Burn Page 5

  “Really. And have you been to war, Penny?”

  She shook her head—more of a twitch of embarrassment than a shake.

  “This is her first,” said the High Gregory. “But she’s L’ung. She’s just here to watch.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Spur. “Who are the L’ung?”

  Ngonda cleared his throat in an obvious warning. The High Gregory saw Memsen pinch the air and whatever he’d been about to say died on his lips. The silence stretched long enough for Penny to realize that there was some difficulty about answering Spur’s question.

  “What, is he stupid?” She scrutinized Spur with renewed interest. “Are you stupid, Spur?”

  “I don’t think so.” It was his turn to be embarrassed. “But maybe some people think that I am.”

  “This is complicated,” said Memsen, filling yet another awkward pause. “We understand that people here seek to avoid complication.” She considered. “Let’s just say that the L’ung are companions to the High Gregory. They like to watch him make luck, you might say. Think of them as students. They’ve been sent from many different worlds, for many different reasons. Complications again. There is a political aspect . . .”

  Ngonda wriggled in protest.

  “ . . . which the deputy assures us you would only find confusing. So.” She patted the bench. “Sit, Pendragon.”

  The Pendragon collected a macaroon from the pastry tray and obediently settled beside Memsen, then leaned to whisper in her ear.

  “Yes,” said Memsen, “we’ll ask about the war.”

  Ngonda rose then, but caught himself against a bulkhead as if the change from sitting to standing had left him dizzy. “This isn’t fair,” he said. “The Cooperative has made a complete disclosure of the situation here, both to Kenning and to the Forum of the Thousand Worlds.”

  “What you sent was dull, dull, dull, friend Constant,” said the High Gregory. “I don’t think the people who made the report went anywhere near a burn. Someone told somebody else, and that somebody told them.” Just then the hover bucked and the deputy almost toppled onto Memsen’s lap. “You gave us a bunch of contracts and maps and pix of dead trees,” continued the High Gregory. “I can’t make luck out of charts. But Spur was there, he can tell us. He was almost burned up.”

  “Not about Motu River,” said Spur quickly. “Nothing about that.” Suddenly everyone was staring at him.

  “Maybe,” began Ngonda but the hover shuddered again and he slapped a hand hard against the bulkhead to steady himself. “Maybe we should tell him what we’ve agreed on.”

  Spur sensed that Memsen was judging him, and that she was not impressed. “If you want to talk in general about fighting fires,” he said, “that’s different.”

  Ngonda looked miserable. “Can’t we spare this brave man. . . ?”

  “Deputy Ngonda,” said Memsen.

  “What?” His voice was very small.

  The High Gregory lifted the tray from the table and offered it to him. “Have a cookie.”

  Ngonda shrank from the pastries as if they might bite him. “Go ahead then,” he said. “Scratch this foolish itch of yours. We can’t stop you. We’re just a bunch of throwbacks from a nothing world and you’re—”

  “Deputy Ngonda!” Memsen’s voice was sharp.

  He caught his breath. “You’re Memsen the Twenty-Second and he’s the High Gregory of Kenning and I’m not feeling very well.” Ngonda turned to Spur, muttering. “Remember, they don’t really care what happens to you. Or any of us.”

  “That’s not true,” said the High Gregory. “Not true at all.”

  But Ngonda had already subsided onto his bench, queasy and unvoiced.

  “So.” Memsen clicked her rings together. “You fight fires.”

  “I’m just a smokechaser.” Ngonda’s outburst troubled Spur. He didn’t know anything about these upsiders, after all. Were they really any different than pukpuks? “I volunteered for the Corps about a year ago, finished training last winter, was assigned the Ninth Regiment, Gold Squad. We mostly build handlines along the edges of burns to contain them.” He leaned against the hull with his back to the view. “The idea is that we scrape off everything that can catch fire, dig to mineral soil. If we can fit a plow or tractor in, then we do, but in rough terrain we work by hand. That’s about it. Boring as those reports you read.”

  “I don’t understand.” The High Gregory sprawled on the deck, picking idly at his sneakers. “If you’re so busy digging, when do you put the fires out?”

  “Fire needs three things,” he said, “oxygen, fuel and temperature. They call it the triangle of combustion. Think of a burn as a chain of triangles. The sides of every triangle have to connect.” He formed a triangle by pressing his thumbs and forefingers together. “Hot enough connects to enough air connects to enough stuff to burn. Take away a side and you break the triangle. . . .” He separated his thumbs. “. . . and weaken the chain. When a burn blows up, there’s no good way to cut off its oxygen or lower the core temperature, so you have to attack the fuel side of the triangle. If you do your job, eventually there’s nothing left to burn.”

  “Then you don’t actually put fires out?” The High Gregory sounded disappointed.

  “We do, but that’s just hotspotting. Once we establish a handline, we have to defend it. So we walk the lines, checking for fires that start from flying sparks or underground runners. Trees might fall across a line. If we find a hotspot, we dig it out with a jacksmith or spray it cold with retardant from our splash packs.” He noticed that the Pendragon was whispering again to Memsen. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Is there something?”

  Memsen gave him a polite smile—at least he hoped it was polite. “She asks about the people who set fire to themselves. Have you ever seen one?”

  “A torch?” Spur frowned. “No.” The lie slipped out with practiced ease.

  “They must be very brave.” The High Gregory wriggled across the deck on hands and knees to Spur’s kit. “Hey, your bag got burnt here.” He held the kit up to the afternoon light pouring through the hull, examining it. “And here too. Do you hate them?”

  “No.”

  “But they tried to kill you.”

  “Not me. They’re trying to kill the forest, maybe the Transcendent State, but not me. They have no idea who I am.” He motioned for the kit and the High Gregory dragged it across the compartment to him. “And I don’t know any of them. We’re all strangers.” He opened the kit, rummaged inside and pulled out a pix of Gold Squad. “Here’s my squad. That’s full firefighting gear we’re wearing.” Dead friends grinned at him from the pix. Vic, kneeling in the front row of the picture, and Hardy, who was standing next to Spur. He flipped the pix over and passed it to the High Gregory.

  “Why are the torches doing this?” said Memsen. “You must have wondered about it. Help us understand.”

  “It’s complicated.” He waited for Ngonda to pipe up with the official line, but the deputy was gazing through the hull of the hover with eyes of glass. “They should have gone long ago,” said Spur. “They’re upsiders, really. They don’t belong here anymore.”

  “A thousand worlds for the new,” said Memsen, “one for the true. That’s what your chairman says, isn’t it?”

  “Your parents came here from other worlds,” said the High Gregory. “So that’s why you think the pukpuks should’ve been willing to pack up and go. But would you come back with us to Kenning if Jack Winter said you should?”

  “That’s not why I. . . .” Spur rubbed at his forehead. “I don’t know, maybe it is. Anyway, they were my grandparents, not my parents.”

  The High Gregory slid across the deck and handed the pix of Gold Squad to Memsen. The Pendragon craned her neck to see.

  “You have to understand,” said Spur, “that the pukpuks hate the new forests because they spread so fast. The trees grow like weeds, not like the ones in my orchard.” He glanced over his shoulder at the hills beneath him. They were on the east side of t
he Taratas now and flying lower. Almost home. “When Walden was still the Pea, this continent was dry and mostly open. The Niah was prairie. There was supposedly this huge desert, the Nev, or the Neb, where Concord is now. The pukpuks hunted billigags and tamed the gosdog herds. Their bots dug huge pits to mine carbonatites and rare earths. Eventually they killed off the herds, plowed the prairies under and exhausted all the surface deposits. They created the barrens, raped this planet and then most of them just left. Morobe’s Pea was a dying world, that’s why the Chairman picked it. There was nothing for the pukpuks here, no reason to stay until we came.”

  As the hover swooped low over the treetops, Spur could feel the tug of home as real as gravity. After all he had been through, Littleton was still drowsing at the base of Lamana Ridge, waiting for him. He imagined sleeping in his own bed that night.

  “Soon there won’t be any more barrens,” he said, “just forest. And that will be the end of it.”

  The High Gregory stared at him with his unnerving yellow eyes. “They’re just trying to protect their way of life. And now you’re telling them that your way is better.”

  “No.” Spur bit his lip; the truth of what the High Gregory said had long since pricked his soul. “But their way of life is to destroy our way.”

  Memsen flicked a finger against the pix of Gold Squad. “And so that’s why they started this war?”

  “Is this a war?” Spur took the pix from her and tucked it into his kit without looking at it again. “They set fires, we put them out. It’s dangerous work, either way.”

  “People die,” whispered the Pendragon.

  “Yes,” said Spur. “They do.”

  Eight

  I have lived some thirtyodd years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.

  –Journal, 1852

  Spur perched on a stump wondering how to sneak over to the Littleton train station. From where he sat, it looked hopeless. He had just bushwhacked through the forest from the edge of Spot Pond, where the hover had lingered long enough to put him onto the mucky shore. Now he was on the trail that led down Lamana Ridge. Just ahead of him was Blue Valley Road, a rough track that connected a handful of farms to Civic Route 22. Cr 22 became Broad Street as it passed through Littleton Commons, the village center. If he skulked down Blue Valley, he could hitch a ride on 22. Except who would be out this time of day? Neighbors. Littleton was a small town; his father had no doubt told everyone that his son the hero was due in on the 8:16 train from Heart’s Wall. Of course, he could avoid 22 altogether and skirt around town to the train station. Except it was a good ten kilometers between the stump and the station and he was bone tired.

  He decided to sit a little longer.

  At least Ngonda had kept most of the upsiders out of Littleton. He could imagine Penny and Kai Thousandfold and little Senator-for-Life Dowm spreading through his bewildered village to gawk at family pix and open closets and ask awkward questions. The High Gregory was all Spur had to worry about. He would be stepping off the hover ramp tomorrow morning at Spot Pond with the deputy. He would pose as Ngonda’s nephew and the deputy would be Spur’s comrade-in-arms from Iron Squad. The High Gregory would spend the day touring Littleton and making whatever luck he could. He would sleep at Spur’s house and the day after tomorrow he and Ngonda would catch the 7:57 southbound.

  “Spur?” called a familiar voice from up the trail. “Is that Prosper Leung?”

  Spur wanted to blurt, “No, not me, not at all.” He wanted to run away. Instead he said, “Hello, Sly.” There were worse citizens he could have run into than Sly Sawatdee.

  The big man lumbered down the path. He was wearing cutoff shorts, one leg of which was several centimeters longer than the other. His barrel belly stretched his shirt, which was unbuttoned to his navel. His floppy hat was two-toned: dirty and dirtier. He was carrying a basket filled with gooseberries. His smile was bright as noon.

  “That is my Prosper, I swear. My lucky little pinecone, all safe. But you’re supposed to be away at the fires. How did you get here, so far from nowhere?”

  “Fell out of the sky.”

  Sly giggled like a little boy. “Go around that again.” Sly was gray as an oak and almost as old as Spur’s father, but his years had never seemed a burden to him. If the Transcendent State truly wanted its citizens simple, then Sly Sawatdee was the most civic-minded person in Hamilton County. “You’re joking me, no?”

  “All right then, I walked.”

  “Walked from where?”

  Spur pointed west.

  Sly turned, as if he expected to see that a highway had been miraculously cut through the forest. “Nothing that way but trees and then mountains and then a hell of a lot more trees. That’s a truckload of walking, green log. You must be tired. Have a gooseberry?” He offered Spur the basket. When Sly harvested the wild fruit, he just broke whole canes off, instead of picking individual berries. Close work he left to his grandnephews at home.

  “All right then,” said Spur. “I’m not here. I’m on the train from Heart’s Wall. I get in at 8:16.”

  “Yeah? Then who am I talking to, my own shaggy self? Watch the thorns.”

  Spur popped one of the striped pink berries into his mouth. It was still warm from the sun; his teeth crunched the tiny seeds. “You don’t like any of my answers?” He slung his kit over his shoulder.

  “I’ll nibble almost anything, Spur, but I spit out what doesn’t taste good.” He pressed a stubby forefinger into Spur’s chest. “Your Sly can tell when you’re carrying a secret, happy old shoe. Ease the weight of it off your back and maybe I can help you with it.”

  “Let’s walk.” Spur set off down the trail. Ahead the trees parted for Blue Valley Road. “How’s my father?”

  “Well enough for an old man.” Sly fell into step alongside him. “Which is to say not so much of what he was. Said you got burnt when Vic Joerly and those other poor boys got killed.” He peered at Spur. “You don’t look much burnt.”

  “I was in a hospital in Concord.” They had reached Blue Valley Road, which was nothing more than a couple of dirt ruts separated by a scraggle of weeds. “An upsider doctor saved my life.” Spur headed toward cr22. “They can do things you wouldn’t believe.”

  “I’ll believe it this very minute if you say so.” His mouth twisted like he’d bit into a wormy apple. “Only I never had much use for upsiders.”

  “Why? Have you ever met one?”

  “Not me, but my DiDa used to say how they poke holes in their own brains and cut arms and legs off to sew on parts of bots in their place. Now where’s the sense in a good man turning bot?”

  There was no arguing with Sly when he got to remembering things his long-suffering father had told him. “I’m guessing you buried Vic already?”

  “His body came on the train last Wednesday. The funeral was Friday. Most the village was there, biggest communion in years and just about the saddest day.”

  “How’s Comfort?”

  “Hard to say.” He grimaced. “I paid respects, didn’t chit-chat. But I heard around that she’s digging herself quite a hole. Wouldn’t take much for her to fall in.” He turned away from Spur and picked a stone up off the road. “What about you two?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Yeah.” He lobbed the stone into the woods. “That’s what I heard.”

  They were coming up on the Bandaran farmstead, corn stalks nodding in the field nearest the road. Spur could hear the wooden clunk of their windmill turning on the whispered breath of the afternoon. It was bringing water up from a well to splash into a dug pond where ducks gabbled and cropped. He tried to keep Sly between himself and the house as they passed, but whether he was noticed or not, nobody called out to him.

  The next farmstead belonged to the Sawatdees, where Sly lived with his nephew Sunny and his family. On an impulse, Spur said, “There is a secret.”

  “Yeah, I know. I�
�m old, but I still hear the mosquitoes buzz.”

  “The thing is, I’m going to need your help. And you can’t tell anyone.”

  Sly stepped in front of Spur and blocked his way. “Does anyone know who sat on Gandy Star’s cherry pie? The one that she baked for your DiDa?”

  Spur grinned. “I hope not.”

  He prodded Spur in the chest with his finger. “Did they ever figure the boy who was with Leaf Benkleman the day she got drunk on the applejack and threw up at the Solstice Day picnic?”

  “It wasn’t me.” Spur put a hand on Sly’s finger and pushed it away. “I was with you fishing that afternoon.”

  “Yeah, the fish story.” He stood aside and motioned for Spur to pass. “Remember who told that one? The old citizen you always forget to come visit now that you’re all grown up.” They continued down the road. The Sawatdee farmstead was just around the next bend.

  “I remember, Sly. Can you help? I need a ride home right now.”

  “The cottage or your DiDa’s house?”

  “Diligence Cottage.”

  He nodded. “Sunny can take you in the truck.”

  “No, it has to be you. You’re going to be the only one who knows I’m back. Part of the secret.”

  Sly swung the basket of gooseberries in wider arcs as he walked. “Sunny doesn’t want me driving at night anymore.”

  “Don’t worry, you’ll be back in plenty of time for supper. But then I’ll need you again in the morning. Come get me first thing. I’m meeting someone up at Spot Pond.”

  “Spot Pond? Nobody there but frogs.”

  Spur leaned closer to Sly. “I can tell you, but you have to promise to help, no matter what.” He lowered his voice. “This is a big secret, Sly.”

  “How big?” Sly looked worried. “Bigger than a barn?”

  “Bigger than the whole village.” Spur knew Sly would be pleased and flattered to be the only one in Littleton whom Spur had invited into his conspiracy. “In or out, my friend?”

  “In up to here.” Sly raised a hand over his head. “Ears open, mouth shut.” He giggled.