Simple prairie hunters who carried radios.
I shook my head to clear it. Explanations would come eventually… or else they wouldn't. Unsolved puzzles were a permanent frustration of the job.
At last the spearmen disappeared behind a copse of trees and I waved for Oar to join me. She crossed the creek with the scuba breather in her mouth, even though it couldn't have much air left in it. I didn't say anything — if she was happier to get air from a machine rather than holding her breath for the few seconds the water was over her head, so be it. The little tank was self-charging, given enough solar energy and access to air; in twenty-four hours it would be usable again.
From the top of the bank, I led us straight to the nearest clump of trees, to make sure we were shielded from the spearmen's eyes — even though they were more than a klick away, the prairie allowed for long sight-lines. The men had come from this direction; we found their footprints in the dirt when we stopped to collect ourselves.
One good thing about people as dense as glass: they leave deep, clear footprints.
"Who were those people?" Oar blurted when we were safely under the trees.
"I was going to ask you the same question," I answered. "You don't know who lives in this area?"
"No. I thought…" She stopped herself. "I thought something very foolish."
Her face was troubled; I suspected I knew why. Oar might have believed she and her ancestors were the only people in the world. She had seen the transmission from Chee and Seele talking about another city to the south, but she had dismissed that as an Explorer lie. The three Skin-Faces may have been the first strangers she'd seen… the first non-Explorers anyway. Their presence upset her more than they upset me. They were proof she wasn't unique.
I didn't belabor the subject. "You said you came this way once before… when you decided to follow the other Explorers. You didn't see the Skin-Faces?"
"No."
"But you did get this far?"
"Yes, Festina. The great river where I stopped is still ahead."
I frowned. Why hadn't she seen Skin-Faces on her last trip? Had she just been lucky? Or were the three spearmen outside their usual territory? Maybe they were the only people of their kind here on the plains; or maybe there was a tribe of thousands, but they usually stayed south of the great river Oar talked about.
Maybe we were walking straight into the arms of a horde who had already killed one set of Explorers and now wore their skins.
Jelca? Ullis?
I gritted my teeth. "Let's get moving," I said. "But keep your eyes open for trouble."
"I am ready, Festina."
She swung her silver axe to her shoulder. I couldn't tell if the gesture was meaningful, or if she was simply getting ready to move out. Did she understand that her axe could be a weapon, or did she only see it as a tool for clearing trees?
I shivered. Spears. Axes. Weapons.
Feeling the weight of the stunner in my hand, I headed off at Oar's side.
Night on the Plains
The footprints of the spearmen had come from the southwest; therefore I headed southeast, setting a brisk pace until the depths of dusk. We camped for the night in a stand of a dozen trees — large enough to conceal us from prying eyes, but small enough that we still had a clear view in all directions.
Before we went to sleep, I tuned the Bumbler's intruder scan to cover the maximum possible area. With so much ground to cover, the Bumbler wouldn't be as sensitive — it would probably overlook snakes, for example, especially ones moving slowly — but it would detect glass spearmen at almost a klick away.
Frankly I didn't give a damn about snakes that night… even rattlers.
When sleep finally came, my dreams were ugly: Yarrun as a Skin-Face, tattered flesh hanging from his disfigured jaw. He tried to kill me with a spear, or maybe it was Oar's axe; I couldn't keep my attention on the weapon with that ravaged face in front of me. As sometimes happens in dreams, it kept repeating itself ineffectually — Yarrun would lunge and I would dodge, much too slowly. The weapon came in, but nothing happened, as if my mind didn't care whether the blow actually landed. The moment passed, then the whole thing started again: Yarrun attacking again and again, with both of us sluggish, as if slowed by water.
It was a tiring dream… like doing hard work hour after hour. Eventually I woke, still in darkness. I lay on my back and stared at the stars for a long time. Maybe the dream really happened then: when I assembled the random nonsense floating through my mind and interpreted it as Yarrun attacking. Some psychologists claim that's the way dreams work — invented after the fact, when you try to impose order on the mental chaos. Perhaps I owed it to Yarrun to dream about him. Who knows?
If I thought about Yarrun, I would cry. If I thought about Chee, I would probably cry too. If I thought about Jelca… I wouldn't cry, but it wouldn't help my mood.
In the end, I passed the time devising ways to fight people made of glass. How to punch them without breaking my hand. Where to kick for maximum effect. Whether their greater density made them harder or easier to take down with a leg sweep. And the perennial question of any martial artist raised under League of Peoples's law: how to batter opponents into unconsciousness without the risk of killing them.
No one has ever answered that question to my satisfaction. That made it a good topic for thought in the restless night… letting my mind swirl around the possibilities until finally, sleep took mercy on me.
Dragons
There was frost the next morning — a white feathered coating across the broad green of the prairie. Oar considered it an aesthetic improvement; she also enjoyed the way her breath turned to steam when she huffed out.
"I have become a dragon," she told me. "Haahhhhh! I am breathing fire."
"How do you know about dragons?" I asked.
"My sister told me."
"Before or after she met the other Explorers?"
"I cannot remember."
Idly, I wondered if her sister heard about dragons from Jelca and Ullis, or if the dragon myth was so old, these people remembered it from long-ago days on Earth.
Less idly, I wondered if dragons weren't a myth on Melaquin: if there really were fire-breathing creatures, created by bored bioengineers. Exposed out here with open space in all directions, would we suddenly see a flying giant in the sky?
Sometimes I hate the way an Explorer's mind works.
The River
We reached the great river shortly after noon, having seen no further sign of glass-people. Although the day had started clear, gray clouds stole in throughout the morning, making the sky morosely overcast. The river was none too cheerful either: half a klick wide, muddy, and festooned with deadfalls. Every dozen meters or so, bare branches protruded from the water, remnants of trees that had fallen upstream, floated a while, then run aground in shallows. Here and there, larger logs lurked under the surface, their slime-coated wood a jaundiced yellow.
"I do not like this river," Oar said.
"Because it came close to drowning you?"
"It is also mean and spiky."
The spiky bits — the deadfalls — worried me too. Before seeing the river, I had planned to cross using some suitably floatable log: Oar would cling to the log, while I dog-paddled to push it from one bank to the other. Now I realized that was easier said than done. Finding a log wasn't the problem; we could chop down a tree from the many stands dotting the shore. However, threading the log through the erratic palisade of deadwood, without running afoul of sunken obstacles… that would take luck.