The Last Mayor Box Set 3

by Michael John Grist

  I pause for breath and we cross a section of sparse yellow grass. "It's like that. This whole place is a Lagged zone, a doldrums in space that doesn't mean anything to anyone. You can do anything you want out here and none of it matters, because none of it's going to last."

  "And that's what you want," she says.

  I shrug.

  We reach my two-story building and enter through the back door. The canvas walls flex as I lead her up the dark, narrow stairs. It's sad, and poor, and it's the life I've chosen.

  "I don't understand," she says, with an excited flutter in her voice. Of course she doesn't understand. She's been hurt and she's lost a lot, but it's nothing compared to what I lost in the war.

  I ease off my jacket as we enter my bedroom, a square space in the air held together with rope and sailcloth. There's my bed, freshly made, a television which I never use and a glass wall looking out over the park. The red glow of an alarm clock casts a lurid glow over the neat, hollow rest of it.

  "It's so empty," she says. I feel through her touch that she is crying. The engram has played havoc with her emotions.

  "It's not empty now," I say. "You're here."

  Her gho comes off easily, and now she's weeping against my chest. She pulls at the buckle of my belt and starts to kiss my face frantically. Her lips crush against mine and she pulls us to the bed, tugging at me so hard it hurts, squirming off her stockings, pressing her hot flesh against mine.

  3. SHARK ARENA

  After Mei-An leaves I lie awake for a time, watching the glow of the alarm clock flick between digits. Through the window I can just make out the half-circle encampment around the man in the moon's left eye.

  These are water projects built in a bygone era, before global tsunamis on Earth swept the old order away; NASA and the Sino-Russian compact, leaving us with our Skulks and our tsunami walls. I've heard the solar reservoirs up there are as big as the great wall of Sino-Rusk. I imagine the last few humans on the lunar surface starting their own civilization built out of craters and moondust, and wonder if their lives hold any more weight than my own.

  I get dressed.

  It's warm out despite being some time after three, and the main alley through the Skulk is raucous, packed with a horde of boisterous Inuit offshoring in the Skulks. The smell of frying squid hangs on the salty air. The alley will chew them and their money up and spit whatever's left out soon enough.

  At the alley top I cross the low-slung rope bridge into the deeper shadow of the wall, joining the flow of people on the jetty-way. A dozen Skulks pass by as I walk, each a city block-sized raft of flotation barrels lashed together, filled with bars and tattoo parlors and slums. My node beeps as I get near Carrolla.

  I find him on Skulk 65 in a third-floor bar called the Aeternum, decorated like an under-ice subglacic ship with metal bolts and hatches cut from sunken boats. He's sitting at a bar made of five periscopes laid flat, shouting blearily at a man in a rubber diving suit. The bar is about half-full and I slide into a space at Carrolla's side.

  "…it's a boudoir," he's shouting at the diver. "You know? An ocean-themed boudoir!"

  I tap him on the shoulder. He turns and gives me a big, bleary grin. "Rit! Glad you made it." He squeezes my shoulder and calls to the barman for Arcloberry shots.

  I look to the diver. I've dealt with him before, though his name escapes me. He's a salvage artist, diving the wrecks around the Skulks for useful materials. "What's he trying to buy?" I ask.

  "Velour curtains," the diver says, the exasperation clear in his voice, "to line the walls of his 'boudoir'. I've told him there's not a shred of velour on any wreck I know!"

  "Velvet then!" Carrolla adds. "Anything plush, to make it sexy."

  The diver shakes his head. I laugh. I palm him some money and lean in close. "Get it from Calico. Tell him you dredged it up."

  The diver chuckles and heads out.

  "I heard that," Carrolla says sulkily, and hands me a full shot glass. "It's supposed to all be salvage."

  I laugh. "You won't remember in the morning."

  He grunts and knocks his shot back. I hold mine up to the light; Arcloberry vodka. The liquid is a pale purple and smells sandy, kind of like raspberry mixed with red chilis.

  I love these new seed-blends, Arcloberry and the others, pleasant side effects of our War and the pack ice melting. I like to imagine all those seeds blown from the dustbowls of millennia ago trapped in the ice like hidden messages. When all the surface ice thawed and the huge blue bergs rose up from the depths, they were just the sugar frosting on the hydrate fuels underneath.

  I swig it and slosh it around my mouth: a spicy berry with a kick, this message from a pre-Jurassic era. Is this what dinosaurs ate? I slot the taste into the space where the missing memory was, then rub at the reddening in my eyes.

  Carrolla's already wandered off to find some girls. I've got some hard drinking to do, to get the thought of Don Zachary's son out of my mind along with all those old, sad memories of the War stirred up by Mei-An. Good thing there's a bar here, and fresh money burning a hole in my pocket.

  Hours later, I come back to myself stumbling through the dark alleys of a Skulk I don't recognize, with no sign of Carrolla or the Aeternum. The rest of the night beyond that is a Lag; spotted with flashes of memory where I was drinking, flirting, maybe fighting, but nothing clear.

  The usual.

  My ribs and head hurt. My hands feel tacky with somebody else's blood. I touch the built-in spike in my node; clotted with blood. Abruptly it chimes, and I hold it close to my eyes but can hardly resolve the tiny screen. Arcloberry packs a punch. A message came in, but is it from Mei-An? I can't read it. Something about the Don…

  "Ritry Goligh," a voice whispers nearby.

  I spin to see.

  What?

  There's only darkness, bar the glow-light of the coming dawn over the wall. My jacket is gone and it's cool.

  Did someone call my name? I turn and totter, then it comes again.

  "Ritry Goligh."

  I stagger after the sound, as the rising sun flashes through gaps in this Skulk's low skyline. There's a swell in the decking ahead and I climb it, following the phantom voice. Perhaps up here I'll find Ven and all my old friends from the war, and they'll still be alive, and I won't have to live this way anymore.

  I crest the top and turn. An abandoned Skulk spreads around me, all jagged black shadow and sinking alleys. There's no people, no sound. I hear the voice again and take a step, then there's a sound like a gunshot as the rotten deck gives out and I fall through. For a second I tumble, then my feet smack off hard concrete, my knees punch me in the chin and I almost black out.

  Lying on rough old wooden beams, I breathe in sour dust and taste my own blood. Tentatively I pat myself down for wounds, but right now it's mostly just the pain in my jaw. It'll hurt to talk for a week. Leaning to the side I vomit a little purple liquor, and feel a little clearer.

  Rubbing my eyes, I peer into the darkness, lit only by the moon through the ragged hole above. There's a wide circle cut into the deck here, filled with seawater. In places the railing circling is broken inward, and there are windblown leaves crusted over the frothy scum on the surface. Perhaps ten rows of seats spread around the rail, tiered like a stadium.

  A shark-fighting arena.

  As with everything in the Skulks, shark fighting's not illegal, but it rarely happens anymore with sharks being so rare. I glance up to where the scoreboards would've been mounted, but see only the faint outlines of red and white wires trailing from the wall.

  I went to a shark fight once, when I'd just got back from the north. It was vicious; the animals plainly starved and dying, their blood splashing across the crowd. Everybody was cheering and holding up their tickets but I felt empty, like I'd only swapped one pointless war for another.

  I scan the darkness for a way out, but see none. Instead I see a man in the darkness. My heart skips a beat and my gut goes cold.

  He's sitt
ing in a ringside seat, wearing a ridiculous two-pointed hat and dressed in a dark gray suit, staring right at me. He's maybe forty years old, turning some kind of cane slowly in his hands, with eyes that are intensely white in the dark.

  I flick out the spike on my node, watching him all the while, but he doesn't move.

  What the hell?

  "You won't need that, Ritry," he says, pointing his cane at the spiked node.

  "Who the hell are you?"

  He smiles broadly, displaying gleaming white teeth as bright as a shark's. "You can call me Mr. Ruin."

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  Copyright © 2019 by Michael John Grist

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