Jesilind wore a wire induction net like Amy's. Mark fished into the doctor's pocket and brought out an identical control box. He looked at it, shook his head, and put the box back where he'd found it.
Yerby raised an eyebrow. "Want me to take care of that one, too?" he asked.
Mark shrugged. "I think we ought to assume that Dr. Jesilind is capable of deciding such things for himself," he said. Like you and your two quarts of gin, Yerby. "I just wanted to make sure that he hadn't given Amy advice that he wouldn't take himself."
"Naw, he wouldn't do that," Yerby said. "It's just that what works for the doc didn't work so good for Amy, I guess. You know how delicate women are."
Amy straightened and pushed herself out of her brother's arms. "Delicate?" she said. "Because I thought you might find some better way to relax on Kilbourn than getting stinking drunk and wrecking a bar? Does that make me delicate, Yerby? Because if it does, you could use some delicacy yourself, brother!"
"Now, Amy, I wasn't drunk," Yerby said abashed. "Now, be a good girlie-"
"Yerby!" Amy said. "You can't help being a fool, but if you'll shut up you'll be able to conceal the fact longer. In the future please remember that my name is Amy or sister or Miss Bannock. Can you manage that?"
Mark turned his head so that he could pretend not to be hearing a family quarrel. There was no doubt of the brother and sister's affection for one another, but they really did come from different worlds.
And Mark came from a world different from either of theirs. Well, they were all together now. At least for the time being.
There was almost no wind over the spaceport. Two of the flyers landed simultaneously, passing one another in opposite directions. When the little wheels touched the ground, the wings tilted into air dams and the riders put their feet down to help slow the vehicles. One of the newcomers was a man clad in leather imprinted with the pattern of scales.
A woman rode the other flyer. She was short, stocky, and looked madder than a wet hen. "Well, there you are, Bannock!" she called, still within the framework of her flyer. "Decided to come home at last, did you? How long are you going to stay? As much as a week, maybe?"
"Desiree?" Yerby said. He looked surprised. "Ah, I thought you'd bring the blimp. I've got a lot of gear for-"
"Wait for you with the blimp, should I?" the woman said. Her outfit was much like Yerby's own, a leather vest over a checked shirt, with canvas trousers and boots that looked like they'd been made by an amateur. "No, thank you. I guess you can bring it back yourself-and you can walk to the grant, too. I just came to see if there'd be news that you'd managed to get your head knocked in by something even harder."
"Mark, this here's my wife Desiree," Yerby said with a broad, false smile. "Desiree, Mr. Maxwell here's a real gentleman from Quelhagen. Wait till you see-"
"Two more mouths to feed is what I see," Desiree snapped. She was at least half a dozen years older than her husband. She couldn't ever have been strikingly pretty, but if she managed to smile and let her hair down from its tight bun, she could have come a lot closer. "Him and your sister and your fine Dr. Jesilind's back, more's the pity."
"Madam!" Mark said. "I assure you I have no intention of trespassing on your hospitality!"
Though Mark had planned to put up at the caravansary until he could make more permanent arrangements, Greenwood didn't have a caravansary. Such amenities were for planets with considerable transit trade, while Greenwood was the end of the line-the farthest that human settlement went in this direction. Well, the Spiker probably has rooms.
"Just who's talking about mouths to feed, Desiree Cartwright?" Amy said, answering Mark's unasked question of whether the two women knew one another from Kilbourn. "My share of Dad's estate was twice what you brought with you to the marriage, so I'd say if anybody was eating what another provided, it's you!"
"Come along, lad," Yerby said to Mark in a stage whisper. "I guess Miss Altsheller didn't teach Amy nothing that keeps her from holding her own."
He shook his head. "And with Desiree, too, which I could never do in a million years. Sober."
The women continued their discussion. Amy's language and tones were refined, but as her brother said, that didn't prevent her from making her point.
Mark was blushing and horrified. It wasn't just that the scene was angry: love, joy, or sorrow would have embarrassed him just as much. On Quelhagen, people just didn't let their emotions out in public.
A dirigible settled beside the pile of cargo discharged from the starship. The external cover that streamlined the gasbags was about a hundred feet long and painted in streaks of red, yellow, and gold.
"Hey Chuck!" Yerby bellowed to the man in the dirigible's cab. "Do me a favor, will you? Run me and my gear out to the grant. Desiree came in the flyer."
"Can it wait till tomorrow, Yerby?" the pilot said. He was a round-faced man, young-looking but so completely bald that Mark wondered if he'd lost his hair from disease or an accident. "That's sixty miles there and sixty back, and I'd really like to get these seedlings in the hothouse today yet"
"Say, you don't think I'd put my sister Amy up at the Spiker, do you?" Yerby said. "Come on, Chuck. Remember how glad you were I was around to help you run pipe when your first well failed."
"I never said I wouldn't, did I?" Chuck grumbled. "C'mon, let's get loaded and maybe I can get some work done myself anyhow."
Yerby strode toward the cargo. "Tomorrow you and me'll go off hunting, lad," he said. He nodded in his wife's direction. "That'll give Desiree a while to cool down. Or anyways, we won't have to listen to her."
Mark grabbed a trunk and began to drag it toward the dirigible's cargo sling. He didn't comment on Yerby's plan.
But since Desiree was obviously angry about the amount of time her husband spent avoiding her, it struck Mark as an extremely bad plan in the long run.
7. Free as a Bird
Dawn on Greenwood was brilliant with layers of color-purple, mauve, orange, and Mark was willing to say he'd seen a streak of green for a good fifteen seconds. 'Birds' with furry wings and spike-toothed reptilian jaws lifted onto the morning breezes. Some of them were so big that at a distance Mark had mistaken them for human flyers, but smaller versions peeping and flapping around the Bannock compound helped him correct his identification.
"Ever flown one of these, lad?" Yerby asked as he lifted a flyer onto the slide that would give it a little extra speed for takeoff. Mark had hefted the flyer. It was amazingly delicate for its strength. On the ground at least he could handle it himself, though not with Yerby's casual aplomb.
"No sir," he said. When he was nervous he got formal again, too formal for Greenwood. "Yerby, I've driven ground cars and aircars, but never one of these. Or a dirigible."
The Bannock compound was on a knoll which sloped gently on three sides toward the river that bent about the site at a half mile's distance. The launching slide projected out over the steep-sided gully to the north. Mark guessed the updraft here was pretty much constant.
Another slide dumped into the same gully all the trash from the twenty-odd people living in the compound.
The compound consisted of about a dozen buildings, mostly sheds and barns. The house sprawled. The initial construction was stone, but wings and an upper floor of cellulose-based plastic multiplied the volume many times. When Chuck's dirigible flew them in the evening before, Mark had seen the plastics plant and a sawmill on the bank of the river.
"You know," Mark said, "you're going to fill up this gully someday, so you might as well find another way to handle your garbage right now. There's package plants you could run off the fusion power supply you've already got. You could convert most of that to something useful."