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Nodding, Ryan shifted himself until he was sitting upright once more. Then, while he sat on the bed, Betty asked him to do a few tests with his new eye, reading the characters on a distant chart that was projected in the air by the cylindrical machine, identifying colors and observing movement through a spinning device in its trunk. Once she had confirmed the eye was functioning correctly, Betty told Ryan that the eye had extra properties.
“I think I stumbled on one,” Ryan admitted. “I focused my vision and a crosshairs target appeared.”
“Yes,” Betty confirmed. “You can also magnify the image in the left eye, like a longblaster scope. Are you right-or left-handed, Mr. Cawdor?”
“Right,” Ryan said, holding up his right hand.
“Tsk, that’s a shame.” Betty sighed “But it is not a huge loss. Obviously, the targeting facility would have been better in the same eye as your blaster hand but that can’t be helped now.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind the next time I lose an eye,” Ryan told her sarcastically.
The clinician acknowledged this with a snort before going back to her explanation. “The eye has other properties that feed directly into your optic nerve to be processed by your brain. You now have night vision, including an infrared functionality—which will also allow you to track the heat given off by a subject. You may access the former by blinking twice in quick succession while in darkness or semidarkness.”
Since the room was shaded, Ryan first tried the night vision, blinking rapidly twice. The feed from his left eye switched to a gray-green hue. The feed from the night vision was confused because Ryan also had his real eye open, creating a double image, one normal and one cast in gray-green.
“Whoa,” Ryan said, feeling a wave of nausea run through him.
“You may find it easier to process if you close your other eye,” Betty said.
Ryan did just that. Then he gazed around the room, saw the figures and details of the room picked out vividly in what seemed to be a murky gray fog. He saw Mildred smiling as he experimented, her eyes and teeth a brilliant white lined in neon green, while the bank of lights on the surface of the cylindrical machine seemed brilliant in the gloom. “That’s...working,” Ryan said, blinking again until the feed switched back to normal.
“The infrared requires pressure here.” Betty showed Ryan by touching the bottom left corner of her own eye.
He mimicked the woman’s gesture and, after a moment’s trial and error finding the pressure plate, he activated the infrared function. This time, he had the foresight to close his other eye, ensuring he saw only the feed. Suddenly, the room was cast in a dull gray through Ryan’s left eye, with the two human forms burning a brilliant red-orange as they watched him. The cylindrical machine glowed a faint orange, cold and lifeless despite its ability to move independently. Ryan moved his head, looking around the room at the spots of heat at the desk and, more dully, across the bank of windows.
“Seems dandy,” Ryan said.
When he drew his hand up to touch the pressure plate again, Ryan saw his own body recast in a brilliant swirl of red, yellow and white, as if he were made of fire. He pressed the hidden plate, toggling back to normal vision.
“What else can it do?” Ryan asked.
“You can hold an image for review at a later period,” Betty said. “To do this, focus on the subject for five seconds and squint your eye like so. You may then recall this image at a later date, where it may be shown as its own image or as an overlay to whatever you are looking at for means of comparison.”
“How many images can it store like that?” Ryan checked. “And how do I recall them?”
“Look to your left while holding down the pressure pad to retrieve an image,” Betty told him. “Do the same once the image is visible and hold your eye closed for five seconds to delete.”
“Delete?” Ryan asked, uncertain what the term meant in this context.
“Permanently remove the image from the eye,” Betty elaborated. “You may hold up to twelve images, but that number will be less should you take images while in night-mode or infrared.”
Ryan nodded. “Got it.”
Mildred spoke up from where she was standing close to the now-tinted windows. “Is there anything else Ryan or I need to know, such as how to maintain or service the artificial eye?”
“The eye is self-servicing,” Betty said. “You may detect some deterioration over the very long term—by which I mean decades rather than years—but should that be the case you may return here and we would be able to adjust the eye or replace it.”
“Just one more question,” Ryan said. “How did you find us?”
“This is Progress, California,” Betty said. “The site grew out of the military redoubt you accessed via your mat-trans jump, which is how we found you.”
“You found us?”
Betty smiled. “Not me personally, no. A patrol was sent to investigate when the mat-trans activated. I don’t know how much you know about the mat-trans system, but it’s largely automated, and that automation includes an alert sent to a number of linked monitoring stations when the system powers up to receive someone.”
Ryan said nothing, merely accepting the information without reacting. The mat-trans was his little secret, one kept by himself and his companions. They did not know much about the functionality of the devices, only that they transported them across the continent—and occasionally off the continent—via some kind of hidden pathways and that there was apparently no way to predetermine where a jump would lead. Ryan was hesitant of sharing any information with the locals, even ones who had saved his life. Save your life today, shoot you in the back tomorrow—that’s what Trader used to tell him.
“It’s lucky we did,” Betty continued. “You and your friends were in a terrible state on arrival. I don’t know what you’d been putting yourself through, but it had left you all seriously wounded.”
“The imploding wall of the mat-trans during the jump didn’t help,” Mildred said, deadpan.
“No, I don’t imagine it would have,” Betty agreed. She touched something on the inset screen at her desk and the shaded tint to the window glass seemed to recede as Ryan watched. Nothing moved there that he could see. The opacity merely altered in a gradual manner until the windows were clear once more. He flicked momentarily to magnification mode, staring at the window frame.
“You have some mighty advanced tech here,” Ryan said. “Heck of a lucky find.”
“Oh, we didn’t find it, Mr. Cawdor,” Betty told him, “we built it.”
Chapter Eight
Once the examination with Betty was completed, Ryan felt the need to stretch his legs. “From what I can tell, I’ve been cooped up in a box for two weeks,” he told Krysty as he met her and J.B. outside the examination room. “I need to feel some fresh air, get the wind in my hair.”
“It’s a large ville, Ryan,” Krysty told him. “You’ll be impressed.”
“Yeah, I could see that through the windows,” Ryan agreed.
Krysty led him to an elevator that spiraled through the building. The elevator was cylindrical with a door that slid silently back on a curved tread. Stepping into it was like stepping into an upright pipe. A single overhead light source was obscured by a screen that diffused the illumination into a subtle effect, preventing any glare. Ryan eyed it for a moment as he stepped inside, flicking through the different options with his new cybernetic eye.
Crosshairs.
Magnification.
Night vision.
Infrared.
“Hey, Ryan,” Mildred called as he stood with Krysty in the elevator. “You be careful. You only just woke up—don’t overdo it, okay?”
“Sure,” Ryan agreed, still flicking through his visual options.
“And, Krysty,” Mildred added, “I’m trusting you to keep an eye on the patient.”
Krysty agreed and a moment later the door slid closed and the elevator began its smooth descent to ground level.
Ryan moved close to Krysty, kissing her mouth and then her cheek. As his lips came close to her ear, he whispered, “This place safe? Don’t answer out loud.”
Krysty nodded very definitely against Ryan’s head, moaning once as if in delight at his kisses.
“Will I need my blasters?” Ryan asked, still whispering.
“Oh, lover,” Krysty groaned. As she did so, she shook her head slightly: No.
Ryan kissed her again as the elevator stopped its silent descent and the door drew back. They were in a vast lobby now, its proportions dwarfing anything Ryan could think of—it was like a predark aircraft hangar or a shipyard, ceilings so high they were almost four stories above him. There were a few people in the vast room—too few for its size, in Ryan’s opinion, but he had witnessed chronic overcrowding in the Deathlands and the sickness it had brought. The people were dressed in white and pale colors, loose-fitting clothes that better suited the climate of the West Coast. Some moved on wheeled devices, standing atop them, maintaining their balance with arms gently out to their sides as they sped swiftly across the room.
A quick scan, automatic now after all these years, revealed that no one appeared to be armed.
The room’s illumination came from an impressive wall of windows that looked out on to the ville. Ryan and Krysty strode across the room, fifty steps from the elevator to the nearest doorway, a twenty-foot-wide gap in the glass that opened straight out onto a veranda beyond. There was an awning up above to keep rain off, should there be any, and the veranda and its surrounds were designed in such a way that no wind could penetrate into the lobby itself.
Ryan stepped out into the sunlight, taking in a deep breath of air. Morning sunshine and clear skies gave a fresh feel to the day. The wide streets were paved and clean, birds occasionally fluttering past, landing for a moment to scout the area for food. Buildings towered all around, eight huge structures clad in bold white like the great marble temples of ancient Greece. The lowest of them was two stories, the tallest much higher than that. The buildings were linked, Ryan saw, with bridges running across the streets from their upper stories. The bridges were open to the elements. Few people were about, given all the space, but Ryan noticed that several of them were traveling via the same wheeled disklike platforms, flitting between the buildings like a ballerina figurine pirouetting out of a music box.
“This place is incredible,” Ryan said as he tried to take it all in.
“They’ve been very hospitable,” Krysty told him. “We’ve wanted for nothing.”
Ryan checked the weapon at his hip, noticed Krysty was still wearing her Smith & Wesson on hers. “Not that hospitable, though,” he said, indicating her blaster.
Krysty smiled. “Force of habit,” she admitted. “I haven’t had to draw my blaster in two weeks. The only time it’s been out of its holster has been to oil it.”
Ryan nodded. Oiling their weapons was a ritual the companions strictly followed. A well-maintained blaster could mean the difference between life and death in the Deathlands; it would never do to become complacent, no matter how tranquil the surroundings.
And they were very tranquil. There was noise here—the hiss and drone from the factories, the sound of the nearby river rushing past—but it was muffled by the buildings and the wide-open spaces.
Ryan and Krysty walked slowly down a wide thoroughfare. Outside, the building looked newly built and was a pale yellow that was almost white, better to reflect the fierce California sun. It ran over three hundred feet before Ryan and Krysty reached its edge, the same in the other direction. Ryan was impressed by its size.
“Is this place all dedicated to fixing people up?” he asked Krysty.
“They’re very advanced here,” Krysty replied. “Mildred said they’re doing a lot of experimental work into cybernetics—like the unit they put in your eye.”
“Robot stuff?” Ryan asked, glancing back at the building.
“From what I’ve seen, they use the building as a repair shop and medical center,” Krysty said. “I’m not sure they see much difference between those things.”
As Ryan focused on the building, the crosshairs reappeared across his left field of vision, a ghost overlay on the image. “Yeah, I guess.”
They continued walking, taking it slowly as Ryan realized how exhausted he felt. He had been fed a steady drip of proteins while held in the drawerlike unit, and while he was fully nourished he had little energy—that had been used up by his body for repairs.
People flitted past on the wheeled disks, while another group traveled toward Ryan and Krysty in a group, riding aboard a wheeled transport roughly the size of a wag but entirely open to the elements. Ryan looked at the vehicle as it passed them and moved down the road. Its passage was almost silent and it had no driver, just a cylindrical box of lights up front a little like the thing that had assisted Betty during her examination.
Krysty watched Ryan, the smile never leaving her face. She was pleased to have him back—it had been a fraught two weeks waiting for the man she loved to wake up after all that he had been through. As they walked, Krysty brought him up to speed on what the companions had been doing in his absence—J.B. and Mildred had checked out every nook and cranny of the medical center, while Jak and Ricky had spent time scouting the ville and its immediate surrounds, coming and going as they pleased. Doc, she explained, had been disappointed in the food here and had taken it on himself to show the local “Progressians” how to cook, despite the lack of a variety of ingredients. Krysty didn’t tell Ryan about her own recovery, nor how much time she had spent in a medically induced coma; she did not want to worry him.
“You weren’t tempted to move on?” Ryan teased. “To leave me behind?”
“No one gets left behind,” Krysty reminded him. “Especially you, lover.”
It was true. No one would ever be left behind. Ryan had been with J.B., Krysty and Doc longer than anyone, and the others were just as much family to him now. But there had been an occasion—once—when someone had been left behind: Ryan’s own son, Dean Cawdor, stolen by his mother, Sharona, and lost to him for the cruel eternity that only a grieving parent could know. Dean was alive, but changed, and his recent reacquaintance with his father had been brief and had not ended well. It was something Ryan couldn’t fix, though he hoped that one day Dean would come back to him. It was something that Ryan didn’t vocalize, but he thought of Dean just about every day.
Fifteen minutes’ slow walk brought the couple to the edge of the ville, where a mighty river flowed. “J.B. calls the river the Klamath,” Krysty said.
J.B. was the guardian of the maps for the group, and he employed a mini-sextant to get their bearings when they traveled. Without him, the group would be lost in Hell; as it was, they traveled the post-nukecaust roads with the knowledge of where they were, but they were still the roads of Hell.
“A lot of California was devastated when the quakes hit,” Ryan observed, peering out at the raging waters. Whiteheads leaped and dissipated there, like horses in the sea.
Ryan was correct in what he said. California had been struck hard by the nukecaust and all that followed. Great chunks of the west coast of America had been sheared off when the San Andreas Fault broke open, and some of the state had been relegated to an archipelago of tiny islands dotted in the Pacific. J.B. couldn’t know it, but the Klamath River had been widened in the past century as a result of the tectonic plate movement, and now ran at a faster speed than it had a hundred years earlier.
Ryan looked across the rushing river to where a great dam had been constructed. The dam was made from huge hunks of stone that had been carved and shaped with craftsmanlike precision, barricading the river. A grand walkway ran across the top, as wide as a two-lane blacktop, arching forty feet above the tumultuous surface of the fast-flowing water. The dam ended in a high protective wall on the far bank, while the near side was attached to a monitoring tower that rose another twenty above the high wall. It was an impressive feat of engineering, something seldom seen in the devastated Deathlands.
“What’s that?” Ryan asked, his eye focusing on the details of the pale, curved wall of stone. “A dam. But I don’t see a whole lot of farming going on.” In fact there was none; the area surrounding the ville appeared to be devoid of life.
“J.B. says they use it to power the equipment here,” Krysty told Ryan. “Some kind of hydropower arrangement, like a watermill only bigger.”
“Much bigger,” Ryan acknowledged as he eyed the watchtower. “Stands to reason. Lotta tech here—needs a lot of power.”
“That tech saved your life,” Krysty reminded him. Then she reached inside the back pocket of her pants and pulled something free. Coiled on itself, the thing looked like a handful of thick black cord. “I saved this,” she told Ryan, handing it to him.
Ryan took the item, unraveled it and looked it over. It was his old eye patch, the one removed back in that redoubt where they had been attacked by the mutie plant. He held it up for a moment, tracing the stitching that held the leather to the cord, seeing the spots where it had frayed. “I don’t need it anymore,” he said, and he drew his hand back and threw the patch toward the rushing water below.
Krysty’s hand darted out, grabbing the patch as it dropped. “I’ll keep it,” she told Ryan when she saw his confused expression. “A keepsake of what you were,” she added, slipping the eye patch back inside her pants pocket.
“I make my own keepsakes now,” Ryan said, stepping back from Krysty. “Stay there.” He looked at her and held himself still, waiting for the camera eye to snap a picture of her. After five seconds it did, capturing Krysty’s image for posterity. In his eye, she would always be beautiful, her hair catching in the wind, the river racing behind her. Now he could call upon that image whenever he wanted to—in his eye.
Chapter Nine
“The food here is so terribly bland, do you not agree?” Doc asked as he blew on a spoonful of soup to cool it.
Doc was sitting at a beech wood table in a large room whose panoramic windows overlooked the river and the hydroelectric dam stretching across it like a stone cutlass. Across from him, Mildred, J.B. and Ricky sat eating from their own bowls of soup while Jak sat a space down from Doc, mopping his bowl with a bread roll from the pile that dominated the center of the table. Tasty or not, Jak ate the meal with gusto.
Around the room, several other groups were eating. They were locals, dressed in plain overalls and coverings in muted colors, whites and pastels. They ate quietly in ones and twos, and mostly in silence.
“I haven’t paid it much mind,” J.B. admitted distractedly. He had heard the argument before; they all had. The old man was nothing if not consistent.
J.B. was gazing down at the dam and the two people who stood close to its edge on the raised river banks. Krysty was easily recognizable even from this distance with her vivid red hair, while Ryan’s huge frame made him easy enough to spot if you knew what you were looking for.
“I have spoken to the chefs de cuisine about adding salt, spices and so on, but they seem ignorant of the whole concept of seasoning,” Doc espoused. “Alas it seems that humankind’s culinary knowledge has been forgotten along with so much else in these terrible times.”
“Food is food, and free food tastes that much better,” J.B. said, his eyes flicking up to the white-haired old man over the rims of his glasses. “At least we didn’t have to hunt and chill anything to get this, and that’s a definite appetizer in my book.”
“Quite,” Doc acknowledged, nodding.
Mildred tore a chunk from a bread roll and chewed on it thoughtfully. “I’ve had worse,” she admitted. “Rat meat, leafy stew, boot—” She stopped abruptly, remembering the horrific moments when she had almost become a cannibal. Ryan had secretly promised to chill her then, if that’s what was needed, and so she had trusted him with her life until she could be cured. “I’ve had worse,” she finished lamely.
Laughing, Ricky reached for another roll. “It won’t ever taste as good as my mama’s cooking,” he said, “but I’ll take it if it’s free.” Then he took a second roll and a third, and began juggling them with casual dexterity. “Anyone else want a roll?” he asked.
Jak and J.B. told Ricky that they did, and both found themselves the recipients of juggled rolls that landed perfectly on their respective plates.
“With an arm like that, he should have played baseball,” Mildred said, shaking her head.
“Mayhap one day,” Doc told her, “when all of this horror is past.”
J.B. chewed a corner of his roll thoughtfully and glanced back to the window. Ryan and Krysty could be seen there making their way gradually back up the paved street. “You think Ryan’s going to be okay?” he asked Mildred.
