"I've got nothing to lose." A moment after he said it, the Grad realized how true it was. Eight survivors had done their best to reach safety, and this was the end of it. Nothing left.
She had spoken. He said, "What?"
"We are Carther States," the black-haired woman repeated impatiently. "I am Kara, the Sherman." She pointed. "Lizeth. Hild." They looked like twins to the Grad's untrained eye: spectrally tall, pale of skin, red hair cropped two centimeters from the skull. "Ilsa." Usa's pants were as loose as her vest. That discrete abdomingi bulge: Usa was pregnant. Her hair was blond ftizz her scalp showed through. Long hair must be a problem among the branchiets. "Debby." Debby's hair was clean and straight and soft brown, and half a meter long, tied in back. How did she keep it that neat?
Sharman mean Shaman, an old word for Scientist. Could mean Chairman, except that she was a woman…but strangers wouldn't do everything the way Quinn Tribe did. Since when did the Chairman take a name?
"You haven't given us your name," Kara said pointedly.
There was something left to him after all. He said it with some pride:
"I'm the Quinn Tribe Scientist."
"Name?"
"The Scientist doesn't take one. Once I was called Jeffer."
"What are you doing in Carther States?"
"You'd have to ask a moby."
Lizeth snapped her knuckles across the back of his skull, hard enough to sting. He snarled, "I meant it! We were dying of thirst. We hooked a moby. Clave was hoping he'd try to lose us in a pond. He brought us here instead."
The Sharman's face didn't reveal what she thought of that. She said, "Well, it all seems innocent enough. We should discuss your situation after we eat."
The Grad's humiliation kept him silent…until he saw their meal and recognized the harpoon. "That's Alfin's bird."
"It belongs to Carther States," Lizeth informed hini.
He found he didn't care. His belly was stridently empty. "That wood looks too green to make a cookflre—"
"Salmon bird is eaten raw, with falling onion when we can get it."
Raw. Yuk. "Falling onion?"
They showed him. Falling onion was a plant parasite that grew at the forks of the branchlets. It grew as a green tube with a spray of pink blossoms at the tip. The pretty brown-haired woman named Debby assembled a handful and cut the blossom-ends off. Usa's sword carved the scarlet meat in translucently thin slices.
Meanwhile Kara bound the Grad's right wrist to his ankles, then freed his left. "Don't untie anything else," she warned him.
Raw meat, he thought and shuddered; but his mouth watered. Hild wrapped sheets of pink meat around the stalks and passed one to the Grad. He bit into it.
His mind went blank. You learned to put hunger out of your mind during a famine…but he had definitely been hungry. The meat had an odd, rubbery texture. The flavor was rich; the onion taste was fiery, mouth-filling.
They watched him eat. I have to talk to them, he thought hazily. It's our last chance. We have to join them. Otherwise, what is there? Stay here and be hunted or let the invaders catch us, or jump into the sky.
The man-sized bird was dwindling. Lizeth seemed content to carve slices until they stopped disappearing; Debby was now cutting the falling onions to stretch them. The women had long since finished eating.
They watched with irritating smiles. The Grad wondered if they would consider a belch bad manners, and belched anyway, and had to swallow again. He'd learned while climbing the tree: a belch was bad news in free-fall, without tide to bring gas to the top of the stomach.
He asked for water. Lizeth gave it to him in a squeezegourd. He drank a good deal. The falling onion had run out. Feeling pleasantly full, the Grad topped off his meal with a handful of foliage.
Nothing could be entirely bad when he felt this good.
Kara the Sharman said, "One thing is clear. You are certainly a refugee. I never saw a starving copsik runner."
A test? The Grad took his time swallowing. "Cute," he said. "Now that that's established, shall we talk?"
"Where are we?"
"Nowhere in particular. I wouldn't lead you to the rest of the tribe until I knew who you were. Even here, the copsik runners might find us."
'Who are they, these…runners?"
"Copsik runners. Don't you use the word copsik?" It sounded more like corpsik when she said it.
He answered, "It's just an insult-word."
"Not to us or them. They take us for corpsiks, to work for them the rest of our lives. Boy, what are you doing?"
The Grad had reached for his pack with his free hand. "I am the Quinn Tribe Scientist," he said in freezing tones. "I thought I might find some background on that word."
"Go ahead."
The Grad unwrapped his reader. He had Carther States' undivided attention. The women were awed and wary; Lizeth held her spear at the ready. He chose the records cassette, inserted it into the reader, and said, "Prikazyvat Find copsik."
NOT FOUND
"Prikazyvat Find—" the Grad said and held the reader to Kara's face. The Sharman shied, then spoke to the machinery. "Corpsik."
CORPSICLE?
The Grad said, "Prikazyvat Expound."
The screen filled with print. The Grad asked, "Can you read it?"
"No," Kara said for them all.
"Corpsicle is an insult-term first used to describe people frozen for medical purposes. In the century preceding the founding of the State, some tens of thousands were frozen immediately after death in the hope of someday being revived and cured. This was found to be impossible.
“The State later made use of the stored personalities. Memory patterns could be recorded from a frozen brain, and RNA extracted from the central nervous system. A brainwiped criminal could thus be fitted with a new personality. No citizenship was conferred upon these corpsicles. The treatment was later refined and used by passengers and crew on long interstellar voyages.
"'The seeder ramship Discipline's crew included eight corpsicles. The memory sets were those of respected citizens of advanced age, with skills appropriate to an interstellar venture. It was hoped that the corpsicles would be grateful to find themselves in healthy, youthful bodies. This assumption proved-' I can't make sense of all that. One thing seems clear enough. A copsik isn't a citizen. He has no rights. He's property."
"That's right," said Debby, to the Sharman's evident annoyance.
So the Sharman doesn't trust me. So? "How do they find you in here? There must be cubic klomters of it, and you know it and they don't. I don't see why you fight at all."
"They find us. Twice now they have found us hidden in the jungle," Kara said bitterly. "Their Sharman is better than I am. It may be that their science enhances their senses. Grad, we would be glad to have your knowledge."
"Would you make us citizens?"
The pause lasted only seconds. "If you fight," said Kara.
"Clave broke his leg coming down."
"We make citizens only of those who will fight. Our warriors are fighting now, and who knows if they will repell the corpsik runners? If we can hurt a few, perhaps they will not seek out the children and old men and women who host guests."
Guests? Oh, the pregnant ones. "What about Clave and the women?
What happens to them?"
The Sharman shrugged. "They may live with us, but not as citizens." Not good, but it might be the best they could get. "I can't say yes or no. We'll have to talk. Kara…"