Cut Off (21 page)

She smiled to mask the awkwardness of the question. "Well—and no offense, Papa Ohe'o—we don't know any of these people."

The old man waved his hand. "There's not much to know. The worst we have are some of the kids, and they're only bad if you think surfing is degenerate. Then there's the organic farmers who've been here since the old days and sometimes talk like they're
happy
the plague came in to set things straight. Other than that? It's a few dozen people who want to live in peace and have decided to do so in the same general vicinity."

"Sounds pretty good to me." Alden searched Tristan's face. "I know it's fast. But we've lived on our own for years. I feel like something's missing."

She gazed blankly past the French doors to the roiling blue sea. It
was
happening fast; she wanted to thank Ohe'o, walk away, and spend the next few days convincing Alden why it wasn't a good idea to move in with a pack of total strangers who, for all they knew, maintained good relationships with the aliens by flinging virgin sacrifices over the rim of Haleakala.

She didn't like mistrusting people. Once upon a time, she'd believed in them, their inherent deep-down goodness. She'd treated it as both a fact and her guiding principle. Except for the rare sociopaths, people went bad by conditioning and environment, not by nature. If you got them away from the bad (poverty, sickness, lack of education) and guaranteed their basic wants would be met, that's when the true face of humanity emerged. People would work together, help one another, move forward as a community.

Yet the Panhandler had exposed a different side of things. Take away their laws and their luxuries, and people didn't give a shit about community. Not unless it helped them toward the only thing that mattered: survival.

And yet, as Alden watched her, eyebrows raised, she understood how little the truth made any difference.

"Only if it's near the beach," she said.

Papa Ohe'o grinned and showed them to a house a short walk north of the stream. It was a two-story structure, and like many of the houses in this part of the jungle, it was elevated on stilts. It had a wraparound lanai and a yard full of fruit trees. Inside, it was an awful mess, full of leaves and dirt and bird droppings, but that represented nothing more than two or three days of work.

Besides, she only had eyes for the coconut palms in the yard and the ocean beyond.

"I'll let the others know we've made an addition," Papa Ohe'o said. "Until word gets around, play it cautious the first time you bump into someone. The island spirit can take a minute to warm up."

He waved and walked off. Tristan couldn't believe that it could be that easy. Yet there they were, in an unclaimed house, a minute's walk from the waves, a five-minute hike from a stream of fresh water, within a jungle so pressing she couldn't see any part of the mountain that stood ten thousand feet above them.

It was early afternoon. Their short-term food and water were in hand, but they had a lot to get done before bed. Such as clearing out a place to go to bed in. And the matter of the beds themselves: the house windows had been left open for years and the mattresses were coated in dark green mold. Or moss. She wasn't sure. Something she had no intention of sleeping on, she knew that much. Or, on reflection, of keeping inside the house. She and Alden dragged the mattresses to a rocky corner of the yard they'd designated for the trash heap and checked the house for alternative sleeping surfaces. She supposed they could pile up the former residents' clothes if they had to.

After another few minutes in the house, it became clear it would require far more effort than Tristan had estimated. As a form of triage, they took brooms and steel wool to the upper lanai on the west side of the house where they'd be shielded from the sun and cleaned with all their might, removing moss, general filth, and a layer of dirt so thick grass had sprouted from it. They barely finished by sundown. Alden used the last of the light to climb a banana tree and toss down some fruit.

He climbed down, peeled a banana, and took a big bite. "Feel like home yet?"

"Since we got into the jungle," she admitted.

Before bed, she went down to the ocean. The Big Island rose from the south, a black mound on the horizon. On the west side of Maui, the other islands had been separated by a channel just a few miles across. Tristan had been confident they would have been able to canoe across in a matter of hours. Here, the Big Island was isolated by at least twenty miles of open ocean. The distance was infinitely more foreboding. Gazing at the vague shape of the island made it feel as if a route had been closed to them.

She went to the lanai to sleep. The whirr of the bugs was still unfamiliar, as was the moist, chlorophyllic scent of the jungle, but the air was warm and soothing. In the morning, she allowed herself a few minutes to wake, then got to work hauling out every piece of furniture that showed mold or staining.

Alden found her at the midden heap, a towel draped around his shoulders. "I'm going to the stream. I'm so sweaty and gross I was dreaming of being sucked into a vacuum."

"Can you find a wheelbarrow or something and bring back a bunch of water? We need to steam some poi. Can't live on fruit alone. Even if you could, my digestive tract would go on strike."

Annoyance creased his face, but he nodded and rattled around the garage until he emerged with a red wheelbarrow and an assortment of jugs and gas cans. He headed up the dirt path to the highway, the plastic jugs rattling on the bed of the metal wheelbarrow. She continued to strip moldering junk from the house. Thankfully, many of the couches were rattan, and had held up better to the jungle's creep.

An hour later, the wheelbarrow rumbled up the trail. A woman's laughter pealed from the woods. Alden and Robi walked into the clearing. Alden was shirtless, sweating. Robi saw Tristan and smiled politely.

"She offered to lend us a hand," Alden explained. "Is that okay?"

Tristan straightened and wiped her temples. "I'd tell you not to break anything, but right now, that's all I'm doing."

Robi helped Alden unload the jugs of water. They stuck two of the larger ones beneath the house and carried the rest up to the kitchen. Tristan wanted to be annoyed when the two of them disappeared upstairs, but they soon emerged bearing old clothes, bedding, and personal effects. It all went into the pile, which was beginning to mount. Tristan already regretted the decision not to cart it a little further into the woods.

She was staring at it with her hands on her hips and considering whether to smash down the larger pieces and haul them off when Ke strode down the trail toward the house. He was hardly any bigger than Tristan, but he was angling his arms from his sides like a weightlifter, his face a range of hard planes.

"Where is she?" he said.

"Your sister?" Tristan lobbed a computer monitor into the pile. "Is something the matter?"

"What's the matter is I told her to stay away from him."

"Alden?"

"You got another brother I don't know about?"

"She's helping clean the house," she stated flatly.

Feet clumped on the steps. Alden appeared on the landing, smiling hesitantly. "Hey, Ke."

"Get Robi out here." Ke pointed up at him. "We're going home."

Alden blinked and headed down the stairs. "What's up?"

"Get down here. Get down here and I'll show you what's up, man."

Tristan held up her palm to Alden, stopping him halfway down the stairs, and put herself in front of Ke. "Step back and calm down. Right now."

But she had become a nonentity, a part of the background, no more relevant than the palms. Ke moved toward the stairs, lips pulled into a taut line, hand curling into a fist. Tristan intercepted him and struck him in the face.

14

"Yes slaves," Sebastian replied. "And?"

"It would be nice to turn them into non-slaves."

"Why?"

Ness glanced across the darkened tower ops room, uncertain if he was misinterpreting Sebastian's signs. "Because
slaves
."

"They are lives with purpose. This is the Way."

"How can it possibly be the Way to take away living beings' freedom?"

"Freedom is not intrinsic. All things are oppressed." Sebastian gestured to the window. "The trees oppress the shrubs. Shrubs oppress grass. Yet grass persists."

Ness threw out his hands. "Grass doesn't have brains!"

"Two years in the past you were fighting humans."

"And we decided that wasn't so cool, didn't we?"

Sebastian twirled his pincers in mounting agitation. "Non-good to discuss now. We retreat to sub. Then talk."

"Do you plan on coming back here? I sure don't." Ness turned to the window. The light had switched off, once more concealing the rows of tents within the high wire fence penning them in. "I was a slave once."

"Yes," Sebastian replied. "Remember."

"It eats you up, not having any will of your own. Piece by piece, day by day, it's like you shrink inside, until you hardly got any of yourself left at all. Until you don't got any
life
at all. Maybe captivity's different for you guys and you don't think it's so bad. For us, though, it's like being..." He pantomimed blowing out a candle. "You got smug when these Swimmers didn't let their buildings grow freely. I can't see how it's the Way to treat thinking beings worse than the towers used to guard them."

Sebastian considered this for a long moment. "Is this the voice of your inside star?"

"Damn right."

"Then we will listen."

Ness grinned, then pointed at the snoozing alien. "How long will that guy be out?"

Sebastian raised the stunner and shot the unconscious body again. "Enough."

"Can you tell how much time we have before anyone else is scheduled to be here?"

Sebastian moved back to the computers and did some quick tentacle work. "Also enough."

"How
long
?"

"93 minutes."

"We could use a translator. How about you ring the sub and ask them to send Sprite over?"

Sebastian shook his head. "No signals. Only silence."

Ness sighed. "Guess we swim back for him, then. Let's move."

Before heading down the ramp, he helped Sebastian drag the unconscious sentry into one of the nooks in the wall where it was less likely to be spotted. That accomplished, Sebastian took point down the ramp and headed back into the jungle. They jogged (or, in Sebastian's pace, scuttled at a jogging pace) to the shore and waded in. Without asking, Sebastian grabbed Ness, dragging him through the water at a pace far faster than Ness could manage himself. He warned Ness to take air, then dived under and deposited them inside the airlock. It drained and Ness gasped.

No more than five minutes had passed since they'd vacated the tower, yet Ness found himself running to find Sprite, who, not being allowed to the lower levels unaccompanied, was sitting around the galley playing solitaire.

"Got a job for you," Ness said. "There's a whole field of slaves on that island. We're looking to bust them out. I need you to explain the score and keep them quiet and organized."

Sprite drew back his head. "Why don't you talk to them?"

"Because we're in the Philippines and I made the crazy assumption they're Filipino. I thought a bunch of them spoke Chinese."

"I bet more speak English. It used to be a US territory, man."

"Then you'll double our chances."

He shook his head. "And octuple my chances of getting sliced in half by a laser."

Ness snorted. "These aren't the old days, man. I wasn't joking about being a former
WOW
buff. Used to be I could hardly bring myself to step foot outside my house."

Sprite cocked his head. "So what happened, Jean-Claude?"

"What do you think?"

"Sure. The end of the world happened. So why aren't
I
leaping at the chance to wage a one-man war against the universe?"

"How should I know? Maybe you haven't lost enough. What happened to that gung ho spirit you had after we jumped on the trawler?"

Sprite regarded him levelly. "'Gung ho spirit'?"

Ness scowled. "You know what I mean. You flung yourself on that boat like it was full of candy."

"Heat of the moment. Anyway, I don't recall having had much choice."

"Well, you don't got one now, either." He grabbed Sprite's arm and dragged him along. They were of equal size and Sprite could have foiled him by planting his feet, yet the other man let himself be borne along. Ness glanced back at him. "Might want to strip down. Bit of a swim."

Sprite mumbled something and pulled off his shirt. "Why does this feel like the worst idea ever? I mean, besides the fact it is?"

"You'll get used to it."

They piled into the airlock with Sebastian. Water filled the chamber. Ness chuckled at Sprite. "If your eyes get any bigger, you can use them as a flotation device."

"Hilarious." Sprite pushed himself up, trying to keep his head clear of the incoming saltwater. Then it swallowed them all.

A moment later, they were spat into the sea. Ness found Sprite and pulled him up for air. He looked ready to scream, but managed to hold his tongue. Sebastian was already streaming toward the island. Ness got swimming and Sprite followed suit. They hit the beach and loped up the trail. At the tower, Ness and Sprite hid in the trees while Sebastian made sure it was still clear. He was back in a jiffy.

"Electricity in the fence," he signed. "Also the detectors of motion for escape."

"Can you shut them off?" Ness said.

"This too is a standard standard."

"Sweet. Let's keep it simple. You lock down security and keep watch from the tower. Once the fence is down, Sprite and I go inside and wake people up until we find someone we can talk to. We explain what's up and herd them to the beach."

With a whiff of fresh kelp, Sebastian moved his head closer. "And then?"

"They swim," Ness shrugged. "Only a couple miles to the big island. And the water's fine."

"This plan gives me worries. Depends much on humans behaving well."