NO PLACE TO STOP

1544 4D

The train, its shadow slowly stretching, glided to a stop at a tiny way station in the midst of a wide, mountain-fringed, grassy basin. Vines heavy with grooved leaves festooned and knotted the steel exoskeleton of the station’s little house. The leaves, deep jade green and veined in light purple, ended in swelling clusters of orange berries; here and there small birdlike flyers hovered, and with long needle beaks jabbed the berries for their sweet nectar. The wings of the flyers flashed like mica in the sun: tiny sheaves of laced scale overlapped and air-filled.

From the seat behind, Alliji nudged Andrew. “Those little bird-things are called ‘caolu' by the colls. They were living on Tarnus when the Colonists arrived.”

Abruptly, the flyers exploded upward from the vines and berries into a swirl of spangles against the huge blue-green sky, scattering and spinning into a pair of long lines riding the west wind toward a heaped grove of dark-emerald bushes. A pale-gray streak plummeted into one of the fleeing lines, and caolu scales puffed and flashed into distant powder. A predator swooped to the ground to gobble its catch.

“That’s a slkheer,” Alliji said, excited. “It’s like a hawk, a hunting bird.”

The far-off slkheer, long-necked and dark with wide heavy wings held half-open, ripped and tore with its hooking beak at the caolu, gulping it down in large pieces; a bright haze of scales floated around predator and prey like a halo.

“Alliji studied for the eco-exam,” Nexi said to Andrew. “That’s where he gets all this.”

“Out for relief, troops,” Captain Bermarin called, peering around the door at the car’s end. “Use the ditch. They’ll recycle it all after we leave.”

The train’s latrines had been too few, and overflowing. Andrew got in line with the others and descended the train’s drop-ramp past the station-house, to stand on a square stone slab about fifteen meters on a side and about a meter above the land around it. The andros from the train, carrying boxes, and a few soldiers headed for the open steel doors of a covered stair entrance a hundred strides away; the stairway descended into the ground. A sign over the entrance read: COMMUNICATIONS RELAY STATION — KEEP AWAY.

The troops at the edge of the slab relieved themselves into the adjacent drainage ditch, men standing, women squatting rumps-out; the others, waiting their turns, scuffed their feet on the slab’s shining surface, trying to see if it would mar.

It didn’t. The slab appeared to be a single piece of native granite, without visible flaw. The flecks of color dotting its perfectly-polished surface seemed almost deliberately arranged, as if tiled into place.

Andrew bent closer to look at the markings in the stone. Beneath its polished surface he made out disturbances in the tile-like pattern of black and brown and gray of the rock, as if the rock had once been water and a careless finger had sculpted ripples through it, writing a name or an utterance or perhaps a whole story, layer on layer, in the now-frozen stone.

“Hey, Nexi, look at this.” As he studied it, images came to him: a face with nothing beneath the nose, a vulva speaking writhing letters, arms and legs knotting each other, buildings made of oozing hair. They were indistinct; he stared closer, then jerked back as a flicker of something came at him from the surface of the stone. He glanced around, his eyes big. Nothing.

“What’s the matter?” Nexi asked him.

“I don’t know, I thought I saw--“

“Don’t waste your time looking at the stone,” Bermarin said, another officer by his side. “It’ll give you bad dreams.”

“The platform is at least ten thousand years old,” the other officer said. “There must be fifty thousand of these things, scattered all across the world. They say they date back to before the Colonists.” He had Gellin Sintherou collechi inscriptions on his forearms.

Another rank of militia gained the edge of the slab, and began dumping. Some remained huddled near the center of the slab, looking around with wide eyes, moving toward the edge very hesitantly when their turns came.

Andrew looked out across rolling hills green-gray with long grass, some darker bluish clumps signaling the concentrations of low shrubs, a tight cluster of moving brown dots indicating a herd of animals.

He pointed. “Look.”

Nexi called to his brother, “Alliji, do you know what that is?”

Alliji squinted in the bright sun. “I think they’re wild hill oxen. They were bred using gene engines during the Colonization, and the Regionals are getting them to populate these hills a second time.”

“What happened the first time?” Nexi.

“A rogue industrial virus and the prohyenas almost wiped them out.” Alliji smiled. “Looks like they’re doing fine now.”

Andrew shaded his eyes and watched; the dots began to move, first one way, then another. “They’re running. They’re fast.”

“Probably the prohyenas hunting them,” Nurumin said, coming up next to him. “It’ll be a real fight.”

“Hey.” One of the other soldiers pointed past Andrew to a clump of low shrubs in the grass. “Pull in those cocks and asses, volunteers, we’ve got hungry company.”

In the shrubs, four pairs of close-set eyes peered out at the slab and the soldiers. Andrew heard a huffing sound, almost a bark. Those at the edges of the slab retreated hastily toward the middle, fastening their clothing. Weapons clicked and hummed, coming to ready.

“These are prohyenas,” Alliji whispered. “They’re sizing us up.”

“You better check again,” said the soldier who had first pointed. Now he indicated two spots some distance out from other corners of the slab. “They hunt this way, distracting us. There’s probably a fourth group and maybe a fifth, waiting for us to make a move.”

Bermarin came up. “You know these animals, Urvios?”

“My family came from just south of here.”

“Suggestion?”

“Here. They just need a warning.” Urvios stripped open his pack, picked up his beamer, and aimed it at the base of the shrubs where the nearest group of animals were concealed. “I’ll be careful with the grass. Ready to fire.”

“Fire,” said Bermarin. A blast of light, and the grass began smoldering. The eyes disappeared.

“The others are gone,” said Alliji. “I saw them leap off through the grass when the shot went off — there must have been twenty of them.”

Another beamer blast from the adjacent side of the slab, and a loud laugh. “Cut that shit!” roared Bermarin, striding toward the offender. “You shoot when I tell you, asshole!”

“Uh-oh,” breathed Urvios. “That’s gonna catch.” Where the second shot had gone into taller grass, a spout of flame licked up and bent eastward in the breeze. Urvios called to Bermarin, “We’ve got to stop that fire or it’ll take half this whole area with it.”

“Come on, all of you, grab blankets and move,” Bermarin ordered. “You six, yeah, you too, Hotfingers — you all stay. Just stand watch here, and cover us. Ballistics only.”

Hurdling the soiled ditches, everyone but the chosen six jumped down from the slab and ran over to the beamer‘s twenty-meter swath of charred grass. Already flames swirled and spouted in several places; Andrew and Nexi stomped and flailed blankets at one hot patch, trying to avoid sending sparks aloft to carry with the wind. The grass seemed green and rich, but its ends were withered and browned; once the ends caught fire, the green part seemed to burn as fast as the rest.

Nobody said anything. The only sounds were the grunts and stamping of the soldiers as they fanned out, following the threads of ignition, stamping until the smoldering had died away, anxiously scanning around them for prohyena signs.

“That stupid halfcock,” Bermarin muttered to himself, his boots thudding next to Andrew‘s, “I know what I’ll do with him.”

Andrew‘s foot knocked away a long white object. He stooped, picked it up; it was a human femur, cracked and broken off above the knee. “Look at this,” he said to Bermarin and Nexi.

They came over, and Nexi looked down. “That’s not all,” he said, pointing at the charred ground. A blackened human skull, its jaw missing and a jagged hole in its temple, lay on its side at Nexi‘s feet.

Urvios joined them. “That’s from a prohyena kill. They can break open a skull like a nutcracker.”

Sweating, sooty, they all filed gratefully back onto the train to line up for washing-water and a small pack meal. As the train started to move, Andrew looked out at the slowly-ending day. By the dwindling slab, the pale forms of andros labored with hoses to wash the train sewage along the ditch and into an underground tank. A quartet of guards with ballistic weapons stood by, watching for movement in the grass. As the train accelerated, they all shrank to tiny dots, then vanished in the sweep of the land and sky.

It was all so huge, so overpowering; the sky seemed heavier than the stone ceilings of the City, but it was infinitely far away, and in their reaching out, Andrew‘s eyes found no place to stop.