Cullsman #9

by Michael John Grist

  I nod and watch her. She's exhausted from a day minding the girls, bargaining with the neighbors for food and water. Her hair is rumpled with play, her eyes sleepy, but still she is beautiful to me. The lines growing into her face are softened by the gas light, and I can see beneath them the girl I met long ago in a level two crust bar.

  "Where are you?" she asks me.

  I blink the memory away. I would be a coward to delay any longer.

  "I signed for the Cull today."

  Her eyes widen, and there is a long silence. I watch her work the meaning through, slowly, as though chewing the whole of her life in one bite.

  The warmth falls away from her. She leans back, rigid.

  "We agreed neither of us would." Her voice is clipped, emotionless.

  "We're dying here, Syl," I say.

  She stands. She walks to the window.

  "Get out," she says.

  I do not move. How can I? She says nothing more for a time.

  "They may not accept me," I tell her. "Even then, we'll be moved to the prime adjunct. We'll earn a year's keeping just for volunteering.

  She turns back to me, her eyes cold.

  "You broke your word."

  I know it. Every minute in the Adjudicant's office I knew it, as I signed my name to the papers of the Cull. But I saw no other way.

  "I'll not see my girls starve."

  She snorts. "You'll not see them at all."

  * * *

  A day passes, and we go to the zoo. There are precious few animals now, scrawny things made for low gravity, culled from the last Second. The fields no longer work here, though, so they stagger about under a crushing weight.

  My daughters do not realize the animals are in pain. They sing and dance about. Glaya holds King Trunk up to the glass so he can better see his counterparts.

  The next day I leave. At the door Sylabry stands, arms across her chest.

  "You are a fool," she says, her face hard, and I know that she is right. I have known it since I signed for the Cull, but I had no choice.

  "I love you," I answer, because there is nothing else left to say. "I'll wait for you."

  She pulls me into a fierce embrace. We are both crying. At the last, she whispers hotly in my ear.

  "Don't wait."

  Then she turns, closes the door, and I do not see her eyes again.

  "I will," I call at the door through the blur of tears. "I will."

  * * *

  I ride the lowrail to the Adjudicant's office, where uprail cabs are waiting to elevate us to the Second in the sky. Our training will be in pods near the fizzling core, that we might better know the conditions to expect.

  There are one hundred of us in this cab. While we sit and ride, a blue-streaked instructor stands at the fore and bellows the creed at us; the Host must go on, the Second is food. They are words I have heard a thousand times before, every time I caught a lift on the Cull cabs heading for my drills in college. Now, though, it is different. I cannot help but think of Sylabry and the girls. What are they doing now? Have their moving orders come through? Are they on their way already to the Prime?

  I look out of the window, and watch the concave curve of the Host diminishing. Even there, the lights are dwindling like guttering candles, some adjuncts wholly black and dead, as our vast shell of a world runs out of life stolen from the Second. That is what I have left behind for my wife and girls.

  "You, son, what is the Leeson imperative?"

  The instructor is looking to me. They all are. To my shame I feel tears on my cheeks.

  "Survive," I answer. It is an easy question. "At all costs."

  The instructor nods, and his blue streaked arm flashes once in my direction. "Good. Promoted to Cull group one."

  I turn my gaze forwards as the dead black bulk of the Second nears.

  Our pods are clustered around an old mountain at the edge of the moon-core pit. At times jets of gas vent from the black cracked landscape, but there's barely any heat; hardly anything left to squeeze from this hulking corpse.

  "From your ranks the nine will be chosen," says the group one instructor. He wears flashes of red down his forearms that blink softly as he studies us, one by one. "Do you know why?"

  I do not care. There must be two hundred of us in this glass-walled bubble, with nothing to see but the man's red-slashed suit and the distant encircling curve of the Host. No one answers.

  The instructor points at me. His red suit flashes, and I imagine all my information feeding into his tinted contacts. I have never seen this stage of the Cull before. My heart thuds in my chest. "Why did you weep on the uprail?"

  I am shocked by the challenge. I have no answer. My shame was seen, and I wonder if I will now be sent back to Sylabry with nothing. I open my mouth to plead, but the instructor is no longer looking at me. He has moved to another.

  "Why did you weep at the Adjudicant?" he asks that man. I am puzzled. Am I not to be rejected? This second man looks to me, back again, but once more the instructor's gaze has moved on. He asks another man a variant of the same question, then another, each time not lingering long enough to hear the answer, until it seems he has asked the question of half the men here.

  At the last the Instructor falls silent, and gazes out over us.

  "That is why," he says. He stands there for a moment as if this is explanation, as if we are to understand from this.

  "No Cullsman longs for this. No Cullsman seeks to run or escape. Every man of the Cull longs only to return, to know the family he left behind, to see his children grown up. You are here because you are those men. You have come because the survival of the Host is everything to you."

  I understand now. It is simple, elegant, and cruel.

  "From your ranks nine will be chosen. The rest will serve. But hear this. Serve well, and you will all regain what you think you have lost. Complete your Cull, and you will all know the touch of the loved ones you left behind. The Host promises it."

  I think of Sylabry, her lips by my ear, her final words, and push them aside. I have no choice. This is the only way it can be.

  * * *

  Our training begins with wisdom patches. We each receive five in the first day; language, culture, mining, technology, and the Cull. In the waiting pod I exchange my story with the others in my group. Some were adjuncts above me, others behind, but all with young families, all terrified they would starve.

  After the patch I stagger from the binding station. It feels as though my mind is weighted with slurry, tipping from side to side.

  "Give it a day to bed in," says the doctor in his flashing red suit. "Now go rest in the dorm."

  I try to sleep, along with the men around me, but it is like trying to squeeze water between my hands. The weight lolls and totters even with my head immobile on the pillow. Men around me cry out in frustration.

  * * *

  The next day it is tolerable. They rail those of us who are able to the mountaintop to look down into the flagging core. The core-pit is immense, its far lip invisible beyond the curvature of the planet. Within, it is near-wholly dark, only a glister of faint light emanating from far below. It seems a vast and bloodless wound.

  "That is what you will do," says the latest instructor. "Are you ready?"

  I nod. We all do.

  "Good," he says. "Some of your fellows have been ejected already, when their minds rejected the patch. There are less than one hundred of you now. The others will serve. Among you I will find my nine."

  The rail takes us into the core, and at each stage the instructor draws our attention to things I didn't know that I knew. As he talks I feel the patch in my mind opening up, the slurry spreading, diffusing, sinking in.

  "Here are the spout-heads of the first drill tines," he says, pointing at huge metal pillars buried in the core-pit walls. The words are unfamiliar, but I feel meaning radiating out from the patch; these drill tines will be built to the Cullsman's design, out of the mass of the Second itself. "You'll place the
m yourself," he continues, "using amputation tech and fibrillar weave. This is magnetophoric rock, this is oroscilly rock, this is the remnants of the first forced-fusion injections."

  The words take on borrowed meaning as I hear them for the first time. I know that the Cullsman will be master of all of this, will manipulate it all as part of the Cull.

  The Instructor goes on as we drop deeper, and the patch in my mind expands like a sponge in the rain. I feel it crowding out the rest of me, pushing my life with Sylabry and the girls to the edges. I still feel them there, in the outskirts, but their presence is less urgent, subsumed by the merciless protocols of the Cull. Perhaps it is better this way. I would not want them witness to the things I must do. I can only hope they will still be there when I am done.

  Above the core our carriage hovers at the end of the rail. There is some mild heat now. The instructor says nothing. We stand there silently for a long time, staring into the dying heart of this planet. It is horrifying, to see something once so grand extinguished by the hand of a Cullsman past. I realize this is why I am alive. I am already a part of it.

  Hours pass, and the sense of horror dissipates, leaving only a slow, unwilling acceptance. This is the life of the Host, red in tooth and claw. I feel the same understanding spreading through those around me. Eventually, silently, our minds reformed by what we have seen and the spreading tendrils of the patch, the rail lifts us away and we rise up to the pods, reborn.

  * * *

  The following months pass in an endless railing from place to place upon the Second, our hundred diminishing at each new site as they baulk at the images of destruction, at the lengths of cruelty expected of us. I too am sickened, as we pick over the crumbled relics of this planet's culture like surgeons dissecting a corpse, but I push that sickness far to the side, because I cannot afford it. All that matters is my family, and what I must do to keep them alive.

  We visit the Second's mass grave sites, the places where their simple weapons exploded ineffectively against the tines, against the hook, the rubbled satellites they themselves destroyed as they flung fire out at the approaching Host, and I think of Glaya with King Trunk in her arms. We hover above the last of their outpost cities, enclosed and treatied against our final incursion, their lights glimmering low over their dwindling supplies of fuel, and I remember the cold hard look in Sylabry's eyes.

  All the while the instructor talks over what we see, running us through each step of the accelerated evolutions we will bring to our planet, how we will leverage up every gain, reinvest every scrap of matter, and so construct at the point of zero spin an almighty hook, that the Host will use to Cull us.

  The images of loss and ruin become entwined with the evolutions he describes, until they seem to belong together, these causes and effects, so perfectly aligned that any sense of horror is pushed to the side, discarded as just another phase in the plan, just like my sense of Sylabry and the girls.

  * * *

  At the last, I am to see them one final time. The day of our jettison is soon, and there are scarcely more than thirty of us left. Nine will head the Cull of worlds.

  We take the downrails to the Host. It seems a different life, now, walking these covered streets, seeing the ruin and waste slowly creeping in. There is not enough here. There is never enough.

  With a red-sleeved instructor at my back, I tread the cracked bitumen decks heading to my old home. The signs still abound.

  THE CULL NEEDS YOU

  It is cold, and this endopolis is dying. I look up at the distant bulk of the Second in the sky, see the few lights that remain glimmering more weakly than before. Their great cities, their last refuges, slowly turning to dust.

  At the door, I pause a long moment. I remember what Sylabry last said to me here.

  "Don't wait."

  I raise my hand to the handle.

  The instructor stops me from reaching it. His blue-flashed glove wraps about my wrist like the grip of the drilling tines.

  "This is the final test," he says. "You are not permitted to see her."

  My heart sinks. I had not realized how much I wanted to, despite everything they have done to make me forget, to flood my mind with the endless protocols of the Cull. Sylabry is the reason I am here. I am doing this for her, for Glaya and Foral.

  "I cannot?" I ask.

  He nods.

  I stare at him a long moment, the realization settling in. They have brought me here to face this head-on. I will not see her again for twenty years, and I must accept it now.

  He turns me and we start walking away. My heart feels numb. I imagine Sylabry at the window, looking out at my back, waiting for one last embrace, one last chance to take back the words she said. I imagine Glaya by her side, clutching King Trunk to her thin chest, asking why her daddy is leaving.

  I cannot bear it. I cannot bear that as the last image they have of me, a father who left them behind. I break from the instructor's grip and race back, yank open the door, tear into the hallway calling out their names.

  The place is cold and empty. The living room has no furniture. I am too late. They have left me behind. I drop to my knees and stare.

  The Instructor stands at my back.

  "Congratulations," he says. "You have passed the final test. You will be Cullsman #9."

  * * *

  They change my face and body to look like the people of the planet I will Cull. It is not so severe -- a trimming of knuckles and nose -- and I am up from the cot in a day. I must meet my fifty, learn their strengths and weaknesses, that our Cull might go well.

  Named my Secconeir is a woman called Eryllin. Her face is as hard as the Host's bitumen decks. She calls me Cullsman, and averts her eyes when I look to her. I suppose that is the way.

  The others are solid men and women with their loss put behind them, though I know it is there. We have all left our families, sacrificed so the Host can go on, and I can see the weight of it in their cold, determined eyes. We are bonded in this.

  A day later, the Host launches us. We slingshot around its enormous orbit for three days, stealing momentum from its mass, until at last we are packed into the foam beds, the lasso is lifted, and we fire off at a vector, off to our chosen planet, ready to be Culled when the Host arcs back around, two decades later.

  * * *

  I wake to rocking. We have had training for this. I tear away the foam pads from my body, lumber to the flight deck, and look out onto a new world.

  Water, endlessly, everywhere. An ocean. The vastness of it strikes me harder than the encompassing bulk of the Host or the gaping hole down to the Second's core. There is enough water here to make the Great Rains last for decades, as this planet's mass is mined away and its oceans steadily transpire to the Host.

  Eryllin is by my side. "To the Pole, Cullsman?" she asks.

  I nod.

  Her fingers run over keys and I feel the buzz of static as stiffening fields brace us against the sudden acceleration.

  "All crew accounted for, bar one," she says, her tone professional and lifeless.

  "Dead?"

  "Dead," she confirms. "Embolism. The system evacuated his corpse during the long haul. There are forty-nine of us now."

  I run a quick mental calculation, re-juggle priorities. This information too was in the patch. There are endless redundancies.

  "Very well," I say. "Prepare the packets."

  * * *

  The Cull begins quietly. It has been refined and perfected across a thousand industrial worlds, and we follow it to the letter.

  Once our Pole base is established in the glacial ice, I send the forty-nine out, each to different countries spread across the world. Within each they establish identities, trading institutions, and begin the lodging of claims to intellectual property, which I coordinate.

  They begin with small inventions, each unconnected, nothing to draw attention; fine-tuning of existing machinery, new coolant mixtures for power stations, new braking systems for automobiles, new formul
ations of plastic, rubber, metal, gas, liquid, and so on.

  Though small, all are designed to become indispensable and universally adopted within months. We create entire industry chains producing these needed goods, and so begin the siphoning of the world's resources. As profits amass we buy up other corporations until we are majority shareholders, through shell corporations nested so deeply in legal protection that no pattern can possibly be discerned. Through them, sourced across our supply chains that span the planet, we begin to manufacture not just parts, but wholes. Instead of only the fuel for a jet engine or the tread for the wheels, we produce the whole plane. We do it slowly enough, spread widely enough, that it seems no more than a record season of global innovation. There is no way to see our hand at work.

  Next we move to weapons. We supply armies and governments, and our technologies win wars all around the world, backing our chosen sovereign states, until there is no more war, and all resources can be bent to our ends. We build new communications networks, launch our own satellites, and manipulate the minds of the world's leaders. We destroy our competitors and monopolize everything. On forty-nine different fronts, in forty-nine different countries, through thousands of corporations, we develop the world, take hold of its reins, and bend it in the direction we desire.

  There is no way to resist us. The Cull is so seamless it offers nothing to resist. At the five-year mark there are enough pooled resources, assets, and industries to begin work on the tines and the hook. By that point we are essentially running the planet, using its own desire for technology, wealth and power to make it blindly dig its own grave. We have taken everything they already had, made it bigger, better, and stronger, and then turned it to our own ends.

  * * *

  Three months later the deaths begin.

  An incendiary bomb at a global trade summit takes the forty-ninth as he negotiated for rare-earth metal rights.

  An investigation leads to nothing. The country's media and leaders ascribe it to squabbles over mythic beings and dogma across cultures. To hear that, I am glad that such senseless violence will be eradicated in the Cull.

  I must re-juggle the plan again. I order the remaining forty-eight to compensate for his absence.