by Maggie Allen
“Much good it does me when nothing works.”
“Okay, Marika, we may be back in business,” Banks said. “The manual controls are scrap metal now, and I can’t jack into the shuttle to fly it that way.”
Marika realized for the first time that there was a neural implant socket half in and half torn out of the back of Banks’s neck, a bloody mess of wiring and bent metal.
“But if you’re willing to jack yourself in,” Banks continued. “I can walk you through getting us back to town. First, you’re going to have to—”
“I know,” Marika said, already in the co-pilot’s seat, her heart leaping in excitement. Not only was she going to come back to town a hero, but she was going to come back to town flying a real shuttle. She reached for the neural jack in the headrest of the seat and plugged it into her implant’s socket.
“Marika, wait—”
Pain hit her like a hammer, like something crushing every bone in her body, red hot pain that went on and on, like the pain in her legs when the silo door had crushed them and kept crushing and she had screamed and screamed—
The pain stopped, but she kept on screaming, and clutched with both hands at something she realized after a moment was the fabric of Banks’ uniform. Banks had crawled over to her, hurt as she was, to unplug the jack, because Marika hadn’t thought to do it. Shame crawled in her stomach, and she made herself let go of Banks and stopped screaming.
“It hurt me!” She knew the shuttle was only a machine, but it had felt like it was trying to crush her, as if it were deliberately slamming that heavy door shut on her again and again.
“The neural feedback from the shuttle is a lot more intense than a hopper or your legs,” Banks said. Her hand was cupping the back of Marika’s head, a soothing pressure against Marika’s braids. “It’s not trying to hurt you, it’s just trying to tell you that it’s hurt. You’re just not used to it, so it probably feels pretty overwhelming.”
“It hurt so much.”
“We’ve taken a lot of damage,” Banks said. She was still sweating, and although her voice was still calm and encouraging, her expression didn’t quite match it. “But I’m hoping it’s all exterior hull damage and this mess in here, not vital propulsion systems.”
“You want me to do that again.”
“Yes, but first I want you to listen to what I was trying to tell you when you went running ahead, okay? I want you to visualize a dimmer switch, like the ones you use to turn lights up and down. There’s writing on the switch, and it says feedback.”
Marika nodded. It was something like the exercises they’d had her do when she got her legs, before she’d learned to control them without having to think about it.
“Now slide that dimmer all the way down. Do it a couple of times, really picturing that switch in your mind.”
“Got it,” Marika said.
“Okay. As soon as you jack in, the moment you feel any pain, I want you to take that switch and slide it down. I’ll tell you what to do after that.”
Marika reached for the jack, and hesitated for a moment, not hurting yet but remembering the intense pain, remembering her legs feeling like they were on fire. But it looked like it hurt Banks to move right now, and Banks was still moving. Marika gritted her teeth and plugged in the jack.
There was nothing but pain, beating through her body with every beat of her heart. She tried to visualize the slider, but all she could see was the silo. The doors were closing again, crushing her…
No!
Now she had the slider in her hand, and she could stop it, she could stop the pain, she could turn it—
“Down, down, down!” She slid down the imaginary slider, and the pain eased, becoming a throbbing ache, and then no more than an uncomfortable tickle of discomfort. “I got it,” she said, her voice uneven but steadying. “I turned it down.”
“Good,” Banks said. Her own voice sounded tired. “Now think about the shuttle’s legs, about extending them. All at once, just like standing up.”
“Aren’t we going to fly?” At the thought, the shuttle shuddered a little, and she felt a hundred complicated things happening as the shuttle tried to ready itself for liftoff, readouts and sensations flickering in and out of consciousness too fast for her to understand any of them.
“There’s too much you’d have to learn first,” Banks said. “I need you to stop trying to fly the shuttle, right now, and concentrate on extending the legs. We’re going to have to walk home, but we will get home.”
“Walking is too slow,” Marika protested, but she concentrated. It did feel like standing up, but on bigger, stronger legs than she’d felt even in the hopper. She tried to walk, and for a moment she didn’t think her front legs – the shuttle’s front legs – would clear the front edge of the trench.
Then she was up and walking, the shuttle moving steadily on its heavy legs.
“Turn us thirty degrees clockwise,” Banks said. “That’s right, keep heading that way. That’ll take us right into town.”
Marika tried to speed the shuttle’s steps, but it would only plod at a measured pace, although its legs were long enough that they were covering plenty of ground with each stride. “It’s going to take us forever,” Marika said.
“We’ll get there,” Banks said, leaning back against the side of the pilot’s seat. “That’s the important part. It might take a couple of hours, but I can live with that.”
“I still wish I could fly though.”
“You’ll fly,” Banks said. “When it’s your time, you’re going to fly. I don’t have any doubt about that.”
“I bet you could recommend me for pilot training,” Marika said, not quite daring to make it a question.
“I bet I could, in about five years.”
“I can wait,” Marika said, unable to keep the little smile from curling up her lips. She kept walking, each step eating up more of the ground between the two of them and home.
Luckless Tin Elephant
Angeline Woon
Angeline Woon is a Malaysian writer who lives in Ottawa, Canada, where she has taken up breeding pet rocks. Her short stories have been published in the Esquire magazine, Readings from Readings 2, KL Noir: White, FUTURA and Cyberpunk: Malaysia. She is co-editor for a Southeast Asian urban writing anthology. Like all children, Angeline had wanted to become a paleontologist but ended up in microbiology instead. She later took up medical journalism so she could train to be a writer and write about dinosaurs. Angeline has yet to write an outbreak story and refuses to do so unless they involve dragons. In between writing and pulping novels-to-be, she visits museums and old forts for the atmosphere.
“Unlucky female! Leave now, quick!” shouted the pawang in Malay.
Suan stifled a groan. She had hoped to get the oto-gajah, the elephant automaton, into the pit before the pawang showed, so he could not block her entry. But since the pawang was there, she would have to ask him permission to enter the mine. Politely, as per her father’s orders. Meanwhile, the poor miner was suffocating under the fallen earth.
She pulled a lever. There was a clank, and the automated elephant settled with cheerful hiss. She dismounted and gave the oto-gajah a proprietary pat on its metal leg. She girded herself mentally and turned to face the pawang.
A few weeks before, Suan and Tok Pawang had had an argument. Some of the men had threatened to leave if the pawang’s pride was not appeased. Her father had lectured her for more than an hour, laying down a series of rules, which ended with the admonition: “Be mindful of our social position. You are a lady, so behave like one.”
If anyone else but Pa had said that to her – his second wife, for instance – Suan would have plotted and then carried out cold, hard revenge. Something involving cow dung, or perhaps the poisonous plant that grew under the mango tree that made the skin burst out in boils. But because Pa had said it, Suan bit her tongue. She had felt disquieted, because rather than getting angry and shouting at her, he had seemed resigned.
&nb
sp; “Be a lady, Suan,” said the girl to herself. “Do it for Pa.”
“Apa khabar, Tok Pawang?” she called out the Malay words of greeting. He approached her from the edge of the mining pit. Though he had his walking stick, he still slipped on the muddy ground. He seemed frantic, and he was waving a white cloth, one he typically used in his rituals to chase away evil spirits.
Suan’s bare feet squelched in the mud. She had hurried out of the house as soon as she heard the news, forgetting to put on her slippers. A frantic miner had rushed into her father’s audience hall and shouted that there had been a cave-in. She knew the oto-gajah could help. And then, once successful, she could persuade her father to support her plans to bring the mechanical elephants into the tin mines permanently. But first, she had to get past the pawang.
She bowed at the man. Was it low enough? Or too low? Did she incline her head sufficiently? She hoped she did not just cause offense. Feeling self-conscious, she pushed back her shoulders and stood up straight. She let her nose tilt in the air, just a smidgen, to show that she was a lady. Absently, she brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. She smelled oil.
“Haiyoh!” she exclaimed in horror. There were black oil and dirt on her fingers from the oto-gajah. She wiped her hands on the leather apron she wore atop her blue cotton tunic and trousers and was dismayed at the resulting smear of oil, dirt and soot.
She smiled nervously at the pawang. He was breathing hard from his exertion. She opened her mouth to greet him again, but he interrupted her.
“Ngi ceu,” he gasped. He was repeating his previous message, this time in Hakka, Suan’s own Chinese dialect. “You go away.” He waved the cloth in her face. It touched the tip of her nose.
Suan’s cheeks burned; the pawang’s actions stoked her internal forge. The pawang meant to chase her away as though she was an evil spirit!
She was just about to say something insulting that she had learned from the miners, but her father’s words came to mind. “Do not antagonize the man,” he had said. “The men trust him, and I don’t know if you can find another good shaman who can bau timah, sniff out the tin, the way he does. Try not to make problems for me, Ah Suan.” He had been worried about the competing mines opening in the north, in Perak. They had been luring pawangs to work for them.
Suan took a deep breath and said, “I can help.”
“You can help by going away.” Tired of flapping the cloth at her, the pawang poked his walking stick – also used in rituals – in her general direction.
“But –”
“You have no respect for our rituals and traditions. Women are unlucky. I told you before. What did I say the last time? Do not come back here. It was bad enough that you brought these abominations, these soulless machines... Do not compound our bad fortune with your feminine emanations.”
Feminine emanations, mouthed Suan silently. How dare he? How dare he talk to her that way? The pawang’s sarong, tunic and trousers were funereal black, and he was lecturing her about bad luck?
Still, she held herself in check. Pa, you better appreciate what I’m doing for you.
“Let me dig the poor man out. Please. He must be suffocating.”
Likely, he was dead. The man could not have survived the bone-crushing fall of the earth. She could see that now that she was there at the scene. The lack of urgency shown by the miners, who were paying more attention to Suan and the pawang than to digging, was further proof.
The pawang looked as though he was considering her appeal. Or maybe he, too, realized that the miner was dead and wondered how to use that knowledge against her. Finally, he nodded and said, “You should have thought of that before you came here and caused his bad luck.”
She stared.
No matter what argument she put forward against the pawang’s superstitions, he would find another that she was hard-pressed to counter. How does one fight such illogical statements? She shook her head.
“Such nonsense,” she said. “How many piculs of rice would it take to cleanse all this bad luck I’m going to cause right now? What was it the last time? Two? Twenty? I cannot remember. Probably twenty, because you look like you have eaten that much. Whichever it is, send my father the bill.”
The man spluttered with rage.
Suan slipped and stumbled her way to the oto-gajah, piling her plait on her head as she did so, the way the men did when they worked. She rapidly scaled the mechanical beast.
She dropped into the cockpit, right behind the domed head, and placed her hands on the bar that she used to steer the machine. She smiled. She was home.
“Let’s show them what you can do,” she said.
She released the lever that kept the oto-gajah in position. The metal beast clanked and hissed. The oto-gajah lurched, but Suan had expected it. She knew how to move with the machine. Forward, it went, steam building up within. When the needle hit red on the gauge, Suan pulled a knob. Steam escaped from a valve in the fake elephant’s trunk. The tin machine trumpeted a call for everyone to move out of its way. In the jungles nearby, birds burst out of the trees.
The pit that had collapsed was one of the smaller ones, big enough to fit twenty elephants (a wholly mental exercise, seeing as elephants were as unlucky as females in tin mines). Miners swarmed up ladders with buckets holding a picul of soil at a time. They slid down different ladders. The men shouted instructions and cursed at each other in Malay (ignored by the lady-like Suan, who rode primly on her steed). Though the miners were Chinese, those who spoke the Hakka dialect did not necessarily speak Cantonese or Hokkien, and vice versa.
Suan entered the pit via a slope that had formed during the collapse, far from where the men were digging. The miners backed away when she first came with the oto-gajah, but they followed her instructions.
The work was the kind the men were accustomed to, though on usual days, they would have been under the shade to escape the harsh afternoon sun. They wore their pigtails wrapped around their heads. Their shaved foreheads shone, and they perspired heavily, though they wore only loose trousers.
Suan found the work tedious, and her shoulders ached from the pressure she had to place on the steering column. The oto-gajah was mostly automated, but for fine work, manual guidance was necessary.
She listened to the men as they conversed. They must have thought she could not hear them over the clangs of metal and the hiss of the hydraulic release.
“That silly man, thinking he can tell us what to do. Did you see him? So graceful,” said a stocky, broad-shouldered miner.
“Ya,” agreed his skinny colleague. “Tok Graceful. Slipping and sliding on the mud. Gracefully arguing with the Capitan’s daughter.”
“Pawang or not, unlucky or not, we do not dare lay hands on her!”
“It would be most unlucky for us then! The Capitan dotes on that child. He lets her have her own way.”
The other man said something in an undertone that Suan could not hear. Both men laughed.
“Did you hear about the naga?” said the stocky man.
“What is a naga?”
“Dragon.”
“Oh. Well, what about a dragon?”
“This merchant came the other day and was gibbering about how a dragon was seen around the Rawang area. He said the dragon guarded a sutra.”
“Sutra?”
“A holy text.”
“And then?”
“He said that Mai-he-di and those gangsters, the Ghosts, are working together again. He said they captured the dragon and are thinking of using it for vengeance.”
“So?”
“You know lah – the Ghosts hate the Capitan. Mai-he-di also hates the Capitan. So maybe after the next pay, I’m going to make myself scarce, in case the dragon decides to visit Kuala Berlumpur and set it on fire again.”
“Choi, your talk is much unlucky.”
“Up to you if you want to stay. Me, I know better.” The stocky man shrugged and went back to work.
More nonsense, thought Suan.
Nagas and sutras. Dragons. Stories for children.
She shook her head at the superstitions prevalent among the miners. But she had to admit, her heart beat fast when they spoke about the fire of Kuala Berlumpur. She remembered the blazing heat, so hot that she thought she was on fire, the crackling and crashes of falling buildings, the painful stench of smoke, her father holding her tight, running, while she screamed for Mama and her little brothers...
The oto-gajah slipped.
Men shouted and scrambled out of the pit as more earth threatened to engulf them. Suan moved the oto-gajah to stem the landslide with the tin elephant’s body. The movement of the earth slowed, but it continued to fall in a steady flow. She shouted at the men to bring wood and to shore up the wall with it.
Crisis averted, Suan focused on picking up dirt with the trunk and dumping the unused soil over the side of the pit.
More shouting. They found the trapped miner. He was dead.
“Why? Why did you go to the mine?” said the Capitan, Suan’s father. “You cannot just go anywhere you want, Ah Suan. You’re almost fifteen. You’re not a little girl anymore.”
“What was I supposed to do, Pa? The man was dying.”
“You just wanted to show off,” said her father’s second wife, the mother of the sons.
“You know better than I do that he was already dead,” said the Capitan. “You just gave Tok Pawang more reasons to consolidate his power at the mine. Or he may just leave and take some of my best men with him. Some of them are already thinking of leaving because of ill-luck.”
“Superstitions,” said Suan.
“You may scorn them and think it not important, but others take their beliefs very seriously. Why can’t you respect that? Why do you always have to fight me on this, Suan?” Her father slumped in his chair. “Why do you keep trying to push your strange ideas on people?”
“Please lah, Pa. What’s the point of having the oto-gajahs around if you’re not going to use them to their full potential?”
