We Are Shepherds, Part 2: Shepherd Town
[Here is the second part of "We Are Shepherds" the Rough Cut. --ed]
[Art by David Frankel, OSA.]
II
Hide. Run. Shoot. Nothing. My body wasn’t responding. I looked desperately around for cover, but could do nothing more than slowly crumble into the rusty dirt as the black spot grew larger on the face of the sun.
“Kelly?”
[I’m sorry I can’t tell you anything. I can barely keep track of your vitals in this environment.]
“Shit.” Do something! I can’t do anything. The spot grew larger, and between the bursts of static from my artificial eye, it resolved itself into…a covered wagon. Rolling of its own accord, no horse to pull it. Driven by a pleasant-faced man in a plain suit.
I still tried to shoot him, because heat and exhaustion had made me incautious, but the gun in my hand felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, and it slowly dragged me to the ground.
“Hello, stranger!” The man with the pleasant face called to me, once he thought I was in range of his voice. “You look like you could use some help!”
“Ain’t that the god’s honest,” I muttered. I collapsed face-first in the sand.
***
I half-woke again inside the wagon, which was cool enough that I knew it must be climate controlled. It was mostly empty, except for a woman in a sober dress who might have been the driver’s cousin, or sister, or mother; I couldn’t tell her age, only that she was pleasant. In the back was a peculiar lattice of a matte-blue color that I recognized as being a silver-cobalt alloy.
“Are you seeing this?” I asked Kelly, turning the artificial eye towards it.
“What’s that?” The pleasant-faced woman asked me, smiling. “Are you awake?” I lay still and didn’t say anything. I didn’t want a conversation right now.
[Silver-cobalt quantum lattice. It’s a power receiver. They must have a real atomic generator nearby.]
[They must,] I replied, remembering to subvocalize this time. [So, that’s…that’s…] I started to drift off. Since the End of the World, no one had been able to build new atomics. The generators that survived were the only ones we had—little bright spots of limitless power, lost in the deserts, or breaking down with no one to maintain them, the last torches of the Old Science. [Is that good news or bad?]
[I don’t know] Kelly told me, as I lost consciousness.
***
The people with the nice faces drove me in their covered wagon to a place that was probably too small to be called a town. Eight buildings, sheltered from the sun in a shallow defile, clustered around a fat water-pump. It sat on a huge picotech filter that, presumably, took the heavy metals out.
The covered wagon stopped in the middle of the buildings, which looked like they’d been made from wood. There were carved lintels above the doors, and shutters on either side of the windows. The roofs were flat and sloped gently downwards.
“It’s time to get up,” the woman said to me. “Come inside, and we’ll get you something to eat, and find you a nice bed.”
This was a compelling argument, and I could find no reason to resist it. “Who are you?” I asked, as I followed her and her…husband? Cousin? Brother? We went into the largest building, which seemed primarily to be a kind of a hall, and on the top of which was a tall clock-tower.
“We are shepherds,” the man told me, without missing a beat. He smiled at me, a smile even more eerily similar to the woman’s than the strange likeness of his features. “We’re going to rebuild civilization here.”
“Well, that’s nice,” I told them, and tried to figure out their angle. “Shepherds” sounded religious, but they didn’t look like triblies, which is what most of the little clusters of humanity out in the desert were. The triblies believed that the End of the World had been the Rapture, and all that was left now was a hell for wicked men to suffer through. You could spot them by their hollow cheeks and the dark circles under their eyes, and the great weight of self-loathing they always seemed to carry. No man is more unhappy than the one who believes he’s already been judged by God, and that God has found him wanting.
These two people, and the four dozen others that they introduced me to inside the town hall, all seemed fairly well-adjusted. They smiled, and said they were pleased to meet me, and told me in firm but gentle terms that carrying weapons was not permitted in the town. After a moment beneath their stern glances, I turned over my knife and gun. My gun…my gun was Old Science. There were no weapons like that anymore.
[Are you sure that’s a good idea?] Kelly asked.
“No. But I’ll risk it,” I said, then smiled apologetically at the shepherd’s confused looks. “Heat must be getting to me.”
The shepherds fed me fried chicken and white bread and broccoli. I fell upon the food with vigor and abandon, my stomach grew full and fat, my eyelids drooped. They had bitter beer for me to drink, and I did. I could feel myself relaxing, floating softly, sweetly, sleepily away.
I noticed that the twenty-five men and the twenty-five women didn’t eat anything. I noticed that no matter who was doing what, futzing about in the neat, clean, cool hall, at least four of them were always looking at me. I noticed that they all looked like they could be related, that they all smiled the same identical smile, that they took turns answering my questions as if they didn’t care who I was speaking to.
“What are you shepherds of?” I asked, and they just smiled blankly back. [Notice anything weird about this place?] “Where did you get the food?”
“Oh, we have our ways,” said one of the women, as she smiled enigmatically. “Some of the Old Science survives, and we’re going to build a new world out of it.”
[No fields], Kelly said, [no livestock, no trees nearby, no art on the walls, no septic pits or latrines, no one over the age of forty.]
[No children, is what I was thinking] “A new world, huh? That sounds good.”
“You can be a part of it,” one of the men said. “If you’re willing to give up violence, and selfishness. We have more than enough resources for everyone. We can all be happy now, and share the world.”
[It is late] Kelly replied. [Maybe the children are in bed?]
“So, you think the End was a good thing?” [Maybe.]
“Oh, unquestionably,” said a different woman, who put a hot fried chicken leg onto my plate. “Don’t you?”
There was a silence then in the room, as fifty eyes turned to look at me. Fifty calm, placid eyes, in calm, placid faces, set atop calm placid people in their calm, sober clothes. There was no sound except for the low-grade air conditioner that hummed outside and kept the building cool.
“Sure. Yeah. All the old stuff is…is destroyed…”
“…to make way for a new world,” the woman (the same woman? A different woman? I wasn’t really sure) finished for me. Satisfied, the shepherds returned to their seemingly pointless, never-ending busywork. “We’re lucky. We’re lucky we have the chance to start over.”
“Lucky,” I agreed. “You said something about a bed?”
One of the women took me out into the night air, that now was cold and crisp. Stars glittered diamond hard and painful overhead. I could barely make the young woman’s (pleasant) face out in the dark, as she led me across the open square, past the water pump, to another building—this one, I assume, for guests.
“You’ve got an atomic,” I said to her, as she unlocked the front door. “A generator?”
“Oh,” said the woman. “Yes. We’ve got the last pieces of the Old Science here, ready to make a new world with them. We are shepherds of the next life.”
“Where did you get it?” I asked. She said nothing. “Did you find it? Did someone give it to you?” Nothing. “What’s your name?”
“You can stay in here,” the woman said. “I know it’s not much, but we’re the last city left, you know. There’s nowhere else to be but here.”
“There are cities,” I replied, as I let her lead me into a small bedroom. There was a fresh bed, a nightstand, a mirror. A window with the shutters thrown open, so that it let in a fine layer of heavy-metal grit to rest on top of everything. It seemed that no one had slept in this room for a long time.
“Oh.” She said. “Where?”
“East. That’s where I came from.”
“Oh.” She left me in the room without another word.
I sat down on the bed, and gently began to pull out my left eye. The magnetic clamps released from the orbital rings, and I felt that weird sensation, like I was drawing something long, obscenely long out of the socket, all the way out of my brain, as the eye’s long cybernetic ganglion clicked and slurped through my face.
I took the orb and tried to blow some of the dust out, polished it with a small cloth I kept for the purpose, gently massaged the servos. All the while, I kept my mind away from the east, from the Emerald City. The city that I’d come from. The last green place on earth—green grass, green trees, everywhere just green. The city I could never go back to.
I left the eye on the nightstand, and tied my scarf around the empty socket. I took off my boots and coat, but left the smartfibre shirts and pants, as I lay back in the bed. It didn’t take long before I was fast asleep.
It wasn’t long after that before the buzzing in my head told me that someone was trying to kill me.
[On to Part 3]
