Complete Short Fiction, page 151
Still, the rust . . . I was getting just a glimmering of how he actually planned to get the limbs out when I came to a spot where a delivery of some coolers had blocked the street. I took a side passage, but it grew darker and narrower than I was comfortable with.
I realized I had gone off my route back to the station. Amtoum was set up that way, deliberately disorienting, pulling you one way when you wanted to go another. But . . . this way?
I had not expected Lemuel to do it. After everything, I had never thought he would do something like this to me. But why . . . and then I realized that it hadn’t been Lemuel loosely providing information. It had been me. He’d mentioned boots, but I was the one who revealed she knew they were Amtoum boots, and even that they were of Darkwing leather. He realized I knew things I shouldn’t.
Around the next corner, a cluster of baby Biks waited for me. But these looked different than any living Bik I had ever seen . . . it took me a moment to understand what I was seeing, and thus to really see it. Their forelimbs looked longer and more varied than those of modern Biks, and even than they had been earlier in the day.
They were carrying fighting limbs rescued from some cache: cutters, pincers, spiked clubs . . . not the highest quality, cracked, with pieces missing. But they weren’t just wearing them strapped on as some form of generational drag. These were unified with their nervous systems, working like real body parts.
Rust. It had to be. This was the source of its appeal to these kids. It allowed them to remain themselves, yet take on the armament of their forgotten ancestors. They didn’t have the hang of it yet. I could see them getting stuck on each other, shuddering and falling limp. But they’d learn soon enough how to manage them.
And right now, their edges and points were enough to intimidate a soft-skinned Om like me. Particularly when another group of them emerged behind me, cutting off that last escape route. Silence sifted from the dark sky, down the windowless stone walls, and over the narrow passage in which I tried to hear myself breathe.
They hauled me back to the abandoned stepwell in Fifth Plaza, and then down into a rocky chamber that occupied the same location as the platform into the other stepwell.
They all crowded in after me and kept me away from the door. If the place really was similar to the place the Mesklitch had had his boot display, there would be another door on the far side, down a narrowing passage left amid the fallen rubble. I kept that in mind, despite the fact that route was almost certainly impassible. Sometimes even the threat of an unexpected doorway can serve a purpose.
“Lemuel isn’t your friend,” I said. “He doesn’t have your interests at heart.”
“Lemuel! Who said anything about Lemuel?” they all shrieked.
“I did.”
“You did! You did!” They had tinny, clanging voices, higher-pitched versions of Greng’s echoing sound.
After a while they settled down. They stopped threatening me, but wouldn’t let me leave. But their instructions didn’t seem to include getting me to do anything, or acquiring any information from me. No, Lemuel just wanted me out of the way while he did whatever he had scheduled—though he was probably in more of a hurry than he had expected. I didn’t get the feeling that tonight had been planned as the night of the operation.
Despite the fact that it was completely futile, I tried to argue with these idiots. “Lemuel is using you for his own purposes. He won’t share those limbs with you after they are removed from the cache. He has buyers. He couldn’t have financed this without them. What can you pay for them?”
“He isn’t using us,” one said. “We’re using him.”
“How, exactly?”
“He has penetrated the security for us. He has provided a path for acquisition. These are the limbs that we need to use to restore our meaning. The limbs are ours. Limbs! Limbs!” They shouted together and waved their bits and pieces of forgotten ancestors. “Our limbs!”
When they did that they were terrifying. They moved together, and spoke with a single voice that echoed from all the hard surfaces around us.
It looked like the rust did more than enable them to connect to antique molts. It also caused crosstalk in their own nervous systems, syncing them up in a way they couldn’t really control.
Whenever they calmed down they lost their synchronization and moved as individuals again. But if I got them madder and more connected with each other, there might be a way I could take advantage of their involuntary unification.
I moved around and they pushed me back. I argued with them and they shouted me down. I got them used to my annoying ineffectuality. Then, when their attention momentarily slackened, I ran. Instead of heading for the obvious way out, which I could never get to before being caught, I jumped for that back access door.
Sure enough, the doorway was blind, blocked by the rubble, leading nowhere. But access did narrow down, until there was barely room for me, much less anyone else.
They quickly overcame their surprise and surged into the passage after me.
Enraged, they didn’t think, not individually. They just kept pushing in, unable to stop themselves. I could hear their shells squeak as they rubbed against each other.
And then they couldn’t move. For the moment, they were just one big organism that had gotten itself stuck in a space too small for it. No longer even able to speak, they made a noise like a commercial kitchen, all clatter and hiss.
It wouldn’t last. I put my hands on two of their rounded backs and vaulted over. I didn’t quite clear the last few, caught a toe on a bit of projecting shell, and rolled painfully on the rock floor.
When I got to my feet, I thought I understood how Lemuel was planning to get those ancient molted Bik limbs out of the cache . . . like Lemuel himself, the scheme was brilliant and crazy.
And, like these guys, maybe it was easy enough to stop, if I got to it in time. I was just picking up speed toward the exit when Greng appeared and filled it.
“This is shameful!” it clattered.
“Damn right . . .” I managed.
“Taking advantage of the young and foolish in this way! Through knowledge of Bik physiology that you should not have. You have not changed, Sere. You will still try to win when you shouldn’t even be playing.”
Well, that was a hell of a thing.
But it didn’t spend more time haranguing me. Its clatter lowered in frequency and increased in volume, until its voice was the deep rumble of a rockslide. The gang unhooked, scrambled on the floor, then crouched, mouthparts into the ground as a sign of respect.
It then spoke to them, not in the cityspeak we had all been using or any other standard traffiq, but in a recent Bik dialect, more dry leaves than clashing plates. I couldn’t understand much of it, though I could tell Greng was, wisely, not trying to match youthful slang and phrase repetition. It was clearly telling them they’d gone too far. And that the fact that they had been humiliated and defeated by an Om should reveal how far they were from knowing what they were doing.
A couple of them spoke, giving explanations or justifications. He listened patiently, letting them trail off, conscious of their own inadequacy.
Then Greng went back to common traffiq so that I could understand what it was telling them. “If we return to those morphs, those urges, those acts, we will be truly and unashamedly happy. All of us. We will feel delight in those new selves, and nothing but a puzzled contempt for our earlier compromising, peace-insistent selves. Contempt for our current selves. Us. We will be dead, in other words. Our successors will not mourn us, because they will believe themselves to be us. That is worse than oblivion, to be dead, yet have something else live on in the world believing itself to be you.”
It was a nice speech. The kind you only appreciated much later, after you’d already made all the mistakes it had warned you about. Parental instruction was a bit like a mystery story, where you found out who the murderer was after all the victims were already dead.
“Things are much worse than I had thought, Greng,” I said. “I need your help.”
“You wish to stop your old partner, Lemuel,” it said. “Why should we interfere in a business squabble? What interest in how your unpleasant assets are divided?”
“Because he won’t be getting any of those assets. He will be causing a disaster.” I looked around at the baby Biks. Their mouthparts were still down to the ground, but an eyestalk here and there was slyly turned up to look at me. “Can I speak to them?”
“And recruit them?”
“Only if I recruit you as well.”
“Speak.”
I stood as tall as I could. “Lemuel wanted you guys all watching me tonight, so he could get the limbs out of the underground cache without interference.” I had to get them to follow my reasoning. “But his original plan was for tomorrow night, or a night later on. Had he provided you all with an operation that would have taken you out of this area?”
For a long moment they just vibrated. Then one said: “Two nights from now.”
“In Kremmid,” said another.
“Scouting,” a third said. “A scouting expedition. For a cache.”
“Nice. Real nice. There once was a cache in Kremmid. It was the first one we ever got into. It’s empty. He wanted you out of the way. When I showed up and he realized someone else might be figuring out his plan, he had to move his schedule up. Fortunately for him, he figured out how to get you all out of the way for his operation. Were you aware of how he was planning to get those limbs out of the cache?”
I was reasonably sure he had not let them in on any details of his plans, and their vibrating silence confirmed it for me.
“Lemuel will gang those limbs and segments together,” I said. “Mate their rust-infected nervous systems, one by one. Make something that can move, can climb, can . . . get out of the Mimnurm excavation under its own power.”
I’d had a sense of it. It had only become truly clear when I watched what happened to this rust-happy group of Biks when they got too cooperative with each other. As a way of getting Biks body parts out of a difficult-to-access subterranean area that was being used as a corrective labor facility, it was clever, audacious . . . and somehow deeply crazy. My old lover had more scope than I had thought.
“So, I have another question for you. How much rust have you dumped down into the cache over recent weeks?”
They didn’t want to answer me. It’s not that I can read Bik body language or anything. It’s that they didn’t answer me. They clearly had no recognized spokesman—they hadn’t known they would need one. And no one was going to volunteer to give up this desperate secret.
Greng spoke. “So that is what they were doing. Dropping this rust into the cache. Assume much more than your partner is calculating.”
“Ex-partner.”
“Your failed business arrangements are not my concern. We want those limbs. We will take those limbs.”
“To destroy,” I said.
“It is up to us how we dispose of them.”
I looked at the baby Biks. Hiding your expressive parts to show respect has the additional benefit of hiding visible disagreement. “Will they do what is needed?”
Greng knew he couldn’t answer that for them. For a long moment they stayed still, then, one by one, they collected themselves, detached themselves from the grimy ancient body parts Lemuel had bribed them with, and clambered out of the abandoned stepwell to organize themselves in the plaza outside.
While they went up, I went down. Greng had grumpily given me a light. It was in no way adapted to Om anatomy, and every time I tried to attach it somewhere it tried to break a bone or slice my skin. I finally figured out a way to kind of rest it on my shoulder. Sometimes it would pinch my ear. I could live with that.
This stepwell was round. Each step was around eighteen inches tall . . . and narrower than the one above it. So, in theory, there might be no bottom, and the ratio, which grew more precarious as I climbed down, made it impossible for me to lean out and look all the way to the bottom. I passed the dark lines that marked previous well fill levels.
I had pictured a steady climb down. But here I was, feet on a ledge maybe four inches wide, leaning forward to hold on to a wider step further up . . . exactly the angle I had mentally mocked Lemuel for adopting on the tower, making it more likely that my feet would slip out from under me.
I paused, breathing hard. Blood pounded in my ears. I deliberately relaxed. That took me a few minutes, but I knew I couldn’t hurry.
As the roar in my ears lessened, I heard sounds from below. Nothing loud, but a periodic rumble, as of a rubble conveyor, and a vague hum of equipment. My peripheral vision caught some lights, with one steadily flashing red one most prominent. And air puffed up from below, more humid than the air of Amtoum and carrying with it that sweetish odor of Mimnurm I had grown a bit too familiar with.
I almost lost my footing. In reestablishing it, all notions of not panicking forgotten, I dislodged a couple of rock fragments. They clattered on something a few feet below before vanishing into the void.
Just a few feet below . . . I thought about the way the tiny bits of light had looked, vanishing and reappearing over the few inches I had managed to move my head.
There was something solid just below me. And not far. How far? And how solid?
I slowly reached a foot down. Each inch I moved it down meant I had that much less grip with my other three limbs. My left hand, particularly, was shaking. And my other knee was reaching the limits of how high it could go. . . .
I touched something. I shouldn’t have trusted it so immediately, but my body gave me little choice. As soon as my foot found a purchase, everything else let go.
Instead of a screaming drop into the abyss, I found myself standing on some scaffolding. I looked to be near the top of the preliminary Mimnurm excavation.
I could just see a couple of catwalks at different distances below me—and the partially excavated bulk of the Bik molt cache, which was about three or four yards across. Someone had made a lot of markings around it and on the ridged, sagging crust that held all the body parts. The Mimnurms had to have had routines for dealing with the piles of forgotten crap that were the inevitable beneath the foundations of the City of Storms.
I saw a flicker of light below me, and felt a vibration in the scaffolding. Someone was walking on a catwalk below me, in the direction of the body parts cache. I lay on my stomach and peered down.
It was Dothanial. I recognized his loose-limbed way of moving. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get to the cache.
“Dothanial.” I said it in a normal conversational tone. I’d only yell if he didn’t hear me the first time.
He stopped and looked up at me. “Sere? Is that you?”
“Doth—”
He raised a finger to stop me, then immediately jumped off the relatively safe catwalk and clambered up the struts to me. He showed no fear at being hundreds of feet up. So much for that.
He sat down next to me, as placidly as if we’d met for lunch. He did wear a helmet and an equipment harness that dangled various gear. His smart headlamp angled its beam away from me and generated a more diffuse sidelight. He carefully pulled the gauntlets from his hands and touched my shoulder with real concern.
“Sere . . . you haven’t gotten back together with Lemuel, have you?”
That was the last question I was expecting. “I have a lot of information to give to you. And that’s what you want to know?
“Nurri and I . . . we talked about that quite a bit. Neither of us ever thought Lemuel was a good idea for you. Not that we could ever figure out who would be.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. Look, Doth, whatever Lemuel told you, don’t do it. Don’t break into that body parts cache. Everything in there is incredibly dangerous. Lemuel hasn’t told you what you’re risking . . . he himself doesn’t know what he’s risking . . . and he lied you into this stupid Mimnurm prison in the first place.”
“Could you take it a bit slower?” He brushed flakes of something off his sleeve and yawned. “It’s late, and I have to get back to my bunk before anyone realizes I’m gone.”
“Wow, I’m glad I caught you before . . .” Then I identified what he had on his sleeves and all over his gear: body parts crust fragments, the kind Lemuel and I had always had all over ourselves after a successful expedition. I’d let myself catch his relaxed mood, something I needed after that climb down.
“If you dug in there, why were you heading back to it?” I demanded, as if he’d tricked me on purpose.
“I wasn’t heading back to it. I just climbed out and over, the only route I could find to a place where I could stand and really dig into it. Then over and back down these zigzag catwalks. And I really need to go, it was nice to have an unexpected visit. . . .”
His headlamp spilled enough light that I could see my mistake. He’d been heading down, to way below where the cache hung, en route to a ladder that would take him farther down. I’d seen him going that direction and just assumed he was heading to start penetrating the cache. But, dammit, he’d already done it.
“What did you do?” I said. “What did you do to those Bik parts in there?”
“Just wiring, connecting . . . and a bit of control circuitry I filched from some autonomous digging machinery that was under repair. Lemuel was really pretty vague, considering how long you guys have been doing this stuff. He wanted them ganged up, so I daisy chained it, pretty standard. But it was odd. They were all jerking around. Like they had just been cut off or something. How long ago were those things put in there?”
“The molted Bik limbs?” I said. “They’re already moving?”
“Yeah. Not in an organized way, but pretty active. Pretty hairy. I’ve never seen a Bik with limbs that dangerous. Those things could break through walls, set fire to thing, poison you. So I didn’t hang around to check things out any more.”
