by J. C. Staudt
“You have quite the knack for telling tall tales, don’t you?”
I still couldn’t see either of them, sitting behind me on their safe hoverbikes with the nearflow howling around us and the Churn belching below, threatening to eat me at any second.
“I don’t have time to argue with a couple of primies about how tall my tales are,” I said.
We call humans ‘primies’ because they’re extra the-worst.
“He’s an uppity one,” the first biker said. “Maybe we should just leave him here.”
“I’ll take my chances, if you’re gonna be like that,” I said.
“Have it your way,” the other one muttered. He revved his hoverbike like he was getting ready to leave.
“Whatever cave you antiques crawled out of, I doubt it’s any safer than this,” I said, trying to sound as condescending as possible.
“Living down here isn’t difficult as long as you’ve got the tech.”
I scoffed. “Tech? Please. You primies wouldn’t know tech if the Churn spit it onto your dinner plates.”
“We’ve got plenty of tech. It’s just not glued to our bodies like yours is. We found your bluewave beacon thanks to our tech. And by the way, some good your tech’s doing you right now, blueblood.”
“Hey. Up until yesterday I had a real slick kit. Some miner thugs pinched me and stole it all.”
“Now why would mine workers do a thing like that?”
“‘Cause they’re lowlifes, is why,” I said. “Now how about giving me a hand here?”
I’ve seen the Churn knock a streamboat out of the sky and swallow it whole. Trust me when I say I was at risk of being swallowed very, very whole.
“I’m sure you were just minding your own business when they decided to come along and mug you.”
“They had pulsers. You tell me.” I shrugged. My shrug gave the gravel a chance to crowd in and press harder against my lungs. All part of the master plan.
“Poor fella,” said the first guy. “And how did you respond when these cruel security guards had their way with you?”
“I ate them.”
As if in reply, the Churn ate me.
The ground opened and I fell fifty feet straight down until the bikers stopped laughing and decided to reactivate their energy field. I snapped to a halt, dangling from my wire like a rag doll. They hadn’t stopped laughing, actually. I could still hear their whiny guffaws echoing down. I’d heard dying streambirds make nicer sounds.
The bikes began to rise. They dragged me with them, bumping and scraping against the sides of the pit as it collapsed in around me. I felt the gravel sucking at my legs just as I shot up above the surface. Good thing I wasn’t wearing boots. The flecker shield and my bluewave comm were gone, devoured by the Churn.
“Where are you taking me?” I called up.
The grav engines were roaring and the nearflow was wailing so loud I don’t think they heard me, but I saw why they’d been in such a hurry to leave. Captain Kupfer and his law-loving super troupe were coming down through the clouds, converging on the beacon’s coordinates.
As much as these biker primies were pissing me off, it turned out they were also my heroes. They’d saved me from the Civs in the nick of time. Fellow Civ-haters. We must be on the same team, I realized. I couldn’t tell whether the Civ Captain and his goons had spotted us, but I vowed that if I got away, it would be the first of many, many times I’d give Captain Kupfer a good screwing over. I’d get started on keeping that vow as soon as I got myself fixed up.
In the meantime, the primies were taking me back to their place. I get that a lot. Everyone I meet wants to take me back to their place. Usually to kill me. The primies’ place was a drift-town like none I’d ever seen before. To be more specific, it wasn’t a drift-town.
It was a grav city. And it was full of primies.
I could see the Churn hiccupping below as we passed through the cloaking field, a gigantic protective bubble that encased the city. My jaw dropped halfway to the Churn when I saw that the entire city was suspended on a gravstone bed. The land mass beneath it looked like any other drift-town, giant stone roots hanging off the bottom like a mountain flipped upside down, except that it wasn’t drifting.
A network of polarized rods was holding it in place, about a quarter-mile above the surface. Neither the Churn’s upheavals nor the brash, keening winds of the nearflow did anything to shift the city from its place. Even when they set me down on a shaggy carpet of grass in a lush green field, I felt no movement or tilt.
My first thought when I entered the city was to wonder if there were a hammer and chisel I’d overlooked in one of the pockets of my webgear. The amount of gravstone buried in the bedrock below this city was worth more than I could spend in a hundred lifetimes. The biker primies must’ve known there would be gold gleaming in my eyes, because they slapped a pair of steel wristbands on me as soon as we landed. I was resistant to the idea at first, until they offered to drop me back where they’d found me. Whenever I moved my hands more than about six inches apart, the magnets in the wristbands activated, snapping them back together with a painful clack. The device also gave me a nice little shock for my trouble.
The dome of crackling bluish-white energy above us looked a lot like the one the primie had generated from his hoverbike. Whenever a floater or a clod hit the dome, it glanced away as though it had struck a solid object, making almost no sound. I could feel a faint breeze and I knew the barrier was filtering the air, as clean and breathable as it was way up in the stream.
The two primies took off their masks and caught their breath. One had long, medium-brown hair and a beard; the other’s hair was short, dark and curly, and he was clean-shaven. Both were younger than I was at the time, though I was better-looking than both of them put together.
“Muller Jakes,” I said by way of introduction. I held out a hand and got my first dick-tickling shockwave of pain, complements of my wristbands.
They both laughed at me. The bearded wonder said, “I’m Clinton Vilaris, and this is Gareth Blaylocke.”
“And this… is Pyras,” Blaylocke said, waving a hand.
“Never heard of it,” I said, still recovering. “You live here?”
Pyras looked sparkling-new, its sculpted white curves towering above gothic arches, like a scale replica of an ancient metropolis realized in styrofoam. Water cascaded down echelons of thick garden greenery, a maze of winding staircases and meandering walkways in smooth marble.
“You sound impressed,” said Vilaris, scratching the beard. “Best part is, hardly anybody in the stream knows we’re here.”
What the crap, I thought, a little jealous. This place is nicer than most drift-towns… and it’s completely hidden? After I was done thinking it, I said it.
“Not completely. We release the locks and move the city around from time to time. Just for safety’s sake. It’s not that nobody knows we exist. It’s that we make ourselves hard to find.”
My jaw was still hanging open. “How long?”
“Seven and a half inches,” Blaylocke said.
Vilaris made a face at him. “Not likely.” Then to me, he said, “A hundred and eighty-two years.”
“You’re kidding me. It looks brand-new.”
I liked the thought of being somewhere the Civs couldn’t find me. That thought alone made me want to stay a while. It was hard to believe there was a thing in the world the Civs hadn’t gotten their grubby mitts all over. Being there gave me a sense of peace I hadn’t felt in a long time. It was like having my own secret hideout and knowing it would last forever.
“We’re standing on a magnetic island veined with several thousand tons of the most valuable element in the world, and you’re doubting how we keep the place up?”
“I’m not doubting how you keep it up,” I said. “I’m doubting how you keep it hidden. And why me? Why did you bring me in here and show me all this? I’m a few capers away from being the most wanted outlaw in the stream. I’
d sell you out for a warm meal and a cot to sleep on right now.”
“We have both, as it happens, and you don’t have to sell anyone out to get them.”
“Good, I’m starved.”
They took me past blocks of the greenest landscaping I’ve ever stepped on, introduced me to a dozen other primies whose names I forgot seconds after hearing them, and brought me to a building they called the Kingsholme. Judging by the look of it, I assumed it was a cathedral or a library. Once we’d ascended the grand limestone steps and come through the towering entryway, an ornate affair of burnished brass inlaid with silver etchings, I found myself standing in an echoing stone hall with arched ceilings. A row of floating pedestals ran down either side of the room, displaying illuminated objects I could only assume held cultural significance to the city’s residents. The pedestals were carved from dark stone marbled with exposed veins of driftmetal.
“This is great. Just, really great. Can we eat now?” I said.
Blaylocke was confused. “Wait. You eat food?”
“Are you dumb?” I said, incredulous. “What did you think, techsouls drank motor oil and ate roofing nails?”
The two primies shared a glance and burst out laughing.
“I swear, you guys…”
“Relax. We’re messing with you,” Vilaris said between chuckles. “Turns out you can’t take a joke. I like that about you, though. It’s more fun that way.”
So I was a little uptight, being that I was suffering from a distinct lack of tech and my parents had just tried to serve me to the Civs on a silver platter. I wasn’t feeling too good in the flesh department, either. I’d been shot, at least twice. Not to mention my whole body was gashed and bruised from falling thousands of feet through a cloud of floaters and landing in a section of Churn that was about as soft as a bathtub full of razorblades.
They led me down the hall and through the doors at the far end. A normal-sized hallway stretched from left to right. We veered left, then through a door, down another hall and past a large dining space furnished with a dozen pristine table settings. Through a swinging door with a circular plexiglass window, I was greeted by the sounds and smells of industrial cooking.
“Three bowls of gruel with a side of slop,” Vilaris shouted.
The kitchen was a hurricane of white cotton twill and stainless steel, five in number. Their leader, a man as portly in stature as he was prodigious in toque, rapped the counter repeatedly with a metal ladle and shoved it in our direction. An underling obeyed, filling three bowls and carrying the tray past us into the dining room. Vilaris and Blaylocke followed him. I followed them. I was shoveling down spoonfuls of the tastiest gruel I’d had in days when the head chef came out to greet us, wiping chubby hands on an apron splotched with red-orange stains.
“Sheldon McLean, at your service,” he said with a slight bow.
I stopped to cast him a sideways glance, then mumbled, “If you say so,” between spoonfuls.
“I apologize for the slow service,” said the chef.
Blaylocke waved away the apology. “Nonsense. You guys are strapped down tight in there. You should have a staff twice as big for the job you do.”
Sheldon brightened, chins tightening beneath his five o’clock shadow. “We get by,” he admitted with a certain note of pride. “How are things out there today?”
Vilaris shrugged. “Thick. Windy. Dangerous. The u’she.”
I slurped the last dregs of my soup as though I were a condemned man enjoying his final meal, then let the bowl spin to rest on the table. To Sheldon’s credit, he didn’t bat an eye while the bowl wub-wub-wubbed to a halt.
“What is this place?” I asked, studying the ceilings.
“Kingsholme? It’s the closest thing we have to a city hall. Pyras’s center of arts and culture.”
“So you guys can come in here and get free food whenever you want?”
Sheldon answered on their behalf, flashing a smile. “We’re always happy to feed the City Watch and their friends.”
“Friends?” I said. “I wouldn’t go that far.” I showed him my wristbands.
“It’s a formality,” Vilaris explained. “We’re taking him to see the Innovators.”
“News to me,” I said.
“Maybe you should see a doctor as well,” said the chef, no doubt having noticed my wounds.
“It looks worse than it is,” I said. I tapped my synthetic eye with a fingernail. Tink-tink.
Sheldon’s expression darkened. “Is he allowed in here?”
“We’ve reported it to the council already,” Vilaris said. “There’s a reason for all this.”
“Ah.” The chef gave a nod of sudden understanding. “My apologies. I didn’t realize.”
“Shel, ol’ buddy,” I said, “think nothing of it.”
When you’re a techsoul, you live without discrimination except in the presence of primies. Redbloods think they’re better than you because they don’t rust. They act like you don’t both eat and crap the same. Blaylocke had had me there for a second with his little ‘You eat food?’ ruse, but in truth he knew as little about what it meant to be a techsoul as all the other primies.
The chef took his leave after a moment of uncomfortable silence. Vilaris and Blaylocke thanked him for another fine meal. Sheldon insisted that it was hardly a meal and no trouble at all. Another series of hallways took us to a set of heavy wooden doors with riveted brass plating. The plaque on the wall read:
Department of Innovation
Prof. Dr. E. Chester Wheatley
Master Gadgeteer and Technotherapist-in-Chief
Technotherapist? I wondered. Vilaris magicked a steel key from his jacket and unlocked the door. The room beyond might as well have been in a basement for all its lack of windows, exposed brick walls lit by the orange warmth of coal furnaces and the cold white outbursts of blowtorches shedding sparks. I counted no fewer than ten men at work, each the picture of focus, armed with mallet and saw and rivet gun, encircling the skeletons of half-finished chassis like tribal hunters ganging up on big game. The workshop was a graveyard of gears, flywheels, pressure gauges, dynamos and pipes, all piled in corners, stacked on steel shelving units, and strewn about the floor.
Nobody noticed us. Vilaris had to send Blaylocke to fetch the guy whose name was on the plaque outside the door. What I’d expected to be some wizened old man was actually a guy about my age, a strapping youth bound in an exoskeleton of gleaming metal. A veil of black hair hung into his face, stringy-damp with sweat. When he removed his goggles they left wide pink circles in the skin around dark, tired eyes. I was smitten. If there was a man in this city who it could benefit me to befriend, this was that man.
“Gareth, Clint, good to see you. Chester Wheatley,” he told me, thrusting out a greasy palm.
I took it in both of mine. “Muller, Muller Jakes,” I said, shaking his whole arm vigorously. “What’s this you’re working on?”
He turned the upper half of his body to look, stiff-necked in his metal scaffolding. “Oh, that, just a new idea. My grandest idea yet. As they all are. Very secretive, you know. Everything we do here is very secretive.”
And yet we walked right in and no one batted an eye, I almost said. His secret project looked to be something meant for flight—a light, winged frame about the size of a large dog, its internal mechanisms spinning.
“It’s… magnificent,” I said. “Really, I mean that.”
Creases appeared in the skin around Chester’s eyes. I like to think he would’ve stood a little taller if he’d had that much postural freedom. “You think so?”
“Without a doubt. Clean lines, efficient machinery, thoughtful design. You’ve really taken this to a whole new level. It’s by far the most advanced model I’ve ever seen.”
Chester was confused. “The most advanced… but this is my own design. Where could you have seen anything like it before?”
“Listen, Chaz. Walk with me.” I would’ve put an arm around him if not for th
e wristbands. Instead I took him by the shoulders and guided him away from Vilaris and Blaylocke. “I know you work hard. I can tell you’re a brilliant man. Lots of great ideas have taken shape here, haven’t they? Yeah. This place is so full of dreams. So—” I paused for effect and panned my hands over the room, “—so… pregnant, with possibility. This is a place where dreams come alive. I can smell the inspiration.” I could smell something, but inspiration wasn’t it. “You have a gift,” I said, looking him straight in the eye, “and you’re wasting it.”
There were wrinkles between Chester Wheatley’s eyebrows. “But this… this flying machine will be the greatest invention the City Watch has ever seen. I’ve rigged up a bluewave communicator to send simple commands to it from a distance. Watch.” He picked up a black plastic box that had once been an ordinary comm. Now it had a control wheel made from a copper gear, along with three extra buttons. When he turned the wheel, ailerons on the wings flapped in reverse of one another. “It’s operable from as far away as the bluewave signal will go. This button will operate the built-in camera, after I install it. The City Watch will be able to fly it and take pictures of the outside without ever setting foot on the Churn. The Automaplane, I call it.”
“This technology is new around here?” I acted incredulous. “Hate to break it to you, Chaz, but send me up to the stream with a few ounces of gravstone and I’ll bring you back a fleet of these things. I’m sure I can find someone who still has a bunch of them lying around in their backyard.”
Chester’s bubble was burst. “Just when I think I’ve discovered something completely different,” he said, the sparkle in his eyes turned to sorrow.
This guy got out of the house as seldom as I’d hoped. His Automaplane was a blasted brilliant idea. But I had places to go and things to steal. “Hey, don’t get so down on yourself,” I said. “You came up with this entire contraption without ever having known it existed before. If that isn’t the mark of a true genius, I don’t know what is. Chaz, buddy… others around here might not see your potential, but I do. You’re one heck of an inventor, and if you don’t see it in yourself, you need to be reminded.” I reached through his scaffolding and poked him in the chest with both pointer fingers. “Your potential stretches further than you know. There are so many unexplored avenues of technology, the potential for finding that next big idea is right around the corner. Matter of fact, I think I may have already found it for you.”
