400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  Ganly smiled ruefully. “Or you could take one of those pieces of scrap you chipped away and give it to me, and I could put it in my living room and call it art. Next week your scraps could be all the rage on my level.”

  There was a light tap on the window. Jack glanced up to see a giant finger at the glass, and beyond it an even larger eye. Liss opened the door.

  “Hi, Nairla,” she called. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “Jack’s home early?” said the giant woman. “Or did he call in sick again?"

  “I got fired,” Jack yelled.

  “Fired?” Nairla said. “Isn't that terrible? What are you going to do?”

  “I'm not sure yet. Keep me in mind if you need any detail work done.”

  Nairla tried to hide her expression, but her face was like an immense beacon where emotions were concerned. She obviously thought him insane.

  “Don’t you think that’s a wee bit . . . humiliating?”

  * * *

  “Middleman’s Rent” copyright 1988 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1988.

  THE FARMER ON THE WALL

  “I feel so relaxed in the country,” said Jack Greenpeach, putting an arm around his girlfriend Liss. She pulled forward a few inches to free her long red hair and the porch swing began to rock. She leaned closer to him, drawing her feet up onto the cushions, and said, “I know. It’s so peaceful. The crickets sound like a symphony, don’t they? Each one playing a different instrument, the music rising and falling, rising and falling. . .”

  Crickets? Jack listened to the night, terrified by the prospect of crickets the size of airplanes. There were no insects anymore, not since all the world had moved onto the levels of the great indoors. Pollination was done by tiny workers gathering pollen grain by grain; they passed their bags to giant workers on the next level up, who carried the pollen to fields in other rooms and handed them back down to other tinies for careful insertion in selected plants. A swarm of bees could have put a whole level out of work in a matter of days. A single locust could devour a wallful of crops, overturning tables and chairs in neighboring houses. It was a scary idea.

  “That’s not insects,” Jack said, relieved and amused. “You should be glad of it. That’s Narmon Cate snoring.”

  Liss jumped up from the swing and went to the porch rail. Leaning out into the night, she peered downward for several moments. He saw her shoulders fall.

  “So it is,” she said. “That’s not nearly so romantic.”

  He joined her at the rail. Looking down from the porch, he could see the fields falling away in tiers, like a fuzzy staircase leading down to the floor of Narmon’s room. Out in the midst of the vast enclosure was the slumbering mountainous shape of the giant farmer, Narmon Cate, who had rented them this house on his wall. All the walls of the giant’s main room were formed of grassy earth, tiered fields, neatly trimmed orchards. Here and there a few golden lights burned in the windows of other farmhouses the same size as Jack and Liss’s new place. These were country walls, especially beautiful to Jack and Liss who had lived until recently in a suburban apartment whose walls were infested with tiny tract homes. Their home in turn had been one of a thousand on the suburban wall of another giant—Narmon Cate’s white-collar equivalent. In the suburbs, they had longed for fields and trees; but they hadn’t gambled on a snoring giant.

  “Should we wake him up?” Jack wondered aloud, knowing that his voice would never carry to the giant.

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. You don’t go complaining to your own landlord about his habits. We were lucky to get this house.” She straightened suddenly, glancing at her wristwatch. “Uh oh, Jack, we left the lights on.”

  They hurried back inside in time to hear the rising of tiny cries, the faint beating of pots and pans. Their walls were patched like four old quilts with the plots of neighboring farmers. Brussels sprouts the size of pinpoints grew across a good quarter of the far wall, and below the sprout patch was a dilapidated farmhouse whose residents were currently gathered on the porch. The tiny children drummed on kitchenware, an ant-sized infant wailed, but the loudest voice belonged to the goat-bearded elder who had earlier introduced himself as Grampa Treel. A lifetime of shouting at giants had invested his voice with authority while robbing it of strength. His words scraped the air like an unrosined bow drawn across an out-of-tune fiddle.

  “Where the hell were you?” he bellowed. "We’re farmers here! We expect to get to sleep at a decent hour. Now that light of yours—” (here he jabbed a finger at Jack’s ceiling) “—is parching our crops. Arc you going to be the one out watering them tomorrow? Are you going to take responsibility for upsetting their light cycle? In other words, are you going to play god in every detail, or will you kindly shut off that damn light before I get out my wrist-rocket and do the honors myself?”

  Liss already had her hand on the switch. Before Jack could open his mouth, she turned off the light.

  The only illumination remaining in the room fell from the little houses on the farming walls.

  “It’s about time,” said Grampa Treel. He turned to his family, snatched a pot from the hands of a granddaughter. “The rest of you get inside. I want to have a few words with our new giants.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Jack said. “We didn’t mean any harm.”

  Grampa Treel flicked the air with a hand, dismissing Jack’s apology. He settled down in a rocking chair whose runners creaked faintly on the warped boards of the porch. Jack saw a microscopic spark of light and might have dismissed it as a random twinkling of his optic nerve if it hadn’t slowly flared and caught fire in a tangle of tobacco, way down in the bowl of a minuscule corncob pipe. The slightest whiff of cherry cavendish drifted through the room.

  “Smoke?” asked Grampa Treel.

  “No thanks," Jack said. “I got out of the habit in the city. None of my neighborlings would put up with it.”

  “Thank heavens for that,” said Liss.

  “Won’t bother me,” said Grampa Treel. “Not much bothers me, now that you come to it—except screwy light. And giants who play harmonica. Last feller had your place, he was a city type like you. Thought that just by moving in he could call himself a country boy. Bought himself a straw hat, a pair of boots, and worst of all he took up the harmonica. Now I don’t mind when my neighborlings play it on their porches in the summer; it’s no more trouble than a fly humming in your ear. But when it’s a giant right outside your door, wheeping up and down the scale, blowing spit all over everything . . . well, that’s something I can’t abide.”

  “I never did want to play harmonica,” Jack said.

  “Then there’s hope for you. What brings you to the country?”

  “Liss is an artist. She needs peace and quiet to get her work done. We both wanted a change of scene, a new set of walls. I thought I could help out on the farms if anybody needs me.” He flexed his hand, dwarfing the Treels’ front porch. “‘No job too big or too small.’ That’s my motto.”

  “Hm,” said Grampa Treel. “Might be I could find some use for a giant. That is, unless Narmon Cate’s got work for you climbing in to ream his pipestems or something like that.”

  “Uh, no,” Jack said. “Narmon hasn’t said anything to me about that.”

  Treel’s chair stopped rocking. “So tell me, are you an early riser?”

  “Sure. I used to work eight to five every day, so I had to get up early. My eyes just pop open around six-thirty.”

  “Six-thirty?” The old man found this quite hilarious. “Boy, I wish I could sleep that late.”

  Jack bit his tongue. “What time do you get up?”

  “We’re up about an hour before light, like I said. And the lights come on at five-thirty this time of year.”

  “Five . . .” Jack stared up at the dark ceiling. “. . . thirty?”

  “Guess you won’t be sleeping in the main room, hm?”

  “No,” said Liss.


  “Well, no matter. I had some work needed doing first thing, and there’s a field needs turning, but don’t you worry about it. You just sleep in till those eyes of yours ‘pop’ open. Six-thirty, you said?”

  “Uh, no, earlier is fine. I can be up around five-thirty, I guess. I need the work.”

  “Good man.” Grampa Treel stood up, increasing his height by a fraction of an inch. “Work is something there’s always plenty of around here. I’ll be getting to bed now. Good night, youngsters.”

  Liss pulled Jack onto the porch again. He saw that she was laughing with a hand over her mouth.

  “What’s so funny?” he said.

  “You. You’re in for it now.”

  “I like getting up early. Really. It’s sort of like . . . well, it helps you tune into nature. Even if the light cycle is artificial, it’s still based on the rhythm of the world outside. The world that had a sun and a moon, day and night, indoors and outdoors. The world that was, you know, finite.”

  “Those old notions again.” She laughed. “I’m sorry, Jack. I just don’t know if you’re cut out for farming.”

  Perturbed, he dropped down in the porch swing and folded his arms.

  "Anyway,” he said, "all this was your idea.”

  * * *

  Despite himself, Jack was up before the lights came on. He had slept badly, like a boy awaiting the coming of old Saint Escher, who strode through the infinite levels of scale, visiting all in a single night, rewarding children both giant and small with miraculous gifts. It puzzled Jack that he should be so excited about a day of manual labor—truly, the first in his life. He slipped out of bed without disturbing Liss, then crept into the dark of the main room.

  The farming walls looked like fairy trees ablaze with the tiny lights of neighborlings. He leaned close to the Treel residence, hoping to catch the faint clatter of spoons in cereal bowls, the peaceful mooing of vineclimbing milk cows. Instead, he was greeted with a bellow.

  “Well, young feller, didn’t expect to see you till midday.”

  He jerked back, a hand to his ear, as Grampa Treel came clomping onto the porch. The old man carried a bullhorn so that Jack wouldn’t miss a syllable.

  "Don’t just stand there, sonny, let’s get to work.”

  Jack closed the door to the bedroom, envying Liss her extended slumber in the warm dark bed. There was a crust of sleep in his eyes, but he was so tired he hadn’t managed to yawn yet. Meanwhile, the ceiling was slowly growing brighter.

  Old Grampa Treel was as lively as he’d been the night before. “Good to get an early start,” he was saying as he tromped around on the porch. “Course, we already milked the cows. You wouldn’t have been much use there. They’re delicate things.”

  They certainly were. To Jack they resembled fat spotted aphids clinging to shiny green vines that grew in a tangle above and beside the house. A few plaintive mews rose from the herd. He knew that any attempt on his part to milk them would have ended in disaster. “You mind if I have something to eat?” Jack said.

  “Eat? Well, I imagine you do need your fuel. A big feller like you. One of your breakfasts could feed all us Treels for a year and a day.”

  At that moment, Jack felt a mighty rumbling. Light poured in through the windows from Narmon Cate’s room. The lobe of Cate’s monstrous ear blocked the glow momentarily, then he heard a roar that faintly resembled the end of the world.

  The giants were awake.

  Narmon commenced to clear his nostrils, gathering floods of mucus in the vast inmost caverns and sunless seas of his skull. His massive door creaked open; then came the sound of a distant cataclysm as he hawked and spat a mighty wad into the room of the giants on whose wall his house was built. To those giants two levels up from Jack, Cate’s phlegm would have been no more objectionable than a fly speck or a flea turd. (There were neither flies nor fleas in the levels, but these old concepts made useful metaphors and refused to die.) Had Narmon turned to spit on his neighborlings’ earthen wall, however, Jack and Liss could have drowned in the stuff.

  Jack had lost his appetite for breakfast. He shrugged, tucked in his shirt, and turned back to Grampa Treel. “Where do I start?”

  “You got a fork?”

  “A fork?”

  “Sure. You were gonna eat, weren’t you? I imagined you’d have a fork.”

  “Yes, I have a fork. But what do I need it for?”

  “Like I said last night, the lower tier needs turning—gotta bring up that fertile soil. My tractor’s broke down, but all you’ll need to do is dig it up with a fork.”

  Jack went into his kitchen. As he rummaged through unfamiliar drawers in the dark, he accidentally woke the residents of a few houses arranged in and around the cabinets. Without apologizing he went back into the main room and knelt down by the Treels’ farm. Grampa strutted back and forth on the long porch, pointing to the area that needed turning

  “A job like that would take us two days,” he said. “Let’s see how long it takes you. Skim off about a foot of soil and just, you know, flip it over.”

  “A foot?” Jack said.

  Treel cackled. “Oh . . . glad you caught me there. Guess it’d be about a fraction of an inch to you.”

  Jack raised the fork and leaned close enough to see tiny stones and the weeds that grew around them. He had just prodded the field with the tines of his fork when a cry went up from elsewhere on the wall

  “You better call him off, Treel! That’s a violation of the cross-scale labor laws!”

  "Oh, stuff a pipe in it,” Grampa bellowed through his bullhorn. This instrument sounded loud to Jack; it must have been deafening to the Treels’ samesize neighbors. “You go right ahead, Jack.”

  Jack sat back and took a look at the walls. All around the Treel place, other tiny farmers had come out of their barns to watch. Expressions of anger were writ large on every minute face.

  “You gonna help the rest of us when you’re through there?” cried a relatively tall, plump farmer.

  “Well, I . . .” Jack began.

  “You’re not paying him,” yelled Grampa Treel. “He’s got plenty of work to do around my place.”

  “That’s unfair competition, Treel! You ever stop to think about the samesizes you’re putting out of work? I don’t suppose you happened to arrange this little deal with the Labor Bureau? Is he paying you scale, giant?”

  Jack looked to Grampa Treel for direction. The little old man beckoned him close and shouted without benefit of bullhorn: “Ignore them, Jack. You just turn that soil.”

  “Are you sure it’s all right?” Jack said.

  "Why wouldn’t it be? They’re just jealous I got you first, that’s all. Damn Labor Bureau doesn’t bother with folks like us.”

  Jack addressed the general neighboring community: “I’ll be more than happy to help out where I can in this room.”

  “No, no, no, no, no!” wailed Grampa Treel. “You work for me!”

  “In this room, eh?” said the tall plump farmer. “What about the next room, and the next? Are we supposed to start digging for our neighborlings? You gonna ask your giants to do your dirty work?”

  The tone of his voice angered Jack, who gripped his fork anew and was just about to plunge it in the wall when the bedroom door opened and Liss came out, blinking.

  “Jack? Did I hear voices?”

  “Bunch of reactionaries,” he grunted. “Go back to sleep.”

  He jabbed the tines deep into the wall.

  Too deep—

  Grampa Treel screamed, “Hold on!”

  Startled, Jack wrenched out the fork and a tiny storm of dirt exploded over his fingers. The field began to crumble away, spilling onto the floor. Squeaks rose up from all the neighborlings. The aphid-cattle mewed in fright as their vines rustled and came undone in the growing avalanche. Tier slid over tier, then suddenly the ramshackle Treel farmhouse began to collapse. The inhabitants dashed for safety, throwing themselves onto sagging vines. Then the house flopped over and
fell right through the fields before Jack could do anything to catch it. It crashed to the floor in a shower of splinters and glass.

  “My God!” Liss cried. She leaped at the wall in time to rescue young Mrs. Treel and her baby, who were poised at the edge of a dissolving precipice where the nursery had been. She set them down on a safer portion of the wall.

  Jack dropped the fork, stumbling backward. As the dirt-slide ceased and the dust settled, Grampa Treel appeared atop a rocky mound that had formed in an instant at the base of the wall. He slapped his shirtfront with his ragged hat, coughing and cursing, then narrowed his eyes and pointed a finger at Jack.

  “You damn fool! Look what you did to the family farm!”

  “I—I’ll get a broom,” Jack said.

  “It’s your own fault, Treel!” cried the tall plump farmer whose fields had survived the catastrophe. “You’re going to jail right along with him!”

  “Jail?” Jack whispered. “But . . . but . . .”

  He turned to Liss for comfort, for advice, but she had gone to the window and was staring out at the world of the giants, one level up from their own. Jack heard a terrible sound, a bone-freezing, petrifying banshee wail that grew louder and louder until he thought his eardrums would explode—

  And then there were thundering knocks on Narmon Cate’s door. They heard the farmer apologizing for the state of his house as he let some giants inside. Jack covered his ears, but he couldn’t block out the giants’ voices: “We got a call from the Labor Bureau. That’s the house; that one right there.”

  “That? But they’re new tenants, officer. They seem like cute enough folks anyway.”

  “They’re never as cute as they look, Mr. Cate. These are criminal types.”

  “Criminals? On my wall?”

  “It can happen to anyone. Seems they were setting up to cut across scale labor regulations, doing work that’s zoned for samesizes. One lazy giant can put a whole wallful of skilled low-level workers out of a job. There’s just no way the tinies can compete. Sometimes we have to stop them with force.”