Opensky whirled past them now. Along the embankment on both sides, legs dangled a decorative fringe. People sat atop the pilings and hurled debris at the speeding stainless steel cars. Their accuracy had always amazed Brens. Even as he willed himself rigid, he flinched at the eggs, rocks, bottles, and assorted garbage that clattered and smeared across the window.
“Look at those sonsabitches throw, would you? You ever try and figure what kind of lead time you need to hit something moving as fast as we are?”
Brens shook his head. “I guess they’re used to it.”
“Why not? What else they got to do but practice?”
Behind them, gunfire crackled and bullets pattered along the boiler plate. Many of the commuters ducked at the opening burst.
“Look at them back there.” Karras pointed down the aisle. “Scared blue, every one of them. I know this psychologist who’s got a way to calm things down, he says. He had this idea to paint bull’s-eyes on the sides of the cars, below the window. Did I tell you about it? He figures it’ll work two or three ways. One, if the snipers hit the bull’s-eyes, there’s less chance of somebody getting tagged through a crack in the boiler plate. Two, maybe they’ll quit firing at all, when they see we don’t give a suck of sky about it. Or three, he says, even if they keep it up, it gives them something to do, sort of channels their aggression. If they take it out on the trains, maybe they’ll ease up on City. What do you think?”
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to put up shooting galleries in all the playgrounds? Or figure a way to get new cars for the trains? We can’t keep patching and jury-rigging these old crates forever. The last thing we need right now is to make us more of a target than we already are.”
“Okay. Have it your way. Only, I was thinking. . .”
Brens tuned him out and squinted at the last molten sliver of setting sun. Its rays smeared rainbows through the streaked eggs washing slowly across the window in the slipstream. The mess coagulated and darkened as airblown particles of ash settled in it and crusted over. When he could stand it no longer, Brens flipped on the wipers and watched the clotted slime smear across the glass, as he had known it would. But some of it scrubbed loose to flip back alongside the speeding train.
The people were still out there. If he looked carefully straight ahead, their presence became a mere shadow at the edges of the channel through which he watched the trainpad reeling toward him. Though he doubted any eye would catch his long enough to matter, he avoided the faces. There was always the slight chance that he might recognize one of them. Twenty years wasn’t so long a time. Twenty years ago he had watched the trains from an embankment like these.
Now the train swooped upward to ride its cushion of air along the raised pad, level with second-story windows on each side. Blurred faces stared from those windows, here disembodied, there resting on a cupped hand and arm propped on a window ledge.
The exterior mirrors showed him faces ducking away from the gust of wind fanning out behind the train and from the debris lifted whirling in the grimy evening air. He tried to picture the pattern left by the train’s passage—dust settling out of the whirlwind like the lines of polarization around a magnet tip. A few of the faces wore respirators or simple, and relatively useless, cotton masks. Many didn’t bother to draw back but hung exposed to the breeze that the train was stirring up. And now, as on each of his previous rare turns at the window seat, Brens had the impulse to slow the train, to let the wind die down and diminish behind them, out of what he himself considered misplaced and maudlin sympathy for the skyers, who seemed to enjoy the excitement of the train’s glistening passage. It tempered the boredom of their day.
“. . . right about here the six-thirty had the explosion. Five months ago. Remember?”
“What?”
“Explosion. Some kids must have got hold of detonator caps and strung them on wires swinging from a tree. When the train hit them, they cracked the window all to hell. Nearly hurt somebody. But the crews came out and burned down all the trees along the right of way. Little bastards won’t pull that one again.”
Brens nodded. There was one of the armored repair vans ahead, on a siding under the protective stone lip of the embankment.
The train rose even higher to cross the river which marked the Opensky-Workring boundary. They were riding securely in the concave shell of the bridge. On the river below, a cat, or dog - it was hard to tell at this distance—picked its cautious way across the crusted algae which nearly covered the stream. The center of the turgid river steamed a molten beige; and upriver a short way, brilliant patches of green marked the mouth of the main Workring spillway.
At the far end of the bridge, a group of children scrambled out of the trough of the trainbed to hang over the side.
“Hey! Hit the lasers. Singe their butts for them.” Karras bounced in his seat.
“Shut up for a minute, can’t you? They’re out of the way.”
“Now what’s that for? Can’t you take a joke? Besides, you know they’re sneaking into Workring to steal something. You saying we ought to let them get away with it?”
“I’m just telling you to shut up. I’m tired, that’s all. Leave it at that.”
“Sure. Big deal. Tired! But tomorrow the window seat’s mine. So don’t come sucking around for a look then, understand?”
“It’s a promise.”
Sulfurous clouds hung in the air, and Brens checked the car’s interior pollution level. It was a safe 18, as he might have guessed. But the sight of buildings tarnished green, of bricks flaking and molting on every factory wall, always depressed him. The ride home was worse than the trip into City. Permissive hours ran from five to eight, when pollution controls were lifted. He knew the theory: evening air was more susceptible to condensation because of the temperature drop, and dumping pollutants into the night sky might actually bring on a cleansing rain. He also knew the practical considerations involved: twenty-four-hour control would almost certainly drive industry away. Compromise was essential, if City was to survive.
It would be good to get home.
The train swung into its gently curving descent toward Workring exit, and Brens instinctively clasped the seat arms as the seat pivoted on its gimbals. At the foot of the curve he saw the barricade. Something piled on the pad.
Not for an instant did he doubt what he saw. He lunged at the power override, but stopped himself in time. Dropping to the pad now, in mid-curve, might tip the train or let it slide off the pad onto the potholed and eroded right of way where the uneven terrain offered no stable lift base for getting underway again.
“Ahead of you! On the tracks!” Karras reached for the controls, but Brens caught him with a straight-arm and slammed him to the floor. He concentrated on the roadbed flashing toward them. At the last instant, as the curve modified and tilted toward level, he popped all speedbreaks and snatched the main circuit breaker loose.
From the sides of the cars vertical panels hissed out on their hydraulic pushrods to form baffles against the slipstream, and the train slammed to the pad. Tractor gear whined in protest, the shriek nearly drowning out the dying whirr of compressor fans, and the train shuddered to a stop.
Inside, lights dimmed and flickered. Voices rose in the darkness amid the noise of men struggling to their feet.
Brens depressed the circuit breaker and hit the emergency call switch overhead. “Hold it!” he shouted. “Quiet down, please! There’s something on the pad, and I had to stop. Just keep calm. I’ve signaled for the work crews, and they’ll be here any minute.”
Then he ignored the passengers and focused his attention on the window. The barricade lay no more than twenty feet ahead, rusted castings and discarded mold shells heaped on the roadbed. The jumbled pile seemed ablaze in the flickering red light from the emergency beacons rotating atop the train cars. Behind the barricade and along the right of way, faceless huddled forms rose erect in the demonic light and stood motionless, simply staring at the train. The s
troboscopic light sweeping over them made each face a swarm of moving, melting shadows. Brens fired a preliminary burst from the fifties atop the first car, then quickly switched them to automatic, but the watching forms stood like statues.
“They must know,” Karras said. He stood beside Brens and massaged his bruised shoulder. “Look. None of them moving.”
Then one of the watchers broke and charged toward the car, waving a club. He managed two strides before the fifties homed on his movement and opened up. A quick chatter from overhead and the man collapsed. He hurled the club as he dropped and the fifties efficiently followed its arc through the air with homed fire that made it dance in a shower of flashing sparks. It splintered to shreds before it hit the ground.
The other watchers stood motionless.
Brens stared at them a long moment before he could define what puzzled him about their appearance: none of them wore respirators. Were they trying to commit suicide? And why this useless attack? His eyes had grown accustomed to the flickering light and he scanned the mob. Young faces and old, mostly men but a few women scattered among them, all shades of color, united in appearance only by their clothing. Workring skyers in leather aprons, thick-soled shoes, probably escapees from a nearby factory. He flinched as one of them nodded slightly—surely they couldn’t see him through the window. The nod grew more violent, and then he realized that the man was coughing. Paroxysms seized the man as he threw his hands to his mouth and bent forward helplessly. It was enough. The fifties chattered once more, and he fell.
“But what do they get out of it?” He turned his bewilderment to Karras.
“Who can tell? They’re nuts, all of them. Malcontents, or anarchists. Mainly stupid, I’d say. Like the way they try and break into City. Even if they threw us out, they wouldn’t know what to do next. Picture one of them sitting in your office. At your desk.”
“I don’t mean that. If they stop us from getting through, who takes care of them? I mean, we feed them, run their schools, bury them. I don’t understand what they think all this will accomplish.”
“Listen! The crew’s coming. They’ll take care of them.”
A siren keened its rise and fall from the dimming twilight ahead, but still the watchers stood frozen. When the siren changed to a blatting klaxon, Brens switched the fifties back on manual to safeguard the approaching repair car. The mob melted away at the same signal. They were there, and then they were gone. They dropped from sight along the pad edge and blended into the shadows.
The work crew’s crane hoisted the castings off the pad and dropped them on the right of way. In a few minutes they had finished. Green lights flashed at Brens, and the repair van sped away again.
Passing the Workring exit guards, Brens made a mental note to warn the Co-op. If the skyers were growing bold enough to show open rebellion within the security of Workring, the exit guards had better be augmented. Even Suburbs might not be safe any longer. At thirty miles distance, he wasn’t really concerned for his own home, but some of the commuters lived dangerously close to Workring.
He watched in the exterior mirror. The rear car detached itself and swung out onto a siding where it dropped to a halt while the body of the train went on. Every two miles, the scene repeated itself. Cars dropped off singly to await morning reassembly. Brens had often felt a strange sort of envy for the commuters who lived closer in: they never had the lead window seat on the way out of City. Responsibility for the whole train devolved on them only for short stretches, only on the way in.
But that was fair, he reminded himself. He lived the farthest out. With privilege go obligations. And he was through, for another twenty weeks, his obligations met.
At the station, he telexed his report to the Co-op office and trotted outside to meet Hazel. The other wives had driven away. Only his carryall sat idling at the platform edge. He knew he ought to look forward to relaxing at home, but the trip itself still preyed on his mind unaccountably. He felt irritation at his inability to put the skyers out of his thoughts. His whole day was spent working for their benefit; his evenings ought to be his own.
He looked back toward City, but saw nothing in the smog-covered bowl at the foot of the hills that stretched away to the east. If it rained tonight, it might clear the air.
Hazel smiled and waved.
He grinned in answer. He could predict her reaction when she heard what he’d been through: a touch of wifely fear and concern for him, and that always made her more affectionate. Almost a hero’s welcome. After all, he had acquitted himself rather well. A safe arrival, only a few minutes late, no injuries or major problems. And he wouldn’t draw window seat for another several months. It was good to be home.
<
* * * *
Kate Wilhelm
THE FUSION BOMB
AT DUSK the barrier islands were like a string of jewels gleaming in the placid bay. The sea wasn’t reflecting now, the only lights that showed were those of the islands and the shore lights that were from two to four miles westward. The islands looked like an afterthought, as if someone had decided to outline the coast with a faulty pen that skipped as it wrote in sparkles. Here and there dotted lines tethered the jewels, kept them from floating away, and lines joined them one to another in a series, connective tissue too frail to endure the fury of the sea. Then came a break, a dark spot with only a sprinkling of lights at one end, the rest of the island swallowed in blackness of tropical growth.
The few lights at the southern end seemed inconsequential, the twinkling of hovering fireflies, to be swept away with a brush of the hand. No lines joined this dark speck with the other, clearly more civilized, links of the chain that stretched to the north and angled off to the south. No string of incandescence tied it to the mainland. It was as if this dark presence had come from elsewhere to shoulder itself into the chain where it stood unrecognized and unacknowledged by its neighbors.
It was shaped like a primitive arrowhead. If the shaft had been added, the feathers would have touched land hundreds of miles to the south, at St. Augustine, possibly. The island was covered with loblolly pines, live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, cypress and magnolia trees. The thickened end was white sand, stucco houses, and masses of hewn stones, some in orderly piles and rows, others tossed about, buried in sand so that only corners showed, tumbled down the beach, into the water where the sea and bay joined. Philodendron, gone wild, had claimed many of the blocks, climbing them with stems as thick as wrists, split leaves hiding the worked surface of the granite and sandstone, as if nature were working hard to efface what man had done to her island. Those blocks that had been lost to the sea had long since been naturalized by barnacles, oysters, seaweeds; generations of sergeant majors and wrasses and blue crabs and stonefish had lived among them.
At low tide, as it was now, the water whispered gently to the rocks, secrets of the sea murmured in an unintelligible tongue that evoked memories and suggested understanding. Eliot listened hard, then answered: “So I’ll tell the old bastard, take your effing island, and your effing job, and your effing money and stuff it all you know where.” The sea mocked him and he took another drink. He sat on one of the stones, his back against another one, and he put a motor on the rocky end of the island and wound it up. It was a rubber-band motor. The arrowhead pointed due north and cut a clean swath, its motion steady and sure, like a giant carrier. And when he had circled the world, when he had docked at all the strange ports and sampled all the strange customs and strange foods, then he didn’t know what to do with his mobile island, and he sank it, deep into the Mariannas Trench where it could never be raised again, where it would vanish without a sign that it had existed. He drank again, this time emptying the glass. For a moment he hefted it, then he put it down on the rock next to him.
“Eliot! Where are you?”
He didn’t answer, but he could see the white shape moving among the rocks. She knew damn well where he was.
“Pit, old man, I’m through.
I quit. I’ll leave by the mail boat in the morning, or swim over, or fly on the back of a cormorant.”
“Eliot! For God’s sake, don’t be so childish! Stop playing games. Everyone’s waiting for you.”
“Ah, Beatrice, the unattainable, forever pure, forever fleeing, and fleet.” But I had you once, twice, three times. Hot and sweaty in my arms.
“You’re drunk! Why? Why tonight? Everyone’s waiting for you.”
She was very near now, not so near that he could make out her features, but near enough to know that she wore a white party dress, that she wore pearls at her throat, near enough so that the elusive whisper of the sea now became water swishing among rocks. He stood up. She was carrying her sandals.
“You’ll bruise your feet. Stay there, or better, go back and tell them that I do not wish to attend another bloody party, not another one for years and years.”
Orbit 10 - [Anthology] Page 20