Wasteland of flint

strip of bright material gleamed in the Ephesian sun. 'Here we are, blessed furry little kit.' Her yellow eyes flickered back to the schematics on the other panel. 'These lights are made of a phosphor material which can be controlled by onboard comp.'

Parker laughed aloud. His thin fingers fluttered across the control console, bringing up the specifics of the LuxTerra illumination fabric. He ran a forefinger down a list of wavelengths. 'We can pulse each phosphor in ultraviolet – that would cut through the clouds and atmospheric distortion – and the satellite cameras could pick up a datagram as large as the panel array will allow.'

'Good.' Maggie ran her claw down the middle of the command panel. Immediately, the workspace split in two. 'Get to work on a receiver program to interp a multibyte array.'

'Me?' Parker gave her a horrified look. 'I'm not a comp-head! I fly shuttles, aircraft, pogo-sticks…'

Magdalena smiled at him, showing a great number of teeth. 'I'm busy, coding blind commands to reconfigure the Midge. So make yourself useful.' She paused, nose twitching. 'I want to know what the packleader is doing. Right now.'

Parker swallowed nervously and dragged over an equipment box for a seat. 'Sure. Sure. I'm working on it.' He forced his fingers to the panel and cleared away everything but some editors. 'Code – I wrote some code once. In school.'

Maggie's lip curled. The smell of the human's fear-sweat made her nose twitch.

Slot Canyon Twelve

With the old Mйxica helping her stand, Gretchen stepped gingerly out of the overhang. The sun had set and the wind had died down, leaving everything quiet and still. Anderssen was vastly relieved to have the world wrapped in darkness. Her head still felt altered, somehow, and she was sure the full light of day would be too much to take. Even the light of the stars – very clear, very bright, with a pellucid crystalline quality – hurt her eyes.

'Careful…there's a cable,' Hummingbird pointed. Gretchen stopped, staring at the line of shadow stretching from the ground to the Midge. Something like a white flame winked at the edge of her vision, then brightened. After a moment's attention, she saw the cable itself outlined in pale fire. Gretchen swallowed and looked up.

The ultralight was glowing very softly. Every edge was lit by the same kind of faded, heatless brilliance. Each strut, window, airfoil – all were limned with light. Gretchen's heart skipped a beat, but a sense of delight filled her. There was no fear, only amazement at the glorious sight. She leaned on Hummingbird's shoulder and looked around. Both aircraft were spectral, incandescent ghosts standing out sharp against a limitless black background. The cables made sharp, tight lines to the ground – but the sand, the rock, the cliffs seemed to have disappeared. Only very faint lights winked in deep crevices in the stone.

'The…the Gagarin is glowing,' she said softly.

Hummingbird's eyes crinkled up in response. 'Yes. I imagine it is.'

'What am I seeing?' Gretchen turned to look at the old Mйxica and found him equally illuminated, his kaffiyeh wicking with jewel-colored flames, face blazing with a pearlescent, gold-tinged light. She raised her own hand and saw her palm and fingers glowing in the same way.

'When first you begin to see,' Hummingbird said, voice soft against the respirator's background hiss, 'you will see too much. In this darkness, you are sensitive to even the least perturbation. By day, you would be almost blinded by the immense detail of the world. Right now, you are aware of the electromagnetic field around living things. The Midge is illuminated because our aircraft carry vibrations from their engines, from the motion of flight, from the powered systems onboard.'

'I'm seeing an electromagnetic field?' Gretchen started to laugh. 'That's impossible!'

'You see the light from a glowbean or a wand, don't you? This is the same, only much much fainter.' Hummingbird took hold of her shoulders and turned her toward the open plain. 'The 'helper' I gave you has broken down a barrier in your mind, a perceptual filter to which you've become accustomed since you were born. Look out there, into the emptiness. What do you see?'

'Nothing…wait, there's a faint radiance along the dune faces.'

'Heat is radiating from the earth. Soon it will be gone and the sand and air will be the same temperature. Then there will be no difference for you to perceive.'

Gretchen gave the old Mйxica a sick look. 'Is this what you see? All the time?'

Hummingbird shook his head. 'No. A student on the path must overcome many obstacles – this is the obstacle of clarity. I fear…' His voice changed timbre and Gretchen was aware of a change in the glow outlining his face. 'The drug you took is one given to students who have been training and preparing themselves for months. But we have no time to guide your feet along the traditional path -'

'You're not supposed to be training me at all!' Gretchen interjected suddenly. Memories flooded back and she remembered the strange conversation in darkness. 'I heard voices arguing as I slept – 'only men may become tlamatinime.' Women must become…' She paused, trying to remember. The memories were fading, scattering like pine needles in a fall wind. 'Skirt-of-knives said…she said…ah, it'sgone.'

Hummingbird had become quite still, his gaze fixed on Gretchen's face. 'You heard a woman's voice? An old woman?'

'No – she was young – but there was an old man, he sounded like a stage actor.'

The nauallis made a queer barking sound, which Gretchen remembered was what passed for laughter for the old man. 'She was young long ago. But I was thinking of that day while you slept.' He sighed, an honest sound of regret. Then he began to sing, but only for a moment. 'We leave the flowers, the songs, the earth. Truly, we go, truly we part.'

'You were there.' Gretchen knew the truth of the matter even as she spoke. 'You were in the room, a young man. The old actor was sitting in a wooden chair. He stood up to leave.'

'Yes. And he was right – he is right – and I've broken an ancient law, speaking to you as I've done, giving you the 'helper', setting your feet on this path.'

'I am in danger?'

'You've always been in danger,' Hummingbird said in a sharp tone. 'But now, today, you must learn to see again.'

'I think,' Gretchen said, 'I see too much!'

Hummingbird nodded. 'Yes – listen closely, there is not much night left. Your mind has been forced awake by the 'helper.' A veil of perception has been cast aside, letting you see as a human organism naturally perceives the world. Your mind is now exposed to a flood of data – a flood which in normal course is filtered, flattened, reduced to aggregates and symbols – but your consciousness is not ready to operate in such an environment.

'Now you must learn to concentrate on the important. You must learn to see selectively.'

Gretchen felt itchy all over and shook her arms and hands. The z-suit felt strangely tight. 'Didn't I see before? I mean – you're saying this sharpness, with everything seeming in focus all at once, even things far away – is what happens anyway?'

'Even so.' Hummingbird raised his hand in front of her face. 'But your mind was hiding the true world from your consciousness. Look at my hand tonight and you see every single bump and groove in my glove, you see the fire of my bodily electrical field, you see each pore in my skin. But yesterday? Yesterday you saw an idea of a gloved hand. An abstraction. A great part of human mental activity is devoted to reducing this raw flood of images and smells and sensations to remembered symbols. A hand. A man. A dog. An ultralight.'

He swung his hand, indicating everything within sight. 'Those symbols are not real, but they are very convenient. They let the lazy mind operate in such a confusing world.' Gretchen could hear a grin in the man's voice. 'Have you seen a baby watching the world? Their eyes are so wide! Their entire mentation is focused upon trying to understand everything all at once. A baby becomes a child and then an adult by replacing raw truth with layers of abstraction. By learning speech. By learning to read and to write. All those tools – the tools which build Imperial society and our science and our technology – hide the true world behind symbols.'

'I…I understand.' Gretchen felt faint and swayed. Clumsily, she sat down on the sand. The sensation of touching the earth, the sound of sand shifting under her hands, was nearly overwhelming. 'What do I do…to be able