City Under the Stars

1

IT WAS HIGH SUMMER in Orange, in York, in the Human Domain of Earth. There was commerce in the town, crops in the field, beasts in the byre, bandits in the roads, thants and chimeras in the hills, and God in His Heaven—which was fifteen miles away, due east.

From where Hanson worked—on an open platform extending out from the side of the giant State Factory of Orange and nestling right up against the bare, rocky face of Industry Hill—it was possible to look east, out across the teeming squalor of Orange, and see the Wall of the City of God marching north-south across the horizon, making the horizon really: a radiant line drawn across the misty blue of distance, pink as a baby’s thigh, pink as dawn. And to know that it stretched, in all its celestial arrogance, more than two hundred miles to the north, and more than three hundred miles to the south, unbroken, cutting three-quarters of the Human Domain off from the sea—the City of God, perfect and inviolable, with a completeness that was too much for man. That was what Hanson must face every day when he came to work and stood in the sun and in his human sweat with his little shovel. That terrible, alien beauty, indifferent to mortality, forever at his back, a head’s turn away, as he worked, as he grew old. And knowing that God and all the angels were in there, pure and incomprehensible as fire, maybe watching him right now, looking down over the Edge of the Wall and into the finite world: a huge watery eye, tall as the sky.

But no one ever thought much about God on shift, not for long. The sun was too hot in summer, the wind too bitter in winter, the work killing in any season, blighting and shriveling a man, draining him dry. There was too much sickness, not enough food, little medicine, little comfort, and only brief bitter joys. It soon became evident that God didn’t care about man, that He paid no more attention to the misery swarming beneath the Wall of His City than man pays to the activities of beetles, that He had no more compassion for humanity’s messy agonies than man had for the suffering and tribulations of mayflies. There were two State Temples of Purified Catholicism visible in the sweep below, and even the encircled cross that marked a kachina shrine, a kiva, but none of them were very well attended. In spite of its proximity to the Wall of the City of God—or perhaps because of it—Orange was not a devoutly religious town.

Hanson leaned into his shovel and watched the blade disappear into the coal. The pile sloped up and back, toward the lips of the gullet, through which new lumps of coal would rattle slowly down onto the top of the heap every few seconds, obliging the shift to keep up a steady tempo of work to avoid being swamped. On heavy days they would have to shovel like fiends to keep up, dumping the coal down chutes into hoppers on the lower transport level of the factory. But no matter how much they sweated, the coal remained undiminished, replenished constantly from the top as fast as they could clear it away from the bottom: a glossy black mountain crawling sluggishly with the unending inching motion of the coal. Hanson had even stopped hating it, regarding it now as a condition to be endured, something too big, impersonal, and constant to rail against, impersonal as a thunderstorm. His mother had told him an ancient tale once—a few months before she’d died in one of the food riots that were an aftermath of the Campaign Against the South—about women with brooms trying to sweep the sea free of salt. He often thought about the tale while on shift, and unlimbered the flinty thing that had served him for a smile the past few years, since his wife, Becky, had died coughing blood in the White Winter four seasons back.

It seemed that everyone he had ever known and loved had died, one by one over the falling years, leaving him here in the barren center of nothing, living on and on, alone. He had never wanted it that way. He’d never asked for that.

Taking a step backward, Hanson scooped up a shovelful of coal, pivoted smoothly, and tossed it over the curb and into the chute, turning back for another shovelful without bothering to watch the first fall. After years on the job, he could send a steady stream of coal anywhere he wanted it, with pinpoint accuracy, almost without looking. He placed his foot on the blade, dug it back into the pile, and stopped. Normally he would work like this for hours without stopping, steady as a mechanical thing, his motions flowing into an unbroken cycle. But today—today he could not keep his mind on his job, today he was like a child, distracted by anything, everything, the wind, the sky, the light glinting from his shovel blade. He leaned on the shovel, buried up to the handle in the pile, and watched the gullet spit up some more coal.

Somewhere up there, miles deep into the slope, miles beneath Industry Hill, maybe even halfway to Pitt, one of the last surviving Utopian autominers was burrowing and wallowing like a steel whale through a deep vein of coal, exploring the secret roots of the world. No—it was blind, and ate its way past wonders it could never see, so maybe tapeworm would be a better analogy than whale: a robotic, reactor-powered tapeworm that gnawed through Earth’s bowels with adamantine teeth, insatiably tracing the tightening convolutions of the intestines, passing the ore through its indestructible body and voiding it back along the endless tail of the conveyor field to the mouth of the gullet. Where it dribbled onto the pile and tumbled slowly down the grade so that Hanson or one of his shift-mates could scoop it up with a shovel and dump it into a hopper. Hanson had wondered once or twice at the Factory, at Orange, at the State of York—at the incongruity of a society that must use unbelievably sophisticated machines and primitive hand-labor as integral parts of the same industrial process. Horses pulled the loaded ore-hoppers across Orange to the Docks, where a monster Utopian transport waited to carry it on the long journey to the ancient blast furnaces in Pitt, then skirting the Wall to the pockets of industry in the Chesapeake country, and then to the South. Horses and transports, autominers and shovels. The Utopian machines were used where they could be used, to do the magic work no army of ordinary men could do. Where they couldn’t be used, where there were no machines anymore to be used for that, then the gap was filled in with hand-labor, with sweat and broken backs and sudden heart attacks. There were plenty of people after all.

And most of those people found nothing odd in the arrangement. Hanson had once worked with the Utopian autominers, years ago, before factory politics and the enmity of Oristano the foreman had started him on the long road down to the Pit, and when he had first arrived at the Pit, at the rock bottom of his career with nowhere to go except death, he had remarked to old Relk in a mixture of bitterness and grim humor that it was too bad they couldn’t scrape up a Goddamned Utopian machine to do the Goddamn shoveling. Relk had merely gaped blankly at him, unable to understand—Hanson might as well have spoken in a foreign language. Work was work; magic was magic; and that was that. Relk could see no incongruities, no connections between the two. He’d sniffed disapprovingly at Hanson and told him he wouldn’t last long in the Pit.

But Hanson had worked like a hill demon his first few months in the Pit, and had finally replaced the old shift-leader, Ricciardi, after Ricciardi had died of a heart attack on the job. But that didn’t cut any ice with Relk, “that didn’t make no never mind” with him, as he would have said. No one lasted in the Pit as long as Relk, in the end. Others were transient; Relk was a permanent fixture.

Relk was staring at him now, his leather face wrinkling facilely into deep-worn lines of displeasure, so that he looked like a shriveled, thousand-year-old monkey with a bellyache. Hanson realized that he had been hesitating for a couple of minutes, leaning on his shovel and watching the gullet. He cursed himself wearily. As shift-leader, Hanson had the responsibility of pacing the work, setting the tempo and rhythm. He couldn’t allow himself the luxury of daydreams—at least he wasn’t supposed to. Angrily he scooped up another shovelful of coal, dumped it, came back for another. He forced himself back into the rhythm, concentrating on the movement of his body.

Relk snorted sourly and began shoveling again. Relk had never thought much of Hanson as a shift-leader. Hanson wasn’t dedicated enough. Old Relk had worked the Pit for more than thirty-five years—his skin burned black, his skinny, knotted, cordwood body indestructible—and he’d seen at least ten shift-leaders come and go. None of them had been dedicated enough. Relk was dedicated—so dedicated his intelligence had long ago sunk down to the subhuman, which was why he’d never been chosen for shift-leader. He was totally absorbed by his job. He was his job, so much so that he no longer had any separate existence or identity. In many ways, then, he was the ideal citizen of Orange. He made Hanson’s flesh crawl.

Hanson glanced surreptitiously down the line to see if anyone else had noticed his lapse. Gossard, next down beyond Relk, seemed oblivious to the world, grimly absorbed in his task. He was a little slower in the shoveling than the others—his motions faltered occasionally, the big blade wobbled every so often in his hands. His pale, globular body glistened slickly with sweat. The Pit was hard on Gossard. He was a good man, a friend, and a conscientious worker, but he was absurdly fat—the sickly, flabby fat of a glandular imbalance; few men got enough to eat in Orange to become fat in the traditional manner—and his weight told cruelly on him, especially in the summer. But he was trapped; he wasn’t a fast enough worker to merit advancement out of the Pit, and the blacklist would deny him employment elsewhere if he should quit his job. It was hard enough to live on State salary; people without jobs often didn’t live at all. If Gossard wanted his family to survive, he had to work here. It would kill him someday. The coal dust bothered him too, and he coughed constantly, great wracking coughs that set his fat to quivering like lard poured into a tub. Hanson wondered sometimes if the dust or a stroke would get Gossard first.

Beyond Gossard were the two workers with unpronounceable names who didn’t speak Mercan very well: one burly, bland, and butter-colored; the other as dead-black as the coal, amazingly slight for Pit work, all whipcord muscle and jittery nervous energy—the track marks were vivid up and down his arms and legs, and some days his eyes were nothing but whites swimming with ruptured blood vessels, but as long as he did his work, nobody would complain until the day he finally collapsed. They were openly queer, sitting with sweaty arms wrapped around each other’s necks during breaks and joking in their rapid, incomprehensible dialect, singing and fondling each other in the washroom, grinning obscenely at the other men. Nobody cared about that either, and some people openly envied them: women had been scarce in Orange for a number of years now. Hanson had privately named them Tic and Tac. Tic was now working with insane speed, but spastically, spilling coal, doing a jittery skipping dance dangerously close to the curb with every stroke, unable to remain still even for a second. Tac was slyly screwing off as usual, his face crafty as a cat’s, but Hanson didn’t feel like calling him on it so soon after his own dereliction.

He used his return swing for an excuse to glance to his left, where he had been wanting to look from the first, made hesitant by guilt and apprehension. They had put the New Man there this morning, just to Hanson’s left, ostensibly so that Hanson could keep an eye on him. Hanson knew better. Hanson and Oristano the foreman had been deadly enemies for almost a decade and they understood each other with that special intense intimacy reserved for feuders and lovers. And Oristano’s obscene shark grin this morning, as he introduced the New Man, had told the whole story. Oristano knew Hanson’s pride, knew how it had been slowly battered down over the years until being the fastest, hardest worker in the Pit was the last thing Hanson had left to be proud of, knew how Hanson clung to that brag with the desperation of a drowning man.

And that it was no longer true.

The New Man was working with the dazzling, rock-steady rhythm he had displayed all morning, calm, fluid, and unrestrained, not even breathing hard. He was a huge bull of a man, a coffee-colored giant with kinky, flaming red hair. He was a solid barrel of muscle, carrying not an ounce of fat, and he was young. He was very young. Hanson had been a factory legend in his own time, but he was almost twenty years older than the New Man, and each day of those years sat like lead on his arms and legs, like a bar of iron across his shoulders. Hanson knew that he couldn’t beat the New Man, not now, not after half a lifetime of killing labor—the New Man was young, magnificently fresh, fed by a hundred biological springs that had dried up in Hanson long ago.

He just couldn’t keep up with him. That was bitter; that was very hard.

Maybe he never would have been able to match this monster, even in his prime.

That was unendurable.

The New Man had seen him daydreaming, like a toothless old fool, just when he would have been establishing his status over the younger man, when he should have been proving that he was still the hardest-working slug in the Pit. He had shamed himself before the New Man, he had disgraced his reputation at the very moment that he needed it the most. He was too old, his brain was going, he couldn’t think anymore. Somebody should shoot him if he was getting that senile, roll him in a ditch, cover him up before he started to rot out in the open air. And the New Man was easily matching Hanson’s quickest pace, with the unthinking grace and sureness of the young. In fact, it was obvious that he could go much faster if he wanted to but that he was restraining himself, he was deliberately holding himself back to Hanson’s slower tempo.

The New Man was being polite.

And Hanson stopped thinking, except with his body.

Hanson began working faster, without volition—faster and faster, like a mechanical toy speeding up to a blur, wound too tight, out of control.

The New Man matched him easily, stroke for stroke.

Gossard faltered, dropped out. Tic and Tac kept up a little longer and then stopped, panting, watching in awe. Old Relk continued to work at his own personal speed, ignoring everybody, shaking his head at the decadence of the world.

The New Man had finally moved ahead of Hanson, opening up all the way. Hanson couldn’t keep up. Already he had fallen three or four strokes behind—

To Hanson, it was as if the sun had melted and poured down over him in a cascade of scalding molten gold—he breathed it stabbingly into his lungs, it stripped the flesh from his bones, it broiled the marrow in the sockets, it piled up mountainously on his shoulders and crushed him with the weight of the sky. Slowly his legs buckled under the mass of the sky-mountain. He was talking to Becky now, and they were walking together through a high open meadow where the grass and trees were made all of ice, and flowers sprinkled like searfrost. But he couldn’t keep up with her because the mountain was too heavy and he couldn’t put it down. He tried to run after her, but the mountain crushed him like a giant’s thumb and the icy ground softened to mud under his feet, and he sank into it under the mountain, floundering, sinking deeper and deeper. No matter what he had to

stop.

He did.

The shovel saved Hanson from actually falling. He leaned against it, legs rubbery, knees flexed, breath rasping in his throat. Oristano’s face swam under his eyelids. It superimposed itself over the coal-mountain, the two things merging into an inhuman, undefeatable entity—a god of black malignancy. He opened his eyes. Slowly, his vision cleared. Planes of bloody shadow resolved into the New Man, who was staring at him with a worried, embarrassed expression. He caught Hanson’s eye and smiled hesitantly—he didn’t want to rub Hanson’s face in his victory. He was still being very polite.

Gossard caught the tension in the air and went doggedly back to work, not wanting to watch Hanson’s final humiliation. Tac made an obscure, fatalistic gesture with his fingertips; Tic stroked his shoulder, pursed wet lips—they started shoveling again. Relk looked around with an air of sly, senile vindication, made a muffled hunh sound, and turned away, muttering something about dedication to the coal pile as he dug his blade into it.

Hanson drew himself up. His arms and back throbbed as if they had been beaten with clubs and there was no strength in his legs; he wobbled in spite of his best efforts to brace himself. The New Man pretended not to notice. Hanson ran his tongue around his lips, tasted blood, swallowed it. Defeat slumped his spine, burned his brain to ash. He waited for some ashen thought to filter down through his new ash brain, but no thought came—it was as barren as the Moon. Sternly, he took control of his face and forced himself to smile back at the New Man. It wasn’t really his fault; he was a good boy. Blame himself instead. Blame Oristano. Blame Time.

The New Man relaxed, visibly relieved—his smile broadened into a grin from which with all the best will in the world, it was impossible for him to keep a trace of satisfied triumph. This is his hour, Hanson thought, let him enjoy it. He was being good about it anyway, out of respect for Hanson’s reputation. How very strange that was. When had living admiration become respect for a legend? How could the line have slipped up on him and past without his notice? Had he been that blind? Wasn’t he still the same man he’d always been, below the old bones?

The New Man fished in his pocket and came up with a narc. He scratched the stick on his hip; the narc flared and then guttered to an orange ember-glow at its tip. A wisp of smoke curled up around his massive forearm like the ghost of a snake. The New Man offered the narc to Hanson: a friendly monster, smiling and huge, sweat runneling his broad face.

Hanson hesitated, studying the sweaty giant, and then took the narc. He put the horn-tipped end of the resin stick in his mouth and sipped deeply, holding a smoldering pine forest in his lungs. The New Man produced another narc. They stood smoking together while the sun baked them dry of sweat. Coal rustled unheeded around their feet.

“Hot sumbitch, a’n’t it?” the New Man said.

“Ai,” Hanson said, trying not to sound too much like a dead man. Prodding himself: “A’ways is, this time of year. Freeze your ass off in winter though. A’ways one or the other, up here. You a’n’t never going to be comfortable.”

“Ai.”

The New Man was staring out across the sweep of Orange: seas of hunched, dirty roofs, narrow alleys, smoke-belching chimneys, here and there the broken skeleton of a ruined Utopian building towering above the squalor, picked clean, naked and pathetic. “Can see a hell of a ways, though, up here,” the New Man said enthusiastically. “Most all of the city I’ll bet, near about.”

“Ai, the whole Goddamn shitpile.” He wouldn’t turn his head to look at the Wall, though he was sharply aware of its presence. It beat against him like a hand of light, the knowledge of that golden, heartless thing.

Far as Hanson could tell from here, the Wall marched across the whole world and never came to an end. The Goddamned thing just never ended at all.

He blinked back sudden tears of rage and sorrow so great they squeezed his heart.

“Come on,” he said, and punched the giant in the shoulder. And picked up his shovel.

And somehow he managed to keep working throughout the afternoon, although his mind was not there at all most of the time. His body seemed to manage well enough without it.

It was dark by the time the shift ended. Hanson gave the signal to quit work, and they shouldered their tools and shuffled single file along the curb to the lip of the Pit.

Oristano met them at the lip.

To Hanson, the foreman looked like a gross manikin sculpted from shadow, a hunched puddle of darkness that even starlight couldn’t melt, merely glinting dully from teeth and eyes. He was backlit by the furnace glare that escaped around the iron doors behind him, and his bloated silhouette suddenly seemed to be that of a monster toad crouched in a smoldering sulfur swamp, waiting for weary flies to spiral hopelessly down within reach. Hanson could almost see the sticky, supple frog-tongue licking out, flickering impatiently down and around the foreman’s waist. Then Oristano stepped forward, and the rough blob of his head split open to reveal an ugly, tooth-glinting grin. Oristano was big, half a head shorter than Hanson, but built broader and heavier. Hanson could remember him as a svelte bear of a man, covered with bristly black hair, clumsy but very powerful, and with a bear’s sick, uncertain temper. Time and ease had added weight until now he was grossly fat—not the flabby stuff of Gossard’s affliction, but tight-packed and well-muscled lard that made him look even more dangerous than he had in the past. Usually he was brusque with Hanson, and the two spoke little to each other, making no attempt to hide their dislike. Tonight he greeted Hanson with boisterous good cheer and an exaggerated oily courtesy, asking Hanson in a loud voice if the New Man had worked out all right.

“Yes,” Hanson answered quietly, “he works very well.” The shovel felt incredibly heavy against his bruised shoulder. He bowed grudgingly under its weight. Alternate waves of hot and cold ran along his body, and a faint nausea returned. He could sense the New Man somewhere off to his right, embarrassed again, made uneasy by the sadistic malice in Oristano’s voice and the weary, beaten hatred in Hanson’s, aware that the two older men were acting out some ritual that he couldn’t quite understand but in which he had played an integral part.

“He’s a good worker, ai?” Oristano boomed.

“Yes,” Hanson said.

Oristano grinned, another flash of crooked teeth. “Good, good.” Flash again. “That’s good, ai?”

Hanson nodded dully.

“Ai.” Oristano laughed, and waved a ponderous arm. Factory artisans rolled the fire door open—the sudden blast of hot light sent Oristano’s shadow leaping out, swelling and elongating fantastically, washing over Hanson—and began to carry equipment out. Hanson’s shift moved up from the curb, swirling around Hanson, and filed along the platform behind the lip to make room. The new shift waited by the fire doors as the artisans gingerly carried old spotlights out to position them along the curb. The line of artisans broke around Oristano: ants around a boulder. Neither man had moved. Oristano bulked like an ogre on the platform, goblin-grin glistening wetly. Hanson remained at the junction of curb and lip, shovel still slung across his shoulders, watching wearily.

The artisans had clamped the spotlights to the curb at intervals, muzzles tilted up at an angle so that their glare wouldn’t blind the shovelers, but would give enough light to work the Pit. Now they were stringing much-patched wires back along the underside of the curb, where they’d be out of the way of pivoting feet, and testing connections. The spotlights came on one by one, at low intensity: a herd of giant rheumy orange eyes—dinosaurs jostling down in the dark to drink. The nearest spot spilled shifting orange patterns across Hanson’s knotted back, up and along the bulge of Oristano’s naked belly. Then the spot came on at full strength, slicing a white column through jet. In the sudden glare, Hanson could see Oristano’s face clearly for the first time that evening: heavy-jowled, eyes pinched shut with fat; lips absurdly small and delicate; a mashed, shattered nose laced with old white scars, hair peeking in tufts from the nostrils. The same beam illuminated the upper half of the pile and the ceaseless crawling of the coal.

All this, all these years, Hanson thought in numb horror, because I once broke Oristano’s nose in a tavern brawl, in front of the men of the factory.

Nothing ever ended. Five minutes of his past had birthed all the rest of his life.

Hanson shifted the weight of the shovel and stepped up onto the lip. He walked past Oristano without looking at him and continued steadily on across the platform to the fire door. Oristano laughed again, an ugly clotted sound, and followed Hanson with his eyes, although he disdained to turn his head.

Fifteen years of shuffling around the giant factory, going from one section to another, from job to job, always falling lower, but always hanging on to one more hope—fifteen years, and now it was all over. He was finished. The New Man would be shift-leader tomorrow, although he didn’t know it yet. Hanson would not come back. Oristano had known that he wouldn’t. And without a job in Orange, barred from work by quitting the factory, Hanson was a dead man. He might as well lie down now and wait for the scavengers. It was all over with him.

Without saying a word, Hanson collected his shift and led them out through the fire doors, through the guts of the factory toward the washroom. He did not look back.

Behind him, Oristano smiled.

Hanson washed up slowly, working the tarnished brass pump, watching the hypnotically rhythmical spurts of rusty water fill the basin. His face was expressionless, and he ignored the other men in his shift. Relk, as usual, had merely changed into his civilian clothes and left, without bothering to wash, without bothering to say goodbye. Tic and Tac splashed noisily at the far basin, talking in a rapid stream of gutturals and fricatives. Gossard wallowed in armfuls of water, blowing like a whale. The New Man washed quietly, dressed, and then hesitated by Hanson’s basin on the way out, feeling obliged to say something to the older man but afraid to speak. Hanson did not look up. After several moments, the New Man shrugged, shook his head, and left. Hanson continued to wash, stolidly, turning his arms over and over under the pump.

Moving with deliberation, he soaped the salty patches of dried sweat from his body, lifted the heavy ceramic basin, and poured the brackish water over his head, carefully pumped the basin full, and rinsed himself again. While he was doing this, Tic and Tac went out, each staring at him as they went by—Tac looking at him with morbid, insolent curiosity, as if he was examining a particularly interesting corpse, and Tic rolling his eyes in a quick sideways motion, as if he was afraid to look at Hanson directly, as if Hanson was the carrier of a disease so virulent it could be contracted by a glance. Hanson stood like a statue, holding the basin over his head, letting the water flatten his thinning black hair, cascade over his shoulders, pour in runnels down his legs. His eyes were fixed and unblinking. Tic and Tac hurried out, and didn’t look back.

When the basin was empty, Hanson put it down and picked up a coarse towel, moving no more than necessary. He heard Gossard come up behind him, hesitating as the New Man had, a few steps away. Hanson rubbed himself down methodically, not turning around. Gossard shifted his weight uneasily from foot to foot, unconsciously sighing and massaging his stomach. Hanson could hear him breath: labored, wheezing, strangled by fat. He wouldn’t last much longer, Hanson thought again. His heart, one day on the shift. Or a stroke. Or the dust. The thought made Hanson sad and almost pierced the wall that humiliation and the loss of status were building around him—he felt a momentary desire to talk to the fat man, to confess the shame and agony. To share his friendship while he’s still alive, Hanson realized, in a wave of black fury. Before the job kills him. Like it will kill all of us eventually, one by one, until only old Relk is left. Or until we all become like him: dead, but still walking. Hanson snapped the towel viciously against his calf, relishing the sting, and began to rub himself down again. Anger had rebuilt the walls of his shame, and he pointedly ignored Gossard, keeping his back turned. Why should one corpse talk to another? About what? Gossard cleared his throat obstreperously without eliciting any response, walked suddenly to the door, paused, and came slowly back.

“Carl?”

“Yes?” Hanson replied, without turning his head.

“Are you all right?”

Hanson’s cheeks flamed. Half a lifetime leaped in his throat, tangled itself hopelessly in his tongue, refused to pass his lips. What he said was: “Yes.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes.”

Silence, Hanson standing motionless with the towel clutched in his hands like a snake, and then Gossard said, “Is there—” and Hanson said, “No,” almost simultaneously.

Gossard tried again: “If there’s anything I can do—”

“No.”

Then, forcing himself to speak:

“No. Thank you, John, but no. Nothing.”

Then:

“There is nothing that can be done.”

There was a long silence and Hanson did not move at all. Gossard didn’t speak again. After a while, he went away, closing the door gently behind him. The sound of his heavy footsteps dwindled into distance, was gone.

Hanson was alone.

The fading gurgle of water down sunken drains, the slow drip-drip of a faulty pump. The single carbon lamp flared and dimmed regularly with the beat of hidden dynamos, a brassy illumination washing across the stone walls and floor, ebbing from a beach of shadows. The air was heavy with old sweat. The room was full of ghosts.

Hanson was still for a moment longer, then, like a statue coming to life, he crushed the towel into a ball and hurled it viciously away, shuddering with disgust. He took a staggering step to a basin, braced his arms against it, and took three deep breaths, his backbone rising and falling with the effort. Gradually his breathing slowed. He became a statue again.

He had been sure he was going to be sick, but he couldn’t: the sickness clogged somewhere in the very back of his throat, too deep ever to be regurgitated.

He pushed himself away from the basin, walked rapidly and violently to the center of the washroom, and stopped, looking around uncertainly, shaking his head, baffled. He started out again with great vigor, stopped after two steps, casting quick, frightened glances around him, seeing through the walls to the labyrinth of factory corridors, the maze of his life. He grimaced, rubbed his hands along his ribs, forced himself into motion, his steps dragging as if he were wading into quicksand, four steps, five, and he was halted again—stopped dead by inertia. He could feel the factory above him, below him, holding him in its belly, crushing down against his shoulders, anchoring his feet deep in its alien earth.

There was no place to go.

There was nothing to do.

There were no options left open to him.

Appalled, he allowed himself to drift back into the washroom, away from the door, along the row of basins, along the row of urinals. The stone under his feet was stained and porous, slightly damp—it felt like flesh. The air was delicately webbed with ancient piss, the light was spiky and hurtful against Hanson’s eyes, his shadow drifted listlessly with him, across the grimy walls—the ghost of a ghost. He fetched up against the far wall, turned restlessly, and pushed into a wooden commode stall. The commode was old—stone-lipped, and earthen-breathed from the huge sump beneath the factory. It was now considered a luxury, and the use of it an incentive to work; the factory had been built in somewhat more prosperous times—the interlude between the Third Plague and the disastrous Campaign Against the South—when the State had been able to afford spending money and materials on such things, and when artisans sufficiently talented to build such a system were common enough to waste on nonessentials. Hanson had been raised with outhouses and nightjars at best, slit trenches or hand-scooped holes at worst, and still found the big stone commode alien and faintly menacing, in spite of years at the factory. He stared at it dumbly, as if expecting it to speak in a septic voice of decay.

Habit took over. Automatically, he sat down, tried to move his bowels. All the while, he watched himself, as if from a vantage point outside his body—one part of his mind was sardonically amused, one part was very afraid, and one part was murderously angry. The fearful part kept him going through the mundane actions of his normal life by rote, making him wash, dry himself, excrete—all rather desperately, as if by clinging to familiar routine he could negate and unmake the horrors of the day. The sardonic part was amused by the incongruity of trying to cling to normalcy when his life had just been blighted, destroyed, turned upside down, of carrying out the minutiae of life when he was dead. The angry part watched both others, and despised them both, and grew ever more angry at the conditions that had produced them—it knew nothing but hate.

There was an open, latticed window in the wall, giving a fine overview of the torchlit sprawl of nighttime Orange, but Hanson refused to look at it. He watched the wide lip of the window instead, the iron bars set in stone, the intricate networks of cracks and chips, the patterns of dirt and small pebbles, the mummified bodies of flies—watched them until they had no meaning to him anymore, until they were completely alien to him, incomprehensible, and then he watched nothing at all, just as intently although his eyes were no longer focused. The stone underneath his buttocks was cold, and the night wind through the window was damp on his naked body. Instinctively, he brought his knees closer to his chin, wrapped his arms around his legs. He sat alone and naked in the cold belly of the factory, surrounded by yards of chill stone and the even colder ruins of his life, rocking back and forth, hugging his knees. This was the time to cry—he knew it, wanted to, longed for the release crying would bring. But the tears would not come. They hung, burning, somewhere behind his eyes, but they would not fall. Tears were for the living, not the dead.

And he could not move his bowels, although his stomach ached. He was completely dead now, dry, sterile, shriveled, his blood curdled in his veins, his seed killed in the sack, his bodily openings sewed tightly shut. He moved a hand through the thick tangle of hair on his chest—his skin was slick and cold as rock and he was unable to feel his heartbeat—across his ribs, along his huge arms, his massive, corded legs. There was a roll of fat beginning at his waist, in spite of work, in spite of his poor diet. The muscles were beginning to sag slightly on the undersides of his arms and thighs, and veins stood out on his legs as if they were done in relief. He was losing his hair and his skin was starting to crack and yellow, like sunbaked mud. He was getting old. And there was a dull pain in his stomach, always present, although sometimes it would stir sluggishly, like a blunt-headed beast inside him that wanted to get out. The Crab was in there—he had suspected it for months, known it for weeks, finally admitted it to himself. He had seen the Crab take his uncle, his cousin, his brother’s wife, his friend Matthew, and now it was going to take him. It would take him within the year.

And what had his life been for?

Hanson stopped rocking. He sat very still, listening to the world wind down, listening to his body decay. Now it was as if his mind was a blinking light, first flashing red, then black. When it flashed black he would huddle freezing and paralyzed, immobilized by despair and futility, unable to move, unable to think. When it flashed red, he regained the ability to move, but only in one direction; to think, but only one thought—his frozen limbs thawed in the furnace of rage, but the furnace had been stoked for only one purpose. The light of his mind flashed black and red, red and black, and each time the red light remained on a little longer than the black, and longer, and longer still, like a spun coin wobbling toward collapse, until finally the black light vanished completely and the red light blazed as steady and smoky as blood.

Hanson got to his feet, pushed out of the commode stall—the wooden door boomed with hollow finality in the silence, in the empty room.

Moving quickly and surely, he dressed, laced on his boots, and left the washroom. There was no hesitation in him now: he was all economy and efficiency, his actions flowing together as smoothly as quicksilver as he threaded the factory corridors. He walked with a steady, springy stride, full of authority and self-assurance, cruising through the building like a big, dark clipper ship under full sail. There were few people about at this time of night, and none of those he encountered thought to question him, or even paid any attention to him at all—he too obviously knew where he was going and why. His expression was calm and absorbed; only a close look would have revealed the strain in that face, the tiny lines around the eyes, the bloodless tension of his lips.

He crossed half the width of the giant building to a little-used stairway, ascended two levels, went out a storeroom window, across a low roof, up a metal ladder in the inky darkness, in another window—squeezing awkwardly between the two boards that haphazardly sealed it—up one more level by another dusty back stairway, along a deserted corridor, and so arrived back at the shift room unseen. He knew the rounds of all the watchmen and State Inspectors perfectly, by the second and by the inch, and he had dodged three of them by this roundabout route, passing successfully through their territories just before or just after they did: the watchmen would swear that no one could have passed them unobserved, and that might help to cloud matters a little, or so the rational layer of his mind hoped, although he was too far gone now to worry much about consequences—he had acted mostly out of an animal instinct that had told him not to let himself be seen, to avoid other men because he was, in this moment, alien to them.

The shift room was empty, echoing and too bright under the carbon lamps. The big metal lockers looked like rows of drab tombstones, light winking coldly and malevolently from their polished faces. Hanson crossed the room unhurriedly and used one of his keys to open a locker. He took out a shovel, carefully doctored the supply sheet to make it appear that the shovel had been issued to one of the men now on shift, and closed the locker up again. Then he walked to a door half hidden by the row of lockers, opened it with another key, stepped briskly inside, and locked it behind him.

This was a big supply room, seldom in use: dark, smothering, full of the slumbering, shrouded shapes of crates and barrels, steeped through with pungent, unidentifiable stinks. The only light came from far on the other side of the room, very dim and pale, as if it was leaking in from another world.

Hanson made his way slowly through this dusty tangle, oozing around the nearly invisible crates with preternatural ease, making no sound. In the darkness, he appeared less human, more feral: thicker and broader, bulkier, goblin-shaped and glitter-eyed, too sure and cat-footed for a man. He held the heavy, iron-bladed shovel like a twig, like a fey child with a switch.

A rectangle of smoky light: a door.

Hanson settled down to wait, squatting on his hams behind a tall packing crate. He knew Oristano’s schedule as well as he knew every other detail of factory routine, knew it in both the overt and covert details, as the foreman was a creature of long-established habit in all things. The second night crew had gone on shift about a half hour before; in an hour Oristano would go on an inspection tour of those sections under his authority, poking and prying and making the workers uncomfortable, as he was hired to do. In the meanwhile, he would be in there fucking fat Emily, the tumorous whore from the Bog, on the cot in his office. In about a half hour, Oristano would finish fucking fat Emily, they would share the obligatory cigarette, and he would let her out the other door—she had another regular appointment on the hour, with Oristano’s immediate superior. Then Oristano would cook a C and M speedball—crystal cocaine and morphine—over a small brazier, bang himself with it, and settle down to wait for the rush, and to drink enough corn whisky to ensure that he was in a sufficiently evil mood for his tour. After the whore left, he would be alone in his office for a half to three-quarters of an hour: no one would dare disturb him then, no matter what. Everyone knew better.

A muffled jumble of sound: voices.

Oristano would be alone.

A shrill laugh, silence, the sound of bedsprings.

Hanson hefted the shovel in his hands.

The dust tickled his nose and tiny spiders scampered across his arms, across his face, like the touch of gentle, invisible fingers. They were the shy, albino spiders that inhabit dusty corners in dark buildings and spin gossamer out of disuse—they never saw the sun. They used Hanson for a highway, washing over him in a waterfall of velvet feet while he sat in the shadows and listened to the factory: the massive, deep-throated beat of pistons far below reechoed through every joint and seam of the building, conducted through cement and wood, shaking the room, shaking his blood, shaking the teeth in his head, shaking the brain inside his skull, boomdoom, boomdoom, boomdoom, boomdoom, until he was somehow on his feet, shaking uncontrollably, convulsively squeezing wood to keep it in his hands, shaking, being shaken, jarred, jostled, jolted, being frog-marched toward the door in a lurching stiff-legged stride, trying to remember that he had to wait, wait, although it was hard to remember what he had to wait for. He stopped just outside the door, fingertips resting on the wood, wondering why it didn’t explode inward under the force of the pressure behind him, why it didn’t shatter and fly to flinders, as he was shaken by the surge of the world that wrenched his bones out of his body, boomdoom, boomdoom.

Inside, voices again, louder now, another laugh, footsteps going away, the slamming of another and more distant door, a single set of heavy footsteps returning.

Suddenly smooth as silk and steady as skin, as if he had instantly shifted into a different gear, Hanson reached out and opened the door.

The room was dingy and cluttered: a table, two chairs, a cot, a washbasin, a cabinet. Oristano’s broad back was toward the door—he had not heard it open. He was rummaging in the cabinet, taking out a hypodermic needle and a rusty spoon. An ancient revolver, symbol of his position and authority, sat in its holster on the table, three feet away.

Now, said Hanson’s blood, while his back is turned. But instead he heard his own voice, as if from a great distance, speaking Oristano’s name aloud, as a rock might speak, or ice.

Oristano knew death when he heard it. Without bothering to look around, he whirled and snatched for the table. His shadow swung and scurried like a crab behind him. He was awesomely fast for a man of his bulk. He had the gun in his hand and had brought it halfway around to bear before Hanson’s shovel, swung in a short horizontal arc of immense force, crushed his head.

The force of the blow spun Oristano in a misty explosion of blood and brains, and hurled him heavily against the table, which splintered and collapsed. The table and Oristano went down together, in a tangle.

Except for the meaty slap of the shovel and the crack of breaking wood, there had been no sound.

The hypodermic needle teetered on the edge of the cabinet, then toppled very slowly to the floor. It shattered with a tiny glass cry, like the breaking of a fragile dream.

Hanson stood motionless, holding the shovel. His arms tingled from impact, and a splinter had dug into his palm. The blow had nearly decapitated Oristano, and the body, in falling, had sprayed blood across half the room, the cot, the ceiling. Most of the spray had missed Hanson, but his face had been lightly, almost delicately, dusted with a fine sprinkling of droplets, as if he was a child playing at measles with garish red paint. He took one hand off the shovel and absently wiped at his eyes with his knuckles, smearing the blood. He continued to wipe at it, grinding it into his skin.

He looked down at Oristano’s body. With his killing blow, with the first touch of impact, the red light in Hanson’s mind had instantly gone out, leaving him with no purpose or plan, drowned in the paralytic black light of despair. Now he was like a man waking, stupid and desolate, from a particularly evil dream—or else like a man swimming down from the border of dream into another, even more troubled sleep, unable to wake although he knows that he should. The room around him seemed blurred and vague, his memory of the past hour even more vague; he remembered his actions as if another man had done them while he watched, only dimly able to guess at that man’s motives and feelings. Oristano’s bloated corpse filled him with surprise and horror. He felt no emotional responsibility for it as yet, no sense of it being a child of his hands, but it seemed so charged with outré significance, so remarkable and unnatural an object in itself, that it flooded him with superstitious dread: he could imagine the shattered, faceless man rising, confronting him, embracing him with cold arms, smothering him. Absorbing him tracelessly into its bulk.

And now there was a sickness starting deep inside, a spreading numbness that drove the room even further away. He shook his head stupidly, baffled as a bull. He couldn’t wake up. The room spitefully refused to change, to alter—it remained starkly and harshly the same, and he mired in the middle of it with murder in his hand and death all around. And now there was a noise, a scrape of wood on wood. Through numbing waves of nausea, he looked up.

Tac stood in the doorway: face bland as butter, eyes shrewd and malefic.

There was his doom, Hanson realized with tranced calm and logic. Tac was poised for flight, holding the door ready to slam after him; he was the entire length of the room away, on the other side of Oristano’s body; from that other door the main entrance of the shift room was only six paces distant, down a short corridor—even if Hanson should try to attack him, all Tac would have to do was slam the door and run out into the shift room, shouting for help. Long before Hanson could hope to catch up to him and silence him—if Hanson could get his numb, leaden body to move at all—Tac would have the place boiling with workmen, watchmen, State Inspectors. Escape would be impossible—they would run him down in seconds, subdue him, take him away. Then the gallows, the block, a bullet in the head, maybe a public stoning or the stake since this had been a dull season in Orange. No way out. No way to stop Tac, no way to talk him into silence. Tac would surely get a big promotion for turning Hanson in, and Hanson had nothing to bribe him with anywhere near the value. And to appeal to the charity of that sly, cruel creature would be like entreating fire not to burn.

All this in a second, Tac looming in the doorway, Hanson staring hopelessly at him across the tilted landscape of Oristano’s corpse. Then, before either man had a chance to move, Tac’s face suddenly changed: his slitted eyes widened enormously, huge with surprise; his cheeks puffed, his mouth gaped impossibly—all his broad face, all his stubby body seemed to swell, blowing up like a balloon, expanding like a pufferfish straining at the limits of his skin until it seemed certain he would explode and splatter. And then Tac went limp—ponderously he fell, first to his knees, then forward to his face, almost lazily, shouldering into death as a man settles into a warm and restful bed.

Gossard stepped into the room, behind Tac. There was a knife in his hand, and the blade steamed with new blood.