Puska’s face contorted, watching the lonat’s twitches subside into limp stillness. "Are you really going to eat that?"
"Consider the alternative," Ha’anala said, shooting a foot out to grip Puska’s ankle. "Oh, Puska! Someone was joking!" she cried when Puska jumped and wrenched her leg free.
"Well, don’t. Don’t ever joke like that!" Puska shuddered. "If you’d seen what I’ve seen in Mo’arl—" Ha’anala’s mouth dropped open and Puska stopped, embarrassed by her own self-referential crudity. I really have gotten bad, she thought. "Sorry," she apologized and held out a hand for the lonat, holding her breath as she scraped the scales from its legs. "Someone thinks such jokes are in very poor taste."
"Someone thinks lonati are in very poor taste," Ha’anala muttered, biting off a nasty little haunch when Puska handed the thing back to her. The main virtue of lonati was that they were easy to catch. Both Ha’anala and her father were used to the small, poor prey they could sometimes capture to supplement offerings of "traditional meat," as it was delicately re — ferred to, but eating was always a hurried, furtive task.
"What’s it like in the cities?" Ha’anala asked, trying to divert Puska’s horrified fascination with the tiny carcass.
"You don’t want to know," Puska told her with evident disgust, and left to find herself some rainberries for breakfast.
THEY PRESSED ON, PUSKA INCREASINGLY EXASPERATED, HA’ANALA ALMOST as irritable. Traces of Isaac’s passing had been trampled by forest things—sweating, panting, defecating in the humid heat—and she lost the scent repeatedly as his path veered unexpectedly toward patches of fruiting bush. Even when she caught his course again, it was mingled with clouds of vraloj pollen and the stench of rotting plants, and difficult to follow. By their fourth day on the trail, Puska was complaining bitterly and continuously, and stopped to forage with resentful thoroughness while Ha’anala fumed and clawed under logs for bitter grubs, silent and ravenous and more determined with every passing moment to run Isaac to ground and haul him back by his ankle.
"One more day," Puska warned that night. "Then we’re going back. You are too hungry—"
"Isaac will be even hungrier," Ha’anala insisted, for she had never seen Isaac feed himself and had begun to hope that he would weaken so that they could overtake him.
But his dung told her otherwise. In the absence of those who had cared for him since infancy, Isaac was managing rather well, Ha’anala realized. His bowels could stand a Runao’s diet and he had probably watched Runa foraging, attentively if obliquely; he understood what was edible and knew how to find it. So now he feeds himself, Ha’anala thought, remembering the stories about how Isaac had begun to walk one day and to sing one day and to type one day. He evidently rehearsed each new skill in his mind until he was certain he could do it, and then simply did.
Has he been planning to leave? Ha’anala wondered that night as she drifted off to sleep. What does he think he’ll find? But then she thought, He’s not searching. He’s escaping.
THEY SLEPT BADLY THAT NIGHT, AND AWOKE TO A THUNDERING DOWNPOUR that made travel impossible. Still unwilling to admit defeat, Ha’anala sat at the edge of the woods, staring disconsolately at a limitless plain, her nostrils flaring with the effort to retain Isaac’s scent even as it dissolved into the dirt, churned by fat drops and mixed with the scent trails of prairie herds. Even Puska was quiet.
"Gone," Ha’anala whispered that evening, as the wet, gray light dwindled. "Someone has lost him."
"He lost himself. You tried to find him," Puska said softly. She put an arm around Ha’anala and rested her head on the Jana’ata’s shoulder. "Tomorrow we will go home."
"How can I tell Sofia?" Ha’anala asked the darkness. "Isaac is gone."
28
Giordano Bruno
2066–2069, Earth-Relative
"YOU’RE JOKING,"JOHN INSISTED.
Fat Frans looked up balefully from his plate. "Is suicide still considered a sin?"
"It depends—. Why?"
"Well, for the sake of your theoretically immortal soul, I’ll give you some advice," said Frans. "Never get into a plane piloted by Emilio Sandoz."
Colorful exaggeration, John thought, and pushed his own plate aside. "He can’t be that bad!"
"I’m telling you, Johnny, I’ve never seen anyone with less natural ability," said Frans, somewhat belatedly swallowing a mouthful of tilapia and rice. "Nico, tell Don Gianni how long it took you to learn to fly the lander."
"Three weeks," said Nico from his seat in the comer. "Don Carlo says the landers practically fly themselves, but I had a hard time with the navigation programs."
John winced. Emilio had been working on this for a month.
"His brain must be completely crammed with languages. As far as I can tell," said Frans, adding some salt to the rice, "there is not one spare synapse available for flight training. Look, I admire perseverance as much as the next man, but this is pointless. Even D. W. Yarbrough gave up on him. Know what it says in the first mission’s records?" Frans paused, chewing, and then recited, " ’As a pilot, Father Sandoz is one hell of a linguist and a pretty fair medic. So I am taking him off flight training and assigning him to permanent passenger status, to avoid getting anybody killed.’ " Frans shook his head. "I thought I had a better chance with him because the new landers are almost entirely automated, but Sandoz is so terrible, it’s eerie." He scooped up another forkful of fish and peered over mounded cheeks at John. "Do something, Johnny. Talk to him."
John snorted. "What makes you think he’ll pay any attention to what I say? Apart from reaming me out for some damned mistake in Ruanja subjunctive, Emilio hasn’t said two words to me in the past eight weeks." It was hard not to be hurt, actually. Drugged or sober, Sandoz would let no one near him. "Where is he now?" John asked Frans.
"He practices in his cabin. I can’t even monitor him anymore—it’s too awful to watch."
"All right," said John. "I’ll see what I can do."
THERE WAS NO ANSWER TO THE FIRST KNOCK, SO JOHN BANGED HARDER.
"Shit!" Emilio yelled without opening the door. "What!"
"It’s me—John. Lemme in, okay?"
There was a pause, and the sound of the door latch rattling. "Shit," Sandoz said again. "Open it yourself." When John did, Sandoz was standing with the full-coverage VR visor shoved back on his forehead like a conquistador’s helmet.
John slumped at the sight of him. He was encrusted with equipment, the VR gloves overlaying his braces, the skin under his eyes purplish with chronic fatigue. "Oh, for God’s sake," John said, tact forgotten. "Emilio, this is stupid—"
"It’s not stupid!" Emilio snapped. "Did Frans send you? I don’t give a damn what he thinks. I have to learn this! If I just didn’t have all this crap on my hands—"
"But you do have all that crap on your hands, and I still can’t get that left brace to work right, and the controls in the lander are even harder than the VR sims! Why can’t you just let—"
"Because," Emilio said, cutting him off with soft precision, "I’d rather not depend on anyone else to get me off the planet."
John blinked. "Okay," he said finally, "I get it."
"Thank you," Emilio said sarcastically. "You may recall that the last time I was on Rakhat, the cavalry was a little late riding to the rescue."
John nodded, conceding the point, but still in the mood to argue. "You look awful," he said, picking a fight. "Has it occurred to you that maybe if you got some rest, you might do better? When the hell do you sleep?"
"If I don’t sleep, I can’t dream," Emilio told him curtly, and shoved his door closed, leaving John alone in the passageway, staring at its blank metal surface.