Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales Read online

  At the images Tavil feels something hard and immovable begin to grow in his chest. It crushes the air from his lungs and presses against his ribs, this feeling that he is wrong. Where he is, the air he breathes, the chair by which he stands, and the buttons over which his fingers hover … all of it wrong.

  That place through the screen, that is the truth and he should fear to be parted from it for so long. His legs feel weak, and he sits. The book slips from his numbed fingers to land on the floor with a thud. It touches the ground for only an instant before the floor lifts it again to a height where Tavil merely has to slide it back onto his lap with no effort exerted on his own part.

  And then something moves onto the screen: a wheeled carriage carrying a human-shaped creature unlike any Tavil has laid eyes on before except through the window on the train. This one is mannish, his body round and draped in a tunic that hides most, but not all, of his wobbling white flesh. A respirator masks his face, covering from his chin to just below his eyes and strapped over his bald head.

  He is speaking. Tavil knows this only because the man’s jowls bunch and sway. Tavil touches a button, and the sound soars around him.

  “… against an inner rebellion of those who’d once lived within these walls and in other structures surrounding the castle.”

  “That’s not even close to correct,” Tavil mumbles to himself, the noise floating a bit in the air of his room before settling around him. The history of the ruins isn’t one of rebellion, but of protection: a town defending itself against the onslaught of another.

  The man on the screen hesitates and adjusts his mask. This squeezes the several layers of skin trapped under his chin even more, so that his flesh bulges out from his neck. He clears his throat and continues.

  “The remnants of which are, of course, still scattered through the Seven Hills of Wessex, which leads to the idea that … ”

  Tavil barks with a sort of indignant laughter while the man prattles on. “Eight Hills,” he calls to the screen.

  Again, the man pauses and fiddles with the straps of the respirator. His breathing is wispy and echoes against the chambers of his mask. Tavil hears someone cough and then a grumble, the sound filling his room from some unknown source in the same way as his light.

  This is how Tavil understands his mistake: that as he hears so also can he be heard. He fumbles for his book, intending to shuffle through the pages to learn which button will silence anything he might say.

  But his task is cut short when the lecturer continues, seeming to speak directly to him, though Tavil feels this must not be possible. “I assure you, that the hills number seven is not a firsthand idea. It is beyond fact at this point.”

  Tavil sputters. “That’s absurd! All you have to do is look around and count. It’s not like they’re not obvious!” Someone hisses as others begin to murmur, but he ignores them. He stands before the screen tapping it with his fingers as though the lecturer can see where he points as he counts out the hills. “There’s one with the crag, two next to it where the top is sheared off to the west.”

  He’s forced to talk louder and louder as the chatter emanating from the walls begins to grow overwhelming. They bark against the prospect of using observation to determine any sort of information, arguing that doing so adds an improper color, a bias skewed toward any idea that has not come down through intermediaries.

  Tavil shouts over them all. “Three is just behind—it can sometimes be hard to see in the mist but right now it’s clear and four—”

  And then one voice—a woman’s—breaks through the rest, clearer than the others: “Tell them nothing about the surface.”

  This stops Tavil, his finger hovering just over the screen. He takes a step back. “Who said that?”

  He’s met with the roar of attendees from the lecture, their words and arguments now grown indistinct.

  “Who said that?” he demands again.

  Some kind of feeling tickles along the back of his neck and he catches his breath to listen. It is the same instinct he learned to heed on the surface, with the wilds of the remaining world around him. He shakes his head against the humming in the walls, the voices in the air, but they continue to overwhelm any sense of his surroundings. He pounds the button by the door and it springs open. He stands and listens. Behind him is the chatter from the lecture, and in front is the long, curving tunnel.

  He starts to walk, letting his frustrations burn through energy, opening his senses to this dry mechanical world. Ahead of him he hears a new noise, the whir of a machine different from the one humming in the walls. He speeds up but the sound eludes him and so he begins to run.

  It always seems to be just around the next corner. Sometimes he’ll catch a glimpse of something darting, and he pushes himself faster until he comes tearing around the same unending bend and there in front of him a wheeled carriage sits.

  A woman steps from the carriage. She is unlike the man from the screen or the person Tavil saw on the train. While she is still of a roundish shape, she is tall, able to carry herself on her legs, and her long dark hair swings as she moves. She steps through an open door.

  “Wait!” he calls out.

  But then as the doors begin to close she turns to almost face him. He knows, without her having to utter a word, that it is the woman who issued the warning.

  Tavil stumbles when he sees that she, like him, is of the surface. Her skin has seen the sun, of that there is no doubt—it is written across her cheeks in the form of freckles. In her hands she carries the massive book. When she sees Tavil running for her, her eyes flare slightly. She does not move or make any effort to stop the doors from closing.

  And then she is gone and Tavil is left pounding on the door. There are so many questions he needs to ask her.

  He notices a button and he presses it until the door swings open again and he is faced with nothing but an empty white box. He storms inside, looking for any trace of the woman but finding only more buttons—columns of them racing up the wall.

  He pushes one and a small red light blinks in its center. The doors close, he feels something twist in his stomach, a sensation of growing heavier, and then the doors open again and he is facing the tunnel. Only this one is different; there is no wheeled vehicle sitting in front of him.

  He has moved to another level. He listens for sounds of the woman, but there is nothing. He moves back into the box and presses another button. He repeats this again and again but there is no trace of her. No trace of another living being at all. And then he has touched the last button and the doors open and he is someplace new.

  Long platforms stretch out away from him and from them branch more platforms that lead to the decks of several massive airships. Their bloated hulls curve toward the heavy domed ceiling, where the stretch of white tiles is marred by a large circular opening that presumably leads to the surface far above. Tavil is familiar with the hulking ships, but he has only ever seen them from a distance as they rise out of the tunnels from the Underneath and sail off toward the horizon. Their cabins have always been shuttered, but now they are not and Tavil can see inside.

  Each is a mirror of his own room below: a chair, a table, walls crowded with buttons. Almost all are empty, and it is the rare window through which Tavil glimpses the bulbous flesh of another human being.

  They are all headed to the surface, and just thinking the word makes him realize that he can almost taste how the air on this level is different. As if each airship brings a bit of the world above back with it as it arrives.

  A fierce yearning spreads through Tavil, a desire to abandon this mechanical world and return home to his sister. He strides along the platform, choosing a ship at random and climbing toward it. At the top he’s met by a woman with an officious demeanor.

  She looks at him oddly, and her voice holds a note of suspicion. Her eyes slide away from him as she states, “Please present your Egression-permit.”

  When Tavil has no response, she glances at him. “I’
d simply like to get to the surface,” he finally tells her.

  An expression of horror crosses her face at his request but she quickly controls it. “This is the airship to Courland.”

  That tight feeling Tavil experienced the first moment he realized he was trapped underground begins to crawl along his arms. Perhaps it is the taste of the surface on the back of his tongue or the knowledge that he has finally found a way out of the labyrinthine Machine, but he is unable to hold back the sensation of being buried alive.

  He swallows again and again though his mouth is dry. “Please,” he begs. “I need to get to the surface.” In an attempt to gain the woman’s sympathy, he places his hand on her arm.

  She recoils instantly, disgust roiling her features at the physical contact. “You forget yourself!” Her words bite at the air, and Tavil takes several steps back. He can see her pulse pound furiously in her neck.

  She says nothing more, refuses to even look at him. He waits, hopeful, but is finally forced to retrace his steps to the small white box and count the buttons back down to his level, where he wanders until he comes upon an open door with a mark along the wall where it was struck by his book.

  Everything in his room is as it was except the image on the screen is of a different blob of flesh sitting in a carriage in a different landscape. That, and the air is filled with the sound of chimes. Buttons flash along one wall. When he presses one, a voice issues forth asking if perhaps he’d attended the lecture on the Brisbane school of music or a discussion on Plewis’s theory of the French Revolution as informed by Graubert.

  Even as he stands, doing absolutely nothing, the bells continue to chime, and the voices issue forth. They ask to share ideas; they ask his thoughts on a recent lecture; they talk about the recent scent added to the bathwater and whether he prefers the new platters used to hold the food.

  Tavil sits in his chair and he listens, searching for that voice that had warned him, “Tell them nothing about the surface,” and yet he never hears it. He thinks about this warning, trying to understand what it means and why it was issued. To tell him to say nothing is to imply both that there is something he could tell and that something should be kept secret.

  But what could that be? He can think of nothing special about the surface: food is scarce, machinery is a distant memory used only as a cautionary tale, life is not about sitting but moving and doing for oneself and the community. It is about existing with nature rather than opposed.

  And so, after a while, his curiosity overwhelms him and he issues a question of his own to those voices on the other side of the buttons along his walls. “Tell me about the surface,” he asks. He hopes he has tread close enough to the female voice’s warning that perhaps she might chastise him again and in doing so he’ll be able to communicate with her directly.

  If she heard his question, she is silent, but others are not. Instantly, he is inundated with responses: the surface is frozen, it is dry, it is cracked, it is broken, it is uninhabitable. It is irrelevant. It is where they render dissenters Homeless, the worst conceivable punishment.

  What he hears is all incorrect, but he cannot understand the purpose of the misinformation. Those living aboveground have always been aware of the Machine, the great cities below the surface, and why should the reverse not also be true?

  Why do they not know of the small communities scattered in the hills, people living with the land rather than below it? How can they not know that it’s possible to survive aboveground where they don’t need the Machine to feed and clothe, to teach and communicate? Perhaps it wasn’t easier aboveground, but it was honest and sustainable.

  Though he has learned how to isolate himself to stop the unceasing communications now inundating his room, he chooses not to. Instead, he presses the buttons to call for his bed and to dim the lights, and then, in the darkness, he listens to the chatter, trying to understand.

  During the night, while Tavil sleeps, the conversations have shifted to other topics. He wakes to a discussion on the historical significance of indoor plumbing. Voices respond to one another rapid fire, citing various lectures they’ve heard as sources.

  He turns the isolation knob, at first seeking solitude, but then he is faced with nothing but the humming of the Machine around him. He calls back the voices for company.

  As he listens he reads the Book of the Machine, searching until he finds the information on Egression-permits. Immediately he presses the proper button to apply for one and is rejected almost instantly. The Book informs him he is allowed one application per day, and so he waits.

  His ninety-seventh day underground is the first that he forgets to apply for an Egression-permit. He doesn’t realize this until the next morning, and he presses the button immediately and almost as quickly receives his rejection. He experiences only a moment of disappointment before turning to the walls and his buttons.

  He has already planned his day: a lecture on the lakes of Sumatra followed by a discussion of such, and then he has promised several correspondents to listen to their ideas and give his thoughts on them. At first he found such invitations tedious and pointless and only indulged them out of boredom.

  However, as time passes he begins to gain a bit of a reputation in the cities Underneath for a perspective almost wholly intermediary. Because the only information Tavil knows firsthand relates to life on the surface, which he refuses to ever discuss, anything he knows beyond that must necessarily come through intermediaries. He learns nothing about anything directly; rather, he learns only what others have thought about those things.

  Because of this reputation, Tavil finds his time more and more sought after. So much so that gradually, as the months collect upon themselves and turn into years, he spends less time outside his room, walking along the tunnels, looking for the woman with skin like his, searching for a way to the surface.

  More and more his days are spent moving only between his bed and his chair until, in the distance of time, his legs grow soft and his body rounded. Rarely anymore does he think of his sister left behind at the mouth of the ventilation shaft so long ago. When memories of life aboveground do enter his consciousness, he shudders at the thought of the wasteful expanse. At the bugs, the variance of temperature and light, the struggle of daily necessities like preparing food and eliminating waste.

  In these moments he’s reminded of just how much comfort the Machine gives; how much easier it is to exist in his little room where all needs can be met with the touch of a button.

  Sometimes, however, in a fit of nostalgia, he’ll decide to strike out and explore like he did during his first days underground. He’ll wheel his chair to the door and call for the carriage, grumbling over having to walk the distance between the two. He’ll take the lift to the top floor, where he’ll call for another carriage, and he’ll let it carry him along the platforms so he can stare up at the airships, wrinkling his nose at the stench they bring.

  He’ll think about his first trip here so many years ago, and the sensation of placing his hand on the ship attendant’s arm, and he’ll shudder in revulsion and embarrassment. How unenlightened he’d been to seek physical contact! To seek anything of necessity or desire outside of the Machine!

  As often as not he’ll bring the Book of the Machine along with him on these jaunts, finding himself unsettled and anxious when he can’t place his hands on its cover and murmur, “Blessed is the Machine,” in an echo of the words recently printed on the opening page. Besides, to not constantly carry the Book is to invite suspicion of being anti-Mechanism, which carries a punishment of Homelessness.

  Out of a sense of dwindling obligation Tavil continues to apply for an Egression-permit. Sometimes a week or a month will go by and he’ll have forgotten, but then some small thing will trigger a reminder—a lecture on the Seven Hills of Wessex or mention of an airship route being terminated—and he’ll promptly press the button to submit his application.

  Thus he’s surprised when, one day, rather than the expected
and usual rejection, he is approved. As evidence of the approval, a button by the door begins to glow with a green light—if he were to press it his door would open, a car would gather him and deliver him to the top level, a mask would be presented to him, and a narrow door would open to a vestibule leading to the surface.

  Tavil doesn’t move. Instead, he sits in his chair, the voices of his friends drowning the humming of the Machine, and tries to understand what to do with this new information.

  The thought of going aboveground appalls Tavil. It has been years since he was there last, with his sister at night hovering around the tunnel to the Underneath. Would he even be able to find his way to the village again? Would anyone recognize him anymore? He closes his eyes and imagines what it would be like to go back: all that space, the silence, the gray fog that dampens everything it touches.

  His heart races at the thought of it, his muscles going rigid. Without the walls of his room, what’s to keep his body—his mind and his soul—contained? What use is the world of the surface to him anymore?

  There would be no one to clothe him, feed him; no buttons to press for light and music, his bath and his bed. Everything civilized exists in the Machine now, he thinks to himself.

  In his agitation he reaches for the Book of the Machine, finding an instant peace as the weight of it settles in his hands. He presses the button indicating how unwell he feels and an apparatus drops from the ceiling to check his pulse, his temperature, his blood pressure, his respirations. A table rises from the floor with a cup perched on top, and he takes the proffered medicine without thought.