Semblance of Eden 7 ~ The Iron Horse
Listen, I'll tell you something while we wait for these two to stop undressing each other with their eyes:
There are people in this world like Legato, who come from nowhere in particular, move through your life and on, going nowhere in particular. Just like a force of nature. Then there are people like our friend the Preacher, who come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the most significant thing in the world to them and everything they do – their whole damn existence – is focused on that one spot of origin. And they're like the root of a cactus.
And then there are people like me, who come from somewhere, but we can't even remember what that place looked like. We're going somewhere, but we aren't particularly interested in what that place will look like, either. Like a mote of sand swept by the wind, we're defined by where we are at the moment and shaped by the forces that move us, beyond our control.
Did I have a home once? Sure I did.
Do I call it home and get all warm and fuzzy when I think back on it? And do I say things like, when did I stray so far from that place that I could never find it again? I doubt it.
First thing's first, Babylon was never my home. It was just one place I stayed for a while, a holdover due to weather while waiting for the Sandsteamer to leave the station. Do you really think I'd be the same sweet sane well-adjusted person I am today if I was born somewhere like Babylon?
My real home was called Little Boulder. I don't know who decided to name it that, because there really weren't any boulders around, not even little ones. Maybe it was wishful thinking, or maybe it was something else. Those waves and waves of uninterrupted sand as far as the eye can see have a way of making you a little delusional.
Had to have been delusional to live in a place like that.
There wasn't a Plant for a hundred miles, but we were right on a Sandsteamer route. All night long you could hear them groaning with the effort of endless forward progression, like ghosts, only too big to be ghosts. Like ghosts of huge and frightening creatures that roamed this land long before the coming of man.
Good thing they were ghosts, I would think, because something like that sure as hell wouldn't waste anytime in swallowing a town like this in a single bite. Good thing all ghosts did was run screaming through the night and keep people who didn't really want to sleep anyway awake.
Sometimes, when sleep was just too far out of the question to even consider, I would lay awake and listen to the freight wail billowing up from the desert. And after I had lain awake for a long while, I would rise and tug on a coat or something and slip out my bedroom window. I liked the warmth of the sand beneath my bare feet, the air so dry it was like all the oxygen had been dehydrated right out of it.
I had a brother back then, too, and he had said there was a way to see pictures in the stars. I would look up to the sky and concentrate until my eyes ached, but I could never see the things he had told me I was supposed to be able to see.
It was frustrating in that vague kind of way things you don't really care about but think you should are frustrating.
So I had no patience for astronomy. It was probably just as well. Spend all your time gazing up at the stars, and who knows what will pass you by down here on earth. In any case, I was much better at creeping low over the sand dunes, at sticking to the shadows as I slipped past the last house and down toward the valley where the earth was packed flat by the passage of Sandsteamers.
I was six years old and convinced that the only way I could be sure I was alive was to see one of those things bellow by beneath an inky lightless sky up close and personal. Even though I knew what it was, even though the smell of coal and engine grease, and the clang of metal was nothing except intrusively human, there's still something about that exact combination of light and deafening noise and darkness and silence that has a way of awakening an ancient terror in your heart. An adrenaline-rich primordial fear.
Of course, I wasn't thinking anything like that when I slipped out of bed to watch them pass in the post-midnight hours. I was just hoping to catch sight of a ghost.
Isn't that the most pathetic excuse you've ever heard for being alive and talking to you today?
I remember, it was a clear night when it happened. It must have been spring, because the smell of cactus blooms bursts in on my memories like an unwelcome houseguest. If you've never seen the cactus blossoms in the spring, you should know that it really is a remarkable sight. There's only one night out of the year when you can get the full feel of it, only one night when previously gray and barren stretches of desert explode with flowers so white that they seem incandescent in the moonlight. Pollen pours from them in waves, so thick that if you were to pass a hand over your clothes or through your hair, your fingers would come away chalky and pale.
This is how life is created in the desert, with the desperate, urgent, loveless coupling of a thousand white flowers and the night air. This is how baby cacti are made. You have to admire the efficiency, at least.
But what's all this, you say? You didn't come here to have the secrets of a desert night revealed to you. You say: What about tears, Dominique? Did you shed any? What about blood? Certainly some veins were opened that night all those years ago with the Sandsteamers rolling by and the cacti spitting pollen like fine tobacco.
Don't worry about all that. Everyone's going to get their money's worth.
The thing that hurts the most when I look back on it, is how unorganized the whole damn raid really was. I realize that, had I known then what I know now, I could have stopped the whole thing dead in its tracks, neat, and fast, and slick as piss without even breaking a sweat. But I didn't know what I know now, the reason for that most likely being I was only six years old, cowering in numb horror on the far side of a dune, wetting my pants, while a cavalcade of rusty cars swept into Little Boulder, while the bandits in those cars poured out. While a symphony of shotgun fire drifted over the sand and I flinched with each report. While the one with the flamethrower torched every house systematically.
This is a lesson we all have to learn sooner or later: No phantom, however immense, can possibly be more dangerous then plain old mortal maliciousness.
All night, I stayed up on that dune, long after the bandits had left with whatever valuables they had managed to get their hands on. I can't imagine it was much. We weren't a rich town; we lived off the crumbs shaken loose from the pockets of rich Sandsteamer passengers.
But it's not as though I'm in much of a position to lecture anyone on the value of human life.
It wasn't until the sun was high that I pulled it together enough to investigate the ruins of my town. The fires had gone out, but the rubble still smoldered. My house was a pile of blackened stone and ash, and I turned away from it quick, telling myself firmly that I must have wandered up to the wrong place. And that was what it was for a long time, a town not my own. These bodies, emptied now of blood and starting to attract ugly and curious carrion birds, were the shells people I'd never met before.
You'd think that would keep me from crying, wouldn't you? Well, you'd be wrong about that.
I sat down in the center of town and at last gave in to my hitching breath, the unbearable ache in my throat and burn behind my eyes. I cried until I had no more tears, until I was simply too dehydrated.
Even now, looking back on it, there's a quality of furious surrealism, of desperate detachment. Since that moment when I realized with a jolt like waking that I needed to drink or else I'd die, I've always been too busy staying alive to feel a lack.
Think I'll keep it that way. I'll have plenty time to grieve after I'm dead, I'm sure.
I must have looked like a damn zombie stumbling around those ruins in search of water, trying so hard not to look at anything that when I finally did stop to reorder my sense of direction, I was on open desert again.
And that's where my story begins. You'd think a little girl with no survival training, lost and alone in the desert would work better as the ending to a story, wouldn't you?
Well, this isn't that kind of story.
What kind of story is it, you ask? You're just going to have to wait until I take care of a few things before finding out.
