Runner

We had been rebuilding the planet for half a century, and just when crystallography and synchrotronics and all our AEC training wouldn't see us over a snag, there he'd be.

We called him Expert. He never would tell us his name, just said, "Listen. I do the work; I get paid. If I save your asses, leave mine alone. Okay?"

We had to call him something. "Hey, you," diminished us, and prying into his privacy diminished him, it seemed. So, "Expert" it was.

And he was.

He once told me, when I couldn't keep my nose out of his business any longer and he was in one of his lighter moods, leavened by a particularly good synthetic alcool: "If my knowledge was from a disk I'd shove it up your ass, Coultrane. Lucky for you it comes naturally. I just know, is all."

He was almost social when lubered up. Other times you couldn't get him to say more than was necessary. He'd work for two, maybe six weeks. During that time he'd solve a problem we'd been struggling with for months. And then he'd disappear.

He didn't make us feel stupid, or anything. At least, not me. I saw him as one of those idiot-savants they used to have back in Old Earth twentieth century, before we engineered all the aberrations out of the species. Hard to engineer the hate and greed out, of course. Which is why we'd been rebuilding for so long.

I'd better describe Expert, so you can get an idea of just how unlike he was.

As you know, we're all six foot out here, a good height for standardizing life on the planet, and all built much the same. Mobiles, skingear, living quarters, womb-beds, et cetera, can come in one size, cutting down on manufacturing costs and waste. And the amount of food the planet needs to process can be prepared before hand on a directed person/caloric quota. The same for everyone.

Expert stood about six-six and I'd guess, weightwise, beat us by a good eighty pounds. I don't know where he got his skingear, but there are ways to get most anything on the planet, and if you've got enough specie there are individuals who still craft. He wore the footgear called "moccasins" -- historic Old Earth aboriginal gear -- and not one of us ever dared ask what material the crafter had used. There are some secrets best left untouched. But one secret of Expert's life held me enthralled: he was two-toned.

Expert's hair was mostly an unruly mess of black, and although I would have guessed him to be no more than sixty at our first meeting, his hair was spotted with white. Not streaked as a ninety-year-old-one might be, but spotted like the fur of a cat. We are all a uniform dark brunette and our hair changes gradually over the years, until at two hundred or so, we are completely white. Our skin is uniform also, the color of COFFEE 2, the Columbian derivative, and by the two-hundred time our skin has paled to white, also. But you know all that.

Expert's skin was as strange as his hair; almost black where it was dark, and spotted, as his hair was, with white. Each time he appeared on site, and it was just like that -- disappear/appear -- he was a little less dark, and a little more white, and a lot older looking.

We age fairly consistently; he aged in big jolts.

It had been two years, a long time for him, since I'd last seen Expert. We had a particularly tricky problem at Sector 8, near New Australia. The earth had been fried and was as unstable as an Old Earth politic. We had tried stabilizing with geo growth, setting up a NMR so the fine particles of dirt would bond to the crystals: like building blocks creating solid earth.

Solid, all right. Like meteoric. No way the Man in Charge would be able to requisition the billions needed to build subhomes in it.

"Give me back some good old-fashioned earth, boys," was what he'd said, with all the expletives left out.

We'd been working on the problem for two months when Expert arrived, whiter than ever. He solved our problem in two weeks. Had us demagnetize the crystals, canceling the bond; deactivate them; then dig them up and put them through the repro. As a little added ecofix he had us shoot the works over the nearest exanimate desert, laying a rainbow shimmer over the blackened sand. I scoped it. It was real pretty.

What he suggested next boggled us. Old Earth stuff. Organics! Fertilizing. Seeding. Growing and working the organics back in. All super speeded; a complete cycle every three days.

It worked. The soil was like nothing I'd ever seen before. I rubbed it between my fingers and could almost see why in Old Earth days they set so much store on it; fought and died for a little part of it.

Expert said, "Wash your damn hands, Coultrane, and let's get tanked," more jovial than I'd ever seen him.

We were halfway through the container of Syngin when he opened up to me. Well, not really. Let's just say he started talking to himself and I was on hand to listen. He'd aged about twenty years in two and his hair and skin were now three-quarters white.

"The bastard's got me three times this year. He's getting stronger and faster." He downed his drink, poured another, and drank off half. "The older I get the more it hurts; the more it hurts the older I get." He laughed a queer, desperate laugh and spun in his chair, shaking his fist at the six walls of the WreckRoom, our local enthuse. "I'll get you next time, you bastard."

People turned for a few seconds and then got on with their pleasure.

I asked, "Who's a bastard, Expert?"

He stopped spinning and looked at me, focusing his eyes.

"You are, Coultrane. You and all your, so smart, New Earth lackeys."

He finished off his drink and poured out the remainder of the Syngin. He smiled at me, a slightly lopsided child's smile.

"Do you really wanna know, Coultrane? Do you?" He leaned in closer. "Do you wanna know about the Runner? The pain? The mindless fear?" He shivered and his white skin shimmered.

"Do I look like a coward to you, Coultrane? Well, I am. Runner can make chicken-shits of all-a-ya." He slammed down his drink and stood up. Then he ran.

I sat there for a few seconds before I reacted. After all, why should I go out after some drunk, crazy man with his talk of a bogey called Runner. I got up, walked out, and looked down the mobile street we'd laid out three months before. I could see Expert still running like all the ancient devils were after him. I took off at a steady pace.

I was just about to call out when he sped up and his weird skin and hair strobed in the moonlight. As I pushed myself faster Expert picked up speed again, and I got so angry at him trying to out distance me like that, I think-linked into my adrenal store, reached him and grabbed for a shoulder.

As he spun around I saw a mask of such fear and loathing on his face I almost fell. The fist I saw a microsecond later made "almost" a reality.

Expert was leaning over me when I came to in the healthtec. "Coultrane," he said, "don't you ever do that again."

Not the kind of greeting I'd expected. My jaw hurt like hell, but I swore at him anyway.

"So maybe I deserve that," he said, "but it's meant as a friendly warning. On a darker night I could have killed you."

"I think you owe me an explanation, Expert," I said. "You were running drunk and scared, and I figured you needed stopping. I was bloody well trying to help."

He stared through me for a moment, sizing up our on-again off-again relationship, I guess.

"I've never told anyone everything, Coultrane, and I'm only telling you some of it, just to keep you off my case. Okay?"

"I'm listening," I said.

He swung himself into an Adjustachair and sat uncomfortably; all wrong-sized, wrong-colored, and wrong-headed.

"You ever know someone was watching you, Coultrane, and then turned and discovered no one there? You ever heard steps following, and no one there? You ever been chased by someone -- or something -- you can't see, but can hear getting closer and closer until your heart's about to burst from the strain of running and then . . . wham!" He whacked his fist into the wall and I jumped. "He's through you and the pain tears you apart before you black out." He was shivering with the memory of it, his black and white splotches blurring to grey.

"I wake up and find parts of my life ripped from me, empty spaces all over," and he indicated the white parts of his skin, "and I'm older, Coultrane. Lots older than I should be.

"He's killing me. Little by little he's killing me."

"Who is `he'?" I asked, not that I believed such a wild story, but still . . .

"Wish to hell I knew," he said. "I call him Runner, just like you call me Expert. It's as good a name as any."

*****

It was a long time before I saw Expert again, if it really was Expert I saw. I was in New Disney for some much needed playtime. The planet was good-shaped physically, though the politic situation was something needed fixing bad.

He was standing with some politic bigboys while they hung on his every word, too far away for me to shout. A good half head taller than all of them, he looked like an Old Earth prophet with his disciples.

"Who's that?" I asked the man next to me, not wanting to make a fool of myself.

"Quite a specimen, friend. Name's Specialist. Leastwise, that's what the politics call him. Solves problems. Turns up now and then whenever the Man in Charge is up to his neck in polishit and saves his ass."

As the group walked closer I waved, and then let my hand drop.

No. He was too young to be Expert. No older than thirty and not a white spot on him anywhere. Dark. Dark all over.

I saw him suddenly stop and swivel his head, listening, his eyes wary. But then they cleared and he continued on, chatting in a brusque manner.

And walking a little faster in his ancient moccasins.

Joy Hewitt Mann has been publishing for several years in the print media, in such magazines as Amelia, Cosmic Unicorn, Bardic Runes and On Spec. She published a story in Jackhammer in March and in 13thStory in April, and had a fantasy posted at Storyteller UK. This is all such a kick for her. She loves the speed, even of rejection. When not writing she runs a junk store. Box 168, Spencerville, Ont., K0E-1X0 Canada

Email: Joy Hewitt Mann

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