by Ben Bova
He knew then for certain what he had only feared: Dr. Niss had not healed his soul. How could he, when Spur had consistently lied about what had happened in the burn? Spur didn’t mean to groan, but he did. When he opened his eyes, the gandy in the blue flowered dress was staring at him.
“Are you all right?” She looked to be in her late sixties or maybe seventy, with silver hair so thin that he could see the freckles on her scalp.
“Yes, fine,” Spur said. “I just thought of something.”
“Something you forgot?” She nodded. “Oh, I’m always remembering things just like that. Especially on trains.” She had a burbling laugh, like a stream running over smooth stones. “I was supposed to have lunch with my friend Connie day after tomorrow, but here I am on my way to Little Bend for a week. I have a new grandson.”
“That’s nice,” Spur said absently. There was one other passenger in the compartment. He was a very fat, moist man looking at a comic book about gosdogs playing baseball; whenever he turned a page, he took a snuffling breath.
“I see by your uniform that you’re one of our firefighters,” said the gandy. “Do you know my nephew Frank Kaspar? I think he is with the Third Engineers.”
Spur explained that there were over eleven thousand volunteers in the Corps of Firefighters and that if her nephew was an engineer he was most probably a regular with the Home Guard. Spur couldn’t keep track of all the brigades and platoons in the volunteer Corps, much less in the professional Guard. He said that he was just a lowly smokechaser in Gold Squad, Ninth Regiment. His squad worked with the Eighth Engineers, who supplied transportation and field construction support. He told her that these fine men and women were the very models of spiritual simplicity and civic rectitude, no doubt like her nephew. Spur was hoping that this was what she wanted to hear and that she would leave him alone. But then she asked if the rumors of pukpuk collaborators infiltrating the Corps were true and started nattering about how she couldn’t understand how a citizen of the Transcendent State could betray the Covenant by helping terrorists. All the pukpuks wanted was to torch Chairman Winter’s forests, wasn’t that awful? Spur realized that he would have to play to her sympathy. He coughed and said he had been wounded in a burn and was just out of the hospital, and then coughed again.
“If you don’t mind,” he said, crinkling his brow as if he were fighting pain, “I’m feeling a little woozy. I’m just going to shut my eyes again and try to rest.”
Although he didn’t sleep, neither was he fully awake. But the nightmare did not return. Instead he drifted through clouds of dreamy remembrance and unfocused regret. So he didn’t notice that the train was slowing down until the hiss of the air brakes startled him to full alertness.
He glanced at his watch. They were still an hour out of Heart’s Wall, where Spur would change for the local to Littleton.
“Are we stopping?” Spur asked.
“Wheelwright fireground.” The fat man pulled a limp handkerchief out of his shirt pocket and dabbed at his hairline. “Five minutes of mandatory respect.”
Now Spur noticed that the underbrush had been cleared along the track and that there were scorch marks on most of the trees. Spur had studied the Wheelwright in training. The forest north of the village of Wheelwright had been one of the first to be attacked by the torches. It was estimated that there must have been at least twenty of them, given the scope of the damage. The Wheelwright burn was also the first in which a firefighter died, although the torches never targeted citizens, only trees. The fires they started were always well away from villages and towns; that’s why they were so hard to fight. But the Wheelwright had been whipped by strong winds until it cut the trunk line between Concord and Heart’s Wall for almost two weeks. The Cooperative had begun recruiting for the Corps shortly after.
As the squealing brakes slowed the train to a crawl, the view out of Spur’s window changed radically. Here the forest had yet to revive from the ravages of fire. Blackened skeletons of trees pointed at the sky and the charred floor of the forest baked under the sun. The sun seemed cruelly bright without the canopy of leaves to provide shade. In every direction, all Spur could see was the nightmarish devastation he had seen all too often. No plant grew, no bird sang. There were no ants or needlebugs or wild gosdogs. Then he noticed something odd: the bitter burned-coffee scent of fresh fireground. And he could taste the ash, like shredded paper on his tongue. That made no sense; the Wheelwright was over three years old.
When the train finally stopped, Spur was facing one of the many monuments built along the tracks to honor fallen firefighters. A grouping of three huge statues set on a pad of stone cast their bronze gazes on him. Two of the firefighters were standing; one leaned heavily on the other. A third had dropped to one knee, from exhaustion perhaps. All still carried their gear, but the kneeling figure was about to shed her splash pack and one of the standing figures was using his jacksmith as a crutch. Although the sculptor had chosen to depict them in the hour of their doom, their implacable metal faces revealed neither distress nor regret. The fearsome simplicity of their courage chilled Spur. He was certain that he wasn’t of their quality.
The engine blew its whistle in tribute to the dead: three long blasts and three short. The gandy stirred and stretched. “Wheelwright?” she muttered.
“Yeah,” said the fat man.
She started to yawn but caught herself and peered out the open window. “Who’s that?” she said, pointing.
A man in a blue flair suit was walking along the tracks, peering up at the passenger cars. He looked very hot and not very happy. His face was as flushed as a peach and his blond hair was plastered to his forehead. Every few meters he paused, cupped his hands to his mouth and called, “Leung? Prosper Gregory Leung?”
FIVE
Fire is without doubt an advantage on the whole. It sweeps and ventilates the forest floor and makes it clear and clean. I have often remarked with how much more comfort & pleasure I could walk in wood through which a fire had been run the previous year. It is inspiriting to walk amid the fresh green sprouts of grass and shrubbery pushing upward through the charred surface with more vigorous growth.
—JOURNAL, 1850
The man waited impatiently as Spur descended from the train, kit slung over his shoulder. Although he did not turn back to look, Spur knew every passenger on the train was watching them. Was he in trouble? The man’s expression gave away nothing more than annoyance. He looked to be younger than Spur, possibly in his late twenties. He had a pinched face and a nose as stubby as a radish. He was wearing a prissy white shirt buttoned to the neck. There were dark circles under the armpits of his flair jacket.
“Prosper Gregory Leung of Littleton, Hamilton County, Northeast?” The man pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and read from it. “You are currently on medical leave from the Ninth Regiment, Corps of Firefighters, and were issued a first-class ticket on this day—”
“I know who I am.” Spur felt as if a needlebug were caught in his throat. “What is this about? Who are you?”
He introduced himself as Constant Ngonda, a deputy with the Cooperative’s Office of Diplomacy. When they shook hands, he noticed that Ngonda’s palm was soft and sweaty. Spur could guess why he had been pulled off the train, but he decided to act surprised.
“What does the Office of Diplomacy want with me?”
Just then the engineer blew three short blasts and couplings of the train clattered and jerked as, one by one, they took the weight of the passenger cars. With the groan of metal on metal, the train pulled away from the Wheelwright Memorial.
Spur’s grip on the strap of his kit tightened. “Don’t we want to get back on?”
Constant Ngonda shrugged. “I was never aboard.”
The answer made no sense to Spur, who tensed as he calculated his chances of sprinting to catch the train. Ngonda rested a hand on his arm.
“We go this way, Prosper.” He nodded west, away from the tracks.
“I don�
��t understand.” Spur’s chances of making the train were fading as it gained momentum. “What’s out there?”
“A clearing. A hover full of upsiders.” He sighed. “Some important people have come a long way to see you.” He pushed a lock of damp hair off his forehead. “The sooner we start, the sooner we get out of this heat.” He let go of Spur and started picking his way across the fireground.
Spur glanced over his shoulder one last time at the departing train. He felt as if his life were pulling away.
“Upsiders? From where?”
Ngonda held up an open hand to calm him. “Some questions will be answered soon enough. Others it’s better not to ask.”
“What do you mean, better?”
Ngonda walked with an awkward gait, as if he expected the ground to give way beneath him. “I beg your pardon.” He was wearing the wrong shoes for crossing rough terrain. “I misspoke.” They were thin-soled, low-cut, and had no laces—little more than slippers. “I meant simpler, not better.”
Just then Spur got a particularly intense whiff of something that was acrid and sooty, but not quite smoke. It was what he had first smelled as the train had pulled into the Memorial. He turned in a complete circle, all senses heightened, trying to pinpoint the source. After fire ran through the litter of leaves and twigs that covered the forest floor, it often sank into the duff, the layer of decomposing organic matter that lay just above the soil level. Since duff was like a sponge, most of the year it was too wet to burn. But in the heat of summer it could dry out and became tinder. Spur had seen a smoldering fire burrow through the layer of duff and emerge dozens of meters away. He sniffed, following his nose to a charred stump.
“Prosper!” said Ngonda. “What are you doing?”
Spur heard a soft hiss as he crouched beside the stump. It wasn’t any fire sound that he knew, but he instinctively ran his bare hand across the stump, feeling for hotspots. Something cool and wet sprayed onto his fingers and he jerked them back as if he had been burned. He rubbed a smutty liquid between thumb and forefinger and then smelled it.
It had an evil, manmade odor of extinguished fire. Spur sat back on his heels, puzzled. Why would anyone want to mimic that particular stink? Then he realized that his hand was clean when it ought to have been smudged with soot from the stump. He rubbed hard against the burned wood, but the black refused to come off. He could see now that the stump had a clear finish, as if it had been coated with a preservative.
Spur could sense Ngonda’s shadow loom over him but then he heard the hissing again and was able to pick out the tiny nozzle embedded in the stump. He pressed his finger to it and the noise stopped. Then, on an impulse, he sank his hand into the burned forest litter, lifted it and let the coarse mixture sift slowly through his fingers.
“It’s hot out, Prosper,” Ngonda said. “Do you really need to be playing in the dirt?”
The litter looked real enough: charred and broken twigs, clumps of leaf mold, wood cinders and a delicate ruined hemlock cone. But it didn’t feel right. He squeezed a scrap of burned bark, expecting it to crumble. Instead it compacted into an irregular pellet, like day-old bread. When he released it, the pellet slowly resumed its original shape.
“It’s not real,” said Spur. “None of it.”
“It’s a memorial, Prosper.” The deputy offered Spur a hand and pulled him to his feet. “People need to remember.” He bent over to brush at the fake pine needles stuck to Spur’s knees. “We need to go.”
Spur had never seen a hover so close. Before the burns, hovers had been banned altogether from the Transcendent State. But after the pukpuks had begun their terrorist campaign to halt the spread of forest into their barrens, Chairman Winter had given the Cooperative permission to relax the ban. Generous people from the upside had donated money to build the benevolence parks and provided hovers to assist the Corps in fighting fires. However, Chairman Winter had insisted that only bots were to fly the hovers and that citizen access to them would be closely monitored.
While in the field with Gold Squad, Spur had watched hovers swoop overhead, spraying loads of fire-retardant splash onto burns. And he had studied them for hours through the windows of the hospital, parked in front of their hangars at Benevolence Park Number 5. But even though this one was almost as big as Diligence Cottage and hovered a couple of meters above the ground, it wasn’t quite as impressive as Spur had imagined it.
He decided that this must be because it was so thoroughly camouflaged. The hover’s smooth skin had taken on the discoloration of the fireground, an ugly mottle of gray and brown and black. It looked like the shell of an enormous clam. The hover was elliptical, about five meters tall in front, sweeping backward to a tapered edge, but otherwise featureless. If it had windows or doors, Spur couldn’t make them out.
As they approached, the hover rose several meters. They passed into its shadow and Ngonda looked up expectantly. A hatch opened on the underside. A ramp extended to the ground below with a high-pitched warble like birdsong, and a man appeared at the hatch. He was hard to see against the light of the interior of the hover; all Spur could tell for sure was that he was very tall and very skinny. Not someone he would expect to bump into on Jane Powder Street in Littleton. The man turned to speak to someone just inside the hatch. That’s when Spur realized his mistake.
“No,” she said, her voice airy and sweet. “We need to speak to him first.”
As she teetered down the ramp, Spur could tell immediately that she was not from Walden. It was the calculation with which she carried herself, as if each step were a risk, although one she was disposed to take. She wore loose-fitting pants of a sheer fabric that might have been spun from clouds. Over them was a blue sleeveless dress that hung to midthigh. Her upper arms were decorated with flourishes of phosphorescent body paint and she wore silver and copper rings on each of her fingers.
“You’re the Prosper Gregory of Walden?”
She had full lips and midnight hair and her skin was smooth and dark as a plum. She was a head taller than he was and half his weight. He was speechless until Ngonda nudged him.
“Yes.”
“We’re Memsen.”
SIX
It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady.
—JOURNAL, 1851
Although it was cooler in the shade of the hover, Spur was far from comfortable. He couldn’t help thinking of what would happen if the engine failed. He would have felt more confident if the hover had been making some kind of noise; the silent, preternatural effortlessness of the ship unnerved him. Meanwhile, he was fast realizing that Memsen had not wanted to meet him in order to make friends.
“Let’s understand one another,” she said. “We’re here very much against our will. You should know, that by summoning us to this place, you’ve put the political stability of dozens of worlds at risk. We very much regret that the High Gregory has decided to follow his luck to this place.”
She was an upsider so Spur had no idea how to read her. The set of her shoulders flustered him, as did the way her knees bent as she stooped to his level. She showed him too many teeth and it was clear that she wasn’t smiling. And why did she pinch the air? With a great effort Spur tore his gaze away from her and looked to Ngonda to see if he knew what she was talking about. The deputy gave him nothing.
“I’m not sure that I summoned the High Gregory, exactly,” Spur said. “I did talk to him.”
“About your war.”
Constant Ngonda looked nervous. “Allworthy Memsen, I’m sure that Prosper didn’t understand the implications of contacting you. The Transcendent State is under a cultural—”
“We grant that you have your shabby deniability.” She redirected her displeasure toward the deputy. “Nevertheless, we suspect that your government instructed this person to contact the High Gregory, knowing that he’d come. There’s more going on here than you care to say, isn’t there?”
“Excuse me,” said Spur, �
�but this really was an accident.” Both Memsen and Ngonda stared at him as if he had corncobs stuck in his ears. “What happened was that I searched on my name but couldn’t find anyone but me and then the tell at the hospital suggested the High Gregory as an alternative because our names are so similar.” He spoke rapidly, worried that they’d start talking again before he could explain everything. “So I sent him a greeting. It was totally random—I didn’t know who he was, I swear it. And I wasn’t really expecting to make contact, since I’d been talking to bots all morning and not one was willing to connect me. In fact, your bot was about to cut me off when he came on the tell. The High Gregory, I mean.”
“So.” Memsen clicked the rings on her fingers together. “He mentioned none of this to us.”
“He probably didn’t know.” Spur edged just a centimeter away from her toward the sunlight. The more he thought about it, the more he really wanted to get out from under the hover.
Ngonda spoke with calm assurance. “There, you see that Prosper’s so-called request is based on nothing more than coincidence and misunderstanding.” He batted at a fat orange needlebug that was buzzing his head. “The Cooperative regrets that you have come all this way to no good purpose.”
Memsen reared suddenly to her full height and gazed down on the two of them. “There are no coincidences,” she said, “only destiny. The High Gregory makes the luck he was meant to have. He’s here, and he has brought the L’ung to serve as witnesses. Our reason for being on this world has yet to be discovered.” She closed her eyes for several moments. While she considered Spur’s story she made a low, repetitive plosive sound: pa-pa-pa-ptt. “But this is deeper than we first suspected,” she mused.