The Abyss Beyond Dreams (58 page)

Jymoar shrugged. ‘You doubt me, but those people have died in the Desert of Bone, señor. I will not go there, not even for the señorita.’

‘And I would never ask you to,’ she told him kindly.

Gothora
tied up at Croixtown’s single jetty. The townsfolk were disappointed it wouldn’t be taking any of their livestock down river to the big markets, but Nigel was paying
Captain Migray to stay there until they got back.

‘For a month,’ the captain said. ‘Your coins are good, señor, but the
Gothora
is my life and my living. I cannot chain her to the land; she must travel the
river.’

‘I understand,’ Nigel said. ‘We’ll be back before the month is up.’

‘I will wait,’ Jymoar ’pathed privately to Kysandra, ‘until you return safely.’

‘Don’t worry about us,’ she ’pathed back. ‘Please.’

Nigel whistled happily as he led his horse down the jetty. ‘Ahh, shipboard romance. Finest kind.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ she growled at him.

It was hard riding across the savannah. Kysandra was almost in tears the first night, she was so saddle sore. Even the nerve blocks her secondary routines established to ease
the pain didn’t seem to help much. They set up camp in two tents that
Skylady
had fabricated to resemble ordinary canvas, but were actually lightweight thermo-stable sheets.
‘They’ll keep the temperature just right in the desert,’ Nigel explained. ‘Nights can get exceptionally cold. Explorers have been caught out by that before.’

Kysandra lent some half-hearted help putting them up. She didn’t want to sit down, and watched Fergus disapprovingly as he showed her how to use the valve on her self-inflating
mattress.

‘It’ll be soft enough,’ he promised.

‘Nothing could be,’ she assured him.

But because the mattress was some fancy Commonwealth fabric, it was indeed soft enough to lie on without wincing and cursing. Madeline came in with a large tube of cream from the first-aid kit
and told her to roll onto her front.

‘I’m going to need this as well as you, kiddo,’ she admitted to Kysandra as she rubbed it on red-raw skin. ‘That was a long ride, and I haven’t been on a horse in
years.’

Kysandra sighed in relief as the mild analgesic took hold.

‘We should put some dermsynth on that,’ Nigel announced. ‘It’ll strengthen your backside for tomorrow.’

Kysandra
yiped
in shock and hurriedly pulled a towel over her bare buttocks. She glared up at him. ‘Don’t they have privacy in the Commonwealth?’

‘Hmm.’ Nigel scratched the back of his head, seemingly bemused. ‘It kind of depends which planet you’re on.’

‘Out!’

He chuckled as he left the tent. Kysandra glared at the flap for a long moment. Her u-shadow told her Nigel was sending a file, which she accepted reluctantly. It was a list of dermsynth
properties.

‘Always got to be right,’ she grunted. ‘Madeline, fetch the dermsynth spray, would you?’

‘Sure thing, kiddo.’

Russell started a small fire and cooked their rations. As the sun finally went down, Kysandra was suddenly very aware of animals snuffling about through the long gangrass at the periphery of her
ex-sight where she couldn’t quite identify them. Cries of lone roxwolves began to sound further off across the savannah, answered by the challenging howls of dingo packs.

‘They won’t come near the fire,’ Nigel said, picking up on her concern.

‘It’s not the genuine animals I’m worried about,’ Kysandra said. ‘It’s the Fallers. The eggs don’t get to choose what they eggsume.’

‘Interesting,’ Nigel said. ‘They must have some basic parameters. I mean, eggsuming a roxwolf I can understand, but there’s no point in them becoming bussalores or
flies.’

‘They call it the first forty rule,’ Kysandra said. ‘I read it in the Research Institute’s manuals. If an animal weighs less than forty kilos, it doesn’t get
attracted to the egg in the first month, but after that the egg gets less fussy and starts to attract smaller creatures.’

‘So they’re smart even at the egg stage,’ Nigel mused.

‘Not smart,’ Russell said. ‘Cunning, like all evil things.’

Kysandra grinned at the man’s certainty. Even this new Russell liked his world simple.

‘We’re going to have to examine an egg at some point,’ Nigel said. ‘See what makes it tick.’ Then he cocked his head to one side. ‘But the Faller Research
Institute must have done that already; and they would have had the best equipment – if it worked. We need to get their results, if they ever published them.’

‘Coulan will find it,’ she said confidently.

‘If it’s there.’ Nigel gave Kysandra a sharp look. ‘So, do Faller animals eat humans, too?’

‘No. They only ever eat what they’ve become, it’s in the manual.’

‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ Nigel muttered.

‘The animals know,’ Madeline said in satisfaction. ‘They can always tell if one of their own is really a Faller. They attack instinctively. Bienvenido would be overrun
otherwise.’

‘But Faller animals kill humans, they always have,’ Kysandra said. ‘They know we’re their real enemy. That’s why . . .’ She gestured into the night.

‘I’ll be on watch all night,’ Fergus assured her. He patted the high-powered hunting rifle
Skylady
had fabricated to look like a normal Bienvenido-manufactured weapon.
‘You’ll be perfectly safe.’

Despite the worry about possible Faller animals, and the nagging pain from her thighs and bottom, Kysandra fell asleep quickly.

It was another two days’ ride over the savannah before they reached the foothills. This was the southernmost point of the Bouge range. Three hundred miles directly east lay the coast with
the Eastath Ocean beyond, while to the north the Desert of Bone rolled away for nearly eight hundred miles before eventually breaking up against a small range of hills that dipped down to the
northern, equatorial, coast. The north-eastern boundary of the desert was formed by the Salalsav mountains; while not as high as the Bouge range, they formed an effective barrier to any rainclouds
coming off the Eastath Ocean. So only the southern edge of the desert was unguarded by highlands, and it was a rare wind indeed which blew any rainclouds in that way.

They trekked round the Bouge foothills until the scrubland grew arid, gangrass giving way to tufts of succulent weed which itself soon became sparse. Loam turned to gritty soil. The first of the
dunes were visible a few miles ahead, and with the sight of them came fine particles of sand, blown by the parched wind that came off the Desert of Bone, stinging Kysandra’s face.

‘There’s a stream over there,’ Nigel said, standing up in his stirrups. ‘That’s where we’ll camp and prepare.’ He flicked the reins, reinforcing the
’path order to his horse. The rest of them followed.

The stream was barely more than a winding line of rushes in the grit, betraying the damper ground. When they parted the sharp blades to expose the water, it was brackish and slow moving.
‘It should be enough,’ Fergus said. He took a spade and started digging.

‘I’ll help,’ Russell said, always keen to prove his worth.

Nigel, Kysandra and Madeline opened the trunks the modhorses were carrying and unloaded the extra bundles of rods, laying them out on the ground in the pattern they’d all memorized from
the countless rehearsals they’d gone through before setting off. Had anyone examined the thin composite struts, they would have assumed they were just more tent poles.

Once they had them in the right order, they clipped them all together, forming three simple square framework platforms. Kysandra slotted the curving struts together to form wheels and fitted the
tyres to them – superstrength fabric tubes that weighed less than a kilogram each. There were six of them. She twisted the footpump hose into the valve of the first and started inflating. It
was hot, exhausting work that had her sweating profusely after the first minute, but she kept going determinedly. Nigel took over and inflated the second. Once all six tyres were inflated, they
fixed the wheels to the platform axles, and they had three small carts which the mod-horses could pull.

Russell loaded them with the water bladders made from the same fabric as the tyres.

‘Now the tough pumping,’ Nigel declared.

They used a second, larger, footpump to siphon water out of the hole Fergus and Russell had dug, impelling it through a sophisticated filter and into the bladders. There were three on each cart,
holding a hundred and fifty litres each.

‘Isn’t this too much?’ Kysandra asked, a question she’d asked often enough back at Blair Farm as they put their equipment together.

‘It’s a desert,’ Nigel had explained patiently. ‘Eight hundred miles long and three hundred at its widest. We have to find the one point that produced the anomaly, and
I’ve only got an approximate coordinate for that. Now I have no idea how many days this search will take, but I’m budgeting a couple of weeks. A horse will consume a minimum of
twenty-five litres of water a day under normal circumstances, but this is a desert, not normal circumstances. And we need a good three to four litres a day ourselves. Even carrying thirteen hundred
litres, we’ll have to go back to the foothills and refill every few days.’

‘All right, all right,’ she surrendered.

They’d only pumped three of the nine bladders full when Fergus said: ‘Oh, yes, look at this – there, where the air’s cooler.’

Kysandra looked in the direction he was pointing. High on a slope about three miles away she saw some grey specks moving slowly round the gradient. When she zoomed in, she realized just how big
the animals were. ‘Are those elephants?’ she asked. She’d always wanted to see one of the big animals.

‘Mammoths,’ Nigel said, with a knowing smile. ‘Hell, I remember when the first one was born. San Diego Zoo was swamped for months after; even baby pandas got ignored by the
media.’

‘Are they artificial?’

‘Oh, no. Well . . . not exactly. They were terrestrial animals that died out during Earth’s last ice age; then the Genome Structure Foundation sequenced their DNA from mummified
remnants dug out of the Siberian permafrost. Controversial at the time, especially given what that particular foundation morphed into, but we wound up taking them to half the planets we settled,
them and the crudding dodo – though what the point in recreating that was I’ll never know. Dumbest creature ever, and as ugly as sin too. Plus, it tastes exactly like chicken, so that
wasn’t a valid reason, either.’

‘It sounds very worthy, bringing the species back from the dead. I know Earth was in big ecological trouble at one time; that was in my general history memory.’

‘Yeah. We had a bit of a guilt overreaction to that. It’s called Sanctuary: the only world we ever terraformed from scratch. Two hundred years dumping billions of tonnes of microbes
and biogunk onto it to prepare its atmosphere and sand for terrestrial plants. Another century bombing it with seeds and insects before we went all Noah on its ass and released our animals two by
two. Every species but humans – oh and wasps, I think. It’s the only true pure copy of Earth’s biosphere in the galaxy, and we’re the one lifeform that’s banned from
it. Brilliant! But hey, there are lots of whales in Sanctuary’s oceans. Always whales. We have such an ingrained collective culpability trip over them. So that’s okay.’

‘You sound so cynical.’

‘That’s self-deprecation,’ Fergus said. ‘He’s not sorry about Sanctuary at all. Who do you think paid for it?’

‘That was necessary,’ Nigel said. ‘An experiment.’

‘Experiment?’

‘Yeah. See, there’s a lot of H-congruous worlds in this galaxy; the biochemistry is different, but not lethally so.’ He gestured round. ‘Like here, we co-exist happily;
there’s even some native plants we can eat. But if our colony fleets got to another galaxy and the majority biochemistry was incompatible, we’d have to know how to terraform, and get it
right. Best we find out how before we go.’

‘Another galaxy?’ Kysandra pressed her hands to her temples. ‘Is there really no way I can get out of the Void? I want to live out there. I want to be
free
.’

Nigel gave her a sorrowful look. ‘Sorry – me and my mouth. I’ve got to learn when to shut the crud up.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t do that. Not ever.’

*

In the morning they dressed in their desert robes – a silverwhite cloth that had the same thermal properties as the tent fabric. It was also used in the wide floppy hats
they made the horses wear to protect their heads from the direct power of the sun.

Kysandra carefully wrapped the turban round her head, making sure she tucked all her hair away from her face. With the cloth wound tight, it was difficult to make sure her darkened goggles
fitted properly.

‘I can hardly move my jaw,’ she complained.

‘I’ll refrain from the obvious comment,’ Nigel said, and stood in front of her, adjusting the strips of turban she’d wrapped below her chin. ‘How’s
that?’

‘Good, I guess.’

‘You ready?’

‘Uracus, yeah.’

They rode their horses out past the foothills, where the last tufts of vegetation clung to the floor of shallow gullies, and moved out into the dunes of the desert itself. Nigel and Fergus
checked how the tyres were dealing with the hot grey sand, but they appeared to be coping okay. Certainly the bladder carts rolled along smoothly enough.

An hour after they started, Kysandra was glad of the desert robes. She’d felt as if she was swaddling herself when she put them on, they seemed so restrictive. But, sitting in the saddle
as her horse plodded along, she didn’t have to exert herself. The cloth’s shiny surface reflected the sun’s heat away, while the thermal shielding prevented the hot air from
scorching her skin. Except for breathing. The air was hot in her mouth, almost painfully so, quickly drying her throat out. She sipped constantly from the tube that snaked up from the flask
strapped to her stomach under the robes. As the morning progressed, the desert’s eternal heat was something she was highly aware of, enveloping her completely, yet never managing to break
through her protection. It felt exciting, defying such a hostile environment. She began to wonder if those audacious early explorers had actually found anything. Surely no one would be mad enough
to trek to the middle of the desert as they were doing.
Are the legends of bones just heat fever dreams?