But, ah, it was so easy to fade away. The engines. The flow of trees. The road, always reaching before them, winding and snapping like a great, grey ribbon every time he opened his eyes. Sleep…
A loud bang shattered the lull that had settled on him, but before he could even force his eyes to focus, all residue of sleep was shattered as the groundcar unexpectedly veered onto the gravelly roadside. Daria cursed, gripping the guidance wheel with white hands and stomping at the pedals beneath her feet. The groundcar tipped and Tagen had a flash-recall of tee-vee imagery—groundcars rolling, crashing, exploding—before they came to a painless stop.
“Shit.” Breathing hard, Daria released the guidance wheel. It seemed to take some effort. She leaned back into the captain’s chair and drew a long, shuddery breath. “Shit,” she said again, but she looked much calmer.
“Rowr?” The groundcar halted, Grendel now roused and hooked his front half over the seats between them, tail high and tone expectant. Rest stops for the cat meant a stretch, a bite to eat, a scratch at the true Earth, and perhaps some petting from one or both of them. That Daria was not immediately turning her attention to it seemed bewildering to the animal. It turned its eyes on Tagen as though demanding an explanation.
“What is wrong?” Tagen asked cautiously. He was not a mechanic. He had only the most rudimentary knowledge of engine repair and he doubted any of it would be useful when applied to human groundcars.
“We blew a tire.” His words seemed a kind of catalyst to her; Daria unbuckled her harness. “No biggie. I know how to change a tire. In theory. Shit.”
Feeling superfluous, Tagen pulled the cat onto his lap and occupied it with gentle rubbing as Daria exited the vehicle. He watched her circle the car, her expression one of tight dismay. She knelt at the right front wheel, stared for a while, and cursed. Then her eyes rose to meet his through the fore-window. He had no idea what she expected him to do about their situation but Tagen unharnessed and got out.
“I can do this,” were her first words to him. She looked just at the edge of tears.
The front passenger wheel was gone. Nothing remained except the metal round the rubber tread had wrapped. Looking behind him, Tagen could see wide flaps of black shrapnel that had once belonged to the vehicle. The groundcar, it seemed, could not operate without it.
In his arms, the cat was irritably resisting captivity, so Tagen set it down with a stern admonition to behave itself. Grendel flicked its tail to show what it thought of stern admonitions, and then wandered into the near bushes. Tagen watched it long enough to make certain it was staying close, and then walked to Daria’s side. “You can exchange the wheel?” he prompted.
“I think so.”
“Then you had best make the attempt.” He glanced skyward pointedly. “It is too hot to do nothing for long.”
She looked up at the patch of sky visible between the flanking lances of Earth’s trees, and then stared back at him bleakly. “You’re going to go into Heat anyway,” she told him. “I can do this, but not that fast.”
“I can help.”
She looked doubtful.
“I am a soldier,” he reminded her dryly. “One thing at which I excel is following orders. Tell me what to do.”
She managed a smile that didn’t much touch her eyes and went to open the rear hatch. She pushed Grendel’s traveling necessities to one side, pulled up the carpeting, and revealed an extra wheel sunk into a recess. It took some doing to pull it out, as it was fastened down with metal bars, but when she had it freed, she kept the bars in hand. They folded together into a tool-shape and she brought it to the wounded quarter of the groundcar and knelt down again.
She was struggling to insert the tool underneath the vehicle, but with the tire utterly gone and the metal base sunk into gravel, it would not fit. Tagen watched her efforts as they edged toward panic, and then bent, took hold of the groundcar’s frame, and lifted it.
She looked at him, blinking rapidly.
“Do not ask me to carry it to town,” he said.
Hurriedly, she placed her tool. “Set it down,” she said, fitting a lever to the base she had placed. She pumped her arms furiously and the tool lengthened in short lurches.
A lift. A portable lift. Every so often, it struck Tagen all over again how completely un-primitive the people of this world were.
The front quarter of the groundcar rose slowly but steadily, and although the base of the lift sank into the soft gravel, it seemed secure enough. “Okay,” Daria said, once the metal round was fully freed. “Bring me the spare.”
Tagen went to the cargo hatch. He brought out the new wheel and, as an afterthought, a tin of cat food. He leaned the former against the side of the vehicle, opened the latter and placed it on the ground, and then stood back. Grendel came running, but Daria only continued to sit and look helpless.
“Do I have a…” She shook her head, striking the heel of her hand against her brow. “Christ, I don’t even know what it’s called. It looks like an X?”
“What is an X?”
She looked at him and laughed. It was an unhappy sound. She got up and went to check the hold for herself. He heard her rummaging in the groundcar’s interior, and then her quavering curse. “Damn. Just…just damn!”
Whatever it was she wanted, they did not appear to have one.
She leaned out to look at him, her eyes too bright. “I don’t suppose you can take those bolts off by yourself, can you?” She pointed to the hardware that held the wheel base to the vehicle.
She had a great deal of faith in him.
Tagen took off his jacket and, after a glance at Daria’s blackened hands, his shirt top. He returned them, neatly-folded, to the groundcar’s interior before kneeling to inspect the bolts. There wasn’t much to grip. Nevertheless. Tagen rubbed sand between his hands to roughen them, already knowing this was futile.
“Wait, I found it!”
She came running, a tool of slender bars set at crossing in her upraised hand, and Tagen moved back and left her to it. She fit the end of one of the bars to the angled cap of a recessed bolt, and the rest of the tool instantly became a lever for spinning them off. Daria fought to do just that for several seconds before Tagen took her place. The tightly-fit bolts were no match for a Jotan officer; he removed and held them while Daria exchanged old wheel for new.
“Almost done,” she said, spinning the bolts back on. “Are we in time?”
Meaning him, of course. Meaning Heat.
He felt no more than a faint discomfort, not even a true itching, yet, but he was tempted for an instant to claim more. All this day and all the last, there had been a heaviness between them. He knew it was his fault, his silence and his reserve, but knowing didn’t make it any easier to resolve. He couldn’t speak to her without the looming loss of her crowding at his thoughts, but he longed to hold her. He just wanted things between them to be as they were before the thought of leaving her had ever occurred to him.
But he was no seasoned liar and Daria would see through one even if he were. She might mate with him anyway, but sex without honesty was a dim thing. Even on Jota, where matings frequently had all the intimacy of a handshake, that much was so.
“Yes,” he said simply, and turned to gather Grendel, now basking in full sun beside its empty food tin.
“Oh.” Did he imagine disappointment? Her expression was unreadable when he glanced her way; she carried the ruined wheel to the hatch without meeting his eyes at all.