Wasteland of flint

whatever. As it happened, Hummingbird was only a few hundred meters away, off at an angle from the crash scar and the wreck. He was hunched over, walking slowly across the gravelly soil, peering at the ground.

As she watched, he bent down and picked up something bright – a bit of metal, she thought – and weighed it in his hand. Gretchen expected the nauallis to throw the fragment away, but he did not. Instead, he continued to wander aimlessly. A little later, he turned suddenly, curving back on his previous path, and dropped the metal on the ground. Without pausing, Hummingbird continued his lazy, winding circuit.

Shaking her head, Anderssen climbed down from the wreck and resumed piecing hextiles together. Boring work, but at least there was some sense and purpose to the activity.

Hummingbird returned after dark, suddenly appearing at the edge of a circle of light cast by a lantern hung on the nose of the Gagarin. Both aircraft and the tent were now up on hextile pads. Anderssen ignored Hummingbird as he unwrapped his kaffiyeh and cloak. Another pad of tiles held the mealheater and a water bottle. She was working with her big comp, collating the data collected during the day by sensors on the Midge and her suit. Despite the nauallis's admonition, nothing had prevented the cameras on the ultralight from recording his activities.

'Did you finish?' Gretchen did not look up. An interesting pattern had revealed itself from the camera data. Biting her lip in concentration, she sketched in a transform with the stylus. The comp obediently began to interp the data, building a three-dimensional model.

'Yes.' Hummingbird squatted across from her, his back against the front wheel of his ultralight. 'We can leave in the morning.'

'Are we going far?' Intrigued by the display building on the comp, she turned the device sideways to get a different perspective. 'Which direction?'

Hummingbird pointed southwest with his chin. 'The comm records on the Palenque show Russovsky used a relay transmitter on one of the Escarpment peaks to communicate with the ship when she was on farside. The peak is called Mons Prion on her maps. That is our next destination.'

Gretchen nodded and put down the comp. 'And once we're there, you'll make the transmitter disappear without a trace.'

The nauallis unwrapped a threesquare and began to chew methodically.

'There you go with the stone face again,' she sighed. 'Do you really think I'll just follow your orders blindly? That I'll ignore what you're doing, or pretend it hasn't happened?'

Hummingbird stopped eating and Gretchen thought he was actually paying attention. She tried not to swallow nervously and plunged ahead.

'You didn't want me to pay attention to you today, so I kept out of your way. But the cameras on the ultralights recorded everything you did on this side of the wreck. You didn't seem to care about that…they made me a map of where you went. Would you like to see it?'

Gretchen tipped up the comp, showing him a three-dimensional representation of his path. The trail looked like a snake with a broken back, but one which entirely surrounded the wreck in a long oval. Moreover, the path seemed to cover the sandy ground without doubling back upon itself. 'This search pattern, master Hummingbird, is a thing of beauty. I am truly impressed.'

There was a grunt on the open comm channel and the nauallis looked away. Gretchen tucked the comp back into its bag with a pleased expression on her face.

'At the university, on my first dig, the pit foreman tried to teach all of us – all the first-term students – how to look for things on the ground. He gave us thirty minutes on a newly mown soccer field to find all the things he'd hidden. Seemed very silly to us – the grass was cut short, the field was almost perfectly flat – where could you hide anything? I managed to find a copy of Schulman's Techniques of Radiocarbon Analysis by tripping over the damned thing.'

Gretchen smiled wryly and shrugged her shoulders. 'The flatness of the field was an illusion – it wasn't entirely flat, there were little dimples or furrows in the grass – and we felt very, very stupid when he took us around and picked up all the things he'd laid out for us to find. More books, pencils, a belt, a hammer, a walking stick. A whole set of white plastic rulers he'd laid along the goal box lines. It's funny to think, now, how blind we were to things right in front of us.'

Anderssen stretched. Her back was tight and sore from assembling sheets of tile all day.

'Most people don't think looking at the ground and searching for things is a skill. But it is.' She pointed out into the darkness. 'Today, you covered the debris field thrown out by the crash centimeter by centimeter. I really doubt you missed a single bit of metal or ceramic or wire. Did you?'

Hummingbird lifted a hand and made a 'turning-over' motion. 'I don't think so.'

'Two questions come to mind, master Hummingbird.' Gretchen felt as if she were approaching a flighty horse or a sleeping, irritable dog. 'I can't make you answer them, but it would be helpful if I knew how to help you do this… thing.'

The weight of the Nбhuatl's gaze grew heavy and Anderssen started to sweat, feeling as if an exam had suddenly been placed in front of her.

'First, you didn't pick up every piece of debris out there – only some of them. How could you tell there were materials the microfauna couldn't digest? You weren't using a comp – in fact, do you even have a comp with you?'

Hummingbird grunted and there was a hiss as he bit idly at his breathing tube. 'There is a comp in the Midge. A powerful one.'

'But you didn't use a comp today.' Gretchen didn't wait for an answer. 'You put the bits and pieces of indigestible debris back down on the ground. Sometimes you just adjusted them a little where they lay.' Her heart was beating faster now and a curl of sweat was trickling down the side of her neck. 'If I…if I went out there tomorrow morning, with this map, would I be able to find those fragments? I wouldn't be able to, would I? They'd be…invisible. Indistinguishable from the rock and gravel and sand out there.'

Another hiss, followed by an almost-sigh. 'With your map, you might be able to find some of them. All of this must be done in haste, which always leads to mistakes.'

Gretchen stared at the nauallis. He turned his attention to the threesquare wrapper and empty chocolate tube in his hands. Slowly, he folded them up into a tiny ball which he placed in a pocket of his djellaba. Finally, she shifted to keep her legs from going to sleep.

'Will you answer my questions?'

'There are more than two!' Hummingbird replied in a tart voice. 'Will you be content to let me be? I agree – I do need your help to escape from this world. I am entirely human and do not wish to be marooned here or consumed by the little creatures in the sand. If you stay out of my way, all of this will go much faster.'

'How could you tell which fragments needed to be hidden?' Gretchen leaned forward, her voice rising. 'Can you see a difference? Do you have special lens setting on your goggles?'

'No.' Hummingbird shook his head in amusement. 'This is part of my training.'

Gretchen grew still. 'Can you teach me how to tell the difference?'

'I will not,' the nauallis replied with a dismissive snort. 'Though I'm sure you think your career would benefit from such knowledge.'

Anderssen settled back on her haunches. 'If I could do what you did today, we would have been finished sanitizing this site yesterday and already on our way to Mons Prion. Two can cover more ground than one.' She cocked her head to one side, squinting at him. 'What if you are hurt? Or injured in an accident? Who will finish the job then? I won't be able to. The evidence of man – of the Empire – will be left scattered all over this world. Ready to be found by whatever you fear will come hunting us.'

'I cannot teach you what I know.' Hummingbird's voice sounded irritated. 'You are a woman and my skills are a man's knowledge. I do not know how to train you properly.' He stood up. Gretchen rose as well, a slow steady anger curdling in her gut.

'That is a remarkably stupid thing to say. Why should my gender make a difference?'

'It does,' Hummingbird said. 'Men and women are…different. They see differently. There is…there is some danger if you interfere with my work. Danger which springs from you. I think, when we get to Prion, we should make camp a distance away, so I can