Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

Over and over, Bassin bent down and sifted silt through a round twig basket. At most once each day, he would pluck a muddy ball as big as a walnut or an egg from the basket, examine it with his good eye, then toss it on the stream bank.

After a zesty lunch of rope cakes and water, Bassin gathered his day’s take, if any, then buried it in a hole he had scraped alongside his hut, which he covered with a flat stone. Seven identical muddy stone balls defined his life’s work.

After that, Bassin the Assassin got his sharp stone, and hunted the always-tasty brown root balls. These he located by crawling, nose an inch above the mud, sniffing. After washing the balls in the creek, he strung his harvest from tree limbs to dry, so he could make more rope pancakes. Apparently, the secret to zest and tenderness was proper aging.

Then we slept in the dark.

On the morning of the third day, I pointed upslope. “You’ve got a great career here, Bassin. But the prospects for advancement? Not so great.”

He stared.

I told him, “I’m gonna go prospect for flint. You will absolutely love fire.”

I walked toward the trees that bounded Bassin’s valley.

“Jason!”

I looked back. Bassin shook his head, and made the chomp sign with one hand.

I made the chomp-chomp sign back. “I know. I’ll be careful.”

He pointed at the sun, then pointed at the sky’s midpoint, where the sun would be at noon, then raised his eyebrows.

I nodded, and patted my belly armor. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back by lunchtime.”

He frowned and watched me all the way into the woods, crooked on his leg and stump. His stone-sifting basket dangled from one hand.

Two hours later, I had retraced the path Bassin and I had followed to his hut. The breeze was in my face, I carried a spear I had fashioned by sharpening a fallen branch against a rock, and now I knew what to watch out for.

I resumed my search along the debris perimeter, marking my trail as I went, increasingly sure that no Earthling would ever follow it. It had now been more than three days since the crash. But I had survived. I persuaded myself that the others could be hunkered down somewhere, too.

At eleven hundred by my ’Puter, I had circled around to the point where the debris field arced back upslope. So far, I had found no sign of life more advanced than a dung beetle, not even a monster turd.

To traverse the remaining unexplored perimeter would take until well past noon. But if I shortcut the search, I’d just have to come back after another frigid night.

I sighed.

Bassin had eaten lunch alone before I got there, apparently forever. One meal without me wouldn’t kill him.

I started on around the crash site’s remaining unexplored quadrant. The visibility was as bad here as it had been everywhere else.

Brush crackled.

I froze. This sound was no whisper, it was crash-crash- crash.

I clutched my spear, no thicker than a pool cue, and wondered how it would work on something hungry and forty feet long.

My heart racing, I retraced my steps for a hundred yards. Then I mounted a low boulder cluster and scanned the area.

All I saw was a gray-green brush sea, ten feet tall, quaking in the wind that blew toward me, and split by rare clearings.

Again the wind carried the crackle of snapped branches.

I knelt, froze, and stared toward the crackle. It came from the clearing from which I had retreated.

Something bigger than a backhoe bucket rose above the low treetops. It was an animal head on a thick neck, white and ochre, like a pinto pony.

The head dipped out of sight.

I leaned forward and squinted as the head rose again. It had big, brown eyes, and a broad duck’s bill. Leaves and branches mustached from the bill, and the animal’s lower jaw ground side-to-side as it chewed. Its skin was hide, tufted not with hair so much as with coarse down. Based on the length of the neck above the trees, this animal fit my size estimate of twenty to forty feet long.

The good news was this giant ate plants. The bad news was whatever left the spoor I had found didn’t.

The duck-billed pinto swallowed the last of its mouthful, except for two long, stubborn tendrils.

I stared at them. And blinked.

The tendrils didn’t hang from the animal’s mouth. They dangled from its nostrils, brown, artificial, and secured with rings. The straps disappeared down behind the brush that screened the creature’s body.

I stood, and peered over the brush to see what lay beneath.

TWENTY-THREE

I STARED. THEN I BLINKED. Then I shook my head.

What I saw remained. The pinto stood on massive hind legs, but bent forward on shorter forelegs, with a tail as long as its body balanced behind. I guessed the thing measured twenty-five feet, nose-to-tail.

To dodge calculus, I satisfied the science requirement of my mail-order Masters’ with Paleontology. The animal looked like a teaching-holo reconstruction of a duckbilled dinosaur.

In a world becoming loonier by the second, that almost made sense. The flora I had seen, conifers, angiosperm plants, was analogous to what existed on Earth during the late Cretaceous. This planet fell within the same sliver of cosmic creation that Earth did. Similar mass, and close enough to its star to liquefy water, but not so close as to boil it away. It was not so strange that parallel life would evolve in two identical petri dishes.

One fact was strange, however. Men like Bassin hadn’t evolved on Earth until more than sixty million years after the last duckbilled hadrosaur died off.

The puzzle grew stranger as I looked below.

Beneath the pinto’s great head a figure knelt, head down alongside the path I had just followed, clutching the dangling straps in one hand.

Hand. It was a man. But a man unlike Bassin. This man was black-bearded, booted, and his shoulders and chest were plated in coppery armor. But unmistakably he was another man.

I staggered back against a twisted tree trunk.

The man tugged off an armored gauntlet, then reached down, and rubbed the soil with bare fingers. Where some idiot had industriously left broken twigs, stone cairns, and Eternad bootprints.

The man stood, hands on hips, and rubbed the chin beneath his beard. Six foot six, he wore brown leather trousers thick enough to deflect modest battle axes, and a matching tunic beneath his armor. From each hip hung a holstered pistol so large that its muzzle nearly reached his knee. Two more pistols just as big were strapped to his chest, cross-draw, over his breastplate. A sword hilt diagonaled from a scabbard strung across his broad back. A scar as fat and brown as a nightcrawler creased his nose bridge, and he scratched it with three fingers and the stub of a fourth.

Tough neighborhood.

Blackbeard patted his monster’s flank, then drank from a skin bag hung from the beast’s saddle. All the while, his eyes traced up the hill, along the path I had followed back to these rocks.

I ducked behind the tree, and peeked out from behind it to watch him.

He stared at the outcrop that hid me. Then he threw back his head, cupped his hands, and bellowed.

Small and distant, another duckbilled head rose above the brush, this one dappled gray. Then another, and another. Human bellows answered.

One minute later, thirty duckbills and riders thundered toward the big bearded man, crashing through brush like armored personnel carriers.

I slid down the outcrop’s rear slope, then sprinted, away from Bassin’s valley. If these guys turned out friendly, I could always find my way back to Bassin. If they were unfriendly, Bassin didn’t need me bringing them home for lunch.

My breath grew ragged as I picked my way over boulders, and wove through brittle trees.