City Under the Stars

2

ORANGE IS A SPRAWLING, ugly town, situated a few miles west of the historic site of Old Orange, something to the north of what was once St. Cloud. It is made mostly of wood and fired clay, sunbaked mud, some sections of fine brick and iron put up during the fleeting prosperous decade of the Great Restoration when York was carving an empire out of the checkerboarded squabble of the northwest, before the fortunes of the State began to decline. It contains a large proportion of Utopian buildings, although few are completely standing, and only a very few are in anything resembling usable condition. It is primarily a trading town, serving as a funnel and middleman for the traffic between the Stabilities of Portland, Pitt, and the South, all of the trade that follows the main routes skirting the Wall of the City of God. It also contains what passes today for heavy industry, and is well-known for leather tanning and textiles. It is the third-largest city in York, and, since the destruction of Worcester, the most eastern of all the really big towns in the Human Domain, south of Portland.

Tonight, it simmered.

Deep in a parched, brutal summer, the city stewed and steamed like sluggish porridge over a flame. Heat poured in from the west, as though tilted from a giant’s ladle, filled the city to the brim, and then hardened—like wax, like amber, catching and preserving everything within the fierce dry ocean of itself.

In Orange, all motion had stopped. The life of the city sank to a torpid minimum, the occasional patient twitching of a toad buried in mud at the bottom of a riverbed, hiding from the sun. People huddled in their shanty homes, stunned by heat, stacked like corpses in the smothering dark. There was no wind. Torches burned without wavering, their smoke stretching straight up, as if they were lines attached to a hook in heaven. Heat swallowed sound like a mountain of feathers, damping it, sopping it up. Even the air itself seemed to have been sucked away, molecule by molecule, and replaced with a clear liquid glass that one could somehow breathe without ever quite suffocating completely, but which never afforded any comfort or relief.

To Hanson, sitting on top of an ancient Utopian freight transport crawling through Orange from the Docks toward South Gate, it seemed as if the hush and suspension of the night were aimed at him, as if the whole city were holding its breath in horror at what he had done. Or perhaps the city was gathering that breath for a great shout, a scream, the hush breaking in an instant and boiling with sudden faceless pursuit, the pointed finger, there he is, the contaminated one, the fugitive, the killer, there, and the horny, impersonal hands pulling him down, pulling him under, rending his bones apart in a single ecstatic explosion of blood… Hanson shifted his feet on the deckplates, bracing himself better against the rolling of the massive old machine. There was no pursuit yet. The shabby buildings of the Blackstone district watched him with disinterest, drooping lids of windows, slack-gaped mouths of doors, leaning against each other in weariness and defeat—they had seen too much, known too much; they didn’t care about Hanson, or his crime.

The sweltering torpor of Orange suited Hanson’s mood tonight—still half dazed, drained, and shaken by the violence of his passion at the factory, unable to keep up with a bewilderingly fast tumble of events. Like a graveyard, silent Orange was both disconcerting and peaceful, radiating an inevitable certainty of death that was oddly comforting. The city might have been an open grave, yawning dumbly at the stars, weighted down with the dead but not yet filled in with raw earth. In many ways it was just that—an open grave; always had been, always would be, until the last of its scurvy inhabitants succumbed to disease, hunger, war, murder. And then would someone, something, come along to kick the dirt down over man?

They had come up from the Docks without seeing anyone at all—unusual, since the magic, lumbering passage of a Utopian machine was a minor event, and normally the streets would have suddenly swirled with people at their approach, certainly hordes of grimy children, all hoping for a moment’s release from the monotony and brutality of their lives. But the killing heat had won out over curiosity, over magic. Industry Hill had been deserted when they skirted around its base, as it had been earlier when Hanson had descended from the factory in the dazed clamor of his own blood. Even the State Inspectors who usually swarmed the Hill to guard against sneak thieves were hiding inside from the weather; but then, so too were the sneak thieves. As they rumbled through the edges of Prospect Terrace, Hanson had seen a drunk pissing contentedly on the fine stone house of a prosperous wool merchant—a harbinger of the slums, and a bellwether of the night: no SIs around to stop him, as he would usually have been intercepted long before reaching the Swank. Now, as they turned downhill toward the center of Blackstone and the Bog, and as the neighborhood crumbled and deteriorated appallingly, he saw people in the streets for the first time: sullen, sluggish crowds who were out on the street because they lived there, in the street; because they had nowhere else to go.

Behind him, the State Factory shouldered against darkness, an island of brazen light, a mountain of iron—an open flame flickered red from its top, like a tongue. Lesser industries, lesser buildings clustered around its massive flanks: attendants to the Lord of Hell. It was a sight he had seen every evening for fifteen years, but now it made him uneasy and afraid, as if the factory was watching him with hungry furnace eyes, as if it would stride monstrously after him on legs made of stone and shadow, a demon cat after a mouse. It would have Oristano’s face.

Murderer, he thought, trying it on for size.

In spite of himself, he turned his head every few seconds while they crawled down the slope to the Bog, keeping an eye on the factory until it was swallowed by a jumble of low roofs, as Industry Hill sank below the outskirts of Blackstone.

Gossard had saved him.

The feral half of Hanson’s mind, the killer that had taken control to hunt Oristano, had thought itself clever—dodging the watchmen and State Inspectors, stalking its prey, waiting in ambush. But Tac had been much smarter than Hanson. He had sensed Hanson’s anguish and turmoil, figured out what Hanson would do before Hanson himself knew, extrapolated the consequences and decided how best to turn them to his financial advantage; laying an ambush of his own to catch Hanson murdering Oristano. And Gossard had been smarter than Tac. Gossard had seen Tac skulking near the washroom, and had figured the whole tangle out in one intuitive, empathetic flash: what Hanson was doomed to do, what Tac’s avarice would drive him to do in response, and what he himself must do to save his friend’s life. And he had, setting a counter-ambush to silence Tac before he could betray Hanson.

In the whole web of intrigue, only Hanson had been stupid.

Passion had driven him to a blind crime, poorly conceived, clumsily executed—stupid. Only luck had saved him, for the moment, from the consequences of the act. And he was still stupid—now he was fleeing stupidly, blindly, stumblingly, with no plan, no purpose, no destination. If not for Gossard, Hanson told himself bitterly, he would probably still be standing in Oristano’s office like a heatstruck ox, waiting dumbly for the SIs to come and collect him. It had been Gossard who had gotten him going again, who had jolted him a little out of his daze, who had set the mechanism of escape in motion. It had been Gossard who had locked the doors to Oristano’s office from the outside and, leading Hanson by the elbow like a sleepwalker, helped him dodge the watchmen and make his way safely outside the factory. And it was also Gossard who destroyed the fantasy of Hanson concealing his guilt: everyone in the factory knew of the vendetta between Hanson and Oristano, and the moment Oristano was found dead, everyone would know who had killed him. The factory SIs wouldn’t even bother to carry out an investigation. They’d know who to arrest.

“Get out of Orange tonight,” Gossard had said. “Get as far away as you can before morning, and keep on going. They’ll put their hands on you if you’re anywhere in the city, but if you skip entirely, go up the country, they won’t look for you very far. Oristano wasn’t that important. But get out quick. And don’t tell anybody where you’re going—” And he’d looked up at Hanson out of his sick, fat face, more strained and pale than ever with the heat. Hanson had realized, in one of those flashes of intuition that approach prophecy, that Gossard didn’t have much longer to live, that his health had deteriorated too far to stand the summer ahead, that Gossard probably knew it, that certainly both of them were aware they’d never see each other again, and found nothing in his vocabulary adequate to that kind of goodbye. So they’d stared at each other for a long, awkward moment until Hanson finally blurted “Come with me,” knowing as soon as he said it that Gossard would never desert his family and could never get them safely out of Orange, that Gossard would play out his role till he dropped, knowing what would happen but unable to get off the wheel. Gossard had merely shaken his head, said “Luck,” and lumbered back into the factory, shutting the service door behind him, committing Hanson to the night.

With luck, Hanson had until the morning, maybe until noon, to get out of Orange. When Oristano missed tonight’s inspection tours, it would be assumed that he had taken too much dope, or drank too much whisky, and was sleeping it off in his office behind locked doors. It had happened before; nobody would think too much of it, nobody would dare try to wake him up. Probably nobody would begin to wonder until sometime tomorrow. Then they would try to wake Oristano by knocking, try again, and eventually someone would have the guts to go find a master key and investigate. Maybe noon, maybe not.

And where was he supposed to go?

Nowhere on foot, that had been certain. Even dazed, he retained that much logic. The nearest village was Garfield, thirty miles away, and that hardly more than an SI garrison to maintain an old stone bridge over the Passaic. Too far, in one sense, over dangerous ground, alone. Not far enough, quick enough, in another sense. It was unlikely they’d bother to search that far afield for him, but if they did he’d be finished: only one usable road to Garfield, only two roads out of Garfield north, and more than thirty miles to the next village—he could be easily run down by mounted men, who just might check Garfield because it was the obvious place for a fugitive afoot to go. And once he started out on foot, he’d stay on foot. Orange was the only place within a hundred miles where he might be able to find an alternative to walking.

And so he’d gone to the Docks, and his luck had held. There had been four caravans loading up at the land-docks, in spite of the heat and the late hour—the Docks were the deep-beating heart of the city’s commerce, of its life, and they never shut down. Three of the caravans were hauled by the clumsy, potbellied steam-tractors, all pig iron and pistons, boisterous and bellowing. The fourth was headed by a sleek Utopian transport, an untarnishable, indefatigable giant of high steel, twelve feet tall by thirty feet long, more than four hundred years old and still running as smoothly and perfectly as an engineer’s dream, running continuously for all of those four centuries without need of refueling or repair—magic. It had been built long before the creation of the ancient and venerable Government of the State of York, and it would probably be around long after the State had guttered and died, maybe even after there were any men left in the dwindling world to run her. But now, in the haunted interregnum of Earth, she was captained by Johann Willis and headed north this trip, to the Stabilities of Portland. And Johann Willis was an acquaintance of Hanson’s. Not a close friend, but an acquaintance, and an occasional drinking companion—and the uncle of Hanson’s dead wife, Hanson’s Becky, down and dead in the flinty soil of York for more than four years. That was a blood-bond between them. Maybe it would be enough.

They reached the bottom of the slope and turned right, paralleling the open, ceramic-lined sewage trench that ran down the middle of Canal Street. The transport lurched as the road changed from worn cobblestone to thigh-deep mud, then its massive treads found traction and it steadied—the clumsy steam-tractors sometimes foundered in the rutted morasses that passed for streets in this section of summer Orange, but the ancient transport was nearly unstoppable. It wallowed ponderously along Canal Street, throwing a wake of mud on either side. Dense clouds of mosquitos and stinging black flies rose up out of the mire at the transport’s approach, and settled again, swirling and buzzing angrily, when it had passed. Hanson swore irritably and slapped at his face; almost immediately, he was bitten again, on the back of his hand and then on the neck. Brigault, the Mate, grinned at Hanson from his position on the broad spine of the transport—he was wearing a hood of fine-meshed netting, and heavy black leather gloves in spite of the heat. “A bitch, a’n’t it?” Brigault shouted jovially over the pounding of the engines. “But you gots to get flies, ai? The whole place is made out of shit!” The Mate grinned at Hanson again, enormously, revealing a mouth crowded with crooked, broken snaggleteeth. Brigault seemed to be having a fine time. And another two flies bit Hanson.

Dispiritedly, Hanson pulled his head as far into his coat as he could, like a turtle. It was, if possible, even hotter here than it had been on the Hill, and the stench alone was almost enough to knock a man down and kill him: offal, carrion, endless middens of hundred-year-old garbage, raw industrial sewage running through the Ditch, rank and sulfurous clouds of chemical smoke drifting downwind from the factories on Industry Hill. This was the center of the Bog, the Valley, the Sink, whichever you wanted to call it—the cancerous, ulcerated underbelly of Orange, the nadir of a city where even the rich had never risen too very far above subsistence. Rickety, narrow buildings lined Canal Street by the hundreds, rearing precariously up on either side of the open sewage trench, the Ditch, like rheumy, arthritic animals who had come down to drink of the foul water before they died. Some of these hovels were nine or ten stories high, and none of them were wider across the base than the width of a single room. They were made of mismatched wooden beams, bricks, paving-stones, all stuck together with clay and mud and mortar any way they would hold—some of them were so unsteady that they had to be propped up with poles braced in the ground, and all of them would sway and totter sickeningly in any kind of a wind. There was seldom even a handsbreadth of space between one structure and another, and many actually did lean against their neighbors, so that if a building did finally collapse, it usually took two or three others with it. No matter: a horde of homeless people and “contractors” would swarm through the rubble, strip—and sometimes eat—the corpses, and salvage what building materials they could. Within a few weeks, new buildings would have been raised under the brutal direction of the “contractors,” cannibalized from the debris of the fallen, and people would be bribing and murdering with total ruthlessness to obtain the privilege of inhabiting them. This had been going on for hundreds of years, and it was doubtful that any building in the Bog had survived intact; they all toppled down into junk and were reassembled out of that same junk, over and over again, like shabby phoenixes. Every decade or so, a fire would rip through the Bog and destroy huge swaths of it, followed inevitably by Plague, a year or two later. But the Bog was indestructible—it would eat a little deeper into Blackstone, transforming the swallowed sections into the Bog; building materials would be found somewhere, somehow, and the hovels would rise again. And soon everything would be just about the same as it had ever been.

This had been my life, Hanson thought numbly, staring into the depths of the leprous warrens. A little bit better, perhaps, but not much. Blackstone instead of the Bog. Malnutrition instead of outright starvation, lingering sickness instead of immediate death. At least a pretense of a roof over his head, although some winters he’d wondered if it could be much colder even out on the street. A difference only in degree, not in kind. That was what he had bought with his youth, with his life. With Becky. And always the underlying threat of the Bog, of a fall into the Bog. Inevitable, waiting for all of them when they could no longer work hard enough to keep themselves out of it. In the end, all roads led downhill to it, to the Bog.

There was a fresh corpse floating in the Ditch, and he watched it bob and swirl with the current until, just before it was too far behind to see, two men with a travois fished it out of the water.

Ahead, the crowds became denser. The transport slowed, slowed again, almost—but not quite—coming to a stop. It inched through the muck, ponderous and irresistible. The crowd parted reluctantly around it—sometimes a man would wait until the giant treads were almost touching him before his courage broke and he foundered out of the way, slipping, falling, rolling. And then he would climb up out of the mud—plastered and stinking with it, rubbing it out of his eyes—and spit at the transport, or shake his fist. Hanson could see mouths moving in the crowd, teeth bared, men grinning with hate; he could hear shouts and obscenities, rising thinly above the sound of the engine. Someone threw a clot of mud that spattered against the deckplates; another. These were the dregs of the Bog: lobos, offenders whom even the casual butcher that was State justice found too unimportant to kill; homeless and unregistered children; junkies; gene-scrambled sports; decrepit whores; the infirm, the aged, the blacklisted—all those who couldn’t work, or were not allowed to. They lived like wild dogs, on garbage, on what they could steal, on each other. They slept in the street, on the steps of the shanty homes of the more fortunate poor, in alcoves, under bridges. By the thousands. And every winter they died, by the thousands. And every spring there was another thousand, or two, to replace them—filtering down, no longer able to hold even a place in the middle terrace of Bog society. Their despair was a tangible pressure, black as coal; the heat crushed it into hate, diamond-bright, diamond-hard hate, tight and dangerous, gave it something to work on. There was a solid wall of men a few yards in front of the transport, and they did not look like they were going to move. Some of them were holding knives, some clubs, some torches, and their faces made the flesh crawl around Hanson’s stomach and groin. Suppose one of them had a bow, or a javelin, or a scorpion—

Up in the cab, Johann Willis hit the whistle. The giant bellow of it slammed the high building walls on either side of the road and washed back, filling the world. The faces of the crowd went slack, shattered by sound, and then firmed up again when reason returned. But they had been shaken. They clutched their weapons uneasily and blinked around them, as the thunder died in grumbling echoes from the street. Willis hit the whistle again. The crowd was ready for it this time, but they still flinched, and when their faces set themselves up again, a little determination had gone out of them. The whistle blasted twice more. Buffeted, the rickety shanty buildings swayed and trembled, and a board crosswalk connecting two of them was jolted loose: it fell, sending an onlooker who had been lounging on it hurtling twenty feet down into the mud. Incongruously, someone in the crowd laughed. And instantly, as if that was his cue, Brigault was on his feet and at the edge of the deck, leaning out, bracing himself against a stanchion. He had pushed the netting back from his face, and his revolver was in his hand. “Move your asses!” Brigault screamed. “Move ’em!” He was grinning ferociously at the crowd; his eyes flickered back and forth, very fast, and the revolver moved with his gaze, so that first one man, then another found himself staring straight into the gun’s ugly muzzle. Willis had poked his head up above the three-quarter shield of the cab—he said nothing, but he raised an ancient repeating rifle and slowly brought it down so that it was braced against his left forearm. Brigault shouted again. When the crowd did not move, he seemed to be amused. His grin softened into a smile that was even more frightening. “Move, Goddamn you,” he said, not at all loudly, almost with affection. “Move.” There was something infinitely hard in his voice, riding it like a carrier beam, and the crowd flinched at the sound of it. Hesitantly, they moved—men stepping back, then changing their minds and stepping forward, then stepping back again. Willis caught the ripple of movement; he must have made some imperceptible signal, because the whistle screamed again at that moment, longer and louder than before. At once, the crowd broke. Grudgingly, they flowed aside, like some heavy, sluggish liquid, and let the transport through. Most of them didn’t look up as it passed; they studied their feet and slogged wearily away through the mud. Willis ducked back down into the cab. In a moment, the transport was picking up speed once more. Its whistle hooted again and again, scornful in victory.

Brigault came walking back along the spine, rolling effortlessly with the motion of the vehicle. He sat down next to Hanson and patted the revolver in its holster. “No sweat,” he said, “no problem.” He grinned at Hanson. “Sometimes we gots to really shoot a couple, when they gets, you know, real stubborn. Mule-headed. They gets real mule-headed, in the hot weather.” He spat, casually. “Or just run them right over. Ai, that’s even better, that works real good. But they a’ways move. Eventu’ly. Oh yes.” And he flipped the netting back down over his face with his thumb, and settled back against another stanchion. He looked very comfortable. He didn’t move or speak again for a long while, and he might almost have been asleep. But his eyes glittered through the mesh, and they missed nothing.

Hanson tried several words on his tongue, but none of them worked.

He sat in prudent silence, and swatted blackflies.

In another half hour, the transport had crawled through South Gate, and was beginning to pull clear of Orange. There wasn’t too much in the way of suburbs: one or two quarries, a few truck farms, some night-shrouded gypsy trading camps, a large garrison of the standing Army of York—carefully not allowed inside the city itself since the last “reorganization”/palace revolution/civil war—a deserted roadside shrine, and then, after a long stretch of nothing, a final SI post commanding a crossroads. No outlying villas, or estates, or summer homes, or middle-class residential areas, as there might have been in another age. It was dangerous to live outside the city walls, and few did, except for the gypsies and free-traders who were themselves too feral to be afraid, and the armed troops who were there to keep marauders away from the city—and the marauders, of course.

And then Orange was gone, completely, and the night closed in, black and smothering. The transport’s headlight, at medium intensity, pushed the night about fifty yards away in front, but it closed down behind them even more dark and menacing, as if it resented the intrusion of the light. Brigault sent the other two crewmen walking down the train to hang lanterns at the couplings, and one at the tail. The transport was pulling a train load of eight cars this trip, and the lanterns helped the driver judge the position of that long, awkward tail accurately enough to get around curves without jackknifing it. The wood-and-iron freight cars were clumsy, ponderous things, but the transport pulled them easily, and could have pulled four times their number if the poor condition of the roads did not disallow it. To compensate, the cars were built deep and filled to overflowing—their loads barely contained by the tarpaulins lashed down taut over every car—and the cargo hold of the transport itself, under Hanson’s feet, was stuffed full of the smallest and most valuable items. In spite of the weight, the transport moved swiftly through the darkness, sure and graceful, and Hanson was once again filled with rueful awe at the skill of the Utopian artisans. It was easy to understand the attitude of people like Relk; indeed, of most people—Hanson knew, intellectually, that the transport was “merely” a product of superior engineering, but it still seemed like magic to him, and he responded to it in that way, emotionally. The gap between those ancient people and himself was too great; so much had been lost and forgotten…

They were running through a stretch of scrub forest that alternated with sand and clay barrens. It was desolate, forlorn country, especially by starlight on a moonless night. They followed a curve around the shoulder of a small hill; there was a light way up the hill, just below the crest, the lit window of a building shrouded by trees. It shone high and lonely, a cold star riding above the earth, below the sky. Then the road dipped, and it was gone. Hanson realized that he would never know what the building was, or who lived there, or why, or if someone had been at that window, listening to the transport breathe mournfully by in the night, watching the lanterns bob like a string of blurred red jewels, perhaps wondering what eyes rode the train and were looking invisibly back up. The thought made Hanson sad. Life was like that—you rushed by others in the dark without knowing they were there, you left them behind; each minute buried a thousand possibilities, each turning killed a thousand alternate lives, and you had to say farewell constantly to people you would never meet. And still you rushed on. Hanson became aware that Brigault was watching him closely, although he could no longer see the Mate’s eyes. He forced himself to relax, to sink back down against the deckplates. He was trembling. Nothing then but night and motion, until they pulled abreast of another SI outpost, a big half-timbered building surrounded by a tall earthwork wall, ablaze with torches, Bloomfield Station. A potbellied SI in his shirtsleeves, a half-eaten chicken drumstick in one hand, stood by the side of the road and waved them on. An embankment ahead, tall and long, diagonally across their path. And a ramp.

The transport had been heading east, more or less. Now it flowed up the ramp, turned left, and began to crawl north. This was an ancient highway, unbelievably huge in comparison to modern roads—a half-dozen transports could have traveled it abreast without crowding each other, and it stretched on endlessly ahead, dead black, like a frozen river made out of the night-fabric itself. The transport picked up speed. On such a good surface, Willis was certain to open it all the way up; he would be unable to for seven-eighths of the trip. They rocked and clicked along at a terrifying clip, but even Hanson knew that this was the safest part of the journey. The highway was one of the major arteries—and assets—of the State. It stretched from the southern counties, where it was chopped off sheer by the Wall below Iselin, all the way up to Spring Valley in the north, where it was possible, after a break, to take another old road up to Newburgh and Kingston Center. It’d been cleared of rubble and occasional blockages by a massive project during the Restoration, and now it was zealously guarded by the State—there would be SI garrisons every fifteen or twenty miles along its length.

The whistle hooted once, and Brigault went up to relieve the captain. In a moment, Willis came back along the spine, massaging the tension out of his shoulder. He squatted down next to Hanson. He was still carrying the rifle; on caravan, it was chained to his wrist, and it never left him—he even slept with it. It was nearly irreplaceable, and worth more than some of the cargo. That reminded Hanson of Oristano’s revolver, wrapped heavily in oilskin and hidden in Hanson’s pouch—Gossard’s idea; he’d never’ve had the presence of mind to think of it. Stealing the revolver was alone enough to earn him the death penalty; in fact it was probably a more serious offense than the killing of Oristano. Thinking that, Hanson smiled. They could only hang him once, after all.

He greeted the captain, and they talked of the trivial things people talk of when something is making them uncomfortable in each other’s presence. Imperceptibly, Willis edged the conversation around, and, after a while, Hanson realized that Willis was fishing for more information on why he was leaving Orange. To get the ride, he’d told Willis a compendium of half-truths about being laid off and blacklisted, and that he was leaving, simply, to survive. Willis knew of the enmity between Oristano and Hanson, and the tale was credible enough, except for Hanson’s desire to leave Orange immediately, with only the clothes on his back. He had explained that away as a desire to avoid possible further prosecution by Oristano—since, as a blacklistee, he was outside the law and anyone could do anything at all to him with perfect impunity from the State—and the fact that he stood a better chance of getting a ride from Willis than from another captain. It was a good story, but Hanson was a poor liar, and Willis was very sharp. Hanson had no way of knowing how much of the story Willis believed, if he believed any of it.

“So what will you do now?” Willis asked. “You have any plans at all?”

“No,” Hanson said, “just to get out of Orange, is all. I a’n’t got a chance in Hell there. Upcountry, at least maybe I can get some kind of piss-ass job, someway. Don’t know what, but I’m a dead man if I stay.”

“Ayah,” Willis said, “that’s true, right enough.” He sighed. He was a tall, lanky man, about ten years older than Hanson, with a face like a weathered stone hatchet. His hair was heavily streaked with gray, but he held his squatting position effortlessly, rocking slightly heel-to-toe to balance against the motion of the transport. He turned his head and stared steadily at Hanson. He had an intricate, compassionate face, but it was a grim one nevertheless—there was something unshakable in it, as cold and hard as flint. It was a face of a man accustomed to command and in the habit of depending on no one or nothing other than himself. “That’s true,” he repeated musingly. He shrugged, and ponderously aimed his face away from Hanson, as if it was very heavy and moved on hinges. But his eyes flicked back again. His eyes were a restless, glittering black, like those of a magpie or an ancient crow. They would fix on something, absorb it completely, flick to something else. “What was it you said you got canned for?” he asked.

“Didn’t say,” Hanson said. Then he told him, making it up as he went along. He wasn’t very good at this sort of thing, and he had the feeling that he was floundering in deeper and deeper. Probably he had contradicted himself a half dozen times already; it was hard to remember what he’d said even a moment ago. He was numb and confused and deeply sad, and that desperate, hysterical depression was building up again—he could feel it crying and yammering inside his belly, like a little trapped animal. He finished his story and sat resignedly, waiting to see if Willis was going to challenge him on it.

“Ayah,” Willis said at last, “a bad thing.” His eyes flicked away from Hanson, flicked back, flicked away. “A shame and a Goddamned waste,” he said. “Piss your life away—” He stopped, sighed, scratched his ear with his finger, sighed again. After a long pause he said, “Making good time tonight.”

“Ai,” Hanson said.

“Ayah,” Willis said.

They fell silent.

Another caravan was coming down the highway toward them, probably headed south to Orange. This one was hauled by one of the clumsy steam-tractors, puffing and clattering horrendously, belching fire-shot clouds of black smoke, its great pistons thudding back and forth. It sounded like a giant’s sackful of pots and plates being dragged across rocky ground. The two big vehicles hooted at each other as they passed. The sound rolled wistfully around the low hills until it was blotted up by the thick pine woods. Willis shifted position restlessly. He ran a hand up through his graying hair, brought it down to tug at his earlobe, but didn’t say anything after all. Hanson was aware that Willis was wrestling with some complex emotion, but there was no way to tell exactly what it was. They sat silently while the transport clicked up a slight rise. To the west, the country opened out into extensive piney woods, but to the east, Hanson knew, there was nothing but five or six miles of low, weed-overgrown rubble, the tangled ruins of broken Utopian buildings, inhabited only by coyotes, chimeras—sports too gene-scrambled even to be regarded as human—and abandoned children who had grown up completely feral. Even the bandits preferred to camp in the woods usually. It was safer there, in spite of the wolves and the killercatchers.

Then they topped the rise and they could see the Wall itself, immense, smoldering with pinks and coral-reds, burning without flame: the Wall of the City of God. Running roughly parallel with the highway here, only five miles away, it looked almost close enough to touch. But your hand would burn, Hanson thought. It would surely burn.

“Lookit that, now,” Willis said.

“Ai,” Hanson said, mistaking the emotion in Willis’s voice. His own heart had thudded painfully at first sight of it, and his breath had sucked in, in spite of himself. “It’s very beautiful.”

Willis turned to look at Hanson. His eyes had slitted up and somehow, subtly, he seemed to be crouching now, where before he had been merely squatting. He stared long and intently at Hanson. Then he made a small disgusted sound in his throat and turned back to look at the Wall. His eyes had widened, and the radiance of the Wall was reflected in them in tiny burning highlights. When he spoke again, his voice was flat and hard. “I hate it,” he said. And he spat, emphatically, in the direction of the Wall. And he got up and walked back to the cab, without another word.

Hanson sat up awhile, trying to puzzle it out. But exhaustion, long denied, rolled over him like a mountain coming down, and he tied himself to a stanchion with his belt, and he went to sleep.

He awoke briefly as they were crossing the Passaic, and he realized that the sound of the whistle signaling to the SI garrison had been wailing through his dreams. He had pictured it as the cry of a huge black bird, wings wide, falling blind through the encrusted and ornamental air. Then his head lolled, and he slept.

He woke again, later, surrounded by motion and blackness. The Wall still blazed across the world, burning its image into the jelly of his retinas. He closed his eyes against the light.

And opened them again at dawn. They were in the process of crossing the Hudson, at Montgomerytown, where a bridge had survived enough intact to be capable of repair by the artisans of the Great Restoration. The Wall was no longer visible, though afterimages of it seemed to smolder in Hanson’s still sleep-fogged mind. It had begun its great slow curve east of north, crossing the Hudson below Ossining—cutting straight across the water, the river disappearing under the Wall and out of the knowledge of men. Some said that the river met the sea at last, behind the Wall, inside the City of God. But no one Hanson knew had ever seen the ocean—with the possible exception of Willis—and it was a thing as impossible to picture as the City itself. Occasionally a fishing-boat or a canoe would be swept under the Wall by the current, but the crews never returned, and the river kept its secret.

Here the Hudson ran swift and fierce, as if impatient for its translation into the realms of the Divine, at Ossining. It was a wet, chilly morning. A breeze skimmed silver mists from the broad, gunmetal surface of the river; they boiled up around the black iron of the bridge, and swirled off into the lightening upper air. The sun was just climbing over a forest ridge to the east, sending broad fans of smoky light slantwise through the mist, striking bright highlights from the oily, turbulent water. The span boomed hollow under the transport, buzzed, boomed, buzzed. They were in the middle of the bridge, with everything gray and raw blue and silver-orange, the sky opening into hot gold east, night dying away to the west, the river rolling a humped shoulder below. Hanson felt something move inside, something slip, like a landslide in his head; he was leaving everything he’d ever known, everyone he’d ever known, behind. Then up the steep, thick-wooded slope of the opposite bank, and time for one last look back at the Hudson as it wound toward Ossining, back over all the lands stretching away toward Orange, where he had kept his life. Beaded with cold dew and slapped by raw morning wind, Hanson wondered if he felt regret or relief. And could not decide. And the river sank away behind, and was gone.

Early that evening, the transport rolled to a stop in a nondescript clearing in the woods. There was a pile of rubble in one corner that maybe used to be a house, and, among the weeds, a blistered tangle of Utopian machinery, made of an alloy so complexly specific to its task that it had no value even to the scavengers that ranged out from the cities and smallest towns of York like starveling dogs in search of something, anything, that would keep their worthless lives going yet another day. It had memory, down to the molecular level; you could melt it down and pour it into ingots, but, cooling, it would re-form itself into its original shape.

Much like a man’s life, Hanson thought—you could melt it down in the fire, change it completely, but old habits and old ways of thought would re-form it again in the same pattern somewhere else. Once a loser, always a loser. Once a fool, always a fool.

Hanson took advantage of the stop to hop down off the deckplates and make his way into the musky-smelling stand of staghorn sumac by the rubble-midden and take a leak. His piss steamed in the cold evening air, and tiny clodhoppers rose to the surface of the ground to soak in it, preening, pirouetting with evident pleasure and spreading their miniature fans wide. Willis had disappeared around the back of the transport, and Brigault stayed with the cab, face set into bored immobility.

Willis’s irascible voice sounded. “Hanson! Git on back here!”

“A’right. Coming!” Hanson shook free the last drop of pee, buttoned his trousers, and trudged around to the back of the transport.

Willis raised the rifle and pointed it right at his gut.

A kind of sizzle passed through Hanson, a cold and stinging surge of fear. As quietly as he could, he said, “What’s this about?”

“You know what it’s about.” Willis held the rifle steady, no posturing, and no way he could miss at this distance, a man to whom the gun held no glamour but was just another tool to be used with a minimum of waste-motion and fuss.

“Listen,” Hanson said, and then lapsed into silence. What could he possibly say? That numb despair and resignation were seeping back in, soaking into his bones the way his piss had soaked into the black dirt and the preening hoppers, making it impossible for him to speak. He knew that he should plead for his life, but he couldn’t summon the energy to do it. He should have known that he could never get away, never get free of the morass of Orange and the mess he’d made of his life. He should have known that everything would catch up to him, that the world would reach out and crush him as casually as he would crush a bug. He had known that, in fact, known it with a fatalism that was deeply ingrained in the marrow of his bones. He’d fooled himself into forgetting it for a moment, into letting himself feel a moment of relief and hope, and now the retribution when it came, when Willis squeezed the trigger of the rifle and the bullet ripped his body apart, would be even more bitter and black by comparison. His luck had never been good; he’d allowed himself to think for a while that it was turning, but now, as he should have known it would, it had run out entirely instead. He cursed himself for the hundred opportunities he’d let go by to slip over the side of the transport and disappear into the wilderness between towns, where he might have carved out a living of some sort for himself. He had a gun, there were brigands he could join… But now it was too late. Maybe it always had been too late.

After all, what did it really matter? If Willis didn’t kill him now, sooner or later the Crab in his belly would.

They stared at each other over the sights of Willis’s rifle. A wind came up and swirled dust around Hanson’s feet.

For what seemed like a very long time, neither man spoke.

At last Willis nodded to the side. Hanson’s knapsack sat there, in the shadow of the transport, old and frayed, pathetically small. “You’re family,” Willis said, “of sorts. Blood’s thicker’n water, they say. Can’t bring myself to kill you. But I won’t let myself be used neither.”

Hanson nodded, said nothing. The moment of crisis wasn’t over; he knew that there was still time for Willis to change his mind.

“A man like you,” Willis said. “A man like you—” Instead of finishing the thought, he noisily cleared his throat and spat a great gob of phlegm to the side. Then, raising his voice, he shouted, “Brigault! Get off yer thumb and let’s get out of here!”

As Willis strode off Hanson noticed for the first time that he had a slight limp, a stiffness in one leg that caused him to pull up slightly at the top of each stride. Willis was getting old, too. They were all getting old. To match the world, which was itself old, old and worn-out and weary, grown gray with the dust of millions of generations of lives and stained black with the residue of innumerable sins.