400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  “Go right ahead, officer,” said the giant farmer.

  An enormous bloodshot eye pressed up to the window and blinked in at Liss and Jack. The capillaries were as big around as Jack’s arm. Liss put her arms around him. “Jack, I think you’re in trouble. Big trouble.”

  “It looks that way.”

  Jack shivered and looked at the farming walls. The irate neighborlings showered him with insulting gestures and obscenities: “Go ahead, you big jerk! Take what you’ve got coming!”

  After a moment, someone knocked sharply on the door. It sounded too precise to be a giant. Liss opened the door, revealing two samesizes in police uniforms. The giant officer had set them on the porch. One of the cops carried a stunstick; the other held a tiny box decorated with the official infinite-staircase design of the Plenary Police.

  “Name?” said the cop with the stunner.

  “J-Jack Greenpeach.”

  The officer with the box stepped inside, his eyes drawn to the damaged section of farming wall. “There it is,” he said. He knelt down by the recent avalanche and opened his official box. Out of it stepped two tiny officers, diminutive twins of the ones in Jack’s house. With tiny motions, they signaled for Grampa Trecl to descend from his mound. Their voices were too small for Jack to discern, but he had no doubt they were saying something very like what the same-size officer was saying to him:

  “You are under arrest for violation of scale statutes and for damaging private and public property. You will accompany us for sentencing.”

  Liss wept on his neck. He felt numb, but he couldn’t look away from the two little cops who were leading Grampa Treel back into their box. Once they were inside, the uplevel officer locked the box, picked it up, and tucked it under his arm. The neighboring farmers were cheering all the while.

  “I’ll call you as soon as I can,” Jack told Liss.

  “Don’t worry, I know a lawyer. We'll have you out right away.”

  He didn’t have the strength to force a smile, but he managed to nod. “I’m sure you will.” He gave her a kiss. "I love you.”

  Just outside, the giant cop was waiting with an upscale version of the police box that now contained Grampa Treel. The officers led Jack inside, strapped him into a seat, and then secured themselves. Soon they were swinging through space. Muttering like thunder rumbled above them as the giant cops debated whether to stop for doughnuts. When Jack’s stomach growled, he gave thanks that he hadn’t eaten breakfast. This was worse than any carnival ride.

  * * *

  They took his clothes and dropped him naked into a tall glass jar capped with a perforated lid. The jar sat on a shelf along with dozens of others. From this vantage, Jack could look out at a vast ledge crowded with giant officials going about their titanic yet tedious business. That ledge opened onto an even greater one where the giants two levels up were also busy at their work. And that ledge was a mere recess in yet another ledge, where thrice-large giants moved like mountains, their features scarcely discernible. And beyond those were dark slow blurs, the grumble of a hive, inconceivable bulks like planets clipping past each other in vast gulfs of artificial light.

  Above the racks of jars, Jack could just make out a small alcove where neighborling officials were hard at work: it was the ledge within this ledge, with ledges within ledges within it. Thus the halls of criminal justice continued in either direction, perhaps to infinity. He wondered if somewhere in that infinity, someone just like him had unwittingly committed a crime like his own and waited now in a jar resembling this one, but astronomically tinier or microscopically more huge. If so, would that fellow’s emotions be any greater or lesser than Jack’s? Did scale apply to human feelings?

  Someone rapped on the wall of the jar next to Jack’s. He looked up and saw a pale samesize looking in at him. The voice scarcely carried: “What’re you in for?”

  Jack shrugged. He didn’t feel like talking.

  “I’m a murderer,” the fellow said, pulling at his hair. “You like that? Murder! All I did was scrape my walls, stamped out those filthy little buggers that’re always yelling at me day in, day out, to clean up this mess, take a shower, bugging me, bugging me, know what I mean? And they call that murder? Those things aren’t even human, know what I mean? They’re roaches. Germs. Give me some insecticide. . . .”

  Jack moved to the far side of his space. The jar was bad but the company was worse.

  He wasn’t sure how long he had waited when a giant lifted the lid of his jar, dropped in a pair of gray overalls, and then carried him away. He scarcely had time to dress before the jar came down none too gently on a vast tabletop scored with pencil lines and littered with office desks. Liss and a man in a business suit were waiting for him.

  “Jack!” Liss cried. She ran up and put her hands on the glass. Her blue eyes were full of tears. “Jack, I brought Tyler Mashaine. He’s your lawyer now.”

  The man gave Jack a nod. “Good evening, Mr. Greenpeach. I’ve studied your case and spoken through intermediaries to citizen Treel and several witnesses of this morning’s event. I think the best we can do is ask for a minimum period of confinement, a moderate fine, and a period of probation in keeping with your past record as a person of honest character. I’ll stress the fact that you were ignorant of cross-scale labor regulations when you went into business for the farmers.”

  “You know the laws, I guess,” Jack said with a shrug. Mashaine grimaced. "Well, I know better than to cross scale without a permit.”

  Jack blushed. “What exactly did I do, Mr. Mashaine?”

  Mashaine crossed his arms and looked down at Jack’s bare feet. “Mr. Greenpeach, our society, our very environment, is based on principles of strict order. The integrity of scale, perfect compression, relativity . . . these are fundamental. When we came to the levels, we traded a disorderly world for a realm engineered from pure thought. Unfortunately, when we made the transition, human nature remained basically unchanged. We must conform to logical rules if we wish to exist here; even a minor functional infraction can greatly affect the purity of form. But our nature is sloppy. We evolved in a sloppy locale. We can be taught to obey—well, to fear and then obey—the laws necessary to our safety and sanity. I believe the judge will rule that you do not have a proper respect for the principles of proportion and must therefore submit to them for a time not to exceed, say, ninety days.”

  “Ninety days?” Jack cried.

  “I'll visit you every one of them,” Liss promised.

  “That could be difficult, Liss,” said Mashaine. “I’m afraid Mr. Greenpeach will have to cross scale. There’s no getting around that. It’s one of the ways the penal system has of enforcing conformation to scalar law. Form following function, you understand. It’s also, more broadly, a security precaution.”

  “You mean, they think I’d try to escape? I’m not a hardened criminal, Mr. Mashaine. I’m—I’m—this is small-time stuff!”

  “I know you wouldn’t try anything, Mr. Green- peach, but the courts are very consistent on this matter. There were problems in the past—on Earth, I suppose—with overcrowding, and this has proved to be the most effective way of using space while stretching penal resources.”

  “Crossing scale,” Jack repeated. It was a possibility he had never considered. I he’d spent all his life on one level He was meant to be this size.

  Liss stared at him, stunned, her fingers tangled in her golden red hair. “This doesn’t change anything, Jack. Between us, I mean.”

  He tried to smile. “I didn’t mean it when I said this was all your idea. I mean, it wasn’t your fault. I was stupid.”

  “Nice meeting you, Mr. Greenpeach,” said Tyler Mashaine. “Let’s hope this is the last time you need my services.”

  Liss blew him a kiss. They whisked him away in his jar, and for a time he sat on a shelf. Later, the expected news was delivered by a frowning giant: he’d received ninety days’ confinement, a thousand-dollar fine, a year’s probation.

  His te
rm began the moment he crossed scale.

  They shook him out of the jar and into the center of a small, round stage. He was bathed in sapphire light for five minutes. When it faded, the dimensions of the stage had increased by incredible proportions. What had once been no broader than his shoulders now seemed an endless plain. As he surveyed the featureless wasteland, a shadow fell from the sky, an endless pole tipped with a huge fleecy pad. It poked the plain beside him and swept gently in his direction. Jack fled, overcome by pointless terror, the panic of a fly that sees the swatter falling. The fleecy pad brushed him from behind, like a huge hand caressing him from head to toe. Apparently it was impregnated with a dry adhesive to which he found himself completely glued. This was a good thing, for the pad-tipped pole lifted him straight into the sky for what seemed like miles. He soon wearied of screaming. Besides, he was allergic to the adhesive. By the time they set him down and gently scraped him onto a floor, he was limp with exhaustion. He found himself in a cell whose dimensions nearly approached his own. The walls were bare, devoid of neighborlings, and the cell had no ceiling. There was no reason anyone his size would want to clamber out. He would only be squashed or otherwise exterminated by inconceivably monstrous wardens.

  Twice a day, a samesize guard checked to make sure that he had food and water. The bed and other furniture were all a bit too small, which convinced him that the downscaling had not been entirely precise. In the mornings he was allowed to stretch in a corridor between other cells. There was nothing to see except the roofless cubical buildings. There was no one to talk to, no human face aside from the warden’s. After a while he realized that he missed having neighborlings—tiny lives to watch, tiny miseries to share or sympathize with, tiny problems he could be grateful weren’t his own. He’d never really appreciated them before. Now he was smaller by far than his neighborlings. He’d have been a speck under their shoes, small enough to inhabit the dustmotes that fell through their long afternoons.

  Loneliness propelled him into a strange kind of trance, a numbed isolation that left him lying on his back day after day, staring up at the blurry sky with his arms crossed behind his head for a pillow on the undersized bed. Time passed differently here: it went very slowly. After a while he forgot the life he’d left behind. Even in his dreams he had always been here. He was adrift, cut free from anything familiar.

  And then, perhaps a month into his term, he began to notice inexplicable repetitions in the sky. Each day around lunchtime there would come a self-similar formation of clouds, or what he had thought were clouds until their regularity caught hold of his curiosity and began to rouse him from torpid no-thoughts. Clouds never repeated from day to day. Clouds weren’t always, always tinted with the same hues of pink and blue, or accompanied by vast atmospheric streamers of hazy reddish gold that defied meteorological explanation.

  He stared and stared, thoughts brightening, slowly emerging from his trance to puzzle out this strange natural phenomenon, spirit quickening day by day until at last he realized what it was.

  Who it was.

  Each day at noon, as she had promised, Liss came to visit him.

  * * *

  “The Farmer on the Wall” copyright 1989 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Synergy 4, edited by George Zebrowski (1989)

  BRUNO’S SHADOW

  Through the light which shines in natural things, one mounts up to the life which presides over them.

  -Giordano Bruno

  Creaking, the heavy door swung open, and I stepped into the darkened cell. The old gatekeeper waited at my back. Two hundred years ago he would have been a jailer, and this might have been my cell. I straightened up slowly, uncertain of the ceiling height, and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dimness. I had an electric lantern with me, but I wanted my first impressions of the cell to match those of its last tenant. What had he felt as the door closed behind him and the key turned in the lock? In the end, had his eyes turned huge and sightless from staring into shadows? Had he seen the pyre to which they led him after so many years in the dark? Or had that final dawn burned out his eyes, even before the flames of the auto-da-fe came leaping from below?

  Poor Bruno. Burned alive, a conflagration, no more shadows.

  “It's on the wall behind you,” my guide called after me. “I’ll close the door so you can see it whole.”

  I spun around in time to see the doorway closing up: “No!”

  But he hadn't heard me. The old man was possibly quite deaf. Of course, I had wanted him to shut the door eventually— but not so soon. Not until I'd had time to grow used to my surroundings.

  I could not bear the darkness. Quickly I switched on the lantern. And found myself staring at Bruno’s masterpiece.

  It was a composition in black and white and tones of gray, applied with a hand steadier and more revealing than that of any painter. At first it seemed to me no more than a subtle arrangement of dark and light planes, perfectly abstract, broken by slanting lines and gray arcs, with a row of dappled, feathery shapes suspended from above. It covered the entire wall, including the door through which I had entered the cell. As my eye grew more familiar with the piece, I realized that it was not abstract but had been taken directly from life. The image was merely inverted.

  Turning on my heel, I regarded the opposite wall. Yes, there was the window he had used, long since boarded up. In Bruno’s day it had looked out on a square enclosed by imposing white walls, with arches along one side and slender trees lining the far end. It was this scene which he had captured, in inverse, on the wall of his cell.

  All that architecture had long since been destroyed. Where the courtyard had been, there now rose a squat, gray monument to Roman finance. From the street one could see this modern monstrosity and the old prison of the Inquisition hulking shoulder to shoulder, like conspirators.

  In that small window, now sightless and dark, Bruno had inserted a wooden shutter which completely sealed the cell from light. In the midst of the shutter was a circular aperture, over which he tacked a sheet of gold leaf. And in the very center of that sheet was the tiniest possible hole, no more than a pinprick, admitting only the faintest imaginable light.

  Faint, but suitable for his purposes.

  I wondered what his jailers had thought when he dispatched them to search for the various strange materials his camera required. He must have had some friend outside the prison to furnish the gold leaf and chemicals. His requests should have surprised no one—he was already thought a sorcerer, after all—but I was amazed that they had ever been honored. What mightn’t he have concocted in the years he spent in prison? Gunpowder? Poison gases? Why not the philosophers’ stone?

  But his materials were actually quite harmless and must have seemed so even to the warden: silver salts, bitumen of Judaea, pewter sheets, and lavender oil. A lesser man would have given up after months, perhaps even days of frustrated experimentation. But here, for once, Bruno’s muscular ego served him in good stead. He had eight years in which to work without interruption, undistracted. Eventually he succeeded in rediscovering principles he had previously taken for granted. Leonardo's own processes had been kept a careful secret by his estate, which dispensed fine cameras, paper, and premixed chemicals to those who dared to purchase them in violation of Church decrees. It was not until more than a century after Bruno's death that Da Vinci's self-imposed patents expired, and the chemical principles of chiaroscurography became widely understood. But long before that time, following the brilliant suspicions that had made him such a terror to the Church, Bruno had managed to duplicate Da Vinci’s findings and develop his own ingenious techniques.

  Imprisonment had slowed his pace but not his mind. It took the flames of the Inquisition to make that engine fail.

  No record remains of the trials he conducted. History has not preserved his failures. All that remains is Bruno’s triumph, cast in light and shadow on the wall of his living tomb. He must have labored all through the year’s shortest night, painting the wall with
the mixture he finally settled upon as ideal, namely an asphalt which hardened on exposure to light.

  The entire wall beneath that bituminous layer was covered with sheets of polished pewter, tacked up edge to edge to form a seamless canvas. He had pewter-plated even the door.

  At dawn he took his position. The waxing sunlight pierced the tiny hole in the sheet of gold leaf, throwing thin rays over Bruno's wall. It was Midsummer Day, the trees in leaf, the shadows stark and simple on the plaza as the sun crawled overhead. Those shadows were conducted into the dark cell by the pinhole and focused on the light-sensitive coating. Bruno never moved, not for an instant of the year’s longest day. Sunlight poured through the golden hole, hardening the asphalt wherever it touched. Gradually, invisibly, the bright image of the outer world, that expansive courtyard, was frozen in the hardening bitumen of Judaea, while all the shadows remained soft—none softer than the region directly behind Bruno, which bore his umbral shape. When at last the pinhole went dark, had he collapsed exhausted on the floor of his camera? I do not think so. There was much to do while the asphalt was still soft; he had to act quickly to reveal the mystery hidden on the wall.

  He worked through another night with a rag or brush soaked in lavender oil, gently dabbing the coated pewter to remove the soft bitumen, taking microscopic care not to destroy the hardened areas. By candlelight he watched the image emerge: The lines of walls and columns, the sweep of the arches, the sun-flecked leaves of inverted trees—these were captured in dark pewter and white asphalt. And last of all, his own form emerged.

  But where was it?

  I raised my own lantern, sending the shadows shifting over the wall, casting light at last upon the door itself, which was slightly recessed in the wall.

  There he knelt, Giordano Bruno himself—the true shadow of the man!

  I had not expected this. No one had described him. In the Church records, there was no mention of the shadow's posture.