Filaria (5 page)

“I’m convinced they had real women taking care of real kids once. I think
my
nanny was a real woman.”

“Well, she did a lousy job.”

Deidre instantly regretted her unkind words; it wasn’t often that the dead boy referred to details from his short life, and she hadn’t meant to stop him — Deidre suspected, at times, that he might even have lived when the world was very young and peopled by those who had built it, the vanished creators, but she had never felt right about prompting him. Did remnants of that past flutter, she often wondered, tattered and forgotten in the breath that Sam had revived his corpse with? Did vague, infantile memories of another time blow through the boy’s veins?

Regardless, he would not elaborate now.

So Deidre said, “This story,” and cleared her throat, “is called
The Engineer
— ”

But the boy interrupted: “A single pod is descending from Elegia!”

They both turned toward the lift shaft, like an umbilicus stringing whitish and gnarled a few fields over, extending from the ceiling far overhead to the misty land below. Individual lifts were not visible from the outside but nonetheless the girl and the dead boy stared at the shaft for two beats of Deidre’s heart, and when she again looked at the boy, she saw that he held, cupped in his pale hands — as if he had just conjured it — the body of the
bianca
. He dropped the dead insect into the open killing jar and a whiff of ether rose between the two, poison on the warm air. The moth twitched on the cotton, curled in on itself, ugly for a moment, in final death.

Deidre clapped down the lid.

Cued by that sound, compartments and recesses throughout the plantation around them hissed and opened; workers emerged from where they rested overnight. In the nearby field, like ancient cicadas, several staff members crawled up to begin their shift. They rocked from side to side to clear the dirt from their carapaces. Elsewhere, machines and men and those creatures betwixt prepared to do their toil. A clatter and a moan from high above as a great gusty breath blew down through the lemon trees; the entire plantation sighed, perhaps at the idea of starting another day —

A frantic bluebird swooped down from a branch, to appear at Deidre’s side. Had the bird seen her father emerge from the lift, a mug of hot cocoa in his hands, his hair tousled from sleep? Flying low over the light-dappled plants before her, madly circling the trunks, it waited for her to follow. She crammed the jar back into her satchel. Turning to quickly say goodbye, but the dead boy had already vanished.

Sam’s tiny device circled and circled, preceding Deidre from the grove and over the wheatgrass field, wanting her to move.
Don’t get caught
!
Hurry
!
Hurry
!

She thought she heard her name being called, faintly, in her father’s flat baritone.

A giant water filter, standing high over them, turned its head to watch the girl and the bird dash across fallow soil and through a tiny wood, to pause in the radish fields. Stretching to the north, and fading into the last of the morning mists: other plantations, jurisdictions of other Orchard Keepers. And two more lift shafts, mere guy wires from this distance. Beyond were lands unknown. Renegade settlements. Strange people, those the Orchard Keeper called
barbarians
. Civilized people, such as Deidre’s family, lived above, in estates, directly under the suns. This level was for farming. And below?

Deidre shivered.

Among the tubers hovered three workers, spraying fertilizer. Light glinted off their flanks. They bade Deidre good morning with nodding motions. Pressing on once more, she tried to ignore them. Drudges like these would never think to inform the Orchard Keeper they had seen Deidre passing, a bag clenched tight in her hands and one of the supervisor’s birds flying frenetically at her side. Certainly her father would never condescend to ask
them
if they’d seen anything.

Her sanctum was beyond the radish fields. She had discovered the place several summers ago, while exploring the plantations, shortly after her father had been elected to the position of Orchard Keeper. A narrow aperture between two boulders opened up into a crooked hall, the kind with hard, smooth walls, and a low ceiling, just like a hall inside a small house. From this budded five successively smaller rooms, an arrangement seemingly designed expressly for children or very tiny adults. When she had first found the sanctum, these rooms were devoid of anything except dust. Now she kept her moth collection in the last chamber, which was an area barely big enough for the short counter and knee-high cabinet she had dragged in. Deidre had to stand with the door forced open, stooped, her backside sticking out.

After gradually befriending the bizarre and lonely plantation supervisor that summer, Deidre had asked about the rooms. Sam, as the console had asked to be called, assured her that, to the best of his knowledge, no machines or people had been inside the area for as long as he had been aware. At least, not that he could remember. In fact, he had seemed surprised to learn of the rooms’ existence and had no good ideas as to what the area had been constructed for in the first place, nor even if he had
ever
been aware of them before Deidre’s inquiry. Unable to see within, he had bluebirds flutter inside and out for a full day, mapping and investigating, and reporting back.

Deidre moved in right away, bringing some light furniture, a few notebooks, a doll or two. Artefacts brought down from Elegia that made her feel more comfortable. She drew a mandala, her personal glyph — selected from an ancient printout — carefully over the walls, so that the chain of tiny rooms became a palace in the kingdom over which Deidre reigned, a place where she was princess, a home where she was the eldest sister.

Cramped inside, breathless from the run, but grinning, she put her satchel down on the small counter. Taking out the killing jar, rolling it slowly, so she could see the moth better: the body thumped softly against the glass. She placed the jar next to the satchel and carefully folded back the sleeves of her blouse.
Catacola bianca
would require her largest spreading board. She retrieved this, which she had made herself, from under the counter, plus two thin strips of paper, and some pins, to hold the wings in place until they dried. Lifting her hooked spreading needle, her tools arrayed before her, she was filled with the contentment that comes from being in her sanctum with a productive task at hand. Her limbs tingled from the morning’s excitement. She began to work.

However, a short while after setting the left-hand pair of wings, staring dreamily at the exposed white shapes and delicate system of veins, Deidre heard a very faint sound. She had the immediate and disconcerting impression that this voice — for it was indeed a voice — might have been speaking for some time but she had only just now registered it. When did it start? Had the muted tones been whispering the entire time she’d been here, working on the
bianca
? She strained to listen. The source did not seem far away, certainly not from the fields outside, but as if someone infinitesimally tiny were calling out from within the sanctum itself. She was unable to discern any words, nor tell if they issued from man or woman, human or machine. Nor even if they were in the language she knew and spoke.

Holding the spreading needle in one hand, she stepped back into the hallway; the voice became slightly louder. She crept down the narrow hall, anxious but not especially nervous. From the second room of the chain, where she kept her paper and sketching charcoals, there came a flicker of bluegrey light, the colour of static. Nothing in that room could give off light — other than the ceiling. Certainly nothing could emit a flicker like
this
.

The murmured voice, unreal — ceasing when she held her breath, resuming when she shifted — came from in there.

“Sam?” Deidre whispered. “Sam? Is that you? Who’s in there?”

No answer. The light continued to flicker. The voice continued to whisper. She curled her fists, took a deep breath, and stepped forward —

The tiny man was fifteen centimetres tall. Dressed in an outfit such as a pilot might wear — hood pulled up over the back of his head, leaving his face, which was turned to the ceiling, exposed — he stood with both hands at his sides. He did not look her way. Over his eyes he wore goggles, and a thin mask covered his mouth, as if there was dust, or perhaps a virus, borne in the air. Deidre got down on her haunches and moved closer; the man wavered, blurred, coalesced.

A
gram
.

She felt disappointment. Elegia showed her grams of all sorts, whenever she asked. They were boring and mostly acted out dumb plays or tried to teach her stuff. Granted, this particular one did seem more detailed than those she normally viewed — its face more expressive, the concern near palpable — but it was a gram nonetheless. She waved her hand over the tiny, luminous figure, coming at it from various angles until it eclipsed and only the quiet voice remained. Squinting, she looked up, scanning for the source.

She stood and searched the walls with her fingertips, searched the counter, feeling for the patch that controlled the size and volume of the projection. She had never found any in this room before but she had never had reason to look. And there it was, under the rim of the countertop, a small wet spot. Rubbing it caused the figure to erupt until the man suddenly filled the room, surpassed it, one glaring boot massive at eye-level —

“Damn . . .”

Managing to adjust the figure to her own height, Deidre sought the volume with a second finger. The insubstantial whisper became a loud voice:

“ — had lost two cows from his flock. They wandered off when his son fell asleep.”

Yes, Deidre’s own language, but spoken with a strange accent. Someone from far away? The man did not seem like an actor, or a teacher. Nor, for that matter, anyone particularly barbarous.

“The patrol was searching for indications of the breach. Coming up over Amusement Ridge, looking for debris on the ground, Captain Elrion spotted what looked to be massive scorch marks. Yes, sir, twin trails of scorched dirt and brush. In one place, the base structure had been exposed, rocks melted away, right down to the frame.”

The man paused. Was he listening to something?

Deidre could tell he wore a scarf but it was hard to discern what colour. And there was a device strapped to the man’s waist, on the right-hand side, the likes of which she had never seen before. He turned toward her now but did not look at her, of course: he looked right through her. But at whom? His boss? Someone he called ‘sir.’

“The coast was clear. We circled the area and landed nearby. There was a light breeze from the north and visibility was great. We found the missing cows. They had been roasted. Not eaten, sir, but roasted to cinders. As if in sport. I have never seen anything like it.”

Deidre stepped back. She did not know what a cow was but unpleasant images were certainly forming.

“Exploring the area on foot, we found a small camp, a hut and such, presumably that of a solitaire. We knocked, identified ourselves. There was no response. When we entered, we discovered the body. The victim had been tied to a chair and tortured. I prefer . . . prefer not to describe the nature of his injuries, sir, but refer you to a series of images that our camera took at the scene.

“Yes. That’s right. Ensign Conway found the footprints. Uh, yes, sir, Ensign Conway. The one and only. He was with us because no one expected our assignment to become so, so sensitive. He’d been tucked out of the way where he couldn’t cause any trouble and instead he found himself in the thick of it. Trouble found him. Trouble found all of us.

“The prints? They were huge, two individuals, not of biological origin. A new form of staff, we wondered. A new position? Undiscovered for centuries? That’s what we thought too. Regardless, the bootprint was double the size of a human man’s boot but very much a bootprint. We also found the casing of an unidentified armament. Pardon me, sir? Yes, that’s right, the flame-throwing device.”

The wavering figure contracted as if stricken, its image sliced up and then complete again. Jumping forward, temporally, the man held his goggles now, and seemed a trifle more at ease.

“ — told no one about it, but my wife believes there’s something bad coming. She had her cards read. Says this woman’s never wrong. Couldn’t sleep and kept asking me about war, and if I thought there could ever be another one. What do I know about war? I told her that every moment you’re alive something bad is coming.” He grinned. “I told her to go to sleep and to stop worrying. But maybe this woman’s right. I know, sir, I’m also pragmatic, but it’s unsettling, you must admit.”

The man ceased moving, then repeated the gesture Deidre had seen when she’d first looked in.

“A local livestock farmer had lost two cows from his flock. They wandered off when his son fell asleep.”

She diminished the gram to thumbnail size and the voice faded to nothing. She knew she had better finish mounting the
bianca
before it stiffened too much, but her feelings of contentment were displaced. When she got back to her setting board she did a rushed job and lost some of the white scales in her clumsiness.

After putting her equipment away, she hurried out of her sanctum; it suddenly seemed a good idea to seek out her father, to walk by his side while he made his stern morning rounds.

Despite the fact that it was Mereziah’s birthday, he spent the early part of his shift as he spent most of his workdays now: suspended quietly, head-down, side by side with his silent brother. In the quasidarkness of the shaft, neither moved much. Not any more. Hardly a muscle twitched between them. When they breathed, it was deep, in unison, and at a very slow rate. Had anyone been watching, the distinction between this stasis and death might have been hard to detect.

No one was watching.

Nearby lift pods, inactive for ages, nestled into the curved wall, virtually sealed into place. Few would be capable of motion again, even if their services were required — a situation which seemed less and less likely.