The lump in my stomach only gets harder, thicker, sicker, so disgusting I can scarcely breathe.
"I could be fucking your wife, Ritry," he says, conspiratorially. "Your beautiful painter wife. And she'll call out your name while I do it. How would you feel about that? Your kids will call me papa. Art and Mem, what kind of names are those anyway? We'll change that. And do you know the best thing? Nobody but you and I will know. They say Job had it bad, but Ritry I'll make it so you never existed."
I gasp. A second flood of tears mists my eyes.
"Be reasonable," he says. "You must know you owe it all to me. When I found you you were only waiting to die. I gave you the world and you turned me down, but you kept everything else. That isn't fair is it? I'm only here to claim my due, to put you back where you would have stayed if not for me. You were lost and alcoholic, and so you would have stayed. Don't look at me like that, Ritry. Ask yourself, is this what I, Mr. Ruins, wanted? I didn't want this. I wanted you on my side, but you rejected me, didn't you? I can't allow that."
"Please," I manage to whisper.
He laughs. "That's a beginning. Perhaps in ten years? In twenty? I might relent. But until then, I need you to understand. You take your punishment like a good boy. You don't try to end it prematurely, because if you die, then so do they. You don't try to Lag the memories away, because if you do they'll die. If you do anything other than roll belly-up and take it until I say it's enough, they all die."
More tears, so thick I can barely see. If I had control of my body I'd be sobbing madly.
Ruins nods appreciatively. "Good, good. Now, to a point of order. You said before that I can't break open your mind, and maybe you were right. There's just too much scar tissue built up around your Core. But them?"
He nods to my children. I want to tear out his eyes. I want to drop on my knees and beg for forgiveness.
"There's nothing special about them. I can do what I want with them, and through them I'll do what I want with you."
I let out a sob. The misery is already too strong for his bonds.
He notices. I can feel him begin to feed off me. "That's more like it. Come on Ritry, let me hear you bawl. Didn't I say it would come to this? You poor child, didn't I warn you? I gave you everything, and you threw it back in my face, and now you're going to pay."
I push back against the force of his will with all the strength I can muster, and speak.
"Kill me," I say.
He looks pleasantly surprised.
"Really? Do you know, that is exactly what Napoleon said to me? When I told him how I was going to take everything from him, all his loyal friends and his beloved Jospehine, how I was going to drop him on a stinking hole of an island to while away his piss-ant life in ignominy and dishonor, unable to even kill himself, that is exactly what he said. And do you know what I said to him?"
He leaves this hanging. I am only standing now because he wants me to, because he's holding me up through the nerves in my back. Otherwise the shock would have dropped me vomiting up everything on the carpet Loralena and I chose together.
"I told him, what would be the nourishment in that?" His eyes glow hot. "But alive? Ritry, you'll keep me fed for as long as you live. Have you any idea the strength I'm going to get from your misery? You're a freak, and breaking those bonds is going to be a-fucking-tomic. You are my latest masterpiece. I fitted you for a suit, and you didn't even know it. For the past ten years you've put it on, piece by piece, and I've watched. Gods, how I've watched, and waited. Every delicious kiss, every touch on your children's hair, every kind word, every bit of it, gone!"
He is red-faced, working himself up, and now I am shrinking to a sick little nothing deep inside myself full of shame and disgrace. "You put the suit on for me, Ritry. You did it by yourself, and you thought it was a rebellion. You didn't even suspect. And you once had the gall to threaten me?" He laughs. "Who's the predator now, you fucking idiot, who's the true shark?"
He lets his grip on me loosen. I can barely breathe, barely move, but now I can speak.
"Say it," he says impatiently. "Come on, spit it out."
I know what he wants, he'll have read it in my mind, as I read enough in his. I am Don Zachary fallen to nothing.
"Please don't hurt my children," I say.
He laughs.
"I'll do whatever I want," he says. Then the Lag begins, and everything turns black.
BONDS E
We race, and days pass us by. Corridor after corridor we run, metal turning to flesh as the lips of the Lag hunt us down, going deeper than anyone ever dived before, farther and deeper still. The blip of our flashing red dot worms through the fractal maze of the Solid Core, running on faith that So calculated it right, that we're not even now speeding deeper into the heart of an off-shoot.
I think we are taking every turn we are meant to, but nothing is clear anymore, as we shed memories like breadcrumbs at our backs. Piece by piece the new life Ritry Goligh made for himself, for ourselves, wears away. We shave it into hemi-demi quavers and throw them out as chum to keep the Lag from our heels. We forget every bit.
We grow weary. We snatch sleep and food in what few moments we can, hunkered down in rooms that get darker and danker the deeper we go, with books of knowledge that get smaller and hazier, stories from a fragmented childhood, unimportant repetitions of routine life on the skulk or in the sublavic, events like drinking and eating and taking a piss.
Three days, and there's been nothing on the blood-mic but the distant fuzz of So's repeated lullaby. None of us wants to give her to the Lag, not until we can be certain she's really gone.
Doe, Ray and Far are lying in the entrance gap of the latest room. The smartly-pressed metal of the outer maze is long-gone now, the signature RGs smoothed out into veiny seams of rock.
The room is a murky cave, roughly oval in shape but far from symmetrical, riven by ridges, clefts, cracks, and banded discolorations in the rock. There are skeletons buried there, fossils perhaps, shapes of things that came before. Water drips down from above, fine droplets of it float in the cool air like gold-spray from the accelerator, condensing on the inner screen of my HUD as my breath wheezes in and out.
I tongue it to clear, but the vacuums under my eyes only whirr then fail. I take off the HUD and run my finger around the suction cups, and feel something click loose. I hold it in my hand, a small chunk of black plastic with a chip cracked off the corner.
This equipment was not designed to last this long. None of us were. I look at the others, wheezing softly in the wet air. It smells of old things here, peat and a past long-buried. Doe's skin is whiter than the book I'm standing on, her cheeks sallow and drawn. Ray twitches in his sleep, haunted by dreams of emptiness.
It's not the fear or the monsters that come for me either, in my sleep. It's the nothingness I've left behind.
Far trembles. I've tried holding him, but it does nothing. The weals on his neck shine brightly like LEDs. Even when he's walking with us, he's suffering. Half the time we carry him, because his legs won't hold him up. Sometimes when he tries to speak, all that comes out are the same five tones. The panic in his eyes scares us all.
SAVE FAR
I think back on the mission folder, what feels like a lifetime ago. I am a different person now. I still have no idea why Far matters, but I feel it. I love the boy, like he was my own son, like he was me.
Of course, I know what he went through. We all felt it, but he still lives and breathes it daily. Even as we dive, they dive him again and again. His memory is erased again and again.
I dropped the mission folder a way back, when we sloughed of all our excess weight. Everything is gone now but our HUDs, the candlewax, and one musket which Doe carries.
ONE OF YOUR CHORD WILL KILL YOU ALL
I think of the other message from the folder too. It must be wrong. Ray and Doe love me, I know that, just as I love them. I trust them with my life. Far is not capable of it, can barely think for himself.
I set my broken HUD to the side, look down at the book beneath my feet. It is far thinner now, unprofessionally made, in keeping with the depreciation of all our surroundings. It is still huge, but thin, and made of cheap yellow pulp-paper that scratches against my skin as I turn it. There is no heavy leather binding, only a slightly thicker, darker card. The pages within is blotted with dark scuff marks and ink scribblings. In places words and whole lines, sections, have been redacted with wildly etched lines of ink. I can just make out the loops and whorls of the letters underneath.
Perhaps this is what was lost.
It tells a fragmentary story of my infancy, or the infancy of Ritry Goligh, since I never lived it. I am an expression of Ritry as he became, that I know now. I am not all the various stages of the man, but only one phase. The further we go, the older the memories get.
We are close to the Solid Core, so close I can feel it in Far's hum. A little further and we will be in the tank with the blastocyte Ritry Goligh, while the seven-tones of his artificial womb build him into existence. Further still, back beyond the arc of recollection to a place that is truly primal and disconnected from memory, we will hit the moment of conception.
Perhaps the answers will lie there. Perhaps there will be a bridge to something better, and a reason for all of this.
Then Far screams.
The noise is incredibly loud in that dark cavern, and without my HUD I cannot buffer it. The boy is sitting bolt upright and screaming, and at once I see why.
The Lag is in the room with us. Its distended pink head is in Far's lap and goring at his stomach. Blood and viscera sucks down its throat as its lipless jaws smack and bury. Far stops screaming and his eyes roll up in his head.
I leap to the Lag and rip it away, thrust my arm between its jaws. It champs hard at my shoulder, chipping deep divots into the exo-suit armor. I rove with my fingers until I find the matter it stole, and grip it hard.
"Kill it," I shout, as Doe and Ray awake. Another Lag tendril shoots across the space and hits Ray full in the HUD, knocking him flat onto his back inside the book.
The beast's lips bite through my armor and into my shoulder, and the pain is excruciating. I thump it with my free hand but to no avail. Doe is already astride it with the bayonet in her hand. She stabs down, and while the beast thrashes she decapitates it.
Its jaws relent and I pull my wounded arm out of its mouth. Blood is everywhere, whether from me or the ruins of Far's innards I don't know.
"Stabilize him, shock-jacks, transfuse, whatever you can," I shout as I lurch backward.
Does goes directly to it. Somewhere nearby Ray is wrestling with his Lag duodenum, his hand reaching out toward Doe. She puts the bayonet smoothly in it as she kneels by Far, and Ray drives it into the monster's jaw, sealing its lips shut.
I turn to Far. He is thrashing now, his upper body jerking in time with his pulse. I drop next to him and hold out the fistful of viscera glistening in our flickering suit lights. His heart is amongst them, I think.
"It's going to be ok, Far," I say, as soothing as I know how. Doe is holding his head, has the vital tubes from his suit aorta linked in to her own. I glimpse a fat slug of her blood bead along the tube and enter Far, another, all of it spilling out.
"Quickly Me," she says.
I lean in and drive my fist into the gory hole in Far's middle. There I snap open my fingers to deposit the load that was stolen, then pull it out again. I have to use my other hand to slick the trailing, torn strands of gut off. They sit in the horrible hole like food vomited from a mother chick's mouth.
I scrabble for the edges of his exo-suit, to seal him up like I couldn't seal up La, but it seems the beast must have ravaged it, and the edges won't match.
Doe is already stripping, pulling her suit off over her head. Beneath it she is all sinuous white flesh, a sweat-darkened bra bound tightly across her breasts.
"Get that off him," she says and I comply, fighting with Far's fading tremors to feed his arms back through the arm-holes of his suit, one, the next. My touch rings tones out of him, but now they are discordant, off-key, not the pure harmonics before.
Ray drops beside me to help. He is covered in gore too, ragged grooves in his cheek where the beast's abrasive lips must have caught him. Between us we tug the suit off and drop it to the side, then work to wrap him in Doe's suit. It's too large and we get his arms in easily, seal it up over the horrific wound in his middle, and watch as it compresses inward.
Ray breathes a sigh of relief. Doe closes the siphon off her throat and hands the tube to Ray, who takes it and plugs it in to his own.
"He'll be alright," says Ray, and though the words are hopeful I can't help but detect the desperation in his voice. He has to be alright.
Doe sits down heavily. "Where did they come from?"
I rise and track the convulsing duodenal beast's fleshy jawless appendage. The lights on my suit blink and fade, so I can just barely make out the point where the meat joins the rock. There is no gap, the conjoin is seamless. There is rock, then there is flesh.
"They didn't get in," I say. "They grew in."
Ray laughs. "What the hell, Me?"
I prod the supple snake's base, but it doesn't press away from the rock as I would expect. It simply strains, and tight white sinew lines rise up along it like scars.
"It grew," I repeat. "This whole place is turning against us."
"Out of solid rock?" Ray asks. "So would have a field day talking about bonds."
It's a weak joke, and nobody has the strength to laugh. Ray has Far's head against his chest, is rocking the boy unconsciously. Doe is sitting and breathing hard, her white skin glowing like a halogen flower-flare in the deepening dark.
Ray turns to her, notices all her bare snow-white skin, and spreads his impeccable grin.
"You look hot," he says.
Doe frowns. "Shut up."
"I'm serious. You should take off the pants too. It would be good for morale."
"You take off your pants," she returns.
Ray appears to give this suggestion serious thought. Then he nods. "If that's what it takes." He shuffles awkwardly to his feet, holding Far in one hand, and starts unbuckling his pants.
I snort a laugh. Doe is quizzical, though I see the corners of her mouth start to turn up.
"Don't be an idiot," she says. This doesn't stop Ray, who already has managed to get his waist-band loose and sliding down. Doe turns to me, all seriousness. "Me, we need to leave. If they can metastasize in rock, they can metastasize anywhere. Make him stop."
I nod, but I don't make him stop, because part of me suspects we need this. I am not here for morale, that is Ray's job and I leave it to him. Doe huffs a big sigh, and we turn to watch Ray strip down his pants.
Doe says, "Stop," half-heartedly a few times, but of course he doesn't stop. It becomes a funny dance for balance as he shuffles his pants off one leg at a time, still managing to hold Far's head up. He can't kick the pants off over his boots though, so he settles for leaving them down.
Thankfully he has his inner-skin suit on underneath.
He turns to Doe.
"Happy?"
"Of course I'm not happy, you lunk. Put them back on."
He turns to me, twirling like it's a cat-walk.
"Me?"
I shrug. "I've seen better." More intestinal snakes could burst through the rock at any moment, but right then I don't care. This is the chord, my chord, and this is what Ray does best.
Ray turns back to Doe, then inexplicably gets down on one knee. He almost trips on the pants. "Doe," he says, and now his tone is surprisingly earnest. "Doe, I've done as you asked. I took off my pants. And I love you. Won't you take off your pants for me?"
Her face skews in feigned disgust, but I can see the amusement beneath it. Even Ven, in her most authoritarian moments was still the woman who worked me mercilessly in bed. "You think this is the time for this? Far almost died, we almost died."
"That's why i
t's the time," Ray says, reaching for her hand, which she snatches away once, twice, but not a third time.
"Me, tell him," she says.
I don't tell anyone anything. Instead I get up, go over, and pick Far from Ray's arm. I unplug the aortal stimulator and plug it into my own suit. At once I feel the drain. The fritzing display of my HUD shows my numbers begin to fall, but that's alright. Through it I can feel the boy beginning to heal, as the suit sews him up inside, fabricating what he needs.
I go to the edge of the cave and sit with my back against the wall, Far in my arms like a baby being fed. I look back and see Ray has produced a ring, and is holding it up to Doe. I have no idea where it came from, or when he made it. It looks a little like one of the gamma-clamp spools lasered away. In place of a diamond sits a gouged out brass button from one of the plastic soldiers in the outer orbit.
"Are you kidding?" Doe asks.
"I am serious as a snake in the gut," Ray says. "Doe, I love you. From the moment we woke up in adjoining fire-pods in the sublavic, I've loved you. Your skin is so pasty-white, and your hair so yellow, you swing above the Molten Core with such grace and of course you speak Gaullic too. Doe, will you take off your pants for me?"
She punches him in the head, but he doesn't back up.
"Put your pants on," she says. "You think this is the time?"
"It's the only time. We're almost certainly going to die."
"Put your pants back on!"
"No, take yours off."
She punches him again, but he rolls with it, pulling her after him. They scrabble and bite their way around the book and out of sight. Squeals of delight and surprise quickly follow.
I mute my HUD, focus on the tones fuming up off Far. I don't hear them or see them, but I feel the new memory building in my own mind. It is good, happy, snatching joy from the jaws of this misery.
Far feels it too, and I think it helps. His draw on my fluids reduces, his pulse chimes into time with my own. Perhaps it buys us some time. It is the first powerful memory we've made that is not someone dying, and that is something to be proud of. It holds a kind of dispelling power, and keeps the Lag at bay. But only for a time.
Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) Page 21
