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NEXT DAY I SERVICED two Kirrikibats. Tyge stayed and watched me do the first one, then she had to go. That afternoon I went down to the Club. Stevedore was hunched near the piano. Sharp was there, unusually early out of bed for her, watching him with concern.
“This isn’t going to damage it?” she was asking.
“Nuh,” grunted Stevo impatiently, as if she had already asked several times before. I heard some mechanical whirrs and clicks as I wandered over. Scattered around the piano was a chaos of tools and bits of machinery but the piano seemed unchanged. Then I noticed it seemed to have developed some sort of vertical ribs or buttresses. I glanced at Sharp. Her face was as perfect as always, though I noticed that she had varied her colour scheme.
“Everything okay?” I asked. I knew it was. She had virtually become the richest woman in town on tips alone, living in the best room of the hotel across the road.
“Yes.” She turned from the piano and faced me. “You know, Doc, I’ve never had the chance to say ‘thank you’. Arriving here was...” she shrugged, “quite a miracle for me.”
I smiled shyly, remembering my gauche attempts to woo her, way back in the dark ages of Crush Central. I replied, “I’m glad you came.”
“We must have dinner together some time, over the road.” (The hotel still had the swankiest restaurant in town, which wasn’t saying much. Oh, and Soiree the chef had gone back after having a screaming fight with Komodo.)
“Er, yeah. Sometime.” I nodded uncomfortably, then sort of kicked myself mentally. Wasn’t this exactly what I’d been dreaming of?
“He’s done a good job,” I managed to mumble, nudging the conversation sideways.
Actually I had no idea what Stevedore had done. I couldn’t possibly see how it was going to move at all.
Sharp’s lovely hand slid up my arm to my shoulder. I twitched with surprise. “I really mean it,” she purred, “You’ve changed my life.” I faced her again, listening as politely as I could considering everything else I really wanted to do right then. To my horror she lifted her lips and kissed me lightly just beside my mouth. Arrrgh! Everything I’d ever dreamed of, and now I knew I couldn’t, shouldn’t have it! Not with Tipper in the picture.
(Or was she? I hadn’t exactly seen them both together for some time.)
“Uh, yeah,” I said as I eased her away, “um, love the new colours. Look I’m sorry but I’ve got to get back to the clinic right now. Got a five o’clock. But I’ll be in for tonight’s show. Dinner sometime? Yeah, cool.”
I turned and fled.
The last thing I wanted was a run-in with Tipper. That would ruin everything!
#
I SLIPPED BACK INTO the Club later and had dinner. Tipper and her mates weren’t back from whatever job they had on. Stevedore wasn’t around. The place seemed to be full of strangers. Tourists mostly. You could pick them so easily! Everyone was talking, eating, drinking. The kitchen was going flat out and people were already gathering expectantly near the piano. It was weird, cosmopolitan, like a café in downtown NovoTokyo.
Tipper, Tyge and the other truckies finally rolled in. Apparent one of them had had a breakdown so they’d all stopped to fix the problem. Anyway Sharp finally glided forth from her changing room, about an hour and a half late. The crowd thrummed with excitement, then settled down. She sat at the piano, played a couple of numbers, then stood up to hush the crowd. We all fell silent. This was unusual.
She glanced around the room, her eyes lingering a second on me (so I thought) then said, “Here’s a song especially for someone who’s very important in my life. Very important.”
She began to play something I knew quite well, one of those old classics: To know, know, know, you / is to love, love, love you...
Damn it, what was she doing?
I saw Tipper across the room, smiling like a big doofus. Tyge was there, nodding along to the tune. What sort of weirdness was she playing at? Wasn’t anyone getting it?
Thank God no one was getting it!
So that was finished, thunderous applause and the usual huddle of guys in the corner all sobbing on each-other’s shoulders, then she continued with her usual performance; all the sing-along favourites; until she once again suddenly stopped and stood up, calling for silence.
“We need some space here. Could you all move back a bit? We’ve, ah, got a little dance number coming up.” Drunken cheering. Hubbub. People did their best to squeeze back. Laughter somewhere as someone fell over a chair.
“... A little more, a bit more. That’s it.”
We all moved back until people were jammed to the walls. Then she lifted herself on tip-toes and peered around expectantly. There was a murmuring silence. Whispers in the crowd. Suddenly a strange figure emerged from the back rooms. For a moment I didn’t recognise him. Then I gasped. It was Stevedore, dressed in a long black cloak and a tall top hat!
“Ladies and gentlemen!” he boomed dramatically, then having apparently forgotten his next lines he quickly pointed a magician’s staff at the piano. There was a crude explosion of fireworks from the wand but for a long moment thereafter nothing seemed to happen.
Then I saw one of those buttress things detach itself slowly and stretch out across the floor. Somebody screamed. Then another leg sprang out, and another, like insect legs. The crowd stirred, thrilled by the mystery of it all.
Then the piano stood up and started walking around! Sharp immediately crashed down on the keyboards, Dud-Dud-Dud-Darrrr,... Dud-Dud-Dud-Dummmm, ...
The crowd went insane.
Sharp continued to play, moving with the piano as it tip-toed around the room, banging out this fantastic new piece of music. Certainly not classical. I guessed it had to be very modern. Not to my taste but still I loved the theatre of it! Guess I was applauding like an idiot with a huge stupid grim on my face. So was everybody. I hardly thought about it but of course Stevedore was controlling the piano, hunched over his hand-made remote control in his ludicrous hat, shuffling on the spot to a rhythm that mimicked the piano. He was lost in his work, oblivious to the crowd.
Suddenly I got it: the man was a whacko, and a genius!
As Sharp brought her tune to a close the crowd went wild again. The piano sat down and folded itself together. She closed the lid with a final bang, and bowed. More applause! She gestured to Stevedore. Thunderous applause! He suddenly realised what was happening and scuttled away to the safety of the back rooms. Laughter.
The applause continued for five whole minutes, then the crowd started regrouping, hubbubbing excitedly. Money continued to shower into Sharp’s hat. She stood gracefully in the midst of it all, one hand on the piano, bowing now and again to her fans. Stupidly, I fell in love with her all over again.
#
I FOUND OUT LATER THAT she shared that night’s money with Stevedore, half-and-half, and continued to do so for many nights to come. Speaking of money, by popular consent the 3,000 credits Tyge had collected for the Hickster scam were redirected into getting the new club together. The day after the piano walked, Tipper persuaded a bunch of tourists to clean the place up. I don’t know what powers of persuasion she used. I presume they got paid.
I called in that afternoon. Five strangers were in there, cleaning up and doing a few repairs. “Hi, I’m the guy who owns the place,” I said.
“Ah, you must be the Doc!” They all stopped to greet me. I felt like I was famous.
“So, has Tipper been telling tales about me, eh?” They shrugged, grinned, and muttered something about Tipper being “a bit of a hard case, eh!”
I wandered around, trying to get more of a feel for ‘my’ club. It was actually a very fine place with a huge parking bay and much nicer toilets. Except when I stepped inside to use one of them there was a crudely written sign: DON’T USE YET. Same with every other toilet. I went back to the workers.
“Hey what’s the problem with the toilets?”
“Oh, Tipper and her mates just need to replace some parts underneath.”
“Parts?”
“Some tank or something. Apparently it got nicked.”
#
THE ‘PARTS’ TOOK SEVERAL days to arrive and I kept out of the way until Tipper announced that the new club was ready. By then the whole town knew about it. I just hoped the CEA didn’t. Anyway it came to pass that five days after Hickster’s demise Komodo wrote to the CEA advising them that the Crush Club at number 41 Edgetown Central Parade had been permanently closed, as required.
He then immediately reopened at number 49 Central Parade to a record crowd. Everyone continued to call it The Crush Club, despite the word ‘New’ on the sign.
And how did they get the piano there? It walked with us, the craziest parade I’ve ever seen. But at least the piano wasn’t as pissed as we were.
Business in Edgetown continued to boom. Tipper and the other truckies began celebrating the end of their various debts (particularly to Komodo) and began a new round of arguments on the various merits of upgrading their motors and fitting gimmicky spoilers and suchlike. I tuned it out. Komodo began sporting a fine platinum tail-ring and smiled a lot more frequently. (A terrifying sight if you didn’t understand his body language.) Tourists continued to pour in and the strider-tours to The Edge became more popular than ever.
And I continued to be a flake.
The secret, I had discovered, was to party late, get up early, vomit as required, drink a cup of coffee and get stuck in. Occasionally I would eat lunch. I have to confess I’d developed quite a taste for Instant Cheesy Stuff with Vitamins, even though the servings were way too big. And every time I flung the scraps down the disposal chute I felt guilty about the litter piling up under my building. I really needed to get another tank down there, but I wouldn’t go asking Tipper again. It should have been something for Panther to deal with but I must confess I was just a little bit reluctant to ever call her again.
I never went up to Hickster’s old place. There was absolutely no way I wanted to live there. But I did find a good use for it. It happened like this. One day I went to the Club early. The place was virtually empty. All the tourists were away on tours. I ordered a decent lunch and settled at a table. Stevedore was once again working on the piano. The thing appeared to have exploded. Its housings and panels were laid out all around, and Stevedore had his head inside. On the floor were detailed drawings and a litter of tools and parts. I strolled over.
“Hi, Stevo!”
He startled, there was a thump and the piano twanged discordantly. He looked up. “Uh, you,” he said, then ignored me and made another careful mark on one of his drawings.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
I could see this wasn’t true, and he wasn’t working on the leg system, and I wasn’t getting an answer. His micrometer, followed by his arm and then his head, went back inside. He made another mark on his drawing. I lingered, studying the peculiar bits he had assembled on a temporary stand until I realised what it actually was; a duplicate of one of those elaborate piano mechanisms, even with a miniature string to hit.
Curious, I pressed the key. The resultant note sounded thin and twangy.
“Don’t touch that!” he snapped, lurching across to bat my hands away.
“You’re trying to make one?” I asked, “Another whole piano?” Silence. For Stevedore that was a ‘yes’. (Also a ‘no’, once you knew him.) “So,” I asked, trying to show him that I was harmless and friendly (while keeping my hands well away from his stuff) “you’ve got like a workshop and all that?”
He waved at the floor. Then I remembered something Tyge had let slip about this strange man: he lived in an old truck body hanging under a deserted warehouse.
“It can’t be easy,” I said.
He shrugged and started gathering up his stuff.
“Why don’t you use Hickster’s old place?”
“That’s your place.”
“No, no, I’m still at the clinic. I, ah, I don’t need it. You go use it.”
He slowly lit up. “Really?”
“Really.”
He glanced around at his tools. “Mind if I set a few things up?”
“Yeah, no, go ahead.” I gave him the key that Mayor Bol had given me.
Stevedore, noticeably happier, started humming an Elvis tune as he began replacing the covers on Sharp’s piano. I continued to peer at his piece of mechanism. There was something odd about it. “What are you using here for wood?” I finally had to ask, puzzled by the strangely familiar stuff I saw there.
“Nothing.” He swiftly took it away from me.
I went back to my lunch, feeling like I’d possibly just gone a bit too far this time. Surely Hickster had never wanted anything like that to happen? But then Hickster thought I cared. Well I had, sort of, but not enough to actually save his life, and that fact still weighed inside me like an anchor. Quickly I moved on to different thoughts. The lovely Sharp.... No! No! NO! My medical career...? Yeah, well, that was somewhere out there, waiting to resume. Sure, Panther would have to award me my field points; that was why med students even came to Crush, but I’d probably have to go offworld to pick up the threads now. I couldn’t imagine I was still in her good books.
But actually, oddly, I didn’t want to go anywhere in a hurry. All that stuff Tyge had talked about; not having an implant; ‘freedom’. She was kind of right. I wasn’t missing that wall-to-wall commercialism at all. Not even Harriet.
“Well, I’m ready.” My turn to be startled. It was Stevedore, standing beside me with his fists full of tools and stuff.
“Sorry, what?”
“We’re going now.”
It was a statement. Suddenly, it seemed, I was part of Team Stevo. I knew him well enough by then to know there was something extremely simplistic about the man; he took things seriously, and literally, like a child. Things could become enormously important to him, and very suddenly too, and he had to follow them through at all costs. He was also quite the genius, as mentioned.
Example: On about the third day after they’d fitted my tank he had arrived unannounced at the clinic, edged his spider-strider up to the taxi apron, walked in with one of my clients and fitted a sensor into the waiting room. First I knew of it was when he came strolling in with my next Kirrikibat client, handed me a device (something he’d adapted out of something else) and grunted, “Portable client light.”
It worked, too. I had it with me right now. Glanced at it (no clients waiting), and realized that this was one of those moments I needed to humour this weirdo.
So a minute later I was in his strider (terrifying enough, considering all the modifications he’d made to it) and heading uphill towards that clump of cruddy mansions along the ridge. A ridge, it needs to be mentioned, that afforded a fine view of absolutely nothing. To be honest; I didn’t know which of them was actually Hickster’s... mine.
Next moment Stevo gets wildly talkative.
“I love this place, totally love it!”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I'm free.”
“No more ICONN, eh?”
“No, no, no. I miss that. Still log in at the airport, sometimes. Data! Tutorials! And I have to order parts. Nah, nah, it’s not that.” Silence again.
I attempted to nudge him back to his starting point, “So ...?”
“I just love it, y'know. Here ... It's a, it's a place ... it's about the people, really. You're one of them. Like, from you I don't get any bullshit, not much. Few things you could improve on, mate, but here: y'know; in a quiet sort of way, no-one's in yer face about it, not like some therapy group ... I mean they've all done something evil but here:” he strugged, “there's a chance of redemption here. Fellowship. Silence. Living here I've never once been subjected to the outmoded duality of conventional judgment systems bent on imposing humanity's primate paradigms upon the vulnerable.” He glanced at me. “Know what I mean?”
I nodded, “Yeah.” (I so didn't!) Surreptitiously I glanced sideways at his lumpen face, those mountainous shoulders, the slight hunch, that hooter of a nose. What sort of astonishing mind lurked within? But right then he was just a big happy doofus driving a mechanical spider at 80 k's across a continent-sized alien that could kill us with a single twitch.
#
BUT ONCE AGAIN ‘THE Big Lady’ didn’t kill us. We reached a particularly large rust-streaked carbuncle on legs and rammed our heads up its rectal. This was my 'mansion'.
The internal lights blinked on.
“Love it!” said Stevo loudly, flicking up his lid and springing out. He went straight to the ‘lateral dock’ – the same type as I had in the clinic – and immediately started tinkering with the controls. For one alarming second he cracked the seal and the sphincter began to open. He reversed the control and it jerked back to create a seal.
“Needs work,” he grunted.
“Yeah, sure, have fun!” I said, trying to recover my composure.
“Gonna get my stuff in here A S A P.” He glanced around, “So, workshop? Can I ..?”
“Sure. Yeah. Pick a room, any room. I’m cool.”
I was wondering when that crappy old robot was going to show up, but it didn’t. Maybe it had finally given up the ghost, timed nicely to Hickster’s departure. Because, now that I thought about it, that heap of crap contained enough evidence to send me away for quite a while, or at the very least destroy my entire career. I had to make sure it was thoroughly dead!
“So where’s that robot?” Stevo asked right then. I jumped.
“Don’t know. Maybe Hickster shut it down. I hope so. I mean; it looked like it was on the verge of failure anyway. With luck we’ll find it face-down somewhere.”
He just grunted.
I went on; excessively cheerful about robot-death, “Do they.., I mean – all that data they’re sitting on? Does it retain, or does it ...?” I made that ‘Phutt!’ noise.
“Well, there are several scenarios ...” And he launched into a dense techie explanation for a good eight minutes, ninety percent of which went right over my head.
I nodded wisely. “Okay,” I said, “so if you do find him dead then let me know, and we’ll find a way of cleaning it out. I mean: I’m sure you’d like to use it for parts?”
“But ...”
“Go on!”
Once again the big man teetered on the edge of an emotional melt-down, his eyes wet with gratitude. Once again my ethical innards squirmed like a nest of copulating snakes. It was while I was thus distracted that he hugged me massively. I had some discomfort with that. Quite a lot, actually. I’m fond of being able to breathe, for example.
“Right! Well I’m gonna get my shit!” he finally announced, releasing me from his temporary organic prison, “Wanna lift anywhere?”
“The clinic, thanks.”
“No worries, mate!”
And that was that: I had a new bestie. Not sure I felt entirely comfortable about it, though. And the existence of a robot full of incriminating evidence was damn-near destroying me. Fucking hell; how did I get into this mess!?
#
THE NEXT MORNING I received a visit from the most unlikely of people. The first Kirrikibat through my door at seven thirty was a smooth gleaming individual I knew I had serviced only a week before. And it was the first Kirrikibat I’d ever seen in his full glory. His chitin looked like the most beautiful armour, patterned in coppery and charcoal stripes almost like the deeply waxed wood of the Lovely Sharp’s piano.
“I want to talk,” he said through the translator.
Since he wasn’t covered in rotten flapping crud I took off my mask and goggles and sat down. “Sure.”
“I am KU-TUK-RRRRIKKIBA, director of Western Maintenance.”
“Hi. I’m Flaker Bagel.”
“We all love you.”
That came as a surprise! I reeled on my chair and tried to think of a suitable respectful reply. He might have been a friendly alien, but he was still big enough to bite my head off. “Uh, thank you. I am honoured.”
“So you should be, Flaker Bagel. We have seen that you have a fine matriarch who is not in a hurry to eat you, and that is good sign. We all honour your skills and attention to detail. Your reputation has spread far and wide.”
Uh oh.
“I have come to ask of you a favour.”
Uh oh, again.
“My fellow Kirrikibati in the Inner Ring Gangs would like to come to you too. But we know you are not paid well. None of us are.”
I agreed with that assessment.
“So we have conferred and agreed that since we honour you so highly, we shall pay you to your worth as best we can.”
“What?” I said, “No!” Quickly I tried to remember details from my introductory course on Kirrikibat culture, “But you are good males and send all your credits home to your matriarchs who patiently wait to eat you, and that is right and good. What could you possibly pay me with?”
“This.” From a pouch under his thorax he pulled out a bag and emptied it on the floor with a metallic clatter. I saw a number of large ragged flakes of various metals, including gold. “We find this stuff all over the place. It gets squeezed up from inside the body of The Crush. We know the best places to find it now.”
I already felt my alarm bells ringing. Wasn’t there going to be something slightly illegal about all this? “Got any idea what this stuff is?” I asked, picking up one of the silvery metals.
“We’re not big on metals,” he answered, “That is titanium, maybe.”
I wasn’t big on metals either, but I’d heard the guys complaining about the price of strider parts enough times to know that some extra titanium might come in useful.
“Your teams are good for the moment, aren’t they?” I asked.
“You are highly honoured. We are very happy.” I figured that meant about two a day, my current average. I could handle twice as many, easy!
“Tell them to come. Four a day. Five if they’re really desperate.”
KU-TUK-RRRRIKKIBA fluttered his mouthparts appreciatively and continued, “Thank you, Flaker Bagel, Thank you! And you must have days off. We give you the ninth. Every ninth, starting today.”
I was surprised, and gave him what I had learned to be the Kirrikibat version of a bow, “Thank you! Thank you!”
“You’re welcome.”
The huge grasshopper shuffled around in the tight space and went off, leaving all the nuggets on the floor. I gathered them onto a cart and wheeled them to the parking bay. As usual in those days, Tyge’s truck cabin was poking up my rectal. The rest of the truck’s spine was folded down out of the way much like a gigantic insect would stand. (She could only park it at my place if she didn’t have a load on.)
Tyge was lying face down, her head down inside her cabin and her rump stuck up over the rim. I stopped, momentarily distracted by this sight. She twisted up, a spanner in her hand. “That was a quickie,” she said.
“Huh? Oh yeah, he just wanted to talk.”
“Talk?” Then she saw what I had, “Hey, what’s that stuff?”
“Just a little gift of appreciation. Some ... stuff they picked up.”
She strolled over and hefted one of the nuggets, “Gold?”
“I think so. And apparently this one’s titanium. What do you think?”
She lifted the flake, peered at it, then tried to bend it. The paper-thin wafer resisted her strength. “If it is, then it’s already correctly alloyed.”
“Any use to you guys?”
She slowly broke into a bemused smile. “Doc, you could make shit-tons of money here! Don’t just give it away!”
“I can’t take it with me.”
“We can ship it to Central for you. Just say the word. I know a guy who’ll buy it.”
“What, overland?”
“That’s how we got your container here. It’s a hell of a run, but it sure beats the airline on price if you’re moving a serious load of stuff.” She strained at the titanium again, getting it to bend a little at one end. “This is good shit, Doc! Tell you what, I’ll drop off a sample to Stevo. He’s got the gear to test it.”
“He’s now at...”
“The mansion. Yeah, I know.”
There was a moment’s lull in the conversation. We were standing there, just like friends would, and I thought it was probably about time I made a suitable gesture.
“Got time for breakfast? My shout.”
“Haven’t you got clients?”
“Day off.”
“Alright for some.” She turned back to her strider, leaned in and stowed the titanium somewhere under the seat. Once again her nicely proportioned rear end was pointing towards me. With her tiger face hidden it became completely obvious that she was entirely human. All that stuff on the front end was just for show, to keep people at bay. But it wasn’t frightening me anymore. I felt something stir within me. (Within my pants, actually.)
No! I was sticking to my visualisation on this one: Love; Romance; Marriage. Not some quick steamy affair with an over-sexed truckie!
She came up and turned around right then. “So, how about a ride then?”
My face must have given something away.
“I don’t mean that, you cave-man! I mean the tourist run.”
Cringing that she had spotted my interest I quickly blathered, “You can do that?”
“Course I can do that! It’s my flaming truck! Anyway it’s time you did The Edge. You’re not a real Edger until you have.”
Suddenly I was afraid. “But, ah, what about your paying customers?”
“Don’t worry, I won’t be losing a red cred. You’re up front with me.” She gestured to her passenger seat, which had become ‘my’ seat this last month. Seemed she was not exactly signaling that ‘No” was going to be one of my options. (Okay, I’ll admit it, my male pride was on the line. I wasn’t going to wimp out, at least not in front of her.)
So I just vaulted down into the seat. “Okay so let’s do it, already!”
Silence. I looked up. She was grinning down at me. “Well bugger me dead, Doc, I thought you’d wimp out. Okay!” And before I had time to change my mind she dropped in beside me and yanked down the lid. I watched her flick through her usual perfunctory check as she powered up the electro-convulsive ‘muscles’ down below, then hit the release. We unlocked and dropped.
I could never get used to it. Instinctively I expected to crash on the ground five metres below. Instead the machine’s legs blurred into life as the belly of the truck leveled out at about human head-height. She swung us northwest, a new direction for me.
“Where’re we going?”
“Need my loony bin.”
But I guessed what she meant before she finished explaining. We were off to pick up her ‘bus’ fitting – the thing she’d mentioned a few times now.
Dead ahead I spotted our destination: a huge space-frame that I’d heard them refer to before: The Truck Yard. Dozens of interchangeable cargo pods hung clamped under a vast lattice of rust-streaked frames, all on a half-kilometre circle of extra-sturdy telescopic legs. It was the biggest single unit of the town I had yet seen, barring the airport. Trucks like ours were striding around underneath. I saw one push up under a big cylinder of some sort and lock under it, then vehicle plus load scuttled away like a single organism towards the airport. Tyge, swearing heartily as it cut across our bow, waited for her chance to flick in and lock onto her cargo-du-jour. I peered up, wondering which one of the gigantic eggs was hers. The way cleared and she shot us towards a battered metal cylinder that looked for all the world like a modified length of crashed aeroplane.
“That’s it?” I said, twisting around to get a closer look as we surged up under it, the computers barely needing to fine-adjust her seemingly casual flick of the joy-stick. To me her ‘loony-bin’ looked like a death trap.
“Yep.” She grunted.
“Tourists pay to ride in that?”
“They love it! Gives ‘em a sense of adventure.”
“Is it safe?”
“Hah!” We locked on with a series of clunks. Tyge seemed to be listening to them. “Bugger!” she growled suddenly, “Number six again! Hold your breath, love.” Suddenly she flicked up the lid and slid out the gap, flicking it down again. The fly-spray-and-brimstone stench of Crush hit my nostrils a moment later.
Holy crap she was out there without a breather!
Twisting around I watched in panic as she scrambled along the side of the truck some five metres off the ground, kicked the recalcitrant locking claw into place, and turned back. Seconds later she exploded back into the cabin and hit a switch. Extra air blasted in.
“Damn Stevedore!”
“Why?” I asked.
“He used to keep me absolutely sweet. Now he’s obsessed with that bloody piano.”
“Isn’t there another mechanic here?” I gestured around at the truck yard.
“Nah we don’t use him. Crap mechanic, really crap. Authority spy.”
She jerked her control handles and we dropped off the rack. With a wild turn she drove us straight between two moving trucks, narrowly judging her margin. I shrank to half my usual width as we squeaked through.
“Never used to be like this,” she growled, “Quiet as a grave it was.”
I was feeling quite ready for my own grave right then; at least as far as rigor mortis went. I was rigid with fear, and I hadn’t even begun the tourist run.
#
SHE DROVE US TO THE western end of Main Street. There was a sort of jetty there where the tourists gathered in an air-filled gallery. Tyge jumped out and hooked up her ‘loony bin’ to one of the flexible connectors, then opened the ‘bin’. The former aircraft cabin quickly filled up with excited tourists. I felt the truck shift underneath me as the servos took up the extra load. Suddenly a little screen came to life on the dashboard and I was looking in miniature at her cargo. Oh My God! I hadn’t realized just how many more people were in town.
They were ordinary regular shiny-faced twenty-somethings, mostly couples, all with rental breathers painted in garish colours and all in either casual-active wear or active-casual wear. (I could barely pick the difference but apparently, according to the last magazine I read before losing touch with civilisation, the difference was what this season was all about.)
All of that now seemed far away. And I was grateful!
Tyge suddenly loomed into the picture, evidently stepping in through the door. Her voice came to me over some sort of jury-rigged sound system which was picking up the sound of the air blowers back there. As she did her intro, I saw the breather fields progressively shut off all around the ‘bin' – which in this view looked like the interior of an aeroplane. Nice.
“Gidday, cobbers,” she began, “My name’s Tyge and I haven’t had my lunch yet so don’t mess with me, and we’re about to set off for ‘The Edge’. It’s the Edge they’re all talking about - the edge of the Biggest Living Entity in the Entire Galaxy. We just call her ‘The Crush’, and guys, that’s what she’ll do to you if you fall down between her thighs.” Someone began giggling hysterically. “Our Big Lady the Crush is 1300 kilometres wide at this point, and over seven thousand kilometres long. She feeds on molten lava along both edges, makes her own atmosphere and controls her own temperature. She was discovered a hundred years ago and she’s still bamboozling the scientists of today. Any of you a scientist?”
One of her passengers nervously raised a hand.
“Well you might think about getting out right now, kid. She hates scientists! In this area alone 22 scientists have perished trying to extract her secrets.”
Her loopies were getting nervous, but she didn’t relent. “Today we’ll be crossing some very unstable skin. There will be earthquakes. It’ll get rough, and it’ll get hot. There are no restaurants out there, and no restrooms, so if you want to get off you’d better do it now!”
Silence, except for someone coughing.
“Any questions?”
A young man raised his hand, “Uh, yeah. Um, like, so when can we expect the next earthquake?”
I heard Tyge laughing. “Listen, mate, no one knows when She’s gonna have another little itch to scratch. They happen any time, day or night.”
“Oh,” continued the tourist blithely, “because we came in yesterday and we’ve been very disappointed so far.”
“Disappointed?” asked Tyge dangerously. I saw her lean in to the tourist’s face, not doubt using her tattoo to intimidate him.
“Uh, yeah, about the earthquakes.”
A few other voices muttering in agreement and people were nodding.
Tyge leaned closer, “Well like I say, cobber, She ain’t here to entertain us. We are just bugs on her skin. To Her, you're just a little irritant.”
The tourist was obviously regretting his question. Tyge stood back and resumed her speech. “Okay, last call for anyone who wants to wimp out. No? Then seatbelts on, Edgy People! We are gonna Rock and Roll!”
Twenty seconds later she was back in the front cab with me. She flicked up her head-mic and turned to me, “What a woozer! ‘When’s the next earthquake due to start?’ What the fuck does he think this is? A theme park?”
I didn’t say a thing, but since that ‘woozer’ had mentioned it, it had occurred to me that there hadn’t been a single earthquake all morning. I cast my mind back but could not accurately place when I'd last felt one.
Tyge flicked her mic down, an action I now realised turned it back on, “Okay, loonies! Here we GO!” On the word ‘go’ she let the truck drop, then flicked us into a hard turn west. I heard screams from the back. We skimmed under a few buildings then we were clear of the town, striding at high speed for the lumpy horizon. I was terrified too but didn’t dare show it. I glanced back. Edgetown was rapidly falling behind. We topped a rise and plunged headlong down the other side. Suddenly I was out in the wilds. All around me stretched an endless landscape of gigantic skin flakes, heaped and tumbled against one another. Each foot of the strider, guided by its own micro-processor, planted down on firm rock instead of the dark-shadowed gaps in between. The complex of organo-mimic machinery fluttered wildly beneath me like a mad orchestra directed by eight different conductors, each working off a different page of the symphony but somehow all still staying together.
I looked sideways at my driver. She seemed very relaxed, even happy. Her hands moved lightly on the controls, guiding us through the best gaps towards the smoother-looking terrain ahead. She sensed me looking and glanced at me, grinning.
“I love this place!” she shouted above the roar of machinery, “Just love it!”
“Freedom, huh?”
“Yeah! Freedom!”
After a while the landscape began to change. The surface became smoother as if the cells were younger. Our speed increased to 120 km/hr. Ahead of us I saw a huge bank of the same forest-like stuff I had seen from the plane. Close up it resembled nothing so much as a gigantic fungal infection, the upper structures reaching several hundred metres high.
Tyge flicked on her mic. “What you see on your left is the inside-out lungs of The Crush. Through those structures She sucks in stuff like sulfuric gas and breaths out a mixture of oxygen, carbon dioxide and methane.”
I said nothing, but I was itching to. What in the world was ‘sulfuric gas’?
We skirted around the forest outcrop for about five minutes and moved on. Ahead I could now see the faint fire of volcanoes. To either side I could see more patches of lung. From a distance they certainly looked like ‘pubic upthrusts’ and I was about to ask about it when Tyge changed course, heading for a hump in the landscape that was composed of the usual almost-geometric pattern of skin cells.
“Excellent,” I heard her murmur.
We got closer. I was sure I could see some sort of movement on the hump.
“Oh great,” she said, “Got it at the perfect moment.”
“Why? What is it?”
“Just a minute.” We were slowly circling the lump now, which must have been about a kilometre long. There was a definite sense that it was active. Then she stopped. The truck stood poised on the landscape.
“Okay, people, you wanted earthquakes!”
Even as she spoke the ground shuddered. I could actually see the ripples spreading from the hump. The truck bucked violently and the leg muscles fired discordantly to get us balanced again. There was a lot of squealing from the back. Tyge grinned at me, “Woozers.”
Now that we were stationary I saw that the ground was different. The skin cells were incredibly smooth, and seemed to be joined together with something like huge rubber joints. The surface even appeared to be slightly damp or sticky.
Tyge let three more earthquakes hit us, then began pacing the truck slowing west alongside the hump. “Folks, we’re now walking upon the living tissue of The Crush. Each cell is built of complex silicone structures which to the untrained eye would simply look like rock. Beneath us the complex life processes of The Crush are constantly going on; a huge factory making millions of tonnes of ... whoa! Hang on, we’ve got a problem!” As she spoke she jerked the truck left, then right, causing the legs to automatically splay out and our height to drop. Even though I could see she was in complete control I still felt alarmed.
Then I got really alarmed! The hill in front of us was starting to erupt like a volcano. I had no idea how close we were, the scale of everything was so whack, but seriously we were only about a klik away. As it ripped open, seemingly in slo-mo, more cells came pushing up from below. Tyge danced us this way and that, getting a bit of distance, but everything was on the move! The hump was pushing up higher, splitting open, shoving hundreds of skin cells loose. They were slithering and tumbling towards us. Tyge turned to face it and I got a horrible feeling I was about to die.