With Danna swimming close beside her this time, Kahvi hugged the bottom closely as they moved away from the raft. She headed almost east for a time. She was not going to risk going between Sayreand the mainland; the water was deep enough, but there was the obvious risk of running into the search party on its way back from the island. Since they might also be intending to look over the smaller one farther north, there was at least a kilometer and a half to swim around this. Danna, her mother was sure, could make the distance as long as they went slowly enough. The water was warm enough so that even the little one’s big surface-to-volume ratio offered no risk of chilling. All Earth’s water was warm these days, except next to the still-vanishing pole caps. The acid seas had given off most of their dissolved carbon dioxide, and carbonate minerals were busily doing the same; greenhouse effect was warming the planet. Nitrogen dioxide, blocking some of the incoming radiation, was slowing the process, but where it would end no one could tell.
Fortunately for general peace of mind, no human being left on the planet had any idea of the process; and it had not even occurred to Bones.
By keeping in less than four meters of water, the two were able to contour-chase around the islands, but they were both extremely hungry by the time Kahvi judged they had come far enough. Danna had not yet learned how to eat under water, though the Nomad masks permitted this. The woman did not consider this a good time for a lesson in the art, since an error in coordination might have forced them to surface in order to get water out of Danna’s mask, so she had not eaten either.
As it turned out, they had come rather farther than necessary. They came up at the mouth of the cove on the northwestern tip of the peninsula, here Bones had decided the night before not to attempt landing.
Kahvi, aware that the searchers might have come this far but considering it most unlikely, chose to take the chance. The two swam ashore, got quickly out of sight in the dense vegetation, and settled down to eat.
The sun was now well past the meridian. Danna was very tired from the swim, and Kahvi decided that time had to be taken to rest, though they would have to find a jail or some other oxygen source before too many hours. They didn’t build a nest this time; there was a fluff organism large enough to keep the small body off the ground, and the child curled up in this, while her mother scouted the area for useful plants. The peninsula, or at least this part of it, seemed to have been visited by people who had allowed many kinds of pseudolife to take hold; Kahvi wondered whether this had been intentional. She would have been much more certain if she had seen the one which Danna had found on Sayre. There were tissue producers of a dozen kinds at least; a gigantic block of the Newell material from which the Fyns made their raft floats, the transparent stuff which was used for roofs, even the highly specialized material from which breathing cartridges were loaded. At present, of course, this was empty; Danna, waking up at last, was able to pick up logs of it larger than herself. She amused herself throwing one of these around while her mother explained the uses of the different growths.
“Do you think you could find these again if we wanted them?” Kahvi asked at length.
The child looked thoughtful. “Where will we be when you ask? I don’t know where home is, right now.”
Kahvi laughed. “Good for you! Mother wasn’t thinking, was she? Here, let me show you.” Even with air shortage threatening, the child had to learn, and a few minutes could be budgeted for a mapping lesson. Danna caught on quickly, and after a few minutes study of the diagrams Kahvi scratched in the earth, she was able to point out the direction to the raft and even give a fair description of how long it might take to get there.
Very satisfied with themselves and each other, the two resumed their journey. There was only a small amount of food left. Kahvi rolled it into a single pack of tissue and fastened this to her harness. She was still fatigued, and even Danna had not slept very long; but the woman let the child straddle her shoulders, after readjusting cartridges and breathing lines to make room, and set off again a little west of south. The bulk of Great Blue Hill loomed three kilometers away in that direction, but she was using this as a guide rather than a goal. She planned to follow the ridge which led south along the peninsula — the same one which overlooked the anchorage — high enough to get a good view of the land in hope of spotting jails, but not big enough to be seen from the anchorage itself or the islands.
The choice of route was unfortunate, since it led close to the fire site which Bones had found. Kahvi saw this, and once again decided that the search for air could be postponed a few more minutes toexamine this curiosity. The Bones trait was contagious, at least to intelligent people.
The contents of the fire pit had now reduced themselves to white ash which would not have glowed visibly even at night, but some heat could still be felt. Kahvi realized as Bones had done that this must be the site of the fire which had imperilled the nearby jail. She also saw that the stone wall which had been around it must have been artificial, and had to examine it closely even though it was obviously not an oxygen source — at least not any longer. She put Danna down, advising her to rest, but made no mention of the danger of appearing at the top of the ridge.
The child, tired as she still was, wanted to make sure that the ideas she had gotten from the map were right. If so, she judged, she would be able to see the raft from the elevation only a few dozen meters away; and without Kahvi’s noticing, she headed quietly in that direction. The vegetation here was too sparse to hide either from the view of the other, and the girl felt perfectly safe.
Inevitably, she encountered the same bed of glass slivers which had trapped Bones. Her scream brought Kahvi on the run. Her reflexes were good, and she placed only one foot in the danger area; she managed to stop before the other was injured, and even held back the cry of pain which almost escaped her lips. She snatched up the child and retreated several meters, ignoring the agony in her left foot until she felt they had reached a safe distance from whatever was causing the pain.
Then she put Danna down gently, sank to the ground herself, and fainted.
XIII
Peregrination, Painful
It was pain that caused the faint, and pain that brought back consciousness; Kahvi was out of action only a few seconds. Danna’s shrieks had ceased, and the mother’s awakening was completed by the realization that the child had torn her mask off — it had interfered with the deep breaths needed for the cries. The little chest was still heaving, but the lips had already turned blue.
Again Kahvi’s own pain was forgotten. She snatched up the discarded breathing gear, squeezed the bellows to empty it of outside air, replaced the mask on the child’s face, and pulled the bellows open again to fill it with straight oxygen from the cartridges. It was no longer possible to see the lips, but the convulsive gasping grew quieter and in a minute or so the still unconscious girl was breathing normally.
Kahvi, her terror reduced to a bearable fear, examined her own foot. Like Bones, she had no trouble identifying the cause of the pain. In full sunlight the slivers were easy to see, and for the most part easy to withdraw. Their shape made them easy to get hold of, they were not simple, straight splinters, but caltrops, their four ten millimeter points directed tetrahedrally. No matter how they landed on the ground, one point was always upward. The other three provided a good stand on the ground and, fortunately, a good handle for pulling the things out where they protruded from the skin, provided they had not broken off. Two or three had done this, and Kahvi was still working on the last of these when Danna began to regain consciousness.