After Mind

by Spencer Wolf

  The glandular fountains along the tributary hills disgorged their water. They were no longer able keep up with the changing pressure. The rivers lifted in their channels, then broke into globular form.

  Ceeborn and Meg got up. They were breathless, staring over the vast open atrium of the conjoined and inverted valleys.

  “Is that the world?” Tenden asked as he stood, gasping.

  “I’ve never seen it like this,” Meg said.

  The two fast Chokebots jumped from the upper rails to the screen and corkscrewed in a coordinated split around the axle, descending in ambush upon Ceeborn, Meg, Tenden, and Spud from above.

  The lead Chokebot formed a divide with Ceeborn and Meg to the front and Tenden and Spud to the rear. The second Chokebot took its position end-to-end with the lead. It faced the weaker Tenden and Spud.

  The third Chokebot that had injured Tenden stalked his slower, sickened steps from behind.

  Ceeborn and Meg looked ahead toward the gully. The screen was intact. Tenden and Spud looked back, rips in the sky tube were opening behind them.

  “Don’t run,” Ceeborn said. “Don’t move. They’ll chase you.”

  Tenden’s eyes were glassy and teared from his pain. Ceeborn and Meg had the clearer run ahead to freedom. Tenden took a step forward toward the Chokebot guarding his front. The leader facing Ceeborn immediately turned and faced Tenden. He squared off with the two, his arms hanging limp at his front.

  “Tenden, don’t!” Ceeborn said and charged forward. His first Chokebot spun back around and reared.

  “Go on, jump me,” Tenden cried to his guard. “You understand!”

  Two more Chokebots scurried down the rails to the alerted trouble along the tube. They descended on the screen and reinforced the back-to-back two as a quad: two faced Ceeborn and Meg, two against Tenden and Spud. Tenden turned in silence as they counted. In total there were five Chokebots in the pack, including the patrol in the rear that tore the strength of his arms.

  Ceeborn’s Chokebot guard in the quad raised its stinger and clawed its way forward. Its dome screen was a bold red of warning that scrolled, Leader. No. Run.

  “Tenden, go around!” Ceeborn said as his guard crouched for its pounce.

  Spud shuffled to the side, but his Chokebot followed his movement. He froze in fear.

  Tenden taunted in closer to the pack. “No, you two run. I can bash them all.”

  Meg backed away. She pulled Ceeborn by his arm.

  The four Chokebots reared, their targets tracked.

  “Dammit, Tenden, run!” Ceeborn said as the Chokebots crouched from their middle legs to spring in their jumps.

  “No, you run!” Tenden lunged forward, flexed his arms to his front, lifted his chest high and mighty and roared, “I am a nail! And I—”

  The four Chokebots leapt and Tenden took the hit head on. Spud was second. Meg was third to go down in their mêlée.

  Ceeborn counted only a moment’s breath as his Chokebot leapt through the air. Its dome neared his face to within the stench of its body’s char and he rolled away from beneath its fall to the screen. He dodged and it missed.

  Meg and Spud were choked still and screamed.

  Tenden writhed. He rolled on the ground before his Chokebot could lock in its frame. He slipped his weight onto his hip, muscled a roll, and twisted his waist and ankles free from the grip of the claws. He bucked to his hands and knees and flipped the Chokebot from his back. It grabbed him and he rode it belly up into a fall. They landed together by Spud in a crush.

  The first patrol rushed in and grabbed hold of Tenden’s ankles with its claws. It signaled with frantic speed to the lead Chokebot circling Ceeborn after its missed attack. The patrol brought its dome to within a breath of Tenden’s face and tilted its head in a flash of aqua, scrolling the impossible word, Calm.

  Tenden flexed his body. He rose like a beast breaking its shackles. The lead Chokebot rushed from Ceeborn and leapt upon Tenden’s mass. The combined force of Tenden, Spud, their two locked Chokebots, the patrol, and now the leader landing hard, was too much for the sky screen to bear.

  The screen ripped wide open beneath them. Spud screamed for Tenden’s hand as they fell en masse through the sky. The four Chokebots flailed as they fell. Tenden and Spud fell into a swath of the screen, both wrapped into a torn piece of the flickering sky. Together they descended to the ground, like two freed angels who didn’t need wings to fly.

  Ceeborn rolled away from the edge of the hole in the tube. He saw them all fall. He thought he saw Tenden and Spud move on the ground on their own, or so he thought it would be best to think that they did.

  “Cee, Help!” Meg cried beneath the last remaining Chokebot. It stayed locked, but its dome was held askew toward the hole in the sky tube. It clicked out a higher pitch, but received no reply in return.

  Ceeborn rose, enraged. He grabbed the edge of the sky-screen along its tear. He ran toward the Chokebot on Meg, ripping the screen forward as he charged. In one swift movement, he pounced and wrapped the screen like a plastic bag around the clear dome of the demon. He raised his knee and slammed a kick down upon its bulbous dome. Over and again, he drove his foot down and through, shattering the dome to its lifeless end. Revenge trumped grief, but it could bring no one back from their fall. He had lost his friends, and these pipe-walking demons would pay.

  “Stop,” Meg said from beneath the crushed dome, protecting her face with her hands. “Stop. It already let go.”

  Ceeborn fell to his knees on the tube’s screen.

  Meg crawled out from under the Chokebot’s stilled frame. She found Ceeborn’s eyes with hers. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and met her forehead to his.

  “It’s all my fault. I brought us up here,” she said.

  “No, I did,” he said as he pulled her arm from his neck. “It was me who brought us this far. Not you.”

  She managed a smile if he’d have it. “I saw you from up here,” she said. “Up ahead, at the end.”

  Blackened water oozed and geysers shot from the 256 sections throughout the embattled body of the ship around them. In pure binary form, one section turned off with the ooze, while another came on with its spray; as if the ship were desperately trying to regulate its health in crisis, recalculate its settings for life.

  “Come on,” he said, taking her hand as he stood. “It’s time to get off this ship.”

  The sky screen ahead crossed an expansion joint and the screen curved away from beneath them, sheered all the way down to the bank of the gully.

  “Is this where you were when you saw me?” he asked.

  “We’re close, you’ll see,” she said as the entire ship wobbled anew from the rotation of the water in the tank, gyrating on its long, linear axis around a watery node.

  The massive, blue ring torus hovered around their end of the axle. They passed beneath the center of its humming blue mesh that floated in its delicate balance.

  “I once dreamed I was a bio-machine with a brain like this, one a thousand times more powerful than my own,” he said as the world twisted and unhinged. “But now I think bio-machines only exist in nightmares.”

  “We’re here,” she said as she stopped at a double-wide door to the bulbous room at the end of the axle.

  “I’ve seen the outside of this room from below,” he said. “What is it?”

  “A room at the end of the sky where no one should ever have to go alone. And you won’t.”

  “I’m ready. Let’s go in.”

  She slid aside the door and led him into a gloriously bright chamber. It was round.

  He stepped first through the door, and she followed him in. Then she turned back around toward the fall of the world she knew, and with a straight-armed heave, shut tight the doors at the end of the sky.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I CAN’T SAVE YOU ALL

  CEEBORN AND MEG stepped into the glowing chamber around the axle that was adjoined to the center point of the gully’s rear bul
khead. The axle with its eight long rails passed above their heads and through the chilled air to the end of the spherical room. But more spectacular were the rows of silent, rectangular cabinets that were attached at their ends and stood out from the rails like the spokes of a wheel.

  Around the walls of the sphere and directly beneath each hanging cabinet row was a tiled, raised floor aisle.

  He stepped up onto the aisle to his front. Alternating tiles were transparent, with a direct view over the gully swelling far below; and then from the transparent tiles in the other aisles of the sphere, the gully could be seen in its wrap-around entirety, all the way up and around to upside down. The rays of light that shone from the sphere’s outer surface over the old gully world were an inspiration.

  It was easy to count the cabinets from where Ceeborn and Meg stood, by their three groupings of five on each rail, with the addition of one extra cabinet on the rail directly above them.

  “My dad showed me once about a number system called hexadecimal that counted up to fifteen, then rolled over to the next place whenever there was an extra one. But that can’t be this. Hexadecimal had the numbers one through nine and then letters A through F to represent ten through fifteen. These cabinets are more like binary ones standing in groups of five.”

  He held his neck and arched back to see through the glass-covered top of one of the hanging cabinets. Then he became silent himself. The box contained a body, a person lost and alone in a freezer. All of the cabinets hanging in their rows had eyes that eternally pointed down through the cabinet’s cap, stuck in tearless sight over the gully’s water far below.

  Meg followed Ceeborn up onto the aisle and took his hand. She had taken him to a secluded morgue, a heaven above but also within the sky.

  He lowered his chin in despair. If he counted from the one body above him among the eight rows of fifteen around the axle, there were 120 bodies. And then there was that one extra cabinet, still empty.

  “I was brought here once before when I was little,” Meg said. “But I lived.”

  “There are only a hundred-twenty,” Ceeborn said. “Your mother said there were a hundred twenty-one people who were sick. Is it you? Your mother?”

  “No. But you know him,” she said.

  “Is it Pace?” he asked, but then recanted. “But, my father fixed him.”

  Meg only had to look up and along the rails for Ceeborn to recognize there was so much more to be counted and far worse in scope. The row with the added cabinet along the rail ended at the double-wide door.

  “Just think. Everyone had the PluralVaXine5 spray,” she said. “Everyone.”

  Ceeborn slid the double-wide door back open. The cabinet rails of the morgue were the same as the long empty others that ran down the entire central axle of the sky. There was room on the rails for hundreds or thousands more cabinets for the dead. Everyone on the ship had the spray.

  “We can warn the rest,” he said. “I’m not sick.”

  There were no more Chokebots to chase them or choke them out into calm. He reached up to the pain in his neck. He looked at his fingers: They were dry. Then he turned back to Meg beneath the long rails. “Wait. Are you sick? You can tell me—”

  “No,” she said as she shut the doors and stepped back into the morgue with a terror that stayed. “No, Ceeme, you are.”

  “No. Why would you say that? You have no idea.”

  “It doesn’t matter now, does it? We’re leaving. And without the cure, we’re all going to die on the ground. Let’s you and me just stay here together where it’s quiet, okay?”

  “No, we can’t,” he said.

  He hugged her tight and she shut her eyes beneath the hanging cabinets of the dead.

  “Remember, we saw the cure,” he said. “It worked. Your mother can make it again. I remember the bins. I can find the pieces again on the ground. They were easy, I remember. A petal from a dandelion. A wing of a beetle. A fish scale. We’ll collect the three in a vial. Your mother can make the cure. Once we get off this ship, I can save us on the ground.”

  “I used to watch you from up here,” she said as she kneeled down by a transparent tile. “I’d sit up here all by myself and watch you from up here at these windows. Now I know why. The sun never shined on your side of the ship, but you never gave up.”

  He looked down through the tile and found his orientation in the gully world. “You could see me?”

  People were scrambling far below en masse, packing across the bridge from the transportation annex. The water in the gully was a rising torrent, splashing the evacuees on the bridge’s walkway.

  Then, suddenly invigorated, he looked down through another clear tile. Gerald Aiden was out on the eroded front grounds of their crumbling, terraced hill home.

  “We have to get down there,” Ceeborn said.

  The double-wide door to the sky tube was a useless retreat. Its pathway was gone.

  The eight rails and aisles of the spherical morgue converged on a catwalk that looped the rear, end cap of the room. The cap had four doors equally spaced on the quarter turn. The door marked 1B was straight ahead of their aisle, 1A was up to their left and sideways, 1C was higher to their right, and the fourth door, 1D, was high above the axle and upside down. It was unreachable by any stretch, ladder, or climb.

  Looking out through the transparent tiles, long, throat-like shafts trunked away from the backside of the doors, attached to the gully bulkhead, and radiated in their four spoke-like directions, one to the top of his terraced building, the other three toward the bridges that crossed the gully.

  Far below, Aiden ran from the building and over the roots of the yard, rushing in limps and stumbles to reach the collapsing bridge that he sealed. Ceeborn pounded on the clear tile in a soundless rage. It was hopeless. Ceeborn sprung back up to his feet. “We’re taking the door on the right, closest to the transportation annex,” he said, pulling Meg away from her view. “It’ll get you to your father. It’s the only way you can go.”

  “What about the door straight ahead, One-B? It’s easier,” she said. “We can climb straight down to where you live.”

  “There’s no way out down there. My father, he’s trapped. We have to get to the arms. We have to get you off this ship!”

  Door 1B straight ahead clanked with a tapping from the other side.

  “There can’t be more,” he said.

  The wheel of the door didn’t spin.

  Ceeborn ran up the mesh stairs of the catwalk toward the sideways door on the right, 1C. As he climbed, he didn’t fall or slip from its incline. Meg hopped up to follow. The sensation was a most peculiar one that neither could explain. There was a fizzing feeling taken in through their hands on the railing and a tingling drawn out through their feet on the platform. The circular catwalk had a definitive upward bias ahead that became flat underfoot as it passed.

  The once-sideways door was now directly to their front and upright. He tried its wheel but it wouldn’t budge.

  Door 1B below clanked again with a pounding and then its wheel spun. The door pulled open. Michael Longshore ducked through and entered the morgue. Robin was right behind him.

  “Dad! Mom!” Meg yelled as she ran back down the catwalk and fell into her mother’s embrace.

  “You’re father is okay,” Robin said to Ceeborn. “He wants you to come back to him now.”

  Michael leapt down from the door to an aisle for a desperate view through the transparent tile in the floor. More people were jammed onto his transportation annex bridge, shoving and scrambling, falling from the bridge into the torrent of the gully.

  “The hangar doors aren’t opening!” he said. “I’ve got to get down there.”

  “We’re coming with you,” Ceeborn said.

  “No,” Michael said, “Meg, you go back with your mother. You, too, Ceeborn—the three of you. You go back down the way we came up from Madden’s place.”

  “No. We want to get off the ship,” Ceeborn said as he ran up the catwalk for
the higher door on the right to the annex. “We’ve got to get down to your bridge, through its airlock door to a craft to go down.”

  Michael pulled his way up the catwalk’s railings. “Listen to me,” he said. “Every bridge has an airlock that aligns with an arm. Yours is no different. The people at my bridge can’t get through. The shift of the ground must have put pressure on the doors. If the doors on the bulkhead aren’t perfectly aligned, they won’t open to let the people through. If I can’t get the doors open, there won’t be any craft!”

  Meg moved back down toward door 1B. “Come on, let’s go,” she said.

  “All the doors will be blocked to the arms,” Michael said. “All the people are trapped. They’ll all die up here if I can’t get the doors open.”

  The wobble of the ship sent a chilling crack down the central axle. A dozen cabinets popped from the rails and crashed out to the walls of the sphere.

  “Go with Robin. Now!” Michael said. “I have to get down there. I have to get the doors aligned and the people through.”

  Robin, Meg, and Ceeborn dashed for door 1B. Michael muscled his way up the catwalk to his higher door.

  Ceeborn and Meg dove through door 1B into its throated passageway. Robin followed them through, and once in, pushed on the door to close it. “You make it! You live!” Robin cried out to Michael.

  The structural twisting of the ship dislodged the catwalk from the wall. Michael rolled and fell headfirst back down to the aisle.

  Meg fought through Robin’s hold as Michael stumbled toward her at the door. Meg reached her arm through, lunging her hand out for his grasp. But rather than take her hand, Michael pushed her back through. He grabbed the door’s wheel from his side of the morgue and pulled.

  “Daddy!” Meg screamed.

  “Take care of your mother,” Michael said. He pulled on the door, overpowering Meg as he looked back through the morgue that was opening up to the sky.