Citadel 32: A Tale of the Aggregate

by Tom Merritt

  “Oh, that crap,” said LeAnn. “I remember being incredibly bored by that. I was way more into the practical physics. I think I may have skipped some of the demos to do extra credit in mechanics lessons.”

  Corge and Ibrahima just stared at LeAnn.

  “What?” she said.

  “You skipped demos? The most fun thing in all Student levels?” Corge gaped.

  “Your assignment was never in doubt, was it?” said Ibrahima.

  “I think the delivery doctor made her a Specialist in tunnel maintenance,” Corge joked, still somewhat slack-jawed. This made Ibrahima chuckle.

  LeAnn refused to take the bait. “Whatever. You can have your boring fantasies. That’s why we’re in this Assembly. A bunch of people who think too much, who liked doing demos instead of dealing with reality.”

  Corge spoke gently. “Sorry, LeAnn. Didn’t mean to tease. But the butterfly effect is practical. It’s just long term. It’s like a small drip from a water return conduit that would eventually lose us gallons of our water. It’s a small drip, but you want to stop it, right?”

  LeAnn didn’t want to let go of her annoyance, but she let Corge lead her anyway. “Of course.”

  “So the disappointment from a failed response is like a small leak. If the leak is necessary to make sure our plants get watered in time for harvest, we live with it and fix it afterward, right?”

  “Maybe,” she begrudged.

  “Otherwise, you fix the leak right away, even if you have to shut off water for a while.”

  “OK.”

  “Well, the transmission is a drip. It won’t cause immediate revolution. But it could destabilize the psychology of the station, which even someone as practical as you knows is fragile. So are we watering plants or not? That’s what’s up for debate.”

  “You know, Corge, you’re a real jerk,” laughed LeAnn. “You just made me understand the butterfly effect.”

  Ibrahima placed a hand on Corge’s shoulder. “That was impressive.”

  Before she could continue, the members of the Assembly began returning for the vote. “Here we go,” she said, and headed back to her seat.

  It didn’t take very long. A culture like Armstrong’s learned to be efficient at everything, even bureaucracy. A constant threat against survival proved to be one way of making government work.

  Each Executive in the Assembly approached Serafina, who registered their vote and allowed them to verify it. The vote would go into the record, normally made public immediately. This session would only become public right away if the decision to transmit was supported. After the last vote was registered, Serafina waited for the Executive to return to her seat. Serafina would only vote in case of a tie.

  “Does anyone object to the vote?” she asked the chamber.

  Silence.

  “Then it will be considered a binding decision of every person here. The vote favors transmission. Ibrahima is charged with overseeing the procedure. Roger Hu will carry out messaging. That is all.”

  “Outrage!” one of the Passives yelled. A few members stopped and looked stunned at the outburst.

  “Is that normal?” Corge whispered to LeAnn. She shrugged and looked as surprised as he felt.

  Serafina had already turned to leave the chamber, paused and turned back. She had a very genuine and very real version of the steely glare she had pretended earlier in the day.

  “The decision. Is binding. On every person here.”

  Corge heard malice in every word. The unspoken threat almost overpowered the meaning of the statement. Ibrahima rose and moved toward Serafina. Most of the chamber had been leaving but now stopped.

  More Passives began to gather together, shouting.

  “Madness!”

  “You’ll wreck us all!”

  “It’s suicide!”

  “STOP!” Serafina shouted. “I call for an emergency reassembly. NOW!”

  “I think I know why she was chosen as Assembly Leader,” whispered LeAnn. She and Corge both fell quickly into their seats at her shout. The Assembly itself rapidly returned to sit down and Corge experienced the most awkward silence ever.

  “You don’t agree with the decision.” Serafina spoke calmly, but her rage and fire simmered underneath. “You seem to imply it is dangerous. Is it more dangerous than overturning our system of government? Are you Students who cry when a referee’s call in their games goes against them? Do you somehow feel that you are the only privileged members who understand the world, and the rest of your co-citizens are imbeciles?

  “For that is how it appears. I call a vote of censure.” An audible gasp came from the Assembly. Even Corge knew censure from the Assembly was an accusation of a serious crime almost on the level of wasting resources. The few who had ever been censured were effectively ruined. Not a small punishment in a society as small and closed as Armstrong.

  The Passives who had begun the shouting earlier looked shocked and angered and were beginning to stand. Ibrahima seemed about to rise to object when Serafina continued.

  “The subject of potential censure is myself. Voice vote. I can only assume that my incompetence did not allow for a full and fair discussion of the issue. Therefore I call censure on myself. All in favor?”

  Not a squeak. Not a chair moved. Nobody coughed. Even the air vents seemed unusually quiet.

  “Opposed?” A firm but somewhat muted “No,” rumbled through the chamber.

  “That’s settled. Emergency Assembly adjourned. Let’s have no more unpleasantness.”

  “Brilliant,” mused Corge.

  “More like stupid,” said LeAnn. “What if they’d voted yes?”

  “Not a chance,” said Corge. “Only the Passives would even have thought about it, and she gave them no time to think. She gambled, very safely in my opinion, that they wouldn’t be mad enough to ruin her life over this, especially without consideration, and she gave them none. She just avoided weeks of problems.”

  “Maybe,” said Ibrahima, walking up and overhearing the last of what Corge said. “Or she may have just brought a simmer to a boil. I think the stove’s still hot, in any case. Expect a more subtle opposition now, but expect it nonetheless, Corge. Come. We have work to do.”

  CAPITULUM 4

  Michael had told Guteerez almost everything. Almost. He expected there would be an encryption scheme to break after authorization, and he had been right. He only hinted at that vaguely in his talk with Guteerez.

  What he couldn’t have known when he talked to Guteerez was that he would stumble on the decryption key and break it so easily. He marveled at the brilliant simplicity of the key.

  Michael loved the ancient things that filled the Reliquary. He loved to imagine the past when those things were new. Before he began spending all his time in the Sculpture’s room, he had spent time exploring another room with artifacts from the Metalwork Age. That age encompassed the first widespread forging of metals up to the first widespread manufacture of complex machinery. The first written records from that age came from civilizations like the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Chinese, Mayan, Greek, Roman, Umayyad, Aztec and Incan.

  He particularly liked the Rosetta Stone with its various languages and the story of how it was used to help decipher the meanings of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. He was inspired by that story when he discovered that the Sculpture’s encryption used an old alphabet from the Electrical Age called Cyrillic. However, the letters made no sense, even in the languages known to have used that alphabet.

  Taking a cue from the Rosetta Stone, he transliterated the Cyrillic into another alphabet, Greek, and then another alphabet, Latin. That didn’t work. So he went from Cyrillic to Arabic to Latin. Then he tried a few more combinations, favoring ending in Latin because that was the alphabet most used by the Citadels.

  He finally hit on it—Cyrillic to Greek to Manchu to Latin. The text became clear to read as anything written in his own time, albeit with some old-fashioned phrasing.

  He hid his research materials and
made himself memorize the Greek and Manchu alphabets before returning the books to the library. He didn’t want anybody to know what he’d done. He had checked out the books with the alphabets along with several other historical texts so nobody could tell which books were important to his research.

  Strangely, Dabashi had not been around to bother him. Guteerez only looked in to say hello and remind him to give the signal if he unlocked anything more. It had been ridiculously easy to hide his progress.

  He decided to try entering an actual draft message and proceed right up to the transmission point. He hadn’t yet dared pass beyond the “message creation” option. It made him nervous. He took a deep breath and bent his head down to the control box. He was exhausted. He was pushing himself too hard. He rested his forehead against the flat metal. It wasn’t comfortable, but it still felt good to rest.

  He woke with a jarring bump and the sound of a motor. He must have fallen asleep. He felt wind rushing by from outside. He opened his eyes to darkness, punctured by pinpoints of light floating in his vision. Was he sick? The points waved around, making him feel nauseated. His eyes adjusted and he realized he wasn’t in the Reliquary anymore. In fact, he wasn’t sure where he was.

  He bounced again and felt the whole room he was in bounce with him. The wind wasn’t blowing on him. It wasn’t a breeze. It was coming in through the same places where the light was. He was in a cart. A tarp covered him, and he saw light coming through where it was tied to the sides of the cart.

  His mouth felt dry and he had a splitting headache. He hadn’t felt this bad since the last time he had the flu. The bouncing cart didn’t help. The last thing he remembered was working at the control box near the Sculpture in the Reliquary. He tried to piece together anything else after that. He had heard a noise, maybe greeted some people, but he couldn’t tease out any details. Every time he thought he had a clear memory, it escaped him.

  Finally, the cart rolled to a stop and someone threw the canvas off. The sun hung low in the sky and blinded him. They must have spent most of the day rolling along. Two men with bandannas reached in through the blinding light and pulled him out. It felt like a dream.

  “I’m a spaceman,” he heard himself say to the bandanna men, and he felt like one. One of the men grunted a laugh and the other shushed him. He now understood the term “lightheaded.” He’d never felt like this before. It really felt the way he imagined the people on the Moon must feel. Supposedly, gravity worked differently there and people were lighter. He bobbed along with the two men holding him firmly. He felt like they needed to hold him to keep him from floating away.

  “Thank you,” he said. Again, he spoke without meaning to.

  At that moment, he noticed where he was, and it wasn’t like anything he’d ever seen. He had never been outside New York’s Citadel area. The farthest he’d ever been from Manhattan Island were short trips into the countryside to the east. A lovely farm in Queenlyn provided the fresh produce for the kitchens in the Complex. As a younger Monk, he had to go on several trips to bring the produce back in an autocart.

  But that was a land of buildings amid grass. The gardens there grew among the ruins of the Citadelian civilization. While more open than Manhattan, it still had structure. It still looked like civilization, just a greener, sunnier and more open civilization than the island of the Citadel.

  That was what he thought of as the country. This, where he had been taken against his will, was the wilderness. He dared to worry that it might even be the Devastation. The men led him toward a small metal shack with wavy walls. Could bombs have done that to walls? He still wasn’t thinking clearly.

  Other than the shack, nothing else was around in any direction. Not even trees. He saw some light green on the ground in the distance, though underfoot was only a coarse, grey gravel of some sort. Some plants lived out here but nothing big, and nothing numerous.

  “It’s almost dead,” he muttered.

  The grunting man openly laughed this time, and the other man reached in front of Michael to punch the grunter, snapping, “Shut up!” The man sounded irritated and mean.

  The front of the metal shack was red with rust. The structure had four walls and a roof slapped together with whatever lay at hand without an ounce of effort spent on making things work well. A faded, red, plastic sheet hung there, tied to the metal on the left with rope in three places to serve as a door. On the right, a loop of black plastic attached the plastic sheet to a flap of metal cut out from the wall. This was shelter at its crudest.

  The mean man worked the plastic loop while the grunting man held Michael. The lightheadedness had begun to fade during the walk and his headache roared back. He also felt the nausea return. He longed to be lightheaded again. As he settled into his body again, he felt a multitude of small agonies clamoring for his attention.

  The mean man pulled the red, plastic flap back and the grunting man pulled Michael through the doorway. The room inside was roughly square. A hole had been cut out of the back to let in the light from the setting sun. In that dim light, Michael saw a wooden door set on a stack of logs to serve as a table along the wall on the left. He wondered why they didn’t use the door as a door and have the plastic sheet serve as the tabletop. Too much work to make a real door work with the thin metal, he supposed.

  On the makeshift table sat an unlighted fuel lamp. Its base was clear and Michael could see three quarters of the fuel was burned off. Several unmatched wooden and plastic chairs were scattered about the room. A huge, soft-looking blob of a material Michael had never seen before sat to the right near a battery heater. So these weren’t Heretics. He had worried until he saw the heater. Heretics never touched battery devices. They would use electricity but only direct from the sun as they thought it the only pure source and self-limiting, as fit their theology.

  A series of maps and charts hung on the metal walls, attached with some kind of adhesive Michael couldn’t see. Some of the maps had red and yellow markers on them. He recognized the map of Manhattan and a marker indicating where the Citadel stood. The rest made no sense to him.

  Aside from the two bandanna men who had brought him in, the only other person in the room was a withered old man with grey hair who sat in an odd, black plastic chair that seemed to have wheels under it. Who would want to sit in a chair that would move around under them? But the man sat quite well, spun around and wheeled over to them quite deftly.

  Michael thought maybe the man was disabled until he stood and strode toward the three of them with his hand out.

  “Welcome, Michael. I’m Jackson. Proud to meet you.”

  Michael just started at the hand. “Proud to meet you” was a greeting of the Heretic movement. What little remained of it.

  “But you have a battery heater,” Michael spluttered almost without meaning to. He was back in his own brain but not quite in full command of his faculties yet.

  The man burst out laughing. “A phrase doesn’t make a philosophy. I sympathize with many of the things the Heretics believe. But I don’t sympathize with their lack of comforts when I can get them. I suppose that’s confusing to a sheltered Monk like you who believes the world is being reordered by the Authority. Well, consider this the real beginning of your education, Michael.”

  “What are you?”

  “I’m Jackson, I told you,” He looked down. “You’re not going to shake my hand?” he knitted his eyebrows in a look of worry. “Seems rude.”

  Michael let the man grab his hand in what felt more like coercion than greeting. Jackson worked Michael’s arm like a puppet being worked by a master.

  “Much better. Have a seat,” Jackson motioned to one of the wooden chairs as he sat back in the black chair with wheels. “I know this isn’t up to your usual standards of comfort, but it’s all we have. The Authority may not consider us Heretics, but they don’t allow us too many freedoms either. They don’t like those of us who don’t play along.”

  “But if you’re not a Heretic and you don’
t work for the Authority, you’re a Free Citizen. You must pay the support fees, certainly, but they are fair. Do you not work?”

  Jackson began to laugh, but it faded into a grunt of anger. “No, Michael. We don’t work. We steal. Why? Because, even though your Monk-addled brain will have a difficult time believing it, it gets us better accommodations than most so-called Free Citizens have.”

  Michael shook his head. “That’s not true. I see Citizens every day in Manhattan—”

  Jackson cut him off “Manhattan! Yes, and how do you get to live there? You already live there. Or you are related to someone who lives there. Or have a good relationship with a Superior or Factor or someone even higher up who lives there. You don’t move there and find a place to live. Not unless you want to live in Queenlyn or Jorsey. Or risk your life refarming the South Island.”

  “Those aren’t bad places. I’ve been to Queenlyn many times.”

  “Have you? To the Authority’s farms, I bet. Oh yes. Sunny people in the sunny farms. But try buying food there as a Free Citizen. ‘Farm it yourself!’ they yell and drive you out. But on what land? No, they don’t show you the outbuildings. The refuges. The camps. Free Citizens live in camps, Michael. Did you know that?”

  “Of course,” he said, feeling an unusual defensiveness for the order. “I’ve even visited one of the Jorsey campgrounds. It’s a service for those transitioning to new ways of living. They provide shelter and education.”

  “Ha! They recruit, you mean. And if you’re not interested in being recruited they ‘transfer you.’ To where? Out here, in the Desolation. Because, as you might have guessed, that’s where you are. Ha. I see your fear. No worries. The stories of rads are exaggerated. You can die out here, sure, but not from standing around. At least, not from catching rads while standing around, anyway. Come on. I’ll show you.”

  The two nameless men, whom Jackson seemed to have no inclination to introduce, tied Michael’s hands behind him and took him back outside. Now that his head had cleared, the landscape looked less dreamlike and daunting and more just empty. He got his first good look at the cart he’d arrived in. He’d never seen anything like it.