Pallas by L. Neil Smith

broken bottle of light green powder his mother had once had him clean up in the Residence kitchen. Sage, she’d called it.
    Standing over the undergrowth were small clumps of trees hardly taller than himself . He knew nothing about trees—he’d never been to the precious, heavily guarded Project orchards and had only seen trees in books—but he knew the closer ones were different from those he saw marching up the sides of hills two or three miles away from the road. Those nearby had flat, pale leaves, branched stems, and trunks that looked like they’d been painted white and lightly sanded until brown showed again on the high spots. Those further away were dark, somewhat taller, and somehow...pointier. Occasionally the breeze would bring him another exotic aroma which might be coming from those faraway trees, or might simply be the smell of freedom.
    What fascinated him most, however, were the animals. Even the flowers, purple and white, yellow, pink, every other color he had a name for, failed to rivet his attention the way a long-eared jackrabbit could, startled by the vehicle, bounding across the track in front of it. Once he saw a fat porcupine—it couldn’t have been anything else—lumbering along beside the road, oblivious to the machine and its passengers, going from one well-chewed tree to another where the bark was tastier. On another occasion, the rollabout frightened a skunk, which sprayed a te r rible warning as it passed. He recognized the black and white stripes from childhood picture books. For some reason he found the odor—at least at this distance—a bit exhilarating, rather than disgusting, and knew he was discovering the freedom to react differently than expected by others.
    There were many birds: tiny quail running in a file behind their mother with her antenna-feather erect, grouse exploding from the high grass, gobbling and clattering their wings. Off over the horizon, a predatory bird rode the updrafts, patrolling for small, furry food. He’d never seen a meadowlark, but he’d enjoyed their melodious trilling at the edge of the Project where he’d kept his secrets hidden. He appreciated the company they gave him now as he always had. Nobody had ever had to explain to him that demanding freedom often meant being lonely.
    For the most part, the vast silence of the uninhabited prairie was broken only by the crunch of wheels on the road and the buzzing of i n sects. For some reason this was deeper than that of the houseflies that swarmed the refuse bins at the back of the Residence or gathered around a newly plowed furrow. At one point an eight-inch dragonfly swept past his face on four shiny, transparent wings—looking like a World War I bi p lane he recognized from books and magazines he’d salvaged over the years from the same bins—and on essentially the same mission as the bird of prey he’d seen earlier. At another point he jumped, bitten by a mu s tard-colored fly. He’d remember the pain for the rest of his life, as another taste of freedom.
    Toward the end of the afternoon when the light had begun to fail and, although he wasn’t aware of it, the rollabout was nearing its destination, a heavy-antlered mule deer, fascinated by the machine’s headlamps, froze in its path and wouldn’t move until the rollabout had stopped and one of the drivers dismounted, grumbling obscenities as he grunted his way down the ladder to shoo it out of the way.
    Emerson had almost forgotten the men operating this machine. To his surprise—not to mention the driver’s—the animal stood its ground, raked dirt with a hoof, and ducked its dangerous-looking rack at the man until his colleague blew a blast on the horn, startling their unknown passenger out of his wits and frightening the deer into giving way. The boy’s last sight of the animal was of the cottony underside of its tail as it bounded, with an incredible slow-motion grace almost painful to watch, over an enormous rock and was gone. He