"There"s a brainiac with them!" Zinger shouted.
Everyone scattered like moss-dust on the breeze, no direction to go, just b.u.mping around in the station. Only one way out, up, and the tin men had it blocked. I took the silver disk I was using and one of the factories and pushed them into the flooded part of the station, then tried to run for the door.
The tin men galomp-ed down the steps carefully, using their long arms to steady themselves on the uneven steps. They had three brainiacs with them. Each held their big heads in their hands and moaned from all the effort of walking. Brainiacs didn"t like to do that if they could help it.
The tin man corralled us arties up into a tight bunch and others stole away with the disks and factories. One sheriff tin man, gold-coated and round, prodded the brainiacs, and they pointed at Niles, all three at the same time. Then the tin men took Niles too. We arties tried to fight then, and Boo did too. But we"re not made for fighting, and we all hurt ourselves on the cold sleek sh.e.l.ls of the tin men. When Niles was gone, they let us a-go, and left following the sheriff.
We wailed and cried. "Doomed," Topps moaned. "Doomed. "
The ache wasn"t over us yet, but it would be now.
"Every time we find something new to Make, they take it away," Tess said, dabbing tears from her eyes.
"The tin men don"t care," Zinger said.
"Of course they don"t," I said. "They only do what the Elderfolk tell them to do. And the Elderfolk don"t care. they don"t care about anything but themselves. "
"We have to get Niles back," Topps said, starting to cry again. "Arties are too dumb on their own. Too dumb!"
I snapped up at that. "No!" I said. "Arties aren"t dumb! Niles said!"
"Doesn"t matter anymore," Zinger said. "Niles is gone to the pokey-pokey. They"ll never let him out. "
"Then we get him out," said a tiny voice I had never heard before. It half-sung the words, just like a melodie did whenever it talked, but the sound was wrong, harsh around the edges. It was a bad Make.
Boo didn"t look scared. She was younger than all of us, but she wasn"t scared. Everyone tried to wipe up tears then, just so they didn"t look like little babies when the real baby didn"t even cry.
"Boo can talk!" Zinger said after a long silence.
"Of course she can talk," I snapped. "But she didn"t want to before now. This is important. "
Boo nodded. "Hurts. My-" she touched her throat, "not made right. " She winced from the effort of talking. I grabbed her and held her close.
"Boo is right," I said. "We arties have to get Niles back. "
"But how?" asked Tess.
I didn"t know. I looked at Boo. Boo didn"t know.
"We"ll ask the brainiacs," I said then. It was what Niles had done, and they owed us after turning Niles in.
The brainiacs spent most of their times at the libraries, and there was one on P-Street that I had remembered because it had pretty statues on each side of its big doors. Boo and I marched inside, past the tin men that watched the door, and inside, before they could get a good sniff of us. The first brainiac we saw, we cornered against a shelf. She was locked into her little wheelchair and couldn"t move very fast.
"Tell us how to rescue Niles," I demanded. Boo made menacing gestures with her hands that she must have learned from watching thicknecks.
"Who?" said the brainiac. "Oh, that arty kid with the stolen gengineering kits? He"s gone up-tower to see Council. The Elderfolk are real p.i.s.sed about that little scheme of his. Not even a platoon of thicknecks could get in there. The Tower is crawling with tin men. "
I shuddered. The Council were the Elderfolk to the Elderfolk. They told everyone what to do. If they had Niles, then there really was no hope. The aching bent me over in two like a folded piece of paper.
Boo shook her head and pointed at the brainiac. I guessed at what she was trying to say, and fought through my pains.
"You"re smarter than arties and the just-plains. The Council is just a bunch of just-plains all grown up. You can help us rescue him," I said, not really believing but hoping.
The brainiac sighed and nodded. "I can think of dozens, thousands of ways to free your friend, but logistically, you arties can"t manage it. "
"What"s logistically?" I said.
"Tools, resources," she said, rolling her eyes. "You"re just a bunch of stupid beatniks. Maybe if you still had some gengineering factories, you could make something, but-"
"I hid one," I said quickly. "Under the water. When the Tin Men came. "
"Well then, you"ve ruined it. It"s no good. "
"But you could fix it," Boo rasped in sing-song. the brainiac nodded.
"I could fix it, but then you"d need to make something that could get you into the Tower without having to fight tin men, and that"d be almost impossible," said the brainiac.
"Making is what arties do. You fix the factory, and we"ll do the rest," I said. I could see the shapes forming already. My fingers itched to work the disk.
"Fine, but this makes the arties and the brainiacs even," she said.
"Deal," I said.
The tin men were killing all the animals and plants in the city with ick. Someone must have changed their orders. They weren"t supposed to do that.
It hurt us arties to know, but it kept the tin men busy while we Made in shifts with the factory. We had a plan, one that the brainiacs thought would get us all tossed in the pokey, but Boo and I both believed it would work. The other arties made animals that would go into the Tower and distract, and I worked on special plants with exploding seeds. Weapons, like thicknecks used on one another. We tested the seeds on a lone tin man, and it stunned it. We smashed it up good while it was down.
The brainiac who repaired our factory met us in the shadows outside the Tower before we launched our attack. She pressed a sheet of paper into my hands. "One last little bit of help," the brainiac said. "This will show you where they"re keeping your friend. "
"Why?" I asked.
The brainiac laughed. "You have no idea how bored we are. Your little creations are an ad-hoc ecosystem springing up all over the city. We"ve been studying things. Your creations are immensely complex and function cohesively, even though they are artificial. This bit of information has vast implications on issues such as the Jungian overmind-" the brainiac blinked and cut off her speech. I hadn"t understood a word of it, only that they liked our Makes. That made me feel good. "Sorry. Anyway, we hope you can make more. "
"It was Niles" idea," I said. "Without him, we arties are too stupid to figure anything out. "
The brainiac frowned. "I wouldn"t be so sure about that. This plan of yours might actually work. And it looks like your friends are ready. "
Us arties were gathering from all over the city. Each had a wild little animal, frantic and tugging at a leash of plant-rope. Each carried a satchel of bomb-seeds. Across the corner, a few thicknecks had gathered. They made catcalls and threats, but none dared to cross the street. I could hardly believe my eyes.
Everyone waited for my command. I hesitated. If I said so, we arties would all go home to our Elderfolk. Maybe some would get supplies to ease the ache, and maybe some wouldn"t and they might die. Or we could attack the Tower and some would die and the rest would end up in the pokey-pokey or we might win and get back Niles and all his crazy ideas for Making. And it was my decision. Little Mona, whose art n.o.body understood.
n.o.body but Niles.
I gave the word. The arties rushed the tower. Tin men spilled out from the doors, and seeds flew from everywhere. They crashed to the ground in beautiful purple sparks, and we swept past them inside. We arties freed the frantic little animals, and they ran free. The tin men couldn"t decide whether to chase us or chase the animals and split up. I led us arties up, up, following the drawings on the paper.
We pushed past many many tin men, leaving them smoking behind us, and finally we got to the end place, and it was a place we all remembered, a birthing lab, cold, white and metal. And there were just-plains, the birthers, watching Niles, and he was sleeping in the tank, just like a baby arty. We scared away the just-plains. They tried to tell us to stop, that they needed Niles, but we needed him more. So we took him, and we left. We didn"t go back to the station. We found a new hiding place, in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a power station, and there, we waited for Niles to wake up, and we cried, all of us arties, all as one.
We"d done it, but Niles wouldn"t wake up.
He wasn"t dead, we knew that, because he was breathing. At first, no one would leave him, but even arties get hungry, and so we started watching in shifts, taking turns. Every one wanted to be the arty who was there when he woke, but it was me that was there, and it was Boo that woke him up.
She sang; it was beautiful, even if it was broken. The pattern in the sound reminded me of the colors on her screen. The sound grew louder as she continued, and then I saw that little flying animals had come from the sky and joined her, together adding their voices and fixing where hers was broken. It must have been the best sound in the world, because then finally, Niles woke up, and he smiled.
"Hey-a, Boo, "he said. "You can sing." As if he had always known, and it wasn"t a surprise to him. And maybe he did. Niles was smart, especially for an arty. Then he turned and smiled at me.
"Hey-a, Mona. You rescued me. "
"We did," I said. "And the brainiacs hardly helped at all. "
He laughed. "that"s good. But Ibeen thinking about what you said. You right. We should ask the brainiacs for help more often. Arties can"t do everything. "
I cried, and hugged, and cried some more.
Niles is getting better. He told me the secret of how the animals work, and at first, it made me sad. But we can eat the plants, and the animals too, so we don"t have to go back to the Elderfolk for chits. We"re staying here in our hiding places, and we"re sharing what we know with the brainiacs. They"re slipping away from their Elderfolk too. We need the thicknecks" help too, and the brainiacs are talking to them for us. Thicknecks listen to them, at least sometimes.
There are plants and animals everywhere now, and they grow too fast for the tin men to stop them. And the little flying ones, they all sing such sweet songs. Boo, and Niles, and I sit and listen to them for hours. Boo says that she only made some of them, and doesn"t know where the rest of them come from. The brainiacs have theories, but we don"t understand them.
And we still Make, more plants and more animals each day with more stolen factories. The ache is still there, but it"s not the same. It"s the ache you feel when things are good, not when things are bad. And that"s the kind of ache that makes you feel good. Niles says he understands it, but I don"t believe him. n.o.body understands that, not even the smartest brainiac of them all.
Jordan"s Waterhammer.
by Joe Mastroianni.
Joe Mastroianni"s short fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy and Tomorrow Speculative Fiction. He"s currently working on a novel that he describes as a psychic Antarctic love story. He"s done five deployments to Antarctica, and two to the south pole where he worked on instrumentation for climatic research. He"s been a Silicon Valley executive for twenty-five years and says he"s currently writing and building Tesla Coils.
Most of the worst atrocities in human history spring out of the dehumanization of particular groups. Germany"s war crimes during World War II are some of the most horrifying examples, with over 11 million people put to death not as individual humans, but as faceless Jews and Gypsies and anti-establishment "criminals. "
But genocide isn"t the only crime people commit when they strip the humanity from each other. Apartheid came from the same ugly source. Slavery, child labor, and even indentured servitude also depend upon devaluing a human being. It"s sickening to imagine a society that encourages people to see a man merely as a tool, not even worthy of a name.
Our next story gives us just such a society. The workers in this world fight to teach each other a man could be worth as much as the ore they work to mine, not because a man can be bought and sold for a particular price, but because a human being is valuable in and of himself.
Here is a world without the right to liberty, the pursuit of happiness, or even life itself. After all, how can a tool be free?
The gaffer tripped. He fell into Jordan"s blade and was cut in half with the ore pile. Perhaps it was confusion. The boy may have had his hearing. Confusion in the mine was common among the young men who could hear the crash of shovels against rock, the impact of turbo-pressured water against stone, and the roar of the loader engines. Jordan felt the slight hesitation as his machine sliced through the soft human body on its way to the heavy pile of ore. A less experienced man may never have noticed the barely perceptible difference between the hydraulic shovel"s pa.s.sage through air and its pa.s.sage through human flesh and bone.
Jordan typed a command on his console. He marked the ore load "dirty. " the ore would have to be washed clean of blood and bone before it reached the refinery. He ordered another gaffer.
He received an acknowledgment for the ore load but the tone sounded before his gaffer order was processed. He made a mental note to reorder a gaffer in the morning. At least the dirty load wouldn"t be charged against him.
The lights in his cab went dark. His control sticks grew sluggish then immobile in his hands as the hydraulics of the huge mining machine wound down. Steel bolts retracted with a jolt and the unlocked cab door swung open a crack. He could smell the air fill his cab. The atmosphere in the mine was damp and full of dust. The filters in the loader kept the air clean for him to breathe. But every time the cab door opened he could smell the sweat of the men amid the rock dust and steam. It reminded him of his boyhood.
Jordan unlatched the control connector and pulled it from his neck. He switched his connector from "cable" to "radio" control. Then he stepped from the cab into the dimly lit mine. He got in line with the other men and moved down the tunnel toward the elevators to the dormitories. The last load of ore lay still in his shovel. He saw the gaffer"s hand poking out of it as he pa.s.sed the front of his machine.
As they walked they pa.s.sed through larger and larger tunnels until they arrived in the main gallery where hundreds of miners stood in single-file lines waiting to board the elevators to the dormitories.
He joined the sea of white helmets and blue overalls and kept his eye on the number "6" lit above the elevator door to his home. Jordan felt a tingling on his neck as his audio monitor sprang to life. His ears had been damaged long before by the continuous din of the mines. Time as a gaffer and waterhammer had left him deaf. He heard the control voice from within his brain. The signal came through the contact on his neck and was relayed to the probes that had been embedded in his brain when he was sent to the mines.
"Loader J-for-Jordan group A, 600 tons on a team three. One neutralized load credited at half rate," said the voice. The tingling stopped. Control had deducted for the dirty load but they hadn"t yet processed the gaffer request. He would have to take the deduction for that on tomorrow"s work. He wondered if he had enough credit for a few hours in the sunroom.
A man in line for elevator two fell to his knees as the other men stepped away from him. They created a zone of emptiness between him and the community. Jordan felt the tingling again in his neck.
"Step away from Loader S-for-Solomon group K," said the control voice. Jordan took a small step away from the man who solemnly raised his hand.
A man in white overalls and a blue helmet approached Solomon. Jordan felt the tingling in his neck and heard the controller say, "Loader Solomon is in violation of quota as required by ordinance 62. 1. 3. "
Jordan didn"t bother to watch. It happened every work period. There was something about termination that made him feel unwell. He imagined the maintenance man pressing the particle gun to Solomon"s temple. There would be no struggle as Solomon dropped dead to the floor. The tingling in Jordan"s neck stopped. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the maintenance vehicle pick up the body for disposal.
The doors to elevator six slid open and thirty-one men stepped into the car. When they were in, the doors slid shut. Jordan walked two steps forward and stopped. He felt someone press two fingers into the small of his back. The sensation was brief but unmistakable.
He kept his eyes fixed ahead. He recognized the sign, the silent language of the deaf, the language of men. It was the sign for, "I understand. "
Jordan let his arms hang at his side. He made a fist with his left hand and held out two fingers in acknowledgment. He wondered what understanding Waterhammer had come to.
Jordan walked along the catwalk until he came to Thomas"s sleeping chamber. Without looking, he forced himself into the upright sarcophagus. Thomas was already inside the chamber barely big enough for one. Thomas exhaled. The door swung shut and compressed Jordan"s naked body against the other man"s.
In total darkness the two men stood compressed chest-to-chest. Jordan could feel Thomas"s ribs smashing painfully against his. He could feel the vibration of his heartbeat. The two men interlaced their legs and their arms. They stood compressed cheek-to-cheek as the sarcophagus sealed the last inch shut. Thomas strained his neck to touch Jordan"s. Jordan could feel Thomas"s breath against his face. With all the strength he could muster, Jordan pushed his head past Thomas"s. the control connectors on their necks touched.
The compartment rotated to the horizontal as the door bolts slammed into place locking them in. Carefully, they synchronized their breathing. Jordan exhaled while the other man inhaled.
"Your body is getting large, Loader Jordan. " Thomas"s voice appeared in his head as the voice of control had for years. "I killed Timer Matthew simply by growing too much for my lessons. I"m afraid you will do the same to me. "
"If you can finish the lessons soon you won"t have to worry about that. You"ll live happily to full termination age. "
Thomas exhaled as Jordan took a breath.
"Don"t breathe so heavily. The monitor will register abnormally high oxygen consumption and control will think I"m sick. "
"Okay," said Jordan. He tried to calm himself. He was eager to get to the lesson.
Thomas said, "Let"s begin then. " the words floated in Jordan"s mind. "In the beginning was the word, and from the word came the change. "
Jordan repeated what Thomas said. He visualized the words and imagined them appearing in Thomas"s mind much as Thomas"s words appeared voiceless inside his own head.
"Have you found someone to pa.s.s the book to?" asked Thomas.
"Yes," Jordan replied.
"That"s good. Very good. Does he have caring?"
"I think so," said Jordan.
"And how could you tell?"
Jordan hesitated. "He"s from farm 52 Iowa. He"s first one I"ve ever met. "