“We could have the Corporation out of the Drift by spring, if we could only get our people off their asses,” Victoria was saying. She spoke rapidly, urgently, as if she might not have the time to finish her next sentence if she dawdled. “But when you’ve got a life expectancy of—what is it, Uncle Bob?”
“Twenty-two point three years.”
“Yeah, it’s hard to get Drifters to give up a chunk of their lives—they’ve got so little of it. But by the same token, they’re very emotional, very volatile. If we could find the right rallying point, we could raise them. Sometimes I think we need a martyr, like …” She hesitated.
“Horst Wessel?” Patrick suggested.
“Nathan Hale,” she said coldly.
“What about those two batteries of Ethan Allen missiles you stole in Cambridge? What are your plans for them?”
Victoria grimaced and said, “That’s Fitzgibbon’s baby. You can ask him about them when you meet him.”
“One more question,” Patrick said. “I understand that your mother was something of a legendary figure in her time—some kind of mystic or healer; I get varying stories. Has her memory been an influence on you? Was it a factor in your involvement with this revolution?”
“Why not ask her yourself? She’s sitting right next to you.”
The hairs on Patrick’s neck crackled. He felt a strong sense of presence crowding against him on the seat, a hard certainty that someone was there beside him. His head whipped to the side, and he found himself staring into the cold, cold eyes of a pale-faced woman wrapped in a shawl. There was a dark blotch on her forehead.
Then everything resolved itself, and the woman was gone. The shawl became the window curtain, pulled back to afford a glimpse outside. The reflection of his own pale face stared back from the dark pane. And the forehead tattoo was only a finger smudge on the glass. Patrick twitched the curtain shut, feeling a small, involuntary thrill of horror.
“Gotcha!” Victoria crowed. For a fleeting moment her age showed, and she was young, painfully young.
But despite the laughter, her eyes were serious. She was watching Patrick, studying him, as if something very significant had just happened.
Twice they were stopped by the Militia, once as they crossed the isthmus that used to be the Back Bay landfill, before the harbor waters had reclaimed their own, and once at their destination. The first time they passed with a few muttered words from the driver. The second time, Esterhaszy handed out a white envelope with a red wax seal. “Real Arabian Nights stuff, eh?” he chuckled as they were waved up the drive. “Like something out of The Count of Monte Cristo.”
“Damned poor security,” Victoria observed. An automobile came up behind them, cut impatiently across the lawn to pass around them. At the end of the gravel drive, they alighted.
A string quartet could be heard, delicately mingling with party chatter. Patrick admired the tall dark oaks, the orange-lit windows of the mansion. “Electric lights,” he said. “Must be outside the city limits, hey?” Then: “Tell me. Exactly where are we, and why are we here?”
Frowning, Esterhaszy said, “We’re here to meet with some very influential people who will be attending this party. You, however, are only here because we’ll be leaving immediately afterward for the Drift. I don’t expect you’ll suffer much discomfort waiting in the cab for a few hours.”
Patrick glanced up at the luggage rack. His own bags were there, behind the driver. Who kept his face averted from them. “Listen, couldn’t you get me in? Just for a peek?” Then, seeing their expressions: “Strictly off the record.”
“Well …” Esterhaszy said. “We’ll try. But the best we can hope for is to get you into the kitchen.”
By standing to one side of the kitchen door, half crammed behind a serving table, Patrick could avoid the scurrying help, and get a glimpse down a long hallway into the party. The people looked rich and even glamorous from the distance, but he knew, having covered similar socials in Atlanta, that he wasn’t missing much. Perhaps half the guests wore denim, but their suits were crisp and new, more an affectation of humility than a political statement.
There was a man standing just within the hallway, watching silently, hardly moving. After a time, Patrick snitched a glass of wine from a tray and took it to him. “Here,” he said. “Must be tough, trying to guard a crowd like this.
The man turned slowly, studied Patrick with unblinking eyes. “Thanks,” he said at last, and accepted the glass. He sipped delicately, then pursed his mouth in thought, all the while staring into the party. “Republic of California,” he said at last. “Very good stuff.”
Patrick followed the guard’s gaze to a figure in red. Her hair stood out like a torch. “Quite a woman,” he said noncommittally.
“That bloodsucker?” The guard spoke with quiet assurance. “I could kill her from here, you know that? Like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“Why would you want to?”
The guard looked at him again. “If you don’t know who she is, you must be the only person here who doesn’t.” He handed back the glass. “Here. I can’t drink on duty.”
Patrick slugged down half the glass. The string quartet struck up, and half the party was given over to dancing, something slow and stately and old-fashioned. A gavotte or contra or something. “You seem to be the only one here who’s upset,” he observed.
“I believe in the revolution,” the man said. “But by the same token, I’ll obey its leaders. If I’m told to serve guard duty, it doesn’t matter that the people I guard are fools or traitors.”
“Your leaders don’t seem to share your loyalty.”
The guard didn’t even glance his way. “A Southerner couldn’t understand. But seventy years after the Meltdown that created the Drift, there were still active nuclear reactors in New England. I bet they don’t teach that in your schools. And those suckers were only designed to last for thirty years. They were kept limping along by the capitalist oligarchs, and their running dogs in the government. It took a Socialist revolution to finally shut them down. We’re here because of the revolution. Remember that.”
“Uh … right.” Patrick saw Esterhaszy coming his way, and faded back to the end of the hallway, by the kitchen. There, he bent over so the dwarf could speak into his ear. “Time for us to be moving on,” Esterhaszy said sharply. “We’ve done all our business here.”
Patrick hesitated. “I thought Victoria was coming with us.”
Esterhaszy glared back at the party, and at the tall, elegant man dancing with Victoria. She nipped the man’s earlobe with even white teeth, and he threw back his head and laughed. “She’s old enough to bed down whoever and whatever she wants to. It’s none of my business if she wants to fuck a pig.”
Five days later, Patrick and Esterhaszy arrived in the Drift. There had been no trouble making rail connections for the border town in New York Holding, by the badly defined edge of the Drift. But once in Kingston, they’d waited for three days in a shabby old hotel bar before making contact with a gun smuggler. Over sour local beer, Esterhaszy had cut a deal for them to hitch a ride in on the smuggler’s alcohol burner. They had left that night, and been dropped off while it was still dark.
It was almost noon now. Patrick sneaked a finger under his nucleopore mask and scratched. The thing was hard to get used to. “Are you sure this is the right place?” he asked.
Esterhaszy was sitting in the shade of what might have been an apple tree; its fruits were rotting on the limb, brown and liquescent, whatever they were. Behind him a vast, semicollapsed brick factory building seemed to stretch on forever. Before him were the crumbled remains of an interstate. “Sure,” he said. “I did some salvage work in this very building once—Empire State Gasket. Long as whoever’s picking us up knows how to find it, we’re all set.”
“Terrific,” Patrick muttered. But just then a muted whine rose from beyond the roadbed, and Esterhaszy was on his feet, clutching his Gladstone in both hands. Patrick hoisted h
is handgrip, looped the transceiver over one shoulder.
A battered old four-wheeler drove up the middle of the cracked and crumbling road. At the wheel was a tall dark man wearing a remarkable hat. The wind threatened to blow it off as he approached, and he set it down beside him, revealing a perfectly hairless head. He pulled to a halt before them.
“Old Esterhaszy! You surely do look like all fools in one, standing there.” The man laughed.
“And you look like one fool in a Halloween hat,” Esterhaszy snapped.
Patrick tried not to stare at the driver. The man wasn’t wearing a mask; he seemed obscenely unprotected. Patrick could see his decaying teeth, the pink insides of the man’s mouth.
“I don’t need the whiteman mask,” the driver said, as if in answer to Patrick’s thought. “The spirit people, they protect me from the boneseekers, the marrow death, the hot sting of the radiation wind.”
“Save that voodoo crap for somebody who’ll be impressed by it. I want you to meet Patrick O’Brien. Patrick, this is Obadiah. He’s a conjur man—kind of a quasi-religious con artist.”
Obadiah stood up in the four-wheeler, slowly unfolding into the tallest, most emaciated human being Patrick had ever seen. He was seven feet tall if an inch. A battered old frock coat opened to reveal loops of chains and amulets on his bare chest. His clear bright eyes transfixed Patrick. “I be your salvation in time of need, friend Patrick,” he said. “I be your black Jesus. I crack your soul open and fill it with the shock of recognition!”
“Christ!” Esterhaszy muttered. “Let’s just get the hell out of here, okay?”
The conjur man lifted a tall beaver hat with feather dangles and bits of mirror in the band, and seated it firmly on his head. With a good-humored wink, he said. “Old Esterhaszy has no appreciation of the power of vernacular speech.”
The smell of burnt alcohol wafted up from the engine as Obadiah throttled it to life. Patrick held his transceiver cradled in his lap, and they drove off into the twisted wilderness of the Drift.
Hours passed. The vehicle slowly negotiated roads that had crumbled almost into nonexistence. Patrick was tired and bored, and he sweated like a pig in the midday heat. “Most native Drifters are vegetarians,” Esterhaszy was saying. “They’d have to be quite literally starving to eat meat. That’s because the boneseekers increase in concentration the higher up the food chain you go, until—”
“Hey,” Patrick said. “No offense, but I’ve been writing about the food chain and radioisotopes and chelates and genetic drift since I came north, and frankly I’m sick to death of it. I came here to cover a revolution, not to become the damn science editor. When do I get to cover some real live news?”
Obadiah had been listening in silence; now he threw his head back and laughed, a chilling laugh and one that went on for far too long, irrational, eerily close to madness. Esterhaszy sulkily shifted in his seat and said, “You’ll get your news.” Then he lapsed into grim silence.
They were in the foothills now, the road steep and winding, broken to loose rock in places. Time and again, streams ran along the roadbed, occasionally undercutting a bend. Obadiah drove wildly, recklessly, plunging over ruts and clumps of brush that grew out onto the pavement. “Where are we, anyway?” Patrick asked.
“Just that way is the treaty town,” Obadiah said with a careless flip of his hand. “Got a clearing coming up. You want to stop for a look?”
“If he doesn’t, I do,” Esterhaszy said. When they reached the mountainside clearing, Esterhaszy lifted the binoculars and stared downslope for a long time. Then he handed the glasses to Patrick.
The town was rankly overgrown with trees; Patrick couldn’t even spot it at first. His vision shifted from forest to city to forest and back. Gangs of Drifter laborers, white rags over their mouths and noses, were at work clearing the town, under the supervision of a few armed Corporation Mummers. They were chopping down the trees and piling them into heaps in the center of town to be burned.
“It looks okay,” Esterhaszy said. “But you can’t trust that bastard Piotrowicz. I wouldn’t put it past him to be planning some kind of trap.” He sighed, signaled to Obadiah to start up the engine again. “Well, Fitzgibbon is in charge of tactics. Nothing we can do about it.”
“I thought this treaty wasn’t going to come off,” Patrick said.
Again Esterhaszy shrugged. “Hell, I don’t suppose it will hurt us to listen, eh?”
The road narrowed and became a dark tunnel as trees interlaced overhead. The four-wheeler left deep ruts in the loamy litter of leaves that buried the pavement. Obadiah drove slowly here, and with his head tilted to one side, as if listening to unseen voices.
Patrick, watching him surreptitiously, saw that Obadiah had a small earphone in one ear, disguised by feathers and bits of fur. He wondered briefly if it was possible the man had unearthed a functioning hearing aid from some abandoned house, then decided it was more likely just part of his costume.
Then Obadiah brought the jeep to a sudden halt, and leaped out. With an insane laugh he bounded up into the woods and disappeared.
“Hey!” Esterhaszy stared after him in disbelief, then clambered down. “You wait here,” he told Patrick. “You’d only get lost.”
Awkwardly, he jumped a ravine at the road’s edge, and hurried upslope after the fugitive conjur man.
Left alone in the still, hot summer air, Patrick felt half drowsy, vaguely petulant. So far his performance as a war correspondent hadn’t been exactly stellar. Well, grow up, he told himself. Boredom is a part of life.
Then he heard a distant growling, soft and almost subliminal at first, but growing swiftly. Motor vehicles approaching.
Patrick snatched up his transceiver and jumped down to the road. He had no idea who might be coming, but anyone he encountered on a lonely road in the Drift had potential for news.
Ahead, a four-wheeler rounded a corner, followed swiftly by a dozen more of its kind. At the sight of him they pulled to a confused halt, the foremost not a hundred feet away.
The jeeps were loaded down with Corporation Mummers in black uniforms and berets, their white masks dazzling in contrast. An old man in civilian clothing stood up in the lead car and querulously called out, “Who the hell are you?”
With a small electric thrill, Patrick recognized the man from old morgue photos. It was Keith Piotrowicz, head of the Drift Corporation and possibly the one man Patrick wanted most in the world to interview. “Mr. Piotrowicz, sir!” he cried out. “I’m Patrick Cruz O’Brien from the Atlanta Federalist.”
He started forward, hand extended, in the best tradition of war reportage. A meeting like this was golden. It was almost too good to be true.
A shot sounded—a flat crack like two boards being slammed together—and Piotrowicz bent slightly forward. His hands flew up to his chest, and his eyes opened wide in astonishment. He stumbled over backwards, falling into the rear of his vehicle. The two Mummers in his car grabbed for him. Patrick stood petrified with shock.
In one of the rear cars, though, a Mummer had recovered swiftly, and he snapped off a hip shot. A bullet whizzed by Patrick’s ear and the side of his face tingled coldly in reaction fear. He heard the gun go off. The red dot of an aiming laser touched his sleeve, danced toward his heart.
Terrified, Patrick threw up his hands in surrender, turned and tried to run. He lurched to the side as another bullet flew by, stumbled on the edge of the road, and fell clumsily into the ravine.
Three more rifle shots snarled, and bullets slapped into the earth overhead. In blind panic, Patrick scrabbled at the edge of the ravine, trying to climb out. Loose, moist soil crumbled under his hands, gave way, let him fall again.
The Mummers were holding their fire now, advancing on him. Patrick could hear them running forward. He thrashed through brambles and fallen tree limbs, deeper into the ravine.
The transceiver was gone, dropped in his haste. A cool part of his mind registered the fact and, insanely calm, said that
he must go back to retrieve it. But his body was not under his conscious control. Twigs lashed across his face, leaving stinging red welts. His boots splashed in a trickle of muddy water underfoot.
Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw a Mummer loom into sight, head and chest rising above the branches, and lift a rifle to his shoulder. Patrick froze. The man paused with his stock halfway up, jerked suddenly, and fell.
Patrick gawked at the place the man had been. Then his mind focused on what his ears had heard an instant before—a sudden surge of cries and shouts and gunfire.
The noise doubled as the Mummers returned fire. Everything became a confusion of meaningless sound, of explosions and screams.
“Up here!” a voice shouted. He looked up to see Esterhaszy standing above him, offering a hand. He seized the hand and was almost thrown out of the ravine, he was hoisted up so fast.
“Upslope! Come on!” They ran through the trees. Patrick’s stride was longer and he took the lead, but whenever he wavered to one side, Esterhaszy was there to urge him upward.
Over his shoulder Patrick saw flickering shapes on the roadway below, a mass of horses and men, and among them a slim, active figure with shocking white hair flying like a banner. The Mummers had regrouped about their four-wheelers, and were trying to turn them on the narrow road.
Patrick slowed, hesitated, feeling the loss of his transceiver for the first time. “I ought to be covering this for my paper,” he said uncertainly. Esterhaszy gave him a hard shove in the back, sending him stumbling forward.
“Don’t be a God damned hero. There’s a nice grassy meadow ahead, and you can watch the show from there.”
They broke into a clearing that was bright with flowering weeds, and fell to the ground. Patrick snatched up Esterhaszy’s binoculars, rose and quickly scanned the land below. “God damn,” he swore.
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