Up Jim River

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Up Jim River Page 30

by Michael Flynn


  It’s useless, one of the men declares. His voice is heavy, though oddly not with defeat.

  “One day,” says a young man. He is dressed in a chlamys, fastened at the right shoulder, under which he is otherwise nude. His right flank is exposed. “One day, people will look back and remember the names of each one here.”

  But are you here? Donovan wonders. Am I? For all he knows he may be lying unconscious on the floor somewhere on a world as yet unknown.

  “You will never have better friends than you have this day,” the young man continues. “Each of you owes your life to the others. You have acted with one will, one mind.”

  Donovan notes how the grime of battle has likened them. The same war paint, the same camouflage zoots. Hands, eyes, faces made anonymous by concealing goggles and gloves. He goes to each one in turn and embraces them, and they do the like. One is especially fervent, and bestows a kiss on his cheek.

  “It will be dark,” the girl says, “when we reach the river.”

  There comes a time when the body finds its limits, and then it finds whether there is anything beyond those limits. The river is wide at this point, but its banks are undeveloped and so there are none to see him. He wants nothing more than to lie there and sleep undisturbed until morning. After which, in the pitiless light of day, he will be considerably disturbed. Very funny, he thinks. But there are miles to go before he sleeps. There is a safe house in the O’erfluss District, if he can reach it. If it is still safe.

  “Why assume it is not until we need to know?”

  He looks around to see who has spoken, but he is alone on the river’s bank. Who was that? he asks the night; but receives no answer save the murmur of the river’s current, the creaking of insects, and the distant crackle of bolt-tanks and thud of buildings behind him in the Centrum. He uses the I-ball for its intended purpose, tossing it up and letting the stabilized images from its miniature cameras flash his surroundings on his goggles. No one is near.

  Not much left of the Revolution…

  “Whatever you rescue from a burning house is a gain.”

  He summons reserves of strength, rises to his feet, walks slowly to the edge of the river. Sooner begun, sooner done. He will probably drown halfway across; and it is a measure of where he has come to that this seems a happy end.

  He wades in until the water is waist deep, then he stretches out and begins to swim. The zoot helps, since it has buoyancy pockets. The current carries him downstream, away from the firefight in the city’s center and toward the great bridge, black-shadowed against the night sky.

  It is tempting to give up and simply drift with the river. In the buoyant zoot, he could sleep all the way to the sea. But to reach the safe house he must make shore some place before the water-ferry docks, and so he strokes more briskly, now fighting the current.

  And after a lifetime, he staggers up on the western bank of the river, and throws himself to the ground. It is marshy here. An old sugar processing plant gone to seed. Improbably, sugar cane has taken root and stands out of the water as bewildered as he.

  “It’s not too much farther,” says the girl in the chiton. She sits atop a piling that once outlined the sugar loading dock.

  He hears feet brushing through the riverside growth. Pulling back into the shadows, he slips a knife from his belt. The searcher whispers his name.

  His true name.

  It has been years, a lifetime, since he has heard it. And he recognizes the voice.

  Rising from the shadows, he whispers urgently, Over here. He waits to see if he has made one last mistake, but recognition comes. You made it out of the Chancellery, then.

  The other rebel steps forward and embraces him. “Glad to see you got free, Chief. Are there any more with you?”

  “No. I…I thought for a while there were, but…”

  “I understand.” He kisses him on the cheeks, once on each. “I hope you do, too.”

  And with that the Protector’s Special Security forces close in and pin his arms to his side and take the knife from his hands. They are not gentle. The goggles are yanked from his head. One of the Protected Ones punches him in the belly and he doubles over. Looking up, he catches the eye of the man who had been his friend. “Why?”

  And the man shrugs and will not look at him. “‘Close fits my shirt,’” he quotes the proverb, “‘but closer my skin.’”

  Donovan gathers all his strength—though there is little left to gather—and he reaches out with both hands and…

  …and dimensions twist and their hands impossibly meet.

  The Fudir holds tight; sees that Donovan has done the same at his end of the table, grabbing Silky Voice and Pedant. Sleuth gropes for Pedant; Brute for Silk. Inner Child clutches the Silky Voice like an infant his Madonna. he tells the shadowy apparition.

  …and then they are a ring, and the unshaped thing is excluded, and the table is normal in size and shape, and there are only the nine of them around it.

  Each looks at the other, and looks at where the shadows had sat, and it is all gone. Donovan wrenches his hand from the Brute’s grasp. Sleuth lets go. Pedant crosses his arms and leans back in his chair.

  “Well,” says the Fudir. “That was different.”

  “Laugh all you want to, you fool; but that is what comes of your fissiparous activities.”

  “Mine!”

  “Yes, yours. And all the rest of you. What are you, after all, but shards and pieces of me! By your very existence you fragment me.”

  The Sleuth turns to the Pedant. What is the point of your gathering the grapes of experience if you fail to press them for the wine of wisdom?

  The naked young man in the chlamys says harshly, “Have you learned nothing? You have defeated Nothing itself. But you have defeated nothing yourself. You have preserved yourself intact, and which of you did that?”

  “Who are you?” asks the Fudir. “And you?” The last is aimed at the young girl in the chiton.

  “Parts of you,” she says, “that you thought you had lost, but who were always there, close by, waiting.”

  “Was all that…,” says Donovan. “Was all that something that once happened to us? Was it memory, or imagination?” Had he really fomented a rebellion against some tyrant somewhere? Had they conditioned him out of the very memory of it?

  The girl shrugs. “I know no more than you; but I would like to think that we will one day remember who we were.”

  The first part, says the Sleuth. That was clearly symbolic.

  Symbolizing what?

  “The facets of a diamond,” the young man suggests.

  Donovan stares at him and recognizes what he once was, a long time ago. And he knows that he cannot be that ever again. He has lost his youth.

  “And is that not a gain,” asks the girl, “as well as a loss?”

  “I think,” says Donovan, “that I will call you Pollyanna.”

  “Call me what you will, so long as you call upon me when the box has been emptied out. Every man loses his youth one day. You need not lose your happiness.”

  Méarana!

  “If that is your happiness.”

  The Pedant smacks the table. Remember the minion that changed.

  And the dog that turned.

  “And the man who kissed us on the riverbank,” says the Fudir.

  He leans back in his chairs and considers. He can see it so clearly now and wonders why he has not seen it much earlier. Too busy mocking himself. Too busy fighting himself.

  “We can’t stay here. It would be a betrayal. She is our daughter, after all.”

  Finally, you admit it?

  “Yes,” says the Fudir. “Her chin. Her age. Half of what she is. Though it frightens me.”

  “It ought to,” Donovan comments. “We can’t let her go into the Wild, knowing what we know.”

  Have you forgotten? We’ve been drugged. We lie helpless on some Gatmander cot.

  Silky? Isn’t that your job? You�
��ll need this enzyme, and this one, to counteract it.

  The Silky Voice summons glands into service. Enzymes race from their enclosures. Antibodies hunt down drug molecules, latch on, seize them and choke them tight, shove them out through sweat pores.

  “As it pertains to him,” he hears a voice say, “there is a fever.”

  And Donovan knows by this sign that he is near the farther bank of the river.

  “There is still time,” says the young girl in the chiton.

  XI INTO THE WILD

  Méarana had second thoughts about leaving Donovan behind, but her two companions assured her it was all for the best. “A man that sick can’t help us,” Teodorq told her as they rode the bumboat up to Blankets and Beads.

  “We just go Wild look-look,” Billy added. “You see. Back no-long time. Sahb get good care meanwhile.”

  But it was not whether Donovan received good care or bad that bothered Méarana, it was whether he received that care from strangers. And a friend was not measured by the good he could do you. “Maybe we could have waited a little longer.”

  “Ah, no, memsahb! Port Captain say long time no more trade-ship.”

  “What the little weasel means, babe,” the barbarian told her, “is this was his best chance to run out on his master.”

  “You no say such, lack-wit! Mistress Harp need me now, not sick-man Donovan.”

  “Quiet, the both of you.” She fell into a morose silence as the boat hurtled upward on Port Gatmander’s laser lift. Teodorq tried to pretend he was an old hand at this sort of thing, but every time the vessel shuddered, the Wildman grabbed for the edges of his seat. Billy saw this and snickered, though by his own admission he had himself ridden a laser lift only twice.

  Méarana sighed once more. “I hope our luggage makes it.”

  “No worry, memsahb. Dukovers handle luggage alla time. Cargo boat lift, yawn-yawn-time.”

  Méarana once more tried to relax, but almost immediately the boat began docking maneuvers and the gyros spun the great, gray world of Gatmander into her viewport. Ah, Donovan. Sure, and it’s all for the best.

  Blankets and Beads resembled more a small town in orbit than anything once called “ship.” Domes, spheres, apses, barrels, and tubes joined in a complexity of angles, connections, and fusions, like a mass of soap bubbles. The resemblance to a town was heightened by the whimsical outer structures by which the pressure vessels were decorated to resemble buildings of different eras in the long history of human habitation. The skin-style had been popular among shipbuilders a generation before, but had grown passé among the inner worlds. It survived now only among the thrice-used ships at the edge of civilized space.

  She carried survey-class alfvens, for in the Wild she could expect no assistance from ground-based propulsion, and must pull herself along by the very strings of space. She also contained ffffg-imagers to analyze the berms of uncharted roads and probe for unmarked exits. It was a dangerous business, as the slightest miscalculation could take the ship into the subluminal mud to dissipate in a Cerenkov blink. Consequently, while her owners were tight enough with the ducat to outfit her with secondhand gear, they were wise enough to scrounge only the very best of secondhand gear.

  The other reason for the trade ship’s size was that such vessels often embarked on voyages years in duration, and when they did so took along families and friends. She resembled a small town because on many occasions she was one. This left plenty of room for passengers on those shorter jaunts on better-established routes when only the crew was aboard.

  Méarana, Theodorq, and Billy Chins were welcomed aboard by the cargo-master, if welcome it be called—a subtle if unwitting indicator of their status in the ship’s economy. The master’s name was Mart Pepper, who projected by his attitude a preference for less animate cargo. He checked each of them against a list, and gave them a chit directing them to their quarters. The chit would brighten or dim depending on whether they were on the proper path or not. It would also open and lock their cabins, debit their meals from their deposits, and so on.

  As he handed each of them their chit, Pepper muttered in a wonderful economy of syllables, “Cap’n’ll bead-lighted tavya-come t’dinner-atse’n-point-five horae, metric,” although he did not communicate a very heartfelt delight nor even that the sentence was composed of more than a single, very long word.

  Méarana said, “We’ll try to keep out of your way.” But even that, Pepper indicated by his grimace would not be far enough.

  Their cabins were in Dome Three, encircling what appeared to be a village green. It featured bushes, a fountain, children’s playsets, and several dwarf maples. It was cleverly landscaped to appear larger than it was, and Méarana inferred the long-ago hand of a High Taran greensman.

  There were a few other passengers already about on the green. One was a veiled woman with the grand title of Princess of the Farther Spaces from a small world on the farther side of the Burnt-Over District. She had negotiated a trade treaty with the League, had been suitably awed by what she had seen, and was returning with her eunuch and maidservant with a page full of promises.

  “You pipple of the Farther Space,” she later complained to Méarana in a heavily-accented Gaelactic, “you tink because we pipple got no ray guns, we stupider than you pipple. But we know it when we getting poked up the butt.”

  The fourth passenger was a thin, well-shaped man a little older than Méarana, dark-haired, long-nosed, with a dusky complexion, and garbed in a practical traveler’s coverall. He sat by himself on a bench by the fountains and, so intent was he on a reading screen, that he had created a bubble of privacy that Méarana was loathe to break.

  Lastly, there was a Wildman from Teodorq’s own home world; though their bodyguard was not pleased to find a compatriot on board. “Paulie’s O’ the Hawk clan out in Overmount,” he said. “Yuh can tell by his tats. They futter sheep out there, ‘cause they can’t get no women.”

  “Stay away from him, then,” the harper told him.

  When the dinner chimes called the passengers to follow their glowing chits toward the barrel vault leading into Dome Two, Méarana noticed the dusky man still engrossed in his screen; so she went to him and touched him on the shoulder. “Dinner bell sounded,” she said. “They won’t wait.”

  The man did not look up. “You are casting a shadow on my screen.”

  Surprised to be so admonished, Méarana stepped aside and glanced curiously at the man’s screen—and recognized the gene map he was studying.

  “Professor Doctor Doctor Sofwari! I have been wanting to meet you for a very long time.”

  At that, he did look up, his eyes showing surprise, puzzle, and pleasure in rapid succession. He rose and took Méarana’s hand in his and kissed the back of it in a greeting gesture that the harper had not encountered before, but found unusually pleasant. “And I have been waiting even longer for a beautiful stranger to say that to me.”

  Méarana laughed and offered her arm and they walked together to the dining hall. “You and I,” she said, “have much to discuss.”

  Teodorq Nagarajan knew he was destined for greatness. He was not certain what form this greatness would take, only that his village did not contain it. And so, not long after killing his first man, he had taken up the trade of the wandering champion. Partly, this was a necessity. Dead men have kinsmen. But partly, too, it was sheer wanderlust. On some worlds, he would have been called a mercenary though he often worked pro bono.

  He followed rumors to the coast, where he found “the Big Encampment” to be wood-and-brick buildings, stacked cheek-by-jowl, some soaring to three storeys, and built by the strange green-faced men from over the Boundless Main. They had come, the coastalmen told him, in large canoes with blankets tied to sticks. But Teodorq set himself the task of “learning the ropes,” in the sailormen’s talk, signing on as a “landsman” and making several voyages with them.

  He mastered the new by never allowing his sense of wonder to become a sense of a
we. He learned to study a thing with narrow-eyed concentration rather than to stare at it in gape-jawed astonishment. Too many coastal-men had fallen into drunkenness and squalor from awe of the green-faced men.

  In the Oversealand he saw wonders beyond wonders and learned that the “Big Encampment” was a poor imitation of the sprawling, brawling cities of Old Cuffy and Yavelprawns and the other Great States. There had been employment there, too, and he had learned the art of the musket and the cannon. Although he regarded the latter as unmanly and the former as too slow to reload, he did not allow his sense of honor to outweigh his sense of practicality. He learned, too, a grave respect for captains who used men well, and contempt for those who used them badly.

  Still, it was the “stunt” which lured him, and he sensed that in the massed armies of the Great States there was little scope for a man not “born with a cockade in his cap.” He heard tales that far to the southeast, in the land of the swartsmen, were fabulous cities where men had caged fire in steel. And so he set out to find them.

  His journey, had any of the skalds of his homeland known of it, would have earned him immortality seven times seven. He crossed inland seas and deserts, he passed the broken monuments of forgotten empires, he gazed on the ruins of a city that would have put to shame even the grand capital of Yavelprawns had it not been the hovel now of howling savages. He endured a winter beyond imagination in the high ice-mountains of Bellophor, where lived a degraded and cannibalistic folk who dressed in the furs of the White Grizz. And in the end he had come to the finest city on World, where an appalling stench of soot and fire blackened the very air, but in whose stamping mills wondrous weapons and other goods were forged. The smiths of the plains had fashioned swords upon anvils with mighty strokes of thick-hewed arms. Those of Old Cuffy and the other Great States had done so with trip-hammers and water-driven wheels. But in the cities of Varucciyam in the far southeast they had tamed the Fire itself! Ai, Tengri! Awe very nearly overcame wonder in his heart.

  But he had schooled himself well, and he saw in the whirling “gears” and “driveshafts” but finer versions of the cams and blocks and tackle of the northwest, and in the power delivered by steam a more refined version of the power delivered by water unboiled. He hired himself out as usual, starting with the most menial deeds; found dishonor and treachery to be fine arts among the Varucciyamen; and taught them a bit of what honor meant on plains so distant that word of them had not yet reached their ears.

 

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