“Family Bishop.”
He said it half-defiantly, because he never knew how people were going to react. Sometimes they got puzzled. Others would make a sour comment about dirt-huggers, or else just look blank. This man did neither, since he was busy vomiting suddenly into his own hand. Toby helped him clean it up.
“You sure be important.” The man looked a lot worse now, his face yellowing like an old wound, but he clung to his idea. “Gotta be.”
He spoke with a flat accent but his phrasing was like one of the old Bishops Toby had known. Maybe the people around here were Hunker Down Families. Toby patted the man, not knowing what to do. “You sleep.”
“You gotta be. Directive said to look out for you.”
“Then what?”
“Report back. And hang on to you.”
“For who?”
“Dunno. You stay right here, now.”
“Get some sleep.”
“Why you so important? You got something to do with all this?”
The question floated in the dusty air. Though Toby had heard it in his sensorium, the words in a thin whisper went unanswered
because Toby was already at the edge of the plain and moving fast.
FOUR
Salvage
He came down into a long barrel-like valley. It was green and moist, hollowed out between glowing massifs of timestone.
It was hard for him to remember now just when he had started running from the mechs. He had shat his pants a few more times and no longer felt ashamed of it. Killeen. Quath. The names evoked the same emotions now but he had not cried for them in a long while.
This new Lane was pleasant and he sensed no mechs. He had gotten used to the mild, diffuse light that oozed from juts and plains alike, sometimes casting upward shadows. The stone sent ribbons of light projecting up through the root systems of trees. He could see them like buried blood vessels in the fleshy soil. He loped steadily and came down into the valley. Yellow knots of timefog clung to the peaks on both sides.
Nothing in the sky to alert him. Still, the mechs could come on you faster than his rickety sensorium could register. So he kept to the shadows when he could.
He had once spent a day staying barely ahead of some mech sniffer, a silver-gray flyer that skated just over the trees and shot at him three times. He had eluded it by jumping into a river and swimming until his reserve air played out. Mechs didn’t seem to understand water very well. Or at least couldn’t see through it. He had stayed under until a waning came, and crawled out gasping into total blackness.
Besen. Killeen. Ol’ Cermo-the-Slow. So long ago.
A burnt scent and beneath it something sickly sweet. Down the whole valley grew dense fields of maize. He had not seen any since a boy, and then only a scraggly lot at the edge of the Citadel when he was barely big enough to walk. He walked along a rutted harvesting trail and smelled the soft, milky air.
Maize. He remembered there had been maize planted in the mud of spring; dug into the earth on a plowed hillside, with narrow-eyed women keeping seed-eating birds just out of gunning range; fine stands of young maize sending a keen aroma into the rainy day; the work of chopping weeds from the base of the stalks, the shiny-bladed hoe churning up fine dry dust; cutting and shocking maize with a thick long knife; the bluegreen ears that could turn to follow the sun through the day; ripe ears thrown into a wheelbarrow; tiny insects tech’d up to defend the sweet maize against pests, each loyal to the death to its particular plant; bare stalks in a quiet snowfall; a sister who lost her finger in a shucker, quick as a wink; rattling kernels spewing from a hand-cranked, steel-toothed feeder, the bare cobs shooting out the top and tumbling onto a pyramid pile; a silo crammed with drying husks; whiskey sloshing in a wooden keg, the charcoal staining the spout where it had been strained out; sharp sweet smell of a pat of butter sliding down an ear, skating on its own melt—
—and Toby staggered, knowing that these memories were not his. But they felt absolutely real, especially the pungent fragrances.
I worked in the fields a lot when I was a girl.
Shibo’s voice seemed to come down from the yellow sky. Toby gulped, eyes watering. He walked on and let the dry scent of the fields calm him.
So he had not got all of her out. And now there was nothing to do. Not even a knife blade could help him now.
The burnt stench was stronger and he looked warily into the fields as he passed. The standing grain was at its peak, aching to be harvested. He shucked a few ears and ate them as he went on, the kernels popping full and sugary in his mouth. Some of the maize had started to shell out of the heads, overripe.
The few trees were splintered and singed as if something inside them had wrecked them trying to get out. There were a few bare spots in the closely planted fields, exactly circular. The maize was pressed flat.
He walked on and something stung his nose. He remembered the time he had sat sick in an outhouse at the Citadel, smelling it and afraid to leave even to get a breath of clean air, because of his diarrhea, which gave no warning. The whole Family had gotten sick with it and a while later he had helped his father push the little house over on its side and fill in the hole with the dirt from the next pit. Then a team of men and women had dragged it over and set it up in fresh splendor.
He came to the first bodies then. Brambles divided the long fields and irrigation channels. Chunky parts were hung up in the branches. Bodies had exploded and the pieces were split along no anatomical lines Toby knew of. It could not have been very long since it happened because they had not begun to rot, though the blood had long caked into a brown crust on them.
His Isaac Aspect fidgeted at not having been allowed out for a while.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, as the ancient saying put it.
Toby knew that bodies did just the opposite. They decayed into wet slop, highly attractive to carrion beetles and clouds of flies. How could the ancients get so simple a thing wrong?
He touched a few bodies gingerly. Mechs had been known to booby-trap bodies back on Snowglade, but apparently they had not taken such trouble here.
It seemed wrong to leave the ripped sinews and muscle and bones snagged in brush but he turned away from the sight and moved on. The outhouse smell came from the simple fact that their bowels were spread over the fields, too, wider than the spray of heavier parts.
Further on whole bodies dotted the fields. They lay in small clearings where he guessed they had tried to fight something above. They were intact and their skins were smooth and glassy. He knew the way bodies changed with time. The skin quickly took on a lemon tinge which deepened into yellow-green. If left out for days the flesh went brown, a deeper brown than Cermo’s beautiful smooth color.
—and left long enough, he suddenly recalled, the flesh thickened to be like coal tar, crusting hard where ripped or torn, and the bodies swelled, too, getting too big for their clothes and bursting out at the cuffs and popping zippers open, people becoming balloons, and the smell of them in the dry heat of midday, a heavy thing that lodged in your throat—
He caught himself. Those were not his memories.
I saw much when my Family died that it would be better if you did not know.
“Then don’t let it out!” He probed for Shibo but she was elusive, darting away.
