Armwrestling the Dead

hail, orange and red sediments disturbed, toppled, fallen. Nothing growing. He realized he was squinting. The sun beat down. He looked at his hands, which appeared normal. His feet too, bare and pink. He wore a leather jerkin, tough yet soft. A filthy loincloth sagged between his thighs.

  ‘Find him,’ the voice instructed. ‘Kill him.’

  Ekland shaded his eyes. ‘Who is he? How will I know this man?’ He felt a dislocation, a mental jolt as if roused from a particularly vivid dream. But he was still in the defile.

  There was a delay before he received his answer.

  ‘By reputation.’

  xv

  Smith was furious. ‘Gone?’ he questioned, scales glistening. ‘Gone?’ he repeated. ‘Just vanished?’ He would have the guards roasted for breakfast. She’d been beside him, quietly sleeping. And now? Taken, Smith decided. Yes, stolen. By whom? He summoned the wagon.

  He’d never believed Joplinski to be dead, the proof of it early on in the shape of coded messages, tremors through the earth, resonance in his arches, whispers of the strata Smith had become attuned to. Ruby also, he figured. Others - others slowly coalescing, shapes mostly unseen against an ever changing backdrop. Potent shapes, presences he watched, observed as a subtle pattern to the winds, the harnessing of global powers, the fixing and, more importantly, control of milieu and elements.

  In a word, gods.

  It was inevitable, Smith thought, the company always did return in one guise or another. You were never clear of Mother. Her influence was paramount.

  He was undecided whether to be pleased or angry. His existence had been dictated by the company. He was their creature, manoeuvring inside their framework...and yet? A lingering resentment. Freedom, having tickled his nostrils, proved a difficult perfume to shake.

  But first, Ruby Joplinski.

  xvi

  They were met on the outskirts of a town that had sprung up overnight by a group of five men, stolid individuals with a host of adaptations, mutations Harry found he accepted without cost. More interesting was the group’s demeanour, their urgency, the fact Ivan and himself were expected. They, the detectives, had telegraphed, the men said. They rode into town and tied up outside the jailhouse.

  Inside was dim and muggy, wallpapered. A desk was hastily cleared and two chairs arranged. Harry cast his eyes over the WANTED posters.

  Only one of the men remained. He asked if they wished to see the prisoner, adding, ‘He confessed this morning. Real slippery customer - but we’ve got the goods on him.’

  Ivan cloaked his ignorance by nodding.

  Harry inquired, ‘How’d you catch him?’

  The townsman looked puzzled. ‘Don’t get too many robots in these parts...’

  ‘Okay,’ said Harry. ‘Leave us to it.’

  The man left reluctantly, perhaps sensing their displeasure, what was in fact confusion twisting Harry’s mouth and puckering Ivan’s nose. They could only guess at the motives of the people here in summoning outsiders. Unless, of course, the town had been created with the single aim of ensnaring the alleged criminal. However that worked. The extraordinary interplay of events was a source of constant bewilderment to Harry, something he was learning to take as given. But it didn’t explain their role in this production. Perhaps Oriel was fulfilling the pair’s investigative wishes.

  Harry shrugged. ‘Let’s go in.’

  The robot was small and polished, a dented chrome, head in hands behind dull steel bars. It (he?) gazed up when they entered, face mobile yet expressionless. Resigned, interpreted Harry.

  Ivan creased his forehead. His stomach rumbled. ‘Did you do it?’ he demanded, starved...

  The robot frowned. ‘I don’t recall.’ His voice was flat but human. ‘Who are you gentlemen?’

  ‘You’re not guilty?’ Ivan persisted.

  ‘I have no memory of committing a crime.’

  Robot amnesia? Harry was incredulous.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  The chromed prisoner thought a moment, counting on his metal digits.

  ‘Daniel...’

  ‘Desperate Daniel’ quipped Harry, struggling to place the cultural reference.

  ‘Of course desperate,’ Ivan stated brusquely. ‘These good people have thrown him in jail for a crime he can’t remember. How would that make you feel, Harry?’

  He wondered where Ivan was going with this. ‘So what do you suggest?’

  The assassin brandished a set of keys.

  They wrapped Dan in a sheet and slung him across the rump of Ivan’s horse.

  The town wasn’t large, three or four criss-crossing streets and a central square, none of which were busy, buildings of wood and brick two storeys tall displaying facades of bland architectural simplicity. The traffic was slow, mostly equine, a few pedestrians wandering the duck-boards as they spurred their mounts and rode the robot to freedom.

  Over the next hill the sea was visible. Round a bend in the now paved road appeared the port that was their intended stop. Here the equine traffic persisted, although Harry detected bursts of steam close by, hot plumes from cumbersome engines mixing with vapours off the ocean. Masts were visible between warehouses, cranes and winches groaning, men stripped to the waist exercising crate-hooks; sometimes two arms, sometimes four, loading and unloading cargoes these adapted stevedores.

  The harbour resounded to shouts. Two sailing ships butted hulls with a coal-fired liner. Passengers crowded its decks, waving handkerchiefs and hats. On the wharf a group of mischievous sailors ducked fists and parasols as they made improper suggestions to ladies whose cause seemed an exodus, fleeing war, the confusion working to the advantage of Harry and party, who, paying with gold, soon had themselves a stateroom on the Rebecca, no questions asked. A naval escort, they learned, ironclad and twelve inch gunned, wallowed two miles off shore, charged with providing safe passage. The intervening waters were calm and blue-grey. Gulls turned somersaults in the tangy dock air.

  Commotion was the scene from the porthole. An old lady carried aloft on a chair, skirts gathered as she belaboured ears, a feisty young girl wearing a bone through her nose clearing the way, shoving one capped sailor off the rustily nailed pier into the white-foamed depths, his hat floating and his mates oblivious. The girl, not a backward glance. Her course was irresistible. Harry loved her already. But who was she? A fugitive from peace, like himself, or a refugee and a victim of consequence? Ivan, meanwhile, had lost his watch to the robot playing cards. Saliva glossed his lips...

  He should know better.

  Dan banded his shiny wrist.

  Harry rapped his pipe off his heel, then proceeded to stuff the carved bowl.

  Just as his thumb was about to spin the wheel of his readied Zippo the door burst open.

  It was her.

  Zonda MacIntyre. ‘Sorry, boys, we booked in advance.’

  The old lady had a beard. ‘You heard her - out!’

  Dan suggested they flip for it.

  And lost.

  ‘Best of three?’

  What he’d stolen, it later transpired, that he’d forgotten, what he confessed to having appropriated under a layer of greasy canvas in a dank and undulating lifeboat aboard the Rebecca on the high seas, was a compass. But no ordinary compass, he explained. This compass, a finely wrought instrument, did more than point north, it indicated the best opportunity, the safest course; it highlighted the most favourable odds, the set of circumstances least likely to effect disaster. It pointed true, he said. And where was it now?

  ‘I swallowed it.’

  ‘You what?’ Harry squinted, head propped on a rowing bench.

  ‘You are this compass,’ Ivan guessed. ‘Right?’

  The robot shuffled.

  ‘They locked you up for safekeeping...’

  ‘Yes!’ blurted Dan, brain audibly ticking. ‘I want only my freedom,’ he said, comically plaintive. ‘I am slave to no man, least of all that pirate, Marshall Kay.’


  The name meant something to both Harry and Ivan, reminding each of a secret past, albeit Harry’s was more recent. He climbed from the lifeboat and wandered the crowded decks, waiting for night. He pictured Angelo on his sofa, all those worlds ago, pitching for the agency with a company report in a brown paper envelope. Harry had never cared for the mission, vague as it was. What was he to do anyway? Write a particularly scathing pamphlet? Start a poster campaign? Incite a revolution? He avoided the saloon, chewing on his pipe stem as he thought about the girl with the bone through her nose, the same that had evicted them from their cabin. Few on board had a berth. The stars, when they were visible, reflected on the water like candles in little boats, souls adrift on an irredeemable ocean. The engine’s vibration could be felt through the railing and smoke from the twin stacks was a match for the clouds in occluding the spring moon. It waxed toward full, silver and enigmatic. A bit like Daniel...

  Around midnight, their escort, the Derringer, came about. Its twelve inch guns swivelled. Close but unseen they delivered a broadside that ripped the liner asunder, sending most of her passengers to their deaths, either blasted, burned or drowned. Harry knew little of the vital minutes. Fished from the cold waves by hands of flesh and steel, he bled from numerous small wounds. The lifeboat rocked disturbingly, tossed in the ship’s final wake.

  A woman dabbed his brow with the hem of her dress. ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘Cigarette?’

  It hurt that he’d lost his pipe. But the lighter with the naked lady was miraculously spared. Relief flooded his short