The Best of Michael Swanwick (39 page)

“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
them!”

“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 wel-come 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 backwards, 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.

Afterwards 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 naive 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:

The antenna.

Even driving the pickup truck, it took three days after first sighting to reach its base.

On the morning of one of those days, Victoria suddenly pushed aside her breakfast and ran for the far side of the truck. That being the only privacy to be had for hundreds of miles around.

I listened to her retching. Knowing there was only one thing it could be.

She came back, pale and shaken. I got a plastic collection cup out of my bag. “Pee into this,” I told her. When she had, I ran a quick diagnostic. It came up positive.

“Victoria,” I said. “I’ve got an admission to make. I haven’t been exactly straight with you about the medical consequences of your…condition.”

It was the only time I ever saw her afraid. “My God,” she said, “What is it? Tell me! What’s happening to me?”

“Well, to begin with, you’re pregnant.”

***

There were no roads to the terminus, for all that it was visible from miles off. It lay nestled at the base of the antenna, and to look at the empty and trackless plains about it, you’d think there was neither reason for its existence nor possibility of any significant traffic there.

Yet the closer we got, the more people we saw approaching it. They appeared out of the everywhere and nothingness like hydrogen atoms being pulled into existence in the stressed spaces between galaxies, or like shards of ice crystallizing at random in supercooled superpure water. You’d see one far to your left, maybe strolling along with a walking stick slung casually over one shoulder and a gait that just told you she was whistling. Then beyond her in the distance a puff of dust from what could only be a half-track. And to the right, a man in a wide-brimmed hat sitting ramrod-straight in the saddle of a native parasite larger than any elephant. With every hour a different configuration, and all converging.

Roads materialized underfoot. By the time we arrived at the terminus, they were thronged with people.

The terminal building itself was as large as a city, all gleaming white marble arches and colonnades and parapets and towers. Pennants snapped in the wind. Welcoming musicians played at the feet of the columns. An enormous holographic banner dopplering slowly through the rainbow from infrared to ultraviolet and back again, read:

Byzantium Port Authority

Magnetic-Levitation Mass Transit Division

Ground Terminus

Somebody later told me it provided employment for a hundred thousand people, and I believed him.

Victoria and I parked the truck by the front steps. I opened the door for her and helped her gingerly out. Her belly was enormous by then, and her sense of balance was off. We started up the steps. Behind us, a uniformed lackey got in the pickup and drove it away.

The space within was grander than could have been supported had the terminus not been located at the cusp of antenna and forehead, where the proximate masses each canceled out much of the other’s attraction. There were countless ticket windows, all of carved mahogany. I settled Victoria down on a bench—her feet were tender—and went to stand in line. When I got to the front, the ticket-taker glanced at a computer screen and said, “May I help you, sir?”

“Two tickets, first-class. Up.”

He tapped at the keyboard and a little device spat out two crisp pasteboard tickets. He slid them across the polished brass counter, and I reached for my wallet. “How much?” I said.

He glanced at his computer and shook his head. “No charge for you, Mister Daniel. Professional courtesy.”

“How did you know my name?”

“You’re expected.” Then, before I could ask any more questions, “That’s all I can tell you, sir. I can neither speak nor understand your language. It is impossible for me to converse with you.”