I seem to recall a sound leaving my throat. I would not be ashamed if anyone called it a whimper.

  Suddenly, two pairs of chill hands seized my arms and yanked me upward. I felt a snap below, and soon thereafter found myself on my feet atop the pedestal, standing next to the statue itself, just under the benevolent arm of the sculpted eminence.

  “Thank you,” I gasped, between hasty breaths.

  This time, Moulder spilled no parts when he laughed. “Think nothing of it. That’s why the tribe has recents, like us, check out the surface before an advent. Older corpies don’t like surprises. Makes ’em grumpy.” He nodded downward, and I got an all-too good look at the entity who had tried to seize me, seconds before.

  A zombie, I thought, subvocalizing a word that I’d been avoiding for some time. Shreds of former clothing still draped the cadaverous form, grinning liplessly as it cast about, left and right, searching for something it had lost. It never occurred to the wretched thing – thank God – to look up.

  “S’cuse me,” Moulder said, in an amused voice. “I think you’ve got something our cousin wants back.”

  As he crouched by my side, I looked down and must have yelped. The woman, Sully, steadied me as Moulder wrestled loose a severed hand that still clamped ahold of my service boot. With a grunting effort, he loosened its grip, holding it warily by the wrist as it slowly writhed, opening and closing clumsily.

  “Hey, cuz! Here ya go. Wear it in health!”

  He tossed the disembodied appendage down so that it struck the zombie in the chest. After a moment or two, the pathetic, horrible thing bent over to recover the member, fumbling and finally managing to re-attach the hand in some way. Backwards, I realized when it clenched. The poor creature didn’t seem to notice.

  “Flshsh-shfleppp-ph-ph gr-gr-flph-ph-f,” it slobbered through a rictus grin… and I swear, the slavering sound seemed almost musical, in a strange, chilling way. I wouldn’t have expected my nanos to make sense of the noise, but the translator in my left ear offered a best-guess interpretation—

  “Why thank you, kids, for finding what I had misplaced! How nice to see that courtesy is still extant among today’s youth.”

  It was only a rough rendering. The original statement might have been bitterly sarcastic for all I knew. Still, I muttered, “You’re welcome,” almost involuntarily, as the corpambulist shuffled off to join a horde of risen forms, now shambling in unison through the gloom.

  “Have a nice evening stroll,” I added.

  The woman, Sully, let go of my arm and stared at me. I turned, and abruptly realized something I’d been too tense no notice before – that she was, without a doubt, the loveliest dead person who ever saved my life. To her surprised regard, I could only shrug and repeat what my own instructors used to teach, here at the academy, as good advice for any occasion.

  “Well after all,” I told the beautiful zombie. “It never hurts a body to be polite.”

  Sully and Moulder led me to a mausoleum at the far end of the cemetery, where tombs apparently pre-dated the present era of decline in both population and wealth. Lavish marble masonry faced the vaults and sepulchers, adorned with kneeling statuary figures in prayerful poses. On Earth, such postures usually illustrated earnest supplication for an afterlife. But I tried to shuck aside any preconceptions. Clearly, to the denizens of 1265 Oxytoxin 41-C, “death” was just another phase in a rather complex cycle.

  The crypt possessed an arching roof, like an ancient Greek tholos, under which we sheltered from some intermittent drizzling rain. Beyond a bank of low trees, I could make out lighted skyscrapers, less than a kilometer away. I might have been tempted to call them beacons of refuge, but right now I was in no hurry to test the nighttime reactions of trigger-happy guards, protecting the “Standard” populace… Standards who were sure to be utterly paranoid, if they had any sense at all.

  In the opposite direction, away from the city lights, a gap in the clouds let moonlight spill across a hilly glade, where milled throngs of limping, staggering forms. A distant lowing floated from that place – a creepy, moaning din that sent chills coursing down what remained of my aptly-named nervous system.

  I tried ignoring the zombie sounds, as my rescuers, Sully and Moulder, asked questions and I did my best to answer. Still, my thoughts were elsewhere. What I really wanted, desperately, to restore contact with Clever Gamble! Whatever my plight, the well being of my ship and crewmates came first.

  Fortunately, the cool weather was reason enough to press my collar against my throat the entire time that I told Moulder and Sully about my predicament – the kidnapping of my comrades from the heart of the Lik’em urb, and my subsequent encounter with Lorg and the gang of Besh. Perhaps my shirt was transmitting but not receiving. Anyway, it seemed worth a try.

  “You were lucky to get away from Besh in one piece,” Sully commented. “Either his bunch currently has a full larder, or you did something to put him off his feed.”

  “Mmm,” I commented, remembering those last moments under the urb. My singing has affected people that way, on occasion. But I never before owed my survival to that fact.

  “Anyway,” Moulder added as he groomed Sully, much as I’d seen apes do in a zoo, picking through her glossy hair, seeking what I dared not dwell upon. “Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about your friends anymore, if I was you.”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “Naw. You’ll probably be reunited soon.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure, providing the Lik’ems left enough of them to animate, and didn’t put the remains out in the sun. It’s not nice, but Besh has been known to do that. Otherwise, they’ll be along this way soon.”

  I winced at the image. Demmie zombies. It made me shiver.

  “I’m pretty sure Besh never got his hands on my colleagues.” And I explained the reaction of Lorg to my questions.

  “He said what?” Sully sneered. “That Zooms ambushed your group? Right in the middle of the urb? Oh, that’s rich!”

  “Why’s that? Maybe it was some other, er, tribe of corpambulists. I think he used the term… Renks?”

  The two of them looked at each other and I knew I’d said something important. But they didn’t comment.

  “Look, if I could only ask your leaders—”

  “That’s just the point! Zooms have very little of anything you’d call leadership. Sometimes a group’ll get an idea into their failing brains, and go shambling off in some direction to do one thing or other. Settle old scores they vaguely recall from when they were alive, for instance, or surround a house and bang on it to scare everybody inside half to death. And then there are brain-smorgs… those are hard to resist.

  “But the very idea of doing something so… organized… as an ambush in Lik’em country…?” She shook her head, dismissing the idea as absurd.

  “Well, what about you?” I asked, taking a chance. “You and Moulder are… well, recent is the word you used. You still have plenty of um…”

  I almost said life in you, but decided to use other phrasing.

  “…You seem just as bright and astute as anyone not saddled with your… uh, impairment.”

  “Why, what a sweet thing to say!” She smiled and turned to her friend. “Wasn’t that sweet, Moulder?”

  Moulder grunted and rolled his one eye in its socket. “Yeah, real sweet.”

  “But you really don’t understand,” Sully continued. “Recents like us have to stay out of the way, or the older corpsies will tear us apart. We smell too fresh, you see. They assign us tasks that take finesse, like dealing with strangers and such. But when it comes to mass action, Zooms tend to follow those even further along than they are.”

  “Farther along?”

  “You know,” she said, and pretended to hold her nose, without actually touching it.

  “Rule by the ripest,” Moulder summarized.

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Ripe makes might,” Sully corrected. “Only the decayed may decree.”

  Moulder pondered. “Which means the really rank hath privileges.”

  “Uh huh. And victory goes to the spoiled.”

  “Then corruption empowers?” I interjected, on impulse.

  They paused, then Sully replied with a grin. “Necrolutely.”

  “Rot on!” Moulder enthused. “Power to the putrid!” And for a second I feared he was about to offer me a high slap-handshake. But he settled for raising a clenched fist.

  I relaxed, having already, that evening, learned a new meaning to the expression – “gimme five.”

  We sat in silence for a time, listening as the zombie “singing” on that far hillside coalesced, taking on a complex rhythm and eerie tonality I had never heard in all my travels.

  I let go of the throat mike at last. It seemed futile, and anyway, my neck was getting raw. There had never been the slightest sign that anybody in orbit heard me. Something was terribly wrong, and I was going to need help ever to find out what happened to my crewmates in the slurry party, let alone the Clever Gamble herself.

  I could feel my alertness start to fade away. It had, after all, been a damn rough day. (Or two? Or three?) The music of the dead had a somnolent effect, drawing me downward toward unconscious realms, whether I liked it or not. I had no will any longer to resist as a deep languor spread across my limbs.

  “I have it!” Sully announced abruptly. By now she had traded places and was grooming Moulder, a process I chose not to watch too closely. Still I managed to turn and regard her eyes, which seemed to shine at me with genuine pleasure.

  “Have what?” Moulder asked, clearly concerned and trying to squirm around to see what she had found in his scalp.

  “I mean I’ve got an idea. I know where we can take our guest in the morning, if the weather’s nice. We’ll guide him to town and introduce him to Professor Ping!”

  Moulder sat up suddenly. Too suddenly, leaving a patch of hairy scalp in Sully’s hand, which she quickly hid from view.

  “Of course!” he cried. “Ping is the thing. You’ll see, stranger. He’ll get you straightened out in no time.”

  “And if he doesn’t, perish the thought,” Moulder added with a leer. “Or if the guards or viggies or Nomorts get you first… well, no harm in trying. You’ll just wind up right back here in Necropolis, and we can show you how to fit right into the rot race.”

  I suppose I thanked them. I guess I must have made all the right, polite sounds. But I was so exhausted, I had no strength to ask any further questions.

  Sometimes students, in your travels, there will come occasions when you simply have to hope for the best and put your fate in the hands of strangers.

  I had never been in stranger hands than I was that night. Still the rule held. Anyway, what choice had I, except to I trust my instinctive feeling that these two would protect me until dawn? I drifted off, lying upwind of my two deceased friends under a marble mausoleum canopy.

  As minutes elongated, the crooning from the hillside zombie-gathering seemed to come together with compelling urgency and a kind of unexpectedly weird beauty, blending into the equally unalive, yet animate, singing of the wind.

  I recall at the time thinking vaguely about a certain radio station – one still using binaural, no-pix format – that I used to listen to as a boy. The net-jockies on that channel always bragged that they played only contemporary tunes, never classical, or oldies, or cro-rock, or warp zither… Just the latest stuff.

  “No music by dead guys.” That was their motto.

  But here I was, listening to a veritable song of the perished. A melody with spirit, with soul. And it was the very latest thing.

  The rhythms were unique.

  The harmonies, splendid.

  Decomposers were sublime.

  5.

  Picture a lonely human, sleeping fitfully atop a cold marble slab in an alien cemetery, his dreams threaded by a night-long threnody of the undead – a crooning zombie serenade.

  How restful would you find that, after a long hard day getting pummeled by bourgeois werewolves, seeing your comrades snatched away by cloaked figures in the night, and then losing even the distant comfort of contact with your starship, orbiting far overhead?

  Would your slumber be fitful? Disturbed… on this night of the living dead?

  Not mine. For the rest of that long first night on Oxytocin 41, I slept like… well… the dead… somehow knowing that my new friends – Moulder and Sully – would guard me until dawn. Protecting the most precious thing that I had left. Something the two of them no longer possessed.

  Life.

  The next morning’s weather was “perfect” for my kindly hosts. Dank, chilly and overcast, but not too humid. An ideal sort of day for “recents” – the newly risen dead – to stroll into town.

  We had to wait, of course, for the great Zombie Conclave to break up, after that strangely stirring nightlong dirge. The (literally) haunting harmonies at last began to fade, along with the brittle constellations, when a pale morning glow spread in the east. Gradually, through a predawn mist, shambling figures could be seen descending through the graveyard, returning to tombs and crypts and cenotaphs, then pulling shut their hinged lids, leaving behind a trampled slope scattered with various organs, limbs and other fallen parts, twitching, then dissolving into sludge and vapor.

  A few of the oldest walking cadavers – nearly fleshless and evidently confused – wandered past the tombstones and monuments, moaning softly as they meandered toward the dim city skyline, heedless of a mine field that lay in the way, just short of the town wall. A staccato of muffled explosions made me wince. But Moulder, the male Zoom who had befriended me last night, grunted with satisfaction each time a detonation resonated through the rows of tombs.

  “That’s how I plan to move on, when the time is ripe,” he commented. “With a bang. None of that soul-o whimpering for me!”

  A final coffin lid slammed shut, even as the mist condensed into swirls and then clouds that drifted upward, revealing the resplendent skyscraper towers of a city that had been named – until yesterday – Cal’mari. In this light, the metropolis looked pretty typical for a Stage Eighteen world… only with some unique features. For example, a maze of netting – like spiderwebs – making it next to impossible for any creature (alive or undead) to fly between most buildings. One of many defensive measures erected by the planet’s living population, I supposed. Perhaps paranoid… but understandable, given what I had learned so far.

  The city proper was a realm for the planet’s most numerous subspecies, known as “Standards” – sufficiently humanoid that an Earthling like me could walk among them. At least that was what I hoped to do… with help from the substantial makeup kit that my other new friend, Sully, carried with her at all times.

  “We’ll have to change your skin tone and put some box-corners on your ears,” she commented while applying putties and sprays “Oh! And let’s give you a nice goatee beard to cover up that awful chin.”

  I stopped myself from blurting: “What’s wrong with my chin?” Even with nano translators tuned to the local language, I had to assume there would be, well, exaggerations. So I quashed any impulse to take offense.

  Besides, she had a gentle touch… and was by far the most attractive corpse I had ever met.

  Sully even made a few alterations to my Alliance uniform, sewing some of the rips and tears from my battle with local lycanthropes, the night before, then adding a few clever touches to make my clothes resemble normal street attire. Moulder, pacing nearby, grumbled that she was putting in far too much effort.

  “It’s not as if he’ll really blend in. Have you forgotten we’ll be with him?”

  Moulder had just finished puttying his own face, but only in a very dark room would anybody fail to note a missing chunk of skull, perhaps the very injury that brought him to this place. To his second phase of “life.”

  “Oh, hush,” Sully responded. “Don’t you want the flavor of a good deed to carry with you, as memory and mind fade away?”

  Moulder muttered some more. But of course, this merely confirmed something that I’ve long observed during my voyages aboard the Clever Gamble. For all of its apparent malignity, the universe also overflows with kindness and skill.

  Anyway, I just have to believe it. A character flaw, I suppose. They only pick optimists to serve as human advisors aboard demmie-crewed ships.

  Anyone else would probably go insane.

  Our day began with a hurried search of the big park where my crewmates and I had slurried down to this planet, only a day before. I held out little hope of finding the Nozzle intact. After all, I couldn’t see the Hose. A careful scan of the sky showed no blue, shimmering line leading upward to the heavens. Still, I had to check. If our ship had been destroyed, the Nozzle-reconstructor should still be there… along with a tangled coil of fallen tubing that would trail ever westward, falling from space to snarl trees, power cables, and clotheslines across half a continent.

  The nozzle was gone. No sign of it in the park. And, in a sense, that was encouraging! So, the Gamble hadn’t been destroyed in a flash. There must have been time to at least begin hauling in the slurry hose.

  A small comfort. Very small.

  Our search brought forth one more clue… a tattered tunic of lime green, very large, with WEMS spelled across the chest. I turned it over carefully, checking for clues to what might have become of the security crewman, but there were none that I could see.

  Then I tried using the garment’s built-in transmitter to contact Commander Talon, on the Clever Gamble.