Unknown - The_Growing_589064

Kirsten lays one hand almost reverently on Koda’s bowed head, brushing her palm against the silken strands of her thick, jet hair. “How…how did she get sick?”

“As near as anyone could tell,” Koda begins, comforted by the stroking hand, “it was a student who’d just come back from Asia. The epidemic was just starting up at that time, and quarantines weren’t in force. She went to school hale and healthy one morning, and was hooked up to a ventilator that same night.”

“But the treatment…!”

Koda shakes her head. “She wouldn’t take it.”

“Wouldn’t—? But why?”

As Koda looks up, Kirsten reads the answer within the fathomless grief in those too-blue eyes before Dakota even speaks a word.

“She was pregnant.”

*

Ellsworth is a large installation, and as Maggie makes her way from the brig back toward the base housing and home, the pain in her leg returns full force. Official rationing of gasoline has not begun, but unless they can find fresh supplies to exploit in Rapid City and the surrounding area, the time will come when all petroleum products will grow not just scarce but extinct.

Dionsaur thou art; to dinosaur thou shalt return. Amen.

She makes a mental note to have someone check on foot-driven transportation already available on base and to send a couple squads to raid the remaining inventories of bicycle shops in town. She will need to speak to Koda and the Mss. Tilbury-Laduque about the possibility of acquiring horses. She will also have to think about how—no, goddammit, somebody else can think about something. Let Boudreaux and the other goddam surviving CPA’s earn their keep.

She shifts that problem firmly off her desk. The bean counters will have to figure out how to pay for such things.

Then the rest of us can fill out the forms in triplicate. Requisition: individual personnel transportation and supply hauling unit, quadruped. Translation: horse.

The feeling that time is slipping out from under her returns: years, decades, centuries tilting drunkenly away as they did the morning of the battle of the Cheyenne. The armature of a whole civilization has collapsed, sending them back to . . . where? When? Maggie shivers a little under her uniform jacket, hunching her shoulders both to hoard the warmth and to ease the weight of her brief case. The most taken-for-granted, everyday facts of life have all suddenly acquired question marks, and she’s not sure there are good answers to all of them.

Maybe not to any of them.

Is there still a United States? If so, is there a Constitution?

Who decides?

How are goods to be paid for? Up until now, patrols from the base have been happily looting—there is no other name for it, no matter if they have been calling it ‘salvage’—and that is a thing that offends her orderly soul. Sergeant Tacoma Rivers, as honest a man as she has ever met, is at this moment heading a team to study the feasibility of appropriating electrical generators that had been private property a few short weeks ago. If any of the power co-op survives, how are they to be compensated? Is there such a thing as money any more?

And who decides?

The headache that has been tapping, tapping lightly at the edges of her consciousness becomes the full-blown assault of a jackhammer. She needs that bath. Thank god there is still lavender. She needs a cup of chamomile tea. She needs—

Something cold and wet and rubbery suddenly thrusts itself into her free hand swinging at her side, and it is all Maggie can do not to jump out of her skin. For half a nanosecond it takes her straight back to junior high school and haunted house fundraisers—one of the oldest tricks in the world, a kitchen glove filled with ice water and dragged over an unsuspecting hand or better yet, the back of a vulnerable neck. It had gotten satisfyingly terrified screams even out of the football jocks.

Especially out of the football jocks.

But this is not a trick, and she turns to ruffle Asi’s fur as he greets her, whining and twisting himself into Moebius strips of canine ecstacy. He barks twice, high and sharp, and the sound almost splits her skull, but she is almost as glad to see him as he is to see her. Anything to be dragged away from the train of thought that has become increasingly oppressive. He will allow her to think about something besides the minuscule but suddenly critical problems that have parked themselves like orphans outside her gate, and will not go away.

“Hey, fella,” she says, scratching his back in long, lazy strokes. “Where’s your lady?”

He barks again, a glass-shattering high B, and Maggie looks up to see Kirsten and Koda coming toward her from the bare woods to the west of the base residences, climbing the short slope that leads up to the sidewalk. Their faces are both flushed with the westerly breeze that is now carries with it the chill of dusk, Kirsten’s hair alight around her face like an aureole in the low sun.

There is something of peace in Koda’s face that she has never seen before, the quiet that follows cessation of pain. With it, too, is a new sense of intimacy between the two women. It is nothing overt, nothing that Maggie can easily put words to; only something in the tilt, perhaps, of Kirsten’s head, the inclination of Koda’s body. A lessening of the space between. Something, something of vital importance, has passed between them this day. Something that has Maggie, this time, on the outside, looking in.

The sight brings a small pang about her heart, but Maggie cannot pretend to any sweeping operatic emotion, neither jealousy or grand amour. Neither can she pretend that she does not see the obvious and instinctive bond between the two women. Her ancestors, plying the coast of East Africa with ivory and leopard pelts to trade for turquoise and myrrh in the incense fields of Oman, would have called it kismet.

Insh’allah.

As god wills.

Aloud she calls, “You guys headed home?”

“Yeah,” Koda answers as she gains the sidewalk, and Asi, fickle male that he is, bounds toward her and paws at her chest as if he has not seen her in a week. “Hey, boy. Down.” And to Maggie, again, “I put some soup on before we left. It ought to be done in an hour or so.”

“You look tired,” Kirsten observes. “Bad day with the interviews?”

Maggie grimaces and shakes her head slightly. “Filthy.”

“Them or the day?”

”Both.”

Koda’s eyes meet hers, concern and affection in their blue depths. “You look like something Asi wouldn’t bother to drag in.” She gestures toward a pair of benches set under the still-naked branches of a sycamore tree. “Soup won’t be on for a while yet. Let’s sit.”

Maggie nods and follows the other two toward the knoll that looks down over the woods. The sun has begun to fall toward the horizon, almost even with the treetops, and birds that gleam blue-black in the light that lies like gold wash across the snow make their way ponderously, two and two, into the trees where they will roost for the night. All of the pairs fly sedately together save one. Where the others glide almost wingtip to wingtip, one raven dives from height upon his companion, swoops under to come out in a barrel roll, pinwheeling his wings about the axis of his body, his long flight feathers throwing off flashes of blue and green and silver where the sun strikes them. His low-pitched prrrukkk resonates in the air.

Kirsten stands transfixed, her eyes wide and impossibly green. Asimov seems to have taken on her mood, sitting quietly beside her. A first. Kirsten asks, “Those are ravens, aren’t they?”

“Common Ravens, to be exact. We— we Lakota—call them ‘wolf birds,’” Koda answers. “They’ll follow a pack on the hunt or sometimes even lead them to prey.”