Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 05 (2 page)

She blinked, pushing the images of the dream from her. The outlaws were gone now—as were the Eversills who had tried to steal her land, and other enemies. They were all gone, now, making way for new foes. She listened a moment longer, but about her the house of Fal Morgan was still.

After a moment she got up anyway, stepping for a second into the chill bath of night air as she reached for a robe from the chair by her bed. Strong moonlight, filtering through sheer curtains, gave back her ghost in dim image from the tall armoire mirror. A ghost from sixty years past. For a second before the robe settled about her, the lean and still-erect shape in the mirror invented the illusion of a young, full-fleshed body. She went out.

Twenty steps down the long panelled corridor, with the familiar silent cone rifles and other combat arms standing like sentries in their racks on either wall, she became conscious of the fact that habit still had the energy handgun in her grasp. She shelved it in the rack and went on to her great-granddaughter's door.

She opened it and stepped in.

The moonlight shone through the curtains even more brightly on this side of the house. Betta still slept, breathing heavily, her swollen middle rising like a promise under the covering blankets. The concern about this child-to-be, which had occupied Amanda all these past months, came back on her with fresh urgency. She touched the rough, heavy cloth over the unborn life briefly and lightly with her fingertips.

Then she turned and went back out. Down the corridor and around the corner, the Earth-built clock in the living room chimed the first quarter of an hour past four a.m..

She was fully awake now, and her mind moved purposefully. The birth was due at any time now, and Betta was insistent about wanting to use the name Amanda if it was a girl. Was she wrong in withholding it, again? Her decision could not be put off much longer. In the kitchen she made herself tea. Sitting at the table by the window, she drank it, gazing down over the green tops of the conifers, the pines and spruce on the slope that fell away from the side of the house, then rose again to the close horizon of the ridge in that direction, and the mountain peaks beyond, overlooking Foralie Town and Fal Morgan alike, together with a dozen similar homesteads.

She could not put off any longer the making up of her mind. As soon as the baby was born, Betta would want to name her. On the surface, it did not seem such an important matter. Why should one name be particularly sacred? Except that Betta did not realize, none of them in the family seemed to realize, how much the name Amanda had come to be a talisman for them all.

The trouble was, time had caught up with her. There was no guarantee that she could wait around for more children to be born. With the trouble that was probably coming, the odds were against her being lucky enough to still be here for the official naming of Betta's child, when that took place. But there had been a strong reason behind her refusal to let her name be given to one of the younger generations, all these years. True, it was not an easy reason to explain or defend. Its roots were in something as deep as a superstition—the feeling in her that Fal Morgan would only stand as long as that name in the family could stand like a pillar to which they could all anchor. And how could she tell ahead of time how a baby would turn out?

Once more she had worn a new groove around the full circle of the problem. For a few moments, while she drank her tea, she let her thoughts slide off to the conifers below, which she had stretched herself to buy as seedlings when the Earth stock had finally been imported here to this world they called the Dorsai.

They had grown until now they blocked the field of fire from the house in that direction. During the Outlaw Years, she would never have let them grow so high.

With what might be now coming in the way of trouble from Earth, they should probably be cut down completely— though the thought of it went against something deep in her. This house, this land, all of it, was what she had built for herself, her children and their children. It was the greatest of her dreams, made real; and there was no part of it, once won, that she could give up easily.

Still seated by the window, slowly drinking the hot tea, her mind went off entirely from the threats of the present to her earliest dreams, back to Caernarvon and the Wales of her childhood, to her small room on a top floor with the ceiling all angles.

She remembered that, now, as she sat in this house with only two lives presently stirring between its walls. No— three, with the child waiting to be born, who would be having dreams of her own, before long. How old had she herself been when she had first dreamed of running the wind?

That had been a very early dream of hers, a waking dream—also invoked as she was falling asleep. So that with luck, sometimes, it became a real dream. She had imagined herself being able to run at great speed along the breast of the rolling wind, above city and countryside. In her imagination she had run barefoot, and she had been able to feel the texture of the flowing air under her feet, that was like a soft, moving mattress. She had been very young. But it had been a powerful thing, that running.

In her imagination she had run from Caernarvon and Cardiff clear to France and back again; not above great banks of solar collectors or clumps of manufactories, but over open fields and mountains and cattle, and over flowers in fields where green things grew and where people were happy. She had gotten finally so that she could run, in her imagination, farther and faster than anyone.

None was so fleet as she. She ran to Spain and Norway. She ran across Europe as far as Russia, she ran south to the end of Africa and beyond that to the Antarctic and saw the great whales still alive. She ran west over America and south over South America. She saw the cowboys and gauchos as they once had been, and she saw the strange people at the tip of South America where it was quite cold.

She ran west over the Pacific, over all the south Pacific and over the north Pacific. She ran over the volcanos of the Hawaiian islands, over Japan and China and Indo-China. She ran south over Australia and saw deserts, and the great herds of sheep and the wild kangaroos hopping.

Then she went west once more and saw the steppes and the Ukraine and the Black Sea and Constantinople that was, and Turkey, and all the plains where Alexander marched, his army to the east, and then back to Africa. She saw strange ships with lug sails on the sea east of Africa, and she ran across the Mediterranean where she saw Italy. She looked down on Rome, with all its history, and on the Swiss alps where people yodeled and climbed mountains when they were not working very hard; and all in all she saw many things, until she finally ran home and fell asleep on the breast of the wind and on her own bed. Remembering it all, now that she was ninety-two years old— which was a figure that meant nothing to her—she sat here, light years from it all, on the Dorsai, thinking of it all and drinking tea in the last of the moonlight, looking down at her conifers.

She stirred, pushed the empty cup from her and rose. Time to begin the day—her control bracelet chimed with the note of an incoming call.

She thumbed the bracelet's com button. The cover over the phone screen on the kitchen wall slid back and the screen itself lit up with the heavy face of Piers van der Lin. That face looked out and down at her, the lines that time had cut into it deeper than she had ever seen them. A sound of wheezing whistled and sang behind the labor of his speaking.

"Sorry, Amanda," his voice was hoarse and slow with both age and illness. "Woke you, didn't I?"

"Woke me?" She felt a tension in him and was suddenly alert. "Piers, it's almost daybreak You know me better than that. What is it?"

"Bad news, I'm afraid…" his breathing, like the faint distant music of war-pipes, sounded between words. "The invasion from Earth is on its way. Word just came. Coalition first-line troops—to reach the planet here in thirty-two hours."

"Well, Cletus told us it would happen. Do you want me down in town?"

"No," he said.

Her voice took on an edge in spite of her best intentions.

"Don't be foolish, Piers," she said. "If they can take away the freedom we have here, then the Dorsai ceases to exist—except for a name. We're all expendable."

"Yes," he said, wheezing, "but you're far down on the list. Don't be foolish, yourself, Amanda. You know what you're worth to us."

"Piers, what do you want me to do?"

He looked at her with a face carved by the same years that had touched her so lightly.

"Cletus just sent word to Eachan Khan to hold himself out from any resistance action here. That leaves us back where we were to begin with in a choice for a Commander for the district. I know, Betta's about due-"

"That's not it." She broke in. "You know what it is. You ought to. I'm not that young any more. Does the district want someone who might fold up on them?"

"They want you, at any cost You know that," Piers said, heavily. "Even Eachan only accepted because you asked someone else to take it. There's no one in the district, no matter what their age or name, who won't jump when you speak No one else can say that. What do you think they care about the fact you aren't what you were, physically? They want you."

Amanda took a deep breath. She had had a feeling in her bones about this. He was going on.

"I've already passed the word to Arvid Johnson and Bill Athyer—those two Cletus left behind to organize the planet's defense. With Betta as she is, we wouldn't have called on you if there was any other choice—but there isn't, now—"

"All right," said Amanda. There was no point in trying to dodge what had to be. Fal Morgan would have to be left empty and unprotected against the invaders. That was simply the way of it. No point, either, in railing against Piers. His exhaustion under the extended asthmatic attack was plain. "I'll be glad to if I'm really needed, you know that. You've already told Johnson and Athyer I'll do it?"

"I just said I'd ask you."

"No need for that. You should know you can count on me. Shall I call and tell them it's settled?"

"I think… they'll be contacting you."

Amanda glanced at her bracelet. Sure enough, the tiny red phone light on it was blinking—signalling another call in waiting. It could have begun that blinking any time in the last minute or so; but she should have noticed it before this.

"I think they're on line now," she said. "I'll sign off. And I'll take care of things, Piers. Try and get some sleep."

"I'll sleep… soon," he said. "Thanks, Amanda."

"Nonsense." She broke the connection and touched the bracelet for the second call. The contrast was characteristic of this Dorsai world of theirs—sophisticated com equipment built into a house constructed by hand, of native timber and stone. The screen grayed and then came back into color to show an office room all but hidden by the largeboned face of a blond-haired man in his middle twenties. The single barred star of a vice-marshall glinted on the collar of his grey field uniform. Above it was a face that might have been boyish once, but now had a stillness to it, a quiet and waiting that made it old before its time.

"Amanda ap Morgan?"

"Yes," said Amanda. "You're Arvid Johnson?"

"That's right," he answered. "Piers suggested we ask you to take on the duty of Commander of Foralie District."

"Yes, he just called."

"We understand," Arvid's eyes in the screen were steady on her, "your great-granddaughter's pregnant—"

"I've already told Piers I'd do it." Amanda examined Arvid minutely. He was one of the two people on which they must all depend—with Cletus Grahame gone. "If you know this district, you know there's no one else for the job. Eachan Khan could do it, but apparently that son-in-law of his just told him to keep himself available for other things."

"We know about Cletus asking him to stay out of things," said Arvid. "I'm sorry it has to be you—"

"Don't be sorry," said Amanda. "I'm not doing it for you. We're all doing it for ourselves."

"Well, thanks anyway." He smiled, a little wearily.

"As I say, it's not a matter for thanks."

"Whatever you like."

Amanda continued to examine him closely, across the gulf of the years separating them. What she was seeing, she decided, was that new certainty that

was
beginning to be noticeable in the Dorsai around Cletus. There was something about Arvid that was as immovable as a mountain.

"What do you want me to do first?" she asked.

"There's to be a meeting of all district commanders of this island at South Point, at 0900 this morning.

We'd like you here. Also, since Foralie's the place Cletus is going to come back to—if he comes back—

you can expect some special attention; and Bill and I would like to talk to you about that. We can arrange pickup for you from the Foralie Town airpad, if you'll be waiting there in an hour."

Amanda thought swiftly.

"Make it two hours. I've got things to do first."

"All right. Two hours, then, Foralie Town air-pad."

"Don't concern yourself!" said Amanda. "I'll remember."

She broke the connection. For a brief moment more she sat, turning things over in her mind. Then she rang Foralie homestead, home of Cletus and Melissa Grahame.

There was a short delay, then the narrow-boned face of Melissa—Eachan Khan's daughter, now Cletus'

wife—took shape under touseled hair on the screen. Melissa's eyelids were still heavy with sleep.

"Who—oh, Amanda," she said.

"I've just been asked to take over district command, from Piers," Amanda said. "The invasion's on its way and I've got to leave Fal Morgan in an hour for a meeting at South Point. I don't know when or if I'll be back Can you take Betta?"

"Of course." Melissa's voice and face were coming awake as she spoke. "How close is she?"

"Any time."

"She can ride?"

"Not horseback Just about anything else."

Melissa nodded.

"I'll be over in the skimmer in forty minutes." She looked out of the screen at Amanda. "I know— you'd rather I moved in with her there. But I can't leave Foralie, now. I promised Cletus."