“Ah,” Victoria said. She looked down on her paper with satisfaction. She had to hold herself upright with one hand, but still the map she had drawn was neat and tidy. “Excuse me, I didn’t mean to interrupt. Please go on.” She began writing small numbers on the map, distributing them in a gridlike pattern.
Keith looked annoyed. “Tell me the location of the lab where the radioactives are to be processed. You can’t bluff me, and you’ve got nothing to buy with. If you want to stop Fitzgibbon, the burden is on yourself.”
“Fitzgibbon left me to die,” Victoria said. “He knew that I might live long enough to talk with you, but he didn’t bother to shoot me. I have not the faintest idea in hell where he plans to process the radioactives.” She finished the numbers, drew a series of long, looping lines. “Here.” She handed the map to Piotrowicz.
“What’s this?” he asked suspiciously.
“It’s a map. There’s Philadelphia down in the corner; you see where the rivers come together? And the numbers are radiation counts, and if you connect them up, it ought to be fairly obvious to anyone that Philadelphia actually lies inside the Drift. Not outside, like almost everyone believes. Inside.”
“Where did you get this?” Keith cried, horrified.
“What does it matter where I got it? Your question is, does anybody else know about it?”
“Yes.” Keith almost whispered the word.
“An identical copy of this map is in the hands of my uncle. You may even know him—Robert Esterhaszy? He certainly remembers you.”
“The dwarf,” Piotrowicz said. Then: “What is it you want?”
But when she told him, he shook his head. “No. I won’t do it.” He stood and walked to the barred window. It was bright outside, and the street was empty. At last he said, “I’ve done a lot of dirt in my time, and gotten damned little for it in return. Why should I even bother?” When nobody answered, he said, “Damn it, what’s in it for me?”
“Nothing.” Already Victoria was tiring; the effort she put into holding herself upright made her tremble. “Remember what you said about power. There’s only one decision you can make, isn’t there? You have the power—and you have to make the decision.”
It was noon. People had been gathering in Honkeytonk all day. They thronged the center square—every Drift Corporation employee and indentured colonist that Piotrowicz could order to attend, every Drifter laborer that his Corporation Mummers could march in to watch.
“Supposedly they’re all here because I want to teach them an object lesson,” Piotrowicz said sourly. He pushed his mask down and spat, working his mouth in an ugly way. “This is what my life comes to. My own people hate me already.” He handed Patrick his transceiver. Battered and familiar, the leather scarred and cracking at the edges, it was an old and faithful friend refound. He ran a hand over its surface.
“Break their hearts,” Piotrowicz said.
He started to walk away, then returned. “I must be getting senile—I forgot to give you this.” He handed Patrick a folded document, then headed for the reviewing stand.
In the center of the square, stackwood had been piled high around a tall, upright pole. Mummers were soaking the pile with coal oil.
Opposite Patrick, almost in a line with the stake, Victoria stood straight and poised in a long white dress. She was held in an open wooden cage, and guards kept the crowd at a distance. No one could get close enough to see how she had been dosed with painkillers to preserve the illusion of cool, proud defiance.
Already a few scattered individuals were casting glances his way. Informing each other that there was the Southern traitor who had turned in Victoria Paine.
Patrick looked down at the pardon in his hand, thought back to what Victoria had told him—years ago, it seemed—in the townhouse. “They’ll hate you for it. Your name will be a curse for centuries to come in this part of the world, if we work this right.” She had smiled through her pain then, shrugged and said, “Still, every martyr needs her Judas.”
There was an ironic resonance to that thought, and Patrick discovered Victoria’s presence inside his head again. He looked up and saw her smiling blearily at him across the square. His joints ached in sympathetic pain. He felt the irons about her wrists. She was straining to reach him; he could feel the effort reflected in her body—the tension up the side of her neck, the involuntary tremble of a muscle in her cheek. Until finally, as if from a great distance he thought he heard what might have been the merest echo of her whispered voice. The words evaded him, but the meaning did not. It was a goodbye.
It hit them then—and not for the first time—that all might fail, their plans and schemes, everything. Would the people of the Drift actually rally to the memory of a dead martyr? Here and now, with the dirt hard and real underfoot, with the sun hot on his head and harsh to his eyes … he could not believe. They were about to burn Victoria alive, and all for an abstraction, something intangible and theoretical.
A hand balled itself into a fist, unclenched. There was nothing he could do.
The charges were being read. Treason, sedition, subversion—more abstracts. Something about vampirism. It seemed to go on forever. After a time, Victoria found her eyes drooping. There came a flash of vision then, from Patrick to her and back, and she saw herself in the dock. She was tall and proud and in his eyes she was beautiful, as beautiful as a flame. A light breeze whipped her hair up, twisting and soaring, as if she were burning already.
Victoria straightened, suppressing a smile. The breeze felt good on her skin.
The smell of coal oil was pungent. Patrick wanted to look away and never look back. He wanted to break the link between himself and Victoria, wanted to kneel in the dirt and vomit up all the poisonous memories from his body. Tears began streaming down his face, and he couldn’t for the life of him imagine where they came from.
Piotrowicz mounted the reviewing stand. Even from the far fringes of the crowd, Patrick could see how the other officials edged away from the old man. A guard standing by Victoria, and seen by no other eyes, made the sign of the horns at Piotrowicz, to ward off evil. The old Mummer stood in the eye of the crowd’s gathering hate, as if oblivious to it.
He flapped a hand impatiently for the show to begin.
Victoria’s hands were uncuffed, and she was jerked roughly out from the dock. She stumbled, and recovered easily enough, but she stubbed a toe in doing so, and the pain was annoyingly distracting. There was old straw ground into the earth underfoot. She noticed a child with mask askew, and her fingers ached to straighten it.
A set of wooden steps ran up the stackwood. The guards—one to each arm—allowed her to mount the stairs slowly, with some dignity, though the one to the left seemed anxious to get it over with. He tugged at her lightly as they climbed. There was an awkward moment as the cuffs were relocked behind her, so that she was chained to the stake. Then the steps were removed, and she stood atop the pyre, alone.
The view was good from up there. The colors were bright and clear; she could pick out Patrick’s brown eyes from among the thousands that stared up at her. Tears dimmed Patrick’s vision, and she washed away, only to be replaced again by the view from her own eyes.
It was strange. Standing there, knowing how little time she had left, she loved them all, from Patrick on down. She would have been perfectly happy if this moment could be frozen so that she stood looking at them all forever.
A hooded man appeared from nowhere, brandishing a smoky torch. He whirled it three times about his head, and threw.
It arched toward the wood.
Esterhaszy should not have been present. Indeed, their entire scheme would fall apart if Piotrowicz were to spot him. But the dwarf was in among the crowd, and Patrick glimpsed him at the front, among the people who had to be held back by a line of Mummers. Victoria saw him, white-faced and taut, straining as close as he could get to the fire. And when the torch landed at her feet, touched the wood, he screamed before the flames could even reach her.<
br />
The first flame touched Victoria, licked the front of her dress. Patrick flinched but did not close his eyes.
The pain was liquid, and it ran right through Victoria, pushing aside the painkillers as if they did not exist, searing through to the marrow of her bones. But she did not forget her duty. Blood trickled down Patrick’s throat; he had bitten through his tongue.
“Freedom!” Victoria screamed as the flames wrapped themselves about her. “Rise up!”
The air was hot. The fever of summer had reached a peak, and was about to break. Autumn was almost upon them.
It was nearly harvest time.
About the Author
Michael Swanwick published his first story in 1980, adding him to a generation of new writers that included Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, Connie Willis, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Since then he has been honored with the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards, and received a Hugo Award for fiction in an unprecedented five out of six years. He also has the pleasant distinction of having lost more major awards than any other science fiction writer.
Roughly one hundred fifty stories have appeared in Amazing, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, High Times, New Dimensions, Eclipse, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, the Infinite Matrix, Omni, Penthouse, Postscripts, Realms of Fantasy, Tor.com, Triquarterly, Universe, and elsewhere. Many have been reprinted in best-of-the-year anthologies, and translated into Japanese, Croatian, Dutch, Finnish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Chinese, Czech, and French. Several hundred works of his flash fiction have also been published.
A prolific writer of nonfiction, Swanwick has published comprehensive studies of Hope Mirrlees and James Branch Cabell, as well as a book-length interview with Gardner Dozois. He has taught at the Clarion, Clarion West, and Clarion South writing workshops.
Swanwick is the author of nine novels, including In the Drift, Vacuum Flowers, Stations of the Tide, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Jack Faust, Bones of the Earth, The Dragons of Babel, and Dancing with Bears. His short fiction has been collected in Gravity’s Angels, A Geography of Imaginary Lands, Moon Dogs, Tales of Old Earth, Cigar Box Faust and Other Miniatures, The Dog Said Bow Wow, and The Best of Michael Swanwick. His most recent novel, Chasing the Phoenix, chronicles the adventures of confidence artists Darger and Surplus in post-Utopian China. He is currently at work on a third and final novel set in Industrialized Faerie.
He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter. In 2016 he will appear as guest of honor at MidAmeriCon II, the World Science Fiction Convention.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1985 by Michael Swanwick
Cover design by Jesse Hayes
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3647-4
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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In the Drift Page 22