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It took almost three days to travel to the outskirts of Listig on the humbike. Haiden and Ayma barely spoke, having arrived at a kind of silent truce during the long trip. They were both in the same predicament; in fact, Ayma seemed to be going through a lot of the inner turmoil that Haiden had himself experienced. The two of them took turns driving, methodically working their way through the lush forests and musky swamps of the greater interior.
It occurred to Haiden that they were likely the first androids to ever actually see this part of the planet first-hand. Certainly, it had been remotely seeded and scanned numerous times during early terraforming—he himself had participated in that endeavor—but there was something to be said for seeing the results up close. In the current post-terraform world, there would be no need to travel to such remote areas; inter-city travel was delegated to a select few as most of the exchanges between cities were in the form of raw materials. He knew the gravrail from Mission was snaking its way westward a few hundred kilometers to the south, far away from the willow groves and reed forests that mottled the terrain between Mission and Listig. Somehow, here in between two isolated points of civilization, he felt safe.
They had traveled well into the night on the first day, mindlessly pressing on into the darkness to escape the confusion and devastation at the mining facility. Eventually, however, it became too dark and too dangerous, and they had settled in an area of thick Margdens in a tiny bowl valley. Most of the words between them had been spoken on this first night, words that had allowed them to establish the current truce they shared.
“How did you do…what you did,” Ayma asked, her thin voice carrying the perceptible weight of despair or resignation through a darkness relieved only by the faint light of glittering stars.
Haiden shook his head, though he knew she was not even looking at him. “I really don’t know. These emotions get the better of me sometimes. I…lose something of myself. It happened back with Amon, and then with you, but it was different, somehow.” He sighed. “I don’t know what happened to me.”
He knew that she was like him, caught up in the horror and mystery of this terrible freedom, and he needed her as much as she needed him. Putting his trust in her, Haiden related his entire story to Ayma, starting from his early awakening in the cryofreeze facility inside Mission. He left nothing out, explaining the strange visions and elusive memories that haunted him. Before he finished, Haiden realized Ayma was sitting beside him, her hand touching his arm in a gesture of sympathy.
“Whatever caused me to be this way, I somehow passed on to you. It’s as if a part of me is reaching out, but it’s a part of me I don’t understand.” He forced himself to look into her eyes, gleaming faintly beneath the midnight stars. “I’m sorry that you’re involved, but…I need time to figure things out, and I don’t want to be reprocessed before I understand it.”
Haiden couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw her nod slightly before her hand moved away almost reluctantly from his arm.
She pointed into the thick canopy above, and Haiden was able to see a set of black piercing eyes staring back at them. Its body blended perfectly into the darkness of the leaves and bark of the trees, but a long tail was clearly wrapped tightly around the tree’s trunk like a vine, helping the predator maintain its purchase.
“Vemethgar,” Ayma whispered. “They will watch, but they won’t attack—unless we seem frightened—or we run.” Remembering the fierce flurry of teeth and muscle that had nearly overtaken him back at the mining facility, Haiden watched the creature for almost an hour. It didn’t make a single movement; it simply stared back at him, waiting. When he momentarily shifted his gaze to the humbike and back to the canopy, the creature had quietly disappeared.
Unless we seem frightened. He searched the treetops for signs of more of the creatures, but could find none. Ayma was going about her business, seemingly oblivious to the vile animals or any potential danger they represented.
They had fallen asleep together, wrapped tightly in a hooded survival blanket Ayma dug out of the storage compartment on the bike; it provided modest insulation and shielding from creatures of the night, which helped him assuage his fears of the Vemethgar. The nights were getting colder and colder, and a thin frost was nibbling at the edges of the nearby foliage. Haiden wrapped his arms tightly around his new ally during the cold night, trying to preserve as much warmth—and energy—for their continuing journey the next day. He did not sleep well.
Although they had been forced to become very close very quickly, there was still an almost imperceptible distance between them, a distance more emotional than physical. A kind of wall had sprung up between them, a permeable substance through which most interactions passed, yet which somehow separated them on an internal level. It was not a division born of fear, or even anger, yet it was definitely an emotional barrier. Because they couldn’t understand it or talk about it, they simply worked around it.
On the third day, as the heat diffraction from the approaching ringed city marked their approach, Ayma presented her plan to enter the city undetected. Haiden was skeptical at first, but he could offer nothing better as an alternative. Gaining entrance to the city would be dangerous; they had no idea if the security forces had somehow deduced their escape route. For all they knew, they were walking into an ambush. Still, there was nothing to do but make the attempt—and succeed, or fail.
There was a supply rail that entered the architecturally frenzied periphery of the city from the northeast. They spotted a small grove of young, slender Margden trees near enough to the rail that they could knock one down and impede progress along the railway. Backtracking a kilometer or so, they secreted the humbike in a thick tangle of thorn brush they’d passed on the way. Taking what supplies and food they could carry in belt pouches and packs, the two renegades walked warily back to the grove of Margdens. There was still no sign that they had been spotted, or even followed, so Haiden nodded to his new traveling companion to begin.
Ayma used a collection of small tools she had taken from the bike’s toolkit to chip away at the tree until it fell, trying to make the cuts look like the work of a beretak, a small woodland creature that was known to down Margdens to gain access to their rich nutritious foliage. The tree fell across the rail with a crash, and the pair waited.
Haiden took the opportunity to ask Ayma about her own experiences, but she seemed reluctant to discuss it in very much detail. She was much younger than he, having only been awake for a few centuries. Ayma’s commission was the result of a restructuring of the mining operations outside of Mission, and she had spent most of the last century at the very facility where the two had met.
The somewhat stilted discourse on Ayma’s past was interrupted as a supply tram approached Listig. Judging from the short array of cars—less than two dozen—it was a parts resupply shipment from Mission. They were not particularly worried about being spotted; sents seldom traveled inter-city, and both security and military personnel had their own means of transportation. The small convoy of supply cars approached at a rapid speed, but soon began to slow, small blue flashes revealing the application of field-brakes. Its progress impeded by the tree lying across the rail, the supply train was forced to stop. Just as Ayma had predicted, the tram halted and issued a beacon requesting assistance from the city. A facility on the outer ring would send a repair mechanic or two, so Ayma and Haiden climbed aboard one of the small cars, rearranging a stack of long aluminum cylinders to make room for themselves. Nestled together in the cramped space, they waited in silence for a couple of hours. Haiden was about to break the silence when a small sled carrying a team of two repair mechs arrived. He caught a glimpse of the sled through a small view port before ducking down, indicating to Ayma with a hand gesture to stay low. The automated mechs moved quickly to clear the debris of the fallen tree from the rail, and soon the train lurched once again into motion. So far the plan had worked; Haiden and Ayma were on their way into Listig undetected.
They waited until they passed the fourth ring until they forced the tram compartment open again and dropped to the ground. Quickly, they made their way across a small plastalloy pedway to a set of nearby glass buildings. The buildings looked uninhabited—they had probably been long since finished construction, and were now simply waiting idle for the human colonists to arrive.
They had arrived in Listig.
Copyright © 2004-2005 Jay and David Steele. All rights reserved.
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Posted by: zgixqfovc seykxh | March 23, 2009 at 10:29 AM