Patriots

7. Free as a Bird

Dawn on Greenwood was brilliant with layers of color-purple, mauve, orange, and Mark was willing to say he'd seen a streak of green for a good fifteen seconds. 'Birds' with furry wings and spike-toothed reptilian jaws lifted onto the morning breezes. Some of them were so big that at a distance Mark had mistaken them for human flyers, but smaller versions peeping and flapping around the Bannock compound helped him correct his identification.

"Ever flown one of these, lad?" Yerby asked as he lifted a flyer onto the slide that would give it a little extra speed for takeoff. Mark had hefted the flyer. It was amazingly delicate for its strength. On the ground at least he could handle it himself, though not with Yerby's casual aplomb.

"No sir," he said. When he was nervous he got formal again, too formal for Greenwood. "Yerby, I've driven ground cars and aircars, but never one of these. Or a dirigible."

The Bannock compound was on a knoll which sloped gently on three sides toward the river that bent about the site at a half mile's distance. The launching slide projected out over the steep-sided gully to the north. Mark guessed the updraft here was pretty much constant.

Another slide dumped into the same gully all the trash from the twenty-odd people living in the compound.

The compound consisted of about a dozen buildings, mostly sheds and barns. The house sprawled. The initial construction was stone, but wings and an upper floor of cellulose-based plastic multiplied the volume many times. When Chuck's dirigible flew them in the evening before, Mark had seen the plastics plant and a sawmill on the bank of the river.

"You know," Mark said, "you're going to fill up this gully someday, so you might as well find another way to handle your garbage right now. There's package plants you could run off the fusion power supply you've already got. You could convert most of that to something useful."

He pointed to the multicolored filth straggling up the side of the gully. Creatures flitted over and burrowed through the mass. Besides native life-forms, Terran rats and insects had arrived with the settlers. That was true on virtually every human-colonized world.

"Aw, don't worry about the trash," Yerby said. He was checking that the wing's beryllium monocrystal stiffeners were securely fastened to the central spine of the same light, immensely strong, material. "Come spring and the rains, they'll scrub the ditch clean as a rocket nozzle."

"Wash it into the river?" Mark asked.

Yerby pinged a strut with a thumbnail. "That's right," he said.

It obviously didn't occur to the frontiersman that there might be anything wrong with the concept. For that matter, with fewer than three thousand humans on Greenwood, the native biosphere could handle the waste casually dumped into it… but the population wasn't going to remain so low, any more than that of Quelhagen had.

Mark grimaced. He'd come here to learn about the reality of the frontier. It was just that he didn't like some of what he was learning.

"There we go," Yerby said approvingly as he stepped back from the flyer. "It's pretty simple, lad. You sit here-"

He patted one of the two saddles. The riders could carry light objects on the crossways tray of monocrystal mesh behind them.

"-and you do with the control yoke what you want the flyer to do. The throttle's in the right grip-"

He caressed it.

"-but I never been in one of these things that I didn't have the motor flat out, and that wasn't near enough power to suit me."

Yerby grinned broadly and went on, "When you want to land, you crank this back-"

"This" was a lever of one-inch tubing, as sturdy as the flyer's spine. "-and the wings tilt. But you better be on the ground when you do that, because you're sure going to be there an eyeblink later."

There were half a dozen flyers in the three-sided shed that protected them from most of the rain. One had no motor, and the wings of another lay unmounted beside the body. An aircar that seemed to have been pieced together from several very different vehicles rested on blocks at the end of the shed.

The Bannocks had two dirigibles, one of them a general-utility vehicle like Chuck's. Yerby's was still in its shed. It had a royal blue skin except for a tear near the nose that had been repaired with black fabric. The other was a heavy-lift platform, now skidding a three-hundred-foot tree trunk toward the sawmill.

Amy walked toward them from the house, wearing trousers and a jacket she'd brought from Kilbourn. The garments were sturdy, but they were more professionally cut than most of what Mark had seen on Greenwood. The Bannock compound converted cellulose into a coarse rayon that some residents used for leggings and coveralls as well as tarpaulins, but the state of tailoring was as crude as the material.

"Just showing Mark how to fly one of these," Yerby called cheerfully to his sister. "I'm going to take him out hunting and see a bit of Greenwood."

"Right," Amy said. "I thought I'd come along and fly him. The two of us are light enough that one flyer can carry us."

She smiled at Mark. "If that's all right? It's trickier than my brother probably told you. It'd be a shame to lose you down there-" She nodded to the garbage-filled gully. "-before you'd had a full day on the planet."

Yerby's lips pursed. "I don't want anything happening to you, g-Amy," he said. "These flyers, they don't have batteries like the ones you're used to on Kilbourn. If you fly under a cloud, the motor cuts out bing."

"Yerby, I love the dishes you bought me," Amy said. She was still smiling, but her tone was a degree or two chillier. "That doesn't mean I'm made of thin glass. If you think you're going to keep me wrapped in fluff, then I'll leave and book a room in the Spiker. All right?"

"Just be careful, that's all I'm saying," Yerby grumbled. "And they don't have rooms at the Spiker, they got bunks, and don't be talking about that even for a joke."

He walked over to the shed to get a second flyer. Amy stepped up so that she straddled the left saddle with her feet on the ramp. "Hop on," she directed Mark. "Push the handbar and run along to give us a little more oomph."

She switched on the electric motor. The prop spun to a whine above them. It was still feathered so it wouldn't bite. "Ready?" she called as she flicked a thumb control to coarsen the propeller pitch. "Go!"

Amy started running forward with one hand pushing on the bar and the other controlling the yoke. Mark ran and pushed too. If Amy shoves the yoke forward as we leave the ramp, the next thing I'm going to see is a gullyful of garbage approaching very fast.

The ramp dropped from under Mark's feet. His fanny hit the saddle, but his stomach kept right on diving. Wind rushing up the gully wall made his jacket balloon away from his torso.

Amy leaned to the right. The flyer banked and climbed, fully airborne. She kept it in a tight spiral to gain height. The feeling was glorious, absolutely glorious. The craft's nervous twitching didn't frighten Mark, as he'd expected it would. After a few moments, he deliberately raised his hands from the bar.

"We'll circle till Yerby gets up," Amy said matter-of-factly. "Besides, I want to get some altitude. Though the solar cells seem to be in better shape than I was afraid they'd be."

The slow climbing turns took them over the main house at a hundred feet of altitude. A man on the second-story deck waved to them.

Besides the folk who worked for or with Yerby, three other men were staying at the compound. Two were casual acquaintances, headed toward the Spiker but in no great hurry to get there. The third was some relative or other of Desiree's visiting the Bannocks until a starship delivered a power plant to replace the one that had failed at his own steading.

Desiree's complaint about "useless mouths" was obviously without real significance; it was just something to throw at her husband to show that she was angry. Mark didn't entirely blame the lady for objecting to Dr. Jesilind's continued presence, though.

Yerby launched his own flyer without the careful inspection he'd lavished on the machine he offered Mark. He climbed toward them, but he didn't gain altitude much faster than they had. Yerby was even heavier than he looked, because his muscular body was so dense. Besides his own weight, Yerby carried a hamper of food and a monopulse laser with a built-in solar charging system. The weapon weighed a good thirty pounds.

"This is a beautiful planet," Amy said. Despite the moan of the prop, the flyer was so quiet that she could talk in a normal voice. "Except for the settled part. That's as ugly as a picked scab."

Logging had cleared the larger trees on both sides of the valley east of the compound. The slopes were still dotted with the vivid green of new growth, however. The crews were taking the larger trees for processing as timber and cellulose base, but they weren't clear-cutting. The area would regrow.

Rather than argue-because this much of Yerby's operation seemed sustainable-Mark said, "I was surprised that Yerby wanted to bring Alliance soldiers to Greenwood. On Quelhagen, we're trying to get rid of them. And not succeeding."

"That was his friend's idea," Amy said. "Jesilind." She made the name sound like a curse. "On Kilbourn the Protector only has a few soldiers, but she's threatening to bring more in. She's claims she's taken over the planetary finances, but the elected council keeps meeting and says her decrees aren't valid without their approval."

She looked at Mark and grinned. "Which means that most people don't pay taxes to either side. That suits ordinary folk well enough, and since the council's mostly rich people it suits them even better. But the Protector doesn't have anything to pay her staff with, and it doesn't suit her at all."

"All right, let's head north!" Yerby called across the hundred yards separating his flyer from the other. "I'll show you a place prettier than anything you ever seen!"

They flew north at thirty miles an hour, the best speed the heavily laden flyers could manage in still air. Amy stayed five hundred feet up, so the flight seemed more leisurely than it would have if the trees had been closer.

"There's no need for Alliance troops anywhere in the Digits," Amy added. "Anywhere at all, really. There'll never be another war. The Treaty of Cozumel has held for twenty years, and there's no reason it shouldn't hold forever."

"There sure aren't any troops on Dittersdorf," Mark said in what he meant to sound like agreement.

He'd had too good an education to believe that peace between the Atlantic Alliance and the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere meant peace for all time for all men, though. Particularly with the trouble brewing between Earth and the settlers of most colonized worlds.