The Archivist (3 page)

As Danae leans her head against my shoulder, I smell a hint of rosemary in her hair, and the warmth of her body reminds me how long it has been since I held someone close.

I wonder if she has fallen asleep standing here, until she reaches for my pipe and takes a long draw.

“Your turn to answer a question,” I say when she hands the pipe back. “Why would an exquisite woman like you pour drinks in a bar, especially when you can handle a sling like that?”

She is silent for a minute before she replies, “I was married for a while, but it didn’t work out too well. He died while fishing. Afterward none of this superstitious lot wanted anything to do with me, at least as a wife. Not that I wanted any of them either. I needed to do something to help Papa out, so it was serve drinks to sailors, or serve them something else across the street. At least I can respect myself after serving drinks.”

Danae reaches for the pipe and takes another draw as she asks, “So… I guess you’re going back to the Archives after this?”

“Well, that’s what I do. Retrieve items and bring them back.”

“You have someone waiting for you to come home?”

This time I pause, both because I know she is fishing and because there was a time, a place when someone waited. But that is a long-faded ghost of the past, and I lost the ability to go there a long time ago. There are lots of places I have stopped going to.

“No. My home is the Archives, but my life is in the field. There was someone, but I lost her during the Demon Days.”

If Danae picks up on the fact that I have a much longer lifespan than I appear to have, she does not reveal it. Few of us remain who had aging reversal treatments, back before the Crash, when it was still available.

The Archives once estimated that only one out of a thousand people around the globe survived the initial year after the collapse. From what I have seen that is a generous figure, at least in the highly-populated areas.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Danae murmurs, and I hear genuine sympathy in her voice as she steps closer to me and places her head on my chest. “So we both know it. That loss which never really goes away. Wishing that the memory of the person could go wherever the person went to.”

“You loved him then, that fisherman of yours?”

Before answering she stares into the distance for a while. I feel some light sobs from her before she eventually replies in a small, quiet voice, “Yes, I did. He was my best friend as we grew up. We used to build forts in the boats that wrecked and washed up on the beach. When we were eight we had a mock marriage,” Danae says with a light laugh. “But to us it was serious. It never occurred to us that we wouldn’t grow old together.”

Her gaze shifts up to me with the same empty eyes and downturned mouth that I sometimes see in the mirror, when I make myself look. It hurts to look at her, but I cannot turn away.

Danae whispers, “Sheldon was a good man. You don’t find many of those nowadays.” She peers deep into my eyes and lets the blanket drop when she places both arms around my neck. Her eyes glisten with unshed tears as she asks, “Do you still think about her? Does it ever stop hurting?”

I slowly shake my head, and reply, “It gets better. But no, it never goes away.”

Tears well out onto her cheeks as she presses her face into my shirt. She says nothing, but sobs shudder through her body, and I feel her pain just as deeply as my own. I wrap my arms around her and fold her into me, until eventually her tears fade and she buries a long sigh into my chest.

“Do you ever feel so alone, it’s as though the rest of the world doesn’t exist?” her muffled voice asks.

I answer not with words but with my hands, caressing her back and shoulders gently, feeling her soft hair against my palms. The gentle warmth of her shoulder. I feel a hard response to the womanly scent of her arousal. She moans softly when I turn her face upward, and my mouth finds her full, willing lips.

Danae’s arms tighten around my neck as she pulls her body against mine and my hands reach under her shirt. She moans again as I caress her full breast and swirl my fingers over her hard nipple. Her mouth presses rough against mine, and she pulls me through the door, back into the house. With an almost-dancing motion we move across to my small room, and I close the door. Our lips only separate long enough for me to slip her shirt up and over her head.

As I drape the garment over a chair, I notice scarlet dragon-like shapes on Danae’s upper arms. Before blowing out the candle, I see that they are tattoos: mirror images of crouching and snarling red tigers. There was a moment back in the bar, when Danae stood with a candle glowing behind her, that her illuminated hair glowed with the same hue as the cats.

Then, I am back in the here-and-now as she pushes me down onto the cot and straddles me without a word.

Our passion builds like thunderheads on a sweltering summer day, until release comes for both of us, as sudden and intense as a cloudburst in the desert. A flash of intimacy floods over the parched landscape, then flows away before anything is allowed to seep into the hardened soil of our souls.

Silently she rises, takes her shirt and is gone, leaving behind only her scent.

Stray slivers of sunlight poke through the curtains that are drawn across a small window above the cot I am lying on. I still smell faint traces of Danae, which remind me of our encounter in the darkness. Danae is certainly not the first woman I have lain with over the past thirty years, but they have been few and far between, and always at the Archives.

Unlike any of those others, though, for a few moments last night Danae and I were not only physically naked, but utterly nude in an emotional sense. More than a sexual liaison, that flash flood of intimacy was almost a spiritual experience, and that scares the hell out of me.

Reluctantly I slip out from under the warm covers into the frigid morning air that seeps through the same cracks as the sunlight. Only the radiant warmth of the chimney which makes up the inside wall counters the chill as I dress and prepare for a cross-country trek.

When I step out into the common room, I find a vigorous fire snapping in the hearth, which explains the warm chimney. Danae has already laid out a breakfast at one end of the table: earthenware bowls filled with scrambled eggs, cooked grain that looks like oatmeal, and some sausage links.

Danae regards me with eyes as empty of expression as they were overflowing with it last night. Her stare silently tells me, ‘What happened last night will not happen again,’ and my unwavering gaze replies my agreement. I think it was as unexpected for her as it was for me.

“Good morning,” she says, finally, with what would be a friendly greeting from anyone else. But I have seen Danae’s real smile, and the stiff grin is a pathetic facsimile. She steps behind the table, placing the barrier between us. We both needed our encounter in that moment, but now we need what happened in that room to stay there.

Doc strides out of his room dressed for the road in heavy pants and shirt, interrupting what had been an awkward moment. He nods to me and I follow his lead as we fill broad, flat bowls with our servings and sit on the bench.

I turn toward the older man while Danae returns to the small kitchen. “If you don’t mind my asking, why the request for information on toxicology? We’ve never had anyone ask for that before. Usually it’s either how to make weapons or grow food.” I am not actually interested. I just want to put distance between me and that un-moment.

Doc closes his eyes while he savors a bite of sausage, then looks at me. “There used to be a mining operation upriver. You’re too young to remember the time of the Crash, but like everything else, the mine was run by robots and computers, so the whole operation shut down along with the tech. The few men staffing the mine had no idea how to do the real work, so they just drifted away. Unfortunately, the mess they left behind didn’t drift away with them.”

I am not surprised that the mine was abandoned. After 3D materials printing came of age in the Twenties and robots became versatile enough to take over not only building robots but designing them, manual labor and skills pretty much vanished in all but the most impoverished nations. By the time of the Crash, the only humans with any crafting skills left were a handful of diehard anachronistic hobbyists, most of whom died in the Demon Days.

“What were they mining?” I ask.

“God knows what,” Doc shrugs. “I have no idea, nor how they processed the ore. That’s why I need those texts, so I can identify the symptoms of chemical poisoning, as well as find treatments. It can be a very insidious disease.”

“Well, at least you can treat it,” I say, waving my spoon at him. “Much better than radiation sickness. I’ve seen what radiation can do to people. It’s about the nastiest way to die that I’ve ever seen.”

“Is it really as bad as they say it is? Down south, in the Dead Zone?”

I stare into my bowl before responding to Doc. That poor bastard we found floating in a canoe off the coast of what used to be California barely resembled a human being. His hair had fallen out, his entire body was covered with a sunburn from hell and the man was lying in a pool of diarrhea and vomit.

“Whatever you’ve heard, it’s worse. It’ll be generations before anyone goes east of the Appalachians or almost anywhere in California. Or at least, anyone who’s going to come back to talk about it.” The canoeist was alive when we found him, but the sounds he made before the morphine put him out of his misery were not words.

Danae emerges from the kitchen and loads up a bowl, then joins us at the multipurpose table. “I cleaned everything up, so we can leave as soon as we’re done eating,” Danae remarks as she digs in.

“The hell you are!” I spit out. “This isn’t a sightseeing trip, and we’re not going out picking berries.” It is not just that having Danae with us would be awkward for me, to say the least. She has no idea of the thousand and one ways that a retrieval can go wrong, nor just how bad some of them can be. I know, I have seen most of them.

“I’ll bring a bucket just in case you change your mind,” she replies sweetly, then turns to her father. “You said it’s just a few hours each way, and that you’ll be back tonight.”

“True enough, child. But it’s a hard day’s hike and not for the faint of heart. You won’t enjoy it.” Doc does not sound very determined; I hear surrender forming in his voice.

“Not for a faint heart!” Danae snorts. “That certainly rules you out. You know full well that I can hike to places you haven’t seen in years. Besides, I’m not coming for fun, I’m coming to make sure you get back.”

“You don’t need to worry, I have the Archivist to look after me,” he protests.

“You’re absolutely right, Doc.” I slap my bowl on the table. “Having her along won’t speed us up, but it could definitely slow us down. If we run into trouble, I don’t need someone else to watch over.”

“Papa,” Danae pleads, “you know I’ll just follow behind. If you’re really worried about my safety, you might as well keep me with you. Unless you plan to tie me up.”

I am about to ask where they keep the rope when Doc caves in to her plea. “Dee, you are just like your mother,” he responds with a sigh. After running his hands through his hair in resignation, he continues. “You are just as stubborn as she was. I guess I can’t say no to you any more than I could her.”

Danae gives her father a hug and shoots me a smug, satisfied smile before she heads back into the kitchen. I suspect she is coming along just to annoy me, but I shrug and turn back to my breakfast. As long as I get what I came for, I truly do not care if Danae gets blisters.

After breakfast, Doc and Danae waste little time preparing backpacks, which are now routine gear everywhere. I always keep mine ready to grab, literally. More than once I have barely had enough time snatch it and run. I will not say I cannot live without my backpack, but there is no question that my retrieval work would be far more difficult without all the goodies stashed away in one or another of its secret compartments.

When we are ready to leave, I take my staff and follow Doc out the door, then pause, barring Danae from coming out while I quickly scan the street. No sign of the Disciple, and if his goons have recovered, they are keeping out of sight.

Across the street, a small pack of several mongrel dogs is intent on digging up a small animal burrow in an abandoned lot. Dogs are still companions for humans everywhere I go, but only the working varieties. Aside from a minor baron that I found maintaining a small pack of King Charles Cavaliers, I have not seen a show breed in decades.

For several years I kept a German Shepherd companion, but for her own safety I had to leave her with a trusted contact on a mission in Peru. She probably still has not forgiven me, I reflect, with a pang of guilt.

A few pedestrians trudge by on the street, going to whatever chores await them, and they chat nonchalantly while ignoring us, so the coast seems to be clear. After I move out onto the porch, Danae glares at me before she locks the door. I respect that she likes to be her own boss, but not on my retrieval. I have probably been doing this longer than she has been alive.

Other than a few puffy clouds, the sky is clear, and the morning light gives me a better view of the residential section of Port Sadelow. The simple houses are small and relatively featureless, fashioned out of rough-hewn wood and mostly unpainted. Now when I examine them, I see that the rustic, austere structures are built stronger than I first gave them credit for. Most yards have vegetable gardens and a few have compact flowerbeds. The large house on the corner even has a second story.

We turn at the corner and follow several long, dirt street blocks until we reach the edge of the modest town. There are no city walls, just a plain wooden fence marking the transition from town to farmland. As we move into the fields, a light, gusty breeze beats steady on our backs, and the brackish smell of inter-coastal water follows us on the worn path that leads up a gradual slope into the trees.

Near the top of the hill, I pause to glance around while I take out my pistol crossbow and sling it on my pack. Plots of green fields and brown dirt surround this settlement, spreading to the right and left alongside the river. Left unmolested, this might one day be a significant community.

Our route takes us inland into small rolling foothills. Just after it enters the forest, the ten-foot-wide path connects to a well-travelled thoroughfare which has the consistent width and level surface of a pre-Crash road. The years have reclaimed much of what was probably a paved two-lane road at one time; the forest encroaches from both sides. Broken asphalt occasionally shows through the decades of dirt and debris that have collected; only regular traffic keeps the route relatively open.

The moment we entered the forest we lost the warmth of the sunlight, so the air gets colder, but the breeze is also gone. After six weeks of breezes while I was at sea, escaping the wind chill makes it a fair trade. We leave the town behind as we trek down a worn pathway through a tunnel of trees.

Our small group is not talkative; the old man conserves all of his breath for hiking, and Danae falls back occasionally to take a stone out of her shoe or adjust her pack. At least she does not complain when she catches up, so I give her points for that.

The morning passes. A couple of times, we step off to the side when we encounter small caravans of traders coming our way. These groups of three or four wagons have banded together for protection; the wealthier ones typically hire foot-soldier mercenaries for protection. The drivers nod to us warily as they pass. Their mouths smile, but their eyes narrow and dart around, looking for any signs of a trap.

Not that I can blame them. There is no governance outside the towns and small cities in this region, and Disciple territory lies to the southeast across a couple of hundred miles of lawless wilderness and a small mountain range.

The Disciples like to claim that they rule with an iron rod of Justice, which is just one reason my missions there have been few and brief and always under deep cover. I have to concede that the only offenses I have seen occur in their region are the fanatical ones they themselves perpetrate.

The lack of law and order outside the vicinity of towns like Port Sadelow is mitigated by the severe countryside and the fact that there just is not enough wealth to attract any serious criminal elements. Not yet, anyway. That will change in time, if human history is any guide.

Doc calls a halt and Danae sneaks a sideways glance at me while she takes a swig from her water skin, but when our eyes meet, she looks away. She has barely spoken to me all morning. If Doc has noticed anything odd between us, he keeps it to himself. Not that I am sentimental—the lack of any messy attachments works for me—but I am still annoyed, for some reason.

Even under the woodland canopy, the temperature has warmed enough that I hang my duster on the back of my pack. When we resume, Doc leads us into the forest on the right side. A sparse game trail winds through brush and pine trees. I suspect that an underground spring runs through this small valley, because the ground is moist.

An occasional squirrel barks at us and birds flitter back and forth in the trees, which Danae eyes warily, for some reason. Otherwise we do not see any wildlife, but that is not surprising given the amount of noise we make.

Doc manages a slow but steady pace while we follow the animal track along a gentle rise up to where it circles a small lake. When the trail begins to wind back and forth up a hillside, he begins to wheeze and has to take frequent breaks. By the time the vegetation thins out I am half-pulling him up the hill.

When we reach the ridge I estimate we have gained at least 2000 feet in elevation. Danae helps the old man to the side of the trail and he collapses against a tree trunk to catch his breath. As she helps him sip some water, I have to admit that Danae was right to be concerned.

We take a leisurely snack and water break, then follow the crest for half an hour, until Doc halts for another water break in the shade of a pine tree. Now we are back in the direct sun and the morning chill is long gone, so I would guess it must be at least eighty-five degrees.

I rarely see a thermometer these days outside of the Archives. It is not just that most of them were electronic and no longer worth the silicon used to make them. Few people have a practical reason for them now.

“It happened just up that hill,” Doc says, pointing to a spur off to the right. We sling our water skins over our shoulders and scramble along a narrow, rocky ridge that leads onto an open outlook, where a freshly-built cairn stands in the distance.

“What exactly happened?” I ask as we pick our way along the ridge. “Something that seems like a minor detail to you may have great bearing on our safety.”

Doc pauses to look at the ground, then steals a glance toward Danae before responding. “We were on our way back. Your friend said he needed a few minutes alone, so I rested in the shade under that tree back there. As you’ve seen, I’m an old man and not the hiker I used to be. Anyway, a while later I heard him cry out, once. That was it, just once. When I got there, he was already dead and I didn’t see what killed him.”