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My captive robot, still clutching me, leaned forward. More and more. Until we dropped face—first down into the pit.
There have been a number of times in my adventurous life when I have strongly wished I was elsewhere. This was definitely one of them. My past life did not flash before me, but the jagged stone walls certainly did. They were lit by a ruddy glow from below that we were rapidly approaching at what must be terminal velocity.
Was this the way it was going to end? Not with a whimper, but with a resounding crash when my metallic captor hit the ground. Which was rushing towards us far too fast. A bleak, black landscape lit by sporadic gouts of flame. I wriggled ineffectively in the robot’s iron grasp.
Then we juddered and slowed and I almost slipped out of the thing’s embrace as deceleration hit it. But it just clamped harder on my chest until I couldn’t breathe.
With a resounding clang we hit the ground and I crashed down as the thing let go of me. Before I could get my breath back it had me by the arm and was dragging me along. I had very little choice; I went. Limping because the stony ground was exceedingly hard on my stockinged feet. I wished that I was back in Heaven with my boots.
What I could see of the surroundings was far from inspiring. A miasma hung in the air that not only stank but irritated my air passages as well. I coughed and, as though in ghastly echo, there was the sound of heavy coughing from up ahead.
We went around a mound of crushed rock and I saw the cause.
Stretching Out and vanishing into the distance, barely revealed by the ruddy light, were long, low, almost table—like structures of some kind. Standing along both sides were bent figures with their arms extended. They were doing something, just what I could not say. As we passed close to one of the structures there was a rumbling sound and from the mouth of an apparatus there fell a mass of some dark powdered substance. A wisp of it came my way and I coughed again for this was the source of the stench and irritation.
It was difficult to see clearly what was going on since my metallic captor neither slowed nor stumbled, just dragged me forward steadily. Yet, since the scene repeated itself over and over, I began to see what was happening. I couldn’t understand it—but I could observe it.
The dust was flowing, or being carried, slowly down the length of the table—like constructions. The laborers, they were all women I could see now, ran their fingers over the surface.
That was all they did, slowly and repetitiously, never looking up, never stopping. One of them picked up something, I could not tell what it was, and dropped it into a container at her side.
I dragged by.
By far the worst part was there total lack of interest or attention to anything other than their work. I would have certainly looked up if a giant, decrepit robot dragged someone by me. They did not.
We passed more and more of them. All engaged in the same mysterious task, silently and continuously. This went on for a very long time. There were hundreds, possibly thousands, of laboring women. Then we were past the last ones and I was being hauled off into the semidarkness.
“I say, good robot guide, where are you taking me?” It plodded on. I pried at its clamped fingers. “Cease!” I shouted.
“This is the voice of your master, your human master. Stop now you animated junkyard.” It neither slowed nor paid me any heed, dragging me along like a dead beast. I walked again, stumbling, which was somewhat better than being dragged. To a metal door set into the rock face. It opened the door and pulled me through. I heard it clang shut behind us although I could see nothing in the darkness. It started up an unseen stairway, apparently seeing all right with its single operating eye. I fell and banged my shins, fell again and again until I grew used to the stairs. I was reeling with exhaustion by the time it stopped again and opened another door. Seized me up and threw me through it.
Behind me the door clanged shut even before I hit the ground. Reality twisted, the sensation of passing from one universe to another. There was sudden light and I banged down hard onto a stone floor.
Cold light lit the even colder scene; my teeth began chattering. I was in a metal—walled room with a barred door set in the far wall. Snow and frigid air blew in between the bars.
Had I been hauled down to Purgatory, then tossed through the machine, just to be allowed to freeze to death? It didn’t make sense. There certainly must be lots of easier and less complicated ways of disposing of me. My blue and bare toes, protruding from the ruins of my socks, kicked against something. I looked down at the heaped clothing, thick boots, gloves. This was a message that I was happy to receive.
My fingers were trembling as I pulled on the heavy socks and trousers, then kicked into the boots. They didn’t fit that well—but they kept out the cold. Everything I put on was a depressing shade of ash gray, which did not disturb me in the slightest. The clothing was warm and not too uncomfortable. I wound a scarf around my neck, popped on a seedy fur hat, then wriggled my fingers into the thick gloves.
Right on cue the barred door swung open and more snow blew in. I ignored it and turned around to see if there was any way of getting out the same way I had come in.
“I am called Buboe,” a menacingly deep voice said. I sighed and turned to look at my newest tormentor.
Dressed like me. Almost of a height, but he was heavier and wider. In his hands he held a flexible metal rod that I looked at very suspiciously. Particularly when he waggled it in my direction.
“This is Buboe’s bioclast. Bioclast hurts lot. It kills too. You do what Buboe say, you live. Don’t do it, you hurt and die. This is hurt.”
He flicked the thing at me. I jumped aside so that the tip barely grazed me.
This was a new kind of pain. It felt like my flesh had been sliced to the bone and boiling acid then poured into the wound. I could only stand, holding my wounded arm and waiting for the pain to pass. It did, eventually, and it was hard to believe that both clothing and arm were still intact. Buboe waggled the bioclast at me and I shivered away.
“Learn fast, live. No learn, die.”
His linguistic abilities were not of the best but he had an unassailable and thoroughly convincing argument. And at least he could talk; I could only nod agreement not trusting myself to speak yet.
“Work,” he said, pointing his weapon at the open door. I stumbled through it into blue—lit daylight, a desolate, snow whipped frigid hell. Large machines were moving around me, but until my eyes stopped tearing at the sudden cold I could not see what they were doing.
I soon found out. This was an opencast mine, a great sunken pit of broken stone and heaped gravel. The black layers were being torn open by hulking machines; the rubble they heaped up was then carried away by many—wheeled devices. At first I thought that the machines were work robots. Then I saw that each vehicle had a rider or an operator. The machines did the digging and carrying under the men’s guidance.
“You go up.” Buboe said, rapping on an immobile machine. The sight of his thin rod sent me scurrying up the handholds on its side. I wriggled into the bucket seat, looked out through the scarred and chipped window before me, wondered what to do next. A loudspeaker above my head scratched to life.
“Detection. Unknown individual. Identify yourself.”
“Who are you?” I asked, looking around for an operator, but I was alone. It was my steel chariot that was speaking to me.
“I am Model Ninety—one surface debrider and masculator. Give identity.”
“Why?” I asked angrily, having never enjoyed conversations with machines.
“Give identity,” was all it would say.