In the Drift

by Michael Swanwick

  “Yeah, well, I don’t think so.” Gambiosi carefully folded his handkerchief and tucked it away. “What’s the story on your nigger?”

  “He’s on a respirator. Nobody expects much.”

  “Well, he’s old,” Gambiosi said. He stared at the Chagall in silence for a while, finally shook his head and looked away. “Ugly damn thing.”

  “We could go over the biomass projections again.”

  Slowly, Gambiosi’s head tilted forward, until he was staring directly at his knees. He placed his hands on his upper legs, pushed slightly, as if to keep knees and face apart. “What’s the use? I bit off more than I could chew and now I’m gonna choke on it. Another couple of hours and the whole thing goes to you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Gambiosi looked up angrily. “Can the crap, willya? I know how you’ve taken over on me. It’s been a long time since I been running the resettlement program. Hell, even back at the beginning the decisions were all yours. When they ask me questions tonight, I’m not going to have any answers. ’Cause I don’t really know what’s going on any more.”

  Keith said nothing.

  “I mean, there’s no hard feelings or nothing. It ain’t like you done it deliberately. Just—I don’t want you to think I don’t know.”

  “Captain Gambiosi?”

  Gambiosi swiveled to face the two officers of the court standing in the doorway. “You guys mind if I have a couple last words with my assistant?”

  The officers looked at each other. “Ten minutes,” one said, and they stepped back into the hallway, closing the door behind them.

  “I only need two,” Gambiosi said. Then, to Keith, “Look, I can take you down with me.”

  Keith started. Gambiosi looked steadily at him, through eyes that were infinitely weary. “There’s no benefit to me in shooting you down, kid, but I swear to God I can do it. Just try me, if you don’t believe I can.”

  “What do you want?” Keith said quietly.

  “My boy Tony. I got a good job lined up for him, collecting the cut from a string of tappies down South Philly. It doesn’t take much; he ought to do okay.”

  “All right.”

  “Yeah, and one of these days he’s gonna dip his hand into the till, more than he oughta, and he’s going to get caught, you know that?”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Keith said. “But you oughta know, stuff like that—one time’s the limit. I can pull him out the first time, but after that, I dunno.”

  “One time’s all he needs. He pulls a dumb stunt like that twice, he deserves what he gets. I wouldn’t ask you for nothing you couldn’t handle.”

  “Okay,” Keith said. “Sure, I can do that. You got my word on it.”

  Gambiosi sighed, and shook his head. Slowly he rose, as if by taking his time, he could hold off the future. “If you see Jimmy, tell him I hope he gets well real soon.”

  The Council had been in session over an hour before Keith was called in. He sat in the antechamber, idly flipping through his folders as he waited. It seemed forever before the officers of the court came for him.

  They escorted him through an archway and into the Council hall, with its ancient stone pillars and canopy. The room had originally been part of an Indian temple, dismantled and stolen during the nineteenth century, and shipped to Philadelphia. It had been reassembled there as part of the Oriental wing of the Art Museum. Bodhisattvas and other heathen deities leered down from the roof and colonnade.

  Gambiosi was already lost.

  The big man was pale and sweating. He did not look up at Keith’s entrance, but kept his eyes steadily fixed on the wood between his hands. The other members of Council, captains of the most powerful Mummers Clubs in the city, sat about the vast table, calm and bored and disapproving by turns. Someone coughed, and the sound echoed boomingly.

  For the first time it occurred to Keith that he might not emerge from this unscathed. Fleetingly, he was sorry to have set the machinery in motion.

  “Mr. Piotrowicz,” Captain Moore said sternly. In the dim light, his dark skin seemed ominous, his massive fat imposing. “Your superior has informed us that there exists some intricate, clever plan for extricating order from the mess that has been made of the resettlement program.”

  It sounded like an attack, but in fact Moore had given him the best opening he could have hoped for. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I believe there is.”

  The Council sent Keith away, to make their deliberations in secret. But he already knew which way they would jump. He had won them over, all of them. The power that had been concentrated in Gambiosi’s hands was now in his.

  It had been a long night, and Keith was tired. He returned to his desk, to lock the papers away. Then, since he had to wait on the Council’s final judgment, he took out the SM&B requisitions list again, and began crossing off items that could be done without. He lost himself in the work, and so had no idea of how much time had passed when there was a small tentative cough at his open door.

  He looked up. There was a black kid, about ten years old, in the doorway. A runner.

  “Jesus, what is this—nigger night?” Keith said. The kid trembled but otherwise stood frozen. “Well come on, out with it.”

  Taking a quick breath, the boy said, “Captain Moore’s compliments, sir, and Mister Bowles died at Jefferson this evening at seventeen minutes past ten.”

  The hallway was empty; Keith could hear footsteps down at its far end, then silence. After a minute, he said, “Okay, you can go.”

  For the longest time, Keith stared at the shut door, waiting for the tears to come. But there was nothing there.

  He bent over his work.

  III

  Boneseeker

  The young vampire awoke at dawn. She was dreaming of her father when the sun squeezed between the boxcar doors and hit her right in the eye. She winced and nuzzled into her battered leather suitcase, trying for a minute’s more sleep. Then the woman beside her shifted and dug an elbow into her stomach and she woke up.

  The train had stopped. Up ahead the methane-burning locomotive was being yanked and replaced by an alcohol-burner. Samantha could smell the mingled scents over the stink of urine and sour sweat, of human waste and menstrual blood. Only a few women were up, and these sat silent and unmoving among the shadowy sleepers. The sick one in the corner still shivered in the grip of some unnamed fever.

  Sam was hungry. Her belly ached so hard it seemed to throb. She clutched the grip to her and opened it warily, jealously. Some of these women would as soon steal your food as look at you. Reaching in, she removed a canteen, a tin of vitamin capsules, and the last newspaper-wrapped egg.

  The idiot girl was trying to get out again. She had stretched one long, anorexic arm through the crack between the far doors and was struggling to cram her shoulder through. It was hopeless, but she didn’t realize that. She gasped and panted in a frenzy to be free that was almost sexual in its unreasoning intensity.

  Sam looked away, disgusted, and stared out through the gap in her own door at the gray, misty morning. She carefully unwrapped the egg. It was cracked but not broken. She shook a vitamin capsule into her hand, pulled it open, and smeared its contents across her tongue. Then she broke open the egg, separating out the yolk and swallowing the white raw. Surreptitiously, she chucked the yolk and shells out the door and licked her fingers clean.

  Lifting the canteen to her ear, Sam gave it a small shake. It was almost empty—only a swallow left. She uncapped it, sniffed to see that the contents hadn’t gone bad, then tipped it back and let the good rich blood fill her mouth. She washed it about, savoring the taste, before swallowing. Closing her eyes, she concentrated on the feel of it flowing down her throat.

  Gone. With a sigh, Sam recapped the canteen.

  From her door she could only see the cinder footing for the tracks and a few scrub trees. The white uniform of a NIGH guard loomed up, and the chains holding the doors locked were rattled and the doors themselves slammed w
ith an iron baton, to make sure all fingers were clear.

  The idiot girl suddenly wailed in pain and fear. She jerked back from her door and clutched her arm to her body, rocking back and forth, crying. Women started from their sleep, with startled demands to know what was happening.

  A long hoot sounded from the alky locomotive ahead. With a sudden lurch and tug, the train began to move. Sam glimpsed the guard as he trotted alongside, snagged a grab bar, and swung up to the side of the car. A moment later, she heard him stomp by overhead.

  He was whistling, as if he had not a care in the world.

  Baltimore was a sea of gray slum buildings; the train took hours to wind through it. Ragged children were scattered along the tracks the entire way, gleaning whatever spillage was to be found from the freights that passed through. When they saw the NIGH train, they stood back and jeered and threw rocks.

  At noon they stopped at a set of holding pens at the far outskirts of the city. The train jerked and shuddered forward haltingly as the colonists were processed, a car at a time. The morning chill had died away—it was hot now. The process seemed to go on forever.

  Then one set of doors slammed open, and a guard bawled, “Awright, you cunts—out!” They stumbled down the chute, blinking in the sunlight.

  They had all, of course, been processed in the Richmond Detention Camps, and were identically clad in electric purple trousers and blouse—to facilitate identification, they had been told. And they all had the same bruise on their foreheads, where they’d been shot with the tattoo gun, though some few—fast healers—showed only the shapeless blue blob of ink there. But worst of all was how their heads had been shorn in De-Lousing, almost to the skin, leaving them all looking scrawny and awful and horribly vulnerable.

  My God, they look barely human, Sam thought.

  Guards with electric prods herded them through a maze of “people-mover” gates and fences. Sam could see the local slum-dwellers hanging on the chain link fences, watching, vacant and hostile. She remembered their brethren down in Richmond, when she had been run through the open-air chemical showers, and squeezed her eyes shut tight.

  She was jostled forward. A NIGH flunky thrust a bucket of water at her. The water was warm, and not overly clean, but she drank as deep as she could before it was wrenched from her and passed to the next in line.

  Someone shoved a package into her arms, and she stared down at it in blank incomprehension. Then a guard goosed the woman ahead of her between the legs with his prod, for not hurrying. He laughed as she leaped spasmodically and fell. Samantha clutched her package tight and scuttled by, and was rotated back into the car.

  The doors were chained and tested, and a guard slammed the side of the car with his truncheon. The train lurched forward.

  The packages contained food, the food they had been promised a day and a half ago in Richmond. All had been permitted to bring what supplies they could, but these were mostly gone, and the packages were unwrapped with small cries of joy, and very few of disappointment.

  Sam stared at her food. There was a large chunk of wheat bread, a lopsided slab of unidentifiable cheese, and a lump of beet sugar. Enough to keep a normal woman going for at least another day, if she didn’t mind hunger. She put a morsel of bread in her mouth. It tasted good and it would kill the hunger, but it held no nourishment for her. There was nothing here she could digest.

  She could eat, but it would not keep her alive.

  “Is this all?” a woman shouted hysterically. Everyone turned to look. She was grossly fat, and the melanin in her face had broken down, leaving white patches everywhere and a large pink blotch under her lip that gave her an indignant look, like a goldfish with fungus. “I can’t live on this! I got glandular problems—I need more food!” She was waving the empty paper wrapper in the air, like a banner, her food already eaten.

  Somebody snickered. A second joined her, and then more. Faces took on expressions of scorn. Soon the car all but rocked with laughter. It was cruel, ghoulish humor, but it was contagious, and they all joined in.

  The piebald woman shouted indignantly. She threw the paper from her and the veins on her forehead stood out, but she could not make herself heard over the laughter. Finally she turned her broad back on them all and crouched down, facing into the corner.

  When the laughter had died away, Sam eased her way to the woman’s side, and sat. She waited a while, then touched her sleeve. The woman drew her arm away.

  “Missus,” Sam said, and when the woman looked up angrily, she held up her rewrapped package. “Would you like mine? I can’t eat it—honest.”

  The woman stared at her for the longest time, stern and unblinking. Sam proffered the bundle again, then placed it in the woman’s lap.

  Finally the woman looked down. “Well, bless you child,” she said. And then, after a pause, “That’s right gracious of you.”

  She broke the cheese in half, put one chunk in her mouth and chewed. “I wouldn’t take this if I didn’t need it,” she said. “I wasn’t lying. What’s your name, child?”

  “Samantha Laing.”

  “Name’s Celeste. I got short bowel syndrome—you ever heard of that?” Occupied with her food, she didn’t notice Samantha shiver and draw herself back. “My intestines are too short, see. I ain’t got it bad, but it takes me twice as much food as anybody else to get any nourishment. ’Cause it passes through so quick, you see. And I got this glandular thing on top of it.” She forced the bread into her mouth, mawed it down with great, muscular chewings. “But it ain’t none of it genetic. They made a bad mistake about that. I got it from being so sick when I was a child, all burnt up with fever.”

  Samantha, who knew better, nodded anyway. And when Celeste asked what her problem was, she quickly said, “Vitamin deficiency. I can only eat a special diet.”

  “Well don’t you worry,” Celeste said. “They be sure to have what you need ready when we reach the Drift.” The lie hung between them for a long, silent minute, and then she said, “Where you from?”

  “Seven Pines,” Sam said. “That’s just outside of Richmond. I was living at Miss Levering’s Boarding School.”

  “You like it there?”

  “It was okay. I got to ride horses on Sundays, for an hour.”

  “You got lots of friends there?”

  Sam thought of how the other girls looked at her at table, where she had to eat foods she’d eliminate an hour later, the jokes they made, and the stories they spread about her. “No,” she said. To change the subject, she asked, “Do you know anything about where we’re going?” She meant the resettlement camps, but Celeste misunderstood her.

  “I hear tell there’s worse places than the Drift,” she said. “I mean, it be poisoned up all bad for sure, but you can live there. So maybe you pick up a sick cancer ten, twenty years down the line—so what? If the choice is dying now.…” She let her voice trail off. “Listen, lemme tell you a story my uncle told me when I was a little girl. He came out of the Drift with my daddy when he was young—had the bad lungs to show for it too. And he said …”

  Off and on for the rest of that day and into the night, Celeste retold her childhood tales of the Drift. They were full of cannibals and radioactive monsters that came out from the swamps and glowing green mutants who returned from the dead, but they helped to pass the time, and keep Sam’s mind off of her hunger.

  But she began to grow weaker through the day and night that followed and the morning after that, for the lack of food.

  Sam’s stomach was a knot of solid pain by the time the train reached Philadelphia. It hurt so much she could no longer identify it as pain, and was left feeling numb down there, without sensation. Her cheeks burned like two coals, and her eyes felt dry when she blinked.

  The doors slammed open. Celeste helped her to her feet and put the grip into her hands. She was herded out with the others, feeling light and dreamlike. The train went away, and the guards with it; for the authority of the National Institute for Genetic
Health ended here, and that of the City of Philadelphia picked up.

  They were left standing in a large pen, separated only by a single fence from a similarly large holding of men. A few of the more energetic women were trying to locate their husbands, and they were thrust back from the fence by black-uniformed guards. Mummers, these guards were called, reflecting some weird local power structure.

  Sam saw everything lucid and bright, as if the world had been polished and then drenched in a perfectly clear liquid—it all seemed to sparkle. There were a number of battered wooden buildings nearby, warehouses and such, and she compulsively stared at each in turn, as if committing them to memory. It served no purpose, and she stopped when she saw the slaughterhouse.

  They were slaughtering cattle. Sam could hear them faintly, lowing somewhere within the building. These same pens must be used for cattle, she thought. A glance downward confirmed it—they were walking through a mud made of churned-up dirt and cattle leavings. There was some little straw ground in.

  The usual idlers were by the fence, and Sam singled out one, a boy of about ten, as most likely. Feverishly she rummaged through her bag, and came up with the canteen and one of the ten silver dollars she had managed to save from the NIGH officials.

  She went as close to the outer fence as the guards would allow, and threw the dollar over it. It landed in a puff of dust by the boy. Like a flash, he snagged it from the dirt, and held it two-handed, staring at the thing as if he couldn’t believe his good fortune.

  “You like that, kid?” Sam called to him. “You want to earn another one just like it?” It was a Bank of Atlanta dollar, probably the first the kid had ever seen. But silver was silver the world over.

  The kid nodded. His eyes were big.

  Sam threw her canteen after the dollar. It flew wide, but the kid sprinted after it and, puzzled, retrieved it. “Go into the slaughterhouse,” she told him. “They bleed the cattle there. Tell them to fill the canteen with blood—it doesn’t cost much, a nickel at most. Then throw it back to me and I’ll toss you another dollar. Got that?”