Where Grow the Barrel Trees
Part 5
At the depot next morning, the depot manager was upset and had to call Mistr’ Manca.
“That clone of yours has run off on me,” he said. “Now my manifest is off, and what am I supposed to do, eh, since I signed for him?”
The flop-room by the benches was empty, and the truck for Oskalon Well-Head Three had to leave without him. Mistr’ Manca had a sense of foreboding and went to his daughter’s room.
“Vi!” he yelled.
Her rucksack was gone, and some of her clothes, her hiking boots, and some odds and ends he did not recognize for sure what they might have been, but there were things gone off her bed and dresser he knew.
She wasn’t around the office or the house or the barns or the grading-equipment shed or the pig-cote, so he went down to the co-op with his fowling-piece, and a few farmers joined him with fowling-pieces and pistols and pepper-boxes, and they headed up-slope towards the Badlands.
There was a sign of footprints, lost and found and lost again, and that gave them hope, but by noon, the trail went across a kilometer-wide layer of hot, dry stone where no track lay and no sign was seen. They were flagging and running with sweat, and they hadn’t brought enough water.
“They won’t get far,” the co-op manager said confidently. “She’ll come back, at least.”
Ismarada’s father shaded his eyes and looked high up towards the remote edge of the cliffs, what had been the abyssal drop-off when this was an ocean bed. He saw nothing, no matter how desperately he looked. It was almost thirty-five degrees. Tonight, high up there, it might drop to zero and squeeze frost out of the air onto the stones. On the Upper Plateau, the air would be thin. If they got respirators in Clytemnestra, they might be able to outstrip the runaway clone and Ismarada tomorrow. But how much time would they lose? What if the fugitives slipped into the Badlands, where the air was thicker but the labyrinth impenetrable? She’d never come out alive.
He swore, and the rest of the search party waited for him to decide.
“We’ll tell the ephor,” he said.
The ephor called for a drone, and it found nothing. More searchers went into the edge of the Badlands and found not so much as a heelprint. Days went by, and everyone knew Ismarada and Corson were gone.
But what, exactly, had happened to them? The talk went on for months. Some said they’d died in a crevasse. The edge of the Upper Plateau was full of them. Others said the clone murdered her and hid her body, then suffocated up there, and his bones were white in some hole. Someone remembered a broad valley on the other side of the Badlands, a wave-covered gulf a billion years ago. Maybe they’d managed to slip through. The provisional council spared a drone for it and saw nothing.
The Mancas hung on for a few years. The famine ended. He was reassigned and moved, and the stones-players at the co-op told the story long after his name was forgotten.
Farms spread all over; trees were planted; there was more green than brown and red. There were more birds, and spiders for the wasps, and big landowners appeared who started to push the first settlers further on. Reteo Vern was one of the bankrupted small-growers and turned to prospecting. He was a curious old man, and he came back once out of the deep Badlands and said he found a grove of barrel trees bigger than any he’d ever seen before and met two young people at a stone cabin there that might have been Corson and Ismarada. But that was forty years after the incident, and he was mad and said a lot of things, said he’d found a mine of gold and met aliens and who knew what other lies, and disappeared up the Plateau years later himself, and no one ever saw him again.
They say, though, you should never sleep under the barrel trees because they can bring strange dreams, and everyone knows that you shouldn’t drink their nectar. It’s poison.