by Zack Parsons
An entire shelving unit was gutted to make room for a twelve-foot glass-sided tank filled with murky liquid. Casper paused at the tank, searching for a card that might identify its contents. There was a strong chemical odor surrounding it. He gave the tank a gentle push, and the liquid within sloshed. There was a momentary slap of yellowed flesh against the side of the glass.
“Leave it alone,” said Foster.
The tank was covered with an iron lid too heavy to lift. There was a small sliding panel in the top like a speakeasy’s slot. It was rusted into place, but a swift strike from the heel of his hand dislodged the corrosion and popped the little door open. The sloshing liquid was as dark as pitch. He leaned down.
“Get the hell away from that,” said Foster, clamping a firm hand on his shoulder. Before she could yank him away, the fleshy body in the tank rolled—in which direction, he was not sure—and as a fin revolved out of the water, he was confronted with a pickled cluster of rheumy eyes—two large, sixteen small. He recoiled in revulsion as much as from the yank Foster gave him.
“What the hell was that?”
“Stuff floats out of the Pool sometimes,” she said. “Maintenance brings it here. Usually it’s fucked-up maggots, inside out, no eyes, that sort of thing.”
She guided him back onto the path through the aisles of storage shelves. The sound of a nearby saw made him strain to hear her voice.
“Sometimes it’s not people.” She hooked her thumb at the tank. “Something like that comes out, maybe in parts, maybe just one part, mutation or something, I guess, not my department. Flops around on the maintenance deck for a few minutes and usually dies. If it doesn’t, somebody makes sure it dies. They bring it here, chop it up if they have to, and process it for storage. It’s considered a prime job for Maintenance.”
They passed beneath a yellowed fish’s jawbone hanging from stanchions lost behind the forest of lighting strips. Whatever the jaw was from was easily big enough to swallow a man. He craned his neck in a vain search for a paper label.
“When did this business start?” he asked.
“They’ve been doing it as long as I can remember,” she said, holding open a gate into a secure area of the storage. “It’s been happening more lately, I guess just because more of us come through every day bringing weird junk with us.”
“Us,” he said quietly. “How many of us have come through?”
She answered, but the zip of a saw stole the sound of her words. He was pretty sure she said three hundred thousand, which made him a little queasy. They passed workbenches where men and women were preparing anomalies for the shelves, preserving them in strong-smelling fluids, fabricating cages, mounting in display boxes, screwing bones into placards, stuffing the loose hides of animals, and attempting to arrange meaning from the broken pieces of pottery and unidentified machine parts.
The worn nature of the anomalies reminded Casper of the sort of thing anyone could find washed up on a beach, but alien, as if the deepest sea had churned and released ancient shipwrecks, drowned sailors, crashed airplanes, and a haul of sea creatures that lived as strangers to the light of day but were discovered clattering in the surf.
“There’s the man,” said Polly. She was walking with purpose toward a big man dressed in blue coveralls beneath a forge apron, gray beard hiding his throat, filthy welding goggles over his eyes. He wore a dusty bandana over the Medusa’s nest of his dreadlocked hair. Foster waved to him, and he looked up, the glowing joint of metal reflected in the lenses of his goggles.
The big man snuffed the torch with a puff of gas and hung it from its cradle. He propped the goggles up on his head, revealing the pale circles in the grime on his face. His eyes nestled deep amid wrinkles.
“Polly!” He greeted Foster with a big hug. Their arms intertwined. They spoke too quietly for Casper to hear over the sound of the machines, but after a few seconds she turned and brought the man over to Casper.
“This is Grinch,” she said. “Used to be PitSec. Not bad. Lousy shot, but he could talk a confession out of a spore siren. Grinch, this is Ninety-Ninety. Fresh-brewed.”
“I see,” said Grinch. He pinched the carbonized finger of his work glove in his teeth and shucked the glove off to offer Casper his hand.
Casper was shaking the man’s callused hand when he realized that Grinch was a Gideon. Old and worn in strange places, a much harder sort of man than he ever imagined Gideon being, but he was for sure of the same blood. Casper’s handshake went limp, and he found it impossible to return the old man’s friendliness.
“Ninety-Ninety has been in the cannery for a long, long time,” said Polly. “Longest I’ve seen.”
“When?” asked Grinch.
“Fifty-one,” she said. The year was clearly fraught with some meaning the man immediately understood.
“Sorry about that, bud.” He clapped a hand on Casper’s shoulder.
“I had a dog with me,” said Casper. “They took it.”
“All right, for you and Polly, I’ll check.” Grinch shed his remaining glove and took Polly and Casper over to the lone clear space on a workbench otherwise crowded to overflowing with various screws, tools, and spiral machining scraps. There was another beige typewriter keyboard attached to a television, and Grinch began to clatter away as easily as any pool secretary Casper had seen, pausing only to turn his head and light a cigarette. Something called a Bravo Licorice Mild.
“Yeah, dog is in live holding, brought in about ninety minutes ago. We get dogs more often than you’d think.” Grinch turned and blew out a stream of smoke and looked meaningfully at Casper. “White ones keep bobbing to the surface or getting sucked into the outflow tank.”
“The Indian dog?” asked Casper.
Grinch tapped a finger against the side of his cauliflower nose. “We get so many, we dump them right back in. Don’t worry, yours isn’t one of those. Says white and black. It’s on tier two by the birds. I put in a hold, but I’d hustle my ass over there in case some maggot forgets to check the computer and decides to dump it back into the soup.”
“You’re gold,” said Polly. She gave Grinch a kiss on his grimy cheek.
“What are you doing in Corrections anyway?” Grinch asked as she pulled away. “This about that thing on the news?”
“Yeah. It’s a long story.”
“Well, I don’t watch the news. Too depressing. You tell me the story sometime over drinks.”
“I’ll be back on the street soon. I bitched to the right people and landed an audience with one of the white-hairs.”
“Now, there are some monsters I wish we’d never created.” Grinch looked at Casper. “But you’d know better than me.”
“It’s good, They wouldn’t call me in if they weren’t planning to do something about my complaints.”
“Careful,” said Grinch. “The nail that sticks up gets the hammer.”
Tier two was more of the same, with a focus on live animals—at least in theory—in cages. There were terrariums full of cave crickets and millipedes, cages thick with bats, birds, rabbits, even the occasional dog and cat. The animals were somnolent; few lifted their heads as Polly and Casper moved among them; few ate or made any noise at all. Some seemed dead, and the smell of excrement and decay was repellant.
Polly didn’t seem to know the men and women working in this area. She bounced from one to the next, asking for help, Casper shuffling behind her as if he’d just been in a car accident. She eventually stopped a harried-looking duplicate of herself. The woman’s face was younger and leaner than Polly’s, her hair pulled tightly back except for one curling lock that kept falling into the woman’s mouth. Her arms were shrouded in elbow-length rubber, and her chin dipped beneath the filter mask she wore around her throat. When Polly flagged her down, she was pushing a bin cart heaped with the dead bodies of hundreds of pigeons.
“If it came through in the last six hours, it’ll be in Processing,” said the woman. “After that it’ll either be in the stacks for th
e Gardeners or in the queue for Euth.”
“Processing” suggested the industrial nature, but not the brutality, of what was occurring. Panicked animals in cage-topped bin carts were pushed in through a strip door and wheeled into a parking area to await handling by crews from Anomalies.
“Cozy place Bishop has built.” Casper ran his hand over the prickly crown of his head. “I really need a cigarette. You got one?”
“No,” she said. “Let’s just find your dog. I’ve wasted enough time with this today.”
A gangly Warren—Polly referred to him as a “type two”—with a bandage across half his face finally helped them with more than just a pointed finger. TWENTY was stitched across the breast of his coveralls. He looked like he’d taken a blow to the head; it was misshapen, as if part of his skull had been removed. He typed at the keyboard attached to a television, demonstrating none of Grinch’s speed or skill. At last he hammered out the right keys, and the television flickered and displayed an alphanumeric code. It was gibberish to Casper but clearly meant something to Twenty.
He motioned for them to wait by his sorting station and disappeared into the stacks of recently processed animals. He returned a few minutes later with a dog on a leash. It was a medium-sized breed, white with black spots, one covering its left ear. It was a friendly-looking dog with big, expressive brown eyes. It heeled and sat beside Twenty as he passed the leash over to Polly.
Casper knelt and scratched at the dog’s head affectionately, but this prompted no reaction. It had cleaned the cowl from its body, so he cleared a few leathery strips remaining atop its head. It stared at him, unblinking, and he felt a growing unease. The dog’s eyes were not brown, as he’d first thought; they were a shade of red, and, more disconcerting still, he recognized the black and white pattern in its fur.
It was RIngo.
FLAGGED - ALERT - FLAGGED - ALERT -
FLAGGED - ALERT - FLAGGED - ALERT
REDACTION NOTICE 6/10/06 4:09 PM
Pit Maintenance Incident 7889-40
An obstruction formed at the inflow aperture of emergence channel D5. A maintenance team routed to clear the obstruction reported a single mass of hard material. D5’s inflow aperture depth of 950+ necessitated the deployment of a side-scan buoy in plated pressure sheath. Images produced indicated, as before, a homogenous mass, exactly 10 feet in diameter, sealed, with slight indentations in the surface. Recovery armature deployed, but the flow pressure holding the object to the aperture exceeded fail load. An engineering team consulted, and two armatures were deployed, clearing the obstruction. D5’s gate was closed, and positive buoyancy lifted the sphere to the surface of the maintenance lid quickly.
Obstruction was spherical, AU-clad, evidence of minor damage, but hull and seals intact. Buoyancy suggests a large hollow cavity within. Serial number 707-1950 and WESTWARD stamped in cladding. Sent to engineering.
ENGINEERING ADDENDUM
Object s/n 707-1950 WESTWARD recovered at depth 952 feet. Protocol followed, no attempt made to open the object, Gardeners contacted and retrieved object.
GARDENER ADDENDUM
Fifth object in two weeks. Serial number matched Operation Westward archives. Launched June 1, 1950, Oscuras.
Object opened. Control surfaces undamaged and appear almost new.
As before, audio and film archives blank, pilot’s logbook contained single log entry written in English on first logbook page, intended for date of launch. Ink matches pilot’s mission pen. Message as follows:
Deep water rises.
Abandon your spire.
It is coming.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Pool boiled with hunger. Beneath a wellhead of intake pipes and high-pressure skimmers, the surface spanned three hundred feet and descended in a conical shaft penetrating into the mantle rock. It was capped by a domed lid of jointed concrete supported by steel rib-beams. The side of this lid that faced the Pool was lined with a microlayer of insolvent gold known as shield paint. The coating was used on any object intended to come into contact with the Pool’s highly corrosive fluid.
The obverse side of the lid formed the white-painted floor of the maintenance vault. It was a vast, curiously low-ceilinged chamber filled with sodium-lit gantries and high-pressure pipes. It smelled of marrow and echoed with the ceaseless churn of the Pool beneath the lid.
Wesley Bishop sat in the uncomfortable backseat of a maintenance car, wishing he had died in his sleep. His office desk was piled with charts and reports describing an unraveling scenario he desperately wanted to escape. The last diversion he would chose would be a trip to the maintenance vault, and yet Milo, chief of the Gardeners, thought to drag Bishop from between the tangled legs of his bedtime friends and force him into the heat and ugliness of that exact place.
Though Bishop’s thoughts often wandered toward suicide, he never wanted to go near the Pool. He hated even being reminded it existed. Being this close to it, hearing it speak from beneath the floor in gurgles and sloshes, was intolerable.
The only place worse was the Fane. He’d made the mistake of visiting the Fane out of curiosity only once. You could look through several feet of gold-treated glass and see the thing at the bottom of the Pool. Oh, yes, he’d had more than his share of nightmares about that little trip. The memories were a gift to all his misbegotten duplicates.
The maintenance car thudded over a rail track as it traversed the acreage of access hatches and parked inspection teams, bound for the bulging hillock at the lid’s center.
“Sorry about the rough ride,” said the type two driving the car. “They’ve been laying cables and tracks all week to move stuff around.”
The summit was ringed by maintenance cars and lit by a semicircle of bright halogen lamps. Between the parked vehicles and generators he glimpsed shimmering gold and the white hair of the Gardeners. There were armed PitSec men and women and a gaggle of engineers in bright coveralls poking at items spread out upon a tarp.
Milo was waiting to greet him, his expression as grave as ever, his heavy brow knit with worry. He was stooped, shrunken with age, but still tall, his white hair pulled back from his face and held with a silver band. He favored a black cassock coat and wore a badge of office around his neck on a leather cord. The stag’s-skull badge was popular among the Gardeners, and in Bishop’s experience the entire freak-order of white-haired Gardeners fancied themselves more hunters than weed-pickers.
Bishop did not share his predecessor’s reverence for the Gardeners. He viewed them—and Milo especially—as melodramatic buffoons. Relics of a superstitious age. He entertained their eccentricities as long as they were useful. They were utterly ruthless and sworn to loyalty to the corporation, and he used them for the dirtiest of work, so long as they conducted their perverse ceremonies out of sight.
“Mr. Bishop,” said Milo, and he offered Bishop a hand out of the maintenance car. Bishop refused it.
“Why are you haunting the maintenance vault?” Bishop straightened up and wiped machine grime from the seat of his pants. “No, a better question: why have you dragged me out of bed to join you in this miserable place?”
Milo began walking with him toward a central perimeter of privacy screens.
“I hope you read my communication yesterday.”
“Admiral Haley and his carrier group parked off the coast? We built that carrier at the Brunel Yard in San Diego. That fat Unionist bastard is making noise to set himself up for his future political career.”
“I informed you of CSG-9’s blockade position three days ago.”
Something else. Something about maintenance reports. Spark? Was that involved? He had been sleepwalking with opiates when the document appeared on his desk.
“I didn’t read it, then,” said Bishop. “I have a lot on my mind. A lot of important documents. Bring me up to speed.”
An armed sentry stepped aside, and Milo parted the privacy screen for Bishop. They ducked into the ring of lights. The gold sphere was larger than he re
membered. It was dented and scraped, but its protective cladding had survived whatever journey it had undertaken through the caustic liquid of the Pool. The cockpit of the Operation Westward craft was opened and surrounded by engineers in white coveralls poking and prodding at its interior. Bishop stopped just inside the perimeter, struck by the golden brilliance of the machine reflecting the halogen lamps.
Milo waved with a hand at a tarp spread upon the floor. There was the body of a type two, stretched out, still zipped into his flight suit, the rubber cup of his oxygen mask hanging beneath his chin.
“One came back?”
“The Westward craft have nearly all returned, all at once, regardless of their launch date,” said Milo. “He is the first pilot we’ve found.”
Bishop overcame his shock and joined Milo beside the dead pilot.
“He looks well-preserved.” Bishop moved the mask partly covering the pilot’s mouth. His lips were blue, his flesh ashen, but he did not look a day older than the man who had departed in 1950. “The others were empty?”
“Yes, but there was a message in each vessel’s logbook. ‘Deep water rises. Abandon your spire. It is coming.’ The message in this vessel’s logbook was slightly different.”
Milo handed the logbook over. The pages were clean and white; the message Milo described was neatly printed but awkward, the letters misshapen and connected in odd places. Beneath this message was another one, larger, scrawled haphazardly but in the same style.
“ ‘Sorry, Warren Groves. Here was not meant for your flesh.’ ” Bishop read it aloud. “What does that mean?”
“My men will autopsy the body,” said Milo. “His personal camera was in his pocket. Perhaps there is more evidence there. The message seems to imply his destination point was inhospitable. A toxic environment.”