City Under the Stars

by Gardner Dozois

  The New Man fished in his pocket and came up with a narc. He scratched the stick on his hip; the narc flared and then guttered to an orange ember-glow at its tip. A wisp of smoke curled up around his massive forearm like the ghost of a snake. The New Man offered the narc to Hanson: a friendly monster, smiling and huge, sweat runneling his broad face.

  Hanson hesitated, studying the sweaty giant, and then took the narc. He put the horn-tipped end of the resin stick in his mouth and sipped deeply, holding a smoldering pine forest in his lungs. The New Man produced another narc. They stood smoking together while the sun baked them dry of sweat. Coal rustled unheeded around their feet.

  “Hot sumbitch, a’n’t it?” the New Man said.

  “Ai,” Hanson said, trying not to sound too much like a dead man. Prodding himself: “A’ways is, this time of year. Freeze your ass off in winter though. A’ways one or the other, up here. You a’n’t never going to be comfortable.”

  “Ai.”

  The New Man was staring out across the sweep of Orange: seas of hunched, dirty roofs, narrow alleys, smoke-belching chimneys, here and there the broken skeleton of a ruined Utopian building towering above the squalor, picked clean, naked and pathetic. “Can see a hell of a ways, though, up here,” the New Man said enthusiastically. “Most all of the city I’ll bet, near about.”

  “Ai, the whole Goddamn shitpile.” He wouldn’t turn his head to look at the Wall, though he was sharply aware of its presence. It beat against him like a hand of light, the knowledge of that golden, heartless thing.

  Far as Hanson could tell from here, the Wall marched across the whole world and never came to an end. The Goddamned thing just never ended at all.

  He blinked back sudden tears of rage and sorrow so great they squeezed his heart.

  “Come on,” he said, and punched the giant in the shoulder. And picked up his shovel.

  And somehow he managed to keep working throughout the afternoon, although his mind was not there at all most of the time. His body seemed to manage well enough without it.

  It was dark by the time the shift ended. Hanson gave the signal to quit work, and they shouldered their tools and shuffled single file along the curb to the lip of the Pit.

  Oristano met them at the lip.

  To Hanson, the foreman looked like a gross manikin sculpted from shadow, a hunched puddle of darkness that even starlight couldn’t melt, merely glinting dully from teeth and eyes. He was backlit by the furnace glare that escaped around the iron doors behind him, and his bloated silhouette suddenly seemed to be that of a monster toad crouched in a smoldering sulfur swamp, waiting for weary flies to spiral hopelessly down within reach. Hanson could almost see the sticky, supple frog-tongue licking out, flickering impatiently down and around the foreman’s waist. Then Oristano stepped forward, and the rough blob of his head split open to reveal an ugly, tooth-glinting grin. Oristano was big, half a head shorter than Hanson, but built broader and heavier. Hanson could remember him as a svelte bear of a man, covered with bristly black hair, clumsy but very powerful, and with a bear’s sick, uncertain temper. Time and ease had added weight until now he was grossly fat—not the flabby stuff of Gossard’s affliction, but tight-packed and well-muscled lard that made him look even more dangerous than he had in the past. Usually he was brusque with Hanson, and the two spoke little to each other, making no attempt to hide their dislike. Tonight he greeted Hanson with boisterous good cheer and an exaggerated oily courtesy, asking Hanson in a loud voice if the New Man had worked out all right.

  “Yes,” Hanson answered quietly, “he works very well.” The shovel felt incredibly heavy against his bruised shoulder. He bowed grudgingly under its weight. Alternate waves of hot and cold ran along his body, and a faint nausea returned. He could sense the New Man somewhere off to his right, embarrassed again, made uneasy by the sadistic malice in Oristano’s voice and the weary, beaten hatred in Hanson’s, aware that the two older men were acting out some ritual that he couldn’t quite understand but in which he had played an integral part.

  “He’s a good worker, ai?” Oristano boomed.

  “Yes,” Hanson said.

  Oristano grinned, another flash of crooked teeth. “Good, good.” Flash again. “That’s good, ai?”

  Hanson nodded dully.

  “Ai.” Oristano laughed, and waved a ponderous arm. Factory artisans rolled the fire door open—the sudden blast of hot light sent Oristano’s shadow leaping out, swelling and elongating fantastically, washing over Hanson—and began to carry equipment out. Hanson’s shift moved up from the curb, swirling around Hanson, and filed along the platform behind the lip to make room. The new shift waited by the fire doors as the artisans gingerly carried old spotlights out to position them along the curb. The line of artisans broke around Oristano: ants around a boulder. Neither man had moved. Oristano bulked like an ogre on the platform, goblin-grin glistening wetly. Hanson remained at the junction of curb and lip, shovel still slung across his shoulders, watching wearily.

  The artisans had clamped the spotlights to the curb at intervals, muzzles tilted up at an angle so that their glare wouldn’t blind the shovelers, but would give enough light to work the Pit. Now they were stringing much-patched wires back along the underside of the curb, where they’d be out of the way of pivoting feet, and testing connections. The spotlights came on one by one, at low intensity: a herd of giant rheumy orange eyes—dinosaurs jostling down in the dark to drink. The nearest spot spilled shifting orange patterns across Hanson’s knotted back, up and along the bulge of Oristano’s naked belly. Then the spot came on at full strength, slicing a white column through jet. In the sudden glare, Hanson could see Oristano’s face clearly for the first time that evening: heavy-jowled, eyes pinched shut with fat; lips absurdly small and delicate; a mashed, shattered nose laced with old white scars, hair peeking in tufts from the nostrils. The same beam illuminated the upper half of the pile and the ceaseless crawling of the coal.

  All this, all these years, Hanson thought in numb horror, because I once broke Oristano’s nose in a tavern brawl, in front of the men of the factory.

  Nothing ever ended. Five minutes of his past had birthed all the rest of his life.

  Hanson shifted the weight of the shovel and stepped up onto the lip. He walked past Oristano without looking at him and continued steadily on across the platform to the fire door. Oristano laughed again, an ugly clotted sound, and followed Hanson with his eyes, although he disdained to turn his head.

  Fifteen years of shuffling around the giant factory, going from one section to another, from job to job, always falling lower, but always hanging on to one more hope—fifteen years, and now it was all over. He was finished. The New Man would be shift-leader tomorrow, although he didn’t know it yet. Hanson would not come back. Oristano had known that he wouldn’t. And without a job in Orange, barred from work by quitting the factory, Hanson was a dead man. He might as well lie down now and wait for the scavengers. It was all over with him.

  Without saying a word, Hanson collected his shift and led them out through the fire doors, through the guts of the factory toward the washroom. He did not look back.

  Behind him, Oristano smiled.

  Hanson washed up slowly, working the tarnished brass pump, watching the hypnotically rhythmical spurts of rusty water fill the basin. His face was expressionless, and he ignored the other men in his shift. Relk, as usual, had merely changed into his civilian clothes and left, without bothering to wash, without bothering to say goodbye. Tic and Tac splashed noisily at the far basin, talking in a rapid stream of gutturals and fricatives. Gossard wallowed in armfuls of water, blowing like a whale. The New Man washed quietly, dressed, and then hesitated by Hanson’s basin on the way out, feeling obliged to say something to the older man but afraid to speak. Hanson did not look up. After several moments, the New Man shrugged, shook his head, and left. Hanson continued to wash, stolidly, turning his arms over and over under the pump.

  Moving with deliberatio
n, he soaped the salty patches of dried sweat from his body, lifted the heavy ceramic basin, and poured the brackish water over his head, carefully pumped the basin full, and rinsed himself again. While he was doing this, Tic and Tac went out, each staring at him as they went by—Tac looking at him with morbid, insolent curiosity, as if he was examining a particularly interesting corpse, and Tic rolling his eyes in a quick sideways motion, as if he was afraid to look at Hanson directly, as if Hanson was the carrier of a disease so virulent it could be contracted by a glance. Hanson stood like a statue, holding the basin over his head, letting the water flatten his thinning black hair, cascade over his shoulders, pour in runnels down his legs. His eyes were fixed and unblinking. Tic and Tac hurried out, and didn’t look back.

  When the basin was empty, Hanson put it down and picked up a coarse towel, moving no more than necessary. He heard Gossard come up behind him, hesitating as the New Man had, a few steps away. Hanson rubbed himself down methodically, not turning around. Gossard shifted his weight uneasily from foot to foot, unconsciously sighing and massaging his stomach. Hanson could hear him breath: labored, wheezing, strangled by fat. He wouldn’t last much longer, Hanson thought again. His heart, one day on the shift. Or a stroke. Or the dust. The thought made Hanson sad and almost pierced the wall that humiliation and the loss of status were building around him—he felt a momentary desire to talk to the fat man, to confess the shame and agony. To share his friendship while he’s still alive, Hanson realized, in a wave of black fury. Before the job kills him. Like it will kill all of us eventually, one by one, until only old Relk is left. Or until we all become like him: dead, but still walking. Hanson snapped the towel viciously against his calf, relishing the sting, and began to rub himself down again. Anger had rebuilt the walls of his shame, and he pointedly ignored Gossard, keeping his back turned. Why should one corpse talk to another? About what? Gossard cleared his throat obstreperously without eliciting any response, walked suddenly to the door, paused, and came slowly back.

  “Carl?”

  “Yes?” Hanson replied, without turning his head.

  “Are you all right?”

  Hanson’s cheeks flamed. Half a lifetime leaped in his throat, tangled itself hopelessly in his tongue, refused to pass his lips. What he said was: “Yes.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Yes.”

  Silence, Hanson standing motionless with the towel clutched in his hands like a snake, and then Gossard said, “Is there—” and Hanson said, “No,” almost simultaneously.

  Gossard tried again: “If there’s anything I can do—”

  “No.”

  Then, forcing himself to speak:

  “No. Thank you, John, but no. Nothing.”

  Then:

  “There is nothing that can be done.”

  There was a long silence and Hanson did not move at all. Gossard didn’t speak again. After a while, he went away, closing the door gently behind him. The sound of his heavy footsteps dwindled into distance, was gone.

  Hanson was alone.

  The fading gurgle of water down sunken drains, the slow drip-drip of a faulty pump. The single carbon lamp flared and dimmed regularly with the beat of hidden dynamos, a brassy illumination washing across the stone walls and floor, ebbing from a beach of shadows. The air was heavy with old sweat. The room was full of ghosts.

  Hanson was still for a moment longer, then, like a statue coming to life, he crushed the towel into a ball and hurled it viciously away, shuddering with disgust. He took a staggering step to a basin, braced his arms against it, and took three deep breaths, his backbone rising and falling with the effort. Gradually his breathing slowed. He became a statue again.

  He had been sure he was going to be sick, but he couldn’t: the sickness clogged somewhere in the very back of his throat, too deep ever to be regurgitated.

  He pushed himself away from the basin, walked rapidly and violently to the center of the washroom, and stopped, looking around uncertainly, shaking his head, baffled. He started out again with great vigor, stopped after two steps, casting quick, frightened glances around him, seeing through the walls to the labyrinth of factory corridors, the maze of his life. He grimaced, rubbed his hands along his ribs, forced himself into motion, his steps dragging as if he were wading into quicksand, four steps, five, and he was halted again—stopped dead by inertia. He could feel the factory above him, below him, holding him in its belly, crushing down against his shoulders, anchoring his feet deep in its alien earth.

  There was no place to go.

  There was nothing to do.

  There were no options left open to him.

  Appalled, he allowed himself to drift back into the washroom, away from the door, along the row of basins, along the row of urinals. The stone under his feet was stained and porous, slightly damp—it felt like flesh. The air was delicately webbed with ancient piss, the light was spiky and hurtful against Hanson’s eyes, his shadow drifted listlessly with him, across the grimy walls—the ghost of a ghost. He fetched up against the far wall, turned restlessly, and pushed into a wooden commode stall. The commode was old—stone-lipped, and earthen-breathed from the huge sump beneath the factory. It was now considered a luxury, and the use of it an incentive to work; the factory had been built in somewhat more prosperous times—the interlude between the Third Plague and the disastrous Campaign Against the South—when the State had been able to afford spending money and materials on such things, and when artisans sufficiently talented to build such a system were common enough to waste on nonessentials. Hanson had been raised with outhouses and nightjars at best, slit trenches or hand-scooped holes at worst, and still found the big stone commode alien and faintly menacing, in spite of years at the factory. He stared at it dumbly, as if expecting it to speak in a septic voice of decay.

  Habit took over. Automatically, he sat down, tried to move his bowels. All the while, he watched himself, as if from a vantage point outside his body—one part of his mind was sardonically amused, one part was very afraid, and one part was murderously angry. The fearful part kept him going through the mundane actions of his normal life by rote, making him wash, dry himself, excrete—all rather desperately, as if by clinging to familiar routine he could negate and unmake the horrors of the day. The sardonic part was amused by the incongruity of trying to cling to normalcy when his life had just been blighted, destroyed, turned upside down, of carrying out the minutiae of life when he was dead. The angry part watched both others, and despised them both, and grew ever more angry at the conditions that had produced them—it knew nothing but hate.

  There was an open, latticed window in the wall, giving a fine overview of the torchlit sprawl of nighttime Orange, but Hanson refused to look at it. He watched the wide lip of the window instead, the iron bars set in stone, the intricate networks of cracks and chips, the patterns of dirt and small pebbles, the mummified bodies of flies—watched them until they had no meaning to him anymore, until they were completely alien to him, incomprehensible, and then he watched nothing at all, just as intently although his eyes were no longer focused. The stone underneath his buttocks was cold, and the night wind through the window was damp on his naked body. Instinctively, he brought his knees closer to his chin, wrapped his arms around his legs. He sat alone and naked in the cold belly of the factory, surrounded by yards of chill stone and the even colder ruins of his life, rocking back and forth, hugging his knees. This was the time to cry—he knew it, wanted to, longed for the release crying would bring. But the tears would not come. They hung, burning, somewhere behind his eyes, but they would not fall. Tears were for the living, not the dead.

  And he could not move his bowels, although his stomach ached. He was completely dead now, dry, sterile, shriveled, his blood curdled in his veins, his seed killed in the sack, his bodily openings sewed tightly shut. He moved a hand through the thick tangle of hair on his chest—his skin was slick and cold as rock and he was unable to feel his heartbeat—across his ribs, alon
g his huge arms, his massive, corded legs. There was a roll of fat beginning at his waist, in spite of work, in spite of his poor diet. The muscles were beginning to sag slightly on the undersides of his arms and thighs, and veins stood out on his legs as if they were done in relief. He was losing his hair and his skin was starting to crack and yellow, like sunbaked mud. He was getting old. And there was a dull pain in his stomach, always present, although sometimes it would stir sluggishly, like a blunt-headed beast inside him that wanted to get out. The Crab was in there—he had suspected it for months, known it for weeks, finally admitted it to himself. He had seen the Crab take his uncle, his cousin, his brother’s wife, his friend Matthew, and now it was going to take him. It would take him within the year.

  And what had his life been for?

  Hanson stopped rocking. He sat very still, listening to the world wind down, listening to his body decay. Now it was as if his mind was a blinking light, first flashing red, then black. When it flashed black he would huddle freezing and paralyzed, immobilized by despair and futility, unable to move, unable to think. When it flashed red, he regained the ability to move, but only in one direction; to think, but only one thought—his frozen limbs thawed in the furnace of rage, but the furnace had been stoked for only one purpose. The light of his mind flashed black and red, red and black, and each time the red light remained on a little longer than the black, and longer, and longer still, like a spun coin wobbling toward collapse, until finally the black light vanished completely and the red light blazed as steady and smoky as blood.

  Hanson got to his feet, pushed out of the commode stall—the wooden door boomed with hollow finality in the silence, in the empty room.

  Moving quickly and surely, he dressed, laced on his boots, and left the washroom. There was no hesitation in him now: he was all economy and efficiency, his actions flowing together as smoothly as quicksilver as he threaded the factory corridors. He walked with a steady, springy stride, full of authority and self-assurance, cruising through the building like a big, dark clipper ship under full sail. There were few people about at this time of night, and none of those he encountered thought to question him, or even paid any attention to him at all—he too obviously knew where he was going and why. His expression was calm and absorbed; only a close look would have revealed the strain in that face, the tiny lines around the eyes, the bloodless tension of his lips.