“Up,” Das Muni says. She tugs at me again.
“I can’t,” I say.
“If you don’t get up, I’ll leave you out here for Meatmoth,” she says.
I don’t quite believe her, but I move my legs anyway, leaning hard on Das Muni.
Pain radiates up my bad leg. I hiss at the pain. Just the act of standing, even pushing hard against Das Muni, has me sweating and trembling. When I am finally standing straight, I find that I’m head and shoulders taller than Das Muni. And even in this state, having lost much of my flesh here during recovery, I easily outweigh her by fifty or sixty pounds.
Das Muni leads me on an agonizing walk around the hovel, squelching across the slimy ground. I wear no shoes or trousers, only a long tunic woven with the same plant stuffs as the basket. Hemp, maybe? Where do all of these things grow? Certainly not here.
I sleep after, exhausted and sweating. When Das Muni rouses me again, we again walk around the hovel, twice this time, though I whine about it. The more I must rely on Das Muni, the more I hate her, but the longer I stay, the more she seems to stare at me. I’m not sure if the hunger in her gaze is desire or actual hunger. Perhaps it is a little of both. I find that it is her gaze that inspires me to move now. I must get well before she decides which compulsion she wants to act on.
When we are not circling the hovel, we listen for the recycler monster, for Meatmoth, and the others: Bonemesh, Blightdon, Ravisher, and Smorg. It’s as if Das Muni has mushed all these names together like a child. I wonder how long she has been down here, really. How old was she when her world died? I ask her about the names, and she says they just came to her; they have no greater meaning.
When I ask about her past and her people, she has the same reaction.
“That time is dead,” Das Muni says.
After many periods of sleeping and waking, I’m able to get around the hovel five or six times on my own, using the long femur of some great creature as a cane.
Some days, I still do not want to get up, but Das Muni prods me until I do. One day, I don’t want to get up at all, but Das Muni leans over me, arms crossed, and I stare at the basket behind her and remember seeing her eat out of it. This is not someone I want to spend the rest of my days with.
So I get up, and I move slowly, painfully, to the stink hole outside the hovel and relieve myself like a civilized creature. When I try to get back in, Das Muni tells me the food is already set up—down a long, threading path between the heaps of refuse. I hate her and admire her at the same time. If our positions were reversed, I would have left this whining, grumbling hulk of flesh that is myself to die on some heap. I’d feed her to my friend Meatmoth and be done with it. Wouldn’t I?
“What do you have to live for out here?” I ask her.
“There is always something to live for,” Das Muni says. “The gods have a plan for each of us. They give us signs.”
“Signs? And what sign have they given you here in this horrible place?”
“They did not see fit to kill you,” Das Muni says. “Nor me. That’s a very great sign in this place.”
I’m able to mark the time now by the swinging lights and the blooming bioluminescent flora. Best I can tell, they work on cycles, in time with the rotation of the ship. Fifteen hours, roughly, of blue, broken light. Fifteen hours of complete darkness, during which the fauna give off their singular glow. I have long since stopped noticing the stink of the place, which unsettles me. I don’t want this life to become normal.
Because I don’t like the swinging, erratic light, I wait until the blooming of the flora to go out. I step over Das Muni’s slumbering form. I get perhaps a dozen steps from the hovel before I notice Das Muni following me. She still makes my skin crawl with the memory of the sharp-toothed tadpole heads in the basket. What kind of purpose do creatures like that serve? Why do the people of every world fear her enough to throw her down here?
I creep into the green-glowing refuse, walking and walking, still leaning heavily on my bone cane. I gaze at the blackness above me. I can see no ceiling. But I know that above us are layers upon layers of the world. I only need to figure out how to get into them.
I call back at Das Muni, who hides behind a pile when I turn. Does she really think I don’t see her?
“Have you ever mapped out this place?” I say. “Have you ever seen its edges?”
Das Muni scuttles toward me, spine bent, ducking her head left, right, like a puppet on a string. When she is close enough, she says, low, “It has no edges. It has no walls. It is a vast circle.”
A circle, just like the rest of the world, but one with no gates, no doors, no corridors? A vast sphere.
“There must be a way up,” I say. “How are things recycled by the world? What comes down has to go up again, in some form.”
Das Muni points to the ground. “The world absorbs it. Absorbs the shit that Meatmoth and the rest put out. That’s what we learned from the mothers. Did you not learn this?”
I avoid the question. “There must be a way out,” I say. “The top can’t be so far away. The ship is vast, yes, but it has limits. If we can get in, we can get out.”
“Stay here,” Das Muni says. She rests her clawed hand on my forearm.
“My sister,” I say, and saying it aloud breaks something in me, some terrible fog that has stolen my will and my strength all through this long recovery. “My sister is in danger. I need to save her, and I can’t do it from here,” I say. “It might be too late. She might be dead. But if she’s dead, then I want revenge on the people that did this. On the Bhavajas.” I stare long at the darkness above us. How to tackle it? I need Das Muni’s help, however much she disturbs me.
“Listen,” I say. “If you help me take this world from the Bhavajas, you will have an honored place topside. You can have your own space. Food whenever you want it. You can live upworld. I can do that if we win.”
“You will need an army to take the world,” Das Muni says.
“I will,” I say. “You’ll be the first among them. Will you do it?”
“We won’t survive,” Das Muni says.
She is probably right about that. I lean into her, biting back my revulsion. I put my hand on Das Muni’s sagging, filthy shoulder. “There is a difference between living and surviving. I want to live, Das Muni. Do you?”
Das Muni quakes at my touch. “I will live,” Das Muni says.
I pull my hand away. “Then we must set out on a great journey together.”
“I am yours,” Das Muni says, and something in her tone makes me hesitate, as if I stand on a great precipice. Why is she so devoted to me? Is she truly so starved for human company that she will travel with me? I decide to accept her answer, for however long it lasts, and for whatever reason.
“We are bound, then,” I say, “until we reach the surface.”
“There is no surface,” Das Muni says, and for one cold moment, I wonder if Jayd and my sisters were the fever dream and this is my true reality. I shake it off.
“We’ll get there,” I say.
“I will go with you,” Das Muni says, “but you will be disappointed.”
“I cannot be more disappointed than I already am,” I say, and I pray to the War God, and whatever gods Das Muni worships, that I’m making a true statement.
“WHEN I RELEASED THE MOKSHI FROM ITS ORBIT, I NEVER EXPECTED TO ENCOUNTER RESISTANCE ON THE WAY OUT OF THE LEGION. I SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN SURPRISED HOW MANY FEARED THE FUTURE.”
—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION
18
ZAN
The recyclers are worse during the sleeping period.
Yet I insist on traveling during the blooming of the flora, the same ones that live now in my wounded leg. The bacteria glow from beneath my healed skin, a part of me. I fear sometimes that they will overtake me. Will they colonize me? But Das Muni has been here for a long time, and she assures me the bacteria will eventually assimilate with my body. Soon, Das Muni says, the glowing will cease
as they are eaten and absorbed by my body. Yet it is disconcerting to wake each morning and see the pulsing green flora swirling up my thigh.
We walk for many cycles. I wake Das Muni when the blue worms begin to glow, and we walk. We say little. As time passes, endless walking through endless semidarkness, my strength begins to grow; at the same time, I feel my sanity begin to waver.
“Surely, you must have found an edge to this place,” I say after many cycles.
Das Muni only shakes her head.
It is twenty sleeping periods before we come upon a structure I recognize.
When I see it, I fall to my knees. It’s just as Das Muni says. There is no way out.
We have walked and walked, and here we are again, at the little hovel where Das Muni nursed me back to health, not far from the field of horrors where I watched my sisters die. This is the proof. There is no edge.
I make a choking sound. It’s a sob. Das Muni comes up beside me and holds my hand, and I wrap my arms around her because not even when I woke up without a memory have I ever felt so lost and alone. Here, Das Muni is the whole world.
“It is not a terrible life,” Das Muni says, stroking my hair. “We can live here together. We can—”
“Jayd,” I say. “Let’s choose a different direction. Tomorrow we go . . . we go . . .” I point ahead of us. We can divide the world into sections and explore each, like slices of a pie. I won’t be ruined by this. I won’t be put off. There’s no alternative to finding a way up. I’m not giving in.
Time becomes meaningless. We go on for seven more periods of slogging through the world, cowering from recycler monsters. I have resolved to step in front of the next monster I see and just offer myself to it.
That is when I see the rope.
It dangles ahead of us like a living thing, a tentacle or tubular growth, and as I approach, I suspect it may be that, too, but it is being used as a rope. I see a stout figure slither down its length. I rub at my eyes, just to be sure, but the figure is still there when I open my eyes.
“Do you see that?” I whisper at Das Muni, but Das Muni is snoozing against a trembling wall of filth. Shattered bones and calcified parts poke through the rotten organic matter, visible now in the swinging blue light of this strange evening in the belly of the world.
I crouch low and keep to the heaps, tracking the figure as it goes from pile to pile. It occasionally raises its head, and when it does, I freeze, hopeful that the shadowy lights will hide me.
When I am within a dozen paces, the figure’s face is lit by the swinging overhead lights, and I can verify it is human. The woman’s face is clean. She wears neat, whole clothes that appear remarkably wear-free for someone scraping along down here the way Das Muni is.
But in that instant, the woman’s gaze meets mine, a clandestine gaze in the wink of the light. Her eyes widen. Then she sprints away, heaving her plump body back toward the ropy tentacle.
I coast across a pile of refuse. I am nearly fully recovered, but most importantly, I know this world very well now, and I navigate the heaped mounds faster than my prey. I snatch at her tunic. Yank her back.
“How did you get in here?” I say.
The squat woman tries to twist away. I throw a punch, but the woman deflects. Scrappy, this one. I grab at her hair, but it’s too short to get a proper hold. I kick with my bad leg and connect with the woman’s stomach. The woman keels over, but so do I. Pain shoots up my leg, making me stumble.
The woman runs, faster than I thought she could on her muscular little legs.
I give chase; it’s a slow chase because we must climb over debris. I stagger after her like a drunk woman. I hear Das Muni yelling behind me, dimly. I’m not going to give this up.
The woman leaps for the tentacle. I leap too. I grab her legs and pull her to the spongy ground.
“All right, stop!” I say. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
The woman gapes at me.
“I’m Zan,” I say. “This is Das Muni. We only want to get out of here. Up.” I point at the rope.
“Casamir,” the woman says. “I’m Casamir.”
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
“Can ask the same as you,” Casamir says. She rubs her leg. “I’m an engineer from Arokisa. Or that’s the best translation I can think of.” I note her accent and wonder what language is her native one.
“I don’t know what an engineer is,” I say.
“Yes, well,” Casamir says, “the bottom of every world is filled with the castoffs of others. It’s how the Legion has lasted so long.”
“How do you know about that?”
“Engineers know things.
I lean into her. “You know who I am, then?”
Casamir cocks her head. “No. You’ve not got a common face.”
“Are most faces common?”
“Oh, certainly.” Something roars in the distance. Casamir points at the tendril. “I suggest we have this conversation on the next level.”
“We can’t leave,” Das Muni says, coming up behind me.
“Of course you can,” Casamir says. “You just have to want to.”
“Who’s up there?” I ask. “How many people?”
“Just me,” Casamir says. “I suspect if you were going to eat me, you’d have done it by now, so I have no reason to lie about some horde of friends. I don’t expect to find much alive down here but the monsters, and”—she glances at Das Muni—“the folks that want to stay.”
“I need to get up there,” I say.
“You hardly look fit for it.”
“Then we improvise.”
“We?”
“We,” I say. “You know the Bhavajas are up there. They’re taking over the world.”
“The who?
“Bhavajas,” I say. “They are usurping the Katazyrnas.”
Casamir shrugs. “Sorry.”
“How can you not care? They’re the people who rule the world.”
“Not this part of it,” Casamir says. She sighs. “I’ve met a few people from above Arokisa, sure. Explorers, mostly. I never much cared for them.”
“We need to get up there,” I say. “Past all those levels. To the surface.”
“Surface?” Casamir raises her brows. “Surface of what?”
“The world,” I say.
She covers her mouth, as if she’s going to laugh. Then sobers. “I’ll take you up to Arokisa, at least, on one condition,” Casamir says. “Or perhaps two. Well, one for now; maybe if I think on it, I’ll find—”
I snatch her by the throat with my good hand. Casamir is a short, thick woman but lighter than she first seems. “How about no conditions,” I say.
“Sure, sure, sure,” Casamir gasps, kicking her legs.
I drop her. “You go first,” I say. “I’ll follow.”
Casamir lunges for the rope. I grab her collar and pull her back. “We stick close,” I say. I untangle the rope I was using as a belt and knot my wrist to Casamir’s, leaving enough slack to ensure we can climb up together.
“This really isn’t necessary,” Casamir says.
“I’ll release it when we get up,” I say.
Das Muni is puttering around me, humming softly. “I can’t get up,” she says.
I haven’t considered that part until now, and I feel some guilt about that. Of course she can’t get up, not with how weak she is; not on those little legs, with her crooked back and clawed hands.
“We’ll pull you up after,” I say.
She ceases her puttering and gazes up at me with big glassy eyes. I have to look away. She doesn’t believe I’ll take her with me. She thinks I’ll leave her here.
As Casamir grabs hold of the rope, I glance back once at little wretched Das Muni and think about how much easier it will be to go on without her. Casamir is stronger and clearly knows the surface. Das Muni isn’t even from this world.
I crawl up after Casamir. The rope is slicker than I anticipated, and I’m not as fit as I imagin
ed. I move painfully, slowly. Casamir has to pause and wait for me. The line between us is stretched taut.
Finally, Casamir takes hold of the lip of the seam in the sky above us and pulls herself over. I get up one more knot, and then my strength gives out. I’m an arm’s length from the top. I cling hard to the knotted rope, arms shaking. I take deep breaths, willing my strength to return.
Casamir peers over the top. Her gaze goes from her wrist to mine and the long thread that binds us. If I fall, she will too. She touches the knot at her wrist. I grit my teeth. She’ll untie it, and I’ll be stuck here, too weak to ascend. I worried she would pull the rope up after her if we weren’t bound on the way up, but of course that would mean nothing once we made it to the top. She can cut the line and run off now.
I meet her look and firm my jaw to still my trembling face. My whole body is shaking now. I have an animal fear of showing weakness. But I am weak, and she sees it.
Then she reaches down, and I brace for her to cut the rope or untie us, but she grabs my wrist instead.
“Up, now,” she says, and she grins. There’s a halo of flickering light above her, whiter light than that below, and I love her a little in that moment, the coy grin, the strong arm, the short, messy sweep of hair brushed back from her forehead, the easy decision to offer a hand instead of cut it off.
I let out my breath and grip her wrist with my bad hand and squeeze. She pulls while I push on the knot below me.
I slide up over the lip of the jagged rent in the floor and try to catch my breath. Casamir slumps beside me. Grins again. I can see the whites of her eyes in the dim glow. For a moment, I think the room is lined in something bioluminescent, like the recycling pit below us, but the lights are moving, flitting along the walls. They are a flying creature of some kind.
Casamir follows my look. “Moths,” she says. “There’s proper lights farther on. Closer to town. Come up. You’ll need to help me get that friend of yours up.”
I call down at Das Muni, “Tie yourself up in the end of that rope and hold on! We’ll pull you up.”
From this height, surrounded in the brighter light of the moths, I can’t see Das Muni at all. I squint and ask Casamir, “How do you safely get down there without getting eaten?”
The Stars Are Legion Page 13
