given freely, freely done

And so it went, Freely was given a free pass. He didn't know how to feel, standing there outside the swinging doors, holding between his fingers the small yellow card. Yellow, bordered by a heavy orange stripe. Pass was all that was printed on the card – he could use it to go anyway, do virtually anything without comment or reprimand. A white cord dangled from a punched hole in one corner of the card, and Freely took the cord in his hands and dropped it over his head, mussing his yellowish hair, where it settled down and hung loosely around his neck.

Freely took some time to gather his thoughts, not least of which included his dire situation. Freely had been given a sentence, his luck was running out, the end was near. He glanced around and spotted a stone bench at the foot of the marble steps, and Freely walked down and took a seat. He leaned back with his hands planted behind him, and whistled into the sky. A few people who were passing gave him a quick look. Normally a lone person wouldn't be making the amount of noise Freely was, this was quite unseemly. But they saw the tag hanging down from his neck and pushed on. Freely barely noticed any of them. Not the businessmen walking alone, hurrying back from lunch or errands. Not the women with children. Not even the pretty girls moving together in twos and threes talking with their hands and laughing at loud. Freely barely knew what to do with himself. He stood up abruptly and stepped in front of a man who nearly collided into Freely and did just spill a drop of his coffee.

“Good heavens, I'm sorry,” said the man gruffly, trying to be polite, but was in fact irritated. He lightly rubbed a napkin across Freely's shirt, then noticed the yellow card. “Oh. Sorry, sorry. Is there something I can do for you? Of course I'm late for a meeting.” The man began to edge away.

Freely didn't know what he wanted. He looked at the brown stain on his shirt and shrugged. “Well, maybe I'll just tag along.”

“Oh,” the man stood slack jawed, staring at Freely, who took the blank look for a comment on his attire.

“Right,” said Freely. “Not dressed for a meeting, I suppose. We'll just stop in to a clothes shop first, okay?” Freely looked around and saw across the street a shopfront with mannequins in the window wearing suits. “Aha,” he proclaimed and started to cross the road, holding up his hand with the yellow card. The cars and taxis came to a halt and Freely crossed. “Come on,” he called over his shoulder.

In the shop Freely took a very nice suit off the rack. It fit almost perfectly. He also selected two ties, one for himself and one for his new acquaintance, for his troubles, thought Freely. Freely showed the clerk his yellow card, and they left the shop without paying. He had a free pass, Freely was obliged to do anything and everything he wanted. This was decreed. He smiled broadly on the way out. “What's your name, mister?” Freely asked the coffee man.

“Roger.”

“Really? Roger. Well, you must have inherited that name. Do you know, I've never met a person with one of the common names. Where to, Roger?”

Roger sipped his coffee, it had gone cold, and then threw the cup into a sidewalk recycling bin that growled as it chewed up the refuse. “The meeting is probably started, but we can catch the end of it. I can even arrange for a new one, if that's what you want? Do you like graphs? I can call ahead.”

“Let's just go. Listen, I don't want to be a nuisance,” said Freely, and Roger led the way to his office. It was in the Hamilton Building, on the eightieth subterranean level. The views were piped in from somewhere else. Freely didn't recognize any of the scenery, but he happily gawked at the transmission digiposts that lined the walls. At one point they passed through a darkened tunnel and were surrounded by gigantic underwater creatures. Freely stopped for a moment to watch a sperm whale battling an immense squid. “Who will win?” he asked.

Roger stopped and returned to Freely. He put his hands in his pockets and looked out into the pixilated depths. “I've never watched the entire battle, but I think, in maybe ten or fifteen minutes, some sort of mechanical underwater boat will come along and shoot some missiles into the octopus, and the whole lot will turn a bloody red and cover everything up.”

“Gruesome. I don't like blood.”

“No, than shall we?” Roger took his elbow and they continued through the tunnel to a transparent door. Inside was a long table and several people sat there with pencils, looking at a tall man who was pointing at pie charts on the wall. Roger tapped at the glass and then opened the door.

The tall man dropped his arms and scowled. “You're late, Roger. Who's this. Oh.” He saw the yellow card.

“I'm sorry, I didn't bring any of you a tie,” said Freely, and he sat down in a vacant chair just inside the room, next to dark haired woman. “I like your ringlets, do you have an extra pencil?” he asked her, smiling.

She touched one of the rings that orbited her bland face and it quavered awkwardly. “You can have mine,” she said, and the woman pushed her pad of paper and the pencil in front of Freely. There were no marking on the paper. The pencil was sharp, like it had never been used. Freely drew a circle onto the top page and the woman cringed.

“Thanks, go on.” Freely tapped the paper with the erasered end of the pencil and stared up at the tall moderator.

“Ah,” said the man, “As you can all see by the graph, this trend right here, indicates a sincere downfall of inherent attitudes. Well, we can't fall below this point. Right here. That would be bad. Really bad. Uh, Roger,” the man turned to look at Roger, who had also taken a seat. “What's going on up in the clouds?”

“Nothing much. They're dragging their feet of course.”

The woman by Freely's side spoke up. “Well, we're the first to go, down in the ground. They'll wait to see what happens. They won't be doing anything to help with the trend, will they?”

Nobody said anything. The man across from Freely mumbled and poked at something on a plate in front of him with his sharp pencil. Freely started counting the people in the room, starting with the dark haired woman on his left. There were fifteen. Sixteen including himself. “How long has that whale show been going on in your tunnel?” he asked. Everyone stared. “Would you go under the table with me, please?” Asked Freely of the woman, and he slipped off his chair onto the floor. The woman twitched and looked around, seeing no one had anything to offer. Then she followed Freely under the long table.

The light from above didn't reach here, and the two sat under the table, shrouded in the dark from the eyes overhead. Freely whispered. “Your rings, they don't glow,” he said. “I thought they might glow,” he added sadly.

“I'm sorry. I never thought...”

Freely sat cross legged on the ground, while the woman scrunched up close on her knees. She was hunched and her head tilted at an angle against the underside of the table. Her ringlets weren't visible in the shadows.

“Thanks for the pencil, what's your name?” Freely thought about the pencil, which he had left up top. He was hoping no one would take it, or the circle he had drawn. He wanted to add a square.

“Infinity.”

“Of course,” he said. “Do you want to get out of the eightieth underground floor, Infinity?”

Freely felt a pain in his leg which traveled down to a sharp end in his foot. He grimaced. At the clinic they had foretold his end. A girl there, the girl with curls in her hair and a crimson robe, took his temperature, and rolled the die. She poked him with a sharp stick until a bruise rose on his reddened skin. Then she felt the bump and closed her eyes. A dark man came into the room and waved his hands over Freely's head and he proclaimed, “Your time is up. Shisamelda has seen it. Eat this.” The dark man thrust a biscuit at Freely, and he took a bite of it, it tasted good, so he ate it all. The girl closed her eyes and lay down on her couch, and Freely left. They had given him a yellow card. Freely knew what that meant.

“I wish your ringlets showed in the dark, like Saturn's rings. I hear they are especially bright on Phoebe, away from the moon's minor rings. I'd like to see them, someday...” his voice trailed off and Freely looked up at the darkness. He had seen on the news, in his small flat, the dusty rings of Phoebe. They paled in comparison to Saturn's, but they had still impressed Freely. He thought of them often.

“Me too.” Infinity had never considered Saturn's rings before. She now wished her name was Phoebe. “Will you call me Phoebe? Just for a little while, when nobody is watching?” she asked in a hush, leaning close to Freely's ear and brushing his cheek with her pale lips. Freely felt a ring rotate against his skin, her warm breath.

Freely put his finger on her nose. “Yes, Phoebe.” He backed out from under the table and stood up, taking Infinity's hand and helping her out.

Freely raised his hands up, high above his head. He tilted back his head and the yellow card shone brightly against his dark suit's lapel. Freely lowered his arms and looked slowly at every face around the table, stopping finally on Roger's. “Follow me.”

The sixteen led by one man, deemed unavoidably terminal by issue of a government sanctioned yellow card, took to the lift and together, compressed, they ascended from the depths into the light, transcending the swallowing shaft until the doors parted and they disembarked upon the lobby. Lower level elevators never rose above the firmament, while upper level elevators never dipped below the ether. The group all were branded, via dangling pocket tags, with idents proclaiming them underground employees. They were all educated and trained in some function or another, then relegated to the deep. There they performed mundane tasks, moving piles of paper and designing charts and sitting in on meetings. If the numbers fell below the red line, then someone from on high would have to make a weighty decision. Someone would have to pay, some division would inevitably sink under the weight. The tall man chewed his fingernails to the nub, until his digits bled. Most nights, after his employees had left, he stayed behind studying charts and crunching numbers. The tall man would stretch his long body out on the floor of the subaqueous tunnel and watch as the giant squid grappled with the gray sperm whale, latching onto the whale's thick hide with its sucker arms and gouging it with a razor sharp beak. The whale always protested, lunging and taking in huge mouthfuls of the squid and its appendages, rending and tearing with its great jaws. The tall man would watch and tally up the points like a panel judging a boxing match, the fight now going to the squid, then shifting over to the sperm whale. He could never decide who would win. Whichever did would limp home victorious and wounded. And sated. Then the submarine would appear from beyond the hoary deep. It neared and the captain and crew peered out from the great glass enclosure, ribbed and transparent at the nose of a tremendous metal ship. The tall man then followed its progress, saw the widening eyes of the men in their white uniforms. With a shout from their captain, the words unheard and unknown to any observers, the crew would jump to action and within moments streams of bubbling effervescence discharged from trembling blowholes that lined the hull and whirligig submersibles surged forward, breaking the calm between man and monsters, flying forth and wreaking havoc into the pulverized flesh of the warring beasts. Streaks of red played down the concave surface of the tunnel, filling the void, and the tall man bled in tandem. He knew the eightieth level would soon fall victim to mechanization from above. But calamity would not come in the form of a monster, or a missile. Engineers would simply stop the pumps and the eightieth level would fill with ground water. Only the hatches on subsequent floors would stop the flow, for the time being.

He now stood with the sixteen, but would go no further than the lobby. He held out his hand to Freely. “It has been a pleasure knowing you, sir, but my place is with my office. I'll stay to the end, hoping against all hope to find a solution.”

Freely felt the strong grip of the tall man, but the warmth was draining out. Freely sensed a chill and let the tall man's hand drop. “Good luck,” he said, and then led his charges away. Roger was the last to turn and he watched as his foreman stepped back into the lift and descended. The dial fell into the negatives, but nobody looked on.

As they crossed the tiled floor, a uniformed guard put up his hand. Infinity, who walked beside Freely, laid a hand on the guard's shoulder and pointed to Freely. “He has the yellow card,” she said.

“I'm going to the top,” said Freely. “I'd like to take these people along.” Freely smiled remotely and then looked around the lobby. It was a cavernous space, lined with marble monolithic slabs that opened onto heavenly escarpments that glowed whitely with the afternoon sun. The elevator shafts reached up the palisades for a hundred yards then vanished into a ceiling that dangled banners, lights, and conduits like stalactites. Freely tapped his card. “Have you ever seen the rings of Saturn?” he asked.

“Only half can go at a time. The elevator can't handle more,” said the guard. Another guard came from across the lobby to join them. “Pick your half, the others will have to go up a separate lift.”

“I understand,” said Freely. He pointed to Roger and Infinity, who joined him. “And you, and you,” he said. A group of three were standing to one side and Freely waved them over. “I'll take these seven.”

The guards looked at each other and nodded. “Alright. Then these other seven can follow.”

Freely led his group to the nearest elevator and they all stepped into the glass enclosure. The door shut and there was breathing room, but they were all close enough to touch. They ascended, all eight looking up, while below the guards led the second group from the lobby into a room with no windows.

Roger fingered his tie, admiring the bright colors that only recently he thought might be too vivid for his position. Reds and yellow were not conducive to work in a dungeon, where subterranean lighting muted everything into a stale paste. He looked from his tie to Freely's, which was plain white. Pure white. Freely caught his eye and smiled. The elevator climbed.

It stopped five floors below the top. Freely and his group didn't have the clearance to progress higher. “I guess we'll take the stairs from here,” said Freely, and he gestured for them to exit. Freely left last and they gathered around him in the vestibule. Footsteps echoed down the hallway and as a group they turned to meet the new arrival.

“Who are you?” asked a woman. She was of average height but her heavy gray jacket and polished jump boots made her formidable. The woman tilted her head and held up a floor badge cupped in her left hand. Her right hand dangled at the impact stick on her belt.

Freely flicked the yellow card with his thumb. “Free pass. Taking the tour,” he said. “Go on ahead a bit,” he motioned to his group, and they filtered around the woman who stayed very still. Her eyes moved rapidly while the seven broke around her. Freely stayed, and when the woman put out a hand to stop the flow he jumped forward. She shouted, but too late as Freely grabbed her arm and spun the woman. Roger took her other arm and they forced her against the wall and secured her with two of Infinity's rings. “By the power of this free pass, I'm relieving you of the consequences. Also of your boots.” They carefully sat her down and Freely let Infinity put the boots on his feet. They fit snug, but felt good. “Oh, take her key as well.”

They secured the woman's feet with another of Infinity's rings and started down the hallway toward the stairwell. Freely took two quick steps and appeared suddenly twenty five yards down the hallway where he stumbled to a halt and caught himself against the wall. The group oohed and clapped. “Those boots will take some practice, Freely. Be careful.” Freely grinned and urged them to follow. He disappeared around the corner. Another man had taken the security woman's impact stick, and he jumped up at the ceiling and smacked the tiles there. The noise reverberated down the corridor and bits of material rained down on the composite flooring. As they walked the digipost walls shifted with scenes from an ancient sky city full of fantastically plumed birds and helium filled aerovolants. Exotic spinning discs and steamship blimps coursed languidly overhead and they passed amid the vista gasping through open mouths. They found Freely waiting, he was poking a finger into the wall making surface concentrics that spread to a width of thirty centimeters then dissipated. “What now,” they asked, and Freely pulled open the door and stepped into the stairwell.

“Come on.” The seven men and women entered and Freely moved backwards up a step and waited. “Alright,” he said, “we've gotten this far, thanks to the old free pass,” he tapped it. “So, I know a couple of you fine people, forgotten workers of the Hamilton Building. Let's why don't we go around and introduce ourselves. I'm Freely, you know, dealt the portentous card of doom, so to speak. The death sentence, yellow card, sorry state of affairs and all that. Could drop over stone cold dead any second now. Still, I'd be happy to do it knowing your names. Go on, you first.”

They began to talk, all knowing one another, but never sharing much beyond their names. Freely's eyes began to glaze over as they went round. That morning he'd woken with a tickle in his throat. The coffee hadn't helped and the toasted bagel made him cough and sputter. Freely dug around in his cabinets for some kind of throat remedy and he found some old syrup. It was peach colored and viscous and had relieved the tickle for about five minutes. There was a warning on the back and a number. 'If symptoms persist after one dose, immediately cease further doses and call 911*HELP.' This he did, beginning to worry, and was directed to the clinic on Emerald Avenue. Freely dressed smartly for the weather, which was dung colored that morning, and boarded a low flying flying carpet. Beyond his apartment house the rug climbed to one hundred feet and flew direct to the emergency clinic. A hole unraveled beneath his feet and Freely fell into a perfect trajectory straight into a catch funnel, swooped in a controlled spiral and was gently deposited through a perfectly coordinated conduit to the processing room. A robust squidge tagged his elbow and led Freely to a seat that conformed to his specifics. 'Wait,' it monotoned and retreated into a closet. Freely coughed. 'Freely? Come this way, please.' He stood, rather was pushed up from the seat, and followed a white clad nurse into a bright room. She had him sit on a hovering cushion and was directed to remove his clothing, then put on a purple sheet. There was a hole in the middle of the sheet that went over his head. Freely slipped it over and was draped with what seemed to be a loosely fitting tent. He enjoyed the roominess of it, and said so. The nurse left the room, switching off the light from outside. Freely could see her peeking in through a small window. Then the ceiling began to peel back and a lightning ball lowered, sending sparks into every corner of the room. Freely gnashed his teeth and fidgeted as the electric charges probed his body. They left no corner, corpuscle, or orifice unturned. The lights came back on and the nurse, who seemed a little flush to Freely, led him into a different room. It was dimly lit and thick divisions of cloth hung about the space separating the room into smaller spaces. He was set onto a low chair in the center and a small, pretty woman in red robes opened her eyes and sat up. She adjusted the robes to cover her shoulders and squinted at him. 'Give me your hand,' she said and the girl touched his palm with a temperature meter. Fractal striations had formed upon his wrists and continued up his arms. She lifted his sheet and traced the patterns with a finger, raising goose bumps on Freely's naked flesh. He shivered. The woman leaned back, finished with her examination, and laid a deck of cards on a side table. She turned over two cards and pursed her lips. Then she picked up a die and threw it into the corner where it rattled around for a second and came to a rest on an oval eclipsing an umlaut. 'Sit still,' she said and picked up a stick, poking at him painfully, then observed the sore spot. The woman closed her eyes and murmured audibly. Then, suddenly, a swarthy man had rushed through the hanging tapestries and made obscure gestures over Freely's head. He pushed a cracker at Freely, told him to eat it and ushered him from the room. 'Don't go home, do not talk to your friends or family. Your time on this earth has come to an end, Mr. Freely. Here is your yellow card, do not remove it. With it you can purchase anything and go anywhere. You can do whatever you dream, but do it fast because your time is limited. Go now.' He was given back his clothing and thrust into the street, with a free pass and no clue.

“My name is Clariform. Hello, until now I've never been so high, in the sky of course. I never dreamed of it, even,” said a short woman who had a stiff hairdo extending two feet into the air, making her all of six feet tall. I know all about colors, I learned them all, even mauve, we use it all the time in pie charts. The people up here are always, were I mean, complimenting us on our color pie charts.” Her hair was embellished with a delicate filigree of mauve in fact. Freely raised one eyebrow. She was the last of the seven to speak.

“Okay,” he said, “let's climb?” Freely turned and took the steps two at a time. He had forgotten about the boots and was up three landings before he realized. “Sorry,” he called, then quickly dashed to the top floor and nudged open the door half an inch to peek out.

The door opened wide on its own accord and Freely walked through, his momentum carried his body instantly clear of the opening and into an alcove bordered by tremendous windows that leaned so far up and out that Freely lost all sense of space. He felt a keen stab of vertigo and quickly knelt to one knee, steadying himself with an outstretched arm. Two abrupt red flashes erupted into the spot where he recently stood looking in, and the door smoked on its hinges then fell off the jamb with a deafening clatter. Freely turned under the windows rapidly surveying the room. The entire floor was open and covered a huge expanse. Nearly fifty yards toward the center he could see a man in ragged clothes, tied vertically to a hand truck that propped him up. His deathly white head lolled in its braces, but Freely easily saw the ghastly red eyes burning out from scorched sockets. Dried blood streaked down the man's blanched face, filling the crevices and hollows left there by famine and disease. It was no more than a living corpse, a horrible death dealing cadaver. Its head pivoted on a rope thin neck, Freely could hear the vertebrae crack as it swiveled.

The thing paused, a gaze catching on fire, and its mouth opened. A torrent of blood gushed out as the grotesque corpse gurgled, trying to speak. “Commm tooo joinnn the... dehhhhhh. D?”

Freely searched again, all around the creature were mounds, stretching out long like hours on a clock. They were cloth and bone, gristle and dried meat, ghastly lengths of guts trailing back to the thing in globs of fat and muscle. It lifted an arm and with bony hands pulled a ropy string of entrails up to its face and leaned forward to nibble at them with its rotten teeth and veiny tongue. The group of seven finally reached the top floor, wheezing at the effort, and piled into the open room, gasping in horror at the carnage. “Get back,” yelled Freely, but the thing only fizzled a bit at its smoldering eyebrows and moved its jaw back and forth on the rancid meal. It ceased with its disturbing banquet and leered at the seven, and an evil smile broke across its visage like an oozing wound. The room shuddered and with a series of creaks and snaps it jolted and jumped loose of its moorings, flying upwards several feet. Every person in the room fell like bowling pins, sprawling on the tiled floor with shouts and screams. In the corners, winches operated by scuttling crab-like contraptions levered the floor higher and the windows popped in their casements, cracks spread out like the branches on a dormant tree, but the glass held. A hive of automatons appeared from breaches in the walls and floors with girders, pipes and flickering wrenches and began erecting supports and beams, shoring up the disintegrating spaces below their feet. They were constructing a new floor, to replace the lowest level of the building which was bursting now at the added weight, filling with a million gallons of water and sea life within the cavernous depths. Freely caught a glimpse in his minds eye of the tall foreman, drifting flaccidly in the airless reservoir, and of the dozens of bodies that bobbed in a watery grave just twelve steps deeper, and of the following floor, then the next...

Quickly the new story took shape inside a latticework of steel and assembly, and scrambling bots swept the room clean, tossing filth and bodies to the winds, while laying a fresh floor about the human's dancing feet. In the center of all leaned the corpse-thing, like a cockeyed scarecrow, surveying the work from darting eyeballs, its crimson marbles rotating in oxidized sockets. With a final bump the job ended, a few motes of dust drifted down from the rafters, and the mechanisms slinked off into cabinets and hidey holes. The horrible monster raised a finger and beckoned Freely to approach, and he did, cautiously. All the while the creature dried, small flakes then pieces started shedding off onto the pristine floor. It worked its mouth, but no sound issued, just a stale puff of breath, and the whole of its being crackled into a brittle cast, then rained onto the tiles in a tempest of gray particulate. Freely stooped over the pile and with his finger dusted off a laminated yellow card that lay half buried in the desiccate heap.

A vacuum hose poked out from a dilating ventricle and snorted the debris away, and Freely was left alone in the center of the expansive room. He raised his arms, the free pass dangled on its cord, and from every corner of the city hovering spybots, loose shreds of paper, the seed of springing vegetation, traffic heliodrones, migrating birds, oscillating autobats, suspended motes, commuting jet packers, flying carpets, errant dust devils, punched paper confetti, silvery can lids, spent wrappers, grains of sand and shards of glass, wind blown caps, mismatched socks, pieces and parts of any and all sized flotsam and jetsam converged upon the Hamilton Building and began to orbit taking on the shape of an humongous ebony disc, shifting with the hues and distraction of a rainbow across its remarkable surface. Larger matter circled, creating distinct separations between the myriad discs, excavating grooves like pauses on a record. The seven oohed and aahed, formed a full arc around Freely in the room, and rotated in perfect step around his upright composition. Roger and Clariform and Mithigrill and Chortle and Blissfully and Hunkerdown and Infinity, who lost her rings to the cause. Her pale white face reflected the colors that played around the room off prism window panes, and she smiled, calling herself Phoebe in the mirrored angles.

 

“Free pass,” Freely whispered, while his yellow hair rose with a static charge and his eyes glowed red.