41 - This Is Home

The real world was almost as strange as the world of code, now, Dag thought.  She stepped carefully out of her cottage... her rooms in the cliff-face, really.  The city had given it to her, because she was mining code.  The first Empress’s code.  Most of the zardukar who were working for the lin and mining such important information had been moved to a very quiet place, away from the city.

She stood looking out of the lace-carved stone that turned what would have been a complete worm-burrow dark tube in the cliff-face, into a fantasy of light and air and even a fine mist occasionally.  The village had been grown... or built by the bees, into the north face, low enough from the top that the fine, toxic grit blown from above, could be caught and filtered by the terraces above, growing more and more earthan plants the closer the terraces got to the living spaces.  So the plants went from yellow, orange and dark red, to yellow, to pale green, and then green and even a darker green below.

Falling away from the last growing terrace there was a dark sweep of stone with the enormous folds of beehives.  They were walls of wax and honey, all the way down to where the spray from the waterfall was continuous.

It wasn’t high spring flood so the water squeezing through the vertical crack in the rock was only as high as a man on a war bird, if he stretched his bird stick over their heads.  It was also thick and dark with sediment, flecks of glittering mica making the almost black water sparkle as it squeezed through and then, once it had arched out and fallen into the pool below, it settled almost to a reddish yellow and became the river flowing down to the city and beyond. 

Even before the ice from the moon, there had been enough water that it had carved the vast length of canyon, spreading out and vanishing in the plateau of Trovi, before dribbling down the edge of the continent, to evaporate before it could even begin to fill a sea basin.  In the spring, when the vast snows in the tsingy melted and the polar ice as well, this waterfall was a vertical torrent that reached almost to the top of the cliff, clear turquoise.

Dag loved the view.  It was so good to be able to stand and feel moisture in the air, to see the source of the Great Hive.  This was what had saved Gregori and Petra and their people.  This was the Lainz’s great treasure.   She could feel the skin of her face relax as a breeze brought another splash to dampen her veil and clothing down and smiled to herself as she re-played Petra’s recording of the fugitives discovery. 

######## ## ## we can’t hold on.  Gregori refuses to let us just stop.  I’ve run out of rage, I think.  The dry has sucked it out of my heart.  Babuchka... you would have been angry with me.  We have my single case of  Terran genetic material left.  The others have been either lost or broken in this trek through hellGreg.  We have his birds... the last line he tried to get them to domesticate.  He took screaming, carnivorous freaks that would dash themselves to death to get at you, tear you up rather than tame down, even the little ones... they’d imprint... follow us around in the lab... then something would happen and they’d get crazy and you’d have a ravenous flock chasing you onto the tables and furniture.  That crazy wildness made it impossible to use them, Perrin said.  He slaughtered almost all of that eco-system on Xanadu.

Greg just won’t quit, but then he's like that, my bright husband.  He’d got them so they’d take a hood... if you bolted their beaks shut.  We rode them... We had to.  There was nothing else.  I bent hooks out of the ruins of one of our cars so we could haul their heads around.  We had to kill some of them and drink their blood.

We’re dying.

I don’t want to ### ## #### ## kill him with my bare hands... set my hands on that iztimum’s neck an# ### ##### with my bird #ho##oks. ## ### ###

We’re lying under our birds in the tiny shadows of rocks until the deadly sun goes.  There’s no more complaint. There’s only endurance.  It is possible to move in the cold at night.  We have no where to go.  We are just going to keep on, until we all die.  There is nothing here in Hinnom.  Dust.  Poisonous flying dragons. Creeping tentacle things that have everyone leaping up and crying ‘oh yuk’, so we’re calling them that.They ooze into people’s sleeping bags and the stink when you smash them...

I’m considering trying to boil them in the sun... get the toxins out and see if we can choke down the leather without it killing us. I have no more juice in me.  One more night.  I can do one more night.  Greg sighs and sits up, pokes his head out of the insulating feathers, not even pretending he’s asleep either.  Then, between us... am I dreaming?  Am I hallucinating?  A bee.  A food bee.  The only good design that Wellcorp ever made.  There’s another.  I can see a third zipping toward us.  A line of bees.

“Am I dreaming in my last heat-stroke, lover?”  Greg’s whispering.  Our voices have almost gone, too dry to talk.  “I’m seeing a line of bees... there... leading...”

### video corrupt ### ###file corrupt### ###bad sector @$%@$^^^^^##### ... ushka, we’re saved.  Greg, Greg, my Gregori... there’s water... there’s raghnall trees... we can tap them for filtered water... there’s enough water that everyone is in it.  Everyone... the bees... there’s food bees and honey and even a few, ancient raghnall nuts.  Oh if I weren’t an atheist I’d be praising God.  We found a place that is cool in the day... and where a fire cannot be seen unless one is directly over it... under the overhang the stone grows warm and even the damn birds keep trying to shuffle closer to the warmth.  Oh my sweet husband!  Greg... we made it.  This is home.