Bertingas doubled the thread over three times and tied it to a notch in the bow. He bent the stick across his knee and tied the other end. Without pausing to admire his workmanship, he crouched over the notched block, holding it with his bare toes. The drill stick fitted into the notch, and the pad fitted over the top of the drill. A loop in the doubled thread gripped the stem and whirled it around as he sawed back and forth with the bow.
The block wobbled, and he pushed harder with his toes to steady it. The top pad wiggled on the drill until his hand found exactly the right angle and the right pressure for holding it. His stroke with the bow smoothed and found its rhythm: not so fast that the point of the drill rode up out of the notch; not so slowly that it dug into the wood and stuck.
Back and forth, back and forth. The sweat rolled down from his armpit and soaked the cloth along his side. Then the wind came and made that place cold.
Back and forth. He was about to give up. The old books were wrong. No Human had ever made wood smoke and burn this way. It was the wrong wood. Too much sap. Or not enough.
A spark suddenly tumbled out of the notch, fell on the rock. Bertingas dropped his tools and covered it with a promising leaf. The spark went out.
He quickly picked up drill, pad, and bow; found his angle; began sawing again.
In another minute or two, the blackened pit of the notch smoked and gave forth another spark. Bertingas ignored it. Then two or three sparks. He sawed fester. The tip of his drill flared into flame.
He dropped everything again and bent down. He blew on it, and the flame rose up the width of his little finger. Without looking, he reached for a piece of leaf and pushed it into the notch. It burned quickly. Another, and another. He piled on his tinder, then his small sticks.
It made a light by which he could see the backs of his hands, sense the reflection off his gaunt cheekbones. He could just feel a beginning of warmth against his face when a sound caught his attention. A crackle of brush, a tramp of feet. Far off now, but growing.
With a hiss that was almost a curse, Bertingas spread the fire and batted the flames out with his hands. He kicked shavings and tinder to the four corners of the wide spot where he had crouched, and a growling noise came involuntarily from his throat. There were tears in his eyes, and not from the smoke.
Taddeuz Bertingas was ready to sit down right there, slump cold and exhausted, and wait for his pursuers—the first patrol he had heard in two days—to find him.
Let them take him to some place with light and warmth, even if they had a lock on the door and chains on his legs. Let them take him to real food, even if it was a crust of dry bread, and his last meal. Let them kill him. At least he would be warm for a moment.
But these thoughts passed in an instant. He gathered himself to himself. He slipped on his bark shoes. He picked up his drill, his bow, notched block, and flint blade. And he faded into the trees.
Chapter 14
Regis Sallee: TICKLER
Regis Sallee chose his moment exactly: two minutes into the melon course of a state breakfast. The honorees this morning were the Latifundist Association. Salt of the earth, the landholders, but boring people. More interested in labor fees, title law, export prices, and weather control than in real politics.
What must it be like, to live and strive for half a corona more on the price of beet juice, and care not a fig for dominance?
This was the perfect audience before which to drop his grenade.
“I say, m’dear . . . ?” The vocipulators picked up his voice and carried it, as they were intended, through the bubbles of conversation around the table.
Deirdre turned, a wedge of yellow pulp on a spoon halfway to her mouth. The look she gave him was not that of a loving bride.
“Have you reached a decision about the nomination?”
“There never was a doubt of it, Regis.” Her voice came back through the same system, and everyone in the room could hear. “We are pledged to Roderick.”
“Pledged, but not bonded.”
The cattleman sitting at Regis’ left put down his spoon, wiped his mouth, and turned to look at the governor.
“A mere technicality. I will have the consent codes, I am sure, from all loyal Pact subjects. I am glad to report that the—um—majority of our friends here have graciously provided me with their codes.”
Around the table, spoons tinkled onto plates and a smarter of applause echoed. Some of it was muffled by napkins clutched in one hand or the other.
“Majority, m’dear? Some but not all? Of our loyal friends?” That was according to script.
“Indeed.”
“Do they have doubts, do you think?”
“Certainly not! They know where their loyalties lie—and to whom. I am sure they have merely been too preoccupied with matters of business, the harvest, taking care of their bondworkers, to provide the codes in a timely manner. An oversight, I assure you.”
“Yet some have doubts.” Regis looked right and left with his eyes. This was not according to the script. He noted subtle hesitations among both the guests at their food and the servants moving plates.
So there were spies in the Palace staff. Well, he knew that already, just not who all of them were. He made a rapid catalog of faces and badges—the names would come later.
Amelia Ceil threw down her napkin.
“We support you, Deirdre. You can trust that. We support order, peace, law, and a settled market. But Roderick . . .”
“He’s a puppet,” someone on the far side of the table said sharply.
“Better than a combination of the traders,” someone else whispered.
“I know My Lord Roderick ten Holcomb . . .” Governor Sallee began.
“Rather too well,” Regis supplied in a grunt, deep in his throat, unheard by the vocipulators.
“He has his father’s values. He appreciates the work that all of his subjects, but especially you stewards on the land, have done to promote and defend the Principles of Pact. Once elected, he will continue the program of expansion and development that his father—”
“Grandfather,” from down the table.
“Great-grandfather,” from the other side.
“—supported with his every waking thought.”
“When he was sober,” in a whisper.
“Which wasn’t often,” in rejoinder.
“We will not have a war, Deirdre!” Amelia Ceil barked.
“Of course not!” the governor replied.
“But others will. Spile makes open war for the Chair. He has support from many sources.”
“Mad dogs and traitors,” from Deirdre.
“Of course. The man is mad himself,” Amelia Ceil conceded. “No one denies that. Still, he leads by example. There are others, no less ambitious and not at all mad, who would push him along his course, as far as he can go, watch him burn down to a greasy spot both himself and everything in his path . . . Then they would slide in behind him with real strength.”
“If you have evidence of such plotting against the Pact,” the governor said, “it is a crime to withhold it, Amelia.”
“Of course I don’t have evidence! But I know what everyone knows, if they have eyes to see and a brain to think.”
Regis noted a white-coated waiter drifting close to the Mistress of Greengallow’s shoulder. The man—for he was a Human—had big, loose hands and held them about at the level of Ceil’s neck.
“Roderick and the Central Fleet will stand against all such mischief-makers,” Deirdre Sallee affirmed.
“If he gets our consent,” from Ceil.
“You have given yours.”
“An indication of willingness only, Deirdre. Not my promise. And not my code.”
Others around the table were nodding and murmuring agreement.
The waiter with the big hands turned away sharply and made himself busy at the sideboard, preparing the protein course. It was steak and eggs with a salmon sauce. Regis wondered how many here could eat it, or keep
it, after this interchange.
His mission was well accomplished.
Chapter 15
Taddeuz Bertingas: TAKE-OUT
Thick and hot, the blood ran over Bertingas’ lower lip and trickled through the beard stubble on his chin. He stopped only long enough to wipe it back with the heel of his hand, then licked his palm. Immediately he set again to ripping chunks out of the animal’s liver with his teeth.
When about half a kilogram was choked down, and the gorging frenzy was off him, Bertingas paused to consider.
Was it an animal?
It had moved on four legs, each tipped with a single callused pad that might have been a hoof in the early evolutionary stages. It had grazed along the forest floor and the lower tree limbs, nibbling anything green and flickering its short, black-striped tail. Its eyes were on the sides of its head, like a herd animal, a sky watcher, a prey. Not toward the front, like a predator. It might have been a sort of proto-deer, except its high, domed skull was innocent of any horns. Its white hide was covered with short, stiff bristles, like a hog’s.
When he had met it on the trail, the animal—call it a Bristle Deer—had stared at him stupidly. Someone not so hungry might have said its stare was more . . . thoughtful. The creature had hardly flinched when Bertingas put his flint-tipped spear against the yoke of his throat and pushed once, hard.
As far he was concerned, the Bristle Deer was a dumb animal. He saw no possibility of it being an undiscovered intelligence. It was just an unclassified fauna of the Palaccio Uplands, possibly very rare, but also very tasty.
He could feel the nourishment pour through him from the broad, glistening organ he thought of as the liver. At least it had been in the right place for a terrestrial mammal’s liver—once he had hacked through the skin of the belly with his spear blade and pulled the carcass open with the help of a short stick.
The Bristle Deer—call it Odocoileus bertingasi—was wealth, health, perhaps life itself to Bertingas. He would mine the flanks for steaks, to supplement the berries and grubs that had been his diet for the last week. He would strip and scrape the hide for a sturdy outer garment and moccasins, to make up for the cloak of dried grasses he was wearing next to his ragged underwear and his bark slippers, which were thin and falling apart. He would peel the tendons for a bowstring, slice the intestines for food pouches, chip the top off the skull for a water cup, crack the long bones for arrowheads and fish hooks. He would boil the small bones for glue and shave the bristles to fletch his arrows.
With this deer, he could continue the long trek indefinitely. He felt like thanking it for the gift of his life.
What a difference a week in the wild country had made in him. Would any of his friends recognize this savage who had killed an animal with a sharp stone and ripped its meat with his teeth? Would they believe it was the same Deputy Director of Communications for Aurora Cluster? Formerly the archivist of the Baseform Platter and adherent of Veracitor principles? A svelte urbanite of Meyerbeer and resident of the plush Satellite Villas. Rubber of elbows, almost, with Central Centrists such as Deirdre Sallee and Selwin Praise. Would anyone believe it?
Yes, Halan Follard would. He knew all about Tad’s penchant for escaping to the high country, to the winds and the deep woods. Still, Follard knew Bertingas went on his treks with the latest in gear: a tent of thermal silk, a ground roll of spring fibers and memory-malleable airbeads, boots of moleskin with steel shanks, nutrient syrups with the savor of a banquet if not the substance, a convection heater with leaves of light metal that folded down to the size of a candle in his pocket.
What Follard didn’t know was that Tad had also studied the old ways—of the Sioux, the Yakut, the Inuit, the Polynesian, and the Wahabi—for surviving on the land. It was from them he had learned to chip flint, strip a sapling, and wait along a game trail for the first unwary mammal.
It had taken a week to bring down his first deer. To be honest, he’d had more than mere survival on his mind. A dozen times in the waiting and walking Bertingas had been interrupted. Where he expected the delicate footfalls of an animal large enough to kill, he heard on the trail the crashing, crackling, limb-snapping progress of a Human patrol. One not trained to the woods and to silent stalking. Therefore, soldiers.
As his hands worked on the deer, picking the parts he wanted, his eyes and ears scanned the perimeter of this place among the trees. If anyone came upon him before he had time to prepare a cache pit and hide the remains—even the blood-soaked soil from beneath the carcass—he would have to run very fast.
It would help to have advance warning, just a whisper on the wind or flash of movement along the hillside. And . . .
What was this?
Right at hand, not five meters from his dinner table, a Leila tree grew. Bertingas had been looking for one since he had tumbled out of the aircar. Of the thousands of known and classified flora on Palaccio, this was one of two that were known to be poisonous. The other, Nerium khan, was pure death to touch in any form—root, bark, leaf, seed, sap. A drop of rainwater falling from the smallest leaf of Nerium was a Borgia’s cup.
The Leila was more friendly. Its sap, on entering the bloodstream, caused drowsiness, disorientation, and a stupor lasting some hours. That interaction, however, neutralized the sap; so flesh from an animal or bird taken with a Leila dart was still wholesome and untainted. Game killed with a smear of Nerium was inedible.
Bertingas had planned to make some birding arrows, once he found something to fletch them with. A blunt stone weighting the tip would stun birds and small animals among the treetops without rending the small bodies or pinning them among the boughs. Leila was better. A thorn or bone sliver, tipped with the sap, could be blown from a short pipe. If he had a short pipe . . . perhaps carved from a shinbone of the deer, or cut from a stout reed.
As he policed the area of his kill, making the ground smooth and clean, he took a cutting from the Leila. While he continued down along the path, he used a piece of sharp flint, left over from his spear making, to cut and smooth and hollow out his selected shinbone. He could make a flute, if he knew how to play one—or a deadlier instrument.
When the bone was to his liking, Bertingas stuck it in the back of his grass belt to dry and grow hard.
His hands, always moving, went to work on the Leila cutting. He peeled away bark and cambium, and split away strips of the inner wood. Each fresh surface he rubbed with the side of his thumb to coax the sap out, making first a gummy curl, then a tight brown ball of sticky narcotic. He dropped these into a sack of deer’s intestine.
Toward evening, when his legs were about walked out, Bertingas arrived at his destination. During the last three hours he had been climbing. For anyone lost in the woods, he knew, this was generally a bad policy. Downhill, following the natural course of water, takes the weary traveler to the lowlands; to the place of social, intelligent beings; to the sea, if there is one on the planet. Uphill takes you to the peaks, the dry rocklands, the interior wastes. Yet Bertingas was following no haphazard trail.
He knew, without his AID to tell him, that he’d abandoned the aircar within 200 kilometers of the Uplands Hyperwave Station. It was one of the few in the system that were planet bound, instead of being lodged on a moon or free-floating asteroid. Since capturing, suspending, feeding, turning, and shooting laser messages through a massive singularity was potentially dangerous work, the stations were placed beyond the pale of civilization. On a new planet like Palaccio, that was about 500 klicks out of town.
Bertingas had been moving toward it, more or less, for the past week. He had been interrupted only by the need to avoid hostile searchers and find water sources along the way.
On a scarp about thirty meters above him, the station grew like some giant puffball feeding on the rocks. The round containment for the singularity gave the building its shape. From the cover of the trees, Bertingas studied it. He noted the waveguides that traded microwave signals, through repeater stations, with Meyerbeer. He list
ened for the background rumble—barely audible above the light wind—of the fusion generator. The power system was under autonomous control, with backups. And, if the worst of bad days happened and the backups went down, the system would automatically switch over and draw 500 megawatts of power through the microwave signal system. Uplands Station had every priority it needed to maintain its power stream.
If it ever failed, and the field that suspended the singularity dropped, Palaccio would die.
No one had ever seen a planet collapse from the black cancer of a gravity singularity eating out its core. Aurora Cluster’s permit for Uplands Station still called for a systemwide evacuation in the event of a fifty percent power fluctuation.
There, in the fabric of the cliffs, he could feel it: the rumble-tumble-grumble of the generator. All was well.
Oh no it wasn’t!
As Bertingas watched, the ground-level hatch undogged and swung wide. A Human in some kind of uniform, dark green coveralls with heavy boots, stepped out and looked around. He walked over to a flat rock about stool high and sat down in the evening sun. He propped a repulsor rifle against the rock and loosened his bootlaces.
Slowly, careful not to make a sound on the loose pebbles underfoot, Bertingas faded back in among the trees. Just as slowly, he sank down into a crouch, then put his stiffening legs out, and rested his back against one of the trunks. Through the intervening branches, he could still see the station and the soldier.
Only one, but Bertingas was fast gaining an appreciation for the military mind. There would be more inside the station. How many? At least two. Maybe five. Unlikely to be more than that, or he would see another outside.
Group dynamics predicated that when more than four or five Humans gathered in any setting, social or otherwise, and the location provided for more than a single space, say an inside and an outside, as here, then the group tended to clump. In any body of ten people, one person would not casually break off like this—unless he was in a sulk or on guard duty. This one’s body language showed neither solitary anger nor special alertness. So, if a large number of people were inside, two or three would more likely be out here. Or that was the theory Tad had absorbed in his reading.
An Honorable Defense Book 1 Crisis of Empire Page 17
