He stopped. Straight ahead of him now was a sandstone bluff, low, eroded, sticking out of the ground, a typical Arduan feature. And beside it, a figure, a single human being. He, she, was crouched by the bluff, digging into the ground with one hand—no, drinking, he saw, there must be a spring there, a pool.
He walked steadily forward. He held the crossbow at his side, loosely, his finger away from the trigger. He didn’t call out.
Soon enough the figure by the rock bluff spotted him. A slim woman, she stood up straight. She wore no shoes, trousers that were the cut-down remains of an orange jumpsuit, a black shirt that looked like half an astronaut’s uniform, and a homemade coolie hat made of stem bark, not unlike his own. She had lost one arm, amputated above the elbow, he saw, shocked. The tattoos on her face were solid black slabs, and seemed designed to emphasise the glare of her pale blue eyes.
He knew her. She was Delga, who he’d known on the ship, and on Mars before that. The snow queen of Eden.
Delga grinned at him. “Hello, ice boy.”
Chapter 44
Having met, they had to decide to go one way or the other. Yuri chose to walk west with Delga, towards her group, which she called “the mothers”, rather than back towards Mardina.
“Only a few klicks,” she said.
“Yeah. We’re further away than that.” That was a lie; in fact Mardina and Beth were a lot closer. His instinct was to obscure, to hide, to protect. Of course she might know all about his little group already.
Delga had aged, and life on Per Ardua had evidently toughened her; she looked scrawnier, more wrinkled, but strong, leathery. Her tattoos hadn’t faded, her face was just as blade-like, just as threatening. Despite the loss of that arm he was quite sure she’d have weapons available. As, indeed, he had.
He was trying to work through the shock. Just encountering another human being, any other human, here on this static world, changed everything. And now it turned out to be Delga.
Delga’s face was a tattooed mask, under a scalp shaven in elaborate whorls. Yuri barely knew her. He’d only come across her a couple of times on Mars. On the Ad Astra she’d been in the same hulk as him, but again he’d kept his distance. He’d wanted nothing to do with her products, her chain of contacts, her suppliers and users. The last time he’d seen her, he remembered now, she was leading a bunch of rebels up towards the ship’s bridge, after the arrival at Proxima. She was the type to have survived, he supposed.
He said now, “So what were you doing all the way out here?”
“Stretching my legs. What do you think? The one thing this place does have is room, room to walk off until you’re over the horizon and alone. Can’t do that in a Martian hovel, right? Or in some hulk of a ship. Or on most of Earth these days, probably.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “I come out this way for the water. The springs. And there’s a hollow a little further out that way, more springs, but it just got flooded.”
She must mean the hollow that now held the jilla lake.
She looked at him, shrewd, analytical. “You don’t know this area well.”
“No. We’re on the move.”
She picked that apart. “We. Who, how many? How heavily armed? On the move. From where, to where?” She grinned. “Don’t worry. We’ll be sharing soon enough. You know, ice boy, of everybody in that dumb hulk I never picked you out as one of the survivors, here in the Bowl.”
The Bowl? The air ahead was misty; as they walked he thought he smelled water, but his view was blocked by a low rise, worn hills. “Why not me?”
“Because, back in Eden, you came out of that cryo tank like you’d been dropped from the sky. You never fitted in, even on Mars. You didn’t make any contacts, you didn’t have any networks. You didn’t even have a way to pay off the Peacekeepers. We noticed you, though. The ice boy, right? Your name is Yuri. What the hell kind of a name is that?”
“Not my name.”
“Then why are you called it?”
“Some joker called me that when they woke me up, on Mars. It’s the name of an astronaut. Or a cosmonaut. The first one, I think.”
She shrugged. “Never heard of him. So what’s your real name?”
He looked away.
“You’ve put aside your lousy past, is that it? What kind of accent is that, by the way, Aussie?”
“North British. I grew up in Manchester, at the border with Angleterre, the Euro province.”
“You sound Australian to me.”
“You all sound sort of Hispanic to me.”
“How long were you frozen, a hundred years?”
“Nearer eighty.”
“Were you one of the Heroic Generation? What did it feel like to be a Waster?”
“We weren’t called those names then. I was too young anyhow.”
She grunted. “Surprised they didn’t call you as a witness in the trials. But you escaped it all, didn’t you? You in your freezer tray.”
He was reluctant to answer, but it was hard to turn away from her iron gaze. The whole conversation, suddenly thrust upon him, was bizarre, like his deepest past suddenly pushing up out of the Arduan ground. “It wasn’t my choice. It was an experiment. There were too many of us, my generation. So they tried freezing us in these big honeycomb banks, under the ground, in Antarctica. We’d have less of a footprint that way.”
“Your parents got rid of you. That’s what happened. Whereas now they get rid of us from Earth to Mars. Or even further, right? I suppose it was cheaper to ship you out to Mars still frozen than to deal with you any other way. Well, on behalf of the future, I hope you enjoyed your stay on Mars, my friend. The butthole of the solar system.”
He glared at her, defiant. “If it’s so bad, why were you there?”
She shrugged. “We were there, the UN was there, because the Chinese were there. We can’t let them have Mars all to themselves, can we? And the UN has these big ships now, the hulks, big powerful engines. Nothing like the steam-engine put-puts they had in your day, I bet. Now they can afford to send people to Mars who don’t even want to go. Even to the stars! That’s progress for you.” She laughed and spat. “Funny thing, life. You never know what it’s going to throw at you next.”
He didn’t like her dismissive tone. “So how did you survive here?”
“See for yourself.”
They rounded the low hills, the view opened up, and Yuri saw a river, a ribbon of blue-black water flowing across the flat, arid landscape. It was an astonishing sight, after all these years stuck by the jilla lake. The bank was lined by the usual beds of stems in their marshes, but he saw no signs of builders or their works, at this first glance.
And there were people here. People and their stuff. Some kind of tepees, frames hung with cloth, smoke from fires rising reluctantly in the still air. What looked like a cut-down ColU, without the dome and manipulator arms. And the people: women and kids gathered around a hearth, a handful of men further away, clustered around another, smaller fire. Like Delga, they all wore what looked like cut-up ship’s-issue clothing, even the little kids. Yuri recognised none of the adults, at first glance.
When Yuri was spotted with Delga, some of the women got to their feet and reached for weapons. Yuri could see ISF-issue crossbows, what looked like home-made spears. Delga held up her good arm in a signifier that it was OK, Yuri was no threat. But the women watched and waited, intent. The men by their fire didn’t bother to rise; they just looked on apathetically.