Lutha stared at him in wonderment. He didn’t notice. Mitigan raided the supply pile once again for mottled gray-green overgarments he said would hide them among the bracken. Snark suggested that they smudge their faces with dust so as not to show up pale or dark against some contrasting background. Lutha went along with all this for a time, though all the preparations seemed rather melodramatic, but finally she could stand it no longer.
“Will someone please tell me why we’re going outside?”
Leelson cast her a lofty glance. “Anything Snark experiences feeds back to Simidi-ala, where the Procurator is no doubt even now planning our rescue. The feedback includes not only what Snark sees and hears but anything she sees us do or hears us say. We’ve had no chance to look around in daylight. One of us might come up with some insight that may be useful in planning the rescue attempt. Even the scanty information we have now is more than the Alliance has known previously!”
Mitigan, busy checking his own armament, raised the subject of weapons for the others, and Snark suggested they go first to the camp to pick up heat guns like the one she carried. These were tools used by the shadow team to sterilize soil before planting homo-norm crops, but they would serve to discourage attack as well.
While Snark demonstrated this device to the others Lutha checked her arrangements for Leely once more. Saluez’s knife was put away in Lutha’s own pocket so he couldn’t get at that. His tether was tight—she checked it for the third or fourth time—so he couldn’t get loose. While she did this Snark was instructing the others: “ … turn it on … press the button.” Even distracted as Lutha was, she thought she would be able to manage that.
They went down the slope into the camp, exploring from building to building, Mitigan, Leelson, and Snark half-crouched, looking in all directions at once, the ex-king and Lutha shambling along, feeling faintly ridiculous. Lutha was reminded of the vacated world the Procurator had showed her, where Mallia had lived. Here, as there, was clothing out of which bodies had been stripped. Here, as there, were artifacts, tools, games left behind when their users had been taken away. Through open doors the wind keened softly, a chill murmur that never ceased. In a window a tuft-eared, short-nosed animal sat quietly, staring at us interlopers.
“Is that a live cat?” Lutha asked, disbelievingly.
“Left behind when the real team was evacuated,” Snark said. “Her name’s Zagger. There’s another one somewhere. Zigger.”
“Animals? Real animals? Left behind? The Procurator told me the Ularians left nothing alive!”
“I know what he said,” snarled Snark. “I was there, pouring your damn tea!”
Lutha fell silent. The cat jumped down from the window and came to rub itself against her legs. A strange sensation. It looked up intelligently. Lutha realized that it, like the gaufers, knew things. Not as humans knew them, but in its own way. She saw language in its movements. Not her own language, not a spoken language, but … Smells, maybe? A combination, perhaps, of smells and gestures and sounds.
“You’re right about what the old Proc said.” Snark leaned down to stroke the cat. “He talked about all life being gone. But you remember that world he showed you—there was a little pet animal crying along the fence. And there was trees and plants and birds. It was only the humans gone. It’s just, the old Proc, he’s like a lot of people spend all their lives in Class-J cities, with only humans around—he gets to a point of thinking life means human. People like that, maybe they got a flower in a pot and a clone fish in a bowl, but they get like Mitigan, so set on humans being the top of the heap, they don’t give anything else credit for living.”
“What do the cats eat?” asked the ex-king.
“I put out food for ‘em,” said Snark. “They’ll eat fish. I used to catch ‘em fish. Now I dunno. Won’t be many fish left, the way the shaggies’re gulping ‘em down.”
Though they had come to the camp for heat guns, Lutha took the opportunity to do a superficial inventory of supplies available. She was looking particularly for a medical diagnostic unit for Saluez. Such a unit should have been a standard item in any human-occupied area, but there was none in any building they visited. Lutha didn’t mention the omission to Snark, considering that Snark had quite enough to be angry about already.