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“Right,” he said. “Well, thank you kindly. That’s all we needed to know. We’ll be leaving you to it, now.”
“Ryan, we can’t just leave her,” Krysty protested.
He looked at Krysty in what seemed genuine consternation.
“It’s time to go,” he aid. “Shake the dust of this place off our boot heels.”
“But what’ll happen to her?”
“She’ll find her way. Or she won’t. She made it this far, anyhow, and that’s a thing. It’s not our problem what happens to her now, though. One way or another.”
As Krysty scowled at him, the girl abruptly launched herself at her. Blasters whipped up, but instead of attacking her, Mariah was suddenly clinging to her and sobbing. Krysty judged herself lucky she’d been on her knees; otherwise the girl, slight as she was, might’ve bowled her over backward.
“Krysty’s right,” Mildred announced as the redhead began to stroke Mariah’s head and murmur soothingly to her. “We can’t just leave her out in the middle of this god-awful wasteland.”
“But she’s been living here just fine all along,” J.B. said.
“When she had a family and a working farm around her,” Mildred shot back. “What is wrong with you, John? Where’s your compassion?”
He blinked at her through the round lenses of his specs. “Compassion?” He sounded as if the word was unfamiliar to him.
“There’s food,” the girl said, still sobbing and her face pressed sideways to Krysty’s neck. “Supplies. Powder and shot.”
“Jak,” Ryan called out. “You still out there?”
“Yeah?”
“How trashed is the place?”
“Chills everywhere,” the albino said in his customary clipped and often cryptic speech. “Chill parts, too.”
“They get around to pissing down the well?” J.B. asked. “Or tossing any chills down it for poison?”
“No,” Jak said.
“So the mutant blackguards got no chance to indulge in an orgy of wanton stickies vandalism,” Doc said.
“Before Elias put the chop on ’em,” J.B. added.
“Sounds like,” Ryan said. “Thanks. We’ll make sure to leave plenty for you. And now—”
Krysty put her arms around the girl’s thin, shaking shoulders. She was actively shivering now, not just to the timing of her sobs.
“Ryan, no,” she said.
“You know as well as I do we can’t go picking up every stray we stumble across,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to look out for ourselves.”
With a final sniffle, Mariah stopped weeping, or at least stopped weeping as vigorously. The trembling subsided, too, but did not stop.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Ryan looked blank. “You mean stumbling around in the storm?” Mildred supplied helpfully.
Mariah nodded.
“Let’s say we’re new in the district,” Mildred said.
“Yeah,” Ryan said—grudgingly, because information was a trade good itself. But clearly he saw nothing to be lost by imparting a few morsels to the foundling.
“You looking for work?” Mariah asked.
“Well, yeah. Now that you mention it. We could use a gig.”
Their supplies had gotten low. The stocks of food and such the girl had mentioned—and fresh water from the well—would tide them over for a spell. But they were always looking for ways to sustain themselves, and mebbe get ahead, even, for the lean times that inevitably followed.
“I know a place,” Mariah said. “A ville nearby. The baron’s always looking for help, and he ain’t triple bad, as barons go.”
“We don’t hire on as mercies,” Ryan said.
“No. Not that.” Mariah paused. “I—I can take you there.”
Ryan sighed. “We’re outvoted, J.B.,” he said. “Even if it’s just Mildred and Krysty against the rest of us.”
“I don’t mind her coming along,” Ricky said.
“Put a sock in it,” Ryan replied without heat.
“I have no objection to it,” Doc put in. “Perhaps performing the occasional humane gesture might remind us of our own humanity.”
“I don’t see how that loads any blasters for us,” Ryan said. “But you can come with us as far as this ville.”
Mariah let go of Krysty to spring for Ryan. She caught him around the waist in a powerful hug and pressed her cheek against his breastbone.
“Fireblast!” he exclaimed. “You can come as long as you don’t hug me anymore, understand?”
Chapter Four (#ulink_3681f7c9-b0b5-5a47-a6db-ccf8d7d322f4)
“Please,” the painfully gaunt blonde woman said, falling to her knees on the short, winter-scorched Badlands grass before two glowing avatars. “I did what you told me. Now let me have my daughter back. I beg you!”
“What wretches these people are,” Dr. Oates said to Dr. Sandler over the suppressed channel. “Hardly worth the trouble to rule.”
He might have reminded his colleague that they could just as well speak aloud in this vile, cowering being’s presence for all the difference it would make. But he did not. Habit was key to discipline, in communications as in every area of life. Discipline was a goal in itself.
Especially when one’s collective goal was full-spectrum dominance over this entire timeline.
By the same mode he told her, “They can be shaped into useful vessels, into which to pour our leadership and enlightened thinking.”
“Of course, Doctor.”
Aloud he said to his supplicant, “What have you done? Report, that we may judge your performance.”
“I told him to go up Harney Peak to seek a vision. I told him to eat the magic mushrooms to put himself in the proper receptive state. I betrayed my people, because you told me that’s what I needed to do. Isn’t that enough for you?” the blonde woman asked.
“How did you betray your people?” Dr. Oates asked. “Inasmuch as your people are Absaroka, and Hammerhand a Blackfoot—and a coldheart outcast at that?”
The woman wrung her hands. “Because their trust in me encompasses the sanctity of my visions! If it were known I gave...false advice to Hammerhand, we would suffer disgrace, loss of standing in councils and even mebbe war!”
“The advice we told you to give was not false,” Dr. Sandler said. “The subject climbed the peak as you instructed him to. And there he received the vision he desired. What falsehood was there?”
“But the vision wasn’t real. It was an illusion you created. Wasn’t it?”
“What a pathetic beast,” Dr. Oates said inaudibly to the wretch. “To imagine there can be any such thing as a ‘real’ vision.”
“The credulity of our two-legged cattle has long been a mainstay of our power, Dr. Oates. Do not forget the fact.”
“I apologize, Doctor.”
“Who are you to say our powers are not those of the gods or spirits?” Dr. Sandler asked the woman. “Have we not amply displayed them to you? Did not Hammerhand experience them, for that matter?”
“If I may ask, why do you bother justifying yourself to this belly crawler, Dr. Sandler?”
He deigned to answer. “Because I cannot abide this creature not understanding her inferior status, however transient that misapprehension proves.”
And if Dr. Oates takes such sentiment as evidence of weakness on my part, he thought, that error will prove her own unfitness to serve Overproject Whisper. And be a self-correcting problem.
His colleague, wisely, chose to say no more.
Meanwhile, the woman had gone back to groveling and whining. “Please. You promised.”
“We did,” Dr. Sandler declared. “You have done as we instructed. And as we promised, we release your daughter to you now.”
On cue the silent white-coated lab techs removed the duct tape from the child’s mouth and pushed her through the portal into her cold and desolate space-time.
Dr. Sandler’s viscera twisted in disgust at the sight of the girl, with her mud-colored hair and dust-colored skin. The feeling did not come from any superstition as vulgar and ignorant as racial prejudice, but from the clear evidence it gave of the unrestricted breeding, without regard for genetics, that prevailed in the Deathlands.
The groveling woman reared back on her knees. Her green eyes went wide, then she spread her arms wide.
“Mommy!” the girl cried. She ran to her mother and threw her arms around her.
“Thank you,” Susan Crain sobbed into the juncture of her daughter’s neck and shoulder. “Thank you, thank you.”
“Go now,” he said.
“We are finished with you,” Dr. Oates added.
“I’m free?”
“Yes,” Dr. Sandler said.
Hastily the woman detached herself from her offspring enough to stand. Taking the child by the hand, she hurried down the slope of the mesa on which she had met the doctors.
Waiting until she was thoroughly out of sight, and thus splatter range, Dr. Sandler made a certain gesture. Thus activated, the bomb that had been implanted in the child’s stomach while she was under sedation went off with sufficient force to blow her mother, as well as her to bits.
“Was that truly necessary, Dr. Sandler?”
“Sentiment, Dr. Oates?”
“Not at all. Rather, practicality. Might the shaman have been of further use to us?”
“No such prospect presented itself, Doctor. Her people belong to the past now. They are retrogressive. They will join the new order our subject will establish, under our guidance and control. Or it shall exterminate them.”
“I see.”
“And now we have further duties to attend to,” Dr. Sandler said and closed the portal that opened between worlds.
* * *
“I DON’T KNOW where I was born,” Mariah said as they trudged along what looked like some kind of game path trodden by the hooves of deer and elk. The sun had come out that day long enough to melt off much of the snow on the ground. “I don’t know who my mother and father were. I don’t remember anything but a life of wandering.”
Krysty walked beside the girl. Mildred trudged behind the pair. Flat prairie stretched to her left. About half a mile to the right the land rose into badlands, rocky heights, wind-carved and striated in shades of brown and yellow. Ahead of them the Black Hills were visible as dark serrations on the horizon.
“What did you do for the Baylahs?” Mildred asked.
The girl shrugged. “Chores around the ’stead. Chopping wood, cleaning, cooking. The same as I’ve done my whole life.”
“How did they treat you?” Krysty asked.
Another shrug. “Like I was disposable, mostly. Not bad. But mostly like they couldn’t be bothered to be mean to me. Also the same as my whole life, mostly.”
She seemed to think about it a moment. She was a mighty serious-seeming little girl, Mildred thought. Even though “little” mostly meant “skinny.” Mariah seemed maybe thirteen or fourteen and wasn’t more than an inch or two shorter than Mildred, who, granted, wasn’t a tall woman.
“Not that the Baylahs were mean,” Mariah said. “Not like some. I mean, they fed me all right and didn’t hit me too much. Didn’t...try other stuff.”
Mildred grunted, softly enough that the girl couldn’t hear. She hoped. Sexual abuse of minors wasn’t all that unusual in the here and now.
Not that the life Mariah described, of being a poorly regarded and poorly compensated servant, sounded a whole lot better. Then again, it beat being an outright slave. On the other hand, keeping an extra mouth to feed could only be justified if it freed up enough time and energy among the other members of the group to generate the wherewithal to keep feeding the extra person while feeding themselves just a little bit better.
They didn’t call the country Deathlands for nothing, Mildred thought.
The girl had made herself useful in camp the previous night, gathering relatively dry brush and even making a fire without being asked. She had taken over cooking the brace of rabbits Jak had hunted and chilled with his special leaf-shaped throwing knives. She’d done a pretty good job, too.
Enough that Ryan stopped grumbling about letting her tag along.
“So you don’t know how old you are?” Ricky asked from behind Mildred.
“Not really,” Mariah said. “Like I said, I don’t remember much. Wandering. Working.”
“Don’t you get lonely?” Krysty asked.
