Chapter Four

When Ollin returned two days later he snagged Timas's arm and pulled him along through the courtyard away from the watered down pulque.

Ollin didn't tower over Timas, but his bulk and presence could intimidate.
Ollin made him feel like a child again. Ollin's wrinkled tunic and unkempt hair were the only signs that he'd been out of the house for two days.

"I know we don't talk often, now." Ollin's words cracked quickly. Precise, businesslike. "But you're grown now, you've seen one of the worse things a man faces, here on Yatapek, and I should treat you as one."

Timas stumbled behind his dad into the cool shade. "I tried to bring him up in time…"

"There was nothing you could have done. I talked to Heutzin." The chair creaked as Ollin sat. "Itotia!"

Timas's mother appeared in the doorframe with a tentative smile. "You're back."

Ollin didn't smile back. He raised his hand. "I invited the pipiltin over for a lunch. We have little time, and a crisis to move .. everyone in the city begins to offer advice and rumors to cloud our thoughts."

"I'll get the courtyard ready." Itotia hesitated for a moment, looked at Timas, then backed away.

Ollin leaned over the table and peered at Timas over clasped hands. "Would you believe that the man who fell out of the sky and hit us is still alive?"

"Mom told me," Timas said. "If he is still alive, can we hold him accountable? Is he from the Aeolian cities?" If so, he might be rich enough to fix the damage he'd done. Unlike Yatapek, the Aeolians came from worlds where humans had lots of contact with aliens and their advanced technologies. The Aeolians had faced oppression, minorities among those alien worlds. But now they called Chilo their own, using the tools and technologies they'd wrested away from other races. How could Yatapek compete with that?

"We don't know," Ollin shrugged. "But he will pay one way or another for what he did. He's delirious, he keeps talking about zombies and invasions. We think he may have spent time here before." People nicknamed Aeolian ambassadors "Zombies" due to their awkward pauses and blank looks.

Timas felt a chill at the idea of an Aeolian invasion. Their city could do little to ward them off.

"And the cuatetl," Timas whispered. "What do we do about that while we wait?"
"We'll talk about it tonight. I know many will say we have to go on our knees and beg the Aeolians to give us a loan." His father looked disgusted with the thought.

"What other choice do we have?" The almost mile-wide city needed raw resources to survive. The Aeolian cities floated high, some of them even had cables that reached out into space. They got their ores and materials from asteroids. Few got them from the surface with old mining equipment like Yatapek. One of Timas's great grandmothers had helped purchase the machine. He doubted she anticipated that they would still be using it.

"The pipiltin will figure them out tonight." Ollin stood up and rubbed his face. His eyes were red from weariness, Timas noticed.

"And you will be there to help them." Timas also got up and walked towards his room. Everyone knew about his dad's desire to become one of the guiding leaders of the city.

"That is why I invited them to council here. Where are you going?" Ollin stood in his doorway.

"Back to sleep." The pulque sat heavy in Timas's stomach and made him feel weary.

"Sleep? Is that what you've been doing all this time?" Ollin entered the room and grabbed Timas's shoulder. "You at least went running, didn't you?"

Timas didn't try to lie. "What's the point right now? I won't be needed for a while, and if the cuatetl gets fixed, it will be by the Aeolians."

Ollin shoved him away. "You are xocoyotsin," he hissed. "You will keep your shape. You will not fall apart on me."

The anger in his dad's eyes didn't shake Timas. He gritted his teeth. "Like Heutzin?" His father merciless hounded him about being primed for the role of xocoyotzin.

"Heutzin," Ollin said slowly in a neutral voice. "He paid his dues, saw friends die, and risked his life for almost ten years."

Without children, though, Heutzin remained just another once-xocoyotzin. Timas left the thought in the air.

Ollin shook his head. "You need something to keep your mind off Cen. You keep your schedule, you run every morning and night, and you watch your food. And I think I have something to help you find some direction. It will keep you from circling around yourself."

"What's that?"

Ollin lowered his voice to a whisper. "There's a delegate from one of the Aeolian cities here sniffing around already, dropped off by airship an hour ago. I was going to have your mother take her around the city, but I think now you're going to do that."

His father's voice had that 'no-options' edge to it. Timas would spend the day playing babysitter to some snooty outsider tourist. He knew they liked to fly out to Yatapek to enjoy the large and open upper layer for vacations. No wide-open spaces in their packed cities. Handmade crafts from the lower level markets also attracted them. For the Aeolians the price of a flight here cost little, even though most on Yatapek couldn't afford to leave.

"Great," he muttered. Another of Ollin's and Itotia's schemes to get involved running the city. They'd climbed up from the filth and darkness of the lower layers thanks to him. Yet still they schemed as if the grime lay lurking just behind them.

Ollin ignored that. "Listen to me." He slapped his hands together, but still kept his voice low. "You will tell her nothing about the man who hit the city, except that we have his body. Do not tell her he lives. You understand me?"
Timas understood. "I understand."

"Right." Ollin smiled. "We want to know what we can get out of it before we volunteer information." Yatapek had few powerful friends in the other cities. Again, Timas reminded himself to think about the dying cuatetl. His city needed the resources to fix it. His city needed him.

"Take me to the delegate, I'll give them the tour," Timas said.

Ollin pulled his brass pocketwatch from inside a tunic pocket. The city bumped at them from underfoot. Ollin swayed and Timas followed suit. Neither of them paid close attention to the unconscious reaction. "She should be waiting outside. Her name is Katerina Volga."

Timas walked around his dad and into the corridor where he could see the courtyard gates that led to the street. The girl who stood in front of them wore a silvery shirt and trousers, had her hair cut short to her ears, and her left eye glinted in the morning light.

"She's my age," Timas said. "I thought you said she was a delegate from the cities."

"She is." Ollin walked alongside Timas as he left the corridor for the courtyard. "You know the young and inexperienced of theirs can wield a lot of power. You've seen the tourists. Even the children are rich."

"She has one of those metal eyes." Timas had seen Aeolians with them before. "She's like a robot?"

"Something like that. I'm sure she'll tell you all about it, it's hard to get them to shut up about themselves." Timas looked over at his dad as they crossed the courtyard together. Ollin didn't often reveal personal opinions about the Aeolians. "Be back by lunch. The elders will want to talk to her."

"Okay."

Ollin opened the gates. "Welcome, Katerina, to my home. This is Timas, my son. I've asked him to personally take you on a tour of our city."

Katerina had wide eyes, one of them green and the other, her right eye, silver. She had brown skin like Timas's. Usually the Aeolians were black or pale, it surprised Timas to see someone that looked more like him. Maybe that was why she'd been sent, she could almost blend into Yatapek. Except for her hair. Yatapek's citizens had straight, black hair. Katerina's hair was frizzy.

"Good morning," she said. "I'm pleased to meet your son, and thank you for the hospitality."

She looked both of them up and down, very slowly, her silver eye taking them both in. It had tiny metallic veins that spidered off the corner of her eye-socket and eyelids.

It was erie.

Ollin left them both at the gate.

"So were do you want to start?" Timas asked. He couldn't avoid staring at the silver eye.

Katerina waited for Ollin to walk back into the house. "We've seen Yatapek, we don't need the tour. But I haven't eaten yet since I left home this morning."
They way she used 'we' and 'I' differently made Timas pause. He looked at the silver eye. If Heutzin told the truth, people all throughout the Aeolian cities looked at him right now through that silver eye of hers. Through their more advanced technology.

He shivered.

"Am I making you uncomfortable?" Katerina asked.

Timas considered lying. For a moment. "Yes. A little bit. Knowing that other people see what you see, back in all the other Aeolian cities. It's unusual." And a little creepy.

"We're all sorry." She blinked and held her eye closed. It looked like a normal eyelid, except for the metallic veins. She grabbed his arm. "We can keep the eye closed, if it bothers you that much. But you'll have to help me walk around if I'm doing it with one eye closed. It messes with my depth perception."

Timas stepped back. "It's okay, you can use your eye."

"You realize we can hear you." Katerina tapped her right ear.

"It isn't metal," Timas said.

"They don't have to be. The eye is a marker, a choice, by us, to let outsiders know."

"Are all Aeolians part robot?"

Katerina sighed and rolled her eyes. "Oh come on!" She bit her lip, paused, and then tilted her head. "We're not robots, Timas. We're people, like you."

Timas considered it. "You're all connected to each other, using your devices and transmitters? Do you all have similar things in your head like that eye?" He also thought: if they ever chose to invade, they would swarm around Yatapek's warriors, who had no radios to plan their defense. Yes, the Aeolians could invade easily enough.

"In a manner of speaking, yes."

"Then you're not anything like me." Timas felt nervous around her as he contemplated the thought of hundreds of Aeolians with silver eyes taking over his city. "Are you?"

"I'm hungry, Timas. Can we go eat?"

Happy to change the subject, Timas nodded and led Katerina down the street. Along with several other roads it radiated out from the atrium like spokes in a wheel.

Timas walked them towards the outer edge of the city. The clusters of buildings that stood near the atrium petered out into the city's farms and gardens. They made the bulk of the top-most layer, the dome curving up over all the greenery. A tiny mist of rain trickled down from the sprinklers in the dometop far overhead.

The oldest citizens of Yatapek said that the topmost layer felt the most like being back on the world they came from, New Anegada. The Aeolians said that as well. Tourists often stayed in rooms near the edge of the upper layer's fields and gardens.

"Is that a harvester?" Katerina pointed at a rusted machine that sat in the center of the wheat section on their left with several clusters of farmers standing around it.

"The harvester," Timas said. It had broken down again. He kept her walking along, the harvester broke down more than it worked. Nothing unusual there.
"Where are we going?" Katerina asked. "Your maps don't show any elevators on the inside of the city wall."

"I'm taking you to the mezzanine gardens."

Even this sophisticated delegate should appreciate the food and view there.

At the edge of the dome the land gave way to treetops.

"Oh, I've heard of this," Katerina said. "Neat effect."

They took the steep stone stairs down the wall and descended into the trees and shrubs of the gardens that all carefully framed the clouds just outside the city. It made one aware of the fact that the whole city floated. They lived a hundred thousand feet in the air, following the air currents near Chilo's great storm in a regular circular pattern, far enough above it they were not affected. The dirty brown spiral of the storm dominated the landscape before them today.

At the bottom of the stairs Timas turned around and let her look out into Yatapek's second layer.

"This is the real view," Timas said.

The mezzanine he'd taken her to hung underneath the topmost layer. From here they looked out over the farms and edge gardens of the second layer. And where the sun failed to reach on the edges, the layer's streets, houses, and structures began.

"Very neat," Katerina said. Weblike towers criss-crossed the inner area, and this high up you could see that the layer resembled a three-dimensional map. A diorama laid out for just them, with the edges of it receding into gloomy murkiness.

The city lights hung from long cables connected to the underside of the top layer. They vibrated and swung whenever the city trembled from super-gusts.
"But where's the food?"

Very neat, that was all she had to say about the mezzanine? Timas led her along the path by the large windows.

"Here." A small booth with little tables and chairs scattered around flagstones hid behind a series of over-large hedges. Timas snagged a paper menu from the booth.

"So do you have anything like this in your city?" Timas asked.

Katerina looked over her menu. "Well, no, not any more. Eupatoria's edges are filled with developments now. Everyone wants an apartment 'on the edge' so that they have sky in their living room."

"Then how do you grow food?" The edges of the layers and the top layer got all the sunlight.

"Hydroponic gardens, we keep them around the core of the city. Or vats." More technological tricks up their sleeves, Timas thought as she tapped on the menu. "No beef, just chicken?"

"Meat, even for xocoyotzin, is not very plentiful," Timas said. "We don't have the land for grazing."

"Grazing… animals." Katerina looked upset for a second. "I'll have beans and rice."

Timas felt like he'd failed some test with her. She had this look on her face like his mother did when she'd had to visit one of her cousins in the lower layers, deep in the city near the recycling plains.

Katerina felt Yatapek dirty and uncivilized, and Timas by extension too, no doubt.

Timas walked up to the kitchen booth and ordered extra beans and rice, with chicken.

"Go sit with the young lady," the tall cook winked, "I'll bring it right out, xocoyotzin." The cook's teeth glinted with cheap metal caps when he smiled.
When Timas returned Katerina looked up. "You said 'xocoyotzin' didn't you? You work on the surface?"

Excited that some measure of respect had arrived, Timas sat up straighter. "Yes. I am xocoyotzin."

She leaned forward, eager. "We would like to ask if you were on the surface when the debris hit your mining machine?"

"You say 'we' again." Timas did not feel comfortable talking about the cuatetl. He didn't want to say anything that the elders or his dad wouldn't want him to. They might need to bargain or beg with this girl, and the people behind her silver eye, for the repairs.

"'We' is what we say when we are engaging you. When I use I it's just me talking."

"Just you?"

"Katerina," she smiled.

"How can you both be a robot and yourself?" Timas asked. "It's weird."

Katerina sighed. "You go to school right?"

"My schooling is very technical." Timas tapped the edge of the table. "I can continue school after I no longer function as xocoyotsin." Die like Cen, grow fat like his father and Heutzin, or just grow old and not able to quite fit. He prayed for the last.

"We know you should know what a democracy is, yes? You have, what 40,000 people living in Yatapek? In Eupatoria it's more like a quarter of a million, and our city is the same size. The Aeolian Consensus uses techno-democracy to handle self-governance. We're a little different than you. And there are dozens of Aeolian cities."

"But you're still controlled by that." Timas pointed at her eye. He'd seen a silver-eyed Aeolian once, visiting his dad. That happened back before the Aeolians forced Yatapek to install a large communications bubble on top of the city. Back then, the man who'd visited had taken forever to answer the easiest questions. He'd had to wait on every diplomatatic phrase to get vetted and and then a response voted on and beamed back to him to speak out loud. Without advanced and fast technology, it had taken forever to get through dinner.
Damn zombies, Ollin had muttered late in that night, apparently tired of the two-minute pauses.

"If you volunteer to be on a sports team of some sort, are you controlled by your team?" Katerina asked. "Or are you still you, but just within the team?"
"You're still you…"

"I"m on a very big team." Katerina hunched forward. "There are three hundred thousand people from a random variety of Aeolian cities, live, voting on my every word because I'm their avatar, emissary, diplomat, or whatever you would like to call me. I agreed to this when I became a citizen. Three days ago I was studying for finals when I got the message that I'd been randomly selected for citizen's duty. And here I am, representing Eupatoria's interests."

So when she said 'we' the masses behind that silver eye spoke through her. And when she said 'I' it was only Katerina. "It takes getting used to," Timas said.

"Try having all this sitting behind your skull," Katerina said. "A public face of the citizenry is never an easy task. Fail to do your job properly and you get fined, or exiled and stripped of your citizenship."

The cook interrupted them, staring openly at Katerina's silver eye as he set their plates down and grinned at Timas.

Timas waited for her to start eating.

"Timas, we're not here as tourists. We have an offer for your city." Katerina pushed her plate aside. "An offer we want you to deliver to your city's leaders later tonight."

She wasn't eating. Timas rolled up a corn tortilla and scooped rice and chicken up with it. Before biting he responded. "To the pipiltin? Why would you want me to do that? You should speak to them directly, or maybe even my father."

He bit into overheated rice. He breathed around it and realized he was awkwardly eating in front of hundreds of thousands of people.

Timas felt horribly aware of his gangly elbows, loud chewing, and uncomfortable posture.

"We feel," Katerina looked down at the table with a slight smile. "We feel that the pipiltin would be more willing to listen to someone from their own city. The voting is running two-to-one in favor of this theory. We feel that if we, with our reputation for being robotic and arrogant, stand in front of your leaders and give terms, that some will refuse on general principle."

Timas snorted. That sounded about right. He put the rice-filled tortilla down. "And what are you offering?"

"We're offering complete repair services on your mining machine. We know how desperate your situation is. Your city will founder without it."

"In exchange?" Timas was curious.

"We want the man who hit your city." Katerina said. "And we want to talk to him. Tonight. It's very important. He has given our cities information about a possible threat to them. We need more information."

Timas sat and looked at her. "What, you think the man lived through that?"

"Judging by your lack of surprise, and analysis of your body language, pupil dilation, we think you know he did. You just confirmed the suspicion for us. Let's not lie, Timas." She turned cold and expressionless. Timas felt out of his depth. He couldn't bargain about Yatapek's future! The pipiltin negotiated those things. Not xocoyotsin. "He lives and we want to see him. Your people would be foolish to turn down what we offer. What is one stranger to you?"
Apparently one stranger equaled at least a repaired mining machine. At least. Timas looked at his plate. "You're all so very sure of yourselves, aren't you?"

Katerina nodded. "The votes are decisive."

"And if they weren't?"

"I'd be eating and making polite small talk while the debate went on," Katerina said.

"I'm not going to finish my meal here, am I?" Timas asked.

"No," Katerina laughed. "I think we're about done."

Timas pushed his plate away. "I have no idea whether this man exists or not, but I don't see what your hurry is."

"The hurry is that he is at the least an incredibly dangerous man, we think, and the sooner we investigate, the sooner we know for sure. He might also be an early warning. Either way, we need to get him into our custody. Then we will decide what to do next."

Timas stood up and left enough money on the table to cover the food. Katerina picked up one of the bills. "Paper money?"

"Yeah."

"Cool!" She rubbed it between her fingers. "Very cool. Can I keep it?"

"No." Timas shook his head, slightly annoyed. "That pays for our meal. If you want more I'm sure your city can provide some."

Katerina dropped the bill back down on the table, looking disappointed. "Okay."

"And Katerina," Timas added as they left. "Please don't mention that I ate anything to my parents."

"Ok." She didn't ask why, thank goodness. Timas didn't feel like explaining more about the nature of being xocoyotzin.

Although he imagined there would be more trouble for him in revealing that the man who'd hit the city still lived, even if unintentionally, than in anyone finding out he'd eaten too much for the day.

Timas had the feeling that a lot of yelling at him lay ahead.