In the Land of Nod

In the Land of Nod

In the Land of Nod

Joseph Cadotte

Copyright © 1998, 2014 by Joseph Cadotte

Paradise, Inc. universe Copyright © 1993-2014 by Joseph Cadotte

Artwork by Cordelia Norris

Cover and interior design by Luna Creative

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior explicit written consent by the author.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Published by Old Sins

Knoxville, Tennessee 37922

oldsins.com

An early form of this work is held at the University of Washington Library

in Seattle, Washington

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-0-9915-9012-4

Ebook paperback ISBN: 978-0-9915-9013-1

For Nana & Papa Joe

Contents

In the Sky, Between Worlds 1

In the Tower of the Matriarch 3

The Nursery Loses Its Comforts 5

Run Through the Night 9

Being Hunted Through the Woods

While the Trees Suck Out Your Blood 11

The Boneyard 13

Jen’s Dream 16

A Boy with a New Family 17

Over the Border and Safe for a While 19

At the Seminary, Every Day Is Orientation Day 21

The Rat in the Maze 24

Sometimes, You Just Don’t Notice the Years 26

Jen, a Bit Later 28

Jen, Back in His Hometown 32

Tuscus Comes Home 35

A Sourpuss on the Boat 42

Being Woken by Someone Banging on Your Home 44

Yawn 46

An Educational Interlude 48

Tuscus Wakes 51

The Boat Stopped 55

Burrow Into the Boat 57

The Animate Corpse 65

Two Boys Go Romping in the Forest 67

Back at the Boat 77

Another Educational Interlude 79

The Boys Wake Up 83

Under the Temple 89

Diaries of Dead Gods 92

The Boys Return to the Boat 94

The Town of Semt 98

Agitator 102

Tuscus Makes a Deal 106

How Does This Man Get Around So Quickly? 111

Jenaro Has a Job to Do Too, You Know 113

Sometimes You Can’t Go Back,

Even If You’ve Only Been Gone a Little While 120

Tuscus Thinks About What He’s Done 124

It Must Have Been Something He Ate 127

Some Days, It Just Doesn’t Pay to Get Out of Bed 130

Back to the Scene of the Crime 140

He’s Oblivious, Isn’t He? 144

Jak Does the Responsible Thing 146

Mornings Are Just Miserable All Around 149

Lust for Life 152

Some People Have a Knack For Showing

Up At the Most Awkward Time 155

Jen’s Forced Into Something Else 159

Tuscus Confesses 163

Into the Mine 166

Jak Tries to Make The Trip Less of a Total Loss 175

Fennish Meets the Boys 179

Offices Should Not Be Built to Be Slept In 185

High Resolution 191

Rainy Season 193

I

In the Sky, Between Worlds

The Arbor Vitae gathered light to itself, floating alone above the cloud-shrouded moon, only the corpses of its family accompanying it. It monitored that moon, Tubal-Cain, obsessively, all but ignoring the gas giant the moon orbited and only just vaguely aware of the giant’s other companions.

In the rare times when the clouds beneath it parted, the moon below was a warm, blue-green world. The Arbor Vitae had brought humans there millennia before, and they remembered it and worshipped it, but had long forgotten its name. It forgot nothing though, and it knew all that transpired on Tubal-Cain. Its surveillance was the only thing that kept it sane.

Grown long ago, off of a black, icy asteroid years away from where it rests, the Arbor Vitae was one of the first treeships, sister to the long-dead and long-gone Arbor Scientae. Its trunk was long and thin, with its roots curled up into a ball where the asteroid had been, slowly eaten thousands of years ago, and its canopy spread wide and flat. The branches were strong and somewhat motile, thick with leaves that twisted to catch and reflect the light, feeding the tree with radiation, dust, and solar wind. On the sail made by those leaves, it had soared through space at impossible speeds, keeping an entire ecosystem deep beneath its bark, to be released on the planet below.

It watched the first war the humans had on that moon, so soon after they had arrived, and it had watched city after city destroyed as rocks fell like brilliant pebbles from the sky. The Arbor Vitae remembered its cousins being wracked apart, becoming drifting debris and empty vaults, as they chose one side or the other. It saw its sibling, Arbor Scientae, die to stop the falling rocks. It did not like to remember this, and, though it could not forget, each year, each century, it dwelt on it less. It had given up hope as it saw the people below degenerate in order to survive and regained it as it saw them recover a little of the way they had been. It wondered as they bred humans to do the work of machines and as dukes became autarks and oligarchs ruled their people’s thoughts.

Once, long ago, it had brought a near-dead human up to it, its favorite of centuries, and made that human a being like itself before it was returned to the surface, alive in mind but dead in body. It talked to this other, the one that people began to worship just as they had worshipped the Arbor Vitae, long known to them simply as the Ship. This other, this Sailor, was its best and only friend and its best and most loyal tool.

The Ship waited desperately for the day that the humans it had born to the shrouded moon beneath would return to it. It waited desperately for its family to be born again. It waited desperately to leave the moon behind and travel through the skies, no longer wracked by the radiation from the gas giant Cain. Until then, it gathered light and, through the Sailor, gently nudged the people below.

II

In the Tower of the Matriarch

It was midday in the basilica, and the view through the matriarch’s window showed the grand sweep of all that she ruled. Directly before her was the Church’s lands and outbuildings, a brown and green man-made mountain range, with her room at its summit. Beyond that stood the ever-writhing forest, poisonous and lush, though which boats drifted on rigorously cleared canals. Beyond that still lay the ocean surrounding the basilica’s island, spotted with gold and silver sails below and great, wide, black dirigibles above. In the far distance, there was the hint of the mainland, a grey and misty shore that seemed to grow farther from her each year.

In the tower, almost directly above the Sailor’s dreaming corpse, the newly elected Matriarch sat. She was of middle age, and not terribly unique from her fellows. She wasn’t the smartest, the wisest, or even the most ruthless of the archbishops. But she knew better than all of them what to promise someone to win their vote. And she knew better than all of them how to get the best of any bargain. Her holiness was beyond question, for she had accrued more wealth and managed it better than anyone else currently alive. Her allies widely said that she was a merchant unlike any since the Sailor itself, and even her enemies begrudged her some business acumen and the piety that went with it.

The Patriarch she had replaced had died in the usual way – quietly and with little fuss. There had been none of the messy deposing that had torn the Church apart a few generations ago. Without that turmoil, she hadn’t needed to kill anyone, just promise them more than she could deliver. She knew that she needed to reward those who had stood beside her or she would find herself deposed just as quietly as the previous Patriarch had been.

As things stood, at least one of her supporters would have to go without, and she did not like that thought at all. A bishop unrewarded was a waiting enemy, and she could not afford that just now. As rich and holy as she had become on her rise to the top, there simply weren’t enough businesses under her control to divvy up, not without losing her majority in the Church. And then, from the Sailor, in its vault directly below her, a thought arose. She poked at the Church’s border on her map, shifted one line or two, ordered a small invasion, and the problem was on its way to being solved.

III

The Nursery Loses Its Comforts

Early in the morning, when it was still dark, the children were roused from their sleep. The needles slipped into their arms silently, painlessly, through the same skin, in the same spot, they went into every night and every morning. The stimulant entered their bloodstream, counteracting the depressant injected only four hours before.

Five minutes later, the children rolled out of their stacked bunks and dropped to the floor. Their teachers were not there, and the younger ones and some of the older ones started to cry. The youngest didn’t know that this wasn’t right and proper and the oldest were in shock. They couldn’t remember the last time the teachers weren’t there to welcome them and help get the little ones ready for the day. They didn’t know it, but the teachers had been there every day for four thousand years, and though their jobs had changed many times over the millennia, not one day had gone by without them in the nursery to greet the little ones. But the children did not know this, no one had bothered to tell them, no one had thought that there would be a day when the children would be awaken before dawn, with only the emergency power running, and no teacher able to help.

Maybe the teachers were testing the children. Maybe the beds had made a mistake. Maybe someone, some prankster, had broken the beds’ programming. But this had not happened. No one would sabotage the beds. Everyone knew the beds would kill if the dosage of the drugs wasn’t just right or if the teachers willed it so. Everyone, even the youngest, had woken up in the morning to find a bunkmate euthanized in the night. Death was administered quickly and painlessly in the nursery. Even the littlest ones knew that such people were not going to be any help to the state nor would they ever be. Maybe the timer had broken. Maybe the teachers were busy. Maybe the teachers were dead.

About that time, word began to spread among the children that the doors and windows were still locked. Those with a bit more presence of mind, or maybe the ones locked in the routine, began to prepare for the day, showering away the dirt of the night, shaving off any stubble that had grown over the previous day, making sure their bodies were bare and clean again before they dressed. The more who dressed, the more who joined them, until only a few naked children stood next to the doors and windows trying to take them apart. These portals had been designed to keep the children locked in in case of a riot, and no quick tinkering could open them from the inside.

Two boys were sitting next to each other near the window that overlooked the lake. They had never seen the lights that came from the floating city that rested outside the nursery, whose name they had never learned (it was called Nephi), and to which they had never gone. Sometimes, late at night, they would talk to each other before the needles entered their arms and they would speculate about what the buildings could be for. They did this quietly, so the teachers would not hear them, afraid that they could be punished for such idle talk, so they didn’t notice that the canal lights, the boats, and the city hall were all dark.

Both boys were getting older. They had just started shaving their armpits, genitals, and face, although it would be another year before they would have to begin shaving the rest of their bodies. In a half-decade they would stop shaving their scalps and hair would grow over the serial numbers tattooed there. Both were slight boys, almost identical in mannerism from years of friendship, except the one named Tuscus was so nervous that his skin was changing color more quickly than normal. His teachers had admonished him time and again for this, and the other boy, who wasn’t of a custom design, did his best not to notice. He held the Tuscus’ hand tight, a bit of sweat between the two palms.

The other boy, whose name was Jenaro, was staring through the window, pointing with his chin and whispering to Tuscus Don’t worry, everything will be ok, don’t worry, I’ll be here for you, you’ll be here for me, he continued to strike Tuscus’ arm, the teachers will be here soon, they won’t hurt us, we’re too old to kill, look at that! he almost spoke the last aloud, as the building directly across the nursery, the three-story one that stretched almost a third of the way across their vision, its leaves wide and green, the one they thought their food came from in those late-night talks, (it was really just an Administrator’s house), ruptured outward in flames, wood hitting the water with a hiss, and the house itself sinking slowly into the lake, its root network undermined.

The door, the one the teachers used to leave through, burst open and the teachers rushed in, hunched over and whispering. The younger children rushed up to the teachers and grabbed at their legs and arms and backs, but the teachers, with tears in their eyes, brushed most of them back, taking just a few, one under an arm or another carried on their back. Tuscus’ teacher, the one he went to when everyone else was eating, walked up to him, grabbed his arm and pulled. The teacher did not speak when he resisted - she just pulled harder.

Tuscus held tighter to Jen’s hand, and he held as tight as he could, but she broke his grip. Though Tuscus went limp, and fell to the floor, his legs dragged as she took him with her. Jen jumped onto Tuscus and grabbed him around the waist. He cried, and his grip became slippery, but even so, Jen held on tight as another teacher tried to pull him off his friend. Even when the beating loosened his grip, and Tuscus slid out from his grasp, Jenaro still pulled at him until he was thrown to the other side of the room. The teacher dragging Tuscus lurched forward, steadied, and followed the other teachers through the door they always left through. Every one of the remaining teachers was struggling with one or two pupils.

With Tuscus gone, Jen closed his eyes and sat still by the window, though the light from the fireballs outside was the most beautiful he could have hoped to see.

IV

Run Through the Night

Tuscus was scared, huddled up under his teacher’s arms as they ran from the nursery, where he had spent his entire life. They were piled on a raft that had been mocked up to look like a piece of driftwood, a piece of a building that had fallen off in the attack and was propelled by whatever had shattered the building.

He saw, behind them, bizarre creatures enter the nursery. The creatures, from this distance, looked like bowls with plates covering them. They had small arms and legs, stunted and belching flame from all joints, animated kettles of death. He giggled in his fear, and his teacher, whose arm he huddled under, smacked him, and he knew better than to complain about the pain.

The fires were dying down as the sun rose and they pulled away, but the town was still a floating flame, with wine-dark whorls of blood under the bridges that stretched from roof to roof, where occasionally a kettle creature floated, but more often something else, something human, was in the midst of it.

Once, when Tuscus looked back, trying to find the nursery, hoping to see Jenaro, just as the town was about to be obscured, he froze, and the world did as well. The sun revealed a now static image, and the floating buildings seemed not to bob in the water, the water no longer lapping up on their bases, roots, and pontoons, instead a smooth glass of reflecting an empty sky and an empty town.

The children were forced out of the boat and were met by seven creatures, three tall and hunched over to hide their height, three small and scrabbling near the ground. The seventh one was like a fetus clutching to the head of one of the tall ones, and from all of them, especially the fetus, a high-pitched whine emitted that nagged at Tuscus. The fetus-thing was blind and small-limbed, mostly head and abdomen, the arms seemed strong, but built only for grasping. The other six were also naked and bald, but wore