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TYGE WAS DODGING THE house-sized tumbling cells. At one point she even caused us to leap over one with a bone-jarring thump under my butt. And still I watched in fixated horror as the hill of cells continued to thrust up, ripping apart along its full length, propelling hundreds of fragments into the air. A dark mass instantly burst out of the rupture, something I mistook at first to be smoke. I think I might have screamed. (You know, a manly sort of scream, deep and chesty. I’m sure it must have been like that. Yeah.)
Anyway Tyge was laughing heartily, totally in control.
I finally realised the black stuff was not smoke. It was more like broccoli. It climbed higher, flicking from side to side as if the stems underground were still fighting their way through a lot of resistance. The ground beneath us was still rippling, waves rolling beneath us from the action inside the hill. The truck rode up and down by about five metres per wave, easily its own height. The legs shuffled relentlessly, constantly maintaining our footing, their muscles popping explosively all around me.
Up on the hump I could now see, much to my relief, that the broccoli-like structures were actually newly sprouted trees (or lungs, or whatever they were), and it finally sank in: I was merely witnessing a brief tiny moment in the billion-year life of the Crush. It was sprouting another tuft of those 'lung' structures.
Things settled. I finally allowed myself a long glance at Tyge. She was grinning from ear to ear, her tattooed Angels doing their eternal dance. I dared to speak, “You ... you bitch!”
She just laughed as she flicked her microphone on. “Wow, we’ve been so lucky. That's what the boffins call a 'Structural Breakout', or as one of my mates says: a Pubic Upthrust!”
Laughter, driven largely by relief, came from the loony bin.
I looked back at the scene of our recent ‘lucky escape’ and now I saw how well the name fitted. From the huge smooth dome an even greater dome of vegetation was sprouting, the coiled broccoli-like heads now unfurling into long dark curly fronds. Still, I was not greatly amused. It could easily have killed us all.
Suddenly, “Oh shit, what's that?”
Dropping out of the ‘pubic hair' came some extraordinarily lively cells of a type we hadn’t seen before. As they bounced down the slope they unfurled flailing tentacles which they actually seemed to be using to steer. Were they intelligent? And more importantly, were they were steering towards us?
“Hang on, folks! A little spot of target practice before we go.” Tyge pulled up a handle and something sprang into view on the inside of the windscreen - a targeting display. She popped off a shot which thumped away from somewhere under my feet. Micro-seconds later one of the flagellating monsters broke apart. Tyge fired again, then took out a third one for good measure. All the time we were backing away from the hill.
“What the hell are they?” I squawked.
“Antibodies, I suppose you’d call them. They evolved about three years ago.” (Another shot) “Some idiot scientist managed to drop some big robots down an upthrust that year, and ever since then we’ve been seeing these fuckers come up. They’re actually pretty harmless so long as you keep away from them.”
“They evolved? Just – BANG; like that?”
“Yep. She’s a pretty amazing beastie is the Crush.”
Tyge fired off one more shot and pulled away, swinging back onto our westerly track. The ground was now very smooth, all of it ‘new’ tissue. Once again she cranked on the speed till we could barely speak. About five klix flicked by. I pondered the ‘whippers’ and what it might have meant, and what it meant was that the ‘Big Lady’ was even more remarkable than I'd thought. I also wondered if the locals had ever bothered to mention the ‘whippers’ to The Authority. Probably wasting their breath. The science money wouldn't come back.
We were now rising and falling over a series of smooth swells, like waves on an ocean that came at us from dead ahead. As these vast ripples flowed under us, lifting us each time with smooth surge of power, the tourists in the back began whooping like they were on some theme-park ride. And the waves were getting bigger. Whatever forces The Crush was absorbing up ahead, they were seriously big!
Tyge flicked her mic on, “We’re now about five klix from The Edge, folks. This is a very active zone where The Crush is doing all her growing. For some mysterious reason She grows much faster on this edge than on the eastern fringe. Since its discovery in 2353 She’s put on an estimated seventy billion tonnes. How’s that for weight gain, guys? Envious much? Twenty-two tonnes per second! She literally eats volcanoes on this side, resisting a crush-force equivalent to you holding a landing shuttle on your chest under full power! The forces under us right now can push volcanoes right through her skin. How’s that for acne, girls?”
Laughter from the back.
“And by some process we don’t yet understand, she keeps out the worst of the violent toxic storms you can now see directly across the border. She is also an immense heat pump, keeping her own body temperature 51 degrees lower than the planetary average. Despite that, the temperature outside is currently 68 degrees and still rising as we get closer.”
Ahead, through a blur of heat haze, I saw the fire and spurt of volcanic activity. I realised I was sweating, both with fear and from the heat. Tyge was now totally focused, watching the landscape for any sign of danger. I remembered her casual listing of things like ‘quickie volcanoes’ and ‘weather breaks-in’ and began to grip my panic-bar as if it were life itself. Finally we stopped, riding a surge that was so violent it slammed my shoulder into the side of the cabin. I wanted to scream at Tyge to turn back.
“That’s it, folks,” she told her customers cheerfully, “we’re as close as the Law allows. Sorry 'bout that.” She turned us around and started driving east. As each wave came up behind she had a technique of running downhill ahead of it at tremendous speed. I clung on, barely breathing, terrified that one of the leading legs was going to give way or trip. But the cellular surface below us was incredibly smooth and reliable, and Tyge’s driving was perfect. We were back in the lung zone within minutes.
“So what law was that?” I finally had enough self-control to ask her calmly.
“The law of self-preservation, mate.”
Tyge drove us around an outcrop that could have been the one we saw getting ‘born’ earlier, or another one entirely. It all looked the same. I felt lost, but also sensed that we were going back on a more northerly track. The surface was gradually beginning to lose its fresh youthful appearance, becoming a more familiar chaos of dead and littered skin cells. Tyge eased the speed down and drove on for about five minutes, running up smooth miniature valleys and clambering over fracture-ridges. Any moment I expected to see the stained metallic domes of Edgetown appear over the rumpled horizon. But no. We topped a height and descended a shallow slope towards a vast sink-hole. The edges, like most of the landscape, were fractured and layered with those familiar rock-like cell remnants, but the steep sides were smoother as if still made of active living tissue.
It was easily big enough to swallow my entire clinic in one gulp.
“What’s that?” I asked nervously.
“Old skin pore.”
She drove closer, flicking down her mic to speak to her customers, “Folks, looks like we’ve found a skin pore. I’m just going to try and get in a bit closer to see if there’s any gold lying around. The Crush is always pushing out minerals and metals, all the by-products of her metabolism... Ah! Looks like we’ve found a way in.”
Tyge began steering us down a long split in the side of the pore. As we got deeper the sides gradually loomed higher than the truck. I didn’t like it one little bit.
“So, would anyone like me to pick you up some gold?”
Nobody answered from the back. I knew why. They, like me, were terrified of the giant hole we were heading towards. The steep sides of the narrow cut gave way to open space as Tyge stopped us on the very edge.
“Sorry, folks, this doesn’t look good. I think we’re going to have to back up.”
She had been fiddling with some sort of computer control all the way in. Now she hit a key and sat back, hands off the controls, relaxed. The vehicle whirred for a moment, then started backing out on its own. She saw my look and flicked up her microphone. “Auto-reverse,” she told me, “It memorised every step in.” Casually she looked back, waited a few seconds, then flicked her steering lever to one side. We lurched and the ‘loony bin’ scraped momentarily on the side. Screaming terror for the back.
“Sorry, folks,” said Tyge, “Could be an earthquake. Just hang on now. No cause for alarm.” She did it again on the other side. After one final scrape of the side she let the truck back itself completely clear of the crevice, then resumed control.
“That was a close one folks. And no gold either. Oh and more bad news: looks like we’re running low on power so I think we’d better be heading home.” As she turned east I glimpsed another tourist truck behind us waiting to use the slot. Tyge was straight onto the mic. “Looking ahead you’ll make out a north-south band of colour that marks the original edge of the Crush. This is where the volcanoes used to be just fifty years ago when they first started the settlement at Crush Central. Just amazing how much the Big Lady has grown since then.”
I looked too, but didn’t see any line.
“Is that true?” I asked once I knew her mic was off.
“Oh yeah. Edgetown was a lot further east to start with. They walked it this way a couple of times since then.”
“Walked it?”
“Oh yeah. Those legs were made for walking, and that’s just what they did.”
“But the town’s fixed now, isn’t it? It doesn’t move?”
“Yeah,” she growled, and I knew there was another rant coming about the Authority, “when that idiot Hickster was mayor they bribed him to install the taxi-way system so they could undercut the independent truckies and shift the transport revenue back their way. Bastards! So every building had to be 'locked', and the town hasn’t moved since. Except the morons hadn’t figured out that we’d eventually end up right on top of the earthquake zone and maintenance would go sky-high. That’s government for ya; epic fuck-up!”
I said nothing, reflecting upon the fact that I was only there because of those self same ‘morons’. (Thank you, morons!)
Tyge gestured back at the gigantic skin pore shrinking from sight behind us. “Great spot that! It still hasn’t caved in.”
#
THE TOURISTS STAGGERED shakily out of their cabin, some looking distinctly ill. Tyge saw them off as if she was some sort of evil congeniality hostess. As that one guy came out, looking greener than all the rest, she greeted him cheerfully, “Enough earthquakes for ya, mate?” He said nothing and lurched off with his girlfriend.
Once all her 'marks' were off, and once she'd told them they could buy an AOI record of the ride from the 'Edgewalker Tourist Centre' (first I'd heard of it. Oh: and they’d completely repaired the roof of Mainstreet – full atmosphere!), Tyge wriggled through a force-field airlock, swung herself out without her breather and, hanging perilously between dock and truck, hooked up a recharge cable to her machine.
“Right: lunch!” she announced the moment she was back, “And here comes Tipper!”
We watched as another spider-truck scuttled in and another batch of traumatized tourists came ashore. Tipper plugged hers in too, then joined us. “Anyone for the Club?”
“Bloody oath!”
Both of them were sweaty from scaring the crap out of their respective customers. I guessed I smelt the same, but in Edgetown it never seemed to matter. We all trooped along the street. I was amazed to see how much the place had progressed. The souvenir shop was busy and so was the travel agency. Holy crap, there was even a Starbucks! At the Edgewalker Tourist Centre, tourists were babbling at each other and pointing at Tyge. They were actually recommending her!
She grinned at them, waved, and kept on with a distinctive swagger.
The New Crush Club (my club, I had to remind myself) was nicely full. I heard enthusiastic conversations about pubic upthrusts and near-death experiences on the brink of a skin pore. The smell of food filled the air and Komodo gave us a cheery wave from the payment station as he kept on taking money.
“Where’s Stevedore these days?” asked Tyge, frightening some tourists away from the table she wanted.
“Oh, he’s got some project going on,” answered Tipper ungraciously.
“Well bugger him!” said Tyge, “I’ve got repairs to do.”
“Me too.” Tipper stood up. “Hey, any of you tourists a mechanic?” They all looked around, startled, then all the heads starting shaking 'no'. Someone said, “I’ve got a degree in engineering.”
“I said I needed a mechanic, not a computer-shagger.”
The poor wretch shrank from sight.
“Yeah anyway, pass the word around,” Tipper finished, “Plenty of work in this town.”
We ate, drank and talked about things. Incredibly, Tyge didn’t mention a word about our journey to The Edge. It was as if it were so commonplace as to not even rate a mention. Then Notch said, “You got to hand it to these loonies. Get this: they were complaining this morning about the lack of earthquakes.”
“Yeah, mine too.”
“And mine!”
“So when was the last earthquake,” I asked, just curious. The others shrugged.
“This morning, wasn’t it?”
“No, last night. I think.”
“What does it matter?” growled Tipper dismissively, “There’ll be another one.” She drained her beer can. (I noticed they had restricted themselves to just three each.) “Right. I’ve gotta go replace a knee pin. See yez later.” She strode out.
Notch was still thinking. “Yesterday, about this time. Or was it at breakfast?”
“What?”
“Last earthquake.”
Tyge stood up with a snort, “Strewth! You’re starting to sound like the bloody loonies! If anyone wants me I’ll be up at the agency. Time to put my prices up again. Hey Doc, see ya later, eh? Didja enjoy ya ride?”
“Oh yeah,” I said, smiling because I was finally over my terror, “Terrific!”
Tyge pulled a sexy pose in the middle of the Club and waved me off, “Aww, that’s what they all say.” With a cheeky backwards glance she bounced out. I didn’t know what to make of it. Didn’t seem right. It wasn’t her. I almost wanted the edgy old Tyge back.
New thought: was this ‘Angelique Secondi’ starting to show through? I kinda liked it.
Notch was still thinking. Finally he said, “It’s not good, Doc. Not good at all.”
“What?”
“The earthquakes have gone. I’m sure of it.”
“Well, isn’t that a good thing?”
“No, it’ll be bad for business. The loonies come for the danger. This town’s got a reputation to live up to.”
I thought about it for a minute, then said, “She’ll be right mate. They’ll be back.”
“I hope so,” he muttered as he stood up to go, “I bloody well hope so.”
I was left alone, and suddenly an afternoon’s boredom loomed before me. Suppressing an urge to run after Tyge and ask her for another run to The Edge, I fiddled with my half-empty can and tried to review my unusual day. Suddenly I leapt up. The titanium! I still had to get that nugget out of her truck!
I ran back to the tour departure jetty. Tyge’s truck was still there. The sign said NEXT TOUR AT 2 P.M. I relaxed a bit. She arrived a minute later.
“Any chance of getting that sample around to Stevo?” I said.
“Let’s do it right now.”
We piled in and she drove me up to the old Hickster dome. Being a luxury place it had two parking rings. There was a battered truck up one of them already; Stevedore’s truck. But we couldn’t take the other ring. Tyge still had the tour-bus unit on her clamps. So she parked us near the 'front door' (Hickster's access to the taxi-way from where he took his final stroll) and we rang the bell. Stevo opened. He grunted when he saw who it was and headed back to his work. We followed. I felt a rush of guilt as soon as I was in the place, half expected Hickster’s ghost to walk through the wall and point an accusing finger at me.
Stevedore, in his trademark dirty orange coveralls, was unloading some strange curved slab-like material from a container. This, unlike the modern one that was still plugged in back at the clinic, was scratched, battered and weather-worn. I glimpsed fittings inside that reminded me that this shipping container had recently been Stevedore’s entire home.
What was going on? I actually started to get worried about my real estate values, then I relaxed. What did it matter!? I need to feel joy that the place was actually getting used.
Stevedore took his bits through to a nearby room that he’d converted into his workshop and let down his armload carefully. It clattered on the floor with a hollow resonant sound.
“What’s that?” I asked, peering at the stuff, “Wood?”
He looked a little troubled, “Errrm, not exactly, but I think the rigid but essentially fibrous nature of this material will still give it the reverberant qualities it’ll need.”
“It?” asked Tyge.
He tugged self-consciously at his coverall, “Uh, yeah, the piano.”
“What’s happened to it?” I asked, suddenly panic-stricken.
“Nothing, nothing. The piano is just fine. This is for my piano.”
I stepped forward, bent down, and took a closer look. It was Kirikibatic chitin, but cured to a dull wooden consistency. Even the curvature had relaxed, giving the pieces an almost plank-like appearance. “Remarkable,” I said.
Tyge knocked her knuckles on it, then glanced at me. “Explain?”
“Well usually it just rots down in the collection tanks and gets reused as fertilizer in the Kirrikibatic hydroponic gardens. But something’s arrested the process here, cleaned off the pus and sort of petrified it.”
“I... ah... got it from under the clinic,” mumbled Stevedore, “The best stuff has to be picked up after about a week.” I realized that he’s been harvesting all the big pieces I’d been lobbing off the side from the taxi turn-around. “Hope you’re not mad.”
“No. The Kirrikibati don’t care for it after they’ve shed it.”
“So why don’t they flake each other?” asked Tyge, “That’s what I’ve never understood.”
“In their own culture, it’s normal for them to shuck four or five times as they grow. Comes off in one whole piece, usually. But here the atmosphere damages their shells and buggers up the process. It starts to rot and they can’t shuck it themselves. So they need help.”
“But why not do each other?”
“It’s like taking a crap. No-one ever helps you take a crap, do they?”
Stevedore hooted with laughter. I’d never heard that before.
Tyge – “So since it’s a solitary thing, they don’t have a culture of communal shucking.”
“Exactly.”
“Poor buggers,” she said, “It must be hell working with your mates and watching them slowly falling to pieces. Gross.”
“Yeah. It’s all part of the stress that builds up in their work teams. They’ve even bitten flakers because they’ve become so crazed.”
“Surely there’s a better way?” she said.
“They’re working on it,” I lied.
She glanced at her watch, “Look, guys, Gotta go! Can I leave you here, Doc?”
“Sure... the nugget!”
“Right here.”
Stevedore took it with interest. “Where’d you get this?”
“Just tell us what it is,’ said Tyge, “and you’re welcome to it. By the way, can you do a couple of jobs for us?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In a day or two, okay.”
“Okay. See ya!” Tyge hurried out.
“Gizza a hand will you, Doc,” said Stevedore, “then I’ll fix you a cuppa.”
#
TOGETHER WE LUGGED the last of the cumbersome slabs through to the workshop. It was only then I realized that Stevedore had removed a wall. Down the other end, with everything pushed back, was Hickster’s VR room. I stiffened, but Harriet didn’t appear.
“Quite an interesting room, this,” said Stevedore, noting my sudden interest, “Pool?”
He grabbed a remote control and put on the lights. There still wasn’t much to see, just the hunched lumps of the field generators and hologram projectors. I looked around but didn’t see any pool, but I guessed this thing could generate virtual water if it wanted to.
“This,” said Stevo, pointing to an odd-looking green-topped table. I final recognised it from an old movie. He took up a tapered stick and hit a white ball at a bunch of coloured ones. They ricocheted around the table, all deflected inwards again by the upraised edges. A very convincing effect.
“Your turn.”
I took the stick. “What do I do?”
“Just try and sink one of the coloured balls.” He indicated the six cavities around the edge of the table. I got the idea, lined my stick up behind the most likely ball, and tapped it into the cavity. It rattled away out of sight. Suddenly there was a clamorous noise and flashing lights.
“You lose!” shouted several voices, “Now take your punishment!”
Suddenly I was surrounded by eight or nine people, outlandishly dressed in extraordinarily skimpy garments made of feathers, scales, leather, or nothing but shimmering bands of light. They advanced on me; some grinning, some serious, some with fangs, some with no pupils in their eyes, and all wielding whips.
“Ah, I think you’ve got me mistaken for someone else.” I quavered.
“No mistake, Filmore Bagel,” said one of them (the scariest-looking one, and also the sexiest), “We know all about your little secrets.”
Then the little crowd parted to reveal...
“Harriet!” I gasped.
She was dressed in her genie costume, my all-time favorite, and when she was close enough she ran a finger down my face. I felt it! Her fingernail turning at the last moment to actually hurt. Then she spoke.
“It’s been a while, lover.”
“Errr...” (The written word is inadequate. Think of old plumbing, gurgling.)
She laughed and poked me firmly in the chest, then turned to the others, “My friends, let me introduce my former boyfriend, the evil fiend who created me out of his fetid little teenage mind: this is ‘Mister Poker’.” It was my private name for myself. No-one, but no-one knew it, except for Harriet. I cringed.
Somewhere outside of this fantasy I heard Stevedore hoot with laughter, but inside it I was not amused. “Harriet,” I said firmly, “Get back into your bottle!”
She just laughed, “No, Mister Poker, because you see, you are no longer my Master. Here, thanks to these lovely people, I’m free at last!”
“What shall we do with him?” asked their ringleader.
“Whip him, whip him, whip him...” they began chanting. They had me backed right up against the table (which, it turned out, was an actual real table!). The whips began to flail my body, gently at first but then faster and faster. I felt them, but oddly it was almost pleasant, stimulating... Holy crap – I was going to orgasm!
Pop. It all vanished. Stevedore was standing there, holding the remote control. He was chuckling like a small hill of muscle, shaking all over.
“That was not funny!” I said, pulling my dignity quickly together.
Still he shook, “That was priceless, absolutely priceless! Now thank me, Doc. I reset the masochism levels before they got started. That guy Hickster was a very sick puppy.”
My thudding heart slowly eased back to normal. The room was empty, just Stevo and me, and the smell of my own perspiration and something akin to wood shavings.
“Let’s get that cuppa,” he said as if his little practical joke had never happened, “Kitchen’s this way.”
#
THE KITCHEN WAS HUGE, and immaculately clean, but I noticed dozens more of those robot collision-marks on the many corners and edges. Stevedore brewed up some peculiar beverage and set it in front of me. I decided not to comment on his bit of fun. I suspected it was his way of opening up a friendship with me.
“So,” he began, “Nice place you got here, Doc.”
I waved off the comment. “It’s not really my place. Doesn’t feel like my place.”
He nodded, “Yuh.”
Well, that was sympathy for you. At that point the conversation hung. I tried a different tack. “So whatever happened to Hickster's robot?”
“Dunno. I haven’t seen it at all.”
Moments later there was a loud crash and something came bursting out of a doorway that I had taken to be a pantry. We both jumped with fright.
It was Hickster’s pathetic old butler robot.
“Ah, Master Bagel at last. I am Graves, part of your in-in-in-in-in-heritance. The Authority has already authorised my transfer to your care-ear-ear-ear-ear-ear-!” It actually slapped itself at that point. “Terribly sorry, Master. Can I get-et-et you some cough drops?”
“Err, no. Thank you.” I was a little distracted at that moment because a horrible thought had just struck me – Graves had witnessed my visit that fateful night. He had stood in attendance the whole time I had meticulously conned poor old Hickster into thinking he had to rush off to Formaldehyde Four to save his life, when I could have done it just up the road... Arrrgh! Guilt seized my soul once again, followed immediately by a sick cold dread. What if the Authority ever got suspicious about Hickster’s demise? They could get enough evidence out of Graves to send me away for a very long time!
I needed to organise the timely demise of dear old Graves, and soon, or my career would always hang on the brink of destruction!
Was it a crime to murder a robot? How exactly did you do it anyway? And wipe his memories. Holy fucking crap; could my life get any more complicated?