Another instantaneous rod of light stood for a second in the air and missed her and then a third struck her weapon. It flew to pieces with a loud bang. Bradley aimed at the mech and kept firing until he saw it and the second one sprawl across the ditch and stop moving.
A compressed silence returned to the valley. The transport was burning but beyond its snaps and pops he could see nothing moving on the road.
Angel was moaning with her wound and Nelson took care of her, pulling out a first-aid kit as he ran over. When they saw that her wound was manageable, Dexter and Bradley walked slowly down to the road. Dexter said, “Bet that’s the last big party. We’ll get strays now, no problems.”
Bradley’s legs felt like logs thudding into the earth as he walked. He waved to Paul, who was already on the road, but he did not feel like talking to anybody. The air was crisp and layered with so many scents, he felt them sliding in and out of his lungs like separate flavors in an ice cream sundae.
“Hey!” Mercer called from the transport cab. “They got food in here!”
Everyone riveted attention on the cab. Mercer pitched out cartons of dry food, some cans, a case of soft drinks.
“Somethin’, huh?—mechs carryin’ food,” Angel said wonderingly. For several minutes they ate and drank and then Paul called, “There’s a boy here.”
They found Paul standing over a boy who was half-concealed by a fallen mech. Bradley saw that the group of mechs had been shielding this boy when they were cut down. “Still alive,” Paul said, “barely.”
“The food was for him,” Mercer said.
Bradley bent down. Paul cradled the boy but it was clear from the drawn, white face and masses of blood down the front, some fresh red and most brown, drying, that there was not much hope. They had no way to get him to cryopreservation. Thin lips opened, trembled, and the boy said, “Bad… Mommy… hurt…”
Dexter said, “This ID says he’s under mech care.”
“How come?” Angel asked.
“Says he’s mentally deficient. These’re medical care mechs.” Dexter pushed one of the mech carcasses and it rolled, showing H-caste insignia.
“Damn, how’d they get mixed in with these reb mechs?” Nelson asked irritably, the way people do when they are looking for something or someone to blame.
“Accident,” Dexter said simply. “Confusion. Prob’ly thought they were doing the best thing, getting their charge away from the fighting.”
“Damn,” Nelson said again. Then his lips moved but nothing came out.
Bradley knelt down and brushed some flies away from the boy’s face. He gave the boy some water but the eyes were far away and the lips just spit the water out. Angel was trying to find the wound and stop the bleeding but she had a drawn, waxy look.
“Damn war,” Nelson said. “Mechs, they’re to blame for this.”
Bradley took a self-heating cup of broth from Paul and gave a little to the boy. The face was no more than fifteen and the eyes gazed abstractedly up into a cloudless sky. Bradley watched a butterfly land on the boy’s arm. It fluttered its wings in the slanting yellow-gold sunlight and tasted the drying brown blood. Bradley wondered distantly if butterflies ate blood. Then the boy choked and the butterfly flapped away on a breeze, and when Bradley looked back the boy was dead.
They stood for a long moment around the body. The road was a chaos of ripped mech carapaces and tangled innards and the wreck of the exploded transport. Nobody was going to run into an ambush here anymore today and nobody made a move to clear the road.
“Y’know, these med-care mechs, they’re pretty smart,” Paul said. “They just made the wrong decision.”
“Smarter than the boy, probably,” Bradley said. The boy was not much younger than Bradley, but in the eyes there had been just an emptiness. “He was human, though.”
The grand opening elation he had felt all morning slowly began to seep out of Bradley. “Hell of a note, huh?” he said to no one in particular. Others were doing that, just saying things to the breeze as they slowly dispersed and started to make order out of the shambles.
The snap and sparkle of the air were still with him, though. He had never felt so alive in his life. Suddenly he saw the soft, encased, abstract world he had inhabited since birth as an enclave, a preserve—a trap. The whole of human society had been in a cocoon, a velvet wrapping tended by mechs.
They had found an alternative to war: wealth. And simple human kindness. Human kindness.
Maybe that was all gone now.
And it was no tragedy, either. Not if it gave them back the world as it could be, a life of tangs and zests and the gritty rub of real things. He had dwelled in the crystal spaces of the mind while beneath such cool antiseptic entertainments his body yearned for the hot raw earth and its moist mysteries.
Nelson and Mercer were collecting mech insignia. “Want an AB? We found one over here. Musta got caught up and brought along by these worker mechs?” Nelson asked Bradley.
“I’ll just take down the serial numbers,” Bradley said automatically, not wanting to talk to Nelson more than necessary. Or to anyone. There had been so much talk.
He spent time getting the numbers logged into his comm and then shoving mech carcasses off the road.
Dexter came over to him and said, “Sure you don’t want one of these?” It was a laser one of the reb mechs had used. Black, ribbed, with a glossy sheen. “Angel’s keeping one. She’ll be telling the story of her wound and showing the laser that maybe did it, prob’ly for the rest of her life.”
Bradley looked at the sleek, sensuous thing. It gleamed in the raw sunlight like a promise. “No.”
“Sure?”
“Take the damned stuff away.”
Dexter looked at him funny and walked off. Bradley stared at the mechs he was shoving off the road and tried to think how they were different from the boy, who probably was indeed less intelligent than they were, but it was all clouded over with the memory of how much he liked the rifle and the sweet grass and shooting at the targets when they came up to the crossfire point in the sharp sun. It was hard to think at all as the day got its full heat and after a while he did not try. It was easier that way.
DANCE BAND ON THE TITANIC
Jack L. Chalker
Jack Chalker began publishing fiction in 1976, after earning notoriety as editor of the small press fantasy magazine Mirage and as publisher at Mirage Press. His first novel, A Jungle of Stars, is a science-fiction tale of alien entities in conflict who fight through human surrogates. With his second novel, Midnight at the Well of Souls, the first novel in the Well World quintet, he began his well-known blending of science fiction and otherworld fantasy. The novels in many of his multivolume series—Soul Rider (Spirits of Flux and Anchor, Empires of Flux and Anchor, Master of Flux and Anchor, The Birth of Flux and Anchor, Children of Flux and Anchor) and Rings of the Master (Lords of the Middle Dark, Pirates of the Thunder, Warriors of the Storm, Masks of the Martyrs)—are renowned for their adventures of human characters on quests in worlds under the control of capricious and unpredictable forces. He is the author of the alternate world fantasy And the Devil Will Drag You Under, the short-fiction collection Dance Band on the Titanic, and the monumental reference guide The Science-Fantasy Publishers: A Critical and Bibliographic History.
THE GIRL WAS committing suicide again on the lower afterdeck. They’d told me I’d get used to it, but after four times I could still only pretend to ignore it, pretend that I didn’t hear the body go over, hear the splash, and the scream as she was sucked into the screws. It was all too brief and becoming all too familiar.