For Love and Glory

XXXVIII

She had set her brain to wake at the earliest clear light. In these latitudes at this time of year, nights were short. She sprang to consciousness, gasped, and sat up. Hebo’s eyes were already open. They widened—in appreciation, she felt fleetingly—but he put an arm across them before she could cross hers over her breasts. “Do you want to dress first or shall I?” he mumbled. Laughter broke from her of its own accord and shook her to full alertness.

The rain had ended a couple of hours ago, easing her worst dread. When she emerged, she found mist a-smoke over the ground and among the trees. The cold didn’t belong on the Freydis of popular imagination. A whole world, though, a whole congregation of miracles like none other in the universe— How was Orichalc? She sped to the last signs she had found yesterday.

“I’ll fix breakfast,” offered Hebo at her back. She nodded absently, her mind concentrated on brush, dead leaves, mud. It was not easy to trace the spoor farther; the rain had obliterated much. In vague wise she noticed him gather deadwood, use a lighter to start a fire, make a grill of green sticks on which to heat food in its containers. Well, naturally he’d have elementary skills.

He brought her a serving, together with his own. She glanced up from her crouch. He didn’t look as though he had slept well, either, but if he could smile, so could she. “Here.” She lifted a branchful of crimson berries she had cut off a chance-encountered bush. “Redballs for sweetener.”

“Have you eaten any?” he exclaimed.

“Not yet. I meant to share— What’s wrong?”

“Whew! That’s not a proper redball, it’s a highland species, poisonous to us. Those little yellow dots on the leaves mark it. You’d have been one sick girl.”

“Thanks.” You are necessary, damn you. And you are trying to be friendly again, damn you. And I think you’re succeeding, damn you. Lissa took the opened container, set it down, spooned food from it with her right hand while her left hand turned debris over.

“Can you really still pick up sign?” he wondered.

“Yes. Tracks in the dirt don’t all slump away under rain. Many collect water before silt starts to fill them, and are temporarily more visible than before. Leaves blow onto others and protect them. Bent twigs and such don’t disappear overnight. The problem does get extra complicated. I find plenty of breaks in the trail. Just the same, I’m getting an approximate direction. Once this flinking fog lifts I’ll have better clues. Orichalc wouldn’t move purely at random, you see. No animal does. Whether or not he had much consciousness left, the body itself would tend to follow the least strenuous course. If we look ahead and study the contours—A-a-ah!” A breeze made rags of the gray. Dripping trees, begemmed shrubs, wetly gleaming boulders hove into sight.

Having gulped their ration, swallowed some milk, and separated to do what else was needful, the searchers moved onward. Lissa led the way, slowly, often pausing to cast about or for eyes and fingers to probe, yet with a confidence that waxed and tingled in her. Up the slope they climbed, topped the ridge, and gazed across vastness.

The air had cleared, though it remained bleak, and heaven was featureless, colorless, save where the unseen sun brightened it a little, low above eastern bulwarks. Ground slanted downward, begrown with bushes and dwarf trees well apart, otherwise ruddy-bare to a narrow ledge. Underneath this a talus slope plunged into unseen depths. The far side of the gorge reared a kilometer beyond. Its course zigzagged north and south, a barrier between distant plain and distant mountains.

“Look!” Lissa shouted. “The trail, straight and plain!” Runoff had gouged the slight hollowings unmistakeably deeper. Wavery as the footprints of a man staggering at the end of his endurance, tail dragging behind, they pointed to her goal.

Hebo caught her arm. “Easy,” he warned. “Remember what kind of soil and rock we’ve got hereabouts. You could lose your footing at best, touch off a small landslide at worst.”

“Orichalc didn’t.” Still, she placed her boots warily, one, two, one, two, on the way down.

The reddish body lay coiled in a clump of scrub. Lissa fell to her knees, crushing branches, to cast arms about it. “Orichalc, Orichalc, s-s-siya-a, shipmate, here I am, how are you, comrade, comrade?”

Cheek against skin, she felt not the wonted warmth but a faint incessant shuddering. Otherwise the Susaian barely stirred. Glazed eyes turned toward her and drooped again. The least of sibilations reached her ears.

She scrambled erect. “Hypothermia,” she heard her voice say; it rang within her skull. “Extreme. Fatal, I think, unless we act fast.”

“He didn’t wear any clothes?” Hebo asked, as if automatically.

“None of them foresaw the need, when they’d spend every night in camp.” Her own tongue likewise moved of itself. “You know, you ought to know, Susaians seldom do. They’re warmblooded, with thermostats better than ours. But the wind chill factor last night overloaded his. You or I would be dead. He’s dying.”

“What to do?”

“We haven’t got a thermal unit. Quick! Unroll your sleeping bag, open it fully, spread it out.” Lissa released her backpack, dropped it, squatted to pluck at the fastenings of her sack.

He followed suit while he asked, “What’ve you got in mind?”

“Warming him, of course. Putting him between the padded fabrics and ourselves.” She glanced about, saw a spot that wasn’t truly level but was not so canted that they would roll off, and brought her bag there. Returning, she said, “It’ll take both of us to carry him. Susaians are massier than you’d think.”

Hebo had the strength to be gentle as he hauled the limp form up across his shoulders. Lissa took the head end. Grunting with effort, they bore Orichalc over and laid him down on her bedding, stretched out. Hebo fetched his and put it above. “Now what?” he inquired.

“Clothes off,” Lissa directed. He gaped. “Strip, I said! To chaos with modesty.” She ripped at her garments.

He removed his more slowly, eyes at first locked on her. Then, doubtless realizing how he stared, he swiveled his head away. A moment later he turned his back while he completed the task. She was already between the bags. As he faced her again, he tried to cover himself with one hand. Though big, it wasn’t quite enough.

Lissa couldn’t help herself. Laughter pealed. “Oh, fout, don’t worry!” she called. “I’d feel slighted if you did not react. C’mon, join the party.”

He grinned and obeyed. They snuggled close on either side of Orichalc. That put their arms in contact across the Susaian while glance met glance over his head. The chill made them shiver too. Then as heat flowed from them, replenishing itself within, and the victim’s blood began to respond, they felt a growing voluptuous comfort.

“Yeah, I recall hearing of this trick,” he said. “Never had to use it before, and I doubt I’ll ever do it again with so shapely a trailmate.”

Respond amicably, but don’t be too encouraging, Lissa warned herself. “Thank you, kind sir. We’ll be here a fairish while. May as well relax and enjoy it, now that we know it’s working.”

“It does feel good, saving a life. Uh, that sounds smug, doesn’t it? Wasn’t meant to be.”

“You mean it doesn’t fit your rough-and-tough image. Well, I admit to a touch of smugness in me, and consider it well-earned. Relax, I said.”

“How to pass the time? Not with more wrangling, I hope.”

“Me too. We must both have a lot of stories from our pasts that we haven’t swapped.”

“Good idea. Want to start?”

“What?” she teased. “A man doesn’t snatch at a chance to talk about himself?”

“I know my biography.” A shadow passed over his face. He could not yet be quite sure how much of it was gone from him. He lightened again, but she decided to steer clear of talk about Earth. “Yours is new.”

“No, do go first, please.”

He regarded her for a moment. “You want something to get your mind off fretting about your friend, don’t you?” he asked softly. “All right, I’ll try.”

So he has that much sensitivity, she thought. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Still, it’s good to know. She let her hand brush across his. “Thank you.”

“Um-m-m, something really different from right now.… This happened maybe fifty years ago, to a fellow I knew. You not being a girl fresh out of convent school,” whatever that meant, “it shouldn’t offend you too much.”

The anecdote was bawdy and funny. Two hapless lovers, stranded on an asteroid with supplies and equipment but otherwise only their two spacesuits, and nothing else to do until the relief ship would arrive and rescue them, weeks hence, applying their engineering ingenuity to the problem—Lissa whooped laughter. Only later did she wonder who the man was to whom the incident had really happened.

As if in response, Orichalc writhed a bit, raised his head, let it sink again but whispered a few words. Lissa’s trans was in her pack. However, by now the Susaian understood Anglay. “Everything is well,” she said gladly. “Rest. Get warm. We’ll soon take you home.”

“To New Halla?” Hebo asked.

“To our base on the coast,” Lissa replied. “From there, we can call for further transportation if need be, but I don’t think we’ll have to. A couple of days’ relaxation ought to put Orichalc in fine fettle.”

“What’ll he do with it? Isn’t the upland project spoiled?”

“Not permanently. First he can join another group, maybe my river cruise—”

The muzzle brushed her cheek. “S-s-s,” she heard, and words that must mean something like, “I would enjoy that, your company, darling comrade.” She patted the big bald head.

“Meanwhile somebody can talk with Uldor at Forholt,” she continued. “If he’s up to it, and I bet he soon will be, we can arrange audiovisual transmissions, so a new expedition can have the benefit of his advice till he’s recovered himself. I can lead it, once we’ve taken care of my canoers, if nobody better is available.”

He studied her for a spell before he murmured, “My God, you’re a hopeful one still. But just what is it you’re so hopeful for?”

“I’ve tried to tell you.”

“In snatches. We keep being interrupted.” He smiled ruefully. “Or interrupting ourselves. I only got from you what I’d heard about in a fuzzy, general way. It’d always seemed too far-fetched to me to bet the store on. Maybe, while we wait here, you could rightfully explain.”

Now she was happy, yes, eager to discuss immediate reality. “It hasn’t been a secret, but it hasn’t been publicized either, so I suppose I can’t blame you for not knowing more. Partly that’s because the people working on it don’t want to make overblown promises. They, we need more scientific evidence, more data on the Freydisan biosphere and its ecologies, before we can draw up a comprehensive scheme.”

Go ahead, take the risk. “Also, if we raise premature expectations, they’d be bound to cause public disappointment and disbelief. This is a long-range, gradual thing. And there are those, even on New Halla, who’d take advantage of that disappointment to undermine support and build opposition. No offense, Torben. Honestly, none. We know full well the colony needs a base of conventional industries to start from, to build on. What we want to prevent is them becoming much larger and more widespread than they are. That leads toward over-commitment, outright dependency, and the end result—I’ve spoken already of the end result. Certain interests want exactly that to happen. They stand to profit hugely. Not just in return on their investments, but in the power that control of such a system will give them.” In a rush: “I believe as independent a spirit as you would stand against that.”

He nodded, showing no resentment. “In principle, sure.” He grinned a bit. “I don’t care for fat cats. Keep ’em lean and hard, I say.” Soberly: “I’m here to make money, but within decent limits. Trouble is to figure out what they are.”

Yes, she thought, he is looking toward something else. And dropping no hint about it.

“What is your alternative, anyway?” he went on. “How much chance has it got of working?”

“The basic concept is almost ridiculously simple and obvious,” she told him with mounting enthusiasm. “It went far toward rehabilitating Earth, till Earth civilization became so—so ethereal that industry and commerce are irrelevant. It’s used in different ways and degrees on several other planets, including Asborg. It isn’t striking there, because the settlers began with a remarkably Earthlike world and with state-of-the-art technology, nano, robotic, self-recycling, that doesn’t need to draw heavily on the environment. Besides, huge territories are still held as preserves by the Houses.”

“You mean gene-modification. Sure. Can you do it on the scale you’ll need for a global civilization?”

“That’s what we’re working toward. It’ll take a tremendous lot of research, sequencing and reading the genetic codes of millions of species, detailing their biochemistry, working out their evolutionary histories, understanding how they interact, everything, on a world that is not very Earthlike. In the end, though—microbes that extract and refine minerals, buildings that grow out of the soil, food, fiber, chemicals, not from farms or factories but from the forests that keep Freydis alive.”

“What’ll that do to your beloved wilderness? Sounds to me sort of like the nightmare you were laying out yesterday.”

“No, not truly, not at all if things work out the way we hope. Of course there’ll be some conventional artifacts and processes, but minimal. Besides, ‘wilderness’ is a relative concept. It doesn’t mean chaos. The life you see around you is in balance, though it does change with changing conditions. What we dream of is a civilization not opposed to nature, but integrated with it, both in and of it. Something altogether new. No telling how it will develop, what shapes it will take, what the rest of the galaxy might learn from it.”

“Visionary.”

“We mean to move toward it step by strictly practical step. If we’re given the chance.”

“ ‘Bold,’ I should’ve said.” Hebo smiled into her eyes. “Except that’s too weak a word. A scheme bound to appeal to one like you, Lissa.” His gaze dropped. “Could I think about it for a while?”

“I was wishing you would,” she answered softly.

The silence that fell beneath a rising wind grew more and more companionable.

Finally Orichalc stirred, making as if to move from between them. Lissa had been feeling renewed warmth in the smooth, muscular body. “I think we can let go of you,” she told him. “But you stay under covers for now, hear me?”

She slipped forth, bounded to her feet, and hastily dressed. Hebo followed suit. They were careful about keeping back to back till they were done.

Thereupon she said, “Our patient’s out of danger, I suppose. But you must have noticed how cut and bruised he is—thorns, rocks—and probably still weakened, in poor shape to travel cross country. Can we do an airlift?”

He frowned. “You’d better stay with him while I fetch the flyer. Whether a safe landing is possible hereabouts, I don’t know. If not, I can try hovering and lowering a stirrup cable, though that might be tricky in this weather. Let me look around for a more promising spot close by.”

The wind had strengthened as the air warmed. It boomed, slewed about, shook boughs, sent dust devils awhirl. He’s right, Lissa thought.

His tall form zigzagged away from her, stopping to examine outcrops and dig bootheel into gravel, till he reached the ledge above the canyon. She saw him glance at his bracelet, and well-nigh read his mind. Guided by the radio beacon, he could make most of his return distance on that bare strip instead of struggling through the brush. A new smile tugged at her lips.

The rock broke beneath his feet. He flailed his arms, then pitched downward out of sight.