Patriots

8. Living Toward Tomorrow

As the sun rose, the motors gained power and the flyers became noticeably more agile, though their speed didn't increase greatly. Yerby continued to lead them north.

Mark drew Amy out about Miss Altsheller's Academy. At first, Amy was embarrassed to discuss her education with a Harvard graduate. Mark did his best to convince her that she had no reason to feel ashamed. Sure, the General Knowledge curriculum was scant and dated by Earth standards, but Miss Altsheller's emphasis on deportment made her students as civilized and cultured as anyone raised on Quelhagen.

Mark had been taught to learn. Amy had been taught to believe that humans could make themselves better. Not just richer: everybody on the frontier believed that or they'd have stayed where they were born.

Mark wasn't even sure he could define "better." His education had taught him that you had to look at matters from every side, that every viewpoint was valid.

The thing was, an ivory tower attitude meant that the viewpoint of four Zenith thugs was just as valid as that of the innocent traveler they were going to beat the hell out of for fun. Mark didn't feel neutral at all about that concept.

The flyers sailed over a rugged crest. Before them spread a broad valley. Trees were scattered sparsely among much lower vegetation. It was the first natural open space of any extent that Mark had seen on Greenwood.

"Here we go!" Yerby called. "But watch where I land!"

He brought his flyer around low to the far side of a cliff jutting from the ridge like an axe blade. Amy followed her brother, but she was frowning and her hands tightened minusculely on the control yoke.

Mark concentrated on looking relaxed. He figured that was the most help he could give at the moment. Besides, he'd learned that sometimes when you faked an attitude, you tricked yourself into making it real.

It wasn't real this time. He was still scared.

On the other side of the cliff, a waterfall leaped a hundred feet from the top of the crag. Yerby brought his flyer in to a jittery landing on the area fringing the creek that formed at the base of the falls. The frontiersman's boots and the flyer's wheels kicked up sand as he braked to a halt, then turned in to the vegetation to give Amy a clear approach.

"Sometimes," Amy said, visibly relaxing, "Yerby shows better sense than I give him credit for."

Amy landed them easily on the sandbar, though in the moment before the whole wing lifted in a huge aileron Mark thought they were going to do an endo on the soft sand and come to rest upside down. "Oh!" he said, amazed at how relieved he felt to be safely on the ground. Above them the propeller whirred softly to stillness.

The leaves of the nearby vegetation were broad, but they sprouted directly from the soil the way those of Terran grasses did. What looked like a smooth carpet from the air was actually a varied mixture of species, but only a few grew more than three feet high. A tree rooted in the cliff face had a trunk like wires twisted together rather than a single stem.

"Take a look to your left, both of you," Yerby said in a quiet voice. "Easy, now."

A creature the size of a large dog poked its head out of a burrow twenty feet away. Its eyes extended on short stalks. They swept the creature's immediate surroundings, then focused on the flyers. Mark held very still. The creature snapped back into its hole as if pulled by an overstretched rubber band. Its feet immediately drummed a warning underground.

"We call them pooters," Yerby said. "They do love a tree, near as much as my logging crew does, but mostly they eat this short stuff."

He plucked a clump of "grass" from the soil. The taproot was eighteen inches long at the point it broke. "Any place the ground's soft enough they can burrow, you're likely to find them. Cute little beggars and they're pretty good eating."

Mark noticed that the frontiersman hadn't bothered to unstrap the flashgun from his flyer's rack. "Aren't there any predators on Greenwood?" he asked.

"Sure there is," Yerby said. "Nothing we need to worry about, though. They're mostly birds-that's why the pooler was scared of our flyers. Some of the really biggest ones, they run on the ground, but even they used to be birds before they got too big to fly. You'd need to go a good five hundred miles south to find any of them anyways."

"I was just curious," Mark said. It wasn't entirely a lie.

"Yerby, you're right," said Amy, looking up at the waterfall sliding through the air in rainbow splendor. "This place is beautiful. The whole planet is."

Yerby beamed as though she'd praised him personally. "Ain't it, though?" he said. "You know? I'd like to keep it like this."

"This corner?" Amy said. "This waterfall, you mean."

Yerby shook his head and grimaced. "Look, I know it don't make sense, but I'd like to keep Greenwood pretty much the way it is. You know, I just come back from Kilbourn and the way it's built up-that's too many people."

"How big is Kilbourn?" Mark asked sharply. He was trying to connect this Yerby Bannock with the man who let freshets flush his garbage into the river.

"About a million and a half," Amy said. She looked surprised also. "The population's been growing fast all through my lifetime, ever since the Treaty of Cozumel."

"And yeah, I know what you're thinking, Mark," Yerby said. "I could do a better job keeping things neat than I do. But hell, people ain't perfect, and the more of them you put together the worse they each of them gets. There's cities on Kilbourn so crowded I wouldn't board a dog there."

And how would you feel about Landingplace or Zenith's capital, New Paris? Mark thought. Aloud he said, "You know, I think a recycling plant could pay for itself in a year or two. A few years."

"Have you talked about this with Dr. Jesilind?" Amy said. "His vision for Greenwood is huge city-buildings, arcologies, like they have on Earth. Everything self-contained, everyone living in identical boxes with identical parks and artificial rain at programmed times."

Yerby shook his head glumly, looking out over the savannah. "I know," he said. "He's a smart man, the doc is, educated like I'll never be. Only…"

The big man leaned down and thrust his hand like a spade into the hole from which he'd plucked the grass. He crumbled the loam through his fingers. "Thing is," Yerby said softly, "there's plenty of planets. No reason to put a lot of folks on every one of them. And there's plenty already built up now, like Kilbourn. Some folks, that's how they want to live."

He scattered the last of the black dirt at his feet and straightened. "Kilbourn, it's not going to go away. Earth's not going to go away. People who want to live tight together already have plenty of places to do that. There's other folks who need to be able to stick their fingers in the dirt and look at a waterfall with just a couple friends. I'd like Greenwood to stay a place you could do that."

He laughed uncomfortably. "Well, I guess I sound pretty silly to a couple educated people like you, don't I? Don't know what came over me to talk like that."

"I didn't hear anything silly," Mark said quietly. He squatted and rubbed bare dirt between his thumb and forefinger. "You know," he added, "it could be that more people need the chance to sit with a few friends and a lot of nature than know they do."

The pooter stuck its head out of the hole again. Mark winked at it. After a moment, the creature snipped off a clump of grass and began to ingest it, bite by bite.

As they watched the creature eat, Yerby Bannock said, "Where d'ye suppose a man would find one of them recycling plants you talked about, Mark lad?"