Pallas (42 page)

It was Emerson’s turn to sit in silence. Finally: “Eleven years...”

“Until my Grandma Gwen hired a detective to find me, and a squad of mercenaries to get me out. She raised me, Emerson, that wonderful, sad old woman. She had no choice but to move the family to West America, where her ex-husband’s lawyers couldn’t get to me. In the end it was my Uncle Terry—Altman’s younger son—who steered me toward xenoa
r
chaeology. He was really only four years older, but...”

Emerson nodded. “I get it.”

“Well, from the beginning I intended to get back to Pallas somehow, at first to repay Grandma Gwen—I figured if I could make up for what she’d always felt was her failure as a pioneer woman...and then there was the matter of confronting a grandfather who let something like that happen to me.”

Another reason, Emerson thought, to hate Gibson Altman for the rest of his life.

She laid a palm on his cheek, very gently, having seen the pain she was putting him through. “And then there
was
you.”

He turned his head and kissed the gentle hand that caressed his face. He touched her still-flat belly. “I loved your mother,” he told her, “but you’ll never know how glad I
am
that I’m
not
your father!”

She smiled and folded herself into his arms.

Suddenly, he was struck in the back—for an instant he thought one of
the wolves had jumped him, but he’d hit a tree trunk which had either been much closer or which he’d been approaching faster than he’d est
i
mated—and only barely held onto his gun. The tree shivered and dumped a tremendous load of snow on him, blinding him momentarily, which the wolfpack, its numbers augmented now by those who’d finished with their dead mates, took as a signal to attack him.

Again the leader died as Emerson’s pistol thundered, but this time, it was much closer. Too close for Emerson to let the rest of the animals come devour him. A few tried, and a few more died. The thought ran through his mind that he hoped these weren’t the last wolves on Pa
l
las—then he laughed out loud, changed magazines with a single round still left in the chamber, and shot another, and another.

And another.

Five rounds left.

Then four.

Then three.

The enemy closed in.

Forget heaven and hell, he thought; it looked like he was going to Valhalla.

With a pack of wolves for pets!

“Desperate times call for desperate measures!”

Gibson Altman paced back and forth at the front of the saloon, trying to give emphasis to what he’d said and stay warm at the same time. He was angrier than he could ever remember being—odd, how good it felt—because he and everybody else on Pallas had been betrayed. This was just like the business with the sunrises and sunsets nobody had pr
e
dicted, only, of course, it was far worse.

That old bastard Brody hadn’t let him in the Nimrod, where people had gathered to sit out a storm they weren’t sure was ever going to end, but the crowd here in the White Rose Tattoo would do nicely. He’d had to come into town anyway, since the Residence, where nothing remotely like nuclear fusion had been tolerated for many years, was like a meat locker. It was that or
begin
living in the rollabout, which did have its own
reactor. Someone was going to pay for what was happening here. Since William Wilde Curringer had escaped justice, it would have to be someone else. Altman knew just who that someone else would be, too.

The last time an estimate had been made, there were fifty thousand people on Pallas, and there were fewer than a hundred in this room, but it was a beginning.

Everything had a beginning.

“There’s no storm at the poleports,” he pointed out. “And I’ve learned that there are ample supplies of aluminized
mylar
to build another solar mirror! All that’s needed is the will to order that mirror built and placed in orbit!”

Perhaps the White Rose Tattoo was better, since some idiot at the Nimrod would have been sure to point out that putting another mirror in orbit would take time and money as well as will. It would require the skillful operation of a dozen small spacecraft, which were expensive and difficult to run even at the best of times, and it wasn’t strictly true that there was no storm at the poles. There wasn’t any atmosphere, and the storm through which they were suffering—and which would make the undertaking dangerous—consisted of deadly charged particles.

“We’ll put it to a vote,
then
act! Suspend the Stein Covenant, take over both TV stations,
conscript
an army which will overrun any resistance at the poles! By that time, I can have a war fleet on its way from Earth! We’ll force them to put up that other mirror, and if anything needs to be
paid
for to get it done, by God we’ll enact some tax law and screw it out of rich sons of bitches like Emerson Ngu!”

Nobody cheered among the huddled masses in the tavern, but nobody argued with him, either. A few eyes, a few faces turned toward him, half in guilty fear, half in dawning hope.

Everything had a beginning.

“All in
favor,
say aye!”

To know what you know, and to know what you don’t
know, is to
know.

—Roger L. Smith

T
he night held warmth, moisture, and a promise, unmistakable to anyone who could remember it, although there were children grown on Pallas, with children of their own, who couldn’t.

Emerson
squinted
one good eye through bifocals that needed cleaning. Long ago he’d learned the hard way, from the first experience he’d had like this—the ambush in which Gretchen had been killed—never to pr
o
vide an advantage to the enemy. This time the territory was his—they couldn’t possibly know the ground the way he did—and he didn’t intend to be caught entirely in the dark.

It seemed a lifetime ago—and it had been—that ugly business with Gretchen and Junior’s goons. He’d
been,
what, sixteen? He didn’t r
e
member, although it felt like yesterday. For that matter, it had been a full quarter of a century, he realized with a start, since he’d fought his de
s
perate, snowbound battle with a pack of hungry wolves, back in the early years of Pallas’s long solar winter. And he’d thought himself an old man—of fifty-three—even then.

Now—he looked down. The icy claws of winter had been pried loose of Pallas at long last, although the wounds and scars they’d left behind would be a long while healing. And was this the hand of somebody s
e
venty-eight years old? But the sight of an old, familiar weapon in his hand brought him abruptly back to the present. He was seeing it mostly by memory in any case. Through a high overcast, the reflected light from Rosalie, his artificial
mylar
moon, was insufficient to lend any real detail, and the wellhead’s electric lamps would stay unlit.

He needed light for only the merest fraction of a second, something to tell him where the other guy was. What he wanted was a tripwire of some kind, a blasting cap from the toolshed behind him, and a pinch of fine, fast-burning flash powder, the latter unconfined by anything more than the thin layer of transparent plastic wrap required to keep it together. They’d do the trick very neatly.

Rosalie—his own Rosalie—did the wrapping; he prepared the tri
p
wires and caps. The only plastic they had with them, the kitchen variety that stuck to itself whether you wanted it to or not, had always hated him. Then, in the moonlight, he placed as many of the makeshift devices as they could fabricate, ten or twelve dozen before he lost count, around the little fortress of piled sandbags where they would make their stand. B
e
tween the rocks and boulders of this stony region where his pipeline started, the soil bubbled with a thaw a generation overdue.

They sat together and ate a final meal.

Hell,
he thought,
if I’m seventy-eight, it’s a different seventy-eight than anyone ever lived before.
He’d spent all but the first two on Pallas, in a tenth the gravity mankind had evolved under. And he was physically capable in a way an Earthman of forty might envy. Even those, like Mrs. Singh, Aloysius—and Altman, unfortunately—who’d spent most of their adult lives on Earth had benefited on the asteroid, and there was no telling how long those born here were likely to live.

Cherry, who’d returned to Earth and its gravity, had passed away a couple of months ago, although she’d lived a long, eventful life, acquiring LiteLink and other media companies. For thirty years she’d sent him postcards and he’d sent her pictures of the kids. She’d even made a stab at reforming the way news got reported.

His wife looked up from her sandwich and smiled. He was a lucky man, he reflected, to have loved three beautiful, intelligent women, the one he’d married the most beautiful and intelligent of all.
That they’d apparently loved him for some reason, each according to her fashion, was little short of a miracle.
And that the beautiful, intelligent creature sitting beside him had bestowed upon him eight beautiful, intelligent children while managing an alien artifacts laboratory at the
Ngu
Departure plant with a crew that still grew every year was utterly beyond belief.

In the distance, a bird—he didn’t know what kind—gave uncertain song to the friendly darkness. If he had to die tonight, he could do it knowing he hadn’t missed anything very important. But he’d do his damnedest not to die, not only to help keep his lovely Rosalie alive, not only so that their wonderful mob of kids would have a father, but because there remained so much he wanted to do!

Twenty-five years: she’d been eight months into a troubled pregnancy filled with blood and hovering terror, the kind no young woman should have to go through. There being no such thing as a free lunch, it was a price they paid for their longevity on Pallas, a not-so-beneficial cons
e
quence of lower gravity. It would result in a winnowed, hardier popul
a
tion. But, as had so often been the case in the two million years humanity had already been around, women had to pay the tab.

Tonight, damp, earthy smells of melting ice and warming soil dom
i
nated even the blooming of night flowers. Back then, he’d been feeding animals in the Pocks (not as trivial a pursuit as it might seem), when he’d had a warning through Ned Polleck that Altman was up to his old tricks, this time attempting a straightforward coup against the Covenant under cover of harsh weather, rallying a portion of the populace driven from their homes by the cold, as Altman himself had been. They were desp
e
rate enough to listen to him, and he was taking full advantage.

He’d begun in the White Rose Tattoo, planning to seize the TV st
a
tions next door and across the street, proclaim suspension of the Cov
e
nant, and yell for help to a fleet he swore already stood about Earth to come to their aid. Democracy would be “restored,” and he promised an extra solar mirror would be constructed to end the unusual weather. What good seizing KCUF and WRCS would have done, Emerson hadn’t fi
g
ured out yet; their antennas had been blown down in the storm, they were off the air, and Altman didn’t know enough to get them back on again. He’d never learned you can’t order technicians around the way you can stoop labor.

Meanwhile, Emerson was fighting for his life. He’d fired his last shot, and there were plenty of hungry wolves left, many of which hadn’t shared in feasting on their dead and dying pack-mates but were maddened by the scent of blood.

The Grizzly would make a lousy club, he thought, as the starving animals shook off timidity and approached slowly, fur bristled, muzzles accordioned into snarls. He groped inside his coat for the survival knife he carried. It had been Gretchen’s, a long, subtly curved weapon with a
tanto-
cornered tip. That he was a dead man, he knew all too well, but he was determined not to die cheaply. A customer or two tonight at Eme
r
son’s Diner would get a supper of cold steel.

He dropped his pistol, bracing against whatever he’d backed into as the first wolf leaped. Holding his knife, edge up, in both hands, he took the shock of the animal’s eighty pounds on his wrists, lifting and gutting it before he thrust it aside.

Another leaped—then exploded in midair, showering him with hot blood! An instant later
came
the thunder of a mighty weapon, terrible as the impact of the bullet.

He didn’t dare turn to his left, where the sound came from. Part of the pack was distracted, but several still paced a half-circle around him, and he must keep watching. Another, closest to him, blew apart, tossed to his right like a doll of rags and sawdust. At the same time he knew he’d had another shower, a literal bloodbath, he heard a second tremendous blast, closer now, and recognized it.

“Digger!”

“Coming, boy!
Keep your guard up—and an eye on the doggies!”

“No problem!”

Another wolf died, and another, and another. Then it was over. As the old man approached on what Emerson recognized were snowshoes, the pack evaporated into the storm they’d come from, leaving behind little but the bones of their dead. They’d even licked up most of the bloody snow around the bodies of their fallen mates.

He groped at his feet for his gun, brushed away gory slush, and slipped it in an outer pocket, unwilling to reholster it. He found a spare magazine where he’d dropped it and, by the time Drake-Tealy was at his side, wondered what to do with his knife. It was stainless, but he didn’t want to put it back bloody, either.

“Well, son, I see you almost made it!”

“Digger, what the hell are you doing way out here?”

“Way out’s in the eye of the beholder. Don’t you know where you are?”

He looked suspiciously at the snow-buried clump behind him. “No
idea. When I went down, I figured I was fifty miles from Curringer, but I had plenty of reason to be further off than that.” He slipped his feet into snowshoes Digger had brought for him. They were oval, smaller than Digger’s, something he’d be grateful for before he took more than a few steps, snowshoeing being a strenuous art.

Drake-Tealy laughed. “You’re in Mrs. Singh’s backyard! Miri and I holed up here for the duration. When Nails told us you were headed back, we kept looking. Imagine our surprise when we heard gunfire. I thought you’d come to practice where you first learned!”

Emerson sighed, realizing that the long day wasn’t over yet. “I could use the practice. I’ve come to kill the Senator, I think. You want to go with me?”

Drake-Tealy nodded toward the bloody knife clutched in Emerson’s fist. “I had an impression you were out of shells.”

“I have this—or I can beat him to death with my gun.”

Digger nodded enthusiastically.
“
That
I’d like to see!”

With a pang of regret over sandwiches and hot chocolate he was sure Mrs. Singh had waiting for them inside, Emerson turned toward the corrugated shed where she kept her three-wheeled contraption. Their snowshoes got them that far. They dug away the door and discovered that the rear of the roof had collapsed. The machine itself was almost pinned in the shed. It got them to the edge of town a mile away.

The trip took over an hour.

It was like a diorama of the end of the world. Snow piled deeply against buildings on both sides of the street had blocked it, forming gently-curved saddle drifts such as he’d landed in between the trees. They abandoned their vehicle, strapped snowshoes on again, and made their difficult, exhausting way toward the Nimrod. Emerson was nearly used up. It was harder and harder to breathe in the intense cold, his chest had hurt since the landing, and the full ferocious weight of a leaping wolf on his knife had strained his arms, which ached.

Before they came to Brody’s
,
they saw a scattering of shadows stra
g
gling from the blizzard into the White Rose Tattoo and decided between them to see what was going on. They arrived at the door just as Altman
was finishing his harangue.

“...no storm at the poleports, and I’ve learned that there are ample supplies of aluminized
mylar
to build another solar mirror! All that’s needed is the will to order that mirror built and placed in orbit! We’ll put it to a vote,
then
act!”