Jo Clayton - Fire in the Sky

He coughed, fiddled with the sensor board a moment, shrunk the blank screens, and brought up the other two. “The male Drudge had an equally um aaah disturbing but quite different reaction. There is a um point to be stressed here. It is quite likely that the history and personality of the subject interact to determine the content of the fantasies.”

The left screen held the image of the same observation theater as before. The male Drudge was an anatomical study, each muscle group clearly delineated, the heavy bones in his face prominent in the typical Drudge mask. His hands and feet were thick with rough dead skin as if he’d glued cork pads to them. The tech went through the process as before, oiling and polishing the knobby head, settling the crown in place, taping it down. He pulled his breather mask into place, emptied a specimen pac of shredded husk into the brazier by the Drudge’s head and set the fibrous pile on fire. Then he stepped back, moving out of view.

The Drudge lies still, only the twitching of his eyelids and the slow rise and fall of his chest to show he was alive. He doesn’t try testing the strength of the straps, though his eyes keep sliding round to the no longer visible tech. The smoke from the brazier thickens over him, he is holding his breath, but used air explodes out of him and he gulps in a lungful of the smoke. His mouth stretches wide, he is screaming, though there is no sound recorded on this flake, unlike that of the woman. His face is suffused with blood, his chest is vibrating as he pants faster and faster as panic seizes hold of him. Like the woman he turns his head from side to side, the movements increasingly violent, then he jerks his head loose from the strap, lifts it as high as he can and slams it down on the headrest. As he lifts it again, the tech rushes into the viewfield, jerks the strap taut. The subject tries to scream but cannot. His body surges against the straps, then collapses in on itself. The smoke is very thick now, swirling about the subject whose breathing has steadied; he is limp, pacified, deep in the spell of the drug… nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing a stirring in the greenish black ground as if something is trying to take shape nothing nothing the screen goes white, branching black patterns race from edge to edge, smaller and smaller patterns until the whole screen is black. White patterns start in the upper left corner and race outward, downward until the white has overlaid the black. The screen pulses black to white, again, again, eye-straining flashes timed to the pants of the subject. Then there is an explosion of harsh primary colors, jags of red stabbing into splotches of green, pinwheels of yellow with razor-edged arms slashing across both… then the colors and forms vanish or rather mutate into a pastoral scene with an extremely idealized but recognizable male, the subject, striding across the grass, sword in hand shining copper and silver in the sunlight. He is walking toward a woman who is also idealized, but recognizable…

“That…” Hunnar watched a moment longer. “He dares… I’m right, isn’t that the Bashkan’s youngest daughter?”

“Ah um yes, I’m afraid it is. And it gets much worse as the fantasy progresses. There are references to you also, O Ykkuval. Um aaa, you will definitely not appreciate the subject’s thoughts about you. They are um aaa highly subversive. Of course there isn’t the sliver of a chance he would ever act on such dreams. Remember, this is a Drudge.”

“A dead Drudge.” He glanced at the screen, scowled as he watched the image bowing before the woman, laying his sword at her feet, moving to unsheath a sword of another sort while she was unfolding like a flower before him. “Stop that now. I don’t care to see more.”

“Certainly, O Ykkuval.” The screens went black. “We will be dissecting both subjects in the near future after we’ve put them through some psychological tests so we can test the mind state after continued use of the drug against the baseline tests we took at the beginning of this investigation. Do you wish the personal reports to continue or would a flaked notation be acceptable?”

“Flakes have a way of sliding through cracks in security. The personal reports will continue. This is to remain on Samlak status, forbid to all eyes but mine.”

“It will be done.”

Kurz woke with the sun, crawled out of the shelter, and took a quick run round the islet. His were the only prints visible. There’d been a windy thunderstorm late last night that left the damp sand as neat as if it had been raked. He came back to the trees, pulled on his clothes, and inspected the shelter.

There were hundreds of small discoloration speckled over the upper curve. They’d bleached some color from the polymer sizing applied over the fabric but hadn’t done damage to the fibers themselves as far as he could see. Not yet, anyway. It was the first time he’d seen anything that could get that polymer to admit it existed. He didn’t touch the spots until he’d rinsed the shelter repeatedly with water from the spring.

He listened to the noise made by the tip of his claw passing over one of the tiny splotches. Rough. Catching on the edges of broken bubbles. The cloth underneath seemed intact, but it was woven from Menaviddan spider silk and there wasn’t much that could injure that. He checked over the gear he’d hoisted into the trees, but that was untouched. It was after him, whatever it was. He shrugged. No matter, he wasn’t going to be here long. He clipped a yagamouche and its holster to his belt, pulled his tunic down over it, slipped a stunner into the pocket built for it inside the tunic, checked to make sure his other weapons were in place, then he peeled a trail bar and started toward the chorek settlement, jaws working on the hard sticky confection as he splashed through water and muck, pounded across sand spits.

The satwatch reports were enough to give him a good notion of the habits of the chorek who lived there. Six men, four women. Two of the women seemed bonded, the other two available to all the men. Even the women never rose much before noon, though they were about earlier than the men, getting meals fixed and doing other chores. There were no sentries, just one man each night taking his turn to keep the fire going in the round stone firepit at the center of the village.

When he viewed the reports, he wondered why a fire in a place that warm and humid. He understood it now, understood the stack of poles beside the firepit, poles with bundles of rags bound round the ends, rags saturated with a dark, sticky liquid. Whatever it was that had come after him last night-that’s what they’d got ready for. It was a comfort to him that crude torches would drive the thing off; his yagamouche could melt a hole through the hide of a Sancheren tantserbok.

He slowed his pace as he got near the settlement, began choosing his path carefully, keeping himself sheltered from view as much as he could. It only needed one restless kreash stumbling out to relieve himself to see him and rouse the camp.

When he reached the shack he’d pinned as the leader’s hole, he ignored the doors and windows, caught hold of a projecting rafter, and hauled himself onto the roof. Using his claws as pries, he extracted shakes until he had a hole large enough to ease through and balance on one of the crooked beams that supported the roof.

A man and a woman lay snoring, tangled in a nest of filthy blankets, a clumsy jug beside then. Kurz wrinkled his nose at the stench that rose to meet him, a mix of sweat and sex with a sour overbite from that jug. Must be something on the order of old Farkli’s yang. He reached inside his tunic, eased the stunner free, and put both of them out.

A few beats later he had trees and sawgrass between him and the settlement and was trotting easily through shallow water, the naked and filthy chorek wound into an equally filthy blanket and draped over his shoulder. Though he hated touching the creature, Kurz held him in place, arm across the backs of his knees. The chorek’s arms hung loose behind him and slapped against him with every step he took. He closed his mind to this and to the stench, concentrated on getting back to his camp as quickly as he could. Trying to hide his trail would just waste time; he couldn’t beat the trailcraft these swampbyks were likely to have.