Every passenger had left the confines of the worm. Most of the caretakers were busy breaking into a nearby warehouse, presumably under orders to claim any useful supplies. “How far away is that?” a young fellow asked. Jopale couldn’t gauge distances, but others gladly threw out numbers. Optimists claimed the fire was just a few kilometers behind them, and it was really quite small. While Rit admitted that the flames were enormous, but trying to be positive, he thought they might be as far away as World’s Edge.
“Oh, it’s closer than that,” the old caretaker called out. “As we stand here, Left-of-Left is being incinerated.”
With a haughty tone, Rit asked, “And you know that how?”
Swollen eyes studied the horizon. Master Brace had been crying again. But he had dried his face before joining the others, and he managed to keep his voice steady and clear. “I was listening to broadcasts, where I could find them. From spotters near the fire lines, mostly.”
Every face was sorry and scared.
“That quake we felt? As we were crawling out of World’s Edge?” Brace shook his head, telling them, “That was an old seam south and east of the city. It split wide, along a hundred kilometer line. I didn’t know this till now … but so much gas came from that rupture, emergency crews didn’t have time to dress. They were killed, mostly. And the methane kept bubbling out. For a full cycle, it was mixing with the air. Then something … a person, or maybe lightning from a thunderstorm … made the spark that set the whole damn mess on fire.”
“What happened to the city?” Jopale asked.
Brace glanced at him for a moment, then stared at the planks. “I talked to a spotter. She’s riding her balloon east of World’s Edge. The city’s gone now, she says. Including the ground it was sitting on. From where she is, she sees open water where millions of people should be…”
“Open water?” Rit asked. “Does that mean the fire is going out?”
Brace hesitated.
Do-ane said, “No.” The woman looked tiny and exceptionally young, her boots back on her feet but still needing to be buttoned. Clearing her throat, she explained, “If too much methane saturates the atmosphere, and the local oxygen is exhausted or pushed aside … there can’t be any fire…”
Jopale closed his eyes, seeing the beautiful station and the black-haired woman with that lovely, lost voice.
Brace nodded, saying, “There’s two fire lines now. One’s racing east, the other west. In the middle, the water’s bubbling up so hard, huge chunks of rotten wood are being flung up in the air. So the methane … it’s still coming, yes sir. And the spotter told me that our fire … the one that’s chasing us … it just now reached to the fringes of the Tanglelands … and then I lost her signal…”
Some people wept; others appeared too numb or tired to react at all.
Two drivers were standing near the worm’s head. One of them suddenly called out a few words, her voice barely legible.
The other caretakers had vanished inside an unlit warehouse.
Master Brace turned to the drivers. “The full dose, yes,” he shouted. “Under the vestigial arm.”
“But the flames don’t look that tall,” said the wealthy woman. She shook her head, refusing to accept their awful prospects. To her companion, she said, “Perhaps the fire’s just burning off the forests.”
Her young man muttered a few agreeable words.
But Do-ane said, “No, you’re confused. It’s the smoke that fools you.”
“Pardon me, miss?”
“That land is definitely burning,” she said. “Huge volumes of green wood are being turned to smoke and ash, which help hide the tops of the flames. And of course that scorching heat will lift everything.” She pointed at the sky, asking, “Can you see what I see?”
Jopale hadn’t noticed. But the eastern half of the sky had no stars, a dense black lid set over the dying world. Flood this landscape with daylight, and half of the heavens would be choked beneath a foul mass of boiling, poisonous clouds.
“Are you certain?” the old woman asked doubtfully. “What do you know about any of this?”
Do-ane hesitated.
“The girl’s a scientist,” Rit interjected. “She understands everything that’s happening to us.”
“Is that so, miss?”
Do-ane glanced at Jopale, eyes narrowed, as if blaming him for making public what she had told him in the strictest confidence.
But he hadn’t said one word.
“She and her friend here thought that I was napping,” Rit confessed. “But I wasn’t. I heard every word they said.”
Do-ane looked embarrassed, shrinking a little bit, and her tiny hands nervously wrestled with one another.
Jopale tried to find a reply—gentle words to help deflate the palpable tension. But then a hard prolonged shock came through the ground, everybody’s legs bending, and the land beneath them fell several meters in one steady, terrifying moment.
When the falling sensation ended, the old woman asked Do-ane, “Would you explain that, dear? What just happened?”
“This ridge,” Do-ane began, opening her hands again. “We’re standing on the last slab of the Tanglelands. It’s the largest slab, and it reaches back to the east, deep underwater, ending up under Left-of-Left.” Like a teacher, she used hands to help explain. “As the ground above is burned away, and as methane rushes to the open surface, this land’s foundation is being torn loose.”
As if to prove her words, the ridge shook again.
Jopale looked over his shoulder, but Master Brace had slipped away. He was standing besides the worm, he and the two drivers busily manipulating a leather sack filled with some kind of dense liquid. The sack was connected to a hose, and the hose fitted into a needle large enough to push through two grown men. The trio was having trouble with the work, and noticing Jopale, the caretaker cried out, “Sir, would you help us? Just for a moment. She knows we’re up to something, and she isn’t cooperating.”
The others glanced at Jopale, surprised he would be called, and perhaps a little impressed.
The worm had stopped against the trail’s closer edge. But there were still a few steps of greased ground to cross. Generations of worms had laid down this thick impermeable oil—the same white gunk that its wild counterparts used to lubricate their enormous tunnels. On soft-soled shoes, Jopale let himself slide down to the creature. He hadn’t touched a worm since he was a boy, and he didn’t relish touching one now. He could smell oil and worm sweat—a rich mingling of distinct odors—and he looked up at the vestigial limb, crooked and thin and held flat against the huge gray body.
“Take this extra wand, sir,” said Brace. “Like I’m doing. Just stroke her belly, if you will.”
The rubber wand ended with a metal electrode, batteries strapped to a spicewood handle. The drivers had set a tall ladder beside the worm, spikes driven through the oil and into the ground. The woman driver climbed quickly and her colleague followed—a boyish fellow carrying the enormous needle as if it was a spear. The ladder was topped by a narrow platform. The woman grabbed the limb and pulled hard, and Brace ran his wand back and forth against the worm’s slick belly, small blue flashes producing what must be a pleasurable tingle.
The woman forced the limb to extend.
“Why there?” Jopale asked, mimicking the old man’s motions.
“It’s a good blood-rich site,” he said quickly, as if speaking one long word. “And besides, there’s no time to open the usual veins.”
The other passengers had come to watch and listen. Except for Do-ane, who drifted to the far end of the platform, studying her magnificent fire.
“Is this a drug?” Jopale wanted to know.
“I like the word ‘medicine’,” the caretaker admitted. Patting the sack, he said, “We keep this stuff for drivers more than for the worm. Of course, there’s enough in this sack to kill a thousand people. But what it is—”
Somebody cursed, and a second voice shouted, “Watch out!
”
The long needle fell between Jopale and Brace, landing flat on the oil.
“It’s a stimulant, sir.” The caretaker picked up the needle, and with a quick voice explained, “It will make our girl faster, and she won’t need sleep, and it may well kill her. But of course, we don’t have any choice now.”
“I suppose—”
“Two more favors, sir. Please?”
“Yes.”
“Take the needle up. All right?” Then he asked for a second favor, promising, “It should help quite a lot.”
Jopale had never enjoyed heights, but he didn’t hesitate. There were twenty rungs to manage, and the breeze seemed to grow stronger as he climbed higher. Over his shoulder, he saw the rest of the crew returning from the warehouse, nothing worth stealing in their hands. Then Jopale was standing on the narrow platform, and the driver had the vestigial limb extended as far as she could, and her assistant took the needle with both hands, starting to jab its tip into the exposed flesh while shouting, “Now!”
A tiny pump began to sing.
“The hand, sir,” Brace called out. “Please, sir.”
The worm’s arm was tiny compared to its enormous body, but it was far longer than any human limb. Perched on the end of it were three fingers fused into a knobby extrusion and a stiff little finger beside it. And there was a thumb too. Not every worm possessed thumbs; Jopale had read that odd fact once or twice. And more unusual, this particular thumb could move, at least well enough to curl around his hands as he clasped hold of the worm. Then he squeezed its hand as tight as he could, trying to make certain that his grip was noticed, letting the great beast feel a little more ease, at least until the medicine found its home.
WORMS
Then they were moving again. The pace felt swift, but the worm was sliding down a considerable slope. Without landmarks, the casual eye had trouble discerning their true speed. But later, when they were crossing a flat empty plain, Jopale was sure they were making swift progress. Wandering up into the throat again, he listened to the hard swift beating of the heart, and he was sure that whatever else, the creature’s body was expending a fabulous amount of energy.
Returning to the stomach, he found every passenger gathered around Do-ane. “Show us that book of yours,” Rit was saying. “Show us your machine.”
“We’re very interested,” said the rich woman’s companion. Then with a wink, he asked, “What harm would it do?”
People were scared and miserable and desperate for any distraction.
Jopale sat next to Do-ane.
She seemed to consider the possibilities. Then she said, “Here,” and opened the book to a fresh page—a page showing photographs of giant chambers and smooth-walled tunnels. Holding her torch above, she explained what she had already told Jopale, and a little more. “We think these were living quarters. It’s hard to realize how big everything … but this is a colleague of mine, here, standing in the background…”
The scientist was little more than a dot on the grayish landscape.
“If this machine was a ship that traveled between the stars, as some believe … as I believe … then its engines would have produced an acceleration, and this would have been the floor.” She pulled a fond finger over the image. “This was taken ten years ago. Do you see the dirt in the corner?”
Some people nodded, but those in the back could see nothing.
Do-ane turned the page. The next image was a large black-and-white photograph showing a skull and ribs and a very long backbone that had curled up in death. The earlier colleague was present again, standing on the giant skull. And again, he was still little more than a dot on this bizarre landscape.
“That’s a dead worm,” Jopale whispered.
Do-ane glanced at him, then at the others.
“This machine came from another star,” Rit said, repeating her verdict.
“Yes,” she said.
“A spaceship, you’re saying?”
“It seems obvious—”
“And that’s where our worms came from too?” The tall man was kneeling on the other side of her, his expression doubtful but focused. “They came from this spaceship of yours?”
Do-ane said, “Yes.”
Then she said, “No.”
“Which is it?” Rit demanded.
The young woman sighed. And then a second time, she sighed. Finally she looked up, telling everyone, “Suppose that we built a starship, and we went out hunting for a new home. Even a machine as powerful as this needs a great deal of time to cross from one sun to the next. And if that new sun didn’t happen to have an inviting world, we’d have to travel farther. And if that next sun didn’t offer a home, then we would have to travel farther still. And if we could never find a planet like our old home, at some point, wouldn’t we have to make due with the best world that was in reach?”
Jopale tried to study the worm’s skeleton.
“I don’t know any of this as fact,” she said. “But we’ve learned this much. This starship’s crew was nothing like us. Not like people, or anything simply organic.” She ran a finger along the edge of the fossil skull. “What looks like bone is not. It’s ceramic and very tough, ancient beyond anything we can measure. And what organs we find aren’t livers or hearts or lungs. They’re machines, and we can’t even begin to decipher how they might have functioned when they were slipped inside a living body.”
Rit started to make a comment, then thought better of it.
“These creatures were built from metals and ceramics, plus rare earth elements that exist to us only in the tiniest amounts. Scarce beyond measure. But if you look deeper into the galaxy, into the spiral arms, you see suns with more metals than our sun has. And presumably, the worlds circling them are built from similar bones.”
She breathed, breathed again.
“Our sun, you see … it is very large and bright, and it is metal-poor and rather young. By many measures, it won’t live long at all. Less than a billion years, which is a short time in the universe.” She lifted her torch higher, allowing more people to see the bizarre skeleton. “I don’t know any of this for sure. I’m telling you a story, and maybe it’s all wrong. But what I think happened … what many of my colleagues, the true geniuses in this endeavor, feel is self-evident … is that this starship journeyed all the way to our world and could go no farther. It landed on the Ocean and tasted the water, tasted the air, and its crew took what they had in reach. Metals were scarce, as were silicon and all the other heavy elements. But at least they could borrow the oldest genetics inside their own bodies. To build a full functioning ecosystem, they wove a thousand new species. Humans. Mockmen. Copper-eels and many-mouths. Plus all the little scramblers. And they used the other species that were brought with them. We’ve found spores and dead seeds on the ship, so we’re sure that our ancestors brought plants with them. They devised giant plants that could thrive on the Ocean’s surface, roots reaching deep to bring up the scarce minerals. And think of our forest roaches, too. We have found little versions of them dead in the ship’s darkest corners, hiding in the cracks. Incredible as it sounds, perhaps they rode here as pests.”
“But where are the human bones?” Jopale asked.
She looked at him, her face sad for a brief moment, but then drifting into a cautious amusement.
“I mean the crew that piloted this starship,” Jopale continued. “What finally happened to them?”
Judging by the murmurs, others had made the same obvious assumption.
Do-ane shook her head. Then she said, “No,” with a grim finality. “Think if you can in these terms: You fly from star to star. Your body is as much a machine as it is flesh. And everything you need comes to you with the help of your loyal machinery. With that kind of freedom, you can acquire any shape that you wish. Which is why you might allow your limbs to grow smaller with the eons, and why you perhaps would decide, finally, to let yourself become a worm.
“Assuming that we began as human beings, o
f course. Or something that resembles humans, back on that other world of ours.
“This lost, unnamable home.”
GOOD MOUNTAIN
Caretakers began to hurry through the stomach, in twos and threes, carrying buckets of salve and sacks of buffering agents back into the now-empty intestines. Jopale guessed what this meant, and he felt sure when another pair of caretakers arrived, hurriedly dismantling the latrine and its privacy curtain. But where would the worm’s next meal come from, and how much time would they spend waiting for her to eat her fill?
Capping the nearly filled latrine, the caretakers began wrestling it towards the esophagus. That was when Jopale decided to confront them, and that was when Master Brace finally reappeared.
The old caretaker wore a grimacing smile. He tried to wink at Jopale, and then he noticed Do-ane sitting among the passengers, flipping from page to page in her enormous book.
“Are we stopping now?” Jopale asked.
Brace nodded. With a distracted voice, he said, “There’s an emergency locker up ahead. Always stocked with knuckle-roots and barrels of sap. Or at least it’s supposed to be stocked.”
His voice fell away.
“How long will this take?” Jopale wanted to know.
Brace heard something in his tone. Speaking with absolute surety, he admitted, “My girl needs food. Badly. If we don’t give her sugar, we won’t make it off this wasteland. Fire or not.”
Jopale nodded. “All right. I see.”
“Good Mountain,” said the caretaker. “That’s where we’re stopping.”
A dozen faces looked up.
Realizing that he had been noticed, Brace straightened his back and took a deep breath. Then without hesitation, he said, “Everyone will disembark. The feeding will be done as fast as possible. And from this point, everyone rides on top of the worm. Up where the mockmen are sitting now.”
The old woman bristled. “But where will my mockmen ride?”
“They will not, madam.” With squared shoulders, the caretaker faced the spoiled creature, explaining to her and to everyone, “This is an emergency situation, if ever there was. And I’m using the powers of my office, madam. Do not try to stop me.”
The Very Best of the Best Page 25
