Pillar of Darkness by Dave Duncan

Author:Dave Duncan [Duncan, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504086035
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2023-05-09T15:57:13+00:00

Chapter 14

Saturday was to be their last day in civilization, and most of it was taken up by one of the required lecture sessions. The site was not a lecture room, but a huge warehouse, whose rows of shelves bore all sorts of equipment—enough, Rita thought, to outfit a hundred safaris. She was assigned her own changing room, which was very large and contained one chair, two tables, innumerable clothes racks and hooks, one droid, and no mirror. On one table lay the bow she had been using for the last couple of days, and two quivers full of arrows.

“I am Delta,” announced the droid, which looked exactly like Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, a fresh-faced male just off campus. “My job is to outfit you with everything you will need, and want, and can carry.”

“I am sure that list is oxymoronic.” She would dearly have liked to take a featherbed with her.

“Incontrovertibly!” Droids had built-in thesauri. “Let’s begin with clothes,” it told her, flashing a boyish smile. “No revenant has ever complained of having been cold during the day in Sungoback, so shorts and blouse, all right? You are advised to wear red.”

“It’s not my favorite colour.”

“But it makes you less likely to become separated from your companions. Carnivores are mostly colour blind.”

With a huge shopping basket on its arm, Delta led her a long way between tall racks of shelves, to where piles of red clothing were stacked. She found her size, but red was the limit of the choices offered. Two blouses and two shorts ought to be enough.

Delta put them in its basket. “These should last you as far as Zone Seven. For footwear we offer moccasins or boots, but we recommend the moccasins. They help keep your feet supple and your soles tough, for when you reach Zone Eight and have to go barefoot. Revenants have reported that they last slightly longer than boots.”

She tried on moccasins and accepted them, then a woven straw hat, rainproof, and good until Zone Eight.

“We can also provide,” Delta said, reaching to a high shelf, “an ingenious lightweight poncho, with hood. It keeps the rain and sun off, and you can blow in this tube here to inflate it as a mattress. Not a great mattress, but better than bare rocks.”

Rita eyed the shimmering red thing. “And how long does that last?”

“Not far, alas. It’s too high-tech. About Zone Three. But let me put it in the basket. You can pick and choose later.”

Then they proceeded to what Delta called the personal-comfort zone, where he proceeded to point out items like soap, insect repellent, antiseptic salves, sun screen pills, foot hardener, candles, waterproof matches, tinderbox with flint and steel, water purifying tablets, toothbrush, dark goggles for sun and dust, toothpaste, toilet tissue, flashlight large or small, clothesline, and adhesive bandages.

“Water, of course is essential. We have here light, easily carried canteens, good until you enter Zone Five. And here are natural gourds, good until around Zone Eight, but clumsy, harder to carry.

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