In the Drift

by Michael Swanwick

  The eye opened and looked at her.

  Patrick woke to find he had been laid across the supplies in the back of a four-wheeler. It was in motion. Crammed awkwardly in among the baggage, Obadiah crouched over him. “What happened?” Patrick asked.

  “You had a seizure.” Obadiah frowned. “Why didn’t you warn me you were prone to fits?”

  “I didn’t know.” Patrick sat up, looked around weakly. “Where’s Victoria?”

  “Lie back down. She’s fine. She’s at the head of the procession now. In charge of the whole damn thing.”

  “I thought …”

  “About an hour ago, there was a small steam explosion on the island. Scared the holy shit out of everyone. Then Victoria came out. She was barefoot, not wearing her suit at all. Only had on a little white shift that she wore under the suit. No mask either. Come walking out as cool as you please, and she say the reactor done give her power. Then she ordered everybody saddle up and said we were going to take Honkeytonk again, and keep it this time. Nobody had the nerve to say boo to her.”

  “Jesus. They’re really following her?”

  Obadiah glanced around, lowered his voice. “Hell, if she don’t die in the next day or two, I’ll follow her. Back into the Meltdown reactor if she tell me to.”

  But just as the moon was rising over the naked hills, Victoria fell off her horse. The rebels milled about her uncertainly. She tried to stand up, lurched suddenly, and fell again. This time, several hands helped her up. Afoot again, she leaned her head against her horse’s saddle for a moment before remounting.

  They made camp late, and the next morning Victoria turned down the proffered goblet of blood. She quickly shook her head when it was brought to her, and there was a queasy look on her face. Then she yanked off her mask, and disappeared into a nearby ravine. When she reappeared, there were flecks of vomit on her blouse.

  Then a rebel assigned to monitoring the airwaves suddenly yanked off her earphones and said, “Corporation activity.” With a swift bustle and clatter, the group began packing and mounting.

  As Victoria wearily prepared to swing up onto her horse, Fitzgibbon rode up to her and said, “Don’t bother.”

  Victoria looked up at him. The others fell silent, listening.

  “The Corporation is on our tails, and we can’t carry any excess baggage,” Fitzgibbon said. “Look at you! You can’t even ride without falling off.”

  “We could lash her to the horse,” Obadiah suggested.

  Fitzgibbon ignored him. “You’ve failed,” he said harshly. “Admit it. You’ve got radiation poisoning and you’re dying. Nobody is going to buy your little charade anymore.” He glared about him. No one would meet his eye. “Nobody.”

  “It was just bad luck,” Victoria said softly. “With this kind of exposure, there’s usually a few weeks after the initial nausea before the sickness sets in again. Odds were I should’ve been able to pull it off.” She handed the reins over to Fitzgibbon, backed away slowly. “Nothing but bad luck.”

  Their possessions made a forlorn pile in the road—bloodbags, water, Patrick’s transceiver, enough food for a week. They also had, if they wanted them, several collapsible cots and stools, cook sets and shovels, all items lightened from the fleeing rebels’ load. Obadiah pressed an old medical text into Patrick’s hands, along with a syringe and morphine kit. “I’ve underlined the passage about morphine overdose—be real careful about that. It’s easy and painless, so I hear.” He clapped Patrick’s shoulder. “Wouldn’t want you to have any unfortunate accidents.”

  Fitzgibbon’s horse cantered up at the last minute, and he leaned down to say, “Don’t be stupid, boy. She’ll be dead in a week, with or without you. You’re not doing her any favors.”

  Patrick shook his head. “I owe her—” But Fitzgibbon, disgust plain on his face, did not stay to listen.

  As the troupe rode away, several looked back over their shoulders. Obadiah glanced back frequently, and with obvious regret, but he went anyway. Heron, in contrast, shouldered her rifle and rode off stiff-backed, without once glancing back.

  “Well,” Patrick said. “Any idea what we do now?”

  Victoria was lying on her back, eyes closed. “I don’t know. I don’t care. I’m just tired as shit.” She began to cry.

  Patrick found a development of townhouses, with the roofs and upper floors all collapsed. One had half its ground floor miraculously preserved, and he moved Victoria in there. The land was cleaner here, sparsely covered with stunted scrub, but still heavily enough laced with radioisotopes that there were no rats or other vermin to disturb them.

  While Victoria lay on a cot by the door, Patrick busied himself cleaning out the room, and creating makeshift shutters for the windows and doorframe. Even these simple tasks were difficult without the right tools, and consumed a great deal of time.

  Despite the constant toil, the next three days passed slowly, a cold, lonely nightmare, as Victoria sank deeper into her disease. She was weak and feverish, and Patrick applied wet cloths to her forehead as she twisted on her cot. Several times a day he would try spoon-feeding her blood. She did not always manage to keep it down.

  Sometimes Victoria suffered from delirium, and then there was little Patrick could do but try to keep her from injuring herself as she raved and thrashed about. Halfway into these episodes, the hallucinations would begin to leak into his own mind, and he had to run outside, fleeing her presence, as the world filled up with monsters and demons, and he lashed out blindly, trying to destroy them.

  Other times she had bloody diarrhea, messing her clothing and cot, as well as herself. Cursing himself for the part he had played in reducing her to this, Patrick cleaned it all up.

  Once he heard a helicopter pass through the night, and thus knew that the Corporation Mummers were still in the area. Victoria had awoken then, convinced that he was going to feed her to some gigantic mutant insect, and she had to be restrained or she would have fled out the door and into the Drift. “My mother lied,” she cried when she finally calmed down. “I was supposed to become a hero, and instead she sent me to Hell.”

  When he found time, Patrick typed out a full dispatch covering the events at the Meltdown island and beyond. It was written crisply and emotionlessly, as a kind of penance for how deeply involved he had become. Because he was in a state of constant exhaustion, he missed the polesat passing overhead, and filed it a day late.

  On the third day, Esterhaszy knocked on the door.

  Patrick had been sitting over Victoria, half dozing, when the dwarf appeared in the doorway. He stumbled to his feet, walked stiffly outside. The sunlight made him blink, and tears formed in his eyes.

  “Don’t bother explaining,” Esterhaszy said. “I’ve already spoken with Fitzgibbon. How is she?”

  “Sleeping.” Patrick led his friend away from the door, to avoid disturbing Victoria. “How’d you find us?”

  “It wasn’t difficult. I knew Fitzgibbon’s planned route, so when I finally decided I was wrong to abandon Victoria, he was easy enough to intercept. But how is she doing?”

  “I think the fever has broken. But—well, the way this thing goes, there’s a temporary remission after the first onslaught, which might last a week or two. But after that there’s a relapse, and I’m afraid there’s not really much hope for her.”

  “I know the symptomology of marrow death,” Esterhaszy snapped. “I was just hoping that Fitzgibbon had told me wrong.”

  “Well, you—” Patrick stopped. There was a small noise from within the house. Victoria.

  Inside, they found her awake. “Uncle Bob?” She took his hands. Tears were in her eyes. “Uncle Bob, my mother lied to me,” she said in a little-girl voice. “She told me to go to the Reactor and offer up my life to it. She said that when I did that it would give me the power to drive the Corporation out of the Drift forever.” An angry edge crept into her bewilderment. “God damn her, why did she lie?”

  “Show a little spunk, child!” Est
erhaszy growled. “I let you get away with blaming things on your mother for too long when you were little; I’m not about to let you start again. Don’t try to foist off responsibility on someone else—straighten your shoulders, and make me proud of you.”

  They glared at one another for a long minute. Then the eyes fell. “Yes, Daddy,” she said weakly, obediently. She closed her eyes, and her head lolled over to the side. “I’m tired,” she said, and fell asleep again.

  Now Esterhaszy stood motionless, still holding her hands. He bowed his head and tears fell silently. Finally, Patrick led him outside.

  “Aw, jeez,” the old man said. He took out a handkerchief, dabbed at his eyes, blew his nose, slid his mask into place. At last he said, “It’s my fault. I tried to get her off this obsession with occult crap. But I don’t know. Maybe I was too strict. Maybe I wasn’t strict enough.”

  “Maybe there was nothing you could have done.”

  “I should have been in control.” Esterhaszy drew himself together. “She’s going to die unless she gets bone marrow transplants. The odds aren’t good, even with the transplants, but that’s all the chance she has. And the only place she can possibly get that operation is in Boston.”

  Patrick shook his head at the hopelessness of the notion. But all he said was, “How do we get it for her?”

  “We surrender to the Drift Corporation is what we do,” Esterhaszy said, “and try to cut a deal.”

  “They’d want names—you’d be a traitor to your friends.”

  “What concern is it of yours? You God damned neutral! You just stick to reporting the news; you’re not supposed to take sides.”

  At that instant, something happened within the town-house. Patrick knew it. He could feel it happening, could sense it by some means he could not have defined. It was as if the world had skipped a beat to let someone in. “Something odd is happening,” he said dreamily. Victoria’s mother was not far away. She stood in Victoria’s presence, close enough for the rebel leader to touch.

  “What do you mean, odd?” Esterhaszy asked.

  “She’s in the house!” Patrick spun about and ran.

  But when they burst into the townhouse, Victoria was alone. She was sitting up in her cot, eyes bright and glittery. And when Patrick demanded to know what had just happened, she shook her head. “Nothing,” she said, and Patrick knew she was lying.

  “We’ve decided on a course of action,” Esterhaszy said. But when he tried to explain, she brushed it aside. “What are my chances, even if everything goes the way you want—slim, eh? Practically nonexistent, aren’t they?”

  Esterhaszy frowned. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say—”

  “For as long as I remember, I’ve known I’d die young. I’m not afraid of it anymore.” She took Patrick’s hand and squeezed it. “I’m afraid I’m shameless, Patrick. When I needed publicity, I let you become an outlaw, and when I needed a … friend, I kept my secrets from you. There’s no reason in the world for you to forgive me anything. But I still have one more favor to ask. I need your help. Will you give it?”

  Patrick looked down at her thin hand in his, so much weaker than a few days ago. The practical side of his mind knew he shouldn’t make any blind promises. But the honest side knew that it didn’t matter what she asked. “Anything,” he said.

  She told him what she wanted.

  It took only minutes to vacate the townhouse. Patrick helped Victoria outside while Esterhaszy piled up flammables. He built the fire quickly and competently, first tinder, then kindling, then planking, then wall. “Stand clear!” he yelled; then he lit a match and torched the building.

  As the smoke billowed upward, Patrick pulled out the whip antenna on his transceiver. It was far too early for a polesat transmission, but the Corporation might be listening anyway. He began typing.

  Esterhaszy brought around his motortrike, a converted Citicab with roll bar and balloon tires, and parked it with the motor running. He slapped a hand on Patrick’s back in passing, and went to the ancient truncated lamppost, where Victoria sat huddled in a light blanket. “Well,” he said.

  “You have the envelope?”

  “Right here.” Esterhaszy slapped his shirt pocket. “Though I don’t believe for an instant this fool scheme is going to work.”

  “Piotrowicz loves his city. It’s all he’s got left,” Victoria said. “I guess—”

  “Don’t say anything. I don’t think I could stand it; I’d start crying.” Esterhaszy forced a smile. “And we don’t want your old uncle to cry, do we now?”

  Victoria shook her head. “No.”

  “All right then.” He turned away.

  But before he got halfway to his vehicle, Victoria was on her feet and running to him. She hugged him from behind, getting down on her knees to do so, and hooked her chin over his shoulder, buried the side of her face into his neck.

  “Now don’t,” the old man said. He patted her arm, then began to stroke it. “Oh, hell.”

  An hour later a Mummer patrol showed up; three fast all-terrain vehicles with armed Corporation Mummers holding their weapons ready. They found two beaten figures huddled under a makeshift white flag of surrender.

  The jail in Honkeytonk was nothing special—a rehabbed brick rowhouse with bars set across the windows, and padlocks and peepholes added to the interior doors. But it sufficed to hold the new prisoners. They had been in custody only an hour when a guard unlocked the door and Keith Piotrowicz walked in.

  Even though Patrick had only seen Piotrowicz once, and then briefly, it was still a shock how the man had aged. The flesh on his face was loose and sunken, and his motions abrupt and graceless. But he still retained an aura of power.

  Piotrowicz slammed a handful of papers down on the table with a peremptory thump. Patrick recognized a fragment of prose on the top sheet. They were pirated hardcopies of his dispatches.

  “Just in by packet boat,” Piotrowicz said. He jerked a folded copy of the Atlanta Federalist from under his arm and thrust it at Patrick.

  The paper contained one of Patrick’s early dispatches. They’d put it on the front page, a full column in a sidebar running down the left-hand side, and continued within. A quick glance showed that the editing had been light; most of his prose had been let stand. Patrick put the paper down. Once it would have meant a great deal to him.

  Piotrowicz took a chair, studied his two captives from under bushy eyebrows. “Well. Shall we talk?”

  “Let’s not waste time,” Victoria said. “You’re concerned about the fact that a fanatic like Fitzgibbon has a battery of missiles and enough radioactives to dust Boston four times over.” Idly, she drew the top sheet from the pile of dispatches, and flipped it over.

  Piotrowicz nodded slowly.

  “You’re not going to catch him. So you want to know, does he really have the radioactives? Can he really use them as a weapon? Will he?” Among the possessions the guards had let her keep was a charcoal stick. She drew it from her pocket now, and began doodling.

  “Well?”

  “You bet your ass he will.” Victoria glanced up and flashed a quick grin. Her gums were bleeding a little. “You just bet your sweet little ass.”

  Keith glanced darkly at Patrick, then back at the rebel leader. “You will both be tried as war criminals,” he said. “You are both accomplices to the act, and you will pay. Crimes committed against civilian populations are not acts of war, and need not be treated as such.” He paused, rubbed his forehead wearily. “I knew your mother,” he said to Victoria.

  If his intention was to startle her, it failed. All of Victoria’s attention was on the paper before her. Her brow furled slightly in concentration. The blanket slipped from her shoulder, and she drew it back without looking. “Oh, yes?” she said.

  “She had a lot of grit,” Keith said. “And people believed in her. We could have accomplished a lot together. But she fell prey to a kind of false sentimentality. You can’t help people out of weakness. It’s damned hard to
help people at all, but you can’t do it without strength. Even then, the best you can usually do is minimize the pain.” He glared at Victoria. “What do you imagine your mother would say about this plan to kill everyone in Boston? How would you justify it to her? Do you think she’d approve?”

  “Pull your troops out of the Drift,” Victoria said.

  Piotrowicz blinked. “What?”

  Victoria bent over her paper again. “Pull your forces out. Move out all the Corporation Mummers, your spies and agents and informers, your overseers and executives and officers. Everyone. That’s the only way you can stop Fitzgibbon.”

  Slowly, Piotrowicz began to laugh. The laughter built. He leaned forward and then back, rocking helplessly in his chair. “My dear, my dear,” he said at last. “It’s not as easy as you make it sound. I don’t have that kind of power.” He sobered a bit and went on. “There are things which must be done, you see. There are unpleasant decisions which someone has to make. Someone has to personally decide to start this war, order that execution, abandon that faithful ally to the wolves. And the man willing to make those decisions is given the power to see that they are carried out.

  “But he only has the power to make those particular decisions—he can’t decide contrary to the interests of those he represents. If he tries to avoid that war, that execution, the loss of that faithful ally, then the power goes to the next man willing to make those decisions.

  “I can’t pull the Corporation out of the Drift. Too much money is involved. Those who reap the benefit of the Corporation will simply refuse to beieve that Fitzgibbon isn’t bluffing. If I move against their interests, they’ll simply replace me.”

  “Maybe so,” Patrick said. “But you could still lose the war. It wouldn’t be at all hard for a man of your ability.”

  “I concede the point.” Keith spread his hands wide. “I could—if I wanted—fight so bad a war as to leave your forces in a winning position. But why should I? Even if I were totally convinced that Fitzgibbon can actually deliver on his threat—Boston isn’t my city. Let him destroy Boston, and then I’ll negotiate. But only to save Philadelphia, not because I care diddly-squat about some jerkwater metropolis in the Greenstate.”