by R. Lee Smith
Nicci took another step back. She looked as if she might be on the verge of tears. “Please don’t fight!”
“No one’s fighting, Nichole,” Scott assured her, then turned his best in-charge frown on Amber. “Miss Bierce, you are grossly overweight.”
“Grossly?” she echoed. She looked down at herself and up at him again, as derailed as she’d been when the medico back on Earth had called her obese. The next argument that wanted to come out of her wasn’t even about him, but just that she’d lost sixty pounds, goddammit, and how overweight could she possibly still be? Grossly?!
Scott seized the opportunity of her angry silence to make another speech, half-turning away from her to include all the other people watching them as he said, “It wasn’t all that long ago that you decided you had to lecture me on how a leader should be willing to sacrifice his popularity when he makes a command decision. Well, we all have to make sacrifices, Miss Bierce. We have limited rations and frankly, you can live off your reserves for a while.”
“I’m fat, so I don’t need to eat ever again, is that what you’re saying?”
“Hey.” Eric stepped up between them, both hands raised and empty. “Both of you. Calm down.”
“I’m not upset,” said Scott. “There’s nothing to get upset about. The facts are these: A human being can survive without food for at least three weeks, provided he or she has plenty of water, which we have.”
“Now wait a minute,” said Mr. Yao.
“And judging from the looks of you, you could probably go twice that, easy. Now we’ve got a long hike ahead of us, Miss Bierce, so why don’t you stop complaining and get ready to go.”
Nicci grabbed at her arm. “Please!”
Amber shook her off. “These aren’t command decisions, damn it! This is just you being a dick!”
Scott did not immediately reply. Instead, he reached out to touch Nicci’s shoulder, his brow furrowed with concern. “Are you all right, Nichole?”
Nicci blinked at him. So did Amber.
“I didn’t hit her, for Christ’s sake!” she sputtered. “Why wouldn’t she be?”
“Mr. Gunnarson, can you take Nichole and see if you can’t find her some tents or something to carry?”
Dag glanced at Amber. “Sure,” he said, beckoning to Nicci. “Come on, people. Show’s over and we got a lot of shit to shift.”
Scott waited, watching while the crowd loosened up and milled away. Amber waited too, watching only him. When they were mostly alone, except for the other Fleetmen, he finally turned back and faced her again.
“I’m warning you,” said Amber. “This is not the way you want to play this.”
“Miss Bierce, I’m willing to continue to take care of you, but I’m not going to stand here and entertain your selfish little temper tantrums. This is still a colony—”
“It’s a what?”
“—and now more than ever it is absolutely essential that we support one another in the spirit of that colony. You do not have the right to ask the rest of us to suffer the consequences of your choice to be obese.”
There was that word again. Amber sent a single furiously baffled glance down at herself—this is not obese damn it i fit in the sleeper i fit in your stupid clothes this is not obese this is just plush—and when she looked up again, Scott was walking away.
“Let him go.”
Amber swung around, ready to throw all her embarrassment and anger right in Eric’s face. “And thank you so much for standing up for me!”
“Come on, this isn’t personal.”
“That,” she snarled, pointing at Scott’s retreating back, “was personal! If the food is so limited and we’ve all got three weeks before we start starving, why am I the only one losing my rations?”
“I’ll talk to him about that,” said Mr. Yao.
“What did you expect?” asked Eric, looking pained. “You’ve been out here convincing people the whole valley’s going to flood out when we told you how important it was to keep people calm.”
“What? I have not!”
“We’ve had, like, six people bring that up in the last two days,” Crandall said.
“Because it’s raining, you idiots!” she exploded. “We’re in a goddamn valley taking in all the goddamn runoff that’s pouring over the goddamn fucking hills! I don’t have to say a fucking word! Everyone can see the water rising!”
The Fleetmen exchanged frowning glances.
“I’ll talk to him,” said Mr. Yao again and this time, he headed after Scott.
“So don’t tell me it wasn’t personal!” snapped Amber. “You just admitted he thinks I’m plotting against him!”
“No, at the moment he only thinks your bitching is bad for morale,” Crandall said. “If he thought you were really plotting, he’d toss you out on your butt.”
“He can’t do that!”
They looked at her. Crandall laughed a little. After a moment, Eric swiped rain out of his face, sighed, then looked her in the eye. “Have you ever been popular in your life?”
She blinked again. “What?”
“Popular. Have you ever been. In your whole life.”
“No,” she admitted, puzzled. “But I’m still standing.”
“Yeah, yeah. Stick to yes or no, Bierce. Have you ever been popular?”
“No.”
“Have you ever had any reason to think that being popular doesn’t matter in social situations?”
Her eyes narrowed.
He waited.
“No,” she said.
“Is this a social situation?” he asked patiently.
“It’s a fucking survival situation!”
“Aside from that.”
She glared over her shoulder at the camp, which was already coming down and being crated up. Dag was still with Nicci, trying to teach her how to bundle up a tent when all she seemed willing to do was hold one.
“Making friends here matters,” said Eric, coming up beside her. “Making friends with Scott matters. You’re a smart girl, Bierce. Surely you’ve got to see that.”
“I’m smart enough to see that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Why the hell aren’t you the one giving orders? You were trained for this!”
Crandall laughed again.
Eric looked at her for a long time as the rain drilled their hair flat against their heads. Then he said, without expression, “Yeah, I was Fleet. And when I enlisted, they taught me how to shoot guns we don’t have, run computers we don’t have, pilot vehicles we don’t have, and keep the peace on a ship we don’t have. I’m not the hero here, Bierce. I don’t want those people down there to look at me like I am. When it goes bad here, the guy in charge is probably going to get strung up from the nearest tree.”
“We are one more disaster away from a mob as we speak,” Crandall agreed, crookedly smiling. “I think the space-scout is finally starting to wise up to that and that’s bad for you, sweets. He’s going to need someone else to blame when the shit hits.”
“Keep your head down and your mouth shut,” Eric warned. “For what it’s worth, I actually think you’ve got your head on pretty straight, but I’m not putting my ass on the line to cover yours. Regardless of what that loudmouth says, this isn’t a colony. This is a whole new world, Bierce, and it’s every man for himself.”
3
They hiked for days in the rain, moving the camp piece by heavy piece, following a storm-swelled fall of water up the eastern slope and away from the Pioneer. It shouldn’t have taken as long as it did, but Scott refused to leave anything behind. The purifier, the generator, even the stupid bags of concrete—everything was the property of Manifest Destiny, everything was necessary to the settlement of a self-sustaining colony, and everything came with them.
Amber did not object. She carried her concrete all day and slept in the rain all night and took the single ration she was allotted and did not so much as mutter under her breath. Now and then, Scott came out of his tent long enough to say inspiring thi
ngs about the indomitable spirit of exploration or the human will to thrive and survive, and it bothered her to see so many people not only listening but smiling and nodding and sometimes clapping their hands, but she didn’t say anything.
The rain began to wind down the same day that they actually made it over the top and started down the other side. The view was pretty much what it had been on the other side of the valley, except that there wasn’t an enormous skid-mark slashed through the middle of it or a pile of melted wreckage entombing fifty thousand human beings. It was just grass. Brown grass and tangles of trees stretching out for God knew how many miles beneath the low, rolling clouds, uninterrupted by even the most ambiguous sign of civilization.
But there was life. The total lack of cities, roads or any other distraction made the small groups of animals grazing on the plains impossible to miss. To Amber, whose personal experience with animals could be almost entirely summed up by dogs, cats, rats and roaches, they didn’t look too scary. Long-necked bodies and four thin legs made them look more or less like deer, except that they also had long tails. Instead of antlers, they had a set of back-sweeping horns, in addition to which they also had two huge jutting tusks. Their shiny, scale-covered skin was brownish on top and black underneath, with a white stripe on their bellies that only showed if they stood up on their hind legs, which two of them kept doing, gronking and clawing at each other with their hoofless, taloned feet.
People began to murmur in an uneasy way.
“They’re not going to bother us tonight,” said Scott firmly. “Let’s establish our camp and secure a perimeter. Over there.”
He pointed at a hilltop not too steep or too far off, with a few trees around it, but not so many that they had grown into impassable thorny walls. It wasn’t right up by the stream anymore, but maybe that was a good thing, if the native animals decided to wander over in the middle of the night for a drink.
That first night wasn’t bad. The wind never let up, but no one complained; it felt good just to dry out a little. There was enough deadwood lying around to start a couple fires and Scott pulled out a pocketknife, of all things, so that people could take turns cutting grass and dried thorns to keep burning. Dag roasted his ration on a stick, so a couple other people did too. Amber didn’t have another ration. She sat next to Nicci, watching her sister try to heat bites of concentrated protein supplement on a stick, and listened to the scaly deer-things bawl and gash at each other.
When it got dark and the talk died down and Nicci wrapped herself inside her laughably ineffective emergency blanket and fell asleep, Amber picked up one of the roasting sticks and fingered thoughtfully at its heat-hardened point.
* * *
Early the following morning, Scott crept out of his tent and gathered the Fleetmen for his usual meeting. Amber woke up as they filed quietly out of the sleeping area and over to the crates and things, stacked at one end of camp to form Scott’s idea of a windbreak. It hadn’t worked.
She drowsed for a few minutes to let them have their male-bonding time during the morning pee, and when she heard their low voices begin to pick up again under the wind, she got up. She rolled up her blanket, stuffed it in her duffel, picked up Nicci’s roasting stick, and headed over to join them.
“—unless we can provide them with some kind of future,” Scott was saying, but he stopped when the others looked at her and turned to see her for himself.
He blushed, which was a weird reaction. “This is a debriefing, Miss Bierce. Please go sit down somewhere. I’ll pass out the MREs when we’re done.”
There were so many things she wanted to say about the democratic process he kept insisting they still had in this so-called colony, but instead, she forced on a smile, held up her hands, and said, “Truce, okay?”
They all looked at the stick she was holding.
“I’m aware that you haven’t sorted out the priorities yet,” began Amber, picking her way very carefully toward her goal in her most diplomatic tone, “but when you get around to wanting a closer look at those animals, I think it would be a good idea if the people in your scouting party had something like this with them. Just in case, you know?”
Eric reached out and plucked at the tip of the stick.
“You’re not anywhere on my list of people to go on that scouting mission, Miss Bierce,” said Scott bluntly. “So get it out of your head right now. I need people in peak physical condition for that.”
“No fat chicks, I get it.” Amber made herself stop there, then pinned up that smile again and started over. “Even if I can’t do the running around that’s involved, I can at least help with the preparations. If I could borrow your knife, I—”
“Not a chance.”
“—could spend the whole day making grown-up versions of this,” Amber said stubbornly, but softly. “So when you get a team organized—”
“That is not where my priorities are right now, Miss Bierce.”
“Then let me do it. I’ll ask for volunteers, I’ll make the spears—”
Scott stepped forward so fast and so unexpectedly that she jumped back, banged the back of her knees into a crate of pipes, and went down hard on her ass. He leaned over her, absolutely furious, but barely speaking above a whisper, careful not to wake anyone in the camp beyond them. “Before you start re-enacting The Lord of the Flies around here, you might want to remember what happened to Piggy. You’re not the only one who ever thought of sharpening sticks.”
Before Amber could decide how to respond to these bizarre but unmistakably hostile statements, Scott turned around and stalked off.
Baffled, Amber looked over at Eric and Dag. “What the hell was that about?”
Eric shook his head, looking away in a vague manner, frowning.
“It’s from a book they made everyone read in school,” said Crandall. “About some gay Brit kids who get stranded on some island.”
“Did he just call me a pig?”
“There was one in the book.”
Amber eyed him narrowly. “What happened to it?”
“I think the kids fucked it or killed it or both.” Crandall shrugged. “Yeah, it didn’t make a lot of sense in the book either, but I had to write a whole page on how incredibly fucking profound it was, I remember that.”
“So…” Amber sent a searching gaze across the camp, but Scott had gone inside his tent. She tried to laugh the whole thing off, but no one joined her in it and the sound she made was clearly an angry one. “So what the hell kind of threat was that?”
“You just need to back off a little,” said Eric quietly. “That’s all.”
“Back off what? All I want to do is think about hunting! I didn’t say it had to be today! I just want him to plan for it! How is that so wrong?”
Eric and Dag exchanged another set of glances. She followed their gaze afterwards to the stick in her hand.
“What?” she said, tightening her grip.
“It just doesn’t look good,” said Eric. “Arming yourself. Calm down. It’s nothing serious.”
She turned to him fast and hissed, “He! Doesn’t! Feed me! That feels pretty fucking serious to me!”
They shuffled a little and avoided her eyes.
“I asked for his permission! I gave him every opportunity to go back and pretend like it was his idea! Does he think those stupid rations are going to last forever? What does he think we’re going to eat when they’re gone?”
Eric shrugged, still not meeting her eyes. “He’ll come around. Just let him figure it out on his own. Let him decide when it’s time.”
Amber threw up her empty hand and slapped it loudly down on the top of the crate. “Wait until the food runs out, is that it? Look, we don’t have guns here. We don’t even have bows. We have Scott’s pocketknife and a whole lot of stupid sticks.”
“I know, I know—”
“No, I don’t think you do. I don’t think you get it yet that when it comes to hunting, we’re going to have to chase things around and stab them
! How many meals do you think we’ll have to skip before that becomes impossible?”
“Okay, calm down.”
“I don’t want to calm down, I want you to get pissed! Scott can talk all he wants about how a human being can live three weeks without food, but I guarantee you, two days after we eat the last of those crappy ration bars, no one is going to be able to run down one of these fucking deer!”
Eric and Dag went for Round Three of the meaningful looks. At the end of it, Eric sighed and raked his hand through his hair. “Yeah, I know,” he said, and sat down on a stack of cement bags.
“Then why aren’t you helping me?” Amber demanded. “If we all talked to him together, we could make him do something!”
“Oh, he’d do something, all right.” Crandall snorted and kicked a crate. “Look, Bierce, you’ve got balls, no one’s saying you don’t, but it’s obvious you didn’t do too well in school.”
“What, because I never heard of the Lord of the Pigs? Who the hell cares about that now?”
“Flies,” Crandall corrected. “And also because you suck at basic math. So let me help you with your homework, honey. The four of us, and maybe Yao, plus alien critters we know nothing about, minus guns, plus pointed sticks, equals somebody getting hurt. Guaranteed.”
“But we can’t just—”
“Shut up a sec, I’m not done. So far we’ve been really lucky and so far people have stayed pretty calm—that’s some more math, see if you can figure it out yourself—but when we come back from our first big hunt carrying some bloody, screaming mess that used to be you, people are going to freak and they might not stop.”
“Used to be me, huh?”
“And when it happens,” Eric said quietly, “Scott is going to be right there telling everybody how sharks can smell blood from ten miles away and who knows what could be out there tracking you down. You’ll be gone, Bierce.”
“He can’t throw me out,” she scoffed. “He can call himself Captain or Commander or King of the fucking Fly-People for all I care, but he can’t make me leave if I don’t want to.”