Furnace

by Joseph Williams

  I stepped back and watched the walls of the shaft around me light up like the mess hall on the Hummel after a long night of heavy drinking, which is only remarkable when you consider the brightest light I’d seen in nearly a day had been the barroom-dull reflection of the cathedral dome in the hazy Furnace atmosphere.

  The most astounding thing about the lights was how they displayed on pre-grooved tracks, not just sockets or bulbs. I didn’t realize they formed a moving picture until they swept down the shaft behind me and the images roared to life in vibrant red.

  TSCHARIA, the first panel read.

  Beside the declaration was a detailed etching of the clown king at the city’s center, which had been painstakingly depicted at the height of its prosperity and opulence. I’ve mentioned several times that it reminded me of an ancient Greek or Roman city, and I think that impression has stuck with me more from what I saw in the maintenance shaft than anything I observed on the surface.

  As I stared at the etching and began to piece the tale together, it occurred to me that the clown king wasn’t Tscharia like I’d initially thought. Tscharia was the name of the city. The capital of Furnace, not its king. I wasn’t sure if that answered more questions than it raised, but at least it was an answer.

  Continuing down the tunnel, I observed a historical reenactment of the day that the clown king and his disciples arrived on the planetoid. If I understood the panels correctly, they hadn’t stumbled on Furnace by chance. They’d been banished from some Earth-like world in a gigantic spaceship, which I assumed was the vessel surrounding me. I couldn’t decipher the justification for their banishment by the supreme deity—who was symbolized by a clenched fist and one emphatic index finger—but it was clear that the panels had a sympathetic bend to the monsters’ plight and I therefore interpreted the remaining etchings with a grain of salt.

  Forlorn, the hideous creatures (who apparently hadn’t been so hideous once upon a time) had built the city of Tscharia and filled it with beautiful fountains, statues, paintings, libraries, and even looping holographic displays of moving artwork, albeit perverse. The technology they’d developed apparently rivaled that of modern humans, and this had been a long, long time ago. Thousands of years at least, perhaps millions. Who knows where they would have wound up without complete isolation? After all, what good was a fleet of spaceships if your physical body couldn’t leave the surface?

  Clearly, they’d tried to forge a life out of the wastelands for their forsaken people, but the planet itself eventually transfigured them into something far worse than the monsters they’d been on their home worlds. Their architectural wonders had fallen to ruin, the living artwork had likewise faded, and their collective mind had fractured. There was still some semblance of order and cooperation among their ranks, it seemed, but it was mostly fueled by blind, dogged belief in the poisonous teachings of the clown king of Tscharia.

  I was surprised to realize that the plight of the demons resonated with me beyond an obligatory, surface-level expression of pity. It didn’t take much imagination to see how I could wind up in the same situation if the Crown government suddenly decided I was a liability and it was better to send me off somewhere to rot than deal with me themselves. I’m well aware that my story is a serious threat to their expansionist propaganda should it ever be made public. I’ve seen them dispose of countless other political threats in the same manner for lesser offenses, declaring them ideal colonists uniquely suited for life in deep space and then banishing them with a wave of the royal scepter (at least, metaphorically speaking). Exile is often more convenient for governing bodies than genocide, I’ve found, since there are now seemingly endless colonies where problems can be quietly tucked away to be ignored. Sometimes, I wonder if that’s the only reason we’re hell-bent on interstellar Manifest Destiny in the first place.

  It’s generally a good PR move to at least feign mercy towards a disparaged people, though, even if you are providing them comically insufficient resources on uninhabitable balls of rock. That’s why they don’t kill them outright. As far as the Crown is concerned, the troublemakers can denounce the government all they want from soapboxes hundreds of millions of light-years from the ears of the voting citizenry. They’ll never be able to relay the actual reasons they’ve been cast out to sea, and they’ll be forgotten altogether once enough time has passed to render their social and political causes irrelevant.

  While my experiences on Furnace to that point gave me the gut feeling that the banishment of the clown king and his subjects was justified (or at least more so than the political radicals the Crown allegedly deports at the slightest whiff of dissent), I can understand how the exile had driven them insane. This wasn’t just a distant colony in the same galaxy, remember. As far as our scanners and naked eyes could detect, Furnace was a whole universe unto itself. The natives were cut off from every other aspect of the humanoid reality, and judging by the state of the city, it had been that way for a very long time.

  In their shoes, I may have cracked the same way, much like I assume I would on Pluto Station. Maybe even worse. To cope with a completely fucked-up world, I may have begun to worship the most fucked-up creature I could find and accept his lunatic ramblings as genuine enlightenment. It’s happened throughout history, human and otherwise. An opportunist arises from the downtrodden masses with a convenient scapegoat for their ubiquitous misery, and forsaken people fill their mouths and hearts with the misdirected hatred he spews to channel their desperation into some tangible, destructive force. They are suffering, after all, so why shouldn’t others suffer, as well? They are victims of circumstance, so why not create new victims so that they can reclaim some measure of power in their own lives? Carve out a place in the universe, in this case through the literal carving of flesh? And it can’t be done merely for the sake of carving. It must be done in the name of a greater cause or else their conscience will object.

  I don’t think that idea is particularly misleading or, for that matter, revolutionary. At least using Earth as an example, the theory has significant historical basis. How many holy wars have been manufactured out of sheer restlessness, despair, and the feeling that our lives are worthless within the greater whole? How many soldiers of God across countless religions have willingly gone to their deaths solely for the prospect of immortality, whether in a literal, transcendent sense or through the legacy of their championed cause? And the more corruptible the cause, the easier it is to recruit the young and disenfranchised. They don’t have a voice or a purpose, so they’ll seek both wherever they can be found.

  Reading through the history of the demons, I pitied them, but only for a moment. Only until I was forced to take a hard look at whether or not I was a cog in that same misguided machine. The Crown may have more credibility on a secular level than there was during the Crusades, or centuries of European and American Imperialism, or the Second Dark Ages, but I have reason to at least be suspicious that it’s merely a more refined version of the same cultural angst and desire for immortality.

  Saying so may put me at risk for immediate exile and dishonorable discharge from the fleet for manufactured reasons, but this is supposedly a classified document (which, I should point out, is inadmissible in a DOIA court since it is not a public trial and I have not exposed military secrets) and it doesn’t change the facts. It’s always startling to see an enemy in a new light, and although I won’t even attempt to argue that finally having proper context made me question whether or not the demons truly were an enemy (they were still trying to kill me or at least make me suffer and have to be afforded some accountability for their actions), it didn’t seem nearly as black and white as it had before. For all I knew at the time, they could have seen us as invaders trying to take their land, or denizens of that most supreme deity who’d sentenced them to eternal deaths millennia ago. It all could have been a colossal misunderstanding.

  I knew better than that, of course, and upon further reflection, decided they must have had some form
of access to our reality even if it was access through a state of consciousness rather than physical form. That’s what ultimately swayed me away from complete empathy and regret. They knew about us, or at least the clown king did, and therefore knew our vulnerability. I can see no other way that their legend or their nightmarish forms could have permeated human culture from so far away. Even if they’d inhabited Earth once upon a time, I find it hard to believe that the collective memory of their presence would have endured across mass extinctions and rebirths. They must have manifested in our reality throughout the ages.

  I continued to study the etchings. The panels mesmerized me enough that I forgot where I was for a while, but pain eventually overwhelmed curiosity and I found I didn’t have the time or energy to read any more. The history stretched back down the shaft as far as I could see, after all, and I was already on the verge of collapse. I think I managed to decipher the gist of the story anyway, and that’s how I discovered what I consider the true identity of the wasteland planet, at least in human terms:

  Hell.

  Furnace was Hell. Literal Hell. Gehenna, not just outside of Jerusalem but outside of the universe altogether. In other words, utter separation from the universal entity called God. It may seem like I’m being melodramatic, and you may have trouble believing me, but it’s true. Not just a personal hell, either, or a really awful place that resembled Hell. It was Hell, with a capital H, and the evidence was all around me. The Judeo-Christian tale of the fallen angel was right there on the wall of the maintenance shaft, woven into the history of the lonely planetoid in exquisite detail. In this case, the fallen angel was an evil clown creature who’d been banished from an idyllic planet to a wasteland along with his legion disciples, but that still sufficiently aligns with my understanding of Lucifer’s fall. Since then, his people have been doomed to spend eternity separate from the rest of the universe except for the souls they lure to share in the unending misery.

  Like me, for instance, and the entire crew of the Rockne Hummel. Because of one innocuous course alteration, we’d been assimilated into the damned forever.

  “We’re fucked,” I said aloud. The words took on a new meaning the longer I considered the evidence.

  Hell is a real place, I continued to remind myself. A planetary-mass object (not truly a planetoid since it orbits nothing at all) you can reach by ship, although you’ll need some help along the way.

  Hell exists, I mouthed. Hell exists.

  I repeated the words over and over again in my head. Chewed them back and forth to get the full flavor without truly digesting their meaning.

  Hell exists.

  Hell is a real place. And not filled with invisible demons who spend their entire existence convincing people to do bad things. Hell is a planet. A tangible body. And the Devil—Lucifer, Satan, clown king, whatever name you prefer—is not a fallen angel but an exiled alien of tremendous, maniacal power. Namely, the power to extract ships from open space and transport them to Furnace so he and his minions can feed upon their misery.

  It sounds very gothic (perhaps downright Christian) to say that he uses suffering for sustenance, but when you’ve been out in deep space as often as I have, you realize that there are endless metabolic demands and endless methods for extracting energy from organic matter. My guess is that these creatures are able to metabolize the chemicals many humans and aliens release when they experience significant amounts of pain, and that the clown king could sense these species (smell them, if you will) from great distances. Somehow, our flight path had skirted within range of the clown king’s influence, and that’s how we’d wound up in the middle of absolute nowhere…or perhaps the center of everything.

  That’s not an excuse for my failure by any stretch of the imagination. I still know that I must have fucked up the calculations somehow, and that if I hadn’t tinkered with the flight plan to test my theories and shave a little time from our journey, we never would have been culled in the first place. The clown king—Satan, if you prefer—would have located another doomed ship and extracted its crew in our stead. Food would still have been plentiful on Furnace and we would be safely on our way to Marvek so Gallagher could take care of her political business. Chara would still be alive. Sillinger, too. Flaherty, Salib, Aziza, Katrina, and countless others. I have all of them on my conscience, and much more. Fuck-ups like this one are different than mistakes made in the heat of battle, or even taking the life of another creature that’s trying to kill you in open warfare. They stick with you. They keep you up at night because they could have been avoided so easily. The ‘ifs’.

  If I’d stuck to the flight plan. If I’d never slept with my ex on Europa Station. If I’d let Teemo shoot the flare as soon as we’d found Tscharia.

  If any of that had happened, things would be different, and that kills me. We wound up in Hell because of me. It doesn’t get much more spectacularly traumatizing than that.

  No matter how eagerly people on Earth attempt to exonerate me, or tell me there was no way I could have anticipated our abduction simply because we’d re-routed, it doesn’t make a difference. In fact, it makes things worse. Especially when someone suggests there’s no way to know what could have happened if I hadn’t altered course. We could have been hijacked by pirates. Blown to pieces by a Kalak cruiser. Abducted and sold as zoo animals or slaves to any number of planets. We could have botched the landing on the colony and everyone would have died, destroying the Hummel in the process. But that’s all bullshit to me. At least in those situations, the pain would have been over in the blink of an eye for those we lost. On Furnace, their spirits are eternal, as are the twisted souls of their tormentors. It wouldn’t be just a flash of suffering, then, or even a lifetime of it. A thousand lifetimes. A million.

  “Why did you want me to see this?” I asked the humming drone of the spaceship. I wondered briefly how long it had been buried there, and how long it had been since the clown king visited our solar system. How else would his legend have reached the green hills of Earth?

  Of course, there was no answer. Or if there was, it was hidden in the decoding of the panels along the maintenance shaft, and I didn’t have time to follow them down to the cathedral and back again. I didn’t even have time to ask rhetorical questions of the ghost ship. I had to keep moving, even faster now that I knew the clown king’s true identity. I guess I’d suspected it all along, but in a tongue-in-cheek way which fell well short of belief until the evidence was right in front of me.

  Stepping carefully around the pedestal, I limped deeper into the ship without looking back. There was enough light to see ahead for a while, although the red lights disappeared the moment I crossed to the other side of the pentagram (and who knew the significance of that little artifact; could it have been the coat of arms for the clown king’s people back before they’d been exiled? A symbol of their planet?).

  I walked for a while in a half-dead stupor, favoring my right side where my ribs were exposed to the stale air, stumbling drunkenly over drainage grates and exposed wiring from the long, steel tubes overhead.

  It’s too late, I thought to myself over and over again. It became my mantra as I pushed away from the satanic cathedral. My prayer. It’s too late. Everyone on the Hummel is either dead or dying. We’re all damned.

  But I couldn’t shake the core question underlying the revelations of the ancient ship, which seemed to be of tremendously greater import than the hopelessness of my situation. Namely, if Hell exists and Satan is a twisted alien banished from creation, does that mean God exists, as well? And if there is an all-powerful entity capable of exiling an entire culture from the known universe as punishment, who should I fear most? The degenerates of the system, or the system itself? When I direct prayers skyward in my hours of most desperate need, whether in a foxhole somewhere or when dealing with private tragedies in my humble apartment back in Detroit, who is listening? Will an omnipotent being concern itself with my best interests? I suspect not. I suspect it has its own ag
enda which extends eons beyond the pathetic reach of my lifespan.

  It’s a disturbing line of thought to say the least, and I’m still not sure I’ve arrived at satisfactory answers.

  After a while, the shaft turned pitch-black again, but I kept walking. I didn’t know what else to do. Ten minutes later, I emerged on the bottom deck of the Rockne Hummel, and my heart nearly broke from shock and exhaustion. My mind had already been shattered.

  HUMMEL

  The horrors didn’t end there, of course. I was still on Furnace, and as far as I knew, the ship was still incapacitated, possibly even overrun by the monsters who swore allegiance to the clown king of Tscharia.

  All I wanted to do was stay exactly where I was and allow sleep to serve up pleasant dreams of another world. I needed water first, though, or the sleep that took me would be death. I was hungry enough to eat conduit shells, too. But I’d been trained well enough to know water was my most pressing need. If I got water from the mess hall there’d be food nearby anyway, unless they’d started locking down resources for rationing since I’d left. It was possible, but I thought it more likely that Gibbons would have devoted all hands to ship repairs. He had to know any food and water that remained on the ship would run out if we didn’t leave the planet as soon as possible. We needed to find another rock with more abundant resources right away to have any chance at surviving an FTL jump toward home.

  Gallagher might have protested (Crown politicians are always looking for pseudo-democratic solutions to these sorts of problems without any concept of the big picture or the stark realities of survival) but, ultimately, she would have been overruled. Captain Gibbons always toed the line in terms of following orders from Crown Representatives, but he was also a realist with the unwavering loyalty of his crew…even when some of us weren’t sure he was doing the right thing.