The Golden City (8 page)

Verga slapped Michael on the shoulder as if he had just joined a football team. “From now on, you’re ‘Tolmo.’ That was the thief’s tag.”

“What if someone asks about him?”

“They don’t care about our faces. That’s as clear as the boots I’m standin’ in. Only the gods watch our lives.”

The harvesters clutched their knives as if they were going to climb onto the crawler and kill everyone onboard. The machinery squealed and chugged and spat little jets of steam. Suddenly, Verga reached into the water and pulled up a green, pumpkin-size plant still attached to its leafy vines.

“This here’s a spark. Don’t know what you guardians call it. Now you want to take your knife and cut right around the base root. Trim the side vines off and toss your harvest into the feeder.” He picked up a smaller plant. “Now this one is still growing. And this one …” Verga grabbed Michael’s hand and pushed it below the surface so he could feel a large, smooth object. “That’s a mother plant. We leave that to birth the next measure.”

“I understand.”

“Slow and steady wins the day. Don’t cut your leg with your blade.”

“There are creatures in the water. I got bit.”

A few people laughed, and Verga tugged down the brim of Michael’s hat. “If a finner starts chewin’ on you, just let me know. He’ll end up in the pot.”

Now that the main crawler had stopped, Michael could see the equipment attached to the back of the machine. A metal frame held
a long conveyer belt that was only a few inches above the water. The horizontal belt fed the harvested spark to a vertical wire tube with a screw device revolving inside. Once the spark reached the top of the tube, it could be directed into the hoppers carried by the two auxiliary machines.

“May the gods reward us,” Verga prayed. The harvesters drew their knives. Steel poles extending from the conveyer belt established twelve separate work areas. If Michael hadn’t substituted for the dead man, it would have been immediately clear that someone was missing. The loud noise from the machinery and the shimmering space of the waterfields was almost overpowering. For a moment, Michael wanted to turn away and slosh his way back to dry land.

A steam whistle blew with a high-pitched shriek and the crawler began to roll forward. Startled by this disturbance, one of the finners broke the surface of the water. The old woman grabbed its tail and flipped it onto the conveyer belt, where a man sliced off its head and another man tossed its body onto the back of the frame. The crawler kept shaking as if were about to fall apart. Michael stared at the eel head with its needle teeth as it floated past him.

“Tolmo!” Verga shouted. “What’s your task now? Where’s your blade?”

Michael drew his knife and caught up with the others. Both the men and women worked quickly. They gauged the size of the unseen spark with their feet and legs, then reached into the water, grabbed a stem and pulled the plant to the surface. One or two quick cuts and the spark was free. Then they had to catch up with the crawler and toss their harvest onto the conveyer belt.

Michael could feel the spark hidden below the surface, but it was difficult cutting them free. Their stems were thick and tangled. Everything was a mess of leaves and mud and his own confusion. Bend down. Grab. Cut. No, that’s not right. Too small. Toss it away. Finally,
he cut a plant of the right size and realized that the crawler was now thirty feet away from him. He had to run through the muddy water, splashing and swearing to himself until he dumped the spark onto the belt.

Verga smiled. “Good. That’s an offering for the gods.”

“So how long do we have to do this?”

“’Til the midway resting.”

“And when is that?”

“The crawler stops and turns when it reaches a boundary mark. You’ll have time to fill your lungs …”

The crawler blew its whistle and Michael had to run again to catch up with the machine. Back in his own world, he and Gabriel had worked in a cattle feed lot, and one hot summer they had mopped tar onto roofs. But this didn’t feel like a job at all. It was a muddy battle with the living world—grabbing the spark, slashing its stem and flinging it away as if it was the head of dead enemy.

T
he hazy triangle of suns moved higher in the sky and one of the smaller machines left with its load of spark. Still squeaking and blowing off steam, the main crawler stopped beside a levee, and the harvesters stepped onto dry land. Near this resting point, someone had set up a large cone of hammered copper filled with clean water. Cups were attached to the cone with little chains. While the harvesters took turns with the cups, a young woman opened a sack and passed out small loaves of something that looked like bread. Michael took a loaf and bit off a piece of the end. The midday meal had a brownish-orange color and a coarse texture; it tasted like roasted hazelnuts.

Verga sat near the edge of the levee gobbling down one loaf with two other loaves on his lap. “It’s the gunder-spark today. Thought they’d serve us the rasten-spark, but this is better.”

“Is that all you eat?”

“I forgot—you guardians eat more of the world. We servants eat finners and shantu and rake, but mostly it’s spark, cooked different ways.”

“You ever want to eat like the guardians?”

“Here I am and here I should be,” Verga said as if this one phrase could refute any argument. “We servants are the hands and arms and legs, standing strong on the ground. And the militants are here …” He touched his heart. “And you guardians are here …” He touched his head. “All is just when each does his part.”

When the harvest resumed a short time later, Michael felt stronger and was able to keep up with the others. What had looked like a haphazard operation turned out to be an efficient system of farming. There was no need to plant seeds or pull weeds as long as the mother plants were left alone. Drainage pipes connected the different fields, and a weak current kept the water from turning stagnant. Even the clanking, hissing wet crawler followed an established pattern; the servant operating the machine steered a straight line by aiming at the sticks embedded in the mud.

Toward the end of the day, the workers put away their knives, rolled down their boot-tops, and followed Verga through the grid of levees to the dry land that surrounded the waterfields. After twenty minutes of walking, they reached three railroad tracks set on a gravel bed. The tired workers lay down on a weedy strip beside the tracks until a steam engine arrived, pulling a line of flatcars. The steam engine itself was as simple as a teapot on a three-wheeled wagon: a steam cylinder and a single piston transmitted power to the crank shaft that propelled the train.

If the train carried him to a new area, he might find it difficult to return to the passageway. As the harvesters began to climb onto to the flatcars, Michael looked around for landmarks and saw a rusty handcart that resembled an old-fashioned rickshaw. At night, he could follow the railroad tracks back to this point and then retrace his steps to the sticks he left in the water.

His new friends waved their hands and called to him. “Hurry up, Tolmo! We’re leaving!”

Michael jumped onto one of the flatcars, and the rickety train started down the tracks. They followed the perimeter of the water-fields, stopping every ten minutes or so to pick up another group of harvesters. Although the flatcars were moving about as fast as a Sunday jogger, there was a lively, excited feeling in the group. Everyone knew each other and people shouted jokes back and forth about the amount of spark each group had harvested that day. The wheels clicked with a quick rhythm as the wind of their passage ruffled the women’s hair and the hems of their skirts.

Michael sat at one end of the flatcar with his hat pulled low over his face. He thought again about the summer he and Gabriel worked at the cattle feedlot. They didn’t have money for gasoline so, at the end of the work day, an older man named Leon would give them a ride home in the back of his pickup truck. It was just like this: rolling down a road past the countryside.

Forget all that, Michael told himself. Focus on the present situation. Listening to the conversations around him, he figured out the system of two-syllable names used by the servants. Verga was also called “Verga sire-Toshan”—which meant he was the father of the man named Toshan sitting a few yards away. Mothers added their oldest daughter’s name, and so the woman next to him was called “Molva san-Pali.”

In the distance, huge white shapes seemed to emerge from the ground. As the train grew closer, Michael saw that they were approaching a cluster of triangular buildings with steep roofs. The steam engine blew its whistle loudly, the engineer pulled back a brake lever, and the entire train screeched to a stop. Everyone jumped off the train, and Michael followed Verga across the tracks. A line of rail cars had been left on a side track; some of them held wire hoppers filled with harvested spark. A few cars carried stacks of bricks and a work crew was unloading them into wheelbarrows.

A pathway led them to a central courtyard surrounded by the triangular buildings. The courtyard was dominated by white brick structures that were as large as the barns back in South Dakota. Near a machine shop, men were repairing a vehicle that Verga called a “dry crawler.” It looked like a nineteenth century stagecoach with a driver’s box and a steam engine in front. But there were also three-wheeled carts pulled by shaggy ponies with blunt noses and hand carts pulled by the older children. An open cooking area was at one end of the courtyard; women scooped out the pale orange pulp of the spark plant and molded it into loaves which they baked in an outdoor oven.

“Stay with my boots,” Verga said, and Michael followed the old man through the crowd to one of the barns. He found himself in a cavernous room where sunlight streamed in through high windows. The building was used as a dormitory for all the men in the community. There was a mound of straw at the center, pegs for hanging blankets and clothes, and a trough for waste that was continually flushed out by the water flowing from the bathing area. Imitating the old man, Michael washed his face and hands beneath a stone spout.

“Some say guardians could never cut spark in the waterfields,” Verga announced. “But you carried your blade better than that thief ever did.”

“What happens now? Do we eat?”

“Eat all you want, Tolmo. And then it’s the night for the visionary …”

Michael nodded as if he knew what the old man was talking about. They returned to the courtyard and followed the crowd to a trellised area where stew was being served in metal bowls. No spoons or forks were on the tables so they ripped off chunks of gunder-spark and used them to scoop up their food.

Verga led him over to a long table where their work crew was
eating dinner. As they approached the others, Michael was startled by what he saw. About a hundred yards from the dining area was a screen as big as a billboard with a shimmery gold surface. The screen was about six feet above the ground, and benches and stools had been placed in a semi-circle in front of it.

The faithful servants gobbled down their food, laughing and gossiping, but Michael stayed quiet and studied a line of black and white circles on the surface of the screen. Every few seconds, the circles changed their configuration, like an odd clock keeping time.

It took him awhile to realize that the circles represented a binary number system—the same system used by computers back in the Fourth Realm. Each digit in a line of numbers was either on or off, one or zero. When number eleven (
) was transformed into number ten (
), people tossed their empty bowls into a bin and sauntered over to the viewing area. Parents called to their children and, for a few minutes, Michael felt that he was back in a small-town movie theater where people arrived a half hour before the show to save seats for their friends.

The three suns were a hand’s width above the horizon. The cooks had finished their jobs and found their seats in the little amphitheater. Michael was cautious about asking too many questions, but he wanted to know what was going on. “How long do we have to wait?” he asked Verga.

“Soon enough. When the dark sky comes.” The old man jerked his head at the screen. “Just keep watchin’ the visionary.”