Tony Daniel - A Dry, Quiet War

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2024-11-23 0 0 40.23KB 18 页 5.9玖币

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A Dry, Quiet War

Tony Daniel

I cannot tell you what it meant to me to see the two suns of Ferro set behind

the dry mountain east of my home. I had been away twelve billion years. I

passed

my cabin, to the pump well and, taking a metal cup from where it hung from a

set-pin, I worked the handle three times. At first it creaked, and I believed

was rusted tight, but then it loosened, and within fifteen pulls, I had a cup

water.

Someone had kept the pump up. Someone had seen to the house and the land while

was away at the war. For me, it had been fifteen years; I wasn't sure how

long

it had been for Ferro. The water was tinged red and tasted of iron. Good. I

drank it down in a long draught, then put the cup back onto its hanger. When

the

big sun, Hemingway, set, a slight breeze kicked up. Then Fitzgerald went down

and a cold, cloudless night spanked down onto the plateau. I shivered a

little,

adjusted my internals, and stood motionless, waiting for the last of twilight

pass, and the stars -- my stars -- to come out. Steiner, the planet that is

Ferro's evening star, was the first to emerge, low in the west, methane blue.

Then the constellations. Ngal. Gilgamesh. The Big Snake, half-coiled over the

southwestern horizon. There was no moon tonight. There was never a moon on

Ferro, and that was right.

After a time, I walked to the house, climbed up the porch and the house

recognized me and turned on the lights. I went inside. The place was dusty,

the

furniture covered with sheets, but there were no signs of rats or jinjas, and

all seemed in repair. I sighed, blinked, tried to feel something. Too early,

probably. I started to take a covering from a chair, then let it be. I went

the kitchen and checked the cupboard. An old malt whisky bottle, some dry

cereal, some spices. The spices had been my mother's, and I seldom used them

before I left for the end of time. I considered that the whisky might be

perfectly aged by now. But, as the saying goes on Ferro, we like a bit of

food

with our drink, so I left the house and took the road to town, to Heidel.

It was a five mile walk, and though I could have enhanced and covered the

ground

in ten minutes or so, I walked at a regular pace under my homeworld stars.

The

road was dirt, of course, and my pant legs were dusted red when I stopped

under

the outside light of Thredmartin's Pub. I took a last breath of cold air,

then

went inside to the warm.

It was a good night at Thredmartin's. There were men and women gathered

around

the fire hearth, usas and splices in the cold corners. The regulars were at

the

bar, a couple of whom I recognized -- so old now, wizened like stored apples

a barrel. I looked around for a particular face, but she was not there. A

jukebox sputtered some core-cloud deak and the air was thick with smoke and

conversation. Or was, until I walked in. Nobody turned to face me. Most of

them

couldn't have seen me. But a signal passed and conversation fell to quiet

murmur. Somebody quickly killed the jukebox.

I blinked up an internals menu into my peripheral vision and adjusted to the

room's temperature. Then I went to the edge of the bar. The room got even

quiet.

The bartender, old Thredmartin himself, reluctantly came over to me.

"What can I do for you, sir?" he asked me.

I looked over him, to the selection of bottles, tubes and cans on display

behind

him. "I don't see it," I said.

"Eh?" He glanced back over his shoulder, then quickly returned to peering at

me.

"Bone's Barley," I said.

"We don't have any more of that," Thredmartin said, with a suspicious tone.

"Why not?"

"The man who made it died."

"How long ago?"

"Twenty years, more or less. I don't see what business of--"

"What about his son?"

Thredmartin backed up a step. Then another. "Henry," he whispered. "Henry

Bone."

"Just give me the best that you do have, Peter Thredmartin," I said. "In

fact,

I'd like to buy everybody a round on me."

"Henry Bone! Why, you looked to me like a bad 'un indeed when you walked in

here. I took you for one of them glims, I did," Thredmartin said. I did not

know

what he was talking about. Then he smiled an old devil's crooked smile. "Your

money's no good here, Henry Bone. I do happen to have a couple of bottles of

your old dad's whisky stowed away in back. Drinks are on the house."

And so I returned to my world, and for most of those I'd left behind it

seemed

as if I'd never really gone. My neighbors hadn't changed much in the twenty

years local that had passed, and, of course, they had no conception of what

had

happened to me. They only knew that I'd been to the war -- the Big War at the

End of Time -- and evidently everything turned out okay, for here I was, back

my own time and my own place. I planted Ferro's desert barley, brought in

peat

from the mountain bogs, bred the biomass that would extract the minerals from

hard ground water, and got ready for making whisky once again. Most of the

inhabitants of Ferro were divided between whisky families and beer families.

Bones were distillers, never brewers, since the Settlement, ten generations

before.

It wasn't until she called upon me that I heard the first hints of the

troubles

that had come. Her name was Alinda Bexter, but since we played together under

the floorplanks of her father's hotel, I had always called her Bex. When I

left

for the war, she was twenty, and I twenty-one. I still recognized her at

forty,

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Tony Daniel - A Dry, Quiet War

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