Twinmaker

50

THE DRIVER OF the four-wheeler took them along the rutted orchard rows rather than across them, to spare Clair’s injured friend. At the end of the first row they hit a service road, just dirt and gravel but level and straight, aiming for the patch of sky where the sun had been. The clouds were deep red to the west, fading to black to the east. The smoke from the fallen airship was almost invisible now.

Clair sat on the flatbed with Jesse and Arcady, feeling sick. Perhaps it was from blood she’d swallowed, or maybe it was the deep uncertainty of her present position. Out of the power beam and into the . . . what now? She didn’t know where she was, who she was with, or where they were taking her. She had flat-out refused to be separated from Jesse and now sat with his head in her lap, wishing with every fiber of her being that he would wake up.

Clair had already asked Arcady where they were going, and this time he had answered simply, The Farmhouse. She took the hint, although she was both curious and skeptical. A farm, honestly? As the orchard passed by, row after row of branching trees, apparently stretching for miles, she wondered how there could be nearly enough Abstainers in the world to eat so many apples. Then she did the math and realized that if one percent of people were Abstainers, even one tenth of one percent, that still left a huge potential market—but how would the apples get to them without d-mat? There were no trucks anymore, no planes for airfreight. The fruit would rot on the ground.

Every minute or so, Clair checked for the Air and for Q. Still nothing. She bit her lip, trying to protect Jesse from each bump and shudder of the vehicle beneath them. As far as she knew, they were the only survivors of the crash. She didn’t want to think about what it would mean if he died and left her alone. All she knew about farmers was from old movies, and although Arcady and his friends might not look like inbred cannibals, she could imagine any number of terrible fates awaiting a girl on her own in the middle of nowhere.

Her face was crusted with blood, and her nose hurt. It didn’t feel broken, which was a small comfort among a cavalcade of miseries.

They crested a low hill and drove down into a depression that didn’t really constitute a valley. Lights at the bottom of the depression issued from a close cluster of buildings. Clair could make out very few details in the thickening gloom. Sheds of some kind, containing angular agricultural machinery. The Farmhouse, she presumed.

They passed fences and through open gates. The four-wheeler bounced lightly over a packed-earth courtyard and came to a halt in front of a long, gabled building. One wall was entirely windows. She could see people moving within. Strong, stern men with beards and work clothes. Hardly any women. No one she recognized.

Farmers issued from a wide double door and converged on the flatbed. They took Jesse from her and carried him carefully inside. Clair followed closely, blinking in the light. Arcady’s hand was tight on her upper arm, guiding her and keeping her close through a central hall with trestle tables below and naked wooden beams above. Voices came at her from everywhere. Her blocked nostrils twitched—was that a wood fire she smelled?

Somehow she was separated from Jesse. Before she could protest, Arcady ushered her into an office. There was a desk and two chairs and a series of cabinets that might have held actual paper files.

“Take a seat, Clair.”

“How do you know my name?” She stayed standing.

“You were in the video with Dylan Linwood,” he said. “I didn’t think it was real until you practically landed on our heads. We heard reports via shortwave radio of an airship damaged in a power-beam accident. That said two things to us: one, WHOLE was involved, because no one else flies airships so far from the coast; and two, because WHOLE was involved, it was unlikely to be an accident. We immediately mobilized to search for survivors.”

Arcady showed her a map. The Farm stretched across a significant chunk of North Dakota, from the Little Missouri grasslands to the east almost as far as Fargo to the west, north halfway to the Canadian border. Clair’s portion of the airship had come down on the southern edge of the farm, near a ghost town called New Salem. The crew compartment had disintegrated into several pieces, with her larger chunk getting snagged while the rest tumbled on much farther. Farmers were still calling in with news of wreckage raining over the plains. Arcady couldn’t or wouldn’t tell her anything about other survivors.

“Where’s Jesse?” she said, fighting a resurgence of the same panic that had threatened her earlier. “What are you doing to him?”

“He’s being looked after,” Arcady said. “Don’t worry. We have competent medical staff here.”

Clair tugged at a hangnail with her teeth, pulled a face at the taste of dried blood on her tongue. Was competent good enough? Jesse had become much more to her than a guide to his world of misfits and outsiders. He was the only one who agreed with her about how to deal with Improvement and the dupes, and he had saved her on the Skylifter just as much Q had.

She didn’t want any more friends to die that week. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, it was beginning to look somewhat more than careless.

“You said I could trust you,” Clair said.

“You can.”

“So why am I in here? Why can’t I be with him?”

Arcady ran his fingers through his beard. “We live quietly. We don’t like attention or surprises.”

“Are you part of WHOLE too? Is what why I can’t access the Air?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“What else am I supposed to do?”

He smiled, which unexpectedly transformed him.

“Come on.” He stood and held out both hands to her. “You need a shower.”

“I want to wait for Jesse.”

“You could be waiting all night,” he said, “and you don’t want to smell like this when he wakes up.”

She sniffed warily at one armpit. Her nose was still mostly blocked, so she couldn’t tell.

“Is it bad?”

“It’s worse,” he said. “Much, much worse.”

The showers were communal, but the water was warm and plentiful, and there was soap, which was enough for Clair to overcome her reluctance. She took a corner stall and scrubbed two days’ worth of accumulated blood and grime from her skin and hair. She lathered and rinsed three times, and then stood under the water for a full minute, savoring the sensation of clean.

The shower was on a generous but definitive timer, otherwise she might have stayed there all night. When it shut off, she reached for two towels, drying her skin first and then her hair as best she could. It would spring up into an Afro now, no matter what she did. The clothes Q had sent her in Manteca lay in a muddy puddle. No way was she putting them on again.

She stepped out of the shower stall wrapped in a thick towel. The steam had cleared her nose. She could smell nothing now but soap.

“Here,” said Arcady, handing her a stack of neatly folded garments. “I think I got your size right.”

Among the clothes were overalls, utilitarian and tough-looking. Fit for a farm.

“These have been fabbed,” she said, caught off guard by something that had once seemed completely normal in such an alien place.

“How can you tell?”

“They smell . . . you know, fresh.”

“This surprises me. I thought you were one of Turner’s crew.”

“We’re temporary allies, that’s all.”

Arcady nodded. “Well, don’t tell the others about the clothes when they get here. They wouldn’t approve.”

“But you trust them, and you say they trust you. How can that work?”

“We’ve been ‘temporary allies’ with Turner Goldsmith for twenty years. We don’t have a problem with d-mat per se, just the way it’s regulated. The Farmhouse has its own closed networks and makes its own patterns. Nothing weird or anything. Just . . . amplifying our produce a little.”

“You grow stuff naturally and then fab it? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It does for some things. Think about it. If everything’s fabbed and nothing’s really grown anymore, there goes mutation. Life gets boring—it’s all about produce. Here, we actively breed for mutation, for novelty. We like randomness, and we like what it brings.”

Clair still didn’t understand.

“You’re not getting dressed,” he said.

She didn’t want to drop the towels while someone was watching her. She felt vulnerable enough already.

“Why don’t you go on ahead of me? I’ll catch up.”

“Can’t do that, I’m afraid. No wandering around the Farmhouse on your own just yet.”

She stared at him. “You’re guarding me?”

“Let’s just say I don’t want you to see anything you shouldn’t.”

Then it occurred to her. There was one class of organic compounds that could be grown but couldn’t legally be transported through d-mat.

The farmers were making drugs—new drugs that no one had ever heard of before, like the one Libby had taken to deal with her Improvement headache. That was why Arcady didn’t want people dropping in on them unexpectedly and why the Air was comprehensively blocked.

“Those apples I saw are for more than just eating, aren’t they? They’re for getting high.”

Arcady winked and turned his broad back on her.

Clair dressed in the uniform of a farmer, deciding as she did so that she could trust the farmers no more or less than Turner did. Terrorists and drug runners. Honor among illegals. But at least their defenses were good—too good even for Q, it seemed. Like everything in recent days, she had to accept the good along with the bad.

She figured she could live with that just as long as the bad wasn’t too bad.