It’s a Long Road to the Sky Train

By Michael Andre-Driussi

THE BIODOME WAS ON FIRE, but that did not halt the looters.

Young Marika stood on the downtown street in her Marie Antoinette Bo-Peep uniform, watching in numb shock as the intruders emerged with fresh meat from her dog farm. There were child-sized Grays, towering Nordics, scaly Reptilians, stomping robots, twitchy mutants, and Saturnians with glowing discs around their pale bald heads. Marika had been outside a few times in her life, but now, with her elderly mother sobbing on the sidewalk beside her, she knew she would not go home again.

She felt the big world expanding around her like an inflating balloon, and a new fear rose within her. Though twenty-two years old, like a child she clutched at her goldilocks and tugged. “Where will we go?” she wondered in despair. “Where can we go?”

“Bad news,” said a passing hybrid who had stopped to look. Shifting his bulky backpack, he turned his alien/human eyes to the curvaceous blonde and her bony mother. “You have nothing but the clothes on your backs? That is no good. You need stuff.”

“Dey is lootin’ da place,” said Marika, determined not to show the fear suddenly coursing through her.

“They are hungry,” said the hybrid patiently.

“Even da robots?” asked Marika, her pale face blushing with anger.

The hybrid waved that aside. “You need to go back in. Find a suitcase, or use garbage bags, and fill them with cigarettes, booze, high value items like that. I will guard your grandmother for you.”

Distrustful of his offer, but wanting to use his dark menace to her advantage, she said, “No, I want ya should help me inside da place.”

“As you like,” he said.

At first the stream of looters impeded their way, but when the hybrid drew his shimmering knife, the stream parted for them, just as Marika had thought. Inside the dome, the familiar sight of Main Street further calmed her. As they went around the Hanging Tree, she tugged on her earlobe to aid her planning process. She and her mother could not stay; they must go somewhere. She realized with a start that there was only one place, the same place so many of her relatives had gone to. With growing resolve she salvaged what she could from her despoiled home, and when they came out again Marika was relieved to see that her mother was still there.

“Come on, mamma,” she said. “Time to get up an’ carry stuff.”

The woman did not react.

“Well,” said the hybrid. “I should be going.”

“Hold up,” said Marika. She set down her bags and began digging through one. “I should give ya sumpin’ for ya help—how ’bout a bottle? Dem’s heavy an’ I wanna trade ’em first.”

“No thank you, I was glad to help.”

“I hate to owe anybody,” she said, thrusting a bottle of vodka into his arms. “Here. Now we’s even. So where ya goin’?”

The hybrid started to hand back the bottle, then accepted it with a pained laugh that showed his shark teeth.

“I’m going to find work at the Sky Train.”

“Hear dat, mamma? He goin’ da same place we goin’. Hey, I axed ya ta get up, now get up.” As the elder began to slowly rise, Marika told the hybrid, “We got family out dere—Uncle Sugar, mebbe more. I hear it’s far—ya gonna take da train?”

“No, the maglev hasn’t been running from Liboweier for some years now.”

He tried walking away, but she doggedly followed, tugging her mother along. Now intently focused on the hybrid, Marika noticed that his rigid backpack was made of wood, something like a small chest of drawers or a miniature armoire, filled with drawers of different sizes.

“No, Marika,” mewled her mother. “Let’s git back. Someone will come.”

The street ahead was bustling with aliens and humans going about their business, unaware or unconcerned about the situation at the biodome.

“Ain’t nobody coming,” said Marika. “We can’t stay—’member Slow Moe?” The older woman moaned in grief. “Dat’s right, he done died outside. We gotta leave da city.”

“But I’s scared. It’s big, too big ...”

Marika felt her own agoraphobia creeping back, the city threatening to expand around her again. Fighting it, she squeezed her mother closer.

“Don’ be afraid,” she said. “Look, dis street’s just like Main Street, only bigger. We’ve seen dem on 3V. An’ all dese aliens, we’ve prolly met near every one of dem, since everyone visits da biodome. An’ look, see doze Ay-rabs, doze Injuns, an’ dem Chinee? More visitors to da dome. So it’s just like da dome, dese streets and dese people. Da size is bigger, but we’s only in dis little bit.”

Her mother seemed to calm down, no longer holding them back. Marika was able to speed them along until they caught up with the hybrid, who grudgingly agreed to travel with them.

At first the equatorial humidity of the African coast was a novelty for Marika, but all too quickly it became an oppressive soup that she trudged through. After an hour of this, she spotted a fast food restaurant she knew from 3V commercials. Her stomach growled and she led the way to the General Gao’s Chicken.

As the trio approached the restaurant, a beggar sat up to accost them.

“Do mine eyes deceive me, or is this Marika of the American Habitat Park?”

“Yeh, dat’s right,” said Marika, happy to be recognized. “An’ dis is my mamma, Oosa.” The beggar was a Chinese woman with obvious mutations—her skin was partially pebbled in patches, and her messy black hair had a number of fleshy tendrils like pale worms.

“But what are you doing out here, so far from your ancestral home?”

“Biodome done got burned up.”

“Burned? Oh, terrible, terrible. It signals the end of an era. I hate to bother you under such trying circumstances, but could you give me some food?”

“Whatcha name?”

“Forgive me, purest of pure ones, this tainted one is called Trash.”

“Okay, Trash, how ’bout I hire ya for a long trip?”

“To where are you travelling, purest?”

“Sky Train.”

“Sk—Sky Train?” stammered Trash. “All the way to Tansangniya?”

“Ta Kilimanjaro.”

“To Qilimazhaluo-shan,” said Trash in wonder, shaking her head slowly. “That is halfway across Feizhou.”

“Yeah, long way. Like I said.”

Trash gestured Marika closer. Marika squatted down.

“Purest, forgive me, but is yon hybrid also in your party?”

“Yeah, his name’s Duke.”

“O purest, this is dangerous, do you not know?”

“I do. If ya come wif us, ya can guard me.”

Trash laughed.

“True,” she said. “I am tainted—he would never eat me. Still, it’s a long way. Where is your car, purest?”

“Ain’t got no car.”

“No car! But purest, how will you go?”

“On foot. Get rides.”

“Getting rides for only one or two persons is one thing, but it seems less likely with the three you have, and even less with four, should I be added. Purest, would you consider hiring a taximeter cabriolet?”

“Sure, if’n we could pay da price. Where dey at?”

“I know this man, a driver who owns his car. I think he would be interested in a job like this.”

And so they came to meet Driver Danesh, a cyborg taxi man. Danesh told them the trip would take at least eight days, and pointed out that accommodations along the way would not be free. He mentioned cities, Kahawa, Cipla, and Gazprom, names that were like wondrous fables to Marika. Mother Oosa came out of her stupor then, announcing that they were “on tour,” and she negotiated with Danesh about giving paid visits to towns and cities along the way.

“We’ll call it, A Evenin’ wif Marika, Last o’ da Biodome,” she said. “Or make dat Tea Time, dependin’ on da hour. An’ I’ll get up on da stage, or on a box, or even on da hood o’ da car, if it come to dat, an’ I’ll give a little speech like dis—Ladies an’ gentlemen, I’s sure you know dat I is Oosa, an’ dis here’s my daughter Marika. Many or most o’ ya has visited our home, da dear ol’ biodome, where us folks has lived fer generations beyond countin’. An’ now, fer da first time, we is come to visit you.”

The money raised this way would form the basis of Danesh’s fee.

Danesh realized they were asking him to drive on spec. He considered it carefully, the fingers of his metal hand drumming on the counter.

***

The first day they drove, made their stop, did the job, and slept a few hours before starting out again. This set the pattern, and even though one town was Chinese, another was Indian, and a third was Russian, still, they were all pretty much the same, despite the bank, the pharmacy, or the mosque at the center of each. They kept gaining elevation as they drove east into the heart of the continent. On the fourth day they were two thousand feet above sea level, where the air was thinner and drier. That night Marika saw stars for the first time.

But as they got farther from the coast, the work itself became harder. Marika was just an object, but by stages she went from being an object of beauty to being an object of scorn. She met each threshold with greater unease, but in the end she always agreed—first to pose nude, then to wear the dog collar, and later to lick the boot.

On the seventh day they lost the car. They were still about 275 miles from their goal. Marika offered to keep Driver Danesh on at a lower wage as a porter, and Danesh accepted. They continued on foot.

***

Day after day they hiked along, mile after mile, strung out in a line. Marika would stop to allow her mother to rest, and the others would pass. Then later the pair would pass the others and find themselves at the head.

Marika was at the front one day at around five p.m., with Trash and Oosa about fifty yards behind. The path was fairly faint, fading out completely in a clump of underbrush, but Marika saw the path appear again on the other side. Rather than go around, she went straight. Suddenly the ground gave way beneath her feet and she fell through space. Marika landed abruptly, and after a dazed moment she found she was in a pit, on a bed of spikes, fifteen feet below ground level.

Unhurt, she gasped at the sight of the deadly twelve-inch spikes. She thought herself lucky to have escaped being skewered on these cruel stakes, but then she realized that it wasn’t luck, it was her dress—her cumbersome, heavy dress that held her flesh safely above the thirsty points. She laughed hard for a while, then she shouted for rescue.

Trash and Oosa came along.

“Get a vine an’ pull me out,” said Marika.

Trash went away. Oosa sat down on a log. The hybrid came next.

“Are you injured?”

“No,” she said. “Just get a vine an’ pull me out.”

“A vine,” he said, sitting down on the log.

Marika tugged on her earlobes as she searched for a way up the walls that were smooth, yellow, and incurved. Finally Driver Danesh appeared with Trash and a vine. They made quick work in pulling her up.

The party started off again, with Duke in the lead. Marika was ashamed of her stupid mistake for several minutes until the hybrid disappeared through the path with a yell. They hauled him out and patched his leg with green leaves.

As they finished this first-aid, Marika realized they were being watched by seven hybrids nearby. Her terror was blunted when Duke spoke to them in their alien language, saying something that made them laugh, their sharp shark teeth flashing. He conversed a bit with them and then said, “Come, they invited us to their village.”

As they went to the village, Trash gave Marika a constant stream of information—that they would all be killed; that all these hybrids were female, and all hybrids were sterile like mules; that Duke would save them; that Duke would kill them himself and become the village king.

The squalid settlement was a double circle of ramshackle huts, patchwork tents, and scrap-metal shacks. Marika learned that the males were all away at a war, but would be back soon. Then the visitors went through the tedium of bartering for the rental of two rooms for the night.

Marika nodded off. Trash woke her up to lead her and Oosa to one of the shacks.

“This one is for us women,” said Trash. “And the luggage. The men will be in another one.”

The place was dirty, with some little bags hanging from the roof poles and insects everywhere. The hybrid women took Marika’s dress with a promise to repair it for her, then Marika curled up among their suitcases and bags, falling asleep in an instant.

In the middle of the night she woke up from Oosa’s coughing and gagging. The air was thick with a rank odor. Marika lit a candle stub and investigated, tracing the stink to the hanging bags.

Marika handed the candle to Trash and took down the largest of the bags. To avoid losing anything of value, she emptied the bag into her Bo Peep bonnet. Out tumbled a human hand, five big toes, three eyes, and an ear. The hand was fresh, the others coated with a bluish silver slime.

“Der, dat’s da one,” she said, poking the hand. “Dey didn’t use da gel on dat one yet.”

Trash moaned and doubled over in a fight against vomiting.

“Hey, buck up,” Marika told her. “Go open da door, breathe out dere.”

Trash scrambled to follow these instructions while Marika scraped excessive slime off the items to spread on the hand. After Trash had gulped down some fresh air, she asked, “Purest one, how is it that you can cope with this?”

“Da gunk? From bein’ a dog rancher, I guess. I done da herdin’, but also da butcherin’, an’ dat gel is for keepin’ it fresh. Dere now, see? Covered up, dat hand ain’t stink no mo’. Still, Trash, dis proves you’s right ’bout da danger here. We gotta take turns sleepin’ so’s we don’ get surprised.”

After a fretful night they left the village at dawn, forgetting to retrieve the dress in their hurry.

***

Some days later Marika faced a stand off. An extended family refused to give her party food in exchange for doing farm chores, or even charity food so they would leave. At this point Marika wore a canvas sunhat, a red t-shirt advertising a brand of cigarettes that snugged jealously to her curves, and a ragged pair of pants; her arms were sunburned an angry red. They had tried playing on her biodome fame, but these stubborn Indian females seemed to know nothing of her. Driver Danesh had tried to win them over as a fellow ethnic, but had also failed. The party had run out of options, and her stomach was an empty pit of gnawing hunger. The previous farms had worked out, but now this.

She felt her frustration turn to anger. She whirled around and strode deliberately to the hybrid.

“We gotta scare deese grubbers,” she muttered to him. “Take off all ya clothes, get out ya knife, an’ go wif what I do.”

“All right,” said Duke, “but this is going to cost you a body part.”

In sudden, icy fear, she asked, “Which one?” She hoped it would be a kidney, or maybe something as trivial as her appendix.

“The hair of your scalp.”

She nearly laughed in relief. “Okay.”

The hybrid began removing his clothes, which increased his dark menace exponentially.

“Hey,” said Driver Danesh with alarm. “What is going on here?”

“Quiet, all of you,” said Marika. “I have to do this.”

She turned to the farmwomen. “Y’all is so stingy, ya make me do dis. Look at him. He take off his clothes, he come with his knife, ya gonna wish you was never born.”

Marika was pleased to see the farmers shift slightly closer together, traces of fear dawning on their faces.

“He is my devil, my curse on ya. Ya gonna wish ya done give us lots of food, half ya food, ’cause now—”

The hybrid’s heavy hand dropped onto her shoulder.

“I’ll take the payment now,” he said.

“Now?” she squeaked, her mouth dry.

“Yes. When they see what I do to you, then they will believe.”

“All right.” She took off her hat, shook out her sweaty blonde curls.

“You should kneel.”

Marika knelt on the hard ground, fixing the Indian women with what she hoped was a baleful glare.

Duke lifted the oily tresses off her shoulders. Her neck felt cool and refreshed as he made a quick topknot on her crown.

“No, Marika, no!” cried her mother.

“Precious one, please halt this!” cried Trash.

Marika held up her hand to them and said, “Do it now.”

She gasped with surprise when the shimmering blade touched her forehead. She held her breath as it traced along her hairline down to the right, behind her ear, across the back of her neck, behind her left ear, and up to her forehead again. Then the hybrid tugged and the whole thing came off like a wig.

***

Several days later, Marika and Trash were scouting ahead in the border town of a war-torn land. They knew their party could not pass through the town because the males would be arrested or pressed into service, but the women hoped to get supplies or information.

The day was hot and lazy, and there weren’t any supplies, nor any information except that the war was tentatively over. The one bright spot in the place was a fenced lot filled with hundreds of bicycles, watched over by two Chinese soldiers in a guard shack.

“Could we buy some?” murmured Marika to Trash.

“With what, purest? Besides, they can’t sell them. They’re soldiers, not merchants.” But Trash’s lips bent into a sly, knowing smile.

“So what, den?” asked Marika, trying to guess at the riddle. “We come back at night an’ steal a few?”

“No, too dangerous. They might shoot.”

“I give up.”

“We make them give us bikes. We seduce them.”

“No way.”

“Easy, easy, purest—we only promise them, okay? We don’t actually do anything.”

“I dunno.”

“Just follow my lead,” said Trash, starting forward. Marika held back. Trash linked her arm in Marika’s and drew her along.

The soldiers sat up with interest as the women walked toward them. Trash called out something in Chinese, and the soldiers smiled. One said something back and they waved the women over.

Marika saw that the men were young, barely twenty. The taller one said something to her, and seeing she didn’t understand, he said, “English okay?”

“Yeh, English okay.”

“Now the war’s over, right?” said Trash. “So we should have a party, to celebrate.”

The soldiers were in favor of that.

The taller one said to Marika, “Please take off your hat, for just a second.”

Marika removed her hat, and they were surprised to see her bald head.

“Saturnian?” said the other one to Trash.

“No, no,” said Trash, giggling coquettishly behind her scaly hand.

“I’s human,” said Marika, replacing the mannish sunhat.

“We have booze and drugs hidden at another place,” said Trash. “If you lend us some bikes for a little while, we will go get the stuff, come back, and party with you.”

“You look kind of like Marika,” said the taller one, and she saw the hungry way he looked at her.

“Who?” said Trash, her tendrils twitching.

The other soldier said, “Yeah, maybe, if she had a blonde wig.”

“So lend us some bikes, and then we party,” said Trash. “Okay?”

“I don’t know,” said the taller one, rubbing at his chin as he looked over Marika, his hunger wavering.

“Go on,” said Trash to Marika. “Lift up your shirt.”

“Wha—?” said Marika, feeling her heart sink. But it wasn’t as bad as wearing the dog collar, or licking the boot, so she did it, briefly exposing her pale breasts tipped with pink before she turned away in shame.

The soldiers lent them two bicycles and never saw them again.

***

Five people and two bicycles. The males pedaled and the women rode.

The detour around the border town was long. Oosa’s health was failing. They found a doctor, but he demanded payment upfront.

Marika felt a panic. She shifted her mother over to Trash and stepped off the wide porch, past Driver Danesh, to stand before Duke.

“I need some money ta fix up my mamma.”

“Every body comes to an end,” said the hybrid. “Maybe it is time to let her go.”

“No! She’s all I got left. I got to sell you something. Tell me what.”

“Well, you know, there are rules ...” Duke stroked his chin, thinking on it. “For you, it should be something that doesn’t show. I guess that means it could be a kidney or a lung, but you still need those, so it should be something that is not so necessary to daily life.”

“Like a little toe?”

“Yes, but that isn’t worth enough. I know! A little lump of flesh, like the tip of your ear lobe, only one that nobody will see.”

***

Marika sold that little button of meat and gave the money to the doctor, who began treating Oosa.

Oosa died despite all the efforts. Through her terrible black sorrow, Marika was desperate to raise enough money to cremate her body to keep it from the aliens. Again she turned to the hybrid.

“Duke, I gotta sell something. Please!”

“Luck has been bad for you. Maybe you should just quit. Make a life for yourself here.”

“But den everythin’ we done is fer nuthin’. Dere ain’t nuthin’ here, you know dat—da boom town is at Sky Train. Please, ain’t dere sumpin’ else I can sell? Kidney? Lung?”

“No, no,” said Duke. “Now it will be something that shows. What fills up your shirt.”

***

After the cremation, the four of them went on. Marika was now bald and flat-chested, a genderless person, looking like a boy with wide hips and swollen thighs. Driver Danesh was better than when he had started, owing to the fact that at every opportunity during the trip he had upgraded his cyborg parts. In a similar way, Trash had improved herself by spending her money on mutagenic alien foods and substances—her ears had fallen off and all her skin was now pebbled, so that she hardly seemed human any longer. Duke was the only one who seemed unchanged.

They began scrounging food from garbage bins. Trash wept silently the first time Marika ate alien food scraps, risking mutation, and she no longer called her “purest” after that.

There were days when they smoked cigarette butts for energy and hunger suppression, nights when they slept on the roadside in utter exhaustion.

At last they came to Station City, out on the Serengeti Plain.

The city was a lot like Liboweier, it being full of aliens and having a mixture of buildings active and abandoned. Marika was doubtful, then disappointed.

“But where’s da mountain?” she cried. “An’ how come I ain’t been hearin’ da boom—should be one every hour!”

“The boom is heard on the east side of the mountain,” said Driver Danesh, “not on the west side. And the mountain is seventy-five miles away.”

“Seventy-five? Another seventy-five miles?”

“The space cars cover it in seconds. Somehow or another the space cars are loaded into the underground tube here, and fired like a bullet that comes out at the mountain top, way over there.”

The guards at the gate would not allow Marika to enter without a sponsor from inside or the posting of a bond. She gave the name of Uncle Sugar, but they checked and said he was not there. She tried Johnny Jingo, Legal Eagle, and even Jimmy Gimme. It did not work. The guards said that none of her relatives were there.

Another barrier, here at this penultimate stage, was still a bad surprise for Marika. In a sense she had been toughened by her travel, giving her a rhino hide, but in another sense her layers had been removed, leaving her the skin of a tomato, such that this new barrier cut right through her, straight to her heart, which erupted with rage and defiance. At the eye of the storm she knew that she had only herself, that there was no other help, that there was no other way. She took a deep breath, let it out. She knew what to do, and she promised herself it would be the last time.

“Duke,” she said, “before ya go in, come over here a ways. I wanna talk wif you.”

“Listen,” he said. “You and the others can make some money here, outside the wall. Maybe not enough to get in, but—”

“Take one o’ my ovaries.”

His mouth snapped shut. He looked at her in silence, then said, “The law is very plain about that.”

“Which mean dat da price is bestest.”

Duke’s eyes bulged out. Sweat beaded on his brow. The tables seemed to have turned. Silently he walked into a maze of empty buildings, and after telling the others to wait, she followed.

The buildings seemed to be mainly temporary structures from when the space cannon was being built: dorms, beer halls, laundries, gambling dens, warehouses, and the like. Deep inside the maze, Duke led Marika into a dingy surgical suite lit by a dim naked bulb. He stood facing a corner. She took off her clothes, her shoes, her pants, her shirt, and her panties. She choked back a moan at the sight of her flattened chest, sudden tears spilling from her eyes, then she climbed up on the surgery bed.

“I is ready,” she said.

Duke turned around slowly, stiffly. He advanced haltingly, step by step, with heavy breathing and his wide eyes darting around a circuit of her hips, her thighs, her loins. She closed her eyes, but she could feel his gaze, like laser beams, spiraling in from hips, to thighs, to loins, over and over again.

“Woman, you tempt me too far!” he roared. She opened her eyes in time to see Duke drive a spike through her head. As her sight grew dim, he blurred. Hoisting her up, he pushed her against the wall and drove the spike into the wall so that she dangled there like a pinned butterfly.

Then the blur was gone and she was alone. The light stopped fading. Marika hung there, thinking of the steps that brought her to this fate, over and over again, and the hours turned into days. She remembered the time when she had lost the dress, and in the room the dust fell upon her like the hot ash from a spewing volcano. She recalled how she had sold her scalp, believing it was just her hair, and on the wall the days turned into years. Again she sold her clitoris, then her breasts, but then her mind jumped back to when she was back on the road. While posing nude, the line they had her say was, “Twenty-five in one night,” which she repeated so many times that it went through all shades of meaning and became meaningless. While wearing the dog collar, her line was “My Plot of Three Daggers,” which never meant anything to her, nor did her boot-licking line, “I rejected the Hundred Days’ Reform,” and yet even though the words meant nothing, still cool tears of shame had skipped lightly down her burning cheeks to patter against the floorboards, while in the medical suite around her the years turned into decades.

Suddenly there was a blurry motion, then there were two. A blur came close, very close, and all at once Marika fell, as if gravity had returned, but her body was softly stopped by a blur.

Marika’s vision cleared, the room grew brighter, and she was surprised to see Trash and Driver Danesh. Both seemed untouched by the passing of decades. They were talking to Marika, but she could not understand. It was something about a city, a duke who did wrong, and going home.

She was so happy to see them, her heart was hammering in her chest and tears were streaming down her face. They were trying so hard to help her, and she said yes, yes. She marveled at the years, the decades, and they clouded up, saying it had only been days, weeks. Then she cried in pain and confusion, but they comforted her, saying it was all right now.

They took Marika to a Saturnian surgeon who reinstalled her parts. They took her to a Gray tailor who gave her a new Marie Antoinette Bo-Peep uniform that was even better than her old one. They took her back home by maglev train to Liboweier, the place of her birth, where the city put her in a mansion, cherishing her as the last American.

After all this flurry of activity, she found herself alone for an hour. It was a relief. From her balcony she looked out over the city in the long late afternoon. She spotted the ruins of the biodome. She tried to find meaning in what she had gone through, but all she could come up with was, “I was stripped down to nuthin’. No, first I was called bad names, every bad name, an’ run out like a animal, some dirty animal. I was pollution. Den I was stripped down to nuthin’, an’ I was nuthin’. Later on I was builded up, an’ bringed back, but I is no more da same as before.”

Beneath it all she felt the itching fear that the whole thing would happen again. She recognized that possibility, and vowed that she would do things differently the next time. 

Michael Andre-Driussi is an Associate Member of SFWA. He is the author of “Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle,” and “Handbook of Vance Space,” a guide to the science fiction worlds of award-winning Grand Master Jack Vance.