Spotty realized the situation and tried to suggest a middle ground. “Froggy can stay with the Father,” she suggested. “They will be good support for each other. Littlefeet and me will go with you.”
N’Gana wasn’t all that sure he liked that. “Now, hold on! You said yourselves you don’t know what you’re getting into but it’s all bad. I’m not sure I want to worry about you two when we’re this close.”
Littlefeet drew himself up to his full height, even though he barely came up to the colonel’s neck, and said, “We have survived all our lives on this world. You have not. We know the dangers and how to stalk the tall grass and dark groves. We will be no burden!”
None of them really thought that they would after that. Still, one problem showed up almost immediately.
“You mean neither of you can swim?” Harker was amazed. That seemed such an obvious survival skill.
“Nobody knew how,” Littlefeet replied. “There were tales that people could swim in the water in the old days, but there was nobody to teach us.”
Time was far too limited to give them lessons, but a variation of Littlefeet’s own idea of river travel wasn’t all that hard, as it turned out. Very near were some good-sized pieces of wood that had been blown down in the storms long ago, and with a little work and trimming here and there they made a serviceable float. And the log did float, a bit awkwardly, with Littlefeet and Spotty clinging to it for dear life as Harker and Socolov took turns guiding and pushing it.
Much of the crossing turned out to be less swimming than navigating through river muck. This was a brand-new channel and a delta that was still forming. It was shallow in most places but had a sticky mud bottom that threatened in turns to drag them down or pull them under if they walked the bottom.
By the coming of darkness they hadn’t quite made the opposite shore and were pretty well stranded on a wet, muddy bar a few meters out of the water. Their meager rations were long since exhausted; it would be a hungry and desolate night.
The storm didn’t help, either; it put a huge amount of water into the river in a very short period of time and threatened to wash them off their precarious refuge. Finally, the storms passed as they always did and the sky began to clear.
They were all covered in mud, and there wasn’t much that could be done about it in the dark. So, they just lay there and mostly stared up at the stars or dozed uneasily.
“The grid is easy to spot tonight,” Harker commented to Kat. “Maybe it’s just being out here with nothing obscuring my vision for a couple of kilometers, but it’s a lot clearer.”
She nodded. “I think if we can break one of the anchors, that whole thing will collapse, and with it their immediate hold on this continent. I wish I knew how to do that.”
“You still think the grid’s more than just a surveillance system?”
“I’m sure it is. I think it’s managing the whole continent and everybody on and in it. Their precious giant flowers, maybe even the way the so-called survivors are developing.”
“Huh?” He was interested.
“The more I think of those Hunters, and the more I talk to the two here, the more certain I am that the Titans are allowing the Families to survive, at least for a while, for some purpose. Maybe breeding stock for pets or guards or whatever. Hard to say. I’ve felt it since a few days after we arrived. Felt my own body respond to it. Talking with Spotty only confirmed it.”
“You’ve felt it?” He knew that she’d been talking about this in some kind of nebulous terms, but this was the first time she was willing to articulate her feelings.
“Yes. You know, like most girls, I had the implant at fifteen and since then I haven’t worried about pregnancy or suffered more than a very mild and almost forgettable period. But a few days ago, I could feel it being canceled out. I started to have feelings I hadn’t had very strongly in a long time, and hadn’t particularly wanted, and I became aware of going on a fairly strict cycle. Spotty says that her periods are bloody and one’s due in a couple of days, and I’m beginning to suspect that I’m going to face the same thing. That’s going to be bad enough, but after Sergeant Mogutu and Father Chicanis’s arm I can handle it, I think. It’s—after that. From talking to Spotty, I get the impression that for most of their cycle the women had little or no sex nor much urge to do so, and that the men didn’t push it. That’s unnatural in that kind of primitive setting. But every month, they had a period of time when that’s all they wanted to do. Gene, that’s like animals in heat.”
“Well, that could have just developed along with their other oddball notions,” he suggested.
“No, I don’t think so. It’s more specific than that. And since, as we said about the Hunters, these kinds of mutations—in this case a throwback characteristic—would be unlikely in large numbers in so short a time, it had to be deliberate. But the Families weren’t ever captives of the Titans, nor did they spring from there. Conclusion: they are being kept in the mud deliberately. And that is the mechanism. It doesn’t have to be specific. If they’ve identified the latent genes, they could just turn them on. It’s a lot easier than engineering creatures like the Hunters, which may just be out there to keep the `normal’ population numbers under control.”
“I liked it better when we thought they ignored us completely,” Harker said.
“Yeah, me too, now. But I don’t think they have any sense of us as individuals, let alone equals. I don’t think they think that way at all. I think they’re just playing games or experimenting or whatever with whoever and whatever they happen to have around. And that now includes us.”
That thought was always on his mind. And, he now realized, it was even more on hers. If she was right, they had very little time to complete their mission before the grid introduced some compelling and inconvenient distractions.
It wasn’t a big deal to make it the rest of the way once morning arrived, and all concerned were more than happy to get underway. They were hungry, thirsty, and exposed.
Kat didn’t want to talk about it, but she’d slept very little overnight and had been nervously watching fuzzy egg-shaped balls of light dart back and forth in the distance, coming from and going to the very area they were headed for. Many times she worried that one would change course and notice them, all in the open on the mud bank, but, thank God, none did.
Littlefeet had had the same kind of night. He didn’t wonder about the grid, which had always been there, or about the effects it might be having on him and Spotty. He did, however, worry about those fuzzy eggs speeding back and forth. Something in a corner of his mind sensed them. He could even, to some extent, link with them or with whatever was driving their craft and see a bit of what they saw and hear a bit of what they thought. Of course, none of their thoughts made any sense at all. It was just images and confusion, but it had an ugly, unclean feel to it every time. Like the anthropologist, he was very happy to get off that bar and back onto land.
Finding some squash and melons was relatively easy; there were also several pools of reasonably clear water that was useful for washing off the mud, although none of them felt they would ever get all the stuff off.
Having Littlefeet and Spotty as scouts proved very valuable, although somewhat embarrassing as well. Both of them were able to vanish and blend into the tall grasses and groves almost at will, and then reappear with barely a sound to report on what was ahead.
What was ahead now was the ruins of Sparta.