61: Regrets

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“Maybe somebody took her,” Ketyk frets. “Or hurt her.”

“There’s nobody around,” Yar assures him. “If there was, the scouts would’ve seen them, or we would’ve seen evidence of their foraging.”

“It could’ve been someone in this group,” Ketyk says. He rounds on Kesal. “You — ”

“Ketyk!” Tyk says sharply. She does not want to start a fight with the hiveheart of the hive that’s been generously sheltering them.

“He could have some secret plan to – ”

“Kesal’s ‘secret plan’ is to get Smon’s hive established here, which he has always been incredibly upfront about, and harming Smon would hardly help. And we need to have a talk about manners.” Tyk dips her horns in apology to Kesal, but he seems too distracted by the dilemma to take Ketyk’s disrespect personally. Thankfully.

More quietly, just to Tyk (thankfully), Ketyk says, “Yar doesn’t want Rayjo Tau to be built; maybe she – ”

“Yar’s not the type to be so underhanded,” Tyk replies, just as quietly. “I’d be more inclined to look at any of our other companions, who we don’t know so well, but I don’t think anybody put a claw around Smon. It would’ve been a lot easier to kill her on the road than to wait this long. Besides.” She speaks louder, to the group as a whole. “Look in the tunnel again. Her pack’s gone. She left of her own accord.”

“What?” Yar asks. “Why?”

“She might’ve been surveying the area with tools from her pack and gotten lost, or hurt,” Kesal says. “I’ll take the men out and check the area.”

“I’ll take the women and search the tunnels, in case she went deeper in,” Yar says. She says nothing when Tyk doesn’t join her search party, and when Tyk quietly calls Ketyk back from Kesal’s, he doesn’t say anything either. The two groups depart.

“What?” Ketyk asks. “What’s wrong? Shouldn’t we be looking?”

“Not where they are,” she says. “They might be right, it’s possible she’s slipped down a crevice or gotten lost in the caves, and if she has they’ll find her. But I doubt it. Smon’s agile, but there’s no way she could’ve crawled over the women in the tunnel without waking anyone up. And she wouldn’t have taken that whole heavy pack to go and survey things.”

“Then where is she?”

“I’ve seen this before, after a pollen storm before you were born. She’s gone off to panic and sulk, I think. And she’s taken her supplies with her so she can vanish indefinitely.”

“She doesn’t have enough food to do that!”

“Exactly.” Tyk remembers Smon crawling out of the river with her farm, tossing aside her broken echo stone, and fishing a replacement out of her luggage. “But Smon knows how tenuous her survival her is. She likes to be as prepared as she can be. She can’t bring her farm up here, but she would’ve brought the life from it, to start a new one if she had to. Meaning that she’s probably gone off to sulk in the only nearby area that we know about that has enough life to feed her farm.”

“The valley to the Southeast.”

“Exactly. Let’s go.”

Ketyk takes off to head generally Southeast. Neither of them know precisely where the valley is, but neither does Smon, so Tyk heads in that direction choosing whatever paths she thinks it would be easiest for Smon to take. Her journey is made easier when she notices small, fresh, deliberate chips in some of the rocks – Smon, lacking a truebrother and not being an idiot, has unobtrusively marked the path so that she can backtrack if she gets lost.

Tyk feels better every time she sees one of the marks. It’s good to know that the idiot made it this far without falling down a crevice somewhere.

Tyk loses sight of Ketyk, which isn’t anything to worry about. Men frequently scout far ahead, and she knows that he won’t get lost. She expects him to find Smon and come back, and is mildly surprised when she, in fact, finds Smon, resting under a rock ledge and hidden from the sky.

“Smon.”

She looks up, startled.

“What are you rotting doing?”

Smon hugs her pack. “This was a mistake.”

“Rayjo Tau?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.” She hugs it tighter. “I did something really bad, Tyk.”

“What happened? What’s the problem?”

“Back with the neima. Kana gave me… no, it’s not her fault. I brought something with me. I brought some of the life with me.”

“The life?”

“Yeah. From their reservoir.”

“… Well, yeah. Obviously.”

Smon stares at her.

“I mean, you had to get some from somewhere, didn’t you? I’m guessing you didn’t bring any from your egg boat, because we weren’t expecting to make this journey then, and especially since you were so angry about their reservoir when you saw it. But we all know that you’re going to have to feed the people who gather here somehow. And I’ve seen how much it takes to feed your farm just to make enough food for one of you; that thing isn’t going to do it. You’re going to need to harvest sun energy directly to make food that you can eat, and that means a reservoir.”

“There was supposed to be another way!”

“And have you found one?”

“No.”

“So you’re just going to not build Rayjo Tau until you do? You’re just going to mope indefinitely while your people do their best to live in their tiny groups and build their own little reservoirs everywhere? While they slowly die due to not having a community to – ”

“Maybe that would be better!”

“You don’t believe that.”

“Maybe I do!”

“No, Smon, you don’t. Because if you did, you wouldn’t have grieved the two people who died coming down in your boat. You wouldn’t have been sad about Myn and Haidn. You would’ve tried to kill Dem and Kana and Yotoru, and you would’ve killed yourself, or at least let one of the many dangers we’ve faced making it this far kill you. You’re scared, and unsure, but you want to live, you want your people to live and thrive here, as much as we do. You – ”

“You only want that because you don’t know any better!”

“What did you just say to me?”

“You don’t know us! You don’t know me! You don’t know the things I did on my Earth, and you don’t know the things we can do here! The pain and death and chaos our mere presence could cause – just look at that bug, the sunseeker. Kesal said that those ones, with that pattern, don’t live anywhere else that he knows of, just this little part of the mountain range. When we gather here, when we build our big reservoir for food and another one for clean water and our homes and our towers and a big area to purify our wastewater, what will we do to those sunseekers, to their homes? We could wipe them all out. And I know what you’re going to say, ‘oh, just be careful and keep them in mind’, but that’s the thing – it’s not just them. We don’t know anything about the life in this area, and Kesal’s manner makes me think that you guys don’t know enough about it to help either. There could be a hundred types of unique cave spiders that we kill without noticing. The ocean below us could be the breeding ground for rare types of fish that find the oil on our skin toxic and we could wipe them out by swimming too much. We could – ”

Tyk bites her.

She’s as gentle as she can be, wary of Smon’s lack of a shell. But even a firm pinch cuts a little line across her arm which quickly becomes a stripe of bright red blood. Smon doesn’t seem to notice, staring at her in shock.

“I’ve had about enough of this,” Tyk snaps. “I don’t know any better? Excuse me? I didn’t leave my home, I didn’t tell my father to temporarily let everyone think I’d died, I didn’t nearly die half a dozen times and lay my only beloved truebrother in the middle of the rotting wilderness and then have to raise him in a foreign drowning hive to drag your sorry shell halfway across the continent to let you sit here and cry about how pointless it all was and I’m an idiot for thinking otherwise.”

“That’s not what I – ”

“That is what you said, and I’ve just about lost patience with it and your whole high-and-bright attitude. I don’t know you? Because I don’t know about whatever mysterious horrible thing you think you did on your Earth? Why would I care about your Earth? Why should you? Everyone you knew there is dead. You’re never going back there, none of us are ever going there, and if I understand your journey correctly, nobody else there is ever coming here either. It’s just you. Just us; your people and mine. You and me. And I may not know much about your Earth, or your people, or your past, Smon, but I don’t think you know much about yourself, either. And one thing I know for rock solid certain is what you think you are.”

“What do you mean, what I think I am?”

“You think of yourself as a baby god.”

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