Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  So we row carefully, but fast as we can, hoping to distance our little fishing boat from the towering building complex. Its lights pulse so brightly they leave spots behind my eyes.

  And then, above us, we hear the chopping whirr of blades cutting the air, the whine of unmanned machinery readying for deployment. I look up and shade my eyes: a reaper.

  Tris drops her oar. It slides straight into the bay, but neither of us bother to catch it. If we don’t get away now, a lost oar won’t matter anyway. She lunges into our supply bag, brings out a bag of apples. The noise of the reaper is close, almost deafening. I can’t hear what she yells at me before she jumps into the bay. I hesitate in the boat, afraid to leave our supplies and afraid to be blown to pieces by a reaper. I look back up and and see a panel slide open on its bright blue belly. The panel reveals dark glass; behind it, a single, unblinking eye.

  I jump into the water, but my foot catches on the remaining oar. The boat rocks behind me, but panic won’t let me think—I tug and tug until the boat capsizes and suddenly ten pounds of supplies are falling on my head, dragging me deeper into the dark water. I try to kick out, but my leg is tangled with the drawstring of a canvas bag, and I can’t make myself focus enough to get it loose. All I can think of is that big glass eye waiting to kill me. My chest burns and my ears fill to bursting with pressure. I’d always thought I would die in fire, but water isn’t much better. I don’t even know if Tris made it, or if the eye caught her, too.

  I try to look up, but I’m too deep; it’s too dark to even know which way that is. God, I think, save her. Let her get back home. It’s rude to demand things of God, but I figure dying ought to excuse the presumption.

  Something tickles my back. I gasp and the water flows in, drowning my lungs, flooding out what air I had left. But the thing in the water with me has a light on its head and strange, shiny legs and it’s using them to get under my arms and drag me up until we reach the surface and I cough and retch and breathe, thank you God. The thing takes me to shore, where Tris is waiting to hug me and kiss my forehead like I’m the little sister.

  “Jesus,” she says, and I wonder if God really does take kindly to demands until I turn my head and understand: my savior is a drone.

  ***

  “I will feed you,” the glassman says. He looks like a spider with an oversized glass-man head: eight chrome legs and two glass eyes. “The pregnant one should eat. Her daughter is growing.”

  I wonder if some glassman technology is translating his words into English. If in his language, whatever it is, the pregnant one is a kind of respectful address. Or maybe they taught him to speak to us that way.

  I’m too busy appreciating the bounty of air in my lungs to notice the other thing he said.

  “Daughter?” Tris says.

  The glassman nods. “Yes. I have been equipped with a body-safe sonic scanning device. Your baby has not been harmed by your ordeal. I am here to help and reassure you.”

  Tris looks at me, carefully. I sit up. “You said something about food?”

  “Yes!” It’s hard to tell, his voice is so strange, but he sounds happy. As though rescuing two women threatened by one of his reaper fellows is the best piece of luck he’s had all day. “I will be back,” he says, and scuttles away, into the forest.

  Tris hands me one of her rescued apples. “What the hell?” Her voice is low, but I’m afraid the glassman can hear us anyway.

  “A trap?” I whisper, barely vocalizing into her left ear.

  She shakes her head. “He seems awfully . . .”

  “Eager?”

  “Young.”

  The glassman comes back a minute later, walking on six legs and holding two boxes in the others. His robot must be a new model; the others I’ve seen look more human. “I have meals! A nearby convoy has provided them for you,” he says, and places the boxes carefully in front of us. “The one with a red ribbon is for the pregnant one. It has nutrients.”

  Tris’s hands shake as she opens it. The food doesn’t look dangerous, though it resembles the strange pictures in Tris’s old magazines more than the stuff I make at home. A perfectly rectangular steak, peas, corn mash. Mine is the same, except I have regular corn. We eat silently, while the glassman gives every impression of smiling upon us benevolently.

  “Good news,” he pipes, when I’m nearly done forcing the bland food down my raw throat. “I have been authorized to escort you both to a safe hospital facility.”

  “Hospital?” Tris asks, in a way that makes me sit up and put my arm around her.

  “Yes,” the glassman says. “To ensure the safe delivery of your daughter.”

  The next morning, the glassman takes us to an old highway a mile from the water’s edge. A convoy waits for us, four armored tanks and two platform trucks. One of the platform beds is filled with mechanical supplies, including two dozen glass-and-chrome heads. The faces are blank, the heads unattached to any robot body, but the effect makes me nauseous. Tris digs her nails into my forearm. The other platform bed is mostly empty except for a few boxes and one man tied to the guardrails. He lies prone on the floor and doesn’t move when we climb in after our glassman. At first I’m afraid that he’s dead, but then he twitches and groans before falling silent again.

  “Who is he?” Tris asks.

  “Non-state actor,” our glassman says, and pulls up the grate behind us.

  “What?”

  The convoy engines whirr to life—quiet compared to the three old men, but the noise shocks me after our days of silence on the bay.

  The glassman swivels his head, his wide unblinking eyes fully focused on my sister. I’m afraid she’s set him off and they’ll tie us to the railings like that poor man. Instead, he clicks his two front legs together for no reason that I can see except maybe

  it gives him something to do.

  “Terrorist,” he says, quietly.

  Tris looks at me and I widen my eyes: don’t you dare say another word. She nods.

  “The convoy will be moving now. You should sit for your safety.”

  He clacks away before we can respond. He hooks his hind legs through the side rail opposite us and settles down, looking like nothing so much as a contented cat.

  The armored tanks get into formation around us and then we lurch forward, rattling over the broken road. Tris makes it for half an hour before she pukes over the side.

  For two days, Tris and I barely speak. The other man in our truck wakes up about once every ten hours, just in time for one of the two-legged glassmen from the armored tanks to clomp over and give us all some food and water. The man gets less than we do, though none of it is very good. He eats in such perfect silence that I wonder if the glass-men have cut out his tongue.As soon as he finishes,one of the tank glassmen presses a glowing metal bar to the back of his neck. The mark it leaves is a perfect triangle, raw and red like a fresh burn. The prisoner doesn’t struggle when the giant articulated metal hand grips his shoulders, he only stares, and soon after he slumps against the railing. I have lots of time to wonder about those marks; hour after slow hour with a rattling truck bruising my tailbone and regrets settling into my joints like dried tears. Sometimes Tris massages knots from my neck, and sometimes they come right back while I knead hers. I can’t see any way to escape, so I try not to think about it. But there’s no helping the sick, desperate knowledge that every hour we’re closer to locking Tris in a hospital for six months so the glassmen can force her to have a baby.

  During the third wake-up and feeding of the bound man, our glassman shakes out his legs and clacks over to the edge of the truck bed. The robots who drive the tanks are at least eight feet tall, with oversized arms and legs equipped with artillery rifles. They would be terrifying even if we weren’t completely at their mercy. The two glassmen stare at each other, eerily silent and still.

  The bound man, I’d guess Indian from his thick straight hair and dark skin, strains as far forward as he can. He nods at us.

  “They
’re talking,” he says. His words are slow and painstakingly formed. We crawl closer to hear him better. “In their real bodies.”

  I look back up, wondering how he knows. They’re so still, but then glassmen are always uncanny.

  Tris leans forward, so her lips are at my ear. “Their eyes,” she whispers.

  Glassman robot eyes never blink. But their pupils dilate and contract just like ours do. Only now both robots’ eyes are pupil-blasted black despite the glaring noon sun. Talking in their real bodies? That must mean they’ve stopped paying us any attention.

  “Could we leave?” I whisper. No one has tied us up. I think our glassman is under the impression he’s doing us a favor.

  Tris buries her face in the back of my short nappy hair and wraps her arms around me. I know it’s a ploy, but it comforts me all the same. “The rest of the convoy.”

  Even as I nod, the two glassmen step away from each other, and our convoy is soon enough on its way. This time, though, the prisoner gets to pass his time awake and silent. No one tells us to move away from him.

  “I have convinced the field soldier to allow me to watch the operative,” our glass-man says proudly.

  “That’s very nice,” Tris says. She’s hardly touched her food.

  “I am glad you appreciate my efforts! It is my job to assess mission parameter acheivables. Would you mind if I asked you questions?”

  I frown at him and quickly look away. Tris, unfortunately, has decided she’d rather play with fire than her food.

  “Of course,” she says.

  We spend the next few hours subjected to a tireless onslaught of questions. Things like, “How would you rate our society-building efforts in the Tidewater Region?” and “What issue would you most like to see addressed in the upcoming Societal Health Meeting?” and “Are you mostly satisfied or somewhat dissatisfied with the cleanliness of the estuary?”

  “The fish are toxic,” I say to this last question. My first honest answer. It seems to startle him. At least, that’s how I interpret the way he clicks his front two legs together.

  Tris pinches my arm, but I ignore her.

  “Well,” says the glassman. “That is potentially true. We have been monitoring the unusually high levels of radiation and heavy metal toxicity. But you can rest assured that we are addressing the problem and its potential harmful side-effects on Beneficial Societal Development.”

  “Like dying of mercury poisoning?” Tris pinches me again, but she smiles for the first time in days.

  “I do not recommend it for the pregnant one! I have been serving you both nutritious foods well within the regulatory limits.”

  I have no idea what those regulatory limits might be, but I don’t ask.

  “In any case,” he says. “Aside from that issue, the estuary is very clean.”

  “Thank you,” Tris says, before I can respond.

  “You’re very welcome. We are here to help you.”

  “How far away is the hospital?” she asks.

  I feel like a giant broom has swept the air from the convoy, like our glassman has tossed me back into the bay to drown. I knew Tris was desperate; I didn’t realize how much.

  “Oh,” he says, and his pupils go very wide. I could kiss the prisoner for telling us what that means: no one’s at home.

  The man now leans toward us, noticing the same thing. “You pregnant?” he asks Tris.

  She nods.

  He whistles through a gap between his front teeth. “Some rotten luck,” he says. “I never seen a baby leave one of their clinics. Fuck knows what they do to them.”

  “And the mothers?” I ask.

  He doesn’t answer, just lowers his eyes and looks sidelong at our dormant glass-man. “Depends,” he whispers, “on who they think you are.”

  That’s all we have time for; the glassman’s eyes contract again and his head tilts like a bird’s. “There is a rehabilitative facility in the military installation to which we are bound. Twenty-three hours ETA.”

  “A prison?” Tris asks.

  “A hospital,” the glassman says firmly.

  When we reach the pipeline, I know we’re close. The truck bounces over fewer potholes and cracks; we even meet a convoy heading in the other direction. The pipeline is a perfect clear tube about sixteen feet high. It looks empty to me, a giant hollow tube that distorts the landscape on the other side like warped glass. It doesn’t run near the bay, and no one from home knows enough to plot it on a map. Maybe this is the reason the glassmen are here. I wonder what could be so valuable in that hollow tube that Tris has to give birth in a cage, that little Georgia has to die, that a cluster bomb has to destroy half our wheat crop. What’s so valuable that looks like nothing at all?

  The man spends long hours staring out the railing of the truck, as though he’s never seen anything more beautiful or more terrifying. Sometimes he talks to us, small nothings, pointing out a crane overhead or a derelict road with a speed limit sign— 55 miles per hour, it says, radar enforced.

  At first our glassman noses around these conversations, but he decides they’re innocuous enough. He tells the man to “refrain from exerting a corrupting influence,” and resumes his perch on the other side of the truck bed. The prisoner’s name is Simon, he tells us, and he’s on watch. For what, I wonder, but know well enough not to ask.

  “What’s in it?” I say instead, pointing to the towering pipeline.

  “I heard it’s a wormhole.” He rests his chin on his hands, a gesture that draws careful, casual attention to the fact that his left hand has loosened the knots. He catches my eye for a blink and then looks away. My breath catches—Is he trying to escape? Do we dare?

  “A wormhole? Like, in space?” Tris says, oblivious. Or maybe not. Looking at her, I realize she might just be a better actor.

  I don’t know what Tris means, but Simon nods. “A passage through space, that’s what I heard.”

  “That is incorrect!”

  The three of us snap our heads around, startled to see the glassman so close. His eyes whirr with excitement. “The Designated Area Project is not what you refer to as a wormhole, which are in fact impractical as transportation devices.”

  Simon shivers and looks down at his feet. My lips feel swollen with regret—what if he thinks we’re corrupted? What if he notices Simon’s left hand? But Tris raises her chin, stubborn and defiant at the worst possible time—I guess the threat of that glassman hospital is making her too crazy to feel anything as reasonable as fear.

  “Then what is it?” she asks, so plainly that Simon’s mouth opens, just a little.

  Our glassman stutters forward on his delicate metallic legs. “I am not authorized to tell you,” he says, clipped.

  “Why not? It’s the whole goddamned reason all your glassman reapers and drones and robots are swarming all over the place, isn’t it? We don’t even get to know what the hell it’s all for?”

  “Societal redevelopment is one of our highest mission priorities,” he says, a little desperately.

  I lean forward and grab Tris’s hand as she takes a sharp, angry breath. “Honey,” I say, “Tris, please.”

  She pulls away from me, hard as a slap, but she stops talking. The glassman says nothing; just quietly urges us a few yards away from Simon. No more corruption on his watch.

  Night falls, revealing artificial lights gleaming on the horizon. Our glassman doesn’t sleep. Not even in his own place, I suppose, because whenever I check with a question his eyes stay the same and he answers without hesitation. Maybe they have drugs to keep themselves awake for a week at a time. Maybe he’s not human. I don’t ask—I’m still a little afraid he might shoot me for saying the wrong thing, and more afraid that he’ll start talking about Ideal Societal Redevelopment.

  At the first hint of dawn, Simon coughs and leans back against the railing, catching my eye. Tris is dozing on my shoulder, drool slowly soaking my shirt. Simon flexes his hands, now free. He can’t speak, but our glassman isn’t looking
at him. He points to the floor of the truckbed, then lays himself out with his hands over his head. There’s something urgent in his face. Something knowledgable. To the glass-men he’s a terrorist, but what does that make him to us? I shake Tris awake.

  “Libs?”

  “Glassman,” I say, “I have a question about societal redevelopment deliverables.”

  Tris sits straight up.

  “I would be pleased to hear it!” the glassman says.

  “I would like to know what you plan to do with my sister’s baby.”

  “Oh,” the glassman says. The movement of his pupils is hardly discernible in this low light, but I’ve been looking. I grab Tris by her shoulder and we scramble over to Simon.

  “Duck!” he says. Tris goes down before I do, so only I can see the explosion light up the front of the convoy. Sparks and embers fly through the air like a starfall. The pipeline glows pink and purple and orange. Even the strafe of bullets seems beautiful until it blows out the tires of our truck. We crash and tumble. Tris holds onto me, because I’ve forgotten how to hold onto myself.

  The glassmen are frozen. Some have tumbled from the overturned trucks, their glass and metal arms halfway to their guns. Their eyes don’t move, not even when three men in muddy camouflage lob sticky black balls into the heart of the burning convoy.

  Tris hauls me to my feet. Simon shouts something at one of the other men, who turns out to be a woman.

  “What the hell was that?” I ask.

  “EMP,” Simon says. “Knocks them out for a minute or two. We have to haul ass.”