about fighting fires,' he said, 'that's different.'
Ngonda looked miserable. 'Can't we spare this brave man…?'
'Deputy Ngonda,' said Memsen.
'What?' His voice was very small.
The High Gregory lifted the tray from the table and offered it to him. 'Have a cookie.'
Ngonda shrank from the pastries as if they might bite him. 'Go ahead then,' he said. 'Scratch this foolish itch of yours. We can't stop you. We're just a bunch of throwbacks from a nothing world and you're - '
'Deputy Ngonda!' Memsen's voice was sharp.
He caught his breath. 'You're Memsen the Twenty-Second and he's the High Gregory of Kenning and I'm not feeling very well.' Ngonda turned to Spur, muttering. 'Remember, they don't really care what happens to you. Or any of us.'
'That's not true,' said the High Gregory. 'Not true at all.'
But Ngonda had already subsided onto his bench, queasy and unvoiced.
'So.' Memsen clicked her rings together. 'You fight fires.'
'I'm just a smokechaser.' Ngonda's outburst troubled Spur. He didn't know anything about these upsiders, after all. Were they really any different than pukpuks? 'I volunteered for the Corps about a year ago, finished training last winter, was assigned the Ninth Regiment, Gold Squad. We mostly build handlines along the edges of burns to contain them.' He leaned against the hull with his back to the view. 'The idea is that we scrape off everything that can catch fire, dig to mineral soil. If we can fit a plow or tractor in, then we do, but in rough terrain we work by hand. That's about it. Boring as those reports you read.'
'I don't understand.' The High Gregory sprawled on the deck, picking idly at his sneakers. 'If you're so busy digging, when do you put the fires out?'
'Fire needs three things,' he said, 'oxygen, fuel and temperature. They call it the triangle of combustion. Think of a burn as a chain of triangles. The sides of every triangle have to connect.' He formed a triangle by pressing his thumbs and forefingers together. 'Hot enough connects to enough air connects to enough stuff to burn. Take away a side and you break the triangle…' He separated his thumbs. '…and weaken the chain. When a burn blows up, there's no good way to cut off its oxygen or lower the core temperature, so you have to attack the fuel side of the triangle. If you do your job, eventually there's nothing left to burn.'
'Then you don't actually put fires out?' The High Gregory sounded disappointed.
'We do, but that's just hotspotting. Once we establish a handline, we have to defend it. So we walk the lines, checking for fires that start from flying sparks or underground runners. Trees might fall across a line. If we find a hotspot, we dig it out with a jacksmith or spray it cold with retardant from our splash packs.' He noticed that the Pendragon was whispering again to Mem-sen. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'Is there something?'
Memsen gave him a polite smile - at least he hoped it was polite. 'She asks about the people who set fire to themselves. Have you ever seen one?'
'A torch?' Spur frowned. 'No.' The lie slipped out with practiced ease.
'They must be very brave.' The High Gregory wriggled across the deck on hands and knees to Spur's kit. 'Hey, your bag got burnt here.' He held the kit up to the afternoon light pouring through the hull, examining it. 'And here too. Do you hate them?'
'No.'
'But they tried to kill you.'
'Not me. They're trying to kill the forest, maybe the Transcendent State, but not me. They have no idea who I am.' He motioned for the kit and the High Gregory dragged it across the compartment to him. 'And I don't know any of them. We're all strangers.' He opened the kit, rummaged inside and pulled out a pix of Gold Squad. 'Here's my squad. That's full firefighting gear we're wearing.' Dead friends grinned at him from the pix. Vic, kneeling in the front row of the picture, and Hardy, who was standing next to Spur. He flipped the pix over and passed it to the High Gregory.
'Why are the torches doing this?' said Memsen. 'You must have wondered about it. Help us understand.'
'It's complicated.' He waited for Ngonda to pipe up with the official line, but the deputy was gazing through the hull of the hover with eyes of glass. 'They should have gone long ago,' said Spur. 'They're upsiders, really. They don't belong here anymore.'
'A thousand worlds for the new,' said Memsen, 'one for the true. That's what your chairman says, isn't it?'
'Your parents came here from other worlds,' said the High Gregory. 'So that's why you think the pukpuks should've been willing to pack up and go. But would you come back with us to Kenning if Jack Winter said you should?'
'That's not why I…' Spur rubbed at his forehead. 'I don't know, maybe it is. Anyway, they were my grandparents, not my parents.'
The High Gregory slid across the deck and handed the pix of Gold Squad to Memsen. The Pendragon craned her neck to see.
'You have to understand,' said Spur, 'that the pukpuks hate the new forests because they spread so fast. The trees grow like weeds, not like the ones in my orchard.' He glanced over his shoulder at the hills beneath him. They were on the east side of the Taratas now and flying lower. Almost home. 'When Walden was still the Pea, this continent was dry and mostly open. The Niah was prairie. There was supposedly this huge desert, the Nev, or the Neb, where Concord is now. The pukpuks hunted billigags and tamed the gosdog herds. Their bots dug huge pits to mine carbonatites and rare earths. Eventually they killed off the herds, plowed the prairies under and exhausted all the surface deposits. They created the barrens, raped this planet and then most of them just left. Morobe's Pea was a dying world, that's why the Chairman picked it. There was nothing for the pukpuks here, no reason to stay until we came.'
As the hover swooped low over the treetops, Spur could feel the tug of home as real as gravity. After all he had been through, Littleton was still drowsing at the base of Lamana Ridge, waiting for him. He imagined sleeping in his own bed that night.
'Soon there won't be any more barrens,' he said, 'just forest. And that will be the end of it.'
The High Gregory stared at him with his unnerving yellow eyes. 'They're just trying to protect their way of life. And now you're telling them that your way is better.'
'No.' Spur bit his lip; the truth of what the High Gregory said had long since pricked his soul. 'But their way of life is to destroy our way.'
Memsen flicked a finger against the pix of Gold Squad. 'And so that's why they started this war?'
'Is this a war?' Spur took the pix from her and tucked it into his kit without looking at it again. 'They set fires, we put them out. It's dangerous work, either way.'
'People die,' whispered the Pendragon.
'Yes,' said Spur. 'They do.'
Eight
I have lived some thirty-odd years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. - Journal, 1852
Spur perched on a stump wondering how to sneak over to the Littleton train station. From where he sat, it looked hopeless. He had just bushwhacked through the forest from the edge of Spot Pond, where the hover had lingered long enough to put him onto the mucky shore. Now he was on the trail that led down Lamana Ridge. Just ahead of him was Blue Valley Road, a rough track that connected a handful of farms to Civic Route 22. cr22 became Broad Street as it passed through Littleton Commons, the village center. If he skulked down Blue Valley, he could hitch a ride on 22. Except who would be out this time of day? Neighbors. Littleton was a small town; his father had no doubt told everyone that his son the hero was due in on the 8:16 train from Heart's Wall. Of course, he could avoid 22 altogether and skirt around town to the train station. Except it was a good ten kilometers between the stump and the station and he was bone tired.
He decided to sit a little longer.
At least Ngonda had kept most of the upsiders out of Littleton. He could imagine Penny and Kai Thousandfold and little Senator-for-Life Dowm spreading through his bewildered village to gawk at family pix and open closets and ask awkward questions. The High Gregory was all Spur had to worry about. He would be stepping off the hover ramp tomorrow morning at Spot Pond with the deputy. He would pose as Ngonda's nephew and the deputy would be Spur's comrade-in-arms from Iron Squad. The High Gregory would spend the day touring Littleton and making
