Eclipses v1 0, p.19
Eclipses (v1.0), page 19
“Tooweer! Toowee!” He heard a deer chattering away as his approach was heralded by a bird. As it took wing, Erik recognized the bright plumes of a migratory marsh bird, not often seen this far north of its nesting valley. What a sight! Yesterday he could not have seen the colorful feathers arcing over the treetops as the bird banked on swept-back wings. Then the bird was gone, but the vision of it as a pendant in the sky was forever in his memory.
The glen was empty. He hadn’t expected to meet even his friends at this early hour. Taking off the heavy, long-sleeved shirt he had worn since before dawn, Erik sat next to his packboard and reached into the pack for a lighter shirt. It was impossible to reach one without first removing his extra socks and raincoat, and he found himself refolding half his wardrobe. It was scant but durable. The Water Baron, luckily, provided his family with the finest clothing for all occasions. Unwittingly, this included the occasion of running away from home.
When the pack was rearranged and the lighter shirt was covering his torso, Erik slipped his arms through the pack-board’s straps. But he lay there, resting his weight against the pack, not quite willing to leave the glen. Sunshine streamed through branches and warmed ferns and leaves that were still dew-covered. Tiny lips of early pink sunflowers were opening to suck in the rays. Sometimes a shadow crossed the sun’s shafts: a bird settling on a branch was the cause. He was glad to see it all after a week of the tormenting half-vision of the bad eye. It didn’t disturb him that the eye’s full use would be forever lost by forgoing therapy. He’d never even realized it was fading on him, and the loss had not really caused any functional damage. He had already learned to compensate for depth perception, though not consciously. It was something his brain had done for him, without asking or telling. The bad eye had pulled a few degrees toward his nose, not so much that anyone could notice, least of all Erik himself, who rarely looked in mirrors. It had caused double vision—so the physician said, though for the life of him, Erik could not remember seeing double at any time. And at some time, the brain had dimmed the eye that wouldn’t focus in tandem with the other. To bring back the eye would have required patching the good eye for months, perhaps for a year or more, and even then the odds were no more than fifty-fifty that the patch would do its job. But if it did, and the bad eye began focusing again, there was only another fifty-fifty chance that it would stay corrected. Erik felt he had a small chance of regaining something he’d never known he had lost. A year was too long to devote to something he didn’t need.
Aram and Beth had not agreed to Erik’s request to forgo therapy, and somehow the patch had become involved in the real problems. “Not wear the patch?” Aram had stared at Erik as if he’d gone mad. “Didn’t you understand what the physician told you?”
“Yes, but…” Erik made an appealing glance to Beth as she looked up from two-year-old Marc, who was straddling her knees. Beth’s brow was furrowed, and Erik could not tell if her frown was for himself, Aram or little Marc, from whose sticky fingers she was disentangling a lock of long blonde hair.
Aram didn’t wait for Erik to continue. “By wearing the patch you’ll regain your vision,” he said, repeating only in part what the doctor had said.
Aram considered the unmentioned context of odds, something to be essayed, not circumnavigated. Erik wished he could share his father’s positive attitude. “I wanted to take a contract this year … an adult-status contract.”
Aram snorted. “With your good eye patched you’ll be half blind. Responsible contractors won’t risk giving you even an unskilled contract and, since your sight loss is only temporary, computer training for the blind would be wasted.”
“I know,” Erik said. “That’s why I want to forgo the patch.”
“That’s unnecessary, Erik,” his mother said, pushing her hair behind her ears and patting Marc’s hands to keep them busy and away from her hair. “We’ll extend your juvenile status for another year or for however long you must wear the patch. I’ve programmed our education computer extension to work with your partial vision until you can read the printouts again.” She smiled. “It won’t be so hard, honey. I retrained when I was past thirty, and I survived.”
“But—” Erik fell silent, for Aram was glowering.
“Recently I’ve heard you speak of maturity as if it were a quality you possessed. I’d be willing to believe you if you’d stop talking about maturity and start demonstrating it. Wearing the patch and accepting the inevitability of juvenile , status—and making the most of it—is the only mature decision.”
Heartsick, Erik had left the room. Aram’s and Beth’s decision did not seem the only alternative to Erik. Erik wanted his adult status and he wanted to direct his own life. Now! The solution was simple. Forget the patch. He could see everything in the world that he wanted to see with one bright, reliable eye. And he could see it now. There was no reason to delay another year. If he didn’t hurry, he’d never cram into one lifetime all that he wanted to do.
He got up. The pack was extremely heavy, for he had packed his winter gear in fear of being a fugitive within his father’s Empire for not only the summer and fall but winter, too. He hoped Aram would simply wash his hands of his second son when he learned Erik had run away. But there were Beth’s pleas to consider. She could turn Aram’s will when no other human on Serensunar could, and the Baron’s forces, focused on finding one well-known sixteen-year-old boy, would be difficult to evade. Alexi was right: He could not get fifty kilometers without being found. But if he could just make ten, to Red Rock Pass, where groups of five hundred Earth refugees were crossing Aram’s land on their way to the coast, Erik would have a very real chance of leaving the Empire undetected.
Beth, though she was most like Erik in nature, would be the last to see that Erik would have his way in the end. fter biggest concern would be Aram’s feelings. Yet despite Beth’s pleas, Aram might not pursue him at all once Aram heard Alexi repeat Erik’s promise to run again and again. Aram did not like exercises in futility. Aram had a myopic view of the world, but he genuinely felt he did what was best for everyone, his family and the Empire alike. It probably had to do with having exercised tremendous power since he was a very young man and having been lucky—and wise, Erik grudgingly admitted to himself—in making a lot of right decisions. When he made a wrong one, he suffered a great deal, for he was a conscientious man and a loving man. He had demonstrated his love for his family year in and year out, and that same great love poured over onto his Empire. Erik recognized it, never once tried to convince himself that his father did not love him, for to do that would be to lie to himself. But Aram saw .the world from his own eyes, while Erik’s eyes went beyond. Erik might be a dreamer, or he might be a visionary, but whatever he was, he was going to be it for himself.
One foot before^ the other, placed with determination despite the wish to set down a heavy pack and find relief from the hot mountain sun in a cool stream, can put a lot of kilometers between a mansion and a boy.
Chapter 18
Beth’s twenty-first spring on Serensunar was turning out to be a miserable one. It had begun, with Erik’s running away from home in the early spring, then got worse after the horrible argument she’d had with Aram when he refused to look for Erik. She could have launched her own search, of course, but that would have made Aram angry. She couldn’t help believing that the decision to look for him ought to come from both of them. She was determined to convince Aram that looking for Erik was the right course of action; the boy was, after all, barely sixteen terran years, not old enough to know his own mind yet, or he would have stayed home and treated his eye condition. Yet, since the very day they had learned Erik had left, she had had only one opportunity to talk to Aram, and that had ended in a bitter disagreement. Since then he’d been busy with Empire responsibilities, meeting with coastal representatives as they faced yet another drought while trying to accommodate the hundreds of refugees that entered their borders each week. Despite two new dams having begun operation this year, Aram was hard-pressed to meet the water needs of his own Empire without increasing allotments to the coast, and he was unable to augment their energy requirements. Beth knew Aram was deeply concerned about the coast problems, for he felt he was contributing to them by allowing the shuttles to land against the Research City-computer axiom by which he supposedly lived.
There had been other times when Aram had been so involved with his world that Beth saw little of him for months at a time. She particularly remembered the fall when she had returned from her last diamond quest nine years ago. Aram had been relieved to see her home safe, and she remembered a night of frantic lovemaking, but for months thereafter she could barely recall seeing him and had no idea of what they might have said to one another or what they had talked about, if at all. Aram probably would remember their relationship of 5 those months similarly, and if anyone had asked him to say what had happened in those months, Aram would tell of the development of a huge land-clearing machine that eventually wrenched the tangled growth of tropical forests out by the roots and pulverized rocks in the low and warm valleys in his southern mountains. Similarly, Beth’s emotional investment of the time was not in her mate but in changing her profession, training for hours on end at a computer terminal and then exploring how the changes in her own self-worth were affecting her day-to-day living.
Sometimes Beth wondered if Aram buried himself in Empire work at some signal from herself, knowing she could not handle her relationship with him and another involvement as well. It could be that he protected himself from rejection by being too busy to notice it. When he had emerged from the development of the land-clearing machine so long ago, he had been surprised to find her deeply involved in a nursing program instead of cataloging Lost Expedition artifacts. When she finished coding and testing the nursing program, he had been further surprised to realize it provided for monitoring patients stricken with muscle-worm fever in their own homes. It was a task that could only be done properly in a hospital until then, and Serensunar’s medical staffs had been notoriously scant since the Colonial times. He’d been proud and very curious to leam how she had learned so much about the disease and its treatment without medical training, and she had delighted in explaining that in order to write the nursing program she had to know nearly as much as the doctors who treated the disease. Over the years she had become a minor expert in muscle-worm fever, tissue-regeneration monitors and coronary-alert implants and was considered one of the best program-design specialists in the field of medical monitoring. It was true that she was currently working hard on the chemical balance monitoring system that would be used to prevent the imported terran cattle from poisoning themselves on Serensunarian turf when the little experimental herd outgrew the feedlot; but despite knowing that she was working hard and long hours, she had the feeling that this time Aram had deliberately sequestered himself in his work to avoid another confrontation over Erik.
This particular day he had spent all afternoon with someone in his office, talking about more dams. At least he was home, but no doubt the guest would stay for supper; then Aram would walk with him or her down to the wharf or the railhead, returning too late and too tired for them to talk about Erik. Half the year was gone; her program was not written and her son was not home.
Beth got up to close the drapes against the late afternoon sun. Hunted Moon had eclipsed the sun yesterday but would provide no relief today, and she could hear the blowers working hard to circulate cool air. Closing the drapes would help, but nothing could make the upper-story rooms cool on a really hot Serensunarian summer afternoon. Beth didn’t mind. She could have worked in the wing of the house that had refrigerated air or even in Aram’s office, since there were plenty of terminals there. But she missed the outdoors when she stopped working on the Lost Expedition, and so she had taken over her oldest son’s bedroom, which had a complete terminal, just as soon as he had finished his computer examinations. Alexi moved to another bedroom on the north side of the house, leaving the one with the southern view to his mother, where she could see far beyond the orchards to the reservoir, and even to the mountains beyond. Beth liked to watch the storms come up from the south and push over the mountaintops and to see the resulting scurry of boats in the reservoir as they headed for shelter from the squalls. Being in one of the southern rooms also satisfied a need to know where Hunted Moon was from day to day, something that probably had developed within her that first year on Serensunar. She liked to take a break from her work during eclipses, which usually involved settling down on the windowsill with a cup of coffee from the carafe. If the day was warm she’d throw open the window to listen to the night-calls of the birds, and it always made her laugh to see the goats in their neighbor’s pasture trekking across the pasture to the barn, as if it were truly sundown. Today there was no eclipse to provide an excuse for a break, but she hadn’t really worked hard enough to need a break. Since she knew that trying to concentrate on cows’ stomachs, acid levels and blood chemicals was useless, she went to take a swim before changing clothes for dinner.
Beth had developed the habit of dressing up for dinner years ago during the construction of Calib’s Dam when guests were present in great number every night. They came in dusty coveralls and muddy boots, and Beth could have worn dungarees without anyone having noticed. She supposed that was why she dressed well at dinner time, for aside from the feeling of being well-groomed and in control of how people perceived her, she still enjoyed sidelong glances from the men and Aram’s open approval, too. She selected a simple indigo dress with an orange button on the single shoulder strap, then went down to the dining room, where Aram and his guest were already seated. For an instant she mistook Aram’s guest for her own son Alexi, for the man was tall and broad-shouldered, dressed in light dungarees as Alexi often dressed. Then she realized this man sat taller in the straight-backed chair, and while his hair was dark and shaggy, too, it was more red than black.
Beth circled the table to come up behind Aram, touching his shoulder and bussing his cheek even as she heard him say, “Beth, I believe you know Shelley.”
Beth lifted her eyes into sparkling blue and mischievous ones that told her he’d just been waiting for her to notice him, electric eyes that shocked her heart to a faster pace. The linen-covered table was between them or she would have hugged him with joy, for he looked confident and content and pleased to see her. As it was, she reached across the table to take his hand in the old style of Earth, her eyes fastened on his and studying him as she felt his self-assured grasp.
“You’re looking well,” she said. “So good to see you again.”
“And you, Beth.”
Yes, she decided as the amenities were finished and she sat down next to Aram, her impression of him was correct. Shelley had survived the ordeal of leaving Lydia, and he had come out of it unscarred. He couldn’t look so magnificent and vigorous otherwise.
“Shelley has designed a dam foundation structure that will make it possible to dam rivers like Little Sister or The Ebony,” Aram said, reaching for a cracker. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The rivers Aram named were close to where a major rift jagged in toward the mountains. The area was riddled with scalding springs and active volcanoes and was known to be tectonically active.
“I’m not surprised,” Beth said, looking at Aram now. He still wore the light blue shirt and pants she had seen him in at breakfast, a bit wrinkled now, as if he hadn’t spent the entire day in his air-conditioned office as she had thought he had. “Shelley was always good at solving special problems.”
“Well, I’m surprised,” Aram said feigning self-reproach. “I’d never considered the kind of development Shelley has offered, and that means I’ve overlooked a lot of good land and development opportunities. I can’t wait to tell Alexi. Ah, here he is now. Shelley, I want you to meet Alexi, my son, and Pola, my daughter.”
Alexi’s height and breadth were in truth not quite so great as Shelley’s, but with his tiny sister, Pola, at his side he gave the appearance of being the biggest person in the room.
“Hello,” Pola said, taking her seat quickly. She was blonde like Beth, but there the similarity ended. Pola’s bones were sturdy and thick, her face more rounded, and she would have looked like a peasant woman from the Earthly Middle Ages but for the conspicuous bearing of self-assurance.
Her brother squeezed Shelley’s shoulder and sat down also.
“Tell me what, Aram?” he said, reaching instantly for food. He had to satisfy himself with crackers because the servants had not yet begun to serve the meal.
“This foundation system Shelley’s come up with for dams in earthquake areas,” Aram said. His eyes were keen with excitement, which Alexi noted. “I’ve been reviewing the plans of dams he built on the coast that are a take-off on the same idea. It really looks good for irrigating western foothills areas.”
Alexi and Shelley exchanged amused glances. “I know, Aram,” Alexi said. “Jesperson took me to see one of Shelley’s dams when I went to the coast last winter. It was proof of some sort in Jesperson’s mind that anarchy works. I suggested to Shelley that you might be interested in a similar design, one tailored to solve our problems on the western slopes.” Alexi would know that the best way to get Aram interested in a project would be to put him in contact with the best authority possible. Apparently Alexi had managed to do that; it was obvious he was pleased. Now Alexi looked at Shelley, a bit of puzzlement in his gray eyes. “Did you finish that project ahead of schedule?”
-Shelley’s lips thinned to a frown as he shook his head. “It doesn’t look as if it will ever be finished. They kept expecting Cherry Grove Commune to throw in some backing, but they sunk a well instead. Hit Sweetwater, too, so I sure can’t blame them. They’ll be okay until creep busts the shaft.” He shrugged, indicating helplessness, but Beth could tell he wished things could be different. He had been bom and raised on the coast, and that was the place his heart felt was home. No one asked how or why such a large project had even been started without proper backing being assured, but Beth suspected that Aram and Alexi knew the answer. She would ask her son later.
