Lois Bujold - The Flowers of Vashnoi

Enrique fiddled with his scanner. “ Now there’s someone inside,” he remarked in a satisfied tone. He pursed his lips. “Or possibly a goat.”

They walked around it and found that it fronted on a wider clearing. It had a door, to Ekaterin’s relief. Closed, low, barred from the outside by a crooked stick with the gray bark still on, resting in two wooden catches. A scan of the soil around the entry by what Miles called the Old Mark One Eyeball revealed a few odd feathers and dried chicken dung and, yes, goat berries, swept out and scattered by some twiggy broom, not naturally piled. There was nothing like a rematch with motherhood, Ekaterin reflected glumly, to attune one to the messages in feces. The ponies had left no such calling cards—was this a shelter for the smaller animals, then? No, wait, a tell-tale mound of droppings lay off the corner of the shed, a pony-length from where such an animal might be tied by its bridle.

Ekaterin’s hand closed on the stick—Enrique nodded encouragement—then paused. “Stow your scanner and get ready to catch someone’s goat if it bolts.” Lady Vorkosigan’s rights of trespass were arguable, but wouldn’t be aided by complaints about letting people’s domestic animals escape. And goats were tricky brutes, as Ekaterin recalled clearly from some youthful misadventures on her great-aunt’s South Continent farm.

Enrique crowding her heels, she opened the door and stepped inside, preparing to let her eyes adjust to the shed’s shadows.

Instead, it was like walking into a Winterfair light display, or some space station’s observation lounge, or a planetarium show gone wrong. Very wrong.

From the floor, the walls, the ceiling, there glowed, yes, surely upwards of a hundred flower-like trefoils set in metallic purple gleams, ranging in color from a dull umber to butter-bright, scarcely less radiant than the thin chinks of daylight leaking between the boards. The effect was as enthralling as it was appalling. Some held still; some moved slowly, like wandering planets in this stunning constellation. They ranged in size from no bigger than her thumb to something that would fill her palm. Her gloved palm.

A hoarse voice from the floor said, “Oh, Ingi! Did you find me some more, huh?”

Ekaterin’s gaze jerked downward.

The stout shape huddling there with its back to them wore a man’s old shirt with the sleeves cut off. Its pale arms hung out; three or four especially brilliant thumb-sized radbugs crawled along these waving trackways, clinging with their little claws. A few more skulked among the dark and rather greasy curls on its head. The figure rocked back and forth, turning toward the door without getting up. A couple of larger radbugs nestled in its lap, half-hidden among folds of skirt. A moon-shaped face with a gaping grin looked up into the silhouetting light from the door, small slitted eyes crinkling.

A girl—a woman? She was near adult-sized, and her thick torso was definitely past puberty, though the wide face was as smooth as an egg. But as the girl stared up at her visitors’ masked and hooded aspects in a shock that entirely reflected their own, the lineless features crumpled into a child’s bewildered terror.

“The white ghosts! White ghosts!” she shrieked at what must surely be the top of her lungs; the wail echoed off the boards and made Enrique flinch. She scrambled up, shedding radbugs, which bounced among the rough cobbles and scuttled away, save for one unfortunate insect smashed under an, oh God, stumpy bare foot. Thick, uncut toenails ridged up like claws on all six toes, save for the nails cracked and broken off.

“My bugs!” yelped Enrique back. “Stop stepping on them, you idiot!” Pejorative, or literal classification? With Enrique, at this harried moment, it was hard to be sure. “Settle down!”

Instead, the girl sprinted for the low door, evading Ekaterin’s lurch. “Grab her!” Ekaterin cried.

“She’s not a goat!” But he complied, or tried to; she twisted away and struck out hard with her arms and fists, scratching wildly at his faceplate with her stubby fingers. Too many fingers…

“No, don’t eat me!” she screamed, bounced off the doorjamb, and pelted away. “Ingi! Ingi! The white ghosts are after us! Oh, where are you?”

Ekaterin stared at the agitated scrub where the howling girl had vanished. The cries stopped before the zigzag movement did, but it was already impossible to discern her direction.

“I have to get a container,” said Enrique breathlessly, turning, seeming not to know which radbug to grab first. “Before they get out.”

“This shed seems to have held them so far.” She grasped Enrique’s arm and pulled him out after her, gently flicked an exploring radbug back inside with her bootied toe, closed the low door once more, and retrieved and replaced the stick-lock, such as it was. “We can collect and count them later. First things first.” Which were… what? Ekaterin took a breath. “That child—those two children”—might Ingi be the name of their bug-thief? the girl’s words had suggested it—“can’t be maintaining this place by themselves, and they certainly can’t have built it.” Judging by the weathering and general dilapidation, these shacks were decades old. “There must be grownups of some kind around here, who are responsible for this, this… whatever this is.” And she was developing some very uncomfortable notions about that. “Let’s find them.”

Enrique nodded and took up his scanner again. As they walked on, he said, “Why did she run away screaming like that? We weren’t going to hurt her.” Now that he was over his initial surprise at finding his missing bugs, he craned his neck in a somewhat distressed fashion toward the scrub where the crying girl had fled. “She seems to have gone to ground in that patch of deadfall, by the way.”

“Let’s not go after her right away, maybe,” said Ekaterin. “Let her calm down a bit.”

“And I certainly wasn’t going to eat her!” Enrique added, growing indignant in retrospect. “White ghosts ? Was that supposed to be us?”

“At a guess, someone told her”— what? —“some fairy story to scare her, to keep her from approaching strangers. Or letting them approach her. Strangers in protective garb, anyway.”

“It must have been a pretty evil grownup, to tell such lies to such a child.” Enrique stared around, plainly perturbed. They checked what turned out to be the privy, on the opposite side of the hut from the graveyard, and found it empty. Regularly and recently used, though, Ekaterin’s nose attested even through her air filters.

“What, didn’t your parents ever do that? To try to keep you safe when you were too young to understand?”

“No, not really. They mostly explained things as they were. Well, not subatomic physics, not when I was three. I generally tried to make them read me nonfiction, though, as soon as I was old enough to complain.”

“Mm.” Ekaterin considered the problem of a pupil less literate, and literal, than the young Enrique. One more frustratingly—perhaps frighteningly—slow. Still, the girl had exhibited speech, reasonably appropriate and grammatical if wrong-headed, which already put her well-up on the ladder of cognition. Not too profoundly impaired—or she wouldn’t have survived out here this long? Ekaterin pictured those smaller, more misshapen skulls. “How do you regard fiction, then? Or parable, myth, fable?”

Enrique waved a conceding hand. “Consensual lying, perhaps.”

“That’s actually a, a pretty socially advanced thing.” Though Sasha and Helen seemed to be coming up on it fast. But then, they had Miles for a Da.

“But if one embeds a lesson in a lie, and the children find out it’s a lie, they’re likely to throw out the lesson as well. I mean, logically. They couldn’t trust anything at that point.”