The Engineer ReConditioned

by Neal Asher

  “Couple of times. Chopped him up last time and spread him all over the island. Reckon it took him a century or two to pull himself together.”

  “Someone tried burning once,” said Boris. “Wouldn’t burn.”

  The conversation went completely over Erlin’s head. Beyond the putrephallus the hill rose up into a gentle pimple in the centre of the island. Ambel unshouldered his buss and began walking up the slope, his head darting from side to side. Definitely bluer, thought Erlin. Then she looked upslope just as the nightmare loomed into view and came screaming and giggling down towards them, something flaccid, and which she had no wish to identify, held in its long fingers. It was like a man who had been put on a rack for a hundred years, every joint and muscle stretched out impossibly. It was huge blue and spidery and came capering down the hill as if to welcome them. Ambel’s blunderbuss boomed and a great cloud of smoke wafted away. The Skinner went, “Oh!” and fell on its back.

  “Quick!” shouted Ambel, drawing his knife. Boris did likewise and followed him. They reached the Skinner just as it sat upright, reached round behind itself, and threadled its long hand through the hole Ambel had made in its chest. Ambel and Boris skidded to a halt.

  “Shit!”

  “Bugger!”

  Erlin ran past them and swiped with her laser scalpel. The Skinner’s long head thudded on the ground and looked at her accusingly. She laughed a little crazily and proceeded to cut the rest of the monster into pieces.

  “That’s the ticket!” bellowed Ambel, and proceeded to pick up bits and hurl them in every direction. Boris joined him and soon the Skinner was scattered all over the hillside and in the jungle below, barring the head that Ambel held onto, and the flaccid thing it had been carrying. Erlin saw it direct for the first time and immediately threw up.

  “Oh God! Peck!”

  It was Peck, outwardly.

  Ambel looked at Boris and nodded towards the skin. Boris picked it up and shook it, then turned it around and peered at the split from the circle cut around the anus to the one cut around the mouth.

  “He’s gonna be a bit cranky for a while,” said Boris.

  Ambel nodded. Erlin turned away. They had both gone mad, she had to get help for them. When she turned back they were walking back up the hill. She quickly followed.

  She had nothing left to throw up when she followed them into the basin in the top of the hill. She just retched a little. The rest of Peck was jammed between two rocks, writhing about and making horrible noises. Erlin followed them down and watched in horror as they dragged him down and dropped him on the ground. All his muscles she could see, all his veins. His lidless eye-balls glared up at the sky. She advanced with her laser switched on. It was the only merciful thing to do.

  “No!” Ambel knocked the laser from her hand. “Don’t you think he’s got enough problems? Find his clothes.”

  Erlin dropped to her knees, not sure if she wanted to cry or laugh. No, this was not happening…but it was. When she looked up, Ambel and Boris were putting Peck’s skin back on him, tugging the wrinkles up his legs and pressing the air bubbles out…and Peck was helping them.

  * * * *

  As she watched Peck climb unsteadily into the boat she said to Ambel, “What are you going to do with the head?”

  Ambel held the Skinner’s head up in one hand.

  “I’ll put it in a box, then he’ll never be able to pull himself together properly.”

  Erlin had lost all her doubt. Of course, why not? She wondered about the report she must make. A nice scientific dissertation about how the leech fibre kept everything alive so that the leeches would have more prey to feed on, that was fine, but what about the Skinner? How would she tell them what the fibre had turned Spatterjay Hoop into, and what happened to humans too-long deprived of the Earth proteins that kept the fibres in abeyance? No, she would move her research in another direction—something about the leech symbiosis with the pear-trunk trees. She was relieved, as they came to the ship, to see a couple of sails circling above it. Both Boris and Ambel were now a much darker shade of blue, and Ambel seemed to be getting taller. Her own blueness was hidden by the natural colour of her skin, though Ambel had told her she had a pretty blue-white circle in the middle of her back.

  ABOUT “JABLE SHARKS”

  Here’s the story I did read in that book shop, and with grim relish over the gory bits. It was first published in Storycellar (issue 5, ’95), and continues the nautical theme of the previous story but ventures to that place I like to visit, and will be visiting some more in the collection, the regressed colony. This is an alien world, the creatures tell you that, and the reference to ‘ship metal’ should tell you something else. Here you will also find a monster that had its inception in the fantasy trilogy gathering dust in my attic. One day I must pull that all down, blow off the dust, and write again about the fage…

  JABLE SHARKS

  The ship: three masts stitched across the horizon, black against the lemon sky. The hull is a cliff of wood topped with rails supported by tallow urns. Carvings everywhere. Wood and bone knitted together, interlaced, cunningly crafted. Along its sides are longboats braced like a beetle’s wing cases. It seems deformed—top heavy. In the rigging are five crew, two hanging idle and one in the crow’s nest, the twins reefing a sail. Below the deck are five more: three sleeping, the Barrelman, and Cook. On the deck to make things even are five others, for the moment.

  Bosun Hinks handlines for green mackerel and the Captain sits in drugged stupor. Hinks pays him no mind. It is a fear the Captain has never named that drives him to the smoke, but he is not as bad as some, better than most, and only gives orders when the sharks are in. The rest of the time Hinks has charge. From his handline he now glances to Cheyne and Pallister who are sharpening the great knives ready for the next jable run. These harpoons are made of manbone and laminated shark skin. One of them is tipped with rare hull-metal, but it is never used during a run, being too valuable to lose.

  “Ketra! Ketra!”

  Hinks ties his handline to the rail and stares to where Chaff lies with arm stumps leaking into his bedding and the smell of his dying sickening the air. Tiredly Hinks climbs to his feet and walks over to the dying man. Cheyne is quickly with him.

  “Chaff…Chaff, it’s Hinks.” He squats down beside the man and touches a palm to sweat-soaked hair.

  “Chaff.”

  Behind him Cheyne pulls a long bronze-edged stiletto from his sash and waits.

  “Chaff, speak to me, please.”

  “He would choose death.”

  It is Pallister who speaks, Second Knife now that Chaff is dying.

  “I would choose death and I would expect my friends and shipmates to release me, even had I no tongue to ask it.”

  He looks with especial concern to Cheyne. Cheyne has no tongue.

  “Ketra! Ketra!”

  Hinks glances to the Captain. “The Captain says no knife until he asks for it. By the Book. By the book.”

  All three of them regard the large black book resting next to the Captain’s hooka. The book he always has with him but never seems to read. They are aware of its presence, its weight, that it is the source of the fear that drives the Captain to his choice of oblivion. They listen to the creak of his chair as he rocks slowly back and forth puffing the smoke into the air.

  “He will not see now,” says Pallister.

  They observe the reddened eyes fixing on the horizon as the rocking of the chair gradually comes to counter that of the ship. The glow of the gauze-wrapped wad of dreamfish waxes and wanes like the beating of a sick heart. Hinks turns from the Captain to the two knifemen.

  “He asked us then. You will back me on this.”

  Pallister nods and glances at Cheyne who nods also. Cheyne tests the point of his stiletto with a callused thumb. A bead of blood falls to the waxed deck. Above; stillness. The one in the crow’s nest watches. The four who are closer pretend concerns elsewhere. It is a hot and sultry day with no
t a breath of wind. There is little need for them to be up, but there the air is fresher in the rigging and the responsibility is nil.

  “I cannot order you, Cheyne.”

  Cheyne nods, then steps past to stoop down next to Chaff. Pallister and Hinks stand between him and the Captain. There is a crunch as of a vegetable being segmented. There is the spastic kicking of legs, then stillness. Chaff no longer suffers.

  * * * *

  “Man born of Earth who strives upon this sea…”

  The prayers are sincere and the sermon long and boring for the crew. The Captain assuages the guilt he feels at missing Chaff’s death by reading the man’s last rights. What remains of Chaff has been stitched into an old sailcloth and weighted with lumps of salt. Hinks watches it slide into the sea, a small splash, nothing really. Below decks the Barrelman cuts ligaments and drops Chaff’s bones into the maggot barrel. As is the way, his bones will be fashioned into a great knife along with the skin of the jable shark his other remains will summon. The shark is not long in coming.

  “Fin. Fin. Fin.”

  Pallister thumps the haft of his great knife against the deck. The chant is taken up by the rest of the crew as a fin a yard high slices their slow wake and takes the cloth-wrapped bloody morsel before the salt can take it right down. It is bad luck, but they are used to that.

  “Fin. Fin. Fin.”

  “Second Boat!” yells the Captain, and the windlasses are manned. With a clatter of bone ratchets the boat folds out level. The twins leap aboard to stow the coils of rope and floats. They are not allowed to touch Pallister’s barbs for he believes it is bad luck for them to be handled by women. Cheyne is not so superstitious and hands his down. As the boat is loaded the Barrelman comes out on deck and the chant becomes quieter in deference to him. He has the black skin that marked him for his position from birth, for only by the hands of those born of the dark may the dead be handled before their last passage into it. His face and shaven skull are dyed white and his eyes are blue. All the crew fear and love him.

  Six crew board the longboat: the twins, Pallister and Cheyne, Hinks and the Captain. The Barrelman has charge of the ship, but then, he always has had charge.

  “Lower away!”

  The ratchets clatter again and the boat drops to the sea. As it hits the surface the fin turns and moves in. Who is hunting whom? Hinks wonders as four scapula oars dig into the water and shoot the boat forward.

  “It comes!” The Captain clutches a wax-proofed copy of the book to his chest as he shouts. “First knife!”

  Cheyne stands with a great knife ready. Behind the blade he has mounted one of the detachable barbs from which a rope coils to a sea-cork float. The sunlight glints on the waves and the jable shark approaches in a tide of golden bands. They can all see its dead button eyes.

  “Steady.” The Captain is firm. Cheyne is firm. The shark’s expression is all tooth-bone and flesh-ripping horror.

  “Now!” The Captain, a second after Cheyne has made his cut.

  The boat is rocked at the edge of a strike. The fin clips an oar as it is raised. The rope thrums as it goes out and the float hits the water with a dull flat smack. Cheyne stands with his knife emptied of its barb and the shark paints a red line from behind its right eye, a curving line, as it turns.

  “Second knife!”

  Pallister has his place and is ready. Soon two lines of blood flee the boat, turn, return, three lines then four, until at last the shark has had enough and tries to dive.

  “Row, boys, row!”

  They pursue the bobbing and jerking floats that reflect the shark’s struggles. Down below; a cloud of blood at the nexus of four taut ropes. Then out of the cloud the toothed horror comes again, slowed and tangled. Cheyne’s unbarbed cut is true and the great knife goes in behind the shark’s head and severs its cartilaginous spine. The shark is held on the surface in the tangle of ropes and floats, and the blood spreads.

  * * * *

  “Heave, boys, heave!”

  The Captain holds the Book in his hand, the proper book, the ship’s book. One of the twins mutters something filthy about his continual use of ‘boys’. There was no proof to the rumour, though.

  By slow increments and ratcheting clicks they hoist the jable shark from the sea using the same windlasses used to lower the boat. The weight heels the ship over and bloody water rains down its side. No fins are in sight, but there is time yet. Hinks hauls with the crew. Two sharks snapping at a dead one on the side of a ship is enough to pull that ship over. He knows. He has seen. In the long boat Cheyne and Pallister keep ready to drive sharks away, but only adapted squid swarm around the ship. Even so, they will not be washing their bloody hands in the water as Chaff did.

  The white water of an approaching fin is seen as they lower the corpse onto the deck and open the blood drains. Cheyne and Pallister soon attach lines to the boat and the new shark only manages to nudge it once before it is hauled up the side of the ship.

  “Open her up, boys. Let the shark soul free.”

  It is Cheyne’s honour under the sight of the Barrelman. He uses the hull metal great knife in one flamboyant slice. Steaming guts avalanche across the deck at the unzipping. The opening of the stomach at the last spills a hundred weight of turtle crabs, an almond-shaped shell the size of a barrel, the remains of Chaff and, what appears to be the corpse of a small boy until it convulses and spews salt water from its lungs.

  * * * *

  “Shark soul,” hisses Pallister as the Captain hauls the boy to his feet. Hinks glares at the Knifeman, then turns to one of the twins as she speaks.

  “Sea people?” she wonders.

  Hinks stares at her. Is she Jan or Char? He has never known as they deliberately confuse. He turns back as the Captain pushes away damp fair hair to inspect the boy’s neck for gill slits.

  “Not of the sea people,” he tells the crew. “Where are you from, boy? How is it you come live from the belly of this shark?”

  The boy stares at him with blue and innocent eyes and Hinks does not like the expression that twists the Captain’s mouth.

  “Deal with this shark. I shall question him in my cabin.”

  He pulls the naked boy away and the twins nod an affirmative to each other.

  “That is not a boy. That is the soul of this shark come to avenge. We must cast it back in the sea.”

  “Pallister, why so sure of this?”

  “Always ‘release the soul’ and we see nothing. This time, something. A reason for the words. We always throw the innards and their contents back though they could be used.”

  “’Tis no soul of a shark.” They turn as the Barrelman comes upon the deck. “Yet it seems not likely it is a boy.”

  “What should we do?”

  “As the Captain instructs. As always: by the Book of the Sea.”

  With great knives and small knives they cut the shark. The innards go back into the sea after, with cursory ceremony, the remains of Chaff. The hull thumps with movement below the waves: squid and the butting of sharks. Barnacles never grow on the hull of a jable hunter, but weed often grows on the teeth left jammed into the wood.

  They skin the shark and the Barrelman takes its skin to preserve and prepare for lamination—one of the many uses of a skin with a colour and a texture called jable. The salted meat they store in the barrels he marks, the fat is rendered for oil, and the cartilage stored in brine for later use in the manufacture of glue. When all is done, they wash the deck clean and replace the blood drains. All around the sea foams and great dark bodies surface and dive. All around, fins.

  * * * *

  Night seems to drive the last of the sharks away or perhaps another jable hunter has cast a bucket of blood into the sea. Hinks knows there are those who prefer to hunt by the light of the moons, those who make it a mystic thing of ceremony and sacrifice, and toast each kill with shark’s blood drunk from whelk-shell cups. As he pulls in nacreous glitters of green mackerel and snaps their necks with his forefing
er and thumb he wonders what questions the Captain might be asking now. It has been some time since he took the boy to his cabin. No matter, no concern. Hinks casts his line of lures back into the sea as the two yellow moons the twins have their names from break over the horizon like glaring eyes.

  “He buggers an innocent while Pallister talks of shark souls, Cheyne sharpens all his knives, and you catch mackerel we don’t need.”

  Hinks stares the pile of mackerel next to him then looks up at one of the twins. “Are you Jan?”

  She ignores the question. “In Piezel they would crush his testicles and throw him to the jable. We sit idle while he gratifies lust.”

  “Many would, given opportunity.”

  She steps more into the moonlight and stands with her hands on her hips. “I might give you opportunity, Hinks. It is for me to say yes or no and for you to accept or not. This boy has been given no such choices.”

  Hinks reels his handline back onto its frame then climbs tiredly to his feet. It is his responsibility, just like with Chaff. They all know what the Captain is doing and they all know it is wrong, but only he can do anything, by the Book.

  “Back me up then. Where is your sister?”

  “She is testing the point of Cheyne’s most important knife.”

  Hinks is surprised. In all the time the twins had been on board he had never known either of them to bed another member of the crew. The rumour was that they preferred their own sex, but then that was always the rumour when men’s egos are bruised.

  “A strange night, and I wonder why you told me…Is she recruiting to your cause?”

  “No and yes. She has been with Cheyne since the season began and he is in agreement about the Captain.”

  “I heard nothing.”

  “Cheyne does not gossip.”

  Hinks shakes his head. Of course Cheyne does not gossip. Cheyne does not speak at all and has not spoken since the excision and cautery of the fungal infection in his mouth and throat.

  Through the double moon shadows they walk to the forward hatch and the single stair that goes down to the Captain’s cabin. As they slip below decks, Hinks shakes a biolight to luminescence and carries it before him. Soon they are before the door of shark skin stretched on its frame of manbone. They listen. Nothing. Hinks reaches to scratch on the door, but it opens, unlatched. They enter.