by Paul McAuley
‘I’m glad.’
‘You should be ashamed,’ Amy said, jabbing her slate with her forefinger, flipping through the false-colour representations of his brain’s neurodynamic activity. ‘Causing trouble like this. Is it pride, Felice? Or is it because you don’t really understand other people?’
‘I couldn’t walk away from it. I had to try to help her.’
‘You knew it was a show, didn’t you?’
‘When I saw the others, yes. Not at first.’
‘You knew that they were using Bel to lure you into some sort of trap. And you knew that they wouldn’t have done anything really bad to her because the guards would have punished them. You should have walked away.’
‘I was angry. Because they were using her. Because I had put her in danger.’
‘And now?’
‘How do I feel now? Ashamed. Confused. I poison everything I touch. I put your friend in danger, and you must be in danger too. I should go . . .’
But when he tried to sit up his head ripped wide open and muscles across his chest seized up with pain, so he lay back and watched the ceiling tiles slide apart through fat lenses of self-pitying tears.
‘This isn’t in any way a normal society,’ Amy said. ‘It’s more like a tribe of wild primates. Ruled by an alpha male with the help of a circle of men and women who behave like him because they are frightened of being exploited and threatened like the rest. And because Edz Jealott is at the head of the tribe, it reflects the way he thinks, and the way he thinks is crippled. You challenged his authority by acting as though it had nothing to do with you. He couldn’t ignore that because it was damaging his reputation, and reputation is all he has. Hence this.’
‘If he wanted to fight me, he could have called me out.’
‘He wanted to humiliate you. Hopefully, he thinks that he’s succeeded, ’ Amy said. ‘Otherwise he’ll come after you again. Now, not another word. Let me finish up here, so you can rest.’
Felice slept for a while, and woke to find Amy sitting straightbacked beside his hospital bed, hands folded prayerwise in her lap. She asked him how he was feeling, and he said that he felt that she had something to tell him.
‘The bruising and cracked ribs are healing amazingly quickly. And your nose won’t look quite as noble as it once did, but it’s healing too,’ Amy said. ‘But I need to ask - have you been experiencing any numbness or dizziness recently?’
‘It’s my condition, isn’t it?’
‘The tests show an impairment to your peripheral nervous system. It’s a natural progression. Neither faster nor slower than I expected.’
‘This is why Edz Jealott could beat me up.’
‘That’s exactly the attitude that got you in so much trouble,’ Amy said, and he shrivelled from her look of severe reproof.
Because he knew that she was right. He’d thought that he was different to the other prisoners and trusties. A nation of one, a secret king harbouring the secret wound of his illness, aloof and invulnerable, noble and virtuous. Edz Jealott had proved him wrong. Had shown him that he was as human as everyone else. He supposed that he should be grateful, that he shouldn’t hate the man, but he couldn’t quite manage it. Perhaps that was part of being human too.
3
The front-line camp of R&R Corps #897 was a row of Quonset huts hunched at the foot of the tanks and towers of a soil factory. To the south, gleaming like steel under the darkening sky, the Platte River ribboned away through a patchwork of restored reed beds and grassland. Everywhere else was a desert stripped of topsoil by a century of megastorms. A vast and tumbled waste fretted with gullies and crevasses and sinkholes, haunted by strong and restless winds that prowled writhing ridges of rock and winnowed tufts of tough catchgrass that clung amongst broken stones and blew swirls of sand past the posse of riders heading towards the camp, hunched on their horses in flapping dusters or serapes like road agents escaped from the myths of the long ago, the red blaze of a sunset foundering on the low and level horizon behind them.
An advance party had ridden into the camp several hours before. As the riders came down the ancient blacktop a small crowd surged through the gate in the security fence, whooping and cheering. Cash Baker checked his horse and thumbed back his broad-brimmed hat and looked around. Men and women dressed in green denim shirts and blue jeans; a jostle of upturned faces pale in the glare of the arc lights strung along the fence. This was the part he liked the least. An assassin could step forward, face cold and pitiless as a snake’s, and aim a revolver or trigger a satchel bomb. Soldiers could jog out from the shadows under the soil factory’s towers . . .
People raised their hands towards him and he reached down and shook a few. The other riders were shaking hands too, and their leader was halted in the middle of the crowd, leaning on the horn of his saddle and talking with an officer who had caught the bridle of his horse. After a few moments he sat up, blond hair shining in the arc lights, and lifted his hands over his head. The crowd grew quiet. Every face turned towards him as he thanked them for their hospitality. ‘We’ve ridden a long way to be here, so I hope you’ll excuse us if we take an hour to tend to our horses and freshen up. But I look forward to talking to you. We have much to discuss!’
Cash Baker had been riding with Alder Hong-Owen and his crew for six months now. At first they’d worked their way north along the Rocky Mountains, visiting with fugitive groups of so-called wildsiders. People who refused to quit the land and lived as nomads, a thousand small groups with a thousand names. Some of them native Americans, fiercely proud and independent. Others the descendants of refugees from the great shipwreck of civilisation. Sheep-herders and goat-herders in their temporary camps in summer pasturage high in the mountains. Bands of hunter-gatherers who pitched their smart-fabric tents here and there for a few days or a few weeks, tending little gardens hidden amongst rocks, in clearings in forests of pine and birch and alder, moving on. There was a village of houses built into ledges in the side of a steep canyon, with gardens strung along the canyon floor and wind-powered turbines hidden in tunnels carved through the ridge-rock. A group of rabbit farmers who presented everyone in Alder’s crew with patchwork gilets stitched from black and white pelts. A group that had colonised a nuclear shelter from the long ago, tending a hydroelectric plant, a farm of ancient mainframe computers, and a communications network that stretched along the backbone of the Rockies.
Everywhere they went, Alder Hong-Owen’s pilgrims distributed people-tree seeds, talked about revolution, and discussed the latest news from the rest of Greater Brazil and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
Bandits, criminals and the like who’d gone feral were rare in the mountains. Most had been hunted down by the wildsiders, who either killed them in firefights or captured them and dumped them bound and naked and tattooed with lists of their crimes at the edges of the ant-heap cities. But when Alder’s crew of pilgrims quit the mountains ahead of the winter snows and cut around the northern end of the Great Desert, they were twice attacked by bandit crews. The first time a sneak raid at night, two guards left dead with their throats cut, five horses stolen amidst a wild stampede in the pitch dark. The second time, one snowy day early in December, a woman was shot out of her saddle by a rifleman as they rode through the ruins of Coleharbor, south of the great salt pan of what had once been Lake Sakakawea. They were pinned down by desultory gunfire until, as dusk began to fall, Cash led a counterattack. They engaged several indistinct figures in running gunfights amongst wrecked houses, lost their only drone, and pressed on until they reached a position the bandits had abandoned only minutes before, a horseshoe of stones amongst a stand of leafless sycamores, bloody bandages and clothes scattered around a smouldering fire, tracks trampled into the snow heading towards the hills to the north. The next morning, riding out of the ruins, they passed poles alongside the road, leaning into the blizzard and topped with grisly heads wearing caps of bloody snow, eyes rolled back, ears sheared away. Whether meant as threat or trib
ute they never knew nor cared to discuss.
They celebrated Christmas with a community of wildsiders in a village of shipping containers buried in the raddled plains just south of the Missouri River, in what had once been North Dakota, left on New Year’s Day and rode on south along the edge of the Great Desert in a meandering path that sometimes doubled back on itself or looped out to the east or west. By now, they were beginning to talk to members of the R&R Corps. To individuals or small groups that came out to meet them at first, and then to entire camps.
There had been food shortages and riots in the cities that winter. Martial law in most of the territories of the former United States. In Panama City, soldiers opened fire on starving people who marched on the mansion of one of the scions of the Escobar family. More than seven hundred people were killed that day, and thousands more died in riots that laid waste to half the city. The bishop of Manaus led a prayer vigil for peace; on the third day, in the middle of the service, an assassin walked through the congregation that packed the cathedral and shot the bishop dead as he raised the host for Mass, and in the square outside soldiers shot into the crowds as they fled. The government declared that the martyred bishop had been an agent of the Pacific Community, there were mass arrests of priests and other dissidents across Greater Brazil, and trials and executions of the most prominent so-called traitors were broadcast across the nets.
A number of brigades of the R&R Corps refused to leave their barracks when they were ordered to help the army put down riots. Army units fought their way into camps, rounded up everyone, selected men and women at random, and executed them. When the Commander-in-Chief of the R&R Corps protested, she and many of her senior officers were placed under arrest and transported to the notorious military prison outside São Paulo. The rank and file of the R&R Corps were in a mutinous mood, but had lacked direction and leadership until Alder Hong-Owen, son of the famous gene wizard Sri Hong-Owen, rode through the camps along the front line at the western edge of the Great Desert to speak amongst them.
The stopover in the camp of R&R Corps #897 was little different to all the others. Cash spoke first, drawing on the tricks and techniques he’d been taught when shilling for the Air Defence Force. Standing on a table at one end of the crowded mess hut, he told the story of how he’d been made into a hero by General Arvam Peixoto and then disgraced as part of a plot to bring the general down, explained that his elevation and fall from grace was just one example of how the great families used and discarded ordinary people, and then asked Alder Hong-Owen to step up and talk, raising his voice to be heard over the crowd’s whoops and applause.
Alder spoke with an easy and engaging confidence. His pale hands shaping the air, his mellifluous voice floating above the packed heads of his audience. He spoke of how gangsters, arms dealers, pirates and plutocrats had seized power during the confusion after the Overturn and had founded new dynasties. How these so-called great families had co-opted certain ideas of the green movement - restitution and rewilding, ecological stewardship, living lightly on the land and all the rest - and used them to gain and hold on to power. How the great and good work to reclaim and restore Earth’s damaged ecosystems had been turned into a tyrannical creed. How people had been herded into cities that were prison camps in all but name, or forced to toil on pharaonic projects. How enemies had been invented to keep the population under control, for as long as the population feared those enemies they would not question those in power. The Pacific Community, and then the Outers, and now the Pacific Community again. And always the wildsiders and bandits on the borders. How the sacrifices endured by the many were not shared by the few who ruled them.
‘Ordinary men and women have suffered every kind of deprivation and hardship in the name of Gaia, yet this is how the so-called great families of Greater Brazil live,’ Alder said, and conjured images of the houses of the rich in a memo space. Some from his own files, some taken by Cash Baker, some from surveillance satellites. Mansions and hunting lodges. Great estates walled off from the world. Islands made over into private paradises.
He answered every question put to him, and it was long past midnight when he and his crew distributed people-tree seeds amongst the R&R crew and explained where to plant them and how they would grow.
Early the next morning, the small party rode out in a mist of thin rain blown by the cold March wind in drifts and billows across fields of cottonwood and willow saplings. They rode across the pontoon bridge that floated on the broad, shallow flood of the river, rode on down a dirt road that cut straight through rewilded grassland, and just two kilometres south of the river they were ambushed.
The three men riding point ahead of the rest of the party disappeared in an eruption of red flame and black smoke and a harsh thunderclap that rolled out across the grassland as dirt and pieces of horses and men rained down. The other riders checked their startled mounts and circled round, shouting to each other as men rose up from the waist-high grass either side of the road, two on the left, three on the right. They were armed with automatic rifles and began firing at once from distances of less than twenty metres. Rounds snapped through the air and knocked spouts of mud and water from the road as Cash crawled behind his foundered horse. He’d lost his hat and his ears were ringing. His horse had been shot through the neck and kept trying to lift its head. Its eyes were rolling and it was blowing bloody foam through its nostrils. Cash drew his pistol, but his hands were shaking badly and the gunsight wove and jittered as he tried to take aim at the nearest of the bushwhackers and his shots went wide. A burst of gunfire struck the road close by and spattered him with wet dirt. He thumbed mud from his eyes and braced his pistol against the worn leather of the saddle’s seat, but the harder he tried to keep it steady the more it shook. One of the bushwhackers collapsed as if someone had cut him off at the knees and the other ducked away, bent low as he ran off into the windblown sea of grass. Cash rolled over, pointed his wavering pistol at the other side of the road, and saw that the three other bushwhackers were down. One was crawling like a broken-backed snake along the ditch, and Cash got up and limped after Arnie Echols and caught hold of Arnie’s arm as he raised his pistol.
‘He can tell us who set us up,’ Cash said.
But the man had been shot through both lungs and when Cash turned him over he coughed a spray of blood and died. His halflife camo gear pulsed with dark irregular patches as it tried to match the blood seeping through the ditch’s mud.
‘Who are they?’ Arnie said. ‘Army?’
‘The Army would have surrounded the camp with tanks. These are bounty hunters I reckon,’ Cash said. ‘And amateurs at that, luckily for us. Anyone who knew what they were about would have hit us as we were crossing the bridge.’
He searched the dead man but failed to find any ID, just three clips of steel-jacketed rounds, a pair of handcuffs and a packet of chewing resin in his pockets, a hunting knife sheathed at his belt, the spike of a short-range phone in his ear. Cash washed blood from his hands in cold ditchwater, then stood up and followed Arnie back along the road. Two bodies covered with dusters, horses lying dead or gravely wounded, horses standing in the rain with their reins trailing. People were kneeling around wounded men and women, cutting off clothes, breaking open medical kits. One of the wounded sat against the belly of a dead horse, the shoulder of his green nylon serape wet with blood, blond hair plastered in rat-tails, face pale as chalk: Alder Hong-Owen.
They agreed that they couldn’t ride back to the R&R camp because it was very likely that someone there had betrayed them. Arnie Echols used the phone that connected to the clandestine communications network to arrange a rendezvous, and they buried the dead by the road, fixed up hammocks between pairs of horses, and walked their wounded through the grassland and out into the desert beyond. Late that night they met up with a group of wildsiders camped in a deep ravine, and the wildsiders led them east. They crossed the river at a series of fords strung between low islands and as the stars began to fade from the sk
y they reached a camp in the hills beyond.
Alder Hong-Owen’s left shoulder had been shattered by a high-velocity round and he’d developed pneumonia during the journey to the camp. A medical technician brought in from the big R&R depot outside Omaha did what he could, but said that Alder needed the kind of surgical intervention and post-operative treatment that only a hospital could supply. Alder refused to leave the camp, and Cash and the others backed him up when the technician appealed to them.
‘He’ll lose the use of his arm,’ the technician said.
‘Better that than lose his life,’ Cash said.
The medical technician was affronted by this slight on his honour, and said so. Cash told him that he shouldn’t take it personally. ‘One of those bushwhackers got away, and we have to assume he has friends, or maybe told the Army about us, hoping to get a share of the reward. And that means we can’t show our faces anywhere people might be looking for us.’
Alder was young and strong. Within a few days he was using the wildsiders’ communications network to keep track of the growing political and civil disturbances and to talk with leaders of Freedom Rider cells in cities scattered the length and breadth of Greater Brazil. A week later he was out of bed and hobbling around the camp, wincing and sweating, sitting down to rest at frequent intervals; two weeks after that he quit using painkillers and declared that he was fit enough to travel.
The next day, he and Cash rode through the sandy hills beyond the camp with two wildsiders trailing them. Alder’s arm was strapped to his chest in a sling of black cloth, but he handled his horse well enough and if he was in any pain he didn’t show it. They stopped at a grove of people trees growing green and vigorous in a shallow basin below a ridge top, sat in the shade amongst knobby roots and black ropes of symbiotic nanomachinery clutching at rocks, and shared a lunch of cheese and bread and pickled tomatoes while Alder explained that he wanted Cash to travel east and meet one of his contacts in Indianapolis.