They walked forward, Yuri wary.
“Look north,” Delga said. “That patch of green? Potatoes, our latest crop. Ready for harvesting soon and we’ll be out of here. And, further north, see?”
He saw more smoke, a dirty scar on the landscape, figures moving, dimly visible, another couple of ColUs perhaps. “More people?”
“Yep. Our difficult neighbours. Klein.”
“Gustave Klein? From the hulk? The big man?”
“He survived. Well, you’d expect him to. We deal with him. No choice, Yuri. Planet’s big, but humanity’s small here.”
They were approaching the central group now, the women, the big fire. He counted quickly: six women together, a bunch of kids, five men in the other group. The women were being cautious of him, he saw, some of them shepherding the children out of the way, others drawing up in a loose line with their weapons. They were all tattooed, more or less as Delga was—even the older children, some of whom looked as old as ten years maybe, presumably conceived not long after the landings. Yuri made sure he kept his hands open and visible.
Delga noticed this. “I’m not going to tell them you’re no threat. For one thing I’m not a leader here, and they wouldn’t listen to me. Well, we don’t have a leader, haven’t felt we needed one since we put down Hugo Judd. For another I don’t trust you. I mean, you’re obviously lying, right? About your people, where they are. You’re not a good liar, ice boy. Maybe your facial muscles never thawed out from that cryo tank.”
“Yuri?” One of the armed women broke from the line, and walked forward cautiously.
“Anna, right? Anna Vigil.” He barely recognised her under the tattoo on her face, behind the spear she wielded easily, as if she’d done a lot of practice. Yet he was relieved to see her.
“God, after all these years—I just assumed you were dead. For sure I never thought I’d see you again. Cole!” She glanced over her shoulder. “Cole, come here…” One of the children came forward reluctantly, a boy, skinny, wide-eyed, maybe fourteen years old, but already taller than his mother. “You’ll remember Cole from the ship.”
The boy stared suspiciously. Yuri realised how rare it must be for kids like this to meet strangers, how wary they must be. He and Mardina would have to manage Beth through this process, when the time came.
The boy soon backed away and ran off to join the other kids, who were engaged in some game of running and capturing that must have been broken off when Yuri came wandering in from the plain; now the game was proving more interesting than the stranger, and they returned to it. A couple of them, meanwhile, were throwing stones at a group of builders by the riverbank. Yuri guessed this group hadn’t taken the time to watch the builders that he had. The builders swivelled and scuttled to get away.
Anna said, “You and that buddy of yours, you used to help me—Lemmy?”
“Lemmy Pink.”
“Did he land with you?”
“Yes.” He shrugged. “He didn’t make it.”
She nodded, as if she was used to news like that. “It’s OK,” Anna said now to the group. “I know this guy. He used to help me out on the ship. Got me supplies for the baby.”
The rest of the women, none of whom Yuri recognised, backed off, lowering their weapons, but they kept their eyes on him. The other group, the oddly excluded men around their own fire, huddled and muttered, glancing over at him.
“This way, ice boy.” Delga led Yuri towards the women’s fire. They had seats set out here in the open air, some of them remnants of ship’s supplies, others improvised from storage drums and crates. All the equipment here, the tents, the furniture and tools, looked mobile to Yuri, easily packed up. They were a people used to moving, as indeed he and Mardina and Beth had become.
“Sit,” snapped Delga. “Talk. Keep your hands where we can see them.”
Yuri obeyed. Anna, smiling, sat on one side of him, Delga on the other.
One of the other women, weaponless, approached Yuri. “Yuri, right? My name’s Dorothy Wynn. I’m on hearth duty today. You want something to eat, some tea?” Aged about forty, her greying blonde hair pulled back from a handsome face tattooed like the rest, she had what Yuri, in his own time, would have labelled a brisk US east coast accent.
“Tea?”
She filled a metal mug from a pan on the fire. “Brewed from nettles, Earth nettles I mean. They grow fast here, in compost. Surprisingly useful.”
“Our ColU didn’t bring along any nettles. I mean—”
She shrugged and sat down. “They seem to have had variant programming. I guess they were trying out different possibilities, the mission designers, to see what worked and what didn’t.”
Delga grinned blackly. “And see who died and who didn’t.”
Dorothy Wynn said, “Yuri, Delga is one of our more morbid personalities.”
Delga said, mimicking her badly, “While Dorothy is one of our more sane personalities. Or she thinks she is. Surprising you ended up down in the Bowl with the rest of us, in that case, isn’t it?”
Wynn seemed unfazed. “Oh, ignore her. Yuri, I was a corporate accountant, working for one of the big reclamation companies in New New York. My first crime was to siphon off a little of my employer’s wealth for—well, let’s call it an indulgence. My second crime was to get caught. Unforgivably clumsy. And so I ended up here. You know, Yuri, I never expected to meet you. But I remember the chatter about you on the Ad Astra. The man from the past. How fascinating. More tea?”
“No, I’m fine.” Yuri, stuck alone with Mardina for all these years, felt bewildered, almost shy. He was unused to this kind of complicated interplay between personalities. And he became aware of scrutiny from the men, sitting a way apart. One of them was muttering, staring, pointing. “Fantôme… il est un fantôme…”
“What’s he saying?”
“That you’re a ghost,” Anna said. “His name’s Roland. French Canadian, and he reverts to French when he gets scared.”
“Why a ghost? You have met other groups before, right? Like Klein’s over there.”
“Yes,” Delga said. “But you just came wandering out of nowhere, alone, ice boy. Look at what you’re wearing.” She fingered his leggings, his tunic of woven stem bark. “Like you’ve risen up out of the Bowl dirt.”
“There are stories about ghosts,” Anna said. “Well, one ghost. Of Dexter Cole, you know? The first pioneer who came out here alone…”
“Who you named your kid for.”
“They say he haunts this world. Maybe he lives on, in the unending night of the far side. That kind of thing.”
Strange, Yuri thought, that his own group had come up with much the same story.
Dorothy snorted. “What a crock. If you ask me Gustave Klein just made it all up to keep his boys in check.”
Yuri looked around at their faces: Anna puzzled but friendly, Delga cynical, Dorothy competent but cautious, the French guy Roland wide-eyed.
Anna asked, “Yuri? Are you OK?”
“To be honest I’m feeling kind of bewildered. Turned around.”
“Maybe we should put him with the men,” Dorothy said, and they all laughed.
Anna patted his arm. “Look, Yuri. We had some trouble. We were dropped down here, just as you were, I guess. The shuttle landed some way to the north. And after it took off again, after all those speeches by the astronauts —”
“What kind of trouble?”
“With the men,” Dorothy said with some disgust. “Some of them tried to take charge. Others tried to lay claim to us.” She eyed him. “I’m betting it was the same with your group.”
“It got a bit rough,” he admitted neutrally.
“We had to put one of them down,” Dorothy said. “Two more killed each other, but one of us got caught in the crossfire, so to speak. And so—here we are, the survivors.”