Alien Child (18 page)

“Go on, keep shouting—let every bear in the wood know where we are.” He took a breath. “Don’t you remember what the records said about bears? They’re usually shy, the library said—you might have frightened it off without firing at it. You probably provoked it instead, and wounded bears are more dangerous. Then you get so panicky that you scare me into racing off without being able to see where I’m going.”

“And I’m sure you would have thought of all that,” she responded, “if you’d been awake the way you were supposed to be. You just want to blame
me
for something. I don’t know why we came out here. What good are we going to do anybody else if we can’t even look out for ourselves?”

The robot settled on the ground near her, apparently waiting for orders to move on. Nita glanced at its viewplate; she could almost sense the mind watching them through it. This display, she thought bitterly, would make a fine addition to the Institute’s records of her kind.

Sven said, “Do you want to go back?”

“Do you?”

“If you’re going to keep after me about one mistake, maybe we should. I said I was sorry, and that it won’t happen again. I don’t know what else I can do.”

“We can’t turn back now.” She got to her feet. “Besides, we’d have to go back the way we came, and I don’t want to be anywhere near that bear.”

“How many times did you hit it?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Five—maybe six.”

“You might have killed it.”

“We’d better not count on that.”

They did not speak for the rest of the day, not even during the times when they stopped to rest. By afternoon, they had reached a large clearing bordered on one side by an outcropping of rock. Sven peered up at the sky. “It’s still light enough to keep going,” he said.

Nita started at the sound of his voice; she had been wondering if he would ever speak again. “I think we should stop here,” she said. They would have shelter under the rocky shelf, and the clearing was wide enough for them to spot anything that entered from under the trees. “It must be close to evening by now, and I’d rather stop here than in the forest.”

She gathered wood with the robot while Sven prepared a place for the fire near the outcropping. This time, they managed to get a blaze started after only two attempts.

Nita took off her boots, checked her bandaged blisters, then pulled the boots on again. Her eyes stung from lack of sleep; she felt filthy and longed to bathe. Her muscles ached from walking, and the heat of the fire was making her sweat; the air had grown hot and sticky that day. She sipped a little water, then leaned back against the rock.

Sven took his bottle from his pack. “Aren’t you going to eat anything?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Eating just makes me more thirsty. I’ll eat in the morning.” She studied her bottle, then put it back into her pack. “We’ll need more water soon.”

“I know. If we don’t find any, we’ll have to use the water the gardener’s carrying to make it back.”

“Do you have any idea of where we are?”

He reached under his suit and pulled out the map. “I’m not sure, because I can’t tell how far we’ve come. Reading a map is one thing—moving around out here is something else.”

“All our plans,” she said. “They don’t amount to much, do they, even with a gardener and all our supplies.”

“We knew it wouldn’t be easy. But if we keep going south, we have to find the river and the plain.”

“If the river’s where it was,” she said. “We can’t even be sure of that.”

“I don’t think a river that large could have altered its course that much, but if we don’t find it, we can still turn back and make other plans. We’re not going to get to the river or the plain, anyway, unless we find more water soon.” He slipped the map under his suit. “Why don’t you sleep now? I’ll keep watch first. I’ll stay awake this time—I’ll tell the robot to nudge me once in a while to make sure.”

She curled up on top of the cloth as Sven crawled out to sit by the fire.

“Nita, wake up.”

She opened her eyes; Sven was leaning over her. In spite of the hard ground, she had slept deeply.

“Wait,” he said. “Don’t move.” The firelight flickered behind him as he pulled on his gloves. He groped at her side, then stood up swiftly and hurled something toward the trees.

She sat up quickly. “What are you doing?”

“A snake was lying next to your leg.”

She let out a gasp.

“It was probably trying to keep warm. It couldn’t have bitten you through the suit, but you should probably keep your gloves on when you sleep.”

She shuddered and moved toward the fire while he stretched out on the cloth. She checked the pile of wood and saw that there was likely to be enough for the rest of the night, then sat back on her heels, keeping her wand ready.

This night seemed darker than the last. She looked up; even the stars were hidden. A distant snarl, like that of a cat, broke the silence, and then the forest was quiet again. The air was still; she could hear nothing except the crackling of the fire.

Her people had lived out here once, long before they had buildings to shelter them and cybernetic minds to tend to their needs. Every day must have been a struggle, and every night a time of terrors and fears. They had been threatened constantly; she could understand why they might have seen their lives as a long fight.

But they also could not have survived out here without depending on one another. They would have needed friends whom they could trust; a solitary person would have found it hard to live. Whatever her kind had become later, they must once have been people who faced the dangers of the world together without fighting those like themselves. Their days would have taught them how precarious their existence already was; their nights would have shown them how alone they would be without their friends.

She looked back at Sven for a moment. He was asleep, his head cradled on one arm. The trees whispered and whined overhead; she realized that the wind was picking up. She huddled closer to the fire; the wind rose to a shriek. The sky was suddenly bright with light; a thunderclap brought her to her feet.

She let out a cry as the thunder rolled. The sky brightened again as rain began to fall. “Under the rock!” she called out as she gestured to the gardener; the robot floated under the ledge.

Sven was awake. The rain sizzled as it hit the burning wood; their fire would go out. She hurried toward the boy as he stood up.

“Our fire—” she began to say.

“Nita. Don’t you see? We’ll have water now.”

She gaped at him, then reached for the helmet lying next to her pack as Sven grabbed his. They propped them just beyond the ledge against a few stones as the rain fell.

Sven touched her arm and then lay down again; his head rested lightly against her thigh. The fire blazed up once more before it died. She sat in the darkness, listening to the howl of the wind and the patter of the rain.

The storm abated before morning. Nita waited until the sky was gray before awakening Sven. They gulped some of the rainwater in their helmets, then poured the rest into their bottles before eating their morning meal.

The ground was softer and muddier as they walked; droplets fell on them from the tree limbs above. Her spirits lifted; they had a little more water, and they had made it through another night.

When they stopped to rest and relieve themselves, her newfound confidence was beginning to fade. By the time they halted again to eat a few nuts and dried fruits, the effort of walking was tiring her.

Sven stood up when he had finished eating and moved toward a tree trunk. He touched the scratches on the bark with one gloved hand, then stared at the ground. “Do you see those marks?” he asked. “There, where it’s muddy. They look like animal tracks.”

She gazed at the ground. The wet earth made the tracks more obvious. She reached for her wand, thinking of the bear she had encountered.

“It could be a trail,” he said. He took out his compass. “Seems they were going west. Animals need water as much as we do. Maybe if we follow it—”

“But we have to go south.”

“We could follow it for a while, and turn south later. We might be close to a source of water and not even know it. There might be a spring or a pool that isn’t marked on this map, that didn’t exist when it was made.”

“We don’t know what made those tracks,” she said. “It might be dangerous.”

He sighed. “We have our wands. We have a little more water than we did. We ought to use the extra day it’s given us to see if we can find more—at least that’s what I think.”

“I think we should use it to get nearer to where the river’s supposed to be,” she said.

“But we don’t know how far we’ve come,” he replied. “We don’t know how far we still have to go. If we don’t find more water in a couple of days, we’ll have to go back anyway.”

“We should have brought more water to begin with.”

“You know we couldn’t have carried it,” he said, “and the gardener’s weighted down enough as it is—it wasn’t made to carry heavy loads.” He paused. “Well, what do you want to do?”

He was leaving the decision to her, but he clearly wanted to follow the trail. “You decide,” she said.

“Oh no. We’re in this together. I’m not going to decide things alone.”

“All right, Sven. We’ll follow the trail.”

They walked west, searching out the tracks. Nita grew so nervous at the thought of what they might be following that she often fired her weapon at any sign of movement. Her rays hit only bushes and shrubs; she suspected that the sight of the beam was enough to scare animals away. She forced herself to curb her nervousness. Her weapon’s charge might get used up; she did not want the wand to fail her if she needed it again.

Searching out the signs of a trail was slowing their pace. She was finding it difficult to spot the tracks; by the time they reached a place where a dead tree had fallen, she was convinced that they had lost the trail.

Sven leaned against the fallen tree. “I can’t see the tracks anymore,” he said. “Might as well admit it before we lose any more time.”

“It was worth trying,” she said.

“I should have known I couldn’t follow a trail.”

“You did the best you could.”

They turned south once more, moving carefully along the sloping ground.

They spent the night at the base of a hill; finding dry wood for their fire had taken them longer than usual. When Nita’s turn came to sit by the fire, she saw a pair of eyes gazing at her from under the trees; the eyes gleamed in the reflected light. She froze, keeping her hand near her wand until the eyes vanished. By dawn, her body was stiff with tension.

As they walked, she relaxed a little; her body was not aching so much today. Her pack was lighter, but that was because she had eaten some of the food and drunk more of her water.

The air was filled with the songs of birds; there seemed to be more of them than usual. Tiny insects hummed near her face; she swatted at them with one hand, then halted while she and Sven waited for the robot to clear away some brush.

The boy frowned, then held up a hand. “Do you hear that?” he asked.

“Hear what?”

“That sound.” He gestured to his left. “It’s coming from over there.”

She ordered the robot to be still, and strained to hear. The birds were still singing. She held her breath. He was right; she could hear a faint trickling.

“The river?” she whispered.

“Follow us,” he said to the gardener. They hurried in the direction of the sound and soon came to a small brook. Two deer were drinking on the other side; they lifted their heads and vanished into the wood. Nita let out a cry, then knelt to splash cold water on her face; she was about to drink and then remembered what the records had advised. “Do you think it’s safe?”

Sven stared at the stream. “The animals were drinking it. It seems fresh enough, and it’s running. I don’t think we have too much to worry about.”

“Maybe we ought to boil some later, just to be safe.” She recalled the map. “Was there a brook like this marked on the map? Maybe we can finally figure out how far we’ve come.”

He pulled out the map. “I don’t see one. There’s the river, and a smaller stream in the western part of the forest, but we’ve been going south. Either this brook wasn’t here before or the map doesn’t show streams this small.” He put the map away. “We’ll have water, though. It means we can keep going.”

She grinned. “It also means we can wash.”

They cleared a space not far from the bank, built a fire, and boiled water in their helmets, letting it cool before they poured it into their bottles. While Sven kept watch, Nita pulled off her clothes and made her way down to the stream.

Even when she knelt, the water came only to her waist. She washed quickly, then rinsed out her coverall. Being naked out here made her feel vulnerable in a way she had never felt inside the Institute; her body seemed fragile and unprotected.