A Circle of Celebrations: The Complete Edition (13 page)

“Shhh!” Luis Olmedos hissed. “The old guy’ll hear us!”

“So what?” asked Mark Greenberg, laughing. But the boys lowered their voices. The only sounds were calls from the occasional night bird, the rush of car tires on the tree-lined roads surrounding the field, and the
thud
-
gunch
! of a shoe penetrating the shell of yet another pumpkin.

“Hey, pretend they’re the asses of the cheerleaders,” suggested Carlos Cruz, pointing a finger at a row of basketball-sized gourds. He was notoriously unlucky in his attempts to get any of the girls to date him. “That one’s Cheree,” he said as he booted the first one. “This one’s Marylou …”

Rebecca turned away in disgust. She could have told him why none of them would ever go out with him, and it started with deodorant. Angrily, she stalked over the deep furrows toward Don, who was going down a row of small white pumpkins, decimating them like Godzilla walking through Tokyo.

“Grrrh!” he growled, waving his arms. “Grrr-ooough!”

“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?” Rebecca asked.

“Dude, what’s your problem?” he asked her. “Go kick something! It’s fun!”

“I want to go home,” she said.

“Soon,” Don said. His legs were covered up to the thighs in gleaming pulp. “C’mon, you try it.” He pointed at a small globe on the ground between them. “C’mon, just a little one.”

“No. I don’t want that junk on my shoes.”

“God, you’re dreary,” Don groaned. He booted the little pumpkin. It rolled down the row and split, lying with its seeds leaking out like entrails. “Wow, look at that one!” He moved toward a huge sphere tilted sideways, its surface a zebra pattern of dark and light.

“It’s freezing out here,” Rebecca said, disgusted. “I’m going to sit in the car.”

He ignored her, marching down on his prey with purpose. Rebecca glanced around. Carlos had hoisted a huge gourd over his head. He staggered a few paces, and heaved like a shot-putter. But a vine caught his leg, ruining his timing. He dropped the pumpkin almost on his feet.

“Dammit,” he swore, jumping back to avoid the splatter of goo. Undaunted, he went straight for another, bigger fruit.

Boys,
Rebecca thought in dismay. Why wasn’t she at home with her girlfriends, painting jack o’ lanterns on their toe nails for tomorrow night’s Halloween party? She had a great costume, Trinity from
The Matrix
, all black vinyl and cool shades. If she caught a cold standing out here in a field in the middle of the night and had to miss the party, Don was a dead man.

The moon made eerie shadows across the fields as it ducked behind a veil of cloud. In the diminished light Rebecca couldn’t see either Raree or Mark. Carlos and Don had joined forces to ruin two rows of head-sized pumpkins leading up to a file of humped giants.

The keys were in the old Delta 88, just where Don had left them. Rebecca cranked the ignition, relieved to see the blue light of the speedometer. The big engine sounded deafening after the silence of the field. Suddenly scared at the loneliness of it all, she turned the radio up full blast. Rage Against the Machine howled out of the car’s four speakers, and Rebecca leaned back with her head against the seat rest to enjoy the music.

Pretty soon, the radio station turned over to some dreary ballad. Rebecca twisted the ancient silver knob off. How long had they been in the field, anyhow? The longer they stayed, the more likely it was someone was going to come and maybe arrest them for trespassing. She’d better go get the guys.

A dire chill wind whistled up the arms of her thin coat as she got out of the car. She peered over the field, but could see no movement in the faint silver light.

“Don?”

No answer but the whisper of leaves moved by the breeze.

She pursed her lips in annoyance. They’d seen her get out of the car, and they were pulling a joke on her.

“Come on, guys, this isn’t funny! Tomorrow’s a school day, remember? Let’s go!”

Morons.
They knew perfectly well she had to wait for Don or Luis to drive the car. She didn’t have her license yet. So she had to play hide and seek with them. Ugh. Boys.

I will not scream,
she thought, as she tiptoed along the rows full of twisted vines.
I will not scream. They’re going to jump out at me and yell “boo” But I will not scream.
The trouble was, the more she insisted to herself that she wasn’t going to scream, the more she knew if one of them did jump out, she was going to shriek her lungs out, just like those stupid girls in the horror movies. All right, so it was kind of fun, waiting to see who was going to pop out first.

“Luis? I know you’re there. C’mon, Raree…”

Something caught her eye on the ground. It was Luis’s striped scarf, almost draped around a big fat, drunken-looking pumpkin the size of an ottoman.

Carlos had asthma. She ought to be able to hear his breathing. She closed her eyes and let herself drift, going toward any noise at all, picking her feet up carefully so as not to trip on the obstructions she bumped into. The night was so silent she could hardly stand it. When she got home she was going to put her Walkman headset on full blast and drive out the memory.

Something cold and smooth touched her outstretched hand. She jumped backwards before her eyes flew open. She squinted in the faint light. It wasn’t a boy hunched over like that; it was one of the pumpkins. The giant, the one that Mr. Barrow had told them to keep away from. She had no intention of getting close to it.

But in the moonlight the half-seen smile compelled her. Her feet lifted one at a time, drawing her nearer and nearer to the huge, ridged fruit. The grin called her forward. She wanted to run away, to scream, but her whole attention was focused upon the pursed mouth that now opened and spread wider and wider. A musty, damp smell issued forth from the heart of the gourd. How could it do that? It must be a trick of the light. She would just go back to the car now, where the boys were waiting. It was a joke …

The cold lips suddenly touched her flesh. Rebecca gasped as the pumpkin sucked her inside it like dust in front of a vacuum.

O O O

She lay curled up on her side on a damp surface clutching her head protectively between her arms. Her body felt as though it had been dragged through a life preserver, bruised on every side. She hadn’t seen what she had just seen. It had
not
happened. She was
not
inside a pumpkin.

Rebecca rose to her knees. The scanty moonlight would have seemed like carbon arc spotlights now. It was so dark that she almost doubted her own existence. Gingerly, she put out a hand in the dark, and withdrew it right away as cold wet strands draped themselves around her fingers.

“Brrrr!” she exclaimed. But she forced herself to try again. Summoning all the courage she had, she made her hand go out through the sticky spaghetti, until it touched a wall that stretched all the way around her in a huge sphere lined with wet fibers and almond-shaped stones.

“This can’t be happening,” she said aloud. Her voice resounded, trapped as it was inside a solid object. “I’ve been eaten by a pumpkin!”

She sat down as the horror of that truth overwhelmed her. It had eaten her! And now, was it going to digest her? Would the farmer find bones inside when he came to cut the seeds out Halloween morning?

He knew that this could happen! He had said so. Rebecca battered at her memory to recall everything Mr. Barrow had told them when they had been there earlier.

The mouth on the bottom of the tilted ones could get you; that she remembered. That’s just what had happened. She had gotten too close. She was doomed!

Frantically, she started pounding and punching the hard sides. “Don! Luis! Help! Someone come and get me out!”

She carried on until her hands were sore and trembling. She kicked at the shell. It must be too thick for her soft shoes to dent. But where were the boys?

Realization hit her as hard as her own situation: they had set out to destroy every unpicked pumpkin in the field, without paying attention to what position they lay in. They must have gotten too close to smiling pumpkins and been trapped, too.

She didn’t dare wait until morning for rescue. The digestion process could start at any moment. She didn’t want to die. Tears filled her eyes, but she dashed them away with an impatient hand.

What else had Mr. Barrow said? They cut pumpkins into Jack o’ lanterns, to take away their power! If she could cut through the shell, it would have to set her free!

Her nails were already hopelessly broken. She reached into the pockets of her jacket and jeans. Her old Girl Scout knife was sitting uselessly in her bureau drawer at home. If she had the power of Phoenix, of the X-Men, she could summon it here, or just use Nightcrawler to
bamf
her out of there. But she wasn’t home. In the dark, she turned her purse out into her lap. A paper-covered tube—that was no use. A stick of gum; her mouth was dry, but if she chewed that gum, she’d heave, she just knew it. A hard, rough finger-long piece of metal as cold as the side of the pumpkin—her nail file!

Where to start? Was any part of the shell thinner than the others?

It didn’t matter. She felt her way to the nearest upright wall and stabbed at the center with the file.

The big pumpkin seemed to move around her in agony. Rebecca shrieked as wet strands and seeds dropped onto her neck. She shoved them away and kept cutting. The side she was slicing at began to shed water as though it was bleeding. For a moment she was grateful for the darkness. She didn’t want to see it bleed all over her. Wet, the file slipped in her hand, gouging her as she grabbed to steady it.

“You’re not going to get me,” she snarled at the pumpkin. Tears ran down her face. She took off her jacket and wound it around the blunt end of the file, using it as a handle. Resolutely, she cut and cut and cut. The point hit something stiff, like cardboard. Rebecca pushed. Suddenly there was no resistance. She had gone through!

Rebecca lengthened the slit. When it felt about a foot long, she changed direction, cutting at a 120
^o
angle to the first cut. And when she had finished that, she joined the ends of the two with a third. She rolled onto her back. With her feet, she shoved at the triangle portion. It moved, then shot away from her with a horrible squelching sound. A wave of cold air came rushing in. She clambered up and crawled for the opening. Fibers grabbed for her as she scrambled out into the moonlit field. Rebecca controlled her fear until she was on the cold, rough dirt. She crawled away on hands and knees, goo and seeds and strands of pumpkin guts clinging to her all over. She took a moment to breathe, then she stood up. The others were trapped inside pumpkins, too. She knew that. She had to save them.

Only the smiling ones were carnivorous, so the farmer had told them. Rebecca ran back toward the fruit she had seen wearing Luis’s scarf. It wasn’t very big; could a whole teenage boy be inside? She sawed away at the shell with her file until she heard a cry from within. As soon as she shoved the point through the shell, the pumpkin split, and Luis was lying on the ground in between its two halves.

“My god, Becky,” he gasped, staring up at her. “What happened?”

Rebecca dragged him to his feet and explained as quickly as she had while making for the double row where she had last seen Don. “Only the smiling ones, got it?”

“Got it,” Luis said, fervently.

They located only two smilers in the row of giants, sitting side by side. Under the shadow of one was a sneaker a lot like the ones that Carlos had been wearing. With Luis helping, they broke open the pumpkins. Don and Carlos rolled out, panting in fear.

“Oh, baby,” Don said. “I thought I’d die in there.”

“I think I had an accident,” Carlos said, looking down at his pants. Rebecca groaned.

It took a little longer to locate where Mark and Raree had been marauding, but only moments for the four of them to break out the other two teens.

“How’d you figure it out?” Don asked, giving his girlfriend a grateful hug. The two of them were slimy with pumpkin guts.

“It was what the farmer said,” she explained. “About Jack o’ lanterns. The tradition of cutting faces in them must have gotten started to protect people from being eaten.”

“Too smart,” said Raree, with an admiring grin.

“That’s why she gets straight A’s,” Don said proudly, putting his jacket around her. Her hands were shaking so much she let him fasten the coat up for her. “I should have listened to you in the first place. We’re going to have one hell of a story to tell the others on-line tonight, and it’s true! Come on. It’s late. I’ll drive you home.” He guided her toward the side of the field. The moon had come out again, lighting up the windshield of the old Delta 88.

“No,” Rebecca said, firmly, stopping in her tracks. “Before we go, I’ll help you destroy the other smiling ones.” When Don raised an eyebrow, she shook her head. “Maybe that’s how the tradition of kicking in pumpkins got started, too. Self-defense. We don’t have time to carve them all.”

***

Thanksgiving

The Stars in Their Courses

“A hundred turkeys,” said Captain Daniel Holcomb.

“No,” said Quartermaster Betty Jackson.

“Fifty.”

“No.”

“Twenty?” Holcomb asked, becoming more exasperated by the moment. He leaned over the white enamel table to glare at her. “Dammit, woman, this is for the crew’s mental well-being.”

“I’m thinking of their future well-being,” said Jackson, imperturbably, sitting with her arms crossed. “These are our brood flocks you’re so blithely decimating.”

Dan Holcomb, captain of the Earth colony ship
Columba
, didn’t consider himself unreasonable, but he disliked being at a tactical disadvantage. A rangy, sandy-haired man whose height was all in his legs, he was sitting when he should have been standing, the better to get the others’ attention, but sitting was more of an authoritative posture, and that was important just now. He regretted deeply making this a public meeting, but too much had happened in the last thirty-seven days to make it a confidential discussion. All important discussions needed to be held out in the open, or rumor would distort all the good that came out of them. There had been too many rumors lately shooting around on the internal s-mail system, and too much back room politicking in chat rooms, break rooms, and bedrooms. The mission to Gamma Taurus was in danger of coming apart from internal pressure.

The other department heads sat around the table, flanked by anywhere from three to eight supporters, but Jackson, opposite him, was his only serious rival for loyalty from the ranks. She was an attractive, petite brunette with amazingly beautiful flower-blue eyes fringed with long, black lashes. Holcomb had a problem keeping his own eyes off her. During cryosleep his berth had been right next to hers. He wondered what kind of dreams he might have had about her in that slowed-down state. Thank God that no one had yet worked out a way to read people’s thoughts. She was not only an excellent officer, but a warm, compassionate person. People confided in her. One of her young lieutenants, after an impromptu counseling session with her, had nicknamed her the Mother Superior. The title had stuck, which bothered Holcomb. He’d been raised a Roman Catholic, and had trouble reconciling the nun name with the attractive thirty-year-old female to which it was attached. Her expression at that moment would have suited a nun, prim, disapproving, and unyielding except to her own higher authority.

The fact was that by official charter she held autonomy over her department. Only by calling it an emergency could Holcomb overrule her, and a ritual pig-out was not an emergency. But everyone was looking forward to the celebration so much that he was trying hard to get her approval on releasing the appropriate stores. It wasn’t easy.

“How many have we got in cold sleep?” he pressed her.

“Five hundred. But,” Jackson held up a warning hand to forestall his protest, “that’s nothing. A small family could eat one a week. We have four hundred and seventy couples on board. We need two, maybe three generations before we have sufficient genetic redundancy to blow the minimum count for one day.”

“I know the statistics, Jackson, as well as you,” Holcomb said, with some asperity. “Five, then. One percent of the total.”

“No. No way.”

“Then how many will you allow for the feast?” Holcomb pressed.

“None!” She ran a long-fingered hand through her hair. It was very nice hair, and Holcomb enjoyed watching the way it fell into stylish untidiness. “I can’t. Really.”

“You approved of this plan from the beginning,” Holcomb pointed out. Jackson threw up her hands.

“All right! So, I agreed that this Thanksgiving feast would be a good thing. But we can’t allow our present exuberance to threaten our future survival by using up seed vegetables and breeding animals for one dinner. For pity’s sake, we haven’t
landed
yet.”

Holcomb knew he was risking valuable resources on what seemed like a wasteful notion, but the crew was getting restive and fragmenting into mutual complaining societies.

He blamed it all on Mission Control back on Earth. They’d ordered everyone into cryosleep too soon after takeoff, before Holcomb could unite everyone under his authority. And now the travelers had been wakened too soon, so they had too much time to think about the upcoming landing, and to begin to jockey for position, trying to establish beachheads of personal power before they touched down.

Such struggles, in the myriad turnings of the quarter-mile-long ship, undercut Holcomb in small but significant ways. He felt every day as though he was losing more ground. That could not continue. Small political groups had formed all over the ship, competing for advantages, and obstructing members of other groups from obtaining needed information or supplies. Those who tried to remain uncommitted to the groups quickly found that no one trusted or cooperated with them. Politics could be the death of the colony effort. To give Jackson credit, she had always kept her department operating as it was supposed to, though Holcomb sensed a personal snub. He disapproved. He needed all his officers behind him, not forming little fiefs to usurp his position.

But the problem was what to do about ship’s morale. The fragmentation was threatening the colony effort. So much so that Holcomb was being forced to make hard decisions. Earth had entrusted command to him. He was not only captain of the ship, but would be the first governor of the Gamma Taurus Four colony. He would hold the office for five years, after which the colony would be allowed to replace or re-elect him as it chose, but it appeared that he might not get the chance to govern. There was an undercurrent of distrust and discontentment. Holcomb had no ideas of his own that could undo the damage and restore the cooperative spirit that had imbued the settlers before they’d gone into cryosleep. He had asked his officers for suggestions.

It was dour-faced Rodney Campbell, head of Engineering, who had come up with the eventual solution. He had approached the captain to insist that the symbolism of the approaching event of landfall could not be ignored. It ought to be observed with a ceremony of prayer and thanksgiving for having made the journey safely all the way from Earth.

Holcomb was intrigued. Here was an opportunity to reunite the crew behind a common cause, a fact that had gotten lost in the grab for power. They were the first Earth ship to set out into the void, beyond the bounds of the Sol system, to make a new life for humankind among the stars. They should gather together and celebrate that miracle. A thanksgiving was the answer the captain had been hoping for. Holcomb immediately set the idea before his officers. They were less interested in a ritual, but brightened at the notion of a food-oriented celebration, and gave him a rousing round of approval. Now all they needed to do was figure out how to make it happen.

So they were here, around a long table in the middle of the rec hall, the largest single chamber on the ship, each with their copy of Campbell’s proposal printed out on translucent plastic flimsies. Holcomb looked out over a sea of gray-blue cloth. Word had spread about the captain’s plan. Every crew member who could jam into the room was there. The rest of the sixteen hundred settlers and crew were watching on screens all over the ship. Holcomb had to make a strong showing here.

“We can’t serve everyone shipslop for Thanksgiving dinner,” Holcomb said. His own supporters nodded their enthusiastic approval. One of the other reasons that it was a shame they had been awakened so soon was that it extended the period they would have to subsist on ship food. Those purees and biscuits were not exactly hardtack and swill, but in an earlier century forcing the crew to eat them for six months on end could have provoked mutiny. They contained every nutrient the human body needed: fiber, protein, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and mineral supplements, but the flavorings always seemed to be somewhat off. In fact, thinking of Thanksgiving, the turkey paste was far too salty and tasted faintly of paprika. Holcomb would order that no paprika be involved in any way during the cooking process. “Everybody misses real food, and I should say few lose out on a chance to say so.”

“And I can’t allow valuable brood hens to be slaughtered,” Jackson said, firmly. “Request denied. Find alternatives. In fact, you are going to have to find supplements or alternatives for most of the foods on this list.” She shook the plastic flimsy at him.

Murmuring broke out around Holcomb. How dare she flout his authority there in front of the entire crew? He felt his face go red, lighting up his freckles like neon spots. Jackson looked abashed, and ducked her head.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking up into his eyes again. “My mouth got the better of me. I apologize, Captain.” Holcomb nodded. He could still pull success out of this discussion.

“One,” he said. “One turkey. That way everyone can have a taste of the real thing. It’s the symbolism.”

“Yes, yes,” insisted Campbell, his head turning toward her as slowly and inexorably as that of a tree sloth. He addressed her in the ponderous way that he used to lecture the ensigns on how to replace modules. “It’s the event that’s important! We are about to set foot onto the soil of a new world, as much as many of our ancestors did onto the continent of the Americas. I believe that we need to commemorate that in a vital and sacred way, to impress upon us the importance of what we have undertaken.” Jackson smiled.

“That’s a lot for one poor little turkey to accomplish.” She eyed Holcomb. “On a ten kilo bird, allowing about half for waste, you’re talking about a five-gram sample per person. Is it worth it?”

Holcomb could feel the avid anticipation of every man, woman and child on the ship behind him as he said, “Yes.”

O O O

“I’ve got a problem,” the Mother Superior said, appearing at Holcomb’s office door with an armload of plastic sheets. Holcomb jumped up from his desk and gestured to his personal easy chair. He’d always intended that when he became governor the big, black leather recliner would be his official seat.

“Please sit down, Jackson,” he offered. She grimaced.

“I’m too agitated to sit. This food thing is going too far. Everyone is giving me wish lists for the kinds of food they want to see on the table. If I approve all the requests for samples of sweet potatoes, cranberries, pumpkin pie, green beans and onions, corn and biscuits, we are not going to have any specimens to plant when we get to Gamma!”

“I’ve got the entire Biochem department working on artificial constructs,” Holcomb said. “They need real examples to test against. You’d be impressed by the process.”

“I know,” said Jackson. She sighed. “I’ve been down there eight times this week. They’ve requisitioned half a ton of soy kibble and powder, chemical extracts and esters, and I wanted to make sure what it was going for. I have to ask you to insist that they not waste anything they’re taking.”

“I’m sure they’re not,” Holcomb said, frowning. “Lieutenant, they have to experiment on something. I told you that if we spared the real thing, we were going to have to offer something almost as good in exchange. Otherwise, what is the point?”

“The point is that this whole exercise is either too early or too late. Three days until this feast, and then what? Another forty days until landfall. Will it hold them? No meal is
that
filling. I mean, figuratively.” Jackson plumped down into the easy chair, and bounced her bottom on the cushy padding. “Say, this is nice. What does it weigh?”

Holcomb felt himself blushing again. “Half my personal luggage complement,” he admitted.

“Suited to your lofty position?” she asked, and gave him a self-deprecating grin. “Sorry, that was a low hit, Captain. I seem to be always socking you in vulnerable places these last few days.”

“More than you know,” Holcomb said softly. She caught his gaze with an expression of surprise, followed by a look that Holcomb could only feel was a summing-up. He hoped he passed her standards. Both of them were aware that the contract they had signed required them to marry and raise children with
someone
once the colony was settled. Holcomb wanted Jackson to be his mate. He had been aware of his feelings toward her a long time, but had almost always suppressed the thoughts because the business of running the ship got in the way. Similar thoughts must have run through her mind, because her lips parted slightly, but she turned hastily and hurried out of the room without speaking.

He watched her leave with great regret. If only they hadn’t been in rival positions. If only the office of governor had been a permanently appointed position that he could give up when he felt the colony had reached a secure point. Five years was too brief a time to establish a safe, viable colony from scratch. On the other hand, he could understand Earth government being reluctant to trust anyone giving up the office willingly. It might even be hard for him, but right now he had to hold fast to his job. Too much depended upon him.

O O O

The
Columba
was due to break out of tesseract within three days. The upcoming event caused Executive Officer Donaghue to change the bridge technicians’ shifts to 13 hours out of every 24, instead of the usual 8 1/2 hour shifts. There were no complaints over the schedule. Everyone was enthusiastic about it. Those present would see for the first time, on spectrascope, of course, the invisible halo of solar radiation around Gamma Taurus that marked the edge of the heliopause.

Holcomb, who had risen through the ranks as a navigator, spent days overseeing the data pouring in from the sensors, and checking out every system to make sure they would take no harm as they passed inside the barrier. No one wanted to leave the tesser bubble intact going through. For one thing, it was believed to be dangerous. For another, everyone wanted to see the system already.

At the speed they were moving they’d pass through the Oort cloud in five more long-shifts, and reach the fourth planet, their new home, in forty days. Telescopic views would be possible soon. Everyone wanted to be the first to spot Gamma Four, so Holcomb had to order crew members off the bridge when their shifts were over, or they’d fall asleep in corners with their eyes open.