Avalon

by Rusty Coats

  Levi pulled a disc from his vest, turned it lazily in his hand. It was the ROM I'd used as a cover to escape New Berkeley. "This," he said, "is not you."

  Before I could say anything, he brought the disc down on the table, shattering it.

  Levi waited for a reaction, and when I didn't kick, he produced another disc -- my ID-ROM for Avalon, the decade-old data Monk had saved to preserve a long-gone Jack Denys. It also contained the encryption code Mohican.

  Levi held it high, as if playing table tennis with the sunbeam. "And this?"

  "That," I said, "is as close as I get to a soul. If you asked me to choose at the Binding ceremony, I’d choose that as my cross." I let the sun through the skylight warm my clothes. "Of all people here, you should know that, DeCloud."

  His eyes narrowed, then his face opened to a smile. "It's good to see you again, Jack." He placed the ROM aside. "I heard you were paroled."

  "And I heard you finally found a cushy job."

  "Nothing's cushy about leadership. Look at my hair. Leadership has sucked the color from my head."

  "Along with the brains."

  "Watch it."

  I shook his hand, felt the calluses on his palms. He was stronger than he'd been in Jasper, where we farmed silage and slept in tents that whistled when the wind roared off the Eastern Sierra. He was just another fanatic then, looking at thirty years for trying to destroy a Campus electrical depot, a bomb that destroyed two dynamos and Levi's left eye. He was one of the Sons of David converts, an intern at the Campus clinic destined to be a surgeon until he caught religion. Up was down. Down was up.

  "Our missionaries have seen you on Campus. You must feel like a prodigal son."

  I shrugged. “Somehow I thought the myth had a happier ending."

  "It must be a very bad ending indeed if it has brought you here."

  I glanced away, letting my eyes blur on the blond veins in the wood, suddenly craving metal. Sheets of aluminum, walls of Vitrolite. Anything.

  "What brings you to us, Jack?" He fingered the barbed wire around his neck. "Our missionaries said you were working for the Smithsonian, some rehabilitative work for your parole. Are you here for research?"

  I stared out the skylights, chuckling. The Smithsonian. Some rehab.

  "There's a warrant for my arrest," I said, "and a bounty on my head. Rita and I escaped through the sewers to New Berkeley, then hopped a Tube on that ROM you just destroyed. The Neuromantics followed me as far as Redding, so maybe they're as smart as they say." I met his eyes. "I need a place to hide, Levi."

  "Marigolde is not a hideout," he said flatly. Then: "What are you charged with?"

  "Murder."

  His clear eye did a dance. "What?"

  "The warrant says I killed a boy in Avalon."

  "Did you?"

  "No," I said. "But whoever did it doesn't want me around. Especially not now."

  "Why not now?"

  I shivered inside the damp clothes, my skin as bumpy as a plucked chicken. "Because whoever killed that kid killed the Sysops two nights ago, along with four thousand people plugged into Club Trocadero. Because I have all the pieces of a very pretty puzzle but can't seem to put them together." I stared back at him, hard. "But then, maybe I don't need to anymore, because by now Avalon is gone."

  The intensity of his stare flickered. "What?"

  I sat on the front-row bench and crossed my arms to keep from shivering. "The Neuromantics beat you to the punch, Levi. They were taking over the substations when we left the city. A few hours ago, at midnight, they were going to pull the plug."

  Levi was about to speak when a woman's voice rang out.

  "Liar!"

  She emerged from the wings, long legs striding toward Levi. Around her neck was a shiny pendant, and when I saw that it was a ROM disc, my eyes jumped to hers. But her dark green eyes only punctured me, a razor-tipped stare dipped in old venom.

  "He's lying, Levi," she said, but she spoke to me. "He's always been a liar. He's never known anything else."

  She stepped off the stage and walked toward me. I followed the familiar angle of a hairline I'd watched my mother brush and only smiled when she raised her hand and slapped me across the face.

  "Tell him what a lying bastard you are, Jack."

  "She's right, Levi." I said, staring at the flecks in her eyes, flecks my father called Denys Gold. "I once told Gretchen I'd never leave. And I did."

  Her hand ripped my other cheek. "Bastard."

  "Here now," Levi said, giving her a squeeze that was more than paternal. "This is no way for family to behave."

  Gretchen’s eyes were wet. "We stopped being family eight years ago."

  Levi left to assemble the members of Marigolde's High Council for an emergency meeting, leaving Gretchen and me alone. She sat beneath the painting of Marigolde's first harvest, still fuming. I stood at the end of the table, arms crossed, still chilled to the bone. The shivering had started a rough clawing in my chest.

  Finally, I said, "I didn't know where you were."

  "I didn't want you to know," she said, glancing up. "I don't want you to know now. I want you here long enough for me to convince the rest of the Council to banish you, so I never have to see you again."

  "Christ, Gretchen," I said. "I was arrested for treason. Did you expect the judge to let me go because of a promise I made my sister?"

  "Everyone knew you were going to be caught!" She was on her feet now. "After you released Icarus everyone at the Wharf told you to go underground, but you wouldn't listen! You had to stick around for the applause."

  She leaned forward, her face red. "You didn't leave me because you were trying to save the world, Jack. If you've convinced yourself of that, I'm sorry, because it's a lie. You went to prison because you were vain."

  Her words pastiched with images from Echo Wharf, memories of me posing in front of Lucky No. 7 with a ROM of Icarus in my fingers, watching myself in the amber-tinted mirror, hearing my story expand into an epic myth.

  She was wrong. I'd sniffed myself out a long time ago.

  "After they took you away, Mom and Dad became obsessed. People were openly talking about SDS and CNI, and there was a rumor that the Project might be suspended. Maybe Mom and Dad knew Prohibition was coming. I don't know. But they worked themselves crazy. Mom was working on that archiving consciousness project with Dr. Cassady when they heard Prohibition had passed."

  I listened, staring at my hands. The only thing I knew about the last months my parents were alive had been crammed into a funeral ROM and mailed to Jasper.

  "I'd been drifting away for a long time," she said. "You were always in trouble; they had to notice you. But the more the Library developed, the less attention they paid me. I never loved code, and I didn't plan to walk in your shadow. So one night I ran."

  She flicked tears off her cheek. "His name was Ronnie. A missionary for the Sons of David. I didn't go for the philosophy, not then. But I knew Ronnie would take me to a place where I wouldn't have to worry about walking in anyone's shadow."

  "Here."

  She smiled, looked away. "Ronnie didn't last. But Marigolde took hold of me, and four months later, on the day of my Binding ceremony, a package came from Monk. He said the datacops had sealed off the Campus and were about to gas it, and Wrecking Ball was pounding through the higher memory. It looked hopeless. Mom and Dad died about six hours before the Sysops seized control."

  Her fingers went to the small ROM on her necklace. The edges were rough from the grit it had suffered riding on her neck. "This is all there was. It's from Mom."

  I stared at the disc like a fool hypnotized by the sun. "What's on it?"

  "Who cares?" Her voice was bitter again. "They're gone, killed by that horrible place just like all the others. It's in the past, someone else's past, someone I stopped being when I came here. And that's my cross."

  My eyes held the ROM’s shimmer, remembering the album Van Meter had stolen. Eight discs of memories and they were gone, p
robably erased with Van Meter's cerebellum, and around Gretchen's neck was the last dispatch. And she didn't care.

  "Your cross," she said, her eyes like flint, "is going to be your knapsack as you walk out of here. I've made a life here. Levi and I have a daughter, Sunny. I'm on the Council. I carry my past around my neck. I don't need you staring back at me."

  I coughed into my fist. "So much for blood."

  "There are limits to everything."

  Levi had me tell the Council what I'd told him about Avalon. When I was done, he stood. "Now you see why I called this meeting. Word is sure to leak into the community. I'm sure you realize how devastating this may be."

  There were four women and two men on the Council. Gretchen was the youngest; Levi and a woman in a yellow cape were the gray matter. It was the old woman who spoke. "Do we need to tell them at all?"

  They argued for several minutes, an argument that seemed ludicrous to me. They discussed how to tell everyone Avalon was gone, since the news may take the wind out of their fanatics, maybe even drive them out of the Sons of David. Spread across the country, that meant thousands of vigilantes, their enemy killed by the Neuromantics, who had done in hours what the Sons couldn't do in fifteen years.

  "We must alert the other Councils," said a member with thick rivers of black hair. "This concerns every member."

  "That will take several weeks."

  I laughed. When they turned, I said, "This isn't local gossip. This is the Titanic."

  The members gave me a condescending nod, then ignored me. Levi leaned over. "Information isn't like that here, Jack," he said. "The Councils distribute news from the outside. Anything that doesn't come from the Council is regarded as heresy."

  "You can't hide something this big."

  "We've hidden bigger."

  Later, the Council decided to keep the incident quiet until they gathered a quorum, which would take weeks, since the Sons of David refused to use uplink screens. That meant stalling until the leaders of other communities -- from Shiloh in Ohio to Harmony in Georgia -- came to Marigolde.

  They were about to adjourn when Gretchen spoke.

  "One matter remains before this Council. This man and his companion. They cannot stay here."

  Levi's jaw fell open. "This man is your brother, Gretchen."

  The other members of the Council mumbled, watching her. "He was my brother, yes. But now I have another family to protect. And that family will be harmed if Jack Denys is allowed to stay."

  More mumbling. Levi said, "How can you know that, Gretch?"

  Her face hung over me like a moon. "Death follows him."

  When the mumbling exploded into shouts, she waved her hand. "If not for that reason, then this: We are trying to contain a very large secret. Jack cannot be trusted."

  The mumblers faced me. I said, "If it means staying here safely, I can." I nodded to Levi. "You have my word that Rita and I will say nothing about Avalon until you've told your flock. After that, it should be safe for us to move, and we'll leave."

  Gretchen scowled. "The Council does not accept the word of a known liar."

  "Gretchen!" Levi snapped. "We are a community of compassion. Like every traveler, his past stays at the gate, along with our prejudice. This Council decides on the man sitting before it, not who he was. That is our creed."

  She glared at him, the skin beneath the ROM turning red. Then she bowed her head, trembling in anger. "My apologies."

  Levi put it to the Council and they ruled Rita and I would be quarantined in Marigolde until the delegates from the other communities decided how to tell its citizenry that Avalon was gone. The vote was five to one.

  AVALON XXIV: The Binding

  Jakob's shoulders blotted out the sun as he leaned over the mouth of the hole, and in the shadow, I couldn't see his hands. I signed back, "Can't hear. Glare." So he signed over his head, thick fingers twitching against the sky: "Water."

  I nodded and he lowered a swollen skin into the crater, the beads dripping on my face as I reached for the bag. Jakob watched me squeeze a jet of water into my throat, saw me cough. The fit was tougher this time and I had to grab my knees and hack.

  "Bad cough," his hands said. "Need doctor."

  I shook my head. What they called doctors here most people called gardeners. I signed back, "Need cigarette."

  Jakob laughed the barking laugh of the deaf and hauled the bag up the wall. The evergreens stood like unopened umbrellas behind him and I shielded my eyes from the dirt tumbling off the sheer wall. When the dust cleared, Jakob had produced a hand-rolled cigarette from his pouch. His silent eyes twinkled, but I shook my head, my hands conveying that natural herbs only made me stupid.

  "Suit self," he signed with a shrug. "Change mind, tell me."

  Then he was gone and the sun was back, boring into the hole like a drill.

  After four days of digging the tank had finally broken through, buried in the black, rocky soil like a terrible secret. Now half its corroded body was exposed and I was doing the slow job of digging a trench so it could be removed. Despite its uselessness, the old gasoline tank seemed to be growing, just for spite.

  It wasn't bad work. The old petrol station had been dismantled during Marigolde's first years, its parts used to build lodges and the foundation broken into rocks for creek beds. But crops planted here wouldn't grow; the buried tank had decayed, leaking gas into the soil. The dirt I sent up in buckets was spread on solar screens to bake out the toxins. It was as close to science as the Sons of David allowed.

  The smell of gas filled the hole like fog, and sometimes the odor was so strong I had to call Jakob to haul me out, lightheaded and woozy. The tank hadn't given up its lifeblood yet, still trickling pink fluid into the soil. My clothes stank of it.

  Rita took a job organizing books in the library – which quickly overwhelmed her. Acquisitions from missionary runs into the city and nearby ghost towns had simply been allowed to arrange themselves, like Big Bang molecules bouncing around until they formed planets. Each night she came back to the silo complaining, but beneath the griping I could hear joy. Rita functioned best when she was needed. I guess we all do.

  We'd heard nothing from the outside, of course. Levi said word had gone out to the other communities to seal their gates until a Council quorum decided how to release the news of Avalon. Outside, anything could be happening, or nothing. My life revolved around a shovel, a hole and the job of excavating a toxic past.

  On the sixth day Rita and I felt Marigolde's excitement, like the hum of a buried cable, and knew it was a Binding ceremony. At first light, a crew of broad-backed men erected a stage of creosote posts, decorated with a canopy of tie-dyed parachutes. The meadow soon filled with people as Marigolde's members arrived from the boondocks.

  We ate breakfast at the silo window. By the time the sun crested the pines, the food stands and artists had come in, milling through Marigolde's midway. Jugglers hurled eggs and bricks into the air, a magician pulled coins from ear wax.

  Rita's face moved through phases, from childish glee to a scowl, and I found myself watching her instead of the meadow, imagining I was watching a ROM of her memories. She called me old man, but in Marigolde she was the elder, helping us fit in. She knew Marigolde's routines the way I knew Avalon's hardhat tunnels; they were second-nature, the rules of a game never forgotten. But when she fell into the pattern -- the smooth speech, lilting walk or the urge to embrace -- she'd clench her fists and silently reprimand herself. She fit in easily here, and hated herself for that.

  "They'll go all day like this," she said, her face creased with shadows. "And after the Binding, the adults will go all night."

  I cleared my throat, straining against fluid in my lungs. "Work hard, play hard."

  She turned. "It's one of their holiest ceremonies. The rituals have names and hidden meanings. Even the playfulness is premeditated. This carnival? It looks like it's all fun and games, but it's designed to awaken the child self in everyone here. Stuff like l
aughter, fearlessness, adventure, magic. Mostly magic."

  I shrugged. "Kind of overstated, aren't they?"

  "That's what these communities are about. Resonance. Harmony." She turned to the window, her breath fogging the glass. "They seek rituals, so no experience is wasted. It all relates to the Creed, serving each other, but the underlying theme is ecstasy. Ecstasy in living. Eros, agape; it all blends together so that life is an orgy."

  The workmen digging a trench in front of the stage paused to pass along a hand-rolled cigarette. "If they're into orgies," I said, "they would have loved SwingFest."

  She shook her head, the black hair slashing her cheek. "No, no. See, their idea of orgy isn't just sex, it's the group sweat, the communal rhythm, finding some kind of resonance that grows out of everyone. That's why they were so opposed to Avalon. No matter how big a crowd you're in, you're always alone in Avalon."

  A procession of people in hooded blue robes parted the crowd. As they passed, others reached to touch them, as if they were totems. It was plain they were initiates.

  "Blue is the color of the spirit," Rita said offhandedly. "They're gathering energy now, seeking intimacy. To them, Avalon robs people of that, supplants it with a manufactured stimulus. 'Without intimacy, we are nothing.' The Creed was written years before Construction, but it fit very well with the war on Avalon."

  I remembered my first time online, a stolen moment in the Parthenon with a ballerina who once performed in the Virtual Olympics. Jana. We'd planned weeks ahead, flew in under Chowder and uncloaked to consummate a love that never seemed to translate offline. Now she shared disk space with other junkies at New Hope.

  I said: "It always felt intimate to me."

  "Maybe, Jack," she said. "But you're an old softie."

  "Hey," I said. Or tried to. The coughing came again, harsh and bubbly. Rita dug into her pouch for a small jar, opened it and rubbed cool menthol goop on my chest.

  "You are a softie, Jack," she said. "And that's your secret. With all your encryption, that's the one thing you want to keep hidden, like a dark stain. But it's the one thing that keeps bleeding through."