by David Drake
Mark's lips pursed. It wasn't his place to comment on Yerby's attitudes or domestic arrangements, either.
Amy appeared at the hatch above them, gray-faced. She moved with short, shuffling steps like a mummy whose feet were still wrapped together. She started to walk out into space.
"Amy!" Mark shouted as he bounded up the ten steps a lot faster than he'd have bet he could manage in the aftermath of suspended animation. He caught Amy by the shoulders an instant before she went off the edge of the top step.
"Something hurts," Amy said in a tiny voice. Her eyes didn't point in quite the same direction. "I think my head hurts."
"Here, lad, I got her," Yerby said. He reached past from the step below Mark. "Jump clear and I'll lift her down. Didn't the little gadget work for you neither, darling? The doc showed me the best one and I bought it."
"Do you think—" Mark said. Do you think you're in shape to carry jour sister, Yerby? he'd have continued, but obviously Yerby did think that and nothing anybody else said was likely to change his mind.
Mark jumped the six feet to the ground. Yerby lifted his sister and carried her as delicately as porcelain down the unrailed steps. He must still have the hangover, but Mark supposed Yerby had a lot of experience doing things hungover. And probably dead drunk, too.
"I don't know," Amy said. "If it worked, then I'm never going to travel anywhere again. Oh, Yerby, I hurt."
She was still wearing a net of fine wires with a lead to the pocket of her jacket. Mark removed the net and pulled a flat, four-inch square metal box from the pocket.
"My goodness," he said in horror. "You were using this? No wonder you've got a headache. My goodness, this is worse than nothing!"
"The doc said it was the best kind," Yerby said doubtfully. "It sure cost enough, I'll tell you that."
A dirigible had lifted from the Spiker's courtyard. Three individual flyers were circling closer. The upper surfaces of the flyers' thin, rigid wings were covered with solar cells. A small electric motor drove a propeller above the central spine, and the tubular frame beneath would hold two people if they were good friends.
"Twenty years ago," Mark said, "they thought you could lock your own brain patterns over those imposed by the ship's mechanism. Some people thought that. What really happened is the two systems set up harmonics that changed every time the ship transited to another bubble universe."
He glared at the device in his hand. "Look," he said, "I can teach you both how to bring your patterns into synch with the ship instead of fighting it. When the ship changes universes, you'll stay under but you'll shift too. That's what the newer electronics try to do, but none of them are really subtle enough and you don't need a machine."
"Guess we don't need this one," Yerby said. He took the device, crushed it in his right hand, and dropped the remains on the hard soil. He stroked his sister's hair very gently. "You teach Amy if you would, lad," he said. "Me, well, the booze works well enough for me."
He looked up at the hatch and called, "Hello, Doc—"
Dr. Jesilind walked into the hatch coaming. He spun counterclockwise at the impact and pitched out of the hatchway. Jesilind hit the ground flat and lay there on his back. His face bore a dazed smile.
Mark walked over to Jesilind.
"Oh, don't worry about the doc," Yerby said. "When he comes out of the capsule, it's like he's been tying one on for a week. You know a drunk never hurts himself falling."
"I didn't know that," Mark said. He didn't believe it, either. "But I can't say I was terribly worried."
Jesilind wore a wire induction net like Amy's. Mark fished into the doctor's pocket and brought out an identical control box. He looked at it, shook his head, and put the box back where he'd found it.
Yerby raised an eyebrow. "Want me to take care of that one, too?" he asked.
Mark shrugged. "I think we ought to assume that Dr. Jesilind is capable of deciding such things for himself," he said. Like you and your two quarts of gin, Yerby. "I just wanted to make sure that he hadn't given Amy advice that he wouldn't take himself."
"Naw, he wouldn't do that," Yerby said. "It's just that what works for the doc didn't work so good for Amy, I guess. You know how delicate women are."
Amy straightened and pushed herself out of her brother's arms. "Delicate?" she said. "Because I thought you might find some better way to relax on Kilbourn than getting stinking drunk and wrecking a bar? Does that make me delicate, Yerby? Because if it does, you could use some delicacy yourself, brother!"
"Now, Amy, I wasn't drunk," Yerby said abashed. "Now, be a good girlie—"
"Yerby!" Amy said. "You can't help being a fool, but if you'll shut up you'll be able to conceal the fact longer. In the future please remember that my name is Amy or sister or Miss Bannock. Can you manage that?"
Mark turned his head so that he could pretend not to be hearing a family quarrel. There was no doubt of the brother and sister's affection for one another, but they really did come from different worlds.
And Mark came from a world different from either of theirs. Well, they were all together now. At least for the time being.
There was almost no wind over the spaceport. Two of the flyers landed simultaneously, passing one another in opposite directions. When the little wheels touched the ground, the wings tilted into air dams and the riders put their feet down to help slow the vehicles. One of the newcomers was a man clad in leather imprinted with the pattern of scales.
A woman rode the other flyer. She was short, stocky, and looked madder than a wet hen. "Well, there you are, Bannock!" she called, still within the framework of her flyer. "Decided to come home at last, did you? How long are you going to stay? As much as a week, maybe?"
"Desiree?" Yerby said. He looked surprised. "Ah, I thought you'd bring the blimp. I've got a lot of gear for—"
"Wait for you with the blimp, should I?" the woman said. Her outfit was much like Yerby's own, a leather vest over a checked shirt, with canvas trousers and boots that looked like they'd been made by an amateur. "No, thank you. I guess you can bring it back yourself—and you can walk to the grant, too. I just came to see if there'd be news that you'd managed to get your head knocked in by something even harder."
"Mark, this here's my wife Desiree," Yerby said with a broad, false smile. "Desiree, Mr. Maxwell here's a real gentleman from Quelhagen. Wait till you see—"
"Two more mouths to feed is what I see," Desiree snapped. She was at least half a dozen years older than her husband. She couldn't ever have been strikingly pretty, but if she managed to smile and let her hair down from its tight bun, she could have come a lot closer. "Him and your sister and your fine Dr. Jesilind's back, more's the pity."
"Madam!" Mark said. "I assure you I have no intention of trespassing on your hospitality!"
Though Mark had planned to put up at the caravansary until he could make more permanent arrangements, Greenwood didn't have a caravansary. Such amenities were for planets with considerable transit trade, while Greenwood was the end of the line—the farthest that human settlement went in this direction. Well, the Spiker probably has rooms.
"Just who's talking about mouths to feed, Desiree Cartwright?" Amy said, answering Mark's unasked question of whether the two women knew one another from Kilbourn. "My share of Dad's estate was twice what you brought with you to the marriage, so I'd say if anybody was eating what another provided, it's you!"
"Come along, lad," Yerby said to Mark in a stage whisper. "I guess Miss Altsheller didn't teach Amy nothing that keeps her from holding her own."
He shook his head. "And with Desiree, too, which I could never do in a million years. Sober."
The women continued their discussion. Amy's language and tones were refined, but as her brother said, that didn't prevent her from making her point.
Mark was blushing and horrified. It wasn't just that the scene was angry: love, joy, or sorrow would have embarrassed him just as much. On Quelhagen, people just didn't let their emotions out in p
ublic.
A dirigible settled beside the pile of cargo discharged from the starship. The external cover that streamlined the gasbags was about a hundred feet long and painted in streaks of red, yellow, and gold.
"Hey Chuck!" Yerby bellowed to the man in the dirigible's cab. "Do me a favor, will you? Run me and my gear out to the grant. Desiree came in the flyer."
"Can it wait till tomorrow, Yerby?" the pilot said. He was a round-faced man, young-looking but so completely bald that Mark wondered if he'd lost his hair from disease or an accident. "That's sixty miles there and sixty back, and I'd really like to get these seedlings in the hothouse today yet"
"Say, you don't think I'd put my sister Amy up at the Spiker, do you?" Yerby said. "Come on, Chuck. Remember how glad you were I was around to help you run pipe when your first well failed."
"I never said I wouldn't, did I?" Chuck grumbled. "C'mon, let's get loaded and maybe I can get some work done myself anyhow."
Yerby strode toward the cargo. "Tomorrow you and me'll go off hunting, lad," he said. He nodded in his wife's direction. "That'll give Desiree a while to cool down. Or anyways, we won't have to listen to her."
Mark grabbed a trunk and began to drag it toward the dirigible's cargo sling. He didn't comment on Yerby's plan.
But since Desiree was obviously angry about the amount of time her husband spent avoiding her, it struck Mark as an extremely bad plan in the long run.
7. Free as a Bird
Dawn on Greenwood was brilliant with layers of color—purple, mauve, orange, and Mark was willing to say he'd seen a streak of green for a good fifteen seconds. 'Birds' with furry wings and spike-toothed reptilian jaws lifted onto the morning breezes. Some of them were so big that at a distance Mark had mistaken them for human flyers, but smaller versions peeping and flapping around the Bannock compound helped him correct his identification.
"Ever flown one of these, lad?" Yerby asked as he lifted a flyer onto the slide that would give it a little extra speed for takeoff. Mark had hefted the flyer. It was amazingly delicate for its strength. On the ground at least he could handle it himself, though not with Yerby's casual aplomb.
"No sir," he said. When he was nervous he got formal again, too formal for Greenwood. "Yerby, I've driven ground cars and aircars, but never one of these. Or a dirigible."
The Bannock compound was on a knoll which sloped gently on three sides toward the river that bent about the site at a half mile's distance. The launching slide projected out over the steep-sided gully to the north. Mark guessed the updraft here was pretty much constant.
Another slide dumped into the same gully all the trash from the twenty-odd people living in the compound.
The compound consisted of about a dozen buildings, mostly sheds and barns. The house sprawled. The initial construction was stone, but wings and an upper floor of cellulose-based plastic multiplied the volume many times. When Chuck's dirigible flew them in the evening before, Mark had seen the plastics plant and a sawmill on the bank of the river.
"You know," Mark said, "you're going to fill up this gully someday, so you might as well find another way to handle your garbage right now. There's package plants you could run off the fusion power supply you've already got. You could convert most of that to something useful."
He pointed to the multicolored filth straggling up the side of the gully. Creatures flitted over and burrowed through the mass. Besides native life-forms, Terran rats and insects had arrived with the settlers. That was true on virtually every human-colonized world.
"Aw, don't worry about the trash," Yerby said. He was checking that the wing's beryllium monocrystal stiffeners were securely fastened to the central spine of the same light, immensely strong, material. "Come spring and the rains, they'll scrub the ditch clean as a rocket nozzle."
"Wash it into the river?" Mark asked.
Yerby pinged a strut with a thumbnail. "That's right," he said.
It obviously didn't occur to the frontiersman that there might be anything wrong with the concept. For that matter, with fewer than three thousand humans on Greenwood, the native biosphere could handle the waste casually dumped into it . . . but the population wasn't going to remain so low, any more than that of Quelhagen had.
Mark grimaced. He'd come here to learn about the reality of the frontier. It was just that he didn't like some of what he was learning.
"There we go," Yerby said approvingly as he stepped back from the flyer. "It's pretty simple, lad. You sit here—"
He patted one of the two saddles. The riders could carry light objects on the crossways tray of monocrystal mesh behind them.
"—and you do with the control yoke what you want the flyer to do. The throttle's in the right grip—"
He caressed it.
"—but I never been in one of these things that I didn't have the motor flat out, and that wasn't near enough power to suit me."
Yerby grinned broadly and went on, "When you want to land, you crank this back—"
"This" was a lever of one-inch tubing, as sturdy as the flyer's spine. "—and the wings tilt. But you better be on the ground when you do that, because you're sure going to be there an eyeblink later."
There were half a dozen flyers in the three-sided shed that protected them from most of the rain. One had no motor, and the wings of another lay unmounted beside the body. An aircar that seemed to have been pieced together from several very different vehicles rested on blocks at the end of the shed.
The Bannocks had two dirigibles, one of them a general-utility vehicle like Chuck's. Yerby's was still in its shed. It had a royal blue skin except for a tear near the nose that had been repaired with black fabric. The other was a heavy-lift platform, now skidding a three-hundred-foot tree trunk toward the sawmill.
Amy walked toward them from the house, wearing trousers and a jacket she'd brought from Kilbourn. The garments were sturdy, but they were more professionally cut than most of what Mark had seen on Greenwood. The Bannock compound converted cellulose into a coarse rayon that some residents used for leggings and coveralls as well as tarpaulins, but the state of tailoring was as crude as the material.
"Just showing Mark how to fly one of these," Yerby called cheerfully to his sister. "I'm going to take him out hunting and see a bit of Greenwood."
"Right," Amy said. "I thought I'd come along and fly him. The two of us are light enough that one flyer can carry us."
She smiled at Mark. "If that's all right? It's trickier than my brother probably told you. It'd be a shame to lose you down there—" She nodded to the garbage-filled gully. "—before you'd had a full day on the planet."
Yerby's lips pursed. "I don't want anything happening to you, g—Amy," he said. "These flyers, they don't have batteries like the ones you're used to on Kilbourn. If you fly under a cloud, the motor cuts out bing."
"Yerby, I love the dishes you bought me," Amy said. She was still smiling, but her tone was a degree or two chillier. "That doesn't mean I'm made of thin glass. If you think you're going to keep me wrapped in fluff, then I'll leave and book a room in the Spiker. All right?"
"Just be careful, that's all I'm saying," Yerby grumbled. "And they don't have rooms at the Spiker, they got bunks, and don't be talking about that even for a joke."
He walked over to the shed to get a second flyer. Amy stepped up so that she straddled the left saddle with her feet on the ramp. "Hop on," she directed Mark. "Push the handbar and run along to give us a little more oomph."
She switched on the electric motor. The prop spun to a whine above them. It was still feathered so it wouldn't bite. "Ready?" she called as she flicked a thumb control to coarsen the propeller pitch. "Go!"
Amy started running forward with one hand pushing on the bar and the other controlling the yoke. Mark ran and pushed too. If Amy shoves the yoke forward as we leave the ramp, the next thing I'm going to see is a gullyful of garbage approaching very fast.
The ramp dropped from under Mark's feet. His fanny hit the saddle, but
his stomach kept right on diving. Wind rushing up the gully wall made his jacket balloon away from his torso.
Amy leaned to the right. The flyer banked and climbed, fully airborne. She kept it in a tight spiral to gain height. The feeling was glorious, absolutely glorious. The craft's nervous twitching didn't frighten Mark, as he'd expected it would. After a few moments, he deliberately raised his hands from the bar.
"We'll circle till Yerby gets up," Amy said matter-of-factly. "Besides, I want to get some altitude. Though the solar cells seem to be in better shape than I was afraid they'd be."
The slow climbing turns took them over the main house at a hundred feet of altitude. A man on the second-story deck waved to them.
Besides the folk who worked for or with Yerby, three other men were staying at the compound. Two were casual acquaintances, headed toward the Spiker but in no great hurry to get there. The third was some relative or other of Desiree's visiting the Bannocks until a starship delivered a power plant to replace the one that had failed at his own steading.
Desiree's complaint about "useless mouths" was obviously without real significance; it was just something to throw at her husband to show that she was angry. Mark didn't entirely blame the lady for objecting to Dr. Jesilind's continued presence, though.
Yerby launched his own flyer without the careful inspection he'd lavished on the machine he offered Mark. He climbed toward them, but he didn't gain altitude much faster than they had. Yerby was even heavier than he looked, because his muscular body was so dense. Besides his own weight, Yerby carried a hamper of food and a monopulse laser with a built-in solar charging system. The weapon weighed a good thirty pounds.
"This is a beautiful planet," Amy said. Despite the moan of the prop, the flyer was so quiet that she could talk in a normal voice. "Except for the settled part. That's as ugly as a picked scab."
Logging had cleared the larger trees on both sides of the valley east of the compound. The slopes were still dotted with the vivid green of new growth, however. The crews were taking the larger trees for processing as timber and cellulose base, but they weren't clear-cutting. The area would regrow.