by Paul McAuley
The top of the ridge was a wind-blown sweep of rocks and snow and yellow grass. Low stone walls ran here and there, remnants of little houses built by the Anasazi about two thousand years ago. There was a tremendous view of mountains stepping away southwards under a clear blue sky, their peaks hidden by clouds grey with unfallen snow.
In those mountains, Jack Walker told Stone, was the spot where he’d hidden out with his father while the world ended. His father had been an ecologist working for the National Park Service. He and Jack’s mother had split up several years before the war, and Jack had seen little of him after the divorce had been finalised, but after a political crisis in Germany blew up into a full-scale confrontation between America and the Soviets, he turned up at Jack’s school in Santa Fe one day and told him they were going on a little trip.
They drove into the mountains, left the car at a picnic area, and hiked through the forest to the remote valley where Jack’s father had dug a deep shelter into a slope above a river, and hidden caches of food, guns, ammunition, tools, medicine and clothing round and about. Jack and his father spent most of their time fishing, making an inventory of their stores, and listening to news bulletins and the President’s speeches to the nation on the radio. The first report of full-blown war in Europe came three days after they moved into the shelter. A few hours later, the radio cut out in the middle of a prerecorded civil defence message.
It was just after noon. The flawless summer sky was suddenly crisscrossed with white contrails. Jack Walker and his father sealed the shelter’s three sets of doors and hunkered down amongst boxes of canned and dry goods and bottled water. The clicking of the radiation counter grew into a steady roar. The radio picked up snatches of music, screaming rants, plaintive calls for help, a confusion of military and civil defence traffic. One by one the signals faded into a dismal universal hiss.
After they emerged from their shelter, Jack Walker and his father made no attempt to contact other survivors. They kept away from roads and houses. They hunted with bows and arrows, stitched coats and boots from hides, wove fish traps from willow switches, drove waterfowl into pens woven from reeds. Jack’s father taught him everything he knew about the mountains, told him about the wonderful variety of plants and animals and the intricate web of checks and balances that kept them in ecological harmony, told him about the culture and history of the native people, the Anasazi, who had lived in the mountains and the desert to the south before Europeans stole the land and made it part of the great lie they called America.
Two years after the war, Jack’s father died from blood poisoning after he pulled out an abscessed tooth. Jack gave him a sky burial on a platform raised on a high, rocky crest and set out into the new world. He remembered everything he’d been taught: it became the foundation of his belief that the war was both a punishment for man’s hubris and a chance to begin afresh. Now, on the ridge above the guerrilla camp, looking out across the winter landscape toward the snow-capped mountains, Jack Walker told Stone about the lesson that could be learned from the sudden failure of the civilisation that the Anasazi had built across the Southwest.
‘The climate changed,’ he said. ‘It became drier, their crops failed, and they could no longer feed themselves. There were too many people and there was not enough food. War broke out between the settlements - that’s why the last of the Anasazi lived on the tops of mesas, and on ridges like this one, places that were easily fortified. They became so desperate they turned to cannibalism. If you dig through the middens of late-period Anasazi settlements, you’ll find human bones with marks on them that show they were processed for meat, just like animal bones. You’ll find skulls split open with stone axes, too, and skulls with scorch marks that show they were set on fires to roast them. Like the Anasazi, every society that relies on agriculture lives on the edge of catastrophe. All it takes is a couple of bad summers. It was because we relied on agriculture and technology that most of the survivors died after the war. They did not know how to live off the land, and in any case there were too many of them for the land to support.’
The bitter wind plucked at the blanket Stone had wrapped around his shoulders, sent Walker’s hair streaming back from his face. His trousers and tunic were sewn from tanned deer hides that had been scraped with stone knives until they were as soft as butter. His deer-hide boots were lined with dry grass. He looked heroic. He looked frighteningly young.
Molly Gee, the old blind woman who followed him everywhere, crouched a little way off, a black blot in the snow. Her crow was perched on her shoulder, shrugging its wings to keep its balance in the wind. She seemed to be the only person Walker deferred to. He believed that she could see into the future.
‘I love this land,’ he said. ‘I have sworn that no more harm will come to it. I told my father that, on his deathbed. When he could no longer stand the pain, I killed him and carried him to a high place and cut up his body so the crows and turkey vultures would take it back into nature. I was sixteen. That was when I became a man.’
Walker was silent for a while. Stone clutched the blanket around his shoulders. The wind cut him to the bone.
‘Before the war, we lived our lives out of balance,’ Walker said. ‘The war was a blessing. It was a great cleansing. We can’t afford to make the same mistakes again, and that’s why we will never surrender to your people. That’s why we will drive you back through your gate and destroy it. You are a strong-willed and determined man. You haven’t told me half as much as I need to know, and much of what you have told me is at best only half-true. I could try to torture the truth from you, of course, but I think you would lie to me even under torture, and I have a better use for you. I will tell your people that I will exchange you for several of my people held prisoner in Las Vegas.’
For a moment Stone felt a pang of hope, felt that he might live through this after all. But then Walker explained the plan to turn him into a human bomb and told him that he should be happy, because his death would help to end the war.
‘It will show your people that they cannot afford to fight us. It will prove to them that we will stop at nothing to drive them from our land, that we will never negotiate, and never submit. Yours will be a glorious death - a martyr’s death! We will always remember and honour it.’
The next day, a party of whooping warriors brought a new prisoner into the camp, a sturdy Native American whose wrists were fastened to a line tied to the saddle of one of his captors. He had a gunshot wound in his shoulder but walked with straight-backed dignity, looking neither right nor left at the people who jeered and spat at him.
Jack Walker questioned the prisoner in front of Stone. He wanted to know where the man had come from, how many people lived there, how many had been born that year, how many had died, what crops they grew, what they had salvaged from the ruins of the old towns, but the man refused to answer any of the questions, saying only that he was the brother of one of the guides who had been leading Stone into the mountains, that he’d sworn to revenge his brother’s death and had been tracking Walker’s men when they had caught him. When it was clear that the man wasn’t going to give up any useful information, Walker handed him over to the mob. They stripped him naked and hung him by his heels over a fire and slowly roasted him by lowering him inch by inch toward the hot coals. The prisoner began to scream and thrash. A vile stink of burnt hair and roasting flesh filled the air. Black blood burst from his ears and nostrils.
Stone begged Walker to give the man a clean death. At first, the guerrilla leader feigned indifference to both Stone’s pleas and the prisoner’s screams, but after a few minutes he signalled to the youngest of his warriors and told him to finish it. The teenager strolled across the cave, pushed through the crowd around the fire, and cut the prisoner’s throat with a single stroke.
‘I gave him release because he told the truth and he was on an honourable quest,’ Walker said to Stone. ‘Also, if he did not come here alone, as he claimed, his screams would have brought his fr
iends to us by now. Still, we will have to move on from here at first light. If he could find us, so could others. It will delay your martyrdom, my friend, but only by a day or so.’
Stone tried once more to convince the young guerrilla leader that he had started a war he could not win, that instead of fighting against the new government he should become part of it and help shape the new America.
‘This isn’t about power,’ Walker said. ‘This is about ideas. I have studied your people. I have listened to their propaganda broadcasts and read the pamphlets they hand out to settlers. I know that they want to spread the same idea through all the different Americas, to impose a single way of life and obliterate everything else in the name of freedom. Have you never thought how wrong that is? Ideas are like trees. They are shaped by the place where they take root. And they can only take root in the right kind of place, the right kind of soil. Everywhere else, they wither and die.’
‘Frankly, I don’t think much of your ideas. They mostly involve murdering people to prove yourself right.’
Walker’s smile showed all his teeth. ‘Is it murder when the wolves take down a deer?’
‘Is that how you see yourself? As a wolf?’
Behind Walker, the old woman stirred and said in a voice dry as dust, ‘He is the will of the land.’
That night, Tom Waverly launched his attack on the guerrillas’ camp.
The emplacement where guards kept watch over the entrance to the canyon went up in a showy fireball fuelled by plastic explosive and jellied gasoline, charges planted above the long, wide ledge brought a dusty avalanche crashing down, and smaller bombs set fire to trees and dry brush. Inside the roofless room where he’d been confined for the night, Stone was jerked awake by the explosions, felt the bare rock shake beneath him, saw light cast by burning trees flicker across raw rock slabs high overhead. The guard who’d been sitting outside the entrance was gone. Stone sat up, palming the sliver of flint he’d spent most of last night flaking to a razor edge. He was sawing at the rawhide that pinioned his wrists behind him when Jack Walker strode into the room.
He kicked Stone in the chest and knocked him flat, pointed a Colt revolver at him and said, ‘Tell me who it is and I’ll give you a quick death.’
Stone felt rawhide part beneath him. He coughed as if winded, mouthed nonsense words. Walker took the bait. He knelt beside Stone, grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled his head up and repeated the question, and Stone rolled sideways and punched the sliver of flint into the soft flesh under the hinge of the boy’s jaw, severing the carotid artery. The gun went off, hot gases scalding Stone’s cheek as the shot sparked off the floor an inch from his face. He caught Walker’s wrists and threw him onto his back and straddled him, but the boy managed to get off another shot. The round hit Stone in the abdomen, just above the crest of his left hip bone, drilled through fat and muscle, clipped the descending flexure of his large intestine, exited beneath his left kidney, and lodged in the pocket of his quilted jacket, where he found it much later, after he’d been discharged from hospital back in the Real.
At first, Stone didn’t know that he’d been shot. Something kicked him hard in the belly and knocked him onto his back, and then the old woman’s crow was smashing its wings in his face. He cuffed it away, but it came for him again in a fierce frantic flurry, its naked feet clawing his chest as it pecked at his fingers and face, trying for his eyes. Stone managed to catch hold of it with both hands and it gave a hoarse cry and tried to break free, but he tightened his grip on its body with his left hand and closed his right around its head and snapping beak, and yanked and twisted until its neck broke.
When he struggled to his feet, he felt a burning wire pull through his belly and knew that he was badly hurt. Jack Walker lay in a spreading pool of his own blood, his legs twitching as he bled out. Wild bursts of gunfire hammered outside. People shouted to each other. A man was laughing hysterically. A child was crying out for its mother. And the old woman was suddenly standing in the doorway, as if she’d coagulated from firelight and shadow. She clutched a broad-bladed hunting knife in both hands, her blind, scarred face tilting left and right like an owl’s. When Stone took a step toward her, she began to scream and slash wildly at the air, and he snatched up Jack Walker’s Colt revolver and shot her dead.
Men and women were crouched behind low walls and fallen rubble along the edge of the cave, firing into smoke boiling up from the box canyon. They turned one by one as Stone walked between them with the body of Jack Walker limp in his arms, the hot wire of his wound twisting in his belly with each step, his shirt wet with blood and sticking and unsticking to his skin, blood running down his left leg into his boot.
A profound silence hung at his back as he staggered down the steep path. He made it past the curved overhang and then he stumbled and fell to his knees. He set Jack Walker’s body on the ground and discovered that he was too weak to get up. Tom Waverly darted from cover then, and dragged him through halls of fire and smoke to the spot where he’d tethered two horses.
‘He’d come in with the local guy Walker’s people had captured,’ Stone told Linda Waverly. ‘As far as the Company was concerned, I was already dead, so he couldn’t get any official support for my rescue. Only the brother of one my guides volunteered to help him. It took them two days to follow the trail left by the guerrillas who’d caught me. They were scouting the perimeter of the camp when the brother was caught by one of the patrols. Tom sat tight, listening to him being tortured and waiting for the cover of darkness, so that he could set up his little package of surprises. He triggered the charges he’d planted and used the confusion to pick off the perimeter guards, and he was getting ready to go in and kill everyone else when I walked out.’
Stone didn’t tell her that Tom had wanted to call in air support to clean out the nest of guerrillas, or that he’d persuaded Tom to spare them. Most disappeared into the mountains; the rest were evacuated to Las Vegas and were swallowed up by the refugee camps. It was possible that some of them were recruited into the army, like so many young men in post-nuclear sheaves, and were sent through the mirror to fight for truth, justice, and the American way in other sheaves. In any case, without their leader, the guerrillas quickly abandoned their campaign.
Jack Walker had been wrong. Ideas are not woven into the fabric of the world: they live only in the minds of men, and when men die, their ideas die too. But Stone never forgot what the boy had said about the immorality of obliterating the variety of all the different Americas in the name of freedom, and that was why he was relieved, really, when he was called to testify in front of the Church Committee. When, for the first time since he had been recruited into Special Operations, he could speak the truth about what he had done.
Linda dozed as the road descended through forested hills in lazy switchbacks. She’d had a hard time of it, Stone thought. She must have found it impossible to sleep the past few days, worrying about whether her father would be brought in alive or dead, she’d been being briefed and bugged at first light this morning, and then he’d pulled the switch on her . . . But she’d hung in there. She was inexperienced and too ready to defer to the authority of her superiors, but she was determined to do the right thing by her father.
Stone drove past fields and patches of trees, past houses with porches raised three feet off the ground - snow would be deep here, all through the winter. At the edge of a small town, he passed a sign that stated, with touching precision, Pottersville, Pop.1748.
White clapboard houses, a green, the white spire of a Colonial church rising behind a row of young maples that had already turned, their leaves the colour of old blood in the glow of the dim street lamps. Yet even this quiet little town, sunk in a deep reverie of its own history, had been touched by war. The Stars and Stripes hung above the porch of almost every house. There were yellow ribbons tied around gateposts or trees, and in the windows of some of the houses pictures of fresh-faced young men were lit by flickering night lights and framed
by black crêpe and red, white and blue ribbons, memorials to casualties of the Texas War.
Stone drove past a diner and a string of factory buildings that ran alongside railroad tracks. There was a little motel on the far side of the railroad crossing, a short, single-storey string of rooms with an office at right angles to them, woods rising steeply behind. An illuminated sign sat on the office’s flat roof: The Crest Inn.
As Stone pulled into the parking lot, Linda stirred, looked around.
‘This town is where your father was born,’ Stone told her. ‘And this motel, it’s where he told me to wait for him.’
9
While Linda Waverly took a shower, Stone used the room phone to place an order with the diner across the railroad tracks, then sat on the end of one of the twin beds and watched the late-night news he’d found on a local channel.
The TV stood four-square on the green shag-pile carpet, wood-cased and the size of a sideboard, the black-and-white picture on its fourteen-inch screen fuzzy with ghost images. Stone felt that he was beginning to get a feel for the Johnson sheaf’s recent history. Technology had stalled after the nuclear war. Twenty years on, cars were still made with quarter-inch Detroit steel, secretaries used typewriters instead of word processors, telephones had dials instead of push-buttons, TVs were powered by vacuum tubes, and you had to change channels by getting off your ass and turning the selector dial.
Half the news was about the war in Texas. Most of the rest was concerned with local issues: produce and livestock prices, an early frost that had damaged the apple harvest, the winner of a local beauty contest, a two-headed pig born all alive-o on a farm near Rockingham. After the grandfatherly anchor handed over to the weatherman, Stone clicked through channels and settled on a movie - a piece of patriotic nonsense about the Army Engineering Corps, Richard Widmark trying to do his best as a stern colonel who wouldn’t admit that the idea about a floating harbour put forward by his secretary - Kim Basinger in big hair and big glasses - could be crucial to the success of the invasion of France in World War Two. They’d had Nazis here, then. A Second World War instead of the Russian Campaigns.
