Excerpt from “The Walled City”
Because this is my job, I’m going to continue to try and convince you to buy my wares. Here’s the first 600 words or so of the new Cates short story, which you know you want like the desert wants the rain:
1. the accumulation of humiliating aches and pains
I made myself as comfortable as I could against the tree and watched the smoke rise. Several thin tendrils of white smoke, very tidy, very on purpose. This wasn’t some old fuel depot blowing, or a town catching a spark from a wildfire. This was civilization.
In the field in front of me there was the wreck of an old SSF Hover, bent nearly in half, a scattering of rotting white uniforms around it. It had been stripped of anything useful years ago, and a climbing vine had begun to envelope it industriously, crushing it an increment at a time over the course of centuries.
The fields had once been worked and still retained the basic outlines of neat squares of crops, but were being overrun, melting slowly back into the wild. I sat for a long time in the warming air, watching, listening. The smoke was the first sign of life I’d encountered since the Howler. I didn’t exactly have the urge to go running towards it, shouting in joy at not being alone any more.
Instead, I let my hands slide the shredder off my shoulder and begin dismantling it while my eyes, which weren’t what they used to be, kept scanning, and my ears – also not what they once were – kept straining through the birdsongs.
Shredders, the Roon Corporation 1009 model – gas-powered, explosive shells – were notoriously easy to jam. They attracted grit and dirt like it was a design feature, and failed on a regular basis. For the old Stormers in their white ObFu, it didn’t matter because they’d had plenty of backups, and plenty of other Stormers laying down fire. For me, alone and old, with limited ammo and fraying reflexes, the shredder was a superpower. If it didn’t jam when I fired it.
Luckily, they’d been designed for morons to take apart and clean.
I didn’t know where I was. I hadn’t seen any of the robotic … things that had dragged me to the Howler’s little playpen, but that didn’t mean they weren’t out there. And now I had cooking fires, my first people in a very, very long time. I didn’t know how to feel about being alarmed and unhappy about the idea of seeing other human beings.
Feel smart, Marin whispered in my head.
He was the last survivor, or at least the last conscious survivor. Where once I’d had dozens in my head, Marin was the only one who spoke up, now. It was rarer and rarer, and usually only to insult me, though if I concentrated I found I could usually get him to answer me. There might be others in there, silent, watching – Marin had hinted as much – or then again he might have been fucking with me, because I got the sense that Richard Marin, former Director of the System Security Force, did not like me very much.
When I was done with the shredder, I stowed it next to me in its bag and took out the Head. Mara’s face was frozen in an expression locked somewhere between shock and amusement, and would always be if I had anything to say about it. Inside the plastic and silicon was Canny Orel, or a magnetic imprint of him, all those secrets, all that death.
“One,” I said, holding it up to the sky, “I go check out the smoke. Good idea if it’s civilized. Maybe I can trade some stuff. Jesus, maybe someone has fucking alcohol.”
The Head said nothing.
“Two,” I offered. “I go around the long way, because everyone I’ve ever met in my whole life has been a miserable asshole.”
The Head said nothing, but it felt like it was agreeing with me.
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NOOK (T/K)
