The Sum of Her Parts (2 page)

Ingrid blinked at him. “ ‘What’ is it?”

Her companion nodded at the desert Meld. “I get it now. Our waterlogged friend here thinks we’re after diamonds.”

“Diam …?” Shaking her head, she turned back to the freewalker. “We’re going camping so we can look for wildlife.” For a second time she gestured at her backpack. “If my friend and I dumped everything out of our packs you’d see that we don’t have a single geological tool with us.”

“Does not mean anything.” When Quaffer turned slightly to one side Ingrid got a better look at the remarkable sweep of water-choked
flesh that clung to his back like a giant beige coelenterate. “This country is full of diamonds. When the first Germans came here they were filling empty coffee cans with gems by picking them off the ground or sieving them loose out of the sand. You don’t always need explosives and heavy machinery. Not if you know where to look.” He turned back to her.

“I think maybe you two have a line on a place like that that the Germans—and the British, and the Boers—overlooked. A lot of this land has yet to feel the tread of a human foot. Except for the San, maybe, and they never cared nothing for diamonds. You might have a line on an old alluvial deposit, or maybe an unmined inland sea terrace that has been hidden by shifting dunes.” Small eyes burned into her own. “All I know is that nobody leaves Orangemund heading north on foot because they are looking for wildlife.”

Whispr started to go around him. “Then this will be a first for you. Come on, Ing … my friend.”

She moved to follow, having to skirt the bulk of the freewalker to do so. Quaffer tracked her progress but made no move to block her path. As she and Whispr lengthened their strides she could feel his eyes on her back. Calling after them, his warning words seemed to hang in the crystalline desert air.

“You are going into one of the worst places on the Earth! I don’t care what kind of communicator or guidance instruments you have with you—the Namib eats people. Without a guide it will eat you!”

Turning so that he was walking backward on the perfectly flat ground, Whispr pulled his communicator and waved it at the freewalker. “If we call for rescue you can be the first to say I told you so.”

“I will say that over your bodies!” Quaffer’s voice was beginning to fade with distance. “Because if you go more than a day’s walk into the Sperrgebeit without a guide, the company security will find you and kill you! Even if you really
are
scientists!”

As Ingrid shouldered her pack a little higher its integrated air
cushions inflated proportionately to ease the burden. “Do you think that’s true, Whispr? Have we only got a day before SICK, Inc. security finds us?”

Her companion’s studied reply was thick with his characteristic fatalism. “If you’ll recall, doc, I thought this was a suicide trek from the get-go. On the other hand, I also never thought we’d make it this far. I feel like a rock rolling down a slope that just keeps getting steeper and steeper. Every step makes me have to go a little faster and shrinks any chance of ever going back the way I came.” He shrugged. “Can’t go back, so gotta go forward.”

“At least,” she said as she stepped over a purposeful migration of ants, “if anything does happen, you got to see your animals.”

“Yeah.” As he recalled their time in the wildlife-rich Sanbona Preserve he tucked his thumbs under the straps of his backpack. He was so thin that only the built-in auto-stabilization feature kept it from sliding off his narrow spine. “Yeah, that was something.” He glanced over at her. “Thanks for that, doc. Whatever happens from here on out, thanks for that. It sure was different from Savannah.”

“You’re telling me.” She returned her gaze forward. “I wonder what some of my patients would say if they could see me now.”

“Probably worry that you’re taking a big chance on becoming a patient yourself.”

He looked back toward town. There was no sign of movement in their wake. Intensely interested in their goal though he might be, the freewalker was not following them. Already they were utterly alone in the vastness of the southern Namib.

Not utterly alone, he corrected himself. Even though they were now technically intruders in the Forbidden Zone, they were no more than a communicator call away from help. The authorities in Orangemund would not refuse an emergency call from a pair of visiting Namericans. Should a life-threatening situation arise, he and Ingrid could easily request assistance. Doing so would probably
mean the end of their quest to learn the secrets of the mysterious metal thread she carried and they might well be prosecuted for trespass, but he doubted they risked incarceration. Especially since his companion was a doctor. He doubted the law worked any differently here than back home, where justice was a mixed salad best dressed with money.

A glance to his right showed Ingrid striding along briskly, her expression determined. With her maniped red hair tucked up under her wide-brimmed thermosensitive hat and her skin biosurge darkened, she ate up meter after meter of the hard ground on legs toughened from days of travel in Florida and South Africa. Her unwavering pace and resolute expression were very different from those of the pale physician whom he had first begged to remove the police traktacs from his back in an office in Savannah. He and this woman, who had acquired more education than he could ever dream of, were rolling down the same steep slope side by side. Of one thing he was by now certain: they would reach the bottom together.

If only she would let him embrace her one time before the final crash.

He sighed. Movement overhead caught his attention and he squinted up at a sky so stunningly sapphire that it hurt his eyes. It was a crow, an ordinary, local black-and-white crow. He smiled to himself. Life in the Namib was not nonexistent—just sparse. Wildlife. Whatever happened now, he had fulfilled that childhood dream and seen his share.

Determining that the two figures moving slowly below it were too big to tackle, the crow moved on, a small winged silhouette set against the bowl of blue heaven. Regrettably for the scavenger, the large two-legged creatures were neither dead nor dying.

Yet.

T
HE FIRST NIGHT THEY
spent in the Namib would have been magical had it not been so cold. Thankful they had taken the time and the care to acquire proper camping gear before setting out from Orangemund. Ingrid huddled beneath her fold-up but toasty radiant blanket and gazed up at more stars than existed outside a university astronomy text. Not even perceptible at night in brightly lit Greater Savannah, the Milky Way was not merely visible, it seemed close enough to touch. She felt she could reach up with an outstretched hand, grab a handful of stars, and sprinkle them like grated parmesan on her supper of self-heating pasta concentrate.

Giving the lie to the apparent emptiness, in the distance something distinctly mammalian and unhuman howled. She stifled a laugh as Whispr looked around nervously.

“What’s that? A wolf?”

From another location a second howl echoed across the barren plain. It continued; dueting tenors in a canine opera. To her surprise Ingrid found the mournful exchange exhilarating instead of frightening.

“I don’t think there are any wolves here. Probably jackals.” She shoveled in another forkful of pasta. “Surely you must have done some reading about this place too, Whispr. It just looks empty, but it’s not.” In the starlight her eyes seemed to shine. “Jackals have to eat, so that means there are other creatures here besides them.”

“I get that,” he muttered. “They probably survive on the corpses of stupid trekkers like us.”

She gazed back at him in the darkness, shaking her head. “Sometimes I think your pessimism will outlive you, Whispr. You’ll die but it’ll hang around, like a gray ghost in mourning. Until it can infect somebody else and make them as miserable as you are.”

Having concluded his meager meal and tossed the biodegradable
container far enough into the night to ensure that any wandering ants would have easy access to it without having to go over or through him, he settled down beneath his thin blanket.

“I’ll remind you one more time, doc: it’s that pessimism that’s helped keep you alive.”

She acknowledged the truth of his observation, rose, and threw her own food container far away. The surrounding silence swallowed up the slight clatter it made as it hit the ground. Whispr tried not to stare as she stretched and, as usual, he failed. While he grew more edgy and anxious the nearer they got to their goal, Dr. Ingrid Seastrom only became more beautiful—and not because of recent minor repair, replace, and regeneration maniping. She turned to look back at him.

“We’re going to do this, Whispr. We’re going to make it to Nerens, get inside, and find out what the thread is all about.”

Tucked beneath the blanket, he mumbled his usual misgiving. “You still believe that if we get to Nerens we can get in.”

She regarded his prone, huddled form. “Of course. Precisely because no one is supposed to be able to get to Nerens. Everyone will assume we belong there because only those who belong there are allowed to be there.”

“Circular logic, doc. Doesn’t hold up.”

She blinked. “I didn’t think you were familiar with something like circular logic, Whispr.”

“Why would you think that?” He rolled over. The ground was hard, but so were the pavements of Savannah, and he had spent plenty of nights thereon. “The street overflows with circular logic. You look like a lawbreaker, so the cops pick you up. If the cops pick you up, you must be a lawbreaker. If you look like a riffler when you walk into a store, the operators assume you are a riffler and you’re treated like one.” He coughed lightly. “I could go on, but I’m tired.”

“Sleep well, then.” She settled down and cocooned herself within her own blanket. Serenaded by unseen silver-backed jackals she drifted off to sleep.

For a long time Whispr lay awake, unable to join her. He didn’t trust the bitch-burble of the four-legged variety any more than he did that which originated from the two-legged kind.

T
HEY PAUSED AT LEAST
once every thirty minutes to check their position on their communicators. Understandably, Morgan Ouspel’s route took them inland and kept them away from the single forbidden north–south road. After several days they lost sight even of scattered 4×4 tracks. That did not mean the rocky, uninhabited terrain was never visited. A floater would leave no mark except where it set down.

They were walking parallel to a dry wash. While Ouspel’s course followed the winding arroyo precisely, they saw no reason to navigate every twist and turn. Hiking beside instead of within its five-meter depth allowed them to avoid the rocks and sand at the bottom while cutting off the sharper bends. Staying up top would save time and permit easier trekking.

It also, however, left them exposed.

Fortunately Whispr’s enhanced hearing allowed him to pick up the sound before they were spotted.

“Down!” Without waiting to see if she was following he scrambled madly down an eroded slope and into the riverbed. “Don’t wait, don’t look around—hide!”

As she hurried after him she looked around anyway, and saw nothing. “What—Whispr, I don’t see …?”

“Searcher! Get down here!”

By the time she reached the bottom she was moving so fast that she stumbled into him and nearly caused the both of them to fall.
Though she weighed more than his attenuated form, the strength in his wiry arms allowed him to catch and stabilize her. The shock of the close physical contact momentarily unnerved him. He wanted to hold on, not to let go. He finally released her because he did not want both of them to die.

“Here!” He gestured frantically toward a rocky overhang. Without pausing to see if the narrow opening was already occupied by scorpions or snakes he dropped to his belly onto the sand and slithered beneath the opportune cover. Though he left the most room for her, Ingrid still had to struggle to wiggle back far enough so that she would not be visible from overhead. There was no time to remove her backpack. She could feel it scraping against the rock, threatening to trap her.

A minute passed, then several. The sun beat down from above. A couple of jet-black, nearly spherical tok-tok beetles moseyed comically along the canyon floor. The absence of sound, of even a querulous bird, was deafening.

“Whispr, maybe all you saw was another crow.” Jammed beneath the overhanging rock, her right leg was beginning to cramp. “We could take a look and …”

“Crows don’t reflect light. Stay put.”

Though she complied with his instruction, frustration increased with each passing minute. Her leg began to throb. Ample experience had shown that her companion was more than a little prone to paranoia. Indeed, he embraced it. In the course of their journey together he had raised previous false alarms; maybe this was another. How long did he expect her to lie here, facedown in gravel and sand?

“Look, Whispr: if there was anything out there then it’s gone by now.” She started to crawl forward—only to have him grab her arm. Her glare was murderous. “Let go of me right …!”

With utter lack of ceremony he slapped his other hand over her mouth. Her eyes widened. Declarations of muffled outrage spent themselves against his splayed and none-too-clean palm.

Then she heard it, and froze.

The searcher drone was of a type she had never seen before. Those employed by the city of Greater Savannah came in several body types depending on the municipal division that operated them. Those utilized by the fire department carried small tanks of highly concentrated fire suppressant, or escape ladders, or other emergency equipment. Medical drones packed first-aid kits and waldos that when operated by doctors seated at hospital control-room monitors could perform emergency triage right at the site of an accident. Police searchers were armed and armored. But this one …

Humming softly on its repulsors it headed down the arroyo and glided directly past their hiding place. Whispr pushed his face into the sand but a fascinated Ingrid could not keep from staring. Perhaps the shadows saved them. Or maybe the drone fortuitously happened to be scanning the other side of the canyon when it passed. Coated in heavy-duty flex-black that helped to power it, it traveled in near silence, the only sound being the steady soft hum of its dampened engine. From the top several antennae protruded. From the sides extended—she could not be sure they were gun barrels but she had no intention of finding out. Beneath the power-paint was what she took to be armor. The searcher was not only intended to fight, it was clearly designed to withstand a first attack and offer a devastating response. In the silence she could hear her heart pounding.