The Venging (5 page)

like a dancing snake, hesitated, rippled again, and came within reach. She grabbed it and pulled herself down. "Porter, this is Lunar Guidance. Earth says the charges weren't enough. Something went wrong." "She held together, LG," Porter said in disbelief. "She didn't break up. I've got a fireworks show like you've never seen before." "Porter, listen. She isn't moving fast enough. She'll still impact." "I heard you, LG," Porter shouted. "I heard! Leave me alone to get things done." Nothing more was said between them. Turco reached the hatch and crawled into the airlock, exhausted. She closed the outer door and waited for equalization before opening the inner. Her helmet was off and floated behind as she walked and bounced and guided herself into the control room. If the motors were still functional, she'd fire them. She had no second thoughts now. Something had gone wrong, and the situation was completely different. In the middle of the kilometers-wide crater at the Janacki pole, the borehole was still spewing debris and ionized particles. But around the perimeter, other forces were at work. Canisters of reaction mass were flying to a point three kilometers above the crater floor. The Beckmann drive engines rotated on their (25 of 197) mountings, aiming their nodes at the canisters' rendezvous point. Porter's ship was following the tail of debris down to the crater floor. He could make out geometric patterns of insulating material. His computers told him something was approaching a few hundred meters below. There wasn't time for any second guessing. He primed his main cargo and sat back in the seat, lips moving, not in prayer, but repeating some stray, elegant line from the Burgess novel, a final piece of pleasure. One of the canisters struck the side of the cargo ship just as the blast began. A brilliant flare spread out above the crater, merging with and twisting the tail of the internal charges. Four cannisters were knocked from their course and sent plummeting into space. The remaining six met at the assigned point and were hit by beams from the Beckmann drive nodes. Their matter was stripped down to pure energy. All of this, in its lopsided incomplete way, bounced against the crater floor and drove the asteroid slightly faster. When the shaking subsided, Turco let go of a grip bar and asked the computers questions. No answers came back. Everything except minimum life support was out of commission. She thought briefly of returning to her tug, if it was still in position, but there was nowhere to go. So she walked and crawled and floated to a broad view-window in the bubble's dining room. Earth was rising over the Vlasseg pole again, filling half her view, knots of storm and streaks of brown continent twisting slowly before her. She wondered if it had been enoughit hadn't felt right. There was no way of knowing for sure, but the Earth looked much too close. "It's too close to judge," the president said, deliberately standing with his back to Kollert. "She'll pass over Greenland, maybe just hit the upper atmosphere." The terrorist team officers were packing their valises and talking to each other in subdued whispers. Three of the president's security men looked at the screen with dazed expressions. The screen was blank except for a display of seconds until accession of picture. Gestina was asleep in the chair next to Kollert, her face peaceful, hands wrapped together in her lap. "We'll have relay pictures from Iceland in a few minutes," the president said. "Should be quite a sight." Kollert frowned. The man was almost cocky, knowing he would come through it untouched. Even with survival uncertain, his government would be preparing explanations. Kollert could predict the story: a band of lunar terrorists, loosely tied with Giani Turco's father and his rabid spacefarers, was responsible for the whole thing. It would mean a few months of ill-feeling on the Moon, but at least the Nexus would have found its scapegoats. A communicator beeped in the room, and Kollert looked around for its source. One of the security men reached into a pocket and pulled out a small earplug, which he inserted. He listened for a few seconds, frowned, then nodded. The other two gathered close, and they whispered. (26 of 197) Then, quietly, they left the room. The president didn't notice they were gone, but to Kollert their absence

spoke volumes. Six Nexus police entered a minute later. One stood by Kollert's chair, not looking at him. Four waited by the door. Another approached the president and tapped him on the shoulder. The president turned.

"Sir, fourteen desks have requested your impeachment. We're instructed to put you under custody, for your own safety." Kollert started to rise, but the officer beside him put a hand on his shoulder. "May we stay to watch?" the president asked. No one objected. Before the screen was switched on, Kollert asked, "Is anyone going to get Turco, if it misses?"

The terrorist team leader shrugged when no one else answered. "She may not even be alive." Then, like a crowd of children looking at a horror movie, the men and women in the communications center grouped around the large screen and watched the dark shadow of Psyche blotting out stars.

From the bubble window, Turco saw the sudden aurorae, the spray of ionized gases from the Earth's atmosphere, the awesomely rapid passage of the ocean below, and the blur of white as Greenland flashed past. The structure rocked and jerked as the Earth exerted enormous tidal strains on Psyche. Sitting in the plastic chaff, numb, tightly gripping the arms, Giani looked updownat the bright stars, feeling Psyche die beneath her. Inside, the still-molten hollows formed by the charges began to collapse. Cracks shot outward to the surface, where they became gaping chasms. Sparks and rays of smoke jumped from the chasms. In minutes the passage was over. Looking closely, she saw roiling storms forming over Earth's seas and the spreading shock waves of the asteroid's sudden atmospheric compression. Big winds were blowing, but they'd survive. It shouldn't have gone this far. They should have listened reasonably, admitted their guilt Absolved, girl,she wanted her father to say. She felt very near.You've destroyed everything we worked fora fine architect of Pyrrhic victories. And now he was at a great distance, receding. The room was cold, and her skin tingled. One huge chunk rose to block out the sun. The cabin screamed, and the bubble was filled with sudden

(27 of 197) The Venging flakes of air. |Go to Contents |

The White Horse Child

When I was seven years old, I met an old man by the side of the dusty road between school and farm. The late afternoon sun had cooled, and he was sitting on a rock, hat off, hands held out to the gentle warmth, whistling a pretty song. He nodded at me as I walked past. I nodded back. I was curious, but I knew better than to get involved with strangers, as if they might turn into lions when no one but a little kid was around. "Hello, boy," he said. I stopped and shuffled my feet. He looked more like a hawk than a lion. His clothes were brown and grey and russet, and his hands were pink like the flesh of some rabbit a hawk had just plucked up. His face was brown except around the eyes, where he might have worn glasses; around the eyes he was white, and this intensified his gaze. "Hello," I said. "Was a hot day. Must have been hot in school," he said. "They got air conditioning." "So they do, now. How old are you?" "Seven," I said. "Well, almost eight." "Mother told you never to talk to strangers?" "And Dad, too." "Good advice. But haven't you seen me around here before?" I looked him over. "No." "Closely. Look at my clothes. What color are they?" His shirt was grey, like the rock he was sitting on. The cuffs, where they peeped from under a russet

jacket, were white. He didn't smell bad, but he didn't look particularly clean. He was smooth-shaven, though. His hair was white, and his pants were the color of the dirt below the rock. "All kinds of colors," I (28 of 197) said. "But mostly I partake of the landscape, no?" "I guess so," I said. "That's because I'm not here. You're imagining me, at least part of me. Don't I look like somebody you might have heard of?" "Who are you supposed to look like?" I asked. "Well, I'm full of stories," he said. "Have lots of stories to tell little boys, little girls, even big folk, if they'll listen." I started to walk away. "But only if they'll listen," he said. I ran. When I got home, I told my older sister about the man on the road, but she only got a worried look and told me to stay away from strangers. I took her advice. For some time afterward, into my eighth year, I avoided that road and did not speak with strangers more than I had to. The house that I lived in, with the five other members of my family and two dogs and one beleaguered cat, was white and square and comfortable. The stairs were rich dark wood overlaid with worn carpet. The walls were dark oak paneling up to a foot above my head, then white plaster, with a white plaster ceiling. The air was full of smellsbacon when I woke up, bread and soup and dinner when I came home from school, dust on weekends when we helped clean. Sometimes my parents argued, and not just about money, and those were bad times; but usually we were happy. There was talk about selling the farm and the house and going to Mitchell where Dad could work in a computerized feed-mixing plant, but it was only talk. It was early summer when I took to the dirt road again. I'd forgotten about the old man. But in almost the same way, when the sun was cooling and the air was haunted by lazy bees, I saw an old woman. Women strangers are less malevolent than men, and rarer. She was sitting on the grey rock, in a long green skirt summer-dusty, with a daisy-colored shawl and a blouse the precise hue of cottonwoods seen in a late hazy day's muted light. "Hello, boy," she said. "I don't recognize you, either," I blurted, and she smiled. "Of course not. If you didn't recognize him, you'd hardly know me." "Do you know him?" I asked. She nodded. "Who was he? Who are you?" (29 of 197) "We're both full of stories. Just tell them from different angles. You aren't afraid of us, are you?" I was, but having a woman ask the question made all the difference. "No," I said. "But what are you doing here? And how do you know?" "Ask for a story," she said. "One you've never heard of before." Her eyes were the color of baked chestnuts, and she squinted into the sun so that I couldn't see her whites. When she opened them wider to look at me, she didn't have any whites. "I don't want to hear stories," I said softly. "Sure you do. Just ask." "It's late. I got to be home." "I knew a man who became a house," she said. "He didn't like it. He stayed quiet for thirty years, and watched all the people inside grow up, and be just like their folks, all nasty and dirty and leaving his walls to flake, and the bathrooms were unbeatable. So he spit them out one morning, furniture and all, and shut his doors and locked them." "What?" "You heard me. Upchucked. The poor house was so disgusted he changed back into a man, but he was older and he had a cancer and his heart was bad because of all the abuse he had lived with. He died soon after." I laughed, not because the man had died, but because I knew such things were lies. "That's silly," I said. "Then here's another. There was a cat who wanted to eat butterflies. Nothing finer in the world for a cat than to stalk the grass, waiting for black-and-pumpkin butterflies. It crouches down and wriggles its rump to dig in the hind paws, then it jumps. But a butterfly is no sustenance for a cat. It's practice. There was a little girl about your agemight have been your sister, but she won't admit itwho saw the cat and decided to teach it a lesson. She hid in the taller grass with two old kites under each arm and waited for the cat to come by stalking. When it got real close, she put on her mother's dark glasses, to look all bug-eyed, and she jumped up flapping the kites. Well, it was just a little too real, because in a trice she found herself flying, and she was much smaller than she had been, and the cat jumped at her. Almost got her, too. Ask your sister about that sometime. See if she doesn't deny it." "How'd she get back to be my sister again?" "She became too scared to fly. She lit on a flower and found herself crushing it. The glasses broke, too." (30 of 197) "My sister did break a pair of Mom's glasses once." The woman smiled. "I got to be going home." "Tomorrow you bring me a story, okay?" I ran off without answering. But in my head, monsters were already rising. If she thought I was scared,

wait until she heard the story I had to tell! When I got home my older sister, Barbara, was fixing lemonade in the kitchen. She was a year older than I but acted as if she were grown-up. She was a good six inches taller, and I could beat her if I got in a lucky punch, but no other wayso her power over me was awesome. But we were usually friendly. "Where you been?" she asked, like a mother. "Somebody tattled on you," I said. Her eyes went doe-scared, then wizened down to slits. "What're you talking about?' "Somebody tattled about what you did to Mom's sunglasses." "I already been whipped for that," she said nonchalantly. "Not much more to tell." "Oh, but I know more." "Wasnot playing doctor," she said. The youngest, Sue-Ann, weakest and most full of guile, had a habit of

telling the folks somebody or other was playing doctor. She didn't know what it meantI just barely didbut it had been true once, and she held it over everybody as her only vestige of power. "No," I said, "but I know what you were doing. And I won't tell anybody." "You don't know nothing," she said. Then she accidentally poured half a pitcher of lemonade across the side of my head and down my front. When Mom came in I was screaming and swearing like Dad did when he fixed the cars, and I was put away for life plus ninety years in the bedroom I shared with younger brother Michael. Dinner smelled better than usual that evening, but I had none of it. Somehow I wasn't brokenhearted. It gave me time to think of a scary story for the country-colored woman on the rock. School was the usual mix of hell and purgatory the next day. Then the hot, dry winds cooled and the bells rang and I was on the dirt road again, across the southern hundred acres, walking in the lees and shadows of the big cottonwoods. I carried my Road-Runner lunch pail and my pencil box and one booka (31 of 197) handwriting manual I hated so much I tore pieces out of it at night, to shorten its lifetimeand I walked slowly, to give my story time to gel. She was leaning up against a tree, not far from the rock. Looking back, I can see she was not so old as a boy of eight years thought. Now I see her lissome beauty and grace, despite the dominance of grey in her reddish hair, despite the crow's-feet around her eyes and the smile-haunts around her lips. But to the eightyear-old she was simply a peculiar crone. And he had a story to tell her, he thought, that would age her unto graveside. "Hello, boy," she said. "Hi." I sat on the rock. "I can see you've been thinking," she said. I squinted into the tree shadow to make her out better. "How'd you know?" "You have the look of a boy that's been thinking. Are you here to listen to another story?" "Got one to tell, this time," I said. "Who goes first?" It was always polite to let the woman go first, so I quelled my haste and told her she could. She motioned me to come by the trees and sit on a smaller rock, half-hidden by grass. And while the crickets in the shadow tuned up for the evening, she said, "Once there was a dog. This dog was a pretty usual dog, like the ones that would chase you around home if they thought they could get away with itif they didn't know you or thought you were up to something the big people might disapprove of. But this dog lived in a graveyard. That is, he belonged to the caretaker. You've seen a graveyard before, haven't you?" "Like where they took Grandpa." "Exactly," she said. "With pretty lawns, and big white-and-grey stones, and for those who've died recently, smaller grey stones with names and flowers and years cut into them. And trees in some places, with a mortuary nearby made of brick, and a garage full of black cars, and a place behind the garage where you wonder what goes on." She knew the place, all right. "This dog had a pretty good life. It was his job to keep the grounds clear of animals at night. After the gates were locked, he'd be set loose, and he wandered all night long. He was almost white, you see. Anybody human who wasn't supposed to be there would think he was a ghost, and they'd run away. "But this dog had a problem. His problem was, there were rats that didn't pay much attention to him. A whole gang of rats. The leader was a big one, a good yard from nose to tail. These rats made their living (32 of 197) by burrowing under the ground in the old section of the cemetery." That did it. I didn't want to hear any more. The air was a lot colder than it should have been, and I wanted to get home in time for dinner and still be able to eat it. But I couldn't go just then. "Now the dog didn't know what the rats did, and just like you and I, probably, he didn't much care to know. But it was his job to keep them under control. So one day he made a truce with a couple of cats that he normally tormented and told them about the rats. These cats were scrappy old toms, and they'd long since cleared out the competition of other cats, but they were friends themselves. So the dog made them a proposition. He said he'd let them use the cemetery anytime they wanted, to prowl or hunt in or whatever, if they would put the fear of God into a few of the rats. The cats took him up on it. 'We get to do whatever we want,' they said, 'whenever we want, and you won't bother us.' The dog agreed. "That night the dog waited for the sounds of battle. But they never came. Nary a yowl." She glared at me for emphasis. "Not a claw scratch. Not even a twitch of tail in the wind." She took a deep breath, and so did I. "Round about midnight the dog went out into the graveyard. It was very dark, and there wasn't wind or bird or speck of star to relieve the quiet and the dismal inside-of-a-box-camera blackness. He sniffed his way to the old part of the graveyard and met with the head rat, who was sitting on a slanty, cracked wooden grave marker. Only his eyes and a tip of tail showed in the dark, but the dog could smell him. 'What happened to the cats?' he asked. The rat shrugged his haunches. 'Ain't seen any cats,' he said. 'What did you thinkthat you could scare us out with a couple of cats? Ha. Listenif there had been any cats here tonight, they'd have been strung and hung like meat in a shed, and my young'uns would have grown fat on'" "No-o-o!" I screamed, and I ran away from the woman and the tree until I couldn't hear the story anymore. "What's the matter?" she called after me. "Aren't you going to tell me your story?" Her voice followed me as I ran. It was funny. That night, I wanted to know what happened to the cats. Maybe nothing had happened to them. Not knowing made my visions even worseand I didn't sleep well. But my brain worked like it had never worked before. The next day, a Saturday, I had an endingnot a very good one in retrospectbut it served to frighten Michael so badly he threatened to tell Mom on me. "What would you want to do that for?" I asked. "Cripes, I won't ever tell you a story again if you tell Mom!" Michael was a year younger and didn't worry about the future. "You never told me stories before," he said, "and everything was fine. I won't miss them." (33 of 197) He ran down the stairs to the living room. Dad was smoking a pipe and reading the paper, relaxing before checking the irrigation on the north thirty. Michael stood at the foot of the stairs, thinking. I was almost down to grab him and haul him upstairs when he made his decision and headed for the kitchen. I knew exactly what he was consideringthat Dad would probably laugh and call him a little scaredy-cat. But Mom would get upset and do me in proper. She was putting a paper form over the kitchen table to mark it for fitting a tablecloth. Michael ran up to her and hung on to a pants leg while I halted at the kitchen door, breathing hard, eyes threatening eternal torture if he so much as peeped. But Michael didn't worry about the future much. "Mom," he said. "Cripes!" I shouted, high-pitching on the i. Refuge awaited me in the tractor shed. It was an agreed-upon hiding place. Mom didn't know I'd be there, but Dad did, and he could mediate. It took him a half hour to get to me. I sat in the dark behind a workbench, practicing my pouts. He stood in the shaft of light falling from the unpatched chink in the roof. Dust motes maypoled around his legs. "Son," he said. "Mom wants to know where you got that story." Now, this was a peculiar thing to be asked. The question I'd expected had been, "Why did you scare Michael?" or maybe, "What made you think of such a thing?" But no. Somehow she had plumbed the problem, planted the words in Dad's mouth, and impressed upon him that father-son relationships were temporarily suspended. "I made it up," I said. "You've never made up that kind of story before." "I just started." He took a deep breath. "Son, we get along real good, except when you lie to me. We know better. Who told you that story?" This was uncanny. There was more going on than I could understandthere was a mysterious adult thing happening. I had no way around the truth. "An old woman," I said. Dad sighed even deeper. "What was she wearing?" "Green dress," I said. "Was there an old man?" (34 of 197) I nodded. "Christ," he said softly. He turned and walked out of the shed. From outside he called me to come into the house. I dusted off my overalls and followed him. Michael sneered at me. "'Locked them in coffins with old dead bodies,'" he mimicked. "Phhht! You're going to get it." The folks closed the folding door to the kitchen with both of us outside. This disturbed Michael, who'd expected instant vengeance. I was too curious and worried to take my revenge on him, so he sulked out the screen door and chased the cat around the house. "Lock you in a coffin!" he screamed. Mom's voice drifted from behind the louvered doors. "Do you hear that? The poor child's going to have nightmares. It'll warp him." "Don't exaggerate," Dad said. "Exaggerate what? That those filthy people are back? Ben, they must be a hundred years old now! They're trying to do the same thing to your son that they did to your brother and just look athim! Living in sin, writing for those hell-spawned girlie magazines." "He ain't living in sin, he's living alone in an apartment in New York City. And he writes for all kinds of places." "They tried to do it to you, too! Just thank God your aunt saved you." "Margie, I hope you don't intend" "Certainly do. She knows all about them kind of people. She chased them off once, she can sure do it again!" All hell had broken loose. I didn't understand half of it, but I could feel the presence of Great Aunt Sybil Danser. I could almost hear her crackling voice and the shustle of her satchel of Billy Grahams and Zondervans and little tiny pamphlets with shining light in blue offset on their covers. I knew there was no way to get the full story from the folks short of listening in, but they'd stopped talking and were sitting in that stony kind of silence that indicated Dad's disgust and Mom's determination. I was mad that nobody was blaming me, as if I were some idiot child not capable of being bad on my own. I was mad at Michael for precipitating the whole mess. And I was curious. Were the man and the woman more than a hundred years old? Why hadn't I seen them before, in town, or heard about them from other kids? Surely I wasn't the only one they'd seen on the road (35 of 197) and told stories to. I decided to get to the source. I walked up to the louvered doors and leaned my cheek against them. "Can I go play at George's?" "Yes," Mom said. "Be back for evening chores." George lived on the next farm, a mile and a half east. I took my bike and rode down the old dirt road going south.