Expendable - James Alan Gardner [80]
My first hint we were close to our goal was a sharp dive: I couldn’t tell if we were going down intentionally or some new breakdown was sinking us at speed. The dim and distant daylight from the river’s surface faded to darkness. After half a minute, I asked myself how deep the river could be. We hadn’t traveled far enough to reach the ocean. Perhaps we had come to a lake whose bottom was lower than the river feeding into it.
Down and down and down. I was glad the water level had risen now—it helped balance the fearsome pressure pushing on the shark’s broken nose. Even so, the damaged area creaked in protest…and perhaps it was in the nick of time that the machine passed through an airlock into bluish-silver light.
The shark’s mouth opened, spilling water onto a concrete jetty.
The tentacled grip on my ankle eased. Stiffly, I pulled myself past the Bumbler (still pressed against my stomach), and crawled out of the shark’s mouth. Thirty seconds later, I was on my feet, the Bumbler strapped to my back, and my stunner in hand.
Silence.
No one rushed to attack me. The entry chamber was small and empty, with blank concrete walls. At the far end was a metal door with a red pushbutton beside it.
Enter freely and of your own will, I thought to myself.
The Colored Town
There was no way to go back the way I came. Even if I could start the whale-shark again, I’d drown on the return journey. That left two choices: sit where I was, or move forward. Staying put just avoided the future. Better to head out now, and find cover before anyone came for me.
I walked straight to the door and pressed the button. With a rusty whine, the hatch opened toward me. I stepped through.
Glass towers. Glass homes. Glass blockhouses.
It was larger than Oar’s village, but built on the same model. A black hemispherical dome loomed overhead, no doubt holding back a million tons of water. The buildings on the perimeter were low-built, while the ones in the middle reached high into the air, stretching more than halfway to the roof. Like Oar’s home, the place had an abandoned air: quiet and unpeopled.
But it had color.
Red plastic streamers lay in the street, like the unswept remains of a Mardi Gras. Purple and orange banners had been fastened above many glass doorways—banners now fuzzed with dust, and corners dangling dog-eared where the glue had lost its stick. The tallest spire in town sported a droopy yellow flag with a smudged black crest in the middle; and other towers had flags of their own, bile green, dark blue, stripes of brown and fuchsia.
It all looked so sad. Dirt-specked attempts to brighten the place up. Deliberately garish yet futile.
Wherever I looked was glass, as sterile as distilled water. The scraps of blousy fabric only heightened the austerity of the barren backdrop. How can a meter of cloth enliven a wall twenty storeys high? And from the clashes between adjacent colors, I could tell the decorators had no sense of what they were doing. They had no particular effect in mind—they only wanted to disrupt the sameness of glass on glass.
I thought of the spearmen I’d seen, wrapping skin on their faces and genitals. Did that come from a similar impulse? Plastering skin on their bodies to break up the sterile sameness?
But there was no reason to assume this town belonged to the Skin-Faces. For all I knew, the banners around me might be centuries old. The red plastic in the gutters might be that old too. With no rain under the dome and no animals, with air that was likely filtered free of most bacteria, the fallen streamers might last a lifetime. A flat and weary lifetime.
It might be helpful to see whether this place had its own Tower of Ancestors filled with dormant bodies. If the bodies wore scraps of skin, it would tell me something.
Cautiously, I walked to the middle of town. Like Oar’s home, this place had an open square, a square featuring four fountains, not two. The colored debris was more abundant here: mostly on the ground,