The group was completely silent. The spokesman rose, nodded soberly, and started down the trail to the east. After a moment, he turned, stared at Smith and the resistance fighters: “Well, you comin’ with us or waiting here to get snatched by the ratcats?”
Later that day, when the pace of the march had slacked off, and during a brief lull in the wave-attacks favored by the local mud-mites and swamp-flies, Hilda caught up to Smith. “Quite a performance you put on back there.”
He stared at her. “I had the choice to make the truth interesting, or dull. I chose interesting. But it was the truth, every bit of it.”
His sudden seriousness took her aback. “Hey, I’m sorry: I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“No, not exactly. But you figured a little needling wasn’t out of line.”
“Well-” she wondered if it was right to feel suddenly defensive, and decided she didn’t care. “Well, maybe it isn’t out of line, after all. You’re dragging more and more of us around by our noses, without ever telling us what we’re up to, or why we’re doing it.”
He looked away. “We’re doing it to kill kzinti. To kill a lot of kzinti.” His cheeks bunched as he said it.
“Yeah, we figured that out. But it would help if you could share a little more-”
“Look.” His voice was calm, but low. “I don’t like keeping secrets, but it’s part of my job. What if this weapon doesn’t work? What if it does but the kzinti capture some of us, now or later? This isn’t the start of the Great War of Liberation: this is only the test of a new weapon. Which will only be effective later on if it remains a surprise, a secret, after it’s been tested.”
“So what does that mean? That you’ll kill all of us after you’ve tested the weapon? Otherwise, every one of us that walks away from your apparent suicide mission is a potential security leak, right?”
“Wrong.” His expression and tone softened slightly. “That won’t be necessary. You won’t be security risks.”
“Oh? And why is that? No, wait: let me guess; you can’t tell me.”
“See?” Smith’s jocularity had returned. “You are starting to get the hang of this.”
“Ha ha. But what about you? You know about this weapon, and you could be caught. That seems like a pretty significant secrecy risk. Unless, that is, Captain John Smith has his own private poison pill, ready to go.” She had meant it as a jibe, but seeing his expression, Hilda suddenly realized that her wild fabulation had actually brought her face to face with the cold hard truth of the matter. “Gott in Himmel! I–I’m sorry. I didn’t know-I didn’t mean to-”
“Of course you didn’t. Look: I’m sure a lot of my old mates would have been happy to have a ‘final option’ rather than get captured by the kzinti, and be diced up or Hunted for sport. Besides, this mission ends one of two ways for me: success and hiding, or failure and death. So if I fail, I’d rather the death be quick, painless, and at the time and place of my choosing.”
In the silence that followed, Hilda sought desperately for a new conversation-starter and discovered that no such rhetorical beast existed: “Well, that was all a bit awkward.” He shrugged.
“And continues to be so,” she added. That got a genuine smile; handsome, even through the swamp muck, she had to admit.
“Having a kill-pill in your pocket is only a big deal if you let it be one,” he said gently. “Taking a mission like this-well, let’s just say I made my peace with all possible outcomes the day I said ‘yes,’ and they cut my orders.” He drew to a halt when the local that Hilda had come to think of as Papa Sumpfrunner put up a hand, listened, and then made a leisurely, palm-down motion. Sighing, the whole contingent sank to the ground, except the three that Papa selected with pointed finger; they uttered sighs of resignation, not relief, and wandered outward toward the perimeter.
Watching Smith’s easy motions, Hilda took a stab at starting a different conversation: “You seem pretty comfortable here: have you been in the Susser Tal before?”
“Not in it, but at the entrance to. A couple of times. Back when I was a kid, and my dad dragged me along on his provisioning trips, we had to make runs up here. Ours was the closest town that got regular deliveries of supplies and spare parts, so the ’Runners came to him with their orders.”
“But I thought your dad only ‘procured stuff’ for your town.”
“Yeah, but areas as far off as the Sumpfrinne fell into a special category. Technically, they are in someone’s backyard, and in this case, it was my dad’s. Could’ve been a few other towns just as easily, but my dad wasn’t a bigot or a classist prick, so he didn’t mind being their conduit to the cities and supply sources. And they were pretty grateful. Not that they showed it much: people back in these swamps don’t show much of anything. They’re a careful bunch. But still, you could tell they liked him.”
“Oh? How?”
“They teased him a lot.”
“And that’s how they show they like you?”
He stared at her. “Of course it is. It’s their way of saying, ‘you’re okay; you can take a joke.’ You have to have a certain basic level of trust, of comfort, between two people before they can start to really tease each other.”
Hilda nodded, tried to simultaneously study his features but not get caught looking at him: every time she spent five more minutes talking with Captain Smith, she discovered things about him that were surprising. In this case, the surprise was not how he had learned to manipulate ’Runners so well, but rather, the obvious affection he had for a father now long-dead, and the genuine sympathy he had for the ’Runners themselves. As well as a sharp dislike of bigots. You’re not half-bad, Captain Smith, inside or out…“And so if the ’Runners don’t like you?”
“They don’t tease you. At all. They don’t do anything: they just stare at you. And spit at the ground. A lot. Not right at you, or where you’re standing. But you’d have to be a low-grade moron not to get the message.”
“So how did these people come to live in the Sumpfrinne?”
Smith shrugged. “It was better than being constantly reminded that the herrenmanner think you’re subhuman. And the rest of the Teuto-Nordic immigrants followed their example; the poorest of them were the most outspoken and harsh in their prejudice.”
“When you’re next to the lowest spot on the totem pole, you fight pretty hard to keep the one guy lower than you are in his place.”
“Ja, wirklich. A lot of these folks either traced their roots to gastarbeiters or signed on the colony ships as the equivalent of indentured servants: a lot were poor folks from the Balkans, South America, South Africa. And of course, anyone foolish enough to marry into that kind of family was encouraged to spare their high-blooded kin any further embarrassment by wandering out here to join the rest of the untermenschen. To become swamprats, hillbillies: your choice of derogatory terminology.”
“Upon whose bioharvesting skills the anti-senescent pharmaceutical firms depended, if I recall correctly.”
Smith nodded. “Until the kzinti arrived, who apparently decided that the earlier each human dies, the better they like it.”
“Ja, sure seems that way. But how do the ’Runners survive at all, now?”
“Hey, you’re the one who was born into this time period, not me.” Smith turned to look at their shabby clothing and much-repaired guns. “Looks to me like they’re just managing to hang on. Maybe not even that.” He looked away. “I don’t want to know what their infant mortality rate has been, since the kzinti arrived. Nor the prevalence of malnutrition-related diseases.”
Hilda followed his gaze, saw the same things, wondered a further question she decided not to ask: so why would they stay? The answer was in front of her, plain to see, if difficult to grasp: they didn’t leave the oppressive stink and miasmas of the Sumpfrinne because it was all they knew, and was what their parents had known before them. In almost every face, she could detect the sullen resolve of squatters. These were the faces of true parochialism, of the unfathomable intransigence of insular communities that had, since the beginning of recorded history, doggedly inhabited the most marginal and isolated of environments. Even unto their own, slow extinction.