Fabrick

by Andrew Post

  Clyde remained in front of the facility on the damp sidewalk, looking for Flam. He looked up and down the street, as far as the bend in the road would allow. In the morning gloom, he could make out the shadowy shape of the geyser standing tall over the entire city. It blinked its arrangement of lights, then darkened—as if acknowledging Clyde: Yes, here I am.

  He returned inside. Just as he passed through the nurses’ center, he saw the broad-shouldered silhouette in the corridor. “Flam!”

  “Yeah, what do you want?”

  “Something wrong?”

  “No morning light. Went up to the roof to see if there might be any way to get a glimmer of it, but no dice. Guess you’ll have to pardon me, but I’m afraid you’ll be dealing with a rather unpleasant Mouflon the remainder of the day.”

  Clyde chuckled. “That’s quite all right.” He felt a touch bad for even considering the notion that Flam would abandon him.

  “Where were you, by the way?” Flam said. “I woke up, and you were gone.”

  “I decided to take a look outside as well.”

  “Sad as the foamy bottom of a beer glass out there, isn’t it?” Flam sighed. “Where’d the mice get off to?”

  “Some of them are still here.” Clyde indicated the occasional white streak that slipped along the walls, easy to miss when expecting to see Rohm in his compiled shape. “And some went back to Mr. Wilkshire’s home to gather evidence.”

  “Reckon they’ll be gone awhile?”

  The frisk mice interjected, “Our other half will try to make our investigation as expedient as possible.” They were harder to hear when not speaking with so many voices.

  “All right,” Flam said, looking around as if he weren’t sure which mouse in particular to answer. “Well, either way, it seems we’ve got some time to kill if we want to stick together.” He jutted a thumb over his massive shoulder. “Why don’t we go back up, Pasty? We’ll tackle this elevator power supply problem straightaway once we get some suns on our faces and the other mice things return.”

  Clyde agreed it would be a good idea, especially if Flam would be dour the whole day if he didn’t get the suns he needed—but that last part he kept to himself.

  High atop the hospital facility, crunching through the gravel on the roof, Clyde carefully sidled the edge and saw beyond the limits of the Geyser platter to the second, genuine horizon. It took a considerable amount of time to get any thought to pass through his head. There it was: the planet stretching in all directions. The island that the spire city was based upon, the ocean beyond Geyser’s lakes. The clouds were thick and dark, the mountain ranges hazy and seemingly a lifetime away.

  Flam walked to the rim of the roof and gripped the legs of a communication tower to lean out safely. Seeing Clyde gawking, he couldn’t resist a smile. “Quite a sight from up here, isn’t it?”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Hmm. I suppose it is.” Flam turned to look in the same rough direction Clyde was peering. Clyde was seeing Gleese for the first time from a bird’s-eye view, whereas Flam had first come to the planet after a ten-day interplanetary trip riding coach with a bunch of folks who’d apparently had a falling-out with soap. He was so used to dealing with it—Gleese and all its stunted highs and plunging lows from the ground level, out in the wastes and deserts and jungles, where it seemed everything that sucked breath aimed to kill every other thing. But up here, none of that desperation and violence could be seen. It seemed pure, as if the planet were a quiet place where not a single bad thing ever happened.

  The breathtaking sight of Gleese was deceitful. Bad things did happen. Frequently. But it was appropriate, Flam supposed, for someone so new to things to see the good before the bad and not the other way around. Perhaps.

  Clyde would have to see the bad eventually.

  Flam kept his back to the alabaster-skinned man, just a touch of suns warming his face. “What do you aim to do when you find the person responsible?”

  Clyde carefully moved closer to the edge of the facility to stand next to Flam. He adjusted the collar of his coat to shield his neck from the cold wind. “I’m not sure.”

  “You do have Mr. Wilkshire’s citizen dagger. I suppose that could be a suitable way to dispense justice. Poetic.”

  “I wouldn’t want to tarnish his memory with that. I suppose I’ll think of something when the time comes.”

  Flam leaned against the metal legs of the tower and slid down to sit. He reached up and plucked one of the looser quills from the back of his head, brought it to his lips, and pricked his tongue to get a dab of black blood upon its point. He took a couple of sheets of parchment from his satchel and poised the quill to write. “I don’t suppose you know much in the way of fighting, do you?”

  Clyde took hold of a strut of the tower when another blast of wind struck his back. “No, I don’t.”

  Flam wrote in the Mouflon language, with its columns of tight symbols and shapes, and sometimes—if you were a fancy bloke and took that lesson in school—certain three-dimensional shapes that could communicate entire paragraphs of information with a singular expert jot.

  “To my uncle,” Flam said in response to Clyde’s quizzical look. “Of course, the post doesn’t run in this city, so I have quite the backlog of correspondence. But it’s sort of a tradition among Mouflons. Morning suns on our faces make us grateful for a new day while also making us nostalgic. We’re supposed to reflect on those in our lives we hold dear and remind them of the impact they’ve made in our lives. I write to him every morning I can.” He released a frustrated sigh. “Of course, he hasn’t gotten a single one of my letters. When I get to a postbox, I’ll probably just drop them in, knowing they won’t actually go anywhere, the old codger being dead and all . . .”

  Flam felt a hand pat his back, nearly so softly it may’ve never happened at all.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Clyde said. “Do you have any other relatives?”

  He grinned. “A brother.”

  “Did he live here in Geyser?”

  “He repairs autos on another world. A few planets over, on a mountainous rock called Aura. The terrain is difficult, and my brother had the stroke of genius to set up shop there. He’s the only mechanic on the entire planet and can charge as much as he likes. They’ll either pay or travel by foot, which is inadvisable: lots of acid stone.”

  Clyde nodded. “Do you think you can train me?”

  “Afraid not. Fixing autos isn’t exactly my area of expertise.”

  “I mean to fight.”

  Flam lowered his quill. “I knew what you meant.” He looked at Clyde, whose eyes were just above his own eye level even though Flam was sitting down. “You’re pretty serious about this, aren’t you?”

  “I am. My master deserves to be avenged.”

  “It surprises me, Pasty.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You refer to this fellow of yours as your master. You’re no longer in his service, but you feel the need to seek out his killers as if he were your kin. I mean, I gave my word; I intend to go with you as far as it takes to get you to a pilot—which, if you remember correctly, is the end of our agreement—but shouldn’t you be happy to no longer be in servitude?”

  Clyde looked toward the town square to the stony spire. Steam puffed out of the geyser’s summit, followed by a creak of the turbines deep beneath the streets.

  “He was better than all the masters I served before. The others took out their frustrations for their own wrongdoings on me. Not just by confessing but . . . venting in all manner of ways. Mr. Wilkshire was patient. He knew his offenses were the fault of no one but himself.”

  “And you honor him simply because he didn’t beat you? You should honor me, then; I never laid a hand on you. And Rohm, with all those tiny hands; not one of them ever put a blow to you. Shouldn’t you worship the ground all their tiny feet have traversed as well?”

  “Mr. Wilkshire was my friend,” Clyde said firmly. “I suppose calling him
master isn’t right, but that’s what the others demanded I call them. I called him master only a few times. He always corrected me, asked me to call him sir instead. He was a great man, very intelligent and kind. I don’t understand why anyone would want to do him harm. ”

  “He was loaded,” Flam said bluntly, finishing the parchment page and then flipping it over, pricking his tongue again and beginning on the reverse side. “I imagine he got that way by having hardworking employees. And it doesn’t matter how well you pay a bloke, there will always be someone who thinks it insufficient.”

  “Mr. Wilkshire was good to his employees most of the time.”

  “Ah, you see? You admit it. ‘Most of the time.’ There must’ve been a select few he wasn’t good to. Seems to me whoever killed him lived here in Geyser and got rounded up with the other citizens and carted off to the refugee camp. Maybe you should start there.”

  “I believe the Odium did it, if they are as dastardly as you make them out to be.”

  “Dastardly.” Flam laughed. “Yes, well, they are a cruel lot, but don’t jump to conclusions, even if the Odium do indeed deserve your hatred.”

  “Well, half of Rohm’s numbers are going to the chateau. We’ll see what they uncover.”

  “They’re probably going through the pantries, finishing off what I left behind.”

  Clyde’s face was marked with frustration.

  “I apologize, Pasty. That was wrong of me to say. I’m sure Rohm is doing a bang-up job looking for evidence.” He looked at the parchment, both sides of the page filled. “There.” He folded the letter three times and tucked it into the satchel. With some difficulty, he got to his feet.

  “So, what will it take?”

  “For?”

  “For you to teach me to fight.”

  Flam dusted himself off, swatting down his legs and the backs of his arms, three smacks each. It was something he did often, though most of the grime would never come off. “I won’t teach you anything right now, but I will impart to you this little nugget of information. Before you plan an attack, it’s good to know whom you’re up against. This is chief among your arsenal. And never underestimate them—any of them. When we find out who is responsible, if it is the Odium or one of Mr. Wilkshire’s employees, we’ll discuss lessons.”

  “Why not now, while we’re waiting?”

  “Because I need to know which lessons you need to fit the situation.”

  Clyde was clearly perplexed.

  “Imagine we only have time for dagger lessons. Fat lot of good that’d do against the Odium. Sods who like guns as much as an arse likes pants, I might add, were the ones that got to your master or friend or sir or whatever you want to call him.”

  “I called him sir because that’s what he asked—”

  “Just listen, Pasty, okay? So here’s lesson one. Know what you’re up against, and use this”—he touched Clyde’s forehead—“what good Meech gave ya, and not just this”—then his chest—“because this isn’t where your smarts are. If anything, it’s where your anti-smarts are. Know whom you’re up against, use what Meech gave ya—and, well, yeah. That’s it.”

  “Sage advice.”

  “Go ahead. Joke. But you’ll thank me later.” Flam pulled open the door. “I may not be pretty, but I know some shite.”

  Chapter 12

  Someone He Thought He Knew

  The frisk mice raced to the elevator, where Flam was using the blunderbuss again to open the doors. The mice, standing in an accumulated figure the height of a small child—since the other half of their numbers hadn’t yet returned—quavered with excitement.

  Before Clyde could ask what was wrong, the mice burst in unison, “Mr. Clyde, we’ve discovered something quite troubling at the chateau.”

  Flam steered his attention from the elevator doors, his ears upraised.

  Clyde took to one knee before Rohm’s short stature. “What is it?”

  “Some of us have discovered a journal of sorts within your master’s study. We’re reading the pages now. I will narrate what their eyes see.” The mice cleared their throats in unison. “‘I, Mr. Albert Wilkshire of Geyser, hereby record the transgressions of my life for those in my family who will know after my death that I was not the honorable man I tried so very hard to appear to be. I have done terrible things to many, many good people.

  “‘As you know, I was a mine owner. I owned several branches of the Kobbal Mines beneath Geyser, and despite being informed of a possible Blatta infestation, I sent my men in. My avarice was great, I will admit. Many of them were killed. Being a man who only thought of the bottom line at those times, I took this news as strictly a loss of employee numbers that I would have to struggle to refill. I apologize to the families of those men for this sort of thinking; I should’ve done more to see to it that they were taken care of, that their losses of loved ones were made easier. I did nothing to serve them except refute my knowledge of the presence of Blatta in my mines. For that, I am sorry. I have received a great many threats upon my life for this.

  “‘The Odium is rumored to be returning to Geyser for another attack soon, and I wish to get this admission off my chest. My dear Clyde. I tell him all my secrets, but this one I fear is much too great to tell him. The repercussions of having him ease a troubled mind with his generally innocuous hexing this time would probably do me in for good. And to him, I apologize as well. He thinks me to be a good man, and I’m afraid he is wrong.

  “‘Nonetheless, with Geyser rapidly falling apart and many of my employees joining the Odium in this kill-or-be-killed world, I fear when they return, they’ll have me in their crosshairs. If they do kill me, if they do end my life, I will not fight it. They deserve reprisal for what I put them through.

  “‘For all who read this, know I am deeply sorry. I have never been so sorry for anything in my life.

  “‘Sincerely, Albert Wilkshire.’”

  Rohm’s voice returned to its usual, bounding cadence. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Clyde.”

  Clyde could summon no words. His mind raced. He opened his mouth, then closed it. No, there was nothing to say. Nothing.

  He stood, spun away from Rohm and Flam, and trudged toward the front of the hospital.

  Rohm was about to follow, but Flam stopped them.

  Clyde heard the Mouflon’s throaty voice far behind. “Let him go. He needs time to stew with that for a while.”

  “Should we call back the others? Or do you suppose there is further investigation to be made at the chateau?”

  “Call them back. There’s nothing else to be learned there, I believe.”

  Clyde went behind the nurses’ station kiosk and collapsed into a seat.

  Outside the glass doors, the big rain droplets collided with collected puddles, a small trickle forming in the gutters, rushing in brown torrents where they terminated, vanishing through storm drains.

  Clyde thought about the innocent lives his master had allowed to be sacrificed. Clyde had not one but two partners in this journey whose time he was wasting. His master wasn’t worth it. He was a greedy man who had countless innocents killed in exchange for a precious metal or whatever was to be found within those mines. No matter what it was, Clyde decided, it wasn’t worth people dying over.

  If his master’s ex-employees joined the Odium, returned, and killed Mr. Wilkshire, they had earned that right. He pictured a widow of one of the miners being the one to pull the trigger on the old man. Regardless, all had been tidied up and scores settled. Clyde’s going after the people responsible wouldn’t be justice; it would be self-centered retaliation.

  When it began to rain again, he returned inside the hospital. He lingered in the lobby, far from where the others were scrounging for supplies in the various closets and exam rooms. He thought about standing out in the rain, because it’d match the dourness that had flopped itself atop him, but he didn’t want to risk getting sick. The old man, he now regrettably knew, wasn’t worth that.

  Clyde wished Mr. Wi
lkshire had tried to ease his mind of the burden of guilt to him, just so Clyde could know what sort of man employed him. It made his stomach turn. He pounded his fist on the receptionist’s counter and cursed.

  As if in reply, the patient registry processor flashed on, the diagram of the hospital displayed in a three-dimensional framework representation of all the floors and sublevels. One of the rooms below ground level was marked in a deep red, but then the screen died.

  Clyde sat and waited for the surge to pass again, but it didn’t come for a full ten minutes. Regardless, he waited. He wanted something to busy his mind so he wouldn’t be giving Mr. Wilkshire any more thought than he deserved.

  The screen sprang to life. Quickly Clyde zeroed in on the flashing red room within the diagram. He read the label: Patient Eleven. Next to the name a heart rate display blinked in a somber pattern.

  The screen winked out. He was about to call out to Rohm and Flam when half of Rohm came in through the crack in the front doors. They moved along, all working together under the gilt-edged journal of Mr. Wilkshire. Clyde had hoped they wouldn’t bring it to him, but there he saw it scooting across the hospital lobby floor as if on its own.

  The frisk mice climbed the side of the nurses’ station counter and set the volume before Clyde. “We understand you had a strong attachment to Mr. Wilkshire and that humans are prone to keeping mementos of their fallen. Do not despair, Mr. Clyde. We are all fallible and imperfect. Remember Mr. Wilkshire as the man you knew him to be.”

  “Thank you, Rohm.” Clyde held the small book.

  Rohm moved down the desk. “We are glad to have been of help.”

  Clyde saw the owner’s name embossed on the journal’s aged leather cover, and it suddenly felt heavier. He tucked it into the interior pocket of his tuxedo coat and got up to follow Rohm.

  The pack of rodents convened with its other members at the far end of the corridor. The tiny mice hugged one another and gathered into a standing adult human form again.