“What is it?” asked Ode.
Drum glanced out the door. “Don’t know, but they are going out to our landing. I think I’ll see what it is.”
Ode wiped his mouth and followed.
“Careful. Remember, this is Security’s job.”
Drum picked up his shovel and gave it an experimental swing. The landing was poorly lit. Sewermeck had shunted most of the power to search circuits down the pipe. They saw mists and mycelial strands glowing in the distance. Security Squad had pulled on boots and were now wading cautiously into the delta muck. Without a word they slogged off into the darkness. Puzzled, Ode and Drum stood for a long moment. Then Drum shrugged and turned to leave. His foot clattered into a tangle of wires and boards. The circuitry looked familiar—remote gear from the dinghy.
“Someone has taken our boat,” said Drum as he entered the control room. “Can we pick it up on our pipe sensors?” The search pattern produced a series of infrared images on the screen, but, like a checkerboard, every other square was blank.
“Most of my eyes are clouded,” said the Sewermeck. “My mass detectors are picking up a lot of floating trash, but no boat so far.”
“Ears?” asked Drum.
“Nothing.”
“Well, call us if you find anything.”
The men returned to their meal. When the Security Squad returned they tracked black and rancid. The Wet Crew offered them hot refreshments in exchange for the news. “I hate to see them get away,” said the Squad Leader. “We’ll try the next city downstream.”
“No dinghy,” said Ode. “I suppose that means we’ve lost our bedding.”
“Unless…” suggested Drum, “unless we take the tubeways to that city.”
They studied the traffic pattern through the terminals. The round trip would take many hours, and trying to keep bedding together would be almost impossible in the crowded passenger lines. They both shook their heads.
“No, I guess not,” said Drum. “It would be cheaper to buy all new things.”
Ode nodded—much more sensible.
5
Warbles and Bots
Warm waves rolled slate-grey through barren, tropical archipelagos; crossed thousands of miles of silent, sterile seas; and broke—thundering—against the split and tilted cliffs of Orange Sector. Limestone beds, eroded by the persistent pounding, surrendered their ancient memories of Xyne grex and Ganolytes cameo. Washed down from the cliffs, these delicate chalk traces of Miocene herring and shad were slowly erased by the wave action—disinterred and erased without ceremony, without witness, by a sterile ocean under empty skies. Twenty-million-year-old molecules that had been assembled by bony fish were now being disassembled in an era without bony fish. Out of the countless mega-fossils recorded in the Earth’s crust, only a handful survived. Today, one of the surviving mega-fauna brine-swirled with these remains of herring and shad.
Nostrils wide, Big Opal surfaced, snorted, and rode the hissing breaker into the shallows. She floundered until the next wave carried her up on to the smooth rocks. Her powerful fingers and toes clung to the slimy surfaces. Climbing on to a dry, salt-crusted boulder, she glanced up at the cliffs. An ominous, black mouth broke the continuity of the shoreline—the hundred-yard-wide arch of the sewer sump. The high-water mark around the sump was littered with the floating debris from the effluent—the fungus-softened organic material from the hundreds of cybercities that fed the sump. Among the amorphous garments was an occasional body, bloated and pocked by maggots—outcast Hive Citizens, the discarded drones of Earth Society.
Opal cast a long shadow as the sun kissed the western horizon. She turned to face the warm, orange disc. A horizontal bar of gold formed where the disc buried its face in the sea. It submerged. Opal stood carefully. Her “land legs” were slow to adjust to the firm coarse grit. Between waves, she waded quickly to shore. Her unsteady foot nudged a skull. It rattled across the rock and came to rest grinning a toothless grin. She picked it up. Her disgust for the Hive creature did not apply to his remains. She carried the delicate white relic to the cliff and placed it with other bones rescued from the irreverent surf. A row of them stared back at her with bleached, empty sockets. All were small-jawed and paper-thin. She thought of them as children, although they were clearly fragile and toothless with age. Twilight faded. She began her cautious climb to the Gardens.
A hundred miles up-sump the sewer conduits sang with pneumatic belches of dead city gases: incoles, skatoles, methane, ozone, and carbon monoxide. Where ever these toxic vapours lingered, sewer fauna died. Slime-matted rafts of bloated carcasses drifted, their bulging, hemorrhagic eyes staring blindly into the darkness where dead insects fell like flakes of snow. Ears high in the arched ceiling of the pipes—Sewermeck’s line sensors—caught an occasional moan. Optics rotated but saw nothing in the four hundred to seven hundred nanometre range. Darkness.
“Come back,” called the meck.
“Hush,” whispered Big Har. “The wall ears live.”
Their mould-flecked dinghy drifted sideways, its bow wedged into a raft of nondescript, floating debris. Hemihuman Larry hunkered down, swatting flies, The blackness and echoes told them nothing. Their progress was marked by aerial mycelia which swept across the boat’s wet ribs and snagged in their hair. Persistent swarms of sucking botflies hovered over them. Their throbbing backs sponged out with bots and warbles—the cutaneous abscesses that contained the vigorous fly larvae.
“The damned itching is getting worse,” complained Larry. “A new crop must be maturing.” He wiped his hand across his scaly, lumpy back, breaking open pus pockets and catching the wiggling, bristly maggots as they emerged. “Damn!” He rubbed at the pasty crusts of pupa cases, wings, legs, and dermal scales.
Big Har listened sadly. Larry’s irascible voice had been softened by the larval infestation. Hundreds of purulent sinus tracts weakened him as the little maturing creatures migrated from the bite site to his back, where they pupated. Skin, muscle, and lung were riddled and abscessed.
“Hang on, Larry,” Har whispered. “The Ocean can’t be far away now. Can you smell the brine?”
Brine? Larry crawled to the side of the boat and dipped his hand over—sewage covered with stiff, granular foam. He swirled his hand around the surface until his palm contained fluid that was less particulate. He bathed his back. A salty burn erased some of the gnawing itch and brought relief.
Shift Foreman Furlong studied Sewermeck’s wall charts. “We have a fix on the stolen dinghy. Its speed is about a third that of the effluent stream. Drifting. Where is the interceptor I ordered?”
The SS crew fidgeted. “Ode and Drum hand-carried the paperwork this morning. They should be back by now.”
Sewermeck went on-line with the Watcher circuits and tracked them down. They were in Recycle looking at a junk heap.
“What are you doing there?” demanded Furlong.
Ode turned sheepishly towards the screen.
“Interceptor boats are not available. We were sent over here to see if we could find a mobile meck to do our hunting for us.”
“And… ?”
Ode lifted up the shovel-shape of Iron Trilobite—blinking friendly dorsal lights.
“What’s that?” asked Furlong.
“A Servomeck assigned to us for dinghy retrieval. I’d like to keep him on for permanent patrol. He seems bright, and most of our line sensors are clouded.”
“Bright? Does it talk?”
Trilobite spoke succinctly: “Certainly. I am equipped with the standard OLA functions: optical, lingual, and auditory. I have no graphics of my own, but I interface well. My image converters are…”
“Fine,” interrupted Furlong. “Sewermeck will handle your graphics while you’re with us. We are trying to retrieve a lost dinghy in the pipes. How are you at Wet Work?”