“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?”