Coyote Destiny

by Allen Steele

  She was direct and to the point, with little patience for niceties. Fine with me; I wasn’t in the mood, either. “No, it isn’t. Official business. I’m searching for someone who I have reason to believe now lives here…a suspect in an ongoing criminal investigation.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “If this is a criminal investigation, then why wasn’t I informed?”

  From the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Captain Hansbach disembarking from his craft. Although he’d apparently overheard this part of the conversation, he didn’t come over to join us but lingered near the ladder. He was trying to distance himself from me as much as possible, if only for the sake of deniability. The blueshirts stamped their boots against the snow, clutching their rifle straps and obviously wishing they were anywhere but here.

  “It’s a classified matter,” I said, using the half-truthful excuse I’d concocted during the flight. “The federal government has been keeping it as quiet as possible, so as not to tip off our quarry. That’s why no one here was informed that we were coming.” I paused. “Sorry, but we’ve had to be careful.”

  This didn’t seem to satisfy Stanley, but before she could respond, Copperfield stepped in. “Of course we understand. Whatever assistance we can give…” He gave Stanley a sidelong look, and although the frown didn’t leave her face, she nodded reluctantly. However, it was clear that she didn’t like having blueshirts or generals stomping into town unannounced; I hoped that I wouldn’t have any trouble from her.

  “Who is it that you’re looking for?” she asked.

  I reached into my parka, pulled out a pad. “His name is David Laird. He’s also gone by the name of Peter Desilitz, but…”

  “There’s no one here by that name.” Stanley glanced at Copperfield. “There is no one here with that name, is there, Gerald?”

  The mayor reluctantly shook his head; he appeared to defer to his chief proctor, and I wondered whether she was Manuelito’s real power. But I didn’t have time or inclination to deal with small-town politics. “As I was saying,” I continued, “it’s possible that he may have assumed another identity. Our information leads us to believe that he came here about three years ago from Defiance. I realize that Manuelito is small enough that you know everyone here…”

  “Our population is only 152,” Copperfield said. “We pretty much know everyone by sight.”

  “Then perhaps you’d recognize his face.” Opening the pad, I fumbled at its keyboard with my gloved hand until I accessed the menu. “Here, take a look…”

  David Laird’s mug shots, the ones taken of him by New Brighton proctors when he was arrested at the spaceport in C.Y. 16, appeared on the screen. I touched another button, and they coalesced to form a hologram that rose above the pad. The image was old, though, and I could only pray that Laird hadn’t changed so much in the last seven years that he’d be utterly unrecognizable.

  But I didn’t need to worry. The moment Copperfield and Stanley saw the holo, their expressions changed. The mayor’s mouth fell open, and even the chief proctor looked as if she’d just received the shock of her life. Neither of them said anything for a moment, though, but simply stared at Laird’s image in dumbstruck surprise.

  “I take it that you know him,” I said.

  “Yes…yes, we do.” Copperfield struggled to recover himself. “But there must be some sort of mistake.”

  “That’s Joe Ross,” Stanley said. “He moved here from Midland about three years ago. But…” She shook her head, no longer quite as obstinate as she’d been only moments earlier. “Are you sure this is the man you’re looking for?”

  “His real name is David Laird,” I repeated, “and, yes, I’m sure.” I hesitated, then decided that they needed to know the rest. “He was a member of Living Earth, who may have participated in the bombing of the New Guinea space elevator. He escaped to Coyote almost seven years ago but was arrested by the New Brighton proctors on charges of attempted assault with a deadly weapon. The authorities couldn’t deport him, though, so they put a control patch on him and released him on probation, and it was during that time that he built the bomb that destroyed the Robert E. Lee.”

  Stanley gave me a querulous look. “I thought it was Alberto Cosenza who blew up the Lee.” She glanced at Copperfield; the mayor’s face had become grim, but he said nothing.

  “Cosenza carried the bomb aboard the Lee, yes…but it was Laird who actually put it together for him. The authorities suspected that he might have had something to do with the bombing, but since they didn’t have any evidence, in the end they were forced to let him go.” I paused. “I can’t tell you how or why, but we know better now. He was responsible for the Lee disaster…of that, we’re more than reasonably certain.”

  Copperfield slowly let out his breath. When I looked at him again, I saw that his fists were clenched at his sides. “My older brother was aboard the Lee. We’d moved to Coyote only a few months earlier, and he was on his way back to Earth to fetch the rest of our family.” His voice trembled with repressed anger as he said this, and there was cold fury in his eyes when he turned to Stanley. “We trusted him, Emma. Damn it, we…”

  “I know, Gerry. I know.” She laid a comforting hand upon his arm as she looked at me again. “General, I appreciate what you’re trying to tell us, but there’s something you need to know. Joe Ross…or whoever you say he is…is one of the most respected members of our community. And believe me, that’s saying a lot. Many people here came to Manuelito in the first place because something had gone wrong with their lives, and they wanted a fresh start. We…”

  “Look, I don’t care…”

  “Let me finish, please.” Her expression hardened; once again, she became the chief proctor. “One thing that’s unique about this town is that nearly everyone here has converted to Sa’Tong. It’s not mandatory, of course…there’s a small nonsectarian church for those who’ve chosen not to do so…but, all the same, every person who’s moved here has agreed to abide by the Codicils, regardless of whether they’ve read the Sa’Tong-tas or not.” A faint smile. “Believe me, I’ve got the easiest job of any proctor in the Federation. I could count on one hand the number of arrests I’ve made since I’ve been here, and maybe have a finger or two left over.”

  “She’s not exaggerating.” Copperfield calmed down a bit; his right hand was no longer clenched into a fist as he reached up to absently brush back his hair. “Manuelito is a decent community. We trust each other so much that no one ever bothers to lock their doors. So when we tell you that Joe is someone who’s…” He stopped, shook his head. “No. There’s got to be a mistake.”

  “Sorry, sir…no mistake.” I nodded toward Laird’s holo, still floating above my pad. “This is definitely the man I’m looking for, and you’ve identified him as a local resident. Now where do I find him?”

  The mayor and the chief proctor didn’t reply at once. They gave each other an uncertain glance, almost as if silently debating whether or not to tell me. “Joe Ross doesn’t live here in town,” Copperfield said at last. “Fact is, it’s what he does that makes him one of the most trusted people we have. That’s why…”

  “Where is he?” I was quickly losing patience.

  Chief Stanley sighed, then stepped away from me. “Here…I’ll show you.”

  I followed her as she walked around from behind the skiff. On the other side of the spacecraft were the ice-covered breakwaters that had been built along the shoreline. Beyond them were the Providence Straits, and in the distance, several miles away, lay King Philip.

  She pointed toward the island, and at first I didn’t see what she was trying to get me to see. Then I realized that it was a tiny spire rising from the southernmost tip of King Philip: a lighthouse, erected at the mouth of the Straits to help fishing boats find their way home.

  “Joe lives out there, at the lighthouse,” Stanley said. “With his wife and baby.”

  Of the dozens of islands that dot Coyote’s global maze of rivers, channels, bays, and
straits, King Philip is the oddest, if in name only. Many people have asked why one landmass would bear the name of a monarch, while nearly all others—with the exception of those first explored and settled by Coyote’s original colonists—had been christened after Native American tribes and historical figures. So why is this single island different?

  Yet King Philip is not the exception that it seems. It was named after the seventeenth-century Pokanoket leader Philip, whose father, the tribal sachem Massasoit, had given him an Anglo-Saxon name out of fondness for the English settlers of the Plymouth colony. But Philip had no love for the white man; once he came to power among the Pokanokets, he proclaimed himself to be a king, then united the other tribes of New England to launch a bloody war against the European invaders that came close to wiping out the first American colonies.

  Perhaps it was fitting that David Laird sought refuge on an island named after someone who’d caused such widespread death and destruction.

  Chief Stanley took me out there herself, on a small wooden boat that she and her husband Paul used for sport fishing during the warm seasons. It had an outboard motor, and there was enough room for the three blueshirts I’d brought with me. Mayor Copperfield could have joined us as well, but he decided not to; he was heartsick at what he’d been told, and I don’t think he wanted to see a trusted member of his little community put under arrest and taken away. I wish I could say that I didn’t blame him, but his feelings or Stanley’s were none of my concern.

  It took about an hour for the boat to make the short journey across the Providence Straits to King Philip. It was almost dusk by then, with dark grey clouds obscuring the setting sun. Buoys floated in a ragged line down the center of the Straits, marking the safe passage through its reefs and shoals. The frigid waters were choppy, a harsh wind out of the northeast kicking salt spray against our faces. While the blueshirts huddled together in the bow, their heads lowered beneath the raised hoods of their parkas, Stanley and I sat next to each other in the stern, and she passed the time by telling me a little more about the man she’d known as Joe Ross.

  Laird had come to Navajo aboard a freighter carrying livestock from Defiance. By then, he’d apparently decided to ditch his Peter Desilitz identity and create a new one. As Joe Ross, he was a down-on-his-luck drifter who’d decided to make his way to Manuelito in search of work. He found a job as a longshoreman, hauling cargo to and from ships that docked at the town’s commercial wharf, while living in a boardinghouse near the waterfront. During this time, he was something of a loner; rarely seen in the taverns, he kept to himself and didn’t have many friends.

  It appeared that loneliness finally got to him, though, because after a while he joined a Sa’Tong-tas study group that convened once a week at the town hall. It was there that he met Amy Atkins, a recent widow whose late husband had been the lighthouse keeper on King Philip. George Atkins’s boat had disappeared in a storm while returning home from Manuelito, and Amy had assumed the task of maintaining the lighthouse on her own. She had also recently converted to Sa’Tong, and it was while studying its teachings that she met and fell in love with Joe Ross.

  The two were married six months later, in a civil ceremony presided over by the local justice of the peace. Joe Ross quit his job as a longshoreman and moved out to King Philip, where he took over the role of lighthouse keeper. That came as no surprise to anyone; Amy was pregnant by then, and she’d never been as good at maintaining the light as her first husband had been. What was a revelation was how well Joe learned to handle his new line of work. No evening went by without the light coming on, and no fog rolled in upon the Providence Straits that wasn’t heralded by the King Philip horn. The buoys were kept in good condition, and marine weather reports from the lighthouse were prompt and accurate.

  But that wasn’t all. Last summer, a catwhaling ship on its way home from the Great Equatorial River lost its bearings due to an inexperienced pilot’s error and foundered on the reefs off the east coast of Narragansett, twelve miles south of King Philip. This happened in the early hours of the morning, and the proctor on duty in Manuelito wasn’t awake to hear the distress signal transmitted by the stricken ship (Chief Stanley later fired him for sleeping on the job). But Joe Ross had been up late, reading in the den, when he heard the ship’s SOS come over the wireless, which he kept switched on at all times. He immediately woke up Amy and told her what had happened, but while she was on the phone with the chief, Joe himself took action. He ran down to the lighthouse dock, untied the family’s boat, and set out on his own for the ship, which he knew to be taking on water and sinking fast.

  “Joe saved seven men that night,” Emma Stanley told me as she guided her boat toward King Philip. “He got there on his own, with nothing more than GPS coordinates and his knowledge of the area to help him find his way. The crew was already in the water by the time he got to them, floating around in their life jackets and about to be swept away by the channel current. He hauled them all aboard even though it put him at risk himself…his boat isn’t any bigger than mine, and believe me, eight men will capsize you if you’re not careful…and managed to get them back to King Philip while I was still getting our search-and-rescue team out of bed.”

  “So you’re saying he’s a hero,” I replied.

  “Damn right, he’s a hero.” She didn’t look at me, but instead stared straight ahead. By then, the lighthouse dock was only a few hundred yards away. “He earned the respect of every person in town that night. And he didn’t have to do this, either. He could’ve just sat back and waited until the SAR team got there. But if he had, I don’t think those guys would still be alive.”

  I didn’t reply. There was little I could say that wouldn’t offend her. The chief seemed to realize this, for after a moment she went on. “I know what you’ve told me, and I have no choice but to believe you. But sometimes, y’know, a man gets a chance to make up for the bad things he’s done in the past, and maybe that’s what Joe…or David, or Peter, or whatever you say his real name is…has been trying to do with his life. You ought to remember that when you and your boys take him away.”

  A silence fell between us, one that lasted long after Stanley pulled her boat alongside the floating dock and one of the soldiers climbed out to tie us up. A long flight of wooden steps led up the steep, rocky point to a small wood-frame house perched at its top. The lighthouse, a white-painted concrete cone sixty feet tall, rose beside the house, connected to it by an enclosed walkway.

  Not much grew on this side of King Philip, but when we reached the top of the stairs and walked toward the house, I spotted what appeared to be a tidy little garden, buried beneath the snow but marked by tomato stakes and a trellis, which had been cultivated just below the porch that wrapped around the channel side of the house. Steps led to the front door, and above it was an awning from which a small, hand-painted sign swung in the evening breeze: WELCOME, FRIEND. SA’TONG QO. Lights gleamed from within the windows; the odor of woodsmoke told of logs burning in the fireplace. All very warm and inviting.

  “Let me go first,” Chief Stanley said quietly, when we reached the porch steps. “Might make things easier.” She glanced back at the blueshirts. “And I’d appreciate it, too, if you’d tell your men to wait outside.”

  I hesitated. I hadn’t brought a Militia squad all the way from Midland just for show; they had a duty to perform, as distasteful as it might be to the chief. But I’d have to do things her way if I wanted any cooperation from her. Besides, I wasn’t unarmed; my gun was in its holster, hidden by my parka.

  So I reluctantly nodded and left the blueshirts standing at the bottom of the steps while I followed her onto the porch. The chief had barely touched the brass doorknocker, though, when the door opened from within, and a woman peered out at us.

  “Hello?” she asked. “Who’s…? Oh, Emma! What a surprise!”

  “Hello, Amy.” Emma Stanley tried to make her tone pleasant, but it wasn’t working. “Sorry to disturb you, but…well, somet
hing’s come up, I’m afraid.”

  Amy Atkins was one of those petite, trim ladies whose age couldn’t easily be determined: older than she looked, yet not quite as young as she seemed. She wore her dark hair long, with bangs that she constantly brushed out of lively brown eyes. From somewhere behind her, I heard a child’s voice pipe up. “Whoizzit, Mommy?”

  “Just Ms. Stanley, Erin.” Yet as she said this, Amy caught sight of me. An instant later, she looked past the chief proctor and me, and her eyes widened when she spotted the blueshirts standing at the bottom of the steps.

  “What’s going on, Emma?” she asked. “Why are they…?”

  “This is General Sawyer Lee, of the Corps of Exploration.” Chief Stanley spoke my name as if it were a curse. “The men with him are…”

  “Militia. I can see that.” Amy stood in the doorway as if to bar our way into her house. “What’s going on?” she repeated. “Is there some sort of problem?”

  “I’m afraid there is.” Stanley hesitated. “Amy, General Lee says…”

  “Ma’am,” I said, interrupting the chief proctor as I stepped forward, “I apologize for the intrusion, but I’ve come to see your husband. Will you tell me where he is, please?”

  Amy stared at us in confusion. In that second, I saw myself as she saw me: a stranger in a uniform, abruptly showing up on her doorstep with three armed soldiers and demanding to see her husband. Every wife’s worst nightmare. I hated myself for what I was about to do to her, but there was no way I could stop what had to be done.

  “He’s…upstairs,” she said at last. “In the tower. Getting ready to turn on the light.” She looked at Stanley again. “Emma, please tell me…what’s going on?”

  “Amy, I’m sorry, but…” Stanley let out her breath. “These men have come to put Joe under arrest.”

  “What?” Amy’s mouth fell open. “I…what did he…?”