Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  Or was it really just a dream?

  Maybe—

  That maybe was madness. He couldn’t afford to go crazy. Not here in this desert, thirst already burning in his throat. He would need all his sanity and all his luck just to save himself. He found the briefcase he had brought aboard and stumbled away through clumps of coarse gray brush. When he looked back once, three more crows were wheeling down from the hot copper sky.

  All that baking day he blundered on. The briefcase became a dragging burden. Once, light-headed with thirst, he threw it away. A few steps farther, he turned back for it. If he were picked up, it might betray him, yet it was too precious to leave. It contained most of the last batch of American dollars he had got from Anya Ostrov, the travel papers he had prepared, the letter that even yet might be his lifeline.

  In the middle of the searing afternoon, he saw the rippling of water ahead. Near at first, its breaking waves cool and blue and tantalizing, it flowed farther and farther away until it lifted and vanished at last in the dance of heat above the hot white blaze of a dry salt lake. Half-blind from the merciless glare of that, reeling and giddy, he came before sunset to a well-worn highway.

  Too weak to walk on, he waited on the edge of the narrow pavement, waving wildly at every passing car and truck and bus. One pickup veered at him till he had to jump for the ditch, but nobody stopped. At last, as the brassy sun was setting, he heard the beat of hoofs and the jingle of spurs. A lone vaquero on a spotted pony came loping along beside the road. He staggered across it to meet him.

  “Párate, señor!” His shout was a rusty croak. “En el nombre de diós—”

  The man laughed and spat a brown stream at his feet and spurred the spotted pony. He pulled his knife. The grinning pig was near enough and no longer looking. Weak as he was, he could have thrown it for a kill.

  Something stopped him.

  Maybe the giddiness. Sliding the blade back under his blood-stiffened shirt, he shook his head. Maybe the thirst. Maybe—

  He spat dry foam. His knife had been the sting of the scorpion, and the will to use it had never failed him. Never before. Schooled to kill as his father had been, and his old grandfather, proud of his emotionless efficiency, he had never hesitated. The sneering vaquero had earned no compassion, and that frisky pony could have saved his life. What had hit him?

  He didn’t understand.

  He slept part of the night in a thicket of weeds beside the road. Slamming thunder jolted him out of an ugly dream of the Scorpion. He had been trapped again in the wet stink of that leaky little fishing boat crammed with convicts and lunatics, most of them fouling the hold and the deck with their vomit on the rough crossing from Cuba. Again he had been marking down the most vicious enemies of the people hidden in the mob, prepared to follow them ashore and knock them off With the cool skill of a bowler knocking down tenpins.

  Proud of that skill in the dream, he woke sick and trembling, glad to endure the burst of icy rain that drenched him to the skin, happy to escape the dream. For now, since the shining shadow of Alphamega reached inside him, it hurt to think that he had been that quick-stinging killer. He huddled shuddering in the mud, his back against the driving rain, while that memory faded.

  Shivering still, but feeling better when it had dimmed, he cupped his hands to catch drops enough to wet his bitter mouth and lay on his face to suck at a muddy trickle off the pavement until the shower ended. Walking on, too cold to sleep again, he found himself whistling the old Montenegrin marching song his grandfather used to sing. No matter. Whatever he had been, he had grown somehow different since Alphamega touched him. Whatever she had done, he didn’t need to understand. Whatever came to him now, it couldn’t really matter.

  Whistling louder, he plodded down the empty pavement.

  43

  El Cucaracho

  Sorry now that he had ever been the Scorpion, he walked on in the dark. Now and then, when a truck came thundering by, he stood close to the road and waved both arms. The truck always roared on, to leave him in a cloud of suffocating dust and diesel-reeking heat.

  A pale moon came out. Before dawn, it showed him a car stopped in the ditch, one that must have passed him. All lights were out, all windows closed. Peering inside, he saw movement. He rapped on the glass. A narrow slit opened.

  “What do you want?”

  English. A woman’s voice, quivery with panic. Needless now, because he was Scorpio no longer.

  “I’ve had trouble,” he told her. “I need a ride. Anywhere at all.”

  “You’re American?”

  “Jim Gibson,” he told her. “From Cedar Rapids.”

  “Cedar Rapids?” That seemed to relieve her. “What happened to you?”

  “I’m a rock hound. Yesterday I parked by the road while I climbed down into a promising arroyo. Slipped and hurt myself. When I got out, my pickup was gone. I’ve been hiking since. All day and all night. Nobody gives a damn.”

  “Maybe—maybe my husband can give you a lift.”

  “I hope so.”

  The slit opened wider. The inside lights came on and he saw a pale, anxious smile.

  “We’re Buck and Martha Tanner. From Nashville. On our way to Gordo la Jara—however you say it. Buck’s uncle has a condo on the lake there. He’s loaning it to us for a month while he’s back at his business. I wish to God I’d never heard of it!”

  “I know how you feel. Glad to hear an American voice.”

  “We wanted to fly, but Uncle Dan talked Buck into driving down. Said we we’d love the Mexicans. Hah! Always jabbering nonsense at us and trying to rob us blind!”

  “Where is Buck?”

  “Uh—” Blinking in the dimness, she decided to answer. “Gone for help. The car banged and stopped yesterday. Buck couldn’t start it. He walked off to look for a wrecker. Before sundown. He’s never got back.”

  She was trying to see him.

  “I slid off a rock,” he told her. “Tore my shirt and skinned my ribs. Nothing to eat since then. I’m dying for water.”

  “Maybe—” She hesitated. “I’m afraid of Mexicans. Buck understands a little Spanish, but I can’t speak a word. If—” She rolled the glass farther down to peer at him again. “You look worn out. If you want to wait in the car, we’ve got a case of this Mexican Coke.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Tanner. Very kind of you.”

  She unlocked the car and he climbed into the back seat and gulped a can of warm Coke. Listening to her nervous chatter about the daughter married to a Nashville car dealer and the son studying to be surgeon, he felt a strange relief. His luck had turned. He had no need to kill. Strangely relieved, he couldn’t understand the feeling.

  Perhaps—perhaps he had no need to understand.

  The sun rose. Martha Tanner gave him another tepid Coke. Her chatter stopped and he heard her snoring. He took off his shoes and rolled Buck’s plaid jacket up to make a pillow. He felt nearly safe, and there was no need to kill. At least not yet.

  Buck Tanner woke him, shouting and hammering on the glass. Bright sun blinded him. His legs ached from his cramped position, and hot sweat had drenched him. Martha stirred and groaned and tried to explain why she had let him into the car.

  Buck had brought a wrecker from a town twenty miles away. Hostile at first, he warmed a little to Jim Gibson’s story of the fall in the gorge and the stolen pickup. He had walked all night and he didn’t trust those grinning thieves at the service station and he wished to Christ he had never seen Mexico.

  He rode into the pueblito with the wrecker driver and ate huevos rancheros con jamón with Martha while Buck tried to deal with those black bastards at the garaje. Buck came back boiling. The camshaft was broken, and a new one would have to come from Parral. Maybe all the way from Torreón .

  Martha asked how long.

  “Quién sabe?” Buck mocked a Mexican shrug, scowling at her bitterly. “That’s all I can make the mother-beaters say.”

  Still with enough of Anya’s money, he of
fered two thousand American dollars for the four-year-old Ford. With Clegg no doubt spreading alarms and roadblocks maybe already set up, the pueblito might be his safest harbor. So long as’ he had a reasonable excuse to stay here.

  Eagerly, Buck warmed to his offer. With a fifty-dollar mordita to hasten the deal, Mexican officialdom provided a bill of sale, duly stamped and legalized, with a warning of import duty if he kept the car in Mexico.

  Their free month in the lakeside condo forgotten, the Tanners caught the next bus north. He rented a room in La Posada Gloriosa, using the driver’s license and credit cards he had obtained for Jim Gibson before he left Piedmont. Troubled only a little by his own reckless confidence in the happy turn of his luck, he went shopping for clean clothing and shaving gear and a portable radio.

  In the posada that night, another ugly recollection shocked him out of sleep. He had been back in the helpless jet, falling blind into the desert, all his skills and plans spent for nothing. Bard lay dead in the aisle. In the seat beside him, Torres was whispering crazy pleas to the mother of God. The silent child behind him was still buckled into her seat and suddenly deadly to him now.

  Even if they lived through the landing, he would have no way to hide her while he made the trade. Cool enough through those last breathless seconds, he had sketched out a new plan to be the only survivor. He would knife the girl and the Mexican, fire the wreck to confuse investigation, and move to save himself.

  A memory too cruel to be reviewed. Sick and sweating, he sat up trembling in the saggy bed until the nightmare had dimmed. After all, he hadn’t killed them, even when they lay naked to his knife. Lifeless as her body looked, some part of that strange child had somehow survived and returned to make him new. Now—and he didn’t need to wonder about that seeming dream—he was free to forget all he had been.

  Strangely relaxed, almost as if she had returned to touch him again, he sank back into more peaceful dreams of his boyhood in the rocky Kras, where his old grandfather loved him, and he had nobody to fear or hate, and even the rocks and the goats seemed kind.

  Asking very patiently every day about the camshaft, he lived at the inn and hiked around the town to look for interesting rocks and listened to the radio for news. Every day there was more about the kidnapped American heiress. A pretty little blond three-year-old. There were wealthy relatives, acting through attorneys who refused to reveal any names, eagerly offering millions of American dollars for her rescue or even for word of her.

  Newspapers were always late at the pueblito, but when they came, there were drawings of the slender child and smudgy pictures of the renegade security officer and the Mexican accomplice, an escaped convict who had been convicted of murder in el Norte. A third man was said to have been involved, but his name and description were still unknown.

  That news should have cheered him. As Jim Gibson, footloose rock hunter, he felt comfortably safe, maybe too safe. With Alphamega out of the game, he still had the Belcraft letter. It told more about her origin than anybody else had seemed to know. More, certainly, than he could understand. When the right time came, it should be saleable. To Washington. To the Kremlin. To some private speculator. With craft he still recalled, he could turn it into Swiss bank accounts that should last him forever.

  Yet he felt puzzled more and more by a formless unease growing in him. Not for himself; he had learned to live with closer danger than he felt around him now. What troubled him was a curious concern for Alphamega, a feeling he had no way to understand. He had left her in the wreckage, looking as if she had died in the crash.

  Yet—

  With no need to wonder, he couldn’t help himself. He was somehow alive when he should have been dead, that knife wound in his side no more than a fading scar. He owed his life to her return—or had the crash killed his sanity?

  His parents had scoffed at all religion. Though his dying grandfather had begged for a priest, he had never seen a better reason for belief in the survival of the human soul than the blind animal dread of death. The human soul—

  But Alphamega had to be something else than human.

  He found himself pondering all the perplexing evidence of that. Frankie Bard had brought him stories too crazy for belief. She had somehow talked to Belcraft across many hundred miles. She had revived and healed the wounded Mexican after his death under severe interrogation. Mickey Harris, drunk one night at the club, had cursed her as a witch too tough for anything to kill.

  The laws of her being were all unknown. He found no way to grasp what she was, nor even any sane reason why she should matter to him now. Yet he felt haunted more and more by that unaccountable dread that she faced new danger, too deadly even for her.

  Excitement stirred the pueblito when a high-flying American spy plane located what was left of the jet and American agents came to guide Mexican officials to the spot. News of that gave him an uneasy night. The camshaft from Torreón had never come. He was still stuck here, next door to the investigation.

  The garage owner drove out in search of salvage and came back to tell of two bodies found in the wreckage. One was the missing security officer, the other perhaps the Mexican convict, though its state of decay made identification difficult. Those offered rewards had grown larger and still larger; many American millions for recovery of the missing heiress; many hundred thousand for the arrest of that mysterious third passenger, or even for proof of his identity.

  He wanted to catch a bus or vanish into el campo, but he had let that illogical trust in his luck keep him here too long. The time for flight had gone. He had to play Jim Gibson, keep on joking with the campesinos and looking for odd pebbles in the arroyo.

  Somehow, though the camshaft was always still to come manaña, his luck held. The police and the visiting Americans came to doubt that anybody could have lived through the crash. The missing heiress and her captor must have been dropped off to meet confederates at some secret airstrip before it happened.

  Next day a truck rolled through the pueblo, carrying twisted fragments of the jet toward Torreón . The heiress vanished from the news, replaced by reports and denials that a sudden outbreak of the Enfield organism in South Africa had wiped out the whole population of a black homeland.

  Though still he felt curiously secure, that dim concern for the child kept on nagging, until one night he saw her again in another dream. If such visions were no more than dreams. She had been somewhere far away. Trying to return, she was lost in the dark of space, out where she could see the roundness of the planet and the dazzle of the sun On its side.

  The thread of her life had drawn too thin to guide her home, and she was seeking help from the man she called Panchito. It was Panchito who had brought her body from the fallen avión to the place where she had left it. Searching for him or the path he had followed there, she had come up El Escorpión instead.

  “No scorpion now.”

  He saw her happiness to see how completely he had healed, but that faded when she found the color of hope gone from around him. She knew he couldn’t guide her home. He shared her sick despair. Not for herself, but for the whole round world beneath her. If she failed to reach her body, to make it live again, to finish her mission for El Querido Vic, then his life and hers were wasted.

  He felt her joy when she found Panchito’s mind and then the path he had taken from the wreck. He followed as she perceived it. The jolting ride across the dry laguna to the highway. The long drive south. The turn at the bridge. The climb through the brown foothills toward the saw-toothed summits. The dark tunnel cut into the cliff.

  He came with her back to Panchito. They found him sitting on the sharp-smelling green stuff he had cut to make a bed for her, her stiffened body in his arms. After the icy night, it was very cold. He held it hard against his heart, praying for it to live again.

  She tried once more to slip inside it, but all the machines of her being had been too badly crushed when the avión fell. The sleeping Sax had taught her how to repair the damage to Panch
ito and to El Escorpión, but she knew no skills to remake herself.

  Together, they felt Panchito sob and saw the stains of tears across the dark grime on his unshaven face. Sharing her hopelessness and pain, he wept with her for Sax and El Querido Vic, and for all the sad world Vic had wanted her to aid.

  Perhaps—

  He saw new images in her mind, things too strange even for a dream. They sprang from the desperate hope that help might come from the far-off children of fire if she kept on begging the greatness of her need.

  Those were images wrapped in strangeness, even to her, shadow-forms shaped more like dancing flame than anything she had known, living in the strange places of their strange city where it turned like a giant wheel of fire around the spinning brightness and the dreadful blackness that had twisted space and swallowed a star.

  Those unknowable children of fire had promised life and new learning for her, if she would stay with them. Even wearing no bodies she could see, wrapped in their frightening fire that seemed to cover only beating hearts of fire, they had shone with more than fire, glowing with a love she understood.

  They were her own kindred, akin because the dear Vic had made her able to share their strangeness. They were very wise. They would surely know the secret working of her body.

  Perhaps, if she went back to beg again—

  Red danger flared across the tunnel mouth. Through the fixed and staring eyes of Panchito, she saw a man standing there, his face dark and cruel and grinning.

  Bright mirrors hid his eyes, but she knew his cruel hands from the interrogation cell. Stark and black against that red-blazing fog, he raised an ugly gun.