Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories

by Barnacle Bill the Spacer

  ‘Let ’em try! They might pick off a few of us when we’re out on the flats, but we’re dug in too deep for them to do any real damage.’

  ‘That’s what you believe,’ I said. ‘But then you’d be crazy to count on it bein’ true, wouldn’t you?’

  He tried the same stare on me that he’d tried on Coley, but for some reason I wasn’t cowed by either it or his faulty logic. Coley, I noticed, seemed pleased by what I’d said.

  ‘S’pose they got more weapons than what you figger?’ I went on. ‘S’pose they got some’ll dig you outta your holes? They might decide to kill us all. Who knows what they got in their minds?’

  Wall gave a laugh. ‘You a clever talker, Bob, I’ll hand you that. But ain’t no point you goin’ on like this. It’s all been talked through and decided.’

  ‘How ’bout everyone back on the Edge?’ Callie asked. ‘And Windbroken? And everywhere else? You talked it through with them, have you?’

  ‘They ain’t involved with us. Anyhow, the Captains got no reason to go hurtin’ them for somethin’ we done.’

  ‘No reason you know of, maybe,’ Callie said.

  ‘Well,’ said Wall after a bit, looking off into the distance, ‘this is a real nice chat we’re havin’, but like I told ye, it comes a little late in the game. We’ll be going down into the Garden at dusk.’ He cut his eyes toward me. ‘You come along with me if you want, Bob, and have a look for Kiri. But keep in mind she’s not the main reason you’re goin’ to be there. Keepin’ the Captains back from the ship is. That clear?’

  Brad started to speak, but Wall cut him short.

  ‘The boy and the woman can stay with the ship. We can use another coupla rifles case any of ’em break through.’

  I thought Brad was going to say something, but he just lowered his head; I guess he was wise enough to realize that Wall couldn’t be swayed by argument.

  ‘Keep your chin up,’ Wall told him. ‘Time’ll come soon enough for ye to do some real killin’.’

  The three of us spent the remainder of the afternoon huddled among the rocks. We talked some, more than we had recently at any rate, but it was for the most part anxious talk designed to stop us from fretting over what lay ahead, and never touched on the things we needed to talk about. Snow fell steadily, capping the boulders in white, and as the sky darkened, golden light began to stream up from the crater once again. Then, as dusk began to accumulate, I caught sight of Coley and a couple of others leading a diminutive pale figure down the slope. It was a Captain, all right, but like none I’d seen before. Dressed in rags; emaciated; scarred. As they drew near, I got to my feet—we all did—fascinated by the proximity of this creature whom I had previously thought of in almost godlike terms. There was nothing godlike about him now. His nose was broken, squashed nearly flat, and his scalp was crisscrossed by ridged scars; one of his eyes was covered by a patch, and his other had a listless cast. The only qualities he retained similar to those curious entities I had spoken to in Edgeville were his pallor and his size. About his neck and cupping the back of his skull was a metal apparatus worked with intricate designs resembling those I’d seen on antique silver; its richness was incongruous in contrast to his sorry state. I had expected I might feel hatred on seeing him, or something allied, but I felt nothing apart from a dry curiosity; yet after he had passed I realized that my hands were shaking and my legs weak, as if strong emotion had occupied me without my knowing and left only these symptoms, and I stood there, as did Brad and Callie, watching until the Captain—Junior—had been reduced by distance to a tiny shadow crossing the hardpan toward the crater.

  It was not long afterward that Wall came to collect me. Callie and Brad went off with a big, broad-beamed woman who reminded me some of Hazel Aldred, and Wall led me over to a group of men and women who were sitting and squatting at the edge of the hardpan, and gave me over to the care of a woman named Maddy, who fitted me out with a hunting knife and a pistol and an ammunition belt. She was on the stringy side, was Maddy, with dirty blonde hair tied back in a ponytail; but she had a pretty face made interesting and more than a little sexy by the lines left by hard weather and hard living, and she had a directness and good humour that put me somewhat at ease.

  ‘I know a red-blooded sort like you’s all bucked up and rarin’ to go,’ she said, flashing a quick grin, ‘but you keep it holstered till I give you the word, y’hear?’

  ‘I’ll do my level best,’ I told her.

  ‘We’ll be goin’ down soon,’ she said. ‘If there’s an attack and things get confused, stick with me and chances are you’ll be fine. We believe there’s gonna be some of our own people down there. They’ll be collared, and like as not they’ll be comin’ after us. If you gotta kill ’em, nobody’s goin’ to blame you for it. But if you can, aim at their legs. Maybe we can save one or two.’

  I nodded, looked out between boulders across the hardpan. A handful of Bad Men were visible as silhouettes at the rim of the crater, black stick figures blurred against the pour of golden light; I couldn’t make out what they were doing. The thought of descending into that infernal light turned my nerves a notch higher; I couldn’t have worked up a spit even if the price of spit had suddenly gone sky-high.

  ‘Ain’t no point my tellin’ you not to be afraid,’ Maddy said. ‘I ’spect we’re all afraid. But once we get down to business, you’ll be all right.’

  ‘You sure ’bout that?’ I said, trying to make it sound light; but I heard a quaver in my voice.

  ‘You come all this way from the Edge, I guess I ain’t worried ’bout you seizin’ up on me.’

  ‘How bout Wall? You reckon he’s afraid?’

  She made a non-committal noise and glanced down at her hands; with her head lowered, a wisp of hair dangling down over her forehead, her expression contemplative, the crater light glowing on her face, eroding some of the lines there, I could see the girl she once had been.

  ‘Probably not,’ she said. ‘He likes this kind of thing.’

  There was disapproval in her voice. This was the second time I’d detected a less than favourable feeling toward Wall, and I was about to see if I could learn where it came from, when Clay Fornoff hunkered down beside us.

  ‘He all set?’ he asked Maddy.

  She said, ‘Yes.’ Then, following a pause, she asked how much longer before we started.

  ‘Any minute now,’ Fornoff said.

  I didn’t really have anything to say, but I thought talking might ease my anxiety, and I asked him what sort of opposition we’d be facing aside from people wearing collars.

  ‘What’s the matter, Bob?’ He made a sneering noise of my name. ‘’Fraid you gonna wet yourself?’

  ‘I was just makin’ conversation.’

  ‘You wanna be friends, is that it?’

  ‘I don’t much care about that one way or another,’ I said.

  His face tightened. ‘Just shut the hell up! I don’t wanna hear another damn word from ya.’

  ‘Sure thing. I understand. I s’pose you don’t want to hear nothin’ ’bout your folks either, do ya?’

  He let a few beats go by then said, ‘How they doin’?’ But he kept his eyes trained on the crater.

  I told him about his folks, his father’s rheumatism, about the store and some of his old friends. When I had done he gave no sign that he had been in any way affected by the news from home. Maddy rolled her eyes and shot me an afflicted smile, as if to suggest that I wasn’t the only one who considered Fornoff a pain in the ass. I’d been coming around 180 degrees in my attitude towards Bad Men, thinking of them more as heroes, rebels, and so forth; but now I told myself that some Bad Men were likely every bit as rotten as what I’d once supposed. Or maybe it was just that I was part of a time with which Fornoff would never be able to reach an accommodation; he would never be able to see me without recalling the night when he had gone Bad, and thus he would always react to me with loathing that might have better been directed at himself.

  Not lo
ng afterward I heard a shout, and before I could prepare myself, I was jogging alongside Maddy and Fornoff toward the crater, watching the chute of golden light jolt sideways with every step; a couple of minutes later I found myself in the company of several hundred others descending the crater wall on ropes. The three ships rested at the bottom of the crater on a smooth plastic floor, from beneath which arose the golden light. We paused beside one of them as Wall, with the help of two other men, worked feverishly at the smallest of the mining lasers that protruded from the prow. I saw that it was a modular unit that could be snapped into place. Once they had removed it, Wall shrugged out of his coat and lashed the unit to his right arm with a complex arrangement of leather straps; the way it fitted, his fingers could reach a panel of studs set into the bottom, and I realized it must have been designed to be portable. Wall pressed a stud and a beam of ruby light scored a deep gouge in the rock face. On seeing this he laughed uproariously, and swung the thing, which must have weighed 70 or 80 pounds, in a celebratory circle above his head.

  Beyond the ships, at the bottom of a gently declining ramp, lay the entrance to a vast circular chamber—I guessed it to be about a half-mile across—floored with exotic vegetation, some of the plants having striped stalks and huge rubbery leaves, unlike anything I’d ever seen; the domed ceiling was aglow with ultraviolet panels, the same sort of light I used to grow my peas and beans and tomatoes back in Edgeville, and the foliage was so dense that the four narrow paths leading away into it were entirely overgrown. Mists curled above the treetops, rising in wraithlike coils to the top of the ceiling, lending the space a primitive aspect like some long-ago jungle, daunting in its silence and strangeness.

  And yet the place was familiar.

  I couldn’t quite figure why at first; then I recalled that Wall had said the Captains called the crater the Garden, and I thought of the book I’d read and reread back in the hydroponics building, The Black Garden, and the illustrations it contained—this chamber was either the model for one of those illustrations or the exact copy of the model. Confused and frightened already, I can’t begin to tell you the alarm this caused me. Added to everything that I previously had not understood but had managed to arrange in a makeshift frame of reference, this last incomprehensible thing, with its disturbing echoes of decadence, now succeeded in toppling that shaky structure, and I felt as unsteady in my knowledge of what was as I had during our ride from Edgeville. I had an urge to tell someone about my sudden recognition, but then I realized that thanks to Junior, they must know far more than I did about the Garden, and of course damn near everybody knew about the book. But none of these rationalizations served to calm me, and I got to thinking what it meant that the Captains would give us these clues about their existence, what it said about their natures.

  Approximately a hundred of us headed down each of the avenues, moving quietly, but at a good pace. Maddy, Clay Fornoff, and I were attached to a party led by Wall. Once beneath the canopy we were immersed in a green twilight; sweetish scents reminiscent of decay, but spicier, issued from the foliage and a humming sound rose from the polished stones beneath our feet—that sound, apart from the soft fall of our footsteps—was the only break in the silence. No rustlings or slitherings, no leaves sliding together. Every now and then we came to a section of the path where the stones had been replaced by a sheet of transparent panelling through which we could see down into a black space picked out here and there by golden lights, and once again I was reminded of The Black Garden, of what the book had related about a region of black foliage and secret rooms. Once we walked beneath a crystalline bubble the size of a small room suspended in the branches, furnished with cushions, and with a broad smear of what appeared to be dried blood marring its interior surface. Far too much blood to be the sign of anything other than a death. The sight harrowed me, and Maddy, after a quick glance at the bubble, fixed her eyes on the path and did not lift them again until it was well behind us.

  No more than fifty yards after we had passed beneath the bubble, we encountered the first of two side paths—the second lay barely another twenty-five yards farther along—and at each of these junctions we left a quarter of our number, who hid among the ferns that lined the way. I expected to be left with them, but I imagine Wall wanted to give me the best possible chance of locating Kiri, and though uneasy with the fact that I was moving deeper and deeper into this oppressive place, I was at the same time grateful for the opportunity. After about fifteen minutes we reached the far side of the chamber, a place where the path planed away into a well-lit tunnel that led downward at a precipitous angle. We proceeded along it until we came to another chamber, smaller than the first yet still quite large, perhaps a hundred yards in diameter, its walls covered with white shiny tiles, each bearing a red hieroglyph, and dominated by a grotesque fountain ringed by benches and banks of tree ferns, whose centrepiece, the life-sized statue of a naked crouching woman with her mouth stretched open in anguish, bled red water from a dozen gashes carved in the greyish-white stone of her flesh. The statue was so real-looking, I could have sworn it was an actual person who had been magicked into stone. Vines with serrated leaves climbed the walls and intertwined across the white tray of ultraviolet light that occupied the ceiling, casting spindly shadows.

  On first glance I’d assumed the chamber to be untouched by age, but then I began to notice worn edges on the benches, corners missing from tiles, a chipped knuckle on the statue, and other such imperfections. The idea that the place was old made it seem even more horrid, speaking to a tradition of the perverse, and the longer I looked at the statue, the more certain I became that it had been rendered from life; there was too much detail to the face and the body, details such as scars and lines and the like, to make me think otherwise. I imagined the woman posing for some pallid little monster, growing weaker and weaker from her wounds, yet forced by some terrifying presence, some binding torment, to maintain her pose, and the anger that I had not been able to feel on seeing Junior now surfaced in me and swept away my fear. I grew cold and resolved, and I imagined myself joyfully blowing holes in the pulpy bodies of the Captains.

  We crossed the chamber, progressing with more caution than before. Judging by the way Wall turned this way and that, searching for a means of egress—none was apparent—I had the notion that the existence of the chamber came as a surprise to him, that Junior must not have informed him of it. Unnerved by what this might mean, whether it was that the collars were not totally controlling and Junior had lied, or else that he had been so stupefied he had forgotten to mention the place, I put my hand on my pistol and turned to Maddy to see what her reaction might be to this turn of events; but as I did, a section of the wall opposite us slid back to reveal a wedge of darkness beyond, a void that the next moment was choked with emaciated men and women wearing metal collars like the one Junior had worn, dozens of them, all armed with knives and clubs, driven forward by white-furred apes that differed from the Edgeville apes by virtue of their barbaric clothing—leather harnesses and genital pouches. The most horrifying thing about their approach was that they—the men and women, not the apes—made no sound as they came; they might have been corpses reanimated by a spell.

  I glanced back to the tunnel and saw that it was blocked with an equally savage-looking force; then the attackers were on us, chopping and slashing. There was no hope of aiming discriminately as Maddy had suggested. Everything became a chaos of gunshots and screams and snarling mouths, and we would have all died if it hadn’t been for Wall. He swung his laser in sweeping arcs, cutting a swath in the ranks of our adversaries, and headed straight for the opening on the far side of the chamber and the darkness beyond it.

  It was a matter of sheer luck that I was standing close to Wall when he made his charge. During the first thirty seconds of the attack I had emptied my pistol; I’m sure I hit something with every shot—it would have been nearly impossible not to do so—yet I have no clear memory of what I hit. Faces, ape and human, reeled into
view, visible for split seconds between other faces, between bodies, and blood was everywhere, streaking flesh, matting fur, spraying into the air. I simply poked the barrel of my pistol forward and fired until the hammer clicked. Then as I went to reload, a club glanced off the point of my left shoulder, momentarily numbing my hand, and I dropped the pistol. Even with the ape stink thickening the air, I could smell my own fear, a yellow, sour reek, and while I didn’t have the time to indulge that fear, I felt it weakening me, felt it urging me to flee. And I might have if I had seen a safe harbour. I drew my knife and slashed at an ape’s hand that was grabbing for me, going off-balance and falling backward into Wall. He shoved me away, and inadvertently I went in a staggering run toward the opening from which the apes and their collared army had emerged, so that in effect I wound up guarding his flank, though it was Maddy, beside me, who did the lion’s share of the guarding. She had managed to reload, and in the brief time it took to cross the remaining distance she shot four apes and two collared men, while Wall burned down countless others, the laser severing limbs and torsos.

  When we reached the darkness beyond the doorway, Wall turned back, continuing to fire into the mêlée, and shouted to us to search for a switch, a button, something that would close off the chamber. As I followed his order, my hands trembling, fumbling, groping at the wall, I saw that seven or eight of our group were pinned against the fountain, and before the wall slid shut to obscure my view, sealing us into the dark, I saw three fall, each killed by collared men and women. Many lay dead already, and many others, wounded, were trying to crawl away; but the apes were on them before they could get far, slicing with long-bladed knives at their necks. It appeared that the red water from the fountain had been splashed and puddled everywhere, and that the open-mouthed woman at the centre of the fountain was screaming in a dozen voices, lamenting the carnage taking place around her.

  The instant the chamber vanished from sight, isolating us in the dark, Wall demanded to know who had found the control, and when a woman’s voice answered, he had her lead him to it and burned it with the laser so that the door could not be opened again. He then asked us to speak our names so that he could determine how many had survived. Sixteen names were sounded. Clay Fornoff’s was not among them. I tried to remember if I had seen him fall, but could not. The darkness seemed to deepen with this recognition. I could see nothing; even though I knew that the door to the chamber was within arm’s reach, I felt as if I were standing at the centre of a limitless void. It seemed strange that only now, now that I could not see it, did I have a powerful apprehension of the size of the place.