Wool (26 page)

Their soothing efforts were in vain. All Bernard felt was a surge of fear. He went over and over what could have gone wrong. It wasn’t as if she would survive, she couldn’t possibly survive, but his mandate, second only to preserving the data on these machines, was never to let anyone out of sight. It was the highest order. He understood why and trembled from the repercussions of the morning’s failure.

He cursed the heat as he reached the server on the far wall. The vents overhead carried cool air from the down deep and deposited it into the server room. Large fans in the back whisked the heat away and pumped it through more ducts down the silo, keeping the cool and dingy nastiness of the triple-digit levels humanely warm. Bernard glared at the vents, remembering the power holiday, the week of rising temperatures that had threatened his servers, all for some generator, and all because of this woman he had just let out of his sight. The memory stoked the flames under his collar. He cursed the design flaw that left the control of those vents down in Mechanical with those grease monkeys, those uncivilized tinkerers. He thought of the ugly and loud machines down there, the smell of leaking exhaust and burning oil. He had only needed to see it once—to kill a man—but even that was too much. Comparing those noisy engines with the sublime servers was enough to make him never want to leave IT. Here was where silicon chips released their tangy scent as they heated under the strain of crunching data. Here was where one could smell the rubber coating the wires, running in parallel, neatly bundled, labeled and coded, and streaming with gigabits of glorious data every second. Here was where he oversaw the refilling of their data drives with all that had been deleted from the last uprising. Here, a man could think, surrounded by machines quietly doing the same.

Somewhere down those vents, however, was the stench of the unclean. Bernard wiped the sweat from his head and rubbed it on the seat of his overalls. The thought of that woman, first
stealing
from him, then rewarded by Jahns with the highest office of law, and now daring to not clean, to wander off … It raised his temperature dangerously.

He reached the server at the end of the row and squeezed between it and the wall to the back. The key kept around his neck slid into the greased innards of the case locks. As he turned each one, he reminded himself that she couldn’t have gotten far. And how much trouble could this really cause? More importantly, what had gone wrong? The timing should always be impeccable. It always had been.

The back of the server came free, revealing the mostly empty innards behind. Bernard slipped the key back into his overalls and set the panel of black steel aside, the metal warm to the touch. There was a cloth case fastened inside the server’s belly. Bernard loosened the flap and reached inside, extracting the plastic headset. He pulled it down over his ears, adjusted the mic, and unspooled the cord.

He could keep this under control, he thought to himself. He was head of IT. He was mayor. Peter Billings was his man. People liked stasis, and he could maintain the illusion of it. They were afraid of change, and he could conceal it. With him in both offices, who would oppose him? Who was better qualified? He would explain this. Everything would be okay.

Still, he was mightily, uniquely afraid as he located the correct jack and plugged in the cord. There was an immediate beeping sound in the headphones, the connection automatically taking place.

He could still oversee IT from a distance, make sure this never happened again, be more on top of his reports. Everything was under control. He told himself this as his headphones clicked and the beeping stopped. He knew someone had picked up, even if they refused anything in the way of a greeting. He felt there was annoyance hanging in the silence.

Bernard dispensed with the pleasantries as well. He jumped right into what he needed to say.

“Silo one? This is silo eighteen.” He licked the sweat off his lips and adjusted his mic. His palms suddenly felt cold and clammy, and he needed to pee.

“We, uh … we might have a, uh … slight problem over here …”

The walk was long, and longer still for her young mind. Though Juliette took few of the steps with her own small feet, it felt as though she and her parents had traveled for weeks. To impatient youth, all things took forever and any kind of waiting was torture.

She rode on her father’s shoulders, clutched his chin, her legs wrapped choking around his neck. Riding so high, she had to stoop her head to avoid the undersides of the steps. Clangs from strangers’ boots rang out on the treads above her, and sprinkles of rust dust drifted into her eyes.

Juliette blinked and rubbed her face into her father’s hair. As excited as she was, the rise and fall of his shoulders made it impossible to stay awake. When he complained of a sore back, she rode a few levels on her mother’s hip, fingers interlocked around her neck, her young head lolling as she drifted off to sleep.

She enjoyed the sounds of the traveling, the footfalls and the rhythmic song of her mother and father chatting about adult things, their voices drifting back and forth as she faded in and out.

The journey became a haze of foggy recollections. She awoke to the squealing of pigs through an open door, was vaguely aware of a garden they toured, woke fully to the smell of something sweet and ate a meal—lunch or dinner, she wasn’t sure. She hardly stirred that night as she slid from her father’s arms into a dark bed. She awoke the next morning beside a cousin she didn’t know in an apartment nearly identical to her own. It was a weekend. She could tell by the older kids playing loudly in the hallway instead of getting ready for school. After a cold breakfast, she returned to the stairs with her parents and the sensation that they’d been traveling all their lives instead of just one day. And then the naps returned with their gentle erasure of time.

After another day they arrived at the hundredth landing of the silo’s unfathomable depths. She took the last steps herself, her mom and dad holding a hand each, telling her about the significance. She was now in a place called the “down deep,” they told her. The bottom third. They steadied her sleepy legs as she wobbled from the last tread of the ninety-ninth stairway to the landing of the hundredth. Her father pointed above the open and busy doors to a large painted number with an incredible third digit:

The two circles captivated Juliette. They were like wide-open eyes peering out at the world for the first time. She told her father that she could already count that high.

“I know you can,” he said. “It’s because you’re so smart.”

She followed her mother into the bazaar while clutching one of her father’s strong and rough hands with both of her own. There were people everywhere. It was loud, but in a good way. A happy noise filled the air as people lifted their voices to be heard—just like a classroom once the teacher was gone.

Juliette felt afraid of getting lost, and so she clung to her father. They waited while her mom bartered for lunch. It required stopping at what felt like a dozen stalls to get the handful of things she needed. Her dad talked a man into letting her lean through a fence to touch a rabbit. The fur was so soft, it was like it wasn’t there. Juliette snapped her hand back in fear when the animal turned its head, but it just chewed something invisible and looked at her like it was bored.

The bazaar seemed to go on forever. It wound around and out of sight, even when all the many-colored adult legs were clear enough for her to see to the end. Off to the sides, narrower passages full of more stalls and tents twisted in a maze of colors and sounds, but Juliette wasn’t allowed to go down any of these. She stuck with her parents until they arrived at the first set of square steps she’d ever seen in her young life.

“Easy now,” her mother told her, helping her up the steps.

“I can do it,” she said stubbornly, but took her mom’s hand anyway.

“Two and one child,” her father said to someone at the top of the steps. She heard the clatter of chits going into a box that sounded full of them. As her father passed through the gate, she saw the man by the box was dressed in all colors and wearing a funny floppy hat that was much too big for him. She tried to get a better look as her mom guided her through the gates, a hand on her back and whispers in her ear to keep up with her father. The gentleman turned his head, bells jangling on his hat, and made a funny face at her, his tongue poking out to the side.

Juliette laughed but still felt half-afraid of the strange man as they found a spot to sit and eat. Her dad dug a thin bedsheet out of his pack and spread it across one of the wide benches. Juliette’s mom made her take her shoes off before she stood on the sheet. She held her father’s shoulder and looked down the slope of benches and seats toward the wide open room below. Her father told her the open room was called a “stage.” Everything in the down deep had different names.

“What’re they doing?” she asked her father. Several men on the stage, dressed as colorfully as the gatesman, were throwing balls up into the air—an impossible number of them—keeping them all from hitting the ground.

Her father laughed. “They’re juggling. They’re here to entertain us until the play starts.”

Juliette wasn’t sure she wanted the play to start. This was it, the thing she wanted to see. The jugglers tossed balls and hoops between each other, and Juliette could feel her own arms windmilling as she watched. She tried counting the hoops, but they wouldn’t stay in one place long enough.

“Eat your lunch,” her mother reminded her, passing her bites of a fruit sandwich.

Juliette was mesmerized. When the jugglers put the balls and hoops away and started chasing one another, falling down and acting silly, she laughed as loudly as the other kids. She looked constantly to her mom and dad to see if they were watching. She tugged on their sleeves, but they just nodded and continued to talk, eat, and drink. When another family sat close and a boy older than her laughed at the jugglers as well, Juliette felt suddenly like she had company. She began to squeal even louder. The jugglers were the brightest things she had ever seen. She could’ve watched them forever.

But then the lights were dimmed and the play began, and it was boring by comparison. It started off well with a rousing sword fight, but then it was a lot of strange words and a man and woman looking at each other the way her parents did, talking in some funny language.

Juliette fell asleep. She dreamed of flying through the silo with one hundred colorful balls and hoops soaring all around her, always out of reach, the hoops round like the numbers at the end of the bazaar’s level—and then she woke up to whistles and applause.

Her parents were standing and yelling while the people on the stage in the funny costumes took several bows. Juliette yawned and looked over at the boy on the bench beside her. He was sleeping with his mouth open, his head in his mom’s lap, his shoulders shaking while she clapped and clapped.

They gathered up the sheet and her father carried her down to the stage, where the sword-fighters and strange talkers were speaking to the audience and shaking hands. Juliette wanted to meet the jugglers. She wanted to learn how to make the hoops float in the air. But her parents waited instead until they could speak to one of the ladies, the one who had her hair braided and twisted into drooping curves.

“Juliette,” her father told her, lifting her onto the stage, “I want you to meet … Juliette.” He gestured to the woman in the fluffy dress with the strange hair.

“Is that your real name?” the lady asked, kneeling down and reaching for Juliette’s hand.

Juliette pulled it back like it was another rabbit about to bite her, but nodded.

“You were wonderful,” her mom told the lady. They shook hands and introduced themselves.

“Did you like the play?” the lady with the funny hair asked.

Juliette nodded. She could sense that she was supposed to and that this made it okay to lie.

“Her father and I came to this show years ago when we first started dating,” her mother said. She rubbed Juliette’s hair. “We were going to name our first child either Romeus or Juliette.”

“Well, be glad you had a girl, then,” the lady said, smiling.

Her parents laughed, and Juliette was beginning to be less afraid of this woman with the same name as her.

“Do you think we could get your autograph?” Her father let go of her shoulder and rummaged in his pack. “I have a program in here somewhere.”

“Why not a script for this young Juliette?” The lady smiled at her. “Are you learning your letters?”

“I can count to a hundred,” Juliette said proudly.

The woman paused, then smiled. Juliette watched her as she stood and crossed the stage, her dress flowing in a way that overalls never could. The lady returned from behind a curtain with a tiny book of papers held fast with brass pins. She accepted a charcoal from Juliette’s father and wrote her name large and curly across the cover.

The woman pressed the collection of papers into her small hands. “I want you to have this, Juliette of the silo.”

Her mother protested. “Oh, we couldn’t. That’s too much paper—”

“She’s only five,” her father said.

“I have another,” the lady assured them. “We make our own. I want her to have it.”

She reached out and touched Juliette’s cheek, and this time Juliette didn’t pull away. She was too busy flipping through the papers, looking at all the curly notes handwritten along the sides beside the printed words. One word, she noticed, was circled over and over among all the others. She couldn’t make out many of them, but this one she could read. It was her name. It was at the beginning of so many sentences:

Juliette.

This was her. She looked up at the lady, understanding at once why her parents had brought her there, why they had walked so far and for so long.

“Thank you,” she said, remembering her manners.