Red Walker Read online

  Dana hung his head and sighed. He couldn’t test the fix he had made without plugging in the stove, and he couldn’t plug in the stove without moving it, and he wasn’t supposed to move it. He replaced the back of the control panel and tightened the bolts that held it in place. He kept his back to her.

  “Ma’am, I think I’ve fixed the stove, but the power cord doesn’t reach to plug it back in. When the moving team comes to move the stove back, they’ll plug it back in. If the stovetop still doesn’t work, you’ll need to call Work Control and I’ll come back.”

  The woman was not happy. “This is ridiculous. Can’t you just move it far enough to plug it in?”

  “No, ma’am, I am really sorry, I would get in trouble,” said Dana.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake! Let me try!”

  Dana stepped back as far as he could, and the woman set her control box on the stove top and started pushing at the stove. She made no progress, despite putting her shoulder into it and bracing her backside against the cabinets.

  “Damn!” she shouted. “Damn!” Dana kept his eyes on the floor. “Just get out!”

  Dana quickly gathered his tools, slipped on his pack and walked down the stairs, hearing the door slam behind him. He almost expected to feel a jolt from his collar until he got out of range on the third floor. He was tense until he got there. Several times over the past few years, he had gotten a sudden painful jolt while walking down the street, from some unseen source. Once the pain had brought him to his knees. He always wondered if there were angry women looking out a window who just wanted to see a man in pain, or if he was just too near to a control box being used on some other man, or if some woman had pushed a button by mistake.

  The sidewalks were almost deserted. Occasionally, a man, dressed like Dana in a black shirt, black pants, and black shoes, shiny neck collar and wristband, sometimes with a bright yellow workpack on his back, would walk past him. They did not look up or acknowledge each other. It would have been suspicious. He saw no women walking. Vehicles moved past him down the street once in a while. Sometimes the women in the vehicles were wearing that particular shade of blue that always made him a little afraid.

  In the middle of one block there was a vehicle by the curb that was clearly non-functional. Three women in various colors of clothing were gathered around it, and a large panel in the front was propped open. One of the women shouted at him, “You there! Man! Do you know anything about electric motors?”

  Dana knew about small electric motors that he had to service, but he had never been trained on the large ones that some vehicles used, and probably never would be. “No ma’am, I’m sorry. My occupation is appliance repair.” Dana kept his head down.

  “Men are so useless!” the woman said in a disgusted tone. “We’ll have to call Work Control. Saint Andrea knows how long it will take to get this fixed. Stuff falls apart and they take forever to fix it.”

  “There’s a cute restaurant down the block,” said another woman. “Why don’t we go there and have coffee?”

  Dana took that as a signal that he could move on. Actually, he felt pretty confident that he could have diagnosed the problem with any electric motor, no matter how large. They were pretty simple.

  Dana grasped the principles of things quickly and could rapidly deduce how most everyday things worked. His training, first in school, and then for two years as an apprentice under a middle-aged appliance repairman who had lived in his dorm, had been mostly fun. He wasn’t taught how to design appliances, but he felt confident he could design most. He knew they could be designed better than they were. Appliances, like the buildings and roads, were prone to breaking down, and he could see why. He could do better, he was sure. But, he knew he would never have the materials and tools to make them.

  He had deduced for himself that voltage equaled current in amps times resistance in ohms, although that was nowhere in the manuals. Watts equaled voltage times current. He had simply looked at the backplates of some appliances and had done the math. Wiring diagrams took some work to understand, but they had become second nature to him now. He had worked out for himself, using his multi-tester on various appliances, that the resistance of a circuit with components in series was the sum of the resistances of the components. It had taken him much longer to work out that when components were in parallel, the total circuit resistance was the inverse of the sum of the inverses of the resistances of the components. He had been very proud of himself when he had figured that out. He never told anyone. He suspected it was something he was not meant to know.

  Dana understood electrical circuits, but had only a vague notion of electronics. He knew there were resistors, capacitors, inductors, transformers, switches, various transistors, and printed circuits containing thousands of components on a little chip. But, he never worked with those chips beyond replacing them. Electronics were out of his field, and probably inaccessible to males anyway, like all computerized devices. Too much of the security apparatus ran on electronics. If he encountered an electronic chip in a device, the manual would tell him step-by-step how to determine if there was a fault, and how to replace it, but he could only guess at what it did.

  His apprenticeship tutor had always been impressed by how quickly he learned things. He was a thin, balding, man with a lined, worried face, but it brightened to a smile when Dana had quickly excelled at some task. One day, the man had said to him, “I think your talents are being wasted in this occupation, my young friend.” He had grown to warmly like his tutor in a way he never had liked any other person since he had been taken from his mother, and was sadder than he had ever been when the two years were up. The man had said, “I’m sorry I have to leave. I … think this may be my last assignment.” He looked far more sad and worried than usual. Dana had not known what he meant, and now kicked himself for not asking. But, he strongly suspected the man would have evaded the question.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  He spent 90 minutes at the second address. He had to take the ice-making unit out of the refrigerator and take it apart before he discovered that two gears had gotten wet and then had frozen together. He ran hot water over them and dried them off. Dana was preparing to reassemble the unit when the woman’s little boy arrived home from kindergarten. He had brown, curly hair and large brown eyes, and was very inquisitive, asking Dana what the ice-making unit did and how it worked. Dana had a little bit of experience with children in this sort of situation. He always enjoyed talking to them. He showed the boy the parts, and explained how the unit made ice as he re-assembled it. It was something magic to the boy. As far as Dana knew, it was perfectly OK to make eye contact with him, and his mother did not seem to mind. Dana wondered if this bright little boy was one of his. He did not know any of the children he had fathered, or how many there were. It was none of his business. Briefly, he thought how pleasant it would be to show the boy something of what he knew every day, and bask in his admiration. But, that wasn’t going to happen.

  When Dana was packing up, he explained to the mother that this sort of problem occurred often with these older ice-making units, and she should probably set aside one day a month to let the freezer defrost. He doubted she would do it. As he left, he glanced around the living room and saw, as he suspected, there was no viewscreen in the apartment. It appeared that women with boys at home were not allowed them.

  As he left, Dana realized how hungry and thirsty he was, and that he needed to pee. He could not possibly have asked the woman for a glass of water, a place to sit and eat his nutrition bars, or for the use of her bathroom. But now he was becoming desperate for a toilet.

  He knew there was a male dorm in the next block, and he hurried there. He explained to the matron in the vestibule office what he needed. He had a feeling she was probably rolling her eyes, but she directed him to the bathroom on the second floor. The four men who lived in the dorm were all out working. The Matron allowed him to sit at the two-person table just off the vestibule, and eat his nutrition bars and
drink a glass of water. He thanked her, and he meant it, and then he set out on his two kilometer walk to his third assignment.

  Dana enjoyed the day. The sun felt good on the right side of his face and chest as he walked southeast, into the nicest suburb of the city, with large two-story homes surrounded by lawns and gardens. There was no one else walking on the streets, although Dana made sure to keep his head down anyway. There were very few vehicles. Something strange did occur, though. A formation of four aircraft, moving very fast, very loud, heading south, passed overhead to the west of him. He looked up briefly and saw them shining in the sunlight as they streaked away. He assumed they were military aircraft, but what their purpose could be he did not know.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The woman who opened the door was dressed, as far as Dana could tell, in a pink business suit. “You must be Dana,” she said in a soft voice. She sounded older, maybe elderly. “Work Control told me you were coming. Please come in. Would you like something to drink?”

  Dana was momentarily stunned by her kindness. “No ma’am, thank you, I’m fine.”

  “Well, you’ll have your work cut out for you with these two bulbs,” she said, “Follow me.”

  They walked to the back of the house, the woman seeming to limp a little. She looked a little frail. The woman said, absentmindedly, “All the maintenance men and gardeners are short these days.” On the way, Dana saw framed photos of two young women and two young men on a table. “My kids!” the woman said brightly. It was unusual. He had never seen pictures of men in any home - occasionally boys, but never men.

  They reached a room that covered the entire back of the house, two stories high, all curved glass windows, looking out onto a garden full of flowers artfully arranged. There was rich leather furniture here and there, and rugs with complex designs on the polished wooden floor. Dana had seen some nice homes, but none quite as nice as this.

  “Look up,” she said. Dana was careful to keep his back to her as he looked up. There were two chandeliers hanging a meter over his head, each with four type C bulbs, with one of the four burned out. “There’s a big aluminum ladder in the garage. Come on, I’ll help you carry it. Then, I need to watch the news.”

  At that moment Dana noticed that a large hanging viewscreen covering part of the wall of the room opposite the windows, and furthermore, it was on with the sound muted. “Uh, ma’am, uh, I’m not supposed to watch viewscreens,” he said.

  “I know. It won’t hurt you. I won’t tell. And, this is important.” As she led him toward the garage door, he noticed the viewscreen on the wall to the side of it was showing a group of young women in khaki uniforms, holding what looked like weapons of some kind across their chests, marching in formation. He was careful to keep the video camera in his neck ring pointed away from it.

  The ladder had a label on it saying “11.8 kg.” That meant it was OK for Dana to carry if someone else took the other end. Together they brought it into the sunroom and set it up under one of the chandeliers, pointing away from the viewscreen. Dana took out one of the two new bulbs and started to climb. As he did, the woman said “Sound,” and the sound came on the viewscreen. Now he was terribly conflicted. If he listened, he was breaking the Rules very badly. He said nothing. He put his forefinger over the microphone on his neck ring, holding the new bulb with three fingers, and hoped. The woman held onto the lower part of the ladder to steady it.

  “General, what is the situation with the southern rebellion?” Dana turned his head slightly to catch the viewscreen out of the corner of his eye. It was showing a young woman interviewing an older, hefty woman in a green tunic with a red sash across her chest, brimming with brilliant, colorful medals. Dana was trying to unscrew the dead bulb one-handed.

  “We are confident that we can push the rebels back. We would have finished them last week, but the entry of Mexican troops into the war has caused some reversals. Right now, most of the fighting is south of a line from Phoenix to San Antonio, Texas.” A map appeared on the viewscreen. “We had almost pushed the rebels down to Brownsville, but then we were attacked by the Mexican Army. They are supplying heavy weapons, hypersonic intelligent missiles, intelligent fighting machines, and aircraft, so it will take longer to push them back.” Dana was now concentrating on the dead bulb above his head, but he could still hear everything.

  “We thought Mexico was an ally. Why have they joined the rebels?” asked the younger woman.

  The general sighed. “What can you expect from a patriarchal culture? They still allow men to vote, hold office, and run things. It’s natural for men to be aggressive and acquisitive. It’s their hormones, as we all know. They want what we have. We will just have to show them that they can’t have it.”

  “Casualties?” asked the younger woman.

  The General paused. “That’s classified, and this is a public hearing.” There was a murmur from the screen.

  Dana had finished with the first bulb replacement and began climbing down the ladder, still one-handed, with a forefinger over the microphone and three fingers holding the dead bulb. He tried not to make his muting of the microphone obvious to the woman, although it must have been. Together, he and the woman moved the ladder under the second chandelier and he began to climb. The viewscreen was now showing a line of eight aircraft, sun glinting off their surfaces, lifting off in formation and disappearing at incredible speed with a roar. They looked much like the ones he had seen earlier.

  Another voice was speaking. “From a small disturbance of a few escaped men, the rebellion gave the authorities in south Texas more and more trouble. Somehow, the rebels obtained weapons and staged raids on small military and police installations, killing some of our brave girls, and making off with more weapons and supplies, freeing men along the way by breaking their hardware. As the weeks went by, their testosterone levels rose as the effects of the suppression drug wore off, and their raids began to include rape…”

  The woman said, “Off.” Suddenly, the sound went dead, and Dana was able to drop his finger from the mike. He finished replacing the second bulb and climbed down.

  He wondered what he would say to the woman. But, she said nothing to him. The silence between them was embarrassing. Finally, she said, “Don’t worry. You never heard that. I won’t tell. No one will question what happens in my house. Thanks for fixing the lights, Dana. It was just in time for a garden party tomorrow. My name is Marjorie, by the way. Let’s put the ladder back.”

  Dana walked back to his dorm in a daze. The whole day had been the most confusing of his life. He had always anchored his life around certainties – the dorm, the Matrons, the Rules, the knowledge that as a man, he needed to be carefully controlled, and would be. Now, none of that was certain. Rowan had broken the hardware and had run, and Male Control had not discovered it immediately. Somewhere to the south, there were men who had broken free and were running loose, armed with weapons, freeing other men. And, there was a country called Mexico where men could participate as full citizens, and they were helping the rebellion. He could not let all that show on his face when he returned.

  Halfway back to the dorm, his wristband vibrated, and the screen said “7000.” That was a warning that he was getting close to the step limit. No problem, he was only about 600 steps from the dorm.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Dana woke the next morning with just his wristband giving the usual mild 6:30 vibration. The plastic bedframe and thin mattress across the room were just as they had been when he had taken away the sheets yesterday. He looked up at the long window butted up against the ceiling, only 20 cm of thick glass across the top of the room. The sky was grey and the window was streaked with rain. Better than sleet, he thought. But, it meant that he was going to have a cold wet sock on the bottom of his left foot, where the sole of his shoe had worn through. He wasn’t due for a new pair of shoes for nearly a month.

  He knew he should rush for the bathroom before it was fully occupied, but he decided to be one of the last
this morning. He wanted to think. He suspected that Rowan had known about the rebellion, and had waited for an opportunity to escape to join it. But, how did he find out? How far would that mean travelling? Fifty kilometers? A thousand? How far could he travel in a night on foot? How would he evade detection by MC patrols or camera drones? How would he find food? Could he use a vehicle? Would there be patrols in the areas away from the roads? Could he be detected even at night, hidden in bushes? Were there towns, farms, and other habitations in the countryside? Were there dangerous wild animals? Would there be other escapees to travel with? How much planning did Rowan do? Did he just run and hope for the best? Was he, even now, being electrocuted by a Male Control officer? Dana simply didn’t know, and he had no idea how to find out.

  Dana went through the next two weeks of routine work and household duties constantly turning over these questions in his head and looking for any information that might help answer them, but to no avail.

  One strange and disturbing thing did happen. Near the end of the two weeks, he was given an address he had never seen before, right on the eastern edge of his normal territory. Just one address for the day, but several items to fix. There was routine maintenance on a large air conditioning unit, several bulbs to replace, and a microwave oven that didn’t work. The air conditioning unit and the microwave were a problem, since a number of things could be wrong with each, and he doubted all the possible components would fit into his bag. He took only those that were most likely, and still was just under the 10 kg limit.

  The address turned out to be a building that looked like an abandoned warehouse – a big open space with cinder block walls under a roof. The Matron at the door was in a khaki uniform. She told him that all the women there but one were out on training exercises, and showed him where the air conditioning unit was. After an hour, he had done all the maintenance, luckily finding nothing wrong that required a component he didn’t have.