Tainted Trail (23 page)

If he married Indigo, the only way she would ever experience the same wondrous unknown of a child would be by allowing another man to father it.

Rennie tipped up Ukiah's chin to meet his eyes.
Maybe one day you can father a natural child. Hex is dead. If we ever eliminate the Ontongard completely . . . children aren't a complete impossibility.

For a few moments, he was pleased, and then realization slipped in. “So, like my kids, wouldn't the wolf dogs be perfect hosts for Gets?”

Rennie sighed and turned away. “Yes, they are.”

“You made it a Get?” He caught Rennie's arm and pulled him back to face him. “That's what you did, didn't you? You made it a Get! But you said you killed it. As a perfect host, it should have easily survived the infection.”

Touching, skin to skin, he felt Rennie's revulsion and caught a flash of memory: of having the dog before them, animal in intelligence, wolf in nature, Pack in every other regard.

“We couldn't bear letting it live.” Rennie's voice was husky with emotion. “It was like holding a mirror constantly in front of you so you can see the monster that you are.”

Pendleton, Oregon
Sunday, August 29, 2004

Max glowered as Rennie made himself comfortable on the hotel room's floor. In the morning, Max and Ukiah planned to drive out to Jubilee Lake. Sam had volunteered to play native guide, and Max gladly accepted. Rennie said nothing of the trip, but he joined them at breakfast at Shari's, making the normally cheerful waitresses nervous with his dangerous looks.

“This case has nothing to with the Pack.” Max added milk to his coffee until it was tan. “If you come along, you'll probably scare the locals.”

“I came out here to keep an eye on the cub. I can't do that from thirty miles away.”

“I don't suppose I'll get any answers if I asked why he calls Ukiah ‘cub'?” Sam asked the table and received closed looks from all the men. “Okay. That's what I thought. Why doesn't Ukiah take tall, dark, and scary to the Big Sink while Max and I question people at the lake?”

Max glowered some more at Rennie, obviously not happy. Finally, he sighed, “Fine! We'll take both cars.”

But just as they were about to split up, Max pulled Ukiah aside and checked that he had the tracer on.

 

Whereas traveling south from Pendleton to the town of Ukiah had been a slow climb up into steep hills, going east up into the Blue Mountains was a stunning transition. At Weston,
both cars turned off the almost-flat Route 11 and started to climb the first mountain on 204. Within five miles, they rounded a corner for a view that stretched for twenty miles out over the plateau. In another five miles, there was a scenic viewpoint, looking west into the heart of the mountains as if the plateau never existed. Pines leapt up, a hundred feet tall, crowding close to the road, and the wind-swept treeless plain was forgotten. Another ten miles, and they turned off onto a road of packed dirt, and civilization fell behind.

“This is the Oregon I remember,” Ukiah said.

“This part doesn't look much different than when I first saw it,” Rennie said as he gazed out the passenger windows.

Ukiah sensed that Rennie was scanning the mountains for something as they drove along the forest road. “What are you looking for?”

“What I always look for in Oregon.” Rennie continued to gaze out the window. “The scout ship. There's a hole in our memory, of how it came down and where exactly it landed.”

A hole would indicate that Prime had been injured and never recovered the memories. “Do you think it crashed?”

“Prime would have tried to destroy it before it reached Earth. It would make sense that he did something that made the landing rough. They certainly didn't land on the plains.”

“You sure?”

Rennie barked a laugh. “No. We're not sure of anything. It's all mixed up and full of holes. Who knows what happened!”

Max had taught Ukiah problem-solving. Always make sure, he said, you knew what was supposed to happen before you try to determine where things went wrong.

“Well, we know how it should have gone,” Ukiah said. “Hexadecimal—all six of Hex—was to explore the landing site of the mother ship. Check it for geographical anomalies. Secure it against native life, yada, yada, yada.” To steal one of Max's phrases—the memories he shared with Rennie had a complete command list for the mission. “Prime managed to add himself to the crew.” At that time, the Ontongard did not guard from attacks from within. They were, in essence, one sprawling creature. That part of itself would attack the whole
had been unimaginable for the Ontongard. “We can recall the scout ship's approach, and then something must have gone wrong, because after that, Prime only remembers one Hex.”

Rennie grunted an affirmation. “And Prime diverted that one Hex by sending him after the native life to start up a breeding program.”

Ukiah found himself blushing slightly. “Which is where I come in.”

Rennie scratched at his nose, thinking aloud. “Hex needed to get the Mars Rover within seven hundred feet of the mother ship in order to lower the shields. With human technology, the only way Hex could have positioned the Rover with that accuracy was via a transmission from the mother ship itself—sometime before the shields went up—giving its location.”

“Knowing that the mother ship was intact on Mars,” Ukiah followed the line of logic, “Hex probably would have taken the scout ship to Mars if it was capable of lifting off.”

“But instead, he started a breeding program.”

“So the damage was great enough that he committed himself for the duration,” Ukiah said.

“Which leaves the question, where is the scout ship?” Rennie waved at the soaring mountains. “We've never found trace of it. They were aiming for the plateau prairie between the Cascade Mountains and the Blue Mountains. We think they missed, but they might have hit hard, somewhere close to a river, which later eroded the crash site. Or they went down in mountains. Our first outdoor memory from Prime is in the mountains, but he's already airborne and running at that point—and which mountains?”

“Coyote doesn't know?”

Rennie laughed. “Doesn't know, doesn't care. Despite the centuries he's been in human form, he's more wolf than man. What matters to him is
now.
He can't even tell us when Prime made him a Get. He spent countless days drifting as a Pack-blooded wolf, and then, once he started to change into a man, he lived years with the natives, mostly the Nez Percé. They're the ones that named him Coyote. He remembers Lewis and Clark, who came through Oregon in 1805, which gives us at least one date.”

“Who?”

Rennie gave him a hard look. “Think on it a moment, cub.”

So he did, and in Rennie's memories found a boyhood fascination with two explorers, the first white men to find passage to the West Coast.

“So, I was born before 1805.” Ukiah glanced at Rennie. Rennie's boyhood had been in 1840s, shortly before the Civil War. When Coyote had found Rennie dying on a battlefield, Rennie had been in his early twenties. Rennie had “aged” less than a decade since then, but he was clearly a man, whereas Ukiah was arguably still a boy.

“Aye, cub, you're older than I am.”

My life is so weird,
Ukiah thought.

Rennie laughed.

 

Max and Sam in the first car turned off for Jubilee Lake. With Rennie navigating, Ukiah and Rennie continued until they found Forest Road 63, another narrow dirt track winding through the forest. Ukiah measured three miles via the trip meter and pulled off into a rough parking space.

It was the first time Ukiah worked with someone who could sense everything that he could. Rennie found where the women had parked Kraynak's Volkswagen and like two bloodhounds, they followed the grad student's trail. Where the girls separated, Rennie took Rose's track, while Ukiah kept to Alicia's trail.

Judging by the way the women had meandered over the valley, their directions had been not been very clear.

“What exactly were they looking for?”

“A hole in the ground, I think,” Ukiah said.

“Are we talking groundhog-sized? Or something bigger?”

Ukiah stopped on an outscropping of rock. “Something bigger.” He motioned down at the sunken earth before him. “Like that, I'm guessing.”

Rennie bounded easily up the rocks to his side and whistled in his surprise.

Ukiah crouched down, picked up a pebble and tossed it out into the massive rocky depression. He knew it was only because they talked about the scout ship that this seemed to be
a likely crash site. Both the Ontongard and the Pack had scoured Oregon, Washington, and Idaho—surely they would have investigated such an obvious spot.

“First time I've seen this,” Rennie murmured, apparently reading Ukiah's thoughts. “I was on horseback last time I was in these mountains—this spot hasn't been this easily reached before.”

Considering the rough dirt road and hike, Ukiah wouldn't consider it accessible. Surely, though, the ship's landing site couldn't be so well-known that two college students from Pennsylvania could so easily find it. And yet—

“Do you really think it's the ship?” Ukiah picked up fist-sized rock and sent it after the pebble.

“Perhaps.”

“How can we find out if it is the ship?”

“I'd rather leave it lost and buried,” Rennie said, “rather than dig it up and try to keep it safe from the Ontongard
and
the humans.”

Ukiah looked up at him in surprise. “So why look for the ship, then?”

“To make sure that the Ontongard don't have it.”

Ukiah chilled at the thought of the Ontongard having access to the scout ship, its weapons and technology. “Do you think that's why the Ontongard keep coming back to Pendleton? They know where the scout ship is?”

“Actually, I don't think they do. Hex would have focused all his energy into its repair instead of fiddling with the Mars Rover.”

Ukiah frowned at the weak logic. “Using the Rover means humans do all the work of getting to Mars. To repair the scout ship to the point of being able to take off would mean exposing it to lots of curious noses, and not just the Pack's.”

Rennie considered for a long time in silence, staring down at the massive depression that might be hiding the alien ship. Ukiah could sense Rennie's mind sorting through centuries of action and reaction, plots and sabotage, starting with Prime leaving the mother ship. Prime's nature of laying plan within plan was in fact an Ontongard habit, stemming from the fact they could think on multiple subjects at once. Luckily,
Prime's rebellion had instilled in Hex a self-paranoia; the creature mistrusted all its Earth-born Gets and limited his strategies to those conceived by the one wholly alien unit. Still, with hundreds of Gets to carry out his schemes, the sheer number of interwoven plots were staggering.

The Pack simply destroyed anything that smacked of Hex, without trying to step through the alien logic. Rennie now tried to see the greater design.

After a long time of thinking, Rennie said quietly, “Hex wanted
you.
If he had the scout ship, he could repair the ovipositor and make breeders based on his genetics. If he could hope to make a single breeder, he wouldn't need you. I've dealt with his Gets long enough to know that Hex would rather cut off his arm and burn it than to allow something of Prime's to live. Tainted as you are by your father's blood, he would have wanted you only if he had no other choice.”

 

After searching the area thoroughly, Ukiah and Rennie rejoined Max and Sam, who were also calling it a day. All of the current campers claimed that they arrived after Alicia's visit to the Big Sink. There was simply no indication that the graduate students had ever been to the lake.

On the way back to Pendleton, they stopped at the Tollgate Mini Market and Café. The women that owned the store hadn't seen the girls, which, considering Alicia had filled the van on the morning of their trip, wasn't surprising.

Sam used the restroom as the men eyed plaster-cast footprints of Bigfoot hanging on the walls. The older of the two women was telling Max about the Bigfoot sightings when Ukiah's phone rang.

“Oregon.” Ukiah moved off into the darkened café for a little privacy.

“This is Jared Kicking Deer. You wanted to see my grandfather?”

“Yes.”

“If you come out to the farm, you can meet him.”

 

Jesse Kicking Deer was the oldest man that Ukiah had ever seen. His skin folded again and again like a prune's. He sat on the edge of the folding lawn chair, seeming too excited to relax into the green-and-white webbing. Cassidy had claimed that her grandfather was nearly a hundred; Ukiah had expected someone fragile with age. Jesse Kicking Deer radiated health, from thick white hair, sound teeth, and long hard fingernails.

“Is this him?” Jesse asked.

“Yes, Grandpa.” Jared leaned in the doorway of the back porch. He had greeted Ukiah and Max at the front door, shown them through the house to the back porch where Jesse and Uncle Quince waited, and yet paused at the door, as if not wanting to commit fully to their presence. “He thinks he's Magic Boy. We think he might be too.”

Jesse considered Ukiah with fierce dark eyes. “His face is very familiar.” His wrinkled hands came up and moved through smooth hand signs. “The eyes. The nose. It's been so long. I did not think I would forget a face so loved.”

“Father,” Uncle Quince murmured in Nez Percé. “Kee-ji-nah is dead.”

Kee-ji-nah was Cayuse, not Nez Percé. Magic Boy. The liquid syllables struck something deep inside Ukiah that resonated.
Kee-ji-nah. That's my name!

“I saw him,” Jesse replied to his son in Nez Percé while Ukiah sat dumbstruck. “After your brother was born. I hunted elk in the mountains, and I saw him. His hair was matted. His eyes were wild as the wolves. It was Kee-ji-nah. He did not know me. He ran away, frightened.”

“Father, I've seen the
photographs
.” The last word, in English, jarred against the native words Quince used. “He is dead.”