Steel Sky (8 page)

“Sweetheart . . . that’s not what I’m saying at all.”

Amarantha’s voice rises in volume. “Then what
are
you saying? Maybe I should just pull him to the floor and fuck him right there! Would that help your
career
?”

“I didn’t mean anything at all. I wasn’t thinking.”

Her open palm lashes out, striking him in the temple. “I can’t believe what an asshole you are sometimes!”

He raises his elbows to ward off another blow, but she is already back on the bed, burrowing under the covers. He sees that he has genuinely hurt her. His mistake was to think of her as having the same desperate drive to succeed that he does, the same indifference to humiliation.

“You’re right, sweetheart. I’m sorry.” He stands next to the bed, looking at her. After a few moments she shifts over to make room for him.

They lie spooned together. He runs his hand gently up and down her arm. “I was wrong,” he says. “I’ll go to the party alone.”

She sighs. “I’ll go. But I’ll give that squit a piece of my mind if he bothers me. A big piece.”

Smiling, he rests his chin on her shoulder. Feeling her body relax, he runs his hand around her hip and down across her stomach. “Fair enough.”

A FEMALE VISITOR

In Hydroponics, Orel Fortigan lifts himself to his elbows, his head throbbing with pain. A thin stream of blood runs down the side of his head to drip on the floor. He hears the sound of scuffling and heavy breathing nearby. Looking up, he sees Bernie about five meters away, with the creature on top of him. Orel can see that its form is human, even if its behavior is not. Its teeth are locked on Bernie’s left arm. Bernie is trying to push it off with his feet, but the creature cannot be dislodged. Its head shakes back and forth furiously, ripping into the arm. Tatters of cloth and plastic are flying around them.

Orel gets to his feet, finding it more difficult than he expected. He pulls a wrench from his tool belt and circles around to approach the creature from behind. With each step, he staggers a little to one side. When he is almost upon the creature, it hears his steps and turns its almost hairless head. It squeals deafeningly, baring long, white teeth. Its tiny, black eyes glisten with menace.

Orel swings the wrench down against its head as hard as he can. The creature moves to evade the blow, but not quickly enough. Its head collapses with a wet crunch like an old, rusty pipe. It falls sideways, red and gray bits falling from its crushed skull. Bernie struggles out from underneath its body.

Orel is barely aware of him. He is watching the creature’s body to make sure it is really dead.

“I’m going to throw up. I’m going to throw up,” Bernie says, ripping off his respirator. He stands with his head bowed for a moment, then holds the respirator back over his face. “I can’t,” he says. “I’m too damn scared to throw up.” He takes a few deep breaths. “What the hell
is
that?”

“Rat,” Orel says, dropping the wrench. He, too, is breathless and sick with adrenaline.

“It could have killed me!”

“It would have, too, if it had latched onto your good arm.” Orel gestures at Bernie’s exposed cybernetic arm beneath the torn fabric and plastiflesh. Long scratches have been made in the black metal. “Look what it did there. It could have stripped your other arm to the bone.” Bernie edges closer. “It’s dead, isn’t it?”

“It’s dead. Skull caved in. Pretty easily, too. Must not have had enough calcium in its diet.”

Bernie laughs weakly. “Let’s not talk about its diet.”

“Cyborg, medium rare.”

Their laughter sputters out. “Do you really think he’s a Rat?” Bernie asks. “Maybe he’s just some lunatic.”

“He’s a Rat, all right.” Orel kneels down beside the body and, hesitating a moment before touching it, turns it face up. “Or rather,
she
’s a Rat.”

The creature is short and wiry. She is naked from head to toe, but nothing suggests her sex other than her genitals. Her breasts are mere bumps. Her face is gaunt and devoid of personality, its character lying not in the pinprick eyes, but in the angry, oversized incisors protruding over the thin lips and recessed chin.

Orel is surprised to see that her right arm ends in a red, twisted scar just below the elbow. “We were nearly killed by a one-armed girl,” Bernie says with a grimace.

Orel turns the creature’s head and lifts the lid of one eye. The pupils of her eyes are so dilated so that they nearly overwhelm the irises. “Look at this,” he says. “That’s why she broke the lights. She couldn’t stand the brightness.” He lifts the creature’s good hand. “Look at the callus. On her hands and knees as well as her feet, for climbing across rock. She’s a cave dweller, all right.”

“I’ve never heard of one of them coming into the Hypogeum,” Bernie says. “I thought maybe they were just an old story.”

“I wonder why she decided to come here.”

“There are scars all over her body, like the ones on my arm.” Bernie kneels down next to Orel, his voice rising in excitement. “She was attacked by other Rats. She didn’t
want
to come here — she was forced to!”

“Do you think that’s how she lost her arm?”

“Maybe. Or maybe she lost the arm in an accident, or a fight, and that’s why the others chased her out. Because she was crippled.”

Orel considers this. In his imagination he sees the Rat, her arm trapped under a rockslide. She tries to pull loose, but the stones are too heavy. The other Rats turn away from her, giving her up for dead. She is left alone in the dark, crying in pain. Desperately she leans forward and bares those enormous teeth. She begins to chew . . .

“Poor thing,” he says. “She never had a chance.”

“Who does?” Bernie asks peevishly. He stands up, wiping the blood and mold from his jumpsuit. “What do you think we should do with the body? Should we call the knackers or should we call the clops?”

“Let’s not call anybody for a bit,” Orel says, lifting the creature’s callused hand. He runs his thumb along the edge of the thick, yellow fingernails. “I’d like to take a closer look at her.”

MOSLEY’S BODY

The designation of Caretaker is primarily ceremonial. No one really expects that anyone will come along to desecrate the corpse in the moments following death. But even in the Hypogeum, where sentiment usually takes back seat to expediency, the importance of giving mourners something to do, something to make them feel needed, is understood. So Mosley’s eldest son stands watch by his father’s body, protecting it from harm.

After a while, two orderlies arrive. The son steps aside, and they wheel Mosley’s bed to the door. Seeing Dr. Penn’s prostrate figure, they pause, considering it. But they have received no instructions about a second body, so they continue on their way.

They wheel the body through the halls to a large elevator in a quiet corner of the hospital. They push the bed in, maneuvering it awkwardly with outstretched arms so as to avoid actually stepping over the threshold into the car. One of the orderlies reaches in and stabs the single button. The light inside the elevator begins to blink rhythmically. The orderlies stand against the opposite wall and watch the doors close.

The elevator descends, rattling through the hospital, continuing past the basement and the subbasement. It does not slow, but descends past the sewers to the very lowest catacombs of the Hypogeum. With a soft ping it opens to a dimly lit hallway with walls of bare, chiseled rock. The floor is lined with scratched and yellowed plastic mats. The gutters that run along the edges are indelibly stained dark brown. A short, hunched man in a surgical mask and a smock lumbers toward the elevator. He yanks the body off the bed. Holding the body by the ankle, the man in the smock hits a button in the elevator to signal receipt of the body. The doors bounce once against the corpse’s head before the hunched man pulls the body fully out of the way. When the doorway is clear, the elevator and the bed travel upward again.

With a single practiced movement, the hunched man slings the body over his shoulder. He proceeds down the passage, his broad feet slapping against the floor, carelessly dodging the bulbs that hang from the low ceiling. Without raising his eyes, he travels through the endlessly branching corridors until he comes to a wide room filled with bubbling vats and roaring furnaces. Other hunched men hurry to and fro, almost invisible in the steam. No words are spoken. This is the domain of the knackers, the untouchable class of the Hypogeum, despised by even the lowest quaternaries.

Mosley’s body is thrown on a polished metal table. Two men undress the body, rolling and manipulating it with the ease of long experience. The clothes are tossed into a passing laundry cart. The hair on the head and body is shaved and vacuumed though a flexible plastic hose hanging from the ceiling, where it is sucked into a long pipe. At the other end of the pipe it will be used to make rope, filters, and insulation.

Mosley’s throat, forearm, and groin are cut open. The blood rolls down the table to a drain. From there it flows to a large collecting vat where it joins with the blood of hundreds of other men and women who have died today. Some will be returned to the hospital. The rest will be used in the making of puddings, juices, and plastics.

A deep incision is made down the sternum, and a pair of metal claws descend to crack open the chest. The intestines are lifted out; their contents will be turned into fertilizer and bacteria culture. The other organs are examined and checked against a list from the hospital. Those that are not compromised by the lymphoma are packed into a stasis field container, similar in principle to the touch of a Deathsman, and returned to the hospital via a different elevator. The rest are dropped down a chute to a conveyor belt, where they will be separated according to chemical content, dissected, and distilled.

The contents of the skull are removed. Extra care is taken in the extraction of the pituitary gland because of the part it plays in the production of musth, a natural euphoric highly prized by those citizens who can afford it.

The skin is peeled away from the body to be made into vellum and paper. The fat is cut off for use in oil, wax, and soap. The muscles are dropped into another chute where they will be ground up and sent to the kitchens. The collagen in the blood vessels is used to make elastic. The marrow and stem cells are extracted from the bones. The bones themselves are pulverized to make fertilizer and cement. Whatever is left is thrown into the great bubbling vats. Nothing is wasted.

The knackers work tirelessly and without speaking. A knacker who does not shoulder his share of the work might end up lying on one of the metal slabs instead of working at it. But there is another reason for their perseverance. A worker who excels in his duties here might, if he is lucky, be promoted to a different level, where it would be his duty to break down and assemble machines instead of the bodies of other men and women.

JUSTIFY

Ready grabs the old man’s wrist and presses their idents together so that the access ports link up. With Ready’s knife to his throat, the old man enters the release code to drain his financial account. When they’re done, Ready punches up his own account to see what’s been added to it.

“That’s
it
?” he says. Though his eyes and his voice don’t betray it, Ready wants to cry. When he quit his job at the hydrogen conversion plant, swearing not to live behind plexiglass and die in flames like his father, Ready thought he was finally free. Now he realizes he’s just traded one jail cell for another one, slightly larger and just as indifferent.

Despite Ready’s angry tones, the ragged people hardly even look up. Only the old man, the ‘father’ of this conglomeration, is watching Ready and his partner. The others continue cooking something unpleasant in a metal box over an open fire. Ready doesn’t want to guess what it might be.

“That is all we have,” the old man says in a flat voice. He is not frightened of Ready and Hoon. He is not even angry at being threatened. He seems only to consider them an inconvenience.

Ready pushes the old man’s face. He stumbles backward into the wall, which breaks apart, bits of rusty metal and cardboard coming unglued. Beyond the wall, another huddled family looks up, seemingly unsurprised by the intrusion. Unhurriedly, one of them stands and begins building the wall up again. The old man’s family reacts only just enough to protect whatever it is they are cooking.

“Do you want me to kick your fucking face in?” Ready shouts, waving his ident. “I know you’ve got to have more than this!” Bags of the family’s belongings bump against him as he moves. There is barely enough room to stand in the tiny hovel.

“That’s all we have,” the old man repeats. “Look around you. Do you think we are rich?”

Ready’s friend Hoon laughs with a goofy grin. Hoon didn’t tie his respirator on tight enough as a child. He’s not too bright.

In frustration, Ready runs his fingers through the stripecuts in his hair. A life of misery has left these people indifferent to the threat of violence.

“Maybe I should just tear this place up,” he says, waving his arm. “Maybe I’ll break a seal and let the fumatory in.” At this last threat, the other family members finally look up.
That
scared them.