Driftmetal II

by J. C. Staudt

  Halfway up the stairs, I grabbed the butler’s face and shoved him backward. As I heard him tumbling down behind me, I thought of how nice it would’ve been to have a good set of stairs handy for half the people I’d ever met. Gravity as a tool for punishment is largely underrated.

  The butler flopped to a halt at the bottom, groaning. I had almost made it to the top when a slender young man in silk pajamas appeared on the gallery landing.

  “What is the meaning of this?” he said.

  “I’m guessing you’re the Baron.”

  Anger wrote itself in sharp lines across his face. “And who, pray tell, might you be?”

  “It’s not who I am that you should be concerned with. It’s who I’m about to be.”

  “And that is…?” the Baron asked coarsely.

  “A satisfied investor in this wretched patch of ground you call a barony. I understand there’s been a recent vacancy in Kilori’s underside ferry service.”

  “I wouldn’t know. My financial advisers handle these sorts of things.”

  “You do know, because I just told you. The guy who runs the town ferry croaked two days ago. He has no living heirs, so all his crap is going to sit around until the statute of limitations has passed, at which time it’ll be absorbed by the barony. That means you, pal.”

  “Well, yes. That is usually how it works.”

  “How it usually works isn’t good enough, in this case. You’re going to upset your citizens, who rely on the ferry to get from here to the underside and back. The ferry service happens to be of great personal interest to me, and I’d like to save you some trouble by buying it out before it goes to auction—or however your financial gurus are planning on disposing of it.”

  “For heavens’ sake, stow this nonsense, man. How can you presume to enter my home uninvited and make these demands of me?”

  “Because if you don’t let me buy the ferry, I’m going to steal it.”

  The Baron laughed. “The very nerve of some people. Chelmsworth, kindly show this man the door. Then bluewave the constable and tell him to keep an eye out for a thief matching the description I’m about to give you. Six feet tall. Gangly. Foul-tempered. Devilish look in one eye. Patch over the other. Scraggly. Uncultured. There… that ought to do it.”

  At the bottom of the stairs, Chelmsworth groaned.

  “I think you’re gonna need a new butler,” I said.

  The Baron looked at Chelmsworth as if seeing him for the first time, lying there in a heap. His face went white. “You aren’t even a Kilorian. How did you get in here? How do you know about the old ferryman, and how did you know where I live?”

  “Some kid in the street told me everything.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

  “No, and I hope to continue not knowing you for a good long time.”

  “What did you say your name was, again?”

  “I didn’t.” I spat on the carpet. Then I turned and descended the stairs, stepping on Chelmsworth’s back on my way to the door.

  The Baron took a step forward and called down after me. “Whoever you are, don’t think to cross me. In all my years in charge of this village, I’ve never let a crime go unpunished.”

  “This ought to be a first for you then,” I said. I opened the door and slammed it so hard the glass shattered behind me.

  Thomas was outside waiting, right where I’d left him. “Nice chat?”

  I strolled past him down the gravel walkway as I spoke. “Lovely. We’ve got a ferry service to run.”

  The ferry was an old hover that might’ve passed for a bus back when it had a roof and windows. Now it looked more like the bottom half of an egg carton with a steering wheel and bench seating. It hadn’t taken us long to ask around and find the old ferryman’s house, and it hadn’t taken me long to break into the garage where he kept the thing so we could confiscate it. Old Chelmsworth had been slow on the draw in making that phone call, and we were already in town picking up passengers at three chips apiece by the time we noticed any commotion.

  “Welp—time to go, folks. Everybody on board and take your seats,” I said, latching the gate and taking the wheel.

  I started the old bus and lifted off just as the local constable and his deputy came careening around the corner on horseback, hollering and screaming at the tops of their lungs about ceasing and desisting and other such nonsense. I saluted them as we left, then suggested to our passengers that they might enjoy giving the constable and his law-lover-in-training a friendly wave. Some did; others just sat there looking scared.

  “They after you, mister?” asked someone behind me.

  “I guess I forgot to pay my electric bill,” I said.

  I took the bus over the windward edge of Kilori, praying that there was actually something down there. I’d seen people build out over the sides of floaters before, but it was exceedingly rare to find a whole separate infrastructure built on the bottom. I found out why the top was such a dump as soon as I got a load of how the other half lived.

  There were sets of scaffolding embedded in the rock, thick metal bars hanging down to frame a system of walkways, like some strange village of upside-down tree houses. Vehicles were parked on landing pads and tucked into crevices carved into the stone like garages. As I drove through the hanging town, I could feel the Civs watching me from their sloops in the distance. My bus was full of civilian passengers, so I knew they wouldn’t dare come at me now.

  I stopped at a way station to let out a few passengers, then parked inside a public tunnel to drop off the rest. The tunnel ran clear through the floater from one side to the other, and I could see warm rays of golden afternoon light shining in at the opposite end. There were people milling about, boats and hovers parked along both sides of the tunnel as if it were a busy street.

  Thomas and I asked around until we found someone who knew Ezra Brunswick and could point us in the direction of his house. We had to walk all the way down to the far end of the tunnel, then take a set of steps up onto the narrow walkways that crisscrossed the underside of the floater. From there, every step was treacherous. The slightest movement of a plank underfoot had Thomas going green in the face and clinging to the supports for dear life.

  The path twisted away from the rocky underside wall and out into open air. It felt a little like walking on nothing, if that nothing had been supported by metal suspension wires and was so flimsy it shifted every time there was a strong breeze. By the time we were halfway around to Ezra’s front door, Thomas was all but paralyzed with fear.

  Anytime someone passed by in the opposite direction, he would cling to the nearest piece of scaffolding as if he were hanging from the edge of a cliff. I had to coax him onward with promises of safety and solid ground. When that didn’t work, I scared him with comments about how close behind us the Civs were getting.

  When we finally came to the door marked 5227, I’d never been so happy to see such a weather-beaten hunk of wood in all my life. A staircase led off the main walkway and took us up to the door, which was mounted on hinges bolted into the underside. There was smoke pouring from a vent high above. The place came complete with its own deck and landing pad too, though there were no vehicles parked on it.

  I knocked. Presently, an elderly gentleman opened the door.

  “You must be Ezra,” I said cheerfully.

  “Am not, and thank the heavens for that,” he said, grinning. “You’re here for the meeting, I presume?”

  “Why… yes, naturally,” I said.

  The man moved aside, and we went in. It smelled like potatoes. Not the cooked kind with oil and salt; the kind that were still growing. A dozen men and women huddled around a tiny living room, where a warm fire was glowing in the hearth. An old man with flowing white hair and piercing eyes the color of blue ice was sitting in a deep armchair beside the fire.

  I saw the family resemblance right away, just as I’d done when I met Yingler’s sister. The old man had Sable’s cold blue ey
es, alright, but the smirk on his face also had the same shape. I remembered it clearly, and I wondered how she and the others were getting along in jail. I wondered how long it had been since anyone had given Sable a good reason to smirk.

  “Welcome, welcome.” The old man stood and thrust out a spindly mechanical hand. Motors hummed as he extended his fingers, waiting for my response.

  I nodded and shook with him, his cold metal digits squeezing mine like the legs of some robotic insect. “You’re Ezra,” I said.

  “These days, I ain’t so sure whether I’m him, or he’s me.”

  Oh, dear Leridote. Here comes the eccentric old hermit routine.

  Sable’s grandfather was old, alright. But he wasn’t a hermit, as the guests in his living room could attest, and I would soon learn that pound-for-pound, he was no more eccentric than certain duenders I’d recently come to be familiar with.

  He did have a point, though; he’d done little to hide his augments, and there were plenty of them. His right hand was mechanical up to the elbow. The patch of skull from his left eye socket to his hairline was bare circuitry, an augment fused directly onto the telerium in his skull. When he sat back down in his armchair, his pant leg revealed one normal shin and one shiny hydraulic tube.

  But perhaps most astounding of all was the bulk around Ezra’s shoulders, which I’d at first thought to be the hunchback of an aging man. Upon closer inspection, I could see peeking out from under his collar the spiky exterior of a neural rig, lined with hundreds of tiny probes and sensors. Old tech by today’s standards, but too complicated to remove without jeopardizing the life of its subject.

  “Always pleased to see new faces,” Ezra was saying. “We can use all the help we can get. You were looking for me?”

  I glanced at Thomas, who was holding his breath like he was expecting me to say or do something dangerous or embarrassing. “Don’t let us hold things up,” I said. “We’re just here to contribute however we can. Carry on.” I found an out-of-the-way place to stand, and Thomas did the same. I could feel him looking at me, trying to get my attention so he could give me that ‘what, exactly, are you doing?’ look. I was observing, is what I was doing. I was curious to know what this little gathering was all about, and before I spoke up, I was going to wait and see.

  “I ain’t taking their side, Rufus. All’s I’m gettin’ at is they got their own stake in all this. Just because they’re from across the way don’t mean they get anymore benefit from a division than we do.”

  “Public ground is public ground,” said Rufus, a genteel oldster with sharp slate-colored facial hair. “Long as it ain’t ours by law, they can keep parking their vehicles where ours belong.”

  “That’s why we gotta give ‘em enough land to keep ‘em satisfied with the arrangement,” said Ezra. “Can’t have them coming back in six months asking the barony for a redelineation.”

  “They got no right to our space anyhow. Don’t matter if they ask or not—it’s ours.”

  “Excuse me,” I said. “If I might make a suggestion.”

  Everyone turned to look at me.

  “Could this dispute be handled more efficiently if someone were to speak to the Baron about it directly?”

  Rufus laughed. “We been waiting on the Baron’s approval for over a year now. Every time it comes across his desk, he rejects it. Been sitting here twiddling our thumbs, trying to figure out what we ought to do. The Baron don’t take kindly to change, and he’s too rich and fancy to come down off his throne and recognize the concerns of the people.”

  I cleared my throat and gave Thomas another glance. “I just talked to the Baron today, and I’ve no shame in saying I agree with you.”

  The room erupted in low murmurs. Ezra eyed me with those cold blues, putting a shiver up my spine.

  “What did you tell him?” asked a woman dressed like an aviator, with long reddish-brown hair and a slender face.

  “I told him we’ve had enough of this. I said we won’t stand for it any longer. This has all gotten completely out of hand, and it’s about time things changed.” I went on, plucking heartstrings and touching on concepts about which I had only the vaguest idea. I didn’t have a clue what I was talking about, but they ate up every word. The whole time, I was throwing glances at Thomas, watching his reaction turn from astonishment to mortification. I had worked them up into a frenzy, when all of a sudden, I stopped. “Then do you know what he said to me?” I asked the room, my voice but a whisper.

  They sat there, bated.

  I opened my mouth as if to speak, and let it hang there, drawing out the silence. “He said, ‘The very nerve of some people.’ And then he started in on his justification for why the working class is essential to life in the stream, and why people like us ought to just be happy with our lot in life and stop looking for reasons to complain about everything. Can you believe that? Talk about nerve!”

  I had the room boiling now. There were growls and curses coming from every corner. I had them with me and against him, and that was all I needed. If there was going to be a mob of angry villagers storming the gates today, you could bet your last chip it was going to be my mob of angry villagers.

  “There ain’t room enough for all of us down here, I keep saying,” said Rufus. “This takes it. Enough is enough. We gotta do something before they sneak in here and steal every last patch of ground away from us.”

  “That’s what we’re here for, ain’t it?” I said, adopting a little of Rufus’s drawl. “To do something about it. We ain’t just going to sit on our hands and let this happen right in front of our eyes. The greatest folks in history were the ones who took charge of their own lives instead of letting someone else do it for them. That Baron is going to talk to us today. He’s going to sort this out for us, and we’re not leaving until he does.”

  The group agreed wholeheartedly, so we spent the next hour putting together our plan of attack. I offered to take everyone topside in the ferry so we could all be together when we showed up on the Baron’s doorstep. I gathered that the dispute was over landing zones on the underside. As Ezra and his cohorts saw it, residents from the opposite end were taking up too much space, and an official decree from the barony was the only thing that would cement their rights as landowners.

  “So that settles it, then,” I said, when everyone was ready to go.

  The others gave their consent, and we made our way back across the tunnel. The ferry hadn’t been tampered with—not in any way I could discern from a quick inspection. There were people waiting in line to get on, so I told them we were running a special. Since the service was under new management, I let them on for free. We all piled in, and I took us above.

  “Are you quite sure we should be doing this?” asked Thomas, leaning in to whisper over my shoulder. “Perhaps we should tell Ezra who we are. He’ll want to know about Sable, I’m sure.”

  “We’ve just gotten him to start liking us,” I whispered back. “Let’s not confuse him with the details.”

  When we landed in town, the Civs had already descended on the place. They’d been so standoffish while Thomas and I were sailing here that I thought they’d continue to watch from a distance until they saw some sign of the gravstone or the money. Not so, it would seem. Like a bear in a honey factory, I was in a sticky situation.

  I adjusted my mustache and pulled Dennel’s top-hat down over my brow as I stepped off the bus and closed the gate behind me. Thomas and I became part of the mob, letting the crowd carry us toward the Baron’s mansion. We managed to avoid being seen by the Civs until we’d reached the wide gravel pathway that led to his front door. I was worried about the Galeskimmer. If they found the boat before we got back to it, Thomas and I could consider ourselves all but stranded.

  “I think you should be the one to knock… since you’re the one who knows the Baron and all,” said Rufus, looking less brave than he had in the confines of Ezra’s living room.

  “He’ll never open up when he sees us all out here,
” said Ezra.

  “And you guys wonder why it takes so long to get things done in this town,” I said. “You’ve been cowering in your dens on the underside for a year. How is the Baron ever supposed to know you mean business unless you show him you mean business? Nobody ever causes real change by waiting patiently and quietly out of sight. The people who get what they want are the ones who speak up for themselves—who stand up and get noticed. Do you want to be heard, or would you rather go home and keep being ignored?”

  Predictably, they wanted the former. I felt like a little league coach giving his team a halftime pep talk. Thomas just stared, wondering what I was doing and why I was wasting my time with their petty little property dispute. What he didn’t understand was that when he’d used the word estranged to describe Ezra’s relationship with his son Angus, it had changed the whole ball game. Had I simply strolled into Ezra’s living room and dropped his son’s name straight away, we might’ve found ourselves staring at his front door shortly thereafter. Thomas seemed to have forgotten that sometimes, if you want a person to help you with something, you need to return the favor first.

  I knocked loudly on the Baron’s front door, whose empty windowpanes had already been boarded up. I realized I still didn’t know the guy’s name, and yet I was already coming back to bother him again. The others were gathered at the bottom of the porch steps, waiting to see if I could really work the miracle I’d promised them.

  I saw the butler’s face appear from behind the sheer curtains that covered the narrow sidelights next to the door. He sneered at me and disappeared. I waited. When the door didn’t open, I knocked again, louder. He pulled the curtains aside and glowered at me.

  “Go away,” I heard him say, muffled through a veil of glass.

  I folded my arms and tapped my foot.

  “Go away.”