The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [80]
“We should go down,” Beckett said, after studying the controls for a few moments.
Valentine nodded. “I’ll go first.”
Of course you will, thought Beckett. He followed the younger man down the narrow wooden steps. They had no railing; Beckett kept one hand resting on the wet, slippery wall on his left, still mindful that, if he did fall, the ice would afford him no purchase. The dim, electric lights led them deeper and deeper in to the heart of the ice, past more small rooms filled with enigmatic machines, past narrow wooden bridges connecting to more platforms whose use remained obscure. All the time, the heat grew worse, and Beckett’s mind wandered deeper and deeper into the waves and storms of the black sea.
At the bottom, half-eclipsed by the tall wooden walls, was a vessel. It was made all of dull brass, and in the shape of an airship or a submersible. There were no propellers, no visible means of propulsion; from the back of the ship sprouted gears and pistons, tall antennae, and three stubby prongs, glowing white and pouring dry heat into the air. Stenciled in black along its hull was the word Montgomery. The aethership.
“How long as it been since they used it?” Beckett mused aloud. “And it’s still hot. How can it even be that hot?”
“Uhm, Beckett?” Valentine, ever the victim of his erratic attention span, begun exploring the other chambers at the bottom of the cave. “I think you’d better see this.”
The young coroner had found a small room packed to the brim with crushed ice. There, preserved by the cold, were a number of cots, and three bodies. The bodies were, or had once been, human. Something had changed them now, some force outside the stability of the Word had disrupted the essential laws which all matter in nature was bound to follow.
The men’s bodies, though clearly dead, were hideously plastic, shifting beneath the eye, avoiding natural classification. They changed from black to white to red, giving the impression that, at the same time Beckett was seeing their outsides, his eyes were struggling to cope with the fact that he could see their insides as well, continually blossoming out from the deepest recesses of the body to the edges of the skin and back again. Limbs, twisted at angles that seemed impossible not only by the limits of the human body but by the limits of normal space, were strangely manifold: sometimes a corpse would have only one arm, sometimes twenty, sometimes a hundred legs and no arms at all, and somehow all at once. It seemed as if each man was made of a thousand men, some half-faded from view, some horrifyingly clear, and all superimposed upon each other. Throughout that hideous panoply of pain-wracked corpses only the faces of the men remained constant: three rigid screams of agony, all untouched by whatever force had mutated the bodies.
Just looking at them caused a foul terror to sprout from Beckett’s stomach and crawl up his throat, a terror that not even the veneine could keep at bay. He felt sick, a dark tunnel began to close in at the edges of his vision, and the awfully melted towers of the City of Brass sprang up behind his eyes, clawing frantically at a leprous moon covered with black basalt cities.
“Nng,” Beckett groaned as he staggered from the room and leaned against the wall of ice. The cool radiating from it helped to restore his senses.
“Are you all right?” Valentine asked, his face painfully white. He, too, seemed unsteady on his feet. “There’s…there’s four cots in there, Beckett, but only three bodies…”
Beckett nodded. “One of those things survived.”
“How do you . . . oh, no.” If it were possible, his face grew even paler in the dim light, almost luminescent. “That thing, it’s loose in Trowth.”
“No.” Beckett pushed himself away from the cold wall and composed himself. “I don’t think