Orduval halted on the crest of a dune and gazed across the sand sea. Distantly, a rocky mount seemed to float on heat shimmer. He chose this as his destination and tramped down the dune face, sending a skirl wailing ahead of him. Some hours later, the sun low in the sky, the shimmer began to fade, but the mount looked no closer. And now only three-quarters of his water remained. He gazed down at the bottle for a moment, then…
Sand in his mouth and clogged around his eyes, to where his nictitating membranes had cleared it. Sand in his clothing and two skirls sheltering in the shade of his body. The water carrier lay still-stoppered down at the bottom of the dune, so it was lucky he had not been drinking from it when the recent fit struck. Orduval crawled down the dune face to retrieve the precious carrier, the skirls skittering away with their usual racket. He drank thirstily, noting that, with half the water gone now, the chiller worked better on the smaller quantity remaining. Not that he particularly needed cold water now, with the desert temperature plummeting as the sun sank behind the horizon, for the night-time should provide a chilly but bearable fifty-five degrees Celsius. He hauled himself to his feet and climbed back up to the dune peak he had been following. With the stars coming out and his eyes adjusting, he decided to continue towards the mount, since it still remained visible.
Why did their mother die? Apparently it had been a miserable accident, though Orduval had suspicions about that. Had Orbital Combine been conducting some kind of experiment that went wrong, and then swiftly concealed the evidence?
"Did they kill you, Mother?" he asked, his mouth already dry again.
He desperately wanted to drink more water, but decided he must reach the mount first and so he trudged on. A Sudorian human needed to consume an estimated gallon of water every four hours, to survive here in direct sunlight, so after his day under this sun he was now severely dehydrated. His clothing felt crusty—sand and salt combined—and he began to feel damp with a sweat that would have earlier quickly evaporated. It seemed as if shadows now accompanied him on his trek—the expected hallucinations were beginning to arrive.
"But who was our father?" he asked the desert night.
Amenable to his request, the silvered darkness provided a shadowy figure, though not located in that same darkness but somehow standing just aside of it. He tried to discern its features and could not. He and his siblings had once asked Utrain about their father, but their grandmother could provide no answers: Elsever had formed no permanent attachments on Corisanthe Main. A brief liaison, then? Perhaps even a brief liaison with something not human. The figure changed into an unknowable spectre poised on the edge of his perception. The Shadowman? Orduval shivered and turned away, to find himself falling into his own abyss.
An unknown time later, voices called him out of it:
"With all your understanding of the human condition, is this the best solution you can find?" Harald sneered.
"I am saddened," said Rhodane. "But I understand."
"Get up, Orduval," Yishna urged. "The mount is not so far."
He was lying on his side, and the salty taste in his mouth was blood from where he had bitten his tongue. It occurred to him that in his weakened condition he might not even need the pills, for the next fit might kill him. He struggled to his feet and moved on.
"Pathetic, weak…are you sure you are one of us, Orduval?" Harald taunted.
It was so unfair. He wanted to cry, but his body lacked sufficient moisture to allow him tears. Immediately after the moment of self-pity, he grew angry. Yes, pathetic, weak, but what other recourse did he have? Staying there in the asylum was no life, and the fits so disrupted his thinking that he could pursue no selected subject as deeply as he wished. He could have chosen to just keep on existing, but to him that was displaying weakness. He cursed and shook his head…and his siblings fragmented into the night. Clasping his failing body under an iron will, he forced himself onwards. Hours later, when his boot finally came down on stone, he considered that a victory, allowed himself a celebratory drink of water, then began to climb the rocky slope ahead. Hundreds of feet above the desert, weariness finally clubbed him. He drank once again, then curled up in a sandy hollow in the rock, and slept.
Morning; the sun rougeing the horizon and glimmer wings twinkling in the twilight. Up on his knees, Orduval drank more and now felt ravenously hungry. New day, new perspective? He felt suddenly optimistic, as if he could continue living. But this feeling was precisely why he had walked out here, the previous day and night, since there could never be any return. He stood and peered up the slope above him. He would climb to the very top, watch the desert for a while, and then ease his way gently from life with the pills. But the moment he moved, dizziness washed through him, and it was on unsteady legs he began to negotiate the slope. And with a degree of reluctance—where was his moment of clarity? That strangeness during the night was already fading in memory. So unfair—
Blackness slammed him down.
Orduval woke to utter agony. Perhaps his suicidal impulse was working, with him climbing such a difficult slope when he suffered from fits. With vision blurring he gazed at the shards of bone poking from his right shin, the dislocated fingers of his left hand, the rips in his clothing and the blood. The sun, now shining straight down on him, burned acidically into his wounds, and thirst lay like a twisted knot inside him. His water carrier was nowhere in sight, but maybe he could summon up enough saliva to swallow the pills without water. He groped into his pocket with his right hand, searching for the pill tube. Couldn't find it. Summoning the will to lift his head and look, he saw the pocket was torn open. He moaned with self-pity, then the ensuing anger drove him to crawl on. At least he could find some shade where the sun did not burn so.
Harald came to taunt him, the sun a halo around his furnace head; Rhodane came to sympathise, and Yishna to offer pragmatic advice. Utrain called him in to supper and stood some way to one side, holding out a chilled glass of fruit juice. Memories surfaced and fled and another fit took him away for a while. How many hours? How many hours did he make animal sounds of pain? Shade then…cool…and was that trickling water he heard? He lay still, sliding in and out of consciousness. A kind of relief settled on him, and a calm, for he felt the worst suffering had passed and death was now coming to embrace him. The hallucinations seemed to lose their potency…but for one appearing near the end. His fevered mind painted a metal beast out of surviving biological files from Earth, squatting at the mouth of the cave in which he lay.
"Screw non-intervention and screw Geronamid," grumbled the silver tiger. "I'm not going to let you die, Orduval."
6
The colonists of Brumal required very few adaptations—and those mostly concerning toughening their bodies to the acidic environment and a mild amphidaption to their watery surroundings. Their leaders instituted building programmes—quickly setting up a domed encampment much like the one we set up at Transit. Exploration led to the discovery of deep cave systems, huge forests and massive river systems. The leaders were preparing to build their communal and socially just isocracy, whereupon they would of course relinquish control. However, then the first out-gassing occurred upon the first close pass of the planet Sudoria, and for frantic days the Brumallians thought our predecessors here were gas-attacking them from orbit. But then they discovered, in the mountains, the geothermal vents spewing out pure chlorine gas. The atmosphere became rapidly intolerable, and their technology began to corrode and decay around them—the landing craft they had so congratulated themselves on retaining becoming unusable within a matter of weeks. Salvaging what they could, they retreated into the shelter of the cave systems. The first Brumallians—as we know them—did not step outside until seventy years later. What changes they made to themselves and their society in the intervening period we know to have been radical, and occurred almost certainly because they never managed to lock their fanatics outside like we did.