Now the snake reversed its rippling, bulges traveling downward mile after mile to vanish In the gray dust sea. Ripple followed ripple like peristalsis, and I realized that whatever lived inside that grotesque metal worm was eating its way upward, invisibly, through the last miles of rock.
Automatic sensors had picked up the dust geyser beneath the second city. An alarm went off; a catlike feathered creature awoke at his console, yawned, stretched, examined the computer’s graceful Elder Culture hieroglyphs on a printout screen. He shut off the alarm, blinked sleepy green eyes, and tried to make sense of the information. It looked interesting; he decided to call his superior.
The worm came up in the center of the first city.
The tesselated pavement split, small-brown and white tiles’ snapping and crumbling, and the worm flowed out in the middle of a multicolored crowd. It paid no attention to the screaming, or to the panic flight, even though some citizens tripped over it or stepped on it. Instead, it wriggled quickly across the street, still feeling its way, tapping nastily with its tapered head. It encountered a building, a ten-story white octagon ribbed with blue metal, and suddenly increased its speed, all doubt removed now, moving with the speed of a cracking whip. It circled the building, leapt through an alley, circled another building, smashed through the plastic panes of a geodesic cylinder and killed five of its inhabitants almost incidentally, smashing them against walls and bulkheads to leave them crushed in broad pools of blood: a red puddle, a green puddle, a copper-colored puddle….
It ran and moved and slid with dizzy grace, spearing through some buildings wrapping others in casual helixes of its length, moving through every quarter of the city, crossing its own path a hundred times in a drunkard’s walk of fear, until at last it returned to its point of origin at the city center. There at the crumbled hole a huge being, a metal-hoofed satyr at least eight feet tall, was stamping repeatedly on the body of the worm. He must have weighed over a ton and the hooves on his bristled legs were sharp, but it was like stamping on a bar of stainless steel.
It was all happening at once. Smoke rose in the eastern part of the city, where a group of citizens had tried to use a radiation weapon on a segment of the worm. The beam had glanced off, melting a dozen bystanders and most of a building. Elsewhere, despairing citizens threw themselves into incompleted soul sculptures, convulsing as sections of their psyches were shorn away. Others made frantic attempts to supply a ship for takeoff. Yet others were beginning to radio warnings and pleas for help to their sister city.
The snake stopped. It was convoluted, wrapped around and through the city’s buildings like a tapeworm through intestines. Now it took up the slack. A barely perceptible trembling shook it. Metal began to buckle. Masonry disintegrated. The length of the snake went through, buildings like a wire garrote through a human throat, spilling water, hemorrhaging electric fire as it cut through cables and conduits, messily severing dozens of trapped inhabitants, toppling buildings onto the crowds in the streets.
Then it began to retreat down through its hole, sliding slickly inwards like the extended tape from a tape measure. The satyr was still stamping insanely. With its last few yards, as a final gesture, the worm looped itself around and around him, ignoring his wrenching, twisting hands. Then it squeezed him till he burst.
Hundreds had died, but dozens survived, hidden underground or in buildings strangely untouched. There was one cargo ship in the city still functioning; its cyborg pilot had had the great presence of mind to leap the coil as it slithered around the ship. The ship’s reactionless drive had curdled a building nearby with great loss of life. But the ship, with its cargo of refugees and hastily salvaged soul sculptures, was intact.
The ship was already trying to pick up survivors when the snake slithered out of the crevice in the side of the cliff and collapsed downward, simply falling, threadlike, in mile-long loop after loop after loop….
The city’s atmosphere immediately began to rush out the hole. A cloud of frost appeared as moist air puffed out and froze, glittering in raw vacuum sunlight like the dust of diamonds.
The rainbow film that roofed the city began to collapse as the air whistled out from under it. It settled slowly, dents and ripples forming on its surface, pale bands of insect-wing color chasing one another faster and faster across its surface. Soon it would touch the top of the highest remaining skyscraper.
The second city was in a state of frantic activity now, readying rescue craft, searching for weapons. The first rescue ship was about to lift off when a subtle grinding registered on the outpost’s seismographs, a grinding from directly beneath the city.
A circular area all around the outpost suddenly gave way, as neatly as coring an apple. The city immediately fell fifty feet. Rock met rock with incredible impact. There were strong buildings in that city; some of them actually remained standing. But the rainbow film instantly gave way, and a sparkling gust of air leapt upward and outward from the newly formed crater. It was a mercy, really; the freezing vacuum ended the pain of these few still alive. A little disturbed dust, loosened by wind, sifted over the freezing ruins like a scattered benediction.
There were no witnesses. The rainbow film on the first city was still collapsing. A final long indentation touched the leaning top of a battered skyscraper. Blinding white energy sleeted outward from the area of contact; the top of the building dripped hot slag into the street. The film burst.
Death was immediate. Even as the few survivors died in their underground shelters, coughing blood of different colors, the last starship lifted off. Its reactionless drive, at frantic full power, melted a few of the remaining buildings, and it surged away from the planet’s surface. Seeking free space.
A cloud of dust arose from the crater beneath, a small cloud, no more than two or three tons worth.
It accelerated upwards. I estimated that by the time it reached the lip of the cliff it was doing at least three-quarters of the speed of light. It moved faster than perception; there was no evidence of its existence at all until the hull of the starship was suddenly turned into something like metal cheesecloth. The loss of air was only incidental. Everyone aboard was riddled with charred holes, thousands of them. There was no blood; it was all cauterized. And they were all dead.
The hulk drifted off serenely into blackness.
The sun was setting over the rim of the Nullaqua Crater. The sea below was calm; the slow vortexes of dust that had disturbed its surface stilled into eddies and vanished. The whole Crater seemed to settle into the peace of complete satisfaction, a state like the quiet joy of drawing in one’s first cool breath when a fever has finally broken. Stasis. Peace. Stability.
The sound of coughing woke me.
I opened my eyes to a vast unfocused glare, and blinked away a gritty film of tears. The dust was all over my face, clogging my eyelids, crusting inside my nose, coating the inside of my mouth with a nauseating mealy dryness. I was floating on my back on the surface of the sea.
I tried to clear my mouth. My lips split their dusty scabs and thickened blood flowed over my desiccated tongue. My mouth revived a little in the wetness and saliva began to flow, turning the dust to a thick nastiness. I began coughing convulsively.
My dustmask was still hanging by a strap around my neck. When I reached for it I felt the first red-hot jolt of pain penetrate the numbness of shock. I felt it like a burning bubble inside my right elbow. As I moved weakly others sprang up like flames in my joints and muscles—knees, thighs, arms. Tears of agony channeled through the dust on my cheeks. I had the bends.
An aeroembolism in my heart could kill me. I lay very still, feeding the dust with the tears clearing my eyes and the blood oozing through caked clots from wounds in legs and hands and ears. I tried to control my coughing; I was beginning to suffocate. I reached for my mask again and felt red-hot spikes rip through bones and nerves and tendons. I realized that death was very near, and the thought called up deep reserves of animal vitality.
I spat
wet sludge and said, “I want to live. Just let me live. I can help you, I’ll be your friend … you gods …”
I reached for my mask left-handed, and the pain was not so bad. As I lifted the mask to pour the dust out of it, my head sank a little and I was forced to kick my legs to keep my face from going under. My knees and hips began to bum from the inside out, little trapped fires boiling under my kneecaps. My hands trembled uncontrollably as I put the dustmask to my face. Its adhesive edge, form-fitted to my face, pushed grit into my skin. I wheezed outward to clear the filters. Dust fell from the little rubbery creases around the lenses, inside the mask, to torment my nose and eyes. I lay still again, waiting for the pain to bum itself out.
In the absolute stillness there was a sort of numb stasis of pain. But when I moved, it seemed as though my movement cracked a shell around the pain and let it ooze out, burning cells and nerves.
I kept weeping, and my eyes began to clear again. I turned my head a little to look at the cliffs, expecting to find them red with evening—it seemed as if hours had passed—but they were gleaming white.
As I looked I saw a black speck move slantwise across their mighty faces.
The black speck was a disturbing presence in a world of walls and bitter dust. It was Dalusa. I lifted my left arm, crusted gray on gray. Could she see the movement amid the miles of bleakness? I could barely move my right arm. Beyond the burning nexus in my elbow was the hot mashed numbness of bleeding fingers. I kicked my legs, raising a little plume of dust, clenching my teeth with a crunch of grit at the stabbing pain in my knees.
There was hope. I kicked and splashed in the dust for as long as I could, stopping when I had to fight a choking fit. My eyes kept oozing tears; I felt more than saw the shadow flit across me. There was wind, and the dust slurred over my cracked lenses and Dalusa settled into the dust beside me.
She knelt in the dust, sinking into it waist-deep and stabilizing her position with the extended edges of her wings, like outriggers. She stretched out her pale hands over my face, put the heels on her hands together, crooked her fingers like fangs and meshed them together, once, twice.
There was no mistaking that gesture—sharks. She pointed their direction, half-sinking as she did so.
“It’s all over then,” I said inside the mask, but she must have heard only a mumble. She swam around to my head with quick sculling motions of her wings. She took my left hand and gently wrapped it around her left ankle. Then she tried to fly.
Her impetus broke my grip at once. As I turned over onto my stomach, wallowing in the dust, I saw a flash of green zip by. Dalusa flinched aside, then snapped out with one preternaturally long arm, snatching a pilot fish out of the air. I heard the rattle of its thin wings against her wrist as she quickly, reflexively, bit through its spine. She threw it aside, and pointed behind me.
I got my hands together and grabbed her ankle in a double panic grip.
She couldn’t quite fly; my weight was too much for her. Instead she flopped and splashed and swam, dust bursting up in dirty plumes beneath her. She would leap upward from the dust to fly forward with great powerful surging strokes, fall to dust again, scrabble and swim with wings and hands and her free leg, and leap up once more to fly through the hot, sterile air as if she had to rip her way through it.
We didn’t look back. The pain in my arms was filling up the whole crater and spilling out over its edges. I felt fresh blood on my palms, and the slickness of sweat. I felt the skin of Dalusa’s ankle beginning to blister, its texture roughening as her skin was devoured with hives.
I couldn’t see the blistering because of the dust. I like to think that I would have let her go if I had seen it, accepted my own death rather than hurt her.
But we were always at our best when pain united us. I wanted to live—for her sake almost as much as my own, for the hope we could give each other. In my pain and confusion I could hardly comprehend the sacrifice she was making. It was only later that I grew to understand it.
I didn’t let go until we stopped moving. I didn’t know how long she had been towing me. It felt like days or weeks. I felt the harshness of rope around my chest, I felt it tighten around my ribs, and, as the sailors hauled me up out of the dust to the deck of the Lunglance, I blacked out.
I was vaguely aware of movement beside me before I awoke.
“Here Mr. Cookie. Drink some of this.” Meggle, the cabin boy, was holding a ladleful of thin, yellowish broth. I lifted my head and tried to steady the end of the ladle. When I saw the bluish, broken nails of my right hand I started and spilled a little of the broth on my quilt I drank the rest, feeling the flat saltiness of it sting my mouth and soothe my raw throat. Meggle set down a kettle of it.
“Drink it all,” he said. “Mr. Flack says you need lots of water.”
I sat up, wincing at the pain in my hand. Someone had’ sponged the dust off me. I was naked under the quilt “What time is it?” I said, almost croaking.
“Clifflight.”
I drank some more soup. “So I’m rescued,” I said. I started to cough rackingly and dropped the ladle with ft clatter on the kitchen floor. Innocently, Meggle picked it up and handed it back to me.
“Have you seen anything unusual?” I asked him at last.
“Anything big moving under the dust—sharks—like that?” Meggle looked at me incuriously. “No,” he said. He seemed unhappy with my questions, as if my forcing him to answer was an imposition.
“Well, what about Dalusa? Is her leg all right?”
“I dunno Mr. Cookie,” Meggle said, reaching up uneasily to tug at a strand of his coarse and incredibly dirty-looking hair. “I only saw its leg when it brought you in. Then it flew off to look for the captain.”
“No!” I said, stricken.
Meggle ducked his head guiltily into hunched shoulders. “Mr. Flack tried to stop it,” he said. “But it said it had to go look while it still had the strength. Its leg was really awful-looking, all swelled up past the knee and everything, but it said it had to go look for him. The captain I mean. It said it had to find him before the sharks bit all his blood out. That’s just what it said: ‘Bit all his blood out.’ Mr. Flack tried to stop it” Meggle looked away.
“How long has she been gone?”
“Three … hours.”
“Then we might as well go home,” I said. “We might as well all go home. She won’t be back.”
“It might, Mr. Cookie. Mr. Flack put bandages on it and stopped the bleeding. Are you all right, Mr. Cookie? Your eyes are red as fire.”
I couldn’t say anything. I only waved him away as I looked down into the soup kettle. Meggle put on his mask and went up the stairs out on deck. Salt tears fell into my broth, adding a lingering bitterness to my lonely meal.
It was her last act of faithfulness to those who hurt her, a last misguided act of sham humanity. She must have found the captain, because she never came back.
Chapter 16
The Voyage Ends
My recovery was rapid. I stopped coughing after the first day, and my hearing wasn’t affected, even though my ears had bled. I would bear scars on my palms and shins, but only until I could get to a cosmetic surgeon off planet. The other scars were not so quick to heal; they would stay until the passage of time wore my personality away.
When I rifled Desperandum’s cabin I discovered that he had had more money than any of us had suspected. Luckily some superstition kept First mate Flack from sleeping in the dead man’s quarters. Perhaps he still felt guilty about Desperandum’s notebooks.
We had thrown all of Desperandum’s notebooks overboard. Flack protested, but only mildly, when I explained to him that their destruction had been the captain’s last wish. While lying in my sickbed I had invented a detailed and elaborately worked out lie about our submarine voyage: how our navigation had failed us, how we became mired in the layer of sludge below the surface; the captain’s bitter regret and his request that I destroy the evidence of his folly, should I escape;
our destruction of the ship; my rescue. My artistry was entirely wasted on the crew; they accepted the explanation without enthusiasm, without even caring.
It was very sad, as sad as watching the abandoned notebooks sink slowly astern, their close-crowded pages riffling slowly in the sluggish breeze. I had watched them long after the crew had returned to their scrimshaw and their silent pursuits.
Even with bruised and swollen hands it was not difficult to break into the cabinet and take the money. To be quite frank, I might have done it in any event; but with Dalusa’s death, the money became a kind of wergild. I was able to skim enough off the top to take me away from the planet, while leaving enough for the crew’s wages and even a bonus.
We reached the Highisle in two days. Desperandum had left no will, and Flack, as captain, left as soon as we docked to report the situation to the maritime Synod. They would probably give him the ship. It was highly unlikely that Desperandum had heirs on Nullaqua, and the government would frankly not bother with locating any interstellar ones.
I was soon paid off, with a generous bonus. I had thought that Flack would quietly squirrel away a large part of what was left of Desperandum’s money; he needed capital, after all. But whether it was some superstitious dread, respect for Desperandum’s departed spirit, or plain dumb honesty, he paid us all off handsomely.
I took the elevator up to the city. My first act was to buy a new suit of clothes. I discarded my tattered, repellent whaler’s outfit in a recycling chute at the tailor’s. Then I reclaimed the goods I had put into storage. With rings on my fingers and my dustmask sold back to a shop for scrap, I felt almost my old self again. But not exactly: there was an unreal quality to it, as if I were haunted by the frail and friendly ghost of my old self.
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