Christopher Rowe - The Voluntary State

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Science Fiction

By Christopher Rowe

The

Voluntary

State

The Voluntary State

by Christopher Rowe

Fictionwise

www.Fictionwise.com

First published in Sci Fiction, May 2004

NOTICE: This ebook is licensed to the original purchaser

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The Voluntary State

by Christopher Rowe

Soma had parked his car in the trailhead lot above

Governor's Beach. A safe place, usually, checked regularly by

the Tennessee Highway Patrol and surrounded on three sides

by the limestone cliffs that plunged down into the Gulf of

Mexico.

But today, after his struggle up the trail from the beach,

he saw that his car had been attacked. The driver's side

window had been kicked in.

Soma dropped his pack and rushed to his car's side. The

car shied away from him, backed to the limit of its tether

before it recognized him and turned, let out a low, pitiful

moan.

"Oh, car," said Soma, stroking the roof and opening the

passenger door, "Oh, car, you're hurt." Then Soma was

rummaging through the emergency kit, tossing aside flares

and bandages, finally, finally finding the glass salve. Only

after he'd spread the ointment over the shattered window and

brushed the glass shards out onto the gravel, only after he'd

sprayed the whole door down with analgesic aero, only then

did he close his eyes, access call signs, drop shields. He

opened his head and used it to call the police.

In the scant minutes before he saw the cadre of blue and

white bicycles angling in from sunward, their bubblewings

pumping furiously, he gazed down the beach at Nashville. The

cranes the Governor had ordered grown to dredge the harbor

would go dormant for the winter soon—already their acres-

broad leaves were tinged with orange and gold.

The Voluntary State

by Christopher Rowe

"Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer's-Alley," said voices

from above. Soma turned to watch the policemen land. They

all spoke simultaneously in the sing-song chant of law

enforcement. "Your car will be healed at taxpayers' expense."

Then the ritual words, "And the wicked will be brought to

justice."

* * * *

Efficiency and order took over the afternoon as the

threatened rain began to fall. One of the 144 Detectives

manifested, Soma and the policemen all looking about as they

felt the weight of the Governor's servant inside their heads. It

brushed aside the thoughts of one of the Highway Patrolmen

and rode him, the man's movements becoming slightly less

fluid as he was mounted and steered. The Detective filmed

Soma's statement.

"I came to sketch the children in the surf," said Soma. He

opened his daypack for the soapbubble lens, laid out the

charcoal and pencils, the sketchbook of boughten paper

bound between the rusting metal plates he'd scavenged along

the middenmouth of the Cumberland River.

"Show us, show us," sang the Detective.

Soma flipped through the sketches. In black and gray, he'd

drawn the floating lures that crowded the shallows this time

of year. Tiny, naked babies most of them, but also some little

girls in one-piece bathing suits and even one fat prepubescent

boy clinging desperately to a deflating beach ball and turning

horrified, pleading eyes on the viewer.

The Voluntary State

by Christopher Rowe

"Tssk, tssk," sang the Detective, percussive. "Draw

filaments on those babies, Soma Painter. Show the lines at

their heels."

Soma was tempted to show the Detective the artistic

licenses tattooed around his wrists in delicate salmon inks, to

remind the intelligence which authorities had purview over

which aspects of civic life, but bit his tongue, fearful of a For-

the-Safety-of-the-Public proscription. As if there were a living

soul in all of Tennessee who didn't know that the children who

splashed in the surf were nothing but extremities, nothing but

lures growing from the snouts of alligators crouching on the

sandy bottoms.

The Detective summarized. "You were here at your work,

you parked legally, you paid the appropriate fee to the meter,

you saw nothing, you informed the authorities in a timely

fashion. Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer's-Alley, the

Tennessee Highway Patrol applauds your citizenship."

The policemen had spread around the parking lot, casting

cluenets and staring back through time. But they all heard

their cue, stopped what they were doing, and broke into a

raucous cheer for Soma. He accepted their adulation

graciously.

Then the Detective popped the soapbubble camera and

plucked the film from the air before it could fall. It rolled up

the film, chewed it up thoughtfully, then dismounted the

policeman, who shuddered and fell against Soma. So Soma

did not at first hear what the others had begun to chant,

didn't decipher it until he saw what they were encircling.

The Voluntary State

by Christopher Rowe

Something was caught on the wispy thorns of a nodding

thistle growing at the edge of the lot.

"Crow's feather," the policemen chanted. "Crow's feather

Crow's feather Crow's feather."

And even Soma, licensed for art instead of justice, knew

what the fluttering bit of black signified. His car had been

assaulted by Kentuckians.

* * * *

Soma had never, so far as he recalled, painted a self-

portrait. But his disposition was melancholy, so he might have

taken a few visual notes of his trudge back to Nashville if he'd

thought he could have shielded the paper from the rain.

Soma Between the Sea and the City, he could call a

painting like that. Or, if he'd decided to choose that one clear

moment when the sun had shown through the towering slate

clouds, Soma Between Storms.

Either image would have shown a tall young man in a

broad-brimmed hat, black pants cut off at the calf, yellow

jersey unsealed to show a thin chest. A young man, sure, but

not a young man used to long walks. No helping that; his car

would stay in the trailhead lot for at least three days.

The mechanic had arrived as the policemen were leaving,

galloping up the gravel road on a white mare marked with red

crosses. She'd swung from the saddle and made sympathetic

clucking noises at the car even before she greeted Soma,

endearing herself to auto and owner simultaneously.

Scratching the car at the base of its aerial, sussing out the

very spot the car best liked attention, she'd introduced

The Voluntary State

by Christopher Rowe

herself. "I am Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails,"

she'd said, but didn't seem to be worried about it because she

ran her free hand through unfashionably short cropped blond

hair as she spoke.

She'd whistled for her horse and began unpacking the

saddlebags. "I have to build a larger garage than normal for

your car, Soma Painter, for it must house me and my horse

during the convalescence. But don't worry, my licenses are in

good order. I'm bonded by the city and the state. This is all at

taxpayers' expense."

* * * *

Which was a very great relief to Soma, poor as he was.

With friends even poorer, none of them with cars, and so no

one to hail out of the Alley to his rescue, and now this long,

wet trudge back to the city.

Soma and his friends did not live uncomfortable lives, of

course. They had dry spaces to sleep above their studios,

warm or cool in response to the season and even clean if that

was the proclivity of the individual artist, as was the case with

Soma. A clean, warm or cool, dry space to sleep. A good

space to work and a more than ample opportunity to sell his

paintings and drawings, the Alley being one of the other

things the provincials did when they visited Nashville. Before

they went to the great vaulted Opera House or after.

All that and even a car, sure, freedom of the road. Even if

it wasn't so free because the car was not really his, gift of his

family, product of their ranch. Both of them, car and artist,

product of that ranching life Soma did his best to forget.

The Voluntary State

by Christopher Rowe

If he'd been a little closer in time to that ranching youth,

his legs might not have ached so. He might not have been

quite so miserable to be lurching down the gravel road toward

the city, might have been sharp-eyed enough to still see a

city so lost in the fog, maybe sharp-eared enough to have

heard the low hoots and caws that his assailants used to

organize themselves before they sprang from all around

him—down from tree branches, up from ditches, out from the

undergrowth.

And there was a Crow raiding party, the sight stunning

Soma motionless. "This only happens on television," he said.

The caves and hills these Kentuckians haunted unopposed

were a hundred miles and more north and east, across the

shifting skirmish line of a border. Kentuckians couldn't be

here, so far from the frontier stockades at Fort Clarksville and

Barren Green.

But here they definitely were, hopping and calling,

scratching the gravel with their clawed boots, blinking away

the rain when it trickled down behind their masks and into

their eyes.

A Crow clicked his tongue twice and suddenly Soma was

the center of much activity. Muddy hands forced his mouth

open and a paste that first stung then numbed was swabbed

around his mouth and nose. His wrists were bound before him

with rough hemp twine. Even frightened as he was, Soma

couldn't contain his astonishment. "Smoke rope!" he said.

The squad leader grimaced, shook his head in disgust and

disbelief. "Rope and cigarettes come from two completely

The Voluntary State

by Christopher Rowe

different varieties of plants," he said, his accent barely

decipherable. "Vols are so fucking stupid."

* * * *

Then Soma was struggling through the undergrowth

himself, alternately dragged and pushed and even half-carried

by a succession of Crow Brothers. The boys were running

hard, and if he was a burden to them, then their normal

speed must have been terrifying. Someone finally called a

halt, and Soma collapsed.

The leader approached, pulling his mask up and wiping his

face. Deep red lines angled down from his temples, across his

cheekbones, ending at his snub nose. Soma would have

guessed the man was forty if he'd seen him in the Alley

dressed like a normal person in jersey and shorts.

Even so exhausted, Soma wished he could dig his

notebook and a bit of charcoal out of the daypack he still

wore, so that he could capture some of the savage

countenances around him.

The leader was just staring at Soma, not speaking, so

Soma broke the silence. "Those scars"—the painter brought

up his bound hands, traced angles down either side of his

own face—"are they ceremonial? Do they indicate your rank?"

The Kentuckians close enough to hear snorted and

laughed. The man before Soma went through a quick,

exaggerated pantomime of disgust. He spread his hands,

why-me-lording, then took the beaked mask off the top of his

head and showed Soma its back. Two leather bands

crisscrossed its interior, supporting the elaborate

The Voluntary State

by Christopher Rowe

superstructure of the mask and preventing the full weight of

it, Soma saw, from bearing down on the wearer's nose. He

looked at the leader again, saw him rubbing at the fading

marks.

"Sorry," said the painter.

"It's okay," said the Crow. "It's the fate of the noble

savage to be misunderstood by effete city dwellers."

Soma stared at the man for a minute. He said, "You guys

must watch a lot of the same TV programs as me."

The leader was looking around, counting his boys. He

lowered his mask and pulled Soma to his feet. "That could be.

We need to go."

* * * *

It developed that the leader's name was Japheth Sapp. At

least that's what the other Crow Brothers called out to him

from where they loped along ahead or behind, circled farther

out in the brush, scrambled from limb to branch to trunk high

above.

Soma descended into a reverie space, sing-songing

subvocally and supervocally (and being hushed down by

Japheth hard then). He guessed in a lucid moment that the

paste the Kentuckians had dosed him with must have some

sort of will-sapping effect. He didn't feel like he could open his

head and call for help; he didn't even want to. But "I will take

care of you," Athena was always promising. He held onto that

and believed that he wasn't panicking because of the Crows'

drugs, sure, but also because he would be rescued by the

police soon. "I will take care of you." After all, wasn't that one

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ScienceFictionByChristopherRoweTheVoluntaryStateTheVoluntaryStatebyChristopherRowe2Fictionwisewww.Fictionwise.comCopyright©2004byChristopherRoweFirstpublishedinSciFiction,May2004NOTICE:Thisebookislicensedtotheoriginalpurchaseronly.Duplicationordistributiontoanypersonviaemail,floppydisk,network,print...

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Christopher Rowe - The Voluntary State

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