The Peace Keepers were blaring something about surrendering and submitting themselves to the law. The law, Jarl thought, allowed some people to be created to be used – for their bodies or their minds, but to be used for others’ benefit without ever having a hope at freedom. The law, he thought, needed correction.
He laid flat on his belly and started firing both burners at the lights that lit up the scene: the bright floods on top of the orange flyers, but also the flyers headlights. As soon as he started firing, he started getting return fire. He heard Jane scream, “Keep down,” but he was fairly sure she was speaking to her charges, not him.
After a few moments, the scene was dark, except for flashlights held by individual Peace Keepers, and the beam of those could not possibly illuminate well enough to let them see what he was about to do. And what he was about to do was first set up rocks, precariously balanced on an incline on the right side of the gathering. There were paths of sorts down, on the right and the left, where the cliff effaced downwards towards the surrounding landscape. Jarl set the rocks up so that with a very little touch they would cascade down the right side path, and made sure they were large enough rocks to make quite a lot of noise falling.
Then he turned to the left side path, tripping and grabbing onto bushes to keep himself from sliding all the way down and yet managing to be almost completely silent. It brought him behind the nearest orange flyer. The Altermans were on the other side, and he must get to them.
Getting to them could be done two ways, and he chose the least likely one. He’d gathered from the Alterman’s talk that he was undergrown for his age. Well. He’d make use of that. he dropped to his stomach. the flyers were slightly curved below as well as above, an ovoid shape, which, at rest, touched the ground only in the center of its underside. This left a large area of darkness underneath, if one were able to slither underneath quietly.
It wouldn’t do for the Alterman’s. There were five people to get out from behind there. And he didn’t know how agile the mules were. But it would do for him.
Holding his breath, almost not daring think, in a way that seemed to him excruciatingly slow, he crawled under the flyer, and out the other side. He approached the group, still crawling on his belly, and got behind Jane, but not before she turned towards him, the burner almost but not quite swinging his way.
“It is I,” he said, standing up and speaking as close as he could to her ear, and as low as he could. “Jarl Ingemar.”
She took a deep breath. “Jarl,” she said. She pronounced it properly too, ee-arl. And she smelled different from men, in a way that Jarl could not define, but which hit him like a kick to the head, making him feel suddenly slightly drunk. “How–”
“No,” he said. “No time. No time to talk about it. I’ve set things up. Here, here is your bag. It has everything but your clothes and toiletry articles in it. I couldn’t bring anything more. They were looking for you at the resort. I thought– When I start the distraction up, you are to leave, crawling under the that flyer on the left. I’ll show you where. All of you. I left a flyer for you,” he told her the coordinates. In the dark, he could see her hand that held Carl’s move. It seemed to him she was tapping on her husband’s wrist with her finger. He thought she was telling him what he told her. “On my mark, be ready to go.”
“No,” she said. “No. What about you? You must come with us. We’ve talked. We’ll adopt you. Where we live, no one knows what we do. We have no children. My husband... He was rescued, years ago. We can’t have children. We’ll adopt you. We’ll erase the markers. You can live a normal life.”
Jarl closed his eyes. The temptation was almost unbearable. He wanted that normal life. He wanted the freedom he’d seen back at the resort. But if he filed in after them – if no one stayed in the circle to distract the Peace Keepers – they’d be pursued. And, on foot, with the Peace Keepers in flyers, they’d be caught. They’d be killed.
“No,” he said. “I’ll stay. Don’t worry. I have no intention of dying for this. I’ll get out of it – somehow. And I’ll get back to where I’m supposed to be. Besides, I have friends. Xander and Bartolomeu are supposed to keep me from getting out. They’ll be half killed if I don’t come back. Now, mind you, on your mark.”
“We do this,” Jane said. “Because we believe that God made man in his image and semblance and that his son once took human form, and therefore every human form is sacred.”
“Sounds good to me,” Jarl said, slightly impatient. “I have a human form.”
“You have a human heart,” she said, softly. “And today is the anniversary of the day we believe the son of God was born. They say angels sang in the sky to herald us. You’ve been our angel tonight.”
It was nonsensical and stupid, but he felt tears in his eyes, even if all he could get out was a gruff, “go.”
And then took the rock he’d put in his pocket, and making use of those bio-improved physical abilities, he aimed at where he left the rock pile, and threw. Hard.
The sound of someone slipping and sliding down the path on the right came. “Go,” Jarl whispered to Jane.
She got the mules out first, crawling beneath the edge of the flyer, the way Jarl had come in. It was easy, because all the Peace Keeper’s had run to the end of the other path, hoping to catch Jarl.
Jarl waited just long enough to make sure that the Alterman’s were some way away, then he started working on his own escape. He pointed at the nearest flyer, and burned. Then the one next. Then the other. He knew precisely where the power packs were – he’d stolen one of these before. Hitting them in the power packs caused a most satisfying explosion, and then some of the debris caught the other flyers, until even the blue flyer behind him was burning.
Jarl dove behind it, anyway, for some modicum of protection from the flying debris. Most of the Peace Keepers had run the other way, to avoid the debris, and he could hear them calling frantically for help, so they must have at least one working transponder. He could vaguely see orange flyers converging.
But they weren’t here, yet, and the other peacekeepers were to far away to fire at him. The cliff face was craggy and naturally had much better hand and footholds than the wall around the zipway. And he could move fast. Very fast.
He climbed the cliff face quickly, thanking whoever had designed him for superhuman speed, coordination and balance. The God of normal humans might have made them in His image and semblance. Jarl’s creators had improved on the design.
He was at the cliff top before the Peace Keeper’s reinforcements arrived and started sweeping the cliff face with brilliant lights. They found nothing.
Jarl found nothing as well, when he got to where he’d parked his flyer. He’d hoped to find nothing. He hoped they were well and away.
As for him, he turned and, tiredly, started to make his way towards Hoffnungshaus. If he got there in the next twenty four hours, perhaps Bartolomeu and Xander would avoid extreme punishment.
***
He couldn’t leave for a week after that. Not only was he too sore from the truly spectacular whipping he’d got as punishment, but he wasn’t left unwatched a single night. And he was not just watched by Bartolomeu and Xander, but by a sentinel, outside this door.
But after a week on his best behavior, vigilance relaxed. Hoffnungshaus did not have the resources to devote that much to their most troublesome charge. And besides, Jarl might escape, but he always came back and of his free will. While they held his friends, he would not disappear for good.
And so a week later, Jarl escaped and made it back atop the zipway wall, where he’d been when the sirens first sounded.
When he opened the panel, there was something in there, besides the circuits. At first he thought snow had got in there and not melted, but that was stupid. It would, of course, have melted. Touched, the whiteness revealed itself for a slip of paper. By the light of the holograms he read it, “Dear Jarl, I want you to know you are on our thoughts and in our prayers. On Christmas
night, you were our savior angel. I don’t think we can rescue you – even if we found the location of your crèche, it would be very well guarded. But we want you to know the mules you rescued that night are your age, quite normal as to intelligence, and will have a chance at a normal life because of you.” It ended with a very odd phrase in quotes, something Jarl had a vague memory of hearing sung in an old holo, “Angels we have heard on high.”
He let the paper go in the wind, of course. He could not take it back to Hoffnungshaus. but in a way it would always be with him.
Jarl’s fingers worked furiously, blindly, tying and connecting the circuits in a way they’d never been meant to go, and then taping a mad dance on the buttons, reprogramming the hologram.
By the time he climbed down from the wall and beat a hasty retreat through the fields to Hoffnungshaus, making sure to lay a false path so no one would think this was him – even if they believed a single person could make the calculations to change the holos – he knew that from down in the zipway people flying towards Friedstadt would see an angel all in white fly away to disappear into the dark snowy night.
Jarl half dreamed that Jane and Carl would be out again, on one of their missions of mercy and would see it, and know he was well and had got their message.
Angels he had met right here.
Dragons
WHAT IF THEY WERE REALLY THERE?” Jack said. He came out of the engine room, looking like something dredged up from a dark sea – all flying white hair, and wide blue eyes that looked like they should be blind. Spacers Eyes they called them. “What if they were really there?” he asked. “Those monsters, those dragons, those creatures ready to swallow ships, ready to render humans mad, ready to tear apart the faint shell of reason we use to paint over what we don’t know?”
He’d been enlarging on this theme for the last three hours: the monsters who’d once threatened seafarers. He’d read to me from an account in the ship’s database – not standard issue I was sure – of a dragon—like creature flying round and round a ship’s sails and finally making them burn, and all the sailors lost, which made me wonder who’d written the account and known how many times the monster went around the mast and how his wings sounded like moth’s wings in the wind, and how he obscured the sun.
He’d been talking about it, all the while he was in the engine room, working on the faltering engine of this fifty-year-old mining ship. And from outside, now and then, as I listened to the tinker and swish of tools, to the idiot beeping of the machine as it tried to establish normal function, I’d shouted, “Then they weren’t. If they existed where did they go? Where did they hide?” Now I said it again, quietly, and I added, “Because we’ve crisscrossed the Earth with ships, and we’ve gridded her with communications satellites, and these monsters don’t exist.”
Jack gave me a slitty-eyed look, and a corner of his mouth twitched up. He was wiping his hands to a huge, oil-stained rag. It was as if the ship’s engine had bled all over them.
A two man ship, is all this was. A two-man asteroid miner ship, one step up from a robot one, in that we could avoid collisions most of the time, and we didn’t get confused about what to mine.
My dad had done this for most of his life – had gone out and harvested minerals and rare earths from the asteroid belt. A month, two months, three months at a time, and come back home a little more tired, a little grayer, but with money to keep me in educational modules, and to keep Mom and I comfortable in our little house. He’d gone and come back, gone and come back, a fisherman in an endless sea, until the cold of space and the emptiness had bleached him away entirely. He’d died of one of those cancers long-time space miners get, and faded away into death like someone washed out to sea.
He’d left almost enough money to complete my training – almost – to become an interstellar navigator, to work in those ships that went out to the new colony worlds. Almost. I needed another six months, another module and then I could apply.
One trip out to the asteroids ought to do it, I’d thought, and I’d tried to find a ship that would take me – inexperienced and raw as I was. There had been only Jack. Jack who’d taught dad, Jack who’d been old when dad was an apprentice. Jack and the Gone Done It, his forever-breaking-down ship, cobbled together of salvage and will power.
And so here I was. A month trip. All I had to do was survive a month.
“Have you ever thought,” Jack said. He crossed the common room that was all we had outside the engine room and the storage room for our found materials, and dove into the cupboard for a piece of cheese. Hard cheese. He bit into it, leaving the mark of his teeth in the white-yellowness of the cheese. “Have you ever thought,” he said, “that the monsters were there; that they moved on? They were there when man first woke, when man first said I am, there in the darkness of the cave away from the camp fire, waiting, waiting. Any human who wandered away from the camp fire was slash, cut, gash.” He made vicious motions with the hand holding the piece of cheese. “Nothing but the remains found in the morning, half eaten.”
“I imagine there were tigers and bears and stuff,” I said. I’d almost said saber-tooth-tigers, but then I wasn’t sure if those had lived at the same time as humans. Natural history modules were extra and not needed for a space ship navigator. “Waiting to snack on a human,” I said. “But not supernatural monsters.”
Jack quirked an eyebrow at me. He had bushy eyebrows, very white, like the tentacles that grow over the eyes of certain dark-dwelling fish, and which give a sort of light to move by. “No?” he said. “But what if there were? And what is supernatural, exactly? Just a word people use to hide what they can’t explain. There’s always things people can’t explain. Imagine that there were those things, there, in the dark, waiting for humans to stray beyond safety and then—”
“I won’t suppose anything of the sort,” I said. “Stop trying to scare me. Did you fix the engine?”
He shoved the rest of the cheese in his mouth, wiped his fingers to the coveralls, leaving crumbs of cheese behind amid the oil smears. He waggled his hand at me. “Almost,” he said. “I can keep the artificial gravity on and the air purifying, but we’re still not moving. We’re marooned here. I’ll go do battle with it again.”
The engine room swallowed him. He left the door open, though, so he could talk. I wondered why he was talking to me about monsters, and figured it was part hazing since I didn’t quite belong to his world and never would, and part to keep himself amused while he worked.
I knew how to repair engines, too, at least in theory. I’d taken the module just before coming on this trip. But I didn’t know what had happened to the Gone Done It in the fifty years since she’d left the factory, and I doubted very much that her entrails resembled much of anything that the modules had shown me.
Jack had changed her, at least for the last thirty years, and he should know her way around her twisted, convoluted interior.
“Consider, young Pete, consider. Perhaps there were things out there. Why else would our ancestors write about them, our oldest songs and legends sing of them: of things of claw and tooth and scale, of night and infinite malice. Suppose they were made of something not-flesh, something our ancestors couldn’t kill. Consider they were rivals with humans – rival intelligences, zealously defending their space against the curious monkey-minds. When humans left the camp-fire, the place all other human minds know, the place all other humans tell each human he is safe and lit and rational, then these things pounce. They pounce in defense of their lair, of their secret dark. They kill and rend in order to be allowed to go on living.”
He banged something. It sounded like he was hitting metal hard with a hammer, and then there was a series of pings, that sounded like he’d managed to loosen a piece and was pulling it around, the other way, slowly. “They were there,” his voice came above the other sounds. “In the dark of the cave. But then more and more humans ventured out into that dark, humans learned to make torches, take the fire with them, mak
e the darkness less dark.
“And the monsters fled, before the light of the torches, before the certainty of the human minds that they were safe. They gathered in distant lands, in forests, in plains where they could ambush the human mind, feed on human fear. The few who ventured there and survived brought out stories. Fearful stories of those who lurked there. They came with claw and tentacle and with tearing fang, and humans ran back with stories and warnings. Don’t go into the forest, they said. And don’t stray far from the shore. And maps were drawn with vast areas marked Here there be dragons.
“But the humans came, over hill, around trees. They came in numbers, in family groups, in migratory bands. They cut down trees and built among them. What had been strange and wonderful became familiar, safe. The dangerous animals were killed and the suggestion of fangs, the shadow of claws retreated. The monsters retreated, to the cold, salty, trackless deep ocean, hovering over the unexplored waters. Till the humans went there too, and above the Earth, in the sky. And then the monsters fled, still further.
“These things were chased from Earth,” Jack put his head in the opening of the door, and grinned at me, a pantomime devil, his forehead sooted with machine oil, his eyes slanted and amused, and I thought he was laughing at me. This was almost all hazing, and he was laughing at me, amused at my discomfiture, waiting for my reaction. “Do you ever wonder?” he asked me, and raised his tumultuous eyebrows at me. “Do you ever wonder where they went? Where they are?”
“I imagine they went back to hiding under beds and scaring children,” I said, sardonically.
He went on, as if he hadn’t heard me, “They went out to the dark of space, to the unknown land out there – claw and wing, tentacle and fang. They wait out here, they wait—”
Here Be Dragons: A collection of short stories Page 26