Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by G. C. Edmondson

  Camp consisted of two tipis constructed of oilplant stalks covered with every hide not needed for other purposes. Even multiple layers of muskylope with the hair on could not make a tipi warm in this kind of weather. Heat rose in these conical structures, sneaking out the smoke flap and leaving the inhabitants to shiver no matter how high-banked was the snow and earth around the edges of the lodge. Yet the Cree had stuck stubbornly by them for millenia, shivering and muttering over-the-shoulder curses at the Manitou while ignoring their northern neighbors who dressed differently, ate differently, and were warlocks and witches since how, without supernatural help, could those shortbodied, shortlegged folk come down laughing and cheerful from the north where it really got cold? Such were the strangers’ disgusting habits that they were called “eats raw meat” which, in Cree, is pronounced eskimo.

  But Jerome had learned this all secondhand from tribal legends and campfire tales. The Bureloc had never rounded up any Inuit six hundred years ago when their sweeps removed dissidents and slackers alike from Old Terra. Those hardy hunters had undergone a cultural revival and pulled out of the CoDominium—back into the trackless north as civilization became increasingly unbearable. The Cree had not, so now they were on Haven along with Apaches, Arabs, and anyone whose presence the old CoDominium had found inconvenient. For the last three years they had also shared the planet with the Saurons.

  Haven had never been a misprint for heaven. The entire planet had sustained a bare twenty million when the Saurons, on the run from a lost war and seeking whatever bolt hole they could find had settled on Haven. To prepare those twenty million for the new order the Saurons had blown every protein factory and every starch stand off the face of Haven. Five and a half million starved during the first winter of Sauron occupation.

  Haveners who thought about such things, which meant everyone still alive, calculated and extrapolated. Without the Empire’s daily ration of synthetic swill the planet could, at best, support six million—providing those six million mastered stone age techniques of hunting and gathering since all heavy industry had been taken out in the same strike that put an end to the unfree lunch. By the third year of Sauron occupation Haven’s population was down to the projected level. Out in the boondocks, away from the relatively amenable climate of Shangri La the first year brought little change. Nomadic peoples living a marginal life were annoyed by city and farm folk overrunning their trap lines but most of the refugees did not live long enough to disrupt the nomads’ lives.

  It was during the second winter of the Sauron presence that the survivors were winnowed out and tough enough to push the nomads off into the low-rent districts far north of the Shangri La Valley and beyond the distant range of the Atlas. Which in turn pushed little Jerome’s band that much farther north—up into the uninhabitable swamps that surrounded the North Sea. The air was so thin at this altitude that it was almost impossible to start a fire. Once ignited, it required constant fanning and infusion of pitch or animal fats to keep the wood burning.

  Jerome flexed a sheen of ice off his mittens and made a snowball which he overhanded against the stiff-frozen skin of the smaller tipi. Thus warned, presumably the inhabitants would not spear him before he could finish crawling through the flap. When he got inside his eyes took half an eternity to adjust to the darkness. Why, he wondered, had his mother let the fire die so low? He found a sliver of pitch-kindling and blew the coals into life. And saw why she had let it die so low. Jerome’s maman would never cook another meal.

  Life wounds. Scar tissue forms and after a while one learns to accept the inevitable. But not at age ten. Fish forgotten, Jerome rushed from the tipi and without pausing traversed the ten meters to the larger tipi. “Oncle Antoine!” he shrieked as he forced the flap open. Then he saw the dead-cold ashes and remembered that his uncle had already taken the Sky Path. His two aunts, one Oncle Antoine’s sister and the other the old man’s wife, had died over a week ago.

  The old man had been too feeble to do what should have been done. There were no large trees handy and even had there been, ten-year-old Jerome could never have gotten the stiffened corpses in position in a crotch. In the warmth of the tipi they had become unbearable after the third day so, with Oncle Antoine’s reluctant acquiescence Jerome had rolled and levered the two old ladies onto a toboggan and dragged them a kilometer out onto the ice. The theory was that when spring breakup came the Manitou would give them a decent burial at the bottom of the lake. But of course, the tas-wolves had gotten there first.

  Something had gotten to Oncle Antoine since Jerome had last been in this tipi. It did not look like a wolf. But the old man’s flint-frozen face had been nibbled at. Eyes were pecked out. Lips had been chewed away to reveal ground-down teeth in an unnatural grin. His nose and earlobes had also been shredded by small teeth. There was a sudden buzz and Jerome collapsed into a fetal ball of panic as something huge screed and flapped past him and out into thin-aired twilight.

  Minutes later the chill brought him to his feet. There would be no help from here. He went back to his mother’s tipi. In his frantic rush he had left the flap gaping and now it was as cold inside as outside. He looked at the shrinking woodpile and knew tomorrow he would have to do something about that, too. But right now he had to get some food into himself.

  Once the fire was reviving he hung his three fish above the tiny flame where they would defrost enough for him to skin and gut them. Meanwhile, he looked to his mother.

  It had been a cruel winter. More so because of cruel men driven beyond their limits by Sauron excesses. Although Jerome’s band had never actually encountered a Sauron, their planetary strike had sent a shock rippling round the planet, pushing a rolling wave of starving people ahead of it. At first frost Jerome’s band had numbered twenty-two, of which nine were able-bodied men. Eleven had been women of varying ages and the other two had been ten-year-old Jerome and his Oncle Antoine who could not remember how old he was. After a summer of slim pickings, moving always farther north where it froze even in summer and the air was too thin for parturition, Oncle Antoine had been anxious to get past the barrens even if it meant venturing into the near-impossible swamps surrounding theNorth Sea. It was, at minimum, a place where they could count on being left alone.

  But those Sodbusters a day’s ride beyond the last palisaded settlement had been too tempting. This far north they had missed out on the orbital bombing. Whole barnloads of winter forage, ristras of tobacco and chiles and onions and other treasures draped from walls and fences, just waited to be taken. Even to ten-year-old Jerome it had seemed too good to be true.

  It was.

  When the first raid succeeded beyond Oncle Antoine’s wildest expectations they came back for seconds. And the Sodbusters were loaded for bear. Lightly armed so they could carry off more, the Lafranche band was first distracted from their looting by an unannounced blizzard of slung stones. Boiled-leather armor immediately demonstrated its inadequacy when three men and a woman went down in the first volley. One man regained his feet just in time to catch the first of the short, heavy crossbow quarrels that next came at the raiders from three sides.

  Retreating in the only direction that lay open, the Lafranche band abruptly found themselves thigh-deep in a wild grain bog. The Sodbusters came at them in pirogues, drawing long bows with even longer brush-penetrating arrows whose sectional density was even more demonstrative of the inadequacy of fried-leather armor. One arrow went through Jerome’s father’s muskylope breastplate and emerged from that heavy built man’s back, stopping only when its leather fletching snagged at his chest. More pirogues came snaking through the grass and women of the Sodbuster colony belabored the surviving raiders with the heavy sticks with which they thrashed wild grain heads into canoes.

  Home in camp, ten-year-old Jer6me refused to believe it. Four men and three women had returned, bedraggled, mud-smeared, bloody, bearing neither arms nor loot. Jerome sat up all night waiting for the others to come home. Those already there did not waste t
ime. They hit the trail at first light, making tracks before the Sodbusters could follow up on their advantage.

  Shorthanded and short-rationed was no way to start a winter in even the nicer parts of Haven. Thus, despite his band’s ingrained distaste for fish, Jerome had been fishing. His catch was dripping now, and had relaxed from the agonized shapes into which it had frozen to death. He gutted it and managed a halfhearted job of skinning before letting the three small jacks swing back over the fire. When tentacles began to crackle he snatched the smallest in mittened hands, waved it about for a minute, and began chewing before it could freeze again.

  Maman lay relaxed in her half-open blankets, almost as if she were sleeping. But Jerome knew better. Like the others, one by one, maman had starved to death. Jerome was the last surviving member of this branch of the Lafranche band. He ate the second-largest fish, grumbling at the armored boniness of the jack’s huge head. He was eating the last claw when abruptly Jerome realized he was no longer alone.

  Cautiously, he glanced around. The smoke flap was just barely cracked. The door flap was secure and tied behind him. The ‘dactyl must have taken refuge from the cold and the rising wind when he had panicked and rushed out, leaving the flap open. It must have been here all this time.

  It was a huge ‘dactyl, over a meter tall and with a wingspan that could bear away a muskylope calf. This leathery-winged marsupial had claws on its leading edges, and was as savage as most of the local fauna. With ten-year-old hindsight, Jerome knew this was what had bowled him over in Oncle Antoine’s tipi. He also abruptly guessed that this animal who entered tipis and was not shy around humans must once have been someone’s pet. “So what do you do here, brother ” he asked.

  The Lafranche band’s usual range was farther north than other nomads, and they had had minimal contact with the more southerly rovers. Little Jerome had heard the older men speak of spirit-talk but none of the Lafranches claimed that ability. With the pragmatism that derives from a single decade of existence, little Jerome’s attitude was, “I’ve never seen it, therefore it does not exist.” Thus he was totally unprepared when the ‘dactyl replied.

  “It’s because I’m not used to being alone.” Jerome told himself. “Or maybe I’m going to die of the blood cough like Tante Marie. Or maybe if I had another fish or a piece of meat to fill my belly I wouldn’t imagine things like this.”

  “You are not Cree,” the ‘dactyl spirit-spoke.

  “Metis,” Jerome said. “Ma mere fut nettement française.”

  “Then,” the ‘dactyl said, “the white side of your brain will convince you that you’re hallucinating and that none of this really happened.”

  Jerome was inclined to agree with this.

  “But you will be wrong. Don’t you know what all Indians know?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Jerome, mon fils, je viens de dire ton nom.”

  “So you have spoken my name. What’s yours?”

  Lightning flashed briefly in the ‘dactyl’s eyes as a nictitating membrane closed and opened. With the proto-avian equivalent of a shrug the ‘dactyl said, “Weeti.”

  “All right, Weeti. Now what?”

  “Now begins your education—providing you don’t freeze to death tonight.”

  It was already too cold and too dark to think about hunting more firewood. Jerome found his blankets and began laying himself out as close to the tiny fire as he dared.

  “Plan ahead, boy,” Weeti spirit-spoke.

  “I’m doing my best.”

  “Maman’s blankets too, boy. Do you think she still needs them?”

  As he buried himself in the robes and slowly began to feel warmer it abruptly occurred to Jerome that the ‘dactyl’s spirit-voice sounded just like Oncle Antoine.

  Hunger almost satisfied, Jerome fell asleep and dreamed that he had been talking with a ‘dactyl. From some reserves of his subconscious he recalled other bits of esoteric Cree knowledge. The ‘dactyl had spoken his name. Of course he knew what that meant. Everybody knew that! Yet, despite his desperate situation Jerome was calmly certain that he was not going to die. Other people sickened. Others were struck down by arrow or blade. Not Jerome. He’d been around for ten years and it hadn’t happened yet. Therefore it was never going to happen.

  The faint growing light cast a glow through the upper part of the tipi where the greased skins were only one layer thick. Jerome stretched and heard the tinkle as frozen breath shattered off the outer side of his tas-wolf robe. To the uninitiated these robes of inch-wide twisted strips of winter fur seemed useless. Woven so loosely that a finger could be poked through at any point, they seemed totally incapable of tempering the minus sixty of this prairie. Yet, unlike blankets, a wolf robe never absorbed perspiration, never became soggy, did not hold dirt, and was inhospitable to vermin.

  Without conscious thought, Jerome stepped out of the tipi and spread his robe to the morning air. Immediately the moisture of a night’s sleeping turned to frost which fluttered to the ground like a miniature snowstorm when he shook the robe. Freeze-dried and clean of all vermin, he rolled it and took it back inside the tipi.

  Weeti—funny how he remembered that name. Had the ‘dactyl really spoken to him? The ‘dactyl was eating. It took Jerome an instant to realize what the beast was eating. Then he realized there was only one piece of flesh in this tipi.

  This morning the carnivorous marsupial did not spirit-talk him, leaving Jerome sure that it had never happened. But what was a ‘dactyl doing inside a tipi? Then he knew. Tight-tied flaps and the smoke of fires kept most predators away. The fire had been out for days in Oncle Antoine’s tipi. With game scarce, the ‘dactyl was no respector of persons. Now that the fire had gone out in this tipi too, the ‘dactyl was having breakfast from Maman’s marble-hard corpse.

  “No time to be delicate, boy. The dead are dead. If she were alive she’d want you to live.”

  It had to be hunger. He was dizzy and starting to see double. But whether the message was coming from a ‘dactyl or his own subconscious, Jerome knew it was simple truth. He had been warm as long as he slept wrapped in enough coverings for two people but now the cold was getting to him. Before he could muster energy to go hunt firewood or more fish, Jerome had to get something into his stomach. In the dim light of the tipi he found the axe and began hacking.

  Frozen raw liver is of the crunchy consistency of a popsicle, less difficult to chew than plain ice. It is also infinitely more nourishing. Without further comment, the ‘dactyl cleaned up the bits and pieces left where Jerome’s hasty ill-aimed axe had failed to hit twice in the same groove. The meter-high carnivorous marsupial still roosted atop a berrying basket hung from the sloping tipi wall when Jerome had rested and felt strength returning. He took the flesh-fouled axe and went to look for dry wood.

  Among the extraordinary fantasies which humans are capable of believing, the myth of a balanced diet is right in there with other true whoppers. Explorers starved on ancient Earth, lost teeth and skin from scurvy, had expedition after expedition fail for lack of supplies before one white man asked what, in hind sight, seemed an obvious question: if vitamins and lime juice and green vegetables are all necessary to sustain health, how do Eskimos, who’ve never seen a green vegetable, manage to live long, happy lives and die with a mouthful of teeth?

  When Vilhjalmur Stefansson who, despite his Icelandic name was an American, considered this question he went native and learned the secret, which is no secret at all to any Argentine gaucho.

  When primitive hunters made a kill the cuts normally found in a supermarket—steaks, chops, roasts, and other muscle-meat were given to the dogs. Organ meats had higher and better flavor. Liver, kidneys, lungs and spleen, brains, guts, reproductive organs, and other items not normally on civilized menus contained all the vitamins necessary for a balanced diet. Thus Jerome survived the winter by eating first his mother, then his uncle—from the inside out.

  It was not easy. Gathering firewood took the greater part of each s
hort day. And his people had all died of hunger, leaving lean stringy bodies without an ounce of fat.

  Fat in Haven’s clime is essential. In winter the over-long, folded-back sleeve of a parka forms a pocket always stocked with whatever fat is available. Those who have not endured a Haven winter forget that, though it is possible to wear layers of furs and protect one’s exterior from cold, no one has yet devised a fur lining for lungs. Each icy breath exits warmed, carrying away calories at such a rate that it is difficult to move in the open without dipping into that parka cuff for a mouthful of fat every ten minutes or so. Finally Jerome caught a semi-dormant spiny boar and gorged himself on its oozy, juniper-gin-tasting oil which possesses the virtue of not hardening no matter how cold the weather.

  But if the short days were hard, the nights were harder. No matter how cold and hungry, it’s difficult to remain motionless, wrapped in wolf robes for the nearly week-long stretch of a midwinter night on Haven. Especially at age ten. On the colder clear nights when the wind died and the Kotsnaku took advantage of the interval to threaten Manitou with his fiery war dances, the dry air was so charged with mana that skin prickled and hair stood on end. The gods and demons charged and countercharged across the sky, rattling and shaking fiery blankets at one another until the whole sky rippled with fire and the very air hissed. Night after night the Sky People squabbled, never once paying the slightest heed to men below who lived out their lives unable to fly through the sky or fling shafts of aurora at one another. Nights like this Jerome would take Oncle Antoine’s bow and shoot a couple of arrows into the northern sky. “I am here!” he hissed, just as Their light shows hissed and made little balls of fire balance on treetops. “I am alive. Someday I will eat Your liver!”