by Jerry
And the child who would one day be Schaeffer looked upon the vision . . . and smiled.
O O O
The return to the examining room was as clean and quick as before. Dr. Wells stood before me, a worried frown on his face. “Mr. Schaeffer? Can you hear me?”
For a moment, I could not answer. The memory hung dazzlingly before my eyes, like an after-image of the sun. I wondered how I could have forgotten something like that.
Truth was, I hadn’t forgotten it. It had always been with me.
I looked at Dr. Wells. “Yeah. I’m okay.”
His frown vanished, replaced by a faint smile, an odd certainty. “All right. Tell me about it.”
“I—” I began, and then stopped. I didn’t know what to say.
“It wasn’t fear at all, was it?” he asked.
I shook my head with something like wonder. “It was . . . exhilaration.”
He nodded approvingly.
“You knew!”
“I suspected. It made sense. It fit in perfectly with your personality. No rules, no absolutes . . .”
“Infinite possibilities.”
“Yes,” he said. “You know, you’re a lucky person. You’ve lived your entire life in an exploration of that vision. Not everyone gets that chance.”
What I felt at that moment is difficult to describe. The dark place was again dark, but I no longer feared it. It had taken me into danger again and again, to the moons of Saturn and back. It had made me a hero to some. But it wasn’t some outside, alien force, it was me. It is me, to this day.
Dr. Wells stood. “I believe I’ll call the ISC,” he said, grinning, “and let them know they have the right person for the job.”
“Thanks, doc,” I said, extending a hand. “For everything.”
He shook it firmly. “Good luck with the flight . . . Captain. It’s a long trip.”
I smiled. “I’ve been on longer.”
THE ANOMALY
C.W. Johnson
Growing up, Ketkam saw no sun, no stars, no morning or evening sky. Just the ferrocrete corridors he was born in. It would have been that way for all of his life; he would never have traveled to the stars, had he not he discovered the spark.
His father, Baakam, a thin stick of a man with hands hard and dark like dense wood, sifted trash for bits of junk. One day his father was selling batteries to Goli, the local thug, who put a few, one by one, into his mouth. Ketkam blurted out, “Why do you do that?” Baakam slapped the top of Ketkam’s head, but Goli laughed. “To see if there is still life in the battery. Here, you do it,” he said, handing over a cylinder still slick with spittle. “Suck on it,” Goli instructed. When Ketkam did so, he felt a sudden sour tingle, as if a cockroach had climbed inside his mouth, and he hastily spit out the battery.
Goli laughed again. Then his face turned sour. He said to Baakam, “It’s not nearly enough. For those scraps I could get you some colored pills, sham pills, but they would do nothing.”
Not far away, Ketkam’s mother Maakam cleaned and sorted the scraps Baakam had found, patching holes and pounding bits of metal. His older sister was on her back, too weak to get up, coughing as she had for a long time.
“Please,” begged Baakam, grasping Goli’s arm. “I will pay you back.”
Goli shook off Baakam’s hand and spat on the floor. “You have no idea how much real medicine costs. I would have to borrow. A lot. You would never be able to pay back.” And he walked away.
To his friend Chabi, the shit-wallah’s son, Ketkam wondered aloud if food was made of tiny batteries. After all, food provided life for people, batteries life for machines, and the taste of good food on his tongue was like the tingle of a battery. Chabi shrugged. Chabi liked stories and making jokes and was always singing. But they didn’t know any songs or jokes about batteries, leaving Chabi profoundly bored with the question. So Ketkam begged his father for a live battery to play with.
Baakam’s mouth tightened. He could sell a battery. His daughter was sick and needed medicine. But in the end, he relented.
Ketkam had noticed batteries touching strips of bright, clean metal. So he touched his tongue to copper wires attached to the ends of a battery, and squirmed with excitement at the now-familiar sour tingle.
As he took the wires out of his mouth, they brushed together and made a tiny yellow spark. The spark looked like a star, only Ketkam had never seen the stars or the Sun.
But because of that spark, he one day would.
Discovering the spark was an accident. Later, Ketkam read philosophers who believed the Universe began as an accident, that in one of the obscure dimensions beloved of mathematicians and dervishes, some god knocked over the teapot, or dropped a piece of sweet-cake, or stepped on the dog’s tail so that it pissed itself, and there was the Universe, a mess splashed into being, milky drops of galaxies and uncounted crumbs of stars spilled across existence. It was an idea Ketkam thought of when he couldn’t sleep, a heresy to shock others, a theory he didn’t really believe.
But it was an accident that taught him about the spark, that lead him to become a fix-it-wallah. And it was an accident that opened his eyes to the anomalies, to their power and their value. An accident that also suggested how to steal one.
After the spark, after his older sister died from heart fever, Ketkam took apart everything his father would allow: electric torches and cook-pots, hydraulic jacks and wind-up prayer wheels. He knew their wire-and-gear guts so well he dreamed of them, and soon became so skilled as a fix-it-wallah it was more profitable for him to fix junk than to collect it. “It’s better this way,” Baakam said. “We can afford cleaner water and cleaner clothes. Your brother is old enough to assist me.”
Ketkam did not say it aloud, but he was glad to not go to the trash piles anymore with his father. The walk to the lifts was long; the ride up short, jaw-rattling, and terrifying, and ended in a vast ferrocrete cavern where the air was hot and sticky and trash rained down every few minutes. The mountains of trash were larger than anything Ketkam had seen, and the eye-watering stench was the worst he’d experienced in a lifetime of bad smells.
Baakam told him this was but the belly of the city where the overpeople lived. Ketkam didn’t know what a city was. And who were the overpeople? Silently, Baakam pointed to hulking figures in the distance. Ketkam shrank in fear. Were they monsters? Gods?
Baakam snorted. “They are men. But down here they wear clothes of machines, powered armor, that allows them to act like gods.” He paused, sucking at his teeth. “Or like monsters. Be careful around them.”
One of Ketkam’s fixes was a child’s electric tutor, dented and cracked but which, after the replacement of some corroded wires and a speaker, worked. Goli offered money, a lot of money, but Ketkam wrapped his arms around it. Baakam sighed. “It means a lot to the boy.”
Goli’s dark, sticky gaze fixed on Ketkam. “Keep it, then,” he said, “but you owe me a lot of fixes, understand?” Ketkam nodded so hard it hurt.
Ketkam loved the electric tutor. He even hugged it to his chest while sleeping, the volume dialed down to a whisper. The didactic, disembodied voice had a funny, clipped accent, both cheerful and cold at the same time. He listened for hours as it cycled through its lessons, talking of things that Ketkam didn’t understand: how the world was round (but what is a world?) and orbited the Sun (but what is a sun?) which looks the size of a bright coin in the sky but is much bigger than the world, and the stars, though they look small, are but very distant suns. He tried to tell his mother about the Sun and the stars, only to be disappointed when she said, “Silly, everyone knows about that.” The tutor also taught him about light, and the tiny rivers of electrons damned up in batteries only to spurt out to make things run, to make tongues tingle, to make sparks like tiny stars. Ketkam learned numbers, how to add and multiply and take roots and logarithms, and Ketkam didn’t know what they were for but they were beautiful, as beguiling as the fanciful stories Chabi liked to tell.
But most
importantly the electric tutor taught Ketkam how to read.
Books opened yet another door for Ketkam. They became like food or air to him. When he wasn’t fixing things, he read, forgetting to sleep and eat, and his mother clucked her tongue. When he came across poems or dreamy stories, he read them aloud to Chabi, who clapped his hands with joy. But for himself, Ketkam read books on math and mechanics and electric theory. He read semi-religious tracts about atoms and subatomic particles and the infinite variety of folded, hidden dimensions. And he read about astronomy; afterward, he paced off distances down the corridor, the scaled distance to moons, planets, and stars, as he tried to cram into his mind the vastness of the Universe.
One day Goli brought a book. Basic Astrophysics, and as Ketkam skimmed it he nearly pissed in excitement. He kept his face placid, though, because otherwise Goli would ask for more.
“What’s it say?” Goli drawled, taking the coins.
“How stars work,” Ketkam said dreamily, lifting the book to his face and inhaling the musty scent. “Far above us, the world ends, and above the world are lights, which are the stars, and they . . .”
Goli interrupted with a braying laugh. “Listen, boy. Not only do I know about the stars, I’ve visited a saloon where the overmen who fly to the stars drink alcohol. I’ve even talked to the masters of those ships.”
Ketkam’s heart beat faster. “Really?” Then he regained his composure. “Someday I’ll see the stars.”
Goli laughed again, then spit on the floor. “You? They won’t let you. You’re jhuto. Impure. Filth. We’re all jhuto. The people who live above, who shit on us and pour their trash down on us, they keep us down here so our presence doesn’t insult the Sun and the stars.”
“Even you?”
Goli’s eyes narrowed to little oily slits of darkness, and the muscles in his arms tensed and jumped. Ketkam braced himself, but then Goli chuckled. “Lucky you make me money,” he murmured. “Your boldness will get you in trouble someday. Yes, brother, I am jhuto; but I am not too filthy for the overmen to buy, shall we say, certain items from.” And he grinned, showing large yellow teeth.
Despite what Goli said about being jhuto, Ketkam daydreamed about the people who flew among the stars. A few years later, after pestering Goli some more, he tried going to the starman’s saloon.
As he trudged up and up and up, Ketkam realized the world had hidden layers he had not realized existed. He thought of a sweet his father had found in the trashheaps and brought home. The texture was like nothing Ketkam had put in his mouth before, and pulling apart his small share, he saw it was made of dozens of thin layers of pastry, each like paper, translucent when held up to the light. “Don’t play with your food,” his father had said.
At last, exhausted, Ketkam came to a brightly lit corridor, glass and gleaming metal, and the entrance to the starman’s saloon.
A bulky, wall-faced overwoman stood outside. “You must be lost, to find yourself so far down here,” she said.
Ketkam, who had been climbing stairs for hours, was startled into silence. Unable to look her in the face, he kicked at the floor.
“Lift your head, boy-boy, and say what you want clearly.”
Ketkam’s guts contracted. “I just want to talk with someone,” he said softly. “Someone who has gone among the stars.”
“And what do you bring?”
He had no answer. He had spent all his coins on bribes and tolls on the journey up and had none left. He was a jhuto with empty pockets. Dejected, Ketkam turned away from his foolish, secret dream and began the long walk down to his home.
“We’ve had inquiries about you,” his mother said. She was brushing dirt off some of the treasures Baakam had brought back. She looked up at her son and smiled.
“Inquiries?”
“Everyone knows of your skill. Still a boy, and already a famous fix-it-wallah. And people talk about your kindness and generosity. We have more money than we ever dreamed, but you do not gouge people like Goli does. “His mother went back to cleaning the bits of junk. “But you will not be a boy much longer.”
Ketkam frowned, unable to puzzle out what his mother meant.
“There is a rug-wallah,” Maakam continued, “one level up, very wealthy: he holds nearly ten meters of a corridor. His daughter is very pretty, we hear. The rug-wallah sent his cousin by the other day to talk with your baa.”
“Does he have something that needs fixing?” Ketkam asked.
Maakam smiled and wiped a piece of glass with a rag. “Oh, Keti. No, the cousin came by to discuss a dowry. Well, we haven’t actually discussed the dowry yet, but the cousin brought a gift of fresh tea—very expensive!” She lifted her head. “What do you think?”
What did he think? The words fell on Ketkam heavy as blocks of ferrocrete, as his stomach flipped over. He hadn’t thought of marrying anyone, of kissing them, having babies. The only one he wanted to kiss—and this was a secret he had locked in his heart and not dared to tell anyone—was Chabi, with his beautiful eyes the color of ink and the silly riddles he made up; when he looked at Ketkam and laughed, Ketkam’s insides melted. Would such a thing even be possible? He had not dared to ask anyone, not Baakam, not Maakam, not least of all Chabi.
Ketkam did not marry the rug-wallah’s daughter. Goli put him on a different path.
Ketkam was rewinding the coils of an electric motor when a shadow fell over him. He looked up, blinking, and saw Goli with a livid bruise on his cheek. “Someone not want to pay?” Ketkam asked.
The thug shook his head. “Had to teach a lesson to that sour-arsed Izam from the next corridor over. His gang were giving my boys some tongue.” He poked at the copper coils with a filthy finger.
“I have to fix this, then I can pay you,” Ketkam said, irritated.
Goli squatted down. “You are about to pay me a lot more money, Brother. Oh, don’t look so worried! You will be glad to hand it over, for you will have more money than you ever dreamed of.”
The thug jerked his chin upwards. “I’ve heard of a job for the overmen. It must be dirty and dangerous, for they don’t mind jhuto, and they pay a lot, but the overmen want someone smart. Fixing some machinery in the sky, I think.”
Ketkam’s heart skittered back and forth in his chest. “In a ship that travels to the stars?”
“Ha! Not so far as that for a jhuto boy. But almost as good.” Goli scratched at his head. “Some sort of a factory on a moon that hangs high above the city, much higher than the city sits above us.”
“Dangerous, you said? What kind of danger?”
“Are you a coward? The overmen, they consider having to wipe their own arses dangerous. But for this money, I’d lick them clean with my tongue.” He scooted closer, whispered the amount in Ketkam’s ear, his hot breath tickling. “Whatever you send your family, I want a third,” the thug demanded.
On the eve of his departure, Ketkam was feted. Neighbors up and down the corridor came by to press Ketkam’s hand, to eat and drink and sing and dance. The rug-wallah did not come but sent a present, a beautifully woven sleeping carpet. Maakam cried when she saw it and did not stop crying. Baakam got drunk and slumped against the wall.
Goli got red-eyed drunk, too. “Don’t cheat me,” he said, pointing an unsteady finger at Ketkam.
“I won’t.”
“If you cheat me, I’ll know,” Goli insisted. “I have many ears listening to many mouths. To the lowest sewer-wallah and to starship masters, I listen. You may think you know much, but your ignorance is staggering. You wouldn’t believe what I know, who I have met. For instance—” He paused to give a sour burp. “—I know a starship master who is . . . a machine!”
“A mechanical man? Like overmen in powered armor?”
Goli waved a hand. “No, no, you’re not listening, it’s nothing like that. Remember that electric tutor you loved so much? Like that, only more so.”
Ketkam, not understanding, changed the subject. “I used to dream of going to the stars.”
“Ha!” said Goli, then burped again. “That’s why you went to the starman’s saloon, wasn’t it? And you didn’t even get inside.” He wiped at his mouth. “Where’s the alcohol? Your baa better have left some for me.”
Goli stumbled away and in his place stood Chabi, who threw his arms around Ketkam. “Don’t forget me,” Chabi said.
“Never,” said Ketkam, “never never,” as he pressed his face against his friend’s neck and breathed in his scent.
Ketkam flew to the Moon.
When he had gone to the starman’s saloon he had taken sneaky ways, back ways. Now he rode lifts straight up. I am going to the Moon, he kept thinking. I am going to the Moon.
Not all of the journey was pleasant. At several stops the overpeople treated him as if he stank like a trash heap, made him bathe and trade his clothes for new ones even when he protested that the overpeople on the previous stop had just given him these clothes.
Then he queued up with other jhuto and marched out beneath a sky so naked it made his heart stumble. Some of the jhuto gasped and hid their eyes, and one broke from the queue and ran back, sobbing. Ketkam held his breath and walked on.
Despite the fear pricking his heart, Ketkam savored the shuttle journey, up and up, seeing so much for the first time. That is a cloud. That is an ocean. That is the Sun; there are the stars; those are the moons that swirl around the world like pale-faced children. He stretched to peer through a tiny port; the world below looked like a bowl of porridge, while the sky turned to inky blackness, sprinkled with little yellow-white lights like sparks from two wires crossing.
A few hours later they landed on a moon. The surface looked like an ash heap, and when the hatch clanged open, Ketkam caught a whiff of the electric odor of ozone. They were queued up and made to shower again. The gravity was light, and the water fell slowly, light as dust. It then pooled on Ketkam’s ski, and he had to rub hard to get it all off.