KRISA AND THE VALLEY OF GOLD
4. MARKO
Marko hugged his eldest daughter tightly and laughed. “You’d think I hadn’t been here in a month.”
She kissed him on the cheek. “Six days is too long.”
“Nothing happened?”
“No! The gardens are coming in sprouts, and we already have a few more grams of gold. The girls have been working hard.”
Naresh stepped out on the running board, putting his elbow on the roof of the truck. He rapped the rusty green metal with his knuckles. “Come on, Krisa, climb in, and we can get moving.”
She jumped between the two of them, and the doors creaked and slammed. The truck was friendly with the familiar smell of old steel and worn, cracked, rubbed leather. “How was Hipassus?”
“Same as ever,” Marko said, swinging the steering-bar open and kicking the flywheel into humming rotation. “Flat and dirty. Cabbages and turnips and olives and wheat. Everything your mum hates.” He smiled fondly at her. “We went to the clinic. Nurse Vittoria says hello. Asks when you’re getting married.”
She snorted. “Who to?—You got your checkup?”
“I’m healthy as a mule. Satisfied?”
She studied his face. His hair was thinning, and he was jowlier than he was when she was a little girl. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“What about me?” Naresh said in mock-injury.
“Nothing wrong with you. Da here’s in his fifties and should be cautious.”
“Cautious! No respect, child. You make me sound like I’m made of stick-candy.”
“Can’t be too careful,” she said.
“More than one reason to be careful,” Naresh observed.
She looked sharply at him. “What d’you mean?”
“Oh, that,” Marko said. “Yah, there were some KFMK men in town.”
Krisa grimaced. The old family enemy. “KFMK.” She pretended to spit between two fingers. “What were they doing?”
“Asking questions,” Naresh said. “Down at the metals guild. Precious metals questions. They wanted to know who was prospecting on the East Face these days, who was bringing in dust.”
“They’ve done that before,” Marko said easily. “They know we’re out here. And there’s others.”
“I don’t want to see them out here,” Krisa said. “I’ll shoot them.”
“No! You will do no such thing,” her father said, severely. “That will get the militia out here at once and end us, and I don’t want my pretty girl killed or indentured. Don’t give them an excuse, Krisa.”
The pleasure had gone out of the morning, and she wrapped her arms around herself and scowled. The truck rocked and swayed over the rough, rutted track of sterile regolith through the Pillars. Da focused on the sorry excuse for a road, and Naresh was uncomfortably silent.
“They don’t need an excuse to come out here,” she said at last. “All they have to do is enforce their metals monopoly, make us license. It would ruin us.”
“A couple of hundred grams a month isn’t worth the effort,” Naresh said at once, as if desperate to keep the silence broken. “It would cost what they made to get us in line.”
“Not worth the effort at all,” Marko agreed. “Now, I was assigned to their north polar mines…”
Krisa sighed. She’d heard this story a hundred times.
“I’ve seen that operation. The value of what they take out of them every hour in iron is worth what a lifetime of work in the Valley of Gold will bring us.”
“But he hates Mum,” Krisa said. “What if he forced us out for spite?”
“He’s had a quarter of a century to do it in. He did what he did to your mum and hasn’t raised a hand against her since. Why would he start now? And don’t forget, Christophia: if he didn’t hate your mum, you’d have never been born.”
“I don’t think he’s any happier about us for that.”
“Maybe not.”
“I thought it was odd, though…” Naresh began.
“Not really,” Marko interrupted.
“What?” She looked at them both. “What?”
“Nothing.”
She glared at her father. “I’m not a little girl.”
“You don’t need to worry—”
“Good, then tell me.”
Marko looked at Naresh.
“Biosphere Corps,” said Naresh.
“What about them?”
“There was a Biosphere Corps officer with the KFMK men.”
She mouthed the words. Biosphere Corps. “Why? Not interested in your meadow, I assume.”
Marko laughed. “They don’t even know it exists. Doing their job for them, anyway.”
“Well, it isn’t like they do anything here: there’s the whole stonelands between us and Hipassus. And here we are halfway up to the Upper Plateau.”
“I thought it was odd, too,” Naresh said. “I was in the taverno, and the Corps officer had bought a few prospectors some drinks, and was asking some questions.”
“About what?”
“What kind of animals lived over the stonelands.”
She laughed. “Easy enough. None. They know that better than anyone.”
“Not totally true,” Marko said. “The yellowmouths.”
Krisa thought about them, the little feathery tree-climbing serpents of the Valley of Gold. “Just another kind of xenosnake,” she said. “They can’t care about something like that. Maybe they want to introduce more terraforming into the stonelands. I wouldn’t like that any better,” she added. “I like it the way it is. Clean, native.”
They passed through the Pillars, kilometer-high jutting red and yellow stone abutments from either side of the valley, and there was Da’s meadow on the left, and the pseudopine forest on the right and ahead down the cleft in the Plateau that was the Valley of Gold.
Marko looked over her head at Naresh, who said nothing, and as they bumped along by the side of the stream, she tried not to think about KFMK or the Biosphere Corps. There was nothing out here at all but the trees and the xenosnakes…and the little yellowmouths…
Nothing at all.
But, it was true…she had had a dream, once, lying in the meadow at night. She had been twelve, and had left the Big House with a blanket…this was before her house was built, and before Da went and got Zghira for her. Artume and Neith were going to conjoin at midnight, full, and the valley was going to be filled with gold and silver and umber light.
She wanted to see it. She lay on the young turf, her hands behind her head, the light beginning to shine from behind the Athenavista’s peaks. Her eyes drooped, her muscles loosened, and dreams flowed over her mind like cool water over pebbles.
In that dream, she remembered a form delicately tap-tapping on long claw-hoofed feet from the pseudopines, a figure as big as the truck, spindling along on six slender legs. It was tall and narrow, and dark, and many-eyed and had a smell like spice and chemicals and age. It approached her in the dream, towering over in silence, save for a slow series of sounds like men blowing over the tops of jugs. It knelt on its first pair of legs and sniffed at her, and made a low, friendly sigh.
“Oh!” she said in the dream. “What are you, beast?”
And her eyes blinked because the silver light was gone, and the Beast was gone, and the two moons were overhead.
“Just a dream,” she said, and picked up her notebook and her instruments and began taking measurements and writing them down.
Just a dream.
“Da,” she said, shaking herself.
“Yes, Krisa?”
“What would we do if people came up here?”
“People came here before, at the start, and they went away.”
She’d heard this story as well, but unlike his horror stories of the KFMK mines, Mum and Auntie Gem and Da had been more closed-mouthed about what had occurred.
“That’s what they did then,” she said. “What would we do now?”
He held tight to the steering-bar as they crossed a particularly tricky bit, but he smiled. “It would depend on who they were, and what they wanted.”
“And we’d figure out what to do?”
“And we’d figure out what to do.”
“This is why I’m happier when you two are here,” she said. “You’re the only men we have. I don’t like hearing about outsiders thinking about us.”
“Not just us. The whole East Face.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better,” she said. “Not at all.”