The Fifth Sacred Thing (58 page)

“I understand pain,” she’d said through gritted teeth. “That doesn’t scare me—heaven knows I’ve lived through enough of it. But in spite of all the role plays we’ve led, I still can’t really imagine what it’s like, Bird, to face torturers.”

“Don’t think about it,” he said. “It may never come to that. Maybe we’re making a mistake with all this training and anticipating. Maybe it would be better just to wait until it happens and trust that we’ll have the strength to face it when it comes.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Well, chances are by that time you won’t have a whole hell of a lot of choice in the matter.”

There were things he couldn’t talk about to anyone. Not to Maya, whose own fear and grief was barely contained. Sam was spending his free time with her now, and Bird was glad, because it lessened the intensity of her focus on him. Not to Marie or Roberto or Lan, certainly. Not to Sage and Nita and Holybear. They were worried enough for him and a touch guilty besides, because they were preparing to move to the relative safety of the high mountains.

“I hate to leave you,” Nita said, as the four of them jostled for position on the big bed in the ritual room. Her head rested under his chin, and he could look over the thatch of her wild hair to meet Holybear’s blue eyes peering anxiously into his own. “But we’ve got six years of work invested in these cultures. The cell lines are irreplaceable.”

“We argued with Toxics Council,” Sage said, curling her long body against Bird’s back, “but they convinced us not to risk the experiments. If we can really breed a microbe that can break down toxic residues in salt water, we could reclaim the bay.”

“If the bay is still ours to reclaim,” Holybear said glumly.

“We have to believe it will be,” Bird said. “We have to act as if we will win, or we’ve already lost. Toxics is right. You’ve got to protect your work, because that’s what we’re fighting for.” He could sound so sure, so strong, as if he believed in the possibility of victory, as if he weren’t afraid. Better than crying “Don’t leave me!” or, worse, begging them to take him along.

“It doesn’t feel right,” Nita said. “It feels like deserting you.”

“You’re doing me a favor,” Bird said. “If you’re gone, I won’t have to worry about you. And no one can use you against me.”

“You really feel okay about us going?” Sage asked.

“I feel okay about all of us going to sleep. I’ve got a training early tomorrow morning.”

At three in the morning, Bird woke up moaning from a nightmare. He was trembling, drenched with sweat. Where was he? In the ritual room, with Sage and Nita and Holybear still asleep. He couldn’t remember the dream, but he felt it, like a chill in the air, and quietly he disentangled a blanket, wrapped himself in it, and sat by the window watching the moon. Under the blanket he was shaking. He hoped the rest of them stayed asleep, but then Holybear’s hand was on his shoulder.

“You’ve got to talk to us about it,” he said. “Even if it hurts us.”

Bird shook his head. They were around him now, all three of them, holding him in a multi-armed embrace. “There’s nothing to talk about. I’m just scared, is what it comes down to.”

“What did you dream?” Sage asked.

It came back to him when she spoke, and he shivered. “I keep dreaming that I wake up someplace dark and cold. I can’t feel the earth, and the air is old and stale and smells of shit. And then I hear footsteps, in the corridor outside, and the rattle of keys. And I know that they’re coming for me—and it’s going to begin again.”

There was nothing they could say, but they held him tighter.

“I’m waiting for it now. That’s what’s so hard. When it’s actually happening, it’ll be okay. I mean, it’ll just be what’s happening. But I hate the waiting.”

“Is it a fear or a memory?” Holybear asked.

“I don’t know. Both, maybe.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I wish there were something we could do for you,” Sage said.

“Talk to Maya for me. I should do it myself, but I just can’t look her in the face around this.”

“Sure.”

“Tell her, if something bad comes down, if it looks like something is going to happen to me, to stay home. I don’t want her to come out and watch.”

“She’ll want to.”

“I can stand a lot, but I can’t stand that. Having her watch.”

“Okay,” Holybear said. “I’ll tell her.”

In the morning, they said goodbye. Bird walked them down to the docks, where they boarded a small sailboat. They would head upriver and, from there, somewhere. He wouldn’t let them tell him; already he knew far too much. He watched the white dot of their sail until it disappeared on the other side of the bridge. And then, for a long time, he watched the emptiness where the boat had been.

His days were taken up with training and meetings, planning strategies, telling over and over again everything he knew about the ways of the South. The telling brought back memories he had tried to repress. Even the lost years began to yield up incidents and bits of knowledge.

He came home at night stuffed with pain that he couldn’t bring himself to unload on Maya. Everybody else was gone. Only Rosa still came for her piano lessons, in the late afternoons when training was over for the day. Sometimes he actually forgot his fear, watching her concentrate as she struggled with a new piece of music.

One night, after she had gone, he found himself absently fingering the keys on the piano. His fingers were stiff, and they ached, but he banged out a few chords, a trickle of melody. Then he grabbed paper and pen and began to write the notes as he heard them pouring through his mind. No, he couldn’t play, except awkwardly and painfully, but he could write the music out and leave it, and maybe, someday, somebody else would play it. Writing out the music was like talking to someone who could understand without guilt or judgment. He forgot time and fear. Afterward he could sleep through the night even though he slept alone.

He came to depend on the hour each night he spent by himself, picking out on the piano the bones of tunes he heard fully fleshed in his mind. The struggle to capture his music kept him sane, calm, steady. He guarded that time jealously, shutting the door on Maya and Sam, refusing to be distracted. Music had become vital to him, necessary as water.

21

T
he ruined roadbeds of the City of Angels still ran laser straight across the basin, mile after mile, but each route was studded with obstacles, piles of rubble from buildings collapsed in old quakes and never rebuilt. Around their bases clustered shacks thrown together from the reclaimed ruins. Corpses of trees reared their heads at the edges of old crossroads, now swallowed under dead hulks of metal and cardboard shelters.

Madrone and Hijohn maneuvered their way through the refuse-clogged paths. Children picked through the rubble, fiercely guarding their collections of old cans and broken bottles, glancing up with hungry eyes as they passed. The spring heat had been fierce in the shaded, waterless canyons; here on the asphalt it was brutal. Madrone began to wonder if she had made the right decision. Hijohn had suggested she spend some time teaching healing in the city’s center, where he claimed there was ample water. The plan had seemed good, but now she was not so sure. The canyon had its own beauty, even in austerity; these streets were an assault. Her bee mind buzzed alarm at the stench, and her instincts scented danger everywhere.

They skirted a solid concrete building where a long line of people waited in the glare of the sun. They looked hungry, and the air around them reeked of hopelessness.

“Water line,” Hijohn said. “If you got a ration card, you can line up every day and collect your water. Half a gallon.”

“That’s not enough. You can barely survive on that in this heat.”

“Yeah, but you can survive, that’s what makes the difference. The hardliners want to kill the program. Say it’s supporting idleness in the lower classes.”

A windowless concrete monolith stretched for most of the next block, and they detoured carefully around it.

“Factory,” Hijohn said. “We’re getting into the industrial area.”

“It looks like a prison,” Madrone said.

“Feels like it too. I did a stint in one, one summer. The Web thought we could organize the workers.”

“What was it like?”

“Like hell. Punch in, punch out, dock your pay if you’re five minutes late. Then ten hours under white-hot lights, bent over a table monkeying with things so small you could hardly see them. We put together electronic stuff out of scavenged parts. My job was to take apart old radios, tape players. Never did learn how to put anything together.”

“Did you organize a union?”

“What they call unions run the factories. They provide the management.”

“There’s no counter-union? No movement to strike for better conditions?”

“We tried to get something together, but people are scared. Their pay is shit, but it’s better than being out on the streets with no job at all—and no water. No, we got some recruits for the hills, but that was all. This system can’t be reformed. We got to tear it all down, root it out, and start fresh.… Here’s where we turn. We don’t want to go too deep into the factory zone, because the Corporate Guard checks there for passes.”

They turned down a street and soon were winding their way through a neighborhood of twisted lanes and shacks. The faces Madrone passed were as withered and dry as her own had become, and on them she saw the look of haggard endurance she felt in her own eyes. I’ve begun to feel at home here, she realized.

After a while, the crowded paths gave way to broad stretches of open, dusty ground. Hijohn’s eyes darted around uneasily. The long walk was beginning to tell on Madrone, but she forced herself to keep up. In the distance, she could hear shouting, and what sounded like shots, and Hijohn increased the pace until they were almost running.

“Gang territory,” he said. “Mostly they don’t bother the Web, but they could just as easily shoot us by accident.”

Madrone tried to create an energy web of protection around them, visualizing it as light and color, but the image did little to quell her nervousness. Finally they ducked into the protection of buildings.

“Now we’re in territory the Web controls,” Hijohn said. “The liberated zone.” Madrone thought to herself that “discarded zone” might be a more accurate term. She couldn’t imagine why the Stewards would want this place. If anything the people looked dirtier, thinner, and shabbier. The streets were a confusion of pathways among buildings that seemed to be standing more out of inertia than any structural integrity. Most likely the Stewards were quite happy to have this area occupied by the Web. Falling plaster probably kept mortality high and saved bullets.

On and on they walked, until the soles of Madrone’s feet began to burn in her shoes from the heat of the pavement. She was too dehydrated to sweat. As
they went deeper into the zone, she began to hear a sound on the air, a pulsing beat like a muffled drum. At last they pushed through a narrow opening between two leaning stucco buildings.

Madrone stopped, amazed. They had come to an open square where the ground was shaded from the sun’s harsh rays by stretched, filmy cloths. The buildings that formed the boundaries of the plaza seemed well cared for, solid, gleaming with whitewash. And around their bases actual plants grew, each one swaddled in moisture-conserving plastic, fenced off and protected but alive and green. She smelled moisture, and everywhere she looked she saw evidence of care and attention. Bright murals were painted on the walls, and the wooden posts that supported the canopies were intricately carved.