Uncanny Magazine Issue 39

by Lynne M. Thomas

  I eat some cornbread and a peach, though I’m not hungry. I sit on the shore with my feet in the water and watch for other boats or drones or reapers overhead. I don’t see anything but seagulls and ospreys and minnows that tickle my toes.

  “Ain’t nothing here, Libs,” I say, in my mother’s best imitation of her mother’s voice. I never knew my grandmother, but Mom said she looked just like Tris, so I loved her on principle. She and Tris even share a name: Leatrice. I told Mom that I’d name my daughter Tamar, after her. I’d always sort of planned to, but when my monthlies stopped a year ago, I figured it was just as well. Stupid Bill, and his stupid patchy hair, I think.

  I dream of giant combines made from black chrome and crystal, with headlights of wide, unblinking eyes. I take them to the fields, but something is wrong with the thresher. There’s bonemeal dust on the wheat berries.

  “Now, Libby,” Bill says, but I can’t hear the rest of what he’s saying because the earth starts shaking and—

  I scramble to my feet, kicking up sand with the dream still in my eyes. There’s lights in the afternoon sky and this awful thunder, like a thousand lightning bolts are striking the earth at once.

  “Oh, Christ,” I say. A murder of reapers swarms to the north, and even with the sun in the sky their bombs light the ground beneath like hellfire. It’s easier to see reapers from far away, because they paint their underbellies light blue to blend with the sky.

  Tris stands beside me and grips my wrist. “That’s not…it has to be Toddville, right? Or Cedar Creek? They’re not far enough away for home, right?”

  I don’t say anything. I don’t know. I can only look.

  Bill’s hair is patchy because the glassmen arrested him and they tortured him. Bill asked his outside contacts if they knew anything about a place to get an illegal abortion. Bill brought back a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of farm equipment and scars from wounds that would have killed someone without access to a doctor. But what kind of prisoner has access to a real doctor? Why did the glassmen arrest him? What if his contacts are exactly the type of men the glassmen like to bomb with their reapers? What if Bill is?

  But I know it isn’t that simple. No one knows why the glassmen bomb us. No one really knows the reason for the whole damn mess, their reapers and their drones and their arcane rules you’re shot for not following.

  “Should we go back?”

  She says it like she’s declared war on a cardinal direction, like she really will get on that boat and walk into a reaper wasteland and salvage what’s left of our lives and have that baby.

  I squeeze her hand. “It’s too close,” I say. “Toddville, I think you’re right. Let’s get going, though. Probably not safe here.”

  She nods. She doesn’t look me in the eye. We paddle through the choppy water until the sun sets. And then, without saying anything, we ship the oars and I turn on the engine.

  Three nights later, we see lights on the shore. It’s a glassmen military installation. Dad marked it on the map, but still I’m surprised by its size, its brightness, the brazen way it sits on the coastline, as though daring to attract attention.

  “I’d never thought a building could be so…”

  “Angry?” Tris says.

  “Violent.”

  “It’s like a giant middle finger up the ass of the Chesapeake.”

  I laugh despite myself. “You’re ridiculous.”

  We’re whispering, though we’re on the far side of the bay and the water is smooth and quiet. After that reaper drone attack, I’m remembering more than I like of my childhood terror of the glassmen. Dad and Mom had to talk to security drones a few times after the occupation, and I remember the oddly modulated voices, distinctly male, and the bright unblinking eyes behind the glass masks of their robot heads. I don’t know anyone who has met a real glassman, instead of one of their remote robots. It’s a retaliatory offense to harm a drone because the connection between the drone and the glassman on the other side of the world (or up in some space station) is so tight that sudden violence can cause brain damage. I wonder how they can square potential brain damage with dead children, but I guess I’m not a glassman.

  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 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 glassman 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 glassmen 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 glassman 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 achievables. 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 glassman. “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.