Armwrestling the Dead Read online

‘He was sedated! Fifty milligrams. I can’t explain it.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Duct sixteen. At least that’s where we pulled him out.’

  ‘Right.’ The pilot shook his head to clear it. ‘I’ll go in after him. You stay here.’

  Brouchard was uneasy. ‘I don’t know,’ he quibbled. ‘I think maybe it’s time we reported the incident.’

  ‘Incident, George? Be realistic. It’s gone too far for that. You want to be jailed on Oriel? Besides, Gruman knows his stuff. He can cut it; in or out of his skull. Think of your percentage.’

  ‘But if something were to go wrong? He could do permanent damage to the ship. It’s not worth the risk, Hookler. You didn’t see him!’

  ‘No - you let him get away,’ the pilot said calmly, shaking in his boots.

  The doctor shut his eyes tightly, nodding.

  ‘Well, now we have to get him back again.’

  i

  In the artificial darkness, rubber suit tight round his throat, goggles misted, Gunther Gruman fumbled with Vector Dud’s Magic Spanner. The negative light displayed the duct’s parameters as a set of interconnecting, varicoloured grids given visual solidity via the medium of the clouded lenses strapped firmly to his head. He took them off, eyes squeezed shut against the otherwise invisible radiation, and wiped them as best he could on a cloth looped through his tool belt. If he were to open his eyes he might never leave this adapted region, but become adapted himself, its spurious imagery etched into his floating mind.

  Switching rails, the goggles reseated, he brought the spanner round till it connected with the blue key, which flashed dimly, echoing its weakened state. Then, as a scale slowly counted down, Gruman turned the key anticlockwise. The blue died completely, one coded dimension from four. Keys red, green and yellow began a compensatory motion.

  The spanner withdrawn he glided toward a junction of red and yellow, their flowering responsible for ship’s speed and orientation.

  Vector Dud tagged along. The storekeep, he’d brought his Amazing Acrobatic Wrench with him, too.

  Gruman liked that. The wrench had definite possibilities.

  ii

  Geena scowled; her screen had died. She crunched a ball of paper and flung it at young Mason, who woke up. ‘Hey, Mason, my screen died - what do you think?’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ said Thompson, stretching. ‘Mason?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Geena’s screen died - what do you think?’

  They fell about laughing. Mason stood, walked across to the coffee machine and filled a cup.

  ‘Hey, Mason,’ Geena said, ‘you can’t do that. Who said you could do that?’

  ‘I told him,’ Thompson answered. ‘Isn’t that right, Mason? I said you could do it.’

  ‘Nobody told me anything,’ said Mason.

  More laughter.

  Then, ‘Hey!’ from Thompson. ‘My screen died!’

  Young Mason smirked behind his cup. His screen worked fine. It was home to his project right now and drew its power from a battery-pack.

  This was his freetime. Usually in his freetime young Mason played ice hockey.

  ‘Thompson?’

  ‘Yeah, Geena...’

  ‘The lights are flickering.’

  He looked around, swivelling in his seat. ‘So they are.’

  ‘Hey, Mason,’ Geena called, ‘the lights are flickering.’

  ‘He can’t hear you,’ Thompson said. ‘His screen’s okay. He’s involved.’

  ‘Really? What’s he involved in?’

  Thompson shrugged. ‘He won’t say.’

  ‘Hey, Mason,’ asked Geena; ‘what’s that you’re involved in?’

  ‘It’s a mystical exercise,’ Thompson expounded. ‘I sneaked a look earlier, when he was out. Mason’s studying to be an Ologist. Isn't that right, boy?’

  ‘Shush,’ Geena replied. ‘You’ll wake him.’ She stood, tossed her head and walked over to the lit screen and the young man behind it, the deck swaying a little so that she imagined she’d got up too fast. ‘Parts and reorder not good enough for you anymore? Want to be an Ologist, eh?’

  Mason pulled his plug, exhausted.

  ‘Now see what you’ve done,’ admonished Thompson. Adding, ‘Hey, Mason, your screen died - what do you think?’

  iii

  The towers grow from the cool lake as if pulled erect, bright shards lifted, tapers hooked into the flurried sky like eager shoots, their living flesh radiating a gelid, textured light. They meander, climbing, veins whose bones are their close neighbours. They narrow, stretching ever higher until their weight drags them back toward the lake, entangling the myriad tendrils like wind-swept grass, folding and snapping the soft bodies like brittle candles. Dew buds, the residents of these transient dwellings slip and slide along the angled walks and bridges, conversing with one another as the orange sun floats beyond the horizon and arises anew.

  They are timeless, the Orieleans.

  Threatened. Invaded. From outside their quiet realm, where the wind speaks with a different voice and the worlds turn at a different speed, a malignant force has arrived.

  And they are dying...

  Mason opened his eyes. His co-workers, frustrated by the power loss and tired of their games, had long since abandoned him to dreams. Dead faces surrounded. Inset, his own reflection sat hunched in the plastic window before his eyes, disconnected from its battery existence. He decided to leave that world caged a while, give himself time to digest this newest angle. Something had penetrated his mind, he felt sure, and that something was receptive, vulnerable even, to his thoughts.

  What of the planet? What was the effect of human influx?

  He stretched, rose, gauging the tension in his muscles as a chorus of otherworldly voices writhed and slithered through his quiet-steeped consciousness.

  iv

  Hookler tied a knot in his belt. It was there to help him remember.

  There is no incident, he kept telling himself. Eh, Gruman? The blue flickered. The yellow surged. The red was stable and the green, now he’d reconnected it, was up to normal working capacity, off the emergency tether as the blue was off the emergency tether. But not himself. Jonas Hookler was buoyed in duct sixteen, enshrouded by a pulsating host of fantastic structures, pinned like a stunned fly in a jar of panchromatic honey. It was sweet; he liked it. You could drown though, submerged in false colours, weighted by the honey’s Siren call, locked within the grids like a fossil in sediment, a footprint on some plaster moon.

  Gruman? Can you hear me? His soundless voice travelled the rail with Hookler close behind, hand over hand.

  There was no reply.

  v

  Vector Dud waved a strobing hand in his face. The mechanic blinked rapidly, momentarily dazed. Drifting free of the rail had been the storekeep’s idea. ‘The perspective is really something, Gunther,’ it had said. ‘Come on, don’t be afraid. It’s easy. I won’t let you fall. Just follow me. Do what I do, okay?’

  Gruman wondered what time it was. Round him, suspended in the warm air, the grids took on the aspects of fabulous creatures, heraldic animals built of millions of illusory bricks. Distant from the rail’s control, estranged from its inhibitive leash, he floated beyond the level of simple matrices deep into an unexplored region of increasingly compound structures...

  ‘Over there,’ his system-generated companion pointed out, a voice resonant with imagery. ‘Where the goat meets the peacock. Use the wrench to splice them.’

  And create what? Gruman wondered, orienting feet. The goat was blue and the peacock yellow; both computing channels. He manoeuvred the Amazing Acrobatic Wrench, then keyed to access the radiant tool, thus subverting the existing grid-features. Next, as the animals lost definition, collapsing outward, dissolving inward, he casually redefined their twin parameters, combining them, melding the various cubic pieces into a new whole.

  A fresh identity, Gruman thought,
how very picturesque.

  vi

  What he had to remember, thought Hookler, was to calibrate the tension-seekers. The tension-seekers switched him between rails automatically, taking their cue from any frequency disturbances in the antiwaves of negative light as rationalized by his goggles. The equipment was sound; the operator susceptible. He shook his head. It was too late.

  Zeroing in on a disturbance was the easy part. Diagnosis came next. Hardest was knowing which key to adjust, as a wrong turn could screw the entire system. The duct would require voiding then, all past configurations erasing.

  The scam had been Gunther’s idea, creaming off fuel and selling it back to the company via an intermediary. There weren’t even any storage costs; the fuel never left the ship. Only Gunther had gone native, and Jonas was no mechanic. Theory wasn’t much use in a environment where ideas, functions, concepts had actual physical presence. He was beginning to be scared. Where was Gruman? What had happened to complicate the once absolute simplicity of the plan? His mind fogged. His lenses had misted. The false colours weaved crazy angles and more and more complicated grids, skeletons, frames onto which layered sediments of dazzling aggregate, motes of luminous dust, a coating flesh of intangible substance...

  And he was frozen, compressed, out of his depth.

  Hookler clamped one arm round the gently throbbing rail.

  Gruman cruised past at the van of a string of gaudy leopards.

  vii

  Issac knew there was something amiss the second his alarm detonated, rattling his brain. The bunk above his failed to sag. There