"With all your understanding of the human condition, is this the best solution you can find?" Harald sneered.
"I am saddened," said Rhodane. "But I understand."
"Get up, Orduval," Yishna urged. "The mount is not so far."
He was lying on his side, and the salty taste in his mouth was blood from where he had bitten his tongue. It occurred to him that in his weakened condition he might not even need the pills, for the next fit might kill him. He struggled to his feet and moved on.
"Pathetic, weak…are you sure you are one of us, Orduval?" Harald taunted.
It was so unfair. He wanted to cry, but his body lacked sufficient moisture to allow him tears. Immediately after the moment of self-pity, he grew angry. Yes, pathetic, weak, but what other recourse did he have? Staying there in the asylum was no life, and the fits so disrupted his thinking that he could pursue no selected subject as deeply as he wished. He could have chosen to just keep on existing, but to him that was displaying weakness. He cursed and shook his head…and his siblings fragmented into the night. Clasping his failing body under an iron will, he forced himself onwards. Hours later, when his boot finally came down on stone, he considered that a victory, allowed himself a celebratory drink of water, then began to climb the rocky slope ahead. Hundreds of feet above the desert, weariness finally clubbed him. He drank once again, then curled up in a sandy hollow in the rock, and slept.
Morning; the sun rougeing the horizon and glimmer wings twinkling in the twilight. Up on his knees, Orduval drank more and now felt ravenously hungry. New day, new perspective? He felt suddenly optimistic, as if he could continue living. But this feeling was precisely why he had walked out here, the previous day and night, since there could never be any return. He stood and peered up the slope above him. He would climb to the very top, watch the desert for a while, and then ease his way gently from life with the pills. But the moment he moved, dizziness washed through him, and it was on unsteady legs he began to negotiate the slope. And with a degree of reluctance—where was his moment of clarity? That strangeness during the night was already fading in memory. So unfair—
Blackness slammed him down.
Orduval woke to utter agony. Perhaps his suicidal impulse was working, with him climbing such a difficult slope when he suffered from fits. With vision blurring he gazed at the shards of bone poking from his right shin, the dislocated fingers of his left hand, the rips in his clothing and the blood. The sun, now shining straight down on him, burned acidically into his wounds, and thirst lay like a twisted knot inside him. His water carrier was nowhere in sight, but maybe he could summon up enough saliva to swallow the pills without water. He groped into his pocket with his right hand, searching for the pill tube. Couldn't find it. Summoning the will to lift his head and look, he saw the pocket was torn open. He moaned with self-pity, then the ensuing anger drove him to crawl on. At least he could find some shade where the sun did not burn so.
Harald came to taunt him, the sun a halo around his furnace head; Rhodane came to sympathise, and Yishna to offer pragmatic advice. Utrain called him in to supper and stood some way to one side, holding out a chilled glass of fruit juice. Memories surfaced and fled and another fit took him away for a while. How many hours? How many hours did he make animal sounds of pain? Shade then…cool…and was that trickling water he heard? He lay still, sliding in and out of consciousness. A kind of relief settled on him, and a calm, for he felt the worst suffering had passed and death was now coming to embrace him. The hallucinations seemed to lose their potency…but for one appearing near the end. His fevered mind painted a metal beast out of surviving biological files from Earth, squatting at the mouth of the cave in which he lay.
"Screw non-intervention and screw Geronamid," grumbled the silver tiger. "I'm not going to let you die, Orduval."
6
The colonists of Brumal required very few adaptations—and those mostly concerning toughening their bodies to the acidic environment and a mild amphidaption to their watery surroundings. Their leaders instituted building programmes—quickly setting up a domed encampment much like the one we set up at Transit. Exploration led to the discovery of deep cave systems, huge forests and massive river systems. The leaders were preparing to build their communal and socially just isocracy, whereupon they would of course relinquish control. However, then the first out-gassing occurred upon the first close pass of the planet Sudoria, and for frantic days the Brumallians thought our predecessors here were gas-attacking them from orbit. But then they discovered, in the mountains, the geothermal vents spewing out pure chlorine gas. The atmosphere became rapidly intolerable, and their technology began to corrode and decay around them—the landing craft they had so congratulated themselves on retaining becoming unusable within a matter of weeks. Salvaging what they could, they retreated into the shelter of the cave systems. The first Brumallians—as we know them—did not step outside until seventy years later. What changes they made to themselves and their society in the intervening period we know to have been radical, and occurred almost certainly because they never managed to lock their fanatics outside like we did.
— Uskaron
McCrooger
Injury hunger was again churning up my insides by the time we reached the bottom of the brick-lined shaft. It persisted because of the broken bones I had suffered aboard the escape-pod, and was exacerbated by the constant physical abuse this environment subjected me to. If I did not eat something soon, IF21 would kill me or I would change horribly. The change would begin by me starting to go a little crazy, then chewing plates would begin to harden inside my tongue and its tip begin to hollow prior to it turning into the feeding mouth of a leech. I would then turn violent, and it would be others who would die.
"I need something to eat," I informed Rhodane.
She glanced at me, then after a moment removed her visor. Dropping it into a pocket in her belt, she then pushed back her hood to release tousled blonde hair. I noted how her dark skin displayed a greenish cast, the same hue even evident in the whites of her eyes. Hard skin ran along the line of her jaw bone, divided into segments like the scales on a reptile's tail, and ran up before her ear to terminate in rough fibrous patches.
"You'll be provided for once we reach our destination," she said.
I kept my complaints to myself and hoped we would reach there soon. Right then I did not feel up to frittering away time by asking how she managed to breathe atmosphere that would leave any other Sudorian writhing, coughing and retching on the ground.
Riveted steel gates opened to admit us to an underground marina. Biolights clustered on the rocky ceiling a hundred feet above, and the chamber ahead was packed with all manner of watercraft moored to floating jetties. Leading off from this chamber were numerous tunnels, some containing canals with paths down either side, and some leading directly to stairs. Far to my left I observed cargo being craned from a barge onto motorised pallets, which in turn were driven by Brumallians right into a huge lift, whether to go up or down I could not guess. As we chugged through into the marina, one craft nearby particularly drew my attention. The thing looked alive, insectoid, with legs folded along its sides, antennae sprouting from the weirdly shaped bowsprit, and a rudder that looked more like a tail than anything else.
I pointed. "What's that?"
"Something made before the War," Rhodane replied.
I mentally compared the biolights and those pumps on the surface with all the other simple mechanisms up on the surface and down here. When a society adopted the biotechnology route, its results tended to fill every niche, gradually displacing all those objects and processes that used to be the products of plain manufacturing. On a world called Hive, right on the far edge of the Polity, the AIs only kept passive watch, for that world had fallen under the control of another race (another story) and the small human population there was ruled by the CGs, or Chief Geneticists. Once, when visiting there, I saw an organism whose sum purpose was to produce nails and screws. I asked the designer of this thing, whose life work it had been, why for so prosaic a purpose she had made something so complex and in need of such nurturing, when simple machines were easily available for the same task. She replied, "But simple machines cannot be bred to replace themselves." I guess she had a point.