“So she appealed to your sense of honor,” Jen remarked.
“’Pon my word she did. Fortunately for you, that was not all she relied upon. Other words were spoken. ‘Reward’ being among them, I decided it was worth burning a day or two looking for you.
“Having spent some time on this world and acquired an understanding of certain of its ways, I managed to track your wandering iceboat’s tracks to a hot spring island. There I found evidence pointing to the recent visit of a clandestine native hunting party. Also human spoor, but no sign of your rented craft or you. Knowing what I do about the Tran, I came to some assumptions. Iceboat tracks leading straightaway from Arsudun and not just from the island confirmed my suspicions.
“That presented a new problem. I knew that no matter how fast and low I came up in a modern skimmer on you and your new friends, they would have ample time to put knives to your throats before I could be certain of taking all of them out, or even talking to them. I was at a bit of a loss how to proceed until I came across the solitary tarqan.
“Now, a tarqan’s dangerous when it’s on the move, but not so much when it’s feeding. I managed to sneak up on that one. Adept Tran can pretty well steer them where they want them to go by applying heat to certain areas of their body. I had some chemical instant heat paks in the skimmer’s supply locker. They did the job. I knew the hunting party that had taken you would respond defensively to an approach by a tarqan, but they wouldn’t connect its presence to you or to a rescue attempt. In the fading daylight I was able to draw close without being seen. After that I was able to get in among them before they had time to realize what was happening.
“I would’ve preferred to stay on the tarqan and pick them off from a distance, but I knew that before I could get them all,” he concluded as casually as if describing a day’s excursion in a park, “they would have had plenty of time to cut off your heads.”
He bit back down into whatever it was that he had cooked over the fire. Arik’s stomach chose that moment to say hello and, by the way, he was starving, and could he perhaps do something about it? Jen was undoubtedly no better off.
“Could I ask you…” He indicated the hunk of well-seared flesh. It smelled wonderful. “Jen and I haven’t had anything to eat since yesterday.” He tried hard not to salivate, knowing that if he did so dripping saliva would freeze hard to his lower lip and chin.
“Bless my soul, I’ve forgotten my manners.” From the lump he was chewing on, September promptly carved off slices of cooked flesh for both of them.
Arik bit hungrily into his. Next to him Jen was chowing down with an enthusiasm that was anything but ladylike. With a flavor that was somewhere between pork and undercooked beef, the blackened flesh was delicious.
“I’m surprised that you would have room in your backpack for raw meat,” he observed, “though on second thought I suppose keeping it frozen isn’t a problem here.”
“It ain’t frozen, feller-me-lad,” September informed him casually. “It’s fresh.”
“Fresh?” Jen stared at the giant, her slab of seared flesh halfway to her lips. “Fresh what? Some local food?”
“In a manner of speaking, young lass.” September nodded in the direction of the destroyed Virin iceboat. “In a difficult situation on a world like this one makes use of whatever is available. Not just here on Tran-ky-ky. I’ve been in awkward circumstances before and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the course of a tolerably long lifetime, it’s that meat is meat.”
Rising slightly from his sitting position, Arik was able to get a better look at what lay just beyond the fire. Along with the giant’s pack and pistol he was able to make out a larger, more irregular object. It was the corpse of the Virin commander Draz-hode.
It had been neatly and very professionally butchered.
Slowly, he removed a half-chewed piece of meat from his mouth. In the flickering light from the fire it looked exactly like any other piece of cooked meat. Next to him, Jen had not so much as paused in her voracious masticating despite September’s matter-of-fact identification of what it was that she was consuming.
This is not impossible, he admonished himself sternly. All you had to do was turn off your brain while leaving your digestive system running. Slipping the meat back between his lips he resumed chewing while simultaneously doing his best to stop thinking. His stomach thanked him.
To help take his mind off the fact that he was violating two and possible four of the principle canons of contemporary civilized behavior, he confronted the giant with a question that had been bothering him for a while now.
“Why are we sitting here eating in the dark and the cold like this? Why haven’t you signaled your skimmer to come fetch us and take us back to the station?”
By way of reply September unfastened one of his sturdy survival suit’s external pockets. Removing a small handful of electronics, he tossed them across the fire. Arik had to drop his deviant steak to make the catch. Still, several of the pieces missed his fingers to scatter on the ice. Too many pieces, he thought with sudden unease.
“This component is broken,” he murmured as he and Jen studied the debris.
September nodded. “Sure can’t fool you, young feller-me-lad. During the dust-up, that module took the full force of a blow from a Tran battle-axe. The flat side of the axe, fortunately. Only bruised me, but it sure made a mess of my communicator.”
Jen gaped at him. “So we’re marooned again? Except that now there’s three of us, and we’re that much farther from Brass Monkey?”
“It is a bit of a hike back, yes.” Setting his food aside, September reached behind him and hauled his backpack into the firelight. From its depths he withdrew a pair of enormous ice skates. The blades were not stone, and had been fashioned out of duralloy or some similar metal.
“Local government issue. Wish I’d had them with me a year ago.” Illustrating how they fit, he slipped one over the integrated right boot of his survival suit. Wiggling it caused the triple blades to catch the light of the fire. It dawned on Arik that the skate’s design had been modeled after a Tran foot.
“Special coating baked onto the blades reduces friction to next to nothing,” September told them proudly. “You can make pretty good time with a pair of these. And with this.” Digging into the pack once more he pulled out a thin sheet of carboflex. A contiguous seal was visible along the edge.
“This attaches to a survival suit. Fits in a roll over your arms and across your back. Mimics Tran dan.” Extending both long arms out to his sides he made slightly awkward flapping motions. “Catches the wind and propels you across the ice. Just like one of the natives.”
“Clever.” Jen eyed the commodious pack. “Where’s ours?”<
br />
“Well now, lass, that does present a bit of a problem. This is emergency gear. It’s intended to allow someone who knows what they’re doing to maybe make it back to civilization in the event of a complete skimmer or iceboat breakdown. I’m afraid I only have the one set, for me.”
The newlyweds exchanged a glance. “Then what are we to do?” Arik asked. “Wait here for you to return with your skimmer?”
“Hardly. There are enough fancy ice sculptures in Brass Monkey without adding the two of you to the gallery. You’re coming with me.”
“How?” Jen considered their rescuer’s size. “Can you carry us?”
“Not while trying to stay upright on the ice while maneuvering artificial dan. But in the course of the past year I’ve gotten pretty good at improvising.”
The flat ice-skid the big man threw together from the wreckage of the Virin iceboat was uncomfortable and fragile. At any moment Arik expected it to come apart under him and Jen. Salvaged pika-pedan ropes attached it to September’s waist. With his arms held outspread and the artificial dan attached at wrist, arms, sides and waist, he could both pull the sled and catch the ubiquitous wind.
Though they started out slow, soon the three of them were all but flying across the ice. Buried beneath appropriated Tran clothing and eyeing September through his protective face mask, Arik wondered how long the giant could keep his arms extended straight out to the sides. Long enough, it developed, for the skid’s two recumbent passengers to feel more bumps and jolts than they had before in their lives.
By the time they reached the small cold spire of an island where September had parked his skimmer, the both of them were sore from head to heel. Though their rented daysuits had by now chemically redlined, the layers of Tran fur and leather taken from their dead abductors had kept them from freezing. Aching and exhausted, they stumbled gratefully into the waiting warmth of the skimmer’s interior. With the inadequate pilot’s seat groaning beneath his weight, September set a course back to the Commonwealth outpost.
There they discovered that the giant had been right about something else. Commercial KK-drive ships did not linger on behalf of passengers who missed their assigned shuttle. Not even on behalf of rich ones. The next starship was not due to visit Tran-ky-ky for a month. Until then the newlyweds would have to listen like everyone else to their rescuer grumble and complain as he stalked the heated halls of the station. They would have to endure this just as they would have to endure surroundings that were considerably less appealing than those they had planned to enjoy on the balance of their travels. At least, however, they were alive and had each other.
Even if it was for as frigid a honeymoon as any two citizens of the Commonwealth had ever experienced.
****
BOW SHOCK
Gregory Benford
Ralph slid into the booth where Irene was already waiting, looking perky and sipping on a bottle of Snapple yea. “How’d it…” she let the rest slide away, seeing his face.
“Tell me something really awful, so it won’t make today seem so bad.”
She said carefully, “Yes sir, coming right up, sir. Um…” A wicked grin. “Once I had a pet bird that committed suicide by sticking his head between the cage bars.”
“W- what…?”
“Okay, you maybe need worse? Can do.” A flash of dazzling smile. “My sister forgot to feed her pet gerbils, so one died. Then, the one that was alive ate its dead friend.”
Only then did he get that she was kidding, trying to josh him out of his mood. He laughed heartily. “Thanks, I sure needed that.”
She smiled with relief and turned her head, swirling her dirty-blonde hair around her head in a way that made him think of a momentary tornado. Without a word her face gave him sympathy, concern, inquiry, stiff-lipped support-all in a quick gush of expressions that skated across her face, her full, elegantly lipsticked red mouth collaborating with the eggshell blue eyes.
They followed him intently as he described the paper he had found that left his work in the dust.
“Astronomy is about getting there first?” she asked wonderingly.
“Sometimes. This time, anyway.” After that he told her about the talk with the department chairman-the whole scene, right down to every line of dialog, which he would now remember forever, apparently-and she nodded.
“It’s time to solicit letters of recommendation for me, but to who? My work’s already out of date. I…don’t know what to do now,” he said. Not a great last line to a story, but the truth.
“What do you feel like doing?”
He sighed. “Redouble my efforts-“
“When you’ve lost sight of your goal?” It was, he recalled, a definition of fanaticism, from a movie.
“My goal is to be an astronomer,” he said stiffly.
“That doesn’t have to mean academic, though.”
“Yeah, but NASA jobs are thin these days.” An agency that took seven years to get to the moon the first time, from a standing start, was now spending far more dollars to do it again in fifteen years.
“You have a lot of skills, useful ones.”
“I want to work on fundamental things, not applied.”
She held up the cap of her Snapple iced tea and read from the inner side with a bright, comically forced voice, “Not a winner, but here’s your Real Fact number 237. The number of times a cricket chirps in 15 seconds, plus 37, will give you the current air temperature.”
“In Fahrenheit, I’ll bet,” he said, wondering where she was going with this.
“Lots of ‘fundamental’ scientific facts are just that impressive. Who cares?”
“Um, have we moved on to a discussion of the value of knowledge?”
“Valuable to who, is my point.”
If she was going to quote stuff, so could he. “Look, Mark Twain said that the wonder of science is the bounty of speculation that comes from a single hard fact.”
“Can’t see a whole lot of bounty from here.” She gave him a wry smile, another hair toss. He had to admit, it worked very well on him.
“I like astronomy.”
“Sure, it just doesn’t seem to like you. Not as much, anyway.”
“So I should…?” Let her fill in the answer, since she was full of them today. And he doubted the gerbil story.
“Maybe go into something that rewards your skills.”
“Like…?”
“Computers. Math. Think big! Try to sign on with a hedge fund, do their analysis.”
“Hedge funds…” He barely remembered what they did. “They look for short-term trading opportunities in the market?”
“Right, there’s a lot of math in that. I read up on it online.” She was sharp, that’s what he liked about her. “That data analysis you’re doing, it’s waaay more complicated than what H
erb Linzfield does.”
“Herb…?”
“Guy I know, eats in the same Indian buffet place some of us go for lunch.” Her eyes got veiled and he wondered what else she and Herb had talked about. Him? “He calculates hedges on bonds.”
“Corporate or municipal?” Just to show he wasn’t totally ignorant of things financial.
“Uh, I think corporate.” Again the veiled eyes.
“I didn’t put in six years in grad school and get a doctorate to-“
“I know, honey,” eyes suddenly warm, “but you’ve given this a real solid try now.”
“A try? I’m not done.”
“Well, what I’m saying, you can do other things. If this doesn’t…work out.”
Thinking, he told her about the labyrinths of academic politics. The rest of the UC Irvine astro types did nearby galaxies, looking for details of stellar evolution, or else big scale cosmological stuff. He worked in between, peering at exotic beasts showing themselves in the radio and microwave regions of the spectrum. It was a competitive field and he felt it fit him. So he spelled out what he thought of as The Why. That is, why he had worked hard to get this far. For the sake of the inner music it gave him, he had set aside his personal life, letting affairs lapse and dodging any longterm relationship.
Jim Baen’s Universe Page 4