And female. Oh, how he'd missed having women around, while living topside. They could be perplexing creatures, but life was incomplete without them.
He turned his head and smiled. "Oh, Remna, you are a sight for sore eyes," he said, before he could catch himself. Grabbing at a way to change the subject, he said, "How are the Tolman kids?"
"Up, down, sideways. Just what you'd expect. But they're with relatives with good heads and even better hearts. They'll be all right, probably. Prayers always appreciated, though." She held up a vase with spring flowers in it. "I couldn't remember. Are you allergic to flowers?"
"No. I'm fine. Anthony has trouble with lilacs, iris, whitetop, and roses, though, and I don't remember what all else. Poor chap."
"I remembered allergies ran in the family, but I couldn't remember who escaped from it. I thought it was you, but wasn't sure."
"They're nice. Thanks."
"I heard you were having trouble with time distortion. Avery had the same problem when he was in his bad spells. Time seemed longer than it was, and so he was generally a few months ahead of the rest of us, in his head – except when he was a few years behind us, of course. I'm used to it. All of which is a ramshackle, clumsy way of saying, hey, if you're wondering why they look like spring flowers, it's because they are, and it's still spring."
Harvey smiled. Remna took the oddest, most circuitous, routes to a point sometimes. With her, it was somehow charming, especially when she got embarrassed by it, like now.
"Thanks," he said. He had a hundred questions to ask, but couldn't figure out how to ask them, without seeming interested personally. He had no intention of saddling any woman with a seriously disabled husband, much less a woman who'd already been through the mill taking care of one.
"I just got back, so haven't had a chance to catch up on news to share," Remna said. "I wasn't sure I was going to be able to come back. Things are pretty tense up the valley these days, and here, too, from what I can see, and they're putting all sorts of restrictions in place. Did you hear that all electronic signals have been banned? Monitoring, too, since there's some fear that the other guys could sense the sensors, or something like that. I confess I don't understand any of it, other than all use of phones, radios, and anything like that, has been outlawed."
"I didn't know that," Harvey said.
He wanted to ask why she came back to a remote spot, when she could have stayed closer to deeper, better bunkers, and larger defense forces. He found he was afraid to ask, though he wasn't quite sure why he was afraid.
"So, anyway, when they said that what might be the last public convoy here for a while was heading out, I jumped into line," Remna said. "It was mostly me and the guys smuggling in an exoskeleton for you." She paused, taking in his reaction. "Oh, maybe they didn't tell you that they were going to try to get one for you? It was pretty iffy that they'd be able to get one that was the right size, and no one knew how long it would take to get here, if it could be pulled off. So maybe they didn't want to get your hopes up. Or maybe they thought they'd try to get you out to do the rehab somewhere else. I guess I don't know."
"That makes two of us," Harvey said. "That's all right. There's every chance they told me, and it just didn't register. I'm foggy a lot, these days. It's hard sorting out what's memory, and what's false memory."
Remna laughed. "Sorry. But I've always had that problem, and I don't even have the excuse of being on pain meds."
Harvey almost laughed, despite himself. "It's all right, Remna. You're still smarter than half the people I know."
He stiffened. That had come out sounding too much like, if not courtship, at least something personal. No, no, no, he was not going to get personal.
There was a knock on the door. The head nurse stuck her head in. "Ready or not, we're going to put you to work now, Davis. Time to get fitted for an exoskeleton. This laying around is no good whatsoever for your muscles or bones or nerves, you know," she announced.
"Time for me to go say hi to Warren or somebody," Remna said. "See you later."
"See ya," Harvey said.
After Remna left, the nurse looked Harvey in the eye. "If you're expecting a miracle from this fancy frame, forget it. You, sir, are about to work harder than you've ever worked in your life, and it's not going to be nearly as fun as flying. It will, however, make it so you can walk. If we're really, really lucky, you'll even be able to graduate from using the frame, and walk unaided someday. Don't count on it. For now, let's just work on making you mobile, with the big, ugly, cumbersome gizmo we had brought in for you. Then we'll worry about the next step."
"One step at a time," Harvey tossed out, with flippancy worthy of a topside pilot.
"Yeah, hot shot. One step at a time," the nurse said. "Starting now."
Renzo hadn't thought about how hard it would be to hide evidence of a murder. If he had, he might have at least planned to kill the man nearer the river, or something else that might have been useful. He hadn't reckoned on the man's corpse being considerably larger and heavier than Julia's. Hers had been hard enough to move. This was harder.
Perhaps he could do what the primitives did, and bury it? He liked that idea. A grave could be as close as he wanted it.
Digging a grave proved to be harder work than he'd thought it would be, and there was the added concern, which kept growing, that he was only trading the difficulty of getting rid of the body with the difficulty of hiding the grave.
He finally got the corpse dumped into the grave. Looking down, he wished he'd thought to put it in face down. The blank face looking up at him looked too much like what he saw in a mirror every day. He covered it up as quickly as he could, then did what he could to disguise the gravesite. Early measures failing, he spaded a large patch of ground around the grave, marking it out as the location for this year's Patriot's Garden for the outpost. It wasn't the best location for a garden, perhaps, but he was sure he could justify the location somehow, if asked. No, no, on second thought, he thought he should just feign ignorance of garden positioning, if asked. As a Pac-Nor, he wasn't expected to know much about such things, even after having experience with it.
He was so busy spading and second guessing himself that he nearly forgot to do the bird count at the proper time. Being too pressed with dealing with contingencies to run over to the observation spot and actually count birds, he decided to make up a report. He'd done that often enough, with no problem.
He nearly panicked when he realized that he no longer had an Informer with which to file a report. Then he laughed, half hysterically. If he'd had one still, and used that, it would have been his ruin. It would have been an Informer assigned to a man who officially didn't exist anymore. He needed to use an Informer assigned to the trespasser.
He wondered if he'd accidentally buried one of them along with the dead man. He hadn't checked pockets. Some people took their Informers to bed with them, after all, instead of placing one on the bedside table and calling that good enough.
He raced inside the cabin, and was relieved to find both Informers. He filed his bird count, right on time.
To his horror, the device asked him for a confirmation number.
It took a moment for his mind to flash him the information that they always asked for a confirmation number after a report was filed – and that it was the outpost number, not the individual's unit number. He knew that number. He'd used it every day, for every bird count. He had used it so often that it had ceased being conscious knowledge, that was all.
Still, he sweated as he punched it in. What if they'd changed procedures? What if they had?
They hadn't. The 'Report Successfully Filed' message came up.
He went back to finish the garden spading, but soon after that he decided he'd better leave that off, for now. For one thing, no one ever spaded a whole garden area in one day, under normal circumstances. For another, there was blood to clean up, and other details to deal with. For another thing, his arms and back were screaming at him.
Near the time for a Foundational Lesson, Renzo nearly panicked again. He hadn't taken time to study his foe, to know in what ways his inferiority tended to display itself. Still, there was nothing for it now but to brazen through. He went through the ritual of washing the table, and lining up the chair just so. Using one of the dead man's Informers, he indicated that he was ready for a lesson. The screen lit up. The Judge came into view.
"Good afternoon, Citizen," the man said, in the wonderfully rich voice and proper enunciation for which Pac-Nor Progressives were noted.
"Good afternoon, Judge," Renzo replied with a similarly rich voice and with a veneer of well-feigned courtesy.
"Today, we tackle the subject of how Society will be perfected," the Judge said.
Renzo nodded and smiled, hiding his disdain.
"First, we will review the nature of man," the Judge said. "Is man basically good, or basically bad?"
"Good," Renzo said.
"You have answered nearly correctly," the Judge said. "The correct answer is that man is basically good. He has inherited goodness. How do we know this?"
"By careful observance of the success of well-ordered communities, and by the teachings of Sacred Government, which has determined that man can be made bad."
"You have answered correctly. Although man is basically, or inherently, good, are all men equal?"
"Most assuredly not."
"You