Rift (17 page)

Day twelve
. The dip and swell of the raft set up a hypnotic rhythm that made it easy for Reeve to remain in a constant reverie. He lay on his side, staring into the fog on which his thoughts took form.

He saw his father amid his data fields and slates in the small room that he and Marie called “the lab,” where for twenty-five years he had scanned for candidate planets and revised the working drawings of the great ship. Marie smiled a silent hello amid her printouts, but left the main interaction to father and son. Cyrus looked up at his son as Reeve stood at the lab door: “Reeve,” he said, barely glancing up. “Come to lend a hand?” Reeve felt a momentary pang of regret, and wandered in to flip through the ship drawings, endless plans for a gigantic craft that seemed beyond anyone’s power to build. “Your children may fly this ship someday,” Cyrus said. But having children was far beyond Reeve’s span of interest then. “Super,” he heard himself say, unconvincingly. Marie faced the flickering screen with an expression akin to devotion. If her screens showed real stars, Reeve might be interested, but astronomy was all about charts and numbers,
so even though Marie was sweet, he had no interest in anything in the lab, least of all his father’s engineering drawings. “Good-bye, Dad,” Reeve said. Cyrus actually looked up then, as though there were a different tone about that good-bye. His bristly eyebrows perched over his eyes, but couldn’t hide their hurt. “Run along then, Reeve, run along and do whatever it is you do.” Backing away, Reeve said, “I love you, Dad.” But his father was already bent over his drawings.

Other times he recalled the Station explosion, the incandescent flowering of the main reactor and the molten spumes lurching away, all in ghastly silence.

Sometimes, in the mists, he saw Tina Valejo, entombed in her glinting white space suit, drifting just out of reach in the fog, and Bonhert cutting the tether and giving her the push that would last ten thousand years.…

Spar was leaning over him, lifting Reeve’s eyelid with a grimy thumb. “Eyes look like sap welling up in a tree,” he heard the man say. And then: “If he dies, how you folks like to get buried?” It was Marie’s voice that came then: “I’ll burn his remains before I’ll let Lithia have him.”

At this talk of death and burying, Reeve wrestled himself to consciousness.

Spar’s gap-toothed smile greeted him, a tad closer than he wanted. The older man nodded at Reeve, and continued the conversation: “Don’t want to bury him, that it?” He sucked on his cheeks, shaking his head. “You folks got to make your peace with Lithia. Stop expectin’ her to be somethin’ different. She is what she is. It’s like bein’ married. You can wish your wife was different, but it don’t change her, all that wishin’. And it don’t help the re-la-tion-ship, neither. Now, you might wonder, what re-la-tion-ship I got with a planet? Eh?”

“Precisely my question,” came Marie’s sardonic tone.

Reeve interrupted: “Cold,” he said. The fog had quite saturated his clothes, and he had begun to shiver.

He felt a jacket draped over him.

Spar continued: “You’re like an ant on the bark of a tree, old woman. You got no concept how small and puny you are. That tree’s growin’ and pumpin’ fluid, and makin’ leaves and swayin’ in the wind, and all you ants can see is the next aphid.” His shoulders bounced with his silent laugh.

“Look at the black ant calling the red ant a bug!” came Marie’s retort.

Spar turned to Reeve, appealing to him for support. “You like your geo-graphy, Reeve-boy. You like to talk about your mantles and your vents and all that hot rock boilin’ around down there. Then that hot rock spits out up here, you get peeved and try to make it go away. Like an ant tryin’ to stop the sap from bulgin’ out.”

“Ants again!” Marie complained.

“OK, never mind ants. But think: Down below, it ain’t a pot of boiling rock, boy. It’s a world all to itself. We got our mountains up here, but down below, Lithia’s got more. Smack in the middle of the big ball of the world, she’s got mountains, valleys, con-tin-ents. And not only that, they’re upside down! Hangin’ like icicles from the ceiling of a cave. Hangin’ from the big boundary between mantle and core. You think this great Inland Sea is a wonder? Think of the great sea below. Right this minute, it’s washin’ up against those anti-mountains, and wearing ’em down. And weather, boy, iron weather. Rainstorms hailing globs of iron, winds blowin’, gales stormin’. We could all sink this instant, below the rocky waves. Then we’d be an anti-sea! Anti-raft! Anti.…”

“Anti-ants,” Marie supplied dryly.

“You got it!” Spar hopped up excitedly. “By the Lady, you finally pickin’ it up!”

“Mr. Spar, this is a matter of science, not metaphysics. Those structures you’re talking about are naturally occurring features, explainable by science.”

“You and your explanations,” he grumbled. “That don’t change what I’m sayin’.”

“Oh, but it does. You’re trying to give Lithia … a personality. Anthropomorphism in the worst degree.”

“Antro-morp-ism? You got a name for somethin’, you figure you know all about it.”

“It’s not just a name, Mr. Spar, it’s a concept. For example, those big structures you’re talking about, they’re reaction products from heat and pressure at the boundary—the boundary between the pure iron of the core and the impure iron mixtures of the mantle. Like rust on that cooking pot we used last night. Over millions of years, it builds up—or builds down, you could say. You’re right—it is a grand, inverted landscape. But there’s nothing religious about it, I assure you.”

“I’m not talkin’ about religion!” Spar grew agitated, pacing from one end of the raft to the other, accentuating the lurching of the platform and Reeve’s stomach.

Marie would not relent. “Call it what you will.”

“You know your problem?” Spar shouted at her. “You got no awe in you.”

Marie asked, “What good does awe do?”

Close by, Spar muttered: “You gotta ask that, you beyond help.”

In the ensuing silence, Reeve dozed again.

Then Marie was kneeling beside him, offering water. He propped up on one elbow, and decided he was well enough to sit up.

“Feeling better?” she asked.

“Tired of lying here,” he said, gulping the water.

“Well, if you’re complaining, you’re on the road to well.” She smiled a flat, no-nonsense smile.

“Where are we? What time is it?”

Marie looked around. “Middle of the sea in the fog. And it’s morning.”

“We need to hurry, Marie.” He’d been sick for two days, and he suspected the others were not pushing as hard as he would have.

“Easy for you to say, sleeping all day.” She grinned at him, giving her a ghoulish look amid her peeling skin and pale face.

“Damn it, Marie, we have to
hurry
!”

She nodded. “I know that. I poled all night, rather than have us camp.”

Loon was poling now, in deep, easy thrusts like a dancer, pulling up the long metal pipe and slicing it back into the water in a hypnotic rhythm. Reeve flushed, thinking of her emerging from the sea, water slicking over her skin—no fevered vision, but a tangible wonder. Then he thought he must be desperate to want such a creature.

Spar sat on the edge, cleaning his knives and occasionally using the needle end of one to pick his teeth. “So,” he said, looking up at Reeve, “not dead after all.”

“Six lives left, I guess.”

“Nope,” Spar replied. “Five.”

“How you figure?”

“Well, you said your Sky Clave got blown to bits, so that was one life right there, I figure.”

Reeve nodded. “OK, five lives left.”

“You not doing too good, Reeve-boy. Even old Spar, he’s got three lives to go, and you usin’ up yours like there’s no tomorrow.”

Reeve turned out to gaze at the fog.
No tomorrow
. The old expression had a different edge these days. Throwing modesty aside as the luxury it was, he took a pee off the side of the raft, proud that he could stand by himself.

The fog was beginning to thin in the mid-morning sun. He could make out the near shoreline, where, to his surprise, striated canyon walls shouldered up a hundred feet in streaks of pink and gray. A wash punctuated the cliffs to their port side, forming a pebble beach.

Spar came to stand next to him. “Canyon country, Reeve-boy. Won’t be long now we’ll be needin’ a better boat than this, if we want to do the Tallstory River. No raft’s goin’ up
that
river.”

As they stood gazing out in the presumed direction of the Tallstory, a large ship materialized out of the fog some half mile away. For an instant Reeve thought he was imagining it, but Spar saw it too.

“Beach!” the claver yelled. He jumped to the back of the raft and grabbed the pole from Loon. The women were peering off into the distance, staring at the ship, while Spar was barking out, “Can’t outsail ’em; got to try for the shore!” He dipped the pole down and gave a powerful thrust, putting his whole body into it. Loon was gathering their gear up and shoving it into their packs.

“They’ve seen us,” Marie announced.

Reeve swiveled to watch the great oars lift and swoop down into the water.

“Run, run!” Spar shouted. “Leave the pack!” Loon saw the good sense in this as she looked up to see the ship bearing down on them. She jumped into the shallow water with the others and they all splashed to the beach.

Reeve heard Spar’s sword clanking out of its scabbard. Marie swooped up the pole that Spar dropped, her face a fury. Reeve clamped on to the pole. “Give it to me.” Marie snarled a response, but Reeve yanked it from her. “Run,” he said. They all had knives, and Marie could use that if she had to. He turned to watch the ship cast anchor offshore and its occupants dive
into the water. They could swim amazingly well, he observed. Adrenaline filled Reeve’s muscles with fire.

As the first swimmers rushed onto the beach, Reeve selected his man and swung the pole. His opponent, bald and toothless, tucked his knife in his belt and caught at the pole, grappling with Reeve. Losing this test of arm strength, Reeve thrust his knee into the man’s groin. As his assailant doubled over, Reeve chopped his rigid hand down on the man’s neck, to no particular effect. On one side he could hear the clang of Spar’s sword and the shouts of the ruffians, while before him two men advanced. He drew his knife, lusting to plunge it in at least one belly.

Each of the pirates carried a short sword that put his own knife to shame and gave them a huge advantage. One of them made a feint toward him, then stopped, scowling, as a spurt of blood erupted from his forehead. Collapsing backward, he sprawled on the beach, while his companion pivoted to find the source of the attack, only to receive a hurled rock in his jaw. Loon was at work, bless her. As her rocks hailed down, Reeve found a path to Spar, who was now surrounded, and out of range of Loon’s help.

Spar, well bloodied, was fending off five men at once, turning and slicing, ducking and thrusting, moving with graceful economy, his face carved by concentration. The pirates, armed with shorter swords, feinted toward him by turns, waiting for an opening. A larger group of them had gathered at the sea edge, watching with cheers and taunts. Reeve darted in next to Spar, assuming a position covering Spar’s backside, and they began defending a shared territory. Spar left Reeve a small segment and carved out four-fifths of the pie for himself and his long sword. The man was breathing hard, but was still steady on his feet.

Within seconds, Reeve took three cuts on his lower arms, though for now the pirates came at him singly. He considered for a moment that he was about to die
with five good lives left, an irrelevancy that struck him as bizarre and unworthy of his last thought. As an alternative he shouted, “For Station!” thrusting at his next assailant, a big man with many yellow braids; no, a woman. He checked the swing of her dagger with his smaller one, but overcommitted, receiving a knee in his thigh like a battering ram. As he staggered under the blow, she slapped the face of her blade along the side of his head, sending him to his knees.

The whir of Spar’s sword was a split second late as she ducked out of reach. Then she proclaimed, “A quick death for his bravery!”

Still stunned, Reeve looked up for his quick death, but the crowd was ignoring him as Spar crouched in his fighter’s stance, bloodied but ready for the next foray.

“Find the rock slingers,” someone shouted, and the ruffians ran to scale the cliffs where Loon hid.

Reeve staggered to his feet. He heard himself say, “No one dies! I escaped from the Sky Clave to join you! This man is under my protection!”

The pirates, already in a relaxed mood from the show Spar had put on, laughed at this statement. “Sky Clave!” one of them jeered.

“Yes, Sky Clave! I breathe with Sky Clave lungs,” he said, pointing to his breather, “and I bring you gifts of fine rope and flashlights.”

The woman held up her hand to quiet her gang. “If you got these things, then I got ’em already. What else you got I don’t already have?”

Reeve licked his lips with a tongue as dry as sand. What indeed?

Spar barked out, “This Sky Claver is smart! He knows lectrical systems, astro spectogafy, computer meters, arithmetic, a bunch of literchure, and the despised code, forward and backward.”

At this pronouncement, the crowd stood stunned, as though this recitation summarized rare knowledge
indeed. Spar nodded loftily. “And you be killin’ these folk, you lost your last chance for big tech, and livin’ easy like up in the big sky wheel.”

Down the beach came a dozen men, with Marie in tow and Loon struggling like a wild animal in the grasp of a man the size of their raft.

One of the pirates had fetched the Sky Clave pack in question and spilled its contents onto the sand. The woman picked up the flashlight and eventually found the “on” button. Its weak beam in the midday sun was less than impressive. Then the pirates were uncoiling the filament rope, which got more approval, but didn’t capture the imagination. One of the men pulled open a breather pack, and yanked apart the delicate gel nanoform breather.

“Don’t!” Reeve yelled, sick at the waste of the breather. “That’s big tech. It can save you from lung disease. Keep you alive twice as long!”