Hot and Steamy

by Jean Rabe

  “Sandbox,” Tia told him.

  With a sigh they walked around her toward the air-lock leading out.

  The third passenger stepped down.

  He had long hair cut to just above his ears and dark eyes partially hidden by wire-rimmed glasses. He pulled a giant trunk with wheels mounted on the corners. A leather-bound notebook dangled from a gold chain looped around his neck, as did a mechanical pen.

  With a cautious step forward, he bowed, and then straightened. “My name is Riun,” he announced.

  He went to walk around her and follow the diplomats, but then realized he’d let go of his wheeled trunk. He awkwardly turned back for it.

  Tia smiled beneath the heavy mask.

  The sandbox was a hall that could seat two hundred. The center was dominated by several long tables, while the periphery had cots that folded out from the wall.

  By the far end, clear one-way mirrors allowed observers to view the sandbox.

  Overhead, large metal balconies allowed Society’s Reporters to look down on the sandbox and constantly file new cards with the machinery of Society, updating the computing machine that ruled them all with all the moves the quarantined made.

  Every fifteen minutes the reporters would change shifts, to prevent contamination.

  As the diplomats huddled together in the far side of the room, not interested in company, Tia removed her cumbersome protective gear and joined Riun at the table.

  “Your city is strict about outside influence,” Riun observed, looking around the sandbox.

  “There are murals on the lower alleyways,” Tia said. “Some of the cityfolk believe that during the Ascendance Wars the city’s programs, during the great Downshifting, became somewhat paranoid of outside infection.”

  “The Ascendance Wars?” Riun asked, looking puzzled.

  Tia stared at him. How much of an outsider was he? Suddenly she thought about the warning, and wondered if maybe Rium was something far more dangerous than she realized.

  Should she even be talking to him?

  But the machine hadn’t flagged Riun to be separately sandboxed. Nor had Tia been handed any warnings to shun him.

  “Were you schooled in your city’s history?” she asked.

  He smiled. “Of course. But I am not schooled in yours.”

  “The great thinking cities of the world tried to reach for the stars, but fought among each other to reach them first and over control of the skies. The fighting grew so perilous and killed so many people that the machines that ran the cities decided to Downshift. They would only use mechanical technology, slow thought, to run the systems of their cities. The city used to use ‘quantum chips’ but now only uses steam and gears and cards.”

  Riun chuckled. “Always different stories.”

  “What?”

  “I find, from city to city, there are different stories and variations on the stories,” Riun said.

  “And what is the story your city tells?” Tia asked loudly, while thinking to herself that surely this was auditory contamination, and why wasn’t the city flagging this conversation yet? Hearing that the city’s histories were false was dangerous.

  Wasn’t it?

  Then again, Tia realized, she’d only seen the murals or heard tales. She’d never heard the city give an official history.

  Riun cleared his throat. “According to the histories of my city, the Downshift came when the great Minds of this world created a shield to save us from a war with the other minds out in the Great Beyond. In order to save us, they banned all methods of information that could be transmitted through the air.”

  “And which one do you believe?” Tia asked.

  Riun smiled again, large and welcoming. “I think they’re all shards of some older truth we’ve forgotten,” he said. “That’s why I travel the world, listening, gathering, and meeting the citizens of the cities.”

  He opened a case of notes and showed her hand-drawn sketches of other cities, other night skies. Handwritten notes of tales, and descriptions of systems.

  “Why?” Tia asked. “Why leave your city?”

  “Why not?” he shrugged.

  The hours dragged on. Food was delivered by chutes, and they ate on the large, empty tables in silence.

  Afterward Tia sat and watched Riun read a leather-bound book he pulled out of his large trunk until she couldn’t stand the boredom. “Do you play Gorithms?” she finally asked.

  “Of course.”

  “There’re several playing stands near the far walls,” she said. “Care to join me?”

  They set up on the small playing table, connected the pneumatic tubes, and a few seconds later the dual packs of cards appeared.

  Tia unwrapped hers and laid them down with a thwack as Riun delicately laid his out behind the dark glass of his privacy shield.

  They looked at each other over the rim of the shields.

  “You play?” he asked. She couldn’t see his smile, but the eyes twinkled.

  “Always.”

  Today’s game was five flowchart sequences with equations, solvable by sub games with the cards. Tia quickly solved her sequences, passed on the marker cards, and looked up.

  “You’re quick.”

  “Five points,” Riun said. “If my results agree.”

  Which they didn’t. One of the sequences tied.

  Tia crosschecked with his cards and he rechecked hers. No tie; they came to the same conclusion by playing out the math. Tia was right.

  Riun placed the markers in the tube and watched them get sucked away. “You’re quick,” he said. “And accurate.”

  “Ninety percent accuracy rate on simple sub games like that.”

  Down in the belly of the beast their results would be tabulated, the result of a low-priority calculation request. Maybe they’d just helped calculate which lights should be left on above some city street. Or regulated the pressure of a valve somewhere. You never really knew. All you knew was that the thousands of games constantly being played helped comprise the total computational capacity of the entire city.

  Streets released traffic along paths that helped simulate equations, games were tied into the city’s calculations, and some suspected that even lives had some sort of calculating function, in the cities.

  Some Gorithim games were checkerboards, or mazes, or just patterns. You never knew what the tubes would hand you. But playing them was usually fun, if not sometimes puzzling, and it gave you something to do.

  Particularly when stuck in the sandbox.

  “Another game?” Tia asked.

  “I don’t know if I should,” Riun’s eyes crinkled. Was he smiling? “I think your mind is far quicker than mine.”

  Tia looked around pointedly. “I’ll be gentle. Besides, do you see anything else you could be doing with your time?”

  Riun conceded the point and tapped the delivery button. “Since you promised,” he muttered.

  As they waited for the next game to arrive, Tia craned over the shield to get a better look at his whole face. He did have the remains of a smile still. “Tell me about the places you’ve visited,” she suggested.

  And Riun began to spin tales of cities perched near cliffs with pipes dug far into the crust of the world to deliver steam, or dug into giant pits, and even one at the top of a tame volcano.

  Quarantine broke. Three days of playing Gorithims, eating, and putting up with the diplomats pointedly ignoring them. All the while, the fifteen-minute shift changes of observers continued in the gantries overhead, shuffling in and out to observe them all.

  It wasn’t all that unusual for Tia, who enjoyed the gentle rhythm. She’d done several quarantines already. And to be honest, there were worse people than Riun to get stuck with. He was easy on the eyes, and he could chatter on about the rails he’d traveled, the citypeople he’d met, and the places he’d been. But in a neutral manner, not a boasting one.

  She liked that.

  When the doors cracked open, Riun excitedly packed his things.
“Thank you for the company,” he said, and gave her a half bow.

  “My pleasure.”

  And they parted ways, Tia headed for the south switchbacks, threading her way down through the houses clustered on the ravine’s steep walls. Riun would be headed for the guest houses, from where he’d launch a campaign of interviews and his explorations of the new city.

  It felt, Tia thought, vaguely treasonous to wonder whether she could submit herself as Riun’s minder to the city while she was getting ready to meet her family and her new cardmate.

  At the card ceremony, Tia arrived stripped out of her ambassador’s garb. She now wore her red leathers, with a bustle designed to shove and prod and push her into what her mother called a more pleasing shape, though Tia preferred the comfortable fit of her work clothes. Her hair had been carefully brushed down, and adorned with brass clips.

  Here she was, an ambassador, an elite trainee tasked with the city’s defense, and her parents had spent money to have her mate-card bronzed; they were not powerful nor rich enough to afford gold. Tia carried it in her gloved hands up the street toward the sub-routines check palace and Gorithims parlor that dominated the nearest intersection.

  There, in black leathers and a tie, was her cardmate.

  According to the lifelong database kept by the city, her life in punched out rows and marks, this was the unmarried city man with the best statistical chance of making her happy.

  Actually, that wasn’t technically true, was it?

  No, this pairing was the most statistically valid and most likely to work. There might be someone else better for her, but who wouldn’t be interested in her.

  Could she fall in love with this man? He cut a fine figure. Dashing dark hair and large eyes. A certain precision to his movements that spoke of self control and quickness. Those were qualities she loved in a person.

  It was long a tradition to know nothing about your cardmate. Getting to know each other was half the excitement. Who was this person you were matched to by the great city?

  That was something to discover.

  But did it make her another switch or lever? Was this truly the person she would love, if left alone? Or was this another calculated move by a greater calculation, testing some subroutine?

  The two families moved together, their center of focus the two cardmates.

  Tia held out her bronzed card. “It says we are most compatible.”

  Her cardmate held out his silvered card. “Then let us verify it.”

  They put the two cards into a machine, and it whirred and clicked, and then a green light glowed.

  Compatible.

  “My name is Owyn,” the man said.

  “I’m Tia.”

  She hung his silvered card around her neck, and he her bronzed card.

  It was done.

  On the first night, she was expected only to eat a dinner with Owyn. A celebration of a new life that was to slowly bloom. She’d done that, sitting politely in place, and asking after his family. They were a family of silk merchants, and Owyn occasionally rode the rails to other towns and even some cities in order to trade for the city. And normally . . . that would have been fascinating and exotic to her.

  Tomorrow there would be a banquet, with dancing and instruments. And on the third day . . .

  Well, on the third day, her parents and friends and extended family would walk in a procession down the road, and Owyn’s parents and friends and extended family would do so as well, all carrying possessions to the new couple’s home, where there would be yet another celebration.

  And after that, everyone would withdraw, leaving them alone.

  It should have been all she was focused on. So why was she wondering how Riun was doing, his first night alone in the city?

  Her stomach full of rich food and tea, Tia climbed up on her roof and looked up at the atrium lights far overhead. Somewhere else Riun might be looking back at the same lights, she thought.

  And then she swore at herself and climbed down the wrought iron ladder along the side of her parent’s house and sneaked off into the night.

  Riun answered the door to the guest houses with a frown. “Tia?”

  She slid right past him.

  He was puzzled, but offered her tea from a side-table and lit some lights. His hair was disheveled, and he wore his nightrobe tied tight around his waist.

  They sat in the large foyer near the coolant fans. At night, this close to the city’s lower depths, it grew hot.

  “What’s wrong?” Riun asked.

  “What makes you think anything’s wrong?” she asked.

  “You’re an ambassador, here in the middle of the night.” He looked guarded, and tired. “Should I begin repacking?”

  “You’ve done nothing wrong.” She curled up on a small couch and hugged her knees.

  “Then why are you here?”

  Tia sighed. Typical of men, to miss the obvious and wallow in their own confusion. It was no wonder the great City Minds took to giving out cards that told you who your best match was. “To see you,” she said, a bit more angrily than she’d meant.

  And why hadn’t he picked up on that? Or did city women who’d just met him show up at his door at odd hours of the night all the time?

  Riun downed the last of his tea and stood. He walked over and sat next to her, and Tia felt a thrill of excitement run through her as the couch shifted from the added weight.

  But Riun didn’t look happy. A weary look had replaced what she had hoped was intrigue. He reached over to her neck and held up the silvered card. “That isn’t wise,” he murmured. “I am here at the courtesy of your city, and I will be expelled if I violate that hospitality. Your city has computed the best possible match already for you. I will not endanger that.”

  He let go of the card suddenly and pulled his hand back.

  For that, she found herself even more interested in him. “You’re right,” she said.

  He relaxed, slightly.

  But Tia grabbed his hand. “You’re right: you’re an outsider. The city never had a chance to run your profile. Maybe we would have been a good match. But we’ll never know. We could never know. And maybe the city made a mistake. There are mistakes made, that’s why there are error checks.” That’s why every game of Gorithims involved cross checks for secondary points.

  Riun pulled his hand gently away and stood up. “Tia, I’m something new and exciting. An outsider. Maybe even a little scary. Many are attracted. I will not destroy your life on a fancy. I can’t.” He walked to the door.

  It was time for her to leave.

  At the door she paused, and then looked up at him. “Don’t you get lonely, out there? Traveling those lines by yourself? Don’t you wish you could share those adventures?”

  He looked pained. “It is lonely out there, Tia. But few have the courage to truly abandon all they’ve ever known. It sounds exciting, but when it really comes down to it . . . they can’t make that jump.”

  He’d been let down in the past.

  Tia imagined him watching someone realize what they were doing and rush out of a train at the last second, leaving him alone inside, pulling away.

  What would it be like to rip yourself out the guts of a city for good?

  Her father sat in the chair by the entryway playing soligorithim at the family games table. It was odd to see him up this late. He worked an early morning shift at the calculating farms, running numbers on slide rules along with thousands of others.

  He set his playing cards aside and held up a red letter. “This woke us up. It came through mail chute. Priority. For you.”

  Tia read it. A simple warning, generated somewhere deep inside the city’s bowels, just for her.

  It forbade her from seeing Riun for the duration of his stay. Any violation would result in his expulsion.

  “Is there a problem?” her father asked.

  Tia folded the letter up. “Did you read it?”

  “I did.” He looked back down at his cards.
“Some of us have had friendships or . . . more, before our card-mates were revealed. People we knew and thought we liked. Over time, you realize you were mistaken. The city is wise.”

  “Did you want someone else?” Tia asked.

  Her dad turned back to the cards. “Tomorrow is the banquet, Tia. You should focus on that.”

  Tia walked up the stairs to her room. In bed she lay down and reread the warning.

  It wouldn’t be fair to Riun to get him expelled because of her own confusion. He was a traveler, an explorer of new cities. She wouldn’t rip this one from him, she decided.

  Her cardmate sat across from her, partially hidden behind a staggering assortment of elaborate cakes, pots of loose teas, coffees, and fancy aerated drinks.

  It seemed like half her street had boiled out of their multi-storied tenements bolted to the sides of the beginning the ravine’s steep climb to celebrate.

  And Tia found herself forcing her smile.

  One of her aunts patted her shoulder sympathetically. “It gets better,” she whispered. “Give it time. All of us are in shock at first. It’s okay.”

  So apparently her smile was not very believable.

  Later into the night Owyn found her, trying to hide behind a flower display.

  “Are you feeling well?” he asked hesitantly.

  “Everything is fine,” Tia insisted.

  Owyn stood awkwardly by her, then finally nodded and walked away. Tia sighed. He looked crushed and frustrated. And none of this was really his fault, was it?

  Neither of them left the banquet happy. When Tia got home she just sat in the middle of her room, frustrated and getting angrier.

  Her dad knocked and entered the room. “We have a problem,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Tia said, looking down at the carpet on her floor. “The city provides. It calculates the best outcomes for us. We have jobs we are engaged with. Lives that are often fulfilling. And I know that Owyn is a good choice. I’m struggling, but I think I’ll get through.”

  “Your aunt just sent a runner, he’s at the door. She says a quarantine order has been issued for you.” Her dad squatted down in front of her. “What have you been doing, Tia?”