Early Byrd (15 page)

"See that tree?" Tim asked, indicating
another big cedar that leaned at a slight angle over the abyss.
"Dad always used to say that game never looks up, and I figured
that might be true for Free Staters too. But you can't climb, so I
had to do better."

I nodded—the cedar had wonderful low-lying
limbs that begged for the touch of a boy's hands and feet.
T
hen
it ascended skyward
like a natural ladder. But my brother was right—it wasn't to
be.

"Anyway, I guess this is even better than
the tree," he said, stepping right up to the edge of the abyss and
pointing down. I limped up alongside him . . .

. . . and
spotted
a narrow ledge maybe ten feet down, plenty
big enough for both of us.

"They'll have to come all the way to the
edge and look over it to see us," Tim explained. "And we have five
shells left."

I nodded; the route down looked rough but
doable. "You first."

"Right," Tim agreed and, using hands almost
as much as his feet, was on the shelf in a matter of seconds. It
took me far longer with a non-working arm. Halfway down, my
foot slipped
. I landed
directly on my shoulder and, predictably, screamed again before
rolling toward the edge. But at the last second, with my center of
gravity well beyond the lip, Tim grabbed me and pulled me back.

"Jeez!" he muttered as we lay
side
-by-side in the ever-growing
light, hearts racing in terror.
Thumpthumpthumpthumpthump!

"Thanks!" I replied. We'd kept each other
out of trouble before, and perhaps even saved each other's lives
while out wandering the ranch. But this was different somehow.
Something had changed.

Perhaps it was us.

"We're brothers," Tim said. "And twins,
which is extra-special. When one of us is in trouble, the other
takes action. Your fights are my fights, and mine yours. Always and
forever."

"Always and forever," I agreed. Then I
smiled. "I think we did okay, overall. Dad and Rapput and Li would
all three be happy with us. Mom too, once she got over the
heebie-jeebies."

"Yeah," Timmy agreed. "Even if . . ." He
didn't have to explain what the "if" was. We were, after all, still
starved, half-frozen kids perched on what was probably an unsafe
shelf suspended above heaven-only-knew-how-high a drop. Besides, if
Rapput didn't make it then the Artemesians were liable to drop
rocks on Earth until we were all dead anyway.

There was another long silence, broken only
by the continued
thumpthumpthump
of my heart. I cocked my
head at that—something was wrong there. The beat was louder, when
it should've eased off now that I wasn't working so hard. And there
also wasn't a pain in my shoulder with every beat like there
should've been. The cold was still rooted deep in my brain, or else
I'd have figured it out sooner. But . . .

"Helicopter!" I finally said aloud. "Out in
the fog somewhere, but getting louder. Li must've made it!"

"Yeah!" Tim agreed, brightening up
considerably. "Plus—"

"I hear it too!" I cried, eyes tearing with
relief. It was a distant buzzing, like a swarm of thousands of
cattle-sized bees might make. "A scout-ship! The Artemu and human
governments are still cooperating!"

"Hooray!" Tim cried, and he bounced up and
down in joy. I was about to warn him not to do that when we had no
idea of how strong or flimsy our ledge was, when I caught sight of
something moving beyond Tim's head. It was a Free S
tater
squinting down at us and just
beginning to raise his rifle! I grabbed the sawed-off shotgun and
braced it against my left shoulder for lack of anywhere else. Then
I pulled the left barrel’s trigger and one last time the world was
rent in two. The improperly-grasped gun went flying over the edge.
Tim, his head much too close to the weapon's fireball, dropped
unconscious across my belly. The Free Stater, his face transformed
into a bloody mask, fell in apparent slow motion out and beyond us
to land who-knew-where, and my
good
shoulder erupted into pain-wracked spasms not
so different than those of my right.

And that was that, I decided with terrible
clarity. I couldn't move a muscle anymore, not with an unconscious
brother lying atop me and both arms rendered useless. We'd live,
we'd die—it was all up to chance now. I'd given both my best and my
last effort, and so had my brother. The world might be a
battlefield, but we were no longer warriors. Even if the universe
held an infinite supply of weapons, neither of us were in any shape
to wield them. "Might as well go to sleep," I whispered to myself.
There was no reason not to that I could see. Sleep, sleep, sleep,
and the pain would go away. All I had to do was close my eyes . .
.

It must've worked, because the next thing I
knew a helicopter armed with the biggest guns I'd ever seen was
hovering just above the lip of the cliff, while an Artemu scout
ship floated with its hatch open just a few feet away from our
shelf.

"Timothy?" I heard my father cry, his voice
filled with anguish. Clearly it wasn't the first time he'd called,
and he thought we must be dead. "Robert?" But I couldn't make a
muscle stir. I lay paralyzed, eyes barely cracked open.

"Kids?" Li tried next, from deeper in the
machine. He and an Artemu were working feverishly on some sort of
gangplank. "Please, kids! Hang on, and we'll be there in just a
moment!"

Then a shaggy creature with three fresh and
still-bleeding head-wounds and wearing an inflatable
field-dressing-type shoulder cast appeared in the doorway.
"Nephews!" Rapput called out in his perfect, beautiful Artemu.
"Battle-brothers and fellows-in-arms! I call all H
eroes home!"

I don't know why, but at that I first
grinned and then managed to roll my head a bit to the left.

"Robert lives!" Rapput cried, shaking his
good fist. Which was stained crimson with human blood.

"So does Timothy, Uncle!" I shouted in the
same tongue, though I fear with a worse-than-usual accent. My lips
were half-frozen, after all! "We shall both someday fight again!"
Then I turned to Dad. "He'll be fine! I had to shoot too close to
his head, was all. I'm sorry, but I couldn't help it!"

Then Dad was grinning as well. Soon the
gangplank was rigged. Li, as always slippery as an eel, wormed his
way past the Artemu soldier poised to come to our rescue and,
despite his obvious fatigue and total lack of safety gear, came
dancing out to our ledge. "There's no back door," my tutor chided
as he first checked my brother’s
pulse
and then examined him for gross physical
damage. "You should never,
ever
choose a hideout that lacks
an alternate means of escape."

Tim picked it out, not me!
I almost
said. Then I thought of my brother, his feet hurting as badly as
mine,
dragging me
to his
fire while not sure if I was dead or alive. "Yes, sir," I replied
instead.

"Ha!" he laughed with the widest grin I'd
ever seen on anyone anywhere. "You are
so
like your father!"
He reached out and carefully rolled Tim over. "Even more than this
one."

I blushed—what else could I do? Then a
human-type stretcher was passed across for Tim, followed by a
second for me. I tried to be strong and silent for Dad and Rapput
as Li laid me in place and strapped me in, but I fear I moaned and
whimpered. Each sound seemed to pierce Dad's heart, judging by his
expression, and the more he actually saw of me, well . . .

"Be brave!" Rapput directed, but I knew he
understood as well, having suffered not-so-different injuries
himself within the last few days.

Then I was inside the scout ship, followed
closely by Li, and the engines screamed like I'd never heard
before. "San Francisco!" Rapput ordered. "Warn our hospital to be
on alert for wounded heroes!"

"Seattle!" Dad countered. "They're humans,
after all. They don’t need your Artemu doctors in San Francisco.
And Seattle is closer."

"You are of course correct," Rapput said
after pondering it for a moment. "Yet I fear for their security,
Congressman, in any facility but our own."

"A good point as well," Dad agreed. "But
they could still go into shock and die at any moment. We've got to
figure something out and do it quick."

And so it was that for the first time ever
an Artemu scout ship landed in the trauma center parking lot of a
downtown Seattle hospital, upsetting the morning rush hour
something fierce. But instead of disembarking us, the ship took
aboard practically an entire emergency room-worth of doctors,
nurses, and equipment, and then raced down the west coast at its
best—hypersonic!—speed to the Artemu enclave and planetary medical
center located not far from the south end of the Golden Gate
Bridge. And I couldn't even get a window seat!

The Artemesian hospital was almost exactly
like a human one, or at least our room was so transformed almost
immediately. It was sort of cool, really—we started out in bare
cubicles with the Artemu equipment shoved roughly into the
corridors. Within a day there were cartoon animals painted on the
walls, and we each had our own TV sets. Not long after that, clowns
began to drop by to visit. Pet dogs too and all sorts of
interesting characters. Plus Mom sat worrying in the chair between
us so that except when we left our room it might as well have been
a human hospital, and an especially good one at that.

I was right about my shotgun's muzzle blast
having knocked Timmy out, and I felt terrible when I learned he was
now deaf in one ear. But they were able to install an implant that
gave him almost all his hearing back, so it wasn't so bad after
all. It was really awkward at first not having any working arms.
The left shoulder was only badly bruised, it turned out, so at
least I got that one back almost right away. We never got to see
our feet until they were all the way healed up again. This was
because they kept so many layers of bandages on them, and it was
probably just as well. When the wraps finally came off, I couldn’t
tell anything had ever happened to them at all.

What our "children's" hospital room had that
no human one ever would, however, were Giril and Queth, my and
Timmy's lifeservants respectively. They sat with us even more
faithfully than Mom, though at the foots of our beds instead of
between the pillows like she did. We tried to tell them it was okay
for them to go away, but they wouldn't hear of it. "We're assigned
to you," they explained over and over. "You're our leaders. So this
is where we
must
be. It's a matter of duty and loyalty."

So we made the best of it and taught them to
play video games. Giril caught on right away, though Queth
didn't lag
far behind.
Both seemed perfectly happy to perform even the foulest and most
personal of tasks for us, to the point of elbowing aside human
nurses in their determination. All they ever sought in return was a
firm skullcap-squeeze upon the night's dismissal. Mom hated their
presence with every cell in her body, though she forced herself to
be polite and even came to like them a little on a personal level
because all they seemed to want was to make us happy. It wasn't
their actions or duties she resented, I came to realize.

Rather, it was because they were proof that
Rapput still intended to take us off-planet with him. Which was an
idea she liked even less than ever.

24

Rapput was of course at least as badly injured as we
were, so no one was offended when almost a week passed before he
contacted us. Besides, he'd sent his Lifeservant, Harsen twice a
day to make inquiries and had gone so far as to buy and sign a pair
of get-well cards for us in an attempt to honor the human custom.
That said cards were intended for children about half our age was
humorous, but it meant nothing in greater balance of things. The
point was that the all-highest among our conquerors had "lowered"
himself to take notice of how our kind did things. He was sincere
about bridge-building, in other words, and was showing his own
people as much as humanity that he was willing to bend and
compromise in order to get along.

Dad spent almost an hour during one of his
visits holding the cards and staring off into space, trying to
grasp the implications. Then he'd smiled and taped them to the
walls above our heads like the parents of uncounted sick children
before him, despite the prominent presence of the Family Seal of
the Clan of Gonther. This supposedly demanded special handling like
burning instead of being tossed in the trash. "One good turn
deserves another," he explained as he hung them in place. "And I
suspect this is exactly where Rapput wanted these to end up."

Even Dad didn't have much time to spend with
us. Apparently the Rocky Mountain Free State was in full rebellion
and though poorly organized and badly supplied was proving to be
more than a mere nuisance. A lot more people supported them than
really should've; according to Dad, a large minority of the world's
population believed the human race had been sold-out by the rich
and powerful and didn't at all understand the consequences of rocks
dropped from space.

"They think it's all a big conspiracy meant
to make them poorer," he explained to us once as he paced back and
forth across our room, the day's
New York Times
headline
lying exposed in the visitor's chair: "Byrd Boys Not Only Ones," it
read. "Gonther Clan To Take at Least a Dozen Child-Hostages;
Washington Fails to Comment." Dad let his eyes drift to the paper
again and sighed. "The big problem is that the Treaty really
is
making them poorer, and fairly quickly at that. I'm no
longer certain that even the United States can maintain a working
democracy. We
must
cooperate with the Artemu, no matter how
the people feel about it. At least until we're in a much better
bargaining position than we are now. Why can't everyone see
that?"