In the Shadow of Lazarus

by J. J. Keller

  When he opened his eyes, the dark ceiling had taken on strange textures. Lumpy shapes squirmed and writhed, multiplying like bacteria under a microscope. His hair itched against the back of his neck and shoulders. He turned onto his other side and stared at the floor. It appeared to be flowing slowly past, forcing his eyes to follow it, and whenever he changed back to where he’d started, it reset itself.

  Reigo swung his feet down to the floor and sat on the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees and heels of hands on his forehead. He blinked, squeezed his eyes shut, and opened them. Neon shapes clung to his vision, as though he’d been staring at bright lights. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and his throat burned. He found a bottle of phytoculture water in the dark. The cold water in his throat slaked his fever as well as his thirst.

  He stood and went to his cubicle. The cool shower soothed his rash. He had to feel for the soap in the dark and stumbled against the wall a few times without his sight to reinforce his sense of balance.

  After dressing, he tried to sit quietly in a chair, but he kept thinking he’d caught sight of things in his peripheral vision, but seeing nothing when he looked. Perhaps Ceril had some drugs that would bring sleep. He would go and look for him.

  Through the window in the corridor a few stars showed, but most of the sky was blocked by the blank disc of the gas giant. Reigo hoped starlight wasn’t strong enough to fuel the disease as he studied the thin light reflecting from the metal edges of the window.

  In one of the cargo bays, Reigo found Hectar and Aspera sitting on empty pallets, talking quietly. A dim reddish emergency light provided the only illumination.

  Ogonaovan arrived behind Reigo. “Here, Reigo, watch this,” he said in a low voice, grinning.

  “Ogonaovan, no,” Reigo told him as Ogonaovan’s mobility chair tilted up and began to climb the wall. He continued up the wall until he was hanging upside-down from the ceiling. The chair made no sound as the caterpillar treads moved it across toward where Hectar and Aspera sat. He maneuvered very slowly and carefully until his head was dangling just behind Hectar’s, before letting off a loud belch.

  Aspera started and Hectar let out a loud yell and fell forward off the pallet onto the floor. “You stupid bloody fool!”

  Ogonaovan laughed. “It’s only a joke, mate!”

  “It’s not amusing, and I’m not your mate!”

  Aspera rose and glared at Ogonaovan fiercely. “This is all your fault,” she said in a low voice.

  “No, it isn’t!” Ogonaovan’s face distorted into an obnoxious expression. “It’s ’is own bloody fault!”

  “It is not! All he ever did was his job. It’s you that starts it, every time. Now he’s lost his job because of you, and now I’ve to make a choice that no man should ever have to make. You want to know why? Because I’m a Blood traitor, and that means the castellan of Carck-Westmathlon has a warrant for my death because of what I’ve done, and if I get off at Carck-Northfenvier, the computers will talk and the castellan there will know. So I have to choose between staying here and preserving my own life, or going with Hectar and most likely bringing death to both of us!”

  “Oh. I’d have thought that’d be a fairly easy choice.” Ogonaovan laughed. “Stay here and be safe, or go somewhere dangerous with someone who shits his pants on the bridge.”

  “I did not shit myself!” Hectar objected. “I went to the lavatory!”

  Aspera crouched to pick up a can of levigated esculents she’d been eating. “You’re a Bloodless fucking shit!” She flung the contents in Ogonaovan’s face and hurled the empty container across the cargo bay. It made a hollow ringing sound as it struck the far wall.

  Hectar sat back on his pallet. “Tiorné is not herself. This disease the leper brought aboard...I think it may have affected her.”

  “It’s affecting all of us,” said Reigo. “Ceril’s analysis said as much.”

  “Ceril and Tiorné. Would seem convenient, the same as it’s convenient she’s changed the course.”

  “Why shouldn’t she?” Reigo felt confused. His head was beginning to hurt again. He wanted someone, just for once, to agree with him, plainly and simply.

  “What if she has this disease?” Aspera leaned against the wall, facing the window and watching the stars. “She gave permission for Naral to come aboard, after all. Ceril scanned him, and said he was not a risk, and yet the ship was still contaminated. It could be they conspire against us. What if this disease is just another kind of cargo, and she has been paid more to transport it than she considers our lives to be worth? What if she and Ceril plot to bring us to a ship of plague carriers so the Nimrod can be taken and all of us infected as new acolytes?”

  The word acolytes sent a thrill down Reigo’s spine. Naral had spoken like that. The memory of his mother shouting on the observation deck came back to him. Surely Tiorné would not leave him to die of a disease. If the disease was infecting all of them--it was hard to tell. It didn’t make sense that Ceril would lie about his analysis, but it could be he had made a mistake.

  “Speak with her, if that’s what you think.” He wanted to be left alone, but at the same time he felt a desperate need for solidarity.

  “No. It’s you who must speak to her.” Hectar clasped his hands behind his back and raised his chin. “You saw what Tiorné...what Tiorné called me in the observatory, how she theed and thoud at me. Much as I think you an inexperienced upstart, unfit to negotiate on our behalf, I do permit that your word carries weight with your mother, and much as you probably are aware of my opinion of Ogonaovan here, I agree with him.” Hectar moved closer to Reigo, and looked deliberately up into his eyes, and at the same time Reigo was aware Ogonaovan had moved closer and Aspera had come away from the window to block the other side, leaving only the corridor through which he had entered accessible.

  “That is, unless you are also infected.” Hectar’s tone had an admonishing malice to it. Hectar was broad, but he was three inches shorter than Reigo and clumsy. He could overpower Aspera, despite his natural aversion to striking a female. Ogonaovan he could outmaneuver or out-climb, but something in him needed a scapegoat, and his anger at his mother and her treatment of him was still there. The storm in his mind! He needed something to believe.

  He turned, ignoring Aspera’s grimace. “I will go then and I will speak to Tiorné.”

  He left the cargo bay and walked slowly to the fore. The door to the bridge remained shut.

  “Mother?” he said. “Mother?” he thought.

  “I remain.”

  Reigo took a deep breath. Telling his mother the crew was conspiring against her would not be easy. “Are you sure this course of action is the right one?”

  “Reigo, this is not open for debate.”

  “The crew wants answers. I think we should stop our approach to the moon and discuss this.”

  “The course is non-countermandable.”

  “There must be some way of changing it.”

  “Steel and Flame, Reigo, do not tempt me!”

  Reigo sprang back from the door. Tempt her? Tempt her to what? Tiorné could kill him here in this corridor, kill him by a variety of means, him powerless against this ship which was just an extension of her own reach. Temper overcame him and he shouted at the door, “Do as thou decrees with that which is thine. Throw yourself from an airlock if you so wish. Question or opposition I shall not voice.” He breathed raggedly. “Steel and Flame, I’ll give you Steel and Flame! These people out here are of Steel and Flame just as much as you are!”

  Reigo stood facing the door, his breath rasping in his lungs. In his mind he heard noises: faint, pestilential murmurs and an unnervingly serene moaning. Colored aurora curled over the door frame and the Nimrod’s gloomy walls. Nothing more did he perceive of his mother.

  The colors began to coalesce into forms, like the knotted pillars of gas where stars are born. They wove an intricate dance before his eyes. There, an effigy of a female, not gaunt from conurin like Tiorné, b
ut one with flowing hair who turned coyly from him. Here, the essence of a morran in neon pink, head up-tilted and an expression of ecstasy on its face.

  Na’Athril?

  “Come into the light,” sang the morran in its cracked tin-whistle voice.

  The green haze bounded over Na’Athril’s evanescent specter, and became Naral.

  “Thou didst kill me,” said the prophet, “but Lazarus is merciful.”

  Reigo shook his head slowly. The mirages dispersed.

  The knotted coils of a metal-mailed snake extruded themselves from the door. The snake turned its profile toward him and raised a steel lid over a ruby eye. Reigo turned his head and saw snakes festooning the corridor--too many snakes to discern individual animals. The bodies hung in glistening loops, and dark, questing tongues flickered down to the room. Reigo threw himself at the serpent where the door had been. He felt solid metal against his cheek and palms. He had a sudden vision of the Nimrod fleeing through space and an engulfing sensation of distance. He was hallucinating. The darkness was making him hallucinate...

  He found his way back to the cargo bay, but in the dark the Nimrod’s corridors were strange and unfamiliar.

  Ogonaovan’s hand gripped him fiercely at the elbow as he entered the room. “Will she yield?”

  “My mother does not heed me,” was Reigo’s reply. “She will not listen. The disease has her in its grip. It is not the light that promotes this disease, but the darkness.”

  “What?” Aspera hugged her arms around her shoulders. The cargo bay was already growing cold.

  “Do you not feel the disease taking hold?” Reigo felt cold and cynical, and sense was beginning to form in his mind. Ceril and Tiorné must have it wrong. The darkness promoted the progression of the Lazarus disease, not the light. Na’Athril had become so infected at such speed because of the morran’s instinctive hatred of light. It had come into the light as a last desperate attempt to save itself, but the light had killed it, of course, because it was a morran. “People have an instinct for self protection. Do you not feel the need for light?” And indeed Reigo craved the light within these Stygian walls, out here in this wretched, claustrophobic capsule his mother called the Nimrod.

  “She and Ceril plot against us.” Hectar’s words were expelled as a snarl “She must have light on the bridge. She has hidden herself up there so that we do not infect her!”

  “What am I being accused of now?”

  The voice came from the entrance to the cargo bay. Reigo turned. Ceril stood there, the eyes on the snakes of his staff glowing faintly. In the darkness, Reigo could discern nothing of his expression.

  Hectar strode up to Ceril. He drew himself to his full height, although Ceril still towered over him, light and agile with his weight on his toes and the fine features of the Blood. His elegant mannerisms made Hectar appear squat and ungainly by comparison.

  “Step aside, toad in a hole! You either stand with us or against us!”

  “Snake in the grass,” Aspera corrected him after a pause to translate his sentiments.

  “Please, calm yourselves.” Ceril raised his staff. “What is going on here?”

  “We might ask you the same question,” said Hectar.

  “Since we changed course, I have started to have doubts about my hypothesis. I think it may not be light, but the absence of light, that promotes the disease. We need to get Tiorné to move the ship back into sunlight.”

  “What do you mean?” Aspera said. “Is it the light or the darkness that causes the Lazarus disease? If we choose the wrong one, we are doomed!”

  “What if we are making the same mistake the denizens of the circumfercirc made?” said Hectar.

  “I don’t think the evidence I based my conclusions on was sufficient. I think I may have come to a decision prematurely. We are going to need more results before I can say for sure. This disease is like nothing I’ve seen before. It may be that the disease itself has caused us to reason that the light makes the disease worse, as a deliberate evolutionary tactic to ensure we’ll be infected and it will get what it needs.”

  Hectar frowned and cocked his head to one side. “So now it’s a disease that can scheme and make double bluffs?”

  “If men and morrans have evolved to be capable of such things, who’s to say a disease can’t do the same? That’s what diseases do. They exploit whatever abilities their hosts have.”

  “Wait,” said Reigo. He was trying to be of Steel and Flame, but the dark and the buzzing, singing sensation in his head was becoming intolerable. “What if it’s not a double bluff, but just a single bluff, whatever that is, or a triple one? What if Lazarus wants us to think, now, that the darkness is bad for the same reasons?”

  Ceril shook his head. “I do not know. We need to discuss this again with Tiorné and decide what’s to be done.”

  “We’ve already tried that!” Ogonaovan shouted. “She won’t listen. Not even to Reigo.”

  “Can’t we force the lights to work?” Hectar suggested.

  “No,” said Ogonaovan fiercely. “She’ll have cut off the power supply. We’re going to have to go up there and break down the bridge door!”

  Reigo touched the interface bolt in the center of his forehead. The Nimrod was in a state of hibernation, but he could still sense it, very distantly. Most of its systems were not operational, and its signal came back to him sluggish, like a reply from a man inebriated.

  “How long’s that going to take? Every minute we waste, every second we don’t have light, this disease could be gaining ground!” Aspera said.

  “Wait, there’s a better way,” said Reigo. “The phytoculture tanks.”

  “Of course!” Hectar concurred.

  “You’re right,” said Ogonaovan. “Those tanks are artificially illuminated. If Tiorné turned the lights off the phytoculture would die.”

  “A judicious choice.” Ceril flourished an arm theatrically. “To the phytoculture tanks!”

  Reigo led the way.

  “Fuck,” said Ogonaovan as they reached the lift doors. “No power.”

  Hectar, as if out to prove the mechanic wrong, banged his thumb several times against the contact plate.

  Reigo ran his hands along the wall and found the gridded hatch that covered the entrance to the Nimrod’s maintenance shafts. “Then in the footsteps of morrans shall men walk.”

  “That goes all the way down to the phytoculture deck?” Aspera’s voice held a dubious note.

  “My chair won’t fit down there,” said Ogonaovan.

  “Light and life or darkness and disease and death are your own choice.” Hectar reached around Reigo and lifted up the hatch.

  “Who said you get to go first, ye fat bastard?” Ogonaovan barked. “If you get stuck in there, none of us will be able to pass!”

  “Those of the Blood shall be first. The rest can go last.”

  “Bollocks! If that’s the way of it, Reigo and Aspera and Ceril would go before you!”

  “Shut up, the pair of you!” Reigo shouted.

  Ogonaovan and Hectar both faced him and said nothing.

  “Hectar, you go first, if you’re going. What does it matter who goes first? So long as all of us make it there.”

  Reigo heard his labored breathing as Hectar got his feet through the opening, and felt him squeeze into the shaft. Aspera followed, more lithely but without thanks or acknowledgement to Reigo for letting her pass. Ceril slapped his shoulder as he followed.

  “Ogonaovan, are you coming?”

  He heard the creak of the chair as Ogonaovan climbed out of it. “Ay. Can’t stay here. I’d better go first, otherwise I might fall on ye and damage your brain more than it already is.”

  Reigo tried to assist Ogonaovan as little as possible, and what help he did offer the mechanic resisted. He was a proud man beneath his jocular exterior. When he had found the rungs on the opposite side of the shaft and begun to lower himself, Reigo followed.

  At first he descended too fast. Ogonaovan grun
ted as Reigo’s foot landed on his shoulder, and Reigo hurriedly apologized. As they lowered themselves farther into the hatchway he began to sense a growing luminescence, and something compelled him, driving him toward where he knew he would be safe and the disease would be cured.

  At last he saw Ogonaovan ease himself out into a pool of light below and swing from a wall bracket like a gibbon. Reigo dropped from the rungs and landed on his toes, flexing the joints in his legs, and all was light, and for a moment he could see nothing, and a delirium of ecstatic abandon overcame him. And, when he did see, the light that entered his eyes seemed to have been diffracted into all its constituent colors, and he could make no sense of direction.

  As he stared at the colors they began to merge, until the red element was entirely lost and at last it became a sea of uneven green.

  Reigo lifted his head. At some point he had fallen, or lain down without realizing it, and he lay on his back on the gantry crossing the vast tank that contained the phytoculture. Through the vitreous walls of the gantry he saw the bodies of the many green motes, waves and unevennesses moving through their masses, the sun lamps that drove their photosynthesis casting a dynamic green-tinged light through the verdant curtain. And there was light, there was light. Reigo saw every movement of the phytoculture organisms, moving in dynamic fractal synergy. The sounds he heard were distorted and wonderful, and as he stared at the phytoculture he lost all reference points.

  Reigo sensed a minute change in pressure against his eardrums. He heard a voice, and recognized it as being Ogonaovan’s.

  “She’s trying to fucking kill us!”

  Reigo looked up. Something in the strut supporting the roof arch of the bridge through the phytoculture tank had ruptured. Liquid was jetting into the tunnel at high pressure.