Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95

by Robert Silverberg

  He drew a deep breath. “Listen, I’ve changed my mind, OK? I think I’d just as soon travel by myself.”

  She turned and gave him a startled look. “You serious?”

  “Yep.”

  “You really want to walk all the way to Spook City rather than ride with me?”

  “Yep. That’s what I prefer to do.”

  “Jesus Christ. What the hell for?”

  Demeris could detect nothing at all inhuman in her exasperated tone or in the expression on her face. Uncomfortably he said, “Just the way I am, I guess. I like to go my own way, I guess, and—”

  “Bullshit. I know what’s really going on in your head.”

  Demeris shifted about uneasily and remained silent. He wished he had never become entangled with her in the first place.

  Angrily she said, “Somebody’s been talking to you, right? Telling you a lot of garbage?”

  “Well…”

  “All right,” she said. “You dumb bastard. You want to test me, is that it?”

  “Test?”

  “With a witch charm.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not carrying any charms. Those things aren’t worth a damn.”

  “Some are, some aren’t.” She reached into a saddlepack and pulled out a small device, wires and black cords intricately wound around and around each another. “Here,” she said harshly. “This is one. Push the button and it emits a red glow if you point it at a Spook. Use it to check out the next woman you meet.”

  She tossed the little gadget toward him. Demeris grabbed it out of the air by reflex and stood watching helplessly as she slapped the elephant-camel’s flank to spur it into motion and started off downstream toward her tent.

  Shit, he thought.

  He felt like six kinds of idiot. The sound of her voice, tingling with contempt for him and his petty little suspicions, echoed in his ears.

  Baffled and annoyed—with her, with himself, with the boy—he flipped the witch charm into the stream. The water hissed and bubbled for a moment and then the thing sank out of sight. He turned and walked back to his shack.

  She had already begun to take down her tent. She didn’t so much as glance at him. But the elephant-camel peered somberly around, extended its long purple lower lip and gave him a sardonic toothy smirk. Demeris glared at the great beast and made a devil sign with his upraised fingers. From you, I don’t have to take any crap, he thought.

  He hoisted his pack and started up the steep trail out of town.

  He was somewhere along the old boundary between New Mexico and Texas, he figured, probably just barely on the New Mexico side of the line. Spook Land was roughly triangular, running from the Great Lakes to Montana along the Canadian border and tapering southward through what had been Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa down to Texas and Louisiana, but it included a piece of eastern New Mexico, too. Demeris had learned all that in school long ago. They made you study the map of the United States that once had been, so you wouldn’t forget the past, they said, because some day the old United States was going to rise again.

  Fat chance. The Spooks had cut the heart right out of the country. They took over with scarcely a struggle, and every attempt at counterattack had been brushed aside with astonishing ease: America’s weapons had been neutralized, its communications networks silenced. Its army of liberation had disappeared into the Occupied Zone like raindrops into a lake. Now there was not one United States but two: the western one, which ran from Washington State and Idaho down to the Mexican border and liked to call itself Free Country, and the other one in the east, along the coast and inland as far as the Mississippi, which still insisted on using the old formal name. Between the two lay the Occupied Zone, and nobody in either United States had much knowledge of what went on in there. Nor did anyone Demeris knew take the notion of a reunited United States very seriously. Much of its technical capacity had eroded and great chunks of the country had reverted to a preindustrial condition.

  What he had to do, he calculated, was keep heading more or less easterly until he saw indications of Spook presence. Right now, though, the country was pretty empty, just barren sandy waste with a covering of mesquite and sage. He saw more places where the aliens had indulged in their weird remodeling of the landscape, and now and again he was able to make out the traces of some little ancient human town, a couple of rusty signs or a few crumbling walls. But mainly there was nothing.

  He was about an hour and a half beyond the village when what looked like a squadron of airborne snakes came by, a dozen of them flying in close formation. Then the sky turned heavy and purplish-yellow, like rotting bruised fruit, and three immense creatures with shining red scales and sail-like three-cornered fleshy wings passed overhead, emitting bursts of green gas that had the rank smell of old wet straw. They were almost like dragons. A dozen more of the snake things followed them. Demeris scowled and waved a clenched fist at them. The air had a tangible pressure. He waited to see what was coming next. But then, magically, all the ominous effects cleared away and he was in the familiar Southwest again, untouched by strangers from the far stars, back in the good old land of dry ravines and big sky that he had lived in all his life. He relaxed, but only a little.

  Almost at once he heard a familiar snorting sound behind him. He turned and saw the ponderous yellow form of the elephant-camel looming up, with Jill sitting astride it just back of the front hump.

  She leaned down and said, “You change your mind yet about wanting that ride?”

  “I thought you were sore at me.”

  “I am. Was. But it still seems crazy for you to be doing this on foot when I’ve got room up here for you.”

  He stared up at her. You don’t often get second chances in this life, he told himself.

  “Oh, Christ,” she said, as he hesitated. “Do you want a ride or don’t you?”

  He remained silent.

  She shot him a quick wicked grin. “Still worried that I’m a Spook? You can check me out.”

  “I threw your gadget into the stream. I don’t like witch things around.”

  “Well, that’s all right.” She laughed. “It wasn’t a charm at all, just an old power core, and a worn-out one at that. It wouldn’t have told you anything.”

  “What’s a power core?”

  “Spook stuff. You could have taken it back with you to prove you were over here. Look, do you want a ride or not?”

  It seemed ridiculous to turn her down again.

  “What the hell,” Demeris said. “Sure.”

  Jill spoke to the animal in what he took to be Spook language, a hiccuping wheeze and a long indrawn whistling sound, and it knelt for him. Demeris took her hand and she drew him on top of the beast with surprising ease. An open-work construction made of loosely woven cord, half poncho and half saddle, lay across the creature’s broad back, with the three humps jutting through. Her tent and other possessions were fastened to it at the rear. “Tie your pack to one of those dangling strings,” she said. “You can ride right behind me.”

  He fitted himself into the valley between the second and third humps and got a secure hold on the weaving, his fingers digging deep into it. She whistled another command and the animal began to move forward.

  Its motion was a rolling, thumping, sliding kind of thing, very hard to take. The sway was both lateral and vertical and with every step the ground seemed to rise and plunge around them in lunatic lunges. Demeris had never seen the ocean or any other large body of water, but he had heard about seasickness and this was what he imagined it was like. He gulped, clamped his mouth shut, gripped the saddle even more tightly.

  Jill called back to him, “How are you doing?”

  “Fine. Fine.”

  “Takes some getting used to, huh?”

  “Some,” he said.

  His buttocks didn’t have much padding on them. He could feel the vast bones of the elephant-camel grinding beneath him like the pistons of some giant machine. He held on tight and dug his heels in as ha
rd as he could.

  “You see those delta-winged things go by a little while ago?” she asked.

  “The big dragons that were giving off the green smoke?”

  “Right. Herders is what they are. On their way to Spook City for the hunt. They’ll be used to drive the game toward the killing grounds. Every year this time they get brought in to help in the roundup.”

  “And the flying snakes?”

  “They herd the herders. Herders aren’t very smart. They’re about like dogs, maybe. The snake guys are a lot brighter. The snakes tell the herders where to go and the herders make the game animals go there, too.”

  Demeris thought about that. Level upon level of intelligence among these creatures that the Spooks had transported to the planet they had partly conquered. If the herders were as smart as dogs, he wondered how smart the snakes were. Dogs were pretty smart. He wondered how smart the Spooks were, for that matter.

  “What’s the hunt all about? Why do they do it?”

  “For fun,” Jill said. “Spook fun.”

  “Herding thousands of exotic wild animals together and butchering them so the blood runs deep enough to swim through? That’s their idea of fun?”

  “Wait and see,” she said.

  They saw more and more transformation of the landscape: whorls and loops of dazzling fire, great opaque spheres floating just above ground level, silvery blades revolving in the air. Demeris glowered. All that strangeness made him feel vulnerable and out of place, and he spat and murmured bitterly at each intrusive wonder.

  “Why are you so angry?” she asked.

  “I hate this weird shit that they’ve strewn all over the place. I hate what they did to our country.”

  “It was a long time ago. And it wasn’t your country they did it to, it was your great-great-grandfather’s.”

  “Even so.”

  “Your country is over there. It wasn’t touched at all.”

  “Even so,” he said again, and spat.

  When it was still well before dark, they came to a place where bright yellow outcroppings of sulfur, like foamy stone pillows, marked the site of a spring. Jill gave the command to make her beast kneel and hopped deftly to the ground. Demeris got off more warily, feeling the pain in his thighs and butt from his ride.

  “Help me with the tent,” she said.

  It wasn’t like any tent he had ever seen. The center post was nothing more than a little rod that seemed to be made of white wax, but at the touch of a hand it tripled in height and an elaborate strutwork sprang out from it in five directions to provide support for the tent fabric. The tent pegs were made of the same waxy material, and all you had to do was position them around the perimeter of the tent and they burrowed into the ground on their own.

  Together they gathered mesquite brush and built a fire, and she produced some packets of powdered vegetables and a slab of dried meat for their dinner. While they waited for these to boil up, Jill went back to the spring, which despite the sulfurous outcroppings gave fresh, pure water, and crouched by it, stripping to the waist to wash herself. Seeing her like that was unsettling. He flicked a quick glance at her as she bathed, but she didn’t seem to care or even to notice. That was unsettling, too. Was she being deliberately provocative? Or did she just not give a damn?

  He also washed himself, splashing handfuls of the cold water onto his face and over his sweaty shoulders. “Dinner’s ready,” she said a few minutes later.

  Darkness descended swiftly. The sky went from deep blue to utter black in minutes. In the clear desert air, the stars began quickly to emerge, sharp and bright and unflickering. He looked up, trying to guess which star might be the home of the Spooks.

  As they ate, he asked her whether she made this trip often. “Often enough,” she said. “I do a lot of courier work for my father, out to Texas, Louisiana, sometimes Oklahoma.” She paused a moment. “I’m Ben Gorton’s daughter,” she said as though she expected him to recognize the name.

  “Sorry. Who?”

  “Ben Gorton. The mayor of Spook City, actually.”

  “Spook City’s got a human mayor?”

  “The human part of it does.”

  “Ah,” Demeris said. “I’m honored, then. The boss’s daughter. You should have told me before.”

  “It didn’t seem important,” she said.

  They were done with their meal. She moved efficiently around the campsite, gathering utensils, burying trash. When the cleanup was done, she lifted the tent flap and stepped halfway inside. He held back, unsure of the right move. “Well?” she asked. “It’s OK to come in. Or would you rather sleep out there?”

  Demeris went in. Although the temperature outside was plunging with the onset of night, it was pleasantly warm inside. There was a single bedroll, just barely big enough for two if they didn’t mind sleeping very close together. He heard the sounds she made as she undressed and he tried in the absolute darkness to guess how much she was taking off. It wasn’t easy to tell. He removed his own shirt and hesitated with his jeans; but then she opened the flap again to call out something to the elephant-camel, which she had tethered just outside, and by starlight he caught a flashing glimpse of bare thigh, bare buttock. He pulled off his jeans and slipped into the bedroll. She joined him a moment later. He lay awkwardly, trying to avoid rubbing up against her. For a time there was a tense expectant silence. Then her hand reached out in the darkness and grazed his shoulder, lightly but clearly not accidentally. Demeris didn’t need a second hint. He had never taken any vows of chastity. He reached for her, found the hollow of her clavicle, trailed his hand downward until he was cupping a small, cool breast, resilient and firm. When he ran his thumb lightly across the nipple, she made a purring sound, and he felt the flesh quickly hardening. As was his. She turned to him. Demeris had some difficulty locating her mouth in the darkness, and she had to guide him, chuckling, but when his lips met hers, he felt the immediate flicker of her tongue coming forth to greet him.

  And then almost as though he were willing his own downfall, he found himself perversely wondering if he might be embracing a Spook after all; and a wave of nausea swept through him, making him wobble and soften. But she was pressing tight against him, rubbing her breasts from side to side on him, uttering small eager murmuring sounds, and he got himself quickly back on track, losing himself in her fragrance and warmth and banishing completely from his thoughts anything but the sensations of the moment. After that one attack of doubt, everything was easy. He located her long smooth thighs with no problem whatever, and when he glided into her, he needed no guidance there either, and though their movements together had the usual first-time clumsiness, her hot gusts of breath against his shoulder and her soft sharp outcries told him that all was going well.

  He lay awake for a time when it was over, listening to the occasional far-off cry of some desert creature. He imagined he could hear the heavy snuffling breathing of the elephant-camel, too, like a huge recirculating device just outside the tent. Jill had curled up against him as if they were old friends and was lost in sleep.

  She said out of the blue, after they had been riding in silence the following morning, “Ever been married, Nick?”

  The incongruity of the question startled him. Until a moment ago she had seemed to be a million miles away. His attempt to make love to her a second time at dawn had been met with indifference and she had been pure business, remote and cool, all during the job of breaking camp and getting on the road.

  “No,” he said. “You?”

  “Hasn’t been on my program,” she said. “But I thought everybody in Free Country got married. Nice normal people who settled down and raised big families.” The elephant-camel swayed and bumped beneath them. They were following a wide dirt track festooned on both sides with glittering strands of what looked like clear jelly, hundreds of feet long, mounted on spiny black poles that seemed to be sprouting like saplings from the ground.

  “I raised a big family,” he said. “My brothers
and sisters. Dad got killed in a hunting accident when I was ten. Possibly got mixed up with a Spook animal that was on the wrong side of the line. Nobody could quite figure it out. Then my mother came down with Blue Fever. I was fifteen then with five brothers and sisters to look after. Didn’t leave me a lot of time to think about finding a wife.”

  “Blue Fever?”

  “Don’t you know what that is? Infectious disease. Kills you in three days, no hope at all. Supposed to be something the Spooks brought.”

  “We don’t have it over here,” she said. “Not that I ever heard.”

  “Spooks brought it, I guess they must know how to cure it. We aren’t that lucky. Anyway, there were all these little kids to look after. Of course, they’re grown now.”

  “But you still look after them. Coming over here to try to track down your brother.”

  “Somebody has to.”

  “What if he doesn’t want to be tracked down?”

  Demeris felt a tremor of alarm. “Have you any reason to think that?”

  “I didn’t say I did. But he might just prefer not to be found. A lot of boys come across and stay across, you know.”

  “I didn’t know. Nobody I ever heard of did that. Why would someone want to live on the Spook side?”

  “For the excitement?” she suggested. “To run with the Spooks? To play their games? To hunt their animals? There’s all sorts of mingling these days.”

  “Is that so,” he asked uneasily. He stared at the back of her head. She was so damned odd, he thought, such a fucking mystery.

  She said, sounding very far away, “I wonder about marrying.” Back to that again. “What it’s like, waking up next to the same person every day, day after day. Sharing your life, year after year. It sounds very beautiful. But also kind of strange. It isn’t easy for me to imagine what it might be like.”

  “Don’t they have marriage in Spook City?”

  “Not really. Not the way you people do.”

  “Well, why don’t you try it and see? You don’t like it, you can get out of it. Nobody I know thinks being married is any way strange. Christ, I bet whatever the Spooks do is five hundred times as strange, and they probably think it’s the most normal thing in the world.”