The Man Who Went West (The Fiction of Science and Death! READ IT. QUICKLY. NOW!)

(NOTE FROM AUTHOR: This story was glimpsed in the afterbirth of a wizard and a one-eyed jackal. No. I guess that isn't true. Like most stories, this came from the ether, while watching a thousand glass-eyed dolls move about the sidewalks with their noses glued to Ipads and Iphones and Idildos, whispering every so often to the strangers milling next to them, which likewise were fused to their devices. It saddened me to think that one day a boy or girl might not recognize the name Einstein or Bach or Dali or Poe. That Ancient Rome might come to mean an "antiquated form of locomoting oneself from place to place." The fear made me dizzy. And yet what can be done about willful stupidity or stylish ignorance?  my third eye retched its prophecy onto the page. I hope you enjoy it ... and take heed.)    


Lomrick stared through the rusted link fence that bordered the complex. The siroccos had picked up again, hurling dust through the red wastes beyond. The slice in the fence clinked in the wind. It had taken years to break each link, crouching between patrols with a rock and aching fingers. Now it was finally done.

 “I’m leaving,” he told them suddenly. “I must.”

The boys and girls huddled behind him. Handpin with her red twists of hair and Leech with his piggly nose; Harlow and Grumbit and a slew of others. They had no names but those which he’d chosen for them, silly things from tales he’d read as a boy. The complex guards called each child by an alpha-numeric code. The code was plain enough to read, burnt above their ankles, but they liked the names he’d given them and used them amongst themselves. Each had been born in The Palace, knew nothing beyond the propaganda that played its cycling loop each moonrise.

YOU ARE THE LAST! THE WAR IS BEING FOUGHT FOR YOU! THE PALACE KEEPS YOU SAFE!

Handpin looked up, her lips trembling. “You’ll die. Everyone knows . If the worms don’t get you, the sand raptors will. We’re safe here. We’re the last. Why can’t y’stay with us? With me?” She was oldest of the Palace children, near seventeen and ripe with curves.

Lomrick was old enough to be her grandfather, and yet the other parts of his body didn’t seem to mind. He looked into her eyes—like sapphires, he’d told her under the glowlamp in the shed, with eyes like that, child, I could rule the world—and felt the rivets of his determination start to buckle. “Aye, I want to stay. You know that. But I must look. I have to see.”

“What’s to see but destruction?” Leech growled, a pugnacious lad that tried to fight anyone who challenged Lomrick’s word. “We’re the last.”

“But we aren’t, my children.” Lomrick dropped his gaze. It seemed now that all their praise was undeserved, the yuletide gifts and sand-sculptures, the cards they made for his Womb Day. He’d done what he could to keep his lost culture alive, disguising it so the guards and sentry-bots would mistake them for child’s games. In twenty eight years only one had seen through this farce … and the poor fool was rotting beneath the sandglass in an unmarked grave.

The children were silent, their expressions of judgment melting into uncertainty as they watched him sway on the heels of his tar-patched boots. It was Handpin who spoke. “What are you saying, Lommie?”

Lomrick snapped his face up and nearly growled. She never called him Lommie outside the shed. She caught herself, looked down. “Lomrick, I mean.”

The others were still too off balance to notice—at least, he hoped. As he turned back to the gate and laced his fingers through the links, the children rushed toward him, screaming.

“Don’t worry.” He pushed them back. “The voltage is disarmed. I filched some wire from the graveyard. Bots don’t stink like humans. A dinner spoon becomes a shovel in shallow earth.” He gestured to a breaker box soldered to one of the gate-posts, where red hot wire was tied into a loop. "The circuits are tripped."

Small Grumbit squinted his eyes, which saw poorly in darkness. “I wish I could do magic.”

“Not magic, lad. Science.” The word was a curse of the highest order, could have you thrown into the sunbox without gruel or water.

“Y’shouldn’t speak so loud, Lom,” Grumbit looked over his shoulder. “The bots—”

“—Aren’t coming. I sabotaged the east barricade before coming here. Should keep them plenty busy.”

“That’s the opposite wall, right?” asked Leech, his eyes eager for approval. “Where the dawn comes?”

“Aye.” Lomrick had taught them navigation terms, astrology, math, myths, and all that he could remember. “And what’s to my right?”

Leech was still thinking when Harlow grunted and said, “North.” The black-haired runt pointed the opposite direction. “Which makes that south.”

“Good. All good.” He looked at them, his children, the only things of meaning left. He knew he must tell, yet feared their ability to conceal it. No doubt they would be questioned. If one of them was weak or foolish enough to spy friendliness in the dead eyes of a patrolman, it would be their doom. And his. Best to remember that.

Lomrick turned back to the gate, stared up and far and with his whole heart. There was no moon. Stars struggled beneath gray sheets of pollution. Would that his conscience could be so muddled…

He considered pulling the steel links apart, just dipping his head beyond the perimeter and running with the supplies on his back. But doing so would uproot the love in them he had worked so hard to nurture. In a world isolated from its past religions, he had somehow become their God. And what was God’s purpose but to impart wisdom and burgeon the hope of greater things.

Lomrick looked them up and down. “Come with me to the graveyard. And be quick about it.”

The siroccos shifted and for a moment he could hear the eastern sirens, where he’d triggered the distraction. He spoke as they followed around the corrugated bunkers. “The War is not ongoing, lads. It swept America thirty years ago.”

“America?” asked Harlow.      

“Don’t interrupt!” It came out fiercer than he would have liked, but the distraction would not hold forever. Sooner or later, the bots would come in droves. “America was the name of this land we occupy, though its borders were once vast. Thousands of miles stretched in each direction. Across the ocean were islands. 62 states comprised the nation, and all shared the common ground of freedom.

“I’ve told you of freedom, though not directly. To do so would have been dangerous for us both. Imagine a world without cages. Without armed guards. A world where you could choose when you went to bed or what you ate. There were rules, of course there were, but only those that protected the citizens from doing harm to themselves or each other. Each man and woman had the right to marry who they pleased; each child the same opportunity to educate himself and rise to the highest seat, if only he worked for it.”

Lomrick halted at the next bend and suddenly flattened against the wall. He turned with a finger pressed to his lips. The children did the same, all of them trembling as a mechanical droning evinced itself against the wind. It buzzed, leaping from roof to roof on chromium spider legs, shining its search lamps through the walkways. The tick-tick-tick of its legs against the corrugated steel made Lomrick’s skin crawl. And then, mercifully, it faded into the wind.

Jogging now, he whispered: “I was born before the brain-drain. The war was being waged for years before the public thought to care. In the end, most of them didn’t. They were too bewitched by the poisons of technology, the lottery shows, the death matches, the com-pads and god-chips that filled their minds with such lucid fantasies that after a time they could no longer dream for themselves. The very thing that’s advent had been forged to liberate society became its strongest shackle.

“When they digitized the books, the world thought it a convenience. That many of the great works of philosophy and religion did not survive this process went unnoticed. Curriculums were pared down to the barest scraps. The world became intolerable, child-like. Blood and sex and beauty and fame were distilled into a single dish and dumped into the pig-trough of society. The old men died, and young Pop-addicts rose to take their place. Suspicion supplanted kindness. The tribe of Man isolated into a thousand warring fragments. And this they did from the private tower of their com-screens. They weaved entire worlds from a keypad, stopped living, stopped caring. They grew paler and fatter and less inclined. Only when a public execution was being held did they pull themselves from the darkness to attend. And the executions, themselves…”

Lomrick felt the tear slide down his grizzled cheek. “We’ve arrived.”

The children said nothing, only looked at barren humps of hard pack that marched into infinity. Planks of black composite served as epitaphs, each stamped with an alpha-numeric code. But some were slightly different. Small paintings or etchings or chalk symbols were to be found among the anonymous dead.

“See there,” Lomrick said, twenty feet into the first row. “That was Bolton, the philosopher. The drawn scales there, that means justice. It was his great obsession. And there, the stripe of red blue and yellow. Those are known as Primary Colors. Erik Karse was an artist of great repute before they sentenced him to die here. His paintings sold in Europe for fifty-thousand pounds. There’s the quill of Alan Demarsch, a German-American poet. Ah, but you don’t know what a quill is, do you? A feather, children. It’s how they wrote for centuries, by dipping the hollowed point in ink.” He went through them all, the scientists and sculptors and musicians and elocutionists, the writers and barristers that had not approved of their country’s new direction, the soldiers and revolutionists and net-knights, who had tried to collapse the system from within as from without. “Even mechanics,” he said, rubbing one epitaph that had been scrawled with a crude wrench.

“What’s a mechanic?” Handpin spoke softly, not wanting to interrupt.

“Someone who works on machines.”

Her eyes went wide. “But you do that.”

He smiled. “I was an airplane mechanic before the government disbanded its military. But that tale is for another day. Come quickly now. See me off. The sirens are starting to die.”

At the gate he embraced each of them, saving Handpin for last. The smoothness of her skin was a siren song. When it brushed against him he felt his legs sink into the hardpack, felt his bones coil like ivy and long to hold her. When he found the strength to pull away he saw that she was crying.

She lifted a finger to his eye and it came back wet. “Remember me?” she whispered.

“Have no doubt of that, child. I’ll live to rue this day. If I live at all.” And then he was through the gate, onto the sand and glass and canyon crags that fostered no life save plants with barbs and poison. At the top of the hill he looked back, saw them still standing by the gate.

But then the wind shifted and The Palace was swallowed by red.

It was four winters past when the sirens wailed, drawing the children from bed. Though, they weren’t children any longer. Handpin was twenty and one, doing all she could to teach what little Lomrick had left behind. Making a poor job of it, she knew. But the effort brought a trailing sweetness, breathed life into the fading memories of nights spent under the glowlamps of the shed.

She heard voices in the barrick's darkness, elbows being exchanged, Grumbit and Harlow and Leech and Dondon and a slew of others that had been transferred from other Palaces in a drugged and dreamless state.

“Quiet!” she told them, edging up to the window.

She saw lights, and the flying bots, and the spider-sniffers lined along the distant roofs with their steel legs raised for attack. Something flashed outside the gate, brighter than a thousand lightning bolts. It punched into the air in a pillar of blue and a fwump sailed through the air in a wave of dust, throwing her back against the others in a spray of plastic and glass as it crashed into the walls.

She rolled on her back, groaning. There were small cuts on her arms and neck. She felt the snaking blood. “Are you okay? Is everyone okay?”

“I’d be better without your arse on my lungs!” Harlow pushed her off with a shove.

“What was it?” Leech added. “What was all that light?”

“I don’t know.” She looked at them uncertainly and picked herself up. Her legs were trembling and a word went sailing across her heart. 

WAR. 

Lomrick had spoken of the war before his leaving. Perhaps he was wrong and it was still being fought. Perhaps they weren’t the last, after all, and what remained outside the Palace borders had suddenly turned their sights to them. What purpose they could have, she didn’t know. But man’s cruelness was beyond explanation. She had seen enough of it between her own small tribe of rabble-rousers to imagine how it might grow and fester in older, less-tempered hearts. “Just stay down. Hide. I’ll go and see what happened.”

“You can’t go out past curfew,” Grumbit warned, taller and skinnier and still squinting in the darkness. “They’ll throw you in the sunbox.”

“Our window just exploded, I’m bleeding, and if any guard has a problem with me poking my head out to make sure everyone isn’t dead, I’ll tell him where he can stick his high opinion!”

They were shocked to silence, but when Leech began to giggle it infected the rest of them.

“Now stay put.” She walked to the doors, started to disengage the hydraulic lock the way Lomrick had shown her … and gasped when the bolt dropped open. “It’s broken.” She looked back at them. “The lock is broken.” She tried the lights. “The lights, the locks, all of it.”

Handpin felt fear then more than ever. Why disable the defenses unless the prisoners no longer served a purpose? She listened closely for the concussive thump of compression rifles or the screech of winder-bombs … but there was only wind. She threw the great iron slat and marched into the dusty aisle with her arms crossed over her chest.

The desert was freezing. The heat lamps that usually lined the walks for the night guards were cold and gray. The pole-lights along the gate were all black, some of them still spitting sparks. All was darkness but for distant flashes. “Hello?”

The wind swallowed her voice.

“HELLO? I’ve been hurt! What’s happening?”

A hooded shape separated from the barrack wall and made its way into the aisle. It limped, she saw, and held a rifle in its hands.

It was then she saw the bots and spider-sniffers collapsed along the ground and roofs and gates, some of them twitching, others shooting fire from between their joints

Handpin searched for a rock and picked it up, shaking it above her head. “Don’t you come near me! I’m mean, stranger! Go on your way! I'm stronger than I look! Might be you’ve come for a piece ... and leave with one missing!”

And then the shape began to laugh, a deep, gravelly sound like pebbles sliding down a cliff. “Might be I’ve come for a look. And forgiveness.”

And she knew then. She knew and dropped the stone and ran to him, screaming her tears, screaming his name. She'd never known such joy could displace the terror she’d felt moments before. The shift made her drunk. But his arms were strong and thick and he kept the balance for both of them.

“Come out, lads!” Lomrick called to the open door. “Come out and say hello!”

      

They lay in the bunker under the lights. Lomrick had fixed the breakers. Not all of them, but enough. “The pulse cooked their hardware, but it wasn’t a full charge,” he’d told them. “The frequencies were set to target bio-wiring. The breakers got hit, but there’re enough fuses to make it through. What doesn’t work, I’ll fix. I brought tools, supplies. Food enough for each of us. Soil, seeds, UV cells. The other Palaces have been destroyed, so don’t expect any reinforcements. I’ve seen to that.”

“Bet you brought a spaceship, too,” Handpin had jibed.

“Of sorts. A cargo racer, not very big, but resistant to radar and built for deserts such as this.”

“And where are we going?”

His face was grave. “Nowhere. We’re staying here.”

And now the lights were flickering and the children that were no longer children were asleep. Lomrick’s black beard was shot through with gray, but to Handpin he had never looked so handsome. “Did you dream of me while you were gone?”

“Even with my eyes open.” He kissed her forehead. “I was so worried they’d harm you.”

“They tried, but we stood together ... like you taught us. No one did their chores. The entire camp sat down in the sun until they pulled me from the sunbox. Some of them even died.” She was still sad about that. “I still feel like I'm dreaming. I love you, Lommie.”

“And I, you.”

After the love, they were quiet for a time, Handpin trailing his chest with her fingers, and Lomrick trailing her buttocks with his. She pressed her cheek to his chest to hear his heartbeat. It had a warrior’s rhythm, like the fierce gallop of a Lion. She knew of lions, though she’d never seen one. Her thoughts spun on in this way until she whispered, “Why did you come back? Not just for me. Surely not for me. Or else why would we stay here?”

Lomrick grunted. She felt him shift beneath him, and it was not until the tremble ran through him that she realized he was weeping. It wasn’t pathetic, like she’d imagined boy’s tears to be. There was strength in it, as a king might weep over his fallen son. She cradled his chin. “What is it, love?”

“The world,” he whispered. “The world.”

“What of it?”

“It’s no longer there. It took me near two weeks to make it to a city, and another to scale its gates.”

“They had gates?”

“Aye. Like the palace. Though made of stone and steel and mounted with gun turrets. Once I got inside …” A tear slipped into his beard. “I couldn’t find my way. Everything was identical. The houses, the people. Their faces were different, but their attire, their gait as they conveyed themselves, the way the spoke. It was flat, without inflection. And they were so pale. Vampires. Holed up in crypts comprised of the same four rooms, the same couches and beds. The same colors.”

“I don’t understand,” Handpin whispered. “I’m sorry, but…”

“They were the same!” he all but screamed. “All of them. There is no war, because there's no individual desire. They’ve bred it out of us. I stayed among them, shaved my beard, tried to walk their causeways and arcades. Can you imagine a store with the same four items? Every store is like that. They eat an infused paste three times a day. They wake and exercise and go to work, then return to plug their god-chips into the hive. Personality has become a private exploration. They voice no sovereign thought. When the fashion changes, all the clothes are burned, and each man in his turn wears the new style like a puppet next to his neighbor.

“They wave and smile, certainly, but they’re soul-less. They want nothing but that which they believe they should want. What’s acceptable to want. Don’t you understand?”

It was plain from his face that her look of confusion disappointed him. “You did not grow up outside, as I did. It felt like I was attending a funeral.”

“A funeral?”

 “The funeral of Man.”

“That sounds awful. Was their music?”

“No music. No art. No expression.” He squeezed her tightly. “We’ve become a race without imagination.”

4/15/2014, 10:15 PM, Lawndale, CA