by Paul Melko
Just the broken ones, Manuel replies.
Quant: Even they had food and shelter.
Manuel: The OG should clean this place out.
Moira sends veto coursing through the pod.
Do we trust the OG to do anything now? she asks. Do we still think the OG is the best form of government? After what it’s done to us?
I didn’t really mean that, Manuel replies, taken aback.
Then don’t think it, Moira sends.
A hefty man walks over from the main building. He’s dressed in coveralls smudged with dirt. He opens the door to the hut and sits on the stool there, pulling a clipboard from the wall.
“Don’t even ask. I don’t have nothing but work for someone who knows a Forzberg Arboratiller. So if you don’t know how to drive one of those, get the hell out of line.”
No one moves.
What’s a Forzberg Arboratiller? Quant asks.
Manuel shrugs.
“I will be testing you on this.”
We step out of line, and the man looks at us.
“At least some of you are honest. The rest of you can go. You five, come with me.”
It was a test.
It pays to be honest, Moira preaches.
A groan slips through us.
The rest of the queue mutters at us as they leave. The foreman hands us forms.
“I’m Mr. Ellis, subforeman for the Molehill Arborist Sodality. You’re all apprentice class A arborists. Fill these out. Wait.” He looks closely at Meda. “You’re clusters. Jesus, crap.”
He’s going to fire us, Manuel says.
“How many of you are there?”
“A trio and a duo.”
“This is my lucky day. Fill these out.”
He trots back to the main building while we write in our fake names and information.
What’s that about? Manuel asks.
He returns, slower than he left, weighed down by a box in his arms. “Read these. Tell me if you can run one of these things.”
Strom opens the box. Inside are paper copy manuals for a tree-planting tractor. The image on the first manual shows a huge agricultural monstrosity. The symbol on the cover—a triangle-bound three—indicates it’s to be operated by trio pods only.
“These are built for trios,” Meda says.
“No shit. Can you drive it?”
Manuel has been paging through the operating manual, his thoughts drifting among us, spicy with abstractions and interactions.
Manuel? Meda prods.
Oh, yeah, no doubt.
“Yes, we can.”
“Happy damn day. The OG dumped a dozen of these bastards on us and we thought they were being nice. Until we figured it took three people to run one. Bastards. Consider yourselves class B arborists.” He checks his watch. “The bus leaves at noon from here. Be on it. Report to Subforeman Muckle at Hinterland. He’ll get you set up with this piece of crap.”
Hinterland: the end of the Congo, a frontier, without law, full of desperate people. If Leto is somewhere, it is there. We leave a note for Duchess Monahan at the guild house to which she is attached, then head back to catch the bus.
The river is perfectly straight for a hundred kilometers, a feat of precision, a green V cut into the desert. There are two main thoroughfares at the tops of each bank, sometimes a kilometer from the river, sometimes alongside the brown, turgid Congo, but always traveling to the northeast.
We are reminded of the Amazon, the other river of our adventures: wild and alive, where this river is mechanical and reversed. If the desalination plants ever stop, if the power ever fails, the river will dry to desert and again the sand will overtake this long oasis.
Barges ply the river, working through locks into the interior, barges full of stone, cement, brick, and steel. At intervals landings jut into the river, places to offload the barges. They are named Landing One, Landing Two, and so on, but serve as population-dense spots, not really towns, just densities.
Otherwise the river is empty, save for arborists and gardeners monitoring the watering. At one hundred kilometers, we reach Brazeltown, an oasis of capitalism and abandon. The hills around the river in a clearly demarcated circle are filled with bars and casinos. A dozen barges are tied up here.
The bus waits twenty minutes for its riders to disembark at a casino that lures them in.
“The next bus comes in twenty-four hours. Why not spend it in air-conditioned luxury?” the driver says flatly.
We buy sandwiches at a stand not far from the bus stop. Some of the people on the bus, other arborists, wander into the casino. They are not on the bus when it starts up again.
The river curves, an engineered bevel to encompass a peninsula of low-lying rice paddies. We expect to see some gengineered animals striding through the fields, but instead see singletons working the slopes.
The road sweeps away from the river, and we are suddenly in a cracked, broken land. Tan and sepia stone and dirt surround us. It is hard to believe that a river is just a kilometer over that hill. It is equally hard to believe that a century before it was jungle.
It’s a strip of green in an ocean of desert, Meda sends.
They are fools, Manuel sends.
They’re at least trying, Moira replies. Striving.
They are exploiting something no one else wants, Manuel sends. Why else would the OG give this to them?
Duty, responsibility, stewardship, Moira ticks off.
Penance, Quant adds.
But the waste of it all, Strom sends.
It was wasted when the singletons got here, Moira says. But the OG couldn’t motivate this sort of project by itself.
The air is so dry and cloudless that the Ring is clear as it seems to dive into the horizon. The Ring is straight overhead here at the equator, just as it was in the Amazon.
I think I see an elevator, Manuel sends. He is peering out the front windshield of the bus.
On the horizon, we see the glitter of a Ring elevator far to the east, hundreds of kilometers away. The sight makes us wonder again why Leto hasn’t taken possession of the Ring himself and used its power to destroy the OG and take what he wants by force.
We pass a grove of plywood-and-corrugated-aluminum shanties. Hollow people covered in linen to abate the sun stare at us. Then the road passes back into the verdant valley around the river, and we notice that the threshold of green is guarded by soldiers with guns.
Managed scarcity, Quant sends. They build a river and then divvy water out to accumulate wealth.
The Community would have done it better? Manuel chides.
Yes, it would have. Were there wasted resources with the Community? Quant replies.
Just war and destruction.
As we drive farther east, the trees and gardens become sparser, the river thinner and less crowded. At nightfall, the bus pulls into one of the landings in front of a hotel the driver must have a deal with.
We rent a single room and then prowl the dark river edge, padding from one raucous lit area to the next. The air is humid and wet, yet there is a trace of desert in the wind. They have built something fragile, on the edge of collapse.
A woman walks past us.
She has an interface jack, Quant sends.
“Hey, excuse me!” Meda calls.
The woman turns, her face slack. She is a girl, fifteen or sixteen.
“Where’d you get the interface jack?” Meda asks.
Emotion surfaces on her blank face: anger.
“Fuck you,” she barks and turns away.
What did I say? Meda asks.
She spotted us as an OG agent.
How?
No. It was hate at the question, not at us, Strom sends.
We try to find the girl in the dark, but she has eluded us, and return to the hotel to sleep restlessly before the bus leaves in the morning.
Hinterland is a moated city; the Congo splits at its foot, and two walled bridges allow access to its splendor. Another free zone, it exudes
decadence and excitement. Here, the valley walls are still desert, unplanted and empty, but the eye is so drawn to the city itself that no one notices the desert outside once you enter.
The guilds and sodalities are clumped in a warehouse in the middle of the city. The foremen and subforemen stand at lecterns and direct contracted and day workers to tasks. We find Subforeman Muckle leaning against a wall, shaking off would-be workers. It seems that getting to Hinterland is no guarantee of work. We see many desperate faces, emaciated forms.
It’s a frontier, Quant sends.
Muckle looks at us, his face blank until we wave our forms in front of him.
“Five? What the hell is Ellis sending me five for? I can’t even use one.”
“We’re not five, we’re two,” Meda says.
“Oh, great. Three times the feed for one-third the work.”
Three times the feed for the same amount of work, Quant corrects.
Shush.
“We’re here to the drive the arborobots.”
“The what?”
“The tree-planting machines that the OG sent you.”
Muckle chews on a pencil. “Well.” He writes down something on his clipboard. He looks at us then, thinking for a while. “I was a week from slagging those things. All right. Come on.”
Muckle leads us out of the warehouse and into the streets. Bicycles and pedestrians vie for position. There are no aircars in the sky. There are no automobiles on the road.
Claustrophobia grips us as we move among so many people. Our thoughts gel and disappear in the ocean of smells and natural pheromones. We trail Muckle, handin-hand-in-hand.
It is ten minutes of walking in the afternoon sun. We pass a walled mansion with stone-fenced gardens and fountains. The clog of people eases. A kilometer farther and we are near the southern arm of the river. There are more warehouses here, fewer shops and restaurants. Muckle palms open a garage on a squat warehouse, ushering us in.
The warehouse holds four arborobots, three of them still partially crated. More crates line the walls, gengineered tree seeds, nutrient-fixing bacteria, fertilizer.
“Get them working,” Muckle says, leaving us alone in the crowded warehouse.
Manuel climbs to the roof and sets up the sat phone. When he has signal with the geosync satellites, we get access to the pod networks and call Colonel Krypicz.
“Where are you? You never made contact with our agent,” he barks.
“We’re in Hinterland.”
“Hinterland? How did you get …” He shakes his head. “Has anyone ever overestimated you?”
Meda says nothing. If we had met everyone’s standards we would be on the Consensus right now.
Instead we’re in a desert.
“All right then,” the colonel says. “Good job, then. The question is where Leto is and we think it’s Hinterland or farther inland. At this point, you’re farther in than anyone we’ve ever had.”
He signs off and Quant starts searching for details on the arborobots, while the rest of us climb all over the one built machine.
They have the exhaust system backward, Manuel sends. He and Strom reassemble the pipes coming off the hydrogen-burning system. The superheated water vapor leaving the catalyst is piped through the other systems for mechanical work.
For hours we absorb ourselves in checking and rebuilding the machine.
It is past dusk when Muckle returns. We have forgotten to eat lunch and are starving for food.
“Well? What have you got for me?”
Quant climbs into the cab and starts the engine. Electrolysis has split enough water vapor into hydrogen and oxygen to at least start the engine. The tractor will have to sit in full sunlight for a couple days to fill the hydrogen tanks completely. Or we could find a microwave receiver.
“Holy crap!” cries Muckle. “You got it started! I guess you can stay.”
“We’ll need a microwave receiver to recharge the hydrogen tanks,” Meda says.
Muckle scratches his bald head. “Well, the receivers are closely monitored by the Power Guild.”
“Why? Anyone can put up a receiver in a few days.”
“Sure, okay, technically. But then you have to have the license fees and the guild inspection.”
Managed scarcity, Quant sends.
“It’s better just to use the solar, if it’s got it.”
“Okay.”
“Are you ready to go? Are you ready to run this baby?”
“Not yet. We need to load it with material.”
“How many trees can this thing plant in a day?”
One thousand, Manuel sends.
If the seeds are good. We don’t know that.
And the bacteria might be dead.
It may be a big hole digger.
“I don’t know. Maybe a few hundred.”
“A few hundred. Okay, okay. When can you try it out?”
“In a few days.”
“Not sooner?”
“Can you find us a microwave power receiver?”
Muckle rubs his scalp again. “Maybe. Maybe not. A few hundred a day, you say?”
“We don’t know, really.”
“But it could be a few hundred?”
“Maybe.”
“Can you unpack another one?” Muckle asks, looking at the other machines still boxed up.
“Only one of us is a trio,” Meda says. “We can only drive one.”
“What if you get a third guy?”
Meda shrugs. “It depends.”
“Okay, okay,” Muckle says. “Three days. Have it ready in three days.”
We send the boys out for dinner. They come back with skewers of grilled vegetables and chicken. We barely stop for the food. Our night is already planned out. It feels like we are back in school and working around the clock on shifts. We schedule ourselves so that at least three of us are up at any one time. One hour a day we are all awake and we use that time to consense and redirect our focus for the next twenty-four hours. For school tasks—memorizing and reading—or for things that don’t need all five of us at once to decide something, this schedule works best for us.
At dawn we move the first tractor into the alley out front, where it can sit in the sun and fill its hydrogen tank. We forget to lock the cabin, and Strom goes outside when we hear the engine turn over.
A gaggle of kids are crawling over the machine, trying to steal it. Strom climbs up the tractor wheel, a miniature thief under each arm. The rest scatter in all directions.
“Hey! Leave us alone,” the kid under the left pit yells. “I’ll tell my daddy. He’s a foreman.”
Before Strom can send the two street urchins flying, Moira is there.
Let’s hire them, she sends.
These thieves? Strom asks.
“We’ve got some work for you kids,” Meda says. “Who wants some breakfast?”
The kid under Strom’s left arm, the one whose father is a foreman, kicks free and says, “I’m Eliud. What’s for breakfast?”
For bagels and a few dollars in singleton scrip we suddenly have our own crew of tractor workers, Eliud its makeshift foreman. We still lose seed and tools to theft, but we have the second and most of the third tractor built and ready by midnight. Most of the kids go home at dark, or wherever they stay each night. A couple of children stay. Eliud sleeps in our warehouse on a bag of apple-tree seed.
I thought his father was a foreman, Quant sends.
That doesn’t mean he knows who his father is, Manuel sends.
Fathers and mothers are abstract concepts to us. We have grown up with neither, just creche nurses and mentors.
The next day, we have twice as many kids show up for breakfast.
We have a guild, Strom sends.
They’re like ducks, Moira replies, pulling a wry grin from Strom.
Manuel takes a walk through the market, taking Eliud and another boy with him. The goal is a precision caliper, but he keeps his eyes open for any sign of Leto’s jacked associates.
Even though it is the far end of the Congo, Hinterland is home to two hundred thousand humans. He finds nothing, not even a caliper, and he and Quant must work with what is available to tune the hydrogen-burning engines.
By noon, the third tractor is built, and the first two are loaded with seed, bacteria, fertilizer, and water. The weight threatens to warp the cobbled street and we set the props out on two-by-fours to distribute the force. The tractors have charged faster than we thought. The first will be ready tomorrow.
After lunch, we hear cursing from the street. Some of our kids are yelling. Meda is asleep, so Strom leads us out. Two men are climbing up the tractors.
“Can I help you?”
“Who the hell are you?”
“We’re Class B arborists and those are our machines.”
“Class B, huh?” The first man drops to the ground. He is dressed in clean coveralls. The name Ryan is stitched into the breast pocket. The lack of dirt proclaims this man as a foreman.
“Go wake Quant and Meda,” Manuel tells Eliud.
“You got a license for these tractors?” Ryan asks.
Bluff.
“Subforeman Muckle does.”
Ryan laughs, glancing up at his companion, still leaning against the cab.
“Muckle? So this is why he bought up the Jergens contract. This is his secret weapon.” Ryan’s laugh is not pleasant.
Strom shrugs. Meda would have said something appropriate, but for Strom a gesture is as good as a word.
“You should get these things out of the way,” Ryan says. “You’re blocking thoroughfare. You’re lucky we’re not the constable. He might confiscate the things.” He and his friend share another laugh.
“Why don’t you come on down before we call the constable,” Meda says. She and Quant have joined us from the cots in back. In seconds the entire history of this confrontation has been downloaded into her brain.
“Well, here’s a spicier one than this boyo,” Ryan says, but his friend climbs down, catching a hose and wire in hand as he does: malicious vandalism, though he would claim innocence. Manuel is there to repair the damage before the man reaches the cobbles. He glares at Manuel, but the damage is already fixed.
“Good day to you then, and we’ll see how this contraption works tomorrow.”
