Tinman

by Simon Fairhead

  But they did hear the sound of falling water, far away. Water piddling over distant rocks. The boys were coated in sweat. It dribbled down their temples from their hairlines and stuck their shirts to their ribs. What better place to head for than a cool waterfall?

  They came upon a red cliff not far ahead. The stream surged over it. It had carved out a smooth track in the rock. Bright green and purple grasses grew to both sides, sucking up the moisture. They found a path down on the right side of the cliff, almost stairs. And in the muddy puddles that dotted the path they saw footprints - footprints only found on Earth in mud turned to stone millions of years ago.

  "Dinosaurs!" gasped Alesso, laying his hand out flat near a large impression. It was three times the breadth of his palm, with two broad toes that ended in long claws.

  Franco nodded. He knew they were not dinosaurs, but they were near as damn it. Creatures from millions of years ago; creatures from a million light years away, both were equally alien. Time and distance are both long and mysterious paths. But that was a big footprint.

  He looked back up at the dripping path they had descended, and beyond that the jungle trees arching over them, up the steep-sided valley. The sky had become a bright, narrow strip, a long way away. And before them the path zigged and zagged down into a warm and misty gloom, shot through with spears of sunlight, and sounds of hooting and trilling, and the susurration of a million alien bugs...

  "Alesso!" he called, "We should go back. It will get pretty dark down here when the sun goes past the ridge."

  Alesso was poking at a revolting-looking fleshy flower the colour of blood with a long stick. Big yellow beetles were streaming out of it, seeking shelter. "I want to see the waterfall!"

  Franco looked up at the path again. He listened to the water. It sounded near. "Okay, fratello. We will see the waterfall, and then we have to go."

  "Yay!" Alesso clambered down the damp slabs, followed by his brother.

  At last they stood upon a huge, flat stone on the edge of a swamp. It appeared the stream, though small, had, over time, filled a massive, sluggish basin of rock with water. Vegetation in colours ranging from deepest blue to virulent orange cascaded down over the edges of the pool; nearly white, softly triangular water plants spread their leaves over the surface, dotted with pin-prick flowers the colour of gold. A great soft mist, granular and slow, eddied over the lazy waters. The stream pattered quietly, insistently, onto great fat slabs of water-weathered rock, yellow as a salamander. Its splashes shone bright in a sword of sunshine that slashed a path across its fall.

  The boys stood and watched in awe. The heat, the calm, the beauty of the spot, bewitched them. They unpacked their lunch and sat on the warm slab eating it, shoes discarded.

  And then they saw their dinocat. The ball had fallen in the water, on the far side of the pond, and it was bobbing and hooting on the shore, unsure of whether it should step into the water to retrieve it. Alesso shrieked and set about pulling on his shoes. Franco began to put on his own footwear when something spasmed in the water, under the white water-lilies. "Alesso! Wait!" he called, but Alesso was off and running round the lip of the pond, diving into the trees, already invisible.

  Franco smashed into the undergrowth and found himself knee-deep in water and cold, clinging water-plants within half-a-dozen steps. "Alesso! Stay away from the water!" he shouted, knowing already Alesso had no fear of water, growing up on a barge on a drowned world.

  Something huge surged through the water to his left. Its bow-wave sent warm, silky water up over his stomach. A tail splashed noisily, soaking him.

  Now he was on a semi-submerged platform of rock, slick with algae. He could see the waterfall, and the dinocat, and Alesso's diminutive figure, splashing towards it to get the ball. And in the pond, a massive dark red thing, faster than he could run, was powering through the water towards them both, a wave of water smooth as a jet-fighter's canopy displaced before it.

  Alesso splish-splashed on his tiny feet through the shallow water towards the ball, the only thought in his young brain to retrieve the ball and give it to his dinocat so they could play some more games. The dinocat, in all probability also a juvenile, snorted and hopped on the shore, excited by all the activity.

  "Alesso!" screamed Franco, pulling the knife from his belt.

  Something with two pairs of jaws working at right-angles opened its mouth at that moment. Four long, slender mouth-parts opened wide and snapped Alesso in two. The dinocat screeched and scrambled away to safety. Alesso's head and torso fell into the shallows to be snaffled up and swallowed in two easy convulsions by the beast from the swamp. His legs bobbed in bloody foam for a few more seconds, and then the submerged animal turned and gulped those down, too.

  CHAPTER 17

  "I miss Alesso," murmured Franco Pirelli, stirring in his life-support cot. Art wept.

  He by-passed all the protocols, and held a dinner party aboard the drifting, probably doomed, hulk of Kyko Halliday's ship. They brought out the best china and glassware, reanimated the cream of the surviving politicians, artists, philosophers and wits, and drank the best booze the ship's lab could concoct. There was contraband, of course. What ship doesn't have contraband? Whisky from Scotland; Bourbon from New Orleans; Wine from France; Vodka from Russia. They set a table on the mezzanine above the flight deck, and managed to find a crisp, white cotton tablecloth from Kyko Halliday's own dining table to cover it all. They had been on board now for 38,000 years...

  Art broke into the buzz of conversation with the chime of a butter-knife against his brandy glass. (Filled with Napoleon brandy, courtesy of Vara Brabin, the Vimo news host. It had started its humble life as a cognac, but any cognac aged for more than five years can call itself Napoleon, and her bottle was old as old can be...)

  "Fellow Imonites!" he crowed, "Drink long, be merry, for we are the chosen few!"

  "Here, here!" called Vara, waving her brandy glass above her carefully coiffured head. She had been drinking steadily throughout the entree, and her face was flushed.

  "Traitor!" hissed Yan Deuter, a skinny and bespectacled novelist and academic.

  Art turned to him. Yan had been quiet throughout the first course. Many of them had been subdued. He had played God with them. He had chosen whom to resurrect. Everyone at the dinner table had had their brains re-grafted back into their bodies after millennia asleep. Perhaps he had made a mistake...

  "Yan," he said, "Whatever grievance you have with Vara is centuries old; the same goes for the rest of you. Imo, Ibo, Mioumu; even that stinking moon, Ium, they have been dust for thousands of years. We have no history here. There is only the future."

  Yan swilled the wine around in is glass. "She lied, Mr Parrish. She served up propaganda, when people could have made proper plans with facts."

  "There was no escape, Yan. Vara made those last few months bearable for millions of people."

  "No. You took away our choice." He pushed his glasses up his nose.

  Art rubbed his eye. "There was no choice. The supernova could not be stopped."

  Yan sat back from the table. "So you think Hiroto and Dawkins are the only intelligences greater then ours in the Mioumu system?"

  Art tried to hold his gaze, but it slipped to Kyko within seconds. He saw something in his eyes he had never seen before - incomprehension.

  But Kyko rose to the challenge. "Are they on board, Mr Deuter?"

  "No."

  "We handpicked the great and the good from across the system, so why did we miss these 'great intelligences?'"

  "Is Harkon Dyll here?" called Yan. He received no response. "Just your friends, then," he snorted, picking up his wine and swilling it around his glass.

  Kyko leaned over the table. "Dyll is on board, Mr Deuter. He has not been invited to this table."

  "Typical. Dyll is an archaeologist - probably not fancy enough for your soiree this evening - but he found something, Mr Halliday, on Ibo."

  "Impossible," retorted Halliday. He lit a
cigar - in direct contravention of protocols and regulations that would have had him thrown in the brig, were the ship not his own - and leaned forward in his chair. "Ibo is a rock. It is too small to retain any atmosphere. It has never had any air."

  Deuter drank some wine. "I know that. I'm talking about the crash site. Aliens, Mr Halliday."

  Halliday stared at him for a moment, thinking. Then he gazed up at a nearby screen. "Hiroto, did you hear that? Alien remains on Ibo?"

  Hiroto's face faded up from black as if he was stepping onto a stage. He bowed his head to the diners politely before speaking. "Deuter San, something was found, but no analysis was made before...the end."

  Deuter smiled up at the avatar. "Nothing you've heard about, clearly. Halliday, your drone surveillance seems to have had some blind spots."

  "What are you talking about, Mr Deuter?"

  Deuter nodded to himself. "That's right - deny everything. I suppose you can, now. No forensics team will ever recover any of your networked robots and cameras, but Hiroto lives on, immortal. And he saw it all..."

  Halliday smiled, mysteriously. "If you say so, Mr Deuter."

  Vara Brabin started to laugh. "Halliday, gimme one of your cigars, there's fuck all else to smoke on board this tub." Halliday politely rose from his chair and offered her one from a silver cigar case. She puffed away on it until it was well alight from Halliday's proffered lighter. "Well," she began, "we're in one hell of a mess, aren't we? Did someone say we'd been drifting for thirty-eight thousand fucking years? We are, in all likelihood, the only human beings left alive anywhere in the universe. Hey, what's your name again? Was it Frank?"

  She was peering down the table towards the hunched figure of Franco, who was quietly working his way through a bowl of soup. "No. I am Franco," he replied, softly.

  "So, Franco, you were one of the last few to leave Earth. Was it doomed?"

  He smiled, and nodded. "Imo was better."

  "There you go; Imo was better. Earth was drowning, fucked up by carbon dioxide. Which leaves us. What the fuck are we going to do? And if you think I am going back into one of those brain tanks after this enchanting soiree, you can fuck off."

  There was a chorus of agreement from people around the table. Art rubbed his temples. This had been an extraordinarily bad idea. And yet the hubbub of voices, the sight of a human crowd had awakened a long dead yearning for...something. Perhaps it was a reawakening of a tribal memory, a - but they would deplete the life support systems in twenty years - where would they sleep? How could they make new clothes? He had a myriad of other nebulous, unanswered questions. And why not? They were drifting in the space between the stars; a place of such total blackness the human mind could not fathom its enormity. And yet Six had spotted something. A craft out here in the vacuum. He saw now he had pulled that vital thread; he had begun the gradual unravelling that would lead all aboard Halliday's ship into decadence and madness. Without hope, without a goal, what else was there but a grand self-destruction, a slow motion suicide? Yes, they had twenty years of life support if all these souls about the dining table retained their bodies, but how long would it take them to work out the maths? How long would I live if there were only ten others aboard? Or five? He had to get them back in their nutrient tanks as soon as possible.

  He found Halliday, suddenly, at his shoulder. A cloud of cigar smoke billowed over his face. "Get Harkon Dyll up here, Art. I want to talk to him."

  "Really? You want one more person up on the deck of the Titanic?"

  "Amuse me." He slipped a brandy glass into Art's hand. Art called over Six and instructed him in his new task.

  Harkon Dyll strode briskly onto the mezzanine within the hour, his long hair still wet from his shower. He wore a white shirt and bright yellow suit, and smiled broadly at the other guests as he arrived at the table. He accepted a large glass of merlot from Dawkins and drank deeply before acknowledging the other diners. Halliday approached him and shook his hand.

  "Mr Dyll, please sit next to me."

  "Kyko Halliday. Still alive. And standing, I see. Whose legs might those be?"

  Halliday smiled. "You are well? The reintegration went smoothly?"

  "You're a fucking butcher, Halliday. You don't just play God and expect to get away with all this, do you?"

  Halliday re-lit his cigar. "You seemed happy enough when I offered you an escape route from Mioumu."

  Dyll's smile disappeared. "You offered an escape for me, my wife and my two children. Where are they?"

  Halliday bowed his head. "Events overtook us all, I'm afraid. There was no time."

  Dyll nodded absently to himself. He cupped his wine glass in both hands and took a few steps to the far end of the mezzanine, where he looked out of the flight deck window at the black gulf outside. He drank some more wine, and then he wandered back, a more reflective figure.

  "Time moves on. They have been dead longer than we have been down from the trees."

  Dawkins trundled forward on his rig, and offered a plate of canapes. "No matter is ever destroyed; your family lives on as part of the universe."

  Dyll looked up at Dawkins, and patted him on the arm. "Better said than any human."

  Dawkins bowed. "Facts give more comfort than myths."

  Dyll raided his glass. "Yes. In the long term, they do." He drank some more wine. "Except for us. We have but a single fact: we are drifting in deep space and we will die here."

  He had hoped for a dissenting voice, a murmer of hope, but none came. Then Six spoke.

  "Inbound object. Closing at two million metres per second. Raise shields."

  Dawkins spun on his rig, tracks squealing, deck plates vibrating like thunder beneath him as he accessed the navigation controls from the nearest terminal.

  "Shields raised. There will be momentary zero G. Brace."

  Everyone held on to the dining table around which they had been assembled. There was a loud clunk as the gears turning the artificial gravity centrifuge disengaged, followed by a high whine, which reduced rapidly in pitch, as the fly-wheel spun down. Six and Dawkins switched on their electromagnets to grip the metal deck plates, but the dining table, and the guests around it, began to lift, and turn.

  "Get away from the table!" called Art, "It's all gonna come crashing down in a second!"

  Far away, there was a distant boom. The ship shuddered. The lights flickered, went out, and then returned. For a beautiful moment, everything continued on its graceful dance...

  And then the centrifuge re-engaged. The table fell to the deck, breaking its legs. Cutlery, crockery, condiments and glasses crashed and smashed in gleeful explosions of destruction. And with it all fell the guests, hair flailing, wine spilling, food flying, their chairs splintering under them as they made their rapid, undignified return to the mezzanine floor.

  Someone's fork had speared Art through his bicep. He tugged it out in a quick, reflexive movement. Blood spurted and then dribbled down his arm, wetting and staining his shirt. He picked up a cotton napkin from the floor and tied it with one hand and his teeth around the wound. Franco lay groaning on the floor, the end of the dining table over his legs. Art feared his thigh bones had been broken, but a fragment of his chair had broken under it, and, with an inch of clearance, he was able to drag him free.

  Dyll had not been so lucky. He had fallen on his wine glass, and had a deep gash on his rib cage. A ragged sliver of glass stuck out from the wound. Art left it where it was.

  "Dawkins, is your Med VR display updated?"

  Dawkins rattled over the deck plates and his torso tilted down to Dyll's chest. "Med VR is not a live scan, Art"

  "I know that. I just need to get an idea of where the arteries and internal organs are."

  Dyll winced, but appeared to enjoy the attention. "I'm not spewing blood, Art. It's okay."

  Dawkins flipped out a screen from his upper arm for Art to see. There was a live video of Dyll's chest, with a digital overlay of generic human anatomy. It shifted and tilted with Dyll
's movements, showing semi-transparent veins and organs approximately where they lay under Dyll's skin. The shard had come close to the bottom of his right lung and had just missed the top of the right lobe of his liver.

  Art patted him on the arm. "You're a lucky man. We'll get you stitched up in the med-bay."

  "You should have left my fucking body in the freezer."

  Six sounded an electronic alarm from the station he was monitoring. "We have a hull breach. We are losing water and oxygen from deck one, section four"

  Dawkins went over to Six. "We should seal section four. The airlock doors are all functioning normally."

  Art looked up at them. "Go ahead. Hiroto will get the hull drones out to patch the mess. Hiroto?"

  He looked up at Hiroto's screen. He saw only static.

  "Hiroto?"

  Halliday clambered back up to the mezzanine. He had fallen unceremoniously down the stairs to the flight deck, and now his white suit was stained with oil and food. He looked up at Hiroto's screen too. "Switch to the emergency channel. The power cut might have blown some circuit boards. Hiroto, can you hear me?"

  A low-res, black and white picture appeared, digital squares building and dying, trying to hold onto an image. A voice came through, crackling and cutting out.

  "D-Dawkins.D-D-D-Dawkins s-s-s-s-stop-stop-stop!"

  "What is your robot doing?" demanded Halliday.

  Art looked over. "We're sealing off section four, deck one."

  Halliday cried out in dismay and stumbled over to Dawkins. For a weak man, he displayed enormous strength in pushing the robot back from the controls.

  "Hiroto lives in section four! You must save him!"

  Six raised his head and sped over to the exit "Man down. Recovery and evac commencing. Please lay down suppressing fire."

  Halliday started after the ex-military robot, but he was tired from the evening's exertions. He returned to the console to see the readouts of the ship's systems. He turned to Art. "Your Tinman is going to kill Hiroto Beta if he tries to take him out of his nutrient tank. Stop him."