Fish Tails (81 page)

“It's just staying on parts of it,” murmured Needly. “How does it know which parts?”

“That's just what it looked like,” said a voice from behind them. Coyote.

“What are you doing here?” asked Abasio in surprise.

“Same as you. Findin' out. Bear n' me got here last night.”

Grandma said, “Coyote, what do you mean?
‘That's just what it looked like.' ”

“When the big kettle they cooked the stinker stuff in got poured out, that's what the stuff looked like. Only not so white.”

“Processed to take out impurities, perhaps?” Precious Wind suggested. “I have to get some of the stuff to Tingawa so they can analyze it . . .”

“Shhh,” said Needly. “Watch. He left a hole on the far side, and now he's going over there. He's spraying the inside toward us.”

The hose man came to the front of the construction and pointed his hose into it with a continuous circling motion. He finished, shut off the hose, walked over to his partner, and stood watching the fish.

“It only stuck to some of the things inside,” said Needly. “Kind of a network. See. It goes to different places inside and it goes to a web that's stretched all over the outside. It's changing color.”

The sprayed material was solidifying as a shiny, dark red coating, stretching smooth over certain wires and controls, falling off others to collect in a liquid puddle. A second hose was brought into play to suck the liquid out.

“What does that red network look like to you?” Precious Wind asked.

“A diagram,” said Arakny. “It's like a . . .”

“A diagram of a nervous system,” said Xulai. “My grandfather has a wonderful pre–Big Kill book on physiology. It's full of pictures like that, as if creatures were cut in half and all their nerves and muscles and organs were different colors so you could see how they all fitted together. I don't understand how the stuff stuck to just certain wires, though. That thing is full of wires and shapes . . .”

“That hum we heard. I imagine they were running power through just one set,” said Grandma. “The stuff sticks only where there's power. See the man at that control thing, he's checking the network and writing things down. He wants to be sure there aren't any . . . bare spots or anything.”

Precious Wind said eagerly, “That would explain . . . remember, Xulai, when I mentioned making a solution of the fatty stuff off the hunter. I said it coalesced. I was using
ul xaolat
at the time, so I would have been in an . . . area of power. That's why the stuff was trying to make a shape!”

“Watch,” said Needly. “They've . . . put power into a new set of wires, I think.”

The first things to solidify had been in a network of strings, knots, and threads. The second one was similar, slightly different in color when it had solidified, as were the third and the fourth, leaving the inside of the shape latticed and surrounded with networks. The fifth set of things to be sprayed was more bulky, made up of sheets, ropes, and cylinders. The procedure was the same, and they heard the hum. The color this time was blue.

“Those look like muscles,” said Abasio. “Now, how in the world can they get the same stuff to form different kinds of tissues?”

“We don't know it's the same stuff, Abasio.” Needly peered at the man with the hose. “He could be connected to a whole bunch of different tanks of the stuff. We can't see where the hose goes. Maybe the leftover stuff is being sucked back, then they connect the hose to something else. They're not wasting it. Each time they spray, they suck up all the stuff that drops down.”

The fifth round had taken much longer. The men doing the spraying had had to move to various vantage points, get behind, over, under. The blue stuff also took longer to settle and acquire a slightly shiny surface.

“What's next?” muttered Precious Wind.

“Organs. Glands. The thing is probably intended to eat and excrete, and I don't see any template for anything like that.” Arakny reached for the glasses in Needly's hand and focused them on another group just arriving. “Now I do.”

A new cart had arrived, this one carrying not only a mass of flexible balloons, hoses, and strange-shaped mesh objects but also a crew of half a dozen tiny men who plunged into the fish and guided the newly arrived material into place, fastening here, fastening there.

“Guts,” said Deer Runner. “They're givin' it guts. What are those little ­people? Somethin' they've made?”

“Midgets, perhaps,” said Precious Wind. “They aren't artificial, Runner. Midgets have always been with us. Every genetics lab would have saved the genotype. At one time, way back, some of our ­people thought if things got really rough here, not enough food to go around, we could impose that genotype to shrink the human race and use less food. As for what they're doing now, it's close quarters in there, so they needed very small workmen. The Edgers may have been collecting them for ages.”

Grandma said, “Coloring the various types of parts helps identify them, I suppose. Can we consider the wires and shapes and inflated things inside it to be templates? Patterns? Do they dissolve after they're covered, or do they stay? Each set of patterns is a different color, and each set has power run through it separately?”

Arakny said, “Or, it could be that each set is coated with materials that will react in certain ways with the stinker material. Maybe the stuff can take any shape it has a pattern for or whatever shape it's stimulated to take. I too wonder if the templates dissolve after the substance dries. Amazing.”

“Perhaps it all dissolves except for the brain,” said Arakny. “That's real.”

The construction went on. Each layer of material was allowed to dry. Liquids were brought out and pumped into certain ports. Something bulgy began to expand and contract, then others began to move. Heart. Lungs. The little ­people left the creature's innards, proceeded south, past the dunes, and disappeared. Coyote, who could see farther south than the others, noted that as soon as they were past the dunes, they began to run. Now, wasn't that interesting? The various parts of the “fish” had begun to pulse, pulling in fluid or gas from somewhere, inflating to fill the space behind them.

“The thing's filling up. The whole thing!” Needly managed to whisper and scream at the same time.

“It still needs a skin,” whispered Xulai in return.

“I do not have a good feeling about this,” Grandma growled.

“There's the skin,” remarked Abasio. The hoses were deployed once again, this time on the outside, all of the outside. The skin was gray when it dried.

Grandma spoke again, now demandingly. “How far are we from them, Abasio? Never mind. However far we are, I don't feel we have enough protection here.”

Abasio looked around them. They were lying just below the crest of the ridge, here covered with sand and with only the clumps of yucca or sage at the top, no barriers or protected places around them. Grandma's uneasiness was connected with what was going on below them, so any danger would come from that direction, and he had learned to trust her instincts. Not far to their left, along another stretch of ridge, the underlying stone protruded at the top of the ridge, making an effective barrier. He nodded toward it, and Grandma immediately scrambled in that direction. The others had heard the slight panic in her voice and followed at once. Each of them found a place at the top of the ridge that had an exposed chunk of solid rock next to it. Though all of them might have been momentarily exposed to view, all eyes among those down on the shore had been totally concentrated on what was being done with the fish. The entire process had taken some hours. The sun was above them, center sky.

Abasio had picked up on the old woman's caution. The nice thing about excess caution was that it almost never killed anyone. He passed instructions back along the line of them: “If
anything
looks the least bit worrisome down there, don't keep watching! Get your entire body and head behind a rock.”

From the end of the line, Coyote looked them over: at the far end Arakny, Needly, Grandma, Deer Runner, and Precious Wind; then Abasio and Xulai, then himself . . . and up the hill somewhere, he heard Bear snort. Now, when had Bear showed up? Coyote squirmed a hollow in the sand, behind his own rock, his nose between his paws and his eyes fixed on the thing on the shore. By shifting himself sideways, he could see a bit farther, right and left.

Now the men had put all the hoses away and were busy removing whatever it was that had covered the various lenses and antennae on the fish, sheets of something that came away without tearing, though they were now heavy with the sprayed material. The men were careful not to touch it. They used long pincers, pulling away each section of film and dropping it into a waiting canister with a swiveling lid. The others, including the giants, watched and muttered. One of the human watchers had brought a bottle, which he passed around.

The sprayers completed their work, closed up their carts, and joined the larger group. Another bottle materialized, and the two sprayers were toasted, everyone miming a raised glass. The giants looked at the men and grumbled, miming drinking. They wanted some, too. One of the men spoke reprovingly to them. The watchers heard his shouted words. “Later, at the cave, just wait.” The giants went farther down the shore and sat on the sand, legs crossed before them.

Another vehicle approached from the south, one equipped with yet another tank—­this one a vivid red and labeled hugely down the sides
ACTIVATOR.
DANGER
. This vehicle had a nozzle mounted on top; it turned and backed toward the fish. The driver, wearing an all-­over covering with face mask, got out to stand beside a tall mechanism at the side of the truck, the top a blank screen, below it a square array of buttons.

“What's that?” Needly asked. “The thing on the side?”

From beside her, Grandma answered. “The bottom part is a keyboard where a person can spell out instructions to the machine. The top part is a screen where the machine's responses will show up. I think.”

“How did you know that, Grandma?” asked Needly.

“It looks like the food machines at the Oracles. You used it, didn't you?”

“Food machine?” said Abasio.

Grandma murmured, “I have no idea where they got it. If I get hungry at night, I can go to one of them and ask it for whatever I like, and the machine either creates it or obtains it, and puts it in a drawer for me. I pull open the drawer, and there it is, hot or cold, whichever. Sometimes I have to put in the recipe first, but never more than once. It always remembers. When we were there last I had something called ‘turkey enchiladas with green peppers and sour cream.' ”

“What's that?”

“Something I found in the Oracles' collection of books. One of them has recipes in it, for all kinds of things So I fed the recipes into the machines, and when I'm hungry, the machines make the food. The enchiladas were very tasty.”

Xulai resolved to acquire, by any means possible, such a device. The thought of sour cream and peppers made her mouth water. She told her mouth to behave. They would have breakfast when they got back to the camp. Maybe she'd ask the camp for . . . enchiladas.

The man beside the truck was now busy pushing buttons, using all his fingers, doing it quickly. Lights came on, spelling out
TARGET
­
AC
QUIRED
.

The man pulled a visor down over his face. His entire body, including his hands, was covered. He pressed a button. The gun on top of the tank shot out a widening cone of red mist that settled over the smaller fish; the nozzle on the truck dropped, hummed, a fine, direct line of fluid shot into the mouth of the thing, the nozzle spun, then it stopped. The entire fish was now a rather bright pink. The sign lit up:
TARGET ACTIVATED
.

The man leapt into the vehicle and drove it away, quickly. All of them but Needly and Grandma watched it go. It was Needly who cried, “Look. Look.”

The fish was shaking, trembling. The fins moved, moved again, lashed as if in fury. A high-­pitched scream came from the thing, part mechanical, part . . . organic. The thing turned itself toward the water, the fins came forward, tried to drag it again and again, gaining only a few inches at a time. The scream increased in pitch, became words . . . “NO . . . NO . . . TURN IT OFF NO TURN IT OFF, HURTS, HURTS, BURNING, BURNING. WATER GOT TO GET TO WATER AAAAAAAA . . .”

The scream went up the scale into a shrill howling as the fish erupted into thousands of screaming shards that blasted away in all directions from a wide, scooped hole in the sand.

Grandma had yelled “get down” at the first scream. Every member of the group watching from behind the rocks had ducked! Metallic bits shrieked over them and into the trees and along the bottom of the mountain behind them. Uncountable bits landed between them and the shore, many of them moving, trembling, trying to crawl. Down on the beach the situation was pure horror! The men and the giants had been showered with debris, including the waxy stuff that had been sprayed on the fish, the waxy stuff that was now activated . . . alive. The men screamed and tore at it, flung themselves into the water, trying to wash it off.

Xulai, responding as she would in any emergency, jumped up, ready to help.

“No,” Precious Wind cried. “Abasio, don't let her go. None of you. Don't go near a scrap of that stuff. Every tiniest piece of it will have to be burned. Coyote, your nose is going to be our guide out of here, so don't go anywhere. Just stay with us.”

Below them, on the shore, the men had fallen. Some still made noises. Others were silent. Even from where the observers were, they could see limbs half severed, faces eaten away. The giants had been hit, too, in the eyes. Their deaths had been quick, eaten through the eyes to the brains, in an instant. Their bodies were still being eaten.