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The evolutionary forces detailed long ago by Darwin, and only elaborated on ever since, are universal, and required for life. The other requirements were thought to be matter and energy, though doubt has now been cast on the former. All life, therefore, lives by rules already discussed ad nauseam by others. Suffice to say that there are doves and hawks in every ecosystem. And some of the hawks are monstrous. Looking into the natural history of our own planet it can be seen that we ascended during a particularly peaceful time, and that most of the monsters were in our past. We missed the dinosaurs by sixty million years. Close call—they were bad enough. However, even Tyra
— From How It Is by Gordon
The kiln smell, then the sound of a steam pump, told Anderson what lay ahead before he even saw the minerallier encampment, and rounding a butte beside which some spillage had cut an oily-looking cha
‘You can see why they’re here,’ said Tergal. Anderson looked at him questioningly, and Tergal pointed up at the butte. ‘White and blue sand in separate layers.’
Anderson glanced up to where layers of pink and orange sand separated the white from the blue.
Tergal explained, ‘You find the two layers close together and they’ve normally reacted with each other. Then the trace elements turn to salts, and rain washes them out. The sands are worthless then.’
Anderson nodded, not wanting to disappoint the boy by explaining that he already knew all this.
By the cha
‘What would we do without them?’ Anderson asked, eyeing the solar triptych lying open on Bonehead’s back—its three cells charging up the batteries of the charge generator they had used during the night.
‘Mineralliers?’ Tergal asked.
‘No, solar cells. There are other ways of generating electricity, but none so easy and convenient as this.’ He gestured to a stack of boxes by one of the sandstone houses.
Beside this, a big black-haired woman was cutting sheets of opaque-white and translucent-blue glass, before polishing them. Next to her, a small monkey of a man was attaching small braided copper wires, painting something on one kind of glass, then sealing pieces of each kind together with sheets of glistening film he removed from a bucket beside him. Each complete photovoltaic cell he wrapped and carefully packed away. It was to the woman that the girl ran. The woman ceased working and walked out to meet Anderson and Tergal at the edge of the encampment.
‘A slow response, and I hardly expected a Rondure Knight to be sent,’ she said, looking Anderson up and down.
‘I think you’re mistaking me for someone else,’ said Anderson, unstrapping himself from his saddle as Bonehead went down on its crawler limbs.
‘You’re a weapons man?’
‘I am that,’ he replied, stepping down onto the sand.
The woman nodded. ‘We sent into Golgoth for a weapons man five days ago and he has yet to appear.’ She gazed about in irritation, eyed Tergal for a moment, then returned her attention to Anderson. ‘Are you taking commissions?’
Anderson shrugged. ‘Whenever available—a man has to eat.’
‘Then I have one for you for which I can pay in pfe
Tergal snorted, choked off his laughter. The woman stared at him estimatingly.
‘Your apprentice?’ she asked Anderson.
‘Of a kind,’ replied Anderson. ‘Tell me about this commission.’
Again the woman looked around. ‘It comes at night, and we’ve not minded when it only knocked a few things over as it searched our camp for food. But it’s getting bolder. Six nights ago it attacked one of our hogs and put a hole in its carapace.’ She gestured to a hog compound over the other side of the encampment in which more of the huge creatures rested like a scattering of laval domes in the sunshine. One of them, perhaps younger and more curious than its fellows, had its sensory head out from under its shell and high up in the air with its eye-palps extruded wide apart to observe proceedings. ‘Then five nights ago it tried to grind its way into one of our houses.’
‘Show me that,’ Anderson said.
The woman gestured for him to follow her, and led the way into the encampment. Tergal also dismounted, and led his hog by hooking his goad under the edge of its carapace skirt. Anderson stared pointedly at Bonehead until, with a long sigh, it heaved up onto its crawler limbs and followed as well. Glancing about as he walked in, he saw that this encampment must have been here—or was intended to be here—for some time, for the spill-cha
‘Do you know what did this?’ he asked.
‘We’d earlier hoped it was a second-stager, but what with the attack on a sand hog and now this…’ She shrugged.
‘Third,’ he said, and gestured to the deep puncture holes in the bonded sand. ‘That’s where it held on with its pincers while it worked on the wall with its carapace saws. Something must have distracted it, else it would have gone right through.’
‘Third!’ someone snorted. ‘He’s trying to bump the price up, Chandle.’
Anderson turned away and began to walk back to Bonehead.
‘Wait!’ the woman Chandle shouted. ‘And you, Dornick, shut your mouth.’
Anderson turned. ‘Thirty phocells—they’ll be useful for trade as I’m heading up onto the Plains.’
‘Bloody extortion!’
Anderson rounded on the man Dornick: a squat, bearded individual with cropped mouth tendrils and the underhand thumb-spurs that inevitably led his type into some technical trade. ‘Would you prefer to hunt it yourself?’
‘At that price—probably.’
‘Dornick,’ Chandle warned.