Inside, Rety knew better. Dwer’s heart didn’t work that way.
But mine does.
When he groaned again, Rety muttered angrily, “I’ll make you even sorrier, Dwer, if I don’t make it off this mudball ’cause of you!”
So much for her glorious homecoming.
At first it had seemed fun to pay a return visit, swooping from a cloud-decked sky in Kunn’s silver dart, emerging proudly to amazed gasps from the shabby cousins, who had bullied her for fourteen awful years. What a fitting climax to her desperate gamble, a few months ago, when she finally found the nerve to flee all the muck and misery, setting forth alone to seek the fabled Slope her great-grandparents had left behind, when they chose the “free” life as wild sooners.
Free of the sages’ prying rules about what beasts you may kill. Free from irky laws about how many babies you can have. Free from having to abide neighbors with four legs, or five, or that rolled on humming wheels.
Rety snorted contempt for the founders of her tribe.
Free from books and medicine. Free to live like animals!
Fed up, Rety had set out to find something better or die trying.
The journey had nearly killed her — crossing icy torrents and parched wastes. Her closest call came traversing a high pass into the Slope, following a mysterious metal bird into a mulc spider’s web. A web that became a terrifying trap when the spider’s tendrils closed around her, oozing golden drops that horribly preserved. …
Memory came unbidden — of Dwer charging through that awful thicket with a gleaming machete, then sheltering her with his body when the web caught fire.
She recalled the bright bird, glittering in flames, treacherously cut down by an attacking robot just like her “servant.” The one now hauling her off to Ifni-knew-where.
Rety’s mind veered as a gut-wrenching swerve nearly spilled her overboard. She screamed at the robot.
“Idiot! No one’s shooting at you anymore! There were just a few slopies, and they were all afoot. Nothing on Jijo could catch you now!”
But the frantic contraption plunged ahead, riding a cushion of incredible god force.
Rety wondered, Could it sense her contempt? Dwer and two or three friends, equipped with crude fire sticks, had taken just a few duras to disable and drive off the so-called war bot, though at some cost to themselves.
Ifni, what a snarl. She pondered the sooty hole where Dwer’s surprise attack had ripped out its antenna. How’m I gonna explain this to Kunn?
Rety’s adopted rank as an honorary star god was already fragile. The angry pilot might simply abandon her in these hills where she had grown up, among savages she loathed.
I won’t go back to the tribe, she vowed. I’d rather join wild glavers, sucking bugs off dead critters on the Poison Plain.
It was all Dwer’s fault, of course. Rety hated listening to the young fool moan.
We’re heading south, where Kunn flew off to. The robot must be rushin’ to report in person, now that it can’t farspeak anymore.
Having witnessed Kunn’s skill at torture, Rety found herself hoping Dwer’s leg wound would reopen. Bleeding to death would be better by far.
The fleeing machine left the Gray Hills, slanting toward a tree-dotted prairie. Streams converged, turning the brook into a river, winding slowly toward the tropics.
The journey grew smoother and Rety risked sitting up again. But the robot did not take the obvious shortcut over water. Instead, it followed each oxbow curve, seldom venturing past the reedy shallows.
The land seemed pleasant. Good for herds or farming, if you knew how, and weren’t afraid of being caught.
It brought to mind all the wonders she had seen on the Slope, after barely escaping the mulc spider. Folk there had all sorts of clever arts Rety’s tribe lacked. Yet, despite their fancy windmills and gardens, their metal tools and paper books, the slopies had seemed dazed and frightened when Rety reached the famous Festival Glade.
What had the Six Races so upset was the recent coming of a starship, ending two thousand years of isolation.
To Rety, the spacers seemed wondrous. A ship owned by unseen Rothen masters, but crewed by humans so handsome and knowing that Rety would give anything to be like them. Not a doomed savage with a scarred face, eking out a life on a taboo world.
A daring ambition roused … and by pluck and guts she had made it happen! Rety got to know those haughty men and women—Ling, Besh, Kunn, and Rann—worming her way into their favor. When asked, she gladly guided fierce Kunn to her tribe’s old camp, retracing her earlier epic journey in a mere quarter day, munching Galactic treats while staring through the scout boat’s window at wastelands below.
Years of abuse were repaid by her filthy cousins’ shocked stares, beholding her transformed from grubby urchin to Rety, the star god.
If only that triumph could have lasted.
She jerked back when Dwer called her name.
Peering over the edge, Rety saw his windburned face, the wild black hair plastered with dried sweat. One buckskin breech leg was stained ocher brown under a makeshift compress, though Rety saw no sign of new wetness. Trapped by the robots unyielding tendrils, Dwer clutched his precious hand-carved bow, as if it were the last thing he would part with before death. Rety could scarcely believe she once thought the crude weapon worth stealing.
“What do you want now?” she demanded.
The young hunter’s eyes met hers. His voice came out as a croak.
“Can I … have some water?”
“Assumin’ I have any,” she muttered, “name one reason I’d share it with you!”
Rustling at her waist. A narrow head and neck snaked out of her belt pouch. Three dark eyes glared — two with lids and one pupilless, faceted like a jewel.
“wife be not liar to this one! wife has water bottle! yee smells its bitterness.”
Rety sighed over this unwelcome interruption by her miniature “husband.”
“There’s just half left. No one tol’ me I was goin’ on a trip!”
The little urrish male hissed disapproval, “wife share with this one, or bad luck come! no hole safe for grubs or larvae!”
Rety almost retorted that her marriage to yee was not real. They would never have “grubs” together. Anyway, yee seemed bent on being her portable conscience, even when it was clearly every creature for herself.
I never should’ve told him how Dwer saved me from the mulc spider. They say male urs are dumb. Ain’t it my luck to marry a genius one?
“Oh … all right!”
The bottle, an alien-made wonder, weighed little more than the liquid it contained. “Don’t drop it,” she warned Dwer, lowering the red cord. He grabbed it eagerly.
“No, fool! The top don’t pull off like a stopper. Turn it till it comes off. That’s right. Jeekee know-nothin’ slopie.”
She didn’t add how the concept of a screw cap had mystified her, too, when Kunn and the others first adopted her as a provisional Danik. Of course that was before she became sophisticated.
Rety watched nervously as he drank.
“Don’t spill it. An’ don’t you dare drink it all! You hear me? That’s enough, Dwer. Stop now. Dwer!”
But he ignored her protests, guzzling while she cursed. When the canteen was drained, Dwer smiled at her through cracked lips.
Too stunned to react, Rety knew — she would have done exactly the same.
Yeah, an inner voice answered. But I didn’t expect it of him.
