Chapter Seventeen

The village was like many she had visited in her young life, and she took some comfort in that familiarity, but the pillar of smoke was unavoidable and filled her with a strange sense of dread. Still, as she approached the settlement she did not detect any obvious hostility from the people she passed. Like most would do with any approaching stranger, they eyed her anxiously, but let her pass unimpeded. Her horse attracted some stares, not surprising given the expense of buying and feeding a pack animal. As she climbed down from her horse and began to lead it by the reins, she felt flushed with an unfamiliar self-consciousness – the embarrassment of affluence.

She moved hesitantly through the outskirts of the settlement, heading instinctively towards the river, where people were likely to congregate. As she had suspected, the encampments were almost entirely scavenged and custom built, with only a small complex of old world buildings clearly visible. Sitting next to some sort of ancient water tank, they had the look of municipal buildings, utilitarian and worn. The front wall of the largest of these buildings had been partially dismantled, and a crude awning had been built above the opening. That alone was enough to suggest the building’s purpose, and the cobbled-together benches she saw inside confirmed her assumption. It was a bar.

She wandered up to the building, wondering how one might look nonchalant while leading a horse. She cast about for a place to tie the reins, settling on an old lamppost, its fixture long since scavenged. She nodded to a patron leaving the bar, a healthy-looking young man in a filthy plaid shirt.

“Is it OK if I tie my horse up here?” she asked, though she was already halfway done with tying the knot.

“Who’s going to stop you?,” he said with a chuckle, then ambled away in the direction Haojing had come. She faked her way through a laugh in return, then walked tentatively inside.

The tall opening in the wall allowed a great deal of light to spill into the space, and she found the bar pleasantly inviting because of it. There was no bar back in her home village, though some in the community were known to ferment the juice of crabapples and trade the liquor they derived. Her mother shunned alcohol for all but a couple days out of the year, which would arrive without warning and on a schedule only she herself seemed to understand. On those nights she would emerge from her room with a decanter of dandelion wine, its origins unknown, and sit on the steps outside drinking and cackling to herself until Haojing would finally drag her to bed.

Twice in her life Haojing had been drunk. Once a boy down the road had tried to impress her and had dug up an old bottle of scotch. It tasted rancid and overpowering, but neither of them could quite tell if it was supposed to or not. The second time, she had been sent on a trip to a nearby garden to trade a bag of individually packaged salt packets for a milk crate of yams. The old farmhand had asked Haojing to drink two glasses of vodka with her as a courtesy, and being on an official mission from her mother, she had consumed them with pride and in the spirit of doing her filial duty. When she stumbled home at last Chien-yi had slapped her with a spatula in punishment until her knee was covered in red welts. Her mother had, however, taken the unusual step of tucking her into bed when the flogging was over.

There were few permanent public buildings in most settlements. Places like the computing shed were treasured in part because they were so rare; there had been something of a general store in Haojing’s village until, suddenly, there wasn’t. Such establishments were subject to the randomness and temporary nature of supply lines, itinerant populations, and human lives. The bar looked well-established, which was another way to say it looked like it had been around long enough to be run down. The bar itself was a pair of repurposed office desks, topped with a wooden countertop that looked just crooked enough to imperil the drinks that sat on top of it. A cracked mirror hung on the wall behind the bar, and as she walked in she faced the uncanny feeling of seeing herself for the first time in many days. Clothes were always dirty but she felt ashamed to see the dirt caked on her face; her ponytail hung limp and matted behind her. She made an effort to stop looking but could not stop peering at herself every few minutes.

She sat at the bar, one of only a few other people in the space. She was annoyed to find herself perpetually nervous about her horse, and periodically glanced behind her to see where he was tied up. She reminded herself that she would have to find him more food, real food, and take him over to the river for a good drink. She frowned and rustled in her bag. She had brought items to barter, but was running low, and it was always hard to judge what something might be worth in unfamiliar territory. She had a bottle of ink she had been hoarding and she was determined to trade it for a least a meal and a bottle of water.

On the wall opposite from her was a yellowing poster. On it a cartoon orangutan hung from a branch, pouring a drink from above into his mouth. Beneath the image, yellow text read “In Sanur, I Hang Out at the Borneo Bar.” As she gazed at it, the bartender wandered over.

“That was in an old shipping container that washed up on the shore a few hundred kilometers from here,” he said. “A peddler pushed it on me in exchange for drinks.”

“Do you, um, have a regular barter rate?”

“Well, now we mostly take work tickets. But I guess you aren’t from around here.”

“No,” she said. “I have a few things to trade.” She pulled out the bottle of ink and handed it to him.

He nodded, cracking open the top and dipping his finger in. He dabbed a bit of the ink onto a washcloth and watched it stain. Satisfied, he closed it up again.

“We’re pretty flexible. Not that we have a lot to offer. I got some potato grain stuff and a little fig wine, a few odds and ends.”

“Water is fine. For me and the horse. And I need a meal.”

He reached under the bar and pulled out an old gallon milk jug filled with water and set it down in front of her.

“That’s filtered and strained. I can trade you that and some soup and bread for the ink. Can’t part with more water than this though. Honestly, you’re better off just leading the horse down to the river.”

“Right,” she said. She picked up the water jug and held it up to the light spilling in the window. It was minimally green and just a bit cloudy. She took the jug to her lips and took a small sip. Satisfied, she nodded. “What’s in the soup?”

“Soup.”

“OK. It’s a deal.”

She sat and sipped the water for a while. Now that she was here, she had to come up with somewhere to go next. She again felt her sense of purpose crashing against her lack of a clear destination. When she had left Big Flat she had felt full of vigor, certain that she was heading in the right direction. Now, she was sitting in a dingy bar in a small settlement, days and days away from home, without much more than a man’s name, a symbol, and very old information about an organization that didn’t want to be found. And she had no idea if the letter she had pressed on the old woman who sold her the horse would ever make its way to its intended recipient. She had to come up with some sort of plan of attack.

But first, soup.

It was not quite hot, and unsurprisingly there was no meat. But the broth was hearty and she tasted real spices in it and it warmed her inside. She took time to enjoy it. More people were filtering in as the day grew later, and the increasing chatter and movement warmed her too. She took another sip from her water jug, then carefully replaced the cap. She pulled out her notebook and pencil, then told the bartender that she was going to post up there for a while. He nodded, then rustled around under the counter for a moment. He poured a couple inches of leather-brown liquid into an old coffee mug, its handle long since broken off, and pushed it in front of her.

“On the house,” he said.

She thanked him, and took a sip. She found her feelings on scotch had not evolved with time.

Though she tried to dedicate herself to brainstorming, she found herself people watching. Many of them were dressed in similar coveralls, but there was no obvious gang insignia or similar that she could see. Dark soot stained their clothes and hands. People mostly brought in their own food, and she came to think it was more of a general public meeting area than anything else, although a kid who led his dog inside was chased out. Some were clearly there to get drunk, but many just came and sat and talked. When he wasn’t being pulled over to help other customers, the bartender kept hanging around near her, chatting amiably. She didn’t mind company but found it hard to concentrate on coming up with a plan. And she kept feeling obliged to take another sip of the scotch while he was nearby.

“So do they all work, uh….” she trailed off, hoping to cover her ignorance.

“Inside, yeah,” he said as he polished a glass, jerking his thumb in the direction of the walled city. “Keeping the fire burning.”

She nodded.

“They aren’t, um. Forced, are they?”

He chuckled, looking her over with amused interest.

“You really aren’t from here, are you? No. No, people kill to get in there. I’d kill to get in there.”

She twisted the scotch glass around in her hands.

“Yeah, I’m really not from around here. Sorry.”

He chuckled again.

“For what?”

“So what’s the deal over there? What do you know about it?”

“All I know is that it’s been there since I was a kid. The wall wasn’t always complete, but I can’t remember a time before it was going up. People come and they keep the fire stoked and in exchange they get to stay. We’re like a satellite camp.”

“For what?” she asked.

“They’re really strict about only letting some people in. Like I said, I’ve never been inside, and I’m 25. They need a place for peddlers and caravans to come and trade, and a buffer to turn people away. And they turn a lot of people away. I don’t know, people from in there, they used to come out a lot more. These people who still come in here, who still leave, they’re older. Anyway. We handle a lot of stuff from the outside world for them.”

“And what do you get in exchange?”

He bent under the counter, then emerged with an industrial light, a single bare bulb in a yellow rubber housing with a long thick cord. He gave the switch a push, and the light clicked on. He handed it to her. She looked at it quizzically.

“So?” she said, shrugging.

“Listen,” he said. She sat still for a minute, straining to make out whatever she was meant to, but she could hear nothing beyond the clatter of glasses and conversation in the bar. Absently she gazed out at her horse, who was still standing patiently, swishing his tail back and forth. She couldn’t hear anything out of the usual. That’s when it hit her: it was precisely what she wasn’t hearing that mattered. There was no familiar clatter of generators. She sat upright in surprise. She hadn’t noticed, after so much time on the open road, that this settlement had none of the omnipresent noise of small-scale electricity generation.

“It’s a powerplant?” she said.

“It’s a powerplant,” he nodded. “That great big fire, all that work.”

“What do they do with it? Do they have a lot of computers?” She made an effort to sound casual.

He shook his head.

“I mean, it’s hard to say. But I don’t think it’s a very advanced operation over there. My mom, when she was alive, she used to go and work, cleaning. They weren’t so locked down then. She said they had lights, some heaters, but not much. Can’t be very efficient, I guess.”

She nodded, and he went back to serving other customers. She frowned to herself as she stared into her notebook. It appeared that it wouldn’t be easy to get into the walled settlement, but it also seemed possible that the Colony wasn’t there at all. Whatever else the files had shown, the men who made up the group were techies, computer scientists; if the settlement was really as low-tech as the bartender had suggested, then that wasn’t a good sign. But there must have been hundreds of people in there and he was repeating old, second-hand memories. Sneaking in was probably too dangerous, but if they weren’t looking for workers she was at a loss at how to get in. For a long while she pondered in frustration, then closed her notebook. Sleep first, she thought, then a plan in the morning.

She sat at the bar for a long while, sipping her water and taking in the energy of the place. She was tired but had little desire to curl up in the grass yet again. So she stayed up until the sun went down, enjoying the clamor of the bar around her. Finally she rose to leave. She nodded to the bartender on her way out, then headed over to the horse, toting the half-empty jug of water with her. He stamped his feet in impatience as she approached.

“OK, OK, you’re thirsty,” she said, stroking his mane. “It’s time to go.” She untied his reins and started to lead him towards the river. As she did, she saw the bartender approaching.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Listen I have to clean up, carry some things to the back. But I’ll be done soon.”

“OK.”

“Do you want to hang out for a while? Just to chat?”

She stared at the grass at his feet. The moon was bright and the artificial light spilled from the building. She felt hungry for human companionship, of any kind. She wanted to say yes.

“I’m sorry. I, uh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He nodded quickly in embarrassment.

“Yeah. Yeah, no. No, it’s fine, no sweat.”

“I’m sorry, I just –”

“No, no, no problem. Well, I guess I’ll see you around.”

He stalked off away from her. She shuffled her feet in indecision. Next to her, the horse tugged at the reins.

“Hey, can I ask a question?”

He turned and ambled back.

“Yeah.”

She reached into her bag and pulled out her notebook. Feeling a brief flush of self-consciousness and vulnerability, she opened it, thrusting it into the best light where he could see it. In the dim light sat her crude facsimile of the ant symbol she had sketched from Big Flat’s files.

“Have you ever seen anything like this?”

He took the book from her, and she feared he would find every secret she had ever kept in it. He held it up to his face, scanning the page for a moment. She studied his face, which looked young and vaguely ridiculous as he squinted in the dark.

“Yeah. You know, I think I have.”