Flyover Planet Ch. 2: Last Day of Home.
Forseti and friends show up. You never know which day is going to be the last, do you?
Chapters One, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen Pt. 1, Fourteen Pt. 2, Fifteen, Sixteen.
(Non-SF Flyover Valley starts here.)
Tian Teacher was smoking on his porch when they pulled up, spilling off their mechs in a riot of noise and color. He still thought of them as littles, but now it struck him suddenly that two of the boys, Cheers and Forseti, somehow were almost as tall as him — when did that happen? — and just look at the girls. Guns was the same, with her thick cap of jet-black hair gleaming in the sun and her eyes still wide open with innocent childhood curiosity; but XieXie was beginning to take after her late mother, with the same wicked smile and a green sparkle in her half-lidded eyes that was all her own. Tian Teacher smiled a little to himself, imagining the young men falling over themselves to get her attention in a couple of years. How fast they grow...
"Tian!" The last of the group was Benjy, a little younger than the others and still excited at being included (at least sometimes) in their reckless mech races and the jokes and maybe — dream of dreams — in the surreptitious cigar-smoking behind the furthest silos with the bigger boys.
They greeted Tian Teacher, with far more enthusiasm for being out of school, though it was not that arduous: like in most farming communities, school was run around things that needed to be done in season and fast. Gunnara was the only one who loved, not just learning, but being the classroom, being given problems to solve.
The boys were unloading the mechs. Their families had sent the usual payment: cans of homemade food and preserves, a new jacket, tea and smokies. It was always a pleasure to Tian Teacher, not only because the food was good and the jacket was tough and warm at the same time, but because it meant that the laborer was worthy of his hire. Wayside was a thriving community but it took hard work to keep it that way, and there were no extras to waste on those who practiced useless trades.
The kids hung around on the porch, XieXie making the tea with her neat precise movements, the first cup going to the teacher. The girls sat on the steps, the boys on the booyaleaf-laden ground, Tian Teacher leaned against the broad rail and warmed his hands around his cup. The day was golden, purple, fresh, the day was endless and they drank and chatted and laughed in the timeless bubble of the violet school yard and the green and gold sky. None of them ever forgot it, that one last day.
It was Forseti, of course, who asked the question. It was always him.
“Tian-Tian, why did we send to Hubworld? If every world is ...” Tian nodded encouragingly as Seti checked the word mentally to get it right, “autonomous.”
“Do you all remember what that means?” Tian Teacher asked, just as if it was class, but he could not help that, the kids figured.
“Having self-government and acting independently,” Guns fired off. Teacher touched her black hair gently, smiling, balancing his coffee cup on his good knee.
“Independent implies “independent of somebody,” you see," he said to the faces turned toward him, glowing in the late summer sunlight. “For example, Wayside is autonomous, so is Pradesh and New Ship and all the rest. Plenty of single 'steads out here, aren't there? But sometimes there is a fire or a flood, or even a gang.” The kids nodded. They were old enough to remember the men on black-and-yellow mechs coming down a few cycles ago, brought by the reports of a plentiful harvest. They had not expected to find that all who could hold a rifle, did. There had been blood shed on both sides, but in the end there were only two graves more behind the Wayside church, though those deaths were bitter; and no cross, no mound marked the pit where most of those nameless men lay, no word said over them.
Tian Teacher rubbed his bad leg unconsciously; that was when he had gotten the limp. If it hadn't been for the Pradeshi sending help when they did, he would have lost more than the ability to run and dance.
"We had help then," he said, "but once the fighting was done, all who had homes outside Wayside went to them."
"Well, sure," Forseti said, and Cheers added, "why wouldn't they? Teacher," he added belatedly. The other kids grinned. Cheers's ineradicable rudeness was the stuff of legend already, and the despair of his mother.
"You think these Eds are like that gang, Tian?" XieXie asked quietly. She too had listened at the window, at Tia Mara's house.
"All the worlds we know of, where they got a foothold, they never left. And soon those worlds went silent. When you go on the Trawl to send messages and so on, all that's coming out of Malahide is, well, Ed newspeak. Long words with no substance."
“Too much shell, not enough kernel,” Forseti said in his grandma's voice.
"Tia Mara is a wise woman," Tian Teacher agreed.
"But has anyone gone there? To see for themselves what the jink is going on?" Cheers asked.
"Language, Charlie," Teacher said automatically, as XieXie rolled her eyes:
"Cheers, you were there, you heard! Tian Linker said no one has come from there in cycles and no one is allowed close."
"Exactly," Tian Teacher said. "It's the same everywhere, all the Ed... Ed-infested worlds, for want of a better word."
"But we told them we don't want their ji- their rusty as- don't want them here," Cheers finished. Teacher shook his head.
"No, we don't, but they are bigger than a gang. We are not sure we can keep them off, you see, because we do not know what really happens when they take over, just that they do. But they answer to Hubworld, we know that, and Hubworld follows the Charter." Should follow it, he thought to himself. "So hopefully it will call those Eds off, get them off our backs. We don't want them here, after all. And as they are an unknown quantity, we go straight to the source. We call the master to call off the dog."
Cheers, had gotten up to refill Tian Teacher's cup (after a gentle kick from XieXie to get his manners running) while Guns asked in her quiet voice:
"Are you coming to the Sunrise tomorrow, Tian?"
"I don't know yet, Gunnara." The Sunrise was a tradition of many years’ standing. Their parents had done it, and their grandparents. Only once a year there was a night when no one would say, “You’ve got chores at daybreak! You’ve got school tomorrow! Have you fed the steers? Have you done your homework?” because this was the one morning, the morning of the year, with a big feast afterward, and dancing and music. After that, the darkening green and pale winter days, the chores, the hard work.
The sky was now more green than gold, empty save for the birds far over the Hills.
“Go on, get you home, you lot. Time enough for the politics when you get old!” he finished amid laughter. How would they, how could they get old? It could never happen.
The kids called out their goodbyes to him as they got on their mechs, the man moving among them, smiling, laughing, ruffling their hair and patting thin teenage shoulders. He watched them ride away, speeding up as they left the school behind. He thought he’d have to tell them soon about the Hubworld, about the Chem Wars, to show them how it works when the words cover the meaning, when the ships want to land where your crops grow, when big governments feed on little people. Time enough for that when school starts again, he thought, and went inside, limping.
They did not go home right away, of course.
The Pull Pockets had little to do with magnetic fields, as a matter of fact. Underneath the green and purple sky of their planet little flourished that shouldn’t. There was no time to understand the hues and the pressures when the first ship landed, years ago. So when the mechs started getting lost in the hills they called the bad place the Pull Pockets, because it resisted scans and because the survivors of the crashes limped back on blistered feet, parched and dazed, leaving wrecks of their metal flyers behind. But when they found that the quick plastic one-by-flies were crashing and melting into the stone the same way, they probed some more. A team of scientists off Hesperides came, several long summers in a row, together with some researchers from Fornost. They crawled through the twisting gully under the overhangs up and down, and then crawled through the local bars front and back and down again, and went back to the gully again. They found little magnetic activity, but the place certainly made waves. These jammed the relays, drove the controls haywire, and anyone flying by the instruments would inevitably have a disorienting moment when there controls appeared to go insane, then the boosters would roar and the dampeners would kick in and the whole thing would go spinning on its hind wheel like a demented ballet dancer, and then of course just boom! and that would be it.
They roared their mechs hillwards, Benjy speeding like the rest, just like he’d promised he wouldn’t, but his parents weren’t there, were they? And no one was gonna tell. Not even Fenny, catching up with them at Widow’s Turn, her chrome glittering green and gold. You’re not supposed to, she said, and Benjy stuck out his tongue, but she would not tell. They raced each other two by two, and Forseti let Benjy try his mech, and XieXie did too. It was tricky work in the shifting halflight and the magnetic pockets, the mechs’ round blades missing each other by inches, the kids yelling and laughing over their engines’ roar. Once Benjy didn’t quite make it, nearly taking off Forseti’s head. The other boy managed to pull up the blunt nose of his mech at the last moment, so the blade scored a deep gouge in the already scarred metal face.
“I don’t think we will be accepting your vehicle for repairs at this time, Tian Forseti,” XieXie said in her fake grownup voice. “The condition of the paint is really quite atrocious. And wasn’t your model issued with a fender?”
“Nope, with Benjy the Rotor! It’s the laaaaatest thiiiiiing!” Forseti yelled like an auctioneer, throwing an arm around Benjy’s shoulders and pointing at his scruffy 2by7 expansively with the other. “They will never hear you coming, folks! Just sweep the heads awaaaay!”
“Benjy is too young to go on these, I told you,” Fenny started in her prissy tone she used more and more these days, when Cheers yelled, “Ain’t no mo' Benjy, Rotor is the name, headchoppin’s the game, give the maaaaaaan a meeeeeeech!” Gunnara giggled. Benjy stuck out his tongue.
“Ain’t like Seti would have known the difference,” he grumbled, and there was laughter.
“Maybe not, Roooootor,” XieXie stretched out the word obnoxiously, “but I bet Tia Mara would.”
“Hell’s bells!” Forseti looked up at the sky. “Seven for sure!” He vaulted onto his mech.
“Rotorman, have another go at my head, yoyo! My Tia is gonna gut me! I was supposed to finish up the roughing today!”
“They are too humped up about that Ed thing to go kicking your case,” Cheers gave him the fist-bump of the Lost Raiders of the Egypto, his vid of the moment.
“You might still sneak in,” in her sympathy Fenny forgot about being disapproving. Tia Mona would cut no one any slack, and Forseti’s after-dinner future looked bleak.
“Hopium-Utopium,” XieXie grinned, turning her blades inward. “Last one?”
Forseti shook his head before starting his mech up. “Not for me, yoyos. Gotta go home to get buried, man!” His ping went off, flashing red, and he groaned. “Jink! She’s onto me.”
“Dead man ridin’!” Cheers gave a ululating yell, and his ping went too. “Jink!”
“Last one home is a turd!”
“Last one home is an Ed!”
Shrieking, laughing, gunning their beat-up engines, yelling promises for tomorrow - and then they were gone and there was quiet on the Dip, as if they had never been. Just the creeping shadows, the crackle of the booya leaves in the wind, rocks rising up to meet the sky, no laughter.