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.“I’ll wait for Buck.”“Leave him, Mrs.McKenzie.”“I don’t need that blessed bus.”“Why not?”“My children drove off to Mobile with their families.They’re coming back to get me.”“My insteted radio”—I gestured at my radio—“says the roads to Mobile are jammed up.You can’t count on them.”“They said so.”“The Confed deadline—”“I tole ’em I’d try to walk to the main road.Got tired, is all.They’ll know I’m back in here.”“Just the same—”“I’m all right, don’t you mind.They’re good children, grateful for all I’ve gone and done for them.They’ll be back.”“Come with me to the bus.It’s not far.”“Not without Buck.He’s all the company I got these days.” She smiled, blinking.I wiped sweat from my brow and studied the pines.There were a lot of places for a dog to be.The land here was flat and barely above sea level.I had come to camp and rest, rowing skiffs up the Fish River, looking for places I’d been when I was a teenager and my mom had rented boats from a rambling old fisherman’s house.I had turned off my radio, to get away from things.The big, mysterious island I remembered and called Treasure Island, smack in the middle of the river, was now a soggy stand of trees in a bog.The big storm a year back had swept it away.I’d been sleeping in the open on the shore near there when the chopper woke me up, blaring.The Confeds had given twelve hours’ warning, the recording said.They’d picked this sparsely populated area for their little demonstration.People had been moving back in ever since the biothreat was cleaned out, but there still weren’t many.I’d liked that when I was growing up.Open woods.That’s why I came back every chance I got.I should’ve guessed something was coming.The Confeds were about evenly matched with the whole rest of the planet now, at least in high-tech weaponry.Defense held all the cards.The big mirrors were modular and could fold up fast, making a small target.They could incinerate anything launched against them, too.But the U.N.kept talking like the Confeds were just another nation-state or something.Nobody down here understood that the people up there thought of Earth itself as the real problem—eaten up with age-old rivalries and hate, still holding onto dirty weapons that murdered whole populations, carrying around in their heads all the rotten baggage of the past.To listen to them, you’d think they’d learned nothing from the war.Already they were forgetting that it was the orbital defenses that had saved the biosphere itself, and the satellite communities that knit together the mammoth rescue efforts of the decade after.Without the antivirals developed and grown in huge zero-g vats, lots of us would’ve caught one of the poxes drifting through the population.People just forget.Nations, too.“Where’s Buck?” I said decisively.“He…that way.” A wave of the hand.I wrestled my backpack down, feeling the stab from my shoulder—and suddenly remembered the thunk of that steel knocking me down, back then.So long ago.And me, still carrying an ache from it that woke whenever a cold snap came on.The past was still alive.I trotted into the short pines, over creeper grass.Flies jumped where my boots struck.The white sand made a skree sound as my boots skated over it.I remembered how I’d first heard that sound, wearing slick-soled tennis shoes, and how pleased I’d been at university when I learned how the acoustics of it worked.“Buck!”A flash of brown over to the left.I ran through a thick stand of pine, and the dog yelped and took off, dodging under a blackleaf bush.I called again.Buck didn’t even slow down.I skirted left.He went into some oak scrub, barking, having a great time of it, and I could hear him getting tangled in it and then shaking free and out of the other side.Long gone.When I got back to Mrs.McKenzie, she didn’t seem to notice me.“I can’t catch him.”“Knew you wouldn’t.” She grinned at me, showing brown teeth.“Buck’s a fast one.”“Call him.”She did.Nothing.“Must of run off.”“There isn’t time—”“I’m not leaving without ole Buck [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]