by Chad Oliver
It would be pleasant to report that Sam died happy and that his dust was peaceful in its urn. In fact, Sam was sorry to go and he was even a little bitter.
If he could have known somehow, he might—or might not—have been more pleased.
Millions of lonely miles from the dead earth, she floated there in the great nothing. Beneath the shimmering pods that would last for thousands of years, a part of her was cool rather than cold, softer than the naked rocks, flushed with green.
Saturn hovered near the horizon, white and frozen and moonlike.
The ancient lifeways acted out their tiny dramas, strange under an alien sky. They had changed little, most of them.
There was one exception.
It might have been the radiation.
Then again, the raccoon had always been a clever animal. He had adroit hands, and he could use them. He had alert eyes, a quick intelligence. He could learn things, and on occasion he could pass on what he knew.
Within ten generations, he had fashioned a crude chopping tool out of flaked stone.
Within twenty, he had built a fire.
That beat man’s record by a considerable margin, and the point was not lost on those who watched.
A short time later, the dog showed up, out in the shadows cast by the firelight. He whined. He thumped his shaggy tail. He oozed friendship.
The raccoons ignored him for a few nights. They huddled together, dimly proud of what they had done. They thought it over.
Eventually, one of the raccoons threw him a bloody bone, and the dog came in.
Don’t like the ending?
A trifle stark?
Is there no way we can communicate with them from out of the past? Can’t we say something, a few words, now that we are finished?
Ah, man. Ever the wishful thinker.
Still talking.
Sam had tried. He was human; he made the gesture.
There was a small plaque still visible on the outside of the silent ship that had brought them here. It was traditional in spaceflights, but Sam had done it anyhow.
It could not be read, of course.
It could not be deciphered, ever.
But it was there.
It said the only words that had seemed appropriate to Sam:
Good luck, old friends.
MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE RESERVATION
One of them was coming down.
Greer Holbrook managed a nearly perfect smile. That smile was a work of art and he practiced it a lot. He needed it in his business.
It was helpful to have a specific target again. It simplified matters.
Greer tried to hate them all. He told himself that he hated them with the special loathing reserved for the indispensable. That made it easier.
He could not exist without them, of course.
In one sense, there were always some of them around. They had to have agents among the peasants. Peasants had votes. Awkward, but there it was. Votes translated into funding.
Greer Holbrook knew all about dreams and how much they cost. He knew about representatives, too.
This was different.
One of the gods, dropping down out of the sky. Exposed. Vulnerable.
Once in a while they had to send a real one down. It was good politics. It was also a calculated risk. It did not happen often, but Greer was not a complete stranger to this situation.
Oh, no.
They knew his name up there.
Greer Holbrook tried out his professional smile again. He wished that he felt better about what he had to do.
This was what he wanted, wasn’t it?
He was actually going to catch one of them on the ground.
“Take ’em to Missouri, Matt,” he remarked to nobody in particular.
The Comanche had once walked this land. They called themselves The People and believed that they owned the Earth.
(Well, the Comanche never walked if they could ride. But they couldn’t ride until they got the horse. That meant waiting for the Spanish. And that ultimately had meant the beginning of the end for the Comanche. The moral? Greer Holbrook did not pretend to know. Maybe there wasn’t one.)
He knew what to do and how to do it. He was willing to play the game and take his chances. The Comanche would have approved of that.
But what would they have made of him?
Greer was a tall and skinny man. He was physically quite unremarkable if you had never seen him in action.
He walked—yes, walked—through the barren urban sprawl of Austin despite the fact that he could have driven. His car, parked near the shell of what had been Texas Instruments, had better than one hundred kilometers left on the battery. He needed a very long walk with high visibility, which was why he had circled around to this side of Austin and spent the night camped on the Mopac. He had to admit that this was one hell of a strange way to start out on a raid.
His mind raced with visions. He looked at the clear hot sky above him and he saw O’Neills and spiderweb mirrors and microwave beams. He saw much more than that. He could see the runaways, the meticulous planners, the righteous, the killers of dreams.
The Comanche had been a short and stocky people.
Still, they knew something about visions.
They knew plenty about enemies. They knew how to hate.
Greer Holbrook had never seen a real Comanche, although some remained in Oklahoma. He felt a definite kinship with The People just the same. They too had been left behind. They too were a part of Earth.
The cracked pavement hurt his feet. He had some pain in his shoulders, the pain that comes from tension and weariness. He was tired of being a symbol. He was tired of the loneliness that surrounded him like a shell.
But the spacer was coming.
He would be ready.
He could feel the crowd gathering around him and he could see the dome of the Capitol now. A gleaming passenger dirigible floated high above Congress Avenue. There was more than helium in that ship. The legislature was in session and the state senators always had the best seats in the house.
The tri-di cameras hummed and buzzed. The robocrews were good; the pictures would be in focus and the sound would be sharp.
Are you watching up there in your booze-flowing tin can? Listening? You’d damned well better be. This is for you.
He dredged up a dash or two of charisma and tried to look like the leader of an invincible horde. He was getting the numbers, as usual. He was convincing to that extent.
By the time he hit Sixth Street, the people were pouring through holes in the concrete walls. They were always eager to walk the last kilometer with him. It was the first twenty that were physically lonesome.
They were the customary crew and in truth they were something a bit less than an invincible horde. They were the hopeless ones, the bored ones, the bitter ones, the ones that stayed because of sheer inertia.
The dead-enders.
Greer had few illusions about them but he could feel for them. Perhaps he even loved them a little.
They carried their ever-present signs:
NO MORE PIE IN THE SKY—WE EAT PIE! SPEND OUR TAXES ON EARTH—WE AIN’T DIRT!
DOWNERS BE COUNTED!
SEND ’EM FURTHER OUT!
PULL THE PLUGS!
Lord, didn’t they ever get tired of them?
Some of the Heroes were there, mingling with the crowd. Greer understood the phenomenon well enough. When the present is sufficiently sad—and when the future seems to be restricted to a remote elite—the idealized past looks pretty good. The frustrations pile up and meaningful actions are blocked. Romanticism becomes very attractive.
What else is there?
There was an Alan Ladd, dressed in the buckskins from Shane. (“One gun’s enough if you know how to use it, Jody.”) There was a Gary Cooper, hitching up his dude pants. (“I may have been—born in Texas—but it wasn’t—yes-ter-day.”) There was a Flynn as Custer, complete with the long yellow hair that was a part of myth if n
ot of history. (“Terry’s cut the Seventh loose, Cooky! We’re on our own!”) There was a John Wayne, weird-buttoned shirt and all. He wasn’t the one from Red River telling Matt to take ’em to Missouri. This was one of the countless other incarnations of the Duke. (“Think it over real good, Pil-grim.”)
Androids, yes. Fantasies, sure. Asinine, probably. But the Heroes were kind of fun.
You could use them, too.
They got the crowd stirred up. A mob had to surge in order to attract attention. It had to mean business. It had to look ugly.
Greer Holbrook did his part. He stepped out for real, flashing that practiced smile. He concealed his ambivalence. He yelled with the best of them and he kept one hand curled around the worn butt of his authentic Colt.
He led that mob, trying to get caught up in the roar and the confusion.
Head ’em off at the pass?
No.
But there was going to be one hell of a rendezvous at the wilds of Congress Avenue.
The ship was fat and delta-winged and it dropped like thunder out of the Texas sky. It was a Moon-Earth craft rather than a Colony shuttle and it came in smoking on a horizontal landing pattern.
It hit at the far end of the Congress Avenue flightway, braking across the old Colorado River bridge. It needed a fair amount of area with nothing in it, but that was no problem. The city itself was an anachronism, a government center enmeshed in the tentacles of taxing credits and parceling them out again. Downtown had changed its character. It was, literally, where the ships came down on political missions.
The ship whined to a stop at the reception arena in front of the Capitol. It was quite close to the statue of Willie Nelson. The dirigible, safely out of range, fired off some welcoming flares.
A portion of the University of Texas band had marched over from what they still called the Forty Acres, less than two kilometers away. Resplendent in their orange-and-white uniforms and spotless cowboy hats, they struck up “The Eyes of Texas.”
The ship waited: alien, strangely earthbound, almost silent.
The governor appeared, flanked by key senators and a covey of police squadrons.
Greer Holbrook and his shouting citizens poured off the Sixth Street ramp onto Congress Avenue. He was only a couple of blocks distant from the inert spaceship.
“Come on, rabble,” he muttered. “Let’s get rabid.”
There had been plenty of ships before, and many delegations. This one was different. He could smell the difference.
This one did not bring the standard politico from the Moon.
This one did not bring the polished performers from the network of close-in space stations.
This one brought a real-for-sure deep spacer, generations removed from Earth, someone who had called the Colonies home, known the slingshot mines of the asteroids, tasted the edge of the universe.
The real thing. A rare thing.
Someone to focus the hate. Someone to absorb the blame. Someone you could go after.
There was movement aboard the ship. A lock hissed open and a landing tube snaked down.
Greer had to time it just right. Timing was everything in a political maneuver. The mob must be close, but not too close. He did not want to force the police into their riot routine prematurely.
The spacer was the first one out.
She could not walk in the Earth gravity, of course. She was clamped into a mechanical frame that almost allowed her to stand upright.
She was obviously terrified. The reality of Earth was far beyond the madness of her most frightening dreams.
She was trying not to scream.
She was a mess.
Greer felt a shock of disappointment that was a physical jolt. He needed an enemy.
He got a shaking, sweating blob of jelly that could only elicit something between pity and horror. That made it tough.
He had seen sick ones before. He had never seen one this sick.
He thought of Senator Garcia. Dear old Juan, adding up the votes, weighing the pressures, calculating the social currents. A deal was a deal. Greer had to deliver.
He told himself that the woman was not innocent. She had chosen her lifeway, or at any rate her ancestors had. She could have stayed out there in her protective egg. She didn’t have to come back. She didn’t have to work for her side, trying to take still more from a gutted Earth.
It didn’t make him feel any better.
Look at her, look at her—
No. Look in her direction. That was enough.
He heard his own voice: “There she is! That’s one of them!”
The crowd hesitated, moved, flowed. It was an uncertain sea, but the anti-spacer chants were nasty. The signs waved and the banners tossed.
Greer broke into a run. He was getting close.
He could see the fear in her bloodshot eyes, sense her anguish and contempt and incomprehension.
He did what he had to do, hating it.
He yanked out his Colt, aimed carefully on the dead run, and fired one shot. The flat crack of the .45 was very loud
The shot ended it. The game was over. The police squads moved in fast, fan stunners keening. The mob melted away, losers again, always losers.
Greer Holbrook went down hard. His head hit the slick unyielding metal of the landing tube. His last conscious image was of her.
The eyes.
The terrible bloodshot frightened eyes …
“She wants to see you,” Sandy Sandoval said.
It was something less than an order and something more than a request. Sandoval was an aide to Senator Garcia. Call him a flunky but color him powerful.
Greer didn’t feel like seeing anyone. He particularly did not want to see her. Stunners were not lethal, but they were also not fun and games. His head throbbed and he had cramps in his stomach.
“Why?”
Sandy shrugged. “You took a shot at her.”
“I missed, didn’t I? I played it fair and square. She wasn’t hurt.”
“She doesn’t understand.”
“So?”
Sandy laughed. He was genuinely amused. He was a comfortable man, a secure man, and many things made him laugh. “The senator would consider it a favor.”
He did not insult Greer’s intelligence by reminding him of his delicate legal position. With Senator Garcia on his side, Greer simply had to watch his step. Garcia was a good senator. That had little to do with his political views; it meant that he kept his word. Without Garcia, Greer was facing a charge of attempted murder.
“Okay. I’ll see her. Wheel her in.”
“You’ll have to go to her. No offense, Mr. Holbrook. It’s just that you’re in better shape than she is.”
“You bet.”
“I assure you—”
“Please don’t. I know how I feel. I need to see her like I need a hole in the head. What can I possibly say to her?”
“You’ll think of something.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
Nevertheless, Greer got to his feet.
He walked.
He looked at her and told himself that he felt nothing.
“My name is Ellyn,” she said. “It has a y in it. We do not use second names in—where I come from.”
Her English was oddly accented to his ears, but he could follow her without difficulty. They didn’t all speak English out there, but it was by no means unusual. It was not Earth that had sent colonies into space. In political terms, the Earth did not exist. There was a mosaic of nation-states and some of them had a space capability and some of them did not. That was one of the problems. The United Nations were united in name only, which was nothing new. There were divisions even within nation-states. Texas had been in the space business for a very long time; the technology was centered in Houston but the decisions were made in Austin. Space was not a big deal in New York or Montana, especially with the shift of population toward the Southwest.
“I know your name,” he said. “You know mine.”
“Oh, yes. Your name has travelled—far”
He tried not to stare. There was no need to make this worse than it was. Ellyn was obviously in pain. She was seated in a chair that had a lung-booster on it. There were strut-clamps attached to her bone structure. Her flesh sagged. Her brown hair seemed lifeless and there was a wheeze in her breathing.
Only her eyes were alive and they hurt.
“That mob,” she said. “I had to learn the word. I had never seen a mob before. Did you know that? Those people. You led them. You—shot—at me. Are you proud?”
“I’m sure that Senator Garcia has explained—”
“He has explained. Do you think we would send a fool down here? Into this?”
Greer did not reply. He wished his headache would go away. He wished Ellyn would go away.
“It is you I do not understand,” she said. Her voice was not strong. “All that hate. It is beyond my experience.”
“Your life has not been my life.” Jesus! He was starting to talk like one of them.
“I have studied your profile. You are a gifted man. You are educated. You have technical skills. You did not have to stay here.”
“Okay. I’m here by choice. So what?”
“So I do not understand.” She shut her eyes, tightly. When she opened them again them were tiny flecks of blood on her eyelids. “I am asking you for help.”
Greer was angry; angry at her, angry at himself, angry at the situation. He didn’t owe her anything. Did he?
“You don’t have to understand. It doesn’t make my difference.”
“It does to me.” Ellyn’s lips twitched in what might have been a smile. “Please. I have to know.”
Charming? Greer wasn’t charmed. He tried to swallow his anger. It was a bit like trying to eat his own esophagus. He thought of Senator Garcia without love.
“Look, Ellyn. Maybe some other time or some other place. We could kick it all around and gnaw on the bones. Not here. Not now.”
“I will say please again. I am not accustomed to the word. I did not have to say it often—out there.”
