The Pure Cold Light (3 page)

She walked on. The Way-Station Lounge, where she was to meet Nance, lay at the far end of the tube, near the docking stems. It was no bigger than the other shops, but, with the liquors concealed in their containers behind the wall, most of the space was given over to small tables and chairs, enough for fifteen or so people if nobody farted—for which reason alone there wouldn’t be any carbonated drinks on hand.

She ordered up a glass of cold
pertsovka
. It was touted as the most popular drink among the platform crews, and Lyell understood why immediately—she could taste it even over the afterburn of taco sauce. Vodka and hot peppers. “The spice of life,” she said to the Oriental bartender after she took her first tentative drink. He wore a red name tag: Skip. She wondered if he thought he was on his way to Mars, too. Sure, they would need bartenders on Mars.

She moved over to one of the small tables and sat down to wait for Nance. For a while she continued massaging the last of the charley horse out of her leg.

If the lounge had been much larger or busier, she might have missed the three who arrived after her: two men, with a third man pressed between them. She could size up the relationship that way from the contrasting attitudes of the three. In the mirror behind the bar, the two on the end—one pale, freckled redhead and one dark-skinned black—wore the expressions of men looking forward to their drinks. The man between them was another matter.

What he was thinking could not be judged easily. The right side of his face—over the bridge of the nose and down the cheek—couldn’t be seen beneath a metal headpiece and lens. Hospitals used such electronic calottes, she knew, in cases where brain circuitry needed rerouting around damaged tissue. Accident victims, for instance. The impression hardened when he failed to respond to the bartender’s query. The redhead nudged him. He shook his head. He’d been listening after all but wanted nothing.

Lyell’s glance fell to his hands, but he wore no manacles. Nevertheless, she took him for a prisoner. Having served three months in the penal colony of Corson’s Island, she recognized the unmistakable look—a face that had used up its defensive expressions of self–esteem and denial; body language of a captive overwhelmed by the machinery of justice. The man was darkly handsome—or would have been without the headgear. His blue jumpsuit looked as though he’d slept in it for days—and all at once Lyell realized that she was looking at a Moon colony uniform, and she idly pretended to scratch her elbow, switching on the nose-cam. Maybe the weight-loss gig wouldn’t be a complete failure after all.

The man in the middle caught her staring at him. He glanced back at her indifferently, then past her, out the lounge doorway, at nothing. He hadn’t killed anyone or he would have been shackled, and probably not allowed to enter inhabited platform areas during layover no matter how much his officers wanted a short one. Something else, then. A mystery…

Lyell downed the rest of her vodka. The pepper burned lovingly in her throat. She got up and went to the bar. “I’ll have another,” she told Skip.

The black man beside her made the next step easier. He looked at her and said wryly, “What did you do, jog through the park?”

Thomasina stared smilingly into his eyes, to tell him how attractive she found him. She let her gaze slide to the one in the middle as if by accident. “You’re out of the Moon colony, aren’t you?” she asked. Peripherally, she saw Skip hesitate and glance up from the drink nozzle.

The black man nodded, but with a vaguely disquieted look as if he wished now that he’d kept his mouth shut.

“SC miners, I’ll bet.”

“Well.” He sipped his drink, caught between the desire to leave and the desire to enjoy what he was paying Geoplatform prices to savor. He tried to ease out of it. “Isn’t everybody?”

She laughed lightly, which was what he’d wanted. “I just wondered what it was like up there, you know, as compared to down here.” He started to answer but she continued, “I mean, you talk to anybody on the platform here, there isn’t anybody can imagine why colonists would go
back
to Earth.”

“Who said we were?” sneered the redhead.

“Oh, come on. You didn’t come all this way to drink on a
company
platform.”

“You’re awfully nosy, lady.”

She gave a coquettish pout to her expression—it felt so good being able to use her face again—to keep the nearer man in sympathy with her. She would get good sharp closeups of all three of these men. “It’s just that we don’t see many workers on their way down from the Moon to the Earth.”

“So what are you, the welcome wagon? We’re dropping our friend off. He’s cycled down. People do that.”

She pretended to study the man in the middle for the first time. “You look like you had an accident.”

The other two became noticeably more edgy but they needn’t have worried, because the one in the middle said nothing, just stared somewhere out the door.

“What’s your friend’s name?”

“Do you mind if we finish our fucking drinks without being bothered by you?” asked the redhead.

“Hey, lighten up, now,” the man beside her warned him. “Lady, don’t get me wrong, but we’ve got a twenty-minute layover and we’d prefer to relax one little last time before we have to deal with the stink of Philly air again. You see what I’m saying?”

“But you can’t mean you’re going to
my
hometown, to Philadelphia? Well, of course you are, you’re with ScumberCorp. You and Mr.—”

“Rueda, his name’s Angel Rueda,” the redhead blurted out, “and he’s not being talkative today, which is his prerogative. Why don’t you try it yourself?”

She stiffened indignantly, took her drink, and walked back to her small table. She took her time with the second drink, letting the camera do all the work while she ignored the trio altogether.

Nance arrived, gave the trio a cautious look, then sat beside Lyell. “All right,” she said immediately, “who the fuck are you, lady, and what do you want with Tami?”

Lyell pretended to have been aware of this from the start. “You know where she is,” she said.

Nance said something else but Lyell didn’t get it. Her attention had been snagged by the trio, leaving.
 

 
She glanced their way casually, as if she’d already forgotten them, to find Angel Rueda staring at her with the strangest look in his one dark eye. It stayed with her long after he and his escort had disappeared down the tubeway.

It was a look of something like forlorn hope.

Chapter Two: Life In The Pit

Amerind Shikker arrived in the subterranean world of the disused subway Concourse against her will, trussed up naked in scraps of her clothing and thrown down the steps into the darkness. Her neighbors—her “friends”—were the culprits. They thought she’d gone crazy, and maybe they were half right. She’d killed a man, cut his dick off. He’d shown her who he was, was why.

He was an Orbiter for sure. He had the burn marks on his temples where he fired the injector gun, so she would have known anyway. But the fucker’s right leg had vanished from the knee down, which became apparent when he crouched next to her and his pant-leg, too short to begin with, pulled halfway up his calves.
 

He didn’t have any socks, and he didn’t have any right leg, either.

His left leg was raw with flea bites. The right just wasn’t there. She wondered if the fleas had been erased, too. His shoe looked to be empty; she could see straight through to the rip in the sole.
 

He hadn’t liked her seeing that, and that was when he’d begun his singsong ditty about “not bein’ a kid, and not bein’ a skipper”. She supposed, with that leg, he likely couldn’t skip if he wanted to.

Amerind knew something of Orbitol and its long-term effects—enough to stay away from it.

“What the hell you muttering?” she had asked the john.

“I’m your fun-loving man,” came his reply. He was grinning by then, an off-kilter smile, and she ought to have known better; but she needed the business.
 

“’course you are, sweetie.”

“Jack the Ripper,” he’d announced with pride.

Amerind had never heard of him but didn’t say so. He’d paid, and she needed the money. She didn’t care if he was fresh off a prison isle in the Atlantic. A lot of her clients were.

He’d settled over her face and sunk in as far as he could go. He wasn’t very big. His dirty fingers grabbed up her tits, began kneading. He was rough, but she’d known rougher. She didn’t understand his true intention until she felt the cold shock of his blade against her rib. He was trying to slice her tit off. Without hesitation, she dug furiously under her pillow and pulled out her flick-knife. He was cackling and trying to saw up under her tit; his dull blade carved a fire in her side, at once icy and hot. His butt and legs squashed her movement, trapped her other arm; she wrestled but couldn’t get past them. She bent her wrist till she thought it would break, slid her blade up under his pants, right across her nose, and stabbed hard. Blood, hot and black, jetted all over her face. Jack fell to shrieking and clawing at himself, but she couldn’t budge the bastard. His blood poured out in a torrent and she was drowning. The Ripper twisted one way and Amerind, still holding onto the slick knife, twisted the other. He toppled head-first onto the cardboard floor beside her blankets. His blood sprayed feathery across the trembling wall of her little box. Coughing, choking, she spat out blood and his excised member. It bounced off his skull and rolled along the floor beside him like a little gray sausage link.

While the bastard Ripper shrieked and twitched in the final moments of his life, Amerind’s neighbors poked their heads in through the ratty curtain. Their faces seemed swelled up at the sight of her all naked and bloody. The Ripper’s disease had spread to them, she could tell, and Amerind yowled and swiped her knife at the fiends before they could finish cutting her up. They backed off out of sight, but not for long.

The curtain lunged at her. It tore off its nails, grew hands that reached for her, and two bodies slammed into Amerind and pinned her to her bed. Maybe she stabbed one of them. She couldn’t be sure. The curtain twisted them all up. But they got the knife away from her.

Their hands swarmed all over her, shredding the curtain with her knife, taking her skirt, her sheets, making bindings and a gag. Ripper’s blood thick upon her hid her own flowing wound. She kicked and writhed and screeched like a banshee, and looked like something equally fantastic.

They hoisted her up and carried her through the narrow aisles of Box City, up and down the black slate walk, past the Liberty Bell, and into the street. Her flesh in the daylight was sallow where it wasn’t bloody.

From out of the foamboard and plywood and plastic shacks, people emerged, drawn by the noisy parade. She saw their breaths smoke like fires, their faces stinging pink in the chill morning air.

A cheering, crazy crowd accreted. She, like a flayed sacrifice, hung up ahead of it all. Appropriately, her black hair glistened with blood.

By the time they reached 9th and Chestnut Streets, Amerind had recovered her senses and was pleading for her life, but the gag kept her protestations secure, and, besides, the matter of disposing of her had become a festival. She did not hate them for it exactly. She thought this might be God’s fit punishment for the times when she had taken part, when she’d urged other hands to throw other sacrifices into the Snake Pit. That was what they called the unknown depths of Market East Station.

All kinds of stories existed about what lurked down there, on various levels, in endless tunnels, in dark recesses where no sane citizen—not even derelicts such as themselves—would venture. Graffiti glyphs on the walls shouted spraypaint warnings of the contaminating madness down there.
 

If only they’d let her explain  herself…but they flung her down the steps as if she were a sack of garbage. She tumbled and rolled, struck her elbow and cried out at the pain, struck her head and lost consciousness.

To those above, watching, the bluish dark of the Snake Pit swallowed her whole. Everyone cheered.

***

Amerind awoke to hands softly caressing her, as delicate as bat wings. The darkness was so pure that she thought she had been blinded, and in a panic she tried swatting at the hands. Her right arm hardly moved, and that little motion slashed the perfect darkness with lightning bolts of agony. The gentle hands withdrew. A moment later the wick of a lumpish candle flared to life beside her.

She found herself inside a box hardly larger than the one she’d been thrown out of, except that this one had a funny little barred window and a bench. She was lying beside the bench.

Holding the candle was a man she at first took to be wearing black livery. Then she realized that she was looking through most of him.

Seeing her astonishment, he tried to reassure her with a smile, but this was complicated by the absence of most of the left half of his face. “I fixed your arm,” he explained softly, too embarrassed to look at her directly. He took a brown cloak off a hook by the window and wrapped himself inside it; his invisible body took on substance, folds of drapery outlined a spindly torso. It was a kind of magic trick—hey, presto! and now you see him.

“It’s fractured,” he said, “the ulna, just behind the wrist. Lucky that’s all, the way the topsiders threw you.” She wondered if he’d been watching the whole time. He floated nearer, his one blue eye wide as if with hysteria. “I’ll f-find you some clothes, how would that be? My name’s G-Glimet.” When he moved the candle aside, she saw the ancient scars at his temple and knew that he wasn’t a ghost.

Glimet was the most decayed Orbiter she’d ever seen.

He had been reduced to his right arm and shoulder, and the right half of his head and neck. Any sane man would have sought rehabilitation long before that, she thought, most anybody would have turned back when their toes and fingers went, but not Glimet. Clearly, he was forging ahead into uncharted territory.

She’d been told that final stage Orbiters simply vanished like ghosts, like smoke. Until then, their bodies maintained some tenuous connection to this world. She’d met plenty such in her line of work. Some offered to let her feel their “missing” limbs—she’d only acted on the offer once, the first time. Her fingers, waving through the air, had pressed into something spongy that she couldn’t see, that wasn’t there. Just remembering the sensation made her skin crawl. She’d been scared for a month afterwards that the change was contagious, that any day her body would start to rot out of existence the same way. She’d asked everyone who knew, or pretended to know, all about it. Ex-Orbiters told her tales, like old sea-farers: It was sticking your hands or feet in cold cooking grease; and forever after you had to drag yourself through thick jelly that you could never see or get away from one inch. It slowed them all down, and made some go crazy. But then if you stuck on a sock or a glove, there were the missing toes and fingers again, like out of that magic hat—here and not here.