She became still again, alert to the nearness of an idea not quite present to her mind. Then it came to her and she unfolded herself, her legs together and straight while stretching her arms out to her sides like a dancer about to begin.
She picked out a star to be her point of reference. Then she twisted, her arms to the right, her legs to the left. Holding that twist, she brought her arms down against her sides and spread her legs open and untwisted, but this time the balance of moments was reversed, and her resting point had shifted. Not by much. It was hard to tell if she was cheating by the aim of her nose.
She did it again, and this time she was certain. Slowly, she managed to wobble her way around until she could see the asteroid down below, bigger than she'd expected, as wide as her outstretched arms, and there, the floodlights, like a cheerful mini-Pleiades! She thought that she could see movement. In her excitement, she got her procedure backward a few times, but soon she was facing the compound. She turned her headlamp to full intensity and began flashing an SOS. There was no response. “Come on,” she said aloud. “Look up! Somebody look up!”
At last, she saw a light moving up to her, and then the captain's voice came through. He seemed to be talking to himself, almost singing, “I know you can't hear me, baby, but you're alive, and that ain't bad. You're gonna be all right. Gonna be all right. Come on and look at me, baby, give me five, give me five, you can do it do it do it, yes you can....”
Then she noticed he was flashing his light at her in chains of five. She flashed back and said, “I read you! I read you!”
“All right! Love the sound of your voice. How's your vital signs?”
“I'm okay. It's all ... all okay.”
“Okay. Keep your light steady on, now. Clear the runway, I'm coming in.”
He was up to her within minutes, carefully checking the damage to her suit, taking readings, pausing to respond to people down below. She could hear the others now, second-hand. Her legs made impatient walking movements, then finally, slowly, he guided her down.
Her joy at returning among the living was tempered a bit by the little voices she could hear in the captain's head, indistinct, but clearly excited, the sound of people taking up positions, moving in, then an unmistakable, “We've got him! We've got him!”
“Okay, hold your positions,” said the captain. “Try to...”
A tiny voice cut in. “He's not responding, captain. He may be unconscious.”
“I can see you now, but I can't see him. What's the situation there?”
Trina could see someone as well as they touched down. One crewmate about ten meters away, and another hovering, looking down at something she couldn't see. She tried to make out what they were saying, but while they were talking, Anders was giving her instructions.
“You stay here. Keep low, he may have improvised a weapon. Don't try to get around without your thruster pack. I'll be right back.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, straining to pick up what the others were telling him. She had no intention of staying behind and losing her com link. She followed carefully, as if the ground might break. Ahead of her, all the commotion had raised a thin haze of dust that magnified every glance and gesture into an interplay of beams and shadows.
Apparently they had Rakshasa pinned down under a tangle of robots that looked oddly like horse-skulls with crab-legs sticking out. The other crew members wielded pipes and torches. By the time Trina caught up, some of the robots had been pulled off and tossed aside to float like dead things in some prehistoric sea. People were cursing. She could see now that the man under the robots had only two arms—it was Fletcher. The haze was visibly thicker below waist level. As the captain got down on his knees and pressed his helmet against Fletcher's he blurred a bit, as if in a fog, and the empty space he left behind filled in slowly with the independent trajectories of random motes.
“All right, tell me slowly, now.” The reply had that hollow sound that told Trina she was hearing something coming to the captain through no com channel at all, but purely by conduction through the helmet contact.
“It cut me off, the first robot, it attacked me and cut all my com links and started dragging me. And then the others were all over me, the ones you sent after Rakshasa...”
Trina could see what they'd been up to. The first robot, under Rakshasa's control, must have pinned his transponder on this poor guy. The captain spotted her. “I thought I...” He stood and came over to her. “We've lost Raki again. I'd sent Fletcher to secure the ship....” He whirled. “The ship!”
The ship was decapitated. Off in the distance, the small speck of the command module was shrinking into the night.
The captain tried to raise it. “Listen to me, Rakshasa, there's nowhere to run. You're just making things worse for yourself.”
Connors was trying to raise it, too. “Get back here you chicken-shit bastard freak!” and he hurled a chunk of pipe at it, flipping himself head-over-heels as he did. The pipe twirled hypnotically, so fast and far it seemed that it really could overtake the ship.
Trina yelled, “Don't do this to us! You're killing me, too, Rakshasa! You're killing all of us! Damn you!”
“Okay, easy,” said the captain. “Forget him. Nobody's getting killed. Look, we've still got the service module. We've got supplies. Kira, how's the backup antenna?”
“He got that one, too. And the omni.”
“Okay, you go check them out and give me a report, how soon to get them back on line. I want the fastest first, even if that's just the omni, and then go to work on the directional. Report to us back at base camp.”
He raised his voice. “Listen up, everybody, we're okay till help arrives. We've got liquid oxygen left in the tanks that we can convert to breathable air, and a working volatile processing plant. We can fix that airlock and pressurize the cave in one day. I want to see a line of sherpa robots moving supplies to the cave. This is a habitat, people, we're moving in. Let's go!”
He came over to Trina and guided her by the shoulders. “I'm not going to lose you this time. How do you figure that crazy bastard? You take it easy for now, and then I'm going to want to know what happened out there. Don't worry, there's nowhere he can go. We're going to nail his ass, and then we'll nail whoever's behind him.”
Trina kept quiet as she let herself be guided back to the cave. It wasn't hard to pretend to be too exhausted to talk. She just wanted to sleep, and forget, and have nothing to do with the mess Rakshasa had left behind. There was a path of least resistance she could take, that would get her off the hook and shift responsibility to official channels. But some part of her still seemed to be looking down from above.
As if clutching a pain, she brought her hand to the keypad and erased the rendering of the mass driver, and thought of what remained to be done, then felt foolish. What if Rakshasa was as crazy as he seemed?
Then she prayed into the nothingness. Please let there be refugees. Please be out there. And be good, dammit. Be worth all the trouble, at least.
Copyright © 2001 by Steve Martinez.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Lincoln in Frogmore by Andy Duncan
Andy Duncan, a native of Batesburg, South Carolina, lives in Northport, Alabama, with his wife, Sydney, and works in nearby Tuscaloosa as senior editor of a business magazine. His fascination with “outsider art” springs from a traveling exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, where he first saw the Sam Doyle painting that inspired this story. Recent publications include stories in Starlight 3 and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: 14th Annual Collection (St. Martin's). His first book, Beluthahatchie and Other Stories, was recently published by Golden Gryphon Press.
[Back to Table of Contents]
From the Federal Writers’ Project interview with Shad Alston at his home on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, September 21, 1936. Interviewer: Miss Jordan Matthews.
Younguns these days, they don't want to hear bout no slavery, they don't want to hear bout M
r. Lincoln. And he was just down the road a piece here, in that swamp yonder. I saw him with my own eyes, and they were good eyes then. You'd think it'd all happened to a bunch of strange niggers up in Philly-Me-York, stead of to their own blood kin, their own folks.
I start telling bout Mr. Lincoln coming down here, and what do I get? “You lying like the crossties, Mr. Shad. You lying up a nation.” “Shame on you, Mr. Shad. You done quit lying and gone to flying.” Huh!
Anybody ain't got sense enough to know what slavery was, won't be able to see it coming back, will they? Be slaves again and not even know it.
Now I'm gone tell you a true thing. I'll tell you bout Mr. Lincoln, just the way it happened, and you can put it in your book. That's how true it is, now: True enough for a book.
"Once upon a time was a good old time,
Bit by a gator he'd spit turpentine."
That's how we'd start a tale when I was a youngun. I don't rightly know how old I was when it happened, but I was bout that high up against the doorframe, and all longleggedy like a granddaddy spider, and fast! I could outrun a coach whip. And you better believe I sure hit it a lick that evening when Maum Hannah called me from the house.
“Shad! You, Shad! You better give it the book back on here to this yard, boy, or I'll be all over you like gravy over rice.”
When I heard that, I was in the edge of the woods, holding up a bright green gopher turtle in the air real still-like, to see would it think it was back on the ground, and poke its head outen its shell. But my arm had gone numb on me, and I reckon that gopher woulda outlast me even if Maum Hannah hadn't gone to fussing. I put the gopher back down in the bresh where I got him and beat it on back. Maum Hannah didn't move so quick, you see, and her voice took some working before it got loud enough to carry, so I knew if she was already on the porch and yelling loud enough for me to hear in the woods, she'd done been calling for ten minutes and was hot as a pine knot. Man! Believe me, I hauled the fast mail.
“You, Shad! I swear I'll put the water in your eyes, boy. I'll whip your sorry head to the red.”
When I got to the yard she was on the porch, a-sitting on the far end of the joggling-board ‘cause she was too heavy for the middle, she'd hit the planks and couldn't get up. She had her pipe in one hand and her walking stick in the other and blue smoke all around. She had her head down to her knees, like she'd wore herself out, but was just opening her mouth to tune up again when I cried, “Here I am, Maum Hannah, I come just as quick as I could.”
“Child,” she said, “where you been?” She stuck the pipe back in her mouth and sucked on it loud. I was bout to tell her when she went on, “I know you ain't been fooling with crawling varmints down in them tick-filled woods that I told you to stay outen.”
“No, ma'am, I ain't,” I said, sitting down real careful on the far end of the joggling-board, past the reach of her stick. I hadn't figured on her blocking off the truth like that, and leaving me to think up a lie with no notice at all hardly.
“Well, thank the wonder-working God for that,” she said, all cast-down and quiet again. Maum Hannah was a big old gal when she was hollering, but when she was done she'd fold back down like all her air was gone, and look small. Lately she was looking smaller and smaller when she was quiet, but maybe I was just getting biggedy. Anyways, I knew she wasn't gone take a lick at me now. I eased on down the board toward the middle, started joggling up and down. Maum Hannah closed her eyes like the joggles was making her tired, but I ask you, what's the good of a joggling-board if you ain't joggling? Might's well have a rocking chair without a rock, a swing with no swang.
“I got to go on a errand this evening,” Maum Hannah said, joggling there on the end of the board, her eyes closed, her knobby hands working the end of her stick. “May be I won't get back till dark, may be black dark. You stay here in the house, child, you got me? Not in the yard, in the house.” She thumped the porch with her stick, and our fice dog run out from underneath, carrying something in its mouth, into the bresh. “The roads and the woods are too dangerous these nights, you hear me?”
“Yes, Maum Hannah,” I said, straining to see what it was the fice had got.
She was right, too—those were dangerous days, for white or colored, slave or free. Me and Maum Hannah, now, praise Jesus, were free, like a lot of colored folks around the island and in Frogmore town. But that didn't help the poor folks none on Mr. Ravenel's plantation, or all the other plantations up and down the Sea Islands, or all the folks who were owned in the cities and the towns. But it wouldn't be slave times for long, no Lord, even the field niggers knew that. Mr. Lincoln's Navy was just off the coast, a thousand ships in a line from New Orleans to Norfolk, each one in sight of two others, and not even a piragua could sail any supplies through without getting blown to kindling wood. Mr. Lincoln's Navy was just sitting there, but his Army, it was getting the job done. They done took Savannah just before Christmas-time, and here it was January, and everybody figured Charleston was next, and there was me and Maum Hannah and all of St. Helena Island a-sitting right in the middle.
I guess that's why everybody was on the move that month. It didn't matter how many of Mr. Ravenel's niggers got whipped or hung, every day more and more of ‘em just turned up gone, headed toward Savannah hoping to hook up with the bluecoats, or heading into the woods hoping to hide out till it was all over. The bravest, we'd heard tell, were rafting or swimming out into the Sound, hoping Mr. Lincoln's ships would take ‘em aboard and give ‘em a medal, I reckon, or leastways a job putting flint to the fuse. And paterollers were combing the country looking to string up or cut to pieces any coloreds they could find, whether they were the ones who'd run off or not—and gator-black wild niggers were living half-starved and crazy in the marsh—and Sesesh deserters, in twos and threes, were trying to get to Charleston by the back roads, or through the woods and swamps—and some said a boatload of drunk bluecoats come ashore some nights, in the fog, bored with sitting in the water and playing coon-can for nickels, and hot for some devilment. Blue can hide in the woods at night as easy as gray, and kill you just as dead.
So it was a wild time, but did I care? I was a youngun and a longleggedy jackrabbit, as I said, and my daddy was sold before I was born and my mama went away when I was little in Master Ravenel's own buckboard, wearing a pink silk dress fit for a white woman, and Maum Hannah was old and moving slow—so I ask you, who was gone stop me? I was in them woods, and in them swamps, ever chance I got, hoping I'd have me an adventure, and see for myself some of the big things a-doing in the world.
“I done fixed your supper,” Maum Hannah said, her eyes open now. “It's on the stove for when you want it. Rabbit stew and beaten biscuits and black-eyed peas and gumbo and a crock of bluejohn to wet it with, and don't you push it all down that worthless dog out yonder neither. You need it more'n he does.”
“Yes, Maum Hannah,” I said, figuring the fice wasn't gone need no supper, the way he was working at something out there in the bresh. “You gone eat when you get back?”
“I done fixed me a bucket,” she said. “I'll eat when I'm ready, I figure.” She waved for me to come help her stand up. She managed it, leaning on me with one hand and her stick with the other. Didn't seem to me she needed to be going noplace.
“Where'd you say you was bound for, again?” I asked her, thinking I was being clever-like.
“I didn't,” she said, “and I ain't gone to.
"Don't you like it, don't you take it,
Here's my collar, come and shake it."
She swatted my rump. “Hand me my bucket, yonder beside the churn. I got to get on. The day's waning.” She teeter-tottered at the top of the steps, fussed with the bonnet knot neath her chin, looked into the sun a-setting. “Yes, Lord,” she said. “The long day is waning, and Your great work is nigh on done. Thank you, child,” she said. The bucket was covered by a oilcloth, but couldn't a been much in it—it didn't weigh far from empty. She set it on top of her head, said, “Umph, umph, um
ph,” and went off down the steps, blowing pipe smoke ever which way. “I want to hear you slam that front door behind me and lock it before I get outen the yard, you hear me?”
“Yes, Maum Hannah,” I said.
This was big doins for sure enough sure. She hadn't in the longest time had me lock the front door. Excited now, I turned my back on her and ran to where the big old key hung on a nail above the fireplace. I slid a chair under it, climbed up there, passed the key on the way up, and stood there feeling like a mullet head. I had grown since last time we used that key; I didn't need that chair at all, now. I jumped off, reached up and snagged the key off the nail, done! Maum Hannah had reached the edge of the yard, but she didn't look around as I slammed the front door and locked it, just like I promised I'd do—cept I was outside the door, on the porch, when I done it. Now Maum Hannah was just outen sight, past the first stand of trees, just a little blue streak curling back to show she'd been there. I was set on slipping around behind her, seeing where she was going. But first I was gone see what the fice had hold of.
I tipped across the yard, trying not to mess up the sand I'd just raked that day, and not to make noise that would call Maum Hannah back down on me. “You, dog,” I whispered. “What you got there, huh?” It growled at me and shinnied backward in the bresh, but switched its raggedy tail, too, like it wanted to play. “Gone get it,” I whispered, on my all fours now. “Yessir. Gone get it. Gone get it. Gone get—!” I snatched at the near end of it and the fice jumped all feet up in the air and backwards and held on to the far end as it stretched out between us—a tore-off rag of black cloth, thin so you could see through it, and as long as my arm, or longer, cause it was mighty stretchy. I set to worrying it away from the fice. “Let go, you thin-brainded thing,” I said, and he said rrrr r rrrr, like a fice does. I stuck a stick between his teeth and he let the rag go to gnaw on that. I held the rag up close and pulled on it and looked through it and rubbed my hands together with it in the middle—man, it was smooth. Pretty, too, even raggedy and dirty and full of trash from who knows what all it had been dragged through.
Asimov's Science Fiction 10-11/2001 Page 25