Nexus, Robert Boyczuk [best free ereader TXT] 📗

and not rows-her light uncovered a fourth circle of similarly-shaped machines: elongated boxes, half a meter long and slightly less wide, supported on pedestals. Following the same pattern, the boxes there were slightly longer than those in the previous circle. When she drew even with the objects in the first ring, she realised they had transparent tops. Curious, she stepped away from the groove to peer inside the nearest one. In a cloudy liquid floated twinned fetuses. The single umbilical, however, was gone. There was nothing attached to the children. At least nothing Liis could see. The infants seemed to be drawing their nourishment directly from the fluid which buoyed them.

Liis moved on.

In the next row the fetuses were more mature; in fact, the term fetus no longer applied, for although the twins were submersed in an amniotic-like fluid, they appeared to be fully developed, year-old infants. They stirred, the light from her flare irritating them. The conjoined twins blinked repeatedly. In the third ring the incubators sat on thicker pedestals; here, the infants had shed most of their baby-fat-and seemed less sensitive to the light. Both turned their eyes to stare upwards. The pattern finally broke in the sixth row: the incubators abruptly grew smaller. When Liis passed them, she understood why. Each cell now held only one occupant, a bright pink patch on its hairless skull marking the point of separation. In the ranks after this, the incubators began growing longer again. As she moved towards the centre of the chamber, the sickly-sweet odour of decaying meat she’d first smelled on opening the hatch grew.

She came to point where there was a gap between the rings of incubators. Here, a second, perpendicular groove, intersected the first one along which she walked. Liis kept straight on. Another dozen rings and she could finally detect the gradual curvature of the circles of incubators. The smell had grown so strong it assaulted her like a slaughter-house stench. Liis tried to ignore it. She came to the final row of incubators. The containers here resembled narrow coffins. Liis looked in one and found it contained an adolescent male, his size suggesting a young teenager; strangely, he had no pubic hair, and his genitalia were underdeveloped for this age. Maybe, Liis thought, they designed the Speakers this way on purpose. Life here would be far less complicated without sexual tensions. Briefly, she wondered if Yilda resembled the clones in every respect.

Half a dozen meters beyond this last row, the groove in the floor came to an abrupt end. It was cut off by a trench that curved around the centre of the room. Half a meter deep and roughly three wide, the trench had sloping sides coloured bright yellow, and a flat bottom that looked like it was made of cloudy glass. On the other side of the trench was a ring of low, white benches, like those that Liis had seen in the room of portraits. At the very centre of this chamber, a thick, waist-high pole had been set into the ground. Its flat, circular top glowed a faint amber. Nowhere could she see anything that might account for the heavy, sickening smell of blood and raw flesh.

Liis stared at the trench, reluctant to cross; the yellow sides worried her. She’d been around enough industrial equipment to recognize the implied warning. Yellow meant hazard. But what kind of hazard? There wasn’t anything nearby that looked threatening. Nothing that looked evenly vaguely mechanical. Maybe the coloration was merely decorative, although she didn’t really believe this. The side of the trench wasn’t steep. Leastwise, its slope was gentle enough so that she could stand on it without falling. She decided that if she stepped down cautiously, she could test the bottom of the trench with her other foot to see if it was safe.

Liis took a step onto the yellow slope-and her foot shot out from under her like she’d stepped on ice. With a shout of surprise she tumbled sideways. Instinctively, she flung away the flare and threw out her arm to break her fall; but her palm hit the nearly frictionless surface and squirted out from under her. She collapsed on top of her broken arm. Agonizing pain reddened her vision as she slid headlong into the trench and lay in a heap, gasping for breath.

Her arm throbbed with each of beat of her heart, sending staggering jolts of pain along its length. Like diminishing waves, the pain eased, until it became tolerable. Under her cheek, the white surface was warm and surprisingly rough, a texture similar to that of fine grain sandpaper. She thought she could detect the faintest of vibrations playing through it.

She raised her head.

The flare lay somewhere in the centre of the room. It raised a corona of quavering light past the far lip of the trench, making the slope on that side appear to be black. Everything was still. It occurred to Liis that the yellow may not have been a caution about dangerous machinery, but might have been a warning not to step on the slick surface. She felt a flush of embarrassment.

With a grunt, she struggled to her feet. Her footing on the rough surface was, thankfully, solid. A few meters away the flare hissed spat out its gouts of light. Cradling her broken arm, Liis crossed the trench and, with a relatively easy hop in the low gravity, ascended the opposite slope, to retrieve her flare.

She stood on an island in the heart of the room. To her right, encroaching on the edge of her light, a ponderous dark shape moved steadily through the ranks of incubators. It was already past the last rank of cells and heading for the trench. She recognized the thing almost immediately: if it wasn’t the same machine she’d caught a glimpse of earlier, it was an identical copy. Tall, matte black, and several meters square, it was composed of crossed, structural members. Inside the latticework were two separate columns: the first contained cylinders; the second, oblong boxes. She recognized the shapes. It’s carrying incubators, Liis realised. Though no wheels were visible at the base of the gantry-for that’s how she thought of it now-the thing moved in an eerie silence. There wasn’t a whisper of sound, nor the slightest tremor in the floor, although the gantry was massive, its summit lost in the shadows overhead, and appeared to carry several thousand kilograms of cargo.

As the machine approached, Liis realised it was running along the groove in the floor. Or at the very least following it. The gantry came to a halt directly in front of the trench.

Liis hesitated: should she examine the pole at the centre of the room or get a closer look at this thing? There was no telling how long the gantry might remain here. Or when she might get another chance to see it. She settled on the gantry. The pole, after all, didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

Careful to avoid the slope, she hopped down into the trench and leapt back up on the other side in two bounds. She strode over to the machine. At the base of the thing, a meter above the floor, one of the cylindrical incubators had been extended on a semi-circular arm until it hung over the trench. An unseen internal mechanism levered the cylinder up. Its hatch swung open, spilling its contents into the channel.

Liis knew instantly the fetuses were dead. With their shrivelled blue-black skin and bloated bellies it was impossible that they could be anything else. An overwhelming stench assaulted her and Liis’s eyes teared up; she gagged. Now she knew where the smell came from.

For a second the twins lay in a pool of amniotic fluid; then the white floor beneath them rippled. A low-pitched humming began, like that of a heavy motor straining to drive a tremendous mass. The surface of the trench buckled and fragmented into a sea of heaving glassy beads. These shivered into minute particles that subdivided again, until the surface powdered and fell inward. In the bottom of the channel were hundreds of slowly rotating vertical discs aligned in dozens of rows that curved with the channel. Each disc was a few centimeters thick, and adjacent discs were offset from one another, the whole assembly reminding Liis of a huge paper shredder. And she discovered her impression wasn’t that far from the truth. Within seconds, the rollers had consumed the white particles. The shrivelled lump that had been the Siamese fetus rolled until its extremities caught between the discs. Little hands and feet were crunched by the discs; then stubby limbs and bits of loose skin were caught. Over the thrum of the machine Liis thought she could hear bones crunching and cartilage popping. The trunks of the tiny corpses were flayed, the fetuses torn into ever smaller pieces, which in turn were ground between the machined discs with horrifying efficiency.

Liis’ stomach knotted; it took every ounce of her will to refrain from vomiting. They’re dead, she reminded herself. They were dead before they hit the trench. She managed to fight back her queasiness.

The incubator had already been retracted and was now moving towards the back of the gantry; a second incubator was being extruded over the trench.

Liis stared at the spot where she had been lying in the trench only moments ago. Why didn’t it open for me? Why wasn’t I ground up like the fetuses? The answer occurred to her almost as soon as she asked the question: like everything else here, those gnashing discs were keyed on some aspect of the Speaker’s bio-signatures.

It’s recycling them.

Having spent most of her adult life as a longhauler, working in sealed environments, Liis understood the need for this machine: in a closed system, everything had to be recycled-especially organic matter. Here, non-viable clones were dumped into the rollers, their valuable organics ground into constituent molecules to be reused in the next generation.

The second incubator tipped. Its contents sloshed unceremoniously into the trench. This time, mingled with the basso hum of the machine, were distinct snapping sounds: the cracking of tiny bones.

Liis backed away. She had no desire to be anywhere near the trench. And there were at least a hundred incubators in the machine, possibly more. It would take a good hour to cycle through all the containers. The island in the middle of the room, and its strange post, would have to wait until it was safe to cross the trench again. Instead, she decided to follow the rings of incubators, spiralling out towards the wall, looking for anything that might be an exit.

Liis circled, the sound of the shredder a constant companion. After three circuits, she lost sight of the trench. Thankfully, the stench lessened. Shortly after she entered the sixth ring her flare finally guttered and died. In an instant she was sealed in complete darkness. Slipping her backpack off, she fumbled until she managed to extract her last flare. She lifted it above her head, placed her thumb on the tab to ignite it-

- then stopped.

Something had changed in the last few seconds. It was a subtle shift, like the pressure changes one feels moments before a storm breaks. Liis swung her head around, but everything was cloaked in oppressive darkness. But had the darkness itself changed, become a degree less absolute? The hair on the back of her arms stood up.

In a dazzling, silent fury, light burst upon the room.

For several seconds Liis clenched her eyes shut against the brilliance. When she did open them, she had to blink back involuntary tears. She lifted her hand to wipe them from her cheeks-and froze, so overwhelmed was she by the sheer scale of the room in which she