by Chloe Garner
“I told you I was bringing in cars. The first ones are scheduled for next week.”
“Next week.”
He nodded again.
“There are vehicles that are built heavy and durable enough to put up with Lawrence, even if Lawrence wouldn’t put up with them, previously.”
“And where you gonna get fuel for ‘em?” Sarah asked.
“The train runs daily,” he said. “As we get a stable population and industries other than absenta, it will come twice. I have no doubt we can maintain a healthy supply of fuel through the train.”
“And the parts?” Sarah asked. “Takes expertise to keep those things runnin’.”
“I have no doubt someone who understands them better than you do will open a garage,” he said. “Men chase money. We have money here, so they will come here.”
“And do what? Swing a pick?”
“Work on cars,” he said. “Deliver babies. Do hair. Make clothes. Teach school.”
She got a chill, finally forcing herself to hold Jimmy’s eye.
He was unwavering.
“You have to get my permission,” she said. He drew a breath, holding it with his eyes closed for two, three, four seconds, then he stood and came to sit next to her.
“Water, Sarah,” he said. “That’s all I’m talking about right now. We would set up irrigation for your homesteads, and they could grow anything they wanted. We don’t have a killing cold. Things grow all year, with the right water and nutrients.”
“Gonna have nice pretty green lawns and sprinklers on ‘em?” Sarah asked.
He narrowed his eyes.
“Would that be so bad?”
She shook her head, standing.
“It’s all gonna boil away,” she said. “Can’t keep that much water sittin’ around all year ‘round, hopin’ for the flood to come top it off again.”
“You’re thinking too small,” he said. “Why do you more readily accept that we can direct the world economy from here than that we can trap enough water to do something with it?”
“Because the world economy is run by men,” Sarah said. “And you and I both know you got the knack for gettin’ men to do what you want. Water’s different. It does whatever the hell the land tells it to do.”
“So we change the land.”
She motioned toward the range, off through the wall.
“That’s the land, Jimmy. We’re just bugs crawling around on it, burrowing down into it and takin’ out the bits we like the best. We don’t change the land.”
He looked disappointed for a moment, then something occurred to him and he sat forward, nearly off the couch entirely.
“Would you like to bet?” he asked.
She checked up hard at this.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what a bet is, Sarah. Would you like to bet that I can’t do what I’m planning on doing?”
She crossed her arms, taking a step back. He watched her, eyes ticking from her eyes to her mouth, reading her.
There was no way he was going to do it.
Just no way in hell.
And yet.
“I know better than to bet against you, Jimmy,” she said. “Ain’t nothin’ I’d consider safe wagerin’.”
He sat back, pulling his knee up with woven fingers to rest out in front of him.
“Do you object to a reservoir?” he asked. “If it can be done?”
Water.
Water for crops. Water for sinks and baths and livestock. Water that you didn’t have to fetch from thirty feet below the ground, and water that wasn’t going to suddenly go foul because someone hadn’t treated it right.
“No,” he said. “I don’t.”
He nodded.
“Then let me try.”
“I’m gonna be watchin’ you, Lawson,” she said as he stood. “You ain’t got too many fails before people are gonna start doubtin’ you.”
He kissed her cheek on his way past.
“Good thing I don’t fail, then.”
--------
Dinner was civil and quiet, and he slept downstairs with her, close enough to touch all night. They got up the next morning before dawn and ate a spare breakfast in the kitchen, then went out to the stable and got the horses ready. They rode toward the Goodson property and Sarah sat horseback while Jimmy negotiated a fee for someone to hand-carry a fortune to Preston. He came back with a nod and they were off toward the foothills, the sun rising behind them. She led the way as they ate lunch in the saddle, taking out a compass and setting a course without needing a map, for now.
The nearest claim would be today. It wasn’t that far into the mountains, and she could probably find it without ever taking the map out, but from here it got harder. The three camps that should have been setting up were scattered, so they’d go on a loop to get to all three, and the second one was fully two days out after this. It was going to be a hard ride for her, and Jimmy still wasn’t in shape for it, though he was getting a lot better.
They went up into the first of the big climbs, through one of three passes Sarah normally used to get across the wet line. Crossing it, the world changed from orange and red to gray and green. Trees sprang up as though from nowhere, big, healthy, and thickly leafed, and the lighter red stone that covered Lawrence and the rest of the high plain was washed away, revealing the harder, grayer stone underneath, granite and quartz as Sarah had learned in researching Pete’s method of predicting absenta.
They were downhill for a long time from there, and Sarah kept an eye up on the sky.
Pete’s claim - the one Apex and Thor were working now - was the closest one to town, and if she rode hard, she’d make it before the afternoon rain. Jimmy was getting faster, but he still wasn’t ready to keep up with her at her full pace, and the claim was another three or four hours away, so she kept her eye out for a likely shelter - watching the ground for spots where the lichens didn’t thrive - and she set Gremlin loose, putting out a tripod and kindling a small fire to boil water. While it caught, she followed the universal sound of water trickling down rock to find a place to fill her kettle, then she came back and sat down on a stone, planting her chin on her fists to watch the kettle water boil.
Jimmy checked over his supplies to make sure none of them had shifted more than he’d expected, then he came to sit next to her, watching the small flames dance under the narrow-bottomed kettle. In the end, Sarah would only get a cup of tea out of it, maybe two, but the rain came down just when she’d expected it, and they sat dry through it. She dragged Gremlin back into the water shadow to keep him from drenching her supplies, but otherwise she sat.
As the rain started to ease - it only lasted fifteen minutes or half an hour every day - she poured the steaming water over dried gremlin leaves in a tin cup and kicked the fire out.
“You want one?” she asked.
“Don’t drink that stuff,” he answered.
“You want water?”
He considered it, then nodded, going to get his cup off of his horse and letting her empty the kettle into it. She drank her tea as she went back to the stream, using the flowing water to cool the kettle before she strapped it back to Gremlin and mounted back up, resuming their ride.
She did check a map, about an hour later, just to be certain, but they were still entirely on track.
“You know if anybody settles up here in any numbers?” Sarah called back to Jimmy. “Gotta admit, life might be better up here than in Lawrence, in a lotta ways.”
“Don’t know of any towns,” Jimmy answered. “Just too hard to get supplies. Perpeto, in particular.”
She nodded.
The drug, the one that kept people from aging, was the biggest link Lawrence had had to the outside world for a long time. The train hadn’t come reliably enough, and the drug had a shelf life measured in weeks, so she’d sent Pete to Jeremiah on horseback every few weeks to buy it on behalf of the citizens of Lawrence. Doc didn’t have the expertise to mix
it, but now folk could take the train any day they liked to go get it from Jeremiah, and Sarah expected Jimmy’s boy Sid could start manufacturing it in Lawrence, if it suited him. If not, they’d get in a chemist soon enough.
It wasn’t life-threatening, to not use it. Sarah had run out of her own supply for a few days in Elsewhere before she’d gone to see their local chemist to mix up a new batch for her. But those were days that you didn’t get back. You picked the age that you wanted to look and feel and that was how old you stayed until you broke off using your Perpeto again. Folk didn’t tend to live an awful lot longer than they would have, otherwise, and Sarah agreed with the social convention that once you had another generation in behind you, you owed it to people to lay off for a few years - grammas should look like grammas, somehow - but it made those years much more uniformly productive, and people were defensive of the days or weeks that they lost to lack of Perpeto as their bodies began to age normally again.
Sarah had started taking it in college, just letting herself age more slowly for a time, feeling out how she liked the way she thought, the way she acted, the way her body felt, but she’d settled out at an age much closer to twenty-six or twenty-eight. Some women preferred to stay at twenty-one, the lithe, light frame that that age boasted something that they valued. Sarah thought that the Perpeto didn’t just change your body - it made your brain stop growin’ up, too, and she wanted to have an adult view of the world, not chase after the next sex high like so many of the people she’d known.
Being up in the mountains meant having to procure your supply through supply runs, which meant spending days upon days getting in and out of the mountains every four or five weeks, and that was just the Perpeto. Sarah could understand why people weren’t that interested, even if the food and the lifestyle were much improved out here.
They finally reached the claim, where they had to search for several hours to locate the prospector and his miniature, improvised camp.
Sarah would have preferred that she meet him before he headed up into the mountains, because approaching a claim like this was always risky. Odds were good, if the prospector had been anywhere that absenta was even modestly common, that he would be watching them through crosshairs. There wasn’t any way to differentiate between a lawman and a claim jumper other than relationship, though, so one way or another she had to meet everyone.
Grin Lawson, Jimmy’s uncle, had gotten shot three times by claim owners. The third one had killed him.
“You up there,” Sarah boomed when she saw the camp. “Sarah Todd and Jimmy Lawson down here. Want to check in on your progress. Don’t want a fight.”
She and Jimmy sat, quiet, for several minutes, then she saw an arm wave.
“William told me to expect you,” the man called. “Come on up.”
Despite the welcome, he had a gun on them as they came out of the brush and into the small, wooded clearing. He looked Sarah up and down, then set the gun aside.
“His description of you wasn’t off,” he said, putting his feet up onto a camp stool and knocking back a drink that had a strong smell to it. It was one of the common morning drinks, up in the mountains. It was brewed from a specific type of root, and it meant the man had spent time up in the mountains before.
“You want one?” he asked.
“Sure,” Jimmy said, tying his horse to a tree and going to sit on the ground next to the prospector. “You finding anything?”
“Not my aim,” the man said. “I’m just doing test drills.” He poured a full cup of bitter brew for Jimmy, then went to get a map out of his saddle bag and holding it up for Sarah to look at. The claim was marked clearly, as were his test holes. Methodical. Expensive, but methodical. Sarah nodded.
“Double-up your density through here,” she said, indicating. “That’s where I’d expect you to find the best results.”
He nodded, going to get a pen and marking it down.
“You’re the one who thinks she can predict the ore?” he asked.
“You ain’t got an accent,” she answered.
He smiled.
“My ma was born out on the range. Moved to Intec when she was ready for school and never went back. I grew up there.”
“How’d you end up in mining?” Jimmy asked, sipping the brew. Sarah was glad he’d taken it. It was a good way to spot a faker. The fact that he hadn’t spit it out at the first drop was a very good sign.
“Chemistry in school,” the man said. “Just liked the subject. Went into lab testing in college, and then I got the digging bug. Moved out to Elsewhere for a decade there at the end of the big absenta run. Made a little bit of money. Enough to keep me digging for the rest of my life, if I want it. Knew William from school.”
Jimmy nodded.
“Glad to have you out here. We’re trying to use locals to keep from getting too many…” He shrugged, and the prospector smiled.
“Con men.”
Jimmy lifted his cup.
“Exactly.”
The man shrugged, folding up his map.
“Well, like I said, I don’t have a lot to report. I’m not looking for the big score, yet. Just trying to find the best places to drop a shaft and start pulling out rock.”
“You gonna to be supervisin’ the dig here?” Sarah asked.
“Don’t know yet. William just told me to get myself out here and put some holes in the ground to feel it out. If he wants me to stay on, he’s gonna have to pay me for it, but I’m not opposed.”
Sarah looked at the sky.
“You mind if we use your camp, for what it is?” she asked. “Got too far to go to make it before night, either way.”
“You’re welcome here, if you brought your own rations,” he said, and Sarah nodded, going back to Gremlin and getting out the food that they would need for the night. She sat down on a rotting tree and kicked her feet out in front of her, pulling out her bag of gremlin and a cigarette paper.
“I’m Hansen, by the way,” the prospector said, watching her roll a cigarette. “Heard you guys smoked that stuff, down here, but I hadn’t actually seen anybody do it.”
Sarah shrugged, glancing at Jimmy. He held out a hand and she gave him the cigarette, digging into her pocket to roll another one.
Hansen looked at Jimmy.
“You bear a strong resemblance to your brother.”
“Which one?” Jimmy asked. “We all look like Lawsons.”
“The one who married Kayla,” Hansen said. “William’s got a picture on his desk.”
“Kayla’s got a lot of sisters,” Sarah said. Jimmy lifted his head.
“William introduced Kayla and Wade at a party,” he said. “A party that we were at because he invited us. Kayla is a favored niece.”
“Of course she is,” Sarah said wryly, and Hansen laughed.
“Politics are the same everywhere, aren’t they?”
Jimmy smiled thinly, blowing smoke at the sky.
“How many guys you got out here, doing this?” Hansen asked.
“Not interested in discussing it,” Jimmy said. “You’ve got plenty of room around you, though. Anyone comes out here unexpectedly, you’ve got every right to ask questions.”
“And if he says he’s out here for you?” Hansen asked.
“He’ll either be one of my brothers, or, for right now, he’s lying.”
Hansen nodded.
“Nice to have that many of you.”
Jimmy smiled.
“My father ran Lawrence through the boom. He and his brother had a hell of a time keeping up with everything. Having a lot of boys was his plan for fixing it.”
Hansen nodded.
“How many?”
“Five,” Jimmy said. “Peter Jr, myself, Wade and Rich, and Thomas, the youngest.”
Left off Yip. Sarah wondered at that without looking at them. That was Jimmy’s business.
“All of you look like Lawsons, you said?” Hansen asked.
“That’s right,” Jimmy said. “You understa
nd that I’ll be taking your information and verifying it with William.”
“Wouldn’t expect anything less,” Hansen said. “Another reason I’m not out here swinging a pick at anything, yet.”
Jimmy nodded.
“William’s a good man. He’ll do this right.”
Hansen smiled, picking up his kettle and pouring himself another cup of brew.
“Hoping I stay off your radar entirely,” he said. “But that’s not likely, if things go the way you want them to, is it?”
Jimmy shook his head.
“If you’ve dug absenta out of the ground, you know how complex this is going to be, if your proofs come back the way you want them.”
“They aren’t my proofs,” Hansen said, friendly enough. “It’s all the same to me, either way.”
“Prospector always wants sparkle in the pan,” Sarah said, and Hansen turned to look at her, the corner of his mouth pulling up into his cheek.
“Now, you, William couldn’t tell me much about, other than what you looked like.”
“Native,” she said. “Grew up with the Lawsons.”
“She’s my wife,” Jimmy said. “And she’s the toughest woman you’re likely to ever meet.”
“You know Inge?” Hansen asked, and Jimmy nodded. Hansen whistled.
“You do what she says,” Jimmy said. “Doesn’t matter how unlikely it seems, she speaks for me.”
Hansen nodded.
“I understand.” He turned his attention back to Jimmy. “What’s your long-term plan, when there are more men up here putting holes in rocks than you’ve got brothers?”
“Any of my representatives will carry my mark,” Jimmy said.
“And what’s that?” William asked.
“Different for every claim owner,” Jimmy said. “And changes whenever I feel like it.”
Hansen whistled again.
“You’re going to get people killed with a system that complicated.”
Jimmy shook his head.
“You kill one of my men, you answer to me, unless they showed you the wrong mark. Any man who comes up here intentionally to go to a claim that isn’t his takes his life in his hands. My men will know that, and they’ll have the right mark to show you. Until they do that, you’re free to hold them at gunpoint. This is your land.”
