Hilltown 3
May. 5th, 2004 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hafocExcerpts from the Journal of Charles A. Wills
(unpubl. ms. preserved at Southeast Regional Archive, Hilltown)
(Archivist's Note: All entries date from year 133 AC)
Friday, October 32
Course still 090 magnetic. Fix 22:45 at 25° 28' 45" E, 44° 45' 58" N. About 5 nm off low sandy shore still running e out of sight, sand bottom. If nothing else we have proven the continent runs e at least 300 nm farther than anyone expected. I hope they know, back home in New London, but with Griffin sick nobody here knows radio well enough to be sure. My own Morse is terrible, my knowledge of radio maintenance and repair is worse. I try to send position reports, but we haven't picked up any replies in three weeks now.
We have light wind, Morning Star is making 3 knots. All seems well there but we are on a lee shore, and if we get caught in another blow like the one that took Endurance the best we can hope for is to make it ashore alive before the boat is pounded to pieces in the surf-- and what happened three days ago tells me how short a time we'd survive there, if that happened.
I still don't understand what happened. There was SOMETHING on the beach-- we all saw it-- but how could it be so beautiful, or what power could it have, to make three of our best crewmembers go mad and run to it? I got us offshore as fast as I could, our water tank only half-full; we fired guns, we anchored offshore for a day longer than we dared, and nothing. No sign of our lost crewmembers; Jim and Cathy Linden, Sam Pulowski. Nothing except, maybe, a faint scream, somewhere far away on the wind, at sunset. And every so often, something moving in the heat shimmer on the beach. Surely this coast is haunted. Surely this is the Devil, or the Devil's work.
The three dead may be the lucky ones. Even with them gone, we're still overcrowded with three Albion survivors still aboard, and we don't have enough supplies for half our number.
Half rations. Scurvy. Thirst-- with streams of fresh water in sight on the shore, and we dare not go ashore for it. They're coming from the woods, those streams, and we know there are snakewolves in the woods. And Burke, that ass, armed us with M1 carbines whose puny cartridges don't have enough power to punch through a snakewolf's scales! Hardly any ammunition left anyway.
"They're sweet little rifles," she told me, a day or two out of New London. "I got a great deal on them." Did she ever stop to ask WHY they're cheap? Fine for crows and bunnies in the Fenced Lands; fine for police work perhaps, but useless out here among the native species.
Of course I didn't know they were useless either, but I'm a sailor. I'm not the one who claimed to be an experienced redwoods hand. She did, that ass! Burke. Another slang word for 'ass,' you'd think they'd coined that slang for her. How did she ever convince the Survey to let her lead this expedition? Rifles that don't work, no ammo, not enough food, and no vitamins in the medical kit, with scurvy making our teeth loose in bleeding gums. Redwoods hand she is NOT. She's a reformed flower-sucker, so they say, but once a flower-sucker, always a flower-sucker. I wish she'd died of flower juice years before she ever met me.
More fool I for ever listening to her. But she's so convincing she convinced me she knew more about sailing than I did, I who charted the Apostle Islands without losing a man. "Let's leave in the first days of autumn. We'll avoid the summer doldrums that way. Good fresh breezes all the way around." Fresh breezes, all right. A gale. A fire at sea. Twelve survivors in a ketch designed for nine.
The crew have whispered of mutiny. Gods forgive me, the only reason I haven't thrown Burke in irons myself is that it wouldn’t help things.
Yesterday, after the memorial ceremony, I asked her if we shouldn't turn back. She looked at me with that sincerity she can put on, that even now seems impressive. "We'd never make it," she told me.
"So we keep going onward?"
"What else can we do? We're already off the map. True, we had only the vaguest notion where the continent ends-- those who reported seeing its position were certainly too busy to take good measurements at the time! But they had to be more or less right, didn't they? And if so, if we were at the end of the continent now, it would be half as far to Pittsburgh Landing along the north coast as it would be to go back the way we came."
I gently pointed out to her that we hadn't rounded the end of the continent. "But it has to be there," she repeated.
Hell of it is, she's right. It has to be there. And it had better be. If it isn’t, we're all cooked.
Saturday, October 33: Halloween
Wind freshening from S; overcast. No star sights but by ded. reckoning appx. 66 nm E and S of previous position; speed 5 knots. No bottom. Shoreline angling 15° S of E and turning more to S ahead; on horizon a bald hill that may be an island or not. If it's on shore, the shore must turn to SE. All aboard are excited because of the famous statement in Second Officer Lightoller's flight log that the continent ends in a SE-trending point with islands along the shore north of it. After so many struggles, so much suffering, we can't help but hope this may be the land's end. We hope for it all the more because thanks to Burke's excellent provisioning skills, rounding the last point and heading for the outpost at Pittsburgh Landing is probably our only hope of survival. Certainly our only hope, if the radio is as broken as I think it is. Why didn't we bring spares?
At least we'll be the first to see it, the first to know exactly where the continent ends. I keep trying to send signals to the Coasties' radio complex at Londonport, on the faint hope they can hear us even if I can't hear them. If they can, then even if the rest of us die halfway to safety-- as seems most likely-- at least the Survey will have that bit of vital information, and at least our sacrifice will be remembered.
Burke wanted us to stay close to shore to map it better, but I command in shipboard matters, and with nightfall coming on I have ordered the boat to put off shore. We can't afford to lose our last boat, and with that rocky hill ahead it's likely the shore ahead is rocky too-- which means there may be unexpected reefs miles off shore. On the other hand, a rocky shore means there may be inlets to hide in, or offshore islands to hide behind. And shelter would be a very good thing to find just now. All I have to do is stick my head abovedecks to understand this. The wind is backing, and although the clouds are still cirrus, there are more and more of them. I don't need a barometer to know what that means.
Sunday, November 1: Day of the Dead
The Day of the Dead. And we might as well be!
With the wind astern and the clouds threatening we sailed back northeast toward the bare hill I spotted yesterday. We saw it was on the continent, the shore coming in low from the northwest to that solitary rock almost at the very end of the continent.
We saw something else too. I couldn't believe my eyes. The red forest didn't cover the point. Instead, it was another color entirely.
"Is that green?" I asked Livingston, who was at the helm.
He squinted. "By damn, it IS green! He shouted. "Plants! Earth plants!"
All this way. All the suffering, all the death. All this distance to be the first to find the land's end, and we find someone had reached here, fenced the end of the point, and planted crops! More than that, as we approached we saw that the low limestone rocks right at the very end of the point weren't rocks at all, but concrete. It took me a few minutes, studying it through my binoculars, to see what it was. A fort, a bloody concrete masonry STAR FORT, classic Napoleonic military architecture. Gods damn us, not just a few miserable pirates or shipwrecked fishermen planting some corn and beans and praying for rescue, no. A major settlement! It had to be!
I told Burke. She didn't take it well. What's to justify her now? What accomplishment for the history books will make the fifteen lives we've lost along the way seem like a reasonable price to pay? She's gone into her cabin-- or closet, really, it's hardly more than that-- and I haven't seen her since noon.
We came in carefully, but this fort didn't look as if it were intended to be hostile to such as us. Oh, it could have shot us all to hell and back in an instant; there were M2 machine guns in quad power mounts up there, and what were probably flamethrowers, and want looked like naval rifles, probably the standard 5" x 45-calibers-long dual purpose design out of the historical archives, mounted in some kind of a carriage that looked more like Civil War tech. But the fort's walls were only about five feet high. That wouldn't keep a human out. It would be hell for a native species, though.
And above it all, a flag snapping in the strengthening wind. But not the flag of the New London Assembly. Oh, no. One white star on a red swallowtail banner. The flag of the Carpathian Line.
But there was nobody in the fort. No hail on the short range radio. Nothing moving. No smoke.
The water stayed deep in close to shore, so I went west of the point, west of the fort, that being the side sheltered from the coming storm. We were lucky for once; half a mile from the fort, within sight of it across the fields, we found a narrow inlet. It led us to a cove, as well sheltered an anchorage as I've seen in all my years at sea.
And there, standing on the shore, a young man. A human, sure enough, of medium height, wearing the blue pants and jacket, the white turtleneck, and even the blue beret with the white star banner embroidered on it. The whole crewman's uniform, right out of a history book. He was jumping up and down and shouting "People! Oh, people! Thank you for coming. I saw you a day ago, I saw you from the observation post on top of the Hill."
"Who are you?" I shouted across to him.
He looked at me as if he didn't know his own name. Then his face cleared. "Dean. Andrew Dean," he shouted across. "You are so tired, and so sick. Come ashore. I have Earth fruits to cure you. There are warm beds, the bot will make parts to fix your broken machines--"
"Bot?" I shouted back. "You have a buildbot? What is this place? Where did the buildbot come from?"
"This is Land's End," he told me solemnly, as if I didn't know that. "And this is where Lifeboat 1, First Officer William Murdoch commanding, came down. Do you think I walled off this point, built that fort, all of it, by myself? Of COURSE we had a buildbot, of course we had an archive computer!"
"Wait a minute. By yourself?"
He looked terribly sad. "Yes. I have been alone. I have been alone for a long, long time."
Monday, November 2
At anchor in Sackport. Gale from the east, snow.
We had no choice but go ashore. I'm not happy with it. I don't like Andrew Dean.
He seems harmless enough, but there is something about him that alarms me. There is a terrible hunger in his eyes. Whenever you're near him you can feel his attention, his concentration; it's like some kind of parasite latching onto your very soul, feeding on your words, your attention. I have never seen anyone who so desperately needs company.
Perhaps living most of his life alone, save for a library computer, can do that. And yet somehow I feel he is as haunted as the rest of this accursed coast. If he weren't a perfectly healthy man, I'd think he was one of the demons who lured our comrades away to their deaths.
"Murdoch flew well," he told me as all thirteen of us-- twelve from the Expedition, and Dean-- sat over dinner in the fort's mess hall. Built to standard designs from the computer archive, of course, it was big enough for about five hundred troops. "He flew well, but Lifeboat 1 was a Class A. Too big, too unmaneuverable to pull out of a dive at such high speed."
And indeed, that's the first fact in our history. It was amazing to find that another Class A, besides the one that founded New London, managed to land well enough to leave any survivors.
"So he crashed here?" I asked, between bites. Whatever else he is, Dean is hospitable; he'd pulled fish and earth greens out of stasis and made us all huge fish salads, with tomatoes and carrots and everything. Even croutons. I don't know when I've tasted anything good.
He nodded. "Well, near here. Northeast of here, to be precise; in the north end of the passage between here and the island."
"Burke Island," Burke said. The look in her eyes wasn't healthy.
Dean just looked puzzled. "No, it's called Old Grandfather."
"Old Grandfather?" I asked. "That's a strange name. Why?"
"I couldn't tell you."
"Burke Island!" Burke said. "The discoverers always get to name what they find!"
"But everything around here already has a name. It always has," Dean said.
I think that's when Burke finally understood. Something broke inside her. I think her spirit died. And as big an ass as she is, I feel sorry for her.
"What happened to the survivors aboard the lifeboat?" I asked, keeping an eye on Burke. I had no idea what she might do.
Dean looked sad, and I swear I felt his sorrow in my own heart. I'd almost think he was a telepath. "There were only a few, only a very few. Two dozen or so. The buildbot survived, well enough that it could repair itself to partial efficiency anyway. The computer archive survived. So those survivors who were crippled at least had comfortable homes for the years they had left. They lacked for nothing. I.. I know that what lived took good care of them, and loved them as long as they lived, and mourned them when they died, and buried them with the full customs listed in the database. Of course my parents... I mean, grandparents... weren't hurt in any crash. There weren't enough human survivors to establish a population, but I remain."
"How old are you?"
He gave me that blank look, as he had when I asked him his name. "I don't know. I don't keep track. I guess I must be old, because I've been alone a long, long time. But time is funny here. It doesn't always pass at the same rate."
"I bet it has something to do with the demons."
"Demons?"
"Things that move half in the shadows. In the mirage. They called some of my crew away. My crew died."
"They're dragons," Dean said, firmly. "Not demons."
"Dragons? Do they have wings?"
"No. But they're dragons all the same. Or that's the closest thing to them you'll find in the archive."
"They're dangerous. They want to destroy us."
He looked like I'd kicked him in the gut. "They don't want to destroy you. They're your... servants. Your friends."
"But you didn't say they're not dangerous."
"Oh, that would be a lie. Yes, they're dangerous. Very." And when he smiled, and leaned back in his chair, I thought I saw fire glowing in the depths of his eyes.
He is a young man, and I think perhaps he means well. But he is of this place. I do not trust this place, or him.
Tuesday, November 3
Burke is dead. We tracked her into the red woods, and found her clutching the blossoms of a trapflower, frozen in the blizzard. Once again I see the Devil's work in this place, in this world; a plant for which our chemistry is so alien it doesn't recognize us as food, doesn't attack us, and yet the drug it uses to lure and disable its prey is even more effective on us than it is on a snakewolf.
I have been too hard on Dean. The little cemetery where the survivors of Lifeboat 1 await the resurrection is on the east side of Dean's peak, facing the dawn. Here his parents softened the rock to bury the lifeboat's survivors, as those aged and died; here Dean buried his parents. They are in solid rock now, and safe from the creatures of this hell world for all time.
He softened Burke's grave right next to his parents', and spoke the obsolete religious funeral service from memory, word for word as it is written in the Book of Common Prayer. He wanted to sing hymns, but it was very cold, so we left.
I do feel sorry for her now.
Dean was weeping. The tears froze on his face.
Undated
The demons walk in the blizzards. I can hear them calling me in the wind.
We are safe, and warm, here in Land's End Fort. With the radio working the Survey knows our full accomplishments. Such as they are. But winter has come. The sea is freezing. Morning Star is in perfect condition. Ships wait to come to our relief right after Spring Breakup. Ships, and even settlers to build a new town here, where the last feeble strength of a buildbot remains to build them a small empire. Only a month, maybe two. Only a month.
But they're out there in the snow. I can't hold out another month. I hear them call my name. I must go to them, I must see their form, I must see the beauty and wisdom in their eyes.
I must see. Even if it kills me.
(unpubl. ms. preserved at Southeast Regional Archive, Hilltown)
(Archivist's Note: All entries date from year 133 AC)
Friday, October 32
Course still 090 magnetic. Fix 22:45 at 25° 28' 45" E, 44° 45' 58" N. About 5 nm off low sandy shore still running e out of sight, sand bottom. If nothing else we have proven the continent runs e at least 300 nm farther than anyone expected. I hope they know, back home in New London, but with Griffin sick nobody here knows radio well enough to be sure. My own Morse is terrible, my knowledge of radio maintenance and repair is worse. I try to send position reports, but we haven't picked up any replies in three weeks now.
We have light wind, Morning Star is making 3 knots. All seems well there but we are on a lee shore, and if we get caught in another blow like the one that took Endurance the best we can hope for is to make it ashore alive before the boat is pounded to pieces in the surf-- and what happened three days ago tells me how short a time we'd survive there, if that happened.
I still don't understand what happened. There was SOMETHING on the beach-- we all saw it-- but how could it be so beautiful, or what power could it have, to make three of our best crewmembers go mad and run to it? I got us offshore as fast as I could, our water tank only half-full; we fired guns, we anchored offshore for a day longer than we dared, and nothing. No sign of our lost crewmembers; Jim and Cathy Linden, Sam Pulowski. Nothing except, maybe, a faint scream, somewhere far away on the wind, at sunset. And every so often, something moving in the heat shimmer on the beach. Surely this coast is haunted. Surely this is the Devil, or the Devil's work.
The three dead may be the lucky ones. Even with them gone, we're still overcrowded with three Albion survivors still aboard, and we don't have enough supplies for half our number.
Half rations. Scurvy. Thirst-- with streams of fresh water in sight on the shore, and we dare not go ashore for it. They're coming from the woods, those streams, and we know there are snakewolves in the woods. And Burke, that ass, armed us with M1 carbines whose puny cartridges don't have enough power to punch through a snakewolf's scales! Hardly any ammunition left anyway.
"They're sweet little rifles," she told me, a day or two out of New London. "I got a great deal on them." Did she ever stop to ask WHY they're cheap? Fine for crows and bunnies in the Fenced Lands; fine for police work perhaps, but useless out here among the native species.
Of course I didn't know they were useless either, but I'm a sailor. I'm not the one who claimed to be an experienced redwoods hand. She did, that ass! Burke. Another slang word for 'ass,' you'd think they'd coined that slang for her. How did she ever convince the Survey to let her lead this expedition? Rifles that don't work, no ammo, not enough food, and no vitamins in the medical kit, with scurvy making our teeth loose in bleeding gums. Redwoods hand she is NOT. She's a reformed flower-sucker, so they say, but once a flower-sucker, always a flower-sucker. I wish she'd died of flower juice years before she ever met me.
More fool I for ever listening to her. But she's so convincing she convinced me she knew more about sailing than I did, I who charted the Apostle Islands without losing a man. "Let's leave in the first days of autumn. We'll avoid the summer doldrums that way. Good fresh breezes all the way around." Fresh breezes, all right. A gale. A fire at sea. Twelve survivors in a ketch designed for nine.
The crew have whispered of mutiny. Gods forgive me, the only reason I haven't thrown Burke in irons myself is that it wouldn’t help things.
Yesterday, after the memorial ceremony, I asked her if we shouldn't turn back. She looked at me with that sincerity she can put on, that even now seems impressive. "We'd never make it," she told me.
"So we keep going onward?"
"What else can we do? We're already off the map. True, we had only the vaguest notion where the continent ends-- those who reported seeing its position were certainly too busy to take good measurements at the time! But they had to be more or less right, didn't they? And if so, if we were at the end of the continent now, it would be half as far to Pittsburgh Landing along the north coast as it would be to go back the way we came."
I gently pointed out to her that we hadn't rounded the end of the continent. "But it has to be there," she repeated.
Hell of it is, she's right. It has to be there. And it had better be. If it isn’t, we're all cooked.
Saturday, October 33: Halloween
Wind freshening from S; overcast. No star sights but by ded. reckoning appx. 66 nm E and S of previous position; speed 5 knots. No bottom. Shoreline angling 15° S of E and turning more to S ahead; on horizon a bald hill that may be an island or not. If it's on shore, the shore must turn to SE. All aboard are excited because of the famous statement in Second Officer Lightoller's flight log that the continent ends in a SE-trending point with islands along the shore north of it. After so many struggles, so much suffering, we can't help but hope this may be the land's end. We hope for it all the more because thanks to Burke's excellent provisioning skills, rounding the last point and heading for the outpost at Pittsburgh Landing is probably our only hope of survival. Certainly our only hope, if the radio is as broken as I think it is. Why didn't we bring spares?
At least we'll be the first to see it, the first to know exactly where the continent ends. I keep trying to send signals to the Coasties' radio complex at Londonport, on the faint hope they can hear us even if I can't hear them. If they can, then even if the rest of us die halfway to safety-- as seems most likely-- at least the Survey will have that bit of vital information, and at least our sacrifice will be remembered.
Burke wanted us to stay close to shore to map it better, but I command in shipboard matters, and with nightfall coming on I have ordered the boat to put off shore. We can't afford to lose our last boat, and with that rocky hill ahead it's likely the shore ahead is rocky too-- which means there may be unexpected reefs miles off shore. On the other hand, a rocky shore means there may be inlets to hide in, or offshore islands to hide behind. And shelter would be a very good thing to find just now. All I have to do is stick my head abovedecks to understand this. The wind is backing, and although the clouds are still cirrus, there are more and more of them. I don't need a barometer to know what that means.
Sunday, November 1: Day of the Dead
The Day of the Dead. And we might as well be!
With the wind astern and the clouds threatening we sailed back northeast toward the bare hill I spotted yesterday. We saw it was on the continent, the shore coming in low from the northwest to that solitary rock almost at the very end of the continent.
We saw something else too. I couldn't believe my eyes. The red forest didn't cover the point. Instead, it was another color entirely.
"Is that green?" I asked Livingston, who was at the helm.
He squinted. "By damn, it IS green! He shouted. "Plants! Earth plants!"
All this way. All the suffering, all the death. All this distance to be the first to find the land's end, and we find someone had reached here, fenced the end of the point, and planted crops! More than that, as we approached we saw that the low limestone rocks right at the very end of the point weren't rocks at all, but concrete. It took me a few minutes, studying it through my binoculars, to see what it was. A fort, a bloody concrete masonry STAR FORT, classic Napoleonic military architecture. Gods damn us, not just a few miserable pirates or shipwrecked fishermen planting some corn and beans and praying for rescue, no. A major settlement! It had to be!
I told Burke. She didn't take it well. What's to justify her now? What accomplishment for the history books will make the fifteen lives we've lost along the way seem like a reasonable price to pay? She's gone into her cabin-- or closet, really, it's hardly more than that-- and I haven't seen her since noon.
We came in carefully, but this fort didn't look as if it were intended to be hostile to such as us. Oh, it could have shot us all to hell and back in an instant; there were M2 machine guns in quad power mounts up there, and what were probably flamethrowers, and want looked like naval rifles, probably the standard 5" x 45-calibers-long dual purpose design out of the historical archives, mounted in some kind of a carriage that looked more like Civil War tech. But the fort's walls were only about five feet high. That wouldn't keep a human out. It would be hell for a native species, though.
And above it all, a flag snapping in the strengthening wind. But not the flag of the New London Assembly. Oh, no. One white star on a red swallowtail banner. The flag of the Carpathian Line.
But there was nobody in the fort. No hail on the short range radio. Nothing moving. No smoke.
The water stayed deep in close to shore, so I went west of the point, west of the fort, that being the side sheltered from the coming storm. We were lucky for once; half a mile from the fort, within sight of it across the fields, we found a narrow inlet. It led us to a cove, as well sheltered an anchorage as I've seen in all my years at sea.
And there, standing on the shore, a young man. A human, sure enough, of medium height, wearing the blue pants and jacket, the white turtleneck, and even the blue beret with the white star banner embroidered on it. The whole crewman's uniform, right out of a history book. He was jumping up and down and shouting "People! Oh, people! Thank you for coming. I saw you a day ago, I saw you from the observation post on top of the Hill."
"Who are you?" I shouted across to him.
He looked at me as if he didn't know his own name. Then his face cleared. "Dean. Andrew Dean," he shouted across. "You are so tired, and so sick. Come ashore. I have Earth fruits to cure you. There are warm beds, the bot will make parts to fix your broken machines--"
"Bot?" I shouted back. "You have a buildbot? What is this place? Where did the buildbot come from?"
"This is Land's End," he told me solemnly, as if I didn't know that. "And this is where Lifeboat 1, First Officer William Murdoch commanding, came down. Do you think I walled off this point, built that fort, all of it, by myself? Of COURSE we had a buildbot, of course we had an archive computer!"
"Wait a minute. By yourself?"
He looked terribly sad. "Yes. I have been alone. I have been alone for a long, long time."
Monday, November 2
At anchor in Sackport. Gale from the east, snow.
We had no choice but go ashore. I'm not happy with it. I don't like Andrew Dean.
He seems harmless enough, but there is something about him that alarms me. There is a terrible hunger in his eyes. Whenever you're near him you can feel his attention, his concentration; it's like some kind of parasite latching onto your very soul, feeding on your words, your attention. I have never seen anyone who so desperately needs company.
Perhaps living most of his life alone, save for a library computer, can do that. And yet somehow I feel he is as haunted as the rest of this accursed coast. If he weren't a perfectly healthy man, I'd think he was one of the demons who lured our comrades away to their deaths.
"Murdoch flew well," he told me as all thirteen of us-- twelve from the Expedition, and Dean-- sat over dinner in the fort's mess hall. Built to standard designs from the computer archive, of course, it was big enough for about five hundred troops. "He flew well, but Lifeboat 1 was a Class A. Too big, too unmaneuverable to pull out of a dive at such high speed."
And indeed, that's the first fact in our history. It was amazing to find that another Class A, besides the one that founded New London, managed to land well enough to leave any survivors.
"So he crashed here?" I asked, between bites. Whatever else he is, Dean is hospitable; he'd pulled fish and earth greens out of stasis and made us all huge fish salads, with tomatoes and carrots and everything. Even croutons. I don't know when I've tasted anything good.
He nodded. "Well, near here. Northeast of here, to be precise; in the north end of the passage between here and the island."
"Burke Island," Burke said. The look in her eyes wasn't healthy.
Dean just looked puzzled. "No, it's called Old Grandfather."
"Old Grandfather?" I asked. "That's a strange name. Why?"
"I couldn't tell you."
"Burke Island!" Burke said. "The discoverers always get to name what they find!"
"But everything around here already has a name. It always has," Dean said.
I think that's when Burke finally understood. Something broke inside her. I think her spirit died. And as big an ass as she is, I feel sorry for her.
"What happened to the survivors aboard the lifeboat?" I asked, keeping an eye on Burke. I had no idea what she might do.
Dean looked sad, and I swear I felt his sorrow in my own heart. I'd almost think he was a telepath. "There were only a few, only a very few. Two dozen or so. The buildbot survived, well enough that it could repair itself to partial efficiency anyway. The computer archive survived. So those survivors who were crippled at least had comfortable homes for the years they had left. They lacked for nothing. I.. I know that what lived took good care of them, and loved them as long as they lived, and mourned them when they died, and buried them with the full customs listed in the database. Of course my parents... I mean, grandparents... weren't hurt in any crash. There weren't enough human survivors to establish a population, but I remain."
"How old are you?"
He gave me that blank look, as he had when I asked him his name. "I don't know. I don't keep track. I guess I must be old, because I've been alone a long, long time. But time is funny here. It doesn't always pass at the same rate."
"I bet it has something to do with the demons."
"Demons?"
"Things that move half in the shadows. In the mirage. They called some of my crew away. My crew died."
"They're dragons," Dean said, firmly. "Not demons."
"Dragons? Do they have wings?"
"No. But they're dragons all the same. Or that's the closest thing to them you'll find in the archive."
"They're dangerous. They want to destroy us."
He looked like I'd kicked him in the gut. "They don't want to destroy you. They're your... servants. Your friends."
"But you didn't say they're not dangerous."
"Oh, that would be a lie. Yes, they're dangerous. Very." And when he smiled, and leaned back in his chair, I thought I saw fire glowing in the depths of his eyes.
He is a young man, and I think perhaps he means well. But he is of this place. I do not trust this place, or him.
Tuesday, November 3
Burke is dead. We tracked her into the red woods, and found her clutching the blossoms of a trapflower, frozen in the blizzard. Once again I see the Devil's work in this place, in this world; a plant for which our chemistry is so alien it doesn't recognize us as food, doesn't attack us, and yet the drug it uses to lure and disable its prey is even more effective on us than it is on a snakewolf.
I have been too hard on Dean. The little cemetery where the survivors of Lifeboat 1 await the resurrection is on the east side of Dean's peak, facing the dawn. Here his parents softened the rock to bury the lifeboat's survivors, as those aged and died; here Dean buried his parents. They are in solid rock now, and safe from the creatures of this hell world for all time.
He softened Burke's grave right next to his parents', and spoke the obsolete religious funeral service from memory, word for word as it is written in the Book of Common Prayer. He wanted to sing hymns, but it was very cold, so we left.
I do feel sorry for her now.
Dean was weeping. The tears froze on his face.
Undated
The demons walk in the blizzards. I can hear them calling me in the wind.
We are safe, and warm, here in Land's End Fort. With the radio working the Survey knows our full accomplishments. Such as they are. But winter has come. The sea is freezing. Morning Star is in perfect condition. Ships wait to come to our relief right after Spring Breakup. Ships, and even settlers to build a new town here, where the last feeble strength of a buildbot remains to build them a small empire. Only a month, maybe two. Only a month.
But they're out there in the snow. I can't hold out another month. I hear them call my name. I must go to them, I must see their form, I must see the beauty and wisdom in their eyes.
I must see. Even if it kills me.
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no subject
Date: 2004-05-06 08:16 am (UTC)'Uh, please sir, can I have some more?' :>
no subject
Date: 2004-05-06 07:08 pm (UTC)*hugs*
It reminds me a bit of some of Andre Norton's stuff from the 60s. Though it feels a bit darker and less likely to be resolved neatly or as ... positively? in the Good versus Evil sense.