The Core

by Jack Robuck

  Trague whispered, “My, my. Look at you.” He closed his hand around Rachel's neck and jaw and pulled her face up to his. “You're an unusual addition to our little family here.”

  Rachel made an unintelligible sound. Trague's pale lips pulled into a thin line. His right hand reached up and gripped Rachel's face, a finger on each of her eyelids.

  “Helpless. Beautiful.”

  He lowered his head to Rachel's cheek, his face twisted, serpentine, and his tongue reached far out of his mouth, licking the foam from the corner of her lips, and spreading it wide across her face like a painter laying-in a canvas.

  He wiped his mouth and leaned down close to her ear. “Yes, you're a special little one. I'll keep my eye on you.” He lowered her head and torso back to the ground. He put both his hands lightly on her face and slid them down, caressing her cheeks, over her jaw line, down to her collar bones.

  He stood up, wiping his hands on his pants. He took a few steps back the way he had come, then turned and announced, “You will work. You will not try to run, you will not try to die. There are things much worse than that. You will discover that you will survive in this place through submission alone. That is all.”

  He strode away and the Troopers followed him.

  It took several minutes for anyone to stand. Matthew rolled over onto his side and sat up. He could see Gusset breathing heavily, and Glazier lay still as if he might be dead. Jimmy was leaning with his hands on his knees. The wiry man and his three accomplices stumbled drunkenly in the direction of their shack. They got no more than a dozen yards when Rachel rolled to her feet.

  She stood bent over, and wiped her face on her shirt. She quietly wretched for a moment, then stood straight up and let out a scream of rage. Turning toward the gang, she tried to run toward them, loping unevenly. She caught up to the leader and grabbed him around the head. With an awkward twist, she broke his neck.

  She grabbed his knife, and stumbled over to the others. The nearest tried to run, but he was in no condition to get away. She bent him over and leaned on him while stabbing him quickly, repeatedly, in the guts.

  Matthew staggered to his feet. The acid feeling of the shock batons still boiled under his skin. He watched through a glaze as Jimmy shuffled after Rachel. Rachel attacked the other two men and killed them, and Jimmy reached her as she stabbed the last one over and over, leaning over his body, her hair sweeping his face. He caught her up in a bear hug, and after a moment, she dropped the knife. They stood like that for a long time, leaning against each other, just breathing.

  *

  The shack was a junk heap, but it was shade out of the sun, and the five of them collapsed on the grungy piles of rags and filth the gang had used as bedding.

  Glazier was alive. Matthew wondered what had happened to the other survivors they had come in with. He sat on the bed, leaning against the corrugated metal wall.

  “Is it ever dark...Is it ever night here? How the hell do you sleep with the sun on? Up?”

  Jimmy muttered, “It isn't ever dark. Not where we are.”

  Gusset lay on his belly, face twisted under an arm. “Shut up.”

  A few hours later, Troopers on iguanas came, announcing that the people of this sector were to check in for work. As the group walked slowly down the hill, Matthew felt a shooting pain from his cracked rib every other step. The bodies of the gang were gone.

  They followed the grey people (as Matthew began to think of them) toward the distant towering shadows through a city of misery, tents, and human waste running in undirected streams downhill. Everywhere the grey people trudged through a limp choreography of civilization, in hovels, in wrecked buses and upside-down cargo pods.

  One large structure they passed made Matthew double-take: an apartment like the one he and his mother had lived in, but ripped in half lengthwise like the set of a stage-play. He looked in on dirty children sitting at the yellow kitchen table, and in the next room he could see a man shaving in the broken sink. The whole hull of a colony ship had been sectioned, the cut so smooth that he instantly turned his head to the left to look for the other half. Matthew thought of his mother, and hoped she wasn't in a place like this.

  He looked from Rachel to Jimmy and back. “How are we gonna get out of here?”

  Jimmy laughed. “Man, you looked excited to be here when we arrived. 'Uh, gee mister soldier, I'm on your team.'” He laughed and grabbed Matthew by the shoulder, shaking him back and forth. “'Uh, can I have a gun and beat people up too?'”

  Matthew shook himself free from Jimmy. Rachel was smirking, but it was clear she was also calculating. The distant fix of her gaze on the town, on the monolithic structures they were approaching and on the grey backs of the shambling locals, all gave Matthew hope.

  The large dark prisms on the horizon were immense factories welded together out of ships like a crazed toddler's monster construction. Matthew thought he had a good idea who that mad child was. They saw Trague again, in the distance, high up through a window in a skyway between two structures, overlooking the main thoroughfare. Some frazzled man was behind him, speaking to Trague. It looked as if he wanted Trague’s attention, but the Commandant stared out into space.

  They stood in front of a concrete platform for some time, then were led under the skyway, past the oil depot—a field of tall, cylindrical oil tanks, each holding thousands of gallons—beyond the desalting tanks and vacuum distillers, to a spaceship graveyard: a junk yard where old oil was pumped and scrap metal scavenged.

  They climbed up a makeshift ladder on the dorsal hull of a Fleet Cruiser and into a hatch, beyond which lay blackness.

  Gusset stopped outside and put a hand on the door, looking in. Matthew turned back toward him. “You alright, Gusset?”

  Gusset nodded, licking his lips. “Yeah, it’s just, I don't know if I'll be able to be in here for long, I sometimes get a little closet-phobic, if you know what I mean.”

  They followed a mousey young woman, dappled with oil stains, inside. They climbed up scaffolds and further into the structure, where she showed them how to set up equipment, carry hoses, and turn the hand-cranked pumps around and around inside a gargantuan piston shaft.

  The oil was sent to the depot, and from there was carried in a bewildering system of overhead pipes to an array of facilities that filtered, distilled, and processed it into useable fluids for all of the Fleet’s needs. Baton-wielding guards passed through at regular intervals, threatening the slow and the tired.

  *

  Hours and hours on, and Matthew's skin felt slick, plastic, his head throbbed numb with exhaustion, and his eyes were bloodshot from straining in the dim light. His ankles ached from standing in the great curved steel cylinder, and the pain in his ribcage had shifted into what felt like a large gaping wound across his entire flank. When a whistle blew and the young woman led them back out of the machine, Matthew didn't know how he would ever make it back to the shack. The sun still shone.

  Days stretched by, the concept a cruel joke in the sun that dimmed orange, then rose; dimmed and rose again, and again. They worked for twelve hour stretches, again, and again, and slept as they could. Matthew wasn't sure if he was sleeping at all, and not knowing that was the worst part. He learned to chip away the burnt oil residue from the engine surfaces, to scrub them down clean, and how to use a cutting torch. Ever so slowly, the Cruiser was carried away in chunks to the steel mill on the backs of workers.

  In the shack, they talked of how they might escape, but nothing presented itself as a worthwhile plan. They ate what they were given and Jimmy advised Matthew not to make any inquiries as to its nature.

  In a surprise turn of events, Richard Glazier seemed to be thriving. He'd lost weight like the rest of them, but the work seemed to be building in him a vigor and strength that he'd missed out on in all the years he had lived on The Waverly.

  Only Gusset seemed unchanged. Matthew supposed his life had always been hard.

  Rachel kept her head down. In a way, s
he had retreated inside herself, hardly interacting with the others. Matthew hoped it was because she was formulating a plan. Despair was stalking him, it gave him a bad taste in his mouth, and he thought of his foolish hopes of mutiny and heroism on board The Waverly only a few days before.

  The sound of a fly buzzing woke Matthew, and the idea that he had slept, that he had really been sleeping, gave him a moment of relief. He sighed, leaned his head back against the rusty wall, and swallowed. Thirst was a constant enemy in this place, and the only source of water was at the factory. He had begun to get a sense of when the Troopers would come again, and he shuffled into his shoes by the door.

  All of the others lay sleeping, and he looked to Rachel, where a beam of light from over the top of the door slashed across her cheek, down along her filthy ribbed undershirt. Even covered in oil and ash, she was stunning. Her sharp features softened when she was asleep. Her eyelid fluttered with the exploration of a dream, or the endurance of one.

  Overhead, from everywhere, a sudden low, thrumming engine sound rose, growing louder with every second. The others quickly woke, and Rachel's eyes snapped open on Matthew. She held his gaze for a moment and he looked away. Down the hill, in the field, the grey people were gathering too, surprised.

  A massive ship blocked out the sun for a moment, and Matthew let out a breath he'd been holding for days. He closed his eyes and swallowed, soaking up the dark, but in a moment, the ship was gone. It passed overhead and landed in a far area beyond the junk yard. Soon the Troopers appeared and everyone was ushered toward the mysterious arrival.

  They stood in the shadow of this monster—a cargo ship—exhausted, Jimmy and Gusset actually leaning on each other. They waited.

  The cargo bay door soared overhead like a slip-textured storm cloud. It hissed as its hydraulic cylinders engaged, lowering it down to the courtyard.

  The Troopers herded all of the grey people into lines leading up to the ship. At the top of the ramp, Matthew could see a woman arguing with a Trooper, the same woman who had collapsed in the field when they arrived. The Trooper held up a hand and, a moment later, beat the woman down with his baton. He beat her repeatedly and she didn't rise. Matthew closed his eyes.

  When he opened them again, the lines of people were passing things down from the ship. He saw the woman's body two lines over. The grey people slowly passed her to the back. Then another body, and another, and Jimmy was handing him a body, and he felt the weight of it, and its stiffness, and he struggled to pass it to Glazier. He noticed the soft, clean synthetic clothing it wore, and looked back up the ramp to where all five lines were now passing down bodies. The cool grey and white stripe of colonists of the 3rd Earth Fleet. The ship was full of bodies from the crash of The Waverly. Some were whole, and some were just pieces.

  There was baggage, too, and cargo; everything from The Waverly. Piles were made according to type: perishables, personal belongings, persons deceased.

  They spent all of that day and the next sorting goods from the crash. Bodies were piled on wagons and pulled away by the giant lizards. A cloud of black smoke rose in the north, and the acrid stench of burning death wafted through the entire facility, making Matthew miss the smell of oil.

  In the shack, squatting by the door, he stared at the wall. He felt that his sense of humanity had been wiped away, that his sense of exhaustion was now emotional as well as physical. He wondered what hole in his body his sense of rage had crawled out of, and why he stayed with these people who had caused his whole world to come crashing down.

  Chapter 5

  In the alley again, Ella sat watching the old man's son cook the noodles. Around the corner, the statue glowed and the sound of music wafted over the distance, but Ella had only hunger and leaving on her mind.

  While she waited, he scrambled an egg into rice and slid it hot-hot to her with a mug of purified water.

  She thought about the money in her satchel, in her jar. She thought about her room, and the price of rice and noodles. The money in her satchel would buy a ticket on the transport the Fleet Troopers ran. She had been to the next town before, as a child, but no further.

  A long day's ride and another day's walk, and she could be there. The ocean. Where there were no buildings dropping bricks from on high, where there were trees alive, alive, and green, and the sun, like a fire in the sky, and the sky white, and so blue it could blind you. And the ocean too. Ella didn't see how the ocean could be blue if water was clear, but she was willing to try.

  Peter said once that Luna had daytime, long ago, and that a train ran anywhere you could think of, and to places you could never imagine.

  Ella laughed. "I'm going to the ocean tomorrow."

  The old man's son eyed her for a moment, and turned back to his work.

  "I'm going to take the Fleet transport tomorrow, and walk out to the ocean the next day, and I'll be there."

  "Transport not cheap."

  Ella furrowed her brow and pursed her big mouth into a crinkly red rose. "I know."

  When she had eaten, she rose, and swished through the alley and the rain. The young man didn’t love her like his father did, but he cooked just the same.

  The great chasm of Luna was branched with alley cracks and zigzagged streets of cobblestone. She turned down a particularly narrow one off the great courtyard with the statue, her sandals squishing.

  Around the third bend, the last yellow gas-lamp went out of sight. Ducking under a strand of faded banners, she picked her path by the light of the glowing plant life in the window boxes and street bins along the way.

  She came to a halt at an ancient store front. The green glass was stamped in a frosted diamond pattern, the windows fashioned in tall, crisp panes, the wooden pieces like bars. The light from within—chartreuse and emerald—splashed across her pale face as she stood outside in the rain.

  She always anticipated the warm smell of vanilla and other spices, of tea, and the syrupy humidity of plant life inside. She turned the knob. The door opened into a dark hardwood foyer with a short counter in front of a hundred letterbox shelves. Across from the door, two steps led down into a wide space with an arched brick ceiling.

  Ella walked to the steps and peered down into the room. The far stone wall stood only a dozen yards away, but the room stretched out left and right into darkness. Here in the center, from the stairs to the wall, ran a dozen rows of waist high greenhouse boxes, and the hundred hues and tints of green that emanated from them fogged the arched stone ceiling and the wall in a broad semi-circle.

  A huge, bear-like man stood in the center of the room, glowing in the organic luminescence. He held a delicate pollinating pick in one meaty hand, and the clay pot of some velveteen flower in the other.

  He spoke, and she noticed a long little brush hanging between his lips like a toothpick. “You always come at night.”

  Ella stood just at the steps, and grasped her pendant with both hands. She lowered her chin and pursed her lips at him. “It’s always night, Sean.”

  The large man gestured openly with his hands. “Not for the plants. Be quiet, they’re sleeping.”

  Ella smiled. She walked down the steps into the rows. Overhead hung big ringed light fixtures, now dark, their purple lenses reflecting obsidian in the green glow.

  An old wooden door opened from the dark, and Sean’s wife, Myra, walked in.

  Ella, welcome!” Myra walked quickly over and embraced Ella with a kiss on the cheek. Her dark red hair was piled high in a messy bun. “How are you? Always wet, Ella.” She laughed, and walked up the stairs past the railing to the bar counter.

  Ella followed. Myra stood in front of the antique arched shelving, laden with an apothecary’s clutter of jars and packets labeled and tied. “Can I offer you some tea?”

  Ella shook her head, and smiled shyly. “Just come to pay up what I owe, and buy some supplies.”

  Myra smiled in return. “So you’re going then? Going soon, I guess?”

  Ella nodded seriously. �
�Oh, yes. Tomorrow, I think.”

  Myra opened the canvas-covered account book on the bar top. “Will you come back?”

  Ella paused. “I don’t know, I guess I didn’t think that far.” She let out a quick, silly laugh. “I guess I was just thinking about how everything will be different when I’ve gotten there. I won’t know what to do with myself if it isn’t!”

  Myra smiled as she pulled a cloth bag from under the bar, and handed it to Ella. “I hope so, yes. I hope you have a wonderful time. You’ll have to come back though; you’ll have to tell me all about it.”

  Ella smiled and took the bag downstairs. Near the stairs were bins of produce for sale. She was gathering items when her eye was drawn to Sean harvesting mushrooms in a nearby row. She went over, and put both hands on a large domed mushroom cap the size of her head.

  "It's beautiful," she said.

  The surface was faded pink, marbled with cream, and it reminded her of a piece of corral her mother had given her as a child. Her mother had come from the ocean. Feeling the cool rubbery mushroom under her palms, she thought about Myra's question. What was she planning to do there?

  Sean gave her a quizzical look. "Go ahead, it’s ready."

  Ella reached underneath to the stem, and snapped the large fungus from its base. She brought the ribbed underside up to her nose, and crinkled her face at the earthy, meaty smell. She put it in her bag.

  Outside, the drizzle had turned into a downpour, and she somehow didn't want to leave alone. She called out to Sean. "Are you bartending at the Silver Lady tonight?"

  He shook his head, and said, "Yes, but later on. Sorry Ella."

  Myra smiled, and put a small red silk umbrella into her hands. Ella said, "Oh, no, I might not be coming back." But Myra squeezed her shoulder, and opened the door for her.

  She tip-toed through the dark alley back to the courtyard, but when she reached it, she stopped. The whole city glowed blue as it always did, and the slick cobblestones reflected streaks of light from the fish market signs and the tall yellow neon palm of the fortune teller's den.