Futures Near and Far (20 page)

He regarded her steadily. Her shiver continued in spite of
the blanket. Now was hardly the time to talk, but there were things he needed
to know.

“Were you guilty?” he asked.

She didn’t look up from her meat. “I did the things they say
I did. Whether they should have been against the law, I don’t know.”

It was a good answer. Honest, not attempting to save face,
but with its admirable pride.

“Have you ever heard of me?” he asked.

“Glenn Ashton?”

“Ashwood.”

She shrugged apologetically.

“Ever heard of the Furies?”

“From the Greek myth?” She was chewing more slowly, as if
wondering why he was interrogating her.

“A protest group, purged by the magistrate in 2832. I was
their leader.”

“I wasn’t even born in 2832.”

With so few children born anymore, Glenn was accustomed to
thinking of everyone as several hundred years old. He faltered through the next
question. “How long is your sentence?”

“Thirty years.” Finishing her meal, she seemed to gather
strength. “And yours?”

“Indefinite,” he said softly.

She blinked. “But that was under an old regime. When they
come for me, they’ll take you, too. That’s if the current administration lasts
that long. Someone might find us sooner.”

“That sounds . . . optimistic,” he muttered.

That silenced her. She crawled nearer the fire, arranged the
straw he had given her for her bedding, and lay down under the blanket to watch
the stars breaking through the widening gaps in the cloud cover. She didn’t
look at him.

Glenn was being a poor host and he knew it. Yet he was
finding it hard to be gracious. Judith might be who she said she was. Or she
could be lying. McCandless might still be in power. He could have sent her. She
could be an actress. She could be an android, a construct of Fluidmetal and an
A.I. matrix.

She was too perfect. She brought with her the prospect of
companionship, sex, hope for release from prison, and information about the
galaxy he had been isolated from for fifty years. Too much like his fantasies,
she was.

McCandless would love to torment him further. No sooner
would Glenn come to trust Judith, pour out his confidences and pour into her
his semen, than she would melt away, leaving a recording of McCandless’s voice,
laughing. Or maybe McCandless needed something. Glenn had always believed that
during all the druggings and coerced testimony, he had not revealed
all
the names of his comrades. Perhaps a
splinter of the Furies remained to this day, annoying the magistrate. He would
try to worm that last name or two from Glenn’s lips.

Judith was drifting to sleep, exhausted by her initiation to
the planet. He winced. If she were to be his Eve, he needed to treat her
better. But how did he dare? He stared at her until long after the storm
run-off from the mountains thundered down the river channel.

o0o

In the morning, he held up the gift he had made for her:
clothing. The garments weren’t much to speak of — just a loincloth of hide,
suspended from a waist thong, and a thong necklace with another wide scrap of
hide that would drape both breasts. He had had neither the time, the skill, nor
the materials to craft anything less rudimentary.

Her nose crinkled at the odd, ferretlike odor, still present
though the animal the skin had come from had been dead a year or more. But she
nodded and tied the loincloth to her waist. She left the upper garment on the
ground.

The gesture had gone over well. Glenn was pleased. It had
been little enough of a risk. If she were a spy, much better for him that some
of her beauty was concealed. If she were a genuine castaway, then he had
ingratiated himself by allowing her to find her level of comfort. Though
modesty had been on the wane ever since the advent of molecular cosmetology,
some people — women especially — still appreciated the chance to selectively
reveal themselves.

She smiled and looked at him expectantly.

“Come on,” he said. “If you’re going to survive here, there
are some things you should know.”

He had no choice but to take her on as a student. It was the
only responsible thing to do if she were not McCandless’s tool, and it would
give him a task to keep him focussed. He started with a tour of the drenched
plain, sticking to rain-softened sands for the benefit of her blistered feet.
She followed his lead without question, listening respectfully as he spoke. And
well she should. The knowledge he was sharing had been won with pain and
arduous trial-and-error.

Soon, as was inevitable, they encountered a quintessential example
of the desert’s unpleasantness. Skirting the edge of a dwindling pool, he used
the haft of his spear to scoop out a drowned specimen he called a heeby-jeeby.

“Too stupid to get out of the rain,” he commented.

She cringed as she leaned over the remains. Long and scaly,
the creature resembled a snake or lizard, but with twenty or more pairs of
legs, like some reptilian version of a millipede.

“They’re lethargic during the day,” he added. “You might be
tempted to sneak up on one to kill it. Don’t. They spit their venom. It’ll
dissolve your skin, or blind you if it gets in your eyes. Dilute it a hundred
to one and it’ll still give you hives.”

Judith, who was only a step from the pool’s edge, scooted
back to keep the potentially contaminated water from touching her feet. “I take
it they’re active at night?” she asked tremulously.

“Very. You’ll hear the scuffle of forty little feet. Can’t
miss it.”

She shivered.

“Whenever you hear that, just stay still. Heeby-jeebies
don’t eat anything as big as we are. They’ll ignore you if you don’t hassle
them. Last month one crawled right over my neck and just kept going.”

She gazed at him with undisguised awe. Glenn blushed. He
hadn’t been trying to impress her. He didn’t want to become dependent on praise
now that he’d lived so long without it.

But it did feel good to be seen as competent. And to be
appreciated as a teacher.

“Well, then,” he mumbled, “I’ll show you what their burrows
look like, so you can steer clear.”

o0o

Over the next week, he shifted the lessons away from
immediate threats to life to the next level of priority — finding food. That
usually meant meat, taken mostly by snare and net rather than spear. Plants
were too often poisonous. Moreover, edible vegetation consisted largely of
widely scattered seeds or pulp hidden deep within spiny protuberances or
armored rinds — it was never easy to obtain. It was worth the effort only
because of the fiber and trace elements, and because those carbohydrate sources
would not run away when a hunter was tired, unlucky, or injured.

Judith closely attended whatever he said to her. He caught
himself staring as she breathed. Her lungs filled, briefly widening the set of
her breasts, and he was reminded of the gentle way the latter rose and fell as
she slept.

She was a woman. He could smell the femaleness of her. She
gave off pheromones that shot up his nostrils and linked directly into his
primitive brain. Each day left him a little more dazed.

Signs indicated she was caught in a complementary sexual
tropism. She maintained less distance, allowed their hands to brush as they
traded objects, and held eye contact. His weathered body might hinder her
evolving interest, but did not halt it.

For better or worse, he was giving in to her. By the end of
another week, they had become casual with one another. She asked more
questions, did small tasks for him. He could tell she was still terrified of
this place, but that she accepted him as an ally. To her, they were friends.

And to him, what were they?

They were exploring the sea, always the best source of
protein, the water cool enough to be refreshing. As ever, he was careful to
warn her of dangers. “Stay in the shallows,” he told her. “There’s a species
out there sort of like a giant lamprey. Big enough to eat people. Venture into deep
water and your nanodocs might have to reconstitute you out of eel shit.”

She laughed. He grinned back. Some of his old self had
reemerged. When was the last time he had owned a sense of humor?

Suddenly she grew serious. “One of them ate you, didn’t it?”

He coughed. “Only my left foot, actually. Not that it made
much difference. The gangrene killed me a few days later.”

“I can’t imagine what you must have been through all these
years.” Disconcerted by her own boldness, she wiped the salt flecks off her cheeks
and chin. “I don’t think I could have endured all that by myself.”

The memories rose like bile. Mocked at his trial, forced to
betray comrades, and then sent to hell. He dropped his net into the surf, using
the motion of retrieving it to hide the tears that were springing from his
eyes. He came up facing away from her.

He was unable, however, to disguise the sob that wracked his
whole body.

Judith moved forward, wrapping her arms around his waist,
hugging him. The unmistakable caress of nipples on his back forced new tears
up.

Glenn rocked back and forth, succumbing to the rhythm of the
waves, letting Judith support him. The touch of her arms, her breasts, her
chin, soothed him too much to resist. She was giving him comfort in spite of
his calculated ugliness, in spite of his gruffness.

“It won’t be so bad now,” she murmured. “We’ll keep each
other company. Let me be your friend. We could make something of our time
here.” She circled to his front, pulled his head down to her level, and kissed
him.

It was a light, chaste kiss. Her nostrils quivered as she
drew away, trying to corral more of his scent. It was clear she would kiss him
again — that and much more. She led the way to the beach, where she dropped her
loincloth to the sand. Beckoning him, she walked in the direction of the camp.

From the shallows he admired the female way her hips rocked
up and down with each stride. He followed, never letting her recede from view.

o0o

Their lovemaking was everything he could have wished for.
Soft, snug wetness. Enthusiastic puffs of breath. Little squeals of feminine
delight. The pungent, delicious aroma of passionate exertion. Only after the
third set of orgasms were they content to collapse into the aftermath, lying
together under a single blanket underneath the stars, where Glenn fell into a
deep, all-consuming slumber.

Morning arrived, illuminating the recessed walls of the
camp. Sunlight glittered off the minerals in the rock. It was the one time of
day the camp was not in the shade, a welcome arrangement that chased away the
nocturnal chill. Glenn woke with a start, opening his eyes to find that Judith
was standing, body haloed as she gazed out at the landscape.

Her passion-tousled form was glorious. As she turned toward
him, his eyes were riveted to the supple twisting of her waist. He could just
imagine how it would feel to grasp her there again while she mounted him. She
blew him a kiss, pointed toward the river, mouthed “Bath,” and tip-toed down
the embankment, out of sight.

He was ready for her when she came back. Beads of water
clung to her coppery skin, held in place by random hair follicles. Were he to
lick them off of her, he would never wish to drink any other way again.

She held out her arms to him. Her expression had hardly
shifted from pleasure to shock before his club connected with her skull. No
sooner had she fallen, limp, to the ground than he raked his stone knife across
her throat. Blood gushed from the huge wound, staining the dust.

Her nanodocs would revive her, of course. Glenn estimated
that would take several hours. He tossed a few essential items, ones he kept at
no other camp, into a makeshift knapsack. By the time her death was erased, he
would be far gone toward the mountains, and given Judith’s rudimentary tracking
skills, she would never catch up.

He shuddered as he marched away, humbled to realize how
vulnerable he had been. In another month, he would done almost anything for
her. At a minimum, he would have restored his body to its youthful morph so
that she would not have to bear the sight of his middle-aged, graying self. And
in the process, erase much of his identity.

That was what McCandless would want, after all. To erase
him, one way or another. Given the effects of intimacy, the drunkenness of
hormone haze, it would not have been long before he had accepted her version of
the outside galaxy — a place where even the name of his enemy was forgotten. He
would begin dreaming, hoping, of the rescue she had mentioned, begin to be
confident that no more than thirty more years of exile remained. He would no
longer plot revenges, no longer picture the moment when he would at last catch
up with the magistrate. New priorities would subsume the old, until former
concerns seemed hollow and indistinct.

In short, he would leave behind the very vision and faith
that had sustained him all these years. And when at last she asked him about
his old friends and of his former exploits, he would pour out it all out
without reservation, naming the names that McCandless wanted, and be made a
fool once more.

And then she would depart, and he would be alone, left with
nothing anymore, not even pride.

The storm, though gone a fortnight already, had blessed the
peaks ahead with bright new snow. Perhaps he would climb all the way to the
top, build a snowman for company, or simply reexperience the novelty of frozen
water. Perhaps, from that height, he would see an ocean out beyond the
wastelands, or a savannah. A new home, where he could laugh at his foe’s paltry
manipulations, and one day find the means to become the victor.

A little inner voice nagged at him, asking if he might have
misconstrued things, but it faded away, unheard. Onward he walked.

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