She followed him, strangely excited, afraid to interfere, and heard his sudden exclamation. “What is it?” She came hesitantly to his side, tugging at her snagged skirts.
“I don’t know…” He kneeled down by a flat piece of metal, warped at one end. She saw a rectangle of green paint, a yellow diamond inside it, a blue circle filled with stars. A band of white, with lettering, arced across the sky. “But that,” he pointed at the rectangle, “is the Brasilian flag!”
“What’s Brasil?”
“A place. A country.”
“Where? Beyond the mountains? Is it like the mayor’s domain?”
“I don’t know.” He frowned. “That’s all I can remember. But the words Ordem e Progresso: that means ‘order and progress’ ... I think it does. Brasilian must be the other language I speak—for whatever good that does me.” He got up.
Dog came bounding to them, something large and brown flopping in his jaws. Amanda grimaced, “Dog! Don’t bring your carcasses to me—!”
“No, wait, it’s not an animal. Come here, Dog! Bring it here, good boy ...” The stranger held out his hand; Dog came to him obediently, tail beating. Amanda wondered if Dog knew a fellow outcast by instinct, or why he gave this one other person his trust. “It looks like a hat—” The stranger pried it loose from Dog’s massive jaws, pounded his back in appreciation. Dog smiled, panting. “Could it be from around here?”
She shook her head.
He turned it in his hands: “It must be mine,” and he looked inside. His breath caught. “‘Cristovao Hoffman,’” he said quietly. “Cristovao…I’m Cristovao Hoffmann!”
“Do you remember—?”
“No.” His mouth pulled down. “No, I don’t remember! Hell, for all I know Cristovao Hoffmann’s the man who made that hat!” He looked back at her, defeated, set the hat on top of his bandages; it fell off. “But it doesn’t matter. I’ll be Cristovao Hoffmann; it doesn’t feel so bad. I have to be somebody. Christ, maybe I made the hat.” He started away across the field to the main wreckage, the mutilated skeleton of the flying ship. She picked up his hat, began to strip wheat from the stalks to fill it up.
When she reached the charred hulk of the flying ship, she found him lying senseless in the grass.
The clouds closed around him like soft wings as he reached the wreck, stealing him away from the dream world of his waking reality, back into the reality of his dreams. He chose a door: The clouds parted, and he was flying. . . .
Hoffmann followed the frayed brown-green ribbon of the river out of the mountains, looking down on the sun’s anvil pocked with skeletal shrubs: the desert that stretched to the sea. “If anybody’s crazy enough to live here now, they’ve got to be sane enough to stay by the water…” On every side, for as far as he could see, a faint rectangular gridwork patterned the desolation. He caught occasional flickers of blinding whiteness, the sun mirrored on metal and glass. This was the Los Angeles basin: hundreds of square miles of accessible aluminum, steel and iron…copper, tungsten, rare earth elements ... all the riches of a benevolent nature, waiting for discovery and recognition. Waiting for him. Waiting for him…His skin itched with desire; tomorrow he would begin to explore.
But with the desperate scarcity of one thing—fossil fuels—no one would ever make use of his discovered bounty, unless there was an available pool of local labor to do what machines could not. He knew small primitive villages and colonies stretched northward up the coast from the South American continent, cut off from all but the most fragmentary dirigible contact with the Brasilian Hegemony: Today he would search for those. If there was an available subsistence agriculture the specialists could upgrade, then the local population, and even imported laborers, could be put to work mining the treacherous, possibly radioactive ruins. The people would have more food, better medical care—and lose their freedom of choice, and their lives, in grueling servitude to the government. It had been the way of governments since the first city-state, and though it troubled Hoffmann somewhat that he had a part in it now, he seldom thought about why. Prospecting was the one thing that gave any real meaning to his life, that evoked any real emotion in him: He endured his fellow men to the extent that they made it possible for him to live the way he did; beyond that, he chose to live without them.
He began to see the form of San Pedro Bay, promising for shipping. From the air, the land was visibly patterned by ruins beneath the amorphous sandpiled pavement of desert. The bay was more deeply incut than he remembered on the maps, with a scalloped rim. “‘Like a crater, Cristovao…’” he repeated. “Jesus, what a beautiful harbor!” He could see signs of habitation now, a small mud-brick town, bright sails in the harbor, fields and pasturage along the river. He used his binoculars, thought he detected other signs of habitation farther along the northwestward curve of the coast; pleased, he dropped lower, buzzing the fields. “Some irrigation, primitive ... bet they don’t rotate their crops. ...” Tiny figures huddled, staring up at him, or fled the ‘copter’s shadow in terror. They were as nonessential to him as the rest of humanity, less real than the shining, lifeless wilderness of the desert.
And then, abruptly, the umbilical of vibrating roar that gave him life within his glass-and-metal womb was cut. Faint cries of fear and disbelief reached him through the windshield glass, echoed in his mind, as he began to fall. . . .
The stranger jerked awake, sitting up from Amanda’s lap in the shade of the broken ship. His breath came hard; he rubbed his sweating face. “Mae do Deus…” He looked back at her, at the shadowing hull above them. “It happened again?”
She nodded.
“I was falling…that was falling, the—the Careless Love. The electrical system was…was…Damn it! Damn it! It’s in there, my whole life! But every time I reach for it, it slips between my fingers…like mercury…”
“Maybe if you didn’t try, it would come. Maybe you try too hard.” She wondered what good it would do him to know, but knew that even she would need to know.
“How am I supposed to stop trying?” He covered the frustration in his voice. “Did I—say anything?”
“You said, ‘Cristoval.’” The name wasn’t quite the same, when he pronounced it. “You said, ‘Craters.’ And that we didn’t…turn our crops around.” She made circling motions with her hand.
“‘Rotate your crops,” he said absently. “Alternate them, from field to field, season to season, to let the fields rest. It’s good for the soil…” He stopped. “Maybe I was some sind of advisor. Maybe I could teach your father better farming methods—”
A small, sharp laugh escaped her. “I don’t think he’d listen to you. Not after he watched you struck down by God.”
He grimaced, got up, staring at the burned-out wreck. He leaned down to pick up a handful of charred papers. “Maps. They’re in English…but I can’t read it anymore.” He bunched them in his hand, didn’t drop them, looking south across the bay. “It’s a good harbor. And that’s important…”
“Yes, it is.” She answered, knowing now that he didn’t need an answer.
“Where do the ships go from here?”
“Mostly south, for a long way. In the southern lands there are airships that fly with balloons, not sorcery, and cross the mountains to a strange land.” Her heart constricted.