Shine Read Free

first of the dark, creaky steps before Xiaohao called out to me.
    "The password," he said, his voice tight. "It's garden ."
    I spent most of the morning in Little Wuxie. Their accumulator was down, and their Administrators were frantic. All five of the gray, yammering men wanted to peer over my shoulder as I checked out the battery, the tanks, the pipes. Their anxiety was as exhausting as it was unnecessary. One accumulator wouldn't make or break the city's weather control. Finally I asked them to leave, told them that their "ambient body heat" might damage the components.
    They left me alone.
    Slowly, carefully, I extracted the tower's guts. The morning was hot, and I was thankful for the sea breeze that played around me. Many of the central wires had started to rust. Not so badly that the whole accumulator should break down, but it would become more of a problem as time wore on. I'd seen the same thing in some of the other towers; these were old machines.
    I wiped the sweat from my face with my forearm, watched the gulls wheel above. The birds were probably waiting for me to leave. They liked to perch on the seaside accumulators and watch the water. The upper halves of the machines' black metal hulls were always spattered with white.
    Maybe , I thought. Just maybe .
    I hauled out the battery cradle, inspected it from every side. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then, with the steadiest hands I could summon, I pulled the battery out of the cradle, and there was the culprit. A layer of birdshit covered the receptor prongs. Either one gull had eaten a catastrophically disagreeable meal, or the entire flock regularly squirted their lunches with vicious precision. I cleaned up the receptor, tucked the various wires back into their racks, and shoved the cradle back into the tower. The accumulator's black skin began to thrum at once.
    The Wuxie Administrators were overjoyed. Embarrassingly so. They thrust iced jackfish and rice wine into my hands: overwrought thanks that Little Wuxie could hardly afford. As much as they plainly appreciated my help, I doubted this was the standard engineer's honorarium; these men knew my father's name. I thanked each in turn, accepted the gifts graciously, and made to leave at the earliest opportunity. But the Senior Administrator, a fox-faced man named Hu, raised his hand to stop me.
    "One more token of our thanks," he said, and produced a small, foldable wi-mo from his pocket. No more than two or three years old by the look of it; the surface was only gently scratched, and the solar cells seemed to work. Hu powered up the device as tenderly as one might wake a baby. "We've recently had a trader from Chengdu," he said. "I give you this on behalf of all Wuxie."
    I unconsciously tongued the month-old unit in the roof of my mouth. It broadcasted at terabytes-per-second to the contacts in my eyes, responded to minute tongue gestures and subvocalized commands. Yunhe had also had the trader from Chengdu. Papa commanded reverence even from outsiders.
    "Thank you," I said, and accepted the wi-mo.
    The walk back to Little Yunhe was long and hot and awkward. Foolishly, I took the boardwalk, which bustled with fishermen and hungry dockside homeless. Most either knew my name or felt no compulsion to harass me, but more than one boathand trailed his leer with a whistle, or reached out to smack my ass. Jokes and arguments played out around me in a dozen tongues: Korean, Filipino, Mongolian, Thai. Some of the jokes were opaque to me. Others were all too understandable.
    The eyes of the homeless flicked up from their decade-old, gray market wi-mos to follow the bundle of treasures in my arms. My cheeks flushed, and the sun bore down, and finally I couldn't bear the stares; I put down the jackfish and walked swiftly away. Papa would be angry if he learned that I'd given away honoraria, but I kept the rice wine and the wi-mo, so he would likely never know--unless the Little Wuxie Administrators asked whether he enjoyed