Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [92]
“It is a staple of the very heavens,” Pym shot back, offended. “Everyone eats it there. Everyone eats it there for every meal, and for every occasion. It is the food of love. Everyone who consumes it has love for it.”
“Everyone?” Garth asked, and emboldened, he took a sample, dipping a bare finger into the gook and putting it on his tongue. “Dog, this is delicious” was Garth’s judgment.
“Great. Eat as much as you want, my man,” I told him. “You sure you know where you’re going, right?” I asked, but Garth was too engrossed in his culinary discovery to answer.
“Where the hell are we going, Garth?”
I didn’t want to seem like the child on a long trip calling out Are we there yet? but yet and still, were we? We were stopped for yet another “bathroom” break, as it was clear that the krakt was proving too rich for the mortal stomach of Garth Frierson, who at least did me the honor of going downwind to shit himself this time.
I’d given up tying Arthur Pym’s hands an hour before, since there was no point to it. For the most part, as I trudged along behind the tracks that Garth laid down just before me, Pym was the least of my fears. Mostly, I worried about Garth. I watched through the small cloud of snow in his wake as he stomped along, the fat of his hips swiveling to get him there. I watched as he Karvel-spotted, removing the picture of the mountain peak from his jacket and raising it to whatever new vista we approached. And I waited. Impatiently. Trying to calculate the point at which our bodies would be sufficiently depleted so that even the life of servitude behind me was literally beyond my reach. And only after that horror became too much to contemplate did I think of Pym instead. And I thought of something. I turned my body and mind to Pym, who was trying to scrape the last of the krakt out of the empty seal bladder onto his fingers.
“Arthur Pym, why’d you say ‘the Gods found you’?” The Caucasian turned up from his feeding to look at me inquisitively but said nothing. Although centuries old, he didn’t look more than thirty-eight. A drunkard’s watery thirty-eight but a lot better than most two-hundred-year-olds nonetheless. Down here, white didn’t crack either.
“You know,” I continued, “when we were talking back at that pub before, why did you say ‘the Gods found you’ about the Tekelians, when I found them? I discovered the Tekelian at the base of the chasm. That was me.”
“You are not half so clever as you imagine, Christopher Jaynes. Did you really believe yourself to be so lucky as to trip upon their perfection? Did you really think it was you that had the element of surprise?”
The tunnels that led to our base camp—immediately I made the connection. My mind lurched forward, fueled by explosive possibilities. The Tekelians had been watching us all along. They had planned for all of it to go down.
In a rush of euphoria, I began to believe that the entirety of humanity was probably still alive and carrying on in the rest of the world without bother. But then I remembered the emails and the missing workers’ boat, and my mind came crashing down once more. There was no way the ice monsters could have made their own computers from bones and snow, or made phones to cancel work orders.
“Do you intend to starve me? For if murder was your dark intent, it would have been better to kill me back in Tekeli-li rather than drag me this far.” It was two hours later, and Pym had a good point on that one; even though it had been only a few hours, I was hungry too.
“Garth, two protein bars, please. No, maybe you should make that four.” It was a hard thing to ask for; I’d eaten so many before we left that the mere thought of those faux chocolate fiber bricks threatened my gut. Still, it was better than the pangs of hunger which I was already starting to feel again.
“Ain’t no more, dog,” Garth said, not even bothering to put his binoculars down and face me.
“What? Of course there are more. There was a whole unopened