Once it fed the world,
this land. The Martian Rover
now seems quite at home.
Karil woke up dead. He could hear the splashing of fountains, the call of birds, and the wind in the trees, and knew he was in Paradise. Just how he, an infidel and unbeliever, had been admitted to Paradise, was something he did not understand, but there it was, complete with a dark-eyed maiden in attendance. No, she was not dark-eyed; she was a Christian angel, with a gleaming golden halo. How he could have ended up in Christian Heaven was an even greater puzzle, because Christians were very precise about who could go there, and he knew he did not qualify.
"He's coming around, Brandy," Terry said. A dark-eyed maiden appeared beside her, with raven hair nearly as long as Terry's. An angel and a houri: what could be better than that? "Are you all right, Karil?"
Now that she mentioned it, he was wracked with pain, and realized with regret that he was still alive. He tried to speak, but the words came out muffled and unrecognizable. Terry placed a cool hand on his forehead, and Raven-hair took his hand in hers. He smiled at them, making them smile back, and bathed in that warmth he slipped back into unconsciousness.
Sometime, hours or decades later, he awakened with a start to find himself in semi-darkness. Despite the pain, he struggled to prop himself up on bruised elbows. He was in a cabin apparently built from felled trees, lying in a bed, one leg and one arm bandaged, with another bandage around his head. There was a rough blanket draped over his body, which he had partly kicked off, and it was the cool night breeze through the open window that had awakened him. In the flickering light of an oil lamp of some sort, he saw Terry and the one she had called Brandy asleep on another bed beside him. Brandy lay curled up like the child she was, hands clasped in dream-prayer, her thumb against her full lips as if she had only just given up sucking it; and Terry curled spoon-fashion about her, one arm thrown protectively across her body. On the pillow between them, golden hair and raven flowed together like a confluence of rivers.
Paradise and Heaven had both lost their charm, and so had the neat, wild garden of High Africa; Karil was glad to be alive and on magical, legendary Earth, where anything could happen. Exhaustion reached up and pulled him down into sleep again.
***
Terry and Brandy propped him up on pillows and spoon-fed him something peppery and delicious, while he peppered them with questions between mouthfuls.
"Where’s Shag and Proj?"
"They’re in the next valley, working on Atalanta."
"Is she all right?"
"She’s not airworthy, for now, and certainly not spaceworthy, but they say she can be repaired. No damage to her higher functions."
A young child peeked around the door at them and ran away, giggling. Through the window, Karil could see a middle-aged man standing at the edge of a cliff, looking out over the forest with a rifle in his arms. "Where am I?"
"New Tharsis," said Brandy. "Your ship managed to crash as close to us as possible. We saw the spume over the lake and came running. She’d already put out the fire, but we had to pry you out of your seat. It didn’t want to let go."
"It saved my life."
"Proj and Shag and some of the men here are camped out at the site, working on a way to get Atty off planet again," said Terry. "As soon as you can stay in the saddle, you can see her."
"You have horses?"
"Of course. How else would we get around in these mountains?"
"If I marry you two, can I live here?" Karil smiled his sweetest smile.
"He’s getting better," Brandy said.
***
Karil sat on a stump, looking out over the valley to the mountains beyond. His splinted leg was stretched out before him, and his cane lay nearby. Terry's scissors clicked about his head and his dark locks rained upon his dark shoulders.
"I've been on Earth before," he said. "But I can never get used to the size of the landscape. Not to see it curve overhead and back again seems strange."
"It's the blue sky I can't get used to," Terry said. Sometimes, at sunset, there's a shade of pink that looks right to me. I haven't been back on Earth in many years."
"Were you born here?"
"My family was killed in the Battle for Toronto and I migrated to Mars in the last wave. That's why I came here with Proj: his first and second wives had been on Mars too long, and full gravity is too hard on them. Besides, they’re clan-mothers now and have a lot of responsibility."
"Was Proj born on Earth too?"
"Yes, in the Virginias somewhere, I think."
"I'm the only one who calls himself an Earther and I'm the only one who wasn't born here. Did you have to leave other husbands behind?"
"I'm just a girl, Karil," she laughed. "Proj is my only husband so far. I'll be taking one closer to my own age later, when it's time to have children. And a young one someday, I suppose, when I'm older."
"Is that how it works? I guess it makes sense."
"There are no rules about it, but that's usually the way it works out. There are children's stories about Phobos, Deimos, and Sol, the three husbands of Mother Mars. It's funny how Mars became female as soon as people started living there."
"You know, I was never told very much about your revolution..."
"It's a rebellion, Karil, not a revolution," Terry said, in the tone of a mother to a small child. "A revolution is a turn of the wheel. Those who were on the bottom are now on the top, with all that implies. Most revolutionaries can’t come up with anything better than what they replaced, and pretty soon they get involved with revenge and theft and politics, and one authority is replaced with another, usually worse. But a rebellion is about throwing off authority altogether. Proj says revolution is just a tool for achieving power, as the police is a tool for keeping it. Besides, revolution is a political solution, but there can be no political solutions because the problem is politics itself. The real purpose of politics is to take something away from whoever found it, grew it, or made it, and give it to somebody else whose only talent is thinking up reasons why it ought to belong to him instead.
"There. Your haircut is finished. No extra charge for the barbershop politics." She examined him, holding his head in her hands and turning it from side to side. "I've balanced the damage from the head-wound, and made you look very cute in the process." She laughed and kissed him, almost long enough to mean something, on the lips. "And we'll take your marriage proposal under advisement. Time for lunch."
***
His leg nearly healed, but his arm still in a sling, Karil rode through the mountains. His sure-footed steed followed Terry's down precipitous trails and across streambeds, through the cool conifer forest and across buzzing sunlit meadows. Finally, they found Atalanta beneath a tent of camouflage netting, her crumpled forward end buried under a pile of toppled trees and her stern half stuck in a sandy beach. Karil was amazed that they had all come out alive.
Terry slid down from her mount and Proj kissed her. He turned to Karil. "Glad to see you in such good shape. I trust you've received good nursing."
"I don't think I've ever felt better, actually. But Atty doesn't look so good." Karil threw his leg over the horse and slid to the ground.
"She needs work, but she'll fly again. Ready, Shag?" Progeny called out.
There was a rumble and a clatter from within the open hatch of Atalanta's cargo hold. A ramp, somewhat warped, slid out of the tilted hatch and a Martian sand-rover trundled, bumping and twisting, out onto the beach. It consisted of three cars connected by accordion-hatches, each car riding on two huge tires, for maximum flexibility on rough terrain. Karil knew that dozens of such cars were often connected in long trains and rolled across the deserts of Mars like deranged millipedes, and that a man could walk from car to car through the connecting hatches. Each car was topped with solar panels and could run forever in the Martian sun; they would be air-tight and air-conditioned within and would carry their own water in recycling tanks.
The first section was the engine car. Shagrug waved to him from behind the tinted ports. A hatch opened in the nose, and he climbed out, swinging out onto the beach. "What do you think?"
"She's beautiful."
The car swivelled suddenly toward him, making him jump back in alarm, and tilted its nose down to face him, as a dog might sniff a bug. "Thank you, Karil," said Atalanta's voice. "I'm very happy to see you recovering so quickly."
Karil laughed out loud. "I'm glad to see you too, Atty. I like the new look."
"A simple transfer of higher functions into a new driver system. Come and see."
Karil stepped inside the hatch and climbed up the well between driver and front passenger seats into the cool interior. There was more seating along one side which folded up into a trundle-bed. The motors hummed quietly in the panels beneath his feet as he stooped and crawled into the next car. It was surprisingly homey, with sleeping-berths and a small kitchen with a fold-down table--even a toilet and shower. The last car was nothing more than an empty box, but at the touch of a button, the rear wall dropped down to form a ramp, and Karil realized it was a horse-trailer.
He returned to the crew-car and sat at the table with the others. "Our best chance to get Atty the help she needs," Proj told him, "without attracting the attention of the authorities, is to make our way across the continent and get in touch with Shag's friends Loris and Johanna in Nueva York. We think the rover can get us there in a matter of days; with the smoother terrain and brighter sun, we can get more speed out of her here than we could on Mars."
"Proj and Terry have volunteered to come with us," Shagrug said, "as guides, sort of, though they don't really know much more than we do about what's out there. Besides, Proj wants his rover back and for some reason he doesn't think much of my piloting skills." He waved a hand toward the wrecked ship outside.
"We can stop at New Planitia, in Ohio," Proj added. "I want to check in with some old friends. I'm sure someone there can guide us into Nueva York without too much publicity. Just how your friends Loris and Johanna will be able to get Atty back in spaceworthy condition, I can't imagine, but Shag thinks it can be done."
"Hell, we can chop her up and fly her out and re-assemble her in orbit, but we'll need a roomy ship to do that. Anais qualifies."
Progeny raised his glass. "In that case, a toast. Over the river and through the woods."
They clinked glasses.
***
The sun beat down on the shimmering landscape, nearly as deadly as the sun on Mars, for the ozone layer had not yet recovered from the ravages of the boom-decades, and the solar constant on Earth is many times that of the more distant planet. The land itself was Paradise compared to Mars but desolate enough--dust-devils whirled across the cracked, dried mudflats, the horizon wavered in the rising heat, and only a few scraggly plants struggled for a foothold alongside what had once been an interstate highway through endless, lush cornfields. The roadway was buckled and cracked, and dunes drifted across it in the fitful wind, but for the rover, designed to negotiate the boulder-fields and canyon beds of Mars, it was a fast track. The huge wheels kicked up clouds of dust as the forbidding landscape flew by.
Inside the forward cab, cool and dark behind tinted ports, Karil was at the wheel, but Atalanta was driving, for the road ahead stretched like a ruled line to the shimmering horizon, and there was nothing alongside to draw one’s attention but the occasional stunted tree-trunk and the ruined, dune-filled foundation of some ancient road-side facility.
"Atty," said Karil, "Can I have a blank screen for a moment?" Data vanished from one of the screens on the panel before him.
"Thank you," said Karil, and he began to type:
Eros was an elder god,
much more than rut and romance,
for his powers keep the world
from flying into chaos
from the stress of moving parts
all seeking their own way.
And Love must wage a constant battle
to maintain good order in the teeth of entropy.
If we neglect to clear
the dust and cobwebs that collect each day,
in time the temple of the heart
will tumble into ruin and jungle rot.
"You've been reading Hesiod, Karil," said Atty. She said nothing about an eighteen-year-old pontificating about the nature of love.
"Lord Coldwell made sure Jay got a classical education. My father agreed that I should get one with him, in between the riding and the shooting and the falconry. I really took to it, though, especially the poetry."
"I have to wake Shagrug now; there's something up ahead that he should see. Do you want him to see your poetry?"
"No, I think not."
The screen cleared, and Shagrug crawled into the cab.
"What is it, Atty?"
The vehicle slowed to a crawl as a more complex collection of ruins appeared on both sides of the roadway. They had seen several hauntingly desolate towns like this--a ruined grain elevator like a hollow, rotted tree-stump; the remains of a roadside cafe, with a rusted and sand-blasted sign creaking in the wind and bearing the nearly-illegible offer of prairie hospitality; the hollow shell of a church, with the bell still forlornly ringing in the gale, as if warning of a doomsday already come; and in the distance, ruined silos like the jagged teeth of some carnosaur skeleton uncovered by the shifting sands. Karil's little poem became inconsequential before this terrible beauty.
"Something important?" Progeny crawled in from the next car and sat behind them.
"Look."
A rotting human corpse hung from a cross by the side of the road like a satanic scarecrow, tattered remains of its clothing flapping in the wind.
"We're entering another tribe's turf," said Shag. "Where are we, Atty?"
"We've entered Nebraska."
"Any more tire tracks?"
"Too much wind, but there's oil on the road. Motorcycles or a dune buggy of some sort passed through here only a few days ago. No other sign of life."
"Okay, let's go, then." The vehicle accelerated and was soon flying over the dunes again. Shagrug returned to his bunk and Progeny slid into the seat beside Karil. Together, they watched the desolate landscape roll by.
"It’s hard to imagine," Progeny said, "that this was some of the richest farmland in the world."
"I don't understand why they let it happen."
"Some people saw it coming. There was plenty of warning but solving the problem would have been costly and there was always some political or economic reason to put it off. Then it was too late. Anyway, it was in the interest of the fantasy class to pretend it wasn't so. And it was in the interest of most leaders to pretend to believe them. They say the plain and simple truth is seldom plain and never simple, but I think the truth is always simple; it's our refusal to believe it that makes it complicated.
"The motivation behind greed--or at least the excuse for it--is providing for one’s family. You might think that providing for everyone would be the best way to provide for your own, but politics runs on fear. Why would you vote for an obvious con man, except for the conviction that his opponent will take food out of your child's mouth? This was the richest, safest place on Earth, and yet every election--even in the boom-years--was about scarcity and vulnerability."
"It's not rational."
"That's why every political debate hung on patriotism, religion, and the family--because human beings are all but incapable of rationality where those matters are concerned. And that’s why we've tried to eliminate those factors on Mars. You're not likely to destroy the future of someone else’s child in the interest of providing security for your own if that child is just as much yours as your own genetic offspring."
"Is it true, what they say? That Martian children don’t know who their parents are?"
Progeny laughed. "That’s bullshit. High Company propaganda. We don’t raise them in Skinner boxes, you know. We live underground, Karil, in tiny little communities. How can you not know who your parents are? The point is that every adult is responsible for every child, and any child can turn to any adult for help in any way."
"I never saw my mother," Karil said.
"Really? Did she die in childbirth?"
"She died before I was born. Her body was kept alive by a machine until I could survive outside the womb." Karil turned and found Progeny looking at him strangely. "What’s the matter?" he asked.
"Never mind. Maybe you should come to Mars. We can find lots of mothers for you."
"Until then," Atty crooned, "I would be happy to mother him."
"It's going to be dark soon," said Terry, as she poked her head through the hatch. "Karil and I can get ready now."
"Terry," Atalanta said, "I am still not sure this is wise."
"You'll have to slow down in the dark to conserve power; that gives us the opportunity to scout the road ahead. People can see you coming for miles, but two people on horseback with night-goggles and muffled hooves will be able to sneak up on any possible traps or hazards. Karil has hunting skills that we can put to good use here, and we'll both be armed. We'll be in constant communication, and you can come get us in a matter of minutes, if you have to. Okay? Come on, Karil."
Progeny smiled at him. "When she was a little girl, she bossed around every little boy in the commune, and they all loved it."
Karil followed Terry back to the next car in time to see her pick up the hem of her robe and pull it up over her head. She shook out her long tresses, padded over to a locker dressed only in a brief panty, and tossed him a pile of folded black fabric. "Hurry up and change."
Karil slipped off his ship-suit and wriggled into the skin-tight black outfit with some difficulty.
"Jesus, Karil, if you’re ever going to be a Martian, you’ll have to get used to seeing naked women without reacting that way; you’ll be teased unmercifully."
In a moment, they were dressed in black, including their riding boots, their infra-red goggles and the holstered lasers on their hips. Terry slid the goggles up onto her head while Karil tucked her golden mane into her hood and covered her face with black goo. There were fine white hairs all over her silky skin, he discovered, and in her green eyes was an expression both frank and quizzical. He was aware of her small hard body beneath the tight black fabric of her outfit, the way the holster draped her hips, the rise and fall of her breasts and the hardening of her nipples as her excitement mounted. Was it the danger of the mission or Karil's touch that was affecting her this way?
She snapped the goggles down and looked at him. "Your body temperature is way up, Karil," she teased.
And so was hers. They crawled back into the last car, where their mounts waited, bored and ready to run after being cooped up so long in a rolling box. They began to stamp and shudder with anticipation as they were saddled. Terry tapped the side of her goggles.
"Can you hear me, Atty?"
"Very clearly."
Karil did the same and received the same response. They swung up into the saddle and the ramp descended to the road behind them, revealing a flat black landscape and a star-studded, equally black sky. It reminded Karil of the SPOT-panel vistas above.
"You lead, Karil," said Terry. "I’ll be in charge of the dressing and undressing; you can be in charge of the hunt."
"That would be the traditional human division of labour," Atty said.
Karil touched his mount’s flanks with his boot-heels and it bounded forward down the ramp and into the sand. They wheeled about, and from the lead car, Shag and Proj watched them wave as they flashed by in the dark, kicking up the dust, and vanished.
"I don't like this," Shagrug said.
"The young ones have to get out of this can for a while," Progeny told him.
"Yeah, well, I still don't like it. Keep an eye on them, Atty. They’re both way too delicious for my peace of mind."
***
Karil had crept up on feeding lions in the dark. From boyhood, he had explored High Africa, sneaking out of the palace to make his way across the savannah when the mirrors were closed, and the animals' behaviour was most interesting. He had built his own infrared goggles as a schoolboy and was nearly as comfortable on horseback as in space. Before him now was a dry riverbed spanned by a bridge.
Karil slid to the ground, scrambled down the embankment into the dust, and examined the supports of the bridge. "These supports have been systematically weakened," he said.
"Are you sure?" Terry was holding the reins of his mount.
"The bridge is made out of lunacrete with space-steel support; I guess there must be tremendous flash floods here. I know about this stuff. Someone has done their best to see that it collapses when too great a weight passes over it."
"A trap."
"Yes, but I don't think it's for us. The rover's not heavy enough. They're after bigger game: bulk transport of some kind. Or else they haven't had time to finish the job."
He climbed up the dry embankment and searched the horizon with his infra-red goggles. "They may be watching when we cross the bridge tomorrow. Did you get all that, Atty?"
"Yes, Karil," he heard in his ear. "Come back now, please."
They returned the way they came. Several kilometres back, they trotted silently through the town they had passed on the way to the bridge--another dust-covered station, another hotel with a sign creaking in the wind, the ubiquitous grain elevator with an advertisement, long illegible, painted on the side. Through the goggles there were patterns of light and dark where different materials had absorbed differing amounts of radiation during the day, but there was no sign of body heat. Across the road, a barn door slammed forlornly in the wind, and the horses whinnied nervously as they crept by on muffled hooves. Karil pulled back on the reins, then bent to examine the ground. "Tire tracks," he said.
The door of the barn beside them was flung wide open and the riders were bathed in light, blinding them in their goggles. Terry ripped off her goggles, her hand flashed down and came up with her laser. Its beam burned into the open door, and they heard a human scream. A dune-buggy roared out of the barn, a dead man slumped over a machine-gun in the passenger's seat. The rollbar was decorated with rotting human heads impaled on spikes. The driver, dressed in equally rotten leather rags, gunned the motor and the wheels spun in the sand. It leaped toward them.
Karil turned his mount, and slapped Terry's horse hard on the flank. They raced off down the highway, hooves flying. A motorcycle roared out of the front door of the hotel, skidded in a sharp turn, the driver stomping the road with huge boots, and took off after them. The whole side of the grain elevator toppled forward and hit the ground, a cloud of insulation fibres billowing up about it. Half a dozen riders erupted from the blackness within, the dust-cloud swirling about them as their vehicles leaped over the fallen panel. Half of the vehicles were decorated with the heads of fallen foes.
"Atty, we're coming fast, and vehicles are chasing us," Karil said. Bullets whizzed over his head. He drew his laser, twisted in the saddle at full gallop, and fired. A motorcycle spun out and flipped into the dry ditch on the side of the road, the driver flipping over the handlebars with a scream to land crumpled in the dust.
Suddenly the night was filled with light and noise. The Martian sand-rover vaulted over a rise in the road ahead, all six wheels in the air for a second, all lights blazing and sirens screaming like a tortured cat. The open ramp of the horsecar bounced along the road behind it, scattering sparks in the darkness. It all roared past them and seemed intent on ramming their pursuers head on. Weapons popped out of the sides of the lead car with a whir and a click and began firing tracers into the night like an exploding fireworks factory. The bikers spun out of the way with screams of panic, vehicles and riders bouncing in several directions. A grinning human skull bounded along the road and leaped up into Karil's face, spinning by him as he ducked.
Karil and Terry wheeled about and raced off after the vanishing sand-rover, the panicked, foam-flecked horses wanting nothing so much as to return to their quiet little car. Behind them, riders jerked up their vehicles and thundered in pursuit. Karil and Terry clattered up the ramp into the car and leaped down from the saddles. A motorcycle roared up the ramp in hot pursuit, appearing for all the world as if it was about to careen into Karil and Terry and the horses besides, in a tangle of blood and broken limbs.
The sand-rover hit a pothole.
The ramp bounced up and the motorcycle flipped upside down, landing on the screaming driver. The motorcycle slid back down the ramp but caught on the ramp-chain and was dragged after the sand-rover, scattering sparks into the night. The alcohol tank ruptured, and the vehicle burst into flame. Now they were dragging the flaming motorcycle, the pinned and injured driver shrieking in pain. Karil slammed the button on the wall, the winch whined and smoked, but the ramp would not lift the additional weight of the motorcycle.
"Hold me," Karil said, and began to inch his way down the ramp, clinging to the chain.
"For Christ sake, Karil!"
"Hold me."
Terry wrapped one arm about a stanchion and gripped Karil's hand with the other. The horses were rearing and screaming, and their hooves crashed against the wall of the car within millimetres of her body. Her hood had come off and her hair whipped about her face as the sand-rover careened down the road. Riders roared past them and were met with machine gun fire from the forward car, Progeny and Shagrug each manning an external gun while Atalanta drove. Karil, his hand firmly gripped by Terry, inched down the incline, flames roaring up in his face, and began to kick the motorcycle, as the ramp bounced along the road.
A dune-buggy carrying two pursuers swung in front of the rover. The passenger climbed onto the back and leaped onto the front of the careening Martian vehicle. Shagrug looked up and saw the man's face, filled for a moment with an expression of astonishment at the fact that no one was driving, but then the attacker began pounding on the windshield with a spiked, mailed fist.
"Someone's at the door, Atty," Shagrug said. "Where's your manners?"
The front hatch spun open, and the attacker was sucked inside. Shagrug saw the expression of surprise disappear from the window and then reappear in the hatch as the attacker was flung into Shagrug's arms. Shagrug's hard head connected with his face; he toppled backward through the hatch, fell to the road, and vanished beneath the vehicle. Shagrug returned to his machine-gun.
Karil held on tight as the ramp bounced over another pothole. The attacker from the front slid between the great tires, appeared from beneath the ramp, and was flung into the face of an approaching driver, whose vehicle went down and skidded into the ditch.
The blackened hand of the burned motorcycle driver reached up and closed about Karil's ankle. Terry screamed a warning too late. Her grip on his hand tightened, but Karil was being dragged down into the flames. The heat was intense and Terry's grip on the stanchion was loosening. If he did not let go of her hand, she would be dragged with him.
"No, Karil," she shouted into the wind, her hair whipping about her face. "Don't you dare let go. You hear me?"
The burned rider lifted his cooked visage to Karil and Karil kicked him full in the face with his other foot. Man and motorcycle flipped off the end of the ramp in a pinwheel of flame and spun into the midst of the pursuers. Terry dragged Karil up the ramp as it began to close, the winch-motor whirring. Another motorcycle cut out of the pack and roared toward them. As they watched in astonishment, the rider stood up on the rear seat behind the driver as it passed, and leaped through the narrowing opening onto Karil, dragging him down. Hooves crashed about him, and the horses screamed as the two struggling figures rolled in the straw and dung at their feet.
Karil looked into the face of a young girl--a slight but wiry figure in brief leathers, her nearly naked torso and shaved head covered with tattoos of snakes. The girl whipped out a knife and raised it above her head to plunge it into Karil’s heart, but she hesitated. Terry drew her laser and shot the girl through the hand, Karil kicked her off his body and into the ramp behind her, and Terry slammed her palm against the button. The ramp fell open again with a crash and the girl was flung out the back. She somersaulted backwards like a gymnast and landed on her feet in the road, but her momentum was too great, and she sat down hard in the dust.
There was a roar from somewhere behind them and they were blinded by light. The girl, silhouetted in the glare, cartwheeled sideways off the road and sprawled in the dirt. With a great honking, like the warning claxon of a spaceship, a vehicle of monstrous size roared past her, gaining on the fleeing rover and scattering motorcycles and dune buggies like leaves along the side of the road.
"What the hell is that!" they heard Shagrug shout.
The sand-rover swerved into the ditch, nearly flinging Karil and Terry and the horses besides out the back of the vehicle. Sand flew in all directions as it careened to a stop in the dirt, nearly jack-knifing into total disaster. The thing that roared by them was a truck as big as a ship. It had several trailers, dozens of wheels and dwarfed the sand-rover into insignificance. There was no driver either--not even a cab--but only a dish antenna on the roof pointed toward the southern sky, where a necklace of powersats blazed in the heavens. The trailers were filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of sacks of grain.
"Wheat from the Canadas," Progeny said, as he crawled back toward them. "Powered by microwave. It stops for nothing."
The motorcycles roared out of the darkness, and everyone drew their weapons and stood grimly by to defend the stalled sand-rover, but the vehicles flashed by in pursuit of the truck. One tattooed young figure, riding on the back of one motorcycle, waved at Karil as she passed, and laughing bawdily, threw him a kiss.
***
The gunship sat quietly, repairing itself. Tiny robots welded and mended, moving to and fro in the dark interior. Only the instrument lights were glowing, to inform the pilot of the state of the repairs. His goggles observed and compared the present state of the ship to its battle-ready optimum, according to the specifications on file, then informed the pilot that the repairs were nearly finished. The pilot did not speak, and so the system assumed it was performing properly. The pilot did not request nourishment, and so the system assumed he was not hungry. There was as yet no contact from headquarters, and so the system assumed it should remain in blackout mode.
The enemy had been shot down, but the gunship remained on alert for additional orders, though no orders had come for a long time. Until such orders, it would continue to monitor its surroundings for signs of enemy incursion in the district it was directed to defend. The roar of the ship passing overhead, and the emissions of its drivers had been the only such sign since the pilot had gone to sleep, resting from his injuries, and had ordered the ship to maintain battle-readiness until he should awake. The simple-minded computers aboard saw nothing strange in a twenty-year nap.
The ship’s sensors detected something suspicious: tracers in the sky, the distant sound of gunfire in the desert. Apparently, the guerrilla raiders had returned. It dutifully informed the pilot, and since no additional orders were forthcoming, it reverted to standing directives to investigate any evidence of battle nearby. Its drivers, now repaired, roared into life, and it rose from the secluded meadow it had chosen as a repair site. Conscientiously informing the pilot of every change in altitude and vector, should he wish to engage manual control, it turned and set course for the desert where it had heard the gunfire, the pilot’s empty skull lolling in its restraints with every movement.