A Rage for Revenge

39 Worm Fences

It's impossible to build a fence that will keep a worm

Actually, out.

A full-grown Chtorran is like a Patton-6 tank with a mouth. A half-grown worm is the mouth without the tank attached. The best you can hope to do is slow the worm down-or at least make it so painfully uncomfortable for the creature to go over, under, or through the barricade that it looks for a way to go around instead.

The idea is to make the price of lunch higher than the worm is willing to pay.

That's what Jack Balaban and I were doing.

Using Duke's name and number again, I requisitioned enough worm fencing to cordon off the narrowest part of the peninsula with multiple rows of razor-ribbon and punji-barriers. Sooner or later, I knew, one of Uncle Ira's accounting programs was going to catch up with me; but in the meantime, I seemed to have an unlimited credit account; that is, Duke did.

A good fence would be tricky to install, yes, but if we were thorough, we might be able to buy ourselves a reasonable degree of safety. First, we would lay down a strip of razor-ribbon, several long coils of it, firmly anchored every half-meter by a spike in the ground. The razor-ribbon alone wouldn't stop the worms, but it would certainly stop any human beings working with worms. We needed to keep the renegades from getting to the punji-barriers; renegades had been caught hammering down breaks for their extraterrestrial partners.

Then, the first row of punji-strip would be installed just behind the razor-ribbon. Punji-strip came in huge rolls; you unrolled it where you wanted it and spiked it into the ground. What you got was a wide strip of aluminum spikes, unevenly spaced, pointing in all directions, mostly upward. The spikes were sharp and nasty looking and coated with microencapsulated bad news: poisons, ucrve jellies, and various forms of bacteria that seemed to like the vsides of a Chtorran.

A human being might be able to pick his way across a punji-barrier, if he were careful, but a worm could never make it. Too many clumsy little feet. The worm would rip out its belly. The average Chtorr didn't have the leverage to step over these spikes; its feet were tiny little stubs that didn't lift its weight as much as helped shuffle it forward. Punji-barriers were nasty.

The barrier alone wouldn't kill the worm, just injure it badly; hut the stuff on the spikes could give a worm a bad case of the cold rullywobbles. And someday we'd find something that would kill them a little quicker.

The worms knew about the barriers, of course. Most of them stayed away from them. Only a very young and inexperienced worm would willingly make the attempt to cross one, and then only once; the value of the barriers was more as deterrent than as weapon.

Behind the first punji-barrier, another row of razor-ribbon. Behind that, another punji-barrier. Behind that, more razorribbon. The theory was that the combination of the two would discourage most worms and renegades.

The army generally recommended nine lines of razor-ribbon, separated by eight rows of punji-barriers; the army also recommended trenches and mines where possible, plus robots and field sensors. I didn't have a trench digger and I didn't want to risk planting mines. A robot would be useless here, and sensors are useless if there's no one to watch the monitors.

So far, the statistics showed that the fences worked; even small installations, like this one, were effective enough to justify the expenditure. Some pessimists said that it was only because there were enough other good places to feed that it wasn't yet worth a worm's trouble to plow through the barriers.

The pessimists were probably right, but I'd vote with the statistics for now.

Fortunately, just beyond the hiking ridge the peninsula shrank to a very narrow strip of land, only thirty meters wide. Indeed, the peninsula was only a peninsula because of politics. Family had been designed and built as a long crescent island. It was also supposed to have its own independent government; but the county fathers, fearing the loss of millions of lovely tax dollars had passed an ordinance requiring that all utility cables be accessible above ground. This meant that the builders of the island would have to lay down a connecting strip to the mainland, a narrow connecting tongue of rugged, ugly rocks, and in so doing, would also put Family firmly under the jurisdiction of the aforementioned county parentage. Before the Chtorr had come, the joke had been that the people of Family wanted nothing more than to be orphans. Now the Chtorr had given them their wish. Sort of.

My thought was to put the worm lines down just behind the rocks and hope that no worm would want to cross the rocks and the fence. The rocks were pretty nasty just by themselves. On the other hand, if a worm was determined enough to make it over the rocks, then it probably wasn't going to be stopped by the worm fence either.

Maybe Betty-John was right. Maybe I was being paranoid. And maybe I still woke up in the middle of the night, shivering and thinking of Jason and Orrie and Jessie.

No. I had to vote with the statistics.

I voted with three rows of razor-ribbon and two of punji-that was all we could afford to install-and a heartfelt prayer that it would be enough to deter.

Now, if only the worms would agree with me. We started early in the morning. Tommy and me, Jack and Dove.

Jack Balaban was a dour looking man with a Welsh accent so thick he was nearly incomprehensible half the time. He had a slight stoop to his body, as if life had been beating on him for several decades, but he was surprisingly tender toward Dove.

Dove was a year older and half a head taller than Tommy. He wasn't exactly mute, but preferred to speak in sounds, whistles, and noises instead of words.

When Dove saw a car, he would point and make the shrill whine of a turbine. If he saw a plane or a chopper, he would make appropriate engine sounds. He could describe floaters, boats, jet skis, motorcycles, and off-road vehicles this way. He was also fond of imitating the electronic chime of the telephone, startling people to their feet, until they realized it was only Dove again. His repertoire also included an astonishing range of explosions, warbles, wheeps, and whistles.

Apparently, this skill had rubbed off on Jack, because the two of them had developed their own language of sound effects and conversed not so much in words as in noises.

When I was around, however, both of them shut up. I finally confronted Jack with it.

He shook his head and denied it. "I don't dislike yeh, Jim. I don't like yeh much, but I don't dislike yeh either. Just don't care much either way, I don't."

"Is it something I've done?"

Jack thought about it a moment, stroking his mustache. "Na." He pulled on a pair of thick gloves and picked up a coil of razor-ribbon he had been laying out. He resumed uncoiling it across the grass.

I picked up the gas-hammer and followed him. "Well then, what is it?"

"Do yeh have to be liked by everybody yeh know?" he asked.

"If someone doesn't like me, I'd like to know why," I said. "If I'm doing something wrong, I'd like to know, so I can stop doing it."

"You're just like all Americans," he said. "You're too worried about who likes you, and not enough concerned with gettin' the job done."

I thought about that.

Maybe he was right. But maybe not. I thought I was more concerned with results than with making friends. Certainly, I'd had my share of arguments to prove it.

"I don't think that's so," I said. "We're out here doing this job right now because I pressured Betty-John. And I don't think she likes me very much anymore because of it."

"Yeh," he acknowledged. "That's the other side of it. When yeh do finally decide to work for results, yeh don't care who yeh walk over."

I decided that Jack didn't have a very clear-cut philosophy behind his argument. He was just going to say whatever he needed to say to justify his dislike for me, and if the facts disagreed with his opinions, he wouldn't alter his opinion; he'd alter his justification.

We worked in silence for a while. It was hard work shooting the anchoring spikes into the ground; even with the gas-hammer. Abruptly, Jack said, "Yeh never properly mourned your mum, did yeh?"

"What's it to you?" I snapped.

Jack shook his head. "Nuthin'."

And then, the nickel dropped. I straightened and looked across at him. His expression was dark and unpleasant.

"You were sleeping with her, weren't you?" I asked.

He didn't answer. He was wrestling with the coil of razor-ribbon. But I knew it was the truth by the way he ignored me. There was something Jason had said, something about how to get the truth out of people. "Most people don't tell the truth, not really," Jason had said. "They've been trained not to. If you want to get the truth out of them, you have to startle them or get them angry. Most people only tell the truth when they get angry. So if you want to get the truth out of someone, you have to upset them first. It almost always works; the only drawback is that you'll have a really angry person on your hands for a while."

Hmm.

I said to Jack, "Did she give you a bargain rate? She did that for steady customers." I said it with deliberate calm.

Jack didn't flinch. I had to give him that much.

He laid down the roll of ribbon, straightened, brushed off his hands, and looked around for the boys. Dove and Tommy were a ways away, carefully unpacking the rest of the spikes.

Jack turned back to me. "Did yeh have to study to be an asshole or does it come naturally to yeh, Jim?" Colored by the musical lilt of his Welsh accent, the words were as pretty to listen to as they were mean.

"She was a whore!" I said.

"Mebbe so," he agreed, startling me. "We've all done some terrible things since this whole bad business began." He pulled off a glove and ran his hand roughly through his wavy hair, as if he was puzzling out the best way to say what he thought. "But there's still a difference between doin' terrible things and bein' a terrible person. Your mum was a fine lady, but she was lonely for your dad, and if she took her comfort where she could find it, who're yeh to sit in holy judgment? Your mum had a lot of love for these children here, and she did a lot of good things for them, and I don't much like listenin' to you spittin' on her good name."

"You think she was good? I can tell you stories-"

"Sure, and so can I. For every bad story yeh tell me, I could probably tell yeh six good ones to counter it."

"You know why she had so much love to give these kids?" I could feel the blood rushing to my face. "Because she sure as hell didn't waste any of it on her own. I'll tell you how much love she had! My sister moved off to Australia, she couldn't stand my mother's silence. And I was so pissed off at finding a different man in her bed every time I saw her, I finally stopped going to see her. You know she divorced me."

"You divorced her. She needed you, lad."

"That's what she said, too. She needed. Didn't you ever notice that everything was always about her and her loss, and what she needed now. She needed us to take care of her now. That's what she said. But who was going to take care of us? She wouldn't. All she did was demand. She screamed at me, every day-it was all my fault that nothing worked anymore, why couldn't I be a better son? She wouldn't leave me alone. She was driving me crazy. Why do you think I went into the army? I could have pleaded exemption, but it was the fastest way I could think of to get away from her."

"She was grievin', lad-"

"So was I! And she wasn't there for me, so why should I have been there for her!"

"It's not the same, lad. You lost your dad, and that's a hard one to handle for anybody. But what she lost is so much greater than what you lost that there's no comparison. She lost her lover, her mate, her friend, her companion, her partner. You lost your dad, but she lost her whole reason for living. Everything she ever did, she did for your Dad. She was so alone without him-yeh never noticed that, did yeh? The poor woman was in such pain."

"How do you know all this?" I demanded. I was holding one of the spikes like a club.

"She told me, she did," Jack said. "And no, I never did sleep with her. I could have. Lots of men did. She was a lovely lady-and a lady in every sense of the word-but they'd get up in the morning and they'd leave her. And she'd be alone again. Nah, it wasn't good. But they never sat with her and listened to her, never let her say all that she had to say. She reached out for yeh, Jim. Yeh and your sister. But Maggie was mourning the loss of her children and yeh were so wrapped up in yourself that neither of yeh were hearing. She needed yeh, that's why she plucked and pulled so hard. She was goin' down without a life jacket. And then, when she needed yeh the most, yeh ran away from her. What was she to do? She started grabbing for any man who would hold her, if even for a little while. The same way any drownin' person grabs for any piece of flotsam. Yeh only saw the grabbing. Yeh never saw the person drownin'." He snorted. "Probably, because it would have meant yeh would have had to stop worryin' about your own drownin' for a while."

"You son of a bitch," I said coldly. "You don't know what I've been through."

"You're right. And I don't rightly care to know, either. I think you're a selfish spoiled brat and I don't care to spend much time with yeh. I'm puttin' up these fences because Betty-John asked me to help yeh; that's the only reason." And then he added, "And mebbe a little out of respect for your mum. Now, are yeh going to hit me with that spike in your hand, or are yeh going to put it in the ground and get on with the job?"

I threw it down at his feet. That was stupid.

Jack just looked at me.

So I picked it up again and jammed it into the ground, anchoring a loop of razor-ribbon. I drove the spike in hard with the gas-hammer. And the next six too.

Jason was right. Getting a person angry was very enlightening. And then I stopped in frustration.

"What's the matter, son?" Jack asked abruptly.

"Nothing," I snapped back at him. "Everything. Dammit, I hate being wrong." I stood there with the gas-hammer poised over the seventh spike and I didn't have the strength to squeeze the trigger. I felt suddenly exhausted and sank to my knees. "I keep trying to do my best and it's never good enough for anybody."

I stopped myself from saying more. My throat hurt. My eyes hurt.

I looked out across the bay, waiting for the frustration to pass. The water was dark and gray and dirty looking. Red sludge? Probably. I looked over at Jack; he was waiting for me to say something. It was hard for me to speak. "Okay, I never had the chance to say good-bye to her. At least, my dad and I . . . well, that was complete. But . . .

"I was right. Yeh haven't done your cryin', have yeh?"

I glowered up at him. "Go fuck yourself. Leave me alone."

I levered myself back to my feet and strode off away, just to be alone for a while. Just to cool off for a minute.

Dove came pushing through the dry brush and made ticktocking noises at me.

"I don't understand that talk, Dove. Why can't you speak in English?"

Dove looked hurt and retreated quickly, and I felt like an even bigger asshole than I already was. That's right. Take it out on the kid.

Except-everything Jack Balaban had said was right. I had abandoned her when she needed me the most, the same way I'd abandoned everybody else when they needed me. That was the pattern of my life. Get close, get close enough to hurt-and then betray.

But always make sure that you have a good reason first. A good reason always lets you off the hook.

The funny thing was that I couldn't cry.

I couldn't cry because I couldn't remember her. I couldn't remember her face.

What I kept seeing was the enigmatic smile of that Japanese fellow at dinner that night. I kept seeing the smarmy greediness of the man she was sleeping with, Alan Wise, or whatever his name had been. I remember wondering about worms in Santa Cruz. I remembered everything except why I should care.

All I could remember were all the things I resented: the time she did this to me, the time she did that. I was glad to be free of her. No. Jack Balaban was a stupid old Welshman, who made noises to children. How could I be mourning someone I was so angry with?

Damn.

I pushed through the brush, in the direction Dove had come from.

I'd called Dr. Davidson in Atlanta once. He'd actually answered his own phone. I'd wanted to ask him a question. "Is it possible to grieve for a whole planet?"

He hadn't said yes, he hadn't said no. What he'd said was, "You don't think it's possible, that's why you're asking." And I'd had to admit that was the truth.

"Jim," he'd said. "The Earth is a part of you; the cool green hills of Earth are a part of all of us, and they always will be. We haven't lost them. We just have to look for them in our hearts for a while, and hold them there as a vision of what once was."

"And will someday be again," I added. Dr. Davidson didn't respond to that. "You don't agree?"

"I don't know." There was something about the way he said it. Flat. Unemotionally. He really didn't know. It was chilling. The voice I depended on for answers didn't have all the answers.

"If we can't grieve for a whole planet," I said, "how do we do our grieving?"

"A piece at a time," said Dr. Davidson. "You can't do everything at once. Do it one part at a time. Grieve for the great elephants. Grieve for the verdant grass. Grieve for the shining dolphins and the laughing otters and the dusty grasshoppers. Cry for the golden butterflies and the fat wrinkled walruses and the silly-looking duck-billed platypuses. Weep for the red roses and the tall ficus and the sprawling green ivy. Sorrow for the highflying eagles. Even the scuttling scorpions and the ugly-tough crabgrass and all the tiny diatoms. Grieve for the purple mountains and the silent icebergs and the deep blue rivers. Grieve for them all, one piece at a time, one day at a time. And in your grief, let them live in your heart.

"Yes, miss them-but in your sorrow, also cherish them." It made sense. Of a sort.

At least it was a way to continue. But . . . my mother.

I couldn't grieve, because I couldn't forgive.

And I couldn't forgive her because I couldn't forgive myself. For Jason.

I was the person my mother used to warn me about. She would have to forgive me first before I could forgive her. And she couldn't do that, because she was dead.

So I couldn't cry.

I could only be angry.

I was staring at what I was seeing without seeing it at all. And suddenly, Dove's tick-tocking noises made sense. He had been imitating the sound of footsteps.

There were footprints here in the soft dirt. Cleated footprints. Neither of the boys, and neither Jack nor I, were wearing cleats on our shoes.

In fact, I couldn't think of anybody who wore cleats. Strangers had been prowling the base of the peninsula. I forgot about my mother.

She was going to have to wait until I had the time for her. Again.