Lawrence Schoen - Barsk - The Elephants' Graveyard

His humiliation increased when gravity went away. All his life Pizlo had leaped and jumped and flown through every high and low place in the forests on Keslo, and never once had his stomach registered a complaint. Now down had become a memory rather than a reality. His stomach revolted and everything in it came back up. Invisible in the darkness, his floating puke terrified him. The smell of his own stomach acids and partially digested meal accentuated the reek of his urine-soaked shorts. For the rest of the voyage he huddled into a ball, wondering if any of Barsk’s moons would ever want to talk to him when he couldn’t even go to the bathroom properly or keep his lunch where it belonged.

Finally, the pod must have reached the shaft’s apex. The walls around him clanged as if something had struck the container and soon after gravity returned, though much less than what he’d known on Barsk. The floor tilted a good thirty degrees, and this was followed by a more muted clanging and then a trundling sound and a sense of movement. The pod had lost some of its chill. Pizlo waited until the sense of motion stopped — with another clang! — and the floor went level again. Tugging his possessions with his trunk, he made his way back along the dark corridor toward the entrance and opened the hatch.

Dim light poured in, more than enough to blind his already weak eyes. He was thirsty and smelly and cranky and he’d forgotten his hands didn’t work. They slid along the frame of the entrance and the rest of him followed out of the pod. He fell a greater distance than when he’d climbed in and landed with a heavy thud. His head spun for a while, and when he managed to get to his feet, his left arm hung uselessly at his side. He stared down at it, annoyed. “That’s not good,” he said aloud, and shrugged. There was nothing he could do about it now. He gathered up his mesh sacks which had fallen out with him, and took stock of his surroundings.

The warehouse held thousands of cargo pods stacked in finished blocks running two wide and three deep and five high. The ceiling was high enough that they could have built the stacks even taller. Pizlo’s pod was one among the set of six that would complete the top layer of a stack, which explained the height of his fall. As he collected himself, a gigantic machine cradling a cargo pod in a three-limbed metal grip sped past. It deposited the pod and then returned back the way it had come. He staggered after it, making note of the countless rows all around him, defined by stacks of cargo pods stuffed with drugs and medicines.

The machine led him to a gate. He followed it through and stopped as the machine turned left to approach a round hole in the floor. Five similar machines also surrounded the opening, and behind each lay an identical gate to the one he’d come through. As Pizlo watched, a fresh cargo pod hurtled up out of the hole and one of the machines extended multiple arms to snatch it. He recognized the resulting clang. The machine tilted back with its prize and rolled toward its gate.

He turned to the right, away from the mouth of the beanstalk, and after only a few steps encountered a different gate, one that was too small for the machines to access but more than adequate for people. He pushed at it and the gate split down the middle, the sides retracting into the wall on either side, to reveal a corridor. The gate closed up again behind him and he froze. Hallways and corridors weren’t new to him, but nothing in the Civilized Wood ran so straight for so far. The only unending vistas he had seen had been at the beach or while on the sea. Everything spun for a moment and Pizlo sagged against the wall. His heart hammered like it wanted to escape his chest. His eyes ached and he couldn’t catch his breath.

He let out a lone whimper, a sound too low for anyone to hear, and once was enough, an acknowledgment of panic that had crept into him unseen. That was fine. “I’m only six,” he said, wiping at his eyes with the nubs of his trunk. Admitting it made it okay for him to be frightened, and knowing that allowed him to set it aside. His hands itched but he thought better about scratching them. Instead he let them rest, positioning one above the other, on the moons he had drawn on his chest. He closed his eyes and just breathed for a while. When his heart rate had slowed to normal he pushed off from the wall, opened his eyes again, and set off down the corridor.

The air in the warehouse had smelled better though he couldn’t think why. He pondered that for a few steps until the closer space of his hallway made him realize that he was the source of the funk. Right. The revelations of his last moon had made it clear that he needed to come to this place but had been disturbingly silent on the specifics of what to do once he arrived. If the warehouse he’d been in with its endless stacks of stuff was like the entire island of Keslo, this space resembled the Civilized Wood. That meant that people lived and worked here. And just like back home, it would be simpler and easier for everyone if he could move about unseen. That included moving unsmelled; he needed to do something about that soon.

His trunk grazed the ink on his chest. “I am like the moons. Invisible behind tree and rain and cloud, but always there.” He fanned his ears and listened but detected no sound. As he stepped forward, light filled the near end of the corridor from above, a trio of thin strips that illuminated walls and floor in his vicinity but let the rest of the corridor trail off in ever diminishing light. The lights overhead left trailing lines on his vision when he looked away. They also revealed a series of doors set flush with the walls, alternating continuously, or at least as far as the light allowed. Everything was plastic, rendered in muted shades of color that invariably tended toward gray, though a paler shade than the Fant back home. Time to explore.

The nearest door had a threshold framing it in darker gray than the gray green of the door itself. Someone had stenciled several tiny glyphs on the frame a bit above his eye level. He pressed his head to the wall but heard nothing from inside so took another step and listened against the door itself. Much like the gate at the head of the hallway, it gave way and vanished into the side of the wall with a faint whooshing sound. It happened so quickly that Pizlo stumbled into the resulting space, waving his good arm for balance and barely keeping his feet. A light came on in the room, brighter than the corridor outside; the door whooshed closed behind him.

A pair of Pandas stood facing him, waving and smiling like they were happy to see him. Pizlo yelped and scrambled backwards. The door opened behind him with another whoosh and only after he had crossed the threshold again did he realize the Ailuros hadn’t actually noticed him. He stepped back inside, closer, and they continued to smile and wave. They stood framed by a background of leafy green plants and a cluster of bamboo, beyond the edges of which was the same uniform gray plastic as the corridor outside, walls, floor, and ceiling.

“Oh!” Under the cheerful gaze of the Ailuros on the wall he investigated the room. A molded desk bulged from one side and a matching bench seat extruded from the floor in front of it. A sleeping platform was little more than another bit of raised floor with some bedclothes wrapped tightly across. A door in the far corner slid open onto a lavatory alcove, the commode and basin and tub all one piece with the room itself, and a shelf above the basin contained tiny dispensers of gel. The near corner’s sliding door held a closet with three black uniforms hanging from a crossbar and a small chest of drawers containing several tunics and pants of a soft and pale green fabric. All the clothes were of a size and shape appropriate to an Ailuros. Three small hooks protruded from the wall at higher than head-height, like upward-curving fingers or nubs, on the wall halfway between the door and the closet. Something very much like a daypouch on a long strap hung from one.