The Mystery of Ireta (36 page)

As Varian approached the nearest, she saw that the windows had been glazed yet when she rubbed away grime, she could barely see through the dense and irregular glass. When her eyes had compensated for the gloom, she could see the interior had been stripped of everything but the stone shelving set into the corners of each room. The only door was made of stout wooden panels, coated with some glossy substance which obviously protected the wood against the depredations of Ireta’s insect life. Set above the handle of the locked door were four metal tumblers, coded to some pattern, for the handle would not move at her touch although the tumblers rolled easily under her thumb. A cursory examination of the other seven buildings told her they were identical: four rooms, two on either side of an entry hall. The windows were too narrow for any but a young child to climb in or out of. With such stoutly built dwellings, why had they moved? There was plenty of room for expansion on the bluff top.

She went beyond the octagon and saw outbuildings, two with chimneys well blackened even after decades of scouring rain. One proved to be a forge and marks on the concrete behind it indicated the complete removal of another installation, as well as the squat thick form of a kiln. What power would they have used for the forge? Water? Up here? No, but there was no shortage of wind! She had become so accustomed to the buffeting of the almost incessant breezes that blew from moderate to gale force through the course of every Iretan day, that she’d almost missed the most obvious and easiest power source.

Paskutti had not been idly bragging when he’d said that he and his band could survive nicely on Ireta. If Aygar was to be believed, and the barbed steel tip of his lance gave fair evidence of metal craftsmanship, they didn’t need the Federated Sentient Planets. Maybe not the FSP, thought Varian, kicking at the mud, but they’d need a larger gene pool or their community risked dangerous inbreeding that could wipe out all they had achieved.

She should reserve her sympathy for her own problem—Kai’s restoration—and she wasn’t getting any help on the bleak butte. But she couldn’t resist the urge to peer into the buildings set apart from the living quarters. They might provide her with a measure of information on the quality of life the mutineers had established for themselves. With metal-working, glass manufacture, windpower, and pottery, they’d achieved a commendable basic standard. One long building, downslope and nearer the luxuriant growth, attracted her interest since it was so obviously set apart from the industrial sites. The door faced the brush and Varian paused, puzzled. Despite the wild profusion of lush vegetation, something about the area struck her as odd. Then she realized that the fruiting trees were placed at regular intervals, and each row comprised different types. Moving closer, she saw metal stakes holding up another form of vine from which thick pods hung: a series of thorny bushes bore huge red berries, then another stand of trees and beyond the trees, against a low retaining wall were smaller plants, weed vines choking them and, on the wall, tucked into niches as if by design, a curious feathery purple moss.

Purple was not her favorite shade after the mold, Varian realized, even as she had to admit that she was looking at an overgrown garden. She turned then to the long hut and observed what she had failed to notice at first—it had no windows. A storehouse for the garden’s produce? Yes, for now that she was closer, she could see the carved panels in the door. Vines, trees, and plants were each so carefully delineated on that door that even someone with little botanical knowledge would be able to identify the specimens once the carvings had been memorized.

What had Aygar said? They had learned a long time ago to balance their diet? Varian recognized the carotene-rich grass from the rift valley that the giffs as well as Tyrannosaurus rex had needed. Turning constantly to check against the door’s carvings, Varian found each of the plants growing in rows in the neglected garden. Divisti, the expedition’s botanist, must have been responsible for that catalog of Ireta’s edible flora.

Varian pushed her way through the overgrowth, gathering fruits which she recognized, until she reached the vine with pods. One split with ripe readiness as she touched it, exposing large pale green beans. The bean had a wholesome smell. She bit, taking the smallest possible morsel to roll about in her mouth, tensing to spit out an unwelcome flavor. But the taste was mealy, the flesh of the bean crisp, but so satisfying that she consumed the contents of the entire pod greedily. She ate as she gathered the beans, as much as her arms could hold. Then she strode back to the sled, depositing her harvest. She had wheeled back toward the garden when she exclaimed in exasperation. Climbing into the sled, she guided it to the garden.

As she picked and plucked, she was careful to take samples from each row of Divisti’s garden, including the leaves or tufts of the various wall plants. She wondered if Divisti had ever thought her garden would one day succor those the heavy-world botanist had once tried to kill. At the foot of the garden, held back by thick staves, Varian came at last to a fine stand of the thick-fuzzy leaves that the giffs had brought her for Kai’s wounds.

“So, the bloodsucker got to you, too, huh?” Varian was subtly pleased that one denizen of this planet caused the heavy-worlders more pain than pleasure.

When the sled was as full as possible, she checked once more that she had a sample of each variety carved on the door of the storage barn. Elated by the unexpected dividend, she set a straight course for the giff palisades, cutting due south and speeded on her way by a smart tail wind.

She was astonished, then, no more than five minutes in the air, to see the recognizable figure of Aygar trotting along a twisting ravine.

Two thoughts occurred to her at once, and she diverted the sled to come up behind him.

“Aygar, I must speak with you,” she said, and sighting a ledge beyond him, settled the air sled, waiting until he came up to her before she slid down to his level. “I’ve been trying to find you. Base reported to me. One of our party has been attacked by some—some—thing . . .”

“Which sucks blood?” he asked quickly.

“You know it?”

“We call them fringes.”

“Fringes?” Varian masked her shock with an understandable curiosity. Surely those aquatic life-forms that Terilla had named “fringes” had not been amphibious. She shuddered with revulsion.

“They come in a variety of sizes,” Aygar went on, “are warmth seekers and fasten onto their prey, preferably lying on it, otherwise enveloping it between their two halves—”

“Their what?”

“I don’t know what your training is, Rianav, but surely you have seen strange life-forms before Ireta.” Aygar knelt, taking one of his knives to draw a fringe in the dust. “They move by collapsing the parallelograms of the side: they have two digits here and here, and can use them to clasp their envelope tightly about the victim, if it is alive. If not, they settle on it, and eat away!” He shrugged with indifference. “One can usually smell them coming but, of course, you haven’t been here long enough to know, have you?”

“Two days,” Varian found herself answering far more casually than she felt because, again, that curious reticence held her: a reticence evidently not stemming from Discipline. “But, if you know about these fringe things, you know how to treat them?”

“The victim’s still alive?” This gave Aygar some surprise.

“Yes, but unconscious and delirious, bleeding profusely from the worst of the . . . puncture wounds.”

“I thought exploratory teams were equipped with belts to protect them from—”

“I don’t know whether his belt was activated or not,” said Varian severely in a tone that implied she intended to find out if any basic precaution had been neglected.

“If he doesn’t die in the first few hours, then the punctures reached no vital areas and he’ll survive. If you’re near the original campsite, find a squat thick-trunked plant with leaves like this: they are covered with a soft down or fuzz.” He neatly sketched the leaf with which the giffs had supplied them. “Gather the thickest ones, squeeze them directly over the punctures and keep repeating the treatment until the wounds seal.”

“I’m told he’s running a very high fever . . .”

“Use an antipyretic, of course. When that didn’t reduce the fever, one of the original members of our group used a parasitic purple moss which usually grows on the north side of the green plum or yellow-juice melon trees. There ought to be some nearby. Boil the moss, let it steep, and get it down the man’s throat. Tastes vile but it will reduce fever.”

Aygar rose, shifted the burden of meat on his shoulders and started off.

“End of interview,” Varian murmured to herself. She was too relieved by the information he’d given her to take offense at his curt departure or his lack of real surprise at seeing her again so soon the same day.

She scrambled up the side of the ravine and back into the safety of the sled as fast as if a fringe had been homing in on her blood warmth.

Terilla’s fringes! The same aquatic life-form that the giffs took care to avoid when caught in their grass nets. And if the creature was basically amphibious, no wonder it had lasted a long time after the other water-breathers had died. But that had been a small creature, like an almost transparent kerchief. Yet Varian recalled all too vividly the voracity with which the sea fringes had flung themselves after the reflection of the sled on the water. She stared at her hand a moment as if she could imagine what that same fringe could do, folding itself into a sucking envelope . . .

She shook her head: she was suffering the depression and enervation of the post-Discipline state. She reached for more of the pods and munched slowly at the beans: they were even more satisfying than the sweet fruit.

Purple moss, huh? That same purple moss that had grown in Divisti’s wall, no doubt. She wondered if she’d taken enough, but at least she knew what to harvest.

The trip was exceptionally profitable though one discovery displeased her a great deal: forty-three years was a long time for
ARCT-10
to have remained missing. And not long enough for a small sea creature to develop into something large enough to attack a man. To be sure, the larger species might have existed on Ireta when the expedition had first landed; they’d barely explored the continental basement shield area before the mutiny.

Varian shuddered again, reminding herself that one reason for her revulsion of the fringes must in part stem from her experience with the blood-sucking Galormis—by day so friendly, by night deadly.

The rain cleared and the omnipresent mists dispersed as the setting sun took a final look at the world it had spawned. The giffs were behind and above her, their golden selves glorious against the muted haze of the western twilight. She hadn’t noticed them when she was on the compound bluff, nor when she had intercepted Aygar. Nonetheless she felt they’d made the entire journey discreetly within sight of her.

Krims! but she was tired. Now, if she could keep her wits about her, and the light held long enough to land inside the cave . . . Other giffs whirled up from their vantage points to escort her the last few kilometers, and she was touched by the courtesy, if that’s what it was. Had the giffs, as well as Lunzie, worried over her long day’s absence?

She made a good landing, considering she was aiming her sled into a dark hole, faintly illuminated on the left by a small campfire. She let the sled down at the far right, bumping just once as she misjudged the uneven stone floor.

“Is Kai improving?” she called as she flipped open the canopy.

“Yes, but we’ve run out of leaves again,” Lunzie said, rising from her position beside Kai’s bundled form.

“I’ve more and food besides. And a helluva lot to tell you.”

“Any equipment?”

“No, but I have a specific remedy for that fever.” Varian took the purple moss from the piles of food in the sled, offering it to the medic who accepted it skeptically.

“This?” Lunzie smelled it. “Why?”

“Highly recommended by a local resident.” Varian grinned wearily at Lunzie’s reaction. “Yes, I ran one down. Oh, it’s all right. I made out that I was one of a relief team. He’s Bakkun’s grandson.” She offered the information with a huge grin, as if it were the best joke in the galaxy.

Lunzie fingered the moss for a few more seconds before she searched Varian’s face. “Grandson!”

“Yes, we cold-slept forty-three years.”

“Well, it’s not much longer than I’d estimated,” Lunzie said, and Varian was deflated by the medic’s calm acceptance. “What else have you here?” Lunzie peered at the dark mounds in the sled.

“Everything’s edible, and this sort of pod bean tastes better than the fruit. Just how
is
Kai?” she asked, struggling out of the sled and trying not to stagger too much as she crossed to Kai’s supine body. “Has he recovered consciousness yet?” She all but collapsed beside him.

“No, but the fever is down a little. Hold still a moment,” Lunzie said. Before Varian realized what the medic was doing, she felt the spray icily stinging her arm.

“You shouldn’t waste it. I’ve so much . . .”

“It’s no waste,” Lunzie was saying, her voice getting farther away as consciousness left Varian. “You can’t see yourself but you’re drained white. Did you use Discipline all day long?”

5

V
ARIAN
came awake by degrees: the first one being her awareness of voices in low earnest conversation, either too far from her for the individual words to be audible or too soft, to keep from rousing her. She thought to get up, but it proved difficult to assemble the energy. Could she have been in cold sleep again? No! She was resting, rather comfortably, on a bed of springy boughs, not the flat plasfloor of the space shuttle or the dust of the cave. She felt an occasional breeze waft across her face and exposed hands.

She didn’t feel so much tired as disinterested. Yet, in the back of her mind, a spark started with the observation: she had so much to tell Lunzie. Sneaky of her to knock Varian out like that.