‘Any sign?’ he called to someone.
‘Viggies’ve been in here,’ someone answered. ‘Foot-prints all over everything. Nothin’ else.’
Viggies! She gasped with relief. Her own tracks had been hidden then. Brunny was moving around the cook wagon, his loose coat wagging around him. After a time, clutching his coat, he went off to the same grove the Tripmaster had used the night before, also carrying a latrine shovel. No one offered to go with him.
Miles moved. Vivian crouched beside him, ready to silence him if necessary. It might not be necessary. Sometimes Miles slept well into the morning….
As he did this time. The wagons were some distance away before he woke.
When she could no longer see the wagons, Vivian assumed the wagons could no longer see her and went down to the campground, hoping that someone would have found some way to leave food and water. The place was as clean as any campsite the Tripmaster had ever left.
‘No cooky?’ asked Miles hungrily. ‘Where’s Brunny?’
Her eyes filled with tears. What had the Tripmaster hoped to do? Had he hoped to take the interlopers into Deepsoil Five and then return for her? Or send someone from Harmony? What would it be, minimum? Three days? Five? Surely he must have….
She put Miles down with an exclamation and ran toward the grove where both the Tripmaster and Brunny had gone. She found it almost at once, a little mound. Tentatively, she dug into it with a dried frond.
Shit.
She wrinkled her nose, disgusted. Well, of course. She shoved the half dried feces aside and kept on digging.
Deep in the hole she found a water bottle, a small carton of rations, and a little plastic sack. In the sack was a note for her and something for Miles.
‘We’ll be back for you,’ Brunny had written. ‘Stay put.’
‘Cookies,’ said Miles with satisfaction.
Staying put for the morning was no problem. The afternoon became less pleasant, with a strong, grit-bearing wind from the south. Vivian left Miles huddled beneath a sheltering Jubal tree while she searched the surrounding area for cover. To the northwest were ramparts of Presences, pale yellow and gray-blue with forests of ’lings gathered at their bases, dwindling southward almost to the trail. Directly north was the pass to Harmony, a long, ’ling-littered slope, almost barren of growth. Nearby, groves of Jubal trees and meadows of knee-high grass lined the trail on both sides. Farther east, another escarpment was first amber, then orange, then vivid red, peaking at its point of ultimate scarlet into the sheer facades of the Enigma. So much she either knew, had seen herself, or had learned from her over-the-shoulder observations of the charts.
To the south, the groves of the trees dwindled to nothing, and the sedimentary rock of a coastal desert took over, only an occasional pillarlike Presence breaking the flat monotony, the ruled-line of the horizon.
The rock was broken by potholes. Within minutes of beginning her search, Vivian found half a dozen of them, none of them much larger than her head. A bit deeper into the rock desert, the holes became larger, and about a quarter of a mile from the trail, in the middle of a patch of fine sand, she found a hole with nicely stepped sides, a sandy bottom, and an overhang on the south edge – a perfect shelter from the strong south wind.
It was warm in the hole, also. The stone walls gathered the rays of the sun and held the warmth. They would give it up slowly, even in the chill of the night. All day they sat in the sand at the bottom of the hole, Vivian manufacturing trucks for Miles out of ration cartons and bits of string, Miles building roads in the sand, both of them retreating under the ledge when the wind blew chill. It was a better hiding place than the grove of trees had been, and from the lip of the hole she could see anyone or anything approaching while it was still miles away. She did not consider that anyone might approach in the dark or in the fog. She had not even seen one of the notorious fogs of the southern coast.
When it came, it was not much to see. The first hint of it was the clamminess of the blankets that wakened her, blankets suddenly soggy and cold in the darkness. She had gathered dried tree fronds for fire, if it became necessary to have fire, and she lit a small pile of them with the firestarter from the rations kit. They smoldered with a dense, eye-burning smoke that would not rise above the lip of the hole, and she threw sand over the charred branches, cursing at them. Better to be cold than half asphyxiated, she thought, not realizing quite how cold it would get. Once that realization struck home, she pulled Miles onto her larger mattress and half deflated the smaller one to make a tent over them, thriftily setting the water jug beneath one folded corner and listening to the plop, plop, plop as condensation from the fog ran into it. A Tripsinger had done that once. She had read about it in his report. She sat cross-legged, with Miles in her lap, making a tent pole of her body and head, both blankets wrapped around them. After an endless time, she even dozed.
It was the voices that wakened her. Soft voices in the dark, calling her.
But not by name. At first the strangeness of that did not strike her. Only when she had come fully awake did the voices seem odd and mysterious. Until then they had been a component of dream.
‘We
