Human Test

by E. M. Foner

  A few minutes later, I stepped out of the second floor closet door and was surprised to find Spot still waiting. Then I noticed the little scraps of leather all over the carpet and realized that he had thoroughly chewed up the messenger tube that I had carelessly left behind.

  “Hey, Mark,” eBeth said, emerging from her bedroom. “What are we doing today?”

  “You’re awake early,” I couldn’t help commenting. Her stated ambition for the school break had been to sleep late every day, and checking my internal clock, I found that she was up at her usual time.

  “Yeah. I tried to stay in bed but it just didn’t work. There’s something wrong with this planet.”

  “It’s the lack of artificial lighting,” I told her. “When none of the moons are up it’s pitch black outside, and even during the nights when they’re all visible at the same time, the reflected light isn’t that much brighter than a full moon back on Earth.”

  “I have candles.”

  “Back home you had electric lights, a smartphone, a laptop, and the Internet,” I reminded her. “It’s a wonder you got to sleep at all.”

  “This is okay too,” she said as if it was occurring to her for the first time. “It’s kind of nice in the morning. The air smells fresh.”

  “I don’t have any work scheduled because of the holiday,” I told her. “I was planning on riding my bike out to the hills to look for cliff art. How about packing a picnic lunch and inviting Peter along?”

  “He’s working,” she replied with a pout. “Paul left for the provincial capital with Stacey, and Peter says that even though the machine shop is officially closed, he has to stay around in case of emergencies.”

  “It’s nice that he takes his responsibilities so seriously.”

  “His priorities are messed up,” eBeth retorted. “Is Sue coming?”

  “She’s staying home to handle the lunch business so that the former owners can take time off,” I told her as we headed downstairs to the kitchen. “Helen will come with us if I can find her.”

  “How about Spot? You can leave your toolbox home and he can ride on the rack.”

  “Or he can run alongside.”

  Two hours later, when Spot’s barking bought our attention to a narrow fissure in the cliff face that led into a sort of crevasse that was illustrated with the most astounding art I’d ever seen, I had to thank eBeth for convincing me to let him ride.

  “It’s beautiful, sort of,” the girl said. “But spooky too, and kind of—” she broke off and looked away. “Don’t try to follow the blue lines all the way to the end or you may get dizzy.”

  “I think I know what this is,” I said, though it didn’t make any sense. “I saw something similar once when I attended a presentation about stability issues with the portal network. It’s a map of sorts, like for the circulatory system of a body, but in this case, it’s showing portal connections in this galaxy, and beyond.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t know much about how portals worked and that they don’t function between galaxies.”

  “Intra-dimensional portals will operate anywhere in this universe. It’s just that at great distances, our engineers haven’t solved the problem of keeping the end-points lined up. And everything I know about portals is from a public lecture series I attended on Library. I just have a hard time imagining another artificial system that would imitate this architecture.”

  “So where’s the branch for this world, or for Earth?”

  Spot jumped up against the wall on his hind legs, a rare exertion for the dog, and scratched at a colorful nexus with one forepaw.

  “Down, Spot,” I barked at him, and with an irritated look over his shoulder, the dog dropped back to the ground.

  “He didn’t hurt anything,” eBeth said. “Whatever the Originals used to color all these lines must be pretty tough. You know, I think there are actually channels engraved in the rock and filled in with something.”

  I went over to take a closer look at the area Spot had scratched, and other then a small “x” on top of what was likely a major portal intersection if my theory about the diagram was correct, there wasn’t any sign of damage. I took some time making mental images of the cliff art for memory, taking extra care since I suspected Library’s head librarian would put a high value on the information.

  eBeth and Spot had finished their picnic lunch by the time I completed the job, and I was disappointed to find that that the basket was empty.

  “What’s the matter, Mark?” eBeth said. “You look like somebody kicked your puppy.”

  “I just thought Sue might have packed something for me,” I admitted.

  “Since when do you care about food? You used to complain that eating just made for a hassle cleaning up.”

  “I don’t need food, of course, but I’ve noticed lately that chewing and swallowing give me an odd sense of satisfaction. Especially things that crunch.”

  “Like carrots and celery?” eBeth asked innocently.

  “You ate them?”

  The girl reached under her jacket and brought out the paper-wrapped package. “I was just teasing.”

  Sitting with the girl and the dog munching on a carrot and letting myself enjoy the aesthetic of the cliff art without worrying about its meaning, I felt strangely pleased with myself. One of these days I really had to run a full self-diagnostic on the encounter suit, but not today.

  Ten

  “You look tired,” I said to eBeth when she joined me in my basement workshop. “Did you stay up late playing board games again?”

  “Spot kept me up half the night making funny noises. I think he was trying to teach himself how to whistle.”

  “Dogs don’t have the right mouths or lips for whistling. Maybe he’s sick.”

  “I can bring him by the apothecary shop and ask Kim to check him out,” eBeth offered. “Do we have any jobs today?”

  “All of those parts I bought in bulk from the scrap dealer need cleaning.”

  “I mean real jobs, fixing stuff.”

  “Cleaning is a big part of the job, eBeth. It’s a big part of most jobs.”

  “I think I’ll just take care of Spot first.”

  “I may as well come along,” I said. “You go find the dog and I’ll meet you out front.”

  I carefully put away the tools I’d been using and moved my current project to the storage area of the workbench so it wouldn’t be in the way if a rush job came in. I could hear a number of people moving around in the dining room above my head even though we weren’t open for breakfast and I wondered if Sue had visitors over. Given my ban on communications when we weren’t face to face, I had suggested leaving each other messages on slates, but for some reason she found my logic annoying.

  When I met eBeth and Spot out front, the dog greeted me with an elaborate yawn, a sure sign that he was up to something. Oddly enough, he looked well rested, and comparing his body language to the reference images I kept in memory, I got the impression that he was rather pleased with himself. We crossed the road to the apothecary shop and found Kim in a deep discussion with a woman at the counter.

  “We can come back,” I offered, not wanting to interrupt a consultation.

  “We were just finishing up,” Kim replied, pushing a small paper sack across the counter to her customer. “Remember, there are no miracle cures, but if you follow the instructions to the letter you’ll feel much better by the end of the week.”

  “How much do I owe you?”

  “There’s no charge today.”

  We stood aside as the woman left, her hood pulled up around her face so I didn’t even recognize her. The bells on the door jangled as she exited and Kim turned her attention to us.

  “Is something bothering you, eBeth? You look tired.”

  “I got to sleep late is all. We came to ask you to take a look at Spot.”

  “Is he sick? I’ll get my bag and be right over. Justin is upstairs working on something so just give me a minute to tell him to come
and watch the counter.”

  “There’s no need for that,” I told her. “We brought—where is he?”

  “You know, I’m not sure he came in with us,” eBeth said. “I remember crossing the road and opening the door, then we saw the woman at the counter and I wasn’t sure whether to enter or not.”

  “Hold on a sec. I’ll check,” Kim said. She looked down at something on her side of the counter, fiddled around for a moment, and reported, “Spot didn’t come in with you. What’s wrong with him?”

  “He was whistling half the night,” eBeth said. “It was weird.”

  “Maybe he just has a tune stuck in his head from listening to Mark singing those ballads behind the bar every night.”

  “But I distinctly remember Spot brushing up against my leg as we entered,” I protested. “And what do you have hidden under the counter there that you’re looking at?”

  “We set up a camera to monitor the road out front,” Kim said. “Don’t get excited, Mark. Anybody who notices will take it for a ‘My Life’ recorder, and Justin ran a shielded cable to the display. Come and take a look.”

  I followed eBeth around the counter and saw that my team members had installed a poorly camouflaged Faraday cage with an LCD display inside that was cycling an old screen-saver of a fish tank. The whole deal was powered by an inverter hooked to a car battery which they must have been manually recharging through their encounter suits.

  “Why isn’t the bubbler making any noise?” the girl asked.

  “It’s not a real bubbler,” Kim told her, and directed an infrared command at the box. The fish tank suddenly transformed into a wide-angle shot of the road in front of the apothecary shop, providing an excellent view of The Eatery in the background. The video recording showed eBeth, Spot, and I crossing the road, and at the last minute, the dog peeled off as I followed the girl into the store.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “If I could plug into that thing, I could display from my own memory when I looked down and—it’s not there anymore!”

  “You probably flushed your buffer without thinking about it,” Kim said. “I only hold a second or two worth of streaming video myself. Who has the memory to waste?”

  “Me, apparently, though I run heavy compression. I got into the habit of holding onto the last couple hours since I started working on clocks and watches. Some of the craftsmen building them are pretty idiosyncratic.”

  “What’s that mean?” my apprentice asked.

  “They feel driven to do things their own way,” I explained. “If you’re not paying close attention when you disassemble some of these clocks it will take you forever to figure out how to put them back together.”

  “Oh. Could I run my laptop in something like that?” eBeth asked. Behind her, I shook my head ‘No’ at Kim, who unfortunately was looking the other way at the moment.

  “Sure, but it really cuts down on the brightness and you’d have to get one of us to keep recharging the battery for you. On second thought, it wouldn’t work because you don’t have built-in infrared so there would be no way to issue instructions.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said to Kim, hoping that eBeth wouldn’t think of asking why she couldn’t just be inside a Faraday cage with the laptop. “Of all the things you could smuggle onto Reservation, why did you feel you needed a security system?”

  “It’s not for security. A few months after we took over the shop, I happened to be returning from a house-call when I saw a boy approach our door and then turn away. I caught up with him at the edge of the village and he finally admitted to being afraid he wouldn’t have enough to pay. Apparently the old apothecary was in it for the money.”

  “So now you monitor everybody who approaches the shop and if they don’t come in you go after them?”

  “Justin and I split up the area around the village so that between us, we recognize everybody who lives within walking distance,” Kim explained. “If somebody who really looks like they need help doesn’t come in, I make it a point to ride out on my bike.”

  “What do you say to them?” eBeth asked.

  “It depends on the time of day and where they are. Sometimes I pretend to be lost or that I’m just stopping by to fill my water bottle. If I see bikes out front I may pretend to have a flat and ask to borrow an air pump.”

  “So you’re monitoring the video all the time?” I asked.

  “No. We just fast forward through it in the morning and the evening. That reminds me,” Kim said, and I saw her eyes emitting another stream of infrared commands. “I meant to come over and tell you about this.”

  The video was much darker than the previous shot, though the camera she was using didn’t show the graininess of low light environments. An Original strolled into the field of view, glanced over at the apothecary shop, and did a comic double-take. He took something out of his mouth, walked directly towards the camera, and the last thing visible was his hand with something shiny stuck on the tip of a claw looming large before the picture was lost.

  “It took me five minutes and a half a bottle of alcohol to clean that gum off the lens,” Kim complained. “I hope this doesn’t become a habit.”

  “How could he have spotted the camera so easily?” eBeth asked. “I’ve never noticed it before.”

  “I thought about that. It’s shielded for radio frequency emissions, but it would show up as a hot spot if the Originals see into the infrared, which explains their night vision.”

  “Got any other bits of smuggled technology you’ve been meaning to tell me about?” I asked.

  “Nothing leaps to mind,” Kim said. “It’s funny to think that when I was on Earth, I couldn’t make enough portal trips back to civilized space to pick up medical supplies. Now that we’re here, I realize that Earth actually makes some pretty useful products, at least for humans.”

  “We did manage by ourselves quite a while before you came along,” eBeth said. “What kind of stuff do you import?”

  “I bring in hydrocortisone by the bucket and mix it with aloe vera for a burn cream that I’m selling by mail order. If you have time this morning, I could use a little help packing orders.”

  “It beats cleaning old gears in a dark basement.”

  “Fine,” I said, figuring out that I’d been abandoned by both my dog and my supposed daughter in the space of five minutes. “I promised Paul I’d check in on Peter every couple days to see if he needs a hand with anything. Any messages?”

  “Humph,” eBeth said, turning her back. It was the first indication I’d had that things weren’t going well between them. Kim made a face at me followed by a lip-zipping gesture, so I swallowed my question.

  An agonized yell came from just outside and I raced for the door. A heavily loaded farm wagon was parked in front of The Eatery and somebody was standing by the back wheel, cursing like a Phoenician.

  “Get it off me, get it off me,” Hosea shouted when I emerged from the apothecary shop. The wagon must have slipped back and trapped his foot below a wooden wheel when he was reaching over the sideboard to retrieve a melon from the bed, probably a gift for me. I threw myself under the wagon and pushed up on the rear axle, like doing a one-ton bench press, and the farmer pulled his foot free.

  “Thanks,” Hosea said in a surprisingly calm voice. “I was on my way to the canal and thought I’d drop off a few melons on the way. That’ll teach me not to set the brake.”

  “Can you walk?” I asked him. “Let’s get you to the apothecary and let her take a look at it.”

  “Oh no, I’m fine,” he insisted, thrusting a melon at me and climbing back onto the wagon seat. “I guess my toe was in a bit of a rut there so the foot didn’t get crushed at all. Just scared me, being unable to move.”

  “I really think…” I began, but the oxen threw themselves forward the moment Hosea cracked the whip, and the wagon rumbled off in the direction of the canal weigh station. Something made me look back the opposite way and I saw Saul lounging in front of the boot maker
’s shop, engrossed in the county broadsheet that was the closest thing to a daily newspaper in our area. I thought about confronting him with my suspicions, then decided to let it pass and headed for Paul’s machine shop.

  Peter was working a treadle-powered lathe to turn the shaft of what looked suspiciously like a crude MacPherson strut when I entered. At first I thought he was modding a bicycle, but then I noticed new mounting plates on the carriage in the shop’s bay space that looked like a racing model.

  “Any problems since Paul left?” I asked.

  “Not with the shop,” the teen replied, allowing the lathe to spin down. “Demetrius stopped in earlier and picked up the order of gear bodies for chain hoists I’ve been working on all month and he said they were as smooth as anything he’d seen.”

  “I’ve noticed the improvement in your work myself. I’m just not sure how it will translate when you get back to Earth since machining is all done with computer controls now.”

  “I’m not worried about that,” Peter said, turning towards me, but not quite meeting my eyes. “Could I ask you something?”

  “You can ask me anything.”

  “About eBeth.”

  “Oh. Well, you can ask, and if it’s not appropriate, I’ll tell you.”

  He picked up a heavy chunk of cast iron that looked like a crude steering knuckle and began filing it while he talked to have something to do with his hands.

  “It’s like this. You know that party eBeth had for her students on Ferrymen’s Day?”

  “I was there.”

  “Right. And eBeth said that you told the kids that she and I were promised to each other as children.”

  “They were asking her awkward questions and I was afraid she would say something suspicious. You know that this is a traditional culture and they take courting rituals very seriously.”

  “I don’t have any problem with it at all. But when eBeth told me about it, I said, ‘That’s cool,’ and she got mad at me.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “About women?”