“Okay,” said Ford. Beautiful Evelyn coasted to a stop and sat there in the middle of the road, as Bill climbed over and stared intently at the diagnostic panel on the front of Ford’s psuit. He went pale, but all he said was:
“Let’s trade places.”
“But you can’t drive her,” Ford protested.
“If we’re on the straightaway and there’s no wind, I can sort of drive,” said Bill. He dove into the back, as Ford crawled sideways into his seat, and came out a moment later with one of the little tube-bags. “Stick your arm up like this, okay?”
Ford obeyed, and watched as Bill plugged the tube into the psuit’s port. “So that’ll make me feel better?”
“Yeah, it ought to.” Bill swung himself into the console seat and sent Beautiful Evelyn trundling on.
“Good.” Ford sighed. “What’s wrong with me?”
“Psuit says you’ve ruptured something,” said Bill, staring at the monitor. He accelerated.
“Oh. Well, that’s not too bad,” said Ford, blinking. “Jimmy Linton got a rupture and he’s okay. Better than okay, actually. The medic said he couldn’t work with a shovel anymore. So … they made him official secretary for the Council, see? All he has to do is record stuff at meetings and post notices.”
“Really.”
“So if I have a rupture, maybe my dad won’t take it so hard that I want to be a Hauler. Since that way I get out of working in the methane plant and the cow sheds. Maybe.”
Bill gave him an incredulous look.
“All this, and you still want to be a Hauler?”
“Of course I do!”
Bill just shook his head.
* * *
They drove in a dead calm, at least compared to the weather before. Far off across the plains they saw dust devils here and there, twirling lazily. The farther north they drove, the clearer the air was, the brighter the light of the sun, shining on standing outcroppings of rock the color of rust, or milk chocolate, or tangerines, or new pennies.
“This is so great,” said Ford, slurring his words as he spoke. “This is more beautiful than anything. Isn’t the world a big place?”
“I guess so,” said Bill.
“It’s our place,’ said Ford. “They can all go back to Earth, but we never will. We’re Martians.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you see, I have hair growing in?” Ford swung his hand up to pat his scalp. “Red like Mars.”
“Don’t move your arm around, okay? You’ll rip the tube out.”
“Sorry.”
“That’s all right. Maybe you should mask up, you know? You could probably use the oxygen.”
“Sure…” Ford dragged his mask into place
After a while, he smiled and said: “I know who I am.”
He murmured to himself for a while, muffled behind the mask. The next time Bill glanced over at him, he was unconscious.
And Bill was all alone.
Billy wasn’t there to be yelled at, or blamed for anything. He might never be there again. He couldn’t be argued with, he couldn’t be shamed or ignored or made to feel anything Bill wanted him to feel. Not if he was dead.
But he’d been like that when he’d been alive, too, hadn’t he?
The cold straight road stretched out across the cold flat plain, and there was no mercy out here, no right or wrong, no lies. There was only this giant machine hurtling along, which took all Bill’s strength to keep on the road.
If he couldn’t do it, he’d die.
Bill realized, with a certain shock, how much of his life he’d wanted an audience. Someone else to be a witness to how scared and angry he was, to agree with him on how bad a father Billy had been.
What had he thought? That someday he’d stand up in some kind of giant courtroom, letting the whole world know how unfair everything had been from the day he’d been born?
Out here, he knew the truth.
There was no vast cosmic court of justice that would turn Billy into the kind of father Bill had wanted him to be. There was no Marswife to swoop down from the dust clouds and guide a lost boy home. The red world didn’t care if he sulked; it would casually kill him, if it caught him Outside.
And he had always known it.
Then what was the point of being angry about it all the time?
What was the point of white-knuckled fists and a knotted-up stomach if things would never change?
His anger would never force anybody to fix the world for him.
But …
There were people who tried to fix the world for themselves. Maybe he could fix his world, just the narrow slice of it that was his.
He watched the monitors, watched the wind driving sand across the barren stony plain, the emptiness that he had hated ever since he could remember. What would it take to make him love it, the way Billy or Ford loved it?
He imagined water falling from the sky, bubbling up from under the frozen rock. Maybe it would be blue water. It would splash and steam, the way it did in the bathhouse. Running, gurgling water to drown the dust and irrigate the red sand.
And green would come. He couldn’t get a mental image of vizio acres over the whole world, tenting in greenness even up here; that was crazy. But the green might creep out on its own, if there was enough water. Wiry little desert plants at first, maybe, and then … Bill tried to remember the names of plants from his lesson plans. Sagebrush, right. Sequoias. Clover. Edelweiss. Apples. A memory came back to him, a nursery rhyme he’d had on his Buke once: I should like to rise and go, where the golden apples grow …
He blurred his vision a little and saw himself soaring past green rows that went out forever, that arched over and made warm shade and shelter from the wind. Another memory floated up, a picture from a lesson plan, and his dream caught it and slapped it into place: cows grazing in a green meadow, out under a sky full of white clouds, clouds of water, not dust.
And, in the most sheltered places, there would be people. Families. Houses lit warm at night, with the lights winking through the green leaves. Just as he had always imagined. One of them would be his house. He’d live there with his family.
Nobody would give him a house, or a family, or a safe world to live in, of course. Ever. They didn’t exist. But …
Bill wrapped it all around himself anyway, to keep out the cold and the fear, and he drove on.
At some point—hours or days later, he never knew—his strength gave out and he couldn’t hold Beautiful Evelyn on the road anymore. She drifted gently to the side, clipping the boulders as she came, and rumbled to a halt just inside Thousand-K Station.
Bill lay along the seat where he had fallen, too tired and in too much pain to move. Ford still sat, propped up in his corner, most of his face hidden by his mask. Bill couldn’t tell if he was still alive.
He closed his eyes and went down, and down, into the green rows.
* * *
He was awakened by thumping on the cab, and shouting, and was bolt upright with his mask on before he had time to realize that he wasn’t dreaming. He crawled across the seat and threw the release switches. The hatch swung down, and red light streamed in out of a black night. There stood Old Brick, granddaddy of the Haulers, with his long beard streaming sideways in the gale and at least three other Haulers behind him. His eyes widened behind his mask as he took in Bill and Ford. He reached up and turned up the volume on his psuit.
“CONVOY! WE GOT KIDS HERE! LOOKS LIKE TOWNSEND’S RIG!”
X
Bill was all right after a couple of days, even though he had to have stuff fed into his arm while he slept. He was still foggy-headed when Mother came and sat by his bed, and very gently told him about Billy.
Bill mustn’t worry, she said; she would find Billy a warm corner in the Empress, with all the food and drink he wanted the rest of his days, and surely Bill would come talk to him sometimes? For Billy was ever so proud of Young Bill, as everyone knew. And perhaps take him on little walks round the Tubes, so he
could see Outside now and again? For Billy had so loved the High Road.
* * *
Ford wasn’t all right. He had to have surgery for a ruptured spleen, and almost bled to death once they’d cut his psuit off him.
He still hadn’t regained consciousness when Bill, wrapped in an outsize bathrobe, shuffled down to the infirmary’s intensive care unit to see him. See him was all Bill could do; pale as an egg, Ford lay in the center of a mass of tubes and plastic tenting. The only parts of him that weren’t white were his hair, which was growing in red as Martian sand, and the greenish bruise where Bill had punched him in the eye.
Bill sat there staring at the floor tiles, until he became aware that someone else had entered the room. He looked up.
He knew the man in front of him must be Ford’s father; his eyes were the same watery blue, and his ears stuck out the same way. He wore patched denim and muddy boots, and a stocking cap pulled down almost low enough to hide the bandage over his left eyebrow. There was a little white stubble along the line of his jaw, like a light frost.
He looked at Ford, and the watery eyes brimmed over with tears. He glanced uncertainly at Bill. He looked down, lined up the toes of his boots against a seam in the tile.
“You’d be that Hauler’s boy, then?” he said. “I have to thank you, on behalf of my Blatchford.”
“Blatchford,” repeated Bill, dumfounded until he realized whom the old man meant. “Oh.”
“That woman explained everything to me,” said Ford’s dad. “Wasn’t my Blatchford’s fault. Poor boy. Don’t blame him for running off scared. Your dad did a good thing, taking him in like that. I’m sorry about your dad.”
“Me, too,” said Bill. “But For—Blatchford’ll be all right.”
“I know he will,” said Ford’s dad, looking yearningly at his son. “He’s a strong boy, my Blatchford. Not like his brother. You can raise somebody up his whole life and do your best to teach him what’s right, and—and overnight, he can just turn into a stranger on you.
“My Sam did that. I should have seen it coming, him walking out on us. He never was any good, really. A weakling.
“Not like my little Blatchford. Never a word of complaint out of him, or whining after vanities. He knows who he is. He’ll make the Collective proud one day.”
Bill swallowed hard. He knew that Ford would never make the Collective proud; Ford would be off on the High Road as soon as he could, in love with the wide horizon, and the old man’s angry heart would break again.
The weight of everything that had happened seemed to come crashing down on Bill at once. He couldn’t remember when he’d felt so miserable.
“Would you tell me something, sir?” he said. “What does it take to join the MAC?”
“Hm?” Ford’s dad turned.
“What do you have to do?”
Ford’s dad looked at him speculatively. He cleared his throat. “It isn’t what you do. It’s what you are, young man.”
He came and sat down beside Bill, and threw back his shoulders.
“You have to be the kind of person who believes a better world is worth working for. You can’t be weak, or afraid, or greedy for things for yourself. You have to know that the only thing that matters is making that better world, and making it for everyone, not just for you.
“You may not even get to see it come into existence, because making the world right is hard work. It’ll take all your strength and all your bravery, and maybe you’ll be left at the end with nothing but knowing that you did your duty.
“But that’ll be enough for you.”
His voice was thin and harsh; he sounded as though he was reciting a lecture he’d memorized. But his eyes shone like Ford’s had, when Ford had looked out on the open sky for the first time.
“Well—I’m going to study agriculture,” said Bill. “And I thought, maybe, when I pass my levels, I’d like to join the MAC. I want that world you talk about. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“Good on you, son,” said Ford’s dad, nodding solemnly. “You study hard, and I’m sure you’d be welcome to join us. You’re the sort of young man we need in the MAC. And it does my heart good to know my Blatchford’s got a friend like you. Gives me hope for the future, to think we’ll have two heroes like you working in our cause!”
He shook Bill’s hand, and then the nurse looked in at them and said that visiting hours were over. Ford’s dad went away, down the hill. Bill walked slowly back to his room.
He didn’t climb back into bed. He sat down in a chair in the corner, and looked out through Settlement Dome at the cold red desert, at the far double line of boulders where the High Road ran off into places Billy would never see again. He began to cry, silently, tears burning as they ran down his face.
He didn’t know whether he was crying for Billy, or for Ford’s dad.
The world was ending. The world was beginning.
The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter
ALASTAIR REYNOLDS
A professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, Alastair Reynolds worked for the European Space Agency in the Netherlands for a number of years but has recently moved back to his native Wales to become a full-time writer. His first novel, Revelation Space, was widely hailed as one of the major SF books of the year; it was quickly followed by Chasm City, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, Century Rain, and Pushing Ice, all big sprawling Space Operas that were big sellers as well, establishing Reynolds as one of the best and most popular new SF writers to enter the field in many years. His other books include a novella collection, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days, and a chapbook novella, The Six Directions of Space, as well as three collections, Galactic North, Zima Blue and Other Stories, and Deep Navigation. His other novels include The Prefect, House of Suns, Terminal World, Blue Remembered Earth, On the Steel Breeze, Terminal World, Slow Bullets, and Sleepover, and a Doctor Who novel, Harvest of Time.
Reynolds’s work is known for its grand scope, sweep, and scale (in one story, “Galactic North,” a spaceship sets out in pursuit of another in a stern chase that takes thousands of years of time and hundreds of thousands of light-years to complete; in another, “Thousandth Night,” ultrarich immortals embark on a plan that will call for the physical rearrangement of all the stars in the galaxy.) Here he takes us somewhat closer to home, in a distressed civilization that’s been set back hundreds of years by war and disaster, for a study of a young girl with an all-too-common problem who finds an extremely unique solution for it.
She stopped in sight of Twenty Arch Bridge, laying down her bags to rest her hands from the weight of two hog’s heads and forty pence worth of beeswax candles. While she paused, Kathrin adjusted the drawstring on her hat, tilting the brim to shade her forehead from the sun. Though the air was still cool, there was a fierce new quality to the light that brought out her freckles.
Kathrin moved to continue, but a tightness in her throat made her hesitate. She had been keeping the bridge from her thoughts until this moment, but now the fact of it could not be ignored. Unless she crossed it she would face the long trudge to New Bridge, a diversion that would keep her on the road until long after sunset.
“Sledge-maker’s daughter!” called a rough voice from across the road.
Kathrin turned sharply at the sound. An aproned man stood in a doorway, smearing his hands dry. He had a monkeylike face, tanned a deep liverish red, with white sideboards and a gleaming pink tonsure.
“Brendan Lynch’s daughter, isn’t it?”
She nodded meekly, but bit her lip rather than answer.
“Thought so. Hardly one to forget a pretty face, me.” The man beckoned her to the doorway of his shop. “Come here, lass. I’ve something for your father.”
“Sir?”
“I was hoping to visit him last week, but work kept me here.” He cocked his head at the painted wooden trademark hanging above the doorway. “Peter Rigby, the wheelwright. Kathrin, isn’t it?”
“I need to be getting along, sir…”
>
“And your father needs good wood, of which I’ve plenty. Come inside for a moment, instead of standing there like a starved thing.” He called over his shoulder, telling his wife to put the water on the fire.
Reluctantly Kathrin gathered her bags and followed Peter into his workshop. She blinked against the dusty air and removed her hat. Sawdust carpeted the floor, fine and golden in places, crisp and coiled in others, while a heady concoction of resins and glues filled the air. Pots simmered on fires. Wood was being steamed into curves, or straightened where it was curved. Many sharp tools gleamed on one wall, some of them fashioned with blades of skydrift. Wheels, mostly awaiting spokes or iron tyres, rested against another. Had the wheels been sledges, it could have been her father’s workshop, when he had been busier.
Peter showed Kathrin to an empty stool next to one of his benches. “Sit down here and take the weight off your feet. Mary can make you some bread and cheese. Or bread and ham if you’d rather.”
“That’s kind sir, but Widow Grayling normally gives me something to eat, when I reach her house.”
Peter raised a white eyebrow. He stood by the bench with his thumbs tucked into the belt of his apron, his belly jutting out as if he was quietly proud of it. “I didn’t know you visited the witch.”
“She will have her two hog’s heads, once a month, and her candles. She only buys them from the Shield, not the Town. She pays for the hogs a year in advance, twenty-four whole pounds.”
“And you’re not scared by her?”
“I’ve no cause to be.”
“There’s some that would disagree with you.”
Remembering something her father had told her, Kathrin said, “There are folk who say the Sheriff can fly, or that there was once a bridge that winked at travelers like an eye, or a road of iron that reached all the way to London. My father says there’s no reason for anyone to be scared of Widow Grayling.”
“Not afraid she’ll turn you into a toad, then?”
“She cures people, not put spells on them.”
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