Asimov's Science Fiction: July 2013 (6 page)

Apparently Lifter was accepting no new patrons tonight. Full complement of overstuffed, duck-and-plum-sated victims? No spare room in the giant chrome lobster trap? Cargo hold full! And
cargo
implied a destination, mind you, a place to deliver the goods. Departure imminent, full speed to the abattoir!

Cammy wasn't about to let her Bengt be salted away. She had to add herself to the haul and rescue her temptation-trapped mate. But even now she didn't dare pound on the truck's side. She feared—who knew what from these creeps? Savage automated tridents and weighted Roman gladiator nets?

She scampered to the shiny truck cab at the front of the trailer. It was a Freightliner Century model, a thousand like it seen every day on freeways, anonymous, no painted name or logo, albeit this one had oddly sensual curves. It was a luxe sleeper model, featuring a berth behind the driver's seat. Hardly daring to hope, Cammy tested the passenger-side door.

Unlocked! In she tumbled, panting from fear more than from exertion. She scrambled through the gap between the seats to the blanket-heaped mattress in back, and drew the stained cloth curtain to shut her off from sight. The curtain's ringlets rattling seemed terribly loud. But no voice cried out.

This back part of the cabin smelled funky, but not with a pong she recognized. Zombie sweat, skin from odd hides, farts of strange esters. Cammy captured some video.

And now her hand found a heavy wrench on the f loor. She clutched it greedily, like a cannibal with a thighbone full of juicy marrow. Time seemed to stretch like a wad of Silly Putty bearing the impression of a photo, distorting the portrait of reality as it lengthened.

She heard a wild hubbub from within the Lifter trailer behind her. Footsteps hitting the pavement, two or three people escaping. Little Barb's voice yelling after them, "You'll be back, you greedy skinny sons of bitch!" Was Bengt running with them?

No time to check, for now she heard the truck cab's door opening, with huff ing fat man sounds. Churchill Breakspeare? Tuneful humming—of "You Can Get It If You Really Want."

Churchill's hands beat out breaks on the truck's dash, the motor roared to life, and they moved off, Barb calling a farewell from the sidewalk.

They rolled slowly through city streets, no direction evident to cloistered Cammy. Then faster, evidently picking up the interstate. Half an hour's steady travel thereafter, before pulling off. Cammy tried to imagine a circle of likely destinations surrounding the city, but came up uncertain, there being no known facility with the sign she was imagining:
Human Feedlot And Meatpacking Center.

Churchill Breakspeare exited the cab, still humming Marley's "Buffalo Soldier." Cammy waited a few seconds, then crept cautiously out. Inhabiting the musty bunk had left her feeling unclean. Through the truck cab's windows, she had a panoramic view of an abandoned airf ield, ringed by a chain link fence and lit by scattered security lights on tall stanchions. Now she knew where she was: a small regional airstrip, formerly used mostly by amateur pilots and an airfreight company or two. It had gone bust with the bad economy. Was Lifter going to f ly their human catch out of the country? Was Bengt really inside the trailer?

Cammy heard Churchill fussing with the truck's hitch, decoupling cables and such. If she exited to ground level, she'd surely be spotted. But if she could clamber above—

Cammy tucked the wrench into her waistband, slithered out the passenger side window, then up and onto the broad roof of the truck's cab. Flattened there, she spied on Churchill.

The heavyset entertainer had entirely freed the diner from its conveyance. He'd opened a hidden panel on the diner's side and was tapping various buttons in a rapid sequence. As he worked, he sang the Clash's "Armaggedon Time." No supper for some of us tonight.

On the f lat roof of the silver diner, growing like mushrooms after a rain, a host of rods and antennae sprang forth—orbs and dishes, vents and baffles, vanes and widgets. Cammy videoed them. The newly sprouted equipment began to buzz and hum. The diner itself began to quiver.

Blurry howls from within, like the sounds of damned souls, and—yes—she could hear poor Bengt among them.

All four of the diner's wheels lifted, slowly but perceptibly, off the airstrip's cracked tarmac!

Without any thought or consideration, Cammy got her feet under her and sprang across the narrow, bi-level gap and onto the diner roof, quickly f lattening herself there.

Churchill may or may not have heard her thump. But it was too late to do anything. The launch sequence was well underway. A glowing transparent nimbus snapped into being, enclosing the whole diner, and Cammy with it. Luckily it had formed a few inches above her head—failing to bisect her skull. Anxiously she put out her hand to feel the shining surface. It was a solid shell. Accelerating upward, the diner headed for the sky——and slowed to a stop an hour later, approaching a silvery spaceship the shape of a vast disk, nearly the size of a city. Not so far below, sweet Earth gleamed like a noctilucent sea creature—Cammy could almost feel Gaia breathing. She got out her phone and captured more video. How many signal bars did low-Earth-orbit offer? Five! But only to the Wiggleweb! For a moment she forgot her worries, losing herself in the craft of her camera work. But then a pang hit her as she remembered her quiet, idle evenings at home with Bengt. Her mission was to bring that life back.

A door opened in the side of the mothership, and the diner drifted in, drawn by a tractor beam. The door closed, air hissed in, and the glassy shell around the diner dissolved. Artif icial gravity reigned. Cammy slithered to the f loor, awaiting an opportunity.

The lock's inner door opened to reveal—giant ants? Three-eyed lizards? Flying jellyf ish? No, the ship was staffed by Cammy's fellow humans. Quislings, sell-outs, opportunistic traitors to their race. They were dressed in identical brown coveralls, the men and the women alike. And they wore those glittery f luffy cobbled-together
bricoleur
-type necklaces like Churchill and Barb. Like a death squad tricked out in aloha leis.

Cammy crouched beneath the trailer, clutching her wrench. And soon her moment
came. The workers had opened the back of the Lifter van, and were herding out the wobbly captives—Cammy heard Bengt's voice again, raised as if in a querulous question. But he couldn't properly form his words. Peering through beneath the underside of the diner, she recognized Bengt's beige French designer jeans, swollen like the conical legs of the Michelin man. She videoed the legs.

At this point her plan was simple—to club down the first worker who ventured near her, to put on the worker's coveralls, to stash the unconscious victim inside the van, and to pose as one of the staff. But this was not to be. A slim, reedy-voiced man came upon Cammy from behind and seized her arms in an iron grip. "Looky here! We got us a stowaway!" "Too thin for the meat line," said a stern, muscular woman, trotting over. "But we can't send her back. Lock her in a cell, Earl, and we'll decide later. Maybe just take her yubba vine and pitch the rest." The rangy woman peered into Cammy's face. Her eyes had a hard, fanatical glitter. "What was your angle, kiddo? Lose a guy to our catch?"

"No, no," said Cammy. "I, I don't know what happened. I was drunk, and I fell asleep on the top of your truck and—where are we? Is this a garage?"

"That's some weak shit," said reedy-voiced Earl. "Especially with you clutching a wrench to clobber us and all."

"I'm scared!" protested Cammy, and broke into sobs. "Please don't kill me. Maybe I could be one of you? I have nowhere else to go. I'm all alone, you see. No relatives, no friends."

"She's quick with the bullshit," said the tough woman. "I like that. But lock her up for now, Earl. I gotta get to work." "Okay, Nelda." Holding Cammy's arms in a painful twist grip, Earl marched her inside the ship. A hellish place, like a level of Dante's Inferno. The ship's domed interior was a great, misty space, like a dimly lit underground city, with the edges fading into the distance.

As she was dragged along, Cammy noticed workstations and clusters of mad activity, with pod-like cubicles here and there. In her time, schoolchildren no longer went on slaughterhouse tours, but she'd seen exposé videos of those bleak and bustling spaces—not unlike this one, with the worst parts off in the distance.

The processing of the latest Lifter load had already begun. To make it the more diabolical, the puffed-up victims were still alive, albeit mumbling and stunned.

The captives were lined up by an oversized operating table, and Nelda, the stringy woman, was leaning over it with a glowing knife. Monomolecular fractal blade. Zen carver with the subtle stiletto. Vorpal!

One by one, the erstwhile Lifter patrons were strapped down, and Nelda leaned over them, quick with her knife as a master butcher. Cammy couldn't quite make out what the woman was doing. Extracting essential entities without mortal harm? But mortal harm aplenty awaited! After the table, the human cattle were yanked up into the air by their heels and sent slowly gliding across the ship's roof, diminishing toward a distant, barely visible nexus of assuredly deadly blades. Poor Bengt was already in transit thither, passive as a pupa.

And now Earl was shoving Cammy into one of those rounded huts. The fat door plumped shut, leaving no sign of a seam around its edges. Cammy was trapped like a seed in a pod. What might she grow into?

But all she could really picture was Bengt's excruciation. He'd already suffered some kind of psychic surgery beneath the Vorpal Blade, and now he was swaying toward a more carnal demise. Grade A chops and f lank steak. Her husband's childlike greed and naïveté had ruined his life and hers. If only she could have tweaked his personality somehow, willed away all his weaknesses, instilled some spine. But standard marital operating protocols stretched only so far.

Cammy's phone rang! Wiggleweb connection! She fumbled it out, dropped it harmlessly on the resilient f loor, then got it up to her ear.

"Hola, chica!
Olala
aqui!
Gonna get you out of there. Sorry for the unforeseen glitch. Unscripted's okay, but sometimes
muy
fubar. Thought you'd be way more Sigourney Weaver with that wrench. Plot stalled with our star in the hoosegow. Ratings taking an instant dip. No good for the bottom line. Renewal options off the table! But Wiggleweb has plenty of my
compañeros
surreptitiously in place among the Lifter crew. Just sit tight."

"Olala, what are the Lifters extracting before the final slice and dice? What's Bengt going to lose?"

"Oh, that's the yubba vine. Every human's got one. The yubba vine is a hidden organ network of which your Terran medical science knows
nada.
You got your circulatory system, your nervous system, your enteric system, your lymphatic nodes and—your yubba vine. It's your personality's gerbil-wheel, the circle where your mind-spark rushes round and round, making you imagine you've got a continuous self. Like when they stole Majek Wobble's, they got all his mojo plus his toasting talents too. And anyone else can wear someone's vine. Any being, any species. Glitzy, ritzy plug-in plus!" "Is—is Bengt going to be a zombie if he loses his vine but survives?" "Not precisely. Just kinda mentally translucent. Less solid and authentic. Insipid. You see lots of such folks around you every day right in Boston. And they still watch TV and pay taxes real fine."

"No!" Cammy began to bang against the pod's rubbery walls, but they absorbed her blows soundlessly. "Hey,
chica,
calm down! Listen. I gotta book now." "Wait, tell me what you really are, you
cabrón!
Ratings dip! Terran science! What the fuck is all that!" But Olala had cut the Wiggleweb signal. No ready answers there. The undetectable door suddenly manifested itself. Cammy rushed out and instantly collided with what her confused senses initially registered as a kindergarten class on a daytrip. Taking in the scene more coherently, out on the f loor of the death arena, she found herself surrounded by a pack of three-foot-tall humans of both genders, all wearing grass skirts, their exposed f lesh a gentle green, their black spiky hair like a thicket of quills. Cosmic
Slumberland
imps! Interstellar Wiggleweb elves!

The biggest elf spoke in a
sotto voce basso profundo.
A low, grainy hum. "Quiet down, crazy lady-miss! No big scenes. We say you rogue meat going to ship's tenderizer machine. We say we want pound you like cutlet to correct anorexic skimp. But really, the Big O, he send us get you and hubby-wubby free. Dramatic
Star Wars
escape from trash compactor climax for show!" "Show! Show! What fucking show!" "Wiggleweb chart-topper. Terran
Self-Selecting Provender Challenge.
'Meet the meat so sweet to eat!' 'Irresistible sophont avarice on parade!' 'Trapped by vestigial Darwinian routines!' And likewise mottos. Olala savvy PR f lack, and A-number-one producer in four galactic quadrants."

Cammy felt her head might explode. "Okay, never mind. Just get me and Bengt out of this madhouse." "Walk this way, dudette," softly rumbled the lead elf. But before Cammy could take a step, she felt hands descend imperatively, one upon each shoulder.

Nelda stood to one side of Cammy, Earl on the other, once again having crept up on Cammy unheard. Not so hard amidst the processing din.

"Now, just where you goin', little miss?" asked Earl.

Nelda squinted menacingly at Cammy. "I doubt your yubba vine is rich and ripe, but I might could harvest it anyhow."

The Wiggleweb elves' leader intervened, all seeming deference and protocol. "Bigtime orders from Chief Snickersnack! Pound the sinews of this one for refectory diet jerky! Look, we open portal straight to ship's kitchen!"

A disc of f loor evanesced, revealing a shimmering gateway. Through the moiré scrim, a scene could be dimly apprehended.

Earl bent over to peer into the wormhole. "You sure you done got the right coordinates here? T'other side of this hole don't resemble no tenderizer machine. Looks to me like Prison Bay termination module Number 785, or thereabouts—"