Armwrestling the Dead

by Andrew McEwan

‘Unfortunately?’ There was a window. He walked over to it and gazed out.

  ‘I can only guess,’ the automaton replied. ‘It appears likely, however, that a number of disaffected troopers got hold of the local variety.’

  Beyond the window was ocean. Fish swam in it. Ivan probed further, restoring momentum. ‘Why was I rescued?’

  ‘Revenge.’

  ‘On the company?’

  ‘Yes. They hurt you. They’ve hurt many of us.’

  One fish ate another. Whole. Swallowed it. ‘How? I can’t feel avenged if I can’t remember. You could be lying, simply misleading me.’

  Was it such a personal thing?

  ‘But why should we?’ answered Marvin. ‘You’ve caused us a lot of trouble.’ He shrugged. ‘Why should we lie to you?’

  Ivan rested his head against the pane and felt it bulge outward. They weren’t deep, he figured. He might have been floating face down in a swimming pool, or a toilet. He exchanged that image for one of a tin bath and a kitchen fire.

  ‘I want to go home.’

  Marvin shuffled behind him. ‘Not possible.’

  ‘And the alternative?’

  ‘There is no alternative, as you must know.’

  ‘There’s death,’ said Ivan. ‘There’s a violent end on this planet’s surface.’

  ‘There’s always that,’ Marvin conceded.

  ‘What did they do to my head, the company?’

  ‘They remapped your brain; if I interpret you correctly.’

  ‘They did?’

  ‘Yes. Crudely put.’

  ‘What can I do to them, Marvin?’

  The construct was silent.

  ‘Marvin?’ He couldn’t take his eyes off the fish.

  iii

  Pointsman had all the answers. Ivan lounged in a comfortable chair and listened.

  ‘You can relax. Nobody knows we’re here.’

  He didn’t believe that and thought it likely Pointsman didn’t either.

  ‘The mutiny - if we can call it that - was unforeseen.’

  He liked the sound of Oriel; was enjoying this question and answer session. He was eager. Stormy’s fate clouded his mind. Ivan tried and failed to dissociate the deckmaster from the crime. But a detail. Lives were details, easily overlooked, or erased. The agency, he knew, was no different from the company in everything but details.

  Personnel...

  ‘We plan to turn the situation to our advantage,’ he was being told.

  ‘Marvin has volunteered for the assignment.’

  Volunteered? A construct?

  ‘He’ll accompany you as far as the landing station. The rest, Ivan, is up to you.’

  Win or lose, there’ll be others. Broken cups and vases. And the map of his brain?

  Fishes...swallowed whole...Deathspoint, Deathspoint, the eye of your needle.

  iv

  ‘Desperate, Marvin, aren’t they?’

  Ivan plucked a blue leaf and chewed it.

  ‘Those things will rot your teeth,’ the automaton said, moving the heavy gun on his back.

  He dragged the long stem between his lips and made sucking noises.

  The landing station was to the northwest. After three days the trees, squat and widely spaced, were slowly giving way to taller and taller grasses, orange and red plants like giant, elongated fingers wrapped in the dawn mist. The world was quiet. Marvin snapped a grass stalk and poured its dusty innards onto the back of his hand. He stuck his tongue in the pile, closing his eyes. Grimacing comically, he spat. ‘Don’t you dare,’ he warned Ivan, about to copy, a mound of spores in his upturned palm.

  ‘The local variety?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He dumped the mass and slapped his hands together while holding his breath.

  By mid-morning, however, the fingers were slowly bending, coaxing, making come-hither gestures that grew increasingly difficult to ignore. They pulled at his clothing, dusted his hair, stuck like fresh marshmallow to his boots and jammed his nostrils. If Marvin was aware of his burgeoning intoxication he didn’t show it, shoulders square as he marched. His durability, the construct’s built-in immunity to such blended retinal fallacies, aroused the anger until recently stashed at the very bottom of Ivan’s emotional pile. He couldn’t keep the blunt nose of his machine-pistol from aligning with a spot at the base of Marvin’s spine. Ahead, the ground climbed steeply, the horizon a distant straight line. The sun was high, the air cool, humming monotonously as Ivan placed one foot in front of the other. None of the expended energy seemed worth it. He allowed his legs to carry him, that was all. At the incline Marvin halted. Turning to face the shorter man he tugged on a flask, capped it and threw it to Ivan, who let it bounce off his chest.

  ‘Not thirsty?’

  His mouth was raw and his stomach contracted.

  The automaton grinned sarcastically. ‘It’s a crazy world, Ivan, a crazy universe. I’ll tell you something before you decompose. There are loyalties, and there are priorities. There are humans and non-humans. And people, unlike machines, can’t always tell the difference.’

  Details, thought Ivan: the company, the agency, equal and opposite forces, symbolic, chaotic divisions. Had Marvin switched sides again? He wanted to shoot him but couldn’t. The machine-pistol bobbed, its trigger solid, the open mouth inviting a stream of bullets. He sensed the drug pushing against the elastic window of his consciousness; but the dose was too small, the effects too weak to snap the yielding pane and usher the white-foam ocean upon him. There were bound to be sharks in such warm waters, ferocious creatures with large appetites for destruction. He had experienced their random kills, run from their deathly voices. And no, he couldn’t tell the difference. Simplistically, his ignorance told him which side he was on. He swallowed hard and fired.

  Marvin staggered back, full of obvious holes, leaking dark blood. The construct’s tongue darted uselessly from his astonished mouth. The big gun was levered forward, aimed, and a further chemical process set in motion. But Ivan was lucky, he’d fallen over, paralytic rather than dead, vision tuned to the sky, telephoning a request to God.

  He was dirty and tired, Ivan realized. The buzzing had found its way out of his skull and floated off like a moth from a false image of the moon. Stars poked through dense steel clouds. He ached all over, squinting despite the dark as he got his two feet under him and walked. Marvin’s holes were barely visible now. The horizon still cut a straight line. Ivan clambered toward it, the slope a lumpy forty degrees, the grasses shorter, benign, passive, as he had been days earlier. Their longer cousins had changed the climber, hardened his wandering soul. Oriel, the dream of it, the reality he strived for, was on his mind like a thumbprint ink-stained on a page. Forget Pointsman. Forget the automaton, the company and the agency, anything he did now was for Evangela, Runner, ex-Runner, sheep farmer and fence erector. The only loyalty he owed was to his father, his mother, and a girl from Albuquerque with the desert wind in her hair. Priorities would come later, topmost the necessity of planet-hopping, world to world, an endless spotlit plain of rolled concrete his immediate stage. It went on forever, the proving ground, reminding him of the mesa, a smoothed tableland then above, now below. Sound moved across it, but not security. Defences were orbital, as there was no perceived threat from the surface. Ivan trudged for about an hour before stopping. Figures, a parked vehicle, a second swinging, driving away. From where he stood he could hear the parked vehicle’s radio. The atmosphere was relaxed, the music distant yet loud. Three men sat on the concrete, laughing. A fourth paced round the jeep. Ivan proceeded, the machine-pistol dangling behind, out of sight, his fingers itching for the moment they spotted his advance. He slowed his step the last twenty metres, anxious not to provoke a violent response, calm as he approached, betting on his own reactions to any given situation. And luck.

  The men played dice. They were drunk. The man walking in circles waved indifferently, counting each lap, concentrating on
his feet. One of the other three tipped his head back. Ivan smiled, got in the jeep and started it. The layout was unfamiliar. He released the handbrake, put the vehicle in gear, stalled, restarted and finally got moving. They shouted then. He nudged aside the circuit man. Gunfire slapped, but they couldn’t catch him. The radio blared uninterrupted. Perhaps it was that they were missing, he thought. He drove toward a low building, swerving round a number of metal containers as he neared, the jeep’s headlights reflecting only dimly off the obstacles. Skidding to a stop, the engine stalled once more. He jumped out. There was a string of red lights and a circle of green. Someone asked him for a cigarette. A young woman with shining eyes. ‘They’re inside,’ she added.

  ‘Who’s inside?’

  ‘The pigs...’ She leaned into the jeep and began emptying a host of plastic bottles she found behind the passenger seat.

  Harsher light cut round the angles of the door. Ivan slipped his weapon into the crook of his arm and gently pushed it open. Feet dragging, suspended from wooden benches supported either end on metal lockers, were eleven corpses, naked and hanged, some with patched wounds, all painted a garish yellow, the semblance of uniforms, fake medals pinned and cuffs linked with brushstrokes and bruises. Meathooks filled their mouths, exiting facially. As Ivan looked a tongue was uprooted, that corpse dancing, its neck at a weird angle.

  Heat drained from his body. The music stopped. He turned to see the woman trip and fall, cracking her head on the hard surface. She’d found a