The Fabulist

[Table of Contents]

It was in West Lake, Nebraska, that Trask and Andy hit the motherlode. Their biggest trove to date. They had babbled on all evening about the treasures that awaited. Just the briefest glance through the card catalog — yes, card catalog — had been tantalizing beyond their wildest dreams.

And they were all there, shelves and shelves of books, cursed and banned, beautiful, dusty, perfectly preserved in the dry Great Plains climate.

The little rural library had been built to last. It was a bomb shelter during the Cold War, environmentally retrofitted during the eco-conscious ‘teens, and for some reason those canny country librarians had apparently never quite transferred their full catalog to the Internet — thus escaping entirely the Burning and Pogrom.

“They’ll find this place someday,” Andy had said.

The pair sat on the library’s front steps in the gathering dusk, chewing on buffalo jerky and taking long pulls from their canteens. The sun was setting and a wind curled about the square below, fitfully stirring leaves and debris.

A row of police cars sat parked and disintegrating in front of the stationhouse across the way. What looked like a school bus had plowed into the entrance of City Hall. Silt and humus was building up in the hollows and nooks of the plaza, along gutters and against traffic islands, and in the dry basin of the Pioneer Spirit fountain. The place was littered with smashed, brittle ivory — skull fragments, femurs, vertebrae and teeth, scattered by animals and half-submerged in the resurgent prairie. Ebola II had hit West Lake hard, and fast.

Trask took another swig from his canteen and looked around at the empty streets. He could just make out the abandoned highway in the distance, a broken, uneven line vanishing into desolation. The sky ebbed, burning and hazy-yellow, giving way to a soft, dark purple.

“None too soon, they won’t,” he finally replied.

They spent the next week loading the boxcars, stacked three across on double-decker a-grav flatbeds. The auto forklifts hummed and trundled along, patiently bearing the burden of pages along the neglected corridors and staircases, across the gravel-strewn parking lot, depositing the pallets of books in the big prefab hypertensile containers.

Overhead, the sky glimmered with the subtle distortion of the displacement field, effortlessly camouflaging the encampment’s electromagnetic spectrum from probing Jurist satellites.

A few spins on the comand disc and it even kept the ground dry when a monstrous thunderstorm raced in from the horizon, sodden breezes pacing at its feet. They stood amazed in a perfect, empty hemisphere as the cataclysm erupted around them. The plaza ringed by surging floods and strobing jags of lightning.

“For a spell there the sky was actually glowing green,” Andy said the next day.

“Big old rain,” Trask agreed.

They had been steering the lifters since dawn, hand-loading some of the more delicate volumes. Outside, the sun was unmerciful, and this time Andy refused to dial in the weather protection.

“It’s one thing to keep the camp from getting washed away,” he said, squinting at the sky. “But I want to experience weather while I can. The rest of my life after this is going to be dependent on field generators.”

“There’s weather on the Magic Mountain. Big cloudbursts. Ski slopes and a glacier, even. And the tulips blossom all year long.”

“But seasons! Real seasons. Winds that come at you from a thousand miles of sky, birds from other continents. There’s more of them now, man! Anyway, when this operation is over, I guess I won’t be coming back. So I really want to, savor it.”

In the end they dialed in a UV blocker as well, and took a long lunch out behind the library, by the campsite. Passing a canteen of cold water on the back stairs, the wind still fresh after rain.

“Thing is,” Andy said through a mouthful of dried apple, “we don’t got enough boxcars.” He chewed more and swallowed. “Gonna have to come back after all.”

Trask stared. “Who’s gonna come back? This is it, buddy. We’re outta here. I ain’t comin’ back. No way.”

“I might volunteer. Stay with the special unit. There’s still plenty left to do. People need our help.”

“People need our help to leave, and how are you getting a billion human beings off the planet? You seem to forget that Earth is fucked, and not just because of all the nuke-packing fascist death-cult theocracies. Thermostat keeps climbing, hasn’t been any naturally occurring snowfall anywhere in the Lower 48 since the ’60s—”

“Not true. It snowed in Cheyenne when I was growing up, a bunch. It’s self-regulating, man. Gaia hypothesis. New ice age is just around the corner.”

“It was a last gasp, son. Hasn’t snowed since, has it? The entire human-supportive ecosystem is in a death spiral. We’re due for some weird new Ebola variant, next 20 years on the outside, and let’s not even mention nanobots. You and me are getting out by the skin of our teeth. Why did you want to stick around again? Proselytize amongst the unlettered, pull books out the furnace, I’m sure.”

“I’m not ready to retire!”

“Of course you’re not, you’re just moving on to a new horizon.”

“Look, old man, you’re ready to hang it up, and I don’t blame you. Your hair is gray and you’re slowing down — just accept it, ow! — you’re old, but I’m still young and I gotta lot left to do down here.”

“You gotta grudge match with them book burners, which could be a terminal condition.” He stretched out the syllables like taffy. “There’s plenty more for you to do, but not on Earth. Once we ship this last batch, the only Bookkeepers left here will be doing surveillance. No recruiting, no pamphlet drops. Come to the Magic Mountain, Andy. Settle down, meet a girl, make some babies. You’re smart and healthy, we need more kids like you up there. Stay on Earth and you’ll die young and for no good reason, and the whole place and everyone on it will remain just as fucked as they already are.”

“And what about the refugees? You found me literally wandering in a desert. If I can do the same for just one —”

“You couldn’t keep cover. Not on your own. You’d lose your cool. You wouldn’t last a week among the Jurists. You have your skills, but bluffing ain’t one of them.”

“I learned from the best.”

“Prove it.”

“C’mon, Sarge!”

“What’s the cardinal rule for any Bookkeeper in the field?”

“Camp upwind from the shitter.”

“That too. But seriously.”

The kid stared at Trask, black eyes like hollow pits.

“Get out while you can,” he finally muttered.

“You’re goddamn right. This is a sick society, they’re going terminal, and they’ll take you with ‘em if they can. Back in Everett? That neo-frickin’-Calvinist they stuck me with? Motherfucker tried to turn in the neighbors for an immodest reading of the Song of Solomon. Can you imagine trying to stay under cover around that shit? Twenty-four-seven! Late-night Bible sessions in the living room every time he woke up packing wood — I’m just aghast. Thank the gap-toothed Buddha he didn’t speak in tongues. I could not fake that. You’re not dealing with something rational here. Think about what they did in Cheyenne. Your own family!”

“You don’t have to shout, man. Every day I think about it, that’s why I wanna —”

“Wanna do what? Is this really about saving lives? Are you on vengeance trip? Get some perspective! We’ve salvaged as much of the best as we can, and the rest of it, we just have to let it go. And good fucking riddance! These people are drowning in their own shit, and no amount of nanobot detectors, radiation vacuums or oxy-processed canned fucking air will stem the tide!”

He spat, flung his frustration in a contemptuous volley at the cracked and ruined cement.

The sun vanished behind a titanic island of cumulous, an undulating column reaching miles up into the sky, blue, the wind was sweet and touched by a fading winter chill.

They were both startled then by a flashing movement of color at the fringes of their vision, two butterflies, caught in an tumbling duet. The insects clung and fluttered and abruptly came to rest amid a cluster of gaudy yellow flowers with voluptuous, bell-shaped petals.

Trask and Andy stared, and the insects flexed their wings, and the long stems trembled in the fitful prairie breeze.

There were flowers everywhere, they realized, as the cloud passed above and the sun swept across the meadow that stretched out behind the library, away to the empty horizon.

“Came up overnight,” Andy said, a grin opening on his face. “All this was just waiting for a big old rain.”

It seemed as if they stood on the verge of an ocean of blossoms, nibbling away at the last concrete atolls and sandbars of human civilization, soon to wash it all away, submerging the ruins in a hundred-year flood of seeds and compost and timid, silent wildlife.

“You heard about those ‘bots they have down in South America,” Trask said slowly. “They eat the pollen first, then turn the petals black. Just any flower. They say the bees and butterflies, moths, those kinds of things. They’re all starting to die out. Only tulips. Fuckin’ nanos don’t like ‘em.”

Andy jumped up, kicked the dust.

“That why you only got tulips in space? What more ain’t ya tellin’ me about?”

Trask stared at him, mute.

“Think I’ll go wade around awhile,” the kid said, into the widening silence. “See ya.”

Trask watched him wander off into the spreading bloom, stiff-legged, hands in his pockets, shook his head, reached down and plucked a blossom, succulent purple with white streaks.

“Fare thee well,” he whispered, and his eyes were wet. He blinked, and the prairie was a canvas of blurred, prismatic color.

They reached the first checkpoint about two weeks later, a weigh station and traveler’s outpost on the old Interstate near the Black Hills, arriving in the dead of night, sound baffler at maximum amplitude.

The slack-faced station manager led them out back to the loading docks, pressed a few buttons, turned on his heel and vanished into the night. The gate swung open. Trask and Andy transferred their cargo into the queue for Indianapolis Spaceport, vaporized their bush-trekker’s gear, and donned the gray-hued uniform of the Environment Bureau’s Hazmat Division.

Their ident chips worked on rooms 34 and 44 of the Great Plains Motor Lodge. The walls were shabby, a leached-out yellow punctuated with adept watercolors depicting churches and snug cabins in wint’ry forests, and rustic waterwheels along placid brooks.

By sunrise the local datanet had been entirely compromised by the infectious memes that had entered the system with their registration, and when California-Pacific Engine # 242, “Prairie Melody,” pulled in the following afternoon, Trask and Andy’s transit documents and Jurist affiliation were dutifully beamed over. The boxcars full of books were decorated in all the yellow and black iconography of creeping, remorseless death: Danger. Biohazard. Radiation. Nanobots. Authorized Personnel Only.

“That would be you,” the conductor said, and looked them over dubiously. “Authorized personnel.”

“It’s all in here,” Trask replied, handing him the dull black ident chip.

The conductor — tall, pear-shaped, red-cheeked, dressed in a navy blue uniform with embossed crucifix buttons — gazed at the little packet of digital subversion and shook his head.

“I don’t want to see this,” he said. “Take it to the cargo duty officer. I’d be surprised if they even want to touch it.”

“They’re not supposed to,” Andy said. “That’d our job, if you’d happened to have read the orders.”

He raised an eyebrow and nodded at the chip in the conductor’s palm.

The man considered his options, sighed heavily, tossed it back.

“Just get it taken care of, talk to the cargo officer if anything comes up.” He glanced at his watch, looked up. “You try the apple cobbler here? Almost as good as the real thing. I swear it is, but they say it’s out of a can.”

“I don’t like sweets,” Andy said.

The conductor gave him a pitying look, and glanced again at his watch.

“Train leaves at 6:45, sharp,” he said. “Don’t forget to tip the cargo boys.”

And he chortled and grinned to himself and lumbered off in the direction of the commissary.

“It is the real thing,” Trask muttered. “There’s a whole damn orchard out there. That station manager, Otanji, and his wife Elsa, you met her? Nice gal. Got a whole permaculture operation a couple miles back. Hard to find unless you know where. He showed me once, years ago. They must be doing alright.”

Andy’s face was alight, fascinated. “I want to see,” he said.

Trask shrugged. “I wouldn’t mention it. They don’t need anyone asking questions. And neither do we.”

Andy bit his lip and kicked the dust and they made their way across the trainyard to tip the cargo boys, who smiled and winked and dutifully slotted the ident chips into their datapallates, downloading the full payload of lies and distortion.

Tanker trucks. From Baton Rouge, Hanford and Santa Fe, hauling their respective cargos of howling death along the shattered highways, converging on this very weigh station, bound for orbital hazmat disposal. Trask and Andy had disembarked from the Washington truck, sitting atop the latest excavations from the old weapons factory. The orders had come from the New Mexico field office, evacuated and scattered to the desert by the Santa Fe detonation four months earlier.

The train’s status-upload to the Judiciary satellite was seeded with the same latent cover story, and every checkpoint thereafter further entrenched the false reality of their passage.

Just at the Iowa border, the train idling in the lush late-spring morning, Trask and Andy pulled down the window for a last glimpse of Earthly paradise.

Rain had been unusually heavy the past few weeks, given the drought and all; the flowers were still in full bloom, and there was a copse of trees a few hundred yards from the track, their long boughs swaying in the wind.

Andy sneezed three times in rapid succession, and again a moment later.

“Goddammit,” he said, eyes watering, and blew his nose in a leftover paper napkin.

“Hayfever,” Trask observed helpfully. “Don’t worry, they only have tulips in space. Keeps down the nanobots.” He paused. “As you know.”

Andy sneezed again and again, helpless in the grip of ancient biological response. “Holy canoli,” he finally whispered.

Trask sat up abruptly, glanced at his watch, gazed out the window, and then back at Andy, expressionless.

“Hang on a sec,” he said, rising, and strode down the aisle and through the sliding doors that separated the cars.

A moment later Andy saw his sergeant’s gray-stippled head just outside the window. It dipped down below the sill for a moment, resurfaced, moved a few yards towards the back of the train, and dipped again below the line of sight.

Andy stuck his head out the window, watched him systematically move down the embankment that lined the track, kneeling to examine the blossoms, and occasionally gathering them up into an unruly bouquet.

He sat back as the sun washed over the undulating grasslands, and the breeze, saturated with pollen, threatened a fresh allergic paroxysm. He snuffled moistly, and groaned when Trask re-appeared with a vivid bundle of flowers in his hand.

“Why do you want me to suffer,” he mumbled.

“They’re for a botanist I know,” said his elder. “I think these are all pretty unusual, actually. Prairie natives, mostly wiped out by the 20th century cattle industry. She’s gonna flip her wig.”

“They’ll wilt. They won’t make it up to orbit. But they will make me sneeze for the next week.”

“Oh, she just needs the genetic material. Anyway, I’m putting these right into the sample case.”

But before doing so he pulled out one of the gaudy yellow numbers, the kind they first saw in West Lake, and tucked it into his lapel.

The train lurched, the whistle blew loud and high, and the birds outside wheeled and banked along the gathering swells of a prairie morning.

They hit the outskirts of Indianapolis late that evening, and the spaceport not 45 minutes later. The way was all rusting girders and decaying tenements, offset by brightly lit Judiciary enclaves with their high guard towers and looming exterior walls.

The station itself was roaring with activity, processing thousands of sleek hypertensile containers just down from automated orbital foundries, stuffed with weapons and chemicals and wartime materiel, all bound for the Rocky Mountain, Oregon and Northern California fronts. The air stank of ozone and engine exhaust.

“The scale of it,” Trask said. “The industry these people devote to their own destruction. Earth will be better off without them. And so will we. Give it time, a few geological epochs, and all this will be dead and buried and long overgrown.”

Andy said nothing. He was staring at the blossom tucked into his sergeant’s lapel.

He pointed, and Trask looked. The edges of the petals were starting to turn black.

Next: The Separation — Chapter four

copyright (c) by Josh Wilson