11.
Slowly, cautiously, they stepped out, one foot at a time, into a carpeted receptionist area on the top and final floor. This was no lobby, but some kind of executive suite. The curvature of the nose area was evident on all sides. The two elevators opened on a small round area that was comfortably claustrophobic. It was a tight little space with inward curving walls narrower on top than bottom by a good two feet. The ceiling looked like a plate that could be removed, probably revealing miles of tangled cabling. Under the tan, stylish modesty of the ceiling were two banks of tiny silvery light globes on tracks. These lit up as the four stepped into the room. Several single-panel doors led away into unknown rooms, presumably the Bridge or Command Post or command module of the entire operation. Around the walls were thick greenish glass windows inset in small, massively built sills. Breaking the circle of doors and windows was a cramped reception counter built directly into the wall on their right as they stepped from the elevator. The four eased in and Ridge nearly expected to hear music softly playing. Instead, a screen in the wall behind the receptionist's abandoned desk flickered suddenly.
"Watch it!" Lantz said jumpily. She turned and nearly emptied a charge into the empty air where the receptionist had long ago risen and walked away to the elevator, never to return.
"It's a view screen," Ridge said. "Hold your fire."
For a few moments the screen-a square about two feet per side-flickered with grainy bluish light. Then an image of Captain Venable resolved itself against a bright background. Under white lighting, Ridge clearly made out chairs, cabinets, even a young woman sitting in the distance at a console chewing gum and sipping coffee. The background was blurry in the extremely bright light bathing Venable's background. "Greetings," the Captain said.
"Can you hear me?" Ridge said, leaning across the dark-blue counter of the receptionist desk. "This is Ridge. I'm the lead engineer from WorkPod01."
"I can hear you and see you just fine," the Captain said. His eyes looked merry, and his fresh youthful cheeks were stipple pink. His teeth were bright, his lips shiny, his enthusiasm infectious.
"We're dying out here," Ridge said, slamming a heavy palm down. He felt too overcome to say anything more.
"It's rough out there," Venable agreed.
"Get us out of here," Ridge said. "Get us to safety."
"Sure. Can you get in here?"
"Can we get in?" Ridge said, phrasing the question in a different tone that suggested 'may' instead of 'can.' As he spoke, Tomson and the others tried door handles. "All locked," Tomson muttered. "Same here," whispered Brenna and Lantz. All were angry, yet all were suddenly overcome with a memory of respect. This was their captain, and he should save them, after all. Ridge burned with concern as he leaned into the view screen. "Captain, I've lost four people in the last few hours."
"Really?" Venable said vaguely. "Who were they?"
"Mughali, Mahaffey, Yu, and Jerez."
"That's very sad," Venable said sincerely. "You should be safe where you are."
"Then you know about the mudmen?" Tomson barked.
"Yes."
"And you let us go out there without even a warning?" Tomson's face was contorted with rage. He looked old and betrayed. His mouth hung open, and his teeth were parted in a gesture of utter contempt. He showed a pink tongue rumpled in utter distaste.
"I had no choice," Venable said. "I have no choice about these things. We are locked in a crisis, and we have no choice. I'm terribly sorry."
"We?" Brenna said. She pushed Ridge aside. "Do you know I thought I had two children? Or did I? What happened to my babies?"
Venable blanched. His features retained their smooth, handsome babyness, but his eyes grew more sympathetic. "You understand, Brenna..."
"You know my name?" She placed her fists on the counter top. Her shoulder dug into Ridge's ribs, though it was a rounded shoulder and did not hurt. Ridge did feel the tenseness in her body, and wished she did not have to suffer so.
"I know all of your names," Venable said. "I know you all."
"What about my children?" Brenna said. Tears ran down her cheeks.
Venable shook his head. "It seemed better to let you be happy than to have you know the truth."
Lantz shouted over Brenna's shoulder: "It was more efficient to have us think we had lives, is what you mean."
Venable looked sad now. "Don't think that way. I am a prisoner here, and I have no illusions. I have only the thought that we are serving mankind. We are on our way to a better world."
"Isn't this the Neptune Express?" Ridge asked, feeling foolish. He felt as if he were a passenger who had taken the wrong train after a night of drinking, and now must ask strangers the embarrassing questions to get home. "Isn't this a cargo ship traveling back and forth between Luna and Neptune?"
Venable shook his head with a sweet, sad smile. "What a fine story."
Ridge waved a fist. "So what is the story here?"
Behind Venable the scene changed to one of deep space. Ridge glanced at the stars in their various diamond hues, but did not recognize any constellations. The sun was not visible. Gone was the lovely, glowing blue orb of Neptune, with the crescent Triton rising like a gray bubble of nitrogen over the Sea God's shoulder. Venable said: "The engineers and thinkers who made you dreamed up a nice name. The real name of our expedition is Nebula Express." He turned his head slightly and flicked his eyes like pointers to the crabbed tangles and spidered webs of stars that looked almost like explosions of wetness in a meadow. "That is deep interstellar space, and we are many light-years from Earth."
The little lobby was silent as they digested this. Ridge felt a hardness in the pit of his gut. "Things can't get any worse now, I'm sure." As if to give his hope the lie, he heard distant thumping noises in the bottom of the elevator shaft. With a sudden inspiration, he said: "You won't let us in there, will you?"
Venable blinked sadly. "I can't."
Brenna said suddenly: "We're not the first ones in here, are we?"
Venable blinked again, this time with a slight shake no of the head.
"Then this has been going on for a long time," Lantz said.
Tomson said: "You had no right to do this to us."
"It was either this or let mankind die out. Earth perished in a swarm of comets that circle around every hundred million years or so. There is no home left to go back to. The Nebula Express is moving faster and faster through deep space seeking a new home."
"Do you know the mudmen ate all the colonists?" Tomson said.
"Not all of us," Venable said. "Not any of us, in fact. Those were the original colonists who set out. We all donated our memory information, our DNA, our hopes and ambitions and the good and the bad of us, into the ship's laboratories. It's all automated and a hundred times redundant. The cleaners started turning sour and eating the freight, but we have plenty of growth stock and the electrochemical soup to cook it with. That's how we made you."
"You cooked us from stray memories and left-over love affairs," Brenna said in a tone that made Ridge cringe, and he hoped Venable felt her disdain. "You made soup from human lives and created us for what purpose? To fix things that cannot be fixed?"
Venable gave his clean-cut, cheerful smile. "You fix things that will require generations to fix, but they can be fixed. They must be fixed, even if eons are required. The ship was badly smashed by a stray comet."
"That would explain the charred and glazed wasteland out there," Tomson said.
Venable said: "Your kind have been laboring for ages to set things right. You are winning the battle."
"Yes, but we live our lives in those cold black tunnels," Lantz said, "while you sit in your nice cozy little CP. Is it warm in there?" She ran around the desk and banged her fists on the view screen. "Is it cozy in there?" Tears flowed down her strong features. "Is it like our workpod in there? Do you lift weights? Take showers? Listen to music?"
"No," Venable said, "I am all alone." He said it so plaintively that the four humans fell silent. Ridge felt all anger and rage leave him. It was clear that Venable was somehow as much a victim as they were. "Are you real?" Ridge asked Venable. "Are you a person?"
"Yes."
"You are the captain of the ship?"
"Yes."
"You are the captain but you are trapped in there and cannot help us?"
"I am safe from the cleaners," Venable said simply.
Tomson grew animated in the remnants of his own anger. He waved his arms and made faces to imitate the mudmen. "Those are the baseball-heads with the stitches and the slits for eyes? Round mouths?" Tomson made fishlike mouth gestures at Venable, thrusting his chin aggressively forward. Sweat glistened on his dark skin, and his eyes looked ravaged from the continuous succession of frightening revelations.
"They are the cleaners," Venable said. "They were made to take away your bodies when you die."
"Damn!" Lantz welled up with anger, then punched the desk with a loud bang. "Just like that, eh?"
"I'm sorry. It is the truth. It had to be. Things got out of control. We are hoping you can make it right. Then we can all be free again."
"What do you mean?" Ridge asked.
"When the ship is fixed, then we can go away."
"Like my children and my husband," Brenna said.
There was a moment of silence in which Venable appeared to be thinking, while the gossamer cobwebbing of stars sprawled behind his head. "Think of it this way, Brenna. You are a composite of many people, but you are the impression of some primary woman who lived a life much like the one you remember. Your babies lived in Buenos Aires and probably grew up to be fine men. They would have listened to tango and drunk and played futbol in La Bombonerita..."
"But you don't know for sure?" Brenna said. Her eyes were wide and hopeful, her teeth like little chicles of desire.
"I have no idea, nor would the most loving mother have control over their lives."
"But they lived?"
"Yes, they lived."
"Oh, thank you," Brenna said and started to cry again, this time for joy. She turned away, dabbing her eyes with her fingertips.
Ridge wondered if it was a lie, but he was happy for her. "What about Dorothy?" he asked. As Venable smiled again, before Venable could reply, he blurted: "What were their names? I loved my children but I can't picture them and I don't know their names." Truth was, he'd nearly forgotten them, and that made him sad.
"Here they are," Venable said. "Patrick Jr. after you, and Robert after Dorothy's dad."
"Then my name is Patrick?" Ridge almost laughed. Tomson did laugh. Brenna and Lantz joined in.
Tomson yelled "This is all more bullshit!" and punched the screen. He couldn't harm the wall, and Venable was unfazed. "No," Venable said, "these are all real people. They lived long ago. Brenna's two boys Ricardo Jr. and Matteo would have lived their lives back on Earth, two or three thousand years ago."
"They are dust," Brenna said, losing some of her joy. Then she brightened again: "But they lived. They had their lives." She bit her lip before continuing: "I hope they loved me as much as I loved them. Or as much as the woman who I was..." She was unable to say more.
"You see," Venable said, "it's not so bad. The engineers and thinkers meant well. They were kind people who tried to think of everything. They tried to think about how we would feel." The screen flickered, and he looked up. "Power is fading. Will need a few hours to recharge." He laughed. "I haven't talked this much in ages. I am all alone here."
And half nuts, Ridge thought.
"...Many secrets," Venable said, his voice breaking up. "...Largo, the city of the future."
"What is he saying?" Tomson asked.
"When we orbit New Earth, we'll drink to that," Venable said. He grinned. His image pulsed weakly as the batteries fed their remaining juice into the com nodes. "Great view from Largo. You and I won't be around, but our descendants will remember us."
"Tacoma!" Lantz shouted, desperate to get her share of the information. "What street did I live on?"
"Off Pearl Street near Point Defiance Park."
"Yes!" Lantz said. "Pembroke Court."
"Pembroke Court No. 34, the house with the basketball hoop on the sidewalk. That's where Dr. Werner Lantz lived, the geneticist at SeaTac University."
"So that's it," Tomson said. "You dumb shit. You gave it away. Some guy named Lantz was mixing test tubes at the lab, and he cooked a few people up."
"Shut up!" Lantz said.
"Easy," Ridge said, putting a hand on Tomson's powerful arm. "Let her have her memories. We don't know how much of this is real and how much is phony, but that's all we're going to get."
The screen flickered again. "Please come talk to me again," Venable said. He smiled as before, but against a dimmer background. The stars were gone, and the background with the coffee-drinking woman had been replaced by a kind of neutral cottony fog.
"Let us in there," Ridge said."
"I cannot, but there is a key."
"Where is the key?" Ridge pressed, leaning close.
In a fading voice, Venable said: "WorkPod01."
"How do we get in there?"
"Hurry," Venable said faintly. "Tell them the code."
"What code?" Ridge said through gritted teeth. "What is this code?"
Venable's voice was a mere whisper: "Function Check Largo." His image was now only a faint outline on a dull gray square. It was like seeing a ghost. His eyes flicked upward, to the right, as if to help his ears hear. "I hear the cleaners. They are coming up in the elevator. They can't reach me, but they can harm you."
As Venable's image faded, they could hear the turning of the elevator gears. They heard a sound like thick cables smeared with grease, stealthily clicking while coiled around their turning pulleys as the elevator car rose.
"Here," Lantz said, "there is a stairway or something. She was on her knees, pulling up a round steel trapdoor in the carpet. Ridge glimpsed yellowish light, steel ladder rungs, a steel tube leading down. "In here!" she said, lowering her wiry frame down into the vertical shaft without waiting for approval; fear for her life, Ridge supposed. He heard the fluting now, the push of air, the plaintive and deadly notes that hung in the air like drifting leaves, like phrases looking for one another to complete a thought. The elevator was audibly rumbling and shuddering now as the car drew near. Ridge thought he heard the chitter of claws on marble, the ripping sound of paw-callus on carpeting. He could well picture their round mouths. He could imagine the slit eyes opening into pairs of round goggle-shaped eyes to find the next human meal. Cleaners, Venable had called them. All part of a plan.
"Down the hatch!" Tomson said, following Lantz. Brenna followed. Even as Brenna's auburn ball of hair sank slowly down the shaft, and Ridge swung himself around to follow, the car rocked to a halt in the elevator shaft. Ridge heard the chorus of excited, hard mudman breaths now. It sounded like a complex note from a calliope, a steam-driven chord of anticipation, a regular up-note from diaphragms meant to sing in hell. Ridge banged his knee on a hard steel rung, and a knock against the ribs took his breath away, but he was too intent to notice. He was intent pulling the trap door down on his head and twirling the lock wheel which dropped steel tumblers into place to seal the floor even as the car doors rumbled open and a half dozen baseball-heads tromped out with their claws and mouths open, their sewn-up skulls and slitty sock eyes expressionless, their nostrils just pairs of yellowish holes poked in borrowed and decaying skin the color of bread-crusts.
Holding a finger over his mouth for silence, Ridge gestured to the faces looking up at him from below. "Down, down, go," he whispered.
The shaft led down interminably. It was lit at intervals by hard little industrial lights the size of one's palm, set back behind steel gratings that resembled shower drains.
"Where are we going?" Lantz whispered. She was still at the bottom, going first. Ridge could see the goose bumps on her shoulders past the quickly moving jumpsuited elbows and knees of Tomson and Brenna.
"Just keep going," Ridge said. "We have to get to WorkPod01 and blow our way in if we have to. Venable says there is a code in there."
"I just want to curl up in there and rest," Tomson said. He slowed for a moment, hung on the ladder, and took a deep breath. Brenna collided with him and apologized. Sweat ran down Tomson's dark face. His eyes were large, white, and desperate. "You want to rest?" Ridge asked full of concern.
"You're not tired?" Tomson looked up, huffing.
"Not yet," Ridge said, "but if you talk about it I might just want to curl up and sleep for a day or two."
"We've got to get to safety," Lantz whispered. Her freckles glowed in the amber light. Her eyes looked blue amid yellowish sclera.
"WorkPod01," Brenna said as if it were a promise.
"Once we get in we can rest," Ridge said. "We were safe there before. We'll be safe again."
"Oh God yes," Lantz said, climbing faster. Her bare arms made a freckled blur. Ridge wondered if she didn't get cold. He hoped the shaft would take them totally out of the nose section and maybe back onto that wall they'd seen when approaching on the moving platform. No telling how long their charges would last, and he did not relish the thought of fighting their way inch by inch out of the nose section. Now that the mudmen were triangulating in on them, it was a guess how narrow their escape might be if they succeeded in returning to WorkPod01. He didn't want to share his pessimism and fear out loud. If nothing else, WorkPod01 was their birthplace and might be the best place for them to die.
Ridge and his people were busy clambering as fast as they could and ignoring banged shins and elbows and knees. Ridge's mind kept focusing on visions of the underside of the nose area. He remembered it as a large round surface filled with protruding cubes and domes and other geometric shapes; hoses, lines, lights, elevators frozen on their cables, long thin ladders like the one they were climbing on.
Suddenly, the dark shaft seemed to brighten up to a faint, hard coppery light. The sides came away and mudmen claws reached in. Lantz screamed. Tomson bellowed and fired his rifle. Brenna shrieked as claws tore her hair. She made fists and battered at the foul-smelling faces that reached toward her with dripping, protruding teeth in little red round mouths. Mudmen were taking the sides off the shaft, and the metal parts came away with banging and clanging noises.
"We're coming into a car of some kind!" Lantz said. Her voice choked into a gurgle as something wrapped around her neck.
Tomson swore and lashed out, but a brace of mottled mudmen arms reached for him. Their skin hung in shedding shrouds, Ridge saw. Up close they smelled like a mix of dry earth and mushrooms and motor oil, plus rust and fish. It was an indescribable smell, faint like their flute words, but nauseating. Ridge struck out left and right with the butt of his rifle, hurting them, bashing their faces in and smashing their clawed fingers on the hard rungs. Brenna shrieked madly and tore at her hair as if it were infested with bugs-or maybe she was losing her mind finally.
A moment later, Ridge saw what Lantz had meant. The shaft ended at the mouth of a tank of some kind. It was a round airlock sort of thing whose lid was open.
In an explosion of action, the mudmen crowded around with reaching arms, all four humans hollered or screamed, the shaft seemed to collapse, and a chrysanthemum of light erupted from somewhere. Or was it the wind being knocked out of him by those callused fists beating them into submission? Ridge fell, and with him Tomson. Brenna and Lantz seemed to be swallowed up by a collapsing wall to one side, and they disappeared into a vast falling mountain of black anthracite and rust liberally splashed with gouts of muddy ruddy water the color of apple cider. The mudmen stared in perplexity. Brenna and Lantz were gone under a collapsed mountain of rotting hull material, and Ridge and Tomson crashed feet first into this thing that resembled a large milk canister waiting to be delivered to some Victorian household millennia ago on a leafy London street, or in Boston or someplace else where horses clattered by on early morning delivery rounds and nothing so weird as a mudman would ever show its face. Or was that another shred of memory cooked up by the engineers and thinkers Venable had mentioned? Ridge landed on top of Tomson, who collapsed with the wind knocked out of him. One or two mudmen spatted against the outside of the riveted steel container, not that Ridge could see them so much as he could hear and almost feel the soggy breaking of their bones and the sickly twisting apart of their arteries so that their sour green blood mixed with the bile inside them. Inside the container it smelled of cheesy mold and dirty socks and rotting milk, but there were no mudmen. There were no features in the container but two tightly riveted, thick plate windows the size of man's face, just enough to look out through, in a ring of shiny brass rivets. The inside was so tight and cramped that the two men were wrapped around each other with the breath knocked out, and could not help but look out the window plates. The canister shot out of the bottom of the nose and whizzed like a child's bottle rocket into the vast black interior of the ruined and burned out hulk of Nebula Express.
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