Celestial Inventories

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  The other red came from a short, thick plant—a strange amalgam of moss, fern, and shrub—with a brilliant crimson centre. It grew everywhere on the planet. Many of these plants were spoiled by spots of black char.

  A third of the plain south of Bennett Compound was now on fire, filling the thick air with carbon dioxide and tiny particles of black ash that attacked his windscreen like hyperactive gnats. Periodically, a cleansing spray washed through the microscopic V-grooves which tattooed the hull. Alec was aware of this spray as a vague, ghostlike dampness somewhere in his skin.

  But even with the spray, particles occasionally burst into flame along the ship’s fuselage. A sudden nimbus of white light or a rainbow blazed off the forward canard.

  The constant fires were a nuisance, but they destroyed enough plants to keep the oxygen level down. A couple of percentage points more, and Bennett could have been an inferno.

  Every few minutes the computer cycled through a systems check. He could eavesdrop when he was in the right state of mind. Electrical schematics overlapped microhydraulic graphic simulations on the undersides of his eyelids. Weaponry alignments multiplied across the mindscreen, then suddenly burst like bright, incendiary bombs.

  He could visualize the wide telemetry shield, fielding impulses from his skull plugs and transmitting them to the computer controls then feeding it all back through his ethereal, yet perfect-looking arms and legs and the parts of the plane his arms and legs had become.

  The plane dropped past red-brown walls dirty with grey-green and crimson growth. He didn’t see any fires in the immediate vicinity, but they were raging only a few miles away, and he appeared to be dragging the ash down with him. It swarmed over him so thickly that at first he thought his eyes had suddenly grown worse.

  Broad plateaus and massive chimney formations rose from a valley floor still miles below him. At times they came close enough together to form their own narrow passages. He was afraid to drop much farther. It would be like a labyrinth down there. And he would need the height when the dragon ventured out, if it did.

  The bodies of the mountains were ponderous, spotted with red and green disease. Enormous, infested mounds of alien flesh. He felt sure that, if he broke into them, there’d be alien maggots: blue and green and brilliant silver, star-and cone-shaped heads.

  The forward canard helped pull him out of the drop. The sides of the fuselage, his sides, rippled once, then set for better air flow.

  Now he had another vista on the canyon: a series of flat places along an ever-broadening series of cliff sides, arranged like enormous steps, rich with the crimson-hearted plants. On some of these steps he could see short, broad grazers, a smaller and slightly hairy version of the hippopotamus. One looked up in a kind of slow motion startle, then lowered its head again. In the shadowed rock behind it, there appeared to be a wide tunnel opening.

  Puff birds, their cheek sacs bloated comically, floated around the plane. If Alec looked carefully enough, he could see blotches of lizard colonies on the canyon walls, their jaws long and broad, crocodile-like.

  Hand length insects with bloated wings and claw-like feet landed on the hull of his craft and were immediately washed away.

  Wing, fin, and hull surfaces changed shape sixty times a second in a graceful, coordinated ballet.

  He felt, to the core, lighter than air, with no care that his arms and legs were dead because he didn’t need them anymore. He felt the rockets within his dead fingers, the fire inside his eyes straining behind the goggles. Darkness filled his chest.

  Then he saw the dragon. At first it was a bit of black ash, turning the corner of the rock tower far below him. Fluttering and twisting in the wind, it seemed the remnant of some scorched field of alien, vegetable life. It changed shape as it rose, from time to time sending out projections first one way, then another, so that at times it resembled a black, funereal pinwheel.

  Then it was a bat, flapping slowly upward out of the shadowed valley toward the heat-baked peaks and plateaus at the top.

  Then it was a small black sail boat, floating unsupported in the valley air. A ghost ship. A Flying Dutchman.

  And then it was a dragon, resembling everything and nothing.

  It was hard to see the thing’s wings clearly. They were three times the length of his plane. Vaguely bat-like, but with gas sacs lining the top and a doubling of the black-grey mottled skin where more gas might be trapped. The wing span appeared to be about eight times the height.

  The dragon wrapped itself in its wings, then unwrapped, furled and unfurled, a dark lady teasing with her lingerie.

  A wing dropped down, and Alec could see the dragon’s head. The top of the skull was broad and pale, and Alec thought of the extinct condor. The eyes were large and opaque, seemingly without centres. The huge mouth dropped open, loose on its hinges, gulping air, as if hungry for anything that might cross it. He assumed that the large areas surrounding eyes and nose and mouth were gas-filled as well, since they appeared to change shape now and then, going from flat planes to gnarled ridges and swirls, giving the face as a whole an almost limitless expression.

  The body was as dark as the wings, dull, and largely hidden.

  The dragon lost altitude suddenly. For a moment it wrapped itself tightly for the drop, then unfurled its wings and let them drift up behind it. Alec watched as the dragon rapidly closed on one of the grazers on the steps below. Its wings spread, covering the step from view. Then it was rising rapidly, the grazer struggling in the dragon’s jaws, a thin ribbon of yellow fluid trailing from a neck wound. When the dragon let go, the grazer smashed back onto the step and was still. The dragon settled slowly over it and began

  to gnaw.

  The sheer physicality of the dragon was enough to take Alec’s breath away. The plane rocked back and forth anxiously. Alec tried to stretch himself, but the wings would not budge. A warning light went off. He felt small and vulnerable, yet drawn to this physical massiveness, this beast of ancient health. Without thinking much about it, he felt the plane drifting down, the altitude readout racing past his eyes, blurring in a way that was almost soothing.

  He was at nearly the same level as the dragon. It had finished its meal and winged itself gently off the cliff side. It hung in midair, watching the ship, watching Alec.

  The creature’s cheeks and neck billowed. Dust and ash shot up from it, as if caught in a thermal.

  Alec let the plane ease closer, rocking slightly in the canyon updrafts.

  The roaring thunder suddenly filled him, almost shaking the plane out of sync with him, a sensation he thought must be akin to out-of-body travel. A black cloud filled his field of vision at the same time that electrical charges worked at loosening his scalp.

  The cloud fluttered and beat at his windscreen. Huge wing edges curled down at their tips. Then he was rocketing sideways, wings shifting, the rear thrust nozzles swiveling rapidly to direct him away from the looming blood-red rock walls.

  Now the dragon was beneath him, massive devil’s head coming up in front of the plane. The thing was flying upside down, blank eyes watching him, and Alec was suddenly bucking the plane ever so slightly, jabbing his belly fin at the dragon’s exposed torso, then rolling out, climbing, banking, and settling back into his altitude once he saw that the dragon hadn’t followed this time.

  The dragon rose to a point distant and slightly beneath him, allowing him to circle. Its wings shuddered and rippled like a black paper kite. Only the head was immobile, held rigid in the turbulent air like an African mask. It drifted in the currents, watching.

  Watching. One night when Marie had stood over him, thinking he was asleep, she’d lifted the covers, touching him hesitantly.

  “Alec?” she’d whispered. “I’m … sorry. I just can’t.”

  He had been surprised, and oddly touched.

  The dragon revolved in midair, wings rising, dropping, paddling forward and back, darkness caught on a wheel.

  The dragon was blowing air, or gas, ou
t of cheeks, mouth, neck sacs. It began rising toward him. The instruments were in Alec’s head, his eyes. The electronic goggles came up. Air speed, wind speed, and a half-dozen other functions read out along a muted silver band that ran across the bottom of the lens. Prepared to meet the dark, he aimed with the goggles and fired.

  A cliff off to the dragon’s left exploded into red debris. Alec trembled. A light flashed on his display. He looked out. The dragon was climbing above him.

  From underneath, the creature’s body blended in with its wings. Then the wings began to rotate, the head turned down, the dark mass hesitated, and the dragon was suddenly dropping. In seconds the mouth gaped grotesquely, the jaws unhinged, the gas sacs receding, expanding.

  Alec pulled away and began to spin in an evasive maneuver. His sensation that the dragon was with him was confirmed by a ballet of graphic stick figures spinning at the bottom of his goggles. Black flaps slapped at his windscreen. He closed his eyes, felt his stomach drop as he cut the thrusters, tensed his shoulders, and prepared the surfaces for the drop. Swiveling the thrusters and cutting them back in, he roared toward the valley floor until he’d left the dragon behind him, then let his canards and altered surfaces bring him back up.

  He stared at the dragon, feeling fire at the edge of his lips and at the tips of his fingers. The dragon stared down at him. It was terrible in its huge, limp fleshiness, but somehow Alec could not bring himself to imagine its destruction.

  He saw the disease moving through his body, growing, reaching out to embrace his beautiful children and his wife. He saw their faces dissolve in slow motion, in blues and greens and reds.

  Then he realized the dragon was descending farther toward the canyon floor, going away. And he was doing nothing to pursue it.

  Alec watched until the dragon shrank back to a twist of black ash, then he dropped quickly, following the dragon around several twists in the narrowing canyon, past towers, chimneys, and spires. The surrounding cliffs loomed progressively closer, and at times Alec felt compelled to bring the wings in to reduce their span. Vegetation became sparser this far down, the lizards were in more abundance, and the grazers were nowhere to be seen.

  Alec manoeuvred through a series of swirled rock formations, following the rocketing dragon that now looked eagle-sized as it threaded the bull’s eyes, into dragon country.

  Part of the wall began to curl overhead, and Alec could see that the canyon here was narrowing, gaining a partial roof. He hesitated, and the plane slowed down, but as the dragon drew farther away from him, escaping, he was seized by a sudden desperation and felt the plane shoot forward.

  The wall curled more as he flew its length, forming more than a complete roof over him now, beginning to drop on the other side like a frozen wave. The space here was still hardly confined—a hundred such planes could have flown wingtip to wingtip and would still have room to spare. The walls danced with broken light.

  He was enclosed in an almost seamless tunnel.

  Alec suddenly experienced vertigo, imagined himself falling through miles of earth with no one there to catch him. He was too heavy, too awkward. Too ugly. He could not fly.

  Bright warning lights tattooed his eyelids. He wondered that the plane had let him go this far, but knew proceeding was better than stalling out.

  A message was up on his windscreen: THIS IS A HAZARDOUS FLIGHT AREA. ADVISE AGAINST PROCEEDING.

  Alec wondered how long it had been there.

  Amazingly, the plane flew on, faster and faster. He wished his wife and children could have seen it. Flying through the dark with no hands to hold him.

  But it wasn’t at all dark in the tunnel. He looked around. A yellowish growth covered the walls, broken here and there by a greyish, tendriled vegetation. But it was all blurred, blending together.

  Up ahead the dragon revolved as if in slow motion, though Alec knew it was travelling faster than he was. Its wings were glistening panels of silver light that, when looked at, almost hurt the eyes. Rainbow light flowed over its head and down its back, trailed off into a tail of fiery dust, and travelled over the dark form, like hordes of migrating, fluorescent parasites in the dragon’s skin.

  The tunnel opened up periodically into a necklace of enormous chambers. The dragon slowed down, seeming to float, maneuvering coyly behind occasional spires and hanging lobes of stone. Coquettish.

  Alec burned his thrusters lightly, wings tilted upward and the jets along his wing edges straining. So although there was forward progression, it was, like the dragon’s, just short of a stall. An encounter between two winged insects.

  Dark, concave ridges with sharp rock dividers, like the body impressions of a huge snake, ringed the chambers. Ribbed stone grew along the walls like roots or stiffened entrails.

  His instruments detected activity in the recessed galleries, dark patterns of movement. Vague impressions of limbs and wings and unclassifiable appendages, nothing more.

  The walls seemed closer, fecund and teeming. He suddenly imagined he could smell the stone.

  Minute bits of material were bouncing off the skin of the plane, some of it darting off before it could be misted away.

  Occasionally, something raked lightly along the underside of the ship, too close and too softly for stone.

  Ahead of him the tunnel split, both branches far narrower than the one he had been in. The dragon floated at the juncture, its glowing wings and face drifting through highly stylized patterns of light, like a woman dancing in a kimono, her face painted a brilliant white.

  He stared for what seemed to be a long time before following the dragon into the starboard tunnel.

  The bright kimono began to wrap him. The plane revolved once rapidly on its axis, freeing itself. Alec imagined being wrapped within his own sheets, unable to get loose, paralyzed.

  Ahead of him the dragon was imitating, making huge loops out of its pliant wings, twirling itself like a pinwheel.

  Another tunnel was opening, even narrower. The dragon straightened and dove through it. Alec hesitated, the plane slowed, but there was nowhere else to go. He had to trust the dragon’s expertise. He dropped his nose and entered.

  The tunnel widened, then began to curve steadily upward, narrowing again. Tilting farther up, Alec could feel the strain. Soon they were almost vertical, facing a dimness ahead. Alec could now guess.

  The dragon was racing up the hollow insides of a chimney formation. Alec shifted focus, gritted his teeth, and allowed his ship to follow as if towed. He felt sick to his stomach.

  The ship gave him something for the nausea—he could feel the change beginning back in his throat. The centre of the chimney was a seamless grey, speckled red. The warning lights cooled, just in time for Alec to burst out of the chimney and into the dazzling sunlight.

  As the plane floated out over the valley again, Alec scanned the sky frantically for some sign of the dragon. Nothing. He could see the gleam off the domes of Bennett Compound on the lip of the distant canyon wall. He’d come back to the departure point. Ground vehicles waited along the edge. He soared closer, into gathering shadow.

  The shadow wrapped him up with a roar. Dark sheets wound around his chest until he couldn’t breathe. A cry caught in his throat, his goggles blazed red, and with a high pitched whine he pitched over, dragging his mind screaming behind him.

  He fired again and again, turning dirt and rock and sky into flame.

  His eyes came open with the sense that the plane was folding back its wings. He looked out, straight down, at a fast-approaching ribbon of blue. He was a child falling out of bed, the bedclothes around him so tightly he could not move. He was a child tossed and dropped by his father. He was a dragon too large and much too dark to fly.

  The water rose. The aide had left him in his bath too long. He could not move his arms. His legs were gone. And he was slipping fast beneath the waves.

  Alec screamed as muscles seemed to tear from bone, as bones bent and snapped. But he was rising, pulling out of the dive, an
d the disfigurement was only illusory, he reminded himself, no matter how terrible.

  He strained for the canyon rim, dragging the plane up behind him. Enough. He had no business here.

  And then he slammed into darkness, and the darkness gave way around him, then came back fighting, eating his windscreen, folding wing and fuselage, crushing him.

  The devil’s head roared above him, blank eyes blazing. Flames coruscated down wings shrinking, turning to silver.

  Crazily, the ship’s computers began cycling through a systems check. Alec watched microhydraulics multiply and disappear, electrical systems blossom. His perfect cobalt-and-lime legs and arms jumbled, doubled, then faded away.

  And on the top edge of the telemetry shield, the dragon’s severed muscles and nerves danced madly. He’d speared it, pinned it. He could almost imagine reaching out and grasping it in his hand. It wasn’t going to get away.

  He could see the edge of the cliff only a few yards above him, in one unobscured corner of his windscreen. Personnel in red suits lined the lip. He’d never make it; he could feel the plane

  falling.

  He reached with his mind, and the thrusters pushed.

  He felt his stomach rise, the leap in his thighs.

  And suddenly he was lifting both plane and shield-pinioned dragon up over the edge of the cliff to solid ground. Plane and dragon skidded over broken rock, crimson-hearted scrub, and cinnamon-coloured soil to a shuddering stop.

  Alec thought of his body breaking, the disease spilling out, the disease murdering everyone around him, his beautiful, sleeping children, his wife. He heaved his useless body. He thrashed, palsied, cramping.

  “Get him out of there!”

  Technicians in black masks were pulling Alec out of his harness and trying to slip a mask over his face. He fought them. Smoke haloed their bulbous heads. He smelled something sharp. Ash began to fill his mouth.