City Under the Stars

by Gardner Dozois

  “Get out of Orange tonight,” Gossard had said. “Get as far away as you can before morning, and keep on going. They’ll put their hands on you if you’re anywhere in the city, but if you skip entirely, go up the country, they won’t look for you very far. Oristano wasn’t that important. But get out quick. And don’t tell anybody where you’re going—” And he’d looked up at Hanson out of his sick, fat face, more strained and pale than ever with the heat. Hanson had realized, in one of those flashes of intuition that approach prophecy, that Gossard didn’t have much longer to live, that his health had deteriorated too far to stand the summer ahead, that Gossard probably knew it, that certainly both of them were aware they’d never see each other again, and found nothing in his vocabulary adequate to that kind of goodbye. So they’d stared at each other for a long, awkward moment until Hanson finally blurted “Come with me,” knowing as soon as he said it that Gossard would never desert his family and could never get them safely out of Orange, that Gossard would play out his role till he dropped, knowing what would happen but unable to get off the wheel. Gossard had merely shaken his head, said “Luck,” and lumbered back into the factory, shutting the service door behind him, committing Hanson to the night.

  With luck, Hanson had until the morning, maybe until noon, to get out of Orange. When Oristano missed tonight’s inspection tours, it would be assumed that he had taken too much dope, or drank too much whisky, and was sleeping it off in his office behind locked doors. It had happened before; nobody would think too much of it, nobody would dare try to wake him up. Probably nobody would begin to wonder until sometime tomorrow. Then they would try to wake Oristano by knocking, try again, and eventually someone would have the guts to go find a master key and investigate. Maybe noon, maybe not.

  And where was he supposed to go?

  Nowhere on foot, that had been certain. Even dazed, he retained that much logic. The nearest village was Garfield, thirty miles away, and that hardly more than an SI garrison to maintain an old stone bridge over the Passaic. Too far, in one sense, over dangerous ground, alone. Not far enough, quick enough, in another sense. It was unlikely they’d bother to search that far afield for him, but if they did he’d be finished: only one usable road to Garfield, only two roads out of Garfield north, and more than thirty miles to the next village—he could be easily run down by mounted men, who just might check Garfield because it was the obvious place for a fugitive afoot to go. And once he started out on foot, he’d stay on foot. Orange was the only place within a hundred miles where he might be able to find an alternative to walking.

  And so he’d gone to the Docks, and his luck had held. There had been four caravans loading up at the land-docks, in spite of the heat and the late hour—the Docks were the deep-beating heart of the city’s commerce, of its life, and they never shut down. Three of the caravans were hauled by the clumsy, potbellied steam-tractors, all pig iron and pistons, boisterous and bellowing. The fourth was headed by a sleek Utopian transport, an untarnishable, indefatigable giant of high steel, twelve feet tall by thirty feet long, more than four hundred years old and still running as smoothly and perfectly as an engineer’s dream, running continuously for all of those four centuries without need of refueling or repair—magic. It had been built long before the creation of the ancient and venerable Government of the State of York, and it would probably be around long after the State had guttered and died, maybe even after there were any men left in the dwindling world to run her. But now, in the haunted interregnum of Earth, she was captained by Johann Willis and headed north this trip, to the Stabilities of Portland. And Johann Willis was an acquaintance of Hanson’s. Not a close friend, but an acquaintance, and an occasional drinking companion—and the uncle of Hanson’s dead wife, Hanson’s Becky, down and dead in the flinty soil of York for more than four years. That was a blood-bond between them. Maybe it would be enough.

  They reached the bottom of the slope and turned right, paralleling the open, ceramic-lined sewage trench that ran down the middle of Canal Street. The transport lurched as the road changed from worn cobblestone to thigh-deep mud, then its massive treads found traction and it steadied—the clumsy steam-tractors sometimes foundered in the rutted morasses that passed for streets in this section of summer Orange, but the ancient transport was nearly unstoppable. It wallowed ponderously along Canal Street, throwing a wake of mud on either side. Dense clouds of mosquitos and stinging black flies rose up out of the mire at the transport’s approach, and settled again, swirling and buzzing angrily, when it had passed. Hanson swore irritably and slapped at his face; almost immediately, he was bitten again, on the back of his hand and then on the neck. Brigault, the Mate, grinned at Hanson from his position on the broad spine of the transport—he was wearing a hood of fine-meshed netting, and heavy black leather gloves in spite of the heat. “A bitch, a’n’t it?” Brigault shouted jovially over the pounding of the engines. “But you gots to get flies, ai? The whole place is made out of shit!” The Mate grinned at Hanson again, enormously, revealing a mouth crowded with crooked, broken snaggleteeth. Brigault seemed to be having a fine time. And another two flies bit Hanson.

  Dispiritedly, Hanson pulled his head as far into his coat as he could, like a turtle. It was, if possible, even hotter here than it had been on the Hill, and the stench alone was almost enough to knock a man down and kill him: offal, carrion, endless middens of hundred-year-old garbage, raw industrial sewage running through the Ditch, rank and sulfurous clouds of chemical smoke drifting downwind from the factories on Industry Hill. This was the center of the Bog, the Valley, the Sink, whichever you wanted to call it—the cancerous, ulcerated underbelly of Orange, the nadir of a city where even the rich had never risen too very far above subsistence. Rickety, narrow buildings lined Canal Street by the hundreds, rearing precariously up on either side of the open sewage trench, the Ditch, like rheumy, arthritic animals who had come down to drink of the foul water before they died. Some of these hovels were nine or ten stories high, and none of them were wider across the base than the width of a single room. They were made of mismatched wooden beams, bricks, paving-stones, all stuck together with clay and mud and mortar any way they would hold—some of them were so unsteady that they had to be propped up with poles braced in the ground, and all of them would sway and totter sickeningly in any kind of a wind. There was seldom even a handsbreadth of space between one structure and another, and many actually did lean against their neighbors, so that if a building did finally collapse, it usually took two or three others with it. No matter: a horde of homeless people and “contractors” would swarm through the rubble, strip—and sometimes eat—the corpses, and salvage what building materials they could. Within a few weeks, new buildings would have been raised under the brutal direction of the “contractors,” cannibalized from the debris of the fallen, and people would be bribing and murdering with total ruthlessness to obtain the privilege of inhabiting them. This had been going on for hundreds of years, and it was doubtful that any building in the Bog had survived intact; they all toppled down into junk and were reassembled out of that same junk, over and over again, like shabby phoenixes. Every decade or so, a fire would rip through the Bog and destroy huge swaths of it, followed inevitably by Plague, a year or two later. But the Bog was indestructible—it would eat a little deeper into Blackstone, transforming the swallowed sections into the Bog; building materials would be found somewhere, somehow, and the hovels would rise again. And soon everything would be just about the same as it had ever been.

  This had been my life, Hanson thought numbly, staring into the depths of the leprous warrens. A little bit better, perhaps, but not much. Blackstone instead of the Bog. Malnutrition instead of outright starvation, lingering sickness instead of immediate death. At least a pretense of a roof over his head, although some winters he’d wondered if it could be much colder even out on the street. A difference only in degree, not in kind. That was what he had bought with his youth, with his life. With Becky. And always the
underlying threat of the Bog, of a fall into the Bog. Inevitable, waiting for all of them when they could no longer work hard enough to keep themselves out of it. In the end, all roads led downhill to it, to the Bog.

  There was a fresh corpse floating in the Ditch, and he watched it bob and swirl with the current until, just before it was too far behind to see, two men with a travois fished it out of the water.

  Ahead, the crowds became denser. The transport slowed, slowed again, almost—but not quite—coming to a stop. It inched through the muck, ponderous and irresistible. The crowd parted reluctantly around it—sometimes a man would wait until the giant treads were almost touching him before his courage broke and he foundered out of the way, slipping, falling, rolling. And then he would climb up out of the mud—plastered and stinking with it, rubbing it out of his eyes—and spit at the transport, or shake his fist. Hanson could see mouths moving in the crowd, teeth bared, men grinning with hate; he could hear shouts and obscenities, rising thinly above the sound of the engine. Someone threw a clot of mud that spattered against the deckplates; another. These were the dregs of the Bog: lobos, offenders whom even the casual butcher that was State justice found too unimportant to kill; homeless and unregistered children; junkies; gene-scrambled sports; decrepit whores; the infirm, the aged, the blacklisted—all those who couldn’t work, or were not allowed to. They lived like wild dogs, on garbage, on what they could steal, on each other. They slept in the street, on the steps of the shanty homes of the more fortunate poor, in alcoves, under bridges. By the thousands. And every winter they died, by the thousands. And every spring there was another thousand, or two, to replace them—filtering down, no longer able to hold even a place in the middle terrace of Bog society. Their despair was a tangible pressure, black as coal; the heat crushed it into hate, diamond-bright, diamond-hard hate, tight and dangerous, gave it something to work on. There was a solid wall of men a few yards in front of the transport, and they did not look like they were going to move. Some of them were holding knives, some clubs, some torches, and their faces made the flesh crawl around Hanson’s stomach and groin. Suppose one of them had a bow, or a javelin, or a scorpion—

  Up in the cab, Johann Willis hit the whistle. The giant bellow of it slammed the high building walls on either side of the road and washed back, filling the world. The faces of the crowd went slack, shattered by sound, and then firmed up again when reason returned. But they had been shaken. They clutched their weapons uneasily and blinked around them, as the thunder died in grumbling echoes from the street. Willis hit the whistle again. The crowd was ready for it this time, but they still flinched, and when their faces set themselves up again, a little determination had gone out of them. The whistle blasted twice more. Buffeted, the rickety shanty buildings swayed and trembled, and a board crosswalk connecting two of them was jolted loose: it fell, sending an onlooker who had been lounging on it hurtling twenty feet down into the mud. Incongruously, someone in the crowd laughed. And instantly, as if that was his cue, Brigault was on his feet and at the edge of the deck, leaning out, bracing himself against a stanchion. He had pushed the netting back from his face, and his revolver was in his hand. “Move your asses!” Brigault screamed. “Move ’em!” He was grinning ferociously at the crowd; his eyes flickered back and forth, very fast, and the revolver moved with his gaze, so that first one man, then another found himself staring straight into the gun’s ugly muzzle. Willis had poked his head up above the three-quarter shield of the cab—he said nothing, but he raised an ancient repeating rifle and slowly brought it down so that it was braced against his left forearm. Brigault shouted again. When the crowd did not move, he seemed to be amused. His grin softened into a smile that was even more frightening. “Move, Goddamn you,” he said, not at all loudly, almost with affection. “Move.” There was something infinitely hard in his voice, riding it like a carrier beam, and the crowd flinched at the sound of it. Hesitantly, they moved—men stepping back, then changing their minds and stepping forward, then stepping back again. Willis caught the ripple of movement; he must have made some imperceptible signal, because the whistle screamed again at that moment, longer and louder than before. At once, the crowd broke. Grudgingly, they flowed aside, like some heavy, sluggish liquid, and let the transport through. Most of them didn’t look up as it passed; they studied their feet and slogged wearily away through the mud. Willis ducked back down into the cab. In a moment, the transport was picking up speed once more. Its whistle hooted again and again, scornful in victory.

  Brigault came walking back along the spine, rolling effortlessly with the motion of the vehicle. He sat down next to Hanson and patted the revolver in its holster. “No sweat,” he said, “no problem.” He grinned at Hanson. “Sometimes we gots to really shoot a couple, when they gets, you know, real stubborn. Mule-headed. They gets real mule-headed, in the hot weather.” He spat, casually. “Or just run them right over. Ai, that’s even better, that works real good. But they a’ways move. Eventu’ly. Oh yes.” And he flipped the netting back down over his face with his thumb, and settled back against another stanchion. He looked very comfortable. He didn’t move or speak again for a long while, and he might almost have been asleep. But his eyes glittered through the mesh, and they missed nothing.

  Hanson tried several words on his tongue, but none of them worked.

  He sat in prudent silence, and swatted blackflies.

  In another half hour, the transport had crawled through South Gate, and was beginning to pull clear of Orange. There wasn’t too much in the way of suburbs: one or two quarries, a few truck farms, some night-shrouded gypsy trading camps, a large garrison of the standing Army of York—carefully not allowed inside the city itself since the last “reorganization”/palace revolution/civil war—a deserted roadside shrine, and then, after a long stretch of nothing, a final SI post commanding a crossroads. No outlying villas, or estates, or summer homes, or middle-class residential areas, as there might have been in another age. It was dangerous to live outside the city walls, and few did, except for the gypsies and free-traders who were themselves too feral to be afraid, and the armed troops who were there to keep marauders away from the city—and the marauders, of course.

  And then Orange was gone, completely, and the night closed in, black and smothering. The transport’s headlight, at medium intensity, pushed the night about fifty yards away in front, but it closed down behind them even more dark and menacing, as if it resented the intrusion of the light. Brigault sent the other two crewmen walking down the train to hang lanterns at the couplings, and one at the tail. The transport was pulling a train load of eight cars this trip, and the lanterns helped the driver judge the position of that long, awkward tail accurately enough to get around curves without jackknifing it. The wood-and-iron freight cars were clumsy, ponderous things, but the transport pulled them easily, and could have pulled four times their number if the poor condition of the roads did not disallow it. To compensate, the cars were built deep and filled to overflowing—their loads barely contained by the tarpaulins lashed down taut over every car—and the cargo hold of the transport itself, under Hanson’s feet, was stuffed full of the smallest and most valuable items. In spite of the weight, the transport moved swiftly through the darkness, sure and graceful, and Hanson was once again filled with rueful awe at the skill of the Utopian artisans. It was easy to understand the attitude of people like Relk; indeed, of most people—Hanson knew, intellectually, that the transport was “merely” a product of superior engineering, but it still seemed like magic to him, and he responded to it in that way, emotionally. The gap between those ancient people and himself was too great; so much had been lost and forgotten . . .

  They were running through a stretch of scrub forest that alternated with sand and clay barrens. It was desolate, forlorn country, especially by starlight on a moonless night. They followed a curve around the shoulder of a small hill; there was a light way up the hill, just below the crest, the lit window of a building shrouded by t
rees. It shone high and lonely, a cold star riding above the earth, below the sky. Then the road dipped, and it was gone. Hanson realized that he would never know what the building was, or who lived there, or why, or if someone had been at that window, listening to the transport breathe mournfully by in the night, watching the lanterns bob like a string of blurred red jewels, perhaps wondering what eyes rode the train and were looking invisibly back up. The thought made Hanson sad. Life was like that—you rushed by others in the dark without knowing they were there, you left them behind; each minute buried a thousand possibilities, each turning killed a thousand alternate lives, and you had to say farewell constantly to people you would never meet. And still you rushed on. Hanson became aware that Brigault was watching him closely, although he could no longer see the Mate’s eyes. He forced himself to relax, to sink back down against the deckplates. He was trembling. Nothing then but night and motion, until they pulled abreast of another SI outpost, a big half-timbered building surrounded by a tall earthwork wall, ablaze with torches, Bloomfield Station. A potbellied SI in his shirtsleeves, a half-eaten chicken drumstick in one hand, stood by the side of the road and waved them on. An embankment ahead, tall and long, diagonally across their path. And a ramp.