Jopale stood beneath a glow-light, shouting Brace’s name. A voice called back to him. A few moments later, the old caretaker stepped from inside one of the little rooms, wiping his sleepy face while asking what was wrong.
With words and manic gestures, Jopale explained the situation.
For an instant, the caretaker didn’t believe him. The weathered face looked doubtful, and the pursed lips seemed ready to downplay what he was being told. But then one of the worm’s drivers ran down the narrow esophagus, shouting the same essential news.
“Where are we now?” the caretaker asked her.
The woman offered a number and letter designation that might as well have been in another language.
But the old man instantly absorbed the knowledge. “We’ll stop at Kings Crossing,” he ordered. “The station’s gone, but the ground is up on the last ridge. We’ll be able to see how bad things are. And any good news too.”
Jopale couldn’t imagine anything good.
Then the caretaker turned to him, saying, “Sir,” with a firm tone. “I need to know. Have the other passengers noticed?”
“Just one. The girl—“
The caretaker hesitated for a moment. Then he said, “Say nothing. I’ll see if I can raise some voices on the radiophone, get the latest news… and then I’ll walk through the belly and offer a few words…”
Brace’s voice fell away. What kind of encouragement could he offer anyone now?
There was tense silence, then a deep slow rumbling. The sound that came and then came again, making the great throat shiver.
“What is that?” Jopale had to ask.
“That would be the worm’s heart,” the caretaker offered. He tilted his head and held his breath, listening carefully. “And you can hear her lungs working too. Which is why we live up here, sir. So we can keep tabs on our baby.”
Jopale nodded.
Then the caretaker touched the rough pink wall, and the driver did the same, both using that pause to fight back their own tears.
* * * *
Do-ane had abandoned the window, sitting alone on her blanket, using her electric torch to read her book. Everyone else was sitting too, including Rit. The old map was unfolded before him. Glancing up, he said nothing to Jopale. Then he looked down again, asking the map, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Jopale lied, as a reflex.
The tall man glanced at Do-ane, and with the heightened senses of a paranoid, he announced, “Something is wrong.”
She started to look at the window, then stopped herself.
But Rit noticed. He decided to take his own look, pulling his long legs under his body, taking a deep breath, and another. But there wasn’t enough courage inside him to stand. His legs stretched out again, and a long hand wiped his mouth dry, and then he carefully fixed his eyes on the old map, nourishing his own faltering sense of ignorance.
“Did you tell?” Do-ane whispered, closing the book on her thumb.
Jopale nodded.
She stared at his face, his eyes. Something about her expression was new—a hard stare meant to reach down to his soul, seemingly. Then she made her decision, whatever that might be. Opening the book again, she flipped through pages until she found what she wanted. Placing her back to Rit, she pushed the book toward Jopale and handed him her torch, giving his face one last study, just to convince herself that her feelings were right.
The page was blank.
No, it unfolded. Jopale found a corner bent up by use, and he lifted the slick paper and gave the book a quarter turn, an elaborate drawing showing what looked to be the configuration for some type of worm.
“Is it—?” he began.
“The mountain,” she interrupted, fingers held to her mouth.
Rit seemed to notice nothing. No one was paying attention to the two of them. The wealthy old woman who had complained at World’s End was making her male companion look out the window. But she only wanted to know what was approaching, and he only looked ahead, reporting with a matter-of-fact voice, “There’s some long slope. And that’s all I can tell.”
Was the mountain a worm? Jopale wondered.
He returned to the diagram, finding a scale that gave him a sense of size. But surely there was a mistake here. Even if the scale were wrong by a factor of ten, this worm would be larger than a dozen rust-fins set in a row. And if the scale were right, then the mountain would dwarf a hundred and twenty full-grown rust-fins… making it larger than most cities, wouldn’t it… ?
He looked up. “Is it alive?” he whispered.
Do-ane had no simple answer for that. She shrugged and said, “It isn’t now,” in a soft voice. And then even softer, she said, “Look again.”
He was no expert about worms. But he knew enough to tell that the mountain shared little with the creatures he had grown up with. Its mouth was enormous but without true jaws, forming a perfect circle from which every tooth had been removed. The throat was straight and wide, and then like a funnel, it collapsed on itself, becoming too tiny to show on this diagram. The anus was equally tiny, opening at the very tip of the tail. And between mouth and anus was a digestive tract that filled only a portion of the worm’s enormous body.
“What are these?” he asked.
She touched the lines and the spaces within them, saying, “Chambers. Cavities. Rooms, of a kind.”
He didn’t understand. “How could a creature survive this much surgery?” he asked. And when she didn’t answer, he looked up, realizing, “But this isn’t any species of worm, is it?”
She mouthed the word, “No.”
“It is a machine,” he muttered.
She tilted her head, as if to say, “Maybe.”
“Or is it alive?”
“Not now, no. Not anymore. We think.”
The worm carrying them was attacking the last long slope, slowing as it crawled higher. Another person stood to look outside. But he was on the north side of the worm, and from that angle, nothing was visible behind them.
“The tail and some of the midsection cavities are flooded,” Do-ane told him.
Those were drawn with blue ink.
He asked, “Is the tail the deepest part?”
She nodded.
“And the mouth?”
“Buried inside a fossil island,” she reported.
“Choked while eating its lunch?” He meant it as a joke, forcing himself to laugh.
But Do-ane just shook her head. “We don’t know what it ate in life,” she reported. “But this organism, this machine… whatever it was… it probably required more energy than you could ever pull out of wood pulp and stolen sap.”
Jopale closed the book and turned it in his hands, examining the binding. But there was nothing to read except a cryptic “Notes” followed by a date from several years earlier.
“What I am,” Do-ane began.
He reopened the book and unfolded the diagram again. “What are you?”
“In the sciences, I have no specialty.” She smiled, proud to say it. “I belong to a special project. A confidential research project, you see. My colleagues and I are trained in every discipline. The hope is… was… that we could piece together what this thing might be…”
“It’s metal,” Jopale guessed.
“Within its body,” she said, “we have found more iron and copper and zinc than all of the peoples of the world have gathered. Plus there’s gold and silver, and elements too unusual to have common names.”
Jopale wanted to turn through the pages, but he still couldn’t make sense of this one.
“Yet the body is composed mostly of other substances,” she continued. “Plastics and compounds that look plastic. Ceramic materials. And lining the mouth and what seems to be the power plant… well, there are things too strong to cut samples from, which means we can’t even test them in any useful fashion…”
“And what are you?” he asked again.
“One member of a large, secret team trying to make sense
of this.” She showed him a grim smile, adding, “I’m just a novice still. Some of us have worked forty years on this project.”
“And have you learned anything?”
A hopeful expression passed across her face. But again, they had reached a juncture where Do-ane didn’t want to say anything more. Jopale sensed that she’d already told him too much. That they were pushing into codes and laws that had to be obeyed, even when Catastrophe walked across their world.
Again, their worm was slowing.
Passengers noticed, and in a moment, they grew uneasy.
“Where?” Jopale asked.
Do-ane ran a finger over the giant mouth. “What are you asking?”
“Its origin,” he said. “Do you know that much?”
“Guess,” she whispered.
He could see only two possibilities. “It comes from the world’s center,” he offered. “There are metals down there. I remember that much from school. Deep inside the world, the temperatures and chemistries are too strange for us to even imagine.”
“What’s the second possibility?”
He remembered what she had said earlier. “Our Ocean,” she mentioned, as if there could be more than one. Then he pointed at the sky.
“In my little profession,” she sighed, “those are the two islands of opinion. I’m one of the other-world people, and I believe that this object is a kind of ship meant to cross from star to star.”
Jopale closed the book and pushed it back to her.
By then, their worm had pulled to a stop, and the passengers were looking at each other, plainly wondering what was happening. But Master Brace was absent, probably still listening to the radiophone. Which was why Jopale took it upon himself to stand and say to the others, “This is Kings Crossing.”
Rit pulled the map to his face, asking, “Why here?”
Like any good caretaker, Jopale managed to smile. But he couldn’t maintain the lie past that point. Shaking his head and looking at the warm damp floor, he reminded everyone, “We’re alive still.” And then he started marching toward the still-closed sphincter.
* * * *
FIRE
The night air was cool and dry, and it blew softly toward the east—a breeze at this moment, but gaining strength and urgency with the passage of time. Years ago, a tidy little city had grown up on this ridge, but then the sun vanished, and the city had died. Homes and shops quickly became piles of anonymous rubble. But the worm station must have survived for more years. The facility was only recently stripped of its metal, but otherwise it had been left intact. Only a few saprophytic weeds were rooted in the softest planks, while the damp faces of the main building were painted with a rough fungus. Regardless of color, every surface glowed with a steady red light. Jopale read KINGS CROSSING on the greeting arch, painted in a flowing script that was popular back when he was a child. Behind him, the other passengers were slowly stepping onto the platform, talking in breathless whispers. He didn’t hear their words so much as he listened to the terror in their voices, and Jopale did nothing for the moment but stare at the planks beneath his feet and at his own trembling hands. Then when he felt ready—when no other choice seemed left for him—he forced himself to breathe and turn around, staring wide-eyed at the burning world.
Jopale once toured a factory where precious iron was melted inside furnaces built from equally precious ceramic bricks. He remembered watching the red-hot liquid being poured into thin syrupy ribbons that were quickly attacked by the artisans in charge. He decided that this wildfire possessed the same fierce, unworldly glow. It was crimson and brilliant enough to make eyes tear up, and it seemed as if some wickedly powerful artist, inspired by his malevolent urges, must have pulled molten metal across the entire eastern horizon.
Every passenger had left the confines of the worm. Most of the caretakers were busy breaking into a nearby warehouse, presumably under orders to claim any useful supplies. “How far away is that?” a young fellow asked. Jopale couldn’t gauge distances, but others gladly threw out numbers. Optimists claimed the fire was just a few kilometers behind them, and it was really quite small. While Rit admitted that the flames were enormous, but trying to be positive, he thought they might be as far away as World’s Edge.
“Oh, it’s closer than that,” the old caretaker called out. “As we stand here, Left-of-Left is being incinerated.”
With a haughty tone, Rit asked, “And you know that how?”
Swollen eyes studied the horizon. Master Brace had been crying again. But he had dried his face before joining the others, and he managed to keep his voice steady and clear. “I was listening to broadcasts, where I could find them. From spotters near the fire lines, mostly.”
Every face was sorry and scared.
“That quake we felt? As we were crawling out of World’s Edge?” Brace shook his head, telling them, “That was an old seam south and east of the city. It split wide, along a hundred kilometer line. I didn’t know this till now… but so much gas came from that rupture, emergency crews didn’t have time to dress. They were killed, mostly. And the methane kept bubbling out. For a full cycle, it was mixing with the air. Then something… a person, or maybe lightning from a thunderstorm… made the spark that set the whole damn mess on fire.”
“What happened to the city?” Jopale asked.
Brace glanced at him for a moment, then stared at the planks. “I talked to a spotter. She’s riding her balloon east of World’s Edge. The city’s gone now, she says. Including the ground it was sitting on. From where she is, she sees open water where millions of people should be…”
“Open water?” Rit asked. “Does that mean the fire is going out?”
Brace hesitated.
Do-ane said, “No.” The woman looked tiny and exceptionally young, her boots back on her feet but still needing to be buttoned. Clearing her throat, she explained, “If too much methane saturates the atmosphere, Good Mountain and the local oxygen is exhausted or pushed aside… there can’t be any fire…”
Jopale closed his eyes, seeing the beautiful station and the black-haired woman with that lovely, lost voice.
Brace nodded, saying, “There’s two fire lines now. One’s racing east, the other west. In the middle, the water’s bubbling up so hard, huge chunks of rotten wood are being flung up in the air. So the methane… it’s still coming, yes sir. And the spotter told me that our fire… the one that’s chasing us… it just now reached to the fringes of the Tanglelands… and then I lost her signal…”
Some people wept; others appeared too numb or tired to react at all.
Two drivers were standing near the worm’s head. One of them suddenly called out a few words, her voice barely legible.
The other caretakers had vanished inside an unlit warehouse.
Master Brace turned to the drivers. “The full dose, yes,” he shouted. “Under the vestigial arm.”
“But the flames don’t look that tall,” said the wealthy woman. She shook her head, refusing to accept their awful prospects. To her companion, she said, “Perhaps the fire’s just burning off the forests.”
Her young man muttered a few agreeable words.
But Do-ane said, “No, you’re confused. It’s the smoke that fools you.”
“Pardon me, miss?”
“That land is definitely burning,” she said. “Huge volumes of green wood are being turned to smoke and ash, which help hide the tops of the flames. And of course that scorching heat will lift everything.” She pointed at the sky, asking, “Can you see what I see?”
Jopale hadn’t noticed. But the eastern half of the sky had no stars, a dense black lid set over the dying world. Flood this landscape with daylight, and half of the heavens would be choked beneath a foul mass of boiling, poisonous clouds.
“Are you certain?” the old woman asked doubtfully. “What do you know about any of this?”
Do-ane hesitated.
“The girl’s a scientist,” Rit interjected. “She understands everything th
at’s happening to us.”
“Is that so, miss?”
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 64