I told her of that road now, and where it had led me. I sat within a stone cube in my own home town, and through the bars I told her of Dad and Wendell and Muskies and of the strange place that was New York, of the hate and guilt and madness that went back twenty years, that had made the world we lived in. I found to my surprise that I was telling her a different story than the one I had given the Council. Instead of talking of interspecies conflict and the precious hope of peace that lay within our grasp, I spoke of the gentle, calm, yet inexplicably different nature of the Muskies I had met, of the soft inquisitive touch of them in my mind. Instead of dwelling on the rage and hate that had led me to booby-trap the bathroom, I spoke of Wendell, of his contradictions and paradoxes and his strange, funny blend of incompetence and wisdom. Instead of bitterly attacking her father and the Council and Dad and Collaci, I found myself speaking of a dead Persian tom and a decrepit leopard. There was something I was trying to tell her, a message I recognized only subliminally. It would not even jell in my mind as “what I would say to her if I had the guts” or anything like that—I just kept on talking and talking and hoping that somewhere between the lines I was saying what I wanted to. I stared at the floor as I spoke, and wondered what my spoor was telling her. I wished I could read hers.
She absorbed the story in silence, which should have surprised me and didn’t. The story of Dad’s treachery must have turned her world-view as violently upside-down as it had mine—like finding out that fresh air causes cancer. But she made no sign. For my part I was staggered to discover the new perspective problems can take on simply because a woman listens to them. I experienced a steadying effect like six quick hits of reefer, a calming and centering of my energies I had not experienced since my last talk with the Sirocco Brothers. The confusion and unacknowledged pain of the last few days stopped being the whirlpool I was drowning in, became only the situation I had to work with.
Somewhere in there a thing was decided, an agreement was made between us, unnamed in any of the words I spoke. We both knew it.
At last I was talked out. We sat in silence together, sharing the stillness, until loud ahem-ing and Shorty’s returning footsteps brought us back to an awareness of our situation.
“’Bout ten minutes more, Miz Alia. Your father’s due at ten-thirty, and it’s almost ten now.”
“Thanks, Shorty. You are a good friend.” He smiled sadly, shook his head and left, whistling “Salt Peanuts.”
“He sure is,” I agreed. “Knew he was downwind, and so he took the trouble to make noise coming back. Instinctive courtesy.”
She nodded. “Your father had that, Isham.”
“And Judas was kind to midgets” is what I started to say, but before the words reached my mouth my anger melted, and what I said was, “Yes, he did.”
After a pause, she caught my eyes and said, “My father is partly right, too, Isham. The Agro situation really is becoming unstable. Public opinion has been running high against us since your father’s death—he was the figurehead for the whole community. People were willing to accept us eggheads as long as we were governed by a man they liked. They respect Papa, as a negotiator, but they don’t like him. He…doesn’t inspire love.”
“Do those hayseeds think that all Dad’s ideas and ideals died with him? Don’t they still want hot-shot, and safe childbirth, and—”
“People have short memories, Isham.”
I was unsettled to find myself hotly championing Dad’s ideals, but there it was. “Collaci gave me the broad outlines. What are the specifics?”
“Well, the usual, of course: spot raids, handwritten broadsides, whispering campaigns. But they’ve opened up some new fronts. They’re getting more confident now.
“First they held a huge meeting, a week after Dr. Stone died. Jordan spoke, at length. The vicious Technos had done away with your father because he had finally discovered their conspiracy to enslave everyone else. He claimed Papa was in radio contact with Wendell Morgan Carlson, and had been for some time. He repeated the charge that Muskies raid most near us, while we never get hit. He said that proved we could control Muskies. He called on every able-bodied man within a hundred miles to leave his farm and join the ‘Agro Army,’ a group he proposes to train and lead. In return he promised them food, quarters, protection for their wives and families—and a slice of the pie, though not in so many words.”
“What pie? Those idiots believe they could conquer Fresh Start, and run it themselves?”
“That’s just what they believe, some of them. Jordan’d be happy just to keep the hot-shot plant in operation, and maybe the ice-cream maker. He has no use for the research or agricultural labs, or for the power plant or the distillery, or even my smithy. Back to nature: muscle power and a thirty-year life span.”
“Look, I know Jordan’s a musclehead and his followers suffer from rectocranial inversion. But did any of our neighbors swallow that bilge?”
“The musclehead was smart. He gave an oration that appealed to people’s fear, threw in half-truths and hinted at the other halves—and didn’t call for a show of hands. He thanked everyone for listening and sent them home.
“A few days later, some of his bravos started going door to door. ‘Why aren’t you joining, Mr. Jones? Your neighbor Sam Smith is.’ Then, when you’ve signed him up, trot over to Sam Smith’s and use Jones’s name to sign him up. Some of the smaller holdouts got roughed up just a little.”
“Christ!”
“Lately, even big suppliers have been having mysterious bad luck. Amos Lewis’s barn happened to catch fire. The Crows Hollow gang couldn’t get their tractor to start one morning and there turned out to be sugar in the tank. A rockslide on a sunny day almost got Mr. Rosenberg and his son.”
“Yeah, Teach’ told me about that one. Jordan’s getting bold. Maybe too bold. Is his location known?”
“He’s still at Salt Mountain, in the old mine. But they say he has nearly a hundred and fifty with him.”
“Whoo-ee. All fighting men?”
“Most of them. Isham, it really hurt us when the Muskies got Mr. Hardy. One of our biggest suppliers, on his way here with a load of rye, and he’s killed a quarter-mile from the Gate. Mrs. Hardy went strange, sent her four sons off to join Jordan, and burned the homestead flat. Old Man Barton from across the river came to the Gate the other day, screamed incoherently for ten minutes, and stumped off home again. People are in an ugly mood.”
“And the true story about what went down in New York wouldn’t help much. I know.”
“And Carlson can’t—and Wendell can’t get the Muskies to stop their attacks and help us?”
“Not without help from Fresh Start. Your father isn’t inclined to give it.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“Talk to Dr. Mike first—he may help you keep your foot out of your mouth. He extracted mine pretty smoothly.”
“I will. Is there anything else I can do?”
“Just what I said. Keep Teach’ occupied for an hour or so. Then when you hear a very loud noise, act surprised. I…I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Maybe not in person for awhile, but…”
“Isham?”
“Yes?”
“Thanks for trusting me.”
All of a sudden that uncomfortableness was back between us again, stronger than ever. I didn’t know why. “Why shouldn’t I? You once gave me the best going-away present I ever got.”
“You too.”
“Eh?”
“Never mind. You’ve got things to do, and so do I. Time I got to them.”
I found I was reluctant to let her go. “How’re things at the smithy?”
“Busy. The bellows busted and I got backed up, and then my damnfool apprentice ran off and married a chemist. But I’ve got a new helper now, the Taylor boy. I think he’ll work out; he can pound sand. I…I’d like to meet Wendell some day. He sounds like a very nice man.”
“He is. I hope you get the chance real soon, Alia. I hope he’s sti
ll al—”
And I stopped speaking, just shut up like a broken tape. The wind had suddenly backed, uncharacteristically for that time of day, and I found myself dumbstruck. Alia sensed it at the same instant I did, tried briefly and without success to keep her features straight. She swore bitterly and burst into tears.
“Damn, damn, damn, shit. I didn’t mean for you to know.”
I was cunningly constructed of corn flakes and stale glue. The steering was out and the brakes wouldn’t work. The only slug left was jammed in the firing chamber. The last step wasn’t there. I had swallowed a giant ice cube and my stomach was shrinking around it. “When are you due? Asshole question number one; March, isn’t it? I thought you were getting fat.”
Dr. Mike’s pedagogical voice sounded distantly in my ears. “The distinctive, identifiably feminine scent of woman arises in large part from glandular changes based on the ovulation cycle…”
She was actually wringing her hands, a gesture I’d read of but never really seen. “I thought if I came after supper, the wind would stay hard north.”
“This time of year it was a good bet. There you go.”
There seemed only so long I could avoid making some kind of statement, some declaration of where I was at. Where the hell was I? Teach’ is right. Sometimes it seems they just keep a-comin’ at you.
I didn’t know the half of it.
“Isham, I don’t…you can’t…I won’t have you…” She couldn’t get it out, and I wanted to interrupt her so she wouldn’t have to, and I didn’t know what to say, and prayed for a distraction of any kind at all, and instantly there was a sound like the trump of doom heard from arm’s length. Thank you. The floor danced and Alia screamed.
Chapter Twelve
My second thought was that the charge I’d planted at the Tool Shed had gone off prematurely, but as I hit the floor I realized the three discrepancies. The blast was entirely too loud, by a factor of five; it was too far away; and it came from the north. North? What the fuck is north?
But my first thought, before I went down, was to poke my leg through the bars and kick Alia’s feet out from under her. I didn’t know enough about her reflexes to depend on a shout. We landed roughly simultaneously, and she did it damned well.
Shorty came in the door at a remarkable speed for a man of his mass, grabbing a Garand and diving behind the desk. The spoor of the blast said mortarfire. Mortars?
“Aw, shit, Isham!” Shorty yelled reproachfully.
“Not my doing, Shorty. Watch your ass.”
“Worse and worse. Want me to fetch you a gun?”
“Wait a minute, I’ll come get it.” I retrieved the pick from my afro and reached up to the lock, keeping as much of me as possible on the floor. Gunfire had been coming from the north since the moment of the explosion, and by now the stink of cordite had reached us. People-killing iron. Alia kept her mouth shut.
Shorty was waiting with a pistol for me. “Match weapon,” I said appreciatively. “Thanks, pal.” It was considerate of him to pick something I could fire one-handed.
“You take west and north windows; I’ll cover east and the door?”
“Solid.”
“Some fine turnkey I turn out to be.”
Alia had crawled near; she started to rise as I did. “Give me a gun—I can shoot.”
“Stay the fuck down, woman!” I bellowed. “You’re pregnant.”
“Yes, Isham.” She dropped back on her precious belly and crawled behind a file cabinet. Oddly pleased, somehow feeling more dangerous, I looked around the room.
An alcohol lamp glowed low; the room was alternating butter and chocolate. Defensive props were at a premium: Alia was behind one and Shorty was just crawling out from behind the other. The Ashley furnace near the twin cells was too small to provide effective cover from any direction. There were six rifles of varying potency racked against the south wall beside the doorless door, but they had no slings—I couldn’t use them. Likewise the big-bore Musky-guns on the other side of the doorway, even if they’d had the range I wanted.
Shorty was busy underneath the Musky gun-rack. He kept a fair-sized mirror around so weekend drunks like Marv could repair their appearance before going home to their wives or husbands, and he was hastily improvising a stand for it: a good way to cover two directions from one position. He got it the way he wanted it and began pushing it into the doorway with the barrel of his Garand. He saw me watching, paused a moment to grin, and said a very strange thing. He said, “That’s a good woman you got there, pal.” Then he went back to his task.
The mirror started to fall, and he risked a quick lunge. His balding head exploded like an egg and yanked him a full yard into the room, slamming him against the floor. I suppose there was a noise. Things splattered. I screamed, an inarticulate wail of fury, and Alia gasped. The room suddenly smelled of excrement.
Shorty’s dying spasm had swept the mirror in my direction—I lifted it to the east window and scanned the rocky slope of the Nose. From the angle of impact, the shot could have come from nowhere else. I saw him. A short man with some kind of rifle, crouching behind a boulder. From the doorway he’d be covered, but I was just that hair to the side: his silhouette was a textbook target against the moonlit sky.
I had a handgun I’d never used before. Everybody knows you can’t hit anything with a handgun. I was firing uphill, with a corner of my eye. Everybody knows you can’t hit anything firing uphill. It was dark out. I stuck my right hand through the bars of the window, bent it awkwardly backward to aim to the right, and shot him dead. I knew he was dead even before I saw the limp, heavy, bag-of-clothes way he rolled down the scree slope, landing in a clatter of gravel in the ditch along South Avenue. I’d known it before I stuck the gun out the window.
I saluted Shorty with the pistol. “I didn’t think I believed in vengeance anymore, Shorty,” I told him, “but I’m glad you won’t go to hell alone.”
Behind her file cabinet, Alia said nothing.
I used the desk to build me an alcove from which I could cover the door, and settled down to wait. As an afterthought, I retrieved Shorty’s Garand and laid it across the desktop so that its field of fire encompassed the window of the cell I had vacated.
More gunfire had been going on during all this, still mostly to the north, but it got right quiet now. I wondered where Teach’ was, and what he thought of the fireworks in this corner of the world.
“Isham Stone!”
Holy smoke, Jordan himself? “Yah.”
“Come on out with you hands empty. We get you out of here, get you to the mountains.” It sure sounded like tapes I’d heard of Jordan.
I said something along the lines of “be fruitful and multiply,” without actually implying a partner.
“The Man gon’ kill you, boy, where you at? We on your side.”
“Then get off of it.”
“Crazy muthafucka, you want to die?”
“Looking forward to it, ugly man.”
There was a silence; when he spoke again his voice was dark with anger. Jordan, all right. “We c’n roll grenades through that door all day, father-killer. I want your ass, an’ I want it now.”
Why the hell? “Roll away.” I thought I was being canny—it seemed obvious that whatever he wanted my ass for, it wasn’t hamburger. He wasn’t about to get gay with grenades.
So my heart nearly stopped when a pineapple-sized object sailed through the door frame. I leaped on it to smother the blast, instinctively, and that was my undoing. For instead of a grenade, Jordan had hurled a much more ancient and childish weapon.
A stink bomb.
It burst beneath me. The smell tore my nose like a dozen immense fishhooks of varying sharpnesses. It brought the shock-paralysis of any sensory overload, the same piteous mewing and spastic clutching you see in a man who’s stared at magnesium combustion or stuck his head in the fire-horn. I didn’t even wish for my plugs—it was far too late. I wished for oblivion, and was heard. Thanks again.
I came back to something like consciousness to find the world upside-down. Slowly I realized I was slung over a broad, anonymous shoulder, being carried at a dogtrot. I was breathing in great spasmodic gulps, and I hadn’t the strength to do anything else. I decided my respiratory system had gone on strike under intense pressure from the olfactory center, and was now working overtime to fill the backlog of orders. The worst of the stink was past.
I was vaguely aware that Alia was near, looking right-side-up and therefore being carried like me. She was unconscious. Light-headed and foolish, I tried to tell her captor to watch out for our baby, but I couldn’t get air allocated for the purpose. Who’s in charge here? I wondered, and what a question that was.
A flat, sharp voice came from the right—Collaci’s, of course. “You die first, Jordan.”
The man carrying me froze, as did all I could see. To give them credit, none tried to dive for cover. It would probably have been fatal.
“The Stone boy die second, pig.” Jordan’s voice held no fear, but there was anger. I noted vaguely that he smelled a lot like Collaci.
Teach’ chuckled. “I class him as pretty expendable.” Hmmph. Through my fog I was vaguely annoyed.
“Maybe the new boss-man’s daughter take his place, then.”
“Fine. Then I won’t have to aim this Browning so careful.”
Jordan was plainly discomfited—this script wasn’t following the expected pattern. And a Browning is a hell of a lot of gun. He growled deep in his chest.
“That’s the trouble with hostages,” Collaci remarked conversationally. “They’re like flashbulbs—use ’em once and they’re gone. I’d rather have her on my conscience than hanging over my head. Next time the stakes might be higher.”
“Then why ain’t you shootin’?”
“Let her go and you can walk. With him, if you want him. You know my word is good.”
“White man’s word,” Jordan spat, but he sounded tempted. He should have been—it was a good deal. But as he was deciding…
“No, Collaci!” came a breathless shout that could only have been Krishnamurti. “Let them go!”
Telempath Page 14
