The eastern road narrowed before it opened.
For perhaps two hundred meters the town pressed close around it in a final strip of wooden shacks, lean-tos, utility stalls, and rooms added to other rooms until nobody could say which structure had been built first. They stood on posts above shallow ditches filled with black water and floating peelings. Their roofs had been patched with sheet metal, tarpaper, flattened oil tins, and pieces of other roofs. Lines of laundry hung above the roadway and dripped upon anyone unfortunate enough to pass beneath them.
Koldin walked through the thin shade cast by the awnings.
The place smelled of wet boards and the sweet narcotic odor of curing tabak. A radio played somewhere behind a wall, People sat in doorways performing repairs that would have to be performed again. A man was hacking down sugarcane with a blade. Two women argued over nothing. Nobody paid Koldin much attention beyond the habitual glance given to uniforms and weather.
Near the end of the row stood a shack painted green many years ago.
An old human woman sat on its porch in a wooden chair with her bare feet planted upon a straw mat. She was small and dried by the climate until her face resembled a date left too long in the sun, but her eyes remained bright, sharp, and exempt from the decline of the rest of her. A wooden pipe rested between her teeth. Smoke gathered around her gray hair and moved slowly beneath the porch roof.
On the mat before her lay tabak leaves, scissors, wrapping papers, string, and several finished packets of hand-rolled cigarettes. Her fingers moved without hurry. Cut. Fill. Roll. Fold. A narrow paper band around each packet bore a red stamp depicting the visage of some human man. Whether the stamp represented a license, a brand, or merely decoration Koldin had never discovered.
Beside the porch stood a baxxid.
Its exoskeleton was scuffed and dulled in places, the dark plates marked with old pale scratches, but there was nothing frail about it. Its long body rested partly beneath the porch awning and partly in the road, arranged with the economy of something accustomed to making itself fit spaces not designed for it. A woven harness carried bundles of cut tabak leaves and two covered baskets. One scythe-shaped forelimb had been wrapped near the joint with a strip of faded blue cloth.
Koldin knew neither its name nor why it had come so far from the Heart.
He knew only that it remained with the old woman.
Sometimes it lifted heavy crates for her. Sometimes it carried water. Once Koldin had seen it repair the roof during a storm while she stood below shouting contradictory instructions through her pipe. It had obeyed every one of them as well as physical law allowed.
The woman looked up as Koldin approached.
“Meneer scav,” she said.
Her use of the word contained neither insult nor affection. It was simply what she called him.
“Morning.”
“You buying?”
“Not today.”
“Then morning to you anyway.”
She returned to her rolling.
The baxxid turned its head. Six dark eyes regarded Koldin from beneath the edge of the awning. Its mouthparts shifted as though testing the shape of speech before permitting it.
Koldin stopped beside the porch.
“How are you doing?”
A low vibration passed through the boards beneath his feet. The baxxid’s answer emerged slowly, each word drawn through an anatomy that had learned human language late and did not enjoy the work.
“Fine,” it said.
A pause followed.
“Working.”
Koldin nodded. It was an adequate answer.
The old woman made a sound through her nose.
“Always working. Never resting. Tell it to rest.”
Koldin looked at the baxxid.
“You should rest.”
The baxxid’s upper plates moved by a fraction.
“Fine,” it said again. “Working.”
The woman pointed at it with the stem of her pipe.
“You see?”
“I tried.”
“You did nothing.”
“I gave an order. It was ignored.”
“You’re militair. You should be used to that.”
She tied a finished packet with string and placed it beside the others.
Koldin had bought her cigarettes on long afternoons when the heat made the road appear to tremble and the patrol seemed unlikely ever to end. They were harsh and uneven, some packed too tightly to draw, and others loose enough to shed tabak into the mouth. He smoked rarely and regretted it almost every time. Yet there were hours when bitterness in the lungs seemed preferable to bitterness in the mind, or days that needed a nicotine boost.