Irontown Blues

by John Varley

  I mentioned some of this to Gretel.

  “That’s exactly what we want the CC to think,” she said, placidly. “We have built a dummy ship five hundred miles from here, and there’s where the CC has been looking. If we keep it looking there just a little while longer, we should be okay.

  “And I’m sorry, but I have to go now. Please don’t fight it, Chris. Tom will take you—”

  I never got to hear the end of that sentence because a huge blast blew her across the room and against Hazel’s service counter.

  SHERLOCK

  I was dreaming. I was half-asleep, but I can dream when I am only half-asleep. I was with αChris, and I was happy. He was throwing a ball, and I was running after it. Then there were rabbits. I do not know where the rabbits came from, but there were rabbits. I was chasing one of the rabbits. I have never chased a rabbit, but I have often dreamed of that.

  I was with αChris and I was very happy in the dream. I opened one eye and looked up. There was αChris. I had lost αChris for a while, but I had looked for him, and I had found him. Everything was all right in the world.

  Chris was talking to the woman named Gretel. Gretel had petted my head and scratched behind my ears when we were introduced. I liked Gretel. I did not hear what they were saying to each other.

  I was on the floor next to Spike. We both had bellies full of Hazel’s vanilla ice cream. Spike was twitching in his sleep, so I knew he was dreaming, too. I wondered if he was chasing rabbits in his dream. I wondered if I could join him in his dream. I do not know where I go when I dream, so maybe we could both be in the same dream. I would like that.

  There was a very loud noise. I do not like very loud noises. This was the loudest noise I have ever heard. I have learned that the very loud noise was caused by a bomb. The bomb was thrown from a special gun that throws bombs. As soon as it exploded there were more bomb explosions from outside the ice-cream parlor, but these were not so close.

  The closest bomb had blown out the window of the ice-cream parlor. Spike and I were on the ground, and the broken glass passed over our heads. But some of the pieces of glass had fallen on me and Spike. There was also a lot of dust on me. I leaped to my feet. I shook off the dust and glass. I was very scared.

  αChris was shouting, “Gretel! Gretel!”

  There was more shouting outside. I did not know where to turn. I saw Spike. I had thought the flying glass did not hit him, but I was wrong. There were some big pieces of glass in his side and in the side of his head. He did not get up.

  I saw αChris kneeling down beside Gretel. Gretel was not moving. There was a lot of blood. I smelled many things, too many things to sort out. I have learned that some of the things I smelled were from the exploding bomb. I have learned that that is what gunpowder smells like when it burns.

  I nudged Spike with my nose, and then pawed at him. He whined and tried to sit up. He could not sit up. One of his eyes was gone. I howled.

  But I could not be afraid. I had to be strong. I heard people outside running toward the ice-cream parlor. I had never smelled people who smelled like that before. I have learned that the smell was the sweat of humans called Charonese. These Charonese humans liked to fight. When they decided to fight, they took a drug that made them stronger. They took another drug that made them not afraid. They took another drug that made pain go away. All these drugs came out in their sweat and in their piss.

  Charonese are bad humans. I do not like Charonese humans.

  I could hear them coming. I could smell them coming. I went to the door of the ice-cream parlor and looked out. I saw many humans lying on the ground. Some of them were moving. Some of them were screaming. Some of them were not moving. Some of them were in pieces.

  There were two large humans coming toward the ice-cream parlor. I knew these were the Charonese humans who smelled so different.

  I wanted to run away. But αChris was behind me. I must protect αChris.

  I must become a wolf.

  I felt the rage boiling up inside my heart. I would be strong, and I would be brave.

  I would kill. I would kill and kill and kill.

  CHRIS

  The bomb went off about thirty yards from where we were sitting. Sometimes your life is determined by a roll of the dice. I had been sitting in a chair with a wall to my left. The force of the blast buckled the wall, but did not blow it down.

  Another roll of the dice determined that Gretel was sitting facing me over the table, with a big glass window to her right. The blast shattered the window and picked her up, along with her chair and the table, and threw them across the room.

  The fact that I had been shielded didn’t mean I was unharmed, but I didn’t know about my injuries until later. They were minor compared to the devastation visited on Gretel. Some of the shards of glass slashed at my arm and the side of my face.

  Worse than the minor injuries was the sense of disorientation. I was not concussed, but I was damn close to it. I was deafened, unable to hear anything but a very loud ringing in my ears. I found myself on my hands and knees. I looked up and saw the Dalmatian that had come with Sherlock. He was on his side, pretty torn up, not moving. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing. I looked around, but I didn’t see Sherlock.

  What I did see was Gretel, crumpled up, twisted, flayed open from scalp to waist. I got to my feet and staggered over to her.

  I was amazed to see she was conscious. Her right cheek was ripped open. One of her eyes was wounded, and I’m sure she was as deaf as me, but she was moving, trying to get to her feet.

  The ringing in my ears was still loud, but I was beginning to hear other sounds. Somewhere water was jetting and splashing, probably from a broken pipe. There was a loud hissing sound.

  Was that gunfire I heard?

  “Help, help, help me . . .” She slurred her words. It was a wonder she could talk at all. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “An explosion. A bomb?”

  “Are we being attacked?” She tried even harder to get up, seemingly unaware that her right arm was almost ripped off, and both of her legs were twisted in ways they aren’t supposed to twist. I could see bone poking through her pants.

  “I don’t know, Gretel. You need to calm down. I’m sure help is on the way.” The only good news I could see was that no arteries seemed to be opened. She was oozing and dripping blood all over, but it wasn’t spurting.

  As to the help . . . I said it was coming to try to calm her down, but now I wondered. I was sure I heard gunfire. I was unarmed. It seemed the best idea was to lie low until I had a better idea of what was happening.

  But it was getting noisier out there. I decided I’d better get up and try to find out what was going on.

  “You just lie quietly,” I told Gretel. Her eye wasn’t tracking all that well, and I thought she might be beginning to feel the pain. I wondered if she was going into shock. I didn’t know what the symptoms were. Hell, I barely even knew any basic first aid. Hoping I was right in leaving her for a moment, I cautiously got to my feet and, keeping my head low, went to the remains of the window.

  It was a mess outside. It was all too reminiscent of the day of the Big Glitch. It was like I was reliving it, and that was the last thing in the entire universe I wanted to do.

  Wreckage was strewn for quite a distance from Hazel’s parlor. Most of it was off to my left, though, so I thought it was possible the bomb had not been thrown directly at us. It was much worse over there. I couldn’t remember what had been there, and there wasn’t much left to tell me what it had been. Another several storefronts, I thought.

  There were bodies everywhere.

  Just outside the parlor, they were heaped in a horrific tumble of torn limbs and blood. No one over there was moving. I remembered that those had been Gretel’s lieutenants, the dozen or so people who had been waiting impatiently for her to get
through with me so she could get back to the important business of organizing the final preparations for the departure of the Heinlein. None of them would be organizing anything now.

  Elsewhere I saw people crawling. A few had made it to their feet and were staggering around. None of them seemed to be very aware of where they were going. Some were horribly maimed and burned.

  I wondered again if Gretel had been the target, or had it been just a bit of bad luck for us, or good luck for them, that she had been hit.

  Once more, I saw that in the heat of battle it can be impossible to tell what is going on.

  I saw people beginning to move in from the edges of the destruction. Were they on our side, on Gretel’s side? Or were they attackers? It was important to know, because I had a growing certainty that this was part of the continuation of the Big Glitch Gretel had spoken of. In which case, the invaders would not be friendly forces.

  Some of the people were clearly trying to render aid to the injured, but that didn’t last long. I saw one would-be rescuer go down in a spray of blood, then another, and then everyone was taking cover as gunfire began peppering the open area. So I had an idea where the enemy was.

  From the other side of the plaza, the side where I knew the Heinlein was, a few people had begun to return fire. For the moment, none of the fighters from either side were showing themselves. So again, I decided the best course was to keep my head down and try to shield Gretel from what was still going on outside.

  Because after all she had gone through, all we had both gone through, I was not about to lose her. Come what may, I was going to be by her side.

  * * *

  —

  Looking back, it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, but it seemed like much longer. I spent most of that time trying to keep Gretel from attempting to rise. She was stubborn, she was a leader, and she was determined not to just lie there.

  I ducked my head around the corner again when it seemed like there was a lull in the fighting. No one was moving in the devastated open area, but I could see muzzle flashes now and then coming from what I thought was the enemy side of the plaza. It didn’t look like a good idea to try to get out of the parlor. So I checked the back, hoping there would be a service entrance leading deeper into the mazes of Irontown. I figured anything would be better than being pinned down here.

  There probably was a back entrance, but the explosion had piled so much tangled wreckage that I couldn’t budge any of it. I could see the door back there, but the frame seemed to be warped, so even if I could reach it, there was a good chance I wouldn’t be able to get through to whatever was on the other side. I was frustrated and came back to Gretel, who at least had stopped struggling.

  All this time I had hardly been aware of Sherlock. When I did notice him he seemed to be sticking close to my heels. Probably terrified, I thought, and who could blame him?

  Suddenly a horn began to blare. It was very loud, a rising and falling tone interrupted by an earsplitting on-and-off buzzer, then a horrible hooting sound that seemed to split my skull. Sherlock began to howl. I can’t imagine how painful it must have been to his sensitive ears.

  My wrist was seized in a grip that I thought might break my bones. It was Gretel, grabbing me with the strength of hysteria. But when I put my head down to hear what she wanted to say, she was eerily calm. One side of her face was a horror mask, but her one good eye bored into me.

  “Emer . . . emerg . . . emerge . . .”

  “Emergency?”

  She nodded, quickly.

  “T . . . t . . .” She shook her head in frustration, then made a strange gesture with her good hand. Palm down, she swooped it through an arc until the fingers were pointing up. I didn’t get it. She did it again.

  “Emergency . . . emergency . . . you’re kidding me. Takeoff?”

  She nodded, her good eye boring into me.

  “You can’t do that! The ship is still hooked up into town, isn’t it?”

  She nodded again.

  “How soon?”

  She spread her fingers. Twice.

  “Ten minutes?” She nodded. “Gretel, we’re all going to die.”

  She shook her head.

  “Not ffff . . . not fuh . . . not if—”

  “Not if we hurry?”

  She nodded.

  “What do I do?”

  She made a lifting gesture.

  “Gretel, that’s going to hurt like hell.”

  “Do it . . . no choice.”

  I sighed and got my arms under her. I was afraid her arm was going to fall off.

  She never made a sound. I went through the door and out into the plaza. If things had been confused before, it was pandemonium now. People were emerging from hiding, clearly worried about getting shot, but even more afraid of being in Irontown when the Heinlein took off. If it took off, I added to myself. But if it exploded, or even if it just sat there on the ground, it was clear that all connections to this area and all the other areas around the ship were going to be severed. If I were doing that, I’d probably use explosives. Far away, back toward civilization, pressure doors would automatically shut, sealing those of us who didn’t make it to the ship inside what would soon become a death chamber.

  “Which way?” I asked. Gretel managed to nod toward my right. I started off in that direction, Sherlock trotting along at my heels. There was still shooting going on, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about that. I had to hope that the attackers were as confused and disoriented as I was.

  A bullet went sizzling by so close I could hear it. I picked up my pace. A moving target is harder to hit than a stationary one. Isn’t it?

  Most of the folks I could see were heading in the same direction. I hoped they all knew where they were going. I hurried along a wide connecting corridor, and at least the gunfire stopped for a few minutes. But I came out in another plaza, about the same size as the first one, and there was fighting there, too. Ahead of me a man was struck with a bullet. He went down, and I almost stumbled over him. I looked down and saw him clutching his thigh, which was spurting blood. I wanted to help him, but there was no way I could manage to do that and still carry Gretel. I chanced a look back after I’d gone a few yards and saw someone grab his arm and yank him to his feet.

  Down yet another wide corridor, then out into the largest open space I had yet seen in Irontown. Off to my right was a smooth surface that I hoped was the outer hull of the Heinlein. I tried to remember just what the ship looked like from the pictures I had found after the Big Glitch. What I recalled was a series of shapes with no obvious pattern to them. Cylinders, spheres, irregular trapezoids. A fair amount of ports and larger windows. Nothing I could see looked familiar, except for what was clearly an extralarge cargo lock. Boxes and pallets were scattered around the lock. I guessed it was cargo that was yet to be loaded. I hoped there was nothing absolutely critical in the containers because there was no chance at all that most of them would ever make it aboard.

  Still, some of them must have been pretty important, as stevedore robots were hard at work lifting the boxes and carrying them toward the lock, supervised by frantic men and women in yellow coveralls.

  “Yellow uniforms, cargo handlers,” Gretel told me. “Blue . . . crew.”

  “Blue crew?”

  “Blue uniforms. Crew. Know where to go.”

  “We have to get there first.”

  “Get us inside. Hurry.”

  The lock was drawing people like a big magnet. People in all manner of dress were funneling toward it, some of them pausing to turn around and get off a shot or two, others trying to shield small children. Off in the other direction, invaders must have been converging because I could hear more gunfire coming from there and I saw another person go down.

  The crowd was inevitably compressed as it neared the lock. This made them easier targets. But off to
each side and from vantages higher up on the hull, people in red uniforms were returning intense fire toward the invaders. I could hear it even over the racket of the multiple klaxon horns.

  “Almost there,” I breathed to Gretel. I looked back. I couldn’t see Sherlock. I shouted his name.

  I had to save Gretel. I had to save Sherlock. What to do?

  I decided I would get Gretel to the lock and give her to somebody, then go back for my dog.

  Something caused me to turn. A sixth sense? I could not possibly have heard anything. For some reason I turned a full one-eighty, and saw a two-legged rhinoceros headed right for me.

  Okay, he wasn’t quite that big, but he was at least double my size. He was part of a line of charging pachyderms, and I didn’t have to take too many guesses to figure out where he was from.

  There is a certain sameness to Charonese, or at least to warriors, which is all I have ever seen. Maybe they have little guys and gals back home, where the babbling brooks of liquid nitrogen meander through the summer landscape. Or maybe not. They’re not telling.

  Half his head was blown off, and he was still coming. Whatever had hit him had just peeled back the skin from the entire right side of his face, exposing his steel skull, taking a lot of his cheekbone and lips with it. One eye was torn out. The skull replacement helps them survive injuries that otherwise would certainly be fatal.

  But what no steel plate can protect you against is concussion. Whatever hit him had rattled around whatever he used for brains inside that silvery skull. He was staggering, looking quite confused. I could see a deep dent the bullet had made in the steel. He was just part of a line that was advancing steadily. They were taking casualties, but they just kept coming.

  I was directly in the line of sight of his one good eye, which slowly began tracking. He pointed a pistol at me. It was an old-fashioned automatic, from a design hundreds of years old. I figured I was dead. He pulled the trigger. It clicked. It clicked again, and again. Cursing, he dropped the gun and lunged the last few feet between us. Before I knew it, he was on me.