Lawrence Schoen - Barsk - The Elephants' Graveyard

“Thank you,” he said to the boat, drawing out the moment, never having known a boat before, not knowing if he would again.

He scrambled out of the surf and onto the beach, stumbling like a child who had discovered his parents’ liquor chest and sampled with the delight of a natural experimentalist. He pressed the fingers of both hands against his chest, forcing them to flex until he could make them do it of his own volition. Only when his body was working again more or less as it should, did he lift his gaze to the light of the elevator and examine his surroundings.

The space elevator rose out of a complex of buildings. The nearer ones looked much like structures you might find in the Civilized Wood of any island, though built on a larger scale. Pizlo imagined they served as home to those Fant who labored here, day in and out, meeting the barges bringing the pharmaceuticals from those islands responsible for that sort of manufacturing, and loading them into the gleaming cargo pods that sat on nearby tracks leading into edifices like nothing else on Barsk. Each pod was as big as Tolta’s house, like a giant cube but with the corners cut off leaving flat triangles and no points. The pods and the tracks they rested upon showed more metal and plastic than Pizlo had ever imagined existing in one place. And the inner buildings rose up in angles not from nature, like monster houses seen only in a nightmare. The tracks flowed into the nightmare, even now with no workers attending them, creeping more slowly than he could walk, to what at first seemed the monster’s maw, but which Pizlo realized was only a passage to their true destination. He stared up at the shining beanstalk and counted. Every hundred heartbeats or so, another pod tumbled into the maw and out of sight, and a different one further along in the process rose up in the shaft of light, leaping upward into the sky like it had learned to fly.

Pizlo stumbled to the far end of the tracks, his gait improving by the time he arrived. Dozens of pods sat on rollers, gradually drifting closer to a space where the tracks began, emerging from a housing in the ground. He could see a series of hooks that came up from below, rumbling like thunder as they pulled down the center of the tracks so they hooked on the pods and carried them along the tracks. Likely hundreds of cargo pods had been packed the previous day and left to slide one by one onto the tracks and await their turn up the beanstalk. These were the remaining ones from the day’s work. The process would begin again in the morning. Pizlo planned to be far away by then.

He started poking at one of the waiting pods. His fingers still didn’t work well, but the sensitive nubs of his trunk were more than capable of working the latches on an access panel and he soon opened it. The inside of the hatch had a packet of pages. The light from the elevator made the headers legible. They read “inventory” in the circular glyphs of the Fant, and presumably the same thing in the boxy marks used by the Alliance. Pizlo braced his arms on either side of the hatch and pulled himself in, his bags banging against the sides before following him. He had enough room to stand up, but an adult would have had to hunch over. He stood in a narrow corridor made by the walls of stacked containers of assorted pharmaceuticals to left and right and underneath. He bumped to either side and jumped up and down but nothing moved. Either they were too heavy, or they’d been bolted in place, maybe both.

Looking back out, he could see the buildings of the complex slowly sliding as his cargo pod edged ever closer to the track. He took some time to examine the inside surface of the hatch, making sure he could open it from within before closing it and shutting out the bit of light and the sound and smell of the ocean. In total darkness he explored his corridor, taking his time to turn at every junction and to double back again until he’d covered every pace. He imagined some Alliance sapient, probably from one of the smaller races like a Geom or Marmo, purposefully striding where he had roamed, comparing the cargo in the pod to some manifest in hand.

He settled himself in a corner, his back against the intersection of two walls of containers, and put his bags down. Everything jolted once, and a faint rumbling echoed around him. His pod had arrived onto the main track at last and a hook was pulling it slowly closer to the entrance of the elevator. Now that he was here, the efforts of the long day caught up with him. He’d never been so tired, but as much as he wanted to close his eyes and sleep, he needed to deal with thirst and hunger first. His fingers felt all puffy, but at least his hands had stopped being slippery. He held a water container in place with the heels of his hands and opened it with his nubs, dropping his trunk into it as soon as the lid came free and slurping up the entire contents. Next he went through all the sweet grasses and succulent fruit from one of his mesh bags and ate until it was almost empty before putting it away. He set the empty bottle aside, carefully putting the cap back in place; he didn’t know how long he would have to be in here, but he didn’t want to make a mess for that hypothetical Marmo, and so he might be refilling the container before he left.

Thirst quenched and belly full, Pizlo curled up tight, shoving his damaged hands into his armpits and tucking his trunk under his crossed arms. He dropped into a deep and dreamless sleep even before his cargo pod had worked its way to the elevator. The rumbling of the track stopped, and while he slumbered he entered the shaft of the beanstalk and began to climb, faster than anything he had ever imagined.

TWENTY-SEVENother Fant had been on the ship that abducted Rüsul — twenty-eight if he counted the young man who so clearly did not belong — and they had come from all different islands, from both the eastern and western archipelagos. Despite a long life, he hadn’t known any of them, though a few recognized his name or had known someone who had met someone who owned one of his carvings. The internment facility was different. Nearly two hundred others had been snatched up from the ocean on their respective voyages to what they’d imagined to be the final journey of their lives.

He had no sooner finished being “processed” by a pair of utterly disinterested Feln when a trunk fell upon his shoulder and a familiar voice exclaimed “It is you! By my grandfather’s tusks, I swore I’d never forget the scar on your ear no matter the years that passed.”

An ancient Eleph stood behind him, arms akimbo and as grim an expression on her face as any Rüsul had known. “Phas? Can it be? I’ve not seen you since—”

“Since you jilted me and went off with another woman, you old bastard!”

Never smart when it came to women, Rüsul didn’t even try to stop the laughter that came burbling out of him. “That was always your problem, confusing a man’s free choice with a personal attack. And I have to think I made the right choice. After two children and more years together than I ever deserved, my mate never once got mad enough to tear into me like you did.”

The other Fant slapped Rüsul’s shoulder again and gave out a loud whoop, revealing her initial anger as mere pretense. “Two kids? Well, I should probably be thankful that she got you instead of me. I wasn’t ready for children for a long while, and I learned quick enough not to become involved with men who didn’t want to wait.”

Rüsul’s nubs lightly grazed the mark on his left ear, his thoughts hurtling back to a foolish bachelor trying to woo the two prettiest women on Telba at the same time. “It’s been a long time since I thought back to that night. Probably just denial that I was ever so young and stupid.”