The old man frowned to himself. The name seemed familiar somehow, and for some reason that eluded him, he associated it with good things. Perhaps he’d heard it over the wireless which, aside from monthly grocery deliveries, was his only link with civilization out here in the Pocks. Half expecting to regret it, he decided to take a chance, thumbed the safety backward, and lowered his rifle.
“Come on over, son,” he answered. “My name, as you heard, is Raymond—Drake-Tealy. Most people call me Digger. The lady on the porch is my wife, Miri—Mirelle Stein.”
For a moment, the youthful stranger who’d faced the muzzle of an elephant gun so casually—Drake-Tealy could see now that he was no more than a boy—stood rooted where he was, as if in shock, eyebrows up, mouth open. It took them like that sometimes. Having become a legend—one that a majority of people were surprised to discover still living—was, for the most part, a pain in the posterior. Then the young man seemed to accept what he’d been told and crossed the stream using stepping stones which had been placed there for the purpose.
Drake-Tealy set his rifle aside again and helped him hang the mule deer from a hook set under the eaves of the porch. It was a handsome buck, large enough to feed a sizable family for a month, indicating some patience and selectivity behind the sighting eye and trigger finger. Young Ngu began to field-dress the animal immediately using a big curved knife he carried on his trouser belt rather than his gunbelt—a survival-wise practice the old man heartily approved and which further raised the young fellow in his estimation. He started into the house before he remembered what he’d been about before the stranger put in his appearance.
He took the bucket to the spring and filled it.
By the time he’d carried the water and his rifle through the screen door, his wife had vanished toward the back of the cabin, where he could hear her stirring up a fire, never allowed to die out altogether, in the old-fashioned stove he’d constructed out of boyhood memories and salvaged materials from the terraforming operation. She rolled over to him, ball bearings clicking, took the bucket from his hand, set it on the stone-flagged kitchen counter, filled the big copper kettle they’d expensively imported from Harrod’s many years ago as one of the few genuine extravagances they’d allowed themselves, and placed it on the stove.
“Thank you.” Her face was set in an expression of grim determination. Company of any sort, under any circumstances, was a tremendous ordeal for her. No one could possibly loathe being crippled, and in her view helpless, more than the popular novelist who’d created a worldwide political movement out of her own personal philosophy of self-sufficiency. Theirs was not, perhaps, the happiest of marriages—they were not the happiest of individuals—but they had seldom been deliberately cruel to one another and she knew what occasional contact with the outside world meant to her husband. “Ask whether he prefers coffee or tea.”
Drake-Tealy nodded wordlessly and went back out onto the porch. The afternoon sun sparkled along the broken surface of the creek, and iridescent hummingbirds hovered and flitted about the feeder hanging at the opposite end of the porch. He was always glad he’d insisted on introducing hummingbirds to Pallas. He leaned against a rough-hewn pillar, shoved his hands into the upper pockets of his bush pants, and watched the newcomer expertly wielding his knife, taking much the same pleasure from it as he did from watching his hummingbirds.
“You’re quite welcome to spend the night with us, Mr. Ngu,” he declared, “provided that you don’t mind dossing down in what we laughingly refer to as the parlor—which is to say our combination kitchen and front room. We were about to have tea when you arrived, and supper will be perhaps another hour. The lady of the house wishes to know whether you’ll actually have tea or would rather have coffee.”
The sentence had come out awkwardly. It wasn’t the first time he’d noticed that sort of thing, which he attributed to insufficient practice at relating to his fellow human beings. It didn’t help that he and Miri didn’t talk much any more. For the space of a few heartbeats, he and his guest listened to the hammering of a woodpecker, hollow in the distance, looking for its own supper.
“Whatever’s easy,” the young man began, then he turned and grinned. “To tell the truth, sir, it’s Emerson—and I’d give just about anything for a real cup of coffee.” He wiped a bloodstained hand off on a rag he’d brought with him, then fished carefully in his shirt pocket and extracted a pair of long, thin cigars.
“I don’t mind if I do, Emerson,” responded Drake-Tealy, accepting one of the cigars. He was a pipe smoker by habit, but any change was welcome, and no one was more sensitive than the anthropologist to the necessities of human ceremony. He fished about in a pocket of his jacket, extracted his lighter, and lit both cigars. For another few heartbeats they stood savoring the tobacco smoke and the moment; then Emerson turned back to his grisly task, filling a plastic bag with the deer’s viscera. “Is there anything I can help you with?”
“I left all my gear in the trees over there,” Emerson replied without looking away from the gleaming edge of his knife. He’d finished the field dressing and begun the skinning process. “There isn’t much of it, if you wouldn’t mind—Digger.”
“Not at all.” Drake-Tealy was secretly grateful to be asked. People he met these days, and they were few enough, were all considerably younger than he was. They took one look at his thick shock of snow-white hair and walrus moustache, the latter stained like antique ivory from the pipe smoke streaming past it, and tried to do things for him, whether he wanted them done or not. It was one reason—not the major one, by any means—that he and his wife lived in seclusion here in the center of an area set aside by the Curringer Trust for future growth.
Leaving Emerson to finish with his work, he stepped across the creek and followed a trail of freshly trod grass into the trees. Beside one of them, within easy sight of the cabin, lay a peculiar object consisting of two hoops, each almost a yard in diameter, hinged together at one edge and presently folded, lying parallel to one another. At the edges opposite the hinge, two pairs of louvered football-sized pods appeared to contain electric motors with short-bladed propellers. One of the hoops held a harness in which the pilot—that much was a guess—presumably sat. The other was rigged to carry a large rucksack.
When he picked the contraption up, he was astonished at how light it was, not much heavier, in truth, than a pair of ordinary bicycle wheels lashed together. He also suddenly remembered in what connection he’d heard the name Emerson Ngu. So this, then, was the brilliant young inventor, originally a penniless refugee from that blasted Greeley commune, if Drake-Tealy recalled correctly, who’d been manufacturing pistols for the past several years, half a world away.
Admittedly, it was a rather small world.
But there had been something else, as well, hadn’t there? Some harrowing tale of jealousy and bloodshed in which this young fellow had been a victim—but then Drake-Tealy made a point of never paying attention to such things and couldn’t remember the details. Nor did he attempt to do so now. Instead, he lugged the peculiar device back across the stream and set it down beside the wheelchair ramp.
“Flying machine?” he asked.
Emerson nodded again without looking up. He’d finished the skinning and was sitting at the top of the ramp, resharpening his knife against the edges of a pair of long brown triangular stones set at an angle to one another in a plastic base. As the youngster tested the results of his effort against a thumbnail, the older man caught a glimpse of sheet-gold initials—GS, not EN—inlaid in the dark, hardwood handle of the knife. “You’re looking at the first production model of the Ngu Departure Flying Yoke, with room for cargo or a second passenger.”
“A motorcycle with a sidecar,” Drake-Tealy observed amiably, “or a bicycle built for two.”
For some reason Emerson didn’t reply, but concentrated harder on what he was doing. The whole story suddenly came back to Drake-Tealy and instantly he regretted what he’d said.
&nb
sp; There’d been a girl.
About a year ago, it must have been.
Even at the time, he’d thought it was like something out of an old Jack London story. They—he still couldn’t remember who “they” happened to have been—had found this poor chap lying in the middle of the spur road which, as he recalled, looped around Lake Selous from Curringer to the damned Greeley Project (he’d named that lake himself, which was why the territory remained relatively fresh in his memory), shot to pieces, half bled out, and very close to death.
Beside him lay the broken body of a young girl, already dead for several hours, which he’d either carried or dragged the two miles over rough country from where their flying machine—he’d automatically assumed it to be an ultralight—had been shot down by UN security hooligans acting outside their jurisdiction.
The girl had been connected with the Greeley Project somehow, not as one of its clients or whatever euphemism they were currently employing where the word “slave” stated the case much better. He was hazy on many of the details, or perhaps they’d never been clear to begin with. One thing was hideously clear: she’d been gang-raped and beaten to death, not necessarily—or exclusively—in that order. In its own way, it was a perfect example of the sort of phenomenon most individuals had come to Pallas in the first place to get away from.
Nor could Drake-Tealy recall anything coming of the semiofficial inquiry afterward. The weak point of the vaunted Stein Covenant, in his opinion—which he’d gone to some lengths to express during the early days on Pallas—was that it failed to specify an adjudicative structure. Miri, with Wild Bill Curringer to back her up, had always argued that the Covenant shouldn’t limit any future arrangements which might prove better than anything she’d been able to think of at the time. In the end, of course, exactly as he’d predicted, the struggle for survival on a new world had claimed every bit of the time and energy which immigrants and pioneers might otherwise have expended coming up with something better.
This travesty had been inevitable.
At any rate, the UN guards had claimed that they’d been lost in rough country, shooting at what they’d innocently believed was a trespasser in the dark, and stuck to their story tenaciously—as what rapists and murderers wouldn’t? The sole survivor wasn’t available for comment, having remained in a deep coma for weeks.
So this was what had become of him.
It certainly accounted for the eye patch and the limp
he’d observed.
Still feeling apologetic for his offhand remark, Drake-Tealy shuddered and forced himself to speak. “Would it be possible to try a spin, perhaps sometime tomorrow? I’ve heard a great deal about these things of yours and been fascinated.”
The truth was that he hadn’t flown since the accidental collision of two tiny, fragile aircraft out of three flying together which had killed his best friend and crippled the woman he loved, and furthermore, he had no desire to. Yet he often felt that there was nothing left of him any more but a garrulous old man, half starved for company. Moreover, he still needed to atone for the careless wagging of his tongue, in order to reclaim something of his self-esteem.
Apparently it worked. Emerson looked up from what he was doing and smiled. “Sure, Digger. I’d be happy to take you for a ride. Your lady, too, if she wants.”
Drake-Tealy smiled back, pretending to an enthusiasm he didn’t feel.
Or perhaps he did, after all.
And for the first time in years—but not the last for a long while—it suddenly occurred to him that their lives, his and Miri’s, were about to change forever.
It was about bloody time.
Daymares
All men tell themselves lies in order to make their lives tolerable, whether it happens to be big lies like being loved by an all-seeing, all-powerful, all-merciful god, or little ones like being six feet tall instead of five eleven and a half. To live without those lies is to walk naked through a hailstorm, but it’s also to walk free.
—William Wilde Curringer, Unfinished Memoirs
Gretchen screamed.
Machine guns hammered at him in the blackness of the night, tearing away his flesh.
He struggled to draw the Grizzly, but there was no feeling left in his fingers. He was forced to look down helplessly as the ultravelocity bullets splashed through him, stripping first the skin, then the muscle from his body, pecking out his organs shred by shred, leaving nothing behind but gleaming, bullet-riddled bones.
Gretchen screamed.
And suddenly it was daylight.
Emerson awoke with a start, his hair soaked and his face bathed in a cold sweat. His back ached from the impression of rough bark being made on it through his shirt, and he prickled from contact with the dry bed of brown pine needles he was sitting on. Although for the past few weeks, and especially the past few days, he’d generally felt better, physically, than he had for more than a year, there were, even yet, these unpredictable occasions of weakness and fatigue when his body betrayed him—as it apparently had half an hour ago, by his watch—and he was compelled to realize all over again that he was still in the process of recovering from wounds which by all rights ought to have been fatal.
For a long while he’d wished they had.
He discovered that he was sitting against the base of a tree a couple of miles from the cabin he’d been staying at for a week. The idea this morning had been to repay the kindness of his hosts with something that would relieve the monotony of venison. In his hands he still held the lighter and an unlit cigar he’d meant to smoke when he’d suddenly felt the need to sit and rest for a few minutes.
Instead, he’d nodded off and here he was.
Looking at the dry needles beneath and all around him, he was glad he hadn’t lit the cigar.
It wasn’t the first time this had happened to him, by any means. He’d come terrifyingly close to screwing his flying yoke into some unseen hillside more than once on his way across the face of the asteroid, which had been a factor in his decision to stop for a while. It wasn’t the first time he’d had a dream like this, either, and he understood with a shuddering certainty that it wouldn’t be the last. They seldom recalled anything that had literally occurred during the gunfight they inevitably concerned, but that didn’t make them easier to take.
The machine-gun hammering continued off somewhere to his left. He knew it now for what it was, some variety of woodpecker happily drilling away at a hollow tree trunk.
With a deep sigh, he lit his cigar at last and leaned back again against the tree, drawing the Grizzly from its holster and keeping it in his lap, hammer cocked and safety on, his eye upwind on the muddy little wash where he and Digger had seen tracks yesterday. There were fierce pigs who came down to water here, where the evergreens thinned into deciduous woodland. No more than a dozen yards away, less than twenty feet uphill, he could still hear the mustard-colored flies buzzing around the big yellow blossoms of prickly pear cactus. But down here in what some of the Project peasants he’d grown up with would have called a wadi, the ground just beneath the forest litter, a hodgepodge of brown leaves and red-brown needles, was damp, and the air had a mushroom odor.
Digger—Emerson still found it hard to accept that his new friend was really the legendary anthropologist and adventurer Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy—had promised to churn up some sort of special barbecue sauce if Emerson could bag one of the pigs. The old man’s easy confidence in his ability was touching. He was somewhere up the hill and downwind at this very moment, gathering the wild onions and garlic that grew in profusion everywhere on Pallas. He was well equipped to make good on his promise. They raised sweet Italian tomatoes in a tiny sheet-plastic greenhouse behind the cabin, and kept other supplies stashed away in a “root cellar,” carved from the soft native carbonaceous chondrite, where they’d hung the deer a week ago. A bank of thermocouples powered by a gallium arsenide array on the cabin roof helped maintain an almost freezing temperature in the underground larder.
Now if only Emerson could reciprocate.
If only Emerson could stay awake.
Only Emerson could have wondered why he continued having dreams like this. There were impressive pseudo-scientific words for what he was going through, as well as words well established in the common idiom—posttraumatic stress syndrome, flashbacks, shell shock, combat fatigue—but at best they only labeled the phenomenon. They failed utterly to explain it or make it easier to live with.
He knew it wasn’t a matter of guilt over not having given an honorable account of himself during the attack outside the Project. Although the UN contingent had carried away their own dead and wounded, professional trackers hired by Aloysius had told him afterward that he and Gretchen had been set upon by no fewer than a dozen of Junior’s uniformed hatchetmen, of whom he and the girl—dazed and injured as they’d been by having been shot down and by the subsequent crash landing—had killed four and possibly as many as six (although there was some reason to believe that more than one had died from overly enthusiastic “friendly” fire).
For that matter, it wasn’t any kind of guilt at all. The only thing he felt about having killed a human being, possibly more than one—and he’d never been in doubt about this from the moment he’d regained consciousness—was a fervently held regret that he hadn’t managed to kill many more of them that night.
Nor was it simply a matter of missing his beloved Gretchen or regretting her death. No words were adequate to express how he felt about that. He wasn’t sure there were any adequate feelings for it, either. He might never come to terms with it, nor with the circumstances connected with it. In some respects he’d been ashamed to realize in the months that followed the event, during which he’d had very little to do but think about it, that he still clung to sanity only because he’d given her up for dead when she’d married Junior, and the one brief night they’d had together afterward seemed unreal. But if that was what was bothering him now, why did he never dream of her except to hear her screaming like a fighting banshee?
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