Sgt. Anthony Kolvin’s eyes shifted from the left screen to the right and back again, too rapidly for his mind to process the shifting images in front of him. Slow down, he told himself. Breathe deeply. He recognized the anxiety attack—he’d suffered them before in stress conditions. The problem was hyperventilation more than anything. The cause was this forest, something about it rattled him, something that didn’t seem to bother the younger men, something he couldn’t name.
He focussed on Monitor 1, which tracked his squad as they spread out up the canyon. The spy drone, with its motion-sensitive cameras, hovered silently eight meters above the lead man, high enough to follow the movement of the targets, and to keep an accurate position on each of the seven men in the squad. They were boys really, just turned seventeen and fearless, the way young boys are. That would be sixteen Earth years, he thought, too young to be out here on their own. The targets were not armed, as far as Kolvin knew, but it wasn’t the targets that worried him, it was the hostiles in the forest, whomever or whatever had attacked Outpost 47 two weeks ago. That’s where monitor 2 came in—it watched his ass. But the drones had their limitations, and that was what drove his fear.
The forward camera on monitor 1 shifted rapidly, showing movement up a steep ravine. Kolvin touched his com switch. “Target to your right, thirty degrees, forty-five meters. Acknowledge.”
“Ack,” came the reply. “Closing in on Target.”
“Once you have them, get back here pronto, Cooper,” he said.
“Will do. Almost have them, Sarge.”
On the lower half of the screen Kolvin watched seven blue dots, representing his men, converge on the two red dots. Once they had them, it would take another twenty minutes for the squad to return to base, and forty-five minutes more to clear out of the woods. That was too damned long. Monitor 2 came to sudden life, and Kolvin sucked in a deep breath. The cameras swiveled upward into the treetops, and high in the branches a shape moved slightly, its outline too vague to identify. It moved once more, just a hair, and the sun glinted off something long and metallic.
“Zoom in,” he said, feeling the panic return. The camera pulled the image closer—it looked to Kolvin like an Egyptian AP70. He’d seen a number of these anti-personnel launchers during his service in the Sinai Wars, too many to ever forget.
“Sniper,” he said under his breath, but it was too late. He heard the shots and watched the camera follow the two AP rounds hurtling toward him in slo mo. Funny how I can see them so clearly, he thought. They should have been a blur at 500 kilometers per hour. Paralyzed now by fear, he watched the miniature grenades rip through the roof of his canopy and explode in a circus of color, dispatching scores of nano smart bombs into the air to snuff out all life within a fifty meter circumference. He didn’t feel, or even see, the miniscule projectiles entering his body to deliver their peaceful death.
* * *
Molly Whitedeer swung her leg wildly, missing the soldier’s head, but pulling free of the strong hand which gripped her ankle. She scrambled up the slope toward Joey, who was now some distance above her near the top of the hill. Pieces of crumbled shale, dislodged by Joey’s boots, showered down upon her, making her own flight more difficult; but the falling rock gave her an idea, and as she climbed, she began to kick chunks of shale into the face of her pursuer, who quickly fell behind as he dodged the hail of stone.
When she looked up again, Joey had disappeared over the edge. He was the one they wanted, and she wasn’t going to let them have him, even if that meant allowing herself to be caught. The two of them had made a pact: if she was captured, he would not wait for her or attempt to rescue her. But the twelve-year-old idolized her, and she wasn’t confident he could hold up his end of the deal. Molly renewed her effort, kicking ferociously at the loose shale, but the soldier had pulled down his visor and was no longer bothering to avoid the debris. He headed straight up the hill at her, and she switched tactics, concentrating once more on climbing the hill. When the top of the incline was within a few feet, two pairs of strong arms came out of nowhere to seize her and drag her the remaining way up and over the edge of the embankment. She saw military boots and camouflage trousers, and they told her what she needed to know—she had been outflanked. And when she looked up, at last, she saw Joey in the grip of two burly boys in uniform.
There were seven of them altogether. The leader’s name was Private Cooper. None of the soldiers appeared older than Molly herself. Borns, she thought. They were Borns, like she and Joey, and that would explain why they moved so confidently in the forest. She hadn’t counted on that.
The soldiers snapped electronic anklets on them, and warned them not to wander more than 20 meters from Private Cooper, unless they wanted to feel the most excruciating pain of their lives. Cooper sent two of his men ahead, and the remainder escorted the shackled captives, two in the rear, one on either side, and Cooper in the lead, as they moved back down the canyon. Escape seemed out of the question. The downhill pace was brisk and Private Cooper clearly had a bug in his pants and a panicked look in his eyes. The others also seemed worried as they talked to one another in hushed tones. Perhaps their radio wasn’t working, or some crisis occurred back at camp, Molly couldn’t quite get the gist of it, but they were in a hurry, that much was certain.
They walked for a time in silence, listening to the sound of tramping boots and snapping branches. The trees here, near the western transition zone, were what Mama called pines, although Molly knew that pines were Earth trees, so they couldn’t be pines or firs or anything like that. The party pushed through the underbrush until it reached the trough of the canyon where a small creek ran to the west, and they turned to follow it downstream.
“I’m sorry, Joey,” Molly said to her nephew at last, when she thought the soldiers were distracted. “I didn’t think they would come this far in.”
“They’re Borns, aren’t they?” he said.
“Yeah, I think so.”
She had counted on the fact that most of the adults, those who had crossed over eighteen years ago, before they shut down the d-gates, had an uncanny fear of the Sweetland forest. The dread, in fact, was so intense that few of those immigrants would even acknowledge its existence. Borns were somehow immune to this delusion. It was an ominous sign if the New Americans were inducting Borns into the military. In a few years, when there were enough of them, they would be capable of invading the Communities from the West, through the forest. The peaceful Communities had no army to defend itself, and until recently, it hadn’t needed one. Now, the New America Corporation seemed unwilling to settle for half a continent, when they could take the whole thing.
The radio on Cooper’s belt crackled, and a voice spoke for several seconds in an excited but unintelligible garble.
“Shit,” said Cooper. He halted the procession with a raised hand and motioned the other soldiers to gather around. “It got Sarge,” he said. “He’s dead just like them others.”
“Damn fool,” said another of the young men, “I told him he should stay back and let us handle this.”
Molly listened to this conversation with alarm. “What killed him?” she asked.
The soldiers merely stared at her. Then Cooper said, “Whatever it is they see and we don’t, Miss. Some call ‘em Indians, some say enemy soldiers, but whatever it was ran through a whole outpost two weeks ago, killed every last man up there.”
* * *
They carried the body of the man they called Sarge down the canyon on a stretcher made from his canvas tent and loaded it into a flying machine the soldiers called a helicopter. The landscape in this place was treeless and alien to Molly, who had never been anywhere outside the forest. The barren earth expanded as far as she could see into the western horizon, and it seemed to her for the first time in a visceral way that the universe was infinite, and she small and insignificant.
The big rotors started turning, churning up dust, and one of the soldiers took Joey by the elbow and led him toward the helicopter. Halfway there, Joey twisted away from his escort and shouted, “Molly,” before being grabbed by a second soldier. The soldiers, one on each side, dragged him the remainder of the way to the helicopter as he continued to call out her name.
Molly was frantic, and would have run after him, if not for Private Cooper, who grabbed her wrist with an unyielding hand. She struggled for a minute, furious, and finally, unable to free herself from Cooper’s grip, she called back to the boy, “I’ll come and get you Joey, I promise.”
Molly turned to Cooper and kicked at him with a viciousness that surprised her, but he nimbly avoided her boot and laughed.
“You’re a feisty one, ain’t you?”
Instead of becoming more angry, she succumbed to her grief. “Where are they taking my nephew?” she demanded, her voice a terrible howl of pain. “Why can’t they take me with him?”
“I guess someone figured you’d be less trouble separated,” said Cooper. “Don’t worry, Miss, you’re both going to be taken good care of.”
Molly wanted to cry, but stubbornly held back the tears and focussed her mind on her predicament. What Cooper said was true. Jolene Cheng wouldn’t want her grandson damaged, and while Molly wasn’t exactly Cheng’s family, she was Joey’s family. In any case, Cheng couldn’t possibly be as evil as she was usually portrayed in the Communities, a description which approached devil incarnate.
“What are you going to do with me?” she asked Cooper.
“I’m driving you to Port Harvest, where someone’ll pick you up.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know,” said Cooper. “Maybe Ms. Cheng, herself. Or someone who works for her.”
The helicopter finally lifted off, taking Joey from her reach. They sat on the dusty ground and waited. By the time the truck arrived with New America Corporation, Special Security Forces painted on its door, Molly had a rough plan sketched out in her mind.
* * *
For several long hours Molly rode in the cab of the truck with Private Cooper. The heat of the sun and the boredom of the bleak, featureless landscape put her to sleep, only to be wakened after too brief a time by a rough patch of road, and around again in a cycle until at last the scenery began to change. To the north, a river now ran alongside the highway, and the landscape to the south began to resemble prairie, with tall grasses and large herds of grazing animals.
“What are they?” she asked Cooper.
“Ain’t you never seen cattle before?” said Cooper.
“No. Are they from Earth?”
“That’s what they tell me. They sure make good burgers.”
“Burgers?”
“Yeah. Great big fat sandwiches. That’s what they’re for.”
Molly felt sick. “They raise them to eat?”
Cooper laughed. “You sure are a strange one. Are all you Bols like that?”
“We don’t eat animals. And we aren’t bowls, whatever you mean by that.”
“You’re a Bolivarian ain’t you?” said Cooper.
It was Molly’s turn to laugh. “That’s an old Earth word, and it doesn’t mean anything on Sweetland. Do they teach you that here in New America?”
The boy looked confused. “What are you then?”
“The Communities don’t have a single ideology. We’re a democracy.”
Cooper didn’t say anything more, and his face grew a scowl as he drove into the afternoon sun. In the space of his silence, Molly closed her eyes and returned once more to sleep.
* * *
She is in the forest, but it is the forest of her childhood, a forest of mushroom trees and faerie bushes and mistol, with its sweet, succulent fruit. The girl who is walking beside her is tall and thin; not just thinness in the usual sense used when speaking of a thin child, but thin in density; as though you could feel the morning breeze blow through her, or she could walk right into a tree and emerge unchanged on the other side. The girl is speaking to her in normal, everyday Linguish, but Molly can’t quite grasp the meaning of the words. She knows somehow the girl is talking about how the past determines the future, but through the agency of the present, through memory and dream, and how we must remember things truthfully or our dreams will be flawed and our future misguided.
“And that is the purpose of the Memories,” said the girl, and Molly knew the girl meant Memories with a capital M, that it was something solid and important.
Molly awoke troubled from her recurring dream. She thought about it for a long time as the truck jarred along the rough road and she watched the sky grow dark from day’s end.
* * *
As sunset faded into night they came to a town, a long, sprawling affair with odd-looking buildings and ugly signs everywhere saying things like, Eat Here, or Motel—Rent for the Evening or by the Hour, or Hottest Dancing Girls South of the Pecos. They pulled up beneath one that read Donna’s Truck Stop, and Cooper knocked on the back window of the cab. “Roz,” he shouted. “Time for dinner.”
It was Molly’s first clue that someone had been in the back of the truck. A shaven-headed soldier stumbled from the rear, stretching and yawning. Molly recognized her as one of her captors.
“This is Roz,” said Cooper. “We got a bunk in back. She’s been sleeping ’cause she’s driving night shift. You’ll ride up front with her.”
Roz grinned. “That would be a good idea,” she said, “unless you want that horndog all over you.”
Cooper’s coarse laugh made Molly blush.
Donna’s Truck Stop turned out to be a restaurant with nothing on the menu Molly could eat except some greasy potatoes and a salad, which consisted of a pile of tasteless leaves, topped with a disgustingly thick, white dressing. As the trio ate in silence, Molly regarded Roz. She hoped maybe the girl had a little more intelligence and personality than Cooper, and decided it couldn’t be any worse. After dinner Cooper clambered into the back, as promised, and Roz drove. Molly rode along in silence for a long time, thinking about Joey and about her sister, Jessie, who would soon be frantic with worry when she and Joey failed to show up in Sangre del Corazon at the appointed time.
Finally she said, “Do you ever think about why we Borns are different from the others?”
“Not really,” said Roz.
“You know we’re different, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess so. That’s why they sent us into the forest to get you, because the old guys are scared shitless. Not without reason, mind you. Just look what happened to Sarge.”
Molly found she had been putting that incident of Sarge out of her mind. It didn’t fit into her picture of the world, of the forest, of the evidence she had gathered with her own senses during her seventeen years of life.
“About that,” she said. “Nothing like that has ever happened in the Communities. The adults are afraid of the forest, but no one has reported massacres or deaths.”
“The immigrants here see something,” said Roz. “Out on the frontier, some of the old military guys like Sarge say they’ve watched squads of soldiers or guerillas moving across the hillsides at dusk. The ranchers around here call them Indians or something. No one paid much attention until recently.”
With a small stab of sadness, Molly thought about her mother’s imaginary Indians. “These things are real for them,” she said.
“I hate to think about this too much,” said Roz, “but if hallucinations can kill them, then can’t they kill us too? Just because we don’t see them…I mean those soldiers at Outpost 47 had real, traumatic injuries, they didn’t just die of fright.”
Molly considered this. She thought maybe she should be taking these words more seriously, but it felt like some old lifelong friend was being accused by a stranger of being a homicidal maniac. She couldn’t quite believe it, she didn’t want to believe it, and yet that old friend always did act a little strangely.
“Another thing that makes the immigrant generation different from us is the forgetting,” said Molly. “Do you know what I mean?”
“You mean like when we tell them how we see things, they can’t remember for more than fifteen minutes? I always thought that was something that just happened when you got older.”
“That’s what I thought too when I was a kid. There was this tree we called a mushroom tree, and they were everywhere around Meadow Springs. It’s trunk was soft and spongy, and it gave off a musty odor. It didn’t have leaves or needles, but its long, thick stems reached up into the sky, and there was something like a pod on the end. Now, you can’t find these trees anywhere in the Communities. When I was older, I asked my sister, Jessie, about them, and she laughed and told me I had a vivid imagination.”
“Yeah,” said Roz. “It’s weird how things changed and they all forgot. I remember these blue things, they looked like tiny parachutes and they floated through Port Harvest every spring on the wind. The old fishermen called them jellies. Now there are blue dragonflies, the exact same color of blue, but the jellies don’t come through anymore and the fishermen don’t even know what we’re talking about when we mention jellies. It’s like the old people have amnesia or something.”
“There were other things like that in Meadow Springs,” said Molly, “small forest creatures, and other plants and trees I remember, but the adults tell me they never existed. Kids have intense imaginations, but—here’s the thing—my sister is an ecologist, her work is to classify the native species, and I remember her studying these things and writing notes on a notepad she carried with her everywhere. If I could find those notes I would hold them up to her face and say, see. A few years ago, I began to read Earth biology books, and I believe almost everything we see now on Sweetland—the plants and animals and everything—is from Earth, except a few spices and root plants we use in the Communities, like breadroot and nunaroot, which we’ve eaten forever.”
“Nunaroot?”
“Jessie makes the best nunaroot stew.” Molly felt a sudden homesickness as she realized she might not see Meadow Springs again. The refugees might never return to the forest and the wilderness communities, which had been virtually destroyed by Cheng’s militia.
“Do you know how long it takes a forest to grow?” she asked Roz.
The girl shook her head. “Not very long, from what I’ve seen,” she said. “You know that outpost that got overrun a few weeks ago? There were trees growing right through the buildings. We found one of those soldiers wedged in a branch five meters off the ground.”
“An Earth tree takes several years to grow that tall.”
“You’re saying they’re not really Earth trees?”
“Yeah,” said Molly.
A light spread across the girl’s face. “But why do we remember when things were different, and the older people don’t?”
“I don’t know why. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. But I think the forest, or the world, or whatever is beneath this illusion, is not our enemy, we just need to understand it.”
Roz looked dubious. “I hope you’re right about that.”
©2010, Duane Poncy, all rights reserved.
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