Asimov's Science Fiction: July 2013 (17 page)

"Not everybody catches it the same," he'd said while they all sat around the fire. The reservations were the only places that had retained any kind of population density. The only place that pulled together to actually make things grow. That first year, when everything went crazy, they were the ones who planted. The ones who thought there might be a tomorrow after all.

"Why ain't you ever got it?" The question had come from Andrew, the boy who'd later be left behind, sixty, eighty miles back. Dead or not.

The fire had burned itself low. Luke was cleaning his gun, checking his ammunition.

"There were vaccines that were given out in the beginning," the doc said. "They gave doctors so many for children, or the elderly. Until the vaccines ran out, and no more came."

"What's that got to do with you never catching it?"

"Nothing."

"Then why didn't you ever catch it?" "Lucky, I guess." "And what about them? Why don't they catch it?" Andrew pointed at the map laid out on the doc's lap. The angular patches of green that gerrymandered their way across the Southwest. The dry lands. The reservations.

"Some do," the doc said. "It all comes down to immunity haplotypes. Everyone is born with a certain set. The right ones. Wrong ones. It all depends. Five hundred years ago, European diseases wiped out half a continent. Some HLA haplotypes went away. Others stayed."

"So they don't get it."

"Not like us," Doc said. "It's all immunity haplotypes and chance. For this bug, survival reaches its highest frequency in native Americans," and he smiled with his shark teeth, and Nathan knew he was more than just a dentist. "What goes around, comes around," he said. "It's our turn to die."

They woke. Luke emptied the RV of its supplies and loaded them into the four-byfour. They left the RV where it was, pinned to the rock. "Damn shame," Luke said under his breath as he climbed behind the wheel of the 4x4. The vehicles backed out, turned around. Headed back the way they'd come.

"You tell us where the turn off is," Luke said.

Nathan nodded.

He considered lying. The thought rose up in him. To play dumb. Forgetful. Lost. But he imagined the doc's face. Imagined his anger. They'd find the farmer no matter what.

"We getting close yet?" Impatience in the voice. Luke's eyes scanned the roadside,
looking for tracks. "Just up ahead."

Ten minutes later they were there.

The two trucks pulled off the road, following an old gravel track that led up into the bluffs.

At the top, the trucks stopped and the men climbed out.

"Where?"

"Just up ahead, a quarter mile. On the other side of the ridge."

Doc and Luke and Elias checked their guns.
Would they shoot the girl, too, or leave her to starve?

They set out, taking the same trail he'd ridden his cycle along two days earlier. Five minutes later, they came to the drop off. The edge of the bluff. Nathan saw the farm. Same bullpen. Same sheep. Same house leaning toward a stand of corn. The bullpen spread out below. The farmer was bent to his work at the edge of the field, cutting open a slash of dirt with his hoe.

The doc walked down the hill, gun drawn.

Beyond the wire fence, the bull paced.

Three sheep. Two pigs.

A world of riches.

The farmer still hadn't noticed them. He had his back to them, bent over his work. Doc stopped at the edge of the clearing. He held up his hand to stop the others.

They watched the farmer.

"He's probably got a gun," Luke whispered.

"No, just a hoe," Nathan said.

"He had a hoe for you, because that's all he thought he needed. But in his house there'll be a gun. I guarantee it. If he heads for the house, you shoot him, do you hear?"

Luke nodded.

The doc turned to look at Nathan. "You got a problem with this, boy?"

"No. I got no problem."

They advanced slowly, the four of them, until they stood in the middle of the opening in front of the house.

"Farmer!" The doc called out.

The man stopped what he was doing. He lifted his head from his work and saw them for the first time. Saw the guns. His face went slack. At that moment, from inside the house, his daughter poked her head out through the front door, drawn by the strange voice. The farmer spotted her.

"No," Nathan whispered.

But the farmer turned, and he ran for the doorway. "Stop!" the doc yelled.

The farmer kept running.

"I said
stop!"
Doc fired into the air.

The farmer sprinted faster.

Doc pointed the gun at the running man, closing one eye, taking aim. "Can't say I didn't warn him."

Nathan turned and raised his own gun—firing into the doc's chest. The puff of air blew the hair out of the doc's eyes. He had time to look surprised. The doc crumpled.

It happened quickly after that.

Nathan turned toward Luke as Luke's gun came up—and they both fired.

Nathan turned his gun toward the last man, Elias, who stood in shock, too slow to react. The man dropped his gun, a dark stain spreading in his pants. He backed away slowly.

"Don't shoot me. Don't shoot me, Nathan."

Nathan shot him. He fell dead.

When Nathan turned, the farmer stood in the doorway. A rif le jutted out from the shadows, aimed at him from across the small courtyard.

Nathan didn't trust himself to speak, so he didn't. And besides, the man might not have understood.

The man made a motion with the rif le.
"Déjelo! Déjelo!"
Nathan didn't drop his gun. He reached up to wipe the hair from his eyes. Only then did he notice his hand was red, blood pouring down his sleeve.

Nathan turned and walked slowly over to where the doc lay dead. His mouth open, jagged teeth exposed to the sky.

Nathan turned his back to the farmer and walked up the hill to where they'd first crested the ridgeline. From the ridge he could see the whole basin spread out before him. A wide landscape that had once belonged to other people and might someday again.

He walked the ridge until his strength left him, and he could walk no more. He found a small pool of shadow in the dirt beneath a small tree. He sat, feeling the world begin to sway. He looked down at his red hand, dripping blood into a muddy red pool in the dust. The wind was hot, blowing across the basin, sighing through the scrubby pines. He found a nice red stone near his dusty boot, and laid his head against it. The rock was cool against his cheek, a soft pillow, smoothed by time, where he thought he might find his rest.

Ian Watson now lives in the north of Spain. His most recent novel (in collaboration with Andy West) is
The Waters of Destiny,
launched at the end of 2012 as three ebooks entitled
Assassins, Tongue of Knowledge,
and
Death Overflows
www.watersofdestiny.com
>. Ian won the British SF Association Award for short fiction in 2010 for "The Beloved Time of Their Lives" from
The Beloved of My Beloved
co-written with Italian surrealist Roberto Quaglia (NewCon Press, UK). Last year, Ian´s eleventh story collection appeared (also from NewCon Press).
Saving for a Sunny Day,
the title story, was in
Asimov´s
October/November 2006 issue. The author's latest tale takes an intriguing look at an alternate twentieth century timeline that leads to its own version of...

During that autumn of 1937, even when the thirty-six refugee girls from the Basque Country were making better progress in English, they all still crowded around the big radio of polished rosewood in the lounge each evening to have Akorda Zubiondo explain to the best of her ability what the BBC announcer was saying in his plummy accent. What riveted their attention was news about the stirring victories and occasional setbacks of the British Expeditionary Force in Spain under General Blair.

Akorda was one of the señoritas who had volunteered to accompany almost four thousand children on the elderly, very overcrowded cruise liner
Habana
on their journey from Bilbao to Southampton, a month after the Germans carpet-bombed to a blackened husk on market day most of the town of Guernica. Venerated by the Basques, Guernica was where they had sited their f ledgling parliament. Akorda graduated as a teacher of English a week before all schools in the Basque Country closed as a safety measure.

The girls' hosts here at Kellstone Abbey, Lord and Lady Hensley, often joined Akorda and the girls for the evening news. The Hensleys were Socialists, hence the offer of their home as a "colony" until the rebel generals and Franco's Fascist and Nazi allies could be thoroughly thrashed. Thanks to connections, Richard Hensley was more in the know than most people, and he'd been amazed how politically aware the majority of the children were, even those as young as nine, when they first arrived on his doorstep. These "victims of a conf lict they could scarcely comprehend," to quote one newspaper a year since, were very well versed in who Mussolini and Hitler were, and the French Prime Minister Léon Blum, and Churchill and Eden and the War Minister Duff Cooper. There'd been endless political debate back home in the Basque towns be

fore and even while the bombs rained.

The other day, thirteen-year-old Josef ina received a letter from her cousin of the same age, Esteban, who'd been sent to a colony at a sanatorium, disused until then, in a wilderness called Northumberland where bedtimes came early and baths were an obsession. Josefina had written to her cousin happily about Kellstone Abbey, to the extent that happiness was possible, and Esteban was now thinking of running away from his sanatorium, but could he find Kellstone and would he be allowed to stay?

María Teresa asked, "Esteban's the one who shrieked
We aren't Gypsies!
when we got to the big camp?"

"No, that was his kid brother Palmiro."

The first emergency camp on a farmer's fields had been a sea of tents, the piles of straw inside intended to stuff mattresses, although at first the straw appeared to be the entire bedding. Most of the children came from high-rise f lats in industrial cities. After the horrid seasickness during the storm in the Bay of Biscay, a tent resembling a pigsty in a damp field had been the final straw for a little 'un from Bilbao.

María Teresa still had nightmares about bombs and incendiaries tumbling from the Junkers 52s of the Condor Legion as those trundled like trams through the sky, and the vicious straf ing by Heinkel 51 fighters. Some nights she would walk in her sleep to the French windows of the lounge in Kellstone Abbey and cry out at the phantoms she saw, the heavens black with cruciform planes ushering the end of the world.

"I don't think Sir Richard could possibly let Esteban stay here," María Teresa told Josef ina, "even if your cousin steals a bicycle, and has enough food, and the police don't stop him on the way here, which might take him
days,
sleeping in fields. One boy among all us girls. That wouldn't do!"

"How about if Esteban behaves really badly so they decide to transfer him to
wherever
else?" persisted Josef ina. "The way Laureana was transferred?"

Laureana, who was precocious, had scared girls at her previous colony with wild talk about
rape.
For a while here likewise, until Laureana calmed down thanks to lots of attention from Señorita Akorda and the benef icent atmosphere of the abbey.

Whatever
rape
was exactly. Something painful, dirty, and violent that Franco's Moroccan Moors, ruthless Rif tribesman, did to helpless girls to celebrate conquering a town and to terrorize the survivors. From time to time fear gripped all the children at what might have happened to their families prior to the intervention by the British Expeditionary Force.

"Well now," said María Teresa, "the Committee would never send a boy here, even if Esteban begged. Besides, isn't his little brother at that same sanatorium? Your cousin has a duty to look out for his brother." "Esteban doesn't like his brother much. He calls him Stinky." "That makes no difference, Josef ina. You shouldn't have told Esteban how lovely it is here."

Once upon a time Kellstone Abbey had been a monastery, until the English king Enrique VIII suppressed the Catholic Church and gave the place to one of his cronies who tore it down and used the stones to build himself a very fine manor house. Around the mansion, lawns that were now raggedly grazed by sheep gave way to extensive woodlands fringing serene little lakes where swans and ducks swam. Monarchs had stayed in the Royal Bedrooms that the Hensleys now occupied, while the girls shared a score of bedrooms, each graced with a bath. The attic f loor housed the redoubtable cook, Mrs. Tucker, and several live-in employees from the nearby village as well as a tutor, Mrs. Eagleton, who had taught English in Barcelona before she was widowed by a street accident.

Meals, taken in a grand hall with a gallery for minstrels, had to conform to the ten

shillings per week that the government allowed the Basque Children's Committee to spend, but extra eggs were plentiful. Hundreds of books, many bound in old leather, lined a library, these days the schoolroom. The whole drafty building cried out for repairs and renovations, though the corridors were grand for running and sliding along, and the grounds for rambling, so long as the day was dry, while collecting small logs that two local fellows sawed up from plentiful fallen branches, to be fed to the hot-water boiler in the basement. In a courtyard, the girls practiced Basque dances accompanied by Señorita Akorda on an accordion, a spare borrowed from local Morris dancers; every weekend a wheezing bus took a party of the girls around the county to perform to raise funds. Akorda's name had nothing to do with accordions except for the fact that she could play the Basque diatonic button version, the trikiti, the "hell's bellows" as reactionary priests disparaged it; adapting had been easy enough for her nimble fingers.

"My name," she had told Mrs. Eagleton, "may signify memory. Or maybe
home
—houses in villages near Vizcaya are called akorda together with the name of the family. But akorda might also mean
stony ground."
Now that war had come and she was in exile, would seed ever fertilize that ground? This wasn't a very suitable thought.

At first the girls had been puzzled at what sort of socialist Sir Richard was, and thought he must be a revolutionary who had expropriated the previous denizen of this abbey that wasn't an abbey, at the same time, somehow, as taking over his title of Lord. The girls themselves had imbibed socialism with their mothers' milk. Back at that f irst big camp, arguments and even fisticuffs had broken out between socialist kids and communist kids and anarchist kids and the pious kids who wanted an independent religious Basque nation. So here at Kellstone Abbey all the children were socialist.

Esteban's unhappiness obviously preyed upon Josef ina's mind, especially since she realized how she herself was partly responsible for that misery by telling her cousin too enthusiastically about Kellstone Abbey, bragging without thinking of the consequences.

Still, maybe Sir Richard could do
something
for Esteban?

The very first item on the news was that General Blair had sustained a shrapnel wound in his throat when a lone Messerschmitt 109 had emptied its fuselage bomb rack near to Blair's mobile headquarters in its attempt to escape from pursuing British Hawker Hurricanes. General Blair was already recovering well and could speak quietly. The BEF's thrust to relieve the siege of Madrid continued unaffected, encountering moderate resistance. The girls, at first anxious, applauded.
"That,"
drawled Sir Richard afterward, Mrs. Eagleton translating, "was a rather f ine piece of propaganda. Blair himself might have had a hand."

Mrs. Eagleton interrupted. "I don't understand how Blair being injured can have anything
fine
about it!"

"Consider. We aren't reluctant to announce his injury, along with believable details. Since the German plane was alone, this is merely a rogue accident.
Alone,
note, as if there's only one of them left out of maybe a squadron, and that one running away. A Condor Legion German, scared by our Hurricanes—thank God and Lord Beaverbrook's pressure that those got into production quickly. Even so, I happen to know that those German 109s can normally out-fly our Hurricanes easily purely as f ighters. Adding a loaded bomb rack of course slows the 109s somewhat." "So the Messerschmitt may in fact have gotten away afterward?" Sir Richard wagged a finger. "The news doesn't actually say the German pilot was shot down; it merely implies so. Since Hitler still maintains the pretense that all his pilots and ground forces are volunteer advisers accompanying equipment leased to Franco, the Nazi government can't even comment."

"But we're being out-f lown?" Mrs. Eagleton was a devil for accuracy, which was

good in a teacher, and angular besides, as regards to her face and her stance. "And what does
moderate
resistance mean?"

"It may well be, my dear," said Lady Hensley, "that we have something rather nippier than a Messerschmitt in the wings! That's to say, in the
theatrical
sense of wings—" But Sir Richard shifted his finger to his lips.

"How," ventured Akorda, "can General Blair 'have a hand' in the news if his throat is injured?"

"By scribbling." Sir Richard mimed writing in the air. "Odd chap, that Blair! Did I ever mention he and I were at Eton at the same time?"

"No..."
and Akorda explained in English for the benef it of whomever amongst the Basque girls was following: "Eton is a school for the sons of the rich. In England, these expensive private schools are called
public
schools. Much in England is not rational, for example the spelling or the pronouncing of hundreds of words." Several girls, who understood this all too well, laughed delightedly. "The tough dough made me cough," piped up Carmen Etxarte. "No, Carmen, you still get
cough
wrong," said Mrs. Eagleton before proceeding to nuance Akorda: "In fact public schools such as Eton are ancient. Before them, apart from church and monastery schools, the only teaching was by tutors to individual rich boys at home. Consequently, gathering twenty or thirty rich boys together in a central place
was
public education." "Blair wasn't a rich boy," Sir Richard said. "He had a scholarship."
"Una beca,"
supplied Mrs. Eagleton. "So he and I didn't normally mix," Sir Richard went on. "Though it was diff icult to miss Blair entirely, him being so tall. You might say he
stood out
on Salisbury Plain when we were doing OTC."

"That's Off icer Training Corps," supplied Lady Hensley. "Public school boys need to learn to use guns." "In case of a people's revolution?" asked Akorda. "Not exactly. Though of course there
was
the General Strike... but that happened when Richard was already at Magdalen. That's the Oxford college. Pronounced
maudlin
in Oxford and Cambridge, because they think they're special. Everywhere else people say
magdalena.
Likewise the river Thames isn't called the Thames while f lowing through Oxford; it's called the Isis, after an Egyptian goddess." Carmen frowned. "But
magdalena
is a cake, not a college..." "Never mind that for the moment, dear girl," said Mrs. Eagleton. "Sir Richard, you were saying about Blair and the OTC?"

"Blair was a bit of a mystery as to what he thought, because maybe he didn't yet know what he thought. I heard he took some esoteric theology book to Salisbury Plain to study, though he seemed not to believe in a God.... Well, most of us were conf irmed at Eton, but that was the done thing. Of course for him the
Catholic
church was a dictatorship plain and simple...."

"At least the Basque bishops supported the Republic," said Akorda, pursing her lips with disdain for bishops as a category.

"That bit of support from a few bishops wasn't unimportant," Sir Richard said didactically, though a shade confusingly as regards the double negative, "considering that Blum risked possible civil war in France, Catholics versus Socialists, by insisting on supplying artillery to the Spanish Republic. Nor were the French general staff exactly delighted! Of course Hitler rubbed his hands with glee and kept quiet, because the artillery came from the Maginot line, but nowadays Hitler isn't quite so happy.... I do remember Blair telling someone he bought his first gun over the counter when he was ten. A Saloon Rif le, that's what it was. Good at short range."

"Any schoolboy could
buy
a rifle?"

"Akorda," continued Sir Richard, "Blair was of a certain class. Local people knew his father was in the Burma Imperial Police. To become a policeman in Burma you needed to pass an examination in Latin and Greek, consequently you were a gentleman. I did run into Blair a few times later on. Apparently his father had hoped Blair would follow in his own footsteps, but Blair's mother feared the climate out East might wreck her boy's health, being as how his bronchial tubes were poor; and mother prevailed. With grave reservations, Blair chose to go for an army commission and he found he liked the life well enough, even though he was beginning to think politically and was risking his hand at some journalism, strictly under pseudonyms of course, about the bad things he saw coming, using trusted friends as go-betweens with editors because a serving off icer shouldn't express political opinions publicly.... Our Eric Blair did have a deep vein of the dictatorial about him, as well as being sensitively sorry for the oppressed and distrusting power. Went well with his upper-crust Etonian drawl." Sir Richard winked, since he shared the same accent.