Journey - Book II of the Five Worlds Trilogy (6 page)

The attendant turned his chromed head in her direction.

“We will be stopping soon,” he said. “Please return to your seat.”

“Let me out now!”

“That is not allowable.”

“Let me out!”

The attendant turned its attention back to driving, while its right hand let go of the transport’s drive bar and reached out to restrain Visid in a tight grasp.

“Let me go!”

“I am not allowed to harm you, but I must keep you in this position until we reach our destination.”

They were nearly in darkness as the transport continued down the incline; now dim lights showed them a docking bay area as the transport’s angle evened out.

“We are nearly there,” the attendant said.

There was a single dark opening ahead of them, labeled overhead with the number 4; a single figure stood regarding the slowing transport.

For a moment Visid’s heart skipped; the figure was tall and angularly thin, and she was struck with the flashing certainty that a cruel joke had been played on her: that the chancellor had somehow raced ahead of her to this spot, where he waited to drag her to the brain cleaning he so desperately wanted her to undergo.

“Oh, no …” Visid said.

The transport stopped and stood idling with a pleasant hum while the figure in the doorway slowly approached.

The attendant continued to hold Visid in an iron grip as the figure outside, its face still hidden in the entrance bay’s gloom, now stood before the transport’s door. Visid, trapped in the exit bay, was a mere arm’s length away from the man, who now made an impatient motion for the transport’s door to open.

The attendant activated the door, which slid open; at the same time, the attendant let Visid go.

Off balance, she fell out of the transport’s exit well, into the arms of the startled figure outside, who clumsily caught her.

Even in the gloom, she could now make out the features of the figure supporting her.

It was not the chancellor.

She gasped anyway, stifling a scream at the horrible visage she beheld: a grossly high forehead leading to a balding pate of lank, long yellow-gray hair; the skin was sallow and pale, deeply pocked about the eyes and sunken cheeks. The eyes were set in hollows and were a brackish color, the whites bleeding sickly into the irises. The mouth’s lips were missing, presenting a mouth full of bad teeth in a perpetual, rictus-like smile.

“I am,” the figure said, “Sam-Sei, the Machine Master of Mars.”

Now Visid, unable to scream, fainted instead. “And you,” the Machine Master concluded, “are here to assist me.”

Chapter 7

“D
ig, damn you!”

“I am digging!”

For the thirtieth time that day, Dalin wanted to turn his shovel from the job at hand to the back of Shatz Abel’s head. The burly pirate was a madman, and everyone knew that the only way to stop a madman was by any means possible.

The flat side of a shovel, for instance.

Above the howl of wind, Dalin heard Shatz Abel’s laughter close by. He turned, and the few minuscule, unprotected portions of his face—between visor and face mask, between hood and neck—stung with the pelt of tiny, unending methane crystals. How he hated this snow! How he hated the fact that it sang when it fell, the crystals scraping one against the other in an unearthly high, pinging hiss. And how he hated, most of all, the fact that it wouldn’t stop!

Shatz Abel’s face, a few feet away, broke into a smile around his mouth hole. Again the pirate laughed.

“Tired, are we, Your Majesty? Perhaps a cup of tea on the veranda, overlooking the gardens? Perhaps a hot bath, drawn by your valet? Perhaps a warm kiss in a rose garden—”

“Shut your mouth!”

Shatz Abel laughed all the louder. Though by now Dalin knew that the bearded freebooter goaded him for his own good, as he had been doing for the last three years, it did not make it any easier to take.

In frustration and mostly anger, the King turned from Shatz Abel, thrust his shovel into the thickening pile of blue-white snow mounting around the storage shed, and began to dig again.

“Ha!” Shatz Abel said.

Suddenly Dalin threw down his shovel and faced the man again.

“When will it end?” he shouted, anger giving way to frustration now.

The pirate laughed. “Perhaps never! Maybe they’ll find us a hundred years from now, my liege, just as we are today! Frozen in place with our shovels—perhaps you’ll freeze solid as you stand over me, ready to strike me with your oversized spoon!”

Shatz Abel began to laugh hysterically—and now Dalin had the frightening thought that perhaps this huge man, who, even though he was boorish, vexatious, and loud, the king had come to depend on, had lost his own mind after so many years on Pluto. Nine years must be an eternity to a man such as Shatz Abel: and now, perhaps this last storm, already by the pirate’s admission exceeding in length and ferocity anything he had ever seen on the planet, had done him in. Nearly six weeks it had been storming, the wind at a constant howl, the snow falling at an incessant rate, requiring them to order their days by the storm’s clock, and each day uncover their supply shed and equipment tower lest they disappear from sight forever. Each day they ate the same food, drank the same store of tea, repeated the same conversations, and harbored the same thoughts. Each day had become like the last, which had been like the one before.

“Ha ha!” Shatz Abel whooped, throwing his shovel into the air where it disappeared into a blowing cloud of snow and was lost.

“What are you doing!” Dalin said in alarm; he approached the pirate, who was now jumping into the air, letting his huge body land in the most convenient drift of snow underneath.

“Ha!” Shatz Abel shouted.

Now Dalin Shar stood over the other man, gripping his shovel like the weapon he had fantasized about.

The pirate looked up at him and produced fresh laughter.

“Ha! Young King Shar, you now present the picture I proposed! Go ahead! Hit me!”

Shatz Abel began to laugh uncontrollably—and when he abruptly lunged up at Dalin, the king stumbled back, shouting, and sought to strike at the pirate in self-defense.

Shatz Abel easily warded off the blow, then grabbed Dalin’s shovel from his hands and threw it after his own, into the storm.

“You’re mad!” Dalin shouted in alarm, as Shatz Abel continued to laugh; now the insane man rose out of the snow, laughing, and lumbered forward to take the king in his grasp.

“Let me go, you lunatic! We’re both going to die!”

“No!” Shatz Abel laughed. “We’re both going to live!”

The pirate wrestled briefly with Dalin, turning him around in the direction of their habitat set within the side of a bill.

“Look!” Shatz Abel laughed.

Dalin stared; through a fog of snow, he could just make out the cleared-away entrance of their home.

“Don’t you understand?” Shatz Abel laughed, as Dalin continued to stare.

Realization began to dawn on the king.

“
I can see
it!”

“Yes,
young fool! You can see it! The storm is lessening! Soon it will stop, and we’ll be on our way!”

Dalin pushed himself out of the pirate’s grasp and jumped into the air, giving his own whoop of joy. “Finally!” he shouted.

“Yes! Finally, Sire!”

While Shatz Abel stood laughing, Dalin scrambled off into the snow and began to search desperately. “What are you doing?” the pirate laughed.

“The shovels!” Dalin shouted in mock desperation.

“We’ll need them to finish digging out our supplies!”

T
wo days later, surrounded by provisions in their habitat, with the crystal-clear sky of Pluto, SunOne hanging warmly in one corner, greeting them from their window, Shatz Abel was in a more somber mood as he outlined their plan for the fiftieth time.

On a crudely constructed map, the pirate elucidated their difficulties. One X represented their present home; another, two feet away, represented Tombaugh City. In between, there were tentative sketches and much blank space.

“The trouble is, I just don’t remember,” Shatz Abel said. “I wasn’t exactly provided with a viewer and satellite maps when they dropped me on this snowball. And there wasn’t much to bother pirating during my years in that profession.

“So we have our eyes, and what equipment we possess. A hundred kilos is a long stretch to do by foot. I’ve had a long time to think about this trip, Sire, and I’m afraid that’s the way we have to go. Ballooning is out; we need to go north and would never get there with the wind always blowing west. I’ve salvaged parts from two crashed satellites and a downed shuttle over the years, but even a sled hits difficulties twenty kilos or so out. Trouble is, the land is just too rough for a spell. It gets very icy beyond that, but it’ll be impossible to get a sled past the rough spots. The farthest I’ve gone myself is twenty-two kilos, which took me three days there and back. I saw enough in that time to know that once this trip is committed to, there’s no turning back.”

He stabbed a thick finger at a smudge on the map, a little ways from their home.

“That’s as far as I got, laddie. A gorge that stopped me cold. I think it’s called Christy Chasm. You’ve seen Vales Marinares, on Mars? Shrink it down, and coat it with ice, and now you’ve got an idea.”

“How far did you explore to either side? Maybe there’s an ice bridge—”

Shatz Abel laughed. “Ice bridge? The monster is a kilometer wide, at least. We’ll have to descend. And that’s where things get ill-defined…”

For the first time since Dalin had known him, the pirate showed not only doubt but a touch of something else—fear, almost.

“What is it?”

“It’s not anything I’ve mentioned before, because it’s more of a rumor than fact. But there are stories about Christy Chasm.”

When the pirate merely frowned, Dalin said, “What kind of stories?”

Shatz Abel rose, rolled his map into one ham-sized fist and cried, “Bah! Best to forget it. I never was one for fairy tales myself.”

Dalin stood his ground. “Tell me.”

Looking flustered, Shatz Abel finally relented. “There’s stories of goblins down there. Creatures of Pluto that were here before SunOne or any human, sheet-white things made of frost or fog that no one’s ever seen. Or lived to tell about, anyways.”

Dalin laughed. “The boogeyman? Here?”

Shatz Abel frowned. “Best not to laugh about it, Sire.”

Dalin laughed even harder. “There’s nothing to do
but
laugh! If boogey stories are the most we have to contend with, I say let’s start now!”

The pirate continued to frown, until Dalin Shar approached to slap him on the back.

“Look at us!” Dalin said with bluster. “Me the fearless one and you the scared pup! Do we have a choice about making this trip, Shatz Abel?”

“Why, no…”

“Then why are we standing here making excuses for not going? We each have work to do! You want to get off Pluto as much as I, don’t you?”

“Yes. But it’s best not to make light of such stories—”

Dalin’s enthusiasm flared to mild anger:
“Do we have a choice?”

His resolve reinstated, Shatz Abel said, “No.”

“Then let’s get ready to leave!”

Filling his barrel chest with air, the pirate said, “Yes! Let’s do that, then!”

Dalin laughed; and soon, as SunOne touched the horizon’s mountains outside with twilight, they had resumed their packing, Shatz Abel singing a lusty pirate song with his nearly bottomless courage and enthusiasm renewed:

“So keel-haul the blighter

From cockpit to stem,

And pillage that freighter—

What we can’t sell we’ll burn!”

Dalin hummed along lustily; but in his heart a clutch of questions and new terrors were fighting for dominance: Goblins? Boogeymen? No one’s lived to tell about?

And though he smiled and hummed and packed with enthusiasm, inside he said: What next?

W
hen SunOne was rising again, they were ready to leave.

To the north, between two far mountain peaks, their destination glowed invitingly. It would be dawn there, too. In Tombaugh City there were real streets, and bustling people, and restaurants and shops. And shuttlecraft, and Tombaugh Port—from which, somehow, they would get off Pluto.

“Ready, Sire?” Shatz Abel shouted.

Taking his eyes from the northern horizon, Dalin surveyed their sledded gear, which, with SunOne’s help, threw tall shadows on the cleared patch before their habitat, whose window was now dark for the first time since Dalin had arrived on Pluto.

He tried to feel something for this hovel cut out of a mountain, which had kept him alive and sheltered him for three years—but he felt very little, except the wish to be moving. He found himself turning to the sky, to once again search for tiny Earth in all those stars—

“All aboard, my liege! Ready to pull anchor!”

Dalin jumped onto Shatz Abel’s sled, as long as five men and as wide as three, its runners of nearly frictionless sheathing cut from the skin of the abandoned shuttle. The sail, on a mast fashioned from the bow-mast of the same shuttle, now unfurled, with Shatz Abel’s expert guidance to its fully massive length,instantly caught the eight-mile-an-hour wind.

Immediately they slid forward, up the incline of their cleared hollow and onto the newer snow plains of the recent storm; and Shatz Abel, whooping from his position in the center of the sled, maneuvered the sail and turned them north.

“Away we go, my king! Away we go!”

Dalin shouted into the wind and looked back at the rapidly disappearing hill that had, up until a few moments ago, imprisoned him.

No wonder I feel
nothing for it.

“Yes! Away!” he shouted.

“Ha ha!” the pirate answered, as they sped on. Soon even their hill was lost to sight behind them, and Dalin knew that he had seen it for the last time.

T
hey covered ten kilos by sled the first day, then tented a camp and covered the final twelve by midday the second. SunOne was high overhead, washing out stars to either side of it yet leaving a black corona of night sky at the horizon, when Shatz Abel lowered the sail and they coasted to a stop at the far edge of a level plain.