Furnace (22 page)

“Screw it,” I muttered.

It’s not like I had options. The only alternative to following the tunnel until I reached an outlet—or more likely spotted something that made me shrivel up and die at the mere sight—was to spend another hour or so retracing my steps in the darkness, only to return to a bunch of confused, masochistic corpses and the evil clown who’d fucked everything up for me in the first place.

So I kept moving.

Gradually, I noticed a faint light ahead. It was so dull that I thought it might be another mysterious shadow passing by, but its stationary persistence quickly made me realize that the light belonged to something other than a living creature.

Please tell me it’s a door
, I thought.

Something inside me knew that this was
exactly
what the clown king had sent me down to find, and whether it turned out to be a good or bad thing in terms of my survival, I wanted to see what was so goddamned important that a creature as evil as he would forsake a tasty meal and a great deal of pleasurable torture so that I could encounter it.

I started jogging a little. I’m sure anyone who saw me would have laughed at the pathetic, limping gait I managed while ducking repeatedly in case something jutted from the ceiling or walls. But I
had
to run, because it seemed every time I slowed up even a little bit to give my body a break, the light stretched farther and farther away from me. If I didn’t pull out all the stops, I realized, it might disappear. And who knew if I’d ever find it again? Who knew if it would ever even reappear to
be
found? It was a chance I couldn’t take.

By the time I saw the pedestal with its glowing orange pentagram, I felt on the verge of physical collapse. Not for the first time, mind you, but this particular feeling was rivaled only by the pain of scaling the hill at the border of the corpse fields. I’d sworn I would accept death rather than subject myself to that torture again, but that wasn’t true. It’s a wonder. I’m continually shocked and somewhat humbled by my body’s dominant will to survive, which apparently supersedes all concerns of physics and psychological fortitude.

Now that I had some light by which to view it, I could see the interior of the ship around me. It looked like I’d been walking through some kind of long maintenance shaft ever since I’d descended the cathedral steps. The sheer enormity of the vessel implied by this realization was startling. Fleet warships like the newly-christened
Doorway
are big enough to walk through for days, but I’d envisioned a much smaller ship beneath the cathedral until I calculated how long I’d been walking and what portion of the tunnel comprised the maintenance shaft. The height of the tunnel told me that the ship was built for creatures much taller than the average human. Maybe the size of the clown demon and his Watchmen, in fact. It stood to reason, therefore, that the full scope of the ship was absolutely colossal. I might never have found an end to it.

I stepped away from the glowing pentagram to assess the height of the ceiling, guessing whether or not the clown king could have walked upright without difficulty. By my estimation, it fit perfectly.

All right
, I thought, leaning against the pedestal and staring into the dull orange pentagram.
I found it. What now?

I leaned over as far as I could before the gash in my ribs prevented me from dipping lower, trying to see if there were buttons somewhere to activate the artifact. I figured there might a message inside. Coordinates. Pictures. Anything that would make locating it in the bowels of the dinosaur ship seem at least
somewhat
worthwhile. After all, I’d basically signed my life away by venturing so deeply underground without verifiable exits for miles. Even if I retraced my steps to the cathedral and found it staffed by a rescue team with cold drinks, med kits, and comfortable beds to rest in, there was a strong possibility I would expire before I ever reached it.

I fumbled around the pedestal for a while. Cursing. Kicking. Pressing my swollen knuckles against the pentagram. Doing anything and everything to get it up and running. In the end, though, it snapped to life on its own, or at least I think it did. I may have set off a chain reaction with one of my ingenious attempts at hacking into the device, but I wasn’t moving at all when it finally ignited and descended into the pedestal with a whirring sound.

I stepped back and watched the walls of the shaft around me light up like the mess hall on the
Hummel
after a long night of heavy drinking, which is only remarkable when you consider the brightest light I’d seen in nearly a day had been the barroom-dull reflection of the cathedral dome in the hazy Furnace atmosphere.

The most astounding thing about the lights was how they displayed on pre-grooved tracks, not just sockets or bulbs. I didn’t realize they formed a moving picture until they swept down the shaft behind me and the images roared to life in vibrant red.

TSCHARIA
, the first panel read.

Beside the declaration was a detailed etching of the clown king at the city’s center, which had been painstakingly depicted at the height of its prosperity and opulence. I’ve mentioned several times that it reminded me of an ancient Greek or Roman city, and I think that impression has stuck with me more from what I saw in the maintenance shaft than anything I observed on the surface.

As I stared at the etching and began to piece the tale together, it occurred to me that the clown king
wasn’t
Tscharia like I’d initially thought. Tscharia was the name of the city. The capital of Furnace, not its king. I wasn’t sure if that answered more questions than it raised, but at least it
was
an answer.

Continuing down the tunnel, I observed a historical reenactment of the day that the clown king and his disciples arrived on the planetoid. If I understood the panels correctly, they hadn’t stumbled on Furnace by chance. They’d been banished from some Earth-like world in a gigantic spaceship, which I assumed was the vessel surrounding me. I couldn’t decipher the justification for their banishment by the supreme deity—who was symbolized by a clenched fist and one emphatic index finger—but it was clear that the panels had a sympathetic bend to the monsters’ plight and I therefore interpreted the remaining etchings with a grain of salt.

Forlorn, the hideous creatures (who apparently hadn’t been so hideous once upon a time) had built the city of Tscharia and filled it with beautiful fountains, statues, paintings, libraries, and even looping holographic displays of moving artwork, albeit perverse. The technology they’d developed apparently rivaled that of modern humans, and this had been a long, long time ago. Thousands of years at least, perhaps millions. Who knows where they would have wound up without complete isolation? After all, what good was a fleet of spaceships if your physical body couldn’t leave the surface?

Clearly, they’d tried to forge a life out of the wastelands for their forsaken people, but the planet itself eventually transfigured them into something far worse than the monsters they’d been on their home worlds. Their architectural wonders had fallen to ruin, the living artwork had likewise faded, and their collective mind had fractured. There was still some semblance of order and cooperation among their ranks, it seemed, but it was mostly fueled by blind, dogged belief in the poisonous teachings of the clown king of Tscharia.

I was surprised to realize that the plight of the demons resonated with me beyond an obligatory, surface-level expression of pity. It didn’t take much imagination to see how I could wind up in the same situation if the Crown government suddenly decided I was a liability and it was better to send me off somewhere to rot than deal with me themselves. I’m well aware that my story is a serious threat to their expansionist propaganda should it ever be made public. I’ve seen them dispose of countless other political threats in the same manner for lesser offenses, declaring them ideal colonists uniquely suited for life in deep space and then banishing them with a  wave of the royal scepter (at least, metaphorically speaking). Exile is often more convenient for governing bodies than genocide, I’ve found, since there are now seemingly endless colonies where problems can be quietly tucked away to be ignored. Sometimes, I wonder if that’s the only reason we’re hell-bent on interstellar Manifest Destiny in the first place.

It’s generally a good PR move to at least feign mercy towards a disparaged people, though, even if you are providing them comically insufficient resources on uninhabitable balls of rock. That’s why they don’t kill them outright. As far as the Crown is concerned, the troublemakers can denounce the government all they want from soapboxes hundreds of millions of light-years from the ears of the voting citizenry. They’ll never be able to relay the actual reasons they’ve been cast out to sea, and they’ll be forgotten altogether once enough time has passed to render their social and political causes irrelevant.

While my experiences on Furnace to that point gave me the gut feeling that the banishment of the clown king and his subjects was justified (or at least more so than the political radicals the Crown allegedly deports at the slightest whiff of dissent), I can understand how the exile had driven them insane. This wasn’t just a distant colony in the same galaxy, remember. As far as our scanners and naked eyes could detect, Furnace was a whole universe unto itself. The natives were cut off from every other aspect of the humanoid reality, and judging by the state of the city, it had been that way for a very long time.

In their shoes, I may have cracked the same way, much like I assume I would on Pluto Station. Maybe even worse. To cope with a completely fucked-up world, I may have begun to worship the most fucked-up creature I could find and accept his lunatic ramblings as genuine enlightenment. It’s happened throughout history, human and otherwise. An opportunist arises from the downtrodden masses with a convenient scapegoat for their ubiquitous misery, and forsaken people fill their mouths and hearts with the misdirected hatred he spews to channel their desperation into some tangible, destructive force. They are suffering, after all, so why shouldn’t others suffer, as well? They are victims of circumstance, so why not create new victims so that they can reclaim some measure of power in their own lives? Carve out a place in the universe, in this case through the literal carving of flesh? And it can’t be done merely for the sake of carving. It must be done in the name of a greater cause or else their conscience will object.

I don’t think that idea is particularly misleading or, for that matter, revolutionary. At least using Earth as an example, the theory has significant historical basis. How many holy wars have been manufactured out of sheer restlessness, despair, and the feeling that our lives are worthless within the greater whole? How many soldiers of God across countless religions have willingly gone to their deaths solely for the prospect of immortality, whether in a literal, transcendent sense or through the legacy of their championed cause? And the more corruptible the cause, the easier it is to recruit the young and disenfranchised. They don’t have a voice or a purpose, so they’ll seek both wherever they can be found.

Reading through the history of the demons, I pitied them, but only for a moment. Only until I was forced to take a hard look at whether or not I was a cog in that same misguided machine. The Crown may have more credibility on a secular level than there was during the Crusades, or centuries of European and American Imperialism, or the Second Dark Ages, but I have reason to at least be suspicious that it’s merely a more refined version of the same cultural angst and desire for immortality.

Saying so may put me at risk for immediate exile and dishonorable discharge from the fleet for manufactured reasons, but this is supposedly a classified document (which, I should point out, is inadmissible in a DOIA court since it is not a public trial and I have not exposed military secrets) and it doesn’t change the facts. It’s always startling to see an enemy in a new light, and although I won’t even attempt to argue that finally having proper context made me question whether or not the demons truly
were
an enemy (they were still trying to kill me or at least make me suffer and have to be afforded some accountability for their actions), it didn’t seem nearly as black and white as it had before. For all I knew at the time, they could have seen us as invaders trying to take their land, or denizens of that most supreme deity who’d sentenced them to eternal deaths millennia ago. It all could have been a colossal misunderstanding.

I knew better than that, of course, and upon further reflection, decided they must have had some form of access to our reality even if it was access through a state of consciousness rather than physical form. That’s what ultimately swayed me away from complete empathy and regret. They knew about us, or at least the clown king did, and therefore knew our vulnerability. I can see no other way that their legend or their nightmarish forms could have permeated human culture from so far away. Even if they’d inhabited Earth once upon a time, I find it hard to believe that the collective memory of their presence would have endured across mass extinctions and rebirths. They must have manifested in our reality throughout the ages.

I continued to study the etchings. The panels mesmerized me enough that I forgot where I was for a while, but pain eventually overwhelmed curiosity and I found I didn’t have the time or energy to read any more. The history stretched back down the shaft as far as I could see, after all, and I was already on the verge of collapse. I think I managed to decipher the gist of the story anyway, and that’s how I discovered what I consider the true identity of the wasteland planet, at least in human terms: