Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  Her sardonic antipathy for Meg still hurt, but he tried to understand. She had never known Meg. All her family dead in Enfield, wiped out by the same biological mischance, she had no reason to think well of Vic or his work. Her smile for him was still alluring, and she cheerfully agreed when he asked her to join him after work for a drink.

  The guards let him take her to the new officer’s club, just opened in what had been the faculty lounge. She said she drank no alcohol, but Perrier seemed to give her gaiety enough. Enchanted again with her flattering attention, her shining eyes and her shining hair, her shape and her scent and her voice and the hinted mysteries of her past, he almost forgot his own Scotch and water.

  Laughing when he asked about her European years, she recalled a time when she’d thought her talents were for the stage. Hitchhiking across half a dozen countries to catch the Bolshoi Ballet on tour, she had run out of money in Rome and nearly been jailed for begging help from American tourists waiting in line for their mail at American Express. Trying out in London, she had finally been offered Laura’s role in a revival of The Glass Menagerie, only to have the director turn her down. He said her accent wasn’t sufficiently American.

  “Me! Imagine! Off an Indiana farm!” She giggled. “Not sufficiently American!”

  Guards always near, they walked to the mess hall for dinner together. Listening to another story, this time about the Italian banker who hired her to write his life history and wanted to keep her as his mistress when she wouldn’t swallow his tall tales about how he’d bluffed out the Mafia to rake in his millions, he hardly touched his dried beef on toast.

  Afterward they strolled around the quad and sat on a bench in front of his residence hall. Listening again, or answering her eager-seeming questions about his boyhood with Vic, he sat longing to be somewhere else with her, and no guards watching. In the darkening dusk, the guard stepped nearer.

  “Nearly ten, sir.”

  “My curfew.” He kissed her, and her response intoxicated him. “I have to go inside.”

  “Shall I come with you?”

  He blinked and got his breath. “Would you?”

  She kissed him again and called the guard aside. What she said he didn’t hear, but the grinning guard waved them toward the door. With him in the narrow room, she stripped and posed for him silently, smiling with candid pride in a form still firmly perfect, delighted with his breathtaken adoration. Half undressed, he had stopped to admire her. Laughing at him, she came to help him out of his shirt and shorts.

  They showered together, soaping each other, and he carried her dripping back to the bed, her pink nipples hardening against him. For one painful moment, her casual expertise reminded him that affairs with other men must have filled her European years. In another moment, as her magical hands guided his first deep thrust into the warm wonder of her, that melancholy pang was gone. Lost in the taste and scent and feel of her, even in the exotic accent of her breathless whispers, he forgot almost everything.

  When the air conditioning stopped at midnight, shut down while the damaged power lines were under repair, he found a fan in the closet and set it to blow on their naked bodies. Laughing once at his unceasing eagerness, she murmured that he must have been missing Midge.

  “I loved her,” he muttered. “I really did. But she was never—”

  Beaching again for Keri, he said no more of Midge. Once when she breathed a half-malicious query about what other women he had loved, he thought of Meg, wondering how she would feel about Keri if she really were alive to reach him again. He thought she wouldn’t care.

  He woke at dawn on the narrow dormitory bed, Keri close beside him, breathing gently, splendid even in her sleep, the fan still washing their bodies with humid summer air.

  “Meg—”

  The whispered name died in his throat. Alphamega had come back in his dream, in Keri’s captivating shape.

  36

  La Madre

  de Oro

  The big gringo with Pancho Torres in the cockpit had been a frightened loco, never willing to let him land anywhere for gasolina. Not even when he begged for La Maravilla‘s blessed life. Starving the engines, he kept the avión in the air until the first daylight let him find the flatness of a wide laguna he remembered from his old days with the marijuaneros.

  It was dry in this dry season, but not flat enough.

  The hot avión came down too fast, breaking into many pieces, and now he knew he was dying. His broken chest made him want to moan with every breath, but he found no strength even for moaning. Both his legs were numb and dead, the way the one had been when the gringo at Enfield shot his knee. Flies buzzed around his blood when the sun came up, and they crawled in his eyes. Death would be a kindness.

  Yet he tried to stay alive because of La Maravilla. He couldn’t move to find her, couldn’t even call her name. Listening, he heard cuervos cawing—waiting maybe for the death they would find in the wreckage—but no sound from her. Perhaps los santos had intervened to shelter her. If they had not, he thought she must be dead.

  La santissima! Perhaps already returned to heaven, where her soul belonged. Praying for her happiness among the saints, he listened to the crows. The flies crawled and stung. His chest grew worse with every breath, but for her sake he kept on breathing. The sun rose higher, blazing into his face until all he saw was purple light. He was glad when the aching deadness began to spread from his dying legs, because he had no strength to help her and sleep would wash away el dolor.

  “Panchito!”

  La niñita’s blessed voice!

  “El pobrecito Panchito!”

  She was floating in the air above him, a white-shining light with a shape he had never seen. Perhaps an angel’s shape. Her high child-voice was tenderly kind. She had felt his pain and come to ease it.

  Her bright-shining wings brushed his face with a coolness that soothed the burning of the sun. Shining fingers of her light reached deep into him, feeling what was torn and was broken. Troubled by what she found, she spoke to El Doctor Sax.

  He was still far away, where they had had to leave him, lying nearly dead on a bed in the gringo prison. A gringo medico was dripping a poison of the brain into his blood, while angry gringos in the uniforms of soldiers shouted demands for all he knew about about la bruja. The witch. That was their name for la niñita.

  The gringos got no answers, because they had poured too much of their poison into his brain. The medico was begging them to stop, because he said Belcraft was dying, though not yet entirely dead. La Maravilla found life left in his mind, and slowed his dying, and brought him with her back to the avión, where it lay broken in the dry laguna.

  Working together, they swept away the pain. Belcraft guided her fingers of light, reaching deep to teach the pieces of broken bones how to creep back into place and knit together again. He helped her cause the dying cells to remember the life they had almost lost. Together, they made him live again.

  “El pobre querido!”

  She felt sad again for the Sax, because when they were done, she had to leave him once more in the far gringo prison. She had reached, however, to help his hurt body heal, and the medico was soon amazed at the way his life signs had returned. It hurt her to see the soldiers still demanding what he knew about how la bruja got away.

  When Pancho Torres woke, el dolor was really gone. He could breathe with no pain. Working with whatever she had called from Belcraft’s faraway mind, La Maravilla had healed him. The dried blood was hard on his face, but the flies were gone, and the blindness of the sun. His head could move. He found his voice and called la niñita’s name.

  Los cuervos squawked and flapped, but he heard no sound from her.

  The day was ending, the air no longer so hot. The crows still cawed somewhere near. When he turned his head, he found one of them standing on the bloated belly of the gringo called Frankie, tearing at the face where the eyes had been. One of Frankie’s hands seemed to be reaching for the pistol he had tried t
o fire at the Scorpion while they were still in the sky, but the purpling fingers no longer moved. Frankie was entirely dead.

  The sun went down. The crows squawked and flapped away. He called again for La Maravilla to speak to him. If she could speak. All he heard was the crows. A sad thing, he thought, if she had given toda la vida to restore him, saving no life for herself. At last he slept again, a healing sleep without pain or dreams or any wonders.

  The engine sound of un carro woke him. Hunger had come upon him in the night, and a great thirst. He thought kind people must have come at last, with water and help for la niñita. A jagged fragment of the broken avión lay across his legs, but he rolled his head to look.

  A pickup truck came jolting across the rough laguna floor. It stopped. A man got out. A lean, quick man in greasy jeans, wearing a ragged straw sombrero. He raised a grimy hand to shade his eyes from the low sun and stood a long time squinting into the wreckage.

  Torres tried to call out when he saw the man turning back to the pickup. In a moment he was breathing gracias a diós that his croaking call had not been heard, because the man had come back with a rifle. Crouching a little, he peered uneasily around him again and stopped to aim the gun at Frankie’s head.

  Frankie’s face was hard to look at where the crows had torn it, but the man fired two careful shots into it before he came on to roll the body over and rip a thick billfold out of the hip pocket. Squinting into that, he looked up and crouched back from something else.

  He had seen la niñita. Pancho moved his head enough to find her. She lay very still on the hard-baked clay beside a broken seat from the broken avión. Her long hair was spread on the ground, golden where the sun struck it. Her body was thin and small, nearly bare, the same golden color as her hair. Her face was down. She was not moving.

  Qué lástima! He thought she must be dead.

  The man was not so sure. He aimed the rifle.

  Pancho Torres moved. His legs came free of the broken metal on them. One finger reached Frankie’s pistol to drag it toward him through the dust. Lifting it took all his strength, but he was able to swing it toward the man aiming at la niñita.

  “Panchito, no!” He heard her small child-voice, screaming faintly in his head. “For favor, no matanza!”

  Sick and shaking, he pulled the trigger. The pistol kicked itself out of his hand and spun away across the dust. The man’s head came apart, as ugly as Frankie’s. The body crumpled down beside la niñita.

  He thought he heard her voice again, scolding him for killing, yet he couldn’t be sorry. Sweating and trembling, he had to lie flat again until he felt strong enough to stand. He limped to la niñita and dropped on his knees to touch her, wondering if she could really be alive.

  Her body felt cold, but it had not stiffened. He saw no blood, felt no broken bones, but she had been hurt inside. There was no movement of breath, but he found a pulse in her tiny wrist, very weak and very slow. Perhaps, if he could get her to a medico, she might yet live.

  Pero no!

  He must hide her. The gringos would be hunting then, alerting la policia, publishing pictures, offering rewards. Any medico would have to inform los autoridades. They would soon know that he was a convict who had waited to die for one killing in el Norte, and who had left two more dead men here in the wreckage.

  He must keep her safe, keep her sheltered, hope she could heal herself as she had healed him. Perhaps there could be aid from the big gringo called El Escorpión. Or had he died? Pancho walked around the wreckage, searching, and found footprints in the dust. Tracks of El Escorpión, limping and stumbling, wandering away.

  Had he gone for help? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps he was dazed, lost in the desert, perhaps already dead. In no case was he a friend worth trusting. No aid would come from anywhere. If one man had found the wreck, another surely would, but none would be a friend. Honest finders, quick to call la policia, would be no better than El Escorpión.

  Desperate as he had been for any chance at freedom, he had never understood the man, who seemed strange and deadly as his name. In the messages Frankie brought, he had promised far too much. He was going to guide them to friends of his own beyond the reach of the gringo law, perhaps bandidos he knew, or to Columbian dealers in narcóticos. That had never been clear.

  Asking Frankie why El Escorpión wanted to rescue them, he had never liked the answers. They wanted to save la niñita from the torture, so Frankie said, because she was a holy being sent by the mother of God to open the way to paradise. Meeting El Escorpión only when they were in the air, he had found it hard to see him as a lover of the saints.

  Searching for any way to safety, he picked up Frankie’s billfold, where the dead man had dropped it. American dollars made a thick sheaf in it. Twenties, fifties, hundreds; he didn’t wait to count them. In the dirty jeans, he found a switch-blade knife and a big wad of crumpled pesos. Nothing with any name; he wondered if the dead man had been another convict in flight.

  The fenders on the old pickup were broken and much paint was gone, but the tires looked strong. There was oil and gasolina. A big plastic bottle in the cab was full of good water. He gulped at it till he felt sick again, and went back to La niñita.

  “Adónde?”

  Where could they hide? San Rosario? In his dreams of escape, back at the prison, he had always taken her there, but those were only dreams. En verdad, his mother and father were dead, his brothers and sisters scattered. El tio Eduardo would report him to la policia for any reward or for no reward at all.

  La Madre de Oro?

  The Mother of Gold? The great mine men said the old conquistadores had found and lost again in las sierras altas. So los viejos said. His brother Hector had learned about it from a rich gringo who hired him to fly for a search expedition. Following the map far up toward the high peaks, they had found the timbered tunnel dug long ago, but no gold at all.

  They had flown above it when Hector was teaching him to be a pilot for los marijuaneros. Hector pointed out the twisting mountain road the gringo had repaired, and the little wooden bohio he had built outside the black tunnel mouth.

  Perhaps the tunnel could hide them until La Maravilla healed herself. If they could reach it. But it was far away, among mountains too sharp and dry and bare for farms or even goats. The road might be hard to find, and it might be too bad for the old pickup. Yet it seemed la mejor esperanza.

  Their best hope. The mine was well known to yield no gold, except perhaps to those who sold maps and went to guide those foolish gringos. It would be a place where few people came.

  He carried la niñita to the pickup. A tiny burden to him since her holy power had restored him, she hung limp and cold in his arms. Too large for her thin little body, her head sagged back against his heart, her long golden hair streaming loose and bright as the halo of a saint.

  The pickup cab had a space behind the seat, where he found a roll of odorous blankets on a clutter of worn tools, cans of oil, and a box of ammunition for the rifle. He laid her there, covered with a tattered blanket, where she would not be easy to see.

  He drove away at once, picking a way out of the dry laguna and on through hummocks of brush and cactus and yucca toward a highway he remembered. Noon had passed before they reached it, and hunger had become a giddy weakness in him. A few kilometers down the pavement, he pulled off again to rummage under the blankets where la niñita lay so very still.

  He found a slab of hard dry cheese and a little stack of stale tortillas wrapped in an old newspaper whose torn headlines spoke of ENFIELD, LA CIUDAD DEL TERROR. The water in the plastic bottle had grown hot, but he drank and drove on again, gnawing moldy cheese wrapped in a dry tortilla.

  Farther down the lonely pavement, he slowed when he saw the skeleton of a car that lay upside down in the ditch, stripped of wheels and glass and engine. It still had license plates. Nobody else in sight, he stopped to change them for the battered plates on the pickup.

  When he had to stop for gasolina, he pai
d with the dead man’s pesos. To keep la niñita from being seen, he got out of the cab and spoke of seeking work he never found in the city of Chihuahua.

  He drove till his eyes began to blur, and stopped at last to sleep in the cab until daylight. When they came to another pueblito, he stopped again to spend more of the dead man’s pesos for bags of rice and dry beans and other things they might need at the mine.

  He had been working a smelter in Chihuahua, he told one of the clerks. He was buying these items for the family he had left on his little farm down in la tierra caliente. He bought tools and cans for spare gasolina. Filling the cans at a Pemex station, he said they were for his water pump, down on the ejido.

  They were four days on the way to the mine. One whole day was lost when he searched for the beginning of the road. Floods must have come since the gringo repaired it to go there for gold, because new arroyos were slashed deep across it. He had to move rocks and dig the tops from high clay banks to help the old pickup climb them.

  Sometimes la niñita drank a little water when he held the bottle to her lax lips, but she ate no food. Her eyes were never open. That feeble pulse still beat when he felt her limp wrist, so slow he always thought the next beat would never come again, but he found no other sign of life.

  When at last they came jolting to the door of the mine, the gringo bohio outside it had burned, but the tunnel was still .open. He cleared the rubble from a place on the floor down inside its cool dimness and cut juniper branches to make a bed for la niñita. He spread blankets on it and laid her there, wondering sadly if she would ever wake at all.

  A pile of timbers inside the tunnel had not been burned. He parked the pickup against a cliff, leaned timbers over it, and spread juniper branches to hide it from searchers in the air. Aching with fatigue when that was done, he stood a long time looking back down the ridges and canyons they had followed.

  The rocky slopes rolled and folded down forever, toward the flat brown desert they had crossed. A far thundercloud towered toward a flattened anvil, draping thin blue curtains of rain that dried up before they reached the barren ground. Here and there, he could trace the dim brown line of the road. Scanning it uneasily, he saw no dust, no hint of any follower.