“Along with a few friends. We’re a pretty technology-minded batch, and what’s wrong with that? By God, you need technology if you want to have any kind of life in the Drift. A century ago they were making plans to live on Mars, Venus, the Moon—why not apply the same principles to the Drift?”
At Utopia, the inhabitants warily came out to greet the rebels. Victoria slipped away by herself, and Esterhaszy took Patrick to meet his wife, Helga, who turned out to be a tall blond woman. Her face was worn and weathered, and there were vicious scars across both her cheeks. As they all three talked, Patrick leaned back in his chair, and wearily let his eyes fall shut.
Instantly, he felt wind on his face. He found himself standing in a grassy green field, before a small white tombstone. Uncle Bob’s geodesic was to his back. He carried a few wildflowers, picked along the way, and now he let them fall before the stone. An incredible sorrow weighed down on his heart, and a huge, gnawing fear.
“Oh, Momma,” he said—only this time he realized from the start that he was imagining himself in Victoria’s place. “I wish you’d come talk to me.”
There was only silence.
“It’s been too many years. I need to hear from you again. If you’d only give me a few words, I’d feel a lot better.”
Victoria waited, but she heard nothing. She glanced sideways at the dark presence that loomed over the horizon, the heavy feeling of menace that she could never entirely ignore.
Victoria? Patrick thought, trying to reach her even though he knew it was only another hallucination.
Startled, Victoria whirled around and saw no one. Back in Esterhaszy’s home, Patrick opened his eyes and found the dwarf anxiously hovering over him.
That evening Obadiah performed a radiation ceremony. While the celebrants knelt and waited for the herbs and chelates that would protect them from radiation sickness and marrow death, he danced something solemn and ceremonial, rod in one hand and an active geiger counter in the other.
Standing in the doorway of his dome, Esterhaszy watched with a disdainful smile. But then several Utopians, his friends and neighbors, joined in the ceremony, taking the sacrament of chelates and herbs. Esterhaszy turned red. “Just what the bloody hell is going on?” he demanded of Victoria.
She didn’t look up from the piece of needlepoint she was working on. Helga had told Patrick that it was begun when Victoria was fifteen, and that whenever she came home, she put a touch more work into it. “Fitzgibbon’s been recruiting,” Victoria answered carelessly.
Esterhaszy turned back to the door. “That’s Jeremiah Peltz! And Rabbit! He’s taking both my engineers!”
“You know what we need them for.”
“That’s supposed to be a threat!” he shouted. “You don’t need my people when you’re only bluffing.”
Victoria started to say something, then stopped. She stood up slowly, and stretched. “It’s awfully claustrophobic in here,” she said, and left.
Patrick caught up to Victoria in the middle of the field behind her foster parents’ dome. The grass and weeds were waist-high there, a dark, shadowy mass in the night. They swayed gently about her as she stared off into the sky. When he put an arm around her, she shuddered but did not move away.
“I really do love them both,” Victoria said at last. “But my God, they can be insufferable.” She giggled. “Did you see the look on Uncle Bob’s face when I walked out on him?”
“Maybe you should—”
“Oh, don’t give me advice.” Victoria reached behind her head and unsnapped her mask. It fell free and she took a deep breath. Then, seeing Patrick’s expression, she said, “It’s okay; we’re in a clean area. Look—not a sparkle, not a glint, not the merest firefly hint of boneseekers, poisons, dark and venomous vapors.…”
“Are you stoned?”
“What?” Victoria stared at him blankly. Then a smile broke through, turned into an almost goofy grin. “Just a little giggle I got from Obadiah.” Then, as he continued to stare at her, “Well? Take your mask off. Come on. Planning to be a prig all your life?”
Patrick glanced back at Utopia, at the tidy curves of domes and the atavistic fire in its center. Small figures, dark in silhouette, were being led in worship by the conjur man. He directed them with sweeps of his rod; from the distance he looked like Moses. Slowly, Patrick removed his mask, filled his lungs with sweet air.
When he turned back to Victoria, she had already thrown aside her shirt, and was hopping on one leg to pull free of her pants. He moved to help her, and they tumbled to the ground together, flattening the tall grass, rolling over and over in it, suddenly happy and carefree.
At the instant of Victoria’s climax, Patrick’s mind was flooded with sensation, her pleasure crashing through him, not at all like his own orgasm or what he would have imagined hers to feel like, but different, unexpected. And in the midst of his confusion and excitement, he became aware of someone standing over them, a woman whose features he could not see. “When you need me, I’ll be with you,” she said.
“What?” Patrick lifted his head and looked about. But no one was there, no more than there had been a second woman in the carriage back in Boston. He looked at Victoria and asked, “Did something just happen?”
But she only smiled happily and shook her head. Eyes gleaming, she reached out a hand to brush fingertips against a nearby white stone.
Somehow, Patrick was not surprised to find that they had been fucking on her mother’s grave.
When the rebels next made camp, Esterhaszy was not among them. He had stayed behind in Utopia.
They were forced to pitch their tents in the middle of a brown-out, a valley where the Meltdown rains had heavily saturated the soil with radioisotopes. The vegetation was sparse and stunted; what little grew died out quickly. Dust puffed up underfoot. Only Obadiah did not wear a mask.
That night they held another radioprotective ceremony. The lead suits were lashed to a string of X-shaped pole frames, looking for all the world like a line of bulky scarecrows. With shrieks and leaps and arcane ceremony lifted from Catholic and Native American rituals, the conjur man daubed them all with red and yellow paint in strange, cabalistic sigils.
Victoria tapped Patrick’s shoulder. She looked tense. “Press conference.” She jerked her chin toward Fitzgibbon’s tent, and Patrick followed her in.
Fitzgibbon was seated on a camp stool, slowly rubbing some balm on the chapped skin of his withered hand. He nodded somberly at Patrick’s entrance. “We’re losing the war,” he said.
“Are you?” Patrick flipped his notebook open, jotted a quick note. “From here you look like you’re doing pretty well.”
“This is a war of attrition.” Fitzgibbon stood, a massive, threatening man. “It’s not enough to survive—we must prevail.” He glared at Patrick over his mask. “Autumn is coming. We live off the land and its people—off their surplus. Come winter, we’ll have to go dormant. In the spring we can reform, but we won’t be in shape to fight again until summer.
“Meanwhile, the Corporation is supplied from outside. They aren’t hampered by winter. They can afford to laugh at us!”
He stalked back and forth in the small tent like a caged panther. As he walked, his crippled arm curled up in a spasmodic clench, relaxed, then clenched and relaxed again, over and over.
“What do you plan to do?” Patrick asked.
“We have a weapon,” Fitzgibbon said. “Something big and dirty enough to force both the Greenstate and American governments out of the Drift forever. We have something evil!” He paused, and Patrick could see that he was grinning painfully beneath his mask.
“Something evil,” Patrick echoed politely.
Fitzgibbon whirled, and his great dark bulk crouched over Patrick menacingly. His heavily muscled healthy arm reached out, hesitated, withdrew. “By God,” he said. “If I thought you were mocking me, boy, I’d—”
“All I want,” Patrick said quietly, “is a clear statement of whatever you’re try
ing to tell me.” He held his ground, hoping desperately that his fear did not show.
To one side Victoria watched intently, her face pale.
Exhaling slowly, letting the anger ease away in one long, protracted breath, Fitzgibbon sat back down. “All right. All right, I’ll—Listen. Back before the Meltdown, every nuclear reactor produced tons of radioactive waste material each year. A lot of it was low-level stuff, and we’re not interested in that. But there were tons of plutonium in the used fuel rods. They were placed in canisters about so high, so broad, and stored away. In the more sophisticated dumps, they’d bulldoze a hole in the dirt, drop the canisters in, and bury them. But at most reactors, they were stored on-site in temporary facilities—warehouses—while they waited to make arrangements for final burial. Sometimes these arrangements took years, and sometimes they were never actually made. Are you listening to this?”
“Every word.” Patrick made a meaningless mark on his pad.
“We’re going right into the heart of the Drift and pick us up some of that plutonium.” He chuckled. “We’re going right up to the Meltdown reactor itself.”
Patrick’s skin crawled. He managed to keep a poker face, though. “Radioactive materials degrade,” he pointed out. “Even if it were weapons-grade stuff a century ago, you’d need a fair-sized industrial base to refine it now.”
“To make bombs, yeah. But we don’t need an explosion—we have the people who can process it into a fine powdery dust. That’s simple enough when you have the know-how. And we have the missiles to deliver the dust with. I don’t believe we need any more than that.”
Horrified, Patrick blurted, “You wouldn’t dare—”
Fitzgibbon exploded up out of his chair, his withered arm clenched and curled almost into a knot. “Yes! By God, I would dare!” He leaned over a low table with maps spread atop it, and slammed his fist down on it. “One burst upwind of Boston, and the dust will flow over the entire town. It will filter through the streets and houses. People will breathe it in without realizing a thing—not until they sicken, and start to die.”
Fitzgibbon was staring off into the night now. He spoke with the calm fervor of a visionary. “It won’t begin for a day or two. Then they’ll fall down in the streets and be unable to get up, they’ll rot in their beds, and keel over while they’re squatting over their chamber pots. Fires will start, and there’ll be nobody to put them out. Those who stay alive longest will kill one another for what canned and bottled food exists, and nobody from outside will dare go in to help them.”
“There must be a hundred thousand people in Boston,” Patrick said in a sick voice. “Two hundred thousand.”
“It won’t be anything new,” Fitzgibbon said. “It all happened before. Right here.”
“It does not have to happen,” Victoria said. “The missiles and powders won’t be ready until next spring, next summer at the earliest. If we can get the Drift Corporation out before then.…” He voice trailed off uncertainly; she looked to Fitzgibbon for confirmation.
Reluctantly, he nodded. “Yes. We are not interested in destruction for its own sake. If there were no need, we would not use the missiles.” Then his voice brightened a bit. “However, you saw what happened at Honkeytonk. We won a major battle, and only got thirty recruits out of it. It’ll take some kind of miracle to win our fight before then.”
Away from the tent, Victoria clenched her hands and said bitterly, “I did not join up to become famous as the woman who killed two hundred thousand civilians.”
“Why, then?”
She gave him a tight little smile. “To be a hero, that’s why. I’m not going to live long, I want my life to burn bright in the night, like—like some kind of beacon, either urging people on or warning them away, I don’t care which. But it’s got to be good and whole and pure. I want those bastards to admire me when I’m gone! And it’s got to be under my own control, not that of Fitzgibbon or blind necessity or …” She hesitated. “Or anyone else!”
Patrick reached out to touch her, and she jerked away, then strode angrily off into the night. He went back to his tent to write up the interview.
Patrick threw in a few purple additions of his own, largely in the description of the dusting of Boston, which he played up heavily. He realized that this was what Fitzgibbon wanted him to do, that he was effectively serving as the propaganda arm of the revolution, but he didn’t care. It was important that the outside world know.
When he was done, he walked the copy over to Obadiah’s tent. The conjur man scanned the text quickly, then said, “I’m afraid most of this will have to be cut, old son. I can maybe transmit the first five paragraphs with only a word or two changed here and there, and then all this background stuff toward the end. But that’s all.”
“Why?”
“For the same God damn reason we took your transceiver away in the first place. How many places do you think there are we can pick up radwaste in the Drift? Any of this shit gets out, we have every fucking soldier in the world waiting for us at the Meltdown.”
“No thanks,” Patrick said. “All or nothing.” He took hold of the story.
Obadiah refused to let go, and for a brief, ludicrous time they acted out a small tug-of-war over the manuscript. “Tell you what,” the conjur man said. “I’ll start it out ‘Censored by the People’s Provisional Government of the Drift.’ See? That way they know they’s parts of the story don’t go through. Then you get the hard copy back and you can send it uncensored after we gone and pick up the plutonium. How ’bout that?”
Patrick hesitated, then let go.
The deeper they traveled into the Drift, the drearier the land became. The green, relatively clean lands became rarer, the brown spots closer together. By day they were plagued by swarms of insects, none of which Patrick could identify. Obadiah chuckled. “Old Esterhaszy could tell you their names, most of ’em. But some—no. They new. There be genuine mutations in the insect kingdom, a lot of ’em, because their generations be so short, and because there’s so many. In the animal kingdom, no so many, and most probably don’t breed true.”
Something iridescent blue landed on Patrick’s hand. Its thorax throbbed twice, and it stung him.
“God damn!” Patrick whipped his hand away, and the insect flew off. The sting was beginning to swell already; it hurt fiercely. “I’ll be glad as hell when I finally leave this godforsaken wilderness!”
“Oh?” Obadiah said innocently. “They’s nobody you mind leaving behind, then?”
For a second, Patrick didn’t get it. Then he ripped off his mask, and spat at the conjur man’s feet. He stalked off angrily.
Victoria looked haggard that evening. They had traveled hard and fast, and it showed. When she tried to pull Patrick atop her, he held back.
“Why are you doing this to yourself?” he asked. “You need a good night’s sleep, not a roll in the sack—why are you running yourself into the ground?”
“Oh Jesus.” With a groan Victoria sat up. She eyed Patrick silently for a moment, then said, “I keep telling you, I don’t have your lifespan. When I was born, they gave me twenty years at best. If I reach thirty, it’ll be a medical miracle. And I don’t expect to reach thirty. Nights like this, I’m amazed I’m still alive.”
“But that’s exactly what I’m saying. If you took care of—”
“I’m a vampire,” she said in exasperation. “I don’t get any nutrition out of normal food. I can only digest whole blood or egg whites—which means there’s no way I can avoid the radioisotopes. Every meal is another dose of death, another step closer to dying of leukemia, like my mother did. So if I want what little time I have left to count for shit, I’ve got to live fast and glorious. Get it? I don’t have the time for deferred gratification.”
“Listen, I’m sorry if—” Patrick began. But she rolled atop him, effectively stopping him from saying more.
Some time later, in the midst of their passion, she muttered, “The worst of it is,” and then somethi
ng else.
Patrick stopped, lifted her slightly away from him. “What did you say?”
There were angry tears in Victoria’s eyes. “I said the worst of it is that I think maybe I love you.”
It was as if a pain that was so slow in growing and so all-embracing that he hadn’t even noticed it was there had suddenly gone away. Patrick threw his head back and laughed. “That’s wonderful! That’s the best news I’ve heard all—”
“It is not!” Crying, she hit him in the chest, hard. “It is not. Oh God, this is absolutely the most horrible thing that’s ever happened to me in my entire life.”
A week passed. They were in the most heavily polluted regions of the Drift, where few travelers went and nobody lived. They passed through a dark stand of rotting trees, phosphorescent fungi glowing on their boles. The ground was damp underfoot.
“Old Esterhaszy’d give his eyeteeth to be here,” Obadiah observed. “It’d be his big chance to name something squishy after himself.”
Beyond the wood the land was half barren, great expanses of baked mud cut through by erosion gulleys. Outlying scouts twice reported spotting small Corporation Mummer patrols at a distance. Once a helicopter passed within earshot. It was clear that they were being hunted.
“Thank God we took out Piotrowicz,” Victoria observed after the copter had faded away. “We couldn’t’ve jerked him around like this.”
Radiation discipline grew stricter. At the nightly ceremonies, Obadiah handed out a doubled sacrament of chelates, and a thick paste he claimed was a mixture of radioprotectives. He brought a bowl of it to where Patrick was finishing off his latest dispatch.
Patrick eyed the mixture dubiously. “Esterhaszy told me that radioprotectives are almost useless.”
“That so,” the conjur man said. “Almost. You’d know all this shit if you came to my rituals.”
“Well, something always seems to—” Patrick stopped. Looking up at the man he noticed for the first time that there were small filter plugs in Obadiah’s nostrils. “I thought you said the spirit people protected you.”
In the Drift Page 19