The 97th Step (3 page)

He stared into the darkness, and for the first time in years, he felt tears form and begin to stream down his face. He closed the window before they could freeze on his cheeks. Farewell, little brother. Farewell.

It was midmorning before he had the coil rewound yet again. He trudged to the south field, where his father worked the dying soil with the old tractor. The vehicle was even older than the flitter, hardly more than a repellor plate with antique ultrasonic diggers and cutters. Amidst the cloud of dust, his father looked like a statue riding the tractor, both man and machine covered with the powdery earth, a red-brown hue, a single biomechanical unit.

He waited while his father finished the row, then brought the tractor to idle near where Mwili stood.

"Yes?"

"I have finished the coil, Baba."

"Took you long enough."

"I'll go to repair the flitter now."

"Be quick about it."

Mwili hesitated. There was no chance, but he might as well ask. "Could I take the tractor? It would save three hours—"

"No. I will not slack my work so that you may ride in comfort! Meditate upon your sins as you walk.

Gain humility from prayer. Such is the Rule."

The strap was inside, out of his father's reach, and even if it had not been, Mwili could not have brought himself to echo the religious refrain. He was leaving, forever, and whatever he said now would be his last words to his father, whether the man knew it or not. Instead, he said, "Good-bye, Baba." With that, he turned and started walking away. He would miss his mother, but it would not come as a surprise to her.

She knew. She had known for some time, he was sure of that. At night, or when his father was away, he heard it in her voice. He might have offered to take her with him but it was her choice to remain. She could have left years ago, and had not. She had her own destiny, and she had made her decision, based on things she would not explain to her son. Of his leaving, she knew, and he knew that she knew. There was no need to speak of it. Faced with her tears, he was not certain of his resolve, so he thought to avoid them altogether.

Behind him, his father might have considered calling him back, might have thought to chastise him, but he did not. Instead, the only sound was the whine as the tractor's old repellors cycled back online, and blew clouds of dust into the cold morning sky. Mwili marched away, passing the house where he'd lived his entire life. His eyes were dry, and he felt less regret leaving his home than he had for the loss of his ferret.

He did not look back, and thus did not see the tiny form of that ferret, scratching at the window of Mwili's room, patiently waiting to be admitted back into his cage.

Three

"AUTHORIZATION CODE."

The Confed operator's voice was cold, and it was not a question but an order. Give the improper response, and you'd be in shit to the eyebrows, and fast. Do something really stupid, like try to manually bail out, and the wheelworld's antiship guns would fry you faster than you could blink. Coming and going was at the Confed's order, period.

Ferret punched a button, and his com computer fed a binary number series into the outgoing data. The numbers were legit, but the ship had no right to them. Such counterfeits were expensive, but part of the biz, figured in on every trip. High Confederation officials couldn't be bought easily, but the lower echelons supplemented their pay with graft; one of the many side benefits of being one of the Chosen.

There came a wait as the controller's computer digested and checked out Ferret's code.

"
Don't Look
, you are cleared for sling out."

"Copy, Chüsai Control," Ferret said into the com. "I am locked into sling."

"Stand by," the tech said. "Six seconds to commence. Five… four…"

Ferret glanced at Stoll, who looked to be asleep in his form chair. This was all automatic; Control would put them into an orbit that would avoid the lumbering boxcars dropping into the planet's gravity well; after that, he would fire up the ship and take over until they reached Bender distance.

—two… one… and… launch," the tech said.

Ferret felt the soft hand of sling acceleration press him against the form chair as Chüsai Tomadachi spat the
Don't Look Back
into the vacuum outside its metal walls.

His viewscreens lit, and the photomutable gel cameras fore and aft showed deep ahead and the wheelworld behind as the ship left the city's embrace. He was glad to be away. There had been violence in his life—a smuggler and thief had to count that as part of the business, like it or not—but the incident in the bar had dismayed him. Not so much for what he had done, but for his loss of control. The slaver was scum, and he would recover from his injuries; likely that his stock-in-trade—people—fared far worse most of the time. No, if there was any kind of karmic justice, the slaver deserved worse than he had been dealt. But to slip the restraints of reason like that had shaken Ferret a great deal. Control of his mind was paramount; elsewise, there was the chance that he might slip into a state of fanaticism. Just like-Just like his father.

Before he did that, he would rather be dead.

"Thinking about the slaver?"

Ferret continued to look at the holoprojic screens.

A Confed cutter hung against the blackness, waiting to strike should the unthinkable happen and somebody who wasn't supposed to leave or arrive tried to do so. The cutter seemed to flash by as the
Don't Look
flicked past.

"Yes. I was thinking about the slaver."

"I've never seen you like that," Stoll said. "Not in ten years."

Ferret turned his chair slightly, to look at the fat man. "I've never told you about where I came from.

What I was before we met."

Stoll laughed softly. "I remember our first meeting. I had to laugh. You, a skinny kid, trying to steal my flitter. I thought surely you were brain-damaged."

Ferret smiled at the memory. "Yeah. I was pretty cocky by then. I'd been in the lanes for five years, and surviving pretty well. I thought the galaxy was my oyster."

"You were lucky."

"Ferret nodded. "Very. I could have died a hundred ways. There must be—" He stopped.

"—gods that watch out for fools," Stoll finished. "But you don't like to talk about gods."

"We've never discussed religion," Ferret said. His voice was stiff.

"That's the point, lad. We've been running together for ten years, and we never have talked about such things. Even a fairly stupid fat man such as myself notices such omissions."

Ferret sighed. "I tried to put all that behind me. Where I came from, what I was raised. I try not to think about it!"

"Haven't been too successful at it, have you?"

Ferret glanced back at the screens. No help there. "Everything was fine on automatic. "Sometimes," he said finally. "But the slaver and his whip brought back an old memory."

Stoll didn't speak. He was very good that way, never pressing. He'd never asked once, not in ten years, about Ferret's past. Ferret had been Stoll's apprentice at first, then his partner, and each of them had kept their own secrets without any prying from the other. They were friends, but not snoopy ones.

Ferret let the silence stretch. He took a deep breath. "I was raised on Cibule," he said. "Son of a dirt-poor farm couple steeped in The God of the Holy Script. It wasn't a pleasant childhood."

"He glanced over at Stoll, who looked attentive, but not to the point of pulling more than Ferret was willing to give.

Fifteen years, Ferret thought. I guess it can't hurt me anymore. Not with this man who has saved my ass more than once.

"I took it for as long as I could," he said. "Then one day, I decided to leave…"

Four

THE MOST VALUABLE things he owned were his boots, and those he wore; otherwise, Mwili took nothing but the money he'd saved and the small backpack that contained his lunch and the coil. Once he got the flitter running, he'd borrow it to get to Toilet Town. The supplies would keep in their hiding place; his father could find them easily enough, and he could tow the flitter behind the tractor when he finally got around to locating it. It would make work for him, but Mwili did not worry too much about that. His father seemed to think that work and God were the only two things in the universe, anyway.

The sun warmed the land some, though it was still cold. He had his gloves today, that helped, and he wore the better of his two gi jackets. His mother had packed him a lunch and water bottle, and he would worry about more food when next he was hungry.

As he walked the lonely road, Mwili felt a mixture of emotions. A small, nagging fear rode him, as if he halfway expected God to hurl some kind of fiery lance at him for daring to go against the Holy Rules.

Honor and Obey Thy Father topped the list. There were civil penalties to go with the holier ones.

Runaways were dealt harsh justice if caught, and on Cibule, they almost always were caught. That was why he had to get offworld.

On the other hand, there was an elation bubbling from him that the fear could not dampen altogether. He had made a choice. Rather than just plodding through his miserable existence, he had taken a step. It might cost him more grief than anything he'd ever done, but he was willing to risk it. There was a time to stand and wait, and a time to move, and he could no longer bear inaction.

As he walked, the dust powdering up behind him in small cloudy showers, he spun fantasies about what might happen to him. He could stow away on a freighter, get to one of the densely populated planets, and find some kind of work. He was strong, not too stupid, and fairly good with mechanical things. He might get a job in a flitter repair shop. Maybe even become a mechanic and buy his own shop someday. Be a man of substance, find a woman, have a real family, with kids he didn't beat. Not play out his days a dirt raker on God's Rectum.

At that thought, Mwili glanced skyward, again almost expecting a heavenly blast. When Kimo Mchanga had first called Cibule God's Rectum, Mwili had smothered a laugh. None of the other boys listening to Kimo's bragging about how he was going to school offworld had dared to laugh either.

God must be otherwise occupied, for there was no rumble of lordly anger nor blazing line of high-energy flame arcing down to consume him for daring to think such blasphemy.

He began to feel better. If God had meant to stop him, surely he would have cut him down when first the thought had come to him? God, according to his father, seldom allowed a man too much rope, even if he intended to hang himself with it.

Mwili was not sure about God, in a lot of ways.

Halfway to the flitter, Mwili took a break. He sat on a patch of skillweed a few meters from the road, and broke out his lunch. His mother had packed vegetable soup in a self-heater, brown bread, and soycheese, as well as the chilled flask of deepwell water. The food tasted particularly good, and he ate it slowly, savoring the blend of flavors. The skillweed crackled as he shifted his position. Not much of a seat, but it kept the ground chill from his backside.

He thought about his mother as he ate. She would miss him, he felt. His going would leave only the two of them. There had been an older sister, Jana, but Mwili had never known her. She had died at fifteen, before he was born. Something always brought a great sadness to his mother's eyes when she spoke of his sister. There was a hint of some kind of disgrace attached to Jana, but he had never found out what.

Once more, he wondered why his mother stayed. It must be out of a sense of duty, he thought. There was no way anybody could love his father. No way.

He finished the meal, repacked the water flask, and started his walking again. He had enough to worry about without calling up memories.

He made better time today than the day before. He reached the flitter in just over three and a half hours.

It sat where he had left it, no sign that anybody else had passed by since the breakdown. Just to be sure, he checked the hidden supplies. They also were undisturbed.

For a moment, he was tempted to take some of them. The replacement circuit boards for the watering computer were fairly expensive—he could get maybe a hundred stads for them if he sold them. And there was food, too.

No. He wanted to leave clean. Whatever else his father might do, he wouldn't be able to have him hauled back for stealing. Even Baba could not begrudge him his clothes, and if he took nothing else, he was only a runaway, not a thief. He only planned to borrow the flitter for a little while.

He put the rewound coil into place. The harmonics had to be retuned, and that took nearly an hour.

When he was done, he locked the tools back into the chest and fired up the flitter. It ran. No better than before, but it would do to get him to Toilet Town. After that, well, it was his father's problem.

He climbed into the flitter, engaged the lift, and left Three Rocks behind, choking in the ubiquitous dust.

Choo Mji was fairly quiet when Mwili arrived in the late afternoon. He cruised past the spaceport, noting that there were six or eight freighters and the regular passenger liner to Kalk berthed. Good.

He parked the flitter near the police station, and tried to look casual as he strolled away from the small craft. When Baba reported it, it would be easy enough to find. Despite his pose, he walked faster than normal, certain that if anybody looked closely at him, they would see his guilt. Fear rode high in him, making him sweat nervously. If they caught him now, it wouldn't be too bad—he was just sightseeing, stealing a few hours from work. Later, it wouldn't be so easy to wiggle out of, did they snag him.

While it seemed warmer, the sky had grown overcast. It smelled to Mwili like snow coming. He hadn't checked the weathercast, but they were due for a good storm. He walked toward the port ticket office, unsure of exactly what he was going to do.

The first thing he needed was to find out what ships were leaving soon. It didn't much matter where they were going, just so they left before Baba started missing him. He figured he had until dark, at least. Add another hour to that for his father to take the tractor and get to where the flitter was supposed to be, then an hour from there to town. Probably Baba would nose around on his own, looking for him and the flitter, so add another hour or even two before he got angry enough to ask the cools for help. That would put it at about 2100.