The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [48]
So now they sat, peeling and reddening and blistering, as the raft drifted, uncontrollable. Yet these issues seemed insignificant compared to dehydration and imminent starvation.
Shoulders touching, the women watched the horizon. Clouds sometimes reached out to smite the water, as if in battle, and occasionally the water leapt up to retaliate. Once there had been an island—small, inviting—but this too had drifted past. They had wept then, silently, for hours.
There were gulls, too, and the women had briefly seen the floor of the ocean through gorgeous water, long weeds brushing the surface.
They were astonished by faces on the fish that rose to watch with eyes like their own, looking back up at them.
They drifted close to the edge of this world. They heard the crash of the waters, falling into the abyss. When their crippled car had been shot down by the brood craft, and had plunged through the atmosphere and clouds, they had desperately sought a place to come down. Just enough time to register a desert, and a city—like a sudden scab—then the impossible cliff of water. Banking over the abyss, holding the car aloft for as long as possible (though the engines were smoking and debris broke away), they wheeled back over the ocean, to strike the water—
They ejected the raft, the suits.
All three had survived, with only cuts and scrapes.
The brood craft did not pursue below the clouds, which, they soon discovered, blocked all efforts to get any signal out.
Without a sail, or oars, the plunge was inevitable. An end to this ordeal was something to look forward to.
The third woman had vanished so long ago now that she must be dead, though it might have only been two days since she had left. Their co-worker, their friend. Their lover. She had taken a flight suit and a transmitter and gone up, to fly above the clouds, to send for help.
She never came back.
Any form of rescue seemed impossible now. Their associate had not made it. They would never hear her laugh again, or her foul mouth, cursing them as they played and drank and worked.
The two remaining women said nothing to each other. Peace would come soon. They would expire together. They watched lights moving above the clouds. From here, these lights seemed almost pretty.
Screaming, Pan Renik fell. There had been branches at first, then nothing but vapours. With no choice but to suck in the mists, he was shocked to discover he did not die right away. He imagined his inner works filled with poisons, damaged beyond all hope. Or maybe he was already dead, and the transition to death had been painless—
As the suit also gulped air, and flapped loudly, turning him about, the vista cleared, intermittently, affording moments of nothing but whistling wind and the sight of another bank of rapidly approaching clouds.
Once, a pack of startled gliders!
Then amber again.
Pan Renik grew tired of screaming and sucking in poison and wondering if he was dead. Wind burned his exposed skin and stung the welts the ambassadors had raised. Could he fall forever? Were the clouds of infinite thickness?
This was an oddly pleasant afterlife; he felt moments of surprising peace, such as he had never before known.
With his shoulders he clicked the rods over his back into rigidity, extending the blanket until it was taut: he was propelled forward. Clicking the rods once more enabled him to slow forward movement. Hunching his back, first one way, then the other—forcing his elbows to bend—caused wide, slow turns.
These clouds, poison or not, were wet, almost refreshing against his face. Pan Renik spread his arms as wide as they could go, closed his eyes, and let himself soar.
Spluttering awake, path sucked in fluids, filling his lungs. As he sank, dying, light came dwindling through the milky liquid. He did not want to drown. He did