The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  But as she did, she could not help casting a wistful glance back over her shoulder, hoping against hope for a glimpse of a bright red aeroplane. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything about Eszterhazy surviving this?” she heard herself asking her odd young passenger. Whatever was happening, with his superb skills, surely he must have survived.

  “Uh, about that…” Radio Jones said. “I kinda got some bad news for you.”

  * * *

  Rudy awoke to find himself in Hell.

  Hell was touchless, tasteless, scentless, and black as pitch. It consisted entirely of a bedlam of voices: “Lemme outta here—wasn’t doing nothing—Mabel! Where are you, Mabel?—I’m serious, I got bad claustrophobia—goddamn flicks!—there’s gotta be—minding my own business—Mabel!—gonna puke—all the things I coulda been—I don’t like it here—can’t even hear myself think—Oh, Freddy, if only I’da toldja I loved you when I coulda—got to be a way out—why won’t anybody tell me what’s happening?—if the resta youse don’t shut—”

  He knew where he was now. He understood their situation. Gathering himself together, Rudy funneled all the energy he had into a mental shout:

  “Silence!”

  His thought was so forceful and purposive that it shocked all the other voices into silence.

  “Comrades!” he began. “It is clear enough what has happened here. We have all been harvested by the police lackeys of the Naked Brains. By the total lack of somatic sensations, I deduce that we have ourselves been made into Naked Brains.” Somebody sent out a stab of raw emotion. Before his or her (not that gender mattered anymore, under the circumstances) hysteria could spread, Rudy rushed onward in a torrent of words. “But there is no need for despair. We are not without hope. So long as we have our thoughts, our inner strength, and our powers of reason, we hold within ourselves the tools of liberation.”

  “Liberation?” somebody scoffed. “It’s my body’s been liberated, and from me. It’s them is doing the liberatin’, not us.”

  “I understand your anger, brother,” Rudy said. “But the opportunity is to him who keeps his head.” Belatedly, Rudy realized that this was probably not the smartest thing to say. The anonymous voices responded with jeers. “Peace, brothers and sisters. We may well be lost, and we must face up to that.” More jeers. “And yet, we all have family and friends who we left behind.” Everyone, that is, save for himself—a thought that Rudy quickly suppressed. “Think of the world that is coming for them—one of midnight terror, an absolutist government, the constant fear of denouncement and punishment without trial. Of imprisonment without hope of commutation, of citizens randomly plucked from the streets for harvesting…” He paused to let that sink in. “I firmly believe that we can yet free ourselves. But even if we could not, would it not be worth our uttermost efforts to fight the tyranny of the Brains? For the sake of those we left behind?”

  There was a general muttering of agreement. Rudy had created a community among his listeners. Now, quickly, to take advantage of it! “Who here knows anything about telecommunications technology?”

  “I’m an electrical engineer,” somebody said.

  “That Dutch?” said another voice. “You’re a damn good engineer. Or you were.”

  “Excellent. Dutch, you are now the head of our Ad Hoc Committee for Communications and Intelligence. Your task is first to work out the ways that we are connected to each other and to the machinery of the outer world, and second, to determine how we may take over the communications system, control it for our own ends, and when we are ready, deprive the government of its use. Are you up to the challenge, Comrade—?”

  “Schwartz. Dutch Schwartz, at your service. Yes, I am.”

  “Then choose people to work with you. Report back when you have solid findings. Now. Who here is a doctor?”

  “I am,” a mental voice said dryly. “Professor and Doctor Anna Pavlova at your service.”

  “Forgive me, Comrade Professor. Of course you are here. And we are honored—honored!—to have you with us. One of the greatest—”

  “Stop the nattering and put me to work.”

  “Yes, of course. Your committee will look into the technical possibilities of restoring our brains to the bodies we left behind.”

  “Well,” said the professor, “this is not something we ever considered when we created the Brains. But our knowledge of microsurgery has grown enormously with the decades of Brain maintenance. I would not rule it out.”

  “You believe our bodies have not been destroyed?” somebody asked in astonishment.

  “A resource like that? Of course not,” Rudy said. “Think! Any despotic government must have the reliable support of toadies and traitors. With a supply of bodies, many of them young, to offer, the government can effectively give their lackeys immortality—not the immortality of the Brains, but the immortality of body after body, in plentiful supply.” He paused to let that sink in. “However. If we act fast to organize the proletariat, perhaps that can be prevented. To do this, we will need the help of those in the Underground who have not been captured and disembodied. Who here is—?”

  “And you,” somebody else said. “What is your role in this? Are you to be our leader?”

  “Me?” Rudy asked in astonishment. “Nothing of the sort! I am a community organizer.”

  He got back to work organizing.

  * * *

  The last dirigible was moored to the tip of the Gaudi Building. The Imperator was a visible symbol of tyranny which cast its metaphoric shadow over the entire city. So far as anybody knew, there wasn’t an aeroplane, autogyro, or Zeppelin left in the city to challenge its domination of the air. So it was there that the new Tyrant would be. It was there that the destinies of everyone in the city would play out.

  It was there that Amelia Spindizzy and Radio Jones went, after concealing the autogyro in a shed behind Dooley’s tavern.

  Even from a distance, it was clear that there were gun ports to every side of the Imperator, and doubtless there were other defenses on the upper floors of the skyscraper. So they took the most direct route—through the lobby of the Gaudi building and up the elevator. Amelia and Radio stepped inside, the doors closed behind them, and up they rose, toward the Zeppelin.

  “In my youth, of course, I was an avid balloonsman,” somebody said from above.

  Radio yelped and Amelia stared sharply upward.

  Wedged into an upper corner of the elevator was a radio. From it came a marvelous voice, at once both deep and reedy, and immediately recognizable as well. “…and covered the city by air. Once, when I was a mere child, ballooning alone as was my wont, I caught a line on a gargoyle that stuck out into my airspace from the tower of the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption—what is now the Sepulchre of the Bodies of the Brains—and, thus entangled, I was in some danger of the gondola—which was little more than a basket, really—tipping me out into a long and fatal fall to earth. Fortunately, one of the brown-robed monks, engaged in his Matins, was cloistered in the tower and noticed my predicament. He was able to reach out and free the line.” The voice dropped, a hint of humor creeping in. “In my childish piety, of course, I considered this evidence of the beneficent intercession of some remote deity, whom I thanked nightly in my prayers.” One could almost hear him shaking his head at his youthful credulousness. “But considering how fortunate we are now—are we not?—to be at last freed from the inhuman tyranny of the Naked Brains, one has to wonder whether it wasn’t in some sense the hand of Destiny that reached out from that tower, to save the instrument by which our liberation would one day be achieved.”

  “It’s him!” Radio cried. “Just like I told you.”

  “It…sounds like him. But he can’t be the one who gave the orders you overheard. Can you be absolutely sure?” Amelia asked her unlikely sidekick for the umpteenth time. “Are you really and truly certain?”

  Radio rolled her eyes. “Lady, I heard him with my own two ears. You don’t think I know the voice of
the single greatest pilot…” Her voice trailed off under Amelia’s glare. “Well, don’t hit the messenger! I read Obey the Brain! every week. His stats are just plain better’n yours.”

  “They have been,” Amelia said grimly. “But that’s about to change.” She unsnapped the holster of her pistol.

  Then the bell pinged. They’d reached the top floor.

  The elevator doors opened.

  * * *

  Rudy was conferring with progressive elements in the city police force about the possibility of a counter-coup (they argued persuasively that, since it was impossible to determine their fellow officers’ loyalties without embroiling the force in internecine conflict, any strike would have to be small and fast) when his liaison with the Working Committee for Human Resources popped up in his consciousness and said, “We’ve located the bodies, boss. As you predicted, they were all carefully preserved and are being maintained in the best of health.”

  “That is good news, Comrade Mariozzi. Congratulations. But none of that ‘boss’ business, do you understand? It could easily go from careless language to a common assumption.”

  Meanwhile, they’d hooked into televideon cameras throughout the city, and though the views were grim, it heartened everybody to no longer be blind. It was a visible—there was no way around the word—sign that they were making progress.

  Red Rudy had just wrapped up the meeting with the loyalist police officers when Comrade Mariozzi popped into his consciousness again. “Hey, boss!” he said excitedly. “You gotta see this!”

  * * *

  The guards were waiting at the top of the elevator with guns drawn. To Radio Jones’s shock and amazement, Amelia Spindizzy handed over her pistol without a murmur of protest. Which was more than could be said for Radio herself when one of the goons wrested the Universal Receiver out of her hands. Amelia had to seize her by the shoulders and haul her back before she could attack the nearest of their captors.

  They were taken onto the Imperator and through the Hall of the Naked Brains. The great glass jars were empty and the giant floating Brains were gone who-knows-where. Radio hoped they’d been flung in an alley somewhere to be eaten by dogs. But hundreds of new, smaller jars containing brains of merely human proportions had been brought in and jury-rigged to oxygen feeds and electrical input-output units. Radio noticed that they all had cut-out switches. If one of the New Brains acted up it could be instantly put into solitary confinement. But there was nobody monitoring them, which seemed to defeat the purpose.

  “‘Keep close to the earth!’” a voice boomed. Radio jumped. Amelia, she noticed, did not. Then she saw that there were radios set in brackets to either end of the room. “Such was the advice of the preeminent international airman, Alberto Santos-Dumont, and they were good enough words for their time.” The familiar voice chuckled and half-snorted, and the radio crackled loudly as his breath struck the sensitive electroacoustic transducer that had captured his voice. “But his time is not my time.” He paused briefly; one could almost hear him shrug his shoulders. “One is never truly tested close to the earth. It is in the huge arching parabola of an aeroplane finding its height and seeking a swift descent from it that a man’s courage is found. It is there, in acts outside of the quotidian, that his mettle is tested.”

  A televideon camera ratcheted about, tracking their progress. Were the New Brains watching them, Radio wondered? The thought gave her the creeps.

  Then they were put in an elevator (only two guards could fit in with them, and Radio thought that for sure Amelia would make her play now; but the aviatrix stared expressionlessly forward and did nothing) and taken down to the flight deck. There the exterior walls had been removed, as would be done under wartime conditions when the ’planes and wargyros had to be gotten into the air as soon as possible. Cold winds buffeted and blustered about the vast and empty space.

  “A young man dreams of war and glory,” the voice said from a dozen radios. “He toughens his spirit and hardens his body with physical activity and discomfort. In time, he’s ready to join the civil militia, where he is trained in the arts of killing and destruction. At last, his ground training done, he is given an aeroplane and catapulted into the sky, where he discovers…” The voice caught and then, when it resumed, was filled with wonder, “…not hatred, not destruction, not war, but peace.”

  To the far side of the flight deck, unconcerned by his precarious location, a tall figure in a flyer’s uniform bent over a body in greasy coveralls, which he had dragged right to the edge. Then he flipped it over. It was Grimy Huey, and he was dead.

  The tall man stood and turned. “Leave,” he told the guards.

  They clicked their heels and obeyed.

  “He almost got me, you know,” the man remarked conversationally. “He came at me from behind with a wrench. Who would have thought that a mere mechanic had that much gumption in him?”

  For a long moment, Amelia Spindizzy stood ramrod-straight and unmoving. Radio Jones sank to the deck, crouching by her side. She couldn’t help herself. The cold and windy openness of the flight deck scared her spitless. She couldn’t even stand. But, terrified though she was, she didn’t look away. Someday all this would be in the history books; whatever happened, she knew, was going to determine her view of the world and its powers for the rest of her natural life, however short a time that might be.

  Then Amelia strolled forward toward Eszterhazy and said, “Let me help you with that.” She stooped and took the mechanic’s legs. Eszterhazy took the arms. They straightened, swung the body—one! two! three!—and flung it over the side.

  Slapping her hands together, Amelia said, “Why’d you do it?”

  Eszterhazy shrugged in a self-deprecating way. “It had to be done. So I stepped up to the plate and took a swing at the ball. That’s all.” Then he grinned boyishly. “It’s good to know that you’re on my team.”

  “That’s you on the radios,” Amelia said. They were still booming away, even though the buffeting winds drowned out half the words that came from them.

  “Wire recording.” Eszterhazy strode to a support strut and slapped a switch. The radios all died. “A little talk I prepared, being broadcast to the masses. Radio has been scandalously underutilized as a tool of governance.”

  Amelia’s response was casual—even, Radio thought, a bit dunderheaded technologically. “But radio’s everywhere,” she said. “There are dozens of public sets scattered through the city. Why, people can hear news bulletins before the newspapers can even set type and roll the presses!”

  Eszterhazy smiled a thin, tight, condescending smile. “But they only tell people what’s happened, and not what to think about it. That’s going to change. My people are distributing sets to every bar, school, church, and library in the city. In the future, my future, everyone will have a bank of radios in their home—the government radio, of course, but also one for musical events, another for free lectures, and perhaps even one for business news.”

  Radio felt the urge to speak up and say that fixed-frequency radios were a thing of the past. But she suppressed it. She sure wasn’t about to hand over her invention to a bum the likes of which Eszterhazy was turning out to be. But what the heck was the matter with Amelia?

  Amelia Spindizzy put her hands behind her, and turned her back on her longtime archrival. Head down, deep in thought, she trod the edge of the abyss. “Hah.” The word might have meant anything. “You’ve clearly put a lot of thought into this…this…new world order of yours.”

  “I’ve been planning this all my life,” Eszterhazy said with absolute seriousness. “New and more efficient forms of government, a society that not only promotes the best of its own but actively weeds out the criminals and the morally sick. Were you aware that before Lycurgus became king, the Spartans were a licentious and ungovernable people? He made them the fiercest warriors the world has ever known in the space of a single lifetime.” He stopped, and then with a twinkle in his eye said, “There I go again, talking about
the Greeks! As I started to say, I thought I would not be ready to make my move for many years. But then I got wind of certain experiments performed by Anna Pavlova which proved that not only were the Naked Brains functionally mad, but that I had it in my power to offer them the one thing for which they would give me their unquestioning cooperation—death.

  “In their corruption were the seeds of our salvation. And thus fell our oppressors.”

  “I worked with them, and I saw no oppressors.” Amelia rounded her course strolling back toward Eszterhazy, brow furrowed with thought. “Only nets of neurological fiber who, as it turned out, were overcome by the existential terror of their condition.”

  “Their condition is called ‘life,’ Millie. And, yes, life makes us all insane.” Eszterhazy could have been talking over the radio, his voice was so reassuring and convincing. “Some of us respond to that terror with useless heroics. Others seek death.” He cocked a knowing smile at Amelia. “Others respond by attacking the absurdity at its source. Ruled by Naked Brains, humanity could not reach its full potential. Now, once again, we will rule ourselves.”

  “It does all make sense. It all fits.” Amelia Spindizzy came to a full stop and stood shaking her head in puzzlement. “If only I could understand—”

  “What is there to understand?” An impatient edge came into Eszterhazy’s voice. “What have I left unexplained? We can perfect our society in our lifetimes! You’re so damnably cold and analytic, Millie. Don’t you see that the future lies right at your feet? All you have to do is let go of your doubts and analyses and intellectual hesitations and take that leap of faith into a better world.”

  Radio trembled with impotent alarm. She knew that, small and ignored as she was, it might be possible for her to be the wild card, the unexpected element, the unforeseeable distraction that saves the day. That it was, in fact, her duty to do so. She’d seen enough Saturday afternoon kinescope serials to understand that.

  If only she could bring herself to stand up. Though it almost made her throw up to do so, Radio brought herself to her feet. The wind whipped the deck, and Eszterhazy quickly looked over at her. As though noticing her for the first time. And then, as Radio fought to overcome her paralyzing fear, Amelia acted.