Futures Near and Far (19 page)

He bounded to his feet and set out, intending to circle to
the southern shore. In spite of his energy, he did not hurry. He knew that he
could always die at the water’s edge again — unnerving as that process might
be. No longer did he have to struggle for every forward pace.

Death indeed came again. Twice. But shortly after the second
revival, as dawn was threatening to call a halt to his nightly progress, he was
drawn on by an impossible sound: the unmistakable roar of water rapids.

Ultimately he was rewarded — if one could call it that — by
the realization that he had come to the end of a narrow peninsula. He could go
no farther unless he chose to swim.

But here, indeed, were rapids.

To his left were the viciously saline waters around which he
had walked — not a sea after all, but a gulf or bay. To his right rested a much
larger body of water. This was a true sea, perhaps an ocean. Straight ahead, a
mere stone’s throw away, another peninsula spread toward a cluster of low
hills. Together, the narrow slivers of land divided the two bodies of water
into nearly separate geographical features connected only by this narrow,
shallow channel.

The rapids were caused by the flow of the larger, higher sea
into the smaller one. The difference in elevation was at least two meters,
enough height to cause the incoming water to tumble downward over the rocks.

Glenn ignored the glaring rays of the sunrise. The
discomfort mattered not at all in the face of the vital information he had just
learned.

Aaron McCandless must have had his men drop Glenn in the
driest region of the planet, the place of greatest torment. The land where he
stood was so arid that the bay actually evaporated faster than the parent sea
could fill it.

That meant that elsewhere,
it wasn’t so arid
. Some major, regular source fed the larger body
of water. It might be barren here, but other parts of its shore had to be more
hospitable. Even now he could see that its hue was healthier, less choked by
salt. By following its coastline, he knew he would eventually come to a place
where extended survival was possible.

He commenced that journey immediately. A newfound spirit
filled his stride. Previously he had depended on faith alone to convince
himself that better conditions lay ahead. This time he had a theory founded on
real evidence.

So accustomed was he to incremental gains that he scarcely
believed his eyes when, just as the heat had forced him up a dune to search for
shelter, he spotted a piece of driftwood in the surf. He slid down the bank,
pranced into the foam, and emerged with the prize. About a meter long, it fit
his grip neatly. Though lightweight, it resisted the prodding of his
fingernail, feeling more like cast aluminum than something that had once been
alive.

Reverently, he raised it above his head.

Something scuttled over the beach ahead. Mentally he
labelled it
crab
, though of course it
was an alien lifeform, crablike only in the sense that it had a flat carapace
and an array of fold-out legs. Instantly he sprinted forward and brought the
club down with full force.

The carapace cracked, giving off a sound like an egg crushed
underfoot. The little creature wriggled, spasmed, and in a bizarre reflex, shook
off all of its legs. An aroma much like fresh lobster filled Glenn’s nostrils.

Giggling like a boy, he lifted a still-quivering leg and
sucked the flesh out of the exoskeleton. Satisfyingly sweet, it quelled the
acid burn in his stomach. Something so good was surely toxic, but so what? He
would savor every last bite.

He danced in a circle around his kill. He had a weapon. He
had food. Shelter would surely come. From these small beginnings, he would
carve out a triumph.

Glenn could smell rain coming, though the first clouds hid
somewhere behind the curve of the planet. After five decades, he was acutely
aware of changes in humidity. Before nightfall, the sky would weep.

Rain was still a rare occurrence, even here in the watershed
of the Sea of Gulfs — named by Glenn for its many bays and peninsulas. Away
from the one permanent river, plants had to struggle to survive from storm to
storm. The few small creatures that roamed among that vegetation provided
barely enough game to sustain a predator as large as a human.

But Glenn had endured. The estuary and coastal tidepools
provided seafood. The river meant a source of drinking water, even if sometimes
he had to dig to reach it. The air was never as unforgivably hot as the region
where he had originally been flung.

He stared at the mountains, at the snow that dusted the
highest peaks. Twice he had followed the riparian zone to the river’s source, a
journey culminating in an arduous climb up canyon walls, through foothills even
more sere than the flats.

When he reached the crest of the pass, all he saw on the far
side was another barren expanse.

The whole planet might be a desert. There were no real
seasons. From the vantage of his main camp, the sun always set over a
particular narrow mesa. The world had little or no axial tilt — no engine to
stir up the weather. Orbital eccentricity alone contributed any suggestion of
“summer” or “winter.” At perihelion, the average temperature climbed a degree
or two higher than at aphelion, a simple function of the distance from the star
to its blighted child.

Periodically Glenn explored other directions, with no better
result. He always returned to the few hundred square miles he thought of as
“his.” Someday he would strike out in a single direction and simply keep going,
perhaps after a rain when the land would be at its most bountiful. The journey
might kill him, but he would revive again and again until eventually he got
somewhere, even if all he did was circle the globe back to the Sea of Gulfs.

But that quest was for some other year. He was not eager to
die again so repeatedly. He had not been killed in almost thirty years, despite
the harsh conditions. That was a victory. The condition of his body was his
badge. A convenient suicide would remove the wrinkles from his leathery skin,
heal the scars from falls or battles with resistant prey. But without those
marks, he would be a blank screen on which Aaron McCandless had typed VICTIM.

That was not an impression he would tolerate. Prisoner or
not, he was a master of this land.

Attuned as he was, he instantly spotted the spoor on the
ground in front of him, though the impressions had been made in a thin layer of
dust atop hard sandstone. The footprints were shorter and narrower than his,
but they were human.

His heart pounded in a way it had not done in his entire
exile. His hand grew so sweaty around the haft of his spear that he nearly
dropped it.

“I knew you’d never let me be, McCandless,” he whispered.

All hesitation gone, he loped forward. The trail cut
aimlessly across the flat. No attempt was being made to hide it. A speck of
blood remained where the walker had passed too close to a porcupine bush. The
stranger had little sense of desertcraft; no one would pass so close to such a
shrub twice in a lifetime.

A line of trees — the only concentration of trees on the
planet, as far as Glenn knew — became visible as he crested a rise. The trail
straightened, leading Glenn without detour to the banks. He arrived in late
afternoon. The first clouds, black as charcoal, had appeared over the Sea of
Gulfs.

From a high bluff he peered down into the eroded channel.
Knee-deep in a cobblestone-lined pool, in a spot destined to be inundated
before the next dawn, stood a woman.

She was naked. Her outer thigh was still spotted with coagulated
blood from the cut made by the porcupine bush, a sure sign that her nanodocs
had been deactivated. She was gently washing away the clots. Body and hair
dripping from a recent dunking, her expression was filled with the stunned,
forlorn disbelief of a castaway.

Appearances could be deceiving, thought Glenn.

Finishing with the wound, she again dipped fully into the
water and stepped, trailing rivulets, onto dry cobbles. She stumbled unsteadily
to a patch of shade and sat down to rub her feet. Blisters dotted her soles.

No plants grew in the riverbed — the periodic flashfloods
stole them away. The shade was that of a large “oak” that projected down from
the bluff, its trunk not five paces from Glenn’s position. As the woman’s eyes
adjusted to the reduced glare, she looked upward and, with a sudden jerk of her
head, fastened her gaze on Glenn. She grew utterly still.

“Who are you?” After half a century of disuse, Glenn’s voice
was a barely intelligible croak.

She shied back, eyes wide, all but bolting away. Glenn had
to give her credit for a realistic human response. Were she a typical
representative of society, she might well have never seen anyone as old and
worn as he, arrayed with such long, matted hair and tangled, chest-length
beard, wearing only a cowl of animal pelts scarcely fit for a barbarian. It
still shocked him to look at his reflection in pools and see something as
eroded as the land.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said, hoping his
Galactic Standard wasn’t too accented. “I’ve never seen anyone else on this
planet. How did you get here?”

She hesitated. “I was convicted of being an enemy of the
state. This was where I was sent to serve my sentence.”

“Did McCandless sentence you?”

“Who?”

“The magistrate.”

She shook her head, confused, then her eyebrows rose in
comprehension. “That was the old magistrate — four or five coups back, before I
immigrated to this sector. The new guy sent me here.”

Glenn turned away, concealing his reaction. McCandless gone?
His term would have lasted for decades yet, but it was true that the political
situation in these frontier areas was volatile. If it weren’t, the asshole
might never have been spooked by what Glenn had done.

Still, unless he could prove she was lying, he supposed he
was obliged to treat her with consideration.

“It’s not safe down there.” He indicated the high-water mark
where the scoured banks gave way to weeds, vines, and succulents. “Better join
me up here.”

She glanced at the clouds and appeared to grasp the threat
without further explanation. No longer inching away, she examined him in a way
she had not done at first. Perhaps she was wondering if being exiled meant that
she would look as blighted as he, given time. If so, the prospect unsettled her
deeply.

Aside from the cowl, he did carry one other item on his
person — a waist pouch that hung from a thong. Suspended from that was the
carcass of a rabbitlike animal he had killed. Her eyes settled on the furred
body, recognized it as food, and licked her lips.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

She nodded tentatively, as if afraid to admit to such need.

“I can cook this for us, then.”

Her reticence eased. Wincing from the pain of her feet, she
clambered up the bluff. She accepted his hand to bring her onto level ground,
and stood self-consciously a pace from him.

“I’m Judith Vining.”

He coughed. “Glenn Ashwood.” He waved upriver toward one of
his camps. “We need to take shelter before the storm hits.” The clouds were
pressing rapidly toward the coast.

“Is it far?”

“No more than a kilometer.”

She sighed.

“I have nothing to help your feet,” he said. “Would you like
me to carry you? You’re small. I could manage it.”

She shook her head quickly. That was the answer Glenn
wanted. This was a proper time to keep a distance, to be intimidated by him. He
would have been suspicious of anything else.

He checked her feet. They were not critical. Nor was she as
sunburned as she might have been. Her morph was Polynesian, a popular fashion
among women even back when Glenn was exiled. Nutmeg brown, with long raven hair
scattered over her shoulders, Judith had reddened so little from the day’s
exposure that he guessed she would not even suffer peeling as long as she kept
to the shade during the next few days. Thanks to the river trees and the
incoming clouds, shade would be abundant.

“Your jumpship’s crew was kinder than mine,” Glenn said
gruffly, and guided them to a path.

o0o

They arrived beneath the rock overhang that shielded
Glenn’s camp just as the rain began to fall. Within seconds, a solid wall of
water obscured the landscape.

Judith sank onto the packed earth and gawked at the torrent.
Then she shivered, because the temperature had plunged.

“Here,” Glenn said, handing her a blanket of sewn animal
pelts — his old one, saving the new one for himself.

She accepted the article gladly, wrapping it around and
hugging it close. With her womanly shape obscured, she resembled a child. Glenn
stifled a pulse of paternal instinct, busying himself igniting the tinder of
his cookfire and adding fuel. The skinning and dressing of the “rabbit” filled
the awkward lapse of conversation.

By the time the meat was cooked, the weather front had moved
on, leaving only a feeble trickle of rain. Down in the canyon the river burbled
enthusiastically, a mere precursor of things to come.

The blackness outside lessened as the faint glow of twilight
leaked under the cloud layer from the west. Glenn genuflected, a bit of
religious ritual he’d adopted out of thanks that he had not been sent to a
planet tidally locked to its primary, with himself abandoned beneath a
perpetual noon. He treasured the night, and this one would be especially fine,
the stars incandescent now that the dust had been rinsed from the atmosphere.

He handed Judith a roasted haunch. She attacked it with
fervor, taking small bites only because larger ones would have seared her
palate. In a short time he gave her another piece, then sat down to have some
himself.