AfroSFv2

by Ivor W Hartmann

  Jonah gave a start, hesitated, and paused, but Adam cut in. “It’s alright, Jonah, we know, we saw you argue this mission best you could.”

  “Yeah, don’t worry about it, Jonah.”

  “Yeah boss, couldn’t have done better myself.”

  “Yeah, we all saw you, Jonah.”

  “Yeah...” The com-line was a chorus of agreements.

  “It was gonna happen sooner or later, Jonah,” Amir proclaimed. “We all saw it coming, we just never said nothing, none of us. We never cared; none of us did, even now. Moles set us up, Council says nothing, Dream kicks in, decisions are made and we’re out at sea again, swimming head first into Hell, not ’membering what the hell for or how it is we got suckered in again. None of us care anymore; the Dream’ll take us all. Sounds to me like something else got B-Team, and I don’t see them caring either. This is the only way for us to go Jonah. So what they say, huh? What can you remember?”

  Jonah threw his head back and floated closer to the group. “The only thing that matters every time, Amir: the spouses and kids will be cared for if anything...”

  Amir laughed out loud. “That’s a nice thought! Not that it matters much either...”

  Several voices snapped back at him angrily.

  “Easy for you to say, we aren’t all married to Fish.”

  “Yeah, you moron, my wife is a Bee.”

  “So is my husband.”

  “My wife was a Mole until they cast her out.”

  “And so is my wife,” Jonah interjected before a fight broke out. His voice had grown firmer. “We made that choice when we married them and we knew what it meant. For Yuri it meant extra ratios of grain, we all know that.” Laughter again relieved the tension, but there was little to be wary about anymore. “Those we meet in the Dream we can worry about then, for those we don’t...Hades’ embrace is warm and comforting...”

  Jonah’s words afterwards were few and short. The Council had urged the mission forward, in full knowledge of the risks to the Fish, and there was little doubt left that the Moles and Priests were expecting this outcome. Exploiting the last of the resources in Europe before the ice settled over it, and the last winter before the Cave? Right...

  Moles...thieves, murderers, and worse, and enslaved for it. To chain a murderer must have made sense when the world fell apart and the waters rose every day; they had needed every hand then, but their children? In perpetuity? In times like those he wondered what kind of masters they had been, or who’d pointed the finger and separated the Moles from the others...

  A voice boomed through the waters, part human, part whale song: WEST...

  A-Team turned west. Ari spun on himself and saw Rebecca again, floating ahead of him, translucent, and glittering with ice flecks, then disappearing once more in a silent blast a few feet from the Fish, rippling through the waters in waves that knocked them back, slammed them into the ice crust, and spiralling towards the bottom. They all felt it this time. Ari tumbled back, regained control, and stabilised himself facing the direction of the blast.

  In the distance, the waters were getting darker; gaining ground forward, he focused his visor on a noticeably darker shape caught deep in the incoming slush, and reality caught up with the Dream. Another shock wave threw him back, and another, and another. His visor focused again on the shape, tumble after tumble. He zoomed in on it, and a two-headed white whale was revealed. It was struggling to free itself, tail caught in the western glacier, each new blast ripping chunks of flesh as ice cut through skin and nerve to the bone.

  Another blast dislodged ice from the surface, raining several tons of ice blocks, dozens of feet thick, on the scrambling Fish.

  Ari felt drawn forward, torn out of his body towards the living ice wall and the dying whale, and yet he remained motionless. He braced himself for impact when, suddenly, the glacier was spreading ahead of him. He could not move, air was freezing in his lungs and the cold numbed the pain from his massive wounds. His entire body trapped, his tail useless, he caught sight of his second head, its eyes black and dead.

  Through the ice, he saw human shapes bouncing discordantly in the distance, struggling to stay out of the blast radius. He felt his strength leaving him, his massive heart fading with a final thump, and his eyes zoomed forward again, through the ice, and into the desperate shapes. He saw himself floating lifeless a few yards ahead. Just as he collided with his own body, reality took over and he saw his father was floating above him, one of the metal fixings from the relay station jammed into his ribs, blood twirling into a shield around him as he spun, helplessly bounced around by the blasts, dead underwater.

  Ice particles flashed by, cutting through skin suits, and riding only a few seconds ahead of the slush, coagulating almost instantly on disoriented Fish.

  Ari floated up to his father and ripped the propulsion pack attached to his back, cursing himself, hoping against luck that there was enough energy left to make it to the colony. No matter what happened, he would see his mother, and he would die taking out as many Moles as he could before they did him. The Dream could claim him then, but not now.

  He repeated the operation with three more corpses, attached a food and energy pack to his skin suit, and blasted his way out of the thickening muck, and ahead, faster and faster ahead.

  The glacier had changed directions. The Fish had wrongly assumed that its progression was a constant south-southeast. They had never considered that it could have been converging from the west as well. The explosion that silenced B-Team made sense to him now.

  Spreading cracks in the icing overhead alerted him to the much larger northern glacier resuming its progress south. If he were not careful, he would be caught in a vice and forced south. If he did not gain speed he would be too far south to reach the colony, if he did not run out of propulsion first. He shot himself towards the surface at an angle, trying to break the thinner ice cap to get a sense of the glacier from the surface.

  He projected himself forward at full speed, then up at a spin; to ease the impact with the surface and have a rotating view, catching all the angles before plunging back and repeating the operation again. Cutting through the air rather than the water would keep him out of the slush and explosions, and with luck, he would stay ahead just long enough when he dove back down to allow himself another leap through the surface.

  His helmet broke through the ice and into the blearing sunlight. The sun shone bright on the ice, and the sky was a perfect blue, but you could not have guessed from beneath. The spin should have blocked the sun out intermittently, but the reflection on the ice made it worse. He activated his shading unit.

  The bulk of the glacier was closing in on him from the west and northwest. The ice cap itself stretched for several hundred yards behind him, until the glacier filled it in from the bottom, and there, the world ended. A kilometre. Maybe less. Moving at thirty meters a second.

  The surface blew up and settled in sequence. Row after row of frozen eruptions, a cloud of diamonds and glass, stretching north and south further than he could see, settling and rising again in waves.

  Where the detonations below were silent killers, the deflagrations outside were shock waves of vertigo. He saw a group of Fish leap through the surface and into the air in the distance, he could not tell who they were, but they were too close to the glacier, much too close. The Fish spun down headfirst into the ice. Ari zoomed out too late. The first Fish’s head burst open in blood against it, missing the thinner ice cap by only a few yards. The glacier exploded southward almost as soon as he hit, shredding the body to reddish powder, and slicing the remainder of the group in a detonation of ice spears.

  Ari’s spin brought him downwards, through the ice cap, into the streaking ice, and up again in hundred meter leaps. It was all he could do to stay ahead, trying to beat Neptune’s closing, vengeful fist, leaping and swimming north-northeast towards the colony.

  The waters were shallower when he approached the cliff. He could no longer dive as deep nor le
ap as high. His propulsion pack was running out, and the smaller, more frequent leaps gobbled up all the energy he had left. The glacier moved faster in the hollow waters, blast after blast, threatening almost every leap and every dive, but the familiar cliffs of the colony drew him in.

  The smell of smoke caught his nose mid-jump; burning pyres lined the edge of the cliff. He could not tell who they were, but he had little doubt the Moles had kept their word and taken care of the children and spouses.

  Thousands of voices flooded the Dream. Not the screams of the bodies on the pyres—he was too far to hear them—but a choir of emotions and feelings, none of them painful, all of them accepting. He sought his mother in the jungle of sentience, and could not find her. He probed for his father, and felt him somewhere, and Adi, and Amir...

  The smell of smoke, stronger now, broke the spell, but it was too late.

  Caught in the dead Fish’s Dreams, he tried a leap towards the cliff wall. He would break the surface, he thought, soar over the flames, and find arms somehow, food too, somehow, and then he would wreak havoc, and then and only then, the Dream would take him. He concentrated all the power in his propulsion engines for a final leap forward.

  His head broke the ice, but the slush solidified around his feet and pulled him back against his impulse, snapping him in half at the waist. The ice closed in on his body before both halves could fully separate and numbed him to the pain.

  He tried to scream and his lungs froze. A low rumble built up underneath him, in useless warning of the eruption to come. The sun faded from his vision along with the smell of smoke and the burning pyres.

  The world disappeared, and he saw shapes floating through the depths. Large. Faceless. Floating stomachs with thick tentacles by the hundreds, holding eyes and mouths. Among them he saw dolphins and sharks, glowing in shades of yellow and green. Slowly dying of radiation poisoning, slowly changing into new things. And even smaller, between the dolphins and the sharks, between and around the monsters and the whales, tiny, tiny creatures, shaped just as Fish were when they wore their suits. Small creatures such as he had never seen before, attaching themselves to dolphin, shark, whale and mutant alike, guiding them, drifting gently at their side... He felt himself shrink as the rumble of the glacier grew tenor, then baritone, and saw a giant two-headed white whale in the depths, catching the light glowing off the dolphins, and he swam closer to it, ever shrinking, ever deeper, ever smaller...

  ...The explosion obliterated his body in a deluge of ice, flesh, and blood, but Ari was already in the depths, in the comfort of the Dream.

  2: Hell or High Lava

  There was a Time before the world was stone...

  There was a Time when birds of flame rose from pits of the same, soaring from cavern to chasm, spreading fire with their wings, nigh invisible in the furnace that was the world. There was a Time when life bled from the earth, burning the ground alive.

  Those birds are gone now, and the world has grown old and rigid. Where it was soft and warm, it was now hard and cold. They thought of her as a Mole, but in her heart she was the Phoenix...

  The school day had ended early, and the sun was setting over the ocean behind Rina as she walked through the gardens.

  Ahead, Bees were covering the fields under electro-photo-thermal protective sheets. When the sun set the sheets would shed light and heat on the plants for the early hours of the night, and then just heat when tended by the Bees working the night shift. Water was channelled through heated capillary tubing from the giant cisterns by the mountain and distributed to the plants through irrigation veins.

  The Bees’ work was down to five months a year. Her father joked that they would not be busy Bees much longer. She had asked what that meant. An old saying, he’d said. Bees must have been busy someday, go figure.

  After the summer the Ants would blast the plantation, bringing up fresh soil. Bees would sow the soil and install the sheets for several weeks, tending to the plants only when there were signs of growth until even artificial heat could not keep the cold out of the ground and the water.

  Meanwhile, Bee women and children would secure the produce from the summer and organise it in rations before submitting reports to the Council for distribution. Male Bees would move further southeast, behind the mountain for grazing until the winter.

  Rina tripped over a small flowerpot, sending dirt and seeds flying around her as she fell.

  A hand grabbed her by the neck, and yanked her off the ground. “Why, you little...” Rina turned to stare into the face of an angry old Bee. “...stinking...”

  A young man rushed in, whispering something in the old man’s ear. Rina could not make out his words clearly, something about Mole girls, rushed talk, and something about Hades. Whatever it was, it mollified the old man, who put her down, and dusted off his hands. He looked down at her strangely, turned, and walked away without a word.

  The younger man patted her on the head. “Don’t worry about him, little girl, cold is working his joints, he gets like that sometimes...but, you!” Rina jumped to attention. “What’s your name?”

  “Rina!”

  “Well Rina, I’m Dan, and you need to do two things, one of which is to watch your step—that’s food for the colony you just spilled. Understand?” Rina nodded vigorously. “Good. The second is to get home before nightfall. You Moles are really easy with your girls, but besides your mother, you got Beasts to worry about along the way. Now scram!”

  “Hey! Watch where you’re going!” yelled a teenage Bee carrying roots and berries out of a small store. Rina turned and poked her tongue at him. The alleyways were crowded with Moles changing shifts, and Ants, Bees, and Beasts on their way back from the places they disappeared to while she went to school.

  She could get home before her second mother, Chaya, and her sister, Hadar, if she was fast enough. They spent the afternoon at Hadar’s husband’s house. She was pregnant with his child, and officially married but his first wife had not passed yet, soon, but not yet. He was still in love with her and uncomfortable having Hadar stay in his house, but they visited.

  Hadar was getting fat. Rina had tried to poke her belly but she’d pulled Rina’s head to her stomach to feel the baby’s kick. If it was a boy, only four more and Hadar would be finished with her pregnancy duties.

  She slowed her pace and hid behind a large wooden cart full of scrap metal as a squad of Fish stepped out of a house dragging two unconscious teenage Moles by the hair, their faces dripping blood, followed by an Ant, his hands tied behind his back. Their leader, a short woman, landed her boot on one of their heads.

  The flow of people along the alleyway hadn’t stopped, but a few paid attention and many more leaned over from small balconies and windows.

  “The two Moles were found attempting to smuggle contraband into the tunnels, and this Ant, abetted them!” said the leader. More people were stopping now, there was something about sentencing that people wanted to hear, if only to have an opinion. One of the boys started struggling. A short, male Fish shocked him with a lancer, and he went numb again. “They will be flogged and thrown over the cliff! The Ant will serve three months penance in the cells and one working the mines! If there are any complaints, log them with the Priests!”

  The Ant’s knees went weak at the word mine, but he managed a steady step as they dragged the two boys away and he followed them guarded by the rest of the squadron.

  They walked past the scrap cart but didn’t see her crouched at boot-level. She dusted herself off as they rounded the bend curving down between the rows of houses towards the Fish quarters, and followed the smell of smoke around the mountain to where the Moles resided, guarded, and dug the Divine Undertaking.

  The common room was empty when Rina cracked the door open. She shut it quietly behind her and rushed to her room, staying there reading until noises drifted through the door. She heard Hadar warming up the stove in the small kitchen by the window and talking to Chaya.

  Her room was wi
ndowless, on the top floor of a three-story house built against and inside the mountain wall. There was just enough room for her bed, a small table for studies, and a string to hang her clothes. Each of her three sisters had rooms of their own, which made her brothers horribly jealous. Boys shared their rooms, and with five brothers, Rina’s few square feet were the envy of most of her male siblings.

  “Hadar, take some rest, I’ll warm up the stove,” Chaya said.

  She heard her sister shuffle her feet to a chair and breathe deeply. The pregnancy was weighing heavily on her, and now that her third mother was between children, she could relieve her of domestic duties.

  “Rina?! Get out here!” Chaya’s summon drew her into the common room. “How was school?” she asked. Her smile slid from Rina to Hadar and back.

  “Fine,” Rina said, and smiled back warmly at her second mother. Chaya was a loving woman, and had recovered well from carrying Noah. Her strength was returning, and she could get back behind the stove.

  “You’re done with your homework?” Hadar grunted.

  Rina nodded hesitantly, happy that Chaya had turned her attention back to the stove. Lying to Chaya was half of what she considered homework, and she would have recognised Hadar’s grunt for doubt at her sister’s honesty. Rina winked at Hadar, who smiled faintly, and pulled herself up to look out of the kitchen window.

  Mole quarters spread east and west below the Divine Undertaking. Beneath them stood the Ant, Beast, and Bee neighbourhoods on a lower ridge below the Mole district, opening on the plantations. Stretching all the way down to the lower plateau before the cliff, the Fish quarters still occupied most of the colony, and ended in a perimeter wall that circled the settlement, manned day and night by armed Fish guards. Beyond the wall, smaller Fish communities dotted the edge of the cliff, overlooking the waters that were the world.

  From the kitchen window, she could see down past the narrow streets of the Mole quarters, all the way to the furthest Fish settlements, distinguishable only by faint lights in the pitch darkness and dwarfed by the brilliance of the colony.