Constellation

by Sharon Lee

  Low voice, a touch of hand-talk—a glance to make sure his large person was between the room and his words.

  “The plot’s tended, and the door’s locked. We called, but it was getting late, and Sherton’s people were a little unsure, on account of the guy’s some strange, they say. Like you figured, Sherton wants the thing cured proper beforehand, and so does Boss Ira.

  “No use spooking him or annoying a good neighbor. The road itself—the thing is, I don’t know how stuff is going to fit together there, but it looks like a straight shot from the tollbooth to the ditch. Road goes right there.”

  Pat Rin looked away, not angered, but frustrated. On his left Natesa asked, “The door locked? How locked—could they have been inside?”

  The big man shrugged, palms up.

  “Wouldn’t think so, catwise. Couple or three right there, wanting us to let ’em in, kinda sleek. Some out cats was around while we searched—pretty much ignored us, but the ones at the door, I’d say they were wanting someone to let ’em to supper.” He shrugged again, looked to the boss.

  “Should I have forced the door? Didn’t seem neighborly.”

  Pat Rin waved the hand-talk, Negative Negative Negative with a touch of impatience.

  “Surely not, Mr. McFarland. I may already have an aggrieved party on my hands; it clearly wouldn’t do to give him any other advantages in negotiation.”

  “My take, too.” Cheever glanced meaningfully toward his place at the table.

  “Tomorrow, it should be done, even if it means I go out myself. The Passage is in orbit and soon enough the logistics of the landings will be organized. If need be, you can fly surveillance for us.”

  Cheever cleared his throat, hard.

  “There’s more?”

  “Boss, if you go, take somebody with you. He’s supposed to be a real fine rifle shot. Real fine. Boss Ira says that, anyhow. Boss Melina says he’s doing better now. Hasn’t fired on people for a couple, four years, far as anyone knows.”

  Pat Rin nodded.

  “Would I could say the same, Pilot. Thank you for your information.”

  * * *

  Farming was like that, day comes after the night, sometimes it rains and sometimes it don’t. This time of the year favored rain, so Yulie was just as glad to be up early, almost on schedule, the gray cat having forgotten to wake. Just as well, a few extra minutes was good, and he’d been a little tense anyway, when he came in, and the single glass he allowed himself did help . . . but he’d been a few minutes late getting to bed. The little Blair Road Booster newssheet yesterday’s visitors had left him was a curiosity—he mostly didn’t take any of the radio feeds, and now this: talk about a clinic going to full-time, all day, all night, all the time, and something that made him laugh—an image of road sign they called a stop sign that drivers were supposed to pay attention to even if there weren’t a tollbooth and a gunman behind it.

  But there was more interesting news: a new bakery, and a new school, and a meeting of the bosses about a general safety patrol to take care of the road. And an events listing, which looked like so many times and days and things going on that it couldn’t be his Surebleak.

  He’d gone to sleep with a twitch of irony. That safety patrol was good from the port all the way out to the third Blair road intersection. But the road, the big road, it came all the way out to him. Was he gonna end up with more cat hunters?

  That germ of an idea had brought nightmares to wake him up—flashbacks, Rollie’d call them—ten of the cats from the greens field, laid out neat in a row, mostly shot, like they was food, laying on a bag. The sight of them made him throw up. Then he’d heard another shot and gone back to the house.

  He’d always liked to shoot—it relaxed him immensely. This time though, he’d brought out the rounds Grampa called military tops and loaded up, and walked calm as could be back past the dead cats, and found another one, along with some of the skulk rats it had taken, and so then he went to hunt mode.

  Wasn’t much to hunt, really: six of them, a couple with pistols, stupid about moving. He was going to try to stop them, that was his idea, but he come on them when two were sighting on a hunter cat at work, and there, clear as could be, was his shot.

  Five of them were dead where they fell; the sixth tried to pull a hideaway on him, way too late.

  He’d gone back to the house with the dead cats, planning to bury them, and roused Rollie—who’d been late getting back from a jaunt to The Easiery—and told him he’d got himself some bad varmints, and Rollie’d better look, which Rollie did.

  Eventually a couple of city-types claiming kin and friend came looking, and Rollie’d pointed out the signs about no hunting and told them there’d been a hunting accident that got out of hand, told them the farm didn’t have any food animals no how.

  Rollie’d already sold the intruder’s guns to Boss Ira, anyhow, and wasn’t much to show them, and that had been that, except of course Yulie’d spent every day for a year walking that route, back and forth, counting the cats, and some nights took the rifle out, waiting for people. Nobody else came, and eventually he’d learned to sleep again.

  And so he’d got up, last night, and walked out to the disguised growhouse. He talked to a couple of the cats who guarded the coffee plants there in the cavern, told them he was sorry for not doing better by them. If they didn’t say nothing back, at least they listened to his apology; then he slept well and woke up sharp, and ready to work.

  The morning wake-up being what it was, he was standing at the window watching the gray horizon verging on pink, his coffee just warming his hands, gray cat leaning companionably against the back of his legs, when this thing appeared in the sky, dusty bright in the coming sunlight, unscheduled.

  No meteor. No spaceship he knew of. Not even a Korval spaceship, big as Grampa had made them sound—this thing looked like it had craters on it . . . and then it was out of sight.

  He stood there for some time, feeling the gray cat against the back of his legs. He sighed, wondering if that hadn’t been in the events columns there in the Blair Road Booster.

  This time he was waiting for it, and since the world had turned under the orbit, caught it in just above mid-horizon, and he stopped tossing the cabbages to stare.

  It wasn’t a ship, and it was cratered, but it wasn’t a big thing by any means, “big” being a relative term when it came to objects in space, even in nearspace. Yulie’d heard of constructs that might be that size, but not constructs of rock; whatever it was, it was not the size of a tidal satellite, by any means.

  Still, he was hardly an expert, having only the hand-me-down lessons from Grampa, and the optics scope. The sky was brilliant though, and blue, and it was still visible, with Triga and Toppa not yet risen to confuse with odd shadows. Not that Surebleak’s two tidal moons were all that bright, but they both were capable of casting some light and when they were in-sync were quite a spectacular sight, especially when they were in conjunction with Chuck-Honey.

  Yulie checked the chronometer, almost doubting. Right. It was orbiting, and it wasn’t high at all. Something that size could make a heck of a hole if it was on the way down. A heck of a hole.

  He felt the panic gnawing experimentally at his vision, but no! There, an aircraft, flying low over Melina Sherton’s land, or maybe over Ira’s back farms. Almost noiseless, it banked, headed his way. He thought to run, but the thing banked away, obviously interested in the growing little blocktown Melina and Ira’d been working on, just in case the fools in the city actually did themselves in. Interested? Hah—it might be it was landing somewhere over that way.

  Yulie threw the striped orange cabbage from his hand to the crate, willing to call the thing full. That ought to do it. Five full crates—time to get things moving. No time to be worried about aircraft, and—

  He twisted, catching a glimpse of some low clouds coming from the northwest, which could portend a rainy morning on the morrow, perhaps even a snowy tomorrow night.

  Th
e moon-thing was out of sight now, but he was going to watch for it. Meanwhile, it was time to go if he was going to hit Boss Sherton’s farmer’s market before the last of the day-buyers left.

  * * *

  The walk was doing Yulie good, even if the plane had come by for one more pass before disappearing for good. He knew it was too soon for the return of the new moon, but scanning the sky was helping him keep the world in perspective as he trod down the slope toward the farmers market. His backpack held six cabbages—one each for the two local bosses, and one each for the tollbooth crews to share. The other two were promise-proofs for the farmers who might come to help, knowing good food when they saw it.

  The slope got steeper, and then the road went through a short valley, still tending downhill, with rocky hills acting as a kind of weather break and demarcation for the land below.

  Originally, of course, that natural wall the valley pierced made for good siting for the test dig that had become World’s End, and for the company’s first management zone. Once the dig got going, management was inclined to prefer the portside bar and restaurants and then—and then the company had gone slowly into decline as the commercial timonium need drove the independents, and later the big boys, to follow the joint trail of creation and destruction that was the legacy of Chuck-Honey’s rapid path through the regional space.

  Somewhere Chuck, or Honey, or the pair together, had swarmed upon a stony-cored brown-dwarf remnant of the same monster cloud that had formed Surebleak and its system, and that dwarf’s bounty lay in the metals and transuranics—and the encounter, sundering the dwarf, created a rogue field of rocks and high-grade ore, loosely trailing behind. Asteroids and comets and potential moons, the rocks now transited interstellar space. Lucky ships could come up with lumps of near pure timonium, or gold, or lead. Hardworking ships and companies could mine instead the broken chunks, needing no excavation equipment to speak of, no investment in people and governments and law—

  The company stuck with appurtenances—excavators and law clerks and straw bosses and crewship pilots and—it had contracts and plans and goals enough to get it through a couple of financial ripples, but in the end it was easiest to sell the company to a shell corporation and merge that with another and drag what funds there were in transit out—and then abandon to the tender mercies of the jackals of interstellar finance the remains. The people stuck onworld belonged there after all—who needed dirt miners in a good clean space-rock roundup?

  Grampa—Grampa had been owed big-time when the company was going to dust, and he’d fought for what was owed him for the ship he’d bought, fought for his plans to retire to a nice planet somewhere with lots of water and lots of willing ladies . . . and filed liens and lawsuits.

  The company capitulated and in a final act of law, after seven years, offered a settlement. They gave all the company’s current right, title, and interest to all its holdings on Surebleak to Grampa. That included the original administrative area, and the marshaling yards . . .

  Like so many others, he’d been swindled: the ditch was worked clean and worth nothing, and the marshaling yard had long been converted into farms for the portside executives.

  In the end, Grampa moved to his holding, found himself a wife and a girlfriend and some monographs on farming, and dug in, sure that eventually, things would turn out. It wasn’t long before he was doing well enough, in the strange way that things worked on Surebleak. His daughter, of course, was brought up to farm, and then her sons, after she left…and now Yulie walked to the people next door, hoping for a boon. He had good food, what he needed was transportation and trade for it . . . especially now, a way to replace the lighting that Rollie’d always traded for.

  It was a trick of geography that could let him arrive first at the market and then at the small streets and buildings, and then go through the tollbooth, if he were so inclined—but really, since he wasn’t much interested in anything but the market and the farmers, he headed that way, the day warming on him in a way that warned of incoming moisture. He walked more slowly now, not liking to overheat if he was going to be seeing people, the road now a sandy gravel as he approached the market.

  Yulie could just about identify the stalls and stall owners when the edge of his hearing was tickled by an odd sound. It was not one of Surebleak’s rare birds, but it bounced around considerably, and it wasn’t an aircraft. It was a more like a moan, speeding up and then down, rising and decreasing in volume . . .

  Whatever it was, it traveled the road, a tail of dust behind it, rapidly approaching the dimly seen tollbooth, and just as rapidly charging through, all the guards standing aside.

  The distant market folk were as transfixed as he, and the sound grew both closer and louder, and downslope he could see the glint of the vehicle. It came on, shiny as dew on the grass, scattering walkers and small carts out of the way. It rushed at him, silver glinting from all the polished surfaces, and he stepped into the gully, trying to push back the panic that rose in him.

  The vehicle charged on, not pausing.

  Unless the driver was mad, there was only one place it could be going.

  To his house.

  Yulie turned and began running, uphill, toward home, the cabbages banging at his back.

  * * *

  The morning had been considerably hectic and much more uncomfortable than expected. Pat Rin had never expected to miss the wallow of his mother’s landau but the rattle-filled car was simply not up to the paving, or lack thereof, on this section of the road he supposedly controlled. He’d gone to the road’s end once before, at a stately pace, some twelve days before his expedition to Liad, but that ride had been marked by ceremonial stops at each of the tollbooths, exchanges of gifts, small sips of whatever the local boss thought potable, and the inevitable meeting of the first three or four ranks of each tollbooth crew.

  This expedition was frantic from the outset. The portacom call had shattered rest, and the breakfast thrown onto the table soon after had been functional and little else. In need of speed, they’d all drunk some of Cheever McFarland’s blend of coffee, which no doubt multiplied the current feel of dangerous speed. McFarland’s unfinished mission of the day before haunted them now.

  Awake on need, he heard the unmistakable timbre, not of Shan’s voice or of Val Con, as he might expect, but of the rapidly socializing brother of his cousin.

  “Boss Pat Rin yos’Phelium Clan Korval, Master Gambler, I give you greetings. I have sighted the landing zone indicated and, following my brother’s wishes that this portion of his art be conducted as smoothly as possible, I have entered into a course arriving there this day. I look forward to seeing you again as we walk together with my brother.”

  And that was that: the tree was landing.

  He’d tried of course—

  “There are preliminaries, Edger, yet undone. I do not seek to school you in haste or—”

  Uncharacteristically, Edger had spoken over him.

  “My brother is in the throes of what may be his most elegant and urgent artwork yet. I will not fail him in this, as my delay in earlier matters of art interfered in the work in progress. We will walk together soon, you and I, and discuss this art.”

  “Wait at least until—”

  “Before the local sun sets on the site, you will assure me that the way is clear.”

  And that had been the end of the conversation.

  “How many more?”

  “We’re not there yet, Boss. Two more.”

  “Excellent!” is what he said, but the ceaseless cry of the siren drowned him out as he fiddled with two piles, one printouts of old company records and the second hastily written legal papers based on the admittedly thin standing his title of Boss gave him. The other standing he held—he looked down at his ring—that standing was certainly an odd one as well. For the first time in memory there were two Korval clan rings. Val Con wore his, the proper original, worn and fractured as it was, while the one recognized here on Surebleak was the won
derfully crafted counterfeit given him by the Department of the Interior. Not that the materials were counterfeit, but that the whole of it was part of a scheme to turn Korval into a puppet of the Department. And now . . .

  And now Korval was depending on him as much or more than ever.

  “Can we go faster?”

  Gwince managed to shake her head and avoid a lumbering truck full of squash at the same time, eyes briefly on Pat Rin through the rear-view.

  “If you say so, Boss. The car’s already gonna need fixing when we get home.”

  “Do it.”

  They could and they did. Cheever McFarland’s overflight had spotted the apparent landowner to home and not carrying a long gun, and now they rushed past Boss Ira’s second tollbooth without acknowledging the various attempted salutes as well as the gestures that were not, quite, salutes from those clearing way for him. Ahead, when he looked, the Boss could see farmers hurrying to the side, and the occasional lurch showed that not all of the travelers used enough alacrity, even with the siren. They’d have to push on the emergency vehicle protocols.

  “Little more coffee up here, Boss,” Gwince told him. “You want it?”

  “I do not. If it keeps you sharp, I suggest you use it.”

  They came that quickly to Melina Sherton’s hold, and screamed through it, still scattering people before them. Gwince said, “Last one, Boss,” rousing Pat Rin from an inner debate on how many items of Code he’d broken today. When his mother arrived from her missions, no doubt he’d receive particular tuition in his faults.

  One last straggler before them, knapsack bouncing, gained the gully ahead, and then open road past the farmer’s market, and perhaps some chance of a successful negotiation.

  * * *

  Yulie wasn’t like Rollie—he spent no time swearing—but he was running now on adrenaline, a situation that always put him prepanic. Not good to have strangers in the yard, not good to try to do this all himself, not good to—

  He stopped his rapid march, stomping his feet at himself. The “not good” was more dangerous than anything, right now, because it took thought from him