Living Hell Read online

  ‘Here.’ Dad darted forward, tripped, then recovered and flung himself against one of the panels. Slowly it yielded to the pressure of his weight, and the hole widened.

  I did the same with the other panel. It felt disgusting, even through my glove assembly – taut, slick and rubbery. As I thrust against it, something small and compact leapt past me into the room.

  ‘Bam!’ cried Yestin. ‘Heel!’

  ‘Hell on earth!’ Conal exclaimed.

  ‘What’s that?’ yelped Dygall.

  ‘Sorry. He’s – I’m sorry.’ Yestin was now through the hole. His legs looked skinny even though he wore pants and a pressure suit; you couldn’t, however, see his overdeveloped knees. He had the same bleached, fragile appearance as a bean plant that I once grew for an experiment, in low levels of electromagnetic radiation. His hair was almost white. ‘It’s Bam. He’s a bit frisky.’

  ‘That’s your rodog?’ said Dygall. ‘But – but -’

  ‘He’s changed,’ said Yestin. It hardly needed pointing out. When I’d last seen Bam, he had been a collection of chips, switches, wires and panels, cobbled together with bits of composite scaffolding and the odd metal pipe. He’d bristled with antennae.

  Now he was a ghastly sight, like something half-dissected. His pistonettes looked gristly under a thin, yellowish membrane. The drum around his microprocessor bore a vague resemblance to some sort of rotten vegetable. Transmission nodes had turned into pulsing red bladders, and antennae into – well, one now whipped about like a tail, while two others were knitted together by a web of fine, flat, almost translucent fibres, forming something that vaguely resembled an ear.

  Yet, despite his unfinished appearance, he was skittering across the floor in an excited fashion, as people leapt out of his way.

  ‘Bam!’ Yestin ordered. ‘Heel!’

  ‘What – what -?’ Mum was flabbergasted. We all were. I felt the urge to sit down, but there was nowhere to sit – except on the portable chair.

  I realised suddenly that, unlike all the other chairs (which were joined to the floor), the portable chair had not changed. It remained a solid alloy chair.

  And I wondered why.

  ‘He’s alive,’ Yestin explained, pouncing on the rambunctious rodog, which wriggled and barked in his arms. ‘He’s come alive. He’s like a real dog.’

  ‘He can’t be . . .’ said Conal hoarsely.

  ‘He is.’ Yestin spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, gazing earnestly up at the ring of faces surrounding him. ‘I can tell the difference. You know, originally he was running off photovoltaic cells. Well, I was starting to change that – I wanted him glucose-fuelled, like a real dog. Ottilie was helping me – we put a kind of stomach between these two air-sockets at the back, and we were working on a miniature glycolysis machine. But we hadn’t finished. We hadn’t worked out about waste disposal.’ Yestin was already beginning to look tired; he didn’t have the strength to subdue a bundle of energy like Bam. ‘Well, now he’s eating. He ate a biscuit all by himself. And he won’t obey me.’ With a great surge, the rodog freed himself. ‘He always obeyed me before,’ Yestin added.

  Bam spied a moving sampler, and began to bark at it. Mum said weakly, ‘Are you all right, Yestin? You don’t look well.’ Dad was still pushing back his door panel, but his mind wasn’t on the job. He wore the expression of someone who’d just been thumped across the head with a blunt instrument.

  Dygall announced, ‘I don’t like the look of that door.’

  I could see what he meant. For a door, it was displaying an ominous reluctance to open and shut. I had let go of my panel, and it had snapped back with such speed that I’d barely jumped out of the way in time to avoid being hit.

  No one else, however, seemed to be thinking about the door.

  ‘You know,’ said Arkwright, slowly, ‘if that robot’s become fully organic -’ ‘Like the ship,’ Conal interjected.

  ‘- it ought to be taken to BioLab.’ Arkwright’s protuberant grey eyes were fixed on Bam. ‘That thing might give us the key to this attack. It might be the ship in miniature.’

  ‘I was taking him to BioLab,’ Yestin declared, staggering to his feet. ‘That’s where I was going.’ He looked around. ‘With Mum and Dad . . .’

  ‘Your parents?’ said Dad. He shifted his weight and craned over his shoulder, peering past a muscle flap into the street outside. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘They were behind me.’ All at once Yestin sounded anxious. ‘They were right behind. I had to run after Bam . . .’

  He returned to the door, ignoring the sampler that zoomed over his head. Conal joined him, and the three of them – Dad, Conal and Yestin – struggled with uncooperative door panels. I glanced at Mum, but her expression wasn’t reassuring. She looked shattered – exhausted – ten years older.

  ‘We ought to get out of here,’ Dygall suddenly remarked.

  ‘He’s right.’ It was Lais speaking. Her voice was high and nervous. ‘What if that door stops working? What if we get trapped? We ought to get out while we still can.’

  ‘I’m going back,’ said Yestin. He lifted one foot, as if preparing to climb into the street. ‘I have to find Mum and Dad.’

  ‘Wait.’ Dad grabbed his arm. ‘Wait, Yestin. Not by yourself.’ ‘I have to!’

  ‘We’ll all go. And we’ll take the rodog with us.’ Dad addressed the whole room; he was red-faced from the strain of holding his side of the door. ‘I agree with Arkwright,’ he grunted. ‘BioLab is where we’ll find the answers. It’s where we all should be.’

  ‘Except that the scouts are going to report back here,’ Conal pointed out.

  ‘Yes. That is a problem.’

  ‘I’ll leave my notebook,’ Zennor offered. He removed from one of his pockets an A4 sheet of plasmafilm, which immediately turned itself on. ‘I’ll write a message, and leave it – I don’t know. On the floor?’

  ‘Is that thing still working?’ Arkwright’s tone was sharp. Dodging Bam, who was once more scurrying madly around the room, he approached Zennor. ‘Let me see.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Zennor, handing the device over. ‘It hasn’t changed.’

  ‘That’s because it’s not attached to the ship.’

  I was surprised to hear the words come out of my own mouth. The notion had hit me just an instant beforehand; things had come together in my head like chemical reagents, creating a flash. The notebook. The portable chair. There was an absolute logic to it all.

  ‘Anything that’s not attached to the ship doesn’t change,’ I observed. ‘That chair is a discrete object, so it didn’t change. Same with the notebook. Arkwright’s tools haven’t changed. The samplers changed because they’re connected through their transmitters. So are the OTVs and the RARs. They’re run by CAIP.’

  When I’d finished, there was a good ten seconds of silence. Then Yestin said, ‘But Bam changed. And he’s a discrete object. He’s got no connection with CAIP at all.’

  ‘He’s complex, though.’ Arkwright was thinking hard. I knew the signs: his narrowed eyes, his lowered chin, his quick voice. ‘That thing’s a highly complex mechanism.’ Arkwright’s head jerked up. ‘It’s got to be the most complex unattached mechanism on board this ship. In fact it’s the only object that comes close to organic potential, which isn’t already organic -’

  ‘Except for the ship itself,’ said Mum.

  This time, the pause seemed to last forever. I found myself lifting my gaze to the ceiling.

  Plexus. Our ship. Our ark.

  An animate being, now?

  ‘It was the Goddamn life force,’ Conal breathed. ‘We hit the Goddamn universal life force!’

  At which point, a sampler whizzed past Dad from the street outside.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  ‘Okay,’ said Dad, ‘whatever we hit, whatever’s happening -’

  ‘We have to get out,’ Dygall finished.

  ‘Right,’ said Dad. And we left the Bridge. Slowly, one by one, we clambered
through the hole between the door panels. It was becoming so small that by the time Dad squeezed through (nearly falling on his face in the process), the fleshy rims of the panels were sucking at his body.

  It was disgusting to watch – like someone being born.

  Out in the street, there were samplers flying everywhere. The street shuttle had disappeared. All the doors had turned into valves, and the floors into slippery paths of tissue, some of it slick and smooth, some of it rough with soggy bristles, some of it bunched into funny pads or pillows that looked a bit like cauliflower heads.

  Mum seized my hand.

  ‘I feel as if I’m in somebody’s stomach,’ Dygall muttered, and I glanced at Mum in alarm. She knew exactly what I was thinking.

  ‘We’re not in a stomach,’ she declared. ‘If we were, those excretions would be eating through our pressure suits.’

  ‘Do you think Plexus has a stomach now?’

  ‘I don’t know, Cheney.’

  ‘What if the streets all fill with fluid?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Dygall, lifting one foot. ‘There’s a lot of goo already.’

  ‘Let’s not worry about that until it happens,’ Mum replied, and pulled me towards the starboard tube. We all trudged along, glancing nervously from side to side. Yestin cried ‘Mum? Dad?’, but no one answered. Bam forged ahead, sniffing and scurrying. He made strange clicking noises, and occasionally barked.

  I was thinking, in a dazed sort of fashion, about Plexus. How could something organic survive in space? It wasn’t possible, was it? Or was it? If there was osmium in the peptide bonds, perhaps the hull would transform, magically, into an organic shield.

  Or would it disintegrate, as Plexus came fully to life?

  I couldn’t get my brain around it, somehow. Any minute, I thought, all this is going to be fixed up. Someone (Arkwright?) is going to work out what to do, and everything will be back to normal.

  I was fooling myself, of course. But perhaps there was no other way of keeping a lid on my own panic.

  ‘What about B Crew?’ Lais inquired breathlessly, from somewhere behind me.

  ‘There are lots of things we don’t know yet,’ Mum replied, in a grim voice. ‘B Crew’s status is one of them.’

  ‘Everyone stick together!’ Dad exclaimed. ‘Yestin, did you come from the starboard tube?’

  Yestin nodded.

  Walking was difficult on the uneven surface of the floor, but we finally reached the starboard tube. Standing at the junction, we looked to our left and our right, but saw no one else. There was nobody on the platform – nobody down in the tube itself (which was now lined with ribbed, resiny material). The great, arching space was empty, as far as the curve of the ship’s drum allowed us to see.

  Yestin said, ‘Where are Mum and Dad?’

  ‘They might have turned down one of the streets,’ Zennor suggested.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well – I don’t know, but -’

  ‘They were right behind me. They were heading for BioLab.’

  ‘Did you tell them you were going to stop at the Bridge?’ Mum queried. ‘You were chasing your rodog, weren’t you? Perhaps they didn’t see you turn. Perhaps they had to check down each of the streets between here and BioLab.’

  ‘Can we look for them?’ Yestin asked, and Dad put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘We have to get to BioLab, Yestin,’ he said. ‘If your parents aren’t there already, and we don’t pass them on the way, we’ll send someone back to look.’

  ‘They’ll be all right,’ Mum added.

  The words were barely out of her mouth when we heard a scream. It was very faint, but it was definitely a scream.

  And it was the most frightening thing I’d ever heard in my life.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Lais breathed.

  ‘Mum? Dad?’ shrieked Yestin, and grabbed my dad’s arm. ‘Who was that? Was that them?’

  ‘I – I don’t know . . .’ Dad stammered. Then Conal started to run towards the noise, which had come from the direction of GeoLab, off to our left. ‘Conal?’ Dad cried. ‘What are you doing?’

  Conal paused. He half turned.

  ‘We should stick together,’ said Mum, in an unsteady voice.

  ‘Wait.’ Dad suddenly took charge. ‘You’re right – we should stick together. Plus Arkwright and Quenby have to get to BioLab. The kids, too. Lucky it’s in the right direction -’

  ‘But what about my mum?’ Yestin wailed.

  ‘I’ll take care of your mum,’ said Conal. He was only small, with sloping shoulders and short legs, but he suddenly looked heroic. ‘Give me that laser pen, Arkwright,’ he added. ‘Just in case. I’m sure I won’t need it -’

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ Dad interjected. Before Mum could protest (I heard her catch her breath), Conal said, ‘No.’

  ‘But -’

  ‘I don’t have a kid, Tuddor,’ Conal pointed out quietly. Whereupon Arkwright handed over his laser pen.

  Dygall croaked, ‘We need some guns,’ but I don’t think anyone heard him. Except me. And perhaps his father.

  Zennor frowned.

  Dad said, ‘Give it ten minutes, Conal. Ten minutes. Then come back to BioLab.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And if you see anyone else, pass the word. BioLab.’

  Conal nodded. He headed off down the tube, as samplers banked and soared around him.

  ‘Try not to touch anything!’ Mum called, and Conal lifted a hand.

  ‘That scream was probably just someone getting a shock,’ Lais quavered. ‘Like I did, when my chair went sticky.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure that’s right.’ Zennor spoke in a soothing manner, putting his arm around Yestin. ‘Everyone’s in a highly agitated state. You have to remember that.’

  Yestin gazed up at him, with a look of hope dawning on his face. Dygall rolled his eyes. Dad prodded my arm. ‘Come on, everyone,’ he said. ‘We can’t afford to hang around.’

  So we pressed on towards BioLab, with many a backward glance. Finally, we lost sight of Conal. Dad was in the lead, followed closely by Lais. Mum and I were next in line. Zennor followed us, between Dygall and Yestin. Arkwright brought up the rear. He seemed to be thinking.

  At the next junction, Dad checked the street to our right, but it was empty. He even yelled ‘Hello?’ and waited for a moment, in case there might be a reply. (There wasn’t.) He did the same whenever we reached a junction, with no success. We were passing through pressure cells designed for storage: chemical components, spare parts, gas cylinders – nothing that was going to yell back.

  The residential cells that we passed were empty too. Their inhabitants were probably at emergency stations somewhere else on board. We didn’t see a single street shuttle, or On-board Transport Vehicle. Just lots and lots of samplers.

  Bam kept chasing the samplers, so that Dygall had to call him to heel, repeatedly. Yestin didn’t. For the first time, Yestin seemed to have forgotten his rodog. He staggered along looking stunned.

  ‘That rodog might tell us a lot,’ Arkwright murmured, and raised his voice. ‘We should have a good look at it, Quenby, when we reach BioLab!’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘If the CPU’s turned into a neurological network, I’m going to need all the help I can get,’ Arkwright went on.

  I noticed that he kept lagging behind, lost in mental calculations. ‘We’ll have to work together. I’m not very clear on things like the central nervous system, or even the autonomic nervous system – is that what it’s called?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mum. ‘But Plexus isn’t normal. We can’t assume anything.’

  ‘No. I know.’

  ‘I really don’t see – I mean, it’s going to be so hard -’

  ‘Ow!’

  Ahead of us, Lais had run into Dad, who had stopped short. Bam was barking frantically. We all looked up.

  A large shape was scuttling across the ceiling. I knew instantly what it was. Though it had slipped off its circuit rail, and its boxy comp
osite sheath was now a kind of elastic shell, and its suction-valve brushes had turned into beating hairs, or cilia, and its padded wheels had transformed themselves into sucker-like attachments, I still recognised the greyish sheen and distinctive shape of a Remote Access Laundry Unit.

  It seemed to pause overhead, its cilia pulsing.

  Everyone froze. It was an instinctive reaction. To see something so big – so big and alive - touched the primitive homo sapiens in all of us.

  Dad was the first to come to his senses.

  ‘Okay,’ he muttered, without taking his eyes off the RAL.

  ‘Okay, everyone, let’s keep going. Gently, now. Gently . . .’

  Before we could move, however, the RAL’s suction valve convulsed. It disgorged a great blast of glossy blue discs, about the size of my palm. They poured out, but didn’t pick up much speed. They just floated in the air, rippling slightly. Slowly they began to disperse.

  They looked vaguely familiar.

  ‘What – what -?’ Lais stuttered.

  ‘Just move!’ Dad snapped. ‘BioLab! Move!

  ’ ‘Scent pellets,’ I gasped. ‘Could they be scent pellets?’

  ‘Move, Cheney!’

  They were scent pellets – I was sure of it. I had studied the laundry system during my stint in Sustainable Services. All RALs carried scent pellets. When you didn’t clean with water, scent pellets were vital.

  But I didn’t get the chance to have a really good look. We were already moving, running along the tube towards BioLab. I stumbled, and nearly fell. Mum hauled me to my feet again.

  ‘Mum -’

  ‘Later!’

  We charged down the platform, though there was no need to. The RAL didn’t follow us; I glanced back to check. It was disappearing down one of the streets, leaving a trail of drifting scent pellets.

  Ahead of me, Dad slipped. It was easy to do, on that surface. He hit one knee coming down, and swore. Lais careered into him; she also tumbled.

  ‘It’s all right!’ Zennor panted. ‘It’s gone!’

  ‘Slow down.’ Mum was also gasping for breath as she hung off my arm. ‘We can’t – can’t run – we’ll hurt ourselves – too uneven . . .’