Ray Aldridge - The Orpheus Machine

Corean shook her head impatiently. “Then listen: Send a Gench to me, that it may confirm my ownership of Yubere’s fief.”

“You would permit this?” asked the woman, eyes wide.

“Yes, yes — but hurry. Those men you describe are here to steal and destroy. Of that reality you should already be certain.”

A Gench shuffled forward on its three short legs. Corean waited for it with her head high. When the Gench opened one of its mouths and extended a sensory filament, Corean stood still, and the only emotion Nisa could see on her perfect face was impatience. The filament sank into her forehead, and the slaver didn’t twitch.

A moment later the Gench withdrew its sensor. “The situation is unclear,” it whispered. “It seems uncertain that you will be able to protect us, as Yubere did for so long. Still, you appear to be telling the truth as you see it. I will recommend that we assist you, as long as you refrain from damaging our properties and servitors.”

Corean nodded and replaced her helmet. “We’ll be careful. But Ruiz Aw won’t, so take us to him.”

The Gench’s eyespots ceased their endless circulation for a moment. “Yes. The men are currently wandering in the same parallel gallery that you have entered, where they can do little harm. But if they are at all clever, they will soon find a way to break into our Inner Spaces. I will give you a servitor to guide you.”

The woman with the ear-covered arms came reluctantly forward. “This is called Soosen,” the Gench whispered. “It will take you to your enemies.”

Corean and her group followed Soosen through the crowd of grotesques, and Nisa returned her gaze to her feet, so that she wouldn’t have to look at the terrible things these people had done to themselves.

But when they reached the turn of the tunnel, Nisa looked back, to see the three Gencha, facing each other and hooting softly but insistently. And then two of them disappeared into nothingness, along with their semi-human entourage. The remaining Gench turned toward her, though she couldn’t tell if it was watching her.

It was almost as if they had been arguing, she thought, before she returned to her walking dream.

Ruiz sat motionlessly taking slow shallow breaths, willing his metabolism to gear down. He glanced again at his armor’s readout slate — his oxygen was almost half-depleted. He manually retarded the rate of release. Surely he could do with a little less now.

He tried to think, to come up with a way to find the Gencha habitations and the Orpheus Machine. It was a maddening situation; the tunnels they had traversed bore a resemblance to the topography Somnire had described. But he had seen none of Somnire’s landmarks, nor had they come across any other dwellers. What was going on?

His breathing slowed a bit more, and his eyelids grew heavy. He found himself nodding. His neck grew too supple and his head fell forward.

He dreamed. At first it was a dream of such stark simplicity that he was almost impatient with it. He was tending his flowers on the terrace. Behind him: the facade of his home. Before him: the great rift canyon with its jagged black cliffs, the airless black sky of his empty planet.

The sun beat through the protective field, warming his back as he bent over the beds. He loosened the black soil around each precious plant, dusted the soil with a handful of mineral supplements. Time passed, and impatience gave way to a sweet regretful nostalgia — though with the unruly time-slipped logic of dreams, he couldn’t understand where that sense of loss and longing came from. When had he ever been happier than he was here, alone and safe?

He saw a clump of asters past its prime; the blossoms had gone brown and ragged. He reached out to pull off the dead flower heads, but when his hand closed around the soft flower, it hardened and twisted in his hand, like a small muscular animal.

It bit him with tiny sharp teeth and he jerked his hand away. The dead aster seemed unchanged. He looked at his hand, holding it palm up at his waist. The hand ached, as if the flower had injected some painful venom. Slowly blood collected in the cup of his hand, and he gazed down at it, unable to look away.

He saw his reflection in the shining pool of blood — the face of a terribly sad man, who cried silently, his mouth twisted with the effort of holding in the sobs.

His eyes snapped open; his heart hammered. His vision blurred, and he pressed the chin switch that sent an emergency draft of oxygen into his lungs. How could he have fallen asleep, here in this place of death and deadly illusion? Was he completely mad? Had he lost all of the edge that had helped him to survive for so long?

He looked wildly from side to side, expecting to see Corean, or her Moc, or an army of monsters standing there, fingers on triggers, ready to laugh and kill.

He was still alone. How long had he slept? He selected the channel to Nisa’s clone. “What’s been happening? Why did you allow me to sleep?”

“I would have spoken if anyone had come. But you needed the rest, didn’t you?” Her voice held a strong echo of that warmth that had captured his affection, back when he was still a slayer and she still a princess.

He was shaking. “Maybe, maybe. But it was an extremely foolish thing to do. I’ll get plenty of rest when I’m dead. Meanwhile, keep me awake.”

“If you say so,” she answered. She sounded a little hurt.

He glanced at his chronometer. He had slept for only a few minutes. But still, he had dreamed. It suddenly occurred to him how strange this was, that he had dreamed. And he found that he could remember the details of the dream. He endured another shudder. Somehow he had always thought that if he ever began to dream again, his dreams would be more endurable. What did it mean?

He shook his head violently. “Have you seen Junior? My clone?”

“No,” she whispered.

He got up, adjusting the oxygen flow to support moderate exertion. An idea had come to him along with the dream. Somnire’s map had seemed to resemble the empty maze in several places. Suppose they were moving along the course of the occupied levels, separated from their goal only by a layer of meltstone and fused alloy? That surmise might explain the sounds they had heard at various points along the path they had taken.

How to find a way into these hypothetical parallel tunnels? Ruiz wondered where Junior had gone. The clone’s sensors might make short work of the problem. Ruiz opened the short-range channel. “Junior?” he said tentatively.

There was no answer; his clone was out of range, at the least. Maybe Junior was thinking. Maybe he was dead. Maybe he had fallen asleep, too. No… he couldn’t believe that of his younger self.

Ruiz sighed and tapped at the wall with the butt of his ruptor. It made a dull clunk. He moved a few meters down the corridor and tapped again. Was there a difference in the clunk?

He shook his head ruefully. The flaw in this approach was that if these tunnels did indeed parallel the inhabited tunnels, he would be constantly announcing his position to everyone on the other side. Though perhaps they already knew where he was.

He tried another spot and this time he heard a definite clink.

“Might as well be hung for a goat,” he said to himself. He set one of his limpet mines against the wall and set it for a penetrating explosion. As he trotted off around the curve of the tunnel, he heard Nisa’s clone ask, “What’s a goat?”

The mine detonated, and an instant later Ruiz heard the shrieks of the wounded.

The world had grown very strange for Nisa by the time they reached the entrance to the enclave’s habitations — a deep narrow shaft, down which a ladder descended into red darkness. She edged forward to look, but an armored man pushed her roughly back, as if fearing that she might fling herself down the hole, dragging the rest of the prisoners with her. She laughed; what a foolish idea. She had long ago passed that point. Now her overriding emotion was curiosity. What new weirdness would her life next serve up to her?