Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (76 page)

“But you’d be—you’d be pregnant!” he cried in alarm. “You’d be in danger of taking an embryo on the River!”

She laughed proudly. “Can’t you get it through your head that I will
not
go on the River? I’ll just watch you and pull you out. I’ll see you get back here. For a while, anyway,” she added soberly. Then she brightened. “Hey, we’ll see all kinds of things. Maybe I can find a cow or some goats on the way! Yes, yes! It’s a perfect idea.”

She faced him, glowing. Tentatively she brought her lips up to his, and they kissed inexpertly, tasting salt. He felt no desire, but only some deep resonance, like a confirmation in the earth. The three moondogs were watching mournfully.

“Now let’s eat!” She began towing him toward the cliff steps. “We can start the pills right now. Oh, I have so much to do! But I’ll fix everything, we’ll leave tomorrow.”

She was like a whirlwind. In the food room she pounced on a small gold-colored pillbox and opened it to show a mound of glowing green-and-red capsules.

“The red ones with the male symbol are for you.”

She took a green one, and they swallowed solemnly, sharing a water mug. He noticed that the seal on the box had been broken, and thought of that stranger, Mungo, she had mentioned. How far had her plans gone with him? An unpleasant emotion he had never felt before rose in Jakko’s stomach. He sensed that he was heading into more dubious realms of experience than he had quite contemplated. He took his foodbar and walked away through the arcades to cool down.

When he came upon her again she seemed to be incredibly busy, folding and filling and wrapping things, closing windows and tying doors open. Her intense relations with things again . . . He felt obscurely irritated and was pleased to have had a superior idea.

“We need a map,” he told her. “Mine was in the boat.”

“Oh, great idea. Look in the old control room, it’s down those stairs. It’s kind of scary.” She began putting oil on her loom.

He went down a white ramp that became a tunnel stairway, and came finally through a heavily armored portal to a circular room deep inside the rock, dimly illumined by portholes sunk in long shafts. From here he could hear the hum of the station energy source. As his eyes adjusted he made out a bank of sensor screens and one big console standing alone. It seemed to have been smashed open; some kind of sealant had been poured over the works.

He had seen a place like this before; he understood at once that from here had been controlled terrible ancient weapons that flew. Probably they still stood waiting in their hidden holes behind the station. But the master control was long dead. As he approached the console he saw that someone had scratched in the cooling sealant. He could make out only the words:—WAR NO MORE. Undoubtedly this was a shrine of the very old days.

He found a light switch that filled the place with cool glare, and began exploring side alleys. Antique gear, suits, cupboards full of masks and crumbling packets he couldn’t identify. Among them was something useful—two cloth containers to carry stuff on one’s back, only a little mildewed. But where were the maps?

Finally he found one on the control-room wall, right where he had come in. Someone had updated it with scrawled notations. With a tremor he realized how very old this must be; it dated from before the Rivers had touched Earth. He could hardly grasp it.

Studying it, he saw that there was indeed a big landing dock not far south, and from there a moveway ran inland about a hundred kilometers to an airpark. If Peachthief could walk twenty-five kilometers they could make the landing by evening, and if the cars were still running the rest would be quick. All the moveways he’d seen had live cars on them. From the airpark a dotted line ran southwest across mountains to a big red circle with a cross in it, marked VIDA! That would be the River. They would just have to hope something on the airpark would fly, otherwise it would be a long climb.

His compass was still on his belt. He memorized the directions and went back upstairs. The courtyard was already saffron under great sunset flags.

Peachthief was squatting by the well, apparently having a conference with her animals. Jakko noticed some more white creatures he hadn’t
seen
before, who seemed to live in an open hutch. They had long pinkish ears and mobile noses. Rabbits, or hares perhaps?

Two of the strange white animals he had seen sleeping were now under a bench, chirruping irritably at Peachthief.

“My raccoons,” she told Jakko. “They’re mad because I woke them up too soon.” She said something in a high voice Jakko couldn’t understand, and the biggest raccoon shook his head up and down in a supercilious way.

“The chickens will be all right,” Peachthief said. “Lotor knows how to feed them, to get the eggs. And they can all work the water lever.” The other raccoon nodded crossly, too.

“The rabbits are a terrible problem.” Peachthief frowned. “You just haven’t much sense, Eusebia,” she said fondly, stroking the doe. “I’ll have to fix something.”

The big raccoon was warbling at her; Jakko thought he caught the word “dog-g-g.”

“He wants to know who will settle their disputes with the dogs,” Peachthief reported. At this, one of the moondogs came forward and said thickly, “We go-o.” It was the first word Jakko had heard him speak.

“Oh, good!” Peachthief cried. “Well, that’s that!” She bounced up and began pouring something from a bucket on a line of plants. The white raccoons ran off silently with a humping gait.

“I’m so glad you’re coming, Tycho,” she told the dog. “Especially if I have to come back alone with a baby inside. But they say you’re very vigorous—at first, anyway.”

“You aren’t coming back alone,” Jakko told her. She smiled a brilliant noncommittal flash. He noticed she was dressed differently; her body didn’t show so much, and she kept her gaze away from him in an almost timid way. But she became very excited when he showed her the backpacks.

“Oh, good. Now we won’t have to roll the blankets around our waists. It gets cool at night, you know.”

“Does it ever rain?”

“Not this time of year. What we mainly need is lighters and food and water. And a good knife each. Did you find the map?”

He showed it. “Can you walk, I mean really hike if we have to? Do you have shoes?”

“Oh, yes. I walk a lot. Especially since Ferrocil stole my bike.”

The venom in her tone amused him. The ferocity with which she provisioned her small habitat!

“Men build monuments, women build nests,” he quoted from somewhere.

“I don’t know what kind of monument Ferrocil built with my bicycle,” she said tartly.

“You’re a savage,” he said, feeling a peculiar ache that came out as a chuckle.

“The race can use some savages. We better eat now and go to sleep so we can start early.”

At supper in the sunset-filled porch they scarcely talked. Dreamily Jakko watched the white bats embroidering flight on the air. When he looked down at Peachthief he caught her gazing at him before she quickly lowered her eyes. It came to him that they might eat hundreds, thousands of meals here; maybe all his life. And there could be a child—children—running about. He had never seen small humans younger than himself. It was all too much to take in, unreal. He went back to watching the bats.

That night she accompanied him to his hammock and stood by, shy but stubborn, while he got settled. Then he suddenly felt her hands sliding on his body, toward his groin. At first he thought it was something clinical, but then he realized she meant sex. His blood began to pound.

“May I come in beside you? The hammock is quite strong.”

“Yes,” he said thickly, reaching for her arm.

But as her weight came in by him she said in a practical voice, “I have to start knotting a small hammock, first thing. Child-size.”

It broke his mood.

“Look. I’m sorry, but I’ve changed my mind. You go on back to yours, we should get sleep now.”

“All right.” The weight lifted away.

With a peculiar mix of sadness and satisfaction he heard her light footsteps leaving him alone. That night he dreamed strange sensory crescendos, a tumescent earth and air; a woman who lay with her smiling lips in pale-green water, awaiting him, while thin black birds of sunrise stalked to the edge of the sea.

Next morning they ate by candles, and set out as the eastern sky was just turning rose-gray. The ancient white coral roadway was good walking. Peachthief swung right along beside him, her backpack riding smooth. The moondogs pattered soberly behind.

Jakko found himself absorbed in gazing at the brightening landscape. Jungle-covered hills rose away on their right, the sea lay below on their left, sheened and glittering with the coming sunrise. When a diamond chip of sun broke out of the horizon he almost shouted aloud for the brilliance of it; the palm trees beyond the road lit up like golden torches, the edges of every frond and stone were startlingly clear and jewellike. For a moment he wondered if he could have taken some hallucinogen.

They paced on steadily in a dream of growing light and heat. The day wind came up, and torn white clouds began to blow over them, bringing momentary coolnesses. Their walking fell into the rhythm Jakko loved, broken only occasionally by crumbled places in the road. At such spots they would often be surprised to find the moondogs sitting waiting for them, having quietly left the road and circled ahead through the scrub on business of their own. Peachthief kept up sturdily, only once stopping to look back at the far white spark of Station Juliet, almost melted in the shimmering horizon.

“This is as far as I’ve gone south,” she told him.

He drank some water and made her drink too, and they went on. The road began to wind, rising and falling gently. When he next glanced back the station was gone. The extraordinary luminous clarity of the world was still delighting him.

When noon came he judged they were well over halfway to the landing. They sat down on some rubble under the palms to eat and drink, and Peachthief fed the moondogs. Then she took out the fertility-pill box. They each took theirs in silence, oddly solemn. Then she grinned.

“I’ll give you something for dessert.”

She unhitched a crooked knife from her belt and went searching around in the rocks, to come back with a big yellow-brown palm nut. Jakko watched her attack it with rather alarming vigor; she husked it and then used a rock to drive the point home.

“Here.” She handed it to him. “Drink out of that hole.” He felt a sloshing inside; when he lifted it and drank, it tasted hairy and gritty and nothing in particular. But sharp too, like the day. Peachthief was methodically striking the thing around and around its middle. Suddenly it fell apart, revealing vividly white meat. She pried out a piece.

“Eat this. It’s full of protein.”

The nutmeat was sweet and sharply organic.

“This is a coconut!” he suddenly remembered.

“Yes. I won’t starve, coming back.”

He refused to argue, but only got up to go on. Peachthief holstered her knife and followed, munching on a coconut piece. They went on so in silence a long time, letting the rhythm carry them. Once when a lizard waddled across the road Peachthief said to the moondog at her heels, “Tycho, you’ll have to learn to catch and eat those one day soon.” The moondogs all looked dubiously at the lizard but said nothing. Jakko felt shocked and pushed the thought away.

They were now walking with the sun westering slowly to their right. A flight of big orange birds with blue beaks flapped squawking out of a roadside tree, where they were apparently building some structure. Cloud shadows fled across the world, making blue-and-bronze reflections in the sea. Jakko still felt his sensory impressions almost painfully keen; a sunray made the surf line into a chain of diamonds, and the translucent green of the near shallows below them seemed to enchant his eyes. Every vista ached with light, as if to utter some silent meaning.

He was walking in a trance, only aware that the road had been sound and level for some time, when Peachthief uttered a sharp cry.

“My bicycle! There’s my bicycle!” She began to run; Jakko saw shiny metal sticking out of a narrow gulch in the roadway. When he came up to her she was pulling a machine out from beside the roadwall.

“The front wheel—Oh, he bent it! He must have been going too fast and wrecked it here. That Ferrocil! But I’ll fix it, I’m sure I can fix it at the station. I’ll push it back with me on the way home.”

While she was mourning her machine Jakko looked around and over the low coping of the roadwall. Sheer cliff down there, with the sun just touching a rocky beach below. Something was stuck among the rocks—a tangle of whitish sticks, cloth, a round thing. Feeling his stomach knot, Jakko stared down at it, unwillingly discovering that the round thing had eyeholes, a U-shaped open mouth, blowing strands of hair. He had never seen a dead body before (nobody had), but he had seen pictures of human bones. Shakenly he realized what this had to be: Ferrocil. He must have been thrown over the coping when he hit that crack. Now he was dead, long dead. He would never go on the River. All that had been in that head was perished, gone forever.

Scarcely knowing what he was doing, Jakko grabbed Peachthief by the shoulders, saying roughly, “Come on! Come on!” When she resisted confusedly, he took her by the arm and began forcibly pulling her away from where she might look down. Her flesh felt burning hot and vibrant, the whole world was blasting colors and sounds and smells at him. Images of dead Ferrocil mingled with the piercing scent of some flowers on the roadway. Suddenly an idea struck him; he stopped.

“Listen. Are you sure those pills aren’t hallucinaids? I’ve only had two and everything feels crazy.”

“Three,” Peachthief said abstractedly. She took his hand and pressed it on her back. “Do that again, run your hand down my back.”

Bewildered, he obeyed. As his hand passed her silk shirt onto her thin shorts he felt her body move under it in a way that made him jerk away.

“Feel? Did you feel it? The lordotic reflex,” she said proudly. “Female sexuality. It’s starting.”