Fish Tails

  It was getting to be more than Coyote could remember. Everything he had seen had to go into words, and he had to remember the words. When animals like Bear and Coyote were given speech, their brains had to be changed to hold words, too, and learning words was sometimes hard. He took a deep breath and looked hard at the naked shapes. They were probably males and females. All of them were covered with that wormy stuff. It wasn’t fur. It wasn’t hair. It was something else. He didn’t know what. He didn’t want to know what!

  The two hunters came back from the part of the bubble he couldn’t see. They had their boots and trousers on and were putting on their jackets. They had worms, too, but not very many. One of them had a patch of the white goo on his back, and the man yelled at him to go back and wash it off. It wasn’t very thick. Not nearly as thick as on the other stinkers. It might even be a different kind, since they hadn’t collected it in the bowl with the other stuff.

  Finally, all of them had their clothes back on and were being herded out of the cavern. Back out into the world. To do what?

  Maybe they were going to feed them. Maybe that’s why they came here. To be fed. Coyote blinked, yawned, put his paws over the edge of the hole, and forced himself to stay awake because the bowl was being lifted up from underneath, some kind of metal legs pushing it up. One side of it had a nose on it, sticking out; there was a word for that nose. A spout! Spout pours out! A hole opened up in the floor. The opposite side of the bowl pushed higher, and higher. The lid slid back a little, and whatever was inside it poured out of the spout into the hole. It was pale-­colored. That’s all he could tell. Pale-­colored and runny. Had it been cooked, maybe? It didn’t smell as bad as it had smelled before. It hardly smelled at all. As he moved, his foot touched a pebble he hadn’t noticed. It rolled off the edge.

  Then noise. A screaming noise, not voice, not human, machine noise. All the men turned around, started looking up at the walls, up through the top hole. Other men came in, yelling. Coyote pulled away from the hole and went back around the first corner of the tunnel, turning to put only his head around the corner, flat on the floor, tight against the corner, watching. A fluttering noise. Bametty whacketa, whacketa, whacketa, on and on. Something came toward the tunnel hole, something spinning. A light came into the tunnel. Coyote pulled back. The light went to the corner, played around over the rock, over the floor, didn’t come around the corner. Abasio said light couldn’t turn corners unless ­people put mirrors up to bounce the light on. The whacketa, whacketa noise went away. Coyote waited a bit before going back toward the hole. The flying thing was outside another hole, shooting the light inside. The big noise had stopped.

  Someone down below yelled. “Fahs awarm . . . ak a wrrrk.”

  “Fahs awarm,” Coyote repeated to himself. Oh, yes. Abasio said that sometimes. “False alarm.” “Alarm” was when you saw a forest fire coming. “Alarm” was when you heard a wolf pack in your territory or the nearest spring got fouled by something. Humans made really loud noises when there was an alarm, to let everyone know. A pack of coyotes did, too. Coyote breathed deeply, wondering if the falling pebble had created the alarm. The spinning machine flew around a bit longer before it settled onto the floor of the cavern, against the wall in the space he couldn’t see. They must keep it down there, next to the water the hunters had washed in, out of the way.

  Below him, in the cavern, the white lights went out, one by one. The rushing sound got softer each time a light went out. The lights had been making the noise. A kind of loud hissing. Like . . . when Xulai cooked things in a pot over the fire and put rocks on the lid. She said the rocks held the steam in. They made the water hotter, and it hissed and whistled. Finally all of the lights went out. The creatures were gone. All the men were gone. Nothing there but the grill thing and the pens, and the lanterns, and fading light coming in from the sky. It was almost night. He needed food. He needed to sleep. But first, he needed to get out of this place.

  Following his own smell, noting that nothing had come in behind him to change the scent trail, he went back the way he had come, stopping only to drink again and to pick up the piece of metal he’d found, carrying it in his mouth. As he stuck his head out into the clearing, a gopher stuck his head out of a hole, not a coyote length away. It started moving away . . . not fast enough! He ate it skin and all, cracking the bones up small and being careful not to nick the bitter round piece in the middle of it. He pushed that piece away, next to his metal thing he’d dropped when he saw the gopher. When he’d licked the blood from his face, he picked the metal thing up and went farther along the edge of the cliff, sniffing other holes until he found one he liked. It smelled of fox-­a-­long-­while-­ago, but it still had a warm bed of dead leaves and grasses. He had never met a talking fox, and he wondered vaguely for a few moments if there were any. If the bed’s owner came home, he’d find out. Foxes and coyotes weren’t friends, but they weren’t food either. Tomorrow he’d go back to Bear; someone would come to take them to Artemisia and they’d give him real food . . .

  IN ARTEMISIA, PRECIOUS WIND WAS suffering from fulminating frustration. “Oh, I wish we could jump the ocean,” she said for the hundredth time. “We just don’t have the equipment here!”

  “I know,” Xulai replied, trying not to sound impatient. “Presh, that’s what you’ve been saying. You’ve said it over and over for hours! Saying it doesn’t help. You can’t jump the ocean. You’ll be able to when they build the floating way stations, but they haven’t built them yet. Or until somebody builds a factory to make flying machines like they used to have. So either leave me here and get yourself to Wellsport and take a ship . . . or send somebody else. Or for heaven’s sake, talk about something else. Tell me why you’re in such an uproar.”

  “I told you! I told you it was the compounds in that fatty stuff that came off the body.”

  “You’ve said that, yes. You haven’t said what’s disturbing about them. Are they dangerous, poisonous? Do you find them so intriguing you can’t wait to analyze them? What?”

  Precious Wind collapsed on the wagon bed. Xulai was feeding the babies, both of whom were sleepy and fractious and, in Precious Wind’s opinion, should be let alone to have a nap instead of having that relentless spoon shoved into their resentful little mouths. New mothers were sometimes too terribly conscientious. If the Tingawan-­granny rule is five meals a day, five it is, even though babies are like dogs, can’t count but know when they’re full! She bit her tongue and decided not to mention it again. What had Xulai asked? Oh, yes. The stuff on the body.

  “I’ll give you my reasoning so far. We know these creatures have been manufactured, and we know they have some human genetics. Right?”

  Xulai nodded, frowned, received a face full of spat-­out mashed carrot, and threw the spoon against the wall in frustration. She bundled up the babies and laid them in their baskets, where they decided to fuss. Xulai shoved their baskets under the bed and pulled a blanket down to make it dark. In half a minute the fussing stopped.

  Xulai rotated her head, stretching her neck to loosen the muscles, sighed deeply, and said, with a fairly good pretense at calm, “If you make a human genetic assumption to start with, I’ll go along with it.” Anything to make you happy, Presh!

  “So they’ve been manufactured. Some parts of them may have been purposeful and other attributes may have happened as a kind of side effect. We don’t know which. We know there are various . . . types of them. Some are fairly articulate—­the one Bear killed: that one talked to Willum and Needly . . .”

  Xulai commented, “To be clear: we’re putting stinkers who speak understandably and engage in complex activity in a class we’re calling the ‘hunter type.’ Right? We’re thinking that sort might possibly include or be related to the ones Abasio met during his trip through the northlands. Right?”

  “Yes. That group—­which we believe are referred to as ‘the Gars’—­is at one extreme. The one Be
ar killed had a name, wore clothing, and could talk. He spoke of a father who had died, so he knew something about families. He could use a bow, build a campfire, and evidently knew how to find his way around. He knew where to go to get liquor or something similar. Abasio did not say the northern men smelled like the body does, so they may be related only in matter of size.”

  Xulai said, “If the one you’ve been examining is at one end of a class of beings, a . . . genus? Then at the other end of the class you’d find something with similar genetics but without speech or clothing. A monster, like Ogres or Trolls . . .”

  Precious Wind looked up, suddenly attentive. “Say that again. A monster like . . . ?”

  “Like Ogres or Trolls.”

  “Ogre. Agra. A gar. That word the creatures used that we haven’t been able to translate. Could it be ‘Ogre’?”

  “I suppose it could. That doesn’t mean the creatures attribute the same meaning to the word that I do.”

  “I wish we knew if all of them have worm things growing on them.” Precious Wind noticed Xulai’s shudder and frowned. “ ‘Worm things’ isn’t a scientific term. I don’t know what else to call them, not yet. The hunter does have them. A very sparse coating of them.”

  “How about the stinkers Sybbis has?”

  “We don’t know. Presumably they’re in the same class as the hunter. That type is between man size and giant size, and it is human-­shaped. Since the hunter killed game for himself, we know they eat flesh. From my examination of the body, we assume they are bisexual—­though we can’t be sure until we find a female one. Only male ones may have been created, as with the first giants. I’m almost certain that it’s the worm organisms that create the fat layer on the outside of the bodies. I’m definitely sure the fat layer is where the smell comes from. We may suspect that layer was purposefully designed—­it includes some very interesting compounds—­but we have no proof of that.”

  Xulai murmured, “And you want all those questions answered.”

  “I do, and some of them might be answered rather quickly if I could get samples to the labs in Tingawa. Ul xaolat can do quite a bit of analysis, given properly preserved samples, but I don’t even have the facilities here to prepare samples properly. The wormy things from the dead stinker disintegrated almost immediately. Even the ones I’d put into preservatives didn’t last very long. I had less than an hour or so to look at them. They’re almost . . . well, if I had picked one up not attached to its host, I would have said it was a separate organism, something like a tapeworm. They have a tiny air bladder. They’re tubular with three openings, one buried in the body, one that excretes the fat, and another one connected to the air bladder. The few still alive made barely audible sounds when exposed to light.”

  “If you get another chance to collect samples, ask Needly if she’ll give you some of her rock medicine. That would preserve them.”

  Precious Wind slapped her forehead with her fingers, snarling at herself. “Yes. Of course! I’ll ask Needly to put a drop of the rock medicine in a vial for me, and I’ll carry it just in case we come up against a live stinker.”

  She took a deep breath, as though preparing to begin saying it all again. For what would be the sixth or seventh time . . .

  Very deliberately, and concentrating intensely upon sounding calm and rational and not screaming, Xulai said, “Oh, Precious, in case you hadn’t noticed, it is late afternoon. I’m about to find Abasio and start fixing our supper.” She slowed her voice, speaking very clearly: “You did promise to pick up Coyote and Bear tonight. If you left right now, you could bring them back by the time our meal is ready. They’re probably hungry and they may have information you’d find helpful.”

  Precious Wind looked out the wagon door at the sky, mouth dropping open. “You’re right! It is late afternoon. I’d lost track. And you’re also right that they may well have some useful information. Where’s the . . . ? Ah, there it is.” She took ul xaolat from its resting place on a shelf and went out, calling, “Be back in a bit. Better have Kim roust out something for Coyote and Bear. There wasn’t a lot of that carcass left, and they may be quite hungry by this time . . .”

  Abasio passed Precious Wind on his way into the wagon. “She going after Bear and Coyote?”

  “I fervently hope so,” snarled Xulai.

  “You sound . . . a little, uh . . .”

  “Irritated, annoyed, upset, stressed. Yes.”

  “At Precious Wind?” He could not keep the astonishment out of his voice. He tried again, more soberly: “At your good friend and longtime virtual sister, your dearest companion in the world?”

  Xulai laughed, stopping abruptly with her hand over her mouth. It had been a rather—­well, lunatic sort of laugh. She swallowed. “ ’Basio, motherhood is turning me into a witch, and Precious Wind is helping do it. She’s been in here for hours, talking. She’s angry that she can’t jump all the way to Tingawa. She tried analyzing some of that stuff from the body, the fatty stuff, and the wormy things that produce it. She can’t tell what it is or they are, but she won’t stop talking about it, every detail, lamenting that she can’t go there, that she can’t do it here, over and over and over.”

  “You say lamenting . . . ?”

  “Over and over.”

  “That’s very Tingawan of her. I’ve noticed—­”

  “Abasio! Don’t.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t start about the incredible tenacity of Tingawans. Their tenacity, their ethical behavior, their sensitivity, their elegance, their whatever . . . Sometimes I get very tired of the Tingawan pedestal. I didn’t grow up in Tingawa. I’m not accustomed to sainthood. I never aspired to it . . .”

  “Sainthood?” Abasio looked puzzled. “What’s that?”

  ­“People talk about Tingawans as though they’re perfect. Sainthood . . . it’s a long-­ago thing about ­people who were so perfect while they were alive that they were believed to have gone to heaven to help God by doing miracles.”

  He frowned. “A miracle is just an incidental good thing, the opposite of an incidental bad thing, which is an accident. Incidents occur naturally through interaction of matter, living or inert, and if someone is watching who makes judgments, that person might identify some as good, some as bad, and some indifferent.”

  “Well, some religions told ­people that all the good ones are miracles, rewards given you by some saint or other. And once ­people got used to that idea that all good things are rewards, then it followed that all bad things are punishment. After that there weren’t any accidents anymore, just ­people getting shoved around by the saints. Or gods. Which doesn’t matter! Except sometimes ­people talk about Tingawans as though they were saints. Or gods. Which they aren’t. You should know that. I’m tired of trying to be perfect. Sometimes I hate the whole . . .”

  He started to say something deliberately amusing, but her expression stopped him. Maybe it was not the best time for that. Instead he put his arms around her, holding her very gently. “I can understand that the Tingawan mystique might be very wearing, yes.” Pat, pat, pat. “Precious Wind does get very intent upon things. Remember her wolves?” He smiled into Xulai’s burning, furious eyes. “I will never forget the feeling I had”—­pat, pat, pat—­“when I was suddenly surrounded by that ring of intent yellow eyes! Hungry yellow eyes. And there sat Precious Wind, completely at ease.” Pat, pat, pat. “She is strange, my love, but we are very lucky to have her with us, strangeness and all. At least the creature she’s intent upon now is dead! She’s not collecting a pack of them. And the thing is buried. It’s not following us, looking hungrily at us as the wolves did. Constantly.” Pat, pat, pat.

  “She’ll get one to follow us if she has the chance,” snarled Xulai. “And she’ll expect us to make it welcome.”

  Abasio ignored both tone and content. “Now, what may I do to help with our supper? Shall I see what
’s available for the animals if they come back with her?”

  She shook herself and took a deep breath. “No. No. I don’t need food kind of help. Come sit beside me with your arm around me. I need you to tell me we’re doing fine, doing well, we aren’t stymied by anything, we’re accomplishing our mission, we’re . . .”

  He sat, embraced, and said in his most authoritative voice, “We are two dedicated and wonderful ­people who are contributing to the survival of the human and other races. The world will remember our names in perpetuity.” He sat and hugged as directed, very gently, rocking her slightly to and fro. Neither of them said anything else for some little time as Xulai gradually relaxed. He could feel the tension leaving her. He decided the situation called for something more demon­strative . . .

  Just outside the wagon, women screamed in terror!

  “She’s back,” Xulai said petulantly, leaping to her feet. “She must have brought Bear.”

  “You stay here,” he said. “Just sit. I’ll take care of whatever . . .”

  Precious Wind had brought Coyote and Bear. Several women who had been shucking corn had seen Bear solidify within a few feet of them. Abasio calmed the Artemisians, soothed Bear, and then introduced soothed-­Bear to calmed-­Artemisians and calmed-­Artemisians to soothed-­Bear. Then, since he had noticed several of the men fingering their knives, he stood and made a short conciliatory speech concerning the inadvisability of hunting and killing speaking animals. One of the hunters expressed rude disbelief as to the animal, the speaker, and the subject. Abasio said it again, more loudly.

  Wide Mountain Mother, eyes only half open, stalked from her house, drawing her disarranged clothing around her. With uniform malevolence she scowled at Precious Wind, Bear, Abasio, and hunters, raising her voice to remind them of the war that had taken place some five or six years ago in which they had been aided by talking animals.