Armwrestling the Dead

by Andrew McEwan

provided. Schilling paid, and sweated to pay, gritting his teeth at each fresh assignment, each naked planet. The atmosphere and gravity on company worlds were always much the same. It was the weather that altered. But it was the only way. He’d sewed his stripe on in the naive belief the bad times were over.

  ‘Schilling?’

  ‘Right.’ He stood, stretching.

  The pilot grinned. ‘I wasn’t expecting any live cargo. You’d better sit up front with me. This is the economy flyer: no insulation.’

  The pilot’s name was Johnson and he’d volunteered.

  ‘People think I’m crazy,’ he revealed at two thousand metres. ‘I mean, I’ve done my six years, earned my colony slot, right? That’s what most volunteers volunteer for in the first place. But not me. I’d get bored after a week. And the idea of settling permanently on some backworld - well, you get the picture.’

  Schilling liked him. Johnson was committed.

  ‘They give me all the worst jobs,’ he went on. ‘That way they hope to kill me off.’ He laughed as the flyer shook. ‘It’s a company joke. They hate anyone behaving differently. You keep on volunteering for new worlds and your name starts to crop up in some peculiar places. Those high up the ladder, they worry, and when they worry profits slump, and when profits slump they look for someone to blame, and when they look for someone to blame whose name do you suppose is on their surgically narrowed lips?’

  Schilling liked him. Johnson was a nut.

  ‘I lost both engines once,’ Johnson said. ‘They just fell off.’ He shook his head. ‘Got a cigarette?’

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ replied Schilling, adding, ‘What’s it like at the mine?’

  The pilot offered a meaningful profile. ‘Like you make bad friends,’ he suggested. ‘Am I right?’

  He answered yes. He couldn’t help admiring Johnson. He’d substituted the company’s reality for his own. Johnson’s was an island universe. A solipsistic one; at any rate, a universe wherein Johnston came first and last.

  The sky changed colour as they overflew the verdant ocean. Shades of avocado and olive tinged the atmosphere, the sky’s upper reaches falsely blue, deceptively purple, subtly orange, perpetually fickle.

  ‘Want to go lower?’ Johnson offered.

  ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’ inquired Schilling. He understood something of the sea’s eruptions...

  ‘Yes,’ the pilot said.

  They dived.

  ‘You ever fly one of these, Schilling? No? You ought to learn. The fundamentals are pretty basic. Here,’ he said, ‘I’ll teach you.’

  They clipped a hundred metre wave as Johnson pushed out of his chair.

  ‘That’s okay, it was liquid.’

  ‘Doesn’t it choke the engines?’ Schilling hadn’t budged from his seat. If anything, he gripped it tighter, with his buttocks. ‘I think maybe you’d better stay where you are,’ he enjoined, peering out the murky window at a vibrating wing tip. ‘Just in case.’

  Johnson laughed. ‘Anything you say.’

  The coast became visible between crests fractured and tumbling. The land was browner, the southern continent richer in minerals, older and more stable than the northern, larger and flatter. Here the company mined lanthanum, promethium and other rare lanthanide’s found in small quantities of the surface. Such enabled lights to shine, planes to fly, and put the electric hum into trucks.

  Schilling relaxed. The ocean had an unsettling feel. The land, although just as ugly, at least remained where it was. Its movements were gradual, like those of the dead in their graves, the decaying echoes of worms burrowing deep below superficies flaked and leached of colour, collapsed in places, inflated in others, mutely giving up their treasure to machines segmented and blind.

  ‘There she is.’ Johnson pointed out the mine, a line of reddish chimneys on the horizon.

  As they flew closer Schilling could see they were steel, expensively fabricated, now scarred and dented. The mine resembled a scrap heap, the rusted carcasses of steam locomotives and automobiles grown with colour splashes, mottled and threaded with cobwebs that changed in design and number as the egg-yolk sun poked through the erratic firmament. It was difficult to believe the mine hadn’t existed a year ago. Like all man’s intrusions, it dominated the landscape, embodying hidden change.

  The pilot circled. ‘Rough house,’ he commented. ‘They’re fond of armwrestling and vegetation.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘They had this idea,’ explained Johnson, meaning the company, ‘of cramming the installation full of trees and such in the hope of creating a better working environment.’

  ‘And did it?’ Schilling could guess the answer; the company was often perversely empirical.

  Johnson shook his head. The ground smoothed and they landed.

  He stepped off the flyer. The field crunched under his boots. The mine itself was eerily quiet, vapours distorting its pipe-organ chimneys from which rose barely visible smoke. Schilling approached the controller’s hut. Johnson waved unseen, this his first stop on a three day trip. Next came Base 2, then back to the mine via Courtney Island (named after its ghost, the Ologist who’d first-footed this globe) to onload a consignment of corpses, bodies the flyer’s chill hold would accommodate neatly.

  Johnson’s was a routine visit. The field controller pawed over Schilling’s papers. ‘You’re not due till Monday,’ he objected.

  ‘Monday?’ Ruby was fucking with him already.

  ‘Today’s Friday,’ grunted the fat controller, flicking ash from his cigar. The hut’s interior was a mess of boxes and fronds, the latter blue, green and yellow, some decked with blossoms like cheap ball-gowns. ‘You’re early. A weekend early!’ He grinned at the pun and slapped his enormous belly.

  The fun and games had started. Johnson’s flyer taxied. Schilling gritted his teeth. ‘Okay,’ he said evenly. ‘There’s been a mistake. But it’s okay. Just give me directions. Where do I sleep?’

  ‘That’s up to you. Security won’t let you in the mine; no clearance.’

  ‘But I am security,’ argued Schilling. He dropped his bag and wiped his brow.

  The controller shook his head. ‘Not till Monday you’re not.’ He wagged a finger. The crop of plants to his rear rustled as if with laughter.

  Schilling turned his back on them. He could feel the knives going in, sense their keenness. But this wasn’t his moment. He’d stick his chin out and take it.

  ‘And no loitering,’ the obese man added jeeringly, ‘or else I’ll have Miller arrest you.’

  The Weekender inhaled deeply but said nothing, eyes fixed on the farthest horizon. The mine intruded to his right. Left, eighteen kilometres across sand, gravel, boulders, some fallen from the sky, was the ocean. He hooked two fingers through the string-pull carrier, its bottom scuffed, and hoisted it, avoiding the question the controller answered anyway.

  ‘Miller’s the turd you’re replacing.’

  He caught Johnson’s lurid smile as the flyer climbed.

  He was stranded.

  He walked.

  ‘There’s nothing that way,’ fat man called after. ‘Hey!’

  But he wasn’t listening. Walking toward the mine’s eastern perimeter, the smell of it arriving as he left the field, Schilling neared a series of low orange buildings. Through open doors he saw machinery silently living and through closed doors men making hand signals, passing instructions from raised walkways to sunken floors, sitting on peeling generator housings eating limp sandwiches and tossing jacks, scowling at one another, unsure who was cheating, wiping poisoned noses on poisoned sleeves. It was only a game. Schilling, this side of the wall, imagined the Runners’ tongues as they swept over lips and inside mouths cracked and glistening, the canines and molars they’d purchased a month earlier already turning silver, indelibly blemished. No happy futures in their smiles. Ologists’ teeth, by contrast, were always ivory, buffed and pristine.

  The ground rose at
the mine’s edge, piled there by diggers and sprouting human litter. Loose grit and heat-shrunk plastic rolled over his boots as he climbed, the lazy sun dragging itself through noon, falling past midday, smudged like his shadow. He’d be hard pressed to improve his situation by evening, but he could at least make the best of it. There was bound to be some way into the complex, above or below surface. Oriel nights were shallow and cold, the roof offering little insulation, and it seemed likely he’d encounter trouble after dark unless he found a hole to crawl in, blessed shelter from Ruby and the weather, one as impossible to predict as the other. There were hints overhead and underfoot, clues to the coming storm in the quality of the light, the peculiar shellac of the sky, its brittle veneer an almost uniform grey, steely blue in places, delicately hatched in violet, what passed for clouds on Oriel a network of wispy bruises. Perhaps tonight, perhaps tomorrow; Schilling couldn’t say. If the sky cracked directly above the mine the debris might land five hundred kilometres distant. Aeronautics, meteorology, these were dangerous professions to be in.

  Schilling had fetched fifty ounces of gold as a baby. He wondered what he was worth now.

  His home planet was Suma. He’d seen pictures of his father on his grandfather’s boat. But the pictures had been fleeting electronic images, presents from a guilty mother the company had wiped. Sometimes he lay awake trying to guess the colour of her eyes, yet never dreamed of her in his sleep. The boat had had sails and its keel had sliced water blue and