by Allen Steele
Pause. Not a word from the bunch. Had they been here so long that the fumes fried their brains? “Did you hear what I just…?”
“We heard,” Barry said, ever so softly. “What makes you think we want to leave?”
Barry had always been the quiet one. Taller than the others, with big hands and broad shoulders, he was the sort of kid adults mistake for being a dumb jock. More intelligent than he looked, he tended to hide his brains behind a curtain of reticent silence, but that wasn’t all. His dad was a Liberty Party member who had been a propulsion systems engineer aboard the Alabama, and Barry had to live down the fact that his father had been one who had to be overcome when the ship was stolen from Highgate. So he was kind of stuck between two worlds: his parents, who still maintained stubborn allegiance to the United Republic of America, and his friends, who came from D.I. families whom Captain Lee had helped escape from the URA. Dad had also been a Party member, so I knew where he came from, yet sometimes he was difficult to read.
“You’re still building these boats, aren’t you?” I nodded toward the Orion. “I mean, I know you guys are bored, but you wouldn’t be doing this if you didn’t think you actually had a chance of using them. Right?”
“Maybe we don’t.” David tapped his wooden spoon against the side of the simmering pot. “It’s either this or feed the chickens.” He glanced at the others. “Hey, that might be a hoot. Why don’t we knock off here and head over to the coop?”
“Sure, go ahead,” Chris murmured. “We’ll catch up to you.” His younger brother scowled and remained where he was.
David was the youngest of the bunch. Until recently he had been nearly as quiet as Barry, but over the last month his personality had changed, and not for the better. His father’s death hit him hard; for nearly three days he didn’t eat or sleep, and when he finally snapped out of it, it was with a newfound cynicism that wasn’t very pleasant. Chris put up with David’s sarcasm and ironic side remarks, but only barely. They quarreled a lot, and once I saw Chris punch him out when he whispered something about me I didn’t quite catch.
And then there was Chris…“You could be right.” He avoided my gaze as he carefully sealed the canoe’s keel. “We’re not doing this for fun. Fact is, we’ve got plans…”
Carlos gave him a hard look—shut the hell up!—but Chris glanced at him and shook his head. “We were going to tell you earlier,” he continued, “but…y’know…”
“You don’t know if you can trust me.”
“No. That’s not it.” Carlos put down his brush, looked straight at me. “Wendy, we trust you. You’re one of us. But we didn’t really make up our minds until a couple of days ago, and since the Doc’s been keeping you in…”
“You couldn’t talk to me about it.” It felt like a lie, but I wasn’t about to call him on it. Not when I wasn’t willing to be completely honest myself. “Sure, I understand.”
Carlos favored me with one of those smiles that softened his face and caused a goofy kid to emerge from within the mannish boy I loved. Chris frowned, but then he noticed that I was watching and quickly forced himself to smile. And that, right there, was the difference between him and Chris.
They were best friends long before I met either of them. They had grown up together in Huntsville, and their fathers had worked together on Project Starflight before they were dismissed from their jobs at the Federal Space Agency for political reasons. When the Monteros and the Levins joined the conspiracy to steal the Alabama, they had done so largely because they wanted their children to grow up in a place where they wouldn’t have to worry about Prefects breaking down the door and spiriting them away to a government reeducation camp. Until the day they were revived from biostasis, any differences they had were trivial.
Now they had one point of rivalry, and it was…well, me.
The five of us were the only teenagers among the handful of children in Liberty, and since I was the lone girl their age it only made sense that the two alpha males of our group would fight for my attention. Yet though I had been initially attracted to Chris—smart, good-looking, a certain savoir faire—he always had a certain attitude that turned me off; he tried too hard to be someone he wasn’t. With Carlos, there was no pretense; he was who he was. Chris always wanted to play the coolest guy in school; Carlos didn’t seem to care what people thought of him. Chris tolerated his little brother; Carlos obviously loved his sister, Marie, even when she was being a crybaby. And when we were alone, Chris had his hands all over me; with Carlos, I had to be the one to initiate our first kiss…or, at least, the first kiss that meant something to both of us.
So I’d picked Carlos, but not before I’d given Chris a chance. We had our moment together, but it didn’t work out, and that pretty much settled the issue. After I became Carlos’s girl, Chris did his best to be a good loser. Yet sometimes there was a certain look in his eye that unnerved me; he’d never forgotten that he and I were once a pair.
“You’re right. We’re taking off.” Carlos picked up a rag, wiped his hands on it. “Orion’s done…or it will be, once we get through here. Barry and David finished stitching the sails a couple of days ago, and tonight we’re going to come back here and drop the boat in the water, see if she floats.”
“She’ll float.” Barry patted the underside with his hand. “This baby’s watertight. And we’ve already tested Pleiades. She’s ready to go, too.”
“You’ve already planned this?” I demanded, and Carlos responded with a solemn nod. “And you didn’t tell me?”
A glance at the others. “I was going to tell you, I swear…”
“Damn it, Carlos!” I was already off my stool, stalking toward him. “If you were going to leave without me…!”
He dropped the rag and backed away, raising his hands defensively. “No, no, I wasn’t going to…!”
“Woooo-hoo! Pussy-whipped!” David chortled, standing up to make a vaguely obscene gesture. “She’s got you by the third leg, man! You’re pussy-whipped…!”
“Shut up!” Chris slung his brush across the room. Still grinning, his brother ducked for cover; the brush ricocheted off the wall and nearly hit Star. The dog recoiled, then walked over to it and began licking congealed fat off the bristles.
By now I’d backed Carlos into a corner. He ducked to avoid banging his head against the Pleiades, and I took the moment to slam him against the wall. “If you were going to leave without me…!”
“I wasn’t! Swear to God, I wasn’t!” Carlos tried to laugh it off, then realized I was serious. He glanced past me at the others. “We were going to tell you! Weren’t we…?”
From the corner of my eye, I could see Chris, Barry, and David looking at one another. “Yeah, sure,” Chris said reluctantly. “Like he says…you’re with us. All the way.”
“Aw, man…” David began.
But I wasn’t giving any of them a chance to back down. “Okay,” I said quietly, still staring Carlos straight in the eye, “then I’m in on this. All the way. Right?”
The smile faded from Carlos’s face when he realized what I was saying. His eyes begged forgiveness, pleading for me to let him off the hook. This was supposed to be a boys-only adventure; he had already imagined that I’d play the role of the girl he left behind. But I wasn’t about to stand alone in the meadow, fretting for my lover after he’d gone away to sea. And he didn’t know how to stop me.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Sure.”
“All right, then.” I released his arms. “So tell me where you’re going.”
Carlos gazed back at me. It took a minute, but the smile finally returned. “Let me show you.”
He walked over to a shelf in corner of the room, reached behind a row of paint cans to pull out a rolled-up sheet of paper: an orbital photo of New Florida, gridded as a map. Barry picked up the handmade guitar Paul Dwyer had given him for his sixteenth birthday; as Carlos unscrolled the map across Orion’s bow, Barry sat down on a stool and idly strummed his instrument. David stood n
ear the window, watching to see if anyone was approaching.
“We’re going down Sand Creek, all the way to the Eastern Divide,” he said quietly, speaking beneath the cover of Barry’s guitar. “Once we’re through Shapiro Pass, we’ll hit the East Channel.” He ran his finger down the broad river separating New Florida from the small continent of Midland. “All we have to do is follow the channel to the southern end of the island, and we’ll be in the Equatorial.”
That was at least two hundred miles. By the time we reached the southeastern tip of New Florida, we’d be below Coyote’s equator. “You’re planning to paddle all that way?”
“Uh-uh. Won’t need to.” Chris had come up behind us. “Once we’re in the channel, we can raise the sails, let the wind carry us up the coast. Shouldn’t take more than a week or so.”
“And that’s the beauty of it.” Carlos pointed to a broad delta that marked the confluence of the East Channel and the Great Equatorial River. “When we’re past the equator, we can catch the westerly winds.” He moved his finger across the southern end of New Florida. “They’ll carry all the way up the Equatorial to the West Channel. By then we’ll be back in the northern equator once more, and that’s where the wind patterns change again, moving to the east.”
“Tack the sails the right way, and we can let it carry us straight up West Channel.” Chris pointed to the river that divided New Florida from Great Dakota, the large continent lying west of our island. He traced the West Channel almost to the northwestern tip of New Florida. “And here’s the mouth of Sand Creek. All we have to do is paddle down it past Boid Creek…”
“And boom, we’re home again.” Carlos tapped the small X that marked the position of the colony. “By the time we’re back, we’ll have circled most of New Florida.”
I studied the map. “That’s at least seven…eight hundred miles…”
“Eight hundred sixty miles, start to finish.” Barry picked at his guitar, essaying an old Robert Johnson song. “More or less.”
“We’ll be the first to do it.” Carlos gazed fondly upon the map. “It’ll be a long haul, but we’ll see things no one has ever seen. We’ll make history…”
“How long?” I asked.
He raised his eyes, gazed at the others. “Five weeks. Maybe six. We’ll get back sometime in Hamaliel, I guess.”
Nearly half a Coyote month from now, perhaps more. By then, it would be too late for a drug-induced abortion, and I knew Kuniko would think twice about forcing me to undergo second-trimester surgery. And if I came home just a few weeks before First Landing Day, no one would be able to stop me from having the baby…
“Sounds good to me,” I said. “When do we leave?”
Carlos stared at me, and I prayed that he wouldn’t realize that I had my own agenda. Chris sighed, walked away. David continued to gaze out the window. Barry, as always, kept his own counsel; he continued playing “Crossroad Blues,” pretending that he hadn’t heard a word of what we’d said. I laid my hand across Carlos’s and favored him with a disingenuous smile, and knew that he couldn’t reject me.
“Day after tomorrow,” he said, almost a whisper. “We’re taking off early, just before dawn. Think you can make it?”
“Sure,” I said. “I don’t have any other plans.”
The next day, things mysteriously began to vanish throughout Liberty.
Nothing that would be missed immediately—a flashlight here, an electronic compass there—or at least until the culprits had long since departed. We pretended to go about our business much the same as always, but each of us had our own shopping list, and when the moment was right something else would disappear under our shirts or down our pants. As luck would have it, it was my turn to help to clean up after lunch in the community mess hall; once the cooks left the kitchen it was easy to raid the pantry and fill an old grain bag with salted meat and preserved vegetables, along with some plates, cups, and cookware.
I felt more than a small twinge of guilt, but it had to be done; we couldn’t set forth into the wilderness with only the clothes on our backs, and we needed this stuff. I salved my conscience by reminding myself that what we were doing was no worse than what the Alabama conspirators had done when they hijacked a hundred-billion-dollar starship. If we were caught, we could always blame our elders for setting a bad example.
The most difficult task was acquiring firearms. The armory was located in a locked closet inside the grange; only the Prefects and a couple of Council members had keys, and every gun had to be signed out with Ellery Balis, the quartermaster. But Carlos had already devised a solution; Lew Geary had started letting him into his cantina, and as a regular patron he knew that one of the blueshirts, Michael Geissal, was in the habit of dropping by for a drink after his shift ended. So Carlos hung out with Mike and tipped a few mugs with him, and when he was good and drunk Carlos helped him stagger home, during which time he artfully deprived him of his key ring. One more reason to disappear for a few months: when Michael figured out what happened, he’d probably want to feed Carlos to the hogs.
For my part, I played things as quietly as possible. It wasn’t easy; Kuniko doted on me all evening, beginning with a special dinner she cooked on my behalf. Chicken was tightly rationed, as precious as a replacement microchip, but nonetheless she used up four weeks’ worth of food chits to acquire a fresh-killed and cleaned bird from the livestock pen. When she placed a whole roasted chicken on the table, I knew what she was trying to do: make up for pushing me into the abortion she’d perform the next day. I wasn’t hungry—too nervous about what I was about do—so I was only able to force down a few bites before I pushed back my plate. Kuni misinterpreted this as anxiety about the procedure; while we were washing up she told me again how easy it would be, that I had nothing to worry about, and how no one would ever know. I listened until she was done, then excused myself and went to my room.
When she checked in on me an hour or so later, I was curled in bed with my pad, reading The Chronicles of Prince Rupurt. She asked how I was doing, and when I looked up I could see the love in her eyes. My mother was a woman I barely remembered, my father a near stranger with whom I’d shared only a few scattered months of my life. Kuniko Okada was the nearest thing I ever had to a family. Stealing food didn’t bother me very much, but betraying Kuni’s trust was like sticking a knife in her back. For a moment I was tempted to tell her, but that was clearly out of the question, so I told her I was okay, just feeling a little tired. Kuniko hesitated for a moment, then she wished me good night and left, closing the door behind her.
After a while I closed my pad and shut off the oil lamp next to my bed. A thin slit of light gleamed beneath the crack beneath the door. Kuniko moved around the house for a little while longer, the floorboards creaking softly beneath her moccasins, then the light disappeared. Her bedroom door opened, slammed shut. And then the house was still.
I tried to make myself go to sleep. I needed all the rest I could get, but that didn’t help very much; instead, I lay awake in the darkness, staring up through the window at the night sky. Bear hung above town, a pale blue orb four times the size of the Moon, its ring plane reflecting the light of 47 Ursae Majoris. I remembered the long nights I’d spent in government youth hostels, lying awake in my narrow bunk, one hand on the sawed-off baseball bat I kept beneath the sheets in case one of the counselors tried again to rape me. Back then, all I’d ever wanted was freedom. Finally, I had my chance…and it scared the hell out of me.
I must have dozed off, because the chime of my pad startled me from what felt like sleep. I fumbled for it in the darkness, switched it off, lay still for a few moments. The house remained quiet; when I didn’t hear any movement, I pushed aside the covers and reached for the clothes I had placed beneath the bed. No time for hesitation or second thoughts; if I didn’t go immediately, it would be too late.
I had already made up a bedroll with an extra set of clothing tucked inside, fastened together by a belt. I eased open my window and d
ropped the bedroll outside. That way, if Kuni happened to wake up and see me leaving, I could always tell her I was visiting the privy.
Yet her door remained shut as I crept through the cabin. I had a momentary urge to write her a note, explaining what I was doing and why, but the boys were probably already at the boathouse, and I was worried that they might take off without me. So I gently closed the front door behind me and tried not to think very hard about what I was doing.
The first light of day tinted the sky purple as I hurried down Main Street. No one was in sight, and the windows of the cabins I passed were still dark, but the roosters were starting to crow; in just a little while the town would begin to wake up. Kuniko liked to sleep late, but it wouldn’t be long before Sissy Levin or Jack and Lisa Dreyfus discovered that their boys weren’t in their beds, or Marie Montero would tell Kim Newell that her brother was gone.
Everything was quiet on the path leading to the boathouse save for the chitter of grasshoarders, but as I drew closer I could make out muted voices. For once, Star didn’t run out to greet me; Carlos must have decided to leave the dog behind. For a moment I thought I heard someone behind me, but when I glanced back the way I came, I saw no one.
David was standing lookout on the porch; he seemed disappointed when he saw me. “What took you so long?” he whispered, as I jogged up the steps. “Forget your teddy bear?”
“Stick it,” I muttered. I was in no mood to argue with the brat. The canoes were already in the water, tied up on either side of the dock. Barry and Chris were loading the last of the supplies, carefully placing them in the middle of each boat and covering them with tarps. Unlike David, they were pleased to see me; they both grinned as I walked out onto the dock.
“Morning, gentlemen,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Permission to come aboard?”
“Aye, m’lady. Glad to see you made it.” Barry took the bedroll from my arms. “Anyone see you…?”