The Godwhale (S.F. Masterworks) (11 page)

Drum’s toe twinged. ‘Here is a bug I found in my boot. Can you tell what it is?’

‘Not marine, I’m sure. Looks like one of the aquatic insects – nymph stage. Let me spread out the parts on Spinner’s stage.’ A genus appeared on the screen immediately,, then several species flickered on and off until Wandee shuffled the parts around. One species printed out.

‘It bit me.’

‘Not serious,’ she said. ‘It has horny mandibles – no barbed mouth parts or poisons.’

‘But my toe really hurts, and it’s all swollen up . . .’

She noticed his limp for the first time. ‘Probably infected. You’ve been on calorie-basic too long. Take off your shoe and come over here. I have a salvaged Medimeck. We can get a quick screen.’

The White Meck lacked most of the expensive appendages, but its basic chassis circuits remained. Coarse splices linked it to Spinner’s What-If-Circuit and Random-Association-Circuit (WIC/RIC) and a brace of memory bins hung high on the wall. Its clouded optic scanned the swollen toe, while the lambda needle sampled a drop of his blood and a drop of the pink serum that exuded from the wound. Spinner’s printout rattled and produced a lengthy report. Wandee studied it and handed it to Drum with a nod: ‘Infection; sewer flora.’

The symbols meant nothing to him.

‘You must have been bitten early in your shift. Exposing the wound to sewage was the worst thing you could have done. Those organisms are pathogens when they invade soft tissues. Your resistance is poor: low proteins, practically no gamma at all; and your assortment of white blood cells is weak. You’d better soak.’

Wandee added a few drops of a brown antiseptic to a pan of hot water and motioned him into a chair. Her haste worried him. He studied his foot more closely and saw the fain red line between the toes – blood poisoning.

‘I wish we had a systemic anti-infective agent to give you,’ she said. ‘Your white cells have toxic granules already. I’d hate to see you lose that leg.’

Several hours later the White Meck stabbed him again. Spinner’s printout now appeared more optimistic.

Drum rested on the floor in a bed of rags. His foot was elevated on a box. Wandee changed hot compresses while he dozed.

‘I’ll fix you a nice perishable sandwich,’ she said. He opened one eye and watched her pour thick green water through a filter. The resultant paste was spread on a standard white tube sandwich. The flavour was different – interesting.

‘Watercress cell culture,’ she explained. ‘It will replace your bioflavinoids.’

Medimeck blinked a light. Its lingual readout was not functioning, but his progress was recorded by Spinner.

‘Having your own White Meck is nice and handy,’ he observed. ‘Many more like him on the junk heap?’

‘Not salvageable. When their chassis circuits go senile they are stripped and dumped. This one was different – a punitive junking. All I had to add was what you see here: power source, memory bins, some rebuilt appendages – and Spinner’s readout.’

‘Punitive junking?’

‘Yes. Saving the unauthorized. You know how anxious the White Team is when it comes to saving lives. This meck came up with the bright idea of building a catcher’s mitt in one of the digester chutes. Caught unauthorized infants on their way to the protein pool. Lives were saved, and the meck had a very high quota. But he was caught when the caloric output of the chute dropped. They found his catcher’s mitt and convicted him. His genius circuit was pulled and he was sent down here. That was over ten years ago.’

Drum studied the chassis. It appeared relatively new. ‘You trust him?’

She nodded. ‘All he wants to do is save lives. He just doesn’t understand about red tape. Well, there’s none of that down here. He helps the Gene Spinner with our project: marine biota.’

‘An important job for a junked meck.’

Wandee waved her arms in frustration. ‘You certainly can’t tell it is important from my budget.’

They painted Drum’s toes brown with a stinging astringent and he pulled on his shoe carefully.

‘It should be OK,’ she said.

He limped back to the barracks thinking that Wandee was certainly a concerned Citizen – considering she had not matured sexually.

The alarm aroused the Wet Crew: ‘Bad Gas!’

Ode studied the wall diagrams in the control room. Gas symbols appeared as fumes tripped pipe sensors.

‘It’s in the city across the sump. Looks like a day for masks,’ said Ode.

Drum nodded. ‘What kind of gas?’

Ode squinted at the symbols. ‘Chlorine and ozone so far. One of that city’s Vent Mecks didn’t get his man-minute on time so he went off-line. You know how those Life-Support Mecks are: temperamental. Its laminar flow generator went out of phase and the city stopped breathing. The symbols show no breathable oxygen in the cloud. It would kill anything.’

‘Anything?’

‘Anything that needed oxygen. Why? Oh. The bedding . . .’

The two Nebishes left the control room with a grin. They rolled up their bedding and carried it out on the landing. The sewer lights had lost their orange tint and their eyes burned. ‘Better mask up,’ said the cyber-dinghy. They tossed the soft bedrolls on to the boat’s cargo rack and snapped bulky gas masks over their faces. The dinghy followed their instructions, lurching through the scum with sensors alert. Floating islands of sticky foam filed up under the bow, crackled and hissed off to the sides in restless fragments.

‘The lights are starting to look green to me. Can’t be too bad, though; I saw a rat swim by.’ Drum stood at the bow following the boat’s light beams with interest. ‘Look at that poor devil! He must have been killed by the gas. The rats have already eaten away half of him.’

Drum swallowed hard. His face-plate steamed up. The body that floated by was missing from the waist down. It drifted on its back, eyes open, staring back at them.

‘It scans 99 degrees. Must have died recently.’

‘Let’s hope our masks are working well today.’

‘There goes the dinghy’s warning light. We’re in the bad gas now. Look at all those dead rats. I suppose we can leave our bedding anywhere along here.’

The little boat slowed and bumped into a muddy delta. Its headlight searched along the wall. Ode gathered up the soft bundles.

‘There’s the outhatch. The chromatograph is reading way over the red zone – should sterilize anything.’

They waded to the hatch and spread their pillows and blankets on the floor of the dry corridor. Drum looked closely at the heap of insects under the light. Nothing moved.

‘It will be nice to get a good night’s sleep for a change.’ Ode smiled. ‘None of those blasted little vermin can live through this.’

Drum abruptly turned to the door. ‘We won’t either if these masks fail. I can taste too much of the cloud. Let’s get back.’

The boat greeted them with a winking light.

‘I didn’t notice these footprints before. They lead right into the water – bare feet,’ said Drum. ‘Who goes barefooted in the sewer?’

‘Tweenwallers – fugitives. The gas drove them out. See anything in the water?’

As they started back across the sewer pipe the boat scanned for bodies.

‘Nothing,’ said Drum, watching the screen. ‘Where did they go?’

‘Drowned probably. Even if they had something to float on there is the foam. Blundering into a mass of that stuff would suffocate you pretty quick. The bad gas is just an added hazard.’

Small pale feathery objects rained down on them.

‘Snow?’

‘Just dead insects. We’re still in the clouds.’

That evening they were interrupted at mealtime by sirens. The Unauthorized Activity light was blinking. A Security Squad jogged past the mess hall.

‘What is it?’ asked Ode.

Drum glanced out the door. ‘Don’t know, but they are going out to our landing. I think I’ll see what it is.’

Ode wiped his mouth and followed.

‘Careful. Remember, this is Security’s job.’

Drum picked up his shovel and gave it an experimental swing. The landing was poorly lit. Sewermeck had shunted most of the power to search circuits down the pipe. They saw mists and mycelial strands glowing in the distance. Security Squad had pulled on boots and were now wading cautiously into the delta muck. Without a word they slogged off into the darkness. Puzzled, Ode and Drum stood for a long moment. Then Drum shrugged and turned to leave. His foot clattered into a tangle of wires and boards. The circuitry looked familiar – remote gear from the dinghy.

‘Someone has taken our boat,’ said Drum as he entered the control room. ‘Can we pick it up on our pipe sensors?’ The search pattern produced a series of infrared images on the screen, but, like a checkerboard, every other square was blank.

‘Most of my eyes are clouded,’ said the Sewermeck. ‘My mass detectors are picking up a lot of floating trash, but no boat so far.’

‘Ears?’ asked Drum.

‘Nothing.’

‘Well, call us if you find anything.’

The men returned to their meal. When the Security Squad returned they tracked black and rancid. The Wet Crew offered them hot refreshments in exchange for the news. ‘I hate to see them get away,’ said the Squad Leader. ‘We’ll try the next city downstream.’

‘No dinghy,’ said Ode. ‘I suppose that means we’ve lost our bedding.’

‘Unless . . .’ suggested Drum, ‘unless we take the tubeways to that city.’

They studied the traffic pattern through the terminals. The round trip would take many hours, and trying to keep bedding together would be almost impossible in the crowded passenger lines. They both shook their heads.

‘No, I guess not,’ said Drum. ‘It would be cheaper to buy all new things.’

Ode nodded – much more sensible.

Warm waves rolled slate-grey through barren, tropical archipelagos; crossed thousands of miles of silent, sterile seas; and broke – thundering – against the split and tilted cliffs of Orange Sector. Limestone beds, eroded by the persistent pounding, surrendered their ancient memories of
Xyne grex
and
Ganolytes cameo
. Washed down from the cliffs, these delicate chalk traces of Miocene herring and shad were slowly erased by the wave action – disinterred and erased without ceremony, without witness, by a sterile ocean under empty skies. Twenty-million-year-old molecules that had been assembled by bony fish were now being disassembled in an era without bony fish. Out of the countless mega-fossils recorded in the Earth’s crust, only a handful survived. Today, one of the surviving mega-fauna brine-swirled with these remains of herring and shad.

Nostrils wide, Big Opal surfaced, snorted, and rode the hissing breaker into the shallows. She floundered until the next wave carried her up on to the smooth rocks. Her powerful fingers and toes clung to the slimy surfaces. Climbing on to a dry, salt-crusted boulder, she glanced up at the cliffs. An ominous, black mouth broke the continuity of the shoreline – the hundred-yard-wide arch of the sewer sump. The high-water mark around the sump was littered with the floating debris from the effluent – the fungus-softened organic material from the hundreds of cybercities that fed the sump. Among the amorphous garments was an occasional body, bloated and pocked by maggots – outcast Hive Citizens, the discarded drones of Earth Society.

Opal cast a long shadow as the sun kissed the western horizon. She turned to face the warm, orange disc. A horizontal bar of gold formed where the disc buried its face in the sea. It submerged. Opal stood carefully. Her ‘land legs’ were slow to adjust to the firm coarse grit. Between waves, she waded quickly to shore. Her unsteady foot nudged a skull. It rattled across the rock and came to rest grinning a toothless grin. She picked it up. Her disgust for the Hive creature did not apply to his remains. She carried the delicate white relic to the cliff and placed it with other bones rescued from the irreverent surf. A row of them stared back at her with bleached, empty sockets. All were small-jawed and paper-thin. She thought of them as children, although they were clearly fragile and toothless with age. Twilight faded. She began her cautious climb to the Gardens.

A hundred miles up-sump the sewer conduits sang with pneumatic belches of dead city gases: incoles, skatoles, methane, ozone, and carbon monoxide. Where ever these toxic vapours lingered, sewer fauna died. Slime-matted rafts of bloated carcasses drifted, their bulging, hemorrhagic eyes staring blindly into the darkness where dead insects fell like flakes of snow. Ears high in the arched ceiling of the pipes – Sewermeck’s line sensors – caught an occasional moan. Optics rotated but saw nothing in the four hundred to seven hundred nanometre range. Darkness.

‘Come back,’ called the meck.

‘Hush,’ whispered Big Har. ‘The wall ears live.’

Their mould-flecked dinghy drifted sideways, its bow wedged into a raft of nondescript, floating debris. Hemihuman Larry hunkered down, swatting flies, The blackness and echoes told them nothing. Their progress was marked by aerial mycelia which swept across the boat’s wet ribs and snagged in their hair. Persistent swarms of sucking botflies hovered over them. Their throbbing backs sponged out with bots and warbles – the cutaneous abscesses that contained the vigorous fly larvae.

‘The damned itching is getting worse,’ complained Larry. ‘A new crop must be maturing.’ He wiped his hand across his scaly, lumpy back, breaking open pus pockets and catching the wiggling, bristly maggots as they emerged. ‘Damn!’ He rubbed at the pasty crusts of pupa cases, wings, legs, and dermal scales.

Big Har listened sadly. Larry’s irascible voice had been softened by the larval infestation. Hundreds of purulent sinus tracts weakened him as the little maturing creatures migrated from the bite site to his back, where they pupated. Skin, muscle, and lung were riddled and abscessed.

‘Hang on, Larry,’ Har whispered. ‘The Ocean can’t be far away now. Can you smell the brine?’

Brine? Larry crawled to the side of the boat and dipped his hand over – sewage covered with stiff, granular foam. He swirled his hand around the surface until his palm contained fluid that was less particulate. He bathed his back. A salty burn erased some of the gnawing itch and brought relief.