Lightspeed: Year One
Page 31
Pelops uses a local anesthetic now instead of sedative. Hoffman may have to be awake during his amputations, but he won’t feel a thing. His eyes grow large as golf balls as he watches Pelops remove his left arm, then later his right. He finally stops trying to scream. Spends most of his time unconscious now. Sometimes he wakes and mutters nonsense, so Pelops sits in a chair next to him, his belly full, and listens.
He reminds Hoffman that this sacrifice makes him a hero. One of the Saviors of Dantus colony.
When he harvests the torso this time he learns to salvage the intestines, filling them with minced organ meat. He discovers how to make a week’s worth of sausages in this way before Hoffman’s heart finally gives out.
He decides to keep the white bones instead of flushing them into the void.
He’ll bury them on Dantus, beneath a growing field of wheat. With stone monuments.
He comes to this decision over dinner.
The next pod contains a gorgeous blonde woman. Mewes, C.
After he gets her onto the table, he wakes her and talks at length about their situation. Lets her know the heroic role she will be playing in the mission. She weeps, begs, pleads with him. He sobs with her, sharing in the tragedy of the situation. He unbuckles her restraints and embraces her tenderly.
“Don’t worry,” he whispers in her ear, arms wrapped around her. “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay.”
He chases her down when she slips away from him, but manages to corner her in the cargo bay and knocks her senseless with a crowbar.
I could let her join me, he thinks. It wouldn’t be so lonely then. Maybe there’s enough meat in the pods for both of us . . .
He smacks himself across the face. Stupid! He knows two people surviving the rest of this journey is impossible. There’s simply not enough food. Both would starve and Dantus would die.
So it’s back to the table where the harvesting begins. Still a good supply of sedative, so she won’t feel any pain.
Somehow, she wakes in the middle of things and starts wailing. The sound pierces his ears in a way that Hoffman’s guttural bellows never could. He has to gag her so he can finish.
Later, enjoying the last of her, he smacks his lips and remembers the lovely blue of her eyes. So delectable on his tongue, like tender Swedish meatballs.
The void persists, and so does his hunger. It returns like clockwork every 48 hours.
He doesn’t bother looking at the name of his next harvest. He cuts out the tongue first to avoid any more conversation.
A few days later he goes to the table-bound crewman, removes the gag and offers him a taste of his own thigh meat. The man eats ravenously, saving his questions until his own hunger is sated. Then he stares at Pelops and tries to form words. The stub of his tongue rattles around inside his mouth. His mute eyes plead desperately. They remind Pelops of the blonde’s blue eyes.
He eats them next.
The human body is indeed an amazing thing.
So many different flavors.
Five and a half months left, five CryoPods unopened.
With proper rationing, he will make it. However, the anesthetic is nearly gone.
This complicates things, but is in no way a barrier to success.
The mission is all that matters.
He has it down to a science now: Open the pod. Tie the sleeper’s hands and feet with copper wire before they come fully awake. Drag them to in the infirmary, strap them to the table. Remove the tongue, put the gag in place. Ignore the screams. Ignore the blood. Slice. Tourniquet. Ignore the squirming, the moans of pain. The tears, the squealing.
Forty-eight hours later. Slice. Tourniquet. It’s no longer a person, despite all the writhing and moaning and muffled screams. It’s only meat.
Forty-eight hours after that. Slice. Tourniquet. They’re usually too weak to scream much more after this.
Some are lucky enough to sleep through the whole process from this point on.
Three more crew members and thirteen weeks later. Only two months away from Dantus.
His next meal is the last female. But this fact barely registers; Pelops no longer sees them as women or men.
They’re only meat.
All of us . . . charting the course of history . . . only meat.
Yet this one is something special. When he slices into her abdomen he finds her secret. The command board would have grounded her had they known. Or maybe she didn’t know. Two months along before Cryo, he estimates. Her eyes are glazed by the time he discovers the prize inside her. Strapped, gagged, limbless, and unblinking, she stares at the antiseptic ceiling as he vivisects her. And there it is . . .
A tiny thing . . . only eighteen centimeters. Barely recognizable as human. More like something amphibian . . . a vestige of our marine origins.
Miniscule arms more like fins, or flippers. The stubs of barely formed legs. Round head no larger than an orange.
So we begin . . . the seed from which all of us grow.
Expanding and developing meat on a rack of expanding and hardening bone.
He carries it to the bridge, shows it to the stars. He imagines the universe itself as one big womb . . . an inescapable uterus containing planets, stars, and galaxies.
In the end, it’s little more than a snack.
Sweet, a bit crunchy. A fresh flavor.
Bit of a fishy aftertaste.
Its mother lasts another eight days.
In these months he’s decided to put all those bones to good use. At first he carves them into tiny figurines: goblins, serpents, scorpions, or wholly new creatures birthed in his imagination. Then he decides on a project. A sculpture. He drags all the bones and skulls onto the bridge and works nonstop in the pale starlight, baring his creative spirit to the naked universe.
Directly ahead, a red star shines. Wolf 359. His destination, the color of spilled blood gleaming brightly in a mantle of eternal night.
A new god observes and blesses the success of the mission. Its lofty head is a ring of ten bleached skulls gazing in every direction. Its body is a tangled conglomeration of leg bones, arm bones, and rib cages. It wears a necklace of finger and toe bones. With screws and caulk and ductile adhesive he has brought it to life.
He sits before it in the captain’s chair, discussing with it the secrets of the universe, watching the void outside and the red star that is their final destination.
His creation tells him things, terrible things that he has long suspected, now confirmed in the glaring honesty of cold starlight. He eats his meals before it, calling upon it to bless the meat.
He tears into his latest chop, red and quivering.
Fresh and raw, that is the only way to eat meat.
His new god approves.
With two months to go and two CryoPods left, Pelops gets careless.
The man inside (Harmon, Sgt. G.) revives while he’s being tied, his frosty eyelids flickering open. Some fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in and he knocks Pelops from the opened pod, spilling out on top of him.
“Wha . . . ” he stammers. “Whaaaaa . . . ”
Pelops tries to club him on the head with a wrench but Sgt. Harmon is already too fast. He rolls away and pulls his hands free of the wire. He kicks Pelops in the side of the head. Stars swim crazily in Pelops’ eyes.
Pelops regains his senses to find Harmon holding him against the wall, pressing the tip of a screwdriver against his neck. The sergeant is still cold and reeks of cryonic fluid. He breathes hotly in Pelops’ face, the crystals on his beard beginning to melt.
“Who are you?” he asks. “And what the hell are you doing?”
He shoves the screwdriver painfully into Pelops’ skin, drawing a trickle of blood.
“I’m Dr. Pelops,” he says. “I had to . . . awaken you prematurely.”
Harmon looks around the corridor. Sees the empty pods. All but one now missing its inhabitant.
“Where are they?” His teeth are gritted as his black eyes bore into Pelops’. “Tell me
!”
“Dead . . . ” Pelops admits. “There was a comet, or a meteor . . . some kind of radiation cloud . . . took out the auto-drive and the pods. I was lucky.”
Harmon blinks, thinking. Considering. He knows I’m not telling him everything. His eyes fall upon the last functioning CryoPod.
“Why didn’t you wake Captain Tyler?”
“I . . . I was going to,” says Pelops.
Harmon grabs Pelops’ throat in an iron grip. “Then why tie me up? Huh?”
Pelops says nothing. Gasps for air.
“You look like hell,” says Harmon, examining him. Hair and beard a matted rat’s nest. Face sunken, skin sallow. Nails long as claws.
Can he smell the dead on my breath?
“How long?” asks Harmon. Rams his knee into Pelops’ groin. Pelops falls to the cold floor. Harmon bends and holds the screwdriver’s tip to his eye. “How long?” he shouts.
“F-f-fourteen months!” cries Pelops.
Shock spills across Harmon’s shaggy face. “Fourteen . . . ” He looks again at the empty rows of CryoPods, stares down the corridor in either direction. Sniffs the air like a suspicious hound. “Fourteen months . . . how did you survive?”
Pelops clutches his throbbing groin and says nothing.
Harmon kicks him in the stomach.
“How? Tell me! Say it!”
Pelops tells him. Doesn’t look at his face. Hears him start to wretch.
“All that matters is the success of this mission . . . ” Pelops growls. “And I’m the only one who can get those converters up and running.”
Harmon is strangely quiet.
“We’ve got two more months,” says Pelops.
Harmon’s boot comes down hard on his face.
Darkness.
“He’s a sick fuck!”
Pelops regains consciousness, wrapped in a web of pain. No, it’s the copper wire. He’s propped upright inside one of the defunct pods. In the corridor Harmon stands arguing with another man. The inhabitant of the last pod, the ship’s captain (Tyler, Capt. H.). A sinking feeling as he realizes that Harmon has revived Tyler far too early. He tries to move his arms and legs, but he’s securely bound. He listens to their conversation, watching them in the corner of his eye.
“I know how you feel, soldier,” says Captain Tyler, still wiping frost from his flight suit, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck. “But Pelops is the only one who knows how to set up those UV converter domes and get them operational. We can’t just execute him.”
“Execute? Who said anything about an execution? You don’t execute a mad dog, captain. You put it down. And that’s what we have here. He fuckin’ ate them! Didn’t you hear me?”
“I heard you, son.” A weary sigh.
“Come on,” says Harmon. “Let me show you the nice little present he built for us on the bridge. Once you see that I’m sure you’ll agree to shoving him out the airlock at the least.”
The sound of their boots tramping down the corridor.
Pelops waits.
Prays.
Mutters poems to his bone god.
Eventually the voices return, growing in volume, punctuated by the sounds of boots on metal.
“ . . . even if we do this, we’re still going to starve. There’s no food left on board and we can’t enter Cryo again. This is the end of the line for us.”
“Then it doesn’t matter, does it? Let me kill him. One last good thing before we die. Then we’ll set the auto-destruct . . . go out in a blaze of glory. Better than starving to death.”
Captain Tyler has no response to that.
The two men stand before the open CryoPod now, looking at Pelops.
“Captain . . . ” Pelops says, “you know as well as I do—”
“Shut up, freak!” Sgt. Harmon’s fist slams into his gut. The air rushes from his lungs, along with the words he failed to utter.
Harmon lifts a service pistol to Pelops’ chin, the barrel digging into his jawbone.
“All of us may have to die,” Harmon tells him, “but you’re going first you cannibal fu—”
Thud.
A flash of silver above his head, a meaty sound, and Harmon goes down. Captain Tyler stands over him with the wrench in his hand. Its round end drips dark blood like syrup, and a clot of hair and skin hangs there.
Tyler drops the wrench and peels the coils of wire away from Pelops’ wrists and ankles.
The captain is silent for awhile as Pelops rubs his limbs to get the circulation flowing again. Tyler stares at his fallen officer, leans against the wall. Tired. Ready to accept his fate.
“You did the right thing doctor,” says Tyler. His sunken eyes turn toward Pelops. They are as black and glittering as the void. “The famine on Dantus could kill tens of thousands. This mission has to succeed.”
Pelops nods. His stomach growls. He is ravenous.
“Can you still make it work?” asks Tyler.
Pelops stares down at the unconscious soldier. Makes a few mental calculations. Rubs his sore temple.
“Yes,” he says. “With your help, the mission will still succeed.”
Tyler helps Pelops carry Harmon into the infirmary.
Pelops carefully rations out pieces of Harmon over the next few weeks. Tyler holds out for sixteen days but eventually joins him for a slight meal. Pelops insists.
“It’s imperative to this mission that you stay alive captain,” he says. “Just a little while longer.”
Tyler won’t go near the infirmary. The blow to Harmon’s head inflicted some kind of brain damage, so he remains comatose as he’s carved to bits day after day. Just as well. No screams to deal with, but still Tyler takes it hard. He sits on the bridge in his chair most days . . . staring at the red star growing ever brighter directly ahead.
Pelops thought the captain would dismantle the bone god . . . but Tyler doesn’t seem to mind it. Or perhaps he’s frightened of it. Too frightened of its power to risk desecrating it. He must know that it, not him, now rules the Goya.
Harmon would have lasted longer if Pelops did not share him with Tyler. However, Tyler ate so very little . . . only enough to keep himself alive for another month. Finally, when the last of Harmon has been consumed and his bones have been added to the god’s intricate frame, Tyler comes to Pelops. A broken man, emaciated, begging to be put out of his misery.
“It’s all my fault,” Tyler tells him, weeping. Pelops listens. “It was my responsibility to make sure we had extra emergency kits. I didn’t do it.”
Pelops leads him into the infirmary.
Tyler babbles, weeping. “Trying to maximize profits . . . cut corners . . . it should have been a simple trip. I did it to save money, Pelops. I killed us all for money . . . ”
“Not all of us, Captain,” says Pelops.
Tyler nods, wipes his swollen eyes. He must be thinking of those starving families on Dantus now.
“I am sorry there is no more anesthetic for this Captain.”
“Just do it,” says Tyler. He unholsters his pistol, lays it on a nearby counter. “Get it over with. Kill me. For Dantus . . . for all those children. Kill me now . . . ”
“If you wouldn’t mind lying on the table first,” says Pelops. Tyler complies.
Pelops straps him down securely and prepares the laser scalpel.
“What are you doing?” asks Tyler. “One shot between the eyes will do it. Make it quick, Pelops.”
Pelops hesitates.
It seems the captain has misunderstood his role here.
“We’ve still got over a month of travel time, sir . . . ” Pelops explains. “If I kill you now, I’m afraid you’ll spoil before we reach Dantus.”
Tyler’s shock registers as a moment of silence. “No,” he says, shaking his head. “No, you can eat for two or three weeks, and the last few days you can go without. You’ll be fine . . . as soon as you touch down you’ll have food on Dantus. You don’t need me to last that long, Pelops!”
“I’m sorr
y, Captain,” says Pelops. “But I don’t like to go hungry.”
He ignores the captain’s screaming and writhing as he puts the gag on him. Same old reaction. Pulling against the restraints, wearing the throat raw with grunts and smothered screams.
“It’s for the mission,” Pelops reminds him.
He starts with the legs, as usual.
Tyler, once a strong and vital man, lasts nearly three weeks on the table.
In the end, with the last few scraps of Tyler gone, Pelops still has six days left to starve.
The red star swells brighter than ever among the starfields in the viewport.
Pelops sits in the captain’s chair and stares into the shimmering void.
Everything from plants to mammals is fueled by the light of stars. Sunlight fuels photosynthesis, which feeds the plants that in turn feed the animals we eat on earth. Photons and atoms being constantly recycled and reinvented, a molecular dance of destruction and creation that never ends. Everything consumes and is consumed.
We are all made of starlight.
Brilliant starlight, pulsing bright as blood inside us.
It’s all energy . . . and energy is neither created nor destroyed.
His stomach growls.
In the glow of a red sun, the Goya touches down atop a broad plateau littered with wrecked vehicles and rusting machines. Pelops stumbles from the open hatch into the ruddy glow. He walks with a single crutch made of bones. His right leg is missing below the knee, a fresh tourniquet wrapped tight about the stump.
He held out for two difficult days before the hunger won its final victory.
Still, he has made it to this place. A nice prosthetic limb waits in his future.
He blinks in the harsh glow of infrared daylight and stares across the plateau at the colonial city.
He stumbles through the wreckage toward the dilapidated walls. The wind hurls black sand against him, raking like claws across his flight suit and his exposed cheeks, coating his beard with dirt.
Where is everyone?
There should be a welcoming party to greet him. They’ve waited seven years.