The Garbage Chronicles (10 page)

CHAPTER 6

Morovia: A planet dominated by the police magician Lancaster IX. Linked through Dimensional Tunnels 901 and 902 across the universe to the planets Cork and Agrippa.

From
A Magician’s History of the Universe

Standing naked next to the dirt hole in his Soil Immersion Cavern, Lord Abercrombie mentoed the white rectangle on his wardrobe ring, activating a dry shower. The rectangular white stone on his AmFed ring glowed, giving him a low-level electrical tingle through the epidermis of his fleshy half. He watched dirt fall from his body.

Wait a minute,
he thought, looking at the back of his hand.
A freckle just fell off too!

He soon forgot about this and mentoed the ring’s turquoise stone. A blue, yellow, and white striped caftan with gold scroll sleeves stitched itself over his half body. Following his form, the caftan covered only his right side. Extending his single foot, he watched a white crew sock and brown patent leather shoe appear there. Then he felt a crown of thistle circumnavigate the outer portion of his nearly bald half skull.

Lord Abercrombie glided regally across the cavern floor, passing cardboard boxes and plastic crates of recycled products, so numerous that he had only a narrow pathway through them. In the rock-lined passageway outside, it was the same, with finished products stacked to the ceiling on each side. He entered a complicated maze of rocky tunnels which he had committed to memory. This led to glassplex tunnels which his meckies had constructed for him. Through the clear glassplex, he could see ancient underground firebat caves and irridescent, multi-tiered waterfalls.

He floated by a wall sign that read “don’t abuse it! reuse it!” In a moment of sadness, he considered how tarnished was his success, limited only to making recycled goods. He had no distribution system. No other human in the universe knew the goods were there.

“I’m not a Job Support criminal!” he yelled into the empty glassplex tunnel. “It is fair to repair!” His words echoed down the passageway, heard by no human except himself.

Now he floated by caverns filled with robotics-operated machinery—hundreds of recycling machines forming the heart of his enterprise, each with a hopper on top. He paused to watch a yellow meckie load old clothing into a hopper. Behind the machine a noisy, loose-belted conveyor carried freshly wound spools of recycled thread to the boxing room meckies. Meckies in other rooms recycled plastics, metals, glass, and paper.

But it was quieter now than it had been, with many machines idle. He was running out of raw material.

Presently he entered a wide cavern which had three walls of mirror glassplex. The side opposite the doorway was a black abyss, the opening to the Dimensional Tunnel. Fifteen large trunks on wheels were chained together in a train at the center of the cavern, with a rock-filled dummy chained at the rear of that. A frigid galactic wind howled through this room, causing Lord Abercrombie’s fleshy half to shiver.

Pausing to light a lavender tintette in front of the mirror, he used his human eye and the bank of visual sensors on his magical side to study the reflected inner workings of his head and neck: an exposed pink cerebrum and a cerebellum that throbbed as his arm moved with the tintette. There was a clear, glossy surface over the exposed inner parts, through which he saw his open nasal cavity, his half tongue and half mouthful of teeth surrounded on the fleshy outside by an ebony beard. Below that was a split windpipe with a pink, lumpy thyroid gland next to it.

I look like someone sliced me down the middle,
he thought.
From my head all the way to the ground.
Lifting his robe with his single hand, he saw one leg hanging oddly by itself, just centimeters off the ground.

Trailing lavender tintette smoke, he glided past the trunks to the edge of the black abyss. Here the wind flapped his robe and howled with an eerie, hostile loudness. He saw the blackest black imaginable from this spot, so dark that Abercrombie knew no artist could ever match its pigmentation. The Dimensional Tunnel was a powerful thing, an awesome thing. Lavender smoke disappeared into the abyss. He tossed the tintette in too.

So many tests!
he thought.
And what do I learn from them?

He considered throwing himself into the Dimensional Tunnel at that very instant. In a wild flight of fancy, he imagined finding the tintette again and smoking it in some strange and distant place.

Surely I would land in a place where my enemies could not find me,
he thought.
But what new dangers await me out there?
Throwing himself in the Dimensional Tunnel was but one of his options if he decided to remain a fleshcarrier. In another scenario, he would remain on Cork in his fleshy form, using salvaged Earthian disaster control equipment to impose his will on the planet and its inhabitants. But that reverse rain problem . . . and planetary magnetics. What did it all mean?

Wearily, Lord Abercrombie trudged to the lead trunk in the train. Grabbing a side handle on this trunk, he used it to pull all fifteen trunks and the dummy toward the Dimensional Tunnel. They rolled effortlessly.

Reaching the edge, he glided to the rear of the procession of trunks and gave them a mighty push. Sidestepping the dummy, he watched the lead trunk disappear into blackness, followed quickly by the others and the dummy.

Fwooshl
They were gone.

He thought of the option being tested here, a scenario whereby the trunks could be filled with recycled goods and a meckie, just enough trinkets and a helper to get him started comfortably in a new place. If he chose flesh. That was a very large “if.”

Now he wondered,
Should I ride in front of the trunks? Or at the rear? How about inside one?
He knew there was no way to answer this question with such a limited experiment. He could not see the other end of the Dimensional Tunnel: His laboratory was universe-size. But the experiments gave him time to think. He was considering all the possibilities he could, preparing a mental balance sheet of flesh versus magic.

With his caftan flapping in the wind, he shouted into the blackness of the Dimensional Tunnel, “Is there another place for me out there?” The words barely touched his ears and tympanic sensors before they were gone, sucked into the howling abyss.

He worried about missing a greater opportunity, a higher calling. Maybe there was a beautiful planet waiting for him out there in the Great Beyond.

But what if every other place is taken?
he thought.
I might be murdered as an intruder.

The unknown terror nearly overwhelmed him.

“Why wasn’t Cork taken?” he yelled. “Why was this place left for me?”

There was no answer, only the ceaseless, eternal howl of galactic winds.

His human side felt lonely. It was an intense loneliness, as deep and black as the universe itself.

In the box-lined passageway outside, Lord Abercrombie was stopped by a silver mid black female meckie.

“Would you answer a question for me, please?” the meckie asked. A white dome light on its top pulsed.

“What is it?” Abercrombie snapped. He was irritated, for there were important matters on his mind.

“You are always speaking of the great joys and benefits of recycling,” the meckie said. “But isn’t that a new outfit you’re wearing? Shouldn’t you be wearing recycled clothes?”

“Report to Servicing!” Abercrombie commanded. “A meckie cannot be expected to understand such things!”

The meckie rolled backward, shocked at the outburst. Gears ground. Then, dutifully, the meckie retreated under the weight of Abercrombie’s ferocious glare.

Moments later, Lord Abercrombie was in the history wall cavern, watching the blue linguistics meckie carve Abercrombie’s story in the limestone with a sharp piece of obsidian.

“I didn’t use cartoons, Lord,” the meckie gargled. “That is in my artistic program, but I didn’t think you wanted humor.”

“This is fine,” Abercrombie said, studying a straightforward pictorial depiction of him under pursuit by evil, white-robed sayermen.

“I’m getting to the time you found the Sacred Scroll of Cork.”

“Good.” Lord Abercrombie glided to another section of wall and studied the circle/magnetics symbol which was beneath a cartoon of a plant being. “This circle,” he said. “Could it represent Cork?”

“A planet? Sure.”

“And the magnetics part . . . Couldn’t the whole symbol refer to planetary magnetics?”

“Hmmm . . . Yes. Very possible. Maybe that’s what defeated the other magicians. An imbalance in planetary magnetics which prevented their magic from operating efficiently. Come to think of it, that could account for your problems with disaster control equipment, too. Your laser shots can’t get around the magnetic disturbances.”

“Where do you come off saying such things? You’re just an artistically programmed linguistics meckie.”

“Uh,” the meckie gargled with synthetic nervousness. “I saw a math and science program lying on a table in Servicing —quantum mechanics, geology, advanced math. Kind of a shotgun tape on a lot of things.”

Lord Abercrombie glared at the meckie.

“I asked for it, Lord.”

“You asked for a program without checking with me first?”

“Yes, Lord,” the meckie said timidly. “I’m sorry, Lord.”

“Get your metal ass into Servicing,” Lord Abercrombie said, shaking his head. “Then get back here and finish this project.”

“Yes, Lord.” The meckie placed its piece of obsidian on a wall ledge, then turned and whirred out of the cavern.

Rebo had only one name. This was the way it was far across the universe on the dimensionally connected planet of Morovia. One person, one name.

With his head bobbing, he loped on three legs in front of his small band of black-jacketed cutthroats. Dark brown hair covered his bulky body, with one stocky leg at the front and two at the rear—a tricycle arrangement of calloused paws instead of wheels, with a large oval head that jutted forward on a mane-covered neck, a knotlike, knurled chin, and wide, cuplike ears. An arm to each side of the front leg had six slender fingers, which he used on one hand to grasp a long knife. The polished steel blade glinted in low light from the street lamps which burned wearily overhead. This was a tired neighborhood on the Southside of Moro City.

Scraps of paper and a piece of yellow cloth swirled in a warm breeze at Rebo’s feet. It was the height of the Morovian summer. He felt beads of perspiration all over his body, culminating in sticky pools of moisture at his arm and leg pits.

Pausing at a street corner, he glanced up to see a curtain move in a third-floor tenement window across the street. Someone was pulling it shut. Rebo dropped his gaze to the main level of the tenement, to Marnus’s Flower Shop, one of many tiny mercantile businesses huddling side by side in the tattered block. The flower shop was dark, save for one light at the rear,

“Old Marnus can’t hurt us,” a woman’s voice husked from behind Rebo. “Let’s leave him alone.” The only female in the gang moved to Rebo’s side, brushing against him.

Glancing at Namaba in the low light, he saw her rest on her haunches. With soft, golden-brown hair and a long golden mane, Namaba wore the scaly black obbo skin jacket of the club, with its wide-winged grapple bird insignia across the back. A yellow ribbon with black polka dots adorned her mane.

“Blades!” Rebo said, disregarding her appeal.

With the exception of Namaba, the gang members drew knives and popped them open. Their red eyes reflected on the shiny steel.

Rebo glared at Namaba.

Reluctantly, she slipped a hand into her jacket pocket, bringing forth a pearl-handled switchblade.

Rebo gazed at her with the disdainful, detached stare favored by Southsiders. Impatiently, he grabbed her knife and snapped it open. “It’s no good to you closed,” he said. His lips parted into a cruel smile, revealing irridescent blue teeth that illuminated the shadows.

“He’s just an old man,” she said softly.

“He told the other shopkeepers not to pay our standard protection fee.” Rebo’s voice was cultured. “For that, he dies.”

“We don’t need to kill him. Why not just rough him up?”

“I need an example. One our people won’t forget.” The tone was resolute, indicating to her that his mind would not be changed easily.

Namaba knew she was in no position to question Rebo. He had saved her from the laboratory fire, and by Morovian tradition this made him her lifelong master. There was no formal law decreeing such a thing; it was a matter of maintaining self-respect. Still, killing an old man did not seem the sort of activity conducive to nurturing self-respect. Her conscience would bother her long afterward, perhaps for the rest of her life. Rebo had told her often that a conscience was nothing for a Southsider to have. It was a meddling, unnecessary thing. Maybe he was right.

Rebo’s red-eyed gaze moved around the group, and he spoke the club members’ names in his thoughts: Kaff, the big one; Yott, the lover Howack, the small one with blond hair covering his body; Namaba, the sensitive one; and Durl, the crazy one who never knew when to stop hurting people.

“We rule the night!” Durl exclaimed. His glowing eyes flashed crazily. He lunged and slammed a heavy chain into the lamppost.

Rebo laughed. Durl always made him laugh.

Copycat laughter rolled through the group—except for Namaba. Rebo heard the chugging of their steam engine hearts and heavy, matching breathing. He felt his own cardiopulmonary system running roughly from the high excitement.

Now Rebo turned his head and bounded across the street. As the others followed, he heard the clatter of their heavy chains. He smelled familiar street odors here: raw sewage in the gutter as he leaped over it, and the garbage of ripe fruit and meats from a cluster of overflowing trash cans on the sidewalk. A dog had its head buried in one of the cans.

Rebo kicked this can over for effect, spilling garbage across the sidewalk and sending the dog fleeing. Rebo liked making noise, and Namaba had once offered a plausible explanation: It made others fear him.