Ray Aldridge - The Orpheus Machine

“You’re a wild man,” said his clone.

“Ah… it wasn’t even close,” Ruiz said, trying to catch his breath.

“If you say so,” said Junior, clearly amused. He crouched beside Ruiz and looked at the creatures who ran toward them, waving an odd assortment of weapons.

“What are they?” said Junior.

“The Gencha keep human servants,” Ruiz explained, though he found the creatures as amazing as Junior apparently did.

They seemed only marginally human. They trotted along a narrow causeway that spanned the sump, and as they came into clearer view, Ruiz felt his stomach twist. The creatures had once been ordinary men and women, perhaps — now their almost naked bodies were encrusted by exceedingly strange adornments. From every patch of skin, some piece of human anatomy sprouted. In the lead was a man whose hairless skull was decorated with a triple ridge of grafted-on noses. The useless nostrils flared in sympathy with the man’s real ones as he pounded toward them, brandishing an antique punchgun. His arms were dotted with circular scalp grafts, each trailing a plume of different-colored hair.

Behind him ran a woman wearing a necklace of grafted fingers, which curled about her neck with a slow spasmodic movement. Tiny toes fringed each ear, and on her knees little mouths shouted silently. Her chest was covered from collarbones to navel with a number of breasts, all different shapes and sizes. She held some sort of obsolete energy weapon; it had a bell-shaped muzzle and an elaborate green plastic stock. Ruiz wondered if it even worked.

Behind the first two were another dozen horrors, all shrieking in thin piping voices. It struck Ruiz that the sounds they were making were somewhat reminiscent of the sounds that the Gencha made.

The voice of Nisa’s clone whispered in his ear. “Oh. Oh, how awful. How can such things be?”

“What do you think they want?” asked Junior, whose air of detached confidence seemed to have frayed slightly.

“To kill us,” said Ruiz impatiently. “And then they’ll want to enhance their collections with our leftover parts, I suppose.”

“Looks that way,” said Junior. “Don’t they know we’re dangerous?”

“Probably not,” said Ruiz. “They may associate the tram with legitimate visitors — those who have business with their masters. Everyone else they see has fallen into the sump… dead, or too severely injured to offer any resistance.”

“Not very bright, then, are they?” The clone set his pinbeam on the parapet and sighted through its scope.

“Brightness hasn’t much to do with it,” Ruiz said. “They’ve lived with the mindfire — for generations.”

“End of the line,” said Junior, and fired his pinbeam.

It burned through the forehead of the lead man, and he went down, plowing through the viscous fluid at the side of the causeway, a loose bundle of limbs.

Junior shifted his aim, put the beam through the middle of the following woman’s breast collection. She tumbled forward, rolling along the dusty path, but continued to shriek and writhe for a minute before dying, curled around her wound.

Junior shifted aim again and would have killed the next grotesque in the pack — but Ruiz put a hand on his arm. “Wait,” Ruiz said. He found himself disturbed by his clone’s callous efficiency — though of course there was no other reasonable course of action under the circumstances, no other way of reliably discouraging the sad creatures.

But now the surviving monsters had turned and were running away with as much alacrity as they had run to attack, still shrieking.

“Are you sure it’s a good idea to let them get away?” Junior asked. “Won’t they warn the Gencha?”

“Maybe,” said Ruiz. “Though if I understand the mindfire, the Gencha already know about us. But you saw them. What could they do against us?”

Junior shrugged. “Who knows? I guess we’ll find out. Do you think this will be easy?” His clone looked at Ruiz with a disturbing degree of speculation, as if wondering if Ruiz had lost all his violent judgment.

“I’m sure it won’t be easy,” said Ruiz. He looked up the tram rail and wondered if anyone was following them yet. He turned to tell his clone to check the rail, but Junior was already back at the rail, touching the metal with a slender probe.

“We’ve got activity, Dad,” said the clone. “Someone coming down fast.”

Ruiz looked across the sump at the low cavern mouths that gaped along the far side of the pit.

“Time to go,” he said, to his clone and to Nisa’s.

Nisa shifted, trying to find a comfortable way to sit as the tram spiraled downward into the murk. The manacles chafed her wrists, and the hot foul air blew past her face, like the breath of some decayed but not quite dead monster.

She glanced back at Corean, who wore a keen predatory smile on her lovely mouth.

Nisa’s thoughts wandered, and after a while it occurred to her that there was a bond between Corean the slaver and Nisa the dirtworld princess. Both of them were looking forward to seeing Ruiz Aw, one more time.

The idea was tragically funny, and she laughed, too low to be heard by anyone.

Ruiz and his clone ran along the causeway as fast as they could run, loaded as they were with heavy armor, weapons, and sensor gear. The nearest cavern mouth loomed before them, illuminated by the same dull red glow that lit the pit. But inside the entrance the light was a little brighter, which created an illusion of fires burning within.

Something stood up within the cavern and threw something, then ducked down.

The object spun toward them. Both Ruiz and his clone, assuming that it was a grenade, leaped off the causeway into the knee-deep slime, prepared to dive into it.

“Wait,” said Junior. The object fell to the causeway, and Ruiz saw that it was a newly severed hand. On each finger, bound with a silver cord, was a different fetish: a bird’s skull, a scrap of blue cloth, a rusty spring, a tiny vial of some opalescent fluid. To the thumb was tied a tiny plastic model of a man in black armor.

“They’re trying magic,” said Ruiz, feeling a sourceless pity. “Back on the path!”

The two of them charged onward, causing a chorus of thin despairing shrieks from within the cavern, and then the patter of retreating bare feet.

At the edge of the sump were a row of pipes, which rose from the pink slime and ran to a pumping station just inside the cavern mouth. As they ran past the pumping station, Junior slapped a limpet mine on the casing. When they were fifty meters inside the rapidly narrowing cave, the charge detonated.

“Give the Gencha something to worry about besides us,” said the clone when they paused to crouch behind a heap of broken stalagmites. “Besides, if they can’t get their nutrient fluid piped to them, eventually they’ll have to leave the caverns — either to fix the pump, or to feed directly in the sump.”

“Good idea,” said Ruiz.

“Your turn, now,” said Junior.

“What?”

“To give us a good idea. How do we find this Orpheus Machine? It occurs to me that I should have asked more questions before I got involved in all this.” But the clone’s voice was easy and relaxed, not at all accusing. It struck Ruiz that he had spent his whole life leaping into dangerous situations and then relying on luck and ruthlessness to carry him through. He resolved that if by some miracle he survived, he would adopt a much more thoughtful style.

Ruiz looked about. The cave seemed to function as a trash pit and thoroughfare — the rubbish heaps along the walls left a clear path down the center of the tunnel. The rubbish consisted of the detritus of the sump — all those items of clothing and gear that the slime failed to digest, periodically raked from the sump and dumped here. An archaeologist could probably read the history of Sook in these remnants. Ruiz shook his head; his attention was wandering from the task at hand.