Pallas

by L. Neil Smith

  God knew that he could see her clearly enough in his waking mind’s eye and remember every intimate moment they’d had, as well as every intimacy, in happier times.

  The thing he ought to be having nightmares—or daymares—about was what had happened afterward. Emerson had been a long while recovering from his wounds, longer than he’d known was possible. He’d spent weeks in a coma, so they’d told him, many weeks more when he was too weak to speak more than a couple of words or even raise his head from his pillow, and months in which sitting up, standing, taking three steps across the room—or simply lying motionless and enduring the pain inflicted on him by a shattered body and what came very close to being a shattered mind—had exhausted him for the rest of the day.

  There had been surprises, all of them unpleasant. He’d never suffered a prolonged illness before and never realized that a person could actually be too sick to read. He’d lacked whatever it took to concentrate or care, and the words on the page had simply slid by the eye he still had left without imparting any meaning to him.

  There had been other things he’d been too weak for. He’d first awakened in Curringer, in Cherry’s squeaky brass bed in her room upstairs at Galena’s, during a fiercely whispered argument the girl seemed to be having with Mrs. Singh. Apparently he’d come out of his coma a day or two earlier, although he had no memory of that, and had been sleeping more normally off and on since then. Believing he was still asleep, the two women had almost come to blows over where he was going to finish recuperating and who would be taking care of him.

  He’d pretended to sleep until they were gone.

  That afternoon, without their knowing it, he’d persuaded Doc Sheahan, the husky blond veterinarian who was Curringer’s only physician—and who might well have been named Gretchen if her name hadn’t already been Heidi—to tell both of them that he couldn’t be moved after all. It wasn’t that he preferred staying at Cherry’s place—although, of course, in some respects he did—but he was already here, and to some degree Mrs. Singh must be used to that fact. Being the cause of fighting between the two living souls he cared most about was a burden he wasn’t strong enough to shoulder and possibly never would be again.

  In time they’d both accepted the status quo and, free of some of their worries over him, had returned to the amicable if guarded relationship they’d had before the disaster. At this moment, along with Nails and Aloysius, they were running the Ngu Departure plant together, Mrs. Singh as chief of quality control, Cherry keeping the books.

  He’d also been too weak for a long time to benefit from—or even to appreciate much—certain unique notions his volunteer nurse cherished with regard to convalescent care. Even now, to some extent, the reliable miracle wasn’t all that reliable, and what surprised him most—even more than his disconcerting problem with reading—was that it was every bit as difficult to finish the process as to begin. It was as if his status as an organism fit for survival—and on that account for passing on his genes—had been ruled probationary.

  But even that wasn’t the worst.

  Nobody but Junior (and evidently his father, sometime after the fact) had ever known who it was that had raped and murdered Gretchen and left him for dead. They might as well have been nameless, faceless automata, and would likely remain unidentified forever. There’d been a sudden rotation of the Project’s UN personnel back to Earth, and the men who’d accomplished Junior’s dirty work for him were probably beyond reach, one way or another, since the UN, safely tucked away beyond freedom of the press, and therefore criticism, in its Third World enclave, tended to be more direct in its methods than previously these days, and even more inclined than those among Doc Sheahan’s profession to bury its mistakes.

  Strangely enough, Emerson had found that he didn’t care about the goons themselves. Every day he’d vowed to get up out of Cherry’s soft, luxurious bed and go after the person who was really responsible for everything that had happened. More than anything he wanted to hunt down the murderous son of a bitch like the dog he was, and to kill him as slowly and painfully as possible. When he’d been able to read again, he’d made a serious study of the subject, summoning the electronic versions of books on the limits of human endurance and the history of torture, only to realize, with a pang of regret, that he was too civilized and that he’d have to be satisfied with making sure that Junior was dead.

  But when he’d gotten on his feet, he discovered he’d been cheated out of even that much satisfaction. Gibson Altman Junior had fled rather than face him. Apparently he’d left Pallas altogether, bound for where, not even his own father knew—or so the man had claimed when confronted; it was difficult to be sure over the phone and, ironically, there was no possibility now that Emerson would be admitted onto Project property to confront him in the flesh.

  The Senator, it seemed, was afraid of Emerson.

  As well he might be.

  Junior was probably on Earth; there weren’t that many other places to go. Earth’s moon (the distinction had to be made since Pallatians were likely to refer to Pallas B as “the moon,” as well), once almost exclusively reserved to scientists and the military, had become a ghost world with the outbreak of the second Great Depression. Mars, a good deal less hospitable than Antarctica to everyone but incurable romantics, had defeated one attempt at conquest after another until the would-be conquerors had given up and gone home, at least for this century. Only William Wilde Curringer’s unique vision of human beings populating the asteroids had proven viable so far, and even that viability was limited, for the time being, to mining operations scattered throughout the Belt, although there was always talk of colonizing Ceres.

  There was always talk of colonizing Ceres.

  For a while, with those mining settlements in mind, and with the help of Aloysius’s business and political connections at both Pallatian poles, Emerson had employed his convalescent period and the phone to become familiar with spaceships, schedules, and spaceport characters in an attempt to track Junior down. He’d met a lot of odd and colorful individuals that way, but with one exception, nothing had ever come of it. He had learned that Gretchen’s little daughter, Gwen-Rose, had been shipped Earthside by a grandfather unable or unwilling to care for her.

  Junior himself had vanished.

  A sudden noise, the rustling of dried leaves in the undergrowth, brought Emerson back to the present. There, by the wash, stood a feral pig—a sow by the look of her, despite her enormous size—about to bend her head to take a drink.

  Emerson forced himself to breathe.

  Although she minced with exaggerated delicacy on her tiny hooves, there was nothing cute and pink about this great, shaggy beast, nor was there an ounce of piggish fat on her long, broad, heavily muscled frame. She looked as if she were put together from bridge cable and fiberglass, covered with steel lathe-chips. Emerson had knocked down thousands of metallic silhouettes patterned after creatures like this without understanding at a gut level that they represented a wild and hardy animal big enough and powerful enough—and, more importantly, determined enough—to maim or kill him if he missed this shot.

  She’d caught him much worse than flat-footed. He’d almost been napping, sitting with his legs folded under him.

  Slowly he raised the Grizzly in his right hand, cocking his head over on his shoulder to get his good left eye behind the sights. By now he’d trained himself to shoot left-handed, but in this primal moment it never occurred to him to try.

  At the last instant, as he thumbed the safety off with a faint click, the sow heard him and pivoted on her front feet. Before she’d finished her turn, she was rocketing toward him, a brownish-yellow blur of animal fury preceded by four wicked, side-thrusting yellow tusks well capable of hamstringing and disemboweling him.

  It was a very different experience from shooting at an iron cutout. Dust motes seemed to hang frozen where they were caught in shafts of sunlight streaming through the treetops all around him, and the smell of moist earth and leaf
mold was all but overwhelming. He could watch the fetid steam blasting from the sow’s flared nostrils, hear her frenzied breathing, see the fury in her eyes and the cruel ridges on the roof of her mouth between her razor-edged molars.

  While he was preoccupied with these observations, his front sight seemed to rise of its own accord—he was completely unaware of his rear sight, exactly as he should have been—and as the scarlet inlay found the center of her chest, just below her blunt chin, the trigger seemed to pull itself. He never felt the Grizzly recoil in his hands or heard the blast that shook leaves from the trees.

  It did seem to him that she should have stopped, or at least stumbled, under the appalling impact of half a ton of kinetic energy, but she didn’t even hesitate as the bullet struck—he watched the dust explode from her coarse fur as it did—but continued straight for him until her forelegs collapsed beneath her and she slid the remaining two feet motionless and dead, her wet snout pushing up a ridge of soil before coming to rest against his folded knee, leaving a small damp spot to darken the worn and faded denim.

  Emerson remembered to breathe again.

  “Olé!” It was Drake-Tealy, rising from a crouch in the woods behind him. “You’ve got a cool hand, Emerson Ngu. When she charged, I’d have climbed that tree behind you, backwards!”

  Emerson, too, got to his feet, forcing his reluctant limbs to cooperate. He had to lock his knees to keep them from folding under him again. Prodding the sow with a cautious toe, he flipped the Grizzly’s safety upward, switched to a full magazine, holstered the weapon, and laughed. “I hate to disillusion you, Digger, but I was too scared to move!” He was astonished to realize that he felt alive again for the first time in almost a year, although he was going to have to think long and hard about why that should be—why the death of one entity should bring life to another—before he understood it without shrinking from it.

  Drake-Tealy joined him in laughter. “Fortunately, your trigger finger suffered no such affliction. Let’s get her back to the house.” He indicated the wicker basket hanging on his arm. “I’ve got what I came for—dangerous vegetables. We ought to hang this old lady for a day or two, but my mouth is set on barbecue tonight.”

  Emerson nodded, regretting that he hadn’t brought his flying yoke and wondering if he ought to fetch it from the cabin. They didn’t have far to go, however, and the pig, although she weighed twice what he did, wouldn’t be much of a burden.

  He took hold of her back legs to let her bleed through the chest wound along the way, and perhaps to avoid those tusks which even now gave him the shudders. Dragging the animal behind, he followed Drake-Tealy up the hill onto drier ground and back through the woods. His mouth was set, as well, although he didn’t know on what. His ancestors may have invented it, but he’d never tasted barbecued pork before.

  He also realized, as he came in sight of the porch and of the hook screwed into its ceiling beam, that he’d never dressed or skinned a pig before, either.

  Prophets in the Wilderness

  I distrust professional skeptics who spend a disproportionate amount of energy denouncing dumb but relatively harmless endeavors like astrology and UFOlogy, while participating in more ambitious hoaxes themselves, such as global warming, ozone depletion, central economic planning, and organized religion.

  —Mirelle Stein, The Productive Class

  “Men—ridiculous!”

  Mirelle Stein was obviously unused to sitting, watching others cooking and serving in her own home. Looking at her now, she seemed liable to fly apart any moment.

  Nevertheless, with Emerson to assist him, that was just what Digger had insisted on. He’d grown increasingly impatient watching his young friend attempting to butcher an unfamiliar carcass. To begin with he had taken over that task, carefully washing and stropping Gretchen’s knife afterward before returning it, giving it excellent marks—praise from the solar system’s foremost expert on primitive weapons—for its beauty and practicability, characteristics which, Emerson felt, merely reflected similar virtues in its original owner.

  Then the old man had run both Emerson and his wife out of the kitchen (simply a matter of insisting that they remain on the other side of the room) while he cooked.

  Emerson was supposed to amuse and divert the lady of the house, no easy task for him because, somehow, Stein (he’d never have thought to call her by her first name or its diminutive, and “Mrs. Drake-Tealy” didn’t seem to work either) intimidated Emerson.

  For awhile, he’d tried to escape his awkward assignment by pretending to reexamine the great fireplace which occupied almost one whole end of the high-ceilinged living room, constructed of native stone as varied and colorful in composition—thanks to the massive prehistoric bombardment by meteoric material which had given this area of Pallas its name—as the exterior of the house.

  Naturally, he paid more attention to Digger’s rifle, which was almost as impressive, a laboriously reworked Pattern 14 Enfield, whatever that meant, originally overbuilt for a much less powerful military cartridge. Obviously enjoying the gleaming blue-black steel and the dull sheen of dark, polished hardwood all over again through Emerson’s eye, the anthropologist had told him, shortly after he’d arrived, that it might be the only full-powered long-barreled weapon on the asteroid. The colonists, who’d virtually paid by the ounce for their passage here, preferred handguns, and the assault carbines now being issued to Project security didn’t count, since they employed cartridges hardly more powerful than pistol fodder, depending on what Drake-Tealy had called “trick bullets” and a high rate of fire rather than the energy of each shot.

  More than anything else, however, Emerson was fascinated with what Stein referred to with mocking gravity as “Drake-Tealy Objects,” almost a hundred of them, laid out along the mantelpiece.

  Named, with whatever sincerity, after their discoverer, they’d been found when the foundations of the house and the root cellar had been excavated and had apparently remained on the mantel for years as simple curiosities. It was possible, in Drake-Tealy’s view, that the weather-worn, time-distorted Objects were artificial, remnants of an unimaginably ancient, nonhuman intelligence. It was equally possible, he conceded at his wife’s scornful insistence, that they were no more than peculiar vacuum extrusions of volcanic stone and metal, like the pillow lava on Earth’s ocean floors, left over from the natural formation of the asteroid.

  None was larger than Emerson’s fist.

  Some were simple shapes: cubes, rhomboids, parallelograms, cylinders, half-cylinders, ovoids, triangular and pentagonal solids, oddities with six, seven, eight, or nine sides. It was difficult to see how such perfect forms could have been natural, but Emerson knew little about crystalline minerals. He had to admit that he’d seen naturally occurring shapes somewhat like this before. The trouble was, all of these appeared to be made of the same dense, dark bronze—later he would learn it wasn’t bronze, but a semiconducting material considerably harder than steel—and didn’t a crystal’s shape depend on what it was made of?

  And if they were truly crystals, why were a few of them shaped like short T-handled spoons, spools or spindles, gears with strangely cupped teeth, even vaguely threaded bolts, complete with hexagonal nuts screwed onto them halfway up the shaft?

  “Let me see, now: dried tamarinds, black pepper, molasses...” For a while, with his back toward them, Digger kept up a commentary as he collected his spices, then washed and cut up the produce he’d brought in from forest and greenhouse. “You know, when you first showed up on our doorstep, I thought you were a Project runaway.”

  “I know,” Emerson replied. “I am, in a way.”

  “So you’ve informed us, although it sounds like you’ve made quite a place for yourself since then in the real world—Outside, as you call it. We’ve seen such runaways more and more frequently over the years, even as far away as we are. I guess Wild Bill was right: when we found, to our dismay, that we had no choice but to let them in, he held that sooner or late
r the Project would collapse anyway. Nine-tenths of the people on Pallas are one kind of refugee or another, from various calamities on Earth. It wouldn’t make that much difference, in the end, if some of them turned out to be refugees from a local calamity, as well.”

  “It’s a calamity, all right.” Emerson reflected on how much easier it was to talk with the old man than with his wife. “I can personally testify to that. And it does seem to be collapsing; at least that’s the impression we get two hundred miles away in Curringer.”

  “Or five miles away at the Ngu Departure factory?” asked Stein, raising her eyebrows.

  Emerson turned to her, no less intimidated than before, but unashamed and unapologetic. “Yes, ma’am, I’m helping it to collapse—doing my very best, anyway.”

  Stein opened her mouth to reply, but was interrupted.

  “But here’s the real reason,” declared Digger, “that the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project is inexorably doomed.” He turned to them with a peeled onion in one hand and a freshly trimmed radish from the greenhouse in the other. “These tears you see upon my countenance are not for the demise of socialism on this planetoid, but on account of the onion. The wild ones are always stronger.”

  “Mustard seeds from one prophet,” Stein stated enigmatically, “onions from another.”

  Whatever it meant, Digger ignored it. “When we planned this undertaking, my esteemed partners and I, we unwittingly made certain that the ground was prepared, as it were, with all that was required for the Project’s ultimate dissolution. Not only do Pallatians eat several times the meat enjoyed by the average inhabitant of Earth, and consequently have less use for vegetation as a bulk food, but there’s always an abundance of hardy wild produce available for the gathering.”

  Emerson nodded understanding. In the Lake Selous region, both game and wild crops were taken from private land, sometimes for a fee, if that was the business the landowner happened to be in. Most Outsiders picked mushrooms, berries, or whatever else was in season, sometimes making a community occasion of it. But they often did it even while they hunted. Although he’d read Drake-Tealy’s book several times, he hadn’t realized that this reflected a deliberate policy.