Organo-Topia (10 page)

He froze, his hand hovering over the handle.

Why he hesitated, he couldn't have said, but he knew.

Apparitions didn't exist. Cold clinical fact cemented his thinking. Icicle clarity hung pendulous on the eaves of his mind, conclusions ready to drop, tacking facts fast to the ground as he melted the landscape of a crime. And yet he'd stopped, a vision haunting him, his freedom put on ice.

You won't get a trial, you won't get a lawyer, you won't get a sentence. You just go.

Jerk the Coalition and its snowman strawman, Colonel Teodor Astrauckas.

And he ripped open the door.

“Interrogation room two,” Lieutenant Balodis said, her voice ice-queen cold.

“Two,” he repeated, giving her a single nod, turning on a single step. She knew, he knew.

Scuffs and scars on wainscotted corridor walls bragged about struggling detainees hustled into holding tanks. Dull tile struggled to reflect his stride through years of wax buildup. Faint glowbes overhead fought to dispel dark thoughts and dimming futures. Bland cityscapes in dusty frames failed to brighten dingy, flaking paint. Frosted glasma couldn't obscure wormwire reinforcement, one door starred with unrepaired cracks, a long-ago suspect hurling an officer into it with superhuman desperation.

A pair of bulky bruisers, soft-soled and shaded, appeared ahead at the far end.

A pair of stares stabbed him in the back, the polarized lenses unable to shield sharp eyes.

Interrogation room two had an open door. Inside was Astrauckas, gesturing at a chair.

Welcome to your future, he might have said.

The four bruisers converged, two in front, two behind.

“Come on in, Detective,” Colonel Astrauckas said.

Omale Ivars Digris and his crèche-sibs Evars, Ovars, and Uvars plowed up a culvert across the rolling steppes under the command of their quint-lead, Avars. Two of his crèche-sibs were Ofem, but of such bulk no one ever knew which. He stood six-four but looked ten feet tall, as thick through as a bulldozer. His hands rivaled hams, his arms whole hogs. His feet were as big as elephants', his legs bridge pillars, his bones and muscles engineered for density, strength, and resilience. Another crèche crew of equivalent bulk and heft installed a pipeline a mile behind them in the culvert they were digging, both crews cloned from the same genome kept in zero-kelvin cryo.

The brawn-brain inverse correlation a myth, Ivars shoved a shovel as wide as his chest deep into the near-tundra soil, levered up a chunk of ground half his weight, and hurled it aside. Sweat poured off his bulk and hit the ground as balls of ice. He'd shed his clothes awhile back, the work too hot to wear a single thread. A jack of adrenocorticotropin kept his bulk at peak and his testicles on ice, the latter the size of peas, his penis a pod.

As if on cue, all five Digris sibs stopped, a neuramail message spilling down their corns.

New orders. Emergency roadwork needed three miles away, subsidence having sunk a gaping hole into an important if little used road, the one to Patarei Prison.

His crèche-sister Avars waved them over. “Bring your shovels,” she murmured. She too wore nothing, sweat dripping off her. Her breasts were indistinguishable from his, his pectoral muscles making him a buxom man, her jack turning hers into vestigial lumps. The bulk at her hairless loin buried the vaginal slit in layers of muscle.

Shovel in hand, Ivars joined the file, third in alphabetical line as always, despite the fact he couldn't spell. They trudged the distance in good time, their synchronized lope shaking the ground like jolly giants.

The Patarei Prison road was a bare strip of tundra twenty feet wide, not a single magnacar upon it. Further, it was intact. In the distance, the whine of a magnatruck could be heard.

“Orders?” Avars asked aloud. As quint-lead, she handled communication with dispatch.

Ivars overheard the content, and static was all that came back, neuranet coverage spotty in remote regions.

The magnatruck whine was getting louder, the vehicle still out of sight over the ridge.

The neuranet channel cleared. “Stop the magnatruck,” said a soft female voice on his coke, his corn blank of image. “Kill all vehicle occupants except the one in orange.”

Orange was the universal color of prisoner, Ivars knew.

“Evars, Ovars, and Uvars, take the rear. Ivars, take the driver.”

He was still puzzling over the illogical message when the magnatruck crested the ridge and careened down the hill, moving fast. He leaped into its path, his shovel swinging, his crèche sibs leaping.

The grill folded around him, the shovel blade slashing through the windshield like a sword through cheese, lopping off the driver's head.

Avars swung her shovel at the passenger side, her blade finding its mark.

Evars, Ovars and Uvars landed on the rear and ripped a hole in the roof. Evars reached in, pulled out a uniformed guard out by the head and flung the body away like a doll, the neck broken. A blue blaze lit the sky and Ovars fell backward, his arm a roast pig. Uvars plunged in head-first, club-feet like ship masts flailing at the air, the magnatruck sides bulging outward. The vehicle slewed sideways off the road, plowing into the far hillside, jackknifing, the cab coming to rest on its nose.

Avars reached in and pulled a slender, orange-clad figure from the rear compartment. She draped the unconscious figure across her shoulders like a pelt and stomped to the front.

“Got him,” Ivars said, the vehicle hood burying him up to the neck, a thumb-size tooth protruding through his cheek, a gash from temple to jaw.

Avars glanced up at the vehicle on top of him. “Evars, Uvars, lend your strength.”

The three of them easily lifted the magnatruck off Ivars. Despite his bulk, the young Omale wasn't invincible, a fanblade having perforated his abdomen and severed his spine.

He pushed himself to his elbows and looked down at his unresponsive lower limbs. “Well, never had much use of the one leg. Not sure why I'd need the other two.”

His crèche sibs laughed, Ovars walking over with his blackened stub, a barbeque pork smell following him.

A magnacar approached, its whine coming over the hill.

Ivars looked over, feeling his strength ebbing.

The vehicle came off the road and pulled to a stop beside the magnatruck. An Ofem got out, sleek and slim to the sibs' hulk and bulk. “Put him in,” the Ofem said.

Ivars recognized the voice, the same in the commands on his coke.

Avars lifted the orange-clad Imale off her shoulders and laid him in the magnacar. The tiny Ofem retrieved the blasma pistol that had burned off Ovars' arm and knelt beside Ivars. “Brother, would you give your crèche sibs their release?”

He looked at the weapon she'd handed him. He looked at the magnatruck wreakage, just now seeing the Coalition emblem on its rumpled side. It didn't take a degree in ballistics to know what would happen to his sibs.

“Ovars,” Avars said, gesturing.

A smoking stub where his arm had been, Ovars obeyed and knelt beside Ivars.

“Are you sure, Brother?” Ivars said.

“Please, it's either you or the recycler.”

Ivars nodded, aimed the pistol with a shaky hand, and pulled the trigger.

Ovars reeled away and fell, a cinder replacing him from the waist up.

Uvars and Evars, sister and brother, both lined up. “You know what they'll do to us, Brother,” Uvars said, a single tear dripping down her cheek.

Ivars knew and didn't want to consider it. He blasted her first and then his brother Evars.

“Now me, Brother,” Avars said, “and then you can die in peace.”

Ivars wept as he blasted his crèche sister, who was also the only mother he'd ever known.

The slim woman knelt beside him. “I thank you for your courage and sacrifice, Brother. May I assist you?”

The pain was overwhelming, and he knew he was too weak to pull the trigger again. “Yes, please.” Ivars looked at her plaintively. “Why this way? Why us?”

“The maker calls us all. You and your crèche sibs were called sooner, is all.”

And Ivars understood a deep and resounding fact: that he didn't know the reason, that there wasn't a reason to know. What more was there to know, except that he would never know?

And that he never would have known.

The blue blasma beam ended his life.

* * *

Maris woke with Ilsa above him, shaking his shoulder.

The ceiling was too close behind her and the odor of unwashed body was too dense around them to be natural.

“Come on,” she said. “We can't stay here.” She practically pulled him to sitting, insistent. “We have to leave.”

Memory swirled into place. A long magnatruck ride toward Patarei Prison, Colonel Astrauckas sending him off without fanfare, without notice, without pity.

“I told you what would happen,” Astraukas had said before the four gumshoed bears had each glommed onto a limb. “Take him to the truck.”

He'd tried traking but his neuranet link was dead. They'd jacked in a sedative at the outset. En route, they'd dressed him in orange formalls, the universal uniform of prisoner, his limbs rubber. Later, how long later he didn't know, the sedative had worn off a little but he'd kept his limbs limp, hoping to lure his guards into complacency.

Then he and the two guards had slammed into the back of the cab, hurled there by momentum, and moments later, the ceiling was ripped aside. One guard got plucked out head-first, neck snapping with a dull pop. The other guard fired off a shot but it was the last thing he did, a mountain of flesh smashing him flat. Then the magnatruck slewed and crashed, Maris losing consciousness.

And now he was here, in some densely-packed cave, being told he had to leave.

He couldn't walk upright, and bending over caused him more vertigo. Stumbling behind her, he heard only the rustle of clothes, the breathing of tension, the silence of hostility.

And it wasn't just a few hostile gazes. It was hundreds. Eyes glistened at him from all directions, all aimed at him.

She's right, he thought, we have to leave. He knew he wasn't welcome. She'd brought him because she was welcome, but they were ostracizing her because she'd brought him. Ohume, all of them, he realized.

Like her.

Unlike me.

The cave became a pipe. Half-bent, he didn't fit. He had to crawl. He realized from the scrapes at his shoulders that he'd been dragged in through such a pipe. He'd heard rumors about such places, way stations for Ohumes on the run from their indentures, headed first for surgery to remove their galactic positioning devices, next for the nearest Ihume or Ohume able to offer them sanctuary and perhaps the start to a new life. If these rumors were true, Maris wondered whether other, more outlandish rumors might also be true.

A whole planet of freed Ohume was simply too farfetched a fantasy, he decided.

Somewhere behind them, a hatch closed, leaving them in complete darkness.

He crawled right into Ilsa.

“Hush, stay completely still,” she whispered. “Don't use your trake.”

His body felt like pulverized meat, pummeled with a tenderizing hammer. His mind felt like mashed potatoes, the fake ones, whisked into a slurry, a soft white tissue without form or structure. Meat and potatoes, he thought, I must be hungry. Silence surrounded them, filled his thoughts with dread.

Steel grated on steel, and she pushed aside a hatch. “Left,” she said, extracting herself into a larger pipe. She closed it behind him, counting in the dark.

Counting her steps, he realized.

“Here,” she whispered. Again, metal grated, and something squeaked open. “In.”

He couldn't see what she referred to, and she had to guide him. Another pipe, this one somewhat larger, one he could stand in, if half-bent. She pulled the hatch closed behind her and squeezed past him.

Another hatch, another count, another pipe, this one longer than the last. Large enough to stand up in.

Five more hatches, five more counts, five more pipes, each count different, each pipe longer, each with a different scent, each with a different feel. All of it in complete blackness, the only sounds those of breathing and footsteps.

“Up,” she whispered, and she put his hand on a metal ladder.

He sighed, about to burst from sensory deprivation. Above him was the ghost of light, but more than just its absence. What was darkness but the absence of light? But even in the darkness, the mind supplied light where none existed. He'd been giving visual form to the sounds, smells, and feels.

But the rim of light above him was different.

“Stay quiet,” she admonished as he groped for rungs, pulling himself up one at a time, not daring to go faster, not daring to hope for the light of day.

The scent was that of fresh air. Fresher than any city air got.

It was, he realized, subtly like Telsai air, subtly different from Crestonia air.

Any air was better than the still, lifeless air he'd just left behind.

He stood in a cistern, he realized, Ilsa climbing up the ladder to stand beside him. Light seeped in through the ceiling. She sealed the hatch and turned to the wall. “Are you coming?”

And he realized what he'd thought was ceiling was in fact the cloudy sky, the dim light to one side the glow of Telsai.

She led the way up over the side of the cistern.

As he climbed over the top and started down the other side, he realized he was looking down upon the vacated Plavinas Incubation Center from just outside its security fences.

“Old cistern before they added all the security,” she whispered, once they were on the ground.

Out of breath, he felt ready to drop, the climb out of the cistern having taken the last of his strength.

“Magnacar over that ridge.”

Maris dropped to a knee and would have wept if he'd had the energy.

“Here,” she said, handing him a mastoid jack.

He plugged it in, and a rush of adrenalin beat back the pain and fatigue. He knew he'd regret it tomorrow.

How she found her way along the narrow animal track through the woods, he didn't know.

The outbuilding looked to be part of an abandoned maintenance station. Ilsa pushed on what looked to be a solid wall, and it slid aside without a sound. Inside was a magnacar, its hatch open.

Peterson fell into it and curled into a ball, pulling out the jack. Fatigue and pain claimed what was left of his consciousness.