Hubbub in Outer Space

By Dan Davies

Six years after comet Lihtan swerves past planet Earth....

"A delightfully offbeat tale of a dystopian world."
—Kirkus Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dan Davies
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005706814

Dan Davies

Dan Davies is a former regulatory economist at the Bank of England and analyst for a number of investment banks. His career has seen him tackle all manner of financial crookedness, including the LIBOR and FX scandals, the collapse of Anglo Irish Bank, and the Swiss Nazi gold scandal. The author of Lying for Money, he has written for the Financial Times and The New Yorker, among other publications.

Book preview

Hubbub

in Outer Space

by Dan Davies

Copyright © 2017 Dan Davies

All rights reserved.

original text restored, 2022

•

Cover Art

Wilson Piechazek

Contents

Part One  •  Part Two  •  Part Three

one

Doc tromped lightly up the hot hillside, taking a little more care now where she planted her feet. Moments ago, she’d set her boot down beside a small rattler sunning itself on a warm flat rock close by the trail—and then she was in the air, jazzed off her toes by the little serpent’s squeaky yet convincing alarm and flying a surprising number of feet up the trail.

And several yards farther, springing bright-eyed and skittish over the tufts of dry grass that crowded the dusty track. Until the way widened onto a patch of stonier ground where she paused breathless and grinning, and spun a nervous snake dance while her heart caught up with her.

The sun beat down and the overstuffed daypack sweated hot on her back. Hot against her neck chafed the frayed strap that supported a well-pummeled old white canvas satchel slung bandolier style from one shoulder. In its accustomed way, the old satchel swung and shifted and thumped her leg with every step, and now, after the sudden leap up the hill, the broad strap was riding high and biting into the floppy collar of her smooth-worn hempen shirt with the big faded print flowers.

While she caught her breath, she let fall the daypack and slung the canvas bag around to her other shoulder. She stretched, glad for a moment to let the shirt breathe a little in the heat.

She glanced up the steepening slope. Already most of the way to the top of this hill. The path ahead seemed mostly to avoid the old gnarled trees that twisted out of the yellow hillside here and there, dry sparse-leaved scrub oaks that let as much sunlight as shade come down to speckle the ground beneath their low spreading branches.

She hefted up the pack and pushed on, up toward the not so distant skyline, her breath mingling with the still, hot air.

Back behind the rising curve of the hill, the rattler’s shrill alarm was stuttering down as the little crawler gradually regained its calm. And Doc was coming off the buzz herself now, the lingering after-image fading—a bright glimpse caught as she flew—the little snake coiling at her ankle, all lively and ablaze in the sunlight; a shifting pattern of gleaming gems on the hot yellow stone.

Light-footed and alert to any fresh perils she might stir up under the bright October sky, Doc loped ahead unhurriedly, not wishing to disturb any further the quiet of the sunburnt hillside. There was plenty of time to get where she was going.

The path took her over a slight rise, then the way flattened a little. The yellow grass loomed at her knees. There was not much in the way of wildlife to be seen or heard other than the furtive rustle and flutter of birds in the thickets beside the trail, startled up by her passing footsteps. Away back below, fading in the distance, still came fitful squeaks of residual terror emitted by the little rattler.

In a couple or three hours the sun would begin to sink behind the low coastal mountains and the heat would let up; cooler air would move into the Salinas⁠ Valley from Monterey and come breezing up these dry inland hillsides. She would be gone before then, of course.

The hilltop rendezvous was supposedly a ten-minute walk from the tree she was looking for. And yes, a bit farther ahead was a large wide-spreading oak standing close beside the trail. It looked to be the one marked on the scribble of map they’d given her. The map was in a pocket of her daypack but she remembered its essentials.

The tree, then, was where her route would angle off and take her toward the summit. Behind the scatter of its higher branches she made out a narrow track switch-backing out of the grassland and up over a crumble of rock below the hump of the hill. Up there the dry woods thickened. Somewhere up there she would find the meeting place marked on the map with an X.

And here was the tree. Doc halted and stood beside the heavy ground-hugging limb that circled the trunk of the old twisted oak. She swung down the daypack and lowered the white satchel, grateful for what meager shade she found under the scatter of leaves overhead. She leaned against the dusty, scabby-barked limb. At rest for the moment, she sighed with relief for how her legs stopped creaking when she stopped walking.

And this reminded her why she was up here on a steep hillside today: the Urgent Request she’d received, to once again step up in defense of the high-spirited but occasionally-beleaguered 9th Amendment Republic. The personal letter, hand-delivered, was persuasive not in its claim to urgency, since everything done in the name of the volunteer hordes was urgent, but by the unlikely force of the word ‘request’ used by the ever-cautious and respectful organizers. Volunteers habitually mocked any strong language inviting them to risk life and limb. Such language was absurd—there was never any lack of volunteers—and laughable when it occurred, for its archaic air of authority. ‘Request’ indeed.

Doc was thirty-two and battle worn. Retired, she had thought. Even though actual fighting was never a part of her job in the border skirmishes, she’d accumulated her share of bodily aches and irks from all the sprinting and dodging into so many battles, rescuing downed Flyers. Her job, drag them out and patch them up, get them back in the air. She’d certainly done her share of that over the past three or four years.

But now this fresh state of urgency. And being asked to abandon her growing crop of clients in town for another stint in the field, for a short while give up her own urgent retirement from all of that and leave her cat and small subsistence garden in the care of neighbors.

Annoying, but small surprise, after all. For sure, there was an air of urgency going around lately. Clearly, the Uni hobgoblin was on the march again. In what guise this time? She snorted, only partly in amusement. A likely guess would be another ‘technical survey group’ or some such, armed to the teeth and ugly. And what made this occasion so special? She thought—wryly, and not for the first time ever—this is only the war that never ends, so what else can you do but join in.

So all right, she would go it again but only this one last time.

Standing in the old tree’s thin shade, Doc looked up the hill, gauged the climb ahead. A nice little stretch.

She turned and glanced back down the slope she’d come up, and from this angle had a clearer view of twin tire tracks worn into the side of the hill, the overgrown trail to here being a dirt road from the days of wheeled vehicles. In those days, a slow dusty rattle up and over the hill, going from nowhere to nothing. Doc knew with exactitude what had been the last possible day this country lane might have felt the bite of rubber treads.

She felt the survivor’s wry appreciation for such fading traces, relics of a gone age that ended half a dozen years back when Comet Lihtan swooped around the sun and splashed a close encounter with planet Earth. This passing glimpse of a grassy old backroad made her feel again the calamitous moment of the comet’s passing, the rising divergence of events that came after.

For those who remembered, survivors like herself, that was the moment when things of old began settling, sifting down a geologic layer, the old civilization’s quick crumble of weed-choked concrete tilting away under drifts of rust-flaked dust. There was unmistakable satisfaction in noting such last traces of a burdensome past.

Now, six years forward of that moment, Doc’s little wheel track in the dirt seemed a mirage, a trite speculation on one possible history. Following its twisty way back down the hillside, her eyes crinkled in mild amusement as she recalled her own past epoch at the wheel. And all the rest of that. Memory of all that was fading into myth now, a dark myth happily revoked by cosmic happenstance. Doc Holiday, like all successful survivors of the catastrophe, certainly felt no regret over old busted myths.

And it would be a comet, wouldn’t it, she reflected, that brought such sudden change to Earth. What finer visitor from the outer spaces, planting a cool fluffy kiss of snow and a long lick of storm streaking a thousand miles up the edge of the continent.

She bent and grabbed up the satchel. Her hand went, with old familiarity, to the wide front flap, then stopped. No calls. The peculiar requirement that her phone be off for the duration of this mission must mean something. It would be about the Uni and their latest tricks, no doubt. She rummaged quickly past the bottles and vials that were her stock in trade and reached into the inner side pocket, where she found the phone. Let’s make a quick check here. The phone disk slid into her palm. Its battery, fully charged, was still, of course, taped securely to the back of it. Fine.

But no calls. She looked out beyond the lowest hump of the hill, back toward town and the fields she’d passed through an hour before, that spread across the north end of the Salinas Valley. Out there the tortuga teams floated, dipping and swaying down the long rows of tall-stemmed artichokes, whole families together aboard the hovering agri-tenders, working their fields. Close by lounged the usual gathering of local co-op traders, picking over the best of the produce for nearby markets. As Doc watched, a couple of these swooped away northward piled with their modest cargo. Around the periphery of each field idled the wholesalers and exporters, picnicking in the shade of multi-ton lifters, waiting patiently for the late afternoon auction that would dispose of the bulk of the autumn crop.

Doc’s gaze ranged wider, taking in the expanse of blue above all this, where scattered puffs of opalescent clouds drifted in a sea of bright warm air over the valley between her and the coastal mountains not too many miles distant.

She sighed and turned to move on.

From out there somewhere something sparked, caught the corner of her eye. Reflexively she looked back. A ray of light reached out of the distance, for an instant flooding her vision, a beam thrown by a facet of some exotic gem of a hue never before seen. She blinked and it was gone. The dusty croplands below remained peaceful and pleasant as ever.

Ready now to face the last stretch, Doc hefted the pack to her shoulders and began edging around the oak tree to reach her path up the hill.

She stepped forward. But here, impossibly bright and green, flourished a dense cluster of tall raspberry canes whose long stems, loaded with bright berries, wound up through the tree’s dry and dusty sparse-leaved branches. Her way was blocked.

Impossible of course, though not entirely unexpected. She thought, one surprise will get you another nowadays. She brushed a hand over the gritty bark of the old tree and smiled. Thousand-mile translocations of climate and latitude were not so very incongruous—even transplanted seasons—things like that happened all the time. For instance, there was that moment of dislocation she’d experienced one morning a few weeks back, when the spark reached out from some gleaming fixture in the bath. A moment later, when she turned the shower handle the small room filled with thunder, the deafening pressure of some mighty cataract falling who knew where. It ceased when she closed the spigot on it.

Today, this. Into the wilting afternoon heat the comet had sent raspberries. Fresh samples! she said. Let’s see what we get when we do this. She picked a handful of the fat red berries, popped them one at a time into her mouth. She gave each her full attention. This one was very tangy, the next one complex and sweet. Each excited her palate in its own way. Each added its own startling gamut of flavors. She looked thoughtfully up through the drab, bony tree and out to the hard blue sky. She took a deep breath. Here under the tree the air was unseasonably cool and filled with drifting particles of mist lit by the sun and lightly spiced with resin of fir, a scent that you really could not expect to encounter in this neighborhood.

Doc shifted her glance down to the bright green leaves ahead, spotted a berry deeper within that tantalized her eye but was beyond easy reach. She had to have that one. She sent in her hand, and her head followed her shoulder into the cluster of rising stalks and the light shifted subtly, thinned to silvery tints suggesting higher latitudes. She withdrew the berry and popped it in her mouth and the raspberry bushes dimmed and departed, leaving behind only the tart burst of complex flavors on her tongue.

two

Doc unhitched the canteen from her belt and took a long swallow of water. Then, fresh raspberry fading from her palate, she stepped forward around the dusty tree and onto the narrow animal trail the map had shown as an s-shaped line of dots winding toward a stippling of trees at the top of the hill. Absent-mindedly humming her tuneless tune, she forgot about her aching legs and swung into the rhythm of the switchbacks.

Before long, the slope steepened and the path disappeared in a bare crumble of flat scaly stones. Then up a dozen sliding steps and a two-foot-high vein of rock cropped up before her, beyond which the slope rounded toward the top of the hill, where the trees began to gather. She dug the edges of her boots into the stratified rock and a moment later swung over the little ridge.

Thin grass and the pale earth dimmed in sun-speckled shade under the twisted oaks. Scattered rabbit trails wandered among the widely spaced trees. Doc drifted forward, not finding any particular route that didn’t involve lots of irksome noisy crunching through sticks and dead leaves.

This was, it turned out, a pretty big patch of trees. Doc went uncertainly on and the thick trunks closed in, drawing close overhead a canopy of gray-barked branches. Peering into the directionless haze of afternoon light filtering through the woods, she caught no glimmer of direct light from any far extent of the hilltop. The light in here was diffuse, dim, a little gloomy. The air sat motionless, slightly hazy, dry and hot. Doc slowed further, getting no sure sense of which direction was the right way to go. Here a tree was tilted, roots in the air threatening to catch her boot laces. She side-stepped it. And now a fallen tree, all spiky branches and roots. She crunched her way around it and now she was drifting off in some new direction. Dust puffed up underfoot.

Then she was scrambling at the edge of a sunken hole hidden under a drift of dead leaves suspended over unseen snags. The side of the hole collapsed under her and she slid down with the rustling leaves and ended up at the bottom, standing knee-deep in shifting dust. She paddled forward into a receding wall of silt. A cloud of the dust rose up and caught in her throat and stung her eyes. She coughed, stopped moving. She could drown in this teacup! She glimpsed a snag spiking out halfway up the side she’d been digging at. She caught hold and yanked herself out of there.

She crunched on over the dead forest floor. Not long and she knew she was off course and feeling a little foolish—she couldn’t be lost, could she, up here on the top of this little hill? How big could it be? She continued on, circling toward where she knew the summit had to be, and after a while arrived all dusty at the edge of a wide clear spot.

Hi-ho, thought Doc. Destination. Take a break.

She paused in the shadow of the nearest tree, listening into the stillness of the circular glade. The space was bare and featureless but for occasional clumps of invading yellow grass. Close by, a clump rustled slightly. She looked and instantly a small bird rocketed from there into the safety of the trees. Oh sorry, bird, she said silently, didn’t mean to scare you. She glanced more carefully around the clearing. At the far perimeter a small brown rabbit grazed in a shady spot. Doc nodded. So it’s just you and me now, rabbit.

And now for a good spot to rest up and wait. Stepping quietly at last on bare ground, she went around the edge of the clearing to a very large, grotesquely gnarled oak tree rooted around a stony outcrop and backed by a stiff cluster of red-barked manzanita. Below the tree, a comforting patch of thin afternoon shade fell into the clearing.

She scanned the jumble of rocks splitting out beneath the tree’s big roots for possible reptilian life, thumped her boots around the ground, but only startled a twitchy fence lizard. She shrugged out of the pack straps and thumped both pack and satchel down before the most inviting of the tree’s twisted roots. She sat, booted feet straddling her gear. She plucked at the sweat-soaked shirt full of dust and leaf litter. She unbuttoned it, shook out the big faded blue and green print of tropical flowers and let it billow from her shoulders in hopes of catching any slight breeze. She rolled up the sleeves and the cuffs flopped wide above her elbows.

She unlaced and shook out her boots and while what air there was cooled her feet, she stretched and leaned back into the curve of the scaly tree root and breathed a sigh at the tree-fringed circle of sky. She admired the single pearly puff of cloud that hung high in the still air above the clearing.

It was quiet and drowsy in here, the air was still. In the tree tops a faint breeze came, rattled the leaves and departed, a vague promise of cooler air later. A few small black-striped bumblebees made their lazy rounds in the sparse vegetation. The heat would lift when the sun fell over the mountains into the distant sea. Time passed and the big tree’s shadow crept farther into the clearing.

Doc came alert with the arrival of two noisy ravens swooping in low from out of the trees. Eyeballing the reclining woman beneath the tree, the birds veered to a landing near the rabbit, still at work near the forest’s edge. They settled just out of hopping distance to either side of the rabbit, strutted and croaked and shook their feathers at him, then hopped away chittering when the rabbit ambled a step toward one or the other. A couple of turns of this game of hazing the rabbit and suddenly the birds cocked their heads and bounded up and flapped noisily away into the shadowed understory of the woods. Watching the birds’ departure, Doc snorted. Ravens; wherever you go, there they are. Back in the clearing, she saw the rabbit had vanished. Then her eyes darted to the treetops. She sat up, one ear angled to the sky.

Ah-ha! she said. They’re here.

three

In the next second three small aerial craft dove almost noiselessly over the treetops and into the clearing. Spiraling rapidly down, they split up and plummeted the last ten feet, two landing at strategic positions around the perimeter, one zigging swiftly past Doc’s position beneath the twisted tree. On touchdown the riders leaped and rolled, disappearing past the scruffy edge grass and into the trees.

The woods were silent for several long moments, giving Doc time to pull on her boots and button her shirt. Then she stood up and with a grin shouted into the clearing, Ha! I bet you boys can dump your scooters quicker than that! Come on out and let’s try that drill again.

The forest remained silent. She scanned the perimeter, whistling softly to herself. She tried to guess where the Flyers might pop up. Another moment passed and she shrugged, nudged with one booted toe the white canvas satchel laying on the ground before her. Here’s that picnic I promised, packed it myself. Then she added, Kids, I walked this medikit containing my own patented package of panaceas all the way from—you know—High-weighty. If you don’t mind my—you know—admitting to that little indiscretion?

Behind the big tree the bushes rustled busily and a gravelly voice from that general area replied, You don’t say. Some folks, I’ve heard, by the way, like to walk. More rustling followed and from behind the tree emerged a stocky, grizzle-bearded man of average height carrying a big wooden longbow tucked under one arm. In his free hand he carelessly twirled a bright metal rod or wand-like instrument. He strolled forward a trifle unevenly, flat though the ground was, a half dozen feet or so clear of the bushes, and faced Doc. He stood the bow up and leaned on it one-handed while he squinted at a gadget strapped to his wrist. Surprise surprise, he said, nary a signal hereabouts. We find no microwave or infrared and no phone! He glanced at Doc and went on, nor any teensy whiff of wifi anywhere detected. He gave her a satisfied smile and closed up the gleaming antenna and slid it down into a side pocket of his jumpsuit. By the way, Doc Holiday, I don’t believe we’ve met. People call me Salmon Trout. The short for that moniker is Sam. Glad to meet ya.

Oh hello Salmon Trout! Call me Doc.

Yep. And right about now, Doc, he went on, giving her a wry nod, seeing as we’re pressed for time today, I bet you got something to show before we move along. Without seeming to mean anything by it he reached up and scratched his neck. In doing so he pulled the collar of his shirt wide, revealing a tattoo that moved across his collar bone, a dark red octopus with glowing violet eyes, on its toes dancing a tango.

Of course, Doc cheerfully replied. She freed up her shirt and pulled it back off her shoulder, turned so the bowman could see: centered on one shoulder blade her own tattoo, an artichoke in vibrant green and blue.

Salmon Trout chuckled and said Yeah, that constellation’s the clincher, all right.

Constellation? she said, buttoning up the shirt.

The tattoo’s one thing, but the four moles spiraling off there, that’s what counts.

Figures, she said. Word gets around, huh?

Not so far as I know, Salmon Trout said. But now I know why Prokofiev mentioned it before he sent us out to collect you. Knowing where you keep your tattoo, I suppose. ‘Like four dark stars dancing with the comet.’ His very words, by the way. Poetic.

Well that’s him, all right, Doc said, always a tender regard for my feminine attributes. In fact, your mentioning him could explain one or two things. Like why I’ve been called up, again. On the other hand, he knows I’m pretty useless in the field, so there must be more to it than just my moles. . . okay, so tell me Sam, why are those boys still hiding out in the bushes?

The bowman sighed and climbed, knees crackling, hand over hand down his heavy-limbed bow to squat on the forest floor. He studied the spot where the bow dug into the dirt. Can’t be too careful with folk can’t get off the ground, he said. Specially not lately. Personators and the like. He raised an arm and beckoned vaguely into the clearing.

Two figures emerged from hiding, shaking off leaf litter and any ants and spider webs they might have picked up under the trees.

Doc nodded. I agree to that, Salmon Trout, though I’m not aware of what’s happened lately.

She sat back down and placed her hands on her knees. Frowning a little, she observed him closely. Then she bent toward him and looked him in the eye. Sam. I’ve seen that Flyer’s crouch before. I got real familiar with it myself. So, no offense, but I’m going to make just a guess here. If that’s the same leg pain so many of us are getting, then I’m sorry to have to suggest you follow the same doc’s orders that keep me grounded. Besides, you look a little tired today.

Tired?

The crouching man looked up from his study of the earth, a fleeting look of alarm crossing his weathered face. The weariness Doc had sensed in him now appeared for a moment as undisguised misery, quickly hidden behind practiced stoic composure.

Salmon Trout rose out of his crouch much too quickly, side-stepped a little and instead of standing sat full on the ground. Oof, he said.

Doc straightened, looked up, and here was a second member of the team striding toward her across the clearing, a girl, dark-haired and tallish and armed with a bow that Doc’s eyes could scarcely make out. At first glance the bow seemed only a vague pearly smear slanting across the archer’s body. What Doc was certain of was the black arrow, green-feathered, nocked at the ready and pointing her way. And the three others like it that dangled between the archer’s fingers, ready in the space of a breath to spring to as many targets. Here was a rarity among archers, a speed shooter. Doc wondered if the girl, who looked to be in her early twenties, could hit anything with all those arrows. In the afternoon sunlight a fan of green feathers glowed bright behind the young archer’s shoulders.

Quickly the archer was in close and Doc was looking up into a pair of startling amber eyes that glittered in the sunlight, and were fixed unsympathetically upon her.

Doc froze like a pinned bug under the girl’s wide mocking stare.

The girl archer paused beside Salmon Trout, stood side-long at the ready, arrow pointing casually at Doc’s midriff, the very odd-looking bow gripped in a gloved fist. Doc made it out as short but wide-limbed, recurved to a surprising degree. Close as her view of it was, still the outlines of this bow remained vague and uncertain to the eye. It seemed a pale shifting iridescence riding the archer’s hand, impossible to bring to focus and scarcely distinguishable from the air around it. It evoked a quality rarely hinted in the world anymore but entirely familiar. . . waking Doc’s recollection of the great storm six years past, the terrible night when the comet came down and grazed the earth.

There was nothing unearthly about the short skinny carbon fiber arrow lightly grasped between two fingers and thumb, that rested seemingly on air over the glassy green bow handle. Smoothly, the girl archer stepped in past Salmon Trout.

So did you get the password? she said over her shoulder.

More or less. Benignly, Salmon Trout slanted an appraising look up at her.

Wary and suspicious as she seemed to be, the girl nevertheless spared a fraction of a second to cast an incredulous frown upon Salmon Trout sitting there on the forest floor.

She scowled and shifted her aim. A slanting ray of sunlight caught the arrow’s wide fletching, the feathers flaring green against the young archer’s snug vest of faded gold silk. Doc got a deer’s-eye view of the broadhead, its twin cutting blades glinting not two yards from her neck. Lined up behind it, a glittering yellow eye.

Jade, I want you to meet Doc Holiday.

Okay there, Doc Holiday, then let’s have that password again. I didn’t hear it.

In the girl’s clipped officiousness Doc heard a clear strain of eager hostility. The eye behind the arrow blazed. The smile that played about her lips was not gentle.

Sorry, Doc said, cautiously looking past the arrow into the girl’s fixed stare, but I never got the password. Or the counter password either.

Yeah, never mind, Jade, said Salmon Trout. We’re covered on the password.

Covered! Okay you—I’ve got you covered—who are you?

Jade, ease up now. It’s fine. Salmon Trout raised a soothing hand.

Okay-I-don’t-like-it. Jade yanked the bow down. She yanked the bow back up. Why do they give us passwords if we’re not going to use them?

She glared at Salmon Trout. Who is this person!

Salmon Trout coughed. He tugged his beard. He said, I’ve told you. You don’t believe me, then try a little interrogation. If she’s Uni it won’t take much to find that out. Ask her if she’s seen any little odd weather lately.

What’s that supposed to mean? Another one of your rustic wisecracks? I came out here to shoot Uni, not play twenty questions.

Sure, and you’ll get your chance. But consider how a question might seem silly to us but perhaps in a revealing sort of way be unanswerable for someone fresh across the divide.

Huh. Uni. Jade scowled and lasered in on Doc again. Okay Doc Holiday, have you seen anything lately, something unusual, maybe?

Doc Holiday glanced at Salmon Trout’s patient, slightly anxious smile. She addressed Jade, That is a classic odd question in a neighborhood like this. I think I could answer it with a yes or a no and be equally convincing. What do you think?

See? Meaningless! Tell us the password!

Salmon Trout said, Well, maybe it’s the wrong question for you to be asking. You’re young, kid, maybe you don’t remember the way things were. In them olden days? Interrogator should have a handle on the subject, shouldn’t she? A little background. Otherwise she might commit a grievous error and never know.

Or care!

Look, Doc said, if Skimmer ever whispered any secret word in my ear it must’ve been drowned out in all his puffing and groaning. You know how it is. I can’t help you with the password. Be a honey and lower that fantastic bow of yours, would you—

If you know Skimmer that well then you can tell us all about his gnarly piercings. I’d like to—

Oh do you have to, cut in Salmon Trout a bit testily.

Doc laughed. I never talk about my clients.

Jade lowered the bow, showed her teeth at Doc. She tucked the arrow deftly into the quiver at her shoulder. The three others spun between her fingers and also went to join their green-feathered mates.

Yeah, forget it, Jade, said Salmon Trout. Point here would be, what could you know about that old sharpy that he doesn’t want the whole world to know or guess at? Not much, would be my first guess. There are other ways of identifying someone and a password is about the least reliable. I, by the way, can tell a lot about a person by what weather they—

Yeah okay, and I can spot a rampant Uni a mile off and none of your gassy guesses about it, either.

Then lighten up, Jade. Here be no Uni. Don’t be such a stickler. Could make you a better Flyer.

A better Flyer! the girl squawked derisively. I can outfly you or anybody.

Doc said, I think what he means is—

A tad more levity might unhinder you, darlin’, a new voice drawled, slightly hesitant, from the near distance.

Jade jerked around to face the speaker. Reflexively, two fingers hooked up to the quiver at her shoulder and she half drew the one arrow not quite settled in with the others.

The third member of the party stood nearby in the clearing, grinning slightly behind his dark well-trimmed beard.

I can outfly you too, fella, any day. Just get you off that fancy flier of yours and onto something more realistic.

In response to this challenge there came a toothy intake of breath from this last member of the group. Doc looked past Jade, got him in focus. Evidently, during her introductions to Sam and Jade, this third party had patrolled unseen, silently guarding the area. Doc was sure she recognized him from someplace.

Medium tall, he looked strong and fit. His short beard was darker than the longish hair that flew out over his ears. He wore a billowy long-sleeved shirt printed with a marbled black, white, and gray pattern that tried to merge, although not quite successfully, into the sun-dappled shade around the clearing. Strapped to his waist he wore a slim, medium-length sword in a black scabbard. Doc noticed the sword was fitted with the pronged Spanish grip favored by many combative Flyers, and a narrow, closely-fitted hand guard of woven black steel bands. He had on wide-legged iron-gray pants with lots of pockets, the legs tucked into lightweight split-leather boots. She noted the pair of blackened flat-handled dagger blades tucked into the boots and strapped snug below his knees.

Now a faint smile hovered on the swordsman’s face as his hands came up and, in a soothing gesture, he gently patted the air between himself and Jade. He shook his head, smiling more. Jade, he said, that’s a day, a challenge I look forward to.

Doc, no longer feeling pinned down, made this the occasion to stand up.

The swordsman looked at her and nodded, then glanced sharply back to Jade, eyebrows raised.

The archer whirled, spun in a half crouch to face Doc again.

Doc found herself again looking the length of the thin black green-feathered skewer, down into a wide, mocking amber eye. Rising and pushing forward a step, Jade emitted a threatening, open-mouthed hiss from the back of her throat, then paused, staring at Doc as though gauging her response. Then she grinned and with no fuss at all the arrow rejoined its flock and she folded up the weird bow and hooked it onto her belt.

I know, I’m horrible, she said. Sorry. I call that scaring up a Uni. Sometimes they try to disguise themselves as human.

She said to Salmon Trout, I look at her and it just doesn’t pop out. And there isn’t any stink, either.

Nah, said Salmon Trout. Jade, much as I admire your spirit and unique talent, I wish you’d be a little more thoughty about who you point your arrows at.

Do I scare you, Sam? Jade leaned over Salmon Trout, still sitting cross-legged on the forest floor. She gave him a little frown. Is the old man having a spell? She gave him a playful shove then offered him a hand up. He took the hand but only gave it a pat on the back and then let go. He remained seated, slowly turning the end of his longbow in the dust between his knees.

Looking at him a little worried, Jade said, All I can tell you is, my point was never on the Doc there. Close, sure, but not on. Off by a fraction. I could have pinned her shirt collar to that tree. Feel better?

You could learn to take my word for things. Some day you’re going to give me a heart attack, missy. He added, Anyway, you’ll get plenty of chances to level up tomorrow, I guarantee.

Ho-hum. Jade turned away, shaking her head. Her gaze swept Doc as she went and their eyes met momentarily. Doc saw no further apology in those eyes for the scare she’d had, only forest highlights and a sharp feline humor. In the sharing of that glance Doc experienced an odd moment of vertigo.

A low whistle turned everyone’s attention to the swordsman, who had drifted noiselessly back across the clearing. He raised a hand and tapped his wrist and glanced at Salmon Trout. Then, looking intently at the man seated on the forest floor, he paused and changed course, veered in the direction of Salmon Trout’s flying machine laying at the edge of the clearing not far from Doc’s tree.

Jade walked briskly off toward the flier she’d ditched at the edge of the forest.

Doc took a deep breath. She bent and laced up her boots, then stood and tucked in the old flowered shirt. She looked at Salmon Trout and waited for the next thing to happen.

She said, So what is it that Jade didn’t see? What is it I lack that makes me okay?

It’s her knack, Salmon Trout said. She has a knowing way with the Uni. With her, the sense is always active. It’s her certainty in it makes her careless about other things, Doc. For instance, Highway 80, was it?

That’s the password. Maybe you should tutor her on how I couldn’t be sure she was the real deal, when she didn’t catch it conversationally.

Okay, a lesson time, then. Later we’ll see if she remembers.

Doc wondered, could the feeling of being off balance that struck her with Jade’s passing glance be in any way a thing of a kind with her experience of the raspberries under the tree? Had the comet once again leaked a hint of experience yet to come, only this time without the usual preamble of an unlooked-for shard of gem light sparking somewhere in the world? If so then this ‘deja forward’, as she thought of such moments, had been pretty raw. Nevertheless, such comet showings were always unpredictable, happenstance, their meaning impossible to guess at. It was only afterward, in living the hinted event or sensation or mood, that she recognized what the comet had shown her. Plus, often enough when the event arrived, it might impinge so lightly on her awareness that she would scarcely recall it at all. That fat raspberry, thinking of it now, sparked again on her palate. Lively. What it was about, well, she would be sure to find out sometime, or simply happen to miss it when its moment came around.

She expelled a breath. Today now, all it took was a little brush-up with prickly Jade and the old zing of battle charged her spine again. We’re back in the wars for sure now, aren’t we! She couldn’t help giving herself a little grin. And had Jade seen what she clearly hoped to see, would this faded old flower-print now be harpooned to the tree, or. . . .

A ratcheting sound came from nearby. The swordsman was hunkered down at the parked flier, one forearm rattling around in the machine’s internal works. In a moment he finished up and had the metal side panel banged into place. He stood and rapped his wrench against the flier’s side a couple of times, again catching everyone’s attention. He again tapped his wrist and this time jerked a thumb at the sky. Time to go. He strode off across the clearing for his own machine.

Time to go, Salmon Trout said. Doc, you’ll be riding with me. He climbed back up his longbow and stretched mightily at the sky.

four

Salmon Trout came around and stepped aboard the flier. Doc swung her pack over her shoulders and straddled the side-seat, gripped the seat strap one-handed and wrassled up the white medikit bag. In the next moment they launched for the treetops. She whooped as they went over the top and slanted for the sky.

In a couple of seconds they were clear of the trees and turning eastward. Doc relished once again the freedom and rush of speedy flight.

Too long, she thought, so many months since she’d allowed herself the exhilaration of running the sky, but the joy these days was equally accompanied with pain. It was all too clear that she’d used herself up in constant running and would never again be able to take the strain of it. The joy of dodging in and out of battle rescuing downed Flyers, that was for the old Doc Holiday, saving fighters right and left, a real hero. Now, all broke down, gone out too many times. And here was Salmon Trout, pretty much in the same boat, it looked like, a lot older than her yet still, she guessed, addicted to battle, still huffing at double-speed on the endless, merciless running belt.

The wind blew, she raked the hair out of her eyes. Rolling hills of brushed gold drifted swiftly below. In minutes, the wide expanse of the central valley spread before them and Salmon Trout veered northeast, ran on toward the distant blue line of the Sierras, edge of the world.

If only this flying thing could be as easy for her as it once was. Treading at a useful speed was a lot of work, up-hill all the way. Anyhow, it was harder for some than for others. What she’d noticed from the beginning was the seeming oddity of how, from one Flyer to the next, an equal amount of effort didn’t always result in equal speed, agility in the air or distance traveled. And there were those who fell out.

She watched Salmon Trout running beside her. He was clearly a veteran Flyer and for now still a strong runner, but the wearing effort was catching up with him. She knew the symptoms first-hand. Knew that she, sprightly Flyer though she once had been, was going to have to be a passenger like this, forevermore.

It was her persisting concern with erratic flying ability, most dramatically suffered in the stress of battle as a total loss of levity, that in the end had brought Doc out for one last spin. It was, after all, her professional interest. There was something about it that never added up. If flying ability were only a matter of individual capacity or training, that would be one thing. But any Flyer might experience a slump, then later recover. Failure and recovery might happen in the space of a moment, sometimes be scarcely noticed at all. She thought it likely happened to everyone in the air at one time or another, an overlooked hazard with effects sometimes subtle and at other times, more rarely, catastrophic. Combative Flyers knew this all too well.

Because it seemed a simple proposition that physical effort amplified through a spinning inertial engine should make for a consistent result in human flight, some anxious Flyers voiced questions about quality control practices at the hidden factory that turned out the devices by the thousands each year. But no particular flying machine was ever shown to perform any better or worse than could be expected, in accord with the skill and experience of any particular operator.

The problem of unpredictable flyability had to be rooted in the source of the inertial engine’s power, Doc thought. The explanation for human-powered flight couldn’t be entirely dependent on mere mechanics, however exotic, because the new invention only worked in the zone of altered physics brought to ground by Comet Lihtan, six years back. Holding up against gravity relied more, she thought, on unexplained changes wrought within the geographic area under the comet’s track. There would be a human factor.

With the introduction four years ago, out of the blue it seemed, of the new factory-made flying machines, Doc became another among the often-seen volunteers of her local Occasional Militia. In her four years of flying, she dutifully participated in nearly all of the sporadic, usually small, confrontations with invading Uni in her range, customarily not more than a day’s flight across to the south Sierras. As many times as the Uni grounders marched over the hill for a little set-to, she would be in attendance, her tent pitched happily among the defenders.

Her job was dodging in and out of the fracas with the rescue teams, extracting the wounded and applying whatever aid was needed. Often enough, that meant running them out of harm’s way on her specially equipped flier, basically a stretcher mounted outrigger style beside the running belt.

Doc’s professional specialty in physical therapy enabled her to provide some benefit to many Flyers shook-up or bent askew in the brawl, but her skills did not extend to otherwise able-bodied Flyers who mysteriously fell out of the air and couldn’t get back up.

There were not a lot of these chance victims over all, but in Doc’s experience of better than a dozen battles, they added up as a distinct group she could do little to help. There never seemed to be any rhyme or reason for what ailed these Flyers. Together they comprised yet another among many cometary mysteries.

In time, the malady became the one thing, in the overall puzzle of odd effects under the comet, that she wanted to work out the answer to.

She took to carrying a thermos of strong coffee with her into the field, hoping the stimulant would jog her stunned patients back to functionality. This of course worked in the ordinary way, motivating her special subjects to run faster, but it didn’t get them off the ground, not by an inch. And too much of the brew was a drag on the system, ending up giving her patients a bad case of the jitters. So she turned to subtler methods for a solution.

Starting with certain browsings of the internet, her studies quickly led to obscure elderly volumes that she eventually uncovered in the special books section at her local branch of the regional library. The trail then took her on to other sources, including tattered tomes she’d discovered in a musty old used-book store on a dust-blown street in some unnamed abandoned town, which led Doc Holiday to begin experiments based on the Hanuman Hypothesis: whereby she steeped her debilitated Flyers in toxins infinitely diluted, whose gross effects at full strength would be analogous to the symptoms she wished to counter, such symptoms particularly related to dyspnea with a sense of gravis, and oppressive mood. In her experimental nomenclature she dubbed these aggregated symptoms, gravitas.

With such novel blends she hoped to induce a cathartic response in her patients that might loft them back into the air.

But she discovered that conventional potions of this type had no effect against a malady unique to the comet zone, there being no substances that induced subjective symptoms similar to ‘fear of the open sky,’ nor any known to kindle such dreads as ‘getting blown sideways in the wind’ or ‘running headlong into the ground’; so she turned to the inertial engine itself for inspiration.

And somewhere found a rusty old discarded flier, clearly one of Flihtworks’ first, hammered out by hand in the company’s earliest years. The thing had been flown till the works ground to a halt. Disassembling it, Doc examined every part. A very early model. Still randomly orbiting the little engine a set of inertial clappers remained, much the worse for wear after countless hours snapping up energies out of the M-Field. Later models of the inertial engine no longer featured the noisy little clappers.

Going further into the engine Doc found, tucked into the core of the crude mechanism, a small metal cylinder. Once she hacksawed it open, she found nothing more than a stack of tiny steel washers filling the tube. Then, rattling up and down within the ring of washers, an even smaller cylinder. She went to work on it and inside she found, to her surprise, a glass capsule containing a soggy twist of paper, which she carefully extracted. Examining the narrow, inch-long rectangle of damp paper she found the legend, ‘Solute #1’ rubber-stamped on it in red ink. She touched it to her tongue and tasted once again the ice of space that years before had slushed the entire region west of the mountains, a thousand miles of it scraped off the comet.

Applying her Hanuman Hypothesis, Doc began the distilling and the diluting, the fractioning, the mixing of the fractions, the whole process of rationalizing and potentizing a subtle energy she supposed existing within Solute #1, slush of the comet. Her process led her down paths progressively more meditative as the experimental potion’s potency increased. Her natural musicality, her lifelong tune of endless tunes that flowed, rarely ever fully consciously through her days, flourished in ever-freer invention in contact with the slush. Ideas, notions, recollections drifted in mind, sparks