Pallas (26 page)

He chuckled to himself. He could still see her slashing away with a felt
pen at long sheets of leftover printer paper, silently arguing for him with Altman. She—

Before he knew why, he glanced up. Someone was tapping on his window and had been for some time. Pulling the Grizzly from its holster where it lay beside his keyboard and thumbing the hammer—he snapped the safety up and kept his finger off the trigger—he turned the desk light toward the glass, pulled up the blinds, and nearly dropped the weapon.

He did drop his jaw.

On the other side of the dusty pane Gretchen Singh—no, Gretchen Singh Altman—was gesturing like a lost soul.

Heart hammering in his chest, he signaled her to a side door down
the hall. He set his gun on the desk and went to meet her, hands shaking and wobbly-kneed as he pushed the panic bar to open the steel door with a thump that seemed impossibly loud in the stillness of the deserted factory. His mouth was dry and there was an odd, clamped feeling in his throat.

She stood on the walk outside, illuminated by a single bulb over the door. Her hair, once waist-length, straight, and of a glossy dark re
d
dish-brown, was chopped off severely at the shoulder. There were circles under her eyes and fine lines showing at their corners and at the corners of her mouth. She wore a peasant’s denims. For him, the bulb over the door might as well have been a halo. She was still indescribably, painfully, the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen. They looked at each other for a long time, both uncertain what to say or do. Then, with a sob breaking from her throat, she threw herself into his arms.

“I promised myself I wouldn’t cry!”

Feeling many things at once, he discovered in that moment that he was angrier with her than he’d let himself realize and loved her more than he’d known. He was so happy to see her he had no way of expressing it. Tears were streaking his face, too, when he gently lifted her away from his chest and ushered her inside.

“Five miles is further than I remembered,” she told him once he’d gotten her to a chair under the window—he’d had to shove books and papers onto the floor—and started a pot of coffee. “I’m out of condition.” She took the paper towel he gave her, wiped her eyes and blew her nose,
and glanced around the office. “
Ngu
Departure—I’m impressed, Eme
r
son. I knew you’d amount to something important someday.”

The thought of the last person who’d said that to him—Cherry—made him more tongue-tied than ever. He thought of something to say, inane as it was, and stammered it out. “You just missed your mother...”Then he looked at the wall clock again—he’d never gotten used to wearing a watch. Actually, it had been a good many hours since Mrs. Singh had returned to Curringer.

“I don’t know if I could take the two of you at once.” She
shrugged,
her eyes still moist and threatening to brim over again. “It’s so
good
to see you, Emerson. I just—I had to get out and, well, I don’t know exactly how to put this...”

“That makes two of us.” He resolutely turned his attention to the coffee machine, which wasn’t finished dribbling and making groaning noises. With the feelings of someone about to go over a ski jump, he swallowed. “Let me make it easy. Whatever you need, count on me.”

For an instant, both of them thought she was going to burst into tears again. Then: “I don’t need much—a word of comfort and advice from the best friend I ever had.”

He nodded, wanting more than anything to ask the one-word question that had tortured him since their last day together, but unable to, partly because she’d been unavailable to answer it for so long that there hadn’t been any point and he’d tried to shut it out, now because he’d promised unconditionally to help her. As usual, she knew what he was thinking. “But you need to know why I ran off and got married.”

“Yeah.”
He didn’t trust himself to say more.

“He used to sneak into Curringer every few weeks by bribing the rollabout crew,” she told him. “I met him at the Nimrod. I didn’t like him much, but he was extremely persistent, and very different from anybody else I knew. The other boys in town were afraid of me, probably because of Aloysius or Mother. And”—she smiled and for an instant was the Gretchen he remembered—“I hadn’t met you at the time, of course.” She sighed raggedly. “Is there a cigarette around somewhere?”

Like mother like daughter. Mildly surprised, he rummaged in a
drawer, found a pack Mrs. Singh had left, handed it to her, and poured them each a cup of coffee. She lit a cigarette, inhaled and exhaled with an ecstatic look, and took the cup he offered. She swallowed, tilted her head back, and closed her eyes.

“God,” she sighed again, “it’s been a long time.”

He wasn’t at all surprised at how well he’d remembered every feature of her lovely face, its tanned, amazing smoothness, flawed now only by transitory marks of stress and fatigue. Her eyes were the deep, luminous green he recalled, still impossibly large over her broad cheekbones. Her eyelashes were still too long to be believed. Her nose was straight, turned up a little at the end, and her full, expressive lips parted to reveal teeth that were white and perfect. Whatever else she’d been through, she’d grown up, and it looked good on her. He sat down with his own cup in the a
n
tique swivel chair Nails had given him the day the factory had opened and with a nod, encouraged her to go on.

“Emerson...” She hesitated. “Jesus, this is difficult...I only...I had this confession all planned out, and now it’s falling apart. You probably won’t believe me, after everything that’s happened, but Junior didn’t mean a thing to me. He was just—well, girls can be pretty damned merciless when they’re curious about certain aspects of life, especially when they grow up in a small town where everybody knows them and everything they do gets back to their family.”

He smiled at her, thinking of his own family, and of Cherry. “No more than boys, I suppose.”

“Thanks for the thought. You can’t say I slept with him. I never spent a night with him or even went to bed with him. I fucked him in the go
d
damned rollabout, Emerson, while the
crew were
busy spending his money at Galena’s.
Pretty cheap, right?
But I learned what I thought I wanted to know—not as much as I’d already learned by reading my f
a
ther’s books. Junior didn’t know anything except getting a hard-on, ge
t
ting it off, and...
hurting—
although that came later.”

He tried to ignore the stab of pain he suddenly felt, for himself, for her, for both of them.

“Anyway,” she went on, “I met you and everything changed. From
you I learned what I’d really wanted to know all along, months before you ever touched me. I thought you’d never touch me, and I wanted you to. But finally you did, and by then I’d told Junior I wouldn’t be seeing him any more. He got real mad and...
well
, that doesn’t matter, he found out how far that got him. I never told him about you or even that there was somebody else, but he found that out, too, somehow. It probably wasn’t hard. And he got his father to come for you.”

He and her mother had figured that much out. “But I won, Gretchen.”

“You won at the Nimrod,” she objected. “Junior took me aside that morning and told me—well, probably the only true thing he ever said to me. He said he’d recruited a cadre of E&M goons personally loyal to him. I don’t know how, even now, but it’s true. I’ve seen them. He said they’d beat you to death when you were taken back.

“And if his father lost, he’d send them out to kill you.”

People may die for love, but they seldom kill for it. By the time they’re ready, it’s usually turned into something else.

—Nathaniel H. Blackburn,
The
WarDove

“S
o you—”

No one had ever had the knack of rendering Emerson speechless the way Gretchen had. Without being told, he knew the rest of the story, and it stunned him.

She nodded. “I...I told him I’d go with him if he let you be. To tell the truth, I was surprised when that meant becoming Mrs. Gibson Altman, Jr. I’d expected...well, never mind what I’d expected. His father insisted on the marriage and performed the ceremony himself. I proposed the ba
r
gain, and I’ve been trying my best to keep it.” She almost broke down again, but struggled and regained control.
“For two long, miserable years.
But I don’t think I can any more, not with that...
Junior
, and not in that socialist hellhole. Not even for you. There are limits to what anybody can take. Can you forgive me?”

Her words had left him openmouthed and speechless, but she didn’t look up. “For what it’s worth, I haven’t been with Junior since my daughter was conceived. It was hard to manage at first, but it seems to suit him now as much as it does me, although his father is always pressing me to get pregnant again as an example to the colonists. I don’t know what Junior does. I don’t want to know.”

She hesitated,
then
pressed on. “I don’t expect that things can ever be the same between you and me. If you don’t have another girl by now, I’ll be disappointed with you. But I love you, and I need to know that you don’t hate me, that you won’t hate my little Gwen-Rose when you see her. It’s been left to me to raise her. I doubt Junior’s looked at her a dozen times, and every time he does, it scares me. It’s not her fault who her father is, she’s really very...”

Before she could finish, he was across the room and had taken her in his arms. “I’ve never loved anyone but you,” he told her, “and I don’t believe I ever will.”

“How can you love me?” she demanded. “How can you trust me after what I’ve done?” She wrapped her arms around his shoulders as he knelt beside her, burying her face beside his neck. Her fingers dug into him as her shoulders shook, although she didn’t make a sound, and in a few moments that side of his shirt was soaked.

He stroked her hair. He’d been deeply angered at what she’d told him, but he was no longer angry with her. How could he be? He was co
m
pletely overwhelmed by the love her sacrifice represented and wanted—needed—to prove
himself
worthy of it. What made him angry now was that she had felt it necessary—that somebody had
made
it n
e
cessary—and he knew precisely whom to blame for that.

“What have you done?” he asked her softly. Somewhere, beneath the odor of fear and the harsh Project soap she’d been using for two endless years, she still smelled of sage and woodsmoke. Without his being e
n
tirely aware of it, his hand had crept inside her tunic and he felt her naked breast, warm and softer than he recalled. If she noticed that his hand was surer at this sort of thing than it had been, she said nothing about it, but only made a little noise halfway between a moan and a sigh. She shu
d
dered in that grateful way women sometimes have. “You were saving my life,” he observed, pausing to kiss her and brush the tear-dampened hair from her eyes, “and apparently it worked. So now it’s my turn. Where’s your little girl right now? Who’s taking care of her?”

She spoke into his shoulder. “I had to find out how hard it was to get past the Rimfence before I could risk taking her out with me. I left her at the Residence.” She sat
up,
keeping her hands on him as if afraid he might disappear. “She’s being watched by—oh, Emerson, it’s your mother taking care of her!”

It made sense, he thought, but it was strange. “Does she—my mot
h
er—know where you are?”

She shook her head, crushing out her almost-forgotten cigarette in the ashtray on his desk after taking a final drag. “I don’t know what she knows, or how much she’d tell or to whom. I’ve never been able to read her. I’m afraid I didn’t think this through very well. I meant to get back, this time at least, before anyone noticed I was gone. The trouble is, I avoided the road as much as I could—
it’s
rough country—and I’ve a
l
ready been gone longer than I’d planned.”

He disengaged himself from her arms, stood, and nodded. “That’s okay. I think I can get you back in about six minutes.” It was true; a part of his mind, operating independently, had just solved most of his pro
b
lems with the flying yoke. “We’ll use the time to get you something to eat. I know what food can be like at the Project, even at the Residence. I have an apartment here, with a kitchen.”

“God, could we?
Something with red meat in it?”
She stood up.
“And maybe a shower?
You wouldn’t believe—but of course you would. You grew up there.”

He shook his head. “No, my love, I wasn’t even born there, and I grew up out here, on the Outside. The next trip you make out—tomorrow night, if possible—will be your last. You have to bring your baby daughter out so she can grow up free. You mustn’t leave her with the Senator’s se
r
vants, whoever they happen to be related to. They’re willing slaves and they can’t be trusted.”

“I know,” she told him. “But it won’t be tomorrow. I’m going in for
Gwen-Rose and coming back out tonight. I’d have been here sooner—I decided to leave weeks ago and start life over again, no matter the cost, no matter where I had to go—but it had to wait until the Senator made one of his rare trips to Curringer. Junior uses the opportunity to get drunk and spend the night in the colonist compound.”

He laughed. “Then I’m the reason you’re here, and I’m going in with you. Altman went to town to make trouble and got his nose bloodied again.” He put his arms around her. “You don’t have to go anywhere to start over. You’re already where you belong.”

Tears escaped her tightly shut eyelids as she held him as hard as he knew she could. At last he led her by the hand to the apartment he was using, where he fried
her a
steak while she showered. The little suite was fully suited for human habitation, but the food in the refrigerator was the only thing personal he kept there. Everything else, including a change of clothes, was in his office.

He realized, sooner or later, that he was going to have to tell her about Cherry. And
Cherry
about her, which was going to be more difficult.

She emerged from the little prefabricated bathroom unit wearing a big cotton towel wrapped around her body and another wrapped around her head. Their bleached institutional whiteness contrasted strikingly with the natural color of her skin.

“I forgot to tell you.” She inhaled the aroma of the cooking food and gave him the same look as when she’d lit the cigarette. It was the same
look,
he remembered now, that she’d had on her face that first time when, straddling his hips, she’d—

He shook the thought off. “What did you forget to tell me?” He flipped the contents of the pan—African Cape buffalo steak, wild onions chopped with wild garlic and mushrooms—onto a plate and added hash browns he’d fried in a separate pan.

She sat on a stool at a counter which was the apartment’s only t
a
ble—he’d forgotten how long her legs were—pulled the towel from her head, massaged her shortened hair with it, and laid it across her lap, giving her other towel a strategic tug that did more damage than it had been meant to repair. She lit another cigarette, inhaled, and exhaled. “I’ve
been to your secret cave.”

“What?”

“The little hollow in the crater wall under the Rimfence where you built your crystal radio?
It’s the only time I ever felt safe out there, a stolen minute hidden among things you’d made with your own hands. It’s still there, artfully concealed by sagebrush, and so are all your treasures. I wish I could have brought them with me.”

He grinned, slid the steaming plate toward her across the counter, poured her a cup of coffee from the fresh pot he’d just made, and began to dish a plate up for
himself
.

“Believe me, you did.”

As she smiled back and reached for her cup, her towel gave in and fell gracefully to her waist in the Pallatian gravity. She looked up at him, over the rim of her cup, from beneath her impossibly long eyelashes. “You know,” she observed quietly, not looking up from her plate, “if I’m coming back out tonight, I should wait until about three, when Junior’s passed out thoroughly and the goons are cooping. We’ve got a couple of hours—think we can find some way to use them?” He looked straight back at her, enjoying what he was seeing, and nodded.

She forgot the towel and finished the meal as she was.

Afterward, he could never remember having tasted his own food.

In the end, Gretchen’s self-deprecatory remarks about her physical shape proved to be exaggerated. Free of her bulky denims, she was just as beautiful as he’d remembered, and his memory was good. Five miles had seemed like more because she’d walked across country in slippers meant for sidewalks and soft soil. The same kind of slippers he’d escaped in. She had the same blisters on her feet.

To him, her shoulders and collarbones and the flawless skin that lay over them were still the same fine work of sculpture. The graceful inte
r
secting curves of her breasts made them seem larger than they were. He didn’t know how to tell if she’d fed a baby with them. Her belly was flat, exactly as it had been before, descending in a breathtaking but inviting rush past many another scenic feature, and her hips, while narrow, were also unmistakably female.

This time, it was she who seemed to appreciate what he knew, a
l
though, like him, she never asked how he knew it. She knew how he knew. Again they made love several times, each better than the one b
e
fore. In between, at odd moments, she was able to tell him something of the conditions under which she’d been living. The rumors they’d been hearing on the Outside were true, as far as they went. The details were worse than even he had imagined. What he remembered as a steady but negligible trickle of vandalism, petty crime, and violence had become a deluge. No one was immune anywhere, at any time of the day. In the two years she’d been there, the security contingent had been doubled, r
e
doubled, and doubled again, and it only seemed to make things worse. The personnel being sent up from Earth each time were more corrupt and brutal than their predecessors.

But they weren’t the only source of brutality. Low on her back above her right hip, he was horrified to discover half a dozen thin, white parallel scars, each perhaps five inches long and no more than an eighth of an inch wide.

“Oh, those,” she answered. “I got them the same night I got Gwen-Rose, along with a lot of fairly nasty bruises. He had the cuffs on me before I knew it, fastened through the bed frame. The whip was made of some kind of wire. Good thing we make such flimsy furniture on this planet—he just had time to do this before I ripped the bed apart, blac
k
ened both his eyes and broke his nose. I would have had his dick out by the roots, too, but he hit me with a lamp—you can’t see that one, it’s hidden in my hair—and your mother was at the door, which interrupted anything else he planned to do after that. I can’t say it was the end of a beautiful friendship, but it was the end of something.”