Elaine Maynes had a soothing effect on my employer. Over the next ten days he issued a great many grants of clemency. The petitioners had to listen to admonitions to do better and warnings that eyes would be watching, but something in Maynes’s friendly smiles and handshakes said the slate was wiped clean. We were sometimes cheered when leaving one of the Maynes Conglomerate holdings or while driving out of town. Maynes enjoyed these ducal moments, and he opened one of the armored glass windows just wide enough to wave regally as we motored out of town.
Rather than a grim, glowering pile of muscle, I saw myself turning into more of a mascot for Maynes. Sometimes he’d give away a bottle of bottled-in-bond whiskey for the worker at one of the sites who could guess my weight. He let kids touch my fur, moving from the silkier parts on my limbs to the bristlier fur atop my head, lifting the laughing kids so they could touch. They’d sometimes sit, four or five abreast, across my shoulders and slide down my arms, using my limbs like fire poles.
Old-timers said it was the nicest June in three generations. I had not the experience on this side of the Appalachians for comparison, but it did grow hot enough that I borrowed a clipper from the stables at the White Palace and trimmed my lower leg and forearm hair down to bristle. A veil of thin cloud drawing down from the north made the sun somewhat waxy rather than blazing, but it was still bright enough to make the dewy leaves glitter in the morning. The humidity stayed comfortably low.
I found the drives with Maynes could be contemplated with pleasure. The stops were as distressing as ever, but the drives were something to look forward to, negotiating the difficult, slide-washed roads with quiet green forest chirping with birdsong from the cool shade.
Speaking of the roads, the spring rains had done their damage, with heavy soil and broken trees dumped on the mountainside roads. Sometimes Maynes had to drive back to the nearest town and press-gang a labor contingent to clear a slide. The men enjoyed the work, with either Home or MacTierney using our vehicle to get a lunch and coolers of lemonade and beer for the workmen. Maynes joined in, and he had access to dynamite, so there was good fun when a few sticks were employed to turn a fallen tree into matchwood or blow a boulder into pieces. After the excitement of the explosion, these West Virginians usually let loose with a sort of wailing whoop-hurrah, each trying to outdo the others in making noise, eventually returning to their shovels and draglines reenergized.
Maynes paid very good wages for this sort of day labor, and was usually cheered when the work was done. He accepted it with a regal wave out of his bus window.
We had spent the morning in the eastern part of the Coal Country so Maynes could sign off on some trade agreements—the usual swaps of coal and timber for more finished product from the industrial patches in southern Virginia and the Carolinas. Other members of the Maynes clan had negotiated the terms, but as he was highest on the current bloodline tree, he often had to sign for the Conglomerate. Fifteen minutes of signing papers, a ceremonial toast of recycled water with the Quislings from the Georgia Control, and once back in the Trekker, Maynes insisted that he was done for the day.
Maynes never showed the carousing side of himself at these exchanges. His proclivities were something of an open secret in the Coal Country, but perhaps he was smart enough not to suggest weaknesses that others might exploit. Or he didn’t care for the zipped-up, professional Georgia Control men and women.
“An hour and a half with tight asses,” he said, on return to the Trekker. “Let’s find some food.”
We stopped at a little riverside eatery that was nothing much to look at from the roadside—a plain white storefront with a grease-stained rooftop—but out behind was a wooden sort of beer garden and balcony overlooking the filled-to-the-banks waters of the Cheat River rushing toward their joining with the Monongahela below. Home had recommended it: “The food’s better than average, and they brew their own beer from one of the Cheat River springs. Good brew. They could probably keg it and sell it, but they don’t want the paperwork hassles.”
The owners weren’t just craft brewers; it looked like they were gardeners as well. Peonies and irises were in bloom in flower boxes and beds. The flower boxes had scrolling of stylized barley and hops—fine work, and I instantly warmed to whoever had designed the boxes. I was glad Maynes was in a mood to forget about his duties, and it wasn’t the sort of place where he’d dragoon a woman off to the transport and then let Home take his turn.
We sat outside. They found a metal milk-crate for me and put a small pillow on top—from the stains, it looked as though several generations of dogs had given birth on it—and I was able to sit at eye level with my companions in reasonable comfort. Home was right, as he usually was on matters of food and drink. The owners took as much care with their food and barleywine as they did with their blooms.
Some teamsters with horse wagons, drivers with gum-and-rust diesels parked out front, a quiet middle-aged couple playing dominoes, a group of young mothers whose kids were at the rail tossing buds into the river, and a pair of troopers were all enjoying the weather, beer, and food.
Maynes liked the food so much, he’d ordered a potpie, and while we waited for that, we enjoyed the beer. I’d just finished a large draft of lemonade—the cheapest beverage on the menu; Maynes was happy to buy us all a single beer, but we were on duty—when my ears pricked up and tracked in on the sound of singing.
The sound came out of the Monongahela Forest and the low ridge of mountains beyond the river to the east.
There were about fifteen youths, plus two young adults and an older man in a dungaree version of the simple New Universal Church clean-lined jacket-and-collar.
The youths, despite their layers of flaking sunburn and bug bites, glistened like polished apples. White, straight teeth, even the incipient beards on the young men seemed to be growing according to plan. They wore survival vests, bellows pockets crammed with tools in a vivid combination of blaze orange and optic yellow. They were led by two older young adults, in khaki versions of New Universal Church day wear. The males wore red bandannas and the females white.
Maynes, with his healing, stitched lip, drew a few surreptitious glances from the outing as they fell into a more orderly line outside the garden gate. They stared more openly at me, as though I were a trained bear wearing a conical hat at a child’s birthday party.
“Before lunch break, we’ll have a song,” the female Youth Vanguard leader declared.
The horse teamsters stood to leav
e, but the female Youth Vanguard leader stepped in front of the gate. “Everyone will be so disappointed if they can’t perform for you, friend.”
“Music, too,” Home said.
“Hope we’re not in for a hootenanny,” Maynes said. “Church sing-alongs sour my beer.”
“You nailed it, Boss,” Home said.
“Badges say Cooper’s Point,” MacTierney said. “That’s over the Virginia line. Wonder why they’re poking around up here?”
From what I understand, Kurian Zones frequently probe and test their neighbors. While the histories make much of the coups and consolidations and so on, they were rare. The Kurians would much rather keep their populations content with stories about how bad it was on the other side of this or that border, or blame a shortage of fresh food on the incompetence of the neighboring principality.
“Martins, say the pledge while the others get out their instruments,” the male Vanguard leader said. Though a bit undersized, he had the alert, energetic appearance of a pointer waiting to be released into a field despite what looked like the dirt of the morning’s exertions.
The shortest child at the end straightened and extended his neck like a curious turtle. “We the growing future, in order to form a more perfect Human, commit Justice and ensure Sustainability, provide for equality and promote the superior to secure the Blessings of Symbiotry to our guides and our posterity.”
The youths opened up satchels and extracted a couple of instruments—some bongos, a harmonica, and a small flute joined the guitars and banjo. They broke into a camp song, something about helping hands and feet making light a friend’s burden:
“Friend, helpful hands never pass or flake,