Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (32 page)

I suppose we might have gagged it down if we were actually starving to death—but neither of us was that far gone yet, and so the bird was given to a grateful Herman, and we ate our last tin of sardines spread on biscuits, with peanut butter and biscuits for dessert. Later, upon consulting one of the reference flecks, Teresa learned that she should have prepared the bird by parboiling it and dumping out the malflavored water several times. The next time she cooked a grouse she followed the technique, and the result was edible—but just barely.

During the week that had just passed, I tried no less than twenty times to bespeak Marc telepathically—and damn the consequences if my feebly powered, imperfectly beamed thoughts slopped out from intimate mode and were overheard. But there had been no answer, which led me to two possible conclusions: either the boy was far out of range of my farspeech, no longer on the planet Earth … or he was dead.

My natural Franco pessimism opted for the latter. I feared that the Magistratum had discovered that our canoe accident was faked and that Marc had been an accomplice in Teresa’s disappearance. The Simbiari Proctors might never squeeze the whole truth out of that valiant young mind, but that wouldn’t stop them from pronouncing him guilty of compounding a felony and accessorizing after the fact. Their meting out of punishment was customarily swift. The family would have been helpless to save him.

Nevertheless, day after day, as my own hope dimmed, I kept on burbling to Teresa that her son was bound to show up tomorrow for sure. I tried to suppress my growing panic, commanding myself to keep up a cheerful front for Teresa’s sake, all the while thanking heaven that the one operant trick I was good at was keeping my thoughts well screened.
But finally, on November 20, without my knowing it she inventoried our remaining supplies. At supper she quietly told me that we had less than three weeks’ worth of food reserves left if we ate very sparingly, and we would have to resign ourselves to the fact that Marc was not coming.

“I suspected as much,” said I. We had dined on pasta and Velveeta with leftover pease porridge on the side. Most of what remained in our larder of staples was simple starches. We did have fair amounts of spices and condiments left, and plenty of tea and freeze-dried coffee and dried fruit, but almost no protein.

As she uttered the fateful words, I stared down at my tongue-polished plate in despair. I momentarily considered emulating the noble Captain Oates on Scott’s fatal Antarctic expedition: I would take a hike out into the snow, telling Teresa that I might be gone some time, and simply never return. But even as the fantasy played itself out in my imagination, I realized that my death wouldn’t save her. She would still be out of food before Jack’s birth, and what would become of her and the child then? The strongly coercive members of the family who might be able to penetrate the Megapod Reserve tracelessly and take her and the baby home and hide them would by that time be 4000 lightyears away on Concilium Orb, attending the inauguration. Even if they became aware of her need, it would take them two to three weeks to return, and long before then Teresa would have starved in the wilderness, or else she would be compelled to reveal herself to the Magistratum.

“It’s not hopeless, Rogi,” she said. “You have the rifle. You can go hunting.”

“There’s nothing left to hunt around the lake but small game, and the high-powered rifle bullets would blast them to shreds. I could certainly trap what’s left of the hares and grouse, but you expend a lot of energy moving around outside when it’s very cold. I don’t think I’d be able to bring in enough small critters to keep us both going.”

Teresa had leaned across the supper table and bestowed that dazzling smile of hers upon me. “Why then, you’ll simply have to go off away from the lake and find something
large.”

It was at that point that I decided the only useful thing to do was get drunk …

Huddled deep within my sleeping bag on the morning after, with my head on the verge of meltdown, I could hear Teresa moving about the cabin, humming an intricate operatic aria as she whipped up something that was probably flapjack batter. The bacon and powdered eggs were long gone, and breakfast was now usually fried cakes, oatmeal, or cinnamon-rice with raisins and a bit of reconstituted milk.

The ambrosial smell of coffee seeped through the thick layer of down and bunny fur covering my face. I heard her footsteps approach, ventured to use my broken-down farsight, and saw her with my mind’s eye, holding a steaming cup.

“Rogi, dear, don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll find some kind of big game. And if we have lots of meat, we can eke out the other things.”

I sat up, taking the coffee and cradling it in my shaky hands. “All I have is two boxes of ammo. And I don’t know a thing about hunting. My sport is backpacking, and I’ve always believed in live and let live. In rugged mountain country like this … dieu de dieu, I don’t know! I’d have to hike down to a lower altitude—”

“Of course!” she agreed brightly. “You see? You’re thinking positively already. Now get up, dear. I’ve got the plaque-reader all loaded with Alan Fry’s
Wilderness Survival Handbook
. It has an excellent chapter on hunting that you can read while you eat breakfast, and I’ll find some other books for you, too.”

I groaned and rolled out of the sack. Books! But they’d helped me to rebuild the cabin and make snowshoes, and they’d taught Teresa how to snare and skin hares and cut the skins in a spiral to make the furry “yarn” for her rugs, and I’d learned from a book that it was necessary to keep the rifle out in the cold to prevent condensation of moisture and rusting when it was brought into the warm cabin, and Teresa had read somewhere that both dry and green firewood would be necessary for cooking and heating, a piece of practical lore I had never heard of. There were scores of other bits of information that we had gleaned from the fleck library and made good use of.

So I would read, and then I would pray a whole lot, and then tomorrow I would go a-hunting.

*    *    *

We had chosen for our refuge one of the most glacierbound areas in North America. In almost every direction about Ape Lake, precipitous mountains and impassable icefields hemmed us in. There were only two feasible exploration directions for me to consider. The first was the Ape Creek corridor, which trended eastward into the deep interior of the Megapod Reserve. The second was a northwestern route beginning at the opposite end of the lake. It skirted the tongue of the vast Fyles Glacier, descended to the valley of a fairly large river called the Noeick, and eventually reached an arm of the sea.

Recalling the cascades of Ape Creek, I thought at first that the other, northwestern route would be better. Ape Lake was at an altitude of 1400 meters. After traveling only 14 kilometers northwest, I would have descended 850 meters to the heavily forested river bottom, where there would certainly be wintering elk. Killing a single one of those large animals would solve our food problem completely—provided I could haul the meat back up to Ape Lake.

But a study of the durofilm topographic map we had swiped from Bill Parmentier revealed those crowded-together contour lines that always ring alarm bells in the mind of the cross-country hiker. The route was extremely steep, and there was almost no forest cover that might harbor animals until I reached the river itself. Furthermore, traveling along that exposed and barren way would take me out of the snow shadow of Mount Jacobsen and into the teeth of the howling storms that swept in from the Pacific.

The other possibility, a route leading from the eastern end of the lake down Ape Creek Canyon, showed the green tint of forest every centimeter of the way into the valley of the north-flowing Talchako River, some 18 kilometers distant. In most stretches along the canyon, the contour lines were reasonably far apart. Now that the temperature stayed well below freezing both day and night, the creek would surely have dwindled and frozen just as the other streams had, making it easier for me to descend. On the other hand, the canyon route would not take me down to as low an altitude as the other path would. Nevertheless I finally decided that I would have a better chance of finding a sizable animal sooner, going that way. What sort of game I would find in the interior was anybody’s guess; but the winter was not yet
far advanced, and I hoped for a late-prowling bear, or perhaps a deer or two.

I prepared to leave early on the following morning. I transferred a small mountain of firewood to the vicinity of the porch for Teresa’s convenience and ordered her to melt snow for water, rather than chancing the steep trail down to the lake. She prepared a dozen fat oatmeal cakes filled with dried fruit for my rations. I also took some packets of soup mix, which had little nourishment but would provide me with something other than hot water and tea to drink. In my backpack I carried a plass tarpaulin and lots of plass garbags, a little pot to boil water, the small axe, my biggest knife, the whetstone, a hank of rope, the ammunition, and the dome tent. I lashed my sleeping bag and pad to the pack frame and put a firestarter and Teresa’s Swiss Army knife with its saw blade into my pocket. When she wasn’t looking, I filled a spare canteen with the high-proof Lamb’s Navy Rum.

“How long will you be gone?” she asked.

“As long as it takes. Don’t try to farspeak me unless there’s an emergency. If they’re still searching for us, that might give you away.”

She nodded, her face calm. She was wearing an oversized buffalo-plaid wool shirt, jeans let out at the waist, and unlaced boots over heavy socks. Her dark hair, once so sleek and shining, was lank now from being washed with soap, and pulled back into a ponytail. But otherwise pregnancy had made her bloom, and she looked so beautiful and young and vulnerable that I had to turn away from her quickly so she would not see my eyes brim up.

She kissed me on the cheek as I put on my backpack and said, “You’ll succeed, Rogi. It can’t end this way. Jack is positive that he’s going to live and accomplish great things. That means we will, too.”

I tried to laugh. “Cocksure little beggar, that Jack.”

“Oh, yes. His ego is extremely healthy. I’ve already had to lecture him about the perils of pride and self-absorption. It’s difficult for Jack to understand that I’m a separate person with an independent life—not simply a loving receptacle who exists only for his convenience. The very notion that other people will someday interact closely with him still frightens him. He—he tends to equate nonmaternal minds with danger. You can understand why.”

“Well, I’m no threat. I don’t know why he’s too shy to even say hello to me.”

“While you’re gone, I’ll try to teach him that it’s a human survival trait to socialize. To be friendly. He and I have so much to thank you for. I’ll try to get that idea across to him, too.”

My gloved hand rested on the door latch. “If I’m not back in six days, I want you to farspeak Denis.”

Her eyes widened. “No!”

“You must,” I insisted. “But you can’t wait too long, or he’ll be off-world on his way to the inauguration. Denis might be able to think of some way to save you. He has an incredible mind, Teresa. Because he’s such a self-effacing man, people tend to forget that. Even his own children do. But his metaquotient in some faculties is even higher than Paul’s. He’s a better coercer, for certain, and I know he strongly disapproves of the more tyrannical aspects of the Proctorship. He might be willing to stick his neck out for you and Jack if you convinced him of the baby’s mental superiority.”

“No!” she cried. “Denis is too cold! Those eyes of his frighten me. He’d think only of the family, just as Lucille did. I can only trust you and Marc!”

“Marc’s not coming back.” My tone was bleak, final. “And I may fail.”

Both her hands were clasped tightly over her abdomen, and she had shut her eyes against a sudden flood of tears. “You won’t fail! Go, Rogi. Go now. I’ll be waiting for you.”

I shrugged, opened the door, and stepped out into the overcast winter morning. It took me a few minutes to put on my snowshoes. Then I took the Winchester down off the wall, loaded it, hung the rifle over my shoulder, and set off. The temperature was somewhere not too far below freezing. The smoke from our chimney rose only a few meters before flattening out, which meant that the atmospheric pressure was low and some kind of bad weather was on its way. The snow was about 30 cents deep, and I mushed along easily over the frozen lake toward the Ape Creek outlet. Dark clouds hid Mount Jacobsen completely and seemed to race on ahead of me, but I never thought of turning back. Having the wind at my back seemed a good omen, and if it did begin to snow heavily, I’d simply hole up in my tent and wait for it to stop.

Five hours later, after I had managed to descend a couple of very steep kilometers into Ape Creek Canyon, the blizzard started.

From the lake, I had climbed down steplike terraces of rock that had formed cascades when the creek was high. Now only a little water still flowed beneath the ice crust. The canyon widened abruptly at a point where a nearly frozen waterfall dribbled into a pool. This lay in a brushy clearing, with terrain that was much more level than the upper part of the canyon. Scattered around the basin were tumbled rocks, looking like huge sleeping beasts partially mantled with snow. Thickets of leafless alder mingled with the spires of tall subalpine fir and spruce at the forest’s edge. It must have been an idyllic spot in warm weather. With a storm beginning to roar down the canyon, I found it much less appealing.

The falling snow thickened rapidly to the point where the landscape began to dissolve into amorphous white. I knew I could go no further until it stopped. The temperature was dropping rapidly and the wind blew harder and harder. I slogged back among the large trees, found a reasonably sheltered place, and trampled down a spot. Then I took off snowshoes, gun, and pack, and set up the dome tent, which had an integral floor. I heaped loose snow around it so that it would not immediately blow away, then spent a bad five minutes searching for the snowshoes and the Winchester, which had been completely buried by blowing snow while I worked.