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Page 2.
 Kion had developed a healing skill in his soul, to counter the terror and loneliness of distant gulay. By night and by day, he retreated into his innermost anima, where precious memories lay like bees making honey. A man’s memories were who he was. Without them, he would be just another animal, or a stranger to himself. For all the cruelties humans had practiced upon each other in the distant past, they had a new experience in these extreme alien prison camps. The Kaarrk were so alien that they could not fathom the human soul, and therefore could not trick or destroy a man’s or woman’s inner soul. They could only use their front-mansh, many of them former human subjects, to inflict brute pain and death. So the individual could escape into his memories, and dwell there amid moments of recaptured bliss. They were moments of healing balm.
Many nights, in his dreams, Kion floated through the pleasant streets of his home town eons and light years away from this hell. Kion's heart went to the two women standing in the doorway of their home cottage, smiling and waving to him. One was his young wife Anet, a blonde with a full figure, dimples, and perky eyes. The other was their daughter Anetena, a more slender copy of both parents, with mischief in her eyes, and long silky hair to make the boys at school crazy over her. In Bilton Township on Tancran chA within the Dominion, you could make yourself a sunshine sandwich and slather it with morning bird song. You never felt fear. You could enjoy things, like a distant train whistle over the forest hills. You could hold your daughter's hand and watch sailboats on a country lake. You could drive into town with your wife and daughter for biir or cafir and borgias 'n chippers under an awning. Nothing anywhere smelled or tasted as wonderful as on the world you called home.
Kion's night dreams always faded amid harsh morning reality. Their smiles turned sad as they rippled away. As dawn broke, the dreamy light of Bilton Township was replaced by a stench of urine leaking across the battered and smashed concrete floors of the POW barracks. He'd open his eyes amid the clatter of prisoners as they awoke in wooden bunks arrayed long and wide, stacked high into the industrial ceiling shadows. The piss smell signaled that another man had died in his bunk during the night, and voided in his last throes and rattles.
Black-robed psychopomp trusties from the chaplains' barracks would arrive. The guides of the dead wore silvered, smiling masks that veiled their stolid faces beneath. They carried tall staffs topped with red, glowing stingways to keep the living prisoners away. The psychopomps would take each corpse down the hall and drop it through a black hole in the wall, sort of the way spirit guides sent the dead across the river of forgetfulness. A similar dark-robed detail made their daily rounds outside, with a rumbling steel cart, to collect the night's deceased. The rest of the living marched out to their daily work detail—and hoped to return alive. The dead people, meanwhile, were taken to a series of trenches on the outskirts, where a buckloader and piled lime sacks waited.
On the morning of this particular day when his life changed forever, Kion enjoyed the main bright spot of each morning. This was the prisoners' walk through a delousing station. Men called it the rain corridor, and loved it. Prisoners filed through this splashing, glistening, monochrome corridor with a doorway of blinding daylight at its end. Distant voices yelled to keep the line moving as the men passed through. Each man savored his five minutes of chilly, cleansing deluge. Life was filled with sacred, cleansing passages. Cool water spattered from a hundred heads of broken concrete pipes under old ceilings dating to the aborted human colony, from the age of ManTime long ago. Ropes of water twirled around Kion, and thick spatters bounced in all directions. The prisoners had it down to a science. They stayed packed close together. They shuffled in unison as slowly as they could, to extend their shower as long as possible. They turned their faces up in ecstasy. They rubbed their clawed fingertips across their scalps. Once they burst through the door at the end, the brief paradise was over. They stumbled onto the sandy company street, where sun and wind dried their skin and tatters within minutes.
Kion tried to keep the memory of that bath in his soul all day long under the brutal sun. It was the only moment in the day that truly reminded Kion of those comforting hands about the Invincible Reductor: …who looks after us all, and brings us safely home from distant wars… (SOROE 6:8:2).
After the daily shower, Kion's labor battalion were marched to long rows of tables behind the slop house, or mess. Breakfast followed on breezy benches in the mild early light, while the sun Manaul fully rose in a purplish-blue sky over the eastern horizon. The world of Aerag-15 was filled, from dawn to dusk, with a low but pervasive fetor of hot sand and trillions of rotting macab insects. Morning fare consisted of the usual diesel-tasting cafir. The hot drink washed down shredded meatforms, fruits, and vegetable bits. These came in little h'andybars packaged inside tubes of tasteless, digestible, paper-like coatings by the mess cooks. Wasn't actually all bad, if your taste-smell buds could ignore the persistent background odor of dead insects—like the faintest aroma of armpit mixed with rotting blood.
The cool morning breeze turned into demonic blow torches by the time you had marched halfway to the day's work spot. Life's dilemma narrowed to a simple but all-important decision. Either you wore torn bits of clothing to keep the sun off your skin, or you roasted in your bare skin but felt whatever breeze wanted to soothe your sunburn. Innovative prisoners, who were going to survive longer, alternated between days of burn and days of roast, to divide the pain, and to switch days of healing. A prisoner without humor or flex sometimes went mad and ran screaming into the desert. A skimmer piloted by laughing merks would pick him off for pocket-change bounty money. It was a little h'andy thrown to the merks by uniformed Sekurita and their Kaarrk overlords.
Noon brought an exhausted rest in a shady place. Kion drank chilled cafir hinting of dieseled wood and dead macabs, but it cooled his pipes as it went down. He rested every moment he could, and inhaled the ever-present malodor. The smell dominated everything. It came from galactic quantities of dead sand flies buried in dunes by the wind, which brought their stench wafting by with turgid, raspy air.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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