Shadows of Annihilation Page 22

  Luz had the backseat to herself . . . except for the briefing files, a Thompson gun muzzle-down in a leather scabbard on the back of the driver’s position, and their evening dresses in a long cloth bag hanging from one of the roof struts by a hook, though they’d kept the canvas hood down since it didn’t look like rain and the visibly patched bullet holes didn’t have the right optics. She took the time to think and plan while the two younger women settled back to chatting happily, laughing now and then, and occasionally dipping into a paper bag of candied peanuts set between them. They were getting along fine, which was pleasant in itself and in a small way a good thing in terms of her partner coming out of her shell and developing Chamber connections from the ground up as she went along.

  Everyone needs connections and friends. If you’re a woman, you need them more. If you’re an offensively brilliant, eccentric woman who loves me, you need them even more than that. And Ciara will need her own at some point; being able to tap into my network is good, but it isn’t enough. She can’t spend her working life being Luz O’Malley Aróstegui’s protégée.

  The lively traffic and people going peacefully about their lives were a pleasure too, not to mention savoring the smooth ride, and she smiled into the warm wind smelling of plowed earth and road tar. Luz had put years of her life into the Intervention, blood and pain and fear, boredom and sweat, watching friends die and resigning herself to the often brutal and usually squalid necessities of her trade, and now the field she’d helped clear was bearing fruit.

  “Turn right at the intersection up ahead,” Henrietta said helpfully, as she passed the bota of warm, leathery-tasting, but welcome water they’d been sharing back to Luz for a moment. “That’ll lead us straight west to Jerez and then through it.”

  The station chief’s secretary had a folded map in her hand, staying in character with commendable consistency even with only the three of them in the little auto . . . and the fact that there were plenty of signposts, bilingual ones at that. You never knew who might be looking at any given moment in public even when you couldn’t be overheard, and Henrietta was ostensibly their guide, having delivered an invitation from her employer at Universal Imports to attend a function at the Duráns’ Hacienda del Dulce Arribo—Hacienda of the Sweet Arrival.

  Quoting from Flecker’s Golden Road to Samarkand again, Julie, Luz thought as she mentally translated the name. Though at least it’s not Golden Arrival—even Flecker thought that he used the word golden too much.

  Many of the local bigwigs would be at the party, American and Mexican both, and the visiting aspiring-middle-grade types they were pretending to be might well have been included; the Party disapproved of social snobbery and thought highly of team spirit and promotion by merit. A dinner party was an economical disguise, a way to discreetly introduce herself to several powerful men who needed to know her face-to-face while losing both herself and them in the crowd, and it also gave her a reason to be out of Zacatecas for the interviews at the air base and with the Ranger captain that the Chamber had planned for tomorrow. Many of the guests would be staying overnight and trickling out after breakfast, as was standard for country house affairs.

  They’d left Zacatecas after a light snack—you had to pace yourself if you were expecting a ten-course formal dinner—and Ciara had had a possibly quite productive gossip with María Luisa and her friends at Madame Teffeau’s patisserie, and felt that Louisa was definitely preoccupied with something she wanted to discuss with an American. That gave them more than enough time until sunset even at this time of year, assuming no serious problems . . . which in these parts was a fairly radical assumption. They were in traveling gear: bandanas around their heads beneath hats that had chin cords to keep them on, motoring goggles, cord jackets with lots of pockets, gloves, practical boots, and divided skirts of the sort that let you ride a horse astride and then fasten up with a row of ornamental-looking silver buttons to turn it into a skirt on foot.

  It was all a bit daring . . . for 1907 . . . and a little old-fashioned in 1917, if you were south of fifty; these days American women frequently just gave up the ancient struggle to deny their own bipedal nature and wore pants where a special situation demanded it. Like many of those north of fifty you could tell Uncle Teddy flinched inside at the sight of women in trousers, for all that he’d encountered it occasionally in the lawless frontier crudity of the Dakota badlands a long generation ago. Though he at least rarely complained aloud. But things were different at the sort of elite bunfest they were heading for tonight.

  They could at least wear their pistols openly on their hips in this upper-class-outdoorswoman gear. For that matter it was becoming common again in the United States proper, though much more so for men and a little more in the West than the East. Uncle Teddy had never made a secret of the fact that ever since his days as a rancher and deputy sheriff chasing outlaws and feuding with mad murderous French counts and their hired gunmen amid the Badlands buttes, he had always kept a weapon—currently a little FN auto pistol like the one her father had given her for her birthday as a girl—in the bedside dresser and slipped a Colt .45 into a pocket when he went out, a routine as set as putting on his hat. That had occasioned some surprise at places like the Harvard faculty lounge in the past when the shooting iron was transferred from an overcoat to a jacket, but these days if he did something in public millions imitated him, regardless of the occasional unfortunate accident.

  Hence Uncle Teddy and Fred Burnham making firearms classes mandatory in the Boy and Girl Scouts to cut the carnage, Luz thought with a curve of the lips. That and their utter horror at discovering how many red-blooded, rootin’-tootin’ Americans didn’t know which end the bullet came out of!

  The Scouts themselves were universal and compulsory nowadays, part of the common school system and a preparation for national service. So at least the next generation wouldn’t be able to say nobody told them that walking around locked, cocked, and safety off . . . or twirling said locked, cocked pistol with a finger through the trigger guard was a bad . . . very bad . . . really, really very bad idea.

  Though you could argue that idiots culling their germ plasm out of the national heredity by fatally fumbling with a loaded piece is just what the Department of Public Health and Eugenics means by negative selection. Plus the spectacle of bespectacled insurance adjusters in Chicago and plump shoe store proprietors in Poughkeepsie playing at Bold Frontiersman is definitely amusing, and life is too short and painful not to laugh when you can.

  By the time they were past the rocky section the road had dropped about a thousand feet, and then they lost another thousand as they continued toward Jerez, a handsome farming town with a core of eighteenth-century buildings something like a quarter-scale version of Zacatecas City. The afternoon turned warmer as they lost altitude—not uncomfortably hot since it was still over six thousand feet and it would be cool at night, but definitely more summery than Zacatecas’s tierra fria.

  The drop put them in a flattish upland basin, pastures with straw-colored grass green-tinged from the first rains, and rectangles of plowed land showing dark brown, or less frequently the golden-brown stubble of reaped winter wheat with rows of sheaves. There were occasional though admittedly usually rather small and often thorny trees, as well as the ubiquitous little patches of spiny, paddle-shaped nopal cactus in neglected spots just now breaking into their big, showy flowers of yellow and red and white. And even an attempt at planting trees by the sides of the road, which might or might not last depending on how well the protective collars of wire mesh worked.

  The Department of Public Works proposes, dem goats disposes, Luz thought.

  Peones worked in the fields, the dirty-white costumes of the men and the colored hiked-up skirts of the women showing against the dark soil; around here getting the seed into the ground as soon as some rain allowed was one of those rural things that had to be done right now, quite literally “on pain of death” since loca
l experience was that they’d starve if the crop failed. The Protectorate’s famine relief policies were too new and peasant trust in government policies far too low to have altered those assumptions.

  The wooden plows and harrows pulled by pairs of the patient oxen Julie had mentioned were finishing up, but also more modern American-style machinery drawn by mules and horses and once or twice a tractor. Men and rather fewer women moved to a rhythm ancient before the conquistadores came, the tall-crowned sombreros bobbing as they made holes in the dirt with the pointed wooden sticks called coa, dropped in seeds of corn or beans from slung sacks or baskets, and covered them with a push of one foot.

  Clumps of adobe huts or stone-stick-mud-and-cornstalk jacals were scattered about, with beehive-shaped clay graneries and ramshackle pens beside them. The greater whitewashed or stucco or stone bulk of a hacienda stood out on a rise now and then, a few burnt-out and abandoned, the rest still in operation with laborers’ quarters and church tight-clustered around them and often a watchtower in a defensive circuit-wall, like a medieval fortified village . . .

  Which is what they are, practically speaking, Luz thought.

  Past Jerez were more fields, but the road turned to graveled dirt—still as good as any rural byway in gringolandia, and better than most; the Party had never met a road it didn’t have a burning itch to straighten, widen, and improve, and here in the Protectorate they didn’t have to convince reluctant local voters to fork out for it. Traffic was sparse in most places but busy in clumps, and it included things like a very large and very badly managed flock of bleating and comically newly shorn sheep that sidelined them and some other passersby for an interminable wait amid a smell of greasy lanolin and dung . . . until it turned out to be the collision of two large, badly managed flocks.

  Traveling here could drive you insane unless you planned for unexpected delays and took them philosophically.

  Ciara and Henrietta took advantage of the enforced pause by teaching each other some of the folk tunes they’d grown up with, trading spirituals and work hollers for Fenian fight songs and planxtyes and laments.

  Ciara’s singing voice was a slightly thin soprano though she had no trouble keeping a tune, since she played the piano very well, almost up to orchestral standards. Henrietta’s was a contralto like Luz’s, but of a deeper smoky-tinged coloratura variety. It sounded a little odd when they belted out the chorus from an old Gaelic clan march together at full volume, because while she did well with “The Rising of the Moon” in English, her Georgia accent grew stronger when she sang:

  “Oró, sé do bheatha bhaile

  anois ar theacht an tsamhraidh!”

  Luz mostly sat and listened—with the Thompson gun cradled in her arms while they were stopped and by ingrained habit keeping an eye on her surroundings—but she joined in at the end, contributing a Cuban song her mother had liked:

  “Sobre las ondas del mar bravía

  puse tu nombre con que soñaba

  y a medida que lo escribía . . .”

  That one had the half-dozen pedestrians stopped with them listening closely, and applauding in pleased farewell as Ciara put the Guvvie in gear and drove off. Luz slid the big machine pistol back into its scabbard and sat back with a sigh. The Sierra de Cardos rose like a blue ripple on the western horizon, gradually accumulating clouds that climbed until they formed thunderheads towering dizzy-high into the blue, rose-colored as winds and shadows fell toward the west.

  “This is the turnoff, my hapless newcomer friends,” Henrietta said, pointing.

  Ciara grinned as she hit the foot-clutch to downshift into low gear, throttled back with the lever on the column of the steering wheel, stuck out her hand to signal, and made the turn. Driving was still a sport to her, as well as a skill she was proud of mastering. There were two stone posts marking the entrance to the hacienda’s lands, and a sign in English and Spanish.

  “Look! We’re on the Durán ranch without a dead sheep stuck to the radiator!” Ciara said. “No burro braying on its back in the backseat, waving its little hooves in the air and squishing Luz! No goat riding on the hood bleating prayers to Satan! A miracle, by Mary Mother and the Saints!”

  The hacienda’s fourteen thousand acres were a fair chunk of the planet, around twenty-two square miles, but the new internal laneways were about as good as the road they’d been driving on, though narrower.

  Other things looked different too after a few years of well-funded and aggressively Progressive management. The fences were neater and much more uniform, all stout treated posts and tight-strung five-strand barbed wire from the Monterrey steel mills, around fields bigger and squarer than usual here. About a third of them were plowed and harrowed and planted and dotted with scarecrows or scarecrowlike ancients with even older shotguns to keep the birds from eating the seed corn—one advantage of good equipment and plenty of it was that you could do crucial operations faster.

  The rest was in grazing, but there weren’t any goats: Goats were officially considered backward and inefficient. The cattle and sheep the mounted vaqueros herded already showed the influence of the pedigreed red-coated, white-faced Hereford and golden Jersey bulls and square-built Australian Polwarth rams the Duráns had brought in from the family’s ranches in New Mexico to cross with local grade stock bought cheap.

  Which is metaphorical, when you think about it, Luz thought with a grin of her own. Though they have generations a lot shorter than ours.

  In one of those plowed fields she saw three tractors with tall rear wheels of cleated metal drawing broad disk harrows to turn the last furrowed stretch to dark-brown smoothness. Four multirow planters followed along, each drawn by big teams of stout mules; it was all just like a first-rate farm in Missouri or Iowa. Closer to the center of the property were a number of deep wells, wind pumps, and irrigation channels, fields of wheat—reaped golden-brown stubble now—vibrant-green alfalfa, brand-new orchards of young waist-high fruit trees with their trunks painted white and enclosed in woven-straw sheaths, and what her Californian eyes recognized as a fair-sized vineyard on grafted rootstocks set out in spring and well into leaf now. Pencil cypresses would give the verges and tracksides a Tuscan look, if they survived beyond their current sapling stage.

  Men and women were tramping homeward with tools over their shoulders, or in some cases riding that way crowded into Ford motor trucks pulling two-wheel trailers full of equipment, a jarring sight given her experience of Mexico.

  Though I suppose it makes sense. Time they spend walking to work and back is time they don’t spend working . . . which is inefficient. Knocking off a bit early for farm laborers in the busy season, though, aren’t they?

  Most haciendas had their casco—the complex of central buildings—tightly packed together, with rutted dirt and weeds right up to the outside wall. Such splendors as they had were within, in the patio and courtyard-centered owner’s residence. The Duráns had taken advantage of the ruin that had come here with the fighting to open things out, starting anew on everything but the casa grande and the church. Those were eighteenth-century buildings on seventeenth-century foundations, and now with twentieth-century tweaks like electric light and piped water.

  Barns, corrals, wool press, stables, equipment sheds and a winery under construction, a dairy, and—very modern anywhere and weirdly alien here—brand-new cylindrical concrete silos and grain stores were well off to one side in a direction that put them downwind, given the prevailing breezes hereabouts. Even with all the modernity and efficiency in the world there was no way she knew of to make a pigpen fragrant, or at least not in a good way.

  The calpanería that housed the workers was rows of three- or four-room adobe cottages on concrete pads, plastered and whitewashed L-shapes with red tile roofs, each enclosed in a walled sixty-by-ninety yard that gave space enough for a chicken coop and a little truck garden. The living quarters were obviously intended to help enclose a centr
al square when they were finished, and there were some larger public buildings as well, in the same plain but rather handsome generalized Hispanic style. More adult farmworkers were around than she’d have expected before the sun was fully down, as well as the expected swarms of children, and the smells hinted at pots of highly spiced mole and something good roasting, while an amateur but enthusiastic band warmed up.

  Ciara slowed and gave it a look as they drove by; she had sensitive antennae for feudal oppression, having been raised on stories of the sins of the Ascendancy back in Erin, which were bad enough in reality and even worse as told to the children of a nationalist exile who’d made it out of Dublin one jump ahead of pointed questions from the Metropolitan Police, the Royal Irish Constabulary, and detectives from the Special Branch in London.

  “Not so bad,” she said, slightly surprised. “And better when it’s finished and the plantings grow and it’s not so raw.”

  Henrietta snorted laughter. “Ciara, honey, they got laid-on water here, a good store, a free ration of cornmeal and beans to every family every week, a clinic with a nurse, a school, and electricity!”

  Only a few American country folk outside the edges of the bigger cities had that already, though the number was growing fast with the new rural utility co-ops and regional grids. The Zacatecas area had gotten a major power plant early in the year, built on a maximum priority by the Army Engineers with General Electric assisting, to serve the Project and incidentally the surroundings.

  “People fight to get jobs on this place, and they live better than a lot of American-born folks in Georgia,” Henrietta added, with a slight edge of bitterness.