The Seventh Rule

Cheeseburger Brown

I.

They say there is a spot so high that above a man's head would be a ceiling of blue emptiness no ladder can touch.

They say that hanging there, beyond reach, is an unblinking ball of flames.

They say also that there are great bodies of smoke up there, and when the bodies of smoke gather up together they weep droplets of water, and the tops of exposed things become wet in this way.

I doubt it. I believe any serious man would doubt it. And I have been a man for more than ten sleeps; even now my member is nearly healed. I have been on many hunts, and I have wandered far. Allow me to assure you: there is no such thing as sky.

I believed it as a boy. Elders tell such stories around the vents. Fantastic stories -- wonders witnessed, demons slain, heroes dispatched on quests to the overworld and dying in noble ways...

I too aspire to die in a noble way.

The overworld is real, certainly, but it is not so wild or ridiculous as they say. I have seen it. There is no ball of flames or blue emptiness, but there are many, many clans there composed of many, many families. Their ways are strange and wrong. They have lost their senses because they live too high up.

We, on the other hand, remain true. The roots beneath the overworld are our country. Our lives are hard but they are good. We fight and love and die in these tunnels the overworlders abandoned long ago. They turned their back on nature, but my people embrace it. In the roots we live according to the old ways, the ways long forsaken in the bright and busy above.

The roots are very beautiful. They are straight and they are keen in a way that men and animals are not. Their angles are true, their direction sure. Divine, they are, and rectilinear beyond all craft.

Some are marked by sacred arrows. Others have holy caution stripes.

It is true that some of the root clans paint images for their own purposes on the walls, but this disgusts my people. The roots are not for men to alter. The roots are older and stronger than men, and I believe they punish image-makers by caving in on them or playing shadow tricks on them.

The waters paint, too. They bleed through the walls and draw whorls of black stink or gay blossoms of orange burn or chalky white dots. The spirits communicate with my people in this way. By reading the marks, we learn about the future -- about births and traffic conditions, or evil.

II.

Our hunting grounds are the middleworld. It is dangerous, but we are brave.

To prepare for the hunt we sing traditional songs and cake our faces and bodies with grey mud. We draw yellow stripes on our arms and red stop signs over our hearts. We equip ourselves with sharp spears and heavy hammers, we recite the twenty rules of our nation, and we drink a fortifying lager of blood and sperm.

The middleworld howls and bellows and roars. We hear it even when we still have far to walk, over two hundred lamps distance. The thrum becomes louder as we climb the rusted rungs the good spirits have wrought for us from the face of the living pipe. Once inside a great vein, our hunters must twist themselves in among the black vines between lanes, for if any part of them strays too far it will be struck off by the flow. Many brave hunters die in this way.

The veins throb with the passage of giant worms. The worms move so quickly they appear as a smear. Our sharpest spotters tell us they have glimpsed ghosts imprisoned within the segmented bodies, trapped behind beady eyes of glass.

I believe they journey to the afterlife.

Along the base of the veins skip tinier things -- whales and their kin whose lanes are marked by golden lamps. They speed but cannot fly. In the flashing shadows of the worm-flow they bolt to and fro along the gutter, unearthly voices sliding up and then sharply down as they blast by.

We hunt them.

On the hunt we keep low to avoid touching the flow or the cocoon of winds that surrounds it. We hunker under orange cones woven by our women, orange cones that make us invisible to metal poltergeists and other tunnel monsters. The cones have slits for our eyes, and our feet project from beneath. They must be kept perfectly upright to remain invisible. The sixteenth rule of my clan keeps us mindful of this.

We lay our trap lines and knot them in the traditional manner, then waddle in our orange cones down to the breakdown alley to lie in wait for our quarry. Such as our fathers did, and our grandfathers before them.

On the day of which I speak we were hunting a very busy vein, the middleworld there not having grown apart and away from it all yet the way it had in other corners of the roots. The flow was thick.

We did not have to wait. Our net immediately ensnared a mammoth.

It whinnied and buzzed as it thrashed against our lines, speed ebbing away, corners knocking against the ground with a spume of sparks.

The spirits of the vein drew the wounded beast down into the breakdown alley where it came shuddering to a halt. A wash of dust rushed in after it, thickening the air into a ruddy gloom. In its wake was revealed our prey, hazard lights pulsing.

We sprang into action with a mighty yelp of war.

Our cones were cast off as we leapt. The great dull eyes that lined the thing's sides were easily smashed with our hammers. One after another we pulled the ghosts out, and when they fell upon the ground they became men again, and we clove them. They squealed like rats because they were not brave and they had not prepared themselves adequately for their passage from the world. Many men show themselves to be boys in this way.

Some of us peeled the rubber strips from the beast's sockets and coiled them for carrying while others tore free panels of armour to use for building. We sniffed out some good orange metal nerves and a bunch of black cleaners from the beast's lungs and interior wind system. We cut the skins off the seats for blankets. We took things with little lights on them, because little lights are captivating and women like us when we have them. We pumped out the water from the toilet tank and divided it among our canteens. We sliced the meat into neat quarters and tied it into bundles we could shoulder for the triumphant march home.

What a hunt!

III.

Not far from the vein, while marching a length of quiet pipe, we heard quarreling voices. I urged my brothers to continue homeward while I investigated, for my manhood was only recently achieved and like all young hunters I was hungry to prove myself against adventures so that I might be lauded and sung about over the vents.

Using all of my cunning I crept upon the quarrel, hugging the cables that feed the lamps as I clung underside the ceiling, a knife clutched in my handsome yellow teeth.

I found two people and a small blind whale.

They were overworlders, yes, but I did not fall upon them right away. I watched. Though their speech was ridiculous and incorrect I was never the less fascinated to see that their hearts were not entirely unlike our own -- they bickered as any man and woman might.

In my opinion they looked supple and delicious, and so I waited for my opportunity to strike, hanging unseen over their heads as they shouted.

But instead of trying to console the woman so his night could be peaceful the man's anger grew, and finally he struck her across the face as if she were not an adult woman but a misbehaving child.

She ran to the whale, and an aperture unfolded from its side. She tried to put herself inside its body but the man pulled her out. She began to implore but his rage was total. He struck her again, and then she twisted free and dived inside the whale. She yanked closed the hatch before he could get under it, and then the whale's lights all lighted up and its stomach growled.

I realized that she was going to feed the man to the whale. It is well known that whales are bloodthirsty things.

The man tried to stand in front of the beast to interfere with its progress, but the whale was not intimidated. It surged forward and crushed its nose against the side of an archway, pinning the man. He made a sound of lamentation but it was brief. Even as the echoes of the impact died away through the nearby roots he was lifeless. The side of the whale popped open and the woman slid out in a spew of viscous blue collision fluid. She vomited some of the fluid out of her nose and mouth and then, confoundingly, attempted to return to the ruined giant carcass.

I decided it was time to intervene. If she damaged herself from grief she would not make a good meal. When the inner pipes of prey are perforated during death their dark essences can leak into the meat and turn it to poison. Members of my own clan have sickened and died in this way.

I leapt down from the ceiling and she screamed. I raised my knife but she dodged it, throwing herself against the collision fluid bubbling out of the stricken whale.

I understood why the man had been shouting at her: she was crazy.

But when she emerged from the foam I had a second understanding, taller than the first, and this was that she was not crazy. She was a mother. With desperate conviction she extracted a baby from the fluid, scooping strings of the stuff out of the baby's mouth and smacking the baby's back until it coughed and shrieked, as if it had been born of the beast.

She rolled her back against the whale and clutched the child to her breast, facing me with one arm raised defensively.

IV.

I lowered my knife. The seventh rule of our clan is to cherish babies. "I will not take you until you have set the baby free," I said in a very clear voice such as one might use with a child, in order to make myself understood despite her incorrect way of making words.

She blinked. "You -- you can speak?"

"All men can speak," I told her. "How can you be ignorant of this?"

"Please don't hurt my baby," she begged.

"You are my meat. The baby is free to go."

She swallowed heavily, still panting. "You're going to kill me?"

I nodded. "Yes. You are my prize, because you are so fat. I will be lauded for feeding so many. But I will not break the seventh rule -- I will not harm a baby. Let the baby go."

"He'll die on his own. He needs me."

I squinted at the baby. It was small but thick in the limbs, cheeks dimpled and full. "He looks pretty strong and fed," I argued. "I believe he will survive."

"He can't even walk!"

I frowned. It was true that very small babies do not remember how to walk when they first climb out of a woman's parts. I have seen this myself. Could it really be true that this sobbing overworlder's clan had been so reduced that she was the only mother? "Where are your other mothers?" I demanded. "Where are your people?"

"In the city," she breathed, nodding upward.

I narrowed my eyes suspiciously. "Has your clan banished you?"

She shook her head. "I don't have a clan."

"That makes no sense. What are your rules?"

"What rules?"

"I am a Twentyman," I explained. "My clan has twenty rules, and the number of our rules is twenty. The rules remind us of all the things we forget when we are in the womb. How could a human being have no rules?"

She cocked her head, breath still coming quick and shallow, causing her excesses to roll and heave. Her skin glistened with sweat, which made it seem especially delicious and salty. "What? Why twenty?" she asked, making me blink.

I looked up. "If there were less than twenty we would know that a rule had been omitted; if there were more than twenty we would know that a rule had been made up."

"What are the rules?"

"The first rule is that I am my clan, and my clan is my body. The second rule is that I am the body, but the chief is my mind and the shaman is my heart."

"They're...your laws? You have a law that tells you to protect babies?"

"The seventh rule is that I should always take care of babies, especially if I like them."

She furrowed her shining brow. "What makes you like a baby?"

"If it reminds me of somebody I know."

She took a deep breath, looked down at the now quiet child squeezed against her chest and then looked up at me again. "Do you like my baby?"

I shrugged. "He is too brown, like you left him too close to a vent for too long. I do not know any man who looks like this baby. Maybe this baby is sick."

"He's not sick!" she insisted.

"The tenth rule is that anyone who is very sick must go away."

She paused and licked her lips. "But that's all I want. I want to go away. Please. What if we are sick? What if we make your clan sick, too? You should send us away. You should let us go."

I thought about this. "You would carry your meat?"

"My meat?"

I pointed to the corpse mashed against the nose of the whale. "I think you may have broken his interior pipes, though. I would not eat his meat if I were you."

"Is that a rule?"

"No, it is common sense. Meat tainted by dark essences turns to poison. Even your baby remembers it, I am sure. How can a crone be ignorant of this?"

"I am not a crone!"

"Well, you are very old."

"I'm not. Maybe it seems that way to you, but you're just a child."

"I am a man ten sleeps gone," I said proudly, puffing out my chest.

"But -- you can't be more than twelve or thirteen years old. You're not a man."

I exposed my member to prove to her how it had been cropped to manhood but this upset her very much. I tucked myself back in and held up my empty hands in appeal. "Hush, crone. Whether you are too wild or not to understand it I do have a man's authority, and this is my decision: I cannot risk bringing your sick baby to my clan, and since your baby cannot walk I will take it to the overworld."

"And...what about me?"

"You are my meat. I have hunted you."

She closed her eyes to look at something inside her mind, then opened them again. "But you will let my baby live?"

"Yes."

"You promise?"

"The ninth rule forbids telling lies or making secrets."

"And you never break the rules."

"The twentieth rule is that the rules must never be altered, and must always be kept."

She nodded, raising her round chin. "I want to accompany you to the city."

I shook my head. "It would be easier to quarter and pack you, first."

"I insist."

"I am becoming tired from so much speaking. Please expose your neck so that I might make a clean cut."

"No, wait!" she cried, holding up her free hand. "If you refuse me...I'll -- I'll kill the baby myself."

I hesitated. If I forced the mad crone to kill the baby, would I be the proximate cause of the baby's death? Would I be guilty of failing the seventh rule? What if the spirits sought to punish me instead of the woman's ghost?

I sighed. "Very well, crone. We go."

V.

Even the woman's sense of climbing was crazy. She had no feel for the natural world. Ladders were strange to her, and she could not find north. She could well enough read the arrows and ordered marks on the walls but, inexplicably, ignored the water stains.

"What's your name?" she asked me.

"Yield is my name. Yield to Right Turning Traffic," I said. "It is a sacred name. A name for heroes."

"Do you want to know my name?"

I shrugged. "Supper, your name is." With my spear I gestured to the convolution of middleworld worm-ways before us, visible through a gloriously rectilinear aperture in the wall of the lesser root. "This is where your whale swam. Now you will be my guide. Which way to the overworld?"

She moved her baby from one hip to the other. "Is that route six?"

"This is a root," I confirmed. "A very thick one."

She shook her head. "I can't help you. I don't know this place. It's just a line on a map. A purple line."

"But you travel here."

"The car knows the way."

I frowned. "The things you say make no sense. You are helpless. I cannot understand how a person could live in such ignorance."

"You wouldn't last ten minutes in the city. It would eat you alive, kid."

I straightened and scoffed. "Monsters are monsters. My spear is sharp and my hammer heavy, my cock trimmed and my heart hard. Test me against your dreaded city -- I would prosper."

She sniffed and said nothing, head down. "Six runs north-south. We should walk south, because it slopes up."

"You laugh at me."

"I wouldn't dare."

I narrowed my eyes.

We walked south, the roots rising in stages. Their character changed with every elevation, the skins of the walls composed of lighter or darker panels or showing different contours. The air thinned and turned dry -- the very vents sung a different note. I took this in stride until the lamps changed from their familiar amber glow to a harsh and steady greenish white. I shrank away from the next stretch of tunnel, hand raised to shield my eyes.

"What is it?" she cried, startled.

"The lamps have forsaken us," I said, teeth clenched. "You must have failed to make a sacrifice of light and shadow before traveling. Do your people truly know nothing at all?"

She touched my arm, one corner of her mouth drawn into an oddly fearless little smirk. "It's a newer section of service tunnels, that's all. Different kind of lamps here. It's no big deal."

I shrugged off her touch, still poised for attack. "But what does it mean?"

"It just means this part was built later."

I let my spear droop, looking sideways at her. "Built? Why do you say ‘built' like the way a man builds a tent? The roots are not a man's tent. Your words are wrong."

"Built," she said again, "because people build tunnels. Well, not really. I mean, they do but they don't. Machines do. But robots drive the machines and robots take their orders from people." She paused, furrowing her brow. "Well, not literally. They follow the orders they've always followed."

I raised a brow significantly. "They have rules, these rowboats. Old rules. Like the Twentymen."

"I suppose so," she agreed.

"So rowboats are your true masters," I reasoned. "You must be a slave. Judging from your bosoms you are some kind of fertility cow. Now it all makes sense."

She shook her head again. "Don't you get it? It isn't me that doesn't know anything -- it's you. Normal people are like me, not like you. How many of you could there even be, anyway? You live in the woodwork. You're scavengers."

"We are not scavengers -- we are proud hunters!"

"You're not even real citizens. You're like beasts."

"Beasts cannot speak because they have no ghosts."

"Yeah? Well robots can speak and they don't have ghosts, either. Speaking isn't everything. My toothbrush speaks."

I spat on the floor. "Lies or mistakes," I declared. "Beasts have no rules."

She smirked again. "Listen, it doesn't matter what you think. The fact is there's fifteen billion people up there and none of them care even the smallest amount about the weird rituals of some service tunnel cult of lost inbreds. We've got bigger problems. Much bigger."

I sneered. "You denigrate my ancestry because you are frightened of my true words. Do you imagine there is no rule against contributing seed to your sister's baby? Of course there is. You count as a child does, using numbers that have no meaning. Your worries might be large but they are stupid if they lead you to forget basic facts about the world."

The baby started to cry, which I took to be a sign that the baby agreed with me, but she did not see it as I did. Instead she sat upon the floor and began digging through her layers of extraneous clothing in search of flesh. When she found her breast she gave it to the baby. "See?" she said. "He's just hungry."

"One can be hungry and hold an opinion at the same time," I argued.

She sniffed again and looked down, petting the suckling infant.

I paced impatiently.

VI.

There is an imprisoned lake above our heads, and all my life I never knew.

In a great vault with caustic reflections shimmering on its roof were an uncountable number of cisterns, with those closest to us being very large and those further away being remarkably small. You cannot imagine the quantity. It would take all of the women of every clan and nation working together to gather one tenth of it.

I gasped. Her expression was smug. "You've never seen the like, of course." Inside the vault her voice echoed in a chilly, distant way.

I shook my head. "Where do these puddles come from?"

She gestured vaguely upward. "It's reclaimed from the air, the streets, the drains, the sewers. I guess it all starts as rain, somewhere far away, at the top of the city -- where the windows meet the sky."

I snorted. "You are gullible."

"So where do you think it comes from, Yield?"

"Water spirits are wily," I said, rubbing my chin. "I had not been aware they could be trapped in this way. Who could imagine? Certainly this is the work of your rowboats and their powerful rules. You are proud, but it was not your kind that did this."

"People do do amazing things, you know," she snapped.

"People live," I said. "No more, no less. You have too many extra ideas if you have forgotten this from yourself."

"I pity you," she claimed.

I shrugged. "That will not change the flavour of your meat."

We climbed. The ladders were slippery with green stains. I feared it was a sign that the spirits of verticality disapproved of our progress, so quietly I kissed my talisman and promised under my breath to lay out a grand sacrifice upon my return to the world.

Looking down upon the glittering faces of the cisterns confused my eyes. Another bad omen.

The woman slipped suddenly, flailing as she clutched the baby into her armpit. I was ready -- I caught her in the first second of her scream. It echoed away, caught in her throat. Startled, the baby wailed. I smiled. "You climb like a moron."

"You just saved my life."

She regained her position on the ladder, breathing fast. She cooed to the baby and clucked her tongue. "Let us continue," I urged. "This place sweats a vapour of evil."

The ceiling was slick. It glistened with green tendrils that hung down like locks of hair. She braced herself against my shoulder so that she could stick her fingers in among the sick beard, feeling around for the edges of what she said was a portal. When an edge had been found she groped near it until she found handles and a rotating lock. "I'm going to push it open," she warned.

"Ready," I reported, leaning into the ladder.

"Don't let me fall."

The baby gurgled. The portal flipped open with a rush of spicy air and admitted a dazzling radiance. My eyes shut but still burned with a hot pink light. I tried to shield my face with my hand but in this movement lost grip on the ladder. For a split second I could see the blazing hatch silhouetting my quarry and her offspring, receding with unnatural speed, shrinking to motes before my body spun and my vision became a confusion.

I was struck by dark and cold. All orientation was dashed away. I saw only sparks and silver bubbles, my ears clogged and my breath turned thick and choking inside my neck pipes. Cruel spirits numbed my limbs and burned in my chest. A glittering blackness overwhelmed me.

The afterlife! I thought; I'm on my way...

VII.

I awoke with the woman's scent on my lips. My insides ached.

"Breathe," she commanded. "Just breathe, okay?"

I wanted to ask her how a man could do other than breathe but my voice would not come. Tears ran from my nose. I started to shiver. At last I managed to croak, "What happened?"

"You fell," she said. "I pulled you out."

"Of the afterlife?"

"Of the water."

I raised myself on my elbows. She was hunkered over me in the narrow alley between two giant cisterns. The baby lay in its swaddling, alone and fussing. She turned to it now, mewling to quiet it. I realized that she had put her baby aside in order to rescue me. "How is it possible that water could engulf a man in this way?" I rasped.

"These cisterns are deep."

I shook my head. Depth was not a quality of water, but of holes. While I could accept that the overworlders in their multitudes kept hundreds of trays of water in this vault for some reason, I would not consent to imagine the cisterns' entire volume was filled by water. That would be absurd. "You could have let me pass on," I said next.

She looked away. "I'm not like that."

"You let your whale kill the shouting man," I pointed out.

Her expression darkened briefly. "That's different."

I reflected her old smirk back to her. "So you do have rules."

She allowed herself a small smile, a genuine one. "Yeah," she admitted. "Maybe."

We climbed again. She soothed my unease by explaining to me that the cisterns did not change size -- it was simply that the furthest of them were so distant that they appeared smaller within my vision. Though I could grasp her idea my eyes remained bewildered. I focused only on the rungs before me, slick and green. I concentrated on aligning myself to catch her if she fell.

"It's called perspective," she said.

"Perspective is the apparent bending of rectilinearity," I contributed. "We have this word, too, but I had never mixed it with far."

"Maybe you'll have to make a new rule."

I snorted. "Don't be stupid. Rules are bigger than men."

This time I took the final transition from the vault of lakes to the brightness with my forearm blocking my sight. I allowed my prey to lead me through the portal and into a land of noise and colour. By degrees I widened my fingers to expose my squinting eyes.

We crouched in a sewer, a shallow trough with a ceiling of metal grating. Beyond the grating were gathered unfathomably tall fingers, like roots stood on end, their skins glittering with thousands of tiny eyes; and between the fingers were bridges that swarmed with miniscule human beings the size of bugs; and everywhere streamed lines of flies whose paths were straight instead of meandering; and between it all were squares of coloured lights whose faces swept and crawled with ordered marks and captured ghosts; and an army of overworld people with their false feet tromped over our heads, back and forth, dodging one another, spilling like a liquid, the flow and stutter of their shadows flashing over us, the clanging of their hard heels against the metal in a senseless rhythm.

"This is a mad place," I hissed, but then furrowed my brow when I saw that the baby was at peace, looking around at every line and smear with open curiosity, his fruity cheeks shining. "But your baby -- he likes it."

"It probably looks grand to you," she said, "but it's a slum. It's the sunless bottom of the city. He doesn't know it yet, either. He has no idea what he's been born into."

"Forgetting is natural," I assured her. "Your baby will recover his knowledge in time." I showed her my teeth in a friendly way and then unhitched my spear and checked its keen edge. "You will watch over him from the afterlife, of course."

"I thought we were starting to be friends."

I hefted the spear. "Are you ready?"

She kissed the baby. She looked up at me. Her chin was quivering. "Please," she said. "I'm a human being, just like you. I don't deserve this. You may not believe it seeing what you've seen, but you don't know. You don't know any of it. You don't know what this planet is like. I'm a good person. You've got to believe that. I just want to raise my child. There's no one else to protect him. Please."

I tilted my head at her as I leveled my weapon. "Your customs are weird," I remarked, taking aim.

"Please," she said again.

I frowned, spear drooping. "You keep talking. Are you prepared for your passage or not?"

"No!" she cried, then covered her face and wept.

I did not know where to look. I was ashamed for both of us. I hoped the spirits of her ancestors were busy elsewhere, and not watching her now to see such disgrace. I hoped the spirits of my own ancestors were occupied elsewhere, too. My cheeks burned.

I did not know why she would show such contempt for my hungry kin who only needed to eat as any living thing does. I had honoured my side of the agreement -- why would she renege now? How could she spit in my face in this way?

"You have to understand, overworlder," I said, spreading my arms in appeal; "I cannot return to my clan empty-handed."

"Please don't kill me," she begged. "I don't deserve to die!"

I blinked. I shook my head. "Your notions are silly. How can a human being deserve death or not deserve it? Death comes to each of us. Do not fight fate. Find your peace. Show me your neck." I raised my spear and prepared to thrust.

"I saved your life! You owe me!"

The baby began to cry.

I sighed. I let my spear dip. Though there was no rule to describe it, I felt a compulsion to seek a compromise rather than be subjected to further infantile pleading. This wretched thing, so helpless and wrong, so alone without clan or rules or spirits -- I felt that it was as if she were a baby, too. I felt that I could stretch the seventh rule, to include her within its reach. I believed this is what the ghosts of my ancestors were trying to say when they spoke through the baby's wails. It is said that sometimes wisdom comes to men in this way.

I made my proposition and she accepted it, eyes filling with tears. "I'm scared," she said. "Will it hurt?"

"Yes."

She was brave. She locked her gaze on her baby beside her while I worked, neck flexing as she fought to control her breath. Though her flesh was supple beyond imagining I restrained myself from greed, and took only the legs.

As agreed.

Now I walk with a song in my heart, plying familiar pipes and nearing the nest where the Twentymen and our brides build our tents. I carry fresh meat and have a story for the ventside -- a wondrous quest to the overworld where puddles are bottomless, distance confounds scale, lost souls flounder in solitude, and the spirit of kindness and generosity can alight inside a young hunter. I work out the verses, bouncing as I step.

I salivate to imagine the meal to come. Such plump calves!

The roots are deep. I love my clan. Our lives are rich, and correct. Nature whispers to us with sharp lines and sure corners, and helps us stay on the path. Whales and mammoths are plentiful. Water comes to us beaded on the sweaty pipes, providing each day each man's allowance of wet tongue and sweet life.

Who could ask for anything more?