Tungsten Dreams
by Noah Isherwood
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
Rourke went through a pack of Fun-Gum on every freight run from Qart Hadast. He tore into the foil pouch one hundred clicks into the trip, a point marked by the end of the original railway.
Folly’s End is what Rourke called it. The tungsten rail ties had been left behind in the embankment, and they stuck up at painful angles, twisted beams of dull cinder cursing a dried blood sky. As the train picked up speed, Rourke saw the ruined track in a prickly blur like the spine of some shallow-buried leviathan. The story of the interrupted initial track-laying was well-known, but Rourke was the first to notice that Folly’s End marked the attainment of top speed for the outward-bound locomotive.
Hamilcar-12 flew past the railroad’s false start at just under two hundred kilometers per hour on triplet rails, inertial engines harvesting Baraq’s immense gravity to drag along fifteen clicks of rolling stock. Folly’s End closed out the first of many legs in the freighter’s four-day run to the polar tungsten mines and back again to Qart Hadast Spaceport. The string of left-behind spikes and ties had been Rourke’s first real impression of the planet, besides the crushing weight of the place.
He had arrived planet-side in the dead of night. Having been warned of the gravitational change, he thought he was ready for the downward grip of the place, but nothing had prepared him for the tense moment when the shuttle’s artificial gravity powered down and his exosuit booted up. Baraq embraced his lungs with terrestrial drowning for a span of six seconds. The veteran loadmasters chuckled over the bent heads of the green arrivals, many of whom became ill upon feeling the new burden of living on Baraq. Then their suits came to life as one and the weight seemed to disappear, bringing laughs from some of those who had been on the verge of panic. Rourke was not one of these.
Even through the mechanical assistance and pulmonary pressurization, he felt the suggestion of weight at the edges of his mind, in the tips of his fingers and toes, and envisioned himself crushed underground, whelmed by a mountain of sediment. The windowless processing centers and training simulators only reinforced the feeling, and by the time he arrived aboard Hamilcar-12 on his fifteenth day on-planet, he was practically mad with claustrophobia. He still had not seen the surface of Baraq even once.
The company habitation domes were rich with amenities, including modest artificial gravity that lessened the planet’s downward draw on workers, but there were no windows. Rourke’s room overlooked the central plaza like all the others. Below, the roofs of other balconies stair-stepped downward to the round parkland where rolling grass, a few stands of trees, and a shallow pond emulated a more hospitable environment than the desert beyond the outer walls.
Rourke watched other employees walk beside the pond during recreation hours and saw families picnic on the lush sward without exosuits, no breathing apparatus in sight. False security, he thought; manufactured nostalgia. The small park was modeled after a larger one at Baraq Minerals headquarters on Qart Prime, which was itself designed according to old Martian customs, and those in turn were hazy recreations of ancient Earthly landscapes. The grasping at straws sat on Rourke’s chest, doubling his feeling that the walls were closing in. Fun-Gum was a welcome respite.
From the automatic pharmavendor in the commissary, all manner of psychoactives could be had for a pittance, and Rourke made great use of this bounty during his acclimation and training period. The chemicals smoothed his anxiety during his drag-along hours inside, with a warm body glow and dazed euphoria buoying the pressure on his chest. By the time he was cleared for duty on Hamilcar-12, he was more than used to casually popping a stick of Fun-Gum just about anywhere, mumbling something about halitosis and riding the high.
His first hours on the locomotive had been measured by its internal rhythms. Even outside the hab, he seemed weighed down, closed in. His eyes were glued to dials and screens, parsing processes and benchmarking the train’s vast array of operating systems. Begin acceleration, manually validate linkage pressure, triple-check braking protocols, on and on, all timely commands and routines attuned to the viscera of the machine. Bear, Rourke’s supervisor, had told him that somewhere during final production, the locomotive’s designers had considered removing windows from the plan entirely.
“Reasoning was, since there’s nothing out there to see, that nothing could be vid-screened. They didn’t want to risk debris coming through, but hell, use thicker glass! Brains up top may be able to work in boxes, but we humans need to see outside. Wouldn’t be a proper train if you couldn’t see what you’re steaming past.”
For all the senior engineer’s praise of the windows, Rourke had barely been able to look out until the four hours of his first shift had nearly elapsed. Until he had become comfortable with the gauges, lights, and screens inside, he could only bear to pull his eyes away for a blink through the glass, a hand’s breadth thick.
Still, they had begun their run in the wee hours, so there was nothing to be seen but his own sweating brow reflected in the darkness beyond. By the time he finally trusted Hamilcar-12’s ability to not self-destruct during a moment of inattention, the terrain was whipping past under a pale dawn. There really was not much to see after all.
Under ruddy clouds, a rough plain of hardpan and gravel the color of bone stretched on to great distance with giddy regularity. At top speed, the nearer landscape was a blur but, when fixing his eyes on the horizon far across the trackless expanse, Rourke could not shake the feeling that the train was making no progress whatsoever.
The vanishing point was aptly named on Baraq, a union of sky and planet that was simply composed of a hazy umber band, not distinct enough to be called a line. The plains were forever flickered with wisps of sand and rolling clouds of grit, all snaking and dancing their ephemeral way to parts unknown at the behest of the merciless wind, wriggling in low waves compacted by Baraq’s gravity. Dust devils sprang up in the middle distance, leaping in and out of existence. Rourke felt the tickle of a phantom zephyr through his suit, imagined his skin drying and cracking in the parched blast, flaking off into the gusts until he was no more than a running sheet of dust.
Distractions kept such haunted feelings at bay, but the pull of Baraq kept them in orbit about Rourke’s subconscious. Nonetheless, that first study of the tableau racing past had inspired his imagination. The openness beyond the rattle and hum of the train’s hurtling pace was a welcome balm. As he became more familiar with his duties, he began to let his eyes wander from the control panels to the whipping plains, each look longer than the last. He spent every waking moment of his off-shift gazing out one of the two picture windows in the crew lounge, chewing serenely.
The view was the same on either side of the train, save for the second set of triple tracks, always on the left. This second line was nearly always empty, except around the midpoint of the route when they passed Hamilcar-11. The gully between the two lines was periodically filled by sidings which housed maintenance cars or smaller trains crossing the main trunk to and from the outer spurs. This traffic interested Rourke less and less as he clocked more time on the train. His attention was more focused on the stark beyond.
Bear had taken notice of his preoccupation right away and warned Rourke against it. “Everything that matters on Baraq is right here on the high iron. Watch a screencast or something. Out there’s too empty to do you any good.”
“My mind is full enough,” Rourke had replied.
Bear had grumbled at this and retreated from the bridge, leaving Rourke to ponder the dusty void once more. He noticed the wrecked line as they decelerated into Qart Hadast at the end of his second run. Its approach coincided with initial braking procedures, and he confirmed that it marked top speed on his third run. He called it Folly’s End after asking another engineer about the broken rails, and his first landmark was born.
By the end of Rourke’s first year aboard Hamilcar-12, he had noted seventy-two landmarks of varying importance to the train’s route, all collected in a small notebook. There was the Hanno Spur, which marked the end of the first turn east before the northern straight sprint, the point at which the red light atop the rear engine disappeared behind the bulk of the consist. There was Naravas Defile, a distant eastern canyon whose lip showed dawn glimmering up from beneath the ground. He shared some of his landmarks with Bear one day, who laughed him off the bridge.
“The desert cracked you! Told you it would!”
Rourke had retreated to his bunk with a face hot from embarrassed anger, chomping on a double dose of Fun-Gum to forget about it. But Bear had remembered a few of the names, and would even use them at times, a tiny curl of humor in the corner of his rough mouth, humor without malice.
* * *
“There went Folly’s End. We’re galloping now, you got this?” Bear asked.
“’Have I got this?’ Yeah, go smoke your cancer stick,” Rourke replied.
“We all have our vices. G’head, jack off to the view, I don’t mind.”
“Maybe I will. Oh, and go ahead and take your off-shift, I’ve got things well in hand up here.”
“I don’t want to see what you’ve got in your hand,” Bear retorted. “You sure you want to switch off early?”
“Why not? They gave me an extra Energex in the caf this morning. I’m wired.”
“Huh, and I’m tired, so I’ll take you up on it. Holler if we crash and die.”
Rourke grunted affirmatively as Bear clanked off the bridge, door slamming behind. He sniffed and flexed his shoulders, using the strength of his suit to crack his spine. With a flick of the wrist, he flipped his helmet visor back and tossed a stick of Fun-Gum into his mouth. Outside, the desert slid past in silence, and all Rourke could hear was the mechanical breath of the engine itself. It was a chaotic rhythm and, from day one, he had found himself nodding along to the broadly repeating pattern of clicks, hums, and beeps. He discovered that antique jazz nicely complemented the whoosh-clank-pop of the solitary cab, especially when he slowed it down to a fraction of its recorded speed.
Staring out the window, he would drift through complex rhythms, tapping his heels along and manipulating the speed of playback with one finger on the audio dial. Backed by a band made up of inertial drivers and thousands of tungsten wheels, he improvised complex remixes that danced over the bleak scene outside, getting lost in hours-long meditations on machine sound in his helmet and warm sand pumping through his veins.
Although the train’s interior compartments were pressurized, the on-shift engineer was required to maintain full suit functionality throughout his shift. Company policy. Baraq Minerals’ commitment to safety was one of the things Rourke had harped on to convince his mother that he was not indeed moving to the far edge of known space to die.
“You’ll be all alone doing a hazardous job. It’s like you’ve got no self-preservation instinct! Or maybe that’s the point, to join Carolena,” she had accused.
Ignoring the stab of rage at hearing his mother so flippantly refer to his deceased fiancee, he had coolly pointed out that she had been pushing him for years to give up his artistic pursuits in favor of a more rational career, that the job offered high pay and excellent amenities, and did she want him to go back to bumming his paintings and playlists?
“Besides,” he said, “it’s not as if I can go anywhere more peaceful than a mining planet in the Phoenecides. It’ll be like a spiritual retreat.”
Soon, his mother was gloating about transferable skills and diversification, all smoke and mirrors. Rourke was merely content in the fact that he could easily justify his inability to communicate with or visit Carolena’s grieving family by pointing out that he was an essential worker on the far side of the galaxy. So no, he could not make it home for the holidays, and especially not for Carolena’s memory-day. The callousness of his choice had faded into a dull ache, and the weight of Baraq was helping to keep it down.
Rourke offered the desert a rueful sneer at this thought and drew out his small notebook from a pouch at his suit’s waist. He thumbed through the synthetic pages and perused the list of landmarks. He had begun recording them in this manner after number five, the distant Magon Range, just barely visible on the horizon when the train began its journey back after being laden with seven hundred hopper cars of tungsten. Rourke had quickly come to envision the recording process as a meditative practice.
After his first few runs, the novelty of living on a wasteland planet had worn off, and he ended up acting out the spiritual retreat farce sooner than expected. He ordered the pocket pad from off-planet, along with a larger sketchbook and collection of pencils, brushes, and paints. In the murmur of the train and silence of his simple quarters back at Qart Hadast, Rourke drew out his thoughts.
Each landmark had its own page spread, emblazoned with name and number, as well as the date of discovery. The left page contained neat lines describing the spot, and some of Rourke’s thoughts about it in his tight, precise hand. The facing page was for a sketch. When he first recorded a landmark, Rourke would roughly line out its shape. At each subsequent sighting, he would add a layer of detail, a dull shadow or dotted line. He restrained himself to one detail at a time, reasoning that his pocket journal was for field notes, not final works. The more complete pieces he created in his rooms at the company dome.
Using his pocket sketches for reference, Rourke began to craft larger, more detailed images of his landmarks. He stuck to drawing at first, working out detailed studies of boulders, distant ridges, and gravel fields in lead and ink. Watercolors and gouaches soon followed. Rourke’s out-of-practice hand soon loosened up, and he began to feel the weight of Baraq easing.
He realized, on his ninety-seventh day on-planet, that he had not picked up a paintbrush throughout Carolena’s illness. The thought dropped into his mind as he put the finishing touches on a rendering of landmark twelve, an impact crater that coincided with the second turn of the return leg. His hand shook slightly as he grappled with the fact, and his doped mind raced to prove it wrong. A wave of anger came, and he flung the brush into a tray with its fellows. So much time wasted. Then the rage vanished and the hollow of his heart reasserted itself. A year spent beside his dying love and not in the studio, and he was angry about the work he did not accomplish.
Soberly, he removed the likeness of the crater and began work on a portrait of Carolena. Two hours later, he flung it against a wall with a sob when he got to the eyes. The brown he used for the sky of Baraq was the same color of Carolena’s irises as he remembered them, a brown that he mixed himself from mineral pigments gathered from the outer wastes. He then drank himself into a stupor, waking hours later in the false twilight of the dome’s dusk.
He gathered up the smeared canvas from the floor and set it back on the easel. The face, blotted from its collision with a wall and hours on the floor, was unrecognizable, especially in the twilight. Rourke picked up his brushes. He painted two eyes amid the swirled, ruined remains of a face, deep bay-brown and flecked with taupe and gray. He returned to bed and drifted quickly back to sleep, the press of the planet nestling his fading consciousness.
Roused from this reverie by an electronic chime, Rourke dropped the notebook back into its pouch and blinked hard. He yawned as he pressed a flashing button to alert Bear of the shift change. Switching off a drawn-out trombone tune, he wondered at how swiftly the hours had passed. Looking out the right-side window, he peered back and saw the fifteen-click consist bent far out into the desert; they were approaching Hanno Spur.
The door swung open behind him, and Bear clanked onto the bridge, puffing the last of the smoke from his cigarette and adjusting his exosuit helmet.
“Off-shift never lasts long enough,” the older man growled.
“Agreed.”
“Anything to report?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary. All systems go. The manual brake check comes up in about a hundred clicks, just so you know.”
“Ugh, you got off easy taking first watch, you sneaky bastard,” Bear said.
“Learned from the best. Have fun,” Rourke replied.
Bear grumbled out a string of oaths and waved Rourke off.
Rourke turned and exited the bridge, twisting off his helmet as he stepped into the wide corridor, his suit’s servos whirring as he strolled mechanically towards the lounge.
Copyright © 2024 by Noah Isherwood
