The Kanshou (Earthkeep) (19 page)

The hovercraft continued to drift forward with their progress, at their same pace.  Gabe ostensibly ignored the overhead intrusion.  "I was crazy," he continued.  "I ran after her, crying, and for months I bowed and scraped for her, loving it even when she belittled me or made a fool of me in front of others.  One day when she had been especially cruel and I was snivelling hard, she shook me and said, 'Gabriel, you will always be my slave!'"  Gabe stopped his walking.  Stone stopped, too.

"Bald Man, it hit me right then what I was letting her do to me.  I shut up.  I looked at her.  And I ran out.  She never got to me after that."  They walked again. 

The cushcar had drifted ahead of the two men.  It stopped abruptly, clearly waiting for them.  As if only now discovering her presence, Gabriel Girardon looked up at the Femmedarme, discernible through the windows of the hovercraft.  With a dazzling innocent smile, he pointed to his white hat and waved.  The driver offered no acknowledgment, merely pressed the air jets to lift the car to a slightly higher altitude.

"Cuntlicker!" Gabriel whispered through motionless lips. 

Stone had glanced at the cushcar as Gabe was doing his act.  He pulled his buddy back to the story.  "So did the girl ever smile?"

"Never."  Gabe shook his head.  "She's head of a big convent in Canada now, bossing other nuns.  Still not smiling, at least from what I hear lately."  He paused.  "Well, Philipa managed to isolate me from the whole family.  Lied to my mother and Pola, made sure everybody thought I was some kind of freak."  Gabe punched Stone's arm with his elbow.  "Get this.  When I was eleven, she showed my mother a complete list of the war flicks I'd been borrowing every day from the flatfilm library, even some of the restricted ones I'd gotten under an assumed name.  My mother completely lost it.  She sided with Philipa, and cut off my privileges."  He glanced up at the cushcar. 

"That's when I split, lied about my age, signed onto a old freighter that took me to sea and then down to Central Africa where I found my mother's people.  I ceremonially took back my tribal name and claimed my old man's name as well.  And I learned to handle weapons.  That's where my 'life of crime' began.  Anti-Kanshou pressure groups, secession movements."  Gabriel walked in silence for a moment.  "Yes," he finally said, pointing to Stone's sleeve, "I certainly do hate that woman."  He looked upward and hissed through a frozen smile, "And same to you, sweetheart!"

"Cut it out, Gabe."  Stone covered a grin with a finger swiped across his nose.  The hovercraft still hung above them.

Girardon put his gnawstalk back in his mouth and continued, conversationally.  "She likes our company, Big Stone.  So on with the parlor talk.  How come you got yourself on the wrong side of the holy Kanshoubu?  You hit your kid.  You told me that."

Stone picked up Gabe's mood, lock-stepping with his friend as he told his story.  "I been cited . . . oh, maybe twenty times for picking fights . . . scrapping, you know.  But then I got slammed into bailiwicks for major offenses.  Three times."  He shoved his hands into the pockets of his fatigues.  "The first time I'd been pissed for days and a traffic 'Darme ordered me to wait at a corner.  I told her she was arrogant.  She looked at me like I was some scumbag, so I laid into her."

"You hit a Kanshou, Big Stone?"  Gabe's voice was full of admiration.

"I tried.  She decked me, right in the middle of the street, and hauled me up before the sub-demesne tribunal.  Since it was a first offense, they modified my term to only three months."  The hovercraft still purred above them.  "When I got out, Aleska and Petar and I lived six happy years.  Good years they were, until one night at a bar I got loaded and tore up a Ruskie who gave me some disrespectful lip.  Two years in a bailiwick for that."

Gabe was sucking on his gnawstalk.  "The last time, you weren't drunk when you hit your boy."

"No.  Just irritable.  Soon as I did it I was sorry.  I grabbed him and tried to apologize.  Scared him half to death.  Then I ran all the way to the the Kragujevac Femmedarmery and committed myself to the nonviolence program here, at Bucharest Bailiwick."  They walked in silence for a few paces.  "This last training has been the hardest.  But," he added, "the best."  He felt Snake shimmy and Eagle's wings flutter.  Stone grinned, his spirits high.  "So now I got a better handle on what happens, on how I cross over and go for the kill."  

The hovercraft had dropped behind them now, but still tracked them.  They rounded a stand of trees and looked out on the flamboyant public buildings of Bucharest Proper in the far distance.  Below them in the valley lay the bailiwick's sediment fields, miles of rectangular beds of crushed coke which transformed the human wastes of the Balkans into fertilizer for the tri-satrapy's farms. 

"And here we are, Baldy," Gabriel chuckled, "you running your em-vees and re-route sequences, me re-framing and trying to forgive a bitch of a step-sister."  Gabe's walk had a bounce to it.  "But my stuff is a little different from yours."

"How do you mean?"

"See, at heart my friend, I am not really violent."

Stone searched for the joke.  "Come on, Gabe.  You wasted six people, for chrissake--"

"By accident, man!  The building was supposed to be empty!  It was just a little demolition demonstration to let the bureaucrats know we were serious."  Gabriel shifted the gnawstalk to the other side of his mouth, noting the cushcar's distance, and talking more easily now.  "See, I get no kick out of hurting or killing."  He chewed thoughtfully.  "Well, maybe a buzz out of accuracy sometimes . . . ."  He grinned.  "But what worries the girls at the Miller Center is that I don't get off on it.  'Dissociated,' they call me.  But actually, I'm not into beating up on anybody.  I'm just a good old-fashioned woman-hater." 

Stone guffawed.  "Can it, Girardon!  You've filled every cunt in two satrapies!"

"Sure I have!"  Gabe swaggered a little.  "It's my way of fucking the government.  I just fuck their Femmedarmes, tell them I'm crazy about them, and when they're in good and deep, I split.  Never lay an angry hand on them.  Just leave them crying for more."  He stopped and looked over his shoulder toward the retreating cushcar.  "But my dear," he called out earnestly, hands over his heart and walking backward, "I never loved you!  You just misunderstood!" 

Stone slapped Gabe's shoulder, laughing.  The hovercraft veered to the west and become a large dot against the clouds. 

In his head, Stone heard a patient voice.  "
Now
," said Eagle. 

"Baldy," Gabe said, "what is it?  You got something in your craw." 

"I do," Stone confessed.  He drew Gabe back into walking again.  He was cool-headed and easy now, supported by a well of endorsement flooding from his arms.  Snake and Eagle were alert, and Tanya's presence brushed the edge of his awareness.  He spoke evenly, his eyes on the horizon, his voice focused toward his friend.  "I want out, Gabe.  I can't do the action."  Snake and Eagle were poised just short of exhilaration.  "
Go, Baragiali!"
Tanya whispered.

Gabriel Girardon's eyes were also on the horizon.  His boots, in sync with Stone's, hit the pavement nine times before he spoke.  "That's a tidy little bombshell."  Two more steps.  "Why?"

"I could tell you that I want out because it won't work, and that's true: it won't work."

"Or you could say you've decided it's okay for them to tinker with our heads." 

Stone exploded.  "Gabe, I just got through telling you I think that's an outrage!  I just got through telling you there's no way I want them using any of us without our say-so!  I just got through telling you that I've got good feelings about my own re-training now, that I got some hope now that I'll never have to consider getting 'adjusted!'"

Stone caught a movement from behind them.  He drew Gabe aside so a suntruck full of Femmedarmes could pass them.  The driver nodded brief thanks.  He felt Gabe's eyes on him as they resumed their walking.  He waited until the suncart had cleared the far patch of trees. "Here it is," he said.  "I just can't be a part of that violence."

Girardon flared.  "
'That
violence!'  Who's doing the violence, Stone?  Not me or you or Ángel or any habitante!  The violence is the Testing.  We are simply resisting it!"

"Resisting it is the same as the violence."  Stone's arms tingled with delight.

"The same--!" Gabe sputtered.  "So, Baldy, are you going to let them cut on you?"

"I didn't say that!"

"That's what you mean!"

"No!"

Girardon snapped to a halt.  "What else can you mean?" he roared.

"They won't do it!" Stone roared back.

"They won't . . . !  Man--"

Stone overrode him.  "Gabe, I know it!  I know
they won't do the Testing
!  I don't know how I know it, but I promise you it's true!"  From his arms surged an ongoing explosion of yeses; he rubbed them gently. 

Girardon stared at him, incredulous.  "Man, you have lost it," he said gently.  He pointed to Stone's arms.  "Your animal buddies, are they telling you that?"

Stone smiled.  "Maybe," he said.  He tried to urge Girardon forward again.

"Wait."  Gabriel was earnest.  "Baldy, I hear you saying you don't want to be part of it."  As Stone nodded, Gabe nodded, too.  "But I do not hear you saying you'll try to stop us."

Stone sent Eagle and Snake an assurance. "I can't stop you," he said.  "I may keep yelling at you, trying to make you see it my way.  But I can't stop you."  He paused.  "Look, Gabe, you know I got no reason to snitch or tip off anybody.  You can trust me on that."

"
I
trust you, Baldy.  But listen up," Gabriel went on, still holding Stone's eyes, "don't say anything to Ángel yet."

"Why not?"
"Just lay off telling him.  A day.  Two days.  This is between you and me.  Okay?"

"I got to tell him, Gabe."

"I know, I know.  Just not right now.  Okay?"

Stone quieted the objections on his arms.  "I can wait until tomorrow, Gabe," he said, "no more than that.  He's got to know."

Both men scanned the open valley to see who might possibly have heard their altercation.  They were alone, and the bailiwick's buildings lay now just below them.  The two men sealed their habitante fatigues chin-high against a rising wind and set out walking again, now in silence, down to the mess hall.

As they approached the common buildings, Gabe slowed their progress.  "Baldy, you want to know a secret?"  He smiled toward the dawning day as he spoke. 

"Sure."

"I've never said this to anybody, man."  Girardon cut his eyes toward Stone.  "So repeat it and you're dead."

Stone pointed to his chest with his thumb.  "It stops here."

"Baldy, the happiest I ever been in my life is in a bailiwick."

Stone slowed to a stop, looking at him.

Gabe held up both hands.  "No.  Rock-bottom truth.  I realized it when I finished my term up at Oslo.  Stone, I been looking for men all my life.  Strong men, interesting men.  Looking for men in a world of girls.  And what's mostly in a bailiwick?"

"Come on, monsieur, you're not--"

"No, I don't mean gay.  I tried that, but no cigar.  I don't need bedfellows, just buddies."  They walked again, encountering two Femmedarmes.  The women greeted them, and passed on.  Gabe continued.  "So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I've found good men in bailiwicks, Stone.  You're one of them."

Eagle and Snake were swelling with pride and appreciation.  Stone flushed.  "Well, I'm glad, monsieur," he said. 

They were in the midst of 'Darmes and habitantes now, coming and going with the start of the bailiwick day.  Gabe stopped them at the door of the food rotunda, speaking in his habitual hearty voice.  "I hope you'll change your mind, Big Stone, and stay on the team."

"I don't think I'll change on this one, Monsieur Girardon.  Your no-rest rugby is too much for me."

"At least think about it," Girardon urged.

Stone smiled.  "Sure, Gabe.  I'll do that.  I'll think about it." They went into the mess hall, slapping each other's shoulders.

* * * * * * * *

Five hours later, Habitante Lucio Baragiali left early from his regular morning shift at the bailiwick's Weather Monitoring Comcenter and rode in a humming suncart along a raised roadway through the sediment fields.  His head was spinning, his heart was thundering, and the tattooed friends on his arms unceasingly broadcast their presence with surges of alert attention and concern. 

The weather was changing rapidly, with the high-noon sun disappearing behind a bank of dark clouds.  The coming rain had been unpredicted.

As the suncart sped along, Stone looked south, deliberately seeking out the sludge dam in the distance.  Its massive headwork loomed over the valley, above the ranks of conduits fanning out over the hillsides.  There, tons of preliminarily treated wastes rested against a grandly structured poratac bulwark.  Poratac, Stone thought, the cement that breathes!  The entire sewage enterprise depended on poratac's strength and efficiency, its unique permeable/nonpermeable properties.   

Stone's grinning companion, Habitante Victor Cuza, drummed on the suncart, barely controlling a wild excitement.  They were headed toward their culvert assignment deep in the bailiwick's filterlands.  Behind them rolled a batchbarrow of gelatinous poratac cement.  For the third time in almost as many minutes, Stone pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from the headband of his light green broad-billed cap.

Femmedarme Nyosa d'Soninke's loose black pants, draped at midcalf by knee elastic, covered the tops of her plastiped boots.  She drove with vigilant eyes and minimum conversation.  When she leaned in their progress around one corner, her large breasts moved visibly under the green cotton of her tabard.

Cuza punched Stone with his elbow, his mouth a leer and his eyes glued to the breasts.  Stone ignored the gesture and wiped his headband free of sweat.  Then he wiped his smooth head.  And his hands.  The weight of the cement behind them seemed like a feather compared to the load of information he had been carrying for the past half-hour.  He folded his forearms together and held his elbows steady against the jogging suncart.  He watched the leaden clouds, more certain than anyone, even Cuza, of the storm that was coming.