Chapter One
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
Gandhi
He pulled her like taffy, as if she were sweet and pliable and maintained a hint, just a memory, of the saltiness of the ocean, and only in the excess of her confectionary flexibility could she achieve the desired result. She responded in kind, driving him, drawing him in and over, taking the path toward vortices, toward pinnacles. Neither deserved the other, or rather they both deserved less but exigent circumstances brought them together in the cooling rain there on the edge of the city, under trees long bereft of their leaves, skeletons whose branches kept no rain from them, bark darkened by the moisture, dripping, making counter-point to the rhythmic motions of the two of them in their nest of dead grass and broken bottles.
The ceiling, nearly fifteen hundred meters above them in the center of the dome but much lower on the periphery where the dome’s curve became wall, bled its watery blood, soaking them while they paid no heed, lost in the moment, in the vortex of their generations loss and excess—one deep in the power and the other deep in wanting it.
Sometimes the ceiling leaked—it was just a part of life in the Under. Sometimes the lights didn’t work, sometimes the air didn’t move and it became musty, hard to breathe as if the entire population was suddenly asthmatic.
Wynn moved her head and wet hair fell heavily against his chest. The odd animal, not infrequent but strange, padded along wet ground, making no sound, watching the humans but not afraid of them.
Wynn raised her head, letting him see her, letting him wander into her eyes.
“Do you think love is still real?” Such a question, there in the mud and discarded trash, might have seemed insincere but he listened and thought and answered.
“I don’t think love was ever real.”
She looked down and away at the muck and mire.
“How we gonna get cleaned up?”
“Find a puddle, strip and let the Leak wash us.” She wasn’t familiar with the Under like he was—born and raised there. Sometimes he used words she didn’t know or that meant something other than what she thought.
“What about our clothes?”
Rinse ‘em in the puddle, hold ‘em in the Banshee.”
She moved, a kind of unconscious undulation and half sat up, still partly on top of him.
“Can you do that?”
He nodded. “Just gotta find a broken pane.”
She laughed and changed everything. A Lumen flashed back on, a ways above them and bathed them in light as if they were on a stage instead of too close to the edge, away from all the places people were willing to go. Standing, she stretched and made him want her.
“Can’t we just find a vend and get new stuff?”
“Not down here. We have to take care of what we wear—wash it and wear it again.”
“Okay!” She turned and moved from him, her smile fading with the motion. “Let’s find a puddle then!” And ran off to explore.
He jumped up and grabbed their things and followed quickly, anxious because she didn’t know where she was or what she might find—or what might find her.
The inside wall of the Dome went up until it disappeared where it became ceiling, shrouded in darkness above the lumens. He didn’t notice. He’d spent his life in the Under and things were the way they were. He caught up to her and grabbed her arm and she turned her head to catch his glare, smiled to let him know she understood but would not be careful and waited for him. Her eyes flashed. Implants that saw in the dark and were full of bioluminescent microbes, engineered specific to her DNA, caught the high light and reflected as she rotated and for a moment she seemed alien to him, exotic and terrible. But she was exotic. Enhanced. Her eyes had done that before but he wasn’t getting used to it.
She found a puddle; a long-abandoned cement holding tank, tilting at an angle so the water began to flow out before it could fill but it was enough and looked clean. She pointed, a question on her face, looking for approval; did I find a good one?
He nodded and she stepped in taking the rest of her clothes off as she did. He joined her, the water clear and a meter deep. Washing became play. Play became . . . other things . . . but eventually they retrieved their clothes from the edge, rung them out—he had to show her—and went to find a place to lay them in the Wind.
Fifty meters along the edge he found a pane that had been removed. Who knew why or when? As they approached they could hear the banshee calling from in-between. He told her to be careful—it could pick her up and suck her in and then she would die—somewhere on the other side—and showed her how to hold her blouse and skirt in the stream of the Wind without getting it sucked from her hands.
Two naked kids, standing right at the inner wall, which no one did except Above at the observations points, drying their clothes and laughing because they were alive and in love even though it wasn’t real and they didn’t know each other, he lost in her eyes and her laugh and she finally free for a moment, down in the Under, defying her parents and their culture and her own safety.
He yelled at her, turning so she could see his lips. “How long do you have?” And she shrugged, non-committal. It took only a few moments to dry their clothes, thin and gauzy as they were. Her panties were still damp but she didn’t care, wrapped the skirt and tied its sash, threw the blouse over her shoulders as she ran her arms into the sleeves. He wore nothing under and pulled up his loose pants as she buttoned, leaving two undone to tease him. His tee shirt, still a favorite after so many decades of style and fashion, pulled down over his head, it’s Under logo identifying him as Trog.
The logo aroused her. ‘He’s a Trog’ she was thinking and I am with him, letting him do things. For just a moment her smile faded as she imagined her father finding out. He’d have the boy killed. It would be legal, just a matter of filling out some forms and faking proof.
Wynn didn’t care—he would never know. Besides, she wasn’t doing anything wrong . . . really. Just downing, looking around. Everybody from The City did it.
Dressed and cold because the Banshee chilled the clothes, they held hands and walked through the rubble and refuse, back toward saner locales, back to where people lived—Trogs at least.
“I have to go to work pretty soon.” He said it like he was testing her, trying to find a chink in her.
“I’ll come with you!” She was bright, glowing, as if she didn’t know where she was and what she had been doing—was doing. He winced.
“I work in the Above Wynn. You can’t go with me.”
“I know where you work!” She dimmed. “I just want to come a ways, that’s all.” He pointed ahead to the first low lumen.
“See that? We have to separate before we get to it. “He’ll find out.” She knew who ‘he’ was.
“You gonna leave me alone down here?” Her lashes flittered across round eyes. She knew she could work him, make him do whatever she wanted. She wanted him to stay with him at least till they were on the commerce level. But he wasn’t just another UnderBoy.
“Yes.” He wouldn’t look at her so she grabbed him and wrapped her arms around him and tried to knock him over with one leg but he hopped away from it, her body still flush up against his, her warmth driving him crazy. What am I doing? He thought, perilously close to acquiescing. She’s Above! A ‘Hancer! Her dad owns god. But he stopped and let her kiss him. Eventually she pulled away, making reluctance a new art form. She knew. It was just playing.
He had a sudden pang for a little torture so he asked; “What’re you doing tonight?”
“Hmmm. Let me think.” Impish. She did a Paris and he scowled. He hated that. “Tonight sis and I are going to Groom Lake. There’s a party out there and we’re gonna buzz the ‘Hancers.”
“But you’re a ‘Hancer!”
“So?”
“So nothin’.” He pulled away, making the taffy longer, trying to break it but it wouldn’t. “See ya.”
She wasn’t ready to leave. “Who you doin’ today?”
He stared at the buttons undone, making it obvious until she giggled and did one up.
“Don’t know till I get there.” He told her, wondering why she would want to know. “Prob’ly some wanna-be corporate hacker in over his head.” She nodded, her hair almost dry. She’d have to stop on the way home and have herself sanitized, lose the clothes and get some new ones from vend. Daddy could be pretty thorough. The sanitizer felt good so she didn’t mind.
“Ever done Amalgamated Services?” One of her fathers companies.
“Yeah.” He squinted, turning his head a little to see her different.
“Up high?”
“No. And I don’t intend to.” He reached out and gently buttoned the last one; more like a mother would than a horned UnderBoy. “Now get going. There’s a lift two blocks down. It’ll take you up to commercial.”
She nodded, suddenly somber, confused by his gesture. “Find me.” She said and he nodded as she turned and began to walk, her skirt flouncing too high, like it was meant too, not looking back, smiling even though he couldn’t tell, knowing he would stay and watch till she was in the vestibule.
He shook his head and turned away when she disappeared inside. It would be a long day.
Once the place had been called the Golden Nugget. There was still a place with that name but it was Above now and the derelict where Bentley lived had no name. Bentley had lived there for three years. He’d taken over four rooms and remodeled, had to fight twice to keep them, and now the rest of them left him pretty much alone.
He tweaked the door as he made the hall and watched it open.
“There are three people inside, all coded.” It told him.
“Okay.” He went in and the door closed and locked and encrypted itself.
“Hey Bender! I scored some beef! Looks okay, wanna cook it?” One of the three, his cousin, sat lotus, lined into the system and doing the finger-dance while his two fellow Trogs watched.
Bentley’s shoulders seemed to nudge upward but were fairly non-committal.
“Go ahead.” He stepped by them and over the mess of cabling and boards and discarded parts on the floor and disappeared into his ‘bedroom’ before the others could really form an appropriate response. His apartment slash condo slash squatters digs was home to all sorts of various comers and goers, hangers-on and desperate crashers but his room was his sanctum sanctorum.
No one but Trogs, those who lived in the Under, had ever been inside. Trogs hated Babels, even when they had to work for them, and Babels tolerated Trogs when they couldn’t avoid them and Bentley was in a quandary over the whole thing. Wynn. There was a fair chance she might want to see his digs, go into that room where only Trogs had ever been.
The Trogs would kill him. They’d hold a prompt court and send him out the window—wouldn’t even break the glass because there wasn’t any. He’d taken it out long ago for some project or other. Didn’t matter. No weather in the Under. Except the Leak and the monthly Zephyr, used to clean out the stale air and bring in new. His mind took him more places than he wanted to go.
What to do about Wynn. He knew she was just Downing, could’ve picked anybody but she liked UnderBoys because they were cleaner and dressed nice—at least in the Above—and knew a few basic manners. He wouldn’t complain, she was a wild one, but she presented certain . . . challenges . . . he had never encountered before.
Dander spoke, looking up long enough to verify it was his cousin and not some squatter.
“Where were you?” His tone was accusatory. “Can’t protect ya if I don’t know your twenty.” He’d said it a million times—angry, smiling, every way it could be said. Bentley knew and was sorry but what else could he do with Wynn?
“Sorry cos’. I had to lose something in the Banshee. No witnesses.”
They were used to that. Bentley was constantly making quick, dangerous forays to the edge, alone, in order to lose evidence of one sort or another. Anything weighing less than half a kilo or so was instantly grabbed by the Banshee and deposited completely at random somewhere else in the Dome. Nothing found after one of those trips could be traced. The Babels hated it. It was like finding tainted flotsam on a public beach. Bentley had never seen a beach but he knew what one was.
Dander nodded. Orders. He had to do what Bentley told him because he loved his cousin and because Bentley was smarter and kept him out of trouble. Dander wasn’t stupid—not like the ‘tards’ anyway—but he wasn’t educated, could barely read. Nobody was smart as Bender, at least that’s what Dander thought.
Collin— Bentley seldom called him Dander—went back to his work, hand soldering connections too small to see according to Bentley’s careful instructions. A small video microscope and monitor let him work in relative comfort. He watched the picture and moved his hands in blind and delicate loops, as if a dancer in a thumb vid. Bentley was always building things based on arcane intuitions and wild speculations derived from poor sleep patterns, over-stimulation of the hypo-thalamus, and the occasional rant of delusional street prophets. One in a thousand times his hunches came up a winner and those were enough to make himself a name and earn mega street cred. Everything else was thrown to the Banshee or turned into sculpture—the Babels would buy anything if it was marketed with a little creativity.
Back in his room he plopped and told the Set to run a diagnostic. Eyes closed, listening to the barely audible beeps and whistles, all the semi-mechanical sounds of technology, he kept at his hobby which was attempting to recognize them all and understand what they meant. His mates thought him daft, telling him nobody could really understand R2D2 but he knew they could—he could—if they really tried. So everyday when he got home he listened to the Set run its diagnostic programs and tired to interpret the sounds, tried to figure out where it was and what it was doing and what everything meant.
No concentration. Wynn kept intruding. He needed to study Yoga. Then he could concentrate. Or hit Born Again. Wynn’s sharp, green eyes flaked with iridescent gold. Transcendental meditation, that’s what he needed . . . her hair felt like smooth candy, like that curve, that impossibly graceful indentation, like molten glass, fluid and hot to the touch . . . he sighed and sat up, the amorphous chair molding to his new position.
“Gimme updates.” He said, surrendering to his own imagination. The Set spoke with placid, calming tones, gently female but far from sexy. He listened with half-attention to the figures, the speculations and news and reports from the Above networks and the Approved News Grid which covered the rest of the world and fed custom-filtered items to each Sector as some semi-AI somewhere saw fit. Productivity was up. Everyone on the planet was content. So much for news from ANG.
Next he heard the alternative reports from the Bloggers and the various underground networks. This kind of behavior meant automatic expulsion from the Dome and a life of servitude on one of the world’s vast agri-corps but he wasn’t worried. No one could trace him and the Babels thought they had a lock on information. They were confident their filters kept such anti-social poison out of their Dome. It never seemed to occur to them who built their systems.
Willie, the one with the big score of beef, shoved his head in.
“Hey. Someuvus’r gonna sneak out to the Groom Lake, crash the party. Wanna come?”
Bentley shook his head. He thought of Wynn. He could find her there but then what? She was a Babel, a ‘Hancer, if he even looked at her he was dead.
“You guy’s are crazy” he told Willie. They’re gonna kill you one day.”
“Naw . . .” feral grin. “They’re doped. Stupid’n fat. We’re slick, like the owls. Can’t’ hear us, can’t see us.”
“Owls get caught.” Bentley warned.
“What’cha gonna do then?” The subject was done, changed. Willie brooked no intrusion when it came to his pleasures.
“Go in. Hunt’n seek.”
“S’all you ever do!” Willie was a cousin too. The Families had been there a long time. They had never been the sort to go after power or money so when the change came they got caught underneath it. They stuck together, kept their church stuff quiet and minded their business. Screw the new world. It was coming down.
