Funicular Story Version 6-11-2006

 Funicular Story Version 6-11-2006 

This is the first, incomplete draft of the story that became Sunless. 1715 Words. 

See explanation at https://peromyscus.blogspot.com/2023/05/writing-and-publishing-sf-short-story.html

Not one, Lord, is going my way.

In the grey drizzle I make out the Saravossa slowly tracking down the funicular. Steam is venting from the portside tubes with a continuous scream. Bigger by far is the Midnight Rambler, already taxied up to the track, fuel lines snaking round. The gunmetal hue of the hull’s burned blue-black with hard radiation, the exposed tubes running around the hull beginning to glow dull-red, the whole a gaudy twenty-storey flute and my ticket out of the cold winds to the Promised Land.

Four boys, ship-spotters, have finished taking the numbers of the Saravossa, and stare at me, their screwed-up eyes spelling fabrico.  Chilled in the rain, my cheap wool suit failing to warm my huge bulk, or perhaps just ashamed, I hide my great yellow hands in my pocket and look away, to where the Saravossa inches down her track, eclipsing the triangular roofs of the factories and their chimneys which line the red horizon of the polluted sunset.

‘You should go back where you came from, boy,’ says the oldest youth. ‘We don’t want your kind here.’ And I lower my head and shuffle towards the Rambler, muttering, red-eyed, ill-shod. Knowing I look drunk.  Where I’m going, incidentally, I’ve never been. I’ve never been anywhere I could call home.

The orbital funicular, made of some magical material, is only a hundred paces wide where it joins the ground, though the foundations are unimaginably deep. There are no guards or workmen at the space station, just a chain-mail fence to stop the curious getting under a ship as it is winched from orbit. On the starboard side the gates are open and trucks bring in containerloads of goods. The line for the portside gate is several hundred metres long, the gate unopened, as the Saravossa makes the most dangerous part of her interstellar journey: the last metre.

Incredulous, I observe a flash from a black cavity between her steam vents, and I stand still, knowing I should have hit the ground and betrayed by my slow reflexes. But the ship doesn’t blow, and there are answering flashes from the Rambler. Morse! And further, it’s Trin morse, which I learned in gaol to ease my second period of solitary. This heliograph is not being operated by the pilot! Mouthing the letters, I start forward for the Rambler, and, as I near the fence, I see the mirror hastily covered and the signaller twenty metres above me slither like a creature from a rockpool back into a recess between the aft radar housing and the secondary lateral drive unit. A glimpse of space-suit, and within it, three eyes stretched across a broad forehead, the middle eye shut as tight as Shiva’s.

Lien on my soul.

The Saravossa detaches from the funicular. A ripple shakes down the whole length and a sinuous echo shivers back up into the dark sky overhead, the setting sun causes the snaking thread to shine,  till it resembles some spirochaete screwing into the warehouses of New Hawaii; the Saravossa’s partner has left the track at the terminus. As the ripple damps out, the Rambler seizesthe track. Up above, another wave is thrown down from the Rambler’s partner as she glomms onto the track thousands of miles above.

Screwing up my courage, I walk up the ramp between the departing trucks and tip my hat to the Loadmaster, who regards me with unequivocal disdain. I have money; plenty of it. I spread a fan of notes, of Dead Kings, with a card-sharp flourish, and the Loadmaster grabs at them, greedily counting and chanting a litany of the big denominations. King Mardred’s good to play at the track, King Aflerod’s the poor man’s friend, King Pettany will buy you a car, King Syrot’s better than any run of luck. The port closes behind the last truck and the illumination flashes on. I am inside as the tannoys call for flight drill. Grinning, he hands me the notes, and I thumbprint them over to him, hesitating over the Syrot, remembering the years of misery I paid for it in the hydroponic sheds of the Midwest. ‘Sure is cold out there, fabrico,’ he says, pocketing the fistful of kings. He makes to leave, and then glances back. ‘Hope you don’t eat too much, boy. We were tight on provisions even before you got on board.’ He gives me a hand-signal, fist closed and the thumb in the air. I’ve never seen it before. Is it an insult or a peace sign?

I see my black dog

I’m disturbed by the three-eyed apparation hiding between the externals. I’m not superstitious - I discounted the black cat that wove between my feet when I set out this morning - but the three-eyed Retors aren’t welcome on any ship. A sailor won’t learn to swim, an actor won’t mention the name of the Scottish Play, a spaceman won’t fly when a Retor is on board. They say if the third eye opens, he’s looking at your spirit guide come to take you back. I’m just a fabrico; they call me names, they hate me, but they take my money. A Retor is another matter.

And there’s more. Last week, when I made up my mind, really decided to head for the Promised Land, I was in a bar. Drugged, drunk, I don’t know, some fluid flowed like wine, a brother’s birthday. A fabrico’s birthday, if you prefer. At the end the fargone danced still, though the lights were on and the cleaners stood patiently round the dancefloor, mops at ease, and those parts of our mind whose job it was were screaming that we’d be embarrassed in the morning, but still we danced and drank to rhythms so old the sea made them, leaning on each other for support, and I made up my mind to leave the ghetto for the Promised Land. Just like that. Wanted to get somewhere where I could be a man.  And staggered by the weight of the decision, I made my way back to the bar and got a shot of liquor and was just about to chug it down, when a hand grabbed my arm. A little Retor had seized me. I looked down, into his eyes; all three of them. The thin sagittal eye stared at me. ‘Tomey,’ he said, though I hadn’t told anyone there my name, ‘they’ll ask you to make a decision. Don’t disappoint yourself. Chapel Perilous is just the gatehouse. Promised Land is beyond the gates.’

In his hellish eye I saw my reflection, and looking over my shoulder was another figure. The liquor had dulled my reflexes sufficiently that I looked behind me before the prickling of my scalp warned me not to. There was no-one there. I shook off the Retor’s arm and bolted from the room, bitter bile rising up, choking me.

My only hope is that the Retor is just riding to the top of the funicular and hitching another ship from there. The funicular isn’t really space, is it? A good captain might argue that. The supernatural forces are very literal minded by all accounts. Of course, I’ve heard of Ghost Trains.

Other side of the tracks.

A man with ‘purser’ sewn on the pocket of his bleu de travaille (he looks like a mechanic to me) shows me to my ‘stateroom’, a little space near the heatsink just over two metres by one metre. I’m two-five, and I look at the space in dismay. The purser laughs. Not unkindly; I’ve already had better treatment from the spacers than from thirty years of working for New Hawaiians. Cosmopolitanism? No, I think it’s because they never grew up with the fabricos on the poor soil. The Marxists told us that struggle against the bosses would unite us. We just struggled one against the other for what we could get, and we reaped a mouldy harvest of eternal mistrust. To the purser, I’m just another groundhog. He didn’t lose grandparents on Bloody Sunday. Or on Bloody Friday, when the armed mob killed three out of four of mine.

He gives me an especially lurid account of the dangers of zero-gravity sex. I’ve heard a few stories, but his is the most extreme. He’s probably right. With my mass and slow reactions I’d break my neck in a minute. I persist, though, in thinking about the Retor; did he transfer when the ship left the funicular? Surely no-one stows away in the hard vacuum, lashed to sensors for up to three weeks? Or has he gotten on board? Even the purser notices. ‘When you came aboard you looked like you’d seen a ghost,’ he says. It’s the wrong thing to say, and he realises it when I slump onto the pallet, teeth chattering, skin almost as pallid as his.

A week into the journey I realise that the Loadmaster wasn’t joking about the food supply. There is precisely enough on board to feed the five crew, supplemented by a couple of kilograms of fresh vegetables a week. The crew look at me hungrily. Not that they’ll eat me; but they may well space me. I imagine my exploded, frozen body completing the journey slightly ahead of the ship; I’d prefer to reach the promised land alive.

I take the mat from the little stateroom and carry it to the hydroponic room. I fling it over the spinach shoots, flattening them under the tungsten glare. Lying under the lights I can already feel the chromaphores begin to open, trapping the light and making sugar. Within eight hours I’ll change from my lemon-yellow to a deep blood-orange, the native colour of my kind. And I’ll starve to death, as well; more slowly than in the neon-lit corridors, but as surely. When man sought to make a creature that would work for him in the feed-stock lighthouses of New Hawaii, he filled his skin with hypoxanthin so that he could photosynthesise like a tree. But a tree has a thousand square metres of leaf, and I have just my skin.  In truth, my skin supplies a thousand calories a day under this light; but it serves better as a banner to mark me as nonhuman; it does that completely and without fail.