Briefing

Ted was in a depressed state, having been unable to suit himself up for the day’s mandatory conduction. Matt was overcome with guilt as he noted how much Ted liked the fire, and that he was headed out in the crystal fallen dawn to find Ben Lewis.

“Hey Buddy, this will be easy. Ben is a man I have spoken with often, provided him with tools, both of us naturally concerned with the line cook cabin. He is a good, reasonable fellow. In your injured state, this is the most doable conduction left, as the other, the cave, might require some climbing or contortion.

“Yes, Boss,” mumbled Ted.

“Ted, your uplift buckle, is there a limit to the accommodations?”

“No, dey can stack. The two that look unused, they’re dead ports. Angel here,” pointing to his belt buckle, “can time stamp and Uplift as many Uplink chips as we got. I figure, Ben, You, who ever is in the cave, and me, at most. Maybe we all stay, right?”

“Maybe, Ted. It’s up to each of us to chose our condition. Uplift has granted that much.”

‘I can’t tell him he is unacceptable for Uplift. He seems to think he can go.’

“Ben is likely to be upset about the wellhead, if he gets up there later today, which is his habit. He is obsessed with a clean water source for Brie, who he has adopted as a kind of daughter or granddaughter. I suggest you visit him at his cabin, here, on your watch, marked in green.

“This is a certified low-tech marooner habitation. I conducted the inspection myself. I would like you to bring Ben one of the Kin rifles and a pistol, with powder and shot so that he can hunt, or leave them behind for whoever moves into his cabin, if he chooses Uplift. Those animals did an amazing job making scrap iron firearms and gun powder. Ted, if I had known about them, that a marooner clan was on this side of the mountains, I would have let you know. I thought they were wintering up in the Frazier Tunnel and ranging around Grandby and Frazier. A ruck full of HDRs are loaded on a wicker tow sled behind the ETV. I have enjoyed making the tow sleds. It seems a shame to leave any of these supplies to be demolished.”

“I’ll be nice as pumpkin pie, Boss. Ain’t got much tussle left in me no how.”

…

Conduction

Baby Girl hummed easily as she towed the sled to Ben’s cabin. The cabin was made exactly like Brie’s, so that it took no fullwit to figure that Ben had made them both—obviously a man of great skill and hard work. The cabin was perched over Coal Canyon and included a deck braced by beams out over the river below, from which a bucket might be hauled up and down for water from the rushing clean stream hundreds of feet below. The rope winch under which the bucket was being drawn up by the very large man standing on the deck, reminded Ted of storybook picture he could not read the words to, that showed a boy and a girl drawing a pail of water from a well. It had always made Ted wonder why they had to go up a hill, rather than down it, to fetch their water. Now he thought he new, that maybe Ben, easily ten years older than him, had drawn that book.

Ted eased up to the front of the cabin, spying Ben, who looked down at him over his great shoulder and scowled. Ted waved nice-like towards the giant and pointed at the sled behind Baby Girl. Ted had a hard time dismounting, standing stiffly in the early morning night, a crystal mist about them, Psycho Girl not vexing him, Peep Girl having repaired his eye mount and injecting numbocaine, Mamma blinking green and resetting her clock. Bad Girl was silent but suspicious, not trusting Ben.

Ted heard the bucket racked on the deck, then the big man tramp around the outer walkway, the cabin different than Brie’s in two things, no root cellar, being above a cliff, and a deck outside the cabin. The big man walked around the corner of the house, stopped at his wood pile, picked up a splitting ax, and regarded Ted with disgust, speaking in a low easy drawl, “Ted the Fed?”

“Yessir,” spoke Ted. “Bringin’ final supplies, including hunting irons from Matt. Am authorized to Uplift ye if ye wish, or Remit ye to marooner if ye prefer.”

Ted’s jaw hurt every word he spoke, making his mumble more slurry and less official sounding than ever.

“You have no authority here, Flatlander!” rumbled Ben as he stalked near, on big legs. Ted figured the man at 6’ 8” and 260, all muscle, a giant.

Ted stepped behind Baby Girl, who unhitched the sled and idled up towards Ben in a blocking position.

Ben hefted that ax and cleaved her neck from her running board, her front wheel and handlebars detaching as she died, just like that, with a lithium whisper in Ted’s haunted soul, “Awe, no, Baby Girl,” Ted whined.

Ben kicked her cleaved remains away left and right and snarled as he stepped through the space where she had died, “You freak, you have taken up with machines against men, like a very Nephalim! You, demon, have no purchase upon my soul! I have removed the accursed thing myself, wear it here about my neck as a trophy, proof of Christ’s grace, an indictment to your space devil race!”

Ben pulled on a rawhide necklace and yanked off the thing, holding up an Uplink chip, about the size of a nickle, which he had somehow removed from his thick skull. He snarled and said, “I shall not, before God Almighty, bow to Satan’s science.”

Ted felt a keen admiration for Ben, wandering how different life would have been with such a man as a brother, a father even.

He then hung the chip from Baby Girl’s handlebars and threw that heavy splitting ax like a tomahawk!

Ted fell to the side, almost passing out from the pain in his ribs, drew Bad Girl, and fired. Peep Girl locked on and sent that dumdum round right into that wide forehead, knocking out the left eye, which dangled from a cracked orbit as the man roared like a storybook giant and came on with great big hands extended for Ted.

Ted cocked Bad Girl, mindful that she had but one round left in the chamber, and fired for the solar plexus to knock the wind out of “Good” Ben.

The thud was sickening, and had no effect, the impact that had knocked down body-armored men and cracked the sternums of strong men, merely bouncing off of that barrel chest.

Baby Girl screamed “Oheeyy,” apparently not already dead, despite her decapitation, as she was kicked by that great booted foot out into the canyon below.

Psycho Girl was cursing him in his brain, “Wimp, fight! Fight!” and his brain burned with a fury.

Ted rose to his left knee, drawing the machete in a defensive posture, the spine against his left forearm, the point past his elbow covering some of his tricep, in time to receive the blow of—a log, a small lodge pole log, but still a log, as thick as Ted’s leg, that Ben was swinging like an ax downward. Ted’s every cracked rib ached with the shiver that wracked his frame, when that log met the blade and both stuck together.

“Don’t let go” growled Psycho Girl through his teeth as his brain burned and he drew his skinning knife from his armored vest and stabbed the giant in the inner thigh, ribbing through the femoral artery and causing a great gout of blood.

“You have killed me,” snarled Ben, “yet off to hell you go while I go to God Everlasting!”

With one final effort of that great, seventy-year-old roughneck frame, Ben swung that log like an old timer might hit a baseball at training school, in Bend, Oregon. There went Ted, flying through the air, towards Coal Canyon—except Psycho Girl whispered, “Twist,” and he did, letting go of his machete and counter-turning so that he hit the snowy canyon rim on his chest, stabbing the turf with his knife and hanging on, as the machete and log sailed out over the canyon.

Ted sheathed his knife and crawled back to the combined ruin of Baby Girl’s body—her head down below—and Ben.

Ben was on his back praying, his eyes open looking up into the clear morning sky as the sun burned off the crystal mist.

Ted, laid down in the lee of the bleeding giant and folded his hands across his belly likewise. Not knowing the prayer himself, he listened to Ben’s, not letting it fold into memory, as that would be a theft of sort.

There he passed out, before Ben’s deep voice halted, no longer sounding through that lantern jaw were dangled the ruin of a great blue eye that must have been kind in its time.

Waking to feel a gentle hand, a big, soft hand, shake him, Ted—who was disappointed that he had not awakened as Big Ben, opened his eyes to see an Indian blanket being draped across his chest.

Psycho Girl advised him to sleep, so he did, as he was laid on the sled and covered with a sweet smelling shroud and drawn down the mountain eastward, within earshot of what he took to be Coal Creek.

…

Debriefing

Related in the following two conduction narratives: The Cave, and Sally.