Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse (30 page)

It was while we were hiding from the Citizen Patrols in B4 that he first spoke the name I took as my own. That was back when the Sisters of Literacy still tried to run schools in B4, which was as close as they would get to B9 where Artie and I lived. School didn't excite me, but Mom wanted me to go, and Artie insisted crossing into B4 was at least as safe as living in B9. Most of the time that was true, but not when the Citizen Patrols were out.

We knew there was going to be trouble that day, because Melissa's desk had been empty at roll call, and word got around by recess that she'd been found in a trash bin, missing a few parts. So the Citizen Patrols were out that afternoon, looking for someone to punish. B9ers were a favourite target. Artie and I ran from shadow to shaft, upground and under, trying to stay out of their way. We watched from beneath an abandoned maintenance cart as they rousted three teenage boys playing hoops in the street.

The boys must have scanned as B4s, because the CPs started to walk away; but then one of the boys said something. Something dirty, and cruel. And a CP just shot him. With a crossbow, that is, because no pulse or projectile weapons were ever allowed in the habitats-too much danger of damaging the shielding. When the other two boys went for their knives, the CPs shot them, too.

I'd seen people die before-things were even worse outside than under the shield. But this was the first time I knew-I knew-if I twitched, I'd be next. One CP went over to kick the boys and make sure they were dead. Another one cut open the mouthy boy's pants and sliced off his privates. "That's for Melissa," I heard him say, and he flung the bloody flesh across the street. It landed right beside the cart where we lay hidden.

The sight of it there, so close to my face, made me gag in horror. I stuffed my fist in my mouth to keep from screaming, and Artie pulled me to him, pushing my face against his scrawny chest and holding me tight. "Sh," he breathed in my ear, knowing both how terrified I was and how bad it would be if the CP heard us. "They can't hurt you. They can't hurt you, Faye, because-because you're magic."

I was so startled I stopped crying, wondering what in the dying world he was talking about. I couldn't see the Civilian Patrol, the way he had me pressed up against him, but after a minute or two he let go of me so I knew they had gone. "What you say, magic?" I demanded in the barest of whispers, not knowing how far away they were.

"They left, didn't they?" he whispered back. "Magic. You've got the magic name."

I told him what I thought he was full of.

"Maybe," he agreed, checking the street carefully to be sure it really was clear. "But your name, 'Faye,' that's like Morgan LeFey, right?" He started to squirm out from under the cart.

I squirmed right after him. "Who?"

"King Arthur's sister," he said. "She was magic. She took Arthur to the Isle of Avalon where he couldn't die."

Later that night, Artie shinnied up the drainpipe to my room, and we sat there for hours in the dark while he told me stories of King Arthur and his knights: men who defended the helpless instead of victimizing them, men who fought against the villains of their age and inevitably prevailed. Not until many years later did I learn what a spin he put on the stories for me that night, to make me believe that once, there had been people who cared about the likes of me, who stood for justice and nobility of spirit, who made it honourable to protect the weak.

That night I took the name of Morgan, not because I ever believed it was magic, but because I wanted to be a part of that ideal. I needed the hope that King Arthur represented, and I saw it in my Arthur-Artie. To think of myself as his sister pleased me in a quiet, deep way I could not explain.

Nor was I the only one so drawn to Artie. He had already begun to acquire a following when I met him: children he had grown up with, and others like myself whom he befriended along the way. There was safety in numbers, as long as no crossbows were involved. A pack offered the protection of a dozen knives that could not all be taken away at once. And then we discovered another form of protection or rather, Artie discovered it, and it changed him. It changed us all.

We were thieves in those days; I hate to say it, but that's what we were. Artie was a thief. I was a thief. There was an ethic to our larceny, for we never stole from people poorer and weaker than we were-the rather rude beginnings of the Code. But we took things we did not own and thought no more of it than a goat thinks of cropping grass. That's how we came by the first bicycles.

Jose started it. A procurement convoy had come in from outside, loaded with goods for the Launch Pad. That's what we called the sectors where the engineers and administrators and other elite live, those who will surely have berths on the next transport ship carrying people away from this dying planet. While the last driver stopped to flirt with the gatekeeper, Josh jimmied the lock on his truck and slipped inside. He was working for some older kids, of course, but by the time they road blocked the convoy in G5, Jose had the cargo mapped out so they knew which crates to snatch. One of them had six bicycles.

The bike was his fee. No one could have been prouder than Jose when he showed up with that bicycle. He carried it on his shoulder, because he didn't know how to ride, and it had slipped its chain, anyway. Artie looked at it, and looked at it, and I could see the ideas spinning through his head like a cyclone. He was thirteen by then, and though he was still skinny, he'd grown into his ears and his teeth enough so the girls were starting to give him second looks; but when an idea possessed him, he still looked like a goofy kid, his mouth hanging slack and his eyes glazed over.

"You can ride it, right?" Jose asked, because like most of the younger kids, he believed implicitly that Artie knew everything worth knowing and had all skills worth acquiring. Artie had even wrangled his way into Spark Academy, which amazed everyone. Kids from B9 didn't get into Spark Academy. Most of them didn't bother with school at all.

Artie had not answered Jose's question; I wasn't sure he had even heard it. I nudged him. "I can ride," I told him softly. "Learned outside. Bikes lay around free-for-nothing; my old man, he fix one up for me."

Finally Artie's eyes left the bicycle and fastened on me, still whirling with the enchantment of his racing thoughts. "Your dad can fix bicycles?"

I shrugged. "He know machines 'n' things. That how we got under shield, finally. Learned him welding."

At that, Artie scowled and came back to the present. "Don't talk street, Morgan," he chided. "You've got to practice Book English if you're going to get into the Academy with me."

That was his dream for me, that I would pass the entrance exams to go to Spark Academy, too. I worked at it, because he thought I should, but I never had much hope. "Yes, Artie, he knows something about bicycles," I said with exaggerated articulation. "I'm not sure how much."

It was enough. When my father got off shift, he had the bike running in less than fifteen minutes; then Artie took it, and me, and found a deserted stretch of tunnel where he could master the two-wheeler without an audience. I was the only one he trusted to witness the ignominy of his early failures. A week later when he returned the bike to Jose, he rode into the street where the others waited, braked to a smooth stop, and dismounted with practiced ease.

"We need more of these," Artie announced. "We need every one of us to be mounted. We can outrun anyone on these things. We can pick up our families' rations and not worry about being mugged on the way home, because no one will be able to catch us. We can get to a friend who's in trouble, and we can get away from trouble when it comes looking for us. Bicycles are the answer."

And because he was Artie, we all believed him.

Over the next year, bicycles sprouted like primalloy mushrooms in the streets of B9. We lost one kid in the process-Torey got shot by Security making a run out of F5, where he should never have been grazing-but that left seventeen of us on wheels, Kniuhts of the Wheel Round, I laughed.

You might wonder how Artie could develop such a following, win the loyalty of so many people who would-and sometimes did-sacrifice themselves and their own well-being to follow his Code. The answer, I'm convinced, lies in three qualities Artie possessed in greater measure than other human beings: compassion, conviction, and compulsion. When Artie latched onto a notion, he pursued it with a focus ordinary mortals can t hope to achieve, and the intensity of his devotion sucked other people in like a black hole.

Bicycles became his world. Between my father's sketchy knowledge and some books we found online, Artie not only learned how to maintain and repair the bikes, he also learned frame geometry and stress factors and performance metrics. I learned some, too, because you couldn't hang around Artie and not learn, but mostly I stuck with maintenance and repair. It wasn't enough for him, though, that we should all learn to ride and care for our bikes-we had to train. He had us up before dawn each day, racing along the empty streets of B9 and B7. Our legs grew thick with muscle as we vied with each other for dominance in speed and endurance.

Soon we ventured out of our home sectors, becoming a familiar sight throughout the upground Bs and Gs, and even in parts of the As. Seventeen cyclists whooshing along in a pack at twenty-plus miles an hour is an impressive sight-that was both good and bad. A pack of thugs in A12 called the Big Dogs tried to lay traps for us whenever we crossed their sector, and we crossed it often escorting Artie to and from Spark Academy. But we were always too quick and too smart and too mobile for them.

There were two reasons Artie kept running the gauntlet to get to Spark Academy. Okay, three. The third was that he couldn't stand for someone to tell him he couldn't do something. But the first was that he liked learning. It charged his batteries. He was into mechanical engineering, and the teachers at Spark actually encouraged him in that. I guess they thought he could help keep habitat infrastructure from collapsing around us.

But the second reason he kept going to the Academy was Yvonne.

Now, Artie had girlfriends in the neighbourhood, and had since he was old enough to understand why a man would want to insert Tab A into Slot B. He didn't exactly tell me the first time he got laid-he did have some notion that I was a girl and wouldn't appreciate hearing about his conquests-but I knew it had happened, because I saw the girl try to take ownership of him. Fat chance she had. Artie always had champagne taste when it came to girls, and you don't find champagne in B9.

Yvonne was champagne. I never met her, but I knew because Artie told me all about her. He'd lost his heart, and it wasn't the kind of thing you could tell other guys, so he told me. Most of what he was learning in Spark Academy, he confided, he could pick up out of books and vids that were available remotely, even on the archaic B9 equipment. And besides, he could earn a ration just running the courier service he'd started, so he didn't really need to get into a university program. But a girl like Yvonne wouldn't marry a courier and live in B9. So he had to get a degree, and a better housing assignment, so he could make a life with Yvonne.

For the record, I think he would have gone to the Academy anyway. Not that he didn't like running courier-he liked using his cycling skills, evading obstacles, flirting with danger only to escape. He liked organizing the rest of us as couriers, and he liked being able to deliver packages quickly and safely for people who were afraid to walk the streets. As with protecting smaller children, and helping outsiders adjust to the habitat, it was a way for him to touch people's lives and make them better. The need to do that was deep in him, and it was the foundation of the Code he established.

For Yvonne, though, he needed to be more than a courier. The others in our pack knew Artie had an Academy girlfriend, but they assumed she was no different than the girls he fooled around with in B9-except it was somehow more exciting to get your rocks offwith some C5 princess, so the rest of the guys looked at Artie in awe. That was why, when Yvonne dumped him, he climbed the drainpipe to my room and cried in my arms.

We were never lovers, Artie and I. He never wanted me that way, and I knew better than to try enticing him. It would have been laughable: I am a homely woman, and I was an ugly child. My mother said it was the radiation I endured outside-she blamed everything on radiation-but I didn't have to look far to find the long jaw and the close-set eyes I inherited, or the limp, colorless hair and crooked teeth. My shape, too, eschews beauty: I have a bony frame and tiny breasts. There are boys who don't care what Slot B looks like, as long as it will accommodate Tab A, but Artie was never one of them.

So I held him the night Yvonne rejected his love, knowing this was as close to him as I would ever get. The next day he went out and built his first bicycle.

Before he graduated from Spark Academy, the counsellors there tried to push him into vocational training because he was so gifted in working with his hands: carving, moulding, welding. "Wouldn't you be happier," they asked, "crafting components? Building machines? Turning out a product?" If Yvonne had dumped him earlier, he might have yielded to their pressure; but he had told them he could do both: design and build. With his heart torn to shreds, he needed to prove that.

It was no work of art, that first bicycle: primalloy tubes patch-welded together. But it was serviceable, and it was a start. DeRon and I took over running the courier business-we already handled the routine maintenance and repair of our pack bicycles-so Artie would have time to build. His instructors in the university engineering program derided him, he told me, for wasting his time building "toys." New robots to evacuate clogged water and sewer lines, or innovative geometries to prop up the sagging tunnels of KanHab-those were projects worthy of a mechanical engineer, they said. Not swift transportation through the unsavoury streets of lawless sectors.