by James Axler
But she didn’t want the job. She liked, respected and tried not to pity Singh, who wasn’t in the chain of command nor responsible for the atrocities MAGOG left in its wake. She didn’t want to cut the ground from under her feet.
Neither did she want to get to like the job too much, even though she was acting more like a real physician for a more protracted period than at any time since Ryan and company had awakened her. And she especially didn’t want to come to view herself as part of MAGOG. Not when it meant identifying with the people who had enslaved her.
“Singh?”
Mildred’s heart performed some pretty odd aerobatics at the sound of the voice. Both women looked up at the door of Singh’s tiny office cubicle, where Captain Marc Helton stood. “Would you mind giving me a few minutes with Mildred, please?”
“No, Captain,” Singh said in an almost inaudible voice. Before Mildred could put her oar in, Singh jumped up and scuttled out.
Mildred made herself face the young officer. She had learned in the interim that when she encountered Helton in the burning ville he had been in the process of trying to rein in the men. Not supervising the destruction, as she had imagined.
So I wronged him. So what? It was only by degree. But standing there looking at his earnest, handsome, and at the moment painfully young-looking face, it was impossible for her to pretend that her only thoughts toward him were negative.
He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen.
“I don’t really have anything to say to you right now, Marc.” She marveled at how hard she sounded. She was a better actress than she gave herself credit for, if nothing else.
He shook his head. “Mildred, I’m sorry. Sorry you had to see that.”
“Sorry I had to? Or sorry that I did?”
“We couldn’t exactly keep it a secret. But I understand your scruples, your compassion. I honor you for them. I really do. But they’re part of the distant past now. The things we do now…are what our reality demands of us.
“And we aren’t doing this for ourselves. We’re doing it for future generations. So they can live in a better world than we’ll ever know. Someone’s got to start building it. We’ve taken it on—the General has taken it on, and so have those of us who have chosen, who have sworn, to follow him. And if we find ourselves forced to do things that leave stains on our souls, in the name of a better tomorrow, then we’re willing to pay that price. Or any other.”
He really was a puppy. Maybe with the mind of a Nobel laureate, but a puppy. She wanted to grab him and shake him and say, “Honey, honey, listen to yourself! You’ve got to know how trite and empty that all is!”
But he believed them.
“You’re doing what you think is right, I know,” she said. “But so were the men who blew up the world in the first place. Belief doesn’t make everything right, Marc.”
He frowned. Then he shut his eyes and shook his head. “I’m not explaining this well enough.”
He half turned away, slumped in the doorway, hammer-fisted himself on the leg. “Nuke blast! If only I knew what to say to make you see—”
She smiled feebly. “I feel just the same way.”
“Mebbe if you spoke to the General himself—”
“Don’t even go there. All I’d say is to ask him to let my people go.”
“Is that how you think of yourself and your friends? As prisoners?”
“Aren’t we? We were taken at gunpoint and rounded up like cattle—taken as slaves, Marc.”
He looked at her as if he was waiting for her to come to the point. She wasn’t getting through. He was a child of a world in which slavery was an everyday part of life, distasteful to some, accepted—at least its existence—by most. Just as he was of a world in which race prejudice was something that existed between man and mutie, where hardly anybody troubled themselves about a slight difference in melanin concentration, so long as you weren’t a taint.
What he had done to her and J.B. and Jak and Doc was like what he had done to the immigrants judged unfit to work on the track: unpleasant, regrettable, but duty. Part of the burden he’d taken on in pursuit of his dream, or the General’s anyway. Wat it wasn’t and couldn’t be was the obscene defilement, the literal denigration, that it was to her. To him, to almost everyone today, slavery had little or nothing to do with skin color. What it mainly had to do with was luck.
She shook her head and turned away as her eyes filled with tears. “Never mind.”
She felt his hand on her arm and whirled. He lifted it quickly. He looked as if she had slapped him.
“I’m sorry, Marc. But…please don’t.”
“But why, Mildred? I…like you. What’s wrong with expressing that?”
“Damn you, don’t play with me! In your eyes I’m just—just a fat old lady! Don’t you dare patronize me. Don’t play games.”
His eyes were big and round. “But you’re not. You’re an incredible person. Your warmth and wisdom, your knowledge, your dedication, your bravery. I admire you. You have greatness inside. And I—”
He shook his head. “I enjoy being with you.”
He reached for her face with his hands. She caught his wrists in grips of iron. “If you’re not playing with me, Marc, then a thousand times don’t keep this up. Please.”
She slowly moved his hands back toward his chest and released them. “I like you, too, Marc. But for right now, I think you’d better go.”
He left.
“ARE YOU GETTING anywhere, Captain?”
Marc stopped and spun in the narrow passageway. Out here you could really feel the train’s motion as it hurtled along the tracks, beneath a tormented sky. It felt like riding within a great living organism.
“What are you talking about, Hubertus?”
The intel chief smiled. As always, it made him look as if he were a tailor who’d forgotten he had a mouthful of pins. “With Mildred, of course.”
The young captain’s eyes narrowed and his hands knotted into fists. “You were instructed to probe her, Captain. For certain information. Have you made any progress whatever?”
“I didn’t ask her just now, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s a pity. The General has been most indulgent with those four. Scandalously so, I might say. But his patience won’t last forever. Our intelligence analysis indicates very persuasively that they have knowledge that could prove crucial to the realization of our grand program.”
“The Great Redoubt.”
“Among other things. Although the location of the redoubt itself might pale into insignificance beside…other things they know. The General’s forbearance won’t last forever. If gentler means fail to produce result, then we will be forced to subject Mildred and her friends to stiffer measures.”
“Lay a hand on her,” Marc said, “and I’ll shoot you myself.”
“Me? I who am nothing but an instrument of our General’s will, Captain? What of the grand design? What of your idealistic dreams?”
“I believe you heard me. Good night!”
Chapter Nineteen
The desert sky was cloudy, yet the morning was warm.
So was the rattler. And getting warmer by the second.
The dark lozenges running down its back, contrasting strongly with the dust-colored scales of its sides, identified it to Ryan as a Western diamondback. He knew the breed. They weren’t as aggressive and prone to attack for the pure pleasure of feeling their fangs sink into flesh as their darker, eastern cousins were. During snake season, his father’s barony of Front Royal in the Shens lost an average of one person per week to diamondback bites.
But the westerners were cranky enough. This one, pissed off anyway at being disturbed while sucking down solar energy on a nice flat piece of sandstone, was molting, and the sacs behind the obsidian-bead eyes were swollen huge with a winter’s accretion of venom. Their pressure, and the itch of shedding dead skin, made the six-foot rattler double savage.
It had him scoped, too.
It was reared back and flicking its tongue at him. It wasn’t rattling yet. From Ryan’s experience it might not. Crouching, dressed in just his jeans and boots and shirt with rolled up sleeves, Ryan tried to stay light on his feet, ready to dodge left or right if it struck.
He began to circle the snake to his left. His left arm was immobilized in a canvas sling. He actually could move it meaningfully, wiggle his fingers and everything, but without strength and not without pain. Still, he reckoned he had to only have cracked his collarbone in the fall, instead of busting it outright, for him to have this much use of it so soon after getting wounded. That, or the Little Ones possessed healing skills beyond even Mildred’s.
Which was entirely possible. The Ewoks were some eerie little bastards, for all their almost comical friendliness.
Trying to track the persistently annoying heat source, the diamondback came out of the neat, powerful coil in which Ryan had discovered it. This was the serpent equivalent of being off balance, and what Ryan had been counting on. It could no longer strike to maximum range.
He darted suddenly back to his right, lunged in, grabbed. He caught the snake’s tail just beneath its impressively long rattle. He yanked it off the ground with a smooth motion.
The rattler tried to double back to plant its spearlike fangs in his flesh. It was bastard mad. He could feel the muscles quivering violently beneath his hand as it tried to shake its tail to rattle its rage. They were like pulsing liquid steel.
The snake turned its arrow head left and right. Ryan turned his wrist deftly in the opposite direction to the snake’s every move. It couldn’t reach him. Quite.
So his reflexes and sure-handedness, and the depth perception he’d trained himself to have since losing an eye to his brother as a youth, were all back firmly in place. One more test remaining…
He swung the furious snake up in the air and let it go. As it came down writhing and rattling, he quick-drew his panga from his belt and struck. The head flew free in a gush of dark blood. The body landed in the middle of a clump of bunch grass, still doubling spastically left and right.
“Bravo,” a voice behind him piped. “Very impressive, Ryan Cawdor.”
He turned. The Little Ones’ shaman Far Walker sat on his haunches ten feet away, gazing at the human with wide, wise eyes.
“Thanks.” Ryan knelt, plucked a handful of dry grass, wiped snake blood from the heavy blade. He scrubbed it with sand to make sure it was all the way clean before returning it to his scabbard. Then he rose and picked up the decapitated body. It doubled as if still trying to bite him with phantom fangs.
“Good eating,” he observed. “Tastes just like chicken.”
“The protein will do your healing processes good,” agreed the tubby little creature. “Regretfully we cannot provide a sufficiency to you.”
No. The food his hosts had provided Ryan had been usable by his omnivore body, quite nourishing by the evidence, and even tasty. For various types of grain, grass, herbs and just plain weeds, spiced with occasional piñon nuts. Naturally—or as close to natural as anything about the friendly muties was—the Little Ones were strict vegetarians. But more than that, they were absolute pacifists. It was hard-wired into their genes by their creators, Far Walker had explained.
“Far Walker,” Ryan said, “there’s one thing I’ve been wondering about.”
“Ask, friend Ryan.”
“How in the name of glowing nuke shit did your people ever get the name Little Ones?”
“Ah.” The mutie nodded sagely. Which was only appropriate; he was a sage, after all. Eldest among his people, although Ryan declined to ask how old that was, exactly, for fear the answer would be something like, “Four.”
“We worship your people as our creators. We try to keep it low-key around you, to avoid embarrassing a beloved guest.” His old eyes laughed as he said this. He laughed a lot. He was that kind of sage, Ryan reckoned. “Our racial memory stretches back far, and far. Beyond even the time our ancestors were captured and taken to the labs so that your people could work upon us the magic they called genetic engineering—from these very cliffs were we taken, and to here, in time, forever changed, were returned.”
Ryan nodded. He surmised that the predark whitecoats, with time and unaccountable black budgets weighing heavy on their hands, had tried to breed a rad-resistant race of servants. Even Mildred shook her head at the wilder excesses of certain scientists of her time, like blowing up the planet. Doc’s accounts of his experiences in the bowels of the Totality Concept and its Operation Chronos, the most supersecret whitecoat projects of all, were fragmentary and hallucinatory; but they always brought to Ryan’s mind the phrase power without responsibility. Like mad children possessed of near-infinite power, the whitecoats from before the Nuke were capable of damned near anything, and seemed to have done most of it.
“When it came time to name ourselves, for we were a new thing upon the Earth, and our forebears, lacking the power and knowledge of words, had never before possessed a name, we searched that racial memory. And from that collective unconscious, or perhaps preconscious, bubbled up one phrase—a single sentence we had heard repeated by your ancestors so many times that, without or even understanding it, it had imprinted itself, as it were, upon our very DNA.”
“And that was?”
“‘Those little ones sure are cute.’”
“You’re laughing at me.”
“Certainly.” Far Walker clutched his fat buff belly and laughed out loud, to prove it was true. “But it is also the truth.”
Ryan shook his head.
“You’re healing up nicely, One Eye Chills,” Far Walker said.
It was the name the Apaches had given him. Ryan didn’t know if they’d come up with it on their own; their sense of humor, for whatever reason, was a lot like that he’d encountered among Indians who had trusted him enough to open up in his presence. Their perceptions were Indianlike in a lot of other ways, as well.
But then again he might have babbled it in his delirium. Or the shaman might have skimmed it out of his mind while inhabiting his dreams. Ryan never doubted for a moment, after his wits returned, that the Little Ones’ shaman had done so. Had it been almost anybody else Ryan would have been at the least creeped out—and maybe made chilling-mad—by the notion of somebody wandering around inside his skull with him. But he trusted Far Walker not to intrude upon his mind and soul.
“Thanks to you and your people,” Ryan said.
They began to walk back toward the Little Ones’ ville, which consisted of burrows dug right next to the Big Ditch. Some actually opened onto the canyon. Evidently Ewoks weren’t much given to sleepwalking. Ryan still carried his dead snake. He was serious about eating it. Just the feel of meat made his stomach rumble.
“You are most welcome, friend Ryan, as you are always welcome as our honored guest. Understand, please, that we are not—how would you say?—altruists. But we feel a great debt to your kind. They took much from us, it is true, but it is in our hearts that the gifts they gave us, of mind and speech, far outweighed our loss. We know you didn’t, personally, have anything to do with it. We also know many of your people are to be feared, and never trusted.”
“You hit the eye and not the brow, there,” Ryan said, quoting a Russkie saying he’d picked up during the time he and his companions spent in that land.
“Yet we have come to like you, in person, as we admire your true heart and strong spirit.”
“You’re soaping me now.”
Far Walker nodded. “Trying to. But I speak straight from the heart. We count you our friend, and hope you reckon us likewise.”
“You did save my life.”
“Indeed. And please understand, you owe us nothing for that. But still…when you are finished healing—not yet!—we would ask a favor of you.”
“Well, why don’t you go ahead and get to the trigger of the blaster, not keep stepping all around the muzzle?”
“We want you to slay a monster.”<
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Ryan stopped. “A monster?”
“A monster. Perhaps not a terribly big monster, by your standards. No more than two thousand pounds’ mass, and surely less than nine feet in height. But immense by our standards.”
“So, a ton and less than ten feet. What kind of monster?”
“A bear. A most voracious bear. We lose many folk to its appetite—young and adults alike.”
Ryan jutted out his chin and bobbed his head slowly, thoughtfully. “A bear. No bigger than a big griz or a polo bear. My Steyr longblaster’s a little light for a bear that size, but I know how to place my shots to make ’em count.”
“Not so fast, friend Ryan. I have no wish to mislead you. This isn’t just any bear.”
“It’s not, huh?”
“It is an armored bear.”
“What does that mean, exactly?”
“Its body is covered with scales. Some as large as your hand. We do not know whether they are made of bone, or just horny hide. But they are very hard and tough. Such, I fear, that even bullets from your mighty firestick, in caliber 7.62 mm, NATO, would bounce harmlessly off them.”
“Now, isn’t that just ace?” Ryan rubbed his chin. As usual, stubble rasped beneath his fingers, just a half-day past shaving himself clean. “What if I say no?”
Far Walker spread his three-fingered hands. “As I have said, you are our beloved and honored guest. We will shelter and heal you as long as you wish to remain among us. Of course, in so doing you run the same risk as all of us, that the armored bear will invade your burrow and eat your head.”
“Makes sense.”
“But as I said, we are not altruists, nor do we ask this great deed of you without offering something in return.”
“Which is?”
“If you slay the monster—and, well, live—I shall guide you on a spirit walk, reveal to you the fate and whereabouts of your friends. I can even show you possible paths into the future for you and they—although such ways are perilous, and quickly obscured by fog.”