After Mind (33 page)

High above the valley’s expanse, Meg pointed down toward her adobe village. She showed them all through a break in the clouds. They could see the empty swings at her school, the treetops along the path to the zoo. The adobe village, the garden, the fields, and the sections all around were partitioned from each other by scalable mounds or low, rib walls. Sixteen sections joined in a line to form a neighborhood; four neighborhoods formed a community. Each community comprised sixty-four sections and was bordered by a river, either veinal draw or artery feed. Astride each river was another parallel community. Four communities in total made a complete wrap around the sky. The inside of the ship held a spectacular 256 sections to count.

“I came up here once,” she said. “I could see you.”

“How?” Ceeborn asked. “I was never out here like you.”

“Not here,” Meg said. “I saw you from up ahead, down through the other end. I’ll show you when we get there.”

And with a sudden flicker, the sky all around changed its images of clouds to an enormous projection of the ship’s schematic design. The image was painted beneath their feet as they walked like passengers riding on a long, tubular plane.

Far below at the planetarium, the expeditionary officer looked about the size of an insect as he stepped outside of the dome. He looked up toward the sky and the outlines of the ship as its live image detail filled in. Starry-eyed crowds gathered around him to witness the promised show of their arrival.

Ceeborn, Meg, Tenden, and Spud were walking on the schematic nearest to the center of the ship’s body. Far ahead in the projection, the ship’s eight long arms flared out to a parasol as the ship rotated on the screen. The cheer of the crowd by the planetarium below rose up like an echo of thunder.

But the ship’s rotation projected under Ceeborn, Meg, Tenden, and Spud’s feet, superimposed over the actual ground below, caused an instant bout of vertigo. The off axis sensation caused them all to wobble and reach down for the ground. A glorious, painted planet crested over the peak of the valley.

“Is this happening now?” Spud asked. “Did we arrive? Did we miss it?”

Animated launch doors opened all along the length of the projected arms and masses of simulated ships sprayed forth and shot through the tube of the sky.

“No,” Meg said as she regained her footing. “It’s only a preview. They showed it to us a million times before at school.”

A geyser of blackened water shot up from the vent at the spiral garden. Then the whole valley shook and with it, the sky buffeted them side to side. It was no projection.

Ceeborn looked at Meg. Spud rose up from all fours on the screen.

“I don’t think that was part of the show,” Meg said.

From their height in the sky, they could see down, up, and around. Blackened ooze saturated the ground around the garden. The crowd on the ground couldn’t see to the same distance and applauded the continuation of the show.

A more distant section’s glandular fountain bubbled, then blew into a vertical geyser. The whole of the land was checkered by section, each either erupting with a pressurized fountain or turning off with a blackened ring of ooze.

Among the quickening pattern of chaos, a beacon of light emerged from the dome of Robin’s clinic, then its vents, walls, and windows. Its light was unmistakably blue.

“What is that?” Ceeborn asked.

Meg jumped up from the screen into a run. “Come on. We’ve got to tell my mom!”

“What is it?” Tenden asked.

“If it’s true, you won’t believe it,” she said.

“Believe what?” Ceeborn asked. He looked down again at the clinic’s dome that shone like a spotlight of health.

“My mother incubated your bins,” Meg said as she skipped backward in her run. “She left on the show. If those are your picks, then they worked. The bins. You picked from the bins!”

“The cure?” Ceeborn asked, and as he started to run, Spud pulled back on his arm.

“You picked them. C, E, and S,” she said. “I think you found it. Come on!”

“Wait,” Spud said. He held back. He sensed something and grabbed Ceeborn’s sleeve. Then he ducked as he spun around.

A Chokebot had stalked them into the tube. It scurried upside down with claws locked onto the axle’s two lower rails. Tenden pushed Spud aside as the Chokebot flipped down from the rails. It landed upright and poised on the thin projection screen.

“Run!” Tenden yelled to Ceeborn and Meg, but the Chokebot jumped and tackled him from behind. Tenden took the full brunt of its weight on his back. He fell to the screen, elbows bent, hands tucked and fisted under his belly. The Chokebot’s two rear legs clamped to his ankles, its middle to his waist. Its front two claws pushed under and found his wrists. He resisted the pull of its pincers, but was no match for the Chokebot’s ratcheted, mechanical strength.

It wrenched out Tenden’s arms, flattening him to his belly, and with a sudden mechanical pop, ripped his bent elbows outstretched, tearing the tendons from his forearms. Tenden screamed in his splay. The Chokebot locked its six shoulder cuffs into place and reddened its dome as Tenden wailed.

Spud kicked at the Chokebot as Ceeborn ran back to pry its unmovable joints with his hands.

Tenden whimpered through labored breaths. The locked Chokebot shaded its dome a gentler orange in its feedback scale. It wasn’t getting the calming response it sought. It changed the color of its dome to yellow then blue, but Tenden’s cries of agony remained. The Chokebot tilted its dome and clacked its keys, deciphering the spasm of Tenden’s hand on the screen as a wrestler’s tap of give.

The Chokebot unlocked its limbs and dismounted. Its dome clicked as it backed farther away.

Ceeborn and Meg lifted Tenden up toward seated at her lap. Tenden cradled his torn arms beneath his chest as he rocked in tears. But worse, something awful had happened. He moved his shoulder, reached his hand into the front pocket of his hoodie, and then looked up. He pulled out the rivulus case. He trembled.

The case was wet. Its side was crushed.

“I don’t know what happened,” Tenden said. “I was carrying him and I got hit.” He looked back. “I couldn’t protect him. You understand?”

“I do,” Ceeborn said. “It hit you first, that’s all.”

Ceeborn took the case a short distance away from Tenden’s grip. He opened it over a stream of the sky and let the rivulus slip loose. The trickling current took the rivulus and it moved with the water, or maybe it swam away on its own. It would be best to think that it did.

Ceeborn turned away from the pacing Chokebot and kneeled to help Tenden up to his feet. As Ceeborn lifted, he winced and grabbed his hand against his neck. His sting was bad, and getting worse.

The projection of the ship’s schematic on the screen reset with a spin, reacting like a compass needle fixed to the ship’s actual orientation. Live status images of the ship’s rear tank in distress were broadcast for all to see.

“We’re almost there,” Meg said to Tenden as he cupped his arms and walked behind them with Spud. “When we arrive,” she said, “the ship’s spinning is supposed to slow, the water pressure is supposed to fall, and the rivers are supposed to flow back into the tank.”

“What are we supposed to do then?” Ceeborn asked.

“We’re all supposed to go to the arms,” she said as the sky darkened all around them.

Ceeborn led forward. Two other Chokebots responded to the networked call of the first. They were fast. They rushed through the tube, not below on the axle’s rails, but above and out of sight. Spud looked back through the tube, sonar pinging with his facial disk into the emptiness, but saw nothing.

The live images of the tank on the projection screen ahead showed the remaining cable of the half-sunken gondola reaching down through the water’s punctured skin. The skin was in a constant state of tearing as the submerged gondola twirled. Water was escaping in waves. A Chokebot, inverted on the ceiling of the tank, sliced through the remaining cable to set the gondola free. The cut ends of the cable hovered at first, then drew down and sank beneath the water. The unencumbered gondola drifted down and swirled away into the current. It sank toward a filter in the tank that fed into the ship’s rearmost accelerator module. The gondola stopped at the outside of the filter, but the thin, flexible cable drew in.

Ceeborn turned away from the images in horror. A shiver ran from his neck through his spine. The extent of what he had done was suddenly upon everyone.

The sky all around them in the ship turned from clear to a hellish, choking red.

Spud looked back again into the tube. He jutted his head left, then right. The two rails of the axle above their heads were empty. “I think something is behind us.”

The cable wound deep inside the accelerator module in the projected tank, then jammed. The gondola began to spin in the water like a stone at the end of a string, churning faster and faster, reaching up and shredding the water’s skin, whipping the water into a cyclonic funnel. The entire orientation of the water was changing. It rode up the side of the tank toward its veinal inlet door and vacated from its arterial outlet, sending the whole ship horribly out of balance.

Spud whipped back around in a panic. He sensed it, his cheeks flared. He saw the two Chokebots coming in fast. “Run!”

The skin in the tank swelled from the reverse of the water’s pressure, stretched, and burst wide open. The cable snapped from the gondola and wound in through the filter. It tied. An inner artery ballooned and ruptured with a click. The accelerator module buckled with an enormous, reverberating seizure that shot through the ship.

Ceeborn and Meg watched the ripple approach from ahead on the sheets of the sky. Then the actual wave hit full force. The projection of the planet on the tube exploded into a kaleidoscope of horror as the bellowing convulsion ripped through.

Spud jammed his hands over his ears and fell to the screen. He screamed. “Is this happening?!”

“Let’s get out of here!” Tenden shouted with his arms hanging limp at his front.

Ceeborn and Meg dove flat on the screen.

The sky tilted.

The ship started to list.

The far white front of the tube rolled as the hill cracked away from the ball and joint behind the white bulkhead.

A rush of water swelled the rivers below.

Great plumes shot across the chest of the ship and splashed the underside of the sky.

Ceeborn was lying face down on the screen beside Meg. The ship was being destroyed, not by fire, but by the power and percussion of water. It was all a result of his doing. The world was drowning from the flow of its source.

Meg lay prone on the sky screen and looked away in her terror. She was trembling. The back of her hair soaked in a trickle of water that ran between them. Even the wet tips of her hair shivered as her back rose and fell with the fits of her breaths. The hem of her pants shook with her legs. The toes of her shoes tapped unnerved on the clear sky as the overwhelming vertigo over the valley below was unbearable. No one deserved to be so afraid, least of all Meg. He had to move, to get her to the arms of the ship.

He reached for her hand as they lay and she turned her head to face him. Her eyes stared long. He tried to smile but his cheeks wouldn’t lift more than a twitch from the corners of his mouth. He, too, was terrified. He loved her. He wondered which of the two would show more.

His neck was soothed by the trickle of water as it ran and dripped through the porous sky. The water flowed as the lifeblood of the ship, but Luegner owned the water. No wonder the ship cried from its sky. He touched his neck’s wound and saw its reddened wetness between his fingers. Meg didn’t blink. It was bad.

The racking vibrations stopped long enough. It was time to get up, and run. The violent structural twist of the ship had shorted out the projection screen from fore to aft. Now it all became clear. The living world of Meg and the dying gully world were united. Huge swaths of the screen had fallen from the sky, opening all of the ship into one.

People dodged from the squared and falling panels of the sky. They saw to the tops of the villages, the fields, and communities on opposite sides of their cylindrical world in the joining of two opposing semi-circular valleys. They froze in horror, the absolute vertigo of spotting the panicked people on the other side of their world also panicked and looking back down on them.

The glandular fountains along the tributary hills disgorged their water. They were no longer able keep up with the changing pressure. The rivers lifted in their channels, then broke into globular form.

Ceeborn and Meg got up. They were breathless, staring over the vast open atrium of the conjoined and inverted valleys.

“Is that the world?” Tenden asked as he stood, gasping.

“I’ve never seen it like this,” Meg said.

The two fast Chokebots jumped from the upper rails to the screen and corkscrewed in a coordinated split around the axle, descending in ambush upon Ceeborn, Meg, Tenden, and Spud from above.

The lead Chokebot formed a divide with Ceeborn and Meg to the front and Tenden and Spud to the rear. The second Chokebot took its position end-to-end with the lead. It faced the weaker Tenden and Spud.

The third Chokebot that had injured Tenden stalked his slower, sickened steps from behind.

Ceeborn and Meg looked ahead toward the gully. The screen was intact. Tenden and Spud looked back, rips in the sky tube were opening behind them.

“Don’t run,” Ceeborn said. “Don’t move. They’ll chase you.”

Tenden’s eyes were glassy and teared from his pain. Ceeborn and Meg had the clearer run ahead to freedom. Tenden took a step forward toward the Chokebot guarding his front. The leader facing Ceeborn immediately turned and faced Tenden. He squared off with the two, his arms hanging limp at his front.

“Tenden, don’t!” Ceeborn said and charged forward. His first Chokebot spun back around and reared.

“Go on, jump me,” Tenden cried to his guard. “You understand!”

Two more Chokebots scurried down the rails to the alerted trouble along the tube. They descended on the screen and reinforced the back-to-back two as a quad: two faced Ceeborn and Meg, two against Tenden and Spud. Tenden turned in silence as they counted. In total there were five Chokebots in the pack, including the patrol in the rear that tore the strength of his arms.