“‘Sister Anne, Sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?’” Marian called to him from inside.
Denny was surprised, and a little intrigued. The line, which he recognized but hadn’t thought of in decades, was from a kids’ edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Kids’ edition or not, the story had given him nightmares. From deep within itself his memory obliged with the right response: “‘Naught but the wind a-blowing, naught but the green grass growing.’ Man, I can’t believe I still remember that! I reckon it must’ve been high summer in Bluebeard’s kingdom, the grass won’t green up here for a good while yet.”
“But here is Bluebeard himself,” came a deep voice from the deck, and the Hefn Humphrey burst through the other door and swept into the room.
Denny bolted to the porch doorway just in time to catch the Hefn’s showy entrance. He darted inside while Humphrey shut the other door and turned to greet him properly. “You were expecting my colleague Innisfrey. I am, as you see, not Innisfrey, however. No. Innisfrey is at present otherwise engaged. I offered to take this meeting in his place, as I was already in Kentucky for a reason of my own. Humphrey, BTP. I am pleased to meet you, George Dennis Demaree.”
Denny stared, more or less dumbfounded. He had of course seen Humphrey on the viddy, doing regular progress reports and updates and announcements. Also scoldings. Humphrey was the highest-profile Observer of the lot, and had had the most to do with humans since the Takeover, but the image on the screen, to which he had paid as little attention as possible, had not prepared Denny for the force of Humphrey’s personality. He looked like Innisfrey, his short, stocky, oddly jointed figure, covered entirely with gray hair (including a long shaggy beard which, though gray like the rest of him, made his improvised witticism particularly apt), with large opaque eyes and forked hands and feet. He also looked, truth to tell, rather moth-eaten. Denny knew why; the anti-hibernation drugs the wakeful Hefn had to take in winter made their hair fall out in clumps. And he had Innisfrey’s faintly gamy wetdog odor.
But the quality of his presence wasn’t remotely like cold, supercilious, charmless Innisfrey’s. All in all, the clash between apprehensive expectation and reality was so disorienting that it took Denny almost a minute to pull his wits together enough to apologize for being late.
“Not at all, not at all. Your tardiness providentially provided me with a chance to stretch my legs. The country hereabouts is delightful; your work here must have given you great pleasure.”
Denny nodded; then, realizing that he and his visitor were both still standing, blurted, “Uh, would you like to sit down?”
Humphrey said, “As it appears that we have two chairs and two humans and one Hefn in this room, I propose that you and Marian Hoffman take the chairs.” And thereupon the Hefn Humphrey, household word, movie star, viddy personality, most powerful Observer on Earth, dropped to all fours, ambled over to the wood-stove, and flomped onto the rag rug. He looked like a scruffy, off-color Great Pyrenees. “All right, Marian Hoffman? All right, George Dennis Demaree?” He gazed mildly from one to the other with those odd flat eyes, and Denny found himself in danger of being seriously disarmed.
Marian had stood when Humphrey came in. She and Denny looked at each other, and then both sat down in the chairs they had been sitting in before.
“Now, to business! I am delighted to be the bearer of happy tidings,” Humphrey said, and the flat eyes somehow conveyed an impression of beaming with pleasure. “Innisfrey has, as you might say, filled me in, and I have examined the radio reports you have filed, and the written reports, all of them, for the entire duration of this study. You have done excellent work here! Thanks to you, and to the studies of coyotes and white-tailed deer carried forward by your fellow wildlife biologists, we have a complete and detailed picture of the top two predators for this recovering habitat, together with their most important large prey species, over the past four years.
“During this period in this area, the black bear population has experienced a seventy-four percent gain in numbers. Eighty-six percent of the bears are not immigrants but bears native to east central Kentucky. Remarkable! More than that, the bears are, might one say, in the pink? A comical expression to apply to a dark-colored bear! Their reproductive success has been excellent, and they are in prime condition! As the flora here proceed through the various stages of succession, the entire ecosystem burgeons and thrives.
“Therefore! With no reason whatever for concern that the trend is in danger of reversing itself, we have determined,” Humphrey said from his shaggy-sheepdog position on the floor, giving again that impression of beaming up into Denny’s face, “to terminate this study, and to reassign you, George Dennis Demaree, to a location in particular need of the skills you have exercised so diligently in this one. Congratulations!” And he bounded up and offered Denny his forked, hairy hand.
Denny bounded up as well. “But the study’s not finished!” he protested, his voice loud and rude with shock. Instead of shaking Humphrey’s hand, he waved his arms wildly. “It’s nowhere near finished! I designed it to run for ten years, that’s the way my data spreadsheets are configured—I don’t want to drop it now! I can’t! I can’t believe you want to pull me out now!”
At Denny’s outburst the Hefn’s beamish-boy look faded away; his demeanor became more closed and quiet, and when he spoke his voice had lost much of its hearty charm. “I regret that you do not wish to end your work here. I regret to learn that in your view it is incomplete. Our view, however, is different. We consider you to have been entirely successful. Thanks to you, we know that this area is well on its way to climax. Also thanks to you, we know that biodiversity increases every year. This is all we need to know. Whether you choose to accept reassignment is, of course, a decision you must make for yourself, but there are a great many other recovering habitat areas in Kentucky about which we know too little, and where your skills would be of great service.”
Denny, so angry he was almost sputtering, managed to let him finish. “It doesn’t work like that!” he blurted the instant Humphrey stopped talking. “Wildlife biology is important for its own sake! Understanding how the bears adapt as this farmland reverts to climax forest doesn’t end because some practical purpose has been served! You—you Hefn never told me you’d turn up one day and tell me to pack up my stuff and leave! I did everything you told me to, nobody ever complained that the work wasn’t done well—you’re throwing me out for doing a good job!”
Marian moved uneasily in her chair, and Denny suddenly remembered, like a bucket of cold water, who he was talking to. The Hefn, as he knew perfectly well, could do whatever they damn pleased. They had absolute power over the people of Earth, and most Hefn felt no sympathy for humanity, given the mess humanity had made of its own planet, and how hard the aliens had had to work to get them to clean it up. This Hefn, Humphrey, was probably the one with the most sympathy for the plight of the Earth’s people, many of whom were suffering a good deal from the cleanup process. If he said the study was over, it was probably over.
Denny was wild. What a fool he’d been, to fall into the comfy habit of assuming he’d been assigned to this field study for the sake of science, and that as long as he minded his P’s and Q’s he would be allowed to continue. He’d been assigned here because it pleased the Hefn to study the bears of east central Kentucky for a while. Now they were done doing that, evidently, and he could take a new assignment or go and do something else entirely, they didn’t much care which. What they would not let him do was the one thing he wanted to do: keep on living in this cabin, watching Rocket and Rodeo develop under the tutelage of Rosetta, recording their weight, examining their scats under a microscope, radio-collaring them in due course, observing as they found mates and began the next generation.
Then he had another thought. “What about Jason and Angie, are you pulling them out too?”
“The studies of Jason Gotschalk and Angela Rivera are integral with your own. The coyotes are thriving. The white-taile
d deer are thriving. The elk are thriving. Everything is thriving! We would not allow any element of this area study to continue unless all were to continue, nor would we terminate one without terminating all.” Humphrey sounded so benevolent as he said this, you would think he was doing them all a favor by yanking them out of the field.
Denny had one more card to play, so he played it, not expecting to gain much by it but needing to try. “I’m a Gaian,” he said. “This is my Ground. A hundred years ago my family owned this farm, and I’d like to stay here, even if the study isn’t to be funded anymore.” Stay and do a little unofficial-work with Rosetta and her family and the half-dozen other breeding sows he’d been following, until the equipment wore out. Or, if they took that all away to a different site, just record observations, do odd jobs in town to buy food, hunker down here for as long as he could.
Humphrey immediately became less alien-seeming, but no less definite. “Then I am truly sorry,” he said, sounding as if he meant it. “But alas, no one may stay. Our Lords the Gafr have decreed that wherever habitat studies have been terminated, the human presence shall be excluded until recovery is complete.”
The Gafr were the boss aliens that nobody had ever seen. They directed things from their ship parked on the Moon, and what they said was final.
“When?” Denny asked, finally defeated.
“We will help you gather your personal things together,” said Humphrey kindly.
He meant they were going to fly him out now. “What about the horse and the mule?”
“They will be transferred to another field station. Yours, if you decide to accept reassignment. And I will gladly put you in touch with the Gaian Steward in Louisville, who should be able to assist you in finding another suitable Ground. Very possibly a way might be devised to match your new assignment with such a place.”
And kick me out again when you decided I’d done enough there, Denny thought. No thanks.
“As a Gaian, you could perhaps be assigned to the terrain around Hurt Hollow? Would that interest you? Bears have been sighted nearby. Pam Pruitt is in residence there at present, but some arrangement could surely be worked out.”
Denny glanced up at this, but his mind was in turmoil. “I … don’t know. I need to think.” He gazed around the cabin, the place he had gradually let himself come to think of as home for the foreseeable future, now on the far side of an absolute divide; it was like looking through a Time Window into the past. “Most of this stuff stays with the cabin. The dishes and bedding and all that. The short-wave set.”
“We will help you gather up what does not, yes, Marian Hoffman?”
“I’d rather do it myself. I won’t be long. You could damp down the stove if you want something to do.”
There really wasn’t much to pack: some dirty laundry, a razor, the daypack with the bear equipment, a few books and computer disks, the PocketPad, the laptop, his field glasses, his other pair of boots. Denny threw it all on the bed and went down in the basement, mind reeling from the sudden shift of direction, to get his duffel bag.
Under the stairs, piled in the doorless tornado shelter, were the abandoned remnants of the old farm’s incarnation as Camp Sheltowee: rolled-up sleeping bags, tents, deflated air mattresses, mess kits, canteens ….Denny’s disoriented brain suddenly focused. He touched nothing, only stood still for a moment before heading back up with the empty duffel. But his mind was made up.
The chopper dropped him at the regional headquarters of Fish and Wildlife in Frankfort and whirled off to collect his two still-unsuspecting colleagues. Tess Perry, Denny’s boss, threw up her arms in protest at his accusing glare. “We had absolutely no clue they were going to pull this! The first I knew about it, here was Humphrey instead of Innisfrey, saying I should alert Louisville to get ready to reassign three field researchers, they were closing down East Central. This office is being closed down! I tried to warn you and the other two but you’d all gone out.”
“I was checking on Rosetta’s cubs,” he said bitterly. “So what happens now?”
“Reassignment, like he said.” And at the look on Denny’s face, “I know, I know, believe me, but you need to think about it anyway before you burn any bridges. When they get back here with Angie and Jason they’re taking y’all to Louisville.” She pronounced it “Luh:uv’le.” “They’re giving me a week to close up the office, then guess where I’m being transferred to. Paducah! Think I want to go to Paducah?”
“Your parents live here in Frankfort, don’t they?”
“My whole goddam family lives in Frankfort! But I’m going to Paducah, because right now I haven’t got a better idea, and till I come up with one I’m keeping on the right side of the Hefn.”
Denny groaned. “God, I hate the fuckers.”
“Not any more than I do,” said Tess glumly, “but if you want to keep on doing wildlife biology, stay on their good side, that’s all I’m saying.”
Denny said nothing to any of them about his plan, not Tess, not his rumpled and furious fellow deportees. In Louisville he went through the motions of being debriefed and counseled about reassignment, took a couple of days to “think it over,” discussing options with Angie and Jason and the teams from the eastern part of the state, who had also been praised to the skies and yanked out of the field.
In the end, after a lot of grumbling, the others all agreed to be posted elsewhere, at least for the time being. Humphrey must indeed have put in a word, because when they interviewed Denny they offered him Hurt Hollow, the Gaian shrine thirty miles upriver. He thanked them politely but said he’d like to apply for an unpaid leave, take some time to consider all his options, including that one, which he hinted was an attractive possibility. Unlike the others, the territory he’d been relieved from was his Ground; that made it harder to know what to do. He mentioned visiting his brother in Pittsburgh; you could get to Pittsburgh by steamboat, right up the Ohio River from Louisville.
The interviewing officer was sympathetic, he too was a Gaian, an early convert who had also chosen family property as his Ground, and could appreciate what a blow it must be for Denny to lose his study area and be forced off the farm. Talking about the Hefn and their imperious ways, his face got very tight. He encouraged Denny to think about Hurt Hollow; they needed someone there and it would be good if the someone were a Gaian, who would appreciate the place’s historic significance.
A round-trip ticket to Pittsburgh was arranged. Denny, cleaned up, with a new haircut and his duffel full of clean clothes, boarded the boat and stood at the railing as it steamed upriver (passing legendary Hurt Hollow, which showed no sign of anyone being in residence), calling at Madison and Milton, Denny’s hometown, and finally at Carrollton, where the Kentucky River poured into the Ohio.
At Carrollton he left the boat, his scrawny, scruffy figure melting into the flow of disembarking passengers, and boarded a mule-hauled flatboat bound up the Kentucky for Frankfort and points south and east. He bought his ticket on board. It was dusk of the following day when he stepped off at the landing at Tyrone, under the railroad bridge that spanned the river from bluff to high bluff.
While waiting for full dark to fall, he converted his duffel into a backpack by adjusting some straps. It was good and bad that there was no Moon. In the blackness he slipped by side roads, now no more than tracks around the town of Lawrenceburg with its inconvenient street lights, and set off up the road he had traveled so many times on Rocinante’s back. He was heading for the cabin.
A mile west of Lawrenceburg he encountered a line of signposts, brand new, marching away from the road in both directions and forward along both margins. It was too dark to read the smaller print, but the word in large type at the top was WARNING! He didn’t need to read the rest, or wonder who had posted the warnings. By continuing along the road he was, in effect, entering a narrow corridor through a forbidden zone. Denny shrugged, made a face, and forged ahead.
That he knew the road from horseback as well as he did was a lucky
thing; the night was very dark, with a mean headwind, and the damaged black surface was hard to see. He found a stick to probe with and felt his way along the edge, cursing the need to go so slowly.
At four in the morning Denny reached the bridge over the intermittent stream he called Part-Time Creek, which established the eastern boundary of the old farm, and probed his way in total blackness down into the bed of the creek. Its jumble of rocks was dry—no water or ice in the bed to make things worse—but inching upstream in the dark without falling was so close to impossible that more than an hour had passed before Denny felt he was far enough from the road to risk pushing up through a tangle of brush to flat land.
But he came out where he had intended to, behind the skeletal tobacco barn where the Scout camp’s maintenance equipment had been kept. Tobacco barns were built with spaces between the vertical boards, so the circulating air could cure the tobacco leaves hung in bunches from the rafters. The barn was therefore poor protection from the wind, and also listing badly. But Denny had stored Rocinante’s and Roscoe’s hay in the loft, and had nailed the saggy ladder tight to the uprights. He had gambled that the Hefn hadn’t found and salvaged that hay, and the gamble paid off. Working by memory and feel, avoiding the weak spots in the floor of the loft, he built a windbreak out of bales. He cut the twine from another bale to make a mattress, scratchy but fragrant, of loose hay (carefully rolling up the cut pieces of twine and stuffing them in his pants pocket), then piled more hay over himself and his stuff and pulled his watch cap down over his ears and his parka hood up over that. By first light he was sound asleep.
Nothing woke him; he woke himself, startled awake from a dream of crossing an endlessly broad, jaggedly tumbled polar ice floe in Arctic blackness. He was feeling his way with something like an ice axe lashed to the end of a ski pole, thinking This would make a good weapon if a polar bear comes along, when just then a polar bear did loom dazzlingly out of the darkness. But after a first thrill of fear, Denny realized that the bear was smiling and nodding in a benevolent way. “Want a lift?” it said. There was a fuzzy white cub on its back already, sitting up like a human child on a pony. “Sure,” said Denny, and he scrambled up on the bear’s back behind the cub. But then the bear began to gallop across the rough ice. There was nothing to hold onto except the cub, and Denny understood that he absolutely must not take the cub down with him. As he was jolted off its mother’s slippery back, he woke himself up yelling.
The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003 Page 31