In the Drift

by Michael Swanwick

  Obadiah looked puzzled, then figured it out and laughed. “Maybe I help them out a little.”

  Victoria no longer siphoned off blood from the pack animals. She drank from bloodbags dosed with dioxylate to inhibit clotting. They were traveling fast and light, letting the horses forage for their food.

  Every night, after they made love, Patrick dreamed that Victoria sat up for hours, straining for a vision that never came.

  They arrived at a place called Highspire, and camped within the walls of what had once been a roadside restaurant. Scratching about, several rebels found old orange tiles and lined their fires with them. While the two leaders conferred over a handful of century-and-a-half-old government reports and layout charts, Obadiah explained to Patrick that they were just out of sight of the Meltdown reactor’s cooling towers.

  “So you’re going through with it,” Patrick said. “You’re going to let that criminal kill hundreds of thousands of people.”

  “Hey, I done my best. I got a doctorate in mass-behavioral psychology from Harvard, you know that? And I put everything I learned into building up Victoria. In fact, I think I did a pretty good job, considering. But you saw the results—people just not willing to give up that big a chunk of their lives.”

  “There’s still another alternative,” Patrick said.

  “Well, there’s martyrdom.” Obadiah shrugged. “Worked pretty well for Joan of Arc. But something like that be hard to arrange. Victoria might not want to volunteer for it.”

  “What I was thinking of—” Patrick began testily. He stopped, lowered his voice. “I was thinking of assassination.”

  Obadiah looked surprised. “You going to kill Fitzgibbon?” He squinted at Patrick, shook his head. “Naw, you just want somebody to do it for you. Has it occurred to you that an assassin would probably die too? Now just who you got in mind for the job?”

  Just then Victoria and Fitzgibbon emerged from the tent, and Obadiah had to hurry off to assemble the nightly ghost shirt ceremony. I could kill him myself, Patrick thought. But listening to the words, he found he simply could not believe them. It was not just that he had never fired a gun in his life. It was that he was a neutral, an observer. His job was to bring back word of what occurred, not to interfere, not to shape the events himself.

  “Just beyond those hills, just over that rise,” Obadiah told his assembled congregation, “lies the Meltdown island!” He gestured with his rod, and the guerrillas stirred in collective unease. “Tomorrow we go there to walk among the atomic fires. We will walk among the broken buildings and the whole, and the killing gamma radiation will wash over us. The air be so full of boneseekers you choke on it, and the ground be so hot it blister the naked feet.

  “But you will be protected.”

  The ragged band of rebels hung on Obadiah’s every word, listening to what Patrick could only summarize as a cross between a science lecture and a pep talk. Beyond Obadiah, Victoria stood before her tent, pale and expressionless, hands by her sides. When the ceremony was over, she ducked under the flap and disappeared.

  When Patrick joined her, Victoria was still and shivering. She smiled wanly and said, “Oh hi,” in a small voice.

  “Hey,” Patrick said, alarmed. “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just your basic panic reaction at going up to the Reactor, I guess. Any Drifter would feel it. I’ll be okay.”

  But it was not the truth. Patrick could feel her evasiveness. “No, really.” He hugged her shoulders, gently rocked her back and forth. “You can tell me, I’m okay.”

  Tears formed in her eyes and, when she blinked, ran quickly down her cheeks. She buried her face in his chest. “Oh God, Patrick, sometimes I worry that maybe I’m crazy.”

  Patrick said nothing, continued to rock her gently.

  “Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve heard things and seen things that other people don’t. Sometimes I get advice from … someone who’s been dead for a long time. Sometimes she tells me things I don’t want to do.”

  “Hush.” Patrick kissed the top of her head, stroked her hair with one hand. He had been about to tell her that she wasn’t crazy, that he had seen the world through her eyes, when she made that last statement. “What kind of things?”

  “Dangerous things, sometimes. But she’s always been right, so I’ve always done what she asked. But now … there’s something she always told me I’d have to do, and I’m afraid. And I’ve begun to wonder if, if it’s just that I’m crazy and all these visions were only hallucinations. The only time I’ve seen my mother appear in years, I was stoned flat on my ass.” Her face was hard and tight. “Damn it, I don’t want to die from craziness, I …”

  “There, there,” Patrick said. “Hush, little baby.”

  They made love awkwardly that night, and when Patrick finally fell asleep, he dreamed that the world was flooded with light.

  The light was deep and blue and profound, and it burned right through the canvas sides of the tent, turning the things within into blurry and indeterminate shadows. It was not static light, but full of shifting emphases of focus and lumination. It washed through the tent restlessly, ceaselessly, like ocean water coursing through a tidepool.

  He stood and pulled on a pair of trousers, put on a shirt. Barefoot, he padded out onto the grass.

  Outside the light was a universal flood, wiping the stars from the sky, fading the moon into near invisibility in its wash. It intensified to the southwest, at its source just beyond the hills, at the Meltdown site. The bright nuclear heart of the Reactor could be seen through the earth hills, piercing through rock and dirt.

  The light was all a single living creature, and it gloried in its life. Dark and beautiful and menacing, it tugged at Patrick, pulling him toward the Reactor. The earth seemed to tilt up on its side, and it was hard to keep his feet, hard to keep from sliding away into the Reactor’s maw.

  A shadow passed before him then, cutting off the sensation of pull, and equilibrium was restored. It was a woman, but he couldn’t make out her features, only that she was terribly, terribly sad. She was dark and fuzzy in the flood of light.

  “Momma?” Victoria said in a small voice.

  Patrick found himself back in the tent, blankets wrapped around him. The reassuring warmth of his love beside him was gone. Determinedly, he kept his eyes shut, maintaining the tenuous contact between himself and Victoria.

  “Momma, I tried so hard to reach you. I don’t know what to do.”

  The woman’s face was an oval of pure light, glowing too brightly for the features within to be made out. Her shawl and dress blazed with colors like none Patrick had ever seen—glory reds and golds and sunshine yellows.

  Then the Reactor’s rays flared up, drowning the woman in cold, actinic blue light. Her clothes faded, bleaching away to sere dryness. The woman’s bones shone through the cloth, and the light left her head.

  She had no face. A dry white skull grinned down on her daughter.

  Victoria cried out and stumbled back. But her mother stepped forward, a skeleton in rags, to seize her hands. Bone fingers closed about her, and then took on flesh. Then there was flesh on the skull as well, and a face—an ordinary enough face, but the expression was filled with love and remembered pain. “It’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said. She hugged Victoria close, and for the first time it was obvious that she was a small woman, not nearly so tall as her daughter. And then Patrick slept.

  But some short while after, he heard Victoria slip into the blankets with him, wriggle into a comfortable position, and murmur, “I had such a nice dream.”

  The cooling towers of the defunct reactor loomed over the horizon as the rebels topped the first rise, and continued to grow as the band toiled forward, a frightening presence, unbroken and perfect. Higher the four towers rose into the sky, and higher. They were huge and impossibly out of scale. It was almost beyond belief that mere human beings had built such things.

  The land was dead and barren from horizon to hori
zon. Gullies runneled the soil, leaving behind rocks and baked mud. In the rare puddle or stagnant pond there grew swaths of nameless scum, microorganisms too simple to be easily killed. An occasional clump of weeds poked out from the rubbled remains of a building, spread out, sickened, and died.

  Overhead, the sky was a clear and heartbreakingly pure blue.

  They set up a work camp on the river shore opposite the island. The river between camp and island was almost gone. Before the Meltdown, a dam had connected island and shore, and with the shifting of currents a sand bar had grown there, with one swift channel cutting through.

  Fitzgibbon led the first party of workers across. They wore radiation suits and brought hand-trucks with them. Laboriously they hauled the half-ton canisters from the storage building to the island’s edge. There, using ropes and donkey engines, the drums were pulled across the sand. At both sides, the canisters were checked with geiger counters for radiation leakage. Several were abandoned.

  Midway through the process, three trucks arrived, jouncing down an almost obliterated roadway. They were driven by people Patrick had never seen before, and had QUAKER STATE INDUSTRIAL WASTE DISPOSAL painted on their sides. Patrick wondered where and how the rebels had gotten them.

  Victoria was standing by the edge of the sand bar when Patrick approached her. She held the radiation suit’s hood under one arm, and stared off at the dozens of buildings on the long, flat island. Many had been broken open by the steam explosion that had ruptured the reactor containment building. Others were relatively intact.

  A light breeze lifted Victoria’s hair and flew it behind her like white flame. “I hear you’re leading the second crew across,” Patrick said, and then in a familiar doubling of vision, he saw the world transformed through her eyes.

  The sky over the island was a patchwork rainbow of soft pastels, yellows and roses swirling and merging slowly, one with the other, robin’s-egg blues flowing into muted golds so beautiful they took his breath away. The island below was all bright mist, shot through with dark flashes of color running along the building edges like St. Elmo’s fire.

  “It’ll be a piece of cake,” she said, and reached out awkwardly to hug him, the lead suit making her motions broad and slow. She kissed him with her eyes open, watching the rainbow sky reflected in his pupils, dancing in the tips of his lashes.

  Then Patrick had stepped back, dazzled, and Victoria raised her hood and fit it over her head, the thick lead glass visor cutting her vision down to a mere slit. Her crew was ready, and she led them silently across the sand bar.

  It felt good to be alive. To feel her muscles working, to see the sand sparkle underfoot. The channel of water was invisible, and it almost undercut her balance when she stepped heavily into it. With a muffled laugh and a lurch, she righted herself, and kept on. The island ahead was a single, complex structure, though the details were lost in mist. For an instant the land, mist, and buildings pulled together into a great, sleeping beast.

  Obadiah slapped a hand on Patrick’s shoulder. “Well, boy, tomorrow you get to file all your old dispatches intact and uncensored, eh?”

  She was almost to the island now. Patrick tuned out his own surroundings, concentrated on the glowing line of brightly colored rocks that marked the end of the sand bar. “Obadiah, I’ve had some strange premonitions lately,” he said carefully. “Maybe I’ve even seen Victoria’s mother. What do you think it means?” There were only three steps to go. Two.

  “Probably means you’ve had too much to smoke.” Victoria’s foot touched the island and the beast awoke. The shining white fog shifted, like the sides of an immense white bear fretfully preparing to emerge from hibernation. Deep blue spears of light shot up into the sky, and a great, silent roar boomed and echoed in her skull. Random emotions bounced up underfoot, died down. Then a huge, unfriendly sense of awareness focused on her.

  “You all right there, brother man?”

  “Just a little dizzy. Listen, I’m serious. I think I’m picking up on Victoria’s psychic influences or something.”

  The crew stepped Indian file along a roadway that no humans had trod on for over a century. Victoria led them into the beast, bypassing the worst of the radioactive rubble, stepping aside from the purple curtains of gamma radiation that sprayed from the broken containment buildings. All the while, she felt immersed in its cold, amused scrutiny.

  “Psychic bushwash,” Obadiah snorted. “Don’t tell me you’re becoming one of her believers?”

  She was surrounded by buildings now. They loomed up on every side of her, and still they were overtopped by the cooling towers, hanging massive and oppressive over her head. Victoria led her crew along a long blank wall, then across a pile of rubble that had once been a building. The low rise that sparkled just beyond that had been an access road. Long tentacles of emerald green and cobalt blue light washed restlessly over them, and daintily brushed against Victoria’s suit.

  “But I’ve seen it,” Patrick objected. “I’ve seen things I couldn’t possibly explain otherwise. There’s no question but she’s got some kind of powers.”

  “Here we are,” Victoria said, and then realized that she could not possibly be heard outside her suit. She signaled for a halt, then waved her gang into the empty-fronted warehouse. They scattered to their work, moving quickly and efficiently. Night after night, they had practiced for this chore, and they were ready.

  Standing alone before the warehouse, Victoria trembled. The canisters were lost within their own glow; she might as well be blind for all the help she could give. Still, she wished she could be in with her crew. Waiting outside, there was nothing to do but listen to the whispering of the Reactor.

  A dark glee emanated from the Reactor. It wanted her, and she stood at the very fringe of its physical being. Wrapping tendrils lovingly about her arms and legs, it whispered Come. Victoria shivered again, and stood firm, her legs braced wide.

  Obadiah sighed. “Well, okay,” he said. “When I started with Victoria, I did some work with hypnosis and psychotomimetic drugs, and there were some suggestive results. Nothing definite, mind you, but enough to indicate that she might indeed have some sort of telepathic ability. But I had to give up that line of inquiry real fast.”

  “Why?”

  The Reactor tugged at Victoria. It drew back the shining mist from the road before her, so that she could see the ancient roadbed as bright as burnished brass. The land tilted up behind her and down ahead, so that it was easiest to simply put one foot before the other and walk, lightly, quickly.

  Nobody noticed her leave. The warehouse lost itself in the clutter of buildings, and Victoria glided toward the reactor containment building. It was huge, almost a third as high as the cooling towers, and it was as dazzling as a palace made of neon tubes.

  “Why?” the conjur man said. “Because your girlfriend is none too tightly wrapped, if you’ll forgive me for saying so. I don’t think she’s actually crazy, but—I been watching her a long time, and it is my considered opinion that she is none too clear on where the line between fantasy and reality should be drawn.”

  A length of wall had collapsed on the containment building, swallowing up a slice of roof and whatever doorway might have existed. Twisted, half-melted girders stuck out through the gap. Within, a superheated vapor coiled about crumbling machinery, delicately veiling it from her eyes. And far beyond, visible only as a fierce red light piercing the mist, lay the Reactor’s sister, the broken, simmering pool of the original Meltdown.

  Am I not beautiful? the Reactor murmured. The blue-lit interior writhed in a slow cascade of shifting intensity. It looked warm, too, warm as the fires of Hell.

  “She gets advice from her mother’s spirit,” Patrick said.

  “I’m not surprised. Not only was her mother a famous mystic and healer, but she died when Victoria was real young. She grew up with everyone expecting her to fill her mother’s shoes. It’d be more surprising if she didn’t see her mother now and then.”

&n
bsp; For all the lure of the Reactor, Victoria did not move. The building crouched anxiously over her, eager to wrap its hot touch about her body. The radioactive slurry within was hot, hotter than the surface of Venus. Join me, the Reactor said. She knew what it wanted, and what was expected of her, but still she resisted.

  Victoria was afraid. She wanted a sign. It wasn’t enough that her mother had told her time and again that she would come to this moment. Not when her last two visions had occurred in a drug delirium, and in a dream. She wanted proof that she was not mad.

  Listening, waiting, straining for the least sign, Victoria thought she heard a voice, weak as a breath of wind on a still day, saying, “Go ahead.”

  Slowly, Victoria raised her hands to her hood and prepared to lift it up. The fires leaped up about her in anticipation, and her heart quailed. She could not make her hands move.

  Victoria, don’t! Patrick screamed mentally. He willed with all his might for the words to reach her.

  Victoria stayed her hand, turned around, saw nothing. “Patrick?” she said. She reached out with her mind, felt him linked to her. “Patrick.” And in that firm touch of minds she found corroboration that No, she was not mad at all, that her telepathic experiences—and hence also her spiritual ones—were real.

  She took off her hood.

  The fires roared up as she shrugged out of her lead suit. They lifted up her hair and sent it flying in the hot air. She kicked free of the leggings, let the suit drop to the ground. Hot needles lanced through her body, thousands of them, leaving long straight trails of ruptured cells. She advanced to the edge of the building.

  Inside, the bubbling heat chuckled and gloated. It was time for their trade, time to consummate their bargain of life for power. For an instant Victoria looked upon the Reactor itself, gigantic masses of machinery that had slumped and crumbled over the decades, but still crouched protectively over a half-melted core of dying fuel rods, like a gigantic metal spider.

  Looking in, Victoria felt the gamma radiation intensify, the invisible spears leaping up to pierce her again and again. And then the steam within the building shifted and the machinery faded away, and was replaced by a single enormous eye. It was lidded over by mist, but still the sullen red shone through, threatening and evil.