2. Apprenticeship

A.D. 2217–2219

Barton Throwster was not a cruel master, but not a rich one either, and his fear of debtor’s prison made him drive his prentices exactingly, so that many a night by lamplight Menelaus and the other boys were still programming dart and fuses and shells, and packing chaff in various combinations, and finishing the magnetic rails for pistols until the acceleration line was flawless.

Mr. Throwster was also a Cathar, which meant he must go through elaborate precautions of maintaining his bodily purity, cleaning his white clothes with sonic waves, and changing his skin-gloves and nose-filters at regular hours. His denomination had objections to the implanted antibodies that kept the Pest away from normal people, but it could not be denied that he was a careful Artificer, and the number of his customers or prentices who caught a disease from an improperly prepared weapon-load was the lowest in the parish.

The same exacting care made the villagers elect Mr. Throwster to the post of Wellmaster, but he was not paid extra for the honor of being the officer watching the purity of the local water supply, and the loss of his daily hours to this task made him drive his prentices all the harder, to make up time. And because he was a Cathar, and friendless, the village elected him Bangbeggar and gave him a long staff, on the excuse that since the vagrants and tramps sometimes carried disease vectors, only a man of his careful habits would do.

Throwster was too conscientious to turn down the position, and so he moved his shop into the Constable’s quarters halfway up the ramp of the broken cloverleaf, from which the village of Bridge-to-Nowhere took its name.

This cloverleaf was a high and crumbling structure of concrete posts and elevated fragments of road. The ramps for traffic were all broken, so the top had to be reached by ladders. At this height, the villagers kept their lofty Meeting Hall, which doubled as a stockade in times of raid. Lesser buildings, like swallow’s nests, clung to road fragments lower down the titanic concrete pillars.

The expense and trouble of these new quarters, especially the cost of hauling water up so high, was one Throwster lost from his own pocket. The theory was that public-spirited citizens should be eager to serve the town, and that patriots would scorn being paid from the parish coffers, but Throwster dared not collect the bribes Bangbeggars commonly used to make up the deficit, not where he was the only Cathar.

This sour lesson was not lost on Menelaus. Men in groups could cheat you just as plain as highwaymen alone in the wild, and do it by the voting box. It was one more thing he saw that never would have been that way had Captain Sterling of the Science Patrol been in charge.

At nine years old, the honor of being the Constable’s boy meant more work for young Menelaus, but it also meant Throwster taught him how to fight with a wand, or with his bare hands, while watching for needles or dirty nails, or mouth-weapons like hollow teeth or spit-shooters that a foe might use to infect you.

Thowster was too refined a man to touch another person’s flesh in match, of course, so he borrowed a practice dummy from the local Militia Accoutrementer, and Menelaus spent many hours being thrown and pummeled and punched and choked by the hard, rubbery hands of the dull, half-paralyzed manikin.

Menelaus learned instinctively to assume his enemies would have no weakness, and this gave him a rough sort of honor, because during a brawl he would not gouge eyes or groins or nerve-centers, merely because his reflexes were not trained for it. His reputation was one of maniacal cruelty, because he applied enough pressure to break an iron bar to break an arm or leg, nor would he stop or even slow, as if some panicky certainty was deep in his heart that a man, no matter how damaged, would still fight as full capacity with his remaining limbs.

He often had nightmares about the faceless, voiceless thing limping down the dark path to his house, and scraping at his door at night with its mittens.

3. Asymptote Revisited

A.D. 2219–2220

A year passed, then two.

The other Constable boys loved rousting blighters (as men escaping from blight zones were called) onto the broken, weed-overgrown paths still called federal highways. Because federal law was enforced on the highways, no law was, and so, to Menelaus, it looked like they were throwing these paupers to the wolves. If he came alone upon blighters, if they would promise to find honest work, he would tell them the name of a farm that was short-handed, let them escape into the fields instead. But the blighters were stickatnoughts, and always broke their word, and many of them were too lazy and stupid to keep themselves clean of enemy diseases, so they really had to be driven onto the highways, whether the highwaymen preyed on them or no. It was wicked to beat them away, and dangerous to let them stay.

He hardened his heart, but it sickened him.

Menelaus noticed that the vagrants of browner skin, the Aztlans and Mestizos, Mulattoes and Swarthies, were always beaten away with gusto by the other boys. The darker they were, the more jabs and blows of the stick they earned, or if they wore the strange medallions of the Spanish Church. Penniless Blondies and Grasseaters (as the Anglos were called, although most of the Noreasternmen ate meat when their womenfolk were not around) were equally as likely to be carrying a disease vector, but were merely treated gruffly. When rich Anglo merchants, who wore antiseptic jackets with polished brass buttons, folk so refined that they ate burritos with knife and fork, came into town, their contempt for the local townsfolk was just as great, just as unreasonable. Only the Jewish peddlers were polite to everyone, but everyone seemed to hate them, and called them sly.

Unlike some prentices, Menelaus still slept under his mother’s roof, which was one small blessing. Another was that his big brother Napoleon was prenticed out as an Apiarist, to learn the art of gene-splicing, breeding, and caring for the insects on which the village’s trade in silks and in pharmaceutical honey depended, and so came home covered with bee stings and spider bites.

Bug-bit Napoleon’s burning jealousy that Menelaus got to work with dangerous chemicals and energies all day was as cheery as a campfire to Menelaus.

There was a second moment of joy that year. For a long while, Menelaus had tried to find another copy of Asymptote, after his mother made him delete it. The other prentices suggested one thing and another, black market and offchannel, but there was nothing. The comic had been an antique, and not even recorded in the Federal Salvation Net, which attempted to recreate from surviving sources the books and files lost when the Library of Congress was firebombed by Speech Puritans in 2091. Antiquarians did not have resurrecting lost kid-lit as their highest priority.

He finally found a third-generation scrape in a Jewish peddler’s old back-up trashfile. The peddler sold it to him for a Spanish royal (he would not take Texan money, and Menelaus did not blame him), but warned him that all sales were final. It was far more than Menelaus could afford, but he had to have the file.

Brimming with excitement, he had kept the file strip tucked in his glove all afternoon, and snuck out back behind the woodshed after supper to feed it into his library cloth. There were formatting errors, and he had to try and retry his load, but finally the thing came to life.

The disappointment was crushing. It was only two chapters out of the middle, episodes he had seen and solved before, with the music track in mono. And it was in Spanish, badly lip-synched.