After Mind

by Spencer Wolf

  “Michael!” Robin yelled.

  “Get to the ship!” he yelled as he pulled. “I’ll find another way down.”

  Ceeborn pushed Meg and Robin’s arms away and caught Michael by surprise at the door. “Come with us,” Ceeborn said.

  Michael braced his foot against the door’s frame for a win. “No,” he said. “You save them. I’ll save the rest.” And with both hands wrapped around the wheel of the door, Michael heaved a final pull and sealed their door 1B shut. Meg screamed.

  Darkness befell their cramped passageway and Ceeborn pictured Michael letting go of the door on the morgue’s side, turning into the chaos, and running back on his own through to the other end of what remained of the long tube of the sky. Or so Ceeborn thought, it would be best to think that he did.

  *

  Ceeborn, Meg, and Robin descended in a utility lift through the darkness of the shaft attached like a fold on the bulkhead. The gated sides of the lift scraped the ossified shaft’s walls and released its stench. The basket was large enough only for them. Light broke the darkness of the shaft, rushing through its red portholes like zeroes and its slits like flashing ones as they passed in their descent. Ceeborn braced himself on the waist-high rail in fright. As the lift jolted, skipped, and slammed on its track to the bottom, the shaft walls fissured and tank water spray blasted into the basket. Robin pressed her back against the basket’s wall and clenched the wetted handrail. She winced in her prayer not to scream.

  Meg folded herself into a corner. Ceeborn stood catty-cornered to her front, pressing his arms against the walls to her either side. The bulkhead alone could rupture and collapse them into a washed-away heap of debris. There would be nothing he could do, but he held to protect her as they descended. She looked up at him in a terror that forced her to breathe in gasps. She shook her head almost imperceptibly faint, but he saw her. She was as terrified as he was. A curl of her cheek shivered up toward a smile. It was more than enough. She loved him and it showed. And together, he smiled enough for them both.

  “So do I,” he said and she threw herself into his arms.

  They hit bottom with a jolt and bounced to settle. The lift’s door opened onto a mesh staging platform entombed in the lower end of the shaft. Ceeborn grasped the handle of a D-ring embedded in a floor panel, gave it a clockwise twist, and lifted the panel to expose a round door beneath.

  Inside, he climbed down a ladder. A hatchway in the center of the floor below was wide open. He looked back up to Meg and Robin.

  “Go through,” Robin said from above. “Michael left it open. We’re right behind you.”

  Ceeborn squeezed through the lower hatchway and his feet found the rungs of a still lower ship ladder mounted against an interior wall. He stepped down and jumped its last rung to a floor.

  It was the floor of a closet. A slop sink pressed at his back as he helped Meg down the last rungs of the ladder. The walls of the closet had the smell of a familiar rot. He opened the closet door and stepped out into a tubular hall. He was home.

  Crusted portholes lined the corridor that passed by the fetid, mossy cell where he had been chained on his earlier return. Now he had been out to Meg’s world and returned without capture. No charred, pipe-legged Chokebot would hold his neck to the floor again. The hallway’s window screens had peeled away. There was no more projection out to the blackness of space, only a misty view out over the gully, instead.

  He had grown up in the oldest part of the ship. The world that Meg knew on the other side of the wall was blinded by a healthful guise. The ship had been brought to life by veins and arteries that grew forward from his old gully world to her youngest sections, all extending along a central axis as time or resources would allow.

  He could see the bared axle of the sky through the gully windows and was filled with remorse. He should have run sooner for a cure. The rows of cabinets in the morgue would one day fill the axle all the way to the world of the young. And by the time he or Meg joined them inverted in their cabinets upon their rail, Robin’s cure, if she ever found one, would have come too late for them all.

  Daniel was in the classroom, collapsed on the stage by the still apparatus. He huddled on the floor beneath the balls of Spud’s wall, his forehead buried deep in his palms.

  “Oh, there you are, Cee,” Daniel said as he pulled a shimmering blanket higher upon his shoulders for relief from the ship’s gyrating motion. “I’m glad you’re okay.” The crinkled material compressed, but didn’t take shape as its bands of red and blue oscillated across his chest. The blanket failed to calibrate, unable to zero in on horizontal within the waves of the room.

  “Did you destroy us again?” Daniel asked. “Was it you who caused the damage in the tank? I saw the projection.”

  “It was. And I’m not afraid,” Ceeborn said as Meg entered with Robin. “This ship was doomed from the start.”

  “I worked so hard to fix everything, to fix all of us, and you destroyed it,” Daniel said.

  “I saw the morgue,” Ceeborn said as he kneeled at his father’s side. “You didn’t fix enough.”

  Daniel sat straighter. “What more do you want from me? I gave you everything I had. I can’t fix everything. What can I do? I can’t fix you all.”

  Ceeborn felt dizzy from the sting in his neck. His wound had reopened and he was bleeding. But the liquid on his fingertips was not red. The opaque tackiness between the rub of his fingers was dark ooze.

  Pace sat cross-legged by the door. The stripes of his suit were bright, pre-calibrated and balanced. His head was tipped back against the wall. His eyes were closed. He didn’t move.

  Robin knelt down at Daniel’s side. “Michael said there was a ship here.”

  “What is there left to save?” Daniel asked.

  “Us,” Ceeborn said. “You can save us.”

  Pace’s eyes stayed closed as he teetered and collapsed in a thud on the floor. Robin and Meg rushed to his aid.

  “You killed the boys, my boys that I fixed,” Daniel said to Ceeborn.

  “I am your boy that you fixed.”

  Daniel stared at him, and then breathed faster and fuller. He reached out his hand to Ceeborn’s face, but didn’t touch. He was the son that he knew, as if from an angle, but older.

  “Michael said there’s a ship here,” Robin said, louder, from Pace’s side. “Where is it?”

  Daniel staggered up to his feet, still staring wide-eyed at his boy. He brushed off the protective blanket from his body to the floor and welled up with pride. “This is the old ship.” Then he rushed and grabbed Pace up by the collar to his feet and dragged him stumbling for the door. He rallied. “And man oh man, we’re playing now!”

  Daniel’s office, his control room, had stayed inoculated against the decay. Its walls were pure. The screen above his desk with its images of muddled shores and mountain peaks wiped away to reveal a window’s view over the dying gully below. Ceeborn, Meg, Robin, and Pace crowded in. A rolling grill door partitioned the back of the room from Daniel’s desk area.

  “Crank the handle clockwise,” he said as Pace stood dazed over the hand crank to the door. Robin helped Pace’s hands turn quicker on the crank. The grill door passed its locking mark, and four heavy trundle seats fell from the wall. The seats squeezed between stacks of boxes and crates.

  Plumes of thickened water burst from the gully and drenched the office’s window with spray. Ceeborn threw his palms against the glass and pressed his forehead for a view over the ground below. Gerald Aiden was out on the front erosion fighting the rising, boiling surf.

  “If the water takes me away, go on without me,” Ceeborn said as turned from the window and rushed for the door.

  “No,” Meg said. “Don’t! You can’t go back out there.”

  “He’ll never make it,” Robin said from the window.

  Daniel grabbed Ceeborn by the arm and stopped him for a look at his red streaked neck. “Go, but go fast,” Daniel said. Ceeborn hesitated and felt his welted neck
with his hand. “Go!” Daniel said.

  As Ceeborn ran from the office control room, Daniel turned for a solemn look at Robin. “There’s a health kit in one of those boxes. See if there’s something in there for his neck. It’s bad and I think he’s getting worse,” he said.

  Robin brushed aside the curios on top of a box in the stack and then smashed the box open on the floor.

  Ceeborn ran from the opened hangar bay doors in the lower recess between the left and right silos of his terraced building shaped like an H. The front yard was a tangled upheaval of roots and debris.

  Aiden desperately stumbled and pawed his way toward the gully. The collection tanks had overflowed with froth and the entire current was polluted. The bridge across the gully had fallen, the shoreline was collapsing. He was trapped.

  “We’re closing the doors,” Ceeborn said. “We’re going down!”

  “Hold the shuttle,” Aiden said as he dug and threw away debris for a way to cross the gully. “I’ve got to find him.”

  Trees and bombs of sod fell, rejected from the other side of the ship.

  “Get back to your father!” Aiden said without turning back as he dug himself in deeper.

  Out in the collapsing hull, pinpricks of light shone through a burning outer skin. Five Chokebots rushed toward the ulcerated flesh. They climbed the walls with their six meager pincers and jumped to contain the damage like sutures on a stretching wound. One Chokebot sounded with the high-pitched cry of a mammal in distress. Another held onto the splitting outer skin, then squealed in a call to the others as its demise became assured.

  “Can you hear them?” Ceeborn asked as Aiden threw another heap of sky-screen panels aside. “They’re calling to each other. They’re failing.”

  “They’re doing their job. They’re programmed. Nothing more. We mean nothing to them. They’re pipes. Machines. Let them go!” Aiden said.

  The outer wall succumbed to pressure. A Chokebot was ripped out into the scorching flames of the ship’s atmospheric entry. The four who witnessed the loss of one of their own bleated as the ulcerated walls ripped open. Their own death was certain. They pulled their end-of-life triggers and became silent. They were plucked in their stillness through the openings in the outer hull.

  The corona of a sun crested through the opened shell. Bursts of air drew the membranes farther apart as Aiden balanced on his hobbled leg halfway across the debris and he kept trying even though he could never make it the rest of the way.

  “Where are you going?” Ceeborn yelled. “Come back!”

  “My boy!” Aiden cried. His voice was blown and hoarsened. “I’ve got to find my boy! He fell.” Aiden’s voice split into ruin. “I saw him fall from the sky. He bounced when he hit the ground. He was moving. I’ve got to find my boy.”

  The water rose above what was left of the berm. The current spread out over the yard and swirled at Ceeborn’s feet.

  Meg ran out of the hangar doors. “Cee, come back,” she yelled. “We’re going, now.”

  Aiden fell his way across the currents, lifting and throwing himself over the far side of the gully.

  Ceeborn ran back to Meg and inside. She closed the hangar doors within the bottom hollow of the building’s H.

  As Daniel’s original ship vibrated in its berth, its H-winged form cracked away from the hill, the encrusted folds of the bulkhead, and its descending orange pipes.

  Ceeborn threw himself back against the window screen in Daniel’s upper office control room. The whole body of the greater ship was aglow. Aiden disappeared into the opening light of its hull. He held up his forearms and curled away from the wide open sky as it flooded the ship’s body with light and took him in whole.

  The massive blue torus ring collapsed onto its axle. The axle twisted loose from its ball and socket. In a horrible screech, the axle spine of the ship broke in two and fell toward a smothering crash on the meat fields below.

  Meg cried out in vain as she watched its fall, “Daddy!”

  Pierced and disjointed around them, the cavernous whole of the ship heaved in a gaping breath from death.

  Ceeborn and Meg buckled themselves into their trundle seats as Daniel pounded at the dysfunction of his screens. The window was still barely over the gully. Pace rocked on the floor with his knees to his chest. A health kit from a box was open on the floor beside him.

  Robin dabbed a spot of cream from the kit onto Ceeborn’s neck with her fingers, battling the ship’s heavy vibrations.

  “Looks like you had some kind of reaction,” Robin said.

  “I should have gone with you,” Pace said. “Maybe I could have saved my friends. Or you wouldn’t have killed them.”

  Robin took an injector pen from the old-fashioned kit. Ceeborn flinched. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not a spray. You’ll be fine.”

  Meg sat in her seat. She murmured to calm herself in their hellish descent. “We’ve arrived and our planet is going around a star.”

  Robin injected the anti-venom pen into Ceeborn’s sting, and then finished his neck with a light gauze pad. “It’s bad. But it should heal,” she said as she reached back for the box.

  “Going around a star is what’s going to make a year now instead of timing the ship travelling straight,” Meg said with her hand over her pounding heart. “We learned that in class.”

  Robin took a cinch sack from the box and pulled out a wrinkled, forest green Windbreaker. She covered it over Ceeborn’s shoulders.

  “I know, honey, I know,” Robin said with a steady hand on Meg’s cheek. She quieted them both for their arrival, and then buckled herself into her seat.

  Old codes and images on Daniel’s forward display finally aligned to his control. The gully was a vision of hell, but the ship’s external camera to the atmosphere was better, and Daniel switched the visuals of his screen to show it. The arch of a planet, enormous and rotating, finally came into frame.

  It was beautifully blue. It had marbled white clouds. It had continents and whole oceans of water. It had perfect seascapes waiting for a swimmer like Ceeborn.

  It was the blue crest of Earth.

  Their whole terraced building was itself a massive descent craft and it fought to separate from what was left of the gyrating ship, smashing into its berth in the gully. In one jolting wave, the Earthscape was lost on their screen, but then returned with a spark.

  On the screen, they saw escape pods and crafts ejecting out of the bays of the long, forced-back arms of the greater ship. Not orderly, but wildly shot. Some propelled hopelessly, streaking into unrecoverable space. Others burned on entry. They fell unsheathed through the rising friction of the atmosphere with ablative shields depleted. Then hundreds released en masse, spitting out from the tentacle doors of the seven other arms in a burning mist of hope. Only a few would survive.

  Pace choked up a cough as he climbed into the seat by Robin. He drew in a deep breath to bulk up his chest. They all fought to hold their own fear.

  The ship buffeted in a dead fall from orbit, careening in the worst possible turbulence. The entire dying ship corkscrewed with its arms split forward and flung back through the atmosphere. The outer mantle of the ship flared into a disintegrating sail and burned off in the hellish, sky-streaking inferno. Being eaten alive by the savagery of flames called for the pull of a trigger, but the ship was already in its dead fall.

  Their descent craft could not break free from the enormous forces of the fall and was trapped within the gully of the ship. Meg cried out in horror, “We’re not supposed to be falling. The practice didn’t say we’d be falling!”

  Life with water was gone; only fire remained. Ceeborn and Meg were trapped in their corner of the craft. Together, they would burn alive.

  North America passed, then the Pacific Ocean below. Daniel ripped a circuit panel from his wall. He looked back at Ceeborn, all of their fright, then he hammer-fisted an Emergency Explosives Trigger.

  A pressure wave blew the gully wide open. Thrusters expl
oded from the top of the craft. White-hot plasma swept the gully grounds, vaporizing remnant pools of water, and splitting the ship in two at its neckline. Their craft was freed.

  They ejected, slotted out from between the gully bulkhead and the flaming, barrel-chested ship. The windows of their craft faced away from the atmospheric fire. They fell over the ocean, blind to their fate, as landing skids on the bottom of their craft extended and—

  A whoomp was all they heard before a flash of light engulfed their screen. They felt the punch of a shock wave and passed to black. Away in the greater ship, the gully bulkhead had finally given way, and dust-thickened water was ignited by a boost of the accelerator module. An electromagnetic aurora encircled and dissipated upon the whole of the Earth.

  Escape pods streaked in, some gained control, many not.

  Their automated descent craft slowed over the ocean. It passed a continental landfall and descended toward the southeastern coastline of an island.

  Pods continued to crash down all along the beach and coastline. Some landed safely, others scorched through the sky as uncontrolled meteors upon a quiet city.

  Their landing descent craft moored in the River Derwent, just off the eastern shore of the Lower Sandy Bay on the outskirts of Hobart. Its pressurized release valves opened. Splashes of filtered, thickened water burst from the craft’s circulatory system into the river below.

  Ceeborn awoke in his seat, as did Meg, Daniel, Robin, and Pace. The windows of Daniel’s screens looked down over the beach and out along the shoreline. Water flushed from beneath the craft’s hull. The craft’s airlock doors opened into the gentle lapping waves on the beach.

  Ceeborn stepped out with a squint. He rubbed his hand over the gauze on his neck. He paused at the doorway, seduced by a first, deep breath of fresh, natural air. It was a pristine stretch of beach.

  There were no people to greet him as he moved onto the shore. All modern buildings existed in the city beyond the sand, but no faces filled their empty streets.

  Logistic officers disembarked from their own battered crafts for an impending exodus from ships to a beachhead. Larger and disparate crafts and their respective hangar doors opened as rows of 3D printed vehicles prepared to roll off and make their way onto land.