by Rusty Coats
Carl Drosberg, director of the Department of Telecommunications Enforcement, would not confirm rumors that among the dead were top members of the Digerati, who have controlled Avalon since the United Nations declared Prohibition six years ago...
We'd been too tired to pull down the bed from the ceiling. We collapsed on the sofa and keyed the liquid-crystal privacy tint, turning the glass milky and opaque. We didn't know where we were going. Didn't care. Levy had fired Rita for trying to save his life. Now he was dead, and she was twice as unemployed. I was traveling under a hot ROM so I wouldn't trigger the datacops waiting to send me back to Jasper.
Doctor Paul Cassady, renowned expert in the field of Chronic Neurotransmitter Imbalance and Septal Decay Syndrome, said last night's deaths are precursors to even greater tragedies. "Once the source of our greatest hopes, Avalon now stands naked, unquestionably our greatest nightmare. If the virtual city is not destroyed, we can expect an onslaught of death, driven by the hidden desires of our own mysterious minds..."
I stared through the suspended Lucite shell as the bullet train shot us over the windmill farms of the Altamont. The Neuromantics had controlled the farms for almost a decade now, the organization's first foray into the utilities market. Through the window I saw the lazy turn of the propellers, then stared at the empty beltways, once the lifeline of a world as dependent on oil as a junkie on immersion. Now they were empty, the asphalt buckled, their purpose forgotten in the nuclear flashes that turned the cradle of civilization into an endless sheet of black glass.
Then the blond hills gave way to Neuromantic farms, their multimedia billboards flashing: Neuromantic farms feed one sixth of the world, plus you. Grapes and wheat, almonds and rice, silage corn and soybean, field after field, the white clapboard houses that once anchored the farms bulldozed to make room for more till. The altruism of Zamora's warriors in the Tomorrow Crusade flowed like the milk from their dairies.
Officials have now confirmed that Rodney Benedikt, Baxter Levy, Daniel Marrs and Jenner Van Meter were killed in the Avalon incident. The Sysops, who seized control of Avalon six years ago, were among the original architects of the virtual city. But today, for the first time, it is without leadership....
The train carried us north, toward the redwoods. I stared at the Sierras, imagining I could see past the peaks to the other side, to the bleak Eastern Sierra, the high desert where Uncle Sam once corralled the Paiute Indians, then the Nisei during World War Deuce, then its high-tech highwaymen of Prohibition. Bodie and Manzanar, Jasper and Tonopah.
A Prohibition that had just been declared moot.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. In the hope that we will make this tragedy the last of its kind, United Nations directors have agreed to release control of Avalon to the Neuromantics. Neuromantic leader Nathan Zamora has accepted the challenge to carry out the demolition of the virtual city. Neuromantic technicians have already taken over several of the substations hidden throughout the Pacific Rim, and will dismantle the operating system known as Merlin. Mr. Zamora has assured me that as of midnight tonight, Avalon will disappear from the global data web. Like its namesake, it will fade into the mists, chased back by reason and intelligence, never to emerge again...
AVALON XXII: Marigolde
The announcement from the coachman got us moving. With an apologetic tip of his cap on the cabin screen, he said we'd be delayed in Redding so Neuromantic investigators could search for a Digerati fugitive. They were searching all trains.
"Come on." I shook Rita awake. “Ride’s over.”
The bullet train slowed, giving the dark green smear of trees individual identities. The rolling mountains were bleached a dull yellow, building toward Mount Shasta. I thumbed through the magazine rack and pocketed a few ROMs with maps of restricted lands. The ROMs were old, some dating back to my time in Jasper. Better than nothing.
I opened the cabin, took Rita's hand and walked toward the exit. Outside, the Redding Depot shone in the endangered sunshine as the storm rolled in. I recognized its smooth gray-resin skin from newsreels; once, the Depot came equipped with uplink booths for Avalon. The booths had long since been torn away, but the WPA plaque still hung over the porter window.
The Neuromantics were standing at the ticket counter, dark fedoras riding low on their foreheads, their insignia blazing from their trench coats. There were three of them.
The train stopped and the Lucite peeled back its doors. The Neuromantics stepped aboard and began going from room to room. They lined up the passengers in the hall and scanned their tickets, ROMS and faces with cool precision.
"Come on,” Rita said. “I think there’s a supply portal in the kitchen.”
“How do you know so much about old trains?”
She shrugged. “I like antiques, old man.”
We ran to the rear of the train, to the breakfast car, where a busboy was setting silverware, blocking the kitchen door and, beyond it, the supply portal.
"Lunch doesn't start for an hour," he said pointedly, another zealot from the Sons of David outposts. “You’ll have to wait another forty minutes.”
Rita smiled politely. Then she pulled the stun-gun out of my pocket.
The busboy didn't have a prayer.
Rita and I hid with the lost luggage as the train shot out of Redding. We pried open suitcases until we found a change of clothes and shoes made for terrain walking. Rita settled on denims, a flannel shirt and a sweater, anticipating the storm. I found a pair of khakis, a sturdy wool shirt and an antique bomber jacket that still smelled of leather balm. We ate protein bars while we searched for outdoor equipment.
"Hey!" Rita climbed down from a stack of luggage, clutching my palmtop. She'd loaded one of the travel ROMs I'd taken from the cabin; it spun behind the sapphire-glass window as she tossed me her cheaters. They rode tight against my eyes. But by squinting I could see a relief map of volcanic plug domes and the black igneous rocks of the Klamath Mountains. Rita had zeroed in on a small compound at the foot of Shasta marked Prohibited and Federal Reserve XIV.
I peeled off the cheaters. "So?"
"So?" she parroted. "So, this map is almost as old as me. That's old Bureau of Land Management property. Back when that meant something."
"Yeah?"
She snatched the palmtop away. "So you wanted a place to hibernate. As far away from Avalon and the Digerati as you could get."
"Sure. I was thinking we’d hold up in one of the ghost towns up here."
"No, no, no! That land is our ticket. It isn't BLM anymore. It changed hands around the time Dad and I went to Shiloh. We all heard about it."
I drew back, putting it together. Rita grinned. "That land is about as far away from this century as you can get, Jack. It's Marigolde."
The rain had started by the time we crawled out of the warehouse, a hot downpour that dragged pollutants out of the sky and smeared them on the ground. In an hour, we were out of Redding, hiking down a buckled beltway toward the Sons of David encampment known as Marigolde, at the base of Mount Shasta.
The idea of walking into an agrarian outpost didn't set well with me; the only time I was on the same side as a Davidian was in Jasper, back when we were both enemies of the State -- and even then, we were opposites. The Sons of David had opposed Avalon from the start, while I wanted to set the city free.
What I knew about the Sons of David I’d learned from Library files. What began in the last century as an unorganized group of vagabonds nicknamed "The Technicolor Luddites" blossomed into a movement when the Depression began cleaving people like Rita's father from Universities. Suddenly, technology didn't seem so nice anymore. Automation and artificial intelligence came at a price, and the price was that people weren't needed for a lot of jobs anymore.
And those weren't just jobs. They were a person's purpose, if you believed in such things. And now those people were obliterated, people a newspaper hack called the walking wounded. His name was David Mendoza.
According to history ROMs
, Mendoza wrote exposés proving that the digital revolution had killed more careers than the bubonic plague killed people. That was before nuclear bombs ended a secessionist movement in China and wiped out the biggest economic base in the world, before mushroom clouds sprung over Tehran and Cairo, shoving the global economy over the cliff. Before the Z-10 virus batted last.
Mendoza’s Voice in the Wilderness columns, written longhand, appeared around the world. He'd become famous for telling people to grow their own food, homeschool their children, form co-op job communities and oppose all digital interfaces. He preached that work is the most beautiful way to serve each other -- an honor that shouldn't be handed off to artificial intelligence.
Quien le poner el ecobel al gato? was his battle cry: Who will hang the bell on the cat? He urged students to commit acts of disobedience at high-tech plants, release viruses on the global web, hack the system. Before long he had a trail of vagabonds following him, calling themselves his Sons who revered him as a prophet.
The A.I. that killed him was only doing its job. Mendoza and some Sons broke into the MINDSEYE office, hoping to destroy the rudimentary virtual-reality park. No one in Mendoza's gang could hack -- still true today -- so they brought axes to bludgeon the first-generation Mensa until MINDSEYE winked out. They made it as far as the airlock, where the A.I. sealed them inside. Mendoza panicked and slammed his ax into a console, shorting out the oxygen feed. Mendoza and his Sons suffocated, three centimeters away from fresh air.
That’s all the movement needed. Mendoza left his wealth to the cause, stipulating that the money be used to buy property -- a homestead where his followers could live by his ideals. The Sons of David became a recognized religion and bought sixty thousand acres in the Adirondack Mountains and forty thousand acres in Tennessee. Everyone was welcome.
Now there were hundreds of communities, specializing in Mendoza's wish to serve people by training doorboys, cooks, porters and servants to send into the world. Their population remained a mystery; census takers were banned. Their acts of disobedience had predictably become less civil; firebombing the Campus was a favorite pastime. What began as one man's argument for reason had become a hippie jihad.
And while Prohibition legitimized their cause and won my Jasper bunkmates an early parole, I wondered what they would do with Avalon destroyed. Quien le poner el escobel al gato? But without a cat, what would become of the keepers of the bell?
"Hey, how about that crazy rain?"
She smelled like Himalayan wool soaked in patchouli and her slate-gray hair was a tangle of flower stems and grass. She wore a set of wire-rimmed cheaters -- real cheaters, just glass -- and her wrinkles looked like a roadmap to laughter. Her bright teeth shone in my halogen as she stepped out of the corrugated-steel shack.
Rita shook the rain off her slicker as I cursed the great outdoors. It had been dark for three hours and we hadn't found an abandoned home worth using for the night, so we'd kept going. The woman's shack was the first building we'd seen in hours.
"Where is this?" I asked. The rain jetted off my fedora in a thick waterfall.
"You might be lost or you might be found. It depends which path you're on."
Rita smiled tenderly, as if she were seeing a favorite nursery ROM. The rain had made me less nostalgic. "Listen,” I said, “I'm not looking for Oz. I'm --"
"Jack," Rita interrupted, giving me a sharp look. Then, in a voice as lazy as old jazz, she said, "What my man is saying is that we know the path. We followed the path out of the city. But we've been lost in these woods since daybreak, searching for a place we hear in our sleep." Her voice was a whisper: "Marigolde."
"Sister." The woman touched Rita's cheek. "You've found us."
Emily made me switch off my halogen and led us into Marigolde, where the path opened to a meadow. My eyes adjusted to the darkness and I saw three large lodges, the roofs just below the treeline and the sky dominated by the dark slope of Mount Shasta. To the east was a column of grain silos, six in a bundle.
"The middle lodge is where we have our come-togethers and where our kids go for social dynamics," Emily said. "The one on the left is our training center. Marigolde is famous for butlers and groundskeepers."
A light flickered upstairs in the remaining lodge. "What's that one?"
"Our High Council. You see Levi there, burning the midnight oil. He's like that. Forever seeking." A reverent blink, then: "Downstairs is our Library, a good one. When we send missionaries into the cities, we bring back as many books as we can carry."
"Books?" What an ancient word. "Do you have ROM readers, too?"
Emily stopped on the path and turned, her face pinched in disgust.
Rita moved between us quickly. "Forgive my man," she said. "We've been in the city a long time. His job, well," a quick glance to me, then back to Emily, "his job had no resonance. It was my idea to come. I love the man. I don't want to lose him."
Emily nodded at the confession. "So many lost souls."
We walked toward the silos. Close up I noticed doors at the base and windows with small ledges and realized the silos had been converted to apartments.
"We serve breakfast at five," she said, standing outside the first silo. No locks. "But if you're too beat to rise by then, don't sweat it. Lunch is a feast, and it's at eleven."
When she turned, I saw her pendant for the first time. It was a child's building block, an antique one made of wood, the sides filled with six letters of the alphabet.
"Your necklace," I said. "Your child's?"
She lifted it from her breast and smiled sadly. "No. This is my cross."
"Your what?"
Emily let go of the block and it bounced along her skin, A, B, C, D. "We perform a ceremony called the Binding when someone accepts Marigolde. In it, we gather everything we own and throw it into a fire. But we choose one thing to carry forever as a reminder for why we're here. We call them crosses."
I nodded. "You were a teacher."
"First-grade."
She opened the door. The entrance was decorated with rice mats, pillows and small lanterns. In the center was a spiral staircase. Emily showed us where to put our coats and shoes, then led us upstairs. She whispered that we could shower in the morning, if we didn't mind it cold, or we wait until the solar heaters got to work. I could barely hear her as we climbed past the thick noise of communal sleep.
On the fifth floor, she found a kerosene lamp and struck a match. The window faced Shasta and two skylights dripped into metal saucepans. The furniture was limited to a futon pad, a shaving bowl, a broken mirror and a small table. On the table were copies of some Sons of David fliers I'd seen in gutters.
"Welcome," Emily said, turning. "You're free to stay as long as you like. Your love will be reciprocated many times, and your work rewarded with the work of others."
She hugged Rita and then walked to me, arms outstretched. I just stared at her.
She lowered her hands. "You have a hard heart. But Marigolde will soften your spirit, and heal the jagged edges of your soul."
And then she left, arms outstretched, like a leaf floating from a tree.
Rita peeled off her wet clothes and hung the shirt and denims on a hook by the stairs, her white underwear and bra glowing in the lamplight. Exhausted, we blew out the flame, climbed into bed and wrapped our bodies around each other, using body heat to push away the chill. Within moments we were asleep, our bodies as still as stones.
Neither of us stirred as midnight came. The rain pounded the silo, the world turned on its axis and Avalon faded into Marigolde's dreamless sleep, forgotten.
AVALON XXIII: Reunion
Our satchels were gone when we woke, replaced by two lumberjacks with Jesus hair, flanneled arms crossed. Thick pendants hung on leather twine around their necks.
"Levi wishes to see you."
Rita was wrapped around me like a pretzel. I freed a hand and pushed up off the futon. My Bulova said it was just past six, its hands blurred by a misted crystal.<
br />
I licked the film off my teeth. "Me?"
"She may sleep. Levi wishes only to see you."
I squinted at the men. "Levi always get what he wishes?"
They nodded. Their pendants -- a surveyor's scope and a tarnished Mensa microchip -- winked in the skylight glare.
"Well," I said, kicking back the blanket, "I'd hate to break a streak."
Sunlight bounced off the veined redwood of the High Council lodge. I glanced at the shelves stocked with yellowed paper, amazed at the bulk of printed data. People pored over documents as if debugging code. Some looked up as I entered, staring at my wrinkled clothes, pegging me as an outsider. They smiled like Emily, but their eyes were also calculating, like deer watching a leashed wolf being led across the field.
At the top of the stairs, my escorts led me through two huge doors covered with hand-carved images -- swooping eagles, jumping trout, plus a few squiggly lines and dotted zeroes, which I figured was some kind of local cypher. The doors opened to a great room with unpainted benches and a platform bearing a long table of solid Sequoia. Behind it was a diary wall telling how they'd carved Marigolde out of a mountainside.
Beneath it stood Levi.
"Welcome to Marigolde, stranger." His baritone voice was as sharp as the teeth of a carbide saw. The outdoors had cured his skin to dark walnut, covering the cables of his muscles with smooth bark. His white mane held traces of its auburn past, weaving cayenne streaks into a bone-colored curtain. The patch over his left eye meant he'd been bloodied, a symbol of his conviction -- or his lack of explosive expertise. Around his neck hung a loop of barbed wire.
"Thanks." My skin prickled under the wet clothes. "We were lucky to find you."