Wasteland of flint

Midge.

'Is there lunch yet?' Anderssen began picking her way down through the broken, eggshell-like slabs of sandstone.

'Yes,' Hummingbird said in a grumpy voice.

Gretchen sighed, but said nothing, preparing herself for threesquares straight from the tube.

She was not disappointed, though the Mйxica had scrounged up some flavored tea. Still, protein paste was protein paste, even if the taste approximated the reddish dust covering every surface in all directions. Gretchen watched Hummingbird eat, making sure he finished his daily ration and drank all his tea. When the nauallis was done, she lifted her chin questioningly.

'Can you show me what to do? How to control this sight?'

Hummingbird looked up, green eyes clouded with distracted thoughts. 'I can show you how to begin,' he said slowly, as if each word were painful. 'Small things. Simple things.'

'Fine.' Gretchen squared her shoulders, feeling a kink in her neck. He's worried. 'Whatever you think is safe. Just being able to tell when I'm seeing or just seeing would be good.'

The nauallis nodded, looking around him on the ground. 'Take a moment,' he said, voice subtly changing tone. 'Close your eyes, let your mind empty, and feel around among these stones. Find one which feels right in your hands. Don't hurry. We're not going anywhere.'

Gretchen did as he bid, though after finally sitting down to eat she felt very tired. Flying by night sort of implied sleeping by day, a little voice muttered in her head, not crawling about among broken shale. As before, when she closed her eyes a great commotion seemed to brew up in her thoughts. This time, the voices and memories and flashes of things she'd seen or done or heard were overlaid by a patina of exhaustion which made them distant and faded. Old sepia-tone images of her life. Despite a great desire to curl up in her sleepbag, Gretchen moved blindly around the camp, letting her fingers see the sand and grit and broken little stones.

Eventually, her hand touched something and she stopped. The bit of rock felt warm, almost hot, even through her gloves. Gretchen opened her eyes. She was at the edge of the rockfall, far from the brilliant demarcation of light and shade. The glassy, dark stone in her hand was curved and sharp along one edge. Could make a tool from this, she thought, turning the piece of flint over in her hands. Without much work at all.

'How does that feel?' Hummingbird said. He was lying down in the tent, his eyes closed.

'Good,' Gretchen replied, becoming aware of the rightness of the stone in her hand. 'It felt warm for a moment.'

'Put it in your pocket,' he said. 'Now close your eyes again and feel about. But this time, find a stone which does not feel proper. One you do not wish to touch. Take your time.'

Frowning a little at the nauallis, who had folded his arms over his chest and gone back to sleep, Gretchen tucked the flint into one of the cargo pockets built into her vest. Closing her eyes brought on a surging sense of drowsiness, but she soldiered on, letting her hands drift across the ground, letting her slow, crawling motion carry her wherever it would.

A little later, after cracking her head painfully against a boulder, Gretchen gave up the search as a bad job and crawled into the tent. Hummingbird was fast asleep, his partially detached breather mask serving as an echo chamber for a snuf-fling kind of snore. Gretchen made a disgusted face at him, then collapsed on her own sleepbag, utterly spent.

'This just isn't the same,' Gretchen said, late in the afternoon, as she and Hummingbird were eating again, waiting for the sun to set and the air to chill enough to fly. 'There's no campfire to sit around. No flickering light on the cave walls, no darkness beyond the firelight, filled with strange sounds…the gleam of eyes as hunting cats prowl by.'

Hummingbird grunted, sucking the last of a puce-colored threesquare from its tube. Gretchen had not offered to share any of her tabasco, drawing an aggrieved look from the old man. 'Our common ancestors,' he said, wiping his lips, 'would not have considered such a scene 'homey' or 'nostalgic'. The cough of a jaguar in the night was a cause for terror, not comfort.'

'I suppose.' Gretchen was kneeling in the knocked-down tent, rolling up her sleepbag. 'So – I didn't find an improper stone this morning – should I look again?'

Hummingbird raised an eyebrow at her and then laid a finger on his temple. 'Really?'

Gretchen rubbed her brow, then winced to feel the bump from running into the boulder. 'Well, I guess…say, how long will it take me to learn the good stuff?' She started to grin. 'Like flying or throwing lightning from my hands or changing into an animal, like in the old tales?'

'I do not teach such things!' Hummingbird snapped, suddenly angry. His face compressed into a tight frown and Gretchen moved back involuntarily. 'The way of the tlamatinime is subtle, balanced. We follow the line of the earth, we do not break balance or distort what is.'

'Oh.' Anderssen eyed him warily, seeing an unexpected, fulminating anger shining in his lean, wrinkled old countenance. 'Not a problem. I understand.'

'I doubt that,' the Mйxica growled, rising abruptly. 'You've plighted troth to a science which barely acknowledges balance at all – much less attempts to move in accord with that which is.'

'Wait a minute,' Gretchen said, her own anger nettled by the fury in his voice. 'Science seeks to understand, not to destroy. I was joking, old crow, joking.' She paused, a flicker of doubt crossing her face. 'Are there…there aren't judges who can fly, are there?'

Hummingbird looked away, attention fixed on the horizon, where the sun was sliding down toward night, a huge red-gold disk with wavering purple edges.

'No,' he said after a moment. A hand waved negligently at the Midge s parked in the shade. 'Though we fly ourselves, with some help. But your science…' He sighed.

'I don't understand,' Gretchen said, trying to keep from sounding antagonistic. 'The more we learn, the fuller our understanding grows, the better mankind can exist in this universe. We learn, old crow, our science learns.'

'No. No, it does not.' Hummingbird rubbed the edge of his jaw, lips pursed, staring at her in an appraising way. 'Your science…your science is about control, Anderssen-tzin, not about understanding. Now, listen to me before you raise your voice in defense of the beast which whelped you! I have met many of your colleagues; on Anбhuac, in the orbital colonies, on the frontier worlds. There are men and women among their number I admire. Many of them mean well. My quarrel is not with these people, but with the doctrine they serve.'

'What?' Gretchen fell silent as Hummingbird raised a hand sharply, though her eyes narrowed in irritation.

'The basis – the seed, the root, the wellspring – of your science, Anderssen-tzin,' he said, settling down to the ground, legs crossed, 'is to make things happen the same way not just once, not twice, but a thousand times. It is to learn enough, discover enough, to allow a human being to control the processes of the universe. From sparking fire to forging a bronze knife to making a reliable breather mask.' Hummingbird tilted his head a little to one side, amusement glinting in his dark eyes. 'Isn't that the heart of your science? The evolution of a hypothesis into a theory? The definition of fact? Of scientific truth?'

'No,' Gretchen said, feeling like she'd stumbled into a first-term philosophy class. 'You're confusing the goal of engineering with the process of science. And not the first person to do so, either.' She sniffed, tilting up her nose. 'Engineering is about reliability and process control – but science…science is about learning why things work, not just how. Science…' She paused, failing to wrestle her words into something succinct and pithy. 'Our science is just like your seeing, but born from the mind, from logic, not from an organic alkaloid.'

Hummingbird grunted dismissively. 'Logic is the construct of a human mind and prey to every failing thereof. The universe around us is not logical, not at its heart.'

Gretchen's nose twitched, as at a foul smell. 'There is always accident, chaos, uncertainty.'

'Yes,' Hummingbird said, starting to smile. 'There is. The bane of your mechanistic technology – the enemy of order, the devil which must always be pursued, always driven out. Consider, Anderssen- tzin, if you turn in a dig report which is incomplete, which leaves data unaccounted for,