The Factory Trilogy 01 - Gleam

by Tom Fletcher

  ‘I think Churr is probably a better shot than me,’ Spider said. ‘What about yourself, Alan?’

  Alan felt disinclined to give the weapon to Churr but he could not justify keeping it himself, so he handed it over. Churr strapped it to her back, climbed onto the bike and motioned for Spider to sit behind her. She kicked the rest up, coaxed the machine into life and sped away.

  Clouds of dust came up behind their bikes on their second Oversight day and the engines sounded sick. Nora assured them that she would get them to fuel before the fumes were gone. The bikes had bulky tanks designed for deep Discard foraging, she said, and they would be okay.

  It wasn’t only the bikes that were running on empty, though. Already the companions were down to chewing plants, though Nora was scornful when Eyes complained. ‘I have lived half my life like this,’ she said.

  ‘You keep talking about your life as a length of time,’ Eyes said between grimaces, his leg bloody and his eyes raw, ‘but even when I could see, I couldn’t see that your life has been as long as all that.’

  ‘I am thirty-two years old,’ Nora said.

  ‘Aye, but by whose calendar?’

  ‘I believe the Mapmaker calendar is not significantly different from that which you used in the House, which itself is not dissimilar to the Pyramid Year Clock,’ Nora said. ‘Built on sun cycles, all.’

  ‘You never have thirty-two of our years,’ Eyes said.

  ‘People have thought me a child all my adult life,’ Nora said, ‘and it grows more wearisome with time, not less. Now, Eyes, I will put this gently on account of your various conditions: shut your fucking pipehole.’

  Spider laughed uproariously at that, which put Eyes in a right sulk. Spider had the highest spirits of all of them, but then, he had survived on little more than whisky, smoke and hallucinogenics for as long as Alan had known him – ever since Spider had put that first tattoo on Alan’s shoulder: the Black Pyramid set against a broken skull that rose like a great bad moon. Alan thought it doubtful that Spider had much of a functioning stomach behind all that hair, inside that knot of dried-up organs and leathery sinew. His insides probably looked like a rack of meat hung up for curing.

  Alan could not stop thinking about food.

  Nora pointed out the petrol tank as the sun neared the horizon. It was a black cube shimmering against the reddening sky. ‘It will be manned,’ she said, ‘but they might help us out for a song or two.’

  ‘Will they survive it?’

  ‘We approach the tank, or we give up the motorcycles.’

  ‘It’s not like they’ve got nothing to barter.’

  ‘You think our green-eyed friend is interested in petrol?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know how it’s tracking us, or if it’s tracking us. I don’t know what it is.’

  Alan did not admit that he had seen it in his head during the brief snatches of sleep he’d achieved the previous night. He did not say that he’d heard its infant voice carrying across the plain, or that its nature was somehow familiar to him.

  ‘We can’t give up the bikes,’ he said firmly. ‘Not with Eyes the way he is.’

  ‘To the tank, then.’

  What Alan had thought was the whole tank turned out to be just one end of it protruding from the stone. A black metal cube with edges of about twenty feet, a riot of green, yellow and purple grasses growing thickly from the small gap between it and the ground. Alan was actually excited to notice a few decent-sized snails sheltering amongst the foliage.

  There was a ladder on the side of the tank.

  ‘Hello?’ Alan shouted up.

  ‘Back away,’ croaked a voice. ‘Back away.’

  Alan looked up to see a hunchback, wearing goggles, crouching on the top of the cube. She looked more like a giant toad than anything, dressed as she was in a shapeless green waxed cotton coat, the kind of attire you didn’t often see out in the open, given the heat. She was pointing an old blunderbuss down at him.

  ‘Back away,’ the woman said again.

  ‘We mean no harm,’ Alan said, holding his hands up.

  ‘Nobody ever does, do they? Nobody goes around all, like, I’m gonna harm you.’

  ‘How does this work? Do you barter? Do you serve only the biker clans?’

  ‘What you got for me? What you got for me, eh? Let’s see what you got.’

  ‘Bartering, then?’

  ‘Show me what you fuckin’ got!’ She jabbed the blunderbuss in Alan’s direction. ‘No more talk!’

  ‘We can play you a song,’ Alan said.

  ‘What good’s a fuckin’ song gonna do me? That a joke?’ A sudden shriek of laughter. ‘That a joke? I’m gonna eat a song, am I? Gonna drink your lovely voice?’

  ‘We’ve got drink,’ Alan said. ‘Eyes – give the good lady your flask.’

  Eyes looked towards Alan, his gaze unfocused. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Eyes, come on.’

  ‘I’m going to die soon, Alan,’ Eyes said. ‘Let me finish my whisky.’

  ‘You’re not going to die.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You are not.’ Alan dismounted, strode over to Eyes and wrenched the flask from his pocket. ‘Here,’ he said, turning and holding the flask up to the woman. ‘This flask for us to refuel completely.’

  ‘What’s in it, eh?’

  ‘Whisky.’

  ‘But what whisky, what whisky? Is it good whisky? Is it the good stuff? Or is it nasty bathtub shine, eh?’

  ‘It’s good stuff,’ Alan lied.

  ‘And is it full?’

  ‘No. But it is made of silver. And it’s heavy.’

  The woman was silent for a moment. ‘Throw it up then, quick – come on, throw it up here for old Mother Margo to have a look.’

  Alan was about to throw it, then he changed his mind. ‘I’ll bring it up,’ he said. ‘The cap’s loose.’

  ‘Wait, wait, wait – what else?’

  ‘We’ve got some bugs,’ Alan said. ‘Not many, mind.’

  ‘I’ll have ’em,’ said Mother Margo. ‘All of ’em.’

  ‘Do you need anything else?’

  ‘Handsome fella over there – you got gold hidden in all that beard?’

  ‘I’ve got two chains around my neck,’ Spider said. ‘But we need some fuel before we agree on anything else.’

  ‘Gather the bugs, songbird, and come on up. Just you on your lonesome, like. We’ll talk terms. And take them damned knives from yer boots. I’m ugly but I’m not a fool.’ Mother Margo disappeared from the edge of the tank.

  Alan nodded. ‘Bugs,’ he whispered to the others. ‘Hand them over. I know everybody’s got some.’

  Spider took a small pouch from behind his beard and shook out a handful. Churr withdrew a couple from a pocket sewn to the inside of her black vest top. Eyes shook his head. He was shining with sweat and as white as some of Nora’s parchment.

  ‘I don’t have any,’ Nora said. ‘Mapmakers don’t use them.’

  ‘Come on,’ Alan said.

  ‘I don’t have any. Take this.’ Nora handed him a small pink crystal. ‘Not very valuable but conducive to rest.’

  Alan threw his last five bugs into the small collection, dropped his knives onto the ground, then climbed the ladder.

  There was a small wooden hut on top of the tank, bleached grey. Mother Margo settled herself into a chair by its door and took off her hat. Her white hair was short and curly. Her goggles were home-made from bottle bottoms and some kind of gut. Her mouth rested open, not closed, displaying what teeth she had left. They were pointed, but not filed; it was as if she had nothing but canines, all pointing in different directions. She waved a hand at the metal tank on which her home was built. ‘Put it all down, then,’ she said. ‘Spread it all out like.’

  Alan did as she demanded and stepped back.

  ‘Not enough for all the tanks,’ she said after a moment. She plucked a snail from out of a fold in her coat and examined it. It retracted its horns and retreate
d into its shell as she brought it close to her goggles. ‘I want that hairy lad’s chains an’ all, and then you can fill all the bikes right up.’

  Alan nodded. ‘Thank you. I’ll go and tell the others.’

  ‘Wait.’ Mother Margo levelled the blunderbuss at Alan and then threw the snail into her mouth. The shell crunched as she bit it and juice spurted from between her lips. Alan looked away as he waited for her to finish her snack. When he looked back she was wiping brown fragments from her chin. ‘Maybe I’ll have a song or two after all. Gets awful lonely up here, it does. Traders come and go but they don’t hang around any longer’n they have to, and they don’t offer nothin’ but food.’

  ‘Food’s important, though.’

  ‘Yeah, but …’ Mother Margo raised her gun. ‘Just sing a fucking song, all right?’ She spat more shell as she spoke.

  ‘All right,’ Alan said, raising his hands once more. ‘All right.’ He swung Snapper around. ‘He’s not at his best,’ he explained. ‘The heat, the conditions—’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Can I shout to the others?’

  ‘Yeah, go on then.’

  Alan shouted down, ‘Spider, throw me your chains. I’m going to play a song or two up here. And start filling the tanks up.’ He turned back to Mother Margo. ‘I need a moment to tune him,’ he said, indicating Snapper.

  ‘Them’s down there’ll need this t’release the valve.’ Mother Margo pulled an unusually shaped spanner from her pocket, and threw it over the side of the tank. There was a clatter and a curse from below. Then she started undoing her voluminous coat. ‘You know any baby songs?’ she asked.

  ‘What, like lullabies?’

  ‘Yeah, like lullabies.’ Mother Margo withdrew a small wooden box from inside her coat and took the lid off. She held up the box so that he could see its contents more clearly.

  He tried not to recoil.

  Inside the box were little bones, and a little human skull. The skeleton was surrounded by dried flowers and scraps of bright cloth. ‘My daughter,’ Mother Margo said. ‘Birthed her alone up here, tried to feed her, but I didn’t have much milk, did I? Not here, not on my diet. Didn’t have much water. Didn’t see any traders for a long time. I woulda taken her elsewhere but for havin’ her did for my back good and proper – couldn’t barely walk. She didn’t starve but I couldn’t keep her strong, not strong enough to fight off whatever got her. I dunno what it was. A sickness, some dirt, I dunno.’ She rocked the box. ‘Couldn’t do much for her but talk and sing. She liked the singing, she did. Still sing to her sometimes, but my voice ain’t what it used to be. Too much weepin’ and wailin’!’ She cackled. ‘We’d like a song from you, though, singer, if yer could.’

  Alan stared in horror at the skeleton. From out of the reaches of Gleam drifted the faint cries of a baby.

  ‘Yeah, I could,’ he said. He ran his fingers over Snapper’s strings, unable to look away from the box. Mother Margo had Nora’s crystal in her hand. She placed it in a small hollow beneath the skeleton’s lower jawbone.

  Alan swallowed. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what song would you like?’

  ‘I don’t know their names,’ Mother Margo said, shaking her head. ‘I remember some tunes, you know.’ She hummed tunelessly. ‘I remember some tunes like that from my own ma, but I don’t know the names.’

  ‘I know them from my mother, too,’ Alan said. ‘My mum and dad, they were in a band. They’d get them all round to practise in the house. I used to live in Modest Mills. They’d come round in the afternoon for just a couple of hours, but then they’d stay and play all night, and I’d sit in the corner and watch. They asked me if I wanted to play something. I always said no. I said … I said to them … you’re too loud. I won’t be able to sleep.’

  ‘What did they play, eh?’

  ‘Mum played the fiddle,’ Alan said, ‘and Dad played the accordion. I never learned to play anything until they were dead. Then I …’ He stopped. He remembered those early days in the Pyramid, the grief and the rage that never went away. ‘I wasn’t allowed, for a while. I wanted to learn the fiddle like my mum but they didn’t have instruments in the Pyramid. My friend, Eyes, he’s down there now, he smuggled a guitar to me. This one here: Snapper. I played it in secret. I found that I could remember some of their songs.’ He shook himself. ‘Sorry. Okay. Do you know “Baby Beetle”? I’ll do “Baby Beetle”.’ He picked the melody slowly and gently, and played for a long time before starting to sing. The sounds of his companions refuelling floated upwards, but they weren’t speaking. The sun was nearly down now and the stars were out and Corval and Satis were bright in the darkening sky. Mother Margo nodded slowly along to the music. The red of the sunset was visible between the planks of her hut. When he started singing, Mother Margo started crooning herself. He couldn’t tell for sure but he thought that behind her goggles her eyes were closed. By the time he’d finished, she was asleep. He went over to her, thinking he’d wake her up, but he saw that her cheeks were wet and he decided to leave her be.

  He took a deep breath, put the lid back on the coffin and climbed quietly down the ladder.

  19

  Going Down

  The Oversight was abutted by a hillside of large, perfectly spherical cobbles, furry with thick bright moss, down which a wide road zigzagged. The stones were piled up in banks on either side of the road. With the morning came a warm fog that smelled of rust. Every now and again these weathers could descend, like a god dropping a cloying grey cloth over Gleam. Nora scraped a boulder clean of its green coat and squeezed the damp matter into the bottom of the dented metal flask that hung from her belt. The flask clinked against what she referred to as her ‘skinning knife’, the sound dead in the mist as she climbed back onto her bike. Periodically she would dismount and repeat the process. The sky had become something that pressed at their skins and at the ground beneath their spinning wheels. The sun was invisible, yet this was the hottest day of the journey yet. Hot and sticky. After two hours easing down the decline, Spider grew impatient and accelerated and the wheels went out from beneath them. Spider’s trousers tore wide open and one side of his right leg was stripped of skin. He gazed in horror at the wound. ‘Three days’ work at least,’ he said, ‘taken in a moment.’

  Churr was wearing leather and her tattoos survived intact. ‘Though,’ she said, ‘I’m as sweaty as a night in the Sleepless Pavilion.’

  By the time they made camp, Alan was shaking with hunger, but he didn’t want to ask the others how they felt. Part of his sickness was guilt at dragging them all out here, but he was also beginning to feel burgeoning lust: he wanted to feel Churr’s sweat patter against his chest once more. He wanted to smell her. He badly wanted to fuck and to be fucked. This hunger was not as urgent as the hunger of his stomach, but it was as real.

  He sat first watch at the base of a solid round tower of stones and tried not to imagine Churr naked. His hands moved restlessly across Snapper’s strings, drawing from the instrument a soft sequence that never repeated.

  The tower, like the boulders, was mossy, and knobbly orange metal stubs protruded from it, presumably the remains of a ladder.

  If this place was supposed to be a factory, then the designers must have been very stupid people, Alan thought. What were these damned balls for? What kind of factory has the space or the room for a mountain of giant marbles?

  Once he was done he woke Spider to replace him and lay down in the lee of a tarp stretched from bike to ground. The bag beneath his head felt lumpier than usual and he spent a good while shuffling around, trying to make at least a semi-decent pillow out of it.

  ‘Damn it,’ he whispered. ‘Damn it, fuck it all to hell, this is fucking shitty and I hate it.’

  The fog was still masking the stars and the other worlds.

  In the morning Alan ate a bitter stew Nora had made out of moss, moss water, toad bones and a handful of fat pink slugs she’d found inside an ancient broken goat skull, and he started to feel
a little bit better.

  *

  The road forked and Nora led them to the left. The new road became a spiral tunnel, burrowing on down into the superstructure. The bike lamps lit up each vehicle, but did little to illuminate what lay ahead. The travellers were strung out, islands of light and gleaming metal growling through the darkness. Though the descending spiral felt endless, it had to end somewhere, and nobody wanted to encounter that end at speed, so they moved slowly, the motorcycles muttering instead of roaring, the cavernous tube rumbled with echoes. Every now and again one would leapfrog another. When he was at the rear, Alan hung back and watched first Nora and Eyes, then Churr and Spider disappear around a long curve, leaving him alone in the ocean of darkness. The sound of his own vehicle was all he could hear, and before long it had become, to him, the sound of the dark itself: its breath, or the rushing of blood through its veins. It was shot through with something else, though: something thin and desolate. Something like the crying of a baby.

  He sped up again.

  At one point he veered to the right and came upon the side of the wide passage. His lamp revealed a row of uniform doorways alternating with windows. There were the remains of wooden doors in the doorways. Gleaming yellow in the glow of the headlights, the bits of wood looked like rotten teeth at the tops and bottoms of stretched black mouths. The windows had similarly worm-eaten shutters, some with glass reflecting the light.

  Alan shuddered and swerved away, immediately besieged by visions of people – people? – watching him from within those pitch-black rooms, drawn to their ruined windows by the sound. Almost as disturbing was the realisation that even if these strange compartments were empty of life – which they probably were – they had once been lived in. They reminded him of Pyramid quarters. The thought that these subterranean boxes had once been homes caused something like panic to blossom in him. Who could live in a place like this? Had they had a choice? Though back then – when? – it would surely have been lit. But still. But still … Underground, light can never truly banish the dark.