Burning Dreams

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  Chris thought that was odd. They so seldom had visitors that his mother always went out of her way to make them welcome. But his curiosity about the stranger was overpowering. He moved just close enough to listen to the two men, and just quietly enough not to attract attention.

  “Could be the travel. Could be the stasis itself. Transporting horses in space is still a fairly new thing,” the stranger was saying. “Could be the turnaround in the seasons when you all arrived, or something in the feed, even a little imbalance in the atmosphere, or those quakes you had a while back. Any of those things could have thrown their rhythm off….”

  The stranger was not as tall as Heston, and seemed to Chris to be slightly older, though he wasn’t good at guessing adults’ ages. Maybe it was that the thick, brushy hair revealed when he took off his slouch hat to run his fingers through it was almost completely gray, or the fact that even when he wasn’t smiling the crinkles around his dark brown eyes remained, as if he spent a lot of time either laughing or squinting into the sun, or maybe both.

  There was something familiar about him, Chris thought, maybe only the fact that he dressed and spoke like some of the men and women, descendants of the original settlers, who lived in and around Mojave, where he and his mother had lived whenever they weren’t traveling, before she met Heston. In any event, Chris was mightily intrigued by both the man and what he was saying.

  “…could be they just need someone to be with them every day to settle them. Horses are sensitive. Some people think they’re stupid, but they aren’t, on the whole. It’s just a different kind of intelligence. But if you’ll consider my offer…”

  “I’ll want to check your credentials first,” Heston said. “I’m not suspicious by nature, but a man shows up off a passing starship claiming to know all about horse breeding, it’s just a bit too convenient, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Don’t mind at all,” the stranger said. He seemed to sense rather than see Chris standing practically at his elbow. “Is this your son?” he asked.

  “This is Christopher,” Heston said, resting a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “How do you do, sir?” Chris said as his mother had taught him.

  “Christopher,” the man said, offering a hand to shake. His smile widened. “My name’s Charlie.”

  “Are you going to be taking care of the horses?” Chris would never know what made him blurt that out just then. He was too young to realize it was putting Heston on the spot. In retrospect, he was glad it did.

  Charlie didn’t answer. He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair again and looked at Heston as if to say: It’s up to you.

  Heston looked as if he was about to say something, but then Chris heard his mother calling him from the porch. By the time he ran to the house, she was holding the door open for him, Heston and the stranger were disappearing into the stables, and Willa was looking after them, her face unreadable.

  Chris would always wonder how things might have been different if he hadn’t asked that question.

  From that day on, Chris found himself following Charlie around the way he’d once followed Heston. It wasn’t as if he was being disloyal to his stepfather, he told himself, just that Charlie was around more.

  Because that was how things were. Willa still divided her time between home and the city, and Heston was spending more and more time out in the field. Charlie, meanwhile, settled into the barn loft and made it home.

  “We could build you a guesthouse,” Willa offered when his gear had been beamed down from the ship he’d arrived on. “It would take less than a day.”

  “The ladies and I need to get to know each other,” Charlie told her, his eyes crinkling. Chris figured out by now that he meant the mares. He also called them his “harem,” another word Chris would have to look up. “If we all live in the same house, they’ll accept me as one of them, and that’ll make my job easier.”

  “Hero worship!” Heston muttered, watching the boy following the new hired hand everywhere.

  “Do I hear a tinge of jealousy?” Willa teased him.

  “Just a little concern about Charlie as a role model. You saw his record. The guy’s had more jobs than most people have eyelashes. If you don’t mind your son getting the idea that it’s okay to just drift through life…”

  “I want my son to know as much about all kinds of people as he can learn,” Willa interrupted him gently but firmly. “That’s how he’ll come to know their value.”

  “Pennyroyal,” Charlie said, getting up from a crouch and dusting his hands on his jeans. He held an unprepossessing little weed with small white flowers that he’d uprooted from one corner of the paddock. “Monardella exilis, or a kissing cousin native to this world. A mare eats enough of it, it’ll prevent her from conceiving, or if she does conceive, she’ll likely miscarry.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Heston said. “Why didn’t the tricorders pick it up?”

  “They did. But since you didn’t calibrate them to look for abortifacient factors in the native flora, they weren’t looking for it. Machine’s only as smart as you program it to be. I’ve worked around horses all my life. I know what they should and shouldn’t eat.”

  Hanging on the rail fence, Chris listened. Charlie had just gone up another notch in his estimation. Heston was a bit more skeptical.

  “So you’re telling me all we have to do is clear this weed out of the paddock and the mares will carry?”

  “No,” Charlie said. “I’m saying clear the weed out of the paddock and you’ve eliminated one reason why they won’t.”

  Before the winter was over, Charlie’s words proved prophetic. He’d successfully implanted two of the mares from the stock of frozen embryos. Heston set aside his skepticism and ordered him to continue with the remaining four.

  “All in good time,” Charlie said. “You really don’t want to have to deliver six foals simultaneously. Trust me on that.”

  Again, watching and listening, Chris could tell from the expression on Heston’s face that he’d never even thought of that. In some subtle way the boy could see but not yet understand, the balance of power on the homestead had shifted. Heston might be calling the shots, but it was Charlie who made things happen.

  Heston’s preliminary survey of the Neworlder lands showed they’d chosen a floodplain too near a river. Refusing to accept his “unNatural” findings, they’d built there anyway. The following spring the rains were heavier than usual, and the river rose above its banks, sweeping everything in its path. Boulders the size of houses rolled along the river bottom, traveling inexorably downstream, smashing through logjams formed by uprooted trees, taking houses and barns with them.

  Starfleet diverted one of its newer starships to monitor from orbit and, over their vociferous protests, the Neworlders were evacuated to higher ground. Even more infuriating to them was the fact that Heston Prescott was assigned to redivert the river and move the floodplain, actions they deemed particularly unNatural. If they refused, they were told, they would have to move to higher ground. Grudgingly, they let Heston do his job.

  There was some erosion of the hillsides surrounding the Prescott homestead, but Heston had a solution for that, too.

  “Hybrid grasses,” he announced as all four of them trudged about in their waterproof boots surveying the deep-etched runnels that hadn’t been there only a few days before. “Crossbred from perennial prairie grasses and annual crops like corn and wheat. Stuff’s got roots that go down four times deeper than the tops grow up. Helped repopulate the Dust Bowl a century after overcultivation nearly destroyed it.”

  “Might want to check your oxygen mix first,” Charlie said thoughtfully.

  “How’s that?”

  Chris wasn’t sure when or how the two men had begun competing with each other. He figured it had something to do with Charlie’s being smarter than Heston about the horses eating the pennyroyal. All he knew for sure was that Heston was usually short-tempered when Charlie was
around.

  “Oxygen concentration’s a little higher here. Not everything that grows on Earth can safely be transplanted elsewhere—” Charlie began.

  “So now you’re a botanist as well?” Heston cut him off. Before Charlie could answer, Willa spoke.

  “Hes? What about my truck farm? It’s experimental,” she explained to Charlie, a pleading look in her eyes, as if she was begging him not to pursue with Heston what could only become an argument. “We were going to grow specialty vegetables, maybe even start a fish farm. So far the only people willing to try conventional farming here are the Neworlders. If we can show them a better way—”

  “Waste of time!” Heston snorted, his boots squishing in the muck as he turned back toward the house. “Pretty soon they’ll own the damn planet!”

  The upshot of the argument was that Willa’s experiment would have to wait. Heston planted the hillsides and a good portion of the flat plain in hybrid grasses and forbade Chris the run of the land until they took root.

  “You can go play somewhere else!” he announced. Chris got a stubborn look, as if he was about to argue that now there weren’t many places close to the house left where he could play. But arguing with Heston, he’d discovered, was about as productive as arguing with either of the Jondays. Heston was too busy gloating about how he’d been right and the Neworlders wrong about the floodplain.

  Heston’s satisfaction was short-lived. The engineers aboard the starship had done their own independent survey of his land as well.

  “We’re sorry to contact you at this late hour, Dr. Prescott, but it’s oh-nine-hundred where we are, and we’re leaving orbit at twelve-hundred hours. We’d have come out to the homestead to discuss this with you personally, but there wasn’t time…”

  “Go ahead. I’m listening,” Heston said gruffly, coincidentally leaning back in his chair so that Chris could see the two official-looking men in Starfleet uniforms on the commscreen.

  “Sir, the revised survey indicates several new fault lines under your property…”

  Chris was supposed to be in bed, but he’d overheard Heston talking to someone on the comm and crept to the top of the stairs to listen.

  “The revised survey’s wrong!” he heard Heston say, his voice sharper than Chris had ever heard it before. “Try to remember who you’re talking to here, gentlemen. I’m not some Neworlder rube who can’t read a seismic map. I’ve rearranged whole continents on a dozen worlds, including this one, and I’ve been over these hills with my own equipment dozens of times.”

  Peering through the stair rails, Chris couldn’t see Heston’s face, but he could see the inspector’s face filling the commscreen. A muscle worked in the man’s jaw, as if he was trying to control his temper.

  “Dr. Prescott…” he began. “I can show you what the orbital survey indicates after those last tremors—”

  “Look, excuse me—” Heston was on his feet, one finger hovering over the Terminate toggle. “—but I’ve got a full day ahead of me. I thank you for your concern, and I assure you I’ll be out in the hills this weekend going over my readings one more time.”

  “That’s all well and good, sir,” the inspector said tightly. “But you’re to be informed that Starfleet has made arrangements with the Elysium Planetary Council to stabilize those fault lines. We’ve got some supplies to deliver to the Omicron Ceti system. We expect to be back this way in another six months or so. We wanted to give you sufficient advance warning that you and your family will need to be evacuated while we do the stabilization. If we’re not successful—”

  “Hold on a second,” Heston interrupted. “Are you making the Neworlders evacuate?”

  “The Neworlder homesteads are far enough away from the fault lines to—”

  “That’s what I thought! I’ll tell you this much for free—by the time you people come back around here, I’ll have those fault lines stabilized myself!”

  Chris waited just long enough to make sure he saw Heston’s finger come down on the Terminate before he scrambled back to his room. As he heard Heston’s tread on the stairs, he risked a glance out the window toward the stables. The light in the loft was on, which told him Charlie couldn’t sleep either. Chris pulled the covers up to his chin and closed his eyes just as he heard Heston’s footsteps stop at his doorway.

  After his stepfather had checked up on him and continued down the hall to the room he shared with Willa, Chris crept out of bed once more and, aware that the stair treads creaked, sat down and slid down them on his butt one by one. He was out the door and halfway across the yard, skipping over the thermal vents from memory in the dark, before it occurred to him it might be rude to bother Charlie in the middle of the night.

  Charlie, however, was not up in the loft. He was checking the rheostat on the embryo chamber, and talking soothingly to Petula, the bay mare who was due to foal first. Seeing Chris in the doorway, he didn’t seem at all surprised.

  “Ground’s kind of cold for bare feet this time of year,” he observed.

  “That’s what my mom says,” Chris grimaced, wondering if all adults had to lecture.

  But Charlie wasn’t given to lectures. “Your mom’s a smart woman. I just made some cocoa. Want some?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “But you do want to unload whatever’s on your mind.”

  Charlie gave Petula a final pat, gestured for Chris to make himself comfortable on one of the hay bales against the side wall near the embryo chamber, and settled himself and his own mug of cocoa beside him. Chris told him what he’d just overheard.

  “So what’s your worry?” Charlie asked when he’d finished.

  “I don’t want anything bad to happen,” the boy said. “But I’m just a kid. I’m not supposed to know what’s going on. I wish I could do something to help.”

  Charlie weighed that before he answered. “Well, what you could do is let me know what’s bothering you, just like you’re doing now.”

  “How’s that going to help?” Chris wanted to know.

  “Gets it off your chest, for one thing. Gives you an ally among the grown-ups in case things get out of hand.”

  “You think they will?”

  Charlie finished his cocoa and put the empty mug on one of the steps leading up to the loft. “I think your mother’s sensible enough to talk Heston out of being so stubborn.” Chris barely heard him add under his breath: “At least I hope so…” Charlie said, a little louder, “…and you’d better get back to bed before you’re missed.”

  Sliding up the stairs the same way he’d gone down them, Chris stopped halfway up when he heard voices. Heston and Willa were arguing in whispers in the dark.

  “…so once those grasses take root, I suppose I can kiss my truck farm good-bye,” he heard Willa say.

  “It wasn’t practical anyway,” was Heston’s reply. “We didn’t come here to be farmers.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. What if I said the same about the horses?”

  “They’re more important.”

  “More important how? Just because they were your idea?”

  “They’re a legacy, Willa. This planet has no large indigenous quadrupeds, and no predators to hunt them. The goal is to fill the plains with herds of the best horses.”

  “Ah, so now your hobby is more important than mine.”

  “I didn’t say that….”

  “Because they are just hobbies, you know. Our ‘legacy’ is the city. Your infrastructure, my buildings. The rest is extra. And I wonder if the Neworlders aren’t right about our tampering with nature. Maybe there are reasons why there are no large quadrupeds on this world.”

  Heston snorted. “Neworlders! These are people who run their vehicles on chicken guts. I’m beginning to worry about you….”

  Chris had heard enough. More than enough, enough to make him worry more than ever. For the first time since they’d come here, he wished they’d never left Earth. He could handle earthquakes, floods, even the fact that he might never
have a horse of his own. What he wasn’t sure he could handle was his mother and Heston starting to fight.

  Because then he’d have to hate Heston, and he didn’t want to do that.

  “Maybe we ought to hold off on implanting the other four mares,” Charlie suggested when Willa told him about the Starfleet directive. Heston had gone off into the hills early that morning to run his readings, and refused to talk about it. “They’d be much more difficult to move if they were pregnant during the evacuation.”

  “You’ll have to take that up with Heston,” Willa said, avoiding his eyes. “The horses are his department.”

  Coming back after dark, his skimmer covered with volcanic dust, Heston was having none of this.

  “There isn’t going to be any evacuation!” he announced. “I know what this is about. There was another Neworlder elected to the Elysium Council in the last vote. They’re coming here by the boatload, and they’re lobbying against any kind of progress, and against me in particular. If they had their way they’d convert this entire colony to their Luddite mentality. I’ll show them and Starfleet. By the time that starship comes back, I’ll have this solved. The volcano is the key…”

  He refused to elaborate. Once again Chris caught Charlie and Willa exchanging warning glances. Something had shifted, and it wasn’t just the ground beneath them.

  Then Charlie went into town for a few days and came back with a box full of mysterious plants which he went about—with Willa’s permission; the horses might be Heston’s territory, but the flora were hers—planting around the foundations of the house and the barn.

  “What’re those?” Chris wanted to know, seeing them change color when the sunlight struck them, and again as Charlie patted the soil around their roots, and a third time when he watered them.

  “Jellyplants,” Charlie explained. “A long time ago, when humans hadn’t gotten any farther away from Earth than their own moon, the ancestors of these creatures were developed by NASA. You know what NASA was, don’t you?”