“Look,” he said gently, “I have to tell you that there is no land of lost
happiness. Your Uncle Tyas really was chasing a rainbow, and there’s no crock of
gold at the end of it because there is no end.”
Her head jerked up. She said almost defiantly, “He wasn’t a fool and he wasn’t
crazy. Whatever else he was, Uncle Tyas wasn’t crazy.”
“I didn’t say—”
“He did find something! I know it. It was something important and it was
something… outrageous, something completely wild… something that no one’s ever
discovered before. He wasn’t simply some crazy old fucker obsessed with a
phantom!”
“Sure.”
“And don’t ‘sure’ me, asshole.”
“Okay, okay. I’m sorry.”
The anger went out of her eyes, the granite hardness from her face. Her body,
suddenly tense, relaxed. She breathed in and said “Okay” while breathing out
again. “I’m sorry. Hell, you saved my life.” All at once she grinned. “You can’t
be a complete asshole.”
Ryan glanced sideways, saw that up front the Trader was watching him, eyebrows
raised. Through the steel mesh that covered the blown windshield he could just
make out that they were heading through trees, an overlush forest that a century
ago had probably simply been pine but was now a moist tangle of humid
undergrowth and purplish topgrowth. He remembered the area. They were about five
miles out of Mocsin. Talk about bizarre, he brooded. There was enough that was
bizarre in the Deathlands without adding to it with all these dreams of
fantastic weaponry and who knows what all else. This forest alone was bizarre.
How it had grown was beyond him: a random gift from the Nuke. On the other side
of Mocsin it was mostly scrub desert to the foothills of the Darks, no purple
forest at all.
He suddenly thought, the Darks.
He said, “You were heading for the Darks. Was that where this wild blue yonder
all started?”
She scowled at him.
“Still heading,” she said.
“You’re what!”
“Still heading. Still heading for the Darks.”
Ryan said, “Come on!”
“Don’t patronize me,” she said through her teeth, the angry look back in wide
green eyes.
Ryan held up his hands in mock surrender.
“I’m not patronizing. I’m trying to be realistic. You got any idea what’s in
between Mocsin and the hills? One hundred klicks of wilderness is what. You
gonna walk it?”
“I’ll get a buggy.”
“How? You got any creds?”
“I’ll sell my body.”
“As to that,” said Ryan, “there’s quite a bit of competition in Mocsin. And it’s
regulated. And the pay’s piss poor. And it’s a hell of a life. And…”
She shot him a withering look.
“You don’t maybe consider I have a touch more class than the majority of my
working sisters?”
Ryan tapped his teeth with a fingernail and looked her over with amusement.
“Here it is,” he said, his eyes locking on to hers. “You have more class than
I’ve seen in five years.”
“Only five years? How blasted gallant.” Her tone was sardonic. “Don’t bother
with the honey talk. I can get by.”
Ryan stood up and leaned against the steel-faced wall. He went on as though she
hadn’t said a word. “But that of course only makes it worse. You wouldn’t start
out in the back-street sleaze pits, you’d go straight to the top. And that means
you’d start off with Jordan Teague, the fattest hog in the territory. You’d not
only supplant all his harem, which means they’d be gunning for you the whole
time, but you’d have to put up with his personal habits and sexual demands,
which are by no means couth.”
” ‘Couth!'” She laughed suddenly. “That I like!”
“When Teague’s finished with you—only take a month at the most, he has a low
boredom threshold—you get passed down to his chief of police, Cort Strasser.
Teague’s just gross, raunchy. Strasser on the other hand has very strange and
violent tastes. Whips, torture, humiliation. I don’t believe Strasser likes
women very much.”
“Okay, okay.” Her voice was tight. She said quietly, “Is it any wonder people
want to escape…”
“If you’ve been around,” Ryan said, “you know very well that not every city,