Withûr We

by Matthew Bruce Alexander

  Such would be the news in the coming weeks when Oliver arrived at Nigel’s to pick up his friend. He arrived in a curious vehicle. It was a tiny four wheel apparatus patched together with mismatched parts, as if assembled in a junkyard from bits and pieces meant for diverse other uses. It had a rickety roof, two seats, and sides made from some translucent canvas that opened by way of a zipper. It was drafty, it was uncomfortable, and it was amazing that Oliver managed to fit inside it.

  Alistair came out to meet his friend, dressed in home stitched winter clothing so that only a strip around his eyes could be seen. He knew the vehicle and had little confidence in its ability to keep the cold out. Unzipping the side canvas, he got in the passenger seat with a nod to his friend. Oliver pulled the vehicle onto the snow-covered street and slowly drove down the side of the hill, whistling in that cheery way he always did when everyone else found reason to frown.

  “There’s a heater on the floorboard between us,” Oliver told him, and Alistair reached down and flipped it on. “If it needs more juice, I’ve got a battery behind the seat.”

  They scampered over the buried streets of Arcarius at a pace only slightly in excess of what Alistair could have achieved with an all out run. It therefore took some time before they left the city and penetrated the surrounding hills on a winding dirt path that traced the low valleys between the hilltops. After they left the city, Alistair reached down and flipped off the heater.

  “My feet are sweating,” he complained.

  “I know. As soon as your face unfreezes, your feet are too hot.”

  He dealt with the drafts for a while to let his feet cool, and as the sun rose higher and the day warmed a bit, the warmth loosened their tongues and they chatted. Before they realized it, the city of Arcarius disappeared. It took two hours to reach that point, and it took another two to reach their destination. At one point Alistair had to get out of the automobile and push up a steep and icy incline. The heater was turned back on, back off, and then back on again before they pulled into view of their destination.

  It was an isolated cabin made of timber. There was a stone chimney, a winding driveway through a spacious yard, and a mailbox out front. Where smooth undisturbed snow should have been, however, the yard had been torn up as if an army regiment had camped there. Alistair spotted several damaged areas of the cabin itself, including a missing front door.

  A look of concern on his face, Oliver pulled into the ravaged driveway and up to the house. He shared an apprehensive look with Alistair, and then stopped his vehicle. The two exited slowly, approaching the house like a sleeping dragon. They heard a thud from inside, followed by a curse. Rather than concern Oliver, it put him at ease and he lengthened his stride. Upon reaching the open door, Oliver called out a greeting. Alistair, pulling the ski mask off his head, arrived in time to see a short stocky man with auburn hair approach Oliver and shake his hand.

  “What happened—” Oliver began, but the man shushed him. With a wave, he indicated they should follow, and this they did around a corner and down a flight of stairs into a dark basement even colder than the cabin proper.

  “I thought I told you not to come,” the man said, his smile friendly but his voice betraying irritation. He lit a kerosene lamp in the darkness, and its light was just enough to flicker gently on the basement walls.

  “I never got the message,” Oliver replied, his breath a great cloud obscuring the space between them.

  “Did you check last night?”

  “Yeah.”

  The man shook his head and sighed, and then his gaze found Alistair. “Is this the guy?”

  “This is Alistair,” Oliver replied, opening his stance to include them both in his speech. “Alistair, this is Kendrick.”

  Alistair and Kendrick shook hands.

  “Well,” said Kendrick, “they’re no doubt watching the place. That’s why I left a message for you not to come. You’ll be in their files now.”

  “Who’s watching?” asked Alistair, his voice betraying concern.

  “The tin men,” Kendrick replied as if Alistair were silly for not knowing. “I haven’t seen them since they finished wrecking my place, but since they didn’t find what they were looking for…”

  “What happened?” asked Oliver.

  Kendrick shook his head. “Somebody fingered me… I don’t know. A whole battalion showed up here last night and tore the place apart.”

  “Did they find anything?”

  “Of course not. But you two are going to be in their database now. Nothing to be done about it.” He shrugged in resignation. “We might as well get this done.” He turned a frank gaze on Alistair. “You got payment?”

  “I’ve got payment. You’ll see it when I see my order.”

  “Fair enough,” said Kendrick, and he pulled a small communicator from his pocket and spoke into it. “Bring it up, Ryan.” So saying, he grabbed the kerosene lamp and left.

  “Should we do this right now, with the tin can around?” Alistair asked from his wake.

  “They’re not going to know anything is going on. And if they try to jump us, your item is in a special container. We’ll incinerate it before the tin have a chance to grab it.”

  “It won’t burn,” Alistair informed him.

  This stopped Kendrick in his tracks. “What?”

  “If you got what I asked for, it won’t burn.”

  The black market merchant paused for a second and then shrugged. “Nothing for it now,” he said with a sigh and led them back upstairs.

  It was only a few minutes later when another man entered the cabin. He was of a stocky build, medium height with medium brown hair and still holding onto his youth. He sported a slash of a scar on the left side of his face. Under his right arm he held a black container in the shape of a briefcase.

  “Oliver,” the man said with a nod. Oliver returned the greeting with a nod of his own.

  “Alistair, this is Ryan Wellesley. Ryan, this is Alistair Ashley, a good friend of mine.”

  Ryan managed a nod towards Alistair. Then he said, “Oliver, we told you not to fucking come.”

  “I never got the message.”

  “What do you mean you never got the fucking message?”

  “What I said.”

  Ryan Wellesley threw his unburdened left arm up in the air. “Can anybody do their fucking job around here?”

  “No one, Ryan,” said Kendrick. “Just you.”

  “Don’t give me your shit. I’m sick of everybody else dropping the fucking ball.” With that, he tossed the container at Alistair, but Kendrick intercepted it.

  “If you’ve got the payment,” interjected Kendrick. Then he said, “Hold on a minute.”

  He went outside and looked around. Still cautious, he returned and took them to a back room cluttered with broken furniture and other odds and ends. “We’ll do it in here, and talk soft. Where’s the payment?”

  Alistair produced a small, solid gold bar from his coat pocket and set it on a broken cabinet resting against the wall. Kendrick’s eyes were drawn to it as if by magnetic forces. His face was blank but his eyes glinted.

  “We went through a lot of trouble to get this…” he breathed.

  “This was the price we agreed on. You’re not going to raise it now.”

  Alistair’s stern words snapped Kendrick out of his entrancement. “No, no… I didn’t mean… Do you want to examine your purchase?”

  Alistair held out his hand and Kendrick passed him the case. From afar it seemed sleek, but now dents and imperfections on its surface were obvious. The lock was even rusted. Something like this, got illegally no doubt, was a difficult and expensive find. It had probably been in use for many, many years. It even looked like the small keypad was not the original. An item like this would be patched and fixed and repatched and refixed until no more use could be squeezed out of it.

  On Kaldis they replace these things as soon as the design goes out of style, Alistair remembered.

  “44533,
” Ryan interrupted Alistair’s reverie.

  After Alistair punched in the code on the keypad, the container snapped open. Inside was a suit of a sleek and thin material, all black. Alistair withdrew it and held it by the shoulders. It proved to be a one-piece suit with a hood, the only apparent opening. The sleeves did not end at the wrist, but flowed into glove shaped endings. The legs, likewise, did not end at the ankles, but formed pockets for the feet, the soles of which were lightly padded and therefore somewhat thicker than the rest of the material.

  Tugging at it, Alistair confirmed its considerable elasticity, and when held up to light, nothing reflected off it. The suit was somehow blurry. The material with which it was woven was difficult to focus on. The eyes kept adjusting and readjusting, as if the suit were closer, or perhaps farther, but no clarity was gained, no fine details detected.

  “What did you say this was called again?” Oliver asked.

  “A Null Suit.”

  “A fine piece of work,” Kendrick commented. And then, picking up the gold bar from the cabinet, he added, “Personally, I’d rather have the gold.”

  “And I the Null Suit,” responded Alistair as he folded it. “That’s what made the exchange possible.”

  Oliver and Alistair shook hands with Kendrick, while Ryan, who was leaning against the wall with his arms folded over his chest, gave them a nod. The two returned to Oliver’s jalopy, scrunched inside once again, and Alistair switched on the heater. Oliver, however, paused before he started the engine.

  “Do you think we’re being observed?” he asked, his eyes scanning the horizons.

  Alistair shrugged. “Probably. Someone is out there right now looking at whatever files the tin men have on us.”

  With a shake of his head and a sigh, Oliver made the engine cough and began the long drive back to the city.

  Chapter 10

  After a patch of bad weather, Arcarius almost disappeared, as if someone had pressed a delete key, leaving a blank white page behind. Work crews were sent to fight the blizzard and push the snow back from the government offices, but eventually even these succumbed to the ashen tide. For his part, Alistair was just as happy having snow to cover the eye sores of the city, but he remembered how convenient it had been on Kaldis, most of whose roads and roofs automatically sublimated the snow, with little effort expended by maintenance crews.

  The night of the snowstorm, long after Nigel and Mary retired for the night, Alistair stayed up with his sister to watch out the kitchen window as the flakes blanketed the ground. Sipping at steaming drinks, they talked of Katherine’s work while one by one the neighboring lights were put out and the snow continued to pile higher and higher. Eventually, it reached and then surpassed the window level, encasing them in a chamber of snow flakes.

  It had been a long time since Alistair had spoken so with his sister, and as usual she had more to say than he. He enjoyed listening to her impassioned talk about her scientific work, which currently centered around Flow Theory. It was a scientific field still considered fringe, but the practical applications were staggering should it be proven.

  After the storm, Alistair found himself eager to dig Nigel’s restaurant out of the white hill around it. He did not realize how restless he had become until he put his muscles to work again. Gerald rushed there from his downtown apartment as soon as the weather permitted and grabbed his own shovel. The new, clean, fresh veneer of the city and the exercise of shoveling combined to lift their spirits, and while they worked they even sang a few songs together, meager voices and paltry sense of melody though they had. Such was the good feeling engendered in Gerald that he did not even blanch when Alistair declined to sing some of the more patriotic songs. Nigel’s was back in business before anyone else in the area, these others lacking men as Nigel’s sons to excavate their properties.

  Later, noses running, cheeks ruddy and palms sore, they went back inside to enjoy some hot chocolate and warm themselves by the fire. As he shared a quiet moment with his brother, sipping away at the chocolate and warming his hands on the hot mug, Alistair felt a sort of quiet peace in Gerald’s presence he had not felt since well before he had left for his military service.

  He decided one morning to take a walk over Arcarius’ new landscape. The city still being buried, and his route taking him through neighborhoods that were empty during the winter, he did not see another soul until he returned. A crowd had gathered in front, and his father was having an animated conversation with one of the men. Quickening his pace, he reached the scene with his teeth clenched and his gaze withering, ready for whatever he might be called upon to do. Though clearly agitated, the crowd hastened to move out of his way, and he soon stood at his father’s side.

  “… because I’ll be damned if you’re going to sit on a harvest while my family goes hungry,” the man confronting Nigel was saying.

  Nigel’s expression was not angry; his tone was placating. He held his hands up as if to calm a beast.

  “I’ve got little more than you—” he began but was interrupted.

  “Why don’t you share what you’ve got?”

  “Why don’t you take a couple steps back and guard your tone,” suggested Alistair, and the man whirled in anger. When he saw the size of the man confronting him, he reined in his irritation. The crowd hissed and murmured but it did not go beyond that.

  “Alistair, I’m Ken Brady,” the man grimly, but politely, introduced himself. “I’ve patronized your father’s business for several years now. There’s no food in the city. We need what your father’s got.”

  “And I’ve explained to you we don’t have enough to feed half the people here right now,” said Nigel. “I have saved a bit for my family and I can’t help you.”

  “There’s no food?” Alistair asked without surprise.

  “A shipment was due in two days ago,” Nigel explained. “When it didn’t come, they told us it would be here this morning. It still hasn’t arrived.”

  “What does Gerald say?”

  “He’s looking into it right now,” Nigel said, more to Ken Brady then to Alistair. “There really is nothing I can do for you,” he ended with a plea.

  “You heard my father,” Alistair warned. “Now clear out. And take your mob with you.”

  “It’s not my mob,” the man shot back as he walked away. “They’re just hungry. If that shipment doesn’t come in there’s going to be real trouble.”

  Ken’s departure acted as a catalyst, and the crowd dispersed. Nigel shook his head and, placing an arm on his son’s shoulder, turned to walk inside.

  “The whole city without food?” asked Alistair.

  “None that anyone is willing to sell, at any rate. I don’t understand it.”

  “I do,” said Alistair in a matter-of-fact tone. “It’s happened a million times before in a thousand different places.”

  “Yeah, I know,” his father sighed as they reached the front door. “The State is incompetent.”

  Once inside, they made for the kitchen where Mary was waiting for them, her expression apprehensive.

  “They’re gone,” said Nigel before she asked.

  “Alistair,” his mother delicately began, “why don’t you stay close to the restaurant for the next few days? Until this blows over.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Nigel gently and without concern.

  “I’ll stick around,” said Alistair as he sat back in a chair at the table. “I’m not so sure this is going to just blow over.”

  Nigel joined him as Mary set about preparing a meal now that the crowd was gone. “Why not?” he asked.

  “You saw the price of food. The price goes up when demand goes up, or when supply goes down. This particular problem might be due to a mistake at the Transportation Bureau, I don’t know. But I can guarantee from what you told me and what I saw in your books that food production is down. The prices the empty shops are charging for food is proof. Did you buy non-perishable food like I told you?”

  Nig
el nodded. “I bought a whole bunch of spatch,” he said, referring to the hard meal made of grain products. First developed for the armed forces, it lasted practically forever and was tasteless enough to mix with anything. Condensed into hard bars, it could be boiled, cooked or eaten raw, and was perfect for storing a lot of calories in a small space. “Cost me an arm and a leg too.”

  “You’ll get your investment back soon enough.”

  They heard a door open, followed by two feet stomping to shed snow, and a moment later a rosy-cheeked Gerald, his expression as grim as any other, entered the kitchen.

  “Damn engines froze on the Metro,” he muttered as he walked in and took off his winter apparel. “I had to walk back.” He collapsed into a chair with a sigh, leaning his head back and closing his eyes.

  “Did you find anything out?” asked Mary.

  Gerald prefaced his answer with a another deep sigh. “The shipment is still in Avon. It arrived three days ago and has been sitting there, waiting for a ship with some cargo space.” After a pause, he looked at Alistair and said, “I imagine you’ll make quite a bit of hay out of this.”

  “I’ve got my sickle ready.”

  “The food will be here by tomorrow. It’s a small glitch.”

  “It’s a small glitch for us,” retorted Alistair, “because we have food. And we have food because Dad bought some, and he bought some on my advice.”

  “Should I thank you on my knees?” asked Gerald, putting his head back again and closing his eyes.

  “You work at the Transportation Bureau,” said Alistair, ignoring his brother’s sarcastic remark. “How are shipments handled?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Gerald.

  “How do you determine what goes where and when?”

  Gerald sighed again. “We get request orders from various agencies. We fill out the forms and they go to someone higher up.”

  “And someone higher up reviews them and plans the shipping schedule?”