Fire Time (19 page)

She drew away from him. ‘What is this nonsense? Do you suppose I want you nailed down here? No, you’re going to – re-up, and I’ll be there to watch.’

That was when the Sun sprang over the world-rim.

Today she whispered a lusty suggestion in his ear, adding,
‘We’ll have to wait a while, confound it. Still, I’ll have you here a tad longer than you figured.’

‘What?’ He decided she’d explain when she was ready. They disengaged and he exchanged proper greetings with the others. Presently he was sprawled on a mattress beside Meroa, his pipe alight, a mug of hot spiced jackfruit cider to hand. A couple of family elders lay nearby. The rest of the folk gathered around his troopers in different parts of the room, since these would have things to relate from Sehala less depressing than Larreka’s word. He had of course used his walkie-talkie, via radio relays, to keep his wife informed; and she had passed the news on.

‘They had already settled it between them: When he returned to Valennen, she would stay behind. It would not be the first time; they had erstwhile met reasons, like undue hazard or shortage of transport or a small child, why she could not accompany him. She had protested: ‘The youngsters are grown. And if the barbarians do overrun you, I want them to know they’ve been in a fight with me too.’

(He answered starkly, ‘I can’t be both places. Foul years are coming to South Beronnen also, and nobody else around the ranch has the kind of military knowledge you’ve picked up. For the family – the whole futtering future – we’d better get the spread properly organized. ‘You’re tapped, soldier.’)

‘Who’s our human guest?’ he asked.

‘Jill Conway,’ Meroa said. ‘She grew restless and went out with Rafik. They’ll doubtless draggle in pretty soon.’

‘Gr’m.’ Larreka told himself not to worry. His youngest son should be able to last out even as vicious a storm as howled and drummed outside. But Jill–

Well, they died, they died, the poor all-powerful starfarers. If you started caring for them, you had to make it a bond to a bloodline more than to a single person. And thus it had been between him and the Conways. Yet there had always been something special about Jill, maybe because she used to stump across the yard before she could talk, laughing for joy, whenever he called. Chaos! Why hadn’t she bred and given him a new little girl to uncle?

Meroa chuckled and patted his hand. ‘Stop fretting,’ she
said. ‘Your pet’s an adult. She knows what to do in worse weathers than this.’ Businesslike: ‘It’s due to her that you won’t simply overnight here, you’ll stay a few days.’

Larreka sucked smoke and waited.

‘She heard about the vote against you, and called me, since you’d left Sehala,’ his wife said. ‘She was either bleeding or snorting live steam on your account – I’m not sure which; I don’t know humans that well – and she wanted to help. It seems that new boss or whatever he is in Primavera won’t let her fly you north. Sometime you must explain to me why in destruction’s name they listen to such a creature. Anyhow, I had an idea. You know those dried rations humans carry in the field, the food they must have that natural soil doesn’t bear. I asked if she could make the same kind of thing for you. Meat, that is. You can forage along the way all right, but you need meat for the strength to move fast. If instead of hunting, you stir powder into a dish of water– You see?’

‘I blazing well do!’ Larreka slapped her rump almost as loudly as the thunder went. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’

‘You doubtless did in the past, but never felt this urgency before,’ said an in-law. ‘And of late you’ve had a great deal else on your mind.’

Larreka scarcely heard. His attention clung to Meroa.
By the Three,
he rejoiced,
I’ve got a soldier’s wife, if ever a male did.
The sixty-fours of females he had mounted when she wasn’t around were as if they had never been. ‘They’d always been incidental, maybe more of a habit than a need. Noncoms in the legions seldom married. Meroa used to purr when he happened to mention an encounter and tell her how much better she was.) He couldn’t think of words, but, catching her eye, he snapped his tail in salute.

‘Jill put the apparatus together – she wheedled a friend out of it – and brought it here,’ Meroa went on. ‘It’ll take two or three days to make an ample supply, she says. You’ll save more than that on the trail.’

And I will have you meanwhile,
said her look.

This was the thing that humans might come to know about, but never to know: What it meant when someone
who had been a part of you for two or three hundred years was gone. Larreka and Meroa would bid each other farewell, and though the blessed radio would carry their words after he reached Port Rua, they could not be sure they would ever touch again.

Well, she was a soldier’s wife; and he was a soldier’s husband.

(It wasn’t that simple. The legions had learned to do everything possible which made for lessened sorrow. They did not accept enlistments of close kin into the same one of them; rather, they kept the companies and regiments wildly diverse, a practice that Hanshaw had remarked would be unthinkable for his race. They discouraged marriage and, through their traditional standards of maleness, encouraged promiscuity; but the very camp followers were made to shift among them from time to time. They exchanged stations every octad, and two successive stations were always far apart. And even so, even so, there had to be rituals, customs, tokens, help, to keep a trooper going after his long-term sword brother was dead… Larreka dismissed the passing thought. He and Meroa had the Triad and their work; the survivor would survive.

(He had decided in these latter years that the work would be more use to him than the Triad.)

‘I’d better let Jill tell the rest herself,’ Meroa added. Her glance flickered around the group. ‘No insult. What you don’t know, you can’t be guilty of concealing from that Primavera boss; and Yakulen may have sore need of his good will.’

They signified assent.

‘What we can discuss openly,’ Meroa said to Larreka, ‘is Rafik. He wants to enlist – in the Yissek, because of your ideas about the Fiery Sea coming under attack soon, where they are.’ Dryly: ‘Also, I suspect, because of what he’s heard about balmy tropical paradises and eager dusky maidens.’

‘No,’ Larreka replied. ‘Not if I can talk him out of it. Can’t he see, his best service is right here? If we can hold Valennen, a few raids on the Fieries won’t matter. If we
can’t, then we’ve lost the Fieries too, and Beronnen is next in line.’

‘
Chu,
do talk to him. Bear in mind, he probably doesn’t care for the idea of his mother being his military chief.’

‘He’d care for those islands less. Already the Rover’s made them the opposite of paradise. The Yissek’s fighting typhoons and flood tides and famines oftener than it’s fighting barbarians. The dusky maidens are too busy staying alive to be particularly eager any more.’

‘I tried to tell him that, but it only fanned his idealism. Service where service is needed, no matter the risk!’

‘Then I’ll tell him that a soldier who willingly takes risks is a soldier the legion is better off without – Speak of a rammer and he’ll stave in your boat.’

The noise from the entry was immensely relieving, footstamp, servants busy, Rafik’s deep young tones and Jill’s bugle clarity. He heard the girl say, ‘–we thought of taking shelter, but no tree would be safe with all that lightning blatting around, so he took me on his back and galumphed his hardest–’

His son staggered in, soaked despite a rubdown, hailed them, and collapsed onto a mattress. That must have been a real fiend’s race he ran. Well, Meroa had birthed him on a vessel beating through Ripship Straits in the teeth of an easterly, and a tinge of that had remained with the lad.
I‘m proud of you, of you and all the rest. I‘m no Yakulen – only by marriage – I’m not in the way of seeing my family as octads of cousins sharing the same land. I’m an old Haelener, whose world has his wife and kids at its core.

Jill followed. She had shed her clothes. Her skin glowed from toweling. The hair stayed as wet as Rafik’s foliage, trailing firelight shimmers. Having been carried, she was not exhausted, and sped to hug Larreka. ‘Sugar Uncle! Hello!’

Watching her come, he thought how oddly lovely she was. Once in her adolescence, when they’d been for a swim, she had commented on that. ‘Tell me for honest, won’t you? How horrible do I seem to you? Sure, you like me, but how do I look? Four-limbed, a torso tottering along, no whiskers, no hump, no tail, no plants, bald except for ridiculous
little patches, breasts dangling on top and … and genitalia right out in front too, in sight of the world and everybody–’

‘How do you think I look?’ he had replied.

‘You’re beautiful. The way a cat is beautiful.’

‘Okay, you remind me of a saru in flight, or a swordleaf in a high wind, or whatever. Now shut up and break out our lunch.’

For a blink of time, while she dashed across the floor, he wished he could spend an hour being her human lover. To gaze into those curious half-white eyes, rub beak against beak and taste thick pink lips, send fingers down the long slim blue-veined throat, across the softnesses beneath to their sunrise-colored tips and on over a many-curved slope till they rested between her thighs.… Did humans ever have such wonderings about Ishtarians? Unlikely; humans were too frail. His was the merest flicker of sadness that he could never be closer than now to her. Damn!
When
would she grab herself a mate and start whelping?

She cast herself onto her knees and into his arms. Her nails dug through the leaves of his mane.

Larreka bellowed for more cider. Jill liked it too. ‘I brought you a kilo of tobacco,’ she said.

‘You brought more than that, I hear,’ he answered. ‘Freeze-dried rations – You’re grand.’

She switched to English. He saw and felt the bleakness upon her. ‘You know about the ban on transport, don’t you? Instead of battering my skull against the wall, I kept quiet and … went around collecting firearms and ammunition. You’ve got mighty little in Valennen. I couldn’t be very bold, in case that Dejerine bastard got wind of it. But I bought, begged, borrowed, a couple of times I stole – about twenty rifles and pistols, plus a few thousand rounds for them.’

‘Jill, you’re a laren!’

‘The least I could do, Uncle. Let’s be practical, though. First, you’ll have to arrange for porters while you’re here, to help lug that stuff to the north coast.’

‘Couldn’t you just flit it to Port Rua in a small vehicle?’

‘Uh-uh. Too obvious. Dejerine could wonder why Miss
Conway took a junket. He could check back and confiscate what he found. Whereas if I go off overland on a field trip, and the weapons aren’t really missed for weeks – You see?

‘Another thing. Several thousand rounds aren’t that flinkin’ many. You know how ninety-nine per cent are bound to miss in action, no matter how skilled the marksmen; and you have maybe ten skilled marksmen in Valennen, right? You’ll want an instructor who can spend a minimum of ammo on training more. And it’ll help if, come combat, that instructor is there in the line, firing shots that go where they’re supposed to.’

He understood before she had finished. ‘You don’t mean you aim to come along with me?’ he exclaimed.

She nodded. She had drawn knees close to chin and folded arms around them; the ends of her wet hair stroked her breasts and left gleaming streaks. ‘I mean exactly that, Uncle.’

Dejerine had found it astonishingly hard to acquire a site for his ground installations. He wanted a place not too far from Primavera, and discovered an area two hundred kilometers eastward which his planetological team reported was suitable. It was otherwise useless land, stony, dusty when rain didn’t make it muddy, barren aside from scattered leathery shrubs, deserted by the natives. Repeated periastrons were doubtless responsible for that, droughts which killed off vegetation followed by cloudburst after cloudburst to wash away exposed topsoil. The planet had many such regions. Yet a substantial water table remained, the bedrock was solid, the surrounding hills could be quarried for building material.

He expected that the Tayessa family, to whose ranch this desert belonged, would be glad to sell it. No doubt they’d jack the price as high as they were able, but he had plenty of
gold along, plus authority to draw pesos if Federation currency was demanded. He was dumbfounded when, after conferring, the owners refused.

On the basis of what xenological knowledge he had, he replied to their representative: ‘I am aware that no individual owns the land, but rather the Tayessas do, and you must consider the rights of generations unborn. However, surely titles change hands, for one reason or another. Have you the right to deny the unborn what my gold can buy?’

‘What can it?’ she answered through the interpreter Hanshaw had supplied. ‘The Red Sun is here. Who can eat gold, or shelter in it?’

‘I can pay in money of my people.’

‘How can we spend that, if no shipments are coming from Earth?’

In the end, he negotiated a contract which bound the Navy to send specified goods within a specified period. His superiors were going to give him hell for it; but no Ishtarians were likely to offer a better deal. The alternatives were either to set up in the antipodes, where only goblins lived, and thus complicate his job without end, or to seize and hold a spot by force. (Ah-ah-ah! Imperialism!) In writing his report, to go home by the next courier boat, he indicated tactfully but unmistakably that if the Navy did not honor the contract, he would resign his commission – and speculated how to let Jill Conway know he had done this.

Immediately upon taking possession, he brought down his men and established camp. Then he phoned to Primavera and requested a visit by Ian Sparling. The engineer should have a large amount of good advice in him, if he could be conciliated.

Sparling’s flyer landed the next day. Ever nearer to each other, both suns were aloft in a breathless sky. The cracked red clay wavered with heat; the hills around were gray and unreal. Prefab barracks clustered offside, ugly hemicylihders, while machinery cluttered the rest of fifty square kilometers, brawling like dinosaurs among sweating men. Dejerine, who had been making a general inspection, conducted him to an office small and bare but air-conditioned.