The Dead Town

At the end of that narrow space stood a small desk where the real Mayor Erskine Potter had sat to maintain records of expenses related to the horses and to keep notes about vet visits and recommendations. At the desk was an old wooden office chair on wheels.

Nancy broke the back off the chair, turning it into a wheeled stool. Using a large roll of Vetrap hoof tape, she bound the cauterized stump of her left leg to the stool, which wasn’t an easy task, but she persisted for the Community. Walking on her right foot, rolling on her footless left leg stump, she maneuvered out of the tack room, into the main part of the barn.

She stood over the remains of Ariel, wondering if there was anything she ought to do. This didn’t look like a Builder anymore. It was like a large, mostly smooth formation of limestone in which someone had been carving faces. There were three faces at different places, all sort of resembling Ariel but distorted. She turned the broom around in her hands and rapped the end of the handle against what had once been Ariel, and it sounded like stone, too. She could not see anything she needed to do more urgently than sweep and sweep the barn floor until all the bristle marks in the dirt were aligned rather than chaotic.

As she set to work, she realized that sprinkles of snowflakes were coming through the two holes that Ariel, in her swarm mode, had made in the roof. Because the building was heated, most of the flakes melted and evaporated as they fell. Those few that survived all the way to floor became dots of dampness that would soon dry.

The broom swished and swished, the wheels of the chair squeaked, the seat creaked. A light wind soughed in the eaves of the barn and snuffled at the holes in the roof.

The horses were calm again. Commander had not managed to kick out any portion of his stall at the height of his terror. Now and then, Queenie and Valentine nickered. A couple of times, the stallion snorted.

Entirely committed to precisely aligning the bristle marks in the dirt, replicant Nancy seldom looked up from the difficult task before her. But every time she raised her eyes, the horses had their heads beyond the tops of their stall doors, watching her, sometimes while they chewed a bit of hay, other times just staring.

They were so stupid. Like everything in nature, they were really stupid, poorly designed, requiring too much in the way of resources, crapping all the time, urinating all the time, so stupid that they would just stand and watch, hour after hour, as she swept, just stand and watch, too stupid to understand that she was working for the total destruction of them and of the natural world that sustained them.

The horses were so stupid, Nancy wanted to laugh at them, but she couldn’t. In theory, she quite understood the psychological and emotional causes of laughter, but laughter was for human beings, one more indication of their lack of seriousness, of how easily they were distracted. Communitarians could pretend laughter to pass for the people they replaced, but laughter never distracted them from their duties, from their lethal crusade. Laughing or not laughing, humans were inattentive, heedless, preoccupied, oblivious fools, no better than horses.

For a while, she pretended laughter, practiced it diligently, so that if at some point she needed to masquerade as an amused and distracted human, she would sound convincing. The swish of the broom, the squeak of the wheels, the creak of the chair seat, the sough and snuffle of the wind, and her laughter, and the snow fluttering down and vanishing in midair, and the horses watching, the stupid horses, so easily entertained.

Chapter 44

A lover of history and tradition, Addison Hawk had never been afraid of change. Occasionally suspicious of the reasons behind some of it, often unconvinced about its value, but not afraid. Until now. Replications of people being pumped out in laboratories, nanoanimals instantly devouring their enemies.… That electrifying video made by one of the Riders seemed to support the fear that if the end of humanity had not begun in Rainbow Falls, if this battle could be won, the victory would be brief, and the end would begin elsewhere, the enemy a later generation of these creatures or something else equally posthuman but even worse.

He didn’t know what to make of Deucalion. The name Frankenstein had been shared with him, as it had not been shared with either the people at the Samples house or with the staff at KBOW. As an editor and a publisher, knowledge was his business, his life, but he was in danger of information overload.

When he heard they were taking a dozen of the Riders’ youngest children — between four and eleven years of age — to Erika’s house, he knew this must be the beautiful and self-possessed woman whom he had encountered earlier in the day outside of Jim James Bakery. He didn’t know of another Erika in Rainbow Falls. He volunteered to go with Deucalion and to stay with Erika, to help her manage these kids and the others who would be brought later.

With the children on benches in the back of the truck, Addison rode up front with Deucalion. He was given to understand that the giant knew a shortcut, a way around the roadblocks, but this mode of travel — teleportation? — was just as unprecedented as all else on this day. As Deucalion drove along the Samples driveway, toward the street, he said something about the arrow of time being indeterminate on the quantum level, that every moment contained both all the past and all the future. And when they turned left into the street, they also and instantly turned into Erika’s driveway, four miles north of town, and parked near the front porch of the house.

Evidently aware that Addison had been stunned into immobility, Deucalion said, “The universe began from an inexpressibly dense speck of matter, which was as much a thought — a concept — as it was matter. After the big bang, after expanding outward in all directions through these billions of years, that speck of matter has become the universe as we know it. But on a fundamental level, because all of time is present in every moment of time, the universe is still that dense speck, it’s simultaneously both that speck and everything that it has since expanded to become. So while the universe is vast, it is also very tiny, a speck, and in that speck, all places are the same place. The Samples house is one step from Erika’s place, which is one step from Hong Kong, which is one step from Mars. You just have to know how to live in the reality of the universe in both of the states that it exists.”

Although he was a man of words, for a moment Addison could think of nothing to say. Then he said, “I’ll get the kids out of the back.”

Erika waited for them on the porch. As Addison followed the children up the front steps, she appeared surprised — and he thought perhaps pleased — to see him.

Although the cold wind chapped lips and pinched cheeks, Erika kept the Riders’ children on the porch long enough to explain to them that in the house they would meet another little girl like them, but also a special little boy. This wonderful little boy, she said, had suffered much in his life, mostly because he looked so different from other children. She said he was self-conscious about his appearance, his feelings were easily hurt, and all he wanted was to have friends and be a friend to others. She was aware that all the Rider children knew about Jesus, and she reminded them that Jesus valued goodness, not appearances. He valued goodness even more than a nice ride on a fine horse. She said once they got to know this special little boy, they would love him. But she also said that after they got to know him, if suddenly he seemed very scary, that would only be because he had smiled. He had a very unfortunate smile. He would try not to smile, because he didn’t want to scare people, but sometimes he just couldn’t help himself. So if suddenly he looked like he was going to eat you alive, that was just silly, because he was only smiling.

Although the kids were excited about meeting this wonderful little boy and shared their anticipation with one another, Addison wasn’t sure that he was as eager for the encounter as they were. Laboratory-made people, voracious nanoanimals, Frankenstein and his two-hundred-year-old creation, teleportation or something like it: Enough was enough for one night.

Erika smiled at him as she waited for the children to take off their snow-caked boots, and he decided to accept her invitation. She ushered them inside, through the foyer, through an archway, into a living room, where a pretty little girl stood beside the special little boy whom apparently Jesus wanted them to love. The boy was immeasurably more special than Addison Hawk had expected, and if the word boy actually applied, Addison’s dictionaries were so out of date that he might as well burn them.

Not one of the kids screamed. That surprised Jocko. They all gasped. Nothing more. Gasp. Not one of them went looking for a bucket. Or a stick. Or an oven to bake him in. Some of them gasped twice, and a few smiled, sort of, smiled funny-like. None of them puked. Their eyes were very wide, although not as big as Jocko’s eyes. They seemed amazed, only amazed.

For a moment Jocko didn’t get it. Then he did. They weren’t interested in him. Why would they be? They recognized royalty when they saw it.