G howell, p.1
G. Howell, page 1
THE HUMAN MEMOIRS
by G. Howell
howell_g@actrix.gen.nz Copyright the author Part I I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made -HOUSMAN
Running feet pattered and clicked on worn flagstones, the sound echoing hollowly through the Library’s cold stone corridors. Of course running in the Citadel was frowned upon, but at this hour the halls were practically deserted; the only ones around to witness such infractions were the rats and mice, and they couldn’t care less. The cavernous oval floor of the foyer - packed with students during daylight hours - was as deserted as the rest of the Library. Beyond the antique leaded glass of the high ceiling dome, nightbound clouds scudded across the sky, seemingly just arm’s length outside. He blinked up at fat raindrops blatting against the glass and shivered; the heating was turned down for the night, not that it ever made much of a difference in a room this size anyway. Somewhere in the library an old water clock chimed the hour, making him glance at his timepiece for confirmation. He grimaced. Rot it! Late enough already.
In the dimness, terminals - a few with green characters flickering up their screen - stared glassily from their cubicles. Beyond the glass partitions, row upon row of ancient shelves stretched off into the shadowy vaults. The soundproofed viewing and study chambers were tucked away in a quiet corner behind a row of wood-paneled doors, one with the ‘IN USE’ plate glowing. He sighed and took a guess at exactly what she’d say, then opened the door.
“You took your time!”
He grinned. Close enough.
Mas swung her feet off the edge of the desk, spun the chair around and glared up at him as the door hissed shut behind him. One finger was impatiently drumming a tattoo on the well-worn upholstered armrest. “So, did you bring it?”
“Love you too,” he retorted, flopping into the second chair. She glared at him. “All right! I got it,” he waved the plastic case under her nose. “Why did you have to wait for the last minute anyway?”
“I had other business,” she growled.
He’d heard that one before. “Sure. More important than your finishing grade?”
“Yes.”
“Oh? What? Someone die?”
She stared at him, then began to bristle. “None of your business!”
“All right.” He shrugged. “Sorry. Forget it. Anyway, you could have booked some of the libraries disks earlier in the year.”
“I didn’t know they’d all be booked out. That festering video they showed; suddenly everyone wants the disks. Great timing,” Mas scratched fingers against the wooden countertop, “Just in time for a thesis. Why on earth did they set THIS as the topic?!”
“Come on. You know it’s customary for every Academy graduate to do it.”
“Every year?” she asked with a wrinkle of her nose. “You’d think the ‘Great Learned Ones’ would be filled to the back teeth reading all those recycled essays. Most of the students just load a thesis saved a year ago and rewrite it. If you look through the files you’ll see they all seem remarkably similar.”
“Those files’re supposed to be locked!”
“Huh!” she snorted. “You of all people should know the locks they use are a joke. There’s no way they can keep a dedicated system wanderer out. If you know the right people and right software, you can get access to anything.”
“You wouldn’t!”
She just grinned at him.
Perhaps she would. That was her style: all take and no give. He didn’t know why he’d agreed to help her. A strange one she was: Only recently arrived at the Academy, perhaps not even from the east coast. Intelligent enough - in the Academy that went without saying - probably smarter than he was, but also incredibly aloof and arrogant. Nobody knew anything more about her other than that she kept herself separate from everyone else, never entering into relationships: a frigid bitch to all appearances. He’d never known anyone who had even claimed to have spent a night with her. He had never found her files in the admin system. She seemed to be a nobody, but nevertheless she held some kind of sway over the establishment, that was the only way they’d been able to bend the rules and get into the Library after hours.
Her arrival at his dorm had come as a complete surprise and her request… no, her demand for help on this project had left him flustered and tongue-tied. Perhaps if he’d been thinking straight he wouldn’t have agreed to help. It was his high academic achievements that’d caught her attention and he knew in his gut that when she’d squeezed him for all he was worth, she’d dump him.
Somehow, he didn’t care.
Frigid she may be, but she was also undeniably attractive; any red-blooded male would gladly give a testicle for a chance to be shut in a cubicle with her. A shame she had a tendency to turn it into an experience akin to being shut in refrigerator. A real waste.
He sighed… Oh well. “If you’re going to do it that way, what do you need me for? I’ll just let you get on with it.” He began to stand but she kicked his feet out so he fell back into the chair.
“Sit down! You’re a walking encyclopedia when it comes to this kind of thing. And I know you get a rush out of doing it. Already got a career planned out, haven’t you? What was it? Historics and Research?”
“Uh… yes. How’d you know?”
“Heard you in the canteen.”
“Oh.” When had that been? He hadn’t been to the canteen for…
“I can’t understand why you enjoy this kind of thing,” she snorted. “We could be researching something practical, like matrix memory, or the space probes and parallel junction projects.”
“And where’d those come from?” He waved the disk. “Aren’t you forgetting who actually suggested those ideas. We’ve just developed the capabilities to actually build them.”
“History!” she muttered. “Shackles of expectations!”
“Huh?”
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “Just forget it.”
“Forget it? You like riddles?”
“No. It’s nothing. Just something my father once told me.”
“Your… “
“Don’t ask!” she snapped. “Now we’ve got work to do. That video: how accurate was it?”
“Uh… ” her sudden change of tact had thrown him. Her father, that was a fascinating slip. There was more there… but later. “I… It was fairly well done, but of course you could still tell they were costumes. And they ‘cleaned it up’ a little: rearranged parts to make it more interesting.” He flipped the disk box in the air and caught it again. “This transcription is copied verbatim from the original translation. Well, as close as possible anyway. Everything’s there.”
“Great,” she muttered unenthusiastically. “Ah, well. What about the museum? You recommend it?”
“Definitely! You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen them in the flesh, so to speak. Weird!” he chuckled, then added, “And you should look up their mating habits. That’s got some interesting tidbits.”
Mas snorted, snatched the case and popped it open, checking the disk’s label before dropping it into the drive. The screen flickered, the manufacturer’s logo blinking across the top, then the disk’s boot sectors took over and a menu appeared, icons arranged in neat rows. Mas selected one, pressed the puck’s button and the drive light flickered for a second, then the high-resolution digitized graphic of an ancient, worn leather volume appeared on the screen along with title and dates. Beat his old system back home clear out of the running speedwise, and the graphics were so clear they seemed to jump out of the glass. Another few seconds then the screen cleared and the text of the translation began to scroll down the VDU.
“Put it up on the big screen,” he suggested, then after a few seconds added, “Who knows, you might even find this interesting.”
She bared teeth back at him and he smiled to himself.
At the touch of a key, the featureless black wall above the monitor flickered, text appeared on it, the lights dimmed. Without another word the pair settled back in their chairs and began to read. THE HUMAN MEMOIRS
This ain’t no technological breakdown, this is the road to hell…
Chris Rea’s voice faded in a burst of white noise, then pulsed back to full strength again as the transistor radio swung like a electronic pendulum from the dash. The headlamps of the world-weary Deuce n’ a Half illuminated the road ahead for fifty meters in the clear night air, the catseyes down the center glaring back at the truck as the lights swept over and past them. I squirmed on the uncomfortable seat, trying to work some feeling back into my numb tailbone. I think they cut cost in the earlier models: welding the axle directly to the chassis without bothering with suspension.
“Will you stop squirming like that!” Tenny Dalton shifted gear and glared at me, his face turned into a cragged monstrosity by the faint green glow of the dash. The stub of cigar jutting from his mouth glowed like a malevolent LED. “You got a rash or something?”
“Not yet,” I groaned and stretched melodramatically, “but it’s only a matter of time. Where are we anyway?”
“How should I know? You’ve got the map.”
“You don’t NEED a map!” I protested, then rubbed my eyes and picked up the flashlight from the dash, illuminating my watch. “Shit. We should have caught up with them an hour ago.”
“Hey! I’ve been going where you tell me. You sure it’s the right damned road?”
I leaned back and flashed the battered old angelhead at the map strapped to the dash. “Uh, what’s this road?”
“Ah… last sign was US29 to Charlot tesville.”
“Uh-huh.” I squinted at the map. “Uh…Yeah, that’s what I’ve got here. How long ago was that? Half an hour?”
“‘Bout that.”
“Well, next stop’s… ” I peered at the confusion of lines, “Lynchburg… I think. That’s not too far now. Might catch up there.”
“Shit. Better hope we do,” Tenny growled. “Can’t you imagine it? Trundling into camp two hours after the others. A truckload of live ammo rolling around the countryside unescorted, SOP out the window… Shit, Jefferson’d have a field day.” He slapped the wheel in disgust, then reached over to fiddle with the radio as it faded out again. “What the fuck’s wrong with this thing?”
“You put fresh batteries in it? Try another station. If the coil hadn’t died on us back there there… “
“Oh, yeah. Whose fault was that? You’re the mechanical whizkid. You were supposed to overhaul it in the pool. ‘Sure,’ you said, ‘get right on it’ you said.” He clamped down on the cigar again; the tip glowed furiously as he puffed away on the reeking thing. “And get your feet down.”
“I did the coil,” I snorted, dropped my feet and made a show of dusting off the scratched metal. “It’d take me years to fix everything on this heap.”
“Heap?” He actually sounded outraged. “Don’t criticise a classic piece of machinery. “He patted the worn steering wheel affectionately. “She don’t like that kind of abuse, do ya girl?”
“Talking to a truck… “I shook my head despairingly. “Have you ever thought about professional help? Or at least a long, long vacation?”
He laughed and took his right hand off the wheel to flick me the finger. “You’re going to eat them words,” he grinned. “It’s a good truck. I like the way it handles.”
I stuck my feet up on the dash again, unintimidated. “You’re only saying that cause you keep drawing the short straw. It handles like a four ton lump of shit. I mean, hell, even SLEP didn’t want anything to do with it.”
“Really?” he asked lightly and the truck lurched over to the right.
I glanced over at him, “You trying to prove… OHSHIT!!” I yelled and grabbed for the dash as a car’s lights glared from around a corner, the driver hit his horn and Tenny held it to the last second. Tires screamed as the truck lurched back to the left side of the road and a seconds later the vehicle itself flashed past us.
“Jesus Christ!”
“Might have been,” Tenny said with a glance in the mirror. “I didn’t see.”
I shook my head.Join the Army; See interesting places; Meet interesting people. It’s a man’s life… And then there’s the Quartermasters Corps. It’s a living. It pays more than regular army, and I was scraping for every cent I could. These days college really costs.
One of the rules engraved in the rank and files’ unofficial handbook is ‘never volunteer’. Okay. That’s no problem. You don’t have to volunteer: they do it for you. You can wake up one morning and find you’ve pulled a duty riding shotgun on a fifty year old truck on a run from Fort Delvoir out of DC down to Fort Jackson with a couple of tons of outdated military hardware on the bed.
And then to cap it all was the driver…
Tenny Dalton: PFC, old friend. Oh, he could drive all right. In fact the way he handled a truck was downright uncanny, as were some of the other things he did. Everything he did he accomplished well and with a slight air of indifference, as though he really wasn’t trying. This applied whether he was overhauling an engine or coming on to one of the noble Ladies in a dive in Jacksonville. Still, they weren’t as annoying as his insistence on smoking: cigars of all things.
I coughed and tried to fan a streamer of smoke aside. Useless to ask him to chuck it; he’d sooner amputate his right hand. I don’t know where the hell he got them from, but he only smoked Havanahs.
I just wound the window down a bit further and let cold air whip around my face. When the local FM station vanished completely into the sea of static, Tenny spent only a few seconds fiddling with the dial, then snapped it off.
The engine growled and the transmission grated, then settled down again as the truck started up a grade. The shadows of the trees along the roadside blurred past in the darkness and occasionally the bluish-white smear of the cloud-covered moon was visible through the black crests of trees and mounatins.
With nothing to see or say, I yawned, then settled back to doze. Well, I meant to doze. Not my fault I dropped off completely.
A slap on my shoulder snapped me out of my slumber. “Davies. HEY! Davies!”
I yawned, shook my head and roled my shoulders. Damn kink in my neck . “Huh? Wassup?” There was no sign of civilisation outside. Just trees, darkness, trees, and more darkness. “Where are we?”
“Somewhere near Roanoke.” He was leaning forward, trying to watch the sky.
“Oh. .
. WHAT?” I grabbed for the map. “Damnation! You decide to take the scenic route did you?” How the hell did I sleep through that? “Why didn’t you wake me?”
That wasn’t a rhetorical question, but he still didn’t answer. “Hey! The power was out when we went through Lynchburg. Lights and everything. I took the wrong turnoff… Look, there’s something weird going on. Check the sky and tell me if you see anything.”
“Huh? The martians coming?”
“Goddammit! Will you look!”
What the hell was he on about? I shrugged and wound down the window. “Oh, wow man!”
“You see it?” he urged, just about smearing his face across the dusty windshield in his efforts to see upwards.
“There’s nothing there,” I told him. “You were perhaps expecting the Hindenburg? You should check those cigars: anything besides tobacco in there?” I grinned and looked up in time to see a bolt of white-blue lighting arc across the sky. Less than a second later the horizon ahead flashed with a white glare that died just as fast.
“Holy shit!”
“You see that?” Tenny yelled, his voice too loud in the cab. “You see it?!”
“Yeah. Weirdest lightning I ever saw… There’s another!”
“And another!”
The bolts had all originated at different places in the sky, but they all seemed to finish at the same spot, out of sight down the road. The sky just over the hill was pulsing like a gigantic strobelight. I stared as more pulses of blue-white light snapped across the night sky. The clouds had cleared, the stars bright.
“No clouds,” I muttered.
Tenny glanced at me, then fixed his attention on the road again. His fingers flexed on the wheel. “Yeah, I noticed… What the fuck is it?”
“Ball lightning?”
“Say what?”
“Fireballs. A kind of lightning… maybe.” I leaned out of the side window, peering ahead. “I can’t see anything, I… SHIT!” I cursed and ducked as the air above my head was ionized.
That time the bolt came from behind us,‘bout ten meters above the road and going straight ahead, it disappeared into the darkness ahead. A couple of seconds later, the sharp crack of its passage hit.
Tenny hadn’t even noticed the near miss, he was staring at something else.
SOMETHING was forming in the air ahead… no, all around us. No real shape to it, a whirlpool of the deepest blue hanging in the air, like one of those laser light shows. Jagged bolts of cyan and electric blue lighting materialized out of thin air and shot into the vortice, highlighting it and the surrounding landscape in strobing flashes of surreal color.
We were heading right for the hub of the thing.
The hood of the truck blazed with dazzling corona discharges and St. Elmo’s fire coruscated around the headlamps and other metal fixtures. The radio blared to life with a scream of static as electrical sparks flared on the antenna.
“STOP!!” I screamed. There was a continuous almost subsonic rumble from the mega-high voltage plasma sculpture building in front of us.
He snarled something back. Bitten in half, the glowing stub of the cigar dropped into the foot well. He had already floored the brake and clutch. Nothing. He jammed the transmission into reverse: A spectacular shower of sparks gouted from the back wheels and tortured metal under the truck screamed, but we kept going.
I grabbed for the dash and yelped as fat blue sparks kicked me back.
Whatever it was, we hit it at seventy five…
And kept going, right through it.
