The Chamber in the Sky

by M. T. Anderson

  With a clang, the Thusser struck out at him again. Brian rolled to the side.

  The base continued to shift. Machines and tools hopped off the wall, clattering and cascading across the floor. Brian landed and rolled.

  The Thusser ran toward him, bounding from floor to wall to floor again.

  The Thusser’s tongue slapped around his lips and he howled.

  The room tilted.

  The cauldron plunged toward Brian. He grabbed it as it went past. He rode it as it screeched toward the Thusser. The torturer looked up in panic.

  The cauldron slammed into the man. Brian fell off backward.

  The baby-faced Thusser was pinned beneath it, his head jerking. He clawed at the kids, but he could not move.

  The metal skeleton of the factory moaned in stress.

  Brian, Gregory, and Gwynyfer didn’t wait to see whether the Thusser could free himself. They ran to the door, swung it open, and fled the room as fast as they could.

  But it wasn’t easy to run. Not only were chairs and equipment and stacks of paper slithering up and down halls, but the floor kept shifting. To go straight, they had to climb uphill.

  The kids ran for the corridor that led to the docking bay.

  Suddenly, they tumbled. They fell through the air. They felt the blows of walls all over their bodies.

  They were on the ceiling. Brian gasped in pain. He heard Gregory barking swears beside him as they pulled themselves up and crawled toward their dinghy.

  There was a huge collision. Everything shook. The lights went out.

  The factory had plunged down against the artery wall. A metal arm had smashed off.

  In the complete blackness, they could hear millions of gallons of blood rushing into distant rooms.

  Brian and Gregory couldn’t see. They were terrified. Around them, the whole huge building pitched and screamed. They didn’t know which way to crawl.

  “Come along,” said Gwynyfer. “This way. Hold on to my heels.” She shuffled forward. “Come on! The flux is coming!”

  Gwynyfer, who could see faintly in pitch blackness, led them across the ceiling of the docking bay. She shut the bay’s airtight door behind them and wheeled its locks closed.

  The rushing of waters got louder. There was a hideous iron shriek, and another arm of the factory pulled off. The room jumped. Brian screamed.

  The door was creaking. The force of watery blood grew behind it.

  Gwynyfer pulled open the hatches to the dinghy. She turned on the light.

  The airtight door into the docking bay burst. Flux spouted in.

  Gregory and Brian tumbled into the dinghy behind her. They slammed the hatch shut. Brian pulled the lever to lock it.

  The whole factory was shifting again — bumping along the arterial wall.

  Gregory started the dinghy’s engine.

  “Release the magnet!” he said. “Cut us free!”

  Brian flipped another lever.

  The little sub jolted and then was adrift.

  Gregory hit the throttle, laid on the gas, and they buzzed away from the spinning factory. Behind them, they could see its greening surface turn and head into the profounder darkness of the lower organs.

  Gwynyfer said, “Why, thank you, Bri-Bri, for grabbing that dagger and saving our necks. And thank you, Gregory dear, for lying soundly asleep while it all happened.”

  Gregory actually looked kind of angry at her sarcasm.

  She sighed, “Exhausting.” She threw her head back against the hull. “I’ve only met two Thusser,” she said, “Dr. Brundish and this awful bounder with the cutlery. I have to say, I can’t recommend them as a people. They seem really rather moody. Full of opinions, but with no conversation.”

  “Where are we going?” asked Brian. He turned on the rattling fan to circulate air.

  “I don’t know,” Gregory answered, and steered them there.

  Kalgrash was sick of being followed. He walked along through the Quicknickel Market, casting quick glances behind him. Two men dressed as servants were making their way through the crowd. Both of them wore the livery of the Imperial Court, both had sturdy backpacks, and both were carrying platters. There was nothing on the platters. Kalgrash didn’t know what was in the backpacks, but he had a strong suspicion it was not soft bread, fine cheese, and all the makings of a delicious picnic.

  Lamps lit the marketplace. Stalls were set up for the night, selling vegetables and flesh. The alleys smelled of rot.

  Kalgrash wasn’t worried while he was in the market itself. But he could see the assassins getting tense. You could always tell when breathers were about to make their move. Their eyes shifted differently, and their muscles twitched. He could tell that the second he was away from others, they were going to jump. He just didn’t know what else they planned to do.

  He stopped and looked at a stall that sold kitchenware. He inspected several metal bowls. He stared into their depths. He caught a reflection over his armored shoulder. There was one of the assassins. Kalgrash inspected the man. At first, the guy looked like he was just another servant: He wore the hat, he was carrying the tray, and so on.

  Kalgrash looked more carefully at the tray. Then he saw two wires leading from the tray to the backpack.

  Suddenly, he knew what was going on. Those weren’t trays. They were electromagnets. The backpacks were batteries. The assassins were going to wait until he was alone and then create a magnetic field around him. A light jolt would knock him out. A heavy jolt would erase his memory, his personality. And turned up all the way, a magnet could kill him outright.

  Kalgrash stopped inspecting the man in the metal bowl. The girl selling the kitchenware looked at him hopefully. “See one you’re interested in?”

  Kalgrash tried it on his head. “No. None of them fit. Sorry.”

  He put the bowl down and stalked away. He was sure the assassins followed.

  He turned down Dainsplint Avenue. A building had collapsed into the street earlier in the day, during the heartbeat. Scavengers were looking through the wreckage. Kalgrash kept going.

  It was time to confront the assassins.

  He found an alley too narrow for both of them to walk side by side. That was important. He had to make sure that they didn’t manage to get on either side of him and create a magnetic field between them.

  He stepped sideways, suddenly, into the alley, and ran down it.

  The assassins saw him dart off the avenue and they moved in for the kill.

  The alley was narrow and dark, so narrow the assassins’ elbows almost brushed the uneven walls. Their Norumbegan eyes quickly adjusted to the dark. They swiveled their platters so the flat faced forward. Each held his thumb over a switch.

  Kalgrash crouched waiting in a doorway, unseen. As the first assassin crept by, the troll reached out gently, quietly, and grabbed the wires that led from the platter to the battery pack. He sliced them neatly with his ax.

  That was one electromagnet down — but he’d been seen. The first assassin shouted, and the second assassin rushed to the doorway and faced the mechanical troll.

  Kalgrash panicked at the sight of the second assassin’s flat, gray tray — soon alive with deadly charge.

  He heard a click. A woozy force hit him. It grabbed his ax sideways and slammed it for him into the assassin, clanking hard against the magnet. The man went reeling back against the wall.

  The other assassin was still fumbling with his useless platter. Kalgrash grabbed him and used him as a club to beat his friend.

  His hands tingled. He’d gotten them too close to the magnetic field. He couldn’t work his fingers.

  So he beat with his metallic fists in clumsy karate chops.

  The two Norumbegans were down on the ground. Kalgrash stuck his foot through the loops of wires and yanked. The charge was cut off.

  He reached down and grabbed his battle-ax.

  “Tell whoever sent you,” he said, “that when I smite, it hurts.”

  He went back out to
the avenue.

  Several hours after they left the crashed extraction station, the three kids came upon a docking facility that stuck out into the artery. There were a few subs clamped to it already. Men in diving suits were making repairs.

  Gregory steered the dinghy into a berth and shut off the engine.

  This time when they stepped through the hatch, the signs were good: A Norumbegan harbormaster greeted them and led them through a long tunnel.

  They had landed in a village called Wellbridge, in a side-chamber of the stomach of Two-Gut. The village was surrounded by huge, feathery, frilled growths that towered hundreds of feet into the air. They looked like fungi or molded wax, but they were called gut fingers. The locals figured that when there was food moving through the alien stomach, these structures somehow combed something out of it or absorbed something or spewed something out.

  The village itself was carved into the gut fingers. There were windows and doors and even gargoyles carved into the flesh.

  The kids decided to stay overnight at a hotel there. There was one diner in town, up in a tower of a gut finger, and they went there to get a square meal. They hadn’t eaten for more than a day.

  It turned out that the flesh of the gut fingers was the main dish in Wellbridge. The waiter served it to the kids in huge red bowls. It was orange and spongy, and came with tomato sauce.

  It wasn’t so bad when they tasted it.

  “So,” said Gregory through a full mouth, “what’s the plan?”

  “I think we head for the Jejunum,” said Brian. “The town of Turnstile. The Ellyllyn Inn. That’s the last place the Umpire Capsule sent a postcard from. We need to trace it from there.”

  Gwynyfer said, “That’s on the way to the family estates. The Globular Colon. Wouldn’t it be delish to relax for a few days? I, for one, would be glad of a dip in the reflecting pool and a maidservant to rub my feet with pumice stone.”

  “I’m not sure we have time to, you know, sit by the pool,” said Brian. “We don’t know how fast time is passing on Earth. Or how quickly the Thusser are spreading there.”

  “Or here,” Gregory added.

  “There’s a terrible thought,” said Gwynyfer. “Thusser in my reflecting pool! Here’s hoping that the musketry of the Globular Colon was brave enough to keep them out.”

  They asked the waiter how far it was to Turnstile. He hadn’t heard of the town, but he said the journey across the stomach to the intestines, which were called the Volutes, was about four days. Near the Volutes, they’d find the Jejunum. The roads down that way were well marked.

  “A few hours ago, there was a big tidal wave of blood in the artery,” Gregory said. “Does that always happen?”

  The waiter shook his head. “No. Hasn’t happened in a hundred years or more. Used to be it happened more often. We’d set the shipping out on the floods and they’d get pulled along. They’d shoot up to the hearts in the veins, come back down in the arteries. Didn’t even have to use their engines. But them hearts haven’t beat for decades.”

  “A heartbeat?” Brian said. “That’s what happened?”

  “That’s what’s on the far end of this artery. Number Four Heart. McRiddle’s Plum. I don’t know for sure. We haven’t got no news, because the telegraph lines were all tore up when the flood hit. But I reckon it’s Number Four Heart.” He nodded. “Strange times, milady.”

  “Strange times indeed,” said Gwynyfer, “when a waiter expects a tip and yet doesn’t bring a girl’s lime fizz.”

  The waiter flushed and bowed low. Brian couldn’t stand to watch a grown man bow to Gwynyfer after she was so rude.

  But he saw Gregory grin. He could tell Gregory was impressed by her self-confidence. Her aristocratic command. How much she was already like an adult.

  After dinner, they went back to their hotel. It was in another growth. Their rooms were small and warm and hollowed out. They lay down in their burrows, nestled in piles of animal skins, and fell asleep for many, many hours.

  The next morning, they left Tom Darlmore’s dinghy in Wellbridge, realizing they would probably never be back for it. They set out on the sky tram that led off through the forest. The sky tram was a big brass pot they sat in, suspended by cables on tall poles. The pot creaked along, forty or fifty feet above the ground. They were protected from the glaring light of the electrified veins by a paper umbrella. They squatted uncomfortably in the pot and swayed along through the towering gut fingers.

  “I feel like I’m a mixed drink,” muttered Gregory as the paper umbrella flapped above them in the hot breeze blowing from the Fundus of Dacre.

  Every two hours or so, they’d come to an engine station where the cables were cranked by a machine that shot out clouds of diesel smoke. They’d have to get out and switch to the next sky tram for the next leg of their journey.

  They passed out of the forest and traveled above a toothy mountain range, the Rugose Hills. The heat from the lux effluvium in the veins above them was overwhelming.

  That night, they slept near one of the engine stations. They’d bought food in Wellbridge: more gut finger. They cooked a few slabs over a campfire.

  As they cooked, two eyes so deep and green they were almost black watched them from behind a hillock. The kids did not notice.

  They talked easily among themselves. Gregory and Gwynyfer had started to call each other G.

  Gregory, lying back with his ankles crossed, said, “You know what the sky tram reminds me of, G?”

  “No, G. I am simply all ears. Do tell.”

  “You are all ears, G.”

  “Don’t sulk, human G. Someday yours might get pointed, too. You could do it with paper clips.”

  “Well, G, what I was saying … you know what the sky tram reminds me of?”

  Brian thought he heard something move in the low scrub. He looked into the blue darkness, but could see nothing.

  Gregory explained, “It reminds me of skiing. The ski lift. Has the Honorable Gwynyfer Gwarnmore ever been skiing, G?”

  “Why, yes she has, G,” said Gwynyfer. “In the Sputum Rifts.”

  “You know, G, I’m not a bad skier myself,” Gregory boasted. “I go up to New Hampshire.”

  “How nice for you, G. Imagine: New Hampshire.” She kicked at a stone near the fire. “Does Bri-Bri go with you to New Hampshire?”

  Brian did not, in fact, go skiing with Gregory in New Hampshire. His parents didn’t want to pay a hundred dollars a day for the equipment rental and the lift ticket. This year, Gregory had gone with other kids, part of the ski club, and they’d come back with stories of almost crashing into trees and meeting cute girls at fifty miles per hour. Those weekends, Brian had spent his time doodling ideas for his round of the Game — which now would never happen — and practicing his cello.

  “No,” said Gregory. “Bri-Bri didn’t go skiing, G. Bri-Bri was no fun. He stayed at home and did nothing.”

  Brian wanted to say something, but he was worried that he heard another movement outside the light of their campfire.

  “Bri-Bri!” Gwynyfer exclaimed. “Why no fun?”

  “It’s really expensive,” said Brian quietly.

  Gwynyfer started to tell a story about a skiing holiday with many noble youths and maidens, the flower of Norumbegan chivalry — a complicated story about running in and out of a sauna with the door flapping — but as she told it, Brian caught sight of something slinking toward their campfire. It was serpentine and low to the ground.

  “Hey!” he hissed, and pointed.

  “You may interrupt to make a jest or express admiration,” said Gwynyfer. “Which will it be?”

  Gregory cracked up at this, throwing his head back — then yelped as something darted across his legs.

  It looked like a cross between a dragon and an insect and a dachshund. It was long and tubular, and had six short legs and lots of antennae or whiskers. It grabbed their food bag and dashed for the hills.

  “What was that?!” Gregory protested. “It r
an across my legs!”

  It stared at them from a safe distance. They could see its blackish-green eyes reflecting the light of the fire.

  Gregory tried to throw stones at it.

  It ducked and disappeared.

  All night, when one of them woke up, they could hear it munching.

  The next day, they set off without food. The sky-tram operator at the station told them there was a town a few hours ahead. They could purchase more supplies there.

  Gregory was hot and hungry. While they waited to step into the next tram, Gregory said, “Why can’t we just call the capsule on the telephone?”

  Brian said eagerly, “That’s right! There was a phone at the Court! You have phones! Can’t we just call down to the inn?”

  “Of course we have phones,” said Gwynyfer. “What do you think we are?”

  Brian said, “Oh, I’m sorry … it’s just … just, sometimes the Norumbegans seem to have stuff from the past, and sometimes you have stuff from the future, and, you know, I never know which is which.”

  “Sorry, Bri-Bri: All human culture is just a dream of Norumbegan culture. We make things, and then you people have some sort of hazy vision of them later and pat yourselves on the back for invention. Your whole culture is just our culture remembered badly.”

  “That’s funny, G,” teased Gregory, “because I thought that Norumbegan culture was just our culture remembered badly. You know, G, because Norumbegan culture seems like a big wreck made out of our stuff.”

  “Human G, that’s the kind of thought that gets you a quick, smart slap on the cheek in some circles.”

  The two kept up their cute fighting while Brian said, “So, Gwynyfer — Gwynyfer? Can’t we call that inn down in the Jejunum? In the town of Turnstile? And ask about the capsule? Couldn’t we just call down there?”

  The future mistress of the Globular Colon gave him the stink-eye. “We have phones. Four or five in the empire. It’s not everyone who can afford a phone. Just a few of them. One organ to another. For important Imperial business. Who’d want to chat, anyway, with people in the Jejunum? Who’d want to know what they ate for breakfast, or what they planned on wearing?”