That started another battle, Eve insisting that he really should sleep instead, since they had, by his own calculations, an hour and fifty minutes before they reached the Pacific Ocean and it was well past his bedtime. Darien withdrew from the discussion and tried to reconcile herself to the bumpy ride. Shef's landing craft was not an aerodynamic shape, and so the buffeting was considerable. It did not seem to bother anyone but Darien—was not, in fact, a patch on the turbulent landing they had had a few days earlier. It was simply what you had to expect when you were moving fast in air, and all the spacefarers had learned to accept it.
Darien divided three thousand-odd kilometers by an hour and fifty-five minutes in her head and realized that they were traveling at nearly twice the speed of sound. Then she understood why there was so little noise. The noise was there; they were simply moving too fast for it to catch up. All across the continent no doubt people were waking from sleep and jamming their fists in their ears and running out into the open to see what catastrophe was splitting their skies, but inside the ship the greatest noise came from its occupants, now squabbling over which ones got the ripest fruits Eve Barstow was unwrapping.
Darien McCullough was old enough to remember jet planes, and all the other resources of the great age of technology, but it had been a very long time since she looked down on a continent. It puzzled her that, as they crossed what must have been Lake Michigan, it seemed to be growing lighter; and then, minutes later, she saw the Sun rising—queerly in the west! They were outracing it! The rest of the crew had no preconceived ideas of where sunrise should occur and did not understand what she was exclaiming at, but all of them clumped around the viewing angles to see the marvelous light. The rising Sun illuminated the sky from the top down. Just below them clumps of altocumulus floated at forty thousand feet like luminous pink and white cotton candy, with tiny white cumulus clouds floating in the shadows far below. Even Jeron thought it was beautiful.
In his own surroundings Jeron did not seem quite as arbitrary and scornful as he had in the sphere of the President of the U.S. (Washington). He was not a handsome boy —man, she corrected himself; regardless of calendar age. Too skinny, too dark, and above all, even on his best behavior, too belligerent. But inside that belligerence was the person who had bred a flower with a portrait etched in its chromosomes, and as he stood silent beside Darien McCullough she discovered that he was holding her hand.
The clouds were thickening up, but she could see mountaintops. She shivered. "I think that's Blackfoot Country," she said.
Jeron studied the ground thoughtfully, then leaned back and regarded the map. "Aunt Eve? What's this part here?" he asked, pointing.
She got up from where she was stroking Jeromolo Bill's sleeping head and came over. "South Dakota?" she said doubtfully.
Darien shook her head. "That was when there used to be states, when there used to be a United States. It's all Blackfoot now. Cornbelt south of us, Prairie Confederation up in what used to be Canada, Rocky Mountain Republic just ahead—but that's Blackfoot. We detoured all clear up through Saskatchewan on the way East, just to miss them."
"There must be roads that go straighter," Eve offered, frowning at the map.
"Probably are. But you'd be crazy to use them. Two hundred years ago the Blackfoot were the meanest bastards in the West. Never did get along with settlers—not that you can blame them. Now they're coming back."
"Indians? Oh, wow!" Jeron's youth showed in his awed face. "I thought they were all extinct!"
"Not a bit of it—especially since the Blackfoot let other Native Americans immigrate. Not to be citizens, you know. They don't go that far. But the Blackfoot have plenty of food, they've even got the buffalo coming back, and it's not so good in, for instance, the Desert Countries. People can't really survive there. They could for a while, when there was plenty of power and they could import everything they needed, but you folks showed them the error of their ways."
Eve fell silent, and Darien was aware she had been tactless. Jeron gave her no opportunity to think what she could do about it, because he was tracing the map with his thumb. "Huh," he grunted. "You came all that way on horses?"
"Oh, Jeron, what do you think we are? Not on horses. By car— alcohol fueled—as far as the lakes, then down by water to the New York Thruway." She sat for a moment, remembering, and then conceded, "It wasn't always that comfortable, of course, but we had a good reason." He looked a question at her. "To see you people, of course," she explained. "We didn't think Jimbo Tupelo would have got your message—and if he had God knows what he would have done—so I brought it to him in person. There're still a few observatories going, you know, though not of course in the East. So—I decided to take a little trip."
He scowled at her. "It is not a 'little' trip and you didn't do it just to give that man the message."
Darien looked at him for a moment. "I never know how to take you," she observed. It was true. He was startlingly self-confident for someone barely out of his teens; most of the people she knew did not get that self-assured manner until middle age. It was not really an attractive trait. "Well," she said unwillingly, "I never meant to lie to you, I just haven't had a chance to tell you everything. We've been having a few problems in Puget. Volcano problems; we've had two bad ash eruptions in the last five years, and both of them hit when the crops were vulnerable. That's not too serious—I mean, if it doesn't happen every year it won't be—but it leaves us a little exposed. We've had to make deals with our neighbors for food. Even the Blackfoot. And Jimbo's a problem."
"Him? So far away?"
"He doesn't want to stay so far away, Jeron. He wants to be President of everything anybody else has ever been President of, and maybe a little more. He's making deals and alliances, and if he had this ship— If he had whatever else you people can give him— He'd get smashed, of course, because he's just a pipsqueak tyrant, but if he started a real war everybody else would start maneuvering too, and while his neighbors were eating him up the SoCals and the Rocky Mountain boys and a few others might get the fever. It's been pretty chancy ever since the sneak attack."
Eve looked up from her thoughts. "The sneak attack? Is that what you call what Shef did?"
"Oh, God," said Darien penitently, "nobody's blaming you."
"I'm blaming me."
"No, really! You folks did us a kind of a favor."
Eve frowned and shook her head.
"No, really," she said again. "I don't think you know what shape the Earth was in. Talk about armed camps! There were missiles under every front porch, and it was only a question of time until they went off. You messed us up, sure. But there were plenty of survivors—and if you people hadn't wiped out the worst of the weapons, I'm not sure there would have been any."
Jeron said, almost apologetically, "I do not think we meant to do you any favor."
"We certainly did not," Eve said bitterly, with a look of decision in her eyes. "Maybe we can now, though. I think we owe you something, and. ... I wish I could talk to Uncle Ghost."
There was something worrying about the way she said it, Darien thought. "Who? Someone you left back on Alpha Centauri?"
"Not exactly," said Eve Barstow, and then, suddenly, "Oh, look! That must be the Pacific Ocean! We'd better wake Bill up to land us!"
28
SOMETIMES I WALK AMONG YOU IN A FORM OF FLESH AND sometimes hover like an airy cloud. My name is Willis Becklund, and I died twenty years ago. More or less. I don't mean more or less twenty years, I mean more or less "ago." When you stand where I stand it is not easy to see what is "ago."