When the River Ran Dry Read online

  When the River Ran Dry

  Copyright © 2018 Robert Davies

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by BHC Press

  under the Indigo imprint

  Library of Congress Control Number:

  2018930622

  ISBN: 978-1-947727-35-9 (Softcover)

  ISBN: 978-1-947727-89-2 (Ebook)

  Visit the publisher:

  www.bhcpress.com

  THE SPECIMEN CHRONICLES

  Specimen 959

  Echoes of Esharam

  Dedicated to the memory of

  Edward F. Miller

  “Go Green...Go White”

  “As the births of living creatures at first

  are ill-shapen, so are all innovations,

  which are the births of time.”

  ~ Francis Bacon ~

  Novum—May 2180

  Long past midnight, Ricky Mills hurried from streets still swarming with night people, angling quickly for a row of three-room flats along the King’s Alley. Two days passed and still the hot, relentless wind funneled down Waterford Avenue, swirling dust and bits of rubbish into wandering vortices like drunken ballerinas in a wobbly, aimless dance; one chased another through narrow canyons between towering buildings reaching ever higher into the dense overcast. Barely a kilometer from the city’s central hub, Sector 4 was moving slowly into a quiet time when the clatter of traffic, sirens and gunfire seemed to ebb—imperceptible at first, but noticed with silent gratitude by those who worked the late shifts.

  The Novum metroplex was vast, even by Resurrection standards, rising up from lowlands on a temperate plain where one of the Old Cities once stood. A megalopolis like others built on the abandoned ruins of forgotten places that went silent after the Fall, Novum replaced a relic from an era on Earth no one alive could remember. The new Founders argued for re-naming the first settlement in recognition of its reclusive organizer, the arguably insane activist, Abraham Standvor, but public outcry forced them to abandon the idea. Despite the passionate efforts of Standvor’s acolytes, it was agreed a more ‘deserving’ name should be found when such gestures still mattered. They settled on a term evoking the new, but most understood it was little more than a thinly veiled move to erase the last of a trouble-maker’s dwindling influence.

  A hundred years on, Standvor’s optimistic New Order endured, but not in the way he intended. Instead of a world built on the myth of absolute equality within city-states scattered here or there across vast, sparsely populated land masses, the second rise of humanity had been guided first by the laws of simple survival. Later, distinct and unique societies emerged, each according to their own needs and desires. The cities had grown anew, but they were hardly a model of Standvor’s vision. Some thrived, while others—including Novum—hadn’t fared as well, struggling to reconcile the aloof visionary’s master plan with soaring populations and limited resources. Many believed the city’s unavoidable class divide was disturbingly similar to those from a distant history they stopped teaching to school children. Whispered voices decried persistent overcrowding and preference given only to those above, but not within earshot of others; ‘the past,’ they declared with firm (and public) conviction, ‘was the past.’

  Ricky held a hand to shield his face from the blustering wind, slowing as he turned into the alley. On the boulevard, haunting melodies made by synthesized qanuns—ethnic and foreign, yet strangely familiar—blended with monotone background chords pouring from advertisement holograms hovering above an intersection. Beyond, prone bodies of two “streeties,” the cast-off and forgotten ones who walked each day on the thin margin between life and death, lay motionless in their stupor at the edge of a worn, brick walkway. Beside them, spent injection ampules for a narcotic fluid neither could resist told of hopelessness and poverty.

  A preview, Ricky wondered? Perhaps the Old God remained after all to place before him a warning with magic hands no one could see. Kelleher, the grizzled caretaker from school used to say so and Litzi believed him, but those were days when they were young and no one challenged the word of grownups. And anyway, Ricky decided, it was unlikely they would notice; didn’t Gods concern themselves with better, more important things than street scum lying unconscious in a Sector 4 gutter? He shook away the disturbing notion, but tethered to the life he made for himself, Ricky knew it would always remain close-by.

  When he reached the door of the tiny flat, Ricky turned his head to one side—instinctive and automatic—to listen for their footfalls or the scrape of a knife along rough concrete blocks the way Bartel and Junkyard always did to pull the fear from its hiding place and remind him of his position. Thin, powdery grit carried on the blustering wind crunched like glass between his teeth and he spat in reflex, rolling his tongue around to gather any reluctant bits before spitting a last time. He held his breath and waited, but there was only the rising wind and a persistent rattle from loose shutters somewhere beyond the darkened alley. At last, a faded, green indicator lit with a dull snap as the door went ajar, easing the tension made by hours of another night on the streets.

  Ricky sat slowly, ignoring his blank vid screen where it dangled from a flimsy, metal bracket the maintenance man screwed haphazardly into the wall; only reruns of old sex shows, or the brutal ‘challenge’ programs would be found there at so late an hour. In the sudden, stark silence, Ricky could feel the muted thump of his heartbeat and a painful throb behind reddened eyes, now pestering, steadfast evidence of his fatigue. Without the wind to draw it from his skin, sweat beaded across his face and neck in the sweltering, stale room, wicking slowly into a worn recliner’s threadbare upholstery.

  Before him, silent, empty walls seemed to mock his loneliness, staring out from the dark through rectangular discolorations where framed photographs or paintings hung long before. The sparse furnishings never mattered to him, but perhaps it was fitting, he thought sadly; a three-room hovel on the bad side of the Sector was hardly an advertisement for success. Instead, it was a place of decay—a forgotten enclave nestled in the bosom of an urban colossus that warranted neither costly renovation nor the trouble it would take to bring it down altogether. As it was for those who lived within its boundary, the neighborhood remained as it had always been; static and unchanged.

  Above, the ventilators stopped again. Mrs. Abber promised to call the fixers, but Ricky knew they wouldn’t show unless she relented and gave them what they wanted. The repair fee was never enough and the threat of inevitable, disturbing noises that would filter through the walls as they took turns with her made him reluctant to ask again. Outside, the wind made odd whistling sounds as each gust pushed its way through the narrow space between ancient, weather-worn buildings, calling out from the night like the shrieks of despair made by mythical wraiths or banshees.

  He closed his eyes as the details and terms of orders taken from clients appeared in his thoughts. It had always been easy for him, the knack for keeping note of intake and output and a parade of numbers scrolled through in his mind like a Ting-Ting machine’s token count in one of the gambling parlors along the Ninth Street corridor. Customer accounts with names and addresses appeared with a mere thought so that hard records were needless.

  He had the skills—all good hustlers did—but Ricky’s
were different. Since he began carrying tiny, hidden packets through the barriers and past Municipal Patrol Enforcement officers for Mister Anthony in his early days on the streets, he built a trade network few in the Sector could match. It was no secret the pale kid from the factory housing blocks could elude MPE cops and even they understood and appreciated his talent. Ricky knew everyone and they knew him; with a word, he would find and deliver what they could not. As the reputation grew, they saw one who moved with ease between opposing halves of a fragmented society; ‘Slider’ had emerged from the shadows at last.

  He shuffled in weary silence to his bed, determined to find sleep before the dawn poured in his only window. Soon enough, it would return through clouded, filthy glass and dust collected on a sill where dead flies and woody powder made by the damnable termites had gone untouched for years. His head fell like an anvil onto a stained pillow as he closed his eyes with grateful satisfaction the noisy shops on Rademacher Way would stay silent for another five hours.

  By noon, the weather cleared. Ricky waited with a cup of watery chicken broth as one of the news network’s half-hour programs ran the Sector’s overnight updates. He listened with half-open eyes about break-ins at a Chinese food shop near the vacant lot where Barclay Towers once stood, and eyewitness accounts of a brawl inside the popular Vesuvius Club that sent three ironworkers to the clinics with ‘localized bruises and minor lacerations.’ The commentary continued, noting without emotion two others who suffered injuries from which they would never recover, now stiffened by rigor and cold inside a morgue’s lonely intake station.

  Ricky smirked at the description of an unlicensed prostitute detained for ‘suspected violations,’ but anyone who cared to look knew her troubles were more likely a mistake of refusing the advances of an MPE patrolman demanding her services without the usual payment she exacted from others. Only two homicides, he wondered? It was unusual, considering the time of year and tempers so often shortened by the suffocating heat, but another night could just as easily reverse the trend. Ricky listened to the rest of the report with little interest until the enticing images of her delicate form seeped into his thoughts the way they always did in his idle hours.

  He stood in silence, surveying his flat with the same, dull emptiness that seemed to torment him most in those moments between visits. Did she wait somewhere? Had they created a place for her within the machine to pass the time before he returned? He knew better, of course, but still the question remained. He allowed himself one last thought, determined to conclude enough transactions so that money needed to pay for time with her would be plentiful. Driven by his most powerful desire, he considered his options and by a quick calculation, three accounts held by mildly important Uppers would, if called in early, buy Ricky six hours at the theater. He nodded with a renewed determination, pushed onward by a need that had become a part of his identity and a compulsion like no other; they would pay up or suffer.

  The late morning heat was rising in the shadow of the mega-towers on a glaring, sun splashed day. At last, the pounding wind scoured low clouds away, leaving bare and exposed the staggering proportions of a city twelve million strong, no longer obscured by the haze. Ricky stepped cautiously from his flat, squinting against the harsh glare and careful to inspect the alley from both directions before aiming up the gentle incline toward Rademacher Way. He didn’t look, but there was little doubt Mrs. Abber watched him go from behind the faded, yellow curtains in her kitchen window. Would she be there when he returned, he wondered? Again, the nagging conflict flitted in and out, tugging at him like thorns beside a footpath. Would she resent his moments with another, beautiful and young, who had become dearest to him of all?

  There was no special understanding between them, of course, but Mrs. Abber never made a secret of her desires. Gorman, the retired delivery driver who lived in the adjacent unit made frequent, crude jokes about it, offering sarcastic warnings about their landlady’s amorous habits, but Ricky ignored him. Maybe in earlier days, long before he found his way to Reese Street Theater, he would’ve taken the offer; her bed was only a short walk away, after all. But now, in the present of a future he once dreamt of, Ricky’s attentions had been taken to another place. The Starlight simulation program’s astonishing realism had made a paradise where Mrs. Abber couldn’t follow; a secret world where only he could feel the soft evening breezes, bathing in the fragrant scent from rare oils and perfumes beneath a crystalline, Egyptian sky.

  Once more, the elegant face emerged from deep within his thoughts; Neferure’s dazzling smile was framed in fine, jet-black hair, curled like a cat’s tail around delicate shoulders. From her neck a heavy, gold necklace inlaid with turquoise, emerald and obsidian to form the wings of a grand and magical bird seemed to aim the eye at breasts barely concealed beneath the flawless linen of her ankle-length dress. As it had always been, the image was compelling as a mysterious tonic—a therapeutic agent, perhaps—to lift his spirits and lighten his step as he crossed between clattering ground carts where they waited on the bustling avenue to unload their goods.

  Ricky made his way quickly along the grimy, littered street, turning north at the old transformer complex and his usual shortcut across a noisy, open air market to where the elevated station writhed with afternoon riders waiting for their pod trains. Above, the hum of magnetic brakes announced the arrival of a twenty-car express, dangling from its support rail like beads of morning dew on a spider’s web. Urged onward by a fresh sense of purpose, Ricky hurried through an identification gate and up the long ramp to take his place amid a growing line of passengers.

  After a fifteen-minute ride, the train eased to a halt above MacAllister Square in the heart of Sector 6. Ricky waited as a gaggle of chattering school children was herded carefully by their teachers along the high platform toward broad, iron steps that led to a labyrinth of streets and sidewalks. On all sides of the station, the hulking mega-towers—cities within a city—soared to two thousand meters on a day so clear, the steeples and spires of transmission antennae were clearly visible from the surface. Pedestrian walkways joining one building to another held fast to the giant structures at twenty-floor intervals where people crossed between and their utility relieved the millions above from a needless and distasteful descent to the filthy, crowded streets.

  The mega-towers had always been self-contained, vertical neighborhoods and within them, the Uppers went about the business of the privileged, unconcerned for the dirt and vulgarity of an unsavory world far below they rarely saw and would likely never visit. On the comfortable end of a permanent divide between social strata neither sought to change, the Uppers had long ago accepted the restrictions and regulated life their opulence demanded. Flatwalkers—those millions who lived out their days on the surface—found the concept intolerable, preferring instead the freedom of ordinary labor and faceless obscurity to a regimented, antiseptic existence of checkpoints, location monitors and security cameras where nothing went unnoticed.

  At the gate, Ricky peered into a retinal scanner and waited until an attendant approved the unseen access request, nodding silently toward an elevated walkway and beyond it, a near-empty lift—mostly a stylish, oval greenhouse—hovered quietly on its pneumatic buffer. After a moment, more took their places along tinted glass panels and polished brass metalwork, anticipating a sudden lurch when the cool, conditioned elevator would rocket them skyward. His destination on the 148th floor would take only minutes to reach, but Ricky held tight to a handrail; external, high-speed lifts never held the fascination for him others seemed to enjoy. When they were young, Ricky and his friends would ride the ‘verts’ for sport until attendants or MPE cops ran them off. Now, he could board them any time he liked; the necessary (and frightening) tools of his trade.

  People in crisp, stylish clothing came and went at each stop, filing onto the vert or hurrying from it, concerned only with the glowing screens of wrist displays or private conversations they continued in front of strangers without a care. They
were all Uppers, of course, standing at deliberate distances from Ricky where he waited alone. As it had been since his early days hustling, Ricky felt the cold, indifferent glances wash over him and a silent scorn they aimed at another unwanted Flatwalker invading their corridors on one questionable mission or another; he wasn’t one of them and the distinction was never allowed to blur.

  When the vert stopped on 148, Ricky moved quickly past the others through a lavish archway toward the floor’s network of passages, sidestepping a janitor’s cart where it sat on an angle at the entrance of a sky bridge. Near the crowded tube connecting Tower B with its identical companion on the north side, Xavier Antonelli waited in a lounge sipping cold, raspberry tea. A perpetually scowling man who hid his insecurities beneath expensive clothes and overdone jewelry, Antonelli stood and walked slowly toward a high counter against the curved wall, suitably apart from the noisy lunch crowd jockeying for elbow room.

  “Is there a problem with the list?” he asked at once, pulling the long curls of his hair behind an ear the way he always did when something had gone wrong, ever nervous and petulant.

  “It’s workable,” Ricky replied blandly, “but we need to clear out your account before I can even begin looking; some of this stuff is…”

  Antonelli stopped him.

  “My account?” he snarled, narrowing deep brown eyes in sudden outrage at Ricky’s brazen display. “Maybe you need to be reminded of the money I’ve poured into it over the years, Slider!”

  Ricky moved quickly to hold his ground; he was in no mood to suffer contrived indignation, and least of all from a sniveling wretch like Antonelli.