by Jerry
Esir did not take alcohol or dopeyweed, instead spending most of his free time in prayer; because of this temperance he was trusted to handle the demon-bottles, the special containers for the anomalies, praying right before and right after each time he handled them.
Ketkam felt a kinship with Esir, another outsider, and was drawn to Esir’s similar intensity and focus. He even tried following him in prayer. But his mind chattered away and eventually the friends simply shared silence, Ketkam reading while Esir knelt and prayed.
But when Ketkam talked about Tiktayut, Esir became agitated. “Don’t trust an aidoul. They’re tricksters, they laugh at our follies.”
“He’s not a ghost or a spirit, he’s a machine, just like a reading machine, only much more complex, a machine of ifs—”
“I know that,” Esir said sharply. “I am a prayerman, but my head is not stuffed with ignorant superstition. I know what the aidouls are.” He narrowed his eyes. “The bossman may want you to work with one. But be wary.”
He should be the wary one, came Tiktayut’s voice. After all, you lied to him.
Ketkam’s face grew hot, and he shook his head.
You let him think you were praying to gods, when in fact you were supplicating me.
And you did not answer, Ketkam replied under his breath. Esir proved himself my friend.
He’ll betray you in the end, said Tiktayut. All frail bodies betray in the end.
Esir gave Ketkam a tour of the collection station. Like silent trash-wallahs, massive magnets sifted the debris of particle collisions for antimatter—useful, if dangerous, as fuel for intrasystem travel—and for the rare anomalies. The machine to extract the anomalies was larger than the vast room in which his father clambered over trash heaps. Only one or two anomalies were collected each shift, and after each capture the beam had to be diverted for an hour. When radiation in the collection chamber had died down, Esir and other workers clambered inside and removed the magnetic bottle containing the anomaly.
Esir showed him a bottle, a cylinder as thick as his forearm, wrapped with fine wire. “This one is empty. If it contained an anomaly, you’d have to handle it carefully. The magnetic field inside keeps the anomaly spinning at a constant rate; if there is a change to that spin, the anomaly can decay.”
Ketkam felt a delicious shiver of fear. “What happens then?”
“You’ve felt the ground quiver, heard a strange thumping sound?” Esir asked. Ketkam nodded; he’d heard the whump! irregularly, about once a week. “Sometimes an anomaly misses the magnetic trap in the collection bottle. It’s so tiny it just falls through matter, going underground. It takes about a second or two to decay, and when it decays it eats out everything around it, in about a two-meter sphere—”
“Shifting off our brane,” Ketkam said.
Esir smiled. “Yes, that’s right, it makes a brane-blister. And that blister falls under gravity, often breaking a few hundred meters underground. But there’s already material there, and when two spheres of rock suddenly exist in the same space, well, it creates a concussion. That’s what you feel and hear.”
“And they use this to send ships to the stars?”
Esir shrugged. “If you spin an anomaly just right as it decays, you can enclose an entire spaceship. That’s why they’re so valuable.” He tapped the bottom of the bottle. “The bottles all have radio-frequency tags, and are carefully watched and counted. They’re valuable far beyond anything you could imagine.”
Ketkam looked longingly at the empty bottle. “I’d love to go the stars,” he said with a sigh. He told Esir about his trip to the starman’s saloon and the overwoman’s question:
What do you bring?
“I had nothing,” Ketkam concluded, “certainly not enough to bribe an overwoman.”
Esir smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. “You should be proud of what you’ve done. We’ve both gone so much further than most jhuto.”
Ketkam felt heat on his face, peculiarly pleased by Esir’s complement. And he tried to be happy with just that, he really did.
It was five years before Ketkam went home to visit his family.
He saved up the money, most of a year’s pay, for a shuttle flight home and queued up at the docking port. As Esir predicted, he was made to strip, and the physician—a woman, to Ketkam’s humiliation—indeed poked and prodded and stared into his body cavities and used a machine to examine his insides without cutting him open. He wanted to ask about that machine but was afraid to open his mouth. The overpeople might fire him or beat him or worse, for daring to talk to one of their women.
On the other side, he was given worn clothing and sagging sandals. There were three jhuto and four overpeople taking the shuttle back. The overpeople sat far away from the jhuto. Ketkam paced back and forth in the nearly empty hall, trying to imagine it full of jhuto workers going back and forth between the world and this moon.
He found the doorway to one of the disused rooms and stepped in. It smelled of moondust, the sharp sulfur smell (millions of years of cosmic radiation creating peroxides and other radicals) of something poised to burn. The light panels overhead had burned out, and in the dim illumination from the doorway, he saw some graffiti insulting the Samraatjus. No one had been in here for a very long time.
Ketkam walked to the far wall and leaned up against it. He imagined Esir on the other side, kneeling, praying. Ketkam had asked him to pray for a safe journey home.
Ketkam had decided not to return to the Moon. He couldn’t keep thoughts of radiation out of his mind. And his family was now relatively prosperous; he could return to being a fix-it-wallah, and his brother was helping Baakam in his trash-sorting. Ketkam had given his electric tutor to his mother, who had learned to read and write, and earned money writing for neighbors. Maakam had also written to Ketkam, begging him to come home. We have the money we need. We never go hungry anymore. We do not have to wear stinking clothes or sleep under filthy blankets anymore. You will make a good marriage. Please, you are worth more to us than a few extra coins. Goli would be angry at the loss of extra income, but Ketkam hoped he could placate him with additional bribes.
On his return, the world weighed down on Ketkam. After less than an hour, even before he had descended all the way to the underbelly of the city, he felt exhausted. He had exercised meticulously, had taken medicines to keep his bones strong and his heart from becoming enlarged, and still it felt as if he was buried beneath stones. It hurt just to take a breath.
When he stepped off the lift, he breathed in the old familiar salt-sour scent of bodies crammed into the corridors. People looked up at him and touched their brows in respect, and children ran up, crying, “Coins, coins, sir? Coins?” Although his clothes were plain and worn, he realized they were better and cleaner than most people had. They mistook him for an overman.
For a moment, he had an idea. What was an overman, but someone with a favorable accident of birth and money? Ketkam had been accidentally born in the deepdown corridors, but he had lifted himself up, had saved quite a lot of money. He would continue to earn more as a famous fix-it wallah. Perhaps, when he had regained his strength, he would return to the starman’s saloon and ask just how much it would cost. Maybe if he brought all his money and offered to fix things on the starship for free . . .
His reverie evaporated when a thin figure said, “Ketju?” Ketkam turned and saw the face of Chabi. Overwhelmed to see his friend, Ketkam hugged him and kissed him on both cheeks. As they held each other, Ketkam noticed how thin and bony his old friend felt.
Together, they walked back toward their old corridor. They gossipped for a while; then Ketkam said, “You’ll have to take me to my family.” He imagined they had moved, with all the money he had sent them.
Chabi stopped and said something Ketkam didn’t quite catch. At Chabi’s feet, a small dark woman with a wizened face sat stirring a cooking pot. She looked up, and Ketkam realized it was his mother. “Keti!” she shrieked with joy, almost knocking over the cooking pot as she j
umped up and hugged him and kissed his face.
Ketkam looked around. It was the same place where he had grown up. The cardboard was cleaner, and his mother’s clothes were not torn or soiled, but otherwise, little had changed. His mind whirred and anger bubbled inside him. “Has Goli given you the money I sent? Has he been cheating you?”
“No, no, he has given us money, plenty of money.”
“Then why do you still live here, like this?”
Maakam looked away. “The medicine is expensive.”
“Medicine? What medicine?” When she did not answer right away, he pleaded, “What have you not told me?”
She kept her face averted. “Your father. He has heart fever. The medicine is very expensive.”
Goli, looking less lean and with wrinkles crowding his treacle eyes, said, “You always had a tongue, but now I see the Moon has toughened you as well.”
Ketkam repeated his question. “This medicine—are you cheating my family?”
“Tchaa,” said Goli, turning his face and spitting onto the ground. “You are like my brother. Your family is my family. It is real medicine. I even paid, out of my own pocket, for a physician to examine your father.”
“And?”
Goli looked at Ketkam. “It is real medicine, but it only delays. Your father’s heart is damaged.”
Ketkam’s own heart thudded hard in his chest. He could feel it knocking against his skin. “Nothing can be done?” he asked in a dry voice.
“He needs a replacement. A new heart.
“I’ll pay for it.”
Goli snorted. “Even with the money you make, it is not nearly enough. Not with ten times the money.”
“I’ll find a way.”
“You might as well dream of flying to the stars.”
Maakam begged Ketkam to stay, hinting that since nothing could be done, Ketkam should stay with his family.
But Ketkam returned to the Moon, determined to find a way to earn the money to save his father.
In the dormitory, no one greeted him. Ullah, gambling and drinking with a small knot of other workers, scowled at him and turned away his face. Ketkam looked around for Esir. That was who he wanted to see, to talk to. Esir.
He found Esir praying in the abandoned storage rooms. Esir was on his knees on a prayer rug, facing away from the door, and Ketkam stood in silence, waiting.
After a while, Esir stood up and turned around. His face broadened into a smile, and he ran and embraced Ketkam and kissed him on the cheek. “You’re back! I was afraid you might not return.” Esir held Ketkam at arm’s length, searching his face. “Is something wrong?”
They sat down, and Ketkam poured out the story of his father, and of his sister and Goli and medicine for heart-fever; his entire childhood really. Esir sat close to him, and Ketkam felt the heat from his friend’s body. Esir held Ketkam’s hand, and Ketkam was conscious of the damp warmth of Esir’s skin against his. Tears leaked out of Ketkam’s eyes, but through the salty distortions, he saw the sweet, serious smile on Esir’s mouth. And inside of Ketkam surged such loneliness and longing, pressing against his chest, that he thought he might burst.
When Ketkam finished his telling, Esir draped an arm around Ketkam’s shoulder, and gently rested his forehead against Ketkam’s temple. Ketkam closed his eyes and listened to the gentle rush of Esir’s breath, to the thudding of his own pulse.
Ketkam slowly turned his face around, kissed Esir on the cheek, and then on the lips.
And then again.
Esir leaped up as if burnt. He looked down at Ketkam, his mouth in a small o, and Ketkam, his guts crimping, could not decipher the look on Esir’s face.
Esir began to fold up his prayer rug. Fresh tears came to Ketkam’s face. “Esir . . .”
“I have my work shift now,” Esir said, his voice tremulous. He did not look at Ketkam, but repeated, “I have my work shift now.” Then he walked out swiftly, almost running.
Ketkam sat with his eyes squeezed shut. His stomach felt as it did in freefall, and he thought he might retch.
Eventually, his stomach calmed, and his pulse slowed. He opened his eyes and let the cool, dim light wash over him. Slowly he rose to his feet, his limbs stiff.
He had to see Esir, to explain, to apologize, to beg forgiveness, to ask him to pretend that nothing had happened. As he walked down the corridor, the familiar loneliness settling on him like a well-worn coat, he tried on different speeches, but they all seemed clunky.
Ketkam was approaching the collection station when beneath his feet he felt the shuddering whump! of a rogue anomaly.
He ran into the station, past mountain-sized magnets that steered the particle beams. At the heart of the station, he found a ring of workers gathered.
Ketkam pushed past them. In the middle of the ferrocrete floor, a hole was neatly scooped out, a half-sphere about two meters across, shiny and slick. And on one side, leaking out dark fluid, there was . . . there was . . .
He turned away, and now he did retch, upended the contents of his stomach onto the floor.
Someone was saying, “He seemed nervous, upset, he wasn’t paying attention. I asked him, ‘Esir, are you all right?’ but he wouldn’t answer me, he wouldn’t even look at me.” Ketkam didn’t want to hear the words, he wanted to stopper his ears, but as he wiped yellow bile from his mouth he heard: “He had the bottle right in his hand, he wasn’t even looking at it, and he stumbled and dropped it and he dove and tried to catch it and he had a second, maybe two seconds you know . . .”
Later, during his sleep shift, Ketkam lay on his mat in the dorms, his eyes burning with exhaustion but unable to lay down his burden of thought. He still felt sick, the worst he had ever felt, worse than when his sister died, even worse than when he learned of his father’s heart fever.
At the same time, his mind was ticking over, whispering to him, recalling that smooth halfsphere hole, and despite his grief and guilt, he saw clearly just how powerful were the anomalies, and how valuable.
Ketkam shuffled up to Hakim and, eyes downcast, asked to take Esir’s place. Hakim shook out a pill. “He was your friend, wasn’t he? You a prayerman like him? You don’t take alcohol or dopeyweed. You don’t see comfort girls, and even Esir paid them a visit once in a while.”
Ketkam’s face warmed in embarrassment, but then inspiration hit him. “Yes,” he said. “I am a prayerman. I have much to atone for.”
The bossman shrugged. “Prayermen make for dutiful hands—and steady ones, with no hangovers or shakes. Don’t know what happened to Esir that day.” He frowned. “But I need a good man on magnet replacement.”
“Broader experience will help prepare me to replace you,” Ketkam said, without raising his eyes.
“True.”
“And I think I have learned all I can from Tiktayut.”
Hakim laughed. “That aidoul does get tiresome, doesn’t he? Well enough, then, I’ll switch you over.” He shook out another pill. “Just don’t let yourself get killed like Esir.”
He wrote to his mother—in his previous letters he had told her about his colleagues and had mentioned Esir as his friend—and told the story of how Esir was accidentally killed by an anomaly and how sad he was to lose him. He did not mention taking Esir’s place at the station.
After he posted that letter home, he waited until the next shuttle, then sought out a jhuto whom he knew to be returning to the corridors for the wedding of a cousin. Ketkam gave him money to memorize a message for Goli. He phrased the message carefully: he wanted to know from Goli how much a certain item would be worth if it could be smuggled out; he didn’t mention what the item was, but directed Goli to go to Maakam.
The jhuto grinned, understanding the lure of the black market. “You’ll never get anything down to the surface,” he told Ketkam. “They shine a torch up your arse to see if you are smuggling anything.”
“I know,” Ketkam said. “Just bring me the reply.”
Twenty days later he got his reply from
Goli: Yes, it would be enough. And: I have a buyer.
Ketkam found a manual, printed on old, crackling sheets of plastic, with the design for the magnetic bottles.
They were not easy to make, requiring high precision lathes, the kind used to make the wakefield resonators for the accelerator. Ketkam worked up his nerve and approached Hakim for permission to learn how to repair and rebuild the resonators.
“By the gods, boy! Don’t you plan to sleep? What would you spend this money on, anyway? You have an ugly sister you need the dowry for?”
Ketkam explained: the sooner he, Ketkam, mastered the skills of the factory, the sooner Hakim could retire and Ketkam could take his place.
Hakim gave a snorting laugh. “You are ambitious, aren’t you?” But his eyes were lit with pleasure, and he gave Ketkam permission.
Ketkam wrote to his mother, asking about Baakam’s health. With the extra money Ketkam was sending, Baakam was able to quit working as a trash-wallah, although Kedukam continued.
How much time does he have? was what Ketkam meant. But he didn’t dare ask that. He wasn’t sure he even really wanted to know.
He barely slept, but he treasured the heavy feeling he got when he was exhausted, reminding him as it did of life deep down in the gravity well.
One of Ullah’s stills was in a disused craftsroom. Ketkam kicked Ullah out—Ullah had turned sickly and weak in the last two years, his hair gray and falling out—but deliberately botched repairing the surveillance cameras.
In that hidden space, he set up a lathe, and with a cloth strapped across his mouth (the beryllium in the alloy was poisonous), he machined magnetic bottles. The first few were misshapen and ugly, utter disasters that gave him despair; but gradually his fingers learned how to turn the cylinders, and he began to enjoy his work, the crisp heat of freshly machined metal, the scent of hot machine oil.
One of the illumination panels in the ceiling was failing and flickering, but Ketkam kept working. He wrapped a fine thin wire around the bottle, attached the battery, saw the small yellow-white leap of current across the leads. Sprinkling in some fine iron filings, he was satisfied to watch them swirl around like a swarm of tiny insects.
