Pallas

by L. Neil Smith

  “Because they’re stupid, me boy. An’ that sometimes even includes yours truly, who hasn’t led an entirely accident-free life.” He gave his prosthetic leg a thump. “The Law of Stupidity is the one phenomenon necessary to explain the small part of the universe Murphy doesn’t cover. Rule Four: y’must be sure of yer target, as well as what’s behind it. Never shoot at a sound, a shadow, or anything y’can’t identify positively—not even a presumably hostile gun flash.

  “Memorize these rules, Emerson, implant ’em in yer psyche so that only by a painful effort of will can y’force yerself t’violate ’em. Only then will y’be safe with firearms.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t yessir me, just do it. I’ll write ’em down an’ leave ’em with ye if y’want.”

  “Yes—I mean, okay, I’d appreciate that, Mr. Brody.”

  Brody had the Grizzly in his hand and was pointing to the rear sight, a square notch in a small rectangular panel, edged in white enamel. “I’ll touch a round or two off so ye’ll know what to expect. When it comes yer turn, center the front sight up in the rear notch so they’re the same height, put the front blade just beneath whatever ye’re shootin’ at, like an apple on a post, an’ slowly increase the finger pressure on the trigger until it goes off.”

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Singh encouraged him. “Squeeze the trigger gently and slowly. Snap it like a light switch, and you’ll disturb the sight picture you set up so carefully.”

  “One more thing,” Brody told him. “As silly as it may seem to ye, focus yer aimin’ eye on the front sight, rather than the target. Let the target get a bit blurry if y’must, but concentrate on that front sight. Live in it. Be in it.”

  The man removed the magazine, slipped a single big cartridge into it, replaced it in the weapon, drew the slide back, and let it shoot forward again by itself, under the power of the great spring under the barrel. He raised the weapon in both hands.

  “Fire in the hole!”

  The Grizzly bellowed in a way that demanded Emerson’s whole attention, even with the ear protectors. A ball of pink and blue fire as big as his head blossomed at the muzzle, which lifted with recoil until it pointed upward at an angle. At the end of the yard, one of the plastic milk cartons leaped ten meters into the air amidst a great spout of muddy soil and fell again to roll down the embankment.

  Emerson loved it. An empty cartridge casing zinged past his ear, caromed off the porch rail, and rolled to his feet. He picked it up. It was still hot from the chamber.

  “Dead center!” Mrs. Singh cried. She’d been watching through a pair of big-ended binoculars she’d picked up on her way through the kitchen. “Let’s see you do that again!”

  Brody shook his head. “It’s time that Emerson here got baptized, don’t y’think?”

  Emerson wasn’t quite as certain about that as Brody seemed to be, but he took the empty magazine the man handed him, and a single cartridge, and managed to get the latter slid under the lips of the former, and the former in the handle of the pistol. Keeping the weapon pointed well away from his new friends, he worked the slide—it seemed easier this time; perhaps he was getting used to it—and lifted the handgun, the tip of his trigger finger resting nervously on the guard. Suddenly, the monster machine seemed heavier than it had back in the living room.

  “Both hands, Emerson. This ain’t no pretty nineteenth-century duel, but real life. No, wrap the left hand around the right, as if it were the one holdin’ the pistol. Take the grip so tight yer hand trembles, then back off the pressure until the tremblin’ stops. That’s fine. Arms straight, both elbows locked, pull back with the left and push with the right—makes a good, firm triangle, doesn’t it? Now take a breath, let it out, an’ take another half breath. Then line up the sights an’ focus on the one in front like I told ye.”

  There was so much to remember at once, Emerson didn’t quite know how he’d manage. The front sight helped. It had an unnaturally bright scarlet stripe enameled into it, was easy to see and impossible not to focus on. The grip panels screwed to either side of the handle helped, too. They were of some sort of black molded rubber and didn’t seem to want to let go of his hand. He took a deep breath, just as Brody had told him to, let it all out, and took another half breath before aligning the sights on one of the cartons which were still standing.

  The pistol grew heavier by the second and it seemed to take forever to compress the trigger, but the Grizzly went off all at once, its roar and recoil becoming Emerson’s whole universe for an instant. It slammed back against his hands while the muzzle wrenched itself into the air. The handle twisted out of his left hand altogether, but he clung to the weapon with his right. In the virtual absence of gravity, the powerful weapon had lifted him back a step.

  It was the most wonderful sensation he’d ever experienced. Somewhere, as if from far away, came the tinkle of the ejected casing. The massive slide had slammed back, locking itself into place, ejection port open and barrel exposed. A thin wisp of smoke drifted from the open breech. He lowered the muzzle, disappointed to see the carton he’d aimed at still standing where he’d put it.

  “Dead center!” shouted Mrs. Singh. “Damn thing’s glued in the mud. Give him another, Aloysius, I wanna see him do that again!”

  Straining his vision in the rain, Emerson could just make out a tiny, fuzzy black dot in the middle of the yellow carton. He’d actually hit it with his first shot!

  “I’ll give him two an’ see if he can hole it three times runnin’.” Brody bent over Emerson and talked much louder than was necessary because of his ear protectors. He pointed to the rear portion of the barrel that showed through the ejection port. “Ye’ll have t’remember hard, boy, that this time it’s still loaded after it’s gone off. Take yer time with the second shot. Think ye’re up to that?”

  “Yes, sir,” Emerson nodded breathlessly. “I think so.” He accepted the cartridges and loaded them with help from Brody, grateful for the chance to rest his arms. Trying to remember everything he’d been told, he raised the pistol with his hands and arms in the proper position, breathed in and out and in again, aligned the sights and gradually squeezed the trigger until the Grizzly roared once more.

  This time, as the empty cartridge case struck the back wall of the porch and rolled away, the plastic carton flopped over on one side with a lower corner torn out.

  “Seven o’clock, two inches,” Mrs. Singh observed, still peering through her binoculars. “Not too bad, boy, for a beginner, but I’ll bet you can do better.”

  Emerson had lowered the handgun, finger off the trigger. This time he took several breaths before he raised it again. His shoulders had begun to ache and he wasn’t sure whether it was from the weight, the recoil, or just nervous concentration.

  The Grizzly bellowed and another small, faint hole appeared—this time the spent case hit the ceiling and bounced off his head—to the left of the first hole, overlapping it.

  Mrs. Singh was jumping up and down. “He’s a natural, Aloysius!”

  Still trembling with exhilaration, Emerson looked a question at the man as he handed back the now-empty pistol with its slide locked to the rear on the empty magazine.

  Brody nodded. “I’ve seen it once or twice before. Some have t’learn the hard way, some few never get the hang of it at all. Ye’ve a lifetime ahead of ye for learnin’ the fine points, but ye’ve the hand and eye of a gunman, Emerson, I truly believe y’do.”

  “Is that good?” he asked.

  Nothing would ever convince Emerson it wasn’t.

  Brody pushed the Grizzly into his hands. “It’s yers, Emerson. Give it back if y’find somethin’ ye like better, or pay me a bit at a time when ye have it. Ye’ll never go hungry on Pallas. As to the rest, like all things in life, it’ll be whatever y’make of it.”

  Emerson grinned back. That was just the way he’d always figured things himself.

  The Huntress

  The human race is a predator-species suffering an epidemi
c attitudinal disease which is almost certainly the source of most of its other problems, social, criminal, political, and otherwise, and which may eventually render it extinct. Some call this disease the “Bambi Syndrome.” I call it preypity.

  —Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy, Hunting and Humanity

  The drizzle had stopped.

  They were back in the kitchen, Mrs. Singh showing Emerson how to disassemble and clean the Grizzly, wielding screwdriver, toothbrush, brass rod, and bronze bristle brush, while Brody made another pot of coffee and a plate of sandwiches, when a clatter coming from the front door distracted them.

  “Mom!”

  The kitchen door swung open suddenly, and right behind it came a pretty girl of about Emerson’s age looking flushed, excited, and perhaps a little road-worn.

  She unbuckled a broad canvas belt she wore about her waist, rebuckled it, and hung it over the back of one of the kitchen chairs, where it swung with the weight of a holstered pistol similar to Mrs. Singh’s and a large, curve-bladed knife. She threw her arms around her mother’s neck, giving her a loud kiss on the cheek.

  “Hi, Mom! Antelope steaks tonight! Aloysius!” She untangled herself from her mother and crossed the kitchen to give Brody the same treatment. He laughed and patted her on the back as she stood on her toes to kiss him. “You have to stay tonight and celebrate with us, Aloysius! After all, it isn’t every day that—er...”

  She stopped suddenly and looked at Emerson, who felt his ears redden and hated himself for it.

  Mrs. Singh gave her daughter a proud grin, put the cleaning rod down, screwed the cap back on the little powder solvent bottle whose pungent aroma filled the kitchen, and wiped her oily hands off on an almost equally oily rag.

  Brody turned from the countertop where he’d been working to watch the proceedings with his usual broad grin. When the girl’s back was turned, he gave Emerson a wink.

  “Emerson Ngu,” the woman told the girl, “this is my daughter, Gretchen, as you’ve probably guessed by now. Emerson is our newest boarder, dear. And it’s a big day for him, too—he just got done firing a handgun for the first time.”

  By some miracle, Emerson managed to find his voice. He was surprised. Mrs. Singh’s daughter was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen. “First gun of any kind, actually.”

  “I’m happy to meet you, Emerson.” Gretchen smiled at him and he revised his estimate of her comparative beauty to include every known entity in the universe. “Two firsts today, then. I’ve brought home a pronghorn, dropped with a single round at a hundred yards. I’ve never shot anything bigger than a rabbit before.”

  This time, things happened the way Emerson had expected. He could only grin back at her like an idiot and didn’t dare speak for fear of stammering. Only an effort of will kept him looking at her rather than fastening his eyes on the floor.

  Along with the heavy pistol belt, she’d tossed a lightweight, hooded poncho over the chairback, subtly mottled and straw-colored to imitate the rolling prairie he could see just outside the kitchen window. Under that, she wore form-fitting blue denim trousers tucked into a pair of low, soft-looking boots, an unpatterned lavender blouse with a wide collar and puffy sleeves, open at the neck, and over that a snug denim vest of a darker, redder purple than the shirt.

  He nodded politely and hoped that would do.

  The name Gretchen seemed incongruous to him. By rights it should belong to some strapping, blue-eyed blond. Gretchen was fair enough in a well-tanned sort of way, he thought to himself, and had a flawless complexion. But her eyes were a deep, foresty green and her waist-long, straight, glossy hair was of such a dark brown color that it might as well have been black, although it threw off reddish highlights under the bright kitchen fixtures. Her eyes were large over broad cheekbones and her nose was straight and turned up just a little at the end. She had full, expressive lips and her teeth were white and perfect.

  Even from where he stood several feet away, she smelled to him of sage and woodsmoke.

  Mrs. Singh’s straight-backed chair scraped, jolting him out of the warm, comfortable fog that seemed to have formed around him without his quite having noticed it. She stood up, took a deep breath, nodded, and dusted her hands off on her thighs.

  “Okay, baby, let’s see what you brung home!”

  Emerson also hadn’t noticed that Mrs. Singh had finished cleaning the Grizzly and reassembled it. He didn’t know whether to pick it up or leave it lying where it was. Brody set his rubber spatula aside—he’d been spreading some white, creamy substance on slices of bread preparatory to putting slices of cheese and ham between them—and wiped his hands off on the absurdly flowered apron he’d borrowed from his hostess, before removing it and hanging it on a doorknob.

  “Good idea! And maybe we can get a snapshot or two, this bein’ such an historic occasion, an’ all! Then we’ll feed this girl some lunch, she looks as if she could use it.”

  “Amen,” Mrs. Singh agreed. “When we get back, I’ll put some soup in the microwave.”

  A laughing, bouncing Gretchen was already through the swinging kitchen door, headed for the front of the house. Brody and her mother were right behind her, almost as animated, with Emerson tagging at their heels, feeling useless.

  As his feet crossed the front doorsill, he stopped, stunned.

  His initial horror and confusion at the violent and barbaric customs of these Outsiders, which had begun to subside a little as he had come to know a couple of them, now returned with its original full force. He wasn’t certain what he’d expected—and his reaction at this particular moment didn’t make sense, even to him—but it was impossible to disregard the hideous sight confronting him now.

  Hanging from the long eaves of the front porch where they extended out beyond the railing was a medium-sized split-hoofed animal with coarse, pale golden fur accented in a darker brown. Instead of antlers like the deer he’d seen—was it only the night before?—it wore a pair of odd protuberances on its head, black, about twenty centimeters long and hair-grained like that of a rhinoceros except that there were two of them, each branching to a finlike side-spur only a little smaller than the main point they curved to so gracefully.

  Although the animal was still warm, there was no question about its being dead. Half a dozen individuals—it didn’t occur to him to count them or to recognize them as anything but moving blobs in his blurred, shock-narrowed field of vision—were dancing around, it seemed to Emerson, making gabbling noises that hurt his head, snapping pictures of each other and urging Gretchen to stand beside the hanging carcass with her pistol in her hand. Afterward, he had a vague memory of her running back into the house to fetch it from the kitchen.

  There was very little blood.

  The gentle-looking creature—Gretchen had called it an antelope—was suspended upside-down from a steel hook screwed in under the eaves which, from its weathered patina, appeared to be a permanent fixture of the front porch, on a short piece of brightly colored synthetic rope from holes cruelly pierced through the skin of both of its hind legs between the bones, just above the backward-working knee.

  Not that the animal was in any condition to care about that or anything else any more.

  Its eyes were clouded, almost dry to the touch, and its big purple tongue lolled obscenely from its mouth in a white-frosted muzzle. The poor thing had been cut from somewhere between the back legs—remembering the big knife on Gretchen’s belt, Emerson didn’t dare look too closely—to its throat, and its insides, which now sat on the front porch step in a transparent plastic bag, removed.

  Flies buzzed around the carcass and the plastic bag.

  Emerson had made himself walk up to the animal and touch it, but it had used up every ounce of courage he could muster. Now he reached out gingerly again to feel the small, ragged, bloodless hole in its side, just behind the front leg, where it had been shot—where the beautiful Gretchen had shot it—and suddenly withdrew his hand and ran back into the house to the little bathroom
just off the kitchen, where he violently emptied his stomach into the washbasin.

  Time passed.

  It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes.

  To Emerson it seemed more like an hour.

  It was Gretchen who greeted him at the bathroom door with a large, soft towel when he emerged again, having cleaned himself and the sink up as best he could with toilet paper and rinsed his mouth out so that it didn’t taste quite as bad as it had.

  She looked almost as upset as he felt.

  “I’m sorry, Emerson,” she told him, sounding as if she really meant it. “I realized where you’d come from the moment I laid eyes on you, and I should have stopped you from going out there on the porch until we got the animal skinned out and cut up for the freezer. I was just too excited, I guess. It’s a very important rite of passage in the life of a Pallatian, the first big animal.”

  Emerson felt his head swim again and squeezed his eyes shut, trying not to think about it.

  “Don’t feel bad,” she added, “You’re not the first. That’s one reason this little bathroom is here.”

  He gave her back the towel, unused. What he needed most was a shower and what he really felt like was going straight to bed. The big Grizzly pistol still lay, cold, black, and accusing on the kitchen table where Mrs. Singh had left it. He shuddered now to think how much he’d enjoyed shooting it. At the time he hadn’t considered what the act of target shooting was intended to be practice for. His voice was hoarse and he’d missed half of what Gretchen had said.

  “What do you mean I’m not the first?”

  She smiled sympathetically, a smile that was extremely difficult for him to resist. It was still almost impossible to believe that this pretty, lively thing standing before him had deliberately and cold-bloodedly lined her sights up on another beautiful creature like herself, had had the presence of mind to remember to focus on the front sight, had taken a deep breath and let it out, taken another half breath, squeezed the trigger without jerking it, and enthusiastically—rather than simply without a pang of conscience—snuffed its life out.