Earthbound

15

Namir didn’t come back before nightfall. We stayed clustered around Paul, at least one of us awake and on guard, on ninety-minute shifts. I hoped the others slept better than I did.

The cubs had left their mother’s body before dark. Where did they go? Would they lead other bears back?

The woods were full of small noises. I guess they always are if you’re listening.

Spy disappeared sometime around three or four, while I was sleeping. Elza said nothing special happened; she just noticed he was gone.

We all got cold. When the sky started to lighten, we built a small fire, twigs, to thaw out our hands and feet. We warmed some water in a metal cup and shared bad instant coffee.

An hour or so after dawn, Namir showed up, riding a horse and leading a mule with a cart. He brought a bag of hard-cooked eggs and a bottle of wine. We attacked the eggs but left the wine for later.

Namir took a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and unfolded it carefully. It had been handled quite a bit. “That fellow with the telescope, Wham-O. He saw something on Mars, and made a drawing.”

It was a smudged pencil sketch, clear enough.

“That’s Syrtis Major,” I said, pointing to a shape like a child’s drawing of Africa on an Earth globe. “But what’s that?

Off the southern tip of the mass was a circle surrounding a cross. Paul’s eyes were open, and I showed it to him. “What do you think?”

He squinted at it. “Earth.”

“No,” I said. “It’s Mars.”

“The circle with the cross. That means Earth.”

“Of course,” Namir said. “The astronomer’s symbol. Could they have drawn that in the desert sand?”

“Walking in a big circle?” Elza said.

“Not walking,” Paul said. “Take heavy equipment. Hundreds of miles.”

“Or the Others might have done it,” Namir said. “Not a very big project, compared to blowing up the Moon.”

“But why would they?” I said, which produced a couple of shrugs.

“I think we did it,” Paul said, “we Martians. A signal to Earth, saying we’re still alive.”

“Let’s assume that’s it,” Namir said, smiling. “If the Others wanted to impress us, they’d do something less subtle.”

The Farmers had put an old mattress in the cart, and a length of plastic webbing to strap Paul in securely.

He wasn’t complaining about pain, but he looked bad. Elza offered him an ampoule, and when he didn’t say no, gave it to him in the shoulder. He was asleep by the time we had him secured.

Namir checked the height of the sun; two and a half fists. “We’ll make it before dark, no problem. Early afternoon.”

I hoped I wouldn’t be the problem. My leg was supporting my weight all right, and with the cart and mule I didn’t have to carry anything but the rifle.

The mule seemed to like me well enough, so I led it, or at least accompanied it, while Namir trotted ahead a couple of hundred yards at a time. Elza followed a ways behind me, and Dustin was the rear guard, hiding in wait a few minutes before following.

We went along the paved road for about two hours, uphill and then down. In a valley—actually a “saddle,” I suppose—we turned off at a place marked by a faded orange tape stapled around a tree. It was not so much a trail as a path that had once been mowed. “Bush-hogged” is the verb I remembered from my Florida childhood. I always had the image of a hairy wild pig with tusks, but I suppose a bush-hog was a kind of mowing machine.

My mulish colleague didn’t care for the new trail; the cart didn’t roll smoothly and tugged and jerked on its harness. After a minute it stopped cold, and whacking its flank just gave me a sore hand.

Namir came back and dismounted. “It didn’t like this part coming up.” With his belt knife he cut a supple branch from a sapling, and shook it rattling in the mule’s face, muttering at it in Hebrew. It grunted and started moving.

He handed the switch to me. “It remembered. How sweet.” He remounted the horse in one smooth motion. Riding boots and a holstered pistol. All he needed was a big hat, and maybe a tobacco cigarette.

He was obviously enjoying it. They’d had a couple of horses on his kibbutz, as well as camels. He said as a boy he liked the camels more; they were more like pets, with personality. But he hadn’t ridden one in about a hundred years. He’d ridden horses in the States, back when he led the simple life of an Israeli diplomat and spy.

What different paths we had followed, to wind up so closely entwined. Before he went into space he’d had a full career in that cosmopolitan universe, now as dead as Babylon. New York, Washington, Paris, Moscow, Tel Aviv—all dark and cold now, some in ruins. But he’d lived that life.

What goes through his head? In what languages?

He was a UN diplomat when I was a teenager stepping aboard the Space Elevator for what I thought would be a five-year adventure. While he was going around the world learning and doing, I was stuck in a small town in a cave on Mars. Not even a small town. The same 105 people waging eternal war against dust and boredom.

It never occurred to me that one day I would long for boredom. That I would give anything to be back in that cave with those plain, brave people.

Namir is bullet-brave. But he would have done well in Mars, too. The starship we shared didn’t have one hundredth the floor space we enjoyed in Mars. But with one exception, we stayed away from each other’s throats. I wouldn’t have called it courage then.

The mule’s name was Jerry. I whispered endearments and scratched his rump with the stick when we had to pick up the pace. Namir’s horse waltzed nervously through the underbrush, but Jerry just plodded along, perhaps conserving strength, and kept up well enough.

We stopped before mid-day to rest and eat. Namir emptied all the cartridges out of one magazine, which had fallen into a stream. He cleaned and polished each round before thumbing it back into place.

Thirty rounds. So much of our world was numbers. Five magazines with thirty rounds each. A double-barreled shotgun with nine. I had twenty-seven left for my pistol and two twenty-round clips for the rifle. Two flare pistols. There were seven ampoules left in the first-aid kit, for three people in pain.

My leg was stiffening up, but I could walk. I hoped they had more ampoules back at Funny Farm, but didn’t want to ask. As an experiment, I took a stick of pain gum after we ate. It would probably work fine if I’d been shot in the mouth. It made my tongue disappear, but didn’t do much for the groin.

After about an hour, we got to the stream that fed the pool behind Funny Farm, but we didn’t follow it. It was a couple of miles shorter to cut through the woods, and it was a good thing we went that way. If we’d followed the stream, we might have been too late.

We were a little more than a mile from home when we heard the first crackle of gunfire. It echoed, but there was no mistaking which direction it was coming from.

Namir turned in the saddle and shouted at me: “Stay here with Paul! Get off the trail!” Good idea.

He snapped the shotgun closed. “Wait until the shooting stops,” he said. “If we don’t, if I don’t come back, Elza, you come check.”

“Maybe you should wait,” Dustin said.

“Yeah, maybe I should.” He nudged the horse hard with his heels, and it trotted forward.

“Good luck?” I said. Are soldiers supposed to wish each other luck? The horse was going pretty fast when they disappeared around the bend.

“We should get hidden,” Dustin said. He stroked the mule’s nose. “You’ll be quiet, won’t you?” It tilted its head toward him and wisely didn’t say anything. Neither did I.

The shooting continued as we worked the cart and mule through the brush. It was sporadic, not the steady firefight roar I remembered from Armstrong and Camp David. Bullets getting rare on both sides.

Jerry had always been whickering and grunting at me, but it was quiet as we struggled up a small hill. Dustin’s innate leadership abilities, or perhaps even a mule knows that when people are shooting guns, you don’t want to draw attention. When we got to the top of the rise, he put his big head on my shoulder and breathed hard, but otherwise stayed quiet.

“I’ll go up on the other side,” Dustin said. “Hold fire if I start shooting; I’ll try to draw them away.” He looked at me. “If you have to leave Paul, do it.”

“No,” I said.

“They won’t hurt him. They need him.”

“No. We don’t know who ‘they’ are.”

“If it was you in the cart,” Elza said, “we’d stay with you. So get the fuck over there and protect us.”

He started to say something but turned and went down the slope.

“So are two husbands twice as much trouble,” I whispered to her, “or four times?”

“Eight. These two.” She looked down at Paul. “Hope he’ll be all right.”

“Namir, too.”

She nodded. “He always comes out on top. ‘Always’ meaning so far.” Surprisingly, she knuckled away a tear. “We’re lucky to have them at all.”

“Yeah. What a week.”

She sat down heavily and looked at her weapon, propping it up on the cast. “Piece of shit,” she said neutrally, and pulled the slide back slowly twice, then fast three times. Five cartridges ejected.

The mule stirred restlessly at the sound.

“Maybe you should have swapped,” I said. Her gun had jammed during the melee with the cyclists, but I only found out later; she’d cleared it by whacking it with the cast, and emptied the rest of the clip at them. Then picked up a pistol and made sure the enemy were all dead. Meanwhile, I was distracted by trying not to bleed out.

“Yeah, maybe.” She picked up the loose rounds and wiped them off with her shirt tail and snicked them back into the magazine. “Devil you know. I was tempted by the fancy ones those bicycle assholes had. But I know this one, and we have ammo—”

In the distance, a sustained hammering of automatic fire. Two thumps that must have been a shotgun. Then rifles and pistols crackling.

“Sounds like he got there,” she said.

“Should we…”

“Hold our position, yeah.” Jerry made a chuckling noise, and I stroked his ears.

It was like overhearing an argument between machines, angry plosives with a whine now and then. A bullet ricocheting from metal? No, I’d heard it in the woods before.

We should’ve taken the bulletproof vest from the biker leader. It was all covered with blood and brains, though. So it hadn’t done him much good. But I had to think what an easy target Namir would present, riding slowly on horseback.

At least smart bullets wouldn’t work. Though they seemed to have plenty of dumb ones.

It was quiet for a minute, two minutes, three. “Maybe that’s it,” Elza said.

Whatever “it” was. I looked across the shallow draw and couldn’t see Dustin, which I supposed was good. “So we stay here?”

“Yeah. Stay ready.” I checked Paul, and there was no change; he’d slept through the excitement. It hadn’t been that loud.

I had to press down pretty hard to feel the pulse in his throat, but it was there. It worried me that he didn’t respond to the pressure. He was too pale and still. Did we give him too much painkiller? I resisted the impulse to shake him.

Another minute. “Shit,” she said quietly. “Something happen.”

“Maybe he’s safe inside now,” I said.

“That or dead. Or maybe he fell back under fire.”

My brain wasn’t working. “So we should wait to see if he comes back?”

“Maybe. Shit. I have to go.”

For an odd second I thought she was talking about a bowel movement. “Tell Dustin.”

She didn’t have to. He came out of the brush below us. “Let’s get up there. Set up a cross-fire.” He looked at me with bright intensity. “You stay here with Paul. We’ll be back before dark.”

“Stay off the road,” Elza added helpfully. She shouldered her bag, and they hustled off.

“Good-bye,” I said to their backs, and felt a sudden twist of new fear.

They had abandoned me. A rifle and a pistol and a mule versus how many armed lunatics?

Jerry shifted his weight and snuffled. I held the weapon away from him and put my arm around his neck. “You and me, mule,” I whispered. The supernumeraries. The expendables?

The aliens, Paul and me. Martian citizens, if born on Earth. Citizens of the galaxy, the title of a movie I saw as a child in Florida, back in the twenty-first century.

When we were chatting with Lanny in the bookstore, he mentioned there had been a strong movement, before the power went out, to reform the calendar. Why mark years from the disputed date of a minor prophet’s birth? That “minor” was Lanny’s own prejudice showing, of course. One out of three Americans had been practicing Christians when the lights went out.

That was another one of his jokes—if they had practiced a little harder, maybe they would’ve gotten it right. And all of this wouldn’t have happened.

But his point was interesting. Some people wanted to begin the calendar on the day, the moment, humans first stepped onto another world—the moon, back in 1969. We knew when that had happened, down to the nanosecond.

Paul had liked the idea but said it didn’t matter which nanosecond you started your calendar on, so long as everybody agreed on which nanosecond it was. He said it would make astronomical calculations easier if you started the calendar at the beginning of a Julian day, which I guess was the number of days since Julius Caesar was born. I remember resisting the impulse to argue that, after all, Caesar was born by Caesarian section, so at what nanosecond was he actually born? When they cut into his poor mother, or when his head came out of the wound, or his feet, or with his first breath, or when they cut the cord? This is science, after all.

My own children had been “born” the instant the mother machine shocked breath into them; their legal birth date was 23 Lowell 28, which translated into sometime in December, 2084, Earth style.

Maybe they should reform Earth’s calendar so year zero and day zero were the same as ours, the day humans first stepped onto Mars. Of course, the calendars and clocks would spin crazily out of synchrony after the first moment.

Computers don’t care, anyhow. It’s only humans who get confused.

Jerry made a protracted intestinal comment, to remind me that humans and computers weren’t everything.

So how did Elza and Dustin plan to keep from being shot by the good guys? Would the fact they were shooting at the bad guys protect them?

I tried to visualize the situation. They’d have to approach on this side of the river, east; it was too deep and fast to cross. But they wouldn’t just walk up this road alongside the river. Too exposed, even here.

They’d probably loop around farther east, and circle back behind the stockade. The orchard wouldn’t afford much cover, which probably meant the enemy wouldn’t be there.

Then what? Holler for someone to cover them while they rushed for the back door? If Namir was there, he could identify their voices. “Don’t shoot; they’re fellow spies from nonexistent governments.”

My degree in American Studies was woefully deficient in course work on staying alive at the end of the world. Find good boots. Count your ammo. Try to keep the mule from farting too loud.

I jumped at gunfire, but recognized it: the “burst of three” setting on the standard-issue army rifles that we were carrying. Two bursts on top of each other. Then one more. Then two more.

Didn’t mean it was them, of course. But it wasn’t the manic rattle we’d heard before. Had they had time to circle around? Depends on how thick the woods were; how cautious they were.

Jerry backed away from the noise. I patted him and told him it was all right. Lying to a mule, how pathetic.

Paul groaned, and I went around to check on him. No change.

I heard a noise, and crouched down behind the wagon. There was something or someone moving in the brush on the other side of the road, back where Dustin had been.

Thumbed the rifle selector straight up to B3, burst, and peered over it to the other side. It sounded like someone walking, not being careful. But then why not walk on the road?

The wagon was too well hidden; I couldn’t have seen anyone unless he was wearing bright clothes. Quietly I stepped around past Jerry, pressing his muzzle, and whispering, “Quiet.” He nodded, which was strange. I went down into a shallow ditch that would be a streamlet when it rained. I touched the extra magazines in my pockets, talismans, and crept down toward the road the way I’d been taught, the butt of the rifle stock firm under my arm, finger inside the trigger guard but not on the trigger.

The noise to my right grew louder. About halfway to the road I stopped and waited, hunkered behind a thick brown tangle of dead brush.

The noise stopped, too.

There was the slightest rustle, that could have been wind—but there was no wind. I swung the rifle in that direction and a wolf’s head appeared, or a dog like a German shepherd, teeth bared and ears flattened down. I fired and the burst went low, scattering dirt a couple of feet below the face, which disappeared.

Probably running away, though I couldn’t hear anything but cotton stillness and metallic ringing. Ear protectors dangled in a small plastic bag hanging from the rear sight, so you wouldn’t forget to use them.

Assuming he was scared away now, but everyone else within a mile knew where I was, I wasted no time getting back to the cart.

The water and supplies and extra weapons were as I’d left them, strapped to the sides. Jerry was restless but quiet. I looked in the wagon at Paul.

His eyes were open.

“Paul?” No reaction.

I touched his skin and it was cool and dry. He didn’t blink when I touched his eyes.

I closed them.