I’m Samuel Edwards, Assistant Director of the Biointerface Project. This is our Liaison with the Research Council of the First, Atima Seung. Please. Have a seat. What can we do for you?”

Vasi sat; the Human matched his movement. “I want one of your dogs,” he informed them.

“Our dogs work with Human partners, Finder Aris,” Seung said in a soft voice, with a hint of steel beneath.

“So your species can be of value within a Triad,” Vasi countered. “I am aware of the political rhetoric. It means nothing to me. I want a dog. I’m willing to pay what you require.” The words came out flat. Perhaps they were harsh. He saw their reaction, the tightening of their mouths, the way they looked at each other as if summoning support. But Vasi didn’t know what else to do. His flaps opened despite his best efforts to restrain them, surely another feature of his alienness that would offend these beings.

Edwards tapped a datacube with one blunt-nailed finger. “We’re aware you had a bio’face installed—without our approval—to allow your Triad to continue working with Finder Durgin’s dog. That wasn’t meant to be a permanent arrangement, Finder Aris. You’ve already had the implant removed. I really don’t see that we can accommodate you. Surely a Finder of your abilities would prefer to use technological means—and you already have a fabulous new site to explore.”

Vasi’s flaps began to tremble, and a tear trickled maddeningly along one lip. “I want another dog,” he said evenly, dreadfully sure they were going to refuse. Why wouldn’t they? They couldn’t understand.

Seung held up her hand when Edwards would have answered. She leaned forward, her strange pale eyes intent on Vasi. “I feel for your loss, Finder Aris.”

“The Professor Emeritus—”

“Mesky,” she corrected. “Your dog.”

He hadn’t known the damn dog had a name—or that Humans named their animals. “Mesky,” he repeated. “I want another.”

“Why? And don’t tell me it’s because you couldn’t have found the site without him,” the female’s voice was sharper. “I won’t accept that.”

“Because. Because.” Vasi stopped on the word, unable to frame the thought, let alone wrap it in their mutual, pitiful language.
Comspeak. Common speak. Useless speak.
The way it was on Aeande XII; the way it always was away from his own kind. He gave up, flaps quivering, dumping unshareable scents of misery and loneliness into the room.

A warm hand touched his arm. The Human female had come to crouch beside him, her expression now one he couldn’t read. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” she told him.

“How do you know I’m upset?” he asked. “I haven’t told you so.”

“You are Tidik.” A slight wave to his neck. “I may not be physiologically able to detect your messages through the air, but I do know they are released during stress. I also know you can’t change the inflection of your voice, so I must discount that as a measure of your emotions. But the droplets on your upper lip? I’ve read Tidik literature, Finder Aris. Those are what we would call tears, are they not? Released, as ours, during sadness or pain. So I know. You cared for Mesky. That’s why you want another dog.”