The Very Best of F & SF v1 (53 page)

I stared at the
tracks for a long time, clenching and unclenching my good hand.

The very next
day we came upon a settlement.

It was a hardscrabble
place. Just a windmill to run the pump that brought up a trickle of ichor from
a miles-deep well, a refinery to process the stuff edible, and a handful of
unpainted clapboard buildings and Quonset huts. Several battered old pickup
trucks sat rusting under the limitless sky.

A gaunt man
stood by the gate, waiting for us. His jaw was hard, his backbone straight, and
his hands empty. But I noted here and there a shiver of movement in a window or
from the open door of a shed, and I made no mistake but that there were weapons
trained upon us.

“Name’s Rivera,”
the man said when we came up to him.

I swept off my
bowler hat. “Daniel. This’s Miss Victoria, my ward.”

“Passing
through?”

“Yessir, I am,
and I see no reason I should ever pass this way again. If you have food for
sale, I’ll pay you market rates. But if not, why, with your permission, we’ll
just keep on moving on.”

“Fair spoken.” From
somewhere Rivera produced a cup of water, and handed it to us. I drank half,
handed the rest to Victoria. She shivered as it went down.

“Right good,” I
said. “And cold too.”

“We have a heat
pump,” Rivera said with grudging pride. “C’mon inside. Let’s see what the women
have made us to eat.”

Then the
children came running out, whooping and hollering, too many to count, and the
adult people behind them, whom I made out to be twenty in number. They made us
welcome.

They were good
people, if outlaws, and as hungry for news and gossip as anybody can be. I told
them about a stump speech I had heard made by Tyler B. Morris, who was running
for governor of the Northern Department, and they spent all of dinnertime
discussing it. The food was good, too—ham and biscuits with red-eye gravy,
sweet yams with butter, and apple cobbler to boot. If I hadn’t seen their
chemical complex, I’d’ve never guessed it for synthetic. There were lace
curtains in the window, brittle-old but clean, and I noted how carefully the
leftovers were stored away for later.

After we’d
eaten, Rivera caught my eye and gestured with his chin. We went outside, and he
led me to a shed out back. He unpadlocked the door and we stepped within. A
line of ten people lay unmoving on plain-built beds. They were each
catheterized to a drip-bag of processed ichor. Light from the door caught their
hair, ten white haloes in the gloom.

“We brought them
with us,” Rivera said. “Thought we’d be doing well enough to make a go of it.
Lately, though, I don’t know, maybe it’s the drought, but the blood’s been
running thin, and it’s not like we have the money to have a new well drilled.”

“I understand.” Then,
because it seemed a good time to ask, “There was a man came by this way
probably less’n a week ago. Tall, riding a—”

“He wouldn’t
help,” Harry said. “Said it wasn’t his responsibility. Then, before he drove
off, the sonofabitch tried to buy some of our food.” He turned and spat. “He
told us you and the woman would be coming along. We been waiting.”

“Wait. He told
you I’d have a woman with me?”

“It’s not just
us we have to think of!” he said with sudden vehemence. “There’s the young fellers,
too. They come along and all a man’s stiff-necked talk about obligations and
morality goes right out the window. Sometimes I think how I could come out here
with a length of iron pipe and—well.” He shook his head and then, almost
pleadingly, said, “Can’t you do something?”

“I think so.” A
faint creaking noise made me turn then. Victoria stood frozen in the doorway.
The light through her hair made of it a white flare. I closed my eyes, wishing
she hadn’t stumbled across this thing. In a neutral voice I said, “Get my bag.”

Then Rivera and
I set to haggling out a price.

We left the
settlement with a goodly store of food and driving their third-best pickup
truck. It was a pathetic old thing and the shocks were scarce more than a
memory. We bumped and jolted toward the south.

For a long time
Victoria did not speak. Then she turned to me and angrily blurted, “You
killed
t
hem!”

“It was what
they wanted.”

“How can you say
that?” She twisted in the seat and punched me in the shoulder. Hard. “How can
you sit there and..
. say
that?”

“Look,” I said
testily. “It’s simple mathematics. You could make an equation out of it. They
can only drill so much ichor. That ichor makes only so much food. Divide that
by the number of mouths there are to feed and hold up the result against what
it takes to keep one alive. So much food, so many people. If the one’s smaller
than the other, you starve. And the children wanted to live. The folks in the
shed didn’t.”

“They could go
back! Nobody
has
to live out in the middle of nowhere trying to scratch food out of
nothing!”

“I counted one
suicide for every two waking adults. Just how welcome do you think they’d be,
back to the oculus, with so many suicides living among them? More than likely
that’s what drove them out here in the first place.”

“Well... nobody
would be starving if they didn’t insist on having so many damn children.”

“How can you
stop people from having children?” I asked.

There was no
possible answer to that and we both knew it. Victoria leaned her head against
the cab window, eyes squeezed tight shut, as far from me as she could get. “You
could have woken them up! But no, you had your bag of goodies and you wanted to
play. I’m surprised you didn’t kill me when you had the chance.”

“Vickie...”

“Don’t speak to
me!”

She started to
weep.

I wanted to hug
her and comfort her, she was so miserable. But I was driving, and I only had
the one good arm. So I didn’t. Nor did I explain to her why it was that nobody
chose to simply wake the suicides up.

That evening, as
usual, I got out the hatchet and splintered enough chitin for a campfire. I was
sitting by it, silent, when Victoria got out the jug of rough liquor the
settlement folks had brewed from ichor. “You be careful with that stuff,” I
said. “It sneaks up on you. Don’t forget, whatever experience you’ve had
drinking got left behind in your first life.”

“Then
you
drink!” she said,
thrusting a cup at me. “I’ll follow your lead. When you stop, I’ll stop.”

I swear I never
suspected what she had in mind. And it had been a long while since I’d tasted
alcohol. So, like a fool, I took her intent at face value. I had a drink. And
then another.

Time passed.

We talked some,
we laughed some. Maybe we sang a song or two.

Then, somehow,
Victoria had shucked off her blouse and was dancing. She whirled around the
campfire, her long skirts lifting up above her knees and occasionally flirting
through the flames so that the hem browned and smoked but never quite caught
fire.

This wildness
seemed to come out of nowhere. I watched her, alarmed and aroused, too drunk to
think clearly, too entranced even to move.

Finally she
collapsed gracefully at my feet. The firelight was red on her naked back,
shifting with each gasping breath she took. She looked up at me through her
long, sweat-tangled hair, and her eyes were like amber, dark as cypress swamp
water, brown and bottomless. Eyes a man could drown in.

I pulled her
toward me. Laughing, she surged forward, collapsing upon me, tumbling me over
backward, fumbling with my belt and then the fly of my
jeans.
Then she had my cock out and stiff and I’d pushed her skirt up above her waist
so that it seemed she was wearing nothing but a thick red sash. And I rolled
her over on her back and she was reaching down between her legs to guide me in
and she was smiling and lovely.

I plunged deep,
deep, deep into her, and oh god but it felt fine. Like that eye-opening shock
you get when you plunge into a cold lake for the first time on a hot summer’s
day and the water wraps itself around you and feels so impossibly good. Only
this was warm and slippery-slick and a thousand times better. Then I was
telling her things, telling her I needed her, I wanted her, I loved her, over
and over again.

I awoke the next
morning with a raging hangover. Victoria was sitting in the cab of the pickup,
brushing her long white hair in the rear-view mirror and humming to herself.

“Well,” she
said, amused. “Look what the cat dragged in. There’s water in the jerrycans.
Have yourself a drink. I expect we could also spare a cup for you to wash your face
with.”

“Look,” I said. “I’m
sorry about last night.”

“No you’re not.”

“I maybe said
some foolish things, but—”

Her eyes flashed
storm-cloud dark. “You weren’t speaking near so foolish then as you are now.
You meant every damn word, and I’m holding you to them.” Then she laughed. “You’d
best get at that water. You look hideous.”

So I dragged
myself off.

Overnight,
Victoria had changed. Her whole manner, the way she held herself, even the way
she phrased her words, told me that she wasn’t a child anymore. She was a
woman.

The thing I’d
been dreading had begun.

“Resistance is
useless,” Victoria read. “For mine is the might and power of the Cosmos Itself!”
She’d found a comic book stuck back under the seat and gone through it three
times, chuckling to herself, while the truck rattled down that near-nonexistent
road. Now she put it down. “Tell me something,” she said. “How do you know your
magician came by this way?”

“I just know is
all,” I said curtly. I’d given myself a shot of B-complex vitamins, but my head
and gut still felt pretty ragged. Nor was it particularly soothing having to
drive this idiot truck one-armed. And, anyway, I couldn’t say just how I knew.
It was a feeling I had, a certainty.

“I had a dream
last night. After we, ummmm, danced.”

I didn’t look at
her.

“I was on a flat
platform, like a railroad station, only enormous. It stretched halfway to
infinity. There were stars all around me, thicker and more colorful than I’d
ever imagined them. Bright enough to make your eyes ache. Enormous machines
were everywhere, golden, spaceships I suppose. They were taking off and landing
with delicate little puffs of air, like it was the easiest thing imaginable to
do. My body was so light I felt like I was going to float up among them. You
ever hear of a place like that? “

“No.”

“There was a man
waiting for me there. He had the saddest smile, but cold, cruel eyes. Hello,
Victoria, he said, and How did you know my name? I asked. Oh, I keep a close
eye on Daniel, he said, I’m grooming him for an important job. Then he showed
me a syringe. Do you know what’s in here? he asked me. The liquid in it was so
blue it shone.” She fell silent.

“What did you
say?”

“I just shook my
head. Mortality, he said. It’s an improved version of the drug you shot
yourself up with fifty years ago. Tell Daniel it’ll be waiting for him at Sky
Terminus, where the great ships come and go. That was all. You think it means
anything?”

I shook my head.

She picked up
the comic book, flipped it open again. “Well, anyway, it was a strange dream.”

That night,
after doing the dishes, I went and sat down on the pickup’s sideboard and
stared into the fire, thinking. Victoria came and sat down beside me. She put a
hand on my leg. It was the lightest of touches, but it sent all my blood
rushing to my cock.

She smiled at
that and looked up into my eyes. “Resistance is useless,” she said.

Afterward we lay
together between blankets on the ground, looking up at the night sky. It came
to me then that being taken away from normal life young as I had been, all my
experience with love had come before the event and all my experience with sex
after, and that I’d therefore never before known
them
both together. So that in this situation I was as naïve and unprepared for what
was happening to us as Victoria was.

Which was how I
admitted to myself I loved Victoria. At the time it seemed the worst possible
thing that could’ve happened to me.

We saw it for
the first time that next afternoon. It began as a giddy feeling, like a mild
case of vertigo, and a vague thickening at the center of the sky as if it were
going dark from the inside out. This was accompanied by a bulging up of the
horizon, as if God Himself had placed hands flat on either edge and leaned
forward, bowing it upward.

Then my inner
ear
knew
that the land which
had been flat as flat for all these many miles was now slanting downhill all
the way to the horizon. That was the gravitational influence of all that mass
before us. Late into the day it just appeared. It was like a conjuring trick.
One moment it wasn’t there at all and then, with the slightest of perceptual
shifts, it dominated the vision. It was so distant that it took on the milky
backscatter color of the sky and it went up so high you literally couldn’t see
the top. It was—I knew this now—our destination: