Into the Hinterlands-ARC Read online

  The Riders could not help but notice the distinction in dress between the men and they would draw the obvious conclusion. Destry was a “chief”, and the other two his warriors.

  “Certainly, Sar Destry, your worship,” said Hawthorn, touching his forelock. He made a rude gesture with the other hand, masking it from the Riders with his body.

  “Quite right, my man,” said Destry, grinning. “And be quick about it.”

  “Don’t push your luck, pal,” said Hawthorn, in a tone of respect.

  Allenson could not help but smile at the familiar exchange. The wilderness was like a fire that boiled a man’s personality down to core essentials. There was little room for pretense or prevarication. The Cutter Stream residents described a sound man as one “to go into the Hinterland with”. Both his friends were sound men, in their different ways.

  Destry stood with his hands on his hips. He finally deigned to notice the Riders, observing them with the expression of the Lord of a Terran Manor on discovering a caravan of gypsies setting up home in the corner of his estate. Allenson hid a smile; the first rule of dealing with Riders was never, never to show fear.

  Allenson shivered. The abrupt transition from the sauna-like frame to a cool climate was bracing.

  “There’s plenty of kindling wood around,” said Hawthorn, noticing. “I’ll get a fire started.”

  The survey team walked to the tree-line. The bottom third of the trunks were bare and there was no ground vegetation. Branches touched above to form a continuous canopy. Nothing moved under the trees and the only sound came from the Riders around their fire. The ground was covered with the detritus of slowly decaying leaves and wood.

  “The trees must shed their branches when stressed,” Destry said.

  He picked up some twigs and rubbed them between his fingers before sniffing at them.

  “Odd smell, I’ll warrant there’s something toxic in the sap. That would explain why nothing seems to inhabit the trees.”

  Allenson and Hawthorn exchanged a grin. Destry had read natural science at Blue Horizon.

  The dead wood lit easily so they soon had a fire going. They warmed themselves, heating ceramic-wrapped ration packs in the flames. The Riders had a massive blaze roaring in the center of the clearing. Every so often there would be a squabble and the loser was despatched to chop down another sapling at the edge of the tree-line and throw it on the fire. The wood caught fire immediately. It spat yellow flames that shot out violently with explosive cracks.

  “Interesting,” Destry said. “The tree sap contains inflammable oil. That must be the toxic agent.”

  He wiped his hands carefully with a scented handkerchief.

  “I wonder if it would be cost-effective to extract as a fuel,” Allenson said, jotting down a note on his datapad.

  “Not much to power around here,” said Hawthorn, sweeping his arm to encompass the wilderness around them.

  “It may not always be forests,” said Allenson, mildly.

  This was a variation of a routine argument between them. Hawthorn knew just how to needle his friend but his grin was infectious so it was impossible not to smile back.

  “We might as well take some notes. We are not going anywhere until the storm passes,” Allenson said, aware of how pompous he sounded but enable to emulate his friend’s irreverent style.

  “True,” Hawthorn replied. “And Brasilia’s money spends as well as any ones, even if they are wasting it. This place won’t make a profit in my lifetime.”

  “It isn’t just about immediate profit, although financial returns are necessary to placate backers,” said Destry. “My family invested substantially in the Harbinger Project partly for strategic reasons. Trance takes the long view.”

  Trance was the paterfamilias of the Destry gens and so had considerable political influence, including a seat on the Brasilian Council. This body was nominally merely advisory to the People’s Representative Committees who had legislative power, but its advice was rarely ignored, partly because of prestige, but mostly because most Committee Members were clients of one or other of the paterfamilias who made up the Council.

  “Terra is extending across the Bight on each side of the Cutter Stream colonies. Brasilian expansion into the New Worlds will be blocked if these arms link up. Terra are trying to surround and strategically strangle us,” said Destry, gesturing with his hands to illustrate encirclement.

  Destry seemed unconscious of a dichotomy developing in the Cutter Stream between those who still considered Brasilia “us” and those who tended to think of Brasilia as “them”. It was a small distinction but one that cut across class boundaries.

  “I have to admit that the Project has been a useful source of ready cash,” Destry said, with the candor of a man who had unassailable social status whatever his financial standing.

  The Cutter Stream Legislature had appointed Royman’s father, Brasman Destry, to the Project’s Presidency in an effort to curry favor with the paterfamilias of Gens Destry back on Brasilia. Did Trance care about what happened to the cadet branch of the family across the Bight? Not very much, Allenson suspected, but he was glad at what the appointment meant for his friend Royman. The Cutter Stream Destrys had no money of their own. Their aristocratic connections brought them status and expensive social obligations but little in the way of hard cash.

  It was entirely proper for Brasman to appoint his son Chief Surveyor and natural that Royman would select an associate to do the actual work. Thus Allenson acquired the title, duties and honorarium of Assistant Surveyor. The fact that Allenson was competent to do the job was a welcome bonus.

  * * *

  The packs in the fire changed color. Hawthorn hooked them out with a stick and the survey team settled down to eat. Destry spooned out a helping of something resembling yellow ochre porridge and blew on it. A trail of water vapor condensed into the air. He tasted the concoction and grimaced.

  “Ready meals aren’t getting any more palatable.”

  Allenson nodded politely. Actually, he had few gastronomic pretensions. He made little distinction between one dish and another provided it was hot and nourishing. The complex sauces used by Brasilian chefs merely muddied the flavor of the food in his opinion. It would not be politic to voice such a view as it would label him a hopeless colonial peasant. Brasilian nobility already tended to assume that their Cutter Stream colonists had barely lost their tails and were still striving for the evolutionary level achieved by Homo erectus.

  The Riders and survey team surreptitiously kept an eye on each other while ostentatiously pretending indifference. Eventually, a Rider made a great show of standing. He approached the survey team with his spear reversed in his right hand.

  Allenson and Hawthorn rose to meet him. The Rider offered Allenson a piece of burnt meat. It smelt of charcoal and blood. Allenson made a gesture of polite refusal. He was far too far from home to risk food poisoning. He offered the Rider a spoonful from his ration pack in return. The man sniffed at it suspiciously, shuddered and mimicked Allenson’s refusal.

  The Rider spoke to Allenson in Kant, a simplified universal trade tongue. Each Rider Clan seemed to have a distinct language so they all used Kant when talking to outsiders. It now included a smattering of English words. These were usually connected with industrial trade goods, as the Riders had little indigenous technology higher than Palaeolithic.

  Allenson could understand only a few words of Kant but Hawthorn spoke it fluently. The Rider said the word “tonk” emphatically to Hawthorn, who shook his head firmly. Tonk was the slang name for Tollins Superior Berry Distillation, a cheap gin found throughout the Cutter Stream. Allenson noticed the word because he was expecting it. Hawthorn waved a hand dismissively and made some sort of counter-offer. This set off a voluble exchange between the two that went on for some time.

  “He demanded a gift of a bottle of joyjuice,” said Hawthorn, using another Cutter Stream colloquialism.

  “I refused of course and asked him what he
had to trade. We agreed on the use of one of the women in exchange. I could probably push him for the two if you like,” said Hawthorn, flashing the ready smile that so impressed the girls.

  Allenson blushed, turning a cold eye on his smirking friend. “Thank him politely for the generous offer but tell him that Sar Destry has taken a vow of abstinence until he has killed a special enemy and we as his loyal followers are bound by the same oath. Tell him that the Sar will honor the principle of the trade even if we have no use for the women.”

  “Shame, some of their girls are really quite inventive,” said Hawthorn. He rattled off a speech in Kant to the Rider.

  Allenson was fairly sure that Hawthorn was winding him up—the man regularly teased him for being po-faced—fairly sure but not absolutely certain. The Rider’s near naked body was stained with dirt and his long hair hung dankly, greased with some sort of animal fat. He was small, twisted and had bad teeth. His body showed the result of dietary deficiencies, parasites, and a hard life. Pock marks, scars and sores covered his skin.

  Allenson thought that artists from the central worlds who idealized Riders in the currently fashionable “noble savage” poetry would find the reality a great disappointment. The smell from the man’s body was overwhelming even in the open air. The thought of coupling with a Rider woman in exchange for alcohol was not only morally unacceptable but physically repugnant.

  Allenson disliked the use of prostitutes. His friends considered this another example of his eccentric romantic leanings. However, a gentleman was permitted to be eccentric but not preachy, so Allenson usually kept his own counsel on such matters.

  “Ask him where he got those,” said Allenson, pointing.

  The Rider had a soiled strip of cheap trade-cloth wrapped around his loins. A twisted vine served as a belt. A stone knife was thrust into the vine but it was the two human hands that attracted Allenson’s attention. Dried blood showed that they were not long separated from their original owner.

  The Rider responded to Hawthorn’s query with a long tale involving expansive gestures and leaps into the air. Hawthorn interrupted the Rider’s flow with occasional interjections. The Rider finally wound down and Allenson looked expectantly at his friend.

  “I’ll give you a summary of the highlights,” said Hawthorn.

  “Yes, the shortened version, please,” said Allenson.

  “This group are from the Purple Star Clan. They were traveling to a moot, a sort of neutral sacred place, to trade girls with the Soft Foot Clan when they came across a hunting party of Sharp Spears. Our friend here made a kill and has taken trophies.”

  “Why?” Destry asked.

  Hawthorn shrugged. “They have no current truce with the Sharp Spears. Enemy and stranger are the same word in Kant.”

  “No, why has he chopped of the hands?”

  “To make a necklace from the finger bones. Riders believe that the possession of a man’s amputated hands binds his soul to serve whosoever wears the necklace in the afterlife,” Hawthorn replied.

  “I see,” said Destry.

  “What do they do to bind women’s souls?” he asked.

  “You don’t want to know,” Hawthorn replied.

  “Congratulate him from me and give him his tonk,” said Allenson, changing the subject.

  Hawthorn dug a bottle out of his pack and tossed it to the Rider who caught it one-handed. Allenson noted that the Rider dropped the meat rather than his spear to make the catch. The Rider returned to his compatriots, whooping and dancing with glee.

  Destry examined a food pack with deep suspicion. He snapped the tab open and the pack flash-chilled with an audible snap. Destry handed ceramic spoons out and passed the pack to Allenson who tried a spoonful. The iced pudding had a sharp, bitter taste that he didn’t recognize. It was not unpalatable but Allenson suspected that a little would go a long way.

  “Greenberry ferment,” said Destry with approval, when the pack came back around to him. “It’s a tad sweet. They probably didn’t age it long enough but it’s not bad for all that. Pater must have slipped it into my stores as a surprise treat.”

  Greenberry plants were native to a Brasilian colony on the other side of the Bight. They could be grown artificially on many worlds but some combination of minerals and climate on their home planet gave the wild berries a distinctive flavor that resisted replication. This rarity made them highly desirable, and hideously expensive by the time they reached the Cutter Stream.

  Conversation stopped as the team gave the pudding the respect that politeness demanded of such an outrageously generous gift.

  Allenson found himself thinking about the rider’s tropies: not because the severed hands particularly bothered him, but because they didn’t. They were the sort of thing that a human born and bred in the cutter stream came to take for granted.

  He glanced at Destry. Perhaps we have slipped to the level of beasts. But this is our land, not Brasilia’s.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Riders

  Raucous laughter indicted that the Rider’s party was getting into full swing. One had surreptitiously pushed the end of his neighbor’s loin cloth into the fire. The victim of the practical joke shot up with flames licking around his genitals. He ripped off the burning garment. The practical joker shook with mirth. The outraged Rider drew his knife and leapt on his tormentor. The two rolled over and over on the ground, slashing, kicking and biting like wildcats. The other Riders yelled encouragement to the combatants.

  Allenson half rose to his feet with some vague idea of intervening but Hawthorn grabbed his arm and pulled him down.

  “They won’t thank you for interfering. Let them sort it out their way,” Hawthorn said.

  The Rider’s Leader carefully stoppered the bottle of tonk before driving the fighting men apart with kicks and blows from his spear haft.

  “They sure do go on a bender real easy,” said Hawthorn.

  “Allelic differences in their alcohol dehydrogenase genes compared with those found in true humans severely limit their body’s capacity to break down alcohol,” said Destry.

  “I suspect that’s more or less what I said,” said Hawthorn, dryly.

  Allenson envied the education that Royman Destry had obtained at the Home World. Allenson was a keen reader of popular books and journals but he considered that an inadequate substitute for proper learning. A place had been reserved for Allenson at a military academy on Brasilia but his stepmother cancelled the arrangement after his father’s untimely death, citing lack of funds for such unnecessary luxury. This killed his hopes for a career in the Brasilian military since he had neither the patronage nor the funds to buy a commission.

  “Does that mean that they split off from our species before we invented alcoholic drinks?” asked Allenson. “That would be—what—more than ten thousand years ago at the dawn of the First Civilization?”

  “Much more than ten thousand years,” Destry replied. “Riders aren’t exactly keen to supply DNA so we have only analyzed a limited number of specimens.”

  Destry had slipped into abstract academic thinking where people became specimens. He probably had not given much thought as to how the specimens’ DNA had been collected.

  “You know the calibration problem with molecular clocks, Allenson. Fossil evidence has given us a rough time base for most human gene clusters so we can calibrate the Homo sapiens’ molecular clock rather well but it’s clear that the mutation rate in Rider DNA has not followed the same patterns. The molecular biologists are still arguing about when the Riders left Old Earth,” said Destry.

  “They are definitely human then?” Allenson asked. Many in the Cutter Stream denied the humanity of the Riders despite their close physical resemblance to people. These were usually the same people who advocated a solution of genocide to “The Rider Question”.

  “They were human once,” Destry replied. “The Lord knows what they are now.”

  “Riders aren’t so different from people,” said Hawthorn.<
br />
  The Riders sang a harmonically complicated epic dirge where various warriors took turns to stand and sing solos.

  “The Rider DNA tested so far has been incredibly similar from specimen to specimen. There is very little variability in human DNA either but it looks as if all Riders are descended from the same group. That suggests that their ancestors left Old Earth in a single event,” said Destry, raising his voice to rise above the noise.

  “Did you notice with which hand the Rider caught the Tonk?” asked Destry.

  Allenson concentrated, replaying the event in his mind. “The left but that was because he held his spear in his right hand.”

  “He had his spear in his right hand to indicate his peaceful intentions,” said Hawthorn.

  “All Riders are left-handed,” said Destry. “They are an extreme example of a “bottle-necked” population. You get the same effect in the DNA of Old Earth animals recreated since the fall of the Third Civilization. The original Rider population was probably less than a 100 people.”

  “Not all Riders are left-handed,” said Hawthorn. “And talking of Tonk.”

  He rummaged around, coming up with a bottle of brandy. It was a local brand made from the fruit of modified plum trees. Brasilian grapes would not grow on any of the Cutter Stream worlds and no one had bothered to engineer the necessary modifications. It still tasted a damn sight better than Tonk, and plum brandy had the advantage of not causing blindness. Hawthorn poured three generous glasses.

  “That’ll keep out the cold, gentlemen,” Hawthorn said.

  “I was taught that all riders were left-handed with no exceptions,” said Destry.

  “But had your professors ever talked to a Rider?” asked Hawthorn.

  “Shouldn’t imagine so,” Destry replied.

  He giggled; Hawthorn stiffened in response.

  Destry held a hand up, palm forward. “Sorry Hawthorn, I wasn’t laughing at you. I just had a mental image of Professor Hackenheim in a Rider encampment. He is very keen on the noble savage ideal. The reality might be a bit too much for him.”