Earthbound

9

I woke suddenly when the plane’s engine throttled down, and we banked sharply. I raised the curtain on my window and saw that we were angling down over some heavily forested hilly land. There was a small, meandering river.

“Should be only a few miles,” Paul said, his amplified voice flat and crackling. “I’m going down low and dead slow, and will cut the engine as we glide over the commune. Your flatscreens should be showing what’s directly under us.” I reached forward and tapped the screen on the back of the seat in front of me. Treetops rolled by underneath, slowly growing larger as we dropped.

They must hear us coming. Were people running for cover? Running to man the anti-aircraft lasers?

“They won’t have lasers.” Namir was reading my mind. “A shotgun could do some damage, though.”

“Why no lasers?”

“They could. But they aren’t getting megawatts out of twentieth-century solar cells and wind machines.”

The forest abruptly stopped, replaced by squares of pasture and fruit trees in neat lines. We were low enough that I could see cows looking up at us. The engine stuttered off, and we glided with a sound of rushing air.

A stockade wall and a glimpse of blue rectangle—a swimming pool where a half dozen naked people pointed at us. Two of them waved, much better than pointing guns.

Just past the pool was a large low building. “That’s the common,” Dustin said. “We used to go there to watch cube.” Past that were dozens of individual dwellings, I supposed multi-family. It looked as if they all started out with a basic octagonal shape, and grew in various directions.

People with clothes on looked up at us, shading their eyes from the low sun. At the entrance to the stockade, a man had a small assault rifle on a sling hanging from his shoulder. He watched us go over without raising the gun.

There were watchtowers at each corner of the stockade. From our angle you couldn’t see who or what was in them. There was a shed at the entrance to the place, probably where they sold to outsiders. Then a dirt road that cut through more pasture and fruit trees, before it plunged into the forest.

Paul turned the engine back on with a pop and a quiet roar, and we gained a little altitude. “Now let’s see how far we’ll have to walk,” he said.

We followed the winding river for a couple of minutes. A dirt path went alongside it, maybe adequate for a jepé, but not wide or straight enough for landing. Then the gray strip of an autoway slid by. Paul rose up in a banking curl, crossing over the river and then back again. He lined up perfectly with the middle lane, and eased the plane down. No sign of any auto traffic, but this probably wasn’t a busy road even under normal conditions.

The brakes chirped a couple of times, and we rolled to a halt just over the river, taking up all of the right-hand lane.

“Namir, you spies could earn your keep here. Take a look around?”

“Got it.” He and Dustin and Elza took weapons and bandoliers from the overhead compartments as the door swung down to become stairs. I was eager to get some fresh air myself, but Paul was right. Send the guns out first. The bridge might be guarded, or at least watched.

“I wonder how safe we are,” Card said. “If a car comes, it should brake automatically, but…”

“Trust to our luck,” I said. “So far so good.”

“That makes me feel so safe.”

“You probably couldn’t get onto the autoway if the failsafes weren’t working,” Alba said. “The power shuts down automatically.”

“Government intrusion,” he said. “Any zero can hotwire a car into manual.”

“Can you?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I know how.” Yeah, like I know how a starship works.

Namir and Elza were pointing their guns up and down the road, while Dustin jogged to the side of the bridge. He looked over and then signaled with a shrug.

Namir came back up the steps. “I suggest Plan P,” he said. “We probably can’t make it to the farm before dark.”

“Excuse me?” I said. “Did I sleep through something?”

“P stands for prudence,” Namir said. “The plane is too conspicuous a target to stay in. So we unload the essentials and hide nearby.”

“Like on the road here.”

“No, we’ll carry stuff back into the woods.” He looked at Paul. “Maybe down by the river?”

“Have to carry it down sooner or later.”

I slung a rifle cross-ways over my back and collected a couple of bags of food and stuff. When Dustin came aboard, I asked him whether the river water would be safe to drink. He counseled caution until we could ask a native. “I drank from it as a kid, but Dad gave me hell.”

After several minutes of no traffic, Card and Alba agreed that the autoway must be turned off. That doesn’t mean someone couldn’t come screaming along on manual, but we could hear them coming and get off the roadway.

There was no actual path from the bridge down to the dirt road along the river. We picked our way down slippery gravel and through a thicket of brambles, the spies preceding us with their guns. After we got to solid ground, they left us with most of the artillery and went up for another load.

It was peaceful and pretty. The river was about ten meters wide, swift, and looked deep.

Card came and stood beside me, looking into the water. “Remember the Galápagos?”

“Sure.” We’d had a day there before we left for Mars on the space elevator. “You ever go back?”

“I did about twenty years ago. Diving and fishing.”

“You became a sportsman?”

“Kind of. Took a motorsled to the North Pole once; that was interesting.”

“Living off polar bears and penguins?”

“No penguins there. Mostly beers and hot dogs. I did see a polar bear, but it ran away.”

“Never went back to Mars?”

“Never really wanted to. Got out as soon as the quarantine lifted. So glad to get back here.” He took a drink of water from a plastic bottle and offered it to me. I took a drink even though I wasn’t thirsty.

“That’s Mars,” he said.

“I guess.” Impolite to refuse water.

“You liked it there.”

“It’s home. Became home.” I shook my head. “Was home. Never going back.”

“No one ever can. If you want to be philosophical.”

“Ever go back to Florida?”

“Yeah. The old house was still there, but with big condos all around it. One quaint old cottage with the rose bushes still there. Same pink gravel lawn. Surrounded by sky-highs.”

“That’s funny.”

“What?”

“Must’ve been some zoning peculiarity.”

He laughed. “Carmen… it’s a fucking museum. It’s the last place on Earth where the Mars Girl lived.”

“Oh, shit.”

“You ought to go. Maybe they’d let you in for free.”

“I could wear my authentic Martian cuntsuit.” What adults called a skinsuit.

“In Florida? You’d be arrested.”

“They don’t seem too inhibited here. You see the people around the pool?”

“Yeah, California. Love it.”

Dustin and Elza were struggling down the slope with the NASA mail cart. We went up to help them through the brush.

“Paul’s making a list,” Elza said. “What we can leave on the plane.”

“Does it lock up?” Card asked.

“He says yes. But you could get in with a can opener.”

“Probably smart to take all the weapons and ammunition,” Elza said.

“Assuming the nice folks at Fruit Farm will feed us,” I said.

“If they don’t, we’ll be on our own in a couple of days anyhow,” Elza said unnecessarily.

Namir came out of the woods, kicking aside brambles. “Found a place where we can spend tonight.”

“A motel?” My brother said.

Namir ignored him. “Small clearing with plenty of overhead cover.”

“In case the prez sends his space force?” Elza said.

“Could happen. Or the folks at Fruit Farm might come down the road looking for us.”

“Armed with pitchforks and trowels,” Dustin said.

“They have weapons. We should be ready for anything.”

Of course. I gestured to Alba. “Let’s go up and get a load.”

We picked our way up and found that Paul had made a neat stack of stuff beside the plane.

I picked up one of the three laser rifles, I think the one I’d had at Camp David. Not much charge.

Paul came down the steps and answered my question before I could ask it. “It’ll be useless junk after Wednesday, but I didn’t want to leave them behind. Somebody could get them tonight or tomorrow and use them on us.”

“This one’s almost dry.”

“Still a potent psychological weapon, till Wednesday.” He set down the two bags he was carrying, food and the flare guns from the motor pool. “Or you could throw it in the river. Two’s probably enough.” We also had the powder weapons from Alba’s trunk, and the ones Namir had “found.”

“Take out the fuel cell before you throw it away,” Alba said. “I’ll carry it till Wednesday.” I extracted it and gave it to her, then tossed the thing spinning over the side. It hit the water with a quiet splash, bobbed up once, and sank.

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.