Eight
Eight
W hen Jessyn had been a girl at her medrey picking her first specialization, she’d seen the wilderness transport rolling in after weeks or months in the field, the researchers all sinew and muscle, skins darkened by the sun and lightened by a powdering of dirt.
They’d seemed like adventurers returning from exotic realms with stories of the animals they’d seen, the caverns they’d traveled down, and the nights spent under a sky more filled with stars than anything a city-bound girl had ever seen.
She’d priced out a camping set, taken pictures of herself in field gear.
She’d even slept in the bushes outside her parents’ house with Jellit nearby pretending that he didn’t know where she was so that she could fall a little deeper into the fantasy.
She had wanted it because she knew she couldn’t have it.
Because she knew that if her mind went rotten while she was on the trail, there would be no one there to take her to the wards and keep her under watch until the drugs could bring her back to sanity.
It wasn’t a dream of fieldwork. It was a dream of being well.
She’d opted for laboratory work instead.
And because the universe was made from energy, matter, and an unhealthy bent for irony, that choice had brought her here.
Now the stability of her mind lived between two panes of glass, and Jellit and her parents and the whole medical establishment of Anjiin were as mythical as a Serintist archangel.
She knew intellectually that she should have been more afraid than she was.
Some of the others kept close to the Carryx ships out of fear, but she wasn’t afraid. She kept her little farm back at the ships to keep it safe, and only returned daily to decant the little glassful of sanity that kept her upright.
For the rest of her time, she took a pair of blankets and a satchel filled with bricks of field rations and bottles of clean water and walked south until the ships were a few bumps on the horizon.
There was a little natural shelter beside a sandstone cliff that she cleaned out for herself.
To the west, ruins of some alien architecture rose up toward the sky, spires shattered and blackened.
That was the only sign she had of the galactic war that had brought her here.
She didn’t find traps or soldiers, and her little base was well within the radius that Third Gardener, their Sinen overseer, had marked on their notebook maps as the safety limit if they had to evacuate.
The plant analogs were thick-stemmed with leaflike structures in green and purple and red with black vasculature that formed patterns of concentric rings.
Small animals no bigger than the smallest joint of her little toe hopped across the ground at dawn and twilight, their thick white bristles chiming like someone two streets away breaking glass.
Larger things flew in the high air with forward-canted wings.
The sky was blue edging on purple where something in it scattered the longer wavelengths of light the way oxygen clutched at blue.
When she wasn’t collecting samples or watching the flow of this new, familiar-but-unfamiliar aspect of natural systems, she could check the notebook the Sinen had given out.
It was like one of the translation half-minds, but flatter.
She could command it to show a map of the local wilds with a simple coordinate system to navigate by and an archive of entries saved there by the other researchers.
A botanist named Manni was adding entries every few minutes with notes and observations about the weeds just by where the ships had touched down.
A geologist named Holom Coombs had written an essay the length of a formal article about the implications of the sandstone cliffs to the south with a long, gushing footnote about how he’d been halfway through composing the entry, lost his notebook down a crevasse, and been delighted to find the incomplete draft still available in the replacement.
A pair of hydrogeologists were using their entries to play strategy games.
She let herself notice that Garral P?r was putting in notes now and then, and that the coordinate markers he sometimes included placed him not so very far from her.
Every now and again, she caught sight of some of the other species that had traveled to the planet with them.
Two of the oblong gray sofa-things had tracked even farther south than her camp, scuttling away together on their skirts of tiny legs.
A flock of Euruk of Lydiándar passed overhead in a V-shaped formation sometimes five or six times each day.
Whatever they were studying, it didn’t show in the notes Jessyn saw.
Probably each species had its own archive, all of it filtering up to Third Gardener and the Carryx.
At night, she slept. In the day, she explored.
She didn’t know who would read the notes she was making.
The impulse to make her writing accessible and clear lasted about a day.
Everything since that had been meant for an audience of herself or possibly one of the others from her research group: Tonner or Campar or Rickar or Dafyd.
She used references that only they would know, the private shorthand they’d built up over years of communal work.
Coffee-ring symmetry for similar shapes at slightly different scales.
First data cologne for aromatics of a certain concentration.
Sometimes she picked terms and references that only she and Irinna or Else would have known, even though the other women were dead.
The only audience who needed to know what she meant was her.
If someone else wanted an explanation, they could ask.
On the fifth day—or maybe the sixth—she was sitting under a wide-leafed fern analog reviewing a draft that she hadn’t saved for the wider community to see when a note appeared on her most recent saved entry.
A VAILABLE TO COMPARE NOTES?— P ?R
The little shock surprised her. She fought back a smile and then—no one was watching her—smiled. Put her field notes back among the drafts and added them to the saved entry.
W HERE AND WHEN?
It seemed like an hour before the entry updated again, but it was almost certainly less. He added a set of coordinates from the map and R EFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED AN HOUR BEFORE SUNSET.
The refreshments were the same things Jessyn had at her own camp, but Garral had set up a little grill out of a metal mesh and a ceramic bowl that he’d salvaged from the ruins of the city.
He cut slices of the ration bar and put them over heat just long enough to blacken the edges.
The water bottles were the same ones she had beside her blankets.
He’d built a double pot with sand between the layers that he’d doused with water.
The evaporation from the sand cooled the inner chamber a few degrees.
The simple refrigerator was one of the most elegant things she’d seen in years, and she told him so.
“The unexpected advantages of getting far too interested in archaeology as a child,” he said, turning a square of the ration brick with a set of tongs he’d made from a pair of sticks.
“I used to spend my break between terms writing scrolls in dead languages and making simple machines in the family yard. There was a creek at the edge of the property that I used to abuse with water wheels every year until my father made me stop.”
Jessyn took another bite. The crust brought out the saltiness of the bar and gave it some texture. It wasn’t good, but it was an order of magnitude better than the unaltered version. She must have reacted somehow, because Garral smiled.
“It’s not winning awards, but I tell myself it’s as good as a street window café.”
“It’s literally the best food on the planet,” Jessyn said with a chuckle.
Garral had made his base of operations on the outskirts of the ruined structures, but just as far from the Carryx ships as Jessyn’s camp.
From here, the dead spires had an almost glassy look, like they’d been made from obsidian.
The air had a different smell—more astringent and biting—that reminded her of industrial manufacturing.
The lean-to he’d made from thin metal bars and the branches of the local tree analogs stuccoed with mud and grass.
It nestled between a boulder and the scorched remnants of a wall like an animal’s den. He saw her looking at it and shrugged.
“It didn’t take as long as it looks,” he said, a little defensively. “I have actually been working.”
“Any great insights?” Jessyn said, half teasing. Garral smiled. He had a good smile. As he spoke, he poured fresh water into the bottle she was drinking from, and his arm brushed against hers in a way that didn’t mean anything unless it did. She found herself very aware of his proximity.
“A few. Some of the previous occupants were about our size and seem to have walked upright, and some others larger but walking on all fours. Or maybe sixes. Could have been eights. I don’t know that part.
The construction was mostly poured polymers with internal reinforcements of something I haven’t quite figured out yet, but I got a couple samples of it.
There are what look like written signs all over the place, so their senses included sight.
And I haven’t found anything that’s painted in ultraviolets, so probably their visual acuity tops out at about the same wavelengths as ours. ”
“Tools?”
“Some, yeah. Simple things. Knives, shovels, hammers, door latches. The kinds of simple machines you’d expect anything advanced to have around trivially. And then a whole raft of stuff I don’t know what I’m looking at and I can’t turn it on. What about you?”