ch 3 | Gull

The rain slapped at Gull's face with cold, elfin hands. His legs and arms prickled as if he had been sleeping with all of them folded up under him at once. He dimly wondered why, if he had just been struck by lightning, was he so comfortable? Gull was bounced gently up and down, hearing the drumming of rain all around him. He was soaked; fortunately, the night was warm. Tentatively, he tried to use his limbs; they seemed to move on command. The tingling grew almost painful, then gradually lessened. Another flash of light revealed his situation to him: like half a grape on a dinner plate, the floater had come to rest upside down on the splintered surface of Crater. A testimony to its durability, the envelope of the wing had survived, and the flight harness held Gull to it in an embrace that reminded him of fat Aunt Sophie.

His helmet was gone, and with it his link to the electronics in the wing. If indeed they were not also just useless wisps of silicon. He looked at his wrist. The miniature computer in there was probably dead, too; even if it survived, it had no radio link. His scalp stung; there was probably a cut up there. There was no way to tell how bad it was in the dark and the rain, but as the fog in his mind began to lift, he realized that was the least of his problems.

"Gotta get moving," he told himself. The question was, which way? He hit the release clamp and slithered off the wing to land in a soggy heap. His memory was spotty. The last few images of his approach strobed in his mind like scattered snapshots. Gull felt that he had been over the northeast corner of the feature. If he started walking the wrong way, he could spend a lethal amount of time in the high-radiation zone.

His fingertips swept the rippled bomb-glass of the crater floor. At least the rain was keeping any dust down, though it was obscuring his view of the heavens. No way to tell how long he had been unconscious; the uncertainty added to his urgency. More lightning stuttered over the grooved and fissured ground. It revealed veils of rain caught tearing themselves apart on knives of glass sharpened by winter after winter.

An idea flickered. Gull clambered back onto the trampoline-like surface of the floater, fighting to fix heels and toes in the harness, and held himself poised until the next crack of lightning. He tried to hold the image he had seen, hoping it was not just a local variation. In the jittering light radiated like thrown ink. His memory of the splintered trees all lying blown away from ground zero gave him hope. Surely, differences in density of the original ground surface would have cast fossilized shadows in the ripples he had felt and seen.

The smooth curve of the crater twisted perspective. He thought he saw glitters from what he hoped was the rim, reflecting the lightning against the matte black of the further sky. He slid back to the ground and set off.

"At least I won't be tripping over anything out here," he said. It wasn't going to be that easy. Twice Gull almost sprained an ankle when his heel caught in a fissure. The lightning began to taper off. The rain slowed, though not enough to let his boots grip securely. He did fall several times, gashing hands and bruising knees. Gull had to slow his pace as the ground began to slope upward. After a while he felt lost in a void with no reference points. As the soreness from the crash passed and his muscles began to loosen, he dared hope that they had been overestimating Crater's potency. He started to worry less about the effect of radiation on his hard-earned DNA. To pass the time, he tried to remember when he had been more uncomfortable.

Perhaps it had been four summers ago. The air was thick and still, hot as the bottom of a compost heap. Gull, and Rafe, his younger brother, were in the south fields, bringing in the hay. Form following function, a farmer of the prior era would have recognize the baler, for all that it was made of high-density plastic and ceramic, and wrapped the hay in a spiderweb of quick setting sprayed resin. That vanished farmer would also recognize the condition of the two boys heaving the fat cylinders into position on the balloon-tired wagon. The humid air and the exercise conspired to coat them with a thick layer of sweat and dust.

"Rafe, I believe that every loose piece of straw is ending up under my shirt," declared Gull, wiping his forehead with a rag gray with dust.

"No way, brother! Half of it's in my shorts. How much of the field do we have left?"

"About half," Gull paused to scratch madly between his shoulder blades. "But it's the biggest half. Look out, here comes another." The tireless arms of the bailer launched another bolus onto the wagon, and the two boys dragged it to its assigned place.

"Maybe we can talk our driver into taking a break."

"I heard that!" Mary called from the driver's pod of the trac. She was a tall girl, born three months after Gull. Mary could keep up with any of them, but still projected an air of fragility, even so. She kept her blonde hair tied back with small locks of hair, braided into little ropes. Her fine-boned hands controlled the bucking steering frame of the trac firmly over the field. Gull enjoyed being with her, but it had yet to develop into anything beside simple friendship.

"We can't stop, or we'll never get this field done."

Gull groaned. "She's a slave driver, Rafe."

They worked their way back and forth over the acres, collecting the condensed production of what had been the settlement's newest working field. By late afternoon, the two brothers' arms and shoulders burned with fatigue and sun, and they felt like the hay splinters would remain embedded in their skin until mid-winter.

"We're heading home, guys," called Mary, wearily swinging the trac toward the path that stitched the fields of the kibbutz together. Gull and Rafe left the last bale where it landed and collapsed back against the bristly mountain that topped the wagon's bed.

"Gull, tell me again how much fun we're having," wheezed his brother.

"Come on, squirt, you know the farm needs the hay. You'll look back on this day when you're drinking milk this winter and-"

"Pour it over your head, brother."

"Come to think of it, that would feel good, right about now."

The wagon followed the trac until all six wheels rode more or less in their proper rut. The variable response elastic cable that had replaced complicated shock absorbers evened out the bumps until Gull could imagine himself on a sailing ship. That is, if it was a life raft- and he had a two week coating of dried salt in his clothes. The day was drawing down , the sun heading for rest behind the blue haze of the Appalachians. Most of the birds had given it up as too much work. The only sound was the buzz of an occasional grasshopper, the wheels hissing through the drying grasses and a whine from the wheel motors as the trac pulled its load up a rise.

Gull opened his eyes as the wagon tilted over the crest. Before him was the settlement campus: young children waved at them from their games on the playing field that bordered the Southfield road. Beyond, cloaked in the greenery of huge, old-growth trees left from the founding of Jeshua lay the Common Hall. It was overseeing a scatter of individual homes like a hen and her chicks. Behind them was the blue and green ribbon of the Branch, a brook that drained an artificial pond made when they dammed a tributary of the Chak. It provided a controlled supply of water, and a pleasant parklike area close by the Hall. The branch flowed along the base of a low, stony bluff. It divided the residential area of the settlement from a small plateau containing the kibbutz' manufactories, such as the smithy, a nanoware and electronics lab, and a ceramic studio. The studio ran on methane generated by manure produced by the kibbutz' various stock of animals. M&M, or methane management, was the least sought after duty on the rotation.

Gull's eyes moved to the ribbed bulk of the hangar west of the Hall, with the spire of the docking tower standing sentry like beside the clamshell doors. They were big enough to swallow the Lady Jessica, , the kibbutz' cargo dirigible. Gull would much rather have been inside those doors, tinkering with spidery airframes, fitting fist sized motors within streamlined nacelles, coating wings with photo electric crystal paint. Even at this distance, he could faintly smell the cinnamon burn of the solvents. When he reached adulthood, Gull hoped to be on the crew of the lighter, part of the transport service that tied the colonies together. At this stage of his life he was expected to rotate among the various functions of the community like everyone else. Gull showed an aptitude for flying, though, and hung around the hangar as much as he could on his free time. If he could just talk Wye into letting him solo...

"Wake up, dreamboat!" Mary's voice opened his eyes, which had drifted shut when he wasn't looking. Their road had turned to the east, and the sun cast their shadow ahead through the trees onto the sides of the barns. "We need to get this load inside before dark."

Gull and Rafe groaned in unison. There was a net under the hay which would be hooked to winch-driven cables to shift the whole load into the loft of the dairy barn. Mary would control the motors, but there was more hot, dusty work ahead of them.

"At least hayseed wasn't radioactive," Gull mumbled, shivering as the rain continued to soak his coverall. The slope of the ground was increasing sharply; Gull took that as a good sign. Perhaps he was nearing the limit of the actual crater, where the blast had pushed the viscous wave of molten earth outward and upward. His boots began to loose purchase, so he turned to the right and began following the curve, hoping to come to a fissure big enough to allow him exit. Presently he was rewarded, a last flash of lightning illuminated an alluvial fan of silt washing into the crater, where erosion had eaten a channel to the outside.

The darkness was an oppressive presence. If dawn was near at all, the clouds were soaking up any clue. Gull was almost sorry to leave the mathematical predictability of the crater and venture into the random world of earth, air and water. The crevice was narrow enough for him to touch both sides, and the wet sand slid under his feet. When his hands left the slick inner surface and encountered honest mud, he whooped for joy. The channel quickly widened, and he was left to guess the shape and direction of the land. After a few minutes, he had fallen several times, and had a mouth full of bitter tasting mud and a split lip. His shivering intensified, and he also started to sweat ferociously. The next time he fell, it was over a large object. Exploring it with his hands, he realized that it was a tree trunk, lying across his path.

"Follow the direction they point," He told himself. Turning right, he crawled along the trunk until he encountered a tangle of what had to be roots, fanning out like the legs of a dead spider, washed clean of earth by two hundred years of rain. He broke free a fairly straight length of wood, and headed back in the other direction, using it to feel out the ground before him.

"T-this is b-better," He stuttered, just to hear the sound of his voice. It did not improve his mood. The ground under his feet was a quagmire of sterile sand and mud. There were no growing vines or vegetation to trip him, though he occasionally encountered a nest of storm-gathered branches and had to detour. Gradually, a faint gray illumination began to gather in the sky, and slowly filtered to the ground, replacing the rain. The light, faint though it was, sparked a headache, and a slowly growing feeling of nausea.

Gull had never been sick a day in his life; the most he had known of pain was cuts and bruises, and once a bone broken in a fall. His condition was new to him, and he didn't like it. The term, radiation poisoning, though familiar to him from safety classes, seemed not to connect with what was happening to him. He tried not to think about it, and put his energies into what had become a deep, fixed drive: to move forward. It wasn't until his hands were raked by blackberry bushes that he realized he had reached a zone where plants could once again grow. It was as if strings to his muscles were cut- he swayed, and nearly fell, with the relief that he had reached a less dangerous area. The feeling was tempered with the certainty that he had already received a possibly lethal dose, not to mention whatever organic poisons that he might have been exposed to in the mud.

His eyes fell on some fruit; they were distorted, some of the drupes were nearly the size of his thumb, others were tiny and shriveled, the size of pinheads. The color was off, and the foliage was mostly thorns. Life could survive, but still at a cost to its DNA. He looked around. The rolling landscape was covered with low scrub, the hills beyond suggesting that he was nearing the edge of the Preserve. There were Native communities there, but he was hazy on their exact location.

"Wait- the river." His voice was hoarse, his throat sore. He tried to clear the fog from his brain and picture the map. The Chak meandered northwest to southeast, draining the watershed of the old national forest. The kibbutz was reclaiming land above the river for eventual expansion. Home was southwest, across a waterway that averaged at least 15 meters wide. There was only one pontoon bridge, yet, just at the settlement. If he could locate a small stream, perhaps he could follow it down to the main river. Abruptly, at the thought of water, he felt intensely thirsty, but was not about to sample the berries and had no wish to push through an acre of mutant thorns. He found an avenue around them and plunged into the thickening brush.

Kevin Ben Hatcher squirmed at the focus of eighty seven pairs of eyes. The Great Hall was silent except for the chatter of the young children at the dinner tables. The murmur of tense voices came from the comp station room, up the wide stairs and through the archway behind him. The biolume garden tubes cast their soft golden light over the hall, but he felt as if a theatrical spotlight was on him. For once, he devoutly wished to be out of it.

"Kevin, come up here!" At the voice of the kibbutz' Chairman Elder, Kev bolted from his chair and up the stairs. The Chairman was seated at the console in the dimly lighted room, his face underlit by the glow from the screen.

"Gull's floater is not back yet, you know."

"Sir? He was on his way back when I closed down- I thought he'd be here by now."

"Then what's he doing in this position?" The Chairman's finger lanced out at the screen. It showed a satellite view of their sector, with a splash of cloud in false color, like a bloodstain, just above the square marking the settlement. A small arrowhead was blinking in the southern fringes of the stain.

"What's he doing there- he must have turned around-"

"Don't be an ass, son."

A chill ran down his spine. He turned and saw Gull's father sitting in a corner of the room. The blue light from the comp deepened the lines in his face. "That's memory. More than an hour ago. There's no way that storm should have gotten that close to him."

"Let me bring you up to date." The Chairman released and fast-forewarded the image. Kev watched in horror as the storm swallowed Gull's indicator and spat it into Crater. When the blip disappeared from the screen, his shoulders sagged.

"Sir, I didn't-"

The father of Gull Ben Adamson leaned forward in his chair. His face, unused to sorrow, was a frozen funeral mask.

"You don't think! We lost telemetry on my son, there! It was your job to keep him posted. I'll see you before the Nobles, boy! "

He rose and stormed out of the room. Kev stood, paralyzed, staring at the display, now in realtime. The storm, crescent-shaped, now, was moving over the coast, and heading out to sea.

The Elder's voice was gentle, surprising Kev. "Gull's father has never had to deal with loss before. He is, perhaps, overreacting. It is possible that Gull is alive. We have called on the City already, and we will try to determine Gull's probable course, to give us a track to base our search patterns on.

What is done is done, and God does not erase the past. What you did was without excuse. I suggest that you pray that Gull does not have to die to teach you better judgment. Until the Nobles arrive, it would be a good idea for you to report to the hangar and help prepare the excursion flier for an aerial search. We, for certain, must wait until dawn or until the storm breaks up to begin."

Kev hurried out of the building, grateful for something to do. The thought of returning to the hall and all those eyes, was intolerable. The kibbutz was a tiny community, and gossip, even truthful gossip moved with the speed of light. Everyone would know everything before the dinner dishes were done. At least his father was in the western forests with the logging team.

The gusty wind spat rain in his face as he hurried across the lawn. Globes suspended from the branches of the trees along the path swung erratically, the tailored bacteria, genes laced with firefly DNA, flaring as their nutrient solution was agitated. He ducked through the three meter access doors, tiny next to the huge valves that allowed the airships access to the hangar. Inside, the air throbbed to the rain drumming on the crystal moss outer shell. The inflated tubes that had supported the foundation membrane during the growth of the hangar were long gone. The arching indentations they left made him think of the ancient animated classic Pinochio, and the interior views of Monstro, the whale. His view of the distant ceiling was unobstructed; Lady Jeshua was out on its circum-Atlantic route. Other craft bobbed gently in the momentary breeze he had introduced, moored closely to the ground at the edges of the playing field-sized floor. The hangar smelled as always, like Christmas, but the spiced scent of the adhesives and monomole plastics did little to lift his spirits.

"Over here, Kevin," called Wye, the Landboss, from his nest of an office. A polished mahogany carving of a man, surrounded by wall maps and bolts of patchfilm, Wye Sverlosk was an anomaly in his family. Out of generations of pilots and airmen, Wye was an acrophobia, out of doors. As long as the airship was under the hangar roof, Wye would crawl all over the netting that held the various pods to the balloons that supported them. Out in the open air, he refused to climb a ladder. He enjoyed designing, building and maintaining the dirigibles. He was content to let his sibs and cousins do the actual flying.

"The Chairman called," he said when Kev arrived. Wye's face was grave, his bushy eyebrows pulled down. Kev's heart thudded in his chest, and he felt as though his ears were about to burst into flame.

"What did he say?"

"He told me that Gull was still out. Missing in the storm. That you're coming over to help get the E-2 ready for a search flight at dawn. That the Nobles and Rangers will be here in an hour or two. Anything else I should know?"

"Uh, no, I guess not. What can I do?"

"Let's see... preflight check. Clean the air intake filters, check the capcells, and hook them up to the grid to top them off. Run the airbag on the dehumidifier; we don't want to run with condensation on the internal surfaces. I'll do a systems check of the electronics. You start with the filters."

"Right." Kev hurried down the row. Most of the airships were modular in concept, with a separate airbag and pods for pilots, passengers, livestock or other cargo. The E-2 was a second generation craft, with an elastic envelope and an integral passenger and cargo area. It used the airbag for both lift and propulsion. The airbag was highly pressurized; when under load, the bag was allowed to expand and enclose a larger volume of air, which was then under the influence of the NivenHawks. There were an array of vents at the stern to provide thrust; in essence it was a jet-propelled balloon. A computer balanced the needs of lift and speed as pumps drew air into the envelope and stored it. The E-2 was designed as an exploration vehicle, and could load moderate amounts of cargo through a hatch on the underside. Kev ducked under the bulge of the airbag and clambered in through the open hatch. The cargo bay was big enough to hold a dozen people, and had a winch mounted above the opening. Equipment and storage cabinets lined the rear of the bay, and a hatch in front led to the cockpit. Kev popped the hatch and climbed into a small chamber between the two areas. He flipped a toggle; there was a hissing sound, and he swallowed several times as the air pressure equalized. He ignored the door to the control room; reaching over his head, he pushed a hatch open and climbed up into the airbag. Avoiding the guy lines that secured the a-grav nodes in the center of the volume, he walked forward over the spine of the cockpit to the drumhead-tight fabric that provided a catwalk along the arc of quiescent air pumps. Kev began to work his way down the array of bass drum-sized intake filters in the pearly light that diffused through the envelope membrane from the hangar's glowglobes.

Around four o'clock in the morning, a bang made the walls of the hangar shiver. Kev jerked up from where he was drowsing over the capcells' indicators.

"Was that thunder? I thought the storm was over?"

Wye shook his head. "I don't think that was thunder." He put down the multitester, closed up the access panel and strode toward the door controls. Kev started to follow him, but thought better of it and ducked behind some crates.

Pneumatics hissed, and the huge clamshell doors rumbled open to the rain and darkness. The hangar lights caressed fluid curves of malachite and silver, and where the lines of the strange craft ran back into shadow, golden radiance danced over surfaces and edges. Steam plumed up as raindrops hissed away on surfaces heated by atmospheric friction. Without a sound or a signal, as the doors opened enough for its flanks to clear, the ship floated in like so much thistledown. It settled precisely on the touchdown marks, resting on three graceful limbs that extruded from the hull.

Wye punched the button to close the doors, and moved to stand at the nose of the craft with military erectness. Against the beauty of the ship's design, he seemed shabby and grease stained. Lines of brilliant light appeared on the belly, widened into a door in which were shilouetted two figures. Kev had to look away for a moment, blinking away afterimages. When he looked back, the opening had closed, and the two figures were standing beside Wye.

Kev had never seen a ship from the City of God before. At the High Feast in midsummer, Nobles traveled among the various settlements on the American continent with containers of the Sacrament, leaves from the Trees of Healing for folk unable to travel to Jerusalem. But the representatives of the Power that had pulled the human race back from the brink of extinction generally used the same transportation as mortals. As de facto rulers, they could have commandeered entire ships, but chose to hitch rides on the trading routes.

The two wore the usual concealing robes, but not because they were disfigured. Far from it: as they walked with Wye, both were taller. His head barely reached their elbows, and the grace of their movements captured the eye. The curve of a shoulder, the angle of a knee as it broke the line of the fabric somehow carried power, as if Michelangelo's David walked. Fascinated, Kev tried to see their faces, but it was as if a glittering fog went with them. His mind would assemble a general description, but his eyes slid aside if he tried to focus on their features. They carried the customary rod of authority, a polished bronze cylinder about a meter long.

They drew level with his hiding place. The shorter of the two individuals placed a hand gently on Wye's arm and stopped.

She (Kev suddenly realize) turned her head, and looked directly at him through the crevice between the crates.

"It is not necessary to hide. Come out and join us." Her voice reminded Kev of a set of wind chimes hanging outside his grandparent's home. He found he was unable to resist the summons. Slowly he stepped out into full view.

"I am Mawri, and my companion is Tiglath. We are here to help."

"I'm Kevin."

"Yes, we know. We are those who have charge over this region. You were presented to us at your birth, as were most of the people of this settlement. We pass by from time to time, but you have grown much since the last time we saw you."

"In light of what has brought us here, do you have something you wish to tell us?" Tiglath's voice was a deep bass rumble, yet gentle, like distant summer thunder.

There was no coercion. Kev looked up, could see their eyes clearly. He opened his mouth, about to confess the whole thing, when there came a voice from behind him.

"That boy is responsible for the death of my son! He deliberately did not warn him about the storm!"

Gull's father, with the Elder and several of the settlement's men behind him strode toward them. Adamson's face was set like stone; his grief and anger let him ignore the daunting presence of the Nobles. Tiglath spoke.

"A serious charge, and one which is, perhaps, premature. We have not been given knowledge of your son's location or condition. But if he were dead, we would sense it.

Adamson deflated a little, as the import of the words penetrated. His voice was softer, more hesitant.

"There- there's hope then?" His eyes took in the sleek craft resting in the hangar, metal pinging softly as it cooled. "Will you use your ship then? Can you go look for him now?"

Mawri spoke. "Patience, sir. We have both once been parents, and know very well your concern, but your own people must do the searching. Our craft is powerful, but small. We will travel with you." She waved the rod in her hand, and an image glowed in the air between them. "As you can see, the area is close enough for travel time to be insignificant. We can leave shortly before dawn, and be over the crater at first light. Use the time remaining to move medical supplies into your search craft. The Rangers are on their way, and will rendezvous at the search area."

The focus of the group shifted to the settlement's doctor, who discussed scenarios with the Nobles. Kev was left to trade uneasy glances with Gull's father. In the forty years since the founding of Kibbutz Jeshua there had been few incidents such as this, and never in Kev's lifetime had he seen all of the settlement's leaders up at half past four in the morning.

If only someone else had caused it!

Chapter 4