“Trade fair . . .” I said. “That’s where Nike is, then?” I couldn’t see a blimp through the binoculars, but that didn’t mean anything; it could be hidden.
“If he said so,” Max said. “It makes sense, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Wonderblimp does a little business there. Lot of spare goods floating around. Lot of people who might want to make a deal, buy a nuke . . .”
“Buy some coke . . .”
“Yeah,” Max said.
“So how do we get there?”
Max pointed at the trail running down from his place. “Dog team,” he said. “We’ll teach you. Hook up the dogs, and head downhill, to Kaditali Marsh; there’s a station there we can water our dogs at. Then we head into Ship Creek. Might be a few checkpoints we have to cross.” He looked at me funny. “Hmm, might be a problem with you.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, you know what else the trade fair is, kid?” I shook my head. “See, it’s sort of a slave market.”
I thought of the people turning the carrousel at the St. Herman’s Club. “People slaves?”
“Yeah, people slaves. People get taken hostage during the year, and then they trade them at the trade fair. This time of year, we could get nabbed.” He scratched his chin. “Now, they won’t mess with me”—he thumped his sternum—“and they won’t mess with Rindi, but if they see a blimper . . . Well, some folks might get it in their head that a blimper is worth taking. They might think they could trade a blimper for a nuke. And I’m sure just about the whole PRAK knows about the Wonderblimp. So . . .”
“So, what?”
Max stared at me. “You can’t look like a blimper.” He stood up. “Let’s go see Rindi.”
* * *
Nope, I didn’t look like a blimper, not after Rindi got through with me. I looked damned silly is what I looked like. Rindi sat me down in a chair, got out scissors and some tubes of greasy stuff, and a little later when she held up a mirror for me to look at, I looked like . . . well, yeah, a bush punk, I guess: hair short on the top and long at the back, short over the ears, scraggly beard and hair all dyed a turquoise blue.
She burned my blimper blues and gave me a pile of clothes to choose from. I dressed in magenta wool pants, mukluks, an oiled sweater, and a knee-length skin parka. I slipped my vest of all pockets under the parka: it was a nice place to keep things. Rindi smiled at my appearance and said I looked very much the hip-wa-zee bush punk, very cool. Cool, maybe, but I had to consider the aesthetic judgment somewhat suspect of a woman with frizzy pink hair.
Rindi herself looked a little odder. Her bullet wound had healed nicely, but she was left with a shaved patch on the right side of her head, so she shaved the left side to match, in sort of a modified Mohawk.
That woman with the pink hair was a tough nut to crack. I was having trouble figuring her, but I began to get clues when she took me out to the dog yard to teach me how to run dogs. The dog yard was about fifty yards from the main cabin, down in a hollow where you couldn’t hear or smell it. We walked down a slippery beaten path, through alders and spruce into a fenced enclosure that looked like it went on for half an acre.
When we walked in the dogs crawled out of their houses, let out a yelp or two, and sniffed us with mild interest. When they saw we didn’t have any food, they crawled back into their houses, except for the puppies. The puppies were crawling all around the yard, stealing bones from the older dogs and seeing what kind of trouble they could get into.
One older bitch was playing with what looked like a rag doll, tossing the bundle up in the air, catching it, shaking it back and forth. It wasn’t a rag doll.
“Shell!” Rindi yelled. She ran to the dog, yanked the doll out of her mouth, and cradled it in her hands. “Goddamn it, Shell,” she yelled. Rindi started kicking the bitch. Max and I looked at each other, ran to Rindi.
Shell was down, yelping. Rindi was holding a black-and-white puppy; there was a small red spot on its throat. There was another puppy in the snow; it didn’t have a head.
“Damn bitch in heat,” Rindi said. “Never should have let the puppies near her.” She set the dead pup down next to its litter mate.
“It happens,” Max said.
“It happens only once,” she replied. She stuck out her hand at me. “You still have that gun?”
Well, yeah, I still had that gun. I’d had it for a week, even loaded a few more bullets in it. No one else seemed to want that Nissan. I smiled sheepishly, took it out from under my parka, gave it to her.
“Thanks,” she said. Rindi took the gun, slipped it in her pocket, unhooked Shell from her chain, and dragged her out of the dog yard. A few minutes later there was a shot, then a soft moan. The dogs started howling until Rindi came back into the yard.
“That’s enough,” she yelled at the dogs; they shut up.
She handed me the Nissan. I took it, gave it to Max.
“I don’t want it,” I said. “Every time I give it to someone they shoot it.”
“Sorry about that,” Rindi said. She gathered up the puppies, held their warm bodies in her arms. “Okay, you want to run dogs? I’ll teach you to run dogs. Let me go get the harnesses.”
After Rindi left, Max turned to me, said, “She sleeps with them, you know.”
“What?” I asked.
“Her dogs. She takes her leaders in with her, sleeps with them.”
“So?”
“She claims to be telepathic. You watch her. Rindi doesn’t have to say commands, just think them. Those dogs know what she wants without her even asking. Of course, they are hyperdogs, you know.”
“Hyper-dogs? Like high-strung?” I asked.
“That, too,” Max said, “But hyper as in space. Those dogs can jump into hyperspace.”
“Right,” I said. Hyperspace? That I had to see. “So what do we need to hit the trail for? Why don’t we just ask the dogs to take us to the Wonderblimp?”
Max shook his head. “Not that kind of jump. Little jumps. Teensy little jumps. Jumps like, there’s a moose ahead, and you don’t want to stop and chat, so you get the dogs to jump and the next thing you know you’re by the moose and the moose never even knew you were there. Or you’re on a river and you hit a patch of overflow and the lead dog gets his front paws wet, next thing you know, you’re on dry snow. Jumps like that: hyper jumps.”
“How the hell do they do that?”
Max shrugged. “They were part of some army experiment, mutant breeding to make super dogs or something. The army was supposed to have destroyed them, but Rindi knew this guy who worked in the lab and she got a few puppies. They don’t always jump, but it’s worth a shot if you think you might want ’em to.”
I’d settle for hyper as in high-strung, but those dogs didn’t look it. When Rindi left they settled down like ice on a hot griddle. They were strange-looking dogs, too: they had the classic husky markings—black and white mask, pointed ears, blue eyes, thick fur—but the long legs and deep chest of a hound.
Rindi came back with an armful of harnesses. When the dogs saw that, they came out of their houses and started running in circles on their chains, yelping and howling like fifty little whirling dervishes. Okay, I’d settle for hyper as in high-strung.
“You want to run dogs?” Rindi asked me. “I’m not sure you have what it takes to run dogs.”
“Ah, hell, Rindi,” Max said. “Any nut who’s got the nerve to climb down an icy cable dangling from a blimp cruising along at sixty miles an hour has the nerve to run dogs.”
I couldn’t agree with that. Being a wing monkey took skill, courage, and great physical strength, sure, but you didn’t have to be crazy to do it. I had a feeling you had to have a few screws loose to run dogs.
“We’ll see if this blimper can do it,” she said. “Harness them up.” She walked around the yard, tossing harnesses on dog houses.
“How?” I asked.
She smiled at me. “Figure it out. Might teach you something.”
I took a harness off the r
oof of a dog house, held it up. My fingers began untangling the loops and holes of the webbing. With the harness untangled, I pulled the hole for the neck open, and held it so that the padding for the chest was down. I held the neck opening apart, pulled the back of the harness up to it, walked over to a dog and started to slip it over its head.
“You run dogs before?” Rindi asked me.
“I don’t think so,” I said. I slipped the harness down, lifted the dog’s right paw up to pull it through a loop.
“Well, somebody taught you how to put that harness on old Alice there right,” Rindi said.
“Maybe,” I said. As I arranged the harness on Alice, I felt my fingers working almost on their own. Looking at the dogs in the yard, watching them whirl around like dervishes on their chains, I began to see the dogs not as dogs, but as sled dogs, team dogs, working dogs. I saw some as dogs that might go up front in a team, some that might work well in back. Had I run dogs before? I thought. Maybe. Maybe it was something I knew how to do but thought I never knew how to do. If I didn’t think about it, my body figured things out on its own.
This thought came back to me, a conscious memory, something I’d read once. The brain, I’d read, is only the thickest and biggest part of the neurological system. All the little nerves, the ganglions in the spine, were part of the system. So maybe I’d just lost the memories in my brain, and maybe other memories remained, the ones in my fingers and hands and arms and legs.
Rindi grabbed a scrawny male named Oscar by the collar, holding his front legs off the ground, and ran up with him to the sleds. Oscar’s front legs kept kicking, and his hind legs pedaled faster than Rindi’s.
I grabbed Alice, the female I had harnessed, and followed Rindi up the hill. Beyond a shed, at the foot of a trail that wound into the woods, she had two sleds with long lines laid out in front of them. Rindi dragged Oscar to the front of the line of a light sled, clipped the back of his harness to a single rope at the end of the line.
“Alice go up front, too?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, and looked at me funny. Rindi pointed at the other sled.
I knew what Rindi was thinking: how did I know Alice was a leader? But I knew. I could feel it in the way Alice moved, the way she calmly urged me to the end of the line, the way she acted, like she was boss and I was just someone steering her. I snapped the lead line to the back of Alice’s harness, petted her. She looked back, let me stroke her neck, then settled down, holding the line out tight.
We dragged more dogs up, two teams worth. Rindi had a team of eight and I had a team of five. The dogs behind the leaders were swing dogs, she said, then team and wheel dogs. We both ran single leaders, Rindi with Oscar, me with Alice.
Rindi called the sleds utility sleds. They were about five feet long from the front bow to the driver’s bow, on runners about seven feet long. Both sleds had crosspieces back, middle, and front, connecting stanchions spaced along the runners. Slats were screwed lengthwise across the crosspieces. The front crosspiece, the nosepiece, connected the two runners, which curved up to meet the nosepiece. A long piece of wood—the brake bar—ran from the nosepiece under the slats and back to where the driver’s bow came down to the runners.
The end of the brake bar was tied to the back crosspiece, and an L-shaped piece of metal about two feet long was hinged to the brake bar. Jagged teeth were bolted to the end of the L, which stuck out about six inches from the back cross-piece—the foot brake. Step on the brake and the metal would bite into the snow, slowing the sled. A piece of elastic cord snapped the brake back up out of the way. A heavy steel hook was attached to the sled by about four feet of rope—the snow hook. The snow hook kept the dogs from dragging the sled off when you stopped. There was a pouch strapped to a bar below the top of the drivebow to put the snow hook in.
Rindi’s teaching method was trial by fire. She taught me three things: what gee and haw meant, how to set the snow hook, and how to brake. Then she got on her sled, pulled her snow hook out of the ground, tossed it into her sled bag, and yelled “Hike!” “Gee” was right and “haw” was left and I figured “hike” meant go. I got on my sled, pulled the snow hook out, and yelled “hike,” too.
The dogs surged forward, following Rindi’s team. I jerked back, but held on, stooping down slightly to lower my center of gravity. Rindi’s team whipped around a corner, and I watched her lean out into the curve, felt my body doing what she had just done, like that, not even thinking about it. The trail went straight downhill, and I saw Rindi look back, a smile on her face; I think she expected me to have been whipped loose. But I wasn’t. I hung on tight.
Rindi turned around, yelled something, and then shot ahead. I looked down at the lines, the gangline Rindi called it, noticed that the left wheel dog, a big male named Ouzel, was slacking off, his line loose.
“Get it up, Ouzel!” I yelled, and Ouzel glanced back, then tightened the line. Alice surged ahead, breaking into a run, body in a slight rocking motion, and the rest of the dogs followed her movements. We gained on Rindi.
Jeez, it was fun. We began to catch up with Rindi, following her around hairpin corners, whooping down hills, up hills, through open fields. Something told me to start kicking, pushing my foot down, letting the sled pull forward, then kicking out, in a smooth motion. On the hills I got off and ran up, to let the team rest. Once, Ouzel jumped over his line, and started to get tangled up with the wheel dog next to him, Sam. I braked slightly, so his line would go slack, and Ouzel jumped back over.
The motion of the sled, the movements around the corners, the gait of the dogs . . . all of that became familiar, and I knew, just as I’d known before when I heard the name of Denali, that I had done this before. It wasn’t my body that was learning how to run dogs; it was my brain. My body knew. My brain just had to be reminded.
I couldn’t catch Rindi, not with five dogs to her eight, but I kept her in sight all the way to the end. When I braked the team back at the Redoubt, and set the snow hook, she had her hook in and her dogs were lying down, froth on their muzzles. She walked toward me and guided my leader to a spot a dozen feet from her team. I took the snowhook out and hooked it around a post set in the snow.
“You’ve run dogs before,” she said.
I shrugged. “I guess. I can’t really remember.”
“The way you run ’em, you have to have done this before. You’re not bad, Holmes. Pretty good. Most people I manage to lose. You kept me in sight.”
“Hard to miss that pink hair,” I said, smiling.
“Yeah.”
Max walked out to meet us. “Well?” he asked Rindi.
“He’s a natural. I think he can stand a trip. This guy’s run dogs before.”
“Really? Where’d you do that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Honest, I don’t remember.” But Rindi was right: I had run dogs before. I could feel it in my muscles.
“Well, all right then,” Max said. “Get him in shape. We’ll leave in two days.”
* * *
Our plan was to run some cargo up to Ship Creek, doing some trading like everyone else. Max figured it would be a good cover. We were running Redoubt freight sleds, a larger version of the utility sled, only with a toboggan bottom instead of slats. Each of us would have eighteen-dog teams. We really were hauling freight: a few vials of hyperdog jizzum, some jugs of kerosene, and a crate of picture Bibles. The picture Bibles were Max’s idea: he didn’t think any of the village militias would mess with us if we were running Bibles. And we had Max. With Max in the orange parka with the three black triangles we weren’t likely to take a lot of fire.
We left at first dawn, two weeks to the day after I’d first come to the Redoubt. I hadn’t slept well the night before. I dreamed that I heard the Wonderblimp rushing in from out over the ice, dreamed that they had come to rescue me in a blaze of gunfire. But in the morning the ice was flat and calm, and the only things flying were clouds of ravens, circling and cawing.
Max explaine
d the trail down, and what to expect. I’d found one of the old brochures for the development the former owner had planned, and it showed that road going down from the Redoubt, what the brochure called the information center. The road down twisted and turned around the sides of hills and through valleys. About halfway down the road crossed Kaditali Creek. Max had blown up the bridge after the Zap, he said, and we’d have to use a drawbridge he’d built to get across. After the bridge was the hardest part of the trail, a long ramp that went from 800 feet to sea level in half a mile. At the end of that ramp was a nasty turn that came out right at Kaditali Station. From the Redoubt down it was 1800 feet to sea level, an ear-popping run.
We loaded up the sleds, then went down to get the dogs. Rindi let me have the leader I’d been training with, Alice. She decided that I would only take twelve dogs down instead of the eighteen they would run. “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” she said, “but the trail’s tricky if you don’t know it.” Max went out first, then me, with Rindi pulling up the rear.
The route down to the bridge was pretty gentle, and wide enough that I didn’t have to worry about skidding over the edge. I tapped the brake occasionally, and on corners dragged my foot out like an outrigger, a trick Rindi had taught me. I stopped my team behind Max’s when we got to the drawbridge over the creek. Rindi pulled up behind me. Two high poles were set at the edge of the creek with the drawbridge hanging raised between them. Two ropes holding the bridge raised ran over pulleys on top of the poles and were connected to two large boulders—counterweights that kept the bridge raised. Max walked to the front of his team, took the leader by its collar, and pushed gently against the bridge. The ropes creaked and the boulders started swaying. Max pushed again, and the bridge started to lower. When the end of the bridge hovered over the opposite side, and the planks were nearly level, Max urged his team onto the bridge, then ran back to the sled.
“Go ahead,” Rindi told me, “I’ll be right on your tail. When we get off the bridge, the counterweights will pull that sucker shut.”
After the Zap Page 13
