The Tourist Read online

  The tunnel opened. The air changed, growing thick, heavy, and damp. The hot smell of bodies. The death smell of rot.

  “You’re lucky not to smell it,” Chocky said. “But I don’t envy you having to see it.”

  “It is incredible. How many are there?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Are there sounders here?”

  “Could be. This they call a resonance. The sounders make their own speakers, some of them. Wind copper wire around big magnets, make them thump. Bury them in the rock so they can be felt all over. Others come to be close to it.”

  “I see them. Maybe. There are so many. Some are listening. Others are doing—oh no.”

  Chocky turned away and put his hand against cool, smooth crystal.

  “I’m going to pay my respects.”

  “They are doing terrible things,” the tourist said.

  Chocky kicked away, drifted for a time, and hit a bare spot in the rocky enclosure. Cool and wet to the touch. He wondered what the tourist saw, the shape of the space, how many dozens, or hundreds, were assembled here. What they did to each other in the dark. He put his hands and face against the rock and felt the heartbeat of his world. The churning of machinery and the feedback of his people, muddied into a constant thrum. He thought about the pasty blur of his face, reflected in the tourist’s visor. It became the face of the virgin, the source of all pain and salvation.

  Somewhere in the hum was the beat of her small heart, carried to him through miles of crust. He believed that he could feel it, growing weaker.

  He kicked back and returned to the tourist, finding the spot by memory.

  “I can hear it,” the tourist said. “But I must transpose the frequency to do so. The audible range is outside of human norms. Some have speculated that the air pressure is too low here for there to be audible sound. That is how little they know.”

  “Let’s go. We have to go.”

  “I do not want to stay here. But, tell me. Can you hear it?”

  “Yes. Hear it here, hear it everywhere. It’s in the rock. Whole damn thing. Now we have to go.”

  The tourist was quiet. Listening. Chocky listened too. In the cacophony of the resonance he heard other, closer sounds. Flesh on flesh. Grunting, moaning, crying. When it spoke again, the volume of its voice was very low. “My interest is anthropological.”

  “Big space words. Use mole words so I can understand.”

  “You said that we should go. The ones who make the music. You call them sounders?”

  Chocky thought for a moment and nodded for the tourist.

  “You know one?”

  “I know lots. You want to meet one?”

  “It is important for my thesis.”

  “Then we go.”

  Chocky drifted in void. An ocean of sound, and him floating on the shimmering surface.

  * * *

  “None of my professors have heard this before. There are no recordings. Not until now. This music has roots going back centuries. Early ritual music. Twentieth century drone, minimalism, musique concrete, electroacoustic. It is communal, spatial, improvisational. Wholly remarkable. But what horror. I’ve never seen anything like—”

  Metal clicked on rock. Movement in the dark. Chocky followed cords and tags to a stall in a market wall. “Here, spaceman,” he said. “You want to make good with the sounder? We’ll go to them with gifts. You barter for it.”

  Chocky heard the clink of coins and the thanks of the merchant. He could hear the merchant’s smile, a tightness in the voice, for the amount that the tourist overpaid.

  “What are these objects? Are they significant?”

  “Booze and batteries. Give them to me.”

  Chocky felt the objects in his hands: a glass bulb, filled with liquid and sealed on all sides; a short metal tube with a recessed switch along one end. He slipped them into a zippered pocket and kicked away, giving the merchant a slap on the shoulder as he left. The tourist followed directly behind him.

  He led the tourist through winding, indirect pathways. He waited for the tourist to question his sense of direction, to ask if he was lost. They did not.

  The tourist asked him many questions.

  “Are you comfortable with violence?”

  “It’s normal.”

  “But it seems to be, umm, everywhere. The representative told me, but I didn’t—do you ever try to stop it? Does anyone?”

  “If they choose. Most don’t. Why make trouble?”

  The tourist was silent for a time.

  “Do you ever wish for light? Do you wish to see in the dark?”

  “Stupid question.”

  “Why is it stupid? The company workers, they use sensors when they enter the tunnels. Infrared. Ultraviolet. Heat maps, depth scans. You don’t see their purpose?”

  “I see the purpose. We like it this way.”

  There were breaks in the tunnels, wide open space. Places where the company’s machines spun and shook and swarmed, eating away at the flesh of the rock.

  “Everywhere else,” the tourist said in a place of relative quiet, “people extend and augment themselves. They see and feel the virtual, the unreal-as-real. They experience broad frequencies of light and sound. Colors never seen before, sounds never heard. Here you do the opposite. You live in darkness and hear only sound that passes through thin air and solid objects.”

  “That’s not a question. What is it you want to know?”

  “Are you familiar with the means by which the original immigrating biosect was conceived? Substantial augmentation. The naked mole rat, of Earth’s Africa, used as a DNA template.”

  Chocky bit the inside of his cheek, tasted blood.

  “It is an extraordinary animal. Studied for its unique immunity to cancers. Exceptionally long-lived. Naturally able to survive in environments with low levels of oxygen, high levels of carbon dioxide. And this, a planetoid with similar conditions, containing huge deposits of radioactive ore. Extraordinary ingenuity on the part of your designers, I must admit.”

  Words from the tourist. Simple words. Not short blades in the dark. Not that faint pain, something deeper. Chocky felt it, then.

  “Do you know that the naked mole rat is matriarchal? That they are a hive society, like insects? Apart from a few breeding males, all other mole rats in the colony are infertile. They serve the queen as drones. By any chance, do you find anything like this behavior in your own society? Do you have a female leader, some kind of matriarch?”

  Chocky tried to talk and his jaw hung open. Words cracked in his throat.

  “Do you have an answer? This is the major question of my thesis. The darkness, the sounders, the violence. Your genes, perhaps. There is a connection.”

  “You thought about it more than I have, spaceman.”

  “Excuse me.” The tourist drifted near him, clacking and buzzing. “You seem aggravated. I hope that I have not offended you.”

  “Don’t know what you mean.” Chocky whispered now. The moment demanded silence. The wound in his cheek bled profusely, filling his mouth. He swallowed it. They came to a place that was unmapped. Secret. Chocky found a touch panel and entered a code by feel. The door that they entered through hummed shut. The tunnel twisted away, and the tourist would not be able to see that it ended in bare rock past a series of sharp breaks.

  “Longest trip of my life,” Chocky said. “We didn’t know if we’d survive. That’s what most don’t talk about. We waited to die for six years. And the changes, the therapy. Pain that never ended.”

  “You are referring to the settlement?”

  “Worth it. Worth every sacrifice. Know why?”

  The tourist stopped, close and blessedly silent, for a time. “You were there. But—I assumed that you were younger.”

  “Talk like that,” said Chocky, his hands shaking, “is what we wanted to get away from. Put words in someone’s head and you can control their thoughts. Images, too. You think you’re smart. All those words. But the words think
for you. Keep you locked away.”

  “You were human,” the tourist said. Something like fear, or awe, in its voice.

  “Not human. Never. Not a fucking mole either.” He reached in his pocket and removed the glass ball. He felt the liquid swirl inside.

  The tourist began a sentence with the words, “If I may,” and then Chocky smashed the glass ball against its visor. The suit’s hands leapt up to defend its passenger. It was faster than Chocky, much faster. It hit him with a burst of electricity and sent him flying.

  The liquid inside the glass splattered against the suit: visor, carapace, arms, and fingers. It hissed and spat and spewed acrid smoke where it touched. The suit turned and rushed for the door, following its programming to defend its passenger, to return it to the surface in the event of any emergency. Its hands grasped the door and pulled at its useless handle, buckling the metal.

  Corrosive acid ate at the suit and its visor. Chocky’s senses returned and he heard the tourist’s screams. He choked on acrid vapor that wafted from the corrosion.

  The materials of the suit weakened and groaned. The suit thrashed around the enclosure, clumsy and vicious, slamming around Chocky in the dark. It tried different doors, hammered against rock with its fists.

  Then the acid melted through the visor. A microscopic puncture. The suit decompressed with a pop that rang in Chocky’s ears. It kept moving, the empty shell. It moved no differently than before, with the same sense of life and purpose, but Chocky knew that the tourist was dead.

  Then he pulled the short rod from his pocket and gripped it tightly. He leapt at the suit, extending the long tip of the prod. With one hand he found the hole burned in the visor, the acid cool against his skin. The suit struck him in the chest and he felt the crack of it. He plunged the prod into the visor, dug it into what was the tourist’s face, and triggered it. The suit sparked and trembled and stilled, burned from the inside out.

  Chocky drifted away, his eyes full of the light of the electric flash, clutching his chest, unable to breathe. He knew the pain of broken ribs. But where the acid touched him, where it ate gaping, scorched holes in his skin, he felt no pain at all.

  His shoulder knocked against a mineral crag and he held on to it, pressed himself against it. He felt the pulses: the machines of the company, all around him. There were sounders nearby, and their drums were potent.

  * * *

  Chocky gave the suit to a gang of salvagers and booked an elevator home to his den. He found the virgin half-dead, feral and babbling, writhing tangled in the dense netting of the room. The stink of her filled the air and made it heavy. Chocky ran his hands along the walls. Urine and excrement splattered every surface, dried and caked under his fingers.

  She murmured her made-up non-language, lost in a long and lonely madness.

  He kicked off and soared through the netting, hands skipping through knots and cords, a maze that he knew because it was his home. He found her by her vibrations, the thrashing motion of her. She was caught in the netting that she could never find her way through, even though it was her home, also. He found her and grabbed her, pulled her close though she fought his touch fiercely. She clawed and bit and scratched at him, ravenous and afraid. He felt her breath and her fingers and her tongue. In one hand she held a blade, dull but still cutting, and she raked it across his eyes, lips, chest. The pain of his bruised ribs was excruciating. Blood sprayed from his wounds and he heard it drip and scatter against the clutter of the den.

  He felt no anger for her. He thought about the face he had seen in the tourist’s visor, that pale and ghostly thing, flesh hanging loose, a sheath of skin over bones. Small black eyes under thick folds of skin. It meant something to him, that image. It meant that she, having been made from him, may be as beautiful as he thought himself to be. It mattered, even though he had no desire to see her as she was.

  It was enough to imagine the pure and holy whiteness of her skin.

  He pulled the knife from her fingers and hurled it away, heard it clatter. He returned to her at last, the virgin, the mute homunculus cloned from his cells, the only joy in his life in the tunnels. She clung to him, weeping wordlessly, at last too tired to fight him. In her touch he felt her breath, her heartbeat, come into sync with his own. His life he gave to her. An unbreakable bond. Together, to the end, they would live free. The tourist’s words troubled him no more. His blood soaked them both as they hung, breathless, in the dark.

  About the Author

  Alex Sherman grew up in rural Virginia with a lovely view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A Brooklyn resident for the past decade, he has earned a degree in digital arts from the Pratt Institute and an MFA in creative writing from the Stonecoast Creative Writing Program. He mostly works in video post-production. He lives with his partner, his dog, and her cat. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2020 by Alex Sherman

  Art copyright © 2020 by Jun Cen