Member

by Michael Cisco

  “Now you’re awake?”

  His voice is mellow and even.

  “Are we going to play ball?” I ask hoarsely.

  Guerrero’s smile changes equivocally.

  “Why not?” he says, with a brief laugh.

  “I have a delivery for you,” I say. After shouting so much—and the other voice has also fallen silent—I have to speak softly; I sound meeker than I feel. Well, fine. Let him think that. It makes a better impression.

  “Yes,” he nods. “But we weren’t expecting any.”

  “Well, I have it here.”

  I turn and lean way out over the edge of the bed, fumbling the bag up from the floor, and saying, “It cost me considerable time and effort to bring it to you.”

  Awkwardly raising myself on one arm, I lift up the bag, so that he can see it.

  “I only wish I had some use for it,” he says, in a commiserating sort of way.

  “How can you know that if you don’t know what it is?”

  “Well, isn’t it spells?”

  He’s casual, but watchful, reading me carefully. It’s impossible for me to do the same with him.

  “Yeah,” I say. “In part.”

  “What else?”

  “There’s some prizes.”

  “Prizes!” he laughs quietly at that. “Oh of course, the prizes!”

  The way he puts it, I get the impression these prizes are just afterthoughts, like fortune cookies, but he hasn’t missed the way I pay close attention to him, his demeanor and tone, as well as to the mere content of what he says, and so he may be trying to persuade me indirectly that the prizes are less valuable than they really are.

  “And what else?” Guerrero asks this in such an obviously supercilious way that I get the message my bluff is being called.

  “You tell me,” I say, settling back on the bed, my back feeling twisted. “I’ve been too busy tracking you down to rummage much in this bag.”

  I pop the clasps, flip back the flap, and hold the bag up. It droops open like a sagging lower lip. As I do this, out of the corner of my eye, I notice a crescent of pale hair dangling just at the nearer edge of the window, as if a head had canted forward to get a look. I shake the bag and the spell canisters and prizes rattle. Guerrero barely glances down, smiles at me, then purses his lips. It’s like he’s sucking on a savory candy.

  “Toothpaste and bandages?”

  I’ve shown him the wrong side. I flip the bag deftly if I do say so myself and show him the other compartment, which has no internal partitions. The spells and prizes are on that side, even my brief look at them a splash of goosebumps up my right side, and gives me a little jolt like an electric shock.

  Guerrero doesn’t look any more attentively at them than he had the toothpaste, but the head of the woman with the glass eyes now floats into view and her hands bring up a triangle made of what looks like static. With a plucking motion—like the gesture you’d expect, but in reverse—she strikes the static triangle with a static rod, and it chimes sourly. When I lower the bag, she withdraws back out of sight.

  “Are all deliveries expected?” I ask.

  “No, not all. But, not to take all night about it, you must not make your delivery to the wrong site, you understand. While we would not be affected much by a mistaken delivery, whoever did put in a request for what you’re carrying—assuming it wasn’t dispatched by mistake in the first place—would be left in the lurch. You are an autumn leaf on a summer day, my friend.”

  This longer speech gives me a chance to appreciate the cultivated way he pronounces English. He has the easy, inconspicuously studied eloquence of someone who is accustomed to making impromptu speeches at meetings and relating finished anecdotes over dinner.

  “Can’t you use this stuff?”

  “No,” Guerrero says.

  “Is this because they’re specific to each site, or something?”

  “Not normally. But we don’t need them now.”

  “What about later?”

  Guerrero laughs. “My friend, you are very eager to make the wrong delivery.”

  I launch into a recitation of my directions. Minutes go by and I start to fall asleep again; but the directions I’ve memorized have solidified into an alphabet that can only come out completely or not at all.

  “All right, so you know some directions. As you’ve been told, those directions don’t mean this site.”

  “But they led me here.”

  “That is true...” he says slowly. This answer evidently takes a bit more concentration. “It is true...” he repeats. “...but did you get the right camp? There is another one here. The artifact cannot have any opening in it—not one—going all the way through it, from one side to the other; and it is so long that the journey around it takes days. There’s rough terrain along the way, in either direction, for that matter.”

  The others murmur a little at that, as if they’d all had firsthand experience of rough terrain and they, as connoisseurs of rough terrain, concurred with his intelligent assessment. I’m not seeing the connection myself, and wonder if he’s running me around verbally.

  “So,” Guerrero goes on, “there is another camp no different from this one on the far side of the artifact, with a foreman of its own and crews of its own. Perhaps it is the place you were directed to.”

  “I don’t suppose it occurred to anyone to ask them.”

  A little sadly, he shakes his head.

  “We have not and we cannot,” he replies. “As close as we are to them, we are completely unable to contact them.”

  “Is this place on a post route?”

  “No. Only a special courier could make the journey overland.”

  “What about over the top of the artifact?”

  “The top of the artifact is impassable,” he says. “Once in a while, someone will try to send a message over to the other side, by crumpling up a bit of paper and tossing it, for example, although other, less crude, methods have been tried. There was a woman named... Gloria—Gloria?”

  He asks this of the people sitting near me, and there’s a murmur of assent and quiet repetitions of the name.

  “Ah, Gloria. She used a pigeon, too, now that I think of it. But nothing ever comes back. Notes are found now and then. Every once in a while notes are found. But they are always ours. They blow back. Sometimes we think we’ve found a message from the other side, only to discover, on further investigation, that it was left a long time ago, by some worker from this camp, long since dead.”

  “Why no radio?”

  “The artifact interferes. Even with lines. No,” he shakes his head. “Only a long journey on foot could establish contact with the other side, and, so far as I know, although I suppose I may be mistaken since I’ve never actually looked into it, no one has ever gone there and come back here again. And no one, not one person from the other side has ever come over here. We can’t even be certain that they are still there. All that can be said with assurance is,” he lifts a finger, “that wood smoke sometimes comes from the other side.”

  “How do you know they aren’t tearing down their side?”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Is this something you would know?”

  Guerrero thinks about that. Then he bursts out laughing. His voice dwindles into a series of clucks as his stifled laughter drills into him, until he has his head down and is laughing in silence, just like an Operational.

  “What about sending over a balloon?”

  The breath he draws goes to fuel a more vocal and helpless discharge of laughter, but he does answer the question giddily.

  “The wind is so fierce above the artifact. Haven’t you noticed how it always blows exactly down its length? That’s one of the oldest and best attested design aspects.”

  From somewhere he produces a mug of coffee, or something, and sips it, recomposing himself.

  Should I ask him what it’s for? Or is this something a real courier would know? But then, how often are petty hel
pers like couriers told anything about what they’re carrying? Knowing what you carry doesn’t make it any lighter, or your feet any faster.

  Perhaps I’d be giving myself away if I didn’t ask—he might not intend to answer, but it could be more dangerous to me to pretend I know what I don’t than to admit I don’t know.

  “What’s the dingus for anyway?” I ask.

  “The wind channel is critical to the entire artifact,” Guerrero is still laughing strangely, in quickly diminishing gasps. “It operates along the entirety of its known length.”

  “I meant the whole thing. What’s it for? What’s it do?”

  “We don’t need to know what it is,” he almost giggles, “to be able to follow directions. They don’t bother to tell us such things. That’s why we identify design aspects, the better to try to understand what it’s supposed to do, or to be.”

  “And? What do you think it is?”

  He pauses to draw breath. In a face the weird light of the camp has turned blue, Guerrero’s eyes take on shrewd look. With a quick, wary glance at the others, that has something of a warning in it, he answers.

  “I think it is a time machine,” he growls, with a kind of Latin emphasis.

  “It certainly taking its time to get built.”

  Guerrero laughs again, lightly and suavely this time. “Sure. But when it is finally finished, it is going to be glorious!”

  “Well,” I toss my hands. “What should I do?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  I shrug.

  “Well,” he says, after a moment, “do what you like. You may remain here, if you choose. This could be the right place for you after all, although I will tell you again that it isn’t. There is no way it can be, but then, sometimes the High Rationals change their plans. If that happened, your delivery might be needed here after all. But there’s no telling when that might happen, if it happens at all, and that sort of thing might never happen.”

  “Is this something the High Rationals could tell me?”

  He sighs, as if he’s rediscovering the comforts of his chair. “Do what you like. But I advise you to wait. We will consult Chorncendantra. Very nice meeting you.”

  Guerrero wheels himself away from the window. I can hear the chair rattle in the lane outside. The people seated in the room respond to this as if they’d been told to disperse, getting up out of their chairs stiffly, like people who’ve been sitting for a long time.

  “Clare can radiate to the outer Centrals. If you wait, I will keep you informed.”

  “After you con—” but he’s gone. So I ask the people next to me, the room, “What happens then?”

  “Get instructions from the Orbiters, most likely,” one of the older women says as she gets up, brushing dust from the front of her dress.

  *

  I drop off into unconsciousness again and again, the truck noise is still going on. And so is my outrage at awakening and reawakening to it, as though any amount of sleep would be a long time, long enough for this truck to conclude any legitimate business. Something connects us, and cues the truck to roar whenever I awaken, and I suppose it must rest when I go back to sleep again. Fatigue grogginess and stupor and seeming to look out from a hole I feel cursed, as though my luck had been stolen from me and my dawn eaten mind.

  From my window, I can watch the shifts. As near as I can tell, the Operationals work only in brief bursts, and spend the rest of their time recovering in their beds.

  The woman with the pale hair, her glass eyes hidden behind sunglasses, stalks by every now and then. There’s something brooding and ecclesiastical in the way she keeps her head bowed and her hands clasped behind her back. Just now she’s vanished between two rows of barracks, almost as if she were trying to find cover.

  Music from somewhere. More like the outer trembling of a music I can’t quite hear, coming from the direction of the artifact. Operationals leap through the air like astronauts on the moon. They’re installing a diaphanous, calyx-shaped object several dozen feet across, which takes form right in front of my eyes; they seem to conjure the materials out of the music’s steady rhythm. The notes tumble around for a second or two, like hurdlers, and then one significantly higher note chimes at the turn of each repetition.

  The music has many layers, is syncopated in a complex way, so that one element at one end of its time-diameter is balanced by another at the corresponding position across the interval. As I strain my ears, lifting myself to the window to hear better, I am just barely able to determine these things, but I notice also that my mind seems to be clearing. My thoughts organize themselves. Chance and my own practice brought me here, they say, and my practice put me in the way of certain chance events—necessarily chance events. Seeing the necessity of chance makes me appreciate the importance of the game, and I am now doing that appreciating.

  It occurs to me that I might try just resting part of myself inside the bag, and so I allow my left hand to drop into it and grope in the paraphernalia. Although I continue to be fully aware of what goes on around me, in my mind I see a planetary system in a part of the universe that’s so remote, that no light from any other part can reach it. In a starless void there are two enormous metal objects, machines the size of giant planets, which attract and repel each other so as to move closer together and farther apart in irregular and greatly protracted cycles. They are actually bound to each other by an elastic braid of some rareified material. Whenever they come close enough together, a charge leaps the gap between them along this braid, forming a constant spark which, while it gives off nearly no visible light, is as energetic as a sun. In fact, this spark is called the “contact sun.”

  The braid connecting these two machines trails thirty-two filaments of equal length. Each of these tethers a planet to the contact sun. These planets are all of exactly the same size, all orbiting at one constant distance from the contact sun, and arranged in pairs one hundred and eighty degrees apart. The orbits are separated by twenty-two and a half degrees of arc throughout the orbital sphere. The filaments are also made of a rareified material, having both solid and gaseous properties, which balloon out to envelop each planet. When the spark appears, electricity is conducted along these filaments to the planets, causing these dead worlds to spring back to life again, each in its own particular way. What light there is in the system comes from the planets themselves, which wink on like fluorescent lamps when the power is restored.

  I realize I have unwittingly witnessed two of these resurrections: one on the planet of the Operationals, and another on the planet of the High Rationals. The windswept world of the shaggy beings is also one of these planets, although I did not see its revival.

  Eventually, who knows why, the machines will begin to repel each other again, and drift apart. The contact breaks, the sun vanishes, and the planets all die, again.

  I turn my attention to the man lying in my bed. I’m sure he isn’t the one who was there last—he was dressed more or less like a patient. This man wears durable work clothes, covered in dust, and he might have only just come in and settled himself numbly down on this bunk to rest for a moment. I get up and go over to him. His shoulders are against the backboard and his head droops forward on a long, thick black neck.

  “Is this Guerrero’s music?” I ask.

  His eyelids flutter, and he takes a long breath in through his nose before he answers, without looking up.

  “No, High Rationals. Guerrero is the foreman...”

  “He’s an Operational, right?”

  He shakes his head. “Rated a Science 5. Something else.”

  “What about the woman?”

  “Hm?”

  “Glass eyes.”

  “That’s Clare. That’s his wife.”

  “I know her brother.”

  “Darren?”

  “Little creep?” I ask, “Has a thing for the bandages?”

  “That’s Darren. He’s got his own way of thinking.”

  “She an Operational?”r />
  He shakes his head.

  “Planetary class Central. She’s planetary class.”

  “Is this important?”

  “Hm?”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Chorncendantra coordinates through Centrals.”

  “Does that put her in charge?”

  “Of Guerrero? Or who?” His head bobs slightly as he asks. It’s like talking to a medium in a trance.

  “Whoever. Is this a high rank?”

  “No, no...”

  He stacks his hands limply then drops them again. “There are different levels of frame of reference, so like Clare can handle this much so she gets ranked at planetary while, you know, ‘Dummy’ can only handle a little bit so he gets ranked at... his ass.”

  “But does she outrank Guerrero?”

  “There’s no outrank,” he says drowsily. “The orders are different. It’s all different orders. No one knows how many there are. The other side keeps its organization a secret. It might consist of only a single player. Actually, allowances are specifically made for that.”

  He blinks at me a few times, then gives me a wan smile.

  “Who are you?” I get the feeling he thinks I’m here under false pretenses, and that he finds the idea amusing.

  “A member.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “My last name is Thanks.”

  “Must be distracting.”

  “Where do the High Rationals make the music?”

  “Don’t go out there now unless you want to end up back ‘on staff’ again.”

  “All right but afterwards where will they be?”

  “I don’t know...” he shakes his head and lets it drop. “They run the plant from somewhere else.”

  “What plant?”

  “They stargrind. Run it through the river and skim off the buff. The input’s oil but the run off’s water and meat. Hold on, I got to finish my pain drink.”

  Only now do I notice he’s been leaning over a cup he has cradled in one hand. He raises it abruptly to his lips and tosses off something that has a sharp smell, then winces and presses a palm to his abdomen, shifting his torso to and fro as if he were trying to tilt the drink through himself, like a ball bearing through a maze. The cup looks like it was quarried out of a rough piece of white rock. It floats from his hand and crosses the room before settling itself into a wooden rack.