Cowboy Angels (16 page)

By now, Stone was fairly certain that Linda didn’t know that her father had discovered where he’d been born - if she did, she would surely have mentioned it by now. But he wasn’t quite ready to tell her where they were heading, not while there was still a chance that she could, with the best of intentions, betray the rendezvous to the Company.

He said, ‘It’s different for civilians, of course. I remember there was this TV show about doppels—’

‘The one about ordinary people, or the one about celebrities?’

‘When I left the Real, there was only the one about ordinary people.
This Could Be Your Life.’

It had been a cynical freak show that claimed First Amendment protection while courting cheap sensation by confronting terminal cancer patients with healthy doppels, losers with doppels who were millionaires in some other sheaf, God-fearing ordinary folk with doppels who were prostitutes or dopers.

‘There’s a bunch of them now,’ Linda said. ‘There’s one where people vote on whether the doppel of a movie actor or a pop singer is better than the original, another where minor celebrities are confronted with their John Q. Public doppels. But the show that draws the biggest ratings is the one where the grieving relatives get to meet the doppels of their dead loved ones.’

‘Frankly, I never saw the point. Your doppel is a completely different person who happens to share a bit of common history with you. It’s what you and your doppel
don’t
share that’s important.’

‘And that’s exactly why people are curious about their doppels. They want to know how much of their life is shaped by who they are, and how much by contingency. They want to know if there’s such a thing as destiny.’

‘I guess it depends on the person. Some swim against the tide, others are content to float along.’

‘Which are you, Mr Stone? A swimmer or a floater?’

‘Lately I’ve been content to live in a place where there aren’t any tides.’

A silence fell. Trees stood close together along one side of the winding road; the other dropped away to a small river barely visible in the blue bloom of the night. Cool night air blew through the broken window. Stone could hear the noise the river made as it ran over and around rocks.

Linda said, ‘This isn’t getting the story told.’

‘What story?’

‘The story about the last time you and Dad worked together. The operation in the McBride sheaf. The time he saved your life.’

Stone smiled. ‘You aren’t going to let it go, are you?’

‘You started to tell me the story, Mr Stone. It’s only fair you finish it. There’d been a nuclear war. Civilisation had collapsed. You were captured by guerrillas, and my father was sent to rescue you. What happened after that? How did he get you out? Did he infiltrate the place where you were being held, and kill your captors one by one? Or did he pull off something highly dangerous and utterly spectacular?’

‘Is that what you think we did? Kill everyone who got in our way?’

‘There are all kinds of stories about you old-school guys.’

‘What I mostly used to do was work in libraries.’

‘Is that what my father used to do, too?’

‘I guess he was a little more proactive.’

‘And he rescued you that time. He saved your life. You were taken prisoner. You were brought before this hugely charismatic guy . . .’

‘Jack Walker.’

‘Right. And then what happened?’

Stone steered the car around a long bend, headlights raking trees that stood up along the edge of the road like soldiers surprised in an ambush. ‘Jack Walker was charismatic, all right. He could talk to a man and convince him to murder his own mother, talk to a crowd and carry everyone with him. But charisma is dangerous because it has no moral dimension. It doesn’t have anything to do with the character of the man who possesses it. Saints and tyrants, they’re equally charismatic.’

‘And what was Jack Walker? Was he a saint or a tyrant?’

‘He was on a crusade,’ Stone said, remembering the way Jack Walker had moved amongst his people, princely and insane. ‘He believed that he was the saviour of America. He had a utopian vision of a world without cities or agriculture, without any technology above the level of the bow and arrow and the stone axe. He wanted to turn the clock back to the Neolithic era, turn America into a pristine wilderness inhabited by small tribes of hunter-gatherers. And he was prepared to slaughter anyone who stood in his way. We became the focus of his crusade after we came through the mirror and started to interfere with local politics, but he’d been waging war against other survivors of the nuclear war long before we arrived. Families trying to settle down and make a new life for themselves would find a patch of unclaimed land and start to farm it, and Jack Walker and his ragtag band of guerrillas would come along and offer them a very simple choice: join his cause, or die. Other warlords took food from the settlers, a little ammunition if they had it, maybe a horse or two, and in return promised protection against other warlords and bandits and gangs of crazy people. But Jack Walker wanted their souls, and he killed everyone who refused to yield to him. One of the settlements had rigged up a truck motor to give themselves electric lighting and run a refrigerator. Jack Walker’s people rode down from the hills and killed them all, even the children and babies. He told me all about it. He was proud of the massacre, claimed that it was a great victory against the evil that had nearly destroyed the land. That’s another thing about people with charisma, by the way. The first person they convince of the incorruptible righteousness of their vision is themselves. They are consumed by their own conviction.’

‘Why didn’t he kill you?’

‘He wanted to use me in a stunt to demonstrate his belief in absolute war. He was going to negotiate my release in exchange for some prisoners, then strap explosives to me and a couple of volunteers, turn us into human bombs that would go off when I was handed over. I think he would have done it, too, if your father hadn’t tracked me down. One of the men who captured me kept my radio because Jack Walker needed it for his negotiations. He didn’t know that it put out a signal even when it wasn’t switched on. It didn’t have much range, but your father got close enough to pick it up. He went against standing orders, he didn’t have any help from the army or the Company, but he found me.’

 

After Stone was brought into the camp, Jack Walker sat him down and interrogated him for six hours straight. The guerrilla leader wanted to know about the disposition of army forces in and around Las Vegas, the health of the refugees crowded into the camps, the morale of McBride’s men, the general’s health and sanity. Stone stuck to his cover story, claimed that he was a Red Cross worker supervising a vaccination programme amongst outlying settlements, and gave harmless or incomplete answers to every question. Walker listened carefully and attentively, and never seemed to forget anything. He asked the same question a dozen different ways, pursued flaws and inconsistencies and contradictions in Stone’s answers with unflagging zeal. He had the sharpest mind Stone had ever encountered, but he had one crippling flaw: he was stone crazy.

At the end of the session, Stone was shoved into a tiny windowless room with two guards at the door, and given a bowl of thin corn gruel flecked with fatty gristle. Jack Walker came for him soon after daybreak and led him up to the ridge above the caves where his people had made their winter camp. Possessed by the unwavering solipsism of the true tyrant, he believed that he could convince Stone that his cause was true and righteous by the sheer force of his own personality.

The top of the ridge was a wind-blown sweep of rocks and snow and yellow grass. Low stone walls ran here and there, remnants of little houses built by the Anasazi about two thousand years ago. There was a tremendous view of mountains stepping away southwards under a clear blue sky, their peaks hidden by clouds grey with unfallen snow.

In those mountains, Jack Walker told Stone, was the spot where he’d hidden out with his father while the world ended. His father had been an ecologist working for the National Park Service. He and Jack’s mother had split up several years before the war, and Jack had seen little of him after the divorce had been finalised, but after a political crisis in Germany blew up into a full-scale confrontation between America and the Soviets, he turned up at Jack’s school in Santa Fe one day and told him they were going on a little trip.

They drove into the mountains, left the car at a picnic area, and hiked through the forest to the remote valley where Jack’s father had dug a deep shelter into a slope above a river, and hidden caches of food, guns, ammunition, tools, medicine and clothing round and about. Jack and his father spent most of their time fishing, making an inventory of their stores, and listening to news bulletins and the President’s speeches to the nation on the radio. The first report of full-blown war in Europe came three days after they moved into the shelter. A few hours later, the radio cut out in the middle of a prerecorded civil defence message.

It was just after noon. The flawless summer sky was suddenly crisscrossed with white contrails. Jack Walker and his father sealed the shelter’s three sets of doors and hunkered down amongst boxes of canned and dry goods and bottled water. The clicking of the radiation counter grew into a steady roar. The radio picked up snatches of music, screaming rants, plaintive calls for help, a confusion of military and civil defence traffic. One by one the signals faded into a dismal universal hiss.

After they emerged from their shelter, Jack Walker and his father made no attempt to contact other survivors. They kept away from roads and houses. They hunted with bows and arrows, stitched coats and boots from hides, wove fish traps from willow switches, drove waterfowl into pens woven from reeds. Jack’s father taught him everything he knew about the mountains, told him about the wonderful variety of plants and animals and the intricate web of checks and balances that kept them in ecological harmony, told him about the culture and history of the native people, the Anasazi, who had lived in the mountains and the desert to the south before Europeans stole the land and made it part of the great lie they called America.

Two years after the war, Jack’s father died from blood poisoning after he pulled out an abscessed tooth. Jack gave him a sky burial on a platform raised on a high, rocky crest and set out into the new world. He remembered everything he’d been taught: it became the foundation of his belief that the war was both a punishment for man’s hubris and a chance to begin afresh. Now, on the ridge above the guerrilla camp, looking out across the winter landscape toward the snow-capped mountains, Jack Walker told Stone about the lesson that could be learned from the sudden failure of the civilisation that the Anasazi had built across the Southwest.

‘The climate changed,’ he said. ‘It became drier, their crops failed, and they could no longer feed themselves. There were too many people and there was not enough food. War broke out between the settlements - that’s why the last of the Anasazi lived on the tops of mesas, and on ridges like this one, places that were easily fortified. They became so desperate they turned to cannibalism. If you dig through the middens of late-period Anasazi settlements, you’ll find human bones with marks on them that show they were processed for meat, just like animal bones. You’ll find skulls split open with stone axes, too, and skulls with scorch marks that show they were set on fires to roast them. Like the Anasazi, every society that relies on agriculture lives on the edge of catastrophe. All it takes is a couple of bad summers. It was because we relied on agriculture and technology that most of the survivors died after the war. They did not know how to live off the land, and in any case there were too many of them for the land to support.’

The bitter wind plucked at the blanket Stone had wrapped around his shoulders, sent Walker’s hair streaming back from his face. His trousers and tunic were sewn from tanned deer hides that had been scraped with stone knives until they were as soft as butter. His deer-hide boots were lined with dry grass. He looked heroic. He looked frighteningly young.

Molly Gee, the old blind woman who followed him everywhere, crouched a little way off, a black blot in the snow. Her crow was perched on her shoulder, shrugging its wings to keep its balance in the wind. She seemed to be the only person Walker deferred to. He believed that she could see into the future.

‘I love this land,’ he said. ‘I have sworn that no more harm will come to it. I told my father that, on his deathbed. When he could no longer stand the pain, I killed him and carried him to a high place and cut up his body so the crows and turkey vultures would take it back into nature. I was sixteen. That was when I became a man.’

Walker was silent for a while. Stone clutched the blanket around his shoulders. The wind cut him to the bone.

‘Before the war, we lived our lives out of balance,’ Walker said. ‘The war was a blessing. It was a great cleansing. We can’t afford to make the same mistakes again, and that’s why we will never surrender to your people. That’s why we will drive you back through your gate and destroy it. You are a strong-willed and determined man. You haven’t told me half as much as I need to know, and much of what you have told me is at best only half-true. I could try to torture the truth from you, of course, but I think you would lie to me even under torture, and I have a better use for you. I will tell your people that I will exchange you for several of my people held prisoner in Las Vegas.’

For a moment Stone felt a pang of hope, felt that he might live through this after all. But then Walker explained the plan to turn him into a human bomb and told him that he should be happy, because his death would help to end the war.

‘It will show your people that they cannot afford to fight us. It will prove to them that we will stop at nothing to drive them from our land, that we will never negotiate, and never submit. Yours will be a glorious death - a martyr’s death! We will always remember and honour it.’