Shadow of Heaven

Chapter Fourteen

It was not until the F.T.A. withdrawal from the He was almost complete that Stirling could accept the idea of being free to take the big drop anytime he felt like it.

Among the miscellaneous supplies the villagers had found when they took the power station was a pair of powerful binoculars with a floating optical system designed to damp out tremors from the observer’s hands. Stirling commandeered the glasses for his own use and spent several hours on the station’s roof watching the evacuation of the F.T.A. headquarters. The foreshortened perspectives of the binoculars showed the work going under a sky which was almost solid with the dark shapes of military drift-ships and the flitting bubbles of television camera teams. As the activity slowly died away, Stirling tried to muster the elation he should have felt at finally being free, but something was getting in the way.

Administrator Raddall had been surprisingly easy to negotiate with, possibly because of an instinctive appreciation of Johnny’s methods; but Stirling suspected that a politician of his stature was not going to be beaten so easily. This feeling had been strengthened, rather than allayed, by Raddall’s immediate use of the Special Powers Act of 1992 to order the F.T.A. off the He, and his vague hints at the possibility of making the eastern end into a sort of reservation for the villagers. The discussion had taken place over an ultra-secure, tunnel-screened beam. Raddall’s only stipulations had been that the villagers were to remain as inconspicuous as possible and the existence of the herbicidal bomb was to be kept a secret. Stirling could appreciate Raddall’s desire to appear as a humanitarian rather than a statesman who had been outsmarted by a drifter; but was that a good enough reason for concealing the one factor which could justify his action in the eyes of the electorate? Or was he afraid the public would not hold still for blackmail? If Raddall was forced to act against the villagers, the resultant sterilization of the lie would represent an ugly blot on his career.

My trouble, Stirling thought irritably, is that it’s six months since I’ve killed a bottle of whisky. He set the binoculars down and lowered himself through the hatch. Johnny was lounging at the door, looking out across the darkening furrows, while Dix, Theodore and the others gathered up all the portable supplies left by the F.T.A. garrison. They were chuckling as they worked, still filled with a kind of revolutionary fervor.

Johnny spoke to Stirling without looking around. “Are you coming back to the village with us, or staying here?”

“I guess you’ll be celebrating tonight.”

“We’ll be celebrating tonight—the shields will be off the fires.”

“One more night up here won’t do me any harm,” Stirling said. “I never tasted the local liquor.” “You could make the elevator before dark.” Johnny kept staring straight ahead.

Melissa, Stirling thought, this is the night. There’s going to be some celebration. The shields will be off the fires—right off.

“There’s no hurry,” he said carefully. “I haven’t said my good-bys.”

“Victor.” Johnny turned, and Stirling saw he was speaking through the prosthetic without moving his lips. “Your father was not my father. We’re not brothers.”

Ranged along a robot’s beam, the raiding party rode east in darkness and then set off on the five-mile walk from the He’s center line to the village. Several stars cruised directly overhead; and, along the length of the perimeter wall, luminous gases crept like huge insubstantial glowworms. Johnny walked slightly ahead, cradling the metal sphere of his bomb. As they neared the village the lights of unshielded fires clustered in the blackness ahead, and Stirling tried to imagine what the celebration would be like. The villagers had struck him as being too solitary, too accustomed to surveying the night from their individual spider holes, to get together for a jamboree.

But he was wrong.

One man had gone back earlier in the day with the news that Jaycee had bested Administrator Raddall and won for the villagers the right to live openly on the lie. The fires were blazing high; and the villagers were sitting around in large, noisy groups, working through their stocks of colorless beer and wheat liquor. A mob greeted Johnny and the others as they reached the outskirts; hands slapped them on the backs; female bodies thudded against them with lusty enthusiasm—the women were giggling, pushing, breathing alcohol. Eddies of smoke carried sparks into the knots of dark figures, mingled with the smell of cooking, and gave the scene an atmosphere of dark carnival.

For the first time since his arrival on the He, Stirling found himself accepted without reservation. He ate hungrily and washed the food down with gulps of burning spirit, and was pleased to discover that six months of abstinence had not deprived him of the ability to enjoy the familiar malty warmth.

“There you are, big fella,” Biquard said out of the darkness. Two other dim, smiling faces hovered behind him. “I’ve brung a couple of the girls to meet you. Carla and Jo. I ain’t forgotten how you jumped me, or anything like that; but you went over the wall yesterday—and I couldn’t. Okay?”

“Say, he is a big fella.” One of the women leaned against Stirling. Her hair was rancid. “Excuse me,” Stirling said. “I think I left my wallet on the piano.”

As he moved away quickly through the Heironymus Bosch landscape, he tried to suppress a feeling of unreality and wondered if owl cameras were drifting above him in the night sky. At first he had some difficulty finding the Latham place, until a remembered configuration of storage tanks showed him where to turn. I always think a good address is so important, don’t you? He was guided by a gleam of candlelight during the last few yards of the journey until he was standing in the doorway where he had met Judge Latham—seemingly in another life. Melissa’s black-clad body was coiled like a whip on the low bed.

“Oh, it’s you.” She sat up. “You startled me.”

“It’s all right. I haven’t brought my chloroform.”

“I thought you were . . ,”

“Johnny. He’s moving in here tonight, is he?”

“It’s expected. This is Johnny’s day.”

“What are you, anyway?” Stirling became angry. “A life-size kewpie doll? When do they hand you over?”

“Why did you come around here, Victor?”

Feeling self-conscious, Stirling went into the room. “Melissa, you don’t seen to understand that all this isn’t real. You could shuck it off anytime you wanted.”

“Why did you come around here, Victor?”

“I’m leaving in the morning. … I think your father intended that you should go too, if you wanted.”

“I couldn’t live down there. I can still remember.”

Stirling sat down on the bed. “It isn’t all that bad. Some people get work out on the reclamation projects. They really live in the open.”

“Breathing dust and eating petroleum yeast!”

“All right, then. We could go south and perhaps I’d get a job on …” Stirling broke off, suddenly aware of what he was saying.

“Did you come around here to propose to me?” Melissa smiled easily, showing even, white teeth; but he noticed the suggestion of a tremor in her lower lip, and his heart began a slow, heavy pounding.

“I think so. It’s beginning to look that way.” He leaned forward to kiss her, but she turned her face aside. Her hair smelled like the night wind.

“Go away, Victor,” she said urgently. “It’s no good.” “You haven’t given it a chance.” He took her in his arms, holding off the first kiss until he had gathered her right hi against him, body to body, thigh to thigh. For one exultant, ringing moment he felt her relax into it; then her weightless body went rigid.

“Well, this is very pleasant,” a grating parody of a voice said at the door. “Warming her up for me, are you, Victor?” Johnny stood in the doorway, still cradling the herbicidal bomb, the orbicular symbol and the reality of his power. He was stripped to the waist.

Stirling rolled away from Melissa and stood up. “I can’t let you go through with this, Johnny. You can’t play games with human beings.”

“Speak for yourself.” Johnny’s eyes flicked towards the bed. “I can think of lots of games to play with human beings.”

“You don’t seem to understand… .”

“I understand you too well, big brother. You want to moralize at me and take my woman at the same time. Get out of here, before I push you right through the east wall.”

Stirling suddenly remembered his dream about being thrust through a door in the wall, meeting his father, and telling him about Johnny. His father’s eyes had filled with accusation. Why?

“It might be better if we talked it over, Johnny. You don’t seem to have the Council with you.”

“I don’t need them.” Johnny set the bomb down and flexed his body muscles, with a movement curiously like a cobra spreading its hood before the strike. He advanced slowly across the room; and Stirling, full of a strange timidity which was foreign to his nature, watched him soberly. The whole concept of physical combat was repugnant to him; yet his quick temper, impatience, and thoughtless use of sarcasm had brought many fights to Stirling, often when he least expected them. Always, when the chips were down, he had handled himself with emotionless efficiency; and always he had won. But how was he to fight Johnny? Would he be able to punch? Would he be able to stop? He raised his arms tentatively, half-heartedly, remembering the look in his father’s eyes. “Johnny,” he said. “This won’t prove anything.”

“No?”

Johnny closed with him and swung a blow which Stirling countered with his forearm. He was surprised at the ease with which he had been able to intercept the punch —until the pain arrowed up into his shoulder. Johnny might have been wearing steel gauntlets, and he had intended the blow to be blocked. He followed it with others in a steady, predictable rhythm, smiling frozenly as Stirling stopped the punches. It dawned on Stirling that Johnny was planning to beat his arms until they were useless—in a contemptuous display of force—and then move in closer. Stirling found himself still reluctant to strike back, and he began to feel afraid of his own weakness. He backed away until he was trapped in a corner, With slow hammer blows pressing him against the walls.

“Stop it!” Melissa ran from the bed and threw herself between them.

“Stay back.” Johnny pushed her away. “This doesn’t concern you.”

“Doesn’t it?” Melissa recovered her calmness. “I think it does. I don’t like the implications, Johnny.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning,” Stirling said, “that you can’t play games with human beings. I think Melissa feels entitled to decide her own future.”

“That’s right, Johnny.” Melissa walked away from them, suddenly in command of the situation, and Stirling got a prescient feeling of dismay.

“Melissa, you don’t make decisions this way. Not this way.”

“What decision, Victor? You natter yourself, you know that?”

Johnny peered from one to the other in the candlelight, then a slow smile spread over his face. “You’ve really been pitching in, haven’t you, Victor? What have you two been saying to each other?”

“Nothing. Nothing except good-by,” Melissa said. She began to untie the belt knotted at her waist. “It isn’t necessary.”

“Good-by, Victor.”

Stirling had walked only a few yards from the Latham hut when he decided he should make another attempt. He turned back in time to see the yellow glimmers fading as the candle was extinguished. Beyond the black outline of the hut, the Moon was scimitaring down on the He’s western horizon; and Stirling saw the silhouette of an army drift-ship cut through it, a witch-shadow in a world where magic was long dead.

He pulled his jacket tighter and began walking towards the elevator head.