“That’s where the main nukes would have hit,” Ryan said quietly. “It’s still a complete no-go area, what little of it is left. Trader had never seen it, but like he used to say, ‘You don’t have to see the shit to know that it smells.'”
“Picturesquely put, my dear boy,” Doc murmured with a wry grin of amusement, “and probably just about accurate. There was the strong smell of corruption stinking out those corridors, the corruption-of-power madness, the insanity of pointless violence and the acquisition of power for the sake of it, with no goal or reason other than to glory in the utter futility of being master of the void.”
Gloria cast a puzzled glance at Ryan. “Is he always like this? I’m sorry, honey, but I can’t understand a word you say,” she added to Doc.
He gave a look of infinite sadness. “Madam, if you had seen the void, you would understand. I could see it in those whitecoat eyes. If nothing else happened in the days of skydark that was good, then at least it cleaned out the canker eating at their souls.”
“Doc,” Ryan said, trying to bring the old man back on track, “if we’re not going to the old capital, then where are we headed?”
Doc looked blankly at the one-eyed warrior, for a short moment lost somewhere inside the hell that he carried within him, the things that he knew but would rather had never crossed his consciousness.
“To oblivion, dear boy,” he said softly. Then, in a stronger voice, “Inevitably, as must all men. But right now I would say we were going to scout around to the northwest of the continent. Strange, is it not, how everything seems to pull us this way. I remember a story from the whitecoats, a rumor only half-heard through an office door, but nonetheless…”
Doc, however, was not to repeat the rumor right then. There was a more pressing problem, as evinced by the sudden sounds of argument that cut him off and caused them to look around.
“Mildred…” Ryan whispered.
“Margia…” Gloria replied in a resigned tone.
“IT’S ABOUT TIME you came out with what you meant, lady, ’cause I’ll tell you one thing—you wind a spring too far and it snaps. You pull that elastic too taut and it snaps. And that’s me, girl.”
Mildred squared up to the blond armorer, shrugging off Krysty’s hand as she tried to restrain the angry woman. Margia had finally taken that one step over the line. And it was the simplest trigger of all: Mildred’s color.
Mildred Wyeth had encountered race hatred and discrimination all her life. Her father had been burned to death in his chapel, a victim of racism. Racism hampered her career as a doctor, despite her success. In the days before skydark, she often wondered if she would have achieved greater success if she had been white. Waking up from her freezie state to an alien world, it might have been an unreasonable dream, but not beyond the bounds of probability, that the harsh demands of a postholocaust world would cause the survivors to forget about race and band together to try to survive. Instead, she found merely that survival increased the tribalism and hatred.
Margia had drawn this inference from J.B.’s oblique answers to her questions about Mildred. And having judged that now was the right moment, she chose to bring this card into play. Passing Mildred where she sat with Krysty and Tammy, the blonde paused to mutter a comment about Mildred sitting too close to the fire, in case she got burned, like her father, adding, “but then, I suppose J.B. likes burned meat.”
It was at the same time both banal and vile, and it certainly had the intended effect. Like the last straw on the cliched camel’s back, it broke the line of resistance that Mildred had kept up for days. The reference to her father, along with the racial slur, was well timed by the blonde.
And now they stood face-to-face, Mildred seething with anger, Margia retaining a detached and almost ironic calm.
“What do I mean?” she said with a deceptive sweetness. “Why, Mildred, I don’t bother to hide things.”