Woodsman

by Thomas A Easton

  As soon as the three guards had left, the camp’s other prisoners had emerged from their crude shelters, kindled their morning fires, and stood beside them, warming their hands, carefully not looking in his direction. The desultory mutter of complaint and argument and memory had resumed as if it had never quit the night before, but no one had said a word to Duncan. It was as if the others feared that if they came too close to one who had attracted such unwelcome attention, they too might suffer.

  When Looby and his small entourage appeared, the voices paused for only a moment. They too were a threat, but they too were prisoners. They were also the only ones who had anything to grin about as they were grinning now. Alone among the camp’s inmates they wore shorts and shoes, filthy but intact, and carried both sticks and extra flesh. All but one wore shirts as well; the one without was too furry to need such a garment.

  “Aww, Jerry,” said Looby. He was a greenskin whose ability to photosynthesize a few extra calories had in the early days given him an edge over other would-be bullies. His other modification—his thumbnails had been replaced by retractile talons—had also helped. Now the other bullies danced attendance on him, and the group kept its informal status as chief thugs by dispensing the meager rations, trading food and drink to the other prisoners in exchange for what they pulled from the ground. It was not surprising that Looby and his friends were the best fed, nor that they protected their privileges by beating and starving those who dared to protest and by informing on those who spoke of escape or riot.

  “Aww, Jerry,” said Looby again. No one knew his last name. “They wrecked your house! And I can use that piece of wood, those posts, that…” Extending one thumb claw as a mute warning that Duncan should not object, he used it to point at the few still usable bits of wreckage. “Mickey, Stanley, Bess,” he said. The indicated aides picked up the pieces. When they had everything that was salvageable, and Jeremy Duncan had nothing left at all, Looby said, “Amy! Give the man a potster.”

  The woman he indicated bore a large scar on her cheek, where some Engineer had sliced away a genetically implanted decoration. Fragments of healing, reforming tissue revealed that the original had been a patch of butterfly wing and that Amy might once have been beautiful. Now, however, she was as scabby, string-haired, and filthy as anyone in the camp. Not even the chief slaves could wash. But she had a cloth sack over one shoulder, and now she produced what looked like a withered potato. Duncan’s mouth watered at the sight. When she tossed it on the ground in front of him, he seized it eagerly. He had expected nothing, for the guards brought food only once a day, in the evening. That, they said, was when the slaves had earned a meal.

  Potsters were one of the gengineers’ earliest successes. They grew in the ground like potatoes but tasted much like lobster. Duncan thought it little wonder that the Engineers tolerated their existence despite their principles, but he said nothing. He was not about to give Looby a chance to change his mind. He was already chewing when the gang turned toward their own huts not far from the guardhouse, there to use what they had taken to make their rooms larger and their walls tighter against the wind and their roofs less likely to leak when it rained.

  When he had eaten half the potster, Duncan folded the rest into his hand. Then he sat back on his heels and stared disconsolately at the little that was left of the wreckage. It had been all he owned. There was nothing else. No book. No rag. Not even a shiny bit of stone or metal. Nothing. They were allowed to build their shacks, if the materials they chose were worthless enough, or if they were ideologically pure, though if they were that they would not be here. Everything else they found was taken away.

  He stared at his neighbor. He was a lucky man. He had no genetic modifications, at least none that showed. The guards therefore did not abuse him as badly. He had a little more pigment in his swarthy skin, and the sun did not burn him. Duncan glanced at his own cracked and peeling hide. And was he also chewing? Could he possibly have saved a crumb of their meager rations? Or was he simply gnawing on his tongue, or a bit of plastic or rotten leather?

  “Bert?” He held out what was left of the potster, offering to share.

  “Yah,” said Berut Amoun, accepting the trade, biting, chewing. “I suppose there’s room. You can squeeze in here tonight.”

  “We’re slaves.”

  “Tell me something new.”

  “I hate them. They’re dumb. They’re stupid. Idiots.” He kept his voice soft. He had seen what happened to those who insulted their masters too loudly. “I hate them. If I ever get the chance…”

  The Engineers had triumphed. Through elections and coups and riotous rebellions, they had taken over every government that mattered. They had slaughtered gengineers and gengineered, the owners and sellers of Slugabeds and garbage disposals and Roachsters, greenskins and bots. And when their frenzy had calmed, they had marched the survivors into the labor camps. Duncan no longer remembered how long he had been here, in this camp. Nor did he remember whether he had already been here when Bert arrived, or whether Bert had been here first. He did remember that they had arrived only days apart, and that they had quickly discovered that they both knew Frederick.

  “I wonder where Frederick is,” said Duncan now. “And that dog.”

  “He sent Renny up there,” said Bert, not for the first time. He bent his gaze toward the sky, too hazy with the smoke of burning garbage to be blue. At night, they could not see even the brightest of stars or satellites, and the moon was blurred. “Probe Station. Oughta be safe enough, eh? And then he went up too. I hope he had sense enough to stay there.”

  Duncan nodded gravely and stared at his hands. They were calloused, stained, cut by shards of metal and glass, red and swollen and oozing pus where the cuts had become infected. It would only get worse. One day, as he had seen happen to others, he would be unable to use them, unable to work. Looby would stop feeding him then. The guards would ignore his pleas. They would beat him. And he would die. He had seen it happen to others.

  A horn blew, and the camp stirred. Duncan groaned. Bert crawled from his shelter. Looby screamed from somewhere, “Back to work! Move, you loafers!” He had chosen to make his occasional show of directive energy, as if to convince the Engineer guards of his value; most mornings he remained undisturbed in his hut. His henchmen appeared and began to chivvy the Engineers’ prisoners toward the wall of the camp and the leavings of the Machine Age.

  The place had once been a sanitary landfill, a dump where layers of earth had shielded from rats and seagulls and other vermin each day’s accumulation of empty cans and bottles, steel and aluminum and glass, the plastics of outworn shoes and clothes and broken toys, scraps of foil, electric motors full of copper wire, cast-off refrigerators and microwave ovens, all the discards of an age far richer in material resources. The aluminum and copper and glass and plastic were still there. The larger chunks of steel had sound, unrusted cores. And it was the prisoners’ job to separate anything and everything of value from the dross.

  The gate in the fence opened, and an ancient front-end loader, red with rust, belching smoke, rattling, creaking, threatening imminent collapse, roared into the crater. When it reached the working face, it dug its bucket into the compressed layers of garbage and dirt, wrenched, and tore. Its job was to loosen, to make what was there available to sorting, stacking fingers. Whatever they found they would hand over to Looby and his crew in exchange for food. Later, they would pile it all in bins near the gate, and later still in the wagons that hauled it away to be used as the raw materials for a new Machine Age. The wagons were drawn by horses, cows, and even people, slaves as much as those who mined the dump.

  Only the sodden lumps of cellulose that had once been newspapers and magazines and books and solid wood were not immediately salvageable, although they were tossed to one side to dry in the sun. Eventually, the prisoners burned them.

  “Move!” A stick landed on Duncan’s back, poked at his gill slits. He gasped at the pain. He lurched. He looked o
ver his shoulder and saw the furry back of Stanley, Looby’s chief sidekick. The man’s upper arms were naked skin, decorated with a Roachster head, a Warbird, “Mother,” genetic tattoos drawn in lines of melanin. Now he was swinging at a woman not faraway. He wore a ferocious scowl, but his lips were quirked as if he enjoyed his role. The woman screamed, drowning for a moment the roar of the machine. Stanley hit her again.

  Duncan did not know her name. He knew only that she was too scrawny to have breasts. Most of the women were, and sex was not part of life in the labor camp, except for Looby and his bullies.

  “Nooo!” Someone else screamed, high and agonized yet unmistakably male. Duncan peered toward the sound. Bess, Looby’s mate, had a prisoner on the ground. He rolled and flailed. She kicked at his crotch and poked at his face with the end of her stick. Spatters of blood suggested that she had stabbed at least one eye.

  “Nooo! Tige! You killed my Mack! Juuli…!”

  There was a sudden crunch. The screaming stopped. Bess struggled to pull the end of her stick from the eye socket.

  Beside Duncan, Berut Amoun began to pant. “Jimmy,” he said. “I knew him.” He moaned, bent to pick up a rock, and began to run toward the murderer. He was staggering with the weakness of his malnutrition, but still he ran. Bert’s scream of rage was interrupted by the short, sharp sound of a shot. He crumpled in mid-stride. He fell. And Looby yelled again, “You! And you! And you! Pick ‘em up. Put ‘em in the pit.” The pit was the hole, not far from the entrance to the camp, where all the bodies went. “The rest of you! Move it! Work! Or you don’t eat!”

  As the prisoners silently resumed their movement toward the working face of the landfill, Duncan bent his gaze upward, toward the edge of the cliff ahead. A guard stood there, above the layers of garbage the prisoners—the slaves—were about to burrow into. He had a rifle in his hands, its butt still against his shoulder, its muzzle sweeping over the scene below.

  Duncan did not even feel shame at the thought that now Bert’s shack would be his, if only he hurried when this shift was done, if only he reached it first. Nor did he feel shame at his lack of shame, though somewhere within his mind a flicker of uneasiness did struggle for life. Far stronger was his intent to survive, to persist. If, he thought, he was very, very lucky, he might someday gain the power to avenge himself, his friends, his civilization.

  It was dusk. The day’s labor was done. Duncan squatted in the doorway of Bert’s hut, held his hands in the light, and stared at them. They were filthy, bleeding from fresh cuts and gashes, stinging where he had let the black liquid that oozed from the ground touch them. There was no way to wash. There hadn’t been since…He thought of the day’s deaths and shuddered and did not feel any safer to know that his back was sheltered by walls and roof that Bert had pieced together. He was, he knew, at the mercy of fate as embodied by Looby and the guards.

  The horn blew again. He peered toward the fence at the mouth of the crater he and the other slave-laborers had carved in the landfill. The gate was open. The guards were pushing into the crater a wheeled bin of the sort the slaves loaded with glass and metal and plastic. It was empty now of garbage but filled with buckets of gruel and water and baskets of potatoes and cabbages and turnips and the fruits of sausage bushes and pieplants and…Most of them would be overripe, soft and moldy. But they were dinner.

  Jeremy Duncan thought the food must come from local farms, where it spoiled in the field for lack of transport to city markets. The Engineers would not be starving, though. They had destroyed the world’s Macks, but they had slaves who could haul wagons toward the city. The substitute transport would be slow, and it could not haul vast tonnages, but it could haul enough to keep the city fed, even if it left as much in the field to rot. It helped that they had killed so many that demand was not what it once had been.

  The prisoners moved eagerly toward the dinner cart. The first to reach it, as always, were Looby and his henchmen. They surrounded it, barring access. As each of the rest arrived, they doled out the food, first putting what they wanted for themselves, including any unusual delicacies such as potsters, in the sack Looby’s Amy carried. Some, who had not worked hard enough or found rich enough treasure, got nothing. No one got enough to feel full.

  Like all the rest, Duncan drank his cup of water and wolfed his food as soon as it was in his hands. Unlike the rest, he felt a little more satisfied than usual. The potster the rubble of his shack had earned had been small, and he had shared it with Bert, but it had still made a difference.

  The gate in the fence had been shut as soon as the garbage bin had passed. Now a trio of guards stood before it, their guns over their shoulders. Other guards overlooked the scene from the barracks roof and the rim of the crater.

  The three by the gate were clearly bored. They were passing a small potted plant back and forth, holding it in one hand, stroking it with the other, pressing its leaves to their cheeks, even licking it. Duncan was too far away to make out any detail, but he knew they held a cocaine nettle, as much a product of the gengineering labs as his gills or pumpkin houses or litterbugs. He grunted wryly at the thought that the Engineers were so selective in their condemnations. He grunted again when he saw the sense in that selectivity: They rejected what replaced the machines of their dreams. If it was only another version of something—food or drugs—that had always grown, always been biological, they might accept it. They still rejected pumpkin houses and bots.

  The prisoners dispersed as quickly as they had gathered, returning to their shacks. A few stood or squatted in twos or threes, talking quietly. Most huddled in their doorways, leaning over their small fires, adding fuel, much of it still damp with ground water and toxic chemicals, letting the smoke and fumes obscure their vision of the present and the feeble warmth combat the growing cool of the night, mindlessly awaiting the next day and its renewal of labor, perhaps remembering happier times, when the Engineers had seemed too trivial, too out of step with the reality of the day, ever to be a threat.

  Jeremy Duncan gathered the splinters and fragments of wood that were all that remained of the hut he had built himself. He piled them by what had been Bert’s shack. Then he sifted through the ashes of the fire Bert had had earlier, looking for a tiny coal. When he found it, he added a scrap of carefully dried paper, splinters, larger bits, and blew as gently as he could. If this did not work, he could fetch a coal from someone else’s fire. Even rain rarely extinguished them all; someone always sheltered the flames and kept a supply of fuel dry. Only when the rain lasted for days did all the fires and coals go out. Then all the prisoners shivered until the sun returned and dried more fuel. The trick was rekindling the flame. Some of the prisoners made do with bottles, filled with water, to focus sunlight, but that worked only in the day. Sometimes there were matches, but the guards were stingy even with something so cheap.

  When his fire was finally going, he added chunks of nearly dry pulp. They would dry and burn, smoking, stinking, but also warming. In due time, he would let it die, cover the coals with ashes, retreat into Bert’s—now his—shelter, and curl himself into a ball to sleep. He would be cold, but he had learned to stand that.

  In the meantime, there was memory…

  He had not met anyone who had failed to see the burning of the bots’ apartment building on the veedo. Many had not realized what it meant, but he had. He had thought of returning to his lab, at least long enough to make it impossible for anyone to use his files to track down any of those genimals he had helped to become human. But he had not. He had told himself that they would be able to take care of themselves. They would have to, as he would have to. And besides, he dared not take the time.

  He had wrapped his torso in painful cloth, wrapped a sleeping bag around his speargun and mask and knife, and packed a small bag with a change of clothes and as much as he could of the food he had had in his cupboards. Then he had gotten into his Armadon and taken the greenway south. He had hoped he could reach the Gulf of Mexico. There, with his
gills, he would be safe.

  He should, he thought, have gone to the nearest river. The news reports on his vehicle’s radio should have told him that. The Engineers were massacring all who embodied what they hated: bots and gengineers and Macks and Buggies and more. But he had only leaned over his tiller, straining to hasten his Armadon along the road to safety. He had never once thought of the streams and rivers that passed beneath his wheels every few kilometers as what they truly were: other, safer paths. The water would have been colder, but it would have let him swim invisibly toward his goal. The trip would have taken longer. But…

  He had had a map. He had planned a route that would avoid all the cities between his home and the Gulf. It would even avoid most small towns, and the few he could not avoid he had planned to pass at night.

  He had not expected to find a roadblock. The Armadon’s legs had been running tirelessly atop its wheels, driving it steadily southward toward the border between Indiana and Kentucky. He had rounded a curve, and the Engineers had been waiting for him behind a windrow of dead Macks and Tortoises and Buggies. They had opened fire immediately, and when his vehicle was dead too, they had taken his bags and patted him down. When they felt the irregularities on the sides of his chest, they had stripped him. They had called him genny then. They had beaten him. They had tied his hands and beaten him again and forced him to march and beaten him once more.

  When he came to, he was lying on the hardwood floor of what could only be a high-school gymnasium. The wood was stained with blood, much of it too dry and crusted to have come from his own wounds. Around him lay perhaps a hundred others, all of them genetically modified. There were ornamented faces and green skins and furry scalps and altered limbs. There were normals who, he later learned, had sold or owned gengineered products or worked in gengineering labs or objected to the Engineers’ tactics or beliefs. There were those who, like Bert, had worked for public agencies and been involved in regulating or inspecting or licensing the gengineering industry. There were even police officers, guilty of no more than using Sparrowhawks and Roachsters in their work.