Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe (39 page)

Together, we wriggled through the hut’s exit, a curtain of ten thousand beaded strands that seemed to caress us, probing, pressing, and grabbing up each stray glop of air as we forged ahead . . .

. . . to step onto the surface of an asteroid. The snow-covered work camp that was our home.

The overseer shouted hoarsely. “Put yer backs into it! These logs won’t move themselves!”

His words, in fact, were more restrained than normal—with none of his usual Ukrainian profanity, aimed at mostly-Russian work crews— but today’s tone seemed much more tense, almost frantic. And I realized, while speeding up my pace, that he had reason. A sleek little space coupe hovered nearby, amid the brittle- bright stars. Few in the solar system could afford such a craft, except members of the master race. Perhaps it was even the Coss owner of this giant farm, dropping by for an inspection tour.

Accidents happen when you’re in a hurry. So I watched Yelena out the corner of one eye, while we hacked at this morning’s fall of freshly harvested crystalwood trees, with spiral branches girdling each massive trunk. The stems—each the size of many men—had to be removed, but one misjudged cut with your laser axe could lop off a person’s arm, instead of the intended target. We agile adolescents had to be efficient, removing branches and stacking the broad, photocrystalline leaves, while adults lashed cables round the main bole, so that mammuts—grunting even in this minute gravity—might haul the massive, stripped-down trunks toward a waiting freight train.

Always, there was the pressure of expectation. Above our heads, elepents were on their way. Clutching yet more freshly harvested trees with their five strong limbs and tails. Maneuvering them to fall upon our planetoid lumberyard at a steady pace, whether room had been cleared for them. Then each elepent would jet back across a hundred klicks of sterile vacuum to fetch more, from the far bigger, forested asteroid frederikpohl 6523 . . .

. . . a place far worse than our mere hellhole. The gulag where Mother thought—or fervently believed—her husband had been sent . . .

. . . where a vast thicket of vacuum- bred vegetation spread broad antenna-leaves to suck light from the distant sun, while roots sank deep into carbonaceous rock four billion years old, sucking and refining every element that man or Coss desired.

The overseer had reason to be nervous. He supervised a dozen work crews, all of them hampered by shortages of skilled, experienced personnel. Our own team had recently acquired two new members, the teenage Strugalatsky brothers from Odessa who spent half their time goofing off, either loafing or leaping across the toppled trees, making stupid sci-fi sounds while slashing random branches, instead of taking them off systematically, in the recommended order. Cynics laid wagers over how long the two dolbobs might survive, and the bookie odds weren’t good. After the seventh or eighth time that I grabbed one of them, chided him and corrected potentially lethal faults in his suit- buttoning, I decided to give up and let nature take its course.

“One of the top ways that the Coss rationalize their harsh rule,” old Starper Litow had explained one evening, amid the fuming lesson smoke, “is that our twenty- first-century Earth had become too tame. Too orderly and charitable. Homo sapiens wasn’t improving, except with techniques like brain boosting, which helped everybody, and thus canceled out any overall, genetic advancement. The Coss claim to have done us a favor through conquest, by establishing a new, more strenuous order. To restore human progress where it matters most. In the raw makeup of our natures. By restarting evolution. Both natural selection . . . and of course, their own special breeding program.”

Litow had touched upon topics that deeply concerned me. I hoped someday to get the elderly exile to elaborate. But curiosity must wait. For now, we had a problem. If the schedule wasn’t met, all our lives might be in danger, “selecting” Yelena and me for the dustbin of Cosstory.

A trumpeted warning echoed in our ear-pickups—elepent bulls on final approach irritably admonishing us to clear our landing zone as another treefall approached. They, too, had schedules to keep if they ever wanted to rejoin the matriarchal herds, grazing the crystal savannahs of Luna.

The overseer’s voice assumed a note of panic. And so, I took a chance. Yelena was experienced enough to finish stacking leaves onto the sledge all by herself. More important, she seemed focused, not distracted. So I signaled her to—Work alone for a while. She nodded with evident pride in my trust, an expression—visible through the pitted faceplate of her vacuum ushanka—that warmed me as I bent . . . then vaulted high over the work site, in order to look.

Our team foreman, Oleg Yevtutsov, also looked worried. But he was busy hitching up the team—Big Benjy and Lean Lennie— to chains that other space- suited men and women hurriedly wrapped around the mighty bole. The two mammuts waited patiently, passing time by prying up chunks of asteroid with their tusks and chomping them with diamond-hard grinding molars, releasing volatiles and organics to fuel their massive bodies and spilling fine dust from their mouths. Little marmot- gleaners went after the dust, the truly valuable side-product of that munching.

Other teams were finishing, and several had already set off toward the railhead, dragging tree trunks or sleds loaded with photovoltaic leaves, destined for rooftops and highways all over Earth. The locomotive Nicholas III huffed and steamed before cars that would take the treasure in- system. Mother worked down there among the freight dollies, with their piles of freshly hewn and trimmed logs, doing the job she had desperately wrangled for, tallying cargo, tracking every item with meticulous care— before the train could finally speed off, riding twin superconducting tetherrails that stretched several million kilometers from asteroid to asteroid, connecting gulag to outpost to colony to town to resort, almost all the way to Mars.

But my eyes and sensor-percept weren’t tuned for sightseeing. At that moment, my sole thought was—Where are those two idiots!

Using some of my slender propellant supply, I searched . . . and finally found them near the tree’s very tip, where Boris Strugalatsky squatted limply on a broken branch. Weeping. Soundlessly, having negligently or deliberately left his transmitter turned off. But the cheap plastic panel of his ushanka revealed a mouth that gaped rhythmically, and his blond-fuzzy cheeks glistened.

Landing nearby was tricky. The boys had left a botched mess of branch stubs, jagged- skyward with axe- shattered points, making impact dangerous, even at two percent of an Earth gravity. Only the special cleats that I had clamped below each boot—made from salvaged mammut molars—saved me from a cruel stabbing as I danced atop the shards, then flipped around in front of the young man.

“Boris, you and Arkady had better have a good—”

Then I saw his brother, lying facedown amid the nearby craggy tangle. Knife-like, a crystal branch jabbed through one thigh.

It might still be okay, I thought. If the fool remembered to wear sealant underwear.

Tugging on one arm of the prone figure— “Arkady, let’s get you out of here before . . .”

My voice trailed off.

I gaped at a second spear-like stub that had pierced the mammut- fur helmet, entering one eye.

But no. I hadn’t time for staring or disgust.

“Boris, snap out of it! We’ve got to get out of here.”

At any moment, Oleg might lose patience, or give in to the overseer and yell “Mush!” at the mammut sledge team. Or else, if the delay kept on, a newly falling tree might smash us from above. Either way, it was insane to remain.

The surviving Strugalatsky stared at me blearily. So I upped transmit intensity and shouted.

“Did Arkady want the second chance? In this cold and vacuum, it might still be possible. Tell me now!”

Boris stared for several more precious seconds, during which I almost decided to clip him in the jaw, sling him over a shoulder, and jet out of there. Only then he nodded. Dammit. I wished he hadn’t.

“Kakashkiya! Okay then, help me now or lose him forever!” Gingerly, I float-stepped into a somewhat stable open niche where I could apply leverage. “Move carefully!”

The niche was a bare patch between branches, and I noticed, with a fragment of attention, that lines had been etched—deeply incised—into the hard tree trunk, not far from Arkady’s head. Had he been making these marks, or peering at them, when the accident occurred?

No time to ponder such things! Applying my laser axe, I managed to cut loose the lance pinning Arkady’s thigh, but had to wait for sluggish Boris to get positioned before carefully doing the same under his brother’s head, leaving the shard where it was, for the cyborg- surgeons to deal with. Personally, I found this “second chance” option daunting and unpleasant, as did a majority of Earth’s human population. And Boris might still change his mind, before committing his brother to another destiny, a different kind of living, in some far-off place the Coss seldom spoke of, where nearly all the reclaimed dead were sent.

At least they leave it a matter of personal and family choice. It’s never imposed. The Coss are that honorable.

Boris wailed again, this time audibly, when he saw his brother’s ravaged face. So loudly that it almost matched the trumpeting elepent cries and warning shouts from Oleg and the overseer.

I grabbed both idiots—one under each arm—flexed, and leaped. A split second before the great tree shuddered and shifted, amid low mammut grunts, sending all remaining branches into a shuddering wave that would have torn us to shreds.

We weren’t out of danger yet! Arcing high, I realized we were about to get smacked between two sharp-studded maces—the tree stump beneath us and one falling from above. An upward glance showed the approaching behemoth— till yesterday a living forest giant—now guided by a half dozen mighty pachyderms, each one clutching the great bole with four squat foot-hands, while using his agile trunk to aim a propellant gun. Dimly, I realized that they weren’t even trying to slow the tree’s plummet. Only to keep it oriented with one shorn side aimed down, to take the impact, leaving most of the valuable branches for harvest.

Calculating trajectories, I could tell we were drifting too slowly, the two trees would only collide glancingly, at their ends . . . where we happened to be!

I applied my jets, full blast . . . if “blast” applied to that feeble thrust. Only when the bottle petered out did I realize—I should have jettisoned Arkady. It might have saved our lives, Boris and me. . . .

Should I have felt stupid about that? Or noble? During those few seconds, as the sky became a shimmering mass of gorgeously deadly crystal, I realized that soon it would hardly matter. At least it should be quick, I thought. And there won’t be anything left for that awful “second chance.”

I braced . . .

. . . which was good, because a gray blur suddenly burgeoned from the right and slammed into us, knocking the air out of my lungs and cracking several ribs. Bellowing ululations filled my ears, and a harsh, vise-like grip seized my left leg, swinging me about like a whip. I clamped down, uttering no more than a grunt while clutching the Strugalatsky brothers with ferocity I never knew I had.

Boris had no such compunctions or stoic control. He screamed.

In fact, he showed impressive durability, persistence, and sheer lung power, howling as the falling tree glistened all around us in a million faceted rods, spires, and infinitely fractal twinkles, our rescuer blatting defiance while he dodged and zigged and zagged, evading razor-sharp branches—

—till we jetted into blackness above the lumberyard, flying high to escape the dust cloud and a billion glittering shards.

Yelena took care of thanking the bull elepent, whose name was Tok and who had intervened for her sake, not for a mammut- lover like me. In any event, I was busy for a while, rushing Arkady Strugalatsky to the administration dome, where a CryoCare Company intern took over, starting the cool-down pro cess while taking a next-of- kin affidavit from wailing Boris. Whereupon, at last, I slipped away, shivering in relief.

A few pats on the back. A gruff nod of respect from Oleg. Those were adequate acknowledgment for my “heroics,” though I knew there’d be a price. Yelena wasn’t going to let me forget that one of her gray friends had saved my ass.

Only none of that mattered. Right then, I had just one thought on my mind. To hurry back. To find the tree where the accident occurred and join the crew that was final-trimming it for shipment atop a huge, open- sided rail car. Oleg—impressed with my work ardor—urged me instead to rest, to attend to my battered rib cage and throbbing arms. But all of that could wait. I had to be part of finishing this one.

Along the way, I sent a personal blip.

—Mother, drop everything and meet me.—

A dark figure over near the train—slimmer and smaller than most of the burly railroad workers—straightened and turned. I recognized her shabby winter coat and visored ushanka. Apparently, word of the accident hadn’t even reached this part of the yard. And why should it, yet, with only one casualty added to today’s tally board? On the whole, a better than average day. Well, good. She would only hear the story knowing how it ended. The best way.

—What is it Sasha?— she sent back. —I am very busy.—

I replied simply. Curtly. She would find this worthwhile. Then I made her wait while I scampered along the great tree trunk, applying axe to stub in half a hundred places, before finally summoning her to come forth, picking her way along the path that I had made.

—Sasha, this had better be—

I nodded for her to come forward, guiding with my hand on her arm, the first time that I had touched her in months. With a gesture, I insisted that we both cut off our radio transmitters, then touch helmet visors, to speak by conduction.

“I know what you’ve been looking for, Natalia Alexyevna Bushyeva. The reason that you chose this place, above all others, for our exile.”

Her eyes widened, and then narrowed in practiced denial.