by Rok Chillah
Lantz stood with her arms akimbo. "Try falling down on your head. If it hurts, it means it's real."
"I'll take your word for it."
They walked through the train station, expecting hordes of passengers to come pouring through the gates on all sides any moment. Not a soul obliged. "Maybe it's a trap," Brenna said.
"Doesn't feel like a trap."
"Feel that?" Brenna felt a breeze on her forehead as they pushed through the swinging walnut doors, which had shiny brass fixtures on the inside and black iron hinges on the outside. "Smells like a rainy evening in Paris," Brenna said, pinching her collar up.
"Someplace smaller," Lantz said. "Brussels or Cleveland or Sapporo." She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. Brenna could hear the other's teeth chatter and said: "Are you finally getting cold? Want a coat?" Lantz nodded, and Brenna pointed to a clothing store across the street. "I have no money," Lantz said, but they both shrugged and ran skipping across the street. The running wasn't necessary, because the street was empty. It was, Brenna thought, a typical rainy boulevard outside a little train station in a prosperous little town anywhere in the civilized world of Old Earth. There were some smallish cars, but none moved. The cars sat parked at the curb on either side of the street, following the convention of the steering wheel on the left (as opposed to the Commonwealth and Japanese convention of the driver sitting on the right). This entire little world was detailed down to the least little item, Brenna thought. Still, somehow, it did not feel like Earth. Not exactly. "Something is different," she said carefully, not wanting to say wrong. Something was different, not wrong per se.
"It's a beautiful place," Lantz said as they hurried through the lightly dribbling rain. It was good to feel raindrops on one's forehead, Brenna thought as they ran across the opposite sidewalk and pulled open the heavy, stylish brushed-steel door of what billed itself in pink neon as the Largo Style Shoppe.
Inside, rock music boomed-no vocals, just suggestively throbbing instrumentals. The air was dry and clean. It smelled faintly of cloth and fabric glues. On flat tables they found bolt upon bolt of attractive cloths and fabrics. Cheery summer dresses hung on one carousel rack. Coats for rainy wear stretched twenty feet along a wall closet in all sizes from little girl to adult woman. One corner was filled with shoes, another with lingerie, another with umbrellas and winter coats and scarves. "A little for everybody," Brenna said as she fingered the fine materials and looked for price tags, but found none.
"Look at these hats," Lantz said. She pulled a plastic rain hat over her head with both hands and twirled around laughing. The hat was transparent, with a wide floppy brim, and covered with pastel dots.
"Here is a sweater for you," Brenna said holding up a heavy knit. It was dark blue and looked almost mannish. It had a thick collar and heavy knitted pillar forms running up and down the front and back. "Nice," Lantz said, holding it up in the white light. "Cool," she said, slipping into it. She shivered with pleasure. Brenna turned a word trick, saying: "Warm," and they both laughed.
"Have you been to the ladies' room lately?" Lantz asked.
Brenna shook her head. "No, why, do you have to go?"
"I think so." Lantz looked a trifle uncomfortable. "I almost don't know how."
"Oh, you'll figure it out," Brenna said. She spotted a sign in the back of the store with an icon suggesting the ladies' restroom. "Over there."
Lantz walked off in that direction, idly fingering coats and pants as she went. On one carousel was a display of loud, happy yellow teddy bears. On another it was a pile of stuffed rabbits with reddish glass eyes. She disappeared into the WC and Brenna eagerly sorted through a pile of leather coats looking for something in her size.
Lantz screamed, and Brenna went running. She wished now that they'd gone back for the rifles, if it had been at all possible to find them in the slag. As she ran toward the bathroom, Brenna reflected that all this seemed too good to be true. There must be a catch-like mudmen pouring out of the walls to eat them alive. But it wasn't mudmen that made Lantz scream. It was a puddle of blood on the tiled bathroom floor-her own. "I don't know what happened," she said. She held her hands to her mouth and leaned against the wall in shock. "I walked in thinking I'd go to the loo" (she pointed to a row of stalls) "and all of a sudden this gush came out. It's not a period or anything, Brenna. I'm bleeding inside."
"Do you feel faint?" Brenna felt the raw edges of insanity gnawing around her at that moment as never before, and pushed it all away. She clung to all that there was, which was what was here--nothing else. She put an arm around Lantz's waist to help her.
"Just tired."
"Do you hurt?"
Lantz pulled away from Brenna's embrace and shook her head thoughtfully. "No." She probed her midsection with her palms and reaffirmed: "No pain."
"What is going on?" Brenna said looking at the slick of oily red blood smeared on the floor like a spiral galaxy. Lantz had stepped in her own blood, and now she wiped her shoes on a handful of paper towels torn from a dispenser. "I wonder who maintains all this so neatly, this whole ship and all?" Lantz said.
Brenna wondered too. "Not mudmen, that's for sure. They're too dumb."
The answer presented a moment later as the two women explored this place called Largo. "I'm glad you have a warm sweater," Brenna said as they left the Largo Style Shoppe. They came back into night and rain. "I'm glad too," Lantz said. She wore the plastic hat with the yellow red and green dots on it, and held it by the brim with both hands. "Wow, this is like back on Earth."
Brenna sniffed the air. "Yes. I can smell green things. There must be a park nearby. Smell that kind of tangy rich stuff? That's soil."
"I know soil," Lantz said as if Brenna held her for a dummy. They jostled each other in the ribs. "Race you across the street," Brenna said.
"Wait," Lantz said. "Take a look."
They walked back to the Largo Style Shoppe and looked inside the window. It was dark inside, and the music no longer throbbed. Brenna tried the door but did not force it. "That's an airlock on the edge of the door," she said. She ran a fingertip up and down the sturdy flex material. "You know what? I'll bet the ship sucks all the air out and leaves a near vacuum. That's how things stay so fresh. The minute you go from one place to another, the lights go on and air rushes in. We're walking through a vacuum-sealed museum."
"Oh come on," Lantz said, but her disbelief seemed to fade as they walked along the sidewalk opposite the train station. From here, they could see that the station was pitch-dark inside. "You may be right."
"So figure this," Brenna said. "We look up and we keep see the stars, even through the clouds and the rain. Maybe it's a band of glass running around the ship. Maybe Largo is some sort of giant shopping mall that stretches around the ship under the glass. Maybe it was meant to be for all those people to live in...but they were eaten..." She held her hand over her mouth in horror at the thought.
Lantz did not find the idea amusing either. "I'm not too sure, Brenna. If people were meant to live here, to cruise here everyday, they wouldn't need those vacuum compartments. I think this area has another purpose. Don't ask me what."
Largo proved to be a ghost town in its own right. They wandered in and out of shops and taverns. In one bar, a mechanical bartender mixed drinks and did magical tricks for them while they laughed. He was a fancy brass imitation of a 19th Century saloon bartender. He had the kind of moveable jaw that ventriloquists' dummies had, but there was no ventriloquist to do tricks with him. Brenna leaned over the bar out of curiosity, and saw that he was just a set of leather bellows and articulated steel pistons from the waist down. Lantz laughed. "He mixes a mean margarita though." She walked over to a juke box and pressed buttons. There was no coin slot. The music just started pouring out-no vocals, just a rich, thick paste of rhythmic sound that wrapped pleasantly around them.
"These aren't real margaritas," Brenna said. "We'd be flat on the floor. These are goody-goody drinks with honey and oats and other health stuff in t
hem. That stuff around the rim isn't salt but crystallized vitamin sprinkles."
"It's fun to pretend," Lantz said at her barstool. She sipped while twirling on the stool. "Too bad there aren't any nice-looking guys around."
"I sort of wish Ridge were here," Brenna said.
Lantz spoke around her straw, which was on her lips. "You like him, don't you?"
Brenna nodded. "I was attracted to him from the first moment I saw him. I felt terrible because I thought I was married to Ricardo and had children." She still felt a devouring sense of loss as if part of her soul had been sliced out with a gutting knife.
"I'm so sorry about that," Lantz said. "I was supposedly still single. Maybe because no guy wants to get near a redhead who pumps iron and shoots guns with the best of them."
"That's all a lot of hooey," Brenna said. "They made us from bits and pieces of other people's lives. Now it's up to us to live our own lives."
"That's sort of how life is anyway," Lantz said. "Nobody just pops into the world without a program running. Everyone has one of those player piano sheets written by their parents, their culture, the whole thing."
"Yes," Brenna said, "so now we just have to figure out how to live our lives. I wonder if we could somehow find Tomson and Ridge."
"We could try," Lantz said. She yawned, setting her drink aside. "Aren't you tired at all, Brenna?"
Brenna did feel a certain faraway bone-weariness. "Nothing serious yet. I'm getting there. They must have fed us a bunch of uppers, because I'm still raring to go. But I could close my eyes for a little while."
They walked down the rainy street together, looking into shop windows and noting that same phenomenon that everywhere they went, lights turned on as they approached and shut off as they passed. "That could get annoying," Brenna said after a while.
"The dark scares me a bit," Lantz said. "Say, do you suppose it ever gets to be daylight in here?"
Brenna said: "I imagine if we were orbiting a planet like Earth maybe. You know, a planet that's just bathed in sunshine. Reflected sunshine would light this place up like a million candles."
"I'd like that."
As they strolled along, the shape of Largo became apparent. The city formed a thin ring, maybe 100 feet thick, about a mile around the wider edge of the ship's nose. Imagine drawing a thin blue line around the thick part of a bullet, Brenna thought...the outer wall was either thick glass or, more likely, a reflective and conductive bluish material that gathered an image on the outer hull and transmitted it through the hull, recreating it in pixels on the inner hull surface-Largo's "sky." On either side of the street were shops and other buildings up to three or four stories high. Some reached almost to the hull. Brenna assumed that the band of real estate forming Largo was hemmed in on either side by steel decking and beyond that would be the more normal (though generally spectacular, except where ravaged by time and mudmen) ship's quarters. It still wasn't clear what the purpose of Largo was, if not to serve as a shopping mall and recreational area for the thousands who had been killed while in deep sleep.
"There is a hotel," Brenna pointed out. "Want to find a room and take a bath? Rest a while?"
Lantz rolled up her eyes. "That sounds divine. My God, yes."
They strolled up the ornate gray marble entrance of the Hotel Largo. The entrance was framed in honey-colored marble pillars with Ionic friezes top and bottom and then a little arch carved full of grapevines, cherubs, and wicked satyrs. As they pushed through the heavy double doors, they heard the customary rush of air filling the spaces ahead. Lights came on. They heard faint, very Continental violin music. The lobby was a high, domed affair with a wrought-iron mezzanine drowning in greenish light from more Art Nouveau stained glass. The air was at once light and cozy. Brenna expected to see men in spats and bowler hats, and women with parasols and hoopskirts, but the usual deathly stillness prevailed. "This could become dispiriting," Lantz said as they took a little brass-cage elevator up to the second floor. "Spooky, I mean."
They emerged on a floor carpeted with long Persian runners. The doorways were set back in little alcoves for a look of privacy to offset the closeness of everything here. Brenna jogged up and down the hall throwing doors open and admiring the variety of sumptuous furnishings. Lantz trailed a bit more tiredly, yawning from time to time. She looked pale and drawn. "Look, Brenna," she said pointing into a lavish marble room that contained a yellow-rimmed swimming pool done in green and blue floral tiles. Mirrors decorated the walls, and there were at least six alcoves, each containing its own hot tub. An atmosphere of vapor and camphor scented with lemon and oranges drifted through the air.
Brenna cautiously tested the waters all around and found them temperate. The two women stripped naked and plunged laughing into the large pool. There, Brenna swam laps while Lantz rested in the shallow end. Lantz held her face up to the light and her hands on the yellow tiles along the sides while her trim lower body floated lazily just under the surface. "How do you feel?" Brenna said as she emerged sputtering from a long trawl along the glowing blue bottom. The water was chlorinated and clean, and stung the eyes. It burned pleasantly in Brenna's nose but made her sneeze. Lantz nodded and kept her eyes closed. "I'm listening to the violin music," she said smiling with pleasure. Her freckles looked carroty and her skin as pale as eggshell paper. Brenna swam up and down a few more times. "I'm getting a little tired now too, Lantz. Want to try some of the hot tubs?"
"I'd like that, but I'm too lazy. I'll just float here a while."
"Okay, suit yourself!"
Brenna climbed out. Artificial gravity pulled the water off along the smooth planes of her body and made her feel heavy. She wondered if humans had not been meant to be aquatic animals somehow. Hooting and laughing, she ran in a circle around the pool and then jumped with big splash into a steaming hot tub. At first the heat stunned her. Then she settled back and let the jets of water under the surface massage the aching and abused muscles and bones of her body that had been through so much duress in the past day. "You should try this!" she called out. The floor around the hot tub was dark tile inset with lovely pink and chocolate stones. It slanted lightly inward and drained back all the water she'd splashed out during her jump. "I can't remember when I last ate," she said out loud, hearing her voice echo amid the olive walls with their curving paintings of nymphs and gods and other classical themes right out of a Bad-Nauheim or Mondorf-les-Bains or Tivoli spa. "All we need now is young men in loincloths to bring us more of those fake health margaritas."
After a while, the warmth became more than she wanted to enjoy and she got out. She found a pile of fresh clean white frotte towels on a table in the alcove, and dried herself. The warm moist air kept her warm and comfortable. She knelt by the side of the hot tub and washed her filthy, torn jumpsuit. "I think we'll do some more shopping after you've rested," Brenna said. She wrung her uniform out and hung it over a chair to dry. In this climate it should take a while to dry down to a sort of warm damp condition, and then she'd find a warm spot in the hotel to finish drying it. Maybe while Lantz slept. "We should find the biggest beds in the hotel," she said cheerfully as she rounded the corner, coming back into the main hall with its yellow-framed pool.
"Lantz?" Brenna heard violin music and hurried to her friend's side.
Light poured down from the glass ceiling, an avalanche or chandelier of overly bright bioluminosity that was the lightest of light yellows like lemon ices. Shades of darker greenish light played in there along with streaks of red and blue and gray. The rich light poured down through hanging plants, palm fronds, slowly turning dark fan blades, little Victorian faux Bernini pillars of bronze holding up the mezzanine. The light gleamed off dark lavish surfaces-large brownish Han vases, polished tables, windows inset into the dark oak walls, Largo posters with beautiful smiling faces, and more. The light fell down on the aquamarine pool waters that stirred lightly with a chlorine foam over a bright pool bottom decorated with inlays of colored glass beads in the shape of a palm
tree.
"Lantz!" Brenna exclaimed and ran to the pool, where she could hear the violin music more clearly than ever. Under cascades of piano music coming from the walls, the redheaded woman lay as Brenna had left her, in the pool with her arms on the yellow ledge. Her head was tilted back as if she were asleep, but her eyes were half open and glazed. Her mouth hung open as if she had taken one last shuddering breath before her heart stopped beating and her lungs stopped rising and falling. Brenna cried out "Oh no!" and ran to her side. Brenna splashed into the water beside Lantz and sought a pulse. Lantz's pale skin was already chilly, and her flesh had a rubbery feel to it. "My God no!" Brenna exclaimed tearfully and held her hands over her face. Stirred by the turbulence of Brenna's legs in the water, Lantz's body slipped gently into the water feet first, all the way to the bottom, and that was where she lay in an attitude of utterly peaceful repose with her arms lightly apart. Her hair came undone and floated like reddish seaweed.
Brenna stood frozen in shock at the pool's edge. The body lay in the water where it had slipped. Lantz's torso lay on the green glasses of the palm fronds.
Abruptly, Brenna ran into the hot tub alcove for her jumpsuit. It was still wet, so she ran back to the poolside and put Lantz's still-dirty clothes on. It didn't matter now. Anything to get away. Her pleasure here was spoiled by the terrible realization that if she did not find Ridge, she would be all alone here. Forever. And that was too terrifying a thought to bear. Sobbing, she ran down the rainy street in the empty night city. Feeling nearly hysterical, she banged on the opaque windows of those odd little cars parked at the curbs. They were empty. One or two lit up faintly, inviting her to get in, but what could they do other than run her around and around Largo?
Then she heard a man's voice. "Lantz? Brenna?"
Ridge?
Confused, she stopped and looked around. Then she realized it was Lantz's collar com. She cupped it in one palm, pulling it close to her chin. "Ridge? Where are you?"
"I'm standing in this train station, wondering where you are."
