JAYDIUM
by Deborah J. Ross, writing as Deborah Wheeler
Chapter 9
Eril
unfolded Kithri's
micropore emergency blanket and spread out their meager supplies while she went
in search of dead wood for a fire. He added the contents of his own pack to the
pile and sat back to contemplate the situation. The food supply was meager,
just the lunch leftovers and emergency rations, his and Kithri's. They could find water in the
forest but they had no purification unit or anything to hunt with, except the
force whip and stungun. Prudently, they should return to their own Stayman
tomorrow. Given that he didn't
know exactly how to get there, they ought to be trying right now instead of
preparing for a camp-out.
Just
one night won't
hurt anything,
Eril told himself, knowing full well that he was rationalizing. The truth was
that he wanted the city to himself for a little longer, before it swarmed with
Federation scientists.
Lennart
hunkered down beside him, looked over the assembled gear and said something
incomprehensible. Eril pointed to the variable-insulation fabric.
"Blanket."
"Bee-ann."
Lennart nodded and grinned.
"No,
no, you're saying it all wrong. The word
has an L and a K. Blan-ket. Say it, Blan-ket."
Kithri
dropped a double armful of fallen wood next to them. It rattled like dry bones
as it hit a patch of bare earth. She scowled. "Don't patronize him."
"I
was just--"
"He's not an idiot. He knows what you
mean." She brushed off her hands and set them on her hips.
"We've got to understand each other
better," Eril said. "Since there's
two of us and one of him, it makes more sense for him to learn our
dialect."
"Sokay,
pal," said Lennart. "Doanfi vermee. Telps f'yoo tak slow, buh nawso bad. I
gih the gennel driff."
Kithri
turned her back on both of them and began making the campfire.
Eril
pointed to the force whip. "Do you know what this is?"
Lennart
shook his head. He looked troubled when Eril explained that it was a weapon.
"Yoofol kep, yoofol yooz," he said, shaking his head. "No thin,
no tall, no damm guh! Nessep--whar! Unnerstan?"
After
a moment's uncomfortable silence, Eril
went through the assembled items, naming each one and watching the spaceman's response, either recognition or
puzzlement. As he did so, he sorted them into items better stored away for
safekeeping and those needed at hand. The water in particular would have to be
rationed until they could find a safe source.
Lennart
pointed towards the place where Kithri had set the guardsafe-field. "Is
wazz?"
"A
device," Eril answered, "for hiding something valuable, keeping it
from being stolen. You understand?"
"Hies
reel weh, yoono. I can see a thin. Whuzzo valla? Hoo'd stee sumthin tauheer?"
"Sorry,
I don't understand."
Lennart
took a deep breath. "Whuh--arr--yoofol--hie?"
"Nothing
much, only a half-load of jaydium."
"Eril!"
Kithri whirled around from the newly lit fire. She'd used her stungun to ignite the
tinder and now she waved it in his direction. "That's my jaydium!"
"What
is he going to do, walk off with it? Out here in the middle of nowhere? When he
doesn't even know what a 'safe field is? A moment ago you
were charring me for treating him like an idiot!"
Kithri
pressed her lips together. "It's
not your haul, not even half. So it's
not your decision to make. Where I come from, letting strangers know you're carrying jaydium is damned
dangerous."
Lennart
took advantage of the pause in their argument to ask, "Waz this
jhaydiuh?"
"Jaydium.
How can you not know about jaydium?" Kithri asked. "You're a spacer, aren't you?"
He
stared back at her with a bewildered expression and started speaking rapidly and
incomprehensibly.
"Jaydium--a
mineral used in spaceflight," Eril managed to interject.
"Faster-than-light, do you understand?"
"Fazzer
thah lie? Snaw possuh. Yoo can seed Einstein's limm forwhy mass sponenshul
incree as the Niverss Nuhcertent Prinz varz wih thinver of--"
"Hold
it! Slow down, I can't
follow you. Kithri, did you get any of that?"
She
shook her head. "Just that he seems to have all sorts of reasons why
faster-than-light travel isn't
possible."
"I'd already gathered that. I wonder
how long ago... Lennart, what was the year? The date? When do you come
from?"
"Day?
Yoofol doano day? I coobe owtaheer few mozz maybe, shibee arawn fie-fhay."
By
scrawling numbers on a patch of dirt next to the fire, they were able to
establish the length of the year and fix Lennart's time somewhere around 3058
Common Era. Common Era, that unimaginably ancient time from the Lost Eras
before the First Federation. Almost nothing was known of that time, beyond its
mere existence.
"You're from our far, far past,"
Eril said. "So long ago we don=t
use that dating system, not even in history texts."
Lennart
looked bleak and nodded. "I thaw nivver see the few. Spay the close I get,
buzz kine lone, heyh? Can exa befrenn theyfol can unnerstan the say lang."
He combed back his hair with one hand. "So whenz weefol now?"
"It's 107-Five," Eril answered,
"counting from the founding of the current Federation."
"That's assuming," Kithri added,
"that he's
come forward into our time instead of us going back into his."
"We'll have to check the stars
tonight to be sure."
Eril
gazed at the parkland, where the weirdly elongated shadows of the umbrella
trees striped the lawn and shivered inwardly. Kithri could well be right, much
as he hated to admit it. But what kind of disaster could turn such a dense,
exuberant forest into the desolate Cerrano Plain? And the city... Surely
some trace of that should remain...
"Yoofol
fly awtie fazzer than lie?" Lennart asked suddenly.
"We've always had superlight speed,
that's what's made the Federations possible.
During the First Fed, roboships brought back the first samples of
jaydium." Eril had only the vaguest impression of the bulky sublight
barges of pre-First Federation spaceflight. It was jaydium that reduced the
prohibitive cost of the fusion-driven faster-than-light drive and made possible
the exodus of humanity into space that marked that golden era.
"Yoofly
fazzer thah lie in thah shih?" Lennart asked, pointing at Brushwacker.
There was only a faint lemony light remaining in the western sky, and twilight
softened the tiny ship=s
scars. "Doan luh lie muzz, buh can telmuh fruh th'ex. Yoofol gaw allsore noo
gadges, whomy t'say
whuh theyshuh loo lie? Eril, yoogaw one pritt spiff shiheer, heyh?"
"It's mine, not his,"
Kithri said, biting off the words.
Lennart
looked from one to the other, his expression unreadable in the gloom. "Hot
damm."
Exactly
my sentiments,
thought Eril.
"Yoofol
show me insie?"
Kithri
hesitated so long that Eril was sure she'd
refuse, but in the end she didn't.
Lennart was so eager to see all the new aircraft developments over the years,
his enthusiasm was irresistible. Finally, exasperated with the limitations of
language, Kithri shoved him bodily into the co-pilot's seat. Eril stood at the opened
cockpit door and watched, trying to keep a straight face as she ran through the
equipment and explained everything again in words of one syllable. From the
look on Lennart's
face, composed of equal parts of delight, concentration and bewilderment, Eril
couldn't tell how much he really
understood. But one thing was sure, the ancient spaceman was crazy over
anything that flew.
The
second run-through exhausted Kithri's
patience. She ordered Lennart out, turned off the ship's lights and closed the door
firmly behind them.
The
fire had died to a heap of embers and the damp breeze felt even colder. Kithri
put the last of the wood on the fire and rolled up in one of the emergency
blankets, her back to Eril. Lennart crawled back into his spacesuit and wished
them both the equivalent of a good night.
As
he lay looking up at the stars and waiting for sleep, Eril's thoughts drifted to the burst
of radio noise and the infrared trace that had vanished so mysteriously. They
couldn't have been natural. Somewhere in
that seemingly deserted city there was something alive, something that used
machinery...
oOo
Eril knew that Kithri was gone even before he
came fully awake, as if some part of his mind, even sleeping, was aware of her.
He raised his head and looked around. A few feet away, Lennart lay stretched on
his back in his space suit, snoring gently. From the overhanging branches came
the occasional twitter of night creatures.
Silently
Eril got to his feet and stepped out from the shelter of the umbrella tree.
Above his head, stars swam in a profusion of milky light, dense and luminous.
One small moon wore a faint blue halo as it rose on the far side of the city,
flanked by two steady points of planetary brilliance.
Anybody
out there? He
waited there for several minutes, just beyond the perimeter of the tiny camp,
head thrown back, staring at the celestial display. Then he spotted a dark
figure against the paleness of the spacefield.
Kithri
stood hugging her arms to her body as he walked up to her. After a pause, she
said, "We've
got the answer to one question, at least. That's our night sky up there. Ours
today, not thousands of years either way. I've looked up at those stars a
million times, dreaming of the day I'd
be out there, too. See that one?" She pointed. "The miners call it
The Dewdrop. When we first came, I used to wish on it."
Eril
shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He cleared his throat.
"What do you think of our spacer?"
"I
know exactly how he feels."
"Me,
too."
"Don't talk scut!" Kithri snapped.
"All you had to do was get back on your ship and take off! You
could jet over to Terillium or Nouveau-France whenever you wanted to! You have
no idea what it's
like to be buried alive down here--no cities, no trees, n-no flowers. Nothing
but dust." Her words came out in a flood, hot and wild like tears.
"Oh, sure, there are choices, even for someone like me--whoring insystem
or marrying some farmer who might say two words in a year. Or chipping jaydium.
All those years of running and hoping... What a fool I was to think I'd ever make it!"
Eril's tongue wouldn't move. A wave of unexpected
empathy surged through him--what would it have been like for him, stranded on
such a desolate world, looking up at the sky night after night? Knowing that
the jaydium he sweated for would see the stars before he would? He'd end up even more bitter than
she was.
They
stood in silence, looking up at the stars. After a while, he said, "So we're on Stayman, but it's not our Stayman. If this can
happen to us, anything can. Out of all that glory up there, what do you want,
really want?"
She
shuddered and whispered something he couldn't hear. He tried to put his arm
around her and she shied away like a frightened deer. "I made you an offer
in the mountains," he said, "and I meant it. But until we get back--I
don't want things to stay this way
between us‑‑all prickly, as if we had nothing‑‑"
"One
trip down a wormhole is hardly enough to make us lifemates."
"Kithri,
let's not throw away what happened to
us in duo. It's
still there, I know you can feel it too. We need time to know each other
better, to learn to trust one another..." There was much more he wanted to
tell her, far beyond these stumbling words. He let them trail off.
After
a pause, she said, "Do you think we can get back...to our own
Stayman?" Her voice sounded low and tired, as if all the fight had gone
out of her.
"I
think it's too early to give up."
He
reached out again, fully expecting her to jerk away. "You're wound up tighter than a drum.
How about I rub your back for you? No--" to her quick flinch, "I
meant a back rub, nothing more."
Kithri
followed him back to camp and stretched out on her stomach on one of the
micropore blankets, her head pillowed on her arms. Eril lay down beside her and
pulled the second blanket over both of them. Using his free hand, he began
rubbing her back with the gentle, insistent pressure he learned years ago.
Her
muscles were stronger and better defined than those of the women he'd trained and flown with. Slowly
the tautness seeped away, leaving a supple resilience he found pleasurable to
touch.
"Mmm,
that's nice," she murmured.
"Hank and I sometimes swapped shoulder rubs after a haul, when he was
still hoping it would lead somewhere."
"Sounds
like Hank. Did he ever give up?"
"Let's say we reached an agreement. If
I wouldn't trick for my passage, it didn't make sense to do it for my duo
partner and then pay twice to get offplanet."
"Hank
wouldn't have seen it as payment. More
like a privilege. According to Avery, he was quite a catch, and she's got high standards."
"I
tried that--before Hank--for the sake of a warm body the next morning. It didn't help. It only made things
worse, like he was in bed with my body and not even me."
"What
about--us in duo?"
She
sighed so gently he felt the passage of her breath through the air, rather than
hearing it.
Eril
laid his head down, still stroking her back. His hand brushed her curls. An
image leapt to his mind, amplified by the residue of their duo
unity--Kithri as a young girl, her hair long and loose, streaming down her
back. Kithri dancing through fields of flowers, her bare feet kicking up little
sprays of pollen. Then he saw her, curls hacked short and skin choked with
dust, clutching a mug of stale brew, sitting alone rather than endure the old
lechers in the tavern. He wished he hadn't
tried to defend Hank.
Kithri
rolled on her side facing him, the blanket draped like a tent between their
bodies. Eril let his hand slip from her shoulder. They were so close he could
feel the heat of her body on his face. He remembered her mouth on his and the
softness of her breasts against his body.
She
said, "What was all that recruitment stuff really about? I don't doubt there is such a thing as
the Courier Corps and that you have something to do with it, but I don't know what. If they picked you
as a spokesman, they're
a pack of idiots. You sounded worse than a tri-vid advertisement. And if that's all you are, why is it so
damned important that I join? Do you get a bonus for signing me up, or
what?"
Eril
hesitated, thinking how he'd
handle one of Avery's
friends. He could tell her how much he wanted her, how beautiful she was in the
light of the two moons. He could promise that this time she would really see
the stars, that he was her ticket, not the jaydium. She'd fall into his hand like a ripe
peach.
"Or
did you mean it about learning to trust each other?" Kithri said, and all
his schemes fell apart.
"The
Corps is real, but I'm
no spokesman for it," he said slowly, a little astonished at what popped
out of his mouth. "In fact, unless I show up with a qualified duo
partner in hand, I'm
not in it at all." That is, if we ever get back...
"You,
or every applicant?"
"Me."
"Why
you?"
"Because
I blew it once too often."
There
was a moment of silence, during which something seemed to be wrong with Eril's heartbeat--too loud, too fast,
rattling the bones behind his eyes.
"I
thought you were some kind of war hero, like Hank."
"Oh!"
His laugh came out a sharp, bitter bark. "That part's true. I have a drawerful of
medals to prove it--Four Sectors, Albion--"
"Albion!
You were there?"
Eril
nodded, even though she couldn't
see him. She said, "And you--you must have been the team that
survived..."
"I
went where my squadron commander said to. It was ratshit luck. You got away,
too."
"That
was years ago, before the war," she said. "I was still a kid, I had
nothing to say about it. In fact, I was damned pissed when I found out we didn't have to leave."
"I
thought people didn't."
"My
father volunteered for the Stayman mission. Volunteered! I suppose it
was a good thing in the end, or neither of us would've made it."
"I
take it he didn't."
Another
sigh in the darkness. "He died...after a long illness."
Back
in the tunnel she mentioned cutting off the supply of lithicycline... That's the treatment for
neurodyscrasia.
Eril shuddered. No one deserved to die like that. She must have nursed him
through it...
"It
never made sense why he'd
leave Albion for someplace like Stayman," she continued. "It was years
before the Alliance Declaration. Sure, some people must have seen the war
coming, but who'd've thought Albion wouldn't be safe? Anyway, the Feds
snapped him up. They needed a chemical geologist, so they didn't ask any questions. So we went,
and stayed alive." She turned back on her stomach, facing away from him.
As
Eril began rubbing Kithri's
back again, he was struck by the bland, dispassionate tone in her voice. With duoenhanced
awareness, he could feel her desperate homesickness, her anger and confusion at
her father's actions, shadows of the things
she couldn't tell him. Well, he hadn't been forthcoming with all the
unflattering details of his own fall from official grace, his own...shadows.
Time, he had said, they needed time to
learn to trust each other. Time...
Still,
it was surprisingly pleasant, lying beside her on a star-strewn night, feeling
her warmth and the gentle rise and fall of her breathing.
o0o
If you can't wait to find out what happens next, you can download the whole thing from Book View Cafe (And the files will play nicely with your Nook or Kindle, as well as other devices). If not, come on back next week for the next episode...
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