She went to the bookcase that filled the entire wall and moved a few volumes to pull out a glass jar hidden behind them. Adam hadn’t realized that she kept specimens in the house; it seemed oddly old-fashioned, considering that she still had access to La Croix University’s modern laboratories. But she’d insisted on being at home for Marcus until he was old enough to start school—no child-minders or nannies for her. She never trusted anyone else with the complicated jobs in life.
“There.” She handed him the specimen jar. A tiny rodent floated in formaldehyde, perhaps seven centimeters long. “I kept it out of sight in case Marcus saw it. I think he finds that kind of thing upsetting.”
Adam wasn’t fond of things floating dead in jars of formaldehyde either. He felt slightly nauseous at the sight of the animal drifting like a drowned man. He imagined it alive, busy among leaves and grass, all twitching movement. Then he tried to imagine it as the subterranean monster from Romily, with six legs, claws, and fangs, and failed to make the phylogenetic connection.
“Now, I’m just a simple engineer,” he said. “But I can count enough to see four legs. Not six.”
“Okay, darling, I’ll put you out of your misery. The legs are vestigial. You remember I did my master’s thesis on rock shrew cell differentiation? Well, I found a dead one when I was out walking a couple of years ago, or at least I thought I had. But it wasn’t a rock shrew. And I could feel these small symmetrical lumps along the pelvis.”
“My wife spends her leisure time fondling decomposing vermin.”
“Examine, darling. Not fondle. And vermin is an emotional classification, not a biological one.” Elain gazed at the creature with a childlike expression of wonder. “Anyway, I found more of them over the last year, all with the same feature. When I dissected them, they all had the extra pair of vestigial legs.”
“Good grief—are you telling me you discovered a new species? Are you sure it’s not just a mutation?”
“Remember who’s the embryologist here. Yes, that’s entirely possible, but it seems widespread, and there are other variations that suggest they might be a different species. Genetic variations.” She dropped her voice. “I think these shrews may be the remains of a genus that once included much larger tunnel-dwelling creatures.”
Adam was genuinely taken aback, not because she’d made such an intriguing discovery but because she’d kept it from him until now. Years. Years. His hurt must have shown on his face, because she took the specimen from him and clasped both his hands in hers.
“Darling, you know what happens to scientists who speak too soon—they’re made to look like fools,” she said. “If I’d started talking about identifying a new species and then it was shown to be environmental mutation, my reputation would be ruined. And I do want to return to work ….”
But you could have mentioned it to me. I wouldn’t have judged you. “So where did you find them?”
“Near the Hollow. I like walking up there. I used to take Marcus with me.”
“That’s a restricted area! What were you thinking?”
“Look, I know the ground’s prone to subsidence. I don’t go beyond the warning notices. It’s not as if I go caving down there.”
Marcus. Adam realized they’d been so caught up in this debate about morphology and new species that they’d forgotten him.
“Come on,” he said. “The monster shrew from the pit of hell can wait—this is my last day at home for a few months. Let’s spend it as a family.”
“If you knew what aggressive, sex-crazed little beasts shrews were,” Elain said, “you wouldn’t think a two-meter one with six legs was a joke.”
Adam found Marcus still sitting in the library, just as he’d been told to. He was perched on a chair that wasn’t high enough for him, trying to read a book, with his chin about level with the surface of the table. Adam could see him swinging his legs, heels occasionally hitting the chair. He wasn’t engrossed. He was just behaving, waiting as patiently as a small child could.
“How’s my clever boy?” Adam said, standing behind him to see what he’d chosen. It was a book of maps. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk. It’s stuffy in here.”
Marcus scrambled down from the chair and looked up at his father. He had a way of slowly turning his head to one side that made him look as if he never believed a word anyone said to him. Adam wondered if it was a gesture his son had picked up from him. No, it was very Elain. It was definitely Elain’s look.
“You’re going away.”
“Not until tomorrow, Marcus.”
“Why do you have to go?”
“It’s my duty. I’m a soldier. A Gear. Soldiers have to go where they’re sent, to protect everyone.”
“But why?”
It was sobering to meet Marcus’s fixed gaze. He definitely had the Fenix eyes, very pale blue just like Adam’s own, and even in a child’s face they looked more accusing than innocent. Adam was suddenly aware of Elain standing behind him. The answer was going to be as much for her as for his son.
“Because all the other Gears go when they’re ordered to, and if I don’t, I’m letting them down,” Adam said. “They’re my friends. They’re the people who’ll look out for me so I don’t get hurt. We take care of one another.”
Marcus blinked as if that had struck a chord in him, then looked away. “I’ll be a Gear, too, then.”
“Ah, not my clever boy.” Adam went to pick him up—something he rarely did—but Marcus looked startled, and he thought better of it. “You’ll be a scientist. You won’t need to be a Gear. And the war will be over by the time you grow up, anyway.”
Marcus frowned. That obviously wasn’t what he wanted to hear. Adam had the feeling that whatever he said would do nothing to erase the impression that being a Gear was somehow so wonderful that he preferred to go to war rather than stay home with his son.
He could have stayed, of course. The post at the COG Defense Research Agency was still waiting for him. So was the standing offer to teach at the university. He could do both, in fact. He could have unpacked that bag right now, this very moment, and picked up the phone to accept the job, and the Kashkur border would have been another place he’d never visit.
But Adam Fenix couldn’t live with himself if he did. The rest of the 26th Royal Tyran Infantry didn’t have those choices, and neither did their families. It was best that Elain didn’t know it was even possible.
Yes, maybe I’ve given Marcus the true picture after all. It’s about loyalty. It’s about comrades. But I still don’t want him to follow me.
“Come on, Marcus,” he said. “Let’s have some fun. Did you know your mom’s found a monster? It’s got six legs.”
Marcus still had that accusing ice-blue stare. “There aren’t any monsters,” he said gravely. “But if there are, you can shoot them. You can make them go away.”
“Quite right,” Adam said, laughing, but his heart broke to see Marcus’s absolute faith in his ability to put the world right. He almost dreaded the day when Marcus was old enough to understand that the real world wasn’t like that at all. “That’s my clever boy.”
Adam held out his hand. Marcus hesitated, then took it, and they walked around the gardens. Marcus could identify most of the tree species, and with their proper botanical names at that. It was pretty damn impressive for a little boy.
My son. What’s he going to be like when he’s my age? I don’t recall ever being like him.
“Don’t worry, he’ll be fine when he starts school,” Elain said. She could read Adam like a book. “He’ll make friends. I feel guilty sometimes that we didn’t give him a brother or sister.”
“Never too late,” Adam said.
Elain just swept past the comment as if she hadn’t heard it. She didn’t even blink. “Come on, Marcus,” she called. “Time for lunch.”
That evening, after Marcus was asleep and while Elain was taking a bath, Adam went to his study and settled down at his desk to listen to the radio. It was less dis
tracting than the television. He could let the information wash over him in the background while he worked. The important details would leap out at him and demand his attention when necessary.
Vasgar did.
Adam put down the folder he was working on and sat back in his chair to concentrate.
“… and President Ilim has resigned. We’ll bring you more details when we get them, but Vasgar’s official news agency, Corisku, is saying that he stood down before a vote of no confidence. He was widely expected to lose that vote, of course, so let’s go over to our East Central correspondent to discuss where that leaves Vasgar and its neighbors. It’s a nonaligned state, and that raises some interesting questions ….”
Adam got up and walked across to the world map on the wall. It was covered with pins and notes—random comments, reminders, even scribbled diagrams—to mark places of concern to him. There was Vasgar, a long corridor sweeping along the borders of Kashkur, Emgazi, and the Independent Republic of Furlin. If Vasgar didn’t hold its neutrality, the strategic map of the Eastern Central Massif would change drastically, and for the worse as far as the COG was concerned.
He took the packet of colored pins from his desk drawer and pushed them into the map at various points along the borders to mark the strategic cities and installations he suspected might be listening to the news of Vasgar just as carefully as he was. Almost as an afterthought, he searched for a speck on the map high in the mountains to use up his last pin.
It was a fortified city called Anvegad.
KANI PROVINCE, PESANG.
It had been a harsh winter. Now it was turning into a bad summer. Bai Tak wondered how long it would be before he had to give up on his herd and find work in the town.
He followed his last surviving cattle further up the hillside as they searched for grass. They grew more bony and wretched with every passing week, and it was getting harder to find decent grazing for them. His only option would be to slaughter some and dry whatever meat they were carrying for the winter. It wasn’t much. But he could sell the hides, and the bones wouldn’t be wasted either.
Maybe it’ll rain. Maybe I should wait. But I’m not going to ask for help from the village—not yet.
His wife, Harua, was working further down the hillside, taking advantage of the tinder-dry vegetation to get ahead with collecting firewood for the winter. She was bent double under a wicker pannier full of branches, struggling to hack a dead tree into more manageable pieces. Bai let the cattle find their own way—they were in no hurry—and half-ran, half-skidded down the hillside to give her a hand.
“Come on,” he said, drawing his machete. “Stand back and let me do it.”
“It’s only because I’ve got this stupid little girl’s blade.” She brandished her cutting tool, a smaller version of the one all the men carried. Women needed theirs for self-defense and kitchen duties. Only men needed the heavier blade for slaughtering animals or—occasionally—fighting marauding Shaoshi clans from across the Pesang border. “Why can’t I have a proper one like yours? This isn’t heavy enough.”
“I’ll buy you one when we have the money.”
“That’ll be never. As soon I’ve filled the fuel shed, I’m going to find some work in the town. Cleaning. Maybe even cooking.”
Bai was appalled. It was the ultimate admission of failure to provide for his family. If he let his wife take a paid job, everyone would talk. Everyone would say he was a no-good, bone-idle bastard who made his wife do two jobs while he lazed around watching his herd die on their feet. He couldn’t let that happen. It would bring shame on Harua, too, for choosing a useless idiot for a husband, and if anything ever happened to him, she’d find it hard to get anyone else to marry her. The responsibility for getting them out of this crisis was his alone.
“Can you manage to look after the cattle as well as everything else?” he asked. He shielded his eyes against the sun to check where the herd had gone. The cows were standing around listlessly, gazing back at him as if they were waiting for him to come up with a better idea than the parched scrub they’d found. “If anyone goes to town to find work, it’s me.”
Harua took off her bandana and wiped her face with it. “Every herder’s suffering the same. You won’t find men’s work down there.”
“I will if I look hard enough.”
Harua grinned and cupped his face in both hands. She shook him a little, like he was a child she was teasing.
“You’re always so determined,” she said. “That’s why I picked you and not your cocky brother.”
But Seng—cocky or not—had done all right for himself. He’d served in the army, fighting for the Coalition of Ordered Governments, and what looked like modest pay to those city people in the west was a fortune back here. Seng had saved enough to set up a company exporting traditional Pesang clothing and build a really nice house with plumbed water. Bai would have followed him into the army if he’d been taller and he hadn’t already married Harua.
And not just for the pay. For the honor.
Harua wanted him to stay home to run the farm. He couldn’t really argue with that, especially as the land was hers. He was also a few centimeters below the COG regulation height, even for a Pesang. That had disappointed him more than anything.
“Okay, I’ll go today,” he said. “It’ll only take me a few hours to walk into town. I’ll stay a couple of days and see what work’s going.”
Harua looked more resigned than relieved. “If you end up working in town,” she said, “I still want a baby. I can’t manage the farm as well when the baby’s small.”
“If I get a job, you won’t have to. I’ll make enough to get help.” He knew she didn’t want to abandon the farm. The land had belonged to her family for generations. “It’s only while we wait for the drought to end.”
That was optimistic talk. But it beat looking at those starving cows and counting down the days to ending up just like them. At least he was doing something, taking action instead of hoping for some unseen force to bring the rains.
It took him three hours to pick his way down to the valley floor and join the rutted track that was the main road to Narakir. Trucks and oxcarts passed him in both directions, kicking up clouds of pale dust that hung in the air like a fog. The town wasn’t as busy as usual. He made his way to the square, expecting to find at least a few traders there who might be looking to hire help, but there was just someone selling fabrics and an awful lot of scrawny goats and sheep in temporary pens waiting to be sold. Nothing for him there, then; he decided to trawl the inns and workshops. He’d need to find somewhere to stay the night anyway.
Bai wandered into an open shed where a strong smell of animal piss made it almost impossible to breathe, even for a man used to living alongside cattle. It was the local tannery. Preparing leather was a backbreaking, dirty job, but he thought that if he started with the least popular work, he’d stand more chance of finding a vacancy. Tanners used urine for soaking the fresh hides—it turned them a soft, creamy white—and dog or fox shit for tanning them. It wasn’t most people’s first choice of career.
But when his eyes got used to the dim light, he realized that most of the men working on the hides were fellow farmers. He wasn’t the only desperate herdsman with the same idea, then.
“Welcome to the perfume emporium, Bai.” Noyen Ji heaved a pail of piss into a wooden butt. “Can we interest you in a bottle of our rose essence?”
“Don’t suppose you need an extra pair of hands here, do you?” Bai made a quick mental list of the other workshops he could try next, starting with the blacksmith. “I’m willing to do anything.”
“Sorry, friend. You could try the laundry up at the monastery, though.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Bai spent the afternoon trudging from building to building, asking the same question and getting the same answer. Times were hard. Everyone was showing up looking for work to tide them over until things took a turn for the better. And each time Bai crossed the squ
are, he noted that the number of miserable-looking animals in the pens was dwindling. He couldn’t see the point of getting a few coins for your animals when you could eat them yourself. The fruitless afternoon depressed him so much that he decided to take a break at the inn. He had enough money for a pot of tea, and he could make that last for hours with the free top-ups of boiling water.
In a few hours, he could think of something else. He couldn’t go back to Harua and admit he’d failed again. He had to return home with a job.
Yes, tea always made things look a lot brighter. He wandered down the street toward the tattered red silk pennant that flew from the inn’s upper balcony, glancing into the windows of the buildings he passed. On one of the walls, there was a peeling and faded poster that caught his eye.
He’d seen it many times before but on this occasion it reached out and stopped him in his tracks. The words on it were printed in very poor Pesan, as if the person who’d made it didn’t understand much of the local languages. The meaning was clear, though. The image of the smiling, healthy foreigner in his smart military armor, holding out a hand of friendship, was saying what a great career it was in the COG’s army, and how welcome Pesangas were to serve in it. There was even a special regiment for them.
I’m too short. And Harua would kill me if I enlisted, anyway.
Bai walked on, somehow feeling the poster was aimed at him personally today. His father had served in the COG forces, and he raised Bai and Seng to understand that soldiering was an honorable living. Pesangas came from a warrior tradition; part of that tradition was to aid allies. The COG was respected, and it hadn’t needed to invade Pesang to get the hill tribes’ support for its war against the UIR. Bai was shocked when he first heard that nations did that—that they rolled over like beaten dogs and did the invaders’ bidding. They should have driven them out. You could only fight alongside those who respected you, and those who you respected in return.
Bai could have used a big dose of self-respect right then. He opened the inn door, found a table, and sat down, suddenly realizing how exhausted he was. A radio was chattering in the background while a bunch of old men gambled with dice.