“Rare earth? What is that?”
“Minerals. Good for drone bones, Old Sam says. A lot of the places it comes from aren’t there anymore. Nuked.”
The Fathers and Mothers had erased inconvenient images. It appeared their censors had also erased so much much vocabulary, I didn’t even know of all the things I didn’t know. “Nuked? And what’s that?”
“Like Germany,” Greta said. “It means it’s not there anymore.”
“Where do they say these places went?”
“Some say the people became shadows painted on crumbling walls. Others believe the people turned to drifts of dust that the wind sifts and takes somewhere far away where there’s no pain.”
“Sounds like little Takers’ stories. Can’t be true.”
“I don’t think so, either, but I know the City used to bring old comm tech in by the ton down the coast. By the shit-ton, my mother says. Lots of little boxes with glass lids the sailors say. There’s a smelter somewhere. The sailors talk about it all the time. The smokestacks burn night and day. They say they burn dinosaurs. You know what those are?”
“More silly stories. Giant lizards. I’ve seen pictures. The Fathers and Mothers say they’re a test. When I was a little girl, a High Father asked me if I believed in the stories of big lizards from a long time ago. He asked if I believed that the lizards were killed by rocks thrown from space. I said I did. My mother said that was what ruined things for me. I might have been a Maker instead of in Service.”
“Service is good,” Greta said. “Everyone’s in service, really.”
“I don’t know if that’s true.”
She smiled. “I know.”
“You’re very sure of yourself for a fifteen-year-old.”
“How old are you, Elizabeth? Really tell me this time.”
“Almost thirty.”
“That’s old,” she said. “Who told you that you shouldn’t be confident?”
That question troubled me so much I didn’t answer. “Greta, what are mangoes?”
“Fruit. They’re really sweet. I’ve had a few. My mother knows people.”
I considered this and searched the air for wafts of monster pollen again. “Greta? Do you know what a peach is?”
“Of course,” she said. “Had one of those, too.”
“The City doesn’t take them?”
“Of course they do.”
“I’ve never had a peach. I wonder where they all go. My mother remembered them from when she was a little girl, but — ”
“Low Town gets a little of every trade that’s allowed through the port.”
“Like with the three hours of energy each night?”
“Yes. The Liaison says it’s to pacify the populace without killing workers.”
“Then how come I’ve never had a peach?”
Greta touched my arm and gave me a friendly squeeze. “How can you be so old and so gullible? They need workers down here to deal with the sailors. That’s why they let you live.”
“Oh.”
“If the City shares,” she said, “it’s not because they care. It’s because they’re scared.”
“Another useful rhyme,” I said. “Someday, I’d like to tell it to the Fathers and Mothers face to face.”
16
As we picked our way along the water’s edge I began to relax. Even at this early hour, many people worked along the piers. Greta told me that when the sun rose high in the sky, if the wind died, everyone would stop to take a nap in the middle of the day.
“Doesn’t the Liaison object?”
“I suppose he used to but we own the docks. They need us.”
“How far do the ships come from?”
“Everywhere that’s left,” Greta said, “but this is the last great city. There is another large community far away that’s sort of like this but they don’t have a City in the Sky. Just a lot of people.”
“Where’s that?”
“East, somewhere. It’s called Shelburne. The sailors say it used to be the third best harbor in the world. Now it’s the best. Lots of fish. No dead zones, but too far from here.”
“Dead zones? Like in the Deadlands?”
“Kind of. Dead zones in the water are like Blight on the land.”
“I was told that Blight was everywhere.”
“Well, I’ve had mangoes and peaches so — ”
“I understand,” I said. “The Fathers and Mothers lie from the bottom of their hearts — ”
“And through their faces!” Greta said.
We laughed together. Her laughter was joyful and mine was bitter. I wondered where all the mangoes and peaches went while I was drinking kale shakes. No doubt the High Fathers and High Mothers got first pick of the best cargo. I knew the City was made possible by hoarding resources. I hadn’t suspected that the Fathers and Mothers were keeping resources from Citizens, too.
At the center of the port, a large concrete bunker lay at the feet of the City’s central pillars. Beneath the bunker, the dark maw of a tunnel lay open. Men and women wheeled wooden boxes up to the building where a very tall drone stood. As tall as three men, the silver bot bent its knee joints backwards to lower itself closer to the humans it spoke to. It gestured with both arms, but one arm was missing below the second elbow.
“That’s the gate to the City,” Greta said. “The tall drone is Percival. He checks the cargo. Phillip is in the bunker. He makes the deals.”
“Is it always this busy here?”
“No, not at all. In the winter, we can go days and days without seeing a new ship. When that happens, the energy is held back and there are no shipments for us to take our share from. We grow a lot of root vegetables to make it through the lean times. We have a lot of soup but I like soup, especially if there’s some meat in it.”
“There’s meat?”
“Of course.”
“What kind of meat? Is it all rabbits?” I shuddered.
“Goats, mostly. Rabbit sometimes. Up north there are a lot of deer. They say the fewer people there are, the more venison there is. The people up north are fierce hunters. They eat well. The people down south are strong gatherers. They eat well. Fortunately, we’re in the middle, trading back and forth.”
“What does your mother do?”
“She knits.”
“What’s that?”
“You know. Sheep’s wool? For your clothing.”
“Oh.” I looked down at myself. From my shoes to my pants to my blouse, everything I wore was plain black and made of hemp. I envied some of the men and women along the pier who wore brightly colored shirts and skirts. In the City, Service workers dressed in black. Makers wore bright colors. Black didn’t show dirt so it didn’t have to be washed as much. The people of Low Town didn’t seem to mind a little dirt.
“What was it like, Elizabeth?”
“What do you mean?”
“In the towers. They say you can see forever from up there.”
“The moon felt a lot closer,” I admitted, “but I never saw all this in the bay.”
Greta told me the term for what I was doing was people watching. “Didn’t you do that in the City?”
I shook my head. “All the same people all the time. It’s considered impolite to stare. There aren’t that many Citizens.”
“So what did you do? Stare at the floor the whole time so no one would get offended?”
That was another question I was uncomfortable answering.
“What did you do?” Greta asked. “For the Fathers and Mothers, I mean.”
“Nothing, really. I moved some files around.”
“What’s that?”
“Like I said. Nothing, really.”
“But what was each day like? I can only imagine the way you lived.” Her eyes shone bright with expectation.
I could tell my answer disappointed her. “I didn’t do anything of consequence that lasted and every day was pretty much like another. The one time each day was different and exciting…the F
athers and Mothers kicked me out for it.”
“How could they do that?”
“It was a little more complicated, but….”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Greta said.
“You don’t want to know?”
“Yes, but if you were ready to say why you got exiled, you would have told me by now.”
“Thank you, Greta.”
“But you will tell me sometime, right?”
I laughed. “Yes. It started with a man.”
“Ooh, sex crime!”
“What? It wasn’t like that! Not exactly.”
She giggled. “I bet it was! When exiles come to us, that’s usually why.”
“Usually?”
“I can think of one who came out of the City on his own.”
“Who was the exception?”
Greta put a hand over her mouth and whispered in my ear. “Jim Kimbo.”
“Who was that?”
“The legend. He’s the one who broke off Percival’s arm. Technically, he wasn’t an exile, I guess. He escaped the City in the Sky. Then he protested the terms of our bargain. He tried to renegotiate with Phillip. When they couldn’t come to terms, Phillip ordered Percival to kill Jim Kimbo. Jim Kimbo went at the bot with a fire ax!”
“The man took an ax to that tree of a drone?”
“Not exactly.”
“What does that mean?”
“Percival was ordered to pull Kimbo apart. There must have been something wrong with the drone’s hydraulics at the second articulation. When Percival tried to do as he was told, his arm came off at the joint.”
“What happened then? Did Kimbo escape?”
“No. Phillip bashed his head against the wall of the tunnel until there was a red stripe all the way down the wall. From the top to the inner gate, they say.”
I stared at Greta horrified.
The girl nodded earnestly. “It was a short-lived revolt.”
At that moment, a young man of about twenty emerged from the bunker and trotted up to Percival. The silver drone bent close and nodded a lot as the human spoke into his ear.
“Who is that man? The one talking to the tall drone?”
“That’s Phillip. Look closer. He’s an android.”
At a distance and without Vivid, my eyes were no longer good enough to pick up any detail that told me I was looking at an android made to look like a human. “Can’t tell,” I whispered to Greta, “but I hate him already.”
I looked up, searching for my room and my deck. It was too far up for me to see. If I’d had a bed to crawl back into, I might have done it then.
Then I remembered my rage at the drones and the Fathers and Mothers. That was enough to keep me moving and searching for a way back into the City in the Sky.
17
Greta introduced me to people she knew up and down the pier. The girl seemed to know everyone. She was friendly, but wily, too. Some sailors flirted with her and she flirted back but never long before moving on and promising to come back when she was older and they were more handsome. They all laughed in good cheer and I envied the girl the social skills she seemed to come by so easily.
As a new exile, I had the unexpected benefit of high status. Greta was sure to exploit that fact to maximum effect. Several sailors gave us bits of food as congratulations and welcome: pine nuts, acorns, chestnuts and a mealy apple. Greta took one bite and I ate the rest. My first apple was delicious. She cleaned her teeth with the apple stem.
I didn’t know what to do with the rest of the food. Greta said chestnuts and acorns had to be roasted and she didn’t know what to do with the pine nuts, either. However, she thought we’d do better to trade what we’d been gifted at the market.
“There’s carrot soup with rabbit at my tent,” Greta said. “Let’s trade at the bazaar and see what we can get. It’s your first day. The best deals you’ll ever get are now. It’s not much to bargain with, but in Low Town, it’s polite to be generous.”
“How does that work?”
“What do you mean?”
“How can everybody be generous all the time?”
“Obviously, everyone can’t. Can’t give what you don’t have,” she said.
“So how is it polite to be generous? It’s stupid.”
“I can’t wait to have more so I can give it away, Elizabeth. Haven’t you ever given anyone anything?”
“Huh?”
Greta sighed. “My mother makes wonderful sweaters. Warm in winter. The Bay can be cold, even in summer. Sweaters are good sellers no matter the season.”
“So?”
“She trades the sweaters for something.”
I looked down at my handful of acorns. “But what if I have nothing to trade with? Or not enough.”
“Someone will have enough and you can let them trade for you. When you have more, you can give more, too.”
“But if someone is trading for me, then someone is always losing out.”
Greta quirked an eyebrow as if I was the obtuse one. “Generosity feels good. Besides, how many sweaters does any one person need? One, right?”
“I follow that, yeah. But what if I like all my sweaters and want to keep them?”
“No one is going to take extra sweaters from you,” she said. “But people who have a lot and don’t share their luck don’t have many friends. They also can’t trust the ones they have.”
“But it takes work to get things, not luck.”
“Having work is lucky, isn’t it? And what’s the use of work if it doesn’t help people? Work is about helping people, not having too many sweaters. If you share without working, aren’t you saving time and trouble? You’re sparing work.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. It sounded crazy. However, it seemed to work in Low Town. I suspected it was a system that succeeded because everyone seemed to have so little. If they had better stuff to fight over, maybe then the bartering would collapse and murders would break out everywhere.
I felt pretty smug about that. Then I remembered that I’d been evicted from my room, exiled from the City and I didn’t have a thing in my pockets. I had worked and done as I was told all my life until recently. Still, I had nothing and I’d left nothing behind. Also, I had to admit, I didn’t know the names of any of my neighbors.
Jon had been my friend for a day or two. Then he reported me when he couldn’t handle the workload anymore. Carter had been my secret friend and the Fathers and Mothers hadn’t allowed that. When I thought the security measures were meant to keep out monster pollen that would poison our food supply, I accepted constant surveillance by annoying little Doormen.
Now that I knew the City in the Sky was built on pillars of concrete and lies, I realized I’d been fooled. I’d been eager to find fault with Low Town’s strange system where Makers and Takers had been replaced by Givers. But the Fathers and Mothers had left me with less than Low Town would have allowed.
“Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated, Greta?”
“Of course,” the girl said, “but maybe not as bad as you. I’ve never known heaven. You’ve been kicked out of it.”
“The City in the Sky isn’t heaven,” I said. “But I’m going to find a way to make it closer to that.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Take me to your leader.”
“I told you — ”
“We’ll start with Old Sam. He knows people, right? Not whether they are alive or dead at the bottom of a blind alley, but he knows people?”
“Sure. He’s an Older. No work nor trades to do so all he has to do is jaw and look adorable. That’s what he says.”
“I guessed. The first thing I need to do is find all the other sex criminals. Let’s get the exiles together.”
“Why?”
“Because the people who have been inside might know the way back in and what to do when they get there.”
“What’s your plan?”
“I don’t have one yet. That’s why I n
eed them.”
Greta looked worried. “Elizabeth, you aren’t trying to end up like Jim Kimbo, are you? We have a system in Low Town. It sort of works. Trying to change it isn’t worth your life.”
“I’m not doing it to make things better in Low Town,” I said. “I’m doing it for everyone trapped in the towers.”
I was doing it for myself, too. Most of my reasons were probably selfish, actually. However, I didn’t say so. I was still a City girl at heart and we keep to ourselves.
18
I stayed in Greta’s tent. Her mother’s name was Iola. She was a friendly woman with long red hair streaked with gray. She worked at night in a warehouse by the pier sorting what came in from the ships.
While the warehouse lights burned in the night, their little tent was lit by a single candle. Vivid was a much more complex program that I’d thought. While Vivid had allowed me to work on computer screens with 3D images, it had blocked much more than it had allowed me to see.
The bay was a hive of activity yet I had never suspected all that went on there. From my soundproofed deck high above the harbor, I’d heard nothing of the sailor’s calls to each other and the ringing of their ships’ bells as they came into port.
While she worked at the pier, Iola allowed me to sleep in her bedroll at night. I slept back to back with Greta. As warm as Low Town could get during the day, the temperature dropped sharply at night.
It wasn’t only the warmth of Greta’s back against mine that comforted me. It was her presence. It seemed the people of Low Town were united against a common enemy in the City, yet they welcomed me gladly.
Of all the exiled, only two answered my invitation for a meeting the next night. The first was Sofia, a bio-engineer who had worked on upgrading Vivid. The other was Alejandro, a support tech from Maintenance.
Alejandro was quiet and listened more than he spoke. Sofia fidgeted with her hands and couldn’t seem to sit still. She helped out in a med tent now. Alejandro did odd jobs for old Low Towners who couldn’t perform tasks on their own.
“Do you miss it?” Sofia asked. “The towers, I mean?”
I shrugged. “I’m making friends.”
Sofia looked pensive. “Out here, I’m not afraid of the same things but I’m still afraid. In the City, I had work and things never changed. Now I’m not happy with the changes. We’re so low on medicine I see old people and children die each day. People die in Low Town who wouldn’t die if they were in the City.”
Robot Planet, The Complete Series (The Robot Planet Series) Page 7