Hemlock Hours

Gabrielle Wentworth stood at the front of the granary and tapped the slate with her stick. Twenty-two students sat on benches that had been church pews once, back before the world ate itself. She was sixty-four years old and had been teaching in this room for five years.

"So," she said. "The plague did not kill people directly. Say it back to me."

"The plague did not kill people directly," the class droned.

"It killed the machines. And then the machines let the people die. A nanite does not know the difference between a jet engine and a heart valve, if it is built to eat metal and carbon. And so."

A hand went up in the back row. Carl, twenty-two, farm kid.

"Professor, if they ate all the machines, how come they stopped? Why aren't they still eating?"

"Good question. They were built with a kill date. Most of them. The ones that had kill dates." She set the stick down. "The ones that didn't are the reason we have a wall around this town and a rule against digging in the old military sites. Which brings us to next week's reading."

The door banged open.

Marie Kincaid came in fast, boots loud on the plank floor. She was fifty-three, salvage rig operator, and she did not knock on doors in New Carthage because knocking was for people who expected to be told no.

"Class is over," Marie said. "Sorry, everyone. Council business."

"There is no class at this hour that you outrank," Gabrielle said.

"There is when the council head is waiting on both of us." Marie looked at the students, then back. "Or do you want me to say it here? In front of them?"

"Say what here?"

"Say that you've known about the Berlow cache for eleven days and told nobody."

The room went very quiet. Gabrielle kept her face still, which was a skill she had learned at fifty-nine when she arrived in this town grieving and had practiced every day since.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said.

"Fine." Marie turned for the door. "Then you won't mind explaining that to Claude in front of six witnesses." She looked at the class. "Read chapter nine. Professor's fired."

She left. Gabrielle stood there with chalk dust on her fingers.

"Chapter nine," she said finally. "And an essay on why rumors move faster than people. Due Tuesday."

* * *

Claude had the council room above the assay office. It was a long table, six chairs, and a lamp that ran off a salvaged battery he was always promising to replace. He was forty-seven, council head, and he had the tired look of a man who had been elected because nobody else wanted to sit in the chair.

"Sit down," he said. "Both of you."

They sat. Across the table from each other, which was not an accident of seating because there were only two chairs on that side and Marie took the far one on purpose.

"Marie first," Claude said.

"Eleven days ago my rig pulled a schematic packet out of a collapsed depot east of the wall. Berlow site. It's a pre-collapse military cache, sealed, intact as far as I can tell. The schematics describe a terraforming unit. Soil reclamation. The real thing, Claude. Not a rumor. Drawings, part numbers, deployment records." She put a folded sheet on the table. "We put that thing to work and we have farmland inside five years. Real topsoil. Fields that don't flood every spring."

"And she knew," Marie went on, pointing at Gabrielle. "The packet crossed the archive for cataloging. Standard procedure. She read it, she flagged it restricted, and she buried it in a drawer. Ask her."

Claude looked over. "Gabrielle?"

Gabrielle folded her hands on the table.

"Flagging a restricted document is my job," she said. "The archive flags things. That's the whole procedure."

"Don't," Marie said. "Don't do the professor voice."

"I read the packet. Yes. And the deployment record has an appendix nobody read past page two, because Marie was too excited by page one. The appendix is the contamination log for the Berlow depot. Do you know why the depot was sealed, Marie? Sealed from the inside, with the crew's own equipment?"

"Tell us," Claude said quietly.

"Because the nanites in that cache were the military line. No kill date. The civilian plague burned out in most places forty years ago, and we've had years to learn which ruins are safe. Berlow isn't a ruin. Berlow is a jar with the lid still on. You open that jar to get your terraforming unit, and if there is one dormant cluster still viable in there, it comes out with it. And it is built to eat machines. Every pump, every rig, every light in this town."

"That's speculation," Marie said.

"It's arithmetic. Forty years dormant is nothing to that generation of units. They were designed for a hundred-year shelf life."

"They were designed to win a war that ended. Everything else rotted. Everything else rusted or the degradation got it." Marie leaned forward. "I've been inside thirty sealed sites, Gabrielle. Thirty. I know what dies and what doesn't."

"And I've read forty years of salvage reports, including the ones from your own rig, including the Hillcrest incident where your crew cracked a case and two men spent a winter sick. You want to lecture me on what doesn't die?"

"That was chemical," Marie said.

"It was never confirmed chemical."

"Enough." Claude put his palm flat on the table. He did it without force, just flat, and both women stopped. "Marie. Is the cache sealed right now?"

"Far as my instruments say. Deep. It would take a month of work to open it properly."

"Then it stays deep. Gabrielle, the packet comes out of your drawer and goes into council record. All of it. The appendix too. I'm not having this town find out its historian hid something, and I'm not having it find out from her." He nodded at Marie. "Fair?"

Gabrielle thought about it. She looked at the lamp, at the water stain on the ceiling, anywhere but Marie.

"Fair," she said.

"Good. Then here's the actual question. Not whether we're scared. Whether we're going to starve." Claude rubbed his eyes. "The east fields flooded again this spring. Third year running. We're buying grain from the river towns at a price that gets worse every year. Marie's right that a terraforming unit is the only real fix anybody's ever found. Gabrielle's right that opening that site could end us. I need a recommendation from this table that isn't just two people shouting."

"Then get a third opinion," Marie said. "Send a query downriver. Find somebody who can read the contamination log with fresh eyes. Neutral."

"There is nobody neutral," Gabrielle said. "There is nobody who has read the log at all except me, which is the point of a restricted flag."

"Then teach me," Marie said. "Sit me down with the appendix. Walk me through it. If you can show me the risk on paper, I'll drop it. If I can show you the margins say otherwise, you drop it. That's honest work."

Gabrielle sat back. It was a reasonable offer and she hated it, because it meant evenings at a table with Marie Kincaid going line by line through a document she had spent eleven days pretending not to have.

"That can be arranged," she said.

"Then we're adjourned," Claude said. "And Gabrielle. A word after, if you don't mind."

Marie took the hint and left, boots loud again on the stairs. Claude waited until the door closed.

"You sat on it eleven days," he said.

"I sat on it four days. Then I spent seven trying to decide if I was being careful or just scared."

"And which was it?"

"I still don't know," Gabrielle said. "That's why the drawer."

Claude nodded slowly. He looked older than forty-seven when the lamp was low.

"Be careful with her," he said. "She's been waiting twenty years to beat you at something."

"I know," Gabrielle said. "That's what worries me. So have I."

Gabrielle went to the rig workshop at dusk, two days later.

The workshop sat at the edge of the machine yard, past the wall's shadow. It had been a grain shed once. Now it held Marie's rig, a crane rig the size of a barn, with the sensor sled bolted to its boom and cables running everywhere. Lamplight came through the big doors, which stood open to the evening.

Marie was under the sensor sled with a wrench when Gabrielle's boots sounded on the planks. She slid out, saw who it was, and put the wrench down slow.

"Professor," she said. "Come to cite me?"

"Come to talk. Privately, if that's still possible."

"Nobody's here. The crew went to the cookhouse." Marie wiped her hands on a rag. She was fifty-three and built like the equipment she ran, and she looked at Gabrielle the way she looked at a reading she didn't trust. "Talk."

"You said at the council table you'd sit with the appendix. I'm holding you to it."

"Good. Start tomorrow."

"Why not now?"

"Because now I'm working."

"Marie." Gabrielle took two more steps into the light. "You're not working. You're decoding. I watched you in that meeting. Every time I mentioned the depot coordinates, your eyes went to your rig logs, not to me. You've been cross-referencing the packet's site numbers against your own survey runs. You already have something, don't you."

Marie stood up all the way. She set the rag down.

"You always did think you were the smartest person in the room," she said.

"That's not an answer."

"No. It's not." Marie came around the workbench. "Twenty-two years ago you took that postdoctoral post out from under me, and I told myself you'd earned it. Then I told myself you hadn't. Then I stopped telling myself anything and just did my work. Now here you are, telling me what I can and can't do with my own rig, my own survey data, my own judgment. And you expect me to feel lectured."

"I expect you to feel it, because it's true. The appendix, Marie. The contamination log. Read it with me and if I'm wrong, I'll stand up in front of the whole council and say so."

"And if I'm wrong?"

"Then I'll help you write the excavation proposal myself."

Marie laughed, but it wasn't a nice laugh. "You're enjoying this."

"I'm terrified, is what I am."

"You don't look terrified."

"Well, I am." Gabrielle's voice came out lower than she meant it to. "I buried my husband five years ago, Marie. I came here to outlive my grief in a quiet place, and instead I'm standing in a machine shed arguing with the only person in this town who knows me well enough to know when I'm lying. And I can't even lie right now. I'm not just afraid of the cache. I'm afraid of what happens to us, to this, if you get your way and it goes wrong."

Something shifted in Marie's face. She set the wrench on the bench, deliberate, like she was putting down more than a tool.

"Us," she said. "You said us."

"Don't."

"No, I heard it. Us." She came closer. "Because I've been doing the same arithmetic, Gabrielle. Every night since the solstice. Six months of it."

"Marie, don't."

"Tell me to stop and I'll stop. I'll go back to my wrench and my logs and we'll pretend the last six months were a bad habit. Say it."

Gabrielle looked at her. The lamp hissed behind her. Her hands would not come up with the word.

"I can't," she said. "I don't want to."

Marie closed the distance and kissed her.

It was not gentle. It was twenty years of grudge and six months of want, and Gabrielle grabbed a fistful of Marie's shirt and kissed her back just as hard. When they broke apart, both of them were breathing wrong.

"We shouldn't be doing this here," Gabrielle said.

"Then don't do it here."

* * *

Six months ago, at the solstice bonfire.

The whole town had turned out. Tables of food, the fiddlers, people running with sparklers until somebody yelled. Gabrielle had been at the edge of it with a cup of the plum wine that Carl's family made, drinking more of it than she should, because the bonfire was the fourth anniversary of the week she had watched her husband stop breathing. Nobody in New Carthage knew that. She had kept it like she kept everything.

Marie had found her there.

"You're hiding," Marie had said. She'd had her own cup, and she'd been drinking from it steadily.

"I'm grieving. There's a difference."

"Is there?" Marie had sat down next to her on the log. "My wife died in a later outbreak, you know. Different year. I was forty-two."

"I didn't know that."

"Nobody does. I don't talk about it." She'd taken another drink. "Claude lost his that year too. Whole town's built on widows, if you think about it. We just don't look at each other's foundations."

Gabrielle had laughed, or something near it. "That's the wine talking."

"That's the wine making it sayable." Marie had turned on the log to face her. "Come somewhere with me. The library. I've got a bottle that isn't plum wine and a couch in the basement archive that nobody's sat on since the collapse."

"Marie."

"Come on. Or stay here and be sad at a bonfire. Your choice."

Gabrielle had gone. She remembered that clearly, that she had chosen. The wine had made the choice easy, but she had made it.

They had ended up on the floor of the archive, because the couch was too far from the lamp and neither of them wanted to turn the lamp up. Marie had kissed her first, that time too, slow and almost shy, which Gabrielle would not have believed if anyone had told her.

"Is this a good idea?" Gabrielle had asked, when they stopped to breathe.

"No," Marie had said. "It's a necessary one. Yes?"

"Yes."

They had been careful with each other after that, which surprised Gabrielle even more. It had gone on for hours, the whole night, and in the morning Marie had made coffee on the