by M. R. Carey
I waited, but he didn’t say no more. “And?” I said. “Then what?”
“Then I give it back. What, Koli? You think Mardew let me stroke my dick with it or something? I only just weared it on my hand for a second or two, and then Ma made me give it back.”
That left me facing every way but the right one, as they say. I tried to figure it, but I couldn’t. “There’s got to be something else,” I said. “Something… what did she say to you? What did she do, right after?”
“She didn’t do nothing. I think she went out of the room with Mardew, when he went. Then she come back and told me not to talk about it, which I didn’t have no idea of doing until now. Koli, why does any of this matter? I wasn’t supposed to touch the tech before I was tested, I know that. It’s meant to be the first time, and it wasn’t. For me it was the second time. But why are you saying it like it was something I should be shunned for? Go ahead and tell the damn Count and Seal. They can dock my ration, if it makes you feel better. Only it’s a stupid thing for us to fight over. The stupidest thing I ever heard of.”
I run out of words, of a sudden. I had charged into this because I felt like I needed to know, and what I found wasn’t what I had been looking for. I was ashamed now of what I had been thinking about Haijon, who was my friend and deserved better of me.
But also I seen clear as day what Catrin done, and what she deserved.
And between them two things I couldn’t speak at all, not even to tell Haijon I was sorry. I got up onto my feet again and put a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged it away. “Dandrake’s balls, Koli, I don’t know what’s in you these days. You take Ursala’s side against my ma, and now you’re working up into a rage against me over nothing. Unless it’s because I passed the test and you didn’t, or I put Veso on the rush-walk in place of you. And if it’s either of those things, then you can go dance with Dandrake as far as I care.”
He was almost crying his own self by this time. He walked past me, banging me with his shoulder on the way, and kept on going until he turned the corner of a wall and I losed sight of him.
I stayed where I was. I knowed right then what it was I was going to do, and it was big enough so I couldn’t see past it or around it.
19
Here’s what Ursala told me. I’ll tell it plain, in her words, and leave you to paint the rest yourself. What it done to me to hear it. What it made me think about the Vennastins and the way they ruled over us all. What it made me think about Haijon, until I learned better.
So this is me going back to that night in Ursala’s tent when I asked her to tell me what she knowed about the tech of the old times and how it worked. And when she said there was one thing more, that was a secret and not to be talked about – or at least not in Mythen Rood, though there was places she’d been to where it was knowed by all.
I asked her to tell me what the secret was. I promised not to give it away, or let anyone know who it was that told me. I meant it too. I thought I could throw the bolt on my loose tongue if I needed to, in spite of what Spinner said the day we tumbled. I thought I had the trick of hiding what needed to be hid.
All right then, Ursala said. And she laid it out for me: the big lie, and all the little lies that had been piled on top of it. She brung me out of a fool’s paradise into a colder place, and it was all at my asking so the only fool was me.
“The tech of the old times,” she said, “if it was dangerous or valuable, had a whole suite of security features. Safeguards designed to make sure it couldn’t be used by anyone except its legal owners.
“Those safeguards got stronger and stronger over time. At first it was most likely to be what they called a password. If you picked the tech up or tried to switch it on, it would ask you for a secret word that the tech’s owner had made up beforehand. Just like when you come to the gates of a village at night when it’s too dark for the gate-watch to see you clearly. She’ll shout, ‘Who is it goes there?’ and you’ll have to answer with your name. Only the password wouldn’t have been your name, because that would be too easy to guess. It would be the name of a pet you used to have, or the name your mother called you when you were a baby, or a word that didn’t exist at all until you made it up. Do you understand, Koli?”
I nodded. I didn’t think Mythen Rood gates opened after dark for anyone, but I understood how it worked for hunters and wood-catchers when they whistled to each other over dead ground and knowed who it was on account of the whistles all being different. I thought it couldn’t be too far removed from that.
“Okay. Well, the safeguards became more sophisticated – cleverer – over time. You might be able to guess someone’s password if you knew them well enough. Other things would be harder to guess. Some tech would open if you drew a shape on it, or answered some questions, but again it was only a matter of a thief making the right guesses and she could get past the safeguards and use your tech.
“The solution, in the end, was to make the tech itself be a sort of gate-watch. When you picked it up, it looked at you and decided whether or not to let you in.”
“Tech ain’t got no eyes,” I said. Then I thought of the bolt gun, and how the bolts chased the thing they was aimed at. “Most tech doesn’t, anyway.”
“That’s true. But it wasn’t always a question of looking at your face. You see this?” Ursala held up her hand with all the fingers spread out wide. “The lines on your fingertips, they’re different from anyone else’s. So there might be a pad or strip somewhere on the tech that could take the imprint of your fingertips and check them against its memory to see if it knew you. If you matched, it would work for you. If you didn’t, it shut you out. The patterns of colour in your eyes could be used in the same way. They’re unique too.
“But the best method, and the one that became pretty much universal in the end, was what they called bio-sampling.”
“I don’t know what that is,” I said.
“It’s very hard to explain. Suppose I said that the tech tastes the sweat on your skin. And everyone tastes different.”
“Okay,” I said. I was thinking of Spinner’s sweat that day in the lookout when we kissed and when we tumbled. How it had made me feel to smell and taste her, and how different it was from any smelling or tasting the world had put my way before or since.
“It wasn’t really sweat that the tech was testing,” Ursala said. “It was something else that was even harder to fake. Something called DNA. It’s in every part of your body, invisible, and that includes the surface of your skin. The tech was so clever it could examine your DNA quicker than you could blink your eyes. And there was no arguing against what it decided. It knew exactly who you were. You were either on the nice list or the naughty list. And if you were on the wrong list then the very best that would happen to you was that the tech wouldn’t wake up. If you were unlucky, it would wake up and scream an alarm, or send a shock through you that would knock you out.”
She was in full flood, her eyes all shining as she talked, but when she stopped she lost the sense of where she was and sat still, staring at the table. I think the wine had something to do with it – and maybe the fear that had made her drink the wine in the first place. The fear that Catrin Vennastin might come against her in the dark.
I asked a question, aiming to start up that flood again. “But the first time you picked up that tech,” I said, “it wouldn’t know you. How could it? Ursala, I seen tech decide for itself to let someone use it, when they picked it up for the first time. It happened to my friend Haijon. I was there.”
Ursala give a shrug, like that wasn’t nothing, but her face was sad. “What you saw wasn’t what you thought you saw, Koli,” she said. “In the world that was lost, it was just a matter of following the instructions. You took the tech out of the box, powered it up and configured it. It woke up knowing there was a user nearby. All you had to do was introduce yourself.
“And after that… well, any authorised user can register someone else. You tell the tech to acc
ept and log the next person who picks it up – to put them on the nice list – and then you hand it over.”
I was still struggling, but now I was trying not to believe what Ursala was telling me. It was too awful if it was true. If it was true, then nothing else was.
“But the Ramparts…” I said. Then I started again: “I didn’t see no…” Okay, that wouldn’t do it neither. “Nobody done any of that when we had our testing in the Count and Seal. The tech was just set there, on the table, and we choosed what to touch. There wasn’t anybody telling it who was who, or giving it orders. We would of seen. Everybody would of seen.”
Ursala smiled, kind of cold, like I was helping her argument – holding the plank so she could nail it in, as they say. “Yes. You would have seen. So all of that gets done earlier. By the time you come to the testing, Catrin Vennastin has already decided which way it will go, for each and every one of you.”
I seen it then. But I didn’t know until Haijon told it to me just exactly how Catrin done what she done.
Which one you like, Haijon? Which one you think you’re like to go for? Let me fetch it for you, so you can take a good look at it. So you can hold it, and so it can get the heft of you. Because I already told it the next one to pick it up would be a friend.
Haijon was innocent of it, at least, but that was what must of happened, just the same. I seen how Catrin made him into a Rampart. That was when the anger took me, and it just got worse and worse until me and him had that fight.
It wasn’t like I stopped being angry after that neither. I just turned it another way. I got to feeling heedless of my future, since the onliest future I could see was being trod on by Ramparts until the day I died. Well, Dandrake could eat that and shit it out again. If rules was being broke, I could break them too. If Catrin could bend the tech to her own wish and her own winning, there wasn’t a damn thing to stop me doing the same, and standing up as tall as anyone. Only trouble was, I didn’t have any tech right then to work with.
So I thought I would go and steal some.
20
Breaking into Rampart Hold was real easy in the end. Also, it was the hardest thing I ever done.
That loose window was still where it had always been. All I had to do to get down into the Underhold was to wait until dark and sneak across the gather-ground while the lookout’s back was turned. And once I was in, I knowed where to go.
What made it hard was the thinking about it. This wasn’t like when we was kids, and sneaked in through that window to play blind man’s touch down in the dark. This was me going up against the Ramparts. And not just the Ramparts but my own mind, that had steeped in all the old rules the way green wood steeps in stop-mix.
I choosed my moment, four turns of the glass past midnight when the old lookout was ready to come off the tower and most likely not so wide awake as they ought to be. I climbed out of bed, put my day clothes on again and slipped out of the house. But I stopped along the way to take the workshop key off its big hook and put it in my pocket. No one heard me go. I hoped nobody would hear me come back neither, but if they did I had already made up a story to explain what I was doing – that I heard someone moving around outside and went to see who it was.
It was a clear night, with a full moon. Anyone with any sense in their heads would of seen that and gone back to bed, but I had made up my mind to this course and it wasn’t in me to put the business off even to the next night. It was now or never, as they say, and never wasn’t a thought I could bear to think.
But I wasn’t so stupid neither as to cross the gather-ground with that moon shining down on me like a lantern. I stood in the shadows under the tocsin bell until a cloud come over, and then I took my chances. I didn’t run, though something in me surely wanted to. I knowed running would make my footsteps sound out louder, and I’d stand out that much more from the dark if someone was looking. I moved slowly, so a watching eye might not see me move at all.
But there wasn’t no watching eyes, or at least none that seen me, for I made it to the back wall of Rampart Hold with no ruckus raised. The cloud was still favouring me so I didn’t tarry. I found that loose window, right where it had always been, and eased it out of its frame. I set it next to me, up against the foot of the wall.
When I joked with Haijon that he might be too big now to go through the gap, I hadn’t ever thought that might go for me too. I had slid through it just as easy as a rat when we was children, and I didn’t feel I’d growed so very much bigger since. But it was a tight fit, and my feet scuffled on the stones a little as I pushed to get through. Then when I come down inside I landed badly and fell over on my back, knocking down a broom that was standing against the wall.
My heart was climbing up my throat with both hands as I crouched there, listening. This was the top level of the Underhold. Right over my head was the Hold its own self, where Ramparts was sleeping now and everything was still as stone. Someone must of heard me, I thought, for the noise had been so shocking loud in my ears.
But no one come, and by and by I picked myself up off the floor. My skin was still tingling with fear, and if anyone had touched me I would of run up the wall onto the ceiling and kept on going. But since they didn’t, I went down the stairs, feeling my way in the dark.
I could of brung a candle and a tinder-box with me, but I was scared the shining would be seen out of the window, or maybe even through the boards in the ceiling if anyone was still awake in the house up above me. In any case, I knowed my way by feel. I had played a thousand games of blind man’s touch down here, and all them games was in my feet and in my fingers.
I went down past two levels of stores, and then I come at last to that door I hid behind five Summers past – the door that was two doors, one behind the other. I drawed back the bolt on the outside door, and I found the handle on the inside one. It didn’t give when I turned it, being locked.
I took out the key I brung with me, my ma’s workshop key, feeling all over the lock plate with my other hand until I found the keyhole. I tried the key, and it slid right in. When I turned it, I felt the wards turning with it, and I heard the click as they give.
I breathed out a big breath right then, that was like a sigh. I hadn’t knowed for sure it would work; I only hoped. The first time I seen the lock, I reckoned it to be the exact twin of the lock on Jemiu’s workshop door. It was my da who made both after all, and put them there. I was thinking he might of used the same key for both plates, rather than cast another while he was here. Catrin would of skinned him if she found him out, but like I said he didn’t stay but a single night. It seemed like a good bet he never told the woman that was paying his hire that he put in a second lock for the woman who tumbled him.
There was nothing but pitch dark on the other side of the door. I stepped forward, my hands held out in front of me, going an inch at a time in case I tripped. I touched nothing for a long way, then suddenly my fingers was stroking cold metal. I slid them over the shape of it and found a row of shelves about an arm’s length deep and maybe twice as wide. The shelves was filled with stuff of every size and shape.
All my guesses was working out, one after another. This was the tech that never yet worked for anyone, or else had stopped working long before. The tech that only come up above the ground once a year on testing day.
I run my fingers over all the things that was there, feeling the strange shapes and the strange smoothness of their surfaces. The men and women who made these things was dead and buried long years before I was ever born. I felt, just for a second or so, that I was buried with them, and when I reached around to find the door it would be gone because this was a grave instead of a room. I had to go back and make sure the door was open, and I took the key out of the lock so nobody could shut me in.
It was around about then I had a thought that might of done some good if I had it an hour before. I should of brung a bag. Without one, the most I could take was what I could hold in my hands. My plan was to take as many bits of tech
as I could carry and try them out one by one in the hope of finding one that would wake for me. If I did find one, I would bring all the others back the next night, hoping that the Ramparts wouldn’t miss the one I took. Then I could say I found it in the woods. It was a thing that had sometimes happened, though not in my lifetime.
It waked when I touched it, I’d say, so that makes me a Rampart. It was a flat lie, but it seemed a small one next to the lies the Ramparts themselves was telling every time they used their tech and every testing day. I felt ashamed, but I was angry enough to get myself past that feeling. And there was a thought under everything else that pushed me on, though I tried my best not to think it. It was that Spinner had choosed Haijon instead of me because he was a Rampart, and if I become a Rampart too then she might change her mind after all.
What with these hopes and dreams and tangled-up thoughts, and fearing to be catched, and not having a bag, I stood there for a long time like I had put down roots and would be found in full flower when the weather turned.
What pulled me out of that was a shout from outside that give me such a shock I all but yelled my own self. I thought someone had found the window out of its frame and set up a hue. I was so panicked by it I took to my heels, though there was nowhere to run to. I missed the open door in the dark and banged into the wall, which set me down on my tail.
My head was ringing like the tocsin bell, and there was lights in my eyes that was kind of dancing. They’ll get me for sure if I just lie here, I thought, but when I tried to get up my legs didn’t seem to have no bones in them. Then there was another shout in a different voice, and I realised it was just the lookouts calling the change, the one of them as she went and the other one as she come.
I had been in here much too long, in other words. I crawled over to the back wall again and grabbed an armload of stuff from off the bottom-most shelf. I didn’t try to choose, which wouldn’t of been much use in the full dark. I just took what come. Then I put myself up on my two feet again somehow and got myself out of there. Remembering to lock the door and take the key, which if I left it behind would of been like an echo-bird shouting out “Koli Woodsmith done this!” for all the village to hear.
