Armwrestling the Dead

by Andrew McEwan

Alarmed, Harry removed the transparencies from his eyes, squinting in realspace, his whereabouts changed, translated. Had he worn them all the time? The dredger scratched. He cast his mind back but failed to locate that locus of dream and fantasy, the moment of his donning the wares of a disreputable stargazing franchise.

  Had he known they were there? Perhaps they were merely placebos, false irises designed to filter certain wavelengths of light rather than alter perceived reality. Or was he still fooled, and did another layers remain?

  Putting questions aside Harry levered from his chair. His Zippo and a pack of cigarettes had caught his attention, lying together on the floor of this square room.

  Disaster. The lighter, out of fuel, cast mournful sparks. The naked lady cold. He spied a door.

  Before exiting Harry checked his flesh. Everything seemed in order, two legs, two arms, that sort of thing. He scratched again, all over, red raw, tingling as if in receipt of an icy blast of electrically charged air.

  Stepping outside, he couldn’t remember when last he’d seen so many stars. The moon was silver and grey. The box with one door and no windows, which he puzzled at now, looked like it had been deposited here, on a grassy knoll.

  A few hundred metres away, on another such green hillock, a similar box rested. And beyond that was a third, and a fourth, a fifth. In fact, all round him were grassy knolls with boxes on them, stretching over the horizon.

  A road twisted between. Harry walked down to it, wondering which direction to take, when along came a motorcycle, in silhouette nearly as wide as it was high.

  He stuck his thumb out.

  fifth: other worlds (lost and found)

  nineteen - dead planet

  Runners Purvis, Oreo and Holyhead wore their restricted access badges on their brown lapels. A blockage in vas 16, subsection 9, necessitated a manual repair. They were nervous, a maintenance triangle more at home in aquifers and sewers, located and assigned by a mould-man and a computer. The former had intrigued Purvis. Oreo made lucky symbols in the air and dirt while Holyhead mumbled numbers.

  ‘I hear there’s a bonus in this one, lads,’ said Purvis in an attempt to raise their spirits, his feet crossed on a seat back, hands clasped behind head.

  ‘A plug in a pipe,’ Oreo posited.

  ‘Right. Nothing we haven’t tackled a hundred times before. No problem. A few hours and we’ll be out of there, en route to Bowler.’

  ‘But this is no municipal shit, eh? This is off limits, unrecorded territory, a world of nameless products. If it wasn’t company business...’ He didn’t finish. Monitored? ‘Never seen so much dust inside a wagon.’

  ‘Maybe they like to fly with the windows open,’ suggested Purvis. ‘What say you, Holy?’

  The big machine winked at him. ‘Wear factor point zero six three three,’ he commented. ‘Lubricant deterioration in left foreclaw well with permissible levels. Shall I continue?’

  ‘No, Holy, that’s okay. System system.’

  ‘System go.’

  ‘And to think,’ Oreo said bitterly, ‘this time last week I could have been married.’

  ‘Enough,’ Purvis told him. ‘Let me see the map again.’

  Oreo handed it over.

  A week ago they’d come up for air in the single-storey city of Bedrock on Vicar’s Blind, an urban landscape flowing with pedestrian traffic, where no powered vehicles were allowed, a squat resort locale of beer houses and brothels whose drains stank of drug-induced vomit and cheap native wine. Oreo had fallen prey. As usual, he blamed Purvis, this time for stopping him signing over three fifths of his future income to a whore with no less than forty husbands to her name.

  Love was a strange virus, the gaffer thought; all those slick, lubricious passages he did and did not understand.

  ‘How long before we ground?’

  ‘Two minutes,’ answered Holy. ‘...Mark.’

  i

  The planet’s cloy atmosphere shimmered with distant explosions, detonating clouds of matter registering as bright white flashes on the eye. Seymour Niaan liked nothing more than to fill his head with these sparks, bathe in their quiet luminosity as he stood on the roof of the residential tower. He longed to touch, to embrace that potential. It had been the explosions, seen from space, which first attracted him here. Observed, they’d suggested a rhythmic, purposeful intent, the communication or myriad fireflies, creatures destined never to meet, that initial breath their last. A short and sad life, but one lived at extremes. And it was those extremes he found irresistible, their brevity and menace heavy with meaning, an entire set of experiences compressed into a single gas-fuelled moment. Primed, ignited; here and gone.

  The end was glorious for the imagined sky-dwellers. They died at their absolute peak, vibrant and young. For a man it was more difficult, impossible even to recognize the precise instant of optimum death. For a man, critical mass was reached, and passed, before the fact sunk in.

  Niaan spent his life putting that moment off. He wasn’t ready yet. Deliberately, he measured such things as position and wealth against a sliding scale omitting both one and ten.

  He had a tattoo on his skull the colour of oil-quenched steel, the colour, along with green verdigris, of almost everything on Lobo, a gunmetal world whose magnetism often failed to cancel itself out, manifesting as wraiths of nickel and iron, thousand metre ghosts that might dispel in seconds or linger for days, an electric hum on the air that stirred the guts and coated the tongue. Sickness was widespread, but then few in the residential tower were prone. It was the ever inquisitive Ologists and their Weekender staff who succumbed, offworlders on field trips Niaan granted passes to just so he could watch them turn blue and run. Lobo was his world and he was immune, sharing his good fortune with those he biofactured, a workforce shaped from the very stuff they dug.

  There had been himself, herself, and seventeen mechanical attendants aboard the yawbus Judge 11. A quiet sojourning between stars close enough to number, visiting planets discovered decades before, tagged and named by the company. A romantic voyage to Farandaway, Ubik, Gargantua...

  How he loved those lights. She smiled, hands resting on his shoulder, chin on her knuckles.

  ‘They make me tingle,’ she said. ‘Can we go down there? Is it dangerous?’

  ‘It’s always dangerous,’ Niaan stated, liking her, still not bored after - how many days?

  ‘Good.’ She was excited now. ‘And air, too? We can breathe.’ She nodded, laughing, twirling in a gown of crimson silk he’d had the ship tailor.

  They danced on a coast without a sea, under a sun glimpsed through clouds, in the company of neither plant or animal, but in a breathable atmosphere, black as coal and white as diamonds, non-colours clashing beyond the tenuous wrap of a military issue bunker screen.

  ‘Do you like it here, Genie?’

  ‘I adore it, Seymour! The smell makes me queasy, but I find I want to travel, to venture over...this place...I don’t know exactly. It’s...’

  ‘Infectious,’ he provided.

  Genie kissed him. ‘Yes!’

  They crossed a terrain misty and fissured.

  The containment field surrounding the ground vehicle burst, stalling electronics. Niaan felt a rush of pure excitement. A direct lightning strike, he conjectured, magnetic particles devouring the screen like a lizard an insect.

  Genie insisted they take a walk.

  The polymer casing of the truck was stained a vivid yellow, which later blistered, turning brown then black like a rotting banana.

  Genie in her dress and high-heels skipped over crevices, her hands above her head, her dark hair thick and curled, a rawness of metallic stone.

  She hid from him, her voice echoic, bouncing off rounded spurs and disappearing below the green-veined surface.

  And he lost her. But now she was found.

  On Lobo.

  A sepulchral quiet...

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Hm? Yes, what is it?
’

  The mould-man gestured shyly.

  ‘Oh - very good. I’ll take care of it. Thank-you.’

  His servant looked puzzled, then retreated.

  Niaan shook himself. The plumbers had arrived.

  ii

  The maintenance triangle fronted by Purvis were specialists in organic waste. They’d worked everything from zero-g moonlets to industrial-agricultural-habitational ships, IAHs built, staffed and flown by mini conglomerates, independent nations whose autonomy carried the proviso they leave company space within a given time frame, a territory occupying approximately one fifth of the galactic disc. It was important their sewage and recycling plants, collection an distribution networks were in good order. There had been a number of bizarre commissions in the past, but never a closed world and a badge indicating restricted access.

  Disembarking, the wind held at bay, they were met by the mould-man who had contacted Purvis initially. Hands were shaken, Oreo squinting, Holyhead blithely pleased in his machine way. Purvis examined the man’s face for clues. Found none, only a handsome symmetry. There were rumoured to be mould-women on Vicar’s Blind. If this was so - and he had no reason to doubt it - they were not given to casual encounters. Certainly neither he or Oreo could afford such exotic services. Oreo’s bride would have been cheap by comparison. It was a money factory they were entering.

  An air-powered shuttle transported them from the port to the residential tower. They reached a soft-angled apartment by elevator, where the mould-man left them, Oreo sucking