“Gene died two year ago,” she said simply.
“I'm sorry.”
“We had our time together,” she said, forcing a smile.
“Remember how we—” And then I recalled where I was, what was coming. “Mrs. McKenzie, there's not long before the last bus.”
“I'm waiting for Buck.”
“Where is he?”
“He run off in the woods, chasing something.”
I worked by backpack straps around my shoulders. They creaked in the quiet.
There wasn't much time left. Pretty soon now it would start.
I knew the sequence, because I did maintenance engineering and retrofit on U.S3’s modular mirrors.
One of the big reflectors would focus sunlight on a recharge able tube of gas. That would excite the molecules. A small triggering beam would start the lasing going, the excited molecules cascading down together from one preferentially oc cupied quantum state to a lower state. A traveling wave swept down the tube, jarring loose more photons. They all added together in phase, so when the light waves hit the fare end of the hundred-meter tube, it was a sword, a gouging lance that could cut through air and clouds. And this time, it wouldn't strike an array of layered solid-state collectors outside New Orleans, providing clean electiricity. It would carve a swath twenty meters wide through the trees and fields of southern Alabama. A little demonstration, the Confeds said.
“The bus—look, I'll carry that suitcase for you.”
“I can manage.” She peered off into the distance, and I saw she was tired, tired beyond knowing it. “I'll wait for Buck.” “Leave him, Mrs. McKenzie.”
“I don't need that blessed bus.”
“Why not?”
“My children drove off to Mobile with their families. They're coming back to get me.”
“My insteted radio”—I gestured at my radio—”says the roads to Mobile are jammed up. You can't count on them.”
“They said so.”
“The Confed deadline—”
“I tole ’em I'd try to walk to the main road. Got tired, is all. They'll know I'm back in here.”
“Just the same—”
“I'm all right, don't you mind. They're good children, grate ful for all I've gone and done for them. They'll be back.”
“Come with me to the bus. It's not far.”
“Not without Buck. He's all the company I got these days.” She smiled, blinking.
I wiped sweat from my brow and studied the pines. There were a lot of places for a dog to be. The land here was flat and barely above sea level. I had come to camp and rest, rowing skiffs up the Fish River, looking for places I'd been when I was a teenager and my mom had rented boats from a rambling old fisherman's house. I had turned off my radio, to get away from things. The big, mysterious island I remembered and called Treasure Island, smack in the middle of the river, was now a soggy stand of trees in a bog. The big storm a year back had swept it away.
I'd been sleeping in the open on the shore near there when the chopper woke me up, blaring. The Confeds had given twelve hours’ warning, the recording said.
They'd picked this sparsely populated area for their little demonstration. People had been moving back in ever since the biothreat was cleaned out, but there still weren't many. I'd liked that when I was growing up. Open woods. That's why I came back every chance I got.
I should've guessed something was coming. The Confeds were about evenly matched with the whole rest of the planet now, at least in high-tech weaponry. Defense held all the cards. The big mirrors were modular and could fold up fast, making a small target. They could incinerate anything launched against them, too.
But the U.N. kept talking like the Confeds were just another nation-state or something. Nobody down here understood that the people up there thought of Earth itself as the real problem—eaten up with age-old rivalries and hate, still holding onto dirty weapons that murdered whole populations, carrying around in their heads all the rotten baggage of the past. To listen to them, you'd think they'd learned nothing from the war. Already they were forgetting that it was the orbital defenses that had saved the biosphere itself, and the satellite communities that knit together the mammoth rescue efforts of the decade after. With out the antivirals developed and grown in huge zero-g vats, lots of us would've caught one of the poxes drifting through the population. People just forget. Nations, too.
“Where's Buck?” I said decisively.
“He … that way.” A wave of the hand.
I wrestled my backpack down, feeling the stab from my shoulder—and suddenly remembered the thunk of that steel knocking me down, back then. So long ago. And me, still carrying an ache from it that woke whenever a cold snap came on. The past was still alive.
I trotted into the short pines, over creeper grass. Flies jumped where my boots struck. The white sand made a skree sound as my boots skated over it. I remembered how I'd first heard that sound, wearing slick-soled tennis shoes, and how pleased I'd been at university when I learned how the acoustics of it worked.
“Buck!”
A flash of brown over to the left. I ran through a thick stand of pine, and the dog yelped and took off, dodging under a blackleaf bush. I called again. Buck didn't even slow down. I skirted left. He went into some oak scrub, barking, having a great time of it, and I could hear him getting tangled in it and then shaking free and out of the other side. Gone.
When I got back to Mrs. McKenzie, she didn't seem to notice me. “I can't catch him.”
“Knew you wouldn't.” She grinned at me, showing brown teeth. “Buck's a fast one.”
“Call him.”
She did. Nothing. “Must have run off.”
“There isn't time—”
“I'm not leaving without ole Buck. Times I was alone down on the river after Gene died, and the water would come up under the house. Buck was the only company I had. Only soul I saw for five weeks in that big blow we had.”
A low whine from afar. “I think that's the bus,” I said.
She cocked her head. “Might be.”
“Come on. I'll carry your suitcase.”
She crossed her arms. “My children will be by for me. I tole them to look for me along in here.”
“They might not make it.”
“They're loyal children.”
“Mrs. McKenzie, I can't wait for you to be reasonable.” I picked up my backpack and brushed some red ants off the straps.
“You Bishops was always reasonable,” she said levelly. “You work up there, don't you?”
“Ah, sometimes.”
“You goin’ back, after they do what they're doin’ here?”
“I might.” Even if I owed her something for what she did long ago, damned if I was going to be cowed.
“They're attacking the United States.”
“And spots in Bavaria, the Urals, South Africa, Brazil—”
“’Cause we don't trust ’em! They think they can push the United States aroun’ just as they please—” And she went on with all the clichés heard daily from earthbound media. How the Confeds wanted to run the world and they were dupes of the Russians, and how surrendering national sovereignty to a bunch of self-appointed overlords was an affront to our dignity, and so on.
True, some of it—the Confeds weren't saints. But they were the only power that thought in truly global terms, couldn't not think that way. They could stop ICBMs and punch through the atmosphere to attack any offensive capability on the ground—that's what this demonstration was to show. I'd heard Confeds argue that this was the only was to break the diplomatic log jam—do something. I had my doubts. But times were changing, that was sure, and my generation didn't think the way the prewar people did.
“We'll never be rule by some outside—”
“Mrs. McKenzie, there's the bus! Listen!”
The turbo whirred far around the bend, slowing for the stop.
Her face softened as she gazed at me, as if recalling memories. “That's all righ
t, boy. You go along, now.”
I saw that she wouldn't be coaxed or even forced down that last bend. She had gone as far as she was going to, and the world would have to come the rest of the distance itself.
Up ahead, the bus driver was probably behind schedule for this last pickup. He was going to be irritated and more than a little scared. The Confeds would be right on time, he knew that.
I ran. My feet plowed through the deep, soft sand. Right away I could tell I was more tired than I'd thought and the heat had taken some strength out of me. I went about two hundred meters along the gradual bend, was nearly within view of the bus, when I heard it start up with a rumble. I tasted salty sweat, and it felt like the whole damned planet was dragging at my feet, holding me down. The driver raced the engine, in a hurry.
He had to come toward me as he swung out onto Route 80 on the way back to Mobile. Maybe I could reach the intersection in time for him to see me. So I put my head down and plunged forward.
But there was the woman back there. To get to her, the driver would have to take the bus down that rutted, sandy road and risk getting stuck. With people on the bus yelling at him. All that to get the old woman with the grateful children. She didn't seem to understand that there were ungrateful children in the skies now—she didn't seem to understand much of what was going on—and suddenly I wasn't sure I did, either.
But I kept on.
THE FEAST OF SAINT JANIS
Michael Swanwick
Take a load off, Janis,
And
You put the load right on me …
—“The Wait” (trad.)
WOLF STOOD IN the early morning fog watching the Yankee Clipper leave Baltimore harbor. His elbows rested against a cool, clammy wall, its surface eroded smooth by the passage of countless hands, almost certainly dating back to before the Collapse. A metallic gray sparkle atop the fore-mast drew his eye to the dish antenna that linked the ship with the geosynchronous Trickster seasats it relied on to plot winds and currents.
To many, the wooden Clipper, with its computer-designed hy drofoils and hand-sewn sails, was a symbol of the New Africa. Wolf, however, watching it merge into sea and sky, knew only that it was going home without him.
He turned and walked back into the rick-a-rack of commercial buildings crowded against the waterfront. The clatter of hand-drawn carts mingled with a mélange of exotic cries and shouts, the alien music of a dozen American dialects. Workers, clad in coveralls most of them, swarmed about, grunting and cursing in exasperation when an iron wheel lurched in a muddy pothole. Yet there was something furtive and covert about them, as if they were hiding an ancient secret.
Craning to stare into the dark recesses of a warehouse, Wolf col lided with a woman clad head to foot in chador. She flinched at his touch, her eyes glaring above the black veil, then whipped away. Not a word was exchanged.
A citizen of Baltimore in its glory days would not have recognized the city. Where the old buildings had not been torn down and buried, shanties crowded the streets, taking advantage of the space automobiles had needed. Sometimes they were built over the streets, so that alleys became tunnelways, and sometimes these collapsed, to the cries and consternation of the natives.
It was another day with nothing to do. He could don a filter mask and tour the Washington ruins, but he had already done that, and besides the day looked like it was going to be hot. It was unlikely he'd hear anything about his mission, not after months of waiting on American officials who didn't want to talk with him. Wolf decided to check back at his hostel for messages, then spend the day in the bazaars.
Children were playing in the street outside the hostel. They scat tered at his approach. One, he noted, lagged behind the others, hampered by a malformed leg. He mounted the unpainted wooden steps, edging past an old man who sat at the bottom. The old man was laying down tarot cards with a slow and fatalistic disregard for what they said; he did not look up.
The bell over the door jangled notice of Wolf's entry. He stepped into the dark foyer.
Two men in the black uniforms of the Political Police appeared, one to either side of him. “Wolfgang Hans Mbikana?” one asked. His voice had the dust of ritual on it; he knew the answer. “You will come with us,” the other said.
“There is some mistake,” Wolf objected.
“No, sir, there is no mistake,” one said mildly. The other opened the door. “After you, Mr. Mbikana.”
The old man on the stoop squinted up at them, looked away, and slid off the step.
The police walked Wolf to an ancient administrative building. They went up marble steps sagging from centuries of foot-scuffing, and through an empty lobby. Deep within the building they halted before an undistinguished-looking door. “You are expected,” the first of the police said.
“I beg your pardon?”
The police walked away, leaving him there. Apprehensive, he knocked on the door. There was no answer, so he opened it and stepped within.
A woman sat at a desk just inside the room. Though she was modernly dressed, she wore a veil. She might have been young; it was impossible to tell. A flick of her eyes, a motion of one hand, directed him to the open door of an inner room. It was like following an onion to its conclusion, a layer of mystery at a time.
A heavy-set man sat at the final desk. He was dressed in the traditional suit and tie of American businessmen. But there was nothing quaint or old-fashioned about his mobile, expressive face or the piercing eyes he turned on Wolf.
“Sit down,” he grunted, gesturing toward an old, overstuffed chair. Then: “Charles DiStephano. Comptroller for Northeast Regional. You're Mbikana, right?”
“Yes, sir.” Wolf gingerly took the proffered chair, which did not seem all that clean. It was becoming clear to him now; DiStephano was one of the men on whom he had waited these several months, the biggest of the lot, in fact. “I represent—”
“The Southwest Africa Trade Company.” DiStephano lifted some documents from his desk. “Now this says you're prepared to offer—among other things—resource data from your North American Coy ote landsat in exchange for the right to place students in Johns Hopkins. I find that an odd offer for your organization to make.”
“Those are my papers,” Wolf objected. “As a citizen of Southwest Africa, I'm not used to this sort of cavalier treatment.”
“Look, kid, I'm a busy man, I have no time to discuss your rights. The papers are in my hands, I've read them, the people that sent you knew I would. Okay? So I know what you want and what you're offering. What I want to know is why you're making this offer.”
Wolf was disconcerted. He was used to a more civilized, a more leisurely manner of doing business. The oldtimers at SWATC had warned him that the pace would be different here, but he hadn't had the experience to decipher their veiled references and hints. He was painfully aware that he had gotten the mission, with its high salary and the promise of a bonus, only because it was not one that appealed to the older hands.
“America was hit hardest,” he said, “but the Collapse was worldwide.” He wondered whether he should explain the system of cor porate social responsibility that African business was based on. Then decided that if DiStephano didn't know, he didn't want to. “There are still problems. Africa has a high incidence of birth de fects.” Because America exported its poisons; its chemicals and pesticides and foods containing a witch's brew of preservatives. “We hope to do away with the problem; if a major thrust is made, we can clean up the gene pool in less than a century. But to do this requires profession-als—eugenicists, embryonic surgeons—and while we have these, they are second-rate. The very best still come from your nation's medical schools.”
“We can't spare any.”
“We don't propose to steal your doctors. We'd provide our own students—fully trained doctors who need only the specialized training.”
“There are only so many openings at Hopkins,” DiStephano said. “Or at U of P or the UVM Medical College, for that matter
.”
“We're prepared to—” Wolf pulled himself up short. “It's in the papers. We'll pay enough that you can expand to meet the needs of twice the number of students we require.” The room was dim and oppressive. Sweat built up under Wolf's clothing.
“Maybe so. You can't buy teachers with money, though.” Wolf said nothing. “I'm also extremely reluctant to let your people near our medics. You can offer them money, estates—things our country cannot afford. And we need our doctors. As it is, only the very rich can get the corrective surgery they require.”
“If you're worried about our pirating your professionals, there are ways around that. For example, a clause could be written—” Wolf went on, feeling more and more in control. He was getting somewhere. If there wasn't a deal to be made, the discussion would never have gotten this far.
The day wore on. DiStephano called in aides and dismissed them. Twice, he had drinks sent in. Once, they broke for lunch. Slowly the heat built, until it was sweltering. Finally, the light began to fail, and the heat grew less oppressive.
DiStephano swept the documents into two piles, returned one to Wolf, and put the other inside a desk drawer. “I'll look these over, have our legal boys run a study. There shouldn't be any difficulties. I'll get back to you with the final word in—say a month. September twenty-first. I'll be in Boston then, but you can find me easily enough, if you ask around.”
“A month? But I thought …”
“A month. You can't hurry City Hall,” DiStephano said firmly. “Ms. Corey!”
The veiled woman was at the door, remote, elusive. “Sir.”
“Drag Kaplan out of his office. Tell him we got a kid here he should give the VIP treatment to. Maybe a show. It's a Hopkins thing, he should earn his keep.”
“Yes, sir.” She was gone.
“Thank you,” Wolf said, “but I don't really need …”
“Take my advice, kid, take all the perks you can get. God knows there aren't many left. I'll have Kaplan pick you up at your hostel in an hour.”
The End Of The World Page 17
