WASATCH 1029
Wasatch 1029 was brilliant in the blue sky of its human-habitable planet. The air was like summer in the mid-latitudes of Tethys, though the vagrant breezes didn’t leave a taste of salt on Ned’s lips to make him feel completely at home.
“Blood and martyrs,” Deke Warson snarled. “This place gives me the creeps.”
A saw screamed on the other side of the vessel. Three men under Tadziki were cutting and welding plastic sheet-stock into a casket for Lendell Doormann.
Lissea and Carron Del Vore had spent the uneventful Transit from Pancahte studying the circuitry beneath the capsule’s outer plating. They wanted to remove interior plates as well, but not even the Swift’s hard-bitten complement was willing to share their limited interior accommodations with a grinning mummy.
Deke struck viciously with his gun butt at what Ned called a plant for the lack of a better word. A gnarled bloom the size of a man’s fist grew on a meter-long stalk. Its form was as insubstantial as patterns of dust motes dancing in sunlight, but the shape retained itself until the plastic butt smashed through it. Bits of bloom, vaguely russet, drifted away in the air and settled slowly.
“Look at that!” Deke said. “How does that happen? What if we’re breathing them?”
Ned looked down. His boots and those of the rest of the Swift’s personnel had crushed other, infinitely varied “plants” into the soil around the vessel. It was inevitable and no different than what would have happened on a planet whose vegetation was more similar to that of Earth. The fragility of the trampled forms made the destruction seem worse, though.
He ought to be used to destruction by now.
“It’s no problem, Deke,” Ned said aloud. “You breathe microbes and bits of plant life on every planet you’ve ever been on. This place isn’t dangerous.”
He looked at the sunlit hills. He didn’t suppose he’d ever see the planet again after the Swift lifted for Kazan. “It’s clean here. I like it. Especially since Pancahte.”
“If you like this place. . .” Warson said as he turned away. He swatted at another bloom, scattering it like a bomb blast. “. . . then you’re f*cking nuts!”
The Swift would leave Wasatch in a day or two, carrying Lendell Doormann’s casket in the external lifeboat bay. Toll Warson and another team were repairing damage caused by a hundred-kilo chunk of lava. The impact had sprung plates and probably would have smashed the lifeboat if the Swift still carried one.
The hilltops were forested with larger versions of the plants here in the valley. The planet had animal life as well, though none of the reported larger forms had appeared since the Swift landed.
Some of the men compared the local life-forms to jellyfish, but the creatures were really more similar to ripples in a running stream. A ripple is a disruption to a fluid’s smooth flow. It remains essentially unchanged so long as the flow maintains, even though the molecules forming its pattern shift rapidly and constantly. Life here imposed its patterns on the environment as surely as hidden rocks did on the water of a stream.
Half the men aboard the Swift hated Wasatch as much as Deke did. The other half relaxed for the first time since they’d lifted from Telaria, and neither party could imagine why the others felt the way they did. Funny to think that people similar in many ways would react so differently to a planet: rock and air and water. It was a mistake to believe every ruthless killer was the same. . . .
Lissea loved Wasatch. She and Carron had wandered off together, taking a break from their concentrated examination of the capsule. The ground would be pleasantly warm on the south slopes.
Herne Lordling came out of the hatchway and stood on the ramp, looking around. He didn’t carry a tumbler, but he’d been drinking. Like Ned, he was off duty at the moment, and he had a right to his liquor ration.
“You,” he called. “Slade.”
The men nearby grew quiet. Moiseyev, on top of the vessel, slid down the opposite side to where Tadziki was.
“Got a problem with me, Herne?” Ned asked. His upper lip began to itch, though during Transit the medicomp had repaired the damage the punch had done. The physical damage.
“No problem,” Lordling said. His face was flushed. Ned couldn’t read his expression, but anger and embarrassment were both part of it. “I just want you and me to talk. We can take the jeep.”
“Take the jeep where, Herne?” Tadziki asked as he walked around the stern of the vessel. His casket-builders, Raff among them, sauntered along behind him. Unlike Ned, they were all armed.
Lordling turned. “Just out a ways,” he said. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as if to scrub away a bad taste. “Look, I want to talk to Slade, that’s all. Do you have a problem with that?”
“I don’t have a problem with it,” Ned said. “But I’ll drive. And we’re not heading east.”
“I don’t give a f*ck where we go!” Lordling said. “I just want to get away from this place, all right?”
The adjutant nodded slowly. “Sure, Herne,” he said. “That’s all right. But don’t get out of helmet range—”
About two klicks with the Swift in a valley and no repeaters setup—
“—and be back in an hour. We might need a jeep for something, and we’ve only got the one now.”
Lordling jumped from the ramp without responding and strode to the little hovercraft waiting by the bow blister.
“Hey, kid?” Deke Warson called.
Ned looked up. Deke held his 2-cm weapon by the balance. He pitched it muzzle-up to Ned, who caught the heavy weapon.
“He won’t need that!” Herne Lordling said from the passenger seat of the jeep.
“That’s good, Herne,” Warson replied. “Because it’d be really too bad if he did.”
Lordling faced front. Ned got in, stuck the borrowed weapon in the butt sock, and switched on.
“Where do you want to go, then?” he asked quietly. The inner muscles of his forearms were quivering in hormonal expectation. Herne was the bigger man by twenty kilos and not much of it was fat, but the day Ned couldn’t handle somebody twice his age—Well, he wasn’t worried.
“Just get the f*ck out of here!” Lordling snapped. He shook himself. “Look, Slade, I don’t want to fight. Okay?”
Ned engaged the fans and pulled away from the vessel. “That’s your choice, Lordling,” he said, making an effort to prevent his tone from turning the statement into a challenge.
He headed west, because the sun was already in the tops of the tall trees there, and because Lissea and Carron had gone east. He hoped he’d be able to drive between the insubstantial trunks rather than tearing a swath through them.
“Look, Slade, I wanted to talk to you because I think you respect Lissea,” Lordling blurted. “Those other bastards, all they care about in a woman is her cunt and if she gives good head.”
“We’re not on a church outing, Herne,” Ned said carefully. “If Lissea doesn’t mind people treating her like one of the guys, then I don’t see where the problem is. It’s not as though anybody’s made trouble about taking orders from a woman.” Except maybe you.
“It’s not that!” Lordling said. “It’s what she’s doing with this pissant she’s brought along. That’s got to stop, and if she doesn’t see it, somebody’s got to stop it for her.”
Ned drove through a band of brush several meters tall. The branches spread into bell-shaped tips, like morning-glory flowers, from which dangled veils of fronds. The shapes were immeasurably more delicate than could have been achieved by denser matter which had to support its structure physically.
The jeep tore the bushes like violet fog. Ned thought the air was suddenly cool, but his mind could have been playing tricks on him.
“Herne,” he said as if each word were a cartridge he was loading in preparation for a duel. “I don’t think Lissea’s private life is any business of ours.”
“Look, Slade,” Lordling said hoarsely. His big hands knotted on the jeep’s dashboard and his eyes were straight ahead. “I’m not saying a woman ought to be alone, it’s not like that. But this puppy. She’s wasting herself just to look at him!”
The jeep was among the tall trees. They grew more like coral branching in a fluid medium than internally supported plants. The bases were a meter or two across, but vast pastel arrays lifted to spread and ramify over hundreds of square meters at their tops.
Driving through the forest was like entering a cathedral with groined vaults. The sound of the jeep’s fans was an intrusion.
“Herne . . .” Ned said. He stopped, because he didn’t know how to continue.
“Well say it, then!” Lordling snapped. “Are you just like the rest? I tell you, Lissea’s different.”
Ned saw a patch of direct sunlight and steered for it He couldn’t talk while he was driving, not about this. His hands were sweaty, and his muscles jumped as they had before the firefight on Ajax Four.
“She’s different, we’re all different, Herne,” he said. He’d been all right because he hadn’t let himself think about it, he was good at not thinking about things, but Lordling wouldn’t leave it at that. “It’s our job to leave her alone!”
Full sun struck them on a tongue of rock which stabbed into the next valley. Ned reversed his nacelles quickly and dumped the plenum chamber. The jeep stopped a few meters from the edge of a seventy-degree escarpment.
The immediate slopes were covered by the big trees, but the valley floor was open. On it were hundreds of golden puff-balls the size of Terran hippopotami. Some of them drifted against the wind. Ned had found the animal life of Wasatch.
Ned stepped from the jeep, staring across the valley. He thrust his hands into his side pockets. “Look, I don’t much like the guy,” he said, “but I don’t have to. He got us out of a couple tight places. I could say, ‘Lissea pays her debts,’ and that’d be enough.”
“That’s how a whore pays her debts!” Lordling said. “She’s not a whore!”
The golden creatures were nearly globular. They began to move as a group up the valley’s western slope. As the herbivores moved, three streaks of silvery translucence shifted from among the golden creatures to space themselves along the eastern edge of the herd.
“She’s a person,” Ned said. The silvery figures were more than three meters tall, slim and as supple as willow wands. “She’s got a lot in common with Del Vore—”
“She’s got nothing in common with him!”
Ned turned. “They’re of the same class,” he said harshly. “They’ve both been stepped on by their families. They’re both engineers. Grow bloody up, Herne! He didn’t hypnotize her, he didn’t hold a gun to her head. She’s doing what she wants to do!”
Lordling looked around for something to hit. He took a step toward a tree, thought the better of it, and kicked the jeep’s skirts as hard as he could. His boot rebounded and spun him halfway around.
Ned faced the valley again. The distant crest was unforested. Sunset turned the herbivores into disks of molten gold as they eased out of sight. The silver figures moved slowly up the hillside after their charges, staying always between the herd and the watching humans.
“I thought,” Lordling muttered, “that if we arranged it together . . . I thought you’d understand.”
“I understand,” Ned said. I understand that I’d like to stick a pistol in Carron Del Vore’s mouth. I’d like to make him bite on it before I pulled the trigger. “If I thought he had to be killed, I’d kill him myself and not worry about what happened next. But it’s her choice. It’s Lissea’s choice.”
Lordling muttered something, probably a curse. “Let’s go back, then. I was wrong about you.”
“In a moment,” Ned said.
The herbivores had vanished. The silvery figures stood on the far crest with the low sun behind them. Ned bowed toward them, as though he were greeting Councillors of Tethys at a formal gathering.
One after another, the shimmering silver creatures bowed also. Then they drifted out of sight.
“Now we’ll go,” Ned said.
He felt calm. It had been a long time since he last felt calm.