Morning Child and Other Stories Read Free Page B

his breathing was becoming heavy and labored. He paused in the middle of what he was doing, put down the wood-chopping ax, and stood silently for a moment, staring blankly at nothing.
    His face was suddenly intent and withdrawn, and his eyes were dull. He swayed unsteadily and wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. Williams got him to sit down on a stump near the improvised fireplace. He sat there silently, staring at the ground in abstraction, while Williams bustled around, lighting a fire, cleaning and filleting the fish, cutting up dandelion roots and chicory crowns, boiling water. The sun was down now, and fireflies began to float above the river, winking like fairy lanterns through the velvet darkness.
    Williams did his best to interest John in supper, hoping that he’d eat something while he still had some of his teeth, but John would eat little. After a few moments he put his tin plate down and sat staring dully to the south, out over the darkened lands beyond the river, just barely visible in the dim light of a crescent moon. His face was preoccupied and glum, and beginning to get jowly. His hairline had retreated in a wide arc from his forehead, creating a large bald spot. He worked his mouth indecisively several times and at last said, “Have I been...ill?”
    “Yes, John,” Williams said gently. “You’ve been ill.”
    “I can’t...I can’t remember,” John complained. His voice was cracked and husky, querulous. “Everything’s so confused. I can’t keep things straight— ”
    Somewhere on the invisible horizon, perhaps a hundred miles away, a pillar of fire leapt up from the edge of the world.
    As they watched, startled, it climbed higher and higher, towering miles into the air, until it was a slender column of brilliant flame that divided the sullen black sky in two from ground to stratosphere. The pillar of fire blazed steadily on the horizon for a minute or two, and then it began to coruscate, burning green and blue and silver and orange, the colors flaring and flickering fitfully as they merged into one another. Slowly, with a kind of stately and awful symmetry, the pillar broadened out to become a flattened diamond shape of blue-white fire. The diamond began to rotate slowly on its axis, and, as it rotated, it grew eye-searingly bright. Gargantuan unseen shapes floated around the blazing diamond, like moths beating around a candle flame, throwing huge tangled shadows across the world.
    Something with a huge, melancholy voice hooted, and hooted again, a forlorn and terrible sound that beat back and forth between the hills until it rumbled slowly away into silence.
    The blazing diamond winked out. Hot white stars danced where it had been. The stars faded to sullenly glowing orange dots that flickered away down the spectrum and were gone.
    It was dark again.
    The night had been shocked silent. For a while, that silence was complete, and then slowly, tentatively, one by one, the crickets and tree frogs began to make their night sounds again.
    “The war—” John whispered. His voice was reedy and thin and weary now, and there was pain in it. “It still goes on?”
    “The war got...strange,” Williams said quietly. “The longer it lasted, the stranger it got. New allies, new weapons—” He stared off into the darkness in the direction where the fire had danced: there was still an uneasy shimmer to the night air on the horizon, not quite a glow. “You were hurt by such a weapon, I guess. Something like that, maybe.” He nodded toward the horizon, and his face hardened. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what that was. I don’t understand much that happens in the world anymore.... Maybe it wasn’t even a weapon that hurt you. Maybe they were experimenting on you biologically before you got away. Who knows why? Maybe it was done deliberately—as a punishment. Or a reward. Who knows how they think? Maybe it was a side effect of some device designed to do something else entirely.