The Native Star (21 page)

It was later that day that they encountered the Aberrancy hunters.

Emily had wended her way to the back of the train, to the observation deck, and was watching the plains roll out behind them. She’d never seen anything as big and flat and queer. The plains were like looking at a huge body of water; it was hard to tell if the sky was being reflected by the land, or the land by the sky. The emptiness seemed to go on forever, bisected into two infinite halves by the scar of black track. The new green mist of the plains was dotted with blooming wildflowers; the air was thick with the smell of them.

The train gave a lurch, slowed, then stopped. Emily was seized with a sudden, inexplicable nervousness. What if they were trapped in the middle of all that emptiness? Who could ever find them? How could they ever find themselves? She went to look for Stanton, who was in the smoking car reading the papers.

Stanton was puffing contemplatively amid a sea of gentlemen. But while Stanton was casually perusing a copy of the
North Platte Sentinel
, the other men in the car were clustered around the windows on the right side, talking in excited tones.

“Do you see them?”

“Aberrancies, sure as shooting!”

Emily gave Stanton a questioning glance as she pushed her way through for a better look.

In the distance, three black, misshapen figures the size of oxcarts galloped over the plains. They had once been jackrabbits. How three of them had encountered a black bolus at once, Emily couldn’t guess.

They were being chased by a cavalry squadron; the soldiers were firing on them. Puffs of smoke issued from their rifles, and a second later came the sound of echoing pops.

Some of the men in the car dug into their pockets and brought out charms of protection and hung them around their necks, as if having them visible made them more effective. One man in a bright purple and yellow waistcoat saw this general action and laughed.

“Out come the charms!” he guffawed. “What a bunch of old women.”

“What are you laughing at, mister?” someone replied hotly. “I been wearing this charm for thirty years, and I ain’t ever been eaten by an Aberrancy yet.”

This remark elicited approving chuckles. But the man in purple and yellow snorted dismissively as he leaned against the doorjamb, thumbs tucked into the armholes of his waistcoat.

“Aberrancies are nothing more than freaks of nature. Scientific explanations for them are easy to find. A gentleman by the name of Charles Darwin, in his book
Origin of the Species
, says that we all evolve. Aberrancies are just evolution gone haywire.”

“Rubbish.” Stanton did not look up from his paper.

“Excuse me?”

“Rubbish,” Stanton repeated. “First of all, the correct title of the book you’re referring to is
On the Origin of Species
. Second, Aberrancies are the result of toxic residuals exuded by the Mantic Anastamosis. That is the accepted understanding.”

“That’s what the Warlocks say, friend.” The man laughed. “Either you been listening to Warlocks, or you are one!”

Stanton tapped ash from his cigar.

“No,” he said. “Just a hobby of mine.”

“Well, those Warlocks … they want you to believe that everything is bad magic. Part of the way they convince people into buying their services. But science can explain most things.”

“Yes,
science.”
Stanton’s icily dismissive tone suggested the man in the purple and yellow waistcoat was the most dimwitted cretin it had ever been his misfortune to meet. “I fail to see why men who espouse the benefits of science so often advance their cause by dismissing the great natural power of magic.”

“Oh, I ain’t dismissing nothing, Mr….”

“… Smith,” Stanton said.

“Mr. Smith. Science and magic can work together, I guess. Come from the same roots, some say.”

“Precisely so,” Stanton said. “Thus, it is foolish to scoff at men who take the perfectly sane and sensible precaution of wearing protective charms. I’m sure all these men have families, duties, responsibilities … I’m sure Mr. Darwin could offer little assistance if any one of them ever came face-to-face with a slavering, rampaging Aberrancy.” Stanton fixed the man with a gimlet glare. “Could he?”

This comment brought sounds of loud agreement from around the compartment.

“As you say, sir, as you say …” The man in purple and yellow lifted his hands, stepped back. His face was flushed red to the ears. “I didn’t mean nothing.”

It was almost as if Emily could feel the mood in the car shift. The men who wore charms stood up a little straighter. They looked firmer, more resolute, and certainly happier. Stanton had defended them and made the man in purple and yellow seem a blowhard and bumbler. But the dissection had been unsettling to watch.

“Did you have to be so harsh?” she said under her breath.

“Uneducated idiots like that can wreak havoc with a credomancer’s power unless they’re brought up good and short.” He sniffed distastefully. “Scientists.”

At that moment, the conductor came into the car.

“Well, gents, they say it’s a gusher,” he announced, with a rueful glance at his watch. “They’ve sent Aberrancy hunters down the tracks to deal with the mess, but it could be hours before they let us pass.”

“A gusher!” the words passed excitedly between the men in the car. Even the fellow in the purple and yellow waistcoat seemed awed by the announcement, but Emily had no idea what it meant.

“Let’s have a look!” someone suggested.

“The train’s not going anywhere!” came an answering voice. “I want to see the Aberrancy hunters at work!”

The young men were the first off, obviously glad for the opportunity to stretch their legs. They whooped their way toward the front of the train. Older men followed; even the man in purple and yellow went to have a look. Soon, the only ones left in the car were Emily, Stanton, and two elderly men whose faces were set in expressions that indicated they were far too old for such nonsense.

“A gusher?” Emily said to Stanton.

He looked at her tiredly, his eyes red rimmed.

“Must we? I have a headache.”

“Fine.” Emily threw up a hand. “I’ll go alone. You stay here.”

Stanton ground out his cigar.

“Oh, certainly not,” he sighed. “Sit comfortably when I could be doing something dangerous instead? Perish the thought.”

The scene of the commotion was about a mile up from where the train had stopped. Compared to the endless emptiness surrounding them, the group that had collected around the “gusher” seemed small and inconsequential. But as they drew closer, Emily saw that it was quite a large and active gathering.

And as they got closer still, she saw that the scene was actually one of barely controlled chaos. The crowd from the train was watching a crew of a dozen workers who milled about a dark, steaming mass. The workers wore globe-shaped helmets of silver, their features hidden behind green smoked-glass faceplates. Indeed, the workers did not display a single inch of skin; they were dressed in heavy suits of stiff material that glittered as they moved, as if their clothes were embroidered with diamonds.

“Are those the Aberrancy hunters?” Emily asked through a hand covering her mouth and nose; the smell was foul, like rotten eggs and decaying meat. “What’s that they’re wearing?”

“They’re wearing protective suits of spun glass and silver,” Stanton said. “Black Exunge will wick through most organic materials.”

Emily and Stanton pressed through the crowd. On every side Emily heard the whispered word “gusher” again.

“What’s a ‘gusher’?” Emily asked.

“Sometimes large pockets of Exunge will collect under the ground, building pressure. Gushers are rare, and good thing, too, for their occurrence is nothing short of a natural disaster.” Stanton looked up over the top of the crowd. “This isn’t a gusher, though. If it was, they wouldn’t be letting people push in so close to watch. Probably just a little upwell causing annoyances.”

They finally came to a place where they could see the Aberrancy hunters at work. The men were using coal-oil flamethrowers to scorch the earth around a trickling black pool.

“They have to completely sterilize the area around the source of the flow,” Stanton explained. “Notice that they’re keeping the flames well away from the Exunge itself. It’s indecently flammable, a property which can be either extremely dangerous or extremely useful.”

As if to illustrate Stanton’s somewhat oblique statement, a grasshopper leaping away from the heat of the flamethrower landed directly on the tarry mass. The insect began to grow at a frightful rate, expanding like a bubble in a pan of hot molasses. There were screams from the crowd; everyone pulled back in preparation for panicked flight. But the Abberancy hunters responded with practiced efficiency. One who’d been standing off to the side jumped directly into the path of the swelling Aberrancy, flapping a bright red handkerchief. The action drew the creature’s attention, and it took one great hop toward the handkerchief-flapper, making a slurping sound as it landed. Once the grasshopper was a safe distance from the bubbling pool of Exunge, the hunter with the flamethrower touched the edge of the creature’s wing with a thin stream of fire. It ignited in an eyeblink, exploding into a screaming, popping column of blue and gold flame. The crowd
oohed
and
aahed
like children on the Fourth of July.

“I told you it was flammable,” Stanton said, as if Emily had stubbornly refused to believe him. He scratched the back of his head. “Had no idea they were attracted to the color red, though.”

Emily considered reminding him about his ill-considered red poncho, the one that she’d once coveted. But it seemed so long ago. So many things had happened since then, it wouldn’t even be like teasing the same person. Instead, she watched the hunters douse the smoldering grasshopper with shovelfuls of prairie dirt. When the grasshopper excitement had passed, she pointed at a pair of hunters who were kneeling near the fountain, fitting a silver apparatus over it.

“What are they doing?”

“They’re capping it, just like they’d cap a well of crude oil,” Stanton said. “It will allow them to pump out the Exunge.”

“And then what?”

“It will be stored in steel containers, like those …” Stanton pointed to a large supply of bullet-shaped containers lined up on the ground nearby. They were marked ominously with a skull-and-crossbones insignia.

“And what happens to the containers?”

“They are taken to government storage facilities,” Stanton said.

“And what does the government do with it? Is there some way to neutralize it?”

“After a fashion,” Stanton said. “When Exunge comes in contact with living matter, its destructive qualities are fixed and thus neutralized. So you can sacrifice living things to it, like goats or chickens, and render it harmless. How many goats or chickens depends on how much Exunge needs neutralizing.”

Emily looked at the pile of containers. There had to be at least fifty of them.

“I’m guessing that’s a lot of goats and chickens,” she observed.

“I don’t quite know what the government does with all the Exunge they store,” Stanton admitted, “but I’m sure they have a rational plan for its disposal.”

“Oh, sure. For the public good,” Emily said. “Just like the Maelstroms.”

The look in Stanton’s eyes indicated that he hadn’t ever quite made that connection before.

Two Aberrancy hunters were rolling a large, box-shaped cart over the ground. They came toward the crowd in an unswerving straight line; the crowd parted to let them through.

“What are they doing?”

“Following ley lines, looking for other weak spots where Exunge might be released,” Stanton said. He pointed at the boxy cart. “That’s a Potentiator. It measures the potential for—”

There was an extremely loud alarm from the box as it passed in front of Emily. She pulled back, startled. The hunters looked up. One of them jiggled the machinery.

“Get back!” one of the Aberrancy hunters cried loudly, his voice muffled behind the green glass of his visor. “There’s a bolus right underneath!”

Emily and Stanton were swept back as the crowd retreated in one panicked mass, shrieks and shouts peppering the air. Once the area was cleared, however, the alarm stopped. The men moved the Potentiator over the spot again, but the alarm did not repeat.

Stanton seemed to find this failure of unfathomable interest. He watched the man with the Potentiator closely. He put a hand on Emily’s shoulder.

“I want you to do something.” He pointed to the man who was fiddling with the Potentiator. “Go ask him for the time.”

“Are you insane?” Emily wrinkled her nose. “You think he’s going to stop and pull out a pocket watch?”

“Just go ask.” Stanton pushed her forward. She glared back at him, but went over to the hunter nonetheless. Before she could open her mouth to make Stanton’s ridiculous request, the alarm on the Potentiator went off with an ear-piercing shriek. She clapped her hands over her ears and stepped back. She felt Stanton’s hand wrap around her upper arm, and he pulled her back away from the crowd briskly, walking back toward the train. She heard the alarm stop again, and someone say, “Damn thing must be broken …”

They came to an abrupt halt when they were about fifty feet from the crowd. When she looked up at Stanton’s face, she knew that something was very wrong. He was extremely pale, and he had a hand over his mouth—a gesture she associated with periods when he was lost in extreme thoughtfulness.

“Of course it would”—he muttered to himself—“and you absorbed all that magic that Caul attacked me with …” He let his hand drop, releasing a heavy breath.

“What’s wrong?”

He seized her wrist, pulled the glove from her right hand. He looked at the stone, the muscles of his throat working anxiously.

“The color’s changed,” he said, turning her hand. “It used to be clear blue. It’s almost yellow now. And look at all those little black inclusions …”

“It’s been changing over time … I didn’t think—”

“Don’t you see? If this is a piece of the Mantic Anastomosis—and I now have no doubt that it is—it will behave like the Mantic Anastomosis. It will absorb and purify magic. And it will also segregate and excrete Black Exunge.”