The Skinner (2 page)

The man laughed. Erlin switched her gaze between the two of them. She wondered if the reif would have smiled, if he could. She replied, ‘On the ships here you have to wait for your
mainsail to fly to you and take the mainmast. Through the mechanisms of the ship, it controls the fore and aft sails, and all you have to do is feed it. Every sail has the same name.’

The reif finally lifted the gaze of his one watery eye from its study of her scar.

‘What name is that?’ he asked

‘Windcatcher.’

‘You have been here before,’ he said. It wasn’t a question.

‘You know that.’

‘So have I, a very long time ago.’

With a deprecatory grin the man said, ‘I’ve never been here before.’ He held out his hand. ‘Janer.’

Erlin clasped the hand he offered.

‘Erlin,’ she said.

Janer nodded and smiled, and only reluctantly released her hand.

‘You’ll have to excuse me for a moment. I just want to see this.’

He stood and moved over to the slanting window, to watch as the shuttle finally came in to land. Erlin turned expectantly to the reif.

There was no clicking gulp this time before he spoke. ‘Keech,’ he said, and did not offer his hand, which, considering his condition, Erlin felt was only polite.

The hornet watched and listened.

‘Land is at a premium here,’ said Erlin as the three of them later walked down the shuttle ramp to a curved walkway running parallel to a parking area around the
edge of the landing pad. She felt buoyant now, though that was probably due to the higher oxygen content in the air and the lower gravity she had felt immediately on stepping from the
shuttle’s grav-plates. She scanned these distantly familiar surroundings. The sea made a continual sucking hiss underneath the huge floating structure upon which the gun-metal wing of the
shuttle had settled, and the air was thick with the smells of cooling metal, decaying seaweed, and of virulent aquatic life.

‘Just islands and atolls, no continents, and no island bigger than, say, the Galapagos islands on Earth,’ said Janer.

‘Yes,’ said Erlin, ‘and there are other similarities too, though you’ll find the wildlife here somewhat . . . wilder.’

‘Wilder?’ Janer echoed.

Erlin grimaced. ‘Well, it’s not so bad on the islands,’ she admitted.

‘But bad in the sea?’

‘Look at it this way: most Hoopers are sailors, but few of them can swim.’

‘Right,’ said Janer.

Rank upon rank of aircabs were parked here along the edge. Beyond them, the sea was heaving but not breaking, and underneath that surface Erlin knew the water would be writhing with leeches,
hammer whelks and turbul, glisters and prill. And all of them would be hungry. She gazed up at the misty green sky and wondered at her foolishness in returning here, then she followed her two
companions off the ramps, her obedient hover luggage trailing along behind.

Keech was intent on getting to the first cab before all the other passengers swarmed off the shuttle. When there came a hissing crack, followed by a stuttering as of an air compressor starting,
Erlin noted how the reif snapped his head round and moved his hand to one of the many pockets of his overalls, and how Janer dropped into a semi-crouch. She studied them for a moment longer as they
warily surveyed their surroundings, then they slowly relaxed.

‘Over here,’ she said, and led them to the rail along the seaward side of the parking area. Below this rail, the foamed-plascrete edge of the floating structure sloped steeply down
into the sea. Erlin pointed to an object like a metre-long chrome mosquito that was walking along the plascrete, just above the waterline. She then pointed to a disturbance out in the water. Pieces
of shell and gobbets of flesh were being pulled at and rabidly denuded by dark, unclearly seen, anguine shapes in the water.

‘Autogun,’ explained Keech. ‘What did it hit?’

‘Well, out there, probably a prill or a glister. Most of the large lethal molluscs here are not swimmers,’ Erlin replied.

‘Charming,’ said Janer.

Keech stared for an interminable moment, but offered no further comment. Instead he turned and continued on towards the nearest aircab.

The vehicle was an old Skyrover Macrojet with a ridiculous and unnecessary airfoil attached, and its pilot was all Hooper in attitude and appearance.

‘The three of yah?’ he asked. He remained inside his cab as he cleaned his fingernails with a long narrow knife that Erlin recognized as a skinning knife, and she tried not to
inspect too closely the memories
that
evoked.

The Hooper’s skin was pale, and the circular scars on his arms and down the sides of his face were only just visible. She supposed that, like all Hoopers on the Polity base, he was on one
of the Intertox family of drugs to keep the fibres of the Spatterjay virus in abeyance. Usually it was the bite of a leech that caused infection but, even though the virus could not survive for a
long time outside of a body, no one was taking any chances. Polity scientists felt that, despite the so-far-discovered huge benefits of the virus, it might still be some kind of Trojan. Erlin
herself had not been infected by the bite on her forearm. Like many other viruses, the Spatterjay virus could be transmitted by bodily fluids, and she knew precisely when she had contracted it.

‘All three,’ replied Keech to the Hooper.

The Hooper looked askance at him, then stabbed the knife into the dash of his vehicle. After a moment he transferred his attention to Janer, then to the hornets in the transparent box on
Janer’s shoulder.

‘Can they get out?’ he asked.

‘Only if they want to,’ said Janer.

‘Look like nasty buggers.’

Erlin bit down on a burst of laughter.
That
from a Hooper on a world where just about every creature was a nasty bugger out for its plug of flesh.

‘I assure you they are harmless unless forced to defend themselves,’ said Janer.

The Hooper studied the hornets more closely. ‘They got brains then?’

How’s he going to explain the hive mind?
Erlin wondered.

‘They are the eyes of the hive,’ said Janer.

‘Oh, them . . . hornets, ain’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK, stick y’ luggage in the back and climb in. Y’want the Dome?’

‘Please,’ said Erlin as she stood aside to allow Keech to take his hover trunk around to the back of the cab. As he moved past, she caught a slight whiff of corruption. He glanced
round at her, and perhaps it was her imagination that she was able to read a look of apology in what small movement his face managed. After dumping his backpack on top of Keech’s trunk, Janer
went forward and quickly climbed into the front beside the driver. Erlin gazed around before stowing her own hover luggage. She was here now, and she would carry on through with her intention,
though sometimes she felt simply like . . . stopping.

‘Erlin Tazer Three Indomial,’ said Keech as the aircab rose and boosted over the pontoons and floating pads of the shuttle port.

Janer glanced over his shoulder. ‘I thought you looked familiar. You’re the one who opened that particular box of . . . leeches.’ He shrugged at his little joke.

The hornets, Erlin saw, scuttled about in their carry-case and moved tail to tail so as to take in every view.

Janer peered down at them in annoyance, then gazed ahead through the screen at the winged shapes that glided in the haze over the island, like embers in jade smoke. He went on, ‘There was
quite an uproar after your studies were published and, as I recollect, the Warden here had to limit runcible transmissions. Big rush to come and live for ever.’

‘Big rush for an easier option, but there never is one of those,’ said Erlin. ‘Our technology can extend life indefinitely, but even now there are . . . drawbacks. The rush of
people here was of those searching for something beyond life extension. They were searching for miracles.’ She noted how Keech, at the word ‘miracle’, reached up to rest his
skeletal fingers against the lozenge resting on his chest. Perhaps it had some religious significance.

‘How does it operate here, then?’ Janer asked.

‘The bare facts?’ Erlin asked, sensing the man had more than an intellectual interest in the subject. He nodded and she went on, ‘The viral fibres bind every life form here . .
. They’re the leeches’ way of maintaining their food supply. They are very efficient parasites, though it can be argued that what happens here is a perfect example of mutualism. Nothing
dies unless severely injured, and I mean
severely
.’

‘It is . . . logical,’ said Keech.

Erlin had to agree.

‘Surely the death of the prey is preferable?’ said Janer, puzzled.

‘No,’ Erlin told him. ‘Isn’t it preferable for the leeches to be able to harvest their meat and keep the prey alive to be harvested again? Though they don’t suck
blood, the leeches are aptly named.’

‘Why’ve you come back?’ Janer asked.

‘Just looking for someone: a Captain I knew. We have unfinished business.’

The Hooper turned and gave her a strange look but said nothing. The Captains were the weirdest Hoopers of them all.

‘Why are
you
here?’ Erlin asked Keech. The reif did not react for a moment, then he slowly shook his head. Erlin waited a little longer, then returned her attention to Janer
as he now turned to inspect her over the back of his seat. She knew that look.

‘What about you?’ she asked.

‘I go where the mind directs. The ultimate tourist.’ He grinned.

‘No resentment?’ she asked.

‘Once – but only at the beginning.’

Erlin nodded. ‘You said you’d served out your indenture twenty years ago?’ She was curious: once people indentured to a Hive mind had served out their time, they were usually
grateful to be rid of their little companions, particularly as those who made the mistake of killing a hornet usually possessed some deep-rooted aversion to the insects. Hive minds also had a
reputation for sending their human servants into some really sticky situations.

‘Why carry on?’ she asked.

‘Adventure. Money. In the last twenty years I’ve not often been bored, Erlin.’

She studied him more closely. He had originally struck her as being rather naive, perhaps not even out of his first century. She decided to reassess that judgement. Once, disease and accident
had been the greatest killers of humankind; now the greatest killer was boredom, usually leading to the latter of the first two causes. Perhaps Janer was much older than she had first thought;
perhaps he had the same problem as herself.

‘Erlin?’ said the Hooper abruptly, the content of the conversation apparently only just penetrating. ‘Thought so . . . It’s the skin.’

Erlin smiled to herself at a remembered conversation aboard a Hooper sailing vessel called the
Treader
. Peck, the 180-year-old mechanic, had been attacked by a leech and it had unscrewed
a fist-sized lump of flesh from his leg – a lump of flesh he had, after beating the leech to pulp, subsequently screwed back into place. The wound had healed in minutes.

‘
Doesn’t that strike you as a little odd?’ Erlin had asked him.

‘Who you callin’ odd? At least I ain’t got skin the colour of burnt sugar. Bleedin’ Earthers, always callin’ us odd.
’

Peck had been very odd after his second . . . accident, but Erlin, even now, didn’t like to think about that too much – and wasn’t even sure she believed it had really
happened.

‘Do you know Ambel?’ Erlin asked the Hooper.

‘Who don’t?’ was his reply.

With a complicated manipulation of the airfoils, he put the aircab into a spiralling glide. The three passengers gazed down at the long, partially artificial island below them. Around the much
larger central geodesic dome of the Polity base clustered many smaller ones – as if the island had been blowing bubbles in the sea. There were also a few smaller ones at the centre of the
island’s widest stretch: transparent spheres dropped into the deep dingle that grew there. Erlin could just make out the groves of peartrunk trees speared with the occasional tall yanwood,
and she reflexively rubbed at the scar on her forearm. A leech dropping from a peartrunk tree had been her first close encounter with the appetite of Spatterjay life forms. Later, Ambel had saved
her from the persistent attentions of a creature innocuously called a frog whelk. Without his intervention, it would have taken her hand off. She gazed across the wide sea, remembering that other
island where, if she could believe Ambel, the body of something which had once been a man was living an independent existence. It would apparently live well enough, but would have no intelligence.
Ambel kept the Skinner’s head in a box.

‘The gating facility was closed, down here,’ said Keech.

‘Heat pollution,’ Erlin told him. ‘The Warden had it moved to Coram after an explosion in the hammer-whelk population around the deepwater heat sinks.’ She also
remembered that Coram, the moon they had so recently quit, by shuttle, had been named by the runcible AI – an artificial intelligence which was also the planetary Warden. ‘Coram’
was actually short for ‘coram judice’, which, it turned out, meant ‘in the presence of the judge’ in some ancient Earth language. It was a name she supposed indicative of
Warden’s opinion of itself.

‘They had a gate here, then?’ said Janer distractedly.

‘It was established on-planet when the Polity arrived here. They had it here for about fifty solstan years before moving it. That was two hundred solstan years ago,’ she replied.

In the roof of one of the largest dome, a hatch irised open and the Hooper brought his cab down through it. Earth light illuminated the inside, stark in contrast to the soft green light of
Spatterjay. Forests and crops grew in neat patterns around a small city of processing plants and a single sprawling arcology like a giant plascrete fungus seemingly nailed to the ground by gleaming
hotel towers. ‘Dome-grown food’ the Hoopers called what was produced in the fields here. It was what, if they did not have access to Intertox, stopped them becoming more like the
Skinner.