Ruined Cities

by James Tallett (ed)

  “You spoke of your sick mother,” he says. “There’s a plague spreading through the city. If she has contracted it, this will cure her.” I stare at the vial, puzzled. “It isn’t magic,” he admits. “But is that truly your concern right now? If it saves her life, what does it matter how?”

  I stare into his eyes. “Why would you help me?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t care either way. I just wanted to show you that what you think is evil can actually do some good. That’s all.” I pocket the vial. “And don’t think I’ll be here in the morning,” he says as I turn around and disappear into the darkness. “I have been traveling, and I will not rest until it is done.”

  Then I am gone, and I journey home without question or thought.

  When I return, I enter my mother’s bedroom. I hover over her, wondering if Perseus handed me poison instead of a cure. But if I do not use it, my mother will die anyway. With nothing to lose, I gently shake her awake.

  “Mother,” I say, “will you drink this? For me?”

  She nods drowsily, and I pour the liquid into her mouth.

  A week later, my mother fully recovers.

  I think about telling my mother, Arthur, or someone else about what I saw, yet I can never bring the words to my lips. Even in my head, I do not know how to organize my thoughts. I cannot form an opinion. I cannot decide if what I saw in that cave was horrific or wonderful, terrible or inspiring. I am empty now, with nothing to glorify or shun, love or hate.

  I often dream of Perseus, but there are two images of him now. The first is Perseus the hero, who wears a dark cloak and wields magic and defends us from the wizards. The second is Perseus the immortal, who builds new technologies from the tools and machines of the past. For now, these two versions of Perseus remain separate, but I fear that in time, they will converge. When that happens, I do not know what will become of me.

  Will I stubbornly claim that magic exists, or will I face reality? Regardless, I see no alternative. There is no place for magic in this world. So either I will perish, or I will become like him.

  I do nothing now but wait for the day when I too cut out my heart and replace it with a computer, believe in one thing but call it another, and travel from city to city with only one goal in mind. They will glorify me. They will call me a hero. They will say I use magic, and I will not correct them. Then one day a boy will come looking for me, and he will see me for who I really am. He will walk away unharmed, but utterly destroyed, and he will realize how little he knows about the world.

  COBBLER AND MINION

  by

  BRENT KNOWLES

  After the third day Jake could last an entire shift on the factory’s dissection lines without spending his breaks puking black coffee, greased fries, and yellow bile into the dirty urinal the fifteen-man night crew shared. By his fifth day he could chat with the others and by his eighth he was laughing with the crew when old man Mazo tore a face free and used it to mask his own.

  “You found a bright one!” Jake said. Splotches of soft blue glowed through where the paint had worn thin, the color vibrant and crisp… the face had life in it.

  Mazo nodded and removed the face. He turned it over for a final examination before tossing it onto the recycling cart, where it joined arms, legs, and even a couple torsos.

  An orange ping-pong ball bounced off the floor near Jake’s feet, rebounding in a low arc to hit his knee before rolling under the idle conveyor belt. Overseer Jenning, with her red pail full of balls, glared at him from behind the wire rail of the second floor galley.

  “Back to work.” The thrown ball had been a warning. He’d seen others bounce off men’s heads. Heard the old timers talk about a guy who had been blinded. Probably bullshit like most break talk.

  Still, he hated her. Well not her specifically but any and all who had risen above him.

  Jake pressed the green button on the dangling cord beside his conveyor line and with a catch and a grumble the line resumed sliding salvage his way. He had long lost the calluses of his youth and his hands were sore and bloody; fingertips covered with strips of cloth.

  What would Dale say if he could see Jake like this? Probably die of shock — if he wasn’t dead already. Jake bit his lip. He would find Dale. That was the whole point.

  When the shift ended Jenning shouted down to dismiss the workers. An assistant of the flesh and blood variety (even overseers didn’t have proper servants), walked the lines and slammed down safety levers, cutting power to each conveyor. Jake lifted his apron and mopped at his sweaty face as he exited the warehouse.

  A boxy service robot, only an upper torso, arms, and head cobbled together with C quality salvage, had been set on an overturned crate outside the door. It dispensed vouchers from a hand held printer. One voucher for each worker with a scratch-out code they could use to cash the night’s wages in any midtown grocery. Jake took his place in line.

  “Clear skies.”

  Jake looked behind him, tilting his head down. Mazo was ancient, with a wrinkled face and scarred, stained hands. Those hands would have been soft in the early, spoiled years of Mazo’s life, back when Rain still fell. Jake followed the man’s gaze to the two moons, Mazo’s bright eyes reflecting the silvery blue of the smaller Cocoon-wrapped moon.

  “Look down, old man,” Jake said, “the gifts are gone.”

  “Nah. She’ll open again.”

  Jake shook his head. No way to convince the elderly that the glorious world of their youth, five robots for every family and all luxuries there for the taking, could never return. Two decades since the last time Rain had fallen. The Cocoon was spent.

  “Evening, sir,” the robot wheezed. She printed his ticket and he stuffed it into his satchel.

  ***

  “Sun will rise, moons will fade; so shall our seven cities,” Renay quoted, the poem’s source unknown to Jake. Dale’s girlfriend wore a short canvas skirt, her bare legs holding her in place on the concrete railing, three stories above ground level. Renay had education, having attended a missionary school until she was old enough to work.

  Her family squatted (as did he and Dale) in the outskirts of what once was a much larger metropolis, back when Rain fell on schedule. Now only the inner city and its ivory towers, across the bay from them, benefited from the Cocoon’s gifts.

  Jake sat with his back against the wall of his balcony, beside and below Renay. He handed her the joint he had been smoking, keeping his eyes from traveling up her skirt. She was careless that way around him but he knew it was unintentional.

  The sounds of life surrounded them, the other homeless who had claimed this abandoned apartment, bustling and busy, preparing for morning despite the lack of promise inherent in a new day.

  She whispered, “Hard to believe it was like the other moon, a dead rock drifting in space.”

  Growing up in the Burning City, a thousand kilometers away, had been an education of an entirely different sort for Jake, but he heard the same tales. The Cocoon had appeared from nowhere, a faint speck of blue that expanded daily until it covered the moon. Nobody remembered who had put it there. Or why.

  “That something so… permanent could change from ugly to beautiful; magical,” she said.

  Jake rolled his eyes. “I don’t believe that. The Cocoon has always been there, there never was a war in space and men never set foot on either moon and…”

  “Men did. And women too,” Renay said, loud enough he had to look up, bare legs or no bare legs, “you know you sound like Dale now, right? Mocking the gift.” She jutted her head towards the moons, added, “But when I first met you the Cocoon was all you talked about. Hunting for Rain, for mana.”

  His cheeks reddened. Eight months ago the rumor of recent Rain, of a mana fall, had brought Dale and him to Bay City.

  “Hasn’t really worked out, has it?” Jake said.

  “A dreamer. That’s what your big brother always calls you.”

  Brother? Was she blind? He smiled, having no energy to lash
out at her with the truth. She continued, “Said without him, you’d have starved, or been stabbed to death, or lost yourself out in the ‘Sands near the Great Salt.”

  “He told you all that?”

  “Of your adventures, yes — being chased out of cities, surviving the wild, hunted by Unwanted,” Renay said, her voice rising, “all ending the same. Dale saving your hide.”

  “What would I do without him?” Jake muttered, annoyed that Dale talked about him, behind his back. And to a woman!

  The lie Jake had given Renay was still holding up at least. He had told her Dale was doing janitorial work on contract for a firm in hightown. But three weeks had passed and time was suspicion’s best fertilizer.

  “At least you’re working now… and you did that on your own. That’ll please Dale,” Renay said, clambering off the rail, presenting her back to the night. She bent low, her blouse hanging loose as she returned his joint. He took a drag and stood.

  She had that smile, like she was amused on several levels, most of which an ordinary man like himself could not attempt understanding. He shuffled, uncomfortable beneath her gaze, wondering if somehow she could read his mind, decipher the tone of his thoughts as he looked at her slender legs or watched the way her blouse ruffled in the gentle wind, a white-blue spray of moonlight softening her.

  “Do they scream?”

  His eyes widened, her words running nowhere parallel to his thoughts. A relief and a regret, that. She made a cutting gesture with her hand as if sawing into flesh.

  “No. The factory has fields on each conveyor, disables the mana. Makes the robots sleep through it.” No screaming. No wiggling. Still gruesome work but not what it might have been, otherwise.

  He shuddered, remembering what had happened his first shift. Renay asked, “What is it?”

  “The fields devour energy. Lots of it. They do fail sometimes.”

  She gasped. “A robot woke up on you?”

  “No, a couple lines over. Almost gave old man Mazo a heart attack.” Almost gave Jake a heart attack too, but he didn’t feel comfortable admitting that to Renay. The effect had been localized, one robot and the recycling cart nearest it, waking. The entire event only lasted ten seconds before Mazo had pulled the heavy lever on the conveyor down and back up, resetting the breaker. Ten seconds in total. Ten long seconds of clawing, scrambling, screaming.

  The Cocoon in the sky was full and shimmering and Renay turned her attention to it. “A butterfly, she is, waiting for her to unfurl silk wings, to Rain down gifts. But is she empty, have we spent it all, have we drunk the fool’s drunk? Was it all a mistake?”

  Jake bristled. “The robots… have their uses.”

  “A company man already,” Renay said, reaching to tease his hair, her long nails digging across his scalp. When her touch lingered he tried to draw away but his back was too soon against the concrete wall. Her eyes stared past his.

  “You have his tattoo.”

  Jake opened his eyes, not realizing he had closed them, had pushed himself off the wall, pressed against her. Too long since Jake had last taken a woman, not since Asma, back in the Burning City. But Renay didn’t notice his intent, her attention drawn instead to the tattoo on his right temple, three rings, overlapping briefly. He brushed his hair back over the tattoo then turned her so her back was to the wall.

  “What did he tell you about it?” Jake asked carefully. Some secrets were not for Dale to repeat.

  “A gang mark, from when you both lived in the Burning City. Before you did whatever stupid thing you did that got the two of you exiled. He never said what that was.”

  Jake nodded. A truth hidden by an almost true lie.

  “Is that how you met? A gang?”

  A half continent away and the Burning City still figured prominently in his dreams. How could it not? His body would remember, even if his mind learned to forget. He stepped past Renay, pressed his scarred hands firmly against the rough concrete.

  “Yes.”

  She gave him a curious look. “Dale is okay, right?”

  Jake’s stance softened. He nodded.

  “Tell him to come by when he returns. And don’t be dour, he’ll be proud of you, for the job and everything.” She gave him a quick parting kiss on the cheek.

  He did not watch her leave, only stared at the Cocoon.

  “Come back Dale.” He whispered. It was not a plea. It was an order.

  ***

  He daydreamed of childhood and heard again the never-to-be-forgotten hissing sound of Rain falling.

  Jake, the child, watched a falling star of brilliant greens and yellows segment the sky, visible even against the bright, sundrenched morning light. The city’s smoke stacks were spraying their excess sideways out of the largest towers; the smog blackened the horizon but was unable to completely hide the arc of mana fall. The hissing stopped moments before the Rain slammed into marshland to the south of the Burning City.

  None of the other beggar children woke to see it. Jake took his plastic box, containing all his worldly possessions, and tip toed out the lean-to, a sheet of aluminum angled against a brick wall, all that remained of the junk keeper’s house. Adults seldom left the inner city, leaving the orphans free to roam and salvage from the accumulated trash of a decayed society.

  His determined strides soon took him clear of the junkyard but he had more to worry about than a companion waking to steal his prize. He knew watchers in the towers would have spotted the fall and robots, driven by their greedy masters, released to steal it. The masters hoarded their blessings, worrying of another great reversal of power, as had happened when the Rain first stopped.

  Twenty minutes of running later, fueled more by dreams of claiming mana than any food he had eaten the last couple days, Jake stumbled into the marsh. He was well aware Unwanted might lurk behind every rotting tree, but the daylight gave him false reassurance, as did the potential payoff of this gamble.

  A robot of his own.

  The fall had created a three meter depression in the soft ground of the oil-drenched swampland, having barely missed a black metal pump-and-sucker. He passed the machine as it slammed up and down, pulling oil into rusted pipes leading to the main conduit. The majority of the petroleum would be burned by those living in hightown, the excess exported to other cities.

  The fall was not particularly impressive, but the hole was large enough he would have to climb into it. Soft soil crumbled away, spilling dirt trails that preceded him into the warm depression. The mana’s blue light glowed steadily, having shoved aside mud and clay, until striking hard rock. The collision had flattened the mana, like a pancake with a rounded top.

  “Finally,” he whispered, not brave or desperate enough to risk a touch, waiting for the last of the steam to curl from it.

  Mana. Moon rock, smart rock, hundreds of thousands of tiny robots, each with reasoning and potential. Alone, insignificant; together, robots within robots — insignificance transformed into complexity. Even trash like Jake knew this minuscule fall harbored a million potentials.

  To a young boy with no future it was the stuff of magic.

  He looked up and surveyed the gravel highway running parallel to the pipeline. The skyline was clear, no clouds of dirt signaling a horde of robot runners. He dropped back into the crater, opening his box and rummaging through his possessions.

  All the kids out here had watched ‘flix recovered from the trash about the shaping. Children’s stories, made during a time of wonder when a fall like this happened daily. Jake knew what to do.

  Shape the mana, give it a form. Then breathe purpose into it.

  Jake placed both dirty palms against the moon rock. He winced but his hands were thickened with calluses and the pain was insignificant when set beside the life of pleasure and indulgence awaiting him. After he shaped a robot, what need had he of hands?

  Though he had not heard the gates open he was certain the runners were released and so he hurried. He would not be safe until he had imprinted
the robot.

  Eyes shut and tight he conjured the form. The crater filled with wet sucking noises, and the scuffing of rock against rock, extraterrestrial against terrestrial. He opened his eyes to watch the mana finish extending and collapsing into a man’s body, the surface rippling as if boiling. The robot was taller than Jake could aspire to, muscular legs bent, knees raised, the crater too small for it to extend to its full length.

  Live.

  And it did. Eyes opened, no fluttering, the transition from being closed to being opened too rapid. Crisp blue eyes, like Jake’s, staring out blankly. The face itself, the body, had sparse definition, smooth without wrinkle or feature.

  He exhaled warm air; let it flow across the robot’s cheek. “Take care of me,” he said, instead of “serve and obey”, as the children in the stories always did.

  The two, creator and created, stared at each another while the ground trembled from dozens of heavy feet slamming into it. Dirt spilled down the crater’s mouth, tumbling across Jake’s hands. He shook with nerves.

  “Who am I?” the robot whispered.

  Now Jake didn’t have a father. Well technically he had one, and a mother too, but they were technicalities, nature’s requirement for those not shaped from moon rock. But he did have a picture, carefully torn from a sheet of paper Jake had stolen during a fun bout of midwinter theft last holiday. The poster had been on the front door of an abandoned club and showed a muscled man wearing no more than a thin leather thong. It had been the man’s face that had drawn Jake to the picture. No broken nose or bruised cheeks. A prideful look, with piercing eyes that had made Jake stand slack-jawed before it. Now he pulled out that paper and unfolded it, not even cursing when he tore it. It would soon serve its purpose.

  The ground shook again.

  “Hurry,” he encouraged his creation. The robot studied the paper and then changed — muscles growing, wear lines appearing, a belly button. Almost all the details that made a man a man. In a minute a glowing blue replica of the poster’s model was in the crater with Jake.