Jason Sanford - [BCS299 S03]

by Where the World Ends Without Us (html)

  But there was no way to break out of the biosphere’s entryway—the outer walls were too strong. And even if they could the anchors outside would never let them escape.

  Finally, Chakatie stepped to the inner doors and touched them, and her own red binding wrapped around her neck.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” she yelled at her family. “If I’m being punished, we’re all being punished.”

  Her family reluctantly did as ordered.

  “The judgment festival begins at noon tomorrow,” Sri Sa said. “Until then, relax and enjoy paradise.”

  The grains making up Sri Sa’s body fell apart and vanished, followed by the words “we’re so dead” spoken from where she’d been standing. Alexnya looked around, puzzled, until realizing it was Pinhaus throwing his voice, so nervous over what had happened he didn’t seem to realize he was doing it.

  The biosphere’s inner doors opened, revealing the habitat inside. A sweet blast of cool air splashed around Alexnya, smelling of green plants and fresh water and a beautiful, perfect spring day. And seen from the inside, the biosphere’s glass rainbowed the sky, sparkling and shimmering in beauty. Birds flew through the air and cicadas hummed invitingly.

  But somehow, for some reason, right in the middle of this paradise was a day-fellow caravan, parked alongside a small lake, only a hundred yards from the entrance.

  The day-fellows stared back in shock at the appearance of so many anchors, but that shock vanished when they began shouting at each other in warning. A young woman in nano-reinforced leather armor unsheathed her short sword and stepped between the anchors and her caravan as all the others ran for the shelter of their armored wagons.

  For a moment Alexnya feared this was her former family’s caravan and they were to be punished too if she was found guilty, but the markings and sigils on the wagons were all wrong. And it looked like this caravan had been camped here for weeks—their horses were unharnessed and grazing in the grasslands near the lake. And the caravan had set up their manufacturing and tool creating nanoforges outside the wagons, something rarely done because of the risk of damaging the environment and angering the grains.

  “Why are day-fellows in the biosphere?” Pinhaus asked. “Are we supposed to attack them?”

  Chakatie didn’t say anything but held her hand up, holding her family back.

  Now that Alexnya looked closer she saw that all of the day-fellows wore the same red necklaces as she and Chakatie’s family. And the woman standing before them in the leather armor was clearly the caravan’s warden, tasked with protecting the day-fellows and answering any challenges from anchors. While she looked tough, armed with that sword she wouldn’t stand a chance against Chakatie and her family.

  Or she wouldn’t have stood a chance if a laser pistol—technology forbidden to all humans by the grains—wasn’t also holstered to her hip.

  Alexnya acted like she hadn’t noticed the laser, praying none of the other anchors had seen it either. But naturally Wren, being the perfect annoyance she was, spotted it.

  “What’s that on her belt?” she asked.

  Pinhaus glanced at the caravan warden and his lips twitched into a straight line. His body instantly swelled to his grains’ power as he shook in anger.

  The warden laughed. But she didn’t pull her laser. Instead she sheathed her sword.

  “You’re pretty brave for a fellow prisoner,” she called. “But I’ve been told all about you, Pinhaus. You can’t do a thing without your mommy’s approval.”

  The warden grinned. Pinhaus shook in anger, but the warden was correct—he wouldn’t attack without Chakatie’s approval.

  Chakatie stepped forward and Alexnya followed. She remembered the images of Frere-Jones cutting down dozens of anchors with a laser, including that crying man who’d begged for mercy. How quickly could this person draw her own pistol and fire?

  “Do I know you?” Chakatie asked when they stood face to face with the warden. “Seems you’re familiar with me and my family.”

  “The name’s Mita,” the warden said, bringing her hands together politely before her chest and bowing slightly. “And no, we’ve never met. But I’ve heard plenty about you. Sometimes can’t get him to shut up about all of you.”

  Alexnya started to ask what Mita meant when a young man walked toward them from one of the wagons. He held a laser pistol in one hand but didn’t aim it as he closed the distance. He also didn’t smile or look nervous, as if walking up to a group of anchors while carrying illegal technology wasn’t anything to worry about.

  The young man paused before Chakatie. “Hello grandmother,” he said.

  Chakatie hugged him tight, and Alexnya saw tears in her eyes.

  “Thank the grains,” Chakatie said. “Colton, I never thought I’d see you again.”

  The young man didn’t react, standing stiff as if being hugged by his grandmother wasn’t anything worth getting emotional over. But once Chakatie released him, he holstered his pistol and touched a finger to a series of glowing red dots on his left forearm. Then, to Alexnya’s surprise, he suddenly smiled and hugged Chakatie back.

  “Grammie,” he said with the loving emotion not there before. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  Chakatie also looked surprised by the young man’s emotional outburst. She whispered something to him, which Alexnya didn’t hear because she’d finally recognized this bastard.

  This was Colton, the banished son of Frere-Jones, Alexnya’s predecessor as anchor.

  The only emotion Alexnya felt was the urge to beat him bloody for his mother getting her into this mess.

  Alexnya and Pinhaus sat in the caravan elder’s wagon along with Mita, Colton, a young day-fellow girl of maybe twelve years of age, and two other day-fellows who hadn’t bothered to introduce themselves. Alexnya knew how they felt—socializing with anchors was one thing, but to invite them into a wagon? Into the only place where day-fellows felt any safety from attacks by anchors?

  Such a thing was never done.

  The caravan’s leader was Elder Vácha, a tiny woman whose face had been so weathered by the years that it resembled fine leather. As befitted her position, this solar-powered wagon was packed with the caravan’s medical and communications equipment, including a very powerful diagnostic table in the middle. Everyone sat around the table on small folding chairs or on the sleeping bunks jammed between storage cabinets and the armored walls.

  While it was tight quarters, being back in a day-fellow wagon filled Alexnya with so many happy memories. She felt that if she turned around, her mother would be there to tuck her into bed, or her father to kiss her on the cheek, or her sister to argue over what game they should play the next time their caravan stopped for a breather.

  The wagon shook as Elder Vácha and Chakatie climbed back inside, then closed and sealed the armored door behind them.

  “That ought to keep everyone happy,” Elder Vácha muttered. “I handed out the good wine. Not the best, mind you. We never give uninvited guests the best. Not unless they first blow tons of sunshine up my ass.”

  “Your manners definitely haven’t improved with age,” Chakatie muttered.

  “Nah,” Elder Vácha said. “But while I’m now old as shit, at least I don’t look it. You, though—did age make you give up on looking presentable?”

  Alexnya gagged a laugh—she’d seen Chakatie kill people for insults like that. But to her surprise Chakatie laughed and embraced Elder Vácha as if they were old friends. Others in the wagon chuckled, the tension broken but only slightly.

  Only Pinhaus didn’t laugh, but Alexnya figured at this point nothing could make him happy about how his day was going.

  Chakatie flashed a grandmotherly smile at Colton, who stared stone-faced back at her. Since his earlier embrace of her, he hadn’t shown any further emotions.

  “Mita, is the wagon sealed and secured from the grains?” Elder Vácha asked.

  Mita tapped the diagnosis table, which shimmered into projected measu
rements and readings. “Yes. There are still no grains in the biosphere and no loose grains in the wagon. But we do have grains in these damn necklaces. And I can’t do anything about the grains the anchors carry in their bodies.”

  Elder Vácha shrugged. “Is what it is.” She looked at Alexnya and shook her head sadly. “So I hear you’re the reason we’re all gathered here.”

  The day-fellows at the table glared at Alexnya, and a few looked like they wanted to curse her out.

  “Calm down,” Elder Vácha ordered. “Bigger things are going on than one young woman being judged. We’ve got to pull together all we know and figure out a way to survive.”

  She tapped the table and an image appeared of this caravan.

  “All of this was recorded a year ago,” Elder Vácha said, “about two hundred leagues from here, in a land controlled by an anchor named Sri Sa.”

  Alexnya frowned. “Sri Sa? That’s the name of the anchor lord running this judgment festival.”

  Elder Vácha shook her head. “Can’t be. The Sri Sa we knew is dead, and there’s no way the grains would create a simulacrum of her life. She wasn’t exactly a model anchor.”

  But when Elder Vácha tapped the controls to project an image of Sri Sa, it was indeed her. Alexnya’s grains clicked together in anger, and she felt her claws growing—she shoved her hands under her legs to avoid alarming the day-fellows.

  “That’s her,” Chakatie said with far more calm than Alexnya felt.

  “Wait,” Mita said angrily. “This festival’s anchor lord is Sri Sa? Our Sri Sa?”

  “So it appears,” Elder Vácha said with disgust.

  Alexnya noticed that Colton responded to this revelation in a strange manner. Instead of getting angry like the other day-fellows, he reached out to touch the glowing dots on his left arm. But both Mita and the young girl sitting beside him stopped him. “Save it for later,” the girl said.

  Elder Vácha shot them a stern glare then continued playing the recording. Alexnya had grown used to the immediate nature of the grains’ communication, which recorded and shared the memories of anchors. But she’d also never forgotten the lessons she’d learned growing up in her own day-fellow caravan. As a child she’d been forced to sit in a communication wagon much like this and watch holographic recordings of anchors butchering day-fellows who’d been accused of harming the environment.

  All day-fellow kids grew up seeing disturbing images like that in the hope it would keep them safe, as much from harming the environment as from doing anything to anger the grains.

  Like those videos, the images now being projected had been recorded by tiny cameras on the outside of the caravan’s wagons, and some of the recordings were in bad positions or from a distance. But Alexnya still watched in fascination as the caravan entered Sri Sa’s domain, only to discover she had murdered all her fellow anchors and gained the ability to control both her land’s grains and their power. The recordings also showed the little girl seated next to Colton having an illegal neuroconnector embedded in the back of her neck, which allowed her to likewise manipulate the grains, although not a powerfully as Sri Sa.

  Because of Sri Sa’s heresy and the girl’s neuroconnector, countless anchors from surrounding lands had attacked this caravan. But the day-fellows had teamed up with Sri Sa and escaped, using forbidden technology such as laser weapons. Alexnya fought back horror as the recording showed Colton and Mita and others burning down anchors by the hundreds in cold-blooded slaughter. The killings by Frere-Jones paled to what these day-fellows had done.

  “The recordings of what happened next were lost to us with the destruction of one of our wagons,” Elder Vácha said. “But it turned out the grains which powered Sri Sa weren’t like the grains we all know—they were an ancient variant of the nano-machines and were programmed differently. In the end Sri Sa used so much of her grains’ power she lost control and destroyed herself and everything around her. Mita, Colton, and Ae were the only ones to escape that wagon’s destruction.”

  Alexnya couldn’t fault these day-fellows—they’d done all this merely to survive. But from the anger on the faces of Pinhaus and even Chakatie, she knew no other anchors would see it that way.

  “Not much more to tell,” Elder Vácha said. “We thought we’d escaped punishment, but a few weeks ago as we were passing through this region, a couple of large groups of anchors surrounded us and forced us into this biosphere. Where we each received one of these glorious necklaces.”

  “Surprised you didn’t fight back,” Pinhaus growled. “Add more dead anchors to your tally.”

  “Sometimes it’s smarter not to fight back,” Mita said. “Live to kill anchors another day.”

  “You used illegal technology!” Pinhaus said angrily. “You murdered hundreds of my people, yet you have been allowed to enter this sacred paradise? We should kill you all right now.”

  “And yet here you are, being punished alongside us,” Mita said, tapping her own red necklace. “Makes me wonder about your own sins.”

  Pinhaus jumped across the table and tried to grab Mita’s throat, but she deflected him with a punch in his face. Alexnya powered up her right arm to punch Pinhaus herself, but Chakatie pulled him back.

  “Calm down, you fools,” she snapped. “Anchors hate day-fellows, day-fellows hate anchors. I get it. But the grains are playing games with us. Unless we all want to die, we have to figure out what’s going on.”

  Pinhaus sat back down, as did Mita.

  Alexnya felt the grains squirming within her body, demanding she act like a true anchor. But what did that mean, when both anchors and day-fellows did good and bad? When the grains themselves didn’t care about manipulating them all or wrongly offering her up as a sacrifice?

  Alexnya noticed Colton looking at her, his hand poised over the series of dots on his left arm. She realized he probably came the closest of anyone in this wagon to understanding what she was going through—he’d once been an anchor and was now a day-fellow. Exactly the reverse of her own life, but still closer than anyone else here.

  Colton touched one of the dots on his arm. He smiled as he waved awkwardly at her, as if trying to say he did understand. Alexnya waved back and, for the first time since learning she was to be judged, didn’t feel like she was facing the entire world by herself.

  After another hour of pointless bickering between the groups, Elder Vácha and Chakatie kicked everyone else out of the wagon so the two of them could discuss things in private. Alexnya eagerly jumped to the ground and grabbed her backpack. It was already nighttime. She was tired and just wanted to sleep somewhere.

  Chakatie’s family had pitched their tents close to the biosphere’s doors. But when Alexnya walked there to pitch her own tent, Pinhaus and the rest of the anchors glared at her, their eyes glowing to the different colors of their grains. Even Wren looked angry.

  Alexnya clapped her hands loudly before Wren’s pouty face and mimed an explosion. “Bang,” she said.

  “What?” Wren asked. “I don’t...”

  “Fireworks and rainbows and all that. Remember how excited you were to see this damn festival when I was the only one who might be punished?”

  Wren had the decency to look embarrassed. Alexnya snorted in her face and left to find somewhere else to camp.

  She paused next to the small lake, spooking a trout that broke the still waters into ripples while crickets and cicadas hummed their songs. The night was almost chilly, and each breath she took smelled sweet and crisp. The slight breeze was also amazingly clear, as if the world had cleansed the air in welcome for her alone.

  Thanks to the new moon she couldn’t see the massive arches and lattices of the biosphere rising through the darkness above her. But she could sense the lack of grains here. There was no clicking in her mind like when she was in the rest of the world, where the grains lived in every plant and animal and even the soil, continually sharing information between themselves. She didn’t feel the grains watching her. She didn’t feel th
e nervous tension that at any moment the grains might take command of her body and force her to defend the environment on their behalf. Even the grains inside her seemed muted, as if unsure what to do when they couldn’t speak with their brethren.

  So this was what all of the Earth once felt like. It really was beautiful. Even if she was to be executed tomorrow, at least she’d known this one moment of peace.

  Trying to find a new campsite, she walked between two of the day-fellow wagons. The back door for one wagon was open, and inside she saw a day-fellow family eating dinner. Their large wagon was a hydroponic, with edible and medicinal plants growing in water-filled tubes, large water tanks built into the armored walls, and a roof that could open fully to the sun. The family’s bunks and tables sat among the plants.

  One of Alexnya’s friends growing up had lived in a hydroponic wagon like this. She’d eaten many a meal with that friend, even slept among their plants countless times. She tried to push the memory away. She really didn’t want to remember all she’d lost.

  A little boy inside waved. Alexnya waved back, only for an adult to notice the exchange and close the door in her face.

  “To them you’re just a big bad anchor,” a soft voice said from under the wagon. “They’ll probably tell scary stories to the kids tonight about you eating any day-fellows you catch harming the environment.”

  The young girl who’d been in Elder Vácha’s meeting earlier was sitting under the wagon, her thin arms wrapped around one of the rear wheel’s giant spokes as she stared up at Alexnya.

  “My name’s Ae,” she said. She lifted her long hair off the back of her neck, revealing a silver neuroconnector. “Don’t touch my neck—I’ll be able to access the grains in your body and force you to do all types of bad shit.”

  “Doesn’t it defeat the purpose of your connector, if you warn me not to touch it?”