5

The airlock did that weird thing; seemingly an impenetrable rainbow-shimmering mirror until I damn-near 'hit' it, then it would clear and let me see in. I saw a dim industrial interior (nothing new in that) so I went on through. My field collapsed and I was suddenly breathing real air; plus a mix of stale beer, stale farts and stale humans. (In trendy bars they called this ‘atmosphere’ and you paid extra for it.)

I paused to orient myself. I was not yet in the bar itself, just an anteroom. On every wall, stretching up as high as possible, were custom hooks for breather rings. Each one a recharger in fact, and I saw about 8 different types, some ancient. I counted the rings and estimated there were about thirty people inside, until something struck me as odd. The highest-level hooks had most of the breather-rings but they were all much older models, mostly battered, no lights on, and one was crushed like a pretzel. Around each of them, like a peculiar bloom of fungus, were glued odd things: old hologram photos, toys, personal effects, hand-written notes. A hat. A scarf. A shabby handmade love-heart.

I was suddenly struck senseless. This was not just a cloakroom; it was a cemetery. Death, real actual death, had happened hereabouts. And the survivors, the locals, had put these things up in here; all this dead-people-stuff; as a memorial ...

No, no! Inconceivable! Death had been beaten! I did not fear it. I had Upload – the galaxy's best Resurrection Insurance. 'Full Upload: Full Replacement' as the ads put it. My clone would be imprinted with my every memory (except in the unlikely event of a violent death in which case I’d respawn without that detail!) and within a few months I’d be back in action. I’d have my first resurrection party with Ma and Pa (they hadn’t ever had one themselves), then I’d get my travel paid right back here to Crush with my qualifications intact, and I’d pick up from here (with a few tweaks, I can assure you!) Even Harriet ...

No, maybe I could tweak that too.

Alright, enough of this! I re-centred myself into the here-and-now, took two long slow breaths and started noticing other details. The sheer number of hooks suggested that the Crush Club had seen better days. I began to notice that some of the locals had personalised their breather-ring in little ways, some with paint, some with mottos (“I Stink Therefore I Am”) and some with studs or spikes or fake valves and cogs. Kind of – quirky. Artistic but very 'outsider', not mainstream. So I spent a moment enjoying these little details (of the living, not the death-row above me) then hung mine on its correct type of hook, took a couple of Centering Breaths and strode confidently through to the bar.

It was a big space, like a domed cavern. The lights were dim. Fans spun lazily overhead. The carpet was sticky. Large roughly-dressed people hunched around three tables while the rest of the place was empty. One of these oafs peered at me for a moment, then resumed his murmured conversation. A few others gave me a brief once-over, but no-one stared. At one table I spotted that distinctive coin-slot head I’d seen earlier at the airport. (Okay, avoid that table.) I turned left and started for what appeared to be a food counter. Yes it was. Good. The menu was pretty basic but I was too hungry to care. I ordered a no-kill steak and, after looking around at the half-dozen low-lifes sitting at the other tables, I chose to sit alone.

I soon found out why the whole town was built on stilts. Halfway through my steak a siren sounded. I stopped and looked around. No-one seemed to be panicking, but I noticed a few of them gripping the edges of their tables. What the...? Then the whole place shuddered violently and the floor seemed to plummet beneath my seat. An earthquake!

I dived sideways out of my chair just as the floor came back up and smacked my nose painfully, then clung whimpering to my table leg until the shuddering subsided. From this vantage point I finally noticed that everything was bolted securely to the floor.

The earthquake ruckus was replaced by the whine and jerk of hydraulics. I felt the entire building re-level itself. People resumed their conversations as if nothing had happened. I looked around, then got up as nonchalant as I could. But I was still shaking inside and felt the need for some sort of human reassurance. I glanced around and asked the first person I saw looking at me, “So, ah, what just happened?”

She was this tough-looking woman in a sleeveless top and jungle pants who had stayed at her table throughout the quake. One of those melting-pot Amazonian woman whose ancestors had taken Exodus after Earth had finally joined the Civilized Galaxy.

“She's just having a little scratch,” came her casual reply.

“She?”

The stranger peered at me and asked, “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

I nodded. She glanced at my clothes then her eyes lit up.

“Ah, you’re the new Flake!”

“Flaker.” I corrected her.

She stood up and moved towards me, threateningly, “We call ‘em ‘Flakes’ here, Duckie.” It was like she was sizing me up, checking to see if I was made of the right sort of stuff. Would I stand, or would I run? “So, how many skinnings you do today, Doc?”

“Five.” I answered rather nervously. I almost added, ‘Is that enough?’

Her eyebrows went up. Clearly she was impressed by this number.

“Since I got here this afternoon.” I added as casually as I could.

She snorted in disbelief, glancing around at her little group of friends with a sardonic smile. But one of them was nodding.

“Yep, he was on the two o’clock.” It was that notch-headed guy.

The tough woman looked from him to me and back again, as if she was deciding whether to believe I’d really done five ‘skinnings’ as she called them, or whether to be impressed by my audacity to lie. Finally she just stuck out her hand, “Ah just put it there, mate! Welcome to Edgetown!” She had the grip of death but I was pretty strong too after three straight months of peeling crud off Kirrikibats. I gave as good as I got.

“I’m Tommie Tipper,” she said, “come meet m' mates.” An order, not an invitation.

I glanced back at my table, suddenly having no desire whatsoever to socialise with her gnarly crew, but my cultured upbringing compelled my to at least be polite.

“Uh, sure.” I walked across, a matter of five steps.

Tommie Tipper gestured at a guy in filthy orange overalls who was effectively a dark moody mountain (complete with appropriate foliage), “This here’s Stevedore.”

She leaned close to me, whispered, “Always call him ‘Stevo’.”

I shook hands with ‘Stevo’. He didn’t meet my eye, just resumed fixing some technical pump thing that was laid out on the table like an autopsy. I began to form a diagnosis (of him, not his pump) but was interrupted as the introductions continued.

“This is Notch. He’s a truckie like me.”

Handshake. Notch looked right at me, neutral. I tried to be his equal, except I was 19 and he was 45 (unless he’d had rejoovs then it was anybody’s guess) and had the markings of a man that had seen war or worked in the backrooms of a fashion show or something equally traumatic. He gazed right through me. I tried not to shrivel.

“Ah!” said Tipper, turning, “And here comes me old mate, Tyge!” Glad of an excuse to quit my slo-mo slaughter by ‘Notch’, I turned in time to see a newcomer arrived through a back door. “Perfect timing, kid,” boomed Tipper, “come meet the new Flake!”

Holy crap, it was that tiger-faced woman!

She strode right up to me, giving me a look I could not interpret. Was she asking me to shut up about something? Then her eyes flicked away towards a hunched beast sitting all alone in the shadows against the farthest wall.

I stepped to meet her, hand out. “Hi, so, uh, Ms Tyge, is it?” Another potentially bone-crushing handshake followed, which I heroically survived.

“Yup,” she answered, “...and..?”

I suddenly realized I hadn’t delivered on my name.

“Uh, Bagel; Filmore Bagel. Medic, intern, third year.”

Usually that line evoked a certain kind of response from people, but not a flicker of amazement or respect crossed their faces. “Flake,” one of them said quietly.

Right, okay, I was getting the message already, and they needed to know that it was their attitude that was ruining their town by driving off their best medical staff, not the other way around, and I was straight away trying to formulate a strategic way to get that into their thick working-class skulls when Tipper finished her introductions.

She meant the hunching beast. Reptilian; I wasn’t exactly sure of the species; but he was definitely big, scaly, ugly by human standards, and wore an eye-patch. Whatever buggered his eye had also taken off one of his spiky eye ridges. I found myself momentarily planning for its reconstruction, happy in my future clinic. Ah – the power of visualization!

Komodo (‘Mr Komodo?’ ‘Komodo-San?’) heaved himself up from his solitary table and loped towards me at frightening speed, his tail and spine-plates undulating beautifully. I did my best not to run away. He stopped at a range of a bare 500 millimeters and glared at me with his one good eye. It was like a black jewel radiating malice and intelligence in equal measure. Then his toothy mouth edged open to grunt something sub-verbal.

But I’d met a few reptilians. They were surprisingly soft. It was a fact I tried to keep in mind as Tyge’s words came back to me – ‘Don’t get offside with the Lizard.’

“Glad to meet you all!” I pronounced in my best public-speaking voice, “I’m... I’ll .., uh... That is to say... Hey, why don’t you just call me ‘Doc’? Make it easier, eh?”

“And I’ll make your life easier in another way too, because I’m going to clean up your Kirrikabats! Hell yeah! I’m going to keep them so clean, they’ll have this town running like clockwork again before ya know it. Whaddaya reckon?”

However none of them seemed impressed, until Tipper started laughing. She was weird, that one; everything was a joke to her. “Siddown, Doc!” she boomed, slapping the table, “Why don’cha join us for couple of pots, eh?”

I sat, trying not to stare too hard at Tyge. (I’d figured it of course: ‘Tyge’ was short for Tiger. And holy wow but that was good tattooing!)

I was handed a can of beer; ‘Four-Eye’ brand. Never heard of it. The drinking began. Tipper fetched my half-finished steak from the other table – where it had magnetically stuck throughout the earthquake. (I’d wondered why the plates were all made for babies.)

“So tell me more about these earthquakes then?” I asked after finishing my first ever can of Four-Eye. I’d deciding to seize the conversational beast by the horns, so to speak.

Tipper answered a little impatiently, “Well like I said, Doc, she was just having a little scratch. See her skin gets pretty itchy, this far from the Edge. There’s a layer, oh, maybe two klix down,” she glanced at Notch who confirmed the number with a nod, “sort of a muscle layer, gives a twitch now 'n' then to loosen off her dead skin. Thus we cop another in an infinite string of earthquakes. Big deal; NOT. So you came outta Central, ya?”

“Quake-free. Oldest part o' the Crush. But you’re living on the Edge now, bro, exciting place, eh!” She drained her can and glanced meaningfully towards the bar, “So, ah, 'Doc', got time to buy us round?”

It was the least I could do. Winning their friendship right now was rapidly becoming my number one priority, because I had already seen what this place could do to a lonely Flake.

I bought a ‘round’, which turned out to be five cans per person (about an hour’s supply if my initial estimates were accurate). Suddenly I was insanely hungry. I ordered another steak and worked my way through my beer quota as I ate, hoping the food would moderate the alcohol’s influence, and tried to follow the conversations going on around me.

For the next two hours these people—a silent giant, a man with a notch in his head, a tattooed warrior woman, a surly lizard and an Amazonian babe – put away prodigious amounts of alcohol and argued about everything going. The conversation lurched from the relative merits of two different makes of 'striders' (I'd guessed right!), to galactic politics, then beer, then Kirrikibatic psychology, then back to the subject of striders. My head was spinning from lack of sleep, strong beer, and trying to follow any of it at all.

“Well I’m a Fiord man! Why do you think they call them ‘Fiords’? Because they cut through the terrain! ...”

The only terrain I was thinking of was about two metres long, soft and horizontal. Finally I stood up and declared, rather drunkenly, “Well, the Doc’s gotta hit the sack. There’s a lodda desperate Kikibats in this town and they wanna see me on deck termorra mornin’.”

My reference to ‘deck’ turned out to be more than just accidental. The floor at that point in my mangled speech was heaving wildly up and down. First I thought Four-Eye beer must have been stronger than I’d been lead to believe, then realised it was just another one of their local earthquakes. I coped.

“I’ll drive ya home,” said Ms Tipper, swaying skillfully while I desperately clung to the table, “Ya don’t wanna take one of them bloody crappy taxis! Bloody Authority crap!” And before the floor had gotten itself back to level I found myself rushing to keep up with her as she strode away out the back door. We soon came to a sort of parking bay, not well sealed off from the atmosphere, and sticking up out of the floor were a number of vehicle cabins, each with a domed Plazglaze lid. Ah! Now that weird room at the clinic made more sense.

She opened one of the lids and boomed, “Yeah just hop in, mate! Isn’t she a beauty? Magnesium alloy legs, double overhead anti-matter injectors and spiral-flow exhaust, plus I’ve just upgraded her cartilage retainers.”

I nodded and smiled approvingly, having no clues what that was about, and gingerly slid into what was obviously the passenger’s seat. My second time in one of these and this one I trusted as much as the first. She plonked into her seat and yanked the lid down with a bang. Then with her hands flying over the controls and her feet shoving at pedals she started the thing up. Servos whined into life. Something went bump under my feet.

Luckily I already knew what I’d gotten myself into; I'd be fine. Or so I smugly thought, but the next few minutes nearly had me shitting bricks. With a hiss and a bang we dropped from the docking yoke. I think I might have emitted a suitably macho high-pitched scream; can’t remember now. (Okay: I did.) I saw the floor panels swirl shut overhead like an iris. Powerful floodlights came on. We were under the building about three metres off the ground and turning left. There was a forest of legs all around and this insanely drunken woman decided to take a direct line to my new home, cranking up the power all the way through said forest. I wanted to scream again as massive mechanical columns flashed past on both sides. We lurched left and right. Every five or ten seconds I re-convinced myself of another immanent collision, but none came.

Bam! Suddenly we were clear of that part of the town. The landscape was now a chaotic jumbled mess of huge flaky boulders as previously described. (Honestly I’ve tried, but “flattened ships” really is the best expression.) Over a ridge and steeply down the far side, scuttled along a gully for half a minute, climbed precipitously up the far side. I saw another glimpse of the town from a new angle. We dived under the taxi-way, turned sharply to the right, and by some miracle I managed to recognise where I was. The clinic was dead ahead.

“Here you are, mate!” she said as she steered us underneath, “You gonna invite me up for coffee then?”

I knew what coffee was but I wasn’t sure just how legal it was on Crush, and I also didn’t know if there was any in the clinic anyway. Cautiously I said, “Uh, no.”

She laughed. “Well I would’ve said ‘no’ anyway! I’m not in the mood for a flaking tonight! Maybe another time, eh, Doc?”

“Whatever,” I said, “My blade’s always in the sterilizer.” That really cracked her up.

She'd stopped us directly under my building, and to my horror she set it to stand up. I cowered down as we rushed up at a crude target that had been painted above. At the last moment she jammed on the brakes (or whatever the spider equivalent was) and I hit the underside of her plazglaze dome.

“Strewth I hate these manual locks!” she suddenly growled, grabbing a dangling control and twisting it about expertly. A robot-arm snaked upwards from her side the cabin and seized a handle under the clinic. She twisted her hand and the robot-arm turned it. The centre of the target spiraled slowly open like a sphincter and she shot us up into the gap. Thunk! There was the sound of some sort of collar-lock engaging right beside my shoulder. I tried not to reveal my terror, yet again. She opened her dome and clambered out, heading straight for a control panel on the side wall. Yay – I'd nailed it: I was back inside that weird room and it was a parking (or ‘docking’) bay, as I'd guessed!

Tipper flicked open the control box and did something inside. That worried me. Was she authorised? I wasn't game to ask. “I’ve set it to auto,” she announced as she strode back, a frighteningly sexy woman. “Out ya get, Doc! And don’t get any funny ideas: I’m not putting you to bed as well!”

“I’ll manage,” I lied. I got out shakily, “Uh, thanks for the lift. Nice driving.”

She laughed; not sure why. “See ya, Baby-face!” She tugged her lid down and dropped from sight. The sphincter closed jerkily, slow enough to let in a whiff of Crush.