First Family

by Patrick Tilley

  ‘Christoper Columbus! Don…? What the eff-eff are you doing here?’

  Donna stared at him, aware that she also knew him but unable to reconcile that knowledge with the way he looked now. ‘I don’t believe it. Brickman? Steve Brickman…?’ The words came out with a husky, whispering laugh.

  ‘Yeah.’ Steve laid aside his rifle and knelt down. The right side of her patched, camouflaged tunic was stained with fresh blood. He lifted her right arm gently and saw the entry wound. The tail vanes of the ten-inch long bolt were just visible. ‘That must hurt…

  Lundkwist’s sweat-stained face puckered up in a rueful grin. ‘Well, I ain’t about to dance Turkey in the Middle.’

  ‘Can you move at all?’

  ‘Only from the neck up. I was able to crawl this far yesterday with Tom helping me but –’ she caught her breath, ‘– don’t think I did myself much good. Bolt must’ve, uhh… lodged in my spine.’

  Steve laid a hand on her swollen belly. ‘This is crazy. How come they sent you out like this?’

  ‘Relax. I’m not about to be a guard-mother. It’s a UHF radio pack. Foam rubber with… water ballast… colour-matched to my skin. You gotta get real close to spot the joins.’

  ‘Certainly fooled me. But what happens if –’

  ‘Lump-heads never manhandle or maltreat pregnant women – no matter where they come from. Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘I know they believe the unborn child is something special. Unfortunately for you it seems they forgot.’

  ‘Yesterday they couldn’t see who they were shooting at.’

  ‘And yet they still hit every one of you.’

  ‘Don’t remind me…’

  Steve hesitated, uncertain how to frame the question he needed to ask. ‘Have you, uhh – sent a May-Day out on that thing?’

  ‘Not yet. There’s a concealed zipper but I haven’t been able to reach it with my teeth.’

  ‘Does that mean…?’

  ‘Yeah. You’re gonna have to tell them what’s happened.’

  ‘I don’t know the call-codes you’ve been using.’

  ‘It’s S.O.P. Brickman. Feed in your own, and ask for help. Once you’ve identified yourself, the set will tell you whatever you need to know.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, of course.’ He cursed under his breath. ‘This is a real bitch. I wish I’d known you were part of this operation.’

  ‘Would it have changed things if you had?’

  Steve spread his hands. ‘If I could’ve stopped this happening I would’ve. You guys blew the whole deal by leaving a trail a mile wide. Getting caught was not supposed to be part of the plan.’

  ‘Yeah… kind of a mess, huh?’

  ‘The worst…’

  A spasm of pain creased her forehead. ‘Guess… guess I’m lucky you came along. Tom couldn’t have held out for long… bleeding too bad… was worried in case he… he didn’t take me with him.’ Her eyes held his. ‘But you I can count on, eh, compadre?’

  Steve grimaced. ‘Absolutely, but… are you sure this is what you want? Maybe there’s –’

  ‘Listen, the way things are, you’re doing me a favour, right?’

  ‘Right…’

  ‘Is Tom, uhh…?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ said Steve quietly, realising that Lundkwist could not even turn her neck. Great Sky-Mother, what a way to go. He stroked Lundkwist’s forehead as he eased the combat knife from the sheath on his leg. ‘Tell me something. How long have you been with AMEXICO?’

  ‘You’re not supposed to ask things like that. But seeing how things are… I passed out of Rio Lobo the year before I went to the Academy. And guess what? I filed a report recommending you for selection.’ Lundkwist bit back a jagged shaft of pain and managed to lop-sided smile. ‘Some joke, huh?’ Her breathing became laboured. ‘Listen, promise me one thing. Don’t let ’em… y’know – eat me…’

  ‘I promise.’

  She closed her eyes. ‘Thanks. It was the one thing I… dreaded.’

  Steve ran his fingers over Lundkwist’s unkempt hair and down onto the nape of her neck, tilting her head back and towards him. He laid his lips gently on her eyelids and on her half-open mouth.

  ‘Lips are dry,’ she whispered. ‘D’you have any water?’

  ‘Yeah, sure, here – lemme help you…’ He grasped her hair firmly, pulled her head as far back as it would go, placed the tip of the knife blade against the curve of her throat and drove it up into her brain.

  Drink, sweet Mother…

  Sixteen

  The trading party, led by Mr Snow and Blue-Thunder, included nearly three hundred Bears, a hundred She-Wolves and a hundred and fifty camp followers and baggage handlers. The thirty-two captive renegades, once again bound side-by-side in pairs like yoked oxen, were dispersed throughout the column.

  Leaving Southern Wyoming, the procession wound its way northeastwards across territory once held by the Da-Kota and the Minnesota, ancient bloodlines that had been swept away as the She-Kargo grew strong and moved westwards from its birthplace by the sacred waters of Me-Sheegun.

  Although they were now crossing land occupied by rival clans there was no challenge to their progress. The turf marker poles’ carried aloft from head to tail of the column, and decorated with fluttering pennants and garlands of leaves or spring flowers, announced their peaceful intentions. This was the time known to the Mutes as ‘Walking on the Water’ – a brief period when ancient rivalries were suspended while the Plainfolk clans gathered to trade with the Iron Masters.

  The M’Call party proceeded at what they regarded was a leisurely pace but which, for their captives, resembled a forced march. Posses, usually four-hands strong, ran ahead bearing raised turf poles, circling wide on each flank before returning to the column to report what they had seen. There was no hunting; to take meat on someone else’s ‘patch’ would have been a violation of the truce. Unless gifts of food were offered, clans only ate what they had brought with them. At sunset each day, the decorated poles were planted to form a large square. A bonfire was lit in the centre from which smaller cooking fires were kindled. The breakers were fed and watered then shackled securely for the night. Fire songs were sung, a little rainbow grass got passed around then everybody settled down for the night in their travelling furs.

  As a mark of their friendship, Steve was allowed to travel alongside Mr Snow. He did not mention the reappearance of his own knife and the loss of Naylor’s, or seek to discover who might have made the switch. With the unfortunate demise of the back-up team, the problem had become irrelevant. There was now no one to contact. When he had brought the skimmer back to the waiting Mutes and had stepped ashore bearing Lundkwist’s severed head and those of her two companions, he had been acclaimed as a brother Bear. Night-Fever, who had moved into his hut during his absence, was now the proud guardian of six heads mounted on poles on either side of the door. Steve was glad he had to leave with the trading party before the fire-hardened stakes had been hammered through the skulls. He found the custom quite repellent but he had no plans to interfere. For a Tracker to be allowed to run with the Bears was an extraordinary accomplishment. It had cost him dear to get this far and he did not intend to do or say anything that would destroy the tenuous trust he had managed to establish. What the Mutes did by brute force, the Federation achieved with the aid of technology – and on a much wider scale. Their hands were clean but their methods were equally barbarous.

  At Rio Lobo, Steve had been given access to detailed relief maps of almost all the continental United States. These had been projected on a huge screen covering one end of a briefing room where he had met with Karlstrom on six separate occasions. For the Operational Direction to take such a personal interest could only mean that MX regarded operation SQUAREDANCE as being of the utmost importance. Cadillac had spoken of the wheel-boats riding up the ‘Yellow Stone, the Miz-Hurry and the Miz-Hippy’. From his study of the maps and the direction in which the column was heading, Steve had confidently expected th
e meeting with the Iron Masters to take place on the banks of the Missouri. When they crossed this below a vast expanse of water, he fully expected them to halt at the Mississippi. He was wrong again. Either Cadillac had been mistaken or he had not been telling the truth. Probably the latter, Steve decided. When pressed for more information about the Iron Masters, the young wordsmith had become noticeably evasive. He had behaved in much the same way when Steve had first questioned him about Talisman.

  The M’Call delegation continued on towards an absolutely gigantic stretch of water, reaching its shore near the overgrown ruins of a pre-Holocaust site that had borne the name of Duluth. Lake Superior, in the poetic imagery of the Mute wordsmiths was truly a ‘great river’.

  Reflecting on the choice of rendezvous, Steve realised that it made sense. When looking at the maps, he had assumed the Iron Masters would travel south-west down the Ohio River then turn north up the Mississipi finally branching left along the Missouri into the heart of Plainfolk territory. But this would have brought them dangerously close to the eastern flank of the Federation’s overground estate – the New Territory of Kansas. Instead, they had chosen a circuitous northern route, via Lake Erie, Lake Huron and across Lake Superior. A big spread of water. Any Mute making the return trip would be everlastingly grateful to see dry land again.

  When the M’Calls arrived at the trading post, several other clans were already setting up camp nearby. The site was marked by a carved and painted pole three to four feet wide and some fifty feet high standing on a flat stretch of ground near the shore. The traditional hosts were the clans of the bloodline San’Paul whose turf bordered the ‘great river’. The camp site was octagonal, with the clans of the She-Kargo and D’Troit occupying opposite sides. As they were the most numerous, they were each allocated two sections; the remaining four were allotted to the lesser bloodlines – the San’Paul, the San’Louis, the M’Waukee, and the C’Natti. Although they were all ‘of the Plainfolk’, they were resolutely dedicated to fighting each other for forty-seven weeks of the year. The other five encompassed the present truce; seven hectic days of trading plus fourteen days on either side to cover the journey to and from the trading post.

  If, through the spirit of Talisman, this brief harmony could have been prolonged, then the San’Paul and M’Waukee would probably have aligned themselves with the She-Kargo; the San’Louis and the C’Natti with the D’Troit. It was the clans of the D’Troit which posed the biggest threat to the She-Kargo’s primacy amongst the Plainfolk. For these two groups, ‘Walking on the Water’ was like balancing on a knife edge because they were – literally – at daggers drawn.

  In the past hundred years the truce had been broken twenty-three times with the D’Troit leading fourteen to nine. Disputes resulting in minor injuries were not regarded as an infringement. Black marks – or points of honour, depending on your point of view – marked a more serious incident ending in one or more fatality as a result of knives being drawn. According to Mr Snow, the D’Troit had always been mean mothers and were evidently quite content to do whatever was necessary to maintain this ‘bad guy’ image, leaving the field of honour to the She-Kargo. To Steve, they sounded like the team to watch.

  Over the next forty-eight hours, the rest of the trading parties arrived and set up camp alongside others of the same blood-line. The carved trading post which was situated near the beach where the Iron Masters’ boats would run ashore, towered over an open square of ground delineated by stones in which the bargaining would take place. In the unoccupied centre of the nearby octagonal camp-site was a smaller eight-sided area known as the ‘bull-ring’. At each corner was a stack of wood some six feet high. Mr Snow explained that these stacks would be ignited when the wheel-boats arrived and would be kept burning till they left. The ‘bull-ring’ was where formal meetings between representatives of the various clans were held, and where the wordsmiths congregated to exchange information. They also took turns to recount the history of the Plainsfolk to spellbound audiences and it was here, when darkness fell, that the fire-songs were performed, the singers vying with each other in extolling the bravery and feats of arms of their clan-brothers and sisters.

  By tradition, no one was permitted to carry weapons inside the area enclosed by the octagon or outside the limits of their alloted camp site. It was also the custom for groups of extravagantly decorated warriors to parade around the perimeter of the camp, eye-balling the opposition and generally being provocative. Any group engaged in this activity was said to be ‘strutting their stuff’. The verbal exchanges – usually mocking remarks and thinly-veiled insults delivered via the elliptical syntax of ‘fire-speech’ was the main cause of the sporadic outbreaks of violence. Line capos, working in groups containing a representative from each bloodline and empowered to break heads if necessary, were usually successful in quelling any disturbance before it got out of hand.

  Mr Snow was concerned that there could be trouble this time too. When the clans had all pitched camp around the lines, it became apparent that the M’Calls had snagged a record number of renegades. To make matters worse, they had caught more than the whole of the D’Troit camp put together. Their best haul – by the clan D’Vine, an old enemy of the M’Calls, was a paltry seven. The D’Troit were clearly discountenanced by their rivals good fortune and things were not helped by exuberant groups of M’Call Bears strutting their stuff and boasting about their encounter with one of the dreaded iron snakes.

  Steve who, at eighteen, felt he had already seen enough trouble to last him a lifetime stayed well back from the action. This gathering of representative groups from every clan was an amazing sight and he was acutely aware that he was probably the first Tracker not only to witness but to participate in such an event. Renegades taken over the past few years had witnessed some of what he was seeing now but they had not returned to tell that story. He would. This was a unique opportunity to observe the Plainfolk and he intended to make the most of it.

  Decked out in his feathered helmet and body plates that had been lovingly adorned by Night-Fever, Steve wandered around noting everything he saw and heard. It was fascinating to watch the interaction of the various groups. Karlstrom had said that the Mutes had no sense of nationhood and no coherent command structure. Yet here they were, sharing the same patch of ground and a common cause and engaging in a dialogue of sorts. The way the camp was organised, the existence of the peace-keeping groups of line capos and the fact that similar gatherings had taken place over the last hundred years was proof that cooperation between the various clans and bloodlines was possible. But the sad fact was, in spite of this annual beanfeast, there was no inter-breeding or trade between clans, no pooling of resources. It all fell apart the moment everybody got back home.

  It was hard to figure out why this should be so but it seemed to confirm the theme that was hammered home in the inspirational videos put out by the First Family: that only strong, inspired leadership could create an ordered and disciplined society where people could live and work together in harmony. The Mutes were able to achieve this sense of togetherness at clan level but could not, or would not, take it further. The idea of living at peace with their neighbours seemed to them as absurd as their ideas about life and death had first seemed to Steve. The reasons that lay behind their present attitude must have been burned deep into the Mute psyche by The War of a Thousand Suns, or its painful aftermath – the period Mr Snow had called The Great Ice-Dark when it seemed that no living thing remained on the surface of the earth.

  Darkness was the operative word. The Manual of the Federation only contained a few bald paragraphs about the first two hundred years of its existence. There were, of course, screenfuls of patriotic guff about the legendary wisdom and foresight of the Founding Father, George Washington Jefferson the 1st and the sacrificial valour of the Minutemen and Foragers. But there was no hard data, no explanation for the Holocaust apart from attributing the entire blame on the Mutes, no details as to exactly where the First Family ca
me from or how they rose to power, or any hint that – as Mr Snow had claimed – that Mutes and Trackers had once shared a common heritage.

  Steve knew, deep down, that he would never rest until he had uncovered the last secret. Sooner or later, he would have to go back in order to find a way into the electronic bowels of COLUMBUS. The desire to know had become an obsession, stronger even than his desire for Clearwater, but he could not understand why it should be so. He had not consciously chosen this path. Once again, as so often in the past, Steve had the clear impression that the choice had not been his to make, that despite all his cleverness and cunning he was nothing more than a pawn in a game he had not even begun to comprehend.

  Although much given over to moments of introspection, Steve did not allow himself to dwell overlong on such questions. This latest fog of incertitude was quickly swept away by the surge of excitement generated by the sighting of the wheel-boats.

  They appeared on the horizon at the same time as the rising sun, a conjunction whose significance Steve was not able to appreciate until much later. Three specks which slowly grew into dark, squat blobs. As they drew nearer still, the outlines became clearer. Smoke curled from two tall, thin funnels set on either side of the square superstructure. Apart from the inflatable skimmer – one of the special devices used only by AMEXICO – Steve had never seen pictures of boats or ships before. The video-archives that could be accessed via the Public Service Channels contained no reference to such things. The First Family had obviously decided that, as far as ordinary Trackers were concerned, waterborne vehicles fell into the category of extraneous information – along with the Iron Masters, Mute magic and, well – only COLUMBUS knew what else.