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Decision Point (ARC)

Page 18

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt


  doing a curious hopping dance in place, hands in his armpits.

  “Constable!” I piped, all sham terror that no one would have

  known for a sham, “Constable! Come quick, he’s going to kill

  himself!”

  *

  The sister who came to sit up with us mourning kiddies that

  night was called Sister Mary Immaculata, and she was kindly, if

  a bit dim. I remembered her from my stay in the hospital after

  my maiming: a slighly vacant prune-faced woman in a wimple

  who’d bathed my wounds gently and given me solemn hugs

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  when I woke screaming in the middle of the night.

  She was positive that the children of St Aggie’s were

  inconsolable over the suicide of our beloved patron, Zophar

  Grindersworth, and she doled out those same solemn cuddles to

  anyone foolish enough to stray near her. That none of us shed a

  tear was lost upon her, though she did note with approval how

  smoothly the operation of St Aggie’s continued without

  Grinder’s oversight.

  The next afternoon, Sister Mary Immaculata circulated

  among us, offering reassurance that a new master would be found

  for St Aggie’s. None of us were much comforted by this: we

  knew the kind of man who was likely to fill such a plum vacancy.

  “If only there was some way we could go on running this

  place on our own,” I moaned under my breath, trying to

  concentrate on repairing the pressure gauge on a pneumatic

  evacuator that we’d taken in for mending.

  Monty shot me a look. He had taken the Sister’s coming very

  hard. “I don’t think I have it in me to kill the next one, too.

  Anyway, they’re bound to notice if we keep on assassinating our

  guardians.”

  I snickered despite myself. Then my gloomy pall descended

  again. It had all been so good, how could we possibly return to

  the old way? But there was no way the sisters would let a bunch

  of crippled children govern themselves.

  “What a waste,” I said. “What a waste of all this potential.”

  “At least I’ll be shut of it in two years,” Monty said. “How

  long have you got till your eighteenth?”

  My brow furrowed. I looked out the grimy workshop window

  at the iron grey February sky. “It’s February tenth today?”

  “Eleventh,” he said.

  I laughed, an ugly sound. “Why, Monty, my friend, today is

  my eighteenth birthday. I believe I have survived St Aggie’s to

  graduate to bigger and better things. I have attained my majority,

  old son.”

  He held a hand out and shook my hook with it, solemnly.

  “Happy birthday and congratulations, then, Sian. May the world

  treat you with all the care you deserve.”

  I stood, the scrape of my chair very loud and sudden. I

  realized I had no idea what I would do next. I had managed to

  completely forget that my graduation from St Aggie’s was

  looming, that I would be a free man. In my mind, I’d imagined

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  myself dwelling at St Aggie’s forever.

  Forever.

  “You look like you just got hit in the head with a shovel,”

  Monty said. “What on earth is going through that mind of

  yours?”

  I didn’t answer. I was already on my way to find Sister

  Immaculata. I found her in the kitchen, helping legless Dora

  make the toast for tea over the fire’s grate.

  “Sister,” I said, “a word please?”

  As she turned and followed me into the pantry off the

  kitchen, some of that fear I’d felt on the bridge bubbled up in me.

  I tamped it back down again firmly, like a piston compressing

  some superheated gas.

  She was really just as I remembered her, and she had

  remembered me, too—she remembered all of us, the children

  she’d held in the night and then consigned to this Hell upon

  Earth, all unknowing.

  “Sister Mary Immaculata, I attained my eighteenth birthday

  today.”

  She opened her mouth to congratulate me, but I held up my

  stump.

  “I turned eighteen today, sister. I am a man, I have attained

  my majority. I am at liberty, and must seek my fortune in the

  world. I have a proposal for you, accordingly.” I put everything

  I had into this, every dram of confidence and maturity that I’d

  learned since we inmates had taken over the asylum. “I was Mr

  Grindersworth’s lieutenant and assistant in every matter relating

  to the daily operation of this place. Many’s the day I did every

  bit of work that there was to do, whilst Mr Grindersworth

  attended to family matters. I know every inch of this place, ever

  soul in it, and I have had the benefit of the excellent training and

  education that there is to have here.

  “I had always thought to seek my fortune in the world as a

  mechanic of some kind, if any shop would have a half-made

  thing like me, but seeing as you find yourself at loose ends in the

  superintendent department, I thought I might perhaps put my

  plans ‘on hold’ for the time being, until such time as a full search

  could be conducted.”

  “Sian,” she said, her face wrinkling into a gap-toothed smile.

  “Are you proposing that you might run St Agatha’s?”

  It took everything I could not to wilt under the pity and

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  amusement in that smile. “I am, sister. I am. I have all but run it

  for months now, and have every confidence in my capacity to go

  on doing so for so long as need be.” I kept my gaze and my voice

  even. “I believe that the noble mission of St Aggie’s is a truly

  attainable one: that it can rehabilitate such damaged things as we

  and prepare us for the wider world.”

  She shook her head. “Sian,” she said, softly, “Sian. I wish it

  could be. But there’s no hope that such an appointment would be

  approved by the Board of Governors.”

  I nodded. “Yes, I thought so. But do the Governors need to

  approve a temporary appointment? A stopgap, until a suitable

  person can be found?”

  Her smile changed, got wider. “You have certainly come into

  your own shrewdness here, haven’t you?”

  “I was taught well,” I said, and smiled back.

  *

  The temporary has a way of becoming permanent. That was

  my bolt of inspiration, my galvanic realization. Once the sisters

  had something that worked, that did not call attention to itself,

  that took in crippled children and released whole persons some

  years later, they didn’t need to muck about with it. As the

  mechanics say, “If it isn’t broken, it doesn’t want fixing.”

  I’m no mechanic, not anymore. The daily running of St

  Aggie’s occupied a larger and larger slice of my time, until I

  found that I knew more about tending to a child’s fever or

  soothing away a nightmare than I did about hijacking the vast

 
computers to do our bidding.

  But that’s no matter, as we have any number of apprentice

  computermen and computerwomen turning up on our doorsteps.

  So long as the machineries of industry grind on, the supply will

  be inexhaustible.

  Monty visits me from time to time, mostly to scout for talent.

  His shop, Goldsworth and Associates, has a roaring trade in

  computational novelties and service, and if anyone is bothered

  by the appearance of a factory filled with the halt, the lame, the

  blind and the crippled, they are thankfully outnumbered by those

  who are delighted by the quality of the work and the good value

  in his schedule of pricing.

  But it was indeed a golden time, that time when I was but a

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  boy at St Aggie’s among the boys and girls, a cog in a machine

  that Monty built of us, part of a great uplifting, a transformation

  from a hell to something like a heaven. That I am sentenced to

  serve in this heaven I helped to make is no great burden, I

  suppose.

  Still, I do yearn to screw a jeweller’s loupe into my eye, pick

  up a fine tool and bend the sodium lamp to shine upon some

  cunning mechanism that wants fixing. For machines may be

  balky and they may destroy us with their terrible appetite for oil,

  blood and flesh, but they behave according to fixed rules and can

  be understood by anyone with the cunning to look upon them and

  winkle out their secrets. Children are ever so much more

  complicated.

  Though I believe I may be learning a little about them, too.

  Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author,

  activist, journalist and blogger— the co-editor of Boing Boing

  (boingboing.net) and the author of many books, most recently In

  Real Life , a graphic novel; Information Doesn’t Want To Be

  Free , a book about earning a living in the Internet age, and

  Homeland , the award-winning, best-selling sequel to the 2008

  YA novel Little Brother .

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  127

  In Rebecca Moesta’s charming fantasy tale, young Allie begins

  corresponding with a penpal via her mysteriously magical new

  mailbox—a penpal who is a princess in a different world …

  P O S T C A R D S

  By Rebecca Moesta

  Memorizing her new zip code had been the easiest part of Allie’s

  move. After all, how hard could it be to remember five digits

  when three of them were sevens? The hardest part had been

  leaving her friends—and what seemed like her entire life—

  behind.

  Sitting on a pile of moving boxes in the echoing, otherwise-

  empty living room of their new house, Allie wondered morosely

  whether yanking a fifteen-year-old out of school three-quarters

  of the way through her sophomore year could not be considered

  child abuse.

  Raking a hand through her shoulder-length blond hair, she

  thought back to the night her life had changed. Allie had just

  returned from her fourth date with Ian Walters— Ian Walters, a

  senior and a forward on the Jackson Eagles basketball team—

  when her parents met her with the “wonderful news.” Her father,

  after only five months of unemployment, had taken a new job as

  head of Human Resources for a regional telecommunications

  firm halfway across the country. He said it was a “great

  Decision Points

  opportunity.”

  Allie knew she should have been happy for her parents. The

  relief was so plain on their faces. But it was obvious they hadn’t

  stopped for a moment to think about how this would affect her.

  Just that evening, Ian had asked Allie to the prom. In a little over

  a month, she should have been dressing like a fairy tale princess

  and then dancing all evening with one of the cutest guys in the

  whole school. But she would miss out on that now. Barely three

  weeks after her father’s announcement, the family had moved—

  leaving behind the only world Allie had ever known.

  Now, Allie’s black Labrador retriever Merlin chuffed, gave

  his tail a tentative wag, trotted to the front door, and looked back

  at her. Allie heaved a sigh. “C’mon, boy. We could both use a

  walk. I need to mail my letter to Roshanda anyway.” For the

  moment, letters were her only means of communication. Some

  sort of delay had come up in activating the telephone wiring, and

  now the idiot phone company said it could be another three

  weeks before their phone or internet service was connected. Her

  parents both had cell phones, but they didn’t seem to think that

  Allie might need one, too.

  From the moving carton next to her Allie picked up a yellow

  envelope containing a letter to her best friend, in which she had

  detailed the miseries of her new life in West Nowheresville,

  USA. Okay, sure, her parents were delighted. It was easy for

  them. Their financial worries were over, and they had found a

  beautiful new house. Her mom was already out applying for a

  job and meeting the neighbors. But on Monday Allie would be

  forced to start in the middle of the semester at a school she had

  never heard of before. Who knew what classes they would try to

  shoehorn her into? She would be the new girl, without a friend

  in the entire state.

  “Not a friend here but you, boy,” she said, clipping the leash

  to Merlin’s collar.

  At the end of the long, curving driveway, they paused at the

  rural-style mailbox, which was empty, of course, since she and

  her parents were the first residents at this address, and nothing

  from their old house had been forwarded yet. Allie put the

  envelope in and raised the little red flag on the side of the

  enameled aluminum box to indicate a letter for pickup.

  Abandoning herself to the dog’s whims, Allie let Merlin take

  the lead and enjoy his explorations for a couple of miles. She

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  paid just enough attention to their route to be sure she could find

  her way back to the house. The black lab romped and sniffed and

  peed and chased, finding wonder and delight in his new

  surroundings.

  Allie wished she could share the feeling, but for her, life felt

  bleak and hopeless and lonely. The only wonder in her world was

  wondering why this had had to happen to her. In spite of these

  gloomy thoughts, a smile quirked one corner of her mouth when,

  after an hour and a half of rambling, they returned to the house

  and she noticed the flag on the mailbox was down. Good, that

  meant her letter was mailed, and the sooner Roshanda got it, the

  sooner her friend could reply. Even though she knew it was

  foolish, she decided to peek into the mailbox in case a letter or

  some piece of junk mail had found its way here already. As she

  had expected, the interior of the arched metal box looked empty.

  But just as she was about to close the door, Allie saw a glint

  of something lying on the corrugat
ed aluminum bottom of the

  mailbox. A sheet of cellophane perhaps? No, it sparkled too

  much.

  Merlin wagged his tail wildly and barked twice, as if

  impatient to know what she was looking at. Allie put in her hand

  and drew out the shiny scrap of material. She laid it across her

  palm to study it. It was a pliable, crystalline sheet about the size

  and shape of a standard postcard, but that was where the

  similarity ended. The card itself was as clear as spring water and

  etched with strange symbols that did not look like any form of

  writing Allie had ever seen. They looked like those laser carvings

  of sailboats or eagles or lighthouses in blocks of Lucite that she

  had seen in the airport gift store.

  The etched symbols seemed to float deep inside the

  rectangle, which was strange since the clear material was thinner

  than a piece of notebook paper. In fact, the more Allie looked at

  it, the more three-dimensional the symbols seemed to appear.

  The markings—hieroglyphics, perhaps?—started to swirl before

  her eyes, forming and unforming words that she did not

  recognize but felt she ought to know. As if responding to an

  optical illusion, her field of vision deepened, and ripples moved

  across the card’s surface, like tiny waves on a crystal-clear

  mountain lake.

  With one finger she reached out to touch the swirling

  symbols and suddenly found herself facing a life-sized,

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  shimmering image of a girl no older than she with knee-length

  raven locks and a tear-streaked face. A window behind the girl

  framed a many-turreted stone castle standing on the shores of a

  sparkling blue-green lake. Allie gasped and blinked several

  times. The image didn’t disappear, yet she could see right

  through it to her house and the mailbox and Merlin. It was as if

  she was looking at the largest, most vividly colored hologram

  ever created.

  Allie groaned. “I’ve finally lost it, haven’t I, Merlin? It—”

  But before she could finish her sentence, the ethereal girl sat

  down at a desk by the window. A diminutive, kindly looking old

  man with a shock of fluffy gray hair handed her a long white

 

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