“Among the most valuable things in the game,” one of the older ones says.
“They wouldn’t simply hand them off to you if you didn’t matter.”
“They handed them off to the woman, first,” I say. “Is this woman one of you?”
No response.
“Hello?”
“She’s an Operational, if that’s what you mean,” a somewhat beefier, matronly one says venomously.
“Was she supposed to hand the bag off to me?”
She shakes her head.
“No, of course not. She recovered the bag on her own initiative.”
“She didn’t keep too close an eye on it.”
“Don’t think you can just sit there and reproach her,” the younger one says.
“No,” she shakes her head. “She let it go.”
“She was disgusted and worn out,” the first one says.
“But there was another Operational who came for it,” I throw in. “He tried to get it from me.”
“What does it matter?” the older one asks. “You’ve got it now.”
“Is this man here?”
“No,” he says. “I don’t know where he is. They must have reassigned him.”
“All right,” I rub the handle of the bag, feeling unaccountably nervous. “What about my furry friends with the rifles. They here?”
Up until now, the room hasn’t been what you would call noisy, but now the silence abruptly becomes acute.
“You saw one? With long shaggy...?” the older one asks.
“Saw him and talked to him. He showed me how to use the tape gun.”
They are taking this in.
“Well, what was he?”
“That’s the first I’ve heard of any Galvophones around here,” matronly says, more to the others than to me. “By the way, we should ask June to come in.”
“I’ll get her.”
A young woman gets up and angles through the door as quick and quiet as a ghost.
“He one of you?” I ask.
“An Operational,” the first one says.
“You called him something else,” I say. “What was it again?”
“They’re higher officials.”
“Gal—?”
Reluctance. Hesitation. Then, “Galvophones.”
“They often talk to menials like me?”
“They can talk to whomever they want.”
“So what does that mean? Why talk to me?”
“It might have been intended to misdirect the other team,” matronly says.
“Here she is!”
The woman comes in with a brief, slightly breathless smile, and gestures behind her gracefully as she heads back to her seat. Right behind her comes an amazon in a print dress. Her face is unremarkably pretty, and composed in an expression of almost comical good-nature.
The room’s quiet changes again. Now it’s the hum of unspoken things.
June stands there, smoothing her dress calmly against her thighs, her eyes flicking from one to another and to the floor. If she notices me, she doesn’t let on. In profile her most prominent feature is a buttery shoulder and arm, dotted with a couple of moles.
“Well,” matronly asks, “do you like her?”
“I’m crazy about her,” I say, being flip. “What’s this all about?”
“She looks good, doesn’t she?” older one asks. From his tone, I get the funny idea he genuinely wishes he knew.
“Fine,” I say warily. “She need a date for the prom? Is this—”
“But I mean,” younger one says, deliberately talking over me, “you, you personally... uh, like her?”
“Is this a sale?” I ask.
Now there comes a quiet moment that really throws me. They’re actually thinking it over.
“I don’t believe we can accommodate you there,” younger says.
“Take off your dress for the gentleman,” matronly says at the same time.
June immediately reaches behind herself and undoes the zipper. Now she pulls the dress off over her head and stands there in her shoes. Just her shoes.
“You see, she’s very nice.”
“Obliging,” old one says, sounding as if he were grasping at straws, and unfamiliar with what might be considered June’s good qualities.
June stands there, completely relaxed, calmly gazing out the window.
“Your kind do like this type, right?” younger says.
I get up.
“I think I need to be going,” I say.
The girl stands in an icy circle of corpses who are hoarsely recommending her charms to me, their voices frail.
“I could use a little air,” I say.
“Well, we have to make a living,” matronly snaps at me with as much acerbity as she can muster, but like the rest she is weak.
The woman who brought her in is on her feet again. She turns June toward me, and gives her short hair a couple of perfunctory pats. Now she’s holding up June’s breasts at me, one on the palm of each hand, like a judicious butcher weighing out his wares. Like a ghoul. Her eyes look like they’re painted on her face. I half expect the warm flesh to wither at the touch of her wooden hands. June is calm, wide awake, almost above it all.
Outside. Down the lane and follow the sidewalk at a brisk pace, the bag swinging at the end of my arm, quietly feeding me its juice I suppose. I feel better, but there’s someone else walking near me and I have trouble concentrating. When I spin, he comes skating up as he’d done once before, lifting his legs over each other as he comes near.
“Not tonight, mac. My patience is at an all-time low.”
“Not looking for that, mac,” he says, smiling because something is different. “Just delivering an invitation.”
He points. I take a few cautious steps back and follow his finger to a spot where an angry, rippling orange glimmer prickles out in the dark over the rooftops.
“So they got another firebug,” I say. “Fine by me.”
“Fine by you and fine by me,” he says. “But not by everybody involved and they want to talk with you about it.”
“That suits me fine,” I say. “Where?”
“Stick around. They’ll home you in.”
After looking toward the house I’ve just come out of for a moment or two, he rubs his hands and gives me a quizzical look.
“You weren’t interested?”
“In?”
“In June.”
“In June? No, thanks.”
“You prefer March?”
“May. I’m a contrarian. Yeah, that’s right,” I snap, because he’s smirking. “Somebody has to be.”
“Stupid way to live,” he says.
“Tell me about it,” I say.
He begins to move off.
“Is this your stop?” I ask.
“It might be.”
“Patron or pimp?” I ask.
He smiles.
“Neither one, chum.”
Walking away again, with that skating move. As he disappears, he pauses, turning at the waist. His arms hang down and he looks at me by craning his neck back and over.
“You ought to find out more about us before you start drawing hasty conclusions.”
“I’ll check the encyclopedia.”
He’s disappearing into the dark.
“You know who to ask,” he says to the air in front of us both. Then he’s gone.
Quiet streets, tranquil night, and about as appealing a place to kill time as a railway crossing. I find a continuous bit of shadow over grass, duck into it going one way and double back, returning the way the first Operational took me. Rather than pop back out into the light, I assume any onlookers are liable to have window glass between themselves and me, making sound less conspicuous than sight; that means I have to veer through some uncooperative bushes, and keep on through the trees.
“Psst!”
It’s June, in exactly the condition in which I last saw her, standing by a tree.
“I’m alone!”
she says, coming toward me with a little frisk of her hands.
“Sh,” I say. “Keep your voice low.”
“OK,” she says, drawing still nearer. Fragrance. Her body is all blues like a moving painting.
“I put a blanket down over there,” she says, pointing at what looks like a tiny pool of electricity glowing against the leaf mold.
I’ve noticed that the repugnance the “spells” inspired in me, I seem to inspire in other people; at least, in other people who aren’t somehow connected to whatever this is I’m connected to. The courier is repulsive, someone says. So her friendliness tells me she’s one of them.
“I’m not a customer,” I say.
“Well, that’s all right!” she says loudly. “I like it!”
She flings her arms around me. Now I’ve got her dangling from my neck, grinning up into my face.
“Maybe your boyfriend doesn’t like it.”
“He’s not my boyfriend, he’s my husband, and whether he likes it or not is his problem.”
A moment later, I say.
“He must be the understanding type.”
“To qualified people.”
“Qualified how? They can find a doorbell?”
She pulls back from me, leaving her palms on my chest, and looks steadily up into my face.
“I can’t help how I was put together,” she says.
“There’s such a thing as trying.”
After a moment, in which we do nothing but study each other, I apologize.
She brightens, as if I’d said something very complimentary, slips from me, and walks in a little circle before me.
“Aren’t I generously enfigurated?”
It’s a proudly rhetorical question.
“Enough for two,” I say.
“And I’m new!”
“Is this your neighborhood? Your husband work with those people I was talking to?”
“No,” she shakes her head.
Something about her strikes me.
“Walk around a little more, won’t you?” I ask.
She struts grandly to and fro. The word “June” is distinctly tattooed on her bottom. I watch her feet, the way she moves. When she draws near to me again, I ask, “You’re not an Operational, are you?”
She just laughs and shakes her head, putting her arms around me again. Before I can say anything else, she’s kissing me. This is a test.
*
I open the bag wide and step down into it again, drawing the mouth closed just above my head, like a submarine hatch. I’m in the dark for a while, how long I can’t say.
There’s a deafening sound of stiff fibres rasping against stone and exposed metal. A dim, gaunt figure, adorned in heavy black festoons, emerges from a narrow chute and begins gathering a dense, crawling carpet of living straws together into a rope. Now it is dragging this rope through its legs. Above it, the sky breaks, opening in a yawning seam from the zenith to the horizon. It’s a colossal dome opening on the true sky, beyond. With the same motion, as they are part of one machine, two parallel ranks of titanic black cubes, blocks a hundred feet tall, lift from their bases and rise unsupported into the air, all at the exactly the same elevation. They ascend beyond the level of the dome as it pulls back and becomes a circular wall.
As the dome opens, the gloomy luster of the outer air reveals a city of huge mechanisms, centered around a wide runway where the figure, a lady, stands, and which is lined by the bases of the floating blocks. I recognize her as the original of the statue in the alcove. She hauls on the rope wildly; a swath of straws in front of her gathers into a distinct coil between her hands and then fans out again, unravelling with bright crackles of static electricity as she thrusts the line through her legs and behind her. The expression of her lips and teeth is maniacal, furious, but her eyes are blank, fixed on a remote object in the sky.
She is watching for the Returner of Life. From up above, it answers the same summons that drew her once again from her lair in the lightless waters down below, and that’s the rekindling of the contact sun. It burns again, dark and intense, after countless years.
There—the Returner of Life is crashing down from space into the outer atmosphere of the world, and she sees it. As it hits the air, a thin, high-pitched scream can be heard, all across the planet. Metal foliage bursts out on the millions of thick branches that fleece the entire colossal structure, so the turret that crowns it seems to be rearing itself up out of a dense, cyclone-battered forest. It has a brilliant lighthouse beam that revolves from a source in the top, sweeping its blade of light around the top. As it plummets into the densening air, its surfaces char and smoke. Blood breaks from its leaves and spatters its sides, black funnels, vents like wailing faces. The blood streams down leaves that heat makes incandescent.
Hot, pungent wind lifts her braids. Seen from the runway, the Returner of Life is a violent comet sparkling as it drops down the sky, a thick arm of scarlet vapor coiling behind it. Turbulence rolls before it in waves, shaking the air until the entire atmosphere begins to move. The machine bears down on the city. As it draws steadily nearer to the ground, the dust that covers everything is whipped into devils that turn in moments into storms. The ground shivers, boulders tumble and then catapult themselves, mountains splinter, the crust vibrates and splits into sections miles across that flutter as fast as a fly’s wings and the whole planet is becoming an avalanche. The pinnacle on which the city stands, alone, of anything else on the planet, is not stirred by the approach of the Returner of Life. For the moment, the city remains still.
With signs of greater and greater strain, the lady continues to pull the cable. As a result of her exertions, the cubes hover a hundred yards above the city, each one too massive to be so much as jostled by howling winds. Raising her eyes, she sees the wall of red smoke roll across the horizon. It charges like a host of cavalry, the comet at its front, shooting out its beam of light and screaming like a frenzied animal.
Awash in red luster, the woman releases her grip on the line. With a scraping of wire along the ground more raucous than before, it rushes back through her legs, shooting out before her. The cubes drop with a deafening crash, like the explosion of as many bombs, and instantly they spring up again. They pound their bases like pistons, leaping up hundreds of yards and slamming down again in unison, in unreal precision. An enormous geared wheel, standing upright, is spinning; the woman strides to the drumming of the blocks and begins turning another heavy gear. Immediately, pipes protruding from the slopes of the pinnacle belch frothing white seawater into the basin below. Roaring cascades, the crescents of water stretch for miles before finally bending to the earth.
The Returner of Life claws through the sky toward the city, screaming, gushing blood, raking the sky with its light. The lady settling down on the edge of the runway, lets herself down into the calyx of a metal press that spreads her legs wide apart. Just beyond her opens a watery sump lined with elaborately damasced steel blocks, and choked with floating human corpses. The Returner of Life is coming; its grating shrieks sound directly above the city, its bulk obscures the sky, a red cyclone fastens itself on the walls, winds batter the ascending waves into massive, twisting surges that dash themselves impetuously against the pinnacle.
The machine battens on the city. Lightning arcs up from gigantic turbines and splits the air with its explosion, striking the Returner of Life. Icy feelers of lighting dart up, lacing their jets among the branches of the machine, forking inside the machine’s haunted forest. A battery of lightning erupts from the turbine and there’s a shattering cacophony of explosive bursts, the howling wind and shrieking machine, the hiss and bellow of rising waves. The Returner of Life trembles and reels; itself as big as the city, it screams and lunges and bucks in place.
Hydraulic plates press the body of the lady, squeezing out albumin that glitters like star sperm as it glides from a slot in the base of the press and down into the sump. It spreads across the surface of the foetid water. The exposed hearts
of the corpses belly out flabbily like limp sails taking a powerful gust, and once again they resume to beat. One by one, they beat in open cavities. They grow stronger, until they are as strong as healthy human hearts. Then twice as strong as that. Then ten times stronger. Twenty. Fifty. A hundred times stronger.
These hearts churn up the filthy water and beat it to foam, stirring up old blood from deep below. Spurts of water burst from bodies, mouths, ears, eye sockets. The bodies writhe and stare, their heads jerk back and blood fountains from their mouths. The hearts beat and the blocks rise and fall. The hearts are growing stronger. Five hundred times. A thousand times. Ten thousand times.
The bodies convulse. They begin to take on a more human appearance, and decay is leaving them. There’s a clamor of voices—the sound of sharp thunder and the rumble of surf as the sea rises on all sides—the lady, trapped in the press, reaches, stretching herself, toward the machine. Now it has her, whips her into an aperture in its machinery where she tosses like rock thrown in a stone polisher. The walls of the pit are studded with the exposed heads of Operationals coming back to life.
When they are a hundred thousand the hearts are so strong they pump blood up in columns that rise above the city’s towers to form pulsating scarlet minarets that dash against the sides of the Returner of Life, seethe around it, and rising steaming further into the sky. The Returner of Life ejects the lady, who drops limply into the pool. The lightning stops, the turbine goes still. The machine shifts itself ponderously upward and its cries become a continuous, tortured scream as it hauls itself upright to howl the word CHORNCENDANTRA out into space. With the force of the sound, it distributes the rising blood of the Operationals into the sky, turning the clouds red, spraying them to the turbulence of the winds which will carry them all over the planet. This rain of blood will fall all over a dead world, and restore it once again to life. The Operationals are silent, and stand looking at each other, waist deep in a limpid pool that is growing ever more still. The Returner of Life, with a scream, lifts itself like a wounded animal back into its orbit around the invisible contact sun.
*
Walk a little more, the bag swinging at the end of my arm. Egrets fly low over the bruise-colored water, which still holds the twilight. I don’t see them, only their reflections. The birds themselves are swallowed by the gloom, like me. The gloom has a dank smell, the water’s flesh, the musty smell of its bed in a shut up room. There’s a chorus of circular ripples, the unreal clarity of the far-off buildings against the sky. There’s a sky in the water, and the fish poke their heads through it. How long was I wandering inside a heavy-metal album cover?
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