When she woke, the sky was clear of cloud and Sauron’s orange light tangled long shadows across the snow. A spin tree had fallen down just outside the fence; the vanes of all the others, thousands upon thousands, spun in wind that was now no more than the usual wind, blowing from sunside to darkside. Soon, the snow would melt and she would go down to the beach and see what had been cast up. But first she had to see to her strange guest.
She took him a cannister of pork hash. He was awake, sitting with the blanket fallen to his waist. After Ziyi mimed what he should do, he ate a couple of mouthfuls, although he used his fingers rather than the spoon. His feet were badly cut and there was a deep gash in his shin. Smaller cuts on his face and hands, like old knife wounds. All of them clean and pale, like little mouths. No sign of blood. She thought of him stumbling through the storm, through the lashing forest …
He looked up at her. Sharp blue eyes, with something odd about the pupils—they weren’t round, she realized with a clear cold shock, but were edged with small triangular indentations, like cogs.
He couldn’t or wouldn’t answer her questions.
“Did the Jackaroo do this to you? Are you one of them? Did they make you?”
It was no good.
She brought him clothes. A sweater, jeans, an old pair of wellington boots with the toes and heels slit so they would fit his feet. He followed her about the compound as she cleared up trash that had blown in, and the two Huskies followed both of them at a wary distance. When she went down to the beach, he came too.
Snow lay in long rakes on the black sand and meltwater ran in a thousand braided channels to the edge of the sea. Seafoam floated on the wind-blown waves, trembled amongst rocks. Flecks of colour flashed here and there: flotsam from the factory.
The man walked down to the water’s edge. He seemed fascinated by the half-drowned ruins that stretched towards the horizon, hectares of spires and broken walls washed by waves, silhouetted against Sauron’s fat disc, which sat where it always sat, just above the sea’s level horizon.
Like all the worlds gifted by the Jackaroo, Yanos orbited close to the hearthfire of its M-class red dwarf sun; unlike the others, it had never been spun up. Like Earth’s Moon, it was tidally locked. One face warm and lighted, with a vast and permanent rainstorm at the equator, where Sauron hung directly overhead; the other a starlit icecap, and perpetual winds blowing from warm and light to cold and dark. Human settlements were scattered through the forests of the twilight belt where the weather was less extreme.
As the man stared out at the ruins, hair tangling in warm wind blowing off the sea, maybe listening, maybe not, Ziyi explained that people called it the factory, although they didn’t really know what it was, or who had built it.
“Stuff comes from it, washes up here. Especially after a storm. I collect it, take it into town, sell it. Mostly base plastics, but sometimes you find nice things that are worth more. You help me, okay? You earn your keep.”
But he stayed where he was, staring out at the factory ruins, while she walked along the driftline, picking up shards and fragments. While she worked, she wondered what he might be worth, and who she could sell him to. Not to Sergey Polzin, that was for damn sure. She’d have to contact one of the brokers in the capital … This man, he was a once-in-a-lifetime find. But how could she make any kind of deal without being cheated?
Ziyi kept checking on him, showed him the various finds. After a little while, straightening with one hand in the small of her aching back, she saw that he had taken off his clothes and stood with his arms stretched out, his skin warmly tinted in the level sunlight.
She filled her fat-tyred cart and told him it was time to put on his clothes and go. She mimed what she wanted him to do until he got the idea and dressed and helped her pull the cart back to the cabin. He watched her unload her harvest into one of the storage bins she’d built from the trimmed trunks of spike trees. She’d almost finished when he scooped up a handful of bright fragments and threw them in and looked at her as if for approval.
Ziyi remembered her little girl, in a sunlit kitchen on a farway world. Even after all these years, the memory still pricked her heart.
“You’re a quick learner,” she said.
He smiled. Apart from those strange, starry pupils and his pale poreless skin, he looked entirely human.
“Come into the cabin,” she said, weightless with daring. “We’ll eat.”
He didn’t touch the food she offered; but sipped a little water, holding the tumbler in both hands. As far as she knew, he hadn’t used the composting toilet. When she’d shown it to him and explained how it worked, he’d shrugged the way a small child would dismiss as unimportant something she couldn’t understand.
They watched a movie together, and the two dogs watched them from a corner of the room. When it had finished, Ziyi gave the man an extra blanket and a rug, and locked him in the shed for the night.
So it went the next day, and the days after that.
The man didn’t eat. Sometimes he drank a little water. Once, on the beach, she found him nibbling at a shard of plastic. Shocked, she’d dashed it from his hand and he’d flinched away, clearly frightened.
Ziyi took a breath. Told herself that he was not really a man, took out a strip of dried borometz meat and took a bite and chewed and smiled and rubbed her stomach. Picked up the shard of plastic and held it out to him. “This is your food? This is what you are made of?”
He shrugged.
She talked to him, as they worked. Pointed to a flock of windskimmers skating along far out to sea, told him they were made by the factory. “Maybe like you, yes?” Named the various small shelly ticktock things that scuttled along the margins of the waves, likewise made by the factory. She told him the names of the trees that stood up beyond the tumble of boulders along the top of the beach. Told him how spin trees generated sugars from air and water and electricity. Warned him to avoid the bubbleweed that sent long scarlet runners across the black sand, told him that it was factory stuff and its tendrils moved towards him because they were heat-seeking.
“Let them touch, they stick little fibres like glass into your skin. Very bad.”
He had a child’s innocent curiosity, scrutinising ticktocks and scraps of plastic with the same frank intensity, watching with rapt attention a group of borometz grazing on rafts of waterweed cast up by the storm.
“The world is dangerous,” Ziyi said. “Those borometz look very cute, harmless balls of fur, but they carry ticks that have poisonous bites. And there are worse things in the forest. Wargs, sasquatch. Worst of all, are people. You stay away from them.”
She told herself that she was keeping her find safe from people like Sergey Polzin, who would most likely try to vivisect him to find out how he worked, or keep him alive while selling him off finger by finger, limb by limb. She no longer planned to sell him to a broker, had vague plans about contacting the university in the capital. They wouldn’t pay much, but they probably wouldn’t cut him up, either …
She told him about her life. Growing up in Hong Kong. Her father the surgeon, her mother the biochemist. The big apartment, the servants, the trips abroad. Her studies in Vancouver University, her work in a biomedical company in Shanghai. Skipping over her marriage and her daughter, that terrible day when the global crisis had finally peaked in the Spasm. Seoul had been vapourised by a North Korean atomic missile; Shanghai had been hit by an Indian missile; two dozen cities around the world had been likewise devastated. Ziyi had been on a flight to Seoul; the plane had made an emergency landing at a military airbase and she’d made her way back to Shanghai by train, by truck, on foot. And discovered that her home was gone, the entire neighbourhood had been levelled. She’d spent a year working in a hospital in a refugee camp, trying and failing to find her husband and her daughter and her parents … It was too painful to talk about that; instead, she told the man about the day the Jackaroo made themselves known, the big ship suddenly appearing over the ruins of Shanghai, big ships appearing above all the major cities.