In the Drift

by Michael Swanwick

  “So I’m wrong,” Esterhaszy said. The four-wheeler was loaded. Victoria hopped in, handed Patrick a rifle. “There’s only the one road,” she said. “If we move fast enough, we might just be able to blast through them.”

  There was a gleeful note in her voice, and Patrick realized that she was enjoying this, actually looking forward to the confrontation, with a kind of blood lust that was beyond his comprehension.

  Patrick handed back the rifle. “I can’t fire this thing. I’m a neutral.”

  “Then die!” Victoria laughed. The piano was tinkling gently in the background. Voices combined to sing Yellow Submarine. She handed the rifle to Esterhaszy, who expertly broke out the clip, snapped it back in.

  “There’s got to be another road out,” Patrick said.

  “Nope.” Victoria started the engine.

  Thinking as quickly as he ever had in his life, Patrick said, “Wait.” There was another chance.

  Somehow the four-wheeler wallowed down the dirt bank and onto the dock without tipping over. They were unloading the suits onto the houseboat before Schechtman wheeled out to see what they were doing. She emerged from the cabin livid with rage.

  “Just don’t give us any sass,” Victoria said in a friendly voice. She gently brushed the muzzle of her rifle against Rebecca’s lips. The mermaid shut up.

  “All done.” Esterhaszy unslipped the lines. Patrick grabbed a pole and helped push off.

  Slowly, silently, the houseboat separated from the dock. The river current slapped lightly on the hull, lulled it downriver. Again they leaned on their poles, putting their backs into it. With agonizing slowness the houseboat eased into deeper water.

  Back on shore there was motion in among the dark trees. At first Patrick thought it nothing but the firing of rods and cones within his eyes. But no—up there above the house, that was a four-wheeler for sure. And that swarm of midges that flowed silently along the bank—Mummers.

  Victoria had dived into the interior of the houseboat as they had shoved off. Now she emerged again, lugging something that looked like a knapsack with an attached length of garden hose. It was a Lakes Federation make laser pistol with battle harness power source and connecting fiber optics cable. A real antique.

  A dark figure crested the bank and halted at the sight of the boat out on the water. The soldier raised rifle to shoulder, and aimed.

  Dropping the backpack and raising the pistol unit simultaneously, Victoria braced herself and fired. A needle of ruby light, so brief as to be almost not there at all, lanced through the man’s heart. Silently, he fell.

  “A scout,” Esterhaszy said. “I don’t think anybody else has noticed us.”

  Patrick opened his mouth, but said nothing. The houseboat continued sliding downriver, and the whorehouse grew smaller.

  “Burned out the cable,” Victoria said in disgust. She nudged the power pack with her foot. “Lucky we’re not all dead.”

  Rebecca Schechtman was looking on with a curious expression. “How did you know where I had that hidden?” she asked. “Nobody knew about that.”

  “How did I know you were bluffing when you said you wouldn’t take my final offer for the suits?” Victoria said. She boosted the apparatus into the river. It made a noisy splash, then vanished.

  There were two rooms in the houseboat. Victoria commandeered the larger for herself, sent the mermaid to the other, and ordered Esterhaszy to stand guard on deck. Then she led Patrick inside.

  The cabin was softly lit by an alcohol lamp. Outside, the Susquehanna chuckled and whispered as it floated them downstream. “Do you know what the first principle of leadership is?” Victoria asked. “It’s don’t fuck the troops. It destroys discipline.” She paused.

  Patrick had been automatically scribbling down her words, rephrasing them into euphemisms acceptable to the Federalist’s readers. But when she paused, he looked up with sudden surprise.

  Victoria fiddled with the top button of her skirt. It came undone. Absently, she played with the next, and it too loosened. “It can be a real problem,” she said. “Because after combat, you’re really wired. Just hopping with all this nervous energy, and sex is an awfully good way of dealing with it.”

  She looked directly into his eyes, waiting for his next move.

  Victoria made love hard, and she left bruises. If Patrick had been any less aroused than she, he could not possibly have enjoyed it. But with all the pent-up desire and excitement of the past week, he found himself responding in kind, energetically and with an intensity that was almost frightening. Lost in the feel of flesh against flesh, he could no longer tell where his body ended and hers began.

  Afterward, she held him tightly, and cried into his shoulder. But when he asked her why, she simply shut her eyes tight and shook her head. He could feel the fear within her, but he could not read it.

  In the morning, Patrick awoke before Victoria. He dressed quietly and went on deck. He walked out slowly, trying to undo small cricks in his legs, and found that the boat had beached on a bend of the river. Esterhaszy was leaning on the rail, staring out into the water. Patrick joined him, saw that Schechtman was swimming gaily in the brown river water.

  With a flash of white breasts, she surged forward and swept her arm across the surface of the river, spraying them both with water. Laughing, they retreated, and she swam off some distance.

  “Jesus,” Esterhaszy said wonderingly, “to be young again! There’s a primordial experience, eh?”

  But Patrick only smiled. He had his vampire lover in the cabin, and could watch mermaids with cool detachment.

  By noon, Esterhaszy and Victoria had gone foraging and returned with a horse and wagon. As Patrick helped load it, he asked, “Where did you get this rig, anyway?”

  “The owner gave them to us because he liked our looks,” Victoria snapped. “Any more stupid questions?”

  Leaving the mermaid to shift for herself, they went on to rendezvous with Fitzgibbon. To Patrick’s surprise, they curved around Honkeytonk and rejoined the rebels in a covert camp within quick striking distance of the coalfields. “We could never pull this sort of operation if Piotrowicz were still in charge,” Fitzgibbon said in a pre-attack interview. “But his subordinates are all political appointees—mediocrities. They’ll be dazzled by the obvious.”

  They attacked in late afternoon, as the shifts were changing and miners filing wearily out of the mountain. Patrick watched from the mountainside above Honkeytonk as the rebels attacked from two sides. He had wanted to be among them, but Fitzgibbon had refused to risk him. Indeed, the rebel captain had ordered him guarded and kept from the action, forcibly if necessary.

  What he saw was a confusion of people running and yelling. Some of the people were shooting weapons. He could make out little pattern to the scurrying about.

  There did not seem to be many Corporation Mummers in the fight, which confirmed what Fitzgibbon had said, that the main forces had been led away for a vengeance raid on what their leaders had been made to think was the rebel encampment. Honkeytonk was left all but undefended.

  As Fitzgibbon had explained it, “They know we can’t hold Honkeytonk. They know we won’t destroy it. And they know it’s not worth the loss of soldiers to steal what little we can carry off.”

  “Then why are you going to attack?” Patrick asked.

  And then Fitzgibbon’s face had twisted up in a snarl, and his withered, curled arm grasped spasmodically at his shoulder. “To make the bastards pay,” he said in a chilling whisper. “To make them suffer, as I have!” Then, catching himself, “No, that was off the record. We’re doing it for psychological purposes. To show the miners that we can, that we’re not without strength, and that we don’t ultimately intend to hurt them.”

  Off the record, my ass, Patrick thought. He smiled politely.

  The conquerors formed a parade through the center of town. Townspeople flooded out of the crumbling brick buildings, to watch and cheer. They all wore white masks, almost all of clot
h and only a few of nucleopore filter.

  An aged woman kissed Victoria’s boot as she rode imperiously by, and the rebel leader didn’t even look down.

  Following after, pushing his way through the jubilant crowds—either the Corporation was not very popular here or its advocates wisely stayed inside—Patrick noted with horror that most of the children were visibly malformed. They had twisted arms and legs, oversized and lopsided skulls, club feet and cataracts, wens and cysts and toothless jaws. The adults were not so ravaged by birth defects, and most spoke in Southern, Midwestern, or Philadelphia accents. But they were riddled by disease, marked with newpox scars, missing fingers or hands from accidents in the mines.

  This was the first close look Patrick had had at Drift society. The rebels were a comparatively healthy lot; few of these people could have kept up with them.

  He found Obadiah painting radiation hexes on the doorsill of what had been a Corporation Mummer bunk-house, and paused to talk. “This be my work,” the conjur man said. “Esterhaszy sets up a medical station for the grown, and I set up a conjur hut for the tiny. Between us, we handle life and death.” And when Patrick asked, he explained, “Parents bring in their newborn for me to pass judgment on. I decide whether the mutations are functional or not, judge whether the child can survive. It it passes, I hand it back to the parents.”

  “And if not?”

  Obadiah stared down at his large knobby hands. “Hey, man. You can’t expect parents to do it to their child themselves.”

  Patrick backed away, went looking for Victoria. She was busy directing her people in various tasks, but paused to give him a squeeze and a kiss. When he said something about the children, she nodded. “They break your heart, don’t they? But think of their parents. Imagine knowing that your child could have been healthy if you’d had the money to buy a new mask whenever the old one wore out, for water purifiers, and gnotobiotic greenhouses.…” Her voice trailed off. “Hell, I’m beginning to sound like Uncle Bob.”

  When Patrick went back into the crowds, a fourteen-year-old albino girl snagged his arm. “Hey, mister. You with the rebels?”

  “No,” he said. “Well, yes. Sort of. Why do you ask?”

  “I want—” She choked, and went into a coughing fit. Finally, she hawked up a load of phlegm. “I want to join them.” She was slight and breastless, with long, thin hair.

  “It’s not an easy life.”

  “Just so long as they give me a gun.” The girl spoke so fiercely that she began coughing again. She bent over almost double before she could control it. “Just so long as I get to kill Mummers.”

  “What’s your name?” Patrick asked.

  “Heron. They killed my parents. There was a strike. The food didn’t come from the farms, and some of the miners took over the shafts. They wanted the Corporation to open up the storehouse and feed everyone. So the Corporation said sure, all right, and when they came out from the mines, the Mummers grabbed them all and took them outside of town and fucking shot them. And left them there.”

  “Go on,” Patrick said quietly.

  “So I—when I came out of the mines today and saw what happened, I went out to where the bodies were so I could bury them. You know? But the bones were all mixed together, so I didn’t know which ones were right. So I was going to bury them all together. In one—in one hole, right? Only I didn’t have a fucking shovel.”

  The child stopped. “How long have you been working in the mines?” Patrick asked.

  “Five years.”

  At sunset a chair was set up for Victoria in the center square of Honkeytonk. Small fires were built to either side, for dramatic effect, making the chair appear a throne. The prisoners—the handful of Mummers that remained, and the Corporate management—were lined up behind her, and those who dared could lodge complaints.

  Watching from the sidelines as the first few townspeople came hesitantly forward, Patrick felt his vision blurring. He rubbed his eyes and his sight recovered for a moment, then grew fuzzy again. Victoria was listening to the complaints. She swiveled to question one of the prisoners. Patrick closed his eyes again. Colors swam on the back of his eyelids, coalesced into shapes, then images, and became suddenly crisp.

  He was looking out onto the square but from a different perspective, from someplace close to its center. The square was transformed, too, overlaid with dark, intense colors. The shadows were shot full of light, and the smoke from the fires to either side of him drifted up, their depths lit with deep, purple foxfire.

  He did not accept all complaints. He listened carefully, and judged solemnly. Then he pointed out three of the prisoners, and they were taken aside and shot.

  The pillars of darker-than-blue smoke drifted up overhead, their somber fires thinning as the smoke spread in the windless air. The dark sparkling was the radioactive particles that had been sucked up from the soil by the trees they were now burning. As the smoke fanned out, the particles swirled and looped like snowflakes. Then, infinitely slowly, they rained down over the people of Honkeytonk.

  The radiation was everywhere, in the soil and on the sides of the buildings as well as in the air, and Patrick itched to see how the crowds stood unnoticing as it swirled slowly about them. The remaining prisoners were stripped of their masks and clothing, shaved bald (amid much laughter), and marched off, to be shoved outside the city limits.

  The warehouse had been broken into, and those supplies the rebels could not use themselves were tossed into the waiting hands of the crowd. Looking around at the excited throng, hands out and grasping as tins of food, tools, bolts of cloth were thrown this way and that, Patrick suddenly saw himself, standing alone at the edge of the square, white-faced and unsteady, eyes closed tight.

  Startled, he opened his eyes, and the hallucination was gone. He stood in his own body, and no flickering radioactive fires lightened the dark square.

  Victoria was looking directly at him. There was an amused smile on her face.

  At that moment Obadiah ran out of the warehouse, and with a bloodcurdling scream, leaped into the air. People edged away from him. He whirled his long staff three times over his head, and pointed it into the open warehouse doors.

  From inside came a great explosion of flame. The crowd gasped and stepped back. Obadiah laughed, ran to the shadows crouching like an ape, then reappeared, swinging a stool wildly. He ran frantically to one side, then to the other. Then he slammed the stool down before Victoria, and sat motionless as a statue at her knee.

  “I will now accept new soldiers,” Victoria said. Behind her, the warehouse burned merrily.

  After a moment’s stunned silence, there was a stirring in the crowd, and a man stepped forward. Another followed after him, and then a woman. In short order there was a line of some thirty-five people. Fitzgibbon strode quickly before them, pushed three away. One of the three was Heron. Angrily, she stepped back into line.

  This time, with a small smile, Fitzgibbon let her stay.

  Patrick noted how Victoria looked at the young albino and shivered almost imperceptibly. She’s reminded of herself, he thought, then rejected the idea as wild and sourceless.

  Flames in the background, the recruits were brought forward one at a time to Victoria’s chair. Each swore allegiance to the cause, placing a hand on the tip of the conjur man’s fetish staff. He opened a vein in the arm of each and collected a few drops of blood apiece in a goblet. When they had all sworn, he presented the cup to Victoria.

  She drained it.

  Now Obadiah opened a small cut on Victoria’s shoulder. Again the recruits were called forward, one by one, to taste a drop of her blood.

  They approached more reluctantly this time, and touched lips to shoulder. Except for Heron, their contact was swift and fleeting. She, however, closed her eyes as she kissed Victoria’s shoulder, and her throat worked, sucking in blood. When she straightened, her eyes were slightly glazed. She backed away slowly.

  “You are mine now,” Victoria declaimed, “and
I am yours. I would die for you.” She glared about her. “Do you doubt me? But you must be willing to die for me as well.”

  It was night by now, and there was a full moon. The rebels, slightly larger in number, rode out. Patrick was among them, and for him the moon doubled, joined, redoubled, time and again, through the night.

  The party dwindled by tens and twenties as detachments were sent away. “The Corporation is still hunting us,” Fitzgibbon explained. “And I don’t have any immediate use for a large force.”

  By dawn only forty or so rebels remained. Most rode horseback, but there were three four-wheelers among them. “The hell of it,” Esterhaszy was explaining to a bleary-eyed Patrick as the sun came up, “is that the money’s there. Enough for masks and chelates and greenhouses and hospitals for everyone. But it all goes to rich bastards in Boston and Philadelphia.”

  They were topping a rise just then, and Victoria cantered up and said, “Heads up, Uncle Bob!”

  Esterhaszy looked startled, then rose in his seat and cried, “Utopia!”

  In the valley below, still wrapped in the shadows of night, was what looked like an antique version of the future. Utopia was a settlement of tidy walks and geodesic domes. There was a rustic-looking watermill by the small river, and a homebuilt windmill by one of the complexes of greenhouses. It looked like nothing Patrick had seen in the Drift, because there was not a single rehabbed pre-Meltdown building. It had all been built new.

  “This is the wave of things to come,” Esterhaszy said happily. “The valley is a natural green spot, hardly any radioisotopes in the soil at all. The rains bypassed it. But we work to cleanse it of what does seep in, too. Over there, that’s our waste treatment plant. And by the forge there is the water filtration system. Bit by bit, we’re removing the boneseekers and radioactive traces from the soil, taking it out of the food cycle.”

  “This is where you normally live, I take it,” Patrick said.