The Barrens (NaNoWriMo Day 4)

Part of the fun/terror of doing this little project is that I'm blazing forward without planning much of anything. As such, there are going to be some inevitable contradictions as my ideas change and this story starts to take shape.

For anybody who's been following along, you might remember that Rasul was told he would be given a transfer to a less arduous position while he recovers from his fainting episode. That part wasn't really working for me, so as the story returns to him, I'll now be going on the assumption that, rather than be given a different position, he's been given a period of medical leave from work. Enjoy!

You can find previous days here:
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3

Day 4 Word Count: 2030
Total Word Count: 6059
Goal: 50,000
Remaining: 43,941

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Rasul hadn’t realized that he had spent the entire day in bed until a knock came at the door. His window and apartment were still dark, and he had just come out of a nap. When the knock jolted him awake, he dialed the window’s tint down and looked down outside. The sun was setting. His head was still sore, but it was a duller pain than the day before.

He rolled out of bed and answered the door.

“Jesus, that does not look good.”

It was Isaac, a coworker from the foundry and the closest thing he had to a friend.

“Yeah,” Rasul said. He instinctively placed his hand next to his wound. “That bench doesn’t mess around.”

“No kidding. Hey, where the hell were you today? They let you stay home?”

“Medical leave.”

“Incredible,” Isaac said. As if it were his own, he walked into Rasul’s apartment and opened the fridge. “You’re lucky, man.”

“I don’t feel very lucky,” Rasul said. He closed the door and sat down on his bed. “Some church doctor hooked me up to a bunch of machines and asked me all these questions. I felt like an experiment or something.”

Isaac took a bottle of water out of the fridge and opened it.

“Well, you’re not the only one who didn’t come in today,” he said. “They shitcanned Brooks.”

“Why?”

“Dumbass got caught skimming. I think he was taking potatoes, or something like that.”

“What happened to him?”

“What do you think?”

Rasul knew the answer. Theft wasn’t tolerated in Avalon. It was considered a slight against the administration, and they responded to insult with exile. Brooks would be stumbling around in the Barrens by now, choking on aether. Never mind that there was a theoretically limitless amount of resources coming in through the element engine. Take a little more than they wanted you to take, and they’d cut you off entirely.

“What are you doing tonight?” Isaac asked.

“Absolutely nothing,” Rasul said.

Isaac wouldn’t be satisfied with that. He had that look about him that Rasul recognized. He had other schemes in mind, as he often did.

“Magda’s having a meeting tonight,” Isaac said. “I’m going. You should come too.”

“I’m really not interested,” Rasul said.

Magdalena Martin was a distribution analyst who operated a small speakeasy in whatever spare time she had. She lived in one of the higher class districts on the other side of the city, befitting her profession.

“Oh come on,” Isaac said. “You haven’t come in a while.”

“I’ve had a long couple of days,” Rasul said. “I’m completely exhausted.”

“That’s exactly why you need to come have a drink.”

“No, I just don’t see the point in risking it. Nothing ever comes out of those things. It’s just an excuse to get drunk and bitch about the government.”

Most speakeasies tended to be small, home-based operations. Somebody acquires the ingredients legitimately, or at least seemingly legitimately, and then distills their liquor in secret. A person like Magda was important enough to be able to falsify the documentation to get what she needed, but with resources so tightly controlled, it could be practically impossible for most people to skim enough extra to devote to distilling liquor.

Grain, like everything else, came out of the element engine. The administration knew exactly how much was produced, and there was always a paper trail to follow. Without any kind of currency, resources were distributed as dictated by the administration, to suit its valuation of each person’s worth to the rest of Avalon.

There was no wealth to be gained from distillation, beyond whatever might be bartered under the table for a bottle or two of moonshine. The real value came from the gatherings themselves. Liquor attracted the kinds of people who had grievances with Ecclesia Vera. Alcohol could be traded for information, and household speakeasies became gathering places for those who sought to do harm to the Avalonian authorities.

“Look,” Isaac said. He put his hand on Rasul’s shoulder. “We might have some real information this time. I really shouldn’t even be giving you all these details, but there’s a vicar coming tonight. Some disgruntled district priest.”

“Are you insane?” Rasul said. “There’s no way that isn’t a trap.”

“It’s fine. Seriously. Magda swears the guy’s legit. He’s been in the church for a long time, and he doesn’t agree with much of what they do. This might actually lead to something real, for once.”

“Like what?”

“There’s some big news about the other colony.”

“You mean Elysium?”

“Yeah,” Isaac said. He finished off the bottle of water and set it on the counter of Rasul’s kitchenette. “I don’t know much, but I know it has to be big, man. Nobody’s talking about it, but apparently it’s got the church in a panic.”

Rasul’s mother had worked on the Elysium colony, before it rebelled. Like most things about her past, she hadn’t told Rasul much about that time.

“I don’t know,” he said. In truth, he was intrigued to learn anything he could about Elysium. Over the years, he had tried to piece together the timeline of his and his mother’s lives, and there was a good chance that he may have been conceived on Elysium.

“You need a drink,” Isaac said. “You hardly ever want to hang out anymore. Two birds with one stone if you come tonight. Three, actually, because you’re supporting a good cause, too.”

“A traitorous cause,” Rasul said with a sigh. “Fine. Let me get dressed.”

The transit system that linked Avalon’s districts together was deep underground. On foot, it would have taken them a couple of hours to get from the Forges to Magda’s district, but on the train they were there within minutes.

Rasul always felt out of place in this part of the city. In truth, he was out of place. There was no law against free movement among the districts, but the administration did its best to keep people siloed in their little worlds.
Magda’s house was freestanding, a luxury afforded to people in her kind of position. It was modest by the standards of the most prominent districts, a single story with a single bedroom, but it was a palace next to Rasul’s apartment. Five cars were parked outside.

“Shit, we’re late,” Isaac said. He ran up to the door and rang the bell. It was answered by a heavyset man Rasul recognized from other meetings, but whose name he could not remember.

“Didn’t know if you’d show,” the heavyset man said.

“Sounds like this is going to be a good one,” Isaac said.

“Should be.”

The heavyset man looked Rasul and Isaac up and down. He was wearing a suit, indicative of some important profession, and Rasul thought he caught a glimpse of caution in the way he examined them.

“How’d you travel?” the heavyset man said.

“By train,” Isaac said. “You wanna let us in? It’s cold out here.”

“Nobody followed you?”

“Jesus, no. Calm down.”

“You two stick out in this neighborhood. Can’t blame me for being cautious. Come on in.”

They followed the heavyset man into the house. The front room was bright but empty, intended to give the illusion of activity to match the cars outside. The speakeasy itself was held downstairs in Magda’s cellar, where her small distillery was. The stairway down to the cellar was dark.

The meeting had already begun when Rasul and Isaac entered the cellar. A cluster of about a dozen people were sitting in a circle of chairs, talking among themselves and drinking. Rasul thought he recognized most of them, but the cellar was lit by a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, making it hard to pick out any distinct features.

These meetings always followed the same ritualistic format. First, everybody drank together, as a way of solidifying their bond for the evening.

Alcohol is illegal, the ritual seemed to say. Now we’re all criminals together.

The discussions would then follow. Usually, it would be a series of impassioned arguments and speeches about the now long-established merger of the Avalonian government and Ecclesia Vera. After the church had infiltrated the government, spiritual authority and temporal authority were one. This wasn’t new. It had been that way all of Rasul’s life, and he never saw the point in trying to resist it.

After the discussions had ended, the evening would turn more social. The braver among them would continue to drink, risking demonstrating a hangover at work the next day.

Magda came to greet them, drinks in hand.

“Thank you so much for coming,” she said, handing each of them a drink. She was an older woman in her sixties, and she had been alive long enough to know what Avalon had been before the church had become so powerful.

“Happy to show our support,” Isaac said as he took a confident drink from his glass.

“Or at least to drink my moonshine,” Magda said.

Isaac shrugged. “It can be both.”

Rasul looked down at the glass in his hand. He could smell the liquor, and already it made his stomach turn. He lifted it to his lips and took a small sip. The taste, if you could call it taste, was worse than the smell.

“It’s been a while since you’ve joined us,” Magda said to him. She squinted a little, looking at his forehead. “What happened here?”

“Argument with a workbench,” Rasul said. “Workbench won.”

“Sorry we’re late,” Isaac said. “We’ll get seated.”

He grabbed Rasul’s arm, pulling him over to the chairs, and they sat down. Magda followed them, sitting down next to a man dressed as a vicar. He looked ancient, with no hair on the top of his head and a beard down to his stomach.

“As you missed introductions, this is Father John Ambrose,” Magda said. “He’s been vicar of my district for about as long as my district has existed. Please, continue.”

“As I was saying,” the vicar said. His voice was deeper than Rasul expected. “Twenty seven days ago, the administration intercepted a signal from the Elysium colony. At first, we thought we had picked up some anomaly, but it continued, though at an irregular pattern. Some days it was there, some days it was gone. The strongest burst came yesterday, a clear, bright signal with a clear, bright point of origin in the Barrens, towards the direction of the crash site.”

“What’s the church planning to do about it?” the heavyset man asked.

“Right now, they’re still trying to determine the purpose of the signal. Someone from Elysium might be trying to communicate with someone here or elsewhere.”

“Nobody survived the crash,” said a woman sitting next to Rasul. “Right?”

“Presumably,” Father John said. “But that doesn’t mean something isn’t trying to communicate. Elysium and Eden were built with an experimental artificial intelligence patterned after human brains. Both were designed for long-term, deep space travel, so they were built to be as self-sufficient as possible. It’s possible that the colony’s brain is active.”

“Both were also equipped with element engines,” Magda said.

There was a murmur of conversation in the group. Rasul sipped his glass. What's the point in all of this?

“The administration’s authority relies on its monopoly over the production of resources,” Magda continued. “If the Elysium colony is occupied or awake, its element engine might still be functional.”

“The administration would never allow an element engine to fall into someone else’s hands,” Father John said. “But, that presents an opportunity for us and those who are like-minded.”

“We might have another place to go to,” Isaac said. He was sitting up straight, and he had finished his drink.

“How could we be sure that Elysium isn’t under a similar monopoly?” another woman asked.

On and on, the conversations went. Rasul had taken a few more sips of the moonshine in an attempt to be polite, and he was starting to feel dizzy. The conversation sounded muted, and he thought the light in the cellar was beginning to dim. Behind his wound, a pain like his head splitting open ripped through him, and he collapsed to the floor.

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Photo by Dgrosso23