Beneath Ceaseless Skies #86 Read online

  Issue #86 • Jan. 12, 2012

  “Calibrated Allies,” by Marissa Lingen

  “The Lady of the Lake,” by E. Catherine Tobler

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  CALIBRATED ALLIES

  by Marissa Lingen

  Perhaps if I hadn’t been from the colonies, I would have been more willing to see the clockwork guards wasted in the revolution. My home islands are poor in so many ways, but especially in automata. Every machine is tended carefully, and most of them require a great deal more attention in that hot and humid climate if they are not to rust and break down.

  No one from the fatherland realized that they could make the automata any differently. Their ways are the right ways, and if the automata break down, it is because the colonies are faulty and decaying and pest-ridden, not to mention full of careless natives like myself.

  I knew this, of course, before I came to the fatherland to study automata. That is, before I was sent; no one in my circumstance has a say in where he goes or what he does, although if I could have freely chosen, I would have chosen just this. I was well aware that my skin would bar me from drawing rooms and salons. I still thought it was uncommon kind of my family’s owner to free me in order to send me for my training. I pressed his hand warmly and vowed to him that I would not forget his goodness. I bowed to his wife.

  I had no idea that he had done it to please me and buy my loyalty, for the denizens of the fatherland treat persons of my race as slaves whether they are slave or free. I learned that I would have to present student credentials every time I wanted to get into the library, where other students came and went freely as they pleased. I learned that there were some of the student bars that would not take my patronage at all.

  And in one of the student bars that would have me, I learned that the fatherland was not nearly as idyllic as we had been told, even for those whose skin was the right color. I sipped my cider—unfamiliar drink for one whose homelands grew neither apples nor pears—and listened with growing shock as the fair-skinned, rosy-cheeked subjects of the emperor complained of his policies in just the terms my darker-complected relatives had used back home.

  After a fortnight of this, I grew bold enough to speak to them. “Forgive my intrusion,” I said, and they all regarded me with round, shocked eyes, as though their tankards had made so bold as to speak. “But I have been hearing of your woes. It is much the same with us. I think perhaps we are brothers under the skin.”

  One of the men made a rude noise—he did not wish to be the brother of one such as I—but the sturdiest and most sharp-tongued of the women held up her hand. “Is this so?” she said. “Are the beaten-down slaves of our emperor perhaps not so beaten-down after all?”

  “I am no slave,” I said, though I had schooled myself to take no offense at the assumption everyone made. “I am a free man and a university student. As I imagine you are.”

  “Your imagination does not mislead you,” said the woman. “My name is Belisse.”

  “Okori,” I introduced myself. “I am learning the workings of automata. I have been here but a short time, so I do not know your ways well, but—”

  “Come over here and sit with us,” she said.

  The man who made a rude noise gave her an incredulous look and rose to his feet.

  “Is there a problem, Vierre?” she said.

  “My family has always treated our slaves kindly,” he said. “That does not extend to socializing with them.”

  “Well, my family has never been in a position to have slaves, gently treated or no,” said Belisse, and several of those around her nodded. “We do not oppose imperial tyranny only to set up tyranny of our own. Sit with us, Okori, and let Vierre choose as he may.”

  I did pull up a chair to their fireside enclave, bringing my half-full mug of cider with me. The rude man set his jaw unpleasantly, but he did sit back down.

  I said very little for most of the rest of that evening, and I believe the rest of them guarded their words also, for that there was one among them they did not know as well as they knew each other. But I could be wrong; it could be that they were still discovering how far to trust each other also. When you know you are new, everyone else seems like a veteran, a fixture.

  But these people had the ring of long-rehashed arguments gathering steam, of a tipping point being reached. When I was ready to go home, I finally spoke.

  “I have told you that you are saying many of the same things as my people at home, and this is true,” I said. “The difference is that mine are not using empty rhetoric.”

  Belisse froze. “I beg your—”

  “You are not slaves.”

  “We—”

  “You are not slaves,” I repeated. “My mother cannot get on a boat and sail to the next island without permission. My father has to ask a man who is not part of his family nor any kind of partner if he may go to the next town. Neither of them can decline to do the work set to them. Neither of them can come to university to learn another kind of work. Until three months ago, neither could I.

  “I see how the emperor treats you shabbily. I see that this is not the life you would ask for. I agree with you. I support you. I am your brother.

  “But you have no idea what it is to be a slave.”

  There was a flat silence, and I wondered if I had ensured that they would never listen to me again, would banish me from their circle before I was even on its periphery. But one of the women who had not spoken before did so then.

  “I apologize,” she said. “I should hope we all do.” And to my shock, they did—some of them not bothering to feign sincerity, but it was clear to them that the turn of the tide was against them, and they must pretend I was a person for just a bit, just long enough to satisfy the sensibilities of this quiet woman and some of the others.

  I made note of which these were, to be careful of them from then on. Vierre was among their number, but there were others. One does not get sent, an island boy who grew up in slavery, to the glorious fatherland’s glorious university without some awareness of identifying and watching enemies.

  Of course they would say I was not to think of them as enemies. Well. They could say what they liked. I valued my life more than their opinions.

  I took a circuitous route back to the little house in which I rented a room—I could not yet think of it as home—but there were no footsteps in the alley behind me, no hands finding my collar to pull me around, no voices shouting my name in tones unfamiliar to me. I could bolt my door and relax, a little, in the spare room with its threadbare, chilly bedcovers. No one shared it with me, which I found a blessing that night, for all that it had been cold and hard to get used to. None of the other students would have shared with me, and the other men of my color were slaves.

  This was not what I had come for. But it was what I had found. My parents always put their back to whatever tasks they find among our people, once the chores of our masters are done; I could do no less than they.

  The emperor’s palace guard are each a work of art, made of just the right mix of electrum that they will not deform as gold would but will shine forth with all the riches of the emperor’s mines. The lenses that make their eyes are polished without flaw; their joints are oiled with the finest pressings of the finest fruit and nut oils, so they smell oddly delicious.

  They were not the automata I coveted, when I cast my gaze around the fatherland.

  No. I most wished to work with the automata of the emperor’s outer court: the footsoldiers, the functionaries, the recorders of the king’s history. For while their joints received ordinary oi
l and their cases and limbs were of ordinary—though highest quality—brass and iron, it was the gears and switches of their brains I found most appealing. They had to make all sorts of judgments that were difficult if not impossible to predict; they had to be not only capable of functioning on their own but able to do so in the most complex of social environments, lest they freeze up at the wrong moment and prove themselves useless.

  Compared to the automata we had in the islands, they were nearly human.

  The university would not let me start with automata so complex, of course. They started me on a mere sweeper, a machine I had been able to take apart and rebuild in less than an hour when I was a lad of ten or twelve. When they saw how I handled it, they looked at each other with pondering eyes, and then they gave me a loader. This, too, was familiar, and it was not long before I had the little fellow humming away with beautiful efficiency.

  The professors, there at the university, did not expect this. They thought to challenge me. They went on through their machines and finally discovered one whose functioning I did not know and could not guess.

  “Their people have clever hands,” one of them said. “I should not be surprised if that’s the extent of it.”

  Another, the one who had helped me to find my rooms, snorted derisively. “If Okori was one of our boys, you’d swear he was a genius,” he said. “Young man, have you ever seen an automaton that serves as a courier in a city?”

  I shook my head. The villages of my own islands would not be considered a city here in the fatherland, and hardly any mail was sent; the couriers who had arrived at my student lodgings with appointment schedules from the university were a revelation to my eyes.

  “I will show you.” He pulled the chest case open and traced for me the cogs that pulled input triggers for the automaton, the tiny compass and orienter for within this city, how it would have to be recalibrated completely for another city. How the arms and legs were induced to move through the city, carefully not stepping on a child’s ball or a kitten’s tail.

  I held my breath for the whole time this wondrous machine’s case was open, but I found a broken shaft where the professor did not see it and replaced it quickly, efficiently. He smiled at me and asked me to join him again the next day for fixing this class of automata. The other professor frowned but did not object.

  Soon I was a fixture in the kind professor’s workshop, finding how to fix things and even create a few of my own. He often said things that were attempting to be sensitive to my plight in a strange land but were instead confusing or patronizing. But he showed me the innards of more kinds of automata than I had ever thought of, and he was able to offer cogent critiques of several of the ones I had conceived when working with my family on our master’s lands beside the sea. My ideas for alternative types of metal and oil for a more humid client particularly made him look thoughtful.

  Between the professor and the rebellious students, I began to feel— Not exactly at home, never that. But certainly I was finding a place of my own in this large, strange city, and that kept me as content and engaged as I had ever been.

  One afternoon I found a young man of my own people hurrying down the paths in the shed behind the building where my classes took place. He looked startled when he saw me coming towards him down the path, my smiling face apparently not his accustomed greeting from strangers.

  “Brother, what is your name?” I asked him. “Are you also a student here?”

  He laughed incredulously. “A student! As you see, I clean the gardens and the worksheds. You are a student?”

  “Yes. My name is Okori, and I study the automata.”

  His face lit. “A real student! How wonderful. I have been—” There he stopped and looked around. I wondered what shameful deed he was about to confess. “When I clean. It is easy to listen.”

  Then he realized he had been very rude indeed and told me his name, Eluka, and his island, which was several to the east of my own in our archipelago, though he had not been there since he was a very small boy. He had picked up a great deal from listening to and watching the professors of the artifice department. He could make devices of amazing subtlety, but he spent his days cleaning things they did not want to set automata to do: corrosive fluids and tools that were used to shape the automata themselves, or delicate parts of the plants in the garden that were particularly hard to program automata for.

  I would have thought he would be trying to design automata to handle his jobs with the plants, but Eluka apparently enjoyed that most of all things he did for the university’s masters, and he would not have ceded the work to a mechanical man for any reward short of his permanent freedom. Instead, he wanted the automata to be able to gauge dangerous materials and use protective gear to handle them, much as a human would do.

  By the time we had talked over our work, evening was coming on, and I was hungry. “Now, tell me truly, brother, where is it one can get fried bananas in this city?”

  He blinked. “I have no idea.”

  “But—” I stared back in astonishment. “Don’t you miss them dreadfully?”

  “If the truth is to be told, I barely remember the taste,” he said. “There is a cookshop that does dark greens in the same ramps and spices my auntie swears are the ones from home. But bananas, I could not say.”

  In this strange city, even the men of my own kind were not like me. I should have known it when he said he had left the islands so young, and yet it disoriented me. Still, I clapped him on the shoulder with good fellowship, and we went off to find this cookshop, as his terms of servitude for the university did not dictate that he could not allow a friend to buy him a meal from time to time, provided that he told them he was going.

  I offered to take him to the tavern with me after, but he protested that they would send someone to look for him if he did not return home. I held out hope for next time, and we parted happily enough.

  In the tavern, my student compatriots were not nearly so sanguine. The man who had sneered at me, Vierre, had good informants in the imperial court—I suspected him of being distantly connected to the minor nobility, but he was merchant enough for the rest of the group and so I suppose for me. And the information was too useful to turn down.

  Our unrest—the unrest of groups like ours—had not gone unnoticed at the imperial court. The emperor, in short, was nervous. He was also poor—richer than the richest of merchants, of course, but in more debt than they, even if all their ships had sunk on their laden return voyages. There were rumblings of war in the south, and soldiers cost money. That money had to come from somewhere, and the emperor had several ideas.

  “He cannot squeeze the peasants any further; they are already bleeding for him,” said Belisse fiercely.

  Vierre shrugged elegantly. “He is the emperor. Their blood is his.”

  “Vierre—”

  “Belisse, my dear,” he said, in a tone that reminded me of the master at home talking to any of my people. “Be at peace. I am not saying what I believe, I tell you what he believes. And how he will act. We must make our choices based on a realistic assessment of his.”

  “‘Realistic’ is one of those words people throw around to silence others,” I said meditatively.

  Vierre turned on me. “Oh, is that so, islander? Do you feel sure, then, that the emperor will treat us like a kindly father?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I expect he will take whatever he can get from all of his subjects, and then add a surtax to whatever remains. But I try not to condescend to others when I say so.”

  Belisse’s eyes went wide, and Vierre’s narrowed. “Vierre condescends to everyone, Okori,” said Belisse. “It is his natural condition.”

  “How charming,” I said.

  “And you, with the sweat of the islands barely dried on your back and the grease of the machines still under your fingernails, what you know of charm—” Vierre started.

  “This is not a charm contest,” said Belisse hurriedly. “This is a discussion
of—of our course of action in the coming days.”

  The woman who had started the apologies to me—in all this time, I had not yet heard her name—said, “I had not thought it was a matter of our course of action, but of the timing and the practical details.”

  The whole group turned to her, I think startled as I was to hear her speak.

  “When we have to keep the imperial troops out of our quarter of the city to enact our demands ourselves, how will we do it? That is the question—not whether we will have to.”

  And then talk erupted from all quarters of the room, with everyone sure they had the most practical plan—I was amused to hear them avoid “realistic”—for stopping the imperial guard.

  Finally I pitched my voice to carry over the babble and said, “And the imperial guards’ automata, how will you stop them when they come against these barricades and these human obstacles?”

  Silence fell among them as they realized that I was posing this question, not making a rhetorical point. But if a life of servitude teaches nothing else, it teaches us to recognize futility when it rears its head. Better to bide our time and rise up later than to raise human barricades against the implacable fists of automata.

  And yet the tides of the human heart are not easily turned, either. Should the people of the empire bend to this tax, they might bend still more easily to the next, and the moment for revolution might pass. I would think on the problem of the automata. I would set Eluka to it also. I promised the other students earnestly that I would set my shoulder to this task. They did not look relieved.

  Once I knew that the city did not rest easy, the signs made themselves clear to me. More mothers pulled their children tight when I walked near; more shopkeepers watched me the whole time I was in their stores. Nor was it mere prejudice that motivated them: they were also sharper with each other, more willing to find fault, and I worried how a revolution would take them, if the fear of one was making them so high-strung and untrusting of their neighbors.