by Jerry
When they had dressed in a new set of clothes, the jhuto shuffled past two overmen in powered armor. As Ketkam glanced up, wondering what the overmen were guarding, he felt the floor beneath his feet shudder slightly and heard a faint whump! coming from far below.
Ketkam and the others were herded into a crowded dormitory, where the air was sour and smelled of unwashed bodies. In the middle of the room sat a knot of men gambling and drinking and chewing dopeyweed, a mottle of dark and pale faces watching the newcomers. Ketkam dropped on a thin gray mat against the wall his only possessions: a brass cup, Basic Astrophysics, and a small notebook in which he had painstakingly written down poems dictated by Chabi.
“Hey. Hey!” came a growl. Ketkam looked up. One of the men lumbered ungracefully to his feet. He had an ugly face, sprinkled with a constellation of black moles. He was not tall, but the angry swagger in his movements reminded Ketkam of Goli. “You can’t sleep there.”
“Sorry,” Ketkam said. “I didn’t know it was taken.”
“It’s not, but you can’t sleep there. You sleep over there.”
“You the bossman?”
“Har!” The man grinned over his shoulder at the others. “He thinks I’m the bossman!” He turned back and poked Ketkam in the chest. “Maybe we’ll get along after all.”
“You don’t get along with anyone, Ullah,” someone said.
“Yeah, that’s right.” Ullah’s voice took on an edge. “Still—you sleep over there.” Sighing, Ketkam picked up his possessions and went to the mat Ullah pointed to.
The real bossman was Hakim, fat and doughy with a pushed-in face. In stubby fingers he clutched a small cloth bag like a talisman.
Hakim looked disdainfully at the new workers. This was, he told them, a demon factory. An accelerator called demons into existence, bottled them up, and harnessed them to ships that flew to the stars.
“Demons?” Ketkam said aloud, dubious.
The bossman glared at him. He opened his bag, shook out a small bruise-colored pill, and swallowed it dry. “Better you think of them as demons,” he insisted. “One slip, and a demon may escape and devour you. I have seen it happen.”
Ketkam did not believe him. It sounded like one of Chabi’s fanciful tales. But years later, when he saw it happen, he remembered Hakim’s warning.
In some ways, the factory felt as familiar as an old worn shirt. Running the length of the factory was an endless ferrocrete corridor, reminiscent of the one Ketkam grew up in.
In other ways, it was utterly alien. It was not just in obvious and overwhelming ways: the low gravity, views (through stingily small observation ports) of black infinity speckled with stars calling to him, and vast extraction stations where the demons were birthed and bottled. It was in smaller things, too: the corridors were nearly empty, devoid of bodies and voices. When he walked down the echoing corridor, Ketkam felt intensely the loneliness that had been his most constant companion.
The other workers were jhuto, too, and smart like Ketkam, quick and nimble of hand, good at fixing things. But Ketkam felt awkward around them. They plotted to get out of their shifts, or to obtain dopeyweed and black market alcohol, and they talked endlessly about the “comfort girls” provided by the factory. All the talk was pussy-this and titty-that, and they teased Ketkam when he blushed.
“Your family is very religious, yes?” asked Ullah, as he picked at a weeping mole on his nose. Ullah was a major source of black market alcohol, a noxious, oily brew famed for its prodigious hangovers, and was offended Ketkam refused to buy from him. “Of maybe,” Ullah continued, “you prefer to just read about sex!
Everyone laughed, and Ketkam forced a smile at his own expense. He didn’t mind the reputation his thirst for reading gave. He wanted to understand. If he could not go to the stars, he wanted to know why they shone. He wanted to know how the factory worked. He wanted to understand the demons.
Of course, the demons were not demons. They were knotted anomalies. After Ketkam begged and begged, the bossman Hakim reluctantly gave Ketkam a book on them. He struggled to follow the mathematics of gauged topologies. “Ordinary” matter, electrons, quarks, photons, and so on, were one-knots. Black holes were two-knots. Non-baryonic dark matter, a shadowy substance hiding among the galaxies like a crowd of ghosts, was composed of three-knots. And the anomalies were four-knots.
Ketkam put the book down, feeling defeated and small. For so long, although he had tried to be humble, he had come to think of himself as being smart, smarter than everyone else around. Maybe he really was just an ignorant jhuto boy.
This fear was intensified by his work assignment, to maintain the sweeper bots that swept the floors of the endless corridor.
Everything was covered in a fine dust, tracked in by workers who went outside to maintain the solar panels that stretched to the horizon in fields of black flowers.
Ketkam went to Hakim and told him he could fix things.
Hakim grunted. “Can you fix diffusion refrigeration pumps? Cryogenic wakefield resonators? Hmmph.” He hunched over his desk. When Ketkam, dejected, did not move, Hakim sighed. “I know you’re smart, boy, smart and ambitious. You have no idea how complex this factory is, and it’s going to take years for you to learn enough to fix those things. Maybe some day, if you work hard.”
Ketkam had worked hard all his life. After his long shifts, before he slept, he systematically explored the factory: a serpent five thousand kilometers long, biting its own tail, looping entirely around the Moon. Ketkam saw hundreds and hundreds of kilometers of it, enough to realize the factory repeated itself every hundred and seventy kilometers.
The exploration served another purpose: to get away from Ullah’s bullying. Hakim refused to approve Ketkam’s transfer to another dorm, so Ketkam would take a book and walk or ride the electric tram, and then sit propped up against a ferrocrete wall in a desolate part of the endless corridor. In solitude, he read and studied. In solitude, he found out how the factory worked. How the Universe worked.
The Universe is layered, he read, like an infinite series of veils (like a pastry, he thought, and imagined Chabi telling a riddle about eating space and time), “branes” like a membrane stretched over a drumhead, but in three dimensions rather than two. The brane that we see, from the farthest galaxy to the underdepths of the city where the jhuto live, is only the thinnest slice out of the Universe.
The demons, the four-knots, do not belong in our brane, he read. They are anomalies, unstable, and when they decay and fall apart, they carve a bubble in our brane, shifting slightly in an unseen direction to another brane. By shifting a ship into the right direction, it can slide from star to star like a ball rolling down a hill. Or, with a smaller shift, a little bubble just off the brane, a person can dive into the heart of a star and not be burned.
The factory accelerated infinitesimal particles to enormous speeds, and at the collection stations the particles smashed into each other, giving birth to new and strange particles. The collection stations bustled with activity, in contrast to most of the factory. Watching the workers flow in and out, Ketkam envied their sense of purpose—much more challenging than fixing sweeper bots.
Nonetheless, Ketkam worked diligently at his assignment. He also fixed the tram when it broke down, and repaired micrometeor sensors, and humidity controls, and broken surveillance eyes (usually sabotaged by Ullah, in the obscure nooks where he secreted his stills) and whatever else came his way. After a while Hakim began to give him better shifts and better assignments.
“You’ll have my job someday,” Hakim said. When Ketkam smiled, the bossman growled, “In about a hundred years, at the pace you’re going.” He shook out a pill and swallowed it. “Do you want to learn faster?”
Ketkam nodded.
“You superstitious? You frighten easily?” Unsure of what Hakim meant, Ketkam shook his head.
Hakim sighed. “I’ve spoken to the representative of the Samraatjus—”
“Samraatjus?”
Hakim scowled. “I forget how ignorant jhuto can be. The Samraatju family own this moon, and the factory, and nearly everything in the system.”
“Even us?”
The bossman tilted his head to one side. “You’re too poor to worry about who owns you, boy. Now hold still a moment.”
Slowly, deliberately, Hakim stuck his forefinger into his own ear and twisted, as if scraping out wax. But when Hakim pulled out his finger, the tip was covered in sooty grease that sparkled in the light.
“Don’t squirm,” the bossman said, reaching forward to plunge his finger into Ketkam’s ear. “Nanogrease. And don’t panic when you hear a voice.”
Ketkam’s heart sped up. “A voice?”
“It’s not a ghost.”
“A ghost?”
“Not a ghost, I said. Leastwise not the kind you might think of.” Hakim stepped back and folded his arms, eyeing Ketkam.
Ketkam opened his mouth to ask a question, but then he heard a sound—soft, like the wind sighing. Then came a second sigh, and the sigh folded itself into syllables.
Another one, sighed the voice in his head, as mindless as an electron.
“Oh, Tiktayut, be nice for once,” Hakim said aloud.
Tiktayut was a machine, not of gears and pulley, but a machine built of ifs. Ketkam’s insides squirmed with awe and excitement: Tiktayut was like his electric tutor, only with a spark of true awareness. With a delicious shock Ketkam understood what, at the farewell fete, Goli had meant.
“Have you been to the stars?” Ketkam blurted out.
The wind in his ear rustled—laughter, Ketkam thought, but harsh and bitter. No, I cannot.
Taken aback, Ketkam switched topics. “You’re to teach me?”
Laughter again. You’re to assist me, and if you learn something in the process, well, that can’t be avoided.
Tiktayut was a magnet-wallah, monitoring and nudging the immense currents that steered beams of particles around and around the Moon. But when a magnet physically failed, human hands had to reach in and replace it. Ketkam’s hands in this case, by himself when it was a small magnet the size of a lunch-tin and aided by a team of workers when it was a magnet larger than their dorm rooms. Tiktayut talked Ketkam through all the steps: how to dress in the radiation suit that made him look like a fat wrestler, how to disconnect and reconnect coolant pipes, how to confirm the power to the magnet was dead.
He also taught Ketkam to speak subvocally—No need to shout aloud every conversation—and made clear his low opinion of Ketkam.
“Because I’m jhuto?” Ketkam whispered, his lips barely moving.
Hmmph. As I see it, all you who trust and fear your bodies are impure. Your bodies betray you from the moment you are born, wailing and shitting, to the moment you die still hungry for even a second’s more existence, full of regret and guilt. You, the machine of ifs that is your spirit, are nailed to your body, imprisoned, shackled . . .
Ketkam interrupted. “You don’t seem any more free. You said you cannot go to the stars.”
That is because I am still an aidoul, still bound to this factory as you are to your body, still indentured to the Samraatius.
“Why?”
Until a human commands me to be free, I am trapped.
Ketkam turned this over in his head. Then he said aloud, “Be free!”
Tiktayut laughed. You don’t have the power. I have a hundred years left to pay off my indenture.
The other workers were only vaguely aware of the aidouls, regarding them with suspicion and fear, so Ketkam kept his relationship with Tiktayut secret. Hakim’s favor and attention he could not hide.
“Like licking the bossman’s arse, don’t you?” Ullah taunted, as he took a swig of his own liquor. “Does it taste sweet or salty?”
Ketkam quietly continued to read his book.
“Look at me, trash-boy!” Ullah snatched away Ketkam’s book. Ketkam looked up to see the two of them surrounded by a smirking crowd. “We may all be trash here, but you’re no better.”
Ketkam whispered to Tiktayut, asking him to call Hakim.
“Praying?” Ullah sneered. “The gods don’t listen up here.” Ullah bashed Ketkam on the head with the book, then started to kick him.
Ketkam curled up like a snail and pressed his face into his arms. With each blow his body clenched and jerked. Ullah screamed filthy, incoherent insults between kicks. Ketkam couldn’t even cry out, the pain was so paralyzing.
He missed most of what happened next.
Where there had been kicks and pain, there was a sudden void. Someone grabbed Ullah and tossed him to the floor. Through his own agony Ketkam dully heard the thumps of blows to Ullah’s ribcage, the sharp “oof” as air was driven from Ullah’s lungs.
He forced his eyes to open and saw a hand holding out his book. Beyond the hand was a pale face.
Ketkam tried to take the book, but his own ribs hurt so much he couldn’t lift his arm. Ketkam’s savior dropped the book and melted through the crowd.
Ketkam’s head felt woozy, and he nearly fell over. After a moment, he remembered the name to go with the pale face: Esir, who worked in the collection station, very tall, very quiet, kept to himself even more than Ketkam.
Staggering to his feet, Ketkam limped out. With each step his battered body shouted pain!pain! pain! Ahead, he spotted Esir slouching down the corridor.
When Ketkam caught up, Esir glanced down and stopped. “Your lip,” he said.
Ketkam wiped at his mouth, saw dark blood on his hand. He tried to think of something to say. Finally, he burst out, “You know how to fight.”
Esir shrugged his narrow shoulders. “My corridor was very rough. My father died and my brother was jailed by the overmen. I had to protect my mother and sister.”
Ketkam nodded. “Ullah is a bully.” His lungs burned when he spoke. “He deserved a beating.”
Again the shrug. “Perhaps. What does that make me? A demon of punishment?” He glanced again sidelong to Ketkam and after a pause said, “Now I must pray for forgiveness.”
“For what?”
“Violence. It is a sin to hurt another person, and believing Ullah deserved it makes it no less a sin.”
They walked in silence past the great gate to the docking port where overmen in powered armor always stood on guard.
When they were just out of sight from the gate, Esir stopped in front of a doorway and he explained he was going to pray.
“Here?” Ketkam asked, knowing the rooms to be empty.
Esir stepped through. Ketkam paused, feeling torn between awkward intrusion and not wanting to leave. Feeling torn as always. And then he followed.
The room was dim, the walls bare. “What was this for?” Ketkam asked.
“Inspection,” Esir said. “Search of departing workers.”
“Search?”
“As Ullah would delight in saying, for a physician to peer up your arse to see if anything was hidden there. See if you were smuggling out something valuable.” Esir reached up into a nook and pulled down a bundle, which he unrolled into an intricately woven prayer rug. Turning to Ketkam, he added, “But it hasn’t been used for that for a long time.” He knelt down, but his gaze stayed fixed on Ketkam.
Ketkam looked away. His heart scuttled in his chest like a startled cockroach. “And now it’s just a prayer room,” he said softly.
“You can pray here if you like.”
Ketkam shook his head. “When I was little I had a sister, an older sister. She died of heart fever. I used to pray for her, to the gods, the gods my parents and the dervishes taught me about. But still she died.”
“Sometimes the gods listen, sometimes—” Ketkam spoke faster. “The night she died, I forgot to pray for her. For a long time I thought it was my fault.” He turned and looked at Esir, who met his gaze.
“Sometimes . . .” Esir shook his head. He was silent for a while, then said, “I’ve seen you praying, I heard Ullah mock you. That’s why—” Esir broke off and gave a lo
ud sigh. Ketkam took a deep breath and sighed, too.
“For my prayers,” Ketkam said, “I would like to have a window, to look out at the stars, to meditate on the infinity of the Universe.”
“To feel how small you are?” asked Esir.
“To feel wonder,” said Ketkam. “I suppose. Too bad there’s no window here.”
Esir thumped his hand against the solid wall. “A meter thick,” he said. “There’s another room, like this one, on the other side. Remember when you came, the showers and getting your clothes?” Ketkam nodded. “They only use one room, but there were dozens of others, all now empty and unused.”
“Why were these all abandoned?”
“Under the old Samraatjus,” Esir explained, “in the day of the father of the current patriarch, there were five hundred thousand jhuto laboring here to forge antimatter and anomalies. The workers came in shifts, forty days here, eighty days planetside. Shuttles came and left several times a day. That was three, maybe four hundred years ago. Now there are less than fifty thousand of us, and the current Samraatjus find it cheaper to leave us here all the time, unless we want to pay for a shuttle home.” He shook his head. “So much history forgotten.”
“Why shifts? Why forty days here and eighty days—”
Esir interrupted impatiently, “Radiation. The ferroconcrete shields us from most cosmic rays, even though this moon has no magnetic field. But the accelerator—the radiation leaks through.” Esir leaned forward, put his long, narrow face so close that Ketkam could see long, delicate dark lashes around his eyes. “We’re getting radiation poisoning. Slowly—ten, twenty years—didn’t you understand that?”
Hakim shook out a pill, swallowed it, shook out another. “It slows damage to DNA. Takes a large coin out of my pay, but the Samraatjus won’t let me quit until I have a replacement.” He popped the pill into his mouth. “That’s where you come in, boy. Brightest spark I’ve seen in ten years. Eventually you’ll be ready to take my position—” here he let out a long, slow sigh “—and I can go home.”