The same tough leaf, with the equally strong and common stripped vine, they used to salvage as much of their modesty as they could, mostly out of deference to the anthropologist. Harker discovered her, with a gun barrel as a weapon, sitting on a rock in the darkness. Achilles was now three-quarters full, and there was at least some light to see with. All of them hoped that they’d be well away before a new moon.
She had, he noticed, gone au naturel. So much for her sensibilities, he thought. It was the last defense; they’d all cast off their boots after discovering that a fairly nasty kind of algae started growing inside them and secreting a toxic irritant on the feet. It was inevitable sooner or later anyway, and the sooner they did it, the sooner their feet would toughen. The first day barefoot, though, had been awful, and tonight wasn’t all that much better.
“No fig leaf?” he asked her, sitting down nearby.
“Why bother? We aren’t hiding anything and those things are a joke when you walk.” She gave a slight chuckle. “It’s funny—somehow it doesn’t seem all that risque. In fact, it feels really comfortable in this climate. Besides, I think if I were going to be raped by any of you guys, it would have happened before now.”
“Not once we saw that bodybuilder’s physique,” he responded in the same light tone. “Where’d you get muscle tone like that? Not in a college classroom, I bet. I haven’t seen a woman with muscles that developed since I once saw Bambi the Destroyer coming out of the shower.”
“Bambi the what?” She laughed.
“Her name’s really Barbara Fenitucci. A real Amazon warrior and a Marine to boot. Always picking on the men, always having to prove she could do anything they could do better and in half the time.”
“Sounds interesting. I’ve known a lot of women like that, but, no, I was never in the Marines and I never wanted to be a man, which is sort of what that’s about. I bet she was a service brat. Marines and the like are really driven as kids. No, I spent a lot of time getting this way, and I’m afraid if I don’t do some regular heavy lifting I’m going to lose part of it. It’s a matter of independence. Of being able to do what you want, go where you want to go, and not live in terror of every guy on the street. I did martial arts first—almost everybody does, I think—and got good enough in a couple of useful disciplines, and I kept it up. Then they opened this training and conditioning program at the university where I was working on my doctorate. I gave it a try and liked it. I weighed in at sixty-three kilos and was bench-pressing more than a hundred and forty kilos before I left to board the Odysseus. Fortunately, they had a good and well-equipped gym on board, mostly for the mercenary twins, and I was able to keep it up. I didn’t want to have to worry about being the only female on the trip.”
He made a guess. “And that’s why you were so upset at yourself on landing? All that, and big razor-sharp claws come up and there are monsters under the sand and the only thing you can do about it is listen to the big guy scream at you to run?”
“Something like that. You can’t believe how cocky you get when you have this much of your body developed. I think I’d forgotten what it was like to be terrified, and there I was, all that crap gone to waste. The first crisis on the new world and I froze in fear.”
“Well, I wouldn’t let that get you,” he told her. “What set me apart in that situation was experience, and in Father Chicanis’s case it was knowledge of what was there and a rifle to deal with it. You’ve been good once we got on solid ground, as good as anybody here.”
She smiled. “Thanks. I needed that, I think.”
“Surprised we haven’t run into any of the locals yet?”
“Not really. There aren’t that many for this whole region, and they are widely scattered in groups of perhaps twenty-five to fifty, no more. I’m revising my theories about what they will be like, though, when we do meet them. This corrosive effect, together with ample and well-distributed food, probably means that they are in fact more primitive, more tribal than I’d thought. I’d really like to find them and find out, although without any supplies I have a feeling getting accepted by them will be tough. Dealing with them might be tougher yet. Usually you can bribe your way to at least safe passage, but I’m not sure we’ll have as good a result now as I’d planned. Not unless Father Chicanis is willing to break up our last remaining artifacts.”
“I think he’ll die rather than give up the communion set,” Harker replied. “So—that’s why you’re along? Expert on dealing with primitives by using old established ways and means?”
“Something like that. And I get to be the first in my profession to actually interact with them. It’s a career maker. If, that is, we meet any of them, and if we manage to get off this rock somehow.”
“You think we’re stuck?”
She shrugged. “What’s the boat we left buried back there made of, and how buried does it have to be? Without the boat, how do we get back to the island? Swim forty-odd kilometers of ocean? I’m not sure I’m up to that. I think that poor man who did the Dutchman’s business was in the same fix. That’s why he broadcast.”
“Yeah, but there’s every evidence from the last part of that recording that something was stalking him,” Harker noted. “And since he was never heard from again, that something probably killed him. Who or what was it?”
“Titans? One of the tribes? Who knows? I think we may find out, that’s all.”
“I’m not so concerned about the long-term as the short-term killer,” he told her. “If they can get this lens weapon to work, they’ll eventually be able to land a ship right here and pick us up. If it doesn’t work, we’re back to square one anyway.”
They sat in silence for a while, and her gaze returned to the moon and stars above.
“Still looking for the grid?” he asked her. “In this moonlight, I doubt if it would show up much at all.”
“Oh, it’s there,” she assured him. “I can sense it somehow, more than see it. It plays over me, gets in my head somehow, makes anything but the here and now seem distant, unimportant.”
“I feel something, too, sometimes,” he admitted. “I think we all do, except Hamille, although who can know for sure about it?”
“Hamille isn’t human. This is designed for us, I think,” she responded, still staring at the stars. “I think it’s more than protection and monitoring. I think it messes with minds. Our minds.”
“What kind of effect does it have on you?” he asked, looking away abruptly as her comments fed a healthy paranoia.
“Interesting effects,” she responded enigmatically. “It stirs up parts of me I’d almost forgotten were there. Not strongly enough yet, but we’ll see.”
He got a vague idea she was talking about and around sexual matters, but he didn’t press it. He was still unaffected enough to consider the implications. If they really were exerting some kind of subtle mass stimulation or hypnosis or whatever, then…