Motus, page 3
While the larger rocks settled, he wiped down the studio with a rag. Left to dry, the silicates in the clay could be trampled into dust and become airborne, a serious hazard to the lungs. Even after his father died from silicosis from his time in the mines, and his mother made him promise to always wear a dust mask, her own safety never concerned her.
Ten minutes later, he poured the dark slurry of water from one pail to another, leaving behind a course sediment. The much finer particles left in the water would settle to the bottom over the next few days and become the clay his mother would use to create the new mugs.
She hadn’t lied. Her business provided her with a steady flow of work, even from those living in the Foredistrict. Celest’s wash basins, pots, tiles, and drinking vessels with carved reliefs, colored with every metal oxide or mica imaginable, adorned many homes throughout the city. Her pieces had a character that was lacking in anything made from rock, metal, and glass, which in Motus was almost everything.
“Take those two pots over to the Smeltery would you? I’ll pay you back for the bisque fee,” she said when she noticed him heading toward the door and donning his helmet. She now sat at the pottery wheel, her feet rhythmically kicking the circular slab of stone beneath to get it spinning. She indicated the two pots on the clay wedging table with a tilt of her head. “Take the ones you dropped off yesterday to Ruth at the Shroomery.”
“Same exchange as last time?” he asked, eager to supplement his diet with a bit more variety that evening.
“A pound each,” his mother confirmed. “I swear you’ll never stop growing, eating the way you do. They’ll have to make the ceilings higher.” He was making to pick up the two unfired jugs when she added, “And crank up the music again. Surprise me with something.”
“You’ll wear through them in days at this rate,” he said. The wax cylinders were only able to retain their clarity for a few dozen playthroughs before they became a garbled mess. And because they’d all been made when wax still existed, they were irreplaceable. Occasionally, she would have him polish a worn cylinder smooth, take the phonograph, and record people singing or talking in the market. It was the only way she could ever experience the city; her decades-old fear of leaving the house remained as strong as it had ever been.
“It’s a good thing you’ll be rich soon. We’ll be able to afford electricity and one of those wire recorders they use in the Foredistrict.”
With a roll of his eyes, Corun rewound the phonograph and removed the delicate wax cylinder. They had dozens to choose from, a collection acquired by his father over many years. As he replaced the cylinder with one in a paper tube labeled “Farmyard Duet,” he eyed two cylinders set apart from all the others. Compared to the rest, these were truly irreplaceable. His father, the ravages of silicosis beginning to take its toll, had erased one of the worn wax cylinders and made a recording of his own. A bedtime song for his young son. The tinny sound of his voice on the phonograph compensated for much of the gruffness brought on by the disease.
Corun had never listened to the second cylinder, at least no more than a few quick snatches when his mother didn’t know he was listening. It was a love letter, she had said. He could have written it, Corun knew, having been the one to teach Corun to read and write, but he used the machine to record his voice instead so that his wife could listen long after his voice had faded and he’d passed away. Corun was eight when that day came. After that, he had occasionally arrived home to hear her listening to the recording and made a point to stand outside until it was over. Depression hit her hardest on those days, especially as the voice became too garbled to understand.
The scratchy sound of the cylinder moving into position beneath the gem-tipped needle soon transitioned into that of a man’s and woman’s voices, a love song about the couple chasing quail through the barley grasses, only to find each other instead.
He took up the unfired pots and cast one last look at his mother, her mouth quietly moving in sync with the lyrics, and pulled the door shut behind him.
It only took him ten minutes to drop off the pots at the Smeltery for bisque firing and another ten to deliver the still-hot pots from the day before to the Shroomery. He stayed to watch Ruth fill the pots with lime-soaked barley straw and sprinkle in some grain spawn. He had seen this process many times before, and the tenacity of the strange lifeform never ceased to amaze him. In under a week, the white mushroom mycelium would completely overtake the straw, and within a few days of removing the lid of the vessel and exposing the substrate to fresh, humid air, mushrooms emerged. The spent mushroom substrate was scraped out of the pots and sent over to the Composters for the mealworms to break down into yet more soil for growing barley.
When Ruth noticed him standing there watching, she shooed him out with two sacks of mushrooms. He returned these to his mother, who insisted he keep one for his help. Pickaxe and mushrooms in hand, he left for his own home, eager to fill the growing void in his stomach.
His quadruplex, by definition, supported four rooms in total, each three meters wide and two across, just large enough for a bed, a small shelf of books, and a kitchenette. Corun could make out the familiar sounds of the other three tenants toiling away at one task or another or snoring as they recovered from their last shift.
Removing his clothes and falling onto his bed, he lay there unmoving until the tension in his back and shoulders eased. Only then did he begin the real task of recovery. He struck a spark against his stove’s burner, lighting the stream of methane.
Barley flour, salt, yeast, water, and malt sugar went into a bowl for bread, while chopped mushrooms sizzled on a hot pan with a bit of quail fat. He saved a bit of flour and water to thicken the mushrooms into a creamy gravy and poured it onto bread rolls straight from the bread pot. He sat down on the base of his bed with the hearty meal heaped onto one of his mother’s decorative plates.
Each bite shocked his dusty tastebuds back into life and suffuse his weary limbs with energy. He would need to save that energy for the mines tomorrow, he decided. Rhyo would forgive him for not showing up at the bar.
Settling into his straw mattress, Corun ignited his carbide lamp and fished the crumpled pamphlet out of the pocket of his discarded pants.
Writing was a common pastime for the more affluent members of society who commonly wrote tales of fiction wholly unimaginative, or books of a more scientific and technical nature, hoping to pass on a bit of wisdom. The author of these pamphlets was different. Unlike him, they were formally educated, but like him, they had a contempt for the current system of governance that trampled on and took advantage of hardworking shareholders. It was no surprise that the author chose to remain anonymous, as the contents of each pamphlet was sure to bristle some feathers. The author’s views made them undeniably an Ascensionist, which was common among laborers, but they presented the facts far more cogently than any laborer could. More than that, the author possessed a knowledge of past events and scandals that could only have been gleaned from the Motus Archives or the quiet gossip of a board member’s assistants. Corun had saved each one he’d managed to scrounge from trash heaps on Third Street. Now, he had a new one to add to the collection and enough fuel in his headlamp to read it.
Where did we come from? The rock that surrounds us provides everything we need to survive, if barely, but it is notably lacking in life. We carry that with us as we tunnel through the rock, just as our ancestors did. But the plants, microorganisms, and quail had to come from somewhere, as did we. This is a tenet shared by all, but we agree on little else.
Decensionists believe we came from below, a place described in some of the more popular fictions as a pocket of air filled with lifeforms of all shapes and sizes, surrounded by water deep enough to swim in and illuminated by rocks glowing white with heat. Ascensionists, while notably lacking in novelists, believe we emerged from a cavern far above, one so immense it is impossible to see the other side. Each theory has its issues, but none so egregious as the one proposed by Lateralists, namely that every form of life we have in our care was revealed to us individually as we explored. A cavern of barley, a cavern of quail, a cavern of mealworms. It is a theory that seeks to explain the differences in these lifeforms whilst ignoring the dependence each has on the other, or the lack of any historical record of such a find. They would have us continue in the same strata, in a place neither too hot or cold, through rock neither too dry nor dense, and at a neutral slope that favors the hauling of buildings and wheelbarrows of ore alike. Their appeal to shareholders averse to change will be Motus’s downfall.
At our current pace, our city will shrink to nothing in the coming century, or we will lose another invaluable resource in our lifetimes, one that cannot be replaced, and the fragile ecosystem of our city will crumble. Change is risky, but when the alternative is a certain death, searching for our origins will give us a fighting chance.
And once we find it, the only question we will have is why we ever left.
CHAPTER FOUR
“You never said what you’d do with all the shares,” Rhyo said the next morning on their way to the mines. He pushed his wheelbarrow stacked high with roof supports, while Corun carried his friend’s shovel and his own pickaxe on each shoulder. Despite their burdens and lack of sleep, they were the only ones on Third Street with a spring in their steps.
“Start my own restaurant, I think,” Corun said, finding it hard to resist Rhyo’s infectious enthusiasm. His friend looked none the worse for wear after spending his night drinking and making moves on the bartenders. Corun wished he could say the same. After reading the latest anonymous pamphlet, sleep had been elusive. The future was always on his mind, but never before had he imagined one so bleak as detailed there. And before he knew it, the streetlights outside his window had brightened to signify the start of a new day.
After brewing orzo that morning, a beverage of roasted barley sweetened with barley malt and barley milk, Corun had donned his helmet and face mask and left to meet Rhyo at the Smeltery. Never ones to pass up some shares, they filled Rhyo’s empty wheelbarrow with roof supports to haul to the mines. Their payment never made it to their pockets and was used instead to replace the spent calcium hydroxide in their carbide lamps with fresh calcium carbide and to fill their canteens and the upper compartments of their headlamps with water.
Only when they reached the wall of darkness a few dozen meters past the headquarters building in the Foredistrict, did they turn their lamps on. Reaching up, Corun twisted the dial on the top of the carbide lamp, allowing some water to drip into the bottom chamber, reacting with the calcium carbide to release acetylene gas. He shifted his hands to the parabolic mirror on the front of the headlamp and flicked a small wheel, sending sparks from the cerium iron alloy across the small jet of gas. It lit with a small, familiar puff, casting a bright but diffuse light across the ground before them.
It took another few minutes to reach the mines, but still longer than Corun would have liked. There was plenty of space between the edge of the Foredistrict and the mines, but the city seldom moved farther than twenty meters each Moveday, leaving the Reardistrict in a perpetual state of overcrowding. And the reason they didn’t move farther? According to Cinna, the paver, it was because they didn’t want to hear laborers hammering and chiseling at the rock.
“When I get back, I expect there to be a heap of that rock ready for hauling,” Rhyo said as they finished unloading the roof supports. With no other miners in the vicinity, he didn’t bother keeping his voice low. “I’ll go pick up another load of supports and see if I can find Hagan. With any luck, he’ll have identified it for us.”
With that, Rhyo buffed out a few scratches on his wheelbarrow with the heel of his palm, grabbed its handles, and headed back toward the city, leaving Corun alone in the mines.
Corun located his tunnel with the same ease he did every day. It was to the right of center, the same tunnel his father had mined since he purchased the claim over thirty years ago. To his relief, no other tunnels extended as far into the rock as his, making it unlikely the other miners would have stumbled across the same deposit.
He mined the same way he had been taught, starting high and moving low. He had notched a few lines into the haft of his pickaxe to mark where he should grip, a place that, until recently, seemed to change every year as he grew. He extended his hands high into the air until the head of the pickaxe brushed the tunnel ceiling. Then he began driving the tapered end into the rock. It was slow-going, but having a smooth ceiling reduced the risk of cave-ins and provided a flat surface for the roof supports. And as always, precision was paramount, as any deviation from the heading of the city, either up or down or side to side, without board approval, was deemed a waste of space, earning him a fine by compliance officers.
When he had cleared a small divot into the stone wall where it met the ceiling, he flipped his pickaxe around and began chipping away at the stone again with the spiked end. Corun preferred to move systematically, in quarter-meter segments, and end with a clean tunnel with no knobs or protuberances along its walls for other miners to deal with. Not for the first time, he considered doing away with this routine, becoming more like the other miners, who whittled away at the wall wherever they saw fit. But his father had taught him when he was five years old, and no treasure lurking behind the rock wall could so easily make him cast that tradition aside.
Corun knew this day would not be like the others after the first few dozen strikes of his pickaxe. Despite Rhyo’s demands, he’d only expected to expose a small amount by the time his friend returned. Much to his astonishment, the strange silver-black ore appeared a quarter of the way down the wall, deposited in a remarkably strait line. The vein was thick, and continued downward, well beyond the small bit he’d exposed the day before, even past the level of the floor. Exposing that much of the dark surface made him double-check the brightness of his headlamp, so great was it at absorbing the light. Despite the appraiser’s assertion that it was not radioactive, Corun adjusted the cloth over his face, wary of breathing in the smallest amount of the stuff.
Once all the ore was exposed within his mining claim, he made his first swing into the material. It crumpled under the blow, cascading to the floor. He stared in amazement as the final flakes hit the ground, exposing more of the ore behind it. Even if this material was only worth a bit more than standard ore, there was enough here to ease their financial woes for months. And if it was chock-full of platinum or something even more valuable, they would live in luxury to rival that of the chairman of the board.
Corun laughed as he dug further into the ore, and mounds of it accumulated around his ankles at record speed.
“You’ve either found something,” said a voice behind him, “Or the mines have finally driven you mad.” The light from Malac’s headlamp obscured his features, but Corun heard hope and a bit of bemusement in the miner’s voice. The man must have only just arrived to start his shift, drawn into the mouth of Corun’s tunnel by his maniacal laughter.
“Better pick up your pace, old man, before I take it all for myself.”
Malac remained silent as he knelt to rub a bit of the black, metallic ore between his fingers. Moments later, he stood and began hacking at his own section of wall, far faster than his normal, methodical pace.
Soon, Corun had to stop. The silver-black ore came up to his knees and covered the tunnel behind him for several meters. It would take a dozen haulers to carry this much away. He couldn’t wait to see the look on Rhyo’s face when he returned.
As if the thought had summoned him, he heard the familiar squeak of a wheelbarrow rolling up from behind him.
Corun waded through the ore accumulating in the tunnel and smiled at Malac, who wore a grin of his own as his pickaxe struck sparks from the wall. Then he turned his smile toward Rhyo, but this time his friend had not come alone.
The identity of his companions failed to register to Corun against the blinding light of Rhyo’s headlamp. It wasn’t until they came within a few meters that Corun recognized the appraiser. The walk from the Smeltery to the mines made the man’s scowling face slick with sweat.
The last of Rhyo’s companions was a laborer girl, her arms well-muscled and the brim of her helmet concealing most of her dark amber hair. His headlamp illuminated sharp cheekbones dusted with freckles and a strong chin. Her eyes had the same color-flecked gray of labradorite and were just as cold. Lips pinched, she regarded him with stern disapproval.
“Rhyo? What’s wrong,” Corun asked, the sense of hostility in the air smothering his good cheer like a cold draft to a flame.
Rhyo simply shook his head.
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong,” Hagen said. “You’ve taken us all for fools.”
Corun stared at the appraiser, slack-jawed. The man’s anger was as out of place as his fancy clothing.
“I don’t understand.”
This time, the girl spoke. “Recognize this?” she asked, lifting her hand to display a piece of ore in the center of her palm. It was identical to the specimen he had given Hagen the day before, except larger. But if it wasn’t from the mines, how had she come to possess it?
“I’m sorry. Who are you?” Corun asked, taking a half step back from the sheer force of her gaze.
“She’s a compactor, Corun,” Rhyo said sorrowfully. “That ore you said you found, it’s slag from the furnace. I told them you wouldn’t do that, try to pass off slag as something valuable, but I totally understand if you felt you had to. Trust me, I know how hard it is to live off the shares we make.”
