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People who like to hurt other people is who I hunt and get. That's not so
bad,, is it?"
She didn't seem sure, and the more I thought about it, neither was I. From
birth I had been raised to believe in the Confederacy, in its perfection and
its ideals. But, in that context, what was my job, anyway?
The same as TMS here? To track down those who posed a threat to the
Confederacy's system or who abused or perverted it and send them to psychs, or
to the Warden Diamond, or, on rare occasions, to their deaths. True, most of
the Confederacy was a far better system than Ypsir's Medusa, but the people
here did in fact believe in that system, including those in TMS. In their
minds they were no different from me. Did that make us different or the same?
Medusa was nothing if not a perversion a distorted mirror image of the
Confederacy's system and dreams. That must have been why I felt so
uncomfortable with it.
I rose to my feet. "Let's get walking. They'll have foot patrols through here
anytime now, and we've already stayed too long. Let's make all the time at
night we can. We can talk on the way."
They did send a few patrols and copters after us, and we saw or heard them
from time to time, but they made no more than a minimum effort, which simply
wasn't good enough. To their minds, being out in the wild was tantamount to
being dead anyway, and nobody was really worth the kind of effort that would
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have been needed to track us down. Again it was Medusa's own system that
allowed us our freedom, although what sort of freedom remained to be seen.
The biology texts hadn't revealed the half of Medusa's natural history,
though. Not only were there hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different plants
large and small, but the forests literally teemed with animal life. All of it
was strange-looking on the surface, but at the same time very much like many
other
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Medusa planets. Perhaps the theory that ecosystems developed under nearly
identical conditions came out much the same way was true. Here, as elsewhere,
trees were clearly trees and insects clearly bugs and they served the same
functions.
The first real concern wasn't eluding a ho-hum pursuit, but finding food.
Coming into spring in the
"tropical" regions meant that there were a number of berries and fruits
around, but little looked ripe and all was unknown to me. , "How do we know
what's safe and what's not?" Angi complained, hungry like the rest of us.
"I think it's simple," I told them all. "At least, it should be. If there's
anything really lethal around it should produce some kind of warning that our
Wardens will trigger. That berry, there, for example, smells really foul, and
I wouldn't touch it. Even my initial indoctrination, though, said that we
could eat almost anything, with the Wardens converting the substance into what
we and they really need. I'd say, for now, we just pick something that at
least seems practical to eat and eat it."
It took some time, though, and a lot of guts, before we decided to go through
with a test. The leaves and unripe fruits tasted from bitter to lousy, but
once we started eating we found it difficult to stop until we felt full. All
of us suffered a bit from stomach aches and the runs that night but after a
somewhat fitful sleep on the open ground we all awoke feeling much better.
After that our Wardens adjusted even more to our new situation and provided
the guidance we needed much as I'd hoped. Some stuff that tasted lousy the
first time tended to taste quite good after that, while other stuff just
tasted worse and worse. With that neat sorting and classification system to go
on, we had no more trouble, although I confess that Ching wasn't the only one
who dreamed of good meat and fresh fruit.
Well, we wouldn't starve, so the next thing was to adapt our lifestyle to this
new environment. Clothing proved unnecessary, as always, and after what we'd
been through modesty was no longer a factor. Shelter from the cold rains and
occasional i6e-pellet storms was provided by the forests and, if necessary, we
could rig portable lean-tos from branches and the broad leaves of a prevalent
bush. In point of fact I had the survival training and the means to make
permanent dwellings, if necessary, but I had no intention of founding a
village at this point. We had three months before the first snows, with the
best weather yet to come, to find the Wild Ones. That had to be our first
priority.
Over several days I made a broad circle around Roch-ande and then headed
toward the coast which that handy map in my head said was there. From that
point, and using the sun for direction, I could determine our approximate
location and chart where we were going.
The first few weeks were education weeks. We learned what we could eat, where
it was most likely to grow, and what caused problems. I gave a small seminar
in survival skills building lean-tos, that sort of thing and we also learned
the habits of many of the animals. The tree-dwelling tubros were all around, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]