stop.
He did.
The shovel saved Hanson from actually falling. He leaned against it, legs rubbery, knees flexed, breath rasping in his throat. Oristano’s face swam under his eyelids. It superimposed itself over the coal-mountain, the two things merging into an inhuman, undefeatable entity—a god of black malignancy. He opened his eyes. Slowly, his vision cleared. Planes of bloody shadow resolved into the New Man, who was staring at him with a worried, embarrassed expression. He caught Hanson’s eye and smiled hesitantly—he didn’t want to rub Hanson’s face in his victory. He was still being very polite.
Gossard caught the tension in the air and went doggedly back to work, not wanting to watch Hanson’s final humiliation. Tac made an obscure, fatalistic gesture with his fingertips; Tic stroked his shoulder, pursed wet lips—they started shoveling again. Relk looked around with an air of sly, senile vindication, made a muffled hunh sound, and turned away, muttering something about dedication to the coal pile as he dug his blade into it.
Hanson drew himself up. His arms and back throbbed as if they had been beaten with clubs and there was no strength in his legs; he wobbled in spite of his best efforts to brace himself. The New Man pretended not to notice. Hanson ran his tongue around his lips, tasted blood, swallowed it. Defeat slumped his spine, burned his brain to ash. He waited for some ashen thought to filter down through his new ash brain, but no thought came—it was as barren as the Moon. Sternly, he took control of his face and forced himself to smile back at the New Man. It wasn’t really his fault; he was a good boy. Blame himself instead. Blame Oristano. Blame Time.
The New Man relaxed, visibly relieved—his smile broadened into a grin from which with all the best will in the world, it was impossible for him to keep a trace of satisfied triumph. This is his hour, Hanson thought, let him enjoy it. He was being good about it anyway, out of respect for Hanson’s reputation. How very strange that was. When had living admiration become respect for a legend? How could the line have slipped up on him and past without his notice? Had he been that blind? Wasn’t he still the same man he’d always been, below the old bones?
The New Man fished in his pocket and came up with a narc. He scratched the stick on his hip; the narc flared and then guttered to an orange ember-glow at its tip. A wisp of smoke curled up around his massive forearm like the ghost of a snake. The New Man offered the narc to Hanson: a friendly monster, smiling and huge, sweat runneling his broad face.
Hanson hesitated, studying the sweaty giant, and then took the narc. He put the horn-tipped end of the resin stick in his mouth and sipped deeply, holding a smoldering pine forest in his lungs. The New Man produced another narc. They stood smoking together while the sun baked them dry of sweat. Coal rustled unheeded around their feet.
“Hot sumbitch, a’n’t it?” the New Man said.
“Ai,” Hanson said, trying not to sound too much like a dead man. Prodding himself: “A’ways is, this time of year. Freeze your ass off in winter though. A’ways one or the other, up here. You a’n’t never going to be comfortable.”
“Ai.”
The New Man was staring out across the sweep of Orange: seas of hunched, dirty roofs, narrow alleys, smoke-belching chimneys, here and there the broken skeleton of a ruined Utopian building towering above the squalor, picked clean, naked and pathetic. “Can see a hell of a ways, though, up here,” the New Man said enthusiastically. “Most all of the city I’ll bet, near about.”
“Ai, the whole Goddamn shitpile.” He wouldn’t turn his head to look at the Wall, though he was sharply aware of its presence. It beat against him like a hand of light, the knowledge of that golden, heartless thing.
Far as Hanson could tell from here, the Wall marched across the whole world and never came to an end. The Goddamned thing just never ended at all.
He blinked back sudden tears of rage and sorrow so great they squeezed his heart.
“Come on,” he said, and punched the giant in the shoulder. And picked up his shovel.
And somehow he managed to keep working throughout the afternoon, although his mind was not there at all most of the time. His body seemed to manage well enough without it.
It was dark by the time the shift ended. Hanson gave the signal to quit work, and they shouldered their tools and shuffled single file along the curb to the lip of the Pit.
Oristano met them at the lip.
To Hanson, the foreman looked like a gross manikin sculpted from shadow, a hunched puddle of darkness that even starlight couldn’t melt, merely glinting dully from teeth and eyes. He was backlit by the furnace glare that escaped around the iron doors behind him, and his bloated silhouette suddenly seemed to be that of a monster toad crouched in a smoldering sulfur swamp, waiting for weary flies to spiral hopelessly down within reach. Hanson could almost see the sticky, supple frog-tongue licking out, flickering impatiently down and around the foreman’s waist. Then Oristano stepped forward, and the rough blob of his head split open to reveal an ugly, tooth-glinting grin. Oristano was big, half a head shorter than Hanson, but built broader and heavier. Hanson could remember him as a svelte bear of a man, covered with bristly black hair, clumsy but very powerful, and with a bear’s sick, uncertain temper. Time and ease had added weight until now he was grossly fat—not the flabby stuff of Gossard’s affliction, but tight-packed and well-muscled lard that made him look even more dangerous than he had in the past. Usually he was brusque with Hanson, and the two spoke little to each other, making no attempt to hide their dislike. Tonight he greeted Hanson with boisterous good cheer and an exaggerated oily courtesy, asking Hanson in a loud voice if the New Man had worked out all right.
“Yes,” Hanson answered quietly, “he works very well.” The shovel felt incredibly heavy against his bruised shoulder. He bowed grudgingly under its weight. Alternate waves of hot and cold ran along his body, and a faint nausea returned. He could sense the New Man somewhere off to his right, embarrassed again, made uneasy by the sadistic malice in Oristano’s voice and the weary, beaten hatred in Hanson’s, aware that the two older men were acting out some ritual that he couldn’t quite understand but in which he had played an integral part.
“He’s a good worker, ai?” Oristano boomed.
“Yes,” Hanson said.
Oristano grinned, another flash of crooked teeth. “Good, good.” Flash again. “That’s good, ai?”
Hanson nodded dully.
“Ai.” Oristano laughed, and waved a ponderous arm. Factory artisans rolled the fire door open—the sudden blast of hot light sent Oristano’s shadow leaping out, swelling and elongating fantastically, washing over Hanson—and began to carry equipment out. Hanson’s shift moved up from the curb, swirling around Hanson, and filed along the platform behind the lip to make room. The new shift waited by the fire doors as the artisans gingerly carried old spotlights out to position them along the curb. The line of artisans broke around Oristano: ants around a boulder. Neither man had moved. Oristano bulked like an ogre on the platform, goblin-grin glistening wetly. Hanson remained at the junction of curb and lip, shovel still slung across his shoulders, watching wearily.
The artisans had clamped the spotlights to the curb at intervals, muzzles tilted up at an angle so that their glare wouldn’t blind the shovelers, but would give enough light to work the Pit. Now they were stringing much-patched wires back along the underside of the curb, where they’d be out of the way of pivoting feet, and testing connections. The spotlights came on one by one, at low intensity: a herd of giant rheumy orange eyes—dinosaurs jostling down in the dark to drink. The nearest spot spilled shifting orange patterns across Hanson’s knotted back, up and along the bulge of Oristano’s naked belly. Then the spot came on at full strength, slicing a white column through jet. In the sudden glare, Hanson could see Oristano’s face clearly for the first time that evening: heavy-jowled, eyes pinched shut with fat; lips absurdly small and delicate; a mashed, shattered nose laced with old white scars, hair peeking in tufts from the nostrils. The same beam illuminated the upper half of the pile and the ceaseless crawling of the coal.