Predator's gold

4

“ North America,” said Pennyroyal, “is a Dead Continent. Everyone knows that. Discovered in the year 1924 by Christopher Columbo, the great explorer and detective, it became the homeland of an empire which once ruled the world, but which was utterly destroyed in the Sixty Minute War. It is a land of haunted red deserts, poison swamps, atomic-bomb craters, rust and lifeless rock. Only a few daring explorers venture there; archaeologists like Valentine and your young ladyfriend’s poor mother, out to salvage scraps of Old-Tech from the ancient bunker-complexes.

“And yet one hears rumours. Stories. Tales told by drunken old sky-dogs in run-down air-caravanserais. Yarns about airships that have been blown off course and found themselves flying over a very different sort of America: a green landscape of forests and grasslands and vast blue lakes. About fifty years ago a flyer named Snori Ulvaeusson was supposed to have actually landed in a green enclave he called Vineland, and made a map of it for the Lord Mayor of Reykjavik, but of course when modern researchers went looking for the map they found no trace of it in the Reykjavik library. As for the other accounts, the punchline is always the same: the airman spends years trying to find the place again, but never can. Or else he sets down his ship only to find that the greenery which looked so inviting from above is really only toxic algae blooming on a crater-lake.

“But true historians like ourselves, Tom, know that within such legends there often lurks a seed of truth. I gathered together all the stories I’d heard, and decided that there was something there worth following up. Is America really dead, as wise men like Valentine have always told us? Or could there be a place, far to the north of the dead cities which the Old-Tech hunters visit, where rivers of meltwater spilling from the edge of the Ice Wastes have washed away the poisons and made the Dead Continent begin to flower again?

“I, Pennyroyal, resolved to discover the truth! Back in the spring of the year ’89 I set out to see what I could find. Myself and four companions, aboard my airship the Allan Quatermain. We crossed the North Atlantic, and soon touched down upon the shores of America, near a place that the ancient charts call New York. It was as dead as we’d been promised; a series of vast craters, their sides fused by the intense heat of that millennia-old conflict into the substance known as Blast Glass.

“We took off again and flew west, into the very heart of the Dead Continent, and that was when disaster struck. Storms of an almost supernatural ferocity wrecked my poor Allan Quatermain in the midst of an immense, polluted wilderness. Three of my companions perished in the smash, the fourth died a few days later, poisoned by some water from a pool which looked clear, but which must have been tainted with some ghastly Old-Tech chemical — he turned blue, and gave off a scent of old socks.

“Alone, I staggered on into the north, crossing the Plain of Craters where once the legendary cities of Chicago and Milwaukee stood. I had given up all thought of finding my green America. My only hope now was that I might reach the edge of the Ice Wastes and be rescued by some wandering band of Snowmads.

“At last, even that hope faded. Weak from exhaustion and lack of water, I lay down in a dry valley between great black jagged mountains. In despair I cried out, ‘Is this really to be the end of Nimrod Pennyroyal?’ and the stones seemed to answer, ‘Yup.’ All hope was gone, d’you see? I commended my soul to the Goddess of Death and shut my eyes, expecting to open them again only as a ghost in the Sunless Country. The next thing I knew I was wrapped in furs and laid in the bottom of a canoe, and some charming young people were paddling me north.

“These were not fellow explorers from the Hunting Ground, as I at first supposed. They were natives! Yes, there is a tribe of people actually living in the northernmost parts of that Dead Continent! Until then, I had accepted the traditional story — the story which I’m sure you were told by your Guild of Historians — that the few poor souls who survived the fall of America fled north on to the ice and mingled with the Inuit, producing the Snowmad race we know today. Now I understood that some had stayed behind! Savage, uncivilized descendants of a nation whose greed and selfishness once brought the world to ruin — and yet they had enough humanity to rescue a poor starving wretch like Pennyroyal!

“By signs and gestures I was soon able to converse with my rescuers. They were a girl and boy, and their names were Machine Washable and Allow Twelve Days For Delivery. It seemed that they had been on an expedition of their own when they found me; digging for Blast Glass in the ruins of an ancient city called Duluth. (I discovered, by the way, that the members of their savage tribe prize a Blast Glass necklace just as much as any well-dressed lady in Paris or Traktiongrad. Both my new friends wore armlets and earrings of the stuff.) They were very skilled at surviving among the dreadful deserts of America; turning over stones to catch edible grubs, and finding drinkable water by observing the growth-patterns of certain types of algae. But that wasteland was not their home. No, they had come from further north, and now it seemed they were returning with me to their tribe!

“Imagine my excitement, Tom! Going up that river was like going back to the earliest beginnings of the world. To begin with, nothing but barren rock, pierced here and there by time-ravaged stones or twisted girders which were all that remained of some great building of the Ancients. Then, one day, I spied a patch of green moss, and then another! A few more days of northing and I began to see grass, ferns, rushes clustering on either bank. The river itself grew clearer, and Allow Twelve Days caught fish, which Machine Washable cooked for us over a fire each evening on the shore. And the trees, Tom! Birches and oaks and pines covered the landscape, and the river opened into a broad lake, and there upon the shore were the rude dwellings of the tribe. What a sight for a historian! America alive again, after all those millennia!

“How I lived with the good people of the tribe for three years, I shall not bore you with. Nor how I rescued the chief’s beautiful daughter Zip Code from a ravening bear, how she fell in love with me, and how I was forced to make my escape from her angry fiance. Nor even how I travelled north again, up on to the ice, and so returned, after many more adventures, to the Great Hunting Ground. You can read about it all in my interpolitan bestseller America the Beautiful when we reach Brighton.”

Tom sat for a long time without speaking, his head filled with the wonderful visions which Pennyroyal’s account had painted. He could hardly believe that he had never heard of the professor’s great discovery before. It was world-shattering! Monumental! What fools the Guild of Historians must have been, to turn away such a man!

At last he said, “But did you never go back, Professor? Surely a second expedition, with better equipment…”

“Alas, Tom,” sighed Pennyroyal. “I could never find anyone to fund a return trip. You must remember that my cameras and sampling equipment were all destroyed in the wreck of the Allan Quatermain. I took a few artefacts along with me when I left the tribe, but all were lost along my journey home. Without proof, how could I hope to fund a return expedition? The word of an Alternative Historian is not enough, I find. Why,” he said sadly, “to this day, Tom, there are people who believe I never went to America at all.”