“Well, all I can say, Rudy” — she wiped her mouth with her hand, as Fat Edna’s bar was uncluttered with serviettes — “is that if they got something that can overthrow the laws of electromagnetism as we know ’em and turn a receiver into a transmitter, then more power to ’em. That’s a good hack. Hey, the Game starts in a few minutes. Who ya bettin’ on?”
“Radio, you know I don’t wager human against human,” Rudy said. “Our energies should be focused on our oppressors — the Naked Brains. But instead we do whatever they want because they’ve channeled all our aggression into a trivial distraction created to keep the masses stupefied and sedated. The Games are the opiate of the people! You should wise up and join the struggle, Radio. This device of yours could be our secret weapon. We could use it to listen in on them plotting against us”
“Ain’t much of a secret,” said Radio, “if it’s all over Edna’s bar.”
“We can tell people it doesn’t work.”
“What are you, some kind of no-brainer? That there’s my fancy-pants college education. I’m not tellin’ nobody it don’t work.”
Amelia Spindizzy banked her tiny craft and turned it toward the huge Operations Zep Imperator. The Zeppelin thrust out its landing pad and Amelia swooped deftly onto it, in a maneuver that she thought of as a penny-toss, a quick leap onto the target platform, which then retracted into the gondola of the airship.
She climbed from the cockpit. Grimy Huey tossed her a mooring line and she tied down her machine. “You’re on orders to report to the Hall, fly-girl,” he shouted. “What have you done now?”
“I think I reminded ZF-43 of his lost physicality, Huey.” Amelia scrambled up the bamboo gangway.
“You do that for me every time I look at you.”
“You watch it, Huey, or I’ll come over there and teach you a lesson,” Amelia said.
“Amelia, I’ll study under you anytime.”
She shied a wheel chuck at him, and the mechanic ducked away, cackling. Mechanics’ humor, thought Amelia. You have to let them have their jokes at your expense. It can make you or break you, what they do to your ’gyro.
The Hall of the Naked Brains was amidships. High-ceilinged, bare-walled, and paneled in bamboo, it smelled of lemon oil and beeswax. The windows were shuttered, to keep the room dim; the Brains didn’t need light, and the crew were happier not looking at them. Twin rows of enormous glass jars, set in duraluminium frames, lined the sides of the Hall. Within the jars, enormous pink Brains floated motionless in murky electrolyte soup.
In the center of the shadowy room was a semicircle of rattan chairs facing a speaker and a televideon camera. Cables looped across the floor to each of the glass jars.
Amelia plumped down in the nearest chair, unzipped her flight jacket, and said, “Well?”
There was a ratcheting noise as one of the Brains adjusted the camera. A tinny disembodied voice came from the speaker. It was ZF-43. “Amelia. We are equipping your autogyro with an important new device. It is essential that we test it today.”
“What does it do?” she asked.
“If it works properly, it will paralyze Lt. Eszterhazy’s engine.”
Amelia glared at the eye of the camera. “And why would I want to do that?”
“Clearly you do not, Amelia.” ZF’s voice was as dispassionate as ever. “It is we who want you to do it. You will oblige us in this matter.”
“You tell me, ZF, why I would want to cheat.”
“Amelia, you do not want to cheat. However, you are in our service. We have experimental devices to test, and the rules of your game are not important to us. This may be a spiritual endeavor to yourself, it may be a rousing amusement to the multitudes, but it is a military exercise to us.” There was a pause, as if ZF were momentarily somewhere else, and then he resumed. “NQ-14 suggests I inform you that Lt. Eszterhazy’s aeroplane can glide with a dead engine. There is little risk to the pilot.”
Amelia glared even more fiercely at the televideon camera. “That is beside the point, ZF. I would argue that my autogyro is far less dependent on its engine than Eszterhazy’s ’plane. Why not give the device to each of us, for a square match?”
“There is only one device, Amelia, and we need to test it now. You are here, you are trusted. Eszterhazy is too independent. You will take the device.” A grinding noise, as of badly lubricated machinery. “Or you will not be in the Game.”
“What are this bastard’s specs? How does it work?”
“You will be told, Amelia. In good time.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s being installed in your autogyro as we speak. A red button on your joystick controls it: Press, it’s on. Release, it’s off.”
“I’m not happy about this, ZF.”
“Go to your autogyro, Amelia. Fly well.” The light dimmed even more and the camera clicked again as the lens irised shut. ZF-43 had turned off the world outside his jar.
Rudy choked down a nickel’s worth of beans and kielbasa and enough java to keep him running for the rest of the day. It was going to be a long one. The scheduled game would bring the people out into the streets, and that was a recruiting opportunity he couldn’t pass up. He knew his targets: not the fat, good-natured guys catching a few hours of fun before hitting the night shift. Not their sharp-eyed wives, juggling the kids and grabbing the paycheck on Friday so it wouldn’t be spent on drink. Oh, no. Rudy’s constituency was hungry-looking young men, just past their teens, out of work, smarter than they needed to be, and not yet on the bottle. One in ten would take a pamphlet from him. Of those, one in twenty would take it home, one in fifty would read it, one in five hundred would take it to heart, and one in a thousand would seek him out and listen to more.
The only way to make it worth his while, the only way to pull together a force, was to get as many pamphlets out there as possible. It was a numbers game, like the lottery, or like selling insurance.
Rudy had sold insurance once, collecting weekly nickels and dimes from the hopeful and the despairing alike. Until the day he was handed a pamphlet. He took it home, he read it, and he realized what a sham his life was, what a shill he had been for the corporate powers, what a fraud he had been perpetrating upon his own people, the very people that he should be helping to escape from the treadmill of their lives.
He finished his coffee and hit the street. Crowds were already building near the CityPlace — that vast open square at the heart of the city, carved out of the old shops, tenements, and speakeasies that had once thrived there — where the aerobattle would take place. He picked out a corner near some ramshackle warehouses on the plaza’s grimy southern rim. That’s where his people would be, his tillage, as he thought of them.
“Tillage” was a word his grandfather used back when Rudy was young. The old man used to speak lovingly of the tillage, the land he had farmed in his youth. The tillage, he said, responded to him as a woman would, bringing forth fruit as a direct result of his care and attention. Not that he, Rudy, had great amounts of time to spend on a woman — but that hadn’t seemed to matter on the streets, where women were freely available, and briefly enjoyable. Sexual intercourse was overrated, in his opinion. Politics was another matter, and he made his friends among men and women who felt the same. They kept their distance from one another, so the Naked Brains couldn’t pick them all off in a single raid. When they coupled, they did so quickly, and they didn’t exchange names.
Moving deftly through the gathering crowd, he held out only one pamphlet at a time, and that only after catching a receptive eye. A willing offering to a willing receptor, that wasn’t illegal. It wasn’t pamphleteering, which was a harvestable offense. Last thing he wanted, to be harvested and, if the rumors were as he suspected true, have his grey matter pureed and fed to the Naked Brains.