Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
Fogwork
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
It paid better than shouting on corners with newspapers. There was less chance of losing a finger or catching a killing cough than if you worked the bobbins. And it wasn’t as risky as pickpocketing — no matter what the neighborhood, no matter how late, the censer marked you as in the employ of towermen, who were said to know everything, to control everything as far as the fog went, and the fog went everywhere in the city.
That was the part Gabriel Loy liked best, being able to walk wherever and have everyone step aside at his approach. They all looked at him without wanting to look like they were looking — he liked that too. The only thing he didn’t like was the way he dreamed disordered jumbled dreams crowded with faces, numbers, and hints of terrible knowledge.
He’d made an art of swinging the fog-seeder, looping it out long or spinning it in tight, in far more elaborate figures than what you needed just to the keep the whirligig works in the brass sphere wound up.
Not that it mattered to the towermen. They didn’t care who waved their smoking orbs as long as someone did it. Half a crown when you took it smoldering from the cart; another crown when you returned it, cold, at dawn.
But when, in alley where he strutted even thought there was no one to watch him, his foot went through a gap between boards and he fell just as the censer was on the downswing and it went down into the dark and splashed two heartbeats later, he knew they’d care about that.
He had to get it back. Even though it meant scraping his hands and straining his shoulders to wrench all the boards off the top of the well. It meant finding handholds in the loose bricks, and mastering his panic when the bricks gave way to packed clay ten feet down and there was no way down and there didn’t seem to be any way back up either. But as he breathed, he learned: the fog had poured deep into the well, so that he was as high above the knowledge-mist as the towermen on their spire-tops and chimney-trestles.
What the fog-mind told them, it told him: he knew where the censer was, how to get it back up, how to keep learning. Plans unfolded like dreams in his head: a balloon! He would fly and breath the top of more fog and he’d be wise, and everyone would look at him without wanting to look like they were looking, even the towermen.
Helmut, Deep in the Rock
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
Even in the middle of a war, Helmut didn’t want to lose his job, because he wasn’t very smart. If they didn’t want him on this asteroid, maybe nobody else would want to hire him either, and then what? Maybe they’d put him in space and laugh at him when he couldn’t breathe, like those boys did when they stuck him in the airlock for a long minute when he was little. He didn’t want that again.
Still, Helmut barely could make himself go in. He didn’t know anything about this kind of work. He’d never done it before. But he did what he was told, which was how he’d always kept a job so far. He got to the end of the rock tunnel, opened the door, and went in.
The room was full of children.
In the distance, some missiles must have been hitting the asteroid, because the whole place shook and boomed. Little showers of dust came down from the ceiling. Some of the children screamed. Helmut wanted to hold his hands over his ears, but he thought the kids might call him scared, so he didn’t.
“Where’s my dad?” shrieked a boy who was only about as tall as Helmut’s knee.
“We’re all going to die! Everybody’s going to die!” wailed a girl.
The wail echoed off the rock walls. They were hidden in one of the deep storerooms, as far from the surface and from the fighting as they could be. The children looked up at Helmut, waiting.
A little dreadlocked girl came up and tugged at the knee of Helmut’s atsuit. “You say, ‘nobody’s going to die.'”
Helmut didn’t understand, so he kept quiet.
“We’re not really going to die, right?”
Another explosion shook the room. Helmut kept thinking he could hear atmosphere breach klaxons off in the distance, but it was just imaginary. The children watched him.
“Maybe,” Helmut said. “If the air goes out, then we’d probably all die then. I hope it doesn’t.”
The dreadlocked girl teared up, but she nodded. “I hope so too,” she said. Then she latched onto his leg like she was trying to keep from being pulled out into space, and the children all clustered around, wrapping their arms around Helmut and each other.
Another thundering, louder now. The lights went out. But the children were holding onto Helmut, even while most of them were crying.
“This isn’t so bad,” Helmut said, wonderingly, and the kids clung to him harder.