He chuckled again, now. Crazy, mindless. It made him feel better. Remembering Quath’s puzzlement, he laughed again. Even the
pang of loneliness did not cut into his sudden, absolutely unearned joy. Irrational it might be but it was fun and fun was,
in a place and time like this, supremely rational and practical.
THREE
Casualties
“Man over there, he wants to talk to you.”
Toby was surprised. “Me? How come?”
“He knows you.”
“Can’t be.”
“He does, says so. Look, he’s bad hurt.”
Toby frowned but went. He moved among the wounded on the dry plain and gave away what was left of his water.
The man’s face was lined and pale and moaning in an automatic way, regular and with the same drawn-out, low, wet grunting at the end. They had his head covered with a shiny sheet that had some medical purpose. The man reached up and tugged the sheet away. Toby saw what had been a face and now looked like a small hill that had been driven over in the rain with heavy equipment and then let bake out in the sun too long.
“They peeled my old face off and gave me this new one,” a clear, soft voice said. The lips did not move.
“I see, yeasay.” Toby felt useless.
“I’m growing a fresh one now.”
“I can tell,” Toby said. Not looking at the face.
“Want to know how it happened?”
“Sure.”
“We were trying to get one of those snake things that shoot down the axis of the Lane. You seen them?”
Toby had seen a lot of things but he didn’t think of them in terms of animals any more. That just led you to make mistakes, like with the woman he had failed to save. “I think so.”
“Awful, killed plenty of us. So we waited for one and hit it from five different positions. Smacked it pretty square.”
The man’s eyes unfocused and Toby encouraged him with “Yeasay?”
“Uh, sure. Thing jerked around and went to pieces before it crashed on the ridgeline. Near me. Went off something powerful. So pretty. All I knew was a hot whack in the side and then I was here.”
Toby reached out and held the man’s hand and wondered if he should believe much of it. The hand was as soft as the voice, not a hand that had ever been in the field much. The voice was dreamy too. The story did not sound like a real battle. He had learned that the wounded were not good reporters and sometimes mingled their dreams in.
Toby murmured something and slid the sheet back so the face was covered. He was pretty sure the man could not see and was just using his inner sensorium. The man said nothing and Toby left the sheet. Then the man said suddenly, “I heard you were here.”
“Me? How’d anybody know me?”
“We saw you, got a pulse on the gen sensorium.”
“What’d it say?”
“To watch for you. Take care of you.”
“Who sent it?”
“General directive.”
“You guys can send signals from Lane to Lane?”
“Sometimes. Our tech here isn’t the best. But we heard about you.”
“My father have anything to do with it?”
“Mightsay. I don’t remember.”
Toby wondered if this was true either. He had heard men lie about how they were wounded, sometimes right after they were hit and even in front of people who had been there. He did not know why but he had done it himself once years ago so it did not seem so bad.
His left calf had gone out then from a mech bolt and it took a week to get running again. By the time he could walk he had woven a story that was completely different from the reality. Not flattering, just different. He did not know why he had done it and after a while had stopped asking himself the question. All that made it hard to talk to this man whose face was not going to work out.
The man said, “Way I figure, you must be important.”
“Huh? Me?” Toby had been thinking and had nearly lost track of where he was. He was remembering the Family. Killeen.
“Must be. Most directives are weapons stuff, tactics and all.”
“I’m not important.”
“Well you’re sure goddamn big. Where from?”
