City Under the Stars - Gardner Dozois Page 0,1

fall. After years on the job, he could send a steady stream of coal anywhere he wanted it, with pinpoint accuracy, almost without looking. He placed his foot on the blade, dug it back into the pile, and stopped. Normally he would work like this for hours without stopping, steady as a mechanical thing, his motions flowing into an unbroken cycle. But today—today he could not keep his mind on his job, today he was like a child, distracted by anything, everything, the wind, the sky, the light glinting from his shovel blade. He leaned on the shovel, buried up to the handle in the pile, and watched the gullet spit up some more coal.

Somewhere up there, miles deep into the slope, miles beneath Industry Hill, maybe even halfway to Pitt, one of the last surviving Utopian autominers was burrowing and wallowing like a steel whale through a deep vein of coal, exploring the secret roots of the world. No—it was blind, and ate its way past wonders it could never see, so maybe tapeworm would be a better analogy than whale: a robotic, reactor-powered tapeworm that gnawed through Earth’s bowels with adamantine teeth, insatiably tracing the tightening convolutions of the intestines, passing the ore through its indestructible body and voiding it back along the endless tail of the conveyor field to the mouth of the gullet. Where it dribbled onto the pile and tumbled slowly down the grade so that Hanson or one of his shift-mates could scoop it up with a shovel and dump it into a hopper. Hanson had wondered once or twice at the Factory, at Orange, at the State of York—at the incongruity of a society that must use unbelievably sophisticated machines and primitive hand-labor as integral parts of the same industrial process. Horses pulled the loaded ore-hoppers across Orange to the Docks, where a monster Utopian transport waited to carry it on the long journey to the ancient blast furnaces in Pitt, then skirting the Wall to the pockets of industry in the Chesapeake country, and then to the South. Horses and transports, autominers and shovels. The Utopian machines were used where they could be used, to do the magic work no army of ordinary men could do. Where they couldn’t be used, where there were no machines anymore to be used for that, then the gap was filled in with hand-labor, with sweat and broken backs and sudden heart attacks. There were plenty of people after all.

And most of those people found nothing odd in the arrangement. Hanson had once worked with the Utopian autominers, years ago, before factory politics and the enmity of Oristano the foreman had started him on the long road down to the Pit, and when he had first arrived at the Pit, at the rock bottom of his career with nowhere to go except death, he had remarked to old Relk in a mixture of bitterness and grim humor that it was too bad they couldn’t scrape up a Goddamned Utopian machine to do the Goddamn shoveling. Relk had merely gaped blankly at him, unable to understand—Hanson might as well have spoken in a foreign language. Work was work; magic was magic; and that was that. Relk could see no incongruities, no connections between the two. He’d sniffed disapprovingly at Hanson and told him he wouldn’t last long in the Pit.

But Hanson had worked like a hill demon his first few months in the Pit, and had finally replaced the old shift-leader, Ricciardi, after Ricciardi had died of a heart attack on the job. But that didn’t cut any ice with Relk, “that didn’t make no never mind” with him, as he would have said. No one lasted in the Pit as long as Relk, in the end. Others were transient; Relk was a permanent fixture.

Relk was staring at him now, his leather face wrinkling facilely into deep-worn lines of displeasure, so that he looked like a shriveled, thousand-year-old monkey with a bellyache. Hanson realized that he had been hesitating for a couple of minutes, leaning on his shovel and watching the gullet. He cursed himself wearily. As shift-leader, Hanson had the responsibility of pacing the work, setting the tempo and rhythm. He couldn’t allow himself the luxury of daydreams—at least he wasn’t supposed to. Angrily he scooped up another shovelful of coal, dumped it, came back for another. He forced himself back into the rhythm, concentrating on the movement of his body.

Relk snorted sourly and began shoveling