Her voice trailed off.
"You couldn't have been that bad," I said. "Leeta wanted you as her apprentice."
"Leeta only took me because I badgered her," Steck replied. "I'd got the idea that if I became priestess I'd suddenly mean something. It's hard to feel worthwhile when you're a teenager with no friends… girl or boy, it made no difference. Leeta accepted me out of pity; or maybe she thought she could mold me into a real person somehow. Either way, she didn't like me. I wasn't likable, male or female. And on Commitment Day, I thought maybe if I picked the third option, things would be different."
"You thought people would like you more as a Neut?" I asked. "Not in Tober Cove."
"I thought maybe I'd like myself more. A new body, a new personality. Leaving behind all the stubborn habits that made me… difficult. I wanted things to change for me. Inside."
"But you knew you'd be banished!"
"Did I care? What was so attractive about Tober Cove?"
"Me."
She sighed. "I know, Fullin. But I thought I could take you with me. I'd leave Tober Cove with my baby… and Zephram would go with me, back to the South… where he told me Neuts and normal people could live as husband and wife…" She shook her head. "And I'd be a new person. I wouldn't make the same mistakes. I'd stop being… oh, the kind of woman Zephram would hate as soon as he came to his senses."
Women say such things for only one reason: to have a man tell them they're mistaken. No, no, I was supposed to say, Zephram loved you for yourself. And I think he did; when he spoke to me at breakfast, his voice had been full of fondness, not "What was I thinking?" embarrassment. Still, it was hard for me to treat this Neut, my mother, as a normal woman who wanted reassurance. A wall of awkwardness loomed between us… and before I could speak, Rashid reappeared at the far end of the pavement.
As before, he stopped at the rusting OldTech cart. For a moment, he leaned into the engine again, presumably to look at the black radio box. Then he suddenly straightened up, and lifted his eyes to the hill behind Mayoralty House. His face broke into a jubilant smile.
"Damn," Steck whispered.
"What?" I asked.
"He's figured it out. He's figured it all out."
She suddenly flinched, as if she hadn't intended to speak those words aloud. Before I could ask what she meant, Rashid started running toward us.
Rashid's feet slapped the pavement like waves clapping against a boat's hull. His smile gleamed with excitement. Long before he reached us, he called out, "On top of the hill… that antenna…"
"It's an OldTech radio tower," I told him.
"The hell it is," he answered. "Have you had a good look at that dish assembly on top? The OldTechs never built anything close." He stopped in front of me, panting lightly. "Quickly, O Native Guide — show us the fastest route up the hill."
Steck put on an irritable expression as she got to her feet. "What's this all about?" she asked.
"Radio relay," Rashid panted, pointing back to the rusted cart. His finger swiveled around to point to the antenna on the hill. "Main receiving station. That's got to be the answer."
"What answer?" I asked.
"Take me up the hill and I'll show you."
The top of Patriarch Hill was a patchwork of bare limestone ledges alternating with scrubby clumps of brush and buttercups. Paper birch and poplar ringed the area, like hair around a man's bald patch; the trees even had a distinct lean to them, as if the prevailing westerlies had tried to comb them over to hide the bareness.
The antenna squatted on limestone in the center of the open area, with three wrist-thick guy wires strung out and anchored into other sections of rock. Kids occasionally climbed a short way up those wires, going hand over hand until they got high enough to scare themselves; but I couldn't remember anyone climbing the antenna itself. Its base was enclosed by a rusty chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire and big signs showing pictures of lightning bolts. That meant you'd get hit by lightning if you touched the tower itself… and heaven knows, the antenna must have had enough lightning to discharge because it got hit a dozen times in every summer thunderstorm.
Neither the fence nor the signs fazed Rashid. In fact, he gave the chain-link a quick look-over, then turned back to me with a gloating expression on his face. "When you were a young boy, didn't you ever go places you weren't supposed to?"
"Sure," I answered, "there was one time we found this garbage dump—"
"But," the Spark Lord interrupted, "I've never seen an OldTech fence in this perfect condition." He threaded his fingers through the links and gave a yank; the fence barely yielded. "With any other fence," Rashid said, "local kids would have pulled up the bottom to crawl under, or made dents crawling over."
I pointed to the nearest lightning sign. "We didn't want to get zapped."
"Come on," Rashid scoffed. "In four hundred years, kids never dared each other to give it a try? And what about wild animals? You'd think a bear would have pushed in a section while using it as a scratching post, or maybe a big deer hit the fence in the dark."
"Tober Cove prides itself on its hunting," Steck told him. "Bear and deer know better than to come this close to town."
"Still," Rashid answered, "OldTech fences don't survive this well." He gave it another tug; no response but a small rattle. "Proof it's not OldTech at all."
"If it isn't OldTech," I said, "what is it? We Tobers didn't build it."
"No," Rashid agreed, craning his neck back to stare at the arrangement of gadgets high up the aerial. "You probably don't need a maser array that can squirt several hundred terabits of data every millisecond." He waved his hand to stop me before I could ask what he meant. "The details aren't important. Just trust me: the OldTechs never reached the technical sophistication of those dishes up there. They've got more bandwidth for sending and receiving than the communication systems for an entire OldTech city."
I turned to Steck and whispered, "Bandwidth?"
She patted my arm soothingly. "Most of this is going over my head too."
I didn't believe her. Rashid shouldn't have either, but he was too excited to pay attention. "We won't learn anything standing out here. In we go."
He reached toward the hip of his armor. As he did, a section of the green plastic slid back and a small holster pushed out of the armor's thigh. The holster held a green plastic pistol: very flat and compact, with none of the chunky menace of the Beretta he'd given to Bonnakkut.
"Laser," Rashid said, drawing the gun.
"Heat ray," Steck explained, pulling me away from the line of fire.
Rashid aimed the gun's muzzle at the fence and made an easy sweeping motion, starting high, ending low. The air filled with the tangy smell of metal, and billows of smoke drifted up into the hot summer day. Rashid put his glove against the chain-link to give it a tentative push; when he did, a whole section moved inward, severed from the adjoining links along a sharp-cut line. "At least the wire's not laser-proof," he muttered. The gun swept across the fencing two more times, shooting no visible bullets or beams… but when Rashid planted his foot against the wire and shoved, a door-shaped section of chain-link fell away, sliced off precisely where the gun had pointed.
He turned back to Steck. "After you, my dear." Steck gave a mock curtsy and slipped through the gap. A moment later, Rashid and I followed.
Rashid bent in close to examine the antenna's metal frame. It looked like normal rusted steel, with red-orange corrosion dusted like thick powder over every metal strut. After a moment, the Spark Lord huffed out a single heavy breath, the way you do when you want to fog a mirror. He watched the metal a few more seconds, then murmured, "Very convincing."
"Why do you keep talking like the tower's not real?" I asked.
"Oh, it's real," Rashid replied. He tapped one of the tower's struts with his gloved finger; the metal tink-tinked exactly the way you'd expect. "It's just not what it appears to be."
He pointed his green pistol at the strut he'd just tapped
. With two quick pulls of his trigger finger, he sliced out a small section of metal, leaving a gap about as wide as my thumb. "Now watch," he said. "See if this is an ordinary OldTech tower."
I waited a few seconds. "I don't see anything."
"Patience," he said. He bent and picked up a small twig that had blown off one of the nearby trees. Carefully, Rashid slipped the twig into the gap he'd just cut in the steel.
The process was almost too slow to see; but gradually, the gap in the metal began to narrow… as if the two freshly-cut ends were steel teeth closing in on the twig. Soon Rashid could let go of the little stick — the gap had closed enough to clamp the twig in place. As I watched, the teeth continued to bite into the wood. The twig bent… then broke… then dropped in two pieces as the antenna completely closed over the cut Rashid made.
"The metal is self-repairing," he said. "And it would have to be, wouldn't it, to survive four centuries."
"I don't understand," I told him, trying not to sound unsettled by what I'd just seen.
"This antenna isn't OldTech steel," Rashid replied. "The whole damned tower must be solid nano. Smart metal camouflaged to look rusty."
I stared at him blankly.
"Think of it as a machine," he answered with the air of a man who doesn't want to explain himself to a country bumpkin. "Solar powered. Probably can store energy from lightning strikes too… or get power beamed down from orbital collectors. It must need a lot of juice."
He glanced back over his shoulder. "The fence must be nano too. That's why it's still in such good shape. Let's leave before our way out seals itself shut."
Steck looked up at the collection of dishes on top of the tower. "Don't you want to check out the transmitter array?"
"How?" Rashid asked. "If we try to climb this tower, I bet it has defenses… like struts that break off while we're standing on them. It may even get mad at us for just hanging around here. We'd better leave."
He gave my shoulder a nudge to start me moving toward the gap in the fence. I rolled away from him. "No."
"No? No, what?"
"No, I'm not leaving until you explain what's going on." I reached out and grabbed one of the metal struts, just to let him know I wouldn't be moved.
With a cry, Steck leapt forward and knocked my hand clear of the tower. "Don't touch that, you idiot!"
I looked at her in astonishment. Rashid gave a thin smile. "Fullin," he said, "I think your mother has a better understanding of this antenna than she'd like to let on."
"If it's nano, it's dangerous," Steck said sullenly. "I don't know any more about the tower than you do."
"Will someone please explain…" I started.
"Yes," Rashid interrupted. "Once we're safe. Come on."
"You want the truth?" Rashid asked. "You really want it?"
"Yes," I said.
We were standing outside the fence, watching the section of chain-link that Rashid had cut out and pushed down onto the ground. The chain metal had lost its solidity; it had turned into a gooey black liquid as thickly viscous as molasses. Slowly, very slowly, the liquid was flowing across the dirt.
How could such a thing happen? Not that I wanted an explanation of the science or magic that could turn steel into this tarry fluid; how could this fence and this antenna, perched on Patriarch Hill my entire lifetime and for centuries before I was born, be made of such otherworldly stuff?
Tober Cove was my home. I thought I understood it.
"What's going on?" I asked… and for some reason I turned to Steck. "Is this just some trick you've set up to scare me?"
She closed her eyes for a moment, then shook her head. "Sorry, Fullin," she murmured. "I know it's hard when you realize things aren't the way you thought." She opened her eyes again. "It really might be best if we walk back to the town square and pretend you haven't seen a thing."
The black chain-link fluid had pooled into an oily puddle directly under the rest of the fence. Now the liquid began to flow straight upward, like a waterfall in slow reverse, inching up to fill the hole Rashid had cut.
"I want to know," I said. "Please."
Steck turned to Rashid. He shrugged. "All right. You know why OldTech civilization collapsed?" he asked me.
"Because demons came from beyond the stars—"
"Not demons," he interrupted. "Aliens. Extraterrestrials. The League of Peoples."
"Inhuman creatures," I said. "And they offered exotic riches to anybody who wanted to leave Earth. Enough people went with them that things fell apart."
"Close enough," Rashid said. "And then?"
"Then the Sparks restored order and organized the planet into the Spark Protectorate."
"Don't make it sound like it happened overnight," Rashid chided. "When the League of Peoples came to Earth with their proposal, the only humans who accepted were those with nothing to lose: people facing starvation or war, not to mention patients with terminal diseases who thought they could be saved by League medicine. They went off; then they came back two years later looking healthy and driving FTL starships, saying no, there really weren't any strings attached to the League's offer. A few more people left… then a few more, and a few more, with each wave coming back to tell friends and family, it's wonderful, we have a clean new home planet, we have unbelievable high-tech gadgets, we have peace. There were plenty of doubters, but there were also plenty of people who decided to take the plunge."
"Traitors," I said.
"You don't know how terrible things were in the twenty-first century," Rashid replied. "Toward the end of OldTech times, most of the human race was poor and hungry. The planet was damaged — the air, the water, the soil — and there were so many conflicting factions claiming they knew how to solve the world's problems that no one could rally enough support to get any recovery plan started. Twenty years after the League's first offer, more than seventy percent of the Earth's human population had decided it was better to start over than stay on a sinking ship."
"Traitors," I repeated.
"So speaks the descendant of someone who stayed home… and in a part of the world that was affluent and not too polluted. Anyway, so many people left that OldTech culture couldn't sustain itself… and it took forty more years before my Spark ancestors managed to reestablish equilibrium. You know what happened in those forty years?"
"High Queen Gloriana of Spark battled the star demons into subjugation and forced them to pay her tribute." Why was he asking me this? Every child on Earth learned history.
"Well," Rashid answered with a wry look on his face, "it's more accurate to say that Gloriana came to an accommodation with the League of Peoples. In exchange for certain, uh, considerations from my family, the League granted us sovereignty over the planet… as well as a supply of high-tech goodies that would help us convince the struggling dregs of humanity to accept us as their rulers."
"The word 'puppet' was never used," Steck put in.
Rashid glared at her. "You know nothing about the League," he snapped. "They didn't need Earth as a vassal; they just felt bad for disrupting Terran society so badly. The League decided Gloriana was the best bet for ending decades of violent anarchy."
"What does this have to do with the antenna?" I asked. "And the fence." The tarry fluid had climbed to the height of my knees now — like a paper-thin black curtain stretched across the hole. Second by second, it continued to climb. I wanted to touch it; I didn't dare.
Maybe it would feel greasy like butter. Maybe the slightest touch would burn like a spider bite.
"This antenna," Rashid said, "almost certainly dates back to the forty years between the OldTech collapse and Gloriana's hands-off treaty with the League. During that time, Earth was officially a free zone — open to any League members who cared to drop by. Nonhumans mostly weren't interested, but humans… they'd got their hands on all kinds of nifty technology from the League, and they were itching to play god with the poor benighted barbarians who'd stayed back on Earth."
I didn't like
his choice of phrase: "play god." My face must have shown my resentment. "I'm sorry, Fullin," Rashid said, "but that's what they did. Certain humans from the stars returned to Earth to set up experiments. They treated their old home planet as one big laboratory filled with guinea pigs who had chosen to be backward… who had irrationally refused to go into space. So the star-siders came back to test their lovely new gadgetry on us. Brain/machine interlinks. Clever tricks to work on genes. Nanotech…"
He gestured toward the fence. The black sheet of goo had risen to cover the hole completely now. There was no more fluid on the ground; it had all seeped upward to bond with the rest of the chain-link.
"They usually set up their experiments in abandoned towns," Rashid said. "Often, they built societies from the ground up — starting with infants they kidnapped from elsewhere on Earth, or even with baby clones of themselves. They'd invent religions, customs, ways of life, all carefully taught to the kids… because these projects were meant to be demonstrations, Fullin. Demonstrations of social theories. Nice little rustic Utopias. And they thought they were doing us a favor; they really did. To them, life here on Earth was a violent, ignorant hell. Forcibly imposing new social structures on us was nothing more than kindness."
"And that's what you think Tober Cove is?" I asked. "Some project built by traitors who came back from the stars?"
Rashid nodded. "The OldTechs were obsessed with gender differences, Fullin: which traits were innate, which were just a result of training. In the years after OldTech civilization collapsed, it's not hard to believe that some of the star-siders set up a research program here — to see what happened when people had the chance to be both male and female…"
"Or both," Steck added.
"Indeed," Rashid said. "An experiment to see what differences persisted even when people saw both sides of the gender gap… and could straddle the middle if they wanted."
The sheet of blackness covering the gap in the fence was beginning to tatter. Holes opened in the goo as other regions began to thicken — a crisscross pattern congealing slowly into the familiar diamonds of chain-link. Red specks appeared on the black surface: simulated dots of rust. The underlying black changed color too, fading to metallic steel gray.
Commitment Hour lop-2 Page 23
