Scale, p.13
Scale, page 13
As she listened to more questions from the audience, it became clear that no one needed inside knowledge to be suspicious about the way the Council had behaved. They hadn’t literally attacked Wendale, but it was obvious that they’d used the satellite launch as a demonstration of their offensive capabilities, and that they’d kept all the new technology secret until that moment for the sake of maintaining a strategic advantage.
Still, between the skeptical voices there were plenty of people offering praise. “It’s about time we stopped the larger scales holding us back,” one woman opined. “My daughter’s decided not to have a second child, because she’s seen what’s happening to house prices. We need more land, or we need to build higher.”
“We’ll certainly have the materials to build higher,” Beech promised her. “And once we’re free to set our own building codes, there will be plenty of room for the next generation.”
“Not to mention all the grandchildren she could fit on the moon,” Dahlia whispered.
“We don’t need to leave Stedland for any of this!” another woman interjected. “We can put a case to the government for more autonomy, or better regulations, without cutting ourselves off from the whole nation.”
“We won’t be cutting ourselves off,” Beech replied. “We will still trade with everyone, we will still travel back and forth.”
“Not as easily,” the critic retorted.
“But the gains will more than make up for that,” Beech insisted. “The economic analysis we commissioned shows that the benefits from the new technology would be eight to ten times greater in the next three months under independence than they would be otherwise.”
“And where was that published?”
“It’s been submitted to a leading journal. Right now, it’s still under review ... no doubt by a Scale One reviewer.”
That raised a laugh from most of the hall, and even Loretta couldn’t help smiling. But the critic’s argument made sense to her: they could assert the right to speed things up in their own lives without withdrawing from the polity to which they currently belonged – and which would continue to surround them, regardless. There was no doubt that G8’s inventions were wonderful, but she believed they could be put to use fast enough to satisfy most people without turning that into a pretext for the Council’s grandiose political ambitions.
As they left the hall, Dahlia teased her, “What was that you said about the people hounding these criminals out of office?”
“That might have been a bit too optimistic,” Loretta conceded, “but they didn’t get an easy time, either. I’d rather they just abandoned the vote, but I’ll settle for a strong majority ‘no.’”
“They do have ten more hours to win us over with more fireworks,” Dahlia noted. “And to be honest ... ”
“What?”
“Would it be so terrible, to let us make our own decisions?”
Loretta groaned. “And then what? Every scale should rule itself? We’d still need to find ways to agree on everything that doesn’t just concern a single district. All that would do is replace internal negotiations with more complicated ones between seven new nations.”
“Do you honestly think Stedland would let us send a rocket to Mars, in our lifetime?” Dahlia asked.
“Do you honestly care? I thought all you wanted from G8 was better cutlery.”
“Mars not so much, but I wouldn’t mind traveling on Earth. Scale One people can tour the world in their retirement, and still come home to see their grandchildren grow up.”
“Everyone wants faster travel,” Loretta reasoned. “Why would the government try to stop that?”
“They won’t stop it,” Dahlia replied, “but can’t you just see them messing it up? One size of vehicle will never work for everyone, but instead of letting us work things out for ourselves, we’ll be expected to make everyone happy all at once.”
“Did anyone stop you having a mobile phone, while D1 are still staring slack-jawed at their valve radios?”
Dahlia thought it over. “I’m not sure that’s the same.”
“Neither am I,” Loretta conceded, “but can’t we wait and see if there’s actually a problem, instead of just assuming that they’re going to hold us back on everything important?”
She paused and glanced at the towers rising up in the west. She had no real friends in any other district; she’d worked well enough with Sam, but she was hardly going to start inviting him to parties. But she still hated the idea of alienating her scale from all the others. Even if it cost something to stay together; even if they could never hope to drag the others forward fast enough to satisfy their own impatience. They were all, in some fashion, still one people, and she didn’t want to lose that.
“What’s going on there?” Dahlia asked. There was a commotion further down the street, with a dozen or so people shouting angrily, presumably at some other group that was out of view from where she stood.
“A protest?” Loretta guessed. But why hadn’t they taken it to the Town Hall?
As she and Dahlia drew nearer, the protesters backed away, and Loretta realized that their adversaries weren’t entirely hidden; she could just see the tops of their heads protruding over the buildings along the side street. Or rather, the tops of their helmets.
The Scale Six soldiers advanced into view. They were wearing bone armor and carrying shields and batons, marching four abreast and taking up the whole street. The locals continued to heckle them, but the soldiers ignored the jibes and strode forward in silence, maintaining a surprisingly brisk pace, given how heavy the armor had to be.
“So now we’re under martial law?” Dahlia wondered.
“Maybe.” If the separatists had hoped that firing a rocket over the capital would make their plans proceed more smoothly, that might have been a miscalculation.
Suddenly a man rushed at the phalanx, ducking under one soldier’s shield to grab him around the legs and pull him off balance. Other protesters ran forward, targeting soldiers who had broken formation to assist their comrade. Loretta watched in dismay, even as a voice she couldn’t quite silence cheered on her same-scale brothers and sisters. When the soldiers began wielding their batons of Scale Seven ivory, she winced at every blow, but then she saw the recipients of some of the beatings snatching the weapons from the soldiers’ hands and fighting back, leaving no doubt which side possessed the greater innate strength and speed.
There was a sound like a firecracker, then a cloud spread out across the melee, revealed as swirls of blue smoke beneath the street lamps. The protesters began coughing and gagging, disengaging from the fight and limping away.
Dahlia said, “That’s going to hit us too, if we don’t move.”
“Yeah.” Loretta turned and followed her, fleeing the rapidly spreading irritant, glancing back to see the soldiers regrouping and continuing their advance. They had no need for masks; the chemical came from a Scale Seven plant, and its molecules were the wrong fit for the Scale Six versions of whatever it was messing with in the protesters’ airways.
“Is that Jake?” Dahlia paused and pointed to a figure hobbling along the street, tears and mucus streaming down his face.
“Yes.” Loretta hesitated. “You go ahead, I’ll help him.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Dahlia admonished her, already starting back.
Loretta caught up with her. They reached him quickly and had him put his arms on their shoulders, to take the weight off his injured leg. The soldiers weren’t pursuing them, but the blue cloud was proving remarkably potent even as it dispersed; Loretta’s eyes began watering and she felt like a hot poker had been rammed up her nose.
“Do you think the bone’s broken?” Dahlia asked Jake.
He shook his head. “It’s just bruising.”
Loretta said, “You should have stayed out of their way.”
Jake turned to her, scowling, his eyes almost swollen shut. “Just let them march in and do what they like?”
“Let them deal with the Council, and G8. You know ... the people you were worried might murder me in the park, not so long ago.”
“The local police should be doing that,” he countered. “You don’t deal with a few criminals by sending troops onto the streets.”
Loretta was silent; she agreed with that, didn’t she? Or did the fact that the criminals had rockets make a difference?
“And why use Scale Six?” Jake continued. “Either the army don’t trust Scale Seven troops to follow orders here ... or they were already ordered in, and they refused.”
They reached Jake’s apartment and maneuvered him inside, then helped him onto the couch.
“I’ll get some water,” Dahlia offered.
“Thanks.”
“Do you have any painkillers?” she called out from the kitchen.
“No,” Jake replied.
“Who doesn’t have painkillers?” Dahlia returned with a glass and a jug. Jake took a swig, then poured some water onto his hand and splashed his eyes.
“I’ll go to the pharmacist,” Loretta offered. “What else do we need?”
“Are you sure the bone’s not broken?” Dahlia asked.
“Yes.” Jake rolled up his trouser leg. His shin was swollen and discolored, but he was adamant in his diagnosis. “I broke my leg when I was a kid, I know what that feels like.”
Loretta said, “I’ll get painkillers, anti-inflammatories and bandages. If you think of anything else, phone me.”
On the street, she half expected to see more soldiers, plastering the walls with curfew announcements and bounty posters for the insurrectionists, but there were no troops in sight, and people were walking about as if nothing unusual had happened.
In the pharmacy, a radio was on, and she listened to the news as she searched the shelves. There were reports recapping the Town Hall meeting, but no mention yet of the soldiers or the skirmishes she’d witnessed.
Back at Jake’s apartment, she put the medical supplies down beside the couch, and said, “I’m going out again. I want to see what’s happening.”
Jake said, “You want to get gassed and beaten?”
“I won’t get that close, but I need to know where things stand.”
She switched on the radio, but the newsroom still seemed unaware of the incursion. Dahlia said, “Let me get Jake patched up, then I’ll come with you.”
Jake said, “I can do that myself. But I think you’re both crazy.”
As they left, Dahlia asked Loretta, “Where are we going, exactly?”
“Where were those soldiers going?”
“The Town Hall, maybe,” Dahlia suggested. “A bit late for the meeting ... but maybe they didn’t want to break it up.”
Loretta said, “Now that it’s over they won’t have to confront all the ordinary people who attended; they can just seize the building and declare that the Council are no longer in charge.”
“If it was me, I’d be going for the launch site,” Dahlia replied.
“They could be doing both. Maybe capturing G8’s labs as well.”
“And the river base?”
Loretta said, “I have no idea how anyone but G8 could reach the river base, unless they commandeer the submarine first.”
Traces of blue smoke drifted through the air as they approached the Town Hall, and Loretta could hear shouting, not all of it in Scale Seven tones. When the building came into view, she saw troops in the courtyard and angry locals gathered on the street, yelling at the soldiers but not physically engaging with them.
“Why aren’t they going in?” Dahlia wondered. The crowd was hostile, but they weren’t blocking the entrance, and the doorway wasn’t so narrow that even these bulkily attired, double-sized guests could not have squeezed through.
Loretta heard a sharp ping, and one of the soldiers shouted in pain. She was too far away to see exactly what harm he’d suffered, but he staggered and clutched his shoulder, notwithstanding all the interleaved plates of Scale Seven bone supposedly protecting him. As his friends helped him take shelter behind a column – if mere masonry really offered any such thing – she looked on, light-headed. She’d assumed that someone would make armaments out of Scale Seven metal eventually, but witnessing an armor-piercing bullet fired in anger still seemed every bit as surreal as the rocket that had roared over the city half an hour before.
“What did they expect?” Dahlia asked, somewhat callously, but genuinely bewildered. “If they knew what G8 could do, why did they think they could march in and take the District with nothing but riot-control gear?”
“Should they have come with arrows instead of tear gas?”
“No, they should have opened up talks and sent diplomats instead.”
“I won’t argue with that,” Loretta replied. The ambushed soldiers were huddled miserably in a corner of the courtyard; their oversized figures posed beside the civic architecture gave the impression of a memorial sculpture to a war long past.
A protracted series of shots sounded; the impacts shattered the paving and sent shards of stone into the air, leaving a wide arc of pits across the courtyard, demonstrating that the invaders could neither advance nor retreat in safety. Loretta couldn’t see where the snipers were hiding, and though she was far from the line of fire she felt her heart racing. Gun battles were something out of Scale One history, or pulp adventure fiction. If she was killed by a stray bullet, she’d be the first Scale Seven person with that method of demise recorded on their gravestone.
“Lie down on your stomachs with your hands on the back of your heads,” an amplified voice commanded, in bass-heavy Panscala that would leave no room for misunderstanding. “Surrender now and you won’t be harmed.”
It was hard to tell if the soldiers were debating in whispers among themselves, but after a few terts they began to comply. Loretta tensed, not entirely trusting the Town Hall’s defenders to keep their word, but there was no more gunfire. A group of six locals, with no distinguishing uniform, emerged from the building and tied their captives’ hands, while two of them set about tending to the wounded soldier.
Loretta was still shaken by the display of force, but she was starting to suspect that the incursion itself was less a genuine attempt to reassert control, and more a staged gesture to dramatize the fact that D7 Mauburg was both restive and dangerous. The Stedland government needed the nation on their side, not just mildly annoyed at a silly referendum, but fearful enough of their neighbors’ new weapons to back something much more extreme than sending in unarmed troops to arrest a seditious Council.
“Where does this get us?” she asked. “Just because they can’t impose their will on us, that doesn’t mean we can force them to play along. Good luck building factories and skyscrapers, if the trains won’t even stop here anymore. Good luck smuggling in raw materials, when we’d be dead before we could travel far enough to set up any new supply routes.”
“It’s a stalemate,” Dahlia conceded. “But maybe things can cool down a bit now.”
The onlookers cheered as the captive soldiers were led into the hall. Loretta understood the territorial impulse, but she hoped a few hours’ reflection would see more locals start shifting the blame from these hapless intruders to the first, needless provocation by their own side. “Do you think I’ll be allowed to campaign for a ‘no’ vote,” she wondered, “or will they lock me up for scale disloyalty?”
Dahlia said, “There’s a big difference between trying to persuade people, and trying to shut down the whole vote.”
“You’d hope so, but why do I get the feeling Beech really wouldn’t take no for an answer?”
“If you can come up with a plan where we can make the most of G8’s discoveries without breaking away from Stedland,” Dahlia reasoned, “what would anyone have to complain about?”
Loretta replied in the same spirit. “Yeah, the Council won’t mind at all. So long as the next industrial revolution arrives on time, why would they care who gets to be in charge?”
Chapter 24
“When can I go to the moooooon?” Idris asked, putting down his book to survey the hotel room impatiently, as if some sign of an imminent lunar departure might have already manifested around him.
Sam resisted the urge to joke sourly, “When you’re eight times smaller.”
“No one is going to the moon for a while,” Noor predicted. “They’re going to need all kinds of new things to make that happen. Putting up one satellite is just the start.”
“But if they’re doing it in D7, everything will happen quickly,” Idris reasoned.
“Let’s just ... wait and see,” Sam replied. He should probably have been grateful that when Idris overheard reports from Mauburg on the radio he seemed to strip away everything alarming, leaving him with nothing but sunny visions of humanity’s rapid ascent into space.
“‘Wait and see, wait and see,’” Idris echoed mockingly. “Will we ever even go back home?”
“Of course,” Sam promised. “We just want to be sure that there isn’t going to be more trouble.” Sure would be a hard standard to reach, though; he couldn’t even decide if the risk was greater in Wendale or Mauburg.
Idris glowered at him, then went back to flipping through the book about ants that he’d borrowed from the library. He’d wanted to read something about space travel, but when the librarian had conceded that nothing on the shelves would accurately reflect the new methods of propulsion, Idris had vetoed all such past speculations as useless.
Noor sat down beside Sam. “Do you think you’re still in danger of retribution, now that everything’s out in the open?”
“Probably not.” Sam didn’t think the possibility of fusion weapons had entered common knowledge yet, but the separatists couldn’t blame him if scientists across the planet started scrutinizing their announcements about energy sources and reaching the same conclusions as Yukio. “But if there’s more fighting in D7, we don’t know what form it will take, or how far it could spread. Scale One really has to squint to distinguish a target that small from everything around it.”
