The Last Hour of Gann (64 page)

“Hey, Bierce!” Crandall was coming for her, his flashlight bobbing as he jogged up the hall. “You die back there?”

‘Yes,’ Amber thought, still staring into the bathroom. There was a dead bot next to the sink; it had been cleaned so often and so thoroughly that its hull had been worn away entirely in several places. ‘We’re all dead. This place is haunted and we’re the ghosts.’

“Hey
.” Crandall glanced into the bathroom without much interest and thumbed back the way he’d come. “Space-Scout says to stay together.”

So had Meoraq. Amber backed up and let the bathroom door slide shut. She stood there for a few seconds, then opened it again. The lights, which had been dimming, whined back to life. One of them popped, throwing one of the stalls into darkness and puffing out a little plume of bluish smoke. Shards
of whatever the bulb was made of tinkled down over the floor. She wondered if there were any cleanerbots left to come sweep it up.

Crandall was still there, watching her with half a puzzled smile. “You okay?”

“Yeah. I don’t know. This place…”

“It’s fucked up,” he agreed at once. “Come on.
”

She let him take her away, past a dozen other doors to the T-section at the end of the hall. There, instead of a directory or a
motivational poster, was a door, with what was probably a bot’s charging pad pulled out into the middle of the floor in front of it. Crandall just stepped over it, turned right and moved on, but Amber stopped. After a lengthy internal debate, she opened the door to find a maintenance closet. As with the bathroom, it was easily recognizable. Here were the shelves for cleaning supplies, there were the various tools too large or specialized to come standard on a cleanerbot, and there, where the bot’s charging pad used to be, there were sixteen bodies’ worth of bones.

The skulls were lined up in four rows, easy to count. All the other bones were organized just as well—arm bones here, ribs there, vertebrae strung together and hanging where there might have been coats once. There were two columns of pelvises (not eight and eight, but four and twelve; male and female maybe) stacked one inside the other like bowls in a kitchen cupboard. The smaller bones were all
in boxes with printed and precisely-centered labels, and while Amber supposed those labels might say Paperclips or Discs or anything at all, she thought it much more likely they said Fingers, Toes…Teeth.

“Jesus, look at that.” Crandall reached in and picked up a skull, work
ing the jaws in snapping motions. “Can’t you just see that crazy thing cleaning all the bodies every day until it had bones to pick up?”

She could, actually.

“There’s other bots. We’ve found three of them so far, but none of them are working…Hey, check it out.” He put the skull down and picked up an arm bone, turning it to show Amber the evenly-spaced cuts on one end. “This was no boating accident,” he said solemnly.

“Huh?”

“Doesn’t matter. Just saying, looks like the commander was right. They really can bite someone’s hand off if they want to. Come on.” He tossed the bones back into the closet, upsetting the bot’s neat stack, and took her hand.

“I’m fine,” said Amber, and pulled away from him.

“Would you relax? You look a little freaked out so I’m trying to be a nice guy here. You don’t have to be a bitch about it.”

“I don’
t need my hand held so I’m a bitch?”

“Whatever, Bierce.” He threw up his hands,
headed back out into the hall. “So what do you think happened here? You’re pretty tight with the lizard. He ever talk about this stuff?”

Amber shook her head. “I do most of the talking.”

“Maybe you ought to bring it up. If we’re going to be puking up our intestines from radiation poisoning tomorrow morning, I want to know about it tonight.” He threw her a grin. “Make my last night worth living, you know? Over here.”

The door he indicated opened on
some sort of inner reception area or waiting room, and probably a very comfortable one in its time. It had no windows, but a few of the lights overhead were working, however noisily. Everyone else was already here, milling around the cushioned seats and many low tables stacked with flat panels of some synthetic material, not plastine or even plastic, but something colorful and fake. Scott tried to pick one up, but it broke in his hand, brittle as junkyard cellophane. He tried to catch it, but it collapsed, the greater part of it falling back onto the stack, which also shattered, and then the table under it, until the whole thing was a dusty heap with no bot left to clean it up. One of the Manifestors was dumb enough to try and sit on a chair, which predictably tore and spilled her into its frame, and while just about everybody was involving themselves in extracting her, Amber wandered out through the opposite door into the lobby alone.

The floor here was tiled and her footsteps echoed, overloud and lonely. There was a round, sunken space along the back where two walls met in a
curved corner—a dried-up fountain, perhaps. The walls themselves boasted a grand, room-length mosaic, which must have been something to see when the full sunlight used to stream through the slanting front windows. Now, in the stormlight, it was just another part of what made this place so creepy: rolling fields and golden pastures dotted with fanciful wildlife far distant from either the scaly deer or monstrous armadillos she’d seen so far; forests hung with flowering vines as colorful as Chinese lanterns; cozy farmhouses along winding roads that led to a city of oddly organic-looking towers and arches; and overlooking it all from a grassy ridge, a happy lizard couple with their lizard child between them, hand in hand in hand. Alien markings in a complicated chain of base characters and accentuation formed a double row of words at the center of the jewel-green sky, dotted by wispy suggestions of clouds and a single shiny wedge of an upwards-arching aircraft.

She didn’t know how long she stood staring at it, but she knew it was the ship she saw most clearly, the ship and the cut-tile shapes of the lizardmen who probably never dreamed that one day there would be a crater in the middle of their ruined city and a neat stack of skulls in the closet where a slightly
psychotic but well-intentioned cleanerbot used to sleep.

The door whispered open and shut again. She knew who it was by the sound of
boots on the tiles. “See anything out there?” she asked, not turning.

Meoraq’s low grunt rolled through the whole room. “The
re is always something to see. I told you I wanted you to stay together.”

She pointed at the lettering in the mosaic’s sky. “Can you read that?”

The boots finished their walk and halted next to her. She still didn’t look at him, but she could feel him, dark and extremely solid at her side, even though he didn’t touch her. “Some,” Meoraq said after a moment’s consideration.

“What does it say?”

“The first bar is senseless sound and I will not give it voice. Below reads: Then. Now. Forever.” He said it without any trace of irony that Amber could detect, but spared the front windows a glance afterwards, as though measuring the fact of forever against the rosy picture put forth in the mosaic. He grunted.

She echoed the sound without thinking, her eyes lingering on the ship. Airship? Or starship? Were the tiny tile-people riding inside it bound for lands across the world? Or across the universe?

And what did it matter now, really? Any ship back then would be no better than this place now—empty, dark and dead. With effort, she made herself look away, at Meoraq. He had tracked the line of her gaze and now he was looking at the ship. She could read nothing in his face. She seldom could, but she thought he was actually trying to be inscrutable now.

“What do you see?” she asked.

His spines twitched in some tell-tale gesture he wasn’t quite quick enough to stop entirely. “Nothing,” he said blackly, looking right at the ship.

“There’s always something to see,” she reminded him.

He slowly turned and fixed her with a stare as good as a smack to the side of the head, then went back to looking at the mosaic. His spines were flat against his scales.

‘I got a real talent for pissing people off,’ thought Amber. It was not a new thought and it frequently came with an underlining of secret pride, as if some part of her were trying to convince the rest of her that it didn’t matter if the world thought she was a bitch as long as she was good at it. But the world was one thing. Meoraq was another.

“What,” he said suddenly, angrily, “do you see?”

She looked at the ship again. Airship or starship, it was just a painted piece of tile in a room no one walked through anymore. “Do you want the truth?”

He was quiet for so long, she thought she’d finally made him angry enough that he was ignoring her. That made her feel a little sick to her stomach. She was on the verge of leaving when he said, “Yes.”

“I see us.”

He frowned, his eyes moving restlessly back and forth across the few tiled shards of the ship as if reading them.

“Not you and me. Me and…the rest of us. It’s not a good feeling.”

He glanced at her and stared at the ship some more.

“It’s everything we lost, too,” she said, wondering why she was still talking.

He didn’t answer, but she felt the rough slide of his scales as he brushed the back of his hand against the back of hers. Just once. Probably not deliberately. He stepped away.

“I told you I wanted you all together,” he said curtly. “I should not have to repeat myself. Go.”

She went, but he didn’t follow right away. When she reached the door and looked back, he was still standing there, once more glaring at the mosaic. His spines were flat again. His eyes were fixed on the ship.

2

T
he storm continued throughout the day, growing in strength with each unmarked hour that took them into night. It was difficult to resign himself to so foolhardy a thing as making camp in these ruins, but long before the darkness made further travel impossible, Meoraq knew he would never coax the humans out into the storm. They believed themselves safe here and since convincing them of the truth would only make them more nervous, Meoraq cried surrender and let them settle in.

He w
as not happy with the situation and as the night stormed on, his tension only increased. He put it to use with long patrols—pacing restlessly from the foreroom where he could watch the striking of Sheul’s hammer behind the clouds, along every empty hall and through every dark door, to the rearmost chamber that lay open to the weather and all those who might be seeking an escape from it.

Because they were out there. He
had seen nothing living on his first patrol, except those few machines whose eternal task it was to tend the empty city, but there were signs these ruins had been used in the past to shelter travelers—the charred ring of a bygone fire, butchered bones, a discarded boot with a sizeable gash across the heel, the clay shards of several broken bowls or pots—but it was difficult to say just how recently these travelers may have passed.

The boot troubled him. It was city-
made, embossed at the cuff and toe, and worn right through its heel by the travel it had seen. A careful search of the surrounding area had not turned up the boot’s mate either. He saw no toothmarks to suggest the boot had been carried off by some four-legged scavenger, but that remained far more likely to his mind than the thought of any man wealthy enough to buy this boot throwing out one but continuing to wear the other. That kind of thrift usually meant a man who did not buy boots at all, but acquired them only as the opportunity presented itself.

Or, to say a different way, a man who stole them.

Easy shelter and far more readily defended than any tent-camp, ruins such as these made powerful lures for the raiders who dwelled in the wildlands outside of Sheul’s grace. During the fair season, the migrations of the few travelers they preyed upon and the pursuit of Sheulek who preyed on them kept them moving, but when the weather turned cold, raiders, like all creeping beasts born of Gann, denned down.

So Meoraq was cautious and, as usual, he was the only one. The humans
tried all night to sprawl themselves out where he could not keep an easy eye on them in direct defiance of his orders to stay together. Even Amber slipped away more than once to stand by herself in the foreroom, in full sight of the glass wall where any scouting eye might see her, staring at the tilework. She stopped once Scott found her there, but only because Scott then saw the tiles and began an infuriating campaign to call the others in to see it.

Meoraq knew what they were looking at and it was not the fertile land or sunbright skies that made up the Ancients’ world before the Fall. It was just five shards of metal, pressed together to make a single shape smaller than Meoraq’s hand. He did not know what the Ancients meant it to be, but he knew what the humans saw.

A ship. A ship that sailed through the sky. Like the ship they claimed had brought them to this world from some other. Meoraq stood alone before that shape for a long time himself, hating it.

He did not believe in the thing called Earth. Sheul’s Word spoke of all things and never mentioned it, and therefore even to consider that such a thing may exist seemed vaguely blasphemous to his mind. There were no ships that flew above the storm and there were no worlds beyond Gann.