Bill rolled his eyes. “No, that was pure coincidence.”
“You came after me later.”
Does she still have feelings for me? He laughed at the irony.“ That was when Scribb said he might be able to get BES off my back. He needs an AI expert, and I thought of you.”
“You aren’t trying to rekindle something that’s long dead?”
Bill caught Gore’s glance, but the sailor answered, wearily, “Don’t flatter yourself, Molly. I stopped loving you long ago. You abandoned Anne and me. That was the end of it.”
A pained look shadowed Molly’s face. Bill’s statement hurt her more than he expected, but it left him unaffected. It’s her own fault. “If I hadn’t met Scribb, we wouldn’t be here.”
Molly changed the subject. “Why is he so interested in helping your brother?”
“Beats me. Probably because Raleigh is high up in BES. He’s been there a long time. I imagine he can pull a lot of strings.”
“It may not matter because I’m not sure I can help Martin with whatever problem Raleigh has.” Molly entered a few keystrokes, and code changed color from red to green. “I still work on artificial intelligence, but it’s more of a sideline than anything else.”
Bill hadn’t considered that Molly might fail. “ Scribb is my best chance to get home to Anne and back to a normal life.”
“Is she doing well?”
Bill wanted to spit out the words, Why should you care? But he held back. “She’s beautiful and intelligent. You’d be proud of her.” Spoken like the father who adores her.
Molly tapped a few keys and paused. “Will you tell her about me, when you see her?”
“If you like,” he said sharply. “Shall I tell her everything, including your career choice?”
She agreed, too quickly for Bill’s taste. “She should know. She’ll make her own decisions about what she thinks of me.”
“She’s already decided what she thinks of you.”
Molly’s curiosity was piqued. “What is that?”
“She hates you.”
“Hates me? Why?” The revelation stung Bill’s ex. “I’m an independent businesswoman with friends at the highest levels. I’m what every ambitious woman aspires to be. I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished.”
Bill could not resist mocking her. “Apart from running a business that degrades women, you abandoned us, remember? You never wrote. You never contacted us by com. Nothing for fifteen years. How do you expect her to react? The only reason I don’t hate you is that you gave me Anne. I’m proud that she’s everything you’re not.”
Molly faced Bill, her voice quiet. “Believe it or not, I am interested in Anne.” She broke her gaze with him for a second. “Maybe more than I realized.” She returned to Bill, and said, “If she is as loyal and persistent as her father, and if she’s inherited some of my intelligence and spirit, she must be an incredible kid.”
The praise took Bill aback. It was self-serving and egotistical, but it was genuine. Perhaps Molly did care about Anne, despite her despicable choices. The possibility confused Bill, but he was not so rigid that he couldn’t accept that Molly had found a way to rationalize her thinking and behavior toward him and Anne. The edges of Bill’s resentment toward his ex-wife dulled as he considered her point of view, though he could never agree with it.
The convoy trundled on, and by the afternoon of the third day, Bill’s eyes smarted and watered. At first, he thought one of the tankers had sprung a leak, but the monitoring system reported nothing. Outside the pilot car, as the convoy moved south at a brisk pace, the relentless green of tall shrubs and stunted trees continued on each side of the road, a living wall that blocked the view beyond a few feet. The land extended into an expanse of low rolling hills, and the pilot car’s navigation computer recorded a slow gain in elevation. The stinging in his eyes waxed and waned, as if the convoy passed through invisible clouds of chemicals.
On the fourth day, Gore halted the convoy, and Bill emerged from the pilot car. Molly stood by. “Why are we stopping?” Martin joined them from one of the trucks carrying Gore’s thugs.
“We’ve reached our destination, Bežat,” Gore said.
Bill repeated the word, though it did not roll off his tongue as it did for Gore.
“‘Run,’ in English,” he said.
A broad valley stretched before them. The floor was smooth and featureless, until Bill realized the “floor” was the top of a cloud the color of a grilled pancake. Tendrils of smoke lifted off the cloud like dust devils on a desert plain. Mechanical sounds drifted up from the true floor of the valley, which Bill picked out through breaks in the smog. Reflections of sunlight suggested bends of a river, though the colors were bent in odd ways, as in a funhouse mirror.
Gore growled. “Back in the car. We have an appointment.”
Within a few minutes of descending from the top of the rise, the pilot car was enveloped in the brown haze, which thinned and thickened with a rhythmic progression. The trucks followed like a train of pack mules.
The tiger-man issued orders and monitored a map of the sprawling city. Despite his fearsome appearance, and his status as a prisoner, Bill had lost some of his fear of Gore. However, Molly was the most relaxed of all in the car, as if she was on familiar ground. This isn’t her first time with him. “You asked me how I met Kapitan Gore. What about you?”
“I’ve known the captain for a long time, Bill,” Molly hummed. “The introductions he had made while I visited the darker corners of harbors from Prince Rupert to Nagasaki proved valuable twenty years later when I reinvented my life.”
Gore grimaced, but Bill was incensed. Gore was a lover. “You slept with him.”
The captain snarled, and Bill regretted his outburst.
“Calm down, boys,” Molly clucked. “It was a long time ago, Bill, before we met. Believe it or not, I was faithful to you, but I admit I was a little randy before then.” Molly clicked a key and smiled at the pop-up. “I’ve missed you, Gregori.”
Gore glanced her way, but his cat’s eyes were impenetrable. “You’ve done well for yourself, Mrs. Bain.”
“Thank you. Business is good for you?”
“I’ll know once I’ve delivered my cargo.”
One thing Bill remembered from his early days with Molly: She never talked about her previous lovers. The sailor was grateful for her silence on that score. He tended toward jealousy, holding onto relationships tight enough to strangle them. In all the years since Molly left him, only one woman in Brier Valley interested him beyond a furtive night or two. Her name was Daphne, an auburn-haired, chatty woman, and she owned a sprawling ranch on the other side of the valley. Her husband had run off, fed up with all the hard work. Bill met Daphne at a farmer co-op meeting, but he jumped too soon to talk of marriage. She stopped returning his calls and texts, and blocked him from her network contacts, and stopped coming to co-op meetings. Bill didn’t understand why she was frightened of him. He later heard she had left the valley to find her old man. Anne was about nine at the time. He reflected on his constant worry about Anne’s well-being. Am I clinging to her?
The pilot car emerged from the haze into a clearer layer heavy with particulates. Dwellings cobbled with found wood from pallets or crates, or sheets of rusted steel, lined the road. Tarps draping the slapdash hovels lay limp in the dead air. The pilot car rolled close to one shanty. A young woman sat in a doorway, the door missing. Her vacant eyes bulged, her cheeks sank into her skull, and her threadbare clothing hung on her bones. A listless boy child put his head on her shoulder.
The column skirted a square surrounded by more substantial buildings rising three or four stories, remnants of an older town. Dozens of merchants in a market of ragged shelters offered rotting fruits, moldy vegetables, and hand-sized loaves of dark bread. Huddled men and women haggled, their mouths muffled by the car’s armored windows.
“Who are these people?” Bill said.
“Victims of our grandparents and great-g
randparents,” Gore said. “Their lives are the result of decisions made in the Age of Coal and the Age of Oil.”
“They’re refugees, but from where?”
“Have you observed their dark skin?” Gore’s amber eyes burned. “How did someone with skin and eyes the color of onyx come to this place, do you suppose?”
As the planet’s atmosphere heated, the marginal lands of Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and other regions for thousands of miles on either side of the equator could no longer sustain agriculture. Rising sea levels pushed humanity from the coasts. Rainfall patterns changed, and from south Asia, millions moved north, pushing into the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas. The ice and snows of the mountains disappeared, leaving nothing but stony desert. The displaced millions continued north. In the chaos of those times, governments disappeared, and whole nations vanished.
“How many are they?” Molly said.
“In Run? Perhaps a half-million. In other settlements, two or three million more. No one has counted them. It is not important.”
“Not important?”
“To them. They care about surviving until tomorrow, and keeping their loved ones warm. A population figure is something an academic, or a tax collector, cares about. There are none of those here.”
The convoy trundled down a narrow street and passed a group of warehouses, coming into a broad tract of land ten or fifteen hectares in size. The tract was pitted with two dozen black pools, resembling the footprints of gigantic round-footed monsters. Rubber sheets lined each of the pools. Each had oil, most less than half-filled. The pilot car drew near enough to the edge of a pool to allow a view of the bottom. A black sludge oozed between the high and low points of the uneven floor, interspersed with the iridescence of watery petroleum. The acrid air made Bill’s skin itch. Gore directed Nelson to shacks at the far end of the tract. “Our destination,” he said over the hiss of the tankers’ brakes.
A group of ragged, barefoot men walked single file on a path between the pits. On their shoulders they carried lengths of ten-centimeter hoses, rope, and other gear. Two vehicles resembling tractors that towed aircraft on a tarmac road led the group. The workers hooked the tankers to the back of the tow trucks, and the trucks maneuvered the tankers down the paths between the pits. The first tractor and tanker-in-tow halted next to a pit, and a pair of workers scrambled underneath the tanker, hooking up one of the widemouthed hoses to an spigot in its belly. A worker opened a valve, and a thick liquid the color of dark chocolate gushed from the hose’s mouth into the pit. More tractors and workers showed up, and one by one they rolled a tanker to a pit and repeated the procedure. The workers spoke little, and moved in a measured manner, as if they had done the task a thousand times and took no joy in it.
“Our delivery is complete,” Gore said soon, appearing next to Molly and the others outside the pilot car. “We’ve been invited to dinner at Run’s City Hall. I’d like you to join me.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“What about us?” Martin said, Bill beside him.
Gore maintained his geniality. “You may come as my guests.”
“How gracious of you,” Martin said. “I’m looking forward to it. Friends turn up in the most unlikely places. Perhaps you’ll know someone, Molly.”
Gore motioned everyone back to the vehicles. The pilot car lurched forward before making a wide turn to the pit farm’s entrance.
“What happens to it?” Bill said.
“To what?” Gore said.
“The oil. These vehicles are electric. I don’t see any others, except for the tractors. What do the people do with the oil?”
“The internal combustion engine is not dead, despite what governments may tell you,” Gore said, keeping his gaze trained on the windshield. “Heat is a precious commodity in the northern latitudes, despite the Warming.”
“What about your oil?”
“It is no longer mine. I’ve sold it to the mayor of Run.”
“What does he do with it?”
“She.”
Gore’s opaqueness infuriated Bill. “I asked you a simple question.”
“Why do you want to know?”
Bill was simply curious, but Molly answered the question. “Bill’s a species killer. I’m a convicted carbon felon. Our curiosity is part of our twisted thinking.”
Gore laughed. It was raspy, like the tongue of a cat. “Very well. Nelson, let us take our colleagues to the lower circles of Hell.”
Nelson touched a screen, and the car turned left down a potholed street. The khaki haze thickened, but Bill made out the walls of a narrow canyon on either side of the road. The shoulder clung to the edge of a desultory river. The canyon walls vanished behind a smog that thickened further to zero visibility. The car’s air filters kept out most of the cloying smell of petroleum, but Bill’s eyes watered again. Nelson wiped his eyes as well. Gore opened a small locker near his feet and removed four respirators. “You’ll need one when we arrive.”
The pilot car pulled off the road and halted. The four passengers exited, respirators on. The smog hovered on the ground like a blanket, obscuring everything but the outlines of buildings and dead trees. Bill heard human voices in the distance beyond the brown air. He heard a whoosh, like the sound of a lighting match, except much larger. Gore led the way up a trail. Nelson cocked his pistol and clicked the safety off.
The volume of the voices increased in number and intensity. Another whoosh, and Bill felt a blast of heat and saw flares of orange and yellow light. As if they crossed an invisible boundary, the smog lifted, though not wholly. A dozen fires burned, each engulfing home-made contraptions of barrels, lengths of tubing, frames of twisted steel, all coated with tar the color of coal. Men, women, boys, and girls, oily from sweat and petroleum, carried makeshift containers holding a few liters of a viscous substance resembling watery jelly. None of them paid attention to the visitors. A boy approached an open fire and poured the crude oil onto the flames, which flashed. From two tubes, a blond liquid flowed into large plastic containers.
“This is a refinery,” Molly said through her mask.
“Indeed,” Gore said.
None of the workers wore respirators.
Bill tightened the respirator’s straps against the poisonous air. “I’ve seen photos of the old refineries before the carbon laws banned them. They don’t look anything like this.”
“Refining crude oil is simple. You boil the petroleum and capture the vapors. You cool the vapors with water and they condense.” He pointed at the blond liquid. “That’s diesel fuel. It’s taken to the market and sold.”
“I didn’t see many vehicles in the town.”
“Diesel also works as a heating source.”
“Why don’t people just use the solar grid or wind generators?”
Gore’s laugh had no mirth. “Let me explain something, Mr. Penn. Even after a hundred years of solar power and wind power for the masses, it still takes technological poise and financial resources to deliver it. Oil requires no such investments, as you can see. The poorest man or woman can use it, though the environmental costs are high, and they know it. Freezing to death, however, is not an option.”
A boy pushed past Bill carrying a jug of diesel fuel. Hell is too kind a word for this place. Persecution by Janine Kilel was a blessing, compared to the life these children led. Was Gore performing a service to these people, or was he perpetuating a cycle of poverty and poison started by generations in the past? Whatever the cause, this was the price of carbon, borne by the weakest of the earth.
CHAPTER 33
♦ ♦ ♦
MOLLY INHALED AS IF SURFACING after a dive. The air inside the drab concrete building was cleaner than the Arctic air at Pole Station, without the dry, tangy smell of recycled atmosphere in Aurora Borealis. The scent reflected a time before the Warming, when the countryside around Run was a humid mixture of pine needles and rushing water.
“So good to see you again, Kapitan Gore. Welcome back t
o City Hall,” said a crisp man with the black pushed-in nose of a pug dog. “Your usual room is ready.”
Gore gestured toward Molly. “This is Mrs. Bain.”
The reception clerk’s face displayed the characteristic blank affect of com access. “Of course.” He touched a keypad. “Mayor deMayer is expecting both of you in the Tsarina Alexandra Ballroom at 19:00. The servbot will show you to your rooms.”
A robot, as shiny as the day it left the factory, came up next to Gore and Molly. The three took an elevator to the eighth floor, and by habit Molly touched her right forefinger to the door. The lock clicked; the hotel had already learned her DNA ID print. Gore followed her into the room, a clean, if standard hotel-style two-room suite.
“My room is next door, Mrs. Bain. The mayor is the fastidious type, and I’ve asked the concierge to make certain arrangements for you. You’ll find an appropriate wardrobe in the closet. I’ll see you a few hours.”
Gore departed, and Molly walked over to the curtain-shrouded window. The fabric was for looks only; steel plates had replaced the window glass. With a sigh of gratitude, she opened the faucets in the bathtub and touched a button for salts. After a half-hour soak she wrapped herself in a hotel robe and lay on the comfortable, if squeaky, bed.
A soft tone awakened her. The time was 18:20 by her minds-eye. She selected a low-cut dress of carmine satin. She hung the gown in the dressmaker, then touched the “measure” key as she slipped out of her robe. A green laser swept across her naked body, taking measurements in three dimensions. A readout asked her to turn 180 degrees. The laser measured her again. By the time she slipped back into the robe, the “ready” light on the dressmaker glowed. The altered gown hugged her in a flattering way. As it happened, the cosmetic studs in her ears set off the design.
Molly adjusted her auburn hair without a brush or comb. A girl can’t have everything. She heard a soft knock at the door.
Kapitan Gore greeted her in an old-fashioned uniform. His face was a mask, but she sensed his arousal at the sight of her. “You are very attractive this evening, Mrs. Bain. Are you ready to accompany me to the council meeting?”
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