Eileen Gunn - Questionable Practices

“I’m an electrical engineer,” somebody said.

“That Dutch?” said another voice. “You’re a damn good engineer. Or you were.”

“Excellent. Dutch, you are now the head of our Ad Hoc Committee for Communications and Intelligence. Your task is first to work out the ways that we are connected to each other and to the machinery of the outer world, and second, to determine how we may take over the communications system, control it for our own ends, and when we are ready, deprive the government of its use. Are you up to the challenge, Comrade —?”

“Schwartz. Dutch Schwartz, at your service. Yes, I am.”

“Then choose people to work with you. Report back when you have solid findings. Now. Who here is a doctor?”

“I am,” a mental voice said dryly. “Professor and Doctor Anna Pavlova at your service.”

“Forgive me, Comrade Professor. Of course you are here. And we are honored — honored! — to have you with us. One of the greatest — ”

“Stop the nattering and put me to work.”

“Yes, of course. Your committee will look into the technical possibilities of restoring our brains to the bodies we left behind.”

“Well,” said the professor, “this is not something we ever considered when we created the Brains. But our knowledge of microsurgery has grown enormously with the decades of Brain maintenance. I would not rule it out.”

“You believe our bodies have not been destroyed?” somebody asked in astonishment.

“A resource like that? Of course not,” Rudy said. “Think! Any despotic government must have the reliable support of toadies and traitors. With a supply of bodies, many of them young, to offer, the government can effectively give their lackeys immortality — not the immortality of the Brains, but the immortality of body after body, in plentiful supply.” He paused to let that sink in. “However. If we act fast to organize the proletariat, perhaps that can be prevented. To do this, we will need the help of those in the Underground who have not been captured and disembodied. Who here is —?”

“And you,” somebody else said. “What is your role in this? Are you to be our leader?”

“Me?” Rudy asked in astonishment. “Nothing of the sort! I am a community organizer.”

He got back to work organizing.

The last dirigible was moored to the tip of the Gaudi Building. The Imperator was a visible symbol of tyranny which cast its metaphoric shadow over the entire city. So far as anybody knew, there wasn’t an aeroplane, autogyro, or Zeppelin left in the city to challenge its domination of the air. So it was there that the new Tyrant would be. It was there that the destinies of everyone in the city would play out.

It was there that Amelia Spindizzy and Radio Jones went, after concealing the autogyro in a shed behind Dooley’s tavern.

Even from a distance, it was clear that there were gun ports to every side of the Imperator , and doubtless there were other defenses on the upper floors of the skyscraper. So they took the most direct route — through the lobby of the Gaudi building and up the elevator. Amelia and Radio stepped inside, the doors closed behind them, and up they rose, toward the Zeppelin.

“In my youth, of course, I was an avid balloonsman,” somebody said from above.

Radio yelped and Amelia stared sharply upward.

Wedged into an upper corner of the elevator was a radio. From it came a marvelous voice, at once both deep and reedy, and immediately recognizable as well. “… and covered the city by air. Once, when I was a mere child, ballooning alone as was my wont, I caught a line on a gargoyle that stuck out into my airspace from the tower of the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption — what is now the Sepulchre of the Bodies of the Brains — and, thus entangled, I was in some danger of the gondola — which was little more than a basket, really — tipping me out into a long and fatal fall to earth. Fortunately, one of the brown-robed monks, engaged in his Matins, was cloistered in the tower and noticed my predicament. He was able to reach out and free the line.” The voice dropped, a hint of humor creeping in. “In my childish piety, of course, I considered this evidence of the beneficent intercession of some remote deity, whom I thanked nightly in my prayers.” One could almost hear him shaking his head at his youthful credulousness. “But considering how fortunate we are now — are we not? — to be at last freed from the inhuman tyranny of the Naked Brains, one has to wonder whether it wasn’t in some sense the hand of Destiny that reached out from that tower, to save the instrument by which our liberation would one day be achieved.”

“It’s him!” Radio cried. “Just like I told you.”

“It… sounds like him. But he can’t be the one who gave the orders you overheard. Can you be absolutely sure?” Amelia asked her unlikely sidekick for the umpteenth time. “Are you really and truly certain ?”

Radio rolled her eyes. “Lady, I heard him with my own two ears. You don’t think I know the voice of the single greatest pilot…” Her voice trailed off under Amelia’s glare. “Well, don’t hit the messenger! I read Obey the Brain! every week. His stats are just plain better’n yours.”

“They have been,” Amelia said grimly. “But that’s about to change.” She unsnapped the holster of her pistol.

Then the bell pinged. They’d reached the top floor.

The elevator doors opened.

Rudy was conferring with progressive elements in the city police force about the possibility of a counter-coup (they argued persuasively that, since it was impossible to determine their fellow officers’ loyalties without embroiling the force in internecine conflict, any strike would have to be small and fast) when his liaison with the Working Committee for Human Resources popped up in his consciousness and said, “We’ve located the bodies, boss. As you predicted, they were all carefully preserved and are being maintained in the best of health.”

“That is good news, Comrade Mariozzi. Congratulations. But none of that ‘boss’ business, do you understand? It could easily go from careless language to a common assumption.”

Meanwhile, they’d hooked into televideon cameras throughout the city, and though the views were grim, it heartened everybody to no longer be blind. It was a visible — there was no way around the word — sign that they were making progress.

Red Rudy had just wrapped up the meeting with the loyalist police officers when Comrade Mariozzi popped into his consciousness again. “Hey, boss!” he said excitedly. “You gotta see this!”

The guards were waiting at the top of the elevator with guns drawn. To Radio Jones’s shock and amazement, Amelia Spindizzy handed over her pistol without a murmur of protest. Which was more than could be said for Radio herself when one of the goons wrested the Universal Receiver out of her hands. Amelia had to seize her by the shoulders and haul her back before she could attack the nearest of their captors.

They were taken onto the Imperator and through the Hall of the Naked Brains. The great glass jars were empty and the giant floating Brains were gone who-knows-where. Radio hoped they’d been flung in an alley somewhere to be eaten by dogs. But hundreds of new, smaller jars containing brains of merely human proportions had been brought in and jury-rigged to oxygen feeds and electrical input-output units. Radio noticed that they all had cut-out switches. If one of the New Brains acted up it could be instantly put into solitary confinement. But there was nobody monitoring them, which seemed to defeat the purpose.

“‘Keep close to the earth!’” a voice boomed. Radio jumped. Amelia, she noticed, did not. Then she saw that there were radios set in brackets to either end of the room. “Such was the advice of the preeminent international airman, Alberto Santos-Dumont, and they were good enough words for their time.” The familiar voice chuckled and half-snorted, and the radio crackled loudly as his breath struck the sensitive electroacoustic transducer that had captured his voice. “But his time is not my time.” He paused briefly; one could almost hear him shrug his shoulders. “One is never truly tested close to the earth. It is in the huge arching parabola of an aeroplane finding its height and seeking a swift descent from it that a man’s courage is found. It is there, in acts outside of the quotidian, that his mettle is tested.”