Joe Haldeman SF Gateway Omnibus

by Joe Haldeman

  “Yeah. Stay ready.” I checked Paul, and there was no change; he’d slept through the excitement. It hadn’t been that loud.

  I had to press down pretty hard to feel the pulse in his throat, but it was there. It worried me that he didn’t respond to the pressure. He was too pale and still. Did we give him too much painkiller? I resisted the impulse to shake him.

  Another minute. “Shit,” she said quietly. “Something happen.”

  “Maybe he’s safe inside now,” I said.

  “That or dead. Or maybe he fell back under fire.”

  My brain wasn’t working. “So we should wait to see if he comes back?”

  “Maybe. Shit. I have to go.”

  For an odd second I thought she was talking about a bowel movement. “Tell Dustin.”

  She didn’t have to. He came out of the brush below us. “Let’s get up there. Set up a cross-fire.” He looked at me with bright intensity. “You stay here with Paul. We’ll be back before dark.”

  “Stay off the road,” Elza added helpfully. She shouldered her bag, and they hustled off.

  “Good-bye,” I said to their backs, and felt a sudden twist of new fear.

  They had abandoned me. A rifle and a pistol and a mule versus how many armed lunatics?

  Jerry shifted his weight and snuffled. I held the weapon away from him and put my arm around his neck. “You and me, mule,” I whispered. The supernumeraries. The expendables?

  The aliens, Paul and me. Martian citizens, if born on Earth. Citizens of the galaxy, the title of a movie I saw as a child in Florida, back in the twenty-first century.

  When we were chatting with Lanny in the bookstore, he mentioned there had been a strong movement, before the power went out, to reform the calendar. Why mark years from the disputed date of a minor prophet’s birth? That “minor” was Lanny’s own prejudice showing, of course. One out of three Americans had been practicing Christians when the lights went out.

  That was another one of his jokes—if they had practiced a little harder, maybe they would’ve gotten it right. And all of this wouldn’t have happened.

  But his point was interesting. Some people wanted to begin the calendar on the day, the moment, humans first stepped onto another world—the moon, back in 1969. We knew when that had happened, down to the nanosecond.

  Paul had liked the idea but said it didn’t matter which nanosecond you started your calendar on, so long as everybody agreed on which nanosecond it was. He said it would make astronomical calculations easier if you started the calendar at the beginning of a Julian day, which I guess was the number of days since Julius Caesar was born. I remember resisting the impulse to argue that, after all, Caesar was born by Caesarian section, so at what nanosecond was he actually born? When they cut into his poor mother, or when his head came out of the wound, or his feet, or with his first breath, or when they cut the cord? This is science, after all.

  My own children had been “born” the instant the mother machine shocked breath into them; their legal birth date was 23 Lowell 28, which translated into sometime in December, 2084, Earth style.

  Maybe they should reform Earth’s calendar so year zero and day zero were the same as ours, the day humans first stepped onto Mars. Of course, the calendars and clocks would spin crazily out of synchrony after the first moment.

  Computers don’t care, anyhow. It’s only humans who get confused.

  Jerry made a protracted intestinal comment, to remind me that humans and computers weren’t everything.

  So how did Elza and Dustin plan to keep from being shot by the good guys? Would the fact they were shooting at the bad guys protect them?

  I tried to visualize the situation. They’d have to approach on this side of the river, east; it was too deep and fast to cross. But they wouldn’t just walk up this road alongside the river. Too exposed, even here.

  They’d probably loop around farther east, and circle back behind the stockade. The orchard wouldn’t afford much cover, which probably meant the enemy wouldn’t be there.

  Then what? Holler for someone to cover them while they rushed for the back door? If Namir was there, he could identify their voices. “Don’t shoot; they’re fellow spies from nonexistent governments.”

  My degree in American Studies was woefully deficient in course work on staying alive at the end of the world. Find good boots. Count your ammo. Try to keep the mule from farting too loud.

  I jumped at gunfire, but recognized it: the “burst of three” setting on the standard-issue army rifles that we were carrying. Two bursts on top of each other. Then one more. Then two more.

  Didn’t mean it was them, of course. But it wasn’t the manic rattle we’d heard before. Had they had time to circle around? Depends on how thick the woods were; how cautious they were.

  Jerry backed away from the noise. I patted him and told him it was all right. Lying to a mule, how pathetic.

  Paul groaned, and I went around to check on him. No change.

  I heard a noise, and crouched down behind the wagon. There was something or someone moving in the brush on the other side of the road, back where Dustin had been.

  Thumbed the rifle selector straight up to B3, burst, and peered over it to the other side. It sounded like someone walking, not being careful. But then why not walk on the road?

  The wagon was too well hidden; I couldn’t have seen anyone unless he was wearing bright clothes. Quietly I stepped around past Jerry, pressing his muzzle, and whispering, “Quiet.” He nodded, which was strange. I went down into a shallow ditch that would be a streamlet when it rained. I touched the extra magazines in my pockets, talismans, and crept down toward the road the way I’d been taught, the butt of the rifle stock firm under my arm, finger inside the trigger guard but not on the trigger.

  The noise to my right grew louder. About halfway to the road I stopped and waited, hunkered behind a thick brown tangle of dead brush.

  The noise stopped, too.

  There was the slightest rustle, that could have been wind—but there was no wind. I swung the rifle in that direction and a wolf’s head appeared, or a dog like a German shepherd, teeth bared and ears flattened down. I fired and the burst went low, scattering dirt a couple of feet below the face, which disappeared.

  Probably running away, though I couldn’t hear anything but cotton stillness and metallic ringing. Ear protectors dangled in a small plastic bag hanging from the rear sight, so you wouldn’t forget to use them.

  Assuming he was scared away now, but everyone else within a mile knew where I was, I wasted no time getting back to the cart.

  The water and supplies and extra weapons were as I’d left them, strapped to the sides. Jerry was restless but quiet. I looked in the wagon at Paul.

  His eyes were open.

  “Paul?” No reaction.

  I touched his skin and it was cool and dry. He didn’t blink when I touched his eyes.

  I closed them.

  16

  We had talked a couple of times about whether it was better to lose a loved one suddenly, without warning and with no emotional preparation, or go through the agony of watching them slip away slowly.

  For yourself you want it to be sudden and unexpected. But perhaps for the ones you love, you want time to say good-bye.

  I still had no clear answer. If the biker gang had killed Paul there by the underpass, I wouldn’t have had the hours of talking, or trying to talk, while he slipped away. And he would have been spared the agony of a lingering death. Physical and emotional.

  I had stopped crying, and started digging, by the time they came back. Cursing the blunt entrenching tool and the coarse network of roots that resisted it. I only had a small hole when Dustin and Elza came up the slope, along with two men from Funny Farm, Wham-O and one who introduced himself as Judd when he took the entrenching tool from me with quiet insistence.

  “I’m sorry,” Elza said. “How many years?”

  “Actual? I was eighteen when we met and a few weeks old
er when we fell in love, or I did. Twenty-one real years?”

  “Not enough.”

  “No.” How many would be enough? We had moved back to the cart, and I stared down at him, at his body. I wanted to touch him, and I didn’t want to.

  Judd had followed me up, holding the small shovel like a toy in his large hand.

  “Ma’am, I’ll do whatever you say, but wouldn’t it be best if we buried him in the graveyard up at the farm? You’re part of the family now.”

  “Of course,” I said, and did a bad imitation of smiling. “I wasn’t, I’m not thinking straight.”

  The three men had no trouble convincing Jerry to back and fill and come back down to the path with them. As we made our way along, they told me what had happened.

  The gunfire we’d heard had evidently been in the nature of a probe: two or three people with automatic weapons staged an attack on the stockade’s front entrance. They killed the man who was standing guard there.

  The “farmers” responded with fire from two of the guardhouses on the corners of the stockade, but worried they might have used up too much ammunition in a show of force.

  When Dustin and Namir came to their aid, giving flanking fire from the east, the attackers withdrew fast, leaving a blood trail but no bodies.

  Other than that first casualty, none of the good guys was injured, but it was a prudent assumption that they hadn’t seen the end of it. And they wanted us inside the stockade as soon as possible.

  I thanked them for coming to our rescue so quickly. Dustin pointed out that it wasn’t exactly charity. Out there, I could be captured and held hostage. Even if they weren’t smart enough to do that, weapons and ammunition and a vehicle that ran on grass were beyond price.

  A phrase with no meaning. When would things have prices again?

  It wasn’t just Dustin and Namir and Judd in the rescue party. They said that Namir had wanted to come up with the horse, but the farmers already had a squad organized and on alert, which was how they were able to come back so fast. I never saw more than two of them at a time, but there were eleven others along with Judd, moving through the woods alongside of us, ahead and behind.

  We moved along at a pretty good rate, and after about twenty minutes turned up into the road that cuts through the wheat field to the stockade. Judd shouted an order and then stayed back in the woods with his scattered squad.

  Jerry stopped for a moment when he saw the building, and then all but trotted toward it. The double door swung open, and Namir came out on horseback to meet us.

  He looked in the cart and nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not unexpected,” I had to say, but my voice cracked.

  He dismounted and walked alongside me. “You were with him,” he said.

  “Yes and no. I went off to check on a noise—a dog or a wolf. When I came back he was, he was gone.”

  “Hard on you.”

  Yes and no, I thought. That chest wound would not have healed without surgery. Even if he had been sheltered and comfortable, he wouldn’t have lasted very long. He probably knew that as well as I did. When we could talk, we talked of other things.

  Gunfire to our right, two single shots. The horse and mule both realized it was time for speed, and we were hard-pressed to keep up with them on the way to the door. It slammed shut behind me, but they eased it back open a few inches, a guard watching through the crack.

  Not a job anyone would want, sniper bait.

  The place didn’t seem much changed from before except that some people carried weapons. And there were more of them. Judd confirmed that they had taken in a few neighboring families, who brought food and munitions with them.

  Did they turn away people who came empty-handed? I could ask later. There were other horses and mules inside the compound, in a corral improvised from scraps of old lumber. A couple of men held it open for the horse and unhitched Jerry. They both went straight for the pile of hay, and I had a sudden vision of how hard that was to come by now. Harvesting under armed guard, quickly. The same with the orchards and other crops, and nobody would be lazily fishing out of the stream. There were chickens underfoot everywhere, which I supposed had been cute for an hour.

  When would it be safe to go back to normal living conditions? Would it ever be?

  Namir and Dustin and Elza helped me carry our gear to the small cabin we were sharing with two other couples. Then we went to the rear of the place, to the cemetery garden just beyond the back door.

  Four living people were keeping guard in foxholes while a burial party of four others worked fast with pick and shovel. A body lay beside them under a dirty sheet stained with new blood. The man who’d been shot at the beginning of the attack I’d heard from back in the woods.

  They passed us the pick, and we started breaking ground for Paul’s grave. I did a short turn, the pick much more efficient than our entrenching tool, but almost too heavy for me to swing. After a long and heavy day.

  When they finished burying the other man, we stopped digging. Roz came out with two women and two children, and they each said some words, the children crying though the women had finished.

  I thought I was done with crying, too, but it started again when the four of us carried Paul’s body from the cart, using a blanket as a stretcher. We lowered him into the waist-deep hole and took the blanket out; no winding sheets when cloth was getting rare. I used Namir’s knife to cut a square of cloth off my shirt, to cover Paul’s face before the dirt fell.

  I cried then, and so did Dustin and Elza. Perhaps Namir would have if he could. The only humans on this planet who had been to the stars. Come back to Earth to die.

  He would not have wanted a prayer any more than I would. But I tried to remember something he had said to me about how marvelously complex man was in spite of his cosmic insignificance. A shifting assemblage of atoms, mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, come together to “mimic and define” purpose in its beautiful stagger from cradle to grave.

  He had been a beautiful man, full of humor and courage and love. I said that, too, after Dustin and Elza gave their farewells, and Namir said something in Hebrew. Then we each threw a handful of dirt into the grave, and Elza led me away while Namir and Dustin did the heavy work.

  17

  Roz had called a meeting of all the adults, newcomers and old residents, outside the dining hall in last light. There were over a hundred, mostly sitting on the ground or leaning against buildings. She began without preamble.

  “We’ve all heard the same rumors. Some are exaggerated. There isn’t a huge army gathering out there in the woods. But there is a large and growing number of people, not as many as we have here. They have weapons and ammunition and a dwindling amount of food.

  “Some people who joined us today confirmed that they have leadership, a coalition of two biker gangs from San Francisco.”

  The “biker gangs” were social clubs with two hundred years of history. They began as warring clans who roamed the old highway system on compact armed motorcycles, gasoline-powered until that became an expensive anachronism. They evolved into respected service organizations whose public appearance reflected their land-pirate origins. Mostly men, mostly fat and bearded, wearing leather clothing and tattoos. The leader would have an expensive loud antique gasoline motorcycle; the others, quiet electric scooters. They organized charity drives and always showed up in formation for parades and big games.

  A few of the gangs had gone back to their violent origins years before the power went off. Then they junked their useless vehicles and took bicycles.

  They knew which towns were not well defended, and raided their stores. The concentration of guns and ammunition at Funny Farm had protected them from individual gangs—but that concentration was also irreplaceable wealth in what had become a desperate firearm culture. So both large gangs had gotten together to plan a joint raid.

  People who had come into the stockade for protection had wildly varying estimates of the size of the biker coalitio
n, from a hundred to a thousand.

  A hundred would be a manageable annoyance. A thousand would conquer the farm and take everything.

  Namir knew how to conduct interrogations; that was his job description in a dark period of his life. Funny Farm didn’t have any of the advanced tools of the trade, but as Roz saw, he had full control of the basic ones: voice, manner, posture. A small room with one door and no windows.

  She asked him to talk to each of the informers individually, alone. He didn’t raise a hand against them, or even his voice, but he got as much of the truth as they could give.

  “The two gangs in charge,” Roz continued, “the Fangs and the Crips, have worked together before. They attacked compounds like ours—Bakersfield and Torrance—and left behind nothing but smoking ruins and corpses.