Стивен Гулд: Bugs in the Arroyo

“I die out there, you can have my mule and cart and all its contents. That’s a pretty good trade for a fiberglass shovel.”

Hahn was watching the conversation intently and Kimball saw him open his mouth, as if to argue on with Graham, but Kimball shook his head. The priest knew of his association with Territorial Intelligence. He’d even passed messages to and from the Rangers for Kimball. Kimball didn’t want Hahn blowing his cover to convince someone to lend a shovel.

Graham said, “I’ve got kids myself. The only thing worse than losing one is losing two. Forget it.” There was something in his voice that made Kimball think this wasn’t just theoretical knowledge. Kimball shrugged. “Right. How about you, Mr. Joffrey?”

Mr. Joffrey was looking at his wife. The hat was twisted tighter than ever. She was biting her lower lip. Her arms tightened around the toddler in her lap so much that he woke, complaining. She shushed him, kissing his head, and he settled again. She looked up at her husband and gave him a short nod.

“Right,” he said. He stared down at the hat in his hand and then touched his sunburned bald spot. “Ow. What a fool thing!” He settled the hat on his head and started up the hill. Kimball turned to follow him. “Now just wait a minute!” said Graham and started to walk up the hill after them.

Hahn stepped in the big man’s way and held up his hand. “Your choice is inaction. I understand that. But she is not your child.”

Hahn was a good two feet shorter than the teamster but something made that man pull up short. Kimball kept walking. At the cart, he took a water bottle, his first aid kit, and some dried apples and walnuts, and put them in a shoulder bag. Joffrey took a rough composite shovel out of his remaining cart and handed it to Kimball. “It’s seen better days.”

The edge of the fiberglass blade was worn and cracked but the handle was all right. “It’s perfect,” Kimball said.

“Be careful, right?”

Kimball nodded. He started to walk away but at the last minute stepped back to his cart and took that wide-brimmed green cattail hat with him.

He didn’t walk back down into the cut. Thayet was far closer to the other side and he saw no point in traveling through more bugs than he had to. Besides, this would save arguing with the teamster. A quarter mile upstream, where the edges of the arroyo were higher and steeper, a slab of limestone shelved across the bed, probably forming a waterfall when the water ran, but now it was a broken swath of rock with only a little of the iron rich sands pooling between raised boulders. Kimball slid down the side of the arroyo in a cloud of dirt, dust, and pebbles and picked his way across the arroyo, boulder to boulder. He had to cut steps into the far side with the shovel to make it back to the top. He came down the road cut on the far side and studied the space between him and Thayet’s rock. Bugs don’t really care about people. As far as they’re concerned, humans are just a slightly thicker manifestation of air.

Bugs care about three things, near as Kimball could figure. They loved metal. That’s what they’re after, what they’re made of, what they ate to turn into even more bugs. You don’t want to have an artificial joint in the Territory. Ditto for metal fillings. In preference over metal, though, they go after electro-magnetic radiation. This means they love radio and really, any of the humming frequencies caused by current flowing through conductors. Forget computers, radios, cell phones, generators, and—remember fillings and crowns?—well, a pacemaker, an imbedded insulin pump, a vagal stimulator brings them quicker. But there is one thing that brings them even faster than all of those, that makes them swarm . A broken bug is to the territory what blood is to a shark pool. They come in numbers, they come fast, and they come with their coal-black nano snouts ready to eat through anything. Kimball used the shovel like a spatula easing it under the bugs, under the sand itself, and lifted. The minute it was up, he stepped there, into the moist sand below, temporarily free of bugs. He sprinkled the shovelful of sand and bugs off to the side, gently, only inches above the others. Some rattled, some spread their silicon-blue photovoltaic wings from under their metal carapaces and buzzed off to land elsewhere, and some just fell to the ground and kept working on the bit of iron they’d separated from the surrounding sands.

Kimball took it very slow. He’d seen bugs sufficiently disturbed that a whole cloud of them rose up without the usual requirement of one getting broken—not quite a swarm—but sufficient to badly scar the horse that had stirred ’em up.

More than once one of the bugs buzzed to a landing on Kimball’s clothing. He scraped them carefully off with the blade of the shovel and they’d drop or fly off.

When he was fifteen feet or so from Thayet’s boulder he spoke. “Hey, lazy girl, you gonna sit there all day?”

She blinked and turned her head. She did not look good. Her lips were cracked and crusted with blood. Her nose was peeling and there was a hole in her pants above one knee that was brown with crusted blood. “Go away,” she said, and closed her eyes again.

Kimball blinked. Ah . “Thayet, I’m not a hallucination.”

“Yes you are. Kim is hundreds of miles from here.”

He laughed. For some reason that made her open her eyes again. “If you can convince me you won’t drop it, I have water.”

She shook herself, then slapped her cheek. She looked back across the arroyo to where her father and the crowd watched. Kimball hadn’t been looking at them. They were all standing, many of them with their hands raised as if they could reach out and snatch both of them to safety. Graham, the teamster boss, even had one hand raised to his mouth.

“Kim?” She looked back at him.

“Yes, Thayet.” Kimball shifted another shovelful of bugs and sand, made another pace forward. He stopped again, to let the bugs settle. “Here, catch.”

He took the hat and threw it like a Frisbee. She clutched it weakly to her, eyes widening.

“Does that feel like a hallucination?”

She rubbed it between her fingers. “No.”

“Put it on, silly.”

She did, and sighed audibly when the rim shaded the sun from her face.

“Ready for the water?”

“Give me a moment. I’m numb from the waist down.”

“Well, you better do something about that.” Kimball’s legs had gone to sleep before during meditation but he was afraid her experience was really more like the time he’d been locked in the stocks by the People of the Book.

She had to use her arms to uncross her legs. She pushed them out, extended and leaned back. Kimball took another shovelful, another step.

Thayet screamed as the sensation began returning to her legs. There was a sympathetic shout from the crowd across the arroyo. They probably thought a bug was boring through her, but Kimball saw Hahn talking, his hands raised, explaining about the legs.

Thayet gritted her teeth together, then, methodically began massaging her legs. “Aaaagghhh.” After a few moments she said, “Water?”

“Sip first, right? You drink too much you’ll throw it right up.” He swung the bag by its handle, underhand, and she caught it neatly.

She was careful, rinsing her mouth before swallowing. She managed a half of a liter in small gulps before he got the rest of the way to her boulder.

“Scoot over,” he said, sitting beside her. “Whew, I’m bushed.” It wasn’t the effort, but the tension. They sat there for another half-hour. Thayet tried some dried apple and a few walnuts and another half-liter of water and Kimball bandaged the bug score on her right thigh. Finally, he helped her stand and encouraged her to take a few steps side to side atop the rock.