by Mike Ashley
I was a young man, newly bearded, hardly much more than a shirt-tail child, on that Harvest day when the stranger walked into town.
This was so unusual an event (and for you to whom a town of ten thousand necessarily means that there will be strangers, I despair of explaining) that children came out to shout and run at his heels, while we older citizens, conscious of our dignity, stood in the doorways of our shops, factories, and co-ops to gaze ponderously in his general direction. Not quite at him, you understand, but over his shoulder, into the flat, mesmeric plains and the infinite white skies beyond.
He claimed to have come all the way from the equatorial abdomen, where gravity is three times eye-normal, and this was easy enough to believe, for he was ungodly strong. With my own eyes I once saw him take a dollar coin between thumb and forefinger and bend it in half – and a steel dollar at that! He also claimed to have walked the entire distance, which nobody believed, not even me.
“If you’d walked even half that far,” I said, “I reckon you’d be the most remarkable man as ever lived.”
He laughed at that and ruffled my hair. “Well, maybe I am,” he said. “Maybe I am.”
I flushed and took a step backwards, hand on the bandersnatch-skin hilt of my fighting knife. I was as feisty as a bantam rooster in those days, and twice as quick to take offense. “Mister, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to step outside.”
The stranger looked at me. Then he reached out and, without the slightest hint of fear or anger or even regret, touched my arm just below the shoulder. He did it with no particular speed and yet somehow I could not react fast enough to stop him. And that touch, light though it was, paralysed my arm, leaving it withered and useless, even as it is today.
He put his drink down on the bar, and said, “Pick up my knapsack.”
I did.
“Follow me.”
So it was that without a word of farewell to my family or even a backward glance, I left New Auschwitz forever.
That night, over a campfire of eel grass and dried buffalo chips, we ate a dinner of refried beans and fatback bacon. It was a new and clumsy experience for me, eating one-handed. For a long time, neither one of us spoke. Finally I said, “Are you a magician?”
The stranger sighed. “Maybe so,” he said. “Maybe I am.”
“You have a name?”
“No.”
“What do we do now?”
“Business.” He pushed his plate toward me. “I cooked. It’s your turn to wash.”
Our business entailed constant travel. We went to Brinkerton with cholera and to Roxborough with typhus. We passed through Denver and Venice and Saint Petersburg and left behind fleas, rats, and plague. In Upper Black Eddy, it was ebola. We never stayed long enough to see the results of our work, but I read the newspapers afterwards, and it was about what you would expect.
Still, on the whole, humanity prospered. Where one city was decimated, another was expanding. The overspilling hospitals of one county created a market for the goods of a dozen others. The survivors had babies.
We walked to Tylersburg, Rutledge, and Uniontown and took wagons to Shoemakersville, Confluence, and South Gibson. Booked onto steam trains for Mount Lebanon, Mount Bethel, Mount Aetna, and Mount Nebo and diesel trains to McKeesport, Reinholds Station, and Broomall. Boarded buses to Carbondale, Feasterville, June Bug, and Lincoln Falls. Caught commuter flights to Paradise, Nickel Mines, Niantic, and Zion. The time passed quickly.
Then one shocking day my magician announced that he was going home.
“Home?” I said. “What about your work?”
“Our work, Daniel,” he said gently. “I expect you’ll do as good a job as ever I did.” He finished packing his few possessions into a carpetbag.
“You can’t!” I cried.
With a wink and a sad smile, he slipped out the door.
For a time – long or short, I don’t know – I sat motionless, unthinking, unseeing. Then I leaped to my feet, threw open the door, and looked up and down the empty street. Blocks away, towards the train station, was a scurrying black speck.
Leaving the door open behind me, I ran after it.
I just missed the afternoon express to Lackawanna. I asked the stationmaster when was the next train after it. He said tomorrow. Had he seen a tall man carrying a carpetbag, looking thus and so? Yes, he had. Where was he? On the train to Lackawanna. Nothing more heading that way today. Did he know where I could rent a car? Yes, he did. Place just down the road.
Maybe I’d’ve caught the magician if I hadn’t gone back to the room to pick up my bags. Most likely not. At Lackawanna station I found he’d taken the bus to Johnstown. In Johnstown, he’d moved on to Erie and there the trail ran cold. It took me three days’ hard questioning to pick it up again.
For a week I pursued him thus, like a man possessed.
Then I awoke one morning and my panic was gone. I knew I wasn’t going to catch my magician anytime soon. I took stock of my resources, counted up what little cash-money I had, and laid out a strategy. Then I went shopping. Finally, I hit the road. I’d have to be patient, dogged, wily, but I knew that, given enough time, I’d find him.
Find him, and kill him too.
The trail led me to Harper’s Ferry, at the very edge of the oculus. Behind was civilization. Ahead was nothing but thousands of miles of empty chitin-lands.
People said he’d gone south, off the lens entirely.
Back at my boarding house, I was approached by one of the lodgers. He was a skinny man with a big mustache and sleeveless white T-shirt that hung from his skinny shoulders like wet laundry on a muggy Sunday.
“What you got in that bag?”
“Black death,” I said, “infectious meningitis, tuberculosis. You name it.”
He thought for a bit. “I got this wife,” he said at last. “I don’t suppose you could . . .”
“I’ll take a look at her,” I said, and hoisted the bag.
We went upstairs to his room.
She lay in the bed, eyes closed. There was an IV needle in her arm, hooked up to a drip feed. She looked young, but of course that meant nothing. Her hair, neatly brushed and combed, laid across the coverlet almost to her waist, was white – white as snow, as death, as finest bone china.
“How long has she been like this?” I asked.
“Ohhhh . . .” He blew out his cheeks. “Forty-seven, maybe fifty years?”
“You her father?”
“Husband. Was, anyhow. Not sure how long the vows were meant to hold up under these conditions: can’t say I’ve kept ‘em any too well. You got something in that bag for her?” He said it as casual as he could, but his eyes were big and spooked-looking.
I made my decision. “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll give you forty dollars for her.”
“The sheriff wouldn’t think much of what you just said,” the man said low and quiet.
“No. But then, I suppose I’ll be off of the eye-lands entirely before he knows a word of it.”
I picked up my syringe. “Well? Is it a deal or not?”
Her name was Victoria. We were a good three days march into the chitin before she came out of the trance state characteristic of the interim zombie stage of Recovery. I’d fitted her with a pack, walking shoes, and a good stout stick, and she strode along head up, eyes blank, speaking in the tongues of angels afloat between the stars.
“ – cisgalactic phase intercept,” she said. “Do you read? Das Uberraumboot zuruckgegenerinnernte. Verstehen? Anadaemonic mesotechnological conflict strategizing. Drei tausenden Affen mit Laseren! Hello? Is anybody – ”
Then she stumbled over a rock, cried out in pain, and said, “Where am I?”
I stopped, spread a map on the ground, and got out my pocket gravitometer. It was a simple thing: a glass cylinder filled with aerogel and a bright orange ceramic bead. The casing was tin, with a compressor screw at the top, a calibrated scale along the side, and the words “Flynn & Co.” at the bottom. I
flipped it over, watched the bead slowly fall. I tightened the screw a notch, then two, then three, increasing the aerogel’s density. At five, the bead stopped. I read the gauge, squinted up at the sun, and then jabbed a finger on an isobar to one edge of the map.
“Right here,” I said. “Just off the lens. See?”
“I don’t – ” She was trembling with panic. Her dilated eyes shifted wildly from one part of the empty horizon to another. Then suddenly, sourcelessly, she burst into tears.
Embarrassed, I looked away. When she was done crying, I patted the ground. “Sit.” Sniffling, she obeyed. “How old are you, Victoria?”
“How old am . . . ? Sixteen?” she said tentatively. “Seventeen?” Then, “Is that really my name?”
“It was. The woman you were grew tired of life, and injected herself with a drug that destroys the ego and with it all trace of personal history.” I sighed. “So in one sense you’re still Victoria, and in another sense you’re not. What she did was illegal, though; you can never go back to the oculus. You’d be locked into jail for the rest of your life.”
She looked at me through eyes newly young, almost childlike in their experience, and still wet with tears. I was prepared for hysteria, grief, rage. But all she said was, “Are you a magician?”
That rocked me back on my heels. “Well – yes,” I said. “I suppose I am.”
She considered that silently for a moment. “So what happens to me now?”
“Your job is to carry that pack. We also go turn-on-turn with the dishes.” I straightened, folding the map. “Come on. We’ve got a far way yet to go.”
We commenced marching, in silence at first. But then, not many miles down the road and to my complete astonishment, Victoria began to sing!
We followed the faintest of paths – less a trail than the memory of a dream of the idea of one – across the chitin. Alongside it grew an occasional patch of grass. A lot of wind-blown loess had swept across the chitin-lands over the centuries. It caught in cracks in the carapace and gave purchase to fortuitous seeds. Once I even saw a rabbit. But before I could point it out to Victoria, I saw something else. Up ahead, in a place where the shell had powdered and a rare rainstorm had turned the powder briefly to mud, were two overlapping tyre prints. A motorbike had been by here, and recently.
I stared at the tracks for a long time, clenching and unclenching my good hand.
The very next day we came upon a settlement.
It was a hardscrabble place. Just a windmill to run the pump that brought up a trickle of ichor from a miles-deep well, a refinery to process the stuff edible, and a handful of unpainted clapboard buildings and Quonset huts. Several battered old pickup trucks sat rusting under the limitless sky.
A gaunt man stood by the gate, waiting for us. His jaw was hard, his backbone straight and his hands empty. But I noted here and there a shiver of movement in a window or from the open door of a shed, and I made no mistake but that there were weapons trained upon us.
“Name’s Rivera,” the man said when we came up to him.
I swept off my bowler hat. “Daniel. This’s Miss Victoria, my ward.”
“Passing through?”
“Yessir, I am, and I see no reason I should ever pass this way again. If you have food for sale, I’ll pay you market rates. But if not, why, with your permission, we’ll just keep on moving on.”
“Fair spoken.” From somewhere Rivera produced a cup of water, and handed it to us. I drank half, handed the rest to Victoria. She shivered as it went down. “Right good,” I said. “And cold too.”
“We have a heat pump,” Rivera said with grudging pride. “C’mon inside. Let’s see what the women have made us to eat.”
Then the children came running out, whooping and hollering, too many to count, and the adult people behind them, whom I made out to be twenty in number. They made us welcome.
They were good people, if outlaws, and as hungry for news and gossip as anybody can be. I told them about a stump speech I had heard made by Tyler B. Morris, who was running for governor of the Northern Department, and they spent all of dinnertime discussing it. The food was good, too – ham and biscuits with red-eye gravy, sweet yams with butter, and apple cobbler to boot. If I hadn’t seen their chemical complex, I’d’ve never guessed it for synthetic. There were lace curtains in the window, brittle-old but clean, and I noted how carefully the leftovers were stored away for later.
After we’d eaten, Rivera caught my eye and gestured with his chin. We went outside, and he led me to a shed out back. He unpadlocked the door and we stepped within. A line of ten people lay unmoving on plain-built beds. They were each catheterized to a drip-bag of processed ichor. Light from the door caught their hair, ten white haloes in the gloom.
“We brought them with us,” Rivera said. “Thought we’d be doing well enough to make a go of it. Lately, though, I don’t know, maybe it’s the drought, but the blood’s been running thin, and it’s not like we have the money to have a new well drilled.”
“I understand.” Then, because it seemed a good time to ask, “There was a man came by this way probably less’n a week ago. Tall, riding a – ”
“He wouldn’t help,” Harry said. “Said it wasn’t his responsibility. Then, before he drove off, the sonofabitch tried to buy some of our food.” He turned and spat. “He told us you and the woman would be coming along. We been waiting.”
“Wait. He told you I’d have a woman with me?”
“It’s not just us we have to think of!” he said with sudden vehemence. “There’s the young fellers, too. They come along and all a man’s stiff-necked talk about obligations and morality goes right out the window. Sometimes I think how I could come out here with a length of iron pipe and – well.” He shook his head and then, almost pleadingly, said, “Can’t you do something?”
“I think so.” A faint creaking noise made me turn then. Victoria stood frozen in the doorway. The light through her hair made of it a white flare. I closed my eyes, wishing she hadn’t stumbled across this thing. In a neutral voice I said, “Get my bag.”
Then Rivera and I set to haggling out a price.
We left the settlement with a goodly store of food and driving their third-best pickup truck. It was a pathetic old thing and the shocks were scarce more than a memory. We bumped and jolted towards the south.
For a long time Victoria did not speak. Then she turned to me and angrily blurted, “You killed them!”
“It was what they wanted.”
“How can you say that?” She twisted in the seat and punched me in the shoulder. Hard. “How can you sit there and . . . say that?”
“Look,” I said testily. “It’s simple mathematics. You could make an equation out of it. They can only drill so much ichor. That ichor makes only so much food. Divide that by the number of mouths there are to feed and hold up the result against what it takes to keep one alive. So much food, so many people. If the one’s smaller than the other, you starve. And the children wanted to live. The folks in the shed didn’t.”
“They could go back! Nobody has to live out in the middle of nowhere trying to scratch food out of nothing!”
“I counted one suicide for every two waking adults. Just how welcome do you think they’d be, back to the oculus, with so many suicides living among them? More than likely that’s what drove them out here in the first place.”
“Well . . . nobody would be starving if they didn’t insist on having so many damn children.”
“How can you stop people from having children?” I asked.
There was no possible answer to that and we both knew it. Victoria leaned her head against the cab window, eyes squeezed tight shut, as far from me as she could get. “You could have woken them up! But no, you had your bag of goodies and you wanted to play. I’m surprised you didn’t kill me when you had the chance.” “Vickie . . .”
“Don’t speak to me!”
She started to weep.
I wanted to hug her and comfo
rt her, she was so miserable. But I was driving, and I only had the one good arm. So I didn’t. Nor did I explain to her why it was that nobody chose to simply wake the suicides up.
That evening, as usual, I got out the hatchet and splintered enough chitin for a campfire. I was sitting by it, silent, when Victoria got out the jug of rough liquor the settlement folks had brewed from ichor. “You be careful with that stuff,” I said. “It sneaks up on you. Don’t forget, whatever experience you’ve had drinking got left behind in your first life.”
“Then you drink!” she said, thrusting a cup at me. “I’ll follow your lead. When you stop, I’ll stop.”
I swear I never suspected what she had in mind. And it had been a long while since I’d tasted alcohol. So, like a fool, I took her intent at face value. I had a drink. And then another.
Time passed.
We talked some, we laughed some. Maybe we sang a song or two.
Then, somehow, Victoria had shucked off her blouse and was dancing. She whirled around the campfire, her long skirts lifting up above her knees and occasionally flirting through the flames so that the hem browned and smoked but never quite caught fire.
This wildness seemed to come out of nowhere. I watched her, alarmed and aroused, too drunk to think clearly, too entranced even to move.
Finally she collapsed gracefully at my feet. The firelight was red on her naked back, shifting with each gasping breath she took. She looked up at me through her long, sweat-tangled hair, and her eyes were like amber, dark as cypress swamp water, brown and bottomless. Eyes a man could drown in.
I pulled her towards me. Laughing, she surged forward, collapsing upon me, tumbling me over backwards, fumbling with my belt and then the fly of my jeans. Then she had my cock out and stiff and I’d pushed her skirt up above her waist so that it seemed she was wearing nothing but a thick red sash. And I rolled her over on her back and she was reaching down between her legs to guide me in and she was smiling and lovely.