Chapter 2 Judy
Judy Hernandez settled in smart, and made a couple of friends. She was very quiet, and had a habit of rolling down to the University or the public library to read. It didn't take long for people to realize that she was awful damn shrewd, especially for a twenty-year-old. She wouldn't ever come out and tell you more than you wanted to know – there's blowhards who do – but if you got onto some topic or other, she'd come in with that key little point that answered the question or solved the problem. Folks who were struggling to make some order in Boulder used to welcome her to their talks and gatherings and such.
Since this story carries customs and habits from the Mountain West, the word "Indian" gets used a lot. Quite a few Southwestern folk called themselves Indians, before the plague. There used to be quite a bunch around the Rocky Mountain West before Captain Trips made the big time. He sure was a one-hit wonder, but he was on everyone's lips. Captain Trips wiped out a bunch of the Pueblos and smaller tribes. The Indians on the Big Rez, Hopi and Navajo and Zuni, there were enough of them to keep from going completely extinct or becoming Lost, and it was remote enough that the epidemic was somewhat blunted.
There were a few Lost Indians in Boulder. Their little worlds were simply too small to survive Captain Trips. Killing off 99.4% of folks meant that one in a thousand survived – and if your whole Pueblo was a thousand people, you could wind up as the Last Mohican.
It's like shelling out an oyster, and throwing its soft body back into the sea. You can do it, but don't fool yourself into thinking you're doing the oyster a favor by setting it free. The kindest thing to happen to that oyster is if a gull catches it on the way down.
It doesn't set well to think that over the last couple hundred years, there's been plenty of Last Mohicans whose culture just went up-and-bang, and not from benign purpose either. Some wandered around the Free Zone with haunted eyes, and it wasn't just Indians – there were all sorts of folks whose little corner of the universe blew up and went to shit that June. In fact, the folks in the Free Zone got to calling them all lost Indians, even if they weren't Native Americans or some such.
They usually took to reprehensible behavior, like laying around being nasty all the time, getting drunk and killing each other in fights, getting infected by the Wicked Way of the Walkin' Dude and turning West. Or, like so many of the survivors of the Nazi Camps, would up hanging themselves. Surviving the camps or surviving the plague, and then to take your own life – why? But when someone went over to being a Lost Indian, there was no way to save them.
You have to look at this emptiness and futility, you can't shy away and immerse yourselves in the Bold New Future, without looking at Big Evil – because Big Evil's been hanging around the campsites of the human species since we began. If you're going to struggle with Big Evil, you have to know what the odds really are.
There was something about Judy that played in counterpoint to evil and despair and hopelessness. She wasn't a gentle spirit to comfort and mother and cheer up the downtrodden. She had some sharp edges. But, when it came to evil persons or things, she was, in a way, invisible.
She herself, a brilliant gal, might describe it as the physics of evil. Like in relativistic physics, her being somehow bent the lines of evil, much like mass bends the space-time continuum. A black hole won't show up as a black dot in space; its immense mass bends the light around itself like a lens, its path curving like a wheat kernel or sunflower seed. All you see, from a distance, is a distortion of the background behind it. Its very mass makes the black hole invisible.
Evil just couldn't quite see her - what they saw was a shimmer, a bubble in the light, a wavy horizon, something like that, I think.
That part wasn't very obvious until Harold Lauder came into town with the Nebraska travelers. Harold treated her in an especially peculiar way than his usual, being a selfish, sex-starved punk. He seemed to ignore her. If someone was talking to him about her, or her ideas, or such, he looked at them like Tom Cullen would look at a blackboard covered with integral calculus.
It was a little mean, but when folks were talking and Harold Lauder got particularly obnoxious and bothersome, they'd deliberately get onto the topic of Judy – Judy says, Judy thinks – and it was like hypnotizing a chicken, the way he'd go out. Not asleep, but like his attention drove off down the road, and after a few minutes, it was out of sight.
But that's jumping ahead, talking about Harold. He hadn't even made it down from Nebraska with the other folks. That didn't happen for a while