Klom bellowed. “Rapaille! Is there a crew mucking about with the ship’s power generators?”
Rapaille boosted his haughty demeanor. “This is no business of yours! Get back to your wor—urk!”
Klom had gripped Rapaille’s shirt with both his hands and lifted the avianoform off his feet, incidentally choking the Quetzal with a knot of fabric at his throat. Klom thrust his face within centimeters of Rapaille and spoke with calm precision.
“You will call the crew working with the generators. You will tell them to be extra careful not to turn them on by accident. Or someone might get hurt. Do you understand?”
Rapaille understood that the person most likely to immediately get hurt was himself. So made a squawk he hoped Klom would interpret positively.
The huge breaker set his supervisor down and released him. After massaging his bruised throat, Rapaille placed the call Klom had ordered. Once Klom was satisfied, he turned away and climbed into a ship-to-shore barge, Tugger heeling behind his master.
“Take me back in,” Klom told the bored Melungeon pilot
As the barge pulled away, Rapaille sought to reassert his dignity and status. “Don’t bother coming back for three weeks! Not till after Festival! You’re on probation. Do you hear me, you addled eggsucker?”
But Klom never even looked back.
He seemed too busy stroking his left arm.
The long hot shed (its sides open for whatever chance breeze might arise) that housed Sorting Line Number Thirty-eight featured the following arrangement: ten parallel conveyor belts ran from one end of the shed to the other. The belts contributed a certain varying level of noise to the shed, depending on how dutifully a small army of oilers—mostly children—tended to them. At the head of each belt stood a matter-modem delivering the smaller pieces harvested from the ship under deconstruction. (Larger pieces not saved and sold as integral units went to disassembly stations first, then to the Sorting Lines.) Along both sides of each conveyor sat the sorters, staggered on three-legged stools at intervals of a meter or so. By the elbow of each sorter, mirror-face upward, was a smaller matter-modem with a keypad that allowed a choice of destinations.
Each sorter had his or her or its special range of components to watch for. When spotted, the component would be snatched off the belt and dropped into the matter-modem. Simultaneous with the grab, the sorter would key in the relevant warehouse station to receive the transmission.
At the end of the belt awaited a final matter-modem, to catch all the unclaimed pieces for further examination and categorization.
The sorters were entitled to only as many lavatory breaks as minimally consistent with the most basic needs of their species. Lunches ran for half an hour, in shifts. Payment was based on speed and accuracy of performance, with debits taken for any missed pieces. So long as standards were maintained, conversation was permitted.
Sorrel was speaking to Aurinka, a Triffid who sat diagonally across from her. They were discussing jewelry. The Triffid waved several stalks decorated with hammered brass bracelets for Sorrel’s admiration, while handling her duties competently with two other limbs.
Suddenly both Aurinka and Sorrel took notice of a distant commotion near one of the shed’s entrances. They strained to ascertain what was going on without slackening production. The commotion seemed to be moving through the shed, getting closer to them. At last Sorrel saw the source of the upset.
Klom and Tugger bulled their way toward her, trailing protesting supervisors. When Klom spotted Sorrel, he bellowed out her name. Then he was upon her.
Grabbing Sorrel off her stool, Klom strongarmed her out of the shed, heedless of either her protests or her struggles to escape.
Once outside, Klom released her. They stood in the lee afforded by a mud-brick pissoir, while all around them surged unemployable or underage or offshift bustee-dwellers, a motley mass of scaled and chitinous, furred and slick-skinned beings, oblate or attenuated, faces like intricate masks or nearly featureless.
Sorrel faced Klom, fall of fury. “You moron! What’s the matter with you? I’m going to lose half a day’s wages now!”
Klom’s single-minded urgency seemed to evaporate. He faced Sorrel with a look that mixed contrition and confusion.
“Sorrel, I need your help. I died today.”
This last sentence, delivered matter-of-factly yet with a detectable tremor, catalyzed Sorrel’s reaction from anger to a curious concern.
“What are you talking about? You’re standing there as healthy as a Redskull ox.”
“No, you don’t understand. Here’s what happened—” Klom recounted losing his arm in the matter-modem. “The last thing I remember is calling out for Tugger.” The beast looked up at the sound of his name, offering a lopsided, slavering grin. “Then I blacked out. Not much time seemed to pass. Or maybe a lot. Anyway, I woke up whole.”
Leerily, Sorrel regarded Tugger. “You’re saying this creature was somehow responsible for regenerating your arm?”
“No, not exactly. You see, there was no blood anywhere anymore. And my sledge was empty. I had filled it with tubes, but now it was empty. Then I looked at my reader, and it said the wrong time. I was in the past.”
“That makes no sense at all.”
Klom whirled savagely around and punched the wall of the lavatory, sending up a puff of mortar and pulverized soil. “I know, I know! But there’s something else besides. Look at my skin!”
Sorrel examined Klom’s outstretched hand, bloody-knuckled from impact with the wall. “Your cruft is gone!”
“All gone! That’s right! But how?”
Sorrel shook her head in bewilderment. “I—I can’t explain. Maybe Airey—”
“Airey! Of course! Let’s go!”
Without waiting for her agreement, Klom hustled Sorrel away.
Tugger trotted blithely along behind them.
The fluids giving life to a typical starliner ranged from viscous hydrocarbon derivatives to thin plant-based extracts to exotically tinged protein-hormone-enzyme sera. These various liquids—some of which could be captured and sold, others of which went straight to crude disposal in the polluted swamps—invigorated a variety of mechanisms, all of which had to be drained before storage or disassembly. This task fell to the crews of the drainage pits.
Airey was right down in one of the pits, ankle deep in rainbow-sheened stenchy sludge. Unlike his downtime finery, his work uniform consisted of scarred boots and a patched brown coverall, its waterproofing peeling away in places. Employing a big spanner, he was struggling with the balky petcock of a suspended engine and cursing furiously.
“Motherless shit! Is this my reward for daring to aspire to elegance? May all the ancestors of all the mechanics who ever worked on this abomination freeze in the lowest levels of the Dimmig hells! Die, you bastard screwcap, die!”
Ranked at the edge of the pit, Airey’s co-workers were enjoying his eloquent frustration. A Foraminifer was laughing so hard it kept dislocating its multiple jaws, resetting them each time with a grisly clacking of bone.
An instant cessation of the laughter caused Airey to crane his neck upward. Before he could react to the unexpected sight of Klom, he was lifted bodily from the pit.
“Come with me, Airey,” Klom demanded. Airey caught Sorrel’s eyes and read there the wisdom of complying. As the trio moved off for privacy, the drainman grabbed a rag to wipe his hands. Finished, he tucked it into a back pocket
In the shadow of a belching, stinking cracking tower, Klom rehearsed his morning to Airey. Airey listened thoughtfully, his glance bouncing back and forth between Klom and Tugger. When Klom finished his account, Airey remained silent for half a minute before speaking.
“I see only one answer. Your pet can manipulate time in some fashion.”
Klom’s brow creased. “What? How could that be? I’ve never heard of such a thing being possible.”
“Regardless of what we know, it’s the only solution. Tugger responded to your distress
by shuttling you back to the past. That explains your empty sledge and the timecheck on your reader.”
“But how would that have fixed my arm? A dying time-traveler is still a dying man.”
Airey stroked his negligible mustache. “This is true. The answer must be more complex then. I’ll need to cogitate on this a while. But meanwhile, I think you should give Tugger anything he wants as a reward. Without him, apparently, you wouldn’t be here right now. He’s your guardian raksha.”
“I’d gladly give him the finest meal or the thickest bed in the world. But all he seems to want is to be by my side!”
Airey hunkered down beside Tugger. He took the rag from his pocket and wiped away a line of saliva from Tugger’s jowls. “There, there, good boy. What you want depends on what you are. And I guess we’ll never know that. Unless—”
“Unless what?” asked Klom.
Airey straightened up, holding the rag bearing Tugger’s drool before all their eyes as if it were a holy relic. “Let’s send this sample to the laboratories at Radius Seven and get a genomic readout for Tugger. It will cost Klom a pretty paisa, but perhaps we’ll learn more about our friend’s constitution.”
Sorrel said, “What could a simple lab analysis reveal that Bright Tide Rising and his majestatics overlooked?”
“I suspect that Tugger deliberately concealed his true nature from the Raisin, so that he would not be separated from Klom. Can we put anything beyond a being who can do what Tugger appears to have done for Klom?”
All three friends studied the innocuous animal with new respect. Tugger simply grinned dopily upward, then scratched behind his jaw with a rear paw, making a noise like a broom on sand.
Klom said, “Please see to it, Airey. We need to know what Tugger is so we can make sure he gets the proper treatment for his kind.”
“Consider it done! And now, although you are suspended till after the Festival, Klom, Sorrel and I need to get back to work. Which brings me round to asking you for a small favor—”
Disdaining the spanner, Klom opened the stuck petcock with the force of his fingers alone. A torrent of purple, iron-smelling hematic coolant gouted out, splashing Klom to his knees, but he only laughed.
Klom’s crib was luxurious by bustee standards. Scabbed together out of rusty sheet metal, driftwood posts and rafters, broad swaths of cured hides from Asperna’s reptilian partchrumpfs and the odd bits of scratched plastic and warped pressboard, the shack leaked only minimally during the monsoon season and retained the heat from a seacoal fire well during the mild winters. Its interior held a hammock layered with rags and a teetering set of shelves hosting Klom’s few possessions, including a photo of an old woman standing in front of a hut on a lakeshore. (The unframed photo was surrounded by deva medals distributed by the marabouts during various holy days, as if it were a small shrine.) A gamecube with a fuzzed-out display and half its functions deleted by age rested on a wicker hassock. Sorrel often spent the night in Klom’s crib, whether she and Klom had sex or not, preferring it to the crowded quarters she officially shared with a family of kitchen workers. The rancid oily smells her fellow tenants brought back in their clothing and hair from their shifts in the kitchen nauseated her.
This night, with Klom still unwontedly preoccupied by his earlier “death,” Sorrel elected to keep company with her lover after her shift ended. Their supper, taken amidst the crowded refectory attached to Kitchen Number Twelve, had been a silent affair.
They lay quietly together now in the hammock. The Great Sun had gone down just an hour ago, and, even without any exertion, their naked bodies—one sleek and golden, one hairy and pale—were bedewed with sweat. Estuarial breezes feathered their skins.
Strung from the two biggest, most solidly anchored posts, the hammock and its ropes nonetheless creaked as Sorrel shifted her position to clamber atop Klom. She began to kiss and tease him. “Where’s the nasty old cruft then, sweetling? Nothing to stop me from rubbing my boobs here now, is there?”
Most unusually, Klom did not at first respond. Sorrel persisted however, and soon the shipbreaker began to react enthusiastically. One massive hand encompassed both her breasts, while the other cupped her whole ass. Straddling Klom’s hips, Sorrel looked back over her shoulder to grab his penis and guide it home. But suddenly she stopped.
“Sorrel, what’s wrong?”
“I—that thing is watching us!”
“What thing?” Klom raised himself up on one elbow. “Oh, Tugger?” The beast sat up on its back haunches attentively, legs askew toward one side and its bifurcate horn aimed straight at the couple. If interpreted anthropomorphically, its face expressed goofy bemusement. “But he’s watched us every night since I found him.”
“I know! But it’s different now. We don’t know what he is, or what he can do, or what he wants. It shivers my bones!”
“Tugger? Never! He’s just my happy little friend. Like you and Airey.”
Sorrel looked incensed, and she bounced off Klom to stand on the dirt floor. “So that’s all I am to you? Some kind of pet? Where’s my dress?”
Klom swung his legs around to sit upright. “No, Sorrel, you’re not a pet. That’s not what I meant to say. Don’t twist my words around. You know I can’t always say things just right. I love you. Come back, please.”
Standing dressed by the plank door with a hand on the latchstring, Sorrel said, “Forget it, Klom. You seem to love this—this monster more than you do me. So why don’t I just leave you two to whatever obscene pleasures you can contrive!”
Klom scowled. “Now, Sorrel, you know that’s not—”
“And Airey deserves more respect from you too!” she yelled, then was gone.
Klom swore. He kicked his gamecube off the hassock and banged the door open. But Sorrel was already out of sight
Tugger continued to beam benevolently, however, and eventually Klom calmed down. Before too long, both man and beast were snoring peacefully.
* * *
Klom’s three weeks of probation were nearly over. He had spent the time increasingly frustrated by the realization that the dismantling of the Caution Discharge Zone was proceeding swiftly without him. For one thing, he was losing taka and paisa every day he sat idle. His dreams of quitting the Yard and retiring to Chaulk seemed to recede further each day. To conserve his meager savings—depleted drastically by the advance charges from the Radius Seven lab—Klom had taken to eating the very scraps from Kitchen Number Twelve which he had once foreseen as supplying Tugger’s needs. (Luckily, that amiable companion continued, however improbably, to flourish on nothing more than air and water.) Soliciting the leftovers from the friendly but sardonic Bergamot cook named Kirsh was a chore that grew more odious to Klom each day. Kirsh’s face, a pockmarked, damascene blue, would crack in a sarcastic snaggle-toothed smile as he handed over the leaky package of oris, always accompanied by some such jest as, “Here’s fare fit for a fourstrand, Klom—a starving, poverty-stricken, imbecilic fourstrand, that is.”
But the loss of pay and the humiliating survival tactics represented the lesser of Klom’s irritations. He found himself angrier over being excluded from the more intangible aspects of dismantling the starliner, the conversion of something useless into something useful. His earlier work on the ship had begun to foster an intimate bond with the vessel, an emotional linkage he had come to relish on previous jobs. And this particular bond had been sanctified in his blood (however inexplicably counterfactual that spillage had since become). It felt as if Klom had abandoned a responsibility to tend to the corpse of a loved one, leaving the job to strangers.
Few of these feelings were cast in words, either internally or to Sorrel or Airey. Nonetheless Klom experienced deep disquiet and irritability over this exclusion.
Each day he would spend hours on the shore, gazing out at the starliner, Tugger lying patiently in the sand at his master’s feet. Tugger carried about a chewed hank of rope with him, and, from time to time, by obvious gestures, would try to inte
rest Klom in a pulling game. Klom played with his pet once in a while, but more often Tugger was ignored, left to sleep or to fret at the frayed ends of the rope with his exiguous shoulder hands.
The mountainous ship just offshore exhibited few exterior changes, and Klom was left to fantasize about the altered conditions of the interior. When the ship-to-shore ferry returned each night full of weary workers, Klom would be present at the dock to glower at Rapaille, who made certain to shelter himself amidst a knot of the brawniest breakers. But Klom never made a move on the overseer, knowing that the surest way to extend his probation would be another physical assault.
When Klom grew weary of staring out to sea, he retreated to one of the scrapheaps with his watercutter. There he would refine his already masterful carving skills by cutting up worthless old pods and wall fragments and contorted rebar with his illimitable tool, until the filthy dirt became a sea of mud. The fastidious Tugger chose to remain out of the way of the splattering, but always within easy hail.
It was at just such mindless pursuits that Sorrel found Klom this late afternoon.
“Klom! Are you mad? It’s Festival Eve! The celebrations will start soon!”
The Festival of the Triple Sunset was an annual rite celebrating the conjoined westering of Great, Lesser and Least Suns. On the first night the three suns would set within several minutes of each other. On the final night the descent of the orbs would occur simultaneously, resulting in an incredible celestial display inspiring much reverence from the more devout citizens of the Yard and greater Aspema.
Klom holstered his watercutter. “I don’t care about any stupid Festival.”
“Oh, shut up and get over here. You’ve been moping for three weeks now, and enough is enough. You’re going to have a good time tonight if I have to carry you on my shoulders!”
This ridiculous image amused Klom so much he laughed heartily for the first time in days. Squelching through the mud, he embraced Sorrel, causing her to squeal.
Harsh Oases Page 12
