Harsh Oases (16 page)

He took out his water bottle. Stretching sore muscles, he braced himself with his left hand against the dead matter-modem. He tilted back his head to glug a liter of warm musty liquid.

Ceiling lights flared improbably to life. So did the matter-modem.

Off-balance, Klom plunged in the mirror face up to his shoulder.

The lights snapped off. As did the matter-modem.

Klom howled. His arm had been sheared off clean at the shoulder. Vast quantities of blood sprayed the room. He fumbled frantically for a bungee, thinking to tie off his arteries. But there remained no flesh stub to bind.

Klom crashed to the floor like an uprooted Salembier sequoia. Consciousness slipped away from him like a school of fish from a disintegrating net.

“Tugger—”

Rapaille awaited the first of his crew to emerge with that day’s salvage. He would key descriptions of the items into his reader, contributing to the vast inventory of parts being taken from the ship, then dispatch the parts through the matter-modem to the relevant disassembly stations and sorting lines. Meanwhile, he had nothing to do but wait and ponder the many injustices of his life. Standing in a shadow to escape the growing heat, he idly scanned the skies. A small Mlotmroz ship undoubtedly bearing buyers soared across his field of vision. Very good, the more customers the better for the Yard s business. All fortune to Bright Tide Rising! Rapaille’s phantom wings itched, and he rubbed his wing stubs against the bulkhead. But the itching persisted. Life was unfair.

Someone burst crazily out of the port, jolting Rapaille out of his philosophical contemplation. That dumb man-ape, Klom, followed by his galloping worthless pet—

Klom bellowed. “Rapaille! Is there a crew mucking about with the ship’s power generators?”

Rapaille boosted his haughty demeanor. “This is no business of yours! Get back to your wor—
urk
!”

Klom had gripped Rapaille’s shirt with both his hands and lifted the avianoform off his feet, incidentally choking the Quetzal with a knot of fabric at his throat. Klom thrust his face within centimeters of Rapaille and spoke with calm precision.

“You will call the crew working with the generators. You will tell them to be extra careful not to turn them on by accident. Or someone might get hurt. Do you understand?”

Rapaille understood that the person most likely to immediately get hurt was himself. So made a squawk he hoped Klom would interpret positively.

The huge breaker set his supervisor down and released him. After massaging his bruised throat, Rapaille placed the call Klom had ordered. Once Klom was satisfied, he turned away and climbed into a ship-to-shore barge, Tugger heeling behind his master.

“Take me back in,” Klom told the bored Melungeon pilot

As the barge pulled away, Rapaille sought to reassert his dignity and status. “Don’t bother coming back for three weeks! Not till after Festival! You’re on probation. Do you hear me, you addled eggsucker?”

But Klom never even looked back.

He seemed too busy stroking his left arm.

The long hot shed (its sides open for whatever chance breeze might arise) that housed Sorting Line Number Thirty-eight featured the following arrangement: ten parallel conveyor belts ran from one end of the shed to the other. The belts contributed a certain varying level of noise to the shed, depending on how dutifully a small army of oilers—mostly children—tended to them. At the head of each belt stood a matter-modem delivering the smaller pieces harvested from the ship under deconstruction. (Larger pieces not saved and sold as integral units went to disassembly stations first, then to the Sorting Lines.) Along both sides of each conveyor sat the sorters, staggered on three-legged stools at intervals of a meter or so. By the elbow of each sorter, mirror-face upward, was a smaller matter-modem with a keypad that allowed a choice of destinations.

Each sorter had his or her or its special range of components to watch for. When spotted, the component would be snatched off the belt and dropped into the matter-modem. Simultaneous with the grab, the sorter would key in the relevant warehouse station to receive the transmission.

At the end of the belt awaited a final matter-modem, to catch all the unclaimed pieces for further examination and categorization.

The sorters were entitled to only as many lavatory breaks as minimally consistent with the most basic needs of their species. Lunches ran for half an hour, in shifts. Payment was based on speed and accuracy of performance, with debits taken for any missed pieces. So long as standards were maintained, conversation was permitted.

Sorrel was speaking to Aurinka, a Triffid who sat diagonally across from her. They were discussing jewelry. The Triffid waved several stalks decorated with hammered brass bracelets for Sorrel’s admiration, while handling her duties competently with two other limbs.

Suddenly both Aurinka and Sorrel took notice of a distant commotion near one of the shed’s entrances. They strained to ascertain what was going on without slackening production. The commotion seemed to be moving through the shed, getting closer to them. At last Sorrel saw the source of the upset.

Klom and Tugger bulled their way toward her, trailing protesting supervisors. When Klom spotted Sorrel, he bellowed out her name. Then he was upon her.

Grabbing Sorrel off her stool, Klom strongarmed her out of the shed, heedless of either her protests or her struggles to escape.

Once outside, Klom released her. They stood in the lee afforded by a mud-brick pissoir, while all around them surged unemployable or underage or offshift bustee-dwellers, a motley mass of scaled and chitinous, furred and slick-skinned beings, oblate or attenuated, faces like intricate masks or nearly featureless.

Sorrel faced Klom, fall of fury. “You moron! What’s the matter with you? I’m going to lose half a day’s wages now!”

Klom’s single-minded urgency seemed to evaporate. He faced Sorrel with a look that mixed contrition and confusion.

“Sorrel, I need your help. I died today.”

This last sentence, delivered matter-of-factly yet with a detectable tremor, catalyzed Sorrel’s reaction from anger to a curious concern.

“What are you talking about? You’re standing there as healthy as a Redskull ox.”

“No, you don’t understand. Here’s what happened—” Klom recounted losing his arm in the matter-modem. “The last thing I remember is calling out for Tugger.” The beast looked up at the sound of his name, offering a lopsided, slavering grin. “Then I blacked out. Not much time seemed to pass. Or maybe a lot. Anyway, I woke up whole.”

Leerily, Sorrel regarded Tugger. “You’re saying this creature was somehow responsible for regenerating your arm?”

“No, not exactly. You see, there was no blood anywhere anymore. And my sledge was empty. I had filled it with tubes, but now it was empty. Then I looked at my reader, and it said the wrong time. I was in the past.”

“That makes no sense at all.”

Klom whirled savagely around and punched the wall of the lavatory, sending up a puff of mortar and pulverized soil. “I know, I know! But there’s something else besides. Look at my skin!”

Sorrel examined Klom’s outstretched hand, bloody-knuckled from impact with the wall. “Your cruft is gone!”

“All gone! That’s right! But how?”

Sorrel shook her head in bewilderment. “I—I can’t explain. Maybe Airey—”

“Airey! Of course! Let’s go!”

Without waiting for her agreement, Klom hustled Sorrel away.

Tugger trotted blithely along behind them.

The fluids giving life to a typical starliner ranged from viscous hydrocarbon derivatives to thin plant-based extracts to exotically tinged protein-hormone-enzyme sera. These various liquids—some of which could be captured and sold, others of which went straight to crude disposal in the polluted swamps—invigorated a variety of mechanisms, all of which had to be drained before storage or disassembly. This task fell to the crews of the drainage pits.

Airey was right down in one of the pits, ankle deep in rainbow-sheened stenchy sludge. Unlike his downtime finery, his work uniform consisted of scarred boots and a patched brown coverall, its waterproofing peeling away in places. Employing a big spanner, he was struggling with the balky petcock of a suspended engine and cursing furiously.

“Motherless shit! Is this my reward for daring to aspire to elegance? May all the ancestors of all the mechanics who ever worked on this abomination freeze in the lowest levels of the Dimmig hells! Die, you bastard screwcap, die!”

Ranked at the edge of the pit, Airey’s co-workers were enjoying his eloquent frustration. A Foraminifer was laughing so hard it kept dislocating its multiple jaws, resetting them each time with a grisly clacking of bone.

An instant cessation of the laughter caused Airey to crane his neck upward. Before he could react to the unexpected sight of Klom, he was lifted bodily from the pit.

“Come with me, Airey,” Klom demanded. Airey caught Sorrel’s eyes and read there the wisdom of complying. As the trio moved off for privacy, the drainman grabbed a rag to wipe his hands. Finished, he tucked it into a back pocket

In the shadow of a belching, stinking cracking tower, Klom rehearsed his morning to Airey. Airey listened thoughtfully, his glance bouncing back and forth between Klom and Tugger. When Klom finished his account, Airey remained silent for half a minute before speaking.

“I see only one answer. Your pet can manipulate time in some fashion.”

Klom’s brow creased. “What? How could that be? I’ve never heard of such a thing being possible.”

“Regardless of what we know, it’s the only solution. Tugger responded to your distress by shuttling you back to the past. That explains your empty sledge and the timecheck on your reader.”

“But how would that have fixed my arm? A dying time-traveler is still a dying man.”

Airey stroked his negligible mustache. “This is true. The answer must be more complex then. I’ll need to cogitate on this a while. But meanwhile, I think you should give Tugger anything he wants as a reward. Without him, apparently, you wouldn’t be here right now. He’s your guardian raksha.”

“I’d gladly give him the finest meal or the thickest bed in the world. But all he seems to want is to be by my side!”

Airey hunkered down beside Tugger. He took the rag from his pocket and wiped away a line of saliva from Tugger’s jowls. “There, there, good boy. What you want depends on what you are. And I guess we’ll never know that. Unless—”

“Unless what?” asked Klom.

Airey straightened up, holding the rag bearing Tugger’s drool before all their eyes as if it were a holy relic. “Let’s send this sample to the laboratories at Radius Seven and get a genomic readout for Tugger. It will cost Klom a pretty paisa, but perhaps we’ll learn more about our friend’s constitution.”

Sorrel said, “What could a simple lab analysis reveal that Bright Tide Rising and his majestatics overlooked?”

“I suspect that Tugger deliberately concealed his true nature from the Raisin, so that he would not be separated from Klom. Can we put anything beyond a being who can do what Tugger appears to have done for Klom?”

All three friends studied the innocuous animal with new respect. Tugger simply grinned dopily upward, then scratched behind his jaw with a rear paw, making a noise like a broom on sand.

Klom said, “Please see to it, Airey. We need to know what Tugger is so we can make sure he gets the proper treatment for his kind.”

“Consider it done! And now, although you are suspended till after the Festival, Klom, Sorrel and I need to get back to work. Which brings me round to asking you for a small favor—”

Disdaining the spanner, Klom opened the stuck petcock with the force of his fingers alone. A torrent of purple, iron-smelling hematic coolant gouted out, splashing Klom to his knees, but he only laughed.

Klom’s crib was luxurious by bustee standards. Scabbed together out of rusty sheet metal, driftwood posts and rafters, broad swaths of cured hides from Asperna’s reptilian partchrumpfs and the odd bits of scratched plastic and warped pressboard, the shack leaked only minimally during the monsoon season and retained the heat from a seacoal fire well during the mild winters. Its interior held a hammock layered with rags and a teetering set of shelves hosting Klom’s few possessions, including a photo of an old woman standing in front of a hut on a lakeshore. (The unframed photo was surrounded by deva medals distributed by the marabouts during various holy days, as if it were a small shrine.) A gamecube with a fuzzed-out display and half its functions deleted by age rested on a wicker hassock. Sorrel often spent the night in Klom’s crib, whether she and Klom had sex or not, preferring it to the crowded quarters she officially shared with a family of kitchen workers. The rancid oily smells her fellow tenants brought back in their clothing and hair from their shifts in the kitchen nauseated her.

This night, with Klom still unwontedly preoccupied by his earlier “death,” Sorrel elected to keep company with her lover after her shift ended. Their supper, taken amidst the crowded refectory attached to Kitchen Number Twelve, had been a silent affair.

They lay quietly together now in the hammock. The Great Sun had gone down just an hour ago, and, even without any exertion, their naked bodies—one sleek and golden, one hairy and pale—were bedewed with sweat. Estuarial breezes feathered their skins.