“What about the upscale on a farm?” Jack asked. “I’m not so sure I’d want to live with enormous bugs and rats.”
“You’re stuck in outphase thinking,” Liss said. “It’s not like that at all. We all grew up hearing stories about giant insects—houseflies that kidnap children—but it’s folklore, artifacts from the race memory. Those are things from another dimension; they don’t affect us here.”
“I don’t know,” Ganly said. “You hear stories….”
“That’s all they are. Our minds are still ruled by those artifacts. It’s just like you were saying, Ganly. We go on paying samesizes to do work that giants could do easily. We go on building farm machinery to do a job a giant can do with his little finger. I mean, can you believe there’s still a market for tweezers when any neighborling can pick up tiny things for us? We should be living totally different kinds of lives—there should have been some sort of revolution long, long ago. But people cling to the old ways.”
“They’re recalcitrant, every last one of them,” Ganly said. “Down to the smallest, up to the largest.”
Jack said, “But if you made some kind of basic change on your level, don’t you think it could have a reaction that went both ways at once? Say if one level threw out farm machinery completely and relied on giants. Don’t you think those giants would get the idea and throw out their machinery? And the neighborlings of the rebel level would do likewise. Right up and down the line, you’d have a sweeping revolution. The potential’s there.”
“Oh, definitely,” said Ganly. “The potential is infinite. The problem is people your own size. Try telling them to change their ways—to throw out their machines and hire someone from another level. It’s tough! They’d rather put their money in the pocket of a samesize than a neighborling or a giant. It gets distressing.”
Liss put her hands on her hips and stood up facing the wall, considering all those houses and ramps and parks. “What if I decided to paint all the houses in colors that I liked? Who’d stop me?”
“Giants would stop you,” Ganly said. “Don’t be ridiculous. The law applies to all levels equally.”
“And what if I went out and painted on my wall, ‘Giants revolt!’ Or something like that, in huge letters.”
“Depends on your giant. I once had a neighborling used to hang big swear words out his windows—boy, that burned me up! I had kids at the time. I couldn’t touch him, though, legally. The law always protects the little guy. It took a movement of samesizes to get the guy evicted. His neighbors got upset once my kids learned the words and started shouting them at the top of their lungs.”
Liss shook her head, frowning. “Now I’m depressed. It makes me feel like… well, what good is this sculpture, for instance? It’ll never change anything. I could throw it out the door, and to Nairla it would just be a scrap of junk to sweep up.”
Ganly smiled ruefully. “Or you could take one of those pieces of scrap you chipped away and give it to me, and I could put it in my living room and call it art. Next week your scraps could be all the rage on my level.”
There was a light tap on the window. Jack glanced up to see a giant finger at the glass, and beyond it an even larger eye. Liss opened the door.
“Hi, Nairla,” she called. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Jack’s home early?” said the giant woman. “Or did he call in sick again?”
“I got fired,” Jack yelled.
“Fired?” Nairla said. “Isn’t that terrible? What are you going to do?”
“I’m not sure yet. Keep me in mind if you need any detail work done.”
Nairla tried to hide her expression, but her face was like an immense beacon where emotions were concerned. She obviously thought him insane.
“Don’t you think that’s a wee bit… humiliating?”
“Middleman’s Rent” copyright 1988 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1988.
THE FARMER ON THE WALL
“I feel so relaxed in the country,” said Jack Greenpeach, putting an arm around his girlfriend Liss. She pulled forward a few inches to free her long red hair and the porch swing began to rock. She leaned closer to him, drawing her feet up onto the cushions, and said, “I know. It’s so peaceful. The crickets sound like a symphony, don’t they? Each one playing a different instrument, the music rising and falling, rising and falling…”
Crickets? Jack listened to the night, terrified by the prospect of crickets the size of airplanes. There were no insects anymore, not since all the world had moved onto the levels of the great indoors. Pollination was done by tiny workers gathering pollen grain by grain; they passed their bags to giant workers on the next level up, who carried the pollen to fields in other rooms and handed them back down to other tinies for careful insertion in selected plants. A swarm of bees could have put a whole level out of work in a matter of days. A single locust could devour a wallful of crops, overturning tables and chairs in neighboring houses. It was a scary idea.
“That’s not insects,” Jack said, relieved and amused. “You should be glad of it. That’s Narmon Cate snoring.”
Liss jumped up from the swing and went to the porch rail. Leaning out into the night, she peered downward for several moments. He saw her shoulders fall.
“So it is,” she said. “That’s not nearly so romantic.”
He joined her at the rail. Looking down from the porch, he could see the fields falling away in tiers, like a fuzzy staircase leading down to the floor of Narmon’s room. Out in the midst of the vast enclosure was the slumbering mountainous shape of the giant farmer, Narmon Cate, who had rented them this house on his wall. All the walls of the giant’s main room were formed of grassy earth, tiered fields, neatly trimmed orchards. Here and there a few golden lights burned in the windows of other farmhouses the same size as Jack and Liss’s new place. These were country walls, especially beautiful to Jack and Liss who had lived until recently in a suburban apartment whose walls were infested with tiny tract homes. Their home in turn had been one of a thousand on the suburban wall of another giant—Narmon Cate’s white-collar equivalent. In the suburbs, they had longed for fields and trees; but they hadn’t gambled on a snoring giant.
“Should we wake him up?” Jack wondered aloud, knowing that his voice would never carry to the giant.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea. You don’t go complaining to your own landlord about his habits. We were lucky to get this house.” She straightened suddenly, glancing at her wristwatch. “Uh oh, Jack, we left the lights on.”
They hurried back inside in time to hear the rising of tiny cries, the faint beating of pots and pans. Their walls were patched like four old quilts with the plots of neighboring farmers. Brussels sprouts the size of pinpoints grew across a good quarter of the far wall, and below the sprout patch was a dilapidated farmhouse whose residents were currently gathered on the porch. The tiny children drummed on kitchenware, an ant-sized infant wailed, but the loudest voice belonged to the goat-bearded elder who had earlier introduced himself as Grampa Treel. A lifetime of shouting at giants had invested his voice with authority while robbing it of strength. His words scraped the air like an unrosined bow drawn across an out-of-tune fiddle.
“Where the hell were you?” he bellowed. “We’re farmers here! We expect to get to sleep at a decent hour. Now that light of yours—” (here he jabbed a finger at Jack’s ceiling) “—is parching our crops. Arc you going to be the one out watering them tomorrow? Are you going to take responsibility for upsetting their light cycle? In other words, are you going to play god in every detail, or will you kindly shut off that damn light before I get out my wrist-rocket and do the honors myself?”