Rocket Fuel Page 8

  He seemed reluctant to say it. Friendly acknowledged and led the way. There were stencilled numbers lining the conduit, or tunnel as Byron would term it; also coded lettering. It was like a sewer, only dry, silent, the fitful illumination as yet victim to the engineer's prior tampering.

  At the nexus they turned north north-west. Like mad sailors, thought Byron, always thinking the direction they'd come from was south, forever ever seeking cooler, windy climes...

  The tunnel narrowed and soon they had to crawl on their bellies, mimicking rats.

  He had no fixed goal in mind: if people wanted to disappear, that was their business.

  They climbed over a converter-housing and down its greasy side. The air was stagnant. Beman sniffed it, said, ‘You mustn't come here too often.’

  ‘No,’ said Byron, pausing as the man used his inhaler, its contents protection - in theory - against the unwindings and complications that were retrograde...

  Together they swung open a large circular hatch and entered a chamber where no light penetrated.

  Sal was woken by a wailing klaxon. The floor on which she'd slept vibrated intermittently, shuddering its message of violence through her languid body. She stood, dizzy, and tried the door. It was locked. Pressing her ear to the white surface she could hear sounds of running, many boots tapping, part of a combat symphony. Upfront, she reckoned, was attacking the station. The four walls emitted noise and a bluish liquid. There was a stench of disinfectant.

  The square to her left erupted, gushing stained water, wispy smoke. Sal barely had time to shield her face. She was thrown to the floor. Scrambling clear of the wreckage she discovered two ringed fingers, a hand, a wrist, but no more. The room next to hers was gutted, as if a bomb (Yes?) had gone off, perhaps killing its planter.

  Gladly, the co-pilot availed herself of the exit. Through the dust figures shifted. A woman yelled, bloodily, and the flimsy ceiling was torn back to reveal the artificial sky with its grid of pylons and net of fine silver bridges. Sally pushed aside a fallen roof-support, the task made easy by the seeping gravity, and climbed to the subsequent floor, a mostly open area of colourful galleries, more alert than was necessary as the only shapes that moved were those of chairs and paper cups, plates, magazines and ashtrays.

  Was the outer skin breached? No, no, couldn't be...

  A darkened ship glided overhead, its silence a quality of the hugging void, what few lights it showed flashing red, green, red, blue, red.

  Shots were fired, stuttering, ricocheting around the deck like stones rattled in a bucket. Sally fell clumsily, the low gee proving awkward. She yanked open a door and propelled herself into a corridor leading inward, toward the core, and what she hoped was safety.

  Beman raised a flaccid arm, let it drop.

  ‘Something hit him hard,’ observed Byron, smoking one of the Topican's cigarettes.

  ‘What?’ queried the man. ‘What hit him Who?’ Aggression reshaped his voice.

  They squatted on a gantry, oily space beneath their feet. The engineer said, ‘I don't know.’

  Beman produced a gun.

  ‘You remember the way?’ asked Friendly, smiling. ‘You still need me I think.’

  ‘There are more ways than one...’ He turned suddenly, unnerved by a movement to his rear. ‘Hunter!’ he shouted. ‘Are you there? It's Beman. Hello!’

  The only reply he got came from Byron. ‘You're imagining things,’ the engineer told him. ‘It's nothing, a spectre, a ghost. There're hundreds.’ He'd slipped quietly off the platform, clambered now below the mesh, Beman frantic, shooting, effecting transient blooms of variegated light.

  ‘Where are you?’ demanded the civilian. ‘You can't get away; not for long. You hear?’

  The air shook...

  Beman was folded, caught in the gantry as it scissored. He screamed incoherently, a last defiance, then was quiet, as with a jerk of hydraulics the steel mesh neatly cubed him, mixed his parts with the murdered rating's, Byron's eyes to flicker as together they spun in tens and twenties, spattering him with lukewarm juices.

  The shock troops blazed a curtain of fire, blackening walls and blistering flesh.

  Upfront had returned with one intention, to seize the orbital station at whatever cost. Sally pitied the occupants while not counting herself among them; they couldn't have had much of an opportunity to strengthen their position.

  Her thoughts drifted briefly to Byron, came shrieking back as an explosion rocked the vent in which she'd wisely ensconced her person. Cold air was dragged over her, then to be heated in a squall of boiling thermals farther down the tract. It was dim, no fun at all where she was, but secure enough for the present. At least till the fighting stopped.

  She relaxed, breathed steadily, listened to the warped echoes as they stole up from the deep, reverberating through the thin aluminium, dampened by her body and amplified by the invisible juncture that lay a short distance ahead. Maybe, considered Sal, providing a second option...

  Slowly, deliberately, she edged forward, halted when her feet lost purchase, hung in the nothingness. Leaning out she touched and identified another five avenues, projections from the sides of a box, her own the sixth, on which she balanced, blind and debating. The gravity hinted there was a down; she ruled it out, up for similar reasons. That meant left, right or straight on. Sal tasted the faint draught, its dying speed, and manoeuvred gingerly eastward.

  *

  The sun rose. Rainbows shimmered. Kate Droover drank from a stream of liquid silver, dunked her hat for more.

  The wrist radio crackled. She didn't answer. Who’d be calling her? She shook her head and hands dry and walked along the bank, leaves and rocks clustered like spectators, an audience of patient stone and temporal foliage. The wilderness seemed to have grown in depth, swollen in detail under the starry aegis of night, as if Uncle Stylo had taken his finest brush and a magnifying glass to its melding borders of green, brown, green, blue, green, yellow, green.

  A hairy caterpillar said good morning, how are you today? And Kate, hungry, asked it the way to the nearest cafe.

  Just follow the spiders, it informed, track with your eyes their longest threads.

  And she did.

  What she found surprised her. ‘Mordy?’ she cried, wiping drops from her nose. ‘Hey!’

  He wandered over.

  She sat down.

  He was gone when she looked again...

  *

  On Earth the threesome sat round an oval table, steaming mugs ringing its varnished (a sheet had covered it) surface. Morgan whisked his cocoa, hating its frothy colour. Dr Grey lifted his mug to his lips and sipped contentedly, while the dog used a straw.

  ‘This is my first visit to Australia,’ said Lumping Jack. ‘I always thought it was...red, you know, like Mars.’ He felt stupid, manipulated. Frozen Hound ignored his silent pleas.

  ‘It's a rare citizen of the planet who ventures far overland these days,’ replied the mad scientist. ‘Life is too comfortable, eh? We shouldn't lose sight of our heritage,’ he added. ‘Not the nice bits anyway...’ he rambled, far away. Then, ‘Listen.’

  The dog's ears pricked up.

  ‘What?’ said Morgan, suddenly nervous. He pushed back his chair and stood, peered out the grimy window at the twilit soil and hills. His guppy rested nearby, swathed in canvas in hue similar to the blackened earth all around. The ramshackle house never possessed a discernible shadow.

  ‘Nothing,’ the doctor said finally, theatrically. ‘This is a dead continent, remember?’

  Lumping Jack groaned. ‘Sure, you told me. And that, over there, was your grandmother's rocking-chair...’

  Henry laughed incongruously. His stump flailed the air. ‘If the world were to end tomorrow,’ he sang, ‘it would be like any other day, with broken trees and bony knees, the sun to wither away.’

  The dog howled, a sound the outback hadn't heard in decades.

  Chorus...

  *

  Byron felt sick.
The drugs they'd pumped him full of on Fury, he now realized, were no substitute for decontamination, the steady purging of malignant chemical traces...only here that process was reversed, like his thinking. Did they appreciate their mistake? he pondered. Maybe it was deliberate, a poison administered, one to erode his immunity. He shrugged mentally, unable to figure it out, and. continued down the ladder. At its base he ducked under a blinking console.

  And came up facing Abdul. He toted Beman's pistol, a severe expression on his face.

  Neither man moved for some time. Then the cook's lineaments hardened further and he keeled over, shattered like a fragile, porcelain statue.

  The engineer toed a few shards; they crumbled. The gun simply vanished.

  Like another, he reflected. Like Monica.

  From where Friendly stood he could see the co-ordinator, her dance suspended in his mind.

  The voices drifted like odours, each different, each with a source. They talked of campaigns, losses, destruction. She was above them, exhausted, bathed in their cigar-smoke and tones of gratuitous promiscuity. She knew she was dying. She poked her aching fingers through the grill and rattled it.

  ‘Help,’ she said, Sally Droover, wanting Amy, wanting Kate,
 wanting... ‘Byron - Byron Friendly.’

  One of the voices repeated the name.

  ‘I don't believe it,’ another said. ‘Here?’

  They obviously knew him...

  ‘Get her out of there.’

  Thank-you.

  He tracked the pale figure, followed the chalk-marks roughly scribed on pipework and equipment lockers. Mostly they were arrows, but every so often a circle or square steered his gaze, and the arrowheads evolved into triangles, sharp tadpoles whose tails shortened, then disappeared.

  The engineer walked tirelessly, mouth dry, head choked with used imagery. Pictures from an earlier time hung before him like promises, leading him on, an exhibition that drew him deeper into the past, toward his beginning, a bizarre retrospective of recent, muddled events. There was Sally on the hilltop, taking in the sunset. Sally again, joking in his Upfront residence; and her sister Kate, coughing, inhaling, laughing blue smoke, himself with his face painted, swinging from a stair...

  Comics. Lumping Jack, Frozen Hound, Dr Henry Grey: Last Of The Earth Men. Before. Lucky unlucky, the knock on the door that never came. And, ‘Ernie,’ he whispered, unknowing of the action. It straightened his spine. Up ahead the wan figure paused, skin waxy, loose and malformed, as if poured from a height onto shrunken bones, a distorted candle, its wick a plume of black hair. ‘We meet at last,’ Byron added, grinning, matching his counterpart's twisted demeanour.

  ‘You're welcome,’ said the engineer.

  Fifteen - Colour Shock

  A man called Silver held her hand, warming it, pressed between his own. ‘I've news,’ he said, ‘of a Terran warship...the SS Usufruct?’

  Sally Droover moaned, squeezed his fingers. A ghosted outline sailed past her eyes, features plastic.

  ‘They described you as “dangerous,”’ Silver said. ‘You want to tell me why?’

  She stuck her tongue out. It was puffy. ‘Those fuckers used us,’ she answered. ‘Ernie told me, in a dream.’

  ‘Ernie?’

  ‘Our engineer - before Byron. Did you find him?’

  ‘Byron? No, not yet.’

  ‘Neither will they,’ Sal said proudly. She felt like a little girl; this was her father who comforted her. He sat by her bed when she was ill, perhaps with mumps or a fever...

  Kate would be out shopping with mother. They'd come bursting in waving bags and big, cheery smiles, teasing her, modelling new blouses, shoes, haircuts. She grimaced.

  Silver looked worried. ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘My sister,’ she murmured, picking the tortoiseshell comb off her chest, dragging her thumb down its springy teeth. ‘I have to give her this.’

  ‘A present,’ he guessed.

  ‘A future,’ she corrected.

  *

  Uncle Stylo exited the narrow canyon, kicking up dust. There was an uneasiness about him, like the world, the false world of the Benches, the accessories to Radio City, its archipelago, was stirring. Roused from some magical sleep, a serpent, its crested tail woven through the tame Atlantic, the pre-industrialized, raw-natured element slowly reasserted itself. Manmade was no longer good enough. Reconstructions, illusions, effigies were being superseded, overtaken by the very forms and processes they themselves had destroyed and replaced. The planet altered, Stylo imagined. Parts of it sank, were cast afresh from the waves, as at first, born of the ocean's depthless womb, thrust up onto the land to struggle, fight, survive or die without intervention, matched and provided for, but in limited, finite numbers. The imitations to dwindle, he saw. And the imitators to fall the long fall...

  Into what? Chaos? He glimpse a fresh solidity in the rocks, their redness enhanced with green and blue and yellow. All the colours were here in the stone under his feet. To his practised eye they shone with a reality only touched on before.

  A great sadness welled up inside him. Yet, long-buried, the serpent stirred in him too.

  And he smiled, pleased. The abandoned kingdoms, the neglected realms, their fabulous gardens had once more opened their gates, set out their random, lavish stalls for business.

  Extraordinary, Stylo thought. He turned for home, wanting, needing to capture it, to shape and mould while the newly vibrant hues were still fresh in his mind.

  Running, he laughed, and his laughter floated on the wind, carried far and wide, even to the ears of Kate and Mordy, the two as yet struggling apart, soon to match both data and stories, scars and organs...compare the trees of the energized forest to the support-systems and backups prevalent in their lives, the lives of others: branches of wood and metal, roots of tangled history, from seed to corpse; bark and leaves, skin and its sloughing, the passage of fluids, blood, sap and tear-dropped water; thoughts across space, distance no obstacle to their willing hearts, the delay meaningless, time abundant...

  Sixteen - The Spider's Tail

  Mordy found himself in a clearing, the noon sky cloudless above, the fine, grassy blades soft below. He lay down in the warmth and closed his eyes. He had wandered for hours through the thick, unyielding jungle. It gave the impression of being far larger than possible, stretching farther and deeper than the sea should allow, its twisting vines and creepers wound back on themselves, a net in which all was suspended, that nothing escaped.

  He'd lost the wrist-radio. No way of contacting his father without it, he knew, caring little, interested more in locating Droover, the woman, his key on her arm, her thimble's abrasions on his flesh. And his father's hat...

  The ocean receded from his thinking much as it did from his inward-coiling path. The water belonged to another plane now, an alternate Earth, a past existence. Mordy felt he might spend the remainder of his living hours beneath the twin canopies of sky and tree.

  He slept for a while. When he woke the shadows were all round him, tugging his own. He got to his feet and turned full circle, wondering which unseen track to take. The moon hung gibbous and large, appeared strangely close. He shrugged and continued in the direction he was facing, shaking hands with an outreaching limb, eager not to upset or embarrass his woodland hosts.

  He walked into the swelling night. It received him kindly, offered him clues to the whereabouts of his intended. Droover's thread was a filament in the dark, the spun conductor of an eight-legged star.

  Mordy grasped its ninth appendage delicately, careful not to break it...

  Seventeen - The Occupants

  Morgan pressed the button and the light winked off. He spun in his chair before the glitzy console, whistling, tuneless, the tight air squeezing his sound, killing it.

  Frozen Hound peered over his shoulder and yawned. Morgan stroked the dog's wet nose.

  The minutes sidled past.

  Fourteen. Fifteen, and the light came back on. Morgan, known as Lumping
Jack, frowned.

  ‘Something not right,’ he said.

  The dog paced in circles, tail between legs.

  The console died, echoing the engines, the ship's drive not only cut but paralysed.

  The Happy Monkey, Morgan's guppy, wound down its vacuous spiral to rest...

  ‘Permission to come aboard.’

  ‘Permission denied.’

  ‘I have a warrant for the arrest of Dr Henry Grey.’

  ‘On what charge?’

  Pause. Then, ‘Murder.’

  Lumping Jack glanced at Henry, who scratched his beard, a look of disappointment etched on his face. They wouldn't be making the trip to Radio after all.

  ‘You have five minutes before we force an entry.’

  ‘There is no Dr Grey here,’ replied Morgan, buying time. He could feel the inadequacy of the supposition; it trickled down his spine, mimicked the guppy's apprehension.

  ‘One minute,’ the voice amended. ‘And counting.’

  Kate shook her head in an effort to clear it and ran into the black corridor, its walls undetectable, its floor slick with condensation.

  Someone caught her arm and yanked her through a jagged rent, the cooling teeth of which tore the skin of her upper arm and shoulder.

  ‘Slow down!’ came the order.

  ‘What's going on?’

  ‘Quiet...listen.’

  Kate freed her arm and stood. After a moment she thought to hear dripping - water or blood. ‘What is it? Stylo? Mordy?’ She fumbled in the uncompromising dark but was alone.

  The dripping stopped. As if a tap had been more firmly closed, she told herself, and shivered.

  Her eyes strained, seeking a focus. In front of her was an opening, its violent nature silhouetted against the backdrop of stars, its position immediately to the left of a just visible fascia, panels and keys, buttons and screens dead. Kate at first imagined herself inside a control-room of sorts, a relic of the island's making. She quickly dismissed the idea, recognizing the jumbled paraphernalia of a bridge - a ship's fractured, rusting skeleton into which she’d...stumbled?