Seasons Between Us
Page 37
Gliders were terrible public speakers, never leaving their protective tanks. Still, envoys would speak to communities all over the world in honour of the twenty-fifth anniversary of First Contact.
Marvin edged up to the glass, as if that mattered. This was the moment of decision, and he wanted to hesitate. There’s too much at stake, Marvin. Man up. “Say, Keith? Do you think I could see him?”
The boy hesitated, looking at Marvin. This was the test, a purely subjective, instinctive evaluation that Stewart, with his sly, furtive air, could never have passed. Marvin, though, was an upstanding member of the community. He was fifty years old. He was conservative. He was a doctor, for God’s sake.
“Sure, Doc, come on it.” Keith gave Marvin a conspiratorial wink. “But it never happened on my shift, right?”
Marvin winked back. “You know it.”
A buzzer sounded, and Marvin stepped toward a door at the end of the counter. Bullshitting my way past a security guard. This could be the first concrete use I’ve ever put my medical degree to. He pushed the door open, then stopped in the doorway.
Behind him, the door to the street flew open. Stewart and Nate darted in, grim-faced and determined, and Keith said, “Doc! Get out of the doorway!”
Marvin held his ground until Stewart’s broad hand shoved him through into the room beyond.
After that, things happened quickly. Marvin stumbled to one knee as Stewart and Nate charged Keith. The guard stood frozen, then grabbed the stun baton on his belt. Stewart tackled him and brought him to the floor, and the baton bounced away. Nate moved deeper into the room, unslinging a backpack from his back, while Stewart wrestled with Keith.
Marvin stared, his legs shaking. It seemed suddenly obvious he was making a terrible mistake, but it was too late now. He was committed. His eyes tracked Nate’s progress. The room ran fifty paces or so, the walls lined with tables and desks. At the far end of the room, however, all mundane Earthly normalcy ended.
The Glider was at the other end. The creature itself wasn’t visible, of course. The tank was a dark, gleaming cylinder the size of a minivan, all strange contours that rippled and flowed.
Nate upended his backpack and spilled a hammer, several chisels, and a pry bar onto the floor. He was going to batter his way into the tank, then take his tools to the alien within. For the first time since the Gliders had arrived, one would die at human hands.
A muffled cry brought Marvin’s attention back to the foreground. Keith was on his back with Stewart straddling him. Keith bucked and thrashed, his arms up to block a rain of punches.
Stewart’s hand snaked out, closing around Keith’s right elbow. In a moment, he had the arm pinned across Keith’s throat. Stewart’s knee trapped the other arm. Keith couldn’t block as Stewart hammered blow after blow into his unprotected face.
Marvin closed his eyes. It’s like chemo, he told himself. It’s like radiation therapy. Sometimes, you have to do some damage to cure a really serious ailment. Sometimes, good tissue has to be sacrificed to save the patient.
Keith moaned deep in his throat with every impact. The moan, combined with the meaty impact of fist on bone, made a mockery of Marvin’s rationalizations.
Think of Tommy. You’re doing this for him. Think of Gwen. Remember how sick she was? She needed chemo and radiation. It would have been bad. Ugly. Hard to face. But it would have saved her. You’re a doctor, damn it. You can face hard treatments.
Except Gwen was alive, she was healthy, and there hadn’t been any chemo. No radiation. He didn’t have to poison her to save her. It wasn’t necessary anymore.
Two thoughts crystallized in his mind. First, this attack would achieve nothing. It would take more than one senseless murder to drive the Gliders from Earth. And if the Gliders left, it wasn’t as if everyone would simply throw fifty years of technological change aside. Knowledge was a river that only flowed downstream. There was no going back. Memory capacitors existed now. Killing Gliders wouldn’t make them go away.
Second, if he could roll back the advancements of half a century, it would be an obscenity. More little girls would develop cancer. Would he really wish chemo on them? For that matter, did he want to wear glasses for the rest of his life, and wince every time he straightened his knees? Could he visit that fate on everyone else?
Marvin opened his eyes. Keith no longer squirmed. There was blood on the floor around him, blood on Stewart’s shirt, even a few drops on Marvin’s shoes. Stewart had one battered fist raised high, but he lowered it, breathing hard.
“Fucking traitor,” Stewart said. “I’ll show you.” His hand plunged into his pocket and came out with a clasp knife. The blade clicked open. He released Keith’s arm to expose his throat, brought the knife up—and Marvin thrust the stun baton under his nose.
“Do no harm,” Marvin said.
Stewart, his snarl fading into a look of comical astonishment, twisted his head away from the baton. “What the f—”
“Do no harm,” Marvin repeated. “Maybe it really is that simple.”
Outrage replaced the bafflement on Stewart’s face. “Seriously? We’re in a combat situation, and you’re thinking about your Hippocratic Oath?”
“No.” Marvin twitched the baton, making Stewart flinch. “It’s not part of the oath. More of a guiding principle. First, do no harm.”
Stewart’s eyes narrowed.
“No one ever gave her chemo,” Marvin said, “and she’s fine.”
“What?”
“Gwen.” Marvin shook his head. “Pay attention.”
In his peripheral vision Nate, frozen like a statue, held a chisel against the tank. I better get on with it. He won’t stand there like an idiot forever.
“I thought I had to do harm to heal,” Marvin said. “But Gwen is fine. I need to get with the times.” And he tapped Stewart across the forehead with the baton.
Nothing happened, of course. The weapon would be bio-coded to the security staff. Stewart flinched, then glared at Marvin and heaved himself to his feet.
“Worth a try,” said Marvin, and dropped the baton. He raised his hands, palms out. “I can’t let you do this, Stewart. It’s wrong.”
Stewart snarled and swung the knife. Marvin got a hand in the way and stared in disbelief as a triangle of steel appeared, jutting through the back of his left hand.
Then Keith tapped the stun baton against the side of Stewart’s leg, and Stewart collapsed.
“Hey!” Nate turned away from his demolition job and came toward them, a hammer in one hand, a heavy chisel in the other. Keith was still trying to rise. He was in no shape to fight a homicidal would-be terrorist, so Marvin stepped past him to the security station. He slapped his hand down on a fat red panic button, and an alarm sounded. A man’s crisp voice said, “Emergency services.”
“Aw, shit,” Nate said. He gave Marvin a murderous glare, then ran past him, pushed the door open, and fled.
“Medical emergency.” Marvin fished out a handkerchief, tied it around his hand, and told Keith, “Hang in there. Help’s on the way.”
They didn’t arrest him. That was a pleasant surprise. An earnest young medic tried to give him first aid, but he declined. It hardly seemed right, under the circumstances, to have Glider tech wash away the consequences of what he’d done. Besides, he had his principles. He stopped bleeding before the handkerchief was soaked through, and when the police were done questioning him, he headed home.
The warm glow of mid-morning sunshine astonished him. It seemed impossible that so little time could have passed. The sight of a memory addict standing dumbfounded on a street corner jarred him further. The world just changed. Why is everything the same? He paused in front of the woman, watching watery brown eyes slowly focus on him. Things change, but human idiocy endures. When he had at least a portion of her attention, Marvin said, “Y
ou’re a moron.” Then he continued on his way.
His medical bag was deep in the back of a closet and covered in dust. The instruments themselves were pristine, though. After all, most of them had never been used. The antiseptic spray had no expiry date, so he squirted both sides of the cut, pleased to find it had a numbing effect as well.
Stitching his own hand was awkward, but he managed it. He sewed up the hand front and back, then surveyed his work with quiet satisfaction. Not the best stitching job I’ve ever seen. But it’s the best I’ve seen in twenty years, and that’s something. He would have a scar, but that was all right. A mistake of such magnitude ought to leave a mark.
There was a message from Gwen, and he scanned it quickly. She wanted more kale soup. Unless he told her not to come, she would be there at six. She’d learned long since that he wouldn’t actually invite her.
He grinned as he hit the “reply” button. “I got your message. I’d love to have you come over. See you at six.” He chuckled as he sent it. She would show up convinced he was dying. What she would say when she saw his hand, he had no idea.
He wouldn’t let the conversation be all about him, though. He’d steer it around to this Peter fellow. He might even be able to offer a bit of insight.
It wasn’t the role he’d wanted for himself as a young man, he reflected as he put the medical bag away. It wasn’t what he’d sacrificed his youth for. But Glider tech couldn’t solve every problem. Some things required the human touch. Maybe he could still be of some use.
Author’s Notes to My Younger Self: You are young. You lack experience and the wisdom that comes with it. But your moral compass is perfectly sound. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Not even your parents. Especially not your parents. Parenthood doesn’t automatically confer rationality, or compassion, or ethics. Only power. Listen only to yourself on matters of right and wrong.
When Resin Burns to Tar
Maria Haskins
(now)
It’s a sweltering summer’s day near haying season, and Kata is carrying wood to the tar-burning pit in the meadow outside the village of Vale, when she sees Mother, standing in the shadows beneath the eaves of the forest. Mother has been dead for a year come this autumn, but there she is, looming as tall and menacing as she ever did in life, wielding her craft and wind-keeper staff at will.
Kata straightens her aching back and gazes across the tall timothy and oatgrass, staring at that darker shade beneath the heavy branches of the spruce trees. It’s not that Kata is surprised to see Mother. She just didn’t expect she would come so near, so soon.
Kata’s calloused hands tighten into fists, and she reaches out with her craft for the reassuring touch of water beneath the ground and in the winding brook beyond the meadow. Weak as her water-sense might be, it has always steadied her in the face of Mother’s wrath.
You can’t hold me here anymore, Kata thinks, willing herself to believe the words.
She turns away and gets back to work, but Mother’s gaze still prickles at her clammy neck and backside beneath the thin wool breeches and linen tunic.
After a life spent caring for Mother and doing farming chores for others, it’s Kata’s first time working at the tar-pit, hauling sun-dried pine to the men and women stacking the wood for burning. They’ve been working for days in the heat with nary a breeze from the far-off Inner Sea. The heady scent of pine and meadow grass mingles with the sharper smell of sweat.
The tar-burning pit is shaped like a wide, gently tapering bowl, dug into the sandy ground of a sloping hillside protected from the wind, its inner surface lined with rocks and dirt. Kata’s great uncle Abel, the village pit master, walks the grounds, leaning on his cane, making sure they lay the wood right—fanning out from the centre, a pile stacked in the middle to keep the flow of tar from getting blocked once the burning starts.
With the longships and traders’ knarrs coming in down-river at the town of Rivermouth every fall, there is always a good price to be had for tar, and every villager covets a share of that bounty, but it is not easy money. It’s taken a year’s hard labour to make this pit, as Kata knows only too well, having helped fell and haul logs and stumps here in winter, splitting and cracking them, chopping them into firewood this spring, stacking it all up to dry until summer.
Fifty barrels, that’s what they might get from a pit this size, Abel says, if the winds are calm and the fire burns just right, slow and hot, bleeding the thick, golden resin out of all that wood, letting the fire and smoke turn it into tar.
While Mother was alive, the village made do without a wind-keeper at the pit, rightly fearing it might raise Mother’s ire, even though she’d never take on such a lowly chore herself. Now, a new wind-keeper walks around the pit with Abel. Her name is Magda, and she’s no stranger to the village or Kata. Magda grew up down the road from Mother’s house, and when she and Kata were children, Magda was as close to a friend as Kata’s ever had. Then, at fourteen, Magda left for the coast and earned her wind-keeper’s staff at sea, while Kata stayed with Mother and earned nothing but a lowly water-finder’s rod.
Magda is in her early thirties now, same as Kata, and she is much the same as when she left, short and round-faced with tan skin and a raucous laugh, though the years have added a fine net of lines around her brown eyes and a scar on her cheek. Somehow Kata always imagined every wind-keeper would be much like Mother, severe and imposing, but except for carrying a wind-keeper’s staff, Magda is nothing like Mother.
Kata works, trying not to dwell on the presence of the shade at the forest’s edge. Even so, Mother’s voice scratches at the inside of her skull, deriding her dirty hands, her ruddy skin, her thick waist, her tousled mousy hair, her soft voice, her shyness.
A day labourer, that’s all you’ll ever be, scrounging for scraps at the wayside. Useless, hopeless girl.
She picks a splinter from her hand and thinks of the barrels of tar, thinks of the brightly painted ships setting sail from Rivermouth in autumn, travelling south along the ragged shores of the Inner Sea, through the Narrow Gates, into the Outer Sea where you can sail for days, seeing nowt but water.
What would it feel like, Kata wonders, to be carried by that sea, to touch it, to have it touch you? What would it be like, to travel beneath a wide-open sky, beneath the sails and the wings of birds?
(past)
The dun horses pulling the logging sled snorted and steamed, trudging through the early winter snow. Kata knew how they felt. She had been working since daybreak with Abel and Taryn, daughter of the village blacksmith, felling pines on a rise above the bog, at the farthest reaches where the villagers cut logs and dug up stumps to burn in the tar-pit in summer.
Many of the pines they harvested here had been cut in previous years by Abel with axe or knife, stripping away bark to make them bleed more resin, which would soak into the heartwood and make more tar when the lumber burned.
Below the rise grew the shrubby sweet gale and withered sedge of the bog, and in past years, Kata had often gone there in autumn, braving the marshy ground and the midges to gather cloudberries. She would not do that again, because somewhere in that fen, mother’s dead body had been sunk into the boggy depths, wrapped in nowt but a shift and a sheet of rough-spun linen.
When Mother lived, the villagers had stayed out of her way, since she was likely to threaten anyone with storms and worse if her mood darkened, which was most of the time, especially toward the end when the sickness had taken hold in her gut. Once Mother was dead, it was a different story. The people she owed money for food and rent and services through the years might have feared Mother, but they did not fear Kata. Every scrap of value from Mother’s time as wind-keeper had been taken—rings, bracelets, necklaces stripped off her body—and Kata had been left with nothing but the run-down cottage and Mother’s staff, leaning on the bricks by the hearth, just as she’d left it.
They’d been wrong.
The first time Mother had come to haunt her had been a week after they’d taken the body away. Kata had awoken in the chill dark of night to see Mother in the cottage doorway, silent, smelling of death and rot. After that, she’d burned Mother’s clothes, used salt and iron on the threshold to bar the shade from returning, but Mother had haunted her steps ever since, and in the woods, there was no protection from her presence.
Kata cleared away the snow around the pine tree, then stood with Abel, while Taryn wielded the axe. She tried not to, but every now and then, her eyes strayed to the bog.
“She haunts me too,” Abel said, his tone not unkindly. “But a shade has no more power than you give it, remember that.”
Kata nodded, but all she could think of was Mother’s voice, close as breath on skin:
You can’t leave.
Mother had spoken those words more times than Kata cared to remember, and every time, Kata had felt something sharp and terrible burn into her, like a nail hot from the blacksmith’s anvil, pinning her in place. Of all the abuse Mother had hurled at her through the years, nothing felt more like a curse, and she felt the bite of it, even now.
(now)
At noon-day, they all seek shelter beneath the birches near the tar-pit. Mother’s shade is gone, and Kata takes her turn scooping cold buttermilk from the wooden pail brought from the village, wolfing down fried herring tucked between soft cakes of buttered barley bread.
“Hey, Kata. How’s an old maid like you handling a workload like this?” It’s Albert, one of the farm-boys, half her age with scrawny arms and a scrawnier beard. She’s too used to the jibes by now to bother answering, glancing at him sideways as she sips from her wooden cup.