The Reaches (60 page)

"Yes," the Molt said simply.

Piet shrugged. "This world isn't in the chart Jeremy found for us," he said. "Even though the Federation cartographers had access to pre-Collapse data."

Stephen was the only one of us who was armed. He'd unslung his flashgun when the Rabbits appeared, though he'd kept the muzzle high. Instead of reslinging the weapon, he cradled it in his arms.

"During the Collapse," he said, "colonies pretty much destroyed themselves. It wasn't Terran attacks, certainly not here on the Back Worlds. Maybe their ancestors—"

He nodded in the direction the Rabbits had fled.

"—came from Templeton or the like as things were breaking down there. Trying to preserve civilization."

Piet sighed. "Yes," he said. "That could be. But you don't preserve civilization by running from chaos."

He glanced back at the ship. Dole headed a crew working on the section damaged by the
Montreal
's plasma cannon, and Salomon's men had already stretched the hoses to the lake.

"I think we can be spared to visit the native village," he said, smiling again. "They don't appear dangerous."

Stephen shrugged. "If we go," he said, "we'll go armed."

He glanced at me, I guess for support. My mind was lost in the maze of how you preserve civilization by cutting apart the face of a woman you hadn't even seen five seconds before.

"The
Montreal
carried a couple of autogyros," Stephen said as we broke out of the path through the brush. "You know, one of those would have made scouting around our landing sites a lot simpler."

The Rabbit village was in sight beneath trees that stood like miniature thunderheads. Up to a dozen separate trunks supported each broad canopy.

"Woof!" said Maher, the last of the six in our party. " 'Bout time we got clear of that!" Not only was Maher overweight, he'd decided to wear crossed bandoliers of shotgun shells and to carry a cutting bar. His gear caught at every step along a track worn by naked savages.

"You were going to fly the autogyro, Stephen?" Piet asked mildly. "Or perhaps we should have brought along one of the Federation pilots to do our scouting for us."

The Rabbits lived in a dozen or so rounded domes of wattle-and-daub. There were no windows, and they'd have to crawl on hands and knees to get in through the low doors. I wondered whether they had fire.

Stephen laughed. "Well, they're supposed to be easy to fly," he said. "Not that we had room to stow another pair of socks, the way we're loaded with chips."

Rabbits began to congregate in front of the huts as we approached. There were more of them than I'd expected from the number of dwellings, perhaps two hundred. The adult males carried throwing sticks, shell-tipped spears, and what were probably planting dibbles, though they would serve as weapons.

"Open out," Piet ordered in an even voice. "
Don't
point a weapon."

We fell into line abreast as we continued to saunter at the pace Piet set toward the village. He and Maher carried shotguns. Loomis had a rifle, Stephen his flashgun, and even Guillermo wore a holstered pistol, though I doubt he'd have been much use with it.

I held a cutting bar in both hands like a baton. Even its modest weight strained my abdomen if it hung from one side or the other.

"Stephen," I said. "Will you teach me to shoot?"

"Yes," he said, the syllable pale with lack of affect.

"We won't need weapons now," Piet said briskly. "Wait here."

He strode ahead of the rest of us with his right hand raised palm-outward. "We are peaceful travelers in your land," he called in Trade English. "We offer you presents and our friendship."

Piet was still ten meters from the Rabbits when they threw themselves to the ground. The men lashed themselves with their own weapons; the women tore their skirts into tufts and tossed them in the air with handfuls of dirt. Small children ran screaming from one adult to another, demanding reassurance which wasn't to be found.

"Wait!" Piet boomed in horror as he sprang forward. "We aren't gods to be worshipped, we're men!"

He forcibly dragged upright a Rabbit who was drawing a barbed spearhead across his forearm. "Stop that! It's blasphemy!"

Stephen pushed his way against Piet's side, though if the Rabbits had turned on us, there wasn't a lot he could have done. I'd have been even more useless, but I stood to Piet's right and grabbed the polished throwing stick that a Rabbit was beating himself across the back with. I wasn't about to try lifting anybody in my present condition, but the Rabbit didn't fight me for the stick. It was a beautifully curved piece. The wood was dense and had a fine, dark grain.

"Stop!" Piet thundered again.

This time the Rabbits obeyed, though for the most part they huddled on the ground at our feet. The children's shrieks seemed louder now that the adults weren't drowning them out.

An old woman came from a hut, leaning on the arm of a young man. She wore a pectoral and tiara made from strings of colored shells.

The youth supporting her was nude except for a genital cup, like most other males. A middle-aged man walked a step behind and to the right of the woman. He wore a translucent vest of fish or reptile skin. I could see the impressions the scales had left after they were removed.

The ordinary villagers edged back. They crawled until they'd gotten a few meters away, then rose to a crouch. Except for the man in the vest, the villagers looked ill-nourished. That fellow wasn't fat, but he had a solid, husky build. He stepped ahead of the old woman, keeping enough to the side that he didn't block our view of her.

We shook ourselves straight again. I still held the throwing stick. I stuck my cutting bar under the front of my belt to have it out of the way.

The two sailors ostentatiously ported their guns. I'd been too busy to look, but I'd bet they'd been aiming into the crowd and now hoped Piet hadn't seen them. Piet probably
had
seen them, the way he seemed to see everything going on, but he didn't choose to comment. Could be he thought Loomis and Maher showed better judgment than the rest of us had.

The old woman stretched out both arms and began speaking in a cracked voice. Her words were in no language I'd ever heard before. She paused after each phrase, and the man in the vest thundered what seemed to be the same words. They didn't make any more sense the second time at ten times the volume.

Maher looked at me and frowned. I nodded the throwing stick as a shrug. I didn't know how long this was going to go on either. At least it wasn't an attack.

After ten minutes of stop-and-go harangue, the old woman started to cough. The youth tried to help her, but she swatted at him angrily. The man in the vest looked back in concern.

The woman got control of her paroxysm, though she swayed as she lifted the clicking pectoral off. She handed it to the youth, mumbled an order, and then removed the tiara as well. It had been fastened to her thinning hair with bone pins.

The youth walked to Piet, holding the objects at arm's length. The Rabbit was shivering. His knees bent farther with every step, so that when he'd reached Piet he was almost kneeling.

"We thank you in the name of our governor," Piet said as he took the gifts. "We accept the objects as offered by one ruler to another, not as the homage owed only to God."

He turned his head and hissed, "Loomis? The cloth."

Loomis hastily pulled a bolt of red fabric out of his pack. He'd forgotten—so had I—the gift we'd brought. The cloth came from the Commandatura on Trehinga, but it might well be Terran silk. Stephen had suggested it would be useful for trading to Rabbits and free Molts.

Piet held the bolt out to the youth. The youth turned his head away. The man in the vest snarled an order. The youth took the cloth. He stumbled back from Piet, crying bitterly.

Piet's mouth worked as though he'd been sucking a lemon. "Well," he said. He turned and nodded back the way we'd come. "Well, I think we've done all we can here."

That was true enough. Though I for one wasn't about to bet on what we
had
done.

The moon was up, so I hadn't bothered to take a light when I went walking. The satellite was huge, looking almost the size of Earth from Luna, though it had no atmosphere and its specific gravity was only slightly above that of water.

The four crewmen's lodges were laid out as sides of a square. A bonfire leaped high in the middle and a fiddler played dance music. Repairs to the
Oriflamme
's hull were complete, or as complete as possible. Liquor acquired on Trehinga and Templeton competed with slash the motor crewmen brewed from rations.

Being able to walk for the past three days had loosened up my chest muscles. I still got twinges if I turned too suddenly, and when I woke up in the morning my lower abdomen ached as though I'd been kicked the night before; but my body was healing fine.

I was returning to the
Oriflamme.
I'd continued to bunk aboard her. The minimal interior illumination hid rather than revealed the ground beneath the starship, but the moon was so bright that I noticed the hunching figure while I was still fifty meters away.

"Hey!" I shouted. I wasn't carrying a weapon. I ran toward the figure anyway. Adrenaline made me forget the shape my body was in as well as damping the pain that might have reminded me. "Hey!"

The figure sprang to its feet and sprinted away. When it was out of the
Oriflamme'
s shadow I could see that it was a Rabbit—a female, judging from the skirt.

Piet opened the forward hatch holding a powerful light in his left hand and a double-barreled shotgun by the pistol grip in his right. The light blazed onto the Rabbit and stayed there despite her attempts to dart and twist out of the beam. Furrows dribbling fresh blood striped her back.

The Rabbit finally vanished into the brush. None of the men celebrating at the shelters had taken notice of my shout or the Rabbit.

Running—jogging clumsily—actually felt good to me, though I didn't have any wind left. The short spurt to the ramp left me puffing and blowing.

I knelt beneath the ship where the Rabbit had hidden. She'd dropped or thrown away something as she fled. I doubted it was a bomb—fire was high technology for these savages—but I wasn't taking chances.

Piet flared his lens to wide beam. "Anything?" he asked as he hopped down beside me.

"This," I said, picking up the handle of a giant comb: a carding comb for stripping leaf fibers so they could be woven into cloth. The teeth were long triangles of shell mounted edgewise so that they wouldn't snap when drawn through tough leaves.

The teeth were smeared a finger's breadth deep with blood so fresh it still dripped. Piet switched off the handlight. I crawled carefully from beneath the
Oriflamme;
it'd be several minutes before I had my night vision back, and I didn't want to knock myself silly on a landing strut.

"Perhaps we should set guards," Piet said. "Of course, we'll be leaving tomorrow. If all goes as planned."

I flung the comb in the direction of the village a kilometer away. There were drops of blood on the glazed soil where the Rabbit had hidden for her ceremony. I sat down on the ramp. I felt sick. Part of it was probably the exertion.

Piet sat beside me. "You wouldn't have had to go as far as the village to find a woman for your desires," he said. "You could just have waited here."

There was nothing in his tone, and his face—softened by the moonlight—was as calm as that of a statue of Justice. The fact that he'd spoken
those
words meant the incident had bothered him as much as it did me. Wine let the truth out of some men; but for others it was stress that made them say the things that would otherwise have been hidden forever in their hearts.

"I was just walking, Piet," I said quietly. "There's some of the men gone up to the Rabbit village, I believe; but I was just working the stitches out of my side."

He nodded curtly. "It doesn't matter," he said. "That sort of thing is between you and the Lord."

I got up and raised my face to the moon. "I haven't lied to anybody since I came aboard the
Porcelain,
Piet," I said. My voice shuddered with anger.
With all the things I'd done, before and especially after I met Piet Ricimer, to be accused of this
—

I thought about what I'd just said, and about the cloak of moral outrage I'd dressed myself in. I started to laugh. Some of my chest muscles thought I shouldn't have, but it was out of their control and mine.

Piet stood with a worried look on his face. Maybe he thought I'd snapped, gone mad in delayed reaction to . . . to too many things.

"No," I gasped, "I'm all right. I was just going to say, I haven't been lying to anybody except maybe myself. And I'm getting better about that, you see?"

We sat down again. "Jeremy," he said, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have spoken."

I shrugged. I could do that again. "If you hadn't," I said, "you'd have gone the rest of your life thinking that's what I was doing out there tonight. When I was just going for a walk."

Fifty meters away in the temporary accommodations, the fiddler was taking a break. A chorus of sailors filled in
a cappella,
"A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing . . ."

They might as easily have swung into
The Harlot of Jerusalem.
I started to laugh again. This time my ribs forestalled me.

"I'm fine," I repeated. I was beginning to wonder, though, and it wasn't my body that caused me the concern.

"If President Pleyal establishes the rule he wants over all mankind," Piet said, "his fall will be a collapse worse than the Collapse. Because we don't have the margin for survival that men had risen to a thousand years ago. Folk like these—"

He waggled a finger northward.

"—mistaking men for gods, they'll be all that remains of humanity. We
have
to succeed, Jeremy."

"I'll be glad when we lift," I said. I looked at Piet, leaning back with his arms braced on the ramp. "Because you're wrong, you know. It's not gods they think we are. They're not worshipping, they're trying to placate demons."