Spaceling

by Piserchia, Doris

  While I clawed and fought to get free of a great deal of cloying vegetation, a dead face popped into view followed by a slender female torso and a pair of scaled legs. Her expression was one of pain and fright and her eyes were wide and staring. No doubt the seaweed had snagged and held her while she floated. No blood leaked from the jagged wound in her throat which meant she had been dead a while.

  It was no easy task to free her of the weeds, since she was so much larger than I, but I managed and then began shoving her through the water. There didn’t appear to be anyone else about but I was afraid her killer might come along to check and see how the corpse was doing, so I got out of there in a hurry. Only when I was certain we had the area to ourselves did I shove her through a yellow ring and onto a familiar cornfield in Peoria.

  I had no way of knowing what would happen but simply hadn’t wanted to leave her there to decompose in Greenworld. I did have a hope or two, and they were confirmed when both of us landed whole, human and clothed between rows of com. Transmutating was always miraculous but that day it seemed more so when the slashed and ugly throat of the twin suddenly became milky smooth.

  “Which one are you?” I asked.

  She was all right for a second and then the shock hit her. Her hand went up to her neck while her old terror came back. Finally realizing she had no wound, she sat up and looked around. Again she felt her throat Then she croaked her sister’s name. “Pat!”

  “You were the only one I saw,” I said. “Who did it?”

  “You mean who killed us?” she said, shuddering as if someone had dropped an ice cube down her back. “Her name was Erma. She said she’d be sure and put our bodies where they would never be found. Her friends held us in the water and she took a knife…Pat!”

  “Come on, maybe we can find her in the same area.”

  The twins had been taken into Greenworld and killed because the woman named Erma was annoyed with them. She had wanted to interview me and they let me escape. Mike told me this while we searched.

  We found the second body stuffed in a cave in a floating mountain. Pat also woke up hale, hearty and scared out of her wits when shoved into D-i.

  They might have been grateful to me for saving their bacon but they weren’t very informative. All they knew about Erma was that she cornered them on campus one day and threatened their lives if they didn’t get me back. Naturally they complained to Gorwyn who declared they were making it all up.

  “There isn’t any use in your asking us,” said Pat. At least I think she was Pat. “We don’t know anything about Erma other than that she’s big and has a mind like a wolverine.”

  “Let me switch the subject for a moment,” I said. “You snooped in my room at Mutat Why?”

  “Gorwyn told us to.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “He probably didn’t have a reason. You know how silly he is.

  We were supposed to hunt for anything at all out of the ordinary. It was an easy job because you didn’t have any property extraordinary or otherwise.”

  “Did you ever tell him or anybody about me?” I asked.

  “You mean about how you mute into such a big goth? No, we never told him or anyone else. Gorwyn thinks we’re morons and doesn’t engage in real conversations with us. Mostly we’re just his runners.”

  They were scared and they had no funds. I told them to stay where they were and I’d go and fetch them some money.

  Circumstance got in my way and it was a while before I saw them again. Running through the com until I reached a deep culvert, I jumped down and sped along the curve of ground. Out of their sight, I located a blue ring, plunged into Gothland and then entered a yellow one that would put me back on the ranch. I walked up the road, whistling, my hands in my pockets, not anticipating anything unusual but finding plenty.

  The sight of a group of people congregated in the living room startled me so that I lost my calm. Kisko sat in a straight-backed chair with a strip of tape across his mouth and his hands bound in front of him, while directly to his rear stood a huge woman who kept nudging his neck with a gun. Deron lay on the couch nursing a bleeding scalp. The rest of the strangers were men who sat or stood and regarded their leader with blank faces.

  “Hi,” I said. “I was wondering if I could use your phone. My mom’s car broke down—”

  “Grab her before she gets out the door,” said the big lady, just as I went into action.

  I didn’t go far, about three meters backward before someone took me by the neck and tossed me onto the middle of the carpet. “Wait’ll my mother hears about this!” I said. “You people need a lecture on the law!”

  Erma hustled around Kisko’s chair and poked her gun in my mouth. It tasted of powder so I knew it had been fired recently and that made me start looking around with anxiety uppermost in my mind.

  “We hear there’s a muter around here who can really hop rings,” said Erma.

  “Is that so? Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that. My mom’s car—” It was difficult talking around the gun.

  The steel started clicking back and forth across my teeth. She wasn’t a kid lover, I could tell. “You’ll be better off saying nothing at all than lying. Except that you’ll say plenty later when we squeeze your empty little skull in an iron vise.”

  They must have been afraid they would miss somebody, and obviously they hadn’t trusted Wheaty all the way which was why they hung around for two more days before pulling out and taking us with them.

  “There’s gotta be someone else,” said Erma. “Someone a lot bigger than these two guys. I figure maybe a wrestler or a sideshow freak.” Occasionally she came over to my chair and played drums on my head with the gun. “Where’s the big muter, buzzard? You know who I’m talking about. The hippo. Gargantua. The one who’s been running us ragged in 2.”

  7

  On the way to a private airport I sat on Erma’s lap in the back seat of an electric car. Her left hand was loosely clasped on my hair. She was never tranquil but wriggled, writhed and sniffed like a hound on the scent. The fingers of her free hand drummed against one knee. Now and then she applied pressure on my hair but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She probably wasn’t even thinking about me or the others. Possibly I was wrong. Maybe she dreamed of strange treasure, such as making a pancake out of my head and mincemeat of Kisko and Deron. She wasn’t the cerebral type and didn’t talk much.

  The plane trip was brief and afterwards we took another car to a ghost city that had only four or five tall buildings still standing in it. The air stank of old pollution and yellow smoke rose from a chemical dump a few blocks away. Stumbling on the broken sidewalk, I took wings as Erma elevated her right arm. The high structure into which I was carried was cold and smelled like a crypt.

  They kept me in the basement and out of the way. I wondered if some former tenant had kept a large animal there since the chain to which I was attached was embedded so securely in the concrete wall that only an elephant or some other behemoth could have pulled it loose. I wore a metal necklace that rubbed, chafed and grew as chill as a collar of ice. Squatting on the floor,

  I tried guessing how long it would take me to catch pneumonia.

  Each time one of my captors came in to look at me, he or she carried a naked light bulb attached to what seemed to be an endless cord. Usually it was Erma who came.

  “Do I get any food or water?” I said once.

  “Shut up.”

  “I just like to know—”

  “Shut up. We know you have an unusual companion who can hop rings like crazy. We only want to know his name and whereabouts.”

  “How do you know it isn’t a she?”

  Erma bent down and stuck the bulb against my arm. “It’s somebody big. I’m told we can’t get any information from you with drugs but that’s something I’ll have to discover for myself when I find the time.” She played a game of seeing if she could stick the hot bulb on a bare spot on me before I jumped out of the way. She
was quick and the chain wasn’t very long.

  “What if I don’t have a companion?” I said, backed against the wall with my eyes on the hght.

  She took me by one leg and upended me in the air. “You mean you’ve been doing that stuff in 2 all by your little self?” Dropping me on my head, she said, “Before I’m through with those two upstairs I’ll know the secrets of their innermost souls, which happens to be a nauseating thought now that I think about it.”

  “Deron and Kisko don’t know anything. Let them go and I’ll tell you all you want to know.”

  “You’re a mosquito. Be quiet before I swat you.”

  After she went away, I wallowed in a puddle of self-pity. They didn’t intend to let me go, not ever, otherwise they would be providing me with items to keep my body and soul together, such as a blanket and at least something to drink.

  Night or day, I lost track of time and didn’t know what it was. Once Erma plunged a hypo into my arm and I went out like the bulb when it was switched off. She was mad when I came back to consciousness, burned me good and yanked out a few wads of hair.

  One day she brought in Deron, lit up the place with a dozen light bulbs so I could see everything and beat the daylights out of him. He didn’t have a chance. I think her soul was so hostile she could have whipped anyone, but then she was larger than a normal man and strong as a bull. When Deron finally got the idea that nobody else was going to come into the room and interfere, he got some grit in his expression and started boxing with her. She knew how to do that too, cracked his face with rock-like fists that split his mouth and brows and bent his nose first in one direction and then another. For such a big person she was fast on her feet.

  She didn’t quit even after his right wrist snapped and dangled when she kicked him, just kept on blasting at him with her dynamite fists and boots until I backed into the corner and closed my eyes. I could hear him fall, hear her haul him up and knock him down again, over and over, repeating the carnage until at last she lost interest and kicked him out the door.

  I knew why she hadn’t started on me yet. I would probably last all of fifteen seconds and she wasn’t quite ready to make me a corpse. After the first two days, I would have told them anything they wanted to know but they didn’t ask me and wouldn’t even listen to me. It was as if I were an incidental in the situation, someone who had lived at the ranch but who hadn’t done much of anything of significance.

  What I learned, during their brief and violent excursions into my dank and dingy quarters, was that they believed Kisko had hired a whiz of a muter and that all I did was act as a red herring to keep snoopers off the real trail. I had gone into D where there was danger, but not as the main spy. If Erma and her crew hadn’t believed something like this, they probably would have dissected me into microscopic proportions to get at the truth. As it was, they left me alone and concentrated on Deron and Kisko who finally broke, and no wonder. They babbled out the truth that I was the only muter working for them, which truth wasn’t accepted by Erma because of her many and diverse misconceptions, besides which her superiors would have done better to commission someone who took less delight in their work. She became so engrossed in what she was doing that she lost sight of her first goal and, before she realized it, her victims were beyond giving information of any kind.

  Not knowing what was happening to Kisko, I lay on cold concrete and wondered if Deron had survived his beating. I hungered and thirsted, shivered with fear and influenza and tried not to let the darkness take over my mind.

  Then Erma came in to finish me off. Their job was almost done and they hadn’t learned what they wanted to know. My captor was full of disgust for humanity. She spent the next thirty minutes twisting my fingers out of their sockets, and I either yelled or promised to tell all if she just brought in Kisko and Deron so I could see they were still alive. She didn’t wheedle or beg and neither did she bring in my friends, which was evidence to me that there was nothing left of them for her to show me. After she broke my thumbs I couldn’t talk anyway so she must have decided she was through wasting time. Either that or she was carried away with blood lust.

  When she poked the light bulb in my face, I saw her big right fist coming at me like a meaty avalanche and believed the blow was intended to kill. There wasn’t much time for me to react. Mostly I was trying to get my eyelids unstuck so I could see which way to sway. Her dark eyes were hooded and full of resentment while her fat lips pursed with displeasure. The lid of my left eye came unstuck just in time for me to perceive the white boulder whizzing through space to knock my head off. I didn’t move intentionally, just instinctively. Because she was so infuriated and couldn’t see much better than I, she probably didn’t notice or care when I went backward in a hurry, rode with the blow as best I could and, before all my internal lights went out I hoped my brains wouldn’t decorate the walls.

  The old dreg who woke me up said he had been scouting the neighborhood for goodies and saw the whole bunch of us come in six days before. He had hung around, skulking in and behind the skeletons of buildings, and saw five people leave. That left three still inside. He said there had been a lot of noise during those first days, but then after the five left, there wasn’t so much as a squeak from the windows. That had made the dreg curious so he investigated with caution.

  I don’t know how he broke my chain. I kept passing out. Maybe he gnawed it in two. As a matter of fact, I think he told me later that he found a hammer and chisel and took his time about getting me loose from the wall. He kept telling me he had a wheelbarrow outside in which he intended to haul me to the hospital twenty kilometers down the road. For a price. I kept telling him he couldn’t haul three people that far in a wheelbarrow and, over and over, he said I was the only living thing in the building besides himself.

  He walked and I crawled up three flights to a room where Kisko and Deron lay, shone his light on their naked bodies and while I cried he ran another mirror test to see if their nostrils created any fog. Finally he said maybe one of them had a little air left in him, but he added that hauling both of us all those kilometers would cost me what I had in both pockets of my jeans, which he had already cleaned out.

  In his better days he must have been a weight lifter. I never found out because he didn’t linger long, left us on the front stoop of Mercy and took off with about four hundred dollars of my money.

  The doctor told me I had a blood clot in my head that might kill me one of these days, and I said was that so and what was it still doing in there after all these months, and she said was that so and maybe she had better run some more tests since clots usually didn’t hang around. I told her not to bother.

  I wasn’t overly concerned about myself since I was mostly all in one piece and hadn’t been fatally injured by Erma’s love tap, so again I advised the doctor not to mind about my sore skull because it was Kisko that worried me. She said she didn’t blame me for being worried about him. Though he and I were charity cases, we would both receive the best medical treatment humanity was able to offer in this century but there was no use my anticipating miracles. Doctors were just people, not magicians.

  Three months later Kisko and I walked out the front door in time to greet an early snow. We went hand in hand because he couldn’t navigate any other way. For the past few days I had swept floors in a slaughterhouse down the street, so there was enough money for a bus ride to Jersey.

  Olger was glad to see me since her funds were running low. I had a crew come from town to fix up a rubber room for Kisko and then I locked him in and traveled back to the ranch via rings. It had been vandalized so there was nothing worth carrying away other than the money box secreted in the living room wall. Everything was either broken or gone. All the fences had been taken, likewise the lumber from the front and back porches. Since the money was what I had come for, I wasn’t too disappointed. A cold winter was predicted by the weathermen so the outbuildings would probably be carted away for firewood, and perhaps even the ranch house
itself. By spring there would be no evidence that I had ever lived there with one friend, one half-friend and one traitor. Strange how the three kept getting mixed up in my mind.

  Between the two of us, Olger and I managed through the winter and let Kisko get away from us only once. That day she kept a good coal and wood fire going in the open hearth while I put on heavy clothing and went out hunting for him. I found him lying in his pajamas on a mound of snow, screaming his head off. He was too worn out to struggle, having already fought a legion of demons with his bare and bloody fists, so I led him back to the cabin, cleaned him and dressed him in long underwear and put him back in his room. It was heated with a fine electric grill hidden beneath the rubber lining.

  He couldn’t be trusted to have a sink or toilet in the room. Olger would wait until he was in one of his tearful moods and then she would clean him and his environment, all the time bawling him out because he was such a pig. He wasn’t always bad. At times he was calm and even looked rational, though he never spoke, and then he was permitted to sit with us at the table. Toward spring the last of his casts were taken off.

  There wasn’t much Olger and I could do that winter but sit by the fire and try to keep from freezing. The house wasn’t like the one at the ranch that had boasted of a generator large enough to power all the machines and light fixtures. Our old farmhouse in Jersey owned the one small generator that took care of the rubber room but other than that, we had no real comforts. Our lights were candles, the heat and cooking fires came from coal and wood. We did have running water. After the first real thaw, someone from the city would come by in a tractor to see how we had fared. The driver’s job would be to haul away bodies and report deaths.

  Kisko grew quieter as the cold weather wore on, or he did until we had an earthquake, and that set him back so far he had to be locked in his room for a week. He rushed out of the house as soon as the tremors began, slogged through the snow as though he were anxious to get to some particular spot, and I chased him a mile before his adrenalin stopped spurting.