Scott Cleveland - Pale Boundaries

She was awake when he arrived, the pain medication he’d set out for her that morning untouched. “The doctor said you’ll heal faster if you take it,” Hal informed her.

“The medicine makes me sleepy, and I wish to hear what you learned from Mistress Cirilo,” she explained.

“Mixed news,” Hal sighed, and explained his predicament.

Dayuki put her hand on his arm when he finished. “Perhaps,” she said consolingly, “you will learn to love her.”

Terson drifted in dreamlike confusion; thick, muddled perceptions of the present blended with the past. Someone held him on his side and beat on his back, commanding him to cough. Virene swam within a school of bejeweled fish. Wet, hacking spasms shook his body. Jack and Terson stood back to back in the middle of the tavern giving as good as they got. Angry demands for silence.

The Big Man passed him on a street in Windstone one night.

Their eyes met and Terson felt the helpless terror of the paralyzed little boy he’d once been, but the Big Man shambled on without any hint of recognition. The young boy whose family he’d butchered had changed considerably more during the intervening twelve years than he had.

Terson turned to follow. The Big Man turned into a dimly lit alley, stumbling in a little way before stopping to piss.

Terson slipped the knife from his boot used it like Boss Hanstead taught him. It was easier than he expected—the Big Man was nothing but a drunk now, and the bottle had taken away any fight left in him. Terson stared at the lifeless body at his feet for a moment then leaned over and added vomit to the pool of blood and urine.

Terson spun in total, absolute darkness. He tried to speak. A painful, racking cough exploded from deep in his chest instead. “God damn you!” someone hissed from the darkness, “Start that shit again I’ll cut your fucking throat!”

“I’m cold,” he managed to croak out.

A light flicked on suddenly. Terson squeezed his eyes shut against it. Someone laid a cool object against his forehead. “Fever hasn’t broken,” a woman said, “but it’s dropped. See if he’ll drink.”

A warm hand lifted his head. A tube touched his lips. “Slowly.” Terson sucked on the tube, found his mouth full of cold water. He let it trickle to the back of his throat, swallowed a little, then a little more. The tube withdrew. “Go back to sleep.”

Terson gazed down on Den Tun’s tapestry from orbit, taking in the rare view of the planet as seen from the northern approach to Saint Anatone. Tiny figures of finely stitched thread cavorted at the base of a triple-peaked mountain.

The universe snapped into lucid focus, and Terson’s eyes flew open.

He knew the reason for the tickle of familiarity when he first saw the tapestry. He knew what Den Tun’s Onjin and gaijin were willing to kill to protect.

The revelation that explained everything blazed in his mind as he woke, crisp and certain and unassailable, then guttered out like a snuffed candle before his consciousness could seize hold of it. He lay still, listening, with the dank, musty scent of stagnant air in his nose. Illumination from beyond one of two doorways cast enough light to make out smooth stone walls. Lighter colored lime deposits lined cracks in the ceiling above.

He was naked except for his shorts, swaddled up to his neck in blankets. He wrestled with them for a moment to free himself and sat up, head pulsing with waves of dizziness amplified by hunger and thirst. The tips of his fingers and toes ached, and his chest felt as if someone was sitting on it. He was somewhat more than mildly surprised that he was alive.

Low voices emanated from beyond the room. Terson pulled one of the blankets around his shoulders and sidled up to the lit doorway, ears straining for the sound of anyone approaching. The room on the other side was larger, filled with trapping paraphernalia and unoccupied. A sensor pod sat on a work bench surrounded by tools.

A topographical map lay next to the pod. The maddening tickle in Terson’s head stirred up again as he approached. Someone had penciled a path leading from a location apparently inside the Great Northern Preserve eastward to the edge of the map. Judging from the notations scrawled alongside the course they’d misinterpreted the elevation lines and their journey would end in an abrupt intersection with the ground roughly fifteen kilometers from its point of origin.

The damaged sensor pod explained the use of the map, but offered no clue to the identity of those who’d rescued him. If they were the same people Zarn worked for he could be on his way to freedom, but there was no guarantee that all of Zarn’s coworkers were privy to the plot. They might hand him over to the authorities as a suspected poacher. If they were poachers themselves, they might decide to kill him to spare themselves the risk of discovery.

Terson needed a weapon. The room contained plenty of blunt instruments, but nothing small and effective enough to conceal. He crept back to the room he woke in and peered through the second, darkened doorway. This room, too, was larger than the first, and possessed a second entrance on the right-hand wall from which the voices came.

Mounds of bedding and personal gear on the floor emerged from the darkness as his eyes adjusted. The nearest pile yielded a twelve-centimeter hunting knife, which Terson thrust into his waistband at the small of his back. Another pack rewarded him with a package of hard candies. He shoved a handful into his mouth then stepped lightly to the second doorway. It led to a small lit anteroom and yet another doorway. Through it he heard people moving about and conversing. He edged along the wall to a shadowed corner where he could peek out without being seen.

Half a dozen men and women wearing shipsuits sat around a bank of heaters. Two more knelt by a communications module discussing their situation with someone on the other end of the circuit. It didn’t take Terson long to get the gist of who the spacers were, what had happened to them, and his own part in it. Eventually they got around to talking about what to do about him.

“…So we can’t fly in daylight until they leave,” O’Brien finished, “and getting out at night will be dicey without the FLIR.”

“I understand your situation,” Shadrack’s voice cracked back, “but the only other option is to leave you behind.”

O’Brien looked sidelong at Grogan, who nodded his head as if addressing their captain in person. “We’ll do’er, Cap’n.”

“The lander’s at the spaceport now. It lifts in the morning, with or without you.”

“Sir,” O’Brien said, “What about our, ah, friend?”

Shadrack replied with dead air for a moment. “Use your best judgment.”

“We leave him here,” Grogan announced when the Embustero signed off.

“He goes,” O’Brien countermanded. “He’s our responsibility, and he’ll die for sure if we just go off and leave him.”

“Your responsibility,” Grogan said, “not ours. You want him along, you give up your cargo-share; equal mass.” He looked about for allies. The others seemed inclined to agree.

“I didn’t say take him to the ship!” she exclaimed in exasperation. “We can drop him off in God’s Saucer.”

“So he can turn us in?” Grogan snorted.

“He’s been unconscious since we found him, you idiot!”

“And how do we explain where we got him?” the man demanded. “Medics are going to ask questions, and remember us when the folks looking for him track him down.”