The Sky Inside

by Clare B. Dunkle

  “You silly dog,” Martin told him in a low voice. “You never get stickers! They slide . . . right . . . off.”

  Slowly, he turned his head until Hertz came into view. The big man was still on his knees, checking over his gear. Old socks, but no stickers. No mud from last night’s water pumping. No blood from the rabbit. Old clothes, but no new stains. No new stains at all.

  Casually, Martin reached for his backpack. He felt around for an eternity, past Cassie’s old bunny, past all those half-melted snack bars, until he found what he was looking for. Then, slowly, he walked over to Hertz and dropped his Alldog reset chip onto the man’s shoulder.

  They probably made a chip especially for bots like this one. In any case, this chip didn’t work very well on him. Hertz didn’t just become a neat pool of simulation gel. That would have been too easy.

  Hertz shrieked and flung himself wildly about, reaching out in all directions. He seemed to sink into quicksand up to his waist: first his legs and then his hips were gone. He flung out his arms: two arms, then four, six, ten, twelve arms that writhed like fleshy snakes and grabbed for Martin. The agony on his face was beyond description.

  Then he collapsed in on himself. His head caved in like an empty shell. For a time, the face still floated on the silver liquid, mouthing silent pleas or curses. At long last, it faded away into the shiny surface like a lost reflection.

  Martin became aware that someone was shaking him. It was Chip, pressed against his legs, shivering so violently that they were both in danger of toppling. Martin knelt and wrapped his arms around the dog.

  “That can’t be fun to watch, can it?” he said. “It was bad enough for me, but it was more weird than anything. For you, it must be like watching your own murder.”

  Hertz was nothing more now than an oblong of silver gel. Floating inside was a big green circuit board, bristling with chips of all descriptions. But there were a couple of odd things floating in there too. One was a long, loose spring running from a closed metal box to what looked like an electrical plug. Two large copper prongs stuck out from the plug, each about an inch long.

  “Hey, Chip, what’s that?” Martin asked.

  Chip spoke for the first time since Hertz’s arrival. He lifted his muzzle and let out a tormented howl.

  “It’s a killer then,” Martin guessed. “A weapon that kills bots as well as people. When Hertz came along, he must have showed it to you. He held up his hand so I couldn’t see, and he told you to keep quiet. Because otherwise—well, of course!—you’d talk to him in bot, and then I would have known he was bad news.”

  But if the weapon had terrified Chip, it was the other discovery that chilled Martin. Coiled up in Hertz’s gel was a radio antenna. This bot was wired for long-distance communication.

  Don’t you ever get the feeling that we’re surrounded by forces we can’t see? Twice a day, I go up high. And I seek guidance, and I find answers. It’s good to know we’re not alone in this world.

  Martin stared at the antenna and felt like howling right along with Chip. Hertz was a unique and very powerful bot, loaded with features and brand-new supplies. He had been entrusted with an extremely important mission, the reason for his whole existence. And that mission was keeping an eye on Martin Glass.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  They escaped as quickly as they could. Martin took the mustard-colored knapsack, loading the snack bars and his flashlight on top of the camping equipment and tying Cassie’s bunny to a strap. It was heavier than his backpack, but the supplies were so valuable that he couldn’t risk leaving them behind.

  “Why do they care what I’m up to?” he demanded as they walked away. “Why me? I’m just one little kid from the burb. If they catch me, it’s game shows for sure.” He quaked at the thought.

  The day promised to stay cool. Fluffy gray clouds blanketed the sky from one horizon to the other as they walked up the packet line toward the artificial landscape he had seen the evening before. A few hours into their walk, Martin saw to his dismay that the packet line split again, going three ways this time. One line continued straight, one line headed left toward the nearby mountains, and one line headed east, along the very edge of that green land that had looked like a giant’s floor.

  “Fantastic!” he wailed. “Three ways this time, and not a clue which way that Motley guy went!”

  They came to the rails that ran to the east, cutting across their line of march. Martin scrambled up the steep gravel bank, and the mystery of the bright green zone revealed itself. The tiles were large cultivated fields, containing row after row of identical plants. Silver bots worked there, moving between the rows.

  “I see food, Chip! Let’s go get some.”

  They clambered down the gravel bank and crossed the weedy stretch of ground before the first field. Martin slowed down as they approached. “That’s kind of funny,” he said.

  Up to the edge of the field were wildflowers and weeds, but the tidy field held nothing but one kind of plant. Outside it, bees and flies hummed, grasshoppers hopped, and beetles and butterflies spread their wings. Inside, not so much as a single ant moved along the bare earth. Martin could see no barrier around the field, but everything unwanted stayed outside.

  “Chip, do you see a fence?” he asked.

  As if sharing his thoughts, a bee flew toward the field. When it reached the edge, a small space before it darkened as if it cast a shadow in the air, and it bounced into an invisible barrier with a small thump. Over and over, it thumped itself against this blockade. Then it flew off in a less discouraging direction.

  Martin tapped at the air with a cautious finger. Sure enough, as low or as high as he could reach, his fingernail hit something hard, like glass.

  “That’s just great!” he said. “We’re not going this way. And those are ripe tomatoes too!”

  Beside him, Chip studied the rustling rows of plants and their attendant agricultural bots. In a few seconds, a small silver bot temporarily augmented their workforce. It plucked several tomatoes and rolled back out again. Then it transformed back into a German shepherd and danced with pleasure at the successful completion of its mission.

  “You know, you like being a dog, don’t you?” Martin observed, biting into one of the tomatoes. “I mean, you’ll change and everything, but you never want to stay changed.”

  For answer, Chip crouched down in a playful feint, poked Martin with a tan paw, and wagged his bushy black tail.

  They walked along the edge of the fields for hours, trying out different kinds of produce along the way. At first, Martin hung back when the agricultural bots were working nearby, but they paid no attention to him. He caught several glimpses of a strange spectacle ahead, but for quite a while, they walked past high rows of corn and could see nothing of it at all. Then they climbed the crest of a mounded bank, and the view unfolded itself, stark and clear, against the cloudy sky.

  “What’s that?” Martin wondered, shading his eyes.

  It was an immense, airy sculpture, a three-dimensional diagram of a shoelace knot, sprawled over a region as large as his entire suburb. Great ribbons of concrete rose gracefully into the air and doubled over one another in long curves. Martin could trace them as they climbed from one side and crossed to the other in long ramps and huge circles: sidestepping, diverging, and merging again, like a ballet of motion stopped and frozen forever. One above another, the thin stone ribbons rose into the air, until the one at the top was five layers high. Martin stared at its dizzying height in rapture.

  “I have got to get up there!”

  This was easier said than done. He could track the soaring span to its earthly origin, but that was still far away. Once he got closer, he found that the massive artwork was protected by steep banks and dense scrub. But he reached the source at last: a broken-up bed of dark gray asphalt, choked with bushes and weeds. Only when the structure left the ground did the weeds stay behind and the pitted surface become sturdy concrete.

  “This is a street,” h
e said as they walked up it. “All of these things look like streets. Streets in the air, running all over the place! How weird is that?”

  The climb was strenuous. Martin was glad that the overcast day was cool because he was soon panting with fatigue. He walked up the middle of the worn roadbed, staying away from the low concrete barriers at the edges. Suburbs were flat. Aside from his climb with Hertz, he had never been anywhere high.

  The top of the span would have pleased Hertz, but Martin felt uneasy at the thought of how far up he was and how little solid support there seemed to be around him. Even the road itself wasn’t flat. It angled in an alarming way, with a high side and a low side. He crawled to the high side to look over.

  Directly below, like a big dark gash, stretched the remnants of a majestic road. Trees grew out of it now, but it had been very wide, and he could follow it with his eyes a long way into the distance. The packet line crossed it on a low, flat bridge, just as if it were a river. Another roadway, almost as wide, came up to meet this one. It was their junction that created the enormous knot of roads and ramps. Martin was consumed with admiration at the planning of it all.

  “I think it’s beautiful!” he told Chip. “Why’d they let it fall apart?”

  He followed the packet line with his eyes, trying to gauge how likely it was as a route for the Wonder Baby packet. It ran toward a confusing clutter of artificial-looking elements in the distance: tall structures, gathered together in a ruinous tumble, like the stack of firewood Hertz had lit to cook his rabbit. Martin squinted at them but could make out little about them beyond their height and lack of uniformity. Light glinted back at him from some areas, as if some parts were glass, but other parts were as black as holes. All in all, they formed a bizarre collage on the far horizon that signified to him neither pattern nor meaning.

  Martin was more interested in the land that lay almost directly below him, right on the other side of the ruined road crossed by the packet line. This region was close enough to see clearly, so he could understand more things about it. It was mostly forest, full of native vegetation, so its color was close to the olive green of the hills that he had traveled. But it was woven through with what had plainly been at one time a net of closely drawn streets, and many dark structures still lined the roadways. The buildings’ outlines were ragged and damaged with age and encroaching brush, but they were regular, like a baby’s blocks.

  Martin gazed down at the spiderweb of streets and the boxes that lined them. The scene tugged at him, as if he should recognize it somehow. Cool wind poured past him, and he looked around. The clouds were growing thicker.

  “Come on, Chip,” he said. “Let’s keep going that way. I want to see what’s down there in those little streets.”

  They were easier to study from above than on the ground. Swallowed up by trees and enormous bushes, they were in a tangle of foliage so thick that Martin couldn’t force his way through. Then Chip found a wreck of broken paving that turned toward the area, probably one of those little streets Martin had seen from the air. The crumbling surface at least discouraged the exuberant plant growth, even if it couldn’t stop it.

  Martin walked along the street, looking about. The forest of scrubby oaks and diseased sycamores and ashes turned the street into an airy tunnel, and matted leaves and plant roots tripped him whenever he was unwise enough to take too many steps without looking down. The dark structures were man-made buildings, just as he had thought, spaced about ten feet apart from one another on both sides of the road. Enormous, ragged bushes growing up before them blocked most of his view, and yet they seemed eerily familiar.

  Here, where the plant growth was sparse in front of the buildings, large concrete slabs came down to join the street, their surfaces shattered like jigsaw puzzles. He had never seen anything like them. Of course not. How could he have? And yet, the regularity of them, as he walked along, spoke like a whisper in his mind: curb, space, curb, space. He stopped to calm the disquieting feeling, studying a busted slab, looking at the crumbled curbing beside it, its chunks like a dropped and broken piecrust. But the minute he started walking, the feeling started up again.

  A chilly wind came winding down through the lemon-and-lime-colored forest, shaking the dried weeds at his feet. But those—were they weeds? Those showy dark red flowers, whipping back and forth on that straggling vine? Surely those hadn’t grown there by themselves. Surely he had seen them before.

  Yard work isn’t for everybody, but I take pride in it. It wouldn’t kill some people to do a little work around here.

  “Oh no,” he whispered.

  Stillness blanketed the empty neighborhood. Against the low black clouds, the shabby leaves seemed bright. Martin felt a sickness falling into the pit of his stomach, an aching dread that came from not wanting to learn what he already knew.

  Pale pink brick on a tumbledown structure, light brown brick on the next, matching one another in form and feature across a riot of tangled growth. Picture window, front door, gap for a garage door; picture window, front door, garage. The patterns of things were revealing themselves, pushing their way through the branches and leaf mold: the spaces and rhythms that governed a way of life.

  They found a building less damaged than the others and entered through the garage—of course, his heart told him as he gathered courage in the semidarkness, because he always entered through the garage. He pushed his way through the remains of the door, and there they were, just as he had known they would be: the kitchen, the dining room, the living room over there, where the breeze curled through what had been the picture window. In the murky gloom, those familiar places seemed to gather around him, as if they had been waiting for his arrival to give them their form.

  “I don’t believe this!” said Martin shakily. “Chip, we’re home.”

  He stepped over drifted leaves and peered through the darkness at shelves that still held plates, at cabinets that had warped and disgorged their contents—cans and broken bottles—onto the uneven counters and floor. He gingerly pulled a brittle syrup container from the filth and held it up. The one he used every Rest Day was this same shape.

  Nudging past the upended structure that had once stood on four legs and been the dining table, he made his way toward the living room. Things that might have once been chairs snapped and crunched under his feet, but the kitchen bar was still intact. As he passed it, he seemed to see, out of the corner of his eye, the shadow of a woman bending over a coffee cup.

  Where had this woman gone? And why?

  Now he stood in the living room and looked out through the picture window at the bushes that were growing in. Had that misshapen lump that sprouted weeds along its length once been a family couch? Could that black hulk by the wall be the shell of a television? What had they watched in the evening, this missing family? And why—why—were they gone?

  Our families were the lucky ones. He had heard that so many times. But what had happened to the ones who hadn’t been lucky?

  Our grandparents competed for the right to live in comfort. Yes, but people were supposed to be dying then. Sickness and poverty, wasn’t that right? But this looked like a fine place to live.

  Suppose, when they had built the domed suburbs in Granny’s day—tiny copies of this huge one, obviously—suppose that this suburb had still been alive and well. They couldn’t have moved everybody into the domes. There would have been far too many people. Somehow, they had chosen who would survive. There had to have been some kind of lottery, some sort of competition.

  Or maybe . . . maybe even a game show.

  An appalling idea! An idea so ghastly, Martin couldn’t even bring himself to say it out loud. We are not going to discuss this. Sometimes it’s best to turn your back on things. For how many generations now had his people been turning their backs on things? How long had they sat in their living rooms and watched other people die?

  A strong gust of wind blasted into the deserted room, and Martin beat a hasty retreat. Outside and overhead, ratt
ling drops hit the roof as he stumbled down the murky hall. The first room he came to had a nice window through which he could see the whipping trees. Martin was glad to emerge from the darkness. He was afraid of the darkness in his thoughts.

  The small space was full of junk and debris, and spiders and insects fled at his intrusion. He picked up a plastic puzzle cube, stripped of its colors but just like the one he had at home. This room, a prickling intuition suggested, had belonged to a boy his own age.

  And in a flash, he felt that boy standing right behind him.

  He dropped the cube and whirled, knowing that nothing would be there. Nothing was. But the air was palpable with loathing and bitterness.

  Don’t you ever get the feeling that we’re surrounded by forces we can’t see? Forces that hate us for the things we did to them.

  Martin spent the storm huddled in the dim hallway, with his arms wrapped tightly around Chip. Water poured through cracks in the ceiling and soaked him to the skin. Thunder crashed, and lightning flashed red against his eyelids, but the violence of the weather was no less terrifying than the violence in his own mind. It isn’t my fault that we won and you lost, he pleaded with the house’s silent spirits. He didn’t dare to look up for fear of the faces he might see.

  Long before the last rumbles of thunder faded, Martin scurried from the house, his anxious dog trotting at his heels. He bolted down the center of the weedy, muddy street, not daring now to look left or right. He could feel stern gazes from those gaping picture windows, the implacable resentment of the dead. What right has one of the lucky ones to come here, they seemed to ask, when we were the ones who paid the price?

  Chip led him out of the tangle of overgrown streets and back to the mammoth knot of ramps and bridges. Martin picked out the most direct bridge to the green produce fields and dashed across it as if they were followed by an army of ghosts. On the other side of the wide gash that had been the great roadway, he collapsed in relief and looked back at the low growth of forest that hid its dismal secret so well.