Rafe stopped beside three people who had their arms around David ben Yehuda.
"Let me through!” Dave screamed. His face ran with sweat and tears.
The beam from Ari's stunner faltered, then died altogether, leaving him in the dark. “All he's got now is a shovel!” Dave cried hoarsely. Rafe hefted his blaster. It wasn't weighted for throwing. He'd need to get in closer.
"Stay back, Dave,” Rafe warned. “I'm going to try to throw the boy a blaster. That'll let him defend himself while we shoot through to him. He's a tough kid; we'll get him out."
Then they jerked their heads around as an accented voice shouted, “Move to the left, boy. I'm coming!"
Halgerd ran as if he outraced ten devils, one of which had already burned a chunk from his left leg, past the front line of stobor fighters, and toward the rock which the first wave of stobor were now beginning to surmount.
"Hold your fire!” screamed Rafe as Halgerd headed directly for the stobor. One good shock should warn him, he thought, though with that bad leg...
One shock was all it took. Halgerd grunted with surprise and pain, drew his legs under him, and leapt, a wide, shallow leap that brought him onto Ari's rock, where he flung one arm about the boy to steady himself, and began firing steadily, systematically at the creatures.
Pauli ran up beside Rafe, panting for breath. She braced herself against his shoulder and fired. Her aim was true.
Rafe pointed. Pauli swallowed. “Lohr marked him."
"He needs our help,” Rafe said.
"He's got it."
Ahead of them, Halgerd wavered visibly, recovered, and kept on firing. “I think he's weakening,” Pauli said. “How long can he hold out, after all he's been through? If he falls now, though, we stand to lose them both—"
"Here,” Halgerd roared. “Catch!"
Snatching the stocky Ari in one arm, Thorn Halgerd flung him over the line of blaster fire. The boy landed on top of Rafe, and they both went down. Then Halgerd fell, his arms and legs thrashing wildly half-in, half-out of the water that churned with stobor. Then he lay still.
There had to be at least six stobor there, Rafe thought with a groan.
Lohr scooped up his blaster and started burning a path to the river. He was firing methodically and he pressed forward as quickly as he could.
He made it to the shore, had pulled Halgerd from the murky water, then flung himself down, head on the man's chest. “No!” the boy said. “No more deaders. Not if I can help it!"
He thumped the man's chest, listened again, and swore. He tilted Halgerd's head back to clear the air passage, meticulously adjusted his hands over the man's sternum, and began to press down rhythmically. His lips moved as he counted.
"Do you believe that?” Rafe asked as Alicia Pryor staggered to Lohr's side. Rafe followed her, gulping back his tears. Only as the adults took over resuscitation did the boy let himself collapse.
"I think we've turned two lives around tonight,” Pauli said happily. She mopped at her eyes, and Rafe started to put an arm about her, but she coughed and swore that the smoke was choking her.
"Ari's fine. And he ... Thorn's going to make it,” Pryor announced. “Don't ask me how they augmented his circulatory system, but it's working."
"He's trying to talk,” three people spoke at once.
Though Pryor began to hush him, Thorn Halgerd struggled onto one elbow, his eyes searching out Lohr. He licked his lips, then tried to speak again.
"Why?"
Pauli shoved Lohr forward to face the man. “Answer him, dammit!"
"I ... Ari's my friend,” he said, eyes downcast, one foot scuffing in the dirt. “Besides, when we first got here, well, my little sister limps ‘cause there were these things, these eaters. They're all dead now, and they call it, call it genocide because the eaters grew up to be smart. To fly. It was wrong to kill them, but they did it to give us kids a chance to grow up straight. You ... I know you did a wrong thing too, but you gave Ari a chance. Ari would have died!” Then his face contorted, and he twisted away, burrowing against David ben Yehuda's side.
"Don’ ... don't understan'..."
"You will,” Alicia Pryor told him. “I promise that you will.” Thorn's eyes filled with tears and the question he was too weak to ask.
"Why? Let's just say that I knew your father a long time ago.” She smiled, and this time Halgerd smiled back. Then a spray hypo blanked the pain of his burnt leg, and sent him into sleep.
"'To sleep, perchance to dream?'” Pauli heard the medical officer muse. “God, I hope not."
When Thorn Halgerd's leg healed, he announced that he planned to climb to the lost Cynthians’ caves and live there by himself.
"If the caves housed your civilians, they'll do fine for me,” he'd told Pauli, Rafe, and Alicia, who had gathered to see him off. “In fact, they'll do better for me than for your people. I don't see the ghosts in them that you do.” Thorn's nostrils flared as if he relished the air. The weather was cold for spring, and the sky shone the color of amber in which tiny plumes were scattered. His eyes scanned the horizon appreciatively, then went dark. “I have enough ghosts of my own."
"I wish you'd reconsider,” Rafe said.
"You'd trust me? All of you? Even the civilians?"
"Lohr does. And we're all alone here,” said Pauli.
"You more so than most. If the scramble we watched is any indication, your Republic has all it can do fighting itself without checking out every one of the No Man's Worlds for settlements like ours."
How was her own side doing? It was pointless to ask. Now her “own side” was the humans on Cynthia. All of them.
"Look,” said ben Yehuda. “Call this a test to destruction. You don't destroy easy. In fact, I'd say you passed a test that your ... father didn't. You're definitely an improvement on the original."
Pryor stepped forward. “I have to agree with that. And you know,” she said very softly. “We could probably turn around that sterility of yours."
Thorn froze. “Is that why you saved me ... for the Halgerd genes?” At the look of sorrow on her face, his own face twisted, that eerie resemblance flickering between them again. Pryor shook her head.
Pauli opened her mouth to try, one last time, to persuade him to remain in the settlement.
"Let it be,” he said, his voice gentle, almost wistful. “I have to get away. Look, let me try to explain. You say that everyone's alone. Well, I never was before. All my life, there have been voices inside my head. Others just like me. Then they were gone, and I was just one piece of a lost whole. That's not what you call alone. That's something else.
"I almost died of it. You saw. Sometimes I wish I still could. Now, though, you tell me I'm unique, my own self, but it all still feels like having a brother killed inside my head. So I have to find out who ‘myself’ is; and I want to do it without a thousand voices clamoring at me.
"Besides, if I'm ever to live among you, I need to see those caves, to learn what price you paid to go on living. After all, I already know what price I—and my father—paid."
"And when you've learned what you have to?” Pryor asked.
He smiled at her. “Why then, I'll come back down, if you'll all still accept me. To take up the future you offered to an old friend's son.” There was no irony in those words, Pauli thought. Already, Thorn was drawing comfort from the generous illusion of a past that Pryor had helped him create. Pauli remembered the poem she had quoted to herself the night Thorn reached Cynthia. "Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something upon which to rejoice." Thorn would construct it quickly and well.
"You know,” Pryor compelled herself into a shaky laugh, “you take after your father? You're just as stubborn."
Thorn shouldered the pack containing the food, the heatcube, the comm, and the few other things he had consented to accept from them, and started toward the foothills.
"Wait!” From around the curve of the nearest dome raced Lohr, a long bundle of struts and gleaming fabr
ic bumping against his shoulder. His wings.
He came to a sliding stop and offered them to Halgerd. “They're a loan, see? You're a pilot; you'll know how to use them. So when you want to, you can come back down easier."
Thorn stared at the wings resting lightly on his hands. Gently he closed fingers around them. “I'll bring them back,” he promised.
He turned. Without looking back, he walked toward the foothills, favoring his burnt leg, but only a little. Silently they watched until all they could see was the sun glinting off his fair hair, and the metal of the wings he bore.
PART III
Bread of Affliction
Lo, this is the bread of affliction ...
—Passover Ritual
15
As the wind sent the snow dancing in the counterpoint of light and shadow cast by two moons, Pauli paced, waiting for Alicia Pryor to emerge from the dome that served the settlers as a medical center.
Scared, by God, of a feast. I must be losing my grip, she berated herself. She stamped her feet and the glittering snow crunched underfoot ... like scales ... Rafe and I climbed up to the eaves where the moths laired, and their scales lay scattered everywhere until we stole enough to kill them.
For an instant, the crisp snow and the white cloud of Pauli's breath reeked with the pheromones of moths, aroused for their mating dances in the thermals of the mountain passes.
Stop calling them moths, she corrected herself. They were Cynthians. Moth, Beneatha Angelou informed anyone who would listen, was a racist term. If you called the Cynthian natives moths, you created an excuse to think of them as less than human: bugs to be swatted out of the way as Pauli had ordered. But her order had wiped out intelligent creatures—humans in all but physical shape—and must not be softened by terms more suitable to pest control.
Wiped out. Had all the Cynthians been wiped out? One night Rafe had waked laughing from a dream of Cynthians swooping down from cliffs by a turbulent ocean. What about the other continents? he had asked. What if somewhere on this world (which they might never explore fully) Cynthians still flew, still built their pallid towers along the planet's magnetic lines, and still fled from their hideous young?
It was still genocide, Beneatha had declared when the subject of Rafe's dream came up. Just the attempt, just the thought, was enough to brand them: and they had succeeded too well as it was. If that's how she feels, why invite me to this feast of hers?
Pauli paced back and forth. Where was Pryor? Her feet were damp, damp on the frozen earth. Not earth, she reminded herself. Earth is long lost to us; this is just soil.
Whatever you called it, however much you escaped being Earthbound in speech and heritage, the ground was cold. Stupid field boots should have been proof against winter snows but they weren't. One of the techs was working on a way of replacing boots when their service issue wore out. Now that was a nice, satisfying task: you mended soles, stitched them, kept heels level, and considered the ways of making a better boot. You could do far worse on Cynthia than be a cordwainer.
For example, you could be a ... a leader. Then you would have no chance to retreat to the comfort of physical work. Your task would be to make the decisions no one else wanted to make, to face—and keep on facing—issues those who followed you would have probably rather forgotten. Your tools were logistics, psychology, nerve, and will. Your products were the decisions you made, and had to live with, you and those you protected.
Boots would have been far easier. If you made them wrong, the most it would cost you was a blister.
"Waiting long?” came Alicia Pryor's voice, almost as clear as the air itself.
Pauli grunted. “What was it?"
"Tonsils,” said the physician. “With all the screaming that the littlests have been doing, I'm not surprised. Sorry, though, to have kept you outside. I didn't want to resterilize."
Tonsils. No wonder, given all the children's screaming over what had occupied their attention for the past week: Beneatha's invitation to re-create Kwanzaa, a holiday honoring Earth traditions that she and her family had carried with them on every planet they'd touched. For the past week, ‘Cilla had run about, her pale hands splotched with green, black, and red, while Lohr had made life hideous trying to force songs from a crude flute. Washington had made a total pest of himself by rehearsing his friends in Kiswahili; privately, Pauli thought that if he asked habiri ganu—"what's happening"—one more time, she might show him what was happening in no uncertain way.
But her irritations were not important. What was important was the children's delight in every facet of the holiday: its history, the seven symbols laid out on the mkeka, or mats ("they should be of cornhusks, but Kwanzaa calls for kuumba or creativity, so we'll improvise"), the whittling of a seven-branched kinara that had made David ben Yehuda stifle a smile, a frenzy of crafting, painting, and sewing of decorations and gifts.
Then there were the names. Many of the children, especially those of black ancestry, had chosen new names to mark Kwanzaa; so the Jamies, the Annes, the Johns, and the other names that the refugees had either remembered or been given once the relief squads had found them had given way to Toussaint, Mahairi, or Samory: “freedom names,” Beneatha called them. ‘Cilla had experimented with calling herself Kizzie, but “my name is Lohr,” her brother had said; and that was that.
"Cold,” muttered Pryor. “Hell with resterilizing; I shouldn't have left you standing out there.” She stamped and breathed on too-thin fingers. The face she turned toward Pauli was tired, its meager flesh clinging too closely to the fine bones beneath. Violet circles underlay the physician's eyes, pale blue, but sparkling in the doubled moonlight.
Her anti-agathics were fading. The thought had occurred to her several times as the winter wore on. Anti-agathics had been plentiful enough for Pryor in her past career as a privileged researcher, but Cynthia colony ad few such luxuries. Fear clutched at Pauli's belly until the odors of hot food, wafting toward her over the clear air, made it clench with hunger too. How can I persuade her to divert enough resources to try synthesizing them? We can't risk losing her.
Pryor walked more briskly toward the dome where yellowish lights shone and from which came laughter and singing. “Where's Rafe?"
Pauli grimaced. “Minding Serge. The karamu—that's the feast on the seventh day of this holiday—lasts all night; and he refuses to let me spell him."
Actually what Rafe had said was a lot closer to “You can't hide behind me all the time, Pauli love. You'll go, and—who knows?—you might enjoy it. Or are you scared?"
"You know it,” Pauli had said. A firefight would be easier. I know about firefights—or I did once. Beneatha had fought her and Rafe every step along the way Cynthia colony had gone to insure its own survival. And now Beneatha was their hostess. It made for a certain amount of discomfort.
Pryor sniffed appreciatively at the dancing snow and, underlying the tang of the snow, the half-frozen river, and the smells of human habitation and production, the food that Beneatha and many of the botany/agronomy types had spent days preparing from their first harvest on Cynthia. If the eager clamor of the littlests ... well, if they didn't help much, at least they no longer pilfered and got in the way.
It was good to see the children insisting on their own lives, their own joys. It was likely to be a good feast. The only problem was, that the woman hosting it had consistently opposed every one of Pauli's decisions: damned ambiguous hospitality.
She must have said that aloud, because Dr. Pryor laughed dryly.
"I don't think so,” she said. “You know, I once heard a proverb that came—or so they told me—from Africa, the part of Earth that Beneatha's ancestors must once have lived in. ‘Come into my home; sit at my table; then you will know me.'” She shrugged, and they walked in silence, their worn boots squeaking on the dry snow, which glistened like blue and green gems or scales from the moons and the sodium lamps that the life-science techs had set up about the domes they had appropriated.
&nb
sp; Pauli sensed that the older woman was waiting for her to speak, and she determined to outwait her. Finally Pryor chuckled dryly. “Good for you, Pauli!” Then her voice turned almost hesitant. “Have you heard anything from Thorn?"
Pauli tilted her head up at the physician. “I thought that you'd be the one to hear from him.” An incongruous bond linked them: aging aristocrat and renegade fighter cloned from cells of a man who had been Pryor's lover in a life no one on Cynthia could comprehend.
"I've tried,” Pryor admitted. Her voice all but shook. “Can't raise him. Either the snowstorms block reception, or...” She shuddered.
Pauli stopped and looked at the woman. He may be sick, or he might have fallen, be lying there now, alone. He grew up on ships: what can he know of planets and their winters? No wonder Alicia's eyes were shadowed. “After this Kwanzaa business is over,” she promised, “perhaps someone can go after him."
Go up into the hills, seek out the lair of the dead Cynthians to which the clone had exiled himself to assure themselves that a pilot who had helped devastate the homeworlds of a hundred children here hadn't broken his stiff neck? Right. But Pryor's face relaxed, losing lines and ten years in the process; and Pauli was glad of her words. Wasn't gift-giving connected with this holiday of Beneatha's? Then her promise was a small enough gift to the physician.
"They're here!” came a joyous cry from the dome at the end of the row. Three children erupted past the doors as they irised, and half ran, half slid in the packed snow toward them, grabbing hands, dragging them into a splendor of warmth and fragrances that made Pauli blink away tears.
Posters boldly drawn in red, black, and green hung from the drab walls like tapestries, while ‘Cilla sat in a corner near the one empty wall space, painting frantically away at the poster that would fill it. She frowned, her tongue sticking out in concentration, her hands and face smeared with red and green as usual. Seeing Pauli, though, she leapt up with a grin, waving the poster to dry it.
Heritage of Flight Page 17
