RAY ALDRIDGE THE SPINE DIVERS So here I am, bound to this rock in a grotesquely melodramatic fashion, waiting for the tide. It's rising. Oh, it's rising all right. I can't see the water moving up the face of the cliff, but the waves below make a different sound as they break, and the sound is closer, more intimate. The sun is going down, the water is coming up. Occasionally, overwhelmed by panic, I struggle violently against my bonds . . . to no effect. The knots are impeccable, as one would expect. I have one minor consolation. My recorders are running, preserving my reactions to this experience. All of my fear, my regret, my anger. The feel of the stone beneath me, the bite of the monofilament at my wrists, my ankles, my throat. The fading flawless sky above, and at the very edge of vision a view of the already-shadowed horizon, the ocean tilting toward me . . . everything, into the recorders, even these pointless thoughts. The little remote camera floats in the air above me, making an external record of my death. Surely my friend and semi-fan Odorini will nutify my agent of my misfortune, and someone will come to remove the recorders from my corpse. The publisher will hire some hack to edit the materials I've gathered on this trip, and my creditors will be happy at last. Odorini will get a special edition, no doubt. The hack will probably start with this scene, or perhaps a little later, when the waves are wetting my toes and I'm wetting my pants. Then, a flashback to the beginning of the whole sordid business. The story in sequence. A final external shot: my dead stare through the darkening water. Fade out. Actually, if my hands were free, I think I'd turn the recorders off. The bearers carried my palanquin along the crag-top path, bare backs shining with sweat, stinking like genuine savages. Perhaps they were . . . the agency in Skull had assured me I was getting the Real Experience. But I suspected a degree of stage dressing. For one thing, few indigenes are left along the north Spine these days, and those lucky survivors have for the most pan found more profitable and less demanding ways to exhibit themselves, So the sturdy barbarians who bore me south along the Spine were in all likelihood just thin-frame mechs hung with vatted flesh. In times past the Spiners, to discourage this scab labor, would waylay the mech bearers, bash in their brain-boxes, carve the flesh from the frames, and have a big barbecue. A number of stranded tourists had to walk back to Skull and several failed to survive the trek. The tourist agencies retaliated by installing poisonous flesh on the next generation of mechs, which is one reason why so few real Spinets remain in the north. I shut down my recorders and wiped the past half-hour from memory. This sour cynicism isn't what my subscribers want. Everyone gets enough of that unpleasantness in their ordinary lives. Most of my fans are urban wage-slaves, yearning for vivid experiences in faraway places. And what's wrong with that? Nothing whatever. After a minute of deep breathing and mind-clearing exercises, I tapped at my forearm dataslate, until a chime signaled that the recorders were reset. I glanced at the remote camera's monitor, a square of light glowing on my wrist. The little camera flew high overhead, recording a long shot of my palanquin joggling down the path. I signaled it to move in closer, and began again. Autumn on the Spine . . . certainly there is great beauty here, and of a fairly uncommon sort. We were passing through a maze of carnelian monoliths, fantastically carved by the eons. In places where the agate had worn thin, the long light of the westering sun shone through, rendered blood-red by its passage through the stone. To the right I caught an occasional glimpse of Azure Ocean, placid-seeming from this height. The path was bordered with creeping thyme, the scent of which made an agreeable counterpoint to the earthy odors arising from my bearers. I turned a determined eye to them. They shouldered the padded poles of my palanquin without noticeable effort, trotting in careful unison, so that my seat swayed in a comfortable and predictable manner. They wore breech-cloths of goatfish leather, beaded with intricate designs: gray, blue, and dusty rose. Their sandals were laced to the knee, the thongs tasseled with thin gold chain, flashing as they moved. On waist straps they carried long slender daggers and short-barreled power guns of an antique design. Their heads were shaven,their skin a brown so dark it displayed a purplish tint. We passed the last carnelian monolith and the trail rose to the right toward the Spine's crest. At the top of the granite knob, I could look out over both oceans. "Stop here," I said. I looked east, to the steel-blue deeps of the Stormbringer Sea. A kilometer offshore, a monster was rolling in the trough of the big waves. Its copper-sealed body was larger than the starliner that had brought me to this ocean world. Its great fins glowed like green flames, I could see the amber glitter of its eye-cluster. I felt a bit of the awe that so rarely touches me these days -- only a little, but enough that clever editing and enhancement will transmit the feeling to my subscribers, when they relive this moment. There was a time when the awe came easily to me . . . whenever I visited a strange world, saw a new vista, or met a person from a culture unfamiliar to me. But no more. Now it's something of a straggle to feel anything but fatigue and weary calculation. Is my reaction strong enough, complex enough, sympathetic enough, different enough? And on this trip -- which may be the last one for me -- I worry that a little desperation will find its way into my work. This one must sell; it must. Another failure will almost certainly end my career, such as it is. I realized that I had gone astray again and paused the recorders, saving the sea monster segment -- not much, but usable. I was very tired; perhaps that was the difficulty. I decided not to waste any more of the Spine's marvels that day. "Is this a good camp?" I asked the lead bearer, who called himself Teeg. "No, offworlder," Teeg said, without turning his head. "Leatherwings hunt the heights after dark. We must go down into the Valley of Shards, or the beasts will carry you away to their nests . . . tent, foolish mechanisms, soft white person and all. There is shelter in the Valley, and a hot spring to comfort your weak bones." He spoke without turning his head, and I again suspected the agency had given me mechs instead of men. There was something about their insolence, carefully metered . . . unpleasant enough to make me suppose that I am among surly barbarians, but not vicious enough to deeply offend me. My historical sources describe the real north Spinets as masters of casual invective --inventive, industrious, and malicious. But perhaps these particular ones had simply adapted to the tourist trade and were angling for a tip. Or it could have been that my force-learned fluency in the Spiner language was insufficiently subtle, so that I was unable to appreciate the depth of Teeg's contempt. I sighed and made another attempt to put my misgivings aside. Here was a fine place to make an opening narrative dump. "Once again," I said. . . . while my vision pans across the wild craggy landscape and the two oceans, while my heart fills with the beauty of the scene, with anticipation of the wonders I will see during my journey down the Spine, a resonant thought-stream sets the scene: "The Spine is a tall narrow chain of mountains, formed during a cataclysmic fracture of the underlying planetary crust. Upwelling magma lifted a fantastic variety of ancient rock to the top of the Spine, so that every imaginable landform can be found there. Though less than a kilometer wide in many places, the Spine divides two oceans completely, curving south for 4500 kilometers. Its southern terminus is the icy waste of the polar cap, its northern terminus the small jungle continent of Skull and the city of the same name. But the chief marvel of the Spine is not its unusual geology. Far stranger are the several unique cultures which grew up along the Spine, isolated by the lack of roads, the expense of air freight, and the impossibility of ocean transport." And here, I realized, would be an excellent place to use the sighting of the sea monster, so I made a note . . . and then I made a sincere attempt to feel all the things I ought to feel. Teeg and his fellow mechs set up camp efficiently. I could not seem to think of them as human, despite my best efforts to believe in them. The hot spring was in a grotto encrusted with white mineral deposits, very pleasant. Teeg had hung several small oil lamps from the ceiling so that the grotto glowed with soft yellow light, reflected and multiplied by the crystal efflorescence. As I eased myself into the spring which indeed I expected to soothe my aches, Teeg spoke. "Soak to your heart's content, offworlder. We eat at dark, but we will save you the scrapings of our plates." I nodded affably. This seemed to annoy Teeg or so I might have thought, had I believed him human. "Enjoy your wallow," he snapped. "At one time, this spring was sacred to the Goddess of Shallow Clams, and no one went shod over its holy ground. Now, flabby offworlders sport in its pure waters, happy as rotting blowfish." He went away. In the morning we took the trail again. We made camp four more times before we reached the village of the Spine divers. We met no other travelers along the way; the agencies in Skull arranged matters so as to preserve the illusion that the Spine was an empty place -- parties on foot were carefully scheduled to avoid overlaps and all return traffic was by flyer. It worked for me. The magic of traveling among wonders had come upon me again, perhaps not so strongly as in the past, ...
allforjesus2001