“The tail and some of the midsection cavities are flooded,” Do-ane told him.
Those were drawn with blue ink.
He asked, “Is the tail the deepest part?”
She nodded.
“And the mouth?”
“Buried inside a fossil island,” she reported.
“Choked while eating its lunch?” He meant it as a joke, forcing himself to laugh.
But Do-ane just shook her head. “We don’t know what it ate in life,” she reported. “But this organism, this machine… whatever it was… it probably required more energy than you could ever pull out of wood pulp and stolen sap.”
Jopale closed the book and turned it in his hands, examining the binding. But there was nothing to read except a cryptic “Notes” followed by a date from several years earlier.
“What I am,” Do-ane began.
He reopened the book and unfolded the diagram again. “What are you?”
“In the sciences, I have no specialty.” She smiled, proud to say it. “I belong to a special project. A confidential research project, you see. My colleagues and I are trained in every discipline. The hope is… was… that we could piece together what this thing might be…”
“It’s metal,” Jopale guessed.
“Within its body,” she said, “we have found more iron and copper and zinc than all of the peoples of the world have gathered. Plus there’s gold and silver, and elements too unusual to have common names.”
Jopale wanted to turn through the pages, but he still couldn’t make sense of this one.
“Yet the body is composed mostly other substances,” she continued. “Plastics and compounds that look plastic. Ceramic materials. And lining the mouth and what seems to be the power plant… well, there are things too strong to cut samples from, which means we can’t even test them in any useful fashion…”
“And what are you?” he asked again.
“One member of a large, secret team trying to make sense of this.” She showed him a grim smile, adding, “I’m just a novice still. Some of us have worked forty years on this project.”
“And have you learned anything?”
A hopeful expression passed across her face. But again, they had reached a juncture where Do-ane didn’t want to say anything more. Jopale sensed that she’d already told him too much. That they were pushing into codes and laws that had to be obeyed, even when Catastrophe walked across their world.
Again, their worm was slowing.
Passengers noticed, and in a moment, they grew uneasy.
“Where?” Jopale asked.
Do-ane ran a finger over the giant mouth. “What are you asking?”
“Its origin,” he said. “Do you know that much?”
“Guess,” she whispered.
He could see only two possibilities. “It comes from the world’s center,” he offered. “There are metals down there. I remember that much from school. Deep inside the world, the temperatures and chemistries are too strange for us to even imagine.”
“What’s the second possibility?”
He remembered what she had said earlier. “Our Ocean,” she mentioned, as if there could be more than one. Then he pointed at the sky.
“In my little profession,” she sighed, “those are the two islands of opinion. I’m one of the other-world people, and I believe that this object is a kind of ship meant to cross from star to star.”
Jopale closed the book and pushed it back to her.
By then, their worm had pulled to a stop, and the passengers were looking at each other, plainly wondering what was happening. But Master Brace was absent, probably still listening to the radiophone. Which was why Jopale took it upon himself to stand and say to the others, “This is Kings Crossing.”
Rit pulled the map to his face, asking, “Why here?”
Like any good caretaker, Jopale managed to smile. But he couldn’t maintain the lie past that point. Shaking his head and looking at the warm damp floor, he reminded everyone, “We’re alive still.” And then he started marching toward the still-closed sphincter.
Fire
The night air was cool and dry, and it blew softly toward the east—a breeze at this moment, but gaining strength and urgency with the passage of time. Years ago, a tidy little city had grown up on this ridge, but then the sun vanished, and the city had died. Homes and shops quickly became piles of anonymous rubble. But the worm station must have survived for more years. The facility was only recently stripped of its metal, but otherwise it had been left intact. Only a few saprophytic weeds were rooted in the softest planks, while the damp faces of the main building were painted with a rough fungus. Regardless of color, every surface glowed with a steady red light. Jopale read “Kings Crossing” on the greeting arch, painted in a flowing script that was popular back when he was a child. Behind him, the other passengers were slowly stepping onto the platform, talking in breathless whispers. He didn’t hear their words so much as he listened to the terror in their voices, and Jopale did nothing for the moment but stare at the planks beneath his feet and at his own trembling hands. Then when he felt ready—when no other choice seemed left for him—he forced himself to breathe and turn around, staring wide-eyed at the burning world.
Jopale once toured a factory where precious iron was melted inside furnaces built from equally precious ceramic bricks. He remembered watching the red-hot liquid being poured into thin syrupy ribbons that were quickly attacked by the artisans in charge. He decided that this wildfire possessed the same fierce, unworldly glow. It was crimson and brilliant enough to make eyes tear up, and it seemed as if some wickedly powerful artist, inspired by his malevolent urges, must have pulled molten metal across the entire eastern horizon.
Every passenger had left the confines of the worm. Most of the caretakers were busy breaking into a nearby warehouse, presumably under orders to claim any useful supplies. “How far away is that?” a young fellow asked. Jopale couldn’t gauge distances, but others gladly threw out numbers. Optimists claimed the fire was just a few kilometers behind them, and it was really quite small. While Rit admitted that the flames were enormous, but trying to be positive, he thought they might be as far away as World’s Edge.
“Oh, it’s closer than that,” the old caretaker called out. “As we stand here, Left-of-Left is being incinerated.”
With a haughty tone, Rit asked, “And you know that how?”
Swollen eyes studied the horizon. Master Brace had been crying again. But he had dried his face before joining the others, and he managed to keep his voice steady and clear. “I was listening to broadcasts, where I could find them. From spotters near the fire lines, mostly.”
Every face was sorry and scared.
“That quake we felt? As we were crawling out of World’s Edge?” Brace shook his head, telling them, “That was an old seam south and east of the city. It split wide, along a hundred kilometer line. I didn’t know this till now… but so much gas came from that rupture, emergency crews didn’t have time to dress. They were killed, mostly. And the methane kept bubbling out. For a full cycle, it was mixing with the air. Then something… a person, or maybe lightning from a thunderstorm… made the spark that set the whole damn mess on fire.”
“What happened to the city?” Jopale asked.
Brace glanced at him for a moment, then stared at the planks. “I talked to a spotter. She’s riding her balloon east of World’s Edge. The city’s gone now, she says. Including the ground it was sitting on. From where she is, she sees open water where millions of people should be…”
“Open water?” Rit asked. “Does that mean the fire is going out?”
Brace hesitated.
Do-ane said, “No.” The woman looked tiny and exceptionally young, her boots back on her feet but still needing to be buttoned. Clearing her throat, she explained, “If too much methane saturates the atmosphere, and the local oxygen is exhausted or pushed aside… there can’t be any fire…”