In the event, it was rather my lack of use that led to the break in the wall. A commotion arose in the early morning, while Kitia was showing me the plan of her wings, which she was at that age beginning to design. She would grow the parasite over the subsequent year, and was presently practicing with miniature versions, which rose from her worktable surface gossamer-thin and fluttering with an involuntary muscle-twitching. I was trying to conceal my revulsion.
Kitia looked up when the noise erupted. She casually tossed her example out of the window, to be pounced upon with a hasty scramble by several nearby birds, and went out the door. I followed her to the square: the children were gathered at the fringes, silent for once and watching. There were five women laid out on the ground, all bloody, one dead. Two of the others looked mortally wounded. They were all winged.
There were several working already on the injured, packing small brownish-white spongy masses into the open wounds and sewing them up. I would have liked to be of use, less from natural instinct than from the colder thought, which inflicted itself upon my mind, that any crisis opens social barriers. I am sorry to say I did not refrain from any noble self-censorship, but from the practical conviction that it was at once apparent my limited field-medical training could not in any valuable way be applied to the present circumstances.
I drew away, rather, to avoid being in the way as I could not turn the situation to my advantage, and in doing so ran up against Badea, who stood at the very edge of the square, observing.
She stood alone; there were no other adults nearby, and there was blood on her hands. “Are you hurt also?” I asked her.
“No,” she returned shortly.
I ventured on concern for her friends, and asked her if they had been hurt in fighting. “We have heard rumors,” I added, “that the Esperigans have been encroaching on your territory.” It was the first opportunity I had been given of hinting at even this much of our official sympathy, as the children only shrugged when I asked them if there were fighting going on.
She shrugged, too, with one shoulder, and the folded wing rose and fell with it. But then she said, “They leave their weapons in the forest for us, even where they cannot have gone.”
The Esperigans had several kinds of land mine technologies, including a clever mobile one that could be programmed with a target either as specific as an individual’s genetic record or as general as a broadly defined body type—humanoid and winged, for instance—and set loose to wander until it found a match, then do the maximum damage it could. Only one side could carry explosive, as the other was devoted to the electronics. “The shrapnel, does it come only in one direction?” I asked, and made a fanned-out shape with my hands to illustrate. Badea looked at me sharply and nodded.
I explained the mine to her and described their manufacture. “Some scanning devices can detect them,” I added, meaning to continue into an offer, but I had not finished the litany of materials before she was striding away from the square, without another word.
I was not dissatisfied with the reaction, in which I correctly read intention to put my information to immediate use, and two days later my patience was rewarded. Badea came to my house in the midmorning and said, “We have found one of them. Can you show us how to disarm them?”
“I am not sure,” I told her honestly. “The safest option would be to trigger it deliberately, from afar.”
“The plastics they use poison the ground.”
“Can you take me to its location?” I asked. She considered the question with enough seriousness that I realized there was either taboo or danger involved.
“Yes,” she said finally, and took me with her to a house near the center of the village. It had steps up to the roof, and from there we could climb to that of the neighboring house, and so on until we were high enough to reach a large basket, woven not of ropes but of a kind of vine, sitting in a crook of a tree. We climbed into this, and she kicked us off from the tree.
The movement was not smooth. The nearest I can describe is the sensation of being on a child’s swing, except at that highest point of weightlessness you do not go backwards, but instead go falling into another arc, but at tremendous speed, and with a pungent smell like rotten pineapple all around from the shattering of the leaves of the trees through which we were propelled. I was violently sick after some five minutes. To the comfort of my pride if not my stomach, Badea was also sick, though more efficiently and over the side, before our journey ended.
There were two other women waiting for us in the tree where we came to rest, both of them also winged: Renata and Paudi. “It’s gone another three hundred meters, toward Ighlan,” Renata told us—another nearby Melidan village, as they explained to me.
“If it comes near enough to pick up traces of organized habitation, it will not trigger until it is inside the settlement, among as many people as possible,” I said. “It may also have a burrowing mode, if it is the more expensive kind.”
They took me down through the canopy, carefully, and walked before and behind me when we came to the ground. Their wings were spread wide enough to brush against the hanging vines to either side, and they regularly leapt aloft for a brief survey. Several times they moved me with friendly hands into a slightly different path, although my untrained eyes could make no difference among the choices.
A narrow trail of large ants—the reader will forgive me for calling them ants, they were nearly indistinguishable from those efficient creatures— paced us over the forest floor, which I did not recognize as significant until we came near the mine, and I saw it covered with the ants, who did not impede its movement but milled around and over it with intense interest.
“We have adjusted them so they smell the plastic,” Badea said, when I asked. “We can make them eat it,” she added, “but we worried it would set off the device.”
The word adjusted scratches at the back of my mind again as I write this, that unpleasant tinny sensation of a term that does not allow of real translation and which has been inadequately replaced. I cannot improve upon the work of the official Confederacy translators, however; to encompass the true concept would require three dry, dusty chapters more suited to a textbook on the subject of biological engineering, which I am ill-qualified to produce. I do hope that I have successfully captured the wholly casual way she spoke of this feat. Our own scientists might replicate this act of genetic sculpting in any of two dozen excellent laboratories across the Confederacy—given several years, and a suitably impressive grant. They had done it in less than two days, as a matter of course.
I did not at the time indulge in admiration. The mine was ignoring the inquisitive ants and scuttling along at a good pace, the head with its glassy eye occasionally rotating upon its spindly spider-legs, and we had half a day in which to divert it from the village ahead.
Renata followed the mine as it continued on, while I sketched what I knew of the internals in the dirt for Badea and Paudi. Any sensible mine-maker will design the device to simply explode at any interference with its working other than the disable code, so our options were not particularly satisfying. “The most likely choice,” I suggested, “would be the transmitter. If it becomes unable to receive the disable code, there may be a failsafe, which would deactivate it on a subsequent malfunction.”