Steven Harper - Dreamer

PLANET RUST

In the end, they walked to Ijhan. Vidya Vajhur started with swift steps, but Prasad slowed her down.

“You’ll tire quickly at that pace,” he told her. “We have a long way to go.”

Vidya nodded. She set her shoulders more firmly into the shoulder harness Prasad had made for the wheelbarrow and forced herself into a steady trudge. The wheelbarrow was piled with clothing, a tent, food, and other necessities. It was hard to think of it as everything she owned, so she didn’t.

Gravel crunched as Vidya walked. Beside her, Prasad pushed a cart containing the rest of their food. Hidden at the bottom were a few trinkets he said he didn’t want to leave behind. One was their wedding knot. Another was a set of red data chips, red for medical histories and gene scans. Prasad had tried to slip them into the cart without her seeing. Vidya had wordlessly her lips. Prasad’s cart was topped by a crate of a dozen quacking ducks, the only animals unaffected by the Unity blight.

“Imagine if the blight had left the kine,” Prasad had said. “Too valuable to leave and too difficult to take on the road. We’re lucky there.”

Leave it to Prasad, Vidya thought wryly, to find blessings in a pile of horse shit.

The harness bit into Vidya’s shoulders and she spared a glance at her husband of five years. He was a head taller than she was, with brown skin to match her own. His black hair had gotten shaggy of late. Dark whiskers dusted chin and cheeks, though he had shaved only yesterday, and curly hair coated his strong forearms as they strained against the hand cart. His beautiful black eyes were lined with stress and strain, though he was barely twenty-five.

Vidya’s eyes were a lighter brown beneath thin brows and a high forehead. Her face was a pleasing oval, and her body was long and lean. Too lean.

The crated ducks on Prasad’s cart quacked in annoyance. Vidya wished they would shut up. They were getting a free ride, weren’t they? She’d trade places with them in a second. It would be nice to be a duck. You could root around in a quiet pool to find food, and if there wasn’t any, you only had to fly somewhere else.

She found she was striding again and forced herself to slow down. Her legs wanted to carry her fast and far so she wouldn’t be tempted to look back at their ruined farm. She kept her eyes firmly on the gravel road before her. Watching out for the blast craters that made wheeled transport impossible was a good excuse to avoid looking at the fields. She could not, however, block out the smell. Every breath brought her the damp, moldy stench of standing crops destroyed by the Unity blight. Sometimes she caught a whiff of rotting meat, and once she smelled burned feathers. This made her speed up, and Prasad lengthened his own pace. Without a word, they pushed on as fast as they dared until the smell faded. Vidya heaved a soft sigh. Chickens mutated the blight into a form that attacked humans, and burning feathers could only mean a poultry farm someone was trying to cleanse. Except in that one instance, the blight-actually a series of diseases-left humans alone. Only now was Vidya realizing how that was, in some ways, even more horrible.

They trudged on, Vidya’s eyes on the ground, until Prasad gasped. Vidya looked up. They had reached the main road, and it was in worse condition than the one they had been traveling. Flyers from the Empire of Human Unity had bombed and strafed it thoroughly. Craters pocked some places, piles of shattered pavement blocked others. It was passable, but only with difficulty. Prasad, however, was looking straight ahead. Vidya set the wheelbarrow down with an angry thump.

“This is a treat!” she cried. “A gift!”

“Hush,” Prasad murmured. “We shouldn’t call attention to ourselves.”

Vidya glared at him, then swallowed her sharp retort. Sarcasm wouldn’t improve the situation, and it wasn’t Prasad who deserved her anger.

“What do you think we should do?” Vidya asked at last. “I have no ideas.”

Prasad shrugged. “What else can we do?”

He lifted the handles on the hand cart and trudged forward. The ducks quacked again. Vidya hesitated, then set her shoulders, hefted the wheelbarrow, and joined him.

The streaming mass of people on the road made grudging space for them. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, crowded the broken pavement. Most carried bundles or pushed carts and barrows. Many were injured. All were heading toward Ijhan.

The crowd shuffled along in eerie silence. Those who spoke did so in subdued voices. Occasionally a baby whimpered or a small child cried, but the sounds were quickly hushed. It was as if the throng feared being noticed.

“They must have heard the rumors, too,” Vidya murmured. Her eyes flicked left, right, forward, behind, constantly scanning the crowd.

“Relief in Ijhan,” Prasad agreed softly. “I wish we could’ve checked with Uncle Raffid to see how true it is. I wish-”

“You make a hundred wishes before breakfast,” Vidya said. “Wishing will not take the networks from the Unity’s hands or make it possible to call-”

“Poultry!” shrieked a voice. “My god- birds!”

Vidya’s head snapped around. A silver-haired man was staring at Prasad’s duck crate in horror. Prasad blinked. The people around them began to draw away.

“The blight!” the man screeched. “They’ll bring the blight!”

He lunged for the crate, intending to smash it, but Vidya was already moving. Her hand snatched a small bundle from the wheelbarrow and whipped the cloth away.

“Stop!” she barked. “Or die.”

The man froze. So did the people around him. After a split-second, the crowd edged away, leaving the man in an ever-widening circle. Vidya held a short rod in rock-steady hands. It glowed blue, and a single spark crackled at the end.

“This is an energy whip for herding kine,” she said, standing in the wheelbarrow harness. “At half power it stuns a full-grown bull. It is now set to full. Leave the ducks alone.”

“The blight-” the man gasped.

“-is only found in chickens,” Prasad said in his soft voice. “Ducks don’t carry it.”

“Back away,” Vidya repeated. “I will press the trigger in three…two…”

The man fled into the crowd. Vidya watched until he was out of sight. Then she slid the whip into her belt, shrugged her shoulders in the harness, and continued on her way. Prasad followed. The crowd watched for a moment, then slowly closed about them.

“My wife has fine reflexes,” Prasad observed. “It did not occur to me that our own people would wish to harm us or take our property.”

“My husband is trusting,” Vidya said, not sure at that moment whether she was annoyed at him or fond of him. The adrenaline rush was wearing off and her hands would have been shaking had they not been gripping the wheelbarrow staves.

Prasad reached over and squeezed her hand twice. She smiled at him. The gesture, born on their wedding night, had originally meant “I love you,” but it had, over the years, become a more all-purpose signal of anything positive. Here, Vidya took it to mean “you did well.”

Hours passed. Hunger pinched Vidya’s stomach-she and Prasad had skipped breakfast to save food-and she was sweating even though a thick layer of clouds blocked the sun. It was warm for early fall. The world of Rust had an even, temperate climate because it had no moons to stir wind and water to anything greater than a balmy breeze or gentle rain. Vidya had dim memories of torrential rains and rushing winds, but after her parents emigrated to Rust, all her experiences with weather involved slow, easy swings from sun to clouds to rain and back again. Now the above-average temperature made her uneasy. Had the Unity done something to the weather as well as spreading the blight? Vidya’s stomach growled, and a hunger headache coiled behind her forehead.