In the Drift

by Michael Swanwick

  The night pulsed.

  A wind rose around her. It tore at her with cold, insubstantial claws. Whatever lay beyond the horizon must be alive in some sense. She could feel it beating slowly, like a gigantic heart with each pulse so slow that minutes separated it from the last. And it wanted her. Sam struggled like a starling caught in a hurricane, thrashing helplessly and fighting for the ground, but carried helplessly along.

  She was swept far past the town, dark trees tumbling below her, mixing in her vision with dark clouds above. The thing was dragging her along more quickly now, thrusting her toward its unseen maw, and Sam cried aloud in frustration. She yearned to leave the sky, the wind, for the dark, comforting earth.

  The sky filled with tentacles, and they closed about her, choking off her air.

  Then one of her feet brushed the ground, ever so slightly, and she woke up.

  Keith had returned. Sam had wandered outside (the wind was up and glittery, and she wore her nucleopore) and around the back of the infirmary, and there he was. He and Bob were standing talking in front of an old Fiat dealership that Esterhaszy had converted to a holding pen for the camp’s mules.

  Esterhaszy was showing Keith the cannulae he’d implanted in several of the mules’ throats. They were of tissue-inert plastic with teflon valves, and the incisions were almost perfectly healed. Sam watched the dwarf bleed off a pint of blood from Priscilla, letting it drain into a glass jar.

  “Let’s see the oxylate,” Esterhaszy said. Among the row of saddlebags waiting to be loaded were two aluminium suitcases with Southern Manufacturing and Biotech logos on their fronts. Keith opened one, and Sam was dazzled by a tightly organized array of glass ampules and gleaming surgical tools. He removed a small pill from a chromed half-liter bottle, and Esterhaszy dropped the anticoagulant into the jar of blood. He shook the jar until the blood foamed and the pill was dissolved. “We’ll see how long this keeps the blood,” he said.

  Still full of her dreamtime vision, Sam found it hard to respond when Keith looked up and said, “Well, there! Up and about, I see.” She simply ducked her head and smiled.

  The man was still beautiful, with golden hair and trim flanks, and eyes that were deep and full of sad wisdom. Sam hated herself for being unable to answer when he said, “We’ll be starting off today, to take you to your father. How do you like that?” He waited a second, then ruffled her hair cheerily.

  The problem was that her dream would not entirely go away. She could still feel the distant presence of the Meltdown reactors, tugging weakly at her. She could still feel their slow, ponderous heartbeat.

  Already, Esterhaszy was packing away medical supplies in one set of rough sewn saddlebags. “Made ’em out of a dead mule,” he said proudly. “Skinned and tanned it myself.” He laughed. “Alive or dead, these critters are going to carry freight.”

  It was then that the first shot was fired.

  The shot was loud and it frightened the mules. They bucked and reared, and Keith almost lost his teeth to one when he plunged in to help Esterhaszy control them. Sam darted forward, and then back as she realized that she had not the slightest idea of what to do.

  The firing was steady now, attack and response, all from the west side of town. Esterhaszy led Priscilla away from the others, calmed the beast somewhat, and strapped on a set of packbags. “Not a lot of time,” he commented to Keith. “Unless you think your people can hold ’em.”

  “Not a God damned chance!” Keith struggled with a mule, trying to pull its head down by the reins and not having a lot of success. Esterhaszy joined him, established control. “Laing’s troops will have us outmanned and outgunned—he always makes sure of that.”

  Two mules out. Keith lifted Sam by her waist, and set her atop the second animal’s saddle. “Stay there,” he ordered. “And see if you can keep this animal calm.”

  Sam reached out gingerly to pat the mule’s neck. It twisted around to snap at her fingers. She drew them back hastily.

  Soon enough they had a coffle of five mules. “Leave the rest,” Keith ordered.

  There was a surreal feeling to their escape, because it was so slow. At a leisurely pace—a mule’s walk—they rode out the east side of town, skirting the fields, and up into the surrounding hills. Here they followed an ancient roadway, unused for over a century and overgrown with brush for the first hundred yards or so. Then they passed within the deep woods, where the road was clear and smooth and covered with a foot-deep blanketing of pine needles.

  The gunshots faded behind them. There was the whistle of a rocket flare as it arched over the town, and then the trees cut off the noises of warfare. They plodded on, through the cool, eerie silence.

  Half an hour passed. “They won’t try to hold the camp,” Keith said. He was riding lead. The others looked at him. “They’ll march off the colonists, snatch up what supplies they can, and torch the distillery tanks.”

  Whoomp-whomp! Far away behind them, the tanks went up in a double explosion. Keith nodded. He looked as pleased at being proved right as he would have been to win the battle.

  They camped that night in a meadow that had once been a service station’s parking lot, building their fire against the building’s sole surviving wall. Esterhaszy pitched tents nearby, brightly colored things made of an ultralight material that folded up to next to nothing, and which he said predated the Meltdown. “Miracle stuff,” he said. “I wish we had a lot more of it.”

  Sam stared deep into the campfire. It was a warm enough night, but she stretched her hands toward the flames anyway, feeling them tingle with heat. Her back felt slightly cool. “Keith?” she said casually. “Back there—at the camp. You mentioned my father just before we left.” It was the first time she had addressed Keith by name.

  “Did I?” Keith chucked a stick of wood into the fire. Sparks flew. “I don’t remember.”

  “You said the soldiers attacking the camp were his.”

  “Well, in a sense they are. Ultimately.” Sam turned to look directly at Keith. The firelight made his face ruddy, softly contemplative. “How much do you know about your father?”

  Though she was sure that it did not show, that not so much as an eyelid flickered in reaction, this question hit her hard. For she knew next to nothing—remembered next to nothing—about her father. There was a very clear picture of him swooping her up in the air while she laughed hysterically, and that was probably real. But there were also memories of him comforting and advising her when she was mistreated at Miss Levering’s, and these she was pretty sure she had made up herself, pretend-talking to her father late at night, when the other girls were asleep.

  “Well, he’s a very important man,” Keith said. And to Esterhaszy, “Go get your map case—I’ll need it to explain.”

  When the map—the same one that had hung on the infirmary wall—was unrolled on a flat section of ground, Keith pointed out the chief landmarks. “Here’s Philadelphia—from here south and west is the United States. Up here is midstate New York, and the Greenstate Alliance runs from there up to Canada and the Great Lakes. See? Leaving all this nebulously defined area in between as the Drift.

  “Now for a number of political reasons I won’t go into, the Drift is claimed as a protectorate of both the United States and the Greenstate. The question has been left unsettled because neither country could effectively occupy the Drift.”

  “It already has occupants,” Esterhaszy threw in unexpectedly.

  Keith looked at him. “Yes, a few thousand scattered here and there. But with no effective political power among them.”

  Esterhaszy shrugged, a trifle sullenly, and Keith continued. “Now, until just recently it hardly mattered who owned the Drift since nobody wanted it. But then the United States government began the resettlement program, as a means of getting rid of the—how shall I put this?”

  “The term is ‘genetically unfit,’” Sam said, with a touch of asperity.

  “Who told you that?” Keith asked. “The term is ‘poli
tically troublesome.’ Or maybe ‘potentially threatening.’ But there were millions of refugees during the Meltdown years, and most of them had children, and great-grandchildren. There are simply not the facilities to move enough people to make any kind of difference at all to the gene pool.”

  “Hey, but I—” She stood, jabbed a thumb at her chest. “They told me—they dragged me out here because I—”

  “I’m sure a number of people shipped up here have genetic problems,” Keith said. “Enough to make the project look good. But are you really one of them? Let’s ask ourselves—who profits by getting rid of you?”

  “As far as I know, nobody.”

  “Your records say you were at a boarding school. Who paid for that?”

  “My father did. He set up a trust fund.”

  “Which was administered by—?”

  “Miss Leveri—” Sam stopped and thought for a moment. Then she kicked one of the rocks ringing the fire. It budged only slightly. “God damn!” She picked up an old brick. It crumbled in her hand, and she flung the handful of powder as far and as hard as she could. “You mean she … that skanky old bitch!”

  She picked up another rock and, too disgusted to throw it, flung it back to the ground. Angrily, she stalked off into the woods. Behind her, she heard one of the men say, “No, let her go,” and she was so angry she couldn’t even tell which one it was.

  Once off from the others, and—she hoped—out of earshot, she leaned against a tree to cry. The tears came slowly at first, unwillingly, and they seemed false and forced. But gradually they came faster and harder, until all her face not covered by the nucleopore was wet, and she hugged the tree with both arms and hit her forehead against the bark. She cried until there were no more tears, and then sat slumped on the ground, feeling weak and miserable, and cried again. Twice she had to remove her mask, to suck in enough air to breathe.

  And finally she felt calm enough to return.

  They greeted her casually when she returned to the campfire, as though she had left on a routine chore and had been gone only shortly. But in her absence, they had cooked and eaten their dinners, and Esterhaszy was cleaning their pots with handfuls of dry sand.

  Sam looked at one pot and said, “You’d better do this over; there’s a smidgen of boneseekers there on the bottom.”

  Esterhaszy looked at her oddly again, but he complied, and when he held up the pot, the bottom was clean and dark and she nodded. She went back to the map, squatted down by it. “So there’s the resettlement program.”

  Clearing his throat, Keith said, “There’s this big, expensive-to-run resettlement program. Which I, incidentally, have spent the past five years trying to make self-sufficient. Meanwhile, to the other side of the Drift”—he pointed to upstate Pennsylvania, near the New York border—“your father had already created Honkeytonk.”

  “What’s that?”

  Keith chuckled. “It’s about the prettiest little interlocking set of enterprises you’ve ever seen in your life. Honkeytonk is a small company town, owned and operated by the Greenstate Alliance. It’s a mining town, because it’s sitting up on top of the last big reserve of coal on the east coast. It’s a farming community—enough to feed the miners. It’s a distillery; they crack the coal there and make coal oil, which they ship to Boston. Honkeytonk produces its own cloth, its own shoes, and half the tools for its own industry. They’re restoring one of the old railway lines. What’s shipped out is almost pure profit, and it was all created by one man—your father. He’s been my model for everything I’ve tried to accomplish in the Drift.”

  “Mine too,” Esterhaszy mumbled. When the other two looked at him, he said, “I wish you could see what he’s accomplished there. There are huge greenhouses—all the food is grown inside them, free of the boneseekers. He’s broken free of the radiation cycle. Do you have any idea what that means to someone born in the Drift? All the buildings have airlocks, all the windows have filters. Little bit by little bit, the contaminated soil is separated from the good, and it’s stored down at the bottom of the played-out mine shafts. It’s not much to begin with—I mean there’s centuries of work to go, but my God, it’s hope. Someday people will be able to walk in the open there, without masks. Someday—” He stopped suddenly, reddened, stared down at his feet.

  “Meanwhile,” Keith said, after an awkward pause, “your father has a small profit-making operation which the government in Boston very badly wants him to expand. But the Greenstate doesn’t have the surplus population to draw from that the United States has. His workers are all recruited from the hill people—” He waved a vague hand at the darkness. “The Drifters. He can’t hire the numbers he needs as fast as he wants. And then this war heats up. A few brush actions at first, and suddenly the Greenstate has prisoners it doesn’t have the facilities to lock away, and your father has mines he doesn’t have the people to run. You can see where I’m leading.”

  Sam nodded.

  “So now we’re providing your father with his work force. Which endangers the entire resettlement program. If we can’t show some signs of profitability pretty damn soon, the whole thing is going to shut down. Probably that’s exactly what your daddy wants, but … well. There are some in the Mummers Clubs who believe that there is a military solution to this mess, but I am not among them. I believe the whole thing can be cleared up if I have a private little chat with your father.”

  “Well then, why haven’t you?” Sam asked.

  Keith cocked an eyebrow. “We’re at war, remember? I can’t just walk into Honkeytonk, smiling and holding out my hand. And diplomatic channels have been cut off. Still, I would very much like to talk with your father. So I sat back and asked myself what could I bring the man that he’d be so grateful for that he’d give me a half hour of his time? What thing could he possibly feel that strongly about? Or what … person?”

  It took a second to penetrate. “You’re using me!” she cried, shocked and indignant.

  “Be honest now,” Keith said gently. “Considering where you were when I found you … do you really mind?”

  The next day they continued northward into the Drift. They paused frequently to argue over Esterhaszy’s map. Bob and Keith would trace short curves on it with their fingertips and argue over roads that were marked and could not be found and others that did exist but were not marked. Sam had never realized how difficult it could be to follow a map without the aid of road signs.

  They crossed over a midtwentieth-century bridge, an enormous tall thing with concrete pylons a mile high and almost no side wall. Parts of the roadbed were eroded entirely away, and through these gaps could be seen great chunks of the land below, and a tiny little river that seemed hardly worth the effort of one tenth the bridge. When Sam remarked on this, Esterhaszy grinned under his mask and shrugged. “They were rich back then, honey.”

  The trees grew close to the edge of the road at the far side of the bridge, growing together into a shadowy arch, and Keith and Esterhaszy looked wary as they passed under it. Not that that made any difference.

  “Hold it right there, friends,” a voice called from the gloom. “I have to ask just where you think you’re going?”

  Keith reined the mules to a halt, peered into the green darkness. “Spivey’s Trading,” he said. There was no response. “Unless we’re not welcome. We’d like to deal some supplies.”

  “Davey.” The voice was husky and sexless. “You just run down to Spivey’s.”

  In a burst of rustling leaves, a boy exploded from the far end of the tunnel and was gone. “Kid ain’t got no arms, but he can run real good,” the voice remarked conversationally.

  “I knew a boy like that round about these parts when I was a kid,” Esterhaszy said. “Died when he was fourteen—marrow cancer. This wouldn’t be his son by any chance?”

  Silence. Sam stared into the leaves, watching the sparkle of radioisotopes within them, like tiny fairy lights in the gloom. There was a pale blob, a concentration of radiation back in
the bushes, which was probably the guard. After some time she asked Keith, “What’s Spivey’s Trading?”

  Unexpectedly, the voice answered for him. “Just what it sounds like—a place where you can barter your goods. Whatever you want, from lasers to long pork, Spivey’s got it.”

  “Oh,” Sam said.

  “Cute girl. You planning to sell her?”

  Keith casually laid a hand over his saddlebag. “No,” he answered mildly enough. “The little guy’s a medic. Thought we could sell his services.”

  Several pulses of the Reactor went by. Then there was another burst of noise in the greenery as the runner boy returned. A milky white shape emerged from the leaves. It was a pudgy albino woman, holding a shotgun in the crook of one arm. Her hair was orange and her skin was so pale that the nucleopore blended right into it. Her eyes were pink and watery. “Down the road.” She gestured with the gun. “Can’t miss it.”

  She stepped back into the trees.

  The road was heavily traveled; there was a thin path down its center. They followed it up into a tributary valley, rounded a corner, and saw Spivey’s Trading.

  Keith pulled up the lead mule and laughed. Esterhaszy, who had been there before, did not.

  The building had paint on it—that was the first thing you noticed—paint that must have come from Boston or Atlanta or the Canadian Maritime. It had vermillion pillars and hot pink dormers, electric green gutters and sunshine yellow shutters, and a length of clapboard siding diagonally striped magenta and chartreuse. There were sky-blue chimneys and flame-red doors.

  Under the rioting colors, the building was a hodgepodge of styles, all piled atop and jumbled over one another—Greek Revival columns against Federal stonework; a Victorian cupola atop the Georgian wing; an art deco façade beneath Tudor half timbering; and any number of doors and windows and architectural features that rightly had no specific style and were as often as not installed backwards or sideways.

  “Jesus God,” Keith said.