Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (7 page)

Julian had come this way. He had done as he said he would, and ridden toward Lundsford before midnight. The snow had stopped soon after, leaving his horse's prints clearly visible, though softened and half-covered.

But his were not the only tracks. There was a second set, more crisply defined and hence more recent, probably set down during the night. This was what had caught my attention at the crossroads in Williams Ford: clear evidence of pursuit. Someone had followed Julian, without Julian's knowledge.

That had dire implications, the only redeeming circumstance being the fact of a single pursuer rather than a company of men. If the powerful people of the Estate had known it was Julian Comstock who had fled they would have sent an entire battalion to haul him back. I supposed Julian had been mistaken for an indentured fugitive or a lease-boy fleeing the conscription, and that he had been followed by some ambitious Reservist acting on his own initiative. Otherwise that whole imagined battalion might be right behind me—or perhaps soon would be, since Julian's absence must have been noticed by now.

I rode east, adding my own track to the previous set.

It was a long ride. Noon came, and noon went, and more hours passed, and I began to have second thoughts as the sun angled toward its rendezvous with the southwestern horizon. What exactly did I hope to accomplish? To warn Julian? If so, I was a little late off the mark ... though I hoped that at some point Julian had covered his tracks, or otherwise misled his pursuer, who didn't have the advantage I had, of knowing where Julian meant to stay until Sam Godwin arrived. Failing that, I half-imagined
rescuing
 Julian from capture, even though I had but a squirrel rifle and a few rounds of ammunition (plus a knife and my own wits, both feeble enough weapons) against what ever a Reservist might carry. In any case these were more wishes and anxieties than calculations or plans. I had no fully-formed plan beyond riding to Julian's aid and telling him that I had delivered my message to Sam, who would follow along as soon as he could discreetly leave the Estate.

And then what? It was a question I dared not ask—not out on this lonely road, well past the Tip now, farther than I had ever been from Williams Ford; not out here where the flatlands stretched away on every side like the frosty Plains of Mars, and the wind, which had been absent all morning, began to pluck at the fringes of my coat; not when my own shadow was drawn out before me like a scarecrow gone riding. It was cold and getting colder, and soon the winter moon would be aloft, and me with only a few ounces of salt pork in my saddlebag and a dozen matches to make a fire, if I was able to secure any kindling by nightfall. I began to wonder if I had gone insane. I told myself that I could go back; that I hadn't yet been missed; that it wasn't too late to sit down to a Christmas Eve supper, and wake in time to hear the ringing-in of the Holiday and smell the goodness of Nativity apples drenched in cinnamon and brown sugar. I mused on it repeatedly, sometimes with tears in my eyes; but I let Rapture keep on carry ing me toward the darkest part of the horizon.

Then, after what seemed endless hours of dusk, with only a brief pause when both Rapture and I drank from a creek which had a skin of ice on it, I began to come among the ruins of the Secular Ancients.

Not that there was anything spectacular about them.
Fanciful drawings often portray the ruins of the last century as tall buildings, ragged and hollow as broken teeth, forming vine-encrusted canyons and shadowy cul-de-sacs.
⁸
No doubt such places exist—most of them in the uninhabitable Southwest, however, where "famine sits enthroned, and waves his scepter over a dominion expressly made for him," which would rule out vines and such tropical items
⁹
—but most ruins were like the ones I now passed, mere irregularities (or more precisely,
regularities
) in the landscape, which indicated the former presence of foundations.

These terrains were treacherous, often concealing deep basements that could open like hungry mouths on unwary travelers, and only Tipmen loved them. I was careful to keep to the path, though I began to wonder whether Julian would be as easy to find as I had imagined—"Lundsford" was a big locality, and the wind had begun to scour away the hoofprints I relied on for navigation.

I was haunted, too, by thoughts of the False Tribulation of the last century. It wasn't unusual to come across desiccated old bones in localities like this. Millions had died in the worst dislocations of the End of Oil—of disease, of fighting, but mostly of starvation. The Age of Oil had allowed a fierce intensity of fertilization and irrigation, which had fed more people than a humbler agriculture could support. I had seen photographs of Americans from that blighted age, thin as sticks, their children with distended bellies, crowded into "relief camps" that would soon enough become communal graves when the imagined "relief" failed to materialize. No wonder, then, that our ancestors had mistaken those decades for the Tribulation of Biblical prophecy.

What was astonishing was how many of our current institutions—the Church, the Army, the Federal Government—had survived more or less intact. There was a passage in the Dominion Bible that Ben Kreel read to us whenever the subject of the False Tribulation arose in school, and which I had committed to memory:
The field is wasted, the land mourns; for the corn is shriveled, the wine isdry, the oil languishes. Be ashamed, farmers; howl, vinekeepers; howl for the wheatand the barley, for the harvest of the field has perished
...

It had made me shiver then, and it made me shiver now, in these barrens that had been stripped of all their utility by a century of scavenging. Where in this rubble was Julian, and where was his pursuer?

It was by his fire I found him. But I wasn't the first to arrive.

The sun was altogether down, and a filmy Aurora played about the northern sky, dimmed by a fingernail moon, when I came to the most recently excavated part of Lundsford. The temporary dwellings of the Tipmen—rude huts of scavenged timber—had been abandoned here for the season, and corduroy ramps led down into the empty digs.

The snow here had been blown into windrows and dunes, and all evidence of hoofprints had been erased. But I rode slowly and paid close attention to the environs, knowing I was close to my goal. I was buoyed by the observation that Julian's pursuer, whoever he was, hadn't returned this way from his mission: had not, that is, taken Julian captive, or at least hadn't gone back to Williams Ford with his prisoner in tow. Perhaps the pursuit had been suspended for the night.

A little while later—though it seemed an eternity, as Rapture short-stepped down the frozen road, dodging pitfalls—I heard the whicker of another horse, and saw a plume of smoke curl into the moon-bright sky.

Quickly I turned Rapture off the road, and tied his reins to the stump of a concrete pillar. I took my squirrel rifle from the saddle holster and moved on foot toward the source of the smoke, until I was able to discern that the fumes emerged from a fissure in the landscape, perhaps the very dig from which the Tipmen had extracted
A History of Mankind in Space
 months ago. Surely this was where Julian had gone to wait for Sam's arrival. I crept a little farther on and saw Julian's horse, unmistakably a fine Estate horse (worth more, I'm sure, in the eyes of its own er, than a hundred Julian Comstocks), moored to an outcrop—and, alarmingly, here was another horse as well, not far away. The second animal was a stranger to me; it was slat-ribbed and el der ly in appearance, but it wore a military bridle and the sort of cloth bib—blue, with a red star in it—that marked a mount belonging to the Reserves.

I studied the situation from behind the moon-shadow of a fractured abutment.

The smoke suggested that Julian had gone down into the hollow of the Tipmen's dig, to shelter from the cold and bank his fire for the night. The presence of the second horse suggested that he had been discovered, and that his pursuer must already have confronted him.

More than that I could not deduce. It remained only to approach the contested grounds as closely as possible, and see what more I could learn.

I inched another yard forward. The dig was revealed by moonlight as a deep but narrow excavation, covered in part with boards, with a sloping entrance framed in old timber. The glow of the fire within was just visible, as was the chimney-hole that had been cut through the planking some distance south. There was, as far as I could discern, only the single way in or out. I decided to proceed as far as I could without being seen, and to that end I lowered myself down the slope, sliding by the seat of my pants over ground that was as cold, it seemed to me, as the wastelands of the arctic North.

I was slow, I was cautious, and I was quiet. But I was not slow, cautious, or quiet
enough
; for I had just got far enough to glimpse an excavated chamber, in which the firelight cast a kaleidoscopic flux of shadows, when I felt a pressure behind my ear—the barrel of a gun—and a voice said, "Keep moving, mister, and join your friend below."

I kept silent until I could comprehend more of the situation than I presently understood.

My captor marched me down into the low part of the dig. Here the air was noticeably warmer, and we were screened from the wind, though not from the stagnant reek of what once had been a basement or cellar in some establishment of the Secular Ancients.

The Tipmen hadn't left much behind at the end of the season: only a rubble of broken bits of things, indistinguishable under layers of dust and dirt. The far wall was of concrete, and the fire had been banked against it, under a chimney-hole that must have been cut by antiquarians in the course of their labors. A circle of stones hedged the fiercely-burning fire, and the damp planks and splinters in it crackled with a deceptive cheerfulness. Deeper parts of the excavation, with ceilings lower than a man standing erect, opened in several directions.

Julian sat near the fire with his back to the wall and his knees drawn up under his chin. His clothes had been made filthy by the grime of the place.

He frowned, and when he caught sight of me his frown deepened into a scowl.

"Go over there and get beside him," my captor said, "but give me that little bird rifle first."

I surrendered my weapon, modest as it was, and joined Julian. Thus I was able to get my first clear look at the man who had captured me. He appeared not much older than myself, but he was dressed in the blue and yellow uniform of the Reserves. His Reserve cap was pulled low over his eyes, which twitched left and right as though he feared an ambush. In short he appeared both inexperienced and nervous—and maybe a little dim, for his jaw was slack, and he seemed unaware of the dribble of mucus that had escaped his nostrils as a result of the cold weather.

His weapon, however, was very much in earnest, and not to be trifled with. It was a Pittsburgh rifle manufactured by the famous Porter & Earle Works, which loaded at the breech from a cassette and could fire five rounds in succession without any more attention from its own er than a twitch of the index finger. Julian had carried a similar weapon but had been disarmed of it; it rested against a stack of small staved barrels, well out of reach; and the Reservist put my squirrel rifle beside it.

I began to feel sorry for myself, and to think what a poor way of spending Christmas Eve I had chosen. I didn't resent the action of the Reservist nearly as much as I regretted my own stupidity and lapse of judgment.

"I don't know who you are," the Reservist said, "and I don't care—one draft dodger is as good as the next, in my opinion—but I was given the job of collecting runaways, and my bag is getting full. I hope you'll both keep till morning, when I can ride you back into Williams Ford. Anyhow, none of us will sleep to night. I won't, in any case, so you might as well resign yourself to captivity. If you're hungry, there's a hank of old pork for you."

I was never less hungry in my life, and I began to say so, but Julian interrupted: "It's true, Adam," he said, "we're fairly caught. I wish you hadn't come after me."

"I'm beginning to feel the same way," I said.

He gave me a meaningful look, and said in a lower voice, "Is Sam—?"

"No whispering there," our captor barked.

But I divined the intent of the question, and nodded to indicate that I had communicated Julian's message, though that was by no means a guarantee of our deliverance. Not only were the exits from Williams Ford under close watch, but Sam couldn't slip away as easily as I had, and if Julian's absence had been noted there would have been a redoubling of the guard, and probably an expedition sent out to hunt us. The man who had captured Julian was evidently an outrider, assigned to patrol the roads for runaways, and he had been diligent in his work; but didn't know the significance of the trophies he had bagged.

He was less diligent now that he had us cornered, however, for he took a soapstone pipe from his pocket and proceeded to fill it, making himself comfortable on a wooden crate. His gestures were ner vous, and I supposed the pipe was meant to relax him, for it was not tobacco he put into it.

Perhaps the Reservist was a Kentuckian, for I understand the less respectable people of that State often form the habit of smoking the silk of the female hemp plant, which is cultivated prodigiously there. Kentucky hemp is grown for cordage and cloth and paper, and as a drug is less intoxicating than the Indian Hemp of lore; but its mild smoke is said to be pleasant for those who indulge in it, though too much can result in sleepiness and great thirst.

Julian evidently thought those symptoms would be a welcome distraction in our captor, and he gestured at me to remain silent, so as not to interrupt the Reservist in his vice. The Reservist packed his bowl from an oilcloth envelope until it was full, and soon the substance was alight, and a more fragrant smoke joined the effluvia of the campfire as it swirled toward the ragged gap in the ceiling.

Clearly the night would be a long one; and I tried to be patient in my captivity, and not think too much of Christmas, or the yellow light of my parents' cottage on dark winter mornings, or the soft bed where I might have been sleeping if I had been less rash in my deliberations.