FIVE RAGGED FIGURES—three older men and two women—trudged up the hard dirt road, their feet barely raising the heavy dust under the bright late winter sun. The men wore blanket jackets with patches, the women old shawls, folded and refolded around them. All five had tattered trousers and shapeless shoes.
Two farmers armed with antique projectile rifles stood behind the wooden gate, their shoulders and heads outlined against the green-blue sky. Both wore heavy leather jackets—the kind that were quilted on the inside.
The five stopped a good rod from the gate. From the underbrush uphill, I caught both the townies and the farmers in the recorder.
“Peace,” croaked the lead ancient.
“What do you want?” asked the heavier farmer, his brown hair shot with gray, as he leveled the weapon at the townspeople.
“Food … our children are hungry. Our gardens are bare, and the convoys have stopped coming.”
“We need food …” protested a heavy-set woman.
“You don’t look like it, woman.”
“Our children need food.” Her breath was a thin line of white smoke.
“We don’t have any, not if we want to plant.”
“You’re hoarding it …” A thin woman at the back whined.
The farmer sighed. “You don’t know … you know nothing …” His face was weathered and lined.
“You won’t give us food?”
“There isn’t any.”
The younger farmer—not much older than I was—frowned.
“See … even
he
doesn’t believe you.” The white-haired whiner jabbed a finger.
“Just go on back to town.” The older farmer gestured with the gun. The younger one leveled his own weapon.
“So we can watch our children starve while you hoard?”
“Woman, my seed grains wouldn’t feed a handful of people, and then you’d have nothing next year.”
“We won’t last until next year.”
The farmer gestured with the weapon again. “I can’t help you.”
“You won’t …”
“ … Verlyt judge you, miserly …”
They turned back toward Llordian, their shoulders stooped and their feet scuffing. As the townspeople dwindled into stick figures straggling back along the road to Llordian, the younger farmer caught the older man’s eyes.
“They’d just take everything because they’re hungry now. If we gave them what we could afford, it wouldn’t be enough. Then they’d be back demanding more. And more.” The older farmer sighed.
“They will be anyway. At night.”
The younger man looked down at the gate, then at the stone wall that ran gently uphill toward the thicket where I lay concealed. Finally, he looked back at the gate. “Think we should have asked those ConFeds for help?”
The older man shrugged. “Which thief do you ask into your home? Now, the ConFeds look better.”
The younger man shrugged in turn and looked back up the road to the farmhouse. “Gero will be down in a while. Need to see about those etheline globes. You think tonight?”
The other shook his head. “Be a while yet.”
TORCHES. A LINE of the flickering lights showed the townies snaking through the darkness.
I didn’t know how well the scene would record, but I did the best I could from an exposed hilltop overlooking the road. Then I dropped undertime.
Anger was a smoldering mist, compounded with fear, that shrouded the entire mob. It was a mob, carrying staffs, knives, a few dart rifles, and one or two projectile rines—ConFed issue.
They didn’t chant. They weren’t marching, but there must have been more than a hundred of them walking up that dark and winter-dusty road.
At the head of the mob was a one-armed man. He gestured; he gesticulated; he exhorted.
They responded, flowing uphill toward the gate and a handful of farmers.
Since Odin Thor would most definitely want a record of the confrontation, I broke out near where I had recorded the first demands of the townies.
“Food … we want food … food … we want food …” The cracked voice of the one-armed man ran like an off-key note through the muttering chorus.
“Ready?” asked a voice from the darkness below me.
“Not yet. Wait until they get closer.”
A spark flickered on the farm road, momentarily illuminating two men beside a wooden framework.
“ … food … we want food … food … we want food …”
The chorus swelled as the mob straggled toward the dark gate, oblivious to the farmers hidden there.
A blaze of yellow flame splashed across the clay of the road a few rods before the leading edge of the mob.
The chorus died into mutters—momentarily.
“Just go home, and no one will get hurt!” boomed a voice from the darkness behind and below me.
“ … food … we want food … food … we want food …” The one-armed man began the chant again, and the crowd picked up on his words.
This time the flame splattered nearly at the feet of the one-armed man.
“Just go home!”
“ … food … we want food … we want food …”
“AAEEEEEEeeeeee …” The blankets of a woman burst into flames.
“Killers! Killers! Get the killers!” screamed the one-armed man, as he grabbed a youth by the arm and pushed him toward the gate, running for an instant with him. Then he did the same with a young woman … and another man, older.
“ … food … we want food …”
Crack!
One of the farmers’ projectile rifles sounded, but I couldn’t
see anyone fall as the mob began to lurch toward the farmers.
The one-armed man kept alternating chants, either “get the killers” or “food … we want food” as the townies surged forward.
Crack!
This time an older woman staggered.
By now, the smoldering oil and smoke gave a hellish atmosphere to the road. My own reaction was to slip under the now and take out the one-armed troublemaker, but I wasn’t certain if that would make the situation better or worse. Then again, maybe I really didn’t feel like either side deserved help.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
This time the shots came from the mob.
“They got Gero!”
“We can do it!” screamed the one-armed man. “We want food … food … we want food …”
The mob surged toward the wooden gate, and the handful of farmers scrambled back up the road, leaving one lying face down by the wooden framework, and another trying to lift the wounded or dead man.
As he saw the mob pouring over and around the gate, the last farmer released the body, then bent down and lit the top globe on the pile of globes by the wooden framework. He sprinted uphill after the others.
The mob continued toward the down farmer.
WWWWHHHHHSSSSTTTTTTT!!!!!
The entire pile of etheline missiles burst into flames, spewing fireballs in all directions and turning a good dozen townies into instant torches.
Using the light of the human bonfire, the farmers dropped three more townies. But the killings went almost unnoticed as the mob moved toward the farm buildings near the hill crest.
“ … food … we want … food …”
Somehow, the chant and the smell of burning flesh got to me, even if no one else paid attention. I retched.
“There’s one on the hillside!”
I dropped undertime before both sides finished targeting the unmistakable sound of guts being turned inside out.
I could have carried off two or three people, but which ones, and where? And for what purpose? They would have hated me for not taking their part, or feared me for my ability, or both.
Instead, I staggered back to my not very clean quarters, washing off in the grimy facilities down the hall. Once again, no one noticed. Or if they did, they ignored me, smelling as I did of burning and death.
I don’t think I slept, just lay there, thinking about bodies burning like torches, and that reminded me of Allyson.
At dawn, after a healthy helping of bland fare—porridge, cheese and
hard crackers, I reshouldered my pack and started back to Llordian.
The morning light showed the trail of bodies up the road. I stopped counting after the first twenty. Besides the farmer shot in the first moments, I only found one other farmer’s body.
Greasy black smoke wisps, interspersed with puffs of white smoke or steam, still smoldered from heaps along the road and from the blackened stone walls of the farmhouse, the silo, and the two barns. The tile roofs had collapsed into the buildings when the supporting beams had burned. A trail of corn betrayed someone’s success at looting.
A few rods farther on a dark splotch stained the stone fence enclosing the small front yard of the farmhouse. Beside the stone walk, littered with small pieces of charred wood, lay a small hand-carved doll.
Overhead, the gray clouds emphasized the desolation. The wind kept the stench of burned grain and charred flesh from becoming overpowering, and I managed to hold back another round of retching as I recorded it all.
No livestock remained, but whether the farmers had recovered it or the townies had made off with it I couldn’t tell. What I could tell was that the townies had destroyed far more than they obtained.
Chhichii … chichiii
Two grossjays perched in a bare-limbed tree.
Chhiichiii …
Another scavenger fluttered down out of sight on the road where most of the townies had died.
After another sweeping pan of the destruction, I dropped undertime, heading back toward Mount Persnol.
OVER THE NEXT ten-day, I recorded, after the fact, the results of another three attacks around Llordian. I refused to witness or record another attack in progress, since, short of killing off the townies wholesale, no reasonable solution was possible.
Wryan and I argued over it—one of the first real arguments we had.
“You don’t think losing a leader will stop them?” I had asked late one night, since we still did not meet openly. She was sipping hot cider.
“No. It’s a structural problem. Removing one person won’t solve anything.” Wryan set down her heavy mug.
“No one else can lead them so effectively.”
“Sammis, that isn’t the problem.” She gave me an exasperated look, the kind that I hated, perhaps because my mother had done the same. So had Dr. Wendengless.
“They’re starving.”
Wryan shook her head. “They’re hungry. They don’t know what starving is. Not yet.” The coolness in her voice chilled me.
“Then what is the problem?”
“You tell me.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t afford to do your thinking for you.”
Sounding like the difficult student I didn’t really want to be, I asked again. “Why?”
“That’s enough. Sometimes …” She gave me an exasperated sigh this time, not just a look.
“All right,” I conceded. “They don’t understand the entire concept of seed grain.”
“They don’t care, but that’s not the real problem.”
I almost sighed. “They hate the farmers, and they hate us.”
Wryan shrugged, as if to ask what else was new.
“The farmers don’t trust them.”
“True.”
“So … that’s the problem.”
“That is
a
problem, but it’s not the critical one.” She yawned. “Now, it’s late, and you’ll probably have to record more disasters for Odin Thor—”
“You agree with all this recording? With Odin Thor letting Llordian tear itself apart?”
“Yes. It’s the only thing. It may not work.”
I shook my head. Sometimes she was so warm, and others … well, then she was the cool and calculating Dr. Relorn.
I dropped back undertime to my single room and its stack of equipment and viewtapes to think over what she had said. I didn’t get to sleep immediately, not with the old memories of smoke and a burned-out steamer and the newer recollections of greasy smoke, blackened empty walls, and the charred heaps that had been people.
Of the three attacks around Llordian, two had resulted in burnouts like the first one I had observed. In the third, the farmers had killed nearly fifty townies—mostly with the etheline firebombs—and someone had picked off the one-armed man.
The morning after our argument, I began another undertime sweep of the Llordian area—only to find another small and burned-out farm. Few if any of the farmers had gotten away.
Most of the grain had been carted off in the farm’s own steam truck. I found it stored in an old house in Llordian, guarded by three townies armed with ConFed-issue projectile guns.
At least one slaughtered hog was being roasted in a pit contrived in the dry fountain in the town square.
More important, urchins acting as sentries had been posted on every road leading to Llordian. I dropped in out of nowhere and told Odin Thor.
“Getting organized, are they?” He just smiled. “Very interesting. Just keep a close watch, Sammis, if you would. Let me know what happens.”
“Don’t you think we should do something?”
“What?” asked the colonel-general, smiling his false smile. “They don’t like us. They certainly don’t want us around. You think I should risk our forces for people who would attack us?”
I shrugged. What he said was certainly true. Yet it rang false.
“Let me know as things develop,” he repeated, looking at the door.
I got the hint. “I will.” I dropped undertime.
As I wandered around my room, straightening it up for lack of anything better to do, and using the sinks in the facilities to wash uniforms, I wondered if I could look foretime, to get a hint of what might happen.
According to all the texts and materials Deric had forced on me, and whose “training” I was ignoring on the pretext of the Llordian assignment, other divers could break out in future times in other planetary systems.
So … after I hung up the uniforms and made a desultory effort at cleaning up the sanitary facilities somewhat, I went and stuffed my body. Then I reviewed the notebooks on future breakouts.
By mid-afternoon, I had pulled back on the heavy black sweater and dropped under the now, heading for Llordian. Hanging over the square, undertime, I edged myself toward the blue direction, gently pushing. That was the easy part. I didn’t even feel light-headed.
Seeing what would happen in the future was another question.
At first, the outlines of the town flickered and fuzzed, much as they normally looked from the undertime, even in the “now.” Then, further uptime the barrier to seeing Query became solid gray. That was what most divers normally saw. I pushed further into the blue, and the gray barrier dissolved into more of a grayish haze.
Through the haze, I could make out one thing clearly. Most of Llordian was gone in whatever future I was watching. I concentrated harder, not moving farther foretime, in trying to make out some hint of what might happen. The haze remained, but I could see two images superimposed on each other.
One view was of unkempt and grass-dotted dunes. The other was of a fountain, the same dry fountain from the Llordian central square, surrounded by a low wall. The hills beyond the wall were covered with grasses and scattered trees.
My head was aching, but the two images shifting back and forth were the best I could do before retreating back to my room. The room was empty and cold. Some days the power wasn’t on in the afternoons. That was to provide enough for the maintenance facilities.
I kept the heavy sweater on and sat on the edge of the bed.
No matter what happened, Llordian was dead. In one case, it looked like a lot more than Llordian was dead, but drawing a conclusion from just one part of a continent could be dangerous.
If Llordian was dead for all practical purposes, why did Odin Thor and Wryan both think it was important? And why wouldn’t either one tell me?