In the Drift

by Michael Swanwick

  The kid stared at her. She might as well have been speaking a foreign language for all the understanding he showed. Sam hurt bad, and she wanted the blood so much she could taste it. “For God’s sake,” she ranted, “it’s easy money! Dammit, do you want me to starve to—”

  There was silence all around her. Abruptly, Sam realized that she had an audience. All the women and the nearby idlers were staring at her. For a long minute the stillness held.

  Then the kid threw the canteen back over the fence at her, turned and ran. The moment broke. The Philadelphians began picking up rubble to throw at her. The colonists edged away, leaving her isolated and alone.

  Sam felt fear. “Celeste,” she said. But the big woman had backed away with the rest. She saw Celeste stoop to pick up a clod of earth.

  Then a stone grazed her cheek, and another struck her knee, and everyone was shouting and the world rose up in a babble of voices.

  She would have died then if the black-uniformed guards hadn’t plunged into the crowd, riot staffs flashing. A rough hand closed around her arm and jerked her away. She stumbled after, unresisting.

  A leathery face thrust itself almost into hers. “You deaf or something?” the man demanded. “What did you do to start this?”

  “I don’t know, I just came here and …”

  “You got a name?” The guard shook her. It was hard to stay awake. “What do they call you, hah?”

  “Sam.”

  “What are you doing in with the ladies, Sam? You got a girlfriend or something?” He began hauling her away, quickmarching her before him. “Don’t let me catch you jumping that fence again.” He thrust her into the men’s pen.

  When they divided up the men and led her away with one group, Sam didn’t even object.

  Sam remembered very little of her ride into the Drift. Only that she was loaded into a truck—one of a convoy—with a lot of men who smelled bad and that it bounced and rumbled on almost forever. There was the smell of burned alcohol in the air, and she remembered thinking how extravagant it was to use an internal combustion engine to transport a corpse, and no more.

  Sam was lying on a cot, under a window. Outside, somebody was talking loudly. She kept her eyes closed, listening, trying to make sense of his words.

  “… back to America and even longer if you wanta go north to the Greenstate Alliance. So you just try it, if you want. Nobody’s gonna stop you.” The voice was faint and had a sarcastic twang, like that of a drill instructor for the Virginia militia she’d once heard. “’Course you got an awful lot of hot land to pass through to get anywhichwhere. I do not advise you try. But—”

  Someone put a hand to her mouth, removed a thermometer she had not known was there. He muttered to himself and lifted an arm to take her pulse.

  Sam opened her eyes. There was a dwarf standing on a stool beside the cot, calmly studying her. His head was enormous, almost half again the size of a normal person’s, and he had alert, intelligent eyes. “Do you feel up to eating something?” he asked.

  Because Sam knew she was going to die, the room took on special interest for her. She could see three other cots crammed between ancient cabinets and desks, obviously salvaged from abandoned houses and in bad repair. The mahogany bookshelves were so badly warped that only half could hold books at all, and the floor might have been a funhouse mirror distortion. But every spot was clean, painstakingly scrubbed down.

  Two of the cots were unoccupied; the third held a young man, comatose.

  “I’m not really a doctor,” the dwarf said. He hopped off the stool, carried it to the far side of the room, and climbed up it again. There, atop a rickety table, was a tin bowl resting on a tripod over a small alcohol lamp. Belatedly, Sam caught the scent of broth. “Mostly I just set bones and such. But I’ve got all these books, and they help. They’re over a hundred years old, but medicine hasn’t really changed much since the Meltdown.”

  He fetched the broth to her side. “I’m Robert Esterhaszy,” he said. “Bob. Pleased to meet you.” He paused, giving her a chance to reply, then began spoon-feeding her broth. It was warm and tasty, and it filled her stomach.

  “I’ll have you up and around in no time,” Esterhaszy said. “I guess I know malnutrition when I see it.” When the bowl was empty, he went across the room to check on his other patient.

  An hour later Sam’s system cleansed itself. She lay groggily passive as Esterhaszy cleaned her up and moved her to a new cot. He frowned. “I think you’ve got something strange.” Sam let her eyes fall closed.

  She opened her eyes and it was night. Esterhaszy must have been waiting, for he was at her side immediately. He held her internal passport in his hand. “It says here you’ve got SBS,” he said. “What is that, some kind of disease? What does it mean?”

  Sam looked at him steadily, without emotion. She found that while she could understand his every word, what he said meant nothing to her.

  Finally the dwarf went away. Sam thought she was asleep again, but then she heard him sigh and shift in his chair. Pages turned quietly.

  A wooden match flared as Esterhaszy lit up a cigar. The harsh, rough-edged odor of northern marijuana filled the room. Half asleep and attentuated as she was, Sam felt herself floating off the instant the light fumes hit her. She looked down and saw her body lying discarded on the cot, pale and thin, and as lifeless as an old rag doll.

  Her awareness paused, hovering, near the ceiling. Then it passed through a wall and out of the building. She was in a city of ruins, a nineteenth-century mill town by the look of it, abandoned after the Meltdown in the twentieth. The buildings were mostly brick shells, with collapsed roofs and floors, though some few had been partially restored with timbers laid across the tops and thatching tied over them.

  The streets were overgrown with twisted, stunted vegetation—predominantly scrub sumac and mutant thistle—with paths worn down their centers. Heaps of lumbered wood lay everywhere; entire roofless buildings served as holding pens for the stackwood. In a former park or Little League field, huge distillation tanks had been erected, and the slow fires beneath them were tended by a few ragged, dirty men.

  The moon was full, and she could see the stubble on their chins, the way the fingers of one’s left hand curled back in an unnatural, broken fashion.

  The stench of woodsmoke was everywhere. The building fronts were all black with it. Sam peered into an old brick storefront, and saw that the inside had been refitted as a dormitory, one huge room with line upon line of crudely made cots. Not everyone had blankets, and some of the men she could see belonged in the infirmary with her.

  Something went tap-tap. Sam ignored it. She looked beyond the town, past the joyhouse, into the lumbered-over areas, and saw that a wide swath had been burned down to ashes and bare earth. There were soldiers patrolling there, men in black uniforms with small feather clusters on their chests. They held their weapons combat-ready, and they faced outward, toward the Drift, rather than inward, toward the town. Something went tap-tap again.

  Someone was gently striking her cheek. “Stop that,” Sam mumbled, and opened her eyes and was back in the infirmary again. Bob the dwarf stood at her side, trying to wake her. At the sight of her eyes, weakly reflecting the blue flame of the single alcohol lamp, he gently pried a spoon between her lips, and let dribble a few drops of liquid. Automatically, she swallowed.

  Blood.

  Her face must have reflected her shock, for Esterhaszy smiled. “Ah,” he said. “The patient responds. Old Dogmeat will be glad to learn his sacrifice has not been in vain.” He brought the spoon to her lips again. “We’ll start you off with just a few tablespoons.”

  Eventually, she slept.

  When she awoke, it was day again. The sun pouring in through the window membrane lit up the blond hair of the man leaning over her, turning it into a blazing halo, and the man himself into an angel. He was beautiful, with deep care lines around his mouth, and clear, sad eyes. He smiled and said, “Good morning.”


  Sam stared at him wonderingly. But she was wrapped in ice, cool and clear as air, and could not answer. Esterhaszy dragged a chair to her side and began to spoon-feed her a few more mouthfuls of blood. The stranger ran a hand over her short, almost nonexistent hair. It felt strange and prickly.

  “Samantha,” the stranger said, “my name is Keith Piotrowicz. I hold a high position in the Philadelphia Mummers organization, and it’s the Mummers who are administering the resettlement program in the Drift. I have the power to have you returned to your family. But you have to cooperate. You have to tell me your full name.”

  The ice filled the room, one great lump, and while it did not hinder motion, its cold froze out the pain, numbed it into silence. “Can’t she speak?” Keith asked the dwarf.

  “I don’t know,” Esterhaszy said. The dwarf spread his arms wide in a gesture of helplessness. “My guess is that she can but that she doesn’t want to. She’s probably had some bad experiences on the way up here.”

  “Hmmm.” Hands behind back, Keith wandered away, to look at a large, hand-drawn map of the Drift the dwarf had hung on one wall. It had been copied from some older chart with meticulous care, with later emendations made in the same color ink. Wobbly circles radiated out from the ancient Meltdown site, and there were little balls of red and green wax stuck to the map at various points. The green wax clustered to the north, near the Greenstate, growing sparser toward the center of the territory—what used to be midstate Pennsylvania—and the red similarly dwindled from the south, by Philadelphia. It looked like a game of Chinese checkers just starting to unfold. “Will it help if I talk to her?”

  Again Esterhaszy shrugged. “I’m not a psychiatrist. Hell, I’m not even a doctor.”

  Keith stared at the map for a time, silent. At last he said, “Your information is out of date,” and removed a red glob of wax, replacing it with green. “We lost another resettlement camp four days ago.” He went to Samantha’s cot and knelt by her side.

  “You are Samantha Laing, aren’t you?” He was silent, waiting for an answer. The ice sparkled about him, cold and peaceful. “Because if you are, I can return you to your family. To your father.”

  He took something from the dwarf—there was a flash of silver as the object changed hands. He held it up in the air, the antique cigarette case she had kept her passports in. That’s mine, she thought, but the ice closed in around her so that she could hardly breathe. It sank deep into her flesh, stilling and calming her.

  Keith turned the case over in his hands, opened it. He removed a cracked glass plate from within—an old holograph—and held it up to the sunlight.

  A rainbow danced on the bright dustmotes and, as Keith rotated his wrist, coalesced into a fuzzy, doubled image in the air. Seizing the plate by two edges, he lightly bent it until the cracked surface was flat. The images joined, merged, sharpened.

  A stern man with angular, hawklike features and a dark mustache floated in the air above her. Her father.

  Samantha opened her mouth, and the ice rushed in to fill it, freezing her lungs into silence. A tear formed at the corner of her eye.

  “Is this your father, Samantha?”

  Something shifted within her, something moved. With a great internal tumult, like icebergs freeing themselves of a glacier to settle into the Arctic water with a great steaming splash, she could think again, could feel, could experience pain.

  “Yes!” she cried, and her voice was so harsh the word was unintelligible. Tears flooded her eyes. She swallowed and her throat hurt. “Yes,” the picture was of her father, and “Yes,” she would speak, and “Yes,” she was going to live.

  Keith cradled her head, and hugged her to him, as she cried and cried.

  Sam was too weak to be moved right away. She was bedridden for most of a week, and when she finally got up to hobble about on a cane, she collapsed almost at once. But she improved rapidly, and soon Esterhaszy took to turning her outside during infirmary hours, where previously he had simply placed a screen before her cot.

  She was sitting on the infirmary stoop, the evening after the comatose patient’s burial, when a work gang was marched by, back—to judge by their tools—from the outlying communal fields. The dozen men were accompanied by a Mummer guard, but she knew enough about the resettlement camp by now to know that the guard was not there to keep the men from escaping, but to report them if they tried to shirk their labor. The guard trudged along as tiredly and dispiritedly as any of the others.

  But as they threaded the path between weed-overgrown heaps of rust that had once been automobiles, one of them glanced up at her. His eyes were hard and glittery in his dead face. And in those eyes Sam could see herself as he saw her: young, with no particular face, a purple blotch on her forehead below dirty, crew-cut hair, a face half hidden by a soiled nucleopore mask and still pudgy with baby fat.

  And she felt his tired, disinterested lust, his cold, impersonal hostility. He would just as soon throw her down to the ground and rape her as not, and if he broke a few bones, cracked her spine, snapped her neck in the process … well, it didn’t matter to him. He didn’t need a lot of life in his meat.

  Then he was gone, along with the rest of the work crew, down the road and around a collapsed duplex. The flood of images from his brain cut off, and within her own, Sam felt some newly opened gate shut with convulsive finality. Whatever it was that had happened, she would not be receptive to it again.

  Sam could feel the blood draining from her face, her clenched teeth threatening to bite through her tongue. Her flesh crawled with the memory of his cold, reptilian lust. But she controlled herself; she felt sure her expression mirrored none of what she felt.

  The door clattered open behind her, and she shifted to the side of the stoop so the last of Esterhaszy’s patients could go by. He didn’t glance her way, but stared straight out before him, a young man with skin as pale as his nucleopore, and reeking of despair.

  Esterhaszy followed him out, more slowly, and with a sigh settled down beside her on the step. He glanced curiously at her pale skin. “What’s happened to you?”

  Sam didn’t think she could answer. To deflect the question, she said, “The big, spongy thing inside your body that goes from here to here”—she indicated with gestures—“kind of like two big wings—is that the lungs?”

  “Yes,” Esterhaszy said.

  “The guy that just left—what’s he got in his lungs?”

  “Well, I’m not really sure. But the two best candidates are uranium-233 and plutonium-239, one or both.”

  “They’re in his bones too, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah, they’re both boneseekers. And they’ve got half lives of one hundred sixty-two thousand and twenty-four thousand years respectively. So they stay hot for a long time.”

  “What’s a boneseeker?”

  “A boneseeker is the reason we have to wear these damned masks.” He shifted a bit, getting more comfortable. “It sure would be nice to be able to smoke a cigar on the stoop at the end of the day, eh?” There was a fine, rich sunset spreading itself over the ruins; he gazed off into it. “A boneseeker is a radioisotope that because of its chemical properties tends to collect in the bones. Most of them are alpha-emitters, and would be harmless enough if they were anywhere else because even a piece of paper will stop alpha radiation. But sitting inside the body, the radiation breaks up the cells, causes lung cancer, leukemia, bone marrow cancer—depends on where it lodges.”

  “We’re talking about that bright glittery stuff, like inside that guy’s lungs and bones, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess—hey, what do you think you’re doing?”

  Sam finished untying her nucleopore, and took her first long, clean breath in days. “It’s okay,” she said. “There’s a little dusting of that stuff way down the street there—see? But there’s none of it near to us.”

  Esterhaszy stared down the street, then back at Sam, at a loss for words. Sam stood up.

  “I’m awful tired. I gues
s I’ll go in to sleep now.”

  That night Sam dreamed she hung high over the ruined town and could see it all laid out beneath her. She could see how the long fingers of radioactive dust, glittering blue and pink and white, reached out of the Drift and into the town. One stretched across the communal fields to the north of town. The ruins served as windbreaks, and the drift patterns piled up on the east side, away from the prevailing westerly winds. The entire camp should be moved west a quarter length, Sam realized, and a bit south.

  Nestled within the town were the camp buildings, the common barracks to the center, and the privately restored buildings of the trustees in a loose ring about them. Off by itself was a lone house in which lived four or five women, haggard and hard-looking.

  She looked away from the town, into the woods that glittered in places like Fairyland and elsewhere were as moonless dark as the pits of Hell. Where the glitter was most pronounced, the trees were scant and malformed, some of them dwarfish and twisted. Just above the trees, to the west, there was still a scattering of light, residual radiation from the sun. To the south—

  To the south, the horizon line glowed. The glow rose and grew into a great, bulging blue dome, and thrusting up from the center of the dome was a thin, bright spike of light, so unbearably intense that Sam had to flinch away. It was huge, miles high, and felt unspeakably dangerous.

  The night pulsed.

  Hanging motionless above the town, Sam felt the sky tilt. Slowly, she began to slide into the cold burning light of the thing beyond the horizon. She felt its dark, uncaring glee as it reached to swallow her up. Frantically, she grabbed for support. But the air provided no handholds. She began slipping faster.

  The night pulsed.

  Desperately, she willed herself downward, toward the safety of the town. And slowly she did descend, but still the thing pulled her toward itself, its huge gravities reaching out to crush her in their embrace. The thing was located somewhere far over the horizon, in the direction of the Meltdown site—indeed, Sam realized, the correlation of place was so exact that it must be at the Meltdown site, must in fact be the Meltdown site.