Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (5 page)

Far climbs up beside me, and I hold onto him in his little suit, like a toy to be played with. So and La follow soon after, Ray, then Doe. No Ti.

"Work the grapnels," I tell Ray and Doe. "Get us off this thing."

The sublavic grumbles underfoot, and I know the screw is dying under the sudden load I've asked it to bear. There is no way Ti can make it.

Who is Ti anyway? I have no memories of her, and perhaps this is why. I saw her once down the corridor, and then she died so that the rest of us could live. She will die, but what is the difference now, her death is as certain and complete as any death in history.

History. What is any other note in the chord for, but to pass the message through whole, and let history continue the way it should, the way it does.

I pat the mission document sealed against my chest, hold onto Far tight, and watch as Doe launches the grapnel traverse-line to the Solid Core. I know that inside that rusted metal heart there will be answers. There must be answers, because if there are not then all this has been for nothing.

The grapnel snags into the black Core, and Doe begins latching us all into the taut line, even as the sublavic sinks underfoot. I can hear its metal walls buckle beneath the heat and mass, its brick-hull melting away. It begins to cant then slide downward, and we slide with it, inching back to the molten floes which birthed us.

Goodbye Ti, I think, as Doe starts the haulier line and my feet lift off the crusted black sublavic nose. It should be the captain who goes down with the ship, I think, not the engineer. Goodbye Ti, goodbye the Bathyscaphe.

As we rise into the air in a pressed-together black-suited clump, I watch my sublavic sink. Perhaps I am crying, as I watch it enfold slowly into the burning waves. Magma flows into the hole I broke through the ablative brick and mortar wall, and I can only hope the end for Ti will be quick. Probably she will choke on exhaust though, as the magma burns up all the air. Then she will bake, then she will crumple as the walls bend like chewing gum, and then she will burn.

The Bathyscaphe is swallowed, and gone.

I look up, my body nudging against Far and So as we rise. The ragged black bulk of the Solid Core begins to grow larger. This is why we have come.

CARROLLA B

Afterward, she sleeps. I lie awake, watching the red glow of the alarm clock cycle through the numbers available to it, shadows through the room lilting slightly with every digit. Through the glass I see the moon, can just make out the half-circle encampment around the man in the moon's left eye.

Water projects, built in a bygone era, before the global killer tsunami swept the old order away. I've heard the solar reservoirs up there are as big as the great wall of Sino-Rusk, but what does that matter, now that the bridge between us is long cut off? Still I imagine the last few tiny people up there, perhaps still alive, starting their own civilization built out of craters and moondust, and wonder if their lives would have any more weight than my own.

I told her the skulks are a Lag, but that's not really true, because the Lag is complete, and the skulks never are, even after they get battered by a tsunami wave. Something always remains, and much of the rest is still there to salvaged, brought back from the bay floor to be re-used.

The Lag is complete. It is the lost space a graysmith goes to when he loses himself in another mind, memories shearing away like ablative layers on a sublavic in the Molten Core, the weight of them lost forever.

It happens if we go too deep, or dive too much, with every dive stealing a little more until there's nothing left inside. It's the nature of the work, why they go in shielded in Calico, and why what I do is banned to the skulks and effectively illegal everywhere else.

Nothing's illegal out here.

Mei-An nestles against my shoulder now, sleepy in the cotton sheets, as she should be. Her body's chemicals are doing what they ought, our skinship transmitting information too complex to fake.

I could do another job beside graysmithing. Lying there in the dark with a beautiful girl at my side, I know I could do something else, and perhaps I'd be happy at it too. This is all so perverse, to stay here and live like this, to boast of what I'm doing like it's a Lag, when all the Lag has ever brought me is pain and loss.

My friends are all gone, under the Lag, but somehow staying here I still feel close to them, like they're only one remove away. If I got another job over in Calico, and started a new life, then I'd be really leaving them behind, and I can't do that. I lost so many in the Arctic, and what could I do for their minds as the life ran out of them? There was no tsunami wall big enough to stop the flow of blood. And family? Of course I have no family.

This is where I belong, glimpsing only fragments of what a real life might be like, through the memories of a girl like Mei-An. She may be fake, but she's real fake. I'm not even that, because I wasn't ever wanted, and never wanted anything I didn't lose along the way.

I rise to my feet, these maudlin thoughts too much even for me. Standing naked at the glass wall, I hear shouting rise from outside like breakers on a wave, impersonal as a dog barking. The old homeless marine in the blue-tarp park. I hear him a lot, cursing out the crulls in New Anglais. I've seen him cooking them before, on trash-fires of plastic and leaves, wrapped in old Calico newsprint. He sets these elaborate traps to catch them, all triggers and string and crutch points. I think he fought in the Arctic too, but we don't talk about it. 

Like the crulls, that ill-gained fusion of crows and gulls, we were never meant for life outside of a skirmish. But still the skirmishes ended, the victors rose up, and this is our world now.

I sit beside him sometimes and we chew through the newsprint, biting into crull flesh. It is sour and gamey, but there's something to be found in eating it together. We both know it tastes bad. He may be utterly crazy, but how far off am I from that?

Seeing me at my window, he raises one wing of charred feathers. I raise my hand like a salute. I'd prefer if he didn't shout so much at night, but I can't begrudge him that. He could come in here and kill me in my sleep if he wanted, but he doesn't, so I have to be grateful for small mercies.

There's no real law out here, we could all do what we want, but we don't. None of us care enough, I think. Plus there's Don Zachary, watching over us all, a monopoly on crime. It's all a kind of Lag.

Enough.

One last look at Mei-An and I pull on my pants, shirt, jacket. Carrolla will be waiting, and I want to taste the Arcloberry, fruit of my sacrifices, one more time, and maybe this time hold onto it.

My node tells me Carrolla is down-skulk, so I set out. It's warm out despite being some time after three, and I shrug off my polarskin jacket, down to jeans and a slink shirt. I nod to the marine through the park, and he nods back.

The main alley is raucous now, packed with a horde of neo-Armoricans regaling each other back and forth with whores and touts pressed between their bulging bellies and bristly beards. The smell of frying chicken grease hangs on the salty air. One of the neo-Armoricans lifts up Eldra, a busty whore with great muscle tone, and starts to dry-hump her in the street.

His friends all laugh. She spots me and waves, then tugs herself free and gives the big idiot a slap. Everybody laughs some more.

The alley will chew them up and spit them out soon enough, like a digestive tract through which they all have to pass, another round of nutrition with everybody eating off everybody. Whatever freighting dues they've earned will be cut down to size through liquor, sex, drugs, food, and a bed to sleep it off in, and we'll all go on our way sated for another day.

The alley winks out as I pass by, bound for the off-wall walk. I could go across the skulks, it would be cheaper but would take forever, weaving in and out of all those slums, alleys, each like the one behind. It would make a mockery of where I live, to see all those places much the same as the last. Plus I might have to jump between the skulk barrel-edges, if there weren't bridges in place.

Or swim.

At the alley top the wall looms overhead like the starkly cloven wall of the Arctic icepack. I join a line of other skulk revelers waiting to cross the low-slung rope-bridge of old canoe paddles that leads to the wall's base. Some of these people are so drunk they'd sink if I only tipped them over the edge.  

"3," the bridge guard says to a man arguing about the last jetstream winners. "Pay or get off."

The guy fumbles and pays. We all take a step closer as he wobbles over the bridge, to join the flow of people walking the off-wall walk.

This close and looking up at the wall's sheer gray-white bulk, it's so apparent how transient we all are. I wonder for the hundredth time if this was how all the world used to feel, living in the shadow of the Arctic ice, knowing that one day soon it would shear and everything would change.

Walking the off-wall way I pass a dozen skulks on my right, some of them like mine, others open and serving as docking harbors for freighters, some as warehouses, some as floating blocks of hutches. My node beeps in my pocket when I go past Carrolla.

I find him on skulk 65, a bar called the Aeternum at the end of an alley much like our own. Inside it's decorated like a subglacic, all metal bolts and hatches cut from boats sunk beside the wall. He's sitting at a bar made of five periscopes laid flat, shouting blearily at a man in a rubber diving suit, oxygen-tanks on his back. The bar is about half-full, and I slide into a space at Carrolla's side.

"…it's business," he's shouting at the diver. "You know? 10 for 10, 20 for a dozen." 

I tap him on the shoulder. "What did you order?"

He turns and gives me a big grin. "Rit!" To the bartender, a lanky young Germanic-type, blonde hair down to his shoulders in a t-shirt with a 'hump'n'bump' written across the front, he says, "Arcloberry vodka, straight up."

The Germanic busies himself with ice, shot-glasses, and a bottle of pale purple liquor.

"Glad you made it," Carrolla slurs, squeezes my shoulder. He's red-eyed and ready to pass out. I look to the diver.

"Velour curtains," the diver says to me. I've dealt with him before I know, though his name escapes me. White beard, though he can't be more than 40. I smithed a lot of guys like him in the Arctic, so though I've never actually donned a breathing tank once, I remember diving hundreds of times. He sighs. "I've told him, there's not a recent enough wreck for that."

"Or velvet!" Carrolla adds. "Anything plush."

The diver shakes his head. "Take the carpet or I'm done with you."

"I can't put carpet on the walls! How will that look?"

The barman serves, and I take Carrolla's shot-glass and hit the bar-periscope in front of him with it. The hollow metal bongs satisfyingly. "Just drink. I'll sort it out."

He smiles widely. "Would you? There's a dear."

He downs the liquor and smacks his lips. I beckon the diver over and talk into his ear while palming him 100. "Get it from the through-market. Tell him you dredged it."

The diver looks down at the notes in his hand, chuckles. "If you say so."

I turn back to Carrolla, who's looking at me with a hangdog expression. "I heard that."

I laugh. I don't know what it is about him, but he always cheers me up. "You won't remember in the morning."

"I will! It's supposed to be a sea-themed boudoir, Rit, dammit. If it's not jetsam, what is it? Newly spun? I could be in Calico for that!"

I laugh. "In what way is velour authentic for a subglacic? You think we had rotating massage beds in our bedrooms too?"

He laughs. "Like a subglacic but better," he says, tapping me on the shoulder. Then he looks about the bar.

"Somebody fuck me now!" he shouts at the people there. "You, how about you?" He's focused in on a meta-Filippine, and as he peels out of his chair he gives me a wink. "Try your juice."

She receives him well, which many girls do. He musses with her hair, starts explaining the bar-boudoir he's building on 49 while rubbing at her hand, and I tune them out.

My own pale purple Arcloberry shot sits before me. I try to summon some memory of drinking it before, but nothing of the content comes, only the frame holding it in place. I know I had a memory of drinking the juicebox, but the flavor is gone.

I hold up the heavy glass, smell it. Alcohol and a sandy twang, kind of like raspberry mixed with red chilis.

Arcloberry and the others were just side-effects of the pack-ice melting, all those seeds blown from the dustbowls of millennia ago trapped in the ice like hidden messages. When all the surface ice thawed and the blue giants rose up from the depths, they were just frosting on the hydrates and oil in the under-crust.

I swig it, slosh it around my mouth. A spicy berry with a kick, this message from a pre-Jurassic era. Is this what dinosaurs ate? I slot the taste into the space where the missing memory was, and rub at the reddening in my eyes.   

3:45 by my node, and hours to go before I'll sleep. I can't go back until Mei-An has left anyway. Carrolla's ditched me, but that's fine. There's a bar here, and numbers burning a hole in my pocket.

"Three more," I tell the barman. "And beer, whatever's on tap."

Hours later, and some idiot neo-Armorican is riling me with his pals gathered around. It's another bar, there's no Carrolla around, just me and these overweight, overhyped idiots.

"Just tell me man," the lead guy says, some kind of freighter with tattoos across his tattoos. "How many Ginks you swatted down in the skirmishes."

"I told you, I didn't fight," I say.

"Ha!" He says it like a word. "What I thought. So what were you, a bitch? Is that what it was like out there? I heard you were all fucking each other, up-down and sideways. Were you top, bottom or sideways bitch?"