Aftermath a-1

by Charles Sheffield

  I had my first direct proof of a changed world. The night river, once busy at all hours with commerce and pleasure craft, sat calm and empty. Not a light showed, on the water or on the far-off other bank.

  The object he led me to did not deserve the name of boat. It was a filthy, broken-sided scow, its flat well littered with items of rubbish.

  “This!” I hissed at him. “We’ll never get to Glen Echo in this.”

  He grinned at me, teeth white in a nearly invisible face. “No, we won’t. This is what I came here in, but it won’t take us back. I did my scouting in it, and it will take us to the real boat.”

  “Why didn’t you bring the ’real boat’ here?”

  “You’ll see. Let’s get you aboard. Sorry, but you have to get your feet wet.”

  He helped me splash through a foot of water and hoisted me effortlessly over the side. More proof, if I needed it, of his physical strength. He settled me aft, went to the bow, and picked up a paddle. “We can talk now if you want,” he said. “But we’ll come to a place where we have to be real quiet. I’ll let you know ahead of time. Sit back and relax.”

  I was too tired to talk, and too uncomfortable to sleep. We moved onto the dark water and slipped lazily downstream. The wrong direction for Glen Echo, but Seth seemed to know what he was doing.

  After about an hour we passed a couple of moored sailboats. “Those,” I said.

  Seth shook his head. “Flat calm. We need engines.”

  Twenty minutes later we came to an inlet where recent high water must have created a strong whirlpool. The shallows were full of flotsam, everything from tree limbs and wooden crates and beams of timber, to a miscellany of shattered light boats and the wreckage of a light aircraft.

  “Pity we don’t have us one of them, in working condition.” Seth grunted. He pointed to the plane. “We’d be at your place in half an hour. Course, we’d need parachutes, too — I reckon nobody’s wavin’ you in to land these days at local airfields. Now we’ve got to be pretty quiet. Nothing but whispers. We’re nearly there.”

  He was appallingly cheerful. I wondered if I had cast my lot in with a madman.

  In reality, I had not cast anything. I hadn’t picked Seth. He, together with his two friends, had picked me. That pair was much on my mind. They knew that I was awake. Even were Seth to vanish into the great hereafter, I would know no peace so long as they knew what had happened, and were in a position to talk.

  Be patient. I had little choice.

  Seth stopped paddling. In silence, we drifted up to another boat. It was a squat oblong, painted some distasteful color that looked in the dim light to be a drab olive-green. Two small outboard motors hung at the rear, propellers out of the water.

  “Mil spec,” Seth whispered. “Old, but these mothers were made to run forever. An’ it has half a tankful.”

  “It’s chained up.”

  “It sure is. Don’t know how near the owner might be. That’s why you gotta be real quiet now. When we go, we go fast — no stoppin’ to pick up passengers. Climb in, I’ll hold us steady.”

  Exhaustion made me clumsy. Seth had to be wincing as I stood up and toppled from the scow into his new find. The thump when I hit the bottom boards seemed to carry across the whole river. I crawled to the middle of the boat and lay there. Seth released his hold on the scow and came over the side as silently as a dark-clad ghost.

  He lowered the outboard motors into position. The clicks as he primed them with fuel were audible to me, but I suspect that from the shore they sounded no louder than insect noises.

  Seth slipped loose the chain securing the boat at its bow to a solid post on the shore, and lowered it link by link into the river. He came to my side and bent close.

  “According to the control setting, the two motors are power-matched and synchronized.” His whisper was barely audible, a mere breath of sound. “I can’t tell if they are until I start them. Grab hold of something and hang on tight. I’m going to full power right away. Things might be messy at first.”

  I saw his teeth. The lunatic was grinning at me.

  “That’s if we’re lucky,” he went on. “If we’re not, and the motors won’t start, we’ll be sittin’ ducks for anybody who comes out to see what all the noise is. We can’t have that. So if we don’t have power inside half a minute, you and me have to get out of here. We’ll go over the side. Don’t worry none about drowning, ’cause I’ll hold you up.”

  He moved forward to the little cabin and the controls, giving me no opportunity to ask, We go into the river, and then what?

  I lay flat and clutched a center post around which a thick rope was neatly coiled. It should have been around Seth’s neck. I had been better off than this in judicial sleep. An electric motor hummed a few feet aft, followed by the racheting racket of a pair of starters. Our efforts could no longer be mistaken for insect noises. The insect to produce so loud a sound would be the size of a horse.

  The starter motors clattered on and on. I was bracing myself for the plunge into cold river water when suddenly the gasoline engines fired in unison. The noise level went from frightening to monstrous as Seth — too soon, the engines were still cold — gave them full throttle.

  The engines coughed, spit, backfired, and finally hit a rhythm. The boat surged forward on a curving course that would run us right into the riverbank. Seth turned us at the last moment, juggled the power of one engine, and headed for midriver.

  He turned to grin at me.

  “Synchronized, my ass.” He had to shout to be heard above the engines. “But we’re doing fine now. Once we’re half a mile out, I’m going to take the power up all the way. Then we head upstream. And you can have a sleep” — on the bare boards of a pitching boat, surrounded by a din loud enough to burst eardrums — “and dream about home, sweet home.”

  Home, sweet home. Seth seemed oddly confident about what we would find there, and I suppose that was my fault.

  In my eagerness to assure him that I would be able to provide equipment to monitor the condition of his and his companions’ telomeres, I had omitted to discuss one crucial point. Not about the scientific techniques, which were every bit as simple as I had suggested. Given a few hours in my home lab, I could put together a sequence of observational methods and wet chemistry tests to replace the role of the defunct genome sequencers.

  There was, however, a default assumption in all this; namely, that my home lab still existed.

  The law admitted an odd ambivalence regarding the property rights of individuals sentenced to judicial sleep. On the one hand, I and others like me were alive. New evidence establishing our innocence might one day be discovered, and we would then be resuscitated. It would thus be wrong to confiscate our possessions or to apply inheritance laws while we were still alive.

  On the other hand, someone sentenced to centuries of judicial sleep, with overwhelming evidence of guilt, had a negligible chance of ever waking. We might, however, live for seventy or eighty years, until at last we died in our sleep of natural causes. What, during all that time, was to be done with our property?

  The heirs, naturally, wanted everything to be theirs as soon as possible. No one is more rapacious, ruthless, and impatient than a loving family member.

  The law, faced with a difficult decision, did what it often does. It looked backward for guidance, and invoked the ancient principle of usufruct. This permits an individual to enjoy the use of something without owning it, to the extent that such use does not destroy or reduce value. In other words, an heir could live in the house of a person sentenced to judicial sleep, and use that person’s possessions, but could sell neither house nor anything in it as long as the person remained alive.

  This took care of all cases but one: that of an individual with no known heirs.

  My parents were dead. I had been an only child. Upon my arrest, anyone who might otherwise have claimed kinship rushed to distance themselves from me. After my descent into judicial sleep, my property — includi
ng house and laboratory — had come under the stewardship of the government.

  The question was, what had they done with it? Left it empty? Rented it out? Made it into a local landmark, like Clara Barton’s house a couple of miles away? The last idea was remarkably unlikely, but the subject was on my mind as we cruised steadily upriver.

  Steadily. Seth, after the first dash away from possible pursuit, had cut back our speed. There were good reasons for this. First, someone who wishes to be inconspicuous does not roar along in the darkness at thirty knots. Second, when you can see almost nothing ahead of you, self-preservation recommends that you proceed slowly.

  The boat did not have a cabin, but there was in the bow a partial deck. It was big enough for a man to crawl under, and he would be hidden there from anything but a close inspection. When dawn approached, Seth suggested that it might be the best place for me. The place was filthy, but I was too tired to argue. I lay down on a heap of old tarpaulins and dirty sacks, thought longingly and lovingly about my darlings, and was asleep within seconds.

  I awoke to the sounds of silence. The engines no longer roared, the slap of water on the bow had ended. The air was hot and humid, with an oppressive heavy feeling to it. I crawled out from under the deck overhang feeling worse than when I went to sleep.

  Seth was stretched out by the controls, his head pillowed on his arms. I wondered how long he had been lying there. I had been asleep for a long time. The sun was high in the sky, the snow on the shore was melting away before my eyes. The boat sat close in, its bow wedged among a mass of overhanging bushes. The river was narrower and faster-flowing. We had come a long way upstream.

  I sat down, leaned over the side, and scooped up handfuls of water to splash on my face. Assuming that Seth had told the truth about the date, this was my first wash in nearly five years. I had not intended to drink the river water — it was brown and muddy — but as soon as it touched my lips the urge became irresistible. I drank from my cupped hands. The water tasted wonderful.

  It seemed to me that I had been remarkably quiet, but Seth apparently slept like a cat, one eye always open. I heard him grunt behind me, and I turned. He was lying in the same position with his head on his hands, but now he was staring at me.

  “Do you know where you are?” he said.

  “No.”

  “That’s bad news. Maybe I screwed up.” He moved to a sitting position and pointed along the river. “I don’t know this part of town very well, but I know how many bridges there are across the Potomac. I counted them as we came, and according to me that next one — see the abutments — should be upstream of where we want to be. So I thought right about here would be Glen Echo.”

  “Maybe it is.” I stood up. Now I felt hungry, but my legs were far less shaky. “I’ve never seen things from the river side before. Once we’re ashore and looking back this way I may be able to place us.”

  “Yeah. First things first, though.”

  He moved to my side and drank as I had drunk. Then he stood and casually urinated into the water. I reminded myself that the world had changed with Supernova Alpha. Anyone who hoped to survive would have to change with it. I followed his example.

  The food that he produced from his waterproof bag looked much the worse for wear, old bread and cheese squashed together in a solid block. I ate my half without hesitation, and wished for more.

  He hoisted the bag on his shoulder. “Ready?”

  We had to move the boat, pulling on the branches of overhanging bushes until we reached a place where the bow could be run all the way in to a clear piece of riverbank.

  Seth went first, scrambling up a few steps and turning to see if I needed help. I was pleased to find that I didn’t. Once I had been unusually strong. With luck and exercise that strength would come back.

  We headed away from the river through scrub and second-growth trees, and within fifty yards reached a wilderness of mud and gravel. It ran beside a broad empty trench with scattered puddles of water along the bottom. Seth looked at me expectantly.

  “It’s the C O canal,” I said. “Or it was. Something has happened to it.”

  “Supernova Alpha. The freak weather ripped all sorts of things to pieces. Do you know where you are?”

  “This mess used to be the towpath. It runs all the way from Georgetown up to Cumberland and beyond, a couple of hundred miles. We could follow it either way, but I don’t know which one will take us toward my house.”

  “Isn’t there a way to find out?” He was on my territory now, and he knew it. I sensed his heightened awareness. “I don’t like the smell of the weather. If there’s something unpleasant on the way, I’d like to be inside.”

  “There are locks all the way along the canal,” I said. If by “inside” he meant inside my old house, I wanted him as relaxed as possible. “We ought to have no problem. Each canal lock is marked with a number. All we have to do is walk to the closest one, then we’ll know where we are and how far we have to go. The lock nearest to my house is number seven.”

  “Right. Can you walk?”

  The physical effects of judicial sleep on a resuscitated subject are small. It is ironic to reflect that my own efforts on clone stability, prior to my capture, had been in large part responsible for minimizing the deleterious effects of long-term syncope. Seldom does one derive such direct benefits from one’s professional work. I felt that I could indeed walk, a considerable distance if necessary. However, I saw value in concealing this from Seth. A weary Seth Parsigian was preferable to a fully alert one.

  “I’m better than last night,” I replied. “But I tire very easily.”

  “Right. Stay here, then. I shouldn’t be long.” He set off to the left, along the muddy apology for a tow-path.

  I leaned against a mulberry tree already set with green fruit, and examined everything in sight. I had walked this towpath often, valuing its tranquil environment whenever my research called for protracted sessions of hard thought. It may seem strange that now I recognized nothing. Five years is surely a short time for an entity that has been in existence for more than two hundred years. However, we are talking of a surprisingly fragile physical structure. Twice before, to my knowledge, the canal towpath had been swept away and the canal partially destroyed by extreme weather. The Potomac River behind me was no more help. The pattern of islands was different from what I remembered.

  The recent legacy of Supernova Alpha offered one advantage. My home lay on the side of the canal farther from the river. We would not need to use a lock bridge, because traversing the empty canal bed was a simple matter.

  Seth was heading back toward me. I looked for signs of weariness in his gait, and saw none. He was impressively (and depressingly) tough and resilient.

  He pointed downstream. “Other way. I walked to lock eight. How far between locks?”

  “Variable. But lock seven is less than a mile from here.” I felt, and tried to hide, my urgency. I was only a few minutes from home. What would that home be like, after five years and more of government management?

  We walked side by side along the muddy remains of the towpath. I began to share Seth’s concern about the weather. It was warm and sunny, but I felt on my face a strange and gusty breeze. The air seemed heavier, dragging and retarding our footsteps. We crossed the canal at lock seven, made our way for a hundred yards along a major but empty parkway, and were at the edge of a residential territory.

  Now I had a legitimate reason to hurry. We did not want to be seen. We kept an eye out for other people as we went up the hill, turned a corner, and were in my driveway.

  I am, with certain exceptions, indifferent to possessions. But I cannot deny the excitement and pleasure that filled me when my house came into sight. Excitement, pleasure, and at the same time trepidation.

  Long before I suffered discovery and arrest, I had taken steps to hide my treasures. I thought I had hidden them well.

  The question was, had I hidden them well enough?

  34
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  Auden Travis behaved as though requests to find space for strangers on government vehicles came every day.

  “Cap what?” he said. He was bending over a thick folder, a compilation of computer listings, typewritten pages, and handwritten notes. “I can’t find it.”

  “Catoctin Mountain Park.” Art looked over Auden’s shoulder. “It’s north of here. I can show you on a map.”

  “That wouldn’t help. All the transportation information is in terms of highway numbers. I need to know those. Unless he promised you a helicopter?”

  The power of the presidency — and the temptation to lay false claim to it. “No. We have to ride on whatever’s going. But the roads are easy once you get outside Washington. North on Interstate 270 as far as Frederick, then Route 15 north heading toward Harrisburg. We only need a ride as far as Thurmont. We can walk to Catoctin from there.”

  “Harrisburg is good. State capital, sure to be something going that way. Here, this ought to do it.” Travis looked up at Art and grimaced. “Provided you don’t mind riding in the back of a cement truck.”

  “It’s better than the way I came down. When?”

  “Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock. That’s the best I can do.”

  “What will we do today?”

  “Anything you like. I wouldn’t recommend going too far because of the weather.”

  “It’s marvelous outside.”

  “It won’t be.” Travis opened another folder and showed it to Art. “See the map? Hurricane Gertrude hit Cape Hatteras last night. The seventh hurricane since February 9, and it’s not even the season. The forecasts say we’ll get the tail of it later today — pretty bad wind and rain. If I were you I wouldn’t go out at all.”

  “What about food?” Art was already hungry.

  “You can eat in the cafeteria in the Old Executive Office Building. Get there through the underground passage. The food’s not great, because it’s from the national reserves. Tonight I’ll find a place for you in the East Wing.”