Maybe the chem stuff got out of hand, maybe the opposition went over the top,
dumped too many toxins down there. Or maybe it just got hotter anyhow, the
climate—something to do with the sea. Who the nuke knows. All I can tell you is
that it’s a poisoned land and I can do without it. Paradise it ain’t.”
“Hey, now. You don’t seem to—”
“And then we shift to the East. Well, sure. That’s civilized, I guess. Parts of
it.” He paused, took a final drag on the cigarette, butted it. “I guess it’s
civilized because everyone there says it is. And sure, they got industry of a
kind, and they know how to produce electric power better than anywhere else I
know, and they got lines of communication that don’t break down every three
hours, and they can grow their own food, and they read and write, and…” He
stopped, stared down at the floor as though a memory had twitched at the outer
edges of his mind. He looked up again, his one eye suddenly bleak. “But it’s
uncoordinated, lady. And beneath a thin skin of culture it’s as much of a hell
as it is out here. There’s maybe a dozen families in the Southern Enclave in an
uneasy truce, all secretly lusting after what the others have got, all about
ready to swoop in and grab any territory that looks to be weaker than they are.”
“I read once about a country out there,” he continued, almost wistfully.
“Hundreds of years ago. It was a large slice of land split up into little
territories, all ruled over by individual princes and barons or dukes or
whatever. All feuding with one another, greedy for land. Everyone else’s land.
And if they weren’t fighting one another, they were figuring out how to stab one
another in the back in the smartest way possible so some other guy would get the
blame. And at the same time as all this is going on, they’re busy inventing and
creating and painting pictures and writing books and fashioning crazy models or
castles out of pure gold with all the towers and turrets and drawbridges and
even arrow slits in the walls, all in proportion, and when you lifted the roof
of the tallest tower, inside was a little glass jar for putting the salt in. Now
that was civilization. Sure, I guess the peasants were treated like shit on the
rich man’s boots, but even so it was a busy time, everything going on, an upward
surge. They had ambition. There was always something beyond the next horizon,
and the next, and the next.”
She said, “Italy.”
He laughed. “You did read books!”
“My mother. She made sure I knew as much as there was to know, as much as she
could cram into me. She said it was important.”
“She was a wise woman.”
Krysty nodded slowly, her head bowed. “Yes,” she said.
Ryan did not pursue that. It was not the time. He kept his eyes on the scarlet
glory of her hair, watched as she brought her head back up again so that they
were once more face-to-face. The imp had gone from her eyes; now they held only
grief, a sense of profound loss.
Ryan said, “Well, anyhow, the East Coast has nothing I want. It’s an armed camp
of greedy madmen. The muties are the peasants and no one is creating paintings
that will last for half a millennium and the only gold that’s coming in is from
that fat rat Jordan Teague, and sure as nukeshit no one’s making salt containers
out of it.”
“If it’s an armed camp,” Krysty said, “who armed it?” She stared at him
clear-eyed.
Ryan held her gaze for maybe six seconds, then looked away, shrugged.
“Yeah. Okay. Point. Maybe we all realize now that our trade routes have been
built on orders we should maybe never have delivered.”
“Maybe?”
“Okay. We should never have delivered.” He stopped, stretched, sat back down
again. His hands plucked at the crimson scarf tied around his throat and he
loosened it. The ends hung heavily down to his waist. “One doesn’t always think