Source: Field Mechanics

Clu slips into the space between the buildings and adjusts her suit to reflect it as camoflage. Instantly, her whole body takes on the texture of the gritty hot sandy clay around her, discontinuously shaded to break up her outline.

In the mazelike street beyond, there is a distant clatter of feet slapping the masonry. Her chest expands so swiftly that it hurts in pressure against the walls, the pain a pulse like the slamming sound of her heart in her ears.

Then there are rushing multilegged figures casting long shadows of the distant sun. She waits, longer than she thinks she should have to, hovering in the adrenaline haze. She watches through her scattered eyes, her heads up projecting in a full three sixty. The spindly figures of her opponents are about to round the next corner. She waits. Then they are gone, and she sighs, shuddering with release. She shakes out a bundle that contains the burnoose like garment that is the conventional dress of Timarushi and shrugs it over her shoulders, bringing up the hood over her simulated local features. She looks down at the small holes burnt into it by the molten bullets preferred by the local constabulary, and sighs. There's nothing to be done, however. She gestures copies of the fabric onto her suit under the holes to reduce the contrast. Then she sweeps down a narrow street past slit windows barred against the relative brightness of the day.

She is trying to breathe, even as the suit warms and thickens the air for her, but it is hard because of the fear. Days and nights of fear, of languages difficult even for her translator. And, today, hours of pursuit and occasional thin projectiles cracking off the shell of her suit. She wonders if she will ever be the same as before this.

The maze of the city slopes down toward the river district, where the buildings are waist high, half buried in the soft cool sand, rimmed with narrow gardens of leaves and spines. She watches her retracer play back toward the zero point with each step, listening to its admonitions to take this turn and then that. Her eyes are everywhere, and she finds herself drawing in each texture from the buildings, every shadowed geometry of a deviant street, and the pastel robes of then occasional midday traveller, like her, bundled against the dim sunlight as if it were a raging furnace.

The maze turns into a sudden private ramp into the earth that arcs up overhead, completed with a mesh of vivid and translucent turquoise plant forms which shift slowly in an unfelt breeze. The ramp ends at a narrow oval door with a knob in the center. She pauses for a moment, eyeing the time signal at the lower right of her visual field. Finally, she plucks the alcoved string beside the door and listens to the tone resonating in the space beyond. This time her heart ramps up with excitement and anticipation.

A querulous voice from beyond translates into "What do you want?"

"Timekeeper," she announces; the sound emerges as a soft rumbling in the native speech.

The door is pulled open and the figure behind seems to glare at her. "Get in here, timekeeper." The translation is colored with sarcasm.

Her first recovery is seven feet tall, spindly, with three legs and two arms. His skin is a bluish composite, and two glassine spheres protrude from beneath a deep brow, twitching, and occasionally obscured by a filmy lid. The lower part of his jaw is like a flat plate, dropping and pursing as it emits low rumbling tones. From elsewhere in the room, and audio emitter rumbles and grunts with a newscast.

"You're not Jo'Dan," he mutters, suspicious, leaning over to peer at her. "And you're a damn poor timekeeper. Too tall. And that robe... something's odd there. What, is it painted on you?"

"Jo'Dan is making the final arrangements," she replies. "She asked me to escort you through the town." The fact that Jo'Dan was back at their vessel, under medical care after the riot, was not something she thought prudent to mention.

"Not looking like that, you aren't," he intones. He stares at her for a long moment and then turns to a rack against the wall, rummaging through its content, finally producing a robe. "This will be much better. Put it on."

"We don't have time for this."

"I don't know who trained you, but if you go out like that, you'll get us both killed after you're apprehended for heresy and timekeeper impersonation. Again. You're lucky you made it here. Your description is all over the radio, and I can see why."

"Fine," she snaps. "OK. Fine." She pulls off her cloak and starts to don the robe.

He makes a clattering, sniffing sound. "What's the matter?" she asks.

"It's not from surprise that you look odd in that robe. Are you deformed?"

She realizes what she must look like in the camoflaged suit. "I'm human," she replies. "Didn't anyone mention that?"

He pokes at her with a jointed appendage. "No. Fascinating. Is that painted on?"

"No, it can change." She finally shrugs into the robe. "Better?"

He adjusts her hood, then rears back at a nearly comical angle, turning his eyes this way and that. "Yes, that will have to do."

"Then let's go," she replies. But he has his back to her and is pulling flat objects from a cabinet built hidden into the adobe. She steps to him and touches his arm. "Please, we have to go."

But his voice is distracted and distant. "I have to take these. It's my life's work."

"You can't carry those in the streets! You were worried about my robe, you think that's less conspicuous?"

"You want me to leave this? I've been hiding and lying for years to get these done." Figures in poses of strength, clearly engaged in symbolic acts against clear skies and bright sunlight. Her eyes linger on one figure, smaller, more delicate, painted with an exquisite attention to detail of shadow and lustre. "She's a timekeeper," Clu remarks, caught up in the emotions conveyed by the crisp technique. "That's not possible."

"It's even less possible than how we felt about each other. But they took her away."

Her eyes come up sharply to focus on his face, but its feelings are not accessible. "I understand," she replies. She checks her internal clock and the customs schedule. "We've only got twenty minutes before the individual movement slot is closed." She scans forward. "Curfew is in an hour. It takes a half hour to get to the pickup site, fifteen minutes before we're beyond the monitors. I don't see how we can do it. If there was a commercial movement slot, I might be able to forge a checkpoint slip... but there isn't. It's just not possible."

"But, I can't..."

"Tlaniak, are you familiar with recording of images?"

He cants his head in a sudden movement of perplexity. "Yes. We have magnetic plates for imaging."

"I have some ability to record these pictures of yours... I can record full fidelity copies, beyond anything you've seen. Color, composition, topology, well... you name it. When we get you out, you'll be able to create reproductions even you can't tell from the originals, down to that smudged turga mark on the frame edge."

"I don't know..."

She steps under his gaze. "I know how you feel. I've felt that way. Remember, this happened to me, too, Look, even if I were wrong, which I'm not, you can always create more. Better. But you will not get out of here unless we go soon. Do you understand? We have to wrap this up and get going."

He shifts back and forth, as if unable to commit.

She sighs inwardly, feeling the pressure of time and potential failure. Finally, it urges her to move and she takes the boards and lines them against the walls, one by one, saddened by the beauty. One by one, she stands in front of them, logs set to full spectrum, full fidelity, eyes drawing in the images hungrily.

Finally, she draws back and gestures. "All right, that's it. Now we have to go."

"I don't understand," he rumbles.

"I've made the recordings, now we have to go."

Suddenly she is slammed up against the wall by powerful, keratinized appendages. "If you are lying to me..."

She reacts from reflex, and suddenly he is about to spin away across the room from her, and would, if she did not, at the same time, stop his motion. She lifts him, using a hand on each side of his waist, and then sets him down.

Her voice is soft. "I am not lying." She slips a hand into the pocket of the suit and produces eye protection in the style used by these people. "Put these on," she orders.

Uncertain, he takes them in a hand rimmed with long, horned fingers. He places them on his eyes, and they glaze to metal as her system turns them into a view onto her log. She dials up the views. "This is visible light. This is infra red. This is ultraviolet. This is x-ray. This is spectrographic. This is the visible chemical analysis. This is magnified one hundred thousand times. A thousand. A hundred." She stops and gently takes the spectacles from his eyes. He stands, fingers curled, which she vaguely recalls is a position only assumed in the greatest abstraction. "Now do you believe me?" she asks, quietly, hearing her tones converted to an odd rumbling with a faint echo.

He raises his hands to near shoulder level. Twice. She wonders what that means.

"I've never seen anything like that." His tones contain a vibrato that her translator interprets as a shaken reaction.

Her smile is rueful. "Let me tell you, that is the least of what you're going to see. That is, if we can get going. Can we?"

He rotates a hand. Twice.

Clu leans back against the clean smelling fabric. It is still cold in the cabin, and beyond a non-physical window beside her as far as her lenses are concerned, the landscape is unreeling and descending slowly. The distant horizon is glowing with the remnants of atmosphere, and above it, space is black, its stars blotted away by the brightness of the world below. She rolls her head toward it, exuding a vague tiredness and a vague disappointment.

They had been just outside the dwelling line, where the dunes roll softly toward the foliage rim, when the patrol came down on them... Three armed cloaks burst running three legs at a time toward them from the vines. She slams Leekter'na to the ground as her systems project the line of fire, just in time to avoid the path of each air-shaped molten drop - ducked arm, lowered shoulder. There is no thought involved, just reaction honed by practice. She draws her gun across seconds like hours from the pocket inside her cloak. It seems to take even longer to come up, as her focus devolves from the target to the sights to the target to the augmented eye lock. She hates herself for a moment as she pulls smoothly, slowly, waiting; the flash and gout of flame and kick as the simulated local projectile blasts away, and then turning to the next and the next.

But she is angry, and as she is turning back, they are falling, and her heart suddenly thunders with fear released and allowed, rage released and allowed. How dare they!

She whirls and reaches down for Leekter'na, seizing his left arm and accepting the stunned blinks of his eyes.

They stagger away down a deep depression in the dunes, to the deserted salt lakebed where the Zadar stands in the receeding light. Leekter'na resists, but Clu tugs him toward the camo tented gleaming patterned metal and sleek bone colored wings. The sun is a point on the horizon beyond the fabric. She calls down the ramp and pushes him up past the pistoned complexity of the landing gear struts into the bright interior. He cowers at the threshold, but she cannot wait and shoves him upward. As they cross within, the ramp rises behind them, and the ducted lift engines begin to spool up, sensing her presence. Soon, the camo net begins to sublime into a vague dark smoke while the Zadar begins to roll forward. Though she cannot see them, there are officers on the rim of the lakebed, watching in astonishment as the Zadar completes its abbreviated takeoff roll and leaps into the air with a thunderous battering.

Now she simply waits as the automatics lead them into space. There is no planetary defense net, no space flight capability, nothing to worry about, and the Zadar is performing flawlessly, with just a quiet rumble from the sternward engines as they push further onward toward the jump correspondence coordinates.

Impatient, she throws a gesture and ramps the engines to overthrust. Time to go home.

Ivo leans against the doorway, smiling. "Well, you're back. All in one piece, lady retriever. How'd you like it?"

Clu looks up out of her entertainment, and her contacts fade from metal. She smiles. "It could be addictive."

Ivo and Clu, side by side in a darkened theatre, listening to a complex live music performance by a small group of disparate entities. From within the rich layered sound, Clu finds a moment to surround the whole. That morning she had consulted on the post-mission checkout of the Zadar and had started test flight planning for Marie Field. The day before, she had been in space... Now she listens to music composed for a nation of creatures she had never known existed in a place little more than a legend for most of her life. For a moment, it is hard to believe... it is a dream.

She knows that she has friends, as she watches Ivo focus on the performance, but she is always lonely, as if her heart once opened and spilled ... everything. Even now, she is cold. Thinking about the winter she knows is rushing down on her home.