Authors: Joe Haldeman
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Adventure, #Fantasy, #General
Earthbound (25 page)
Our philosopher Dustin pointed out that both actions gave humans powers that normally are reserved for gods: giving life and taking it.
So was I a god yet? Or did it only count if you were sure you had done it, and what if you thought you had done it but hadn’t? At least that didn’t happen in childbirth. Did I leave a baby around here somewhere? Well, my own status as a mother was problematic.
The carrion birds who were feeding on the pile took off with a confused clash of heavy wings. I didn’t see anything. My finger moved closer to the hair trigger as I willed myself not to touch it, not yet.
Then I was touching. Just enough to feel the cold of it. I shifted slightly, so the barrel was lined up with the darkness under the underpass.
The shadow moved and a shape inched into the sun. Not a wolf, too big.
A bear, its brown fur coppery in the sun. It looked left and right, then waddled directly toward the pile of bodies. Then it—she—looked back toward the shadow, and two cubs came out in a line.
Feeding time at the zoo. She went to a body that was lying separate from the others, and flipped it over with one pat. It didn’t have much of a face, and its belly was open, guts trailing. She tore at the clothes and got the pants halfway down and ripped away at the meat. She ate a little, but mainly seemed to be flensing it for the cubs, pulling out strips of gray-and-red flesh. There wasn’t as much blood as you would expect.
The cubs rolled around, playing with their lunch, and would have been cute in another context. The mother left them, stepped up to the top of the pile of bodies, and looked around.
She looked straight at me.
I couldn’t breathe. Should I just shoot? How fast can a bear charge?
She growled, loud and scary, and shook her huge head, and turned to look at the cubs.
I heard someone creeping up behind me. If it was another bear, it was a little one.
“What the fuck?” Dustin whispered, philosophically. “Are there bears here?”
“Three, anyhow. You left Paul?”
“He’s awake. Has the riot gun.” He set his own rifle down silently, parallel to mine, and crouched low. “I don’t suppose they’re going anywhere soon.”
“Not unless something bigger comes along.”
His gun was a fancy sporting model with a big telescopic sight. He peered through it and clicked something twice, not electronic.
“Don’t shoot.”
“Won’t unless we have to. Try a head shot if we do.”
“Probably bounce off.” As if to demonstrate something, she closed her jaws around a body’s head, evidently trying to crack the skull. But he was wearing a hard plastic bike helmet, and she tossed him away. The next one cracked like a walnut.
“I guess we’re safe as long as she has all that food,” Dustin said, still peering through the sight.
I wasn’t so sure. “They’re predators, not scavengers. If she knew we were up here, she might attack.”
“Would she?”
“How the hell should I know? We didn’t have bears on Mars.”
“Didn’t used to have them here. Except on the flag.”
“What?” Stars and stripes and a bear?
“California state flag. I guess they were here in the old days.”
I had a chill. “Namir will be coming back this way, with the horse. He’ll be using the road.”
“That’s some time from now. Maybe they’ll eat their fill and move on.”
“Why should they?” How fastidious could they be? Momma, this one tastes bad. Shut up and clean your plate.
I shifted my weight and was rewarded with a sharp stab of pain in my thigh.
“What?”
“Painkiller’s wearing off. My leg.”
“Kit’s down by Paul. I’ll keep an eye on this.”
“Thanks.” I tried to inch away silently, but the underbrush made little scraping noises. When I was far enough down the berm, I stood up slowly. Dustin looked back and nodded.
My head spun and I lurched, limping, down to the first-aid kit. Paul had rolled onto one elbow, holding the shotgun up at an angle. He waved a salute. “What’s the commotion?”
“Bears down on the road. You’re feeling better?”
“Weak. Couldn’t outrun a bear.”
“Me, neither.” I found the box of Anodyne ampoules and read the instructions. Not more than two in one twenty-four-hour period. Unless you’re in a plane wreck and get shot by bicycle gangers. Then you can take all you want.
I sat down and wriggled out of my pants and popped the ampoule near the wound.
“Could I have some?” Paul said, and for a mad moment I thought he was talking about what I had just exposed.
“When did you last have one?”
He touched the head bandage gingerly. “Guess it’s too soon. How’s your leg?”
“Good thing I have two.” I pulled my pants back up and sat next to him, stroking his arm. “Should you be sitting up?”
“Yeah. Maybe not.” He flopped back down. I went over to the pack pile and picked up the extra assault rifle. It already had a round chambered, which would probably get me flogged in Namir’s army. Go ahead, I can take it. I get shot in the crotch and come back for more. Chew up the bullets with my—
“Hello, again.” Spy had materialized between me and Paul. This time he looked like he’d been dipped in dark green plastic, less conspicuous.
It took me a moment to find my voice. “Are you always going to disappear when we need you most?”
“I have no control over that. As I told you.”
“You know what happened while you were gone?”
“Yes. I’m sorry I wasn’t here to help. I could have drawn their fire, at least, and returned it, like last time.”
“Do you know anything about bears?”
“Of course I do. You don’t have to worry about the ones on the road.”
“The big one looks pretty formidable.”
“Don’t worry about her.”
There was a sudden blast of gunfire, and I dove to the ground. Then another. It was coming from the berm where I’d just left Dustin.
Spy hadn’t moved. “Poor bear.”
I staggered back to my feet and limped up the berm, pulse hammering. Stringent powder smell.
Dustin was stretched out prone, rigid, sighting through the rifle-scope. A curl of blue smoke blew away from the muzzle.
The adult bear was lying inert on the slope coming up from the pavement. It had covered about half the distance before it fell.
The two cubs were sitting on the road, looking up at us.
“Don’t go down yet,” Dustin said without looking up.
“What happened?”
“She heard us or smelled us or something. Charged straight up the hill.”
“Spy knew it was going to happen.”
“I wasn’t surprised, myself.” He looked back at me. “What do you mean, ‘Spy’?”
He walked up next to me. “Hello, Dustin.”
“You just come and go as you please, don’t you?”
“No. As I was telling Carmen, I don’t have any control over it. I’m here, and then I’m nowhere for an instant, and then I’m back here, with something like a memory of what happened while I was away.”
“Not a ‘memory,’ ” I said. “Just ‘something like’ one.”
“Don’t I always speak carefully, Carmen? I can’t say the word exactly in English, or any other human language, but ‘memory’ is close.”
Dustin stood up with the rifle. “Better go check the bear.”
“Don’t worry. It’s dead.”
“You knew that before it happened,” I said.
“Not really. I suppose you might say ‘premonition.’ But really it’s no more supernatural than statistics. As we came closer in space-time to the bear’s death, it became more and more clear to me that the bear was going to die.”
I felt suddenly cold. “You knew back then. You disappeared at the overpass. Just before the gangers killed the little girl.”
“I did not know. Not exactly. Just before I went away, I had a feeling of certainty that death was on its way. Who or when, I didn’t know. Then I was gone.”
“Where?” Dustin said.
“I don’t know; everything goes dark for a while. I assume it’s like sleeping is for humans. But I’ve never slept.”
“You had this feeling,” I said, “but you didn’t say anything to us about it.”
“He did, though,” Dustin said. “You told us to watch out or something.”
“I said ‘trouble.’ Then everything went black. That’s when I disappeared, to you.”
“Like the Others wanted to get you out of harm’s way,” I said.
“That’s not it.” He gave me a peculiar searching look. “They don’t care any more about me than they do about you. Maybe less; if they lose me, they can make a new one.”
“Did you have a premonition back then?” Dustin said. “Like, ‘watch out; there’s a bunch of gangers on bikes headed this way’?”
“Not that specific. I did know . . . what I was about to say . . . was that danger was coming; death was coming. I knew it was an outside agency.”
“But the Others snatched you away before you could warn us,” I said.
“He did start to.”
“I wonder,” Spy said. “Another few seconds, and I might have realized we had to get off the road. We might have escaped their notice.”
He raised both hands in a human gesture, frustration or helplessness. “There are things I can’t know about the Others. It’s like . . . as if you made a human avatar, a robot, and gave it no sense of smell or taste . . . and then wired it so it couldn’t use the future tense, the subjunctive mood. That’s how handicapped I am, from their point of view. As if I knew that smell and taste existed, but had no experience of them and no vocabulary to describe them.”
“And the future-tense thing?” Dustin said.
“It’s not that they
know
the future, one hundred percent. But nothing ever surprises them, no matter how unlikely.”
know
the future, one hundred percent. But nothing ever surprises them, no matter how unlikely.”
“And you’re sort of like that,” I said.
He shrugged. “More so than you.”
“So what about tomorrow?” Dustin said. “We’ll make it to the farm?”
He shook his head and looked down the slope. The cubs were poking at their mother, trying to rouse her.
“I don’t know. I didn’t know there would be bears.”
15
Namir didn’t come back before nightfall. We stayed clustered around Paul, at least one of us awake and on guard, on ninety-minute shifts. I hoped the others slept better than I did.
The cubs had left their mother’s body before dark. Where did they go? Would they lead other bears back?
The woods were full of small noises. I guess they always are if you’re listening.
Spy disappeared sometime around three or four, while I was sleeping. Elza said nothing special happened; she just noticed he was gone.
We all got cold. When the sky started to lighten, we built a small fire, twigs, to thaw out our hands and feet. We warmed some water in a metal cup and shared bad instant coffee.
An hour or so after dawn, Namir showed up, riding a horse and leading a mule with a cart. He brought a bag of hard-cooked eggs and a bottle of wine. We attacked the eggs but left the wine for later.
Namir took a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and unfolded it carefully. It had been handled quite a bit. “That fellow with the telescope, Wham-O. He saw something on Mars, and made a drawing.”
It was a smudged pencil sketch, clear enough.
“That’s Syrtis Major,” I said, pointing to a shape like a child’s drawing of Africa on an Earth globe. “But what’s that?
Off the southern tip of the mass was a circle surrounding a cross. Paul’s eyes were open, and I showed it to him. “What do you think?”
He squinted at it. “Earth.”
“No,” I said. “It’s Mars.”
“The circle with the cross. That means Earth.”
“Of course,” Namir said. “The astronomer’s symbol. Could they have drawn that in the desert sand?”
“Walking in a big circle?” Elza said.
“Not walking,” Paul said. “Take heavy equipment. Hundreds of miles.”
“Or the Others might have done it,” Namir said. “Not a very big project, compared to blowing up the Moon.”
“But why would they?” I said, which produced a couple of shrugs.
“I think we did it,” Paul said, “we Martians. A signal to Earth, saying we’re still alive.”
“Let’s assume that’s it,” Namir said, smiling. “If the Others wanted to impress us, they’d do something less subtle.”
The Farmers had put an old mattress in the cart, and a length of plastic webbing to strap Paul in securely.
He wasn’t complaining about pain, but he looked bad. Elza offered him an ampoule, and when he didn’t say no, gave it to him in the shoulder. He was asleep by the time we had him secured.
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