Chapter 11 #2
“If these folks are all that friendly, why are we skulking around and stealing livestock, instead of heading straight for the nearest train station and just getting ourselves to town?” I asked, sourly. “This is starting to feel like a big waste of time.”
“They’re friendly, but they’re … insular,” said Alice. “The Johrlac believe they have the best way of doing everything, via their collective. You don’t establish a world-spanning hive mind without developing at least a slight superiority complex.”
“And given that they just abducted two members of our family, we can’t assume they’d be happy to see us at the moment,” said Thomas.
“We think they’ll be happier to see us after we steal a bunch of their stuff?”
“They respect problem-solving, especially when performed by members of what they perceive as limited species,” said Alice.
“As long as we don’t harm their animals, they’ll understand we were only doing what was necessary to achieve our goals.
And they’re not likely to be happy in the least after we free Arthur and Sarah from their custody.
Johrlac don’t put a lot of weight on family. ”
“Who needs family when you have a hive mind?” asked Sam sourly. He looked surprised as Alice nodded agreement.
“Oh, I’m so pleased that you understand,” she said. “That makes this all so much easier.”
We had left the jungle behind, and were now following her massive stromopod across open field.
Not far in the distance, two more of the creatures were peacefully picking through the grass, using their claws to pull it out of their way as they dredged squirming things out of the soil below.
They didn’t appear overly picky about whether they wound up eating clods of dirt and plants at the same time, but kept on grazing without pause regardless of what they shoved into their mouths.
Alice pulled hers to a halt and slid down its carapace.
“Sam, you’re with me,” she said, and trotted toward the others.
Sam shot me a helpless look before following her, looking about as enthused about the idea as I felt. Alice waited patiently for him to catch up, then led him on to the waiting stromopods, reaching out to touch their sides while waving for him to do the same.
Thomas watched fondly. I shook my head.
“I don’t mean to speak ill of my elders, but I think Grandma’s off her rocker,” I said.
He glanced at me, smiling. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
I blinked. “How is my grandmother having the survival instincts of a puppy wonderful?”
“She’s not like us, Annie. She can’t call down fire or burn away what frightens her.
She has no connection to the pneuma. She’s not even like your beau—Samuel may not be a sorcerer, but he can protect himself easily when the need arises.
Alice is just a normal human woman with a broad streak of good luck and excellent aim with a pistol.
And she spent decades roaming dimension to dimension, refusing to let go of the idea that I was somewhere out there to find.
She never lost hope. She still believes things can be better. ”
“I’m not sure that’s always the best thing to believe,” I said.
“Maybe. Maybe not. But at the end of the day, I’d rather have someone who remembers how to hope at my back than someone who’s completely given up on the idea of things getting better.”
As I watched, Alice boosted Sam up to sit astride the stromopod’s back.
He didn’t need the assist, but was clearly trying not to startle the creature, and accepted it willingly.
She waved her hands, apparently instructing him to grasp the antennae, and I saw him gasp and smile as the creature turned to trundle back in our direction.
Alice trotted alongside, keeping pace easily.
When Sam reached us, he pulled on the antennae, and the stromopod stopped. I pulled myself up the side of the creature, sliding into position in front of him and leaning back against his chest.
“You want the reins?” he asked.
“Nah. This way, if anything comes to bother us, I can set it on fire while you handle the driving. Besides, you know I don’t like the idea of operating a large motor vehicle.”
“This is more like a horse than a car.”
“Same deal.”
Alice was leading Thomas to the third stromopod. Thomas was better at following her instructions than Sam was; that, or this one was more prepared to be mounted, after seeing both of its friends get ridden off, because they were on their way back in no time.
Alice climbed back up the side of her own stromopod, and waved for the rest of us to follow her as she turned it and began riding off, moving parallel to the edge of the forest. “Does she know where she’s going?” asked Sam.
“Hope so,” I said, shrugging, and we followed her.
After we’d gone what felt like about a mile, Alice looked back.
“Most of the life forms on this planet are insects or crustaceans,” she said.
“Not as many spiders as you’d expect, a lot of annelids, no true mammals or even reptiles.
The invertebrates got real ambitious in the skeleton department at some point, and most of them are chordates now, which helps with getting larger than we necessarily want them to be, but that’s neither here nor there.
What matters is that life on this planet evolved along different lines. ”
“Okay,” I said, dubiously. “What does that have to do with the price of coffee?”
“A surprising amount, really,” she said.
“Life seeks out the places it’s most suited to when it comes time to start building permanent settlements.
Fūri build in jungles, humans build on plains—there are always exceptions, but we’ll preferentially move toward wide, flat spaces where we can see dangers coming.
And Johrlac build on estuaries. They like the mud and the presence of brackish water.
If we’re lucky and we’ve been dropped near Ka’krin, moving toward the coast will basically guarantee we find it.
It’s large enough that it swallowed the whole river estuary a long time ago, and extended fairly deep into the surrounding jungles. ”
“You’re enjoying this way more than I’m comfortable with,” I said. “I would like an adult.”
“I think we’d all like an adult, sweetheart,” she said.
“And I guess I am enjoying this. After finding Thomas, the people who helped me recover made me promise to stay home for a while. I’m not supposed to go dimension-hopping without a really good reason.
It’s nice to be home. It’s so nice to have a little stability back in my day-to-day life.
But I got used to things being a lot more exciting than they usually are in Michigan.
You don’t spend years building a relationship as one of the best pan-dimensional bounty hunters out there and then go cold turkey overnight. ”
“I guess that makes sense,” I allowed, glancing over at Thomas to see how he was taking this. He was riding his own stromopod serenely, looking untroubled by the things his wife was saying. “And I guess you have good reasons to stay home for now.”
“I do,” said Alice.
“We’ve been working on the idea that she has backup now, and needs to stay where her backup can find her,” said Thomas. “As long as she lets me come with her, I don’t care if she needs to run into danger from time to time in order to stay happy and healthy.”
“How is running into danger healthy?” asked Sam.
“Mental health counts too,” said Alice.
He groaned, leaning his forehead against my shoulder. “Every time I start to think maybe your family isn’t completely deranged, I’m reminded of how wrong I am,” he complained. “Every single time.”
“I am what I was made to be,” I said, twisting to kiss him on the temple. “But I love you, and I do not share my grandmother’s unreasonable desire to go roaming through hostile dimensions for fun.”
“Thank fuck for that,” said Sam fervently.
“And thank fuck for that,” said Alice up ahead of us, pointing to something in the distance. She had managed to guide her stromopod to the top of a small rise; we hurried to catch up with her, Thomas and Sam each urging their own steed to move faster.
In a matter of seconds, all of us were lined up along the top of the rise, looking down into what must have been a fertile bowl once, fed on the sediment deposited by the large river we could see running toward the sea. The estuary was gone, swallowed by city.
The capital city of Ka’krin was large, sprawling to virtually fill the bowl; there was no farmland left that I could see, unless they were farming trees. Patches of the city had been all but swallowed whole by trees, their branches rising high and green into the sky.
The buildings were mostly irregular and brownish-gray, like a series of wasp’s nests driven onto spikes.
The rest were boxy and solid, and glass panels winked up at us from all the structures, and from the depths of the forested places.
I didn’t see any roads running either in or out of the city, although there was a bridge across the river, and a tall structure like a monorail running off into the distance.
No trains moved there; it was just a long flat path, elevated from the ground and approaching the city.
Ships dotted the bay, but I couldn’t make out anything resembling a harbor.
“How are they…?”
Alice looked at me. “Don’t assume the things you see have the same functionality as they would in a human settlement. Try looking at them in context.”
Looking in context, the monorail would work as a path for trading caravans and people riding beasts like our own.
I squinted. Some of what I’d taken for supports were actually winding ramps, slope shallow enough that pedestrians could make their way to the top.
And the glinting windows weren’t as irregularly placed as they’d originally seemed; they were angled to catch light from all the suns above us, and would provide the foundation for an excellent solar network, if that was the ambition.