Janae massaged her temples as if winding up a jack-in-the-box. “I know it’s what everybody says, that people down there are less than human. But maybe what everybody says is wrong. Ever think of that?
“Sure, there are vile people, but there are also some good people there too—people banished because it was politically expedient to another’s cause or because they didn’t go along with the Commonwealth’s agenda, people forced to serve out a life sentence next to the certifiably insane or crazed soldiers mental from the war.”
She paused the tirade to take another drink, this time aiming the base of the bottle at the ceiling until every drop had disappeared down her throat.
I remained perfectly still. She was talking, and that was good, though it did seem like the fuse on a powder keg had been lit.
The empty bottle wobbled slightly on the shelf as she inhaled sharply. “You people don’t know anything . . . you don’t know anything at all. There are as many good people as bad ones down there, just like up here. Life is just a little more brutally honest beneath the platform.”
Her eyes looked past me, through the walls of the office—she was in another place and time. “But there are some truly evil people down there, and without the rule of law, there’s nothing to prevent the evil ones from running free, taking whatever they want whenever they want. Someone with a disposition for murder, rape, and violence doesn’t change their ways just because you shove them into a huge pit beneath the city.”
The room’s gaslight reflected tear tracks on her cheeks. She quickly wiped them away as if they were trespassers. “Those types thrive with an absence of law and order and become worse, much worse. That’s what happened to my mother. That’s why my father—” She stopped short.
“You really are from down below,” I said, trying to force myself to accept it. “Janae, what happened to your father? You can tell me.”
She shook her head. “You wouldn’t understand. You couldn’t begin to know what it was like down there. Words can’t—”
“Try me,” I said, hoping my defiance would loosen her strings even more.
“Unless someone has been down there, unless they’ve seen it for themselves—” She cut off abruptly as she moved away from Hennemann’s body.
Something had changed suddenly.
“You think you’re up for it?” she asked bitterly as she tugged to free the suitcase from beneath the debris. She was coughing again. “You really want to know what it’s like down there?”
“Janae, what are you doing?” I asked. Her sudden gusto had me feeling uneasy.
The snaps of Nelson’s suitcase sounded like gunshots as she popped them open. She was on the verge of hysterics. “Because I can give you a glimpse of it.”
“Look, I think we just need to calm down for a moment and . . . what’s with the goggles?”
Janae stood and thrust them in my direction. “You think you know anything at all about the people forced to live down there? No, live is too generous a word. Survive. You think you have any idea whatsoever?”
She came over to me and shoved the odd custom goggles into my chest. I tried my best not to wince from my soreness.
“Janae, I don’t think that—”
“That’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to think, you just have to watch. This is your lucky day to see if you’re right.” Her words were like acid.
“Janae, I’m sorry. You’re right, I only know what I’ve been told. I didn’t mean to make you—”
“Strap them on. They’re not normal goggles. They’re something Rodger . . . invented. It’s what got him banished. Some high official deemed him an enemy of the Commonwealth because of what this tinkware can do.”
The goggles were heavy. Instead of a strap in the back to hold them in place, a flexible rubber cord twisted around like a corkscrew. Attached to that was a curved metal piece that resembled a tiny shoehorn.
“I don’t understand. Why did this get him banished? What does it do?”
“In Jimmy’s apartment, you asked me about memories.”
I shrugged as I looked at the concentric brass circles of the eyepieces. They were etched with the first three letters of each of the months, and the ring inside had numerals one through thirty-one. The companion lens on the other side had two sets of numbers zero through nine and the same etched on the smaller ring inside.
“That’s what this tinkware does,” Janae continued. “It remembers in pictures what the wearer saw at the time. Imagine if your camera hat had an unlimited number of frames and took photographs at a blinding rate and stored them all. It’s like that, but they all go into this box, and they’re memories of the wearer.” She handed me a scuffed-up fist-sized wooden box that was heavier than the goggles.
The corners of the small box were worn, and much of the deep varnish had faded over time, exposing hints of the natural wood grain. If it weren’t so unexpectedly heavy, it could have easily been mistaken for a bookend or doorstop.
“It records their brainwave signals, allowing them to be stored and played back from this.”
“I still don’t follow,” I said.
She plugged a strand from the back of the rubber cord into a fingertip-sized opening in the wooden box in my hands. “You will. Wait just a second here. “
She snatched up a chair from across the office and placed it in front of me.
“You’ll need to sit down. This will be disorienting at first, and I don’t want you falling over and smashing the Re-Viewer.”
I took my seat as she continued. “That’s what he . . . what Rodger called his invention, because it lets you visually experience something again later.”
She leaned over to adjust the date rings. She clicked the circles around until they lined up at the top with the date of October 02, 1879. “I’m starting you off when I was six years old, the first time Rodger allowed me to use the Re-Viewer. He did it as a birthday gift, since real presents down there were obviously hard to come by. On this date, I’m giving Bethany, the hair doll my mother had just made for me, a tour of the only world I’d ever known.”
There was nothing gentle about the way she strapped the goggles onto my head, tightening the curved plate until it pressed against the back of my skull. With the fraction of light that seeped in the corners, I saw my bewildered eyes looking back at me off the highly reflective circles inside. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of pinprick holes made it seem that I looked at my office through a sheet of fine linen.
“I only regret that the Re-Viewer only gives the visual of the recorded day,” she said. “You’ll be spared the aroma of sewage and contaminated refuse that has nowhere to go. You’ll miss out on filling your lungs up with coal dust from the ever-present haze that lingers down there. Your belly won’t be a knot trying to consume itself while waiting for the next food and water ration day from above. No, I can’t dispense the full treatment for you here today, but I think this will make my point for me.”
She clicked a button on the left-side goggle viewer, initiating a faint spinning hum. The round, punctured “mirrors” began to rotate counter-clockwise, gaining momentum.
In a cold voice, she said, “Welcome to the Under, Mr. Kipsey,” and slapped me on the back.
At first, I thought the room had exploded into a bright fireball of light. I let out a gasp before realizing that what I actually saw was only visible in the Re-Viewer spectacles. Again, so much for my poker face. It was astounding.
I could tell no difference between the visual manifestations and viewing with my natural eyes. In my field of vision, it was daylight hours. I witnessed the right hand and arm of a young girl extended before me, presumably Janae’s hand and arm. The left hand didn’t come into the frame. I suspected it clutched the wooden box that was capturing the images. Her right hand presented a small figure made of knotted-up hair, which I assumed was Bethany, the doll from her mother.
“This is incredible!” I exclaimed a little too loudly.
It was the most as
tonishing tinkware I’d ever seen. I didn’t know how Janae had held back from doubling over with laughter when I had presented my measly five-shot camera hat an hour or so before. It was like comparing cave paintings to the Sistine Chapel.
Even though I knew that the images only existed “inside” the goggles, I slid them up an inch or so to convince my brain that the fluid, full-color pictures weren’t actually before me.
“Janae, this is amazing! The Commonwealth sent your father down for this? They should’ve have given him a citation or a medal!”
Her tone was devoid of any excitement. “He refused to give the schematics to one of the members, and when they threatened him, he provided an incomplete, non-working prototype. He told me he was banished because he had ‘shirked his duty to the city, choosing to forfeit his destiny for a bowl of beans like Old Testament Esau.’ He wasn’t even granted a trial. A Charon patrol skiff dumped him under the city in the middle of the night.”
Her words quickly deflated my jubilation, as I was reminded why I had the goggles on to begin with. Also, the reference to Esau giving up his birthright for a meal twisted in my stomach. I’d been given the same lecture by Montague less than twenty-four hours ago, but I wasn’t about to reveal that to her for fear she’d go even more mad.
“Personally, I suspect that any device that can record the thoughts of a person would be considered a threat to politicians,” she said. “Anyway, you’re missing the point. Keep watching.”
Janae had been right about needing to get acclimated to the image-making device. A brief wave of dizziness overtook me.
She must’ve sensed my anxiety. “Just be still and don’t move your head. The sensation will pass soon enough.”
I watched as the young girl moved to hug a middle-aged man whose big smile lifted a bushy moustache. I guessed this was the “real” Rodger. His face was creased with dark lines of soot and mire, and he had the same brilliant blue eyes he’d given his daughter.
A woman of similar age bent into the frame and lovingly patted the knotted head of the doll. At first, I thought she was a brunette instead of a blonde until I realized the soot had colored her too. I caught a glimpse of the U brand on her hand as she tightened a knot on Bethany’s arm. Janae didn’t have this marking because she wasn’t sentenced to the Under. Her only crime was being born down there.
The mother said something to young Janae, but the images had no sound. The woman was beautiful in a sad way, her clothes patched and tattered, dark from handling coal in some capacity or another—coal used to power my city.
The six-year-old jumped down from wherever she’d been sitting and started to dance unevenly around the dirt-floor room, giving me another wave of motion sickness.
The scene abruptly ended as if time jumped ahead a few minutes, and now I was outside with little Janae. She looked back at Rodger in the opening of the one-story shanty we’d started in. The dingy home was set in a cluster of other rickety, hodgepodge encampments braced against one of the massive support stilts.
I was certain these homes were pieced together from scraps from the John-Johns’ construction of the platform. That would have made these discarded pieces at least three decades old at the time of the footage I was watching. I counted six or seven structures here. It was difficult to determine where one left off and another began, since the leaning lot of them resembled a giant misshapen accordion folding in on itself.
Rodger playfully waved to her and then pointed upward. Young Janae’s vision shot upward in another sickening blur. I expected to be looking up at the sky, but the enormous bottom of the platform of the city blocked the sun out, casting a great shadow. It took a second or so for me to see what he gestured to above the two-hundred-foot metal wall.
Just below the rafters of the metal framework, some six hundred feet up, was a tiny speck slowly weaving through support beams as big around as redwood trees.
The child observed it for a minute or so as it maneuvered through the massive metal stilts. I realized it was the bottom of a single-occupant patrol skiff high above our heads. Janae playfully waved Bethany at the speck of the Charon.
The next image jumped to a delivery of coal dumped from a dirigible carrier a few hundred feet up. This was what Montague had referred to as Addleton Heights’ dependence upon other nations below, the major external commodity the city couldn’t live without.
As the armed airship cautiously navigated away between the massive wall and the underside of the platform, the hill-sized mound of coal settled enough for the scrapes to begin their duty. I understood now what she’d said about the grey haze lingering in the air like swamp mist.
Young Janae used Bethany to mimic the grimy workers using makeshift shovels, buckets, and hands. All the inhabitants did their best to feed the insatiable appetite of the chimney opening, a greedy mouth the size of a bassel stop.
“What do you see?” Janae asked.
“People shoveling coal,” I reported. “Their mouths and noses are covered with blackened kerchiefs.”
“You never get used to it, the coal dust. It gets into everything. Rodger was in charge of regulating the seawater channels—the water that’d be converted into steam. It was rare for him to scrape or shovel, his tink knowledge being invaluable down there. His main task was to make sure the boiler had the right amount of steam pressure.
“If it were too low, it wouldn’t travel up through the wrought-iron conduits to the convection convertors—too much, and it’d explode halfway up. Anyway, even though he didn’t come into direct contact with the coal like my mother, he was always covered in soot—we all were.”
Young Janae followed Rodger along a narrow alley of a road, except it wasn’t a road. It was a trench formed in the bedrock by the inhabitants shoving the endless stacks of debris to one side or another. On Rodger’s shoulder was a piece of scrap bent and buffed into a crude cutlass shape. I winced when Janae looked down at the ground. She was walking barefoot on a path littered with rocks, shards of steel, and broken glass. October can be fiercely cold on the topside of the platform. I wondered how cold it was here.
The two of them reached their destination, a massive metal wall with more rivets than the night sky has stars. I thought of how a hungry ocean was on the other side, relentlessly hurling waves in hopes of breaking through and devouring the outcasts.
Janae’s words startled me. “Are you to the metal embankments?”
The little girl’s vision scaled the steel barriers. Using Rodger’s height as a guide, I judged they extended at least two hundred feet or more, like the ones I’d seen previously. Not being a structural engineer, I could only guess as to how deep into the island’s bedrock the riveted sheets of steel were driven to prevent people from digging under it.
“How did you know what I was looking at?” I asked as Bethany re-entered the frame, now soaring like a bird in Janae’s tiny hand over the impossibly high edge of the wall.
“I’ve watched the record of that day thousands of times. I know exactly how long it takes to get to that point from the coal-dumping airship.”
The image scrolled back down to where Rodger stood facing her.
“What’s he saying to you there?” I asked.
“He’s got an idea for a new invention.”
Rodger took her by the hand, and the image cut again. Presumably after a short time—maybe half an hour later, judging by the light—father and daughter approached one of the stilts. The massive steel beam was scarred with etchings of all manner of profanity.
Janae continued, her voice nearly a whisper, “He’s saying he’s going to build what he calls a crawler box, a three-person container that will scale one of the stilts.”
As much as the Re-Viewer had captured my fascination, her words forced me to shift the goggles to my forehead. “Is that how you got here? You rode up in this three-person crawler-box thing he made?”
Her eyes shifted to the floor. “No, not exactly. Something happened . . . before he began constru
ction on it.”
Seeing her struggle to continue, I waited patiently.
Finally, she said, “December 4th.”
“What?”
“Adjust the ocular date rings to Thursday, December 4, 1879.”
I rested the goggles in my lap.
“Do you want to know or not?” she asked, the intensity of her blue eyes boring through me. The rings clicked as I dialed them to the date.
“Put them on and push the button on the side,” she commanded. There was so much pain on her face that I welcomed not having to look her in the eye.
The device began to whir as before.
Judging by the walls, I was back inside her childhood home. The three of them had come together at a small makeshift kitchen table. Lantern flickers told me this recording was at night. They were bundled in more clothing than before, all of it ragged, reminding me that I was witnessing a scene in December instead of October.
Janae looked down at her belly, revealing a harness holding the small recording box in place. Her mother gave her a disapproving look. Even without being able to hear the woman’s words, it was easy to see her displeasure about the girl wearing the Re-Viewer apparatus at the dinner table.
Rodger took his wife’s hand into his and rubbed the back of it against his cheek. Though she was reluctant at first, the gesture forced her into smiling.
The expression only lasted for a couple of seconds. It was replaced by a look of shock and then horror. Young Janae’s field of vision blurred as she looked around rapidly.
“What’s happening?” I demanded.
“They called themselves sloats,” Janae said in a cold voice. “Remember how I told you about evil people being allowed to run free down there?”
I watched as the dirt floor of Janae’s childhood hut began to tremble. Grimy fingers punched through, and a hand latched onto her mother’s leg. Though completely safe within my office, I clutched the arms of my chair, my heart racing.
The dizzying images shifted and then finally settled to reveal a fork in the girl’s hand. She plunged it deep into the back of the intruder’s closed fist, allowing her mother to pull free. Little Janae raced to the table to arm herself with more cutlery.
Addleton Heights Page 22
