Garrett
Cold and the Liberty Keepers
Chapter
Eight – Element d
Cassandra Caggonar,
granddaughter of the rebel convict Rural Caggonar, died at my feet in a dingy
dining hall in Dockrill Castello’s Arena. I imagine that the Arena has seen as
much death as almost any single location in the whole Freelife system. Battles
on the sands spilled deciliters of blood, but only after arterial wounds
sprayed out on the drunk and watching convicts in the lower rows of a coliseum
carved out of red stone in the deepest recesses of the place. Many others
perished in the labyrinthine halls, either from treachery or from
overindulgence in the terrible pleasures that emerge from the dark recesses of
the most corrupt and malignant minds to be found among living humanity. Still
others simply withered away, mentally ill and physically crippled devils who
sought refuge in the dark heart of the North Quarter where they were kept like
pets for the amusement of demonic masters whose taste for cruelty was matched
only by their feigned compassion for these exploited, helpless outcastes.
Having nearly bled to
death in the streets, Cassie had been under the dubious care of Dockrill’s healers,
regaining enough strength it seemed, to demand an audience. She crashed our
after dinner unveiling, declaring almost as an oath that my host, his henchman,
and his ‘honored guest’ deserved my trust. Everyone else existed under a
blanket of suspicion that would require first-hand experience to lift. Cassie
had offered testimony of her efforts in saving my life as validation of her veracity
and then she died.
By expiring before I could question her
further, she’d left me with a dilemma. I could accept her judgment despite a
growing body of encounters that left me feeling far from safe in the presence
of my supposed guardians, or I could discount her words entirely, even as
Dockrill feverishly labored to restore life to her decimated body. I imagined
that in all the years Dockrill had ruled over this dungeon of primal justice
one might count on a single hand the number of times he had personally
intervened between the Grim Reaper and that old monster’s intended victim in
such a manner.
When
she had fallen, I’d been looking into her eyes, trying to see the depth of
feeling behind the words she spoke. I saw fatigue and fear, and I felt a draft
pass through the poorly ventilated space, as if a doorway to the outside of
existence had momentarily opened. A cloud of uncertainty passed over her
features and whatever expression had been on her weathered face vanished. She
simply ceased to be. It reminded me of the first time I’d seen Grampa kill a
buffalo, pressing a pair of handheld electrodes into the earholes of the great
shaggy head while the puzzled beast tried to free itself from the neck
restraint that had closed around it.
There
was a pop, as the contacts on the generator closed, followed by a tiny buzz as
if a bee had been trapped inside the animal’s head. But it was the eyes that I saw,
great black orbs with yellow and white rims that had followed my gaze as I bent
to look at them. They simply turned to glass, or so it appeared, lifeless and
damp, and forever stilled. I was eight or nine years old. “Where’d it go,
Grampa?” I asked.
“Where’d
what go, boy? Why it’s right here.”
“No,
it left. Where did it go?”
He
never gave me a satisfactory answer. Perhaps that’s as good an argument for
religious faith as I’ve ever been able to come up with, to answer a little
boy’s questions about where we go when we die. But of course we all decided
long ago that such faith is a waste of time. The sLOD rule over a godless
empire, but this was inherited rather than being created by any act of man or
his government.
When
Cassie started to fall, the Muses, standing attentively nearby, reached out and
eased her to the floor. I started toward her, despite knowing that it would be
futile, only to find myself roughly shoved aside by the hurtling form of
Dockrill Castello. He seemed to fly past with the same sudden energy he’d
demonstrated when he tried to eviscerate me. Crouching beside the still form,
his hoary hands propped her head on a knee as he felt for a pulse before
beginning chest compressions alternated with exhalations of what I imagined to
be greasy lungful’s of breath into her unresisting body. Crumbs and spittle
from his lips clung to her cheeks and his face grew red with the effort. I
knelt beside him, ready to step in should he tire, despite the certainty that
she, like that long ago buffalo, had gone away forever.
Ella
Cantor moved to stand over us, her hands on her hips, legs slightly apart, and
I glanced up at her face, seeing a soft furrow form in the center of her brow.
She was looking at me. I heard the jingle of Bradna Cucrow’s uniform and was
conscious that he had turned his back on the scene, staring down at the papers
unrolled on the table while soft moans keened from his throat. The five Muses,
three assigned to me and the two who’d entered with Cassie, stood in a row
blocking the wide doorway.
In
moments of crisis not directly connected to my immediate personal safety my
mind often fixes on some seemingly unimportant supposition or fact irrelevant
to the immediate need. The less capable I feel of dealing with the events
unfolding around me the more prominent my awareness of that fact becomes. In
the minutes following Cassie’s collapse the revelation that Dockrill Castello
claimed to be over a thousand Standard Years of age clamored to overwhelm every
other thought. He said he had known Hal Wright, the father of the FTL drive, a
man who died centuries before the sLOD, the Seventy Worlds, or Freelife existed.
Dockrill claimed to have known the time when humanity was a lonely species on
the brink of extinction, inhabiting two miserable and dying planets around a
minor yellow star at the edge of an insignificant galaxy in an infinite and
mostly unknowable universe. It was inconceivable, and therefore had to be a
lie.
Yet
Cassie said I should trust Dockrill. While he feverishly struggled to revive
the fallen LT, I got to my feet and returned to the table, pulling at the
age-browned edge of the first chart he’d shown me, drawing it from beneath the
other papers. Bradna made no move to stop me, but he did pick up Ella Cantor’s
radio, which remained on. So loud were the inner voices screaming Dockrill’s
age that I barely noticed, as I smoothed the ancient chart atop the stack. In
retrospect I wondered why the sLOD didn’t question us as to what was happening.
Had he simply waited during the commotion, patiently sitting in his crystalline
vessel while one of us died and another tried to save her? Does the sLOD feel
emotions? I began tracing the letters under the dozen or so stars that
astronomers of that era believed might have rocky planets that afforded Earth
or Mars-like conditions and were therefore prime candidates for human life,
either pre-existing or able to accept transplants.
Sol was first, in the center of the
chart, with Earth and Mars printed in italic script underneath
the star. None of the other rocky bodies in the original solar system fell
within the sweet spot for life, at least not as terraforming technology of that
era could sustain.
As I
looked at the other labeled bodies on the chart, I felt awe at the leaps in
technology since the days of the Keplers, the more than one thousand Earth/Mars
orbiting telescopes which had served as the only eyes humanity had that could
reach out to the uncharted depths of reality. These giant optical devices had
mapped more than three hundred million stars in our local galaxy during the two
centuries of their use. More than a billion planetary bodies from gas giants to
scorched cinders to frozen balls of poisons were discovered, yet despite these
staggering numbers, the conditions for supporting animal life were so
disconcertingly rare that a mere handful were thought worth the expense and
time of further exploration. That was the prevailing belief for almost two
hundred years after the date on the chart. I knew this because Grampa was a
patient teacher and he’d spent hundreds of hours instructing me in the history
of the origins of the Seventy Planets. No need to relive that now. Instead I
searched the upper left sectors of the chart. A star labeled KOI 30.9101.0 with a parenthetical (2)
was the sole identifiable object in sector C1. Thebes was one of the
parenthetical two; at the time of the chart’s making it had only been one of a
tiny fraction of planets thought to possess a significant likelihood of
supporting earth-like animal life.
As
Dockrill rhythmically compressed Cassie’s ribs, I toted off the conditions such
a planet required. Grampa had drilled me on these time and again until I could
recite them as easily as any of the alphabets in the thirty common languages of
the settled planets. Eight were deemed absolutely necessary – a stable star, a
rocky planet, liquid water, dry land, internal heat such as volcanism, a tilted
axis, and a magnetic field. A philosopher musician, in the years when the
evidence of Earth’s demise had passed all deniability, had written a wishing
song that drew on these requirements:
What
I long for in my dreams –
A rocky planet orbiting
A long-lived, stable
star,
Seven wide blue oceans
And land high and low,
land near and far.
I long for a world of
inner warmth,
And seasons, gentle and
harsh,
A place where my
compass can find true north,
For its there I’ll find
my heart’s desire.
It was a quaint but
accurate list of the prerequisites for terraforming. As the technology
advanced, humans learned to artificially generate some of the conditions, but
the energy requirements were so enormous that none of the planetary bodies so
altered remained viable.
Another five conditions
might allow the spontaneous generation of animal life on the planet:
-
Evolution of complex metazoans
-
Proximity of a large moon
-
One or more gas giants in the stellar
system
-
Low number of mass extinction events
-
Time
Single cell life forms,
bacteria, viruses, and exotic species might live on any of a million or more
worlds, but complex plants and animals, including humans, needed a special and
rare set of conditions.
There were hundreds, if
not thousands, of corollaries and subsets of the above elements that played a
part in the development of humanity on the uniquely formed and ultimately
exhausted home world, Earth. Centuries of advances in the terraforming sciences
and FTL travel had produced the Seventy Worlds. But as I stood in the Arena,
listening to the cracking of bone and cartilage in Cassie’s torso accompanied
by Dockrill’s grunts and swearing as his attempts to revive her escalated, I
found myself looking at a chart made in the days when a dying species of
upright apes sought to harness the power of the thirteen items on my mental
list in order to save their kind from extinction. From that list, all of human
history, before and after our time on Earth, had been born.
Dockrill Castello
claimed to be over a thousand years old. I felt a hand on my shoulder and the
scent of jasmine filled my head. I turned to find Ella Cantor standing beside me,
a concerned tilt to her head and an earnestness of sympathy in her face and
eyes that caused me to momentarily forget her promise to kill me if I didn’t
join the Freedom Keeper cause.
“Cassandra Cagganor is
dead. Dockrill should stop,” I said. Ella nodded and Dockrill, who had tried to
revive Cassie for the space of a quarter standard hour, all at once ceased
trying. I forced my head to turn and my eyes to study him. His coveralls were
unzipped. Rivulets of sweat streamed down his forehead and neck to the thick
grey hairs of his narrow and concave chest. His color was like the ruddy soil
of the Anglehorn Ridge. Bradna lifted a clay pitcher from a niche in the wall
and handed it to Dockrill who drank, allowing the grey water to spill out over
his cheeks, matting the hairs of his chest and soaking the front of his
coveralls to the crotch.
“You say it like a
rookie militiaman reporting a tear in his uniform, boy,” Dockrill said, wiping
his mouth and tossing the pitcher aside to shatter on the stone floor. “She’s
not just a suit of old clothes that you can throw away and get another. And
don’t let her uniform fool you. She’s no more militia than I am.” Garrett could
feel the heat rising from Dockrill’s emaciated body. Ella took a step toward
Dockrill, one hand extended, but he turned his back on her, his voice cracking
as he said, “I don’t want your comforts, Witch. You and his grace and Marshall
Cold, the whole lot of you can die on the sands for all I care right now.” He
stopped, fighting to regain his composure. “Cassandra Caggonar cared, as did
her grandfather. She didn’t have to be here, you know. Didn’t have to care that
much. Didn’t have to endure,” but he couldn’t finish the sentence. His thin old
shoulders began to shake while broomstick arms raised bark-brown hands to cover
his eyes. Dockrill Castello dropped to his knees and wept while Bradna and
Cassie and I watched; as to the sLOD, I suppose the sLOD listened.
He cried for the space
of another quarter hour while the Muses, bidden I guessed by some subtle
gesture from Ella, gathered up the remains of Cassandra Caggonar in a white
linen shroud produced from a nearby space. Four of them carried her out on
their shoulders; the fifth remained on guard at the door to the chamber.
When he’d done with his
outpouring of grief at Cassandra’s death, Dockrill blew his nose, not bothering
with the rag Bradna offered, but expelling strings of mucus onto the stained
floor of the room. His eyes were red-rimmed and his breath shallow, almost
panting like an anxious animal, when he turned back toward us.
“I’m going to tell you
a story, Garrett Cold, one that you might think you already know but you don’t,
you can’t, because you had to either live it or hear it from someone who did,
and I’m the only one left who was both there and saw what happened.” He turned
to Bradna and ordered more drinks, a task that the flamboyant convict hastened
to complete, pushing past the one remaining Muse and out the door. “The reason
I’m going to do this is because it will answer most of the questions I expect
you have for us, and because his grace,” he gestured toward Ella’s radio which
Bradna had replaced on top of the charts, “His grace can’t seem to make up his
mind what to do with you. Well, I say we tell you the lot of it and you can
either throw in with us or,” and he looked at Ella whose eyes remained fixed on
me, “Or I’ll let my special guest attend to you as she promised.” He cackled at
this, as if he knew the outcome before beginning his tale.
Dockrill offered his
arm to Ella Cantor, who took it, but kept her eyes on me as Dockrill led her
back to her chair. I was stunned at Dockrill’s attitude in this declaration. Even
more shocking to me was the absence of any critical response, or even comment
from the sLOD listening in.
“Your grace,” I said,
and just as quickly wishing I’d remained silent. What would I say to him?
Cassie said I should trust Dockrill, Bradna, and Ella, but it was only the sLOD
who seemed in a position to help me, based on first-hand experience, years of
it. Cassie had confused me more than ever with her final message.
“I’m listening,
Garrett. You must have many questions, however I think Dockrill may be right.
Let us all hear him out and see where that leaves us. Dockrill, do we have time
for this?” It was Ella’s face that suggested we did not but Dockrill only
cackled and began his tale, one that would forever change my views of life,
freedom, and family.
“Because I want you to
hear the truth, Garrett, I’m going to begin with some things you probably know,
but keeping them in the forefront of that underused organ you call a brain
might help you to know the difference between what’s real and what’s been made
up to keep you in the dark.”
He’d remained standing
after guiding Ella back to her seat and now he moved into the space between the
table and the doors of the hall. His color had returned to the pale dusty grey
of a man who seldom ventures into the open air and surface light. He would have
looked ridiculous in any normal setting with his open and wet coveralls,
red-rimmed eyes, and slight, withered stature. But on Freelife Seven, at that
moment, he looked like an orator brought forward from the ancient days of Earth
when empires encompassing a fraction of that tiny planet were considered
secondary only to the omnipotent gods who watched over the fledgling human
race. I don’t know if it was his posture or the strength in his aged voice, or
the fact that he’d come here on the arm of an alluring and dangerous woman who
now sat upright, her eyes fixed on him as an adored object.
“Freelife exists in a
vacuum of information as far as every convict is concerned. We get no news from
the outside and the hypno-treatments we’re given on the ride over block our
ability to talk about our past. All we know and can share is what we experience
after our arrival in the system. But you know as well as me that we never lose
our past, and you also know that given a little of the right sort of help, we
can not only remember it, but we can talk freely about it.”
He stopped a moment,
squinting with one eye as if trying to see into my mind, to confirm that he had
my attention.
“You’re the grandson of
Amos Albert Cold. No need for you to prove that, I can see the resemblance.
Knowing that, and knowing how your grampa most likely raised you, I don’t doubt
that you think I’m a liar of the highest order. I mean, really, did I actually
expect you to believe that I knew Hal Wright? That I’d lived for over a
thousand years?” He looked around as if he didn’t believe his own words before
resuming, “Why, that’s almost as crazy as believing that I could sustain an
underground community of convicts for over thirty years without any militia
interference, that such a community would survive a militia takeover of the
town, and that I could have a sLOD, who claims he’s the only sLOD, the summa Lapis Occultus Dominatorus, a
being who might be as close to a god as any man ever gets, sit in passive acquiescence
while I openly ridicule his indecisiveness and proceed to spin out a tale that
he’s suppressed for nearly a century.” He again gave me his squint-eyed stare,
allowing his words to sink in. He had made a point, and he had my attention. I
glanced at the radio and Dockrill laughed.
The radio remained
silent but I had the sense that the sLOD was there, and if he didn’t approve of
Dockrill in that moment, he didn’t disapprove enough to say anything about it.
Bradna hurried back in, his decorated uniform tinkling and jingling as, face
flushed and hands wringing, he led two convicts carrying trays of liquor,
bread, and cheeses. He hurriedly rolled up his charts and put them back in
their carrier while the convicts laid out the refreshments. I could see the
bottles were opened and a slice had been removed from each of the loaves and a
wedge from the cheeses.
“I took the liberty of
having these tasted before bringing them,” he said to Dockrill, who frowned and
looked accusingly at the food, as if it might be hiding something from all of
us.
Dockrill took out his
knife and cut a chunk out of a cheese, holding it up to his squinting eyes as
if he could see trouble.
“That was thoughtful of
you, Bradna,” he said, and then, with that startling suddenness I’d quickly
grown wary of, he caught the foppish minion under his arm in a chokehold and
popped the cheese into the surprised gape of Bradna’s mouth. “Now chew it and
swallow it.”
Choking both from the
strength of Dockrill’s hold on him and the overly large bit of food in his
mouth, Bradna tried to spit, but Dockrill pressed the hooked end of his blade
against the flabby skin of his captive’s throat.
“You know I don’t like
to repeat myself, Bradna.”
It was enough for
Bradna, who chewed vigorously, the sparkling attachments to his uniform
jingling in time with the motion of his jaw, before emphatically swallowing the
bit of cheese. Dockrill released him and Bradna grabbed the nearest bottle and
took a long slug from it, his face coloring to purple before he finished so
that I thought for a moment he had been poisoned and was simply trying to speed
the process along. When he put the bottle down, he had regained his composure
and wiped his mouth with his pocket rag, grinning at all of us.
“I’m sure it’s not
poisoned, Dockrill, but I’ll be happy to eat and drink all of it myself if you
don’t believe me.” He belched loudly.
Dockrill shoved him
away with a growl and poured two liquors, tossing off one and handing the other
to Ella. Glancing at the spot where Cassie had fallen, he poured a glass for me
and refilled his own, offering his ceremonial toast.
“Absent friends,” he
said hoarsely.
“Absent friends,” Ella
and I echoed, omitting the part about their never returning. We all drank and
then tossed our glasses at the empty chair.
“Now, where’d I leave
off?” Dockrill said.
“You were about to ask
me to accept your age on faith, I’d say,” I spoke in a voice emboldened by the
strong drink and by a growing sense that Dockrill respected only one kind of
man, the kind who did things purposefully of his own conscious choices without
regard for intimidation, consequence, or the demands of others.
The old convict’s eyes
narrowed and I knew I was wrong. He was simply telling me that he understood
why it would be hard for me to believe him, but if I could believe what I saw
with my own eyes then I would at least have the courtesy to hear him out. Maybe
he saw that understanding in my face. He let the moment pass without comment
and resumed his extraordinary tale.
“Every convict hears
the story of SixKill during orientation. You remember that right? Rural
Cagganor, a super-criminal before Kinky justice caught up with him, took over
the only fully terra-formed world in the system. What they don’t tell you is
that planet, Freelife Six, existed to serve as a base of operations for the
largest mining operation in the galaxy. Did you know that? This system was
never intended to serve as a prison. It was a commercial enterprise, a sLOD
wet-dream really. Do you know why?”
I was skeptical to the
point of not listening, but we were in Dockrill’s lair and he seemed to have the
floor and the power to hold it, despite the listening sLOD and the presence of
the woman I’d been told was the most dangerous biped to ever call herself
human. Not that I’d heard her say it. I shook my head.
Dockrill laughed a
little and rubbed his hands together, relishing the education he was about to
give me, I suppose.
“You’re standing on the
reason for it. It’s this planet. Freelife Seven.”
The voice in my head
seemed to shout LIAR! and I burst out
in protest, “But the mines were all dry holes. Abandoned. Unless…,” I thought
about the tunnel network on Bradna’s chart. Dockrill could see a man’s
thoughts, at least it seemed so. He smiled
and nodded at me.
“You got it, laddie.
The mines were closed for another reason. Now while you let the thinking part
of your brain chew on that answer me a question: Do you know the difference
between Hal Wright’s original FTL drive and the drive on the ship that brought
you here?”
“Sure, the original FTL
drive that Hal Wright invented needed two or three Standard Years of
acceleration. It drew its power from solar radiation so it had to spiral around
the star in a precise orbit until enough energy could be collected to initiate
a …”
“Stop with the
technical mumbo-jumbo. Just tell me why Hal Wright’s original drive died with
him.”
“Time. The effects of
relativity were inescapable. Unless you initiated the drive near a wormhole adjacent
to a very large star your ship would arrive at its destination in seconds but many
years would have passed on the home world. Hal Wright and dozens of others
before him proved this mathematically but he took the chance and went out
anyway. By the time he came back there might be no one who remembered him.” I
was digging deep into my memory here. Grampa had covered all of this with me
but we’d only discussed it once. The Wright drive, for all its genius, was
completely impractical given the physical laws of our universe.
Dockrill seemed to be
waiting and I started to continue but he waved me off.
“Forget about the
difference for a moment. You learned more from Amos than I’d expected. Maybe
too much. We’ll see.” I looked at his face and he was staring at me as if
seeing me for the first time. I glanced at Ella Cantor whose own face was
stone-stiff, expressionless. She was evaluating both of us, I guessed. I began
to wonder about her true relationship with the sLOD listening on the
quantum-phase radio. “You know Hal Wright succeeded.”
“He made one successful
jump out and got lucky.” I was starting to feel argumentative, a proposition
that was dangerous at best, given the state of mind of my host. Apparently my
reckless youth wasn’t yet exhausted.
“Lucky!” Dockrill’s
eyes blazed. “Do you call it luck to use the combined power of a thousand
Kepler’s to find the only star in range of his ship with an active wormhole? Is
it luck to build a super-computer that is so fast and generates so much heat
that it has to be buried in the ice of a Jovian moon while it figures out the
exact trajectory that will get his ship to that wormhole?
“Hal Wright was the greatest
mind that humanity ever produced and you dare talk about him like he’s some
gambler in a cheap suit. Show some respect, or I’ll finish what I started
earlier.” He gave Ella a quick glance as he said this. She didn’t react and
this seemed to calm him. “Hal Wright didn’t know if the wormhole theory would
work. Mathematics can only take you so far. At some point you got to gird your
loins, as some old idiot once said, and find out what happens when you do the
thing you’ve been thinking about. Hal figured that missing a few thousand years
of history was a small enough price to try something no human had ever before
attempted. He made his jump, expecting to find nothing but stars and dust, only
that wasn’t quite what happened. He found stars and dust and something else,
something that is the sole reason you and I are here today.”
I’d
never heard this. The story taught for thirteen centuries was that Hal Wright
had jumped on what most thought would be a one way trip. But he’d figured out a
way to slide backwards into the wormhole, to return to the approximate place
and time he’d jumped from. The first-hand observers, and there were thousands
as every news agency and scientific establishment on both Earth and Mars were
keyed in to the event reported the facts of the first jump. Wright threw the
switch on his vessel, the Victoria, as
she came around the sun inside Mercury’s orbit after three years of spiraling
inward from beyond Jupiter. The ship vanished but then reappeared only sixteen
seconds later. But Hal Wright had aged thirty years. That fit with what would
be expected if his account of sliding back through the wormhole were true.
“He-he,
you’ll like this part, Garrett. Bradna likes it. Even our dour-faced guest,
likes this part,” Dockrill said with a nod to Ella. “The greatest disappearing
act in the history of the human race was Hal Wright’s second journey.”
I
shook my head.
“Right,
all he did was die,” I said. “After selling the governments of two planets on
the idea that he could travel anyplace in the galaxy and overcome the reverse
time effect that aged him if they’d only help him pay for the research. He took
a fortune with him and when he jumped again he died.” I had eaten and drank too
much. Although I was feeling physically more refreshed with each passing
moment, the upcoming Arena show in which I was to be the featured entertainer
seemed far more important than Dockrill’s alternate history lesson.
Dockrill
was shaking his head. “That’s not quite right, young fellow.”
“Of
course it is, I’ve seen the vids. The ship was gone sixteen seconds, just like
the first time, but when it jumped back in it exploded and the debris fell into
the sun.”
Dockrill
was laughing and nearly jumping up and down before I finished my sentence.
“That’s
what we all saw, boy. But what you don’t know, what almost nobody knows, is
that Hal Wright wasn’t on that ship when it jumped back in.”
“Of
course he was. The jump drive had to be operated manually. He had to initiate
that jump.” Why I wanted to argue I still don’t know. Dockrill seemed to just
be baiting me and I had no idea why. Over a thousand years of speculation and
searching hadn’t produced a shred of evidence to suggest that Hal Wright had
any means of remotely piloting his ship. Besides that, the places he could jump
to were lifeless, barren, as had been proved by countless jumps using the newer
Quantum Field drives that had been developed a hundred years after Hal Wright’s
death. Besides that, if he could have perfected the technology as he promised
he would have been the richest and most powerful man alive. There was nothing
that the governments of Mars and Earth would have denied him. Why would a man
with that sort of future disappear?
Whatever
Dockrill was spinning it wasn’t any version of truth that would stand in
kinship with the facts.
“So,
let’s get back to my original question, Garrett. What makes our current
technology so special?”
I
picked up the radio.
“The
only way I know to explain this is with what you call technical mumbo-jumbo, so
I’ll apologize in advance for that.” Dockrill nodded and I went on, “We don’t
have to spiral around a star storing up, what is it, 1045 joules of
energy in order to reshape the space-time field behind the ship, expanding it
so that a consequential shrinkage occurs in front. And we don’t need a wormhole
to overcome the time dilation effect.”
“Good,
don’t bother with explaining how that all works. I doubt you really know, unless
you’re as good a physicist as I’m told you are a mountain climber.”
I
wasn’t going to push my luck on this. I knew the answer, thanks to Amos Cold
and a few hundred hours of indescribably painful reading, but I assumed
Dockrill would get to the point quicker, if he had a point, if I just let him
talk, unless he asked for me to elaborate on some facet of what for him was
obviously a very interesting bit of information.
“However,”
he said, a twinkle appearing in his rheumy eyes, which moved constantly from
mine, to Ella’s, to the radio, “tell me the two elements that made it all
possible.”
“Qubit
fields, like in this radio, and the discovery of element d, the source of mass within what was formally called dark
matter and is the only known substance that can encapsulate tachyons.”
Ella
Cantor yawned and glanced at Bradna who poured her another drink. Dockrill pretended not to notice.
“Element
d. Exactly. Tell me something, Garrett Cold – and by the way, you’ve impressed
our guest far more than her feigned boredom would indicate, I’ll venture a
guess that even our silent listener is more than a little surprised at just how
well versed in the technical mumbo-jumbo of FTL you seem to be – but tell me,
why does Hal Wright get full credit for the first FTL drive, but nobody has
their name attached to element d?”
I
knew that element d had been found, quite by accident, by a terraforming team
in the Proxima Centauri System, the nearest star to earth that had a few large
asteroids containing minerals necessary for work being done on the first few of
the Seventy Worlds. Being able to mine essential elements nearer to the
ultimate end-user instead of having to transport all of it from Sol System was
an economic coup that at least partially led to the sLOD companies’ economic
dominance. Because it was a corporation that came up with what, in simplest
terms, looked like an empty shovel, except for the fact that the mass of
something not visible in the spectrum of human site strained the machine to the
point that it had to be completely overhauled – element d – no one individual
received any credit. The company owned it all.
“It’s
corporate property. I suppose that means it belongs to the sLOD.”
“And
the contents of that ‘shovel’ represent what percentage of element d known to
humankind?”
“This
is ridiculous, Dockrill. All of it. The stuff is so powerful that what was in
that single shovel has powered every interstellar journey for nine hundred
years. As far as I know, there’s enough to sustain humanity’s needs for ten
thousand years or more.”
Dockrill
was on his feet, clapping and standing right next to me, patting me on the
shoulder until all at once he grew very still, bending low so that I could
smell the stink of his breath, a rancid scent like rotting flesh mixed with
alcohol and sweat.
“Are
you sure?” he whispered, a drop of spittle hitting the inside of my ear and
causing me to flinch. Cassie may have died from his breath, I thought,
half-seriously.
He
whirled away and grabbed the tube of charts from Bradna, spilling them onto the
table and rapidly pawing through them until he found the one he was looking
for.
“Recognize
this, Garrett? Your grampa does for sure.”
It
was Freelife Four, the unstable asteroid so laced with mining holes that it
looked more like meshwork of wire and clay, something so fragile that everyone
who saw it wondered how the thing held together. Unstable in its orbit and the
site of more than half the accidental deaths in the system, I wondered, as I
looked at it, how Grampa could have ever been bored working on the thing. I
said the name, Freelife Four. And then it all came together.
“That
asteroid shouldn’t exist,” I said. Dockrill nodded. “Anything that unstable and
mined that heavily ought to crumble and fall into the star.”
“Obvious,
isn’t it. Of course it’s only obvious if you’re allowed to really see.” Dockrill glared at the radio. “Do
you know how many miners have ever gotten off of Freelife Four alive?”
I
knew of one, Grampa. Others had taken leave on the planet, of course, but all
had been returned to Freelife Four after their Fiver. I couldn’t think of a
single miner that I’d met who said he was on his second Fiver from Freelife
Four. And on planet they kept to themselves, avoided conversations with everyone.
They were thought to be the strongest and most incorrigible of violent
criminals, conforming to their own code of conduct because of the combination
of their unbreakable pride and the harshness of their lives. “Only Amos,” I
offered, wondering again what sort of crime Grampa had been convicted of.
“Right,
boy. And he’s not long for this world if Rheynstadt figures out that he knows
what he’s been digging up there.”
“How
could he not know?” It occurred to me that I didn’t know what was being mined
on any of the asteroids outside of Freelife Two, where I’d been initially
posted when I got to the system a decade ago.
“Oh,
I’m sure he does. But the trick is to not let on that you know anything. That’s
how a miner assigned to Four stays alive. Of course, accidents get most of
them. All of them eventually.”
“But
Amos got off.”
“He
did, and he won’t be going back.”
“Why
not?”
“You
tell me,” Dockrill said, leaning against the table top and crossing his arms.
I
let my mind consider every possibility after the initial thought that it was
luck, if you can call it that, having Rheynstadt take over Leaveton while
Grampa was on leave. I looked at the chart. It was actually a photo, taken with
an optical telescope as far as I could tell. There were no markings, no date,
nothing to indicate the time this represented.
“How
old is this photo?”
Dockrill
smiled and clapped his hands.
“It
was taken just before the start of SixKill, just before the asteroid crumbled
into dust and the rest of the element d, which is what they were mining there
in case you didn’t figure it out, vanished forever.”
“Vanished?”
“Outside
of a planetary body, it disperses quickly, and since it is only detectable by
its mass, we can neither find nor collect it.”
I
almost wept, thinking about how close Grampa had come to being part of the dust
falling into the red dwarf when the asteroid disintegrated, if Dockrill’s story
was true. Ella Cantor must have understood how I was feeling.
“For
the second time in his life,” Ella spoke, “Amos Cold survived the death of a
world. And this time, he was the only man on the last shuttle to leave.”
I
looked at the pair, Dockrill who had an expression that might have exploded
into laughter at the great joke of a story he’d just told me, or into the
deadly menace of a man bent on killing me if I denied the truth of what I’d
just heard. Ella, for her part, seemed content to wait patiently, knowing that
this was only the beginning of what would prove to be a most informative and
entertaining evening.
“They
were mining element d on Freelife Four?”
The
sLOD spoke up from the radio. “It’s all true Garrett. I’ve tried to hide it but
the situation has reached a crisis stage. The original stock of element d,
which should have lasted a hundred thousand years, was wasted and ultimately
exhausted by the wars of the past millennium. Simply put, the militia burned it
all up in the interest of protecting the Seventy Worlds.”
“Protecting
their own self-interest, if you’ll pardon my saying so, your Grace,” Dockrill
snarled. The sLOD ignored the comment.
“Freelife
Four was filled with the stuff. We’ve been mining it for a century now. And
although I’ve done my best to shut down our standing armies, the disintegration
of the asteroid puts us all at risk of something I don’t think the human race
can withstand – being completely cut off, each world from all the others.
Quantum engines need element d to work. It’s just that simple.”
I
sat down. My head had started to pound in earnest. There was more to learn and
I needed to get myself composed and strong. There was a pause and I asked a
question.
“But
if you’ve been mining it for a century, there must be enough to last,” I did a
quick calculation, “forever.”
The
sLOD responded at once, and I thought there was the first hint of anger in his
voice.
“It
would and should, if we could find it. It’s been diverted.”
“How
much of it?” I asked, astonished that such a thing could happen right under the
sLOD and militia’s careful monitoring and accounting.
“Nearly
all of it. We’ve got what the colloquialists
might call a ‘thimblefull,’ enough to keep trade active for a decade at best,
assuming we shut down all non-essential interstellar travel.”
I
looked around the room. There were no dissenting faces. Ella Cantor locked eyes
with me. Dockrill scraped his feet on the greasy and food-littered floor.
Bradna crossed and uncrossed his arms, shifted his weight from foot to foot and
finally raised a hand to suppress a belch that drew a warning glance from
Dockrill.
“Your
grace, how does Freelife Seven fit in to all of this?”
A
long silence followed my question. Ella and Dockrill both fidgeted in their
respective places. Dockrill picked up the radio and glared at it, as if his
stare could force the sLOD to answer.
“Are
you gonna tell him, or will I,” Dockrill at last said.
“I
don’t think…”
“Blast
you and your thinking!” Dockrill shouted, throwing the radio against the
nearest wall. To my surprise it simply bounced off, coming to rest in the center
of the room. The red power light remained on.
“I
don’t think anyone present knows as much about the situation on Freelife Seven
as Dockrill’s guest,” the sLOD said, his voice as even and calm as I’d ever
known it to be. “Ella has been my employee for some time and has facts that
even Dockrill is ignorant of. Ella, will you please answer Garrett’s question?”
At
the word employee, I sat up straight, feeling nauseous from the headache but
determined to understand this. sLOD don’t have employees. We were property,
prisoners for life, stripped of our humanity and lucky to eke out a brief and
painful existence on these barren rocks before sliding back into the darkness
from which we’d emerged at birth. But Ella Cantor was the sLOD’s employee. What
did that mean for the rest of us? I looked at Dockrill whose expression
suggested he’d just found something very distasteful stuck to his tongue.
At that moment the four
Muses who had removed Cassie’s body returned. Ella gave them a long look, her
face set in the placid, non-expression that I’d come to associate with my
thoughts of how very dangerous she was. And it wasn’t an undefined danger. The
sLOD, before sending up the Anglehorn to watch her arrival had given me quite a
show. Genocide was petty larceny compared to the violence and death
attributable to the woman who now nodded and stood to whisper something to
Dockrill. I strained to hear and indeed could make out syllables and phrases,
but all were in the sing-song unrecognizable tongue that she had used with Dockrill
during most of their focused interactions. Dockrill nodded and picked up the
radio.
“Your grace will have
to beg our pardons. The hour is at hand for the savior to prove his mettle to
the brethren.”
The sLOD exhaled. I
could hear it through the radio as plainly as I heard Dockrill’s speaking. Did
that mean he didn’t approve of whatever test Dockrill had concocted to show his
own followers that I was someone to be trusted, someone who would lead them out
of the ruins of the city, across the mine stuffed perimeter, and into the gates
of Rheynstadt’s kingdom – to take the garrison, the planet, the whole system.
Were Dockrill’s ambitions even bolder than he’d thus far stated?
Crushing a
civilization’s tyrannical leaders throughout history has produced mixed results
for the populace. Too often, those who follow are worse than their
predecessors. Watching the three principals chosen to instruct me in the
conquest of Freelife, I had trouble imagining our succeeding. Perhaps if Ella
took the lead role, but she seemed content to stay mostly quiet, observing and
occasionally emitting her floral scented calm into the most anxious spaces. How
did she do that? Perhaps some nano-technology enriched her pheromones, or
perhaps she had a concealed mister containing a mix of herbs and drugs. She
could make a man, and probably most women, do anything, of that I felt certain.
Danger, Garrett. You are in grave danger
here.
“Very well,” the sLOD
voice at last spoke. “I just caution you, Dockrill. Losing Garrett to the
bloodthirsty silliness that your brethren subscribe to has never been part of
my plans for Freelife. You do this at your own peril. You’d be well advised to
hold that thought.” Dockrill chuffed as he hit the off switch and handed the
radio back to Ella with the slightest genuflection. Her eyes remained cold,
fixed on some point between Dockrill and I, as if a third party were standing
there, signaling her as to what her next move might be.
The path to the lowest
level of the Arena is constructed of a series of descending spiral tunnels,
most of which have passages that arbitrarily appear, leading into darkened
halls that emerge into rooms of varying sizes. It takes an experienced guide or
years of visiting the place on one’s own to find the way to the bottommost
heart of the place, a grand coliseum modeled on the great Militia Coliseum
found at the Spartan Base on Mars.
The earthlings who
colonized that barely habitable world in the early days suffered from almost
unconscionable sentimentality, recreating many of the ancient ruins from their
depleted home world, and reinstating traditions from some of the most
bloodthirsty cultures known from throughout their history on Sol’s third
planet. Then again, these were military men, true believers who volunteered to
protect the interests of the governments and corporations that sought a way to
the stars, a way to house and provide for the basic needs of a continually doubling
population when their home world was on the verge of economic and social
collapse.
Old Earth’s speculative
fiction wrote of alien cultures that would one day appear in the skies over the
home planet’s great cities, using disrupter rays and mind control to wipe out
most of humanity and enslave the rest. These aliens were often thought to be
fleeing some disaster of their creation, one that cost them their home, and
finding conditions for their particular style of mayhem ripe on Earth, they
seemed determined to wipe out the indigenous locals and set up housekeeping in
their place. Of course these were just stories.
I wonder how horrified
those old writers would be to see the history of the past fifteen centuries. It
wasn’t alien monsters come to our world who destroyed it. We were the monsters
and now we were loosed on an innocent and mostly unresisting galaxy. We invaded
world after world, finding only bacterium and the simplest of single celled
animal life, but nonetheless eradicating it as surely as the supernova that
lies in Sol’s distant future will utterly incinerate all the planets circling
her. The visions of hell from the old religions are not far off from the
reality that lies in the distant upwhen.
As we reached the
bottom of the last curve, led by a Muse and closely followed by Tohoana and
Bradna, me the center of a box formation of four Muses, and Ella and Dockrill
linked arm in arm and whispering all the way down in their proprietary
language, I felt my strength returning. Despite the beating Tohoana had given
me, the lack of sleep, inconsistent nourishment, and the mental dullness that
surely had come as a result of all of the preceding, I was looking forward to
the coming challenge. As the heaviness of the meal was put to use propelling my
body along the stone descent, I could sense a ferocious strength growing
inside. And when it was over, I would have a meeting with Ella Cantor, and I
would have the answers she had promised me. Dockrill’s story, I was convinced,
was a stall tactic. Possibly even something set up by the sLOD for the purpose
of putting me off of my guard. He knew I could not refuse to fight. I was in his
house, under his control. But when I won, well, I’d seen the way the mobs that
witnessed these fights turned. Their moods were as unpredictable as the ocean
weather on Thebes. Grampa never did quite get the ocean meteorology balanced to
his liking. Fierce storms and glass-like calm in the proper balance were part
of the cycles of a terraformed world. Thebes seemed to always be just off
kilter with respect to one or the other. But one thing could be certain, a mob
in motion, like a wave on an ocean, spreads and engulfs everything around it
and only stops when an object larger than itself interferes. The way I felt
now, I was the largest force I knew. I looked at the Muses surrounding me and
felt a fleeting gratitude, even as they marched me to face possible death, they
had given me through their balms and energetic massage treatments the
capability to endure, perhaps even to prevail. I might not prevail, but if I
put up a good enough fight, the mob could be swayed. I’d seen it once before,
on my only visit to the Arena.
“You’ve been here before?”
Bradna asked, turning to glance at me over his shoulder.
I barely nodded. I
doubt he noticed. “Once,” I said.
“When this is over, I’ll
give you the grand tour. The history is fascinating. And tonight, you may well
become a significant part of that history.” His gleaming teeth flashed once and
he turned his attention back to the front as the Muse reached the broad square
at the bottom of the ramp.
Modeled on an ancient
village, the cobblestoned floor was flanked on both sides by three story
structures hewn out of the rock. The arched and columned facades were purely
for show, at least that’s what I’d thought on my previous visit, and the
absence of any visible light or activity beyond the arched openings convinced
me that I was correct in my assumption.
The gates to the
Coliseum were wide open and the flickering light of a thousand torches played
across the rough-cut surfaces. To my surprise, a cool breeze drifted out of the
high ceilinged space. The other strange thing was the absence of any sounds. The
mob I’d witnessed had been loud enough to be heard from far above. Of course
there were far fewer convicts in the Arena now. What had Dockrill said, a
thousand? Our group marched straight in, across a broad terrace that I recalled
ringing the whole of the structure, and stepped through a tattered red curtain,
which left us at the top of a long, steep flight of stairs, wide enough for one
person at a time to descend.
As I looked out on the
empty arena I remembered my previous visit, eight years ago. The tiers of stone
seats, nine concentric circles hewn from the rock more than thirty years ago
and divided into pie wedges by the steep and worn stairs, were filled with a
screaming, drunken mob on that night. Bradna Cucrow, looking pretty much as he
did on this now, his round rosy cheeks shining beneath eyes that seemed to
twinkle with an inner light of their own, rode on his wagon with its horsehair
clad team of convicts. He cracked a long whip in the air over the heads of their
heads and exhorted them to pull faster as he circled the Arena in an ever
tightening circle. The yoke on the wagon groaned and strained as the final few
meters counted down, until at last, the wagon came to rest in the center of the
sandy bottom.
Nearly twenty thousand
inmates shouted names in a cacophony of accusations that always preceded the
various stages of the ritual Bradna managed nearly every night. Dockrill had
not been present for my visit, and in fact, being caught by him was the first
time I’d ever laid eyes on the man.
“Outcastes, enemies,
Freelifers, mind your manners!” Bradna shouted through an antique megaphone
that squawked and hissed with so much static that his voice came out sounding
like he’d ingested a mouthful of crumbled glass before speaking. “You want
justice?” The crowd shouted in agreement. “You say you want justice?” The shout
rose to a sustained yelling demand. “I said, you say-ay-ay you want
jussssstice?” And as the yelling exploded like a giant wave on the beach,
erupting in a foaming, spittle-laced scream of fury, one of the ‘horses’
unhitched himself from the team drawing Bradna’s wagon and trotted around to open
a door on the side of the coach. Dragging a whimpering young convict out using
only one hand and arm, the Horse-man snorted and pawed at the air with his free
hand before throwing the first of the night’s victims roughly on the Arena
sands.
“This is Farhark Drakhoff,”
Bradna’s voice barked out of the megaphone. A sustained chorus of booing
greeted the name while Bradna beamed on the assembled mob. I was about a third
of the way up from the place where the trembling youth lay. Dressed only in a
soiled and torn pair of convict briefs and covered in bruises over most of his
exposed skin, I had a difficult time picturing this battered boy committing any
sort of crime that warranted his transportation to the arena. I’d wondered
about the bruises at the time. I now understood. Tohoana had been in Dockrill’s
service for many years. The beating she
gave me wasn’t special. But I still wondered about her mention of good friends
dying at SixKill. My memories continued as I gazed out on the pristine sands of
the Arena floor. Bradna cracked his whip, raising a cloud of bone-white dust
around the boy. “Young master Drakhoff, arise and meet the face of judgment.
Up, up, up boy! Your public awaits!”
A brief hail of thrown
objects, everything from half-eaten protein bars to full steins of molasses-thick
beer hurtled down onto the sands. Somehow, Drakhoff managed to avoid being hit.
Perhaps because he never stopped to examine any of the thrown objects. Had he
done so he might have seen the handful of items that were either heavy enough
or sharp enough to serve him as weapons in the test he now faced: smooth
stones, a footrest taken from a barstool somewhere in the Arena, even a miner’s
hand axe all lay in the sand around the trembling and pale youth. He didn’t
appear to be looking at anything, keeping head down and his hands covering his
ears, I thought he’d not last a minute once the event got underway. How very
wrong the night proved that assumption.
The Arena was lit by
flaming torches. The stench of the oil and rendered fat made breathing
difficult. Alcohol and sweat were mere aftereffects in the face of the
olfactory onslaught of the torches. Soon, the copper and iron tang of
fresh-spilled blood would dominate all the rest.
Bradna had leapt from
the wagon and was walking the length of the arena, his whip coiled in one hand
as he gestured with the other, presenting the case against Farhark Drakhoff.
“Drakhoff was captured
by a militia patrol. He’d scaled the fence to the garrison and broken into a
food locker. He says he intended to steal a meal and perhaps a bit more for his
friends here, those without that sort of stupid courage.” This pronouncement
was met with a smattering of cheers from the assembly, a few shouts of
encouragement, and mostly a hesitant uncertainty. There had to be something
more. Even suicide missions into the garrison are honored by those who stayed
abreast of such matters. “Unfortunately for the militia, Drakhoff escaped
before they got the opportunity to torture him. Unfortunately for Drakhoff,
before he conveniently escaped, he gave the militia guards the names of all of
his accomplices who had gotten away with more than they could carry. Arrests
were made, people were sent off planet. Most didn’t arrive at their
destinations.”
Now the catcalls and
boos resumed. No more objects were thrown because the wide gate at the far end
of the sandy ring had opened and everyone could see what fate awaited the
snitch.
“Leaker!” someone
shouted from the front row, a cry that was quickly taken up by every spectator
in the arena, me included. It was the only time I publicly jeered a condemned
convict. And let there be no mistake about this, those brought in Bradna’s
wagon to this spot, had reached their place of ultimate judgment.
Bradna waited until the
mob had ceased its latest outburst before leaping nimbly to the box of the
wagon and uncoiling his whip. He was younger then but still surprised me with
his athleticism. The lash whistled as it sailed through the air, striking the
boy full in the face so that he dropped to his knees. “The accusation is laid
on thy face, boy. I pray your defense is half so eloquent. The floor is yours.”
Bradna whipped his team and wheeled the big wagon out of the arena and toward
the open gate. As he passed the boy he took another swing with the whip and to
the amazement of all, the youth grabbed the braided leather and held fast.
“Whoa!” Bradna said as
the boy dug in his heels. The horse-men stopped and Bradna sat atop the
driver’s box eyeing Drakhoff. “Well
then, I see you’ve decided to put up a noble defense. Take it. I won’t need it
for a short while.” Tossing the whip to the youth, Bradna clapped his hands and
exited the sandy floor.
Coming out the same
gate were four convicts, each as big as two average men. Thick bone protruded
above their malformed faces, giving them the appearance of being crudely carved
out of gray stone. Their rusty chain mail and crude weapons were instantly
recognized by the mob.
“Apocalyptos!” the same
man who’d started the “Leaker” chant shouted. The Four Wards of the Apocalypse,
chief entertainers at a gladiator themed fight club in the third circle of
Violence now entered the Arena in a single line, each holding a greasy rod of
vanadium-steel and wearing an expression that offered no sympathy. It might
have been a human infant, helpless and innocent in the center of the arena, and
it would have made no difference.
These dealers in
convict justice, products of a failed genetic experiment to build a race of
super warriors during the Mineral Wars in the early days of terraforming, were
brought out only for the worst offenses, and there was nothing worse among
convicts than being labeled a Leaker. A snitch, rat, stoolie, Judas – history
has never treated those who betray their own kind with anything less than total
disdain. Convict business was a convict’s privilege to divulge or not as he saw
fit. Leakers upset the balances in society. The name had a dual meaning, both
from its implicating the accused and for the final act of degradation, a ritual
urination ceremony executed on the body of such individuals before displaying
them in a public place until they rotted.
“He won’t last a minute
against them, eh?” a convict next to me shouted. “Care to wager on it?” he
said, elbowing me to join in his amusement at the imminence of slaughter.
After a glance at the
approaching brutes, my eye had gone back to Drakhoff. He wasn’t cowering as
some would in the face of brutal and imminent death, nor was he scurrying from
side to side, trying to scale the walls separating the sands from the mob.
Perhaps he knew the former was futile and would only increase the dishonor of
his death. The latter would have resulted in his being torn to pieces at best
or having his efforts rebuffed at every turn by flailing arms and pummeling
fists. He would not leave this scene under his own power.
But what I saw was a
young man suddenly absorbed in an act of extreme concentration. He rose to his
feet, slowly. He’d turned an ankle, digging in to pull the whip when it was
still in Bradna’s hand. He stood uneasily on that foot for a moment, drawing
deep breaths and gradually increasing the weight he put on the foot with each
exhalation. After he was standing erect, he twisted his feet, setting them
firmly on the sandy floor. He flexed the fingers of the hand not holding the
whip, his left, and then he bent town, twirling the braided leather so that it
danced like a wounded serpent, the tip dipping in and out of the sand until he
plunged the fingers of his left hand in amongst the hissing spirals and by some
feat of sudden prestidigitation switched the handle to that hand and stood
immediately erect holding the still quivering and perfectly coiled whip high
overhead.
The Apocalyptos had
continued their steady march toward the boy, and this held the attention of
most of the mob as they jeered and laughed in anticipation of the coming
slaughter. But a few of us had watched the boy’s delicate ritual gathering of
strength and those, like me, must have had at least a moment’s hope that the
accusations were false and some power greater than human strength and a will to
live might spare this boy.
Once he held the whip
overhead I realized his eyes were closed. I’d been so mesmerized by the
twirling of the five-meter long whip that I hadn’t seen him shut them. Now he
opened them wide and gazed not at fate as it came four abreast toward him, but
up to the top of the high cavern that marked the ceiling of the arena’s hall of
justice.
When he released the
coils with the fingers of his left hand I wished more than anything to know the
background of this youth. Instead of falling heavily around him, the whip
seemed to uncoil in a controlled expansion, reaching out to its full length and
then snapping back to form the skeleton of a spiraling form around its new
master, an inverted funnel that encircled him, whirling with just enough speed
to hold the shape. I glanced down toward the Apocolyptos, who probably hadn’t
noticed anything but the boy’s movement which made him a target for their
irrepressible and permanent rage. Beyond, peering out the arch of the gate was
Bradna Cucrow. Even from a distance I could see the amazed look on his face.
When they were ten meters away the hulking
forms split off, one pair traversing left and the other to the right for some
six paces. One of each pair stopped there, the second continuing to stand
behind the boy, effectively boxing him in. As for young Drakhoff, he was only
visible as a blurred image behind the whip, which twirled so fast around him
that it was difficult to discern the division between boy and his weapon.
We were all on our feet,
chanting “Justice, justice, justice…” It was the way of the Arena. If the
accused were innocent, he would survive his test. If not, then justice would
have been served by the peers of the guilty party.
I felt a hand on my arm
and the scent of jasmine fleetingly teased my nostrils.
“Come Garrett Cold,
show us what sort of leader you will be.” Ella Cantor had a hand on my elbow
and we were walking down the steps to the sands of the Arena.
I glanced around. The
underground stadium was empty but for our party. Bradna had ran ahead. There
was no wagon, no horse-men, no Apocolyptos. Just the barren sands and our small
band. Dockrill and Tahoana were seated in the front row seats near to the
center of the oval. I realized that the Muses were gone as well. A second smell
reached my nostrils; a stench really, sweet and foul at the same time. It
reminded me of the hog farms on Thebes, on slaughtering day. Death, recent and
violent, stalked these sands. Ella guided me to the bottom step and then
released my elbow.
“I’m sorry, boy,”
Dockrill said from his seat. “Sorry that we don’t have much of an audience for
your coming out party. Seems that Commander Rheynstadt rounded up all the
tourists that normally fund the gate for these entertainments of ours. The ones
who are left have too much work to do, getting ready to follow you, if you’re
worthy of them. So, it’s just us here to cheer you on.
“You ought to feel
honored, though. I don’t normally attend these little soirees. Bradna, when was
the last time I came here?”
“I’ve never seen you
here,” Bradna answered immediately.
“Well, I’ve been a few
times. But I never stayed to the end. This time, I think I will. It ought to be
one hell of a show.”
It must have been a cue
of some sort because the huge iron gates at both ends of the Arena began to rise
immediately after the word show. Ella Cantor gave me a long look and then took
her seat next to Dockrill.
“Ladies and Gentlemen
of Freelife,” Bradna launched into his pitch. “Tonight, Dockrill Castello and
the Arena staff bring to you a main event unlike any you’ve ever seen. Tonight,
history will be made and soon after, this venue will be acclaimed around the
galaxy as the place where Garrett Cold, the savior of Leaveton, proved his
mettle.”
The gates were fully up
and I watched as one of the Muses entered at a run from my right. He was
carrying a metal box, about a half meter square. It had ventilator holes in it
as if some living thing were inside. Since Freelife had no indigenous animal
life, I imagined that it contained some sort of weapon or implement, either a
prop for Bradna or perhaps something I might find useful in my test. I waited
on the bottom step for instructions.
“Garrett Cold, you are
accused of nothing, but rather have been chosen by the Liberty Keepers of Freelife
to lead us in the capture of the garrison. You were vouched for as worthy of
this task by the sLOD, however, many among us suppose that the task will lead
only to the deaths of most of the convicts in the system. But, a few believers,
and I am one of them, propose that you were born to successfully lead us to the
victory and liberty that our name represents. This test will show if you are
worthy or not.”
From the opposite end
of the Arena, I saw the other four muses enter, pulling a cargo cart covered
with a tarpaulin. The cart was old, the seams rusted, and liquid leaked out,
leaving a dirty trail on the white sands as they approached. When the cart
reached the center of the Arena, Bradna stood to the side. The Muses positioned
it so that the rear gate faced the spectators and me. The decayed scent was
overwhelming and I guessed that the cart was the source.
“Your task is simple,
Marshall Cold. In the box are a particularly aggressive species of flesh-eating
worms, brought here by Dockrill Castello at great expense and considerable
risk. In the cart are the mortal remains of some of our brethren, killed in
your presence, as well as the bodies of some of your enemies and ours.
“We would have a
ceremonial fire for our honored dead and give the remainder to the worms. You
must decide which corpses belong to friends and which are worm food. And you
must place a single worm on each enemy corpse and light the fire for our
friends.
“One more thing, this
species of worm prefers living flesh to dead. They will attack you first. There
are more worms than corpses, so you may kill some, but you must leave enough
alive to dispose of the enemy corpses.”
Bradna paused and
looked up a moment as if trying to decide if he’d neglected any part of his
explanation. He nodded to himself.
“Do you wish to ask a
question?” he said.
I tried to gather my
thoughts, which had immediately gone to the bodies in the wagon. Who was there?
Cypher and the Sarconian certainly. Tiny? Cassie? Would they be so insensitive,
especially given Dockrill’s reaction to her death? I looked at Dockrill who was
slouched in his seat while Ella massaged the back of his neck. Both seemed
completely at ease.
“The worms, how might
they be killed?”
“Any number of ways.
They are quite fragile, truly. In fact, sand will certainly end their lives
very rapidly. Their flesh is very thin.” Bradna again looked up as if
considering if he should tell me more. “They scream when they are dying.” He
watched me for a moment. I was out of practice for this sort of thing, a
life-or-death situation with a wide number of variable complications. There, I
had a starting point. “We begin in one minute,” Bradna said, looping a cord
through the catch on the side of the box. I saw that when he pulled it, the
worms would have immediate access to the sand. I would have to stand the box
upright before any escaped. Until I could quantify all the factors, it was best
to preserve things as they were.
Four of the Muses stood
at the sides of the cart, having untied the tarpaulin, they were ready on
Bradna’s signal to flip it off and probably spill the grisly contents onto the
sand. The fifth Muse took the free end of the cord from Bradna who then
ascended past me into a seat next to Tohoana.
He had a pocket
timepiece that he opened. It projected a set of red digital numbers onto the
domed ceiling, counting down the time to the beginning of my trial. There were
forty-one seconds left and as I watched them count down to zero, I began to
organize the variables into a plan of action.
By the time the clock
reached nine seconds I had only two pieces of data missing: whose bodies were
in the cart and how would I know which were friend and which were foe. I also
knew that no matter what I saw when the tarpaulin came off, I had to tip the
worm box upright and hope the damn things couldn’t jump or fly.
The seconds counted
down and as the red numerals 0:00 appeared high overhead the tarpaulin was
thrown back and I got a glimpse of the bodies, stacked like cordwood with their
heads toward me before the fifth Muse drew back on the cord with a jerk and in
my peripheral vision I saw thousands of white worms, no bigger than my index
finger, writhing and squirming, fall screaming onto the sandy floor of the
Arena.
I should have been racing
toward the box but I was paralyzed by the face of one of the corpses. Battered
almost beyond recognition, Amos Albert Cold’s still form lay atop the mass of
corpses.
Grampa, who had taught
me to pose a single question for every problem, no matter how many
complications. How can I keep the worms
alive long enough to sort the corpses? He taught me to identify the key
variables. The number of worms, the
maximum number I needed to preserve, the number of corpses, how many were
friend and how many foe, how much fire did I need to light the pyre of friends,
the fire source, the aggressiveness of the worms, the condition of the corpses
for identity purposes, the difficulty in moving so much dead mass, how to
induce the worms to choose dead flesh over my living body. A statement of
purpose. To sort the corpses into friend
and foe, feeding the foes to the worms and the friends to the fire. And the
obvious obstacles to success. Deciding
which corpse was friend and which foe given my actual knowledge, preserving
enough worms to eat the foes, finding a source of fire sufficient to burn the
friends, avoiding being eaten by the worms, x-factors. X-factors were the
unknowns that cropped up in any complicated problem. From things Bradna omitted
that I should know to uncontrollable shifts in the situation due to randomness,
Grampa had taught me just one thing, don’t overthink the x-factors, just stay
alert and ready to react to them. Seeing Grampa’s gray and bloodied face, one
eye open, the other hidden beneath a mass of blood and hair, was the ultimate
x-factor. I heard the screaming of the worms as I fell to my knees, unable to
think or even breathe.
