Trail of Bones Read Online Free PDF Page B

initially thought slow pox had
infected that mammal Banglees, when I came across him out here in
these ice fields.
    Instead, he was almost frozen.
Cold-flummoxed, by letting his campfire die down while he
dozed.
    After I helped respark the flames and thaw
him out, he blinked at me several times.
    “Eh — you mean, I am not dead?” he
asked.
    “Evidently not,” I told him.
    “Then how is it you are here, mon
ami , if I am not? Are you not from Heaven, or the other
place?”
    I wondered if “Heaven, or the other place”
referred to some kind of arrak-du .
    “I have taken some very engaging missteps in
space and time,” I told him, “which have all construed to bring me
here.”
    “You mean you are lost?”
    “I am doing extended field research.”
    “Ah, well. If zat means you are lizard
people, I suppose it ees my job to kill you and take your skin and
skull with me.”
    “Your entire employment is based on a
graphic recipe for harming me?”
    “I am a trapper.”
    He tightened the mammal furs — borrowed
permanently, it appeared, from other mammals — more tightly around
himself and moved closer to the flames.
    “But I am also cold, and I have been out a
long time, so I am tired. And while I am not convinced complètement zat I am alive or zat you are real, I will
spend the next hours until sunup talking to you, if for no other
reason than to make sure I stay awake.”
    “Then we will talk of—”
    Nika-tc.
    The word came out of my mouth before I knew
what I was saying. “Home.” Saurian for “home.”
    But it didn’t feel like I was the one saying
it.
    It felt like the lingo-spot.
    Though I’ve never known a lingo-spot to use
Saurian before.
    “You will have to make more sense than zat, mon ami , whether you are imaginary or not.”
    Banglees and I talked of many things,
including the stories of the lizard people. Once he thawed, he
seemed much nimbly again with the kind of zrk-kttl energy I
have come to expect of mammals, and in the morning, he was on his
way.
    I believe I have met the lizard people, and
they are me. I wonder, though, if there are others?
    Since then, the lingo-spot has still
occasionally whispered to me of arrak-du and nika-tc .
    And looking through the slightly distorted
ice lens I have fashioned to recheck my results, I think the slow
pox has affected the cellular structure of the plasmechanical
substance by allowing a mutation that the microtechnology then
tries to “fix.”
    Which is to say, slow pox virus caused
pretend nerve cells to form based on the slightest electrical
impulses between cells. The engineered micro-machines then
“repaired” this suddenly growing tissue. And somehow made it
work.
    The slow pox mutation is, in this instance,
allowing a nervous system to form.
    And therefore, allowing the plasmechanical
tissue to function at an even higher level of intelligence.
    That might explain what happened to the
Saurian time-vessel.
    But this is all untested theory, and there
is little equipment here to verify results, until I get home.
    Nika-tc.
    If I get home.
    Can lost lands become home, if one is
stranded in them long enough?
    Which brings up another question: If the
plasmechanical tissue was fabricated on Saurius Prime, how could
slow pox affect the Saurian biology?
    Slow pox affects mammals.
    The only mammals we have there are small—
and scurrying. Are we using them for science in ways I am unaware
of, or has the slow pox virus mutated already?
    Because of a previous exposure to
Saurians?
    “Many Lights?”
    I turn, gerk-skizzy myself, caught by
surprise.
    I didn’t hear my friend approach.
    Like the other humans I have seen up here,
he is bundled up in the borrowed skins of other mammals. But unlike
the other humans, he is the only one I now call friend: North Wind
Comes.
    “Many Lights — they are hunting you
now.”
    He calls me Many Lights. I have learned his
tongue. I have also, alas, given him some of my lingo-spot, for
better understanding.
    I now