INFINITY HOLD3

by Longyear, Barry B.

  Jak looked around, but each one of the sheets was taking his own counsel. Nazzar held up his hand and shouted, "Everyone who wants to die, form a line right here."

  There were no takers. The yard monster moved over a couple of paces and held up his hand again. "Everyone who wants to get cut loose out there in the sand, form a line right here." There were a lot of looks, but no one chose the sand.

  Nazzar lowered his hand and said to the sheets, "Then you are now members of this gang. If you betray us, you die. Does everyone understand that?"

  There were nods.

  "Is there anyone in this group who does not feel comfortable with fighting for this gang only?" He looked over them all, one at a time. Finding no one who wanted to die, he began moving south. Ondo Suth and the new members of the gang followed him.

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  The Lesson

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  Close to noon, the sun hammering us into the desert, I heard one of the sharks say, "Look at that. A three-hour difference. The days here are twenty-seven hours long."

  I looked over, and a woman had a stick stuck in the sand. She was squatting next to the stick and looking at her wristwatch. I stopped by her side and asked, "How much?"

  She pushed back the hood on her sheet and looked up at me. She was older. Maybe she was in her fifties. "How much what?"

  "How much difference? You know, between Earth and here?"

  She pointed at the stick. "Three hours, more or less. This is pretty crude for a noon indicator, but I'd say the days are about twenty-seven hours long. Maybe twenty-seven and a quarter. I'll know with a lot more accuracy after sunset when I take my next measurement."

  I pointed a finger at her. "Astronomer?"

  She stood up, pulled her stick out of the ground and shook her head. "Social worker."

  I watched her back as she walked away, thinking about twenty-seven plus hour days. A twenty-four hour long day on Earth was bad enough. Twenty-seven on Tartaros was insane.

  There was shouting coming from the front of the column. I picked up my pace and soon I got a good look at what the front walkers were shouting about. The spaces between the dunes were covered with a layer of naked, sun-blackened corpses. Thousands of them.

  Here and there I could see those black flying creatures flitting around. "Sand bats," said a voice from behind me. I looked and saw that the speaker was Ondo Suth.

  I turned and grabbed the front of his sheet. "Did your bunch do this?"

  "No. Couldn't of been us. There must be fifteen, twenty thousand down there." He pulled himself loose.

  "Kegel's not the only gang that works the sand, Bando. Might be the Hand, or the Spanish gang. Even Boss Morret from over the Divide's been known to work the sand. It'd have to be a bigger bunch than mine to do all that."

  "There's all kinds of little freelance gangs out here, too," Jak Edge threw in. He nodded toward the landscape of corpses. "Anyway, it was short."

  I looked away from him and back at the bodies. "How can you know that?"

  "They're all together. Usually by the day after landin', they're divided up into little groups, like your shipload did. Look."

  Jak moved forward and pointed at a place in the sand that was mostly clear of bodies. He squatted and pointed down at a discolored stripe that ran along the surface.

  "See here?" He brushed away the loose sand to show the discolored portion to be made of fused-together granules.

  "What's that?"

  "This is where the edge of the ship's guard shield touched down." He pointed around at the corpses. "The ship must've just left. They couldn't've been down more'n a few minutes when they got hit."

  "Jak," called Ondo. "None of the dead've been shot."

  We both looked up and Ondo was working his way through the bodies. Jak Edge and I joined him, and it was true. Some of the bodies showed the effects of a well-honed razor, but there were no bullet holes.

  "So, what does that mean?"

  "Let me see," said Jak as he climbed up the nearest dune. I accompanied him, and when we both had some altitude, Jak pointed toward the east where the bodies seemed to be the thickest.

  "There. See the tracks?"

  "Where?" I squinted my eyes against the sun.

  "Beyond that wall of bodies, see the tracks going off to the east?"

  "Yeah."

  "That's where this shipload of protos met the attack." Jak pointed to where the bodies were few and scattered out. "Here they were runnin' away from the attack."

  I nodded. "Okay. I see that."

  Jak started walking down the dune toward the east, picking his way carefully between the corpses. I followed, checking each body as I passed. None of them showed any evidence of being shot, although most of them showed evidence of having had their eyes eaten out. The sand bats were responsible for the eyes, though.

  I concentrated on Jak Edge's back and tried to keep from vomiting as I fought to make sense of the evidence. The sharks from this ship had been hit by a strong force, but a force that had no firearms. There were no droppings from the lughs or carcasses, so the attackers hadn't been mounted, either.

  We could see from the tracks that the attackers had numbered many thousands, and had spread out to attack on a wide front. We followed the trail for about a mile, if that, when we found another guard-shield oval. There weren't any corpses littering the landing site, so it was easy to see where the ship had put down.

  There were a couple of stripped corpses. Leftovers from an early power struggle, or a couple of old scores settled. I said to Jak, "This ship put down first, didn't it?"

  He nodded. "I'd say the second ship put down just as this one took off. These chups figured out their chances real quick, and banded together to improve their odds with the second bunch's supplies and clothes. I'd say they struck before the second ship even lifted off."

  He spat on the sand and said, "Thus endeth the lesson."

  We returned to the second landing site to find that the column had moved on. I looked at that ocean of corpses and it finally sank in. This load of exiles had just stepped out of the hatch, and the whole shipload had died—seventeen thousand of them.

  I looked up to find Jak, just to have the sight of someone living before my eyes. He was walking toward the west. I followed him until we found the trail of the winners. After murdering and stripping their fellow sharks, the victors had headed west toward the mirage.

  Only a mile or so from the scene of the massacre we found about a hundred and fifty more bodies feeding their eyes to the sand bats.

  "The sharks stuck together for almost a mile," said Jak. "I'm impressed."

  I saw a trail heading north, a second heading northwest, and a third continuing west. "So, now they're all going to die?" I asked.

  "Now it begins. The mob divides in blood, each time its pieces becomin' smaller, weaker, more fearful. Follow these trails out and you'll find more branches with a little pile of bodies at each fork."

  "When Nkuma split off, no one died."

  Jak nodded slowly. "Very unusual. Voting. Very unusual." He took a breath and sighed as he turned to catch up with the column.

  I stood in the silence for a moment, letting the smell of death's fingers cuddle around me. I had a headache and something in me wanted to explode. I had to ask myself, didn't the UTR know what was going to happen when they dumped us here? Damn them.

  Why had no one come down to Tartaros to see how the experiment was progressing? Every crowbar hotel in the system had half a billion sociologists and criminologists infesting the places like rat plagues. They were always doing little studies, having us answer questions, feeding their computers with tons of worthless data in order to generate grants, degrees, and reports no one wanted to read.

  One of the corpses had an arm raised, its fingers outstretched toward the sky. It's empty eye sockets stared at me while something inside of me screamed that we did not deserve th
is. No one deserved this. I looked and Jak was out of sight. I ran to catch up with the column. All I wanted to do right then was to surround myself with the living.

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  The Retired Messiah

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  All that day we marched south, that green-looking mountain of a mirage always hanging there on the right, that flat white horizon to the south never seeming any closer, the image of that field of corpses always fresh in my mind. I would glance at the mirage—no. My eyes were pulled toward the mirage almost as though I was under a spell of some kind. I would tear my gaze away from it, but in minutes I'd find my eyes once more feasting upon the illusion.

  From time to time I caught others taking surreptitious peeks at the mirage, and more than one of them fell back in the pack. When they reached the end they turned about to try and catch up with Nkuma. I mentioned it to Garoit, and he answered with just a touch of sarcasm, "It's a free country, isn't it?"

  He stormed away toward the left of the column as I said to no one in particular, "Who yanked his chain?"

  An amused voice came from behind me. "It's tough being a messiah."

  I looked around and there was Martin Stays. He was wearing one of the desert sheets over his blues and did not carry a weapon. Judging from the way my face felt, I was gathering a hostie or two against Stays. "At least Garoit is doing something instead of sitting on his ass making smug comments."

  Stays laughed and shook his head. "Don't get me wrong, Nicos. In my day I was a bigger asshole than Darrell Garoit can ever hope to become." He adjusted his gait until he was walking beside me, both of us on the hard sand between the dunes. His face became serious. "I put in some time on the barricades waving a banner and shouting 'follow me!' to a bunch of children who wanted a better way and thought they could take a shortcut through me."

  "Ah, you pols have an ego-thing working. You always think you're better than everyone else."

  "You're right." As he turned his head and looked at me, his eyes narrowed. "My ego fed on that be-my-guru stuff until I was as salted as Charlie Manson." He looked down for a moment, nodded, and continued. "Bando, I could point my finger at a building and say 'disappear,' and it would entropize. I could point at a smear and say 'die' and the pol would drown in blush. My mission was pure, my motives righteous, my intellect tuned to reality, and I had a hundred sets of hands eager to place their lives in jeopardy to try to turn my fantasies into reality."

  "How did you wind up in the Crotch?" I asked.

  "You were already at Greenville, weren't you?"

  "Yeah. I remember when you showed up. Didn't your bunch get shot up trying to kidnap some pol?"

  "Yes. Toshiro Maki. One of the members of Parliament."

  "Yeah, Stays. I remember when you showed up. I saw four stains trying to sit on you until they could drop you down the black hole. I thought you were the original foaming-at-the-mouth pistachio from Hell."

  "I was."

  "Was?" I snorted out a laugh. A con is a con is a con. "But you're all better now, right?"

  "Not better. Different." He looked up at the southern horizon. "In that abortion of a kidnapping attempt, five of my people got wiped, four were wounded, two of Maki's security guards were killed, another stain was turned into a vegetable, and the pol got off without a scratch. That evening, just before the nabs arrived, I saw the bastard on the vids. He was so far up in the polls at that moment he was having a public orgasm."

  "What did you expect?"

  "I thought like a child. I expected things to change simply because so many wanted change so badly, and were willing to die for it. But all I'd done was to make what was already in place more entrenched than ever. I got to think about that each time I was dropped into the black hole, and each time it made me crazy. When they would let me out, I was your basic mad dog. Then it was back in the hole.

  "One time sitting in the hole, all of the anger finally dribbled out of me. I was left with nothing but failure, shame, and confusion. In the center of my being was a huge cavern that demanded to be filled with new answers. I've been looking for some of those answers since—something in which to believe."

  "Answers," I laughed and held out my hands to indicate our companions in the white sheets and crowbar blues. "What good are your answers here?'

  Martin Stays was quiet for a moment, then he pulled me to a halt and asked, "Don't you believe in anything?"

  I pulled away from him. "Yeah, I believe in something. I believe I'm in it up to my ears, and have been in it since I can remember. As for politics, I believe in whatever the strongest goon next to me wants me to believe. If you belong to the Yard Monsters for Jesus, I'll hallelujah my ass right on down to the River Jordan and bubble my bum. If you can swing the sweetmeat and you like the Purple Puck Suckers, I like the Purple Puck Suckers, too. As they say back in the crowbars, it don't mean a thing."

  He studied me for a moment, then averted his glance. "It means something. Nicos, what we're in right now will change someday. It has to. That change is going to take some kind of form, and the form is up to us."

  "You sound like you have an itch to crawl up on those barricades again, Mad Dog. Maybe you want Pussyface's job?"

  He shook his head. "No. What I learned in the black hole was that what I need aren't followers; what I need are answers." He took a deep breath, looked off to the west, and sighed. "Nicos, about Garoit."

  "What about him?"

  He pointed toward the mountains. "Just about all of his Freedom Front dips chose Nkuma and the mirage. Pussyface is taking it personally." He lowered his hand and smiled. "Give him time. Being a messiah is an educational process. The lessons come hard."

  He dropped back and I walked by myself for a moment. I felt uncomfortable and looked around, but there was no one I knew near at hand. I was alone with my own head, and the head was asking "What do I believe?" I didn't have any answers.

  Back in Jordensville there was this chappy who used to ask that during his sermons on Sundays. "What do you believe?" In the back seats we used to tickle around and sing "I believe for every drop of rain that falls a spot gets wet," and other selections from the I'm Too Smart to Believe in this Shit Songbook.

  I stood at the foot of a huge dune. I looked up and began climbing through the loose sand toward the top. Once on top, I looked around. Here we were, a bunch of killers, thieves, terrorists, perverts, and crazies, caught in a furnace between Hell and a mirage, heading south to do battle with an army that outnumbered us maybe a hundred to one. Just for the laughs, I tried to think past Kegel's army. What if we lived through that? Where would we go? What would we become? What would become of us?

  I thought about my reading from last night. "At least it's not hopeless," I laughed. I wondered if there would ever be a time when I could say that without laughing.

  What do I believe? I saw the brothers and sisters below, strung out, rifles slung, stumbling along, half asleep under the force of the sun. Alna was among them, and whether she lived or died was an issue with me. There was something I believed in. I couldn't call it love, but Alna and I had something.

  Far ahead was our main force of armed riders, and to the left and right were somewhat smaller forces. I could see the flank riders on my side riding in exactly the same manner the sheets had been riding when we had surprised them. I had never seen Kegel before, but I believed in him, and in his army. Sure, I believed in lots of things.

  One thing I believed in was that unless things changed soon, we might not live long enough to be massacred by Kegel's army. I could see the problem. We weren't an army, and we certainly couldn't fight one that was expecting us with any hopes of survival. But how to shift the odds?

  I thought, maybe I should just cruise, mind my own business, and see who walked away with the chips. That was crowbar wisdom, yard smarts. That was the intelligent thing to do. Of course, no one ever accused me of being intelligent.


  Tartaros, this gang, Garoit and Alna were in the hand that I had been dealt. I figured I better play that hand to the best of my ability. Anything less than that and I might as well fold. And if you stay in a hand, you may not be smart, but you must have hope, no matter how stupid that hope is.

  There were lots of things to do, many changes that needed to be made. There wasn't any point in going to Garoit and Nance Damas until I knew what I wanted, and I wouldn't know what I wanted until I knew what I was talking about.

  I sat down on the dune and watched the brothers and sisters as they passed. I was looking for a certain face—praying for a certain face. If I remembered it right, it was a very beautiful face. The face of a primo killer. She was called Bloody Sarah, and I tried to remember her particulars.

  Former Major Sarah Hovit was late of the UTR commandos, and held the Crotch record for the number of murders committed without receiving the death penalty. I had forgotten the exact number, but it was around a hundred and fifty. The story had traveled the pipes the year before last, just before Major Hovit transferred to the Crowbar Blues.

  Sarah Hovit had been in command of an counter-insurgency field team of thirty soldiers on the planet Surya. By following orders playing kissy-kissy with the locals, her unit had been caught in an ambush and thoroughly mauled. Half her command had been killed, and a third of those who remained had wounds. The few weapons they had were out of ammunition, and she was ordered out of the area. She sent her troops back but she stayed behind herself to tie up a loose end or two, counter-insurgencywise. The people in that village had not only helped stage the ambush for the rebels, many of them had participated in the actual fighting.

  Sarah Hovit did a personal sweep of the vill, and when the investigators assembled and divided up the remaining body parts, a hundred and fifty-odd Suryian men and women had gone to a better land.

  She had been in Greenville, so she would have been sent to Tartaros with the rest of us. At the landing, did she join the gang with the rest of the women? If so, did she survive the battle? If she did survive, was she now with Nkuma trying to chase down a mirage? I studied the faces below me, and thought about what I believed. I believed that unless we managed to put together one hell of a fighting machine over the next few days, we would be eaten alive by Boss Kegel or some other gang.