The Emergency, page 10
She wasn’t sure of the address, but she suggested a backstreet in the Warehouse District. “Why?” But he only shook his head.
She opened the door, and from somewhere deep within the house a man’s voice called: “My love, did you desert me?” The voice was the director’s—self-amused, complacent with sleep and pleasure. As the freshly painted door closed in Rustin’s face, he remembered something that Annabelle’s demented father had recently muttered, in a moment of characteristic vulgarity and sudden clarity: “When empires fall there’s a lot more fucking.”
15
The Warehouse District looked no different from before the Emergency. There were the same brick façades with broken windows and cavernous bays, the same lumber racked to the rafters and shelves cluttered with machine tools, metal vats filled with grain, stacks of bed frames and chairs blocking sidewalks, chickens hung from their shanks in slaughterhouse doorways, narrow tenement dwellings, puddles of gray water in cobblestone streets, the cold smell of grease and dust, the angry whine of electric tools and men. The city’s dirty work still had to be done somewhere. Most Burghers never set foot in the Warehouse District, but Rustin sometimes came to buy cheap camping gear at a junk dealer’s shop—less to save money than for the pleasure of getting lost in the district’s decayed vitality. As he searched for the street Suzana had mentioned, he noticed that there were no colorful slogans scrawled on walls, no changed street names. The higher spirit of Together seemed to be incompatible with earthly odors and harsh noise.
In the area of the district given to used vehicles, a narrow street crowded with mounds of tires and mufflers and engine blocks matched the name. Outside a shop that echoed with the din of metal grinding and banging on metal, a man in a filthy blue jumpsuit and blue watch cap was kneeling on the cobblestones, hammering away at a piece of tubing.
Rustin stood by and waited until he glanced up.
“I’m looking for a Mr. Kask.”
“You found him.” The man wore an expression of friendly, dough-faced puzzlement. Rustin saw no resemblance of any kind to Suzana.
“I’m a colleague of your cousin Suzana, and—” Rustin was suddenly stymied by the unlikeliness of his mission.
“Yes, sir?”
“I need a vehicle.”
The man set his hammer down and rose painfully to his feet, wiping his hands on the thighs of his jumpsuit. He was tall and pear-shaped, with a meaty neck into which his chin nearly disappeared. “Vehicle?”
“For just a couple of days. An errand in the foothills.”
“What do you want to go out there for?” Kask’s expression grew more puzzled, though no less friendly.
“I know the area. I’ve gone plenty of times.”
“But when was the last time you went?”
Rustin answered vaguely and tried to return to the subject of a vehicle, but Kask persisted.
“It’s a little different now, sir, with the Emergency and all. You have to be a little careful.”
“Yeomen are eating people?”
“I’m not saying that,” Kask said quickly.
“Oh, my daughter’s convinced. Knives and forks.”
Kask frowned and took off his watch cap and studied it. “That whole ‘man-eaters’ thing is overblown. Folks out there are afraid, just like here.”
Rustin thought of the Yeoman boy on his operating table. His father had said something about “games.” “Afraid of what?”
“No one knows what’s going to happen next. They start seeing things different. They get ideas.”
“What kind of ideas?”
Kask squinted, as if weighing Rustin’s ability to take in what he was about to say. “Ever heard of Dirt Thought?”
Rustin pictured a circle of earnest pigs seated in a muddy pen. “What is it?”
“I can’t explain it myself,” Kask went on, “but it’s getting pretty big with young folks out there. Something to do with the old Yeoman ways coming back. Ancient games—animals and such.”
“Dirt Thought. I’m always the last to hear about anything new.” Rustin wasn’t certain what to make of it. “You’ve gone out there lately?”
“I get news. I know people in the country.” A smile dimpled Kask’s soft, heavy jowls. He had a surprise for Rustin. “I’m a Yeoman myself, sir.”
Rustin felt his face go warm. He hadn’t said anything outright insulting, but he’d been too knowing, too easy with his judgments. There was always an awkwardness with Yeomen, both sides stiffened by the effort to show goodwill and hide distrust, and it set in now with Kask.
“But you live in the city?”
“Came here for work when I was fifteen. Thirty-six now.” His eyes brightened and the dimples deepened. “She brought me.”
“Suzana?”
“You said cousin—that’s not really true, sir. She was just a Burgher lady on a country drive who felt sorry for a dumb Yeoman boy because she ran over his dog after stopping for too much millet beer.”
Kask watched with enjoyment as Rustin took this in.
“She set me up here in the district. All these folks around here are Yeomen.” He waved at the shop where the clamor of metal was incessant. “Burghers can’t do this work.”
“Don’t twenty years here make you a Burgher?”
“Like they say, born a Yeoman, die a Yeoman. Dirt to dirt.” Kask laughed a little too hard and then stroked his neck and gazed down the street. Of course he was a Yeoman! All you had to do was look at the big-boned shoulders, the fleshy, leathered face, the eyes at once guileless and hard. Kask gave Rustin the sense that a whiff of pretense would be smelled and scorned—that any use of the new language would end their conversation, not violently but with a scoff. Rustin now understood why, in all the city, the Warehouse District alone had no self-org committee.
“A vehicle won’t be easy, sir,” Kask said. “There aren’t many left.”
“I know.”
The Energy Committee distributed fuel through a system of ration coupons, but the shortage raised the question why anyone would want a vehicle anyway, as if going outside the walls would be an act of disloyalty. The vision of a city without vehicles captured Burgher imaginations, and owners made a show of bringing theirs to repairmen like Kask, who went into a new business as choppers, selling pieces of rubber, metal, and glass for other uses. Vehicles all but disappeared from the streets.
But Kask knew a man who wanted to sell him a small hauler with a wooden bed that ran on switchgrass fuel. That would be an advantage in the country, he said, since switchgrass and soy had just about replaced regular fuel. But the hauler was ancient, the engine badly maintained, and if Rustin ran into difficulty he would have to know a thing or two about repair work in case he couldn’t find a Yeoman willing to help. Rustin said something reassuring and flatly untrue about his mechanical skills. An unexpected twinge of fear made his eyelid twitch.
They agreed on a price. Given the scarcity of intact vehicles, Kask could have asked for more. Rustin recognized the Yeoman’s code of honest dealing. He was getting to like this ungainly and humorless man in a jumpsuit who seemed to take people as he found them. With a trace of old-fashioned manners, he still used “sir,” a word that was now discouraged. Maybe he’d never heard of Together. Kask belonged to two worlds, and that appealed to Rustin, who was beginning to feel as if he belonged to none.
He remembered his last conversation with Cronk, the pig farmer, a year ago. They had discussed the rising price of barley—a subject that meant very little to Rustin but a great deal to Cronk—and they talked for over an hour, the farmer giving details of markets and deliveries, Rustin pretending to understand more than he did. If Cronk noticed, he didn’t seem to care. Relations with Yeomen were like that: incuriosity made them openhearted as well as dull, and if you ignored the difference in status and didn’t expect them to show any interest in the city world, a warm familiarity was possible, with none of the tensions and rivalries that beset relations among Burghers. Now Rustin wanted to hear the whole story of Suzana’s role in Kask’s young life, what he missed from the country, what he thought of Together, what the Emergency meant to the Yeomen out there who had raised him.
Before Rustin could ask anything, Kask leaned over and picked up his hammer. But he didn’t get back to work; he wasn’t yet willing to let Rustin go.
“No offense, sir, but you’re a Burgher,” Kask said. “I’m sure you know what you’re doing, but they don’t see too many of you anymore. They might jump to conclusions.”
“What conclusions?”
“They might not think you are who you think you are.”
This brought Rustin up short. Not who he was, but who he thought he was.
“I’m pretty good at talking to different kinds of people.”
Kask knelt down on the cobblestones and lifted his hammer over the piece of tubing. “Like I said, it’s different now.”
* * *
Rustin found the old junk dealer on one of the side streets that was nothing but battered little shops, all huddled together and barely surviving. Most of Rustin’s camping gear was misplaced or in doubtful condition, and he picked up a secondhand tent and pack, a torch, paraffin lamp, flint and steel, camp stove, canteen, antique brass compass, folding knife, and bedroll, while the dealer—a frail, dusty old man in oversized glasses and a leather apron, who appeared not to have seen sunlight in years—tried to interest him in teacups and snow globes. Rustin stuffed the gear in the pack, strapped on the bedroll, and carried everything out on his back. The unaccustomed weight felt like a promise of something new—something that was not the hospital or the city.
At the end of the street stood a sidewalk market. Rustin’s mental list included fruit, bread, cheese, potatoes, a sack of green beans, a small bag of bulgur, canned meat. But as he made his way under the canopies, the baskets of produce looked almost empty. A few lonely pieces of meat that might have been lamb cuts and chicken parts lay on long sheets of bloody paper.
“Right here, love!” A wide-cheeked, boisterous woman seated on a stool waved Rustin over with a beefy arm. “What do you need, my dear?”
Her wooden boxes contained meager amounts of vegetables and grain. “You’re almost sold out,” Rustin said.
She rummaged in one of the boxes. “What about these gorgeous tomatoes?”
“Where are your goods?”
“Not sold out, love—can’t get them. The wholesale men either.”
“Why can’t you get them?”
“The farm trucks aren’t showing up like they’re supposed to. Some nice carrots?”
She grabbed a handful and brandished them by their tops. She was the hard type of produce woman who would shift in an instant from sweet talk to invective if she didn’t make a sale. Before the Emergency she would have held no interest for him, and he would have kept their talk to a minimum. Now he bought her carrots just to ask more questions.
“How long has it been?”
“Since the trucks stopped?” She thought about it for a moment, then shouted to a neighbor: “Rose, when did those dirty Yeomen stop coming?”
Rose, who had lank gray hair and a mournful face, counted on her fingers. “Six days ago.”
“Six days ago, love,” the produce woman repeated to Rustin. “They’re trying to starve us to death. Hurting themselves, too.”
“Why would they do that? I’ll take the rest of those green beans and potatoes.”
Smiling broadly, she emptied the boxes into a couple of burlap sacks and handed them to Rustin. “They hate us, dear. They’re not educated. My daughter, she’s eleven, and she reads a book every week.”
Rustin wondered if these market women might be from Yeoman land like Kask. “Did they always hate us?”
“Those truckers? We got along fine before the Emergency. That’s when it started.” A thought occurred to her. “You heard about Brave Bella? If that little girl hadn’t thought fast, they would’ve burned the city down.”
Was she recounting the song, or did she believe Brave Bella to be real? “You mean the trolls?”
“Trolls?” Her face lit up. “Never heard that one. Rose, listen to this—mister here calls those Yeomen ‘trolls’!” He had put her in a fine mood. “I’ve heard ‘man-eaters’—never heard ‘trolls.’”
“But Bella is a girl in a song the schools are teaching.”
“That’s right,” the woman said, “and where do you think they got the song, love? They didn’t just make it up.”
“You know that for sure?”
She was slightly offended. “Does Rose look like a liar to you? Of course I’m sure. Everyone knows it.”
Brave Bella was real for the produce woman, and probably half the city. Torch-bearing Yeomen had tried to burn it down. He would never convince her otherwise.
16
It was after Rustin left the sidewalk market, and was walking on a path of slimy cobblestones along the waste canal toward the tram tracks, the straps of his crammed pack digging into his shoulders, that he saw, ten feet away in the open bay of a warehouse whose brick façade bore the faded letters ELECTRICAL AND PLUMBING SUPPLY, a room full of bodies.
They were laid out neatly in rows across a dirt floor, side by side on their backs, fully clothed, faces up, still as death. He flinched and looked away, thinking, They moved the morgue. It used to be in a windowless, cube-shaped building down the street from the hospital. As a medical student he’d spent many hours there. He looked again.
He had no fear of corpses, but he’d never seen anything like the ones lying before him. There must have been a hundred, squeezed together in identical positions without benefit of mortuary sheets, as if they’d been freshly massacred. Their postures were stiffer than ordinary rigor mortis, and they gave off no smell other than the oily fume that pervaded the Warehouse District. Their faces had none of the sunken solemnity that made the corpses he’d seen so remote, so inhuman. These possessed color and feeling, and their eyes were open. They gave the impression of being alive. The really terrible thing was that they were all young—children, teenagers, wearing fanciful garments in bright colors. Pinned to every chest there was a scrap of paper with handwriting on it.
A body lying in the first row was dressed in the blue blouse and plaid skirt and knee socks of a schoolgirl. The paper pinned to her blouse said MAYA. Rustin noticed that some sort of dull greenish, metallic sheathing, like antique armor, covered the girl’s thighs below her skirt, and also her wrists and hands. There were pieces of metal on the corpses around her, too, over necks, collarbones, ankles—wherever missing clothes would have exposed flesh. And not just armor: bits of machinery, gears, dials, copper wiring, rivets, ratchets, rods where shoulders and knees and fingers should have been.
The thought shuddered through his limbs like a fever coming on: They’re not human. These bodies were clothed machines. But the faces—they had the texture of human skin, and individual features. Maya, who looked about twelve, with a pretty upturned nose and pointed chin, was smiling expectantly as if she were opening a birthday present.
“No, no, no! Absolutely not!”
From the shadows in the rear of the bay a man was hurrying toward Rustin between two rows of bodies, making crisp waving gestures as if shooing away hens.
“We’re not open to the public. By appointment only.”
The man was maybe twenty-five but prematurely balding, with round glasses, a tight face above a pencil neck, and an air of superb self-assurance. His shirt and belt and shoes were too formal for a storage depot in the Warehouse District. As he approached, still shooing, Rustin didn’t move.
“Appointment only,” the man repeated. “Please leave.”
“I was passing by. I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“But evidently you are.” The man lifted his meager chin toward Rustin’s overstuffed pack and bedroll. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
“Not really.” He heard himself add: “I just got to the city an hour ago.”
“From?”
Rustin mentioned a smaller city thirty-five miles down the river.
“And you’re on some kind of post-imperial grand tour?”
The tone was nearly offensive, but Rustin didn’t care. Sarcasm directed at a clueless traveler from elsewhere had nothing to do with him. He was going to find out what this superior person—he thought of him as the Manager—was up to.
“Our governing council lost control,” Rustin said. “Breadlines, street fights. I caught the last ferry out.”
“And decided to add yourself to our burdens.”
“We heard things were good here.”
“Be more specific. What did you hear?” With finicky precision the Manager folded his arms across his white button-down shirt, as if even contact with himself was vaguely unpleasant.
“You never elected a council. Everyone organized themselves. It’s called Together. And it’s working.”
This account seemed to please the Manager. “The whole city is a laboratory. We’re experimenting with the last mile to utopia.” He reviewed the flannel shirt and corduroy trousers that Rustin had been wearing for two days. “What was your guild?”
“It—engineering.”
“Ah.” This was obviously the right answer. “Futurum condimus.”
“Exactly.” Rustin had no idea what it meant. He recognized the Manager as the type of Burgher who would be a snob under any form of social organization. “That’s why your—your lab caught my eye.”
“My workshop.”
Trying not to be obvious, Rustin stole a glance at some of the nearby faces. They were uncannily lifelike: this short-haired, melancholy girl with flared nostrils; this boy with a droll expression and wisp of mustache who any moment was going to crack a joke. The Manager noticed, and his lips twitched in an effort to suppress the pleasure that was welling behind his round lenses.
“Really remarkable,” Rustin said, engineer to engineer. “What—” He didn’t know how to go on.
“What are they?” Self-restraint disintegrated on the Manager’s mouth, but even his smile was sour. He turned and pointed at a high wall where a purple-and-yellow banner hung. But instead of TOGETHER it said:
