Earth: Giants Golems & Gargoyles Page 3

  Frank tossed him the keys to Digger’s Eldorado. “Ever been to The Red Circus?”

  Wings of Stone

  Kevin Cockle

  “GRAMPA, ARE GIANTS real?” she had asked, long ago. But that was how it was now, when she visited him. The silence invited introspection, and the past seemed closer, with years scaling to hours in the confines of his private room.

  “No,” he had said, towering over her six-year-old self like a giant in spite of himself. She remembered the cigarette in his hand; how bad that was, because it was illegal in parks. She remembered the river running to their right; the clear blue sky; the hot white light of the sun. “Actually it depends,” he continued, as he almost always did. “What do you mean by ‘giant’?”

  “Like . . . ” she stretched her arms up as high as they would go, affecting a monstrous gait. “Super tall!”

  “How tall?”

  “Twenty meters!”

  “And what do they look like, these giants?”

  “Like people, only super tall.”

  “But the same shape? Just bigger?”

  “Yah.”

  “Nope—that doesn’t happen. At least not in our configuration space.”

  “Config . . . ”

  “Configuration. C’mon, don’t be a little kid. You want to know about giants, you have to be able to say ‘configuration’.”

  “Congfigerashun.”

  “Close enough.”

  “You okay, Beth?” The rumbling bass from the doorway interrupted her thoughts. Her Gun-Boat, Vince, checking in. Speaking of giants. His massive bulk backlit by the hallway lighting filled the threshold, and in the shadows of his face, the low green light of his HUD eye-coverlets glowed. Part man, part machine, part animal neuronics-overlay, part counter-terrorism platform, part bodyguard, part test-bed, Vince was a first-gen Gun-Boat, and still one of the most reliable. Beth had had a hand in programming the neural network interface with his nervous system. She had known for sometime that her nickname amongst the lab techs was Dr. Frankenstein, and supposed that the label would have been inevitable for anyone in her position. It didn’t bother her, but she resented the implications for Vince, and the others of his kind.

  “It’s been over an hour,” Vince concluded by way of explanation. He was monitoring her vitals as a matter of course; knew she was tired.

  “Yes. I’m wool-gathering tonight, I’m afraid. A few more minutes, Vince.” The Gun-Boat nodded his tiger’s skull and resumed his position in the hall.

  Hospital rooms were never silent. Beth could hear the burble of a water tank and the intermittent clicking of electronic diagnostics. In the low light, her grandfather seemed made of stone, the great hooked nose in profile, the prominent brow seemingly chiselled in granite. They had positioned him in his wheelchair, looking out the window at a panoramic view of the Rockies in the distance. His hooded gaze was baleful, unwavering. He was reptilian in his stillness. He was an unnerving combination of fragility and authority; his brooding presence seemed more appropriate for the walls of some gothic castle than a palliative ward.

  She placed her hand atop his, feeling the stony cool of his skin. The jagged saw-tooth pattern of his knobbed knuckles further reinforced his statuesque appearance.

  They had sat on a bench together, all those years ago, on that day she had wondered about giants, and he had drawn her attention to a bridge spanning the nearby Bow River.

  “You can’t just scale-up a human being—in human proportions—to twenty meters tall,” he had said. Six years old or sixty, it made no difference to Grampa, once he got going. “The problem is the bones.”

  “Bones?”

  “The length and width of bones scale differently with size. If you had bones of the same width, but one was twice as long? The force needed to buckle the longer bone would be four times less than the short bone. A super tall giant couldn’t keep his human proportions or his legs would snap.”

  Beth had had a re-vision of the movie she’d seen, with the giants lying on a plain in front of their castle, screaming in agony from broken bone-shards pushing through bloodied skin. Years later, that subjective edit would be the only recollection she had of the film.

  “Now, see that bridge?” Grampa continued. “See the columns supporting that bridge? How wide and thick they are at the base? That’s the aspect ratio you need to support massive weight. When you push on the Earth, it pushes on you. Forces are neat that way: they always occur in pairs.”

  When he’d said “aspect,” Beth had thought of some dish mom usually made for Thanksgiving, but sensed that wasn’t right. Even then she’d had good instincts.

  “So giants can’t happen in our universe, Beth, but here’s the thing: in our universe, giants appear to us as bridges! If you transform our coordinates to some other con . . . work with me . . . con . . . ”

  “Configuration!”

  “Yes—some other configuration space—our bridges become giants in that other universe. Isn’t that a kick?”

  Beth had agreed that it was. Looking back, she recognized it as her first introduction to linear algebra, candy-coated with a soft outer shell of magic. Just one of many seeds Grampa had planted over the years.

  You really are wool-gathering tonight, Beth smiled to herself. It was getting late—only reason she’d been allowed to stay was because of who she was, and what Vince was. Grampa might have been proud of that much at least. She could smoke in any damn park she wanted. Well, let’s be honest, Beth chided herself. He wouldn’t be that proud of what you’ve become.

  In those little-girl days, she’d been all about magic and fantasy, castles and crowns. “Want to be able to predict the future?” Grampa would ask. “Learn physics.”

  “Physics?”

  “Math—same thing. In our universe, it’s what we have instead of magic.”

  “In our configuration space.”

  “Now yer gettin’ it.”

  Slowly but surely, his prodding had taken effect. She’d wanted to be able to predict the future, wanted magic to be real so badly. And it was odd that it would be Grampa who had kept pushing her towards the sciences. Edward Wellan was a Professor Emeritus of English Literature after all, not an engineer or physicist or computer scientist. Beth had eventually come to realize that this was the least of the man’s many contradictions. “When I was your age,” he would say. “English was a respected degree. You could make a buck off it. You’re not going to have that option, kiddo.” Even he had had no idea how right he would be.

  Grampa never attended family Christmas or other get-togethers. No one ever talked about him. When Beth saw him, it was when her mom—Ed’s daughter—took Beth round to his apartment downtown, and her mom never stayed to visit. One day one summer, when they were at Prince’s Island park just a few blocks from his home, and he had said his usual piece: “Ask me a good question,” she’d responded with: “Why don’t you live with Gramma anymore?” She was a little older then, no longer believed in giants or flying horses, but she hadn’t really been old enough to ask an adult that question. They both knew it, which is why he’d given her that wry nod before answering. His acknowledgment that the question had been good.

  “Well, sweetie,” he began, squinting off into the treeline as he chose his words, “I’m not really welcome there anymore. I left your Grandmother, which would be bad enough, but what made it unforgivable is that I left her for a man.”

  “A man?”

  “Yes. So you see, not only did I break marriage vows to her, but I broke a promise I’d made to her as well. I said I was one thing, but became another over time. She’s right to feel the way she does. They all are.”

  “But what man? Do I know him? Where is he?”

  “Actually, you know, I left him as well. For a woman, oddly enough. The thing is, Beth, it was wrong of me to be married. Irresponsible. We all have a responsibility to know who and what we are, and if we misrepresent those things, we own the lie. It’s the only way to live, but it’s hard, kiddo, so most of us don’t get it exactly right.”

  “So you’re like a shape-shifter.”

  He’d smiled at that. “Indeed,” he’d said.

  One of the close-support drones flew into Beth’s line of sight, like a firefly against the night sky. Vince’s cybernetic-intuition controlled the drone array, giving him complete tactical control of the local battle-space. The drones—meaning Vince—monitored cell communications around Beth, kept watch on her in the visible spectrum and infra-red, noted and assessed any approaching objects within several hundred meters of her position. Becoming aware of the security made her aware of her prosthetic leg, artificial left eye, and facial scarring—wounds she’d suffered when an assassin’s bomb had destroyed her first lab. She hadn’t been the target back then, but she surely would be now. Hence the personal Gun-Boat, usually reserved for heads of state or corporate luminaries.

  As her star had risen, Edward’s had fallen. She was in Advanced Placement grad school as a teen at Cal-Tech when she’d heard the news that the University of Calgary had shuttered its humanities departments. She’d been on the short list for the Fields Medal when he’d been arrested that first time, protesting the corporate annexation of aboriginal land outside Calgary. He was becoming dangerous, erratic, bitter, unemployable. He was on no-fly lists and placed under regular surveillance. He was the sort of contact one couldn’t afford to have in the new Alberta, or the old America. That rare crackpot who could get and keep the attention of crowds.

  It had been dicey, sticking her neck out for him in the early days, before she’d become “Dr. Frankenstein”; before she’d had Gun-Boat clout. She’d send bail money, food money, sometimes rent, and through it all, all the risks she’d taken, he’d never bother to disguise his rese
ntment. “How could you work for the defence department?” he’d say on Skype, heedless of who might be listening.

  “Are you eating?” she’d say. Not his idea of a good question. He’d never been one for deflection.

  She’d always been struck by the complex symmetries between them. His restless bisexual appetites; her sedentary asexuality. His ability to captivate the attention of strangers; her near invisibility in crowds. His rawboned physicality; her avian refinement. His failure or refusal to occupy any designated silo; her lifelong focus which had resulted in the Gun-Boat program, and its world-shattering applications. Together they expressed some weird conservation law—some mysterious quantity kept in perfect balance between them.

  What will happen when you’re gone, she wondered, looking at his impassive face. What happens when the Earth stops pushing back?

  He was, she realized, her closest, most profound relationship. Her mother had contracted the H1AV90 strain: Beth hadn’t been able to make the two-week deathbed-vigil. Her father had died on the QE2: Beth hadn’t been able to attend the funeral. Her work had become too important, too all-consuming. As she became one of the central components of a modern-day Manhattan Project so her connections to the outside world began to atrophy and die. At least, the work was a large part of the reason for her isolation. The other part was that she knew exactly who and what she was and hadn’t wanted to lie about it.

  Yet on the eve of her greatest achievement, the culmination of her life’s work, here she was, sitting beside the frozen catatonic shell of her grandfather. Feeling what it had been to be a little girl again; sensing how things might have played out differently.

  She’d found him in a dying forestry town just north of Merritt, British Columbia. He’d lost the ability to balance on ladders and lived in darkness since he couldn’t change lightbulbs. Neighbours fed him, but no one bathed him, cut his toenails, and such. He’d been unrecognizable to her, but he’d recognized her. It was that moment that had broken her heart; the fact that of all the things he had forgotten, she was the one thing that was still real to him. He didn’t fight relocation only because she’d been there to take him away. That lack of fight had been the final straw though, the moment of relaxation that allowed his mind to drift. Once she’d gotten him cleaned up, settled, and secure, he was gone.

  “I’m going to push a button tomorrow that’s going to change everything,” she said quietly, rubbing her grandfather’s knuckles with her thumb. “Gun-Boat 2.0: ‘Oracle’. You told me if I wanted to predict the future—if I wanted to do magic—I needed to learn math. Mission accomplished, Grampa.”

  She wondered if he would have hated what she was about to do; assigned some probability to the affirmative. But human beings couldn’t keep going on as they had been. There needed to be legitimate authority again; order to which people could and would consent. “Oracle” would give them that. And once Oracle was up and running, Beth could begin her own fade. The n-dimensional cost-function harnessing enhanced human intuition to predict “price” was the solution matrix that would change the world. After that transformation, she wouldn’t be needed. Indeed, after that, she and the core members of her team might be too dangerous to be allowed to go on living at all. Vince may already have been tasked to transition from bodyguard to executioner at the proper signal. So be it, she thought. If it came to that, she was ready. She’d been bearing a titanic weight most of her adult life, and her bones were brittle.

  They were headed to a new configuration space, she realized. There would be a giant, a leviathan, the likes of which no one had ever before imagined. In its colossal wake, there would be peace.

  She imagined her grandfather in that new universe, transformed into a grim sentinel crouching on a parapet.

  Watching over the world she had made.

  Taking to the air on wings of stone.

  Soil, Native and Otherwise

  Damascus Mincemeyer

  DAVE’S FIRST DAY on the job didn’t start the way he wanted it to. He began by showing up twenty minutes late after getting snared in a traffic jam on the interstate, and then he’d gone to the wrong administrative building and spent half the morning being shuffled from one manager to another until someone finally directed him to Earthworks’ Transportation Department. When he at long last met his actual supervisor face-to-face, Dave thought the man was going to blow a gasket, but instead Mr. Higgins only laughed and shook his head.

  “Don’t worry about it, kid,” he said as they walked down the hall from Higgins’ office to the elevator. “This place is so damn big it’s easy to get turned around,” he sighed as they descended three floors. “But that’s the nature of the beast. Corporate keeps pushing for more, so we have to keep expanding the facility to Godzilla-sized proportions. Tell you the truth, I’ve gotten lost in here more than a few times myself.”

  The elevator opened with a hissing rush of cool air into a long corridor leading out to a vast warehouse, row after row of towering metal shelves extending back as far as Dave could see. Everywhere there were workers in hard hats crawling on ladders and operating forklifts, raising and lowering shipping containers of various sizes from the shelves while yellow-vested floor managers choreographed the commotion like police officers directing traffic. Higgins popped a stick of gum in his mouth, looking back to Dave.

  “Well, here it is, the lifeblood of Earthworks Shipping Inc.” His voice had a droll bite to it. “Don’t let the excitement kick you in the ass.”

  They went further into the warehouse, the temperature so chilly Dave shivered despite the late June heat. Higgins didn’t seem to notice, barking orders to everyone around him like a blue-collar dictator before Dave asked, “What exactly is it you do here? I mean, not you specifically, but what’s the company do?”

  Higgins peered at him. “You mean no one’s told you?”

  Dave shook his head. “Not even when I interviewed.”

  “And you never thought to ask?” Higgins stopped, running a hand through thinning hair. “How old are you, kid?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “College kid?”

  Dave nodded. Higgins continued. “So I suppose it’s safe to say you were really out to pick up extra beer-swilling cash when you applied for this gig, right? No, don’t answer that. I don’t care. I only care that you’re capable enough to do the job, but if you don’t even know what it is we do, my faith in you is already seriously lacking.” He gestured to the buzzing warehouse. “Earthworks ships one thing, and ships it better than anyone else.” Higgins led Dave to the nearest shelf, rolling one of the containers from its perch. It was similar to a steel footlocker, thirty inches long and rectangular; along the front was a jumble of numerical information and bar codes, the words FRANCE/BOURGOGNE-FRANCHE-COMTE printed above them. Higgins unfastened the metal clasps on the container’s lid and flipped it up.

  Dave peeked inside, frowning. “Dirt? You ship dirt?”

  Higgins pulled a handful of rich, black earth from the full container, crumbling it between his fingers. “You got it, kid. Dirt’s our stock and trade. Well, soil, technically. Corporate discourages us from saying dirt. Sullies the company image, I suppose.”

  Dave looked up and down the shelves around him, then to the seemingly endless aisles throughout the warehouse, wondering how many containers were there before he glanced back to Higgins. “So all of these boxes are filled with . . . dirt?”

  “Soil.”

  “Right. Soil. Sorry. But . . . why?”

  Higgins wiped his hands on his pants. “Because there’s money to be made, that’s why. There’s a need out there that Earthworks meets. Admittedly it’s a niche market, but one that’s proved extremely lucrative. Our client list is just bursting.” When Higgins saw Dave’s face droop into confusion, he pulled the youth forward by the arm, closer to the open, earth-filled locker. “See, it’s like this, kid. Our Acquisitions Department sends crews around the world—everywhere you can imagine, to every country, on every continent—to excavate soil deposits and ship the samples back here, where they’re catalogued and separated by country and region,” he pointed to the container’s label. “See, this particular shipment comes from the Burgundy region in France, and that’s what’s important to note, because while we have multiple samples of French soil in the warehouse, each comes from a different region,” he motioned to the containers directly adjacent to the one he’d pulled out. “This one’s from Normandy, and the one over there’s from the Centre-Loire Valley. All from France, but different regions, and that’s where your job comes in.”