Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [113]
“No. No, my son-of-a-bitch husband has really gone and done it. He joined up. He’s trying to be one of them, trying to get in good. I know it. I’ve seen him act that way with potential corporate clients, that same groveling act. It’s disgusting. He’s limping around the tunnels wearing one of their robes now, tripping over the damn thing because it’s too long. He won’t even look at me. And if he was getting any extra food, I wasn’t seeing it.” Angela sighed, rubbed her skin, which must have itched after being numb with cold for so long. “I thought you were as good as dead, and then come to find out you guys have been living high on the hog this whole time? Unbelievable. I should have left with you when you asked me.”
“You should have,” I told her. But I held her closer when I said it so it didn’t come off as a dig.
Immediately, the thought of Angela Latham inserted into this utopia made the whole BioDome thing more appealing. More sustainable. Mentally I reshot the last few weeks with Angela by my side instead of just Garth Frierson, and this faux past seemed like one worth building a future on. This came in the briefest of flashes, because soon returned the noise of the Tekelian hordes banging away at the structure of the 3.2 Ultra BioDome like it was an aluminum piñata, just waiting for their target to implode and reveal its treasures. From the sound of it, they were all over the roof, and there were at least a hundred of them up there. Maybe it was just acoustics, but it started to sound as if all that beating might actually be working, and in moments the sky might literally come falling down upon us.
This monstrous reality wasn’t the only thing that told me the idea of Angela and me staying in this artificial environment could never work. The other great clue was the look of Mr. Thomas Karvel, who sat a good fifteen feet away, staring at six of his seven new guests with unhidden trepidation. I recognized the look. It wasn’t hatred, or racism, at least in any substantial sense. It was just that, clearly, the six of us were more startling to him presently than the one unfortunate Tekelian who was no doubt that moment ravaging Karvel’s stores of frozen pastry products.
“How did you find us?” Mrs. Karvel asked, and her tone immediately challenged my observation: no hint of animosity in it, aggression.
“I’m a tracker. I’m a tracker; I can track things.” Jeffree started talking, pausing between the first sentence and the second to give Carlton Damon Carter time to remove the lens cap from his camera and capture the discussion at hand. The fact that Jeffree had only one eye now, that his empty socket was covered in a white leather patch, did give him more gravitas. “You see, you got to get a feel, you know, in your heart, for your destination. You got to imagine it, see, in your mind, and then the ancestral spirits—”
“We took the tunnels straight here,” Angela interrupted, unaware of the reckless eyeball attack being thrown by Carlton Damon Carter in response. “Augustus got us to the tunnel, and then we just came straight here. It’s easy to pick the right path when you get closer: the walls along this route are melting. They’re covered in wet ice. That exhaust fan you have there is blowing heat straight into Tekeli-li,” she told us.
“Listen!” Mrs. Karvel said, and I thought she was going into some sort of rebuttal, but in fact she meant just that: listen. Slowly the hammering above us was decreasing. Together we stood, each looking up at his or her own bit of ceiling above. The unseen assault trickled from a hurricane to a drizzle and then dried completely up until Karvel’s radio voices and