Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen (5 page)

The Bricks of Eta Cassiopeiae

I was humming to myself as I checked the primitive gauge on the kiln. The song running in my head was an old tune. Something sweet, catchy, and which I’d not heard in a long time. I couldn’t help myself. It’s hard to not be happy when you’re getting short. A few more months and I’d make parole. Just the thought of it sent quivers of anticipation through my stomach.
Freedom!

The gauge’s needle hovered steadily in the red.

“Still too hot,” I said over my shoulder. “Gotta wait another day.”

“That’s nice,” said my fellow inmate, Godfrey. “So what do we do until then?”

“You dig,” came the reply from Ivarsen, our lone guard.

Godfrey frowned and spit at Ivarsen’s feet, missing just barely.

Ivarsen allowed himself a small smirk and scrubbed the wad of saliva under a heel. Like the rest of us, he wore a broad-brimmed sun hat and wraparound sunglasses to protect against Eta Cassiopeiae’s blinding rays. Unlike the rest of us, his shorts and shirt were khaki—instead of prisoner orange—and he had a holster on his hip with a high-power pistol in it.

In the two planetary years since I’d been assigned to Ivarsen’s care, I’d never seen him draw that gun. But with how Godfrey had been acting since his arrival one week ago, I wondered if even Ivarsen’s patience had limits.

“Kid,” I said, “How in the world did you ever make this detail?”

“I’ve got a winning personality,” Godfrey said, grinning.

“Like hell,” I said under my breath.

Godfrey snorted loudly—a long, thoughtful fricative of his nasal passages—and spit again. This time at
my
feet.

Lisa Phaan put a hand to her mouth, appearing to suppress a chuckle. She was our site’s only female inmate: small, strong, and lightning-quick. Which explained why the two male prisoners who had preceded Godfrey had each been sent to the hospital prior to their being put back in exile on The Island. Nobody ever actually said it was attempted rape. I don’t think Lisa let it get that far. All I know is, each time I was awoken in the middle of the night to hear Lisa’s would-be suitor screaming … and then Ivarsen was calling for a medevac.

When she wanted to, the lady could be a viper.

But Godfrey—cocky and unaware—had been eyeing her since his arrival. I almost hoped he’d try for a piece. The boy needed some cutting down.

“You know the drill, Prisoner Godfrey,” Ivarsen said. “Prisoner Fraccaro and you on the shovels. Prisoner Phaan on the dumper. Wait here while I drive it around.”

Our guard turned and walked away into the white glare of midday, the broken and rocky landscape shimmering behind him.

Godfrey leaned close and said, “Why don’t we just snuff him?”

I turned and looked at the huge-bodied youth, my eyebrows raised.

“And do
what?
It’s two hundred kilometers to anywhere. The sun will kill you before you get thirty. Besides, Ivarsen has a chip in his body that monitors his vitals and stays in constant contact with a Corrections satellite. All the guards at these remote projects have one. If his vitals quit, the satellite gets alerted. Then the cavalry comes. With rifles. Shoot first, ask questions later.”

“Bull,” Godfrey said.

“You really want to find out?”

The kid kept looking at our guard while Ivarsen receded into the heat.

“Look,” I said, “is it really that bad? Time served here counts triple what it counts on The Island. They feed us and give us shelter. We’re not at the mercy of the elements. Why ruin it?”

Godfrey turned and looked at me, hands balling.

“Screw you,” he said, and walked away.

I shook my head, wondering if I’d ever been that incomprehensibly belligerent when I was in my twenties. Then I went over to slap shut the ceramic door that covered the kiln’s thermometer.

As indigenous brick kilns went, ours was pretty standard: a four-meter-cubed box constructed from cut-rock slabs. It sat on the eroded central peak of a shallow crater whose expanse had been populated with automated mirrors. Currently, those mirrors aimed skyward. But when we put a batch of bricks into the kiln, and the computer angled all those mirrors towards the small hill at their center, the kiln lit up like a bug under a magnifying glass.

Depending on the season and the weather, the kiln could take a full day to fire up—and the days on Eta Cassiopeiae’s fifth planet were very long, especially at this latitude.

In the meantime there was always more clay. And the new settlements along the polar coast always needed more bricks. In a world with no large flora and relatively little accessible iron, what else was there to build with? It was a supply niche that would have been filled commercially, if the prison system hadn’t gotten there first. The work was arduous and filthy—the kind of soul-mending stuff reformists had been foisting on the incarcerated for many centuries, going all the way back to Earth. On Eta Cassiopeiae Five, nobody in their right mind wanted to be this close to the equator, so the colonial government farmed the work out to Corrections. Thus everyone was kept happy—even us cons.

It sure beat the crap out of The Island, where there were no rules and it was literally every man for himself. I’d lasted just long enough to decide that The Island was a slow death sentence, then made an appeal to a Corrections Magistrate during one of the random, heavily-armed inspection tours Corrections occasionally made. They’d liked my file—all of us under the watchful eye of Corrections had one, even those of us cast off utterly from civilization—so I’d been given the chance to go to work. And work I’d done. Happily. Eagerly. With a full stomach and boots on my feet and no fear that the gangs were going to roll me up in the middle of the night and poke holes in me. Or worse.

A mechanized grumble broke me out of my reverie.

I turned to watch as the dumper came rolling down the dusty main lane between the mirrors. The huge truck ran on a hydrogen fuel cell and was our primary means of transport; vital to weekly operations. Wet clay was extracted from the hills two kilometers to the east, then had to be moved via dumper to the forming pit. Once formed and dried, the “green” bricks were put on ceramic pallets which again went into the back of the truck for movement to the kiln. Fired and cooled, those bricks stayed on their pallets until they were moved to the staging area to await pickup by the monthly roadtrains headed north. Empty pallets came back from the settlements on roadtrains headed south, to be filled again. And so forth.

Nobody was allowed to drive the dumper except Ivarsen, who kept the truck’s coded keycard on his person at all times. He handled the thing like he’d been born to it, and not for the first time I wondered where our guard had acquired such skill. The man didn’t talk about his past, though it often seemed like we were just his hardhats, and he just the foreman—not a bad way to operate, considering the temperament of some Corrections officers I’d known in my day.

When the truck came to a halt, Ivarsen leaned out and yelled, “Everybody in back!”

We trooped to the ladder on the side and climbed up and over, then down into the extra-large bed where two single-person shovels sat. They’re called shovels because the hydraulic arm on the front of each unit was attached to a large scoop designed to dig hundred-kilo hunks of clay out of the ground.

There was nothing to say while we rode out of the crater and started on the packed-earth highway to the eastern hills. We just gazed out the back of the bed, the truck kicking up a column of dust, each of us enjoying the movement of air which partially alleviated the ever-present heat. Once we arrived at the dig site, Lisa climbed up on top of the cab while Godfrey and I slid into the bucket seats on our respective shovels. Ivarsen used controls in the cab to lower the aft lip of the dumper’s bed to the dirt, and then Godfrey and I caterpillared out and began to attack the scarred hillside.

Clay is not the same thing as mud. I’d learned that my first month on the job. You had to look for the phyllosilicate deposits, then clear off the top layers of worthless dirt and pry out the heavier stuff underneath. It came in various stages of plasticity, depending on how much moisture a given dig retained between thunderstorms, and we could hydrate it using a cistern back at the forming pit.

A familiar, pungent odor filled my nose when my shovel’s scoop bit into the ground. I worked the scoop’s hydraulic controls until a decent hunk had been pulled free, then motored back to the dumper and threw my load in. I did this two more times, and stopped to watch Godfrey struggle for his first shovelful. It was his third time driving, and the kid still didn’t get it. He was punching his scoop into the hillside like a jackhammer, knocking crumbled clay loose until it threatened to engulf the front of his machine.

I motored up to him and yelled over the whine of the hydraulics, “Finesse, man! Gradual and steady! Push in slow, lift out slow.”

“I’m trying!” He yelled back. “Tractor’s nothing but a piece of shit!”

I wanted to tell him it wasn’t the machine that was a piece of shit, then thought better of it.

“Here,” I said over the noise of both engines, “watch me.”

Godfrey backed off while I drove up and eased my scoop into the beige-gray mass. The load pulled free with relative ease, I spun my shovel on the axis of its treads, and moved away to let the kid continue.

His next few attempts were almost competent.

I sighed and kept working, the day wearing imperceptibly on while we filled the dumper with clay. Lisa used her controls on the top of the dumper’s cab to operate the dumper’s claw arm, re-arranging our shovelfuls as the need arose, and ultimately picking up and depositing each shovel back into the bed once we had enough clay to take back to the forming pit.

Ivarsen watched us the whole time, standing off from the dig by about ten meters, hands on his hips. His head didn’t move, but I always had the impression his eyes were constantly sweeping from behind his sunglasses, like radar.

Once we’d secured the shovels and the dumper’s claw arm, we climbed back into the bed and Ivarsen went back to the cab. The drive to the forming pit was as silent as the drive from the kiln, and I idly scratched dirt out of my hair, thinking again about my imminent parole. The government of Eta Cassiopeiae Five was finally going to make me a citizen again. It was odd to think I’d spent my entire thirties locked up—the bitter wage of a mistake I’d long since learned to regret. I wondered what kind of life I could now make for myself, beyond firing brick. With my legal file as checkered as it was, my options were limited. Maybe I could talk to the asteroid miners again? They always needed help. Could I get a felony waiver?

Such thoughts continued to occupy me when we arrived at the forming pit.

Lisa plucked the shovels from the bed before Ivarsen up-ended the entire thing into the slaking ditch. There the clay was allowed to bathe in rainwater from the nearby cistern, and would sit until it had reached an appropriate state of homogenous mushiness. A different slaking pit was ready for draining, and we polished off the early evening by shoveling—manually, this time—wet clay into forms. The forms came in various sizes and dimensions, to fulfill the needs of the construction workers back in civilization, and we had to poke and stir the contents of each form to get the air bubbles out before the clay began to dry. Trapped air bubbles would cause the dried bricks to crack or even explode in the kiln during firing, and though a certain percentage of the load would always be scrapped as a result of damage, losing too many bricks was a basic waste of sweat equity—not to mention it showed up on the monthly tally.

Again Ivarsen watched us from a distance, never moving except to take a tug off the canteen normally slung across his shoulder.

When we’d gotten a decent bunch of the forms filled and stacked for drying, we were all exhausted and ready to call it quits. We washed—clothes and all—using the make-shift showerheads attached to the cistern, then climbed back up into the dumper bed. The clay in the bed’s bottom had dried and cracked, and we let the wind dry us on the ride from the forming pit to our hooches—which sat just outside the low rim of the kiln’s crater wall.

Chow consisted of pre-sealed trays which were microwavable and contained a variety of meats, starches, and vegetable matter. All of it originally Earth-native—imported with the original colonists who’d made the long trip from Sol System, almost a century prior. Earth life did okay on EC5, with a bit of genetic tweaking to account for EC5’s soil and mineral content. The farms surrounded the coastal settlements, and—some day—there would be forests in the hills and mountains surrounding the farms. And men would build with wood again.

Until then, the world needed bricks, which meant the world needed
us.

We tore into our meals, then threw the empty trays and drinking bulbs into the trash compactor. With Eta Cassiopeiae setting, we each took turns at the single outhouse, and finally stumbled into bed—EC5’s three small moons beginning to rise over the eastern hills. Though, calling them moons was probably a bit too generous. They were captured asteroids: one trailing behind the other, which trailed behind the other again. I imagined the miners and engineers working all day and all night—all planetary year long—turning those moons into way stations for the big colonial ships that would eventually bring more people from Earth; once EC5’s biosphere had been sufficiently beefed up. Two, maybe three more human generations.

Some day EC5 would be a garden. But not yet.

With night fully upon us, Ivarsen activated the electric fence which cordoned off the prisoner hooches from the guard hooch. Like most nights, I found the familiar hum from the fence’s transformer to be oddly soothing. I also wondered if tonight I’d be awakened by yet another horrified scream.

“Don’t bite off more than you can chew, kid,” I said quietly, and laughed.

Smiling in spite of myself, I faded into oblivion.

• • •

Morning came, and Godfrey was undamaged. In fact, we had to go kick him out of his cot an hour after sunrise. The activities of the day before had thoroughly exhausted him, despite his youth and size. Grousing and giving us the finger, Godfrey hastily pulled on his jumper and work boots. We ate a microwaved breakfast, used the outhouse again, then took the dumper back into the crater.