Up in the cab, Johann Willis hit the whistle. The giant bellow of it slammed the high building walls on either side of the road and washed back, filling the world. The faces of the crowd went slack, shattered by sound, and then firmed up again when reason returned. But they had been shaken. They clutched their weapons uneasily and blinked around them, as the thunder died in grumbling echoes from the street. Willis hit the whistle again. The crowd was ready for it this time, but they still flinched, and when their faces set themselves up again, a little determination had gone out of them. The whistle blasted twice more. Buffeted, the rickety shanty buildings swayed and trembled, and a board crosswalk connecting two of them was jolted loose: it fell, sending an onlooker who had been lounging on it hurtling twenty feet down into the mud. Incongruously, someone in the crowd laughed. And instantly, as if that was his cue, Brigault was on his feet and at the edge of the deck, leaning out, bracing himself against a stanchion. He had pushed the netting back from his face, and his revolver was in his hand. “Move your asses!” Brigault screamed. “Move ’em!” He was grinning ferociously at the crowd; his eyes flickered back and forth, very fast, and the revolver moved with his gaze, so that first one man, then another found himself staring straight into the gun’s ugly muzzle. Willis had poked his head up above the three-quarter shield of the cab—he said nothing, but he raised an ancient repeating rifle and slowly brought it down so that it was braced against his left forearm. Brigault shouted again. When the crowd did not move, he seemed to be amused. His grin softened into a smile that was even more frightening. “Move, Goddamn you,” he said, not at all loudly, almost with affection. “Move.” There was something infinitely hard in his voice, riding it like a carrier beam, and the crowd flinched at the sound of it. Hesitantly, they moved—men stepping back, then changing their minds and stepping forward, then stepping back again. Willis caught the ripple of movement; he must have made some imperceptible signal, because the whistle screamed again at that moment, longer and louder than before. At once, the crowd broke. Grudgingly, they flowed aside, like some heavy, sluggish liquid, and let the transport through. Most of them didn’t look up as it passed; they studied their feet and slogged wearily away through the mud. Willis ducked back down into the cab. In a moment, the transport was picking up speed once more. Its whistle hooted again and again, scornful in victory.
Brigault came walking back along the spine, rolling effortlessly with the motion of the vehicle. He sat down next to Hanson and patted the revolver in its holster. “No sweat,” he said, “no problem.” He grinned at Hanson. “Sometimes we gots to really shoot a couple, when they gets, you know, real stubborn. Mule-headed. They gets real mule-headed, in the hot weather.” He spat, casually. “Or just run them right over. Ai, that’s even better, that works real good. But they a’ways move. Eventu’ly. Oh yes.” And he flipped the netting back down over his face with his thumb, and settled back against another stanchion. He looked very comfortable. He didn’t move or speak again for a long while, and he might almost have been asleep. But his eyes glittered through the mesh, and they missed nothing.
Hanson tried several words on his tongue, but none of them worked.
He sat in prudent silence, and swatted blackflies.
In another half hour, the transport had crawled through South Gate, and was beginning to pull clear of Orange. There wasn’t too much in the way of suburbs: one or two quarries, a few truck farms, some night-shrouded gypsy trading camps, a large garrison of the standing Army of York—carefully not allowed inside the city itself since the last “reorganization”/palace revolution/civil war—a deserted roadside shrine, and then, after a long stretch of nothing, a final SI post commanding a crossroads. No outlying villas, or estates, or summer homes, or middle-class residential areas, as there might have been in another age. It was dangerous to live outside the city walls, and few did, except for the gypsies and free-traders who were themselves too feral to be afraid, and the armed troops who were there to keep marauders away from the city—and the marauders, of course.
And then Orange was gone, completely, and the night closed in, black and smothering. The transport’s headlight, at medium intensity, pushed the night about fifty yards away in front, but it closed down behind them even more dark and menacing, as if it resented the intrusion of the light. Brigault sent the other two crewmen walking down the train to hang lanterns at the couplings, and one at the tail. The transport was pulling a train load of eight cars this trip, and the lanterns helped the driver judge the position of that long, awkward tail accurately enough to get around curves without jackknifing it. The wood-and-iron freight cars were clumsy, ponderous things, but the transport pulled them easily, and could have pulled four times their number if the poor condition of the roads did not disallow it. To compensate, the cars were built deep and filled to overflowing—their loads barely contained by the tarpaulins lashed down taut over every car—and the cargo hold of the transport itself, under Hanson’s feet, was stuffed full of the smallest and most valuable items. In spite of the weight, the transport moved swiftly through the darkness, sure and graceful, and Hanson was once again filled with rueful awe at the skill of the Utopian artisans. It was easy to understand the attitude of people like Relk; indeed, of most people—Hanson knew, intellectually, that the transport was “merely” a product of superior engineering, but it still seemed like magic to him, and he responded to it in that way, emotionally. The gap between those ancient people and himself was too great; so much had been lost and forgotten . . .
They were running through a stretch of scrub forest that alternated with sand and clay barrens. It was desolate, forlorn country, especially by starlight on a moonless night. They followed a curve around the shoulder of a small hill; there was a light way up the hill, just below the crest, the lit window of a building shrouded by trees. It shone high and lonely, a cold star riding above the earth, below the sky. Then the road dipped, and it was gone. Hanson realized that he would never know what the building was, or who lived there, or why, or if someone had been at that window, listening to the transport breathe mournfully by in the night, watching the lanterns bob like a string of blurred red jewels, perhaps wondering what eyes rode the train and were looking invisibly back up. The thought made Hanson sad. Life was like that—you rushed by others in the dark without knowing they were there, you left them behind; each minute buried a thousand possibilities, each turning killed a thousand alternate lives, and you had to say farewell constantly to people you would never meet. And still you rushed on. Hanson became aware that Brigault was watching him closely, although he could no longer see the Mate’s eyes. He forced himself to relax, to sink back down against the deckplates. He was trembling. Nothing then but night and motion, until they pulled abreast of another SI outpost, a big half-timbered building surrounded by a tall earthwork wall, ablaze with torches, Bloomfield Station. A potbellied SI in his shirtsleeves, a half-eaten chicken drumstick in one hand, stood by the side of the road and waved them on. An embankment ahead, tall and long, diagonally across their path. And a ramp.
The transport had been heading east, more or less. Now it flowed up the ramp, turned left, and began to crawl north. This was an ancient highway, unbelievably huge in comparison to modern roads—a half-dozen transports could have traveled it abreast without crowding each other, and it stretched on endlessly ahead, dead black, like a frozen river made out of the night-fabric itself. The transport picked up speed. On such a good surface, Willis was certain to open it all the way up; he would be unable to for seven-eighths of the trip. They rocked and clicked along at a terrifying clip, but even Hanson knew that this was the safest part of the journey. The highway was one of the major arteries—and assets—of the State. It stretched from the southern counties, where it was chopped off sheer by the Wall below Iselin, all the way up to Spring Valley in the north, where it was possible, after a break, to take another old road up to Newburgh and Kingston Center. It’d been cleared of rubble and occasional blockages by a massive project during the Restoration, and now it was zealously guarded by the State—there would be SI garrisons every fifteen or twenty miles along its length.