Jonah
For such a big machine, the interior was cramped — too cramped to bend and loosen the glass grip on my leg. The Bumbler pressed hard into my kidneys, the pain stinging sharp; so I wriggled and squeezed to roll the other way, facing the Bumbler instead of having it at my back. Having a Bumbler jammed against my stomach wasn't comfortable either, but I could stand it for a while. With less than two minutes of air in the rebreather, I had worse troubles.
The whale-shark's mouth began to close. I tried to hold it open, tried to grab its jaw and pull myself free; but the hold on my ankle was as strong as iron, chaining me in place.
Better to stop fighting. My air would last longer that way.
Concentrate, I told myself. Slow breaths. Wait.
I had no idea what I was waiting for; but no one builds a river-shark just for the hell of it — not one with tentacles for grabbing passersby. This machine was designed to capture people… and I hoped it took them alive.
Yes. Of course it must want me alive. If its purpose was to eliminate intruders, it would have killed me by now. It could have zipped out a knife to slit my throat the second I was immobilized.
Unless it wanted my skin intact. Unless the machine's job was to supply the Skin-Faces with fresh Explorer pelts.
Concentrate! I growled mentally. Slow, slow breaths.
Somewhere inside the shark, machinery started grinding. It was an unhealthy, damaged sound — the stunner had shattered some part of the glass mechanism. Slowly though, slowly, the water around me gurgled away. The shark was pumping water out, and (I hoped) pumping breathable air in.
Taking a chance, I raised my head into the clear space and inhaled shallowly through my nose. So far so good. I completely filled my lungs and waited.
No dizziness, no sudden rush of blackness. The shark wasn't even doping the air with knockout gas.
What a wimp-ass planet.
Pumps Clanking
The water level dropped till half the interior was filled with air. I expected the water to continue receding; it didn't.
Why did that bother me?
The whale-shark contained no light source, but it swam close enough to the surface that weak daylight filtered through the machine's glass hull. The dim illumination showed why the water level wasn't dropping anymore: as fast as the pumps sucked water away, more water seeped through the cracks where the shark had hit the log. It looked like the glass bent slightly inward up near the snout — as if the water pressure outside had enough strength to buckle the hull, now that the inside was half air.
"Okay," I said aloud, "I am now officially worried."
Minutes passed. The grinding noise in the tail section got worse, punctuated occasionally by soft electric crackling. If that was the sound of the pumps, they wouldn't last long.
I held the rebreather in front of my face. The gauge was hard to read in the dimness, but the little tank still held sixty seconds of air. Careful breathing could stretch that out, but not forever.
Lifting my head into the air space, I filled my lungs as deeply as I could. By the time I finished, there was no doubt possible: the water level was back on the rise.
Arrival
In an entertainment bubble broadcast, I'd be saved at the last second — just as the chamber was completely full, just as my rebreather gasped out its last molecule of oxygen. Life doesn't match that standard: you do not find a job just as you run out of money, a couple's orgasms seldom arrive simultaneously, and salvation may not sweep to the rescue at the point of peak drama. For me, salvation arrived with some minutes to spare — better than mistiming its cue in the other direction.
To make a long story short, the whale-shark's gullet still held a few fingers of air at the end of the machine's journey.
My first hint we were close to our goal was a sharp dive: I couldn't tell if we were going down intentionally or some new breakdown was sinking us at speed. The dim and distant daylight from the river's surface faded to darkness. After half a minute, I asked myself how deep the river could be. We hadn't traveled far enough to reach the ocean. Perhaps we had come to a lake whose bottom was lower than the river feeding into it.
Down and down and down. I was glad the water level had risen now — it helped balance the fearsome pressure pushing on the shark's broken nose. Even so, the damaged area creaked in protest… and perhaps it was in the nick of time that the machine passed through an airlock into bluish-silver light.
The shark's mouth opened, spilling water onto a concrete jetty.
The tentacled grip on my ankle eased. Stiffly, I pulled myself past the Bumbler (still pressed against my stomach), and crawled out of the shark's mouth. Thirty seconds later, I was on my feet, the Bumbler strapped to my back, and my stunner in hand.
Silence.
No one rushed to attack me. The entry chamber was small and empty, with blank concrete walls. At the far end was a metal door with a red pushbutton beside it.
Enter freely and of your own will, I thought to myself.
The Colored Town
There was no way to go back the way I came. Even if I could start the whale-shark again, I'd drown on the return journey. That left two choices: sit where I was, or move forward. Staying put just avoided the future. Better to head out now, and find cover before anyone came for me.
I walked straight to the door and pressed the button. With a rusty whine, the hatch opened toward me. I stepped through.
Glass towers. Glass homes. Glass blockhouses.
It was larger than Oar's village, but built on the same model. A black hemispherical dome loomed overhead, no doubt holding back a million tons of water. The buildings on the perimeter were low-built, while the ones in the middle reached high into the air, stretching more than halfway to the roof. Like Oar's home, the place had an abandoned air: quiet and unpeopled.
But it had color.
Red plastic streamers lay in the street, like the unswept remains of a Mardi Gras. Purple and orange banners had been fastened above many glass doorways — banners now fuzzed with dust, and corners dangling dog-eared where the glue had lost its stick. The tallest spire in town sported a droopy yellow flag with a smudged black crest in the middle; and other towers had flags of their own, bile green, dark blue, stripes of brown and fuchsia.
It all looked so sad. Dirt-specked attempts to brighten the place up. Deliberately garish yet futile.
Wherever I looked was glass, as sterile as distilled water. The scraps of blousy fabric only heightened the austerity of the barren backdrop. How can a meter of cloth enliven a wall twenty storeys high? And from the clashes between adjacent colors, I could tell the decorators had no sense of what they were doing. They had no particular effect in mind — they only wanted to disrupt the sameness of glass on glass.
I thought of the spearmen I'd seen, wrapping skin on their faces and genitals. Did that come from a similar impulse? Plastering skin on their bodies to break up the sterile sameness?
But there was no reason to assume this town belonged to the Skin-Faces. For all I knew, the banners around me might be centuries old. The red plastic in the gutters might be that old too. With no rain under the dome and no animals, with air that was likely filtered free of most bacteria, the fallen streamers might last a lifetime. A flat and weary lifetime.
It might be helpful to see whether this place had its own Tower of Ancestors filled with dormant bodies. If the bodies wore scraps of skin, it would tell me something.
Cautiously, I walked to the middle of town. Like Oar's home, this place had an open square, a square featuring four fountains, not two. The colored debris was more abundant here: mostly on the ground, but with scraps of colored plastic thrown over the fountains and festooned clumsily above doorways.