by Rok Chillah
"But you don't know for sure?" Brenna said. Her eyes were wide and hopeful, her teeth like little chicles of desire.
"I have no idea, nor would the most loving mother have control over their lives."
"But they lived?"
"Yes, they lived."
"Oh, thank you," Brenna said and started to cry again, this time for joy. She turned away, dabbing her eyes with her fingertips.
Ridge wondered if it was a lie, but he was happy for her. "What about Dorothy?" he asked. As Venable smiled again, before Venable could reply, he blurted: "What were their names? I loved my children but I can't picture them and I don't know their names." Truth was, he'd nearly forgotten them, and that made him sad.
"Here they are," Venable said. "Patrick Jr. after you, and Robert after Dorothy's dad."
"Then my name is Patrick?" Ridge almost laughed. Tomson did laugh. Brenna and Lantz joined in.
Tomson yelled "This is all more bullshit!" and punched the screen. He couldn't harm the wall, and Venable was unfazed. "No," Venable said, "these are all real people. They lived long ago. Brenna's two boys Ricardo Jr. and Matteo would have lived their lives back on Earth, two or three thousand years ago."
"They are dust," Brenna said, losing some of her joy. Then she brightened again: "But they lived. They had their lives." She bit her lip before continuing: "I hope they loved me as much as I loved them. Or as much as the woman who I was..." She was unable to say more.
"You see," Venable said, "it's not so bad. The engineers and thinkers meant well. They were kind people who tried to think of everything. They tried to think about how we would feel." The screen flickered, and he looked up. "Power is fading. Will need a few hours to recharge." He laughed. "I haven't talked this much in ages. I am all alone here."
And half nuts, Ridge thought.
"...Many secrets," Venable said, his voice breaking up. "...Largo, the city of the future."
"What is he saying?" Tomson asked.
"When we orbit New Earth, we'll drink to that," Venable said. He grinned. His image pulsed weakly as the batteries fed their remaining juice into the com nodes. "Great view from Largo. You and I won't be around, but our descendants will remember us."
"Tacoma!" Lantz shouted, desperate to get her share of the information. "What street did I live on?"
"Off Pearl Street near Point Defiance Park."
"Yes!" Lantz said. "Pembroke Court."
"Pembroke Court No. 34, the house with the basketball hoop on the sidewalk. That's where Dr. Werner Lantz lived, the geneticist at SeaTac University."
"So that's it," Tomson said. "You dumb shit. You gave it away. Some guy named Lantz was mixing test tubes at the lab, and he cooked a few people up."
"Shut up!" Lantz said.
"Easy," Ridge said, putting a hand on Tomson's powerful arm. "Let her have her memories. We don't know how much of this is real and how much is phony, but that's all we're going to get."
The screen flickered again. "Please come talk to me again," Venable said. He smiled as before, but against a dimmer background. The stars were gone, and the background with the coffee-drinking woman had been replaced by a kind of neutral cottony fog.
"Let us in there," Ridge said."
"I cannot, but there is a key."
"Where is the key?" Ridge pressed, leaning close.
In a fading voice, Venable said: "WorkPod01."
"How do we get in there?"
"Hurry," Venable said faintly. "Tell them the code."
"What code?" Ridge said through gritted teeth. "What is this code?"
Venable's voice was a mere whisper: "Function Check Largo." His image was now only a faint outline on a dull gray square. It was like seeing a ghost. His eyes flicked upward, to the right, as if to help his ears hear. "I hear the cleaners. They are coming up in the elevator. They can't reach me, but they can harm you."
As Venable's image faded, they could hear the turning of the elevator gears. They heard a sound like thick cables smeared with grease, stealthily clicking while coiled around their turning pulleys as the elevator car rose.
"Here," Lantz said, "there is a stairway or something. She was on her knees, pulling up a round steel trapdoor in the carpet. Ridge glimpsed yellowish light, steel ladder rungs, a steel tube leading down. "In here!" she said, lowering her wiry frame down into the vertical shaft without waiting for approval; fear for her life, Ridge supposed. He heard the fluting now, the push of air, the plaintive and deadly notes that hung in the air like drifting leaves, like phrases looking for one another to complete a thought. The elevator was audibly rumbling and shuddering now as the car drew near. Ridge thought he heard the chitter of claws on marble, the ripping sound of paw-callus on carpeting. He could well picture their round mouths. He could imagine the slit eyes opening into pairs of round goggle-shaped eyes to find the next human meal. Cleaners, Venable had called them. All part of a plan.
"Down the hatch!" Tomson said, following Lantz. Brenna followed. Even as Brenna's auburn ball of hair sank slowly down the shaft, and Ridge swung himself around to follow, the car rocked to a halt in the elevator shaft. Ridge heard the chorus of excited, hard mudman breaths now. It sounded like a complex note from a calliope, a steam-driven chord of anticipation, a regular up-note from diaphragms meant to sing in hell. Ridge banged his knee on a hard steel rung, and a knock against the ribs took his breath away, but he was too intent to notice. He was intent pulling the trap door down on his head and twirling the lock wheel which dropped steel tumblers into place to seal the floor even as the car doors rumbled open and a half dozen baseball-heads tromped out with their claws and mouths open, their sewn-up skulls and slitty sock eyes expressionless, their nostrils just pairs of yellowish holes poked in borrowed and decaying skin the color of bread-crusts.
Holding a finger over his mouth for silence, Ridge gestured to the faces looking up at him from below. "Down, down, go," he whispered.
The shaft led down interminably. It was lit at intervals by hard little industrial lights the size of one's palm, set back behind steel gratings that resembled shower drains.
"Where are we going?" Lantz whispered. She was still at the bottom, going first. Ridge could see the goose bumps on her shoulders past the quickly moving jumpsuited elbows and knees of Tomson and Brenna.
"Just keep going," Ridge said. "We have to get to WorkPod01 and blow our way in if we have to. Venable says there is a code in there."
"I just want to curl up in there and rest," Tomson said. He slowed for a moment, hung on the ladder, and took a deep breath. Brenna collided with him and apologized. Sweat ran down Tomson's dark face. His eyes were large, white, and desperate. "You want to rest?" Ridge asked full of concern.
"You're not tired?" Tomson looked up, huffing.
"Not yet," Ridge said, "but if you talk about it I might just want to curl up and sleep for a day or two."
"We've got to get to safety," Lantz whispered. Her freckles glowed in the amber light. Her eyes looked blue amid yellowish sclera.
"WorkPod01," Brenna said as if it were a promise.
"Once we get in we can rest," Ridge said. "We were safe there before. We'll be safe again."
"Oh God yes," Lantz said, climbing faster. Her bare arms made a freckled blur. Ridge wondered if she didn't get cold. He hoped the shaft would take them totally out of the nose section and maybe back onto that wall they'd seen when approaching on the moving platform. No telling how long their charges would last, and he did not relish the thought of fighting their way inch by inch out of the nose section. Now that the mudmen were triangulating in on them, it was a guess how narrow their escape might be if they succeeded in returning to WorkPod01. He didn't want to share his pessimism and fear out loud. If nothing else, WorkPod01 was their birthplace and might be the best place for them to die.
Ridge and his people were busy clambering as fast as they could and ignoring banged shins and elbows and knees. Ridge's mind kept focusing on visions of the underside of the nose area. He re
membered it as a large round surface filled with protruding cubes and domes and other geometric shapes; hoses, lines, lights, elevators frozen on their cables, long thin ladders like the one they were climbing on.
Suddenly, the dark shaft seemed to brighten up to a faint, hard coppery light. The sides came away and mudmen claws reached in. Lantz screamed. Tomson bellowed and fired his rifle. Brenna shrieked as claws tore her hair. She made fists and battered at the foul-smelling faces that reached toward her with dripping, protruding teeth in little red round mouths. Mudmen were taking the sides off the shaft, and the metal parts came away with banging and clanging noises.
"We're coming into a car of some kind!" Lantz said. Her voice choked into a gurgle as something wrapped around her neck.
Tomson swore and lashed out, but a brace of mottled mudmen arms reached for him. Their skin hung in shedding shrouds, Ridge saw. Up close they smelled like a mix of dry earth and mushrooms and motor oil, plus rust and fish. It was an indescribable smell, faint like their flute words, but nauseating. Ridge struck out left and right with the butt of his rifle, hurting them, bashing their faces in and smashing their clawed fingers on the hard rungs. Brenna shrieked madly and tore at her hair as if it were infested with bugs-or maybe she was losing her mind finally.
A moment later, Ridge saw what Lantz had meant. The shaft ended at the mouth of a tank of some kind. It was a round airlock sort of thing whose lid was open.
In an explosion of action, the mudmen crowded around with reaching arms, all four humans hollered or screamed, the shaft seemed to collapse, and a chrysanthemum of light erupted from somewhere. Or was it the wind being knocked out of him by those callused fists beating them into submission? Ridge fell, and with him Tomson. Brenna and Lantz seemed to be swallowed up by a collapsing wall to one side, and they disappeared into a vast falling mountain of black anthracite and rust liberally splashed with gouts of muddy ruddy water the color of apple cider. The mudmen stared in perplexity. Brenna and Lantz were gone under a collapsed mountain of rotting hull material, and Ridge and Tomson crashed feet first into this thing that resembled a large milk canister waiting to be delivered to some Victorian household millennia ago on a leafy London street, or in Boston or someplace else where horses clattered by on early morning delivery rounds and nothing so weird as a mudman would ever show its face. Or was that another shred of memory cooked up by the engineers and thinkers Venable had mentioned? Ridge landed on top of Tomson, who collapsed with the wind knocked out of him. One or two mudmen spatted against the outside of the riveted steel container, not that Ridge could see them so much as he could hear and almost feel the soggy breaking of their bones and the sickly twisting apart of their arteries so that their sour green blood mixed with the bile inside them. Inside the container it smelled of cheesy mold and dirty socks and rotting milk, but there were no mudmen. There were no features in the container but two tightly riveted, thick plate windows the size of man's face, just enough to look out through, in a ring of shiny brass rivets. The inside was so tight and cramped that the two men were wrapped around each other with the breath knocked out, and could not help but look out the window plates. The canister shot out of the bottom of the nose and whizzed like a child's bottle rocket into the vast black interior of the ruined and burned out hulk of Nebula Express.
Chapter 12
The canister sailed through dark space inside the void hold, with its lid hanging open. It sailed through the air on some trajectory Ridge could not understand anymore than he could figure out the canister's purpose. "You okay?" he said, trying to separate his heavy male bulk from the longer but also heavy bulk of Tomson.
"Yeah," Tomson said. "I think I have a sprained ankle, that's all." His face looked ashen, but his eyes were alert and bright. "This thing wasn't meant to hold a couple of big bucks like us."
"More like a pair of little tiny elves or something," Ridge said. They both laughed. "Oh no," Ridge said, "here we go." The canister was sailing on its merry path, which had a slight curvature implanted by the ship's spin. The ship's inner hull curved inward at the rear half, and right about there the canister sailed through that faintly glowing coppery light and impacted near the base of a rocky looking mass of slag and rust and burned out carboniferous material. The canister hit, rolling, made a sound like that Victorian milk canister being tossed empty out the kitchen's back door, and it then rolled a bit and ended up stuck in a crack between two humps of shattered coal. Ridge and Tomson were bashed around inside, but gravity was light until the moment before impact, and the hit was a glancing one whose spin left them more dizzy than its shock made them stunned. After a moment, as he heaved himself out by pushing against the "Must be some old cargo transport tube," Ridge said. He reached in to help the other man out. "Can you make it?"
"I'm fine," Tomson said as he heaved himself out and lay on his side favoring his sprained leg. "This does hurt a bit. If we see any mudmen, just shoot me because I can't run."
Ridge looked worriedly about. "I'd shoot us both because I don't want to be alone with these freaks." He didn't want to say the other thing out loud, which was that, with Brenna gone, he really had little desire to live.
Tomson seemed to sense his feelings. "Don't give up on that woman yet, Ridge. If the mudmen ate them, then they are at peace. Otherwise if they are alive it's our duty to find them."
"Spoken like a great general," Ridge said.
Tomson grinned. "With all that crap Venable was talking, who knows what sort of stock we sprang from."
"Good stock," Ridge said. "They wouldn't have used weak stock." He helped Tomson up and together they clambered and crawled and inched their way up the wet surface. There was a lot of water in the ship's ecosphere, Ridge thought. The seals separating the ship from space must be really tight. Water hung in the atmosphere like a haze. Water made the rusty, slaggy, crushed-coal and onyx-glowing waves and ripples of the hull surface slick. Puddles like rusty milk lay in low spots. In the humid air, the decaying metal sweated moist rust. The air smelled of it. It was a smell much like wet human blood in an open wound. Like good fresh blood in a lung, it sucked oxygen molecules to itself until it was saturated like a full sponge.
"It's drier up here," Tomson said as Ridge pushed him on ahead, up the slope, toward the fine steel band of that their platform had traveled on. That seemed like a long time ago. By now, their jumpsuits were partially in shreds, though the stiff hoops around the necks were still in place. Those were for attaching helmets, if one had any. Luckily, Ridge thought, they had not needed helmets. The ship was still that much together. Venable might be right. Maybe there was hope, not for Ridge or Tomson but for some far-future thing made of flesh and coded memories. It was almost laughable, Ridge thought as he and Tomson crawled up the slope. The humans who would be born then, who were all that remained of mankind, would be constructs much like the denizens of WorkPod01. How were they any more or less human?
Ridge helped Tomson up the last few feet. They clambered onto the steel ribbon, which was about six feet wide, with railings on both sides. That was a lot better than they'd had coming out of the work area earlier, when they'd had to go one foot at a time.
"Where are we?" Tomson said as he hobbled painfully on one leg.
"I figure halfway between WorkPod01 and the work area. Which way do you want to go?"
Tomson turned and stared at him with a strange, haunted look. After a pause, Tomson said: "The work area. That's a lot easier, man."
"I hear you," Ridge said. "Okay, let's go." He hauled one of Tomson's long, hard arms over his shoulder and helped the other man hobble along. "Goes faster this way. Gets us away from any mudmen who may be chasing us."
"Maybe they all went to the nose," Tomson said. "Maybe we get to have a respite from them for a while."
"We can rest in the tunnels," Ridge said. Then he remembered that the mudmen had forced their way in there too, and Lantz and Jerez had fought them off with tools. "We need a miracle," he added non-sequitur.
"You're telling me," Tomson said bravely.
"Desperate times call for desperate measures," Ridge said. "We'll have to split up. You rest in the tunnels, and I'll work my way back to WorkPod01 and see if I can break in."
"Good plan," Tomson said with a tone of hollow courage. Ridge had the feeling there was something Tomson wasn't telling him, and it probably wasn't good. "I'll be just fine in the tunnels," Tomson said.
"Sure you will."
Slowly, they made their way to the work area. This was where their world had first started falling apart that morning (if the start of their long day could be called morning, Ridge thought).
One step at a time, they cautiously made their way along the narrow footpath that spanned the last little distance between where they'd caught the moving platform and where they'd left the ledge on which Ridge had first met Caulfield. Coming ashore on the ledge was an oddly dispassionate matter for Ridge. He was surprised he was not more taken by the ghosts of Jerez and the others, of Mughali who had died here, and especially of Brenna. He could still see her holding up that plant with the twisted roots, her face aglow as she related her theory about why the plants in the greenhouse area grew this way.
"No sign of any bodies," Tomson observed as Ridge helped him negotiate the last few hundred feet into the tunnel and then the living area where Caulfield and his WorkPod09 crew had grown old and died one by one.
"I'm not surprised," Ridge said. "The cleaners would have had a nice lunch here." They clambered up the pile of rubble, down into the clearing, and then toward the living quarters and greenhouse area in back. Mughali was gone, as was the mudman in the corridor, and Caulfield's cadaver was long gone.
"All gone to make more mudmen," Tomson surmised. "I'll sit here." He removed his arm from Ridge's shoulder and seated himself on the floor in the narrow little galley. There, he could easily get to the sink and the pantry, which still contained a few bottles of unknown content from the Caulfield era.
