Outcasts Read Free Page B

Redsun’s twenty-seven hour rotation made her
uncomfortable. She could not afford to sleep too much or too little and return
to work exhausted and inattentive. At Screwtop inattention was worth punishment
at best, and at worst, death.
    She was no longer tired, but she was hungry for anything
besides the tasteless prison rations. The vegetation on Redsun, afflicted with
a low mutation rate, had not evolved very far. The plants were not yet complex
enough to produce fruiting bodies. Some of the stalks and roots, though, were
edible.
    On Redsun, there were no flowers.
    Kylis headed deeper into the shadows of the rain forest.
Away from the clearings people had made, the primitive plants reached great
heights. Kylis wandered among them, her feet sinking into the soft moist humus.
Her footprints remained distinct. She turned and looked back. Only a few paces
behind her, seeping water had already formed small pools in the deeper marks of
her bootheels.
    She wished she and Gryf and Jason had been on the same
shift. As it was, half of their precious free time would be spent sleeping and
readjusting their time schedules. When Gryf finally got off, they would have
less than one day together, even before he rested. Sometimes Kylis felt that
the single free day in every forty was more a punishment than if the prisoners
had been forced to work their sentences straight through. The brief respite
allowed them to remember just how much they hated Screwtop, and just how
impossible it was to escape.
    Since she could not be with both her friends, she preferred
complete solitude. For Kylis it was almost instinctive to make certain no one
could follow her. Unfolding the cuffs of her boots, she protected her legs to
halfway up her thighs. She did not seal the boots to her shorts because of the
heat.
    The floor of the forest dipped and rose gently, forming wide
hollows where the rain collected. Kylis stepped into one of the huge shallow
pools and waded across it, walking slowly, feeling ahead with her toe before
she put her foot down firmly. The mist and shadows, the reddish sunlight, and
the glassy surface created illusions that concealed occasional deep pits. Where
the water lay still and calm, microscopic parasites crawled out of the earth
and swarmed. They normally reproduced inside small fishes and primitive
amphibians, but they were not particular about their host. They would invade a
human body through a cut or abrasion, causing agonizing muscle lesions.
Sometimes they traveled slowly to the brain. The forest was no place to fall
into a water hole.
    Avoiding one deep spot, Kylis reached the far bank and
stepped out onto a slick outcropping of rock where her footprints would not
show. Where the stone ended and she reentered the frond forest, the ground was
higher and less sodden, although the misty rain still fell continuously.
    The ferns thinned, the ground rose steeply, and Kylis began
to climb. At the top of the hill the air stirred, and the vegetation was not
so thick. Kylis found some edible shoots, picked them, and peeled them
carefully. The pulp was spicy and crunchy. The juice, pungent and sour,
trickled down her throat. She picked a few more stalks and tied the small
bundle to her belt. Those that were sporing she was careful not to disturb.
Edible plants no longer grew near camp; in fact, nothing edible grew close
enough to Screwtop to reach on any but the free day.
    Redsun traveled upright in its circular orbit; it had no
seasons. The plants had no sun-determined clock by which to synchronize their
reproduction, so a few branches of any one plant or a few plants of any one
species would spore while the rest remained asexual. A few days later a
different random set would begin. It was not a very efficient method of
spreading traits through the gene pool, but it had sufficed until people came
along and destroyed fertile plants as well as spored-out ones. Kylis, who had noticed
in her wanderings that evolution ceased at the point when