A man on a white horse, dressed in a dark blue tunic with brightly burnished epaulets and buttons that caught the magma like lens flare. He held a shining silver rapier in his hand, and there was dark blood on his bright white pantaloons embroidered with yellow thread, spurs glinting on his long black boots as he spun down to the magma.
"Charger!" he shouted, the sound reaching me seconds after the lava claimed him.
I let the periscope go slack in my hands and turn to Doe.
"Gaulic," she says, her voice a cracked whisper. "It means charge, as in attack."
I look back to the smoking space in the air, far off round the core's curvature, and wonder what madness lay within. I can feel the others around me doing the same.
SHARK ARENA C
A long moment passes as he looks at me and I look at him. It's dark, and his teeth are bright. Somewhere far off there is the lapping of the Allatanc against this abandoned skulk's shore.
Is this real?
The stink of my own puke is rising up, right in front of my face, a dark Arcloberry purple. I push myself to my feet, where I waver for balance. Still woozy. It doesn't help that he's sitting there staring at me, his teeth mesmeric.
There's blood on the back of my hand, I notice as I rest it on the shark arena railing. At once the railing gives way, and I stagger a step forward, watch as the metal rail slaps into the thick layer of mossy crud grown over the arena water. Slowly it sinks, cutting lines through the compacted sea-foam and dust that reseal themselves like hot wax after it.
I re-gather my balance, any sense of pride, and point at the halogen-toothed man in the darkness. He knows my name, which makes me feel cornered, and when I'm cornered I get aggressive.
"Your hat looks ridiculous," I say. "Take it off."
He smiles wider and those bright white teeth blind me, like boatlights in the darkness, giving me a headache. "It's not my hat," he says, his voice a warm baritone, while taking it off. "It's his." He points to something at his feet, then drops the hat on it.
There's something dark lying there, like a long package, a glint of white, obscured by the railing and the darkness. "You should take a look at this," he says. "I think you'll like it."
"No I won't," I say at once, automatically contrary. The blood-sticky node is still in my hand, comforting, and I take a wobbly step forward. I glance around the arena one more time, but I still don't see a way out. It only unnerves me further, but to ask him about it would only put me one step further under.
Still, I have to start with something. "How do you know my name?"
"I know lots about you," he says.
Another step forward. "That's not an answer."
"And Ritry's not a name. Who gave it to you, do you know? A clerk in the abortion hall, perhaps? The janitor, cleaning up dribbles of amniotic fluid dripping out of your machine womb? Perhaps he picked up a bit of crayon and wrote out a whim on your vat?"
I can hardly make out what he's saying, my head's too fuzzy for it, but what I'm catching I don't like. "What the fuck are you talking about?"
"I think you know," he says. "I'm talking about the bath-tank that nurtured you, fed you, cycled sweet tones through the juice while you were just a scrub of blastocyte, waiting to be grown. Can you imagine that poor, shitty conglomeration of cells, no idea how unwanted it is, how lonely it's going to be ending up as this pathetic bastard I see before me?"
I laugh, spit vomit taste into the scum arena, and take another step forward. He just made it easy. "You don't know anything about me."
He spreads his arms. "Really? What do I not know, Ritry? Let me ask a question and we'll see. If you could have everything you ever wanted, everything and anything in the world, how would you feel?"
"Fuck you."
"Yes of course, but really think about it Ritry. How would you feel?"
"I'd feel brilliant," I snap back, "with your head on a fucking pig-pole."
"Liar," he says, calm and confident like he's just reading facts off a node. It pisses me off because normally I'm intimidating, at least people take me seriously, and he doesn't. I keep on shuffling forward round the curve of the shark arena. He doesn't move, just smiling.
"You need to get the fuck out of my face," I slur at him.
He laughs. "You're so like a fiddle when you're like this Ritry, I swear. Easy to play. Would you like to know why you're a liar?"
Another step. "I'd like to carve liar in your face."
He nods. "Remember you said that. Don't claim later that I didn't warn you. I am a liar to the core, but then so are you, and I'll tell you why. Ritry, it's because you'll never get everything you want in the world, because you don't want anything at all. What matters to you, Ritry? Nothing. You don't really feel anything."
I stop. He's been saying something.
"Come over here and say that," I say, holding up the node. It feels heavy and slow, but it'll do the job.
He frowns, disapproving. "You're not weeping yet, Ritry. Why are you not weeping? Why aren't you on the floor screaming about how hard it all is, how you've lost everyone you ever cared for, to the Lag, to the ice, to depths and shit and darkness? Why don't you weep for that poor blastocyte you once were, because what the fuck else have you got, let's be honest. Come on, put on a show for me. Make your fucking mother proud."
In that instant I know I really am going to rip his head off. Two more steps, his teeth blurring like distant freighter-lights through a fog. "Come here," I mumble.
"You're angry because you never had a mother. I understand that. You were aborted, flushed to a vat where they strung you along until you were old enough to fight in the ice. How do the tones go, Ritry, can you sing them for me, the ones you heard instead of a mother's pulse? Doe, Ray, Me…"
The singing is what makes me see red, and finally I'm charging, stumbling, bringing the node down hard in empty air.
He's not there anymore. My foot snags and I drop to my knees on something firm but yielding. My knee slides off to the hard floor, and I stand again, look up and around, thinking I hear his laughter but it could just be echoes of my own footfalls.
"Hey!" I shout.
"It's because I want to help you," his voice comes, and I turn. He's standing at the top of the arena, beyond the outer ring of seats, framed by an open doorway where pink morning light is pouring in like a slow thick flood. "You'll see that too, in time. You just need to be open. That's all I want from you, why I've stalked you for so long. But you've a very long way to go, Ritry, before I can give you the help you really need. Sincerely. There's so much yet to do."
My eyes blear up again, and I smear them back like I'm grinding his face under my foot. "I'll kill you," I say.
He laughs. "You will certainly try. I hope you will. Now spend some time with my friend Napoleon. He'll tell you how to find me."
He backs outward, and the door closes behind him, plunging me back into near-darkness. I start up the arena toward the place he'd stood, but it's darker here away from the hole in the roof, and I bang my knees, my shins, cursing as I go. My hand cracks off a seat-back and the node jerks free but I continue on, round a low dividing wall and up to the door.
I yank it open, to find I am standing at the very edge of a rotten skulk, looking down to the gray-green sludge of the Allatanc. Over the wave horizon the sun is coming up salmon pink, like old blood swishing down the shower plug. It spears my spinning head and I blink against it, one hand to shade my eyes while I scan the skulk-edge.
At my feet there's a rung ladder leading down to a narrow, sun-bleached wooden walkway. It only goes one way, off to the right along a thin promontory, itself half-sunk beneath the water, its blue-flotation barrels having lost their buoyancy. A few shack-like buildings rise up from it at 45-degree angles, the water cutting them off in a diagonal line across the doorways, windows.
I don't see him.
I scan the clump of leering buildings. One was a bar, I can see from the faded neon-tubes across the door-top, the glass
now faded to an intestinal gray. 'Shaley's', it reads, all looping cursive. I follow the tilted promontory out to the point that it simply sinks into water and disappears. For a fanciful moment I imagine the skulk continuing on even under the sludge, leading down through banks of festering kelp to an alley much like my own on 47. There I'd find another version of myself working in the graysmith's, sitting in a sonic bath, embedding memories, all while wearing gas tanks on my back.
A shudder, and I wake from the daydream. I think of Carrolla, who wants to start a bar filled with garbage reclaimed from below. That thought brings me back to the moment.
Mr. Ruins, he said his name was.
"Hey!" I shout out, but it's clear he's gone. The promontory leads back around the shark arena, itself a windowless, dark-boarded lump of molded wood studded with glass roundels, looking more like the keel of a ship than a building. It must've been designed as a gradual incline, perhaps so more people could once climb up and watch the shark fights from above through portholes now sealed by windblown grime.
I wonder how lucky I was to not fall into the thick scum of the arena water. An image of my drunk and puking form comes to me, kicking weakly like a T-rex trapped in tar sands, sinking down through the foam like the railing, swallowed with not a trace of who I was left behind.
The guy with the teeth is gone. I could go try to hunt him down but I won't. I dropped my node, and I'm too drunk to run.
I wedge the door open with a shard of broken glass in its jamb, and start back down the hall. With light flooding in I see the place for what it really is, a total shithole. Even in life it would have been a place for garbage people to come. There are broken bottles littering every surface, dark stains that must be blood splattered on floors and walls, cobwebs, the stink of bat guano. The railings and seats are all brittle faded plastic, cracked through in places, shattered to wafer-thin glass-like shards on the floor in others.
It's a sad place, and always was. I never liked the idea of making sharks fight. I heard once that they can never stop moving or they'll suffocate, can only sleep in winks while they keep stalking through the waves. That's the life for a shark, not this.
I start down the wooden steps looking for my node, careful with my feet so I don't kick it down to the arena. It's got all my glial backups on it, plus the spike is not a cheap fitting. Soon I'm crawling on my hands and knees round the aisle, banging my shoulders on the bent metal seating frames, feeling tiny fragments of old rust press up into my palms, telling me the story of this place.
I was once young too, they say to me. I was once alive.
I brush them away, run my fingers through piles of fluff and balls of wiry old hair, nudging aside old crisp packets with the colors leached away by darkness, a cup with the crusted remnants of beer adhering to the inside like limescale, chunks of nail and wet wood rotted through from above.
I find it nearer the door than I thought, well lit now. The face has maybe one more crack, but it chirps to life when I palm it. A call from Carrolla, another from an unknown number which I guess to be Mei-An, and that's it. I scrape blood out of the spike fold and depress it.
It's only when I turn back to the arena, to look it over a final time before I take my leave, that I see the body.
It is lying where the guy with the teeth, Ruins, was sitting. It's a man on his back, dressed in some bizarre military uniform, something out of a long-ago history: white tight pantaloons with yellow trim, a deep blue vest over a white tunic with gold buttons. Epaullets at his shoulders, the bicorne hat resting over his face, and one hand tucked into his tunic at an open button above his sternum.
For a long moment I stare, because I know who this is, or is meant to be. We had all kinds of engrams injected into us when we went up to face the ice, I've added dozens since, and this man was in one of them, something about strategy in some basic foundation course.
A startling memory flashes up, pop-fire like a camera's flash, in the way gray-merged memories are recovered, of two images laid next to each, one of this gallant dashing figure on a rearing horse, a furl of bright red cape swirling about his shoulders like a classic hero, his right hand held aloft and leading forward.
The other is a mean-faced sallow man in the rain, wearing a miserable green trenchcoat and riding a stocky brown pony, his right hand tucked into his coat.
NAPOLEON CROSSES THE ALPS
The words pop-fire into my mind like the images. I lurch down a few steps, closer.
The man on the floor is pot-bellied, rotund. Closer, my heart thumping a sickly cadence in my ears, I edge up to his stockinged legs, his polished black shoes gleaming in the dawnlight.
"Hey," I whisper, "wake up," but he doesn't say anything, doesn't move. I reach out tentatively, touch his left hand then jerk away like I've been shocked.
He's cold.
I stand above him, straddling his chest with my feet wedged between his paunchy upper arms and the seats on one side, railing on the other.
Ruins must have had his feet on this man's chest. The thought is hard to shake. I pick up the hat and study the face beneath. It is not the gallant Napoleon, nor the paunchy mean Napoleon, but neither. It's just a man, fat-nosed and ugly, with the faintest sense that I recognize him, though I can't say from where. His face is beet-red from being strangled.
I spot the garrote marks round his throat quickly, and instinctively spin, bring my arm up before my face.
There's no one behind me.
Then Napoleon begins to beep. I startle and turn, suddenly aware that this is how I will die, blasted apart by a bomb buried in a dead-man's fat belly, just like we bombed the crap out of the proto-Rusks with dry ice bombs stuffed in the ice-pack.
Boom.
But nothing happens, except the beeping continues. I set the hat to one side, stiff dark felt incongruous against the ratty plastic seating, and pat this faux-Napoleon's chest down. I have to unbutton his tunic to get to it, a tiny alarm clock clutched in his tucked-in right hand. I study it, and a bead of my own alcohol-stinking sweat splashes off the plastic front. I drop it into my pocket and investigate further.
There's a folder packed inside faux-Napoleon's tunic, beneath his hand, and I have to unpick most of his buttons to get to it. I peel it from the cold and clammy skin of his liverworted chest with a nasty sucking sound. I hold it up to the light.
FOR RITRY GOLIGH
The words are printed in red ink, an old font like something from a typewriter. Another bead of Arcloberry sweat drips to the paper, and when I brush it away my name smudges with it. I ruffle through the folder, see pages full of the same old font, interspersed with stacks of numbers, hand-scrawled maps, diagrams that look like family trees, a sketch of what looks like the earth in cross-section, or perhaps a topography of the brain, I can't be sure.
The world is churning.
I turn to the side and puke again, long and loud and messy into the dirty froth of the shark arena. I am surely not the first. I am coated in a shivery flop-sweat. I drank too much, fought too much. What did Ruins say? Already the sense of him is fading, something about what I wanted, what I needed.
And help. I look again at the dead man before me. Who was this guy? Did he dress up as Napoleon before he was killed, or after? I wonder what that must have been like, if he'd known what was coming, like being forced to dig your own grave. Get into your coffin suit, Napoleon, you're going to make a point for me.
Like some sad nocturnal pantomime.
"Hey," I say, nudging his corpse with my foot. "I'm sorry. I'll send someone for you."
I know as I say it that this is probably not true. I won't remember where he is, won't remember any of this in a few hours probably, only a gleam of white teeth in the darkness, and a folder of crazy conspiracy scrawlings in my hand. I tuck it into my shirt, just like Napoleon had it. It only occurs to me afterward that it had been touching the dead man's skin, but so what? We all rise together, fall together. We're all the same really.
Stumbling up the s
tairs, I begin to think about Mei-An. I bring up my node, see the message she's left me still flashing, and press to delete.
I don't want to know. I'm bad news.
I lurch out into the new day like some diseased wolf cub from the belly of its dead mother. What started a pink dawn has already settled to a gray and rain-fat sky. This is all that we have now, after we blew the ice out of the Arctic.
I pat the folder against my skin, feel it begin to stick with my sweat as it had with the faux-Napoleon. I start down the ladder, to the slap-slapping sound of the waves nudging the promontory. One good tsunami and we're all gone, I catch myself thinking. Hoping. Wash it all clean.
Over the unfamiliar terrain of that broken skulk, I start for what home I have.
GIANT'S PLAYSET C
"Was that a man?" Ray's voice comes through the blood-mic.
"On a horse," I add.
Nobody says anything for a time, as we consider what this means. Gradually the smoke clears from the gouge our candle-bomb has cut into the Solid Core's side.
"Let's go," I say at last, and start unclicking myself from the rivet-hole in the girder. I am first to fire my grapnel, first to swing back toward the hole.
Superheated magmic air rushes over me, the heat blurring my HUD, and I hear the others talking to each other through mics. I fade them down, focusing hard, because there was something familiar about that man on a horse. It rings a bell in my mind, though I don't know which bell.
I'm first to the gamma-clamp we set near the candle-bomb, so I'm first to rig a traverse wire from it to the next rivet-hole over and coil it tight.
"Be careful," comes Ray's voice in my head. I tongue their voices up, but they're all quiet now. I look back and see them all clustered together like black crulls perched on the last girder back, waiting. I give them a thumbs up, draw my Quantum Confusion parabolic, and slide along the traverse.
Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) Page 6
