Wild Card Run

He’d left the door to the control room open, so I figured I might as well make some of those observations, since I was already pegged for violations. The metal frame vibrated beneath my hand as I peered down the stairs into the dimness. A light went on then, and I moved down the steps into the tangible shock of the tremor and the loud, humming roar.

Jason looked up, startled, from some gauges across the room, moving almost protectively in front of them. He shouted above the roar. “This is Taboo for you, Ruth. You know that.”

“I know.” I raised my voice. “Look, Jason. I’ve already committed my violation, and I just want to see it again. Don’t worry.” I probably knew our towers better than he did, anyway.

His lips tightened, and he turned back to the generator controls. It looked like they’d done some modifications since my last childhood visit here. There was a new synchrometer unit, and one of the panel readouts had been replaced with a different configuration. I gave Jason a wide berth, letting him ignore me, and wandered around the circular room, running a hand along the smooth lucite water pipes and the routing valves. A lighted board indicated the positions of the main valves beneath the fields. Field Three was on trickle right now. I walked on past the seismic scales, the readouts on wind flux to the tremor-rod and counterbalance thrust. I quickly pressed a test button on one of the seismic scales, and the needle jumped and wavered in the satisfactory range.

I glanced over at Jason’s back and whistled casually, wandering over to the thick rod running down from the ceiling through the center of the chamber. Fingers hooked into the protective mesh enclosure, I watched light from the ceiling bulbs flicker across the shiny steel alloy.

The tremor-hum pulsed through my hands and the soles of my feet, overwhelming now. Here at the heart, I could feel its power surge from my toes to my fingertips, stronger than my breathing, stronger than my heartbeat, coursing through me, filling me. I could feel each eddy of the narrow, solid tremor-enhancement and dispersal rod that ran deep into the buried rock through and beyond the hollow generator-spinner whose metal surface flickered its fast lights.

I pressed closer against the screen, drawn into the spinning pattern of light.

It was the tower wing slashing across hot blue sky in a dazzle of sun down snapping mylar, as the ground and the tawny gleam of wheat spun around and past, the wind catching us up for the lift. Isaac’s voice, a calm center in the whirling maelstrom of earth and sky: “Go with it. Ruth. Let it take you, feel the tremor in the sail arm—that’s your base. Let the sun twirl around you. You’re the center when you’re riding the spinner bar. Now, feel how it all moves together.”

And for a centa that could have been eternity I was part of it again, part of the cycles within cycles, the smooth roll of the world and the spin of the sails, the twirling rod and the smoothed-out tremor singing beneath the soil and nurturing the rich fruit of the wheat, the energy humming through the wires and dials of the tower, responding to the touch of fingers.

But there was something else. Something wrong.

The imbalance I’d sensed when I lay on the tower leg. It was there, a physical jolt, a quiver not aligned with the power flux and the tremor-rod. I could feel the jarring eddy out of synch with the wheel and the rod, like a wheel spinning the wrong direction against the cycle. There was something wrong with the field flow. It was—

“Ruth!” A strong grip closed over my wrist and wrenched my fingers from the screen. Jason dragged me back from it, his face angry and worried and paternal.

“Wait, Jason—”

“Are you out of your mind?” His hand tightened painfully around my wrist as he dragged me toward the stairs. I caught a last confused glimpse of the dials, then I tripped in the long skirts as he yanked me up the stairs, and my shoulder twisted in his grasp.

I was blinking in the hot, bright sun as he stood blocking the door. I jerked my arm free from his hand, my shoulder shooting out a little stab of pain. “What in hell was that for? I was only looking!”

He flinched as I swore, glaring at a point somewhere near my shoulder, not meeting my eyes. “Look. I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, but you’ve seen enough. That machinery can be dangerous. You’re a woman, you belong back at the house.”

I rubbed my shoulder. “Okay, I’ll go. But there’s something out of synch with the power flow. Check it out.”

He looked even angrier. “That’s crazy! Aaron was just out here yesterday, calibrating the synchrometers. Maybe he’s right, maybe you think you know better than the Way, but you don’t. Go back to the house and leave our work to us.” The door slammed behind him.