Jo Clayton - A Gathering Of Stones

The chamber was only slightly larger than the one behind him. Halfway across it, shoved up against the right-hand wall, there were two wide flat couches raised waist-high off the floor and surrounded by skeletal instruments he managed to identify through a painful stretch of his imagination and Daniel’s memories. Sick bay, he thought. Thick scummy webs hung in veils from the vines that crossed and recrossed the ceiling and grew out of shattered screens ranked along the walls. Unseen vermin scuttled about. He heard the click-clack of their feet, the tentative whisper of the limp pallid leaves as they brushed past. He scowled at the mess of weed and web. This decay reminded him how lucky he was to be alive. He worked his mouth, spat on the first two fingers of his left hand, reached across his body and rubbed his fingers on the wall beside him, an offering to Tungjii Luck. He did this automatically, a habit pattern from Ahzurdan’s past life, as he struggled to think around pain that struck in from his eyes whenever he moved his head and between times was a dull, grinding ache.

Sick bay. Small. Must be officers only. Hmm. Colony ship, converted battleship, given what that misbegotten patchwork told me. That means I’m not too far off from my quarters. Shee-it, how long was I out of it? God, I wish I knew what happened while I was down. My legs feel like spaghetti, I’ll be crawling before I get there. Come on, Danny, anyplace is better than this, it’s enough to make a goat sick. Start shuffling, man. He set his teeth and began creeping toward the exit. It was half open and he could see a pale light beyond. A corridor, probably. And it was lit. A good sign. Could be it was still passable. There was air wherever you went in this ancient ship, he knew that now; metal and forcefields could exist in vacuum, but too much of the Chained God’s life or essence or whatever had spilled out of the natal computer into that cobbled together mess, bits of brain matter, bone and sinew, vegetable growths and swarms of necessary symbiotes for h/it to shut off the flow of air.

He started across the chamber, clawing awkwardly at the ancient webs, his skin crawling as he visualized spiders dropping into his eyes. The dust he knocked off the webs and the leaves drifted slow/y slowly onto him with the silky ponderance of the half-g gravity decreed by the Chained God throughout this pocket reality; he breathed shallowly, his lips pressed together, but that exuviae, that ancient scurf filled his mouth with the taste of death. He caught hold of the rail at the foot of the first cot and stood bent over it, feeling it give slowly slowly under the pressure of his diminished weight. The dust fell harder, the leaves above him shook with the agitated trotting of the creatures that lived up there. He moved on.

For the next half hour he moved along corridors as overgrown and dusty as the sickbay. The transition into a clean well-lighted section was abrupt, as if he passed through a membrane that blocked contamination from the unregulated life outside. He leaned against a sterile white wall, closed his eyes, sick with weariness, knowing he was near the living quarters which the Chained God had cleaned up for outsiders, the apartments he’d occupied for a month and a half before the god caught him plotting and dumped him into coldsleep. Because he was so near, the will that kept his body moving drained out of him… so near and so far. He sank onto his knees, hugged his arms across his chest and tried to dredge a last effort out of a mind and body on the verge of collapse. Just a few turns more, only a few turns more and he could rest and eat. The thought of food nauseated him, but he had to replace the flesh melted off him while he vegetated in the pod. He had to begin rebuilding wasted muscle. He rocked onto hands and knees and crawled, head hanging, eyes blind with sweat and the hair that must have kept growing while he slept; it fell in a coarse gray-streaked black curtain long enough to sweep the rubbery floorcovering. He hadn’t thought about hair before, it’d just been there on his head. He crouched where he was and scowled at the hair falling past his eyes. The Daniel memories told him that in a properly working coldsleep pod even hair growth stopped, but there was enough play in the stasis field to let small changes occur if the adjustment wasn’t precisely tailored to the metabolism of the sleeper; the wasting of his body was one of those changes, a serious one if he’d stayed much longer in the pod, the hair growth was another. And it was a crude way to measure time. He started crawling again, moving blindly along the corridor as he considered available data. The hair he’d inherited from Ahzurdan was eight to ten cm long when the god put him down. Now it was… he stopped crawling, pushed up into a squat and jerked a hair from the back of his head. It was close to thirty cm now which meant… two cm a year was a good average, take off ten already there, that left twenty which meant he was in that pod for roughly ten years. He threw the hair away and went back to crawling. Ten years?

He snarled at the friable mat that crumbled each time he set a hand down. Ten years cold storage. I’m supposed to be a good boy now, eh? Or you put me down again and maybe this time I’m snuffed? No joy, stewmeat. His mind blanked as rage took hold of him; his arms quivered and he collapsed to the floor, his body shaking with dry sobs.

His half-sires whispered sarcasms into his ears, mocking his suffering as extravagance and nonsense, a whimpering of a hypochondriacal organism, puppy looking to be petted. He slapped his hands against the mat, lifted himself on trembling arms and crawled on, fuming; his anger at the Chained God for risking him so casually was shunted aside by this annoying persistence of his sires; he was beginning to wonder if Daniel and Ahzurdan would ever fully merge with him and leave him without those irritating chains that kept jerking him back into his double past. Hair swaying in front of his nose, limbs trembling, he inched along the corridor, staying close to the left-hand wall.

A door sighed open. He stopped, blinked, then fumbled around and passed through the doorway into the chamber beyond where he collapsed in the middle of a painfully clean, faded blue carpet. He lay there and thought about pulling himself up and putting himself properly to bed, but the will to move died with his consciousness and he sank into a sleep that was close to coma.

For the next two weeks Danny Blue ate, slept, quelled his sires when they threatened to come apart, built back his weight and strength. And he grew more puzzled as each day passed.

He remembered the Chained God being powerfully present everywhere, sending a fantastical web of sound throughout the starship cascades of beeps, oscillating hums, bings, bongs, twangs, murmurs, sibilant sussurations, squeals and twitters, subsonic groans that raised the hair on his arms and grumbled in his belly-the god communing with Wits various pans. That continuous, pervasive noise was barriered from the living quarters, but back then, when he was living there alone, the unheard vibrations filled the rooms despite the filters, buzzing in his bone. The vibrations were gone, replaced by a silence as intangible and impenetrable as the god’s alleged mind. Silence filled the quarters, except for the sough of air through the ducts, the minor ticking of the support systems, and the noises Danny himself made. The god had withdrawn from his realm.

At first Danny was too intent on his own needs to notice that absence, except for a vague unease that wasn’t intrusive enough to break his concentration on himself. When he was no longer an animated skeleton, though, he heard the silence and wondered. And started worrying. The Chained God in h/its ordinary aspect was spooky enough. This was worse.