Piers Anthony - Neq the Sword

Vara had borne a fine boy and named him Vari. She had spent a reasonable period recovering and tending the baby, then begun sharing. Sosa spent considerable time with the baby also, and already it seemed as though Vari were hers. Three months after the first birth, Vara was pregnant again, and not by Neq.

Sola, too, conceived, and her joy transformed her. The two women became closer, not as mother and daughter but as sister-expectants, comparing notes and talking about plans for the Helicon nursery facilities and schooling of children. They were fine examples for the others, and the problems of the sharing system were diminishing.

Neq walked on, in a daze of memory despite the danger of exploring the unknown alone. He had a flashlight, for he never could anticipate when he might need light in Helicon, and he used it to pick out his path through the expanding passage. Now there was no metal, and the rock bore mosslike growths and was convoluted into treelike formations.

Jim the Gun had completed his initial renovation of the equipment and instituted a training program for operation and maintenance so that the work could carry on without him. "I'm not leaving," he said. "I like it here. Machines are my thing, and these are wondrous! But accidents happen, and I am aging."

As the machinery of Helicon moved toward capacity production--the capacity of the human attendants, not the machines--the exports to the crazies increased. The old trucks were renovated, for Helicon produced motors and tires and gasoline and gears, and the six trucks the crazies had been able to maintain became twenty, then fifty. Nomads had to be recruited as drivers and guards, being paid in food and good weapons and medicine. The trucks always traveled in convoys: one for the payload, another filled with warriors armed and spoiling for battle, the third carrying gasoline and replacement parts and food and similar staples. A new tribe formed: the trucker tribe, dedicated to this service. The existence and function of Helicon w,as no longer secret, of course, but the conditions of admittance remained stringent. The Truckers felt they had the best of it: Helicon provisions, a rambling nomad life. Many died in the actions against greedy outlaws, but this was the nomad way. Heroism.

The trail wandered between the overhanging trees, tunnel-like. Neq walked faster, eager to get where he was going.

He had wanted to have a crew lay down a telephone cable from Helicon to the main crazy outpost. But the expenditure in manpower would have been prohibitive, since they would have had either to raise the wire out of the casual reach of the outlaws, or bury it where it could not be found. There were mountains and rivers and badlands along the route. He had to settle for continuous radio contact, which would soon become television contact.

Dick the Surgeon started a hospital where nomads could receive medical attention and such drugs as required. But this posed another problem: either he had to leave Helicon, or nomads had to be admitted on a temporary basis. The old guidelines were inadequate. Neq dispensed with them. A portion of the underworld was blocked off from the rest, and a separate entrance opened. Dick began training those nomads who were interested in the potentials of medicine, though most of these were illiterate and ignorant. He had to devise simplified picture-codes for prescriptions: a circle with a jagged arrow through it representing a headache for aspirin; the outline of a tooth for novocaine; a squiggle representing a germ for antibiotics. He made sure no dangerous drugs were available without his supervision, and the system worked well enough. The nomad trainees were not stupid; they merely had to leam.

But Neq declared that the children of Helicon should be literate. He set the example by attending classes himself, painstakingly mastering the words: MAN, ROOM, FOOD, HONOR. There was an enormous amount to be learned from the old books, and the new generation would not be able to improve on the past without understanding it. The present generation was too busy to practice reading, and Neq had to graduate after building a vocabulary of twenty words, but he knew that once Helicon was thoroughly established the priorities would change.

Yes, it was all going well. Neq was as successful in running Helicon as he had been in running his own tribe for the empire.

This region was familiar. The contour of the route, the type of forest--there was a dead-spoked giant pine he remembered. The memories were at once poignant and horrible, but he had to go on.

Vara's love had proved fickle. It was apparent that her affair with him had been the swing of the pendulum, compensation for her prior abuse of him. And his love for her--it had never compared to the sublime passion he had had for Neqa. He had succumbed to the lure of young flesh, thinking the experience more meaningful than it was. Vara had merely started sharing early, that Helicon might be repopulated.

Neqa: there was the meaning of it all. He had done what he had done to bring back the world that sponsored her kind--but he had not brought her back. This was where Yod's barricade had been set across the trail, balking their truck. Yod's tribe was gone now, of course, and even the staring skulls on poles were gone. Vengeance....

It was time to make camp, for he had come far. Neq bared his sword to cut down saplings for a temporary lean-to. The gleaming steel reminded him: had he demonstrated just a bit of his sworder-skill and agreed to join Yod's outlaw tribe, he could have saved his hands and Neqa's life. Were he in the same situation today, he would do it. She would have had to share--but would that have been so very different from Vara's sharing at Helicon, after bearing the child of her husband's murderer? Would Neqa have been unworthy of his love after bearing Yod's child? She could have borne fifty children by other men, if that were the price of preserving her life! With greater circumspection he could have bided his time and eventually assumed the mastery of the tribe and recovered his woman. He had acted impetuously--and paid a grievous price.

Dusk--and someone was coming!

Neq's blade lifted, ready. He did not wish to kill--but this place was in its way sacred to him, and the man who abused his privacy would be in trouble.

In the gloom of evening beneath the dense forest, Neq paced the man more by sound than sight. The tread was light yet not furtive.

Now he saw the figure: small, very small, with no visible weapon.

"Neq!"

By the voice he knew her: Sosa.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded, knowing she had followed him all the way from the mountain: several days swift march. Did she seek to bring him back as he had brought Sola back?

"I smelled the flowers," she said. "I tend them now, and I thought it was a leak, but it wasn't. So I traced it to your office... I'm almost immune, after these months with the vine. But you--"

Neq stepped toward her, lifting the sword. But even in the worst of his vengeance he had not attacked women.

"I was afraid of that," she murmured. "I'll have to watch you, until I can locate the plants and shut them off."

She walked by him, passing quite close, and he was aware of her athletic surprisingly attractive body. Women didn't have to fade as they aged! Bemused, he followed her, not certain what she intended or what he desired.

Then he recognized her destination. "Stay clear of that grave!" he cried.

"Grave? That's your real wound, isn't it?" she said. "Ah, I think this is it. The passage is blocked, but there's an updraft--"

She began to scrape away the leaves and twigs that covered the site of Neqa's grave, exposing the rich earth beneath. "This is garbage!" she exclaimed.

Neq raised the sword again. "Stop, or surely you must die!"