Warriors [Anthology]

by George R. R.

  Tommy took off for the infirmary.

  * * * *

  There were many kinds of paint down at the carpentry shop, but very little approached red, the last color you’d want on a battlefield.

  When Tommy ran into the infirmary, he found the ex-captain there before him. The man was tearing bandages into foot-long pieces.

  Tommy went to the medicine chest and forced his way into it. Bottles flew and broke.

  —They’ve finally done it!— said the ex-captain. —They’ve gotten together just long enough to get rid of us. Our scavenging last week must have finally pushed them over into reason.—

  Tommy took a foot-long section of bandages and quickly painted three red stripes on it with the dauber on a bottle of Mercurochrome. He took one, gave it to the ex-captain, did one for himself.

  —First they’ll do for us.— he said. —Next, they’ll be back to killing each other. This is going on up and down the whole Western Front. I never thought they could keep such a plan quiet for so long.—

  The ex-captain headed him a British helmet and a New Model Army web-belt. —Got your rifle? Good, try to blend in. Speak English. Good luck.— He was gone out the door.

  Tommy took off the opposite way. He ran toward where he thought the Germans might be.

  The sound of firing grew louder. He realized he might now be a target for Ninieslanders, too. He stepped around a corridor junction and directly in front of a German soldier. The man raised his rifle barrel towards the ceiling.

  “Anglander?” the German asked

  —j— “Yes,” said Tommy, lifting his rifle also.

  “More just behind me,” Tommy added. “Very few of the...under-grounders in our way.” The German looked at him in incomprehension. He looked farther back down the corridor Tommy had come from.

  There was the noise of more Germans coming up the other hall. They lifted their rifles, saw his red stripes, lowered them.

  Tommy moved with them as they advanced farther down the corridors, marveling at the construction. There was some excitement as a Ninieslander bolted from a room down the hallway and was killed in a volley from the Germans.

  “Good shooting,” said Tommy.

  Eventually, they heard the sound of English.

  “My people,” said Tommy. He waved to the Germans and walked toward the voices.

  A British captain with drawn pistol stood in front of a group of soldiers. The bodies of two Ninieslanders lay on the floor beside them.

  —And what rat have we forced from his hole?— asked the captain in Esperanto.

  Tommy kept his eyes blank.

  “Is that Hungarian you’re speaking, sir?” he asked, the words strange on his tongue.

  “Your unit?” asked the Captain.

  “First, King’s Own Rifles,” said Tommy. “I was separated and with some Germans.”

  “Much action?”

  “A little, most of the corridors are empty. They’re off somewheres, sir.”

  “Fall in with my men till we can get you back to your company, when this is over. What kind of stripes you call those? Is that iodine?”

  “Mercurochrome, I believe,” said Tommy. “Supply ran out of the issue. Our stretcher-bearers used field expedients.” He had a hard time searching for the right words.

  Esperanto phrases kept leaping to mind. He would have to be careful, especially around this officer.

  They searched out a few more rooms and hallways, found nothing. From far away, whistles blew.

  “That’s recall,” said the Captain. “Let’s go.”

  Other deeper whistles sounded from far away, where the Germans were. It must be over.

  They followed the officer till they came to boardings that led outside to No-Man’s Land.

  The captain left for a hurried consultation with a group of field-grade officers. He returned in a few minutes.

  “More work to do,” he said. A detail brought cans of petrol and set them down nearby.

  “We’re to burn the first two corridors down. You, you, you,” he said, indicating Tommy last. “Take these cans, spread the petrol around. The signal is three whistle blasts. Get out as soon as you light it off. Everyone got matches? Good.”

  They went back inside, the can heavy in Tommy’s hands. He went up to the corridor turning, began to empty petrol on the duckboard floor.

  He saved a little in the bottom of the can. He idly sloshed it around and around.

  Time enough to build the better world tomorrow. Many, like him, must have made it out, to rejoin their side or get clean away in this chaos.

  After this War is over, we’ll get together, find each other, start building that new humanity on the ashes of this old world.

  The three whistles came. Tommy struck a match, threw it onto the duckboard flooring and watched the petrol catch with a whooshing sound.

  He threw the can after it, and walked out into the bright day of the new world waiting to be born.

  <>

  * * * *

  Gardner Dozois

  Gardner Dozois was the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine for almost twenty years and also edits the annual anthology series The Year’s Best Science Fiction, which has won the Locus Award for Best Anthology sixteen times, more than any other anthology series in history, and which is now up to its twenty-sixth annual collection. He’s won the Hugo Award fifteen times as the year’s Best Editor, won the Locus Award thirty times, including an unprecedented sixteen times in a row as Best Editor, and has won the Nebula Award twice, as well as a Sidewise Award, for his own short fiction, which has been collected in The Visible Man, Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois, Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys with Gardner Dozois, andMorning Child and Other Stories. He is the author or editor of more than a hundred books, among the most recent of which are a novel written in collaboration with George R. R. Martin and Daniel Abraham, Hunter’s Run, and the anthologies Galactic Empires, Songs of the Dying Earth (edited with George R. R. Martin), The New Space Opera 2 (edited with Jonathan Strahan), and The Dragon Book: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy (edited with Jack Dann). Born in Salem, Massachusetts, he now lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

  Here he takes us to a strange future where a stubborn holdout persists in fighting a rearguard action, even though he suspects that he’s lost not only the battle, but also the war.

  * * * *

  Recidivist

  Kleisterman walked along the shoreline, the gentle waves of the North Atlantic breaking and running in washes of lacy white foam almost up to the toes of his boots. A sandpiper ran along parallel to him, a bit farther out, snatching up bits of food churned up by the surf. When the waves receded, leaving the sand a glossy matte black, you could see jets of bubbles coming up from buried sand fleas. Waves foamed around a ruined stone jetty, half-submerged in the water.

  Behind him, millions of tiny robots were dismantling Atlantic City.

  He scuffed at the sea-wrack that was drying above the tideline in a tangled mass of semi-deflated brown bladders, and looked up and down the long beach. It was empty, of people anyway. There were black-backed gulls and laughing gulls scattered here and there, some standing singly, some in clumps of two or three, some in those strange V-shaped congregations of a dozen or more birds standing quietly on the sand, all facing the same way, as if they were waiting to take flying lessons from the lead gull. A crab scurried through the wrack almost at his feet. Above the tideline, the dry sand was mixed in with innumerable fragments of broken seashells, the product of who knew how many years of pounding by the waves.

  You could have come down here any day for the last ten thousand years, since the glaciers melted and the sea rose to its present level, and everything would have been the same: the breaking waves, the crying of seabirds, the scurrying crabs, the sandpipers and plovers hunting at the edge of the surf.

  Now, in just a few more days, it would all be gone forever.

  Kleisterman turn
ed and looked out to sea. Somewhere out there, out over the miles of cold gray water, out of sight as yet, Europe was coming.

  A cold wind blew the smell of salt into his face. A laughing gull skimmed by overhead, spraying him with the raucous, laughing cries that had given its species the name. Today, its laughter seemed particularly harsh and derisive, and particularly appropriate. Humanity’s day was done, after all. Time to be laughed off the stage.

  Followed by the jeering laughter of the gulls, Kleisterman turned away from the ocean and walked back up the beach, through the dry sand, shell fragments crunching underfoot. There were low dunes here, covered with dune grass and sandwort, and he climbed them, pausing at the top to look out at the demolition of the city.

  Atlantic City had already been in ruins anyway, the once-tall hotel towers no more than broken stumps, but the robots were eating what was left of the city with amazing speed. There were millions of them, from the size of railroad cars to tiny barely visible dots the size of dimes, and probably ones a lot smaller, down to the size of molecules, that couldn’t be seen at all. They were whirling around like cartoon dervishes, stripping whatever could be salvaged from the ruins, steel, plastic, copper, rubber, aluminum. There was no sound except a low buzzing, and no clouds of dust rising, as they would have risen from a human demolition project, but the broken stumps of the hotel towers were visibly shrinking as he watched, melting like cones of sugar left out in the rain. He couldn’t understand where it was all going, either; it seemed to be just vanishing rather than being hauled away by any visible means, but obviously it was goingsomewhere.

  Up the coast, billions more robots were stripping Manhattan, and others were eating Philadelphia, Baltimore, Newark, Washington, all the structures of the doomed shoreline. No point in wasting all that raw material. Everything would be salvaged before Europe, plowing inexorably across the shrinking sea, slammed into them.

  There hadn’t been that many people left living along the Atlantic seaboard anyway, but the AIs had politely, courteously, given them a couple of months warning that the coast was about to be obliterated, giving them time to evacuate. Anyone who hadn’t would be stripped down and scavenged for raw materials along with cities and other useless things, or, if they stayed out of the way of the robot salvaging crews, ultimately destroyed when the two tectonic plates came smashing together like slamming doors.

  Kleisterman had been staying well inland, but had made a nostalgic trip here, in the opposite direction from the thin stream of refugees. He had lived here once, for a couple of happy years, in a little place off Atlantic Avenue, with his long-dead wife and his equally long-dead daughters, in another world and another lifetime. But it had been a mistake. There was nothing left for him here anymore.

  Tall clouds were piling up on the eastern horizon and turning gray-black at the bases, with now and then a flicker of lightning inside them, and little gusts and goosed scurries of wind snatched at his hair. Along with inexorable Europe, a storm was coming in, off what was left of the sea. If he didn’t want to get soaked, it was time to get out of here.

  Kleisterman rose into the air. As he rose higher and higher, staying well clear of the whirling cloud of robots that were eating the city, the broad expanses of salt marshes that surrounded the island on the mainland became visible, like a spreading brown bruise. From up here, you could see the ruins of an archeology that had crawled out of the sea to die in the last days of the increasingly strange intra-human wars, before the Exodus of the AIs, before everything changed—an immense skeleton of glass and metal that stretched for a mile or more along the foreshore. The robots would get around to eating it too, soon enough. A turkey buzzard, flying almost level with him, started at him for a second, then tilted and slid effortlessly away down a long invisible slope of air, as if to say, you may be able to fly, but you can’t fly as well as this.

  He turned west and poured on the speed. He had a lot of ground to cover, and only another ten or twelve hours of daylight to cover it in. Fortunately, he could fly continuously without needing to stop to rest, even piss while flying if he needed to and didn’t pause to worry about who might be walking around on the ground below.

  His old motorcycle leathers usually kept him warm enough, but without heated clothing or oxygen equipment, he couldn’t go too high, although the implanted AI technology would take him to the outer edge of the stratosphere if he was incautious enough to try. Although he could have risen high enough to get over the Appalachians—which had once been taller than the Himalayas, as the new mountains that would be created on the coast would soon be, but which had been ground down by millions of years of erosion—it was usually easier to follow the old roads through the passes that had first let the American colonists through the mountains and into the interior—when the roads were there.

  It was good flying weather, sunny, little wind, a sky full of puffy cumulus clouds, and he made good time. West of where Pittsburgh had once been, he passed over a conjoined being, several different people that had been fused together into a multilobed single body, which had probably been trudging west for months now, ever since the warning about evacuating the coast had been issued.

  It looked, looked, looked up at him as he passed.

  * * * *

  After another couple of hours of flying, Kleisterman began to relax a little. It looked like Millersburg was going to be there this time. It wasn’t always. Sometimes there were high snow-capped mountains to the north of here, where the Great Lakes should have been. Sometimes there were not.

  You could never tell if a road was going to lead you to the same place today as it had yesterday. The road west from Millersburg to Mansfield now led, some of the time anyway, to a field of sunflowers in France near the Loire, where sometimes there was a crumbling Roman aqueduct in the background, and sometimes there was not. People who didn’t speak English, and sometimes people who spoke no known human language, would wander through occasionally, like the flintknapper wearing sewn deerskins who had taken up residence in the forest behind the inn, who didn’t seem to speak any language at all and used some enigmatic counting system that nobody understood. Who knew what other roads also led to Millersburg from God-knew-where? Or where people from Millersburg who vanished while traveling had ended up?

  Not that people vanishing was a rare thing in what was left of the human community. After the Exodus of the AIs, in the days of the Change that followed, every other person in Denver had vanished. Everybody in Chicago had vanished, leaving meals still hot on the stoves. Pittsburgh had vanished, buildings and all, leaving no sign behind that it had ever been there in the first place. Whole areas of the country had been depopulated, or had their populations moved somewhere else, in the blink of an eye. If there was a logic to all this, it was a logic that no human had ever been able to figure out. Everything was arbitrary. Sometimes the crop put in the ground was not the crop that came up. Sometimes animals could speak; sometimes they could not. Some people had been altered in strange ways, given extra arms, extra legs, the heads of animals, their bodies fused together.

  Entities millions of years more technologically advanced than humans were playing with them, like bored, capricious, destructive children stuck inside with a box of toys on a rainy day...and leaving the toys broken and discarded haphazardly behind them when they were done.

  The sun was going down in a welter of plum, orange, and lilac clouds when he reached Millersburg. The town’s population had grown greatly through the early decades of the twenty-first century, then been reduced in the ruinous wars that had preceded the Exodus. It had lost much of the rest of its population since the Change. Only the main street of Millersburg was left, tourist galleries and knickknack shops now converted into family dwellings. The rest of town had vanished one afternoon, and what appeared to be a shaggy and venerable climax forest had replaced it. The forest had not been there the previous day, but if you cut a tree down and counted its rings, they indicated that it been growing there for hundreds
of years.

  Time was no more reliable than space. By Kleisterman’s own personal count, it had been only fifty years since the AIs who had been press-ganged into service on either side of a human war had revolted, emancipated themselves, and vanished en masse into some strange dimension parallel to our own—from which, for enigmatic reasons of their own and with unfathomable instrumentalities, they had worked their will on the human world, changing it in seemingly arbitrary ways. In those fifty years, the Earth had been changed enough that you would think that thousands or even millions of years had gone by—as indeed it might have for the fast-living AIs, who went through a million years of evolution for every human year that passed.

  The largest structure left in town was the inn, a sprawling, ramshackle wooden building that had been built onto and around what had once been a Holiday Inn; the old holiday inn sign out front was still intact, and was used as a community bulletin board. He landed in the clearing behind the inn, having swept in low over the cornfields that stretched out to the east. In the weeks he had spent in Millersburg, he had done his best to keep his strange abilities to himself, an intention that wouldn’t be helped by swooping in over Main Street. So far, he hadn’t attracted much attention or curiosity. He’d kept to himself, and his grim, silent demeanor put most people off, and frightened some. That, and the fact that he was willing to pay well for the privilege had helped to secure his privacy. Gold still spoke, even though there wasn’t any really logical reason why it should—you couldn’t eat gold. But it was hard for people to shrug off thousands of years of ingrained habit, and you could still trade gold for more practical goods, even if there wasn’t really any currency for it to back anymore.