by Corey Ostman
“Whether you stayed or not, if you had shared the technology, Tim would not have had to come here.”
“If I’d shared the technology, compstate would have found out a way to misuse it, or deactivate it.”
“How long do you think you will be the only one with gel, Raj?”
“Hey,” coughed Grace. “Can’t a woman sleep around here?”
Raj turned from Avonaco’s glare, back to Grace.
“Sorry,” Avonaco murmured.
“Grace,” said Raj. “How are you feeling? I gave you some painkillers while you were out.”
“Better. Still vertigo. What did I hear about gel?”
“I think Tim’s blue gel might help your brain recover its normal function.”
To his surprise, she didn’t object to using the technology. “Helping me won’t hurt Tim’s chances, will it?”
Raj shook his head. He didn’t want to tell her that Tim’s chances were near zero.
“Remember when we used the gel to hack ITB? It has many uses.”
“Well then—” Her eyes widened. “Raj! An aposti pushed me. He said he was coming back here—” Grace paused. “I think. Or was that on Ceres?”
“A cowboy pushed you,” said Avonaco.
“Your brain has suffered a severe shock with the sudden removal of the gray grafty,” said Raj.
Grace reached for her temple, her fingers hovering over the place where the grafty had been.
“Am I going to die? I watched someone die when his grafty was smashed,” said Grace.
“You won’t die,” said Raj.
Grace closed her eyes.
“Ok,” she said.
“Ok?”
“Do the gel thing.”
Raj squeezed her hand, then opened a drawer beneath the workbench and pulled out a neural adapter.
“I need a neural interconnect cable. Avonaco?”
The boy was already holding one end of the cable out to him. Raj took it with a nod, and snapped it onto the adapter.
“This won’t hurt,” he said to Grace, though he wasn’t sure, given the rawness of the wound on her temple.
“Why don’t I believe you?”
“Take a deep breath,” he said, “and try to think of something relaxing. The prairie whispering in the wind at night.”
“Dust devils skimming Martian plains,” murmured Grace.
Raj smiled. Contrarian Grace. A Grace who had grown beyond Cloister 11.
Raj connected the adapter. Grace tensed only momentarily, like the signal had simply been ignored. He used his upgraded lids to scan her neural activity. The noisy spikes he had seen before had quieted, but the activity level remained elevated. Was it from the gel or was Grace’s mind succumbing to grafty damage? He swallowed the worry: a busy brain might be normal for Grace Donner, he thought. A protector was never fully relaxed.
“That’s strange,” Grace said.
Raj’s heart skipped a beat. “What?” He blinked away the neural overlay and concentrated on her face.
“Jaya?” said Avonaco.
“Are you ok, Grace?” Raj asked.
“Well, it’s just that I hurt like hell all over, but my mind feels ok now. Not confused.”
Raj smiled. He disconnected the cable from Tim Trouncer. “Still ok?”
“Does this mean I’m not going to die?”
“Not unless you want to,” he said.
Grace opened her eyes and grinned. “Can you help me sit up, Raj?”
But before he could slip an arm under her neck and shoulders, she’d already swung her legs over the side of the bench and sat up.
“Not so quickly!” he warned.
But she didn’t wobble, and her eyes focused on him.
“I’ve decided that I’m not going to die,” she smiled. “What just happened to me? I fell, and I smelled the prairie, and then I dreamed of Tim.”
Avonaco turned and went upstairs.
Grace stood from the bench, waving away Raj’s offer to help steady her. “I’m ok, Raj, really. I need to talk to Avo.”
Raj nodded. “Tell him that Jaya’s damaged grafty—the blue gel could help—”
“I’ll tell him,” Grace said, opening the basement door.
“Go easy on yourself!” Raj shouted after her.
He knew she wouldn’t.
• • •
Avonaco heard pounding on the stairs behind him.
“Hey! Wait for me!” Grace yelled.
“Why?” Avonaco huffed, but he slowed to let Grace join him.
“We need to talk,” she said.
“About what?”
“About everything.”
The living room was dark, except for dancing orange forms lit by a weak fireplace. Avonaco blinked and adjusted his visual acuity to the low light.
“The switch is by the front door,” Grace said.
Avonaco walked to the door and flicked the switch. “I thought maybe you only used kerosene,” he muttered.
“We’re fairly modern,” Grace said dryly.
He turned to the fireplace and stared at the low flames.
“Raj wanted you to know the gel therapy might help with Jaya’s busted grafty,” Grace said.
“It would have helped before it was busted,” said Avonaco. “I asked and asked him. He wouldn’t share.”
“I know you wanted that chance. I’m sorry.”
He didn’t care that she was sorry. He didn’t care about anything she said. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
Grace sat beside him.
He scooted away, trying to withdraw into that place where his mind could detach from the physical. It wasn’t working.
“She wasn’t all saved in that grafty, Avo.”
“Go away.”
“There were things missing. Jaya knows that.”
“Knew that.”
“Knows.”
Avo turned and looked at her. Her eyes were wide and sincere, her hands spread on her lap, palms up.
“I’m not Jaya,” she continued. “And I can’t be Jaya for you, not the way you both wanted. But she isn’t gone. She’s in the grafty, for one. And a lot of her is with me. Not pressing out, not hidden down like I was on the prairie. Merged. I think the blue gel… did something.”
Avonaco scanned her face as she spoke, trying to match her facial expressions with his memories.
“You’re not her.”
Grace closed her eyes and inhaled slowly through her nose: a long, deep breath. She let it out. When she opened her eyes and spoke, her voice was different.
“I always ordered the fruit and nut bowl at Jocko’s. I remember the bitterness of almonds. Sour green apples, mixed with pears and peaches and cherries. I put the bowl between us and you pretended to eat, even acted like you were spitting out cherry pips. I figured they might ignore you if they saw you eat.”
“They didn’t,” Avonaco whispered.
“Most everybody just watched. They were keeping their distance and that was fine. I’d be done soon, we’d collect our legz and be off. We were supposed to meet up with my contact in Glendo.
“So I finished, and we went outside. I helped you put on your legz. That’s when an aposti walked up, all cloak and hood, some folks from town behind her.
“‘Synths are illegal in cloister and compstate,’ she said. I ignored her and climbed into my legz. This had happened before, aposti mouthing off. They weren’t protectors: I didn’t have to stay. They could say whatever they wanted, but you and I were leaving.”
Avonaco shuddered. He knew what was coming. Knew he couldn’t prevent the recall now.
“I remember hearing the hammer cock. The fool had a gun in public. Since when did aposti carry weapons? I turned my head and she was aiming at you.
“Instinct is funny, isn’t it? Everything slowed down, the pop of the gun, the oof in my tummy, the screams in Jocko’s. How the aposti’s eyes bugged out. I realized then how young she was. I wonder if she’d even thought about what
I’d do.”
Avonaco picked up the story. “I grabbed you and ran. Later, I traded some of our stuff for a ride to Port Casper,” he said, voice husky. “Jaya told me that if we ever got into anything really bad, to make for the Freer Diner. The transport dropped us off in Bod Town and I pulled her the rest of the way.”
“You pulled me.”
Avonaco started to sniffle. “Jaya.”
“Not Jaya. Some of her.” Grace wiped his tears with her fingertips.
“A copy of a copy. But it is all I have, isn’t it?” he said.
“The grafty will have more. We’ll get Jaya back. But until then—”
Grace stopped and cocked her head.
“What?” Avonaco asked.
“Sssh!”
He waited, watching her concentrate. It was quiet in the house. A creak or two from the roof, transitioning from the heat of day to the cool of night. Crickets.
“I do not hear anything,” he said.
“That’s the problem,” said Grace. She frowned. “Let’s take a walk around the house.”
“With aposti out there?” he asked.
“We’ll stay close.”
“Ok. But let me find Dan and tell him about you. I promised Anna.”
“Sure.” She reached for his hand. Jaya’s self-assurance flamed in Grace’s eyes, or was it the other way around?
• • •
“Maybe I should go after them?” Dan asked for the third time.
“Grace needs time alone with Avonaco,” Anna said, also for the third time. “Stay with us, Dan. Keep us company while we work on Tim.”
Dan sighed, gave up waiting by the door, pulled up a stool, and settled down next to the lab bench. Raj smiled. Watching people work on a robotic dog wasn’t standard fare for Dan Donner. The rancher’s most advanced technology was an ancient pickup truck.
“How goes it?” he asked.
Raj examined the inanimate PodPooch again. Not too good, he thought.
“The mind was within acceptable error bands when we powered it up,” said Anna, more in thought to herself than to anyone else. She stroked the muzzle.
“But it just stands there,” Raj said. It. Why aren’t I thinking ‘he’? Because it’s not Tim, he realized.
The PodPooch had been powered up for over two hours. Plenty of time for systems to settle and the neural pathways to knit together into an intelligence.
“You know,” Anna said. “Martian twofers require a reboot sequence after a cold start. Is the PodPooch like that?”
“It has a reboot sequence.” Raj shrugged. “Might as well.”
He went back to his ptenda and connected with the chassis. The basic toy had few commands: it was meant to be verbally directed. He tapped REBOOT and watched.
“The PodPooch is your friend. Your very very special friend. I can run real quick and my voice is slick. Your very very special friend!” Two barks.
“That it?” Dan asked.
Raj nodded. “We’ve seen this performance before.”
“True enough,” Anna said. “But how was it when you first activated Tim? Not today, but when you did it in the beginning? Did he bark then?”
Raj thought. “Well… after transferring the neural map, I applied power and then—”
“Then what?” Anna asked.
“Do you hear that?” Dan stood. “Shit.”
Dan flung open the lab door and tromped up the stairs. But that wasn’t the only sound. The thunder, which Raj supposed had been going on for a while, grew louder. The rumbling wasn’t intermittent: it was constant, drowning out the sound of the basement’s electrical hum and the PodPooch servos.
“What is that?” Anna asked, her eyes growing wide.
Above, the floorboards rattled, sending tendrils of dust onto the plastic ceiling sheets that kept the lab clean.
“Earthquake?” Raj said absently at the Podpooch, his hand resting on the chassis. His mind had wandered elsewhere. Anna’s question. Despite all the thunderous noise, or perhaps because of it, something tugged at his memory. When he’d first activated Tim, he had applied power and then…
“Then I spoke to him!” Raj yelled, turning to Anna.
Raj’s heart pounded as a familiar chuckle erupted beside him.
“And you should speak to me now,” Tim said. “Don’t you know that’s a stampede?”
Chapter 27
Dan banged open the screen door and stepped onto the porch. The south pasture roiled with stampeding cattle, their black coats shimmering in the twilight, swirls of dust rising as their hooves pounded out an angry storm.
Between him and the erupting herd stood a large group of cowboys, what seemed to Dan to be most everybody on the ranch. He didn’t see Grace.
“Why in the hell weren’t the cattle dispersed before sunset?” Dan yelled, partly from anger, partly so he could be heard above the bovine din. “Zeb!” He ran up to a lanky cowboy standing in the group. “I told you to move your herd to west pasture before you came in. I can see the brands from here!”
“I did, Boss,” Zeb said, pushing back his hat and scratching his forehead. “Left ‘em in west hours ago. There were only a hundred head. Should’ve stayed tucked in til morning.”
“Soph,” Dan said to another hand, “I told you to split the main herd into three groups and settle ‘em way out east by the village.” He swept his hand toward the fray. “But most of your charge is here!”
“They are,” she said, “Dunno how. I had them strung out from the duck pond all the way to the village fence line, just like I usually do.”
“Same here,” her brother Mario added. “And I moved the mamas and their calves down south.” He wiped his face. “My babies aren’t gonna survive this stampede!”
Dan searched for his missing ranch manager. “Where’s Lyle?”
“Lyle got knocked from his horse,” Zeb said.
“Why didn’t you tell me Lyle’s been hurt! Where is he?”
Sophia pointed and Dan pushed through them and the other hands. Lyle sat on the turf, sipping from a canteen. A white bandanna encircled his head, with splotches of red just above the left ear.
Dan knelt beside him. “You doing ok, Ly?”
Lyle’s eyes were wide, staring out to the stampede. He slowly turned at the voice, seemed to be staring through Dan until he blinked and focused.
“Sssh!” Lyle said, bringing one trembling finger to his lips. “I saw things. I don’t want others to hear.” He flailed his right hand toward the crowd.
“C’mon, Ly,” Dan said. “Don’t get yourself worked up. You just take it slow, tell me—”
The man’s hand shot out, locking onto Dan’s wrist, pulling him closer.
“Ephron bragged,” Lyle said. “Talked about gettin’ the upper hand.”
“Ephron?” Dan asked.
“Bout an hour ago,” Lyle said, groaning and rubbing the side of his head. “I thought it was strange. He was movin’ the cattle. Then they stampeded and I—”
Lyle shook his head.
“Where’s Ephron?” Dan roared. Lyle winced.
“I don’t know. I can’t remember falling from Bessie…” Lyle’s voice trailed off to a whisper.
Dan stood. “Attention!” he yelled over the crowd. The hands turned from watching the stampede. Some had already saddled their horses.
“Zeb, I want you to take a third of these cowboys and have ‘em ride east. Start pulling off bits of the stampede. Whittle it down as you work your way back to the house.”
Zeb nodded, moving into the crowd and pulling together his posse.
“Soph, you do the same toward west pasture. All the way out, you understand?”
“Yeah, Boss,” Sophia said. She nodded to a group of greenhorns.
“Mario, take the rest and ride south. All the way to the fence line. Pull the cattle as far south as you can. And be on the lookout for Ephron.”
“Ephron?”
“And any strangers, ok?”
Mario
tipped his hat. “Where will you be, Boss?”
“I’ll stay here with a few and keep those deranged critters away from the buildings,” Dan said.
Zeb waved his hat above his head. “Y’all heard Boss Donner. Let’s ride!”
• • •
“Am I too heavy?” Grace asked. She was leaning against Avo for support as they walked the south pasture. She remembered learning to ride her first horse here, and the smell of the clover when she’d fallen off.
“No,” he said.
“You’ve slowed down since we climbed over the last fence.”
“I was trying to get a better sense as to why the ground is shaking,” he said.
“Earthquake?” she said. The Yellowstone Caldera often shook Cloister 11. They’d lost a chimney once at her grandfather’s house, but bad damage was infrequent. She hadn’t felt anything except her pounding grafty headache, but Avo’s legs were probably more sensitive to movement. And it would explain the unusual silence that had drawn her out here in the first place.
“It is too shallow for seismic activity,” he said. “But it has been increasing for six minutes.”
“Wait,” she said. “I want to feel it.”
She stopped and straightened her back, then tried to concentrate on her feet.
“I don’t feel anything.” The only things throbbing were her sore feet.
“I can hear it now, too,” he said, turning to look over his shoulder. Grace turned with him, and that’s when the noise registered.
“It’s a stampede!” she gasped.
She jogged forward, stumbled at the pain, and switched to walking. It felt maddeningly slow. As she topped a hill, she saw a dark, rolling mass spreading to the east, to the pale glowing west, and to the north—directly toward them!
Where are the ranch hands?
“We have to get out of the way!” shouted Avo.
“First, can you see any cowboys? Look carefully.”
Avo scanned the area. “Infrared hit on horseback, three point two kilometers, bearing twelve degrees, at the edge of the herd.”
“Mango!” she said. “At least somebody’s on top of this.”
“Now get on top of me, and let’s get out of here!” he said.
Avo went to full speed rapidly, but the herd came close behind. Grace could smell the cattle and feel the dust they raised. She heard panicked moos from the great beasts above the sound of their hooves.