My Last Breath Version 06-26-2021

 My Last Breath Version 06-26-2021

Deleted early draft. Complete 6950 words. For explanation see write up at https://peromyscus.blogspot.com/2023/05/writing-and-publishing-sf-short-story.html

Note that the acceptable, finished draft was published as Sunless, in IZ Digital ed. Gareth Jelley, May 2023. https://interzone.digital/sunless/ 

My last breath

By Lyle Hopwood

 

 

Yesterday, I made up my mind to get out of New Pennsylvania. Leave, head for the Promised Land.

I was outside, on foot, trudging toward Mad Hatter’s, the bar on the spaceport end of 6 Klick Road. In Dauphin’s streets the thin, bitter wind tastes of lemon juice, the air rots your teeth and the sun, dim though it may be, gives people cataracts within a few years.

Then I caught sight of something that made me swerve and try to change my route. A priest—mine, to be specific—was handing out tracts outside the door of the bar. I had a guilty conscience, and I didn’t want him worming his way into my mind.

I was too late. He’d seen me. He came up, lifted his hand, and did that blessing they do with the string of rosary stones, where they tap the top gemstone, and all of them appear to flip over and tumble down a place, and yet they stay in the same place. The first time I saw it, my jaw dropped. But later, when I saw the farmers making kids’ playthings on the same principle—Jacob’s Ladders—I wasn’t as easily impressed.

“Tomey,” he said, using the familiar form of my name. “He has your number.”

“Who?”

“The devil.” He pointed upwards, to the sky, where the Bad Man keeps the hearts he’s harvested. “You need to choose carefully.”

“You’ve got the wrong man, Father. They don’t give us fabricos choices.”

 These priests were like weevils, but they infested your psyche, not your grain. I felt him prying inside. I wanted to hit my head against the wall to knock him out of there.

“You want to skip out. Blow away your obligations. I can see it in you.”

“Not me.” I didn’t need this smug fanatic telling the Company Men he saw something like that in my head.

“If you break your contract, you can never escape the consequences. Not if you fight to your last breath.”

I bristled at that. “Anything I did to free myself would be justified, Father.”

“You have to make the right choice, Tomey.”

He lifted his rosary and flipped the stones again, but somehow, this time the backs of the stones were mirrored. Startled by the rolling flash, I stared at it, and I saw myself in the reflection—along with another figure looking over my shoulder. It had horns. My scalp prickling, I looked behind me. There was no one there. I shook my head and continued on my way.

*

In the fulgurous cadmium red illumination of the public bar, I considered what he’d said. I’d thought about it all my adult life, getting out from under the contract, riding the cosmic funicular back to the stars. A fresh start where no one knew me.

At the bar, the notion hardened into a commitment. I told myself I was righteous. The criminals were the mine owners that bought my contract. I could slip away without paying it off. As if in some traveling mummers’ show, I had a little demon on one shoulder telling me to run and a wide-eyed angel on the other whispering, “Tomus—they created you. You owe them your life.”

I swatted that angel off my shoulder. There was a way off-planet, and that was the Cosmic Funicular, the thin sliver of silver stretching away into the sky. Most everybody in Dauphin can see it from the farms, and most everybody knows it’s not a slender thread at all, but a sky railroad where hulking machines haul passengers and freight from the groundworks and hoist them to the terminus thousands of kilometers above our heads. And they know it drags unlucky workers from the skies and deposits them downline, to sweat in the mines and labor in the farms.

The public bar’s drinkers were freedmen, indentees and gen-pop mineworkers, with a scattering of clodhoppers from the surrounding farms. We mostly drank standing up, except in the quietest corner where a few grey-hairs played cards at green topped tables. I looked around the bar to fix the sight in my memory, for later, after I’d succeeded in getting away. I would have liked to remember the patrons as firm friends who cheered me on as I found the courage to fight for my liberation. In reality, the worn-down clientele were habitual drunks who wasted their free time playing their little gambling games every weeknight and spent all Sabbath in the temple. They had long ago blanked out their living conditions, their meager wages and their own crippling debts. When it came to making plans, they were the last people I’d confide in. One of the few things likely to rouse them to consensus reality was the opportunity to turn in a rogue fabrico. There wasn’t a lot of people they could look down on, so they had a vested interest in keeping us in our place.

I exposed the credit chip on my hand and signaled the barkeeper. She dismissed me with a single glance and went on wiping glasses. I exchanged looks with the person next to me. She was a Kuru, horns like ram’s horns, eight of them, curled tightly over her skull like a helmet. She had ten eyes, eight black cabochons in two groups of four on her brow and two larger, more human eyes beneath them. She smiled at me.

I called the barkeep again. “I have credit.”

“You see the sign? Right to refuse service. I’m refusing it, you yellow subhuman. Leave or I’ll call the Company Men.”

Furious, trying to think of a reply, I didn’t see one of the card-playing guys come up behind me. He tackled me like a football player, which wasn’t effective since I wasn’t trying to pass a football. I dropped to the ground and hit him in the face. When he let go of my legs I kicked him, hard, and found myself inside a scrum of card players.

I guess if you’re going to be jumped by a gang, you couldn’t pick better adversaries than hard-drinking gamblers whose daily workout consisted of lifting paper cards and plastic chips. Of the four, I hit three hard enough for them to knock their skulls against the wall. The fourth one was too drunk to go down, and I found a knife tip just under my nose. He was holding it tight, if waveringly. I kicked the knifeman. He spun around and advanced again.

The barkeep was on the emergency call system, trying to get a Company Man up here to break up the fight. The thought that I could be seized by the company agents and held in jail gave me desperate strength. I put up my fists against the man with the knife.

“Back off,” I said to the knifeman, who took that as incitement to rush me. I turned my back and crouched, with the intention of having him go over my shoulder and land sprawling, a move that always works in the films. The tip of his knife grated against bone as he went over, and I knew I had to fight for my life. I got hold of his arm, broke his elbow against the wall and ripped the knife from his twitching fingers.

Others were closing in on me.

The Kuru woman was up off her stool. She grabbed my arm and hauled me to my feet. The yank made my arm hurt like the devil.

“Tomus,” she said, though I had not told her my name. “Come on.”

A squeal and cackle of radio static came from near the entrance. The Company Men were coming in.

I let her rush me into a ‘fresher.

“Leave,” she said to the sole occupant. Some unholy glint in her spider eyes led the man to take her seriously.

I checked over my clothes. I was surprisingly bloody, and not all the blood was other people’s. The man’s knife was still in my hand.

“You need to get out of here. Get on the upline.”

“Why? They started it.”

“You think that matters? They’ll charge you with wounding with intent to cause bodily harm. Thirty years.”

My throat closed up.

 “Midnight Rambler’s lifting in a couple hours.”

“At the orbital elevator?”

“There’s no other way off this rock, brother.”

The Kuru pressed her chip in my hand. I looked closely at the status details. It was not coded to any individual. Basically cash. As I lowered my arm, a stream of thick blood ran out of my jacket cuff.

“I should get that seen to,” I said. I hoped it sounded like a funny, macho thing to say.

She smiled. Kuru have a lot of sharp teeth. “Go to the funicular. There’ll be someone waiting to meet you. Get on the ship.”

She knew the way to the back door, taking us through the rudimentary kitchen. Outside, the cadmium orange hue of the sun was deepening to red. I couldn’t hail a cab; I was too yellow and too obviously a fabrico to stand outside the bar waving. I pulled up my jacket collar and set out on foot, crunching the wet grit, heading towards the space elevator. It was easy to orient myself; the shining filament was visible in the sky from everywhere in Dauphin.

I should explain. Slavery per se is illegal. Me, I’m indentured. The government paid for my conception and delivery, and they claimed a fifth of my lifespan in exchange. Mankind made me in all my photosynthesizing glory and paid for me to exist. I’m not an accident, or a social obligation, I was created, specifically and on purpose. Unlike many, or maybe most, I’m here for a reason.

But I didn’t ask to be born, and I didn’t ask to be born green and sent to a place where I’d grow yellow and sickly in an alien light. After a scant few years of literal children-garden under full-spectrum light, I was transported to New Pennsylvania, where I worked from puberty to manhood for a farmer who needed harvesters. I labored with a knife in the greenhouses, slicing handfuls of vegetables and tying them in bunches, throwing them into a machine that trudged ahead of us, taking what we reaped and hauling it down a belt to somewhere we knew not. Those long clear-vinyl rowhouses were supplemented with artificial light, good for the crops and equally good for me, because I could photosynthesize. Which made it cheaper for the farmers, too, because a green fabrico only needs to eat about half-rations when he’s under lights.

They told me I would finish indenture before I was twenty. By the time I reached that age, I was so far in debt to the Company Trading Post—the only place I was permitted to spend my wages—that I’d never get out from under. And then one bad day, I got in another argument and pulled a knife on one of the company farmers. They called me ungrateful and sold my contract to the mine. I worked at the mine head for three years, tasked with keeping the incoming supplies and outgoing ore balanced and on time. I was under indoor light all day and turned yellow and scrawny and deeper in debt.

I dreamed of buying me way out of indenture. The weight of the debt on my mind was heavier than the ore loads I shifted. I had to pay it off to be free. But how?

And now I was a fugitive. Wounded, on the run, and yellow as a sunflower.

*

There must be more to a funicular than this.

My arm hurt, and when I took off my jacket, the sleeve dripped viscous umber blood. I ran my fingers over my shoulder and arm and felt the slash in the triceps and the matching one on the ribs where the knife had continued down. The deep muscle wound wasn’t going to stop bleeding until I stopped moving.

I expected a spaceport to have an entrance labeled “ENTRANCE”, ramps from the road clearly marked for taxis or for freight. Maybe a pedestrian entrance and a burger bar, with brightly lit storefronts selling local liquors and beetle honey. But near the foot of the funicular there was merely a zinc chain-link fence, like a farmer might have around a couple of his furloughed tractors. Inside it, there was a muddy rail yard badly scaped with magenta gravel that had sunk into puddles of oil and strangled tiny tracts of brown weed. Combustion engines coughed smoke in the gloom between plaited railroad tracks dotted and dashed with motionless train cars. The funicular itself, made from some material magical in its advanced metallurgy, was only a few hundred meters wide as it met its foundations. There were no personnel at all.

In the acidic grey drizzle, I made out a ship slowly tracking down it. Steam vented from the portside tubes in a continuous scream. The nameplate proclaimed the ship to be the Skip Softly. The gunmetal hue of its hull was burned blue-black with hard radiation, the exposed tubes running over the hull beginning to blaze dull red as the ship dropped below the clouds and into the sunset glow. On the ground, the Midnight Rambler was already refueled and taxiing towards the track, the fuel lines snaked around it disengaging with satisfied snaps and retracting one by one. It was a long metal cylinder, blunt-ended and garlanded with metal stems and rods. The Rambler slowly traversed the stinking wet ground like a magic flute transported by ants.

I looked back to where the Skip Softly inched down her track, eclipsing the triangular roofs of the factories and chimneys that lined the red horizon of the industrial sunset. The silver skein of the funicular ascended above the clouds, intermittently visible as specular reflections leading into the cooling sky above.

The disturbed ground was piled with concrete blocks and rebar and the air reeked of a lubricant that had been unsuccessfully disguised with citrus oil, summoning an impression of a sump filled with rotten oranges. Steam screeched from pressure relief valves, filling the air with stinking heat. The vehicles that had provisioned the Midnight Rambler were sorry half-wrecks, limping out of the spaceport to the greenhouses surrounding Dauphin. They rode high in the watery ruts of the road because they were empty—there’s nothing valuable enough to winch down from orbit to farmers, so they are paid cash, ones and zeroes in their subdermal credit chips.

The Skip Softly detached from the funicular. A ripple shook the base and a sinuous echo shivered back up into the dark sky overhead, the setting sun causing the snaking thread to shine like some spirochete screwing into the warehouses of New Pennsylvania. A metallic beat like the devil’s cowbell shimmered down the track from high above; the wave generated by the Rambler’s counterweight ship as she glommed on to the track thousands of kilometers above.

I turned from the fence and found myself enveloped in the leatheriest leather jacket I’d ever felt. It took me a moment to work out that I’d trodden backward and fallen into a person. But not a person like myself, or the barkeep, or even the Kuru. I’d stumbled into the wings of a Devadip.

“You’re going the wrong way,” the bat thing said. “I come find you.”

“The funicular,” I said, pointing at it.

“This is the service level. What are you trying to do, climb onto the track?”

I had been thinking of climbing on to the track. “No, obviously not,” I lied.

The Devadip stepped back, the black skin sheets of his wings folding neatly as he held his clawed hands at rest, crossed in front of his chest as if he were praying. His head and body were covered in dark brown fur, the doggy appearance of his face offsetting the demonic look of the sheath of black leather skin. He shook his head, as if pitying me.

I looked back at the tower. Inside the partial cladding, the vast machinery of the winches and their power plants were visible. I could get inside, get on the track…and then what? Hide myself under a bogey like someone sneaking out of a mine under the train?

The man-bat patted me on the shoulder with a clawed hand “It goes all the way up to space, genius. No air.”

I wasn’t about to tell the Devadip that lack of air wouldn’t bother a green fabrico. Because right now it would bother me. It would kill me, like a human.

“Gimme a token,” he said. He lifted his credit chip hand.

Once I was in some kind of trouble and a mine lawyer buttonholed me. “Gimme a dollar,” he said, and I gave him my credit chip. He debited it a dollar and said, “Now I’m your lawyer and everything I say to you is attorney-client privileged and what you should do now is…” and he gave me legal advice to beat all legal advice. I got out of trouble real quick.

The bat thing had used the phrase that saved me years ago. I touched my chip to his, transferring his requested amount which wasn’t a dollar, but an eye-watering amount.

“What do you plan to do with it?”

He pointed up the funicular. “Up, up, up. We ride that thing high in the sky, until you can see the black above the blue.”

“You’ll get me on with you?”

He nodded. “Yes, you paid. I meet you at the bus terminal,” he said.

“We take a bus? It’s that easy?”

He nodded.

*

The passenger transport vehicle from Dauphin did not travel along the gritty surface road. A few hundred meters from the pick-up spot, it took a left into a tunnel. I turned to look at the Devadip, but he was reading advertisements for underwear on the overhead screens. He was unbothered by the sudden dive into the ground. The tunnel itself had no access lights that I could see, and as passengers we were out of direct sight of the headlight beams. We might as well have been interred. There was no sensation of motion, and apart from the unchanging note of the engine (and its eerie echo from the tunnel walls) there was nothing to suggest we would ever leave. I grew increasingly unnerved. The four other passengers occasionally glanced at me, but as I was with someone of a higher caste, they weren’t about to jump me. They didn’t strike me as spacefarers. They reminded me of the hollowed-out old men playing cards earlier. Losers and users, some sullen, some fidgeting.

My nerves on edge, I was about to ask the man-bat how much longer when a glow in the window opposite appeared and immediately grew as bright as a floodlight. A startling riot of color, people, eye-watering light, thunderous sound and incredible velocity happened in an instant and was just as suddenly gone.

The knife was in my hand.

Now everybody really was staring at me.

“Relax,” the Devadip said. “We just passed a bus traveling in the opposite direction.”

I put the knife away. At least there was such a thing as the opposite direction. The blackness was so absolute I’d wondered what sort of journey I was on.

The bus stopped in the near-darkness by a square plastic hut holding a couple of guards. I indicated the restroom attached to the vehicle’s refueling station, went inside and latched the door. In a mirror over the sink, I examined my face and hair. My skin was olive green. My hair was greening at the top, where the lights on the transport had shone on it, but still yellow at the scalp. I took my jacket off. The bleeding had stopped, mostly.

My bossman once told me that pumped planetary water was seven million years old. It explained why I never found it refreshing. I ran the sour water over my wounds and rinsed out the soaked jacket lining.  I wondered about jurisdiction; did this facility belong to the port authority, or to New Pennsylvania? What if someone had called the mine company?

The Devadip rapped on the door. “Time to get yourself looking pretty later.”

I put the shirt back on but rolled the sleeves up.

The guards let him through but the blond one stopped me. “You sure you want the Midnight Rambler? You don’t look the type.”

The two of them must be underworked, I thought, as they had a chessboard between them, with a game half-finished.

“I’ve seen him somewhere before,” the other guard said, and he did seem familiar, if only in his sallow, exhausted appearance. “He’s the type, all right.”

“He’s with me,” the Devadip said.

“You really don’t want to get on the upbound line with the Devadip,” the first guard said.

“Come on! Don’t listen to him. He’ll send you back,” the Devadip said.

“I’m heading for the Promised Land,” I told the guard who knew me.

“That’s what they all say, sir,” said the guard. He smiled as if he’d just told a great joke.

I shivered.

*

Inside the gate was a black granite wall, giving an impression of immense solidity. The foundations of the funicular were in there, I surmised, hundreds of meters deep in the living rock. The man-bat pressed a button, marked by a lit square around it, and a section slid aside to reveal an elevator door. When the elevator door opened, we walked out on a short bridge towards an open airlock. The Midnight Rambler had completed its pre-flight activities and was loading its last freight—us. The walk from the gantry was brief, but fraught. We were still many meters below the ground level, but the natural light of New Pennsylvania’s sun was shining through the untidy eagle’s nest of wiring, hoses and carbon-fiber ropes. The gritty, lemon wind wheezed its way down to us. There were men, or aliens, working in the center of the tangle at the base of the filaments and their shouts were strangely like the whoops of an ape troop. It was warm here; warmer than the surface. The reddish glow and smell of fuel and the shadows of men shrieking inside the matted coils of the machinery set my nerves on edge.

*

We turned a final corridor inside the ship and entered our cabin. “See? It’s nice inside,” the Devadip said. “The man upstairs thinks you should make this trip in comfort.”

The cabin lights were yellow. I dialed them up to as blue as they would go. The man-bat stretched out on his bunk, and I stripped off, putting the damp jacket over a chair, the blood-soaked shirt in the ultrasound cleaner, and took off my boots and pants.

“Get comfy, why don’t you?” the man-bat said.

I lay down under the bright light and slept.

*

As I lay under the lights, I felt the chromophores in my skin open, trapping the light. Within eight hours it would change me from my etiolated lemon-yellow to a deep green, the native color of my kind. When man sought to make a creature that would work for him in the feed-stock lighthouses of New Pennsylvania, he filled his skin with trans-chlorophyll so that he could photosynthesize like a tree. But a tree has hundreds of square meters of leaf, and I have just my skin and long bristles. My skin supplies maybe a thousand calories a day under good light, but under the perpetual orange glow of New Pennsylvania it only served as a banner to mark me as indentured.

“You’ve changed,” the Devadip said when he woke up.

By then I was lying on my front, getting the light to the roots of my hair and between my shoulder blades. I felt twice as strong. The gash in my shoulder was closing, but tender as a new shoot to the touch.

Hidden speakers emanated a brief announcement in some languages I didn’t know. The whole ship shook like it had been hit with a giant’s fist. And then a strange motion began, a complex vibration, some high pitched as sound waves, some slow undulations like sea waves, and then, later, the longest slowest movement like an earthquake underfoot.

“The Rambler’s clamped on the upline now,” my companion said. “It takes time for the shockwave to get to the top and back down to us. Soon, we’ll start moving. Want to watch?” He got up and opened the door as I hopped back into my pants and shirt.

Our floor of the ship had only a porthole. We climbed a thick metal ladder through a bulkhead to the next level up, which had no cabins, plenty of instrumentation and an airlock. I read the airlock procedures through carefully, while the Devadip hopped around in frustration at my slowness. Once I was sure the outer door wouldn’t open unexpectedly, I opened the inner door and we looked out over the desolate wet grey of Dauphin’s spaceport. It was raining.

“Nice place.” He was smiling, full of energy, almost bouncing with joie de vivre.

I shrugged. “Hated the people. I could get used to the place if it wasn’t for that fucking…” and I pointed at the struggling red disc of the rising sun.

“Fact for you, yellow man, the sun is actually a white dwarf. It’s pretty darn bright. The redness comes from New Pennsylvania’s air, which is as thick as pigshit. You can watch it turn to white as you get out of the atmosphere. I’ll have gone down by then. That’s what I do. I bring people here and then I jump down, down, down.” As he said “jump,” he uncrossed his arms and flung them wide. The limp chamois sheets of his wings tightened into a flight membrane with a noisy snap. He so suddenly transformed from a man-sized dog creature to a four-meter-wide bird that, forgetting the small space we were in, I took a step backward, and slammed my sore shoulder on the bulkhead. The porthole light shone through his dark wings, the veins and bones visible in the blood-red membrane. He strutted for a moment and then let his wings slowly fold.

“Are we the only people on this ship?” I asked.

Usually there’s someone. The purser wanting to take your valuables so they can wring some interest out of them during the trip. There should be a captain. Wasn’t that a law? Somebody was always designated captain.

The Devadip vocalized a sound that was more of a yip than speech. It startled me, reminding me of his nonhumanity. I didn’t know what it meant.

The low hum from the inward side, starboard, changed pitch and the noise rose to a screaming, clanging nightmare. Billows of steam issued from beneath the Rambler and, with a jerk, the ship began to ascend the funicular. The ground below fell away slowly, changing from a view like that from a building to a collection of toy trucks in mud, to a series of colored square blocks on a charcoal background. The steam blowing past the windows transformed from yellow to blue. The ship’s life support burst into life, scouring away the acrid planetary air and replacing it with the fuzzy ozone-tinged ship’s scrubber output.

“Regretting it yet?” yipped the man-bat. He was on his toes with his muzzle pressed against the airlock glass.

“I’ve wanted to leave for years.”

But there was something triumphant in his tone that added to my unease.

We watched the vehicles on the ground shrink to toy-size, then to dots. A black slurry of mine tailings formed a pool near the foot of the funicular. The deep red of local rocks was shot through with the blue, oxidized veins of ore, and far away in the east were the green and yellow squares of farms, some white from the plastic sheets that covered vast acres. The light, I saw, was now cheerfully yellow. I glanced at the sun. It was almost white. White enough for my skin and hair to flourish.

“Here’s where I gotta leave,” the Devadip said, his leather wings shaking with excitement. “Another thousand kilometers for you. Hope it doesn’t get too hot.” He smiled, his long amber canines glinting in the newly glorious sunlight.

I remembered the priest’s prediction. I remembered the fight. I remembered my unpaid debts. I remembered running from my obligations. I’d made the wrong choice.

“Wait—where am I going?” My voice sounded querulous and unsure over the groan of the engines that propelled the slug of metal up the funicular.

“You’re on the upline, Mr. Tomus. I’m just the ferryman, so you’ll have to address your questions to more senior staff.”

“‘Ferryman’?” I remembered the black eyes of the Kuru woman, all ten fixed on my face as she gave me a token…a token to pay the Devadip.

“I’m just here to accompany you to the other side.” He smiled, his white teeth showing in his dark face. “I don’t make the big decisions.”

I leapt at him. The back of my arm hurt like hell, and I couldn’t get the headlock on him I wanted. We landed on the floor of the airlock with him on top. Knocked the breath out of me, but I had my good arm around his neck.

“I thought the Kuru’s gift was too good to be true. I got shanghai’d like a drunken sailor.”

“We’re not going to Shanghai,” the man-bat gasped, scrabbling at my forearm with his long claws.

“No, we aren’t.” I had an idea where the Rambler was taking me, and it wasn’t to any system on the map. I reached for his hand. “Give me my fare back.”

“It…doesn’t…work…like…that,” he grated.

Holding him still with my legs, I tightened my grip around his neck. He tapped on the metal deck with his free claws, and I let up, allowing him to breathe. He reached up to tap his chip to mine.

“What now, yellow man?”

I unscissored my legs and he got up, looking down at the deck and opening and closing his mouth as if trying to speak. He seemed weak, and I wondered if I’d hurt him, broken some bone that humans don’t have. I was overcome with guilt, my principal emotion, and reached out, maybe intending to help him to a cabin or something, I don’t know what.

He bit my hand, whirled around and punched the emergency purge button. The airlock door bolts blew, and the door shot outwards. He jumped. I couldn’t hear the thump as the membrane of skin tightened over his bones and filled with thinning atmosphere, but I saw his taut black wings shine in the glorious new light of the sun. He banked to face the tower and wave at me, before setting his course for down, down, down.

I closed the outer door, silenced the alarms, re-pressurized the airlock and sat down against the inner wall. I’d taken my token back, but I was still on the Rambler.

If I stayed on the ship…

What other choices had I? I looked at my arms again. Dark green. My hair was beginning to grow out, healthy as corn leaves in the spring. I sat for a long time in thought, then I gathered the rest of my clothes from my cabin and stuffed them in a bag.

At the airlock I closed the inner door and performed the emergency purge. The blast of decompression almost took me out of the door—I’d momentarily forgotten we were at the edge of space, a much higher altitude than the Devadip’s exit. I exhaled slowly, allowing the air in my lungs to dissipate into the near-vacuum. I swung my leg over the sill and went handhold by handhold over the ship’s body to the mechanism that held it to the cables.

I was a plant, after all. I’d been kept in the dimness of Dauphin where it was a fight to grow even a cabbage without artificial light. Now I was in full sun and coming into my own. In the light, a plant takes in carbon dioxide and produces oxygen. My human half produced carbon dioxide and required oxygen. We weren’t designed for what I was attempting to do, but it didn’t seem like a good time to check the equations.

I climbed towards the uppermost part of the ship. The flute of the Rambler was attached vertically to the cables, and in this combination of gravity and centripetal force it was easy to climb hand-over-hand up the silver piping adorning the hull. The top was a flat platform, from where I could make my next move.

But I found not breathing unexpectedly difficult.

Before I could drag my wearying body the final few meters, a hand reached out from a service hatch and grabbed my leg. I kicked back at it, struggling to hold onto the ship’s wreath of metal piping in the wildly competing forces hauling differentially on my body. The hand stayed attached, and was followed by the rest of the captain, or at least so I surmised, for he wore a captain’s insignia on his visor.

“Come back in. You’ve paid for the full ride,” he said. I heard his voice in the near vacuum as plain as I would at ground level.

“I got a refund,” I said, airlessly.

He appeared to consider that for a moment.

“Can’t dock without everyone on the manifest present,” he said. “Even we have paperwork.”

A dark shadow was coalescing around my vision, vignetting the scene.

I kicked again, knocking one of his feet from the pipework. The reaction caused me to lose my grip on the fuselage and I scrabbled to grab it and pull myself in.

He laughed. “It’s a long way down.”

The geometry of my predicament suddenly presented itself and I realized with a sick horror that I could fall for fifteen minutes or more, breaking the sound barrier with my ass, dying all the way down.

With my free arm I punched him and pulled myself into the wreath of pipes woven over the hull. In the airless void, he fought like the very devil. I was losing consciousness and realized, belatedly, that maybe I should have taken the time to work out the equations. In the fading light, I wasn’t making oxygen, and carbon dioxide was building up in my veins, making me crazy. I must be seeing things that weren’t there.

The devil fights you to your last breath, the priest had said.

I laughed, but no air came out. “You can’t have me,” I said. “Too late. The last breath’s left me.”

He ducked back into the pipework.

I waited, but I did not see the apparition again.

After a few breathless minutes I hauled myself hand over hand to the ship’s magnetic coil which clamped around the upline fiber, holding the ship to the cable. A service cable ran two meters away from the ship’s outer equipment. It moved at half the speed of the upline. I jumped for it. The shock almost tore my arm from my socket but the swing-and-jump onto one of the stationary flat platforms in the center of the tower was easier as I could land on my feet and tuck and roll. The metal was warm to the touch. The whole tower was radiating heat. And light – the space I was on had lit up as soon as I landed on it, having evidently sensed my presence and assumed I was a technician.

I needed to catch my…well, not my breath, exactly. To wait for the oxygen debt to dissipate. The Rambler continued up the tower, gathering speed. Somewhere a hundred kilometers above that, the counterweight ship was equally slowly coming down.

I picked the sunniest spot on the platform, tried to shut the thin shriek and bone-aching rattle of the cables out of my mind, and fell unconscious.

*

I woke up in a pool of blood. The sudden jerk as I’d grabbed the moving service cable had reopened the wound. The counterweight ship was visible to the west, high above me, moving down fast. I walked out on the platform to the half-speed downbound service line. I knew I couldn’t grab it in my current condition. I waited for the downbound ship to reach me, stood up on shaking legs, trying to find something to fixed I could hold on to. The cables were running and support machinery was likely to swing and crush me. Finding a safe place to stand was almost impossible.

The downbound ship pushed a superheated wave of air ahead of it that carried a screeching wail even in the ragged remnant of atmosphere. It came level, I prepared to jump, but before I could get my legs to obey, the ship was a dozen meters below, heading on down.

Hours passed. Sunset came and went.

I crouched on the little platform. As long as I didn’t move, and as long as the bright white sun came back to warm me, I would live. Three days and three nights I stayed there, thinking about life and death, and religion, and the smile of a Kuru woman with a King’s Shilling in her purse.

*

The rattle of cables and the clatter of machinery awakened me from a dream of cutting and tying bunches of radishes that became the heads of Company Men crowned with green leaves. I got to my knees and peered between the black struts of the funicular at the ground so far away that mountains looked like ant heaps. A tinny grating sound, like someone scraping a metal key on a taut wire, issued from the downline and a rattle shook the cable. The upline answered with a deep thrum and noise like a mine’s rock crusher.

Another ship had provisioned on the ground, clamped on, and was coming up from below. Its matching counterweight was coming down. The upcoming ship would reach me first and if I tried to catch it, I would be jumping for the flat ship’s nose coming towards me. If I jumped for the counterweight ship on the downline, I would have to wait longer, and I would have to make a terrifying leap to a rapidly diminishing circle and a rapidly increasing chance of missing and instead hitting the infinitely larger target of ground zero—several minutes later. The upcoming ship was leaving for unknown ports, but the downline would always lead to New Pennsylvania and its unbroken landscape of mine waste-heaps and sullen indentees staggering under the weight of their obligations.

No contest.

When the upcoming ship started to show a disc I prepared for the transfer. My wound was stable, I hoped. My grip was almost as strong as it had been in the mine. I stepped over to the half-speed line, grabbed hold like a pole dancer, and as the top of the upbound ship became an unmissably large platform, I jumped for it.

And missed.

For a frantic moment, I scrabbled at the smooth bow of the ship, lost all remaining traction, and began to fall. The tidal forces of centripetal and gravity combined to leave me completely disoriented. I had no idea which way to twist, but the decision was taken from me as a large life-support duct came up under me and smacked me hard on the ass, wedging my legs between itself and the ship’s hull. It took five minutes for the pain to die down, and for me to gather my wits, find handholds and start to traverse across the hull. After a dizzying few minutes of bad light, freezing temperatures and poor oxygen, I found an emergency airlock switch, hit it and waited for what seemed like hours for it to close the inner door, depressurize, and open the outer door.

*

I sneaked inside and hid like the fugitive I was—for the entire thirteen minutes it took for the first ultrasonic cleaners I found to get the blood and oil off my clothes. Then I dressed in my crisp white shirt and black pants, shined leather boots and supple jacket, swept my green needles back from my eyes, and walked like a free man into the ship’s bar. A nameplate over the back bar gave the ship’s name—Sans Soleil, literally the Sunless. Luckily for me, the real sun had shown up when needed. I showed my chip to the barman and asked for a potato vodka.

He scanned the chip and his eyes widened in surprise. “There’s quite a lot of value here, sir. It must be deposited with the purser for safekeeping.”

“Sure.” In my mind’s eye I saw my priest wag his finger. “Wait, no. I want to transfer some to my tab back down the well.” I gave him my account number at South-East Five Mine.

He made the transfer. “That puts your credit below our statutory maximum. Ah, but you can still leave the balance with the purser, if you wish to do so.”

I felt tonnes raise from my shoulders. Free of my contract at last. I declined the purser’s kind offer and took my drink to a table near a porthole.

There was a Kuru woman sitting at the bar. She smiled at me. I didn’t smile back.

 

End