Harsh Oases (17 page)

Strung from the two biggest, most solidly anchored posts, the hammock and its ropes nonetheless creaked as Sorrel shifted her position to clamber atop Klom. She began to kiss and tease him. “Where’s the nasty old cruft then, sweetling? Nothing to stop me from rubbing my boobs here now, is there?”

Most unusually, Klom did not at first respond. Sorrel persisted however, and soon the shipbreaker began to react enthusiastically. One massive hand encompassed both her breasts, while the other cupped her whole ass. Straddling Klom’s hips, Sorrel looked back over her shoulder to grab his penis and guide it home. But suddenly she stopped.

“Sorrel, what’s wrong?”

“I—that thing is
watching
us!”

“What thing?” Klom raised himself up on one elbow. “Oh, Tugger?” The beast sat up on its back haunches attentively, legs askew toward one side and its bifurcate horn aimed straight at the couple. If interpreted anthropomorphically, its face expressed goofy bemusement. “But he’s watched us every night since I found him.”

“I know! But it’s different now. We don’t know what he is, or what he can do, or what he wants. It shivers my bones!”

“Tugger? Never! He’s just my happy little friend. Like you and Airey.”

Sorrel looked incensed, and she bounced off Klom to stand on the dirt floor. “So that’s all I am to you? Some kind of pet? Where’s my dress?”

Klom swung his legs around to sit upright. “No, Sorrel, you’re not a pet. That’s not what I meant to say. Don’t twist my words around. You know I can’t always say things just right. I love you. Come back, please.”

Standing dressed by the plank door with a hand on the latchstring, Sorrel said, “Forget it, Klom. You seem to love this—this monster more than you do me. So why don’t I just leave you two to whatever obscene pleasures you can contrive!”

Klom scowled. “Now, Sorrel, you know that’s not—”

“And Airey deserves more respect from you too!” she yelled, then was gone.

Klom swore. He kicked his gamecube off the hassock and banged the door open. But Sorrel was already out of sight

Tugger continued to beam benevolently, however, and eventually Klom calmed down. Before too long, both man and beast were snoring peacefully.

* * *

Klom’s three weeks of probation were nearly over. He had spent the time increasingly frustrated by the realization that the dismantling of the
Caution Discharge Zone
was proceeding swiftly without him. For one thing, he was losing taka and paisa every day he sat idle. His dreams of quitting the Yard and retiring to Chaulk seemed to recede further each day. To conserve his meager savings—depleted drastically by the advance charges from the Radius Seven lab—Klom had taken to eating the very scraps from Kitchen Number Twelve which he had once foreseen as supplying Tugger’s needs. (Luckily, that amiable companion continued, however improbably, to flourish on nothing more than air and water.) Soliciting the leftovers from the friendly but sardonic Bergamot cook named Kirsh was a chore that grew more odious to Klom each day. Kirsh’s face, a pockmarked, damascene blue, would crack in a sarcastic snaggle-toothed smile as he handed over the leaky package of oris, always accompanied by some such jest as, “Here’s fare fit for a fourstrand, Klom—a starving, poverty-stricken, imbecilic fourstrand, that is.”

But the loss of pay and the humiliating survival tactics represented the lesser of Klom’s irritations. He found himself angrier over being excluded from the more intangible aspects of dismantling the starliner, the conversion of something useless into something useful. His earlier work on the ship had begun to foster an intimate bond with the vessel, an emotional linkage he had come to relish on previous jobs. And this particular bond had been sanctified in his blood (however inexplicably counterfactual that spillage had since become). It felt as if Klom had abandoned a responsibility to tend to the corpse of a loved one, leaving the job to strangers.

Few of these feelings were cast in words, either internally or to Sorrel or Airey. Nonetheless Klom experienced deep disquiet and irritability over this exclusion.

Each day he would spend hours on the shore, gazing out at the starliner, Tugger lying patiently in the sand at his master’s feet. Tugger carried about a chewed hank of rope with him, and, from time to time, by obvious gestures, would try to interest Klom in a pulling game. Klom played with his pet once in a while, but more often Tugger was ignored, left to sleep or to fret at the frayed ends of the rope with his exiguous shoulder hands.

The mountainous ship just offshore exhibited few exterior changes, and Klom was left to fantasize about the altered conditions of the interior. When the ship-to-shore ferry returned each night full of weary workers, Klom would be present at the dock to glower at Rapaille, who made certain to shelter himself amidst a knot of the brawniest breakers. But Klom never made a move on the overseer, knowing that the surest way to extend his probation would be another physical assault.

When Klom grew weary of staring out to sea, he retreated to one of the scrapheaps with his watercutter. There he would refine his already masterful carving skills by cutting up worthless old pods and wall fragments and contorted rebar with his illimitable tool, until the filthy dirt became a sea of mud. The fastidious Tugger chose to remain out of the way of the splattering, but always within easy hail.

It was at just such mindless pursuits that Sorrel found Klom this late afternoon.

“Klom! Are you mad? It’s Festival Eve! The celebrations will start soon!”

The Festival of the Triple Sunset was an annual rite celebrating the conjoined westering of Great, Lesser and Least Suns. On the first night the three suns would set within several minutes of each other. On the final night the descent of the orbs would occur simultaneously, resulting in an incredible celestial display inspiring much reverence from the more devout citizens of the Yard and greater Aspema.

Klom holstered his watercutter. “I don’t care about any stupid Festival.”

“Oh, shut up and get over here. You’ve been moping for three weeks now, and enough is enough. You’re going to have a good time tonight if I have to carry you on my shoulders!”

This ridiculous image amused Klom so much he laughed heartily for the first time in days. Squelching through the mud, he embraced Sorrel, causing her to squeal.

“You’re filthy! Put me down!”

Klom complied. Tugger, excited, raced over and jumped up to lick Klom’s face.

“Okay, let’s go get drunk. Soon I’ll be earning my wages again, so I’ll treat tonight.”

“Don’t you want to change up first?”

“The hell with it. If I get drunk enough to fall down, my clothes will be dirty already.”

The twilit, odoriferous streets and alleys of the bustee already swarmed with representatives of two dozen races. Chattering, clicking, cachinnating or cawing, the impoverished breakers and sorters, stackers and drainers, matter-modem techs and vegetable slicers all seemed determined to forget their cares and woes. Interspecies camaraderie reigned. Finery of a rudimentary sort had emerged from cheap chests and cardboard closets to adorn bodies spanning the spectrum from elongated to stubby, rugose to seamless, writhing to dignified.

Vendors with small braziers sold pungent kebabs of partchrumpf flesh. Bottles of liquor circulated freely from hand to tentacle to paw. Shadowy niches half-concealed the carnal explorations of chance-met lovers.

Klom moved through the exuberant chaos easily, the crowds parting before his mass. Sorrel and Tugger slipstreamed behind him. Klom gripped a half-empty flagon of toadchunder by its neck. A smear of partchrumpf grease ringed Sorrel’s mouth. Tugger’s tongue hung out.

At a cross-street, the crowd refused to give way for Klom and party, and he soon saw why. They had intersected a procession of marabouts and flagellants. Spinning their prayer wheels, swinging thuribles that wafted spicy fumes, the holybeings led an elaborately carven juggernaut pulled by a score of Sphinx. Hideous and benign wooden faces of devas gazed down implacably on the onlookers.

Sorrel shouted above the banging of drums, the keening of pandits, the crack of cattails threaded with bloody metal beads, and the blowing of horns. “Airey asked us to meet him later! He’s got the results from Radius Seven!”

“Where?”

“He claims we need to keep the news secret. No eavesdroppers. So he said to meet at three AM by the stockpens. No one will be in such an unlikely place at that hour.”

By two-thirty in the morning, Sorrel was growing weary. Klom’s vigor, unfettered from any brooding, ran unabated. Tugger dragged along gamely.

“Let’s find Airey so we can get to bed, Klom.”

“All right.”

The stockpens housed various softly lowing food beasts for the kitchens, behind shimmering, sizzling lines of force running from stanchion to stanchion. The noisome atmosphere insured that celebrants avoided the acreage.

“Airey!” yelled Klom semi-drunkenly into the luminance-cross-hatched blackness. “Here we are! Show yourself, man! Or are you too busy sucking the ten teats of a Milchmaid!”

Airey stepped from the shadows, hissing. “Quiet, you big rumpf! Do you want every bravo in the vicinity to come investigate your bellowings? I saw a pair of Grimjacks just a few alleys over! We’re here to discuss something extremely vital.”

Klom sobered up. “What have you learned about Tugger? What makes him so important?”

Airey flourished a data-palette, while Sorrel gripped Klom’s arm and leaned in closer. “Your foundling is a twelvestrand, Klom! An incredibly powerful deva, despite his seeming lack of sapience! Perhaps the only one of his kind. But unlike all other devas, he’s metastable on our ontological plane! And he might very well be the Book of Forgetting as well!”

“The Book of Forgetting? But—”

Airey gestured dismissively. “I know, I know, everyone has assumed for millennia that the Book was an artifact of some sort. But I’ve been doing research into the legend, and nothing in the fragments of lore is really inconsistent with the Book being a living creature. And after a little cogitation, I realized how your pet saved your life. He doesn’t travel back in time, but crosswise! He forgets one universe while remembering another. And somehow he shunted the essence of your consciousness onto an alternate timetrack along with him. A timetrack that lagged just a little beyond our moment, where your accident never happened. If you wish to quibble, this universe is not the one you were born in.”

The hesitant tone of Klom’s speech conveyed a slowly dawning understanding. “But then, that means—I guess Tugger is really valuable.” Klom looked down at his pet. The being whose inherently recomplicated cellular structure allowed him to transcend limitations of space and time and leap across the multiverse was busy nibbling at his own hide for pests.

Airey laughed cynically. “That’s understating the case a million times worse than a Neftali trader misrepresents his wares! With Tugger by your side, you can lay claim to all the riches in the Indrajal.”

“I don’t want so much though,” said Klom. He gathered his friends to his side. “Just enough for the four of us to leave this hard place and retire to Chaulk—”

The next voice, a basso rumble, shocked them all, although only Klom recognized it. “I am afraid no one is going anywhere.”

Bright Tide Rising floated above them, clouded by his majestatics. The sixstrand owner of the Aspema Yards stayed silent for a long moment—possibly regarding the quartet curiously through his mutable veil, although Klom could not say for sure—before speaking at last.

“A metastable creature with twice my own information density. No wonder I was unable to read it properly. It is hard to credit such a miracle, although I have never known the scientists at Radius Seven to be mistaken before. You will now give me that data-palette.”

Airey braced his spine. “Klom paid for these tests, so they belong to him. And so does Tugger.”

“Absolutely incorrect. The creature is salvage from a ship owned by me. It is mine by terms of your employment. Your co-worker will be compensated for his find. Perhaps I will give him as much as ten thousand taka.”

Sorrel chimed in. “That’s an insult! This animal is invaluable!”

“And you three are all too stupid and primitive to properly exploit such a treasure. But I am done arguing. With the creature’s entire genome on a palette, it will be simple to rebirth him, this time without any misplaced allegiances. I have no further need of any of you.

Klom felt mentally yanked in a dozen different directions. How had this horrible situation come about, from such simple and innocent impulses? But before he could speak or act, the telecosmic corona of majestatics around Bright Tide Rising seemed to squirt four solid streams of particles, distributed along four vectors.

Klom’s watercutter practically leaped into his right hand, even as he hurled himself to one side. He felt a piercing pain in his left shoulder. But the pain did not disturb his aim.

The noise that Bright Tide Rising’s legs made in falling to the ground was followed in milliseconds by the accompanying mucky splash of his separate upper half.

Klom turned to his companions. All three were stretched out unmoving on the filthy ground. One by one, he searched their corpses for wounds. But the lancelike majestatics had pierced so cleanly, yet so fatally, that Klom could detect nothing. At least their deaths had been swift. There was very little blood, and in fact his own shoulder wound was invisible and unleaking.