Kate Wilhelm - Scream

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2024-11-24 0 0 118.24KB 18 页 5.9玖币

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The Scream by Kate Wilhelm

First published in Orbit 13, ed. Damon Knight, Putnam, 1974

The sea had turned to copper; it rose and fell gently, the motion starting so deep that no ripple broke the

surface of the slow swells. The sky was darkening to a deep blue-violet, with rose streaks in the west

and a high cirrocumulus formation in the east that was a dazzling white mountain crowned with brilliant

reds and touches of green. No wind stirred. The irregular dark strip that was Miami Beach separated the

metallic sea from the fiery sky. We were at anchor eight miles offshore aboard the catamaran _Loretta_.

She was a forty-foot, single-masted, inboard motorboat.

Evinson wanted to go on in, but Trainor, whose boat it was, said no. Too dangerous: sand, silt, wrecks,

God knew what we might hit. We waited until morning.

We had to go in at Biscayne Bay; the Bal Harbour inlet was clogged with the remains of the bridge on

old A1A. Trainor put in at the Port of Miami. All the while J.P. kept taking his water samples, not once

glancing at the ruined city; Delia kept a running check for radiation, and Bernard took pictures. Corrie

and I tried to keep out of the way, and Evinson didn't. The ancient catamaran was clumsy, and Trainor

was kept busy until we were tied up, then he bowed sarcastically to Evinson and went below.

Rusting ships were in the harbor, some of them on their sides half in water, half out. Some of them

seemed afloat, but then we saw that without the constant dredging that had kept the port open, silt and

sand had entered, and the bottom was no more than ten to fifteen feet down. The water was very clear.

Some catfish lay unmoving on the bottom, and a school of big-eyed mullet circled at the surface, the first

marine life we had seen. The terns were diving here, and sandpipers ran with the waves. J.P.'s eyes were

shining as he watched the birds. We all had been afraid that there would be no life of any kind.

Our plan was to reconnoiter the first day, try to find transportation: bicycles, which none of us had ridden

before, skates, canoes, anything. Miami and the beaches covered a lot of miles, and we had a lot of

work; without transportation the work would be less valuable -- if it had any value to begin with.

Bernard and Delia went ahead to find a place to set up our base, and the rest of us started to unload the

boat. In half an hour we were drenched with sweat. At first glance the city had seemed perfectly

habitable, just empty of people, but as we carried the boxes to the hotel that Bernard had found, the ruins

dominated the scene. Walls were down, streets vanished under sand and palmettos and sea grapes. The

hotel was five stories, the first floor covered with sand and junk: shells, driftwood, an aluminum oar eaten

through with corrosion. Furniture was piled against walls haphazardly, like heaps of rotting compost. The

water had risen and fallen more than once, rearranging floatables. It was hellishly hot, and the hotel stank

of ocean and decay and dry rot and heat. No one talked much as we all worked, all but Trainor, who

had worked to get us here and who now guzzled beer with his feet up. Evinson cursed him

monotonously. We carried our stuff to the hotel, then to the second floor, where we put mosquito netting

at the windows of three connecting rooms that would be used jointly. We separated to select our private

rooms and clear them and secure them against the mosquitoes that would appear by the millions as soon

as the sun went down.

After a quick lunch of soy wafers and beer we went out singly to get the feel of the city and try to locate

any transportation we could.

I started with a map in my hand, and the first thing I did was put it back inside my pack. Except for the

general areas, the map was worthless. This had been a seawalled city, and the seawalls had gone: a little

break here, a crack somewhere else, a trickle of water during high tide, a flood during a storm, the

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pressure building behind the walls, on the land side, and inevitably the surrender to the sea. The water

had undermined the road system and eaten away at foundations of buildings, and hurricane winds had

done the rest. Some streets were completely filled in with rubble; others were pitted and undercut until

shelves of concrete had shifted and slid and now rested crazily tilted. The white sand had claimed some

streets so thoroughly that growth had had a chance to naturalize, and there were strip-forests of palm

trees, straggly bushes with pink and yellow flowers, and sea grapes. I saw a mangrove copse claiming the

water's edge and stopped to stare at it for a long time, with curious thoughts flitting through my brain

about the land and the sea in a survival struggle in which man was no more than an incidental observer,

here, then gone. The afternoon storm broke abruptly, and I took shelter in a building that seemed to have

been a warehouse.

The stench of mold and decay drove me out again as soon as the storm abated. Outside, the sun had

baked everything, the sun and rain sterilizing, neutralizing, keeping the mold at bay, but inside the

cavernous buildings the soggy air was a culture for mold spores, and thirty years, forty, had not been long

enough to deplete the rich source of nutrients. There was food available on the shelves, the shelves were

food, the wood construction materials, the glues and grouts, the tiles and vinyls, the papers neatly filed,

the folders that held them, pencils, everything finally was food for the mold.

I entered two more buildings, same thing, except that one of them had become a bat cave. They were the

large fruit bats, not dangerous, and I knew they were not, but I left them the building without contest.

At the end of the first day we had three bicycles and a flat-bottomed rowboat with two oars. I hadn't

found anything of value. The boat was aluminum, and although badly corroded, it seemed intact enough.

Trainor slouched in while J.P. was cooking dinner and the rest of us were planning our excursions for the

next day.

"You folks want boats? Found a storehouse full of them." He joined us for dinner and drew a map

showing the warehouse he had found. His freehand map was more reliable than the printed ones we had

brought with us. I suspected that he was salvaging what he could for his own boat. Unless he was a fool,

that was what he was doing. When Evinson asked him what else he had seen that day, he simply

shrugged.

"How's chances of a swim?" I asked Delia after we ate.

"No radiation. But you'd better wait for Corrie to run some analyses. Too much that we don't know to

chance it yet."

"No swimming, damn it!" Evinson said sharply. "For God's sake, Sax." He issued orders rapidly for the

next day, in effect telling everyone to do what he had come to do.

Strut and puff, you little bastard, I thought at him. No one protested.

The same ruins lay everywhere in the city. After the first hour it was simply boring. My bicycle was more

awkward than going on foot, since I had to carry it over rubble as much as I got to ride it. I abandoned it

finally. I found the Miami River and dutifully got a sample. It was the color of tea, very clear. I followed

the river a long time, stopped for my lunch, and followed it some more. Ruins, sand, junk, palm trees.

Heat. Silence. Especially silence. I was not aware of when I began to listen to the silence, but I caught

myself walking cautiously, trying to be as quiet as the city, not to intrude in any way. The wind in the dry

fronds was the only thing I heard. It stopped, then started again, and I jerked around. I went inside a

building now and then, but they were worse than the ruined streets. Rusty toys, appliances, moldering

furniture, or piles of dust where the termites had been, chairs that crumbled when I touched them, and the

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Kate Wilhelm - Scream

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