Cronix (37 page)

“You go tomorrow,” Gutran said. “Alone.” The guide seemed to brighten up for the first time in weeks. “Tonight we sleep in the outpost.”

“The outpost? What’s that?” Oriente asked, but Gutran was already off, paralleling the mighty construction. 1167 explained. “A few shacks built at the exact spot where the range of the last soul pole runs out,” the youth said, clearly excited at the prospect too. “There’s an iron bar set in concrete. On the north side, if you’re chipped and you get killed, you’ll be transmitted straight back to the Orbiters. On the south side, you’re mortal.”

The outpost twinkled in the dusk as they approached, the first time in months that Oriente had seen the soft, yellow trickle of electricity. A dozen naked bulbs were strung in a twisted acacia, an oddly enchanting sight that spoke of warmth and hospitality.

They tramped into the tiny settlement and dropped their packs on the porch of a wooden shack whose flickering sign announced itself in red neon:
Line in the Sand Bar, food drink beds
. Sure enough, in the street outside was the twenty-foot, rusting metal bar set in sand-scoured concrete. A large metal plague, faded and inexpertly retouched in dripping paint, announced that the line marked the outer limit of the transmitters on the Great Northern Wall: any Eternal venturing beyond did so at their own risk. Gutran ignored both sign and metal bar and marched straight into the hostelry to order a cold beer, which he drank off in one thirsty gulp before ordering another.

Oriente and 1167 flopped at a table. The owner, a portly man with sun-shriveled skin and a grey shovel of beard, introduced himself as Bill.

“I’m Laura,” whispered 1167 conspiratorially.

“Guessed you might be,” said Bill, with a pleasant Australian twang. “We got room for you for the night. Always keep a bed spare for your lot,” he added, placing two cold beers on table. The temptation was way too strong, and like Gutran – who was now on his third pint at the bar – Oriente downed the delicious liquid in two huge gulps, leaning back and belching in satisfaction.

Bill was already pouring another round. Gutran was wilting at the bar, like a plant that has received too little moisture, or a man who has received too much.

“Is this a good idea?” Oriente asked 1167, who was smacking his lips noisily after draining his own glass.

“What? Drinking beer? Are you kidding? Do you realize how rarely we get decent booze? And
chilled
beer? This is only the second time in my entire miserable existence I’ve had real beer. The first time I've drunk it cold. It’s brought in from the north, you know. Oh my god, that's good.”

Oriente, through the mild fog of alcohol, detected a new confidence that the booze had instilled in the boy. Bill came with the next round.

“Bill, I want you to meet Luis. He’s going over tomorrow. Luis, Bill,” said 1167, all of a sudden the generous master of ceremonies. Bill nodded, banged the beers on the table and, turning, spotted Gutran listing dangerously on the bar stool. He darted back to shore him up, calling someone from the back room to start cooking.

“Bill,” said 1167, expansively waving his frosted glass, “is one of us. Borderline Bill, they call him. He’s been here for more than 75 years, running this bar. He’s an institution.”

Despite the pleasant befuddlement of the alcohol, the figure was not lost on Oriente. “He’s one of your clients? You mean, he used your resurrection engine?”

The tipsy boy nodded. “Exactly. Bill even remembers Laura One. He lets us know what’s going on in the border regions, and has great contacts with the smugglers and guards on the wall. And, of course, we get all the hospitality we need,” he added, raising his glass and flashing a sloppy grin.

“Is he a convict? Why is he here?”

“Not exactly,” said 1167, enjoying the boozy story telling. “Rumor is, he got in trouble with someone powerful on the other side of the wall, needed to hide out. Seems to likes it here. As long as he's on the north side of the line in the sand, he's allowed rudimentary elements of civilization, like an electrical hook-up to the wall.”

Bill returned with plates of yams with beans with goat’s cheese, enough to soak up some of the alcohol. As they ate, Oriente saw Gutran slide to the floor, where he lay like a dropped shirt.

Bill was pulling something out a canvas bag. “Here, you’ll want this for the morning, if you’re going over,” he said, pushing a pile of stained white clothing towards Oriente. He held up the items: a long smock and a pair of pants, torn at the knees. He looked quizzically at Bill.

“It’s your shroud,” said the bar owner, as though stating the obvious. “I mean, if you just wander up in these rags you’re wearing now, chances are they’ll shoot you before you get anywhere near the wall. They’ll think you’re a Muerte or a desperado. Wear these, they’ll know you’re coming to get chipped and go topside. Tomorrow’s a good day too, there’s a bunch of tributes coming up from Monterrey. You can go with them.”

“Tributes?” said Oriente, fingering the stained shirt. His hands had started to shake. He took another swig of the beer, but the buzz was fading and he just felt tired now, scared. His hands were shaking and put his hands in his lap, out of sight.

“You new here?” squinted Bill. Oriente hesitated, unsure whether to trust him. But 1167 nodded, and Bill went on. The tradition of the tributes, he explained, pulling up a chair and pouring himself a shot of tequila, went way back, even before his time.

More than a century ago, a group of Eternal anthropologists visited the northern settlements of the Zone, venturing as far as Durango before a Nahuatl war party took two of their number, pushing the group back to the wall. Moved by the suffering they had seen during their stay, however, the Eternals – who clearly lacked the professional ruthlessness of Poincaffrey’s colleague, Dean Wattiki -- endeavored to save at least some of the luckless denizens of the area, though the rules of the Zone forbade external interference. One of the visitors was a senator with some pull airside, and had come up with an inventive scheme: he had told the people of Monterrey that the devils who lived in the barren lands beyond the Great Wall demanded an annual tribute, ten of their brightest and best young people, who were to walk to the wall once a year and present themselves for sacrifice. If they failed to comply, the devils would ride out of the Great Wall and slaughter the entire city.

In terror and grief, the parents of Monterrey gathered the designated tributes and sent them north, wearing white shrouds. The Rangers manning the wall had agreed, after some cajoling and a promise by the senator of extra funding for their leisure facilities, to go along with the scheme. It even became a fashion among the wall guardians to manifest themselves in the most terrifying of human forms. As a result, the Great Wall was guarded by a strange species of ape-men, snaggle-toothed monsters, their faces tattooed and ritually scarred, their noses pierced by iron hoops and human finger bones. An entire regimental culture had evolved out of scaring the poor, doomed denizens of Monterrey.

“You’ll see the Rangers tomorrow,” Bill said, patting Oriente’s hand. “I’ve been looking at the bastards for donkey’s years and it still scares the crap out of me when they come riding out the dust.”

Since then, he said, the people of Monterrey had lived in fear of the northern devils, mourning the fate of their young tributes, whom they presumed were eaten, since none ever returned.

“But they’re saved, my friend,” said Bill. “They go topside and discover there’s a whole paradise up there, that their petty little world was just a speck of fly shit in the desert.”

“And they don’t feel bad about being in heaven when their families are still living and dying in the… fly shit?” Oriente said.

Bill laughed. “Some came back as Rangers, years back, and rode out to Monterrey. Told ‘em to up the tribute. Twenty people, three times a year. The locals were terrified, but complied. Monterrey’s virtually a ghost town these days. That’s why you’ve lucked out: tomorrow’s a tribute day, and they’re much rarer nowadays. They’ll be here around ten. You can go over with them.” And with that, he shuffled off to the kitchen.

By now, Oriente’s stomach was distended with beer and food. Deep inside, he could already feel the threads of his carefully stitched-together personality tugging apart: could he, Luis Oriente, withstand contact with their eternal machine? Or would he split apart into his constituent parts of Glenn and Lyle, those two sad-sack losers whose deaths had fused into his own life? The incipient giddiness of madness, of loss of self, tickled his brain. The room span.

“You okay?” 1167 said. Oriente shook his head, tried to muster some words.

“I don’t think so,” he managed, but the admission only seemed to fuel the fear. The contents of his stomach churned and he rushed to the toilet to vomit. When he came back, 1167 was waiting, a look of concern on his young face.

“It’ll be alright,” the boy said. “I’ll come with you.”

For a second, Oriente stopped fretting over himself. “You might be shot,” he managed to croak.

1167 grinned, and lifted his leather satchel. From inside, he pulled his own crudely woven white clothing.

“I doubt it,” he said.

***

The tributes arrived early next morning, a small group of youths dressed in white rags and singing what sounded like a plaintive chant for mercy. They stopped outside Bill’s bar, their voices rising in the cool desert morning. The portly innkeeper served them fresh goats’ milk and bread to see them through the final leg of their journey.

Oriente and 1167 were waiting on the verandah, already in their white shrouds, nursing hangovers with something that Bill claimed was coffee but had an aftertaste of manure. A few of the tributes nodded their heads in shy greeting to their fellow victims.

“They seem calm for a group of people who believe they’re about to be sacrificed to devils,” Oriente said to Bill, who stood, hands on his hips, overseeing the feeding of the tributes.

“Very religious people, the Monterreyans. Very devout,” said Bill, shaking his head in what could have been admiration. “They believe these tributes are actually messengers to the gods, that if you die a righteous death for the good of your town, you’ll soon be dining with the gods. I guess the elders came up with that one. If only they knew it was them that’s going to die, while these lucky little bastards will live forever.”

Bill told the tributes there were two more going with them. The tributes, none more than a teenager, nodded as though they understood – the devils were greedy, and sometimes asked for sacrifices from other villages. They welcomed Oriente and 1167 into the ranks, formed a protective cordon round them as they set off again to the north, singing their lament. Bill waved goodbye as they filed solemnly off, then returned the cool interior of his bar.

It was a full morning’s walk to the wall. The sun was up and the vast barrier shimmied ahead of them, more like a dam than any wall Oriente had ever seen. White shrouds darkened with sweat. Eventually, 1167 pointed out a gate cut into the defenses that marked the crossing point of Sector 75.

They were still half a mile away when the gate rose, disgorging horsemen who galloped towards them, trailing a plume of dust. As they thundered across the flats, the tributes sang louder. Many were crying. At least one boy, no more than seven years old, had pissed his shroud.

As the guardians hove into view, the horses seemed oddly tiny, like Shetland ponies. It was a minute before Oriente realized it was an optical illusion: it was the riders who were abnormally large. And when the dust-caked figures reined to in front of them and pulled down the bandannas and goggles that protected their faces from the dust, Oriente could see they were shockingly ugly too.

The horsemen stopped a few yards from the group, guns pointed at the quaking newcomers. Two of them dismounted, and the group of tributes backed away instinctively. The men were Neanderthals, heavy browed ape-men with huge necks and jutting jaws, their genes harvested from extinct hominids. In fluent Nahuatl, the grotesque giants ordered the group to line up, then patted them down for weapons.

“They’re clean,” barked one of them in English, a reassuringly routine sound to Oriente, who was every bit as scared as the young tributes.

“Bring ‘em in,” said their leader, a man who appeared to have mingled a little silver-back gorilla into his Neanderthal cocktail. He snarled at the nearest Monterreyan, a slight boy who screamed and shrank back. The riders laughed.

“Never gets old,” said the chief. Oriente fixed his attention on the stony ground, worried that being seen to understand English might mark him out.

They set out once more, the riders walking their horses alongside the group of tributes, like cowboys herding cattle to a railhead. Through the dust that ground its way under his eyelids, Oriente saw a dried-up river bed zigzag under the shadow of the wall, its steep bank strung with razor wire and the occasional sign warning of landmines in English, Spanish and Nahuatl. Close up, the wall appeared somehow less solid, a cracked patchwork of cancerous concrete shored up with gravel, sandbags and rocks, sprouting tenacious shrubs across its flanks. The band of riders and tributes passed in silence through the deep tunnel of the gateway, reveling briefly in the coolness that bisected the ancient rampart, before emerging into the stinging daylight of what had once been the United States of America.