A Desert Called Peace Read Online Free PDF Page B

this particular piece of land. The waterfall had its memories, memories that brought a smile to his face. There by the swimming hole, under the screened bohio  . . . when the kids were all asleep . . . Oh, my . . . 
    The smile disappeared when Hennessey looked at his hand as it picked up the cigarette. He took a satisfyingly deep drag and pulled the cigarette away. Dainty disgusting thing, he thought, holding his hand out. Sickening for a soldier to have such small, miserable, soft hands. Oh well, the rest isn't so bad. And it isn't like I'm a soldier anymore, anyway.
    "Not so bad," was it. He was never going to win any beauty contests but . . . 
    Hennessey was somewhat slight of build and regular featured, with extraordinarily intense blue eyes. A reasonably well formed chest topped slim hips, themselves atop legs unusually massive, the result of many, many miles of heavy-pack forced marching in his younger years. They were infantry legs, plain and simple. Even several years of relative idleness had not robbed them of their strength. He was developing a slight paunch, something he made some effort to combat.
    Turning his attention away from his utterly unsatisfactory hands and fingers, Hennessey's eyes wandered over the bookcases containing his library. He put the cigarette down, replacing it in that hand with the iced whiskey. The cubes made a tinkling sound as he sipped while continuing to peruse the library's shelves.
    Hennessey's eyes came to rest on a simple metal-framed picture of Linda, his wife, now visiting his—mostly estranged—relatives in the Federated States.
    He looked at the picture and glowed with love, thinking, I am one lucky son of a bitch.
    Twelve years now they had been husband and wife; twelve years and three children. And still she looked like the eighteen-year-old girl he had married. If anything, so her husband thought, she was more lovely now than when he had married her.
    Next to the one portrait was another, that of Linda with their son and two daughters. We do damned good work, don't we, hon? Miss you.
    Hennessey looked up from his family portraits. He thought about waterfalls, then left the library to take the short walk down to the one behind the house. There was a small bohio , or shed, there, along with some garden furniture. He sat down in one of the padded chairs, losing himself in the sight and sound of the splashing water.
    God, I love this place, he thought. He didn't mean merely the waterfall, nor even the entire property. He meant Balboa, possibly the only country in which he had ever felt truly at home.
    Odd thing, that. But what's not to love . . . outside of, maybe, the government here? The people are bright, hardworking and friendly. The men are brave; the women loyal and lovely. The land is . . . well, "beautiful" hardly does it justice. He watched Linda's multicolored pet "trixie," Jinfeng, sail across the waterfall. It came to rest on the branch of a large mango tree and began to eat the fruit it found there.
    Just beautiful.
     
    Balboa, being largely jungle and also somewhat sparsely settled, retained more than the usual amount of pre-settlement flora and fauna. Jinfeng was one example. But mixed in with the green of the jungle around the waterfall were some other species, bluegums and tranzitrees, the latter so named because their bright green-skinned fruit was intensely appetizing to look upon, and the mouthwatering red pulp inside intensely poisonous for man to eat.
    Lower animals could eat tranzitree fruit without ill effect. It was conjectured in some circles that tranzitrees had been developed and placed on Terra Nova by the Noahs—the beings who had seeded the planet with life untold eons ago—expressly to prevent the rise of intelligence. Certainly the tranzitrees had been artificially created, as had bolshiberry bushes and progressivines. The latter two were, likewise, poisonous to intelligent life but harmless to lower forms. Their complex