‘My name’s Dorthy, Dorthy Yoshida. And I was born right here on Earth, in Australia.’ Dorthy and Robot were squatting down behind the driving bench, beneath a heavy, oiled canvas, leaning against each other to steady themselves against the wagon’s jolting vibration. None of this seemed real to her, and she was fighting the urge to burst out laughing. From spaceship to horse-drawn buggy inside thirty minutes, it had to be some kind of record in transport devolution.
Durras looked over his shoulder. His black hair was wound in a greased braid that reached all the way down the back of his patched white cotton shirt. He said, ‘You’re the local contact for your friend, then? I hope you unloaded your stuff before those bastards got you, because otherwise they’ll have it in just a few minutes now.’
Dorthy said, ‘We’re not smugglers either.’ She remembered what the Witness had said to her. ‘Or freetraders.’
‘Six of one,’ Durras said, ‘half a dozen of the other.’
Robot asked what the date was, the first time he’d spoken since they’d climbed aboard Durras’s wagon.
‘November twentieth.’ Durras was looking up at the sky. ‘Oh shit,’ he said, ‘there’s one of their flying machines. Stay under that canvas, you hear? Sooner we get you holed up the better it’ll be for everyone. We’ll hide you folks out a couple of days while the Witnesses look for you. With any kind of luck, you’ll be out in time for Thanksgiving. And you can stay a while after if you like, ’cause I reckon you must’ve one hell of a story to tell.’
2
* * *
In the end, Dorthy and Robot stayed at Kingman Seven well beyond Thanksgiving, past Christmas and the New Year, and into the beginning of spring. They were suffering from retroshock, from having been plucked out of the Galaxy’s core and the virtual reality of the interzone between universes and plunged into the mundane backwoods of what had once been the North-East Mexican Gulf States, the Badlands.
The little township of Kingman Seven had been founded on the site of an old agricultural station; centuries-old remains of hydroponic ponds could still be found in the scrubby forest that circled its fields. Less than a hundred people lived there, a dozen families whose ancestors had settled there during the Interregnum. There were thousands of communities like it in the Badlands, clinging like lichens to their patch of the Earth, old and resistant and slow to change.
They were the people amongst whom Dorthy had once wanted to go, the people to whom she’d wanted to tell the secret history she’d glimpsed on P’thrsn. And here she was, and she knew so much more of it now, and yet somehow it didn’t matter. Nothing was as real as the cluster of wooden houses and the white-painted church and the rhythms of the township’s life, slow as the seasons.
Besides, the people of Kingman Seven already knew something of the secret history. How could they not, after That Day, after the Revelation almost fifty years ago, when every human everywhere in urspace had been touched by Talbeck Barlstilkin’s feverish vision?
It seemed that Talbeck Barlstilkin had won after all. The Federation had started to disintegrate immediately after the Revelation. The governments of the ReUnited Nations of Earth, having been shown to have hidden the secret of the hypervelocity star and much else from their own peoples and from the governments of the rest of the ten worlds, had fallen one after the other. There had been riots, marches, rallies. The president of Greater Brazil had committed suicide, or had been assassinated, it was never very clear. Novaya Rosya had seceded from the Federation, Serenity had followed a hundred days later. Then Elysium, Ruby. The puppet government the RUN had installed on Novaya Zyemla had gone the same way as their masters.
And on Earth the Witnesses had seized the moment. They had taken the fiery transcendental images of Talbeck Barlstilkin’s dying vision, of things like Gods at the core of the Galaxy, as their own. The government hastily formed by the long discredited opposition in Greater Brazil had foundered and had been almost instantly resurrected, and half of its cabinet had been Witnesses. For a few years, their aims had coincided with the wishes of the mob, who had wanted nothing of Earth’s nascent interstellar empire. Spaceports had been closed; most had been ransacked, burnt to the ground. Orbital installations had been evacuated, and finally the Federation Navy had torn itself apart, BUN loyalists battling with Witness cadres. The solar system’s first and last spacebattle had been fought in cisLunar space. Side manoeuvres had made most of Eurasia uninhabitable all over again, and Earth had suffered a year without summer, shrouded in dust clouds that had reached all the way to the troposphere. Five billion people, half Earth’s population, had died of starvation.
And after that, the Witnesses had ruled Earth, or what was left of it, with remote, careless authority symbolized by the huge airships that patrolled the skies. They cared little for the peoples they dominated, beyond ruthlessly quelling any signs of insurrection and overturning anyone who tried to set themselves up as warlord or baron. They governed by division.
For the Witnesses believed that there was a far greater matter than governing Earth. Their theology had undergone a prignogenic leap after the Revelation. Instead of seeking out godlike aliens, they now sought to appease the Gods of the core, without realizing that They were mostly fragments risen out of Barlstilkin’s disintegrating self at the moment of his death. But that They had been printed in every human brain on That Day perhaps made Them as real as the angels or the marauders. To the Witnesses, They were more urgently real than Earth itself. Their prayers constantly poured out of huge ground-based radio telescopes that were aimed squarely at Sagittarius, at the heart of the Galaxy. The Witnesses believed that by the time these signals reached the gods, humanity would have purified itself, would have risen above its base animal origins.
Would be ready to receive godhood.
Meanwhile, most of Earth had reverted to a kind of anarchy. There was no money, but there was trade by barter; no law but the rough justice of town councils; no nations but those made by individual men and women. For most people, things were very little changed. Their masters were as remote and capricious as ever, less important than the seasons of planting and harvest. Earth had become what it had been for most of human history, a world of peasants. History continued, but elsewhere. For Earth, history had come to an end.
Dorthy and Robot learned the story of the years after the Revelation piecemeal, from the few inhabitants of Kingman Seven and nearby settlements old enough to remember them, and from those who had heard their parents’ or grandparents’ tales. If anyone had recorded these gracenotes of Earth’s civilization, Kingman Seven did not possess that book, although it did possess many others. As well as being Kingman Seven’s brewer, Sugar Jack Durras was also its librarian, and publisher besides. He used a battered but still functional hardcopier to transfer filed books to sheets of smooth creamy paper laid down by one of his strains of gene-melded bacteria. His wife bound the volumes for trade with other communities.
Dorthy learned from Cochina Durras how to prepare leather—mostly deer hide—for binding, and spent her days scraping flesh and hair from fresh hides and trimming and stretching those which had been tanned in a pungent extract of sumach and oak bark. She soon became adept with currying knife and raising board, slicker and pommel. Tanning liquor hardened new calluses on her palms and fingers.
It was the least she could do to repay Kingman Seven’s hospitality. Robot sometimes stirred himself to fix some piece of pre-Revelation machinery, but for the most part he sat on the Durras’s porch, the communal centre of the settlement, sipping Sugar Jack’s moonshine with his contemporaries, good old boys and girls who were living out the last of their years.
Dorthy and Robot had both lost their urgency, their momentum. But Robot had also lost Machine, and all his manifestos were suddenly irrelevant. Sometimes he broke down and cried deep into the watches of the night, bitter tears of self-pity for the works of art he would never now create. All Dorthy could do was hold him. They had both been taken for out to sea, an
d cast back on a shore grown strange and wild.
After the turn of the year, people started visiting Kingman Seven in twos and threes, never staying longer than a night, casually passing through on their way to somewhere else, or so it seemed. Young people mostly, representatives of shadowy anti-Witness groups whose acronyms probably contained more letters than the groups contained members. They came to see Dorthy and Robot, having heard something about their adventures through some kind of bush telegraph. Mostly, they came looking for support, for magic formulae that would banish the Witnesses overnight, for power. Dorthy told them the truth, and mostly they went away disappointed: the truth was not enough, it seemed. But a few understood, and listened gravely and thanked her. She wondered what seeds she was sowing, but she could not keep silent. Her story and her unborn baby were all she had left of her great adventure.
The seasons wore from winter to spring, and Dorthy’s child quickened in her womb, but otherwise time seemed to have stopped. As on the shore between universes, she and Robot were suspended in a moment stretched between one swing of the pendulum and the next.
When time began again, it began with a dream. Dorthy woke with it still vivid in her mind, mixed with the velvet darkness of their room, the sound of February rain on the shingles of the roof, Robot breathing quietly beside her.
A dream of a beach that was not the shore between universes…yet somehow like it. A sweeping expanse of black grit beneath a pink sky. Walking, or running, at the edge of shallow waves, somehow her childhood self again…but not, not quite. And yet there had been whales: but not the dead hulks stripped of hide and blubber as in the flenching yard where her father and Uncle Mishio had worked. These were alive, their great backs scything green ocean, spouts flinging fountains of diamonds high above the waves. And one hung at the top of its leap in silhouette against a huge reddish sun, twisting as gracefully as a shadow dancer…
Dorthy laid a hand under the swell of her belly, and felt her child shift within her womb. Shadow dancers…
Then the noises which had woken her, a quick scrabbling, a multiple ticking like a fall of metal coins on wood, came again. She dared reach for the lamp, twisted it on. Harsh light flooded her eyes. Robot stirred sleepily beside her, lifting his augmented arm to lay its banded plastic over his face.
‘Wake up,’ she said, and pushed at his shoulder. ‘There’s something in here with us.’
‘…What?’
‘I don’t know. It’s silly, I’m scared to look.’
‘Oh shit,’ Robot said sleepily, and pushed up against the bolster. His breath smelt of acetone, residue of that evening’s jug of Sugar Jack’s moonshine. Dorthy could still taste it in her own mouth, a residue of their love-making: being pregnant had made her as sexy as hell, she couldn’t get enough of it.
The noise came again and Dorthy gave a little squeak, half real alarm, half amusement at her cowardice.
‘Shit,’ Robot said again. He leaned across her to see, then almost fell out of bed. He said, voice muffled against the flannel blanket, ‘They’re back!’
It was the crab-things. There seemed to be more of them than Dorthy remembered, and many of them seemed smaller, too. Robot noticed it. He lay on his belly, bare ass luminous white in the lamplight. ‘I guess something ate, or killed anyhow, some of them. And some of the others had babies. Look there, see the little ones crawling around the spines of that big old fucker? How do you think they found us? Smell, maybe?’
‘No. I know what it is. The shadow dancer templates in my head. I’m sure of it. I was having the strangest dream, Robot.’
She told him about it, and they sat up most of the night discussing what to do, while the crab-things rattled around the floor and finally settled in a heap in the safe shadows beneath their bed.
The next day, Clary Rosas said, ‘Only place you can be sure of finding freetraders is Evangelina. That is a town on the Gulf. Perhaps a long journey for a woman with child, Dorthy, in this or in any season. And Evangelina is not a good place, either.’
Cochina Durras said, ‘I have a cousin in Evangelina, and she is not a bad woman.’
‘A place can be bad,’ Clary Rosas said, ‘yet still good people may live there. It is famous for its murders and its crooked deals, Evangelina.’
Dorthy said, ‘Well, but how often do these freetraders pass through here?’
‘No one can say for sure,’ Clary Rosas said. ‘Some do not trade, they simply take. Loot the ruins of the cities, pillage the ecology…They are all pirates, after all, some more so than others. It has been six years since one was anywhere near us.’ Her shrug was carelessly eloquent. She was a small, dark woman, alive with barely contained energies, her black hair braided with white beads that rattled about her face as she gestured, her jerkin fine deer hide supple as cotton, her boots (cocked on the porch rail) black snakeskin. Clary Rosas was the most travelled of all the inhabitants of Kingman Seven, still unmarried at the scandalously late age of thirty. She added, ‘Perhaps one will pass by again, perhaps not. Who can tell?’
‘There’s my answer,’ Dorthy said. ‘I can’t wait for a freetrader to show up. I’m six months along, and last week my belly-button popped out. I’m a small woman, I don’t know if I can travel well with a fullgrown baby inside me. So now’s the time.’
‘But surely when the child is born,’ Cochina Durras said, ‘it will be easier for you.’
They were all three sat in a corner of the Durras’s porch, sharing a pot of coffee. Dorthy had watered hers down for the sake of her unborn child, but hadn’t been able to completely kick her long-ingrained habit. Rain beat on the sheet-iron that roofed the porch; blowing silvery curtains half-obscured the other houses scattered amongst trees and fenced paddocks. Pennants left over from Fat Tuesday hung limp in the downpour. Late February, it rained almost every day, slanting out of the grey sky and soaking the rich red alluvial earth. First planting was almost over.
Dorthy said, ‘After it’s born it will have to be weaned, and then I suppose I should wait until it can walk, or until it can ride a horse. Before I know it, I’ll be a grandmother here.’
‘Which is no bad thing,’ Cochina Durras said, smiling. Her third grandchild had been born a month before.
‘Which is no bad thing,’ Dorthy said, returning the smile, ‘but not what I had in mind for the rest of my life. I still have this thing to finish, Cochina.’
‘Of course. But without your flying machine it will take you two months at least to reach Evangelina. And the Witnesses still look for you. It might be better to wait here.’
‘Perhaps,’ Clary Rosas said, ‘but it is unlikely, I think. The freetraders at Evangelina have a kind of sanction with the Witnesses. They bring technical goods the Witnesses cannot make for themselves, take away cotton, tobacco, corn, anything they can find. They have passage through the Witnesses’ defences, and those grow stronger with each year, as you yourself found out, Dorthy. Further north you may find a rogue freetrader, but here, now, I do not think so. It is too dangerous for them. The one who came by six years ago had been on Earth for months after she landed, but never in one place for more than a few days. Rogues are always in disguise, and so they are difficult to find.’
‘But not in this town. Evangelina.’
‘Of course,’ Clary Rosas said, ‘any freetrader will want payment in return for her help.’
‘When she learns who I am and where I’ve been,’ Dorthy said, ‘she’ll know she’ll be guaranteed whatever price she asks.’
Cochina Durras said, ‘And what of your husband? He may not want you to travel.’
Dorthy had never gotten around to telling Cochina that she and Robot weren’t married, that in fact the child she carried was not his. She said, ‘We talked about it. He agrees we should go.’
‘You must remember how differently they do things on other worlds, Cochina,’ Clary Rosas said.
Cochina Durras said, ‘I may well be a toothless old grandmother who’s never stirred a step outsi
de her home, but I know more than you would think!’
But Clary Rosas was telling Dorthy, ‘I’m thinking of taking another trip in a week or so. Not as far as Evangelina, certainly, but some way towards it. You come with me, Dorthy, husband or not. Husbands are good for only one thing anyway.’
And so it was decided, in the roundabout way most things were decided in Kingman Seven. Dorthy, Robot and Clary Rosas set out on a cold but clear morning, the first day of March. Robot had spent the last few days rerigging the township’s ancient solar-powered generator in payment, although no payment had been asked, for the horses and supplies they had been given.
It took them ten days to make the two hundred klicks west, to the little town at the river crossing point that was as far as Clary Rosas was going, that trip. They parted in the huge market near the mouth of the bridge, hawkers crying their wares, crowds dressed in a hundred different styles surging around the stalls. The white bow of the suspension bridge shone in clean spring sunlight, shadowed at the far end by the bloated shape of a Witness airship.
Clary Rosas hugged them both and bid them Godspeed, and Dorthy and Robot paid their toll and rode over the bridge, above the swift-moving brown waters of the Mississippi. The crab-things were shut up in a small square crate slung behind Robot’s saddle. He had taken off his augmented arm. Dorthy wore a voluminous blue cloak that hid the swell of her pregnancy. The Witness standing on a platform at the far end of the bridge hardly gave them a glance as they rode past.
3
* * *
It took Dorthy and Robot more than two months to travel downstream to Evangelina. Although it was only five hundred klicks by river, long detours forced by swamps and ox-bow lakes more than trebled the distance. Dorthy and Robot couldn’t risk taking passage on the white, stately, triple-decked riverboats, for there were always Witnesses aboard; and the host of smaller boats that used the river only travelled short distances, and couldn’t take their horses.
Eternal Light Page 42
