“Ah, yes,” said Pennyroyal, rather chastened. “Everybody knows of the MEDUSA event. Why, I can remember exactly what I was doing at the time. I was aboard Cittamotore, in the company of a delightful young woman named Minty Bapsnack. We saw the flash light up the eastern sky from half a world away…”
“Well, we were right next to it. We flew through the blast-wave, and we saw what was left of London next morning. A whole city, Tom’s city, burned to clinker by something my mum dug up. That’s why we steer well clear of Old-Tech.”
“Ah,” said Pennyroyal, thoroughly uncomfortable now.
“I’m going to bed,” said Hester. “I’ve got a headache.” It was true; a few hours of Pennyroyal’s lecturing had set a fierce, throbbing pain behind her blind eye. She went to the pilot’s seat, meaning to kiss Tom goodnight, but she didn’t like to with Pennyroyal looking on, so she quickly touched his ear, said, “Call me when you need a break,” and headed aft to the stern cabin.
“Whoops!” said Pennyroyal, when she had gone.
“She’s got a bit of a temper,” admitted Tom, embarrassed by Hester’s outburst. “But she’s lovely really. She’s just shy. Once you get to know her…”
“Of course, of course,” said Pennyroyal. “One can see at a glance that beneath that somewhat unconventional exterior she’s absolutely, um…” But he couldn’t think of anything good to say about the girl, so he let his voice trail away and stood looking through a window at the moonlit mountains, the lights of a small town moving on the plains below.
“She’s wrong about London, you know,” he said at last. “I mean, wrong about it being burned to clinker. I’ve spoken to people who’ve been there. There’s a lot of wreckage left. Whole sections of the Gut lie ruined in the Out-Country west of Batmunkh Gompa. Why, an archaeologist of my acquaintance, a charming young woman by the name of Cruwys Morchard, claims to have actually been inside one of the larger fragments. Sounds extraordinary; charred skeletons scattered everywhere, and great chunks of half-melted buildings and machinery. The lingering radiations from MEDUSA cause coloured lights to bob among the debris like will-o’-the-wisps… or should that be wills-o’-the-wisp?”
It was Tom’s turn to grow uncomfortable. The destruction of his city was still a raw wound inside him. Two-and-a-half years on, the afterglow of that great explosion still lit his dreams. He didn’t want to talk about London’s wreck, and so he steered the conversation back towards Professor Pennyroyal’s favourite subject: Professor Pennyroyal.
“You must have travelled to some very interesting places, I suppose?”
“Interesting! Oh, you don’t know the half of it, Tom! The things I’ve seen! When we touch down at Brighton air-harbour I’ll go straight to a bookseller’s and buy you my complete works. I’m amazed you’ve not come across them before, a bright young fellow like you.”
Tom shrugged. “I’m afraid they didn’t keep them in the London Museum Library…”
“Of course not! The Guild of so-called Historians! Pah! Dusty old farts… Do you know, I applied to join them once. Their Head Historian, Thaddeus Valentine, turned me down flat! Just because he didn’t like the findings of my trip to America!”
Tom was intrigued. He didn’t like hearing his former Guild dismissed as dusty farts, but Valentine was different. Valentine had tried to kill him, and had murdered Hester’s parents. Anybody Valentine had disapproved of was all right by Tom.
“What did you find in America, Professor?”
“Ah, well, Tom, thereby hangs a tale! Should you like to hear it?”
Tom nodded. He couldn’t leave the flight deck tonight, with this wind blowing up from the south, and he would be glad of a good story to keep him alert. Anyway, Pennyroyal’s talk had awakened something in him, a memory of simpler times, when he had huddled under his bedclothes in the Third Class Apprentices’ dorm and read by torchlight the stories of the great explorer-historians, Monkton Wylde and Chung-Mai Spofforth, Valentine and Fishacre and Compton Cark.
“Yes please, Professor,” he said.
4
“ North America,” said Pennyroyal, “is a Dead Continent. Everyone knows that. Discovered in the year 1924 by Christopher Columbo, the great explorer and detective, it became the homeland of an empire which once ruled the world, but which was utterly destroyed in the Sixty Minute War. It is a land of haunted red deserts, poison swamps, atomic-bomb craters, rust and lifeless rock. Only a few daring explorers venture there; archaeologists like Valentine and your young ladyfriend’s poor mother, out to salvage scraps of Old-Tech from the ancient bunker-complexes.
“And yet one hears rumours. Stories. Tales told by drunken old sky-dogs in run-down air-caravanserais. Yarns about airships that have been blown off course and found themselves flying over a very different sort of America: a green landscape of forests and grasslands and vast blue lakes. About fifty years ago a flyer named Snori Ulvaeusson was supposed to have actually landed in a green enclave he called Vineland, and made a map of it for the Lord Mayor of Reykjavik, but of course when modern researchers went looking for the map they found no trace of it in the Reykjavik library. As for the other accounts, the punchline is always the same: the airman spends years trying to find the place again, but never can. Or else he sets down his ship only to find that the greenery which looked so inviting from above is really only toxic algae blooming on a crater-lake.
“But true historians like ourselves, Tom, know that within such legends there often lurks a seed of truth. I gathered together all the stories I’d heard, and decided that there was something there worth following up. Is America really dead, as wise men like Valentine have always told us? Or could there be a place, far to the north of the dead cities which the Old-Tech hunters visit, where rivers of meltwater spilling from the edge of the Ice Wastes have washed away the poisons and made the Dead Continent begin to flower again?
“I, Pennyroyal, resolved to discover the truth! Back in the spring of the year ’89 I set out to see what I could find. Myself and four companions, aboard my airship the Allan Quatermain. We crossed the North Atlantic, and soon touched down upon the shores of America, near a place that the ancient charts call New York. It was as dead as we’d been promised; a series of vast craters, their sides fused by the intense heat of that millennia-old conflict into the substance known as Blast Glass.
“We took off again and flew west, into the very heart of the Dead Continent, and that was when disaster struck. Storms of an almost supernatural ferocity wrecked my poor Allan Quatermain in the midst of an immense, polluted wilderness. Three of my companions perished in the smash, the fourth died a few days later, poisoned by some water from a pool which looked clear, but which must have been tainted with some ghastly Old-Tech chemical — he turned blue, and gave off a scent of old socks.
“Alone, I staggered on into the north, crossing the Plain of Craters where once the legendary cities of Chicago and Milwaukee stood. I had given up all thought of finding my green America. My only hope now was that I might reach the edge of the Ice Wastes and be rescued by some wandering band of Snowmads.
“At last, even that hope faded. Weak from exhaustion and lack of water, I lay down in a dry valley between great black jagged mountains. In despair I cried out, ‘Is this really to be the end of Nimrod Pennyroyal?’ and the stones seemed to answer, ‘Yup.’ All hope was gone, d’you see? I commended my soul to the Goddess of Death and shut my eyes, expecting to open them again only as a ghost in the Sunless Country. The next thing I knew I was wrapped in furs and laid in the bottom of a canoe, and some charming young people were paddling me north.