Ray Aldridge - The Orpheus Machine

His eyes wandered about the cockpit, lingering on the splashes of blood, the heap of armor he had taken from the taller Deltan. He felt almost sick to his stomach; finally he drained the beer and threw the stew overboard.

After a while he stirred himself and began to perform the necessary tasks. He rinsed the armor clean and buckled it on. In one of the armor’s storage slots he found a wad of SeaStack currency; apparently the Sub-Dominators were on their way to a SeaStack vacation. He tried a harsh laugh, and to his ears it sounded infinitely more menacing than the laugh the dead Deltan had been practicing.

“Well, I’m an experienced monster,” he said, as if to an invisible companion, and smiled. His face felt odd, so he stopped smiling.

He took a bucket and washed the rest of the blood down into the bilge, where an automatic pump whirred and discharged it into the sea.

Despite the sleep he had gotten the night before, he felt a feverish exhaustion. But he sat down in the helmsman’s seat and saw that the navigation computer was already set up with the coordinates of SeaStack. Before he pressed the execute bar, he had a thought; he looked under the dashboard and saw a black box with Delt’s logo: a remote controller. He pried up the connector and jerked the datacable loose.

The boat was now his — or so he hoped.

He buckled on the restraint harness and sent the boat arrowing over the sea at its maximum speed. The sensation was like riding a skipping stone at seventy knots.

He and the bruises he would collect would arrive at SeaStack in the morning, provided he avoided enemies with speedier boats.

Ruiz drove the boat through the night in a state of comatose vigilance. He submerged his thoughts in the sensations of speed, narrowing the focus of his mind to throttle and wheel and the heaving surface of the sea.

He was quite surprised when the dawn showed him the tips of SeaStack’s tallest structures, rising above the horizon.

He jerked back on the throttle bar and the boat came off the plane, settling into the sea with a flare of spray. The engine’s scream dropped to a mutter.

What was his plan? At that moment his head was filled with a terrifying indecision, and nothing else. He had promised Somnire something… hadn’t he? No, actually he hadn’t said he would do anything; Somnire had told him he must do as his heart directed.

At the moment his heart told him to flee as far from SeaStack as he could get, to run away from Sook, to hope that he died a peaceful death long before humanity was consumed by what lay under Yubere’s stronghold.

He sighed. No, it wasn’t his heart speaking — it was common sense.

For some reason he thought of his foolish youth, when he had called himself an emancipator, when he had still believed that the institution of slavery could be destroyed. He thought of the pain, the disappointment, the blood spilled, the friendships betrayed, all in the name of that hopeless chimera.

As he mused, he discovered to his surprise that he no longer regarded that younger self with his customary bitter contempt. Something had changed. Something had thawed the ice that had filled his heart for so long, and now his heart demanded that he go into Sook and do his best to destroy the Orpheus Machine. “How strange,” he said aloud, and his voice shook a little.

He laughed, then, and had a pleasant thought. Perhaps Corean had sold Nisa somewhere; perhaps in SeaStack he could consult the market listings, if the market still survived the disturbances in the city. Maybe he could still find her.

When he began to wonder where he could access the market datastreams, the beginning of a plan formed in his mind, just a faint glimmer of possibility — but it was better than no plan at all.

Ruiz Aw took the Deltan’s helmet from its locker and settled it over his head. He took a deep breath and shoved the throttle bar forward.

SeaStack grew until its towers eclipsed half the sky. Ruiz Aw approached the security perimeter, where he expected some sort of challenge from the floating forts which formed the city’s seaward defenses.

Dead ahead was a fort of burnished rose-colored alloy; it presented a low rounded profile, like a turtle of mythic proportions. He slowed the squirtboat and waited for the fort’s garrison to hail him.

But as he drifted forward, he began to notice ominous details.

No one moved along its armored battlements. Scorch marks licked up from several observation ports. As he floated a little closer, he saw that twisted wreckage had replaced the fort’s weapons emplacements.

He brought the boat to a halt, reversing its impeller momentarily. Had the fighting gotten so out of hand that the pirate Lords no longer controlled the perimeter?

A breeze eddied around the twisted shapes of Sea-Stack’s towers and brought him the smell of decay. He gagged, then forced himself to be calm. I’m not the man I was, he thought, but he felt no great regret.

He swung the squirtboat in a wide circle and passed the fort without incident.

When he neared the first of the great stacks that gave the city its name, he looked up with his usual amazement; it seemed impossible that a structure so spindly could reach such an enormous height.

Then he looked down into the murky water that surged against the stack’s base, and thought how deep the stack reached into the sea. He remembered the job he had done for Publius the monster maker, breaking into Yubere’s stack at its roots — and how it had felt, to be surrounded by the impersonal relentless pressure of the deep.

In retrospect, his assassination of Yubere appeared a rather lighthearted adventure, compared to the things he had lived through since then.

Perhaps those memories retained a certain warmth because of his conviction — at the time — that Nisa waited for him if he returned. He had no such reward before him now… nothing beyond mere survival, a prospect in which he found insufficient motivation.

He searched himself for will. Why should he again go down into SeaStack’s depths? What reasons compelled him to try?

For a while nothing significant came to him. He had made a half-promise to a ghost. What of that? He also hoped to spite Roderigo — but revenge had, very strangely, ceased to move him with any great intensity.

Then he remembered that the universe was surely full of men and women who loved as passionately as Ruiz and Nisa, who hoped to live out their lives together without brutality and coercion. Could he act on their behalf? “Better than nothing,” he whispered. Did he feel a little stronger? Perhaps.

He shook himself. Now wasn’t a time for pointless speculation. Now was a time for caution, scheming, sharp observation.

He looked up at the stack again. What was different from the way it had been when last he had passed this way, a passenger on the barge Loracca ?

Then the terraces had been green with crops and flowers, spilling perfume and color into the air. Now the steep sides of the stack were brown and dead, and no farmers moved along the terraces in their eternal stoop.

Then music had floated down from the habitations higher in the stack, faint and sprightly. Now the silence was so deep as to raise Ruiz’s hackles.

He passed the entrance to an interior anchorage; the metal gates were half-melted from their hinges, and the tunnel seemed blocked by a wrecked airboat, barely awash.

He saw his first corpse, a legless woman with a face so bloated she no longer looked at all human. In the old Sea-Stack, corpses never floated long enough to decay significantly — the margars took them down. Were the margars so gorged they could no longer keep up with their task?

Ruiz Aw hunched down in the cockpit and kept to the shadows, as he made his way deeper into SeaStack.