Filaria - Brent Hayward [18]
Checking his belt, his oilcan, his pipe wrench and transfer hooks, he understood how fortuitous it was for him to have brought these tools with him to work today. Beneath him, snoozing, Merezath was certainly ill-prepared. Even if his brother did awaken and see the active lift, and attempt to join in the encounter, he would be useless, without tools, in his pajamas.
Mereziah squared his shoulders and continued to approach the pod at an oblique angle, hoping to intercept it. Who might be inside? Lunatic? Saint? Someone with news from above? Or maybe . . . maybe even a woman? Merezath had often predicted women descending upon them. Could this be a soft and yielding female, arriving as his birthday gift?
No. That was absurd, an undignified line of thought.
Yet the pod was certainly slowing. He had been right. Did the track end, or was it not fully formed? Or was Mereziah’s station the intended destination?
Trying to contain his growing expectations, he found himself wondering what would happen to trapped passengers when he and his brother were no longer around to help out the pods that stalled down here. If neither Mereziah nor Merezath were available to approach a pod, to re-couple it, or to mend it, or otherwise send it on its way, how much time would pass before the occupants died? And if there were other stations up and down the length of the shaft already without attendants — as there surely were — how many stalled pods contained corpses? In all the many shafts? Would the entire traveling population of the world eventually come to its demise locked inside stationary pods, waiting at abandoned stations for assistance that would never come?
The pod stopped. The green light wavered.
As far as Mereziah knew, there was no horizontal area outside, not where the pod had come to rest. Which meant the occupant had not stepped out. But the shaft and its workings had surprised Mereziah many times in the past. No one could ever know the real whys and wherefores of the world, not even if they lived to be a hundred and ten. Sometimes openings did appear in the shaft wall, and shortly after vanish, of their own accord, leading out to nowhere, the nearest level a deadly drop far below.
Openings could be forced, too. Coerced, cut into the wall of the shaft itself.
Before long, he was adjacent to the stilled pod, out of breath and aching, but safe, intact, and filled now with terrible excitement. With one hand, he touched the warm, smooth skin of the device; the sensations were unsettling and heady.
Around him, the green light of downward motion was dimmed significantly; the area darkened. Letting himself conjure, for a second, a tantalizing lightshow of a thousand pods, of bustling stations he would never work at or even see in this life, Mereziah traced lines on the skin, formed by the rivets that bound the flesh of this device together, and felt the embossed remains of an undecipherable decal on the tarnished surface. He sighed.
The track, as he’d suspected, ended in an unopened bud near his feet. This probably meant that his station was not the intended destination. To send the mystery passenger farther down, Mereziah would need to uncouple the pod and swing it over to another track. Hooking his safety harness in the two lower rings so his hands might be freed, he glanced behind himself, as a formality, to see the position of other appropriate tracks; he knew this area by heart. Even though tracks changed, growing slowly of their own accord, he knew all their positions. Could Merezath say the same? How many attendants in the brotherhood could match his devotion?
One hand resting on the window ledge, he peered