by Chris Bunch
“That I can do.”
After a while, she pulled back. “Although I’m not much of a princess.”
“You’re more of one than I’m a prince,” Joshua said.
“So you have me to do with what you will. What do you will?”
“Let us see,” Joshua said, twirling nonexistent mustachios. “First I shall remove all your clothes except your space boots. Then slather you with freshly made tartar sauce. I’ll wake the six furry creatures I have back in cold storage …”
Kristin laughed. “I never realized you had a sense of humor before.”
“I generally don’t, when somebody’s got a gun on me.”
“No, seriously, what …”
The ship jolted, went in and out of N-space. Wolfe’s stomach crawled. Kristin slid out of his lap as he came out of the chair. “Not good,” he said. “Ships aren’t supposed to do that without giving hints. Let’s go see the worst.” He started for the engine spaces.
Four hours later, they knew the worst.
“Less than sixty drive-hours and this drive’ll make a good ship anchor,” Wolfe said. “Damn these bargain-basement yachts.”
He called up a gazetteer onscreen and opened a voice sensor.
“Nearest inhabited planet,” he said.
The screen blinked twice, then an entry scrolled:
Ak-Mechat VII. Class 23. Currently exploited for minerals. Est. pop. 7,000. No controlled field. No cities. Three populated sites, little better than mining camps, are located as shown …
Figures scrolled.
“Two jumps,” Wolfe said. “Not good. Then a goodish chug on secondary. And it’s a bit chilly. I’m not considering hollering for help.”
“Is there any other choice?” Kristin asked.
“Surely. Press on regardless for real civilization and hope my mechanical diagnostic abilities are pessimistic.”
“Could they be?”
“No.”
“I just realized I always wanted to visit this Am-Kechat.”
“Gesundheit. But it’s Ak-Mechat.”
• • •
Kristin quietly slid open the hatch to the small freight compartment. The space was empty, except for the Great Lumina. It hung in midair, fluorescing colors. She heard, over the increasingly shrill hum of the ship’s drive, deep, slow breathing, coming from nowhere. She heard the clank of metal; she saw a thin piece of alloy steel lift, stand on end, then bend in an invisible vise. The steel clanged to the deck and Joshua appeared. He was naked, drenched in sweat. For an instant Kristin didn’t register. “You did that,” she said.
Wolfe took several more breaths before he nodded. “I still don’t quite have full control. I wanted the metal to bend, and then fall slowly to the deck.”
“When you do — what then?”
Wolfe shook his head. “I can’t tell you. And I doubt if you’d believe me, anyway.”
“I just read, in one of your books, about a queen who believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Try me.”
“All right. I want to use the Lumina to close a door, or maybe seal a door. Something that I think’s here, with us in this spacetime, has to be either destroyed or put on the other side. And then the door must be sealed.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Joshua picked up a towel from the deck, wiped his forehead. “Neither do I, most times. Forget about it. I’m for a shower, anyway.”
“Need your back scrubbed?”
“Always.”
• • •
Kristin rolled her head back and screamed as Wolfe drove within her, holding her knees crooked in his elbows, forearms pulling her against him.
She came back to herself, was aware of hot water needling her face, her breasts. Wolfe set her down. She managed a smile. “I was somewhere else,” she said.
“So was I,” Joshua said. He kissed her, eased her feet to the deck.
“What are you going to do about me?” she asked.
“Not sure,” Wolfe said, picking up the soap from the deck. “I guess I’ll turn you around and scrub your back. Like this.”
“Mmmh. No. Stop for a minute. I meant — you aren’t going to let me come with you.”
Wolfe’s hand stopped for a time, then continued, rubbing in a small circle. “Lady,” he said slowly, “I don’t think you want to come with me.”
“Why not? I’m not going back to the Chitet.”
“My turn to ask why not,” Wolfe said.
“I’m not sure yet,” Kristin said. “But — something died. Changed, anyway, when Master Speaker Athelstan got killed.” She was silent for some time. “No,” she said softly. “I’m lying. Things changed some time before that. After — after we started making love.”
“Sex shouldn’t change what you believe,” Joshua said. “Or the way you live.”
“No,” she said softly. “No, it shouldn’t.”
Again there was a long silence. Joshua leaned close, whispered in her ear.
She giggled, bent forward a little, hands on her upper thighs. “Like this?”
She gasped.
“Like that,” Joshua managed.
• • •
They came out of N-space on the fringes of the Ak-Mechat system. Wolfe went back to the drive chamber, ran a diagnostic program, and returned to the bridge. “That drive is about as defunct as it’s possible to get without going bang or maybe even thud,” he announced. “I can’t chance an in-system jump. So it’s a long, hard drive for planetfall. Get out a good book.”
• • •
Kristin slept, her breathing a gentle bubbling.
Joshua lay beside her, feeling out. He felt the red, the burn, the soundless buzzing insect roar of the life-form that had destroyed the Al’ar’s universe and was reaching into his own. He pulled back from the searing pain as it built.
He felt the red presence, the “virus” far closer now than before.
• • •
Joshua read in a calm, even voice:
Now you shall see the Temple completed:
After much striving, after many obstacles;
For the work of creation is never without travail;
The formed stone, the visible crucifix,
The dressed altar, the lifting light,
Light
Light
The visible reminder of Invisible Light.
He paused.
“I’m not sure I follow,” Kristin said slowly. “I assume this Eliot of yours wasn’t writing about the Lumina.”
“Not by some more than a thousand years.”
“Go ahead.”
“Stanza Ten,” Joshua continued.
You have seen the house built, you have seen it adorned …
Wolfe took the ship in slowly, making two transpolar orbits of Ak-Mechat VII as he killed speed and altitude. “They weren’t being funny about the field being unmanned,” he said. “All I’m getting from down there is a navbeeper. Guess if anybody’s got any incoming cargo they make private arrangements. We’ll land next time around.”
But the Eryx didn’t make it. Minutes short of the field, holding at about three hundred miles per hour, fire spurted out the drive tubes and the secondary drive went silent. Wolfe looked at Kristin, who was double-strapped into a control chair. “This one might be tough. I’m gonna try to porpoise it in.”
He brought the ship down, down, until it hurtled barely twenty-five feet above rocky outcroppings. “Last time around I thought I saw moors around about here,” he muttered. “Come on, Heathcliff.”
He felt the controls getting sloppy, vague in his hands. They were fifteen feet above gray rocky death.
“Gimp one for the winner,” he prayed, flaring external foils, and the Eryx climbed briefly, shuddered, near stalling. He pushed the nose down, and the rocks were gone. Wolfe saw the many-shaded browns of water and land.
He yanked the main stick hard back. The Eryx tried to climb again, reached vertical, then st
alled, toppled, and fell, pancaking onto the dark moor of Ak-Mechat VII.
• • •
Wolfe forced the fuzzing blur from his brain and pushed his eyelids up. The control room was a murky skew of wiring, screens, and instruments that’d popped from their housings. Kristin sagged in her chair, a bit of blood seeping from her nostrils.
The antigrav was gone, and the deck was at a twenty-five-degree angle. Wolfe unsnapped his safety belts and got up. His body was battered, bruised.
He staggered to Kristin and unfastened her. He started feeling for damage; her eyes came open. She coughed, then sat up quickly and vomited.
“I’m all right,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her sleeve. “That was a hard one.”
“I think we’d best see about leaving,” Joshua said, as the ship rolled back until the deck was almost level. “I don’t think we’re on any kind of firmness.”
He made his way to the lock, where there were three packs made from cut-apart crew coveralls. Two held supplies, the third the Lumina.
Wolfe manually cycled the inner lock, went through the chamber, peered through the tiny bull’s-eye, then opened the outer lock door.
The Eryx was half-buried in mire that was pulling the ship deeper second by second.
“Come on, lady. All ashore that’s going ashore,” he shouted, grabbing the packs and muscling them to the lock. He chose a patch of muck that looked a bit more solid than the rest, and tossed one pack onto it. It didn’t sink.
“Now you,” he said, and half threw Kristin after the pack. She landed half on the solid place, nearly slipped into the mud, but recovered.
Wolfe threw the other pack and the Lumina to her, poised, and jumped. He looked around. Close mountains rose gray against gray overcast, lighter gray clouds that looked like rain. Behind him were the foothills they’d almost crashed in. All around was the moor, stretching empty and brown, with dark waters ribboning through the land.
Beside them the Eryx rolled once more, and this time its open lock went under. Air gouted in bubbles, and the Eryx sank deeper and vanished. A single muddy bubble broke with a glop.
“At least we’re not leaving footprints,” Wolfe said. He put the tied-together trouser legs of the pack holding the Lumina over his neck and tied the other, more unwieldy pack behind. He waved toward the mountains.
“Let’s go find some civilization. I need a drink.”
• • •
They moved quickly, in spite of bruises and the swampy land. Joshua felt ahead, and went surefootedly from solid hummock to matted tuft, slowly heading toward the mountains where the gazetteer had said the mines were. He hoped they’d find the field first, and that it wouldn’t be completely unmanned.
They’d made several miles when thunder growled, and they looked for shelter. A hilltop rose ahead, and they made for it. There were two large boulders with a patch of soft mosslike growth between, sloping down to a stretch of black, open water. Wolfe took Kristin’s pack, unzipped it, and took out a rolled section of plas. He secured the plas to the boulders with paracord, then spread insul blankets under the shelter.
“A garden of unearthly delights, madam.”
Kristin looked about them. “Actually, this is beautiful,” she said. “Look at the way the moor goes on forever and ever, and the little flowers in the moss here.” She eyed the pool of water nearby. “Would there be monsters in that?”
“Damfino,” Joshua said. “Whyn’t you go play bait? I’ll try to rescue you before the horrid beasties get more than a nibble or two.”
She kicked moss at him, stripped off her coveralls and boots, and cautiously waded into the water. She kept her gun in one hand for a while, then set it close at hand on the bank and started splashing water about. “Come on, you filthy disbeliever. Clean your vile hide,” she called.
Wolfe obeyed, taking soap down. They washed, shivering as it grew colder, and the storm grew closer.
“Look,” Kristin pointed into the water. A foot-long brown creature drifted past her foot. “A fish?”
“Maybe.”
“Could we eat it?”
“Maybe. Come on, Lady Crusoe. Later for the local fauna. We brought dinner.”
• • •
They’d finished the self-heating ship rations before the storm broke, and rain came down in soft, drifting waves around the shelter, beading on the plas, then pouring down it. Joshua leaned out and let rain drizzle on his tongue, feeling like a boy. Bitter, but drinkable, he thought, and ducked back into the shelter.
Kristin, aided by a small flash propped on a rock, was arranging the blankets. She slid into the improvised bed. “Are you planning to sit up all night?”
Joshua joined her, lying back against the moss. Kristin turned the flash off and put her head on his shoulder. After a while, she sighed. “This is nice. It’s like this is the only world there is.”
“Maybe it’d be nice if it were.”
“Why couldn’t it be? We could eat fish, and — and maybe the moss is edible. We could live on love for our desserts. These shipsuits won’t ever wear out. And maybe you’d look good in a long beard, my little hermit of Ak-Mechat.”
Wolfe laughed, realizing the sound was almost a stranger.
Kristin ran her fingers over his lips. “I do like this,” she said again. “All alone on what feels like an island.”
“Thus proving John Donne a liar,” Wolfe said, yawning.
“I know who he was, you overeducated name-dropper,” Kristin said. “I had to analyze the illogic of some Christian thinkers when I was in creche, and he was one of them.”
“Damned odd training the Chitet have for their warriors,” Wolfe said.
“But I didn’t think John Donne was always wrong. We all are part of the main, aren’t we?”
“Hasn’t been my experience,” Wolfe said, voice chilling, remembering a teenage boy in an alien prison camp, alone, staring down at rough graves.
“Or have you just chosen not to be a player?” Kristin asked. “I read the fiche Chitet Intelligence had, Joshua. It was pretty scanty, but it said you were a prisoner of the Al’ar when you were a boy, and then you escaped and were a soldier until the Al’ar vanished. Perhaps if I’d gone through something like that, I wouldn’t feel connected to the main very securely either.”
“Sometimes,” Joshua said, “it’s the least painful way.”
“Which is why you’ve gone through so much for the Lumina. Just for your own benefit. Of course.”
Wolfe was quiet for a very long time.
“You Chitet sharpen your razors way too damned much,” he said. “Goodnight.”
• • •
The field was as advertised — nothing more than a square mile of hardpack, with reflectors at the perimeter. There was no sign of life. Two stripped wrecks lay drunkenly nearby, not far from a long shed, with the navbeacon in a square cupola atop it.
The shed was unlocked, and had a sign, stamped in duralumin:
Welcome to Ak-Mechat VII.
Feel free to use any of the mokes inside. There are three destination settings: Graveyard, Lucky Cuss, and Grand Central. If you break one of them, fix it or leave some credits so we can. It could be a long hike for the next sourdough.
“I was hoping,” Wolfe said, “there might be at least a watchman with a com we could rent to call offworld. Let alone something like a freelancer with a ship for hire. Ah, for the rough freedom of a pioneer world.” He scanned the sign again. “Naturally, according to the gazetteer, Graveyard’s the biggest mining town. Wonder who the cheery bastard was that named it?”
“Why didn’t they build the field near the mines?” Kristin asked. “Or relocate it, once they found whatever they’re digging out.”
“A lot of people like to see visitors coming from a long way off,” Joshua said. “Or maybe none of them could agree about where the new field ought to go. The less I try to figure out why people do things, if I don’t have to, the better I sleep at night.”
“Probably,” Wolfe said. “But we’re not looking for simple transport. At least not for long. Eventually, I need a ship of my own. I’m pretty sure they don’t run passenger lines where I’m headed. But there’s all kinds of ways to pay for things. Mount up, and let’s see if we can make Graveyard before dusk.”
• • •
The moke was as simple as engineering could make it: a nearly rectangular craft with a bench seat behind an open windscreen, a small cargo department, controls for starting/stopping the drive, a joystick, an altitude control, and the three buttons for the programmed destinations, with a small satellite-positioning screen that gave nav instructions.
Wolfe and Kristin loaded aboard the least-battered moke, lifted it out of the shed, and followed the screen’s directions. The moke beeped if they tried to make any deviation from the preset course.
It grew colder the closer they got to the mountains, and clouds lowered. A wind spat flurries of snow into the cockpit. They were moving uphill, following a track that had been leveled some time ago by earth-moving machinery, curving between trees, storm-twisted evergreens with hand-size leaves.
“We’re not going to make it before nightfall,” Wolfe said. “Let’s start looking for the least dismal place to camp.”
A creek crashed over rocks not far from the trail, near a downed tree and a cluster of rocks that would serve for a windbreak. They grounded the moke and lifted out their packs. Wolfe used the plas to form another tent with the downed tree as a back, and Kristin spread the blankets. He found dead branches for a fire, piled them high, and sparked them into smoky life with his blaster on low.
“What do you want to eat?” he asked. “Stew, featuring the ever-popular mystery meat, or seven-bean cassoulet?”
“Let’s go with the stew,” Kristin said. “The tent’s too small to chance the cassoulet.”
Wolfe set out two mealpaks, then opened the improvised pack that held the Lumina. “I’d like to try something,” he said, “and I need a lab rat.”
“Charming way to put it,” Kristin said, sitting cross-legged on the blanket. “And I can’t say I care for doing anything with that.”
