Ty nodded. “Once TerReForm’s engineered algae had done its job of building the atmosphere, it needed to be held in check. TerReForm seeded the coasts with filter feeders and the oceans with krill.”
“Those clams were the first meat anyone had eaten in forty-seven hundred years,” said the Cyc. “Scout parties that hugged the coast could stay out as long as they wanted, and roam for months or years, eating better than the Diggers who stayed in the Hole.”
“Being a scout must have been popular.”
“Too popular. Some went rogue, and had to be hunted down and subjected to the discipline of the Committee.”
“That sounds . . . unpleasant.”
“It was not a good time. A lot of what you see that is bad in our culture started in those years.”
“Anyway, the scouts would emerge from the Hole,” said Ty, “and make a beeline for the nearest coast.”
“Exactly, and this route we have been traveling is like a game trail for us—we know it backwards and forwards. Well, at some point, after discipline had been reestablished, a scout party was exploring the coast a few kilometers from here, making camp up in the trees. One of them looked down and saw a person just walk up out of the sea. This person carried a little shovel like you might use to dig clams, and had a basket, but no clothes. He or she dug some clams and tossed them into the basket and then strolled back down into the ocean and disappeared.”
“No scuba gear. No wet suit.”
“Correct, just a belt with a knife. Well, word of this got back to the Hole and they talked to a predecessor of mine.”
“A previous Sonar Taxlaw, you mean.”
“Yes. A scout party went back down to the same place the next year and set up a contraption like this one, except not as good, and used it to send signals out into the deep. Nothing. Years, then decades went by. All they had to go on was the one sighting. Some old Digger who had been on a lot of scouting parties came up with the idea of building a bigger and better noisemaker here—he reckoned that the shape of the crater would act as a horn, channeling the sound outwards. To make a long story short, it worked. Contact was made.”
“How recently?”
“About fifty years,” Sonar said. “Then it was broken off around the time that you had your war. Five years ago, though, we began to see cairns.”
KATHREE WAS AWAKENED MUCH AS KATH TWO HAD BEEN ON THE morning when she had seen the Digger from her glider: by a certainty that something was out there, supported by no real evidence. This time, she was responding to sound: something she’d heard while still asleep, accessible only through a memory that eluded her the harder she reached for it. She rolled over onto her belly, propped herself up on her elbows, aimed her face uphill, closed her eyes, opened her mouth, and froze. For the first few minutes she wasn’t trying to hear anything, just taking in the ambient soundscape so that she could detect any noises that did not belong in it. The flynk chain on that barge was still operating, producing a steady note that could be filtered out by the mind’s neural circuitry. She was aware that Bard too had suddenly become very quiet, but she didn’t know whether he had heard something or was simply following her cue. Kath Two might have been bookish and unobtrusive, but Kathree was the sort of person who kept nearby men on their toes.
She heard it again: the same sound that had probably awakened her in the first place. And this time she knew what it was: hand-forged steel arrowheads clinking faintly in a quiver, like coins in a pocket. The dilemma of the Digger hunter being that those shafts had to be held loosely enough to be fluidly drawn and nocked, but not so loosely that they jangled with each footfall. In measured strides across level ground, their kit might make no noise, but in a breathless predawn descent of an uneven slope, things might work themselves loose. As that aural picture sharpened in her mind, she could sense footfalls too, and hear bodies pushing through brush. The party, she guessed, was more numerous than the jangling quivers.
Another Kath Two memory connected: preparing for Survey work in areas with a lot of Indigens, she had read ancient histories of the American West, where white men had made use of aborigines as scouts and guides.
Langobard was hearing things too now, and had begun knuckle-walking along the little picket line that they had established below the rim of the crater, quietly waking Roskos Yur and Beled Tomov. Kathree followed him, going to each man in turn and saying in a low voice: “Maybe two Diggers with bows and arrows, guiding a small unit of Neoanders.”
“How small?” Beled asked.
“Probably not a full peloton. I will guess it is half of the group we observed landing.”