by Spencer Wolf
“Go on. I didn’t create it,” Daniel said. “The main torus core of this ship developed the technology. I just put it to your good use.”
The nearby gyroscope apparatus whirled into a painfully high pitch and Spud shuffled away.
Daniel wheeled a cart down the stage’s ramp and knelt in front of Pace’s honeycombed cubicle. “Open your eyes, Pace. I won’t move.”
“I don’t want to play,” Pace said. “Go away.”
Daniel retrieved a fly-weight ball of glimmering metal sheen from the cart’s lower shelf. He held it, rolled it in his fingers, but frustrated, he couldn’t seem to complete its task. “Sorry, hang on,” he said as he picked at two end tabs of the whisper-thin metal wrap. The tabs were stuck against the ball like the lost end of invisible tape. Then he found the loose end tabs, pinched them securely in his fingers and gave the ball a flick. It opened into a half sheet that spread atop Pace’s desk. It was a wrinkled thin film, only microns thick. Daniel snapped it again and it reclaimed its memory shape, a magnetic bodysuit.
Pace pushed up on the arms of his chair to stand. He reached for a feel of the ultra-thin metallic sheet’s luster.
Daniel helped him into the sheet, and at once, it clung to the shape of his body. Across his chest, two illuminated bands, one blue and one red, wavered to find their angle to the floor. Once aligned, the colored bands locked in their horizontal place and glowed.
“This suit counters the effects of your dark magnetocytes,” Daniel said. “For some reason, they changed when you received your booster spray, and now they can’t ground you with the ship.”
Pace shuddered as his body attuned to the axis of the room. He could stand without holding on. His dizziness receded. He closed his eyes, lifted his chin, and went back on his heels. He didn’t fall. He stood grand. “Thank you,” he said, which was more than Daniel asked.
Daniel led Pace on the stage to the straps of a gyroscope apparatus. In no time, the 100-rpm gyroscope didn’t spin too fast for his suited body, but too slow. He kept overshooting his marks in his motion.
Daniel ratcheted up the speed. “On a stable planet, you’ll race on the fields of champions. You’ll run faster, lighter than anyone else,” Daniel said, basking in Pace’s acceptance. “You’re too quick. Fine-tune yourself. Do a little less. Remember, sometimes less is more.”
Pace laughed as he spun. “If less is more, is nothing perfect?”
“Clever. But, no, nothing is perfect,” Daniel said. “And neither are we. We all have to remember who we were. Now, just focus on the motion.” He pushed his cart and moved on.
As rapid as Pace could spin, Tenden endured in his static stress apparatus. His arms and upper chest buffeted against pincers weighted with resistance. A color-coded strain gauge rose into the warnings of yellow.
“You, my friend,” Daniel said as he stopped. “Your arms have nothing to do with magnets, qubits, or cells in your ears. In fact, you’re not even really that strong. You’re just a pure and simple physical deformity of nature.”
Tenden released the pincers. They crashed with a sound that stopped the room. His pride shriveled within the arms of his station.
Then Daniel leaned in with a gentle derogatory smile that struck Tenden to his core. “Tell me, now, do you understand?”
Tenden lamented the stares of the others. No one could take or belittle his strength. His power was his own. He stood from the pincers and said, “I am different, but not in the same way as them. But that’s what makes me stronger. And I could blast you all.”
He jumped back into the pincers and heaved. The needle of the gauge shoved straight through to red. He felt the burn. He dropped the mass from the pain his tendons endured. He stepped off his bench and held his sore arms crossed at his front.
“There now, was that so hard?” Daniel asked.
Daniel gestured up to Ceeborn at the rim of the tank. It was time for him to get in. Ceeborn treaded a moment, accepted the remnants of once-happy faces, and then reached onto the platform for a weighted bag. With the bag in his hand, he settled beneath the surface of the water and secured himself into a chair at the bottom where he stayed and draped the weight over his legs. A trickle of air rose from his lips as he breathed with the aid of respirocytes infused in his blood.
A thin cloud of air bubbles rose to the surface, escaping from the outer layer of his clothes. And he stayed there; familiar with the bottom of the cylindrical water tank in his secluded perch at the front of the classroom, and watched over the boys in their seats.
No sooner did he raise his hand to his neck and close his eyes to rest when a shudder rocked the room and its stage. The floor beneath them rolled in a jarring wave. Daniel’s cart spilled. The balls from Spud’s wall popped from their holds and scattered across the floor.
Ceeborn kicked himself back up to the platform, swung his legs over the rim of the tank, and leapt down to the quaking room.
Daniel grabbed him by the arm. “Stop. Where are you going to go?”
“This ship is dying. I can taste it,” Ceeborn said as he pulled his arm free. “Something happened, and no one can do anything to fix it.”
The aftershocks were worse. There was nowhere safe to hold.
The colored stripes of Pace’s suit found their horizontal for his body, but he went down to all fours to be sure. They all stared blindly with the same unease at the buckling of the walls that secreted dying black spores. The classroom door was left open.
“It’s dying,” Ceeborn said. “All of us are, or we will be soon enough.”
“No. I fixed you. I fixed you to live, to be better than me.”
Daniel kneeled with opened arms as the floor shook worse, but Ceeborn fell his way through to the door.
“Tell me,” Daniel said, “Where are you going to run?”
“To her,” Ceeborn declared, “To Meg. She’s scared. And no one should have to die alone.” Then, with a release of the door, he was gone.
Daniel turned wide-eyed back to the boys on the floor. He had nowhere else to go. He looked to Tenden and Spud and urged them with a single word, and they took it. “Go for him now. Run.”
*
Ceeborn ran over the dead and overgrown front grounds of his terraced home. Tenden and Spud followed close behind. Daniel stayed back at the base of the building with Pace at his side.
The crusted foothill had once been flowing sap, a healthy sign of the ship’s continued growth, but was now just a slow-moving force destroying the foundation of the old terraced building. Ceeborn ducked beneath the ends of the orange pipes that descended from the rear bulkhead, and climbed over the twisted roots that staved off the gully’s erosion from its rising level of water.
“How are you going to find her?” Spud yelled ahead to Ceeborn as they ran for the gully.
Tenden wore Ceeborn’s fire-red hoodie. It was tight, but it fit. He ran with his arms in their natural position forward, flexed at his elbows, and both hands in the hoodie’s front pocket. He held on tight to the rivulus case and ran with a solemn oath projected forward from his eyes. Nothing was going to get through him in protection of this precious soul.
“I know where she’ll be,” Ceeborn said.
Gerald Aiden was ahead, balanced atop a berm to the gully, with an arc-welding torch. He sweated to cauterize a hole in the descending orange pipe. His patch redirected the froth that overfilled the collection tanks at the bottom of the gully. He bemoaned the slush at his feet, and with a hopeless burst of the pipe, he quit his efforts and limped off the berm. He leaned against the fence to the rotting bridge, the direct crossing from their terraced building’s hill to a door in the membrane screen on the other side of the gully. He lowered his arc flame as the pipe’s wound spread. He might have stopped the spread of the froth across the bridge for a while, but it would still seep down into the gully, a circulation channel that could send the whole body of the ship into septic shock.
As Ceeborn arrived, with Tenden and Spud behind, Gerald Ai
den let them pass through a hole in his fence, not to cross the putrefied bridge, but to roll down into the awful gully. Ceeborn slipped down the bank first, followed by Tenden and Spud, and looked back at his decrepit home.
Aiden stood on its side of the fence and waved him to go on. “You go!” Aiden cried. He was gripped by an unshakable sadness. “You run and make us all free. You run for me, you run for my son!”
Ceeborn looked back up to the height of the bulkhead. The creases of its flesh sweated with a sickened, glistening blackness. He shuddered to think of their instant swamping if the whole of the bulkhead gave way and the ocean tank disgorged its flood down upon them. He slid down the gully’s embankment, but its walls were eroding. Blackened clumps of mud fell from its sides and tangles of roots were exposed as their covering tissue washed away into the rising water.
They fought their way waist deep against the gully’s swell. A dust-filled ball of water rushed past. Ceeborn pressed on upstream toward the next quarter’s bridge, but the rolling waves kept pushing them back. “We have to keep going,” he said. “We can climb up to the doors.”
Spud hesitated in the rising water. A current swept him from his feet and Tenden grabbed him by the arm.
“Don’t get pulled in,” Ceeborn said as he looked up at the sweated bulkhead. “You don’t want to end up behind that wall.” But then he, too, stopped in the rising water. Spud’s facial disk curved into its own natural frown after he recovered from his water’s dunking.
The thickened water gurgled as it surged. The currents rushed out of balance, pulsing through the ship’s circulatory system. It refluxed forward in eddies and swirls, then was swallowed back down through the drains that led behind the bulkhead, then back to the tank, the torn skin over the water, and the gondola that was cut through and hung from its lasting cable.
A shudder ran down Ceeborn’s spine. The tremors and swells were not the result of the ship’s arrival or its sickness, but of the catastrophe he’d caused in the tank.
Tenden pulled himself up onto the footing of the next bridge that connected the rear bulkhead to the healthier body of the ship. He reached down to grasp Ceeborn’s hand as he climbed. Ceeborn reached down in kind for Spud. They climbed the side of the bridge together with the natural bobbing and bumping of friends familiar in a line.
On the bulkhead side of the bridge’s deck to their left was an air-tight hangar door. To their right was an equal-sized opening in the stretched, vertical membrane screen. Beyond the screen was Meg.
Ceeborn wasted no time and entered through the healthier opening into a bright warehouse of a transportation annex, and then he stopped dead in his tracks. Tenden and Spud bumped up behind him.
An industrialized Chokebot stood on its hind and middle legs. Its front body section was raised. It wielded a hose connected to a fifty-five-gallon drum. With its front claws clamped on the nozzle, the Chokebot sprayed a dump of household goods, broken building supplies, and the discarded shrubs of a garden. It held the hose with deft precision, de-printing the collection of waste from top down, dissolving it into a wilting, disintegrating glob of swirling colors. Grates in the floor allowed the pour off to drain down into an array of recycling vats.
Michael Longshore crossed the workspace, wearing the worn coveralls of a senior logistics technician, raised his goggles to his head, and circled behind the Chokebot. He entered a workstation protected from errant spray by a clear, wraparound screen. He sat back against a stone white wall. He tossed his goggles onto his desk and sighed at the growing mountain of stacked abacus beads on his wall, his count of pending product requests.
Huge stacks of crates and supplies filled the aisled shelves of a massive cargo bay at the side of his station through the double-wide doors. A passing forklift buzzed and whirled, transferring pallets according to its programmed course. The air was alive. Something big was happening. They were arriving.
Michael ran his hand through his hair, straightened his hard hat high on his brow, and steadied his mood to get back to his day. Then he saw through the clear screen of his workstation Ceeborn, Tenden, and Spud standing in awe, hiding in plain sight, each keenly aware they were in a place they were not supposed to be.
Ceeborn stepped forward through the hangar with Tenden and Spud as the Chokebot lowered the hose. It tilted its domed head, but Michael gestured for it to continue with its routine chores. It continued as instructed.
Ceeborn tried the door at the end of the hangar. It was locked. An air curtain rose from a row of perforated tiles at his feet. Michael stepped outside the clear screen of his station. He mimicked the lifting of a floor tile with his left hand, and with his right, he lowered his hand through in descent. Ceeborn lifted the D-ring of tile at his feet and slipped down with thanks into a cool, darkened vent.
He led Tenden and Spud through the tunnel, shuffling along on his back through a tight-fitting S-curve, passing beneath various points of gravel and peat, all unseen from the ground above. Tenden and Spud followed in fits of caution and awe. Then, at another narrow bend, Ceeborn dropped into a thin pool of water that met with a gust of cross-current air. He reached up and backward with his hands into a shaft. He pulled in his gut and climbed, rising at last. He pushed aside a floor grate.
He exited at the vent of the spiral garden. He knew exactly where he was.
A ground spasm sent a ripple across the leaves. Tenden and Spud stepped out, settled to the ground, and waited for his lead.
The whole feel of the semi-circular valley was different from the circular nature of the gully. The valley’s ground was definitely on a curve but the sky seemed flat across the valley’s peaks. Maybe, Ceeborn thought, if the valley was anything like the circle of the gully, the ground he was on wrapped wholly around the sky. The sky would then have to be a sheet within the rounded, tubular enclosure of the ship. If so, then his new perspective of his world would be complete, and once exposed, would surely be a sight to behold.
“Let’s go,” he said as got up from his knee and ran through the garden. Tenden and Spud trampled to follow.
He led them on the path ahead to the adobe school, then onward through the fronds to the village, and the boardwalk beyond.
“Wait up, how do you know she’ll be here?” Spud asked.
“Because I saw the bird. She must have caught it. She fed it. It’s hers.”
“What bird?” Spud asked.
Ceeborn pushed aside the vertical netting of the grand aviary cage.
Meg sat on the knee-high edge of a stone fountain beneath the hanging greenery of the cage. Koi swam in the aerated pool and hid under a blanket of floating lilies. A lizard rested on a stone and basked in the warmth of a heat lamp. Her elbows were tucked into her waist. Her hands were cupped out over her lap. She glanced up. Tenden and Spud paired off and investigated the cage’s beauty of nature.
Meg slid her thumbs from over her cradled fingers and the Prion poked its head through her grasp. Its blue beak tapped at her fingers. She picked up a silvery minnow from the wetted rock at her side and fed it to the growing sea bird.
“My mom says one day all kinds of birds and animals are going to fill these cages,” she said.
Ceeborn tilted his head back toward the vines not yet fully ingrown through the roof. Rows of water-misters triggered, and with a hiss, the nozzles rained a cloud of settling mist that kept all the greens glistening and pure. He drew in a cooled, moistened breath as his face was kissed by the touch of water. He looked back down at Meg and smiled.
“I think they’re all going to love it,” he said. “The water feels pure.”
“This isn’t the right habitat for a Prion,” she said. “They like the snowy cold. But she has nowhere else to go. And I can’t take her with me when we go down to the planet. What if that’s worse?”
He rested his palm on the surface of the water, broke his fingers through its skin, and submerged his hand to his wrist. The koi scattered for cover. His gaze fixed on his face in the pool. He swi
rled his hand through the water below.
“Are the patrols still after you?” she asked.
He pulled his hand from the water with a bone-white lily and offered it to her with the twist of a grin. “Probably. I got this for you.”
“No, you didn’t,” she said.
“It’s a flower from the sea. Get it?” he said. “A flower from the Cee. Cee—born.”
“Yeah, I get it.”
“Why don’t you let the bird stay here? And you come with us. We’re getting off this ship.”
She held the bird still in the cup of her hands and stroked its beak with the edge of her finger.
“Where’s Robin?” he asked.
Meg opened her hands and let loose the Prion. It flew up to the woven branches at the top of the aviary. “She went to find you,” she said.
“Yeah, it could live in here,” Spud shouted with a wide-jowled smile as he watched the Prion settle on a branch and shake its feathers beneath a mist.
Ceeborn looked into Meg’s eyes. She was more than troubled. She was afraid.
“What happened to your neck?” she asked.
“I got stung. But it’s not getting better. I think the water makes it worse.”
“My mom can see you.”
“We just came from my dad’s if that’s where she went. We’ll never make it that way. The water is rising somehow. I think the tank might be emptying into the ship.”
“Then you really want to get out of here?” she asked and stood.
Tenden and Spud turned and waited for his answer.
“Are you really ready to leave this ship behind?” she asked. “Even if every part of it is destroyed?”
The ship’s tremors returned and the water of the lily fountain vibrated into nightmarish rings. Meg covered her hand over her heart and breathed.
“This ship is dying,” Ceeborn said. “We don’t have a choice anymore.”