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“No, he does not! He’s just an ambitious young beta male with delusions of alphahood. He wants power and double rations, is all. This whole thing stinks of primate politics.”
“Yes, but maybe we should—”
She silenced his mouth with kisses. Then they made love. Leyster was not at his best that night, and immediately afterwards he fell into an exhausted slumber. But he really did love her. That sort of thing was impossible to fake.
A week later, Jamal walked away from the camp, taking half the expedition with him.
Only Lai-tsz, Gillian, and Patrick stayed. Katie, Nils, and Matthew went with Jamal. With them went all the supplies they could carry.
Their departure doubled the work load for everyone. Two camps needed two people to cook, two people to wash the dishes, twice the labor to make two of anything that was needed. They had to put off building the smokehouse indefinitely, though that would have saved them enormous labor in the long run by making it possible to store meat for more than a day at a time. It was insanely inefficient.
They gave up the tyra
The dissidents didn’t go far. They came back periodically, angry and sheepish, looking for tools or supplies they hadn’t thought to bring along.
“The axes stay,” Gertrude said the first time it happened. She figured the worse their privation, the sooner they’d come limping home. “They’re not private property. They were bought for the expedition with public funds.”
But Leyster, blind to the larger picture, said, “Of course you can have an axe, and anything else you need. We’re not enemies, you know. We’re all in this together.” He still had notions of wi
He was unworldly, was the problem. He was too good for his own good.
Things went from bad to worse. Gillian left them for the dissidents. Then, two months after the rift, Nils died in some kind of accident. The rebel camp didn’t want to talk about it, so Gertrude never did find out the details. But they all got together for his funeral.
It was a tense encounter. The groups didn’t mingle, but stood a way apart from each other. When Gertrude managed to get Katie aside and tried to talk her into coming back, she’d burst into tears. “Jamal wouldn’t like it,” she said, shaking her head. “You don’t know what he’s like when he’s angry.”
It was classic cult behavior: the charismatic leader whose word was law, the unreasoning obedience, the pervasive fear. Leyster wouldn’t listen, but Gertrude grew convinced that Jamal was holding the others against their will, keeping them bound to him by psychological means.
Five months after the accident, they were barely managing to hang on. They’d all lost a lot of weight. Leyster in particular had deteriorated badly. He never smiled or joked anymore, and he sometimes went for days without speaking. It hurt Gertrude’s heart to see him so diminished.
Then, six months less one day after the bomb, Patrick was killed, mobbed by a pack of small theropods while he was digging for turtle eggs.
He wouldn’t have died if they’d been able to spare somebody with a spear and a sack of rocks to watch his back.
So, over the course of a long and sleepless night, Gertrude decided to take action.
The dissidents had built a trench latrine just far away enough from the new camp that they wouldn’t be bothered by the flies and odors. Bright and early the next morning, Gertrude found a hiding place by the path leading to the latrine and settled down to wait.
First Katie walked up the path and back. Then Matthew. Jamal was third.
His face darkened when she stepped out in front of him. “What do you want?”
“I brought you a shovel.”
She swung it at him as hard as she could.
A look of profound surprise overcame Jamal. He didn’t even think to duck away from the blow. The blade of the shovel slammed against his shoulder and then, glancingly, the side of his head.
He staggered. She swept the shovel around again, at the back of his knees.
He fell.
“No, wait,” he said weakly from the ground. He held one hand up in supplication. “For pity’s sake, don’t.”
“Damn you!” Gertrude said. “You took everything that was good and fine and fucked it up. You filthy, ignorant son of a bitch.” She was crying so hard she could barely see, and the corner of her mouth was bleeding. In all her wild swinging, she’d managed to cut herself with her ring. “Die, you bastard.”
She raised the shovel in both hands, blade pointed at his throat. She had thought it would be difficult, but now that she came to it, she was so filled with rage that it was not difficult at all. It was the easiest thing in the world.
“Jamal!” somebody shouted joyfully. The voice came from behind her, from the new camp.
It was Leyster. He was ru
“We’ve been rescued!” he shouted. “They’re here! We…”
He saw her standing over Jamal, shovel raised, and came to a dead stop.
The story ended.
“So how did you wind up here?” Molly Gerhard asked.
“I put together a few rumors, and figured it out that whoever was in charge was headquartered in the very far future. So I stole Griffin’s access card—”
“How?”
“It wasn’t difficult.” She glanced knowingly at Griffin. “I stole his card and took the fu
“Just who are ‘the folks here’? What are they like?”
“All in good time. It’s easier to show than to explain. Wait a couple of hours and I’ll arrange an introduction.”
“There’s one thing that makes no sense to me,” Griffin said, leaning forward. “What’s in it for you? When you changed your past, you also cut yourself free from it. Why did you do it?”
Gertrude lifted her head and stared down her nose at Griffin. Like a bird, Jimmy thought. Very much like a bird. “I wanted Leyster,” she said. “I decided that if I couldn’t have him in one time line, I’d have him in another.”
She turned toward Salley, who seemed to shrink from her gaze. “I did it for you,” Gertrude said triumphantly. “I did it all for you.”
Salley stared down into her lap. She said nothing.
The sun was coming up over the ring forest. At Gertrude’s invitation, they all went out onto the balcony.
The ring forest was a circle of green a mile across with open water at its center. It smelled as different from the forests Jimmy knew as an oak forest smelled different from a pine forest. Birds nested in the branches and fish swam among the roots. There were ponds and lakes within the forest, natural openings above which ternlike birds hovered and struck, sending up sharp white spikes of water as they penetrated the surface.
“This is lovely,” Molly Gerhard said.
Gertrude nodded and, without a grain of irony, said, “You’re welcome.”
Jimmy Boyle remembered how, in an earlier age, Salley had gone on and on about the waterbushes and what a significant ecological development they were. He wondered if these things were their descendants. He supposed they were.
“The forests cover all the continental shallows,” Gertrude said. “These trees are adapted for deeper water. Their holdfasts can’t reach the ocean floor, so they serve as sea-anchors. They entangle, and form a rich variety of habitats sheltering many distinct species.”
As she spoke, Griffin and Salley slipped away. They stood apart from the others, quietly talking. Jimmy positioned himself so he could unobtrusively eavesdrop, while still seeming to be listening to Gertrude.