Jem

SIXTEEN

THE RAINS were all around, squall clouds driving toward them, squall clouds already past them, up toward the Heat Pole, where the raindrops fell a kilometer or two and then evaporated, never striking the hot, salt ground. The flock was spread out over a kilometer of sky, and grumbling in dissonant chords.

“Have patience,” Charlie scolded them. “We must stay, must stay.”

And they echoed, “We must stay,” but it was poorly sung.

No matter. Charlie had promised his two-legged friend that they would stay on station, waiting to observe certain strange and incomprehensible events, and the flock would do as he vowed.

Still, it was uncomfortable to him, like an itch or a sunburn to a human being, to have the swarm in such disarray. The place he had promised to watch was upwind of the camp of the Big Sun. It did not do to come too close to that. Many of his flock, and even more of other flocks, had been punctured or burned by the far-striking missiles of that camp, and so he had to try to keep the flock from drifting toward it, seeking every counterflowing gust, and still avoid the squalls as much as possible. Dalehouse had told him that it would be difficult. But he had also said it was important.

Charlie rotated his eye patches over the entire horizon. No sign of the aircraft he had been told to expect. But he did see a vagrant drift of thistledown and spinner silk moving across the hills below. A crosscurrent! He sang his flock together and vented gas.

The swarm followed, dropping into a level where the wind took them away from the rain to a likely-looking area of up-draft. They followed well, everything considered. Expertly he guided them under the base of a fair-weather cumulus, and they rose with the drift.

The song of the swarm became contented. It was at the top of these invisible pillars of rising air that the best feeding was found: pollen and butterfly-seed capsules, the small, soft creatures that filled the same ecological niche that insects did on Earth, dried salt particles from the wavelets of landlocked seas, and even tinier things. A flock at feed was queer-looking, with every fin and frill extended to trap whatever touched it. It was also at risk, or once would have been. It was a favorite time for the ha’aye’i to knife in, slashing every bag they passed and tearing the life out of the victims before the helpless gaze of their flock-mates. Helpless no more! Charlie sang a boastful song of his great friend Danny Dalehouse, who had given them the far-striking weapons that drove the ha’aye’i a hundred clouds away. Or sometimes did. Now each male and some of the females in his own flock had the weapons, and the ha’aye’i had come to recognize Charlie’s swarm and avoid it.

Although, in truth, it was no longer as tempting to the predators as it had once been. So few were left! Once there had been hundreds, now fewer than a score.

There was still no aircraft on the horizon, nothing happening on the mesa upwind of the camp of the Big Sun. Charlie relaxed and fed with his swarm, and as he ate he became more mellow. He led the flock in gentle songs of childhood and joy.

There had been a time when Charlie was a tiny pip-sized pod, pumping mightily to bulge the creases out of his little gasbag but still tied to the ragged end of his sailing ribbon and to the winds that bore it where they liked. Gusts blew. Air-to-air lightning spat all around him. Because he had no real control over his altitude he was sometimes tossed up through the tops of towering convection clouds, with the dull red sun hot on his tiny balloon and actual stars shining through the murky sky; other times he was so low that he brushed hills and fern trees, and shelled or furred creatures clutched after him as he spun by. Eighty out of a hundred of his brood-mates died then, in one of those ways or in some other. Ten more died almost as soon as their drift-ribbons fell away, when they were tasty hors d’oeuvres for the ha’aye’i, or sometimes for the protein-hungry adults of another chance-met flock. Or even of their own. Only a few out of each hundred survived to reproduce. And then there were still the ha’aye’i. And the storms. And the clutching beasts from below.

But still — to be a balloonist! To soar and to sing! Above all, to share the chorused flocklore that united them every one, from the tiniest pod to the leaky, old, slow giants that even the ha’aye’i scorned. Charlie’s song was triumphant, and all the flock around him stopped their greedy gobbling to join in the harmony.

Still his eye patches rotated watchfully toward the mesa; but still there was no sign of the airplane or of the New Friend he had been told would rise from the spot. And they were drifting with the cloud, away from the camp of the Big Sun.

Many of the flock were sated now, softly singing their private courtesy songs of thanksgiving. They were a fine flock, although, Charlie admitted, very few in number.

He sang to them, “Stop feeding, stop feeding! We must go!”

“Go where, go where?” grumbled a chorus of the slower and hungrier ones, and an individual song sounded above the choir.

Faintly: “I must eat more. I die.” That was the old female, Blue-Rose Glow. Her bag had been meanly seared when half the flock was set aflame.

“Not now, not now,” sang Charlie commandingly. “Follow!” And he sang the new song, the duty song he had learned from his friend Danny Dalehouse. It was no longer enough to float and sing and replenish hydrogen and breed. Not anymore. Station must be kept and the mesa observed. And the camp of the Big Sun must be avoided, and the ha’aye’i guarded against, and the swarm kept together; so many imperatives, both the new and the old! And so he led them through their slow, bobbing dance, crisscross with the winds.

For a long time he led them, watching ceaselessly as he had promised. Even so, it was not he who first saw the thing. From far behind, old Blue-Rose Glow sang feebly, “There is a new Sky-Danger.”

“Catch up, catch up!” he commanded. “You sing poorly.” It was not sung in unkindness but only because it was true.

“I leak,” she apologized. “Nevertheless it is there, almost in reach of the Earth-Dangers, far away.”

He rotated his eye patches and rose to another air current. There it was. “I see the Sky-Danger,” he sang, and the rest of the flock confirmed. It was not a ha’aye’i. It was the hard mechanical thing from the camp of the Middle Sun, as he had been told. In it, he knew, was the Other Friend who had sometimes soared with Danny Dalehouse, and also the New Friend he had not yet seen.

It was all as had been said by Danny Dalehouse. The biplane slunk in at treetop level and set itself down on the dry mesa a dozen kilometers upwind of the Greasy camp. While the swarm watched, Kappelyushnikov and a female person emerged and began to fill a net of balloons out of tiny tanks.

When the New Friend’s cluster began to swell and she rose gently from the ground, the aircraft took off again, turned quickly, and slipped back down the slope toward the distant ocean-lake. The New Friend rose into the prevailing poleward wind and drifted directly toward the camp of the Big Sun.

Charlie dared come no closer, but he saw her venting gas as she approached the camp. She tumbled into the underbrush somewhere nearby; and it was all as had been foretold.

“The thing is done,” Charlie caroled triumphantly.

“And what now?” asked the swarm, milling around him, staring after the New Friend as she fell.

“I will ask the air,” he sang. His little insect legs fumbled at the switch of the hard, shiny speaker-to-air Danny Dalehouse had given him. He sang a questioning greeting to his friend.

He tried twice, listening between times as Dalehouse had taught him. There was no answer, only an unpleasant hissing song of static and distant storms.

“We must go near to the camp of the Middle Sun,” he announced. “The speaker-to-air cannot sing so far.” His skilled eyes read the signs of the clouds and the fern tops far below, seeking the currents he wanted. It was too bad that Dalehouse could so seldom soar with the flock these days because of the hated ha’aye’i of his own kind, but Charlie knew that once they were in line of sight the speaker-to-air would bring his song.

“Follow!” he sang. He swarmed the flock around him. They dropped, all fourteen of them, through a fast-moving layer of stratus cloud into the backflow near the surface.

When they emerged, old Blue-Rose Glow was gone, the leaks in her bag finally too great to allow her to remain airborne. So was the young female called Shrill-Squeal, nowhere in sight, even her song no longer audible.

By the time they approached the camp of the Middle Sun and Charlie began to sing through the radio to Dalehouse, there were only twelve left in the flock.

Marge Menninger looked up as Kappelyushnikov came in from the orderly room, closing the flap to her private office behind him. “Any word?” she asked.

“Danny has had radio from gasbag, yes. Your friend was seen to descend near Greasies, all in order.”

“How long ago?”

“With gasbags, who can say? Perhaps some hours. Not long after I departed spy-drop scene.”

“All right. Thanks.” After he left, Marge started to call the communications tent, then decided against it. If the Greasies radioed that they had rescued Tinka, blown helplessly off course, the communications clerk would let her know. And he hadn’t. So the Greasies were playing it covert and slick, and what was Tinka up against in their camp? Had they figured out that she really wasn’t there by accident? Could she… ? Were they… ? Wasn’t it… ? Questions multiplied themselves in Margie’s mind endlessly, and there was no straightforward way of getting answers. You could get your ass lost in those swamps of contingencies and subjunctives.

That was not the way Marge Menninger ran her life. She made a decision. In one hour exactly she would have the comm clerk radio a query to the Greasies, and until then she would put it out of her mind. Meanwhile, lunch was fifty minutes away, and what to use that time for?

The fifteen notes she had made to herself on this morning’s calendar had all been checked off. All current projects were on schedule, or close enough. Everyone had been assigned tasks. The first hectare of wheat was in the ground, sixteen different strains competing to see which would thrive best. The perimeter defenses were in order. Three turrets still sat on the beach, ready to be put where needed when she wanted to expand the perimeter or establish another post. She looked at the 1:1000 map, two meters long and a meter high, that covered almost all of one wall of her office. That was something! It showed every feature within a kilometer of where she sat — seven creeks or rivers, a dozen hills, two capes, several bays. Grid references were not enough, they needed names. What better way to name them than to let individual members of the camp pick them? She would organize a drawing; each winner could name something, and that would give them something to do. She called in her temporary orderly and dictated a short memo for the bulletin board. “Check it with the communications section,” she finished. “Make sure we list all the features worth naming.”

“Yes’m. Colonel? Sergeant Sweggert wants to see you. Says it’s not urgent.”

Margie wrote Sweggert on her calendar. “I’ll let you know.” Then she put Sweggert out of her mind, too. She had not yet decided what to do about Sweggert. She had a wide variety of options, from laughing it off to court-martialing him for rape. Which she elected would depend a lot on how Sweggert conducted himself. So far he had had the smarts to keep a low profile around her.

On the other hand, she thought, her authority to court-martial anybody for anything rested on the military chain of command, which extended up from her through the tactran link to higher authority on Earth. And who was to say how long Earth would give a shit about backing her up? Or about whether the colony lived or died? The news from home was bad, so bad that she had not passed all of it on to the camp. The tactran message acknowledging her shopping list had advised that it was touch and go whether she would get everything she had asked for. And requests for further supplies after that shipment were, quote, to be evaluated in terms of conditions at the time of receipt of requisition, unquote.

It was what she had expected. But it was sobering.

On her pad for the afternoon she made two notes: Medic. — bank okay? Food — 6 mos. estimate firm? Stretch 1 yr w rationing?

It was a damn nuisance that the agronomists all seemed to be Canadian! Margie needed some smart and private help — smart, because how they managed their crops was quite likely to be life-and-death for the colony; private, because she didn’t want the colony to know that just yet. If she got everything on her shopping list she would have plenty of seed stock. But who knew whether she had the ones that would grow best?

Dismiss that thought, too.

Forty minutes left.

She unlocked the private drawer of her desk and lit a joint. Assume the shopping list all gets delivered. There was enough on it for pretty fair margin against most kinds of disasters, she thought, and there was no sense worrying until she had to.

The requisition list included a good chunk of personal things for Margie herself: clothes, cosmetics, microfiche sewing patterns. With the patterns there would be enough variety in styles to suit everyone in the camp, male or female, for a good long time, assuming they found some way of producing fabrics to make the patterns on. It would be nice to have some pretty clothes. She was already beginning to feel the absence of Sakowitz, Marks and Sparks, Sears, and Two Guys. One day, maybe, she thought, drawing a deep hit. Not Sakowitz, no. But maybe a few boutiques. Maybe some of the people in the camp had sewing or tailoring skills, and maybe it was about time she started locating them. She flipped the calendar ahead a few pages and made a note on a virgin page. That Bulgarian prunt was the kind of girly-girl who would like to sew, possibly even as much as Margie did herself; she had been pretty morose after her long walk in the countryside, but she did her work and might need something to occupy her mind. It didn’t seem that she wanted a man for that purpose; at least, she had thoroughly discouraged Guy Tree and Gappy and Sweggert…

Sweggert.

“Jack, send the sergeant in,” she called.

“Yes’m. He’s gone back to the perimeter, but I’ll get him.”

As she leaned back, marshalling her thoughts about Sweggert, the handset buzzed; it was the communications clerk. “Colonel? I was just talking to the Greasies about Sergeant Pellatinka.”

“I didn’t tell you to ask them.”

“No’m. But I kept sending on her frequency like you ordered, and their radioman cut in to ask if we had lost her. So I said she didn’t answer. So they said they’d send out a party to look for her.”

Margie sat back and took a thoughtful drag on the joint. According to the balloonists, there was no way the Greasies couldn’t have seen her come down. So now they were overtly lying.

Sergeant Sweggert shared a number of traits with Marge Menninger. One of them was that he was willing to go to a lot of trouble to get things right, and then if he saw a chance for improvement he was willing to do whatever it took to make them righter. When he perceived that moving the Number Three machine-gun emplacement two meters toward the lake would improve the field of fire, he moved it. Or his squad did. The fact that it took five hours of backbreaking work did not affect his decision. He lent a hand to put the HMG on its tripod and swung it to check the field. “Fucking lousy,” he told the crew, “but we’ll leave it for now. Get that ammo restowed.”

He crouched behind the gun, swiveling it through full traverse. It was an act that gave him pleasure. As far as the shore of the lake on the extreme left and the beginning of the fern forest on the right, there was no way that any sizable creature could approach without being a clear target for the gunner. The claymores and smoke bombs were emplaced and fused, and his command-post detonating radio was keyed to each of them. The floodlights were in position, with quadruple redundancy. At any given moment only a quarter of them were lit, searching the entire area around the perimeter. Every hour that quarter went off and the next quarter came on so that any burned-out bulbs or wiring deficiencies would distribute themselves equally and could be fixed in the downtime. In actual combat, of course, they would all be on. Most would be shot out, but not in time to let anyone cross that perimeter. Not alive.

Although, he admitted to himself as he climbed out of the dome, the chances that anyone would try a straightforward frontal attack were very small. Maybe an attack from the sky. Maybe by long-range rocket fire. Maybe not at all. This whole fucking shoot-up was crazy, if you asked Sergeant Sweggert. What the fuck was there to fight about in this asshole place without a bar or a town or even, for God’s sake, a decent tree or field? If you had asked him, that was what he would have said, in total sincerity, but it would not have stopped him from fighting for it.

And inside he was swearing. The colonel wouldn’t have kept him waiting like this a week ago. If she was going to shaft him, what was she waiting for?… “Sarge.” He looked up. “They’re calling you from the orderly room.” He turned idly and saw the corporal waving.

“Aggie, take over,” he ordered. “If I come back and that ammo isn’t restowed, it’s all your asses.”

He strolled back toward the HO tent and walked in. Marge Menninger was eating out of a mess kit, reading from a small-screen viewer. She didn’t look up. “The perimeter’s looking good, Sweggert,” she said. “Got that machine gun back in place?”

“Yes’m. Colonel? There’s a bunch of gasbags around, and that one we been using is about used up. We’ll be relieved in a couple of minutes. Can we get a fix from the new ones?”

She put down her spoon and looked at him. After a moment, she said, “Just who do you mean by ‘we,’ soldier?”

“Oh, no, ma’am!” Jesus, she was touchy! He knew he was close to trouble. “I don’t mean nothing, ma’am, just that the detail’s been working hard and they need a little break. We’ll — they’ll come out of it in an hour, and the relief’ll be there anyway.”

She studied him for a moment. “That’s four-oh, Sweggert, but only half the detail. Keep the rest sober.”

“Sure thing, colonel. Thank you, colonel.” He got out of there as fast as he could. Shit, he should’ve been more careful, knowing how she felt and all. Not that she was all wrong. If he hadn’t been drunk he wouldn’t have done it. But, shit! It was worth it. Remembering the way she had been with a skin full of the balloonist mist, his groin grew heavy.

When he got back to the detail he looked at them with some disapproval. Corporal Kristianides was skinny and had sideburns all down her cheeks, but she was the best he had to pick from. “Aggie, take Peterson and four others; you’re on duty till the relief shows up. Kris, you and the rest come along with me. We’re gonna take ourselves a jizzum break. Anybody don’t want to come, switch with somebody don’t want to stay. Let’s move it.”

The balloonists were out over the ocean-lake now, half a kilometer away and low. Sweggert marched his dozen troops across the camp to the empty tents at the end of the company street; he would do it in the open if he had to, but damned if he wouldn’t take a little privacy when he could get it. The tethered balloonist, further than ever from recuperating, had been moved there days since, along with the strobe light.

Sweggert stopped, swearing. Nan Dimitrova and Dalehouse were talking to the balloonist, and only a few meters away the Russian pilot, Kappelyushnikov, was complaining about something to Colonel Tree. Privacy, shit. But it didn’t matter; he had Colonel Menninger’s permission, and she was the one who counted. He retrieved the strobe and pointed it toward the hovering swarm.

Predictably, Dalehouse butted in. “What do you think you’re doing, Sweggert?”

Sweggert took time to aim the strobe and flash it to bring them in before he answered. “Gonna have a little fun. The colonel said it was okay.”

“Hell she did! Anyway—”

“Anyway,” Sweggert interrupted, “why don’t you go check with her if you don’t believe me? Would you move a little, sir? You’re getting between them and the light.”

Ana Dimitrova laid her hand on Dalehouse’s arm to keep him from replying. “It is not fun for the balloonists, Sergeant Sweggert. To experience sexual climax is very painful and debilitating. As you can see, this one is seriously affected. It may die.”

“What a way to go, hey, Ana?” Sweggert grinned. “Take it up with the colonel — hey, Dalehouse! What are you doing?”

Dalehouse had switched on his radio and was singing softly into it. Colonel Tree, beginning to pay attention, walked toward them, and Sweggert turned to him. “Colonel! We have Colonel Menninger’s permission to get the Loonies in for a fix, and this guy’s telling them to screw off!”

Tree stopped with his hands clasped behind his back and nodded gravely. “A dilemma,” he said in his soft child’s voice. “It will be quite interesting to see what they do.”

What they were doing was spreading themselves all over the sky, some dropping lower to catch the onshore breeze, others hesitating. They were singing loudly and discordantly, and the sounds came distantly from the sky and tinnily from the radio in Dalehouse’s hand. Sweggert stood rock-still, controlling the rage that was building up in him. Fucking Cong! When you had the CO’s permission, that was all you were supposed to need! Why wouldn’t Tree back him up?

“Gimme that,” he growled, reaching out for Dalehouse’s radio.

But Dalehouse’s expression had changed. “Hold it,” he snapped, and sang a quick phrase into the radio. The answer came back as a cascade of musical phrases; Dalehouse looked startled and Ana Dimitrova gasped, her hand to her lips. “Tree,” he said, “according to Charlie, there’s some Krinpit down the beach, and they’re eating a couple of people.”

“But Krinpit do not eat human beings,” objected Colonel Tree, and Sweggert chimed in: “There’s nobody down there. Nobody’s gone through the perimeter all day.”

Dalehouse repeated his question into the radio and shrugged. “That’s what he says. He could be wrong about the eating part, I guess — he doesn’t have a very clear concept of killing, except to eat.”

Sweggert put down the strobe. “We better tell the colonel,” he said.

Colonel Tree said, “That’s correct. You do so, Dalehouse. Sergeant, form your squad on the beach in thirty seconds, full combat gear. We’re going to see what’s happening.”

Half an hour later Marge Menninger herself, with thirty armed grunts behind her, met the first party coming back along the beach. There were no casualties, or at least none from the Food Bloc, but they were carrying two people. One was in a sort of sling made from two jackets knotted together, the other on Sergeant Sweggert’s shoulder, fireman-carry. They were both dead. When Sweggert put his burden down it was obvious why he had been easy to carry. Both legs were missing, and so was part of his head.

The other body was less mutilated, so that Marge Menninger recognized her at once.

It was Tinka.

Marge stood numbly while Sweggert made his report. No Krinpit in sight; they had got away, so far that they couldn’t even be heard. Both people were dead when they got there, but recently; the bodies were still warm. For that matter, they were still warm now. And the man had had a packet in a waterproof wrapping inside his shirt. Margie accepted it and tore it open. Microfiches — scores of them. The man’s ID card, which showed that he was the Indonesian Tinka had gone to contact. A pair of child-sized spectacles — flat glass, not optically ground. Why glasses? For that matter, how had the two got here? Had they been caught as spies and then somehow escaped? And how had they come the long distance from the Greasy camp to the beach where they died?

By the time they got back to the base, she had an answer to at least part of the question, because Dalehouse reported that the balloonists had spotted something farther down the beach that looked like the remains of a deflated rubber boat. She swung the tiny glasses from their elastic band as she listened, nodding, taking in all of it as information to process, not quite ready to take in the information of Tinka’s death as a pain to feel.

She looked down at the glasses. They were now almost opaque.

“That’s interesting,” she said in a voice that was very nearly normal. “They must be photosensitive glass. Like indoor-outdoor sunglasses.” She glanced up at the sullen red coal of Kung overhead. “Only what in the world would anybody want with them on Jem?”