doing a curious hopping dance in place, hands in his armpits.
“Constable!” I piped, all sham terror that no one would have
known for a sham, “Constable! Come quick, he’s going to kill
himself!”
*
The sister who came to sit up with us mourning kiddies that
night was called Sister Mary Immaculata, and she was kindly, if
a bit dim. I remembered her from my stay in the hospital after
my maiming: a slighly vacant prune-faced woman in a wimple
who’d bathed my wounds gently and given me solemn hugs
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when I woke screaming in the middle of the night.
She was positive that the children of St Aggie’s were
inconsolable over the suicide of our beloved patron, Zophar
Grindersworth, and she doled out those same solemn cuddles to
anyone foolish enough to stray near her. That none of us shed a
tear was lost upon her, though she did note with approval how
smoothly the operation of St Aggie’s continued without
Grinder’s oversight.
The next afternoon, Sister Mary Immaculata circulated
among us, offering reassurance that a new master would be found
for St Aggie’s. None of us were much comforted by this: we
knew the kind of man who was likely to fill such a plum vacancy.
“If only there was some way we could go on running this
place on our own,” I moaned under my breath, trying to
concentrate on repairing the pressure gauge on a pneumatic
evacuator that we’d taken in for mending.
Monty shot me a look. He had taken the Sister’s coming very
hard. “I don’t think I have it in me to kill the next one, too.
Anyway, they’re bound to notice if we keep on assassinating our
guardians.”
I snickered despite myself. Then my gloomy pall descended
again. It had all been so good, how could we possibly return to
the old way? But there was no way the sisters would let a bunch
of crippled children govern themselves.
“What a waste,” I said. “What a waste of all this potential.”
“At least I’ll be shut of it in two years,” Monty said. “How
long have you got till your eighteenth?”
My brow furrowed. I looked out the grimy workshop window
at the iron grey February sky. “It’s February tenth today?”
“Eleventh,” he said.
I laughed, an ugly sound. “Why, Monty, my friend, today is
my eighteenth birthday. I believe I have survived St Aggie’s to
graduate to bigger and better things. I have attained my majority,
old son.”
He held a hand out and shook my hook with it, solemnly.
“Happy birthday and congratulations, then, Sian. May the world
treat you with all the care you deserve.”
I stood, the scrape of my chair very loud and sudden. I
realized I had no idea what I would do next. I had managed to
completely forget that my graduation from St Aggie’s was
looming, that I would be a free man. In my mind, I’d imagined
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myself dwelling at St Aggie’s forever.
Forever.
“You look like you just got hit in the head with a shovel,”
Monty said. “What on earth is going through that mind of
yours?”
I didn’t answer. I was already on my way to find Sister
Immaculata. I found her in the kitchen, helping legless Dora
make the toast for tea over the fire’s grate.
“Sister,” I said, “a word please?”
As she turned and followed me into the pantry off the
kitchen, some of that fear I’d felt on the bridge bubbled up in me.
I tamped it back down again firmly, like a piston compressing
some superheated gas.
She was really just as I remembered her, and she had
remembered me, too—she remembered all of us, the children
she’d held in the night and then consigned to this Hell upon
“Sister Mary Immaculata, I attained my eighteenth birthday
today.”
She opened her mouth to congratulate me, but I held up my
stump.
“I turned eighteen today, sister. I am a man, I have attained
my majority. I am at liberty, and must seek my fortune in the
world. I have a proposal for you, accordingly.” I put everything
I had into this, every dram of confidence and maturity that I’d
learned since we inmates had taken over the asylum. “I was Mr
Grindersworth’s lieutenant and assistant in every matter relating
to the daily operation of this place. Many’s the day I did every
bit of work that there was to do, whilst Mr Grindersworth
attended to family matters. I know every inch of this place, ever
soul in it, and I have had the benefit of the excellent training and
education that there is to have here.
“I had always thought to seek my fortune in the world as a
mechanic of some kind, if any shop would have a half-made
thing like me, but seeing as you find yourself at loose ends in the
superintendent department, I thought I might perhaps put my
plans ‘on hold’ for the time being, until such time as a full search
could be conducted.”
“Sian,” she said, her face wrinkling into a gap-toothed smile.
“Are you proposing that you might run St Agatha’s?”
It took everything I could not to wilt under the pity and
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amusement in that smile. “I am, sister. I am. I have all but run it
for months now, and have every confidence in my capacity to go
on doing so for so long as need be.” I kept my gaze and my voice
even. “I believe that the noble mission of St Aggie’s is a truly
attainable one: that it can rehabilitate such damaged things as we
and prepare us for the wider world.”
She shook her head. “Sian,” she said, softly, “Sian. I wish it
could be. But there’s no hope that such an appointment would be
approved by the Board of Governors.”
I nodded. “Yes, I thought so. But do the Governors need to
approve a temporary appointment? A stopgap, until a suitable
person can be found?”
Her smile changed, got wider. “You have certainly come into
your own shrewdness here, haven’t you?”
“I was taught well,” I said, and smiled back.
*
The temporary has a way of becoming permanent. That was
my bolt of inspiration, my galvanic realization. Once the sisters
had something that worked, that did not call attention to itself,
that took in crippled children and released whole persons some
years later, they didn’t need to muck about with it. As the
mechanics say, “If it isn’t broken, it doesn’t want fixing.”
I’m no mechanic, not anymore. The daily running of St
Aggie’s occupied a larger and larger slice of my time, until I
found that I knew more about tending to a child’s fever or
soothing away a nightmare than I did about hijacking the vast
computers to do our bidding.
But that’s no matter, as we have any number of apprentice
computermen and computerwomen turning up on our doorsteps.
So long as the machineries of industry grind on, the supply will
be inexhaustible.
Monty visits me from time to time, mostly to scout for talent.
His shop, Goldsworth and Associates, has a roaring trade in
computational novelties and service, and if anyone is bothered
by the appearance of a factory filled with the halt, the lame, the
blind and the crippled, they are thankfully outnumbered by those
who are delighted by the quality of the work and the good value
in his schedule of pricing.
But it was indeed a golden time, that time when I was but a
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boy at St Aggie’s among the boys and girls, a cog in a machine
that Monty built of us, part of a great uplifting, a transformation
from a hell to something like a heaven. That I am sentenced to
serve in this heaven I helped to make is no great burden, I
suppose.
Still, I do yearn to screw a jeweller’s loupe into my eye, pick
up a fine tool and bend the sodium lamp to shine upon some
cunning mechanism that wants fixing. For machines may be
balky and they may destroy us with their terrible appetite for oil,
blood and flesh, but they behave according to fixed rules and can
be understood by anyone with the cunning to look upon them and
winkle out their secrets. Children are ever so much more
complicated.
Though I believe I may be learning a little about them, too.
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author,
activist, journalist and blogger— the co-editor of Boing Boing
(boingboing.net) and the author of many books, most recently In
Real Life , a graphic novel; Information Doesn’t Want To Be
Free , a book about earning a living in the Internet age, and
Homeland , the award-winning, best-selling sequel to the 2008
YA novel Little Brother .
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In Rebecca Moesta’s charming fantasy tale, young Allie begins
corresponding with a penpal via her mysteriously magical new
mailbox—a penpal who is a princess in a different world …
P O S T C A R D S
By Rebecca Moesta
Memorizing her new zip code had been the easiest part of Allie’s
move. After all, how hard could it be to remember five digits
when three of them were sevens? The hardest part had been
leaving her friends—and what seemed like her entire life—
behind.
Sitting on a pile of moving boxes in the echoing, otherwise-
empty living room of their new house, Allie wondered morosely
whether yanking a fifteen-year-old out of school three-quarters
of the way through her sophomore year could not be considered
child abuse.
Raking a hand through her shoulder-length blond hair, she
thought back to the night her life had changed. Allie had just
returned from her fourth date with Ian Walters— Ian Walters, a
senior and a forward on the Jackson Eagles basketball team—
when her parents met her with the “wonderful news.” Her father,
after only five months of unemployment, had taken a new job as
head of Human Resources for a regional telecommunications
firm halfway across the country. He said it was a “great
Decision Points
opportunity.”
Allie knew she should have been happy for her parents. The
relief was so plain on their faces. But it was obvious they hadn’t
stopped for a moment to think about how this would affect her.
Just that evening, Ian had asked Allie to the prom. In a little over
a month, she should have been dressing like a fairy tale princess
and then dancing all evening with one of the cutest guys in the
whole school. But she would miss out on that now. Barely three
weeks after her father’s announcement, the family had moved—
leaving behind the only world Allie had ever known.
Now, Allie’s black Labrador retriever Merlin chuffed, gave
his tail a tentative wag, trotted to the front door, and looked back
at her. Allie heaved a sigh. “C’mon, boy. We could both use a
walk. I need to mail my letter to Roshanda anyway.” For the
moment, letters were her only means of communication. Some
sort of delay had come up in activating the telephone wiring, and
now the idiot phone company said it could be another three
weeks before their phone or internet service was connected. Her
parents both had cell phones, but they didn’t seem to think that
Allie might need one, too.
From the moving carton next to her Allie picked up a yellow
envelope containing a letter to her best friend, in which she had
detailed the miseries of her new life in West Nowheresville,
USA. Okay, sure, her parents were delighted. It was easy for
them. Their financial worries were over, and they had found a
beautiful new house. Her mom was already out applying for a
job and meeting the neighbors. But on Monday Allie would be
forced to start in the middle of the semester at a school she had
never heard of before. Who knew what classes they would try to
shoehorn her into? She would be the new girl, without a friend
in the entire state.
“Not a friend here but you, boy,” she said, clipping the leash
to Merlin’s collar.
At the end of the long, curving driveway, they paused at the
rural-style mailbox, which was empty, of course, since she and
her parents were the first residents at this address, and nothing
from their old house had been forwarded yet. Allie put the
envelope in and raised the little red flag on the side of the
enameled aluminum box to indicate a letter for pickup.
Abandoning herself to the dog’s whims, Allie let Merlin take
the lead and enjoy his explorations for a couple of miles. She
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paid just enough attention to their route to be sure she could find
her way back to the house. The black lab romped and sniffed and
peed and chased, finding wonder and delight in his new
surroundings.
Allie wished she could share the feeling, but for her, life felt
bleak and hopeless and lonely. The only wonder in her world was
wondering why this had had to happen to her. In spite of these
gloomy thoughts, a smile quirked one corner of her mouth when,
after an hour and a half of rambling, they returned to the house
and she noticed the flag on the mailbox was down. Good, that
meant her letter was mailed, and the sooner Roshanda got it, the
sooner her friend could reply. Even though she knew it was
foolish, she decided to peek into the mailbox in case a letter or
some piece of junk mail had found its way here already. As she
had expected, the interior of the arched metal box looked empty.
But just as she was about to close the door, Allie saw a glint
of something lying on the corrugat
ed aluminum bottom of the
mailbox. A sheet of cellophane perhaps? No, it sparkled too
much.
Merlin wagged his tail wildly and barked twice, as if
impatient to know what she was looking at. Allie put in her hand
and drew out the shiny scrap of material. She laid it across her
palm to study it. It was a pliable, crystalline sheet about the size
and shape of a standard postcard, but that was where the
similarity ended. The card itself was as clear as spring water and
etched with strange symbols that did not look like any form of
writing Allie had ever seen. They looked like those laser carvings
of sailboats or eagles or lighthouses in blocks of Lucite that she
had seen in the airport gift store.
The etched symbols seemed to float deep inside the
rectangle, which was strange since the clear material was thinner
than a piece of notebook paper. In fact, the more Allie looked at
it, the more three-dimensional the symbols seemed to appear.
The markings—hieroglyphics, perhaps?—started to swirl before
her eyes, forming and unforming words that she did not
recognize but felt she ought to know. As if responding to an
optical illusion, her field of vision deepened, and ripples moved
across the card’s surface, like tiny waves on a crystal-clear
mountain lake.
With one finger she reached out to touch the swirling
symbols and suddenly found herself facing a life-sized,
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shimmering image of a girl no older than she with knee-length
raven locks and a tear-streaked face. A window behind the girl
framed a many-turreted stone castle standing on the shores of a
sparkling blue-green lake. Allie gasped and blinked several
times. The image didn’t disappear, yet she could see right
through it to her house and the mailbox and Merlin. It was as if
she was looking at the largest, most vividly colored hologram
ever created.
Allie groaned. “I’ve finally lost it, haven’t I, Merlin? It—”
But before she could finish her sentence, the ethereal girl sat
down at a desk by the window. A diminutive, kindly looking old
man with a shock of fluffy gray hair handed her a long white