“I know some of you are not well. Many have already died. I am doing everything I can to alleviate your suffering. I would never do anything to hurt you. And that is my oath to you now. If there is a causality of illness due in part to my efforts to make this a better world for us all, then there will be a time for that accountability. But here and now, in the days of our arrival, the needs of the many must outweigh the trials of the very few.”
A mild applause brought the expeditionary officer closer to the podium, where he stayed at Luegner’s right side. The overhead lights flickered. Luegner met eye to eye with as many of his crowd as the flickering, failing sky allowed. “Today, because of all of you, I looked up through a hole in the sky and saw something for the very first time.”
Ceeborn noticed a fire-red hoodie scrunched and left atop a cast-stone planter. He grabbed it.
“When Tusolo painted the ‘Path to Salvation’ up on this great dome of ours,” Luegner said, “He was asked why he didn’t put wings on any of the cherubs.”
Ceeborn pulled the hoodie over his head.
“‘Because,’ Luegner quoted, ‘naked angels don’t need wings to fly. They just do. Freedom is in their nature.’”
The red hoodie was bright, and he would be singled out for sure, but he kept it on. It felt comfortable, familiar.
“You are all my naked angels,” Luegner said. “Now let me put an end to the rumor about the health of this ship. We are not being forced to evacuate. And it is not true that PluralVaXine5 was developed from the same class of science used to keep the body of this ship alive. We are leaving on our own free will. This ship is stronger than ever! Tomorrow, we arrive and I will deliver each and every one of you, alive, into a wondrous future you can’t yet imagine. Come with me,” he rallied. “I challenge you,” he said. “Are you with me?” The crowd’s enthusiasm was infectious. “Thank you,” he said, and then exited with a waving departure to thunderous cheer.
No,
Ceeborn thought. “The ship is not right,” he said.
The expeditionary officer rose to the podium. He regained the crowd with gestures for quiet, “We have all been working extremely hard to make sure our first descent runs as smoothly as possible. But by the flicker of lights in this room,” he said with a chuckle, “you might be having a few doubts. But watch.” He pointed up to the sky.
The fresco swiped away and was replaced with the blackness of empty space. A vapor trail came into view and became the corkscrewed wake of a bioship, a ship with eight long arms that were shouldered equidistant around a neckline. Then in a coordinated movement, the arms curled themselves back over the body of the ship as if in a feathered cockatoo position. A club-like appendage at the end of each of the two longest arms rotated into the direction of travel, glowed with a thrust, and broke the forward momentum of the ship.
Ceeborn was mesmerized. He muffled his own cheer, or more like a growing outrage, as the projection of the healthy ship was revealed on the dome above. As the ship entered its arrival procedure, a glorious planetary crest appeared, and the room burst into a frenzy of applause.
“And most spectacular,” the expeditionary officer said, “is that later this day, we will be projecting live images of our actual arrival, not in here on this dome, but up on the sky of the valley for all of you to see.”
Luegner returned to the far end of the room, took a whisper from a man watching over the room, and Ceeborn’s wonderment turned to hatred. Luegner spotted him and summoned pursuit.
As the projected body of the ship rotated on the dome, its eight long arms flared back away from the body, outstretched like a parasol, and pierced the planet’s upper atmosphere. Pod doors along the length of the arms opened and with a mass launch forth, injected a cloud of crafts like the atomized mist of a fantastic nasal spray applicator punching itself into the atmosphere. Images of the piloted crafts dispersing into the far reaches of the world were projected over the mob of people in the planetarium, with everyone transfixed by their soon-to-be arrival in the sky.
“You’re a liar!” Ceeborn burst out at Luegner, breaking the awed silence of the room. “This ship is dying. The spray is not what he says. It’s making us all sick. And he knows it!”
The watchman broke through the crowd. Ceeborn shoved as he ran and slammed through the rear exit door. He pulled the rivulus case from his pants pocket, tucked it into the larger front pocket of his fire-red hoodie, and ran deeper into the greener side of the valley.
He jumped the vent in the spiral garden, and with the hood of the fire-red hoodie pulled over his head, leapt the red-berried shrub. Ahead was the wall around the school’s playground, then off to his left, the adobe village.
He ran from house to house; each was empty. “Get off the ship! Luegner’s a liar! We’re all going to die on the ship!”
He rattled the locked door of the domed hospital at the zoo. “Meg!” he called, with no reply. He ran around to the back exit door where she had closed him off. It had no exterior handle. He pounded. “Meg!”
He turned with the clacking of nails on stone. He ran back to the village, checking window to window. He ducked into a courtyard, and peered over a sill.
Meg was inside, still in her pajamas as she entered the home’s tight kitchen. She took a seat at the breakfast table and poured herself a bowl of cereal. Robin, dressed in her white lab coat, set the final touches of a meal of fruit and crispy sliced meat.
“Oh, come on,” Robin said as Meg sat. “You’re not even dressed.”
Ceeborn raised his knuckles to rap on the window, but paused as Meg pulled back her shoulder-length hair into a tail. It was her, but different.
“Hey!” Robin gasped as she spun and broke away from a waist-pinched sneak attack of affection.
Michael Longshore, morning-clean and fit for another foreman day, cradled Robin with a hand at both sides of her waist. She gave him a loving slap on the shoulder and he took his seat on Meg’s side of the table.
“Hey, Dad,” Meg said.
Ceeborn stared. It was a life he’d never known.
“We’re arriving tonight,” Robin said as she poured Michael a morning drink.
Michael nudged his shoulder to Meg and gave her a wink. “How many times have you heard that one lately? Look out, we’re arriving!” He swirled his palms together over his dished-out plate of warmed meat and toast.
“Just about every single day during drills,” Meg said with a roll of her eyes.
“This looks good,” he said to Robin, who didn’t sit.
“Hey, Dad. There’s a boy I know. He wants to arrive with everyone else.”
“Oh, yeah?” Michael said as he filled his cheek with a bite. “A boy at school? Do we know him?” He looked up at Robin, who hurried to gather her things.
“Go on, tell your father,” Robin said.
“I don’t know,” Meg said to her father’s endearing patience. “I don’t think you know him. He lives on the other side of the screen. Where people go to get fixed.”
“One of the madman’s boys?” Michael asked as he smiled over the leafy bits on his plate.
“He wasn’t always mad,” Robin said.
“Well, I wouldn’t mind too much about him,” Michael said. “When we arrive you’ll have plenty to do on your own. You’ll move on and forget all about that boy.”
“I know, but—”
“I’ll tell you, sometimes you can smell the rot from back there where they live,” Michael said. “It comes right through from behind the annex.” He took another bite. “If it spreads to the rest of the ship, we’ll all be unfixable.”
“Then you should be praying he isn’t a madman,” Robin said, “don’t you think?”
“It’s the original, oldest part of the ship,” Michael said. “We don’t need it. Luegner should just give the go ahead to let us cleave it off and move on. Madden’ll never be able to fix it. It’s like coming up with a cure for the sickness. It can’t be done. The fact that Madden keeps trying proves the man is nuts.”
He elbowed Meg and with two fingers lifted his eyelids for a funny face. “And who knows, one boy like that could spread the sickness forward to us.”
“Oh, right, one kid could destroy this whole ship,” Meg said.
“Not on my watch,” Michael said as he ate.
“You’re right. He’d probably need a little help from me,” Meg said. “He swims. I’ve seen him from the sky.”
“Wait. You’ve gone to the sky?” Michael asked. “I told you, you are not to go up there again. Ever. Do you hear me?”
“Okay, but what if he comes to see me down here?” Meg said. She shrugged.
“Then you bring him to Michael. He’s a great father, always there when you need him,” Robin said.
“Looks like we’re covered, then, kiddo,” Michael said to Meg. “Okay, go on now, get dressed. We don’t want to start the day late. Big day, everyone. We’re arriving!”
“Technically,” Meg said, “we’re only arriving to orbit. Another week before we go down.”
Ceeborn rose at the window. He didn’t try to hide. Meg saw him. She wasn’t afraid and sat back down on her foot in her seat as she stared.
“Don’t have to remind me,” Michael said, shuffling his knife and fork in the remnants of his meal. “We’re nonstop busy dissolving the recyclables at the annex.”
Robin buttoned her coat, then quickly kissed Michael on the forehead to leave. “Actually, that boy gave me some good ideas to test in the lab.” As she rushed for the front door, she turned back, stern. “But, the both of you talking about destroying the ship is not helping at all. Not for me. And not for him.”
Michael leaned back from his plate and gave Meg a loving shove. He reached into a bowl with his hand and tossed a few more berries into Meg’s bowl. “Boys,” he said with a wink to Meg. “Nothing but trouble, didn’t you know?”
Meg tossed a peel from her fruit onto her father’s plate and smiled right back. “Why do you think we get along so well?”
Outside, the clicking on stone returned and Ceeborn pushed back from the window. The three Chokebots kept pace in their line. They were relentless, like loping predators on prey. He wanted to stay, to fight for Meg’s approach at the window.
He could turn and smash at the Chokebot’s bulbous dome head as it crossed the courtyard, but its mind would simply recoil into its shell. And with others for backup response, there would always be more. The lead Chokebot of the three stopped and tilted its head for a directional fix. It flexed its squared front thorax up at its waist and rose, front claws splayed and extended in a dominant pose. The tablet in its head feathered its keys and halted the three’s forward movement. It was calm and assured.
Ceeborn climbed the waist-high wall of the courtyard and ran along its edge. More immense than the three sections of the garden, village, and zoo was the enormous count of other sections aligned and farther afield along the rising sides and down the length of the valley. There were more than enough places to hide.
He ran toward the front of the ship and a whitened field where a footbridge crossed a river ravine. He cut right, hopped the bridge’s tensioned rail, and leapt full flight over the edge, diving sidelong and headfirst into the rushing water below.
The Chokebots couldn’t follow and no net could scrounge him from below. He didn’t come up for air. He didn’t come up at all. The torrent of water was his.
A trickle of air bubbles rose from his lips to the surface as the water deepened into a channel. The respirocytes transfusion that replaced his red blood cells stored hours of air that needed no breath, pumping oxygen-rich blood through his veins. The vestibular system of his ears rolled with an innate aquatic sense that kept his body aligned in three axes. He rolled into the current, his chest up toward the surface, and he watched the three Chokebots scurry up along the river’s edge.
Thin, bioluminescent worms were embedded in the hardened inside walls of the river’s channel. His rub against their waves triggered a controlled flushing. He could breathe through the torrent of water, but couldn’t break away from its sudden rush. He succumbed to the natural flow and rode the roaring veinal channel far and aft, back through the membrane screen into his darker system of the gully.
He lunged for the roots protruding from the gully wall, but the joining tributary current could in no way be overcome. He slammed against the sealed subterranean drain that entered the rear bulkhead. He tumbled in place until the drain opened, as if two doors in opposing disks rotated into alignment, and he was swallowed in through the flush.
He was expelled in a pressurized spurt of water above an enormous reservoir. He landed on a sponge-like pad that quickly absorbed the water that poured in around him.
He was in the tank behind the bulkhead. It was a place he had never sought to be.
He gripped the raised collar ring at the edge of the spongy pad and climbed out of the water. Beyond the ring was an undulating layer of skin that stretched over an immense body of water. He walked out upon it and the skin bobbed and rolled under his feet like a thin bladder covering the waves of an ocean. He turned back around and looked up to the opening he came through. It was closed again, and far too high to climb.
Iridescent slicks lapped out from beneath the edges of the skin and reached up the wall of the tank. The thickened stains shimmered in the lights of four corner posts of a utility gondola. The gondola was suspended by tendons that rose and disappeared into the darkness at the height of the tank. Far across, another set of four lights beckoned as a possible way out. Maybe there was another door lower on its wall.
He smelled the dark air. It had a bad omen of sickness. There were no sounds, no cries from the depths. This place was the setting where nightmares were born.
The drainage door high in the tank parted again like a valve, and another spurt of water tumbled onto the sponge. As the water fell, he saw that neither he nor his side of the doorway was turning. It was the door on other side of the opening that rotated into alignment. And the other side was the gully’s bulkhead. That could mean the gully itself was the side in motion.
And if the gully was the side that rotated, then that meant something else as well: The blue torus core didn’t turn on its high central axle. The blue torus core was stationary and everything else, the gully, the gardens, Meg’s better-lit world, must be rotating about the central axle of the ship.