But in the silence, his eyes finally adjusted. And he saw that the sun was merely the burning coil of the tungsten bulb. He reached out and touched the lamp with the dead battery, turning it off and on. Yet, the light remained. Twitching, he unscrewed the bulb and it glowed in his hand, even brighter still, as he became aware of the chamber of horrors that his comet shelter had become. Phineas could feel the hum of electricity in the air, on his arms, and the fine hairs on the back of his neck. The World Wireless System was still functioning, but more importantly, someone was using a Tesla coil, beaming spark-excited voltage in his direction, which could only mean one thing.
Finally, someone was searching for him.
Or perhaps, just the machine. Maybe that’s all they wanted. His lieutenants, the men with lotus tattoos, had waited for him to expire, to take it from his lifeless grasp. As fearful, angry, vicious thoughts clogged his reason his prison became a fortress, his tomb became his castle. And his followers became traitors, worse, they became fallen foot soldiers. The terrible enemy was coming, the Mongols had risen up again, but instead of wearing cloaks sewn from field mice the hordes were arriving in great steam-driven airships sewn from the skin of their conquered dead. They would come in waves, they would search, but they would never find him. The British wouldn’t find him. Neither would the boastful Americans. He’d never allow it. He’d smash the machine — he’d destroy the professor’s creation if he had to.
Holding the glowing bulb like a torch, he rested the machine on his lap. He wiped grime off the metal and asked in a breathless panic, “Will someone else ever use this beautiful device. Could the I-Ching ever be attuned to another. Will they come digging to claim this clever machine.” Phineas cranked the handle, listened to the gears thrum with clockwork precision, and watched the lettered tumblers spin and spin and spin . . . until the static charge in the room faded as quickly as the light.
The answer, his answer came, as he smiled in the darkness.
Jamie Ford is the great grandson of Nevada mining pioneer Min Chung, who emigrated from Kaiping, China, to San Francisco in 1865, where he adopted the western name “Ford,” thus confusing countless generations. His debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list and went on to win the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. His work has been translated into 32 languages. Jamie is still holding out for Klingon (because that’s when you know you’ve made it). He can be found at www.jamieford.com blogging about his new book, Songs of Willow Frost, and also on Twitter @jamieford.
MARGIN OF SURVIVAL
Elizabeth Bear
In darkness, Yana waited. To her left, the sea was the smell of spent oil and a blackness broken by the slow hiss of phosphorescent breakers. If she squinted at the horizon, she could just make it out — a line as level as if it had been planed, pimpled with the tops of aquaculture rigs. To her right, the beach stretched rocky, rusty, and bleak up to an undercut bluff that she knew was there only because of suggestion and memory. It was a narrow margin of survival between the proverbial devil, and the equally proverbial sea.
The aquaculture domes were within sight, trailing rich constructed biomes of mussels and kelp through the richly nutritious, bitterly cold water. She could swim out to them and spare herself the risks. If she were a stronger swimmer; if she were not already weak with hunger; if it weren’t for the waves and the rip current; if she had a drysuit; if she had some way to keep the mussels from spoiling before she got them home to Yulianna; if she could guarantee there weren’t snipers or booby traps or guards.
Yana counted under her breath until the light came again.
Thirty-five, thirty-six. And there it was once more, a beam like a stroking finger. It crossed the black water, lanced over her head, bathed the bluff in brilliance, and moved on. On the horizon, she watched the shine of the Svet nezhyti, the Zombie Light, dim as it swept away again. The thing loomed out there in the night, unmanned, forgotten, possibly leaking reactor coolant — but automated. Still doing the job it had been set to do, decades or maybe a century ago. And it had illuminated enough of the stretch of beach before her that, crouched, she could scurry to the next rock without breaking her ankle.
Her stomach clenched, but Yana had become a connoisseur of clenching stomachs. This wasn’t early hunger, which could endanger one with plunging blood sugar, unexpected weakness, and dizzy spells. Nor was this true starvation, when the stored resources were exhausted and the will began to revolve around food and only food, when the body grew frail and riddled with sores.
This was, rather, the comfortable middle ground of hunger — where the body had adapted to privation, where it was working hard to utilize stored resources, rather than grabbing and cannibalizing anything at hand. What a falconer called “sharp set,” where the bird is ready and eager to hunt, lean — but also physically capable.
Another kind of margin. Another narrow edge to balance on.
Yulianna had been worse off, which was why Yana was here alone. Because when their supplies started to get low, Yulianna had set her jaw and refused food, refused water — starving herself so that Yana would have more. That was when Yana had realized that she would have to go out and seek supplies. They would need to go south, go inland. For that, they needed portable rations — and gear. Boots. Warm clothing.
Yana wanted to worry, but she wouldn’t let herself. Her sister would be fine. She’d left Yulianna most of the remaining food. And the gun.
If she pulled this off, neither she nor Yulianna would have to be any kind of hungry — or cold, or badly dressed — for a good long time.
But first she had to survive the rest of the night.
Yana reached over her shoulder and patted the neck of the crowbar tucked into the loop of her large frame pack. She waited for the light, waited for the darkness, and darted to the next shelter. She wasn’t worried about being spotted by anyone in the Zombie Light; there was no one in the Zombie Light. It had been empty for the devil knew how long, mindlessly spinning away on its reactors.
The people — and cameras, and infrared sensors — she wished to avoid were those in the bunker at the top of the bluff, overlooking the sea.
Unfortunately, they were also the people who had the food.
A basic conflict in desires, as her economics tutor would have said. Before he starved, or was torn apart by feral dogs, or went cannibal and was put down, or whatever the hell had killed him.
She might have made an effort to find out — she’d liked him — if there had been any chance of the news being good, and if there’d been any chance of her finding out some kind of definitive answer. But she’d learned a long time ago that the news was never good, and that it was generally best not to ask too many questions.
You never liked the answers once you got them.
He, too, might have had a couple of trenchant comments to make about margins. Margins of survival. Margins of safety. Margins of profit. The world was right up against the edge of all of them now.
Maybe it was teetering back, Yana told herself. Maybe things were starting to get better.
She was finally close to the bluff. One disadvantage of the bunker’s position, from the point of view of the bunker’s inhabitants: It held a commanding view of sea, strand, genetically-engineered kelp-tangle aquaculture clusters, and distant undead lighthouse, but the edge of the bluff cut off their line of sight to the beach immediately below. There had been motion detectors down here once, not too long ago . . . but after the Eschaton, the end of the world — here in the future — entropy took its toll and things which had once been cheap and disposable could not be replaced. Manufactured objects that had been designed to be thrown away were not simple to repair.