INFINITY HOLD3

by Longyear, Barry B.

  "Why haven't you people held an election?"

  "If Nance dies, we'll have to. She isn't dead yet, we don't want to, and she gave you the job."

  I shook my head, glanced at Alna, and looked back at Stays. I didn't know. I was about ready to strike out on my own. Pushing the Razai could give my nightmares nightmares. Something registered in the dimness of my mind. Maybe I was off the fuzzy blue hook. "What about the cops? Am I still in the RCs?"

  "Sure," said Nazzar. "Man, nobody is low enough to take that job."

  They all laughed while Stays decided to have a moment. "You know, Sherlock, the way I read it, if there ever was an election, the Razai might elect you."

  "What I can't figure, Watson, is how you smuggled in all those flash buttons you been eating."

  "No more of this blushin' modesty," Marietta commanded. "We got things to do. It's yours, down n' brown. Quit cryin'."

  I glanced over my shoulder, recalled what was crouching back there in the dunes, and got a very bad feeling. I looked at Alna, and then faced Stays as a grin sprouted on my lips. "I'm bringing in sixteen thousand new voters, and these sharks really hate my guts. They've got a bunch of children with them, and yesterday I had to lay the max on a little girl. It wasn't a politically astute move."

  "We've survived not being popular before, Sherlock." said Stays.

  "The point is, with me as number two, all of us might be voted out of office about ten seconds after we make it back to the Razai."

  Marietta bellowed out a laugh. "We all could use a vacation."

  "That reminds me." I looked over at Marietta. "I had to send a shark off to a better land riding Rule 13."

  "Huh?" She thought for a moment and nodded, her face empty of expression. "Had to happen sooner or later."

  "We've had a few of our own executions," said Stays. "A rape, some powder puffs killing on the freak, trying to find some stuff. I'll fill you in on the way back."

  He walked his critter over while Rhome and his deadly dozen mounted up. Stays turned back and waved his hand at Rhome Nazzar. "See you in a couple of hours." As Marietta, Marantha, and Ondo led their critters over, Nazzar's people moved off toward the east. I took Alna by the arm and began slogging through the loose sand toward Colonel Indimi's dune.

  Stays, Ondo, Marietta, and Marantha had squatted in my memory like close family only the night before. Now they seemed like strangers. A tide of panic was rising around me. The law, the Razai, taking on the Hand to free all their slaves, I could get behind all those things. It's easy to join a parade. Responsibility and effort are spread around over lots of heads. When you're leading the parade, though, the cards make a different sound when they land. I was convinced Nance had made the biggest mistake of her hellish life when she fingered Bando Nicos to be number two. The biggest mistake of my life, too.

  I glanced at Marietta's towering hulk and suddenly I wanted to talk with my mother. It seemed silly as I thought it. My mother was dead and she hadn't had a whole lot to say to me when she was alive, but that was the feeling the Magic Mountain called up in me right then. She was huge, strong, with fists that'd souped more than one yard monster. The homemade RC star pinned to her sheet looked like a sequin.

  She caught me looking at her, and her massive face fell into a frown as she led her critter over and draped her arm across my shoulders. It was like trying to carry a full grown hog on my back.

  "Listen here, down and brown," she said to me. "We both in the CSAs, right?"

  "I guess. So what?"

  Marietta let go of her lughox and held out a fist the size of a ham. "Don't you so what me, chili pepper! The last time a man so whated me, he spent the rest of his short life lookin' at the world through his asshole. An' that ain't no Rule 13 threat, chili pepper. That's history."

  "Sorry. It's just an expression."

  "There're expressions that get people killed."

  "All right. We're in CSA."

  "Down n' brown, I see chicken feathers growin' out all over you. It wouldn't surprise me none if you started flappin' your wings, cruised right on out of here an' left the rest of us scratchin'."

  I glanced at Alna, but she was looking down, her face very serious. Looking up at the dark face of the Magic Mountain I said, "So is your job to drag me kicking and screaming into camp?"

  She shook her head. "Wouldn't do nothin' like that, Chief. Freedom Rule. Says you can go wherever you want, whenever you want."

  I looked over at Stays. "Man, what about an election being forced once we get this bunch back to the Razai? If it happens, I'm down the pipe anyway."

  "Don't give your last hurrah yet, Bando. Chances are, no one would run against you."

  I laughed at him. "Man, everybody wants to be boss."

  "Not in the Razai. Sharks only want to be boss for self-protection, power, or money. We have the law and the RCs for protection, the vote has the power, and no one has any money. There's no percentage in being boss, so nobody but a whack would run against you, and even you'd vote for a cop before you'd vote for a whack." It was an ego building moment.

  I took Alna's hand and squeezed it as we climbed the dune back to the Colonel. I was scared and everybody knew I was scared, which made me wonder why Nance had dumped her job on me. Even more important, why didn't Stays laugh in her face when she told him she wanted me for the deuce?

  It seemed like questions without answers were getting to be my specialty. When we reached the point group commander, Colonel Indimi was standing. I did the introductions, then told him, "We're only a couple hours from the Razai. Forget about waiting until night. Get 'em on their feet and headed east."

  The Colonel gestured with his head toward where the meeting had taken place. "Has there been some trouble?"

  "Some." What the hell. There wasn't any reason to keep it a secret. "Our boss, Nance Damas, got shot. She's still hanging in there and they don't know who did it yet. They came out to tell me that Nance tapped me for temporary boss."

  "You don't look as though you think congratulations are in order."

  I could feel myself glaring at him. "You have a sharp eye."

  "Speaking of sharp eyes," said Colonel Indimi, "who does the training for the Razai?"

  Right about then I didn't want any criticism, constructive or otherwise. "I think they were just anxious. That's why they rushed out with such a small group like that—"

  The Colonel, Stays, and Marietta laughed out loud as the Colonel pointed with both arms. "Look."

  I turned around and on either side of the small mounted column there were around six hundred armed soldiers strung out across the dunes.

  "If anyone had snapped at the bait, those two jaws would have bitten off his head. Who did you say does the training?"

  "I didn't. But it's Sarah Hovit."

  His black eyebrows climbed for the sky. "Bloody Sarah? Of the Suryian Insurrection?"

  "The same."

  The Colonel nodded. "I know of Bloody Sarah." He smiled and pulled his hand across his bald head as he looked at the disappearing backs of the Razai soldiers. "I just might be able to find interesting work here after all." He looked up at Marietta "About your boss. Does it look like she'll make it?"

  "She'll make it, chump," the Magic Mountain answered. "Big Nance is made out of iron."

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  ▫

  On Passing the Buck

  ▫

  On the way back, the Mihvihtian point guard surrounding us, I listened with half a lobe as they talked around me. The problems were old and new, big, bigger, and truss city. Stays was concerned about being overwhelmed by all the new deadhead powder puffs deep in the sweat-writhe-and-heave thing. Appointing new RCs from the Mihviht load was hot up front with him. "We got some idea who to watch out for from the Crotch, Lewisburg, and the other earthside pits. We don't know anything about Mihviht."

  "One thing I know," said Alna, "is that they're mostly men. Only a third women
. Women put the Razai together. We did it to protect ourselves from monsters like the Hand and Kegel's gang, from men in general. What's going to happen to us when men become the majority?"

  "As long as we have the law," Marantha said, "we don't have to worry about that."

  "What if they toss out the law? They're going to be the new majority. What about that?"

  There was a big silence. Losing this little spot of sanity we called the law was our common nightmare. I caught myself thinking that the only reason the Mihvihtians were on their way to join the Razai was the law. Then little Tani's ghost brushed the edges of my thought, evaporating it. For all I knew, the only reason the Mihvihtians were still heading east was to see the chili pepper chief of the RCs get his.

  There were still voices around me on the outside, and I switched channels. Stays was grinding a couple of other blades. "Even with the sharks from Mihviht, we're less than twenty thousand with only twelve hundred or so rifles between us. Once the Hand knows about us and the shape we're in, they'll eat us alive. With a big enough force, they can put us in the maggot trough in an instant."

  "I heard Sarah's got the Trolls workin' on makin' machine guns out of these popguns," said Marietta.

  "Forget it, chup," said Ondo. "Every boss on Tartaros's had the same idea n' no one's been able to do it."

  "What I heard is the trolls Sarah's got're somethin' special."

  "Can't be done," Ondo repeated.

  With a deadpan face Stays said to the others, "Maybe it'd make more sense to head south and take on Kegel's gang. That way we'd only be outnumbered five to one instead of twenty five to one."

  Funny. Stays always seemed to me like one of those observers of the passing scene remarking on conditions and events with philosophical detachment. A couple of Tartaran weeks in the RCs and he was a wisecracking cynic.

  I listened to them talk around me, and even though they were playing their jaws to some mean stuff, it was good to hear their voices again. The problems were real and they were big. But the Razai had been in tough fights before and come out on top. Maybe after that tour through the forest of corpses the word had spread among the Mihvihtians that on Tartaros power was life, and the only place where the ordinary crowbar sharks had the power was in the Razai, and that only because of the law.

  ▫

  By the time we arrived at the Razai camp, the midday sun was torching our lungs. Things had changed a lot. Instead of a bunch of sharks standing around filling the air with high bitch and agony, the camp was almost invisible until you came right up on it. The tents we had captured from the Hand patrol had been colored whitish yellow to match the sand, and instead of being pitched like a little house in the open, an edge was pitched on the side of a dune and again down at the bottom, leaving a lens shaped shelter beneath. With a little sand sprinkled on the edges, it looked just like just another part of the dune. Each of the sharks had one side of his or her desert sheet the same color, and with them made smaller versions of the camouflaged shelter.

  The Hand's big tent had been colored as well and had been stretched between two dunes, leaving a very large space beneath where they hid the lughoxen-pulled sand sleds. In one of the house sleds Nance Damas was stretched out, feverishly fighting for her life. I felt a pain in my chest as I thought about Nance being down. Hearing about it was only words, and words were air. Seeing it brought the terror right up in my face.

  I felt Alna's hand on my arm. "Bando. Baby, I'm going to look for Nkuma."

  "Yeah."

  She turned back and headed through the point guard. While Stays and the others waited, I climbed the stairs to Nance's sled, pushed the curtain aside, and entered. Two fire cubes burned in black metal wall holders filling the compartment with orange light and that plastic smell. There were built-in bench seats along the walls, the center being taken up by a single bed hovered over by Mercy Jane, the mass mercy killer doctor who chiefed the Razai's med unit. There was also a ragheadded bit named Delia who kept squeezing water from a rag onto the sheet that covered Nance Damas. I wasn't prepared for how Nance's face looked. She was thin, her cheeks and eyes sunken, her skin waxy and yellow.

  "It was bound to happen," Mercy Jane muttered. "No medical supplies, no gloves, homemade instruments, an infection was bound to set in. What's worse, I don't even know if the infection is normal Earth stuff, or something from here." Mercy shot a glance at me. "You nab who did it?"

  "I just got back."

  She faced down at Nance and I watched her as the terrors only she had the training to understand danced in her imagination. Without being aware that she did so, Mercy pushed a strand of reddish blond hair out of her eyes with her long delicate fingers. I never saw so much care in a person's eyes. She shook her head, went through the curtain, and climbed down from the sled.

  I didn't know much about her story, but my gut feeling was that the black rags had dropped the clock in the wrong person's lap. Some people just don't belong in the crowbars. The sharks can smell them out faster than they can make an undercover stain with a badge tattooed on his forehead. When they fingered a fellow shark as innocent, the sharks were never wrong. It's something you read with your gut, and a shark's guts can always see through the bullshit. But no one ever listened to sharks unless the crowbar monkeys had hostages, and then only until the hostages were released or killed.

  I scratched my growth of beard and pushed it all out of my skull. It wasn't something I could change. Innocent or guilty, Jane Sheen was on infinity hold with the rest of us. It sucked muck, but that was just another lump of life's rich pageant.

  As soon as Delia was finished wetting down the sheet, she looked up at me. She had those huge black eyes that looked like they came off a cartoon. "If there's any change, or if that sheet dries out, give me a yell. I'll be just outside."

  I nodded. She left and I was alone with Nance. Her tall muscular frame was limp, her breathing so shallow she could've been a corpse. With her square jaw and those heavy black eyebrows, I just knew that no one had ever called her cute, or cuddled her, or dressed her up in something dish for a party. She had missed some. But those were her dues to the crowbar club. We had all missed a lot. For me it was okay. I was still alive, which was more than I figured I deserved. And as long as you're still alive, you got a chance to make it. Nance didn't look alive. She looked like all of her chances had been used up.

  I sat next to her bed on the built in couch to her right. I felt my eyes burn a bit. Nance moaned, opened her eyes, and reached up her arm. I took her hand in both of mine and held it. She glanced at me, closed her eyes and seemed to relax everything except the grip she had on my fingers.

  "Hey!" I called out. "Someone get up here!"

  Delia and Mercy Jane both poked their heads in through the door of the sled. "What is it, Bando?"

  "She opened her eyes and reached out. I even think she tried to say something."

  For the first time Mercy Jane's face seemed to relax. "Good. That's good." As Delia's face hung in the doorway, Mercy Jane climbed into the compartment and took Nance's pulse.

  "Does it mean she's coming out of it?"

  Jane raised an eyebrow at me. "Coming out of what?"

  "The anesthetic. What in the hell d'you think I'm talking about?"

  "We didn't have any anesthetic," remarked Delia.

  My guts went rigid with horror as a great empty pit seemed to yawn beneath me. "Nothing?"

  "Nothing."

  I blinked my eyes, trying not to accept the thing I had just been told. "Alcohol. What about the wine? The Hand camp had some wine. I know. They served me some."

  "No wine," answered Jane. She shook her head and said, "The alks and deadheads wiped out the wine within a couple hours after the fight. Like it was something out of the Stone Age, when I cut her open she had nothing but a bunch of hands holding her down."

  I began feeling more than a little queasy. "She was out, though, wasn't she? When you cut into her? She was unconscious, wasn't she?"

&nb
sp; I saw a nightmare rerunning behind Mercy Jane's eyes as she looked at Nance's face. "She was fully conscious when I opened her chest. I put a rolled rag between her teeth and eight yard monsters held her down." Mercy Jane closed her eyes and whispered, "God, did she scream. My head still aches from it." She took in a breath and let it out slowly. "Nance didn't pass out until I cut through the second rib." She opened her eyes and looked at me. "Do you want to see what I cut through her ribs with?"

  "No." I only mouthed the word.

  "Homemade bolt cutters. They were in the tools we captured from the Hand." She turned her face up toward the roof of the compartment. "I can't believe the penal authorities just dumped us here! No instruments, no medicines, no antiseptics, no anesthetics, nothing!" Mercy Jane lowered her head, rubbed her eyes, and sighed. "When she gets a little stronger, I'm going to have to go in there again.

  "Without anesthetic?"

  "Of course, without anesthetic!" For just a moment her face was contorted into a scarlet rage. In a flash it eased until she again spoke in a lifeless monotone. "Unless someone in that bunch you brought in today knows acupuncture or has something with them, it will be without anesthetic."

  "I'll find out."

  "Tough lady," Jane observed as she replaced Nance's arm on the bed and covered it with the sheet. "Tough lady," she repeated. Jane turned and went through the door.

  I studied Nance's face. She was always so tough. Now she was soft-looking for the first time. I never thought of her as being good looking. Maybe she was the kind of woman you'd use the word 'handsome' to describe, if you were really desperate. I could see a couple of little scars I'd never noticed before. I used to call her the Bride of Frankenstein, she was so big. Now she looked so helpless it made me want to cry.

  There was so much to do and I didn't know where to start. Somehow I'd have to get the column moving again. We couldn't sit here waiting for Nance to get better. We were still in the Forever Sand, and we only had so much water. Someway I was going to have to come up with some new RCs and get them trained in how we do things in the Razai. We'd have to reorganize some, too. We had almost twenty thousand in the gang, and that's too many for a hit-and-run investigator. We needed to assign RCs to each group.