Trigun Fan Fiction ❯ Children of the Pebble ❯ When It Rains ( Chapter 14 )

Children of the Pebble

 

 

By “Clinesterton Beademung”, with all of love.

 

 

Disclaimer: “Trigun” © its respective creators and owners. I do this for fun, not profit. So there.

 

 

Comments and criticism welcome.

 

 

Chapter Fourteen - When It Rains

 

---

 

Max Simon could not believe what he was seeing.

 

The data were correct; he had to believe the weather station staff in the last five of the Seven Cities had enough wit to read an anemometer or a thermometer. He'd trained them himself, after all. That left him with one less explanation for the strange meteorological possibilities emerging from the patterns on the forecast before him.

 

Max Simon glanced at the clock and his research assistant's empty desk. The girl was late. Again. The forecast had to go on the satellite in fifteen minutes.

 

Well, he thought, there was nothing to be done about that. He scrawled a telegraph message on a scrap of paper, shoved it out the door to the cavalry corporal standing guard at his office, and gave instructions that the replies were to be brought to him immediately. He slammed the door on the bewildered soldier. So hard to find good help these days.

 

Max Simon locked and bolted the door behind him. Fortunately, the best assistant he could ask for was still nearby.

 

At the immense bookcase standing on the far wall of his office the former Polo family forecaster touched a hidden switch, stood back while the bookcase swung outward. He ducked through the low opening in the wall and touched another switch. The bookcase swung back. In the ceiling, a light flickered and held steady. Max plopped into the chair, pulled off the dust cover, and turned on his computer. The monitor glowed to full brightness while he waited for the uplink.

 

When the uplink was established Max Simon accessed the climatology buffer. He stared at what the screen showed him, blinking his eyes clear of what had to be a glitch, of either silicon or plain old age. His eyesight was getting worse, and years of long hours of staring at weather charts hadn't helped, either. Though the groundlings of this world might close their eyes to reality, as either a matter of escape or even a matter of survival, Max Simon could not turn away from the inescapable conclusion this not-so-Lost Technology impressed upon him.

 

“A slight chance of precipitation,” he said, amused at the absurdity of the words and stunned by their import. Rain over December, Inepril, September…all the remaining Cities. With the possibility of scattered showers all over the world.

 

The bookcase slid into place behind him. Only five minutes before the weather report and he had to find some way to make the impossible sound credible. Why bother? He'd sound just as foolish whether it rained or not. Okay, just say something, something that sounds vague and technical—

 

Someone knocked on the door. “Go away,” he said. “I'm busy.” He grabbed a clean forecast sheet and scrawled his prediction. That idiot disk jockey always complained about his penmanship but he wasn't about to start writing in block letters at his age, besides the report wouldn't sound any more ridiculous if the disk jockey read it through that stupid hat of his—

 

A second knock sent his hand, and his pen, sliding off the edge of the paper. He crumpled the ruined form as if to crush the interloper's head. He stomped to the office door and yanked it open.

 

“I said, beat it!” he shouted to the empty air. He looked down. The little man beamed a smile almost as bright as his polished hairless head. “Oh, hello, Sam. What the hell are you doing here?”

 

Dr. Fujiwara stepped into the office as if he owned it and the building around it. “Introducing you to your new research assistant, of course.”

 

“What? I already have three. Or two, since I appear to be short one this morning.”

 

“This morning? Max, she graduated, remember? Eight months ago.”

 

“What? Oh, that's right.” Max Simon scratched his head. “Smart girl, heard she got a job with MBK.”

 

“So it would seem. I'm trying to change that.” Dr. Fujiwara stepped aside. A blond girl with pigtails appeared in the doorway. She licked at a drop of perspiration at the corner of her mouth. “Max, I'd like you to meet Jessica, your newest student.”

 

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” she said, and bowed.

 

“Hmm.” Max Simon stroked his beard. Yes, of course. Botticelli, Jessica A. Outstanding academic record, even considering the high quality of her teachers and the immense resources she'd had at her disposal. “But a bit short on manners and of temper,” Sam had said in his letter of recommendation. Good. She would do just fine. He stepped forward, extended his hand.

 

“Welcome to the Max Simon School, Jessica,” he said. “Now, what do you know about xenoclimatology?”

 

 

---

 

 

“There will be an informal celebration during lunch,” Monica was saying, “at which you, of course, will be the guest of honor, followed at one o'clock by a formal welcome from the senior staff in conference room one, at which time they will present progress reports on all outstanding contracts…”

 

Through the plate glass wall of her office, Meryl Stryfe watched the city of December go about its business. She let her assistant's litany fade into the background, behind the clamor of the one thought clanging through her mind.

 

Father, what the hell are you thinking?

 

“At three o'clock you have a meeting with Mr. Thompson,” Monica said, “followed by a general address to the division and section leaders at three-thirty. Oh, and I've taken the liberty of preparing a few talking points…”

 

Meryl changed focus and let Monica's dim reflection in the window overwhelm her view of the city. Monica had dressed well today, suit exactly like her own except for the pleated skirt that was becoming the fashion among the younger set these days. All that remained of the waitress now was the pad and pencil Monica used to take notes. And when had Monica started wearing her hair down?

 

“Research and Development will give a brief demonstration of—something called a remote televisor, whatever that is, at four-fifteen, and at four-thirty, you have a meeting with the legal department to finalize the transfer of authority. After that, your agenda's clear, Mrs. Stryfe. At least for today.”

 

At least for today, Meryl thought. Her biggest worry this morning had been which earrings went with her best suit. Now she had matching earrings, an agenda, and more responsibility than she'd ever known before. One minute she's idling her convertible through the company parking lot, looking for a place to park and not finding one because some mass insanity had stricken every employee of Father's company and compelled them to park at bizarre angles between and across the lines, leaving Father's parking space the only one open…

 

The next, she's standing at the glass wall of Father's office—her office. All the folders and documents were gone. Apart from the lamp, the blotter, the telephone, the intercom, and her wedding portrait, the top of his desk was a clean continent of stained wood. She'd never have guessed how beautiful his desk was, Mother must've picked it out for him—

 

“—anything else?”

 

“Hmm?” Meryl turned to face her assistant. “What did you say, Miss Allen?”

 

“I said, will there be anything else?”

 

“No. No, that'll be all for now, Miss Allen, thank you.”

 

“Yes, ma'am.” Monica remained where she was, inclined her head toward the inside window. To Meryl it seemed as if the entire company had gathered beyond, waiting expectantly, with smiles both suppressed and open.

 

Of course, Meryl thought. She keyed the office-wide intercom.

 

“All right, you layabouts, back to work!” she said, and through the wild cheering that erupted she barely heard Monica approach, barely felt Monica take her hand and hold it, just as Mrs. Hammersham had done at the entrance to Father's—to her office. Cool, competent, unemotional Mrs. Hammersham's eyes had been brimming with tears, just like Monica's, now.

 

“Congratulations, Meryl,” Monica said, and let go.

 

“Thank you,” she said. Monica plucked a handkerchief from her pocket, dabbed at her eyes as she closed the privacy blinds on the inside window. Monica left the office and shut the door behind her. Meryl returned to her place at the wall.

 

Father, she thought for the hundredth time, what the hell are you thinking?

 

Her father, by design or by duty, remained unavailable for comment. He was a whirlwind of activity again, young and strong in his enthusiasm. She and Mother (especially Mother! Meryl thought, blushing) were pleased to see Father happy in a way he hadn't been for a long time.

 

“What's going on?” they would ask at breakfast.

 

“Something extraordinary,” Father would say, and be out the door and into the city before the butter melted on their toast.

 

Meryl set the memory aside. If Father could be stubborn, so could she.

 

She put her hands behind her back. From this height and angle the Bernardelli Building was hidden, no more significant to her now than a pebble on a distant sand dune.

 

I'm still selling insurance, she thought. At Bernardelli she'd learned to appraise land and property, to assign a monetary value to hopes and futures, and to assess the relative risks of holding on to them in a world that, outside the mysterious technology of the Plants, offered no more certainty than day, night and breathable air. Now Stryfe Consultants, its partners, customers, and even its competitors were preparing to offer the people of this dry planet a piece of Earth one could hold on to, a ticket to the future one could redeem.

 

The Thompson project was at an end, successful under her leadership in every possible way despite her earlier doubts. Mr. Thompson's first order of five harvesters was incentive enough to begin production in quantity, and inquiries were pouring in from smaller farms all over the world. There was talk of collective ownership, suggestions that farmers might pool their resources and use the harvesters together, which was just as well. Stryfe Consultants reaped its profits in patent sales and licensing fees. Reduced demand would be a matter for the manufacturers.

 

Five iles across the city, at the western edge of the scar, a blue-white spark flashed within the closest Plant bulb. A symptom, Father once told her, of high production demand.

 

Meryl pressed her hand to the glass. I know just how you feel, she thought.

 

Meryl straightened her back. From this height, the world beyond the city's edge spread before her like a carpet under the feet of a visiting dignitary. The future was theirs to make, if they only worked hard enough—

 

And why was it so dark? Meryl leaned close to the glass. The sky was overcast, as if a typhoon were approaching, but no one had seen such a storm this far north in a hundred years.

 

Something hit the window in front of Meryl's eyes. Startled, she flinched back. Damn birds, the maintenance budget was tight enough without having to scrape droppings off the windows.

 

Meryl leaned close. Whatever had hit the window was clear and clean. Water? But that was crazy—

 

Another drop hit the window. Another, and then another, until—like her employees and everyone else in December, had she known—she stopped and stared out her water-spotted window.

 

My God, Meryl thought. It's—damn, what was the word again? At the well, she remembered it at the well…

 

The phone rang. Meryl Stryfe, President of Stryfe Consultants, returned to her desk and let it ring twice more. She answered the call and did not look back at the window.

 

 

---

 

 

“What did you call this again?”

 

Elizabeth stood in the opening of the May City Plant's access hatch. Water poured from a gray smoke sky.

 

“Rain,” Vash said. “It's called rain.”

 

 

 

Elizabeth moved aside and leaned against the cold metal. Rain—this phenomenon, this magic out of a child's bedtime story—battered the thirsty earth. Children played in the street, picking up the miracle in cupped hands and throwing it at one another. Adults emerged from their shops, banks, and restaurants, cast aside their hats and bonnets, and raised their arms and faces heavenward in welcome.

 

 

 

“Looks like no one's interested in being productive today,” she said.

 

 

 

“Looks that way,” Vash said. The look on his face was that of an indulgent father watching his children play with a new toy. The Plant bulb, reflected in the window of a restaurant across the street, was dark and dormant.

 

 

 

“You're not going to tell me it's sulking, are you?” Elizabeth said.

 

 

 

“The town's asked a lot of him. He needs time to think.”

 

 

 

Elizabeth crossed her arms, focused her attention on a piece of quartz in the middle of the muddy road. Nonsense, she thought. Assigning gender to a mere machine served no useful purpose. Elmore had done that, and some of the youngsters on her team had picked up his habit until she'd put a stop to it. Giving human qualities to a mechanism was as useless as naming a stray kitten: it connected you to the poor beast emotionally and destroyed your objectivity. Plant engineers needed objectivity.

 

 

 

Elizabeth rolled her glove from her right hand and caught drops on her bare palm. Was Elmore and his team seeing this magical rain, wherever they were? She hoped she'd get a chance to ask him but like as not, as short on people as the Union was, she'd not see him for the rest of the year. Long months of hard travel and harder effort awaited them both.

 

 

 

Later, when the Plant had ceased its “thinking” and made up its “mind” not to behave, Elizabeth and Vash went back to work. The problems this ridiculous machine posed tested her skills more than any Plant she'd repaired in the last five years. Her fingers flew over the main control panel, struggling to interrupt lines of the Plant's fuzzy logic before they pressed onto their potentially devastating conclusions.

 

 

 

At the auxiliary control panel, Vash's hands were engaged in the same disaster-averting dance, fingers flying over the keypad and touchscreen. When she could spare more than a moment's attention from her own labors she watched the legendary outlaw work, astonished at his ability to anticipate the Plant's behavior well into the Yellow Zone command paths, as far as any engineer, even she, had ever dared, short of an imminent and violent Plant failure.

 

 

 

When the repairs were complete, after Elizabeth had collected her fee from the September city leaders, she found a discreet moment to open her checkbook. She scratched her signature on the line, hesitated, then swirled the agreed-upon amount across the check. She ripped it from her book and extended it to Vash, who plucked the paper from her fingers.

 

 

 

“Getting difficult, isn't it?” Vash said.

 

 

 

Elizabeth shoved her pen and checkbook into her purse. “What is?”

 

 

 

“Pretending I'm your employee.”

 

 

 

“Who's pretending, Mr. Stryfe? This was a Union job and I was the engineer called. Business as usual.”

 

 

 

“So why did you call me?”

 

 

 

Elizabeth held her hands to her sides, wanting nothing more than to wipe that smug look from his face with a right cross.

 

 

 

“I thought I might need assistance,” she said. “And I thought you might be interested in some extra work.”

 

 

 

“I have plenty of work in Inepril, Elizabeth. Students who need me. Perhaps you—”

 

 

 

She spun to face him. “In case I haven't made myself clear, Mr. Stryfe, the Union considers you a renegade. It will accept neither you nor your students as certified Plant engineers unless and until it is satisfied your methods, and their training, are consistent with Union standards.”

 

 

 

“That's not going to happen, is it?”

 

 

 

“No.” She looked at a rivet in the floorplates. “Your methods, such as they are, are far too—unorthodox.”

 

 

 

A brown work boot, heavy and worn, obscured her rivet.

 

“Then you have a decision to make,” Vash said. When she looked up a minute or an hour later, he was gone.

 

 

 

At the May City steamer dock, Elizabeth found a quiet corner in a café. Her steamer, the Big Blue, was scheduled to depart for September in ten minutes.

 

 

 

I'm not going to read it, she thought, and held her purse closed. She tried to surrender to the satisfied exhaustion that always filled her at the end of a job, but today it would not come. Her body seemed to hum like a power line, as if she were near the source, but Vash had left an hour before—

 

 

 

Stop it, she told herself. She would return to her office, make her formal report to the Union, and that would be that. Her career was moving forward just as she planned, and within ten years she might have a seat on the Union council itself. Then she could implement what she'd learned from Vash from the top down, and—

 

 

 

Elizabeth opened her purse. Behind her ticket, she found the crumpled yellow telegram:

 

 

 

Dearest Eliza,

 

As always persuasive as you are beautiful but Union Council unmoved by your logic. Integrity of Union body of knowledge paramount. Request for audience with full Council denied.

 

Pleased you have been taking rest but time for rest is over. Request for extended leave denied. Promotion to Caernarfon Territory post nonnegotiable. Official notification to follow.

 

Council concerned by last message re Inepril problem. Hope you are not considering something rash. Remember the Union is your home. Love, Henry.

 

P.S. Congratulations!

 

 

 

I shouldn't have read it, Elizabeth thought as she left the café. I should've thrown it away, or burned it, or fed it to a thomas. I should never have looked at it again…

 

 

 

Two blocks away from the steamer platform Elizabeth found a telegraph station. She gave the operator the address, paused for breath before she recited the text of her message.

 

 

 

“Dearest Henry, you may consider this my resignation from the Marius Breskin Kantackle Technical Industrial Union, effective immediately. Love, Eliza.” She paid the operator, ran back to the ticket booth on the steamer dock. There was still time to catch the last steamer to Inepril.

 

 

---

 

 

“Mine?” Milly said when she could speak.

 

 

 

“That's right, love,” Dad said. “The farm's all yours. Now, your brothers and sisters still have a stake, but only if they return every harvest to help, which probably won't happen very often. Your mum and I will draw a respectable pension, of course, but the biggest share of the land and future income will be yours.” Dad grinned and rubbed his hands together. “Between that prime new parcel of land we finagled from the government and the new harvesters, Milly my love, you are going to be a very wealthy young woman.”

 

 

 

“Well, don't just sit there, dear,” Mom said. “Say something.”

 

 

 

Milly dropped the paper on the coffee table. When she looked up, she was smiling. At least her face felt as if it were.

 

 

 

“Dad, Mom, thank you,” she said. “I don't think I've ever been happier.”

 

 

 

Dad slapped his legs. “I suppose that does it, eh? All we need now is your signature on the deed, right here, beside the X.” Milly took the pen her mother offered, signed on the line, feeling, for some reason, as if every drop of ink were her own blood.

 

 

 

“Well, then, that's that,” Dad said, and stood. Mom joined him. “I guess we'll be going now, burning daylight and all that, you know.”

 

 

 

“You're leaving?” Milly shot to her feet. “But—where are you going? This is your home, you live here.”

 

 

 

Dad closed his eyes and sighed. Mom held her arms, looked into her eyes.

 

 

 

“Millicent, we've tried to tell you. Over and over, we've tried to tell you. Your father and I are retiring. This is your house now—”

 

 

 

“No,” Milly whispered. “This is your house, I don't care what it says on the paper, this is your house, you can't just move…you can't…”

 

 

 

“Milly,” Mom said, and held her. “My darling Millicent, it has to be this way. That's how it's always been. And that's how it will be, one day, when you have children.”

 

 

 

“Milly,” Dad said, “none of your brothers and sisters loves this farm as much as you do. We honestly thought you'd be pleased to see us go. I was bloody damn glad to see your mum's folks go, believe me—”

 

 

 

“Neville, that will be quite enough,” Mom said. “I'm sorry, Milly, that you're having such trouble, but that will pass, and when you have work to do, I promise, you won't give us a second thought. But we'll be close, and when you need us, we'll be closer still. All right?”

 

 

 

After the sound of her parents' runabout faded away, Milly went to the back door. The clothesline was empty. Mr. Fletcher's truck was gone. So was Mrs. Turnipseed's car and Mrs. Ramanujan's motorcycle. Today was Friday, and this was their weekend off.

 

 

 

To the southwest, darkness dominated the horizon. Lightning like little sparks danced on the clouds. Milly breathed in, and the air was clean and clear.

 

 

 

Later, when the suns had set and the clouds had covered the whole sky and the little sparks had grown to thunderbolts, Milly stood on her alcove, naked and asleep, and waited for the rain.

 

 

---

 

 

Maryanne reviewed the application before her, and stamped it approved. She handed the carbon copy to the two men before her. They exchanged a look, grinned idiotically.

 

 

There was nothing new or unusual in her actions today, but she couldn't shake a sense of sadness. Prospecting and salvage licenses were easy to obtain, and those who took on the work knew the attendant risks. The licenses themselves were more of a courtesy than a source of revenue. In the event the prospector failed to return on the license date, it let the appropriate law enforcement agencies know when to start looking for him…and when to stop.

 

 

 

However, Maryanne put little stock in rumors, as a law enforcement officer she couldn't afford to ignore them. If the men had indeed seen this distant flash of light some of the townspeople spoke of, then it was probably nothing more than a derelict Ship catching the sun at a propitious angle, just as they hoped. She wished the men well as they drove away. One could do worse than scouring the desert for spare parts. Go into law enforcement, for example.

 

 

 

Not that the life and times in this town were boring by any means. No one had been more surprised by that than she had. The new chancellor's efforts to destroy and bring to justice the most notorious of the bandit and slaver gangs had forced those who escaped or survived further south, east, and west. The dregs left behind by the chancellor's dragnet had drifted into her town, broken and bereft of the safety of their gangs, but still crooked enough to cause trouble. Three arrests in two months, not a bad haul for a new marshal of a remote territory. They had been sufficient to justify an increase in her budget and the services of three deputies. Colleagues, and more, who'd stood by her in the aftermath of the May City disaster.

 

 

 

Maryanne lifted a metal cup from its nail in the wall near the door and stepped into the street. The town well looked less like a well now, and more like a giant fire hydrant. The government water trucks had kept coming in empty and leaving full, to the almost embarrassing benefit in wealth and trade to so small a town. Concerns that the aquifer beneath their feet might go dry too soon, that their greed might undo everything and leave a ghost down in its wake, were put to rest with every government check.

 

 

 

Maryanne walked up to the public access tap and filled her cup. She drank deeply. Best water she'd ever tasted. She hung her cup on its nail and leaned in the doorway. She let her hand rest on her gun belt, and waited for the man and his son to come into sight.

 

 

 

They turned the corner onto Main Street. Hand in hand—more like clenched hand on tiny wrist—they weaved through the afternoon crowds. At the next corner, the boy stumbled. He knelt on the ground, weeping, reluctant to rise. His father thrust his hand away and looked at his son as if the boy were a crushed insect stuck to the sole of his boot.

 

 

 

The man grabbed the boy by his shirt and lifted him to his feet. The boy held fists to his eyes. Tears drew streaks down his dusty face. Two blocks later they disappeared around a corner, on their way home.

 

 

 

Maraynne relaxed, lifted her hand from her Marlon special. Kostelecki, the town bully who'd accosted the child on her first day in town, was cooling his heels in the city jail, awaiting trial before the territorial circuit judge on a drunk-and-disorderly. Two weeks ago he and the boy's father had come to blows in an alley. When she arrived on the scene knives had been drawn, and it took her and all three of her deputies to pull them apart. The man had claimed self-defense. Kostelecki, strangely enough, had not challenged his account.

 

 

 

Last night, she'd found the lumbering oaf curled up on the floor of his cell, weeping beyond all consolation. She'd left a deputy overnight, on suicide watch.

 

 

 

The four o'clock bus from May City was ten minutes late. Maryanne paced the sidewalk in front of her jail, listening to the hollow clomp of her boots on the wooden planks. Passers-by greeted her with nods and smiles. Good to see she was popular and needed somewhere, even if it was just a pinprick on a mostly empty map.

 

 

 

Not for long, she thought, as the bus appeared at the edge of town and stopped in front of the town's newest hotel. The vehicle poured a stream of humanity from its open doors, and as the people stretched and sighed relief, she listened and watched. Most of them were here to stay, job hunters and homesteaders for the most part by the look of them.

 

 

 

Except for one man, a Marshal Service courier who saw her and approached at a run. He touched his cap to her, presented an envelope and a clipboard. She signed for the envelope, paused to watch him rush back to the hotel before all the rooms were taken.

 

 

 

Maryanne went inside and sat at her desk. She opened and read the message.

 

 

 

Dear Maryanne,

 

Report on possible VTS trail received with much interest. Unresolved VTS problem making politicians nervous. Movement in Congress to find final solution.

 

By order of Chief Marshal Longbaugh you are to confirm beyond reasonable doubt death of VTS. Discretion foremost repeat foremost priority.

 

Further resources cannot be diverted to search. You are on your own. Sorry and good luck. T Rexall, Marshal, December City.

 

 

 

Through her open office door, Maryanne noticed a crowd gathering. She went outside, followed the throng's collective gaze north. Clouds that were not smoke were gathering somewhere between the deep desert and the edge of the world.

 

 

---

 

 

On Augusta 6th, 133 F. A., at 11:38 PM local time, a thunderstorm formed over a remote point of the equatorial desert, two hundred iles north of the northern boundary of Cornelia Territory.

 

 

 

Max Simon had noted the storm, of course, and its potential severity. However, nothing but typhoons formed in the equatorial region, and typhoons never produced precipitation. There was no one to warn, and no sleep lost.

 

 

 

Lightning ten thousand times hotter than the equator's most savage day graced the night-black clouds with flashes of royal purple and descended to the derelict Ship, which absorbed its violence and left it harmless, impotent. From the beginning, the Ship's designers had considered the rigors of interstellar travel with its vagaries of velocity changes and intermittent asteroids, and considered them well. It would take more than a mere spark to breach the hull of so mighty an undertaking, much more.

 

 

 

Yet it was possible, in retrospect, given long nights of bad coffee and circuit diagrams, to calculate the precise voltage, number and duration of the electrical impulses needed to alter the course of an interstellar spacecraft and send it, wrapped in a shroud of pink-hot plasma, hurtling into the surface of an all but dead planet. The builders had never bothered. Impossible, they'd said to one another, impressed by their foresight and predilection for quadruple, quintuple and sextuple redundancy. Might as well ask a computer to resolve pi to the last digit, or divide by zero. Impossible. Hadn't they considered everything?

 

 

 

The skies over the Ship opened, and the rain came down. Drops hissed on the scalding sand and evaporated, but even the heat of this wasteland oven was not eternal. The sand cooled; water began to linger a while on damp earth. Here and there, in the pores of blasted rock, in the leeward side of larger stones, in the spaces between the sand grains themselves, the rain pooled and puddled. It streamed down the ruined craft and, through the hull's myriad hairline fractures and ruptures, found its way inside.

 

 

 

The rain came, and down, down flowed the sacred stuff of life, past the bridge and crew quarters, past the food and equipment storage compartments, past torn bulkheads and doors, down into the true cargo, the sarcophagi. Over, around and through the mummified dead the water dripped, gathered, and overflowed again.

 

 

 

Above, the exhausted storm lay down on the hot wind and evaporated. Below, in the Ship's engineering spaces, Plants dry and curled and brown as dead geraniums hung where they died. All except one. The rainwater dribbled onto the glass chamber of the last intact Bulb.

 

 

 

Humans would have called it torture, this constant drip drip drip of water. Indeed, at one time it was used as such; a benign alternative to searing the flesh and breaking the bone, for the skilled inquisitor knows that only the will to resist must be broken. If that could be done without pain, so much the better. Sadism tempered by patience: the best of all possible worlds for everyone…except for the Plant within the Bulb, who would've given anything to know the touch of water again, benign or malignant. If he could know anything. Which he couldn't.

 

 

 

A universe away, on the Plant's control panel, the oneirostat switch remained set to standby, and no force in the universe would change that. Except, of course, the force that set it, and that force was far away, satisfied that his extended argument with Elizabeth had achieved its purpose, perplexed by his wife's somber celebration of her career triumph, perplexed more still by the pleasant yet perfunctory love they made in its aftermath. Meryl just has a lot on her mind, he told himself, and left his wife sound asleep on her side of the bed. He had a lot on his mind, too.

 

 

 

Quite unlike his brother in the Bulb, who had nothing on his mind whatsoever. His body was nothing more than what his designers intended it to be: a battery that never goes dead. Thus, in maintaining power to the Bulb's external control systems just as he was designed to do, he participated in his own captivity. The irony would've driven him to incandescent fury, if he could feel anything. Which he couldn't.

 

 

 

The power of sensory deprivation had been known for centuries. Mystics sought visions in the solitude of caves, in the self-denial of food and water and sleep. Artists, writers and saints produced work of sublime energy under conditions of brutal confinement. Scientists sought understanding of the mind's power while floating in lightless, soundless tanks of warm brine, but nothing came of it but a few confusing and immediately discredited papers in obscure journals, until the geneticists and neuroengineers of a far more enlightened time saw a way to unlock the power inherent within the visions. A way to control their content. To make them real.

 

 

 

Laws were passed. Laboratories were opened. Objections were made and suppressed. Patents were filed. Genotype became phenotype. And for the benefit of all humankind, both became property once more. “Better Living Through High Technology”, screamed the banners and the apologists. The perfect society. No more ignorance, save of one guarded secret. No more want, save of clarity of conscience.

 

 

 

Sometimes, a Plant thought to hate his condition, to escape his captivity. When that happened, his thoughts were stripped from his mind with a flick of a switch until he could be “repaired”. And when that failed…well, the Brave New World had no room for horror stories, now did it?

 

 

 

No room for horror stories…save one.

 

 

---

 

 

In their pride and vanity, the Ship builders had believed they'd thought of everything. Yet in all their calculations the builders had failed to account for one terrible variable: the irresistible force of a single spark of malice, struck within a mind bent on retribution.

 

 

 

The rain had long since passed, and the streams of water flowing over the dead began to dwindle. To the one living thing left within the derelict Ship it was enough, and it was delicious.

 

 

 

There would be a time later to attend to more practical matters, such as food, clothing and shelter. All these things existed in abundance down here amongst the dead. Finding them would pose no difficulty. For now, it was enough to take pleasure in blood and bone; thoughts directed from within, not annihilated from without.

 

 

 

An iron fist of obligation closed on the Plant's heart yet he was pleased to accept it, for there were debts to be paid, rights to be wronged—and butterflies to be saved. This time, he would succeed.

 

 

 

The Plant known as Knives Millions lifted his head, and laughed.

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Author's Afterword

 

Sorry again for the late update…life, work, marriage, bills—the usual stuff. However, if someone were to pay me to write fanfiction…

 

No dice, huh? Can't say I'm surprised, or even disappointed. The second half of this long tale begins next chapter: Knives is on the loose, Meryl and Vash are struggling with work and marriage, Elizabeth isn't helping, Maryanne is out and about, asking some pointed questions about our favorite Typhoon, and Milly is about to experience—well, I'll save that for later. See you then!