Earthbound (12 page)
Authors: Joe Haldeman
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #Adventure, #Fantasy, #General
Or maybe they didn’t want to hang around Camp David, either.
As we approached the NASA jet, a strip of fuselage swung down, becoming a staircase. No wide Martians to worry about.
The others hurried up the steps. Paul put a hand on Boyer’s shoulder. “Wait.”
“What for?”
“Just wait.” I stepped slowly past them as the president shook loose. “You can’t—”
“I think I can. This is my plane, and you’re not getting on it.”
“Don’t you dare. I can have you shot down.”
Paul looked at the assault rifle in his hands, and smiled. “Shall I pretend you didn’t say that?” He gestured for me to go up the steps and then he followed me, backwards, keeping his eye on Boyer.
“You think they won’t obey me.”
“Pretty sure they won’t. Go back and ask them.”
He looked around, back up to the lodge, then the control shack. The two pilots stared back.
Then he started walking. “I’m going to stand right behind your exhaust. If you start the jet, you’ll be a murderer.”
Paul stepped inside and slapped a red button by the door, and turned to look down on the president. “You do what you will,” he said as the stairs rose off the ground. “This thing doesn’t have a rear view mirror.”
I sat down and buckled up. “Is that true?”
He sat in the pilot seat and the harness clamped itself around him. “Well, sure. Where would you put a mirror?” A flatscreen blinked on and showed the black tarmac behind him.
The president stepped into view and planted his feet wide apart, standing with his hands on his hips.
“All this and stupid, too.” He tapped a sequence of keys.
“You’re going to—”
“Relax. The nozzle’s more than a meter above his head. I could roast him if I goosed it, but I’ll just bleed in a little fuel and creep away.” He put on a headset. “Control, this is NASA 1.” He paused. “Roger. We had to leave one behind for weight limitations. Taking off due north, into the wind? When we’re over the clouds I’ll take a heading of about 250°, destination Northern California.” He nodded. “Roger, thanks. Same to you guys. Over and out.”
The engine started with a loud pop, and I saw Boyer take off running. With a low whine, the plane inched forward.
“Everybody stay buckled in till I finish turning left above the weather. Then the flight attendant will come around with drinks.” He laughed. “Oh, hell. We left him behind.”
8
Nobody had said anything about drawing fire as we took off. I supposed whatever was going to happen would happen. Paul kept the plane low, treetop level, a minute or so after take-off, so I guess a person on the ground, with forest overhead, probably wouldn’t have time to aim at us and fire.
Then I was pressed back into the seat and the plane roared and rattled as it screamed for altitude. We suddenly broke out of the clouds into afternoon sun but kept accelerating, almost straight up. After a minute, he throttled down and leveled off, green rounded mountaintops drifting by underneath us, sticking out of the misty clouds.
The cabin became quiet. Paul turned around in his seat and spoke normally. “Sorry; should’ve warned you. I wanted to get out of range, in case they had heat-seekers.” He checked his watch. “It’ll take us about four hours to get to California. Landing sometime after three, Pacific time.”
“Want to fly over Fruit Farm on the way?” Dustin said.
“Yeah, see if anybody’s home.”
“See if we draw any small-arms fire,” Namir said. “That would help with our planning.”
I reclined and closed my eyes, but there was no way I could sleep. Too much adrenaline, and whatever chemical follows it. I’d be nervous even if I didn’t have anything to be nervous about.
Card and Alba and Dustin had rearranged the rear of the plane so it had seats around a table. Card had found a notebook made of sheets of paper. Each page had the presidential seal and Mervyn Gold’s name embossed (in gold) at the top. He was drawing a complicated geometrical doodle with a pencil, filling the page from the upper lefthand corner down. It was actually beautiful, in a rigid formal way.
I sat down next to him. “I didn’t know you had artistic talent.”
“I don’t; this ‘me’ doesn’t. Picked up some from my second avatar.”
Dustin looked up from his book. “Your different personae had different skill sets?”
“Yeah. Pity we don’t have the third one here. He was the negotiator, the businessman.”
“You learned from both of them?” I asked.
“It’s not like learning.” He shrugged. “Sort of ‘being,’ actually. There’s a quantum-chemistry explanation; they start out as perfect duplicates, but begin to diverge in a microsecond or so. Personality more than specific skills. You would have liked either of them more than the original.”
I squeezed his arm. “You’ll do.”
“The other two,” Dustin said, “did they have separate social lives? Different circles of friends?”
“Yes and no . . . we overlapped, and everyone we knew was aware that there were three of me. It’s not really complicated. Most of my friends have at least one avatar.”
“Feel lonely now?” Alba asked.
“Yeah. You never doubled?”
“Couldn’t afford it. Actually, it was pretty low on the list of stuff I wanted.”
He nodded. “Well, when you get older . . . if it’s ever possible again.”
He was starting to tremble. I stroked his arm and his smooth head when he faced me. “You got a sister back, anyhow.”
“A younger sister.” He smiled. “That’s stranger than my dupes.”
After a pause, Alba said, “Any way you can get them back?”
He grimaced. “Yes and no. The physical bodies are just . . . spoiled meat. Some version of their personalities ought to be hard-filed somewhere. Ought to be. I could sue if they’re not.”
“Carmen, you want to get me a bite?” Paul called back. “Better not leave the stick.” The autopilot would take us straight to Fruit Farm unless the power went out. Then it would be nice to have someone up there who knew how and where to point the plane.
I rummaged through the bag of stuff from the NASA vending machine and got him a cookie and some nuts, and a bottle of water. He gave me a peck on the cheek when I delivered the snacks.
There were two auxiliary screens on, one with some porn thing and the other with page 13 of
Pride and Prejudice
. He probably wanted me to comment, but I wouldn’t.
Pride and Prejudice
. He probably wanted me to comment, but I wouldn’t.
The top part of the windshield was darkened to blot out the sun. It was solid clouds underneath, as far as I could see. “I wonder how far the clouds go.”
“No telling. Feels funny, not having the weather.” His voice dropped. “How is your brother doing?”
“Hard to say. Trying to sort things out, I suppose.”
“He may be more help than Dustin, dealing with the commune.”
“Maybe. I’ll talk to them.”
“Ply him with peanuts,” he said, crunching down on a mouthful.
Maybe a near beer. I picked up a couple and put them on the table and sat down.
“Thanks. Are we on course?”
“Headed west, anyhow.” I watched him pop the can and take a drink. “What do you think these communists will be like?”
“Communists? Like people in the commune?”
“What would you call them, then?”
“Earthers. Most of them. Not sure what they call themselves.”
“You’ve never been up there?”
“God, no. It’s at the other end of the state. Long way to go for fresh vegetables. Wish I had, now.”
“Yeah; we don’t really know what to expect.”
Dustin put down his book. “Quietly crazy. That’s what I expect. Who knows, though, after seventy years.”
“Noisy and crazy,” Card said. “Trigger-happy hillbillies. That’s a cube cliché.”
That was interesting. “With a basis in fact?”
“Not Fruit Farm specifically. Back around the turn of the century, 2100, some communes in the East got together and raised some hell. They tried to secede from the United States, piecemeal. They were followers of that guy . . .”
“Lazlo Motkin,” Alba said.
“Yeah. They had a regular little war.”
“They weren’t even one geographical area,” Alba said. “Spread out over three or four states. They claimed there was an ‘existential border’ between them and us.”
“They had lawyers to prove it?”
“Lawyers and guns,” Card said. “What more do you need?”
“Anything come of it?” I asked.
Card shook his head. “All over in a couple of months. Some people jailed, some leaders executed. Lazlo Motkin himself died in a military action.”
“Which was embarrassing to America,” Alba said. “He was running for president at the time. He was just a rich crackpot until he died. Then he became a symbol of government oppression.”
I had a vague memory of him sending us a loony message on the starship. If we were good Americans, we would do a kamikaze strike on the Others’ home world.
“We ought to start out assuming they are nice rational people,” Elza said, “who have some nineteenth-century ideas about things like electricity.”
“Wonder if they’ll have power after Wednesday,” Alba said. “The only people in the whole country?”
“Not if the Others do the same thing as before,” Dustin said. “Everything stopped working, even batteries. Stuff like hydroelectric power and wind machines. Kept turning around, but without making any juice.
“The question is whether living with this archaic technology makes the Fruit Farmers better equipped for dealing with the brave new world that’s coming. We’re assuming so, but you can argue that their technological primitivism is only skin-deep. They’ve had electricity all along—home-made, but what’s the difference?”
Namir had gone to the head in back of the plane, and he emerged with a bottle of whisky and a stack of cups. “Let’s drink to NASA and their legendary foresight.”
I had a small glass of the stuff, smoky and smooth, and before I finished it, a curtain of fatigue fell over me like a sedative. I walked unsteadily back to my seat, reclined it, and was asleep before my head hit the plastic pillow.
9
I woke suddenly when the plane’s engine throttled down, and we banked sharply. I raised the curtain on my window and saw that we were angling down over some heavily forested hilly land. There was a small, meandering river.
“Should be only a few miles,” Paul said, his amplified voice flat and crackling. “I’m going down low and dead slow, and will cut the engine as we glide over the commune. Your flatscreens should be showing what’s directly under us.” I reached forward and tapped the screen on the back of the seat in front of me. Treetops rolled by underneath, slowly growing larger as we dropped.
They must hear us coming. Were people running for cover? Running to man the anti-aircraft lasers?
“They won’t have lasers.” Namir was reading my mind. “A shotgun could do some damage, though.”
“Why no lasers?”
“They could. But they aren’t getting megawatts out of twentieth-century solar cells and wind machines.”
The forest abruptly stopped, replaced by squares of pasture and fruit trees in neat lines. We were low enough that I could see cows looking up at us. The engine stuttered off, and we glided with a sound of rushing air.
A stockade wall and a glimpse of blue rectangle—a swimming pool where a half dozen naked people pointed at us. Two of them waved, much better than pointing guns.
Just past the pool was a large low building. “That’s the common,” Dustin said. “We used to go there to watch cube.” Past that were dozens of individual dwellings, I supposed multi-family. It looked as if they all started out with a basic octagonal shape, and grew in various directions.
People with clothes on looked up at us, shading their eyes from the low sun. At the entrance to the stockade, a man had a small assault rifle on a sling hanging from his shoulder. He watched us go over without raising the gun.
There were watchtowers at each corner of the stockade. From our angle you couldn’t see who or what was in them. There was a shed at the entrance to the place, probably where they sold to outsiders. Then a dirt road that cut through more pasture and fruit trees, before it plunged into the forest.
Paul turned the engine back on with a pop and a quiet roar, and we gained a little altitude. “Now let’s see how far we’ll have to walk,” he said.
We followed the winding river for a couple of minutes. A dirt path went alongside it, maybe adequate for a jepé, but not wide or straight enough for landing. Then the gray strip of an autoway slid by. Paul rose up in a banking curl, crossing over the river and then back again. He lined up perfectly with the middle lane, and eased the plane down. No sign of any auto traffic, but this probably wasn’t a busy road even under normal conditions.
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