The Ascension Factor

"Not yet." His mother tugged his shirttail to restrain him. "They're not ready. They'd just beat us back."

An older woman behind Kalan clucked her tongue and collected a breath on an inward hiss.

"Look there," she whispered, and lifted a bony finger to point at the figure of a man trotting down the street. He looked backward toward the docks more than forward, so he stumbled a lot, and he ran with his hands over his ears. As he ran by he crouched, wild-eyed, as though everyone in The Line would eat him. As two of the security moved to cross the street, the short young man skittered away down the street uttering frightened, out-of-breath cries that Kalan didn't understand.

"Driftninny," the old woman said. "One of those family islands must've grounded. It's hardest for them." She raised her reedy voice to lecture pitch: "The unfathomable wrath of Ship will strike the infidel Flattery. "

"Shaddup!" a security barked, and she muttered herself to silence.

Then there arose in The Line a grumbled discussion of the difficulties of adjustment, the same kind of talk that Kalan had heard muttered around the home fire when they first settled here from the sea. He didn't remember the sea at all, but his mother told him stories about how beautiful their little island was, and she named all the generations that had drifted their island before Kalan was born.

The Line woke up and stretched and passed the word back in a serpentine ripple: "Keys up." "Hey, keys are up!" "Keys, sister. Keys up."

His mother stood, and leaned against the wall to balance herself as she strapped on her pack.

"Hey, sister!"

A scar-faced security reached between Kalan and his mother and tapped the side of her leg with his stick.

"Off the warehouse. C'mon, you know better. "

She stepped right up to his nose as she shouldered her carryall, but she didn't speak. He did not back down. Kalan had never seen anyone who didn't back down to his mother.

"First tickets up, alphabetical order, left to right," he said. This time he tapped his stick against her bottom. "Get moving."

Then they were inside a press of bodies and through the gates, into a long narrow room. Where Kalan had expected to see the food place, he saw instead a wall with a line of stalls. An attendant and a security armed with stunstick flanked each stall, and out of each one jutted what he thought must be the nose or tongue of some great demon.

His mother hurried him and their things to the furthest stall.

"Those are conveyer belts," she explained. "They go way back into the building and bring out our order to us and they drop it here. We give our order and our coupons to this woman and someone inside fetches it for us."

"But I thought we could go inside."

"I can't take you inside," she said. "Some things we can get on the way home when the market opens. I'll take you around to see all the booths and vendors. "

"Order."

His mother handed the list to the guard, who handed it to the attendant. The attendant had only one eye, and she had to hold the list close to her face to read it. Slowly, she crossed off certain items. Kalan couldn't see which ones. He couldn't read everything on the list, but his mother had read it to him and he knew everything by where it was. He could see that about half of what they wanted was crossed out. The attendant typed the remainder of the list onto a keyboard. It hummed and clicked and then they waited for their food to come down the great belt out of the wall.

Kalan could stand at the very end of the belt and look along its length, but it didn't give him a very good view of the insides of the food place. He could see that there were lots of people and lots of stacks of food, most of it packaged.

His mother told him they would get their fish from a vendor outside. He thought it funny, his father was a fisherman but they couldn't eat his fish, they had to buy it from vendors like everyone else. One man who had fished with his father for two years disappeared. Kalan heard his parents talking, and they said it was because he smuggled a few fish home instead of turning them all in at the docks.

The first package off the belt was his rice, wrapped in a package of pretty green paper from the Islanders. It was heavier than he thought five kilos would be. His mother helped him slip the package inside his backpack, a perfect fit.

Suddenly there were shouts from all around them at once. He and his mother were knocked down and they curled together for protection under the lip of the conveyer belt. Heavy doors slid down to close the opening over each belt and the larger gates that they'd come through clanged shut. A mob had rushed the warehouse and the security was battling them off.

A dozen or more burst through before the gate was shut.

"We're hungry now!" one of them shouted. "We're hungry now!"