It had been one of a unit of Motorik sent over to Cleave from the Prell Cybernetics factory in Golconda. Model PIT365, designation: Flex. There had been twenty-four others just like it. The Guardians had decreed long ago that a certain number of jobs on any world should be reserved for human workers, to preserve stability, but machines were cheaper, and the corporate families had persuaded Emperor Mahalaxmi to change the law so that Motorik were classed as human. One of the factories in Cleave had purchased Flex’s batch to clean the flues of its blast furnaces.
The human workers who had been paid to clean the flues until then were not pleased to see these new Motorik laborers. The job was hard and dangerous and dirty, but it was their job. If they let these wire dollies replace them, where would it end? There probably wasn’t a job anywhere on the Network that Motos couldn’t do cheaper than real human beings. So they protested. They asked the other workers to join them. “Smash them!” they shouted, and went to ambush the freight container holding the Motorik as it was being trucked into the factory.
The container was massive and stoutly locked, but one of the workers was driving a thing called an “Iron Penguin,” a pear-shaped armored suit with massive manipulator claws. She wrenched the doors off, and her comrades barged into the container, waving tools and makeshift clubs.
The earliest Motorik had been built for the military as ground assault drones. Research had proven that soldiers were less willing to fire on something that looked human; there was a momentary hesitation that gave military Motorik an edge. But the workers of Cleave must have been made of tougher stuff than soldiers were, because they didn’t hesitate when they saw the new Motos. “We are pleased to meet you, fellow laborers,” the newcomers said politely. They seemed confused when the blows began to fall. “Please tell us how we have displeased you,” asked the one standing next to Flex, while a burly foreman knocked its head off with a wrench.
Somehow, among all the shouting and crashing, among the thrashing of severed Motorik limbs and gouts of gel and cries of, “Smash the wire dollies!” Flex found itself outside the con-tainer. The Iron Penguin closed huge claws around it and lifted it off its feet. Flex twisted round and looked through the machine’s windshield, into the face of the driver, an angry brown girl with MYKA stitched across the front of her greasy work cap.
Angry, but not that angry, it turned out. Myka could have snipped the Motorik into pieces with those claws, but although she’d been as outraged as all the others when she heard about the company’s plans to ship in putala labor, she felt suddenly less violent now that heads were being crushed and arms torn off and the blue gel, which served the wire dollies for blood, was pouring in such startling quantities out of the container. She met the eyes of the Motorik she had caught, and saw nothing in them but confusion. Nobody had bothered telling it that the world was going to be like this.
“Me neither,” she said disgustedly, and rather than slamming the claws shut, she opened them, turning the Penguin quickly at the same instant. Flex was flung out of the battle, over a hand-rail, and dropped several stories into a pile of garbage that had been slung out on the bank of Cleave River for the next flood to wash away.
There Flex lay, wondering about what had just happened and why. It hid in the heaps of refuse while the shouting died away above. Its brain had been damaged, it thought. It kept getting strange ideas. It found old tiles in the garbage, and started scratching marks on them with a bit of rusty wire. It looked at the marks and liked them. It discovered that they could be turned into pictures. It concentrated. It drew faces and hands. It drew the Iron Penguin and the girl who drove it. It drew the river, rushing by.
Night came to Cleave. The strip of stormy sky that showed between the canyon’s high walls turned black, and some of the shops and factories killed their lights. Flex went on drawing, until it heard someone come climbing down the ladder from the factory above.
It edged backward into a cleft of the canyon wall and watched as a flashlight beam swept the garbage mounds. It did not need a flashlight to see in the dark. It could see that the newcomer was Myka. It wondered if she regretted not destroying it when she had the chance. It wondered if she had come down here to find it and finish it off. It watched her stoop and pick up a tile. She looked at the tile for a long time, and Flex guessed that she had found the picture it had made of her. She looked around in case someone had left it there as a joke and was watching from the shadows, laughing. Flex stayed very still. Nothing moved but the ferns, which danced like slow green flames under the spray from the river.
“Moto?” she called. “You still down here?”
It felt the flashlight beam touch it. It saw the girl start as she noticed its pale face watching her through the ferns. She put the tile into one of the big pockets on the leg of her overalls and came crunching and slithering over the garbage. She said a word that Flex had not been programmed to recognize, probably a curse. She said, “What are we going to do with you?”
“Please, I would like to leave this place,” said Flex.
Myka snorted. “Good luck with that. They’re smashing all your sort. There are mobs outside the station, dragging wire dollies off the incoming trains, breaking them up, using their heads for lanterns. You’re going to have to stay hidden.”
“Thank you,” said Flex. “For not breaking me.”
“I wish I had,” said Myka. “I wish I could. If they find out I’ve helped you…”
“Sorry,” said Flex.
Myka picked up the tile that Flex had been working on when she came down the ladder. She looked at the picture scratched on it. She said, “I didn’t know Motorik could draw.”
“Neither did I.”
“Were you programmed for design work or something?”
“I do not think so.”
She put the tile down and looked at Flex’s face again. (Zen could imagine what her expression had been. Exasperated, but kindly. She had been looking after her mother and her kid brother since she was little, and now this stupid Moto needed looking after too.)
“You can’t stay here,” she told it. “I can show you a stairway that leads up into the stacks. Plenty of places to hide out in the stacks. But someone’s bound to see you, so you’re going to have to stop looking so… You’re going to have to look like a human being.”
“How?” asked Flex.
“Your skin’s too pale, and your eyes are too far apart, and…”
Flex dipped into the menus of its mind. Its white face darkened, taking on a brownish tone not far off Myka’s own. Its eyebrows thickened into a Myka-ish unibrow.
“Don’t overdo it,” Myka said. She looked at its clothes—the remnants of its papery gray overalls, which hung in rags now, baring its blank and sexless body. “Are you a boy or a girl?” she asked it. “Male or female? Most people are one or the other, in Cleave.”
“Which are you?” asked Flex.
“Female, of course.”
Flex found a setting in its menus labeled GENDER and selected FEMALE.
Myka went rummaging in the garbage heap and found some overalls, and a lady’s rain cape with plastic flowers for buttons. She made Flex put the clothes on, then sat back on her haunches and studied her. She told her to make her hair longer, and styled it roughly with her hands. “Well,” she said, “you’re an odd-looking girl, but at least people won’t think ‘wire dolly’ as soon as they see you. You’ll need to work at it, though. You need to watch people—you’re good at that, I can tell from the way you draw. Watch us and copy how we move. Listen, and copy how we talk. But don’t go talking to anybody except me, not unless you have to.”
“No, Myka.”
She led Flex along the riverside, along the rusted walkways, which jutted from the rock face there, up wet stairways, into the complicated alleys between the stacks. Before they parted she pinged something from her headset into Flex’s brain: a messaging address. “Anything you need,” she said, “you call me. I can bring you food, or whatever. But I guess your sort don’t need food?”
Flex did not need food, but she needed power. She made her way alone through the stacks, and into the rail yards. She recharged herself from the unit that drove the huge loco-motive turntable outside the station. In an access space between the tracks she made a small lair for herself. She listened with her mind to the big, calm minds of the trains as they came and went. She heard their songs. They knew that she was there, but they didn’t seem to care. On the walls of her den, where dirt and damp had stained the ceramic, she started scratching draw-ings. She drew trains and Iron Penguins and flowers and trucks and clothes. She drew Myka. She went out into the streets and watched people and came back and drew them. She delved into the Datasea and found other things to draw, things she didn’t even know the names of.
Every few days there was a message from Myka in her mind. “You still there, Moto?” or “You need anything?” One day she messaged back. “Please, I would like things to draw with…”
“So Myka started bringing me paintsticks from the factory stores,” said Flex, smiling at the memory while the Damask Rose carried him farther and farther from Cleave. “I started drawing on the trains. And when people started to recognize my pictures, they came and found me, and asked me to paint signs for shops and decorate taxis and trucks. They paid me in paintsticks and free power. And Myka helped me buy stuff, clothes and things, so I’d fit in better. She came sometimes just to talk. She told me about you, and your ma. She said I was a good listener.”
And all this had been going on, thought Zen, while he’d been off on his thieving trips to Ambersai and Tusk, or hanging out at the Spatterpattern, or lying on his bed at Bridge Street, listening to Ma moan and fret. Myka would come home wet and tired and he’d always just assume she’d come straight from her dead-end job. He felt like a fool for not noticing that Flex was a Motorik; he felt a bigger one for never imagining that his sister might have this other life going on, this adventure of her own.
“Myka’s right,” he said. “There’s so much I don’t know about her.”
Flex smiled. “She’s good. Like you.”
“Me? I’m not good.”
“But you are going to all this trouble to help a Motorik, just like Myka helped me.”
“It’s different,” said Zen.
“When we get to Sundarban,” said Flex, “you’ll have to get into orbit to find Nova. How will you do that?”
“I have a plan,” said Zen.
Which wasn’t true. He had only a fragment of an idea, more of a desperate hope than a plan. It was going to be risky, and perhaps impossible, but he had to try. If he could steal Nova back from death, perhaps it would make up for all the deaths he’d caused at Spindlebridge.