Stance addressed us. I won’t bother to repeat what he said because it was all nonsense, a typical Stance united-against-the-common foe speech. His audience took it well and his warriors cheered mindlessly. I only mention this because of the way Cuff watched him. There was a peculiar smile on the new manchief’s face. It wasn’t simple skepticism. It was more. It was a knowing look.
He couldn’t possibly know about Stance’s disability. The only thing I could think of, was that he’d made up his mind to throw me and Charm out of Noss, now he had the power. And he knew that if I returned to Yam, this would pit me directly against Stance, whom he also disliked. He could visualize Yam divided and impotent. The thought delighted his childish sense of irony.
It shows the mistakes we can make, trying to read another person’s mind.
The next morning Stance dropped off his warriors at Yam, as promised, and filled the trailer with men and women high on the Yam pecking order by reason of memory rather than their ability to stick spears in things. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief. The untidy cavalcade set off for the moors, Stance’s motorcart still leading. The drench showed no signs of letting up; but then, it rarely did until the freeze came. The potholes and ruts were filled with water and the going was very tricky. The temporary awning over our cart afforded some protection, but not much.
“What’s the betting we have to pull your uncle out of trouble before long?” Charm chuckled, cheerful as ever as we sat with our arms around each other.
In fact we had to bail Stance out three times on the way to Devon Station. Cuff, who was driving the Noss motorcart, made the most of it. Barely able to conceal his triumph as he hauled the Yam motorcart out of a roadside ditch, he even went so far as to suggest that old Wand should drive the Yam vehicle. The rest of the Noss contingent were not so happy. Every time Stance got stuck, we had to evacuate our lox cart and unhitch it so the two motorcarts could be coupled together.
By mid-morning the exhaust note of the motorcarts deepened as they began to tackle the stiff climb to the moors. Then I heard something else above the chaff-chaff-chaff: a high whining noise accompanied by a rumbling. Stance must have heard it because the Yam motorcart slowed to a halt. We stopped too, pulling the awning back and staring up into the rain. The noise seemed to be coming from the sky, but it lasted too long to be thunder.
We couldn’t see anything through the downpour, and after a while the noise ceased. The motorcarts moved on.
“A shuttle,” said Crane knowledgeably.
When we arrived at the gates of Devon Station we found a scene of bustling activity inside a new fence that stretched as far as we could see. A few nomads were already gathered with their lox and carts, looking in through a heavy pair of gates, also new. Smith and Smitha were there, arguing with a human who stood inside the gates. We climbed from the cart and joined them.
“No, you’ll have to talk to me,” the human was saying. He looked flustered; a tall slender man in a golden uniform. “I’m authorized to answer all your questions.”
Smith shrugged and glanced at Stance. My uncle said, “I am the manchief of Yam and I demand to speak to your commanding officer.”
Cuff added, “And I’m the manchief of Noss and I demand the same,” rather spoiling the effect.
Lonessa looked as though she, too, was going to add her weight to the demand, but commonsense prevailed and she shut her mouth.
Crane spoke next, forcibly. “Just tell us what’s going on, you freezer! Why the fence? Why the gates?”
The human swallowed nervously and glanced at a tablet in his hand as though refreshing his memory. “As you are aware, Devon Station has been here for many years. During this period, your people and ours have worked together to benefit us all. The operative word is benefit.” He was gazing over our heads, as though by addressing the falling rain he didn’t have to think about real live people. “You have benefited though the injection of technology and bartering power arising from the royalties we grant for the use of the land.”
“Get on with it!” shouted Crane angrily. “Tell us why you won’t let us in! That’s our land in there. We only rent it to you. The original agreement states that we have the right of access at all times!”
“Entry will gain you nothing and may put you in danger. There’s heavy machinery moving about in there. Now, as I was saying. Benefit. It must be mutual. We can’t afford to be philanthropists.”
“Let us in,” shouted Cuff, “or we’ll smash through the fence with the motorcarts!”
It was a typical Cuff strategy and I’d have liked to have seen the human’s reaction, but at that moment I was visited by the most vivid backflash I’ve ever had.
… and now I stood inside a fence, and the tall man beside me represented a temporary authority. “What’s going on?” I was shouting. “Those are Pallahaxi people out there! For Phu’s sake, who are we against?”
“We are against anyone who wants to kill us,” he said.
People stood all around me with unfamiliar things in their hands, and I knew these things were for killing. Murder was in the air, both inside the fence and outside. I said to the tall man beside me, “If your men shoot them, I will kill you, father, the very first chance I get.”
As the backflash faded, I realized I’d seen that place myself, not so long ago in a stardream. It was the cannery at Pallahaxi. What parallel events had taken place there, generations ago? What betrayals? And what kind of a father had my ancestor lived with, to threaten to kill him? When I had time, I would stardream. There might be useful lessons to be learned.
More people were arriving from both directions, mounted on lox or walking, singly or in little groups, bundled up against the chill rain.
Inside the fence, the tall man had been speaking into a small device. Almost instantly a wheeled machine appeared, rolling rapidly toward us. I recognized the apparatus jutting from the blunt nose of the vehicle. It was a big laser gun.
By now Cuff had climbed aboard the Noss motorcart and was maneuvering it to face the fence. “Right, you freezers!” he was shouting.
I covered the intervening ground in a moment and swung myself onto the footplate. “They’ve got a laser gun there!” I shouted into his face. “They’ll cut you to pieces!”
“Let them try! They don’t scare me!” He reached for the regulator.
I pulled his hand away. “Have you seen what a laser can do?”
“Not interested. Let go of my arm, Yam Hardy, before I smash your face in. What kind of a coward are you, anyway? Scared of a few humans? Why do you think they’re hiding behind that fence, anyway? It’s them that’s scared of us.”
“You’ve hardly ever been outside Noss, Cuff. You don’t know what they can do.”
He caught me by surprise, relaxing as though taking in my words, then suddenly flinging me backwards. I landed on a heap of firewood, logs rolling under my feet as I tried to stand. The motorcart lurched forward and I fell again. Cuff leaned out of the cab, yelling defiance at the humans. Our own people dodged out of the way as the motorcart trundled toward them, gathering speed.
I experienced another horrifying backflash.
… I heard a sharp crack followed by a continuous rushing roar like the sound of a huge waterfall. The road filled with a great cloud of steam, boiling and billowing and rolling down the hill toward us. The crowd broke and ran, and the pretty girl and I ran with them, holding hands. After a while we stopped and looked back. Everything seemed to be over. Laughing nervously, we climbed the hill again.
The steam had almost completely dispersed; just a few wisps arose from the boiler. A dead man sat at the controls. He was steaming gently and his face was red and peeling. He must have died very quickly…
I struggled to my feet and seized Cuff around the waist, jerking him away from the regulator. A wheel dropped into a rut and the motorcart lurched, throwing him further off balance. I swung him around and we toppled off the footplate together, cr
ashing to the ground and rolling in the mud as the rear wheels churned by a handbreadth from my head.
Cuff twisted himself free. “Right,” he snapped. “Now—”
An ear-splitting hiss cut him off. A thread of bright mist traced a path between the laser gun and the motorcart. Steam jetted from a small glowing hole in the boiler. The motorcart swerved, slowing.
Then something happened that Cuff’s descendants will never forget. The laser beam must have penetrated one of the boiler tubes, allowing pressurized steam to blow back into the firebox. From where we lay, Cuff and I witnessed the result.
The firebox doors suddenly blew open and a great gout of flames and steam whoofed out, enveloping the footplate. The force of the explosion blew everything from the rear platform, and Cuff and I cowered low as logs, cans, fire-irons and other equipment plowed into the mud around us. When we opened our eyes the wooden cab was blazing and the motorcart was panting to a halt, nudging the fence. I lay there for a moment, dazed with shock. Then people came running. Charm was kneeling beside me, running her hands over my face as though to reassure herself I was still in one piece.
“I’m all right,” I kept telling her, hating to see her crying. “I’m all right, really.” I stood, rather shakily, and pulled her up too.
She clung to me, trembling. “You’re bleeding!” She dabbed at my face.
“It can’t be very much.” I was watching Cuff. He was staring at me with an unreadable expression. Lonessa was fussing over him, shaken out of her aloofness. Cuff turned away, and as he did so he raised his right hand toward me in a curious gesture.
It might have been a token of truce.
“As I was saying, we can’t afford to be philanthropists.”
The tall human had resumed his speech as though nothing had happened. “We’ve paid our way since we’ve been in your world, and we’ve honored our agreements. We never agreed to stay here forever, and our time here has proved very costly for us. We understand that a few of our people made a misguided and unauthorized attempt to attack the lorin, and we apologize for this. We also believe that our mining machine was allowed to get out of control and caused a tragic death, not to mention considerable damage. Again, we’re sorry. We all make mistakes.”
I pushed my way forward, pressing against the fence. “I don’t trust you,” I said. “I want to speak to Mister McNeil.”
A puzzled gaze rested on me. He was trying to gauge my status. “Mister McNeil is unavailable. I’m authorized to speak on behalf of all humans.”
“That’s not good enough. Bring him here.”
He mumbled into his tablet and for a moment I thought he might be calling up Mister McNeil, but then I realized it was just for show. His whole performance was a sham. The humans were pulling out, and there was nothing we could do about it.
He looked up. “Mister McNeil left on the last shuttle.”
It was a crushing disappointment. Was no human to be trusted? “Why don’t you come right out and say you’re all leaving and there’s not a freezing thing we can do about it? Why don’t you throw away your speech and tell us straight?”
He looked into my eyes. “If that’s what you really want. We’re all leaving,” he said flatly. “There’s not a thing you can do about it.”
There was a wailing of despair and desolation from around me.
“Does that satisfy you?” he asked.
“Compensation?”
“We’ll rebuild the net loft at Noss, and your motorcart here. We can’t replace your manchief. And that’s it. Everything else; use of the land, the minerals, you’ve been compensated for over the years.”
I turned around to face our own people. “Let’s go home,” I said. “We’re wasting our time here.”
It was too much to ask that Lonessa and Stance should accept my suggestion. They began to bluster loudly, but it was noticeable that Wand and Cuff kept quiet. Indeed, Cuff had drifted off and was hitching the Noss lox cart to the rear of the Yam motorcart, in which Wand was already sitting.
The human listened to the babble. As it died away he said, “On behalf of my people I’d like to say how flattered we are that you want us to stay, and how much we regret leaving you.”
The anger was still with me. “I don’t care how it seems to you, I want you to go, right now. Many of us can remember our world before you came; and I can tell you it was pretty good. Certainly you’ve improved our roads and brought us your medicines and other benefits. But we were fine before you came, and we’ll be fine after you’ve gone. So just go, will you, and to Rax with you!”
He regarded me silently, and there was an odd sadness in his eyes. Our own people had fallen silent, and I suspect that quite a few of them were revisiting days without the humans, and finding them pleasant.
“But we don’t have enough food for the winter,” said Lonessa, almost apologetically.
He hesitated. “I understood Noss didn’t have a food problem.”
Stance had been unusually silent for a few moments. Now he said, “We will starve in Yam. I demand that you… .”
His words were drowned out by a deep rumble that faded into a whine, hurtful to the ears. Just for a moment the drench had abated somewhat, and we caught a glimpse of an immense wall of shining metal rising into the clouds. There was an awesome finality about the spectacle. What could we, mere stilks, do against such technology? I glanced at Stance and caught an unguarded expression of hopelessness.
“There’s nothing you can do,” said the human. “There’s nothing I can do.” He was not quoting from his script. “If I could help, I would. Circumstances are against us.”
The truth of his words got through to us at last. We were wasting our time. I heard people weeping as the rain began to fall again.
“I’m sorry about your motorcart,” said the human. “I’ll send some mechanics out to fix it. It’ll be better than new.” It was as though he was talking to children.
Which, in a way, he was.
We left the nomads standing outside the gate and headed back for Yam, Stance at the helm of the Yam motorcart towing two overcrowded trailers. I left Charm with her mother and joined the small group on the footplate; in addition to my blighted uncle, Trigger, Cuff and Wand were there. I had the potential to outmemory anyone present, and I needed to be at the center of things in case something stupid was brewed up… .
Cuff nodded and Stance looked at me in mild surprise as I swung onto the motorcart. But there was nothing murderous in my uncle’s expression. “Uh, Hardy,” he said by way of greeting, and left it at that.
“Stance,” I said, equally briefly as I checked the water level in the boiler. It seemed we had another truce in the making. First Cuff, now Stance. Maybe our problems were too big for personal feuds. Or maybe Stance had decided that I was more use to him alive than dead. He was going to need all the help he could get in the light of the latest developments.
“I always thought they’d help us,” he said suddenly, correcting a wild veer caused by his inattention to the road. “By Phu, I never thought they’d run out on us!”
“They made their position quite clear a long time ago,” Wand reminded him.
This provoked a bout of blustering. I noticed Cuff glancing from Stance to me curiously as my uncle ranted on, as though he expected me to dispute some point. But I knew better than to try to argue with Stance in his present mood. And oddly, as time went by, my uncle seemed to reason himself into a more acceptable frame of mind.
“We’re better off without them,” he said finally. “You were right, Wand. We should have accepted the situation when they first made it clear they didn’t intend to help. My mistake has been in treating them like normal people. They’re not. They’re godless. It’s not in their nature to help other people unless they can see a financial advantage. And that’s where they made their mistake.”
“Mistake, Stance?” asked Cuff innocently. “What mistake was that?”
; “In underestimating our powers of survival. In failing to take into account our greatest weapon.”
“Weapon?” repeated Cuff, puzzled. But I knew what was coming because I knew Stance. And I had a glimpse of conflict ahead.
Stance turned from the tiller and smiled at Wand, Cuff, Trigger and me in turn. It was not a normal smile. It was a bright and empty smile, one short step removed from foolishness. The motorcart bounced on and the rain fell heavily and vertically, steaming where it hit the firebox. The wheels hit a rougher patch of road and began to clatter. Stance hung onto the tiller as it bucked and rattled. He still smiled.
He raised his voice but he needn’t have bothered because I knew what was coming.
“The one weapon the humans don’t have,” he shouted. “Prayer!”
Only Stance with his charisma could have pulled it off. I stood in the temple with Charm and Lonessa, watching his performance. There were many such, although I left Yam soon after the first. I’m told they differed little — but this, according to Spring who stayed behind, was a positive advantage. People felt reassured, hearing the same thing over and over again. They flocked to listen.
“We must recapture the old ways of religion and the good times will return. It won’t be easy. I’m not promising you endless summers and bountiful harvests, not yet. We have sinned and we are being punished. We have been embracing human materialism. We’ve neglected our prayers to the sun-god Phu and he has punished us, withdrawing his warmth just as the goatparent has withdrawn its bounty. Now we must atone.”
There was a murmur of agreement from the fools around me. Stance was right. Stance knew what he was talking about. The proof was outside in the cold land for all to see.
Caunter was standing near. His immature face was rapt. “He’s good, you know. He’s right,” he kept murmuring, nodding endlessly like a boat heading into a light chop.
“The humans were false friends. They led us astray. The old ways were good ways… .”
Pallahaxi Page 45
