“We can go, love, but what for? It won’t be any easier to survive out there than here.” “Why?” Evan took a little time to frame his answer. “Because if the rain falling here is poisoned, the rain falling there and everywhere else is poisoned too.” He was staring up at the ceiling, thinking of the cream-colored, deadly snow that was falling, falling above them, around them.
She tugged at his beard, which was now almost entirely white. “What if there were just one of us, then, could you make it through the winter?”
“Stop talking nonsense,” he said, folding his arms around her.
“No, Evan, I’m trying to figure something out.”
He sighed. “All right. Could one of us last through the winter? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. It’s better here with you than out on the desert or anywhere else alone.”
She moved impatiently. Turning close to him, she said, “Evan, promise me you’ll think about the desert. Please. It might be better there. If we’re going to leave, we’ll have to do it soon, before the snow is too deep for us to get through.”
“All right, I’ll think about it.” But the idea drifted from his mind and soon as he was asleep.
At first light he turned over, his arm stretched out to touch her, and he found nothing but her pillow. Surprised but not alarmed he felt the covers, and was startled at how cool they were. He got out of bed into the cold morning: there had been many times when Thea had got up before him, going to check their eternally empty traps or to bring in kindling for the fire. But she had been gone much too long for that if the sheets were any indication. He dressed quickly and went into the living room, calling her name.
There was no response.
Puzzled, he tugged on his boots and stepped out into the pallid morning. Snow clouds scudded over the sky and the smell of the air promised they would release their frozen burden by nightfall. Looking at the white ground he could see her tracks leading away from the house, toward the barricade and the highway beyond.
In sudden fear he went to check their storage closet. Her pack was gone, and her cross-country parka with the fur-lined hood. And he remembered then what she had said the night before, about one of them being able to make it through the winter alone. One, but not two. He closed his eyes convulsively and cursed himself. He had been blind, stupid and blind. He grabbed one of the crossbows from the closet and hurled it across the room, smiling as the window smashed.
An hour later he had packed his things and closed the house without regret. Then he set out, following her tracks through the crisp snow.
There were wisps of a storm in the wind when he finally caught sight of her that afternoon, on the trail south of Tragedy Spring, one that led to the southeast through the heart of the Sierra to the high deserts of Nevada. She was trudging steadily about half a mile ahead of him. She walked as if she were tired, as if her feet were reluctant to take her away.
“Thea!” he shouted, cupping his hands to his mouth and seeing his breath make a fog in the first white swirls that drifted out of the sky.
She hesitated but did not turn.
“Thea!”
This time she stopped, her back sagging at her name.
He increased his stride and came up to her several minutes later. Gripping her shoulder, he turned her to him. “Just what do you think you are doing? Shit, Thea, you can’t last long out here alone.” His hands tightened. “Well?”
She avoided his eyes. “Why did you follow me? Why didn’t you stay there?” She faced him then. “I want you to live, Evan.” “I want that for you, too.” She stared past him toward the blanched horizon. “Look at me. I’m barren as this world. I’m used up. My arm doesn’t work right. There is nothing left for me.”
“Nothing left? Damn it, I’m left.” There was savagery in his voice and the Pirate light in his face. “Don’t you ever say that again. Who wants children in this fucked up world anyway? Thea, I have what I want, and I don’t ask anything more.”
She touched his face lingeringly. “Go back. Please go back.”
“Not without you.”
Sadly she shook her head. “I won’t.”
“All right,” he said taking the hand that touched him. “Go where you want and I’ll go with you.”
She made a miserable attempt at smiling “There might not be any place to go.”
“There might not,” he agreed. There was a moment of silence between them as the wind grew sharper. Then she turned southward again, and keeping his hand tightly in hers, she led the way into the dark mountains; and the snow that followed them covered their footprints as if they had never been.
AFTERWORD
This book was written in 1972; its first chapter appeared in a slightly different form in Thomas N. Scortia’s anthology Strange Bedfellows. This book was published in 1978 from Doubleday. Sharon Jarvis was its original editor, and she asked for a 10% trim on the length, and to soften some of the language, including substituting hell and damn wherever possible, requests which I did my best to accommodate; when she left Doubleday, Pat loBrutto took her place at the editorial helm, and shepherded—to mix the metaphor—it into print.
Although it isn’t easy to identify the origins of many works, there was one early precursor to False Dawn that I can identify as contributing to the book: in 1968 I attended a lecture on the dangers to crops due to the interaction of insecticides, fungicides, fertilizers, and herbicides, as well as potential related damage to streams, lakes, and rivers if current practices went unchecked, as well as explaining some of the reason the contamination was hard to identify and often difficult to stop. Concerns about environmental issues were on the rise just then, and I took advantage of the information gleaned that evening to pursue my own inquiries into the dangers the lecture had addressed.
At the time of its original appearance, there was a fashion in dystopic science-fiction that supposed a world ruined by nuclear war, the results of which often included the Good Guys living in remote regions not unlike eighteenth century agrarian communities, while the Bad Guys clung to devastated cities and behaved like Nazis. Even at the height of their popularity, I found such works unconvincing: if the world was wrecked, it was wrecked—no exceptions—and the chance of exercising moral impact on survivors through righteous character and idealistic practices are not factors in endurance of this, and most other, species. I’ve often called such stories Shangri-la fables, and because I found them hard to believe, I decided to do a novel in which there is no utopia.
For this e-edition, I have clarified certain parts of the story, restored a few deleted portions of the book, explained a bit more of the background of the crisis as well as Thea and Evan’s relationship, but I have kept its vision the one that framed it all those years ago. I haven’t tried to update it to modern consciousness regarding climate change, nor interpolate actual events that have come after the original publication of the novel, though I have shifted the dates so that the story takes place a decade later than I originally set it. It may be that False Dawn is now, at least in part, grim alternate history, not dystopic futuristic speculation, but it remains the story it was from the start.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
15 December, 2011
www.ChelseaQuinnYarbro.net
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The first chapter of this book originally appeared as a short story entitled “False Dawn” in Strange Bedfellows, edited by Thomas N. Scortia © 1973.
An edited version was printed by Doubleday in 1978.
Co
pyright © 1978 by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
978-1-4976-4982-8
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False Dawn Page 27