Though occasionally he’d be clear-headed enough to remember the I-Ching machine. He’d feel his way through the pitch and the filth and find that device, cradling the cold metal box like a long lost child. Sometimes he’d sit for hours, the machine in his lap, as he asked questions and talked to Professor Ling’s cursed invention like a friend, turning the handle, receiving revelation and outright hallucinations. But in blackness that had become his world, he was never able to read the answers.
It was during one of those manic sessions that he thought he’d died, passed through the veiled, onion-skin of reality and slipped into the ether as he saw a flickering glow that grew into a light as bright as the sun. The heavenly orb blinded him as he called out to his rescuers, tears flowing down his greasy, soiled cheeks.
But in the silence, his eyes finally adjusted. And he saw that the sun was merely the burning coil of the tungsten bulb. He reached out and touched the lamp with the dead battery, turning it off and on. Yet, the light remained. Twitching, he unscrewed the bulb and it glowed in his hand, even brighter still, as he became aware of the chamber of horrors that his comet shelter had become. Phineas could feel the hum of electricity in the air, on his arms, and the fine hairs on the back of his neck. The World Wireless System was still functioning, but more importantly, someone was using a Tesla coil, beaming spark-excited voltage in his direction, which could only mean one thing.
Finally, someone was searching for him.
Or perhaps, just the machine. Maybe that’s all they wanted. His lieutenants, the men with lotus tattoos, had waited for him to expire, to take it from his lifeless grasp. As fearful, angry, vicious thoughts clogged his reason his prison became a fortress, his tomb became his castle. And his followers became traitors, worse, they became fallen foot soldiers. The terrible enemy was coming, the Mongols had risen up again, but instead of wearing cloaks sewn from field mice the hordes were arriving in great steam-driven airships sewn from the skin of their conquered dead. They would come in waves, they would search, but they would never find him. The British wouldn’t find him. Neither would the boastful Americans. He’d never allow it. He’d smash the machine — he’d destroy the professor’s creation if he had to.
Holding the glowing bulb like a torch, he rested the machine on his lap. He wiped grime off the metal and asked in a breathless panic, “Will someone else ever use this beautiful device. Could the I-Ching ever be attuned to another. Will they come digging to claim this clever machine.” Phineas cranked the handle, listened to the gears thrum with clockwork precision, and watched the lettered tumblers spin and spin and spin . . . until the static charge in the room faded as quickly as the light.
The answer, his answer came, as he smiled in the darkness.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jamie Ford is the great grandson of Nevada mining pioneer Min Chung, who emigrated from Kaiping, China, to San Francisco in 1865, where he adopted the western name “Ford,” thus confusing countless generations. His debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list and went on to win the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. His work has been translated into 32 languages. Jamie is still holding out for Klingon (because that’s when you know you’ve made it). He can be found at www.jamieford.com blogging about his new book, Songs of Willow Frost, and also on Twitter @jamieford.
MARGIN OF SURVIVAL
Elizabeth Bear
In darkness, Yana waited. To her left, the sea was the smell of spent oil and a blackness broken by the slow hiss of phosphorescent breakers. If she squinted at the horizon, she could just make it out — a line as level as if it had been planed, pimpled with the tops of aquaculture rigs. To her right, the beach stretched rocky, rusty, and bleak up to an undercut bluff that she knew was there only because of suggestion and memory. It was a narrow margin of survival between the proverbial devil, and the equally proverbial sea.
The aquaculture domes were within sight, trailing rich constructed biomes of mussels and kelp through the richly nutritious, bitterly cold water. She could swim out to them and spare herself the risks. If she were a stronger swimmer; if she were not already weak with hunger; if it weren’t for the waves and the rip current; if she had a drysuit; if she had some way to keep the mussels from spoiling before she got them home to Yulianna; if she could guarantee there weren’t snipers or booby traps or guards.
Yana counted under her breath until the light came again.
Thirty-five, thirty-six. And there it was once more, a beam like a stroking finger. It crossed the black water, lanced over her head, bathed the bluff in brilliance, and moved on. On the horizon, she watched the shine of the Svet nezhyti, the Zombie Light, dim as it swept away again. The thing loomed out there in the night, unmanned, forgotten, possibly leaking reactor coolant — but automated. Still doing the job it had been set to do, decades or maybe a century ago. And it had illuminated enough of the stretch of beach before her that, crouched, she could scurry to the next rock without breaking her ankle.
Her stomach clenched, but Yana had become a connoisseur of clenching stomachs. This wasn’t early hunger, which could endanger one with plunging blood sugar, unexpected weakness, and dizzy spells. Nor was this true starvation, when the stored resources were exhausted and the will began to revolve around food and only food, when the body grew frail and riddled with sores.
This was, rather, the comfortable middle ground of hunger — where the body had adapted to privation, where it was working hard to utilize stored resources, rather than grabbing and cannibalizing anything at hand. What a falconer called “sharp set,” where the bird is ready and eager to hunt, lean — but also physically capable.
Another kind of margin. Another narrow edge to balance on.
Yulianna had been worse off, which was why Yana was here alone. Because when their supplies started to get low, Yulianna had set her jaw and refused food, refused water — starving herself so that Yana would have more. That was when Yana had realized that she would have to go out and seek supplies. They would need to go south, go inland. For that, they needed portable rations — and gear. Boots. Warm clothing.
Yana wanted to worry, but she wouldn’t let herself. Her sister would be fine. She’d left Yulianna most of the remaining food. And the gun.
If she pulled this off, neither she nor Yulianna would have to be any kind of hungry — or cold, or badly dressed — for a good long time.
But first she had to survive the rest of the night.
Yana reached over her shoulder and patted the neck of the crowbar tucked into the loop of her large frame pack. She waited for the light, waited for the darkness, and darted to the next shelter. She wasn’t worried about being spotted by anyone in the Zombie Light; there was no one in the Zombie Light. It had been empty for the devil knew how long, mindlessly spinning away on its reactors.
The people — and cameras, and infrared sensors — she wished to avoid were those in the bunker at the top of the bluff, overlooking the sea.
Unfortunately, they were also the people who had the food.
A basic conflict in desires, as her economics tutor would have said. Before he starved, or was torn apart by feral dogs, or went cannibal and was put down, or whatever the hell had killed him.
She might have made an effort to find out — she’d liked him — if there had been any chance of the news being good, and if there’d been any chance of her finding out some kind of definitive answer. But she’d learned a long time ago that the news was never good, and that it was generally best not to ask too many questions.
You never liked the answers once you got them.
He, too, might have had a couple of trenchant comments to make about margins. Margins of survival. Margins of safety. Margins of profit. The world was right up against the edge of all of them now.
Maybe it was teetering back, Yana told herself. Maybe things were starting to get better.
She was finally close to the bluff. One disadvantag
e of the bunker’s position, from the point of view of the bunker’s inhabitants: It held a commanding view of sea, strand, genetically-engineered kelp-tangle aquaculture clusters, and distant undead lighthouse, but the edge of the bluff cut off their line of sight to the beach immediately below. There had been motion detectors down here once, not too long ago . . . but after the Eschaton, the end of the world — here in the future — entropy took its toll and things which had once been cheap and disposable could not be replaced. Manufactured objects that had been designed to be thrown away were not simple to repair.
It was Yana’s advantage, and a delightful little scrap of irony.
She bounced on her toes like a runner warming up before a race. When the light swept past again, she scrambled up the steep, overhung-in-places bluff. Her fingers scraped at crumbling stone; roots gave when she grabbed at them. Though she was strong and fit and practiced and not too hungry, her forearms ached with a deep muscular soreness by the time she dragged herself over the edge.
There was no time to lie there panting and collecting herself. She wriggled to her feet and crouched, balanced on her toes and fingertips, waiting to discover if she’d been seen.
The blind eye of the robot lighthouse swept past once, twice, while Yana held as still as a toad that hopes not to be noticed. She thought, over and over like a short penitent prayer: I am stone. The illumination within the bunker never flickered. No hue, no cry. No sign of life.
They were probably in there enjoying a pleasant supper of hot soup and bread, she thought bitterly — a mistake. Her stomach growled, and she felt faint. She waited for one more pass of the light, gathered herself, and when the welcome darkness embraced her again, sprinted toward the back of the bunker, running not by sight but by the remembered outlines of the land.
She made it. Pressed against the base of the bunker, she paused and listened intently for alarms and excursions. Nothing. Had the infrared sensors given out long ago, along with everything else? Had she been skulking for no reason?
Or was it simply that no one was watching them, and all the artificial systems had long since degraded, ground down, and failed?
She knew the bunker wasn’t deserted. She’d seen shapes moving around it as recently as her last scouting visit, a mere few days ago. But they went inside at night, sealed themselves up. And that was why night was the safest time for her to strike.
She didn’t expect to break in. The bunker was pre-Eschaton tech, and she might have about as much luck prying a clam open with her torn and ragged fingernails. It’d be safer to try to swim out to those aquaculture rigs, and that was nearly certain death. But her careful spying had revealed that while the bunker was probably impregnable by any means within Yana’s reach, the people who lived there didn’t store everything within its walls.
There were outbuildings. Low, dug-in, camouflaged with rocks so they looked like part of the outcropping the bunker was built into; they huddled behind it like so many slanting boulders. There, by those storage sheds — there, Yana thought she could probably break in. And there was food there. She’d seen men rolling the barrels of mussels from the aquaculture rigs along the beach, hoisting them up the bluff with pulleys and cables. She’d seen them hauling up baskets of seaweed, too. And more mysterious large, soft-looking sacks of things, all carried from small boats moored far out to sea — too far to swim.
She imagined flour, bacon. Oatmeal. Sugar.
Her stomach growled again. She swallowed the bitter bilious flavor of her hunger and propped her hands on her knees.
There was a little more light here. It filtered down from the floodlights above, and the dark sky was brightening. Not with dawn, not yet. With rich drapes and swirls of electric green and arctic blue aurora.
Sprinting — and potentially falling — wasn’t worth it, here. By the glow of the Northern Lights, Yana picked her way along the edge of the path that led from the bunker’s great steel door around to its rear. She didn’t walk on the path because it was scattered thickly with bivalve shells — clam, oyster, mussel — and she knew they would crackle and crunch under her feet.
She moved crouched over, as much to get her eyes closer to the ground as to disguise her silhouette. It was a good thing, too, because it kept her from tripping into the trench beside the entrance to the sheds. There were three of them, side by side, two-thirds buried underground and then more earth and stones heaped on the roofs.
She drew up sharply, found the stone steps leading down, and paused. If she, herself, were going to set a booby trap, this is where she would do it.
Someone moaned in the darkness below.
Yana froze. She felt like a damned startled rabbit. For an instant, she thought bitterly of what it had been like to walk tall, mostly fearless. To have a full belly and time to think, read, plan. Then she acknowledged the thought, let it pass through, and refocused her attention on the actual, critical, possibly life-threatening matter at hand.
There was a person in the darkness below.
And that person was hurt.
Well, most likely. She could construct all sorts of conspiracy theories and worries about decoys and traps, but Occam’s razor suggested that somebody else had been attracted by the presence of food, and had either triggered a trap or just — in the dark — stumbled into the gaping hole in the ground.
Yana risked bending down, dropping her hand below the line of the ground, and squeezing her fingers tightly, briefly, on the activator of her minilume. It glowed with a pleasant cool light, illuminating a bare pit or trench paved in flagstones and featuring a fieldstone retaining wall to keep it from collapsing in on itself. On the far side were the doorways to the three sheds or root cellars. They were all closed.
Yana heard the moan again.
This time, she had been listening. Waiting. She thought the sound emanated from the leftmost of the sheds, which was the one closest to the sea. Another quick squeeze on her lume, and she saw that each shed had a small casement window about four feet off the ground. The three windows were not identical. They had obviously been constructed from whatever materials were available, then hinged to a custom-built window frame when the time came to install them in the sheds.
The one on that leftmost shed was propped open at the bottom.
As if in response to her light, Yana heard a brief intake of breath. The moaning stopped.
Silence.
She hadn’t seen anything that looked like a trap in her brief glimpses. Now, though, she palmed the lume and waited for her eyes to adapt. She moved her head from side to side, scanning — looking with her peripheral vision, which was sometimes better in the dark.
There. A faint silvery runnel reflected the glow of the night sky. Elongated, razor-thin, like when sunlight splayed along a length of spider-line: a tripwire strung across the bottom riser of the stairs.
All right, Yana thought. So if you saw that and wanted to avoid it, what would you do next? You’d drop down, right, over the edge on the opposite side?
Yana waited for the lighthouse beam and matched it with a quick flicker of her lume, peering down into that pit. The big flagstone at the far end of the pit had a funny, plasticky shine to it. And it was suspiciously clean, without the scraps of dead grass and litter of sand that marked the other flagstones. Plenty of birdshit, but some of the shit had a sort of funny, elongated splatter pattern.
The flagstone was on hinges. It was designed to drop whoever jumped down onto it into an oubliette. Or possibly into a pit of hungry tiger sharks and rotating knives, which would probably be more efficient in the long run, and probably just about as much fun. No need to haul any prisoners — or bodies — out of a hole in the ground that way. You’d save on rigging pulleys.
She checked again, but those were the only two traps she saw. The moaning had stopped completely, as if the moaner were biding their time, or simply playing dead.
Yana shrugged, checked her pack straps, made sure the lume’s loop was fast around her middle finger, and
walked slowly down the stairs, pausing to step over the tripwire as gingerly as a cat walking through deep snow before testing the pit-bottom with one toe. It held. She shifted her weight onto it.
It held, still.
All right then, she thought, and lifted her trailing foot high over the wire.
She’d need something noisier than her crowbar to get through any of these doors quickly. Though she could probably shatter the frames. But that one down on the end, with the open window . . .
The window wouldn’t have been wide enough for her to wriggle through before the Eschaton. Hell, she wouldn’t have had the strength to boost herself up to it. She’d been a comfortable, wide-hipped graduate student then, and not the lean predator she was now. Yulianna had always been the skinny one — the hot one — back in the day, and Yana had been the smart one. Because most people were too blind to notice that her sister was just as smart as Yana was.
She missed that margin of safety. Hell — insulation, stored food — it was probably the reason she’d survived this long.
She flashed her lume again and inspected the window ledge for imbedded glass and razor blades and the like. She craned her neck to see upward, to check for any sign of, oh, something like a guillotine suspended on the other side of it. She poked the crowbar in, just to be sure.
Nothing.
“Lazy,” she said.
In fairness, she supposed, the bunker folks came in and out of this place every few minutes during the day. Even in the post-apocalyptic world, you wouldn’t want your toddlers playing around guillotines.
The End Has Come Page 24
