Read The Apex Book of World SF 2 Online
Authors: Lavie Tidhar
"Stop it, Fritz!
This thing's gonna blow!"
He was thrown out
from the machine by Ernest and another militiaman he didn't recognise. All
three hit their backs to the ground, their voices screaming
all right, all
right, it's okay, I got him
. The tin soldier just stared at the city
sprawling over him, failing to see any human beings walking the streets at the
sphere's opposite half. It seemed there was no-one at the casino's tower, too.
"It was supposed to
be my turn," Fritz said, partly asking and partly answering. "I just turned
off. Sorry."
"No problem." Chaya
smiled. The only thing still beautiful in this godless world. "It's all right."
The door blasted
open and they both pointed their guns at whoever was coming in. Emilio raised
his free hand, the organic one, making sure the non-human couple could see his
face and recognise him. "Thought you heard me coming," the doctor said.
"The power of habit,"
Chaya said, uncocking her Luger. "How's the city going?"
"Empty. Except for
militiamen, not many people are willing to walk the streets these days. Those
who have food at home have no reason to go out. Those who don't, won't find any
outside." Emilio closed the door behind him with some difficulty. He had a
small wooden box in his mechanical hand.
Fritz rested his gun
on the improvised stretcher and tried to stand up. His joints creaked loudly.
His body was all twisted and warped on the left side, especially his knee,
though his right shoulder also cracked. "Any news from the front? How are the
men doing?" Four days ago he'd been promoted to captain. Not that it meant
anything, since the militiamen followed whoever they thought worth following
rather than those with military rank. They'd been close to lots of bombs in the
past few days, he and his friends, but maybe because he'd got used to the
mortars or maybe because of the nature of the explosives, none of these had
hurt him any more than the first one on the Chanteclair had. Actually, it still
hurt. "Did they retake the casino?"
Emilio lowered his head
and crossed the laboratory towards a tarp-covered table. The sound of boiling
water came from it. Only when he walked past Fritz, did Emilio notice how
injured his friend was. Gunshots, scraps, deep cuts. Were he human, he'd be
dead by now. "No. No, I don't. No news," he said, pointing to the hidden table.
"Last thing I heard was that the Committee issued some kind of edict saying the
militias are now illegal." The doctor looked over his shoulder. "They'll find
us. Sooner or later, they'll take the neighbourhood. It's over. Then they'll
make an agreement with the Consortium and life will be as it used to be before
the strike. Or even worse. And I think you two should pack your things and go
back to Earth now. An aethership will leave in about three hours. You've
nothing to do with this war."
"And
you
do?"
The automaton was craving for an argument.
"Fritz, dear, I
think Emilio might be right," Chaya said. She tried to find some comfort on the
stretcher, but the wires wouldn't let her.
Fritz shook his head.
He had his revolver back in his trembling hand. The bomb might've loosened some
pulley in his shoulder. "We're so close now. You said that. Besides, there's
nothing for us down there, on Earth. Nothing."
Emilio and Chaya
stared at him. The tick-tock in him seemed to have vanished, or at least couldn't
be noticed above the noises in the lab.
Dr Cavalcante
sighed. "So, if we're to finish this experiment, we better get back to work."
He pulled the covered table and brought it to the space between the couple. The
myriad of cables, tubes and wires on the floor got stuck between the table's
rusty wheels. Emilio took the brown tarp off it, uncovering two once-green
cylinders and a series of transparent alchemical glass vials the size of
pressure pans. The vials were mounted like a ziggurat and were full of boiling
liquids, each one of a different colour. The yellows were on the edge of the
table and the blacks were actually extremely dense reds. There were also some
transparent ones and others reflecting light in gold and silver patterns. At
the top of the glass pile, there was a bigger, double-sized vial. It was
completely empty and uncapped. "Okay, we've been through this before, but just
to make sure you got it right," Emilio said donning his waistcoat and the stenograph.
"I'll plug the drains into you and then attach it to the uterus up there and,
and then I'll link it to the aetheric fusion tank down here, as well. If we're
able to produce enough sephirotic reaction, well, we'll proceed to surgery.
Ready?"
They exchanged
nervous glances and smiled, confirming their willingness to move on.
The occultist
connected the suspended cables to the wires inside the non-human veins. He
activated the apparatus by pressing a switch next to the control panel.
Immediately, the prone bodies became stiff, as if they were being electrocuted.
He ran to the aether cylinders and turned the valves only slightly to release a
tiny amount of aetherfoam. The substance flowed through the tubes until it
filled the fusion tank. He returned to the edge of the table and faced the
control panel. It was diamond-shaped and over it was a gematria board, a stone
abacus and a green phosphorus screen displaying the Tree of Life. Everything
was connected by dozens of wires and cables leading to the analytical engine.
Opposite him, the tank blending the non-humans' essences span faster and
faster.
"Come on. Come on."
They always failed in the first step. Calculations were correct and there was
an obvious resonance between the two lovers. But in all attempts throughout the
weeks, the tank had worked as a centrifuge, not mixing, but separating the
essences from the aether.
The first two
sephirotic houses shone in the monitor when a pale light started to emanate
from the tank.
"Yes." Emilio jumped
and punched the air and, when he looked again, the third house was alight. "No,
no, no. Too fast." He found the controls for the mechanical arms under the
table and quickly attached them to his own clockwork arm. Now he was like a
puppeteer whose fingers moved spider-legs over his marionettes. The organic
hand calibrated the analytical engine, moving the stones in the abacus. He
lowered the robotic arms over Fritz and Chaya and, with his feet, he pressed a
pedal to activate their drills and scalpels.
The vibration was
felt, not heard.
Then a thundering
noise hit the street several metres above. The blast almost tore the equipment
away from the ceiling.
"No," Emilio moaned
and stopped to listen, "not now, please." A second later another blast was
followed by another quake and then machine-gun shots.
"Don't. Even.
Consider. Stopping." Fritz had his arm raised, his gun triggered, and was
pointing at the door. "Move on," he said, knowing the doctor hadn't considered
stopping. He knew his friend craved paternity, too.
Fritz saw, right
above him, a robotic arm handling a bright blowtorch and, on the table next to
him, the shining scalpel hovering over Chaya. He tried to turn his sensors off,
but it was too late. He felt the pain and the heat of the torch opening a big triangle
in his belly, while his wife had a vibrating blade carving a doorway to her
womb. Gunshots were closer now and already they could hear screams coming from
Hotel Florida's garage. The doctor, abacus forgotten, now held a pistol, too,
aimed at the door. The face and mind of the now-captain motolang convulsed with
pain, while Emilio tried to find the correct gear inside him with his spidery
arms. At the same time, the doctor looked for a specific root in Chaya.
A blast blew out the
door. A mechanical hand pinched the coils inside Fritz's guts.
Fritz opened fire,
but Emilio hesitated. The doctor barely had the reflexes to dodge the door
flying across the room. It smashed the analytical engine's glass walls. A man
in black uniform raided the room with a rifle, but was blown away by three
shots from Fritz, who was trying to get rid of the wires tangled with his body.
The man fell to the floor still shooting his automatic gun, hitting lamps and
steam tubes. "Wake up, Chaya," he cried, pulling his wife to the floor, to a
space between the stretcher and the multicoloured glass pyramid.
The golem opened her
eyes to the dark fog and screamed as soon as she hit the ground. Immediately,
she understood the situation. She grabbed the stretcher-table's feet and lifted
it, improvising a shield with its hardened wood. She dragged the table to the
door while Fritz covered her, exposing his own body to shoot the guards at the
door. She'd managed to block the entrance, but it'd take only a few shots to
tear down the already splintering barrier.
"Emilio," Fritz
yelled.
The human had his
back to the ground and was chewing off the cables from his mechanical arm. His
left hand held the experiment's samples and his pistol was tucked inside his
trousers. A big piece of wood landed close to his head and splinters forced him
to shut his eyes. He cleared them from wood, tears and condensed steam. A spray
of bullets flew inside the room.
Chaya used the dead
soldier's gun to shoot the guards through a tiny hole in the barrier. "We have
to leave, Fritz. The barrier won't stand much longer." She reloaded the machine
gun with her last ammo clip. "Emilio, is there any other way out?"
He had stood up and
was dodging the bullets, trying to stand in front of the control panel. "This
is a basement, Chaya. There's no way out."
Fritz shot two more
times through the crack, then stopped to reload. It was only then that he
noticed the guards had stopped shooting back. He signalled to Chaya, who was
prepared to spray another set of bullets. Then he looked at Emilio, who in a
single movement opened the mixer, threw the samples in and locked it as fast as
he could.
The only
recognisable sound was that post-gunfight humming. Not even Fritz, nor the
analytical engine, dared to break the silence. Maybe because they were both
broken machines, afraid and with their guts exposed. "What happened?"
"I can't see
anything," Chaya said, her eyes hunting for black uniforms on the staircase
beyond the half-destroyed barrier. "It's as though they've disappeared. Just
stopped shooting." She still heard some lonely shots beyond the layers of
concrete, brass and asphalt above them. Other than that, there was only
silence. But it wasn't like the silence one heard after surviving a gunfight.
It was much more like the silence before passing away. A calm, serene death
that took its time before taking away its burden.
"Hey, Fritz, help me
out." Emilio was pulling a crank that apparently pumped up the fluids from the
mixer to the glass vial atop the ziggurat.
Both non-humans
exchanged looks. He slowly moved away from the door, counting on his wife for
cover. "What do I do?"
"The mechanical arms
are gone. Climb onto the table, and I'll give you the tank. I need you to fill
up the uterus on top."
The automaton put
his gun back in his trousers. He found an empty spot on the table and stood on
it, trying to keep his balance. He stepped to one side and grabbed the mixer
with one hand. A pale-bright whirlwind moved inside it with roots and gears
dancing about. He grappled his way to a place from which to pour the liquid
into the machine and finally bent his body towards the uterus, the sharp metal
of his opened-up belly scratching the glass vials. He poured the tank's
contents into the uterus, already full with some kind of repulsive solvent.
Almost immediately,
the mixture became transparent.
"Now, step down,"
Emilio commanded.
"What?" Fritz was
hypnotised. The two floating corpuscles were attracted to each other and, he
could swear it, were blending together. But at the same time, they were
multiplying. "Oh, Chaya! I think it's working." He turned smiling to wife, but
her face was as hard as stone. She had her hands behind her head.
The low
click
as the gun was triggered woke the motolang from his dream.
"Down, Fritz."
Emilio was pointing his pistol at him.
The troops of the
Committee had forced the barrier and entered the basement. A dozen or more, he
wasn't able to count. One of the soldiers walked around the table and grabbed
the wooden box lying on the brown tarp. "What's happening? I- I don't
understand." Fritz was experiencing something like reverse omniscience. He
could see that Chaya had surrendered, that the soldiers were receiving orders
from Emilio, and that a wood-and-metal embryo grew inside the glass uterus. He
felt diluted, ephemeral in his confusion. Inexorably incapable.
"It doesn't matter.
Come on, man, step down. Do what I say." The soldier put the opened box at
Emilio's feet. There was a brass barrel mounted inside it. It was the same size
as the uterus.
"You can't do this,
Emilio. Please."
"Fritz—" he paused "—if
you won't step down, I swear, my friend, I'll fire this shit off into your
fucking head."
Tick-tock.
"No! Dear, no!"
Fritz grabbed the
uterus as hard as he could and threw himself to the back of the room. There was
a sound of gunshots blasting and he felt two stabs in his back. Something heavy
and metallic bounced on the floor. There were glass cutting cables and jamming
gears inside his joints.
Tick-tock
.