“My uncle Dan is like that with horses,” said Martin. “He just kind of talks them into feeling better.”
“So you really grew up with all that? Riding horses and everything?”
“Hell no. Horses scare the daylights out of me. Never shot a bow, either.”
“I think it’s the arrows you shoot.”
“Like I said.”
The cluster of tan-colored dwellings and administration offices was a thick-stemmed, narrow-armed T. The stem divided ordered plots of crops, and the miniature environments they called biomes ran parallel to the arms of the T. There was a tiny rain forest, a savannah surrounding a rectangular ocean the size of a football field, a shallow spill of marshland. A narrow C of grassland ran along the left rim.
Fabrication took up most of a building near the base of the T. Many of the interior walls had been removed to turn the conjoined space into a warehouse. Seemingly random stacks and heaps of material formed confusing paths through the building. The sound was oddly muffled, baffled by the dense variety of materials. People scurried to and fro, a few of them hauling materials on little upright gizmos that looked like drivable handtrucks. There was a steady muted patter and a constant background thrum of machinery.
Wennda was leading them down one meandering row when they had to step aside to let a vehicle pass. It was the size of a motor scooter, rectangular and bright yellow with a little revolving yellow light, and silent on four odd tires that were a series of angled rubber cones set around a hub. A lift-loader in front made Broben realize he was looking at the smallest forklift he had ever seen. A woman stood on a little footstand at the back, staring at them as she glided by. In fact everybody stared.
Broben whistled at the retreating vehicle and gave a Scout salute. “Man, that was something,” he said.
“How can you tell, with those outfits?” asked Martin.
“Huh?” Broben felt oddly embarrassed. “I was talking about that little forklift. I want one for my dollhouse.”
Martin’s look showed that he wasn’t sure if he was being kidded, which made Broben flush even more. “My first summer job was driving towmotor for a ship-to-rail outfit,” he explained. “I’da traded an organ for a little rig like that.”
The noise level rose as they entered an area where the original floor plan had been preserved, smaller rooms crowded with machinery—pipe benders, stampers, things that looked like caulking guns that seemed to fuse materials, something that looked like a woodchipper that shredded garments and fabric remnants to powder that was deposited in plastic tubs, other things that made no sense to the airmen.
“I was expecting flashing lights and super-duper televisions,” Farley told Wennda. “This looks like my high school shop class.”
“Fabrication wasn’t built into the original plan,” Wennda replied. “This is all repurposed, refitted.”
“So Fabrication is fabricated.”
She grinned. “Exactly.”
Broben tried not to roll his eyes.
They came to a series of conjoined suites where workers dumped the tubs of powdered fabric into a hopper on the side of a machine a little bigger than a phone booth. It looked like a still put together by a madman, with piping of plastic and various metals, condensers, release valves, dial gauges and digital meters. A sheet of oatmeal-colored fabric slowly extruded out the other side into a bin and was automatically cut to length.
The workers stopped when the airmen entered the room.
“Everybody,” said Wennda, “this is Captain Farley, Lieutenant Broben, and Sergeant Proud Horse. Please don’t let us interfere with your work.”
The workers nodded uncertainly and resumed their tasks, but they continued to glance at the strangers. Broben watched a man wearing work gloves remove a newly minted length of fabric and carry it to another contraption. The fabric was threaded onto a compact rack like the film on a movie projector and fed into the gizmo, which buzzed and thrummed. Broben looked around at all the jury-rigged piping and stopgap release valves. He wondered how often things blew up around here.
Across the room Wennda was talking to a wiry, scruffy-looking man who was frowning at the three crewmen. The man pulled a cellophone from his pocket and snapped it taut. He tapped it and his frown deepened. Then he shrugged and crumpled it again. Wennda smiled and squeezed his arm.
“Palto is looking at the task schedule,” she told Broben and Martin. “Lieutenant, you said you have inventory-storage experience?”
“I can drive the wheels off of one of those little forklifts, if that’s what you mean,” Broben said.
The dour man, Palto, raised an eyebrow. “Can you repair one?”
“I can sure give it a shot.”
Palto nodded doubtfully.
“Sergeant Proud Horse wants to try something with a bioprinter,” said Wennda.
“I do?” said Martin.
“He’ll explain it to you,” said Wennda. “We have to get to a meeting with the commander right now.”
“Don’t set anything on fire,” said Farley.
“Sure thing, boss,” said Broben. “You kids scram. And remember, no fighting in the clinches.”
Farley scowled. “If they give you a hard time,” he told Palto, “you’ve got my permission to feed ’em to that thing.” He nodded at the machine that turned powder into fabric lengths.
“The reverter is more efficient,” Palto said. Farley didn’t think he was joking.
Palto brought Broben to Samay, the woman he’d seen driving the little forklift. She was at least ten years older than Broben and intimidatingly knowledgeable about her work. She demonstrated the forklift’s steering and hydraulics, and Broben was startled when she turned it by leaning in the direction she wanted to go. She stopped the vehicle, slid it sideways, and turned while moving in a sideways drift.
Broben whistled. “So I guess now women can parallel park,” he said.
There was no engine. Each wheel was its own motor. Power came from rechargeable batteries printed onto thin sheets. Broben couldn’t even have imagined such a thing, let alone repaired it. But the problem wasn’t that the loader wouldn’t go, it was that the lifting arms were stuck in place.
“Our lives depend on machines,” Samay told Broben as she opened a service panel on the faulty vehicle. “We’ve either kept them running for nearly two hundred years, or we’ve used them for parts like recombinant genes.” She showed him a scrawl on the inside of the panel lid. “Every machine is an heirloom, with its own genealogy of repair records, good wishes, names scrawled on parts. I often encounter notes written by people I knew as a little girl, on machines I’m working on. Or notes from people they knew when they were children. All of them are long gone, but the thing itself is still here. So to maintain these machines is to commune with those ingenious and determined people. And so to love the machine itself. Do you see?”
Broben gaped at her. “Holy jumpin’ jeez,” he said. “A city full of Wen Bonnikers.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He was a guy who loved machines like you do. But he sure couldn’t have put it like that.”
Samay was patient with Broben after it became clear she was talking to a man who understood machines and respected them, and not to some savage. Miniaturization, hard plastics, lightweight alloys all impressed him, but he wasn’t awed by them. Electronics was foreign to him, but it wasn’t magic. It was just something he didn’t understand yet.
But he would not stop calling his teacher Sammy.
“My name is Samay,” she told him for the third time. She opened a side access panel on the loader.
“Yeah yeah,” he said, waving it away. “Don’t make a federal case out of it.”