Steampunk! Part 18

Luz nodded. "Or like your board when you were a girl, eh, abuela?" Unlike all of Luz's other relatives, her grandmother hadn't been born in Kentucky, but in California, so far away as to be a legend. Luz's abuela had seen an ocean; she had swum in it. Most fascinating of all to Luz, she had surfed it.

Before her grandmother could answer, Luz's brother Caleb brought his bike to a sliding stop next to the stall. He was two years younger than Luz, but six inches taller, all elbows and knees where Luz had already been all curves and muscles at that age. He had a wide grin on his usually somber face.

He had a sheet of gray paper rolled up and stuck in the waistband of his shorts, clearly a worksheet he'd pulled down from the post outside the community workhouse. Luz's grandmother smiled and said, "I suppose you're leaving early today, eh, Luza?"

Caleb nodded respectfully at his grandmother but spoke to Luz. "Invasive plant removal at Raven Run," he said. "They've got gloves and hand tools out there, so nothing to haul along. And we get four hours for travel time."

This was a good community service a.s.signment. Raven Run was a nature preserve about fifteen miles away, on the limestone cliffs above the river. The old roads were still in decent shape in that end of the county, and there were some good hills along the way, especially if they took a route that went down to the river and back. Luz could make the ride straight to the preserve in forty minutes, and she wasn't even the strongest cyclist among her friends. They would have time to take a good long ride.

"How many slots?" asked Luz, heading around the back of the stall to her own bike.

"Four," said Caleb. "Um, Samuel was at the workhouse and already asked to come along. He's bringing one of his sisters."

Luz felt irritation pa.s.s over her face at the thought of Samuel and his hopeless crush on her. It wasn't that she didn't like him; it was just that he was like everything else in her life - known. Predictable. But she shrugged and said, "OK. Go round them up and meet me at the zero-mile marker in ten minutes. I'm going down to the shop to top off the air in my tires."

The shop was the stall run by their father that served as the main bike shop in town. He fixed the post office's long-haul cargo bikes for free in exchange for good rates on bringing in parts from the coast, but he always insisted that his children - and his other customers - make an honest attempt at repair before they settled for replacement.

Luz rolled in and nodded at her father. He was talking as he worked on a customer's bike, running through his bottomless inventory of crazy stories about old races and bike equipment made from the same material they used to use to make s.p.a.ceships. He had even been to see the Tour de France, back before, when pretty much anybody could go overseas, even people who weren't rich or soldiers.

The customer made his escape while Luz was using a floor pump to air up her tires. When she looked up, her father was carefully routing a brake cable through an eyelet brazed onto the downtube of an old steel frame. He had his tongue between his teeth, concentrating, and greeted her with nothing more than a raised eyebrow.

"Just needed some air," said Luz.

Papa finished with the cable. "Off for a ride?" he asked.

"Community service at Raven Run," she said. "With plenty of time padded into the a.s.signment for us to go down to the river and back."

Papa laughed. "They should weight the time allowances on those a.s.signment sheets according to youth and vitality," he said. "Y'all should have to spend the extra time doing whatever needs doing out there instead of doing hill sprints up from the ferry. They figure the travel time based on old slowpokes like me."

Luz rolled her eyes. She'd tried to follow her father up the ferry climb a few times and never managed to hold his wheel.

"What needs doing at the preserve?" he asked. "I haven't been out there this year."

"I didn't see the sheet," said Luz, spinning the cap back onto the valve stem of her rear tire, "but Caleb said something about nonnative species removal. Chopping out honeysuckle and English ivy, I guess."

Her father nodded. "We've been working on that for years."

Luz shrugged. "It does seem like it always comes back. But we have to try."

He mounted a wheel on a truing stand and spun it. "Why?" he asked. This was something else she knew to expect from her father, in addition to his stories. Lessons disguised as questions.

Luz pretended he was talking about the wheel and watched the considerable wobble as it turned. "Looks like maybe they T-boned a curb?"

Papa shook his head. "No. Well, yes, that's what happened to this wheel. But I meant why do we keep trying to pull all of the honeysuckle out of Raven Run?"

Luz knew this one. It was one of the central tenets of Localism. "Because they're invasive. They don't integrate; they displace." And then she added, "I'll see you tonight, Papa."

She shouted this last, because she was already rolling out of the stall and down the street, clicking up through the gears, weaving among carts pulled by pedestrians and cyclists and tall horses.

Caleb was the mapmaker and route finder. He usually based their rides on arcane themes, like Ride to the Location of Every Post Office Closed in Bourbon County Between 1850 and 2050 (a circuitous hundred miler through spa.r.s.ely populated farm country) and Turn Right Instead of Crossing Any Creek or Stream (also circuitous, but very short). The inevitable starting point of all his routes was the county's zero mile marker, an old statue of a camel set atop a dolmen in Phoenix Park. They'd grown so used to starting there that it was their common meeting point even for unplanned rides like today's.

Luz found Caleb waiting, talking with Samuel and, unexpectedly, his youngest sister, little Priscilla. Samuel was Luz's age and the only son in a family of many daughters. His mother doted on him, and he could almost always get out of whatever work he was doing at the pottery they ran. This was the first time, though, that Pris had ever come along on one of their rides.

The twelve-year-old girl sat on the saddle of a road bike that was just barely small enough for her. She'd lowered the seat all the way and was balancing herself against the mile marker. She studied the marker while the others talked.

"Hey, Miss Priss," said Luz. "Gonna try to keep up with the big kids today?"

Priscilla gritted her teeth and pointed to her flexed quads. "Don't slow me down too much, Luza!" She laughed at herself before pointing to the inscription below the statue. "What's AAA?"

"You asked for it," said Samuel. "You get to ride in the back with Caleb while he explains."

Luz led them out along Main Street, quickly leaving downtown behind and racing the long straight lane through the necklace of orchards that encircled the city. She heard Caleb's voice floating up from behind when the wind was right, catching phrases like "automobile a.s.sociation" and "U.S. route system" and "the call of the open road."

"I know what that means," she said, half to herself.

Samuel was drafting her closely and overheard. "You know what what means?"

They had just pa.s.sed between the crumbling concrete pillars of an old divided highway and had topped a rise. The road stretched out straight before them, sloping down along a gentle grade for a couple of miles, smooth and empty but for a few people walking along the gra.s.sy shoulders.

Luz pointed ahead with her chin. "Call of the open road," she said. "I know what that means."

Luz couldn't believe that tiny Priscilla was steadily pulling away from her on the long climb up from the ferry. She pushed harder on her bicycle's pedals, trying to match the rhythm of the turning wheels to her rapid breathing. Still, the younger girl danced on ahead, standing on her pedals and apparently unaware that she was leaving Luz and the others behind.

Near the top of the hill, Priscilla signaled a stop, and Luz thought she was finally tiring. But then the girl spoke.

"Is that an engine?" Priscilla asked, eyes wide.

Luz stopped beside her, struggling to slow her breath so she could better hear the howling sound floating over the fields. Hard to say how far away the noise was, but it was clearly in motion. And moving closer, fast.

Caleb and Samuel stopped beside them and dismounted.

"It is," said Caleb, curiosity in his voice. "Internal combustion, not too big."

"Not like on any of the Federal machines, though," Samuel added. "Not like anything I've ever heard."

Luz thought of the last time one of the great Army recruitment trucks had come through Lexington, grinding and belching and trumpeting its horn. It had been the previous autumn. Her parents had made her hide in one of the sheds behind the house, even though she was still too young for the draft. She had stood behind a tidy stack of aluminum doors her mother had salvaged from the ghost suburbs south of town and listened to the engine closely.

The Army engine had made a deeper sound than this, though whatever was approaching was not as high as the mosquito buzz of the little motors on the sheriff's department chariots. If the deputies rode mosquitoes, then the Federals rode growling bears. This was something in between: a howling wolf.

The noise dropped away briefly, stuttered, and then came back louder than ever.

"Whatever it is, it just turned into the lane," Luz told the others. She dismounted and waved for them all to move their bikes into the gra.s.sy verge to one side. They'd stopped at a point where the road was bound on either side by low dry-stone walls. A pair of curious chestnut quarter horses, fully biological, not the hissing machine-hybrid mounts of Federal outriders, ambled over briefly, hopeful of treats, but they snorted and trotted away as the noise came closer.

Suddenly, the sound blared as loud as anything Luz had ever heard, and a . . . vehicle rounded the curve before them. Luz flashed on the automobile carca.s.ses some people kept as tomato planters. She saw four wheels, a brace of fifty-five-gallon drums, and a makeshift seat. The seat was occupied by a distracted-looking young man wrestling a steering wheel as he hurtled past them, forcing them to move even farther off the road.

The vehicle fishtailed from side to side on the crumbling pavement, sputtering, and came to an abrupt halt when it took a hard left turn and hit the wall on the south side of the road. The top two layers of rock slid into the field as the noise died away.

They all ran toward the crash. Luz could see now that the vehicle was a modified version of a hay wagon, sporting thick rubber tires and otherwise liberally outfitted with ancient automobile parts. The seat was a cane-bottomed rocker with the legs removed, screwed to the bed. The driver was strapped into the chair and had a dazed expression on his face.

He was younger than Luz had first thought, just a little older than she, maybe. He had tightly curled black hair and green eyes. He blinked at them.

The huge metal engine that took up most of the wagon bed ticked.

"I think . . . ," he began, and trailed off, lips still moving, eyes still unfocused. "I think I need to adjust the braking mechanism."

He claimed, unbelievably, that he was from North Carolina. Hundreds of miles away, the other side of mountains with collapsed tunnels and rivers with fallen bridges. In Luz's experience, traffic from the east came into the Bluegra.s.s along only two routes: down from the Ohio off boats from Pittsburgh or along the Federal highway through Huntington.

"No, no," the driver said, piling the last rock back on top of the wall his machine had damaged. "I didn't come over the mountains. I went south first, then along the Gulf sh.o.r.e, then up the Natchez Trace through Alabama and middle Tennessee. The state government in Tennessee is pretty advanced. They've built pontoon bridges over all their rivers now."

Luz reached behind Fizz - that was the unlikely name he'd given - and made an adjustment to the slab of limestone he'd haphazardly dropped atop the wall. That he had accepted their offer to help him repair the fence turned out to be a good thing, because it was clear that he had no experience with dry-stone work. For some reason, this made him seem even more foreign to Luz than his vehicle or his claim to have seen the ocean. Samuel had whispered his opinion that Fizz would have left the wall in disrepair if they hadn't witnessed the crash, but Luz wasn't ready to be that judgmental.

Samuel was also more persistent in his questions than Luz thought was polite. "Well, then how did you cross the Kentucky River? And the Green and all the creeks you must have come to? We just came from the ferry and they would have mentioned you. And there's no way the Federals would have let you bring that thing across any of their bridges."

"There's more local bridges than you might think," said Fizz, either completely missing the hostility in Samuel's voice or ignoring it. "I only had to float Rudolf once. See the air compressor there? I can fill old inner tubes and lash them to the sides. That converts him into a raft, good enough for the width of a creek."

Caleb was examining the vehicle. "There are a lot of bridges that aren't on the Federal map," he said, almost to himself. Then he asked, "Why do you call it Rudolf?"

"Rudolf Diesel," said Fizz, in a different, stranger accent than most of his speech. He seemed to think that answered Caleb's question.

Priscilla whispered, "He speaks German." Luz found Priscilla's instant and obvious crush on Fizz annoying.

Fizz looked at the girls. "Sure, he did," he said, and smiled at Luz. "He was German. He probably spoke like eleven languages, not just English and Spanish. Everybody did back then. He designed this engine - or its ancestor, anyway." He pointed to the cooling metal engine on his vehicle.

"I hope you paid him for it," said Samuel.

"No, I remember," said Caleb. "Diesel was one of the men who made the internal combustion engines." A troubled expression crossed his face. "That's from history. You shouldn't tell people you named your car after him, Fizz."

Fizz wrinkled his nose and brow, scoffing. "Figures the only thing the Federals are consistent about are their interstate highway monopolies and their curriculum suggestions. Diesel wasn't a bad guy. Don't you guys have grandparents? Don't they talk about when everybody could go everywhere?"

Some do, Luz thought. Aloud, she said, "Our abuela has been everywhere. She came here from California before the oil finally ran out."

"And we can go anywhere we like," said Samuel. "We just like it here."

"But going places takes forever," said Fizz. Then he finally seemed to notice the uncomfortable glances being shared between Caleb and Samuel. "Not that this isn't a great place to be. The hemp-seed oil Rudolf is burning for fuel right now is from around here someplace. Or it was. My tanks are about dry. That's why I turned north when the Tennesseans wouldn't trade me any."

Luz nodded. "Sure. The biggest oil press anywhere is over in Frankfort. Our uncles sell them most of their hemp. What have you got to trade that the Feds would want?"

Fizz made the face again. "They're not much for bartering with people like me."

"And who's that?" asked Samuel. "Who are people like you?"

Fizz looked them all up and down, deciding something.

Then he said, "Revolutionaries."

"Revolting is more like it," Samuel gasped. He and Luz were working very hard, barely turning the pedals of their bikes over in their lowest gears. Fizz had brought out some cords from the toolbox on his machine, and between them, he and Luz had figured out a way to rig a Y harness connecting the automobile's front axle to the seatposts of her and Samuel's bikes. The others rode behind the automobile, hopping off to push on the hills.

Except for Fizz, who rode the machine the whole time, manning the steering wheel and chattering happily to curious Caleb and smitten Priscilla. Luz wished she could be back there. She had a thousand questions about the wider world.

Fizz had insisted they take a little used, poorly surfaced route into town. He said he wanted to approach the council of farmers and merchants, who acted as the community council, before they saw his machine. "I had trouble some places," he said. "Farther south."

Responding to Samuel, Luz asked, "What's revolting?"

He answered her with a question. "Do you know what we're pulling? I'll tell you. It's a car. A private car."

Luz took her left hand off the handlebars long enough to point out a particularly deep pothole in the asphalt. Samuel acknowledged with a nod, and they bore to the right.

"Don't be silly," Luz continued after they'd negotiated the hole. "Cars ran on oil. Petroleum oil, I mean."

But Luz had already noticed that a lot of the machine's parts were similar to those she found when she went scrounging with her mother. The steering wheel, for one thing, was plastic, and plastic was the very first word in the list of nonrenewables she'd memorized in grade school.

"Well, I guess he made a car that runs on hemp-seed oil," said Samuel. "Or somebody did." Samuel doubted every part of Fizz's story, even his name. "He probably stole it off the Federals."

Luz doubted that. Federals used their Army trucks, a few bicycles, the coal-burning horses that patrolled the highways, and the ornithopters. They all shared a sleek, machined design. Nothing at all like the haphazard jumble of Fizz's "car."

The group managed to attract only a few stares before they made it to one of the sheds behind Luz's and Caleb's house. Luz supposed that people a.s.sumed they'd found a heap of sc.r.a.p metal and had knocked together a wagon on-site to transport it to their mother's salvage shops. People brought her old things all the time.

"Are you going to get your father?" Samuel asked. "Because you should." Then, unusually, he left before Luz asked him to, saying he had to get home.

His little sister, however, clearly had no intention of leaving. She wordlessly followed Fizz as he crawled around, checking the undercarriage of his machine.

"I guess this job posting is open all week," said Caleb, pulling the paper out from his belt. Luz had completely forgotten the original purpose of their ride. "Maybe we can go on Wednesday if we can get enough people."

"Sure," said Luz.

"So it's OK if I work here?" Fizz asked. "You won't get in trouble?"

Caleb was worried. "Our father will be home soon - "

"Wait," Luz interrupted. Fizz and his car were the most interesting thing that had happened to Luz in a long time. Or ever, if she was honest with herself. "Mama's in the mountains, gleaning in the tailings from the old mines. I'll go to the shop and talk to Papa."

"That'd be great," said Fizz, popping his head out from under the machine, right at their feet. "Looks like you've probably got everything I need to get Rudolf up and running."

Luz left quickly, knowing it would be better for them all if her father knew what was waiting for him at home.

Luz's father moved around the stall, putting away tools and hanging bikes from hooks in the ceiling. "Yes, he could have driven here from North Carolina," he told Luz. "Before the Peak, people made the trip in a few hours."

Luz didn't doubt that her father was telling the truth, but something about his claim felt off. She thought of how she could feel the truth when somebody said that the sun was hot, but she could only acknowledge the truth when somebody said it was ninety-three million miles away.

"That's what he was talking about, I guess," she said. "Fizz. When he said that it takes forever to go anywhere now."

Without warning, her father dropped the seatpost he was holding to the shop floor. It made a dull clattering sound as it bounced back and forth on the wide oak boards.

"Hey!" said Luz as he grabbed her arm, hard, and pulled her out the open end of the stall.

Out in the street, he let go and pointed up at the sky. "Look up there!" he barked.

Luz had never heard her father sound so angry. It was hard to tear her eyes away from his livid face, but he thrust his finger skyward again. "Look!" he said.