by Joe Haldeman
“Four.” We hadn’t discussed whether to lie.
“Hiding in the woods? Watching us?” He was looking past me, at the tree line.
“That’s right.”
“I think you mean three.”
“We got the one you left back down the road,” the woman said.
“You got him? What did you do?”
“Come inside,” the man said. He tipped his weapon toward the door.
“He’s my husband,” Elza said. “What did you do to him?”
“Inside.”
We went through the door and found ourselves surrounded by forty or fifty staring people in a crowded semicircle. There were some children and even two babes in arms. Two dogs, no guns. More women than men.
“Is this all of you?” I said.
“You don’t need to know,” the man said, but a couple of people shook their heads no. Somebody whispered the “the Mars Girl.” The burden of fame.
A big white man, bald with a close-cropped gray beard, stepped forward. He looked at the armed and armored man. His voice was loud and harsh: “Where are the others?”
“Hiding back in the woods.”
“Still heavily armed, I assume.” He pointed at the cell on Alba’s belt. “You want to call them and tell them to come on in? Unarmed, like you.”
“No, sir. I can’t do that.”
“‘Sir,’ is it?” He reached to the small of his back and drew a small black pistol. He put his other hand out. “Give me the phone.”
She did, and he looked at the green light, nodded, and spoke into it: “You’ve got five minutes. Come on in without your weapons, or I’ll shoot the black woman. Five minutes more, I shoot the black-haired one. Five minutes after that, the Mars Girl goes to heaven.” He pointed the gun up and fired it, a loud bang that echoed off the walls, and looked at his watch. He turned off the phone and handed it back to Alba.
“You’re serious,” she said.
“Oh, we’re always serious, here at Funny Farm.”
“I thought you were Fruit Farm,” I said.
“That was a joke, back when ‘fruit’ meant homosexual. It’s not funny anymore.”
“We meant to join you,” I said, “but if we’re not welcome, we can go on our way.”
“We’ll talk about that.” Alba’s phone beeped. “You can answer that.”
She did. “Hello . . . yes, he has.” She held up the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”
“Your leader?” Alba shrugged. “If he wants to talk, he has to come here. He has four minutes and ten seconds.” He looked at his watch. “You have. Four minutes five seconds.”
“We have weapons,” Elza said, “but we never intended to use them on you. Only to add to the farm’s defenses.” Her voice was harsh and strained. Could he see that she was tensed to attack?
He stared at her. “What do you think they’ll do?”
“Why don’t you think, for a change, Rico?” A gray-haired woman walked out of the crowd. “This is not the way.”
She stood next to him with her hands on her hips. “I have a good idea. Let’s have the farm surrounded with a group of armed men, and then threaten to kill their women. Maybe they’ll leave their guns outside and come in for a chat.” She stepped closer to him. “Or maybe they’ll think with their balls, like some people I know, and come over the walls shooting, with nothing to lose.”
“I wasn’t really going to—”
“I know that, but what do they know?” She held out her hand to Alba. “Let me talk to them, quick.”
She took the phone. “Hello, hello? That ay-hole who just talked to you is not our leader.”
“Look, Roz—” She shot him a silencing look.
“Your people are free to leave,” she said into the cell, “and I wouldn’t blame them if they did. Or you could come join them, and we could talk.” She listened for a moment, nodding. “Okay. Which one of you is Carmen?”
I held out my hand, and she gave me the phone. It was Paul. “If it’s safe for us to come in, tell me where we first met.”
“Galápagos,” I said. “But wait.” I looked at the man with the gun. “What did you do to the man we left behind?”
“A tranquilizer dart. He’s still sleeping.”
“We want to see him, before this goes any further.”
“Easy enough,” the woman said. I followed her to the nearest building, which had a silver letter A over the door.
Namir was lying on a cot under a window, his shirt off and a white bandage around his neck. I felt above the bandage for a pulse. It was regular but shallow. “How did you get him past us?”
“GEV,” she said, ground-effect vehicle. “We took him around you, along the autoway.”
I asked Paul whether he’d gotten all that, and he had. “We’ll leave Card behind with most of the stuff.”
Roz and I went back outside. “So he’s not the leader. Are you?”
She laughed. “No one is, technically. It’s a paradise of democratic anarchy. But I was elected Primus this year, ‘first among equals.’ I get to listen to everybody and suggest who’s wrong.”
“Do you have any friends left?”
“A few. Life became simpler here when the whole world decided to join us in anarchy. We just chased all the strangers off and blew down two bridges. People can get to us, but it’s not easy.”
“That’s why there wasn’t anybody on the highway, the autoway?”
“Right. Takes a plane, and who knows how to fly one without satellites? You guys surprised us.”
“Glad you didn’t shoot us down.”
“Two people asked for permission. By the time I could respond, you were gone.”
“What would you have said?”
“Bring me their heads and save the bodies for the stewpot.” She smiled. “It was pretty obvious where you’d be landing. There was a lookout party in the woods with the GEV, so I called them and had them go take a look.”
“You’re pretty well-equipped for a bunch of Earthers.”
“Well, some of us are practical. But it’s back to nature for everybody Wednesday, right?”
“That’s what the Others say. Not like they’ve never lied.”
“Wait, now . . . the Mars Girl? You’ve actually met the Others?”
“Yes and no. They were behind glass, two-hundred-some degrees below zero. They talked to us through their intermediary, Spy, but it was like a pre-recorded message. Always is.”
“On the cube they look like big lobsters.”
“Kind of.” A lobster is a close cousin in comparison.
“Must’ve been terrifying.”
“We were scared.” But in a sense we weren’t, not in any familiar way. Helpless and in mortal danger, but it was so unreal that normal emotions were suspended, confused. I remembered smelling peanuts on Paul’s breath and wondering what the aliens would smell like, if we could smell them, but there was nothing else in the frosty air, just peanuts.
How can you tell when you’re kissing an elephant? went the joke when I was a girl. You can smell the peanuts on his breath.
“Do you have cube here, in case they send another message?” Elza said.
She nodded. “Somebody’s watching all the time. Fucking depressing, twenty-four-hour news. But nothing’s new.”
A young man walked over from the group at the door. “Two of them on their way, Roz.” We followed him back.
Paul and Dustin were carrying laser rifles. When they were about twenty feet away, they set them on the ground, and warily continued.
I stepped into the doorway, and Paul rushed to me. “You all right?”
“Fine. Namir seems okay, just sedated.”
“Police-issue tranquilizer dart,” Roz said from behind me, and held out her hand. “Oralee Roswell. They call me Roz.”
He looked through the door at all the people, nodding, counting. “So I guess it’s your move, Roz. What do we do now?”
She squinted up at the sun. “Too ear
ly for dinner. Come in for a drink?” The big gray-bearded guy, Rico, watched this exchange with a blank expression. He came along when we followed her, though.
The dining hall was a few decades past its prime, fading peeling green paint on warped plywood walls. It reminded me of the way the cafeteria smelled when I was a little girl. Layers of old stale food. We went through the dining hall, though, to a screened-in porch with clean blue plastic furniture and a nice rich farm smell from the pastures that surrounded it.
We made introductions on the way. It turned out that Dustin’s story was familiar to them; people at the Farm had been following our fortunes since we left the earth. The fact that his parents had left Fruit Farm as dissenting rebels had been forgotten. He was the Farm’s only famous alumnus.
Two other elders joined us, pulling together two of the plastic tables. One, probably male, was wraithlike, pale, tall, and thin, with a wispy halo of white hair.
“This building was new when we left,” Dustin said. “We kids helped paint the outside. It was dark red then, like a barn.”
“I remember it being red,” Rico said thoughtfully. “They painted it white when I was about ten.”
“Green after you left Earth,” the pale one said. “In the nineties sometime. Thanks, Analese.” A girl of about ten had brought in a tray of cups of steaming brown liquid with a mild aroma.
“We can’t grow coffee or tea here, of course, so we get used to this stuff. Yerba Buena.”
I tasted it. Maybe I wouldn’t get used to it. “You said you blew down two bridges what, yesterday?”
“A few hours after the power went out. We had some early-morning customers we had to escort out, first.”
“You just happened to have lots of high explosives lying around?” Dustin said, “And you knew how to use them?”
“We’ve been ready for a long time, since before I was born. The elders called it Code Red. It goes back to Lazlo’s Rebellion, when a total breakdown outside seemed possible, probable.”
“I was one of the bridge team,” Rico said. “Four of us trained by elders, where to set the charges and what to do. They’d been trained by their elders, and so on.”
“Lucky the charges still worked.”
“Yes. The alternative directions seemed more wishful thinking than sound engineering. But the antique explosives worked fine.”
“It was pretty loud even here,” Roz said.
Namir appeared at the door, walking unsteadily, a young woman supporting his elbow.
“The sleeper wakes,” Paul said.
“I walked right into a set-up,” he said. “As soon as you were out of sight, they popped me with a dart.”
“Our good luck and your bad,” the woman said. “I tried to aim for your shoulder, but you moved too fast. Wouldn’t hurt so much.”
He patted her on the back in mock affection. “My assailant, Miche Onadato. Glad you missed my eyes.”
I touched him. “You’re feeling all right now?”
He smiled at me. “Better than all right. What was in that shot you just gave me?”
“Epinephrine. You’ll feel great until you don’t.”
Roz brought over a chair for him. “So does your group have a plan?”
Dustin spoke first. “I guess our plan was to see whether you had a plan.”
Roz shook her head slowly. “It’s a farm. The calendar and the weather make our plans for us.”
“We know a lot about agriculture,” I said, “if you need help maintaining starship hydroponics.”
“You can grow a lot on twenty square meters, if you don’t have anything else to do,” Dustin said.
“When I was young, I did a lot of dirt farming on the kibbutz,” Namir said. “I could probably still control a shovel.”
Rico was studying him. “I think we’d rather have you on patrol, for the time being. You have military experience?”
“Of a kind.” Before he surrendered his commission, he was a colonel in the Mossad.
“Unlike us, he’s been shot at,” Dustin said. “Elza and I were intelligence officers, too, for the US. But I never shot at anything any more dangerous than a target.”
“Me neither,” Elza said, “until the other day.”
“I heard about that on the news,” Roz said. “You lost one of your number.”
“Stray round.” My voice caught. “She was just standing in the kitchen.”
Roz shook her head. “Sorry.”
“Probably be a lot of shooting,” Rico said, “before everybody runs out of ammo. Not many of us gonna be dying of old age.”
Roz gave him a tired look. “Maybe here.”
“You’ve been watching the news,” Elza said. “Is it all bad?”
Rico said yes, but Roz shook her head no. “There are other places like this, where they’re self-sufficient and well defended. Eugene, Oregon, is the closest.”
“You’re in contact with them?” I asked.
“Just by cell. Till Wednesday. I talked to their town manager, Benjie what’s-his-name?”
“Sweeney,” Rico supplied.
“Benjamin Sweeney.”
“We decided to have a meeting, a physical meeting, the first of every month. Starting a month from now, June first.”
“What were you going to meet about?” Paul asked.
She shrugged. “First off, a damage appraisal. See what we have and how we might help each other.”
“They have something you don’t?”
“Books, mainly. Non-electronic, printed paper books. Tens of thousands of them.”
“Why on Earth?” Elza said. “Is it a museum?”
“I guess it will be, and a library. Right now it’s a huge antique bookstore. There was a cube special about it, a couple of weeks ago. When it was just a curiosity.”
“Probably one in every big city,” Rico said. “Burned to the ground by now. So Eugene’s is special.”
I remembered Dad taking us to a huge paper bookstore in St. Petersburg, when I was little. Rare even then, I did a report on it for school. The owner had died of a mosquito bite in Africa, I suppose looking for books.
“Thought we’d talk to them about trading,” Roz said. “We have a lot of books, a couple of hundred. Not many of them useful, though.”
“Long walk?” I asked.
“A week or so. Depending on how straight a route we take.”
“You could fly,” Paul said. “I could get you there in twenty minutes.”
She cocked her head at him. “How big an operation would that be?”
“If the plane hasn’t been damaged, just have to turn it around. Five or six people. The autoway’s straight for more than a quarter mile there; I can take off easily. Eugene probably has an airport.”
“Lot of trouble to go look at some books,” Rico said.
“Might as well use the plane while we can,” Paul said. “Gonna be scrap metal in a few days.”
“You think it’s safe?” the pale elder said.
“No. But what is, nowadays?” He grinned at him. “As a plane, sure, it’s safe enough. It got us to Russia and back, by way of Maryland. It can make it to Oregon. If nobody shoots it down, and the Martian power keeps working.”
Her brow furrowed. “If the power went off, could you glide to a landing?”
“Maybe. There are emergency mechanical links to the control surfaces. But you have to find someplace flat, not too far away.” He looked around at the mountains surrounding us. “It would drop really fast.”
“So you would do it?” Rico said.
“Sure.” He said that a little too fast. What, me afraid?
“We might ought to use it for something more useful than books,” the other elder said.
“I could fly anywhere you want,” Paul said.
“Not much we need,” the pale one said. “Lead for bullets, primers, powder . . . all for reloads. You know of a place we could walk in and buy some. Or trade?”
“Not on this planet,” Roz said. “Sa
me with other survival stuff. Even if you could find it, what would you use for money?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t fly anywhere,” Rico said. “Don’t remind people that we’re up here. Self-sufficient and comfortable.”