Rift (15 page)

Just enough for a very small mouthful. She rolled the sand in her mouth, sliding it over her teeth and swallowing, her eyes closed in contentment. It was very salty, as the water was. Concentrating harder, she tasted a flicker of the yellow taste, and the one she thought of as blue. And underneath, a dusting of the
good brown taste that her body craved, still faint, but jolting her senses for one sweet moment. She arched her body and kicked into the kelp forest again for another pinch of ecstasy, but the sandy bottom yielded no more. Now and then, however, good tastes flowed past her in the sea current, from the west. She broke the surface, squinting at the gleaming sea that stretched in the right direction.

Exhausted at last, she hauled herself onboard the raft. Spar stood guard by Reeve, gazing outward, and affording her privacy to dress behind him. But as she pulled on her shirt, she saw that their patient was watching her, his eyes narrowed slightly, and craning his neck ever so slightly to peer beyond Spar’s legs. She smiled at him. Maybe he was feeling better.

Reeve floated on the sea in the sun. The endless dip and bow of the raft made his stomach feel like it was brimful of green suds, with their smell that could take a strong man down.

He had been sleeping on and off for so long he lost track of the time. And visiting him this last time was Tina Valejo, once more floating past his outstretched hand, within inches of his fingertips. As she reached for him, her other arm sprawled out, pointing to her destination, the constellation Belfire.

When he opened his eyes, the raft was pitching as a sea creature flopped onto the opposite side.

It was Carlise. He didn’t remember that Carlise survived the crash, or had even been on the shuttle. Last year on Station she had invited him to her bed a few times, and he thought she’d dismissed him for another, yet here she was, naked. As she stood, her muscular body cascaded water, dripping over her breasts and down her bronze thighs. Her beauty caught at his throat. He hadn’t remembered her so small and her hair so short and golden, flecked with sunlight. She
smiled at him. And then, to his acute disappointment, she put on her clothes. And when she put on dirty rags he knew it wasn’t Carlise at all, and that whoever it was had no intention of straddling him and bringing him some womanly comfort, even if he could have stayed awake long enough to participate.…

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At last the shoreline lost its monotonous grassy ridges and the land began to sprout fields of pinkish boulders. As they poled on, Loon watched the outcroppings grow more massive, giving rise here and there to great flat-topped hills thrust up like furniture for giants. Grasses gave way to a pebbled land of short bushes that looked half green, half gray, as though the color were bleaching out under the sun.

It was in these lands that Loon finally found the platform trees rising from red seams of soil, much as Terran trees would sometimes grow next to streams. They beached the raft and Loon set out on her search. She had seen such seams before, along weathered troughs where rock once flowed like water—a thing she had never seen, but believed because her father had told her of it. Often, as here, the troughs bred bubble eggs, a carpet of tiny air-filled sacs that Loon delighted to walk on. Sometimes they yielded in rude noises to her stomps. In spring, she knew, the bubbles would grow rigid and break, releasing perfumed clouds that drifted many miles. Sometimes a Terran tree or shrub would manage to grow here, but Lithia demanded her due, wrapping the branches and trunks in a garment of her choosing, often in wine-red edging to shades of black. It was odd to see green twigs and leaves protruding. Shuddering to see such wrong-looking mixes, she would hurry past them, averting her eyes.

She spotted the first platform tree just ahead. It
thrust toward the sky, a small copy of the giants sometimes found climbing the west slopes of the Stoneroots. But its bounty would be the same, she hoped. She scraped the crimson gills from beneath the plates that wrapped around the trunk, great saucers as large around as her encircled arms. The gills released a powder, and this she carefully wrapped into a piece of rubbery kelp. The smell of the defile in the sun was a heady stew. The claves avoided the red scars, where the perils were not all known. But Loon was attracted to the fecund smell of decay and growth with its steep spikes of intriguing tastes. The times she had overindulged in the heady spices, she had been sick for days, but even the inevitable headaches they engendered could not keep her from savoring them for the space of an hour.

Someone was watching her. She brought up her sling with one hand while reaching for a stone in her pouch.

It was a mountain lion, a great golden beast staring at her from the edge of the gully. The creature stood rigid as a rock carving. Loon loaded her sling and faced the animal, a short throw away. The lion’s sides swelled in and out as it panted, revealing the sharp ribs of a starving animal. Loon could see the animal’s nose sniffing hard at her, or perhaps at the unsavory smells of the gully. Its mangy fur grew in clumps and hung in spots, ready to fall away. Suddenly, it turned from the lip of the bank and disappeared.

Curious, Loon scuttled to the brink and watched the lion retreat, weaving slightly as it departed, moving onto a flat plain littered with boulders. Out from prickly bushes two cubs sprang to join their mother, batting at her great paws as she plodded away. Loon’s hand twitched as her sling reminded her that Spar would be hungry. She loaded the rock, then stopped. The lioness had slumped into a patch of shade by a rock outcropping and, though she and her cubs were
an easy mark, Loon turned away and saved her rock. Following the bank of the red seam, she watched for other prey as she hurried back to the raft.

She returned with a large snake hung around her shoulders, and Spar made short work of roasting it on the beach, creating the meat-smell he so loved. While he and Marie ate, Loon prepared her gill paste, then dabbed it onto Reeve-boy’s festering wound.

For all that the Sky Claver had fine clothes and wrapped his food in silver paper and flew down from the great space station, he was no match for orthong claws. He festered and sickened like any world-bound claver. His skin sloughed off in the sun and he would likely starve before he learned to eat the meat of animals. All the tales of the deserters were part true and part false. They did live off canned air, Marie said, and they never starved or died of illness in their clave. But they weren’t fat and sleek, as the tales said, and they weren’t afraid of their shadows, and they didn’t have very much big tech, except for the face-thing that helped them breathe. So they were the same as anyone in most respects, and could die despite their tech, despite her prayers to the Lady Over All that Lithia spare this one named Reeve-boy.

As her turn to pole arrived, she spied Marie wiping away the gill paste from the boy’s wound. Loon set the pole down across the raft and approached her. “Leave the salve,” Loon told her.

The old woman sighed. “He needs antibiotics, not your vegetable paste.” She continued to wipe.

“Leave it.”

Marie squinted up at her. “You want him to die?”

“Your grease failed. Time for mine.” Loon braced her feet as the raft pitched on the easy crests and troughs of the sea. She felt Spar’s shadow behind her, backing her up.

Marie rose to her feet, presenting herself as a barrier to Reeve-boy. “Look,” she said. “The wound is infected.
I know you mean well, and you’ve been good to us, but you don’t know the first thing about medicine. Don’t interfere.”

Spar broke in. “How many folk you seen die from orthong cuts, eh?”

“None. And I’m not going to see this one die, either.”

“Put her ashore,” Loon told Spar. She picked up her pole and went back to work. Foolish old woman, without fear of the black puffing death. She turned the raft toward the beach.

“Mr. Spar,” she heard Marie say in an undertone. “This boy … is like a son to me. Let me have his care. I’m begging you.”

He eyed her a moment before saying, “Maybe we let
him
choose—what you say to that?”

“Him? But he can’t think straight. He’s sick, damn it!”

Spar leaned in and spoke into her face. “I know he’s sick. Dying man. Dying wishes. You got no manners for the dying?”

Marie bit at her lip while Spar bent over the prone figure and nudged him awake. “Reeve-boy. You’re dying, you got to know that.”

Reeve-boy’s eyes were open and blinking from the middle of dark circles. “Orthong killed me, that right?”

“That’s the short of it, Reeve-boy. But our women here, they each want to nurse you. Marie, she got her Station magic, and Mam, she got her own medicine. And now you got to choose.” He spoke kindly, Loon noted, not like he once would have spoken to the Sky Claver. “It’s your death, boy. Choose.”

Loon put her pole down and crawled next to him beside Marie.

“Reeve,” Marie said. “Without antibiotics you aren’t going to make it. Tell them.”

“You got to choose,” Spar was saying. “Marie or Mam.”

Reeve closed his eyes as the raft rocked in the brisk chop.

“You see?” Marie said. “He’s delirious.”

Spar bent close to Reeve as he moaned. Then he pushed Marie close, and she put her ear by his lips.

After a few moments the old woman sat back up and looked at Loon with a face as flat and calm as that lion in the gully yonder. “He said Loon,” she whispered. “Said he wants Loon.”

Spar nodded judiciously. “Well, that settles it then.”

Marie turned her flat, predatory look in his direction. Loon knew then that Marie was protecting her cub. But like that other lion, she had no way to do so.

Reeve-boy opened his eyes again and reached out for Loon’s arm. “Take off your clothes,” he said in a hoarse voice.

As Marie sneered, Spar stepped in. “There’ll be none of that talk, boyo. Less you mean for
me
to take ’em off.” He chuckled. “And I don’t mind obliging you, but Marie here, she wouldn’t think much of me in the buff. She already had a tough day.” Spar looked up at Loon, and she scooted next to Reeve, then opened the packet of her salve.

And from that moment, Reeve-boy began to heal, and they poled on down the inland coast heading west to the Tallstory River, where, Loon believed, the currents brought down nurturing silt from somewhere called home.

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