Commitment Hour

by James Alan Gardner

“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 abetter 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 die 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.

  It had only taken a few minutes. Rashid had cut out a section of fence…and the fence had healed itself. I couldn’t even see where the cuts had been made.

  “This is just some sort of machine?” I asked.

  “Actually millions of tiny machines,” Rashid said. “Bonded together to look like a fence. Same with the antenna.”

  “All just machines.”

  I thought of the Patriarch’s Hand—another machine. And Hakoore had slyly told me, “Maybe the hand is older than the Patriarch, dating back to the founding of the cove.” Another high-tech toy, brought to Earth by those who created this fence. I could imagine how traitors from the stars would love to give such a gift to their priesthood: a lie detector for keeping the rabble in line.

  “So if Tober Cove is an experiment,” I murmured, “or a demonstration…are they still watching us now?”

  “No,” Rashid said. “When the Sparks signed their treaty with the League, the star-siders were all obliged to leave. Since Master Crow and Mistress Gull still show up every year, I assume the whole process is mechanized. Computer-controlled, continuing to run itself on autopilot—”

  “Wait a second,” I interrupted. “You think that Master Crow and Mistress Gull are part of this too?”

  “It’s all the same package,” he replied. “Master Crow and Mistress Gull are just airplanes, aren’t they? Robot-driven planes that pick the Tober children…”

  I let out a sigh of relief. Airplanes. The airplane argument. That familiar old refrain.

  It put everything else in perspective.

  Listen: Tobers know about airplanes. We’ve seen their pictures in OldTech books. And when someone from down-peninsula says, “Hey, your gods are just planes,” it’s hardly the complete refutation of all our beliefs that outsiders seem to think.

  Yes, Tober children flew to Birds Home in airplanes. Mundane aircraft. Machines.

  But why should that matter? Everything belonged to the gods. Machines were no less god-given than a stone or a leaf. And the planes weren’t the real Master Crow or Mistress Gull—they were just tools held by divine hands. The real gods wore the planes’ metal and machinery like unimportant clothing.

  If that was true for the planes, why not for everything else? For machines like the Patriarch’s Hand, the self-healing fence, and everything. Why not even the star-siders who might have founded Tober Cove? The gods could use people just as easily as they used machines. They could send a duck to tell whether they wanted you to Commit male or female, and they could send traitors from space to set up a town where people could live sane lives.

  If the gods were behind it, who cared about the apparent physical cause? Getting distracted by such issues was just Hakoore’s materialism, wasn’t it? Thinking that the gods weren’t in the picture
just because the cove had a surface explanation. But the gods were in the picture; I refused to doubt them.

  Damn, I hated when Hakoore was right.

  “Lord Rashid,” I said, “the Patriarch once preached that a scientist will cut a gull into pieces, then be astonished none of the pieces can fly. That’s what you’re doing here. You may be happy you’ve cut all this to pieces, but you haven’t got the truth of Tober Cove. You haven’t seen a drop of it.”

  The Spark Lord looked at me curiously. “You’re all right with this? The fence, the antenna…”

  “Why should I care about the antenna?” I asked. “It’s just a big tall thing up on a hill. You haven’t even suggested it has a purpose.”

  “It’s a collector,” he answered, watching me to see my reaction. “This whole peninsula must be covered with radio relays like the one hidden back in that car’s engine. The relays gather low-powered local radio transmissions, and forward them to the array on this tower. This antenna amplifies the signals and sends them on a tight beam to another site—”

  “Wait,” I interrupted. I was actually smiling, even if I didn’t understand half of what he said. “What local radio transmissions? No one has a radio in Tober Cove.”

  “Oh. That.”

  Rashid reached into a belt pouch and pulled out his little plastic radio receiver. When he turned it on, it made the same waves-on-gravel sound it had made before.

  “More static,” Steck muttered.

  “No,” Rashid told her. “Just a type of transmission that’s too complicated for my receiver to decode. And guess where it’s coming from.”

  He touched the receiver to my forehead. The noise of the static went wild.

  “See?” Rashid said. “Radio Fullin is on the air.”

  SEVENTEEN

  A Barrel for the Bereaved

  Rashid offered no explanations. “You don’t like me speaking like a scientist,” he said.

  Steck wouldn’t clarify things for me either. She contended she didn’t see the significance of what Rashid had discovered. He refused to believe it. “I’ve taught you enough science,” he told her. “You can figure out the whole setup. If I were a suspicious man, I’d say you knew how Tober Cove worked long ago. You only pretended it was a great mystery because you wanted me to bring you here for Fullin’s Commitment.”