by T S Hottle
“Bet you’re glad to get away from that dump.”
“Dump?”
“Earth.”
Since his arrival, JT had spent almost all his time decoupled from a working internet, doing work best handled by robots prowling converted skyscrapers, and riding around in cars that could not drive themselves. Granted, his mother owned manual-drive cars, but they were status symbols, ones JT had been all too happy to pilfer for his own use. Here, people actually got around in these things. And electric? Manually driven? It was a wonder no one died in crashes here. Then again, he’d only been on the planet for a day. For all he knew, death by vehicle crash happened all the time. It would certainly explain the sparse population. “I was trying to get to Tian.”
“Oooh, I’d love to go there someday.” The look in Lizzy’s eyes told him she wouldn’t mind if she went there with him.
He shook away the thought. “Well, I may still get there. Just not the way I planned.”
“And how did you plan to get there?”
“Illegally.” John Parker stepped around JT and kissed his daughter on the head. “I see you’re getting to know our guest pretty well. JT, how was your first day of farm work?”
“Painful,” said JT, studying his tablet. It wanted him to setup accounts for mail, voice and image communication, and preferred data streaming services. He ignored these requests in favor of skimming the stale news feeds. Riots had broken out on Jefivah. Apparently, the Compact wanted to shut down a colony recently set aside for the local sex goddess cult, and the faithful were not having it. JT decided he would look these zealots up if they resided on Tian. He looked up at Lizzy, met her gaze. Her eyes had grown large, and she seemed to glow. Normally, JT would respond by saying all the right things to lure her away someplace quiet while he convinced her he was at least three years older than he was. With Lizzy’s parents in the room, he decided instead to move on to the sports feeds.
“Sorry we don’t have up-to-the-minute news from the rest of the Compact,” said Mr. Parker. “Then again, you already know we’re too busy to watch it constantly anyway.”
“How do you do work like that day in and day out?”
“You get used to it. Builds muscle. Builds character.”
Some of the hands JT had worked with were characters all right. As for muscle, he found out today just how many he actually had. Even his eyelids were stiff.
“The governor’s office told me you’re quite the hacker,” said Parker. “I may have need for that. Ever have to deal with wayward AI equipment?”
Did he? Well, if that meant convincing artificially intelligent security systems and transports to do his bidding, then he supposed that could be called “wayward.” After all, it was a matter of convincing a machine with rudimentary consciousness to do what he wanted. “I’m usually the wayward part of the equation.”
“Good.” Parker’s lips pressed into a flat smile. “Some of these tractbots get a bit ornery and stubborn. If they were smarter, they could figure out on their own what we want from them. But if they were smarter…”
“Boom.” JT made the shape of a large explosion by spreading his hands apart as he spoke. “I know all about the end of the World Wars, sir.”
Parker flashed a toothy grin. “No wonder you wanted to leave.”
JT still had no idea what everyone was talking about. The presence of running water and hot showers out here on the plains surprised him, and yet they seemed to think he was from a developing world like Jefivah, a backwater that had been “developing” since the day the first surveyors landed centuries ago.
***
The wheat caught fire rather quickly. A simple accelerant confiscated from a nearby mine started the flames, but soon they engulfed Wallek’s south field.
From the ridge above the farm, Kray and Saja watched the fire spread toward one of Wallek’s barns. The structure, a long, low building, housed moosalo, the native livestock. Most Amargosan farmers kept a couple dozen head of moosalo, selling the meat and milk to the cities and the towns of the Plains for off-season income. When the fire reached the moosalo barn, the building blossomed into flame. Two of Kray’s volunteers had doused the walls of the barn with the same accelerant he and Saja had used in the field.
In the distance, those same accomplices were just barely visible in the dimming twilight as they started two more field fires. When they were done, they would leave through the nearby woods on foot. In the meantime, the screams of the trapped livestock reached Kray and Saja.
Kray nodded to himself. “I suppose we can use the benevolent fund to help him leave Amargosa.”
“Do we really want to use township money for that?” asked Saja, leaning against Kray’s bat wagon.
“Consider it an investment.”
***
John Parker’s idea about coaxing the tractbots into being more compliant gave JT an idea. He could get one of the machines to take him back to the maglev. Chances were, an early morning train would come through before the self-powered farm wagons arrived to load or unload. He could bluff his way onto the train, make his way back to Lansdorp, and work his usual magic to get off-world, maybe on a Tian-bound freighter. Once there, he would reinvent his identity – new wrist chip, reconfigured Social Services Number, and a blank credit slate. He had even heard that, for a price, doctors could inject nanites in one’s fingers to change the prints.
The tractbot started up when JT climbed onto it. It seemed to recognize him from earlier in the day. He talked to it the way some people talked to horses. The thought made JT wonder why they equipped tractors with artificial intelligence at all. The World Wars ended with an AI deciding that the war-ending ceasefire was not enough and took over a city in Siberia as a prelude to going to war with its human masters on both sides. Since then, humans decreed as a race that artificial intelligence would henceforth be “nice and stupid.”
Hence, JT found himself on a distant planet one summer evening (by the local calendar) on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere riding a nice and stupid tractbot. It took very little to convince this mechanical beast of burden to point itself north and find the maglev station.
The tractbot might have been nice and stupid, but it was smart enough to know where the Parkers’ property line was. The machine stopped dead on a rise at the north end of the farm and refused to go any further. JT spent fifteen minutes trying to get the thing to go on before it began to inform him it needed to return to its charger.
Well, that was just great. After all he’d gone through for the past three days, he found himself stuck because of a machine with all the intelligence of a really stupid dog. Was it worth it? What might happen at that military school? Somewhere up in the sky, Sol shown. The trouble was, JT did not recognize the constellations above Amargosa, so he didn’t know which star was his home. For once in his life, JT was completely alone and on his own. He didn’t like it much.
“If you ran away on foot,” said Lizzy, emerging from a bush, “you’d be at the maglev station by now.” She climbed up onto the tractbot and straddled the seat behind him. “And you’d be sleeping on a cold bench with no one around.”
“Do your parents know you’re gone?” he asked.
“They don’t even know you’re gone.” She put her hands on his shoulders, but made no move to embrace him. “And I won’t tell if you walk me back to the farm.”
“What about this thing?”
“It likes you. It’ll follow us home.”
JT jumped off the machine, then held out his hand to help Lizzy. As she climbed down, he said, “So is this like a date or something?”
“It can be. Have you ever dated?”
No, he thought, I just sneaked off with my little sister’s au pair to one of the guest rooms. “Not exactly. I’m kind of a jerk.”
“No worse than the boys around here.” She put her hand on his back. “Except you can spell and do math.”
JT went to say something when he caught a whiff of something, like wo
od smoke. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?” Lizzy sniffed the air. “Maybe someone’s camping over on the next farm?”
JT turned and headed back up the ridge. Only then did he realize the tractbot had started to follow him like a giant puppy. He ran up the hill, Lizzy and the tractbot bringing up the rear. The tractbot stopped short of the top, but Lizzy nearly ran into him as he stopped suddenly to look.
They stood watching as a field two farms over burned brightly in the night.
EPISODE 3
Only Wallek’s cobbled-together home remained the next morning. JT had seen the various pieces of the structure before, but never fused into a single unit like Wallek’s. Emergency shelters, like the one that made up the main living quarters, often served as housing on new colonies until permanent settlements became available. The mobile unit attached to the side still served some of the poorer residents of Earth in certain places. Elsewhere, they were, like the shelter, temporary at best. Antarcticans used them to deal with their continent’s ever shifting ice cap, the result of a planetary climate that could not decide if it was warming up or cooling down.
It was the bus in the rear that really surprised JT. He had heard of people commandeering abandoned busses as living quarters, but only in places that had themselves been abandoned. On Earth, he thought of the outskirts of the New Orleans ruins or the depopulated regions near Seattle. They were rare, and people tried their best to escape such a life, usually by leaving Earth for someplace recently settled. JT had never seen someone go out of their way to weld an old bus onto an existing dwelling.
The air reeked of soot and mud, the result of firefighters soaking the field the previous night. JT and Lizzy had not gone immediately home when they saw the fire. They ran straight for John Parker’s office in Harlan Township’s settlement and alerted the constable’s night deputy. He in turn woke volunteer fire fighters, including Lizzy’s mother, from three townships to get the blaze doused. By the time JT and Lizzy arrived home, most of Wallek’s farm had already gone up in flames.
Mr. Parker took JT with him the next morning, saying only a few words about his attempt to run away. As they drove up to the farm, he said to JT, “I want you to watch how this goes down. You’re going to be here a while, and as you can see, there’s really no place for you to run. So you might as well get to know the local culture.”
JT concurred, even if the local culture did not resemble anything like Tian. Now he found himself standing in Vanral Wallek’s gravel yard, the charred remains of the farm smoldering around him. He also got his first good look at Constable Kray.
The man did not so much as walk as strut. JT recognized the gait as a somewhat exaggerated version of his father’s – ramrod straight, chest out, head high. Only Kray seemed to be looking down on everyone, even that slight woman in a militaristic version of the local police uniforms. However, when Kray looked at her, his expression softened a little. JT wondered if she was his wife, or at least, his mistress. When she wasn’t surveying the surrounding area like she was looking for something, she focused her attention completely on Kray.
It was the head, though, that struck JT. Mr. Parker had clearly been in the military. While he did not wear the traditional buzz cut of the Marines, he did wear his hair somewhat short like those in the Navy. But Kray’s mass of black hair spilled from under his equally black hat to his shoulders, his impeccably trimmed mustache and goatee matching it perfectly. He looked like a medieval knight out of his armor, and JT suspected he thought of himself as such. No one, not even JT, was that cocky. And even JT knew he could blame most of his own behavior on over-exuberant hormones.
“You say you didn’t know the fields were on fire until the smoke reached your bedroom,” said Kray. “Is that correct?”
Wallek himself looked as cobbled together as his shabby home, his belly fat clashing with his muscular arms and thin legs. JT wondered if the man drank a lot. He wouldn’t look up at Kray, however, spending most of his time staring at the gravel beneath his feet.
“Yes,” he said.
“So you did not see who set the fire?” Kray sounded as though he were telling Wallek rather than asking him.
“That’s right.”
“Mr. Wallek,” said Parker, his tone more conversational than Kray’s, “have you had any disputes with anyone who might have a grudge against you? A property dispute or missing livestock?”
Wallek finally looked up at Kray before answering. “I have not had any disputes with my neighbors, Constable.” He seemed to shrink away from Kray as he spoke.
“Any problems with vandals?” asked Parker. “Livestock poachers? Why are some of your fields barren?”
“No vandals. No poachers. The barren fields are being left for winter planting.”
Winter planting? The day before, when he wasn’t catching hay bales or whining about his aching muscles, he overheard several of the hands talking about how there would be no winter plantings this year. The climate models – it amazed JT that Amargosa had such things – suggested that there would be little rain or snow in the colder months, that by the final month of winter, most locals would be living off stored food and hunting the local wildlife. Unless…
“Are you planting Martian hemp?” asked Parker.
Now they were getting into farming knowledge that JT actually had. The variant on the Terran plant was used for everything from rope to medicine to combustible fuel to… Well, Cascadia did have a rather liberal policy toward intoxicants modeled after Central Europe’s beer and wine laws. Mars’s modified version of the plant had one attractive feature the Earth version did not. It could grow in extremely cold or dry climates.
“No,” said Wallek, sounding as though he only half heard Parker. “I’m leaving.”
Kray flashed a toothy smile. “Mr. Wallek has relatives on Belsham who will help him get back on his feet. He’s decided Amargosa just isn’t for him. Isn’t that right, Wallek?”
“Yes.” Without asking if Kray and Parker were done questioning him, Wallek shuffled off back to his hovel.
“There have been Walleks on this planet since my grandfather staked his claim sixty years ago,” said Parker.
“And there are none now,” said Kray. “Six decades is more than enough time to know if you don’t like some place.” He looked directly at JT with a cold gaze that made the boy shudder. “Who’s this? Your runaway?”
Parker laughed. “Lucius Kray, this is JT Austin. Seems Mr. Austin tried to hitch a ride to Tian and got lost along the way.” He put a hand on JT’s shoulder and squeezed. “Tried to run away to the maglev station last night, thinking he could get out of here the way he’s been running off back home on Earth.”
“Well, Mr. Austin,” said Kray. “We’re a little more civilized here. Is he the one who saw the fire?”
“Him and my daughter. Lizzy thinks he’s her pet Earthman.”
“About all Earthers are good for,” said Kray.
JT noticed the woman, Saja, smirked while holding her maddening silence.
“I’ll leave JT here to help clean up the farm,” said Parker. “He needs to get used to the reality of work.” He squeezed JT’s shoulder a little harder. “Also needs to learn that there is truly no place to run while he’s in the Central Plains.”
“Get used to it, boy,” said Kray. “You’re at least half a continent from the nearest city in any direction. And the settlements and towns? Bet they have your picture and biometrics on their watch lists already.”
JT hoped he didn’t have to spend more than a day out here under Kray’s watchful gaze, the man’s cold stare sending a chill down his spine.
***
Saja fell in step alongside Kray as they trudged back to the bat wagon. Kray felt tense, jittery. He knew Parker would come, even welcomed it. It wasn’t unusual for the constable from the neighboring township to step in and assist when an incident occurred on or near the border. In the past, Kray had trusted Parker implicitly. He was a veteran like
Kray and had seen combat against both human and alien. Best of all, Parker knew his people. He was one of them, a farmer.
Lately, though, Kray had been at odds with his fellow constable. Parker commanded the local reserve unit of the Colonial Guard, which meant that he would be the sole authority for a fifty-mile radius of Harlan Township’s settlement in an emergency. It had actually made Kray’s job easier, as he had enough of a rapport with Parker that he could do whatever he needed to do. But as Kray pressed for a citizens’ militia, one independent of Lansdorp and of the red-dwelling overlords on Mars, Parker opposed him. It would, he said, disrupt the carefully laid-out system for dealing with emergencies by creating a competing authority answerable to no one.
Had he not known Parker better, Kray would have sworn the constable was trying to protect his position. After all, it was good to be king. Parker, however, had confided not too long ago that he wanted to step down from his role in the Colonial Guard and start grooming a successor as a constable. He had returned to Amargosa after each of his three tours to farm, and he’d done damned little of that acting as constable.
So Kray’s real problem stemmed from Parker’s ideology, not his need for power. The man had none. This had relaxed Kray toward him. But this kid was another story.
Saja sat at the bat wagon’s controls without starting the vehicle. “What’s the matter?”
The woman knew him too well. “The boy. Austin. Who is he?”
“I know he’s the son of some admiral in the Navy. And he’s from Earth. Beyond that, I don’t know.”
“Find out everything. He saw the fire. If he hadn’t, Parker wouldn’t have showed up so soon this morning.”
She pushed the bat wagon forward and drove out of Wallek’s yard. “As you wish.”
***
They put JT to work clearing the moosalo barn. He had not yet had a chance to see the big shaggy beasts up close. Now, he would only see the charred remains of those killed in the fire. He and Lizzy had heard the screams of the animals the night before. If he never heard that sound again, it would be too soon.