Paul was balancing a flare pistol in his hand. “I could torch the plane,” he said. “Burn our bridges literally.” He shook his head. “We might need it if the farm doesn’t work out. Go find that island.”
“Native girls with bare boobs,” I said. “You have them here.”
We went down to Namir’s clearing and made a laughable kind of campsite out of it. If it rained, we would just have to get wet. But we got enough pine boughs to make a couple of large beds. Needed only be sleeping five at a time, two on guard.
It was getting cool as the sun went down, but we decided against making a fire.
I was on the first guard shift, seven till nine, hiding in some bushes between the road and the river. Sipped cold instant coffee and listened for anything that wasn’t water and wind. I had a laser rifle and one of the flare pistols. Elza had the same armament, hiding in the woods north of our camp. If we saw or heard something, we were supposed to close our eyes, to preserve dark vision, and shoot a flare straight up. Perhaps starting a forest fire.
At first I felt all crawly, but convinced myself it wasn’t bugs. Just skin crud. Dried sweat from crossing ten or twelve time zones. Maybe we could take a dip in the river before we left.
I thought about Snowbird and hoped she was happy and healing. Maybe they’d chip a hole in the ice so she could go swimming.
It was a cloudless night and so not completely dark, with the moonglow. My heart gave a jump when I distinctly heard steps, a quiet crunch and slide of gravel at the end of the overpass, but it was just a small deer, coming over to see what was on the other side. Fascinating to watch it picking its way down, cautious but not careful enough. If I’d been a hunter, she would’ve been venison.
I could smell her, a funny, musky odor. Which meant she couldn’t smell me, I suppose, the wind coming this way. All of my experience with animals was before I had turned nineteen. That deer was more exotic than a Martian.
Less strange than the Other that we glimpsed, though. My skin crawled a different way, remembering the chitinous monstrosity. Our absentee masters now. As slow and inexorable as the wheeling stars.
The stars were bright here. Bright everywhere, after Wednesday. I wondered whether Wolf 25, the Others’ home, was visible. It was pretty dim, twenty-five light-years away. Paul said it was in the constellation Pisces. That wasn’t one of the five or six I knew.
I’d spent years barreling through interstellar space, out among the lonely stars, but didn’t spend much time looking at them. No windows to stare out of.
Mars was unmistakable, a bright, orange, unblinking star. Why did they call it the Red Planet? Didn’t the ancients have a word for orange? Maybe red was more dramatic.
The deer caught a whiff of something and bounded away through the woods, its white tail a dim bouncing flag. Don’t shoot, Elza. She didn’t.
Paul’s watch glowed with old-fashioned hands and numerals, temporarily useful. I didn’t look at it for what I estimated to be an hour, which turned out to be thirty-two minutes.
I tried to concentrate on sights and sounds, almost unchanging. Every few minutes a bird would tweet or hoot. I watched a bright star crawl through the trees. It’s a good thing I wasn’t sleepy. Even so, I kept falling into a meditative state, perhaps encouraged by the rushing water.
The way smells changed was interesting. Subtle but sudden, as the breeze shifted, and some new blossom or bush dominated momentarily. I guess it happens in the city, too, but we’re too overloaded with stimuli to notice.
It occurred to me that we were downstream from the farm. If they knew or suspected we were near the overpass, they could float down silently on canoes or rafts. I gazed at the river for a bit, but realized that approaching us that way would be really conspicuous, even at night. A small stick floating along was easy to see, disrupting the moonglow’s reflection. So I went back to where I’d been, and sat down quietly between two low bushes.
My quietness was rewarded with another animal visitation, a masked raccoon that came down the same path the deer had used, but making no noise. When it got to the road, it beetled off the other way, investigating the darkness under the overpass. Maybe I should be hiding there. Along with the bugs and snakes, no thanks. The raccoon was probably after a meal, one that I wouldn’t find appealing.
Sooner than I’d expected, Card came across to relieve me. His white tropical tourist outfit made him a conspicuous ghost, moving in the moonglow. In another couple of weeks, the tunic would be dirty enough to use as camouflage.
“Anything?” he whispered.
“Two animals, a deer and a raccoon.” I passed him Paul’s watch and the rifle and flare pistol. “You know what to do with this?”
“Straight up, eyes closed.”
“You won’t have any trouble staying awake?”
“No. Haven’t slept yet.”
“Keep an eye on the river.”
“Yeah. They could have a navy.”
It was darker in the forest than I’d expected. I walked carefully, slowly picking my way uphill. If I came to the autoway, I’d missed them. I almost stepped on Paul, his NASA jumpsuit a deeper black against the shadow. Then someone started to snore a few yards away, I couldn’t tell who.
I knelt and patted the bed of pine boughs next to him, then crawled in not quite close enough to touch. I could smell his hair, though, along with the pine, and could hear his soft breath.
What a long day, quartering the planet and coming to ground in this dark wood. I closed my eyes and slept like a tired child.
10
After an energy-bar breakfast and cold coffee, we carried all our stuff down to the road and started walking, Namir in front and Dustin bringing up the rear, each of them armed with laser and pistol. It was a little too military for me, bad first impression, but I kept it to myself. We might be walking into an ambush.
The plane had measured a straight-line distance of 7.4 miles from the commune to the highway. That would probably come to about ten miles along the winding river road. So we should reach the commune by mid-day. My feet were a little tired and perhaps blistered. I felt every pebble in the road through my thin-soled shoes, but could avoid the big and sharp ones.
When we first started walking, we startled a deer drinking at the river’s edge. From then on the animals stayed away from us.
Better woodsmen might have suspected that the lack of wildlife meant that we weren’t alone. But our military contingent mainly knew the perils presented by city and desert. Namir did study the trees for snipers, I noticed, and scanned the ground, I supposed for trip wires and mines.
The semi-wild sylvan setting had been preserved, back in Dustin’s time here, by government edict. Thousands of acres had been gathered up and added to an existing federal parkland. Fruit Farm was “grandfathered in,” allowed to stay and operate as a private, non-mechanized cultural relic. We walked by what remained of the old mechanized farms, doomed by unprofitability to return to nature. Abandoned machinery turned into elaborate birdhouses, streaked with rust and guano. The vegetation that had replaced pasture and farmland, mostly scrub pine, was not as heavy and shadowy as the older forests, and it felt safer walking alongside it.
After about an hour and a half, we stopped under the shade of an old oak to rest, breaking out sandwiches from the NASA vending machines, welcome but starting to go a little stale.
Paul sorted through the stuff in the rolling mailbag. “We have food for two or three days, if they turn us away. What if we have to go back to the plane and find that it’s been vandalized—or just gone?”
“You said not many people could fly it,” Card said.
“Land it. It wouldn’t take much skill to take off, and then crash somewhere. I’m just wondering whether it might be towed away by some highway maintenance machine. Or pushed into the river to keep the road clear.”
“I’d guess not,” Card said. “I don’t think the maintenance robots are going anywhere without satellite communication and GPS.”
r />
“Let’s worry about that when we have to,” Namir said. “How do we approach the commune? They’ll probably be expecting us.”
“They might be having lots of visitors,” Dustin said. “It’s going to be a popular place, once the power goes off permanently.”
“Sure,” Card said. “That accounts for the traffic jam all around us.” A butterfly wafted by in the quiet air. “This place would be in the middle of nowhere even if the autoway was working. You can’t just pull off the autoway and start hiking. People without airplanes would have to start wherever this road starts. And it’s probably not on maps.”
“Didn’t used to be,” Dustin said. “People who wanted our produce would make a day of it. Drive up this dusty old road with no signs.”
“Must’ve been pretty good vegetables,” I said.
“People are funny. We’d sell them stuff like elephant garlic, that we’d buy in bulk down in Sacramento. If it was odd, they would assume we grew it here.”
“Looked like a lot of crops when we flew over.”
“Bigger than when I was a kid, and we were more than self-sufficient then.”
“You said there were a couple of hundred back then,” I said. “Doesn’t look like that many now.”
“Hard to say, the hour we flew over. Lot of people resting up after morning chores and lunch.”
Namir sat down at the base of the oak and studied the scene with binoculars. He braced his elbow on his knee and turned the zoom lever all the way up, looking back down the road.
“See anything?” Elza said.
He shook his head slightly, still staring. “Feels like we’re being followed.”
“I had that feeling, too,” I said. “I thought it was just nerves.”
“Probably.” He lowered the binoculars, rubbed his eyes, and raised them to look again. Sharp intake of breath. “There.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Sun glint off something. Maybe metal, maybe a lens. Maybe a shiny leaf.”
“Sniper?” Paul said.
“No. I don’t think so. A rifle scope would be hooded, sniper or hunter. There it is again.”
I carefully didn’t look in that direction. “What should we do?”
“I’m tempted to wave and see if they wave back. If it’s a sniper with a gig laser, we’re all pot roast anyhow.”
“Like someone would carry that much weight into the woods,” Dustin said. “Even if the Earthers had one.”
Namir set down the binoculars and leaned back against the tree. He folded his hands on his chest and closed his eyes. “Probably wouldn’t be your Earthers, anyhow. More likely someone like us, interlopers after all that good organic food.”
Something splashed in the river, and I jumped. “Should we do something?”
“Just relax. We’ll be back in the woods in a couple hundred meters. I’ll hide at the edge and see if anyone’s following us.”
“We’ll be at the farm in another hour and a half,” Paul said.
“I’ll catch up. Leave one of the cells with me.”
I handed him mine. “Punch number one for Paul.”
He smiled at Paul. “Does this mean we’re a couple now?”
“Oral only. I have standards.”
“Two condoms.” He put the phone in his shirt pocket. “I’ll call before I leave. Or if I see anything.”
We rested under the tree for a while and then walked on unhurriedly. When we came to the woods where the river curved, Namir silently stepped into the brush and disappeared.
Dustin walked past me to take Namir’s point position and looked toward where he’d gone. “I’m impressed,” he said sotto voce.
I wasn’t sure this was smart. Namir was the only one of us who actually looked dangerous. That might be important in a confrontation.
Paul and I were as recognizable as movie stars, and to a lot of people we were symbols of treason. Cooperating with the Martians, giving in to the Others. Dustin looked like a college kid and Elza, a fashion model. Alba was so small she looked like a girl wearing a cop costume, though the riot gun gave her a certain air of authority. Card looked like an overweight couch vegetable, which I guess he was.
Namir had something in his eyes that the rest of us lacked. Not arrogance, but a kind of physical confidence, certainty. Like he’d done everything, and most of it well. He’d told me, though, back at the motor pool last night, that Card was the kind of guy you’d watch out for in a bar fight. Heavy but not slow, and hard to knock down.
Of course, you could always go to a different class of bar.
I was always kind of curious about that aspect of Earth culture, American culture. I’d left before I was old enough to drink legally, most places, so my experience was limited to one beer joint in the Galápagos, the Orbit Hilton, and the dome in Mars. On Mars, actually, above the colony. No boisterous drunks anywhere, no fisticuffs, just the occasional voice raised in dispute over a Scrabble word. All the fun I’d missed. But I did know not to pick a fight with someone who looked like my brother.
I’d forgotten how good it was to be out walking—my body had forgotten. Dutifully treading on the treadmill on ad Astra, walking one day and jogging the next, was no substitute for the real thing, no matter how exact or exotic the VR surround was. Walking the Malibu beach or the skyways of Koala Lumpur, my body knew I was a hamster on a treadmill in an interstellar cage.
I walked along like that, in a reverie, for maybe an hour, everybody not talking and not bunching up. We were trying to be inconspicuous but not sneaky, in case someone was watching or trailing us.
Then a familiar sound, the toy-piano Mozart Paul used on his cell. He put it to his ear and whispered something, then gave it a shake and tried again.
“Could it be low?” I said.
“I don’t know. It got a flash charge at the motor pool. Should still be good.”
He shrugged and held it out to me. The ON button glowed green. I put it to my ear. “Namir? Hello?” Nothing but a white-noise sound.
“Could he have turned yours on accidentally?”
“Don’t see how.” I handed his back. “I mean, you might turn it on, but you wouldn’t punch up the number accidentally.”
“Give it to me,” Elza said. “Hush.” She listened to it, stopping her other ear. After a minute she shook her head and handed it back. “If it’s in his pocket, you ought to hear something when he moves.”
“Unless he’s not moving,” I said.
We all flinched at a sudden machine-gun sound. “Just a woodpecker,” Alba said. “Pileated.” It was a big thing, right over us, bright red head.
I held up the phone. “So should I just talk to him?”
Elza nodded, still staring at the bird. “Yeah. Tell him to turn it off.”
“Hello, Namir?” I repeated his name twice, louder. “Maybe he turned it on accidentally, and dropped it?”
“Or there’s something wrong with it,” Paul said. “So we either go back and check on him, or wait for him here, or move on.”
“Move on,” Elza said when he looked at her. Everybody seemed to agree, except perhaps me. That cell phone had done some screwy things, but I didn’t remember it making calls on its own.
A couple more curves in the river, and we were almost there. The stockade looked more formidable from the ground than it had from the plane.
We studied it from hiding, on the edge of the woods, over a long, empty parking lot. To the right and left were cornfields, regularly spaced plants two and three feet high. The produce stand was empty, with a hand-lettered sign saying ARMAGEDDON OUT OF BUSINESS SALE. No guards visible, but the two guard towers probably had people behind the dark aiming slots.
The road had a chain across it with a CLOSED sign. “We ought to just leave the weapons behind and walk up to the door,” Paul said.
“I don’t know,” Dustin said. “No ace in the hole? We should leave someone in reserve.”
“How about just the women?” Elza said. “Carmen and Alba and I walk up to
them unarmed. Buck naked.”
“No way,” Alba said.
“In underwear?” She grinned.
“I don’t have underwear, and you know it,” I said. “Let’s go back to ‘no guns.’”
“I am naked without a gun,” Alba said. “But it makes sense.” She took off her cop jacket and I left behind the sweater I’d stolen from Camp David, under which I might have concealed something more dangerous than my natural endowments. Elza left behind the pistol she’d been carrying in her waistband, the one that Paul had killed with. Protecting me.
Alba checked her cell and it worked on Paul’s number. She left the phone turned on and we set off, trying to walk casually despite being stared at, presumably from both sides.