Pallas Page 8

  He had no way of knowing that he’d set out on a journey of three hundred miles without water, provisions, or other amenities. He only knew it seemed to last forever, that there were limits to how much anyone could sleep to kill time, especially in a machine bouncing about in lower gravity than it had been designed for, over roads that were no more than lanes cleared of the biggest boulders—usually by rolling them into the smallest craters—and that, by the time he caught his first glimpse of the lights of Curringer twinkling in the distance, he’d be cold, hungry, dehydrated, blackened by the rubber that concealed his presence, and bruised everywhere from his random, brutal contact with it. By then he’d know the freedom to suffer the consequences of his own bad planning.

  At moments when the path was smooth and level and he could peep over the wall of his neoprene fortress without fear of having his eyeballs shaken out, he began to see what Pallas had been like before it had been tamed, as it was inside the Rimfence. Something about the pale sun and flawless blue overhead, the ground gently rolling to the golden line that met it, maybe even the prairie wind swirling invisibly between them, alternately warm and cool, always full of strange scents, was different from anything he’d felt before. The words he knew to describe it accurately—“empty,” “barren,” “deserted,” “bleak,” “desolate”—were negative and therefore somehow incorrect. At the same time that the prairie made him feel a little afraid, it gave him a soaring sensation so welcome it almost took his breath away. It might have been the open plains all around him, or his first real taste of freedom.

  The ground was dry, sparsely covered everywhere to waist height with what his father, seeing it poke through the Rimfence, called buffalo grass, coarser than the carefully trimmed Residence lawn, more yellow-brown than green. By the road lay patches of prickly pear cactus he was familiar with. Mingled in the grass were dozens of different plants, freestanding and in bunches, he couldn’t identify as readily, although from some arose a spicy odor like that of a broken bottle of light green powder his mother had once had him clean up in the Residence kitchen. Sage, she’d called it.

  Standing over the undergrowth were small clumps of trees hardly taller than himself. He knew nothing about trees—he’d never been to the precious, heavily guarded Project orchards and had only seen trees in books—but he knew the closer ones were different from those he saw marching up the sides of hills two or three miles away from the road. Those nearby had flat, pale leaves, branched stems, and trunks that looked like they’d been painted white and lightly sanded until brown showed again on the high spots. Those further away were dark, somewhat taller, and somehow...pointier. Occasionally the breeze would bring him another exotic aroma which might be coming from those faraway trees, or might simply be the smell of freedom.

  What fascinated him most, however, were the animals. Even the flowers, purple and white, yellow, pink, every other color he had a name for, failed to rivet his attention the way a long-eared jackrabbit could, startled by the vehicle, bounding across the track in front of it. Once he saw a fat porcupine—it couldn’t have been anything else—lumbering along beside the road, oblivious to the machine and its passengers, going from one well-chewed tree to another where the bark was tastier. On another occasion, the rollabout frightened a skunk, which sprayed a terrible warning as it passed. He recognized the black and white stripes from childhood picture books. For some reason he found the odor—at least at this distance—a bit exhilarating, rather than disgusting, and knew he was discovering the freedom to react differently than expected by others.

  There were many birds: tiny quail running in a file behind their mother with her antenna-feather erect, grouse exploding from the high grass, gobbling and clattering their wings. Off over the horizon, a predatory bird rode the updrafts, patrolling for small, furry food. He’d never seen a meadowlark, but he’d enjoyed their melodious trilling at the edge of the Project where he’d kept his secrets hidden. He appreciated the company they gave him now as he always had. Nobody had ever had to explain to him that demanding freedom often meant being lonely.

  For the most part, the vast silence of the uninhabited prairie was broken only by the crunch of wheels on the road and the buzzing of insects. For some reason this was deeper than that of the houseflies that swarmed the refuse bins at the back of the Residence or gathered around a newly plowed furrow. At one point an eight-inch dragonfly swept past his face on four shiny, transparent wings—looking like a World War I biplane he recognized from books and magazines he’d salvaged over the years from the same bins—and on essentially the same mission as the bird of prey he’d seen earlier. At another point he jumped, bitten by a mustard-colored fly. He’d remember the pain for the rest of his life, as another taste of freedom.

  Toward the end of the afternoon when the light had begun to fail and, although he wasn’t aware of it, the rollabout was nearing its destination, a heavy-antlered mule deer, fascinated by the machine’s headlamps, froze in its path and wouldn’t move until the rollabout had stopped and one of the drivers dismounted, grumbling obscenities as he grunted his way down the ladder to shoo it out of the way.

  Emerson had almost forgotten the men operating this machine. To his surprise—not to mention the driver’s—the animal stood its ground, raked dirt with a hoof, and ducked its dangerous-looking rack at the man until his colleague blew a blast on the horn, startling their unknown passenger out of his wits and frightening the deer into giving way. The boy’s last sight of the animal was of the cottony underside of its tail as it bounded, with an incredible slow-motion grace almost painful to watch, over an enormous rock and was gone. He also saw the reflective, glowing eyes of half a dozen animals like it who’d apparently been waiting, all but invisible in the tall grass.

  He finally fell asleep and remained so as long as the prairie continued to roll smoothly beneath the tires of the rollabout. When he awoke again, the countryside was no longer quite as flat and the machine was laboring, running on batteries now, to climb back into what remained of the daylight. As they reached the crest of each hill, the slanting sun rays caught them again and the night would be temporarily put off. Straining around the underpinnings of the vehicle for a look forward, each time he could see a little scattering of lights which must be coming from the town. Then the rollabout—and the night—would descend again. They’d reach the trough between two ridges, ford a shallow stream or cross an untrustworthy-looking bridge, and begin to climb again.

  He wasn’t sure if it was the altitude or the time of day, but he began to get cold and realized he hadn’t brought a coat or blanket. There wouldn’t be a next time—he hoped—so the experience didn’t have much to teach him, but he filed it away as another result of the freedom he’d sought and even napped briefly again, not knowing the danger that represented. Before the sun had vanished from the mountaintops, when a few of the twinkling lights lay around him rather than in front of him, and before the rollabout reached the market in Curringer where he was certain he’d be discovered and sent back to the Project, he decided, after an agony of indecision, to climb over the tire and jump out. He had to start his new life sometime—that’s why he was here—and it might as well be now.

  No more willing to hit the ground at twenty-five miles an hour than he had been to remain a slave the rest of his life, he waited until the rollabout had just struggled to the peak of another long, slow climb, then rolled off its equipment rack and watched it disappear over a horizon only yards away. Catching his breath after a soft but prickly landing in one of the aromatic bushes, he picked himself up and followed the rollabout at a cautious interval. It was much faster than he was and quickly began to dwindle in the distance, toward the city lights. The ground here was rough, even on the track, and loose stones in the roadbed hurt his feet through the thin-soled sandals he’d been issued that morning, giving him an opportunity to discover the freedom to endure the agony of sore feet.

  The evening wore on and soon the sun was gone from the highest hilltop
, which was next after the one where he’d jumped from the rollabout. He never recalled seeing the spectacular sunset that night which was characteristic of Pallas. Other things occupied his mind. A subtle afterglow remained on the horizon to remind him it had occurred. Having trudged for hours, concerned about the increasing darkness, trying not to imagine wild flesh-shredders behind every bush, convinced he’d made a mistake by abandoning his ride too soon, he was astonished to hear scuffing noises behind him, transmitted in the unreal silence through the ground.

  At once he realized he was seeing perfectly by the blue-white light of Pallas B. Stepping behind an upthrust boulder which had been blasted in half to clear the road, he turned in time to spy a party of a dozen men and women, each armed with a big, heavy-looking pistol hanging from a broad leather belt. They didn’t see him, but laughed as they swaggered his way, as arrogant in their bearing, in his view, as the blue goons who dominated the Project and the lives of everyone in it.

  To make things worse, swinging glaze-eyed, gutted and lifeless between them, its once-graceful legs tied to an aluminum pole two of them carried on their shoulders—no burden at all in the minimal Pallatian gravity—was a large, furry animal they’d apparently just killed with those guns. He was astonished and sickened to recognize it as a mule deer—the blood still dripping from its mouth was coal-black in the moonlight—maybe even the deer he’d marveled at earlier.

  Like an atheist uncertain of his convictions and alone in a great and gloomy cathedral, he discovered suddenly that he believed the horrible stories he’d been told about Outsiders all his life, whether he wanted to or not. They had guns. They all had guns. They had murdered a helpless, beautiful animal he’d admired.

  And they were laughing about it.

  Afraid, deep inside, that such a fate awaited any interloper who caught these monsters in the middle of their terrible deed, he fearfully concealed himself in the all-too-sparse undergrowth beside the road and waited, almost afraid to breathe for fear of being discovered, until the hunting party was safely past.

  So this was the freedom, he thought bitterly, to be afraid for his life. Shivering in the darkness, he wondered if that was all there might be to freedom.

  Mrs. Singh

  You are what you eat—which sort of accounts for vegetarians, I guess.

  —Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy, Hunting and Humanity

  Emerson didn’t cry.

  Shaken by what he’d witnessed, cold, tired, aching, and hungry from his long ride in the rollabout—and what by this time seemed an even longer walk—he stumbled along the rough-surfaced roadbed in the moonlight, terrified of accidentally catching up with the deer hunters and trying not to travel too fast. He was too exhausted for it in any case, and had no idea where he was going.

  For the first time since he’d left the Project that morning, he thought of his family—of his mother, father, five brothers and sisters—but it wasn’t the thinking of a tired, cold, aching, hungry runaway. It never occurred to him to miss them. Miserable as he was, he never wasted a fraction of a second on the idea of going back. It was only that he’d just realized that his family had never been very real to him, and it had suddenly occurred to him to wonder why.

  Emerson had no way of knowing, because he had nothing to compare it with, that he’d grown up in a kind of silence as thorough and effective as if he’d been born deaf. Whenever he thought about it—something he’d indulged himself in less and less often as he’d gotten older—he did understand that he hardly knew his father.

  Walter Ngu had been a closemouthed, stoic-jawed man to begin with, lean and sinewy, with hard hands and sun-blackened skin. No trace remained of his past life—which, lacking any visible or tangible substance, had assumed the proportions of myth in his eldest son’s mind—as a senior accountant with a powerful Los Angeles law firm. On becoming foreman, something Emerson did remember, he’d begun rising even earlier than his fellow workers, laboring all day beside them in the fields—doing what he calculated was his own fair share in addition to the supervising—and returning after dark in a state of wordless exhaustion which left him no choice but to delegate the raising of his children to his wife.

  Where Emerson’s father was thin, and as tall as any of his people ever got, his mother was soft, and as round as it was in her to become. Alice Ngu considered herself fortunate to have been chosen as the Chief Administrator’s housekeeper and would do or say nothing to jeopardize a position she believed offered her family certain advantages—which her idea of personal integrity invariably prevented her from pressing—over the ordinary peasants of the Project. If Walter’s strategy for survival consisted of working ten percent harder than anybody else, Alice’s was to demand ten percent less than she had a right to expect.

  Emerson gathered that they’d been different before coming to Pallas, both of them ambitious and dissatisfied with political and economic circumstances in their home state which were increasingly indistinguishable from those their own parents had fled in Asia. It was said—he couldn’t remember who’d told him, certainly not his mother or father—that even before the earthquake which had killed twenty million people along the San Andreas fault, California had become an “absolute democracy,” a dictatorship in its own way worse than any eastern European nation had been before the Soviet collapse. Everyday living had been all but impossible, the least activity requiring complicated licensing, expensive permits, or simply being forbidden by politicians and bureaucrats who didn’t have to live with the consequences because it always seemed to work out that they themselves weren’t subject to the same paralyzing rules and regulations.

  A great natural disaster had only made things worse, offering an endless supply of new excuses to extend authoritarian controls until they covered every aspect of every minute of every individual’s life. The fact that a majority, one over half of the people—abetted by the only legislature in America more debauched, voracious, and corrupt than Congress itself—had democratically inflicted these atrocities on themselves didn’t make them any less obnoxious for the minority, one under half of the people, who had to live with them.

  On Pallas, once they fully understood what they’d gotten themselves into, Alice and Walter had grimly resigned themselves to accepting without further struggle or protest whatever damage they’d done their own lives, for the sake of making life possible for their children. Apparently it had never occurred to them that their children—one of them, anyway—might not appreciate such a sacrifice. In the eyes of their eldest, they’d simply given up—no other words existed for it—and, far worse, they’d always insisted that he follow their compliant example without even the benefit of having fought a losing battle of his own, all of which had made growing up and establishing himself as an independent individual infinitely more difficult than it might otherwise have been.

  Now, not very far away, a coyote howled. Emerson knew that sound. Not even the Rimfence could keep it out. With a kind of despair which matched the unseen animal’s plaintive cry, he watched the moon descend to the horizon and drop below it, leaving him in darkness more profound than he’d ever known. In minutes, the inexorable mechanics of weather within the asteroid’s atmospheric envelope had ratcheted through another turn and a cold rain began to fall. Before it was over half an hour later, Emerson was soaking wet, chilled to the core, and closer to death by hypothermia than he might have imagined, even as it was happening to him.

  It wasn’t until years later that he understood how fortunate he was—having simply put one weary foot in front of another, again and again, because no better alternative occurred to him, until he could hardly lift his feet at all—to stumble, in what otherwise might have been his final moment, upon an unlikely-looking structure, the first two-story building he’d ever seen, standing by itself on the rain-soaked prairie, on a low rise overlooking the muddy outskirts of Curringer. Unlike the squat, utilitarian pre-fabrications of the Project which another century had called Quonset huts, it was a gingerbread fan
tasy—or nightmare, he wasn’t certain which—of pierced and scalloped facings, lathe-turned spindles, elaborate railings with decorative knobs, and slender, spiral-fluted columns, carried to the ridiculous extremes permitted by the low Pallatian gravity.

  The yard around the house, which consisted of the “native” buffalo grass trimmed back to a more or less uniform height, was illuminated by a pair of chimneyed outdoor lamps attached to tall posts at its corners. The pools of light they spilled across the road failed to diminish a warm, multicolored glow coming from inside through many oddly shaped stained-glass windows.

  There was no fence on either side of the ornately embellished wrought-iron gate which opened onto a broad flagstone walk to the front porch. Above the gate, swinging from a scrolled arch and lit by a small lamp of its own, hung a sign:

  mrs. singh’s boarding house

  Henrietta Singh, Prop.

  Somewhere out behind the house, a dog began to add a barking counterpoint to the coyote’s wail, utterly destroying any vague resolve Emerson might have been entertaining to risk bartering his labor in exchange for a badly needed meal. He was wearily attempting to muster his energy to move on when the front door, sporting a stained-glass window of its own, banged open abruptly. Onto the broad front porch strode the unmistakable figure, visible only in silhouette, of a small, thin woman wearing coveralls. In one hand she carried some sort of weapon.

  “Well, what’s it gonna be, youngster? Kinda chilly and wet out here, ain’t it? Dark, too, now the moon’s down. Planning to go on past or come in where it’s warm and dry?”

  Almost as abruptly as the front door had slammed open, something inside Emerson folded up. He sat down cross-legged in a puddle he hadn’t realized he’d been standing in, put his face in his hands, and tried, without success, not to cry.