Eschaton 1 – The Other End of Time

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Patsy

Patsy woke up with bright sunlight outside the opening of the yurt and the sound of somebody yelling at somebody, not very near, but not all that far away, either. When she peered out she saw that it was Dannerman who was doing the yelling. The person he was yelling at was Pat, placidly hanging her underwear on a tree branch to dry. "It's just damn foolish for you to go wandering off by yourself," he scolded. "Who knows what's out there?"

"But you said yourself we needed to check out our surroundings," Pat said reasonably, adjusting the bra to catch the sun.

"Not alone!"

"No," she said, acknowledging the justice of what he said- but not, Patsy thought, particularly penitent about it, either. "I should have waited till the others woke up. But, Dan, I found this lovely pond just a little way down the stream, and I got a bath. Well, sort of a bath-no soap, of course, and it was really cold-but I can't tell you how much better I feel. Maybe the two of us can go out later?" And then, looking past him, "Well, good morning, Patsy. Did you have a nice sleep?"

Damn the woman, Patsy thought. Damn the man, too; they might as well be married if they were going to squabble like that. She didn't answer, simply turned and headed for the bushes. Then, delighting in the luxury of being able at last to pee without an audience, she relented. She was just jealous, she admitted to herself. Not merely jealous of the Dan-Pat relationship, although she was certainly envious of that, but extremely jealous of the bath.

On the way back she paused to peer down the stream and, yes, she was nearly sure that, just past where the brook made a bend around a grove of tall, emerald-leaved trees, there was a definite widening. That went right to the top of her list of priorities. Not to be taken advantage of just yet, maybe; she hadn't missed Pat's complaint about the cold, but as soon as the air warmed up a little…

It was astonishing how that thought elevated her mood. She glanced up, and there was the sky. The blue sky, with fleecy little muffins of fair-weather clouds scattered around, and the sun. The sun! Of course, it wasn't their familiar sun of Earth; too large, too orangey. But it was a great deal better than that unending featureless white glow they had lived under in their cell, and she was interested to observe that, even in daylight, a scattering of those incredible stars were bright enough to be visible in the sky. This was not an awful place, she told herself. It was even sort of pretty: the grove of trees behind her was hung with clusters of things like bright-yellow berries; the spiky ground-cover stuff underfoot that was like grass (but wasn't any grass Patsy had ever seen) was spotted with wildflower dots of color. Most important of all, she was outside. Things might be heading for something even worse than what had gone before, but at this moment, Patsy thought, they didn't seem bad at all. So she had a cheery smile for Pat and Dan as she rejoined the group, and another for Rosaleen and Martin Delasquez, doing something with the stack of ration containers. The only ones missing were Patrice and Jimmy Lin, and about as soon as the thought crossed her mind they both appeared out of their respective yurts, Patrice heading toward the bushes without a word, Jimmy yawning, barely glancing at the others, making a beeline to check the condition of his pet campfire.

To Patsy's eyes the fire was behaving just as it was supposed to behave. It was a neat bed of glowing coals, sixty or seventy centimeters across, with only a couple of lately added sticks palely flaming on top. Clearly, however, it did not meet Jimmy Lin's expectations. He pushed the burning sticks together and carefully added two more, just so, muttering to himself. Then he caught sight of Rosaleen. "What are you doing?" he demanded.

She didn't take offense. "We're counting our rations," she said, "and at the same time looking for containers that won't burn if we boil water in them."

"Thought so," he said, patiently superior. "I told you to leave that sort of thing to me, didn't I? What you should do now is find a big empty container and fill it with water, while I get some rocks from the brook."

He made a production out of it, selecting golf-ball-sized pebbles, which he carried back and painstakingly placed on the coals. "Give them ten minutes," he said, wise old expert showing the tenderfeet how to get along in the wild. "Then the rocks will be hot enough; we drop them in the water and they'll have it hot in no time."

"Hey," Pat said, admiring against her will. "More Boy Scout stuff?"

He didn't deign to answer, merely walked off to the shelter of the trees to relieve himself.

"Bastard," Dannerman said, but his tone was tolerant. He glanced at Pat. "Shall we eat something? And then go explore?"

"If Rosaleen's through with her count?" Pat said, looking toward the stack of rations.

"In a minute," Rosaleen called. "Martin's found a couple of other packets-I guess we dropped them."

But Martin was standing a good three or four meters away- how could we have dropped any of the packets over there? Patsy wondered-and his expression was forbidding. He was holding two of what looked like dehydrated stew packets, and staring at the ground.

"Something's been nibbling at these things," he called. "And I think I see what was doing it. Only they're dead."

Jimmy Lin's hot-water scheme worked fine-to be sure, at the cost of some burned fingers, transferring the hot pebbles to the container of water, but in a few minutes the container was gently simmering and meals were coming along. When Patsy got her stew, though, it was lukewarm and only partially softened. It didn't matter. She'd lost most of her appetite when she saw the three little dead creatures-looking a little like lizards, maybe, though densely furred-with their mouths wide open in the rictus of death.

"Different chemistry," Rosaleen said soberly. "I guess I can forget that idea." And when someone asked what idea she was talking about, she explained, "I was thinking we might try some of the fruits from those trees when our rations run out, but if our food kills them, I doubt their food will be any better for us."

Patsy stopped eating to look at the heap of rations. It had not occurred to her to think of it as a nonrenewable resource. She didn't like the conclusions that thought led to. "Rosaleen? With seven of us eating, how long do you think the food will last?"

Rosaleen looked at the tally in her hand. "Let's see, three meals per day per person, that's twenty-one portions a day, divided into, according to this, two hundred and seventy-three portions… say, thirteen days. A bit more, maybe."

"And then?"

"And by then," Rosaleen said firmly, "I presume Dopey will have come back with the guns, and we'll have taken over the base and there'll be all the food we want from Starlab."

"Or not," Patrice said.

Rosaleen nodded. "Or else we will probably have been killed in the attempt, so it's not a problem."

"So then why were you counting the food?"

She hesitated. "I suppose because there is always the chance that Dopey won't come back."

It was what Patsy had known she would hear, but that didn't make it any nicer. She pressed the point. "And if Dopey doesn't come back, and that's all there is, how long before we starve to death?"

Rosaleen didn't answer at first; while she was thinking Dannerman spoke up. "Did you ever hear of a man named William Bligh?"

"I don't think so."

"He was the captain of an old sailing ship, the Bounty, hundreds of years ago. I guess he was a pretty mean son of a bitch, even for those days; anyway, his crew mutinied. Somebody made a book out of it. I never read the book, but one summer in graduate school I worked for a local theater, and they put on a musical based on it. I sang the first mate, the guy who led the mutiny. He was a man named Fletcher Christian."

"I didn't know you were a singer."

"Who said I was a singer? They weren't fussy about that kind of thing at the theater. Neither was I; they didn't pay anything, but you got to meet a lot of girls there. Anyway, Christian made the mutineers put the captain and some of his loyal crew over the side in a longboat instead of hanging them out of hand. The mutineers gave them two days' rations or so, and Captain Bligh managed to get every man in the boat safely to a British port a couple of thousand miles away. They rowed six or eight weeks before they reached land, and all that time they lived on the little bit of water they could catch when there were rainstorms, and the food that was only supposed to be rations for a couple of days."

She thought that over. Another month or two in this place, with nothing to eat at all? And no realistic hope of rescue? "That's not particularly good news," she said.

Dannerman nodded. "We don't really need three meals a day, though. Two would be enough, I think. That ought to give us another couple of weeks, anyway."

But that wasn't really great news either.