by Various
“Two degrees port, aye,” De Quincey repeated, nudging the rudder wheel a tock or two. He was a big man and taciturn, rarely speaking of his own accord. His black hair swept about his long, stern face where his deep-set eyes and chestnut-brown skin offered a somewhat sinister countenance until one recognized his gentle nature. Sabrina liked him.
Buckle kept his eyes locked upon the rapidly approaching earth through the round observation window at his feet. Kellie circled the decking around the window, sniffing, tail wagging, anticipating high activity. “Keep your eyes peeled,” Buckle said.
“Aye, aye, Captain,” Sabrina replied, familiar with Buckle’s thousand-yard stare, the intense functioning of his mind’s eye just before the call to action. The maneuvering propellers responded to the drift controls and she felt the shift in their vibration ripple through her body.
“Descending, ninety-eight feet per minute,” announced Welly.
Sabrina eyed Welly as he leaned over the drift telescope, calculating their rate of drift, his pencil scratching furiously across his navigational maps, pinned to the dashboard. The kid could have easily rounded up, described the rate of descent as one hundred feet per minute, but he was striving to impress and that was fine.
“Maintain dive,” Buckle said, sounding almost annoyed.
“Boards steady, Cap’n. Aye,” Nero said. It was Nero’s job to bleed the hydrogen out of the cells at the correct rate to maintain the steady descent.
Sabrina mumbled the words she often mumbled, even though afterward she always regretted mumbling them, but she was by nature something of a cynic. “We’re sitting ducks.”
“Piece of cake,” Buckle responded absentmindedly, as he had many times before.
“Sure, a real peach,” Sabrina answered. She peered down at the shattered landscape and then leaned over her navigation table to check her map. She tapped her derby at the brim, where a little copper arm with a magnifying glass swung out of its nest among the valves and tubes, its miniature gears whirring with steam power, and dropped in front of her right eye. The map was old and blurred, stained yellowish by exposure to the mustard, as many things that survived The Storming were; enlargement was required to make out the smudged small print.
Sabrina peered into the drift-telescope eyepiece affixed on the instrument panel in front of her. “Magnolia Boulevard intersection with Hollywood Way. One Three Four Freeway running east-west, due south. Right on target,” she announced, with more than a smidgeon of pride in her voice. “Welcome to the Boneyard.”
IV
THE BONEYARD
THE PNEUMATIC ZEPPELIN descended into the heart of the sprawling valley once known as the San Fernando. Low, brown foothills loomed to the south and east, their rough backs striped with rivers of snow and ice. Buckle sniffed. Despite hundreds of years, the place still stank of ash. He did not like this—going to ground when a cunning enemy like the Founders might be on the move. There was no easier target than an earthbound zeppelin. It was little more than a bounce, yes—Buckle would have his feet in the snow for only a minute or two—and the likelihood of the reclusive Founders being anywhere near the Boneyard was almost nonexistent, but a little needle of anxiety stabbed him nonetheless.
Pluteus and his grunts had better be on time, on target, and ready for evacuation.
Buckle clamped his teeth. Once Pluteus and his soldiers were aboard, they would be on their way to the City of the Founders, the most powerful clan’s fortified citadel, considered impenetrable to attack, on a desperate expedition to save their leader, Admiral Balthazar Crankshaft, from the clutches of the Founders, who had abducted him.
It was also of no small matter that Balthazar was Buckle’s father by adoption, and really the only father Buckle had ever known.
“Airship sighted!” the aft lookout’s voice rattled down the chattertube. “North northwest, five miles off the stern!”
Buckle leapt to the stretch of open sky at the starboard gunwale, pulling his telescope from his hat and whipping it out to its maximum length. Looking back, he caught the tiny black dot over the mountains with his bare eyes and trained the scope on it. The slipstream of passing wind dragged at the glass, making it difficult to see, but the bulky form of the magnified sky vessel suggested that she was a tramp, a trader guild steamer, and no threat to Buckle and his airship.
“Tramp!” Sabrina shouted, peering through the powerful main telescope affixed in the nose dome. “Heading east.”
“Aye!” Buckle shouted back into the gondola. Due east meant the tramp was probably on her way to sell her goods in Gallowglass territory. And judging from how she lumbered, her holds were packed, probably full of ivory, fish, and whale oil from the coast.
Still, Buckle hated having a foreign airship of any kind at his back.
Pluteus and his grunts had better be on time.
Buckle looked down. As the Pneumatic Zeppelin descended to the earth, the blasted corpse of the Valley came into sudden, wince-inducing focus. The ground was a mess, a crumbled catastrophe of architectural ruin: endless miles of gutted buildings and abandoned suburbs collapsed down around themselves in a porcupine’s back of naked girders, walls, and chimneys. The street grid was still visible under the debris, making aerial navigation easy.
But what made the place ghostly beyond description were the endless bones. The sea of bones. Ice-rimed skulls and ribcages, femurs and spines. Human bones, mostly, with surely some dog bones, cat bones, horse bones, bird bones, rat bones, possum bones, and squirrel bones mixed in.
They called it the Boneyard.
Unimaginative, but accurate.
Scouts reported that skeletons still sat inside the caved-in cars, bony fingers still clutching the steering wheels. Frozen bones snapped under one’s boots with each step, the scouts said—an ocean of skeletons under the snow. Exposed bones were a pearly color, picked clean by crows, hawks, and vermin, the tattered remnants of their clothes long since carried off to line nests and burrows. An endless glut of rusted cars still lay locked in a traffic jam on both sides of the freeway, all heading northward; the tires had been an excellent source of salvaged rubber until exhausted only a few years before.
No official clan lived in the valley now, even three hundred years later. There were still pools of heavy stinkum gas lurking about, squirting out of unused pipes or suddenly surging up from toilets and sewers. But that was not the real reason: it was simply too spooky to live in that snowy swamp of bones. But some people did live there. People who didn’t mind the horrors. People who stripped the cars and skeletons of valuables and traded the goods, all of them stained telltale yellow, with their fingers stained yellow, in the markets to the south.
Scavengers. Yellow-fingered Scavengers.
And Scavengers didn’t like visitors unless they were coming to buy.
Lissa Price became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of Starters (2012), from Delacorte Press.
Visit her website at www.lissaprice.com.
* * *
Novel: Starters (excerpt)
Short Story: “Portrait of a Spore”
STARTERS
(excerpt)
by Lissa Price
First published as Starters (2012), by Delacorte Press
• • • •
Chapter One
ENDERS gave me the creeps. The doorman flashed a practiced smile as he let me into the body bank. He wasn’t that old, maybe 110, but he still made me shudder. Like most Enders, he sported silver hair, some phony badge of honor of his age. Inside, the ultramodern space with its high ceilings dwarfed me. I walked through the lobby as if gliding through a dream, my feet barely touching the marble floor.
He directed me to the receptionist, who had white hair and matte red lipstick that transferred to her front teeth when she smiled. They had to be nice to me there, in the body bank. But if they saw me on the street, I’d be invisible. Forget that I had been top of my class—back when there was school. I
was sixteen. A baby to them.
The receptionist’s heels clicked and echoed in this stark space as she took me to a small waiting room, empty except for silver brocade chairs in the corners. They looked like antiques, but the chemical scent in the air belonged to new paint and synthetics. The so-called nature sounds of forest birds were just as fake. I glanced at my frayed sweats and scuffed shoes. I had brushed them as best I could, but the stains would not go away. And because I had tramped all the way to Beverly Hills in the morning drizzle, I was also wet as a lost cat.
My feet hurt. I wanted to collapse into a chair, but I didn’t dare leave a damp butt-mark on the brocade. A tall Ender popped into the room, interrupting my little etiquette dilemma.
“Callie Woodland?” He looked at his watch. “You’re late.”
“Sorry. The rain…”
“It’s all right. You’re here.” He extended his hand.
His silver hair seemed whiter in contrast to his artificial tan. As his smile broadened, his eyes widened, making me more nervous than usual with an Ender. They didn’t deserve to be called seniors, as they preferred, these greedy old fogies at the end of their lives. I forced myself to shake his wrinkled hand.
“I’m Mr. Tinnenbaum. Welcome to Prime Destinations.” He wrapped his other palm over mine.
“I’m just here to see…” I looked around at the walls like I’d come to inspect the interior design.
“How it all works? Of course. No charge for that.” He grinned and finally released my hand. “Why don’t you follow me?”
He extended his arm as if I couldn’t find my way out of the room. His teeth were so bright, I flinched a little when he smiled. We walked down a short hallway to his office.
“Go right in, Callie. Have a seat by the desk.” He closed the door.
I bit my tongue to keep from gasping at the total extravagance inside. A massive copper fountain flowed with endless water alongside one wall. The way they were letting this clear, clean water fall and splash, you’d think the stuff was free.
A glass desk embedded with LED lights dominated the center of the room, with an airscreen display hovering a foot above it. It showed a picture of a girl my age, with long red hair, wearing gym shorts. Although she was smiling, the photo was straight-on, like some full-length mug shot. Her expression was sweet. Hopeful.
I sat in a modern metal chair as Mr. Tinnenbaum stood behind the desk, pointing at the air display. “One of our newest members. Like you, she heard about us through a friend. The women who rented her body were quite pleased.” He touched the corner of the screen, changing the picture to a teen in a racing swimsuit, with major abs. “This fellow, Adam, referred her. He can snowboard, ski, climb. He’s a popular rental for outdoorsy men who haven’t been able to enjoy these sports for decades.”
Hearing his words made it all too real. Creepy old Enders with arthritic limbs taking over this teen’s body for a week, living inside his skin. It made my stomach flip. I wanted to bolt, but one thought kept me there.
Tyler.
I gripped the seat of my chair with both hands. My stomach growled. Tinnenbaum extended a pewter dish of Supertruffles in paper cups. My parents had had the same dish, once.
“Would you like one?” he asked.
I took one of the oversized chocolates in silence. Then I remembered my rusty manners. “Thank you.”
“Take more.” He waved the dish to entice me.
I took a second and a third, since the dish still hovered near my hand. I wrapped them in their paper cups and slipped them into my sweatshirt pocket. He looked disappointed not to see me eat them, like I was to be his entertainment for the day. Behind my chair, the fountain bubbled and splashed, teasing me. If he didn’t offer me something to drink soon, he just might get to see me with my head under the fountain, slurping like a dog.
“Could I have a glass of water? Please?”
“Of course.” He snapped his fingers and then raised his voice as if speaking to some hidden device. “Glass of water for the young lady.”
A moment later, an Ender with the figure of a model came in balancing a glass of water on a tray. It was wrapped in a cloth napkin. I took the glass and saw small cubes glistening like diamonds. Ice. She set the tray beside me and left.
I tilted my head back and downed the sweet water all at once, the cool liquid running down my throat. My eyes closed as I savored the cleanest water I’d had since the war ended. When I finished, I let one of the ice cubes fall into my mouth. I bit into it with a crunch. When I opened my eyes, I saw Tinnenbaum staring at me.
“Would you like more?” he asked.
I would have, but his eyes told me he didn’t mean it. I shook my head and finished the rest of the cube. My fingernails looked even dirtier against the glass as I set it back on the tray. Seeing the ice melting in the glass reminded me of the last time I had had ice water. It seemed like forever, but it was only a year ago, the last day in our house before the marshals came.
“Would you like to know how it all works?” Tinnenbaum asked. “Here at Prime Destinations?”
I stopped myself from rolling my eyes. Enders. Why else would I be there? I gave him a half smile and nodded.
He tapped a corner of the airscreen to clear it, and then a second time to bring up holo-mations. The first one showed a senior reclining on a lounge chair, the back of her head being fitted with a small cap. Colored wires protruding from the cap led to a computer.
“The renter is connected to a BCI—Body Computer Interface—in a room staffed with experienced nurses,” he said. “Then she’s put into a twilight sleep.”
“Like at the dentist?”
“Yes. All her vital signs are monitored throughout the entire journey.” On the other side of the screen, a teen girl reclined in a long padded chair. “You’ll be put under, with a kind of anesthesia. Completely painless and harmless. You wake up a week later, a little groggy but a whole lot richer.” He flashed those teeth again.
I forced myself not to wince. “What happens during the week?”
“She gets to be you.” He spread his palms and rotated them. “Do you know about computer assists that help amputees move fake hands? They just think about it and it moves? It’s very much like that.”
“So she visualizes that she’s me and if she wants something, she just thinks it and my hand grabs it?”
“Just like she was in your body. She uses her mind to walk your body out of here, and gets to be young again.” He cradled one elbow in his other hand. “For a little while.”
“But how…?”
He nodded to the other side of the screen. “Over here, in another room, the donor—that would be you—is connected to the computer via a wireless BCI.”
“Wireless?”
“We insert a tiny neurochip into the back of your head. You won’t feel a thing. Totally painless. Allows us to connect you to the computer at all times. We then connect your brain waves to the computer, and the computer connects the two of you.”
“Connects.” My brow furrowed as I tried to imagine two minds connected that way. BCI. Neurochip. Inserted. This was getting creepier by the minute. That urge to run was coming back hard. But at the same time, I wanted to know more.
“I know, it’s all so new.” He gave me a condescending smirk. “We make sure you’re completely asleep. The renter’s mind takes over your body. She answers a series of questions posed by the team to be sure everything is working the way it should. Then she’s free to go enjoy her rented body.”
The diagram showed graphics of the rented body playing golf, playing tennis, diving.
“The body retains its muscle memory, so whatever sports you’ve played, she’ll be able to play. When the time is over, the renter walks the body back here. The connection is shut down in the proper sequence. The renter is taken off the twilight-sleep drugs. She is checked over and then goes on her merry way. You, the donor, are restored to your full brain functions via the computer. You awake in your bod
y as if you’d slept for several days.”
“What if something happens to me while she’s in my body? Snowboarding, skydiving? What if I get hurt?”
“Nothing like that has ever happened here. Our renters sign a contract that makes them financially liable. Believe me, everyone wants that deposit back.”
He made me sound like a rental car. A chill went through me like someone had run an ice cube up my spine. That reminded me of Tyler, the only thing keeping me in that chair.
“What about the chip?” I asked.
“That’s removed after your third rental.” He handed me a sheet of paper. “Here. This might put you at ease.”
Rules for Renters at Prime Destinations
1. You may not alter the appearance of your rental body in any way, including but not limited to piercings, tattoos, hair cutting or dyeing, cosmetic contact lenses, and any surgical procedures, including augmentation.
2. No changes to the teeth are allowed, including fillings, removal, and imbedded jewelry.
3. You must remain inside a fifty-mile perimeter around Prime Destinations. Maps are available.
4. Any attempt to tamper with the chip will result in immediate cancellation without refund, and fines will be levied.
5. If you have a problem with your rental body, return to Prime Destinations as soon as possible. Please treat your rental with care, remembering at all times that it is an actual young person.
Be advised that each neurochip blocks renters from engaging in illegal activities.
The rules didn’t make me feel any better. They brought up more problems I hadn’t even considered.
“What about… other things?” I asked.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” I wished he wasn’t going to make me say it. But he was. “Sex?”