SLATE

It isn’t luck that I find a cave.

I scout the edge of the cliff and find a break in the rock.

I find a passage down that is navigable by moonlight, with a wolf pup under one arm and an alien gauntlet in the other.

I have made an appointment with the artifact as soon as I can set down out of the cold.

Moonlight? Moons’ light?

I stick with the former.

The smaller is red, the larger is grey. The grey half-moon shimmers, with some reflective feature on its surface.

The stars draw together in a slash that divides the sky between the two bodies.

In the center of the slash is a black tear, darker than the night sky. There is an order to it, a symmetry.

Were it not for the cold, I might be able to appreciate the beauty of an alien sky. The cold has crept into me now. Once you are cold on the inside, it is hard to regain warmth. The shivering begins in earnest. I am lucky to have made it this long, naked in the cold. Every part of my body loses heat every second I stand in the open air.

Running helps.

The pup is warm in its fur and its body. It is better suited to the cold than I am.

I almost forget the black slag on my body, which I cannot clean because I suspect it is the main reason I am still alive.

The gauntlet isn’t cold either, unlike metal. The chest plate I wear also does not seem to affect my body temperature.

Scouting the ridge is what does it. Exposed, next to the basin, in the cold wind.

It is slow going and coming down teaches me about the nerve pain of cold bone on hard stone.

At the bottom, I waste no time.

The shelter is a break in the cliff big enough to walk into, roughly twenty paces deep.

At the base, there are promising crevices. I see no obvious threats and judge it good for the night — however long that will last.

How long does it take this planet to turn? How long will the night be?

I lay the pup on the ground in a recess. Its eyes are closed, they will never open.

It yawns. I study it.

Everything it does amazes me — it might have yawned a hundred times, but to me, it is the first time and I have never seen anything like it. There are not many dogs in space, I think. Not much of anything.

Sure, those that lie in the Eschalon have all manner of designer animals, with genetics from the earth, or alien origins, from imagination, or some combination.

I could watch it sleep, its little paws twitching. Its quiet mewling.

I think it dreams — dreams perhaps of the wraith or of the night its brothers and sisters died and it failed to protect them. I put a hand on it — not sure what I hope to achieve by this. Yet the animal seems to settle.

I hope it does not wake alone while I do what must be done.

Wood is what I need most. I slip the gauntlet on my right hand in a well of moonlight. I should have done it earlier but it didn’t feel right — to put on the first artifact on an alien world without recognition.

It slips onto my hand snuggly, stretching and contracting. In the dark, I do not see how it achieves this. It fits like a glove and yet is hard as a gauntlet. If it has any function, I will discover it. For now, it is good protection from the cold. My hand is snug, without sweating.

I almost feel irreverent about the rough treatment I am about to subject it to. The gauntlet should be in a vault on display and I’m going to be using it to gather wood. But I have to use every survival advantage.

A downed tree lies nearby.

I start with snapped and broken branches. I do not worry about cleaning the branches. I gather as much wood as possible as quickly as possible. I only need to take them a short distance. I can do further preparations in the shelter. And over a short distance, side branches and leaves can help the bundle stay together. I pile everything I can on a large branch keeping the V-shaped offshoots to act as a transport.

For kindling, I will use some plant matter kept dry from under a recess in the shelter but I gather as much wood as I can for as long I can. Double what I think I will need and more if possible.

Before long, I have made two trips, and am coming back from my third. I have a substantial pile of wood at the entrance to the cave. But it has come at a cost, I am shivering uncontrollably now. Only a stubborn will keeps my teeth from k. the cold has settled into my chest and bones. The fingers of my left hand have turned blue and numb.

Frostbite, early stages. It means the flesh is turning to ice.

The pile is almost as tall as me, leaves and branches and all. Not bad work for over an hour. I have a good sense of time but I will fine-tune it as soon as I have a chance can enter the mindscape.

I freeze. My blood runs cold.

It’s strange how many expressions of fear revolve around the cold.

Ice in my veins. That isn’t an expression of fear — it is what I need to have.

Standing in front of me is a man. A silhouette in a moonlit passage.

No, I am a man. It is a biped.

Seeing a man is a defect of human psychology.

The biped is covered in white hair, which could be age or more likely, camouflage. It is short and compact. Its face makes me think of a protohuman analog.

Biped is too strong a word.

Ape. It is a ground ape, a potentially dangerous ground ape.

Neither one moves for a long time but I have already decided what to do.

It is quite simple.

There is one shelter and two of us. In a perfect world, we could share it. But in an imperfect world, it slits my throat in the night, or I slit its throat. It kills me to stop me killing it, or vice versa.

And where there is one there will be more which means that if I let it go, it has a potentially powerful advantage. If I let it cry out — same advantage.

This is why I walked three more steps before looking up and seeing it for the first time. This is why I am walking slowly forward, now, with open palms. This is why I keep my cold calculations off my face.

Cold calculation. Ice in your veins. cold-hearted.

It would be different if one of us had found the other, as the she-wolf found me, in her mercy.

And each let the other walk away. But that is not the situation we are in. And the wolf situation wasn’t exactly proof positive either. If I’d found the wolf prone, I would have slit its throat, rather than take the chance.

It is the useless ball of fur stumbling behind it that seals its fate. Stumbling blindly.

This is why I look down at the stone between us.

It is a flicker and it is to the credit of its species that it notices the direction of the glance. Most animals do not pay great attention to the face, but a higher primate might. A higher primate might also know how to use simple tools.

I count on it.

It starts forward first.

It is a flimsy justification but it will serve.

I drive my knee into its face as it bends. It makes two errors. One, it helps me close the space between us, which was considerate of it. Two, it decided to faceplant on my knee. Again, considerate.

Ignoring the rock, I am on it before it lands on its back. The gauntlet held up well, barely a scratch on it. I get in a good strike on the throat before it knows what has happened. For its body plan, there are not many options for sound generation.

Humanity has studied many bipedal alien species. If they breathe they inflate the chest or torso — it is the structure with the largest capacity. If they breathe through the mouth or nose — they usually do — the throat is either the place that sound originates, or, failing that, sound passes through the throat.

The throat is always a vulnerability. It joins the brain to the body. All your important pipes in one convenient package.

Basic plumbing.

I roll away quickly.

The work is done. I hit the air pipe hard. It cannot breathe. It is dead, it just needs to realize it. It does.

While it is dying, it can still do damage. So I put distance between the thing and myself. It has strong arms. The apes of earth were shorter than men but could rip a human into pieces.

Quick strike, withdraw.

Much of unarmed combat can be summarised in this: a fight doesn’t take turns.

The fighting arts teach you to overcome hesitation, to drive home the advantage. To the trained fighter, the untrained fighter is not even fighting; he does not even understand the terms of engagement. He is wholly unprepared.

It works its mouth quietly. for a moment, I think it talks. It clutches its throat and chest, as I did when I woke on this world.

I wait until it falls to its knees before I pick up the rock and strike the head.

The pup howls, failing to produce sound — it smells blood. It is excited like when its sire returns to the den with the kill.

What does it even eat?

The same sense of power fills me. the first strike is the strongest. But now I have the opportunity to consider the feeling as I finish it off.

It is a grisly experiment. A light blow gives less, a heavy blow gives more. But that does not satisfy my curiosity.

All knowledge is a tool of survival, all animals are tools to survive.

And what about people?

Are they tools?

If they are not human, then yes.

Everything is a tool.

I cannot decide whether it is the impact of the strike or the blood it releases or some other factor. I will need to experiment further — but not on this subject. These are poor test subjects. They have not much life in them.

The pup licks the blood from the creature’s fur.

Well, that is one problem solved — it eats blood.

The rock drops from my hands as I turn to look down the dark passage.

Where did he come from?