Live Without a Net Read online

  “There are worse out there than us.”

  “But you aren’t very good at running a city. It isn’t wealth you want, is it?” She had struggled to understand that trader word, long expunged from her language; for better or worse the Qax had for centuries imposed a crude communism on mankind. “There’s no wealth to be had here.”

  “No. There are only people.”

  “Yes. And where there are people, there is power to be wielded. And that’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  He fell silent, and she wondered if she had pushed him too far. ‘Tell me about Sat-urn again—”

  The door slammed open. Somebody was standing there, silhouetted by bright light.

  Rala stepped forward, spreading her arms to hide Pash.

  “I represent the Interim Coalition of Governance. The illegal seizure of this Conurbation by the bandits of the GUTship Port Sol is over.” A light shone in Rala’s face.

  “We are both drones.” She rattled off details of her identity and work assignment.

  “You must stay in your cell. In the morning you will be summoned for new details. If you encounter the Port Sol crew—”

  “I will report them.”

  There was shouting in the corridor; the Coalition trooper hurried away.

  Pash murmured, “Lethe. Look.”

  Beyond the window, in the reddening sky, a Spline ship was hovering, a great meaty ball pocked with weapons emplacements. But this was no Qax vessel; a green tetrahedral sigil had been crudely carved in its flank.

  “Things have changed,” Rala said dryly.

  “Why did you shelter me?”

  “Because I have had enough of rulers,” she snapped. “We must be ready. You will have to shave your head. Perhaps one of my robes will fit you.”

  They were all evicted from the city. The people stood in sullen ranks—mostly drones, but with at least one trader, Pash, camouflaged among the rest. They had been given tools, simple hoes and spades. The walls of the Conurbation loomed above them all, scorched by fire.

  The sun was hot, the air dry, and insects buzzed. These were city folk; they didn’t like being out here. There were even children; the new rulers of the Conurbation had closed down the schools, which the traders had kept running.

  A woman stood on a platform before them. She wore a green uniform, clean but shabby, and she had the green sigil tattooed on her forehead—the symbol, as Rala had now learned, of free humanity. At her side were soldiers, not in uniform, though they all wore green armbands and had the sigil marked on their faces.

  “My name is Cilo Mora,” said the woman. “The Green Army has restored order to the Earth. But the Qax may return—or if not them, another foe. You are the advance troops of a moral revolution. The work you will begin today will fortify your will and clarify your vision. But remember—now you are all free!”

  One man near the front raised his hoe dubiously. “Free to scrape at the dirt?”

  One of the armbands clubbed him to the ground.

  Nobody moved. Cilo Mora smiled, as if the unpleasantness had never happened. The man in the dirt lay where he had fallen, unattended.

  Fields were marked out using rubble from Conurbation walls. Seeds were supplied, from precious stores preserved off-world. All around the city, people scraped at the dirt, but there were machines, too, hastily adapted and improvised.

  For many, it went hard. The people of the Conurbation had been office workers. Soon, some fell ill; some died. As the survivors’ hands hardened, so did their spirit, it seemed to Rala. But there hadn’t been farmers on Earth for centuries.

  Still, the crops began to come. But the vegetables were sparse and thin. Rala thought she understood why—it was a legacy of the Qax—but nobody seemed to have any idea what to do about it.

  The staple food continued to be the pale yellow ration tablets from the food holes. But just as under the old regime, there was never enough to eat.

  In the rest times they would gather, swapping bits of information.

  Pash said, “The Green Army really does seem to be putting down the warlords,” seeming to forget he was one of those “warlords” himself. “Of course, having a Spline ship is a big help. But those clowns who follow Cilo around aren’t Army but the Green Guard. Amateurs, with a mission to cement the revolution.”

  Rala whispered, “What this revolution comes down to is scratching at the dirt for food.”

  “We can’t use Qax technology anymore,” Ingre said. “It would be counterprogressive.” Ingre was always saying things like this. She seemed to welcome the new ideology. Rala wondered if she had been through too many shocks.

  “It’s not going to work,” Rala said softly. “The Extirpation was pretty thorough. The Qax planted replicators in the soil, to make it lifeless.” Their goal had been to wipe off the native ecology, to make the Earth uninhabited save for humans and the blue-green algae of the oceans, which would become great tanks of nutrient to feed their living Spline ships. “No amount of scraping with hoes is going to make the dirt green in a hurry.”

  “We have to support the Druz Doctrines,” said Ingre. “It’s the way forward for mankind.”

  Pash wasn’t listening to either of them. He said, “You’d never get in the Army, but those Green Guards are the gang to join. Most of them are pretty dumb; you can see that. A smart operator could rise pretty fast… .”

  They spoke like this only in brief snatches. There was always a collaborator about, always a spy ready to sell a story to the Guards for a bit of food.

  Soon the cuts began.

  It was as if the Coalition believed that starvation would motivate their new shock troops of the uninterrupted revolution. The first signs of malnutrition appeared: swollen bellies among the children.

  Rala had always kept her handful of replicator dust from her old cell in the Conurbation. Now she found a hidden corner by the Conurbation walls, where she dug out the earth and sprinkled in a little of her dust. Still nothing happened.

  One day Pash caught her. By now he had fulfilled his ambition to become a Green Guard, and he had donned the green armband with shameless ease.

  She said, “Will you turn me in?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because I’m trying to use Qax technology. I am doctrinally invalid.”

  He shrugged. “You saved my life.”

  “Anyhow,” she said, “it’s not working.”

  He frowned and poked at the dirt. “Do you know anything about this kind of technology? We used a human version in the Sol’s life support—cruder than this, of course. Nanotech manipulates matter at the molecular or atomic levels.”

  “It turns waste into food.”

  “Yes. But people seem to think it’s a magic dust, that you just throw at a heap of garbage to turn it into diamonds and steak—”

  “Diamonds? Steak?”

  “Never mind. There is nothing magic about this stuff. Nanotech is like biology. To ‘grow,’ a nanotech product needs nutrients, and energy. On Sol we used a nutrient bath. This Qax stuff is more robust and can draw what it needs from the environment, if it gets a chance.”

  She thought about that. “You mean I have to feed it, like a plant.”

  “There is a lot of chemical energy stored in the environment. You can tap it slowly but efficiently, like plants or bacteria, or burn it rapidly but inefficiently, like a fire. This Qax technology is smart stuff; it releases energy more swiftly than biological cells but more efficiently than a fire. As well as fighting off the destructive replicators, it ought to outcompete plants. In principle, a nanosown field ought to do better than a biologically planted field.”

  She failed to understand many of the words he was using. Though she pressed him to explain, to help her, he was always too busy.

  Meanwhile Ingre, Rala’s cadre sibling, became a problem.

  Despite her ideological earnestness, she was weak and ineffectual, and hated the work in the fields. A collaborator drone supervisor pushed Ingre b
riskly through the scale of punishments, more efficiently than any Guard would have done. And when that didn’t work, she cut off Ingre’s food ration.

  After that Ingre just lay on her bunk. At first she complained, or railed, or cried. But quickly she grew weaker and lay silent. Rala tried to share her own food. But there wasn’t enough; she started to go hungry herself.

  She grew desperate. She realized that the Guards, in their brutal incompetence, were actually going to allow Ingre to die, as they had many others. She could think of only one way of getting more food.

  She wasn’t sexually inexperienced; even the Qax hadn’t been able to extirpate that. Pash was easy to seduce.

  The sex wasn’t unpleasant, and Pash did nothing to hurt her. The oddest thing was the exoskeleton he wore, even during sex; it was a web of silvery thread that lay over his skin. But she felt no affection for him, or—she suspected—he for her. Unspoken, they both knew that it was his power over her that excited him, not her body.

  Still, she waited for several nights before she asked for the extra food she needed to keep Ingre alive.

  Meanwhile, in the Conurbation, things got worse. Despite the maintenance rotas, the stairwells and corridors soon became filthy. The air circulation broke down. The inner cells became uninhabitable, and crowding increased. Then there was the violence. Rumors spread of food thefts, even a rape. Rala learned to hide her food when she walked the darker corridors, scuttling past walls marked with bright green tetrahedral sigils, the most common graffito.

  One day Pash came to her, excited. “Listen. There’s trouble. Factional infighting among the Green Guards.”

  She closed her eyes. “You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

  “There’s a battle, a Conurbation a couple of days from here. There are great opportunities out there, kid.”

  Rala felt sick; the world briefly swam. They had never discussed the child growing inside her, but Pash knew it existed, of course. It was a mistake; it hadn’t even occurred to her that the contraceptive chemistry which had circulated with the Conurbation’s water supply might have failed.

  She hated herself for begging. “Don’t leave.”

  He kissed her forehead. “I’ll come back.”

  Of course he never did.

  The brief factional war was won by a group of Guards called the Million Heroes. They wore a different kind of armband, had a different ranking system, and so forth. But day to day, little changed for the drones of Conurbation 2473.

  By now most of the Conurbation’s systems had ceased functioning, and its inner core was dark and uninhabitable. Everybody worked in the fields, and some were even putting up crude shelters closer to where they worked, scavenging rock from the Conurbation’s walls.

  The Conurbation was dying, Rala realized with slow amazement. It was as if the sky itself were falling.

  Still she went hungry, and she increasingly worried about the child, and how she would cope with the work later in her pregnancy.

  She remembered how Pash had said, or hinted, that the nanodust was like a plant. So she dug it up again and planted it away from the shade of the wall, in the sunlight.

  Still, for days, nothing happened. But then she started to noticed pale yellow specks, embedded in the dirt. If you washed a handful, you could pick out particles of food. They tasted just as if they had come from a food hole. She improvised a sieve from a bit of cloth, to make the extraction more efficient.

  That was when Ingre, for whose life Rala had prostituted herself, turned her in.

  Ingre, standing with one of the Million Heroes over the nano patch, seemed on the point of tears. “I had to do it,” she said.

  “It’s all right,” said Rala tiredly.

  “At least I can put an end to this irregularity.” The Hero raised his weapon.

  Rala forced herself to stand before the weapon’s ugly snout. “Don’t destroy it.”

  “It’s antidoctrinal.”

  “We can’t eat doctrine.”

  “That’s not the point,” snapped the Hero.

  Rala spread her hands. “Look around you. The Qax did a good job of making our world uninhabitable. They even leveled the mountains. This other bit of Qax technology is reversing the process. Look at it this way. Perhaps we can use their own weapons against them. Or is that against the Druz Doctrines?”

  “I don’t know.” The Hero let the weapon drop. “I’m not changing my decision. I’m just postponing its implementation.”

  Rala nodded sagely.

  After that, as the weeks passed, she saw that the patch she had cultivated was spreading, a stain of a richer dark seeping through the ground. Her replicators were now turning soil and sunlight not just into food but also into copies of themselves, and so spreading farther, slowly, doggedly. The food she got from the ground became handfuls a day, almost enough to stave off the hunger that nagged at her constantly.

  Ingre said to her, “You have a child. I knew they wouldn’t hurt you because of that.”

  “It’s okay, Ingre.”

  “Although betraying you was doctrinally the correct thing to do.”

  “I said it’s okay.”

  “They took account of the baby. The children are the future.”

  Yes, thought Rala. But what future? We are insane, she thought, an insane species. We rule each other with armbands, bits of rag. As soon as the Qax get out of the way, we start to rip each other apart. And now the Million Heroes were prepared to starve us all—they might still do it—for the sake of an abstract doctrine. Maybe we really were better off under the Qax.

  But Ingre seemed eager for forgiveness. She worked in the dirt beside her cadre sibling, gazing earnestly at her.

  So Rala forced a smile. “Yes,” she said, and patted her belly. “Yes, the children are the future. Now here, help me with this sieve.”

  Under their fingers, the alien nanoseeds spread through the dirt of Earth.

  Matthew Sturges’s published works include Beneath the Skin and Other Stories, a collection of horror fiction, and Midwinter, a fantasy novel. His short stories can be found on-line on RevolutionSF.com. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and daughter.

  THE MEMORY PALACE

  Matthew Sturges

  When Maryanne returned from the grayness of the ether, the sound of the machines gripped her and pulled her forcibly back into reality.

  She sat up from the chair, dizzy. The test facility seemed small and sharp around her. The insistent humming of the machines, the way they droned, were a depressing counterpoint to the perfect silence of the place she’d just left.

  “I did it,” she moaned.

  “What’s that, dear?” said Lord William Whitley over the intercom, smiling from the control room. “Made it through without fainting, did you?”

  “I … made something,” said Maryanne. “It stuck. I made it and it stuck.”

  Lord William and the other men in the control room smiled politely. “Not to burst your bubble, dear,” said Whitley, “but the boys have been trying for months to bring things about, and I doubt you’d have done it on your first go.”

  Maryanne stood and shook her head, trying to clear it. “You’re the expert, Lord William, but I feel sure I did something in there.”

  “Well,” said Lieutenant Parker, “she’s got both beginner’s and lady’s luck working for her. I’d like to take a look, if I might, Lord William.” He left the control room and emerged a moment later in the lab, where Maryanne was still standing.

  “Oh, rubbish. By all means, do go check. But Mrs. Spenser, when this is all over with, there is still quite a bit of filing to be done.”

  “Yes, Lord William. I’ll have it done right away.” Maryanne forced a smile onto her face, the effort greater than what she’d used to bring about her creation in the ether.

  “Stick around, pet,” said Parker, pointing her to a stool next to the massive EAM device. “We’ll just have a look and see.”

  Parker reclined in the EAM chair and
attached his personal transceiver, running the wires deftly into the set of plugs on the machine.

  “Be right back,” he said. “What am I looking for, Mrs. Spenser?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, still a bit dizzy. “What do you mean?”

  “In the ether,” said Parker. “What did you create?”

  “Oh,” she said sadly. “It was a box. A black box. Not too cheery, I’m afraid.”

  Parker smiled and closed his eyes. “See you,” he said.

  “I’ll be in my office,” said Lord William, scowling. He left the laboratory, visibly annoyed.

  In the control room, one of the technicians brought the machines up to speed, and Parker’s facial muscles relaxed into what looked like unconsciousness.

  For a few minutes, everything was still except for the persistent hum and clatter of the machines. Then Parker began to shake, softly at first, then more and more violently.

  “Something’s wrong!” said Maryanne. “Shut it off! Do something!”

  The men in the control room began powering down the apparatus, snapping down the levers a handful at a time. Parker continued to shake, emitting a low, ugly groan.

  Maryanne remained on the stool, unable to move. She wanted to reach out to Parker, hold him steady, but she found herself incapable of approaching him.

  The machines now off entirely, Parker continued to thrash on the table, and the technicians ran from the control room to restrain him.

  Parker began to rave in unintelligible sounds, growling like a furious dog. Before the technicians reached him, he sat up wildly and grinned at Maryanne, tiny flecks of spittle running from his lips. He lunged at her, tumbling from the chair, his hands outstretched.

  Maryanne screamed. She shrank away from him, pressing herself against the still machines. He fell on her. The technicians took him by the shoulders and dragged him back, though he continued to lunge toward her. As they struggled, Parker’s body went rigid, his eyes bugging out of their sockets. His face turned red, then purple, then a hideous shade of blue, and he collapsed in the technicians’ arms, his fingers splayed out over Maryanne’s breast.