Twigs snapped, off in the direction of the house. In an instant the woman swept up Vicky and darted into the shed, pulling the doors shut after her.
Footsteps approached. The woman cowered back, setting two of the corpses to swinging lightly. One of them touched Vicky. It was cold and clammy.
“Sally!” The voice sounded angry. “Sal—where the hell are you?”
A certain tension went out of the woman. But her grip tightened briefly, and she whispered, “Don’t you move. That’s my brother. If he sees you, he’ll kill you. Don’t you make a noise.” Then she thrust Vicky down on the floor.
“I’m in here,” she said, stepping outside.
“Now what were you doing in—well, never mind. Have you latched all the windows?”
Lying in the dirt, Vicky could see the pair through a crack between the doors. The woman, Sally, said, “I went around real quiet and latched them all up real good. Nobody heard me.”
The man she was speaking to, her brother, shifted slightly from shadow to moonlight, and Vicky could see that it was Morgan. “We don’t want any mistakes,” he said. “You remember how hungry we got last winter.”
“Ain’t I reliable?” Sally sounded hurt. “You ever tell me do something and I didn’t?”
Lying within the shed, with bodies overhead and dark all about, Vicky closed her eyes tight and tried not to cry. She shivered with cold—the dirt floor was chilly and hard.
Then her mother returned.
Vicky couldn’t see Samantha, the way she used to when she was little. Only occasionally could she even hear her. But she could still sense her mother’s presence. And she knew what her mother was saying, even when she couldn’t hear the words.
Stand up, her mother told her, and Vicky obeyed. Moving very slowly, very quietly, she edged around the corpses to the back of the shed. It was hard not to bump her head into any of the bodies, but somehow she managed.
There were shelves in the back, invisible in the darkness. At her mother’s direction, she reached up to one particular shelf, placing her hand just so and then on command closing it around something.
A butcher knife.
Now be patient, her mother told her.
Vicky slipped back in and onto her bench unnoticed. Her uncle hadn’t even realized she had gone. When he finally looked her way, he said, “Oh Vicky, you’ve gotten foodstains on your nice dress.” He dabbed at them with a dampened napkin, then sighed and said, “You aunt will never forgive me.”
Morgan rapped on his water glass for attention. “If I may,” he said, and the tumult died. He smiled.
“Thank you. I have a little speech to make, and I hope you’ll be patient with me.” There was a smattering of polite applause. He held up a hand to quell it.
“Ten years ago, my sister and I came to the Drift. We had a wagon, two horses, and enough supplies to see us through. Men with guns came and took them away from us.” He was standing at his place. Now he looked down bitterly at his whitened knuckles. “We barely managed to keep from starving that first year. But we got through. We found what we thought was an isolated location and homesteaded a farm.
“We just barely managed to make a going concern of it before men with guns came and burned our farm to the ground. They put chains on us and took us to Honkeytonk, to work the mines. These hands—” He held them up to show how rough and awkward they were. “These hands were almost crippled digging coal so that rich men in Boston might grow even richer.
“Some years later, I killed a man and escaped, taking my sister with me. We found a clean spot, and built here.” He paused, looked down at his hands again, seemed to find strength. “Gentlemen—ladies—what you propose to do today is to bring civilization to a lawless corner of the world. I know that you claim more modest ambitions. But when the protection of law is extended to the innocent and weak, that is civilization. Now I hold that in the natural state, there are only two kinds of people in the world—the men with guns, and the victims. And the one kind feeds off the other.
“Good people, you are ten years too late. I am no longer a victim. I have my own guns.”
As the group sat amazed and confused, he whirled around and stepped outside, slamming the door open wide. “Sally!” he called. “The rifles!” He stood with arm outstretched, waiting.
A few people began to rise from the table, chairs scraping back. Vicky’s uncle took her arm and pulled her away from the door.
“Sally! Damn it, bring the guns!”
The room was full of people standing, eddying about, heading for the door. Uncertainly, the first few stepped outside.
Morgan darted first to one side, then the other, trying to locate his sister. “Come on, sweetie-pie, this is no time to be fooling around,” he cried desperately.
People were boiling out of the stationhouse now. Some few headed for their wagons, to fetch the guns they had left behind. But most headed straight for Morgan.
“What I want to know is what about his sister?” a pretty-looking woman said. “Was that woman we found all cut up his sister? And if she was, why would he kill her?”
The meeting was breaking up. But still, everyone hung about the wagons, talking. They said they were laying the groundwork for next year’s session, but Vicky had heard enough adults talk before to know they were just gossipping.
“Well, there’s no doubt the man was crazy,” Uncle Bob said. “I suspect it was his sister, because it had all the earmarks of a crime of passion. It looks to me like she was killed by having her throat slit. There was no rational motive for him to stab her in the heart, the way he did. None of the other corpses were marked like that.”
“I wonder what he thought he was doing,” the pretty woman said. She had one hand on Uncle Bob’s knee, and was massaging gently. From her vantage point atop the wagon, Vicky watched with interest. This was almost certainly another of those things she wasn’t supposed to see.
“We all know what made him crazy, don’t we?” the smuggler from the New York Holdings border said. “It was eating human flesh. Feeding off the top of the food chain like that, all the radioisotopes get concentrated real bad. I’ll bet you he’d’ve been down with leukemia in another year or two, tops.”
But Uncle Bob cleared his throat nosily, and nodded his head toward Vicky, and the man shut up.
Later, Vicky was crawling under the wagon, playing a game with some dolls she had made out of dried grass, when she overheard her uncle talking about her. She snuck closer and listened. “Horrible thing to happen in her presence,” he was saying. “She’ll probably have nightmares about it for months.”
Which was such a perfectly grownup thing to say that Vicky almost forgot she was eavesdropping and climbed out to set her uncle straight. Maybe it had been scary, a little, being grabbed by the woman, and certainly it had been no fun being stuck in the dark with all those corpses.
But when her mother had directed her to take the knife and wait for the woman to return … When she had leaped out and stabbed the woman exactly the way she’d been told to, and the woman fell down bleeding and dying.… That had been fun.
Her blood had been tasty too.
V
Marrow Death
Boston had an old world charm not to be found in the United States. The secret police, the curfews and shortages, the war hysteria, the constant presence of the mounted Militia—none of these could detract from the city’s beauty.
Patrick Cruz O’Brien sat in an open-air cafe, the latest People’s Globe spread open before him and a glass of foxwine by his left hand. His polesat transceiver—a clutch of instrument chips grafted into a portable typewriter with a whip antenna and independent power source—crouched at his feet like a faithful mongrel dog.
Throngs of workers in proletarian denim filled the street. They were returning to their homes and barracks, dinner buckets in hand. Not one in a hundred of them could have afforded the meal Patrick had just finished eating.
Briefly, Patrick felt the warm glo
w of being exactly where and what he should be: the war correspondent in exotic but civilized surroundings, waiting for the furtive contact that would lead him to the rebel strongholds in the mountains. He felt like Hemingway, or Ernie Pyle.
Then the information officer assigned to him said, “Maybe there’s a story in that for you.”
Children were selling bundles of driftwood by the side of the street. Draymen urged their wagons through the crowds, carting manure, ashes, and bone out of town to the alchemies, there to be transmuted into soil and eventually sold to outlying farms. There was a leavening of American, Canadian, and Québecois nationals in the crowd, bright and garish among the drab prole blues. An African strode by, his electrified arm bangles weirdly bright in the dimming light. “I’m sorry,” Patrick said with forced politeness. “I wasn’t listening.”
“The recycling project,” the information officer said. He leaned forward, and Patrick again noted how clean and unfaded the man’s denims were. “Surely you could write about that.” He pointed across Exeter to where the last of the city’s Tall Buildings was being dismantled for its raw materials. Only the top third was gone, its demolition as slow and laborious as the construction of a medieval cathedral. Late afternoon sunlight flashed furiously as a gigantic pane of glass was wrestled in by antlike workers.
“One,” Patrick said, “on the way north, my packet stopped in Manhattan, and I have already filed more stories on scrap metal, skyscraper mines, and unbuilding techniques than I hope to God I ever have to file again. And two, dismantling a building is not news. It’s local color. Although I don’t expect a civil hack like yourself to understand the distinction.”
A Militiaman rode by on horseback, his leather harness creaking. The proles made way for him, faces averted. “Now if you want to talk about news, we could discuss those two Ethan Allen missiles that disappeared from Cambridge last week. Can I assume they were stolen by Drift insurgents?”
The man leaned back uncomfortably, looked away. His paunch strained open his jacket, pink flesh peeking from between two buttons. “The People’s Militia are not missing any weapons.”
Patrick formed a steeple with his fingertips. There was a fine breeze from the waterfront, and over the rooftops he could see the masts of ships at anchor, each—regardless of nation—tipped with an antenna for stealing weather data from the few remaining seasats. He wondered what would become of the shipping industry when the last of their orbits decayed and there were no more. “Ethan Allen is a tacnuke class, isn’t it?”
The man sighed. “There were no thefts, I keep telling you. If any rocket batteries had been stolen—”
“Batteries?” Patrick asked with interest. “How many missiles are in a battery?”
The information officer leaned forward—Patrick grabbed his wineglass aside—and tapped the newspaper significantly. “Perhaps you could file a report on our local press.”
One third of the Globe’s front page was taken up by a story about an exotic dancer in one of the cabarets who actually showed her naked stomach. There was a blurry photo of her face. The rest had obviously been assembled from government press releases. Back at the Atlanta Federalist, they called papers like this crapsheets.
“Let’s just drop it, okay?” Patrick said disgustedly.
The sky was darkening and the crowds thinning. A waiter carried off the two tables nearest theirs. “The curfew will be in effect soon,” the information officer said. And when Patrick did not respond: “It’s easy enough for you to just sit there—your papers will protect you. But I’m in the civil service. The Militia won’t even look at my papers.”
Patrick smiled nastily. “I expect you’d better be running home then, hadn’t you?”
Blandly the man said, “Well, maybe I’ll stay.”
“Please,” Patrick said. “Don’t bother pretending you’re not a police spy. It’s painful to watch you try.” He stirred the dregs of his wine with a fingertip, and gave up all hope of making his contact that evening.
“Excuse me, gentlemen.”
Someone slapped a handful of papers onto the table. Patrick glanced down, startled. A well-dressed old man—a dwarf, with huge head and shrewd eyes—stood before him, smiling. “Take a look,” he urged.
Patrick glanced over the titles. “The Distribution of Rasioisotopes in a Fresh Water System,” said one. “Reproduction of the Sand Flea in Difficult Environments,” read another. “Human Migration Patterns Within the Drift.”
“Get out of here!” The information officer raised an arm, as if to take a swat at the old man. Perhaps he thought that dwarfism reflected badly on the People’s Bureau of Health.
“This man is my guest,” Patrick said firmly. He offered a chair, and the old-timer climbed up on it.
“Robert Esterhaszy,” the dwarf said. “I’ve just submitted copies of these to the New England Journal of Radioencology. They charge an arm and a leg for publication, but they’re not subsidized by the government, so it’s worth paying extra for the credibility. Look at this.” He separated out a piece of paper from the rest, slid it to Patrick.
It read: “I’m your contact. Can’t you get rid of this jerk?”
Patrick looked up and shrugged almost imperceptibly. Esterhaszy nodded to himself, then removed a billfold from his pocket. He slid out three orange bills and laid them side by side in front of the information officer. “Take a hike,” he said.
Without the slightest hesitation, the man took the money and left.
“Jesus,” Patrick said.
Esterhaszy grinned. “Thought you were familiar with corruption, eh, kid? Come on, pay up and let’s go. We have a carriage waiting.”
As they stood, Patrick folded his copy of the Globe so that only the topmost quarter showed. CEASEFIRE IN DRIFT, the headline read. And in a smaller subcaption: Truce To Be Signed Within Month. “Have you seen this?” he asked.
Esterhaszy barely glanced at it. “Don’t believe everything you see in the papers.”
To go by appearance only, the carriage might have been built in Victorian times. It was new, though, manufactured in the Greenstate holding of Albany, and the suspension, axles, and tires were the product of late twentieth century technology. An automobile would have cost less, but internal combustion engines were banned from the city area, as part of the government’s program to limit coal fuels to the reindustrialization effort.
After a glance through the curtain at the darkening street, Patrick asked, “How strong is your revolution here in the capital?”
Esterhaszy lit up a fat marijuana cigar. “I don’t know what they’ve told you, kid,” he said, “but there’s no revolution within the Greenstate at all. It’s simply Drifters trying to kick out the exploiters. We got no programs for dissatisfied Greenstaters at all. Let ’em launch their own war.”
“Fair enough,” Patrick said. “Tell me, from your own point of view—what is this revolution all about?”
“Coal.”
When the man did not go on, Patrick said, “Could you elaborate?”
“Sure. The only thing the Drift has that anyone wants is the coal fields at Honkeytonk. Last surviving hunk of anthracite in North America. It’s currently being operated by the Drift Corporation for the joint benefit of the United States and the Greenstate Alliance. They mine the coal, crack it, and ship half the coal oil north and the other half south. What we—the people of the Drift—want is to cut ourselves in on the profits.”
The carriage was thick with smoke. Unobtrusively, Patrick cracked his window to let a little fresh air in. “That’s a very cold reading of your own cause, Mr. Esterhaszy.”
“I’m an old man,” Esterhaszy said. “It’s too late to kid myself. Obviously we think we’re justified. But you’ll have to talk to some of the younger folks to get the revolutionary jargon.” He chuckled.
“What about this truce? Is it actually being considered? Will it be signed?”
Esterhaszy sobered. “Oh well, it’s true there are negotiations
going on between the Drift Corporation and us. In fact, that’s the main reason we’re here in Boston, to speak with some intermediaries. And it would be nice if we could settle it with words. But, no, I’m afraid there’s a lot of blood and dying ahead of us before this one gets sorted out.”
Secretly—unworthily—Patrick felt relieved. He’d sunk a lot of time into this junket, and had no desire for the war to fizzle out before he got to it. Covering wars was how a correspondent made a name for himself. This little revolution could do his career a lot of good.
“Still,” Esterhaszy said wistfully, “at least we’re talking. So there’s always hope.”
The carriage stopped. Through his window Patrick could see old brick walls, and nothing else.
Then the door opened, and a woman stepped in. She was tall, and dressed in a red evening gown. Her hair was long and straight and white as albino flame. She kissed the dwarf on the cheek, then offered Patrick her hand. “Victoria Paine,” she said. “I’m the figurehead of this particular revolution.”
Patrick felt light-headed. He saw stars sparkling in Victoria’s hair. Belatedly he realized that he had inhaled a lot of smoke from Esterhaszy’s cigar. He hesitated, then said, “You’re a very beautiful woman, Ms. Paine.”
She threw her head back and laughed, exposing a long white neck, and a necklace made of small, oddly shaped lumps of silver. “No, no, I’m not. It’s the height and the hair that fool you. If you look closely, you’ll see that I’m actually rather plain.”
The carriage lurched forward into the night. As she talked, Patrick studied the revolutionary closely. She was painfully young, perhaps nineteen, and her eyes were a blazing green. There was a thin pink triangle about her nose and mouth—the abrasion line from her nucleopore mask—but other than that her skin was pale and clear. And yes, if you ignored the life that shone through her face like clear, pure flame, she was not lovely.
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