Changer's Moon

by Clayton, Jo;

  The Mirror blinked.

  The sun leaped toward zenith, settled at about an hour from noon. A loud whopping sound. A speck in the sky grew rapidly larger. Two men sitting in a bulging glass bubble in a lattice of metal, rotors whirling overhead. The thing swept low over the wrecked village, slowed until it was almost hovering, moved in a tight circle and swung away, moving south along the highway until it vanished into the blue.

  The Mirror blinked.

  The sun flashed past noon, slowed to its usual pace. Liz thrust her head through the crack. “Van’s coming. Far as I can tell, he’s loose. No copters.”

  A short while later, a familiar muted purring—the van came down the street, stopped while Georgia shoved on the sliding door, then drove in beside the military vehicle and stopped.

  The dark woman came out the back, one arm hanging useless, a wide patch of drying blood on the shoulder of her tailored shirt. As the rest piled out after her, she lifted the dangling arm with her other hand and hooked her thumb over her belt so the arm had some support. Walking slowly so she wouldn’t jar her shoulder, she crossed to stand beside Georgia.

  “We had to fight loose,” she said. “We got Aguillar and Connelly out. Catlin’s dead. He couldn’t make it, too far gone, asked me to shoot him. Did. Ram’s got a bullet in him, a crease on his leg, bled a little but he could run and did. Rest of us, well, we’re mobile. As you see, we picked up a couple other prisoners. Connelly says he knows them both not just from the introg center, vouches for them. Woman’s a doctor. Orthopedic surgeon. Man’s a history professor at Loomis. Asked about Julia, says he knows her. Feisty dude for an academic type, saved my life just about. Hauled me up when the bullet knocked me off my feet, half-carried me till we reached the transport.” She grinned. “We jacked ourself a copcar. Bit of luck, got us in smooth enough. It was getting out the shit started flying. Took us awhile to get loose enough to connect with Det. Doc there did get the worst of the bleeding stopped with stuff in the copcar, but she didn’t have much to work with.”

  “Liz says you’re clean.”

  “Yeah, or I wouldn’t be standing here flapping my mouth.” There was sweat on her forehead and her rich brown had gone a dull mud-gray, but the spirit in her was a wine-glow in her light eyes.

  Georgia touched her cheek, his stolid face deeply serious. “You go sit down before you fall down.” Then he grinned at her. “Picking up a medical doctor.” He looked over her shoulder at the battered, middle-aged woman bending over a wounded man, a medipac already open beside her. “Anoike’s luck.”

  “Ain’ it de trut’.” Refusing Georgia’s arm, she went over to the military vehicle, sat down on the flat ledge that ran between the wheels, resting her head against its metal side, waiting her turn for treatment.

  The Mirror blinked.

  Night. Fog or low-hanging clouds. Trees swam in and out of the fog as the Mirror’s eye swept along. A creek cut through a small clearing. Condensation dripped off needles and leaves, off rocky overhangs. A man came from under the trees, another, two more, carrying a third on a stretcher—Ram, the doctor walking beside him. Another two, another stretcher, Anoike on it. A man in his fifties with thick unruly gray hair. Liz. More of the raiders, the strongman, finally Georgia. A soft whistle came from somewhere among the trees; he answered it without breaking stride.

  As they moved into the trees again Serroi began seeing small camouflaged gardens, the plants growing haphazard in the grass and brush, then some lean-tos and crude pole corrals with horses in them, more shelters, tents huddled close in to trees, more and more of them, heavy canvas tops with walls and floors of rock or wattle and daub. Faces looked out of some, some men and women came out and watched the raiders pass, called softly to one or the other, getting soft answers. A whole little village under the trees, hidden from above, a portable community able to pick up and move itself given a few hours warning, leaving only depressions and debris behind. Thick, netting stretched overhead, open enough to let in some moonlight and certainly any rain. The Mirror’s eye swept up through the web and circled over it, showing her, showing them both, the hillside below them, empty except for vegetation and trees, the tent village wiped away as if it had been a dream, nothing more.

  The Mirror blinked.

  The sun shone with a pale watery light through a thinning layer of clouds. The Mirror’s eye roamed about the village, showing them children playing, laughing, chasing each other among the trees and tents, others gathered around a young man, listening as he talked to them, writing in notebooks they held on their knees. Some women and men were washing clothing in the stream, others were cooking, working in the gardens, talking and laughing, some stretched out on mats, sleeping. There were sentries keeping a desultory watch on the approaches to the camp, young men and women, mostly in their teens, perched in trees or stretched out under brush. They weren’t exactly alert, but there were enough of them to make it very hard for any large group of men to catch the villagers off-guard.

  A whup-whupping sound. Serroi remembered it and wasn’t surprised when the Mirror’s eye swept above the camouflage netting and focused on the sky. Huge and metallic, twice the size of the searcher she’d seen before (copter, Georgia had called it, she remembered that after a moment; copter, she said to herself as if by naming the thing she could draw some of the terror out of it), it slowed in the air, hovered over a slope some distance from the camp. Fire bloomed under it, it spat out darts so swift she guessed at them more than saw them until they hit the hillside and exploded, blew a hole in the rock with a loud crunch, a fountain of stone and shattered trees.

  The copter hovered over its destruction until the reverberations of the explosion had died, then a loud voice boomed from it, a man’s voice, many times magnified. “Terrorists,” it trumpeted, metallic overtones and echoes close to defeating the effect of the volume, turning the words into barely understandable mush. “Surrender. Save your miserable necks. We coming after you, gonna burn these hills down around you. Defoliants, you scum, remember those? Napalm. Rockets. We gonna scrub these hills bare. Ever seen third-degree burns? Want your kids torched? Surrender, scum. You got no running room left.”

  Before the last echoes died out, the copter was moving on along the range. Serroi held her breath as it passed over the village, but the men in the machine were blasting slopes at random intervals without any real hope of hitting anyone. They blew a chunk out of the next mountain, over, repeated the message with a few added descriptions, and flew on, the whump-crump of their assault on stone and dirt and living wood fading gradually to silence.

  The Mirror’s eye dipped back under the webbing. Shaken, angry, excited, afraid, the folk from the tents converged on the largest of the camouflaged clearings. Some were silent, turned inward in their struggle to cope with this new threat. Others came in small groups, talking urgently, voices held to whispers as if they feared something would overhear what they were saying. At first it was a confusion of dazed and worried people, but gradually the villagers sorted themselves out and settled on the dirt and grass while three men and two women took stools to the far edge of the clearing, set them in a row and climbed up on them so they could see and be seen. The low buzzing of the talk grew louder for a short while, then died to an expectant silence as one of the five, a lean tall man with thick glasses he kept pushing up a rather short nose, came to his feet and walked a few steps toward the gathered people. “We got a little problem,” he said. His voice was unexpectedly deep and carried through the clearing without difficulty.

  Laughter, nervous, short-lived, rippled across the assembly.

  “We also got no answers.” He clasped his hands behind him and ran milky blue eyes over the very miscellaneous group before him. “Seems like some of you should have some questions. Don’t want to drag this out too long, but …” he smiled suddenly, a wide boyish grin that took years off his age, “.…your elected councellors need to do a bit of polling before we make our recommendations.” He glanced at the tim
epiece strapped to his wrist. “You know the rules. Say your name, say your question or comment, keep it short and to the point. You want to argue, save it for later. You stand, I point, you talk.” There was a surge as a number of the listeners jumped up. He got his stool, climbed up on it, looked them over and snapped a long forefinger out. “You. Tildi.”

  The dumpy gray-haired woman took a deep breath, then spoke, “Tildi Chon. Any chance they’re bluffing?”

  The finger snapped out again. “Georgia, you know them better than most.”

  The chunky blond man got to his feet, looked around at the expectant faces. His own face was stolidly grim. “Georgia Myers,” he said. “No. Not this time. For one thing, they’ve already hit a camp south of here, got that from one of our friends in the city. For another, same friend says they’re just about ready to put up new spy satellites.”

  “Any chance we could ride it out?”

  “Always a chance. Most of us beat the odds getting here. You know that. Almost no chance if we stay together. Have to scatter, groups of two or three, no more.”

  Tildi Chon nodded and sat down, shifting her square body with an uneasy ease, settling with her hands clasped in her lap, her face calm.

  “You next, Arve.”

  The pudgy little man wiped his hands down his sides. “Arve Wahls,” he said in an uncertain tenor. “Something not for me, but anyone who needs to know and don’t like to ask. What happens to anyone wanting to surrender? Who can’t take the pounding any more?”

  One of the rescued prisoners, the history professor, jumped to his feet. “Don’t,” he burst out. He smoothed a long handsome hand over a rebellious cowlick, looked around, made a graceful gesture of apology. “Simon Zagouris. Sorry. New here.”

  “Samuel Braddock, professor. From what I hear, you’re one to know well as any what would happen. Finish what you got to say and keep it short.”

  Zagouris looked down at his hands, then took a few steps out from the others and turned to face them. “If you’re lucky, you’ll be shot.” He waited for the shocked murmurs to die, then went on. “Look at me. Tenured professor, fat cat in a fat seat, doing what I enjoyed, no worries about eating or rent, fighting off a bit of back-stabbing, office politics, nothing serious. When they leaned on me, told me what I had to teach and how I had to teach it, I sputtered a bit, they leaned harder, I caved in. But they didn’t trust me even then. My classes had watchers with tape recorders. My lectures had to be cleared through someone in the Chancellor’s office. And a blackshirt truth squad searched my office, my house, clearing out anything they thought subversive or immoral. My books …” His mouth snapped shut as he fought to control his anger and distress. “Came back again and again. Stealing whatever they fancied, daring me to say boo. Time and time again I was called in to listen to some airhead rant. I remind you, I didn’t fight them, I didn’t do more than protest very mildly at the beginning. Kept my mouth shut after, did what I was told like a good boy. And still they kept after me, never trusting me a minute, just looking for an excuse to haul me in for interrogation. And when they pulled me in, my god, you wouldn’t believe the shit they tried on me. Until you have to listen to them, you can’t imagine the stupidity of those men. Twice I was taken out of the University and held in a room somewhere—I don’t have the faintest idea where it was—just put there and left, not knowing what was going to happen. I started looking about me for some way to fight them that wouldn’t get me killed. I say that for my self-respect, but Im not going to talk about it more than that. The ones that questioned me never got near anything that was really happening, it was what was in my head that bothered them. This last time, though, it wasn’t questions and a few slaps, it was cattle prods and purges, and wanting to know about friends of mine, what they were doing, where they were. Again I remind you, I didn’t challenge them, I didn’t reject their claims on me or work against them, not in the beginning. If any of you think about surrendering, consider how much more they’ve got against you. Say they use you for propaganda to get other holdouts to come in, let you live awhile. As soon as you’re beginning to feel safe, they come to your house and question you, then they take you away and question you. They’ll question you about things so crazy you can’t believe they’re serious, until you start thinking there has to be something more behind what’s happening. But there’s nothing there. They’ll come back at you again and again until you’re crazy or dead. No matter what happens here, I’m not going back alive.” He returned to where he’d been sitting, settled himself, waiting with a calm that didn’t extend to his hands, long fingers nervously tapping at his thighs.

  Braddock pushed his glasses up. “Right,” he said. “Connelly.”

  “Francis Connelly. Anoike just busted me out of an introg. What Zagouris said ain’t the half of it. But he’s got the right idea. Go back down as a corpse or not at all.”

  Half a dozen tried to speak at once. Braddock came back onto his feet. “Siddown and shaddup,” he yelled at them. Into the ensuing quiet he said, “You talk, Tom. Rest of you keep still and listen of I’ll have Ombele sort you out.” He flashed one of his sudden grins at another of the council, a man three times as wide as he was, half a head taller; even standing still the muscles visible in arms and neck were defined and shining like polished walnut in the shifting light.

  He chuckled, his laughter as rich and dark as the rest of him. “Yeah,” he said. “Papa Sammy’s muscle.” The assembly laughed with him but there was no more disorder. “Like the man said, Prioc, you’re up next.”

  “Tom Prioc. We can’t stay here. Can’t go down either. Seems to me there’s three choices left. We can do like Georgia says and scatter. We do that, I see most of us starving or getting picked up one by one and put in the labor camps they’ve set up down south, or some of us, the ones without families, we can keep moving, living outta garbage cans, picking up shitwork now and then from scum too greedy to pay the legal wage. We die and don’t get nothing to show for it. Me, I want the bastards to know I was here before they wipe me.” He folded his arms, nodded his head, his wispy brown hair blowing out from his face. “Or we head north tonight with as much as we can haul, split up in small groups so we can run round the roadblocks and copter traps they’ll have waiting for us. Cross the border how we can. The Condies’ll try shoving us back, don’t want our trouble, they got troubles enough with the death squads coming across to hunt down what they call enemies of the UD. Won’t be that easy, getting in and getting set up. Have to watch out for Condie feds, but we can stay together, that’s worth something.” He chuckled, looked about the crowd, eyes lingering on a face here and there. “That’s one hard border to close. Me and some of you, we did our bit in trade across it. Tempts me. I know those mountains and the trails.” He paused, rubbed at his nose. “But I’d kinda like to take me out a copter or two. Georgia and his bunch, they got us a good supply of rockets and launchers. There’ll be gunships, but a single man’s a hard target when he knows how to be. Third choice. I’d really like to take me out a copter.” He sat.

  Braddock’s long finger flicked to a comfortably round middle-aged woman with short blond hair and a peeling nose. “Cordelia Gudon. Tom’s just about set it out. I can’t see anything else, maybe some of you can. All I got to say, whatever the rest of us do, the kids gotta get out.” She sat.

  “Blue.”

  “Blue Fir Alendayo. I know the trails and the border well as Tom. Same reason. I say we go as soft as we can far as we can, shoot our way through if we have to, probably will, get the lot of us over the border, then those who want to come back and make as much hell as we can for these.…” She paused, searching for a word that would adequately characterize their foes, gave it up and went on. “Well, they can.” She sat, bounced up immediately, eyes shining. “And anyone who wants to stay now and shoot him a copter or two, why not.” She sat again.

  The meeting went on its orderly way. Doubters and grumblers, quibblers and fussers, minor spats and a couple of yell
ing matches. Hern watched them, fascinated by a kind of governing he’d never seen before, even in the few taromate convocations he’d looked in on. He took his eyes away when the meeting was winding toward some sort of consensus. “Coyote,” he called.

  The scruffy little man came out of nowhere, his eyes darting from the image in the Mirror to Hern to Serroi, back to the Mirror. “Yes?” he said, pointed ears spreading out from his head, pointed nose twitching.

  “I want those. If they’re willing. Those people, their weapons and transport.”

  “Willing? What willing? You want them, I bring them through.”

  “No point, if they won’t fight. Are you going to bring them through here or can you transfer them directly to the Biserica?”

  “Will I, not can I, Dom. Will I? Yes. No. Maybe. You go there.” His ears went flat against his head, then his grin was back, mockery and anticipation mixed in it. He’ giggled. “Hern the happy salesman. Death and glory, you tell ’em. They buy you or they don’t. Come through where I want if they buy. Not Biserica. Maybe Southport. I think about it.”

  Serroi straightened. “Ser Coyote.”

  Coyote rocked on his heels, his head tilted, long narrow eyes filled with a sly laughter that she didn’t particularly like. “Little green person.”

  “If they refuse, then Hern chooses again because your debt isn’t paid.”

  Coyote squirmed, went fuzzy around the edges as if he vibrated between shapes, then he wilted, even his stiff gray hair. He sighed. “Yesss.”

  “That being so,” she said more calmly than she felt, “put us through.”

  POET-WARRIOR

  Julia set about the reams of paperwork, the miles of red tape that should eventually land her in the public ward of some hospital and pay her surgeon’s fees.

  You know the route, you’ve helped a thousand others along it. Faces pass before you, good people, petty tyrants, both sorts overworked until anything extra is an irritation not to be borne, both sorts harried by their superiors and the local politicians who found attacking them a cheap window to public favor. You’re unemployed? Haven’t you tried to get work? What do you mean too old? At forty-seven? They say no one’s hiring untrained forty-seven-year-old women? You say you’re a writer. What books? Oh, those. You own nothing? Not even a car? Estimated income for the year. Oh, really, you expect me to believe that? I’ve seen your name, you’re won prizes. Or—hi, Jule, haven’t seen you for years, what you been doing? Oh, god, I’m sorry. Cancer? All that high life catching up with you, no I’m just joking, I know it isn’t funny. I hate to tell you what funding’s like this year. Look, let toe send you over to Gerda. And don’t be such a stranger after this. On and on. Keep your temper. They’re really trying to help you, most of them, if they get snappish it’s because they hate having to tell you they can’t do anything. Answer patiently. Show the doctor’s report. Explain you couldn’t afford insurance, you can’t afford anything, you’re just getting by. Say over and over what you’ve said before as you’re shunted from person to person, watch them hunt about for cracks to ease you through. Be patient. Experience should tell you that you can outwit the system if you keep at it. Try to wash off the stain of failure that is ground deeper and deeper into you. And try to forget the fear that is ground deeper and deeper into you as the days pass. You know the lumps are growing. You can’t even feel them yet, but you know they’re there, you have nightmares about them. Treacherous flesh feeding on flesh.