Small-Minded Giants

by Oisin McGann

  ‘Run!’ the daylighter roared to Sol as others closed in on the hit man with wrenches and ice-hammers.

  Cleo was already making for the door, with Sol close on her heels. There came the sound of silenced gunshots, and two people started screaming. Then three. As they hurled themselves through the door and bounded down the stairs, a bullet struck the wall above their heads. The Clockworker was coming after them again.

  At the bottom of the stairs Sol turned left, heading for the utility corridors that ran around the edge of the depot. They offered more corners and cover.

  ‘He can call others,’ Cleo panted. ‘They could cut us off.’

  As they took another turn, they came upon a low, heavily built denceramic door, and Sol skidded to a stop. There was a readout displayed beside the door: air pressure and temperature. A light glowed green beside the readings.

  ‘We can go through here,’ he said, hitting the lock release. ‘It’ll take us out of the depot.’

  The door slid open. It was nearly forty centimetres thick. Cleo didn’t realize where it led until he had closed it behind them, and she had a chance to look around.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ she gasped.

  ‘They must be doing some maintenance,’ Sol told her, watching through the slab of glass that made up the door’s small window. The Clockworker ran past, gun drawn. ‘We may not have that long.’

  They were between the two layers of concraglass that made up the dome. Sloping up from their feet, a vast glass hill interspaced with a grid of denceramic beams stretched into a false perspective as it curved away from them. A symmetric forest of spring-loaded struts separated and supported the two layers, creating a space between them about one and a half metres high, each layer of concraglass nearly half a metre thick. It did not lessen the sense of vertigo they got as they looked down through their feet at the city below. Sol and Cleo were almost able to stand upright, their heads and shoulders hunched.

  Ash Harbour had been built into a mountain, the centre hollowed out like the crater of a volcano, but all resemblance to nature stopped there. The entire city had been built inside a vacuum insulation system, the crater walls hollowed out and reinforced with denceramic, the hollowed sections hermetically sealed and the air evacuated. This was the secret to the city’s capacity for retaining the heat created by the Machine – the people of Ash Harbour effectively lived in a gigantic vacuum flask.

  The section of dome in which Cleo and Sol now stood should have been devoid of all air or gases. Somewhere nearby, a work crew must be carrying out maintenance.

  ‘There are doors every hundred and fifty metres or so,’ Sol told her. ‘We can get out at the next one along – it’ll bring us out beyond the depot.’

  Their breath was emerging in plumes of vapour; the space was cold, and getting colder. And yet Cleo could feel the warmth of the glass through the soles of her shoes. Putting her hand up to the glass above her, she found it was freezing cold. Flakes of snow were already falling on its upper surface. Gold-coloured strips of solar cells – invisible from the streets – were attached to its lower surface, to make the most of the daylight. Walking along the glass ledge that followed the circumference of the dome was unnerving, with nothing between the glass and the city streets hundreds of metres below.

  Something buzzed past her ear, and blood spattered the strut that Sol was passing – he flinched, crying out, his hand to his neck. Cleo turned and ducked down as the Clockworker took another shot. He was about sixty metres behind them, far enough back on the curve for his aim to be spoiled by the dome’s jungle of struts. Cleo was crouched down and running now, overtaking Sol on the ledge and grabbing his arm. His other hand clutched the left side of his neck, blood seeping through his fingers. Another shot skated off the ledge near her feet and ricocheted up and down ahead of them. Hard as diamond, concraglass was made to withstand centuries of cataclysmic weather. Ricochets made every bullet twice as dangerous.

  Sol was loping unsteadily behind her and was having trouble keeping up. Cleo heard the Clockworker’s running feet echoing around them. A third shot clipped the sleeve of her jacket, making her lose her footing, and she fell sideways onto the sloping glass, Sol tripped over her feet and landed heavily, crying out in pain. Cleo looked back as she scrambled up; the man was less than thirty metres behind them – he had a clear shot now – but he was sprinting full tilt towards them. Sol was back up, and they ran together. The door was there ahead of them; by some miracle it was still open behind the departing crew.

  A siren started to sound through the dome. Sol looked about anxiously, his glance into her eyes all she needed to tell her what it meant. They were evacuating the section. In minutes, the whole place would be as airless as outer space. Sol started to roar as he put every ounce of effort into his race for the door, but his movements were becoming less co-ordinated, and he was struggling to maintain his balance. The wound in his neck was making him dizzy. He collapsed just metres short of the door, shaking his head and crawling on. Cleo leaped over him and seized his shoulders. Dragging him backwards towards the door, she looked up to see the Clockworker slowing down to take aim . . .

  A jet of water shot past her, spraying the slope of glass, finding its way down to the Clockworker and blasting him off his feet. She looked behind her as two men stepped out, directing the nozzle of a fire-hose at the gunman. The siren was loud in her ears, and the sound of the water reverberated off the glass floor and ceiling with a soft bellow. She helped Sol stagger out through the door, and the two would-be firemen gave the Clockworker one last blast before hurrying back out, closing and sealing the opening behind them.

  ‘Don’t watch, girl,’ one of them said solemnly. ‘It won’t be pretty.’

  But she did watch. The Clockworker reached the door, hammering on it, but the pumps had started, the safety locks had kicked in. He fired three shots at the lock and the glass, but the bullets just bounced off, making him jump back. Dropping the gun, he slammed his fists against the glass, screaming desperately, but apart from barely audible thuds, the sound did not carry through the door. Cleo could not take her eyes off his face.

  As the section of dome decompressed, he appeared to gag, gradually losing the ability to breathe; his face went red, and veins stood out under his skin. He stumbled backwards, curling up against the sloping glass. His body went into spasm as his blood began to boil, his arms and legs thrashing. Cleo stared in fascinated horror right up until the point where his eyes burst, and then she fell to the ground, crying.

  Harley Wasserstein was striding up the corridor, his left hand pressing a dressing to his face. As he stopped, he took the bandage away to look at it and they could see a straight line scored up the side of his face, oozing blood. Below it, the blond hair of his beard was a matted red. He pressed the dressing back into place and looked down at them.

  ‘We’re going to get you to some friends of ours – they’ll be able to help.’

  ‘What about him?’ Cleo gestured towards the door.

  ‘You were never here,’ the daylighter said. ‘This never happened. We’ll open the place up again, clean it out. We’ll take the body up top and dump it over the edge. Nobody’ll ever find it.’

  Section 20/24: Sanctum

  THE SIGN OVER the door read:

  THE DARK-DAY FATALISTS –

  SECOND QUADRANT CHAPTER

  ‘NATURE WILL ALWAYS BE THE VICTOR’

  A symbol above it showed three lines spiralling towards a common centre.

  ‘Great,’ Sol snorted.

  His hood was up to hide the bandage on the side of his neck. The bullet had missed the major veins and arteries, grazing some muscle. Messy, but superficial. He and Cleo stood with three daylighters in a gloomy alley, looking at the battered door. It had a spy-lens, and they had no doubt they were being studied from within. The door swung open, and a short, dumpy Pinoy man with grey, wispy hair, wearing a plain black suit and spectacles, waved them in.

  ‘We’ve been expecting you
,’ he said.

  The daylighters wished them goodbye and hurried back up the alley.

  Inside, there was the smell of real books and the murmur of voices. They were led down the painted concrete hallway of the sanctum to a large, open, hexagonal room, lit by gaslight. Here, a collection of some twenty black-clad figures waited. Some were sitting in easy chairs, books in hand, others were standing as if deep in conversation. All of them turned to stare as the two teenagers were ushered into the room. The walls were lined with bookshelves, the concrete-beamed ceiling a hexagonal cone that rose to a rounded point, and the flickering light gave the place a warm, informal feel.

  ‘My name is Mr Ibrahim,’ the man with the glasses said from behind them. ‘Welcome to our chapter. Please, sit down. You are safe here, at least for the moment. We have some food and drink on the way, but in the meantime if you could indulge us, we would like to hear your story. How is it that you have come to be hunted by the Clockworkers?’

  Sol scanned the room suspiciously. He was not at ease here, but Cleo seemed to relax somewhat, and flopped down on a couch. Starting with the day of the crane wreck and Gregor’s disappearance, she explained the whole thing. He had told her everything, so let her do the talking as he continued to stand, eyeing the faces around him. His gaze fell on a fair-haired man with a drooping mouth and broken veins in his nose and cheeks. Tenzin Smith, his father’s friend from the ratting dens. So this was where he had come to hide out. Smith nodded to him, and Sol looked away. But it helped put his mind at rest; if Smith was safe, then chances were that the Clockworkers would not look for them here.

  He sat down on the synth-fibre couch beside Cleo and listened to her tell their story. It seemed incredible to him now to hear it told by someone else. The crane wreck, being captured and nearly tortured before he was saved by Maslow. It was relaxing to hear her relating all the events that had brought them to this point, and see the men and women around them listening intently. He should have felt uncomfortable among all these people, but a feeling welled up inside him that he couldn’t fathom; some strange, disarming warmth. It took him a few minutes to put a name to it. It was a sense of normality. The sheer ordinariness of sitting among people and talking . . . or at least, listening to someone talking.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said abruptly. ‘I need to use the toilet.’

  ‘Out to the hall, second door on your right,’ Mr Ibrahim told him.

  He hurried into the men’s room, pushing through the door of a cubicle and bolting it behind him. Sitting on the toilet seat, he drew in several shuddering breaths, pressing his fists against his eyes. He wasn’t going to cry, but the tightness in his chest would not go away until he had let out a series of gasping sobs. Putting one hand up to the bandage on his neck, he breathed long and deep, calming himself. He was just letting things get on top of him. He couldn’t let that happen – not yet. Not until they were really safe and he had found his father could he let his defences down.

  When he came back into the library, Cleo was just concluding her narrative. He sat down next to her, and she shot him a glance, putting a hand on his knee.

  ‘. . . So, after watching that guy burst in the vacuum, I’d had about as much as I could take. When Mr Wasserstein told us he knew of somewhere we could hide out, it was a real godsend. We’re really grateful for your help. I don’t suppose any of you smoke, by any chance?’

  A few of them exchanged looks, but nobody confessed.

  ‘We need to find out about what happened to Ana too,’ Sol said quietly. ‘We have to know . . . if we could contact somebody at the hospital or—’

  ‘Yeah,’ Cleo added, ashamed that she had been thinking about the stem before Ana. ‘We just need to know if she’s okay.’

  ‘That hospital is in a state of chaos at the moment, but we’ll try,’ Mr Ibrahim told her. ‘There’s strength in numbers, Miss Matsumura. And I believe we may have a common cause. Why don’t you and Mr Wheat try to relax; we’ll have some food along any minute, and then we can talk about where we go from here.’

  A few of the other people in the room started to fire questions at her:

  ‘How many people came after you in total? Roughly?’

  ‘Did . . . did they seem to you to have had any police training?’

  ‘Did this Maslow have any other weapons stockpiled?’ a feeble old man with a goatee piped up. ‘Any heavy munitions? Explosives?’

  Cleo looked hesitantly at Sol.

  ‘We cannot achieve meaningful change through force of arms!’ a stern-faced, black-haired Pinoy woman retorted.

  ‘There won’t be any change at all if they shoot us every time we try anything.’ The elderly man waved his puny fist in the air. ‘We need some firepower!’

  ‘Violence is not the answer!’ chided a young black man, who looked like a student. ‘You don’t win an argument by starting a fight. We must use reason and rational debate.’

  ‘Fat lot of good that’ll do you against semi-automatic rifles!’ the old man exclaimed, his head extending on a chicken-like neck.

  ‘Jonah is right!’ another voice spoke up. ‘They control all the media. Nobody will hear our arguments. We need to make some bombs or something!’

  ‘We’ve been over this before,’ Mr Ibrahim began. ‘There’s no point—’

  ‘How do we know unless we try!’ somebody pleaded, cutting him off.

  ‘We need to engage the mayor in a vigorous debate!’

  ‘We need to bomb the mayor!’

  ‘We can’t risk causing any more damage to the Machine!’

  ‘Tell that to the Clockworkers!’

  ‘Perhaps we could unite the city in prayer?’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’

  Sol and Cleo sat bemused by the dispute that was building around them. Tenzin Smith came over and perched on the couch opposite them.

  ‘They can go on like this for hours,’ he said, with a wry grin. ‘Want to get out of here?’

  Cleo and Sol nodded eagerly.

  There was more than one way in and out of the Dark-Day Fatalists’ building.

  ‘They’re a well-meaning crowd,’ Smith said as he led them down a long spiral staircase, ‘but they can’t agree on squat . . . except that the Machine is on its last legs, of course. Half of them are academics: mathematicians, historians – big thinkers. Lots of long-term plans. Some of the others are engineers, tradesmen . . . even cops. You name it, we have ’em here. Makes for a lot of arguments.’ He winked at Cleo. ‘They’re stingy with their stem too. I’ve a devil of a time getting hold of any.’

  At the bottom of the staircase was a heavy steel door. Sol guessed they must be on the second or third sub-level. The door opened onto a rubbish-strewn laneway; they were greeted by the sound of rats scurrying away at their emergence. Around them were the roots of buildings, foundations and enormous pillars for bridges and supports for engineering works. The only light was from the street above them; cars and mopeds passed by overhead, sending dust sifting down. The most surprising thing was the graffiti art. Every vertical surface was covered with it: gangland tags, band logos, funky cartoon characters, semi-realistic paintings of extinct animals in Ash Harbour settings; angry, obscene declarations of protest, illuminated song lyrics.

  ‘Trying to make sense of their world.’ Smith waved his hand around him. ‘Sometimes you just have to spew out all the crap that’s going on in your head.’

  They walked on down the lane; Sol and Cleo wary, now that they were outside their new refuge, but Smith seemed unconcerned. They passed under three huge drive-shafts, coming to a large building that was emitting steam from vents in its walls. Smith walked up the steps to the door. He opened it without knocking. Sol held back, but Cleo turned to him, nodding. She trusted Smith.

  Inside, some stairs led up to a balcony that looked out over a nightmarish combination of a gymnasium and some industrial disaster. Heavy machinery pumped, whirred, spun and slammed in some incomprehensible manufacturing process. It took Sol a couple of minute
s to make sense of it, because he could not take his eyes off the humans tangled in the works.

  ‘Recycling fixtures,’ Smith told them. ‘Nuts and bolts, washers . . . ordinary things.’

  The workers were bound into the clanking machinery, some pedalling, rowing, cranking, others pumping handles or lifting what must once have been robotic arms. Conveyor belts, lathes, grinding wheels, presses, drills – everything was being powered by the movement of the people in the room. In some machines there were people who were missing limbs, the prosthetics worn to replace them engineered to fit into their place in this human-driven engine. The air was thick with the smell of sweat and oil and hot metal. A furnace at the far end of the factory floor had its bellows pumped on either side by two men with no legs, their corded, perspiration-soaked upper bodies bare to the waist. They had obviously been chosen because, without legs, they could fit into the niches that had once been occupied by machines.

  ‘There are factories like this all over the city,’ Smith informed the two teenagers. ‘The work is poorly paid or, if you’re doing time for a felony, there’s no pay at all. I’m an engineer. Do you know what I do for a living? I make customized prosthetics. Somebody loses their hand, or their arm or their leg in an industrial accident, I fix them up something so that they can go back to work in the same job. It’s that or they and their families starve. There’s no help for them – the companies don’t care who gets hurt.’

  He turned his back on the factory, leaning against the railing to look at Sol and Cleo.

  ‘The city’s dying, a little bit at a time. Metal, plastic, denceramic . . . it all wears down, and it can all be recycled. But every time, we lose some. Resources are dwindling. This whole place used to be fully mechanized, but bit by bit machines have failed, and they’ve had to replace them with humans. Humans fitting into roles designed for machines.