Armwrestling the Dead

by Andrew McEwan

cigarette and broken it, bleeding thinly as she tried to reunite the two ends. One of her shining eyes was extinguished. Ivan shot her. A series of explosions echoed the machine-pistol’s brief clatter. The sky lit up, shaking his teeth. Shapes became visible, military flyers and scorched debris, a battle approaching the red and green landing indicators. He ran round the front of the building and on to the next. People milled here, dazed and nervy, a growing panic among them as the noise and light melded above.

  Perfect timing, some rational aspect of Ivan stated. The orbital cavalry, perhaps alerted by Marvin to a different task, descended at that moment upon the near deserted station, its former compliment having succumbed and murdered.

  It was a limited conflict. They all were.

  Pointsman had all the answers save one, Ivan thought, someone else now, feeling the change without necessarily understanding it, filling the space of a previous individual - a passenger in transit, helmet secured, company ID external and verified. He’d have to shake the facade before long. Wouldn’t he? Or had something extraordinary manifested? Static in his ears, Ivan wondered at his casual acceptance of other people’s escape plans, his nominal objections, of how those schemes were shams that went predictably wrong. It was fate, he decided, taking the easy way out as usual. But fate, like David, like Marvin, had an ulterior motive. Evangela never planned that far ahead. He merely coped, acted, and took the path of least resistance, a survival trait that didn’t hold up well to close inspection. One, none the less, which had saved his skin on this occasion.

  Luck, chance, call it what you will; it got the ball through the hoop from the craziest of angles.

  nine - grandee and rumpelstiltskin

  Harry Schroeder reported the theft of his luggage. Strangely, he didn’t miss it, like the suitcases no longer belonged to him.

  Gravity was high for a company world, a resort stop-over for close to a million tourists. Disclaimers were issued at the port along with pills and sunglasses. The planet boasted previous occupants, an alien civilization whose sandy byways were compacted of desert into regular angles and featureless walls; a city long abandoned, void of clues other than square buildings and oblong terraces. There was an artificial flavour. No sculpture, no images of gods or leaders. Just predictable geometry, blocked streets and regular pavements a snaking six thousand kilometres in length.

  The authorities offered sympathy: discount at the Wisconsin Hotel.

  The city was too hot to explore other than at night, when its bland arches and flat roofs eerily glowed. From space it resembled a neon sign; irresistible fare, despite the squashing gravity, to the vacationing hordes, and those emigrants whose shipboard routine had left Harry feeling condemned. Hugging a cheap cigar, he dreamed of the cold, the mountains of Peru, of impossible snow and a head on his beer.

  The hotel was underground, the room basic, a single inflatable that went some way to cushioning the extra load (artificial gravity being expensive in reverse) and a device for wastes which, thought Harry, required no explanation. He pushed the button and it talked. A single bulb supplied a range of illusions.

  Only the beach scene worked.

  Lounging, the dredger, the reader of leaked reports, two weeks out from Earth, two weeks in which he’d done a lot of useless thinking, did some more.

  Years ago Harry had supposed, naively, that to everyone there manifested an opportunity of strictly take it or leave it proportions, that come his turn he would know intuitively the direction right for him. Sat in his office in Lima, such a day proved illusive. Had he missed out somehow? Was there no warning, no sixth-sense immediacy? He grew wide in a chair dating from the 18th Century, directing news items like traffic, doing a little writing, composing waste-paper balls and tossing them with increasing accuracy into one of several strategically positioned dented steel receptacles, more ready than he knew to succumb to desperation. Then Angelo called. Grumbling, Harry found his way across the Atlantic and into this straight-line expedition...

  Speed frightened him. He’d gone from zero to Grandee in fourteen squished days and was practically incontinent. Smoking relived the tension. The air-conditioning rumbled mysteriously. The report had hinted at absolution, as if everything was redeemable. What had transpired on Oriel, what was possible, shifted his bowels in contrary directions. Maturity howled in his ears, had done since Angelo’s sofa and the extraction of the envelope, and what maturity said forced Harry to accept this mission. The politics didn’t interest him as they might once have done. Even the danger was rationalized. Mother was incidental. None of which he found convincing. Sanity, his body told him, had slipped like space food from his anus.

  Schroeder laughed.

  The city was a vivid orange, the colour of bad dreams and cheap hotel soap. Harry wandered its streets, buoyed by decisions outmanoeuvred, smoking Wisconsin cigarettes. Gravity was busy sapping the enthusiasm of the majority of tourists. Those that slouched along the flat stone walks and dead straight avenues wore company helium vests, luminous greens and blues and yellows that clashed. There was a concession stand in the hotel where you could hire them, the girl behind it dressed in a comical panoply of false limbs and elastic antennae. People were always on the lookout for aliens, real or imagined. The desert stretched, windless and dry, in every direction with equal monotony, punctuated by the human shapes of the port with its squatting craft, terminal buildings and maintenance sheds. All seemed quiet. The city gave off no residual light, appeared like a flat colour against the black, the boundary distinct, as if hung in space. Light from the port was minimal, deliberately so, which left only the stars. He struck a knuckle off a wall and marvelled at the purple mark it left, quick to fade. Five kilometres at its widest, this peculiar conurbation, reinforcing the analogy of the neon sign. Harry stood at its edge studying a set of glowing footprints impressed in the sand, a stored luminescence made visible through compression. Like the mazing walls, the prints somehow expressed shape while shining inward. He followed the trail, leaving one of his own, his cigarette end a lone spark, a wandering imitator of the alien works. With spit and sand, he discovered, it was possible to manufacture lurid orange snowballs.

  He had walked for perhaps ten minutes when the footprints ran out, scuff marks where they ended. It was impossible to see if a person waited, cloaked by night. He sole clue remained the trail.

  ‘Do you think anybody ever lived here?’ a woman asked.

  Harry glanced back over his shoulder, dropping the hot butt as he did so.

  ‘Anybody?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s so basic, as if built for ghosts.’

  ‘Maybe they were aesthetically pure,’ he suggested, ‘and had few if any bodily functions. What are you doing so far from the walls?’

  ‘Watching.’

  ‘Not much to see.’

  ‘No - and you?’

  He fumbled in his pocket for cigarettes, needing that reassurance, hoping to get a look at her face. ‘I saw your trail. I was curious. Smoke?’

  ‘What do you do?’ she quizzed, invisible fingers waving till they touched and slid to the pack.

  Harry was uncertain how to answer. Satisfied the woman had taken the offered cigarette he raised the pack to his mouth while his free hand located his lighter.

  ‘Nothing,’ he eventually said, speaking round the tube.

  His prized Zippo with the naked lady failed to ignite.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Allow me.’

  He squinted, eyes liquid. Sucked. ‘Thanks. What’s your name, if I may ask?’

  No reply. The cool desert was breathless. Grandee was huge and empty, once though noble.

  And Harry was alone. He shrugged, pretending equanimity, where in fact he was angry at being deceived. Had the woman multiple limbs and gangling antenna? That was easier to believe. He hadn’t imagined her, he was sure. The cigarette burned. He held onto it, puffing wildly, making a conscious effort not to look down, afraid of how many sets of prints he m
ight see. Cursing, he returned to the hotel. Crushed in the inflatable midst the beach scene flicker of an enfeebled bulb, wastes disposed and stomach tight, he tried unsuccessfully to sleep. Tomorrow would bring long queues and short patience, a robot ship, this plague of complaining, passive emigrants making way for another, one as dumb and fascinated, crowding the concession stand and dragging gas-filled Mae Wests over heads not dissimilar in content, a noisy herd of would-be sightseers only a handful of whom would have the energy to promenade.

  Tomorrow that ship would take him to Harbour 17.

  The door resounded.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Harry bellowed.

  No reply. The bulb swelled and the beach whitened. Groaning, he rose to answer.

  Two suitcases in the spartan corridor.

  He got behind and pushed.

  i

  The report talked of albumen and tumours. There were several case studies, all inconclusive if not incomplete. It was a game the company played, he remembered thinking, the picking of teams from among itself: goals might be scored either end without affecting the result.

  Drunk on a yawbus, Harry pictured Angelo, nervous with matches, keen to set fire to the report the moment he’d digested it. There were reasons to question its authenticity. He hadn’t brought them up. Angelo appeared reluctant to discuss the prospect of a red herring.