17
by Paul J. McAuley
Illustration by Darryl Elliott
It seemed to 17 that her family had been laborers in the Factory forever. Her mother claimed that her great-great-great grandparents had worked in the original Factory, and that they had helped in the reconstruction after the One Big One; her most treasured possession was a photo of men and women in rags standing in knee-deep mud in front of a hillside of trees all knocked down in the same direction.
17 had worked since she could walk, when her mother had taught her how to grade waste paper. Then she had cycled with the kids from her rack, chasing heavy metal residues in the flues of the refineries, harvesting mussels in the sewers for their metal-rich shells, sorting through the spill heaps. She had run with the same pack for ten years, had been boss for the last three, but at last she had realized that she wasn’t interested in them any more. They were just kids. So she had picked a fight with the next oldest, a lanky boy called Wulf, had beaten him bloody and had told him that he was boss now, and had walked away.
That was last winter. Since then she’d been a free laborer, turning up each day at the canal junction by the cooler stacks and waiting with the others until the shift foremen arrived and made their pick. It was hard, dangerous work. The men went to the refineries or foundries. 17 mostly cleaned the spinners, clever machines that built up hundreds of different things using frames and cellulose spray. The spinners never stopped, their spray heads chattering away right above her while she dug out mounds of stinking cellulose that had accumulated beneath the frames. Blood worms lived in the stuff, thin red whips a meter long that stung bad if they lashed your skin. Rat-crabs too, and roaches, and black crickets.
Her mother disapproved. It was time she settled down, her mother said, time she got herself a man and made babies.
They had terrible rows about it. 17 argued that she could do what she wanted, but she knew that if she stayed a free laborer, sooner or later she’d get hurt. And if she got hurt bad, she’d be sent to work the tanks where wood pulp was dissolved in acid. Most people didn’t last long there; fumes ate their lungs, blinded them, ulcerated their skin until gangrene set in. But it was that or ending up as a breeder like her mother, blown up by having kids one after the other, or becoming some jack’s troll. She’d already had a taste of that, thanks to Dim, the prime jack of her rack. She’d messed around with the other kids of her pack, but Dim had shown her what real sex was like. She swore she’d kill him or kill herself if he or any other man tried it again.
Then Doc Roberts came, and everything changed forever.
Doc Roberts was ex-Service, come to the Factory to stretch his pension by leechcraft. He rented a shack on the roof of one of the racks at the edge of the quadrant. He filled it with sunlamps and plants and hung out a shingle announcing his rates.
17 went to see him the second decad after he arrived.
“You’re not sick and you’re not pregnant,” Doc Roberts said, after a rough, cursory examination. “Why are you here?”
“You went up,” 17 said, staring at him boldly. She had seen him gimping around the market in his exoframe, but he seemed much taller in his little shack. He was very thin inside the frame, like a cartoon stick man. No hair, his scalp seamed with lumpy scars, his face burned brown and leathery; he looked like one of the turtles that swam in the canal by the cooler outlets.
It was hot and steamy in his shack. The glossy leaves of plants shone in vivid greens and oranges under the rack of purplish sunlamps. There was a shelf of books over his cot, a toilet connected to a tank of spirulina, a glass-fronted cabinet where he kept his pharmaceuticals.
Doc Roberts said, “I upped and I reupped. More than twenty years, girly. It made me what I am.”
“I want to go.”
“That’s a hard road. Stay in the dirt. Find a man. Have babies.”
“No! Kill myself first!” Suddenly, amazingly, she was crying. She made fists, knuckled tears. “You tell me. Tell me how. How to get out and up!”
Doc Roberts sort of leaned into his frame, the way an ordinary man might slump in a chair. He looked at her—really looked. She looked right back. She knew he hadn’t had many customers. Breeders looked after each other and their kids; free laborers paid to get their lumps and wounds hacked and sealed at the Factory dispensary.
He said, “What’s your name?”
She said defiantly, “17.”
She’d chosen it herself. She liked the way it screwed up the system. Clerks would ask if it was her given name, and she’d say no, it was what she called herself. Was she her mother’s seventeenth kid, the clerk would want to know, and she’d say no. Her age? She didn’t know, fifteen maybe. What was her real name then? 17, she’d say, stubborn, defiant. That was what she was. 17. She had started calling herself that a little while before she’d left the cycling pack, had beaten any kid who called her different until it stuck. Her mother called her ’Teen, a compromise.
Doc Roberts didn’t question it. He put his turtle head to one side and said, “You pay me, 17, and I’ll give you some teaching. How does that sound?”
That was how it began. She took up cycling again to pay him. Mercury chases were the best. She knew the tunnels under the Factory as well as anyone. She knew where the heavy silvery stuff collected, always came back with twice as much as anyone else. But it was dangerous. Not just because mercury and other heavy metals could give her the shakes or the falling sickness, but because sooner or later a gang of jacks or a pack of kids would find her down there and beat her and maybe kill her for her gleanings.
She surprised Doc Roberts by being able to read (she had learnt from the brief captions under the cartoon notices the bulls pasted everywhere), and he soon discovered her knack of being able to multiply and divide long numbers without really thinking about it.
“You’re an idiot savant,” he said.
“You mean like a dummy? I’m no dummy.”
“Maybe not. But you have a trick in your head. You can do something that takes most people a lot of brain-hurt, as naturally as breathing.”
“It’ll help me pass the tests?”
“You’re bright, 17. I’ll teach you as long as you want to keep paying me. When you’re ready, you can buy tests that will find out just how bright you are. Intelligence is precious, as precious as mercury or silver or copper or chrome. There may be better things than going up.”
“You mean like whores? I don’t think so.”
A few girls and one boy from her rack had gone that way. You saw them sometimes, visiting their families. The last one 17 had seen, a girl, had worn silver boots, silver panties, and a very short open mesh dress, nothing else. 17 had looked at herself afterward and knew she’d never make the grade—wide hips, no breasts, a blob of a nose. Besides, the best the whores could hope for was to become the plaything of one of the Factory bulls until their looks gave out and they were sent to work the Meat Rack.
Doc Roberts gave 17 one of his sharp looks. He said, “I only want money off you, 17.1 upped and reupped. Radiation took care of that itch.”
She said, “Would this cost more than learning about the up and out?”
“Maybe. If you’re real bright, the bosses might pay for some of it. They need bright people.”
“I’ll pay. I want out, Doc. I want it terrible bad.”
Doc taught her more than math. He showed her what the world beyond the Factory was like. 17 had never been outside the Factory, and now she hungered after it the way an addict has the jones for ripple or meth or smack. Doc taught her the true name of the world and the true name of its sun, explained its history.