Armwrestling the Dead

by Andrew McEwan

like milky diamonds, gems which altered colour as the hours passed and the sun carouselled, the dendrologist mourning his nascent jungle, each hour shifting albedos and projecting half-seen forms. These woody plants represented a labour of love, bark stripped and trunks smashed, limbs shattered and foliage torn, carefully tailored from his hipbank of genes.

  Approaching, the air smelled alive.

  second: other worlds (then and now)

  six - real window

  Through the real window the grey-white planet resembled a frosted pearl set on a background of crumpled velvet. He positioned the space wagon so as to look down on its shady curve, the closest any man had come to this world. The ship was trim and silent, reading what Courtney read from a ladder of coloured screens.

  The screens detailed his entry.

  The orbital on the planet’s dark side was the converted hulk of the yawbus Kama 5, stationed, equipped to conduct a normal ten month assessment of the planet’s exploitable potential.

  Courtney stood alone, the cabin darkened, the sugar-icing fractured before him in accordance with the computer projection, his own part in the model next to be realized as he steered the wagon toward a polygonal opening whose ragged edges dripped blue-winged forms into the atmosphere. Like diving seagulls, he thought, birds intent on fish, spearing the unwalked surface of the world a ballot of captains had named Oriel. The opening was two kilometres wide, a break in the grille that was like some crystal mesh, a bizarre cathedral architecture whose grand purpose was to hold itself up. Here the probability of clearance was high, a fissure through which man and machine might readily travel. The difficulty lay in what conditions prevailed the far side of this broken window, in the dynamics of wind and heat. The computer model branched uselessly. It was wait and see, the space wagon’s modus operandi taking over responsibility for flight maintenance, all spare capacity thereafter given to ontological matters; not Courtney’s area of expertise.

  It was a gamble putting the wagon to such an enterprise, and the captains knew it, but the larger craft would be better able to cope with whatever inner Oriel had to offer in extremes of climate, an issue the unmanned Kama 5 had failed to settle, its probes inhibited by the planet’s very nature. As far as Courtney was aware this was a first for both Mother and the company. They’d never previously encountered a world barricaded by its own emissions. The predicted gaps in the facade, most common about the equator where the crust was thinnest and caused primarily by contraction, fitted a cyclic theory of time and motion, a slow, alien course of seepage and precipitation.

  The initial survey results were encouraging. He’d drawn the short straw. But for the group pathologist, newly qualified, it was an honour.

  The trip was largely automated, Courtney along to offer manual assistance, necessary where the model fell short and the accident ratio soared to dangerous levels. Mostly he had only to watch the screens, adjust the dials, monitor his own pulse and brainwave patterns, a routine precaution when entering any new environment. If the wagon failed to register a threat, either viral or intrinsic, such as walking life, then his exposure in the limited event of that threat going unnoticed by himself as well as the computer, would prove a last line of defence. The ultimate filter, his possible sacrifice saving the company billions in cell-time and discussion. His status wouldn’t save him, not down there. Mother would be loath to waste him; but Irving Courtney was intelligent enough to appreciate the political standings. He was a from a retrogressive family. Irving senior had done no favours. Perhaps the death of him. Neither would Irving junior, who understood the many paths of killing. And no Weekender could be offered the kudos of first-footing, whereas Courtney had simply been unlucky. Or had he? He was sure of one thing: if the crimes of the father were to be visited on the son, Oriel provided the perfect opportunity.

  i

  The weather was kind, almost gentle.

  The livid green ocean struck him as freakish. Overflying its soft mantle, instruments swinging wildly, the Ologist shook his head, his conception of its nature prior to the actualization far removed from the sculpted reality of its majestic peaks. He broadened the real window to 360 degrees by raising the cabin floor and fixed the wagon in sightseeing mode, the craft’s dome a dewdrop in which he was trapped like some larval mite. The wagon skimmed the undulating surface, rising and falling to maintain a safe distance between itself and the sea whose perplexing waves were altogether more interesting than the uniform continents. Numbering two, these tracts of land appeared staid in contrast, with just a single noteworthy mountain between them, dominating the northern coast while the southern mass was largely featureless. The wagon though was restricted to a three thousand kilometre band either side of the equator, a line shifting as the planet wobbled. Free from any lunar influence, its axis tilted only marginally, Oriel was disturbed by the jet actions of her geyserlike poles, their combined excretions encapsulating the world and prohibiting the safe exploration of regions farther south and north. Mapping the planet would be a problem. Pinpointing its resources less so.

  As a means of drawing attention the island’s proto-trees worked beautifully. What they lacked in hue they made up for in texture, their place in the computer minds aboard the orbital given special consideration as the stony trunks were thought a likely indicator of planetary history. The island was known to move, its trees a consequence of that slow journey across the ocean floor, squeezed upward like paste through the porous rock and twisting to present heights as the combination accreted. If the space wagon had not been directed there, Courtney may have overridden the controls. It was a forest of standing worms, polyps, their upmost bodies coiled, some broken, others split like damaged hairs. The thin sunlight weaving among them hinted at rich colours under shiny, translucent bark.

  The wagon circled, losing height until finally it hitched up its skirts and settled languidly, a plump ballerina. The earth was powdery yet firm. Springy, he discovered, bounding toward a slope over whose uneven rim the trees were visible. Close to they resembled stalagmites, inverted icicle spines rising thirty metres and more, bunched fingers compacted of sediment in differing shades and bands. Many had fallen, trunks shattered like Greek temple pillars, the competition for space hinting at a strict geological boundary. Courtney jogged to the jumbled perimeter. Looking back he could see nothing of the wagon. His heart beat loudly in his ears. He clambered onto a fractured, horizontal bole, sensing its plasticity through the soles of his boots. Touching it, he thought of stretched rubber, a tensile surface, tapering and finely ridged. Rats’ tails, the rats themselves buried, their bodies stuffing the island. In his shirt pocket was a scalpel, part of the small investigative kit he always carried. Extending the blade, he first traced its intended path with a finger, stroking the surface, bloodless and pale, on which he sat astraddle. A wasted limb. Tense dead flesh, the muscle yet to relax. He hesitated, the scalpel a centimetre from that glossy film.

  He let out a sigh and slid the blade in, opening a half metre wound. It bulged surprisingly, widening like the split belly of a whale, guts outpouring. A yellow liquid ran, stinking of decay, and Courtney had to move quickly to avoid contact. Watching from a safe distance, he saw the tree’s knotted innards uncoil, the wrinkled bark darken, thick loops of tissue spooling like twinned snakes from a basket. The trunk as a whole pulsed, then was still, its past torpidity reinstated. Only the smell remained.

  Shivering, he dropped the scalpel; retrieved it and carefully sealed the blade for analysis. He hadn’t expected anything like what had happened. Moreover, he had never experienced such abject revulsion. Or was it another thing he was feeling? He couldn’t take his eyes of the mutilated tree, the wound he’d inflicted a hideous tumour.

  He wiped his nose and turned left, walking, stepping over other toppled limbs varying in thickness, the greatest two metres in diameter. No doubt larger boles existed, perhaps many times as big, ancient trunks whose girths justified their height. And the tallest trees were located toward th
e centre.

  Did he have time to find them? The space wagon had a fixed schedule and would abide by it regardless of his presence. He could go back and change it. But why worry? He proceeded inward.

  Anyway, he wore a reminder.

  It grew tangibly darker, dust motes suspended like flies in the irregular bars of light. The scene was reminiscent of his childhood haunt, the substructure of floorspace insulating the governor’s palace over Saturn. All it lacked was a roof. If he were to linger till nightfall the effect would be complete - cables arranged at random like the overlapping filaments of collagen in bone, air-pockets in place of marrow, a shield against the broiling, hydrogen rich atmosphere on which the edifice floated. Then he had played hide-and-seek with his shadow, a playmate cast by roving fluorescent mailboxes, weaving documents and memoranda that sped like tiny comets round his head. Now he felt like some parasite crawling amid the quills of a hedgehog. Yet something of Saturn clung. His father’s voice boomed like a god’s, giving life to the darting messages, animating the strobed sandwich columns across whose outstretched toes the boy Courtney