They bore another clear sign of their power. Half-beard hadn't told him that probes would wear pants! Big loose pants and boots to keep legs and feet dry. Luxuries beyond your wildest dreams.
Jemmy stepped forward, eagerness over fear. “Yes, man?”
The lead probe's voice was rusty, and male. “Get on with it.” He waved, and Jemmy saw the toolhouse, like the short arm of an L built onto the barracks building.
The gatherers were cinching the strings on their ponchos. None of them moved, not even Shimon, until “Andrew” took the handles on the high-wheeled cart and pushed it toward the toolhouse.
Wooden bed, metal wheels. A crude piece of work, very different from the low-built machine that had been pulling it, but it robbed easily. It held empty backpacks painted in the colors of a firebird, and one that held something massive.
The probes maintained their staggered position. Attack one, you'd be shot by the other.
The door was blocked by a thick metal beam with a big crude metal lock. A probe opened it. His sleeve hid the key; he returned it to a zipped poncho pocket. Jemmy pulled the cart inside, and the gatherers filed in after him.
He lifted out the heavy backpack. It was full of bullets. Lungshark bullets (yutz bullets) were this size, but these looked wrong and felt light. Jemmy didn't pause to study them. He found the ammo bin where Andrew had said it would be. He unlocked it. It was near empty. He poured most of the bullets in. A handful went into a pocket in his poncho. He returned the pack to the cart.
The gatherers were picking up empty packs and big duck-f oot- shaped gloves. There was a pack with a bigger orange patch. Jemmy took that, and glanced in before he donned it. Rope, and a big box marked with a red cross.
The half-dozen bird guns were shark guns, yutz guns, and nothing but. Jemmy loaded a gun and got his first good book at the bullets. The business end was a cluster of little pellets, not a slug. The gun took eight.
Shimon never stopped watching him. Jemmy wished he would lose that grin: it called attention to them both.
Still moving briskly, as if he had been here too often to find it interesting, Jemmy followed the last gatherer. He glanced back once. Blacksmith-level technology here; settler magic in the barracks- “Snap it up, Trusty.”
“Sorry, man.” “Andrew Dowd” stepped briskly into the Road, leading his gatherers to their work site. Amnon took last place. The proles stayed to lock the toolhouse.
Twenty meters down the Road, Jemmy turned to book back. Above the barracks, pure light flapped like a banner and blazed bike a lightbulb, too bright to look at. Jemmy squinted hard and looked anyway. The roof might have been Begley cloth, but in this light he couldn't tell. The flagpole was three poles meeting in a narrow tripod on the barracks roof. The flag must have been at least ten meters by seven.
You couldn't get lost with that bight to guide the way. But how much power was being burned here? How long had it been burning? Cloth that burned like a lightbulb, that was settler magic!
From the beginning Jemmy had seen a flood of electrical energy. Barda's kitchen would have fed a dozen times the Bloocher family. Hot water at the turn of a knob, and enough to wash twenty gatherers at once! All these ponchos and shorts and blankets cycling endlessly through the big machine that was never turned off. And this!
There wasn't enough Begley cloth to power a fraction of all this. Where were they getting their power?
A sudden downpour turned it all into a great half-globe of yellowwhite rain. Rain hid the last of his line of gatherers, and the proles weren't in sight. Jemmy turned and walked on.
He looked back rarely. Rain and mist hid stragglers. He assumed the probes were mounting rear guard. They couldn't watch him fumbling with the strings of his poncho, snarling them in knots, until he finally managed to cinch wrists and neck and waist against the rain.
Shimon kept pace behind him. When he caught Jemmy's eye, Shimon's casual pushing gesture waved him straight ahead. Jemmy grinned at that. He was following the Road along row after row of speckles crops. How could he get lost?
Probes might guess something if he stopped where speckles plants had already been stripped, or led them past plants ready to harvest. But Half-beard was out with the gatherers yesterday, and he'd guided them to the end of the Road at day's end.
He felt/heard the rain stop. For a long moment the air cleared, and when Jemmy looked back, the last plodder was a shape too big to be anyone but Amnon Kaczinski. No probes.
And the rain resumed, and they marched on.
The Road ended in a muddy pond: a shallow crater. Cavorite had hovered here. When Jemmy was sure where he was, he waved into the plants. The gatherers moved in. They knew where they'd stopped last night. Shimon looked back once before he followed the rest.
The probes were in place. They followed Amnon in, then separated and began to circle wide around the little crowd of gatherers. The gatherers formed a line, one to a row, and followed the rows of speckles plants.
Jemmy Bloocher moved among them, watching and learning. Andrew Dowd moves among the gatherers, supervising.
With gloves built like pieces of an umbrella, they stripped the branches, holding their packs to let a rain of bright yellow dust fall in. Rain was turning the bottoms of the packs into a sludge of tiny yellow speckles seeds. The packs would be heavy, coming back.
He passed near Shimon. Head down, Shimon shouted above the rain. “Look around, not just at me. You're not just watching us work. You're protecting us.”
“From what?”
Shimon looked up, disgusted. “Just pretend. Anything that pops up, the proles'lb get it first.”
Jemmy hadn't been told of any danger. Shimon went on, “They're seeing if the ground is clear. Any bird they find, they'll shoot it-“
“Any bird?”
Still annoyed, still obtrusively patient, Shimon explained. “Any bird that doesn't eat meat must eat plants, right? Any bird you see is after us or the speckles. So the probes do a circle, then they'll take a pass through the rows, then they'll go home and get dry. Home for lunch.” He said it like a curse.
Jemmy moved on.
Winnie Maclean looked like an elf or wraith, very thin and fragile. She smiled up at him and then looked down again, working briskly. Eerily beautiful she was, if you could forget that she was starving.
He got a conspiratorial leer from Duncan Nick, to whom he had never spoken at all. Jemmy watched until Duncan suddenly remembered what he was supposed to be doing with his hands.
A woman's eyes snagged his own, though her hands didn't pause in stripping branches. A once-pretty face turned hard. Was that hatred? What had Jemmy ever done to her?
He was idle while she worked. Trusties must get a lot of this. Jemmy was going past when her head beckoned.
He moved closer. -And in the next row over, a face turned toward him within a gatherer's hood. Narrow head, narrow nose, yellow-brown skin, and Oriental eyes: the same face with a smile like sunlight.
The angry twin said, “They'll leave you. You know that.” Hmm?Jemmy asked casually, “Who's going, Rita?” This had to be Rita or Dolores Nogabes.
“Not us either. We're not crazy. He wants to go over the mountains!”
“Who do I talk to if I want to go?” Rita shrilled laughter. “Who?”
“Willametta, bet. She's with you know.”
With Half-beard: the other Andrew. “And Shimon's with Barda?”
“Nobody talks to Shimon.” Rita Nogales looked down, dismissing him.
He moved on. The other twin smiled at him and said, “Good day for picking, Trusty.”