Behold a Dark Mirror (2 page)

Fabricated evidence perhaps?  Two people who looked like the witnesses to his gambling loss?  As much as he wanted to believe that he was off the hook, his heart sank: only actors, and makeup, and photographic trickery.

Another tightly wrapped little bundle lay unopened.  Jenus reached for a knife in the kitchen drawer.  He cut the swaddle, slowly;  inside, a letter was rolled around an aluminum cigar tube.  He uncovered the tube:  STAY HOME TONIGHT was etched in the metal.

The letter said:  "I lost to Jenus Dorato the amount of 200.00
yees
gambling.  I don't have the money on me;  this is my IOU for the amount due."  It was properly signed by his nemesis.  The amount was trivial, but it proved, if anything, that Jenus had won the bet.

Excellent!
  Jenus thought, perking up.  How could now the other party claim any right to Jenus's absurd loss?  The letter was proof that Jenus had won the bet, even if he hadn't bothered to collect a relatively trivial amount;  and alleged witnesses to an unavailable contract appeared to be elsewhere–even if the evidence was questionable.  His gaze fell on the cigar tube.  He was not a smoker, especially not a cigar smoker, but he could make an exception, yes indeed, a little treat.  Yet the facts didn't make sense.

Why would anyone turn from an opportunity like this?
  He collapsed on a chair at the side of the kitchen table.  Regardless of logic flaws, he could not refrain from grinning:  This was deliverance:  if any complications arose, he could file a motion of misconduct with the Guild and get away with a slap.

And maybe I'll marry Janet eventually–who knows.
  He wasn't sure about getting married yet, and Janet seemed content as things were. 

He palpated the textured aluminum of the cigar tube he was holding, cold, coarse.  Upon shaking, the contents felt loose.  After getting up and finding a lighter in a drawer, Jenus went for the cigar:  The cap was tight, wouldn't unscrew.  He tried harder, cracked it open, twisted it off, and tossed the contents onto his hand, expecting the aromatic smell and textured touch of rich tobacco.

Oozy goo and a fleshy lump dropped instead on his palm, and smell of decay hit his nostrils.  He jolted, cursing, shaking the chunk away from his palm onto the table, rubbing his hand on his pants over and over, accidentally pushing the chair that skidded and fell rattling. 

After a second of silence, the aluminum case rolled off the edge of the tabletop and clinked against white marble on the floor.  A spatter of droplets coated the table surface and the otherwise immaculate tiled floor next to the case, which was now leaking thick fluid.  Before him, defiling his kitchen table, lay a coarsely amputated human finger.

CHAPTER 2

Nero's cart purred as he traveled to the power-generator hangar, the last stop he had planned for his workday.  Light smells of oil and ozone exuded from the motor, the only scents in the sterile air of Doka.  Rook was setting, its reddish light waning fast.  The breeze from the cart's motion tousled Nero's salt-and-pepper hair;  Temperature would remain tolerable while the weaker light of Zochar lingered before its sunset.  With nightfall, a bone-chilling frost would take over.

The road in front of him was flat, straight, and enormously wide.  Grasslands flanked it on both sides.  In the distance ahead he could see rock piles and the large hangar building.  As he drove away from the heap farm, his rear-view mirror showed a jagged profile of man-made mountains becoming smaller instant by instant.  Mining trucks, running in endless ant-like lines, had built the heaps of now-spent ore:  The immensity of this thoroughfare, once engineered for gigantic vehicles and busier times, now buried him.

Approaching the hangar, Nero slowed down and then parked, stopping the cart exactly between faded lines traced on the tarmac.  He dismounted, stretched his legs, and scratched his back, running his gaze around an empty parking lot the size of an industrial farm.  The operations manual required frequent checks of the power plant even if no maintenance was needed.  Nero complied with the routine diligently:  His survival depended on the generator housed in the hangar;  he almost wished for it to fail, yet discipline required him to maintain it properly, so he did.

The hangar was built behind the waste piles where miners had dumped worthless rock dug by necessity to reach the paying ore.  The hangar, enormous like everything else on Doka, was on a scale with the rest of the mine.  Yet the waste dumps managed to dwarf the building:  With the passing years, they had become big enough to look like natural hills.

Nero remembered hordes of children sneaking through the security fences to brave the tops of the dumps.  Now everything was quiet.  Everyone else was gone;  only the hum of the buzzer defied the whisper of the wind.  He stopped the engine, and the wind became louder probing gently the uneven texture of the walls and roof of the building.  Nero listened for an instant, as if hoping to hear some familiar noise like another human voice, but of course there was none.  He entered through a small metal door, which swung on oiled hinges on its way to slamming open when caught in the wind, but Nero was prepared.  He held it firmly while letting himself in, keeping the door from hitting its stops.  After stepping through the threshold, he latched it with a clang that faded into diminishing echoes.

Shade wrapped the interior of the hangar where unreclaimed remains of machinery stood cold and still.  Only the secondary reactor was engaged, powering an emergency backup now acting as a line generator.  A whiff of mist from the boiler hissed against the shadows and the silence.

The hangar was too large for people.  Nero enjoyed the still lingering mood of past glory and decayed power:  He rolled its eerie flavor in his mouth, swished it through his teeth, coursed it in his nostrils appreciating its taste: exotic, bittersweet, it proved that disgrace was not for him only.  On a cosmic scale, the majestic landscapes of Doka remained unscathed except for this small blemish dug and built by mankind, which nature would soon consume leaving wilderness in charge once more.

Zochar-the-pale-sun, lurking through tall windows, cast beams across the empty spaces.  Blades of light stabbed the void, bashing onto concrete blocks where now-missing equipment had once been bolted.  Metal refuse littered the floor.  Nero walked to the control room, the faint echoes of his footfalls vanishing into remote and dark corners.  And then, the hair on the nape of his neck began to tingle.

It's coming
, he thought, with a hint of apprehension.

Years ago, just after Hi was established and Doka was becoming a busy platinum mine, a Boy Scout troop left for a long hike, planning to be away for a week.  A terror-stricken mayday call came in:  The troop reported that
something
was harassing them.  "We're surrounded!" they said, "Creatures that stand still in mid-air!  No wings!  They're watching us!"

It's here.

"Capture?"  the Scoutmasters yelled, "We can't even touch them!"  Ten youths and two adults consistently transmitted identical details.  All returned;  the troop was shaken up but unharmed.

Nero walked on;  the hair on his arms started tickling.

Government authorities at first dismissed the episode as a harmless freak incident;  all resumed their usual lives, with recurring nightmares for some.  Boredom took over the mining town of Hi once more, but that troop's story soon became famous as the first of many.

A thin flash of light shone across the hangar, marking the arrival of a yellow spherical form.

Blue, green, red, yellow floating balls the size and shape of large round watermelons appeared in downtown Hi.  Suspended in mid-air, they moved as if self-guided, and appeared or disappeared at will.  Nothing scared them away.  Nobody could touch them.  Yet nothing really happened, except for popular rumors of a new exotic disease plaguing Doka.

Nero watched the yellow creature hover next to the turbines, then haunt overhanging equipment throughout the building.

On Earth, distance and ignorance fueled an irrational fear that grew and grew from thin air:  Quarantine was put in force.  Yet platinum shipments continued, and no one got sick on Doka or Earthside;  shipnetting was known to kill anything transported: virus, bacteria, plants, animals.  Anything alive died:  It was a strong inducement not to hitch free rides.

The creature moved with impossible stops and turns;  Nero's gaze couldn't keep up.

Time passed without casualties;  rumors died.  Reassured, the rulers of mankind thought it worthwhile to investigate:  The stylish uniforms of Tower officials appeared on Doka.  By then, the evidence had vanished.  The fuzz-balls had lost interest in mankind and disappeared without trace, except for a few unpredictable appearances.  Doka had given birth to a new myth.  The fuzz-balls became taxonomic relatives of werewolves and yetis, if of a gentler inclination.  All good people with a positive attitude agreed–except the residents of Hi.

The creature's hue of yellow was so intense it almost glowed.  Its blinding shifts came to a sudden halt a couple of meters in front of Nero's face.

At parties, Doka's sole indigenous animal had become a topic comparable to weather and fashion.  Once, a beautiful conversationalist had called the creatures
Cheshires
, in analogy to the famous disappearing cat.  The nickname persisted.

The Cheshire that Nero, during his stay on Doka, had come to name Mr. S. Pook–or Pook for short–now floated in front of his face.  He could distinguish no features in it;  calling it fuzzy was an approximation that meant its contour appeared indistinct.

Nero took a slow half-step forward.  His discomfort became more intense, but no more precise:  His body could not translate the alien feedback.  Pook's dangling tail was a meter long.  The last time Nero had seen Pook, the tail had been half that length.

Another imperceptible flash of light–Pook was gone.  No, it wasn't.  The Cheshire now roamed over the control room, restless as a tiger in a cage.  Then–
flash
–it disappeared.

Nero was among the few who could perceive the thin flash, which wasn't really light.  It wasn't really there, either.  Trying to read with the corner of one's eye gave a pale idea of the feeling, as if the Cheshire lay out of range of the five senses.

As after an intense dream, when reality is not yet convincing, Nero felt confused.  Every time he had been that close to Pook he had felt this way.  Now he took a deep breath and looked around:  Everything was normal again.

His steps clanged as he climbed the metal stairs to the control room.  From there, he could have a view over the turbines, cuddled next to each other like sleeping twin giants.  Spent, not worth removing, the two behemoths were special witnesses of the past purpose of the hangar.  In the control room, Nero checked out that all working panels were flashing the right colors, and no dials misbehaved.

He turned to hit the Play button of a music machine.  A tune echoed through the void, trying to fill a space that was too empty by orders of magnitude.  Nero inhaled, filling his lungs with Doka's air, assaying its tinges of lubricant and dust and nothing else.  He stooped to examine the track of the energy recorder.  A sharp spike on a flat line drew a smile to his face:  mail.  He'd have to stop at the way station to pick it up.

Few still remembered him, but those who did were fond correspondents:  Doka was too far and too expensive for casual scribbling.  He left the music machine playing to accompany his exit;  it would turn off on a timer he had set a long time ago.

Outdoors the temperature was falling as Nero headed for the way station.  Zochar hesitated along its twisted path, neither setting nor rising, an erratic companion to the sanguine Rook.  The housing complex came in sight, neat rows of abandoned trailers:  Once, people sipped drinks and barbecued in the common yards, and children played and laughed.

Young children...  Like his own, who were now dead.

A curtain of silence wrapped the buildings.  Everything was waiting as if to be dusted.  Nero parked the cart in the lot reserved for management exactly in front of the main access to the way station.

The door squeaked as he entered;  he made a mental note to grease its hinges.  The hall had a cozy ambiance, welcome after the power hangar.  There were couches and wall-to-wall carpets;  a layer of dust covered an imitation antique tea table longing for some company.  He stopped to thumb the latch of the mail room door.

Some day I should get rid of this lock,
Nero thought.

The room was dark.  Nero flipped the light on, and there it was:  an envelope, regurgitated through a hole in the wall, lone inhabitant of the collating equipment’s innards.  On the other side of that wall, the machine room idled.  He picked up the letter:  no return address.

Nero had his mail, and darkness and frost were looming.  Time to go home, even if "home" and "Doka" didn't go well in the same thought.  Yet solitude was the essential ingredient of life for him now, and Doka provided all the solitude he could wish for.

His heart accused him: 
You have failed!
  Nero's conscience pointed sharp fingers: 
You killed your family and half the crew.  You and only you are responsible.

Yet, at the trial for
Orlando
's disaster, that ship's skipper had been found guilty on all accounts.  Before the law, Nero and Far Lands Mining were victims of the skipper's negligence. 
Not so!
  Nero's conscience yelled with overpowering vigor and, Nero would say, merit.  The skipper was the puppet responsible before the law, but Nero knew he had been the puppeteer.  He was now prisoner of the chasm between his motivations and their devastating consequences:  The past was haunting, the present frightful, the future irrelevant;  and sorrow was his overwhelming, unrelenting filler of days that no repentance could dispel.

His trailer sat on the corner of the park farthest away from the station.  He had chosen his trailer at the time he first arrived, when the crowd was still thick and he wanted to avoid local hangouts.  Later, after Hi had become a ghost town, he had never bothered to move.

*

Back indoors, a long shower was a ritual Nero indulged in daily.  Drying, he appreciated with purpose the warmth and softness of his towels.  He always massaged his sinewy back and legs, enjoying briefly the hot friction of the cloth against his skin, revitalizing circulation in his too-lean muscles.  Nero shaved every day, using an old-fashioned razor, starting by the right ear each time, following the contour of his angular jaws from right to left and then back, avoiding with precision his fleshy lower lip and almost nonexistent upper lip.  He then shaved from chin to Adam's apple, never in the other direction.  Nero had thought about shaving his head bald, but decided he needed the discipline of conventionality to win his struggle for sanity and survival. Bald was too eccentric:  He could not afford to be eccentric.  Yet he wondered, as he wore his bathrobe and stepped into the living room. 
Bald
.  The electric space heater hummed, giving the interior of the trailer a smell of over-dried air.  With the coming of darkness, the outside temperature was falling.