Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories

by Barnacle Bill the Spacer

  ‘Not tonight, boy,’ Wall said. ‘You try goin’ down there tonight, you’d last ’bout as long as spit on a griddle. We’ll be goin’ down tomorrow night. We’ll have a look ’round for her.’

  ‘I’m goin’ with you,’ said Bradley.

  ‘Listen, little man,’ Wall told him; despite its softness, his voice was so resonant, it might have issued from a cave. ‘You do what you told from now on. This ain’t no fine time we’re havin’ here. This is desperate business. I admire you stickin’ by your mama, I swear I do. And maybe we can help her. But ain’t nobody gettin’ in the way of what’s gotta be done tomorrow night, so you might as well get used to it.’

  Bradley stood his ground but said nothing. After a second Clay Fornoff handed his torch to another man and came up beside Brad and slung an arm around his shoulder. ‘C’mon, kid,’ he said. ‘We’ll getcha somethin’ to eat.’

  I didn’t much like Clay taking him under his wing, but I knew Brad didn’t want to be with me, so I let them go off into the darkness without a squawk.

  Wall moved a couple of steps closer; despite the cold, I smelled his gamey odour. Beneath those owlish brows, his eyes were aglow with fierce red light from the torch. Generally I’ve found that people you haven’t seen in a while shrink some from the image you hold of them in your mind. But not Wall. With that golden glare streaming up from the crater behind him, he still looked more monument than man. ‘Where’d you stake your horses at?’ he asked.

  I told him.

  ‘Shitfire!’ He slapped his hand against his thigh. Then he spoke to another man, instructing him to take a party up to the cave and see what could be done. When he turned back to me he let out a chuckle; he was missing a front tooth, and the gap was about the same size as the first joint of my thumb. ‘Perk up there, Bob,’ he said. ‘You look like you ’spectin’ the devil to fly down your chimney. Believe me, you a damn sight better off ’n you was ’fore you run into us.’

  I had no doubt this was the truth, but it didn’t much gladden me to hear it.

  ‘This your woman?’ Wall asked me, jerking a thumb toward Callie.

  Callie’s eyes met mine, then ducked away, locking on the ground. I got something more than fear from that exchange, but I was too weary to want to understand what.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, beating me to it by a hair.

  ‘We’ll fix ya up with some blankets directly.’ Wall heaved a sigh and stared off toward the crater. ‘I’m mighty glad to see you out here, Bob. We been needin’ more people to work in the gardens.’

  ‘Gardens?’ I said dully.

  ‘That’s right. As I recall you had yourself some fine-looking tomatoes back in Edgeville.’

  ‘You growin’ things out here?’ I asked. ‘Where?’

  ‘Somebody’ll fill you in ’bout all that. Maybe in the mornin’.’ Wall took off his hat and did some reshaping of the brim, then jammed it back on. ‘Meantime you get some food in ye and try to sleep. Gonna be a big night tomorrow. Big night for ever’body in the whole damn world.’

  After we had been fed on jerky and dried fruit, Callie and I settled down in a nest made by three boulders a ways apart from the others. We spread a couple of blankets and pulled the rest up to our chins, sitting with our backs against one of the boulders, our hips and legs touching. Once I glanced over at her. Light from the crater outlined her profile and showed something of her grave expression. I had the idea she felt my eyes on her, but she gave no sign of noticing, so I tried to do as Wall suggested and sleep. Sleep would not come, however. I couldn’t stop wondering what we had fallen into. Seeing so many Bad Men this far out, Wall’s talk of gardens, the fact they planned a raid or something like against the Captains—all that spoke to a complexity of life out here on the flats that I couldn’t fathom. And (thought, too, about what Wall had told us about ‘conditioning’. Strange as the idea seemed, it made sense. How else could you explain why people would be so stupid and docile as to swallow such swill as we had about our ancestors choosing a pitiful, hard-scrabble existence over a life of ease?

  There was no use in studying on any of this, I realized; sooner or later I’d learn whatever there was to learn. But my mind kept on worrying at this or that item, and I knew I wasn’t going to get any sleep.

  Then Callie said, ‘I thought it had all gone, y’know. I thought all the bad times had wiped it away. But that ain’t so. Everything’s still there.’

  Her face was turned toward me, too shadowed to read.

  When she had spoken I hadn’t understood what she meant, but now I knew she had been talking about the two of us.

  ‘I guess I wanna hear how it is with you,’ she said.

  ‘I ain’t been thinkin’ about it,’ I told her. ‘I ain’t had the time.’

  ‘Well, you got the time right now.’

  I didn’t feel much like exercising my brain, but when I tried to think how I felt, it all came clear with hardly an effort. It was as if I were looking down a tunnel that ran through time from the crater to Edgeville, and I saw Kiri riding the flats alone, I saw the hurt on Brad’s face, I saw myself, and I saw Callie with rime on her hat brim and a stony expression, and then those images faded, and what I was looking at, it seemed, wasn’t memory but truth, not the truth I believed, because that was just like everything else in my life, a kind of accommodation. No, this truth I was seeing was the truth behind that, the underpinnings of my existence, and I realized that the things I’d thought I felt for Callie were only things I’d wanted to feel, things I’d talked myself into feeling, but that was the way the brain worked, you bought into something and more often than not it came true without your noticing, and so, while I hadn’t loved Callie—not like I thought I had, anyhow—sometime between all the trouble with Kiri and the end of our ride I had come to love her exactly like that, and I was always going to be ahead of myself in that fashion, I was always going to be wanting and hoping for and believing in things because they were what I thought I should want or hope for or believe…except now, because some trick of conditioning the Captains had played on me had worn off, and right this minute, maybe for the first time ever, I had caught up with myself and could see exactly what I had become and what I believed in and what I loved. And there was Brad. And there was Callie. Beneath the flirty, pretty package, she was strong and flawed and sweet and needy, just like us all. But strong was most important. Strong was what I hadn’t known about her. The strength it had taken for her, a girl from Windbroken who would dread the flats worse by far than any Edger, who had grown up fat and sassy in a softer world. The strength she’d had to summon to ride out into that world of less-than-death, and the reasons she had done it, for honour, for love of me and for the thing she didn’t understand that made strength possible.

  And Kiri was there, too, but different.

  Like a picture hung in an old cobwebby room both of us had vacated years ago. Whatever lie we had believed into truth had been dead a long time, and Kiri had done what she had because of how she was, not because of how I was or how she was to me. Recognizing that didn’t make me feel any better, but at least all that old fire and smoke didn’t prevent me from seeing what was of consequence now. I had known all this for months, but I felt stupid for not having been able to accept any of it before, and I couldn’t think of what to say, and all I managed was to repeat what Callie had said, telling her that everything was still there for me, too.

  She moved into me a bit, and I put an arm around her, and then she let her head rest on my shoulder, and we sat that way for a few minutes—we were both, I suspect, feeling a little awkward, a little new to one another. Callie stretched herself and snuggled into me. Despite everything, despite fear and hard riding and all that had happened, having her there under my blanket gave me some confidence.

  ‘You all right?’ I asked her.

  She said, ‘Just fine,’ then let out a dusty laugh.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ I asked.

  ‘I was goin’ to say I wished we
was home, but then I thought twice about it. Edgeville don’t seem like home no more.’

  ‘Just a little of it would be all right,’ I said. ‘Maybe a wood stove and some kindling.’

  She made a noise of agreement and then fell silent. Big cold stars were dancing in the faraway black wild of the sky, so bright they looked to be shifting around like the ships the Captains flew, but I saw no fearful thing in them, only their glitter and the great identities they sketched in fire, the lady on the throne, the old hunter with his gemmy belt. What was it like, I wondered, to live among them, to be small and secretive with purple eyes. To be daunted by life and play with men and women as if they were dolls full of blood. Wall would probably understand them, I thought. For all his homespun ways, I had the notion he was as different from me as any Captain.

  ‘And a bed,’ Callie said out of the blue.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I was thinkin’ a bed would be nice, too.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah, that’d be good.’ Then thinking she might have been hinting at something, I added, ‘I gotta tell ya, I ain’t feelin’ much like doin’ anything tonight.’

  She picked herself up, gave me a look and laughed. ‘I swear you must think you’re the greatest damn thing since vanilla ice cream. I’m so wore down, I doubt I could sit up straight let alone’—she sniffed—‘do anything.’

  ‘I was only saying it in case you were…’

  ‘Just shut up, Bob!’

  She settled back down next to me. I couldn’t tell for certain, but I didn’t believe she was really angry. After a couple of minutes she laid her head on my shoulder again, and a few seconds after that she took my hand beneath the blankets and put it up under her shirt. The warmth of her breast seemed to spread from my palm all through me, and its softness nearly caused me to faint. The feeling that held in my mind then had just a shade of lustfulness; most of what I felt was tender, trusted, loved. A feeling like that couldn’t last for too long, not in that place, not at that moment, but for the time it did, it made the golden light spilling upward from the crater a fine place to rest my eyes, and pulled the starry void close around me like a good blanket, and spoke to me of something I could catch on my tongue and cradle in my hand and crush against my skin, but that I could have never put a name to.

  Mornings, Kiri told me once, were lies. It was only the nights that were true. She meant a sad, desolate thing by this, she meant that the brightness of things is illusion, and the blackness of them is where the truth would fit if we had courage enough to admit it. Yet when I thought of those words now, they meant something completely opposite, because the virtues she applied to night and morning had been all switched around for me.

  At any rate, in the grey, blustery morning following that brilliant night, with big flakes falling from the sky, Wall sent his second-in-command, a man named Coley, to fill us in. Coley was a tense sort, a little yappy dog to Wall’s big placid one, scrawny and worried-looking, with a grizzled beard and sunken cheeks and a startling bit of colour to his outfit, a bright red ribbon for a hat band. Though his anxious manner unnerved me—he was always fidgeting, glancing around as if concerned he might be caught at something—I related to him a damn sight better than I did Wall, mostly because Coley did not seem so all-fired sure of himself.

  He told us they’d been planning this raid for years, and that the purpose of it was to steal a flying machine. A few years back one of the machines had crashed out on the flats; they had captured the sole survivor, whom they called Junior, and forced him to supply information about all manner of things; he was to be the pilot of the stolen machine once Wall’s people succeeded in breaking into it. Problem was, the minute they started messing with it, there was a chance that an alarm would be sounded, and we might have to fight off the Captains for as long as it took to finish the job. Maybe an hour, maybe more. There were, according to Coley, nearly five hundred men and women scattered about in the rocks, laying low, and he wasn’t sure that many would be enough to keep the Captains off, though Wall was of the opinion that our casualties would be light. Coley did not agree.

  ‘It ain’t the Captains worry me,’ he said. ‘It’s who they got doin’ their fightin’ for ’em. Chances are there’ll be apes. Might even be some of our own people. They got ways of makin’ a man do things against his will.’

  ‘What I don’t get,’ Brad said, ‘is how you make this here Captain do what you want. Every time I talk to ’em, I get the feelin’ things don’t go how they like ’em, they’re liable to keel over and die.’

  ‘That ain’t quite the way of it,’ Coley told him. ‘They just don’t think they can die is all. ’Cordin’ to Junior, they make copies of themselves. Clones, he calls ’em. One dies, there’s another waitin’ to take his place who’s got the same memories, same everything.’ He shook his head in wonderment. ‘Damnedest thing I ever heard of. Anyhow, they got these collars. Metal collars that fit back of the neck and the head. I don’t know how it works. But slap one on somebody, and they get downright suggestible. We picked some up from the crash, and we used one on Junior.’

  We all three nodded and said, ‘Huh’ or something similar, as if we understood, but I doubt Brad or Callie understood Coley any better than I did.

  A shout came from a man downslope, and Coley turned to it; but the shout must have been directed at someone else. The crater walls looked ashen, and the whole thing seemed more fearsome now than it had with light streaming up from it. Under the clouded sky the hardpan was a dirty yellow, like old bones.

  ‘What is this place?’ I asked. ‘What the hell are they doin’ down there?’

  ‘The Captains call it the Garden,’ Coley said. ‘Sometimes they use it for fightin’. Junior says they’re all divided into clans up on the stations, and this here’s where they settle clan disputes. Other times they use it for parties, and that’s probably what’s goin’ on now. If it was a fight there’d be more ships. They like to watch fightin’.’ He worked up a good spit and let it fly. ‘That’s how come they treasure us so much. They enjoy the way we fight.’

  I let that sink in for a few seconds, thinking about Kiri fitted with a collar. A break appeared in the clouds, and Coley peered up into the sky, looking more worried than over. When I asked him what was wrong, he said, ‘I’m just hopin’ the weather holds. We usually don’t put so many people at risk. Then if the Captains drop a net, we don’t get hurt so bad.’ He let out a long unsteady breath. ‘’Course even if the weather does clear, chances are they ain’t lookin’ this way. They’re pretty careless as regards security, and they ain’t very well armed. Not like you might expect, anyway. They didn’t have many personal weapons up in the orbitals, and we don’t believe they’ve collected any weapons from the shelters. Why would they bother? They don’t think we can hurt them. All they’ve got are their ships, which are armed with mining lasers. And even if they did collect weapons from the shelters, they probably wouldn’t know how to use ’em. They used to be technical, but they’ve forgotten most of what they know. Eventually I figger their ships’ll break down, and they’ll be stranded up there.’

  Callie asked what he meant by ‘shelters’, and he told us that they were underground places where people had slept away the centuries, waiting for the Captains to wake them once things on the surface were back to something approaching normal. It was in those places that the Bad Men lived. Places fortified now against attack from the sky. But it was clear to me that neither Coley’s faith in those fortifications nor in the raid was absolute. Though I didn’t know him, I had the impression that his anxiety was abnormal, at least in its intensity, and when I tried to talk with him about Wall, I detected disapproval.

  ‘He’s brought people together,’ he said. ‘He’s done a lot of good things.’ But I could tell his heart wasn’t in the words.

  Sleet began coming down, just spits of it, but enough so I could hear it hissing against the rocks.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ I asked Coley; I ge
stured at the crater. ‘All this business here. I know you said it was to get a ship. But why bother if…’

  ‘It’s about killin’,’ said Wall’s voice behind me; he was leaning up against a boulder, looking down at us in that glum, challenging way of his; his long hair lifted in the wind. ‘’bout them killin’ us all these years,’ he went on. ‘And now us evenin’ things up a touch. ’bout finding some new thing that’ll let us kill even more of ’em.’

  ‘I realize that,’ I said. ‘But why not let well enough alone? Accordin’ to what Coley says, we leave ’em be, sooner or later they ain’t gonna be a problem.’

  ‘Is that what Mister Coley says?’ Wall pinned him with a cold glare, but Coley didn’t flinch from it; he made a gruff noise in his throat and turned back to me. ‘Y’see Coley’s out here with us, don’t ye? Don’t that tell ye somethin’? He may believe what he told ye, but he ain’t countin’ on it to be true. He’d be crazy to count on it. S’pose they got more weapons than he figgers? Even if they don’t, who knows what’s in their minds? They might up and decide they’re tired of games and kill us all. Nosir! Killin’s the only way to deal with ’em.’

  ‘Ain’t you worried they gonna strike back at you?’ Callie asked him.