"Well, there's no such place anymore. Hasn't been for a hundred years or more. Not since the Nuke. We thought of trying to salvage something from the seabed there must be riches down there! A lost world! But it's too far and we don't have the gear. And the sea is hot and bubbling and scummy, and there's things down there only a crazy man would dream up."
"You could say that about everywhere."
"Sure. Doesn't alter my argument, though. Which is the West? Forget it. Okay..." he warmed to his theme, "...the Southwest. Maybe you know this, maybe you don't. There used to be desert down there, out of everyone's way. They were doing things they didn't want people to know about. Only snag was, the other side didknow about it they must have known about it because they pounded it, flattened it. Took it out. There's only the wind there now, and sometimes that just literally sears what's left. And where there's no wind, there's nuclear garbage floating in the sky in great clouds as thick as mountains. Sometimes it flares up and sets the night on fire. I've seen it. The sky burns." His voice was softer now, his eye unfocused. "Burns for days and nights on end. And then..." he snapped his fingers, "...it stops. Just like that. You don't know why, and you'll never know why. But it just stops, the fire dies, and all you have left is floating nuclear junk." He cocked an eyebrow at her. "You figure that's paradise?"
"No, that's not what I'm..."
"So what about the North? It's cold up there. Hellish cold. There's guys up there, they don't take their furs off more than once a year. If that. Didn't used to be so all-fired warm before, so it's said, except for plains where wheat grew, but it's cold all over now. It could be that the ice from the far north has shifted south, and maybe it's still on the move, maybe it won't stop until the whole world is covered with it a new ice age. Not in our lifetime, I guess. But it's a frozen hell up there, believe me. I've seen it, I've tried to trek through it. The guys who live there, the Franchies, they'd love to trade, but we don't have the means, the proper equipment. You go up there and your gas freezes in the tanks and gets like jelly."
"So let's try South. I'm easy. Like this, just you and me, we can go anywhere. So South. Deep down south." His tone darkened. "Now that's a place, let me tell you. A dark locale. Far as I can tell it used to be an area of mainly grasslands, woodlands, all over. But now it's jungle, swamp and rot. There's more mutants per acre down there than any place I've seen. I don't know why. Maybe the chem stuff got out of hand, maybe the opposition went over the top, dumped too many toxins down there. Or maybe it just got hotter anyhow, the climate something to do with the sea. Who the nuke knows. All I can tell you is that it's a poisoned land and I can do without it. Paradise it ain't."
"Hey, now. You don't seem to..."
"And then we shift to the East. Well, sure. That's civilized, I guess. Parts of it." He paused, took a final drag on the cigarette, butted it. "I guess it's civilized because everyone there says it is. And sure, they got industry of a kind, and they know how to produce electric power better than anywhere else I know, and they got lines of communication that don't break down every three hours, and they can grow their own food, and they read and write, and..." He stopped, stared down at the floor as though a memory had twitched at the outer edges of his mind. He looked up again, his one eye suddenly bleak. "But it's uncoordinated, lady. And beneath a thin skin of culture it's as much of a hell as it is out here. There's maybe a dozen families in the Southern Enclave in an uneasy truce, all secretly lusting after what the others have got, all about ready to swoop in and grab any territory that looks to be weaker than they are."
"I read once about a country out there," he continued, almost wistfully. "Hundreds of years ago. It was a large slice of land split up into little territories, all ruled over by individual princes and barons or dukes or whatever. All feuding with one another, greedy for land. Everyone else's land. And if they weren't fighting one another, they were figuring out how to stab one another in the back in the smartest way possible so some other guy would get the blame. And at the same time as all this is going on, they're busy inventing and creating and painting pictures and writing books and fashioning crazy models or castles out of pure gold with all the towers and turrets and drawbridges and even arrow slits in the walls, all in proportion, and when you lifted the roof of the tallest tower, inside was a little glass jar for putting the salt in. Now thatwas civilization. Sure, I guess the peasants were treated like shit on the rich man's boots, but even so it was a busy time, everything going on, an upward surge. They had ambition. There was always something beyond the next horizon, and the next, and the next."
She said, "Italy."
He laughed. "You did read books!"
"My mother. She made sure I knew as much as there was to know, as much as she could cram into me. She said it was important."
"She was a wise woman."
Krysty nodded slowly, her head bowed. "Yes," she said.
Ryan did not pursue that. It was not the time. He kept his eyes on the scarlet glory of her hair, watched as she brought her head back up again so that they were once more face-to-face. The imp had gone from her eyes; now they held only grief, a sense of profound loss.
Ryan said, "Well, anyhow, the East Coast has nothing I want. It's an armed camp of greedy madmen. The muties are the peasants and no one is creating paintings that will last for half a millennium and the only gold that's coming in is from that fat rat Jordan Teague, and sure as nukeshit no one's making salt containers out of it."
"If it's an armed camp," Krysty said, "who armed it?" She stared at him clear-eyed.
Ryan held her gaze for maybe six seconds, then looked away, shrugged.
"Yeah. Okay. Point. Maybe we all realize now that our trade routes have been built on orders we should maybe never have delivered."
"Maybe?"
"Okay. We should never have delivered." He stopped, stretched, sat back down again. His hands plucked at the crimson scarf tied around his throat and he loosened it. The ends hung heavily down to his waist. "One doesn't always think ahead. You don't plan for the future, figure out the pros and cons of what you're doing. The present is all, lady. The here and now. It's the only thing you have to wrestle with. And that in fact is the history of the human race. Always too frantic worrying about what was happening in the here and how. We forgot that the future is created in the present, that whatever is done in the here and now has an influence on the years to come." His voice drifted low as he stared at his boots. "Too late, lady. Too late..."
Krysty said accusingly, "You could make a start by not delivering all this heavy shit to Mocsin." She didn't know anything about the load they were carrying, but she knew all about Jordan Teague and his miniempire out near the Darks.
Ryan grinned sourly.
"Funny thing," he said, "Teague ain't gonna be and you can take that as a nondouble negative that's a great big positive he ain't gonna be too fireblasted pleased about this load."
"That's funny?"
"Well, you see, it just so happens that most of Teague's consignment went up when Truck Four blew. Boom!" He spread his arms high. "All those grenades, all that high explosive, all those old armor-piercing shells. Sent most of his delivery to glory in a great big blaze-out. Lucky for us, though, because that's what creamed most of the stickies and other mad muties that had us in a terrible, terrible fix. And that means that Teague's gonna be getting short supplies. Pity."
"And did it?"
"Did it what?"
"All go up."
Ryan chuckled.
"As it happens, no, of course it didn't. But Teague's not to know that. It's the perfect scam. You may not believe this, but we do have a code. Of sorts. I mean, listen we don't spend sleepless nights gnawing away at the problem, it's too late for that, way too late. The Old Man did it to survive."