After a time, I saw the first glimmers of light besides firelight. There was nothing but concrete above me, but, off to my left, I could glimpse the first hint of a lightening sky. I stood on shaky feet and walked toward it.
My new companions called me to return to the fire. I ignored them. I’d never been outside at night. I didn’t know the dangers. I had always been able to see. I had to crawl over some fallen stone and broken rock. I almost stumbled over a mesh of rusted metal. The ground was a maze of rocky debris and, at several narrow places, I almost fell. After a time, I reached the edge of the concrete enclosure. The roof ended and the open sky stood above me again.
When I looked up, I could see the round orb of the moon as I had never seen it. It looked so white, almost like a lamp. I tried to get Vivid to go to telescopic to view its topography. I could see no craters. I wasn’t working for the City so it seemed Vivid wasn’t working for me.
I suppose you already know what happened before I did. Vivid was gone. The machines had taken it from me. I was no longer a Citizen. I had known the Fathers and Mothers and Maintenance could turn off Vivid, but I never expected to live without it.
The corneal implants had occasionally malfunctioned during lockdowns. When the grid powered down in the middle of the night, occasionally I had awoken to darkness. With my room’s shutters down, there had not even been moonlight sparkling off the bay to confirm which wall was which.
Imagine reaching up to your face to brush your hair from your eyes. Now imagine that, at that moment, you discover your arm has been amputated at the elbow. That’s what the first while without Vivid felt like. Call us the Exiled, the Nameless, the Goners. I thought the Blinded sounded right.
High above me, the great hulk of the City came alive at the first touch of sunlight. At dawn, every window became an active solar panel. The Worm began to weave its way through and around the City again.
To watch the City come alive from far below was an awesome sight. However, it was not the towers that drew my eye. The bay was full of sailing ships I’d never seen before.
At the feet of the towers lay another city. It was constructed of tents and rubble. I had viewed this same landscape countless times but I had never glimpsed this camp of the dispossessed.
I had thought Vivid’s function was to enhance our view of the world. That seems naive now, I suppose. What can I say? Fish don’t see the water. People don’t see air. Citizens weren’t allowed to see the devastation and suffering beneath us.
The Fathers and Mothers showed us the world as they wanted us to see it, sterile and lonely. They programmed Vivid to erase the rest. To my eyes, the bay had always been empty. On the dawn of my first day of exile, I knelt on the ground before a harbor filled with sailing ships and a camp filled with people.
My vision blurred with tears.
13
It was the girl who came to collect me. “What was your name?” she asked.
“Elizabeth.”
“What will your new name be?”
“I don’t understand.”
“My name used to be Liesel,” she said. “I chose Greta for my new name. I like it. We change our names when we come here.”
“Why?”
“The past is the past. History is a burning coal. It shouldn’t be held.”
I shook my head. “I’m fine with my name.”
“How old are you?” the girl asked.
“I feel very old today. You seem young.”
“I’m fifteen, I think.”
“Why are you out here?” I asked. “Were you born out here?”
“My family came to Low Town years ago.” She pointed to the Bay. “We came on the biggest tri-master, the Apple’s Eye. I remember sitting at the bottom of the middle mast. The sails are huge solar and water collectors. It was the most beautiful thing when the wind was strong. When I’m old enough, I’m going to work on one of those ships.”
“Where did you come from? Not the City, I guess.”
“Germany,” she said.
“Where’s that?”
“Far away. It’s not really there anymore.”
Greta’s blue eyes watched me steadily. She waited for me to get to my feet. I couldn’t bear to move. My eyes hurt. My head ached. My body was sore. I lay down.
“The Olders say you came from the City in the Sky. What’s it like?”
I looked around. “Not like this. Are there many like me?”
“No. Most of us came from Elsewhere.”
“Where’s that?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know…just…Elsewhere, that’s all. Like Germany.”
“Why do they come here?”
“Everyone knows — ” Greta stopped, smiled apologetically and corrected herself. Her voice took on the sing-song quality of a child reciting a bedtime story. “The Firsts came on the rescue ships. They built the City in the Sky. Then they went inside and closed the door behind them. The Seconds came on trade ships hoping to be let in but they never are. The Thirds come because this is the last place to come. The generations in Low Town don’t live long, so maybe we’ll talk about the Fourths soon.”
I looked at the sky. I could detect no hint of a flurry of diaphanous monster pollen wafting by. Was I that blind now? I closed my eyes and raised a bare hand to test the air. Whenever I was outside, Vivid had shown me tufts of dangerous monster pollen floating on the breeze. I could feel nothing. Had I ever?
We had lived our lives under the watchful eye of high security. Mother told me that when people objected to the abuses of power by humans’ prying eyes, the job had been handed over to robotic surveillance. Vigilance was necessary, we’d been told, because the pollen would poison our crops and we would all starve to death. But I’d seen an onion out here, in the open air, and the remains of a rabbit on a stick.
For the first time, I suspected Vivid had added elements to my vision in addition to erasing things. Maybe the people of the City in the Sky were their own kind of blind.
That made me angry and it made me rise to my feet. “Where are the others like me?”
Greta pointed back toward Low Town in a vague gesture that told me my fellow exiles weren’t all in one place. The hills at the base of the City’s pillars all angled down to the sea. As Low Town awoke, I saw more people from where I stood than I’d ever seen in the towers’ concourse.
“I don’t understand this,” I said. “Who do I talk to?”
“Who do you want to talk to?”
“I don’t know, Greta! Anyone! I don’t know where to start!”
She looked at her feet and I was ashamed. Her cheeks were pink and mine probably were, too. “I apologize, Greta. I’m just…I’m very afraid.”
“You sound angry.”
“I’m that, too, but mostly afraid.”
“That’s normal,” she said. “You’ll get used to it.”
“No, I don’t think I will. I don’t think anyone should feel like that’s normal.”
“You still sound angry.”
“Not at you.” My rage embarrassed me. I didn’t know it was a useful tool yet. I didn’t know how much rage could get done.
“Greta, when is there a central council or something? I need to talk to the people who organize things.”
She shook her head. “There are the Olders like Old Sam.”
“The toothless one who thought I was dead?”
“Right. Do you want to speak to him?”
“I don’t think so. Who tells people what to do?”
“The Olders give people advice but I wouldn’t say they tell people what to do exactly.”
“But who makes sure things get done?”
“Things that need to be done are done,” she said. “There is what is and there is how things work. The only person I know who gives orders is Phillip.”
“Okay. Sounds like I need to talk to Phillip.”
Greta looked me up and down nervously. “What do you have to trade?”
“I don’t understa
nd.”
“Phillip is the Tradebot.”
“Bot?”
“He’s an android. We aren’t allowed to use that other word around him. You have to be careful. Keep your voice down. We only call him the Tradebot among ourselves but never near the harbor. Down there, his title is Liaison to the City in the Sky.”
I rubbed my face with both hands. “This is….” I had no words. I began to weep again.
I stiffened in surprise as Greta took me in her arms. Such casual intimacy wasn’t the custom of Citizens. I had been embraced by my mother a few times. I dimly remembered my father hugging me once before he disappeared. After that, it had been a long wait and then Carter held me close in many warm embraces. Not enough, of course, but many. Now this girl had simply stepped forward and pulled me close.
“Sh…sh.”
I put my head on her shoulder.
“It’s okay. You’re going to be fine, Elizabeth.”
“I am?”
“Hug me back,” she said. “I don’t have any lice now.”
“What’s lice?”
She smiled and put my head on her shoulder. “You’re like a baby and this is your first day, isn’t it? Sh…sh.”
Greta didn’t say, ‘sorry.’ That was new and nice.
14
After a time, I relaxed into Greta’s arms. She only pulled away when she was sure I was done crying.
“It’s your first day in Low Town,” she said. “What do you want to do?”
As if on cue, my stomach rumbled. “I’m hungry,” I said. “I have to urinate, too.”
“We’ll head down to the shore,” she said. “Or you can pee behind a pillar if you’re in a hurry.”
“Where is the bathroom?”
“Bathroom? You can bathe in the bay,” she said.
“Oh, no,” I said.
“The women usually go down to the water in the morning and the men go down to bathe at night.”
“Who made that rule?” I asked.
“It’s not a rule. It’s just how things work.”
“I see. And what am I going to do for food?”
“We’ll find you some. I’ve been doing some weeding so I’m sure no one will mind. Do you like carrots? It’s mostly root vegetables right now.”
“But how am I going to pay for things? What labor can I offer?”
As tender as she’d been with me moments before, Greta laughed at me then. “You’re from the City.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
“Tell me.”
“Only Phillip asks to be paid for things. The rest of us share.”
“How does that work?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if someone can’t work? How do they eat?”
“Everybody gets something to eat.”
“But how do you know how much to give everyone?”
“Sorry, Elizabeth. I don’t understand.”
It was as if I’d awoken on an alien planet. “Let’s put it this way: if a worker becomes ill, how many days do they get to recover before they go back to work?”
Greta looked at me strangely. “Wouldn’t that depend on how sick they were? I can’t choose for another how many days they stay sick. If we could choose, no one would ever be sick one day.”
“I was taught that sharing was tried once and it failed,” I said.
“That’s odd.”
“What?”
“Just because something doesn’t work once, you throw it away? Down here, when something’s broken, we fix it. I’ve been shown that this is how it works. Let me show you.” Greta took my hand, gave it a squeeze and led me through the rubble at the base of the City.
Everything I saw seemed alien and bad. Everything was good in its way, too. As a Citizen, I hadn’t known two contradictory things could be true at the same time. There is something about striving together that lifts the spirit.
In the towers’ concourse, I had seen Citizens step over a fallen man. They ignored his cries and let Maintenance sweep him away. Here, people seemed to enjoy giving to each other.
On our way down to the harbor, I saw several people huddle around a woman who had collapsed outside of her tent. It was obvious she was dying. I’d never seen a dying person but, instinctively, I knew.
The woman had no medicine. Greta stopped me and we joined a circle that grew and grew. Silent onlookers seemed to materialize from all directions. They joined hands and bowed their heads in silent witness to the event of one life’s end.
I’d never seen so many people in such a small space and I was eager to move on. I whispered to Greta, “What are we doing?”
“We have to say goodbye.”
“What was her name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then why — ”
“Doesn’t matter,” Greta said. “She’s one of us. Everyone is one of us.”
I looked up at the City. I didn’t say so, but I knew how wrong Greta was about that.
The Worm turned high above us. I thought about the people on board, behind those dark windows. At that moment, a Citizen might have been looking down on me. Thanks to Vivid, all they would see was dirt and rocks and emptiness. That thought made me angry again. It reminded me of the battle drone’s assertion, and the utter certainty in the machine’s words. Sy Potter said I didn’t matter.
The monorail’s low hum was the music that ushered the woman out of this world and, hopefully, into another. She was the first dead person I ever saw.
They lived in squalor, but as the refugees around me began to sing a sweet lament, I thought how sterile my life had been.
Their voices rose and my spirit, too, was raised. Men and women and children of all races and sizes joined hands and, as they sang a song I didn’t know, they swayed together.
I remember a phrase from the song. It was: she’s closer to the sky now.
Their unity in grief lifted the people of Low Town. As I stared up at the City in the Sky, I allowed myself a grim smile.
There’s something about confronting birth and death that invites prayer, even among non-believers and the uninitiated. As the people of Low Town prayed for the dead stranger, I prayed for the first time.
Carter taught me a forbidden word. He used it when he was talking about the battle drones. I used it then in my first soft, whispered prayer. The people of Low Town talked about God often but I didn’t know anything about that. Instead, I prayed to the Future. “Give me the strength,” I said, “to bring those fuckers down.”
15
The harbor was an alien landscape. From my enclosed deck, the view beyond the wind turbines was open water. From my new perspective, the harbor was a city of its own. From the pier to the houseboats to the skiffs floating in the shadow of the City in the Sky, I could have walked all the way out to sit at the base of the turbines’ spinning blades.
Far to our left, I saw the container ship run aground as I had always seen it. The expanse between was a seascape of sailing ships rocking gently along a network of wharves. Farther out to sea, more ships stood at their moorings.
“Those ships, far out…are they too big to come in?”
“Some of them,” Greta said. “Most are warships.”
“Warships?”
“Of course.”
“For what?”
“To keep out the pirates, Phillip says.”
“But you don’t believe that?”
“Of course not. If it comes from the City in the Sky, it’s a lie.”
“That’s a useful rhyme,” I said. “So why are they out there?”
“To keep out more refugees. Only the sanctioned traders come to the bay.”
“Where do the rest go?”
Greta shrugged. “They come from villages. They’re turned away. The sailors say they go to villages up and down the coast. There’s even a castle down that way.” She pointed.
“A castle? Really? Like in little Takers’ stories?”
“You mean children’s stories?”
“Yes.”
“But the castle’s real,” she said. “My mother saw it once. It’s called Hearst. A ship that isn’t allowed to come into port here can go there.”
“What do they trade?”
“Oh, many things. The far gathering place by the water has a drum that cleans the water of salt. We had to give up one of our electricians for two months for one of those machines. In return a man comes up from the castle and keeps the drum working right.”
“You have electricians?”
“Oh, yes. Three hours a night the City sends us energy.”
“Why do they do that?”
“That’s part of the bargain that keeps us working for them.”
I watched the ships. Two drones flew overhead side by side but I saw none working along the piers. “Why don’t they use drones to unload the ships?”
Greta covered her mouth and whispered, “The traders refuse to deal with them. The machines are in control here but not up and down the coast. The coast is Gear free.”
“Gear?”
“It’s another word for the machines we use when we’re sure they aren’t around. From here on out, cover your mouth if you have something to say like that. There are cameras everywhere and Old Sam says, even if they can’t hear you, they might read lips.”
“Maybe they can hear us,” I said, “but they don’t think we matter enough to care.”
We walked farther along a boardwalk. An old sign hung over us, faded and weatherbeaten. It read: Fishermans Wharf.
“What do the traders have to trade?”
“Depends on which traders. I like the relic traders. They scavenge the Deadlands for Old World finds.”
“Like what?”
“The City pays well for old computers. One ship got a load of mangoes for a ton of old parts. The mangoes didn’t even go into the City. The ships sat side by side and for every box of old parts that went through the City gate, the captain got a big box of mangoes.”
“Why computer parts? There must be tons of those relics. What good are they now? All the data is dead.”
“There are great rewards for those parts. Rare earth is rare. Old Sam says they’re reclaiming lithium. I don’t know what else. Takes a lot to keep drones working, I guess.”
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