Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition

by Rich Horton

  As we reach the locker room, I'm startled that our single-file queue remains intact. The women enter through the same hatch as the men. Bringing up the rear, I tell myself there must surely be a dividing bulkhead or at the very least a screen inside, but of course I was here this morning and know there's no such thing. I try to keep my eyes averted, but just to reach my locker I must step around a woman named Soon, who already has her suit pushed down to her hips.

  The room is too small, and everyone jostles everyone else on the way to the ultrasonic showers. I stand with my burning face to my open locker, wondering if I can get away with standing here and not changing until the room is empty. Soon's bare torso blazes like a beacon in my mind. A part of me is fascinated and wants to look at it again; another part is horrified at the thought, and at the distant, epochal memories of my mother that stir, memories so ancient they seem apocryphal.

  Renny, galumphing through the locker room, slaps the back of my thigh and says, “Next shift's gotta get in, kid. Hurry it up."

  Somehow I strip off the suit, deposit it in the recycler, and manage the walk to the showers. My skin crawls as I crowd into the white ceramic chamber with the others, though part of this, I'm sure, is the feel of the ultrasonics vibrating sweat and grime loose from my body. Still, I can't look higher than anyone's ankles. It's not just the naked flesh that distresses me. I'm out of my coverall in front of heathen, and that's a grave offense in the sight of the Builder. My hands hover in front of my crotch.

  My hip brushes the thin blue man's; I nearly jump out of my skin and mumble an apology. “Don't worry about it,” he says with a kind smile. “We're all friends here."

  "Yeah,” Corgie says. “Just help yourself to a handful of whatever's closest."

  "Or a thimbleful,” says an apparent neuter named Ice IX, pointing at Corgie's flaccid penis.

  "Careful. You don't want to wake the monster."

  Mijk, a muscular man with a series of knobby lumps down his back, says, “I do. Someone ran all the lotion out of my dispenser."

  "And apparently he wants it back,” Soon says with a giggle.

  Corgie wipes his mouth. “Come and get it,” he says, and his penis flares to enormous size, all ridged and quivering. It is a monster.

  I turn away, blushing. But something strange has begun to happen. I don't feel comfortable exactly, but I do feel somewhat invisible, with less of the compulsion to run and hide than comes in the cleansing room at gymnasium. I'm able to let my eyes roam some, taking in the female bodies as well as the male, plus two or three I find less determinate and the entirely genderless Ice IX. In the Quarter, contact between boys and girls is strictly regulated and chaperoned, even during courtship; a situation like this is as unthinkable as a motor assembling itself from raw ore. I have more answers now than I know what to do with to what minutes ago was only a compelling mystery.

  I almost don't want the shower to end, but when the thought takes form I realize the Wrecker is already getting his claws into me. How much easier a time of it he has here than inside the Quarter! Despair washes over me. How will I ever survive this?

  Clean, but with a film of shame clinging to my exposed skin, I trail the group back to the lockers. I've pulled on my underall and my coverall and am about to put my cap on when a tall, trouserless man named Twenty plucks it deftly out of my hands.

  "What's this for, some kind of uniform?” he asks, turning the cap this way and that. “You got another job?"

  My muscles seem to seize up, and the bottom falls out of my soul. So much for invisibility. Renny is gone; I don't know where to turn for help. Heat and mortification radiate from the top of my uncovered head as Twenty's Sculpted hands defile my cap.

  "No, you ramscoop,” Corgie says, taking the cap, “he's a Wheelie. Don't you know anything?"

  And now he's passing it to someone else, who's asking why there's a triangle on it if I'm a Wheelie, and now it goes to someone else, and now it's flying through the air past my face, and now again the other way. I reach for the cap, but it's snatched by the knobby-spined Mijk.

  "Wheelie, huh?” he says. “Those are like Christers, right? How come you're named after a traitor, Wheelie?"

  "Judas betrayed the Builder,” I say quietly. I want to sound dangerous, but even I can hear the quaver in my voice. “Jude was a different apostle."

  "Jude, Judas, Peter, penis—whatever. Think this'd fit me?"

  Mijk's about to slip the cap onto his head, and I'm about to shout something, maybe do something I'll regret, when a half-dressed woman named Beneficent Sunrise takes it from him.

  "Mijk, it doesn't stretch. It's not smart enough to fit your thick skull."

  "Then what good is it?"

  Beneficent Sunrise turns the cap over. She studies the inclined plane symbol. “Never seen something made from dumb fabric before. Interesting the way it feels. Almost real."

  Her frank curiosity defuses my anger. Or is it the sight of her full, bobbing breasts? They fill me with an emotion I can't quite put a name to. Not desire, not quite, but something as sharp in its poignancy. I wonder what they feel like.

  The blue man picks my cap cleanly out of her grip. Holding it by the visor only, he puts it in my hand. My fingers clutch it spasmodically.

  "Real like your tits, Sunny?” he says to the woman.

  "Go deplete your wand,” she says in the general laughter, but she's smiling with everyone else.

  Weak with humiliation and relief, I cover my head and turn to rummage in my empty locker. Around me, my crewmates casually hide their nakedness.

  * * * *

  The blue man is called Haun Friedrich 4, but the fishbowl taught me he prefers to go by Derek Specter. He's in the trial period before a legal name change.

  The idea that one may choose one's own name is as strange to me as everything else about the Sculpted. What would I choose if I were to name myself? Paul? Luke? Timothy? None of them work. I can't imagine learning to answer to any name but Jude. That's me. That's who I am.

  I'm standing in the gangway outside the locker room, having lingered there until the arriving crew forced me out. People edge past me in both directions. I'm trying to remember which way I came this morning, fighting a growing sense of panic, when Haun—Derek—touches my shoulder with blue fingers.

  "Know where you're going?” he asks with an easy grin.

  "Er ... rimward,” I say, feeling the blood heat my cheeks.

  "Yes, that would almost certainly be correct.” Derek leans against the bulkhead near me, a little too close, arms folded and eyes bright. His skin is the blue of Enoch's fabled seas, and his irises glow like bits of its sky. “Do you need any help getting there?"

  I look down at my gray nonslippers. “I guess I do,” I say, embarrassed at the prospect of this ostentatiously abnormal creature rescuing me twice in the same ten minutes.

  Derek gazes at the opposite bulkhead, cupping his chin. “Wheelieville, I presume,” he says. He gives me a sidelong glance, apologetic but not self-conscious. “The Machinist Quarter, I mean."

  "Uh, yeah."

  His eyes narrow. “Let me just find it on the map."

  "What map?” I say. His glance this time is mildly reproving, and I let out an abashed “Oh."

  "We just need to get you to Elevator Seven, Eight, or Nine,” Derek says after a moment. “That's probably the trickiest part of the route. And I happen to be going the same way, if you don't mind company."

  My feet are itching to move. I'd rather he just point me in the right direction and let me go my way, but I'm too tired to argue. I shrug my acquiescence.

  As we set off down the narrow way, Derek says over his shoulder, “You were good in there today. Not everyone adjusts to null-gee that quickly. I think even Renny was impressed."

  He looks back expectantly, but since I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say to this, I don't answer.

  "Corgie gave you some shit, I know,” Derek says, “but you should have seen him back when he started. Ta
lk about an ostrich. Was this your first time with an overlay?"

  "Yes."

  "I remember when I was first getting used to it. It was strange to turn it off and not see labels everywhere I looked. You must be going through the same thing. You probably haven't ever used Geoff before either.” At my blank look, he grins. “Yeah, we'll have to teach you how to use Geoff. Then next time you need to get somewhere you won't have to put up with me running off at the mouth."

  "What's Geoff?” I ask.

  "Info daemon on the public net. You've really been sheltered, haven't you? Geoff's mostly for travelers and transients—anyone offline, really, so you can use him too. He'll answer any question you have, if he has the answer and you're older than ten. And as long as it's not private or classified."

  Derek keeps looking back at me with an expression like he's trying to tell me something significant and I'm just not getting it. I feel dumb, and my skin's been crawling ever since the word “daemon” anyway. “I—thanks, but that doesn't sound like something I ought to be messing with."

  He gives me one more look, then shrugs. “Suit yourself,” he says. “But you do have a right to whatever information you want. You only have to ask."

  We take the next couple of turns in silence, me adrift in an uneasiness I can't quite put my finger on.

  "So what's a nice Machinist like you doing in a job like this anyway?” Derek asks at last. “I thought you were supposed to stick to your own turf, not venture out amongst the unwashed."

  The corridors are wider now, the crowds thickening, and Derek, walking beside me, speaks too loudly for my comfort. “Commerce with the Sculpted isn't forbidden,” I say a little defensively, keeping my voice low. “It's just ... discouraged, I guess. It's—there's a lot of danger, spiritually."

  "I always wanted to be a spiritual hazard,” Derek says. “You probably shouldn't even be talking to me, should you?"

  "Um...” I'm looking around, anywhere but at him. There are unholy forms and faces and sounds and smells everywhere. “Not really, not like this."

  "So why are you? I mean, in the larger sense. Why are you here at all? Why do you have this job?"

  I sigh. “I didn't exactly have a choice,” I say, cursing my inability to hold my tongue. “Thomas, my father, he's our ward trader, which means he goes out and sells whatever we build or manufacture. That's so the ward can meet its obligation to the Guild."

  "Which is saving up to get off Netherview Station and continue its fabled trek to Enoch. I've read about it."

  I look at him, nonplussed. We know so little about the Sculpted, I somehow can't get over the fact they know anything about us. “But business isn't so good,” I continue. “As trader, my father has to pay the rest of the ward first, before he takes his share, but lately there's not much left over. In fact, I think there may not be anything left over. He's been trying for months to get me a job outside the Quarter, and believe me, that means things are grim."

  "Of course they are,” Derek says. “Who wants primitive toys made from primitive materials?"

  "They're not toys!” I say, turning on him, thinking of the motor I've been building for some weeks now. “It's serious work! It's sacred!"

  "Hey, hey, I'm sorry.” We're now at the elevator bay, waiting, and Derek puts his hands up as if to ward off my anger. I see for the first time that his palms and the pads of his fingers are a rich green, fading into blue at the edges. “I didn't mean it like that. But you have to realize that's how most people see what you do. If it has no practical use, it must be a toy."

  "It does have a practical use,” I say. “You people are just too stiffnecked to humble yourselves and admit it."

  Derek nods. “Or you might say we've put away childish things."

  This reference to the Manual startles me. The elevator opens as I'm groping for a suitable reply, and we crowd in with several other commuters, including a woman who has tentacles where her fingers should be. Derek spends the ride staring straight ahead with the barest of smiles on his lips.

  I'm still smarting when the elevator opens on Six. I'm about to say that I think I can find my way from here, but Derek steps out with me into the thick, damp air and dank vegetation.

  "I've been meaning to ask,” he says, “what is the significance of the triangle on your clothing? It's an inclined plane, right?"

  "Um, right,” I say. “That's the ward I belong to."

  "You're lucky you're not in Screw,” he says. “You'd never hear the end of it at work."

  "So, er,” I say, stumbling a little as we step onto the counterspinward slidewalk, “I guess you understand the Inclined Plane is one of the Six Fundamental Machines."

  "I've heard that rumor somewhere,” Derek says.

  "Well, they're also symbols. This one represents the obliqueness of our approach to the Master Builder. No matter—"

  "You mean God, right?"

  "You might call him that,” I say.

  "I might. And again, I might not."

  He has a way of continually derailing me and looking pleased about it that I find entirely infuriating. “No matter how shallow the angle,” I say, soldiering on, “the Inclined Plane leads us ever upward, and though it may take eons, eventually we'll reach the level of the Builder."

  "Sounds suspiciously like the Tower of Babel,” Derek says. “And didn't God punish the Babylonians for trying to approach him in just that way?"

  "Their approach was more direct, and completely literal,” I say, my voice heating up. “We're not talking about a literal approach. Ours is metaphorical. We approach the Builder by understanding and manipulating his six aspects."

  "I'd have thought he'd have more respect for the direct approach. You know, just wrap an inclined plane around a big pole and climb to heaven.” He waggles his blue eyebrows at me, eyes twinkling. “Maybe what offended him about it was the metaphorical significance of it. Maybe the Babylonians were really saying God could screw himself, and that's why he gave them all a good tongue-lashing."

  The delight he derives from such extreme statements takes my breath away. “You can't approach the Builder in anything but a metaphorical way!” I say.

  "Then why let yourselves be literally constrained? Why confine yourselves to what you can build from six fairly arbitrary machines?"

  "The machines aren't arbitrary! They're the six aspects of the Builder."

  "They are arbitrary, and not all of them are even that fundamental. The screw we were just talking about—like I said, it's just an inclined plane wrapped around an axle. The pulley's a special case of the wheel and axle, and the wedge is just another way of looking at an inclined plane."

  I wipe fatigue sweat from my forehead. He's hitting uncomfortably close to blasphemous thoughts I've entertained myself, which may explain my vehemence in denouncing them. “Every aspect partakes of the others to some extent,” I say, but I sound more shrill than certain.

  "Seems to me that if there really is a god, you could find some far more useful metaphors for the way he operates if you'd just reach deeper than your six machines."

  He exits the slidewalk and I follow, belatedly realizing we've arrived near the PM Gate. To my relief and chagrin both, I've been so focused on the conversation that I haven't paid much attention to the nightmarish creatures around me, nor to the riotous greenery. But I notice them all now and feel hemmed in.

  "We're not meant to reach deeper,” I say, hurrying to keep up with Derek's long gait in the swarming crowd.

  "Then you'll never achieve godhood, now, will you?” Derek says. He pauses near the unadorned hatchway that leads to the Machinist Quarter. “Well, here you are."

  Bathed in sweat, I purse my lips. “Thanks, uh ... thanks for getting me here."

  "The pleasure was all mine.” He makes as if to move on, but stops. “I meant to tell you before, I thought you handled those jokers in the locker room about as well as you could have. Just don't let them know they're getting to you and they'll leave you alone soon enou
gh. They're not really mean, just exemplars of what I call the indolent uninformed. Learning new things is such a trivial process they don't even make the effort."

  "Like the Israelites and the fiery serpents,” I say.

  Derek blinks, his eyes losing focus. “Interesting,” he says after a moment or two. “Numbers, chapter twenty-one. If the ones who were bitten only gazed upon Moses's brass serpent, they would live. All they had to do was look. You know, there's good sense to be found in that book here and there."

  "The miracle is,” I say, “even a gentile can look and see it."

  Derek laughs long and loud. It makes me feel clever and proud, though why I should care about looking clever to this mockery of a man baffles me. “Touché, Jude,” he says. “See you tomorrow at the orifice."

  He studies some resource invisible to me, and then he's off, a lean blue figure vanishing into a teeming, grotesque jungle. I'm reminded that he inhabits a world even more strange than this physical one, and that when the two or us look at an object we each see a vastly different thing.

  "Selah, Derek,” I say under my breath. I pull the lever and pass through the Gate, wondering what he sees when he looks at me.

  * * * *

  The cleanliness, calm, cool, and quiet of the Quarter stand in stark contrast to what I've left behind. It's evening by our clocks; we run here on only one shift. The few Machinists out and about look at me strangely as I pass from outside. It should feel good, this homecoming after an eternal shift away, this shedding of weight, this lightness, this cooling of my sweat, but I find myself keyed up and restless before I've even reached the branching to Wheel and Axle. I know Thomas will be waiting for me, wanting to know how the day went, but I can't confine myself at home just yet. Instead I lower my head and trudge to gymnasium.

  The machines are manned mostly by Levers, all older than I, but one station opens up before long. I do my best to complete the ritual properly, pitting every muscle group against the pulleys as I rehearse the Builder's Code in my mind, but I'm barely into the first canto before my sore muscles are quaking. What's more, I can't keep my thoughts focused. My mind keeps reaching back to worry images of naked flesh—sometimes colored naturally, sometimes blue or green.