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He carried a few vivid memories of that time. He remembered the sky, a hazy blue vastness that had seemed as big as time itself. He remembered the miracle of water, water gushing up from sprinkler heads embedded in the dust-dikes that ran in lazy whorls through the fields—water raining down over a thousand acres of new green leaves. The town grew wheat and cabbage and kale and alfalfa and a patchwork of minor crops. Twice, Billy had been allowed to ride out on the big tending machines; and it made him proud and giddy to sit beside his father in the crow’s-nest seat, emperor of all this fragrant green foliage and dusty blue sky. He remembered one scorching summer when a work battalion from AgService came to install what they called “UV screens”—huge ba
Billy remembered Nathan as a large man—large, bearded, generous, often quiet, and deeply unhappy. His father always followed the news on the big screen in the civic center; and Billy gleaned that it was Nathan who received the other news, microwave databursts not sanctioned by the federal information services—news, especially, on the movement of conscription battalions across the Midwest.
Every two or three years the recruiters swept into Oasis. Nathan said they were like the locusts in the Bible, a plague. They would bunk in the labor barracks, stay a few days, maybe leave some of the more impressionable young girls with a new baby inside them; and when they rode away in their huge hovertrucks they would take a few draftees—boys barely old enough to shave, mainly.
Nathan and the town council usually had some warning when the battalions were coming, time enough to tamper with the town’s birth records—to delete or alter certain documents. The likeliest young recruits would be hidden away in a supply cellar under the machine shed and the women would sneak them food. The battalions complained about the slim pickings, and sometimes they ran crude tamper-check routines on the civic computers … but if you got them drunk enough, Nathan said, they’d leave happy.
But if they came without warning—if they had destroyed the pirate relay towers on their way west—then they took what they wanted.
Billy remembered a summer when the news from the Storm Zone was very bad, tremendous loss of life all through the Caribbean and the occupation forces scattered. That summer, the Infantry came without warning. They arrived in a phalanx of black hovercraft, raising a cloud of dust that must have reddened sunsets all the way to Sandusky. Billy remembered his father’s face when he climbed an embankment and saw that gray-black line approaching from the west —dismay as substantial as a weight on his shoulders.
He turned to Billy and said, “Go to the machine shed. Hurry.”
It was the first time Billy had been old enough to hide with the other boys. It might have been exciting … but this time things were different. This time, he had seen his father’s fear.
The cellar was hot and smelled of ancient cottonseed and burlap. He crouched there with a dozen other boys. “I’ll come get you,” Nathan had said, “when the Infantry are gone,” and the words had reassured him a little. But it wasn’t Nathan who came.
He never saw Nathan again.
It was a soldier who came.
An Infantryman. Billy woke blinking and bewildered in the clockless depths of cellar night, startled awake by the sound of footsteps. The Infantryman smiled down from the doorway. His name, he said, was Krakow. He was wearing his armor—a command breastplate, radiantly golden. Billy gazed up with no little awe as Krakow touched his chest. “This is my armor,” he said. “This is the part of it you can see. Some of it is inside me. My armor knows who I am, and I know my armor. My armor is a machine, and right now it isn’t fully powered. But if I switched it on I could kill you all before there was time enough to blink. And I would enjoy it.”
Billy didn’t doubt the truth of this. Krakow ran his fingers over the mirror-bright surface of the breastplate and Billy wondered exactly how you turned the armor on—he hoped Krakow wouldn’t do it by mistake.
“My armor is my best friend.” Krakow’s voice was gentle, confiding. “An Infantryman’s armor is always his best friend. Your armor will be your best friend.”
Billy knew what that meant. It meant he was leaving home.
Curled in the womb of his apartment, Billy ate ca
He took the box from under the bed and opened it. The golden armor was inside—all the large and small pieces of it.
Billy recalled the catechism of his training. Sir, this is my armor, sir.
Sir, these are the body pieces, which are called the elytra. (Like cloth, quite golden, rigid only when impacted at high velocity. Bulging here and there with instrumentation, power packs, processing units.)
These are the arm pieces, sir, which are called the halteres. (Molding to the contour of his skin. They feel warm.)
Sir, these are the leg pieces, which are called the setae. (Snug against his thighs.)
Sir, this touchplate controls the stylet and the lancet, which co
Hollow micropipettes burrowing in, wet with contact anesthetic.
Motion under his skin.
It felt fu
Sir, this touchpiece activates the lancet.
Ah.
He moved in the snowbound night streets like a ghost.
He wore loose clothes over his armor, a long gray coat and a broad-brimmed hat to shadow his face.
He moved among the snowy lamp standards and the blinking traffic fights. Past midnight, before dawn, 1953.
He was supple and powerful and quite invincible.
He was intoxicated with his own hidden strength and dizzy with the need to kill a human being.
He did not resist the urge but he tantalized himself with it. The streets were empty and the snow came down in dry, icy granules. Wind flapped at the hem of his chalk-gray overcoat and erased his footprints behind him. The few pedestrians he saw were bent against the wind, scurrying like beetles for shelter. He followed one, maintaining a discreet distance, until the man vanished into a tenement building. Billy reached the stoop … paused a long moment in the winter darkness … then walked on.
He chose another potential victim, a small man spotlit by the beam of an automobile headlight; Billy followed him two blocks east but allowed this one, too, to vanish behind a door.
No hurry. He was warm in his armor. He was content. His heart beat inside him with the happy regularity of a finely tuned machine.
He smiled at a man who stepped out of an all-night delicatessen with a paper bag tucked under his arm. This one? Tall man, sleepless, red-eyed, suspicious, a cheap cloth coat: not a rich man; bulk of arms and chest: maybe a strong man.
“Hell of a night,” Billy said.