The Empire of Gut and Bone Read Online Free PDF Page A

them: “Fried chicken. New York strip sirloin. Potatoes au gratin. Asparagus with hollandaise sauce. Mac and cheese. Fried shrimp. Hush puppies.”
    “No puppies,” said Gregory, mouth full. “Ban on puppies.”
    After they’d eaten, they could fall asleep.
    Outside, the monotonous landscape went on and the twilight went on without change. Half-light. The slick, glistening plain. The dredge of the sleigh through sludge. Its clammy wake.
    When the boys woke up, the light was just the same. The veins still glowed faintly in the dome of the gut.
    Brian asked Dantsig, “What makes the veins glow?”
    He half shrugged. “Lux effluvium. The gook in the veins. I don’t know why. It gets real bright if you run electricity through it.”
    Brian asked, “Is it the blood?”
    Dantsig seemed uninterested in the question. “We call things blood and stomachs and hearts, but no one knows what all the equipment does. There’s a whole bunch of hearts, a cluster of them, but they aren’t shaped like your heart or a Norumbegan’s. It’s just, they look like they pump fluids. So people call them hearts. And there’s a bunch of organs filled with a different goo, and we call them stomachs, and there are other places we call lungs — fifteen or so, scattered around, we’ve found so far — but we don’t know much except that they get bigger and smaller. I’m telling you, no one knows. No one understands. It’s just the Great Body.”
    “What’s outside the Great Body?” Gregory asked, and Kalgrash added, “Has anyone ever gone out the mouth? Through the teeth and over the gums? Et cetera?”
    “Some of the rich Norumbegans — Varsity men — they fund expeditions sometimes to find mouths. Try to see if there’s anything out there. They head off into thewild gray yonder. Lots of equipment. Big fanfare.” He smiled. “None of them ever come back.”
    Gregory asked joyfully, “What about the butt? Anyone ever gone out the butt?”
    “They’ve been saving that for a special boy like you.”
    Brian did not like any of this much. Anxious, he watched the dull miles pass.
    In a while, they came to Delge. The first thing they could see through the gloom of Three-Gut was the derricks — tall, spindly arms and gantries reaching up out of the goo.
    “Mining,” said Dantsig. “They extract ore from the blood fluid. Valves go through to the capillaries.”
    The sleigh passed through heaps of slag. There were huts strung with electrical wiring.
    They didn’t see any people.
    Then came houses — shacks on stilts. They were high above the Fields of Chyme.
    Something was wrong. Several were burnt. They looked desolate. Piers stuck up out of the marsh, their tips blackened. No one crawled up and down their ladders.
    Huts had been pulled down and lay on their sides. The windows of one were smashed, and some red polka-dot curtains trailed out into the sludge.
    Doors were off their hinges.
    Dantsig was muttering in his own language. He slowed down the beasts. He stood up and surveyed the village’s wreckage.
    On an island, surrounded by docks, there had stood a little town. There was not much of it left. Houses were in ashes. The embers of the commissary still glowed. A few small flames flickered in the ruins. Goods — barrels, stoves, some metal sinks — could be made out, soot-blackened, beneath the fallen beams.
    Around the town there were large, round holding tanks. Holes had been blown in the metal. They were empty.
    Dantsig went below and brought up a rifle. He looked grimly from side to side.
    “I’m going to look around,” he told them. He said to Kalgrash, “Get your ax. Stand guard. Breathers: below.” He pointed down the hatch.
    Brian and Gregory looked at each other. They didn’t want to go below. They wanted to keep an eye out, too. It just felt safer.
    Dantsig dropped a gangplank and crept ashore. He told them to pull the gangplank up. They did. He motioned them to go below. They stayed put and watched him