Armwrestling the Dead

by Andrew McEwan

trimmed and goggles seated, was adroit, a natural.

  Returning to the mirror, its outline softened, she unhooked the frame, smiled at the glass smiling at her, and before it could melt, smashed it.

  ii

  Dead. It was inevitable. The tree would reclaim them, salvage their materials. Only he and the aged sail-maker remained, the latter sick, here to blame, like a kicked dog at his heels, coughing and spitting phlegm that hung on leaves, reminding him of chrysalides, the eggs and pupa of insects. Only the tree was unaffected. Its permanence dominated. Both himself and the corpses were transient, migrating birds nesting in its luxurious mantle, what damage they caused easily rectified.

  Schilling imagined the dead bodies becoming hollow, their juices recycled, husks raised on the wind and scattered like seed pods across the ocean. To float or sink, and perhaps found new colonies. Was that how it worked? He scratched his head in disbelief.

  Night fell. He wondered how Johnson was faring, the pilot he’d last seen aboard the Base 2 hover. Inevitably, Ruby Joplinski stirred his mental ether. The manipulative Weekender. Did such titles exist anymore? Did they matter? It amused Schilling to toy with thoughts, emotions, memories, all with one thing in common, in that they were trapped, part of an earlier stratum, belonging to an archaeology discredited and bizarre, a past time whose earth mounds he might chip at without fear of lost privileges, undesirable postings or vanished friends. Still, deep in his psychic library was a weighty tome, his Book Of Revenge.

  He yanked loose the rope from its mooring, the boat where he had left it at the quay. The sail-maker crawled behind him. Schilling felt pity, disgust, a mixture of love and hate that cancelled out, leaving only a thin residue of surety.

  They were dead. He was living.

  It was cool and dark, summer, the ocean calm, the sail pulling, the ring a silver arch, the last great spar of a once magnificent ceiling. He steered as if to pass under it, this gateway to another world, toward a southern continent remodelled by snow and tide. He wondered what he might find on that shore.

  Schilling patted his stomach, feeling the fish turn inside. He bound the rudder and lay hands behind head. The land was a dream, a place of ghosts and abandoned company furniture. Exotic funfair rides.

  iii

  Ekland hunted a land-whale minus a trigger. He rode as a passenger in an Ologist’s head.

  Bluecap, thinking himself an ogre, stalked the huge dumb creature with a keen eye and a sharp appetite.

  The forest was dull. Motes of dust, sundry insects turned languid circles, racing to see who was slowest, floating in bars of yellow illumination.

  Disturbed by the passage of hands and feet, they were drawn into patient lungs, spun dizzily and ejected.

  Irdad struggled to light a cigarette. His matches were damp.

  Ekland, in his chair, flung his arms out, arched his chest with a loud crack, dragged his heels off the table and stretched. Reluctantly, he left the image-converter and its panchromatic scenery, a real-life drama of alien backdrops. He strode into a corridor beneath a crumpled ceiling of roots. Irdad had never reached Base 1, his role as fly-on-the-wall overtaken by events. Joplinski had raged, calmed, then dismissed the Ologist as incidental, a dead end, of no further consequence. But his secret eye remained. And Ekland got a kick out of it, the fantasy crazed bluecap had invented for himself.

  Ruby still intended to go ahead with the raid. Disorganization among the former company employees held him up. There was a rush of defections, Runners and Weekenders alike. Of those occupying the mountain about 400 might be described as loyalists, men and women whose allegiance was like that of salamanders to a mandrake. They wanted heat to bask in and Ruby could oblige. Ruby was a volcano, the soul of this mountain, and a month after the storm he was ready to strike. Ekland, in his position as first lieutenant, felt strangely left out. He’d disposed of his flame-coloured scarf. Increasingly, he viewed the planned attack on Base 1 as ludicrous, less a military operation than a tantrum, with hundreds of fanatical commandos squeezed like canned fruit into a handful of shaky flyers, planes now in worse repair than their pilots, as the ground-crews had become indifferent, dangerous even, the coming attraction loaded with gunware and seething frost-lipped individuals whose rationales were strictly biological.

  They had a lust for destruction, for violent assault and premeditated action, a trait they shared with Joplinski. It remained to be seen what awaited their arrival, whether this war would be fought by more than one side. Ekland reached and knocked on the iron door of Ruby’s office, noticing the fast accumulation of rust on hinges. A voice boomed from within, a bolt slid back and the door opened.

  ‘Ah,’ said Joplinski, standing, nodding to the others in the candlelit space. ‘Now we can begin.’ He smiled, indicated the vacant chair.

  Ekland sat, shuffling uncomfortably. They all had that far away expression, he thought. And Ruby, his lips were fat and swollen, his features heightened, hands arrayed, fingers tines, the cutlery of delusion.

  Breaths were being held. Ekland let his out through his nose.

  ‘There is a traitor among us,’ said the firelord.

  Silence filled the room. Then dark.

  The iron door groaned, admitting...

  He’d begun to tremble, Ruby’s bloated eyes swinging toward him in the new light.

  The cracking of knuckles. An explosion.

  iv

  Sunrise touched the land, picking out rugged features, cliffs steep and fractured, no obvious beach. Schilling lowered the sail, heaved the long oars over the sides and rowed. The promontory climbed forty metres straight from the water, a sheer wall of igneous rock that belied its age, thousands of years of weathering, attrition, discolouration mimicked in just a few weeks. He rowed steadily eastward, casting glances over his shoulder as the sun warmed his back. Gulls regaled him from ledges, their chatter seemingly for his benefit, the continent whose precipitous edge they guarded much changed from the bare dusty terrain he had fleetingly known. The promontory itself was larger, an island separated from by a tongue of sea Schilling glimpsed now two or three kilometres south. It was unlikely anything of the base remained; or if so, the evidence was locked underground. The sun lent greater definition to the island’s eastern shore, highlighting a number of possible harbours, the first a shallow bay where he was able to ship oars, and sliding over the side, physically steer the boat in toward a defensive clutter of boulders. Beyond these a pebbled strand inclined sharply, abutting the cliff wall, dark and shiny with salt water, tufted by moss and a nameless selection of wildflowers.

  Schilling walked barefoot on the strand and dragged the boat from the shallows, crunching its keel. He took the rope from the prow and made it fast, next clambering on board to detach and fold the sail, which he slung across his back before finally scrabbling ashore. His feet were careful on the unfamiliar surface, as yet attuned to bark, his memories of an earlier life slow to filter through. He glanced at the boat once, smiled, then set his mind to the task of ascending this nascent escarpment.

  A light drizzle began to fall and the temperature dropped noticeably, gauzing his breath against the stone as he eased himself higher, searching out footholds. Soil, windblown over days rather than decades, packing crevices prised open by the action of hypothetical freeze-thaw, trickled down the rockface, unseating the dried husks of insects. The detail was impressive, he thought. It would not have surprised him to find rusted drinks cans on the shore, condoms and other debris flushed from passing liners; perhaps a picnic site above, seats and trestles and huge plastic umbrellas. He laughed inwardly, concentrating, securing passage with his hands. Half way up the cliff the wind suddenly grabbed at him, the air boasting talons. His heart skipped. He clung steadfastly and waited for the squall to pass. Something buzzed close to his right ear. There was a cooking smell. Once more composed, he unstuck himself, tipped his head back and continued. The cracks grew wider, the climb easier, Schilling grateful for the respite, soon hoo
king an elbow and raising his chin above the first step of a complex ledge of brittle angles. Knees followed. He stood, emptied his lungs dramatically, surveyed the land before him, thick with gorse, undulating, the ruin of a castle jutting like the crashed tail section of a solid-fuel rocket.

  Smoke hung over the crumbling wall, betraying the fire beyond. He was apprehensive. The cooking smell failed to reassure. His mouth was dry as he neared, treading stealthily through the stiff grass and stunted bracken. In the distance was a line of crooked trees. The castle looked centuries old, perhaps once a simple tower, a frontier post of the imagination. The mechanics of the planet’s renewal, its chemistry and brief timescale, was bewildering. Proof of it abounded, what he was seeing able to be traced to Oriel’s unsteady roof, that icy grille many an Ologist had claimed to be artificial, not a natural phenomenon, but the work of an absent landlord. A deliberate barrier, like an ingress boarded against squatters. Whatever the facts, he was on the inside. The company had claimed the property - leased it, maybe. And then disaster had struck, exposing the surface to the full throes of a sun not orange but yellow, baking, distilling, sculpting land and sea, fashioning a substitute world in the guise of water-colour memories