Doomtime

by Doris Piserchia

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

It all began when someone tried to push Creed into the flesh pool to be ingested. The assassination failed, but Creed was never the same again. Because it launched the new cliff-dwellers of Creed's colony onto a new course of life - which could lead to humanity's re-emergence as Earth's masters. In those far future days, Earth's masters were two trees. Not trees as we know them, but two Everest-high growths, whose sentient roots and fast-growing branches dominated every living thing on the world. Men lived between their arboreal combat.

Release date: December 21, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 173

Sample

Creed teetered on the brink of the flesh pool, too dazed to resist the shoves of the assassin who puffed and grunted and seemed to grow anxious because his intended victim clung so tenaciously to life. That wasn’t it. Creed clung more to an idea than anything else. It crept around in his brain, coming into view, disappearing for a moment and then coming back where he could see it. What was the idea? He couldn’t remember, but he clutched it while teetering on the brass rim high above the pool of protoplasm.

The pool looked like a giant bowl of bread dough that had been punched in the middle. Forty feet below the struggling pair, never fully exposed to the sun, it was protected by colored metal wings that reached out to shade it. Thin and moving in a circular motion, the wings caught sun, wind and atmosphere and directed measured particles downward at deliberate angles. The pool was both a scientific and a natural marvel, expensive to maintain but done so with care and even love.

Creed didn’t think about what was below him as he battled for existence on the rim. He remembered the idea. “Abool!” he gasped, causing the assassin to tighten his grip.

“Die!” said Garba.

Creed’s moccasins had picked up oil and grit from the graveled path below the compound and now they betrayed him, made him slip on the brass and lose his balance. As he fell, he grabbed Garba while at the same time he bent backward and tried to roll sideways rather than head over heels. He and the assassin tumbled down the sloping wall to pause on a ledge mere inches from the bubbling fluid. Garba tipped his head back as he strained to escape and inadvertently touched the , pale stuff. A part of his skull disappeared, along with a portion of his brain. He had been intending to shriek but now he forgot everything. Not knowing where he was, he gripped Creed and whimpered.

Creed struggled to his hands and knees on the narrow ledge and, with the other man hanging onto his neck, crawled to a bridge just wide enough to accommodate them. The material beneath the bridge gurgled and sent a drop or two to strike him on the arm. Immediately upon touching his skin the substance vanished, having leaped into him and merged with him like water poured into water. It was raw protoplasm in the bowl and as Creed inched forward larger drops hit him on the back and head.

Garba’s arms grew tight around his neck. The pool chuckled and flung particles of itself at them. Flesh soaked into flesh, filtered like oil, found safety in niches and crannies, created patterns among ridges and valleys.

He grunted and crawled and by and by the side of his head was glued to Garba’s. The other man had hugged him too tightly and some droplets of life got between them.

Creed flopped about for the longest time, not really aware of what was happening, only knowing he needed to get away from the spray. A few times he tried to push Garba away, intending to change position and drag his burden by the hair, but they were held fast together at the temples.

In the distance a gleaming corridor beckoned, and it was toward this that he moved and hauled his would-be murderer. The pool had attendants who roved the corridors and checked equipment, read messages on dials and computer faces, monitored life levels and densities. They rarely walked on the bridges above the tributaries and then only while wearing protective suits. The pool was the prime source of food for the city and its contents were dangerous to the touch, even its fine spray. One might find his fingers webbed or even sealed after a naked jaunt in the living mist, or his eyelids might grow closed, or his nostrils, or even his pores.

Some degree of awareness began returning and Creed looked about for attendants. He didn’t want to meet any of them or have them see him going down the hall like a double-bodied frog.

In desperation he paused. He wouldn’t find any help or relief in the hospital. What did the medics know? They would place him and Garba in a bed, X-ray their heads a dozen times and then ask him which should be killed with the separating knife. He and the other man would be better off in the forest with one of the big trees.

It took him a while to find a phone to the outside, and then it took him longer to lift Garba so that he could stand on his own two feet. He called Tedron. Sitting in the booth with Garba on his lap, he listened to the muffled sounds of machinery and people in the complex.

He felt strange. He felt mad. Standing, he shook his head to clear it of fog. What was he doing here, anyway? He didn’t know anyone named Tedron, and why would he think medics didn’t know anything or that a big tree in the forest could help him? Swiftly he hung up the phone, went out into the corridor and allowed an attendant to find him.

At the hospital they wanted to know how it happened. He told them Garba had been following him and that when he went up to the rim to look at the pool the other tried to shove him over.

“We can separate you but it won’t be any snap of the fingers.” The doctor was young and full of faith only in himself. “You’re lucky none of your vital parts merged, otherwise you’d be stuck with your assassin for the rest of your life. How would you like that? Would you again play games near the life pool? You may be the head of the Council but to me you’re just another patient.”

Creed nodded. “Could you have someone go up to my apartment and check on my brother? He drinks, you know. I’ve called him three times since I’ve been here but he doesn’t answer.”

“Sounds as if that’s a job for the Council.”

“For a sick man?”

“It isn’t the same kind of sickness when it’s in the head like that.”

“I’m sick in the head and I’m not a job for the Council.”

The doctor gave him a steady look. “At that, madness might account for the shape you’re in. Stick out your arm for this hypodermic and we’ll take your friend out of your hair. I’m afraid there’s nothing much we can do for him. His brain is damaged.”



Garba didn’t seem to have a family or an address. He was handsome in a dissipated way. His skin was unhealthy-looking and showed signs of dehydration.

“How did you learn his name if you never met him before?” said the housing manager at the bottom of the cliff.

Creed was startled by the question. How had he learned Garba’s name? “I don’t remember.”

The manager had a long face and a dour expression. “It doesn’t matter since it seems to be wrong, anyhow. My files show no Garba. Maybe he isn’t a citizen. Sorry.”

Creed’s next stop with his helpless companion was the psychologist.

“He doesn’t seem to be having a green crisis,” she said. Her name was Lexia.

“He has some of the symptoms.”

“What a sad expression on his face.”

“There must be something to be done for him.”

“I can’t think of what.”

Creed frowned. “He never speaks. I know nothing about him other than that his name is Garba. Maybe he whispered it to me when we were fighting. He tried to kill me. An utter stranger.”

Lexia shook her head. “I don’t think I can handle a green crisis who isn’t genuine.”

“You have my brother here and he isn’t a green crisis.”

“He almost fell out of the city, and he’s only here temporarily until he sobers up.”

“He never does that,” said Creed.

“He will this time. I locked him up. In a few days I’ll send him home.”

“Do you have to?”

“Why don’t you try straightening him out instead of indulging him?”

“That’s a good idea. Who do you live with?”

“If it’s any of your business, a younger sister.”

“Sober?”

“Good-bye.”



The wings over the life pool formed a canopy when it rained. The water poured into a trough outside the brass bowl and ran down the hill. The bowl was kept as sanitary as possible by the wings but it still had to be cleaned. Creed put on a heavy suit with weighted boots, worked his way to the nearest tributary and plunged in. To the bottom he sank and located a vacuum closeted in the wall.

Directly beneath or on the other side of the brass enclosure was the natural rock mold in which the living flesh had subsisted for as long as anyone could remember. The knowledge of why or when the brass part had been built or who built it was lost in antiquity.

As he moved about in the sluggish material, Creed felt it close in on him like a second or third skin, heavy and aggressive and disturbing because it represented innumerable dead. Bodies were not buried in the ground or cremated but were dropped into the pool, freshly moribund or rotting, it didn’t matter, for the substance accepted any and all flesh, cleansing it of impurities, which were discarded into the ground through holes in the bowl. Every opening, crack and delineation in the original rock container had been duplicated in brass.

The dead past, or at least its temporal carcass, existed in the thick stuff around Creed, and it inspired his thoughts toward ghostly plots, made him perspire inside the suit.

“You missed a big patch on the northeastern curve,” Savinger would say to him later. Savinger the short was strictly an indoor attendant since claustrophobia prevented him from cleaning the bowl.

“I always miss a big patch somewhere whenever you’re about,” Creed would reply. “But I was working in the southwestern area today.”

Savinger had once tried cleaning the part of the bowl above the flesh. That also required the wearing of a suit because of the spray and because a worker might fall off the ladder, which misfortune happened to the short man that day. He was taken to green therapy and kept there four weeks.

The pool produced tasty chickens, cows, sheep and pigs, and so Creed cleaned the sides well, polished one spot to a high shine while all the other spots rapidly tarnished. His was a full-time job.



Brother Drago tried to hurl himself from the front porch but was so drunk he underestimated the distance and landed on his face on the living-room floor.

“I’m thinking of requesting an inner apartment,” said Creed. “The only leap you’ll take from one of those is from threshold to threshold.”

“I want out of here!” said Drago. “You keep me locked up like a prisoner!” He was a slender man with dark hair and soggy eyes. He was thirty-five, ten years older than Creed. He shaved each morning, no matter how drunk. Sometimes morning for him was early afternoon. Now he tossed a potted plant at a wall mural, kicked an empty fish bowl from its stand and upended a chair as he made his way to the coaster door.

“Unlock this thing or I’ll flatten your skull,” he said.

“It isn’t locked and you know it. In fact, you lost the key.”

Giving him a baleful stare, Drago staggered inside the coaster for a ride to the ground. “I want my tree,” he said, desperation in his tone. “Tedron said it would save me. Garba, too. They aren’t like you. They’re my friends.”

“Wait,” said Creed, but the machine sighed and dropped from sight. Drago might be back that day or next week. He might drink himself into oblivion or go to work on the farm six kilometers away.

In the evening Creed coasted to the ground, walked away from the city, sat down with his back against a rock in the rye field and looked at the cliff. Actually it was the city of Neo and it contained everything and everyone in its hundreds of octagonal openings.

The cliff looked like a giant honeycomb with its front half slashed off. The wall was perfectly flat, the many openings uniformly three by five meters, running back seven meters to the front doors of other apartments. The front apartments had no outside doors, only open porches that were rarely screened, even at night, since everyone had bug snappers to keep rooms free of parasites.

His back against the rock, Creed looked at Neo and thought how intelligent and economical it was to have a city built into a mountain. It left the remainder of the territory free and uncluttered, not that he knew what the territory was like, never having been anywhere. But it had been a good idea. Reservoirs, generators and electric motors were all under the mountain and no one ever bothered with them. Life was easy in Neo. Good and easy.

*   *   *

The next day Lexia from green therapy called him to come and take charge of Garba. “Nobody else wants the responsibility,” she said.

“That includes me. I have a two-bedroom apartment and a dependent brother. Why don’t we have some kind of agency to take care of indigents?”

“Set one up the next time you have a Council meeting.”

“I’d like to leave him there for a few more days,” he said.

“Sorry.”

No one in Neo seemed prepared to take on an extra tenant at that time. Those who wanted to adopt a child weren’t interested in one with a man’s body. The newly bereaved didn’t want more grief, the lonely shied away from such helpless companionship and the lovelorn saw nothing romantic about a man who wanted to be spoon-fed. The hospital staff said Garba was physically fit and therefore unqualified to occupy a bed. Since Creed couldn’t take his unwanted acquaintance into the wilderness and lose him, he took him home.

It took him a while to realize he was being followed. The pool complex was quiet at this time of the morning with scarcely a stirring of air disturbing the silence. When he looked over his shoulder he saw the large shadow.

For a while he lingered, wondering if his pursuer might be Savinger or some other employee, perhaps some insomniac who came to work early.

He made as if to turn left at the fork in the hall when a steel-tipped arrow flew past him and ricocheted off the tile ahead of him. Its flight had been savage and close to his head. He took the right turn and approached a series of tunnels. Arrows zoomed at him, filling every corridor but one. It wasn’t a course he ordinarily would have chosen.

The complex was modern where it was modern and archaic where it didn’t seem to matter. Abruptly the clean floor ended and damp earth began. Creed tried to turn back but the arrows forced him ahead.

All his life he had roamed these passageways but he hadn’t known about the narrow crevice in the rock wall where this particular tunnel seemed to end. There it was, easy to locate in the dim light as more arrows caused him to hug the rock. He slipped inside.

He turned his belt light on only after waiting long enough to know his pursuer didn’t intend coming in after him. The cavern was wet and old and the ground was full of holes. As he stood listening, he briefly wondered where the low tunnel to his right would lead him, not that he planned to find out. His anxiety was stronger than his curiosity.

Savinger didn’t believe him later. “You’d better go to green therapy.”

“Whoever it was gathered up all the arrows, otherwise I’d have proof.”

“Forget it. You know about my claustrophobia. I don’t want to see your secret tunnel, not that I believe it exists, but just forget it. Go down there and you’ll get lost or killed.”

“Who said I was going again?”

“You like to . . .