by Tricia Reeks
“How does she know these words?”
“They are passed down from lips to ears.” She smiled up at him, released his hand and used one bony finger to tap the emblem on his sleeve. “Much like your tells.”
The woman on the stage moved smoothly from one song into the next, her voice increased its strength without increasing its volume. Her body swayed as the words poured from her lips. Her eyes remained closed. Many in the crowd moved with her.
“But singing is—”
“Forbidden? Yes, I know. As does she.”
“Songs distract. They have no purpose.”
“No?”
“None.”
She took his hand again and stood silent for a moment. Then she said, “Feel how your body reacts to the words. To the sound of her voice, then tell me there is no purpose to her song.”
He did feel it. The woman’s voice seemed to have the power to reach inside of him and take hold of something there. The power to lift him up and away. To carry him as easily as the wind can carry a small seed. It was a feeling he had never experienced before.
“What do I feel?” His voice was soft.
“Perhaps it is love?”
“Love?” The word had an odd shape in his mouth, like a stone smooth on his tongue, but if swallowed . . .
“I know she loves you, though I don’t understand why.” The singing woman opened her eyes and found him instantly. The old woman continued, “It doesn’t matter. Love and understanding are two dishes seldom served on the same plate.”
He knew nothing of love. It too was a purposeless thing; not forbidden, but discouraged.
Fear he understood, and this talk of love frightened him. So did the waves of pleasing sound pouring out of the woman’s throat. The song frightened him even as it excited him. He closed his eyes and let the sound engulf him, let it carry him through the smoky air above the swaying, intoxicated citizens. Never had a sound had so much power. He wanted it to stop, and he wanted it to go on forever.
This is her purpose. But it distracted him from his own. Unconsciously he once more found the emblem on his sleeve with his fingers. It is not mine.
He bowed his head and opened his eyes. The old woman was looking up at him, smiling. There were soft sounds coming from her own throat, as if she too was singing someplace inside of herself. He knelt in front of her and whispered, “I must go. Tell her I will meet her on the Concourse after tasks tomorrow.”
She clasped his hand, saying, “No. Stay. Become kindred.”
“Tomorrow,” he said, pulling away from her. “After tasks.” He turned and left the chamber.
***
To the west the clouds had broken and the setting sun spilled orange-gold light on the tree tops far below the Concourse and gilded the edges of the parapet stones. The woman stood in the exact spot where she had first kissed him. When she saw him, her smile grew in radiance and she raised her hand in a wave. His heart tightened in his chest, and he thought he heard the echo of her songs mingled with the breeze.
He walked to her slowly. His legs trembled. Not forbidden, he thought. But discouraged.
As he neared, she opened her arms. She wore the scarf with the orange stripe. “Why did you leave?”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s all right.” She stepped forward to embrace him, but he stopped her with a hand on her chest.
“I’m sorry.”
The look of confusion on her face turned to one of horror as a Finder appeared above the rim of the parapet buzzing like an enormous, enraged wasp. The man-sized machine hovered there projecting a crimson circle on the woman’s midsection.
“The Advocacy requests an interview with you, citizen.” The mechanical voice was soft, caring.
She looked from the Finder to the man. “You? Why?”
Tears spilled from her eyes and glistened on her cheeks. Were they tears of fear, or of hatred? He remembered her smile, and her song, and decided she wasn’t capable of hate. He reached up and caught a tear with the tip of one finger, but he did not answer. Instead he stepped back as the Constables in their dull green jackets and yellow hats appeared from under the arch of a buttress and took her away.
***
Her interview was short and private. The man was not required and the confidences exchanged between the woman and the Advocacy are not part of his tell.
He was temporarily re-Tasked to the team of Builders who sealed the doors to the chamber with fresh stones and sand-blasted away the emblem above the door. Working with the stones was difficult, and their rough surface tore at his flesh. It was a good task and the pain was rewarding.
***
It is always a good thing when a citizen receives a Task, and the man was glad to be a part of the Tasking of the woman who sang. It was his honor to place the emblem of a Cleaner into her softly restrained hand as she lay there under the clouds on the Concourse. Her fist clenched around the fabric oval and she tried to speak to him, but the device holding her mouth open would not permit that. He thought she wanted to thank him.
He had been shown what to do by a Constable, and he had practiced on a lamb. He worked quickly, and as efficiently as he could. The knife became slick after just the first cut, but he kept his grip, cutting away the offending organ and tossing it over the parapet into the old world so it would no longer be a part of the Tower.
He imagined he could hear the songs falling with it.
***
This is how my tell ends.
I saw the woman who sang recently. She was walking the Concourse with her head down and her hands in her pockets. The emblem of a Cleaner was displayed proudly on her sleeve. She did not smile when she saw me. She simply walked away among the rest of the citizens.
I stood there for a long time after she disappeared, leaning against the stones and looking out over the old world. After a while a butterfly rose from the vegetation so far below and settled down on the capstone near my hand. It was orange with black spots and it died easily under my fist.
Better to remain a chrysalis.
Iron Roses
Michal Wojcik
Originally appeared in Daily Science Fiction, May 16, 2014
Roses don’t grow around New London any more. Cast-off trolleys, engines, scrap metal, and rusted airship frames press up against the city’s edge, not trees. The Fraser River resembles a tongue of burnt milk licking the Pacific Ocean. This is the realm of the scrap-runners, tripping through iron mounds to scavenge what they can for resale to the factories. If anything else could grow here, it gave up a long time ago.
That didn’t stop people from talking about roses.
The two sat on a cog of a huge gear, like two kids on a Ferris wheel. They both bore the big boots, the padded gloves, and the mismatched gear that indicated scrap-runners. Beneath them, barges laden with sheet metal floated down towards the sea.
“I’ve seen them before,” said #1, Selwyn. Like most people in New London he was pale, thanks to the smog that lovingly hugs the city half the time and the rain that pounds it the other. His coveralls and body harness did little to fill out his sparse frame. Once red hair was so full of soot, it hung black and gray, wavered when he spoke. “Went in the country once, must’ve been five or six, with my uncle.”
“How’d they smell?” asked #2, Millie. She was taller than him, had her hair clumsily lopped short (she’d cut it herself) and wore airman’s goggles she’d scrounged from the back heaps, ostensibly to keep the dust out of her eyes.
“Smelled . . . good. Don’t know how to put it; was a while ago.”
“I only seen them on the vee.” She tore another hunk from her sandwich. “Can’t be the same.”
“I picked them too,” he went on, “stabbed myself with the thorns.”
“Oh.”
Selwyn took a full-on look at Millie, who wasn’t looking back. She still watched the barges. “Wish I could get you some,” he ventured.
Millie’s mouth hung open a moment
, masticated food stuck inside. She swallowed quickly. “Yeah, that’d be nice. Though, what I could really use right now is a new celpher.”
“Millie, I—”
But Millie was already hopping along the gear teeth. “C’mon Sel, we won’t make any cash sitting up here.”
Leaving Selwyn staring after her. He scrambled down as soon as he collected his thoughts, back down into the piles of steel.
***
Few scrap-runners came to Serja Petrov’s workshop, a patchwork of old warehouses and temp structures jammed together on the riverbank. They didn’t trust the old Croatian, since he actually built things out of the junk before putting them on the market. Yet, Selwyn periodically wandered onto the premises in the evening, clad in a long coat instead of his usual gear. He could hear banging and cursing from somewhere, eventually found Petrov in one of the warehouses cranking at cogs. Walking in here felt like entering a Mechanist’s temple: pipes suspended from the ceiling (lanterns hung off those), blasts of steam everywhere and the constant tick of pistons or clockwork. Petrov had no beard, no hair, just a head like a dried-out apple interrupted by an eagle’s beak.
“Petrov!” Selwyn called, keeping a safe distance. He needed to shout a few times before the Croatian crawled out from the steelwork.
“Hey? Ah, Selwyn, yes?”
“I . . .”
Petrov hung his body over the frame and wiped his brow. “Something wrong?”
“It’s, nothing really. Just, there’s this girl.”
Petrov laughed suddenly in that long wheeze he passed off as laughter. “You come to me for advice on what?”
“Maybe I should come back later.”
“No.” Petrov ceased his laugh. “But me, I know nothing about women. Ask me about machines, then I give you some answer, yes?”
“You had a wife.”
“Why do you think I left Croatia?” said Petrov. He hopped over the railing so he could give Selwyn a clap on the shoulder. “Who needs women when you can have celpher or a vee? I make all these machines here, when I finish, they live, breathe. Put enough love into anything, and it comes alive. They are like children, and best of all, I don’t need a woman to make them!”
“I’m serious,” Selwyn murmured.
Petrov removed his arm from Selwyn’s shoulder and sat down on one of the workbenches, tossing off his gloves. “So you like some girl.”
“Yeah. I don’t think she likes me, though. I mean, not in the same way. We kissed, once, but that was a while ago. And she laughed at me.”
A shiver went through the workshop, kicking lights and spare bits into a melody. “Just pressure going off,” said Petrov when Selwyn almost toppled. “She’s one of the colonials, Canadian, yes?”
Selwyn just nodded.
“They like freedom. You take things slow.” Petrov lowered his voice into what he considered a whisper. “I tell you, make her see you really appreciate her. A gift, something she cannot get here.”
“You mean, like roses?”
“Ha. Exactly. See, you already have her.”
***
The problem was finding some. Selwyn only made the briefest forays into the inner city, and even then, just the outermost outskirts. Those also made him uncomfortable. Despite his long jacket, people picked him out as a scrap-runner and avoided him; after enduring more than a few young ladies’ arrogant sniffs he stopped the long circuit into New London to find some flower shop—they wouldn’t sell to a sooter anyway. The countryside wasn’t an option; he hadn’t enough sterling to take a freecart the whole way. He could afford a locomotive, but there wasn’t an option of getting time off scrap running without being snubbed by the factories and the other runners as well.
As for seeds, they couldn’t grow. He’d tried to grow potatoes once, in old buckets and whatever soil he could scrounge, but the resulting sprouts and roots looked so sickly and (he couldn’t fathom why) oily he ended up tossing them out without trying any. And still he spent almost every day picking through the slabs with Millie, still failing to get her attention in any meaningful way.
He got the idea, indirectly, from Petrov. After another nighttime run to the workshop, Selwyn found Petrov’s chest. Old Serja had been pouring vodka, came into the main room when he saw Selwyn holding up a delicately crafted honeybee, all twisted out of iron.
“Ah, you found my collection.”
Selwyn started, put the bee back in the chest. Beetles, wasps, dragonflies, butterflies sat there as well, all giving off a dull sheen. He wordlessly accepted the glass from Petrov and tipped it back. “What’re they for?”
“Something I do for myself. You need some time, yes? Started with the butterflies; my wife loves them, and I used to send them before she stopped sending me letters. It’s habit now.”
“Do you think,” Selwyn said, then paused to down the rest of his vodka, “you can show me how?”
***
He had no workshop, and had to set himself up in the abandoned machine room. Not much space; abandoned boilers took up most of it. Still, there was a desk strapped against one wall where he could work. Selwyn put a lantern on one side and his toolbox on the other before spilling out the various bits of metal and wire he’d garnered. Lastly, he stood an old book on the farther end, filled with color plates of flowers. As he shuffled the last bits in place, he heard the door squeal open.
“Sel?”
Another girl stood in the frame, Nydia. She still had her harnesses on, which were too big for her, so she clattered whenever she walked. She was only eleven; still, she carried herself with sureness far outstripping Selwyn’s. She peered over the table and then at Selwyn, who still hadn’t said anything.
“You still awake?”
“It matter?” Selwyn said, going back to rummaging through what he had. “Why’re you here?”
Nydia rolled her eyes. “Think you’re the only one who wants someplace quiet,” she said before she hung over the desk and squinted at the plates. “What you working on?”
“I’m making flowers.”
She scrunched her eyebrows. “Why’d you want to make flowers?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Nydia detached from the desk and hopped onto one of the pipes. “They’re for Millie, I bet.”
Now Selwyn’s fingers slipped. He looked back at the girl swinging on the boiler. “So what?”
No reply, Nydia just kept swinging her legs.
“Look, what is it going to take for me to get you not to tattle?” Selwyn asked after a sigh.
The girl seemed to contemplate this a while before answering. “Let me help?”
Selwyn’s fingers slipped again. “Oh, go ahead,” he managed, and began twisting the first stem.
It took a few tries. With Petrov, it had seemed easy. By himself, it wasn’t. He kept absorbed in trying to replicate the plate as best he could, but what he produced looked dead. Nydia fared no better, and the two of them worked in silence. Eventually Nydia tossed hers down and just sat off to the side, holding her head in her hands while she watched Selwyn carefully fuse, solder, sand, and beat pieces into place. The moon made full circuit, and Nydia was fast asleep, before he was finally satisfied. He’d been forced to take off the gloves for finishing; had to wash his hands in the brass sink and lay on bandages. The pain and exhaustion was worth it, for the iron rose lying on the table.
When Nydia did wake up, she saw the rose directly in front of her and flicked a glance back at Selwyn, who smiled. “Looks alive.” She tentatively picked it up and ran her hands along the rose with a breathless look, suddenly dropped it. “Ouch!” and she nursed her thumb as some red hung from the stem. Selwyn offered her the roll of bandage. “Why’d you put thorns on?”
“They’re not real roses without them,” Selwyn lifted it and turned it in the light.
Nydia picked herself up. “You’ll be ’round here next time?”
“Well, got to make more than one.”
“Hmm. Okay, see ya,” and
Nydia flitted away.
Selwyn’s grin faded once she left, and he wiped her blood off the rose with a towel.
***
In here, the rose almost seemed to take on color. Petrov had a pair of spectacles perched on his nose, turned the one lens so he could get a better focus on the zoom before giving it back to Selwyn. “Craftsmanship excellent.”
“You think it’ll work?” Selwyn asked, shuffling his feet a few times.
“Yes, yes. I knew you had it in you, but these are almost like real.”
“No, but . . . will she like them?”
Petrov flicked off his spectacles and folded into his armchair. “I think she will. Even one.”
“One’s not enough,” Selwyn said, shaking his head. “I need a, what d’ you call them, a bouquet.”
***
As sunset neared, the smog lifted, letting the sun through in more than just a fuzzy swathe. The dull grays that dominated the wasteland changed to brilliant silver. From a distance, it looked like a field of broken glass. Millie had more spring in her step as she wove her way between them, and one of her rare smiles. She had even stripped off her goggles and let them hang. Behind her, Selwyn moved more hesitantly.
“You think you might make it out of here?” called Millie as she clambered over a trolley frame.
“What you mean?”
“Well, no one wants to run scrap forever.” She sat and tucked her knees against her chest. Her chin and cheeks were smothered with dirt, just not the area round her eyes.
He clambered beside her, but didn’t sit. “Course not. What would you do?”
Millie shrugged.
From then, silence—or as silent as these parts got. Only staring out at the mountains of junk marching towards the sea. “Kind of pretty, in the light,” Millie finally said.
“I’ve got something for you.” Selwyn quickly turned away, made sure he couldn’t see her reaction.
Took a while before she said anything. “What is it?”
“It’s in the old machine room. If you’ll come.”
Now he chanced a look. Selwyn couldn’t read Millie’s expression beyond her nod. He helped her up and led her wordlessly back.