The Factory Trilogy 01 - Gleam (19 page)

Alan embraced the crocodile as best he could. It was far too thick for him to get an arm all the way around it, but he reached beneath and clutched a fold of skin at its throat. He ignored the pain as he lay down on its spiny back and held on for his life as it reared up and tried to twist around. Those teeth closed just inches from his side. The icy chill of the green mud was working its way into his core. He moved slowly, inching his right hand forward. He wanted to move it more quickly, but he couldn’t. His fingers felt numb; if he rushed, the knife would just fall from his loose, clawed grip. Maybe his arm had been injured: maybe the tendons on the far side had been sliced and the wound was open and inviting to the putrid matter and the demonic cold of the swamp. Perhaps the crocodile had swung its tail and smashed his elbow when he was submerged. Whatever the cause, his arm wasn’t working properly.

The Boatman got in a good jab with his pole and the crocodile recoiled, grunting. Alan slid down its side. That damned bird out there in the murk shrieked again. Was Eyes drowning? Already dead? Eyes had paid the price for Alan’s foolishness once more.

Eyes – Eyes! Don’t get distracted
.

Alan heaved himself back up onto the beast’s back, pain incising itself across his face. With a howl he dug his heels in and propelled himself forwards, almost overbalancing
as he fell forward over the crocodile’s head into the danger zone, but just in time he rocked back and raised his hands up, and then brought them down and plunged his thumbs into the crocodile’s beautiful eyes. He felt the gelatinous orbs squeak and saw them pop out of the protruding sockets. The crocodile screamed and whistled and he wrapped his hands around the eyes and squeezed. His left hand was more responsive still than the right, but still they both burst and jelly splattered out between his fingers. He pulled and felt the cords tighten and then snap, and the crocodile spasmed and dived into the sludge, but then it rose straight back up again, roaring.

The animal was terrified and confused, making sounds like nothing Alan had ever heard, and he let himself fall while the crying blind monster rampaged away into the swamp, and a chorus of shrieking birds rose unseen into the air.

Alan opened his eyes to a grey-white nothing, and a sense of doom stitched all the way through him. It took him a moment to remember where he was: on the raft. On his back, on the raft. He sat up.

Eyes was there, lying on his back as Alan had been, still unconscious. He was wrapped up in something rough and brown: the Boatman’s cloak. The Boatman himself was gone and Churr was poling the raft through the green sludge. Spider was watching the swamp, poised, hand on hilt. Nora was sitting upright, eyes closed, and breathing deeply. She seemed to have calmed down.

‘Where’s the Boatman?’ Alan asked.

‘Croc got him,’ Churr said.

‘No,’ Alan said. ‘No, it didn’t. He was here when I …’ Words failed him. He felt sick. He made a gesture with his thumbs. ‘He was still fighting.’

‘He was bitten.’

It was possible – probable, even. ‘Shit,’ Alan said. ‘Shit,
shit, shit. Where’s that whisky? Give me some of that whisky, Spider.’

He concentrated on drinking for a short while. The raft moved slowly.

‘You took the boatman’s cloak and wrapped Eyes in it,’ Alan said.

‘Yes,’ Spider replied. ‘It was Eyes or you. We thought Eyes had the greater need.’

Alan nodded. ‘What was the Boatman like?’ he asked. ‘Y’know. Underneath?’

Spider shook his head. ‘Different,’ he said.

Alan did some more drinking.

‘How do you know which way to go, Churr?’

‘Nora pointed. She came up out of her babble and pointed this way. Then she went quiet.’

‘Is she meditating again?’

‘Something like that.’

From out of the mist came a distant crocodilian roar, which rose and broke. Churr and Spider both tensed, Alan jumped, but Nora did not so much as open her eyes. Alan thought he could hear pain in the sound. He knew it was the same animal they’d fought off. The surface of the swamp was not so smooth any more, but there was nothing else to be seen – no ridged backs breaking it, no bubbles.

Alan put his hand on Eyes’ forehead. His friend was still breathing, but he looked so cold and pale. He looked dead.

‘I’m sorry,’ Alan said quietly. ‘Sorry, Eyes.’

‘What are we looking for?’ asked Churr, after a few minutes more. ‘A building? An island of junk?’

‘I don’t really know,’ Alan said. ‘Some kind of shoreline.’

‘I didn’t think we’d reach the swamp,’ Churr said. ‘I thought Dok was above the swamp. Close, but above. What if the swamp has taken it?’

‘We will ascend again,’ Nora said calmly. She still didn’t open her eyes. ‘I know the way now.’

‘What? How? And where?’

Nora didn’t answer.

‘Nora,’ Alan said, trying not to sound too desperate, ‘Eyes needs help. Can you help him? Will there be anyone down here to help us?’

Nora still didn’t answer.

*

Time passed. There was nothing solid for her to push on now, so Churr laid the pole down in the boat and lifted up a paddle. After a while, Spider took over, and then Alan, who felt the paddle hit something solid and looked down to see a slimy skull looking back up at him. Then the swamp was full of bones and rags, all bobbing silently.

‘How many dead has the swamp released from their resting places?’ Spider asked nobody in particular. Nobody answered. He reached into the luminous liquid and withdrew another skull. ‘I’m going to do some drawing,’ he said.

Alan thought about saying something, but didn’t. He turned away.

Birds shrieked. Forms loomed through the mist, and then, when Alan was expecting to encounter a rotten structure or an island of waste, there was nothing there. Sometimes he heard something splashing around, or saw movement in the swamp. On more than one occasion he caught himself waking up and realised that he’d been dozing. Once he was awakened by the sound of a baby crying. He dreamed about Mother Margo and her little coffin, that she was floating through the sludge on a black metal cube. He woke up again, and saw more white and green.

‘Oh, for fuck’s
sake
!’ he shouted.

Churr and Spider kept swapping around, switching positions, just to mess with him, he was sure of it. He knew it. He heard them whispering to each other and laughing. Once he heard Eyes speak and spun around, only to find him lying back down again. He knelt and slapped Eyes across the face. ‘I know you’re awake,’ he hissed. Spider and Churr didn’t say anything. Spider was still drawing that stupid skull – though when Alan looked, the drawing was a mess, just a great tangle, and there was nothing like a skull discernible in it – and Churr was vomiting over the side of the raft.

The swamp grew busier with creatures and with movement. Large dragonflies alighted, black-winged, and then they rose again. Their buzzing hummed through the
mist. Pale, gnarled trees with crooked trunks began to appear, with roots that looked like intestines piled up. Thick reeds rustled as if they themselves were turning to watch the raft pass. Alan had the sense of space closing in. He took up the pole, and found that he could feel something solid with it. Soon there were walls on either side: dark, slimy, endless, occupied by a rash of large slugs and snails. He lit the paraffin lamps at the corners of their raft. Trees clustered thickly at the sides of the channel, many growing from the walls themselves, as if they were climbing up out of the swamp. He tried to pick a strange red flower from one of the closer specimens, only to find that they weren’t flowers but long centipede-type insects curled up into balls. In brushing the tree, he disturbed a load of them and they fell into the raft, wriggling furiously. He stamped on those he could see and spent the next few hours shuddering, imagining that he could feel them crawling beneath his clothes.

Of course, it was probably Eyes’ clothes that they would have found their way into, as he was just lying there unmoving.

Now the substance of the swamp was less strange – it was thicker, muddier and full of dead leaves and twigs – but it smelled worse. The smell of decay burst up out of it, disturbed by the raft. It had a rainbow sheen, and in places puddles of oil rested on the top. Small things moved in it, and through the trees; probably just insects, or rodents. That bird shrieked again.

Alan used Snapper to knock snails from the wall and into the boat. He aimed for good-sized ones, about the size of his head. ‘Sorry, Snapper,’ he murmured, ‘but needs must.’ He could try to cook a snail himself – that might impress the others. Though why he should try to impress them, he didn’t know. It was as if Spider and Churr weren’t even there; they weren’t even present in their own heads.

He stabbed at the swamp with the pole and shouted.
This is too slow. My son is in danger and we are stuck on this stupid fucking raft, bloody punting along in the dark, knowing nothing
. He shouted again, and screamed, echoing up the chasm. There was the fluttering of wings above as the noise disturbed things that he couldn’t see. He fell to his knees and cried, though the sounds he was making sounded strange to him, distorted by the space he was in. He rolled over and lay on his side. He wanted to see his parents. He wanted to be a boy again. He wanted to relive all of those moments when his mother had got home from work and given him a hug. He convulsed with sobs as he remembered his father, that smell of dye and whisky. All those hours his parents had spent making cloth for the Pyramid robes, and for its wall hangings, for its flags and its rituals: time spent away from him and away from each other. He thought about Marion, going to her Stationing every shift, and him, too. All those hours at the Station, reading the discs and punching the cards accordingly. All of the Bleeding. They should have spent that
time together, talking, playing with Billy, watching the dragons, watching the moons, making love.

In the Pyramid, Stationing was a moral obligation. The enthusiasm and commitment with which you went to your Station was one of the factors in determining exactly what your Station was, and what kind of quarters you were allocated. If you did well – if you rhapsodised about your Stationing, if you went willingly, if you didn’t express any interest in doing anything else – you’d get noticed, and promoted to another Station, on the floor above. You could work your way up, in theory becoming an Astronomer or an Alchemist, if you didn’t make the cut at School, or even Management. But most people were born into Admin or Manufacturing and stayed there all their life, perhaps ascending by several storeys, and then they were shunted off into the Gardens when they were incapable of performing their Stationing any longer, and in the Gardens they died.

Maybe better the Gardens than this dank, stinking hell-hole, though
. Alan looked around him. He looked at Eyes lying sick on the damp raft; at Churr and Spider acting like mad people. That was the trade-off: perform your Stationing, and you can stay warm and dry and well fed. Oh, and bled. Don’t forget the Bleeding. But for all that, you get … No. Alan shook his head. He remembered the seeping welt on Billy’s palm. He remembered his parents. They’d been kind to him. There was kindness
and safety in the Discard. Well, there had been, before the Pyramidders razed Modest Mills.

Alan’s Stationing had usually consisted of standing at a long desk full of slots, each numbered with a ten-digit number. There was a large clipping device attached to the desk that reminded him of a long set of jaws with sharp teeth. Baskets hung from the wall next to him, full of cards, and from the ceiling extended tubes from which, every minute, small stone discs fell. The discs were patterned with symbols that matched various symbols on the cards in the baskets. Alan had to take a card from the basket corresponding with the tube from which the disc had fallen, and then he clipped it in accordance with the symbols on the disc. Then he put the card in the slot on the desk indicated by the pattern on the disc. Then he dropped the disc into a kind of bucket-on-rails that he’d kick down the room once it was full. The bucket passed through a flap in the wall and disappeared. Alan had once stuck his head through the flap to see where they went, but all he saw was a long tunnel with shining rails disappearing down a slope and round a corner. That had earned him an extra Bleed. Presumably the discs were collected from wherever they went and then somehow passed back up to the storey above to be reused the following day. That would be the purpose of somebody else’s Stationing. The Stationings were supposed to be performed reverently; they were rituals. They were to be performed in the right robes, in the right manner, with the
right words being spoken. The Stations were lit in a particular way and certain scents emanated from censers and candles. At Alan’s usual Station, the air was full of a fresh smell, something organic and green – something that he had not yet encountered in the Discard. It was a nice smell; that had been the best thing about it. But the dullness had been deathly, and the frustration of being told repeatedly that there were no consequences to his Stationing had come close to driving him mad.

‘The Stationing is a ritual that will develop your mind,’ he’d been told by one of the more patient Assistant Administrative Managers. ‘That is its purpose. Your time and date of birth determine your personality and your own particular defects, which in turn determine the Stations you will be assigned to throughout your life. The Stations are chosen in order to correct you. The timing of your Stations is dictated by the positioning of Satis, Corval and the stars. The Astronomers pass on shift and Station changes down to us here in Administration, and we obey. So you never know, Wild Alan’ – the Assistant Administrative Manager smiled – ‘perhaps some cosmic realignment is on its way and you’ll be re-assigned to the Manufacturing Sector. Some of their work is a little more intricate.’ The smile vanished. ‘But you have to be achieving your Vitals here first, of course. Otherwise you’ll miss out on this re-assignment and have to wait until the next one. If there is a next one.’

Alan had his doubts about the Astronomers. Their methods and rulings were complex and arcane – impossible for
anybody not of their order to understand – and he suspected that they merely promoted and re-assigned the most obedient – or, no, probably up there in their Observatories they just set all of the brass machines spinning and got drunk out of their skulls and ordered the rest of the Pyramidders’ lives at random. You only had to look at some of the Management to know that there was no moral dimension to the way it worked. The idea that the Stations shaped your mind and somehow prepared you for more challenging Stations or for responsibility for those below you, was demonstrably false … unless part of the whole Pyramid design depended on some of those higher up in the hierarchy actually being cruel and unpleasant; unless some Pyramidders were assigned Stations that actively
shaped
them that way …

Alan sat up in the raft. Something was scraping against the side. He slowly turned to look. At first, he couldn’t see anything, but then there it was: a rock. They must be near the shore. But the rock was gently moving. Alan reached down and lifted it up. It was as heavy as it looked. He poked at the swamp with the punting pole, and there was a good three feet between the surface and the bottom. And yet the rock had been floating. He threw it back into the swamp and it sank, and then it bobbed back up.

Alan lay back down.

*

Nora came back to her body at some point. ‘I’ve been looking ahead,’ she said, by way of explanation. ‘I’ve
been projecting. My people have a way of leaving their bodies behind and journeying onwards.’

Alan wondered who she was talking to. Neither Churr nor Spider appeared to be listening, and he wasn’t either, really. Eyes was not dead, but he was as good as dead. Maybe they should have left him behind after all. Nora tutted when she saw him lying there in the Boatman’s cloak, and she used her skinning knife to dribble a little of her moss juice – now fermenting, to judge by the smell – between his lips.

‘Has nobody been caring for poor Eyes?’ she asked.

Nobody answered.

Spider was still scribbling away. His drawings looked incredible: some of the most intricate and powerful geometries he had ever created, with here and there sketchy records of some of the swamp flora. He was not eating, not even drinking, though sometimes he still stopped to build a roll-up with his trembling fingers. There were green fibres in his beard that looked like a kind of lichen.