Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [162]
“What were you trying to say when you came to?” Nurse Roditis bent close. “Something about going on.”
“I don’t know.” She closed her eyes.
“Were you hallucinating?”
“She doesn’t have a history of hallucination.” Acker was hanging around the foot of her bed.
“That injection worked. Dr. Morgan will be pleased. But I don’t know what they’re going to do if this keeps happening.” Nurse Roditis sounded stem and judgmental. She made tsk-tsk sounds as she straightened the covers over Connie.
Luciente gripped her arm, pulling her down into the dugout. Behind decorative-looking screens and small pieces of equipment, some like the one Bee had been carrying on his back, the ground had been scooped out to rock. Her friends were occupying a slight rise over a stream. “Baffles and reflectors,” Luciente explained tersely. “Keep down! They’ll be attacking our line.”
“Where is everyone?”
“We’re on the right flank. The line curves to our left, all the way to the river.”
Otter was cuddled in the dugout next to Connie, examining a bright fallen leaf from one of the maples growing along the stream. Pines stood behind them and a fringe of brilliant maples before. Their red and gold leaves were just starting to fall in drifts on the banks, to float past borne on the rocky stream, to collect in patches of color in eddies and pools.
“How does this touch you?” Otter asked and read off:
“One leaf
webbed gold with fawn
fluttered to my feet
and fragile as a dead moth’s wing
was shattered.”
She looked at Otter in confusion. Otter was dressed in the same mottled jumpsuit, her hair in two long braids. From her broad nose to her glittering slits of eyes she looked proud of herself. Connie asked, “Is it a code message?”
“Code? It’s a poem—a cinquain. You don’t like it?”
“But … how can you write poems about leaves now!”
Otter’s brows wrinkled. “How not? We’re close to death. Then it’s natural to write poems, no? And we fall like leaves … .”
“Here they come,” Luciente said calmly, and they all settled into alert poses with their weapons.
The ground shook violently under her, yet she heard no explosion. In effect, nothing seemed to cause what was happening, yet the ground shook again and she felt sick. Again the ground shook and a tree split and toppled in front of them. Other trees were falling, while a boulder crashed from its perch and rolled fifty feet to lodge in a small basin. Cones pelted them as the birds fled crying terror, the jays shouting Thief, Thief as they flew. To their right someone screamed.
Then she saw the enemy coming: tall figures entirely encased in seamless metallic uniforms, clanking with heavy metal and wearing helmets that enclosed their heads. They dodged from tree to boulder, from boulder to bush on the other side of the stream.
“Hold your fire,” Luciente whispered.
She found she was gripping something like a gun, although it was aimed by peering through a scope and focusing her eyes. Nervously she practiced with it. It responded quickly but she could not quite get the knack of stopping it. She was supposed to lock it in position somehow before she looked away from the target, but she kept stopping it too late.
More and more metal figures flitted clumsily through the trees, getting ready to attack in force across the water. “Hold your fire,” Luciente whispered again emphatically. “Pick off the ones that get through the barrage.” The she added in the tone of a prayer, “Forgive me, if you are living and I kill you.”
Bee and Otter mumbled a similar prayer, before Otter whispered, “Do you suppose any of them are people?”
The troops were massing in the far woods, preparing to break cover. More and more moved up into position. Finally they came clanking out, running pell-mell in waves down the shallow embankment to jump the small stream. Silently they came, except for the clanking of their metal parts. They did not scream or whoop.
Suddenly she was standing in the living room of the apartment where she had lived with Martin. Hot. Sweat ran down her back and collected under her breasts. The air was so thick