“Thought crime,” Al said. “They might not be too wrong.”
“Just as Vivid wipes out visions of a busy harbor full of ships, they’ll be able to erase thoughts like lust and guilt or loving the wrong person.”
“Maybe Love itself is no longer an asset,” I said. “My mother said something like that recently.”
“Nothing will hold them back,” Al said. “They will feel no fear.”
“If they live without fear, won’t they be happy?” Greta asked. “Why do they need to kill us?”
Sophia disappeared from the reach of the firelight and into darkness but she called back, “The Fathers and Mothers hate sin. That means everyone who isn’t programmable. That means us.”
19
We were all quiet for a moment. Al pulled a device from his pack. It seemed to contain water but he did not drink. Instead, he used a flaming stick from the fire to ignite the plant material in one end. He put his lips to a tube and inhaled deeply. After a moment, his eyes rolled back and he sighed heavily.
“Al?”
“Yeah?”
“How are we going to stop this?”
“We? We aren’t,” he said. “We could run, I suppose, but they got flying drones and we’ve got what? Sticks and stones and a bucket of squat.”
Greta’s tears glistened in the firelight. “Is that a helpful rhyme?”
“Sorry,” Al said. He held out the device for Greta but the girl shook her head. I refused as well.
“I saw Jim Kimbo try to stop the drones,” Greta said. “The sailors have weapons to fend off pirates but nothing strong enough to stop Percival, even with his old broken hydraulic arm.”
“Al, you worked on the bots. What are their weaknesses?”
“I just greased Doormen’s wheels all day and ran circuit tests. I wasn’t really a Maker. I just pretended to be one and hoped to be left alone. That’s why I got kicked out of paradise. I was taking up too many resources. Wasn’t productive enough. Didn’t earn my keep. They called me redundant.” He shrugged and inhaled deeply from his device again.
“And here I thought we all got kicked out for sex crimes,” I said.
“Thought crime for me,” Al said. “I thought I was working hard enough. It was okay while it lasted.”
I watched him inhale from his device again. “Does that machine help you breathe better?”
Al smiled and nodded and, after a pause, all his words tumbled out with his breath. “You could say that. Makes breathing more tolerable.”
“Do you know anything about the bots that could help us stop them?”
He shook his head. “Who tossed you out?”
“A Maintenance drone.”
“Was it a battle drone? The big one? All ceramic black armor?”
“Sy Potter, yes.”
“Yeah, he’s the council’s face to the world these days. Old Sy takes care of trouble in the towers. Have you seen a Father or a Mother lately? I wonder if they’re all dead. Do you suppose we could be that lucky?”
I hadn’t seen a High Father or a High Mother since watching the debates with the first sentient drone. The Fathers and Mothers were all old people now. They lived high in the towers just below the greenhouse complexes. Then I remembered the woman who talked on speakers and screens throughout the City and reminded Al about her.
“Yeah, she sure doesn’t sound like a drone. She just drones on. They might have more true believers in the next generation of Citizens if they got some better music and worked on producing a more exciting message.”
“Were they mean to you when they made you leave?” Greta asked Al.
Al’s smile faded. “Sy Potter got rid of me himself. He was polite about it. They always are. It’s that veneer of civility that made me want to tear him apart when he came through my door. They always knock. I had a heavy wrench. I tried to break his cam. He had me by the wrists before I could swing it. A human can’t beat a bot. I didn’t even scratch his pretty armor. You can forget about frontal assaults. We ain’t no battle drones.”
“Where does that leave us?” Greta asked.
“Dead, if they want, when they want,” Al said. “They could send a couple of drones up so high we couldn’t even see them. We wouldn’t know they were attacking until everyone and everything around us started getting chewed up into mash with splinter and acid explosives. They used to do that all the time. Still no reason they can’t, I guess.”
“Sophia made it clear we can’t reason with the Fathers and Mothers even if we could get to them, so I guess that’s out,” I said.
“Not even if you could fly to the highest tower and have a theological and logical chat,” Al said. “They don’t need to think. The Father and Mothers got rules and muscle and a cozy worldview that finds limited experience very comforting. The City in the Sky is the Land of No Change.”
The fire was dying. It felt like we were dying with it. A cold breeze came in from the Bay and we all shivered.
“Where do they come from?” Greta asked. “The machines, I mean.”
“The bots? They were manufactured down the coast somewhere. They don’t make new ones often. They take a lot of resources.”
“Sy Potter said he came from Santa Cruz.”
“The City closed its borders to new Citizens, organics and non, when I was young,” Al said.
“Does that mean there are more out there?” Greta asked.
“Dunno for sure,” Al said. “Many more, probably, especially the solar-powered and the big atom splitters.”
I didn’t know what Al meant but said nothing and sat closer to the little campfire. In the dying light, the stars shone. They weren’t as bright or as beautiful without Vivid. I couldn’t call up a compass to tell me which way North or South lay. But I needed to know. “How far is Santa Cruz?”
Al didn’t know and neither did Greta. However, her mother knew. Iola said that, with a fast ship, it wasn’t far at all.
There was no council to appeal to. There were no leaders in Low Town to ask for help. The next day, Greta and I walked around her neighborhood and asked for donations of food, some for Greta and me and some to pay a sailor for the ride. The girl explained to her neighbors that we had to find where the bots came from to stop the Fathers and Mothers from killing us all.
A few were skeptical. Most gave what they could spare. One frail old lady asked me what I intended to do once I got to Santa Cruz. I said I didn’t know. She gave me a few slabs of salted fish anyway and patted me on the shoulder. “Go be crazy somewhere else.”
By dawn the next day, that’s what I did.
20
We hired a small sailboat. The wild-haired woman who took us was Anne, an old friend of Iola’s. For a day’s supply of food, I was allowed on the boat. For Anne’s long friendship with Greta’s mother, the girl rode for free.
“Will the warships bother us? Do we have to sneak out of the bay or something?”
Anne laughed. “They don’t bother about any ship leaving the City in the Sky. It’s coming back that’s the problem.”
“You’ve seen Santa Cruz?”
“From the water, yeah,” Anne said. “Nothing there that I ever saw. I’m headed down to the Hearst kingdom, anyway. There’s a man down there who knows plants real well. We could use him up here for a while if Hearst will do without him. We need to get that man an apprentice who will live up here. Somebody’s child ate some toadstools. The whole family got sick but the child died. We gotta work on that.”
The wind whipped in off the bay, colder than I expected for a sunny day. Anne told me to grab a blanket from below. I didn’t know anything about sailing and, at first, the rise and fall of the bow made my stomach lurch. As we pulled out of the Bay I began to relax. As long as I didn’t stare directly at the waves I felt better. After a short time I decided being on a boat was exhilarating.
Exhilarating was not a forbidden word in the City in the Sky. However, opportunities to use it did not arise often.
Gret
a enjoyed sailing even more. She knew the names of sails. She understood ropes and how to tie them in knots so they stay tied. Anne let her steer.
“Can’t go wrong,” Anne told Greta. “Keep the land to the left all the way to Santa Cruz and keep the rocks to the right all the way back. We’ve got a stiff wind so we’ll be there in no time. Navigating is easy, long as you don’t get too far away from the rocks nor too close.”
I stared out to the great blue expanse to the right and called back to Anne. “You ever go out there?”
“Go where I can’t see land? No. I never. Never will. I’ve heard some sailors boast of it but I think that’s more reason for shame than pride. You only got one life and you’re going to risk it for what? To say you’ve been over there instead of over here. I’ve been lots of places. May sound nice but everybody gets bored of where they are eventually.”
As I turned to watch the coastline, I missed seeing through Vivid. I wanted to telescope in to search farther back from the shore. I wanted to stick my face underwater and see what underwater kingdoms and wrecks might be revealed in the depths below.
Soon, I didn’t have to imagine a wreck. The rusted stern of a great ship stuck out of the water. It rose so high above us we passed through its cold shadow “What was that?”
Anne shrugged, inured to the sight. “Don’t know what did it in, Elizabeth. Might have been the great wave. Might have been the Terrors. All I know is what my father told me. He said that used to be a great ship. It was never meant to dock, he said. It was for Makers only. The Makers paddled around in that monstrosity until something took it down.”
“It was a city, too, wasn’t it?” Greta asked.
“Ashes to ashes, we all fall down. That was my father’s position on the matter.” Anne made a gesture with her hand I didn’t understand. She dipped her head as she touched her forehead, her stomach and each shoulder.
I was going to ask her about it but as the stern came into view, I gasped. I could make out writing through the rust: Amazonia.
“Amazing. That was a big ship,” I said.
Anne laughed gaily. “Big, but not as great as my little one. My boat is still afloat. No leaks in this boat. That’s a grave not a boat!”
She pointed to the cliffs off to our left. “Look at that! Been there forever ago and will be there, more or less, forever ahead. Smart girls like you, I bet you’re wondering what those cliffs might have seen and what will be yet. Me? I don’t give a ripe shit what was or what war might come next. I got today. I’m going to crack some crab and have a clam boil tonight. And maybe, if my husband waiting for me down there at Hearst is lucky, I’ll let him put his blanket together with mine under the stars. I’ll let him rock the boat and I’ll sleep under my own sails.”
As we sailed on to Santa Cruz, I thought how simple and lovely Anne’s life seemed to be. It was a life worth fighting for and a life worth saving but where did she fit? I couldn’t decide if she was truly in Service, a Maker or a Taker.
If anything, Anne acted like she was a High Mother. As captain of her own ship, I suppose that’s basically what she was.
As Santa Cruz came into view, I asked Anne what she thought her role in the world was. She looked at me strangely. “I’m me.”
“Yes, but how do you relate to everyone else?”
“Reasonably friendly.”
“Yes, but — ”
“I think I know what you’re asking, girl,” Anne said. “It’s a City question. But I don’t relate to anybody but me. The word you don’t have is sovereign. It’s my father’s word. He taught me it.”
“What’s it mean?”
“It means I don’t owe anybody anything but decency and I do what I please long as it don’t hurt nobody. I never hurt nobody and meant it. And anybody hurts me don’t get a chance to do it again. Sovereign means you’re free like those robots want to be.”
“You think the robots want to be free?”
“That’s all anybody wants. My father told me we’ve made all kinds of worlds within this world. What we ain’t made yet is one that ain’t loaded down with obligations. I figure I’m closest to a perfect world right here. But the first I step off this little boat, things get busy and dizzy, you know?”
“I think so,” I said.
“The bots and the Fathers and Mothers…they’re trying to get free, too.”
“That can’t be.”
“Sure. They think nothing changing makes them safe. All the disasters in the world and somebody still believes anything is safe. Ha! Can you beat that? It’s crazy but it’s how they think, I imagine. Everybody’s one leak away from a sinking ship. Maybe it’s a bad cough or a heavy heart that gets you but something gets everybody eventually. Everything is like coral. It can look like rock and still break up in your bare hand.”
I shouldn’t have asked Anne anything. Her answer made my enemies more complex than I wanted them to be.
21
I don’t know what I expected of Santa Cruz. It wasn’t really there. The long skeleton of a broken wharf stretched out into the water. It was so far gone and rotted, we couldn’t dock there. Anne angled her small craft toward a smaller pier but the water was too shallow to get closer to shore.
Greta and I dropped into cold water that went up to my waist. Greta cried out in surprise as she went in up to her breasts. We pushed Anne’s boat back toward deeper water and waded ashore.
“I’ll be back in two days at dusk,” Anne called. “If you aren’t here, it’s quite the walk and you might have a time getting back into Low Town. Look for me. I’ll anchor out here until an hour after dawn. Then I’ll have to shove off!”
We waved. I tried to look confident for the girl’s sake. Greta looked eager to go off on this strange errand. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. I only knew that if there was a way to combat the bots, it would have to begin here.
We got to the shore and walked through rubble. A lot of people had lived here once but there was little trace of them. No two walls were left connected to each other and all the stones and pieces of concrete were blackened on one side.
“Was it the Terrors, you think?” Greta asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I wish Al had come with us,” she said.
Al had refused to make this journey and, looking at the devastation at our feet, I couldn’t say he’d been wrong to stay in Low Town digging fence posts.
As the sun rose, we longed for the cold water we’d complained about an hour before. By the end of the second hour of searching, Greta asked me if I knew what we were looking for.
“Not specifically, no.”
“Then what are we doing here?”
“Every machine has an off switch. I didn’t think Vivid could be shut down but it could. We’re here to find an off switch.”
We found a great rusted hulk of what looked like broken train tracks. Whatever had destroyed Santa Cruz had twisted the metal tracks on its side. It was a huge ruin but neither of us had a clue to its function. A sun-bleached sign amid broken concrete read: Line up here for the Dipper!
“This is a dead place,” Greta said. “I don’t even hear any birds. I haven’t seen a single seagull. We should head back to where Anne left us. Only thing to do here is wait.”
“Let’s keep looking a little bit longer.”
“Looking for what?”
Instead of arguing I walked on. Greta followed me. I think that’s a Maker’s trick. Act decisive even when you don’t know what to do and others will follow. Talk slowly with confidence and few will think to refuse you.
I had to use the same ruse two more times. “Just a little bit farther,” I said. And, “let’s just get to the crest of that next hill and see if there’s anything to see. There’s plenty of time before Anne gets back and we will need to find shelter for the night, anyway. We have to push inland.”
Whatever had pushed the mountain of twisted metal on its side, the force of it had hit Santa Cruz from the West. Perhaps
a tsunami had knocked everything over. Perhaps it had been an explosion. Or both. As we picked our way East, I was sure we would eventually come to something that was still standing vertically. That, at least, would provide us with a barrier against the wind.
Finally, from atop a mound of rubble, I spotted the forest in the distance. If I had Vivid, I could have figured out how far away the trees stood and how long it would take us to get there. I asked Greta how long she thought it would take us to walk to the stand of trees.
She glanced doubtfully at the sky and considered the height of the sun. “If we hurry, we might make it before dark but I doubt it.”
“There’s nothing but twisted metal and stone behind us,” I said. “Let’s move on.”
Greta gave a grudging nod. I set as fast a pace as I dared. A twisted ankle among the wreckage of Santa Cruz would mean a cold night amid piles of rocks. We had to stare at our feet to keep our footing. Hoping to conserve water, I ignored my thirst.
After another hour of walking, the forest hardly seemed closer. However, Greta spotted a lone, stone pillar in the distance.
“Let’s go toward that,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because I can’t tell if we’re making progress. Everything looks alike.”
Sweat soaked through our shirts just as the wind turned colder. The air chilled us and we shivered as the sun, weak and orange, swung low.
Our hike ended at the pillar. The forest was closer but my feet hurt so it seemed too far to walk. We wouldn’t get to make a camp within the shelter of trees.
The pillar was as tall as Percival, the one-armed bot. It was square and gray and it was marked with carvings more precise than any chisel could have done. This pillar was formed by a machine. At its base, carved in the granite, were the words: Asimov Standard.
I touched the pillar. When I had Vivid vision, every surface had texture if you looked close enough. Everything was rough. The pillar looked as smooth as human skin. When I closed my eyes and let my fingertips run slowly over the stone, I could feel the ribs and furrows that I could not see.
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