The Anguished Dawn

by James P. Hogan

  The boy swallowed visibly and nodded. "I guess . . . if I can. I just want someone to know which side I'm on."

  Shayle's mind raced for a few moments longer. "What's your name?" she asked.

  "Mertak."

  "Don't do anything for now. You could be more use to us by remaining on the inside. Keep your eyes and ears open to everything. When we need your help, we'll find a way to let you know."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The first hour the next morning was gruesome. Keene was awakened at dawn by the kind of cold that seems to seep through to the bones. After years of living in Kronia's controlled environments, his body had forgotten how to adapt to conditions like this. When he stirred, every muscle felt as if it had stiffened up. From his muttered groans and hesitant movements, Charlie was evidently having the same problem. They breakfasted sparingly and unenthusiastically on coffee, biscuit, and an insipid cereal preparation, and then packed up their kit, saying little.

  The wind was sharp when they emerged from the shelter of the gully. In the gray light of morning, the sight of valley and the river below that had been so welcome to their eyes when they came over the saddle the previous evening now looked bleak and inhospitable. All it seemed to offer now, at the end of an arduous trek down, was the prospect of several hours of back-aching labor, followed by more unknown perils.

  Their steps crunched over gravel and squelched through the mud, while their breath made frosty plumes in the chill air. Keene's feet ached, his legs ached, and his shoulders and hips were sore where the pack chafed. Predictably, the ground that had looked to be smooth and easygoing from a distance turned out to be broken and boggy, slowing them down with impassable mud-filled hollows and forcing them into detours. They followed the ribs, picking out the lines of the high ground. The world contracted to become just the patch of terrain immediately ahead. Keene found himself playing games in his head, picking out some feature ahead and counting off the steps until they reached it. "Three hundred twenty less to go." Then he would repeat it again. And again. And again . . . He asked himself why they were doing this, trying to block out the almost certain futility of it by now. All that came back was another question, asking what was the alternative. But at least the slope was downward now, aiding their progress and sparing the muscles racked during the ascent yesterday.

  As their bodies warmed and stretched, their pace picked up to a steadier rhythm. And despite the soreness and the fatigue, Keene was conscious of a deep-rooted elation at the sense of being home, in contact and communion with the elements of Earth once again. It was as if this first closeness in years with the air and ground of a world being reborn were infusing part of its life into his being.

  About halfway into the morning they halted by a creek to rest and snack on drinks mixed from a fruit flavoring and a confectionary cake. "We're going to need more water," Charlie remarked, upending one of the bottles they had brought. "Probably better to refill up here than wait till we're lower down." Keene agreed. Charlie scouted around to find a spot where the water was clear and flowing over rocks. A bird with blue and gray plumage was watching with jerky, comical motions of its head from a low bush. Keene flipped it a few crumbs. It hopped down and investigated them, cautiously, keeping an eye on him all the time. Several others that had been less forward joined it. Keene wondered if he had just assured them of a permanent entourage from here on. Charlie rinsed his face and then clambered back up from the creek bed with the water bottle.

  "How do you figure it with the Pragmatists, Lan?" he asked as he began fastening his pack. "All this time they've been pushing the line that Earth distances are too extended for any sustained effort, and we should be focusing on Kronia. And then they do a sudden turnabout and want to set themselves up right here. What's going on?"

  "The usual power thing," Keene answered. "The first story legitimized a ploy for getting a bigger share in running Kronia. When that failed, they switched it to having their own here instead. It was probably the fallback plan all along."

  "All the way out here? With just the resources they could bring on a few ships? Could that be enough to give them a realistic start?"

  Keene shrugged. "Wasn't America started from less?"

  "They wouldn't have lasted through the first winter without the Indians."

  "True. . . . Well, what can I tell you? Evidently, it was a gamble they figured they could take."

  They stood up, shouldered their loads, and turned again toward the west. "I'm still astounded that they were able to organize as much as they did and get away with it," Charlie said.

  "With Terrans, they wouldn't have," Keene replied. "But you know the kind of heads Kronians have for politics. Cavan tried to make them a bit more cautious and questioning, but this wasn't his home turf."

  "You think he saw this coming?"

  "Oh, I wouldn't say that. But I know he got close to people like Xen Urzin and Jon Foy. He wanted them to set up an intelligence operation the way anyone back on Earth would have done, so they'd at least have known what was going on. But their whole background makes them take people at face value and accept what they say. In whichever sense you want to take it, they just weren't from the same world."

  * * *

  Lower down, the vegetation became denser, until Lan and Charlie were passing over broad coverings of grasses, dotted with patches of thorn bush and scrub. Although there was still nothing approaching trees, Keene was impressed by the speed with which nature could reinvigorate a new, reworked landscape in just a few years. It brought home more clearly and forcefully than words ever had the things Vicki had said about Earth's biological and geological transformations happening much faster than conventional theories had once held. At one point they passed close to a group of animals browsing in a dell. They seemed horse-like but too squat and small, and with odd suggestions of bovine qualities, but Keene didn't know enough to say if they were from a preexisting line or something new. Charlie had no idea either.

  The flats bordering the river turned out to be an ill-defined fringe of mud banks, watery incursions, and stagnant reaches of reed-studded marsh. After splashing, sticking, and in some places sinking knee-deep or farther into rank-smelling slime, it became clear that further meaningful progress either out toward the true water's edge or parallel to it was impractical. Yet they still hadn't found any materials they judged suitable for the journey ahead. So they decided to use what they could find to lash the two air mattresses together as a temporary platform and use that to explore the shore further from the water side. Before starting, Keene produced a plastic bag from the assortment of utility items he had packed, wrapped their compads in it, and stowed the package deep inside his pack.

  "What kind of reeds do you need for these Bolivian, Egyptian boats, anyway?" he asked Charlie as they splashed about, hacking boughs from bushes and collecting lengths of the thicker vines.

  "I don't know. I thought you were the engineer here."

  "I build MHD inductor channels and spacecraft reactors. There is a difference, Charlie."

  And then when they were partway through figuring out how to hitch together what they had, they realized that they had nothing to propel or steer with. Nothing in the vicinity offered any means of fashioning a pole long enough to push from the bottom. While Charlie finished frapping and tying, Keene searched around and experimented with various shapes cut from the waterside growths to make a couple of paddles. He settled on a Y fork with a crosspiece lashed across the open end, and then stitched a doubled patch of fabric cut from a parka over it, using a bradawl piercing tool and twine. But when he tried working the paddle in water, it was too flimsy and it bent. There was nothing for it but to find another forked piece the same shape and lash it along the first as a reinforcement. Then they had to do the same thing for the second one.

  By now they were into the latter part of the afternoon. They tried floating their creation, first with Keene on his own, then with them both. The weight was too much to prevent the mattre
sses from bending and shipping water. The raft would suffice for pottering along the shore and its inlets to search for more materials, but neither of them would have trusted it out in the main current of the river, which they could see moving swiftly in places. It was clear that they would not be casting off on the river portion of the journey until the following day.

  They drifted out among islands of root-clogged mud and overhanging branches draped with creepers and vines, pushing between floating mats of weed. In places the water was covered in green and yellow scum that released a stench of decomposition when they dipped their paddles, and flowed in over the depressed parts of the mattresses, plastering their clothing and the packs. The air became filled with gnats and mosquitoes that invaded eyes, ears, nostrils, every chink of clothing, and which no amount of slapping could deter. Keene felt his spirits sinking and the first real doubts taking shape that they might have made a serious error of judgment and overestimated their abilities. He kept them to himself; but Charlie's silence and the grim set of his features betrayed that similar feelings were assailing him.

  The channels grew wider and less choked, the water cleaner as they came out into the river. They followed its edge of ferns and winding mud flats for maybe a mile, staying close in where the water was sheltered. Then a sandbank protruding from a bend forced them out some way into the stream, but they managed to steer their way back in again on the far side. Farther on, they could now see the mouth of a creek entering between high banks on the left, and beyond it a stretch of what could have been marshy shore or maybe a narrow island running parallel to it, fringed by tall reeds along the waterline with stands of higher cane-like growths behind. From what they had seen of the area, it was probably as good as they were going to get. They glanced at each other, both nodded at the same time without speaking, and began paddling inward.

  But as they crossed the mouth of the incoming creek, the flow from it carried them out again into choppy waters, and in the battling between paddles and buffeting, Keene felt the makeshift lashings coming apart. "We're going in, Charlie!" he yelled. "Don't let go of that pack!" At the same time he grabbed for his own, clamping it down on the mattress with an arm as he floundered down into the water.

  The two air mattresses remained tied by a few strands of vine. Charlie clung onto the bindings with one hand and went under, reemerging a few seconds later and dragging his pack up with the other. Keene helped him haul it up from the water and onto the other air mattress. Then, holding on to packs and mattresses like a life raft, they kicked with their legs to propel themselves toward the shore. After about a hundred yards Keene felt down with a leg and touched bottom. Coming into the shallows, they stood and walked the remaining distance, dragging the remnants of the raft and the packs after them—but both the paddles were lost. At the edge they collapsed and sat for a long time recovering their breath and letting the weight of water drain from their clothes.

  When they got around to assessing their situation, they found that the pry bar and alloy stake they had brought as weapons were lost. Keene's compad with the map stored in it was still working. He would have felt more secure had he thought to make a hand copy in a notebook as well, but it was too late now. As to building a better raft, there wasn't much in the way of a place to work. The thicket of reeds came to the water's edge, and the cane-like growths farther back were even denser—but they looked useful. The best strategy, they concluded, would be to cut what they needed right there, by the water, and use the clear area that they created as a space to assemble their craft. Not the best workshop in the world, with its roots and cut stems and the waterlogged ground; but it would have to do. They first secured the air beds and packs from floating away. Then, wearily but without any choice, they sorted out the tools they had brought for the purpose and set to work.

  This time there were spiders and frogs as well as the ubiquitous mosquitoes and flies. The latter became so irksome that Keene wrapped his head in a waterlogged shirt from his pack. It didn't take long for his hands to begin blistering. When he stooped to begin sawing at another shoot of cane, he stumbled on a snake. It was an ugly gray-black, maybe two inches thick, with yellow eyes, and slithered away among the roots and mud at the disturbance. But somehow it was all he needed. He warned Charlie to be wary of them. From the absence of change in Charlie's slow, painful movements, it wasn't even evident that Charlie had heard. Then Keene noticed the blood trickling down over Charlie's boot. He had gashed his calf on one of the thorny plants. It was bulbous and purple-hued, the thorns thick and flattened, sharp along the edges like blades. Keene bound the wound up as best he could, and they carried on.

  Neither of them had any real notion of how to fashion a navigable hull from such materials. It didn't seem like an art that came instantly or easily. Very likely, it was something the Bolivians and the Egyptians had evolved and handed down over generations. They settled for the simple approach of tying reeds in bundles and lashing them together into a rudimentary platform.

  By the time darkness began closing in, they weren't even halfway done. They were too wet and cold and tired to think of a meal. There was nowhere to use for preparing one in any case. All they wanted to do was get out of this awful place, but that couldn't be until tomorrow. Yet with the discomfort and the thought of whatever other vermin might be creeping and crawling and slithering around them, neither could there be any sleep. They nibbled on cold oddments and crouched, wet and shivering, through the long blackness of the night. It was the most miserable night Keene could remember spending anytime in his life.

  They resumed working at the first hint of light. Both air mattresses had been torn by cut stems and thorns during the night, and were useless. They provided material, instead, for filling the frames of a new set of paddles—four of them this time. In addition, stouter pieces of cane lent themselves as punting poles.

  The final construction took the form of two layers of reed bundles laid crossways to each other lengthways, constrained and strengthened by a cane framework. It sat alarmingly low in the water, and Keene couldn't be certain it wouldn't soak in more weight and founder. With ample time, the right tools, space to work, and skills handed down over generations, they probably could have done better; but for now, they would have to settle for it. Yet even with those apprehensions, they set off, conscious only of a sense of relief at being finally on their way at last.

  Today, there was little of the talk and spiritedness they had shown on the trek down from the saddle. The night's ordeal had left them cold, hungry, weary, and depressed. As they drifted downstream, still keeping close to the river's edge, Keene stared dully at the monotonously repeating shores and the unchanging flatlands and hills beyond, feeling the wet clothes clinging to his body and the pangs of protesting muscles that seemed to greet every move. Without walking to get circulation moving again and loosen joints, he felt sluggish and drained. His mind was sinking into a state of passive resignation to whatever events the future might unfold, bereft of any will or potency to change them. Another day or more of this, and he was beginning to wonder if they would arrive in a condition to accomplish anything.

  Assuming they arrived at all.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  At a distance from the Sun corresponding roughly to that of Jupiter's orbit, the course of the Trojan was merging toward that of Eskimo, boosted on its more direct line from Saturn. The two ships first came within sight of each other as just specks of light moving against the starfield. For the next ten hours as they continued to close, the specks grew brighter and larger, eventually taking on discernible shape and form. Finally, they were riding in parallel, Trojan immense by comparison, its annular outer structure and main body turning slowly like a one-wheeled axle; Eskimo, unassuming but fattened by its battery of boosters, a local-range transporter built for ferrying between Saturn's moons, now far from home. The docking radars locked with the approach beacons, and Eskimo berthed at the locks on Trojan's forward Hub a matter of minutes later.

&
nbsp; The reception party waiting to greet Valcroix, Grasse, and their staffs had assembled in the Command Module out at the Rim, where there was simulated gravity. Ceremonies like that were supposed to be carried out with style and dignity, after all, which would have been difficult to achieve with the participants floating about like a slow-motion ballet. The Trojan's honor guard in dress blues snapped to attention and presented arms, and the arriving dignitaries were officially welcomed aboard by Captain Walsh, heading a deputation of the ship's and former SA officers—the latter now renamed the Terran Defense Force. They were then escorted through the customary ritual of inspecting the ranks.

  Valcroix gave a speech, broadcast throughout the ship, formally ending the Kronian Pragmatist Movement and merging it into the recently proclaimed Terran Planetary Government, and reaffirming its mission to rebuild Earth along lines of "universal merit and achievement," instead of "the selective elevation of a few self-styled elites." He went on to declare the Trojan "reclaimed" by the Terran administration: designed and built as a result of knowledge and technologies originated on Earth, and a small token repayment for the unstinted flow of wealth and resources that Earth had poured into the founding and nurturing of Kronia. Valcroix then announced the promotion of Colonel Nyrom to the rank of general and his new title of Commander-in-Chief of the Terran Defense Force. He handed the platform to Nyrom, who delivered a short message of acknowledgment and pledged himself to defending Earth and its citizens. Nyrom then informed the ship's company and its complement of what had been set as Trojan's first operational objective in the service of the new Terran government.

  "The research and supply vessel Aztec left Saturn shortly before Eskimo was rerouted from Iapetus for the historic meeting we've just celebrated. As some of you may know, the Aztec is fitted for trials of the first ship-borne synthetic gravity generators, which will revolutionize every aspect of space travel and habitation. Aztec is also carrying the materials and startup equipment for establishing a basic mix of core industries and the technologies necessary for running them. That capability is essential to founding a viable pilot base on Earth and expanding it rapidly later.