Pallas (28 page)

When he picked the contraption up, he was astonished at how light it was, not much heavier, in truth, than a pair of ordinary bicycle wheels lashed together. He also suddenly remembered in what connection he’d heard the name Emerson Ngu. So this, then, was the brilliant young i
n
ventor, originally a penniless refugee from that blasted Greeley co
m
mune, if Drake-Tealy recalled correctly, who’d been manufacturing
pistols for the past several years, half a world away.

Admittedly, it was a rather small world.

But there had been something else, as well, hadn’t there? Some ha
r
rowing tale of jealousy and bloodshed in which this young fellow had been a victim—but then Drake-Tealy made a point of never paying a
t
tention to such things and couldn’t remember the details. Nor did he a
t
tempt to do so now. Instead, he lugged the peculiar device back across the stream and set it down beside the wheelchair ramp.

“Flying machine?” he asked.

Emerson nodded again without looking up. He’d finished the skinning and was sitting at the top of the ramp, resharpening his knife against the edges of a pair of long brown triangular stones set at an angle to one another in a plastic base. As the youngster tested the results of his effort against a thumbnail, the older man caught a glimpse of sheet-gold i
n
itials—
GS,
not
EN
—inlaid in the dark, hardwood handle of the knife. “You’re looking at the first production model of the Ngu Departure Flying Yoke, with room for cargo or a second passenger.”

“A motorcycle with a sidecar,” Drake-Tealy observed amiably, “or a bicycle built for two.”

For some reason Emerson didn’t reply, but concentrated harder on what he was doing. The whole story suddenly came back to Drake-Tealy and instantly he regretted what he’d said.

There’d been a girl.

About a year ago, it must have been.

Even at the time, he’d thought it was like something out of an old Jack London story. They—he still couldn’t remember who “they” happened to have been—had found this poor chap lying in the middle of the spur road which, as he recalled, looped around Lake Selous from Curringer to the damned Greeley Project (he’d named that lake himself, which was why the territory remained relatively fresh in his memory), shot to pieces, half bled out, and very close to death.

Beside him lay the broken body of a young girl, already dead for several hours, which he’d
either
carried or dragged the two miles over rough country from where their flying machine—he’d automatically a
s
sumed it to be an ultralight—had been shot down by UN security hool
i
gans acting outside their jurisdiction.

The girl had been connected with the Greeley Project somehow, not as one of its clients or whatever euphemism they were currently employing where the word “slave” stated the case much better. He was hazy on many of the details, or perhaps they’d never been clear to begin with. One thing was hideously clear: she’d been gang-raped and beaten to death, not necessarily—or exclusively—in that order. In its own way, it was a pe
r
fect example of the sort of phenomenon most individuals had come to Pallas in the first place to get away from.

Nor could Drake-Tealy recall anything coming of the semiofficial inquiry afterward. The weak point of the vaunted Stein Covenant, in his opinion—which he’d gone to some lengths to express during the early days on Pallas—was that it failed to specify an adjudicative structure. Miri, with Wild Bill Curringer to back her up, had always argued that the Covenant shouldn’t limit any future arrangements which might prove better than anything she’d been able to think of at the time. In the end, of course, exactly as he’d predicted, the struggle for survival on a new world had claimed every bit of the time and energy which immigrants and pioneers might otherwise have expended coming up with something better.

This travesty had been inevitable.

At any rate, the UN guards had claimed that they’d been lost in rough country, shooting at what they’d innocently believed was a trespasser in the dark, and stuck to their story tenaciously—as what rapists and mu
r
derers wouldn’t? The sole survivor wasn’t available for comment, having remained in a deep coma for weeks.

So this was what had become of him.

It certainly accounted for the eye patch and the limp
he’d observed.

Still feeling apologetic for his offhand remark, Drake-Tealy shuddered and forced himself to speak. “Would it be possible to try a spin, perhaps sometime tomorrow? I’ve heard a great deal about these things of yours and been fascinated.”

The truth was that he hadn’t flown since the accidental collision of two tiny, fragile aircraft out of three flying together which had killed his best friend and crippled the woman he loved, and furthermore, he had no d
e
sire to. Yet he often felt that there was nothing left of him any more but a garrulous old man, half starved for company. Moreover, he still needed to atone for the careless wagging of his tongue, in order to reclaim som
e
thing of his self-esteem.

Apparently it worked. Emerson looked up from what he was doing and smiled.
“Sure, Digger.
I’d be happy to take you for a ride.
Your lady, too, if she wants.”

Drake-Tealy smiled back, pretending to an enthusiasm he didn’t feel.

Or perhaps he did, after all.

And for the first time in years—but not the last for a long while—it suddenly occurred to him that their lives, his and Miri’s, were about to change forever.

It was about bloody time.

All men tell themselves lies in order to make their lives tolerable, whether it happens to be big lies like being loved by an all-seeing, all-powerful, all-merciful god, or little ones like being six feet tall instead of five eleven and a half. To live without those lies is to walk naked through a hailstorm, but it’s also to walk free.

—William Wilde Curringer,
Unfinished Memoirs

Gretchen screamed.

Machine guns hammered at him in the blackness of the night, tearing away his flesh.

He struggled to draw the Grizzly, but there was no feeling
left in his fingers. He was forced to look down helplessly as the
ultravelocity bullets splashed through him, stripping first the
skin, then the muscle from his body, pecking out his organs shred
by shred, leaving nothing behind but gleaming, bullet-riddled bones.

Gretchen screamed.

And suddenly it was daylight.

Emerson awoke with a start, his hair soaked and his face bathed in a cold sweat. His back ached from the impression of rough bark being made on it through his shirt, and he prickled from contact with the dry bed of brown pine needles he was sitting on. Although for the past few weeks, and especially the past few days, he’d generally felt better, physically, than he had for more than a year, there were, even yet, these unpredictable occasions of weakness and fatigue when his body betrayed him—as it apparently had half an hour ago, by his watch—and he was compelled to realize all over again that he was still in the process of recovering from wounds which by all rights ought to have been fatal.

For a long while he’d wished they had.

He discovered that he was sitting against the base of a tree a couple of miles from the cabin he’d been staying at for a week. The idea this morning had been to repay the kindness of his hosts with something that would relieve the monotony of venison. In his hands he still held the lighter and an unlit cigar he’d meant to smoke when he’d suddenly felt the need to sit and rest for a few minutes.

Instead, he’d nodded off and here he was.

Looking at the dry needles beneath and all around him, he was glad he hadn’t lit the cigar.

It wasn’t the first time this had happened to him, by any means. He’d come terrifyingly close to screwing his flying yoke into some unseen hillside more than once on his way across the face of the asteroid, which had been a factor in his decision to stop for a while. It wasn’t the first time he’d had a dream like this, either, and he understood with a shuddering certainty that it wouldn’t be the last. They seldom recalled anything that had literally occurred during the gunfight they inevitably concerned, but that didn’t make them easier to take.

The machine-gun hammering continued off somewhere to his left.
He knew it now for what it was, some variety of woodpecker happily drilling away at a hollow tree trunk.

With a deep sigh, he lit his cigar at last and leaned back again against
the tree, drawing the Grizzly from its holster and keeping it in his lap, hammer cocked and safety on, his eye upwind on the muddy little wash where he and Digger had seen tracks yesterday. There were fierce pigs
who
came down to water here, where the evergreens thinned into dec
i
duous woodland. No more than a dozen yards away, less than twenty feet uphill, he could still hear the mustard-colored flies buzzing around the big yellow blossoms of prickly pear cactus. But down here in what some of the Project peasants he’d grown up with would have called a wadi, the ground just beneath the forest litter, a hodgepodge of brown leaves and red-brown needles, was damp, and the air had a mushroom odor.

Digger—Emerson still found it hard to accept that his new friend was really the legendary anthropologist and adventurer Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy—had promised to churn up some sort of special barbecue sauce if Emerson could bag one of the pigs. The old man’s easy conf
i
dence in his ability was touching. He was somewhere up the hill and downwind at this very moment, gathering the wild onions and garlic that grew in profusion everywhere on Pallas. He was well equipped to make good on his promise. They raised sweet Italian tomatoes in a tiny sheet-plastic greenhouse behind the cabin, and kept other supplies stashed away in a “root cellar,” carved from the soft native carbonaceous cho
n
drite, where they’d hung the deer a week ago. A bank of thermocouples powered by a gallium arsenide array on the cabin roof helped maintain an almost freezing temperature in the underground larder.

Now if only Emerson could reciprocate.

If only Emerson could stay awake.

Only Emerson could have wondered why he continued having dreams like this. There were impressive pseudo-scientific words for what he was going through, as well as words well established in the common idiom—posttraumatic stress syndrome, flashbacks, shell shock, combat fatigue—but at best they only labeled the phenomenon. They failed u
t
terly to explain it or make it easier to live with.

He knew it wasn’t a matter of guilt over not having given an honorable account of himself during the attack outside the Project. Although the UN contingent had carried away their own dead and wounded, professional
trackers hired by Aloysius had told him afterward that he and Gretchen had been set upon by no fewer than a dozen of Junior’s uniformed ha
t
chetmen, of whom he and the girl—dazed and injured as they’d been by having been shot down and by the subsequent crash landing—had killed four and possibly as many as six (although there was some reason to believe that more than one had died from overly enthusiastic “friendly” fire).

For that matter, it wasn’t any kind of guilt at all. The only thing he felt about having killed a human being, possibly more than one—and he’d never been in doubt about this from the moment he’d regained co
n
sciousness—was a fervently held regret that he hadn’t managed to kill many more of them that night.

Nor was it simply a matter of missing his beloved Gretchen or regre
t
ting her death. No words were adequate to express how he felt about that. He wasn’t sure there were any adequate feelings for it, either. He might never come to terms with it, nor with the circumstances connected with it. In some respects he’d been ashamed to realize in the months that followed the event, during which he’d had very little to do but think about it, that he still clung to sanity only because he’d given her up for dead when she’d married Junior, and the one brief night they’d had together afterward seemed unreal. But if that was what was bothering him now, why did he never dream of her except to hear her screaming like a fighting banshee?

God knew that he could see her clearly enough in his waking mind’s eye and remember every intimate moment they’d had, as well as every intimacy, in happier times.

The thing he ought to be having nightmares—or daymares—about was what had happened afterward. Emerson had been a long while r
e
covering from his wounds, longer than he’d known was possible. He’d spent weeks in a coma, so they’d told him, many weeks more when he was too weak to speak more than a couple of words or even raise his head from his pillow, and months in which sitting up, standing, taking three steps across the room—or simply lying motionless and enduring the pain inflicted on him by a shattered body and what came very close to being a shattered mind—had exhausted him for the rest of the day.

There had been surprises, all of them unpleasant. He’d never suffered a prolonged illness before and never realized that a person could actually be too sick to read. He’d lacked whatever it took to concentrate or
care,
and the words on the page had simply slid by the eye he still had left without imparting any meaning to him.

There had been other things he’d been too weak for. He’d first aw
a
kened in Curringer, in Cherry’s squeaky brass bed in her room upstairs at
Galena’s,
during a fiercely whispered argument the girl seemed to be having with Mrs. Singh. Apparently he’d come out of his coma a day or two earlier, although he had no memory of that, and had been sleeping more normally off and on since then. Believing he was still asleep, the two women had almost come to blows over where he was going to finish recuperating and who would be taking care of him.

He’d pretended to sleep until they were gone.

That afternoon, without their knowing it, he’d persuaded Doc She
a
han, the husky blond veterinarian who was Curringer’s only phys
i
cian—and who might well have been named Gretchen if her name hadn’t already been Heidi—to tell both of them that he couldn’t be moved after all. It wasn’t that he preferred staying at Cherry’s place—although, of course, in some respects he did—but he was already here, and to some degree Mrs. Singh must be used to that fact. Being the cause of fighting between the two living souls he cared most about was a burden he wasn’t strong enough to shoulder and possibly never would be again.

In time they’d both accepted the status quo and, free of some of their worries over him, had returned to the amicable if guarded relationship they’d had before the disaster. At this moment, along with Nails and Aloysius, they were running the
Ngu
Departure plant together, Mrs. Singh as chief of quality control, Cherry keeping the books.

He’d also been too weak for a long time to benefit from—or even to appreciate much—certain unique notions his volunteer nurse cherished with regard to convalescent care. Even now, to some extent, the reliable miracle wasn’t all that reliable, and what surprised him most—even more than his disconcerting problem with reading—was that it was every bit as difficult to finish the process as to begin. It was as if his status as an o
r
ganism fit for survival—and on that account for passing on his genes—had been ruled probationary.

But even that wasn’t the worst.

Nobody but Junior (and evidently his father, sometime after the fact) had ever known who it was that had raped and murdered Gretchen and left him for dead. They might as well have been nameless, faceless a
u
tomata, and would likely remain unidentified forever. There’d been a sudden rotation of the Project’s UN personnel back to Earth, and the men who’d accomplished Junior’s dirty work for him were probably beyond reach, one way or another, since the UN, safely tucked away beyond freedom of the press, and therefore criticism, in its Third World enclave, tended to be more direct in its methods than previously these days, and even more inclined than those among Doc Sheahan’s profession to bury its mistakes.

Strangely enough, Emerson had found that he didn’t care about the goons themselves. Every day he’d vowed to get up out of Cherry’s soft, luxurious bed and go after the person who was really responsible for everything that had happened. More than anything he wanted to hunt down the murderous son of a bitch like the dog he was, and to kill him as slowly and painfully as possible. When he’d been able to read again, he’d made a serious study of the subject, summoning the electronic versions of books on the limits of human endurance and the history of torture, only to realize, with a pang of regret, that he was too civilized and that he’d have to be satisfied with making sure that Junior was dead.

But when he’d gotten on his feet, he discovered he’d been cheated out of even that much satisfaction. Gibson Altman Junior had fled rather than face him. Apparently he’d left Pallas altogether, bound for where, not even his own father knew—or so the man had claimed when confronted; it was difficult to be sure over the phone and, ironically, there was no possibility now that Emerson would be admitted onto Project property to confront him in the flesh.

The Senator, it seemed, was afraid of Emerson.

As well he might be.