Chapter 13 - Second Choice

The Man took aim at the twisting vines of Dorren. He exhaled, and squeezed. The spear surged from the barrel. The lastiwire line trailed behind.

The spear punctured the tangle. The Man heard a broken-off screech, and a dark shape dropped from the vines. The shape fell fast, the lastiwire line went suddenly taut. The Man was jerked toward the open door of the shell. He held his footing, barely; a rope linked his waist to a hook in the corridor wall.

The Man felt the coilspear pull him by its shoulder strap. He grabbed the wire crank and started reeling. The resistance on the reel was strong; the weight at the end, heavy. Or perhaps it only felt so in The Man’s state, starved and frail. His arms were thinner and feebler now.

The Man ignored the feeling. He turned the crank round and round. He brought the lastiwire in meter by meter. After a moment of hard reeling, he felt resistance as the bundle on the end caught on the door lip. He stepped forward, holding the coilspear carefully out from the lip. He raised the bundle over and set it on the floor. He shut the door, threw home the sealing bar, and examined his catch.

It was a Phaen. Smaller than The Man’s old companion, this Phaen had a grey coat of feathers, with a black stripe running down its crest. It looked like about seventy kilograms, probably twenty-five of harvestable meat. The Man’s spear had taken it right through the breast, punching out under its wing.

The Man fell on the catch like a mongoose on a snake. He jerked the spear loose, hefted the carcass, and was already plucking feathers and tossing them to the floor as he hauled it down the corridor. The Man didn’t pause to crank electric light from one of his lanterns. He moved by feeling.

He passed under the furnace room curtain and tossed the kill toward the butchering table. He walked blindly until he felt the furnace’s heat. He threw the door open; light spilled over the floor and walls.

The Man returned to the butchery table. He shed his coat and grabbed the sharp knife with the wooden handle.

By the fire’s light and crackle, The Man dressed his kill. He pulled feathers out in jerky fistfuls and tossed them to the larger pile. He cleared the softer feathers of its breast first. Before moving on to the rest, he took his knife and slit down its front. He reached in and pulled its innards loose. Crimson painted his hands, hiding the sores and burn scars.

As The Man drew out the organs, one long second stomach still undulated.

The Man had hoped for this. He made a careful slit in the stomach tissue. He reached inside. When he pulled his hand back, the fingers crawled with wriggling birdworms.

The Man wasted no time disinfecting the worms - they rarely carried disease. He brought the whole wriggling handful to his lips. The worms crawled over his beard and sallow face, and wriggling under his nostrils.

The Man bit down and chewed. He tore ravenously at the slimy, stringy, bloody mass. The flavor - like a mix of raw salmon and seaweed — beat anything The Man had ever known.

---

The Man shoved the pipe deeper into the gap between the shell wall and the curved piece of spare metal. He pressed hard, wriggling back and forth until the pipe dug into the pulpy sealant. When it felt firm, he jerked back. There was a sharp sound; the frozen sealant cracked.

The metal held its place. The Man dug deeper and yanked again.

This time the crack was like tearing cloth. The metal piece pulled away from the wall and clanged on the spinning room floor.

As the metal fell it revealed the old broken window. Cold Wind blew into the shell from the frozen slopes of the Engi. The Man saw curling Aedra growing down in sparse roots across the slope. The night stars lit a distant, pale fog.

The Man had peeled the patch loose just in time, it seemed. Dropping the pipe, he hunched over, clutched his stomach, stumbled forward while pulling the leather face mask aside, and vomited through the opening.

A sense of wanting to pass out came over The Man. He fought it. The Man refused to wake again in a frozen shell, his fire having died, the window bared open. The Man pushed back the nausea. He knew his weakness came from his stomach’s unfamiliarity with food. He could deal with that later.

The Man pulled back into the room and retied his mask. He ignored the smell of bile. He reached into the leather bundle at his side and drew a new tool - a wedging bar. With it, he batted at the remaining fragments of broken glass still forming a jagged edge on the frame. He took the wedge-end of the bar and shoved it into the seam between the metal frame and the main shell wall. The Man then took an A3 wrench from the same bundle, and set to work on the frame bolts.

Each time The Man bent himself at the wrench around a new bolt, his intestines contorted. Each time the floor rocked beneath his feet, his guts sloshed. The Man felt as if the birdworms were still live and wriggling inside him. And, no matter how illogical, the continuous churning in his stomach kept that thought alive.

The Man’s hands were numb by the time the broken pane hit the floor with a bang. The Man gasped and retched inside his mask. His limbs shook. He turned back to the curtain and stumbled over the spinner rail. He hit the floor hard on his stomach.

Oil drowned his eyes. The pain and cold seemed to go far away. Not that he no longer felt them, but as if his consciousness were only hearing the body’s complaints, and not feeling them itself.

The Man willed himself toward that pain and cold. He swam through the blackness closing over his eyes. He held onto the thought of dying now; dying after having escaped the glaciers; beaten by a broken window and a bad stomach.

The Man rose. He reached through the curtain, found the new window by numb touch, and brought it into the room. He struck the spinner rail with his shin and nearly fell again. The Man welcomed the pain this time. It was sharp and brought him fully back to the present. He brought the window over the rail and set it against the wall. He felt for one of the bolts in his pocket - he had trouble finding both the pocket and the bolts with the numb fingers, but eventually he pulled one loose. He picked up the A3 wrench.

The Man lifted the window and set it into place against the shell wall. The effort of bending and lifting brought another wave of bile, which The Man swallowed. He held himself together by concentrating on one object at a time. First, he shifted the window into position. Then, he felt for the first bolt hole. He couldn’t feel the hole well enough, so he guided his finger with his eyes. The night sky lit his work. When The Man found the hole, he shoved the bolt into place. He shifted the window - metal scraping on metal - until the bolt sank into the wall. He took his A3 wrench and jerked it in clockwise circles. When the bolt resisted, he took the wrench in both hands and pulled harder, until the nausea became too much or his hands slipped from the handle.

Then The Man started on the next bolt.

Through intense focus on small steps, The Man secured the window into place by four of its eight bolts. That would serve as a temporary hold. For now, The Man retreated. He focused on moving slowly and carefully over the spinner rail. He focused on the curtain, and stepped through the rustling plastic into the longer, darker corridor.

The Man focused on the ambient sounds in this corridor. He heard the long-missed, regular moaning of the Wind. He heard the infrequent creaking that Wind shook from the shell. He heard the steady electric thrumming from the heart chamber, but a thrumming of a higher pitch. The thrum told him the brakes were in place. The shell would remain in this habited patch of Engi.

The Man heard warm air pushing along the furnace vents.

The warm air sound was what The Man had listened for. He concentrated on it, and on its source. He remembered loading the fire, and that it was full, and that it would not smolder out for hours.

It had taken The Man long to remember the fire, going step by step as he was. But it had been necessary. The Man knew the shell was safe. He’d established a livable, if not comfortable, state.

With this knowledge, The Man untensed. Immediately, the nausea and pain struck him an overwhelming blow. He leaned against the spinning room threshold. He peeled back the leather mask and stuck his head through the curtain. He vomited, not much this time, on the spinning room floor. He pulled his head back into the corridor.

The Man sank against the curved corridor wall and allowed himself to faint.

---

Eighth night within Engi after return from glaciers. Little distance traveled; tracks rolled short time 1/night to prevent ice buildup. Fever and sickness prevented regular spinning. Nights spent in recovery. Hunted at shell door and gathered fuel between sickness.

Tonight, fever and sickness abated. Went to shell roof; switched tracks to Leegesward striation at previously encountered fork. Remained in view of split; gathered additional fuel in fair weather and Engi. Tomorrow at stars’ waning, will resume spinning and travel.

• ‘One striation branch - previously explored’

• ‘No artifacts, Human or Golem’

• ‘19 day burnables; 25kg Phaen flesh (lean), 20kg Staegon flesh (lean), 8kg Staegon flesh (fat), 2 jars live birdworms, 8 mineral tablets’

• ‘0hr spin; 2km approx dist’

The Man leaned back from the logbook. He looked up, instinctively, at the rope pile. The Phaen was missing, but everything else seemed almost usual. The plastic curtains swayed in time with the rocking shell as always. The faint stars, in their smallest shape just before the day, shone upon The Man’s possessions as they had every night before the glaciers.

The Man reached to the corner of his desk. He took the handle of his tea mug and brought it to his lips. The tea was made from bone broth and a gnarled root The Man had newly discovered. He hadn’t named the root. His drink had, as always, gone cold. He sipped anyway.

One of the few tasks The Man had accomplished in the previous nights - when he wasn’t bound to his hammock - was to put his stuff in order. The desk was tidy. The inkpot sat on the rubber mat in the corner. Books lay in a neat stack on the opposite corner, with their spines lined perfectly flat atop each other.

Elsewhere in the room a wooden shelf was missing. The Man had used it for fuel. He’d used one of the bolts of pink silk to sew new spinning clothes. The Man had even cleaned the walls from their accumulated must and grime, and laid down a new insulation of feathers.

The radio, also, played as it once had. The voices of the hosts came clear through the speaker. The Man listened as he sipped his cold drink.

Ma: “What can I say? Chairos words - still lisping and manipulative - come to serve the warriors and scullers. Leeges stands firmly on the Nakadanan front.”

Nikon: “Let’s not put credit on the king who only gives the orders.”

Ma: “No, agreed.”

Dano: “I do think it’s important to recognize the eastern campaign’s necessity.”

Ma: “Necessity?”

Dano: “Call it providence then. In the outcome. I’m not agreeing with the Kings’ grounds for the whole war. The effort as a whole seems wasted. But I do think freeing Nakadana’s eastern patches… breaching the black stone fortresses of those patches… I’d say that was right.”

Ma: “None of us want Leeges soldiers left rotting in some squalid, moldy dungeon.”

Dano: “I’m told our warriors’ texel uniforms had to be peeled off their skin. From the mold and sewage.”

Ma: “This conflict has fortunate strokes. And men of Leeges won recognition in their spearplay, that’s true also.”

Nikon: “One sure fallout of the eastern victory: Leeges’ warriors get to spend Ring Day on Leeges ships.”

Ma: “How do they celebrate on a frigate at sea?”

Nikon: “What do you mean? Fealty oaths, same as usual, just on a deck. The captain or lieutenant or specialist is right there with them.”

Ma: “But what kind of ring tokens does a seaman get?”

Nikon: “Maybe it’s a new leotard.”

laughter Dano: “Word on the wire is that Higo’s Ghotleich launches his first fleet on Ring Day. His entry to the conflict.”

Ma: “Not much of a token. ‘Soldiers Mine; today for a gift, I ship thee off to war,’ Why’s Higo pitting their toe in this conflict?”

Dano: “Maybe the Ghotleich is lonely.”

The Man stood, walked over to the radio dish wheel, and turned it. Quiet static filled the room. The static seemed a better accompaniment to the sky. To The Man, the static became the sound of the Engi.

He turned back to the window. His legs wobbly slightly, but that was little concern. He could feel his steadily climbing health. His stomach no longer roiled at each forced sip of water or bone tea. His cheeks, though hidden under a beard, felt fuller, and the sores on his hands had finally scabbed. He’d even ventured outside this evening and switched tracks.

The Man stared past the spiderweb-fractured window. That part of the study scene too, had changed. Beyond it he saw the striation fork. Both branches ran north to the glaciers.

When The Man had switched tracks he’d been unable to turn his shell around. The two north-running striations shared an acute angle. The shell was forced to face the same direction it had when The Man entered the Engi. On the return to Leeges, The Man would have to travel backward. His spinner view, and this view from the study window, would watch the sky recede behind him; watch the striation slide out from his shell instead of into it. The Man would watch the Engi slide away into the distance.

“It is lonely…”

The Man’s voice trailed off. He glanced to the side. His eyes found the painting sitting next to the desk. The Man had yet to mount it above the spinner casing. She Crawled in Stars with Elder Bugs would be the only things for The Man to spin over after the Engi was gone. The Man’s eyes flicked onto the pale child’s face. He followed the massing trunk of elder bugs to their conglomerative roots. He studied the painted glass sky.

The Man had looked upon the painting innumerable times. He’d counted the number of bugs and the number of stars. He’d compared the lines of the Elder Bug roots to the lines of black hair framing the child’s face. He’d stared long into the matching onyx eyes of that face, and wondered what made the child sad.

Yet for all his staring, The Man had never looked for deeper meaning. The men of the stellar church had. The church stellars sermonized on the Elder Bugs. The stellars tried placing the bugs in the pantheon, and what these crawling sky-gods had meant to the ancient golems.

But, those stellars and their sermons never interested The Man. He looked for no new meaning now. To The Man, She Crawled in Stars with Elder Bugs was a thing to look upon; but whatever meaning it held, The Man had long ago made up his mind on. He needed no fresh perspective.

The Man glanced back to the striation fork. It was a river, splitting the Engi landscape. He might never look upon it again after today. He stared long at the two routes, both running north, one into the land of glacial stillness from which he’d just escaped, the other traveling in a similar direction, but to unexplored sky.

The Man looked down at the open page of his notebook. The writing seemed somehow different from older entries. The handwriting seemed unsteady, which was understandable. But, even the unsteady lines seemed brighter against the parchment; as though the ink had changed since the glaciers, and taken on new life. The line, “19 day burnables; 25kg Phaen flesh (lean), 20kg Staegon flesh (lean), 8kg Staegon flesh (fat), 2 jars live birdworms, 8 mineral tablets,” stood out to The Man. It seemed a gross surplus after his ordeal.

Another line stuck out: “No artifacts, Human or Golem,”. The Man looked between it, and the two tracks beyond the cracked window.

The Man threw back the rest of his cold bone tea. He set the mug on the rubber mat and turned to retrieve his feather-lined outwear.

The Man had work to do before the stars woke.

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