Patriots

"We'll circle till Yerby gets up," Amy said matter-of-factly. "Besides, I want to get some altitude. Though the solar cells seem to be in better shape than I was afraid they'd be."

The slow climbing turns took them over the main house at a hundred feet of altitude. A man on the second-story deck waved to them.

Besides the folk who worked for or with Yerby, three other men were staying at the compound. Two were casual acquaintances, headed toward the Spiker but in no great hurry to get there. The third was some relative or other of Desiree's visiting the Ba

Desiree's complaint about "useless mouths" was obviously without real significance; it was just something to throw at her husband to show that she was angry. Mark didn't entirely blame the lady for objecting to Dr. Jesilind's continued presence, though.

Yerby launched his own flyer without the careful inspection he'd lavished on the machine he offered Mark. He climbed toward them, but he didn't gain altitude much faster than they had. Yerby was even heavier than he looked, because his muscular body was so dense. Besides his own weight, Yerby carried a hamper of food and a monopulse laser with a built-in solar charging system. The weapon weighed a good thirty pounds.

"This is a beautiful planet," Amy said. Despite the moan of the prop, the flyer was so quiet that she could talk in a normal voice. "Except for the settled part. That's as ugly as a picked scab."

Logging had cleared the larger trees on both sides of the valley east of the compound. The slopes were still dotted with the vivid green of new growth, however. The crews were taking the larger trees for processing as timber and cellulose base, but they weren't clear-cutting. The area would regrow.

Rather than argue-because this much of Yerby's operation seemed sustainable-Mark said, "I was surprised that Yerby wanted to bring Alliance soldiers to Greenwood. On Quelhagen, we're trying to get rid of them. And not succeeding."

"That was his friend's idea," Amy said. "Jesilind." She made the name sound like a curse. "On Kilbourn the Protector only has a few soldiers, but she's threatening to bring more in. She's claims she's taken over the planetary finances, but the elected council keeps meeting and says her decrees aren't valid without their approval."

She looked at Mark and gri

"All right, let's head north!" Yerby called across the hundred yards separating his flyer from the other. "I'll show you a place prettier than anything you ever seen!"

They flew north at thirty miles an hour, the best speed the heavily laden flyers could manage in still air. Amy stayed five hundred feet up, so the flight seemed more leisurely than it would have if the trees had been closer.

"There's no need for Alliance troops anywhere in the Digits," Amy added. "Anywhere at all, really. There'll never be another war. The Treaty of Cozumel has held for twenty years, and there's no reason it shouldn't hold forever."

"There sure aren't any troops on Dittersdorf," Mark said in what he meant to sound like agreement.

He'd had too good an education to believe that peace between the Atlantic Alliance and the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere meant peace for all time for all men, though. Particularly with the trouble brewing between Earth and the settlers of most colonized worlds.

8. Living Toward Tomorrow

As the sun rose, the motors gained power and the flyers became noticeably more agile, though their speed didn't increase greatly. Yerby continued to lead them north.

Mark drew Amy out about Miss Altsheller's Academy. At first, Amy was embarrassed to discuss her education with a Harvard graduate. Mark did his best to convince her that she had no reason to feel ashamed. Sure, the General Knowledge curriculum was scant and dated by Earth standards, but Miss Altsheller's emphasis on deportment made her students as civilized and cultured as anyone raised on Quelhagen.

Mark had been taught to learn. Amy had been taught to believe that humans could make themselves better. Not just richer: everybody on the frontier believed that or they'd have stayed where they were born.

Mark wasn't even sure he could define "better." His education had taught him that you had to look at matters from every side, that every viewpoint was valid.

The thing was, an ivory tower attitude meant that the viewpoint of four Zenith thugs was just as valid as that of the i

The flyers sailed over a rugged crest. Before them spread a broad valley. Trees were scattered sparsely among much lower vegetation. It was the first natural open space of any extent that Mark had seen on Greenwood.

"Here we go!" Yerby called. "But watch where I land!"

He brought his flyer around low to the far side of a cliff jutting from the ridge like an axe blade. Amy followed her brother, but she was frowning and her hands tightened minusculely on the control yoke.

Mark concentrated on looking relaxed. He figured that was the most help he could give at the moment. Besides, he'd learned that sometimes when you faked an attitude, you tricked yourself into making it real.

It wasn't real this time. He was still scared.

On the other side of the cliff, a waterfall leaped a hundred feet from the top of the crag. Yerby brought his flyer in to a jittery landing on the area fringing the creek that formed at the base of the falls. The frontiersman's boots and the flyer's wheels kicked up sand as he braked to a halt, then turned in to the vegetation to give Amy a clear approach.

"Sometimes," Amy said, visibly relaxing, "Yerby shows better sense than I give him credit for."

Amy landed them easily on the sandbar, though in the moment before the whole wing lifted in a huge aileron Mark thought they were going to do an endo on the soft sand and come to rest upside down. "Oh!" he said, amazed at how relieved he felt to be safely on the ground. Above them the propeller whirred softly to stillness.

The leaves of the nearby vegetation were broad, but they sprouted directly from the soil the way those of Terran grasses did. What looked like a smooth carpet from the air was actually a varied mixture of species, but only a few grew more than three feet high. A tree rooted in the cliff face had a trunk like wires twisted together rather than a single stem.

"Take a look to your left, both of you," Yerby said in a quiet voice. "Easy, now."

A creature the size of a large dog poked its head out of a burrow twenty feet away. Its eyes extended on short stalks. They swept the creature's immediate surroundings, then focused on the flyers. Mark held very still. The creature snapped back into its hole as if pulled by an overstretched rubber band. Its feet immediately drummed a warning underground.

"We call them pooters," Yerby said. "They do love a tree, near as much as my logging crew does, but mostly they eat this short stuff."

He plucked a clump of "grass" from the soil. The taproot was eighteen inches long at the point it broke. "Any place the ground's soft enough they can burrow, you're likely to find them. Cute little beggars and they're pretty good eating."

Mark noticed that the frontiersman hadn't bothered to unstrap the flashgun from his flyer's rack. "Aren't there any predators on Greenwood?" he asked.