There was actually a tiny fringe of snow on the north faces of some of the tallest ones, trapped in sheltered bowls and cirques, and Carpenter stared at those turreted patches of white as though he had been translated to some other planetary sphere, one of the moons of Jupiter, perhaps. He had seen snow maybe three times in his life before this. You had to go to the high country, two or three miles above sea level, if you wanted to see it, and then only on the north faces, and at certain times of the year.
Let it snow everywhere, Carpenter thought.
Let the land be covered from sea to sea by a shining white blanket. And let us emerge from it into a pure new springtime of sweet fresh renewed life.
Sure. Sure.
And now he was across the purple-gray mountains, on the far side of the pass, coming down by switchback upon switchback into what he assumed was Nevada. Night was descending quickly. A hard black sky, no moon, plenty of stars, the eerie silent floating lights of space habitats occasionally making their passage among them, visible to the naked eye. Time to settle down for a little while and let the car’s reciprocator get a little ahead of the rate of energy consumption so that it could recharge the batteries for the next leg of the journey.
He had rarely seen such a backdrop of darkness and such an intensity of brightnesses crossing it. The sky here looked cold, cold as space itself, frigid mountain air, a terrible icy clarity to it quite different from city air, eternally swirling with muck. But Carpenter knew that it wasn’t so. That was a hot sky out there, same as anywhere else. Wherever you went in this sorry world the sky was always hot, even at midnight, even at the edge of this dark and star-flecked mountain kingdom.
Carpenter pulled off the road into a turnout cut from the side of the hill he was traversing and had a bleak dinner of packaged algae cakes that he had brought with him from Oakland. He washed it down with a little sour wine from a bottle cached below the dashboard. Then he curled up and slept in the car, with the security alarms on, as though he were in the midst of some deadly city. When the sun sprang into the morning sky and came crashing against his windshield he sat up quickly, bewildered, not knowing for a moment where he was or what was happening, thinking blurrily that he might be back in Spokane, in his dismal little room on the thirtieth floor of the Manito Hotel.
There was actually a town on the valley floor just ahead of him. It even looked inhabited: a couple of dozen houses, some shops, a restaurant or two. Cars moving around, even this early in the morning.
He pulled up outside the restaurant. DESERT CREEK DINER, it said out front. It looked as if it hadn’t been remodeled since about 1925. Carpenter felt as though he had been traveling in time as well as space.
Everyone inside was wearing a face-lung. That seemed wrong, wearing face-lungs in this outpost of 1925, but Carpenter put his on and went in.
A genuine human waitress. No androids, no table visors, no data pads for entering your orders. She smiled at him, eyes twinkling above the breathing-mask.
“What’ll it be? Scrambled eggs? Coffee?”
“Fine,” Carpenter said. “That’s what I’ll have.”
He hadn’t left California yet, he discovered shortly. The Nevada boundary was another couple of miles down the road.
His Company credit card took care of the meal. He still had that much corporate existence, apparently.
When he had eaten he set off toward the east again. The morning flowed toward him out of Utah. Everything was sandy and almost colorless here, and the landscape had the look of not having felt rain since at least the thirteenth century. There were jagged mountains here, not anything like the Sierra but big enough, pink in the early light and then golden brown. Fluffy white clouds, deep blue sky with faint yellow striations of greenhouse gases.
This was such a beautiful world, Carpenter thought, before we messed it up.
He prayed again, vaguely, incoherently. Ave Maria, gratia plena. Ora pro nobis. Now and at the hour of our death. On us poor sinners.
Farther to the east there were mountains of an unfamiliar kind, long chains of narrow-ridged fangs, bright red in color as if they were glowing with some interior fire. They seemed incredibly ancient. Carpenter half expected to see prehistoric animals grazing in the flatlands below them. Brontosauruses, mastodons.
No dinosaurs, though. No mastodons. Not much of anything. Pebbles, a little weedy-looking grass, some skittering lizards, that was about it. He found what looked like an old reservoir that still held some water, and stopped and stripped for a bath, which he was coming to need very badly. The water looked safe to enter. And this early in the day he could risk letting his skin have a little extra solar exposure.
The pond was dark and deep and Carpenter thought the water might be too cold to enter, but it wasn’t, not especially. Tepid, in fact. But reasonably pure. There weren’t any chemical stains turning the surface iridescent, hardly any pond scum here, no alligators grinning up at him out of the depths, not even a frog in sight. A real novelty for him, actual outdoor bathing in genuine unpolluted water. It felt good to be clean again. A baptism, of sorts.
A few hours’ drive on the other side of those flaming gorges the countryside began to be populated again. Some pitiful scruffy farms, some miserable ramshackle houses, a few falling-down barns that looked five hundred years old. The inhabitants probably not very friendly. Carpenter went on through without stopping. Beyond the farms was a dusty town, and beyond that a city, which he bypassed. A dull gray haze lay over everything here. Even inside the sealed car, he felt a taste of interior-America heat, interior-America smog, outlying tentacles of the heavy oppressive mass of murk that pressed down everywhere on the midsection of the nation with brutal indifferent force. The air was like a fist, clamping close. He knew that if he stopped the car and stepped outside he would be struck by a blast of scorching Saharan torridity.
During the course of the morning he called Nick Rhodes, simply to tell him what had happened to him, where he was now, where he was heading. Carpenter hadn’t wanted to talk to Rhodes the day before, but now it seemed wrong simply to vanish like this, without a word to him. Otherwise, when Rhodes found out that Carpenter had been terminated by Samurai he might think that he had killed himself. Carpenter didn’t want that.
Rhodes’ office android informed him that Dr. Rhodes was in conference. A little relieved, Carpenter said, “Tell him that Paul Carpenter called, that I’ve left the Company as a result of certain recent events and I’m going to Chicago for a few days to visit a friend, and that I’ll be in touch with him again when I know what my plans beyond that are.” He sidestepped the android’s request for a number where he might be reached. For the moment this was about as far as he could go toward making contact with the life he had left behind him.
Carpenter was hoping now to reach Chicago late that night, or at the worst by dawn. The car didn’t ever get tired. All he had to do was sit still and let the miles float by in their merry hundreds. He didn’t have much in the way of food left now, but he didn’t have much in the way of appetite, either. Sit still, yes, let the miles float by.
He passed through long stretches of terrible wasteland: slagheaps, ashes, blasted heaths. Smoke was coming from the ground in places: the remains of ancient fires burning down there, the subterranean world mysteriously consuming itself. An entire dark forest of dead trees covering a long brown strip of sharp-spined hills, with a rusting ski-lift descending out of them like a bad joke. A dry lake. A zone of dead gray earth, a tangle of blackened and twisted wires, mounds of junked cars—in the background, the skeletal traces of some abandoned city, structural girders showing, window-frames like empty eye-sockets.