The Garbage Chronicles (31 page)

CHAPTER 14

Often it is a matter of degree. It is wrong, but not that wrong; right, but not that right. It seems that black and white are ideals, obtainable only by paint pigments, and even there . . .

A Timeless Truth

It was nearly time for Lord Abercrombie’s final soil immersion. He moved from metal man to metal woman, inspecting his meckies for the last time. Using a chamois cloth, he burnished a brass “rebuilt” plaque here, flicked dust off a shoulder there. It was a solemn occasion, with all the meckies standing in three neat rows near Lord Abercrombie’s throne.

Wearing a cardinal red caftan with gold scrollwork on the sleeve and half collar, Lord Abercrombie glided to his throne. He felt a final urge to sit upon it and look out at his underground mechanical staff. The black satin cushions felt soft beneath his half bottom. “I’m leaving soon,” he said.

A blue female meckie rolled forward from the ranks, asking, “You’ve made a decision, Lord?” This was the artistically programmed linguistics expert, the one with the gargling voice.

“I have.”

“Flesh or Magic?” the meckie asked.

“Magic. It may not be the correct decision, but at least it’s a decision. That’s something, anyway.”

“Good luck, Lord Abercrombie. What should I put on the history wall?”

“I’ll take care of that myself. If I turn into any sort of a decent magical planet, that should be a minor matter.” Lord Abercrombie felt a tear welling up in his human eye. The thought of never seeing his recycling facility again was a burden. Then he remembered the visual sensors he would have when he became the planet. Still, it would not be the same.

The blue meckie rolled back into the ranks.

“You’ve all done your best,” Lord Abercrombie said. “I want each of you to know that.” He rubbed his eye.

“Goodbye, Lord,” the meckies said in unison. They waved stiffly and noisily, clanking their metal arms.

Lord Abercrombie glided to the corridor. He heard mechanical voices behind him in the main chamber, and poked his head back in. The linguistics meckie was touching the arm of his throne, acting as though she wanted to sit upon it.

“Go ahead,” Lord Abercrombie said, smiling softly in his half-faced way.

She started. Turning to face him, she said, “You mean sit on it?”

“Sure. Why not? It’s of no use to me anymore.” He turned and left.

As he negotiated the intricate maze of passageways leading to the Soil Immersion Chamber, Lord Abercrombie did not feel happy or sad. It was a numb, neutral feeling, possibly in preparation for the killing of his remaining fleshy self.

Minutes later, he dropped into the immersion hole with more than a little trepidation. Sitting down, he covered his fleshy leg with dirt. The soil was warm. He closed his human eye and visual sensors and lay back in the hole. Warmth greeted his fleshy half-backside.

In a flurry, Abercrombie used his hand to pull dirt over the rest of his exposed skin. His hand was last in. It remained outside for several seconds. Then it made a waving motion and pulled itself into the hole.

Goodbye,
Abercrombie thought.
And hello.

After a short nap, Javik recharged. He felt fresh. Returning to the lean-to, he nudged Namaba to awaken her. “We’d better get going,” he said. “Should try to cover more ground before dark.”

She sat up and yawned.

* * *

Namaba was just completing her recharge when she noticed Rebo loping toward them from uptrail.

“You’ve got to see this,” Rebo shouted. “It’s just up the trail.”

“What’s up the trail?” Namaba asked, handing the folding shovel and barbed cord to Javik.

“You’ve got to see it,” Rebo said.

“You’re not making any sense,” Javik said.

Prince Pineapple stirred from his nap and sat up. “What’s all the commotion?” he asked.

“Come with me,” Rebo said, almost too excited to speak. He pulled at Javik’s arm.

“All right, all right,” Javik said. He secured the nutrient kit to his belt.

“Wait,” Prince Pineapple said, rising to his feet. “I need a recharge.”

“Hurry,” Rebo said. “No one will believe this.”

Javik tossed the nutrient kit to Prince Pineapple. “Make it quick, Prince.”

While Prince Pineapple recharged, Javik mentoed the lean-to and pads. With a crisp snap, they popped back into the tiny yellow cube. Javik replaced the cube in a side pocket of his survival pack. Seeing an empty bio bar wrapper in the pack, he tossed it out on the meadow.

After Prince Pineapple was allowed an abbreviated recharge, they all went with Rebo. The meadow sweltered in the afternoon heat of three Corkian suns. Soon Javik was perspiring again. Waves of hot air danced ahead of them, blurring features on the white cliff.

At the rear, Prince Pineapple complained about the shortness of his recharge. His bag of junk clattered as he walked.

Rebo ran ahead, then waved and called for the others to hurry.

“Rebo’s gone mad,” Javik said. “His brain is sun-baked.”

“I’ve never seen him like this,” Namaba said.

“We’d better catch him,” Javik said. “And make him lie down in the . . . ” Javik stopped in mid-sentence. Rebo had disappeared!

“Where’d he go?” Namaba asked.

“Magic!” Prince Pineapple said.

They heard Rebo’s voice now, but could not see him. It seemed to come from the trail just ahead. But the meadow was perfectly flat here, with no places that might conceal Rebo’s large body.

“Rebo!” Namaba shouted. “Where are you?”

“A little ways up the trail. Keep going.”

They walked cautiously, following Javik. He took each step with care, testing the ground before committing the weight of his body.

“There is magic in this meadow,” Prince Pineapple said.

“Hey!” Namaba said, running into Javik’s back.

He had stopped suddenly in front of her. “My foot!” Javik said. “Look at it!”

Namaba saw the back half of his foot. But the front was gone. When Javik pulled his foot back, she saw it in its entirety.

“An invisible barrier,” Javik said. He reached back and took Prince Pineapple’s bag of junk. While the prince protested, Javik threw the bag forward. It disappeared, landing somewhere with a loud clatter.

“Quit throwing things at me,” Rebo said, still unseen. “That darn near hit me!”

Javik took a deep breath and stuck his face through. There was no physical sensation at all. He saw Rebo standing on a piece of white shale at the base of a towering cliff. Above, the sheer face of the escarpment was profiled against a deep blue sky. The scene was so awesome and so surprising that Javik felt a shortness of breath.

“Don’t hold back,” Rebo said.

Javik stepped through, followed by the others. A series of “oohs,” “aahs,” and “wows” followed,

“I told you it was magic,” Prince Pineapple said. He found his sack of trash and swung it noisily over one shoulder.

“We were getting close to this cliff all day,” Rebo said, “but didn’t know it.” He touched a triangular dot pattern on the cliff at his side, then pointed to Javik’s left, where a trail ran between the cliff and the edge of the meadow. “More dots that way,” Rebo said.

“We might have given up and turned back,” Javik said, scratching his head. “And it was here all the time.”

“What do you think, Prince?” Rebo asked. “Did the magicians create that illusion, or was it Lord Abercrombie?”

“I don’t know,” Prince Pineapple said. His black button eyes squinted as he stared up the face of the cliff.

“How far up the trail did you go, Rebo?” Namaba asked. The yellow and black polka-dotted ribbon fell from her mane and fluttered away in the wind, unnoticed by her or the others.

“Not far,” Rebo said, “Moha should be ahead, whatever that is.”

“Moha,” Prince Pineapple said, feeling a chill run down his back. “Something is coming back to me. A Moha is spoken of in one of our epics. It is a fearsome thing—a terrible monster.”

“It would have been nice to know this earlier,” Javik said, staring at the prince with his hands on his hips. “Don’t suppose we have much choice now, though. No way to cross that bog again.”

“What sort of monster is it?” Namaba asked.

“I don’t know,” Prince Pineapple said. “Didn’t pay much attention to epics in school. It destroyed a Fruit army, I think.”

“It is best not to hesitate,” Rebo said, recalling his gang warfare days. “Sometimes the thought of a thing can be more terrifying than the reality.”

They set out along the trail at the base of the cliff, looking for three-dot markings.

With the decision to commit himself, Lord Abercrombie changed rapidly. His fleshy half disappeared entirely. His mind became more expansive, capable of deeper, more significant thought. He was the planet Cork now, more than ever before. His face became the face of the planet that was exposed to the heavens.

With his visual sensors, he looked out upon the grays and blacks of night on one side of Cork. On the other side, he observed varying shades of color, from sky blues to the oranges, reds, and yellows of dawn and sunset. He told himself he was thinking about important things. Cosmic things.

I have a comparatively large planet,
he thought.
Some are bigger than mine, but most are smaller. Earth is smaller!

The comparison with Earth made him happy, for it seemed to him that he was more important now than Uncle Rosy or any other Earthian. It was a territorial thing: The guy with the most turf was superior.

Maybe this can be a stepping stone to something greater,
he thought,
A method of conquering other worlds could occur to me.

He rubbed the plates of two continents together to relieve an itch. It was an automatic movement, and it surprised him.

Hmm,
he thought.
Think I’ll try that again.
He rubbed the continents together again in just the same way.

I’ll bet I can wipe out Brother Carrot now,
he thought.
And Prince Pineapple, too! I might have done it earlier, if I hadn’t been afraid to commit myself.

But this prospect did not appeal to him very much. It seemed beneath him, a trapping of his former self. Besides, with Abercrombie soil-immersed, the chamber entrance leading down from the surface of the planet was sealed.

A major planet does not concern itself with fleas,
he thought.

So Lord Abercrombie concentrated on more important matters. On the night side of his planet, he saw deep space, with more stars and bright planets than all the grains of sand in his deserts. He wondered who out there might be plotting at that very moment to invade his territory via the Dimensional Tunnel.

I can’t seal the damned thing,
he thought.
Anyone entering the Dimensional Tunnel from another planet could land on my doorstep. Uninvited. Well, go ahead and try. I’ll give you one hell of a fight.

His paranoia raged anew, but on a much larger scale than before. He recalled having laughed at the foolishness of his own fears when he thought he had seen the Big Picture. His laughter roared across the surface of the planet then. But nothing seemed at all funny to him anymore.

A cloud of silver meteorites passed near Cork on the dark side, and Lord Abercrombie could see that they were going to miss him by a good fifty thousand kilometers.

This
way he thought, wanting more bulk for his surface.

But the meteorites went on their inconsiderate way, leaving a space trail of sparkling silver embers.

When the embers had died out, a flash of orange lit up the blackness of space. Something was approaching at high speed, growing larger and more brilliant with each passing second. Lord Abercrombie’s joy overflowed, like the anticipation of a spider about to ensnare a tasty fly. It was a large orange ball, bearing down on him.

Nice meteor,
he thought.
Come a little closer.

Seconds later, Lord Abercrombie blinked his visual sensors.
Wait,
he thought.
It’s getting too big. My God! It’s huge!

He began to wonder who was ensnaring whom.

The orange fireball became so bright that Lord Abercrombie could not keep his visual sensors open. At the last moment the fireball turned and went the other way. When Abercrombie next looked, through slit-wide sensors, he saw a great orange comet, with a long, translucent tail that stretched across the sky in a graceful, orange thread of light.

The comet swung around to Abercrombie’s daylight side and headed toward him again. Again he was forced to close his visual sensors in the brightness. Abercrombie felt the comet sear through his atmosphere. He smelled sulfur and waited for the impact. Strangely, he felt no heat on his surface.

Sidney the comet swooped over Bottomless Bog, then returned and hovered there. The cadmium yellow outline of a face appeared across his flaming orange nucleus. Sidney smiled gently.

Be patient, Wizzy,
he thought, looking down on the bog tenderly.
A million years is but a moment. You’ II be free someday, my son. Then you’ll do wondrous things.

Lord Abercrombie tried to open all his visual sensors, but repeatedly was blinded by the brightness of the Great Comet. The comet irritated him. It hovered in his face like a giant, fat mosquito, and he had no arms with which to swat it.

Lord Abercrombie searched his surface until he found a bank of visual sensors he could keep open. As chance would have it, these sensors were on decaying plants floating just beneath the surface of Bottomless Bog. He peered through the murky water of the bog, using the water as a fleshcarrier uses sunglasses.

He saw the smile on the face of the comet now, and it seemed to be smiling directly at the sensors he had open.
It knows I can’t do anything,
Abercrombie thought.
It’s laughing at me.

Lord Abercrombie created a hurricane. It was quite a powerful hurricane, and it broadsided the comet, bringing with it a gathering of cumulonimbus clouds. This did not bother the intruder at all. The comet continued to smile.

It thinks it’s superior to me,
Abercrombie thought, fuming.
It’s prettier, more mobile.