Halfling Moon (5 page)

Second glance, however, marked a certain
tension in his shoulders and the cock of his hip, and the way his
glance returned, time and again, to the door that led to the
passenger's section.

"Lady Kareen," Natesa began, and paused as
the door flicked open, admitting the lady herself, none the worse
for the wear, saving some singed hair and a neatly bandaged scrape
along her arm.

One step into the chamber, she paused, dark
eyes on the tall shape in his lounge against the chair.

"Kareen," he said, his voice quiet, his tone
absolutely neutral.

The lady took a breath deep into her
lungs.

Sighed it out.

"Daav," she temperately, in the mode between
kin. "Well met, brother."

Moon on the Hills

Surebleak

Yulie had the frights pretty bad this time,
bad enough that he'd waited, tucked down and froze-quiet in the
rugged hatcher-nut grove in the hills well above the road, shaking,
until long after the noisy threesome from somewhere down-road
rushed to the clearest of the paths to the south in the face of
impending darkness.

What exactly his visitors had been doing he didn't know --
they'd called out
hullo
and
whoha whoha
a few times, like they didn't know if the
place was empty -- and one of them called out "Captain Shaper"
twice, and that made no sense since Grampa had been dead for so
long Yulie could hardly remember his face sometimes without looking
at the image files. Likely someone had the house-spot listed
somewhere as a leasehold to the dead company, but heck, that was so
far back it shouldn't matter to no one. They'd called
his
name once or twice
too, he thought, but by then he'd been moving away and it might
just as well have been a trick of the wind.

"We need to talk with you!"

Maybe those were the words he'd heard, but
even as he'd thought to come down, he hadn't -- there was dread in
his way. He hadn't had any company since Melina Sherton had walked
up some butter awhile back, being a good neighbor like she was, for
all that she was a Boss. But he'd known her since he was a kid.
Strangers -- no he wasn't much used to strangers around and it did
make him worry.

They'd probably been in the house if they
wanted, since the door didn't lock beyond mild, and he could only
hope that they hadn't searched too hard -- if he was lucky they'd
left him the gun on the wall. Real luck was that they'd probably
believed the ancient outhouse shoved against the outcrop was what
it looked like.

The whining of the overloaded buggy died
down along with the temperature, and still he waited, hearing the
regular sounds return as the mindlessness of fear receded. He
wilted against a tree then, aware of the tiny movements in the
leaves and drying field grass, of the wind's sigh, super aware of
his vulnerability. The visitors all had guns, and he -- he'd left
his hand gun back in the safe and the long gun locked into the
rack. He hadn't carried them with him for quite some time.

He knew better, he did, especially since some of the city
folk thought they could come up and hunt anywhere that wasn't in
the city. He didn't mind them shooting at rats or wild dogs or
whatever
someplace else
, but here -- here they had no dogs, and the field
creatures were few and far between mostly. The other potential
targets -- well, Rollie'd explained it to the neighbors the year of
the problem, and they'd posted signs, and it ought to be clear he
preferred being left alone, him and the cats.

And they hadn't looked to be intending
assault…

Not that he had reason to be assaulted, but
they came from down the road, and Rollie'd gone down the road one
day and never come back, dead from not knowing one boss from
another, or from not having the sense not to antagonize a port city
block-boy at a tollgate.

The odd thing was that the road -- the road
Rollie'd gone down, the road that grew to carry edibles for city
folks, the road that ran all the way to port; that road, it started
here. Here, on the property he called his, running right by the
door of the cabin, right by the vegetable patch, right to the very
cliffs that marked the first dig -- and Rollie, like always, was
the one wanted to wander the other way. He'd looked over Worlds End
enough that he wanted to get away from it, down the road with the
lectracart in front of him, cart full of produce and him full of
ideas.

"I'll have news of the doings, when I get
back. Big changes, you know. Big changes!"

His brother's last words to him, "Big
changes!"

Yulie shivered, more from the memory than the
weather.
Mud, mud, mud!
His old grandfather'd been a spaceman and that was
the worst thing to him about being on a planet -- the dirt and the
mud and the rain -- and here he was, the last of his Grampa's line
as far as he knew, what with Rollie dead in the city, down the
road.

That reminded him that he still owed a fetch
of onions and maybe some grassnip to the lady, but he'd been pretty
well shook to a standstill recently, and the debt was his
accounting and not hers, anyway.

The debt-letter was still in the house,
walked up from Boss Melina Sherton's closest tollbooth by a kid
with a swagger. It felt like weeks ago, not like a year, like it
was. Some things stick with a man, some things don't.

"You relative to Rollie Shapers?"

He'd nodded, standing at the door, annoyed
enough to insist -- "Shaper, that'd be. Don't sizzle at the end of
it."

The kid had shrugged, unslung his daysack,
pulled out a letter and a bag. He handed over the letter, held onto
the bag, eyeballing the cats around the field edge before bringing
his attention back to Yulie.

"Down to the big whorehouse they had these
to send on up -- 'spose to be for you, I guess. If you can write, I
ought have your name here on this line to give back to Miss Audrey
so she know I done it."

So Yulie had gingerly taken the big fancy pen and signed
the proffered clean white sheet of real paper
Yulian Rastov
Shaper.
He
did
know how to read and write, because Grandpa had made that
rule for all of the family. If he'd had kids he'd teach them.
Rollie -- he'd been Roland Yermanov Shaper. He'd not much been
interested besides half-day gardening with side trips to The
Easiery or girlfriends -- he'd also known how to write, and
sometimes Yulie came across odds and ends of notes on recipe cards
and such, notes that weren't from Grampa or Emily or Susten or --
any of his ladies, so it must have been Rollie.

He handed the signed sheet to the kid, who'd
sealed it in one quick finger rub into a certiseal, his thumb hard
on both sides before negligently dropping it into his pack, and
handed over the bag.

Inside the bag, Yulie'd been given a big
fancy sealed brown envelope, with a return emblem at the top of
"Miss Audrey's Deluxe, Port City, Surebleak." It wasn't an address
he recognized but he'd never really been deep to the city, so that
names weren't much connected.

Inside the envelope was a letter, hand writ,
with a date and the same return address as the outside, that
started "Dear Kin or Friend of Rollie Shaper."

He'd got that dread feeling then because
hardly anyone wrote to him, ever -- mostly just folks requesting
extra greens or hoping for something out-of-season -- and Grampa
had spoke about how he'd had to write kin-letters more than once,
and how hard they were to write even if there really wasn't much to
say.

Sometimes he could push that dread back so
he could see, and that's what he did, pushed it away hard.

Dear Kin or Friend of Mr. Rollie Shaper,
the letter
went,
Rollie was a patron at Portside Deluxe some days ago and on
expiration of his room rental his effects were collected and placed
in storage, where we have them now. Unfortunately, it later became
clear on evidence that Mr. Shaper was the previously unidentified
victim of an altercation, and had died of his injuries before
medical assistance could be sought. The block clean-up committee's
report should be attached; they had a working med-tech known to me
with them who certified the negative results of revival tests and
the clean-up committee's standing disposal instructions were
followed, with ashes included in the weekly south garden
run.

The letter went on of course, and he'd read
it through, requesting him to come on down to the city to pick up
the effects. What would they be? Could his Grampa's Musonium still
be there? The good blade that Rollie'd always carried though it was
supposed to stay at home? Cash in bits or dex or maybe gold
weights? Her name was at the end, and business-like as it was, the
lady's signature was bold and delicate at the same time.

He'd had to think a moment about the ashes, because it was
a strange thought, that sweaty noisy busy Rollie could be something
other than he'd ever been, but they said so, and had bothered to
write to him, which was probably proof enough. The
south
garden, that was one on the far side of the port itself,
down toward the flat of the land. He'd never been there, but the
maps and Grampa both said that's where the small gardens were
supposed to be back before the spaceport was plopped dead center on
the best growing land the continent had, on account of it being
convenient.

Then he'd started to look at the report, but
it wasn't something kin wanted to see, really, about how many cuts
and -- so he folded it in, and held himself a second or two,
knowing that he wanted to know and that he didn't want to know,
knowing that he'd seen something like that once, entrance wounds
and exit wounds and --

The feeling was building as the boy stood there, the
feeling that something was going to happen, that more bad was going
to happen, that the clouds held weight beyond rain, and that
something really
really
bad --

When it hit, the panic, it was solid, like a
crashing wall of rock falling on reason, to the point that he saw
that gray nothingness where vision should be, where if he
concentrated and stared hard he found his shoes and his hands
fearfully far away, like looking the wrong way through Grampa's
optical telescope.

He'd held on, still, so he wouldn't run.
He'd stood there long enough for the kid to ask "You got anything
to send back? Got any smoke or …"

But as much as Yulie'd gotten to feel his
breath run out, as much as he'd felt his hands go numb, and his
eyes begin to search for the way out, that much so, with all that,
he'd managed to scrape together the proper and secure, "We don't
got smoke here, boy, nor want it. Got something for your trouble,
though, and something for Miss Audrey."

For Miss Audrey, the spice herbs, prime
grassnip, just picked. They'd been going to go to the city on
Rollie's next walk down the road, so they might as well go now,
anyhow, and then he'd picked up two of the prettiest spudfruit he'd
seen in awhile -- easily a meal or two for the kid and his family
-- and he'd handed them over.

"For your trouble," he'd said, "but you
better go now."

The kid heard a warning, grabbed the
offerings and packed out, and Yulie'd managed to get the letter and
report inside, grabbing at the door, grabbing at the table,
scattering cats, scattering thought, the panic rising so bad …

And then he'd given it direction, and
lumbered out the door, knocking shoulder on door frame and on the
door, gathering speed, running across what Grampa had named the
meadow, and heedlessly over the small bed of field beans and
through the bluefruits, entirely without thought for the value, or
for anything but getting away, of running, of --

He'd run so far and so fast he almost ran
off the edge they called World's End, which wasn't the end of the
world, after all, but the carved cliff a hundred times his height
and more, the first place the mining company had stripped bare with
the mining machines to tug out the tiny veins of timonium in their
matrix of junk rock and near uranics.

Below, the suddenly tempting vista of scrag
rock, rubble, sand, and several twisty, barren streams of water.
The colors of the lip of land he trembled on were the scrawny green
and yellow of the local ground-grass, a touch of thatch, the dark
flutter of a blowing leaf. Below was shadowed rock and water the
color of the cliff walls and … nothing else, a scar a century and
more unhealed.

He'd stopped, sweating, barely able to catch his breath,
barely thinking, starting to think that maybe this time, this would
be the time -- but no, not now, he couldn't. The nuts would need
harvest, and the -- and -- but what would he
do
? Rollie'd always taken the stuff down road once Mom had
gone away. Rollie'd always --

Dead. Rollie was dead. He'd took all their
money and used it -- used it at the whorehouse without telling him!
-- and now he was dead and dust!

Rage then. A black leaf spun past into the
gorge, and he'd kicked a rock unsteadily at the abyss, and almost
slipped in his breathless weakness, and the fear rose in him again,
and now he was afraid of World's End, and of himself.

He'd run, as best he could then, in the back of his mind
recalling that kid game where they'd counted, "four thousand big
steps from the stoop to the end of the world!" His run was
sometimes no more than a heedless willful stumble in the right
direction, gathering scratches and bruises, feeling afraid of the
sky, feeling afraid of the road, feeling like he couldn't find
breath,
knowing
that he couldn't find breath. He'd skinned his
shins crossing the stoop, falling into house, and barely shouldered
the door shut, locking it three times behind him.