The Reaches

'This,' I said, picking up the handle of a giant comb: a carding comb for stripping leaf fibers so they could be woven into cloth. The teeth were long triangles of shell mounted edgewise so that they wouldn't snap when drawn through tough leaves.

The teeth were smeared a finger's breadth deep with blood so fresh it still dripped. Piet switched off the handlight. I crawled carefully from beneath the Oriflamme; it'd be several minutes before I had my night vision back, and I didn't want to knock myself silly on a landing strut.

'Perhaps we should set guards,' Piet said. 'Of course, we'll be leaving tomorrow. If all goes as planned.'

I flung the comb in the direction of the village a kilometer away. There were drops of blood on the glazed soil where the Rabbit had hidden for her ceremony. I sat down on the ramp. I felt sick. Part of it was probably the exertion.

Piet sat beside me. 'You wouldn't have had to go as far as the village to find a woman for your desires,' he said. 'You could just have waited here.'

There was nothing in his tone, and his face-softened by the moonlight-was as calm as that of a statue of Justice. The fact that he'd spoken those words meant the incident had bothered him as much as it did me. Wine let the truth out of some men; but for others it was stress that made them say the things that would otherwise have been hidden forever in their hearts.

'I was just walking, Piet,' I said quietly. 'There's some of the men gone up to the Rabbit village, I believe; but I was just working the stitches out of my side.'

He nodded curtly. 'It doesn't matter,' he said. 'That sort of thing is between you and the Lord.'

I got up and raised my face to the moon. 'I haven't lied to anybody since I came aboard the Porcelain, Piet,' I said. My voice shuddered with anger. With all the things I'd done, before and especially after I met Piet Ricimer, to be accused of this-

I thought about what I'd just said, and about the cloak of moral outrage I'd dressed myself in. I started to laugh. Some of my chest muscles thought I shouldn't have, but it was out of their control and mine.

Piet stood with a worried look on his face. Maybe he thought I'd snapped, gone mad in delayed reaction to. . to too many things.

'No,' I gasped, 'I'm all right. I was just going to say, I haven't been lying to anybody except maybe myself. And I'm getting better about that, you see?'

We sat down again. 'Jeremy,' he said, 'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have spoken.'

I shrugged. I could do that again. 'If you hadn't,' I said, 'you'd have gone the rest of your life thinking that's what I was doing out there tonight. When I was just going for a walk.'

Fifty meters away in the temporary accommodations, the fiddler was taking a break. A chorus of sailors filled in a cappella, 'A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing. .'

They might as easily have swung into The Harlot of Jerusalem. I started to laugh again. This time my ribs forestalled me.

'I'm fine,' I repeated. I was beginning to wonder, though, and it wasn't my body that caused me the concern.

'If President Pleyal establishes the rule he wants over all mankind,' Piet said, 'his fall will be a collapse worse than the Collapse. Because we don't have the margin for survival that men had risen to a thousand years ago. Folk like these-'

He waggled a finger northward.

'— mistaking men for gods, they'll be all that remains of humanity. We have to succeed, Jeremy.'

'I'll be glad when we lift,' I said. I looked at Piet, leaning back with his arms braced on the ramp. 'Because you're wrong, you know. It's not gods they think we are. They're not worshipping, they're trying to placate demons.'

I shuddered, closed my eyes, and opened them again on the vast, raddled face of the moon. 'Which is why,' I went on, 'that quite apart from standards of hygiene, the women here are in no danger from me. I'm not interested in a woman who thinks she's being raped.'

I clasped my hands together to keep them from shaking. 'Particularly one who thinks she's being raped by a minion of Satan.'

And if God was Peace, then she would surely be correct.

DUNEEN

Day 155

My rifle roared, lifting the muzzle in a blast of gray smoke. I now knew to hold the weapon tight against me. The first time I'd instinctively kept the buttplate a finger's breadth out from my shoulder. The rifle had recoiled separately and fast. Instead of pushing my torso back, it whacked me a hammerblow.

'Did I hit it?' I asked, peering toward the target-a meter-square frame of boards twenty meters away. The aiming point was a circle of black paint. My bullet holes spread around it in a shotgun pattern against the rough- sawn yellow wood.

'You hit it,' Stephen said. 'Reload and hit it again. Remember you want to be solid, not tense. You're using a tool.'

I cocked the rifle, then thumbed the breech cam open and extracted the spent cartridge for reloading. 'It'd be easier if all our guns were the same kind, wouldn't it?' I said. I nodded toward the revolving rifle in the crook of Stephen's left elbow.

'All machine work instead of craftwork?' Stephen said. 'Where that thinking ends is another Collapse-a system of automatic factories so complex that a few hit-and-run attacks bring the whole thing down. Everybody starves or freezes.'

I pulled a cartridge from my belt loop but held it in my hand instead of loading. 'That's superstition,' I said, more forcefully than I usually spoke to Stephen. This was important to me. 'Civilization isn't going to fall because every gunsmith on Venus bores his rifle barrels to the same dimensions.'

If man was ever really to advance, we had to design and build our own electronics instead of depending on the leavings of pre-Collapse civilization. That required something more structured than individual craftsmen like Piet's father casting thruster nozzles.

Stephen shrugged. I couldn't tell how much it mattered to him. 'It isn't the individual aspect,' he said. 'It's the whole mind-set. On Earth they're setting up assembly lines again.'

'But for now. .' I said as I slid the loaded round into the chamber sized to it and not-quite-to that of any other rifle aboard the Oriflamme, 'I'll learn how to use whatever comes to hand.'

During the voyage from New Venus, Stephen had showed me how to load and strip each of our twenty-odd varieties of firearm. It gave us both something to concentrate on between the hideous bouts of transit. This was the first time I'd fired a rifle.

I thought of the officer on the Montreal's bridge clutching the hole in her groin as she fell. The first time I'd practiced with a rifle.

One of the local herbivores blundered into the clearing. A peck of fronds was disappearing into its mouth. Spores, unexpectedly golden, showered the beast's forequarters and the air above it.

The creature saw us. The barrel-shaped body froze, but the jaws continued to masticate food in a fore-and- aft motion. My shots hadn't alerted the creature to our presence. The local animals didn't seem to have any hearing whatever.

'We have plenty of meat,' Stephen said. 'Let it go.'

The creature turned 270° and crashed away through the vegetation. I could track its progress for some distance by the spores rising like a dust cloud.

I glanced down at my rifle. 'I wasn't going to shoot it,' I said.

I meant I wasn't going to try. The board target was considerably larger than the man-sized herbivore. The skill I'd demonstrated thus far wasn't overwhelmingly high.

'It gets easy to kill,' Stephen said. His voice was slipping out of focus. 'Don't let it. Don't ever let that happen.'

'One more!' I said loudly. I closed the breech with a distinct cluck, seating the