The Sheriff of Yrnameer (23 page)

“Right, right,” said Cole, not remembering at all. The hearty handshaking was sending unpleasant shock waves through his system.

“You know, you were pretty
baaaaaad
last night,” bleated Ed, winking at him. “Just kidding—we don’t really talk that way!” He gave Cole a big thump on the back and trotted away.

There was something indefinably off about Cole’s surroundings, as if he were looking at a face that was missing some important features. Like the buildings were naked. Like there was no … there was no branding. That was it. Nothing. Nowhere. He did a slow pirouette, confirming it, and then stumbled a bit as he started to walk again. The dust he churned up obstinately refused to organize itself into any sort of logo. He stopped and scuffed his boot against the ground again. Nothing. Unbelievable.

He looked up. The clouds were just clouds. Nothing scrolled anywhere. No spaceships carved up the sky. He felt a rush of vertiginous anxiety and took several deep breaths to steady his nerves.

“Sheriff, look at that guy,” said Joshua, pointing to another humanoid, a spindly creature several heads taller than Cole. He was dressed entirely in severe black, his sartorial choices reflecting the grave expression on his bony, hollow-cheeked face. Noticing Cole, he altered his course to intercept him, reaching him in a few long strides and silently extending his hand.

Cole, expecting a handshake, held out his own hand. Instead the creature pressed a small device against his wrist.

“Seventy-one point four-three-nine percent,” intoned the device. The alien nodded gloomily to himself as if confirming something, bowed ever so slightly, and withdrew, jotting something on a notepad as he went.

“Huh,” said Cole. Then he noticed the badge on Joshua’s chest.

“What is that?” he asked, pointing to it.

“You made me deputy last night, sir.”

“Right. Of course I did.” He rubbed his eyes. “How old are you again?”

“Sixteen.”

“Great. That’s great, Jake.”

“Joshua, sir.”

“Don’t ever correct me, Joshua.”

“Sorry, Sheriff.”

Cole rubbed his eyes some more.

“What did we charge Bacchi with?”

“Drunk and disorderly.”

“Huh,” said Cole.

“Actually, sir, I have to say, you were pretty—”

“I’m the sheriff.”

“Yes, sir.”

Cole stopped walking and did a few neck rolls, groaning as he listened to the vertebrae crackle. Joshua waited for him. Cole took a deep breath and let it out. “Okay,” he said, and started walking again. “So, what’s going on here? Is there another party or something?” he asked.

“It’s the meeting you called, sir.”

“Meeting.”

“About the bandits.”

Cole stopped walking again.

“Oh, farg,” he said.

Cole sank deeper into his seat of honor, feeling the sweat trickle its way down his sides from his armpits. His forehead was damp. He wiped it with his palm.

Other than a few scraps of streamers hanging limply from the walls, all vestiges of the party were gone. The citizens of Yrnameer sat side by side, filling the neat rows of pews that now lined the floor. Those who couldn’t find a seat were crowded in the back and on either side. Cole had been ushered to the front row and given the first seat on the center aisle.

It was warm in the hall, but that wasn’t why he was sweating.

“Next page, please,” said Mayor Kimber, who was standing at the podium at the head of the room. Someone standing next to
an easel flipped to the next page on a large drawing pad, revealing another series of well-rendered sketches of cruel-faced bandits. “We believe there are at least one hundred of them,” Kimber was saying.

The presentation had been going on for twenty minutes now. In Cole’s mind it had long since started to blend into a mind-numbing nightmarish blur, with certain phrases jumping out like bogeymen at a carnival fright house to grab his attention: “… worst scum of the earth …” “… heavily armed, desperate …” “… their leader is wanted for murder on several planets. His name is Runk, and …”

Cole clutched involuntarily at his chest, his heart convulsing like it had been impaled by razor-sharp icicles. It took him several moments to start breathing again. He swallowed repeatedly, fighting the urge to vomit.

“Oh, farg, not
Runk,”
he squeaked. “Not Runk.”

“… and as we all know,” Kimber said, “they’ll be returning in four weeks. So here to tell us how we can defend ourselves is our new sheriff!”

The applause and cheering were rapturous, which didn’t help Cole’s headache. He twisted and looked at the crowd behind him. Everyone was on their feet, or if they didn’t have feet, in a nonreclining position indicating respect and encouragement. Cole looked back at the mayor, who was making facial expressions that also indicated respect and encouragement, and that it was now Cole’s turn to come to the front and inspire the troops.

Cole rose hesitantly and took a few steps toward the podium. He turned to the assembled and waved his hands for quiet. It seemed to have the opposite effect, so instead he waited, swaying slightly, a sickly smile on his face, until the hall quieted down.

“Wow,” he said. “Thanks for that.”

More applause. He grimaced.

“Wait, everyone, please. Please.”

The hall gradually fell silent, with a random scattering of final whoops like the last few kernels of popcorn to pop.

“Thanks. Thank you. Really.”

All eyes—and there were many more than just twice the number of creatures present—were on him, everyone eagerly awaiting what he had to say. Mayor Kimber was beaming at him. Joshua was nodding at him. He saw Nora, who had an eyebrow raised. He cleared his throat.

“Ahem. Well. The thing is, see …” He paused again. “I, uh, don’t mean to disappoint anyone, but, uh …”

He tugged at the badge. It came free from his shirt, and he looked at it, turning it over in his hand. The silence in the hall had somehow deepened further. He glanced up and his gaze met MaryAnn’s. Her expression was questioning, quizzical. He shook his head, a tiny, almost invisible movement, as if in apology.

“But, uh …,” he said.

“But we’re gonna kick some ass!” shouted Joshua.

“Yayyyy
!” said everyone, applauding and cheering once again.

“Wait!” said Cole. “Wait! Everyone calm down and listen!”

The cheering died down.

“What I wanted to say,” he began, “is that I … I …”

Philip suddenly stood up. “What he wants to say is that he’s not fit to be sheriff!”

The crowd gasped.

“It’s true!” said Philip. “He’s a fraud, an impostor!”

Angry murmurs ran through the crowd, growing in intensity and volume.

“He’s a criminal!” Philip shouted above the clamor. “A criminal!”

The tumult grew louder yet, with everyone in the hall trying to share their opinion—if not several opinions—at the same time. Mayor Kimber was banging his gavel. In the midst of the commotion Cole could discern a single locus of calm: MaryAnn, looking straight at him, waiting for him.

“Hey,” he said, still looking at her, his voice a very minor addition to the din. “Hey,” he repeated, louder. Then he took a deep breath and shouted.

“Hey
!”

The room was instantly quiet. Cole was still looking at MaryAnn, holding her gaze.

“What I meant to say,” he said, “is that this is no time for celebrating. We have a lot of work to do.”

“Yayyyy!!!!!
!”

That night was cloudless, the three moons at various stages of waxing and waning that added up to at least one and a half bright full moons. Too bright, thought Cole, as he scurried across the open ground between the town gate and the beached Benedict 80.

On the Success!Sat Cole discovered something important about himself: that he had theretofore undreamed reserves of courage and determination. And on Yrnameer he discovered something else: the adventure on the satellite had entirely exhausted those reserves.

This was, he reasoned, the best way to help these people. The very last thing they needed was some sort of false hope. False hope would lead to rash action, which would lead to horrible tragedy. By removing himself from the equation, he’d be simplifying the issue and steering them along the path of clear-minded rationality: they would quickly realize that their situation was indeed dire and that resistance was, well, futile. What they needed to do was to focus their energy on constructive activities, like producing more crops so that they could feed both themselves and Runk’s horde. Trying to fend them off would only have unfortunate results.

And Runk wasn’t so bad. No, Cole corrected himself, that was wrong. Runk
was
so bad. He was, actually, far beyond so bad. He was a vicious, murderous grotesque who delighted in inflicting agony. Cole had seen it, seen it on more than one occasion. Farg, the time with that guy, the one who’d screwed up on the Onorv job, the one whose head Runk put into the … Cole winced and put his hands over his ears, trying to block out the memory of the screams.

But Runk wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t needlessly hurt or kill the drones who were providing him with food. Would he?

At some level, Cole knew that Runk would kill his own grandmother if she looked at him wrong. He knew that because Runk
had
killed his own grandmother, although in fairness several witnesses testified that said grandmother had indeed looked at him wrong. But perhaps Runk had changed, mellowed with time, settling into a more manageable pattern of extortion.

Or not.

He made it to the ship unobserved. Once inside he made his way to the cockpit of the escape pod and got to work, testing each system of the spacecraft one by one.

What the townspeople would undoubtedly do is gather the food and leave it in an accessible place, and then go and hide until the bandits had left. No one would get hurt.

MaryAnn wouldn’t get hurt. She was too smart for that. She’d hide.

No she wouldn’t. She’d try and report on it.

Shut up, Cole.

So far the ship seemed to be in surprisingly good shape. He had started at the bottom, with the least important systems first, but nothing looked beyond repair.

Maybe MaryAnn would come with him. They could go to some busy, happy spot with a seaside boardwalk and casinos and—

She’d never go with him.

And if she did it would be worse, because it would mean that she wasn’t the person that he needed her to be. The sort of person that he never was and would never become. That would crush him, finding out that she was like him.

He knew it from the moment she was looking at him in that way during the town meeting, hoping for something from him, hungry for a sign that he was strong and dependable and trustworthy. That he deserved the faith that she had once expressed. At that moment, under her gaze, he actually believed that perhaps he was those things. But then the meeting broke up and the people drifted away and he was left with his own thoughts, which ran along the lines of,
Are you farging crazy?!

It was better he left. Better that he not be there to see the inevitable disappointment in her eyes. Better that he long for her from hundreds of light-years away, where he could still maintain
the fantasy that someday she might love him. Because if he stayed, sooner or later she’d come to understand who he really was, and then he would lose her forever, even in his dreams.

So he was leaving. Right now.

Or would be, if he could get the engines online. Everything else seemed to be functioning tolerably well, and the damn engines wouldn’t respond. It took him about a half hour to figure out the cause of the problem, and about another ten minutes or so to quickly cycle through the five stages of mourning, with heavy emphasis on the denial and anger parts. There was no way he was going to get the engines to fire. Not unless he could get his hands on a replacement Artemis coil, which he could do absolutely anywhere in the sponsored universe and absolutely nowhere on Yrnameer.

He slammed a fist on the control panel, accidentally switching on the forward exterior floodlamps. Illuminated in the harsh pool of light was MaryAnn.

“Hi,” he said when he had exited the ship and joined her, “I was just checking on the …” He trailed off, gesturing vaguely, hoping that would suffice. “Kinda late,” he said.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I was just out for a walk.”

When he’d spotted her, he quickly turned off the light and ducked behind the control panel, praying she hadn’t seen him. He peeked. Her wave suggested his prayer had gone unanswered.

Now they were standing outside of the gate at the edge of the shadow cast by the ship. “You weren’t running out on us, were you?” said MaryAnn.

“No, no, of course not, I—” he stuttered.

“I’m kidding,” she said. “See? Smile.”

“Right. Right.”

He looked at her, as beautiful in the pure silvery moonlight of Yrnameer as she’d been in the faux moonlight of Longest Island twenty years ago. She smiled back at him reassuringly, that same placid, honest gaze. It burned him like an ember. He dropped his eyes and kicked at the dirt. This just wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t.