Curious, Tayne circled up to stand behind the sculptor, keeping clear of the tarps. The old man was pointing up at a black rune scorched into the marble at the base of the statue. It almost looked like a brand had been burned into the governor’s marble foot.
Tayne recognized the rune. “Security services,” he said. “That just means they’ve checked the statue out for . . . for I don’t know what, really. But I suppose there are going to be a lot of important people here later.”
The man turned to face Tayne. He had an unpleasant sneer on his face now. “‘Important people,’ yes. Well, that’s relative.” He reached up and ran his fingers across the rune. “A literal stamp of authority,” he murmured. “How unimaginative.”
Tayne supposed the man was upset about what could be seen as a defacement of his work, but, “Why do you care? You said this was a knock-out job, didn’t you? They won’t pay you any less just because some arbitrator in Customs followed some regulation.”
The old man threw a sharp look at Tayne, but then smiled again. Tayne was starting to wonder just what the smiles meant. “‘Customs,’” he said. “Because you know that this piece, and me, its maker, must have come from offworld. And I took such trouble to adopt the appropriate dress.” He swept a hand down and out, displaying his artisan’s wear. “But of course,” he continued, “I haven’t been here long enough to pick up the subtleties of the local argot.”
Tayne said, “You’ve got a lot more work to do than just changing clothes and mimicking an accent if you want to pass for a local. You don’t act anything like Castellon-born. You’re too clean, for one thing. Even the quality people have ash in their skin here. It would take you years to pass.”
The sculptor nodded. “Years I don’t have, alas. I’m only here a few days. Just long enough for this ridiculous ceremony. Though I hope to see the famous volcano, of course.”
Old Vice was a hundred kilometers inland from the port, part of the coastal mountain chain that separated the city from the sparsely inhabited interior. The caldera was said to be spectacular, the largest on any world, and flights over it were a popular if dangerous activity. Tayne didn’t know anyone who had ever taken such a trip, though he’d once seen the volcano from a distance, back when he first hired on with the municipal authority, years before. One of the very first jobs he’d ever drawn was a scheduled maintenance check on the funicular that ran up to a civil-guard post overlooking the port from a nearby peak. It was still the farthest Tayne had ever been from the city proper, and he could still remember the views inland across the mountains, and out across the alkaline ocean.
“They say it’s something to see,” Tayne told the man. “Look, I need to get back to my crew, and we should probably cover your statue back up. If it’s going to be unveiled later then I’m guessing it’s supposed to be veiled when the dignitaries get here.”
The old man waved a dismissive hand. “Don’t trouble yourself. The ‘veil’ will be a silken drop cloth attached to a line. That way, whichever plutocrat is in charge will be able to pull it off in suitably dramatic fashion without the bother of ropes and rough canvas.”
Tayne hesitated. “Well,” he said after a moment’s consideration, “you know more about it than me, certainly. But listen, I can’t take responsibility if there’s some kind of trouble over it being uncovered now.”
Again, a dismissive wave. “Go, go, scrub the muck off all these wastes of marble and granite. If anyone asks, I’ll tell them I pulled off the canvas on my own. Just the sort of eccentric behavior one expects from an artist and an offworlder, yes?”
With that, he seemed to lose interest in conversing with Tayne. He pulled a fist-sized tin with a hinged top from one pocket and a broad-bladed putty knife from another. When he opened the tin, Tayne saw that it contained a white spackle the exact shade of the marble statue. Whistling tunelessly, the sculptor set about obscuring the blackened rune.
Clad in rubberized coveralls and heavy boots, wearing respirators that had been in service for too long, the crew loaded steaming garbage onto the scow. Tayne drove a skid steer loader checked out from the port authority, humping up piles of municipal detritus at the edge of the dock that half his crew then shoveled over the railing into the open-decked conveyance below. The others were down there, shifting and sorting with pitchforks, making sure that the load was evenly distributed and hoping for the odd piece of salvage, unlikely as that was.
Tayne estimated they were maybe a third of the way through the job when they all heard the explosion roll down over the city.
Tayne lowered the bucket of the loader and cut the power, clambering out of the machine as quickly as he could. Hap and the others working topside came trotting over, pulling off their respirators and babbling to one another.
“Gas main?” asked Hap, speaking to the group in general. Those kinds of accidents weren’t unheard of in the city, at least in the parts where the underground mains hadn’t been properly maintained in years. The parts of the city where they all lived. But no . . .
“It was up in the heights,” said Tayne, and as he started to put it together, Lizane and the rest from down on the scow topped the dock, climbing up from below along rope hawser netting. He saw the look of fear on Lizane’s face and knew that she was making the same guesses he was.
“What time is it?” Tayne asked.
The others looked at one another in confusion for a moment, and Tayne said again, “What time?” shouting now.
“Sixteen thirty,” said Hap. “Sixteen forty-five, something like that. Why?”
“They were all up there,” said Lizane. “They said the governor was going to be there, the mayors of all the settlements, who knows who all?”
Sirens were whining in the distance now, emergency services crews making their way up the hill. A thick plume of yellow and gray smoke rose inland.
“Even if they don’t blame us—” Lizane began, and Tayne cut her off.
“We’re done, we’re all done,” he said, thinking fast. He rubbed his hand across the back of his head, thinking about the questioning techniques of the municipal arbitrators. Thinking that questions from the planetary authorities would be even worse.
“What are you two talking about?” whined Hap. Tayne could see that he wasn’t alone in his confusion.
“Fool!” said Lizane. “Look where that smoke is coming from. Think about where we were this morning and why we were there.”
Hap looked vaguely toward the column of smoke. “The explosion was in the sculpture garden we cleaned out?” he asked. Then realization dawned on his face. “Gods,” he said, “do you think they’re all dead?”
Tayne said, “I think we’ll find out soon enough. We’ll all be put to the question.”
“But we don’t know anything!” said Hap.
Tayne thought about the sculptor. “I do,” he said. “I know that none of you saw anything. So when they come, just tell them that. And tell them that you saw me up at the statue with a stranger.”
There was a brief moment of silence, then Lizane said, “It won’t matter. They’ll still take us all in, and those of us with the wrong kind of records . . .”
She meant herself. Hell, she meant him.
“Give me your work chit,” he told her.
“Tayne,” she said, as soft as he’d ever heard her say anything, but she pulled the chit from where it hung on a leather cord around her neck.
He took it, stalked over to the edge of the dock, and dropped it into the scow. “You weren’t at work today,” he said. “Who else could I not find this morning?”
The crew looked at one another, figuring their chances. Two others pulled off their chits and handed them over.
“So, go to ground,” Tayne told those two and Lizane. “Get out of the city if you can. And if they catch you, just tell them exactly what happened and why. You were afraid of the authorities and I told you to run. Easy, right?”
Lizane was already stripping off her workboots. She spat, “E
asy, sure.”
“But why run at all?” shouted Hap. “Why would they blame us?”
Tayne said, “Because they’ll have to blame somebody. And we’re available.”
Lizane gave him an intense, unreadable look that Tayne supposed was a kind of good-bye, then she and the other two all headed different directions.
“The rest of you can wait here or head on home. If I were you, I’d find a bar and enjoy a drink. It’ll be the last one you have for a while.” Tayne walked over and sat on the bucket of the loader.
“What are you going to do?” asked Hap as the rest of the crew drifted aimlessly away.
Tayne started pulling off his boots. “I’m going to think up a story,” he said.
When the arbitrators came a half hour later, Tayne sneered at them and said, “How many did I get?”
The scar-faced man climbed down the scaffolding, clearly unfamiliar with the light spin-induced gravity this deep in the station. Twenty or so people were gathered in the dark, confined space, watching him in silence.
Finding a place to stand where they could all see him, he took a long time looking at them each in turn. “Too many,” he said. “If you’re just one cell, there are too many of you. If you’re more than one cell, you’ve compromised yourselves.”
A lanky bald woman sat up straighter. She wore the implants of a remote operator of a vacuum utility bot but had none of the distracted look that operators usually sported. “We’re moving to take this station in forty hours,” she said. “We’re past the point of secrecy. We’re ready to join the Free Communes.”
The scar-faced man would be off the station in just a few hours. He idly wondered how many of the people he could see would be dead in two days’ time. He wondered if they would succeed.
Another woman, this one dressed in the clean lines of an administrative aide, said, “Is she really here?”
There was a clanking noise from above, and the scar-faced man held up his hand to help down the limping figure who appeared out of the darkness. Around them, he heard the stationers reverently murmuring her name. “Lizane.”
At least they weren’t calling her “mother,” the way the last bunch had. Mother of the revolution.
Lizane looked at the stationers with a lot more sympathy than the scar-faced man had. She handed over the data drive they’d brought to him, and he, in turn, handed it to the bald woman. “Arbitrator codes,” he said, and half the reason they were there was behind them.
Then Lizane drew in a deep breath and started in on the rest of the reason.
“I knew him. I knew Tayne, and I was there the day he started the revolution . . .”
Nowhere Fast
The sky Luz rode under was a pale and hazy gray, its color burned away by sun and smoke years before she was born. Luz might have even called the sky white, but the zinc oxide sunscreen she and the others had dutifully spread over their skin was so stark against her brown arms and legs that there was no comparison.
Her grandmother said that when she was a teenager in California, thousands of miles distant and decades and decades gone in the past, girls welcomed the sun and used its rays to burn themselves darker. Luz had asked if that meant the girls didn’t know about skin diseases and sun lesions and her grandmother had answered with one of the private gestures they shared. Hand to head, then hand to heart meant that knowing something and believing it weren’t the same thing.
Right now, Luz couldn’t believe that tiny Priscilla was steadily pulling away from her on the long climb up from the ferry. She pushed harder on her bicycle’s pedals, trying to match the rhythm of the turning wheels to her rapid breathing. Still, the younger girl danced on ahead, standing on her pedals, apparently unaware that she was leaving Luz and the others behind.
There were four of them out on their bikes, fifteen miles from town and taking their time getting to the upland field of strawberries they were scheduled to hoe free of weeds. Luz had sent her younger brother, Caleb, to the work hall with strict instructions to find something far from town. She’d been pleased when he brought back the slip listing a work site on the bluffs above the Kentucky River—far enough and different enough from town that she could pretend she was really travelling—but slightly annoyed that Sammy and Priscilla came trailing in after him.
She liked Priscilla, but had assumed—mistakenly, it turned out—that the young girl would slow them down. She liked Priscilla’s brother Sammy well enough, too, but he’d lately started liking her back in a way she just didn’t reciprocate. It made for some awkward talk when they went out on the same community-service jobs.
Not that there had been much call for talk on the long ride out, especially not as they crested the hill, breathing hard.
Up ahead, Priscilla signaled a stop, and at first Luz thought she was finally tiring. But then the girl spoke.
“Is that an engine?” Priscilla asked, eyes wide.
Luz stopped beside her, struggling to slow her breath so she could hear the howling sound floating over the fields better. Hard to say how far away the noise was, but it was clearly in motion. And moving closer, fast.
Caleb and Sammy stopped beside them and dismounted.
“It is,” said Caleb, excitement in his voice. “Internal combustion, not too big.”
Even though Caleb was the scholar of the group, Sammy couldn’t pass up an opportunity to try to impress Luz. “Not like on any of the Federal machines, though,” he said. “Not like anything I’ve ever heard.”
Luz thought of the last time one of the great Army recruitment trucks had come through Lexington, grinding and belching and trumpeting its horn. It had been the previous autumn. Her parents had made her hide in one of the sheds behind the house, even though she was only sixteen and the Federals weren’t supposed to draft anyone younger than eighteen. She had stood behind a tidy stack of aluminum doors her mother had salvaged from the ghost suburbs south of town and listened to the engine closely.
The Army engine had been a deeper sound than this, though whatever was approaching was not as high as the mosquito buzz of the little motors on the sheriff’s department chariots. If the deputies rode mosquitoes, then the Federals rode growling bears. This was something in between, a howling wolf.
The noise dropped away briefly, stuttered, and then came back louder than ever.
“Whatever it is, it just turned into the lane,” Luz told the others. She dismounted and waved for them all to move their bikes into the grassy verge to one side. They’d stopped at a point where the road was bound on either side by low dry-stone walls. A pair of curious chestnut quarter horses, fully biological, not the hissing mounts of Federal outriders, ambled over briefly, hopeful of treats, but they snorted and trotted away as the noise came closer.
Suddenly, the sound blared as loud as anything Luz had ever heard and a . . . vehicle rounded the curve before them. Luz flashed on the automobile carcasses some people kept as tomato planters. She saw four wheels, a brace of 55-gallon drums, and a makeshift seat. The seat was occupied by a distracted looking young man wrestling a steering wheel as he hurtled past them, forcing them to move even farther off the road.
The vehicle fishtailed from side to side on the crumbling pavement, sputtering, and came to an abrupt halt when it took a hard left turn and hit the wall on the south side of the road. The top two layers of rock slid into the field as the noise died away.
They all ran toward the crash. Luz could see now that the vehicle was a modified version of a hay wagon, sporting thick rubber tires and otherwise liberally outfitted with ancient automobile parts. The seat was a cane-bottomed rocker with the legs removed, screwed to the bed. The young man was strapped into the chair, with a dazed expression on his face.
The huge metal engine that took up most of the wagon bed ticked.
The young man, and Luz saw that he was younger than she had first thought, just a little older than her sixteen years, perhaps, blinked and looked at them. He had tightly curled black hair and green eyes.<
br />
“I think . . . ,” he began, and trailed off, lips still moving, eyes still unfocused. “I think I need to adjust the braking mechanism.”
He claimed, unbelievably, that he was from North Carolina. Hundreds of miles away, the other side of mountains with collapsed tunnels and rivers with fallen bridges. In Luz’s experience, traffic from the east came into the Bluegrass along only two routes: down from the Ohio off boats from Pittsburgh, or along the Federal Highway through Huntington. Or by air, though the Federal flying machines were forbidden to land in Lexington by treaty.
“No, no,” the driver said, piling the last rock back on top of the wall his machine had damaged. “I didn’t come over the mountains. I went south, first, then along the Gulf shore, then up the Natchez Trace through Alabama and middle Tennessee. The state government in Tennessee is pretty advanced. They’ve built pontoon bridges over all their rivers now.”
Luz reached behind Fizz—that was the name he’d given—and made an adjustment to the slab of limestone he haphazardly dropped atop the wall. He’d accepted their offer to help him repair the fence, which was a good thing, because it was clear that he had no experience with dry-stone work. For some reason, this made him seem even more foreign to Luz than his vehicle or his claim to have seen the ocean. Sammy had whispered his opinion that Fizz would have left the wall in disrepair if they hadn’t witnessed the crash, but Luz wasn’t ready to be that judgmental.
Sammy was also more persistent in his questions than Luz thought was polite. “Well, then how did you cross the Kentucky River? And the Green and all the creeks you must have come to? We just came from the ferry, and they would have mentioned you. And there’s no way the Federals would have let you bring that thing across any of their bridges.”
“There’s more local bridges than you might think,” said Fizz, either completely missing the hostility in Sammy’s voice or ignoring it. “I only had to float Rudolf once. See the air compressor there? I can fill old inner tubes and lash them to the sides. That converts him into a raft good enough for the width of a creek, anyways.”
Telling the Map Page 7