The Sheriff of Yrnameer (21 page)

“It’s okay, you know,” she said.

“Yes.”

She kissed his hand.

“Good-bye, Cole.”

“Good-bye, Nora.”

“Cole?” she said quietly. Her voice sounded different, somehow deeper.

“Yes, Nora?” he said.

“I didn’t say anything,” she said.

“Uh, Cole?” she said again, in a voice that sounded exactly like Bacchi’s.

“Nora!” It was Philip’s voice.

Cole couldn’t believe how quickly she was out of his arms and on her feet, like someone had released a tightly compressed spring. He opened his eyes, confused, just as she was stepping over him and embracing Philip, saying, “Philip! You’re alive!”

Cole, still facing the corner, heard Philip talking behind him. “Of course I’m alive! Where have you been! What were you doing?”

“Oh, Philip,” Nora said reproachfully.

Cole twisted around to flop onto his other side.

Bacchi was grinning at him, leaning over to align himself more or less with Cole’s horizontal orientation. “All right, Cole!” said Bacchi, giving him the double thumbs-up.

They were still in the cargo hold, but now Philip, Bacchi, Joshua, and several of the children were there.

“Nora! Nora!” they shouted, running to her. Nora kneeled, surrounded by happy children, hugging them in relief. Philip was glaring at Cole.

“I can’t believe it,” he said, “We’ve been searching for you for hours, and you two were in here … in here. …” He couldn’t bring himself to say what he was thinking. “You were
in here
!”

Bacchi helped Cole to his feet. “You sneaky, sneaky devil!” he said.

“What just happened?” asked Cole, dazed.

Bacchi chuckled evilly. “That good, huh?”

Philip marched up to Cole. “You have no sense of honor,” he spat.

“Do I?” said Cole to Bacchi.

“Of course not!” He thumped Cole on the back.

“Oh, Philip, stop it! Nothing happened!” said Nora.

“And in front of the children, no less!” Philip said, including her in the target radius of his disdain.

“Nothing. Happened. We nearly died, Philip,” she said.

“Is this true?” Philip said to Cole. “Nothing happened?”

“Cole, tell him!” said Nora.

“Nothing happened?” demanded Philip again, his face thrust in Cole’s.

Cole paused.

“Depends what you mean by ‘nothing,’” he said, then pushed his way past Philip.

Who could resist, he thought.

Bacchi explained what had occurred: they’d gone into bendspace, and then suddenly popped right out again into an anonymous stretch of universe. Cole and Nora had somehow disappeared.

“We reconformed and did a search, chamber by chamber. The cargo hold was the last place we looked.”

“We were stuck in an anomaly, Bacchi.”

“I bet you were, I bet you were,” said Bacchi, thumping him on the back again.

A check of their coordinates showed them to be several tens of light-years from the nearest inhabited system. They had to bend again, or slowly starve to death in the middle of nowhere.

“Let’s just do it,” said Cole. “What else could possibly go wrong?”

They bent. Things went wrong.

Reg, the tumbleweeg, was fervently wishing that the wind would pick up again.

It had blown him to a spot right between the townspeople and the Bad Men. It then died away, blowing a few gentle gusts and eddies back and forth indecisively.

Yguba fired again. Reg flinched internally.

The village sign, looking somewhat the worse for wear, took yet another bullet. It creaked in protest.

“It’s been two hours now. The bandit has now shot the town sign a total of fifteen times,” whispered MaryAnn.

“See?” said Yguba. “That’s, like,
forty
times! I can do this all day!”

He seemed intent on proving the point. He unloaded another round at the sign, neatly severing one of the two chains that secured it to the gate. The sign swung free, spinning and jerking in a chaotic pendulum movement.

“That’s sixteen,” said MaryAnn into her microphone.

“Forty-five!” announced Yguba triumphantly.

The villagers were still cringing with each gunshot, but by the fifth or sixth repetition the screaming had stopped. Now they were standing in an awkward silence, trading glances, unsure whether or not their presence was required for what looked to become a rather extended demonstration of Yguba’s marksmanship.

“Um,” said Mayor Kimber.

“Shut up!” said Yguba. “Watch this.” He cocked the gun again and turned three-quarters away from the sign, aiming the gun over his shoulder, then changed his mind and tucked it under his arm,
then went back to the over-the-shoulder position. He hesitated again, then changed his grip so that his thumb—second thumb, really—was on the trigger.

“Do you have a mirror?” he asked one of the other Bad Men. The Bad Man waggled his antenna.

“Is that a no?” asked Yguba. “No?”

The Bad Man waggled his antenna in a different direction. Yguba sighed. “All right, forget it.”

He switched back to a more standard shooting stance. “Here comes number fifty!” he said.

“Stop shooting our sign!” said a voice out of the crowd.

Yguba spun around. “Who said that?!”

“I did,” said the voice, and Daras Katim stepped forward. She ran a small greenhouse and grew exotic flowers there, and looked rather plantlike herself. A humanoid plant, proud, wizened, her eyes very clear and penetrating. She was just a meter or so from MaryAnn, and MaryAnn realized that she smelled good, like healthy dirt after a thunderstorm.

“You’ve made your point. Leave our sign alone.”

“Daras, please,” said the mayor.

“Shut up!” repeated Yguba. He began striding toward her aggressively, the mayor trailing tentatively behind. Reg, directly in Yguba’s path, steeled himself for what he knew was next. Just as he expected, Yguba kicked him out of the way, sending him flying.

Daras caught him. “You poor thing,” she said, “you didn’t deserve that.” Then she put him on the ground and the wind picked up again, scooting and tumbling him away from the scene. His last thought before he forgot all about it was that she smelled nice.

Yguba and Daras faced each other. It was quiet except for the wind.

“So,” said Yguba, “you don’t like me shooting your sign, huh?”

“I think I’ve made that clear,” said Daras.

MaryAnn watched her, entranced, her microphone forgotten. She could see no sign of fear or anxiety on Daras’s face. Then again, her face seemed to be composed mostly of wood.

“You don’t like it, then.”

“Is everyone in your species this perceptive?” asked Daras.

“Daras …,” said the mayor.

“Shut up
!” Yguba said, and clubbed him across the face with the
gun, sending him sprawling. An angry sound ran through the crowd, and some of the villagers moved forward, the first hesitant wave in what could become a surge. But then Yguba turned the gun on them and fired a shot that tore through the air just over their heads, and they cowered back again.

Except for Daras.

“I think you should leave now,” she said.

“Is that what you think?” said Yguba.

“You’re going to repeat everything I say as a question, aren’t you,” she said.

“I’m going to repeat everything?” said Yguba. Next to him one of the Bad Men giggled, then shut up quickly when Yguba glared at him.

“Well, I won’t be repeating what you say if you ain’t saying anything,” he said, “like, after I kill you.” And he pointed the Firestick square in the middle of her green chest and cocked the gun and MaryAnn heard herself screaming and everyone else screaming and then the huge explosive sound and then came the shock wave and spray of debris and thudding impact that knocked them all down, and when they all climbed back to their feet and the dust settled there was a battered Benedict 80 lying on the ground where the Bad Men once stood.

All that was visible of Yguba was his arm, sticking out from under the wreckage, still clutching the Firestick 4. With a spasmodic jerk, the hand squeezed off a final shot, and the village sign crashed to the ground, hitting at the same time that Yguba’s lifeless hand dropped onto the dirt.

The wind had shifted directions just before the Benedict dropped on the Bad Men, bringing Reg around once more. Huh, he thought, Teg’s ship. How odd. Then off he rolled.

The dog survived.

He trotted over the rolling hills, away from the wreckage and the town, toward the welcoming forest. If it were possible to accurately render dog thoughts, they might best be summed up as
Good riddance
.

Cole was dreaming.

He’d passed through a period of feverish nightmares, of hands clawing at him and Charlie’s eyes and of the Big Nothing. But now he was dreaming of the woman he loved, the only woman he’d ever loved, seeing her smiling at him, radiant, sensing her warmth and her calm and it was poetry and songs and spring mornings. She smiled and she spoke to him.

“Cole,” she said.

And her serene warmth embraced him and filled him, spreading life throughout his numb body, carrying him in a cloud.

“MaryAnn,” he whispered.

“Yes, Cole. It’s me,” she said, and she smiled once more.

“MaryAnn,” he said, and then “MaryAnn” again. “Oh, MaryAnn, I can’t tell you how much I’ve wanted to … to …”

“Yes, Cole?”

“Wanted to …”

“Yes?”

“Wanted to …” His dream hands lifted and reached out to dreamily fondle her dream breasts.

“Cole
!” she said, and slapped him in a very nondreamlike fashion.

“Wha?
!” he said, and jerked upright to a sitting position in the bed, where his face met a pitcherful of frigid water traveling in the opposite direction. He gasped and sputtered, the water burning inside his nasal passages.

“Cole
!” said MaryAnn again.

He wiped his eyes, blinking and coughing, a horrible suspicion
growing that he wasn’t dreaming, a horrible suspicion he was doing his best to keep from transforming and hardening into an even more horrible certainty.

“MaryAnn?” he said weakly. “Is it really you?”

“It’s me. Hello, Cole.”

Horrible certainty declared victory.

“Oh, God,” he said.

She gave a pained half smile and gestured behind him. He turned. Flashes went off, half blinding him, and the town band, packed into the smallish bedroom along with what appeared to be most of the rest of the villagers, kicked into a celebratory march.

“Yaaayyy
!”

Mugs knocked together, beer slopping over Cole’s arm and onto the floor, already sticky from previous toasts of equal enthusiasm. Hands and other appendages patted him on the back and mussed his hair, which was also sticky. Cole had a fuzzy recollection of someone who looked like a purple shag rug screaming
“Whoo -hooo!
!” in his face and emptying a pint glass over the both of them.

It was a very good party.

The toasting and patting and mussing had been going on for several hours now. The villagers had crowded into the town hall to meet Cole and the others, and they swarmed around him excitedly, making sure that his glass was never empty, that his back never wanted for patting and his hair for mussing. The hall was a broad, high building at the end of Main Street that doubled as the town’s ecumenical house of worship; a small sign announced that on Ser-day evenings they had duck-pin bowling.

Somewhere in the room a trio was playing rousing, catchy music, and little nuclei of dancers would form spontaneously, pulling Cole in and swirling him around before releasing him again to get more to drink. At one point he was spun around near the trio and he saw that it wasn’t a trio at all, just a very talented alien of a sort that Cole had never seen before.

It was a good enough party that Cole was able to blot out the memory of his nondream. Mostly blot it out. Occasionally he’d remember it and wince, and he’d search the crowd for MaryAnn, half fearful that he’d spot her. So far he hadn’t.

Their arrival on Yrnameer had furnished yet another incident to
be registered in the Benedict’s unsafe flight log—specifically, emerging from bendspace within the limits of a planet’s atmosphere.