Seeklight

Two other mechanics were covering the shift in the engine room that night. Daenek sat cross-legged on his bed, carefully rubbing with a wet cloth at the grease and dirt encrusted pages of the old book that Stepke had left behind so long ago. Slowly, so as not to damage the paper, he had over the last few weeks cleaned a dozen pages or so. The work was largely disappointing—most of the words remained illegible, and what he could read revealed nothing new to him. The book was some sort of history of interstellar travel, filled with dry technical information about the supraluminal drives that had been developed a century after the ancient seedships. Still, Daenek kept at it, staining his hands with the years’ accumulated dirt.

He looked up from the book as a knock sounded at the door.

On the other side of the screen that divided the room, he could hear Rennie roll onto her side and drop a coin or some other pilfered object with a dull click back into the little cloth bag in which she kept them. “Who’s that?” she said irritably.

The grinning face of Mullon, the cargo handler, was revealed when Daenek pulled the door open. “Hey, come on,” he said. “A bunch of us are going prowling.”

“Prowling?” Daenek looked at him in puzzlement.

“Yeah, down in the village.”

“What for?”

“You know, just to kick around. See what they left behind.”

Mullon jerked his head towards the stairwell at the end of the corridor. “Come on. We’re just going to slip over the side and look around, is all.”

The thought of the empty buildings waiting silently in the night exerted a disquieting fascination on Daenek. Like bones, he thought. The remains o] something dead.

Before he could say anything, Rennie came up behind him.

She was pulling on her leather jacket. “Yeah, let’s go on down,” she said, winking covertly at Daenek. “Maybe they did leave something—interesting behind.”

Without answering, Daenek turned and pulled his own jacket from his footlocker.

The short distance of roadway between the caravans and the village seemed faintly luminous in the moonlight. Daenek walked with his hands in his jacket pockets, not listening to the laughing conversations of the twelve or so others around him.

When they reached the edge of the village, Rennie pulled Daenek away from the rest of the group. Hidden by the corner of one of the buildings, they watched the others disappear into the unlit maze of narrow streets.

Daenek looked down and saw a small, dim point of red light glowing on Rennie’s palm. It was the seeklight. “Come on,” she said, closing her fist around the device. “We aren’t going to find anything by tagging along with that bunch.”

He nodded and followed her along the side of the building.

The enclosing walls of the squat wooden houses depressed him, bearing down on him like a weight. He began to wish that he were back aboard the caravan, away from these discarded husks and remnants of humanity, that blotted out the lower part of the night sky.

Rennie came to the building’s door. She tried the handle, then kicked at the side of it with her boot. The rotted wood splintered and gave way.

Inside, Daenek watched the seeklight’s small red point float around in the darkness like a disembodied eye. “Damn,” came Rennie’s voice. “Nothing down here. Where’s the stairs? Why’d I leave my flashlight on board?”

Daenek stumbled into a table, knocking the chairs placed on it clattering to the floor. The building was evidently one of the village’s inns. Holding his hands before him, he cautiously threaded his way between more tables and at last came to one of the building’s walls. He groped along its surface until he came to a window too caked with dust to allow any of the dim moonlight into the room. The glass shattered out into the street with a blow from the nearest chair. “There it is.”

In the faint light he could make out Rennie’s figure pointing to the stairway set agairtst the opposite wall. He crossed the room and followed her up the steps.

The first room they explored upstairs contained, as far as they could tell without a light, nothing but a sagging bed and a small cabinet. Rennie poked through its drawers even though the seeklight had made no response when held in front of it.

As she rummaged through the cabinet, Daenek slowly paced out the limits of the room, encountering only the musty-smelling tangle of old sheets and blankets in the center of the space. There were no windows in any of the walls.

“Hey, what’s this?” Rennie’s voice broke the silence. “I think it’s some candles.” There were sounds of more rummaging around in the cabinet. “And some matches, too.” In a few seconds, the room was lit up by a yellow sphere of candlelight.

Rennie lit another taper from the first and held it out to Daenek.

He took it and watched as she bent down and examined the things she had already pulled from the cabinet and piled on the floor. Her candle dripped little dots of wax on the heap of ragged-looking clothing.