The Proteus Bridge
Page 12
Ngoba took in the door and activated the sealing mechanism. Like before, it wasn’t locked. There was a sigh of air as the lock released, and the door opened slightly. Ngoba pulled the door toward him then stuck his head through the opening.
He found the same red curtain. He waited, listening. The club sounded deserted, and it was dark. He took a step through the door and whispered, “Crash, you here?”
Crash the parrot gave an excited squawk, and the cage rattled as it moved. “Ing-go-ba!” he said. “Ing-go-ba!”
“I’m glad to see you too, brother,” Ngoba said.
He pushed the door the rest of the way open, and turned to drag first Fug and then Riggs through the opening, setting them against the portion of the club wall hidden by the curtain. Ngoba pulled the door closed and tried to engage the lock, but he couldn’t be sure he’d been successful. The panel kept flashing a low battery indicator.
Just to be sure, Ngoba found the edge of the curtain, and peeked into the club. Low lighting from the ceiling showed the place to be deserted.
“All right, Crash,” Ngoba said, facing the grey parrot. He felt around the cage for a door or opening of some kind. “I meant to drop my friends off and come find you—because it’s been bothering me that you’re stuck here in this cage—but events haven’t quite worked out that way. I’m going to let you out, but there are people coming after us who might inadvertently cause you some harm.”
“Rack Thir—teen!” Crash said, bobbing his head. He worked at a bar with his horny black beak. His yellow eye glowed in the dark.
“That’s them,” Ngoba said. “Now how would you know that?”
Crash bobbed his head again, squawking in a way that sounded like laughter.
“Fine, be that way,” Ngoba said. “Now, how the hell do I open this cage?”
He found what he thought might be a sliding door, but it appeared to have some kind of biometric scanner that didn’t respond when he slid his finger over it.
“Locked, huh?” Ngoba said. “Well, then.” He lifted the cage off its stand, and found that it wasn’t too heavy, but it was very ungainly. He needed two hands to carry it.
“Riggs!” Ngoba shouted, which made Crash squawk. “Riggs, wake up!”
Riggs didn’t stir.
“So I guess this is a quandary,” Ngoba said.
Booms from the other side of the door set his heart pounding. He left the cage to grab Fug and throw her over his shoulder. When her cheek hit the middle of his back, Fug’s visor fell off her head and rolled between Ngoba’s feet. Ngoba adjusted her weight on his shoulder, which felt like less than a bag of stiff filament, and studied the broken visor. He had never seen her without it, even in the early days. Grunting, Ngoba knelt and picked it up. Realizing he wouldn’t have any free hands, he slid the visor on and settled the band down on his forehead. As he expected, its HUD was completely dead.
Ngoba turned and pulled up Riggs’s shirt to find his belt, and dragged him toward the cage, then used the arm holding Fug’s legs in place to grab Crash’s cage by several bars.
“You’re probably not going to like this,” he said. “I think you prefer being upright.”
Ngoba lifted the cage off its stand and pulled it close against Fug’s legs and his chest. The cage didn’t shift as badly as he thought it would, but the parrot squawked anyway, and hopped from one side to the other, flapping his wings. Ngoba struggled to keep his grip as the bird shifted the weight of the cage.
“Come on, brother. Just for a little while, until I can get out of this current situation.”
Ngoba stepped around the edge of the velvet curtain, jerking Riggs as his head caught in its heavy hem. He went down a short series of steps into the main dining areas, where the tables were arranged with the chairs stacked upside down on top of them. In the middle of each table, the briki flowers sat closed, the purple petals oily and shimmering under the low light.
Catching sight of the closest flower, Ngoba stopped short. He had forgotten about them. While the flowers rested, they hoarded more pollen until it was time to open again, usually triggered by the light that approximated Sol. On the ‘first crack’, as the briki-heads called it, the flowers puffed out a cloud of pollen that hung in the air, waiting to be inhaled. After that, you had to rub your face in the stamens. He inched away from the nearest table, knowing that if he bumped it and woke the flower, he would just as well sit down and enjoy the ride until Tithi blew his head off.
“Careful,” the parrot crooned.
“You see that, too, little brother?” Ngoba said. “I’ll take it easy.”
Ngoba had nearly worked his way across the room, jerking Riggs as he balanced Fug and the bird cage, when hammering rose from behind the velvet curtain.
“Dammit,” he breathed.
He was sweating heavily, his arms and legs were burning from the exertion. He had been focused on a door near the bar that he was fairly certain opened back into Night Park, not far from the fountain. As he breathed and pulled, he had done his best to determine where the corridor out of the Hangar actually went, and it made sense that it only skirted the edge of the park. Otherwise, it would have been out in vacuum. Considering the corridor looked like it was made from an old ship, that was possible—but it was also warm. You could always tell the presence of vacuum on the other side of a wall in Cruithne by the cold seeping its way inside. Mama Chala liked to say they lived surrounded by death, always looking to tear its way inside and suck the life out of them with the Vacuum’s Kiss.
The sound of someone big throwing their shoulder against the door behind Ngoba made the curtain wave, and on the nearest table to the door, the briki flower quavered. Ngoba watched, holding his breath, then told himself he had to keep moving. The opposite door was only a few jerks of Riggs’s heavy ass away.
It took the Rack Thirteen people less than a minute to pry the door open and force their way in to the room. Ngoba had just made it to the edge of the bar, the exit within reach, when Tithi swept the curtain aside and shouted with delight in her voice, “Ngoba!”
Her joy turned to anger when she saw Riggs sprawled like a corpse near the bar. “Riggs! What did you do to him? I’ll cut your head off, Ngoba Starl!”
Ngoba could only shake his head, the exhaustion making it impossible to speak.
Crash the parrot squawked ruthlessly, flapping his wings like a pent tornado.
Unable to warn her about the briki flower near her arm, Ngoba could only blink sweat out of his eyes as the flower’s petals gathered in a single, powerful convulsion and then opened to spit a cloud of crimson pollen into Tithi’s face. She stood blinking in surprise as the pink fog floated back over the group behind her, drawn by the moving air from the open door.
Tithi screamed. She surged forward, probably trying to escape the pollen that had painted her face red, and bumped into another table. That flower spasmed pollen all over her as well. Flower after flower spit pollen as she stumbled around the room, bumping tables in her path.
Ngoba gathered his strength and yanked Riggs toward the exit. The fog had grown suddenly thicker. He thought he could see its edge reaching for him, but couldn’t be sure just how much pollen filled the air now. He let go of Riggs so he could pull the door open, and immediately realized his mistake.
The suction of the opening door drew a cloud of pollen over him. Ngoba squeezed his mouth closed, holding his breath, and grabbed Riggs’s hand again to pull him into the vestibule, where a glass door waited and, beyond, the crowded booths of Night Park.
Ngoba charged into the open, not caring that a crimson miasma followed him outside. He struggled as far as he could without taking a breath, until his lungs screamed and black claws threatened his vision. He reached the first row of booths and staggered into a gap among a pile of storage crates. Then he fell to his knees, setting Crash on the deck, and rolling Fug off his shoulder.
The black had nearly overtaken his vision when he pulled Riggs in toward him, laying his friend acro
ss his lap. Ngoba let his own head fall against the cold crate behind him, and finally sucked in a breath of fresh air.
He hadn’t run far enough, and braced himself as the hallucinations rolled in.
BRIKI LAND
STELLAR DATE: 03.23.2956 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Crash Games Hangar, Night Park
REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
A giant pterodactyl patrolled the domed ceiling of Night Park, shrieking and breathing fire on the two-story battle slug moving slowly across the vegetable market, leaving glowing slime in its wake. In front of the neon battle slug, two versions of Mama Chala clad in ornate armor charged at each other with burning swords raised above their heads, screaming war cries. All around, screaming and cries of terror mixed with maniacal laughter. The ceiling was replaced by a stormy purple sky, like a bruised stomach sucking in and out; changing the air pressure in the great space so that Ngoba’s head seemed to expand and shrink, squeezing his thoughts.
Rack Thirteen thugs stumbled between booths, scratching at their crimson-stained faces, babbling and crying, while others ran full-sprint down the more open areas, firing indiscriminately with projectile weapons, beams, and, occasionally, the deadly plasma gun that thankfully never struck anything of consequence. A fabric booth burned in the distance, sending up roiling plumes of oily black smoke, a mix of plas and natural fibers that smelled like roasting flesh.
Ngoba had lost sight of Fug and Riggs. He pressed his hands over his ears to shut out the mad laughter, only to find his equilibrium disrupted. He stumbled as if the deck had become a merry-go-round, left and right heaving up and down. He shook his head, trying to find something with which to anchor himself, something to serve as reality in the twisting funhouse the world had become. He felt like he was falling, his stomach leaping into his throat and then doing a somersault that left his head spinning; then he felt nailed in place, the bazaar wheeling around him in a riot of color, shape, and sound.
He supposed this might be fun, if the other people caught in the wrath of unbridled hallucinogens weren’t trying to kill him, and if the world wasn’t populated by grinning, stomping monsters while his soul leaked out his ears. At any moment, an angry fire god was going to crack open the fleshy, domed roof, and jam a flaming cock deep into the crevasse of Night Park, and fuck them all with fury and fortitude until everything burned away in an orgasmic maelstrom of fiery fusion and blood.
He must have been screaming. He opened his eyes to find Crash the parrot watching him carefully, the gold eye ringed by grey feathers holding steady in the midst of the storm. Ngoba crawled toward the parrot, clawing at the deck.
“Crash,” he moaned. “Crash can you see me?”
“Ing-go-ba!” the parrot squawked, bobbing its head.
The eye flashed, and Ngoba realized Crash had turned his head and was studying him with his other eye, like he was consulting two different brains. Ngoba struggled to hang onto the image of the parrot, what he knew to be true, before Crash swelled into a rhinoceros with gleaming wings.
“Clippers,” Crash crooned, pointing his beak to something beside Ngoba’s shoulder. “Snippers. Snip, Ngoba. Snip!” Crash released a squawk and continued nodding at something next to his cage.
Ngoba slowly turned his gaze in the direction Crash was pointing. Bits of the world steadied for an instant, then spun away. He saw a man in the distance frantically fighting off a mottled, bulb-shaped thing that seemed to be chewing on his head. He fell into a booth, and it exploded in sparks and gobs of liquid flesh.
Shaking his head, Ngoba worked his gaze closer, finding the ground beside his arm empty except for grime, then up again, centimeter by centimeter, until he found an open toolbox that had spilled its contents. It was probably only a meter away, but seemed to be in another dimension. On top of the toolbox lid was a pair of power-cutters, the kind electricians used to snip fiber cables, or that gangsters used to remove fingers one knuckle at a time.
Crash was telling him to cut him out of the cage.
With his head contracting and expanding like a balloon, Ngoba reached for where he thought the clippers were. Finding nothing, he felt among the shifting colors and shapes until his hand closed on two long pieces of metal that he recognized as the tool. He pulled it back to his chest, eyes suddenly full of joyful tears. Ngoba was overcome with agonizing happiness to hold the clippers against his chest.
Then he opened his eyes to find Mama Chala in battle dress, standing over him and holding high the decapitated head of the other Mama Chala. Mama’s dead eyes stared outward in a way that seemed to take in everything while staring solely at him. The victorious Mama tossed the head at him, and it rolled to a stop with her dead, half-open lips close to his.
“Ing-go-ba!” Crash barked. “Clip! Clip!”
Ngoba nodded, squeezing his eyes closed. His thoughts were starting to get closer together, to link in ways that at least went from A to C. He knew Mama wasn’t there. He knew avatars weren’t smashing their way across Night Park. All he had to fear were the hallucinating Rack Thirteen gang members and Tithi, somewhere in the labyrinth of the bazaar.
Somewhere in his heaving mind, he knew that if he was coming down, they would be, too.
Ngoba rolled onto his stomach and pushed himself toward the cage, which lay on its side a few meters away. Rising to his knees, he set the cage upright and clipped the bars above the rectangular door. Once the top bars were done, he cut along the bottom of the door, trying to shut out the background screams and booming thunder of the giant beings fighting around him. A mecha-dolphin rumbled past, barking and squealing in high-pitched clicks that stabbed his ears, but he squared his shoulders and concentrated on the task.
Finally he pulled the door out, and then reached inside for the parrot. Crash tilted his head until Ngoba held his palm sideways, and the grey bird hopped onto his hand, claws gripping the meat between his thumb and forefinger.
Ngoba carefully removed Crash from the cage, and no sooner was the bird under the open air, than it spread its wings and launched upward, squawking with joy. Ngoba slumped against a crate at his back and watched the parrot shoot higher and higher, its grey wings flapping, red tail feathers tight, squawking the whole time.
He sat staring at the ceiling for what seemed like a long time, watching the mottled bruises that had first looked like lightning resolve themselves into rows of lighting that crisscrossed between support beams. His vision was full of sparkles that drifted like snow, but the major hallucinations had subsided. He stared at his hand for a while, watching his blood move through his veins.
Ngoba was smiling at his palm, understanding perfectly how the various lines indicated his course in life, when a crunch beside him made him look up. A man in a faded red shipsuit stood over him, a fat plasma pistol in his right hand. His eyes were black, and his dust-covered face was covered in the tracks of red tears from the briki pollen.
Ngoba blinked at him, smiling, excited to see another human being. “Have you seen this?” he said, holding up his hand. “My soul is like a little maglev car moving along the tracks on my palm. It’s all laid out right here.
The plasma pistol made a long beep as its arming mechanism warmed up. “We’ve been looking for you, Rack Smasher,” he said, voice warbling slightly. “You thought you could hide, but you’re a giant crocodile. Dumbass. You can’t hide anywhere.”
“I’m not trying to hide,” Ngoba said.
“I’ll hide the little bits of you,” the man said, steadying the pistol in two hands. “But I’m taking your head. I want to make your face into a hat.”
From somewhere above, a black shape floated down, resolving into the spread wings of a bead-eyed raven. The bird unclenched its talons and landed on the man’s shoulder. He turned to look at the ruffle-headed bird with surprise and wonderment, when the raven pecked one of his eyes out. The man dropped the plasma pistol and clutched at his face, screaming.
The pistol hit the ground and spa
t a blob of plasma at the man’s foot and ankle, which disappeared in a splatter of blood and bone.
The raven launched from the man’s shoulder as he fell backward, then circled over him as he rolled over and started crawling away from Ngoba’s pile of crates, babbling and sobbing the whole time. Eventually, the raven landed on the man ‘s shoulder, pecking at his neck as he crawled.
In the distance, Ngoba heard more screams, real this time, as birds from the fountain attacked the Rack Thirteen thugs. Random gunfire spat uselessly as clouds of starlings, grackles, and crows descended on the frantic men and women.
Ngoba stood eventually, and wandered toward the center of the park, watching with bemused detachment as Night Park grew gradually silent except for the squawks, caws, and shrill songs of its birds. When they finished their work, the birds flew back to the fountain and covered the spiky branches of its stone tree, murmuring among themselves as they fell to grooming and grousing at one another, just like during the bazaar’s normal operations.
Finding himself drawn toward the fountain, Ngoba was pleased to see Crash the parrot sitting on the edge near the water. The grey parrot moved from foot to foot, scratching furiously among its neck feathers before fixing him with a yellow eye.
Ngoba gaped. The parrot’s voice was like any man’s, and he thought for a second that Riggs was playing a trick on him. He looked around, but he was the only person in sight.