Opening Acts

by SFnovelists

  *** ***

  Carl headed back to his shift work once the mountain had finished settling. On the way back to the warehouses, he thought about Geoff. Something was definitely up. Carl could always tell when Geoff had done something that was going to get him into trouble with Dad. It looked like another storm was brewing. Geoff couldn't seem to resist provoking their father. It didn't help that Dad was always holding Carl up as an example Geoff should emulate: Carl, who made straight A's, who had gotten a full scholarship to study celestine administration, who had been accepted to a top Downside university for graduate work next spring. Carl, studious and serious. Carl, the one whose teachers all said he'd go far. Exactly the opposite of Geoff, who zigzagged through the rest of his life the same insane, impulsive way he rode his bike.

  Geoff and Dad would never get along. They were too much alike.

  You could smell the disassembly warehouses through a bulkhead. The tart, oily smell of the disassembler bugs mingled with the rotting trash to create a truly foul brew. They had told Carl he would get used to it, but after three months, he still hated the smell. It was also noisy, with the big vats churning, and fluid hissing and rumbling in the pipes under the floor.

  His coworker, Ivan, sat on a bench along one wall, pulling on his boots. Carl sat down next to him. "I'm back."

  Ivan started and gave him a stare. Carl wondered if he was angry. "What are you doing here? I told you to take off."

  "The ice is already in. I've a lot of catching up to do. No big deal." Then he noticed how pale Ivan was. His underarms and chest were stained with sweat. "Are you OK?"

  Ivan shook his head. "You startled me, is all." He had been out-of-sorts for the past few weeks. Carl had heard a rumor his partners and children had left him recently.

  He had been looking at something in his wavespace. Ivan noted the direction of Carl's gaze. "Ever seen my kids?"

  Carl shook his head. Ivan pinged Carl's waveface, and he touched the icon that appeared in front of his vision. An image of Ivan, his wife and husband, and three snarly-haired children unfolded before Carl's gaze. The kids were playing micro-gee tag in a garden somewhere in Kukuyoshi while the adults watched. The image swooped down on the children's faces, and then moved back to an overhead view. Their mouths were open in silent shrieks of laughter. Carl grinned despite himself.

  "That's Hersh and Alex," Ivan told him, pointing. "They're twins. Eight, now. And the little girl is Maia. She's six."

  "Cute kids."

  He gestured; the image vanished. "I'd do anything for them."

  "Of course you would." Carl eyed him, worried. Ivan stepped into his work boots and strapped on his safety glasses. "Let's get this over with."

  "Um, get what over with, exactly?"

  "Nothing. I just-miss them, you know?"

  "Sure." Carl eyed him, concerned.

  Ivan glanced around. "Listen, will you do a favor for me? I left some of my tools back in the locker room. Could you go get them?"

  "Mike will be pissed…"

  "Nah, he won't even notice."

  Ivan had a point. Mike rarely emerged from his office before lunchtime. "All right, sure."

  "It's a small orange pouch with some fittings and clamps. It's in my locker."

  Ivan leapt up to the crane operator cage mounted on the ceiling and climbed inside, as Carl bounded back down the tube toward the offices. As luck would have it, though, Mike wasn't in his office; he was at a tunnel junction just down the way. His gaze fell on Carl. "What are you doing wandering around the tunnels?"

  "Ivan sent me for a tool kit."

  "I don't pay you to run errands for the other workers. Kovak can get his own damn tools. Get back to work!"

  Carl eyed him, fuming. He did have a way to strike back at Mike. The Resource Commissioner, Jane Navio, was a friend of his parents, and had pulled some strings to get Carl this job. She was Mike's boss's boss's boss. All he had to do was drop a word in his mom's ear, and before long, the hammer would come down on Mike.

  But Mike's petty tyrannies weren't the Commissioner's problem. Someday soon, Carl thought, I'm going to be a ship's captain, and you'll still be slinging bug juice and smelling like garbage. "You're the boss."

  "You got that right," Mike said, and floated off.

  Carl went back to the trash warehouse, slapped on bug neutralizer lotion, got his bug juice tester from the benches, and headed over toward the vats. Ivan was working over at Vat 3A. Carl shouted up at him, "Sorry! No tools! Mike's on a tear!" but Ivan was doing something in the cab and did not see Carl, and the noise drowned him out. Oh, well. Later, then. Carl got to work.

  Per safety rules, the tester never worked at the same vat that the crane operator did. The crane operator cages rode on rails that crisscrossed the open space below the geodesic ceiling. The cranes had long robotic arms that the operator used to lift the bunkers of trash and carry and tilt the debris into the funnels atop the disassembly vats.

  There were two kinds of bugs. Assemblers built things: furniture, machine parts, food, walls; whatever. Disassemblers took matter down to its component atoms, and sorted it all into small, neat blocks or bubbles, to be collected, stored, and used the next time those compounds were needed.

  Disassemblers were restricted in town. The specialty ones that only broke down matter of a particular kind-just a specific metal, or a particular class of polymer, or whatever-those were the only ones they used down in Zekeston, and even then, only in small quantities. Trash bugs were much more useful-and much more dangerous. Not only did they break down all materials, but they were programmed to copy themselves out of whatever was handy, when their numbers dropped too low. That's what they used out at the warehouses.

  He went over to the sample port on the side of the first vat, put on his goggles, and stuck the probe into the port. Then he heard a guttural scream overhead. Something small flew out of the crane cab and struck the floor not far from him. Something bloody.

  He heard a loud crash. Debris scattered. It was Ivan's dumpster-he had dropped it. Carl looked up. The crane's grappling arm pointed at the third vat like a spear, and the crane plummeted straight down toward it. He caught a glimpse of Ivan's pale, wide-eyed face as first the arm, then his cage, plunged into the vat. Disassembler fluid surged up and swallowed him and the crane. The vat walls buckled, and disassembler fluid spewed out.

  Carl dove behind a stack of crates. Too late to help Ivan. The bugs were everywhere. Murky, grey-brown oil surged and splatted against the other vats, the trash, the walls, the floor. 25 Phocaea's gravity was a bare one-thousandth of Earth's; gobs of bug juice sloshed and wobbled about; the air filled with deadly mist.

  The vats were coated on the inside with a special paint that the disassemblers were programmed not to touch, but on the outside they were vulnerable. One after another, the vats blew. As Carl made for the maintenance tunnel he was badly spattered. Burning, fizzing sores opened up on his arms and face. He changed course for the nearby safety showers and doused himself with neutralizer, and the burning stopped. But he felt a breeze, accompanied by a hiss that crescendoed to a shriek. The outer walls were being eaten away. The temperature dropped-sound died away-holes appeared in the warehouse wall.

  He looked around. The bugs had destroyed the emergency life support lockers. The bug neutralization shower was across the way from the tunnel doors, and frothing blobs and puddles of disassembler were everywhere. By some miracle, the emergency systems had not yet shut those doors-so air was rushing in even as it was escaping out the holes-but with every second it got harder to breathe.

  Carl leapt and dodged for the doors, looking for a path to safety. His ears popped. Sound was all but gone now. It made everything seem very far away. The floor was being eaten away, and bug juice poured into the steam and bug piping below. His lungs hurt and sparks danced before his eyes. With a desperate leap, he made it to within a meter of the door-as the emergency lights finally lit up, and the door slammed shut. In that instant befor
e it was sealed he saw his boss Mike, Mike's boss's boss Sean Moriarty, and others scrambling down the hall toward him. Then he bashed into the closed door.

  He pounded on it, shrieking, "Help me!"-but could not hear his own words. Pain seared his lungs. He sank to the floor.

  Half the ceiling came down around him. Stars blazed overhead. The air was gone. Outside the crumbling warehouse perimeter, next to the crater, the massive disassembler manifolds fell apart and a blast of superheated steam and bug juice shot out and spread across the near faces of the ice mounds. Wave after wave of membranous bubbles, color-coded balloons holding molecular nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, tumbled upward into space as the bugs got to work on the ice.

  Carl's eyesight failed. He curled up in agony. In those last seconds, while others suited up to come out and get him-as the air effervesced in his veins and saliva boiled on his tongue-he used up his last breath on a soundless scream. Not of fear, but of rage, at being reduced to component atoms himself.