“You know what it’s about.” Willis held the rifle steady, no posturing, and no way he could miss at this distance, a man to whom the gun held no glamour but was just another tool to be used with a minimum of waste-motion and fuss.
“Listen,” Hanson said, and then lapsed into silence. What could he possibly say? That numb despair and resignation were seeping back in, soaking into his bones the way his piss had soaked into the black dirt and the preening hoppers, making it impossible for him to speak. He knew that he should plead for his life, but he couldn’t summon the energy to do it. He should have known that he could never get away, never get free of the morass of Orange and the mess he’d made of his life. He should have known that everything would catch up to him, that the world would reach out and crush him as casually as he would crush a bug. He had known that, in fact, known it with a fatalism that was deeply ingrained in the marrow of his bones. He’d fooled himself into forgetting it for a moment, into letting himself feel a moment of relief and hope, and now the retribution when it came, when Willis squeezed the trigger of the rifle and the bullet ripped his body apart, would be even more bitter and black by comparison. His luck had never been good; he’d allowed himself to think for a while that it was turning, but now, as he should have known it would, it had run out entirely instead. He cursed himself for the hundred opportunities he’d let go by to slip over the side of the transport and disappear into the wilderness between towns, where he might have carved out a living of some sort for himself. He had a gun, there were brigands he could join… But now it was too late. Maybe it always had been too late.
After all, what did it really matter? If Willis didn’t kill him now, sooner or later the Crab in his belly would.
They stared at each other over the sights of Willis’s rifle. A wind came up and swirled dust around Hanson’s feet.
For what seemed like a very long time, neither man spoke.
At last Willis nodded to the side. Hanson’s knapsack sat there, in the shadow of the transport, old and frayed, pathetically small. “You’re family,” Willis said, “of sorts. Blood’s thicker’n water, they say. Can’t bring myself to kill you. But I won’t let myself be used neither.”
Hanson nodded, said nothing. The moment of crisis wasn’t over; he knew that there was still time for Willis to change his mind.
“A man like you,” Willis said. “A man like you—” Instead of finishing the thought, he noisily cleared his throat and spat a great gob of phlegm to the side. Then, raising his voice, he shouted, “Brigault! Get off yer thumb and let’s get out of here!”
As Willis strode off Hanson noticed for the first time that he had a slight limp, a stiffness in one leg that caused him to pull up slightly at the top of each stride. Willis was getting old, too. They were all getting old. To match the world, which was itself old, old and worn-out and weary, grown gray with the dust of millions of generations of lives and stained black with the residue of innumerable sins.
3
HANSON STOOD THERE for a long time, staring at the train pulling away until it had dwindled to a distant string of moving red jewels, and then, after it had vanished completely, at the empty road itself, a gray streak through blackness.
The night gathered around him. Crows exploded up out of the trees on the crest of a distant hill, startled by some noise in the forest, wheeling against the darkening sky and crying out harshly as they flew, in some guttural language he could not understand, finally settling back down into the treetops again. Then there was only silence, broken occasionally by the soughing of the wind through the trees, and by the distant and plaintive chime-like sobbing of some unknown creature far away among the trees in the dark.
At last, when he could stand the quiet and the black eventlessness no longer, he stooped to pick up his knapsack. The gun was still there, wrapped in his second pair of trousers. He stuck it in his belt.
There was a trail, hardly more than a deer run, that ran through the clearing here at right angles to the road, and briefly he vacillated between the two directions it proffered him. Then, because it hardly mattered, he chose one at random, and started walking.
The sun had gone out of the sky entirely now, the last orange cloud of sunset guttering from red to purple-gray to sullen black, and only the soft light from the Wall suffused the wood, flushing it with an unearthly coral glow that cast strange iridescent shadows with blood red edges. Hanson had been traveling for hours, following the trail through the rubble of Utopian ruins, imperishable foundations filled with waters rust-red and turquoise-blue from chemical poisons leached out of the surrounding soil, and the occasional rotting and incomprehensible machine, the remnants of a centuries-long Retreat from the bright dwellings of the Utopians. He pushed his way through woods spotted with feral ornamentals and fruit trees that over the ages had drifted away from their original functions and now produced fruit indigestible to human stomachs… or that perhaps had been designed in the first place to feed unknown and long-vanished races, strange and inhuman races that had been so thoroughly forgotten that neither their names nor even the memory of their presence had survived, save only for the trees. In all this time, he had seen nobody and arrived nowhere, but only walked, unthinking, like an automaton.
Then he saw the glint of firelight up ahead.
He stopped. Whoever or whatever was before him, it was probably best to avoid them altogether. Only outlaws, bandits, or worse would be out in these unwholesome ruins. Honest men would have no reason to be here.
Thinking this, he could almost have laughed. He had nothing in common with honest men anymore. He was an outlaw himself now, cast out from human company like a manshogger or pariah dog.
In the darkness, somebody coughed.
Hanson stiffened in astonishment. The cough had been quiet and deliberate, a noise he was meant to hear. There was a lookout guarding the path, unseen, and he had just been warned that if he tried to turn away now, he was as good as dead. No help for it, he had to go forward, follow the light to its source, seek common cause with whatever human refuse clustered about its warmth. He belonged there now, after all, didn’t he?
Pushing through a stand of bamboo, he entered a clearing. Dark forms hunkered about the campfire, as stolidly motionless as so many apes. They looked up incuriously at his approach, firelight flickering in their eyes. There were at least a dozen of them, perhaps as many as fifteen or sixteen; the half-light, guttering and then flaring again sporadically, made it hard to tell exactly. The pale, near-human corpse of a thant, spitted on a stick, was roasting over the fire. The peculiar stench of the roasting meat filled the clearing, thick and pungent and strange, hovering uneasily somewhere between appetizing and nauseating.
With a swagger he did not feel, Hanson strode into the light, ostentatiously loosening the gun in his belt, making sure they all got a good look. Paradoxically, the bright fire gathered darkness about itself, blinding him, making him perfectly vulnerable. He cleared his throat. “Who’s boss here?”
For a long moment nobody moved. It was as if he had asked a deeper and more profound question than they were prepared to address, as if he’d challenged them to count the stars in the sky or riddle him the meaning of human pain or draw a street map of the City of God.
He was sweating now; the fire seemed to roar up inside of him. He kept one hand firm on the butt of the revolver, though it was really useless here—easiest thing in the world to come up from behind and brain him with a rock if that’s what they had a mind to do. The gun, the fabulously valuable gun, only made him so much less secure, for it gave them something to gain from his death.