Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 51, page 3
Culin swallowed at the thought of being cut off, but she hadn’t answered his question. “Why not?”
“Because it’s not right,” she said, too fast. He kept his eyes on her face.
“What do you care?”
She struggled for something to say. He could see it. He could also see how inadequate it was, to her, to settle on “Because there are five-year-old boys down here who watch camera feeds so they can tell strangers when it’s safe to go to market.”
Well, that explained something.
“You’re one of those people who’s in love with the districts even though they’ve never been here,” Culin said. There had been one in a flat a few alleys away from Culin’s, a while ago. Came down to make a data lab where you could find parts for any machine in the market for cheap, from mostly modern to decades out-of-date; came down for the spirit of adaptation and ingenuity. Hadn’t counted on the lectric that was buggy at best, or the way the cold went right through the buildings no one thought to insulate. Hadn’t counted on half his protein coming from the larvae in the bread, or the way people bought up the buggy flour first, ’cause hell if they could afford protein otherwise. In the end, he’d bugged off Upcity again.
“You find anything new?” Jace asked.
He let her dodge. He pulled out the smartscreen, flipped it on, and showed it to her. “I tried talking with the encryption. It’s all patterns and words, but it doesn’t make sense.”
“That looks like a Markov chain,” Jace said. Culin frowned at her, and she explained. “You figure out what words are most likely to follow each other and use it to make sentences. Of course none of them make any sense, but every three or four words do.”
“Markov chains,” Culin muttered. “What the hell are those used for?”
“Market tests and party tricks, as far as I know,” Jace said. “But there’s a professor Upcity who’d know more. Maybe it’s a lead.” She looked over at him like she was about to say Let’s go, then caught herself. Culin shifted on his bad foot, feeling a sudden pang of imposed self-consciousness. He was no more fit for Upcity than an Upcity pet was fit for the sewers in the slough.
Jace exhaled, sharply, and reached out to clap him on the shoulder. He flinched away, and she pulled her hand back with a rueful, sidelong smile.
“I’ll keep you in the loop,” she said.
She didn’t.
• • • •
Ten hours later, the data lines cleared up like they’d never been clogged. The only news on the net was wild speculation, and aside from It was something with Markov chains?, Culin had nothing to add to it.
He kept an eye out for Jace that entire evening, but didn’t see her. No sightings, no messages. Probably to be expected, that. She might track him across the districts, but would she know his net address? Probably she had better things to do.
He went to collect his payment from the girl running security. From the look on her face when she answered her window, she wasn’t impressed with his service; still, he said “I earned something, didn’t I?”
“Minus the time you took,” she said. Then, after a second, she sighed. “Hang on a minute.” She vanished into her flat, and came back with a plastic sack to give him. “For your effort, anyway.”
“Thanks,” Culin said. Then, as an afterthought, “Sorry.”
She shook her head and shut the window on him.
He climbed up to an empty ledge, settled there, and opened the sack to find a half-full bag of red wheat, a jar of salt, and a clear envelope with a five-credit piece. It’d keep him for a couple meals; not much, but something. No one wanted to send a LEMR away empty-handed. Thin times for everyone, but not so thin you’d flirt with the rep of being someone who didn’t pay.
He tied the sack shut and started climbing again, searching through the crevices of the district for the flags that said someone might need him. All around, the buildings crowded too close together, all but rubbing shoulders to keep from collapse.
• • • •
Culin saw Jace again, after the rains had gone and the water was taking on the old-plastic funk of stuff stored up again. He was sitting in the otherwise-empty contage annex of the Dead Engine as though nothing had happened, nursing cheap distillate and a bruise on his jaw, and another thumb glass of red cordial arrived. This time, Jace was carrying it.
“Sorry to disappear on you,” she said.
Culin grunted and kicked out one of the old crates that served for chairs. She took it without comment, and Culin took the drink.
“So what was it?” he asked.
“This seventeen-year-old kid in Vista Norte, trying to get into a technical college,” Jace said, and Culin had to blink at the idea of someone being a kid at 17. “He had this project to map the districts. Not the buildings, the ideas. The data.” She shook her head. “He wanted to understand the districts. I can understand that. He just didn’t realize he was hurting them.”
“You can understand that, too,” Culin said.
Jace gave him a sharp look, then relented. “Yeah, I guess.”
She reached over and took his distillate, gave it an appraising sniff, then tasted it. He watched her, but she didn’t show disgust.
“Upcity has a cure for that,” Jace said, gesturing at his contage band. “We could take off the tattoo, too.”
Culin leaned back, probing at his bruise.
“So, you came here to save us,” Culin said. “Then it turns out it’s some Upcity rat? That must smart.” He smiled despite the ache. “The people down here know me. Tat or no tat, they know who I am. Upcity, even another district, I’d just be the no-reputation LEMR from the junk district slums. Sounds like no cure.”
Jace watched him for a moment. “How’d you get that bruise?”
He winced, and turned away.
“We might not be perfect, but I think we’re closer to it than you are,” Jace said.
Culin shrugged. “You might be better than us, but this is the place that lets me be good.”
“And throws stones at your face?”
It’d been a shoe, but it didn’t matter. “Hazards of existing.”
She looked pained. “It shouldn’t be.”
That wasn’t a sentiment he could do much with. “And, what? You’re here to make my life better? I don’t really want to be your district charity adoption case.”
Jace looked chastised, but more like she’d already been thinking it than like he’d called her out. “Friend, then? Can that work?”
That didn’t compute. “Friend?”
“Well, clearly I can’t save you.” She pinched at the skin between her thumb and forefinger. “And we’ve seen where trying to study you gets us. But you interest me. Maybe you could deputize me.”
Culin doubted that Upcity taught people the meaning of the word “deputy”—at least, any definition that would follow them down into the districts. “I fix lectric and data lines.”
She shrugged. “Then that’s where I’ll start.”
He was about to respond, but it occurred to him that maybe Jace was like a bloodborne disease he wasn’t getting rid of. What you could do—with contagion, with the crud in the water supply, with the bugs in the flour and the very fact of Upcity and the districts—was learn how to live with it as best you could.
He shook his head, sighed more for effect than for protest, and said, “Let me buy you a drink, this time.” Jace raised an eyebrow, and Culin ignored it and raised a hand for Nis to come.
© 2014 by An Owomoyela.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
An (pronounce it “On”) Owomoyela is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and a handful of Year’s Bests. An’s interests range from pulsars and Cepheid variables to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between. Se can be found online at an.owomoyela.net, and can be funded at patreon.com/an_owomoyela.
To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.
Morning Child
Gardner Dozois
The old house had been hit by something sometime during the war and mashed nearly flat. The front was caved in as though crushed by a giant fist: wood pulped and splintered, beams protruding at odd angles like broken fingers, the second floor collapsed onto the remnants of the first. The rubble of a chimney covered everything with a red mortar blanket. On the right, a gaping hole cross-sectioned the ruins, laying bare all the strata of fused stone and plaster and charred wood—everything curling back on itself like the lips of a gangrenous wound. Weeds had swarmed up the low hillside from the road and swept over the house, wrapping the ruins in wildflowers and grapevines, softening the edges of destruction with green.
Williams brought John here almost every day. They had lived here once, in this house, many years ago, and although John’s memory of that time was dim, the place seemed to have pleasant associations for him, in spite of its ruined condition. John was at his happiest here and would play contentedly with sticks and pebbles on the shattered stone steps, or go whooping through the tangled weeds that had turned the lawn into a jungle, or play-stalk in ominous circles around Williams while Williams worked at filling his bags with blueberries, daylilies, Indian potatoes, dandelions, and other edible plants and roots.
Even Williams took a bittersweet pleasure in visiting the ruins, although coming here stirred memories that he would rather have left undisturbed. There was a pleasant melancholy to the spot and something oddly soothing about the mixture of mossy old stone and tender new green, a reminder of the inevitability of cycles—life-in-death, death-in-life.
John erupted out of the tall weeds and ran laughing to where Williams stood with the foraging bags. “I been fighting dinosaurs!” John said. “Great big ones!” Williams smiled crookedly and said, “That’s good.” He reached down and rumpled John’s hair. They stood there for a second, John panting like a dog from all the running he’d been doing, his eyes bright, Williams letting his touch linger on the small, tousled head. At this time of the morning, John seemed always in motion, motion so continuous that it gave nearly the illusion of rest, like a stream of water that looks solid until something makes it momentarily sputter and stop.
This early in the day, John rarely stopped. When he did, as now, he seemed to freeze solid, his face startled and intent, as though he were listening to sounds that no one else could hear. At such times, Williams would study him with painful intensity, trying to see himself in him, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, and wondering which hurt more, and why.
Sighing, Williams took his hand away. The sun was getting high, and they’d better be heading back to camp if they wanted to be there at the right time for the heavier chores. Slowly, Williams bent over and picked up the foraging bags, grunting a little at their weight as he settled them across his shoulder—they had done very well for themselves this morning.
“Come on now, John,” Williams said, “time to go,” and started off, limping a bit more than usual under the extra weight. John, trotting alongside, his short legs pumping, seemed to notice. “Can I help you carry the bags?” John said eagerly. “Can I? I’m big enough!” Williams smiled at him and shook his head. “Not yet, John,” he said. “A little bit later, maybe.”
They passed out of the cool shadow of the ruined house and began to hike back to camp along the deserted highway.
The sun was baking down now from out of a cloudless sky, and heat-bugs began to chirrup somewhere, producing a harsh and metallic stridulation that sounded amazingly like a buzz saw. There were no other sounds besides the soughing of wind through tall grass and wild wheat, the tossing and whispering of trees, and the shrill piping of John’s voice. Weeds had thrust up through the macadam—tiny, green fingers that had cracked and buckled the road’s surface, chopped it up into lopsided blocks. Another few years and there would be no road here, only a faint track in the undergrowth—and then not even that. Time would erase everything, burying it beneath new trees, gradually building new hills, laying down a fresh landscape to cover the old. Already grass and vetch had nibbled away the corners of the sharper curves, and the wind had drifted topsoil onto the road. There were saplings now in some places, growing green and shivering in the middle of the highway, negating the faded signs that pointed to distances and towns.
John ran ahead, found a rock to throw, ran back, circling around Williams as though on an invisible tether. They walked in the middle of the road, John pretending that the faded white line was a tightrope, waving his arms for balance, shouting warnings to himself about the abyss creatures who would gobble him up if he should misstep and fall.
Williams maintained a steady pace, not hurrying: the epitome of the ramrod-straight old man, his snow-white hair gleaming in the sunlight, a bush knife at his belt, an old Winchester .30-30 slung across his back—although he no longer believed that they’d need it. They weren’t the only people left in the world, he knew—however much it felt like it sometimes—but this region had been emptied of its population years ago, and since he and John had returned this way on their long journey up from the south, they had seen no one else at all. No one would find them here.
There were traces of buildings along the way now, all that was left of a small country town: the burnt-out spine of a roof, ridge meshed with weeds; gaping stone foundations like battlements for dwarfs; a ruined water faucet clogged with spiderwebs; a shattered gas pump inhabited by birds and rodents. They turned off onto a gravel secondary road, past the burnt-out shell of another filling station and a dilapidated roadside stand full of windblown trash. Overhead, a rusty traffic light swayed on a sagging wire. Someone had tied a big orange-and-black hex sign to one side of the light, and on the other side, the side facing away from town and out into the hostile world, was the evil eye, painted against a white background in vivid, shocking red. Things had gotten very strange during the Last Days.
• • • •
Williams was having trouble now keeping up with John’s ever-lengthening stride, and he decided that it was time to let him carry the bags. John hefted the bags easily, flashing his strong white teeth at Williams in a grin, and set off up the last long slope to camp, his long legs carrying him up the hill at a pace Williams couldn’t hope to match. Williams swore good-naturedly, and John laughed and stopped to wait for him at the top of the rise.
Their camp was set well back from the road, on top of a bluff, just above a small river. There had been a restaurant here once, and a corner of the building still stood, two walls and part of the roof needing only the tarpaulin stretched across the open end to make it into a reasonably snug shelter. They’d have to find something better by winter, of course, but this was good enough for July, reasonably well hidden and close to a supply of water.
Rolling, wooded hills were around them to the north and east. To the south, across the river, the hills dwindled away into flatland, and the world opened up into a vista that stretched to the horizon.
• • • •
They grabbed a quick lunch and then set to work, chopping wood, hauling in the nets that Williams had set across the river to catch fish, carrying water, for cooking, up the steep slope to camp. Williams let John do most of the heavy work. John sang and whistled happily while he worked, and once, on his way back from carrying some firewood to the shelter, he laughed, grabbed Williams under the arms, boosted him into the air, and danced him around in a little circle before setting him back down on his feet again.
“Feeling your oats, eh?” Williams said with mock severity, looking up into the sweaty face that smiled down at him.
“Somebody has to do the work around here,” John said cheerfully, and they both laughed. “I can’t wait to get back to my outfit,” John said eagerly. “I feel much better now. I feel terrific. Are we going to stay out here much longer?” His eyes pleaded with Williams. “We can go back soon, can’t we?”
“Yeah,” Williams lied, “we can go back real soon.”
But already John was tiring. By dusk, his footsteps were beginning to drag, and 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.
