Cord and I had talked surprisingly little about our family—that is, the family I’d shared with her until I’d “gone to the clock.” But what little I’d heard had left me amazed by how clever people were at finding ways to make each other crazy and miserable, whether it was those they were related to or a crowd of strangers they’d been thrown together with in a concent. Cord sometimes seemed eighty years old in her knowledge and experience and cynicism about such things. I couldn’t help thinking she’d thrown up her hands at some point and decided to devote the rest of her life to mastering things, such as machines, that could be made sense of and fixed. No wonder she hated the idea of machines she couldn’t understand. And no wonder she didn’t waste a lot of time trying to understand things she couldn’t—like why she was now Yul’s girlfriend.
When the climate had been warmer, civilizations had sloshed back and forth across this glacier-planed landscape for a couple of thousand years like silt in a miner’s pan, forming drifts of built-up stuff that stayed long after the people had departed. At any given moment during those millennia, a billion might have lived on this territory that now supported a few tens of thousands. How many bodies were buried up here, how many people’s ashes scattered? Ten, twenty, fifty billion all told? Given that they all used electricity, how many miles of copper wire had been sewn through their buildings and under their pavements? How many man-years had been devoted to the one activity of pulling and stapling those wires into place? If one out of a thousand was an electrician, something like a billion man-years had been devoted to running wire from one point to another. After the weather had grown cold again and the civilizations had, over the course of a few centuries, shifted south—moving like glaciers—scavengers had begun coming up here to undo those billion man-years one tedious hour at a time, and retrieve those countless miles of wire yard by yard. Professional scavengers working on an industrial scale had gotten ninety percent of it quickly. I’d seen pictures of factories on tank treads that rolled across the north and engulfed whole city blocks at a time, treating the fabric of the ruins just as a mining robot would an ore-rich hill, grinding the buildings to rubble and sorting the shards according to density. The first ruins we had seen were the feces that those machines left along their paths.
Stripping ruins by hand was more expensive. When times were prosperous elsewhere, metals became precious enough that miners could make a life out of venturing to the deep ruins—far-flung cities of old, never reached by the factories-on-tank-treads—and extracting whatever was most valuable: copper wires, steel beams, plumbing, or what have you. The swag made its way toward the road we were driving in fitful stages, from one anarchic little tundra market-town to the next. Snowstorms and arctic pirate-bands might impede its progress but eventually it found the road and was piled on the backs of ramshackle drummons that seemed to consist of seventy-five percent rust by weight, held together only by rimes of ice and shaggy cloaks of dirty snow. These moved in caravans for protection, so it was hopeless to try to pass them, but they moved fast enough for our purposes and they afforded us the safety of the herd once they’d figured out we were pilgrims, not pirates. We stayed well back of them so that we’d have time to swerve whenever a rigid glyph of plumbing or a hairball of wire fell off onto the road. Our windscreen grew opaque with tire-flung mud-ice. We kept the side windows open so that we could reach out and wipe it off with rags on sticks. On the third day the rags froze; after that we kept the stove running with a pot of warm water on top of it, to thaw them out. Through our open windows we looked at ruins passing by. We learned to tell what age a place had been built by the character of its fortifications: missile silos, three-mile-long runways, curtain walls, stone ramparts, acres of curled razor barbs, belts of sequence-engineered thorn trees, all more or less torn down and deranged by scavengers.
As the days went on, all of this stuff was dusted, then frosted, then choked, flattened, crushed, drowned, obliterated by ice. After that, the only things we saw that had been put there by humans were wrecks of former sledge ports: fluctuations of climate or of markets had left them defenseless long enough to die. The landscape a mile from the road was clean and white, that along the road was the most disgusting thing I’d seen the whole trip. The snow-piles along the sides of the road grew higher and blacker until our way became a carbon-black slit trench twenty feet deep, crammed with drummons moving about as fast as a healthy person could walk. After that there was no escape. We could have shut off our vehicles’ engines and the drummon behind us would have shoved us all the way to the end of the road. They had snorkels to draw fresh air down into their cabs. We hadn’t thought to so equip ourselves, and spent the last day breathing oily blue exhaust. When this became too sickening to endure we would swap drivers and climb up out of the trench (there were occasional ramps in the snow-walls) and simply walk alongside for a while (we had bought snowshoes, improvised from scavenged building materials, in one of the tundra markets) or ride on Gnel’s three-wheeler.
It was on one of those trudges—the very last leg—that Yul finally asked me about the parking ramp dinosaur.
Ever since our day together in Norslof, it had been clear he’d wanted to get something off his chest. When he and Cord had suddenly become an item, he’d avoided being alone with me for a couple of days. But once it was clear that I was not going to go nonlinear, he’d begun a gentle search for opportunities to talk to me one-on-one. I’d assumed the topic was going to be him and Cord. But Yul was full of surprises.
“Some say it was a dinosaur, some say dragon,” I told him. “One of the first things we were taught about the incident is that nothing can be known of it for certain—”
“Since all evidence was wiped out by the Incanters?”
“That’s one story. The second thing we were taught, by the way, was that we should never discuss the incident with Sæculars.”
He got a frustrated look.
“Sorry,” I said, “that’s just how it is. Most accounts agree that one group, let’s call them Group A, started it, and Group B finished it. In popular folkore, A equals the so-called Rhetors and B equals the so-called Incanters. It happened three months before the opening of the Third Sack.”
“But the dinosaur—or the dragon or whatever—really did appear in the parking ramp.”
Yul and I were walking side-by-side on compacted snow, a stone’s throw off to the right side of the drummon-jammed slit trench. Closer to it, conditions were dangerous because men, many of them intoxicated, were zipping back and forth on snow machines. The track that Yul and I were following appeared to have been laid down by such a machine a day or two earlier. We could tell where our fetches were in the trench because we’d learned to recognize the jury-rigged snorkels of the adjoining drummons. The traffic seemed to be accelerating slightly, so that we had to mush harder in order to keep pace. This was probably because we were only a couple of miles from the sledge port. We could see its antennas, its smoke, and its lights a couple of miles ahead. Even if the fetches outdistanced us, we’d be able to reach it on foot, so we weren’t overly concerned about keeping up.
“It was only a couple of thousand feet away from Muncoster,” I said. “There was a city there—as there is now. Overall level of affluence and praxic development, let’s say nine on a scale of ten.”
“Where are we today?” Yul asked.
“Let’s say eight. But the society around Muncoster had peaked, though they didn’t know it yet. Deolaters were gaining political influence.”