by Rok Chillah
"Oh God," she said. "Ridge. Hold on, I'm running to you as fast as I can."
"Maybe you'd care to tango," he said in a dry voice, as if nothing were wrong. And maybe again for just a little while, nothing was wrong. Brenna ran down the sidewalk. She ignored the rain hitting her face. If only we can have a little time together, she thought. It's not much to ask. Not after we have had so little and lost so much.
Ridge stood waiting on the sidewalk outside the Largo train station. Brenna fled along the sidewalk and splashed through puddles as she flew toward him. Ridge spread his arms and hugged her tightly against his hard, strong frame.
Chapter 15
You can never come back here," Venable said. Ridge stood in the semidarkness of WorkPod01, wondering about the next clue. What was this Largo? And where? He vaguely remembered from some fragment of music lessons, literally in another life, that the Italian word Largo was notation meaning a slow and solemn musical passage.
"Go," Venable said, "we will speak again elsewhere. Look for me at the police station. Now quickly go before the air is sucked out of WorkPod01 and cleansed and pumped back in. You'll suffocate. It is how we keep both the tiny bugs and the larger contaminants out."
Like the mudmen, Ridge thought as he pressed vainly against the doors. They would not budge. Was he trapped here? He heard a rush of air behind him and turned to look. Another opening had appeared in the wall, this time to a small plain room with a plain wooden bench wrapped around the far side to sit on. The bench was varnished to nearly orange hue. Ridge stepped inside and sat on the hard bench. A thick, riveted metal door like in an ocean liner slipped shut. He was trapped in near complete darkness in this little pod that smelled of varnished wood and painted steel. The compartment was cramped and uncomfortable. He supported himself by pressing his palms on the wooden bench. Abruptly, the compartment jerked into motion. He realized it was a slightly modified version of the message cylinder or whatever in which he and Tomson had been shot out of the ship's bow. Ridge held on as the capsule sped through the bowels of the ship and slowly came to a halt. The door slid open, and he stepped into fresh, rainy night air. He stood in an ornate little hall that looked like an elevator lobby except he was looking at four little compartments in a row, one of which he'd just arrived in. Nice elevator system, he thought. He glanced over the directory of highlights in Largo, noting the location of the police station. It was called Largo Public Safety Office.
His next thought was of safety, and he listened for mudmen sounds, but heard none. His rifle and flame device were on the platform outside WorkPod01. He was unarmed and relatively helpless, wherever this was. He was intrigued by the attractiveness and elegance of his surroundings. They vaguely brought to mind the beautiful marbles inside the ship's nose. He walked out into a fancy sort of little railway station and saw a mosaic sign off to one side: Largo Railway Station. Then he remembered that he should try to reach Lantz or Brenna on his collar mike.
Just minutes later he stood on the rainy sidewalk outside, with Brenna in his arms. He marveled at her, at this little city, and then again at the feel of her in his arms. They kissed long and hard without exchanging explanations or excuses or reasons why or why not. Arm in arm, they strolled up the street. Along the way, he explained how Tomson had died, and she told him how Lantz had died. They came to a lovely hotel entrance, which said Hotel Largo, and she told him: "That's where we were when it happened."
Drawn by a mix of instincts, from morbid curiosity to wanting to know why, they walked into the hotel arm in arm. He let her lead him down a hall of plants and mirrors. She explained about the air getting sucked away and how that preserved everything. Sounded logical, he supposed. Having seen Tomson post mortem, he had no desire to see any more of their kind dead, but he felt it was sort of an obligation. He just wished he were writing their final stories in a notebook or recording it in a camera, for posterity, in case anyone cared. Then again, he and Brenna cared, and maybe that was all that really mattered.
Lantz still lay on the floor of the pool. "I guess," Brenna said, "it means the mudmen don't get in here too much."
"Are we going to just leave her there?" Ridge said as he weighed the pros and cons.
"We can deal with it in the morning," she said. "I want to lie beside you and...just not talk, not run, not be afraid, not feel all this loss."
"I understand," he said, and took her upstairs where they found a quiet little corner room and locked themselves safely in. There, they had a large bed to themselves and they made love while the rain tinkled on the windows above and the wind sighed outside the window and distant violin music drifted through the back courtyards, over the railways, over the fences, over the plate glass or whatever separated them from the whirling galaxy outside.
In the morning, Ridge set out by himself while she slept. It was always night in the city, and he wore a coat he'd found, with a high collar, and deep pockets to put his hands into. He walked several blocks until he came to a building whose green light over the entrance signaled that it was a police station. The sign read Largo Public Safety Office. Like most things in Largo, it was a small version of some larger place back on Old Earth. He pushed his way through the door as the air rushed in and the lights came on. He studied the directory inside, noting the little white bell buttons next to each resident. On the sixth floor was Venable. He pressed that button. "Yes?" came the familiar voice.
"I am here."
"Ah, yes?"
"Why did Tomson and now Lantz die the way they did?"
"Did you have a lovely night with your dear woman?"
"Yes. Not that it's any of your business."
"No, of course not."
"What's the score?"
"You are temps. You only live one day."
"I was afraid of that." Black panic rippled up and down his back, more than at any other time. It was one thing to be terrified of mudmen, thinking you could survive to live a normal human life span. How magnificent 75 or 85 years now seemed. Even ten years. One year. "Can we bargain?"
"I am not in a position to offer you anything. It cannot be changed. It is the way you were made. You and Brenna. Look in the mailbox."
With trembling fingers, he rifled down through the row of battered and rusty mailboxes, each of which had a unique little name tag. When he came to a white stencil that said Venable, he pulled open the little door. A white tissue lay inside. "Take that," Venable said. "If you find you are going first, give it to her. It will make her sleepy and she will go with you."
"Damn this whole operation," Ridge said as he pocketed the pills in their primitive tissue wrapper. He wondered how the packet had gotten there, then peered inside and saw the slot that undoubtedly led to some dispenser in the automated guts of this intricate city.
"You see how it is," Venable said sadly. "Wish I were going with you."
Ridge understood. Venable had years, maybe centuries, but he'd been created a freak more cruelly than anything the engineers and thinkers had done to the mudmen or to the temps. "How do we pull the plug?" he asked Venable wearily.
"I cannot answer. The phages won't let me."
"The what?"
"The phages. Things that eat things. They are in our bloodstreams. They eat poisons, even bad thoughts. Everything is chemistry, Ridge. I thought you understood that."
"If everything is chemistry, then it can be changed. You change the mix, you change the soup."
"I don't know, Ridge. The soup has been this way for centuries. Can you get me a body? I remember what it was like to be young and strong. You don't know that, do you?" His voice changed. It assumed an accent that Ridge needed a few minutes to place. Venable said: "You want to put crackers in the soup, buddy?" He laughed.
"You are crackers, you old hack. Who did this to you?"
"I volunteered. Someone had to take the hit. The other officers were already either dead or dying. When the comets ripped through, we caught a lot of radiation. They all stayed at their stations until t
he end."
"They are still sitting there waiting for the sun to rise."
"Yes," Venable said. "Waiting for New Earth. We'll never see it, you and I and Brenna. You two will mercifully long be gone, and my usefulness will end when the ship drops into orbit. Then Largo comes to life, and I go bye-bye."
"They could stick you in a new sack of bones."
"Can't be done. Memories that specific can't be cloned. Just generics, snatches, like stray bits of music heard through a window down the street on a rare and perfect spring day. Can't see the player, don't know the context. No beginning, no ending, just the middle. No donut, just the jelly at the center."
"What do I do?"
"Go back and play with her. Keep the pills in case you start going first. Enjoy every minute that you have."
Back at the hotel, Brenna was still asleep. Ridge crept naked into bed beside her and woke her with his passion. After they'd made love again, they lay together on the bed in a sea of green light and listened to music that Brenna chose from a radio on the nightstand. Ridge, for a joke, tried calling on the black telephone, but all he heard was static. They laughed as he hung up. She snuggled close to him, and he held her tightly. "Why do they have Largo?" she muttered into his chest hair.
"It's a city from Old Earth to keep in orbit around the New Earth," he told her. "It's sort of a training wheels place to teach them how to build cities when they find New Earth."
"Will they find New Earth soon?"
"I made a deal with Venable."
"You saw him?"
"Yes. He's not just another pretty face."
"He's not handsome like in the view screen images we saw?"
"You could say that. We're going to orbit a likely looking sun in about 100 years, and if that doesn't pan out then we'll probably hang it up for good."
"We won't be around then to find out."
"Probably not." He rose and went to the window. In this artificial city, it was night all the time on the street, but the biolumes above in the skylights kept a 24 hour cycle that mimicked day and night on Old Earth. "Do you feel rested?"
She yawned. "I could have used another hour or two of sleep."
He felt a distant weariness gathering in his bones. "What do you want to do today? Want to play, or work?"
"Do we have a choice?" She stretched and rolled luxuriantly on the bed. "Is some dreadful work detail going to take us back to those tunnels? I'm spoiled now. I never want to go back there."
"I think we've paid our dues," Ridge said. He sat on the bed beside her and stroked her back.
She closed her eyes and rested her head on her folded arms with a happy expression. "What if we stayed here, Ridge? What if we had a baby or two? Can we do that?"
Ridge felt a stab of hurt, knowing what she did not yet know. "I don't know that it's impossible. We wouldn't know unless we tried."
She turned onto her back suddenly and reached out for him. "Come here. Let's do that wonderful thing some more. We're on vacation." He grinned and crawled onto the bed. He could not get enough of her.
They spent some hours wandering through the city. They found a small carnival and he sipped hot coffee from a stand while she rode alone on a little child's ride of metal airplanes hanging from a revolving arm. As he watched her, he knew she would love more than anything to hold a child on her lap, to go around and around, up and down, gently, and to sing to that child as she had sung long ago to keep peace among her team members. He finished the rest of his coffee, balled up the paper cup, and tossed it into a trash incubator that was perfectly clean and empty, just waiting for the first bit of refuse from daily human life.
Arm in arm, they walked back to the hotel. Along the way, Ridge listened to her chatter and agreed with everything she said, but he kept desperately thinking there had to be some way. They got back to the room and lay on the bed listening to the rain outside. She lay on her back staring up into the skylight, where the light gathered like a waterfall of sunlight. She yawned deeply and turned onto her side, curling up. He covered her with a blanket and stroked her face with the backs of his fingers. She looked so young and pretty, and yet he saw age creeping up the sides of her neck, just the faintest of wrinkles, and she was starting to get hollows around her eyes. He sat up on the bed and fingered the pills, then slipped them back into his pocket for later.
Somewhere, a radio played. Ridge ignored it, while racking his mind, running over and over the events in WorkPod01. Was there some other clue, some other thing he'd missed?
The music began to get his attention. It was tango. Ridge recognized the bandonéon, an accordion-like instrument, and wondered why he knew that. He pictured a man and a woman moving across a smoky room. He pictured them coming to sudden stops, regarding each other, and then rolling back the other way on another round of life and love. That had been life on Old Earth. Here it was a one-way tango, this temp life on Nebula Express. Ah, such a bitter pill! No wonder tango was filled with melancholy yet passion. The impossible becomes the thing most desired. Love is the most impossible because it is the union of two who cannot ever be one, though they strive against all the laws of the universe. And so the next generation comes, the next tango, the next waltz across the floor.
Ridge half-rose in shock when he heard a man start to sing in a Flamenco-like wail. For the first time, a man's voice accompanied the dark and urgent rhythms of the dance. It was a man of Old Earth singing the cançion in a rich voice, in the criminal argot of the forbidden classes, lunfardo, and to his amazement Ridge understood who else spoke like that. Venable. Ridge went to the window, away from the bed where she might overhear, and spoke into his collar com. "Venable, I know you can hear me. This is Ridge. Ricardo, if you wish."
"I am busy listening to the cançion. Do you hear it?"
"I hear it, compadrito. Why did you not tell us about Ricardo?"
"She is my daughter, or what is left of her after the cleaners destroyed the dormitories where our people slept."
"Why did the cleaners do this?"
"Time went by. Too much time. There was genetic drift. We lost control of the programming."
"Life on the ship is evolving?" Ridge asked.
"Yes. It is gradually going beyond our control."
"And Ricardo?"
"You are Ricardo, or what is left of him, Ridge."
"That is why she and I had such empathy. You brought us together. Why?"
"I needed to know if memory could be passed on with the tools we have."
"Can it?"
"Not very well. But you did remember each other."
"So we were a start. After we are gone, will you try again?"
"Yes. As often as we must, until we can regain control of the genetic programming and take the ship back from the cleaners."
"That means more Ridges and more Brennas, Venable. More suffering. How can you do this?"
"No choice. You see now I suffer. My very existence is suffering. I am a disembodied soul."
"And the babies? You'll do that to her again? She has mourned for them constantly."
"She was not supposed to find out, so I told her they grew up to live their own lives."
"And that was a lie?"
"I said what was necessary to spare her the pain of knowing the truth. There were no babies. It was part of the pabulum the engineers and thinkers fed you all. You and she did not have long enough together. Just a few nights in the great apartment in the Avenida Boedo before the comets were spotted and we all got ready for this journey. You must not tell her. That would be a worse blow than losing them, never to have had them. She would die a thousand times rather than just once."
"So we were just an experiment," Ridge said bitterly.
"We are all just an experiment, Ridge."
"They made a monster when they made you."
"Think about the eternal rest that is about to come to you. You do not have much longer to suffer, either of you."
Chapter 16
Ridge walked ou
t of the Hotel Largo and into the rain. The streets glistened with water and neon. Ridge's thoughts were saturated with water, which was the universal medium on Nebula Express as it had been on Earth.
The brain in Ridge that thought these things was mostly water, as was the man who walked down the street carrying that brain. Water coursed through the ship the way blood ran through the human body, and blood after all was nothing more than oxygen-red water with nutrients and biochemical nanomachines. Likewise, water poured from falls high up in the oxygen-rusty hull of the ship. Water ran through the tubes and pipettes keeping Venable alive, which in turn provided some feeble remaining guidance to the ship's systems. The mudmen inhabited a world of slag and rust soaked and heavy with water. The incubators in WorkPod01 (or WorkPodNN or whatever the iteration of the moment called itself) filled with water, which nurtured a fetus in its wet embrace, and as the temp-fetus grew, it absorbed its amniotic fluid and emerged dry and whole as a human being meant to live no more than one very long day. That human being carried in it all the water and nutrients it would need on its brief mission to add yet one more work-shift to the million work-shifts that would be needed to restore this ark that carried the entire human race in search of a new planetary water-world.
Ridge entered the police station and started rummaging in cabinets and drawers. Lights flicked on as he entered one room after another, and flickered out as he left. He heard the inrush of breathable air before him, and its outrush behind him as the ship sucked the air back into its main atmosphere.
Ridge found what he needed. In a locker he found a collection of matte black weapons and olive-drab military style nylon-weave web gear: belts, bandoliers, pouches, holsters. The equipment still smelled of the factory, preserved in generous amounts of petroleum-based Cosmolene-type preservative grease. He crisscrossed bandoliers of ammunition over his shoulders. He hung a heavy handgun in a holster under each arm. He picked up an assault needler that could fire a thousand tiny rounds of sparking wire that would enter a mudman body and twirl about with deadly randomness before losing momentum. He also slung a grenade launcher over his shoulder, and around his neck hung a fat bandolier with eight rocket-propelled miniature grenades the size and shape of typical dinner-table pepper shakers.
