7th Sigma

by Steven Gould

  “Good to see you, Kimble,” Bentham said.

  It’s not mutual, he thought. “Major.” He turned back to Sensei. “How’s Tommy?”

  “Brain damaged!” Sensei snorted. “But that wasn’t the result of his accident—it was the cause! His backside is really hurtin’ right now, but by tomorrow it’s going to be far worse. He’ll live.”

  Kimble exhaled sharply. “Not if I get ahold of him. Why was he in there?”

  “Hormones.”

  He opened his mouth and Sensei shook her head slightly, then tilted it toward the open kitchen window. Someone was rattling about the kitchen.

  Later, then. “May I get you tea, Sensei?”

  She gestured to the bench beside her. “Sit. Martha’s on it.”

  He dropped down onto the bench. He thought it was deliberate, her gesture. Normally he would’ve sat seiza, on his knees, a respectful distance away, but this put them both facing Bentham, a united front.

  “I was just reminding Jeremy that the last time I lent you to him, you came back broken. And I didn’t even have a damage deposit.” Her voice was light but she wasn’t smiling.

  Kimble almost lifted a hand to his right shoulder, where the whip had bitten deepest, but managed to keep both hands in his lap. And unclenched. He thought that was something.

  Major Bentham sighed. “Now who’s objectifying people? And was it really my fault? I seem to remember giving some pretty specific instructions.”

  “Too bad you didn’t share those instructions with all involved,” Kimble said. He was surprised at how mild his own voice sounded.

  Bentham’s voice was not so mild. “And if they had killed you, what would’ve happened to the rest of those girls?”

  Now Kimble’s voice did rise. “You want someone who follows orders like a robot, send a robot.” He looked up at the grape leaves and nearly added Oh, yeah, you can’t.

  Sensei put her hand on Kimble’s knee and he subsided. “So, if Kim did such a bad job, why are you back here, Jeremy?”

  “I didn’t say he did a bad job. I said he didn’t follow instructions and, as a result, he got hurt.”

  Kimble looked down at the fieldstone pavers set in sand under his feet. There was justice in Bentham’s position. He had mulled it over for weeks but his conclusion remained the same. Despite the bad dreams, he wouldn’t have acted any differently.

  “I need—” Bentham shut his mouth abruptly as Martha backed through the nylon-screen door with the tea tray. She set it on the end of Bentham’s bench and he shifted to the other end to make more room. Martha knelt on the pavers to pour three cups.

  As soon as she was done, Ruth said, “Thanks, Martha. Leave the tray. Unsaddle the major’s horse and put him in the spare stall, then sweep and mop the guest casita and make the bed.”

  Martha started to open her mouth but Ruth just stared steadily at her. The girl bobbed her head and left.

  Once she was well outside the fence, Kimble said, “I think she was going to point out that we just cleaned the casita.”

  “Well, yes,” Ruth said, “but did you notice how quietly she made the tea?”

  “Yes.” He’d thought she’d been listening, too.

  “She’s already too interested. Poor Tommy.”

  “Tommy?” It hit him. “He was showing off? Trying to impress Martha?”

  “Well, duh. He’s been trying to get her attention since spring without success. Then you came back on a stretcher and she only has eyes for you. He took it personally.”

  Kimble felt himself blushing. “I’ve been very careful not to encourage her. Tommy’s not a bad guy. He’s just—well.”

  “Stupid?” Ruth suggested. She was like that. She had probably said the same thing directly to Tommy many times.

  “He needs to learn things the hard way.”

  “The learning part remains to be proven.”

  Major Bentham cleared his throat. “This is just fascinating. Really.”

  Ruth sipped her tea without comment.

  “Does our deal still stand?” Bentham asked.

  Ruth looked sideways at Kimble. Bentham wasn’t the only person Ruth had shouted at in recent days. She knew his answer before he gave it.

  “Yes,” he said. “For another year, as agreed.” Unless you get me killed before then.

  Bentham let out a breath that Kimble hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “Okay. I need to find out what’s going on in the Pecos River basin south of Ft. Sumner.”

  “Really?” Kimble said. “But you have a post there. A full platoon at the barracks in Pecosito.”

  “Yes. In uniforms and everything. They’ve been asking questions but they’re not getting anywhere. I sent in Lujan, undercover, but they smoked him pretty quick. He had to be taken outside for surgery.”

  Kimble had worked with Lujan several times, mostly in the Valle Grande west of where Los Alamos used to be. “He gonna be all right?”

  “I don’t know yet. He took a gyro in the spleen.”

  “Your own troops shot him?”

  Bentham shook his head. “No. All ammo and weapons accounted for, thank you very much.”

  “Shit.”

  The only military firearms in the territory were rocket rifles—smoothbore composite tubes that used chemical strikers to fire off self-stabilizing ceramic rockets. They were high-tech precision instruments of destruction and had to be made outside the steel curtain with full-metal tech. They were brought in by the feds and only for the Territorial Rangers.

  It was the best part of a bad situation. Wasn’t like there weren’t other guns. Plastic rifles with disposable preloaded cardboard barrels. For small game, elastic slingshots were popular. For deer and elk there were bows and crossbows made in territory of horn and wood laminates or, on the other side of the steel curtain, fiber composites. You just had to give up on metal.

  Traditionalists liked obsidian and flint arrowheads. Scavengers liked glass. Or you could buy fluted ceramic heads made beyond the curtain.

  But nobody but the feds was supposed to have the multi-shot gyro rifles.

  “Is that why he was there in the first place? Were there other shootings?”

  Bentham nodded slightly, just the barest movement of his chin.

  “Gun runners,” Kimble finally said. “Isn’t that supposed to be impossible?”

  The major’s nod was more definite this time.

  * * *

  CLASS was traditionally held when the sun touched the western horizon. This time of year that meant the northern flank of Mt. Taylor, forty miles off, at about eight o’clock. The idea behind the timing was to get things cool enough but still have natural light in the dojo till the end of class.

  There were fifteen students who lived in the village and there were an equal number from other farms along the Rio Puerco. Besides aikido, Ruth taught jyo, the short staff, a very practical weapon for the territory—good for herding, driving off feral dogs, and walking up steep hills.

  She used Kimble as uke as she demonstrated, throwing him or pinning him as required. The dojo floor was ultra-traditional woven tatami, but the reeds came from the Rio Puerco and were not as soft as one might like, especially when he rolled across his right shoulder. He didn’t let the pain touch his face and tried to keep up.

  He sometimes thought that if he’d made more noise, they wouldn’t have gone on as long. Instead, he’d passed out under the whip, without screaming or yelling once.

  The students all knew he was leaving again—though they didn’t know what he did during his occasional absences—so there was a lot of scrambling, especially among the higher ranks, to work with him. He groaned inwardly. The problem with being the senior student was that everyone wanted to test themselves against you. He ended the class out of breath and soaked in sweat, and with an extra bruise on his back where he’d tried to protect one of the recent wounds and had banged over hard instead of rolling smoothly.

  He left the shower room, still wet, a towel wrapped a
round his waist, his folded hakama under one arm and his sweaty gi held at arm’s length. Martha was outside, wearing a cotton kimono and carrying an oil lamp, but she didn’t have a towel so he knew she wasn’t waiting for the shower.

  “Sensei want something?”

  She shook her head and said quietly, “I’ve warmed the massage oil.”

  He blinked. He could hear Tommy groaning in the men’s wing of the dormitory and a pack of coyotes was serenading the moon up on the ridge.

  He lowered his voice even lower than hers had been. “And what would Sensei say?”

  There were rules, especially for instructors, which he was. It wasn’t impossible, but you had to talk it over with Sensei and sometimes it meant one of the parties had to stop training at the dojo if they wanted the relationship. It was meant to avoid abuses of power.

  “I talked to her,” Martha said. “I’m back to school in the fall.” Martha’s parents lived in New Madrid, east of the Sandias, but Martha went to UC Berkeley, outside. She’d started aikido there with one of Ruth’s old instructors during her freshman year. “And you’re going away tomorrow and won’t be back before I leave. Sensei says it’s up to you.”

  “Oh.” He’d had romances away from the dojo. His missions for Bentham had given him opportunities. Once, he’d used one of those opportunities to further a mission, and the bad taste of that experience still lingered. “Was she just talking about the massage?”

  “Well…” It was hard to tell in the lamplight but he thought Martha was blushing. “She asked if I had condoms.”

  * * *

  MARTHA took her time, working from the balls of his feet to the very ends of his jaw muscles, where they anchored to the skull above his ears. She was afraid that she’d hurt the newly scarred wounds, though it was not the first time she’d seen them.

  “The oil and your hands are really helping,” he assured her.

  “Sensei told me not to ask when you first came back. But it had to be a whip, a bullwhip, right?” Her hands could tell, when he reacted—not to her touch, but to the memory. “Sorry. Shhhh. Relax. I’m sorry.”

  He breathed deep and let her hands persuade his muscles to unclench. “It’s all right. Hard to avoid developing a conditioned response to something like that.”

  “What do you do for that man, the Territorial Ranger?”

  “This is the part that Sensei was talking about.”

  “Oh—the don’t ask part?”

  “I’m short. And without the beard I look younger than I am. But even when I was younger I did undercover work for the major. I still do. You need to not talk about it, all right?”

  “What do you get out of it?”

  “The Rangers have a scholarship at their disposal, outside. A choice of Stanford or M.I.T or Cal Tech or Rice.”

  “Oh. I guess that’s worth it. If not for Grandfather, I wouldn’t be attending Berkeley.”

  She unwrapped the obi and let her kimono slither to the floor. Later, after the touching became mutual, then urgent, then leisurely again, he told her about it.

  “The People of the Book were a nasty fundamentalist sect down toward White Sands. There were reports of civil-rights abuses, big time, but no one would testify. I came in as a book peddler’s assistant, which was a big mistake. They were happy to buy Bibles and they allowed the Farmer’s Almanac, though they were iffy about it, but I gave a book on reproductive health to a newly married girl. And I mean girl.

  “They had this nasty thing going where the elders were each other’s in-laws. As in fathers-in-law and sons-in-law. They’d keep their wives pregnant until they died in childbirth, then marry one of their fellow elder’s children—thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girls—and start the whole thing over.

  “When they found the book in Sarah’s possession they put her in the public stocks and whipped her until she miscarried. The Bible is supposed to do for everything, you see. We got her out and away, but they came after us hard and I decoyed them out into the gypsum sands while my partner got her into Gordo.”

  Kimble pushed his face into the crook of Martha’s neck and inhaled deep. “They caught me. I hurt some of them but they took me back and put me in the stocks.”

  “And they whipped you.”

  “Well, they wanted to know where I’d hid her. Beware the anger of ‘righteous’ men. It was…” He broke off and licked his lips. “Anyway, they left me there, no water, no food, no shade.”

  “Did your partner send the Rangers?”

  “Oh, yeah. But it took a while. Three days. It was overcast and he didn’t have enough sunlight to signal the heliograph station. Once he did reach them, they dropped a Rapid Response Team followed up by mounted Rangers two days later.”

  It was Martha’s turn to tense up, but he slid his hand down her back and hip. “Wonder you didn’t die!”

  He nodded into her neck. “True. Would’ve, but there was this kid. He’d sneak out in the middle of the night and bring me water. Never really saw his face. But he kept me alive long enough. I wasn’t in any condition, after, to find him. Hope he’s all right.”

  “Did they arrest them?”

  “The Elders? Oh, yes. Statutory rape. Child abuse and criminal sexual penetration. Marriage laws in the territory are the same as the old Arizona/New Mexico statutes. Fifteen with a court order. Sixteen or seventeen with parental consent. Eighteen or older fine. Thirteen and fourteen—child abuse. There was also manslaughter. There’d been other deaths due to ‘punishment,’ and once the Elders were in custody, people were willing to testify.

  “I’m told they put a social works station in there and they have a permanently detached squad of Rangers. But the thing that will really turn things around is a new library and mandatory reading competency.”

  “Didn’t they have local law?”

  “That would be Elder Povoni, county sheriff. Now a guest of a federal penitentiary in Colorado.”

  “Oh.”

  He turned the topic back to her. He was skin to skin with a beautiful girl and there were better things to talk about or not talk about. He already knew she was studying cultural anthropology. “What are your plans for after you graduate?”

  “Territorial Studies—the palilithic zone.”

  The Territory—New Mexico, Arizona, southern Nevada and Utah and northern Chihuahua and Sonora. The place where the metal eaters live.

  “Palilithic? Is that what they’re calling it now? If Neolithic is new stone, what is pali?”

  “Anew. Afresh. Again.”

  “Stoned again.”

  She giggled and this led to other things.

  * * *

  HE rose in the dark, while it was coolest.

  By the time he’d hitched Mrs. Perdicaris to the cart, filled his water barrels, and got his traveling gear loaded, the sky was half light and Mt. Taylor stood out against the western horizon like some sleeping giant’s shoulder, shrugged up out of the covers.

  He’d left Martha deep asleep, but there was a lamp in Ruth’s kitchen. When he pulled the cart through the gate in the coyote fence, she came out and handed him something hot wrapped in a dishcloth. “For the road.”

  “Yes, Sensei. Thanks.”

  “Martha come to you last night?”

  He felt his face go red. “She said she talked to you.”

  “She did. Just wanted to know what I would be dealing with, today. I like her. She’s very straightforward—honest with herself. If she’d been disappointed, well—I would probably work her pretty hard to take her mind off things.”

  “She may still have been disappointed, Sensei.”

  “How much sleep did you get?”

  “Damn little.”

  She snorted. “Well, then.”

  “Yes, Sensei.”

  Ruth pointed two fingers at her eyes. He nodded and she turned and walked away.

  Mrs. Perdicaris headed out at a trot.

  By late morning they’d gone fifteen miles and he was looking for a place to slee
p through the heat of the day. They were on the river road, following the Rio Puerco down to where it flowed into the Rio Grande, so it wasn’t as if he didn’t have water, but he was still crossing the Jornada del Muerto. Better to sit out the heat.

  Besides, he’d meant it when he said he didn’t get much sleep the night before and he was barely keeping his eyes open, despite Sensei’s gesture. That’s what it meant. Keep aware. Keep alert.

  When a few rocks and dirt clods rolled out of the brush on the low hillside and onto the road ahead, he dropped the reins on the seat beside him and rolled sideways off of the cart. Mrs. Perdicaris walked on and as the cart passed him he snaked his jyo out of the back, then climbed up the hill using a series of deep-set boulders, quiet as he could. It wasn’t completely noise-free but the rumble of the cartwheels and the clop-clop of the mule’s hooves were louder.

  The crest of the hill was fringed with cedar, more bushes than trees, and some green tumbleweed, grown waist high in the summer thunderstorms. He reached the top just in time to see a man step out into the open with a fiberglass crossbow and yell, “Hold it right there!”

  The man was looking down at the cart. Mrs. Perdicaris, at his shout, tossed her head, snorted, and walked on.

  Kimble took a long stride forward and swung the jyo up, striking the crossbow string from below. It popped out of the catch and the quarrel fired over the road, a good twenty feet above Mrs. Perdicaris.

  The man turned, eyes wide, and jerked the crossbow up like he intended to swing it at Kimble, but Kimble had stepped back after discharging the shot, holding the jyo low at his side.

  The man was big, maybe six and a half feet tall, and muscled like a body builder—not like someone who worked on a farm, but like someone who spent a lot of time in a gym. He was the prettiest man Kimble had ever seen, like a movie star.

  “That’s not very friendly,” Kimble commented.

  The surprise wore off and the man calmed as he took in Kimble’s height and size. Kimble was over a foot shorter and a good hundred pounds lighter. “Huh. Just a kid. Sorry about this, but my need is great.” He dropped the crossbow onto a tumbleweed and lunged forward, raising his fist.