The Empire of Gut and Bone Page 3

  The captain shot a murderous look at Brian. He spat off the edge of his sleigh. “Fun,” he said. “Sure, kid.”

  “We need to see them. Do you know about the Thusser?”

  “I’ve heard of them. Ancient history. Not around since I was made. Look, the Emperor’s at New Norumbega. It’s a different system. Circulation. It’s in the Dry Heart. Huge palace up there. Turrets and buttresses and battlements and sentinels all over the place. You have to approach it through the flux.” The captain surveyed their three faces. “He going to pay for me to deliver you?”

  “He’ll be grateful,” Brian said. “We’re bringing him important news of the old Norumbega. Back through the portal. The one they came from.”

  “You from there, too, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Dark, now,” said Gregory. “But it must have been really cool. Back in the day.”

  “Snazzy,” said the captain without much interest.

  “So can you take us to the Emperor?” Kalgrash asked. “To New Norumbega?”

  “Why are you along for this ride?” the captain asked Kalgrash. “This side of the portal, automatons, we wind each other.”

  “We’re all together,” Kalgrash explained, pointing to his friends.

  “Mechanicals shouldn’t get tied up with breathers. Eventually, they’ll just tell you to start lifting stuff.” He jerked his thumb at Brian and Gregory. “Look at these two. Sick because they haven’t put other breathers into a hole in their face for a couple of days. They haven’t cut off something’s hind legs, shredded it with little metal claws, and stowed it under their nose.” He shook his head. “What kind of way to live is that?”

  Gregory said, “You’ve clearly never been to a Chinese buffet.”

  “Kid, you’re in the belly of the beast.” The host gestured to the sky, the plain, the dim walls they could make out in the gray half-light. “Of course, we don’t know it’s a belly, and we don’t know it’s a beast. I’m no theologian. But — ”

  “You mean,” said Gregory, “we’re inside something? In its stomach?”

  “Stomach, lung — no one really knows. We just use names. Who knows how the thing works? Whether it breathes or eats? No one. It fills everywhere. It’s everything. The Great Body. It’s huge. We just know stuff washes past. Or used to. Not so much any more. A few hundred years ago, there was more stuff. More fluid. Now it’s dead or between meals. You have names?”

  They introduced themselves. Their host was called Dantsig. They asked him what he did. He said he rode around, picking up waifs in ruins.

  “Ha ha,” said Gregory.

  “I’m a trapper. A hunter. And I scavenge when I need to.”

  “So where are we going now?” asked Brian.

  “I told you. Delge. It’s a trading post near a valve. We’ll figure out what to do with you there.” He frowned and scratched at his goatee. “Have to check in with the Mannequin Resistance. See what they want done with you.”

  Brian didn’t like the sound of this. Gregory asked about the Mannequin Resistance.

  Dantsig explained, “Mechanicals. All of us. Who absented ourselves from the marble and alabaster halls of the overlords. The breathers. The Norumbegans. We got tired of being told we weren’t real, we’d never know love or the beauty of a baby’s laugh or a puppy with a single tear in its eye. We got sick of it. Lift this. Carry that. Go dig in the mines. So we all left.” He looked quickly at them. “Respectfully. You know, bowing. Walking backward.” He pointed at the kids. “You always have to back out of the Imperial Presence. Got it? Protocol. Got it?”

  “We got it,” said Gregory.

  “I don’t know how they bring up kids these days,” said Dantsig, shaking his head. “In a stable or a shooting arcade or something. No one has any manners.”

  “You’re just jealous because we start little and stupid, but then grow,” said Gregory.

  Dantsig looked at him with honest dislike. “Wow,” he said. “Wow. You really will get along with the Emperor.” With a sense of menace in his voice, he said, “I hope you get a chance to meet him.”

  Gregory and Brian didn’t know what he meant by this. They fell silent as they slid through the waste.

  Hours passed. The two boys didn’t know what to do with themselves. The cabin of the sleigh was cozy, once the stove was lit, but Gregory and Brian were incredibly hungry, and it didn’t sound like there would be any food at a trading post for clockwork people. So they shifted uncomfortably from side to side, holding their stomachs.

  Eventually, Dantsig decided to try to catch them something to eat. He sat with a harpoon across his knees, watching for movement on the horizon. In another hour or so the sleigh careened back and forth a few times, and he clambered down the steps with a repulsive, leggy thing with lots of cords and breathing holes.

  “Fry it up?” he asked.

  They looked at it. It dangled from his mitt.

  Brian was the first to speak. “It was really nice of you … to … it was just really nice,” he said. “But I’m not sure we should eat something from this world without knowing what’s in it.”

  “There could be poisonous glands,” said Gregory.

  Still, Kalgrash said he’d give cooking it a try.

  Forty minutes later, Gregory and Brian ate triangular pieces of it. They kept their eyes closed. As they chewed, Kalgrash recited lists for them: “Fried chicken. New York strip sirloin. Potatoes au gratin. Asparagus with hollandaise sauce. Mac and cheese. Fried shrimp. Hush puppies.”

  “No puppies,” said Gregory, mouth full. “Ban on puppies.”

  After they’d eaten, they could fall asleep.

  Outside, the monotonous landscape went on and the twilight went on without change. Half-light. The slick, glistening plain. The dredge of the sleigh through sludge. Its clammy wake.

  When the boys woke up, the light was just the same. The veins still glowed faintly in the dome of the gut.

  Brian asked Dantsig, “What makes the veins glow?”

  He half shrugged. “Lux effluvium. The gook in the veins. I don’t know why. It gets real bright if you run electricity through it.”

  Brian asked, “Is it the blood?”

  Dantsig seemed uninterested in the question. “We call things blood and stomachs and hearts, but no one knows what all the equipment does. There’s a whole bunch of hearts, a cluster of them, but they aren’t shaped like your heart or a Norumbegan’s. It’s just, they look like they pump fluids. So people call them hearts. And there’s a bunch of organs filled with a different goo, and we call them stomachs, and there are other places we call lungs — fifteen or so, scattered around, we’ve found so far — but we don’t know much except that they get bigger and smaller. I’m telling you, no one knows. No one understands. It’s just the Great Body.”

  “What’s outside the Great Body?” Gregory asked, and Kalgrash added, “Has anyone ever gone out the mouth? Through the teeth and over the gums? Et cetera?”

  “Some of the rich Norumbegans — Varsity men — they fund expeditions sometimes to find mouths. Try to see if there’s anything out there. They head off into the wild gray yonder. Lots of equipment. Big fanfare.” He smiled. “None of them ever come back.”

  Gregory asked joyfully, “What about the butt? Anyone ever gone out the butt?”

  “They’ve been saving that for a special boy like you.”

  Brian did not like any of this much. Anxious, he watched the dull miles pass.

  In a while, they came to Delge. The first thing they could see through the gloom of Three-Gut was the derricks — tall, spindly arms and gantries reaching up out of the goo.

  “Mining,” said Dantsig. “They extract ore from the blood fluid. Valves go through to the capillaries.”

  The sleigh passed through heaps of slag. There were huts strung with electrical wiring.

  They didn’t see any people.

  Then came houses — shacks on stilts. Th
ey were high above the Fields of Chyme.

  Something was wrong. Several were burnt. They looked desolate. Piers stuck up out of the marsh, their tips blackened. No one crawled up and down their ladders.

  Huts had been pulled down and lay on their sides. The windows of one were smashed, and some red polka-dot curtains trailed out into the sludge.

  Doors were off their hinges.

  Dantsig was muttering in his own language. He slowed down the beasts. He stood up and surveyed the village’s wreckage.

  On an island, surrounded by docks, there had stood a little town. There was not much of it left. Houses were in ashes. The embers of the commissary still glowed. A few small flames flickered in the ruins. Goods — barrels, stoves, some metal sinks — could be made out, soot-blackened, beneath the fallen beams.

  Around the town there were large, round holding tanks. Holes had been blown in the metal. They were empty.

  Dantsig went below and brought up a rifle. He looked grimly from side to side.

  “I’m going to look around,” he told them. He said to Kalgrash, “Get your ax. Stand guard. Breathers: below.” He pointed down the hatch.

  Brian and Gregory looked at each other. They didn’t want to go below. They wanted to keep an eye out, too. It just felt safer.

  Dantsig dropped a gangplank and crept ashore. He told them to pull the gangplank up. They did. He motioned them to go below. They stayed put and watched him creep behind a building.

  They sat on either side of Kalgrash, staring at the little huts on little islands. There were bridges and steep roofs and torn nets hanging between telegraph poles. Punctured tanks stood on high pedestals like statues of some robot god.

  “I do not like this. Bad, bad, bad,” said Kalgrash. The gloom seemed particularly dense. Brian wondered how much was darkness and how much was smoke.

  Off in the ruins, where Dantsig had stalked off, there was a cry.

  “What was that?” hissed Gregory.

  Neither of the other two bothered to answer him.

  Crouched forward, they waited. Occasionally, they heard something crack or splash. The fire popped. The air smelled of burning diesel.

  Forms shifted in the dark … Kalgrash rattled, stepping into battle position.

  “Hey!” he said. “Who goes there?”

  Dantsig appeared in the midst of the smoke. “Me, Kalgrash. And one of the miners.” Beside him was a man bent with trouble, dressed in a padded, grease-smeared miner’s suit.

  Gregory and Brian lowered the gangplank and the two men came aboard.

  “He’s the only one they didn’t get,” said Dantsig. “We’re taking him with us.”

  “What happened?” Gregory asked.

  Dantsig didn’t bother to answer him. He spoke to the miner in their language and sent the man below. Then he goaded the beasts into motion. The sleigh pulled away from the dock. Dantsig still kept his eye on the ruins they passed. He still kept the rifle by his side.

  They were heading back out into the plains.

  Gregory asked, “Where are you taking us?”

  “Pflundt.”

  “Did you just hawk a loogie?”

  No one laughed. Kalgrash rolled his eyes.

  “Who destroyed the town?” Brian asked.

  “The Norumbegans. They wanted samples for study. They came in and captured everyone. Took them away.”

  Brian asked what he meant by “samples for study.”

  Dantsig said, “They’ve forgotten how to do a lot of things. A lot of them died when they got here, to the Great Body. And they’re lazy. I mean, they have other interests. For generations, mannequins had made mannequins. Suddenly, we wouldn’t make any more for them. They don’t recall how to put us together. They don’t have any more of us. We left. For their own good.” His jaw twitched to the side and locked, tic. He closed his eyes and fiddled with his goatee. “Their own good.” He opened his eyes and mashed his mouth around to loosen his jaw. Then he said, “Last few years, they’ve been raiding. When they can be bothered. When there isn’t a concert or a whiskey tasting. They come down here and destroy a village. Hunt the people who escape as they struggle away through the muck. Chase them across the plains. It’s a sport. Tickles their lordships’ fancy.” He surveyed the horizon from side to side. He said, “This is the worst raid I’ve ever seen. They came in, he said — came in and just grabbed everyone. No one could stand up against them. When they order you … it’s …” He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter that they’ve forgotten so much. They’re descended from gods. They’re like nothing else. But they can be —” He stopped speaking, as if he couldn’t say more. Finally, he concluded, “The old guff thinks they disassembled everyone before they took them away.”

  “Disassembled?” Kalgrash said, fear in his voice.

  Dantsig didn’t answer, but a few minutes later, he nodded and pointed.

  They saw bodies mired in the goo. Jumpsuits and calico dresses. Hands coming out of sleeves. Feet with boots.

  “The memory is in the head,” said Dantsig. “All the delicate stuff.” He tapped his own temple. “That’s what they can’t get anymore. Without our craftsmen. They can’t design thought. They have mechanicals now — they call them drones — just machines. No thought. No emotion. Just simple commands. Standard format. Hardly any grammar.”

  He looked at the dark horizon. “They want to build more of us. They want servants who they can hurt.” And then he blinked slowly, and finished by saying, “May they have long lives, of course, and may the veins of heaven shine upon all their endeavors.”

  And Brian realized that Dantsig couldn’t say much that was bad about the Norumbegans. Because he was built to serve them.

  Brian was horrified. He couldn’t stand the thought of all those mannequins being disassembled by their former masters. Maybe having to watch, standing in lines, while others before them were taken apart.

  “They can be put back together again, can’t they?” asked Kalgrash. “I mean, someone has taken off my head before and put it on a different body, and I feel like a jillion bucks.”

  “Sure, that’s beautiful, troll. But you need the heads.”

  Brian suggested, “If you take us to see the Emperor, maybe we could petition for the heads to be returned. So the people can be reconstructed.”

  Dantsig looked at him evenly. “Sure, squirt. That’s just what the Norumbegans will do.” He glared off into the belly’s dark evening.

  “That’s great!” said Brian. “We have to see him about alerting the Rules Keepers that the Thusser are cheating in the Game. So if you could take us to him, that would be …” He realized a second too late that Dantsig was being sarcastic, and he felt stupid. Like he was chirping in the dark. Like he was an idiot, whiffling away. He fell silent.

  As soon as possible, Brian, Gregory, and Kalgrash went below.

  The miner was curled on the floor. He did not look well. He gripped his own arms and stared into the tangle of mechanical junk.

  “We need to do something for him,” said Brian. He asked the man if he was okay. If he needed anything. If there was anything they could do. The old man didn’t speak English — just the language of Norumbega. He shook his head and laid it back on the floor.

  Gregory sat with his arms crossed on the bunk. He looked irritably at the stove.

  “That was awful,” said Brian softly. “I can’t believe they just came and took the whole town.”

  Gregory shrugged. “They’re the Norumbegans’ automatons. So the Norumbegans can do whatever they want with them. And plus, the townspeople can be put back together again. Dantsig said so. What’s the big deal?”

  Brian glanced quickly at Kalgrash.

  The troll was clearly angry.

  Gently, but with incredible rage, Kalgrash said, “I could take you apart. And see how well you go back together.”

  Gregory did not laugh. He didn’t make a joke. They glared at each other. There was anger in their eyes.

  And the sl
eigh carried on, dragged over the slime, pulled through the stomach’s dim night toward the fortress of Pflundt.

  FIVE

  A day later, they reached Pflundt. The terrain rose into an infinite gray slope, rough and cut with channels. Coursing down the cliff was a fortress like a floe of ice, a waterfall of wax. It might have been built, or features might have been carved into some ancient deposit there — a weird citadel of blobby towers cut with windows, deep hollow gateways, and cannons mounted on frozen sluices.

  The sleigh sped through the great arch and into a vast stable, a cavern soaring with Gothic pillars made of something that looked like it once had been molten, now gray, translucent, and lit with crystal lanterns. There were wooden stalls for the beasts of burden. Dantsig pulled up beside a stall and dismounted. He unharnessed his steeds so he could wash them down and curry their pimpled flesh. The stall was filled with gravel. Dantsig’s beasts hunkered down in it and covered themselves, delighted.

  When he was done, Dantsig led the boys and the troll into the fortress and its stone town. Hungry and thirsty, they were overwhelmed with Pflundt’s activity. Men in black frock coats rode along the rutted avenues on bicycles with baskets of old gears and cranks. Peddlers offered robotic hands, slim and beautifully carved, inlaid with brass and mother-of-pearl. One old woman at a bench sold only springs. An optician sold eyes.

  The keyhole could not be seen on all of them, but on many it was planted clearly between their shoulders. Some of the people were simplified, their faces a series of smooth planes with black, crystalline eyeballs. Some were built like harlequins, some like knights, and some had extra arms for heavy lifting. Most were dressed soberly in dark clothes of bygone eras.

  Gregory and Brian were dazzled by all the automatons climbing up staircases and bustling through courtyards. Dantsig smiled. “Pflundt,” he said. “Carved right out of the living phlegm.”

  He led them to the headquarters of the Mannequin Resistance, which was in a tall, gray house that towered above the metallic bustle of the streets and alleys. He told the boys and Kalgrash to sit, and headed off to speak to some official. They waited for a while on a wooden bench.