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“Is Elwood still with us?” asked Fandango. “News travels so slow these days.”
“He succumbed last year at the age of eighty-eight,” I explained. “The whole village turned out to cheer him off as he was wheeled into the Green Room.”
We had driven out of the arboreal tu
“How long have you been janitoring?” I asked as we watched the largest boulder being moved as easily as if it were a feather.
“Thirty-one years, give or take,” he replied. “Seen three Leapbacks in that time, each one worse than the one before. I dread to see what they’ll ban next. I suppose you’re too young to remember tractors?”
We felt the Ford start to move as it too was recognized as useless debris to be rejected, and Fandango reversed gently back and forth to fool the Perpetulite.
“Not quite,” I replied, as the Leapback in question occurred when I was five. Horses did the plowing and drilling these days, and any devices that needed static power, such as threshing machines, were run off agri-exempted Everspins, each one about forty times the size of the one I had in my valise.
“I’d been more a
We continued the journey, and Fandango and I chatted some more, mostly about the maintenance difficulties of the carbon-arc mechanism that lay at the heart of the central streetlamp—something that seemed to sap a disproportionate amount of his time. And it was in this ma
Rusty Hill
1.1.01.01.001: Everyone is expected to act with all due regard for the well-being of others.
Dad and I climbed out of the car, and Fandango told us he would wait at the top of a nearby hill in case the Ford “proved difficult to start.” He wished us good luck, told us to signal when we wanted to be picked up and that he would ahoogah twice if he saw any swans. He then departed with almost u
Dad sat on a low wall and examined the town through his binoculars. Although unlikely this far west, it wasn’t unknown for Nomadic Riffraff to use abandoned settlements as homesteads, and neither Dad nor I had the slightest wish to bump into a grunge of well-established and dangerously territorial wildmen.
There were gruesome stories that related to well-hued men being kidnapped, with the threat of plum removal if ransom wasn’t paid. I knew of no one who wore their spot beyond the boundaries.
“Dad?”
“Yes?” he replied, still studying the deserted buildings.
“I learned something interesting this morning. Lucy Ochre’s been hitting the Lincoln pretty badly. She thinks her father was given the murder.”
I had thought Dad might reject the notion as quickly as I had, but he momentarily appeared ill at ease. He put down the binoculars and looked at me. “What’s given her that idea?”
I shrugged. “Not sure. Why, could he have been?”
“Technically, it’s possible. He could have been tied to the Departure Lounger and had his eyes taped open.”
“They would have seen evidence of that on the body.”
“Agreed. Here’s another scenario: Let’s say he was pla
“There’s another lever,” I said, understanding where he was going with this, “outside.”
“Right,” he said, “and they’re linked. Someone might have just held the lever in the open position.”
I shivered. “Is that likely?”
“No. All he’d have to do is close his eyes. Besides, what possible motive could there have been? He was a healer—and a very good one at that. Seven years without a single Mildew. I think it was just a tragic mistake in pursuit of the frog. But it would be interesting to see if Lucy has any more information. By the way,” he added, “deMauve bent my ear this morning.”
“Oh.”
“He said that if you ignored a Direct Order of a prefect again, he’d be down on both of us like a ton of bricks.”
“Right,” I said. “Sorry.”
He carried on studying the town.
“Dad?”
“What?”
“How likely is it that there are Mildew spores still kicking around?”
“Almost nil,” he replied. “A twenty-year quarantine is needlessly long, but those are the Rules.”
Satisfied that the town was empty, he placed the binoculars back in his bag, and we walked past the faded quarantine board and across the stone- arched bridge. The Perpetulite spalled at the center of the bridge, where the organoplastoid had been cut and bronze spikes driven in to stop self-repair. The method was crude but effective, and the roadway had sent off only a few dark grey tendrils before giving up. We stepped off the smooth roadway and trod the well-worn cobbles into the village. It was u
We stopped by the village color hydrant, which looked relatively new and not at all like the unit back home, which was a fir tree of multiple co