Nebula Awards Showcase 2008

by Ben Bova

  “Yes, that could happen, if it’s what you and your children decide,” said Memsen. “We don’t have an answer for you, Spur. But the question is, do you need a preserve like gosdogs, or are you strong enough to hold on to your beliefs no matter who challenges them?”

  “And this is your plan to save Walden?” He ground his shoe into the grass. “This is the luck that the High Gregory came all this way to make?”

  “Is it?” She leaned back against the bench and gazed up into the canopy of the elm. “Maybe it is.”

  “I’ve been such an idiot.” He was bitter; if she was going to use him, at least she could admit it. “You and the High Gregory and the L’ung flit around the upside, having grand adventures and straightening up other people’s messes.” He began to pace back and forth in front of the bench. “You’re like some kind of superheroes, is that it?”

  “The L’ung have gathered together to learn statecraft from one another,” she said patiently. “Sometimes they travel, but mostly they stay with us on Kenning. Of course they have political power in the Forum because of who they are, but their purpose is not so much to do as it is to learn. Then, in a few more years, this cohort will disband and scatter to their respective worlds to try their luck. And when the time comes for us to marry…”

  “Marry? Marry who?”

  “The High Gregory, of course.”

  “But he’s just a boy.”

  Memsen must have heard the dismay in his voice. “He will grow into his own luck soon enough,” she said coldly. “I was chosen the twenty-second Memsen by my predecessor. She searched for me for years across the Thousand Worlds.” With a weary groan she stood, and once again towered over him. “A Memsen is twice honored: to be wife to one High Gregory and mother to another.” Her voice took on a declaiming quality, as if she were giving a speech that had been well rehearsed. “And I carry my predecessor and twenty souls who came before her saved in our memory, so that we may always serve the High Gregory and advise the L’ung.”

  Spur was horrified at the depth of his misunderstanding of this woman. “You have dead people…inside you?”

  “Not dead,” she said. “Saved.”

  A crazed honking interrupted them. A truck careened around the corner and skidded to a stop in front of the town hall. Stark Sukulgunda flung himself out of the still-running truck and dashed inside.

  Spur stood. “Something’s wrong.” He started for the truck and had gotten as far as the statue of Chairman Winter, high on his pedestal, when Stark burst out of the doors again. He saw Spur and waved frantically.

  “Where are they all?” he cried. “Nobody answers.”

  “Playing baseball.” Spur broke into a trot. “What’s wrong? What?”

  “Baseball?” Stark’s eyes bulged as he tried to catch his breath. “South slope of Lamana…burning…everything’s burning…the forest is on fire!”

  FOURTEEN

  I walked slowly through the wood to Fair Haven Cliff, climbed to the highest rock, and sat down upon it to observe the progress of the flames, which were rapidly approaching me, now about a mile distant from the spot where the fire was kindled. Presently I heard the sound of the distant bell giving the alarm, and I knew that the town was on its way to the scene. Hitherto I had felt like a guilty person,—nothing but shame and regret. But now I settled the matter with myself shortly. I said to myself: “Who are these men who are said to be the owners of these woods, and how am I related to them? I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural food.”…So shortly I settled it with myself and stood to watch the approaching flames. It was a glorious spectacle, and I was the only one there to enjoy it. The fire now reached the base of the cliff and then rushed up its sides. The squirrels ran before it in blind haste, and three pigeons dashed into the midst of the smoke. The flames flashed up the pines to their tops, as if they were powder.

  —JOURNAL, 1850

  More than half of the Littleton Volunteer Fire Department were playing baseball when the alarm came. They scrambled up the hill to the brick firehouse on the Commons, followed by almost all of the spectators, who crowded anxiously into the communion hall while the firefighters huddled. Normally there would have been sixteen volunteers on call, but, like Spur, Will Sambusa, Bright Ayoub, Bliss Bandaran and Chief Cary Millisap had joined the Corps. Cape was currently Assistant Chief; he would have led the volunteers had not his son been home. Even though Spur protested that he was merely a grunt smokechaser, the volunteers’ first act was to vote him Acting Chief.

  Like any small-town unit, the Littleton Fire Department routinely answered calls for house fires and brush fires and accidents of all sorts, but they were ill-equipped to stop a major burn. They had just one fire truck, an old quad with a three-thousand-liter-per-minute pump and five-thousand-liter water tank. It carried fifty meters of six-centimeter hose, fifty meters of booster hose, and a ten-meter mechanical ladder. If the burn was as big as Stark described, Engine No. 4 would be about as much use fighting it as a broom.

  Spur resisted the impulse to put his team on the truck and rush out to the burn. He needed more information before he committed his meager forces. It would be at least an hour before companies from neighboring villages would arrive and the Corps might not get to Littleton until nightfall. Cape spread a map out on the long table in the firehouse and the volunteers stood around it, hunch-shouldered and grim. Gandy Joy glided in, lit a single communion square and slipped out again as they contemplated what the burn might do to their village. They took turns peppering Stark with questions about what he had actually seen. At first he tried his best to answer, but he’d had a shock that had knocked better men than him off center. As they pressed him, he grew sullen and suspicious.

  The Sukulgundas lived well west of the Leungs and higher up the slope of Lamana Ridge. They’d been latecomers to Littleton and parts of their farmstead were so steep that the fields had to be terraced. They were about four kilometers north of the Commons at the very end of January Road, a steep dirt track with switchbacks. Stark maintained that the burn had come down the ridge at him, from the general direction of Lookover Point to the east. At first he claimed it was maybe a kilometer away when he’d left his place, but then changed his mind and insisted that the burn was practically eating his barn. That didn’t make sense, since the strong easterly breeze would push the burn in the opposite direction, toward the farmsteads of the Ezzats and Millisaps and eventually to the Herreras and the Leungs.

  Spur shivered as he imagined the burn roaring through GiGa’s orchards. But his neighbors were counting on him to keep those fears at bay. “If what you’re saying is true,” he mused, “it might mean that this fire was deliberately set and that someone is still out there trying to make trouble for us.”

  “Torches in Littleton?” Livy Jayawardena looked dubious. “We’re nowhere near the barrens.”

  “Neither was Double Down,” said Cape. “Or Wheelwright.”

  “I don’t know about that.” Stark Sukulgunda pulled the cap off his head and started twisting it. “All I know is that we ought to stop talking about what to do and do something.”

  “First we have to know for sure where the burn is headed, which means we need to get up the Lamana Ridge Road.” Spur was struggling to apply what he’d learned in training. “If the burn hasn’t jumped the road and headed back down the north slope of the ridge, then we can use the road as a firebreak and hold that line. And when reinforcements come, we’ll send them east over the ridge to the head of the burn. That’s the way the wind is blowing everything.” He glanced up at the others to see if they agreed. “We need to be thinking hard about an eastern perimeter.”

  “Why?” Stark was livid. “Because that’s where you live? It’s my house that—”

  “Shut up, Stark,” said Peace Toba. “Fill your snoot with communion and get right with the village for a change.”

  None
of the threatened farmsteads that lay in the path of the burn to the east was completely cleared of trees. Simplicity demanded that citizens only cultivate as much of their land as they needed. Farmers across Walden used the forest as a windbreak; keeping unused land in trees prevented soil erosion. But now Spur was thinking about all the pine and hemlock and red cedar, needles laden with resins and oils, side by side with the deciduous trees in the woods where he had played as a boy. At Motu River he’d seen pine trees explode into flame. And then there were the burn piles of slash and stumps and old lumber that every farmer collected, baking in the summer sun.

  “If things go wrong in the east, we might need to set our firebreak as far back as Blue Valley Road.” Spur ran his finger down the line on the map. “It won’t be as effective a break as the ridge road but we can improve it. Get the Bandarans and Sawatdees to rake off all the forest litter and duff on the west side. Then disk harrow the entire road. I want to see at least a three-meter-wide strip of fresh soil down the entire length.”

  “Prosper.” Cape’s voice was hushed. “You’re not giving up on all of this.” He traced the outline of the four threatened farms on the map, ending on the black square that marked Diligence Cottage.

  Spur glanced briefly at his father, then away again, troubled by what he had seen. Capability Leung looked just as desperate as Stark Sukulgunda. Maybe more so, if he thought he had just heard his son pronounce doom on his life’s work. For the first time in his life, Spur felt as if he were the father and Cape was the son.

  “No.” He tried to reassure his father with a smile. “That’s just our fallback. What I’m hoping is that we can cut a handline from Spot Pond along Mercy’s Creek all the way down to the river. It’s rough country and depending on how fast the burn is moving we may not have enough time, but if we can hold that line, we save the Millisaps, Joerlys and us.” Left unsaid was that the Ezzats’ farmstead would be lost, even if this dicey strategy worked.

  “But right now the fire is much closer to my place than anyone else’s,” said Stark. “And you said yourself, there may be some suicidal maniac just waiting to burn himself up and take my house with him.”

  Spur was annoyed at the way that Stark Sukulgunda kept buzzing at him. He was making it hard for Spur to concentrate. “We could send the fire truck your way, Stark,” he said, “but I don’t know what good it would do. You don’t have any standing water on your land, do you?”

  “Why?”

  “The truck only has a five-thousand-liter water tank. That’s not near enough if your house gets involved.”

  “We could drop the hard suction line into his well,” said Livy. “Pump from there.”

  “You have a dug well?” said Cape. “How deep?”

  “Four meters.”

  “We’d probably suck it dry before we could do you much good,” said Cape.

  “No,” said Spur. “He’s right. Peace, you and Tenny and Cert take No. 4 up to Sukulgundas’. You can also establish our western perimeter. Clear a meter-wide handline as far up the ridge as you can. Watch for torches. I don’t think the fire is going to come your way but if it does, be ready, understand? Get on the tell and let us know if anything changes.”

  “We’ll call in when we get there,” said Peace as her team scattered to collect gear.

  “Livy, you and the others round up as many as you can to help with the creek line. We may want to start a backfire, so keep in touch with me on the hand-tell. How much liquid fire have you got?”

  “At least twenty grenades. Maybe more. No firebombs though.”

  “Bring gas then, you’ll probably need it. Keep your people between the civilians and the burn, understand? And pull back if it gets too hot. I’ve lost too many friends this year. I don’t want to be burying anyone else. DiDa, you and I need to find a way to get up the ridge….”

  He was interrupted by the roar of a crowd, which had gathered just outside the firehouse. Spur froze, momentarily bewildered. They couldn’t still be playing baseball, could they? Then he thought that the burn must have changed direction. It had careened down the ridge faster than it had any right to, an avalanche of fire that was about to incinerate the Commons and there was nothing he could do to fight it; in the nightmare, he wasn’t wearing his splash pack. Or his fireproof field jacket. Spur shuddered. He wasn’t fit to lead, to decide what to let burn and what to save. He was weak and his soul was lost in darkness and he knew he shouldn’t be afraid. He was a veteran of the firefight, but fear squeezed him nonetheless. “Are you all right, son?” His father rested a hand on his shoulder. The burn licked at boulders and scorched the trees in the forest he had sworn to protect.

  “DiDa,” he whispered, leaning close to his father so no one else would hear, “what if I can’t stop it?”

  “You’ll do your best, Prosper,” he said. “Everyone knows that.”

  As they rushed out of the firehouse, they could see smoke roiling into the sky to the northwest. But the evil plume wasn’t what had stunned the crowd, which was still pouring out of the communion hall. A shadow passed directly overhead and, even in the heat of this disastrous afternoon, Spur was chilled.

  Silently, like a miracle, the High Gregory’s hover landed on Littleton Commons.

  FIFTEEN

  Men go to a fire for entertainment. When I see how eagerly men will run to a fire, whether in warm or cold weather, by night or by day, dragging an engine at their heels, I’m astonished to perceive how good a purpose the level of excitement is made to serve.

  —JOURNAL, 1850

  “There’s a big difference between surface fire and crown fire,” said the Pendragon Chromlis Furcifer to the L’ung assembled in the belly of the hover. “Surface fires move along the forest floor, burning through the understory.” She was reading from notes that scrolled down her forearm.

  “Wait, what’s understory again?” asked Her Grace, Jacqueline Kristof, who was the youngest of the L’ung.

  Memsen pinched the air. “You mustn’t keep interrupting, Your Grace. If you have questions, query the cognisphere in slow time.” She nodded at Penny. “Go ahead, Pendragon. You’re doing a fine job.”

  “Understory is the grass, shrubs, dead leaves, fallen trees—that stuff. So anyway, a surface fire can burn fast or slow, depending. But if the flames climb into the crowns of the trees, it almost always rips right through the forest. Since the Transcendental State doesn’t have the tech to stop it, Spur will have to let it burn itself out. If you look over there…” The group closed around her, craning to see.

  Spur had been able to ignore Penny for the most part, although Cape kept scowling at the L’ung. Memsen had explained that Penny’s research topic for the trip to Walden was forest fires.

  The hover was not completely proof against smoke. As they skirted the roiling convection column of smoke and burning embers, the air inside the hover became tinged with the bitter stench of the burn. This impressed the L’ung. As they wandered from view to view, they would call to one another. “Here, over here. Do you smell it now? Much stronger over here!”

  They had dissolved the partitions and made most of the hull transparent to observe developments in the burn. Just a single three-meter-wide band ran solid from the front of the deck to the back as a concession to Spur and Cape; the L’ung seemed totally immune from fear of heights. Spur was proud at how Cape was handling his first flight in a hover, especially since he himself felt slightly queasy whenever he looked straight down through the deck at the ridge 1,500 meters below.

  From this vantage, Spur could see exactly what was needed to contain the burn and realized that he didn’t have the resources to do it. Looking to the north, he was relieved that the burn hadn’t yet crossed Lamana Ridge Road into the wilderness on the far slope. Barring an unforeseen wind change or embers lighting new spot fires, he thought he might be able to keep the burn within the Littleton valley. But he needed dozens of trained firefighters up on the ridge to defend the road as soon as possible. To the west, he
saw where the flames had come close to the Sukulgundas’ farmstead, but now the burn there looked to be nothing more than a surface fire that was already beginning to gutter out. Peace and the team with Engine No. 4 should have no trouble mopping up. Then he’d move them onto the ridge, not that just three people and one ancient pumper were going to be enough to beat back a wall of flame two kilometers wide.

  “Where you see the darker splotches in the forest, those are evergreens, the best fuel of all,” said Penny. “If they catch, you can get a blowup fire, which is what that huge column of smoke is about.”

  To the east and south, the prospects were grim. The burn had dropped much farther down the ridge than Spur had expected. He remembered from his training that burns were supposed to track uphill faster than down, but the spread to the north and south, upslope and down, looked about the same. As soon as the first crews responded from nearby Bode Well and Highbridge, they’d have to deploy at the base of the ridge to protect the Commons and the farmsteads beyond it.

  The head of the burn was a violent crown fire racing east, beneath a chimney of malign smoke that towered kilometers above the hover. When Spur had given the Ezzats and Millisaps permission to save as much as they could from their houses, he’d thought that they’d all have more time. Now he realized that he’d miscalculated. He reached both families using the hand-tell and told them to leave immediately. Bash Ezzat was weeping when she said she could already see the burn sweeping down on her. Spur tried Comfort’s tell again to let her know that her farmstead was directly in the path of the burn, but still got no answer.

  “DiDa,” said Spur gently. He’d been dreading this moment, ever since he’d understood the true scope and direction of the burn. “I think we need to pull Livy and her people back from the creek to Blue Valley Road.” He steeled himself against anger, grief and reproach. “There’s no time to clear a line,” he went on. “At least not one that will stop this burn.”