Eclipse One

by Jonathan Strahan

  "Ay!" yelled Viola, terrified out of her panic attack—

  Aymon failed to apply the brakes, probably because he had already succumbed to a fatal heart attack. Viola, who had unclipped her seat belt whilst trying to escape, went through the windscreen, despite its toughness. She was technically alive when the Emergency Services arrived, but she never recovered consciousness, and died on the way to the hospital.

  The Woodsman put away his axe. Many members of the commune preferred to cut and stack their fuel in winter, when the trees were sleeping, but he saw no harm in being open about these things. He stood beside his toolshed (which he had cultured himself, from living timber, a proud feat), scratching his chin and pondering. Those tourists now, where exactly had they got to?

  There were Centres all over the world, where anyone who wished could experience, in forest, in meadows, desert, savannah or ocean, full communion with the woken world—or as much of that reality as they could stand. But foreign visitors who came to this oldest meeting place, the original Martigny Centre of the Forest of the Queen, often had very mistaken ideas. There was no raw primeval innocence in this forest, for the forest was not old at all. It had died and been reborn as often as France herself, and the consciousness of nature was imbued with the character of the human culture. This meant that strangers could get into trouble. The woken world here (a misnomer, for it was the human mind that had been woken, by the miracles of science) could be mischievous, bawdy, a little dangerous to the unwary.

  Tourists who arrived in the flesh irritated the Woodsman: Why could they not be content with the virtual access, which was excellent? But he thought fondly of the American couple, for the sake of that remarkable grey steed of theirs; for the sake of a past which he remembered with the nostalgia of a survivor. Nowadays, the living world could compel human beings to deal with its peoples fairly and decently. Trade agreements had been made, laws had been drawn up, which humanity must respect. My God, yes, the human race had learned a hard lesson, when the change first came . . . But even now, in the peace after the ages-long conflict, there was bitterness, and one had to take care. It must be a challenge to keep a machine from the old days, happy!

  And perilous.

  His own car had been drowsing in a hazel thicket. He led it out and checked its skirts for burrs and prickles (its wheels were rarely deployed, they weren't very practical for this terrain)—as he studied the satellite views of the forest and its environs, which he habitually kept open at the back of his eyes when he was guarding these gates. The grey steed was nowhere to be seen. No mark of their passage anywhere. Perhaps they had given up trying to find the Centre, and left the area while his attention was elsewhere.

  "After all," he murmured, as he gave the little white car a gentle touch on the wheel, to guide it across the water meadows—where it tended to shy at the rise of a heron, or the curiosity of the cattle. "It was a very old map."

  QUARTERMASTER RETURNS

  Ysabeau S. Wilce

  " . . .That he escaped that blow entirely is due to the consummate

  good luck which enabled him to steer clear of that military

  maelstrom . . .he never had to be post quartermaster."

  Trials of a Staff Officer

  Captain Charles King, 3rd U.S. Cavalry

  I. Wet

  When Pow walks into the hog ranch, everyone turns to stare at him. At the whist table, the muleskinner gurgles and lets fall his cards. The cardsharp's teeth clatter against the rim of his glass. The cowboy squeaks. At the bar, the barkeep, who had been fishing flies out of the pickle jar, drops her pickle fork. On the bar, the cat, a fantastic mouser named Queenie, narrows her moon-silver eyes into little slits. At the pianny, Lotta, who'd been banging out Drink Puppy Drink on the peeling ivory keys, crashes one last chord and no more.

  Even the ice elemental, in the cage suspended over the whist table, ceases his languid fanning. He's seen a lot of boring human behavior since the barkeep bought him from a junk store in Walnuts to keep the hog ranch cool; finally a human has done something interesting. Only Fort Gehenna's scout doesn't react. He wipes his nose on a greasy buckskin sleeve, slams another shot of mescal, and takes the opportunity to peek at his opponents' cards.

  The barroom is dead silent but for a distant slap and a squeal—Buck and the peg-boy in the back room exercising—and the creak of the canvas walls shifting in the ever-present Arivaipa wind.

  Pow wobbles over to the bar—just a couple of boards laid across two empty whiskey barrels—leans on it—the boards creaking ominously at his weight—and croaks: "Mescal." His throat feels as though he's swallowed sixty pounds of sand. The barkeep stares at him, her mouth hanging slightly ajar. Against her garish blue lip rouge her teeth look as yellow as corn.

  Pow licks his lips with a cat-coarse tongue and whispers: "Come on, Petty, give me a mescal. I'm powerfully dry."

  "You're dripping wet," The barkeep answers. Pow looks down, and yes indeed he is dripping, brown water seeping from his dirty uniform, turning the ground he stands upon to mud.

  "Sorry," he says. "Is it raining outside?" He looks back towards the door, which is a blazing rectangle of sunlight, bright enough to blind—it's not raining outside. Arivaipa is a goddess-forsaken wilderness of a desert, where it only rains occasionally, and then usually in the dead of night. And anyway, if it were raining outside, it would be raining inside too, for the hog ranch's roof is made of brush and it is not water tight. The last good downpour was two weeks ago, and it had almost swamped the hog-ranch out.

  "Lotta—get the lieutenant a towel," the barkeep says, but Lotta does not spring to the order. She shrinks back behind the wall of the pianny and wishes she were invisible.

  "Lotta!" The barkeep repeats, "Get Lieutenant Rucker a towel or I'll kick ya in yer hinder."

  While Lotta reluctantly follows the barkeep's order, Pow wipes his face on the mustachio towel nailed to the bar; the towel, none to white to begin with, comes away black with dirt. The barkeep hands him a sloshily poured glass; he drinks it in one draught, and bangs his glass down for more. The mescal is bitter and burning but it washes away the taste of mud in his mouth. He feels very clammy, and from the itch, there is sand in his drawers. The barkeep pours him another.

  "Thanks, darling," Pow says, and bolts his second drink. The whist game has not resumed; the players are still staring at him, and he returns their glance, saying, "Ain't you people never seen a man drink before?"

  No one responds to this quip, and then the canvas curtains over the doorway to the back room part. Out staggers Buck, laughing, struggling to get her sack coat back on. She's got her right arm in the left sleeve and that's not going to work no matter how much she pulls. The peg-boy follows her, grinning, and snapping his galluses up over red-checkered shoulders. An air of satisfaction hovers over them both.

  Buck outranks him, so Pow wafts a salute at her, and she waves at him drunkenly, collapsing in a chair at the other rickety table. The peg-boy sticks a cigarillo in her mouth, another in his, and lights them both.

  "Where the hell you been, Pow?" Buck says. The barkeep has already anticipated her desire, and plunks a bottle of whiskey before her.

  Pow licks the dirt from his lips and realizes that he has no idea.

  II. Desiccated

  Arivaipa Territory, where the sun is so hot that it will, after dissolving your flesh into grease, melt your bones as well. A territory of bronco natives and bunco artists, wild religiosos and wild horses, poison toads and rattling snakes. A hard dry place, an endless expanse of Nowhere. Why the Warlord wants to keep a thread of authority in such a goddess-forsaken place is a mystery, but the Army doesn't question orders, just follows them. Thus Fort Gehenna, and a scattering of other army posts, sown like seeds across the prickly rocky dusty landscape of the remote territory.

  The hog ranch sits on Fort Gehenna's reservation line, just beyond the reach of military authority, and technically off-limits to army personnel. There are no hogs at this ranch, just
cheap bugjuice, cheap food and cheap love, but these three attractions make the hog ranch a pretty attractive place to Gehenna's lonely bored hungry soldiers. So a well-worn track starts at the hog ranch's front door and wends its way through the desert scrub, up and down arroyos, by saguaro and paloverde, across the sandy expanse of the Sandy River to terminate behind Officers' Row.

  Down this track, known as The Oh Be Joyful Road, Pow zigzags. His feet kick up dust, and the sun hits his shoulders, his bare head, with hammer-like intensity. The heat has sucked the wet right out of his uniform, which now feels gritty and coarse against his skin. His sinuses tingle and burn. He feels in his sack coat pocket for his bandana, but the pockets are full of sand. So he blows his nose into his sleeve, but only a thin gust of dust comes out.

  His boots are full of sand too; near the cactus priest's wikiyup he sits on a rock and pours them out. Were his toes always that black? They look like little shriveled coffee beans. His brain feels thick, as though his skull is full of mud. Pow marches on, his eyes slits of grittiness, his eyelids scrape at his eyeballs like broken glass. He can hardly see where he is going, but the urge to go is strong, and he can't help but follow it.

  Pow reaches the Single Officers' Quarters, and staggers up the steps into the blessed shade of the porch—a few degrees cooler and the air slightly moist from the water olla hanging from the porch eaves. He pulls down the olla, hearing his muscles crackle like dried cornstalks. The olla is fat and round, beaded with moisture, but almost empty. He licks the droplets off the clay, oh delicious wetness, and then throws the pot on the ground, where it shatters.

  As a first lieutenant, Pow's only entitled to one room, and this room is now empty of his gear, its only furniture a steamer trunk and an iron cot. Pow collapses on the iron cot, unable to take another step. His thirst is sharp and pointed, it's overwhelming and all encompassing, it leaves little room inside him for anything else. All around him he can sense moisture, but he himself is parched.

  He shakes his head, feeling the tendons in his neck wheeze and burn. There's a rattling sound inside of his skull—his brain perhaps, now shrunken to a desiccated nubbin. That would account for the thickness of his thoughts. Something falls into his lap; at first he thinks it's a piece of jerky, then he realizes it's his ear. He tries to stick his ear back onto his head, but it won't stay, so he puts it in his pocket for safe keeping.

  A shadow slinks in the corner of the room; two silver eyes glitter. Freddie, Pow's pet Gila monster, which he raised from an egg, is peeking out of its den, a hole in the adobe wall. The lizard waddles across the floor and nips at the toe of Pow's boot, its usual method for requesting a treat. Lacking anything else, Pow gives the Gila monster his ear—his hearing seems fine without it—and Freddie nibbles daintily. Pow reaches for the lizard; Freddie spits a shiny squirt of silvery poison at him. Pow licks the slippery venom off his fingers—it's lovely wet.

  The lizard is fat with moisture; underneath that scaly skin, it's heavy with wetness, its meat saturated with blood, bile, venom, juice. Pow makes a dry clucking noise with his splintery tongue, and reaches for Freddie again. As if sensing his intent, the Gila monster scuttles away, but desperation makes Pow quick. He snatches.

  III. Dry

  Pow's retreat from the hog ranch to his quarters did not go without notice; indeed, when he had staggered onto Fort Gehenna's parade ground, a long file had straggled behind him. In addition to the habitués of the hog ranch, who gave him a respectable head start before following, the brigade included the herd guard, a couple of privates who were loitering in the shade of the sinks watching an ant fight, the tame broncos (as the soldiers call Arivaipa's natives) who live behind the remuda corral, and the dog pack, tempted out of the arroyo by Pow's smell, which, now that his clothes have dried, is quite strong: a meaty kind of decay.

  This crowd now stands outside the SOQ, and it has attracted the attention of Lieutenant Brakespeare, Gehenna's adjutant and current acting quartermaster, and Sergeant Candy, Gehenna's ranking noncom. When they arrive to investigate, a multitude of voices in several languages all begin to babble at once. Lieutenant Brakespeare ignores the shouting and enters the SOQ only to find Pow's room empty. The contents of his trunk are strewn about the room and every item packed therein that once contained anything moist—boot polish tin, a bottle of Madama Twanky's Sel-Ray-Psalt Medicine, fly ointment—lies wrecked upon the floor.

  The destruction continues across the hallway and into Lieutenant Brakespeare's quarters—the lieutenant swears horribly when she sees the mess—and on into the kitchen beyond. There Berman, the lieutenant's striker, stands surveying a battlefield of crumpled tin cans, smashed sauerkraut crocks, broken wine bottles, and the splintered remains of a water barrel.

  "He went that way," Berman says, that way being into the back yard. There Lieutenant Brakespeare and Sergeant Candy find Pow face down in a laundry tub, sucking up soapy water, while the laundress stands over him, whacking at his shoulders with her washboard. They heave Pow out of the almost empty tub. He burps a giant soap bubble, which pops into an appalling stench of sweet-sour decay, and shakes the soldiers off. He feels deliciously waterlogged, heavy and solid. He feels much much better.

  The crowd has rushed around the back, and now a rotund figure—Captain de Poligniac, Gehenna's commanding officer—pushes through, almost invisible underneath a huge black umbrella, an item that officers in uniform are strictly forbidden to carry. When he reaches the SOQ back porch, and lets drop the shade, Polecat (as the good captain is called even to his face) reveals that he's not in uniform anyway, just a pair of dirty red drawers and a white guayabera. He'd been in his quarters, riding out the furnace of the afternoon on an herbal haze, and he is annoyed at being disturbed.

  "What's all that infernal racket, Lieutenant Brakespeare?" Polecat complains. He catches sight of Pow, and his voice trails off. His lips pucker in puzzlement, and he stares at the rapidly dehydrating lieutenant.

  "Pow!" Polecat says. "I thought you were dead!"

  IV. Arid

  Of course, First Lieutenant Powhatan Rucker is dead. Not just dead, but drowned. How can you drown in a desert? In an Arivaipa thunderstorm, all too quickly. One minute the sky is as blank as a sheet of paper; the next minute it roils with quicksilver clouds, from which lunge enormous purple-silver prongs of lightning. And then rain bullets down, water floods into the arroyos and anything not on the high ground is swept away. Ten minutes later the desert is dry as a bone again, and the sky empty.

  He died a hero's death, Lieutenant Rucker did, trying to save, not another comrade, but rather the hog ranch's entire supply of beer. The story is short and tragic: the freight train dropped fifteen cases of beer at the hog ranch, before proceeding on to Rancho Kuchamonga; an inexperienced drover off-loaded the beer in the arroyo below the hog ranch; when the storm came up, Pow organized his fellow whist players into a bottle brigade, and supervised the shifting of fourteen cases to higher ground; the water was already foaming when Pow went back for the last case—refusing to allow the others to join him in harm's way; Pow heroically managed to shove that case up the bank, just as a wall of water twenty feet high came roaring down the ravine.

  After Pow's battered and soggy body was found tangled in an uprooted paloverde tree, he was borne off to Gehenna's sandy cemetery, where he was given a full military funeral, and toasted by the entire garrison with bottles from the fateful case that killed him. But now that sandy cemetery has spit Pow back up, a circumstance that no one in Gehenna can ever remember occurring before.

  "If Pow is dead, how can he be alive?" Polecat says, in bewilderment. They've retired to his office, for privacy, although the crowd still loiters outside, hoping that voices will be raised enough to facilitate eavesdropping. Considering that the walls of the office are mud-covered brush, and the ceiling more brush, under which hangs a piece of canvas which keeps centipedes from falling on your head, the voices do not have to be very loud. Polecat plops behind his desk, trying to look
official, while the Lieutenants Brakespeare and Rucker stand before him, in semi-respectful stances. Lieutenant Fyrdraaca, retrieved from the privy, isn't quite as drunk as she was before, but she's not sober enough to stand at attention, so she has sprawled upon Polecat's well-used daybed.

  Polecat puts his spectacles on to examine Pow more closely; the lieutenant is still crusted with a fine silt, but the few bits of skin visible look downright shriveled. He is twenty-two years old, but now he looks a hundred.

  "I think alive is stretching it a bit, Polecat," Buck says. "I mean, Pow is animated, but he looks a bit rough to actually be alive. I would say he's definitely dead."

  "Then what am I doing here?" Pow asks, bewildered.

  "I called you back." Lieutenant Brakespeare says. She sounds rather smug.

  "You brought him back from the dead?" Polecat moans. "Why in Califa's name did you do that, Azota?"

  "His quartermaster accounts were a mess—and short, too." Lieutenant Brakespeare purses her mouth into a small knot. "I'm not going to be responsible for his shortages, or pay for his mistakes."

  At the time of his death, Pow had been Gehenna's quartermaster, and thus responsible for all of Gehenna's rations, uniforms, equipment, ordnance and equipage, for the previous three months. During that time he'd not done a lick of paperwork, preferring instead to while away the days playing mumblety-peg with the QM clerks. To say that Pow's QM accounts were a mess, was being charitable. Actually, they were a catastrophe.

  When Lieutenant Brakespeare (only shortly graduated from Benica Barracks Military Academy but already well on her way to being a properly stuck-up yaller dog, as staff officers are called) assumed the QM duties upon Pow's death, it had taken her fourteen days of non-stop paper pushing to complete the QM returns properly, and even then she couldn't account for all the shortages in the QM inventories. Since officers in the Army of Califa are personally responsible for items on their inventory returns, someone is to going to have to pay for these shortages. Lieutenant Brakespeare has no intention of being that someone.