The Empire of Gut and Bone (3 page)

W
e changed course while you were sleeping,” Kalgrash told the two boys. “We’re headed for something.”

The day looked no different than when they had gone to sleep. They were incredibly hungry. They were thirsty. They did not bother to stand up. They stared out the window at the featureless plain.

Kalgrash went up and tried to make signals to their host. He paid no attention to the troll.

Down below, Gregory, looking haggard, said to his friend, “I had a dream. The Thusser are everywhere. We’ve lost. Tell me we haven’t already lost.” His voice was husky.

Brian shook his head solemnly. “I’m telling you,” he said. “The Thusser tried to colonize your dreams back in the suburb. It’s not real, whatever you’re thinking.”

“You’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

“I remember them. Come on. You must, too. The Thusser were always there, right? They were at my house.
One of them used to sit in my room, staring at me all night. It was awful.” He held on to one of his arms with his other hand. He looked weak and pale.

Brian insisted quietly, “It’s not true, Gregory.”

“I remember it.”

Brian wrapped his thick fingers around the padded edge of the seat. “No … you can’t let them fool you. They tried to force their way into your head. You’ve got to stop thinking they’re already in Boston. They’re not. They never have been.”

Gregory closed his eyes. “I know you’re right. But I can see them. They were everywhere. They directed traffic. They were …” He squeezed his eyes till the lids wrinkled.

“You’re going to be okay,” Brian said. “They’re not there yet. We can still win. Honest.”

Gregory stared out at the plain of slime. The two of them watched the dull light and the galloping shuffle of the headless beasts of burden.

The sleigh mushed past gray outcroppings and into a deeper, thicker mire.

Kalgrash came down below. He shook his head. Brian watched Gregory toy with the dead appliances.

In another few hours, they discovered where their host was heading. He was meeting someone. They saw another sleigh approaching. It was larger, with some huge cargo shrouded in burlap tied onto the top, bulging out of the sides.

The two sleighs pulled up alongside each other. Their host laid a gangplank across the space between them. He
hailed the other captain. He signaled for the boys and the troll to sit tight, and then picked up his bag of nerves — which bristled like coils of thornbush — and clomped across the plank to do business.

The two captains saluted each other. They both took off their coats and, in some kind of greeting ceremony, inserted keys between each other’s shoulders and wound each other up vigorously.

“He’s an automaton,” whispered Gregory. “That’s why he doesn’t eat.”

Kalgrash pointed out, “I eat.”

“But you don’t have to.”

“I
choose
to. Just like you don’t
have
to be a jerk.”

The captains were making a trade that they had evidently discussed on the speaking-horn. The boys’ host pulled out ten of the cluttered bundles of nerves, shook them to disentangle them, and laid them in a row on the deck of the other sleigh.

The other sleigh’s captain attached some alligator clips to one of them and ran some electric current through it. The branching nerves shone bright blue. He seemed satisfied.

In return, he presented a little canister with rivets and a kind of periscope on it. The boys’ host nodded, asked some questions. For a while, the two men talked. Then the host turned his head sharply away from the other captain and held that pose. The other captain tinkered with small tools, pried open a panel in the side of the host’s neck, and inserted the canister. He made a few adjustments and shut the neck.

They shook hands.

Ten minutes later, the boys’ host returned across the gangplank, drew back the bridge, waved, took up the reins, and began slushing again across the endless monotony of the marsh.

“What was that all about?” asked Gregory.

“I wonder where we’re going,” said Brian. “We’ve got to try to get him to understand we have to find the Emperor. This is … We’re just wasting time while the Thusser are spreading.”

“I wonder how close to winding down I am,” Kalgrash said. “Snig winds me usually.”

“How are we going to tell him we need to see the Emperor?” Brian persisted.

“Hand signals,” said Gregory.

“Charades,” Kalgrash suggested, touching his own long nose.

“Just tell him,” said their host. “Say what you want to say, kid.” He put his cigar back in his mouth.

“You speak English!” Brian exclaimed.

“Just had it installed.”

“What?” Gregory protested. “What’s going on? What is this? Where are we?”

“You’re in Three-Gut. The Fields of Chyme. We’re headed to Delge. A trading station near a valve. Unless you tell me who’s paying me to take you someplace else.”

“Who are you?” Gregory demanded. “What’s going on here?”

Brian said, “Where are the Norumbegans?”

“You want the Emperor? So I hear?”

“Yes,” said Brian. “He’s a blond man. With a beautiful wife. They’re very … very fun.”

The captain shot a murderous look at Brian. He spat off the edge of his sleigh. “Fun,” he said. “Sure, kid.”

“We need to see them. Do you know about the Thusser?”

“I’ve heard of them. Ancient history. Not around since I was made. Look, the Emperor’s at New Norumbega. It’s a different system. Circulation. It’s in the Dry Heart. Huge palace up there. Turrets and buttresses and battlements and sentinels all over the place. You have to approach it through the flux.” The captain surveyed their three faces. “He going to pay for me to deliver you?”

“He’ll be grateful,” Brian said. “We’re bringing him important news of the old Norumbega. Back through the portal. The one they came from.”

“You from there, too, right?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s it like?”

“Dark, now,” said Gregory. “But it must have been really cool. Back in the day.”

“Snazzy,” said the captain without much interest.

“So can you take us to the Emperor?” Kalgrash asked. “To New Norumbega?”

“Why are you along for this ride?” the captain asked Kalgrash. “This side of the portal, automatons, we wind each other.”

“We’re all together,” Kalgrash explained, pointing to his friends.

“Mechanicals shouldn’t get tied up with breathers.
Eventually, they’ll just tell you to start lifting stuff.” He jerked his thumb at Brian and Gregory. “Look at these two. Sick because they haven’t put other breathers into a hole in their face for a couple of days. They haven’t cut off something’s hind legs, shredded it with little metal claws, and stowed it under their nose.” He shook his head. “What kind of way to live is that?”

Gregory said, “You’ve clearly never been to a Chinese buffet.”

“Kid, you’re in the belly of the beast.” The host gestured to the sky, the plain, the dim walls they could make out in the gray half-light. “Of course, we don’t know it’s a belly, and we don’t know it’s a beast. I’m no theologian. But — ”

“You mean,” said Gregory, “we’re inside something? In its stomach?”

“Stomach, lung — no one really knows. We just use names. Who knows how the thing works? Whether it breathes or eats? No one. It fills everywhere. It’s everything. The Great Body. It’s huge. We just know stuff washes past. Or used to. Not so much any more. A few hundred years ago, there was more stuff. More fluid. Now it’s dead or between meals. You have names?”

They introduced themselves. Their host was called Dantsig. They asked him what he did. He said he rode around, picking up waifs in ruins.

“Ha ha,” said Gregory.

“I’m a trapper. A hunter. And I scavenge when I need to.”

“So where are we going now?” asked Brian.

“I told you. Delge. It’s a trading post near a valve. We’ll figure out what to do with you there.” He frowned and scratched at his goatee. “Have to check in with the Mannequin Resistance. See what they want done with you.”

Brian didn’t like the sound of this. Gregory asked about the Mannequin Resistance.

Dantsig explained, “Mechanicals. All of us. Who absented ourselves from the marble and alabaster halls of the overlords. The breathers. The Norumbegans. We got tired of being told we weren’t real, we’d never know love or the beauty of a baby’s laugh or a puppy with a single tear in its eye. We got sick of it. Lift this. Carry that. Go dig in the mines. So we all left.” He looked quickly at them. “Respectfully. You know, bowing. Walking backward.” He pointed at the kids. “You
always
have to back out of the Imperial Presence. Got it? Protocol. Got it?”

“We got it,” said Gregory.

“I don’t know how they bring up kids these days,” said Dantsig, shaking his head. “In a stable or a shooting arcade or something. No one has any manners.”

“You’re just jealous because we start little and stupid, but then grow,” said Gregory.

Dantsig looked at him with honest dislike. “Wow,” he said. “Wow. You really will get along with the Emperor.” With a sense of menace in his voice, he said, “I hope you get a chance to meet him.”

Gregory and Brian didn’t know what he meant by this. They fell silent as they slid through the waste.

Hours passed. The two boys didn’t know what to do with themselves. The cabin of the sleigh was cozy, once the stove was lit, but Gregory and Brian were incredibly hungry, and it didn’t sound like there would be any food at a trading post for clockwork people. So they shifted uncomfortably from side to side, holding their stomachs.

Eventually, Dantsig decided to try to catch them something to eat. He sat with a harpoon across his knees, watching for movement on the horizon. In another hour or so the sleigh careened back and forth a few times, and he clambered down the steps with a repulsive, leggy thing with lots of cords and breathing holes.

“Fry it up?” he asked.

They looked at it. It dangled from his mitt.

Brian was the first to speak. “It was really nice of you … to … it was just really nice,” he said. “But I’m not sure we should eat something from this world without knowing what’s in it.”

“There could be poisonous glands,” said Gregory.

Still, Kalgrash said he’d give cooking it a try.

Forty minutes later, Gregory and Brian ate triangular pieces of it. They kept their eyes closed. As they chewed, Kalgrash recited lists for them: “Fried chicken. New York strip sirloin. Potatoes au gratin. Asparagus with hollandaise sauce. Mac and cheese. Fried shrimp. Hush puppies.”

“No puppies,” said Gregory, mouth full. “Ban on puppies.”

After they’d eaten, they could fall asleep.

Outside, the monotonous landscape went on and the twilight went on without change. Half-light. The slick, glistening plain. The dredge of the sleigh through sludge. Its clammy wake.

When the boys woke up, the light was just the same. The veins still glowed faintly in the dome of the gut.

Brian asked Dantsig, “What makes the veins glow?”

He half shrugged. “Lux effluvium. The gook in the veins. I don’t know why. It gets real bright if you run electricity through it.”

Brian asked, “Is it the blood?”

Dantsig seemed uninterested in the question. “We call things blood and stomachs and hearts, but no one knows what all the equipment does. There’s a whole bunch of hearts, a cluster of them, but they aren’t shaped like your heart or a Norumbegan’s. It’s just, they look like they pump fluids. So people call them hearts. And there’s a bunch of organs filled with a different goo, and we call them stomachs, and there are other places we call lungs — fifteen or so, scattered around, we’ve found so far — but we don’t know much except that they get bigger and smaller. I’m telling you, no one knows. No one understands. It’s just the Great Body.”

“What’s outside the Great Body?” Gregory asked, and Kalgrash added, “Has anyone ever gone out the mouth? Through the teeth and over the gums? Et cetera?”

“Some of the rich Norumbegans — Varsity men — they fund expeditions sometimes to find mouths. Try to see if there’s anything out there. They head off into the
wild gray yonder. Lots of equipment. Big fanfare.” He smiled. “None of them ever come back.”

Gregory asked joyfully, “What about the butt? Anyone ever gone out the butt?”

“They’ve been saving that for a special boy like you.”

Brian did not like any of this much. Anxious, he watched the dull miles pass.

In a while, they came to Delge. The first thing they could see through the gloom of Three-Gut was the derricks — tall, spindly arms and gantries reaching up out of the goo.

“Mining,” said Dantsig. “They extract ore from the blood fluid. Valves go through to the capillaries.”

The sleigh passed through heaps of slag. There were huts strung with electrical wiring.

They didn’t see any people.

Then came houses — shacks on stilts. They were high above the Fields of Chyme.

Something was wrong. Several were burnt. They looked desolate. Piers stuck up out of the marsh, their tips blackened. No one crawled up and down their ladders.

Huts had been pulled down and lay on their sides. The windows of one were smashed, and some red polka-dot curtains trailed out into the sludge.

Doors were off their hinges.

Dantsig was muttering in his own language. He slowed down the beasts. He stood up and surveyed the village’s wreckage.

On an island, surrounded by docks, there had stood a little town. There was not much of it left. Houses were in ashes. The embers of the commissary still glowed. A few small flames flickered in the ruins. Goods — barrels, stoves, some metal sinks — could be made out, soot-blackened, beneath the fallen beams.

Around the town there were large, round holding tanks. Holes had been blown in the metal. They were empty.

Dantsig went below and brought up a rifle. He looked grimly from side to side.

“I’m going to look around,” he told them. He said to Kalgrash, “Get your ax. Stand guard. Breathers: below.” He pointed down the hatch.

Brian and Gregory looked at each other. They didn’t want to go below. They wanted to keep an eye out, too. It just felt safer.