Rift (27 page)

That night as the fire burned down, Bitamalar, as Galen referred to the creature, came over twice more, bestowing food packets on the woman, which she devoured alone. The lesson was not lost on Nerys, that food is power. And perhaps the lesson was not lost on the orthong, that food is not all that matters.

8
 

1

Day sixteen
. Dante’s entourage crowded around a small mound of machinery painted bright yellow. Isis wore an enormous dress roped with peeling fake pearls. From her headdress trailed a length of black lace which fluttered each time she coughed. Kalid and Marie stood by as Reeve held forth on the wonders of the dome machinery, half truth, half fabrication.

“This device,” Dante said, indicating the squat yellow machine labeled
SWANWICK COMPRESSOR
.

“This is a compressor,” Reeve said, as Marie rolled her eyes.

“Yes, yes, compressor, we can read,” Dante said with impatience. Speaking loudly for the benefit of the small crowd, he continued, “And a compressor works in such a manner as?” He smiled at his followers, showing off the Spaceman, his latest acquisition.

Reeve knew that Dante liked him to use industrial words to impress his jinn. He obliged. “Air is drawn in at the casing by a rotating impeller that’s driven by an electric motor. This one has four impellers to deliver very high-pressure air out the other end.”

“Im-pellers, yes,” Dante said. His doughy features
brightened as he said, “Im-pellers will bring us good air under high pressure.” The jinn clapped at this conclusion, as though it were an accomplished fact, not a vain hope. But as a hedge against failure, both Dante and Isis now wore breathers. It had been an ugly introductory lesson to the breathers, with Isis gagging and Dante alternating between rage and tears as he struggled with the simple dexterity and patience needed to apply one. When Dante was in a better mood, Reeve and Marie had managed to convince him that
they
must wear the breathers too, or their service to Dante would be short.

Meanwhile the supply of breathers was rapidly dwindling, with the appliance’s useful life proving to be about five days, a defect that could be fixed if Reeve had the tools and the skills, which he did not.

Dante waved at Reeve to continue.

“This one probably uses mated lobed impellers. They revolve in opposite directions, driven by meshed gear wheels.”

Marie mumbled, “You don’t know if this one is lobed.” She smiled at Dante, who bowed deeply. Still smiling, she muttered to Reeve, “Don’t promise more than you can deliver.”

“Methed gear wheelth,” Isis lisped as she absently pawed through a tray of jewelry held by an attendant. These attendants appeared regularly, bearing new platters of trinkets. If Isis chose a trinket, she bestowed a coin on the servant. On closer view, Reeve saw that these coins were plastic game coins, perhaps legal tender of the realm, or perhaps only mementos of the queen’s favor.

They had been at this tour for over an hour, and Dante’s courtiers were growing bored. When the one called Pinocchio yawned hugely, Dante frowned, pushing out his lower lip.

Observing his lord grow distressed, Kalid spoke up:
“My lord, a ship has just now arrived, fully laden. It may amuse to watch its treasures unload.”

At that moment Spar and Loon appeared at the back of the crowd, which now parted as they were escorted forward by Bunyan.

“Quixote,” Dante said. He bowed with a flourish, revealing the inked curls of his head tattoos. This bow was followed by the dip of the entire entourage. Only Isis never bowed, it being a close thing whether with all her hair and headdress she’d be able to raise her head again. “And Princess Loon,” Dante added.

Spar nodded in military fashion, while Loon cocked her head at all the bowing and scraping.

In the pause, Kalid repeated, “The ship, my lord?”

Startled, Dante swirled on his captain. “Ship? Ship? Am I deaf?” Here he appealed to his jinn, who laughed uneasily.

“Thip?” chirped Isis.

“Ships arrive every hour! Who is amused by such a thing? You may keep your ships, Kalid; we have larger matters before us!” He waved his hand to encompass the towering machinery crowding in from every side. “My Spaceman must tour his laboratory! Medea must catalogue the dome holes!”

“Dome hothes,” Isis said. She shook her head sadly, pouting her violet lips.

Kalid bowed his acquiescence, his face carefully neutral.

“But we tire of compress-ors and un-peelers for now,” Dante said. “Dante will present his own wonders to the Spaceman.” In his best oratorical manner, he intoned: “We will tour the dungeons of Atlantis!” He flicked his wrist at Pinocchio, adding, “You have no science in you. Take your useless friends and beat it.”

Led by Isis, the entourage shuffled away.

“I should attend my ships, Lord Dante,” Kalid said, moving off.

“You work too hard, Kalid! Show us the dungeons and the ships be damned.”

At this, Kalid led the way, followed by Dante, Reeve, Spar, Marie, and Loon. They snaked through the ribbons of pipes and great vats until Kalid stopped them and, bending down, lifted first one, then the other of two large metal doors set into the floor. A gust of air carried a fetid stench from below. Selecting a torch from a stack, Kalid lit it, fumbling with a tiny lighter. He and his torch disappeared into the hole, down a set of steps, with the others following.

Loon held back.

“What is it?” Reeve asked. She had been teaching him some sign language, and now she used two signs he knew: she said with her hands. Her nostrils flared, as though the smells were not entirely unwelcome.

“Stay here then,” Reeve told her. But when he turned to go, she followed him into the recess.

They were in an underwater chamber. The flame illuminated nothing but their faces for now, but Reeve could hear the steady drip of water nearby, and, in the distance, the sounds of gurgling pipes. The place reeked of human waste.

As Kalid lit a torch on the wall, a voice called, “A light! Yonder, yonder!”

Another voice joined in. “Valences, chemical bonds, isomers!” And another, farther in the distance: “Refraction. Also, diffraction! The blue color of the sky due to scattering of sunlight with short wavelengths of blue!”

“Quiet!” Kalid roared.

Spar mumbled next to Reeve, “No prison. This here’s where they keep their crazy folk.”

“Show us Madame Curie,” Dante urged.

The torchlight was directed to the first cell, where a face appeared between the bars. A mass of wiry hair surrounded a woman’s face, so grimy her features were
obscured. “My lord!” she breathed. “Did you bring my mail?” Her voice was plaintive, childlike.

Dante moved closer. “Did you fix my dome home?”

She cast her eyes down, shaking her head.

“Then you shall have no mail!” Dante bellowed. “They say Madame Curie knew science. But all she knew was radio-ogy!”

“Radio-ogy,” she giggled. Then her voice came deep and sane: “Or was it radiology, Lord Dante?”

He cocked his head, as though considering. “I forget, actually. But in any case, you failed.” Gesturing for Kalid to lead on, he said to the group, “These are all my readers.”

“The punishment for failure is steep,” Marie observed.

“Not punishment! They’re fed and clothed until we need them, when the dome engines start up again. These will be your helpers, Medea. My jinn are ignorant. But these are scientists!”

“Socrates,” Kalid announced at the next cell.

An emaciated man with a very long beard lay in the corner.

“Old man!” Dante snapped.

From the corner, the man whispered: “On the other hand, the whole fusion process, it could be reengineered! Take a while, of course, and I’d need my laboratory.…”

“You
had
a laboratory,” Dante said with some kindness. “Remember?”

“No,” the prisoner said, as though speaking to himself, “it was just a big, broken terraform dome.”

Dante’s expression froze for a moment, and Reeve watched for a reaction to this insolence. But Dante only shrugged and moved on, saying, “That was harsh.
A big, broken terraform dome.”
He sighed. “Socrates has let his failure make him bitter.”

Reeve didn’t want to see any more. Dante’s cruelty was revolting. He tried to get Kalid’s attention, to appeal
to him, but Kalid avoided looking at him, his face carefully neutral.

“The smell, my lord,” Marie said, putting her hand to her nose.

Dante looked peeved. “Yes, it stinks down here. Quite right, Medea. Perceptive, as always.”

Marie bowed.

“To the end then, Kalid! Show them my monsters!”

They trooped past cell after cell, passing thin arms reaching out. The inmates’ imprecations were all laced with fragments of science. Loon placed her hand in Reeve’s, and they followed Kalid as he lit another torch along the wall and proceeded past a spate of empty cells. They sloshed through water standing in puddles which glared from the torchlight, as though below them were yet other levels—the levels of hell, perhaps, as in the real Dante’s story.

They stopped in front of a cell, larger than the others, while Dante turned to face them, his eyes glittering in the flickering torchlight. “Here, my exalted visitors, is my humble servant, Pimarinun.”

Spar was the first to recognize what lay within, and his sword came swiftly from its sheath.

“Lord of Worlds,” Marie said. She stepped forward, pressing her face between the bars of the cage.

“Careful,” Spar said. “This here’s a thong.”

“I can see what it is,” she said, unmoving.

Reeve peered into the gloom of the cell. There sat one of the white aliens, immobile. The scar on Reeve’s chest flushed tight for a moment, remembering his first encounter with a creature like this.

It sat on the floor, though a bed lay within. One foot was drawn in close, so that its knee was crooked in front of its chest. Past this knee the creature watched them carefully. It wore a tattered black coat, but nothing else, and its great feet protruded from the garment, the hide yellowish and tinged with gray streaks. One
ankle bore an iron ring sprouting a chain that bound the creature to the wall.

“Keep your sword, Quixote,” Dante said. “We have taken its claws.” He nodded at Kalid, who produced a key from his pocket and opened the cell door.

Dante was the first to enter the cage. He waved the others through, laughing at their hesitation. “I have said, Pimarinun is my servant. Have it speak to us, Kalid.”

Kalid signed for a moment, and they waited for the creature to move, but it remained immobile. The orthong had no nose, but it possessed a small lateral indentation—where its mouth would be if it were human—from which issued the sound of labored breathing. At last its fingers—four of them, Reeve noted—made an answer.

“It greets you, Lord Dante,” Kalid said.

Spar snorted, apparently interpreting the signing otherwise.

Kalid shot a warning look at Spar, and proceeded to interpret: “What would the great lord learn from him today?”

“Ask him how he is feeling. He looks sick.”

Kalid signed and the creature responded with a bare motion of two fingers. “He says he feels nothing.”