Small-Minded Giants

by Oisin McGann

  ‘There’s always more, Mr Wheat.’

  ‘This is stupid! I can’t tell you anything more. I’d have to make it up, and then you’d hurt me for talking crap.’ He arched his neck attempting to get a look at his tormentor, to try to make eye contact. ‘What the hell can I do? I’d be lying if I tried to tell you where he is, or who he talked to. I don’t know! I swear to God I don’t know! What good is it if I lie to you? If you . . . if you hurt me, I’ll end up telling you whatever you want to hear. But it won’t be the truth, it’ll just be anything I think will make you stop hurting me. What good . . . what good is that?’

  His voice was frantic, high-pitched with terror.

  ‘What’s the point in that?’ he whimpered. ‘It’s just stupid.’

  ‘I think it’s time to get started,’ the man said.

  Sol’s face contorted in a sob, and he drew in a long breath.

  Then came the sudden crash of the door being kicked in, followed by three silenced gunshots. Sol heard a body drop to the floor. There was fourth muffled shot, and another. A second body fell. Sol arched his head back, trying to see what was going on under the edge of the bag covering his head. He saw a man lying on the floor. Somebody was standing over him. The man had two bullet holes in his chest. The barrel of a pistol was aimed down at him, and a shot was fired into the centre of his forehead, spilling a bloody mess across the floor.

  Sol’s toes slipped from under him and he hung from his wrists, turning away from the scene as he tried to get his feet under him again. A strong arm wrapped under his armpit and around his chest, supporting his weight. There was a clicking sound, and one of the cuffs came loose. A chain slipped and he was lowered to the floor.

  ‘Solomon? You’re all right now. You’re safe. Your mother’s favourite song was “Dream a Little Dream of Me” by the Mamas and the Papas. My name is Maslow – I’m sorry I was late.’

  The man named Maslow was a little taller than Sol, with wide, flat shoulders, and the burly build of a heavyweight. His once-black skin had the grey pall of someone who spent his life away from the sunlight of the dome. Deep lines described a hard life in his face. His frizzy salt-and-pepper hair was cut close to his scalp, and he had a perfectly black, tightly trimmed moustache that dripped around the corners of his mouth and down towards his chin. Sol sat shaking on a chair, his feet up on the seat, his arms wrapped around his knees. Maslow had pulled both of the dead men’s bodies into the centre of the room, and was searching through the metal cupboards that lined one wall.

  ‘Who are you?’ Sol asked him.

  ‘I’m a friend of your old man’s – I mean, sort of. I owe him a debt.’

  ‘I didn’t know he knew anybody . . . like you.’

  ‘You’re lucky he did.’ Maslow pulled a waterproof bag from one of the cupboards, one with an airtight zipper. ‘Body bags. They were geared up for this. Looks like they get rid of bodies all the time.’

  Sol stared hard at the bag. He could have ended up in one of those.

  ‘How did you find me?’ he asked. ‘And how did you kill them, just like that? They seemed like real pros. I didn’t stand a chance.’

  Maslow glanced down at the bodies.

  ‘I’ve had dealings with their type before. I’ve been following you since last week, and found out they were tailing you too. So I tailed them. They led me back here yesterday. When you were nabbed this afternoon, I was following on foot – I wasn’t expecting the car. But I guessed where they’d take you.’

  He laid out the body bags, one alongside each corpse, and unzipped them.

  ‘Who were they?’ Sol felt a chill run through him as he gazed down at the bodies.

  ‘Professional killers and kidnappers; strong-arm men,’ Maslow told him. ‘But what you should be asking is who they were working for. I can’t tell you that. Help me pack them up.’

  Slipping down from his chair, Sol grabbed the feet of the nearest man and helped lift him onto the open bag. He pulled the bottom of the bag up around the feet and dragged the zipper up towards the waist. Maslow took it and finished closing it up. Sol had one last look at his torturer’s face: a round, jovial-looking potato with light blue eyes, blond hair and grey skin. And a bullet hole through the forehead. They got the other man wrapped up – a bulkier, sharp-faced guy with wizened skin – and then Maslow went over to the aluminium sink in the corner of the room. Sol sat back down at the stainless-steel table and watched Maslow take cleaners and detergents from the cupboard under the sink.

  ‘We can’t hide everything,’ the man told him. ‘A good forensic crew will find some trace of us if they check this place out. So we have to get the bodies out of here and make it look like they just disappeared. The police have to have no reason to look here. We are going to scrub every centimetre of this floor, and wipe down every other surface. We can’t leave a drop of blood anywhere. Got it?’

  Sol nodded. Maslow cleaned the spattered blood off the top of the table, and then he and Sol lifted the two bodies onto it, along with the four chairs. There was a mop in a utility room out in the corridor, and they carefully cleared all the blood from the floor, washing the red-stained water down the sink. For nearly half an hour they cleaned the entire room. Maslow took down the meat-hook that hung from a steel loop in the ceiling – the hook from which Sol had been hanging – and threw the cuffs and ankle-chains into a cupboard. When they were finished, there were only the two body bags left to suggest that there had been any violence.

  Solomon’s gun was lying on the table beside them, and he put on his jacket and pocketed the weapon.

  ‘Next time, try to hit something more important,’ Maslow said, without humour. ‘Can you carry the smaller guy? There’s a chute down to a fertilizer grinder back along the corridor. We can dump them down there.’

  Sol remained thoroughly nauseous after mopping the gore off the floor, but he was otherwise feeling a lot stronger after the mundane work of cleaning up. Rubbing his raw wrists, he reached down, pulled the body towards him and hauled it onto his shoulder. It was incredibly heavy and awkwardly limp, like trying to lift a bag of stones. Maslow picked up the other one as if it weighed no more than a child and, turning to survey the room once more, nodded in satisfaction and then made for the door. Sol followed close behind, struggling beneath the weight.

  The hatch to the chute was down two flights of stairs, in a row of chutes for garbage. Each one was labelled with the kinds of rubbish suitable: METAL, PLASTIC, DENCERAMIC, etc. All organic waste went into the fertilizer chute. Maslow lifted the hatch and shoved his body bag into it. He took Sol’s load from him and despatched it with equal ease.

  ‘By the time they come out of the bottom of the grinder, there’ll be nothing to identify,’ Maslow told him.

  Reluctant to ask him how he was so sure, Sol just nodded. His stomach was getting ready to climb out through his throat, and there were some things he just didn’t need to know right then. With no idea where he was, he let Maslow lead the way out. They were somewhere deep in the Machine, well below the main levels of the city. All around was the rumble of machinery and, from the cold edge to the air, they had to be in that chilly limbo underneath the muggy heat of the city’s engines.

  Here, in this part of the city, secret lives were led, and he was sure that this was where Maslow had spent a good deal of his life. Whoever this man was, he was like nobody Sol had ever met before. And despite the fact that he had just saved his life, Sol was loath to trust him. But this violent man was a means of protection against the nameless hoods who were trying to hurt Sol, and there was a strong chance that he knew where to find Gregor. For the moment, Sol had no choice but to follow him and do as he said.

  Feeling suddenly frozen to the bone, he buttoned up his jacket and matched Maslow’s stride along the echoing corridor and deep into the workings of the Machine.

  Section 10/24: Glass

  SOL SAT WATCHING a film called First Blood with Maslow. It was four days since he had first met the man, and
they were sitting in a dingy deserted office on the edge of one of the vast underground fields of modified soybeans laid out on shelved racks that were spread under the edges of Ash Harbour. The room was cramped, with a decrepit desk and two sagging chairs, the shelves crammed with hoarded odds and ends. But the webscreen was working, so they sat watching the film. Outside the window, the lights came on and went off every eight hours, simulating a shortened day cycle that sped up the growth of the crops.

  They had been on the move since the first day. Maslow said it wasn’t safe to stop anywhere for long, but he seemed to be accustomed to life as a fugitive; there were places where he had food, clothes, tools and weapons stored – locked rooms and derelict offices and workshops tucked away in the hidden corners of the sub-levels. He wore gloves that he rarely took off, and was careful about clearing up any traces of his presence when they moved from place to place. Solomon knew he would have been reported missing and wondered who would be looking for him, and how long they’d keep up the search.

  He had seen strange things down here; people with weird scars, and missing limbs capped with odd-shaped prosthetics. Through dust-covered windows he had seen glimpses of factory floors where human bodies seemed to have been bonded to industrial machinery; sights that made Sol question what his eyes were telling him. But Maslow never let him stop anywhere long enough to investigate, and these bizarre scenes remained a mystery.

  Maslow jumped around on his seat, twitching like a kid on a games console every time the main character, Rambo, hit anyone, shot anyone, or jumped out of a bush and knifed anyone. Sol was finding the experience embarrassing, not to mention a little worrying.

  His new guardian angel had taken him down to a cavern at one point, a place where construction had begun on a new tunnel, only to be postponed, leaving an incongruous mix of modern denceramic beams and supports standing in the untamed space of a million-year-old cave. Here, Maslow had taught him how to fire the gun. It had a built-in silencer, but it was worn out, so the shots were loud. After emptying two clips into a pile of sand, Sol was fairly confident he could aim straight. But then it had been a big pile of sand.

  ‘Got ’im!’ Maslow yelled, laughing as Rambo felled another inferior opponent. ‘I love that bit!’

  Sol turned to look at him with perplexed curiosity. This man, in whom he’d placed so much trust, was still a mystery to him. Sometimes he tried to act like a mentor, clumsily and insistently teaching; other times, he hardly acknowledged Sol’s presence. His only pleasure seemed to be in these twentieth-century action films – cop shows, and war and spy movies – which he watched whenever they stopped in some refuge that had a working webscreen. Solomon thought it a strange taste for a man who did it for real.

  They’d done some hand-to-hand stuff as well. Maslow knew techniques Sol had never seen: deadly things. Solomon had discovered that boxing was pretty limited when Maslow felled him several times without even using his hands.

  But it was frustrating, all this action-man stuff. His new bodyguard hardly talked about what Solomon thought they actually ought to be doing: looking for Gregor.

  Maslow had last seen him outside the depot on the day he’d disappeared. Gregor had given him the scarf, the note and the gun and had begged Maslow to protect his son. That was all Sol had managed to get out of this surly stranger. He didn’t even know how the two had first met.

  It was clear that Maslow didn’t know where Gregor was now, and instead of trying to find him, he was intent on training Sol for something. And it was exciting, but Sol did not have time for it. He had asked the man a number of times how he had become indebted to Gregor, but Maslow wouldn’t talk about it, and Sol got the impression that he was keeping something important from him. It was incredibly frustrating.

  ‘Maslow?’

  ‘Yeah?’ The man kept his eyes on the screen.

  ‘I’d like to check out some things. See if I can find Gregor. I want to . . . to retrace his steps the day he disappeared. Starting with the dome. Could we do that?’

  Maslow grunted. His head tilted and he grimaced, as if he were unhappy with what he was thinking.

  ‘Okay,’ he said finally.

  ‘Thanks.’

  They sat watching the film for a while longer, neither speaking.

  ‘Y’know, this guy – Stallone,’ Sol piped up. ‘He did a boxing film; it’s much better than this. It’s called Rocky. Have you seen that?’

  ‘Ahhh, yeah. I started watching it once.’ Maslow grunted. ‘Arty crap. Too much goddamned talking.’

  Solomon started to wonder if Maslow might be a bit simple.

  It was Solomon’s thirteenth birthday, and he was big enough to fit into a safesuit. Standing in the depot’s changing room, he trembled with excitement as his father kitted him out. It was against company policy to take ‘civilians’ out onto the dome, but many of the daylighters did it. Some of the supervisors approved of their crews’ tradition of showing their teenage sons and daughters life out on the glass – it built a closer-knit team, and helped to prime future recruits for a tough and badly paid career.

  ‘Stay close to me at all times,’ Gregor told him as he pulled the legs of the suit up around Sol’s thighs and waist, and strapped close the harness built into the hips of the suit. ‘There’s no wind to speak of today, but gusts can hit at any time. The glass is clear, but that just makes it slippery, so keep the rope taut, and keep the slack behind you coiled, so you don’t trip over it. Got it?’

  Sol nodded. Gregor helped him get his arms into the suit, pushing the material up his forearms and then shoving on the big mittens that connected with an airtight seal into the sleeves. The three layers zipped and clipped up the front on different sides, and then Gregor pulled up the hood. He switched on the heater on the air intake and checked it was charged up. Before fitting the mask, he looked into his son’s eyes.

  ‘All the guys will be watching out for you; it’ll be like having thirty big brothers and sisters out there.’ He grinned. ‘Some people get agoraphobic surrounded by all that open space, but you won’t. You’re like your old man. I remember my first time on the glass. It was the first time I’d seen the sky without a roof. It was . . .’ He hesitated. ‘Well, you’ll see. I know you’ve been out on a tour on the pack ice, but this is different – you won’t be in any vehicle this time, it’s just you and the elements. I don’t want you to end up working out here, Sol, I want better things for you. But everybody should get to feel an empty sky over their head.’

  He clipped the mask onto the rigid front of Sol’s hood, checking the smart-lens lined up with his son’s eyes. The outlets for Sol’s breath fed through vents to the back of his hood, to stop the water vapour forming ice on the mask itself. Gregor gave him a thumbs-up, and Sol nodded and answered in kind. It took his father a fraction of the time to put his own suit on, and then he checked that Sol’s safety harness was attached properly to his own before they walked towards the airlock. Sol’s breath quickened as the internal door closed behind them.

  The air temperature dropped suddenly around them; Sol couldn’t feel it, but he watched it on the readout on the inside of his mask: 10º . . . -5º . . . -20º . . . -40º . . . -60º . . . It stopped at -73º. A soft alarm chimed, and the external door opened. Even with the tinting of the smart-lens, they walked out into a world of blinding white . . .

  Sol awoke from his reverie as Maslow peered round the door and waved him inside. They were in a small maintenance depot on the west side of the wall, one Sol didn’t know existed. Its entrance was about five hundred metres from the West Dome Depot, where Gregor worked. Inside was a rack of safesuits, some equipment rigs and a little-used airlock.

  ‘The daylighters are done for the afternoon,’ Maslow told him. ‘They’ll all be heading back in. We have maybe another hour of daylight, but after that the temperature’s going to drop . . .’

  Sol nodded. They would have to be quick. Finding a suit his size, he pulled it out and dismantled it, carefully fitting o
n each piece as his father had shown him. He had been out on the dome six times since then, but he still got the shivers now, as he got ready. Maslow was already half dressed, and Sol was surprised at the practised ease with which he fitted himself out. So he had been outside before too. He rigged a rope to Sol’s harness, and then to his own.

  ‘The open airlock will register on the dome-controller’s board,’ Maslow told him. ‘But they probably won’t pay it much attention. With the shifts finishing up, all the airlocks will be busy. Don’t use the radio unless you absolutely have to. You know the hand signals, yeah? You ready?’

  Sol clipped on the mask, and checked the lens readout to see if it showed any leaks. Picking up his plastic-coated ice-axe, he gave Maslow the thumbs-up. Maslow punched the access code into the airlock’s oversized keypad, and the internal door slid open. On a bad day, snow would pile up against the external door, and they would have had to dig their way out, but not today.

  Outside, they quickly scanned around for anybody who might still be out on the glass. In their fluorescent orange suits, they would be clearly visible to anybody this side of the dome’s horizon. Moving ponderously in the heavy gear, they started out for the sector that Gregor had left in such a hurry – D63 in the Third Quadrant.

  There had originally been machines to clear the dome’s surface, but they had lasted about thirty years, gradually packing up as the means to reproduce their worn-out parts were lost in the city’s hunger for dwindling resources. And so men had been sent up to take over the machines’ jobs. Stairs and hand- and footgrips, piton points and rigging posts allowed the daylighters to climb across the dome when it was clear. Otherwise, they climbed over the snow and ice itself. Even with all the safety precautions, one or two died each year in avalanches and falls.

  Looking up into the clear, darkening blue above him, Sol felt the exhilaration of being below such sheer emptiness. It was as if he could fall straight up into it, and it set his heart racing. A feathery frosting was already starting to coat the hexagonal slabs of diamond-hard concraglass, but Sol could see the city lights coming on beneath his feet. They climbed an arcing, denceramic stair up the curve of the dome, then branched off to one side, swinging from one piton ring to another and clinging to handholds. Sol braced the hardened rubber cleats of his boots against the slippery surface until his readout told him he was in the right place. He was already breathing hard, burdened by the weight of the suit, and his gasps were loud in his ears. Even with the variable tinting of the lens, the white was hard on his eyes. Behind him, he could feel Maslow’s eyes on his back, watchful, protective.