He would eat lunch by himself, back at home, without even waking his ingrate brother. Maybe take the rest of the day off.
Upright at last, Mereziah wistfully glanced overhead once more, to spy those remote indications of a life missed —
And saw, instead, quite nearby, the green light of a descending pod.
He rubbed his eyes, looked again, squinted. Tried to focus . . . A slim single, moving closer with each second, was certainly approaching. About a sixteenth of a turn away, inside the curve. Putting his hands out, fingers splayed, he felt the vibrations, quavering the fine cords.
With one last glance at his sleeping brother, Mereziah made his way toward the track the pod travelled. Moving hand over hand, carefully placing his feet in the filaments that strung, like hammocks, between the unused pod tracks, not for one instant did he take his eyes off the green light. He saw a tangle of pale tubes and cables, everything strung with the mesh that he and his brother used to cavort in as kids but now wrapped themselves in like musty shrouds.
Possibly the nearing pod would pass right by their station — if its destination was farther below, and if the track it followed was long enough, and straight enough, and clean. The occupant might not need any form of outside assistance. Yet Mereziah also knew the failing conditions of the shaft wall, and of the pods themselves, and, because it was his birthday, he felt sure in his gut that his expertise and elbowgrease would, on this occasion, be required.
Checking his belt, his oilcan, his pipe wrench and transfer hooks, he understood how fortuitous it was for him to have brought these tools with him to work today. Beneath him, snoozing, Merezath was certainly ill-prepared. Even if his brother did awaken and see the active lift, and attempt to join in the encounter, he would be useless, without tools, in his pajamas.
Mereziah squared his shoulders and continued to approach the pod at an oblique angle, hoping to intercept it. Who might be inside? Lunatic? Saint? Someone with news from above? Or maybe . . . maybe even a woman? Merezath had often predicted women descending upon them. Could this be a soft and yielding female, arriving as his birthday gift?
No. That was absurd, an undignified line of thought.
Yet the pod was certainly slowing. He had been right. Did the track end, or was it not fully formed? Or was Mereziah’s station the intended destination?
Trying to contain his growing expectations, he found himself wondering what would happen to trapped passengers when he and his brother were no longer around to help out the pods that stalled down here. If neither Mereziah nor Merezath were available to approach a pod, to re-couple it, or to mend it, or otherwise send it on its way, how much time would pass before the occupants died? And if there were other stations up and down the length of the shaft already without attendants — as there surely were — how many stalled pods contained corpses? In all the many shafts? Would the entire traveling population of the world eventually come to its demise locked inside stationary pods, waiting at abandoned stations for assistance that would never come?
The pod stopped. The green light wavered.
As far as Mereziah knew, there was no horizontal area outside, not where the pod had come to rest. Which meant the occupant had not stepped out. But the shaft and its workings had surprised Mereziah many times in the past. No one could ever know the real whys and wherefores of the world, not even if they lived to be a hundred and ten. Sometimes openings did appear in the shaft wall, and shortly after vanish, of their own accord, leading out to nowhere, the nearest level a deadly drop far below.
Openings could be forced, too. Coerced, cut into the wall of the shaft itself.
Before long, he was adjacent to the stilled pod, out of breath and aching, but safe, intact, and filled now with terrible excitement. With one hand, he touched the warm, smooth skin of the device; the sensations were unsettling and heady.
Around him, the green light of downward motion was dimmed significantly; the area darkened. Letting himself conjure, for a second, a tantalizing lightshow of a thousand pods, of bustling stations he would never work at or even see in this life, Mereziah traced lines on the skin, formed by the rivets that bound the flesh of this device together, and felt the embossed remains of an undecipherable decal on the tarnished surface. He sighed.
The track, as he’d suspected, ended in an unopened bud near his feet. This probably meant that his station was not the intended destination. To send the mystery passenger farther down, Mereziah would need to uncouple the pod and swing it over to another track. Hooking his safety harness in the two lower rings so his hands might be freed, he glanced behind himself, as a formality, to see the position of other appropriate tracks; he knew this area by heart. Even though tracks changed, growing slowly of their own accord, he knew all their positions. Could Merezath say the same? How many attendants in the brotherhood could match his devotion?
One hand resting on the window ledge, he peered down, but could discern no detail below, only death, and death could hold no light. Thumbing the intercom button, he cleared his throat, slid the window panel aside, and said in his most professional tone, “Attendant here. Please state your purpose and — ”
Looking back through the tiny opening was the face of an insane man, a depraved man. Lost and destitute. Disappointment yawned inside Mereziah. This encounter was most likely his last ever, and he was about to direct a lunatic back to the level he had mindlessly wandered away from. This was not the first time Mereziah had opened a pod’s window to see a drooling idiot staring vacantly back at him, or a lost child, peering up in terror, but it was sure to be the last. Would have been nice, he thought, to go out of life on a note bearing somewhat more resonance than a dull thud.
He stared, unable to finish his opening line. The passenger was naked, filthy, his hair matted in clumps and hanging to his waist. Through these hanks of hair, tiny, dark eyes were visible, ready, it seemed, to pop out of their sockets.
Mereziah saw an image of his own reflection in the window. Could he blame the client for his fear? Once Mereziah had been proud of his skin tone, his blond hair, his full lips. None of these features were left to him now. He appeared, even to himself, a wrinkled parody of a man. A ghoul.
But duty was duty. He had sworn an oath to his father that he would always remain professional, in all cases. Never discriminate.
“You are in a single lift pod,” he said, and cleared his throat again. “Headed downward. The pod has reached an impasse. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
A long pause, but finally the man inside nodded.
“Good. Are you travelling to a specific destination or have you entered this device inadvertently?”
The man started to urinate where he stood.
“Cease that behavior immediately,” Mereziah said, but really though, what did he care if passengers pissed in the pods? He never intended to clean one again. “You might ruin the machinery under the floor. Or even get a shock yourself, should you piss on something live. I’m not qualified to repair the arcane systems of man.”
The passenger stopped peeing, shook his penis dry, and reached out his grubby, damp hand. Splayed fingertips touched the window from the inside, inches from Mereziah’s nose. Mereziah stared past the whorls into those tiny, dark eyes. Somehow, he saw familiarity there, pulling him in, and he swallowed hard, managing to finally look away.
“Uh,” he said, feeling a little dizzy, holding onto the netting while his stomach lurched. “From, from where have you descended? Have other attendants helped you get this far down?”
Shockingly, sudden tears filled Mereziah’s eyes. His vision blurred. He swayed, wiping the tears away, astonished, hoping his brother would not wake up at this moment and climb up here to find him crying like a baby. What he had seen in those eyes was entropy and decay. Inevitable that all things come to pass. He had seen his own demise. He had seen the end of the world.
“Did you come for me?” he asked weakly. “Fool that I am, I thought your descending pod might arrive wit
h news of a more pleasant nature. I even imagined a, well, a companion. One other than yourself.” A quiet sob racked his long frame. “You see, when we were young men, my brother always talked about women. Women coming from up above. It’s embarrassing to admit, but for a second . . .” He tried to smile but it would not come.
“Life, to me, seems to have been some sort of bad joke. I didn’t have many experiences as a youth and I told myself there was always time and opportunity. Adventure, travel, maybe even a family, all that anyone might dream of, without asking too much, even for a man in my position. But I’m one hundred years old today and nobody cares and the world has gone to shit.”
The man inside the pod seemed to be listening.
“My parents have been at the bottom of this shaft, waiting for me, for over eighty years. The Red Plague killed them. When my brother and I were still children. Do you know what the Red Plague is? There’s not much of it around now. At least, I don’t hear much about it these days. But maybe that’s because we see less and less people down here — maybe it killed more than I suspect. Did it ever reach the level you’re from?”
The passenger’s fingers described delicate motions on the steamed window.
“It’s a terrible disease. Horrible,” Mereziah whispered. “My father’s and my mother’s insides turned slowly to liquid and drained right out of them. They coughed up blood for months. They shat out blood, if you’ll excuse me saying so. In the end they shat out little bits and pieces of themselves. And, shortly before they died, chunks. They shat their guts out. During it all, as they went crazy and their minds fell apart, they said the most awful things to each other, and to me, and to my little brother. They accused us, well, let’s say that if someone you’re close to contracts this ailment, it’s a blessed relief when they draw their last breath and finally plummet down, out of sight.”
Mereziah had not mentioned his parent’s death in decades, not to anybody, not even Merezath, and as these words left his constricted throat he felt a sense of unburdening building inside him, as if he might actually be able to float away from the wall and rise up, possibly even to the top of the world. In shaky tones, he continued, expecting rapture now, epiphanies, redemption.
“My, my brother and I were too young to be left alone, but we knew the meaning of duty — we had been well trained, if nothing else — and even though traffic has never been heavy here at our station, we attended every pod that ever stopped. And we sent them on their way. Most of them. Some we had to refuse and send back up, or down, as the case may be: underage passengers without a parent, or those who appeared infirm or unable to make a lucid choice of their own — ”
Mereziah broke off; this passenger’s mental state was obviously similar to the ones he had begun to describe and he did not want to upset the man inside the pod, should he — by some means unapparent as of yet — understand what Mereziah was saying and consequently become belligerent or otherwise hard to deal with.
“We were children,” Mereziah said, removing his torque wrench from his belt and getting a good grip on the pliant handle. “Children. We knew the meaning of responsibility, of duty, and we quickly learned the meaning of loneliness. But there were times — ”
He reached behind the pod and fumbled with the wrench until he heard the head mate wetly with the reversal nut. “There were times, it’s true, when Merezath and I turned to each other for comfort. Boys will be boys, after all. Now he’s a crusty old bastard and I despise him.”
From the netting below, as if Merezath had heard his name, rose an ululating wail; inside the lift, the mad passenger quickly pulled his hand back. When Mereziah surveyed below, he could not see his brother. He waited, holding his breath, one hand in the netting and the other on his wrench. There was no second shout but soon he did hear another noise, a quiet noise. From within the pod. Looking through the window once more, he saw the passenger’s lips move. The man repeated something, barely audible, his expression belying urgency. The words Mereziah made out when he put his ear close to the speaker were, the engineer, the engineer . . .
Mereziah torqued the wrench. He did not unfasten his safety belt from the lower rings of the pod, though they struggled feebly and tried to convince him to do so. He held his cable in place until both rings surrendered. Coming free, the reversal nut made a squelching sound and the entire pod quivered, rumbling.
Oddly, it came as some surprise to Mereziah when he fully understood what it was he intended to do: break the sacrament of the attendant, the first fundamental rule.
The lift began to ascend.
Below, Merezath called out again. Perhaps he assumed that Mereziah had fallen to the bottom of the shaft. Was there a slight chance he was looking up, watching the red glow of ascension as the pod cast its broadening hemisphere of light against the darkness? Possibly, in that case, he might even distinguish the form of his older brother, hanging under the pod as it crept slowly up, up, away from their lonely station.
TRAN SO, L20
Generations ago, the lake god made multitudes of healthy fish, but now it was sick, like the people, and produced only a few small fish, these being weak, thin, and spotted of flesh. The lake god made even fewer crustaceans. Regardless, every morning, after kissing his feverish wife on the cheek, Tran so Phengh made his way down from the communal shack where the couple lived to his adopted place on the beach, to sit there, rod in hand, spending the daylight hours fishing and staring out over the cluttered, receding waters of Lake Seven.
The ailing god, it was said, lived under the surface, in a large tank. Some citizens believed that this deity — maker of fishes, crabs, and aquatic plants — was actually dying, but Tran so could not imagine how any god could stop living. He could not imagine what might become of society if gods ceased providing altogether.
Semi-reclined, eyes half closed, Tran so Phengh saw a great crescent of the beach, extending away from him, out of sight, in both directions. Mists curled the periphery and gave an illusion of infinity. Before him, on the water, coracles, rafts, poorly made junks, and every other conceivable type of homemade vessel bobbed and creaked and rapped against each other. Some, in those vanished, plentiful times, had been fishing boats. Others, floating homes. Most were now abandoned wrecks. Masts and ribs of sunken vessels poked up from the bottom of the shallows like bones. Flotsam filled gaps between the vessels. Over the years, as the level of the lake had slowly dropped, Tran so often imagined a day that he might walk across the entire lake, to the far wall, without ever once touching water.
He would see the god’s house then, if it existed, and he could knock on the front door.
Calling this place where he sat a beach was a misnomer. Not at all like the black, sandy land along the banks of the trickling rivers and streams that cut through Hoffmann City, sharing the same name, this place was a sloped, smooth embankment, made out of the same hard material that the rest of the world’s foundation was made out of. Rimming three sides of Lake Seven, hemming it against the far wall — which could at times be seen from where he sat, misty in the distance — it emanated both a foul smell and a constant churning sound that almost drowned out the susurrus of moans and chatter from the barrios behind Tran so. It was slippery, coated with algae and dark green weeds that had sloshed ashore and rotted, or had been exposed as the waters dropped. At the waterline, stained with mineral deposits, detritus rolled and tumbled in sluggish waves as if trying to escape from the lake. Chunks of wood, foam, spent food paks, spent prayer cards, spent remedy capsules: all rolled ceaselessly on the slick-covered swells, striving to reach up, to overcome the land or at least regain the ground they had lost. Sometimes Tran so watched this motion. Mostly he stared ahead.
His wife, Minnie sue, was not well.
Not well at all.
This morning, however, he allowed himself to consider that he might have reached a point pivotal to his ill fortunes, for upon arriving he had received a sign that he might be commencing a streak luckier than that which he and mos
t of his fellow citizens had been recently hurtling down. Today he had plucked a crab from the waters of Lake Seven. Although the beast’s shell was soft and illformed, the capture guaranteed meat for this evening’s meal. Tran so and Minnie sue would eat the contents of the paks supplied to them by the gods and supplement the bland gel with actual crabmeat. Imagining the taste now, Tran so’s mouth watered.
Of course, he had to assume that Minnie sue would be awake, able to eat, and that the meat might make her feel a bit better. Even though she had not had a grand mal or broken out in a rash in over a month — and her coughing had subsided — the claws of her ailment still dug deep, ruining her appetite, her waking hours, causing her once-beautiful mouth to say the most horrible, hurtful things to Tran so, things she could not possibly mean.
Diverting his reveries back to the crab, and to possibilities of better times ahead, Tran so wondered again if the catch could truly be prophetic. Might this be a turning point in life? Was it absurd to allow a moment’s hope?
He frowned. When Tran so had first lifted the dripping crustacean from the water, it had pleaded, “No kill! Please no kill. No eat, man, big luck! I help. Big luck!”
But should he believe it? Foolish to trust crustaceans, he knew, but maybe just this once a crab might be telling the truth. If he believed enough?
The creature struggled feebly in the holding net. Surreptitiously, Tran so watched it, glancing once or twice over his shoulder at the shacks of Hoffmann City, and the few people milling about. No one paid him or the crab any attention. Tran so Phengh kept a knife in a scabbard, at his waist. He used it to defend these rare catches. He also used the knife to clean fish, but had not drawn it, for either reason, in a long time.
There came an approaching rumble. He looked up. Along the breakwater, atop the slope of the beach — where the water level had once been when Tran so was a kid — trundled a god of dispensing. Stopping at the brink, it watched him from on high. He glared at it. The god nodded, an almost imperceptible motion.
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