Universe 11 - [Anthology] Read online

  When Bowles returned. Keith briefed him on the situation. The old man slapped Keith’s back. “Behave yourselves,” he said with a smirk.

  ~ * ~

  Keith led Fletch into his fourth-floor walk-up, and hung his nucleopore on a hook by the door. “You can take the bed,” he said. “I’ll sleep on the couch, I guess.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “This place is a dump. Don’t you ever clean up in here?”

  “Well. ...” Keith lifted a clutter of dirty clothes from the floor, dumped them into an already crowded closet. Fletch wandered over to the only window that wasn’t boarded over for the winter, jerked the shutters open.

  ‘‘Nice view of the harbor if you squint between the buildings on the left,” she said wryly. Keith fed a miserly few lumps of coal into the stove, starting a fire with twists of papers from last week’s Inquirer.

  Fletch unslung her binoculars, peered through them. “It’s too dark to make out,” she muttered. “But I could swear that some of those ships are coal burners. Even—Good Lord! That looks like a converted oil tanker.’’

  “Oh yeah, we get all kinds.” He blew gently on the fire, anticipating its warmth. Another few minutes and he’d be able to shed his coat.

  “But those things are old! Single-hull construction, with the bottom rusting out and the rivets popping loose. How can you people allow that garbage in your harbor?”

  “What harm could it do?” Keith asked. “Any spill would just wash downriver and out to sea. Living this close to the Drift, you learn to appreciate what you’ve got.”

  ~ * ~

  The dinner plates were piled in the sink, waiting for the nighttime water rates, when there was a knock at the door. Fletch, wearing one of Keith’s old sweaters over her fatigues, answered it.

  A dozen or so tenants stood in the hallway. “Mummers Gift, Mummers Gift!” they chanted. A single Mummer, still in street clothes, stood to the fore, holding a muslin sack in one hand.

  “Mummers Gift,” Keith mumbled to Fletch by way of explanation. He scooped two rolls of silver dollars from a dresser drawer and gave them to the Mummer. The man broke them open, poured them into the sack. Keith ruefully watched this year’s savings disappear, and smiled dutifully.

  As was customary, the Mummer had started drinking early. He was a small man, with a slightly bloated face, and the flush of alcohol accentuated the broken veins in his nose. “Paid in full,” he announced. “Let the revels continue!”

  The tenants cheered and poured into the room. Like the drinking, the floating party was an ancient and hallowed custom. Somebody shoveled coal into the stove, and somebody else waved a jug of grain alcohol in the air. Keith hastened to dig out his last gallon of cider for mixer.

  Jerry from the third floor grabbed Keith’s sleeve and demanded an introduction to Fletch. Keith apologized, and complied. When they heard that she had come out of the Drift, several of his more superstitious friends made the sign of the horns to ward off mutation.

  “No, she didn’t!”

  “Really?”

  “Come off it—she’d be dead.”

  Fletch smiled politely. “You only have to worry about radiation exposure if you’re right on top of the Meltdown site. For most of the Drift, the only thing to contend with is particulate matter. As long as you don’t eat, drink, or breathe, you’re safe.”

  They laughed, but there was an uneasy edge to their laughter. The rich kid from the ground floor—her father had money, and reputedly she only worked three days a week— tried to change the subject. “Keith said that you’re a scholar, Ms. Fletcher,” she said.

  “Yes, I was mining the records in Souderton and—”

  “Next tenant!” the Mummer bellowed. “Time to move the party on, we can’t hang around here all night!” He bullied the party out into the hallway. They went willingly, even anxiously. Contrary to custom, Keith and Fletch were not invited along.

  “Was it something I said?” Fletch wondered.

  “Yes,” Keith said. And tried to explain.

  Souderton was the last city within the Drift to die. Its contamination levels were low, and the city had strong and determined leaders. For almost twenty years after the Meltdown, Souderton had thrived after a fashion. But after two decades of water and foodstuff laced with radioactive isotopes, the cancers and birth defects and leukemias became too widespread, too common to be ignored.

  By popular account, the panic started at a mass town assembly to discuss the problems. An alternative version was that an old woman suffering a heart attack triggered the hysteria. However it began, it turned into a wholesale evacuation of the city, a mob of thousands that fled like lemmings toward Philadelphia.

  They were met at the city limits by a horde of self-appointed vigilantes, men who were afraid of mutation, of radiation poisoning, of anything that came out of the Drift.

  Masked and hooded men with filters and rebreathers went into Souderton the next day with rifles and mopped things up.

  “See, I go out there almost every day so it doesn’t bother me. I tend to forget how everybody else feels about the Drift, though,” Keith said. “And I guess there’s a kind of inherited fear of Souderton itself, of what might have happened if the refugees had gotten through.”

  “More likely it’s inherited guilt.” Fletch sat down on the edge of the bed, unlaced her boots, let them drop. “Time for me to hit the sack.’’ She pulled off the sweater.

  Her breasts bounced once beneath her shirt. They sagged slightly, not much for a woman her age. Keith found himself trying to picture them in his mind. The room was uncomfortably warm, even stuffy. The single drink he had had made him almost dizzy.

  “Uh, listen,” he said. “The bed’s big enough for two.”

  Fletch smiled scornfully. “Back off, sonny,” she said. “You can sleep on the couch for one night without rupturing anything.”

  ~ * ~

  At dawn they were awakened by the sound of children running gleefully through the streets, beating on pots and pans with sticks, and shrieking with all the power in their young lungs. Keith trudged down the hall to the bathroom and returned to find Fletch up and dressed. “How you doing this morning?” he forced himself to say.

  “Oh, a little stiff and creaky around the joints, but not bad for a woman who’s just been run over by a truck.”

  After breakfast they lingered for a few hours over cups of mixed chicory and coffee—the only luxury Keith allowed himself—before going to watch the parade. Fletch made no reference to the previous night, and Keith found himself almost liking her again. They were out on Two Street by late morning, in time to see the last several Comic bands.

  Fletch watched with fierce interest as men in feathers, in sequins, dressed as clowns, as Indians, as playing cards, strutted by in organized disarray. A female impersonator tagging after one brigade waggled enormous mock-breasts at her, turned around, and flipped up frilly petticoats to reveal grossly overstuffed underthings. She threw back her head and laughed.

  “Do women participate in this?” she asked. “All I’ve seen are men.”

  “They used to. They were banned a long time ago, just after the Meltdown.”

  The brass band for the Comic troupe, resplendent in feathers, mirrors, and cheap glitter, was playing “The Bummers Reel.” Behind them a ragtag batch of clowns pulled a wagon float labeled CHRISTMAS WITH TRUESDUEL. Atop it stood a skinny man in baggy Santa Claus suit, who handed wrapped presents to blindfolded policemen. “What does that mean?” Fletch asked.

  “There’s a city councilman named Scott Truesdale, and there was an incident last May . . . um, it’s kind of hard to explain if you’re not familiar with local politics.”

  “I get the general picture,” Fletch said. “I imagine your Mr. Truesdale won’t be too amused by this, however.”

  ‘No.” It was the end of Truesdale’s career, in fact, but Keith didn’t bother saying that.

  The Comics, with the brass bands, floats, and slapstick anarchy, co
ntinued to strut by. At one point Keith bought two soft pretzels from a vendor and introduced Fletch to that old Philadelphia tradition. They were barely warm and cost three cents for the two, a price the vendor could never had gotten away with any other day.

  The groups ranged from the bright and gaudy to the bright and gaudy and inventive. Some, obviously, took themselves more seriously than others. By the same token, these were not always more fun to watch.

  “Who’s next?” Keith asked. The last Comic band was strutting away, strewing confusion and firecrackers in its midst.

  Through her glasses, Fletch studied the banner that led off the group. “Looks like . . . Center City Club. Would that be right?”

  ‘Yeah. That’s the first of the Fancies. After them come the String Bands.”

  “How did all this begin?” Fletch asked. “How did it get organized? What’s it all for?”

  Keith started to answer, stopped, tried again: “Uh. I don’t think anybody can answer those questions. My old man used to talk a lot about the history of the Mummers. You can trace them back for centuries, back to Colonial times when they were just random gangs of men wandering around on the First, shooting off guns and raising hell. But you can’t say when they became Mummers. They just kind of evolved.’’

  “I see.”

  The Fancy club was less than a block away. A hundred-fifty strong, they strutted in neatly ordered rows, their ostrich-plume headdresses bobbing, the feathered, mirrored, and bedangled “capes”—more like false wings than capes, for they towered above the marchers and out to the sides— dipping to the odd cadence of the Mummer’s strut.

  “Who are they?” Fletch asked, indicating a number of darkly dressed, furtive figures slipping quickly through the crowd, roughly parallel to the band.

  “Don’t look!” he hissed. “You’re supposed to pretend you don’t see them.”

  “But who are they?”

  “Men in Black. They’re the spotters. They locate certain people and point them out to the King Clown for a tapping-out or . . .or whatever,” he finished lamely. At her questioning glance, he added,, “The King Clown is their captain, the one marching in front. King Clown used to be a type of costume, but now there’s just the one.”

  Except for the traditional face paint, King Clown’s costume was nothing like a real clown’s. His cape was a full twelve feet high, and he glittered with sequins and mirrors and even a bit of diffraction grating, which must have come from somebody’s grandmother’s trunk. Two guylines led from the tips of the cape to his hands, so he could manage the ungainly costume in the light breezes that sometimes blew up. He strutted with great dignity, occasionally bowing slightly to each side in acknowledgment of the cheers that sprang up.

  Keith indicated the Men in Black with a sideways nod of his head. “Look. They’ve marked somebody.”

  Four Men in Black had slipped up on an unsuspecting watcher, quietly jostling people aside to take up positions immediately behind him.

  The Center City troupe Mummer-stepped briskly down Two Street, banjos, glockenspiels, and horns not playing but at ready and, for an instant, looked as if they would pass the man by. Then King Clown raised a gloved hand, and they stopped, wheeling ninety degrees as one man. The Clown strutted around the troupe and into the crowd. They nervously backed away from him.

  The Mummer chief strode up to the marked man. The victim flinched away, found himself held firm by the Men in Black. He blanched. King Clown stretched out his arms, took the man by the shoulders.

  One arm rose once, twice, again. It fell on the man’s shoulders with an audible crack three times. Then King Clown whirled, returning to his troupe. The crowd cheered, and the band broke into “Oh Dem Golden Slippers,” turned, and marched on. The man from the crowd joined a motley band of followers in mufti, strutting happily after the troupe.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Fletch asked.

  “It was a tapping-out. The man was a candidate, and the Mummers have accepted him. He’s one of the lucky ones.”

  “I wouldn’t mind knowing more about all this. Do you think I could get an interview with the captain?”

  “Don’t do it,” Keith said tensely. “Don’t have anything at all to do with the Mummers. Just smile and watch the parade.”

  “Why?”

  “Forget I said anything.” Keith stared down the street, ignoring her as best he could. The Fancy troupe approached, all glitter and flash, advancing, pausing, and advancing again in their odd half dance, half march. It was off, Keith realized, and strange that it took an out-of-towner’s questions to make him aware of such a simple fact.

  King Clown’s troupe was parallel to them, marching past, when the signal came again. They wheeled to face the crowd. King Clown strutted into the crowd, directly at Keith and Fletch. Sweet Jesus, Keith prayed silently. Let it be somebody else.

  People backed away and King Clown stood before Fletch, placed his hands on her shoulders. He waited a beat. Then he leaned down and kissed her gently on both cheeks. She smiled brightly at him and dipped a curtsey. He turned as if to move away.

  Then he whirled again, and before Keith could react, the gloved hands were on his shoulders, and he was staring into the man’s bloodshot eyes. Keith tried to jerk away, but several pairs of hands held him arm. He could see the weave of the Clown’s costume, could smell the alcohol on his breath.

  Slowly, very slowly, King Clown bent over and kissed his cheeks.

  In an instant the restraining hands, Men in Black, King Clown, and all were gone. The band was Mummer-strutting away, playing “Death March of a Marionette.”

  Fletch’s eyes sparkled and she started to say something bright. Keith grabbed her hand, yanked her into a crowd that shrank away from them. Fletch hung back laughingly, and he gave her arm a ferocious tug.

  “Come on!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Shut up and run!”

  ~ * ~

  Away from Two Street the city was virtually empty. By law all citizens had to watch at least the middle third of the parade. This worked to their advantage—there was no one about to report the direction of their flight—but it also made them visible a long way off, if anyone was already on their trail. Rounding a corner, Keith came face to face with a large, distraught black man. For an instant he thought he was dead, and then the man had turned and fled, another victim like themselves.

  “Why are we running?” Fletch gasped.

  “Because they’re trying to kill us.” He would answer no more of her questions. He needed all his attention to escape.

  As a boy he had played Mummer Hunt, both as victim and assassin, with an intensity rivaled only by the real thing. So he fled from the waterfront because he knew that was the first place the hunters would search. He passed by fire escapes and basement windows that looked like they could be forced for much the same reason. North and west he headed, toward the Mummer Hall, which used to be the art museum.

  Only when they’d reached their goal did he realize he’d had a goal in mind at all. It was a pre-Meltdown parking garage, its four levels gaping open to the winds. Panting, he arrived at the stairwell. It was dark and too grittily rubbled to take footprints. Once inside they could ascend slowly, try to regain their breaths. As they climbed, Keith explained as best he could.

  After the burnings and panic murders of the Meltdown evacuations, Philadelphia’s city government collapsed. There was no help to be had from the state, which had just lost its capital, or from the Feds, who were busy with several million refugees. The self-destruction of New York City in a conflagration of riots triggered a world-wide depression almost as a matter of course.

  The only organized power remaining in the city was the Mummers. Clowns and buffoons, they existed only because they wanted to. Decent men, they marched and collected money to keep the last hospitals going. When there were no police, they organized volunteers to patrol the neighborhoods. It wasn’t long before they controlled the city, and no
t long after that before they realized that fact.

  The Kiss began as a way of flensing mutants and carriers of genetic disease from the population. It was extended to include those who refused vaccinations, when the epidemics began. Finally its potential as a political tool was realized, and no reasons were given.

  The rooftop was cold and windy. Bent over, Keith scuttled to the tool shed standing in its center and beckoned for Fletch to follow.

  “Push on the upper-right corner of the doorway there.” He grabbed the opposite corner and tugged as she did so. After a heartbreaking instant’s hesitation, the door lurched in its frame and tilted askew. There was a gap wide enough to crawl inside.