Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  The pieces of the wreck—along with half the world’s Kurdish archaeological artifacts, forty-nine irreplaceable species of Amazon plant life, and one slightly adjective-heavy first novel—continued to sink to the bottom of the Hudson Canyon. Sliding erosion of the canyon floor would eventually carry them down to the open seabed beyond the continental shelf, there to await the raising of Atlantis or the end of the world, whichever came first.

  The control room did not sink; buffeted by the Yabba-Dabba-Doo’s dying exhale, it headed for the surface, a bus-sized lifeboat. Not only was it the size of a bus, it was painted to look like one, if there’d been anyone outside to do the looking; its metal shell was a riot of psychedelic colors, with trompe l’oeil hippies gazing out from dusty side windows. The bus’s destination sign read: STILL FURTHER.

  Still Further rose towards daylight. Its thirteen passengers—frightened, damp, contrary, and alive—rose with it. They weren’t finished yet.

  Mitterrand Sierra

  “Le sous-marin est fini,” pronounced the computer. “J’entends des bruits de destruction.”

  Captain Baker needed no translation. “We got them.”

  Penzias wondered. “I’m not sure,” he repeated. “Combat . . .”

  “Captain,” Tagore hailed them from the bridge. “We have a visual sighting off the port bow. It looks like—”

  “Nouveau contact,” the computer cut in. “Contact radar et visuel, relèvement un-cinq-huit, distance sept cents mètres. C’est un radeau pneumatique.”

  “Say again, bridge,” Captain Baker requested. “What do you see?”

  “A life raft,” Penzias told him. “Ask him what color the passengers are.”

  “Captain,” a new voice said, “this is Sutter, in the bow lookout. I have the raft in sight. I count two occupants.”

  “What color, damn it,” said Penzias.

  “Stow it,” the captain warned him. To Sutter he said: “You have a clear visual?”

  “Yes sir. They’re coming closer; on this heading we’ll be passing right by them.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “A naked Eskimo,” Sutter said, “and a nigger in a space blanket.”

  The Raft

  Twenty-Nine Words for Snow sat cross-legged in the life raft, naked as a bald seal. The raft was bobbing in the swells; Seraphina watched with no small fascination as Twenty-Nine Words bobbed with it.

  “Put your clothes on!” BRER Beaver ordered. Seraphina had managed to wriggle back into her jeans, but her blouse had been lost in the transfer from escape pod to life raft; she wore the space blanket like a poncho and hugged BRER Beaver to her chest for extra warmth. The intimacy seemed to agitate him even more than usual.

  “I’m hot,” Twenty-Nine Words demurred.

  “It’s forty-one degrees,” BRER Beaver said, “and you’re indecently exposed!”

  “I’m hot.” A steady breeze blew across the raft, but Twenty-Nine Words’s bare flesh showed no goose bumps. Seraphina stretched out a hand; it was like stroking soft marble.

  “Stop that! Stop that right now!”

  A shadow fell over them as the Mitterrand Sierra pulled alongside the raft, dwarfing it. Seraphina looked up at the heavy machine guns mounted on the sub-killer’s gunnels; she felt a thrill of fear and an answering surge of Prozac hormones that left her calm and optimistic. Twenty-Nine Words achieved a similar effect through a series of martial arts hyperventilating exercises. BRER Beaver, who thought relax was something people did with their moral standards, slapped his tail against Seraphina’s rib cage hard enough to leave a mark. “That hurts,” she informed him.

  The raft bucked in the wash of the Sierra’s engines as the sub-killer reversed power, coming to a full stop. Two hard-faced men appeared at the railing near the stern. One trained an assault rifle on the raft, while the other used a winch to lower a cargo net over the side; when the net dropped within reach of the water, the rifleman indicated that they should climb into it.

  “This is definitively unsafe,” BRER Beaver said.

  “Which is more unsafe,” Seraphina asked him, “hanging from a net, or disobeying a guy with a rifle?”

  “Hmm,” BRER Beaver mused, not liking either choice. “All right, get into the net. But be careful you don’t drop me.”

  “Be careful you don’t tempt me,” Seraphina replied.

  City of Women

  “Range to the Robespierre is now six thousand meters, bearing one-six-seven,” Gwynhefar Matchless said. “We’re directly astern of her, out of the firing arc of her Piranhas and probably her Savage Candles as well, unless they’ve got a second launcher.”

  “We’ll play it safe,” Wendy Mankiller said. “Attack center, load tubes one and three with Chanticleer torpedoes.”

  “Aye, Captain, loading tubes one and three with Chanticleers.”

  “MacAlpine, take us to periscope depth.”

  “Aye, Captain. Coming shallow . . .”

  Mitterrand Sierra

  “Guess we don’t have to worry about frisking this one,” Sutter said, feeling a twinge of homoerotic discomfort at Twenty-Nine Words’s nakedness. He covered it by sneering and waving his gun around. “What’s she got under the blanket?”

  “Guess,” Seraphina said. Sutter seemed surprised to hear her speak. Sayles, having come forward to search her, reached out impulsively to touch her face, then ran his fingers down the curve of her neck to her collarbone.

  “Christ Jesus!” he suddenly exclaimed, jerking his hand away.

  “What?” Sutter said.

  “She’s warm and she’s got real skin! She’s alive, Sutter!”

  “Bullshit,” Sutter scoffed, even as Seraphina rolled her eyes. “There are no live niggers anymore. She’s got to be Electric.”

  “She’s not Electric, Sutter. She’s real.” He swallowed hard. “They say Dufresne’s supposed to be a nigger.”

  “Yeah, well, like I said, there are no live niggers anymore. Maybe she’s an abo.” Sutter addressed Seraphina directly for the first time: “Are you an abo?”

  “I’m indigenous,” Twenty-Nine Words offered.

  “Sutter? Sayles?” a loudspeaker called in the captain’s voice. Sayles walked backwards to an intercom mike, keeping his eyes on Seraphina. Seraphina let her own gaze wander, up to the enclosed habitat above the helipad; three lemurs were looking down at her, with expressions like curious children. She smiled warmly at them.

  “Captain?” Sayles said, lifting the mike from its cradle. “Sayles here.”

  “Sayles, have you got the passengers off the life raft yet?”

  “We’ve got them, Captain. Captain, the nigger is real. Human.”

  “Who—“A second voice cut in, and there were sounds of argument, with Captain Baker shouting, “Stow it!” several times. “Sayles, “the captain finally said, in an impatient tone, “what color are his eyes?”

  “Her eyes, Captain. They’re—Jesus!”

  “Jesus-colored?” said Sutter, checking Seraphina’s eyes for himself. “If the Virgin Mary got fucked by a leprechaun, maybe.”

  “Up ahead,” Sayles said, motioning towards the bow. “Look!”

  Sutter squinted past the machine guns. “What the hell is that? Smoke?”

  “It’s moving,” said Sayles. “This way.”

  “Sayles?” the captain called. “Sayles? What’s going on?”

  City of Women

  ”Level at periscope depth, Captain.”

  “Periscope up!”

  Wendy Mankiller grabbed the periscope grips, intending to get a quick peek at the sub-killer and make one sweep of the horizon to check for other ships. But what she saw as she looked into the viewfinder brought her up short.

  “What in bloody blazes . . .”

  “Captain?”

  “Looks like a pillar of smoke on the water, beyond the Robespierre.” She pressed the magnification stud on the periscope grip several times; enlarged, the pillar resolved into individual flying particle
s. “Only it’s not smoke . . .”

  The Buoy

  The third buoy had surfaced ahead of schedule, its ballast pack damaged by the blow from the Yabba-Dabba-Doo’s propeller. It broke through the swells about a mile to the south of the Mitterrand Sierra.

  The buoy was bright yellow, about six feet high, and cone shaped, with the point of the cone sawn off and replaced with a flat watertight lid. As soon as the buoy had righted itself, CO2 cartridges popped the lid off. There was a sound like burning cellophane, and a black cloud came boiling out into the air.

  Not smoke.

  Bugs.

  Mitterrand Sierra

  “C’est des locustes,” the combat computer said. “Des locustes électriques.”

  “Locusts?” said Troubadour Penzias.

  “What’s this now?” asked Captain Baker.

  “Locusts—Electric Locusts, swarming out of the water.”

  “What in God’s name—”

  “I don’t know,” Penzias said, checking a sensor readout. “But they scatter radio waves like a chaff cloud. Could be they’re meant to jam our radar.”

  “As a prelude to what? An air strike?”

  “Or a missile strike. Or something else weird that only tree-huggers would think of.” Penzias studied his tactical display. “They’re coming towards us.”

  “Can we shoot them down?”

  Penzias shrugged. “Machine guns aren’t much use against bug-sized targets, and surface-to-air missiles would just fly right through them. And we don’t have air support to do a napalm—”

  “Périscope!” warned the computer. “Périscope dans l’eau au trois-quatre-sept, distance cinq mille huit cents mètres.”

  “Periscope in the water,” Penzias translated. “Three-four-seven is right up our ass.”

  “Bridge!” shouted the captain.

  Exodus 10:13-15

  “‘So Moses stretched out his staff over the land of Egypt,’” Seraphina recited, “‘and the LORD brought an east wind upon the land all that day and all that night; when morning came, the east wind had brought the locusts. The locusts came upon all the land of Egypt and settled on the whole country of Egypt, such a dense swarm of locusts as had never been before, nor ever shall be again. They covered the surface of the whole land, so that the land was black; and they ate all the plants in the land and all the fruit of the trees that the hail had left; nothing green was left, no tree, no plant in the field, in all the land of Egypt.’”

  “Bugs, Sutter,” Sayles said, paling. “A live nigger I can deal with, but not bugs . . .”

  “Get a grip,” Sutter told him.

  “They’re coming to get you,” Seraphina said. “They’re coming to eat your boat, and they’ll eat you too if you don’t let the lemurs go.”

  “Shut up!” Sutter barked at her. “Don’t listen to her, Sayles! They can’t do shit to us.”

  But Sayles was not reassured. “I can’t take bugs, Sutter. I’m entomophobic, man.”

  “They’ll crawl in your nose,” Seraphina said.

  “I told you to shut up!” Sutter took a step towards her, meaning to emphasize the point with a jab of his rifle, but stumbled as the Mitterrand Sierra’s engines kicked abruptly from idle to full power. The rifle muzzle dipped as Sutter tangoed for balance; Seraphina, thinking this was as good a time as any to make her move, threw open the space blanket and yelled, “Get him, Beaver!”

  Sayles’s cry of “Christ Jesus!” could be heard all the way to the bridge.

  City of Women

  “The Robespierre just increased power, Captain!”

  “Damn!” Wendy Mankiller said, knowing she’d kept her periscope up too long. “Helm, ahead two-thirds, left full rudder, all down on the planes. Make your depth one hundred and twenty meters and come to course zero-three-five.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Dasher MacAlpine said, “coming left to zero-three-five, all down on the planes.”

  “Captain,” Gwynhefar Matchless said, “the Robespierre is coming about. They could be unmasking their torpedo launchers.”

  “All ahead full!”

  City of Women darted through the water; they were level at a hundred twenty meters when the Mitterrand Sierra began pinging them.

  “Captain—”

  “I know.”

  Mitterrand Sierra

  “Relèvement du sous-marin trois-cinq-trois, distance six mille mètres.”

  “They’re running,” Penzias said. “Combat, parez à lancer—”

  “Wait a minute!” Captain Baker held up a hand. “Bridge!”

  “Najime here, Captain.”

  “Power back to one-third. Keep coming right to course zero-zero-zero.”

  “What are you doing?” asked Penzias.

  “Slowing down so you can get a passive sonar I.D. on that sub. We’re not going to shoot at it until we know what it is.”

  “But—”

  “Think, Penzias. It can’t be Dufresne; even if we hadn’t already killed him, there’s no way he could get behind us so quickly.”

  “Those locusts are almost on us. If they can disable the ship’s weapons somehow. . .”

  “We’re not firing on an unknown target, Corporal. Now get me an I.D. on that sub.”

  “Combat,” Penzias said. “Pouvez-vous classer le sous-marin?”

  “Oui. Le sous-marin est de la classe Virago Terrible. C’est un bâtiment d’attaque britannique.”

  “Terrible virgin?” Captain Baker said, sounding out the French.

  “Dread Virago,” said Penzias. “It’s a British attack submarine. . . . Combat, parez à lancer des Chandelles Sauvages sur la Virago.”

  “Belay that order!” the captain said. “What in hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “What do you think I’m doing? You think it’s a coincidence, this other submarine showing up just now? The British must be working with Dufresne. And if we haven’t killed him yet, and we let this Dread Virago get clear—”

  “We are not getting into a shooting match with a British attack sub!”

  “But they might not let us finish him!”

  “Paré à lancer,” the computer said.

  “No!” Captain Baker said. “Non, comprendez-vous?”

  “Combat—“Penzias began.

  “No!” Captain Baker unholstered his pistol. “Corporal Penzias, you are relieved. Step away from that console!”

  Penzias’s VISION Rig swung around to face the captain, but he did not stand down from his station.

  “I mean it, mister. . . .” The captain raised the gun, steadying it with both hands.

  “Yeah.” Penzias nodded. “I guess you do. . . .” He raised his arms and stepped out from his circle of screens and scanners.

  “Now tell it to shut itself down,” Captain Baker ordered. “This operation is terminated.”

  “If that attack submarine turns around and comes back . . .”

  “Shut it down.”

  “Sonnez collision,” Penzias said.

  The wail of the klaxon spooked Captain Baker for only a second, but a second was all Penzias needed. His right hand curled into a fist with a leaf-shaped blade protruding between the third and fourth fingers; springing forward, he made two quick cuts, one across the back of the captain’s wrist, the other just above his eye. Captain Baker dropped his gun and flinched back involuntarily; Penzias stepped in, doubling him over with a knee to the groin. He caught the captain’s head on the way down, cradling it gently in two hands, and slammed it sideways into a chart table.

  “Stoppez l’alarme,” Penzias said. The klaxon ceased.

  The intercom clicked on. “This is Najime on the bridge. Who sounded collision?”

  “Computer malfunction,” said Penzias. “The captain’s checking it out.”

  “Oh. Well listen, Tagore just stuck his head outside and he says there’s a fight going on back by the helipad. Must be trouble with the castaways we picked up.”

  “Tell Tagore not to worry.” Penzias ben
t to the body at his feet; the key to the small-arms cabinet was hanging off Captain Baker’s belt. “I’ll be up in a moment to take care of it.”

  Men Overboard

  “Son of a bitch!” BRER Beaver had clamped onto Sutter’s head like a steel-banded fur hat and was thwacking him repeatedly on the nose with his tail. The munitions wrangler fell against the launch panel for one of the depth-charge racks; a black barrel rolled off the Sierra’s stern and detonated in its wake.

  Sayles crouched to grab the assault rifle that Sutter had dropped; a bare foot kicked it out of his reach. He looked up and saw Twenty-Nine Words standing over him with a rubber fish in his hand.

  “Where’d you get that?” Sayles said.

  “Lake Winnatonka,” Twenty-Nine Words replied, and trouted him.

  Giving up hair to do it, Sutter separated BRER Beaver from his scalp and pounded him against the deck until he stopped biting. The munitions man straightened, breathing hard through a swollen nose. He turned and found himself face to face with a naked Eskimo in a kung-fu attack stance.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” Sutter said. But Twenty-Nine Words was quite sincere—nude, but sincere. He cocked his arms in the Fighting Grasshopper First Position.

  “All right, you faggot!” Sutter snarled, dropping into an attack stance of his own, with the ship’s railing at his back. “Come on! Show me what you’ve got!”