Armwrestling the Dead

by Andrew McEwan

package his heart was willing to unravel, if only his stomach would stop gagging. The fact God and the cowboy knew of Oriel disturbed Harry greatly, more than what had passed between them in Corning’s office, Ivan leaning on the door jamb, the rancher slumped in his sprung chair like a patient who had knocked his doctor on the head and stolen his clothing.

  And Ivan was travelling to Oriel.

  Why? Of all the questions Harry wasn’t asking that proved the most stubborn. Any answer he conjured from the vortex of his ratiocination only added to the problem. To deduce C from A and B required an act of faith suspect in the extreme, like believing Corning really was God and not some company draftee scripted for the occasion. In a universe where it was vital not to trust anyone, Corning was a prime candidate for neat disposal. On returning to the ship the same steward who had loaded his suitcases unloaded them (it) again, explaining the mistake and that they (it) had remained aboard the wagon the whole time. Harry didn’t argue. He searched through his belongings in the remaining case, tempted to dump everything down a waste chute, keeping only the clothes he stood in. But relented. Like in his dream, he had journeyed beyond the window.

  Ivan had boarded the wagon and vanished. He put him out of his mind as Harbour 17 loomed impressively, a fiesta of lights that multiplied exponentially. Glad to be leaving the yawbus he first checked with the bank handling his finances. The amount of transferable company stock he’d started with had been reduced by over two thirds, mostly in barrier taxes, the company fixing the price of essentials at near zero and then taxing their use on a rising scale that varied according to which zone you wished passage. The farther you travelled, the cheaper it was for the company. Thus did expansionism, ever centralized, routinely neglect a large number of planets, even rediscovering a few by accident. Outside of direct company utilization, busses like worlds, simply continued in the direction they were headed. More were constructed, orbiting Neptune like gimbals, while their robot predecessors voyaged on into deepest nothing.

  It was certain no company vessel would take him to Oriel. The planet was restricted. He would have to barter a crossing, hire some junket. Here, at the hub, that ought not to prove difficult. But could he afford the fare? Angelo, together with his organisation, had from the outset deprived him of useful contacts. The agency had, quite intentionally, left him out on a limb. How many others, he wondered, found themselves in similar predicaments?

  The face of Ivan floated menacingly...

  The air was loaded with bromides, sweetened artificially. Violence, he guessed, was sporadic. Explosive, too. Bottled air, though free to residents, was available to transients at a premium, and for such a high a majority of emigrants would queue.

  Not Harry. He signed a tenancy, a cheap bulb with a black view, where the gravity was metered and the power alternate hours. He ate from squashpacks, wandered the smaller quays, observing the to and fro of rushbaskets, patched and blown and salvaged, painted blue over green, yellow over blue, red over yellow like exotic bees. Only a junkie would take him to Oriel. A person whose name he didn’t yet know.

  Harry trudged, eyeing hatches. He wasn’t permitted to smoke in his room. Hub tobacco was artful, creeping up on you like a monkey in a zoo. Someone offered to buy his Zippo with the naked lady. The price was incredible, but he wasn’t selling. Rumour tracked the flame-marked wharves and the dredger employed skills he’d thought lost to his office in Lima.

  A tall man waved him over and they struck a deal

  third: emergent world

  ten - passengers

  The sea was blue and deep. He fished these waters, casting nets woven of chewed bark and sewn using wooden needles. The fish that were his labour, silver and winged, darted like shooting-stars, swift and evasive as they matched their skill with his.

  Noon. The sun rode high, its light dancing off ring fragments in the upper atmosphere, streaking rainbow hues. The ring itself was barely visible, thin and opaque, a pale ribbon among clouds like spring blossom, gravid with the promise of fruit.

  He’d been out since dawn and caught nothing.

  The fish swam deep, following the current. The surface was placid and his nets empty. The tree lay beyond the eastern horizon, the axle of its trunk out of sight. Never had he sailed so far. Concern grew inside him, the proximity of his green home affirmation of a life until recently blessed, a time spent in the company of his family, now dead. A past time, as older memories tainted his breath: a woman’s face that was not his wife’s. A woman’s cries echoing in his heart since the day he’d speared a golden fish. A messenger from the dead.

  His people of the tree said he brought disease among them and called for his banishment. They chased him to the lowest branches. Only his father defended him, arguing his son’s ignorance, his innocence in landing such a catch. But the sea punished them, they said. Why had he not thrown it back?

  And the message? He’d eaten the fish to find out. It stirred in his belly yet, the words slowly loosening, ascending like bubbles to fill his mouth, flood his mind, confuse his thoughts and swell his tongue. There was that woman’s image, pale and beautiful, and the knowledge of land, a place he had been and a place he had to go.

  He turned the boat now, an urgency in his fingers as they tied and untied. Sweat ran from his brow. Salt flavoured his lips. The sail flapped uselessly a moment before humming tautly, contentedly on the breeze. The sea rolled under the keel under his feet. The wood of mast and deck sighed longingly, glad to be headed home, the thick mantle of the tree soon visible on the horizon. A lush crown of bark and leaves it rose like a green moon, his island world, a provider of life and shelter from which he was becoming estranged.

  He remembered swimming through its branches, his entanglement in its many limbs and his discovery of pockets of air and light. He remembered flying. Another boat...

  The silence of depth and the hue of luminous tape.

  Franky Heidelberg. It was her voice in his head, distant and lulling, steering him...where? South?

  The wind strengthened, hastening his return, and yet it was toward evening when he cast his rope to the waiting sail-maker, his smile grotesque on a quay broad and uneven. Stumps rose vertically, the oldest cut for masts, the youngest for oars. The sea frothed with human litter. He jumped ashore, caught the sail-maker’s hand, found it clammy. To his left the tree filled the sky. Lanterns were hung, burning sap. It was magnificent, he thought, glorious and dying. The quay was a massive horizontal limb, part submerged, one of hundreds radiating out from a trunk many thousands of armlengths in circumference, rooted deep below.

  Schilling wiped his palm on the hammered bark leg of his trousers.

  i

  Hey, Zon, look in the mirror.

  Recognize anybody?

  ‘We were like this,’ she said, crossing two fingers. ‘We were so different we had no trouble understanding each other. She was strong and quiet; I was in need of constant reassurance. She cut tomatoes laterally and I cut them through the stalk. But we always met in the middle.’

  ‘So what happened?’ asked her reflection, head to one side, lip folded.

  Zonda closed her eyes, frightened of the answer, the truth she’d arrived at after weeks - months? - of nail-bitten deliberation.

  ‘Oh, she was stolen.’

  ‘Who took her?’

  She opened her eyes, saw them sparkle, wet with tears. ‘The god of the underworld,’ she replied.

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I mean, sometimes she’s near, like next to me, and sometimes she’s far away. So far away I forget her.’

  ‘But you want to remember, right?’

  Zonda wasn’t sure. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘But you want to remember, right?’

  ‘I don’t know! She left me. We were friends and she left me. I thought she was dead. They wouldn’t let me in to see her. But she wasn’t there, where I thought she was. He’d taken her, whisked her off like some fairytale princes
s.’

  ‘And you’re bitter.’

  ‘Yes! Yes - guilty, ashamed, jealous. I don’t know. We were like this,’ she said, crossing two fingers. ‘I loved her.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Enough to want to forget. And quickly.’

  ‘So, what did you do?’

  Zonda paused.

  ‘Zonda?’

  Would the mirror crack if she lied? She dared not risk it.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You were confused.’

  ‘I was scared.’

  ‘You had no option. Your hands were tied. They wouldn’t let you in to see her.’

  ‘I knew in my heart she was gone. Not dead; just gone.’

  ‘Still, you buried her...’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And now you want to dig her up again. That might not be such a good idea.’

  She turned her back on the mirror. ‘If I want your advice I’ll ask for it, thank-you.’

  There had to be ways, more ways than she could imagine.

  A note from Issac lay on the breakfast table. The ink had faded.

  And now the house they shared was dissolving.

  Out of mind, out of range, the house Waters built had begun to crumble. She might try and restore it, shore it up temporarily, but she lacked his talent.

  Windows evaporated. The ceiling drooped. Tiles lifted and curled like wakened moths on the roof.

  She’d fixed a leaky tap but failed to redecorate the kitchen. Zonda was clumsy, too direct, whereas Issac, beard