The Wanderers

by Kate Ormand

  Once she had let slip that she would maybe like to be a field worker, and her parents were shocked. Those who worked in the windmills or grain fields surrounding Arcone would inevitably—however careful they were—develop tanned and weathered skin. It was one step away from being one of those scavenging Wanderers, the lowest of the low in the giant valley. Field workers never became citizens.

  No, maintenance of some kind was the best option. She had toyed with the idea of learning antiheat panel construction and repair, but not for long. The compound used was injurious to your health, and there was no point being awarded extra status if you didn’t live long enough to enjoy it. Often the work took place outside, dangling from a rope on one of the four steep sides of the Pyramid. The worst of both worlds, really.

  It had come as a surprise to her when she realized that she wouldn’t mind following in her father’s footsteps. Bonix spent his days in the refurbishment of interior walls and floors, trained in the use of the plastic mix that could cover imperfections or tears as though they had never existed. You went everywhere in skin maintenance. Not a glamorous job, but you traveled.

  And so this morning, Bonix was smiling all over his face: his daughter wanted to follow the family trade. She couldn’t resist a little lie to increase his happiness.

  “I didn’t tell you, but it’s something I’ve wanted for a long time.”

  “Daughter!” They embraced. Maybe it was a mistake—just a whim. Done now, though. Make the best of it.

  She must tell Veramus. He would be very disappointed in her choice.

  Essa went down the corridor outside her quarters, feeling the familiar rigidity of the smooth white composite flooring under her feet. It was a feat to make the floors both light and sturdy. The secret was a sandwich construction in which the middle section was a honeycomb shape. She couldn’t help but look around her with a new eye, spotting the places where the white was discolored, the first sign that repairs would be needed. The walls were less substantial, and tears often occurred. Yes, she would roam everywhere and have a degree of freedom in her job.

  She found Veramus alone in one of the Writers’ workshops, where sheets of black writing screed were pressed out with a ponderous mangle. After they were cut and trimmed, you could write on them with a steel stylus and white characters would appear through the black. If someone wrote a substandard composition, the flimsy tablet would be recycled. Veramus was often in here practicing his lettering, as he had elected to become a historian. Essa felt sorry for him; he would grow stooped and silent, as did all the historians after years of chronicling the wonders of life in Arcone.

  “You’re completely insane,” Veramus said without a trace of a stutter when he learned her news. “You’ll be no one.”

  “What are you aiming for—a seat on the Council?”

  “No, of c-course not. But at least there’d be a chance. There’s always one historian on the C-c-council. As well as the Master of the Archive—which makes two. There’s n-never anyone from M-maintenance. It’s a d-dead end.”

  “It’s better than history. You’re going to spend your life putting down lies in very beautiful writing.”

  He stood up, agitated. “Nn-nn-never say that. S-someone might hear—don’t even say that to me.”

  Having spoken, as so often, without considering the consequences, Essa defended herself. “I notice you don’t deny it.”

  “It’s not lies. It’s a q-question of emphasis. You’re en-encouraged to dwell on the g-good things—for morale.”

  “When we do it in class, all I know is we’re not getting the whole story.”

  He took her arm. “Essa. I’d d-do an-anything for you. Just for me—never t-talk like that again. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me, Veramus. I love Arcone. But you can’t go around all the time with a silly smile on your face. It’s not perfect here.”

  A smile broke through his solemn expression. “It is if you l-look at the alternative!”

  She laughed at the truth of that. For most of its enormous area, the valley was a terrible place. They were so privileged to live here.

  A week later, she was a scout, Maintenance, second class. She wore a drab sash that said she had access everywhere—and she went everywhere. She wasn’t supposed to; her orders were to confine herself to the upper levels only, but in practice she went everywhere because she could not resist it. Mornings were spent learning the arts of plastic patching and good procedure, and in the afternoon she explored. The scouting was ridiculously simple if you had an eye for it. You had a small tablet and you made note of where work needed doing, classified the urgency of the task, and then wrote it up when you got back to the Work Bay. However, if you missed a torn or decaying patch of wall or flooring, you were in trouble. Preserving the Pyramid was the sacred duty of all who lived in it, and for one whose actual job it was …

  But Essa was confident and quick and made no mistakes, and at the end of every shift, she had a good hour in which to wander. After the first few days, she took to consulting the work and recreation rosters that hung in the Work Bay to ensure that she would not run into some group activity or another on these little jaunts. She took this precaution after a near-collision with the entire Council as they left the Congress Room. Maxamar himself had swept by her, exuding not only that strange half-washed odor but also a tangible charge of power and authority. He was fantastically well-muscled, and you wouldn’t believe he was forty already, with his glossy brown hair and unlined features. He himself led some of the military exercises that all the able-bodied men had to attend, and it was said no man could withstand him except Grollat himself, Commander of the Pacifiers.

  Essa drew back a panel to enter the Pulping Station. She had a fascination with the place. For one thing, there was the delicious sound of water—real water—as it was pumped up from the reservoir through translucent pipes to fill the three big vats. Pulping was woman’s work, and so dull that not one of the workers had enough interest to ask her why she had come back here when she had already checked and reported on every visible surface only two days ago.

  Stacks of paintings lay around the floor, waiting to be taken up and placed in one of the vats and stirred to pulp. This was transferred to the second vat, where it was bleached, and then the whole mess would be dried in the last vat before being reprocessed into a kind of sticky twine that ended up with the loom smiths, to be rewoven into art paper.

  Essa stood in the doorway and watched as a giant picture was wrestled to its doom by three of the women. It depicted a fictional battle in which men of Arcone slaughtered some Wanderers. Essa tried to guess why the work had been condemned. It could be the expressions of bloodlust on the pale Arconian faces. Any kind of brutality is permissible in the city’s defense; but don’t look as though you’re enjoying it. A more successful painting would have represented the defenders of culture as mournfully dignified executioners.

  She watched as the picture began to break up in the vat. At the very moment of its destruction, she recognized that it was a fine work, showing the horror of man taking up arms against man. Gone now. What was the next one? A much smaller painting of a field worker blessing the sun above him with open arms. Oh.

  Oh. It was her own painting, the picture she had entered in the last competition. So the judging was over. She hadn’t heard. Essa felt an unidentifiable emotion stirring in her. She had entertained hopes for this picture. Technically it was the best thing she had ever produced—and it had taken ages. What was wrong with it? Absolutely nothing!

  In a matter of moments, it was sinking into the darkening liquid in the vat, circling and sucked down as the women stirred with their long poles.

  Essa left abruptly and went back to her quarters without continuing her wandering. In their main room, her mother was smiling to herself as she arranged the shadows by means of directing the phosphor lights onto one object or another, or adjusting burn-proof masking on the lights themsel
ves, which were brighter than usual.

  Shadow arranging? “Is someone coming to eat with us?” Essa asked.

  “Oh—hello, Elessa. You’re back early. Finished already?”

  “Yes. Is someone coming?”

  Marran went on adjusting the shadows. It was, supposedly, an art. Essa was all at once bad tempered. “I said, ‘Is someone coming?’”

  There was not much you could do to disturb Marran’s tranquility. “No one’s coming. Your father and I want to sit down and eat well with you. Because you are a very fine young woman, and we are proud of you. It’s wonderful that you have chosen to serve in the way you have.”

  Essa tried to look enthusiastic. “Thank you!”

  She had an urge to complain about something. About everything.

  The land had become very uneven: swollen and lumpy, a strong indication that prospecting was good in these parts, although daylight digs had so far brought little to the surface. So often it was a matter of chance.

  Hawkerman had not encouraged the explorations; he was fixated on the cache and they were all tired, for he had driven them on at a fast pace and food was running short. Worse than that, their water was almost gone, and the familiar tensions were building. Would this be the time that their luck ran out?

  Arriving at the start of a huge tract of scorched land, Kean pointed out a small herd of sun-crazed greenback deer in the early light, in that briefly pleasant time when the gigantic sun showed only its rim over the horizon before it hauled itself into the sky. Where there was meat, there should be water, too. The little deer were thirsty themselves, though: in the last stages of dehydration, when they acted crazier than ever. Generations of exposure to the sun had bred all sense out of them, and in the condition they were in now, you could lure them on by means of laying down a sheet of silver foil. They wanted to believe the shining surface was water, and they came on, jigging left and right like fidgety children. They carried their heads high, and the dry mold on their backs shone a prismatic green when the sun hit them.

  Barb and Ax were the hunters. Each took a bow and bent it back. Without exchanging words, they selected the same deer as a target. You got only one shot.

  At a hundred feet, the deer were wavering. As the first one jumped left and bounded off, the arrows were released and found their target. Ax hit the greenback’s hindquarters, and Barb shot it full through the throat.

  They packed the animal whole on the trailer; it was getting hotter by the second, and there was no time to waste. Wailing Joe took issue with Hawkerman when he heard they would be moving straight on.

  “No! We gotta get out of the drylands, Hawkerman! Those greenbacks must have got water from somewhere behind us—”

  “Sure—and they were water-crazed, and it could be two days away, and you don’t have two days left in you.”

  “I could make it. If this territory leads into sand, we’re all dead.”

  “That’s where we’re going. You go where you like.”

  “It’s the cache, isn’t it? You’re so hungry for it, you’d risk all our lives to get to it quick!”

  “I said we’re going. You go where you like.”

  Of course Wailing Joe would not leave the team, and they bedded down for the day. A bad time. You wanted to be traveling, you wanted to know your fate, and instead you conserved your energy and did not even skin the deer. You lay on your back in the stifling heat under the tent’s low roof, relaxing yourself into that semicomatose state.

  Hawkerman was no water diviner, but he did not let panic interfere with his instincts. Halfway through the night’s traveling, they came upon a grouping of desert wardens sticking up from the parched earth, those stubby pillars of cactus that were almost holy to a Wanderer. They had a taproot which reached far down, like a drill, and worked its way through rock, and miraculously drew up moisture. Working in the near-freezing conditions, the team tapped every one of the wardens, cutting into them and bleeding them into water containers. A grouping like this one would supply the team for a period of days: they were all conditioned to short rations. The great sin was to destroy a desert warden by overexploitation. Kean was too young to remember the day Hawkerman had killed the three Wanderers he had come upon slicing down a warden.

  Wailing Joe was lying beside Kean. The others seemed to have dropped off.

  The old man whispered, “He ain’t doing right, drivin’ on like this. The winds could be getting up. He said so himself. Maybe the Season’s coming early this year.”

  It was Hawkerman who answered him, from the other side of the tent.

  “Not for weeks, Joe. Never been this early. We’ve come this far. If I’m wrong, well”—Kean could almost hear the shrug—“we’ll tie down when we have to. See it out. But we should make it back before it hits.”

  “Supposing we’re in the sand?” Wailing Joe persisted. “You can’t tie down in the sand.”

  “Will you leave it alone, Joe? We won’t be in the sand. And the Season’s not due.”

  “Your call,” Wailing Joe remarked in a don’t say I didn’t warn you tone.

  Kean also worried about Hawkerman’s determination to reach the cache. It was unlike him to take risks like this. Even using the lightest metals for your trailer, a small team like this one made slow progress, and traveling more than a few miles a night was impossible. The wheeled trailer they tugged over the barren land carried all their belongings. It took time and effort.

  And what if they did manage to find the cache? It would be even slower going with booty aboard. Kean would rather they turned around now and headed back up to the Lakes to dig in for the storm season. Close to the Lakes was the great pale Pyramid.

  He’d thought about the Pyramid often, wondering what it would be like to live among the soft-skinned inhabitants with their easy lives and their imperious ways. When he was younger, he had fantasized about being invisible so he could go in and have a look around; now he found himself close to approving of Fireface’s venture to destroy the Bleachers. He’d be an alien there because of his six fingers. He didn’t really fit in anywhere when he thought about it. There were Wanderers who looked askance at him because of his unnaturally pale skin. The taxing climate out here soon marked even those who had come into the world without physical deformities.

  In the evening, refreshed, they did some light prospecting. It was too late in the year to expect to find anything much. The best time for a good find was after the Season, when the fierce winds had rearranged the landscape. Then the fortunate might stumble on some near-whole machine protruding from the ground.

  They worked alone, each of them scuffing foolishly at a patch of dry soil and moving on. The activity was a sop thrown to them by Hawkerman, who did not intend for them to waste too much time here.

  Wailing Joe dug with the best of them, and when he called, they came running despite the temperature, for in his excited shout was a hysteria that promised something good.

  Kean saw Joe bent forward where he knelt and dug. The old man’s arms were deep in the loose dirt, lost from sight, and Joe leaned down even more, scrabbling away wildly.

  “Joe! Back off!”

  Hawkerman’s command was savage in its intensity. “Get out of there!”

  Wailing Joe disappeared from sight in a flurry of dust.

  “Oh, that’s good,” Hawkerman said bitterly.

  Kean saw a long yellow serpent exiting from the hole the old man had fallen into.

  You could hear Joe screaming now.

  FOUR

  It was a whole nest of Long Ones, some dozen of them. Hawkerman pulled Joe out by the legs. The old man was still conscious, though both hands had been bitten and the venom was working fast.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he kept saying.

  “Thought you got wiser when you got old!” Hawkerman panted. The snakes had big heads and cold black eyes, and they continued to strike, hitting only the leather garments of the Wanderers. Ax chased and cut in half the one that had wriggled
out. The others were left in their pit for the time being, along with the metal object that had attracted Joe.

  At the trailer Cara said, “I don’t have enough in the healing bag.”

  “Can we keep him with us?” Hawkerman asked.

  “You know what it’s like. I can’t tell you.”

  “What I need to know is,” said Hawkerman, “does he have a chance?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Could we get him all the way to the Lakes?”

  “Maybe. I’ve got a little sweet petal with me, and I think I can inhibit the paralysis, but to keep him alive we need concentrate.”

  “That’s good.” Hawkerman repeated the phrase savagely. “That’s so good.”

  The cache would have to wait another year. The team came first, second, and third with its leader, and there was no changing that.

  “Sorry. Sorry,” Joe moaned. His eyes were becoming puffy and closing. “These things happen.” Hawkerman turned away from him.

  Ax and Kean got the booty. There were no hazards in using fire when the team was in the sands. They lit a cured greenback skin using sunlight through a lens and threw it into the den, and the serpents were smoked out and killed. From out of the small sandy cavern, Ax and Kean dragged a long metal runner from some huge vehicle. A kind of big ski with bolts still screwed into its fixings. They had seen evidence of these land runners before, but this specimen was immaculate. In other circumstances, there would have been more excavations, and celebrations for a part of the night; as it was, they were moving as soon as dusk came, headed back to the Lakes at what passed for top speed. Joe got the ultimate privilege: by now unable to move, he rode on the trailer itself as they trekked through the night.

  After you had learned to mix the surface-healing compound, you got to practice. Even the most maladroit could patch an imperfection if there was no penalty for leaving a rough welt where the join was made; however, the art demanded that you leave no sign of your work. Essa had somehow absorbed the skill while watching her father. She had the feel for it—the pace and urgency, the soft circular hand movements as you worked the compound while it was still pliable, the swift use of the spatula. Invisible mending was the object, and invisible mending was what she achieved.