Journey on the Liberty Line

This short story was written as an entry for one of John Michael Greer's science-fiction contests. Set a thousand years in the future, Cincinnati reprises its pre-civil war role as a conduit for slaves escaping north - only now our heroine and her family are escaping not just their oppressors but an arid and degraded landscape.

19 Abrill 426 CY  (25 April 3015, O.C.E.)

Tonight at long last I put pen to paper, as I am in my fifty-seventh year and I want my family to know this part of their history, that it not be forgotten.  I was just a little girl when we crossed the river into the City, and yet I can see every detail of that day and the journey that led us here.  It still makes my heart stab when I think of Jill...I’ve spent most of a lifetime not thinking about it, but I want it to be remembered.

It began in the village where I was born.  

On the evening after we buried Kristofer, Papa gathered the five of us around the table.  It’s time, he said. We’ll leave at dusk, in a tone that no one dared protest. But his voice softened as he pushed his grief aside. You’ll remember what I said; take only what you can carry for three days.  Mama and I will see to the food and necessaries.  Jill, you look after after the box with the pictures and memories, the well-worn wooden box Mama kept under the floorboard, hidden from the Taxmen and the raiders, now wrapped in waxed cloth and string.  Keep it well-hidden.  My stomach sank to a pit. Jill whimpered quietly and Joel hugged her tiny frame to comfort her.  Dad put his hand on my head and wrapped his sturdy arms around all of us.  Get some sleep now.  I’ll go talk to the neighbors and see if they know of any raiders about.  

None of us had an appetite for the meal Mama made for us, and we kids picked at our food.  With few words we shouldered our things and started walking as the limb of the sun glowed red on the dusty horizon.  Everything my eyes took in was familiar but my mind was reeling with worry...leaving behind all the familiar things; the road past the neighbors and the little village where the market had been earlier that day. The moon shining wanly over the stubble in the fields, a promise of the cooler season in the wind..the tiny shack we called home.  We walked trying to be in plain sight and yet not be seen.  Dad stopped in at his friend Miguel’s - his little Margitta was my best friend - and told him he could take in our dog and chickens and the few tools he owned once we were away, as they had agreed.  Everything was as familiar as always, but seeing these things even I knew, come what may, we would never come back.  The pit in my stomach grew until it made my legs wobble.

We walked on and came to a stand of trees and an ancient and gnarly oak, which was as far as I’d ever been from home.  There were no more trees past this one, nothing beyond in the space ahead except uncertainty and dry, dusty plain.  Northward was the faint outline of the road the raiders and the Taxmen used.  If we were caught in the open we would certainly be killed, or worse.  But the wheat and the corn came in poorly this year; the sun had stirred up a hot dry wind that came in killing waves all Summer.  The Taxmen and even the raiders had found little in the village that was worth carrying away.  At any rate the road was seldom used at this time of year, for hardly anyone dared to cross the wastes to the north in the summertime.  

A long time ago, Uncle Benn told me much later, maybe a thousand years or more, there were slaves in this land.  Rich men here sent ships across the sea to bring people here to work their fields.  The rich men lived in splendid houses, and the slaves worked the fields and lived out their lives in hovels with barely anything to wear or to eat.  And countless more arrived.  He told me that a great and powerful society swept in and ended the slavery, and reigned for centuries from ocean to ocean, and then faded.  Uncle Benn is the one who taught me that history moves in cycles.  If the Taxmen and their masters live in splendid houses I never saw it, but I have little doubt that we were their slaves.  The Taxmen are hard, but the raiders are worse -  the take of the Taxmen one can tolerate - one despises them, hides from them, resists them - but the raiders live by no code. Sometimes the Taxmen hunt their bands and cut them down to a man; sometimes the Taxmen ride with raiders as if they were all of a piece.  Either way, our village did what it could to bargain with one and conceal from the other to the best of their advantage, to live another year.  

The raiders might be far away, if we were lucky, but there were more dangers ahead and only more luck and Gaia’s blessing would have to see us through.  Even I knew this empty plain could be the end of us - barren and featureless with hardly a stick or a stand of grass to walk upon and nothing to hide behind.  And if the rains caught us, even the road would become a swamp; clingy clayey soil that would hold us and bind our steps until the rain and wind and hunger finished us off.

We walked I think for three days, setting out at dusk and walking through the night, by day trying to sleep in the dry dusty heat under a makeshift tent made with the blanket Papa carried on his back. It was the same color as the dun sea of shifting powder that surrounded us.  It gave us some shade and camouflage, and kept some of the stinging dust out of our eyes from the ceaseless dry wind.  I had never felt so weary. Jill whimpered how much she ached and Mama held her but she looked little better.  Papa and Joel took turns looking out for anyone, but if concealment failed us there was little they could do but sound the alarm.  

Our water had run out on the fourth day. Papa made Mama and the rest of us share it out.  He smiled but I could tell he was uncertain and exhausted and near the end of his will. We walked until nearly daybreak and saw the edge a sparse wood, just some brush and few trees, a few killdeer scratching out a living on the border of the plain...the first life we’d seen in two days.  As the sun peeked its first red rays on us we saw a flicker on the horizon to the north and walked toward it.  It soon resolved into dark figures sitting around a sheltered cookfire. Several men.  We couldn’t see if they were armed, or what they might be.  It could be raiders (a rather sorry lot, if they be raiders, but our lives would be cheap) or perhaps hunters.  I heard Papa suck in a breath, then stand up straight and turn to us with a brave smile to encourage us on...we had surely been seen, and our energy was spent. There was no going back, and no use in hiding, we all knew without saying.  Here was the chance that would save us or doom us, and we trudged toward the light.  

________________________________________

I had not seen him for three summers but Uncle Benn looked just like Papa with a few more creases and the same kindly, sunburnt face that was ready to tease me or make a copper disappear and then pull it from my ear to make me laugh.  I had never seen Papa cry, but he grappled Benn in a mighty hug and did his best to hold them back.  Tears came to Uncle Benn’s eyes and he pulled me and Jill and Joel into a hug that made it hard to breathe and made Jill squeal with laughter.  His companions, two young men taller than any men I had ever seen, served out water to all of us and ladled stew from their pot.  The raiders aren’t likely to risk their skins this close to Lexintown, one of them said.  We’ll have trouble enough in the days ahead but we’ll be safe today.  After our meal we walked a little further until the trees become a real forest, and a place with a clearing which had the signs of many travelers camping before.  In the shade of an oak next to a clearing our companions set up camp.  While Uncle Benn and his companions kept a carefree watch the five of us stretched out in the open, free from the weight of months of worry since Papa first told us of his plans and the dangers we’d face.  I believe it was the deepest I’d slept in my whole young life.  

In the middle of the night, Uncle Benn and Papa woke us and we gathered our packs and set out again.  Our footsteps were soft on the spongy forest path, which in the dark was just visible when the moon shone through the treetops.  Once Uncle Benn scattered us into the brush when a figure appeared which soon became two riders. Jill and I clasped hands with Joel as one horse snuffled and whinnied at our scent. He received a slap from his master’s crop, but they had no dogs and moved on without stopping.  As the sun was coming up the trees ended abruptly in farmer’s fields, and we passed through the first of several villages.  Uncle Benn and the boys promised us we were safe in the daytime now, and we continued on as the fields gave way to shacks and then to buildings even taller than the big oaks around us. We had reached a real town, bigger than I had ever seen, and my mind tingled with the sights and noises and odd smoky smells.  

I had never imagined such a place.   Men in polished leather shoes with smartly-outfitted horses pressed through the crowds in the street; women in horse-drawn carriages and brightly-colored fabrics.  Colors of passersby I had never imagined before; orange and straw-colored and copper hair, and ladies with snow-white skin. I fell in step with a tall elegant man with a cane who had a face as dark as Junie's molasses and I tried to look without staring at all the colors of farm laborers and vendors milling through streets.  A few of them looked curiously down at us, and I felt embarrassed - as a little girl would - for my plain rough cotton dress that Mama had made and my wood-and-fabric clogs.  But most seemed to take no notice of us, for among the wealth were people coarser than we.  Uncle Benn had told us the town would be safe if we did not attract attention, and to act casual - as if we could have imagined what “casual” meant in such place.   

Joel alone of us seemed to be enjoying the sights and smells.  I lingered at the railing of a restaurant, transfixed as a man in a white uniform brought more food to a table already loaded with dishes.  A man and a woman ate at a table of spotless white cloth and glittering metal bits I could not identify.  The lady caught my eye and scowled, and Joel whistled a tune and put his arm on my shoulders to push me along before I could make a scene of myself.  We walked for maybe an hour, skirting the center of town and its Taxmen stronghold, winding our way along a confusion of streets and people. The skies which had burned with bright sun for weeks, were beginning to cloud over with towers of blue and gray.  The threat of rain announced itself as a limpid breeze like hot breath, and the first fat drops of rain pelted down on us.  The city blurred into a frenzy of motion as people hastened their business to get indoors.  Uncle Benn led us into a narrow side-street. Still in a press of people, Mama and us kids kept our hands linked to stay together. Uncle Benn slowed; he seemed uncertain, his eyes darted around, he seemed to be looking for someone.  He came to a storefront where a stout gray-haired woman swept the stoop at the close of the day.  Uncle Benn approached her with the rest of us in tow.  He waved and exchanged some pleasantries and as they spoke of the weather, she seemed friendly and I hoped that this would be the end of a long day without food or rest.  But the more they talked the more cross she became. I think she was on the point of telling us all to be on our way as Uncle Benn’s singsong banter came to an odd emphasis on my companions and I have traveled a long road but I still have a dream.  At this the woman’s broom stopped for just a moment and she fixed her eye on Uncle Benn, then she resumed her work and replied when we travel with golden slippers we cannot walk alone.  Some sign I could not see had passed between she and Uncle Benn, but, still sweeping, she told us curtly to be on our way and said no more. Jill and Joel exchanged quizzical looks and tears welled up in my eyes as I saw there would be no rest or shelter this long long day.  Uncle Benn shushed us kids, with a smack on each of our heads I am sure he immediately regretted.  

Uncle Benn herded us around the storefronts into the blank alley where a gray-haired man motioned us through a gate and into the door behind his shop.  He bustled in the eight of us, cursing at us to hurry and be quiet, then looking about before closing the door softly and slamming the bolt home.  A lamp was lit, revealing a cramped storeroom fitted with a stove and cots.  The gray woman appeared, she lit and fussed over the stove, preparing food while her husband apologized for the angry reception and greeted Papa and Uncle Benn and the boys warmly, clasping their hands together in his and saying  the bounty is high for travelers these days, you see...the raiders and Taxmen have been taking our people and we must take precautions.  He was kind enough not to call us fugitives.

We kids helped the old couple serve out warm bread and soup.  Snug in our little shared room, warm smells of cooking and tobacco, the skies opened up and the rain drummed the roof and water ran in deep rivulets in the muddy streets.  Mama said she shuddered to think we’d been on the deserted plain now.  After dinner, the old man passed around a bottle and glasses to the men, drew a breath and explained what the future would hold.  We kids tidied up from dinner and joined the circle of adults.  From this point on you will travel during the day, he explained, hiding in plain sight.  Blend in with other travelers, don’t arouse suspicion, rely on your wits. And do not try to carry a weapon. Uncle Benn and the boys and sometimes the old man told us how to recognize those who might harm us, Taxmen, raiders, irregulars of all sorts, and how to act and what to say.  To hear them tell it, we had many enemies on the road ahead.  They spoke to us kids as if we were adults, which made it all the more frightening. If you see raiders, hide or run for your lives; my family might escape with our lives and merely be sent back to work some other dusty field in some other flyspeck village; Uncle Benn and the boys would surely be slain.  If riders wear black-brimmed hats of the Taxmen, you just might talk or bribe our way through.  Taxmen come in great variety, he explained further; some ruthless like raiders, but most here are city folk, and paid to patrol the frontier.  The best of all would be to run into the blue uniforms of the Lakes army patrols, though we could not possibly expect to see them for many days.  Our goal was to cross into the Cincy, Cincinnati as the old name was, or simply The City.  If you make it even as far as the south side of the river, anywhere, you’ll surely make it.  The old man then told of the house in a nearby town where we could stay, what the watchword was, the warning sign.  He made Papa and Uncle Benn and Joel repeat it back to him, over and over, every last detail.  

We stayed for two more days and two nights. After dinner on the second night, Mama sat down next to Jill and they untied the wrappings on the wooden box.  A spill of pictures came out and Joel and I gathered them up.  Mama unwrapped a gold bracelet I knew came from her mama’s family.  She held it to her chin and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. I thought she would break into sobs when she caught her breath, collected herself and took a seat next to the gray-haired woman.  She pressed the bundle into the woman’s hand, whispering something I couldn’t hear.  At this, she and her husband both stiffened from an unspoken insult; you think we risk our lives for money?  Mama looked stricken, and Papa and Uncle Benn joined her they all spoke for a long while in low voices.  We kids took no further notice and spent a delightful hour on the floor, squinting at the faces on the pictures in the flickering light and trying to read the markings on the back.  The two boys that came with Uncle Benn paid no mind to any of this, busying themselves with their food, scraping to the bottom of the pot to the great amusement of our hostess.  I’d never seen two people eat so much.  I think in the end the dear old couple kept the bracelet, I hope they did...It would be worth every copper if it bought them or their friends a way out of trouble, even for day.  

We set out the next morning, the old couple having provided us with food and a few gifts.  Joel had a leather belt with a shiny buckle.  Mama had a brightly-colored parasol, and each of us wore a straw hat to keep off the burning sun.  All practical things, but a little bit of style to help us blend in. Jill was delighted to have a shawl that matched Mama’s dress and I had a pretty yellow raincoat made of some soft fabric I’d never seen before, and a bright blue ribbon to wear on my hat.  We hugged all around inside the dim and cramped little room, then the old man unbolted the door and we stepped out into the perfect dawn, the skies washed clean and shot with pink and orange streaks of high clouds.  My heart swelled to the bursting and for just a moment we felt like our worries were behind us. It was Gaia’s blessing on our journey.  

___________________________________________________

What I remember most about the journey was the walking. Endless walking. We walked in the rain, we walked in the hot sun.  We were never alone in the walking - the road had travelers of all sorts - families, bands of workmen, migrant farm-workers.  There were probably other fugitives among the many people we walked with.  Then there were men and troops on horseback, convoys of draft animals hauling the harvest,  I saw adults and kids and soldiers rolling on curious little carts with just two wheels, one in front and one in back, and somehow balancing themselves on top.  Once amid a long convoy of Taxmen, an enormous machine appeared, seemingly moving on its own power with a roar like thunder.  It pulled another machine on wheels with a giant tube pointed up at the sky, which Uncle Benn explained was a weapon, a gun of some sort.  

The Taxmen had set up checkpoints along the road.  I was starting to recognize the types of people our elders had described nights before.  As we walked up to the first one, Uncle Benn hissed at us to remember what they had said.  Be courteous, answer their questions, and stand up straight.  You are not a criminal.  A group of men, probably thirty or more, armed, looking all the more threatening because they were young and bored.  A grizzled and sour looking man in charge asked us who we were and where we were traveling.  We stood awkwardly around while Benn and Papa did the talking.  But he no more than glanced at the papers Papa and Uncle Benn proffered before turning his attention to the next group, more wealthy than we from the look of them and probably more worthy of his attention.  

Besides the walking, it wasn’t all bad, we we had sights and smells and sounds to see to break up the tedium.  The tidy fields of beans and wheat. Little towns where we could replenish our bread and supplies with the few coppers the old couple had provided us with, and even hear music.  Even though it was Autumn and the green was gone from the fields it was more lush than anything I’d ever seen; even the good year Papa had with the corn when I was just four or five.  So, so, different from the barren desert we’d staggered through, even the scraggly fields around our village.  

Uncle Benn told me much later that it wasn’t always a desert there...a long time ago, he said, people used coal - the black rock some of the industries use - in vast, vast quantities; so much of it that they filled up the air with smoke and gas, so much of it they even changed the weather.  They burned every bit of it they could find, he explained, and then they tore down whole mountains looking for more.  He thinks the Empty Plain and the nameless village where we grew up is what was left behind when they vanished - the mountains and streams and forests upended and uprooted and flattened down to the barren rock and clay in order to get at that black rock they needed.  It’s impossible to believe now - I think his students used to smile politely when he explained some of his theories...but I can see why he thinks it.  

Some nights we would camp in the open or under the shelter of a tree.  Some nights we would come to a home or a shop, and Uncle Benn and the boys would look for a something - a gate left just ajar, a pile of firewood stacked just so.  When we found shelter with people they would often give Uncle Benn and Papa a place to seek in the next town. Sometimes they would tell us a password or some odd turn of phrase and what to expect in return.  Other times they would give us a scrap of paper which I could not read until much later. I kept one even though Uncle Benn told me I must put it in the fire; I have a consignment of two full barrels and three fine bottles of wine, they will require a team of three to deliver the wagon.  In one town we hurried on without stopping; hungry and cold we flitted back into the woods when some sign did not look right to Uncle Benn and the boys.  

We passed still more patrols and more checkpoints.  By now the little wooden box had long since been discarded, and the pictures and coins and few valuables parsed out to a pack here, a pocket there. Some had been traded as the price of passage for the family, other things Mama still clung to in the hope that a few memories would stay with us until we reached the City, to help us remember and to start a new life there. But they were becoming smaller and fewer, for the City patrolled here.  We yearned to see a soldier in a blue hat, but most everyone on the road were just hurried travelers. Few of them paused to chat; there seemed to be tension in everyone we met.  One old man wobbling against his cane made steady progress toward us.  He seemed delighted to chat with us kids and I asked him eagerly how long before we’d see the river.  He seemed surprised at my question and chuckled why, it’s just over a ridge or two young lady...you walk any faster than me, and you’ll see it tomorrow or the next day!  He chatted with Papa and Uncle Benn and they parted kindly with blessings on each others’ journey.  As he hobbled along his way, our little group tittered with excitement.  We kids hassled the boys and Uncle Benn about the city, and how soon we’d be there.  Uncle Benn shushed us to silence yet again, but we could see his steps were lighter and the flood of relief coming over him.  And the old man with a cane was right.  The next day we came to a bend in the road that opened up to the view of a valley, with a gravy-brown river in flood just visible.  In the hazy distance two blue-gray towers stood tall above the treeline, with a large settlement beyond. The City. We walked on with us kids chattering and playing and even the boys joined us in a game of talking about all the food we were going to eat when we got into the City.

We passed through a few more little farming towns, and came upon a last checkpoint - a busy one from the look of it - manned by the very men in blue hats and uniforms that we’d hoped to see for so many days now.   We lined up with the many other people in the hot sun, carts with goods and barrels and loads of hay.  There seemed to be a nervousness in the men.  They were all armed, and there were a lot of them.  Joel pointed to the outline of men on the wall of the compound, and more men far above on the tops of the bridge towers.  There’ve been attacks all along the river this year, Uncle Benn explained, and these men expect another one.  But even Uncle Benn and Papa could hardly hold their excitement back now and it showed in a frantic search through all of our packs for the proper set of identity papers.  They needn’t have bothered. When our turn came the officer in the blue hat winked at Uncle Benn and waved us through.  

We stepped inside the compound and found a quiet spot out of the melee to catch our bearings.  Troopers in blue scurried around, directing the hopeless tangle of shoed, hoofed and wheeled traffic and hollering at the civilians and carts to keep moving.  I was watching a hawker selling food out of a cart when there was a cracking noise louder than thunder.  I found myself flat on the ground,  coughing and aching. I sat up and saw Mama and everyone covered with dust.  In the haze and smoke a crater in the ground ahead of us had appeared, and near it the remains of a cart and some bodies sprawled about it.  I heard coughing and cries and men shouting and cursing get these civvies out of here! move that cart! A group of blue-hatted troopers ran past us.  One of the young men stopped to help Mama and us kids off the ground, dusted us off, and pointed to a gate, toward the bridge.  He shouted get moving little lady! run as fast as you can!  Then he took his rifle off his back and turned to join his comrades.  

We joined the press of people escaping the attack, crossing onto the bridge over the brown river, against the current of men in blue, rifles at the ready, streaming the other way.  Bullets whistled overhead, and more thunder sounded behind us in the compound and then we heard  answering crashes of the big guns of the compound.  For the first time since the thunder I saw Uncle Benn, Jill cradled in his arms with a streak of blood running down her dress, and Uncle Benn sobbing softly as we reached the safety of the City at long last.  

Uncle Benn told me it’s not the first time there was an “underground railroad” - the one that saved us from slavery.  I don’t know if it was ever a real railroad, maybe he meant it was a symbolic name.  My Uncle Benn was a professor of history and archaeology at the City University. When my parents brought us to the City and deposited me in school, I more than made up for never having seen a book in my youth. Joel and I learned as much as we could; he left for a trade school while I continued on in university and earned a degree like my dear Uncle Benn.  The stories he told me when I was young were too tantalizing, too different from the hungry and desperate farming life my family escaped, and I wished to know more.  

I have been privileged to see the past as well as the present.  I have been on a train to City of Newyork to visit my colleagues there.  The train used to reach Cincy but ended long before I was born, 220 or so, when storms raged season after season and washed away most of the bridges.  There are only two foundries that can forge rails and engines, and the City will have to wait until funds allow.  For now, one must take a canal boat or ride horseback to the great rail station in City of Pittsburg, or sail the long way via the Lakes.  I correspond with colleagues overseas when the weather and the conflicts allow the sending of mail.  I am friends with a Monsieur DesPres in Paris, whom I will never meet in person, who like me is a professor of history.  He shares the view of a vast and vibrant civilization that left deep grooves in history perhaps a thousand years ago, and then vanished, leaving us to puzzle out the bits.  His view is expansive even beyond Uncle Benn’s wildest theories; when we first begin writing he informed me that we are not merely the second civilization, that there were many more before that, in his part of the world as well as ours. We have a running joke about the youth of our Lakes Federation (...my Dearest Mademoiselle, it is hardly 400 years old!, he laughs) compared to the societies that have come and gone in his land across the seas.  He explained the meaning of the word City-State to me, which I was unfamiliar with, and sent books that I read eagerly and entrusted to the University’s library.  It is an odd connection that the City I call home was named for a man that lived many lost ages ago, across the sea, in a land not even my wise and traveled friend has seen.  

Uncle Benn and Papa are gone now, Gaia rest their souls. I miss them so much. I smile when I think of Uncle Benn in his younger years...the daring volunteer running refugees across the river from the wastes to the south.  I’m getting too old for this shit, he’d laugh wearily, and then he’d make another run.  It’s so hard to square that with the kindly professor I knew in school years later, telling students tales of the history they’ve discovered of civilizations long gone beneath our very feet.  They can’t believe their ears, but then they see it with their own eyes.  I have seen some of the digs our students conduct on the northern reaches of the City; among the farms hacked out of the kudzu and brush and forest...you find concrete and scraps of iron in perfect squares and rectangles; the foundations of the homes and towns of people that lived here before us.  And they go on and on and on for countless k'loms into the wilderness, and the remnants of the ancient roads that used to snake all around the city.  Sometimes we’ll find objects we can use; mostly we find objects that mystify and tantalize. Sometimes a book, saved against all improbabilities against moisture and mold. And places of danger - places where you can tell from what grows there - or that nothing grows there - to stay away. The craftsmen in our University laboratories make wondrous inventions - equation-solvers and machines that can talk to machines in other Cities, machines that run on mere sunshine - but these people had mastered electricity to a degree unimaginable today; wires so fine one needs a microscope to see them.  We marvel at the complexity of such things and wonder what it was meant for.  

The Bridge we crossed that day still stands of course, its iron and stone tended over the centuries.  It was made by a great builder of that past age, a Mr. John Roebling, whom you can read about on a brass plaque.  It’s vital to the City. There are the ferries but they can’t (or they won’t) run all year.  Not even the army can make the Ferrymen’s Union run their cargo and troopers in the dry season, when the banks are a wide muddy mess; in the autumn they can’t stem the coffee-colored current from upstream and the Alagehñas.  The bridge stands as the only way across to the forts and the roads to the farming villages on the south of the river.  Back in ‘83, and again this year - the City demanded a tax for the bridge - a large one - from every citizen, to paint and restore what can be repaired. The High Mayor personally came out to prod the citizenry into supporting the levy amid the usual cries (graft! theft!). In his laconic humor he reminded us if we lose this bridge, we’ll never get another one.  And he’s right, too. The men in the Engineering Hall could tell you all about how it’s made - we know what the metals are and about the tempering of iron and wrapping the steel into cables too big to reach my arms around, and the concrete that holds it together.  But how on Gaia’s Earth they could make so much of it - the fires alone, to forge and shape that much steel - to make such a thing is far beyond our abilities, almost beyond imagination.

We passed the Mayor’s tax levy, naturally.  What else could we do. And he and his court returned to their usual intrigues and ceremony, then left the running of the City to his deputies in order to summer at his residence at the Lake. Well, you never did get clear of the Taxmen, did you? Uncle Benn would have teased me if he were with us today.  But at least these Taxmen won’t burn your home or kill you for sport. They might take you to court and let the lawyers have at you, but you’ll still escape with your skin - and some of your dignity.  

It troubles me that the City seems to bristle with armaments, with the draft and the River Guard and the army patrols and the constant skirmishes with the Raiders on the south side of the river.  We have made a gem of a city, with law and decency, with arts and science and learning, and it - all of it - armed to the teeth.  A continuous stage of siege is unsettling to me and my circle of know-it-alls and academics.  They howl about it on the opinion pages, but I think most of us in the City realize it’s just that way.  I know, and I think they know too, that is our lot.  Men would like nothing less than to sack this city and take its rich fields and its position on the river, that raiders and others would band together for such a prize, and that our safety is guaranteed only by the point of a sword. 


Mama is still here, but we don’t see her often.  Losing two children in one year broke her spirit, she never was the same. She lives in one of the reclusive religious orders.  We can’t visit her there, they are apart from life in the City; they keep to themselves and keep even their beliefs a secret. I wouldn’t call her happy but she has a good life.  That day so many years ago changed Joel as well...for years after, his hurt made him carry on what Uncle Benn used to do, dashing far into the south to bring friends and family out of the bondage of the desert and the Taxmen, until a rifle bullet gave him a limp that made him a marked man beyond our borders.  He lives on the south side of the river, helping to defend the farms and the stronghold there.  I was visiting Joel today, and I’d promised him many years ago I’d write down what happened.  And that’s of course why I was thinking about Jill and our journey and it all came back in a spill of words.  On the way home from visiting Joel’s family I walked the bridge again, just as I did as a scared little girl, all those years ago.  

This story was written as an entry for John Michael Greer's Planet of the Space Bats contest.