The Emergency, page 30
“I’m sailing across the deep blue sea,” he sang softly, and glanced down for a quiver of recognition in her face. Her eye was closed in a wince, her lips parted as if to articulate a complaint that never came.
He looked out the windshield. A vast field of stars glittered overhead. Without his jacket the night was very cold. He wished for a way—a book, cigar, game of cards, surgery—to rid his overcharged mind of the thoughts colliding like electrons in his skull.
“Sel, do you remember your constellations? I always forget a few. You know them better than me.”
He began to say the names. When he came to Ursa Major, he recited the story of Callisto the bear as if Selva were five years old and hearing it for the first time.
“Then Zeus carried Callisto to the sky, and she was safe there.” Selva was moaning softly.
Below her legs he made out a pair of dog eyes turned up to his. There was so much sentience in them, such complete understanding, that it seemed as if Zeus was at last about to speak. The words he longed to utter were right behind his eyes. All he needed was the skill to move his muzzle, and they would come.
“For God’s sake, say something.” Zeus tilted his head, trying to make sense of the unfamiliar command, ready to do anything in his power.
Aren’t you Yeomen? Why did that move him? Baard’s wife had instantly recalled an earlier time, before the Emergency, before animal heads and hot irons and guns, before the implacable will in Big Cronk’s eyes not to know what Rustin knew—when a Yeoman was someone who came to the aid of an injured child. She was still living in that time. There’d been ignorance for sure, and meanness, and plenty of hardship, but no idea like Dirt Thought had been strong enough to snuff out the impulse that made you wince at someone else’s pain. Now all that remained of the old world was a woman’s torchlit face disfigured by indignation.
He wondered, far from the first time, at how quickly it had all fallen apart. The empire’s skin must have been so thin it could hardly hold the body together. Its cohesion turned out to consist of nothing more than names of streets, rooms in a museum, good manners, thoughtless habits—nothing as strong and deep as common feeling, or truth. As if all along there had been something shoddily made, flimsy and fake, about a whole way of life. Yet he had lived as if it would last forever. Even with the Emergency, while he was inside the city walls he continued to believe that any conflict could be averted face to face, with words. Burghers and Yeomen could sit down and establish why the produce trucks had stopped coming, what past injustices needed redress, how to reintegrate the two sides in a new system acceptable to both.
But he had seen the shameful thing at the quarry, and he could never forget it.
When he was a small boy, his father had taught him the names of all the constellations. His father had been a general practitioner and a solemn man of a generation that struggled to find words for their children, but one night on a fishing trip not far outside the city they had stood together on the riverbank and his father had pointed out the lighted figures, human and animal, across the sky. That knowledge had imposed an order on the world as reassuring as the empire itself, had brought the sky near like the painted ceiling of a room in which he was growing up. He used to test himself by picking out the familiar arrangements of stars until he had counted them all. Later, he passed on the secrets of the universe to his children, hoping they would do the same with theirs.
But tonight in the moonless darkness of the switchgrass plains he couldn’t find the constellations. There were too many stars, they were too far away, the patterns eluded him. He shivered again. Something cold and random in the night sky was frightening him, and he lowered his eyes to the road. If the tiny, infinitely fragile girl whose head was resting in his lap died, the stars wouldn’t care. His loss wouldn’t trouble the universe; it would be unutterable, would barely make a sound. And she would die, sooner or later, and so would he, and all of them, and everything he cared about would vanish to a cosmic shrug. The stars would go on glittering in their immense indifference. He had never truly known this before.
They weren’t human—that was the thing about constellations. They were lucky that way, the stars. What good is it to feel and know and love when it will break you up in the end? No wonder children want to become something else—animals or machines. The Manager at the workshop said something about that—something about a cactus in your brain. “What’s wrong with them? What’s wrong with you?” Because a human being turns out to be the most ridiculous thing in the world. Just asking for it. Asking for a reason and getting a punch in the face. Human First? More like Human Last.
What a funny little Rustin I am, with my operating theater, my code of ethics and coat of arms and these leather shoes. Articulate sack of shit. Skull full of ideas floating on the deep blue sea. But it’s not funny if the universe doesn’t laugh.
Again he saw the pig head fall. “I was supposed to take care of you.” She was far away and didn’t hear.
If the world is going to have a boy with a pig head in it—because we must have given them nothing—who are you to think you can think for yourself? All that matters is taking care of her, and you didn’t do it, and you can’t do it all alone out here under these stars. Look at what a funny little Rustin you are. You have to join a side, any side, whatever they call it, Together, Dirt Thought, and it doesn’t matter if they believe in Stranger Friends and metal gods or birds shitting vines and Gard the Great, because who are you to think for yourself? You have to join a side.
He was on any side that didn’t try to kill his daughter.
7
They were on the hard road now, and it was easier to tell that she was breathing, but he held his palm above her face to feel the warmth of her breath. From time to time a howl tore out of her, followed by sobbing that slowly ebbed to dry shudders and then stillness.
Suddenly the hauler sputtered as if it was about to let out its own cry of pain. Her right eye opened. He knew from a glint, a tiny light of recognition, that she was looking at him.
“Sel, can you hear me? It’s Papa.”
Her lips moved but no sound came.
“You understand me! That’s good.” He began using his post-op voice, for his own sake more than hers. “I know it hurts. You’re being brave. Brave Selva. We’re on our way home. We’ll be there soon. I’ll get you to the hospital and you’ll feel better.”
The hauler jolted again.
“Damn!” His surgeon’s composure disintegrated. Here in the middle of the plains, half an hour from the North Gate, they were going to run out of fuel. And then what? Carry her to the city? “Damn fool Burgher!”
A quarter mile ahead lights were flickering on the right side of the road. The monotony of the plains made it hard to know for sure, but from the semicircle of dwellings he thought this might be the last and the first Yeoman settlement, the one that had greeted them a few days ago with a hurled rock. Quickly he switched off the headlights.
The roadside settlements here survived partly by selling home goods to travelers—garden vegetables, linens woven from flax, jars of linseed oil. Kask had said that the hauler ran on switchgrass fuel. Next to the road, with miles of fields all around, the local Yeomen must have plenty of it stored somewhere.
He brought the hauler to a stop on the dirt shoulder. He was thinking through a plan. It depended on too many guesses and chances, but he saw no other way.
She was still looking at him with her one eye. He kept the engine running, and with almost no fuel left it hardly made a sound. “Sel, I have to get something important. I won’t be gone long. If you need me, if it’s urgent, just one honk. I’ll hear it.” He took her hand where it was folded with the other over his jacket and set it on the hauler’s horn. “One honk. Zeus will stay with you.” Her lips tightened; he couldn’t tell if she understood. He eased her head down on the seat and climbed out of the hauler and stuffed the gun inside his pocket. He was about to tell Zeus not to follow, but Zeus hadn’t moved.
The lights were a hundred yards away—no farther than the walk from the rowhouse to the tram stop, Rustin told himself, as if this calculus could improve the odds of success. He didn’t dare use his torch, but the flint gave him just enough flickering light to see the ground at his feet. He wasn’t worried about traps, but he feared stumbling on an uneven patch of dirt and making a noise that would travel across the silence to the settlement. He didn’t know these people. He didn’t know the people in Gandorig’s village either, but a prior contact had made the encounter a little less threatening.
In front of the settlement a produce truck was standing on the roadside. A length of timber ran from the ground up to the lowered gate of the bed. Someone was slowly mounting it with a pail in hand, and someone else stood on the gate, working with a shovel. Rustin stopped short and realized with relief that his own clothes were dark. On the side of the yard closest to the road lamplight shone in the clay-brick house. Three squat structures curved behind it into darkness. He left the road and cut through the field that he thought he remembered, finding his footing on the crumbling dirt with each step, approaching the outbuildings from the back of the settlement. He breathed deeply, trying to locate the warm, baked-bread odor of switchgrass fuel. But what he smelled instead was manure.
The smell was coming from a structure closest to the field. He hadn’t known that these Yeomen owned cows or horses. As he drew near, the smell became something so much worse than manure that he had to move away into the field as he passed. It was human excrement—fresh, black, dense shit. The stench was so overpowering that the entire pit must have been full up. Why didn’t they douse their latrine with ashes or kerosene? Rustin was professionally familiar with all the juices of life and death—urine, feces, blood, bile, pus, rot—but he had to stifle a retch.
The outbuildings were hardly more than sheds, all in a state of disrepair. He wondered if these people were too poor to have anything to sell. Inside the third shed, separated from the back of the house by just a few yards, he found a wooden barrel that looked like a cask of millet beer. When he removed the lid, the surface on which a ladle was floating gleamed oily. Even here the smell from the latrine was too strong for him to be sure this was switchgrass fuel until he bent over the barrel and inhaled.
He found a canister in a corner of the shed and was about to pick up the ladle when he heard a noise. He ducked under the window and peered out. The back door of the house opened, lamplight fell on the ground, and a figure small enough to be a child came out into the yard. Rustin thought he recognized the boy who had thrown the rock. He was walking toward the latrine, carrying a pail, and for a moment Rustin thought he was going to deposit the family’s night soil. Then the boy stopped and turned around to speak to someone inside the doorway.
“Why do I have to?”
“All the men are doing it,” a young woman’s voice said. “You’re almost a man now.”
“But I don’t want to.”
“Shh. Just go on. They need help. It’s getting late, they have plenty more stops.”
As the boy continued toward the latrine, a man appeared from around the side of the house. He was also carrying a pail, and wearing overalls and boots to his knees. “What’s taking your boy so long?” he growled.
“It’s not work he’s used to,” the young woman said apologetically.
“Everyone has to do their part.”
“He’ll do his part.”
From the latrine came the noise of the boy gagging, the pail clanking, a thick splash, then the creak of a heavy chain being pulled to the sound of the boy’s grunts. A minute later he came out of the shed. The pail was now so heavy that it turned his body lopsided.
“Go on around to the truck,” the man said. “Climb up the ramp and throw it in the bed, you’re big enough. If you need help, ask my partner.” As the boy struggled through the yard, the man called after him, “Don’t fall in!”
“He’s just ten,” the young woman said. “He’s still a boy.”
“Other families, I’ve got six-year-olds carrying pails. Everyone has to do their part.”
“We’re doing our part,” she said. “Been saving it all week, ever since we were told to.”
“How many are you?”
“Just me and the four children. That makes five.”
“Where’s their father?”
The young woman made a noise of spitting out something bitter. “Left me for millet beer.”
“Well, that’s a shame.”
The man disappeared into the shed, followed by the noise of metal rattling and chain clanking. He came back out into the yard with the full pail and paused by the lighted doorway, from which the young woman hadn’t moved.
She said, “We appreciate all you’re doing for the Yeoman people.”
“Being by yourself out here on the front line—you might need help,” the man said. “I work at the Tall Pine lumber mill, where the river takes that big bend.”
“You think something’s going to happen out here?”
“Something’s already happened. One of them shot a boy dead in the hills.”
There was a sharp intake of breath. “When?”
“Just today. That’s why we’re collecting tonight. We were going to wait a week, but there’s no time. We want to hit them before they do something big.”
“But how—” She left the question hanging as if it would be indelicate to finish.
“Built a machine on wheels that can send it clear over the walls. Fire, move, fire, move.”
The young woman released an involuntary snort of hilarity. “A shitapult.”
The man didn’t laugh. “They’ll go lower than that if we give them a chance.”
“You just can’t keep the Yeomen down.”
Rustin crouched, holding his nose, straining to hear, waiting for a distress call from the hauler’s horn. But the trips to the latrine continued for a quarter hour, until the man came out of the shed dragging the empty pail by the chain and announced, “That’s your quota.” He went to a pump in the middle of the yard and worked the handle, splashing water over the bucket and chain and his boots. “Good job, son,” he told the boy, who was standing by the back door where the figure of the young woman was silhouetted against the light inside the house. The man walked through the yard a final time, carrying the pail with the chain around his neck. “Don’t forget,” he said. “Tall Pine lumber mill. Ask for Steny.”
“I won’t forget,” the young woman said. “See you around, Steny.”
8
Ladling switchgrass fuel into the canister and crossing the field without spilling took another ten minutes. By the time Rustin reached the hauler and filled the tank, the noise of the produce truck had disappeared up the road in the direction of the city, its lights extinguished by the night. Selva’s hand still lay on the horn, and her eye was open. There was no relief in it, or anger or fear, or expression of any kind, but he saw that she had been waiting for him. In some way he existed for her.
He was going to tell her what he had just seen and heard, then thought better of it. Too upsetting if she understood. He could hardly believe it himself, and as they drove the last miles to the city, leaving the switchgrass plains behind for the marshy hardwood groves, joining the river and following it past the new Burgher settlements, which were dark and quiet in the midnight hour, he was unable to think of anything else. But thinking yielded no real thoughts, only a kind of horrified stupor. Their project mesmerized him. Maybe that was its genius. There was something so audacious about it, so inventive and barbaric, so low, as the man with the pail had said. It would break through the final restraint, and there would be no going back. Nothing could restore the brittle illusion of civilization that had allowed the empire to last so long. They could survive gunfire, but not a shitapult. It was going to smear them all.
He tried to imagine a hatred so deep and hot that it had led to this. His own hatred of the animals who had hurt Selva fell short. It was possible to think of killing them, but not doing this. He saw it as a failing in himself, almost a lack of military preparedness, one that might end up costing him dearly, and he clung to the image of the pig head and the boy with feral eyes.
Rustin was wondering how many trucks were involved in the operation and what time it would start, when up ahead loomed the high arch of the North Gate.
The objects that had been inside the gate before now formed an obstacle course on the other side, forcing Rustin to slow down. Behind the barrier half a dozen guards stood warming themselves around a barrel fire, their uniforms glowing dark green. The first to hear the hauler’s engine grabbed the rifle that was slung over her shoulder and raised it to the firing position. Rustin recognized her as the same guard, the Wide Awake, who had asked for his papers when they were leaving the city. She shouted a command—it sounded like “Ready positions!”—and the other guards produced rifles with an efficiency that amazed Rustin.
He came to a stop ten feet in front of the gate. A whole squad of Wide Awakes held the hauler in its sights. The guns were old bolt-action rifles but alarming all the same. From the floor Zeus was barking wildly.
“Cover me, Iver!” the squad commander said. She walked around the barrier, still aiming at Rustin on her approach, while a boy, the same boy who had been at the gate the day of their departure, who had invaded the hospital with the looters, who had sat next to Selva in school, trailed behind with his rifle raised.
When the commander came up to Rustin’s window, she lowered her rifle. “It’s you.” She looked astonished to see him, and not unhappy. She glanced at the boy standing behind her, who was still pointing his gun while his face twitched in a spasm that he seemed to be trying to master. “It’s him, Iver. Humanitarian mission.”
This was a better reception than Rustin had expected. Perhaps it wouldn’t matter that he’d lost his “Safer Together” pass. He was about to explain about Selva when the commander stepped back from the window.
