City Under the Stars

by Gardner Dozois

  The transport had been heading east, more or less. Now it flowed up the ramp, turned left, and began to crawl north. This was an ancient highway, unbelievably huge in comparison to modern roads—a half-dozen transports could have traveled it abreast without crowding each other, and it stretched on endlessly ahead, dead black, like a frozen river made out of the night-fabric itself. The transport picked up speed. On such a good surface, Willis was certain to open it all the way up; he would be unable to for seven-eighths of the trip. They rocked and clicked along at a terrifying clip, but even Hanson knew that this was the safest part of the journey. The highway was one of the major arteries—and assets—of the State. It stretched from the southern counties, where it was chopped off sheer by the Wall below Iselin, all the way up to Spring Valley in the north, where it was possible, after a break, to take another old road up to Newburgh and Kingston Center. It’d been cleared of rubble and occasional blockages by a massive project during the Restoration, and now it was zealously guarded by the State—there would be SI garrisons every fifteen or twenty miles along its length.

  The whistle hooted once, and Brigault went up to relieve the captain. In a moment, Willis came back along the spine, massaging the tension out of his shoulder. He squatted down next to Hanson. He was still carrying the rifle; on caravan, it was chained to his wrist, and it never left him—he even slept with it. It was nearly irreplaceable, and worth more than some of the cargo. That reminded Hanson of Oristano’s revolver, wrapped heavily in oilskin and hidden in Hanson’s pouch—Gossard’s idea; he’d never’ve had the presence of mind to think of it. Stealing the revolver was alone enough to earn him the death penalty; in fact it was probably a more serious offense than the killing of Oristano. Thinking that, Hanson smiled. They could only hang him once, after all.

  He greeted the captain, and they talked of the trivial things people talk of when something is making them uncomfortable in each other’s presence. Imperceptibly, Willis edged the conversation around, and, after a while, Hanson realized that Willis was fishing for more information on why he was leaving Orange. To get the ride, he’d told Willis a compendium of half-truths about being laid off and blacklisted, and that he was leaving, simply, to survive. Willis knew of the enmity between Oristano and Hanson, and the tale was credible enough, except for Hanson’s desire to leave Orange immediately, with only the clothes on his back. He had explained that away as a desire to avoid possible further prosecution by Oristano—since, as a blacklistee, he was outside the law and anyone could do anything at all to him with perfect impunity from the State—and the fact that he stood a better chance of getting a ride from Willis than from another captain. It was a good story, but Hanson was a poor liar, and Willis was very sharp. Hanson had no way of knowing how much of the story Willis believed, if he believed any of it.

  “So what will you do now?” Willis asked. “You have any plans at all?”

  “No,” Hanson said, “just to get out of Orange, is all. I a’n’t got a chance in Hell there. Upcountry, at least maybe I can get some kind of piss-ass job, someway. Don’t know what, but I’m a dead man if I stay.”

  “Ayah,” Willis said, “that’s true, right enough.” He sighed. He was a tall, lanky man, about ten years older than Hanson, with a face like a weathered stone hatchet. His hair was heavily streaked with gray, but he held his squatting position effortlessly, rocking slightly heel-to-toe to balance against the motion of the transport. He turned his head and stared steadily at Hanson. He had an intricate, compassionate face, but it was a grim one nevertheless—there was something unshakable in it, as cold and hard as flint. It was a face of a man accustomed to command and in the habit of depending on no one or nothing other than himself. “That’s true,” he repeated musingly. He shrugged, and ponderously aimed his face away from Hanson, as if it was very heavy and moved on hinges. But his eyes flicked back again. His eyes were a restless, glittering black, like those of a magpie or an ancient crow. They would fix on something, absorb it completely, flick to something else. “What was it you said you got canned for?” he asked.

  “Didn’t say,” Hanson said. Then he told him, making it up as he went along. He wasn’t very good at this sort of thing, and he had the feeling that he was floundering in deeper and deeper. Probably he had contradicted himself a half dozen times already; it was hard to remember what he’d said even a moment ago. He was numb and confused and deeply sad, and that desperate, hysterical depression was building up again—he could feel it crying and yammering inside his belly, like a little trapped animal. He finished his story and sat resignedly, waiting to see if Willis was going to challenge him on it.

  “Ayah,” Willis said at last, “a bad thing.” His eyes flicked away from Hanson, flicked back, flicked away. “A shame and a Goddamned waste,” he said. “Piss your life away—” He stopped, sighed, scratched his ear with his finger, sighed again. After a long pause he said, “Making good time tonight.”

  “Ai,” Hanson said.

  “Ayah,” Willis said.

  They fell silent.

  Another caravan was coming down the highway toward them, probably headed south to Orange. This one was hauled by one of the clumsy steam-tractors, puffing and clattering horrendously, belching fire-shot clouds of black smoke, its great pistons thudding back and forth. It sounded like a giant’s sackful of pots and plates being dragged across rocky ground. The two big vehicles hooted at each other as they passed. The sound rolled wistfully around the low hills until it was blotted up by the thick pine woods. Willis shifted position restlessly. He ran a hand up through his graying hair, brought it down to tug at his earlobe, but didn’t say anything after all. Hanson was aware that Willis was wrestling with some complex emotion, but there was no way to tell exactly what it was. They sat silently while the transport clicked up a slight rise. To the west, the country opened out into extensive piney woods, but to the east, Hanson knew, there was nothing but five or six miles of low, weed-overgrown rubble, the tangled ruins of broken Utopian buildings, inhabited only by coyotes, chimeras—sports too gene-scrambled even to be regarded as human—and abandoned children who had grown up completely feral. Even the bandits preferred to camp in the woods usually. It was safer there, in spite of the wolves and the killercatchers.

  Then they topped the rise and they could see the Wall itself, immense, smoldering with pinks and coral-reds, burning without flame: the Wall of the City of God. Running roughly parallel with the highway here, only five miles away, it looked almost close enough to touch. But your hand would burn, Hanson thought. It would surely burn.

  “Lookit that, now,” Willis said.

  “Ai,” Hanson said, mistaking the emotion in Willis’s voice. His own heart had thudded painfully at first sight of it, and his breath had sucked in, in spite of himself. “It’s very beautiful.”

  Willis turned to look at Hanson. His eyes had slitted up and somehow, subtly, he seemed to be crouching now, where before he had been merely squatting. He stared long and intently at Hanson. Then he made a small disgusted sound in his throat and turned back to look at the Wall. His eyes had widened, and the radiance of the Wall was reflected in them in tiny burning highlights. When he spoke again, his voice was flat and hard. “I hate it,” he said. And he spat, emphatically, in the direction of the Wall. And he got up and walked back to the cab, without another word.

  Hanson sat up awhile, trying to puzzle it out. But exhaustion, long denied, rolled over him like a mountain coming down, and he tied himself to a stanchion with his belt, and he went to sleep.

  He awoke briefly as they were crossing the Passaic, and he realized that the sound of the whistle signaling to the SI garrison had been wailing through his dreams. He had pictured it as the cry of a huge black bird, wings wide, falling blind through the encrusted and ornamental air. Then his head lolled, and he slept.

  He woke again, later, surrounded by motion and blackness. The Wall still blazed across the world, burning its image into the jelly of his retinas. He close
d his eyes against the light.

  And opened them again at dawn. They were in the process of crossing the Hudson, at Montgomerytown, where a bridge had survived enough intact to be capable of repair by the artisans of the Great Restoration. The Wall was no longer visible, though afterimages of it seemed to smolder in Hanson’s still sleep-fogged mind. It had begun its great slow curve east of north, crossing the Hudson below Ossining—cutting straight across the water, the river disappearing under the Wall and out of the knowledge of men. Some said that the river met the sea at last, behind the Wall, inside the City of God. But no one Hanson knew had ever seen the ocean—with the possible exception of Willis—and it was a thing as impossible to picture as the City itself. Occasionally a fishing-boat or a canoe would be swept under the Wall by the current, but the crews never returned, and the river kept its secret.

  Here the Hudson ran swift and fierce, as if impatient for its translation into the realms of the Divine, at Ossining. It was a wet, chilly morning. A breeze skimmed silver mists from the broad, gunmetal surface of the river; they boiled up around the black iron of the bridge, and swirled off into the lightening upper air. The sun was just climbing over a forest ridge to the east, sending broad fans of smoky light slantwise through the mist, striking bright highlights from the oily, turbulent water. The span boomed hollow under the transport, buzzed, boomed, buzzed. They were in the middle of the bridge, with everything gray and raw blue and silver-orange, the sky opening into hot gold east, night dying away to the west, the river rolling a humped shoulder below. Hanson felt something move inside, something slip, like a landslide in his head; he was leaving everything he’d ever known, everyone he’d ever known, behind. Then up the steep, thick-wooded slope of the opposite bank, and time for one last look back at the Hudson as it wound toward Ossining, back over all the lands stretching away toward Orange, where he had kept his life. Beaded with cold dew and slapped by raw morning wind, Hanson wondered if he felt regret or relief. And could not decide. And the river sank away behind, and was gone.

  * * *

  Early that evening, the transport rolled to a stop in a nondescript clearing in the woods. There was a pile of rubble in one corner that maybe used to be a house, and, among the weeds, a blistered tangle of Utopian machinery, made of an alloy so complexly specific to its task that it had no value even to the scavengers that ranged out from the cities and smallest towns of York like starveling dogs in search of something, anything, that would keep their worthless lives going yet another day. It had memory, down to the molecular level; you could melt it down and pour it into ingots, but, cooling, it would re-form itself into its original shape.

  Much like a man’s life, Hanson thought—you could melt it down in the fire, change it completely, but old habits and old ways of thought would re-form it again in the same pattern somewhere else. Once a loser, always a loser. Once a fool, always a fool.

  Hanson took advantage of the stop to hop down off the deckplates and make his way into the musky-smelling stand of staghorn sumac by the rubble-midden and take a leak. His piss steamed in the cold evening air, and tiny clodhoppers rose to the surface of the ground to soak in it, preening, pirouetting with evident pleasure and spreading their miniature fans wide. Willis had disappeared around the back of the transport, and Brigault stayed with the cab, face set into bored immobility.

  Willis’s irascible voice sounded. “Hanson! Git on back here!”

  “A’right. Coming!” Hanson shook free the last drop of pee, buttoned his trousers, and trudged around to the back of the transport.

  Willis raised the rifle and pointed it right at his gut.

  A kind of sizzle passed through Hanson, a cold and stinging surge of fear. As quietly as he could, he said, “What’s this about?”

  “You know what it’s about.” Willis held the rifle steady, no posturing, and no way he could miss at this distance, a man to whom the gun held no glamour but was just another tool to be used with a minimum of waste-motion and fuss.

  “Listen,” Hanson said, and then lapsed into silence. What could he possibly say? That numb despair and resignation were seeping back in, soaking into his bones the way his piss had soaked into the black dirt and the preening hoppers, making it impossible for him to speak. He knew that he should plead for his life, but he couldn’t summon the energy to do it. He should have known that he could never get away, never get free of the morass of Orange and the mess he’d made of his life. He should have known that everything would catch up to him, that the world would reach out and crush him as casually as he would crush a bug. He had known that, in fact, known it with a fatalism that was deeply ingrained in the marrow of his bones. He’d fooled himself into forgetting it for a moment, into letting himself feel a moment of relief and hope, and now the retribution when it came, when Willis squeezed the trigger of the rifle and the bullet ripped his body apart, would be even more bitter and black by comparison. His luck had never been good; he’d allowed himself to think for a while that it was turning, but now, as he should have known it would, it had run out entirely instead. He cursed himself for the hundred opportunities he’d let go by to slip over the side of the transport and disappear into the wilderness between towns, where he might have carved out a living of some sort for himself. He had a gun, there were brigands he could join . . . But now it was too late. Maybe it always had been too late.

  After all, what did it really matter? If Willis didn’t kill him now, sooner or later the Crab in his belly would.

  They stared at each other over the sights of Willis’s rifle. A wind came up and swirled dust around Hanson’s feet.

  For what seemed like a very long time, neither man spoke.

  At last Willis nodded to the side. Hanson’s knapsack sat there, in the shadow of the transport, old and frayed, pathetically small. “You’re family,” Willis said, “of sorts. Blood’s thicker’n water, they say. Can’t bring myself to kill you. But I won’t let myself be used neither.”

  Hanson nodded, said nothing. The moment of crisis wasn’t over; he knew that there was still time for Willis to change his mind.

  “A man like you,” Willis said. “A man like you—” Instead of finishing the thought, he noisily cleared his throat and spat a great gob of phlegm to the side. Then, raising his voice, he shouted, “Brigault! Get off yer thumb and let’s get out of here!”

  As Willis strode off Hanson noticed for the first time that he had a slight limp, a stiffness in one leg that caused him to pull up slightly at the top of each stride. Willis was getting old, too. They were all getting old. To match the world, which was itself old, old and worn-out and weary, grown gray with the dust of millions of generations of lives and stained black with the residue of innumerable sins.

  3

  HANSON STOOD THERE for a long time, staring at the train pulling away until it had dwindled to a distant string of moving red jewels, and then, after it had vanished completely, at the empty road itself, a gray streak through blackness.

  The night gathered around him. Crows exploded up out of the trees on the crest of a distant hill, startled by some noise in the forest, wheeling against the darkening sky and crying out harshly as they flew, in some guttural language he could not understand, finally settling back down into the treetops again. Then there was only silence, broken occasionally by the soughing of the wind through the trees, and by the distant and plaintive chime-like sobbing of some unknown creature far away among the trees in the dark.

  At last, when he could stand the quiet and the black eventlessness no longer, he stooped to pick up his knapsack. The gun was still there, wrapped in his second pair of trousers. He stuck it in his belt.

  There was a trail, hardly more than a deer run, that ran through the clearing here at right angles to the road, and briefly he vacillated between the two directions it proffered him. Then, because it hardly mattered, he chose one at random, and started walking.

  * * *

  The sun had gone out of the sky entirely now, the last o
range cloud of sunset guttering from red to purple-gray to sullen black, and only the soft light from the Wall suffused the wood, flushing it with an unearthly coral glow that cast strange iridescent shadows with blood red edges. Hanson had been traveling for hours, following the trail through the rubble of Utopian ruins, imperishable foundations filled with waters rust-red and turquoise-blue from chemical poisons leached out of the surrounding soil, and the occasional rotting and incomprehensible machine, the remnants of a centuries-long Retreat from the bright dwellings of the Utopians. He pushed his way through woods spotted with feral ornamentals and fruit trees that over the ages had drifted away from their original functions and now produced fruit indigestible to human stomachs . . . or that perhaps had been designed in the first place to feed unknown and long-vanished races, strange and inhuman races that had been so thoroughly forgotten that neither their names nor even the memory of their presence had survived, save only for the trees. In all this time, he had seen nobody and arrived nowhere, but only walked, unthinking, like an automaton.

  Then he saw the glint of firelight up ahead.

  He stopped. Whoever or whatever was before him, it was probably best to avoid them altogether. Only outlaws, bandits, or worse would be out in these unwholesome ruins. Honest men would have no reason to be here.

  Thinking this, he could almost have laughed. He had nothing in common with honest men anymore. He was an outlaw himself now, cast out from human company like a manshogger or pariah dog.

  In the darkness, somebody coughed.

  Hanson stiffened in astonishment. The cough had been quiet and deliberate, a noise he was meant to hear. There was a lookout guarding the path, unseen, and he had just been warned that if he tried to turn away now, he was as good as dead. No help for it, he had to go forward, follow the light to its source, seek common cause with whatever human refuse clustered about its warmth. He belonged there now, after all, didn’t he?