Member

by Michael Cisco

  “You’re right,” she says grimly. “That makes it an average of—urk!”

  The lights go out, and so do I, backing out through the door into the hall, quietly getting down on the floor and creeping backwards, on my belly, away from the office. The lights flick back on out here, but not in the office, which remains invisible in the darkness. Sounds of distress, the voice of the inspector’s partner, muffled inside the office. The cat smell is stronger here.

  I stay low, hoping the gas rises. Bodies lie all around me, breathing deeply. The lights go out, and come back. In the instant of darkness I hear a wooden thwack, and, when the lights return, I see a trembling knife embedded in a table, not six inches above my head. There’s no telling where it came from—all the windows have been flung open, and a few of the hardier men, who must have been trying to fan the gas out with newspapers, are slumped across the sills.

  Blood trickles from the table leg. The knife is still moving. It twists against the wood, trying to free itself. It doesn’t look like a throwing knife to me—more like a kitchen knife. The handle is smooth and black, with a brilliant steel stripe down its length, and two white steel dots. Should I grab it? That would give me control of it, but it would also put me at the scene of one, maybe two stabbings with a knife in my hand. Table blood is pooling around the leg nearest me, and spreading in my direction. The smell of cats is getting stifling.

  I get hold of a chair and drag it over me, using it like a turtle’s shell. Lying low has been an effective strategy so far. Scuttling across the floor, I reach the door and hesitate. If the knife-thrower is outside, I’d be endangering myself if I left. The attacks came in the dark, so avoiding darkness would seem to be a better idea. There’s a woodbox not far from me, big enough to hold a man.

  I slip over and lift the lid. A man’s hand reaches up from inside the box and yanks the lid back down again with a curse of surprise and anger.

  I open my bag, and struggle down into it.

  *

  I imagine the moon speaking quietly, reciting something to itself that it intends me to overhear, in a dry, gentle, old man’s voice. The invisible coast draws nearer, and now there’s the scream the reviver machine made, barely audible, insanely stubborn, as if it had traversed all of intervening space, refusing to disperse.

  “Of course,” the moon mutters. “You climb peppermint boulders to get to the Lightning House, of course.”

  The other also says, “Of course.”

  Smiles like a murderer.

  Looking at me.

  Grinning like a murderer, the smile turns on its end, upright like the letter I, dances shocks flares and falls in the woods, a huge shock that had suddenly appeared, towering over the forest roof, thin and brilliant. Then it fell to earth, a shooting star, and a smile on a shadow face that had never been seen, and now it’s being brought back out of the woods again by some crazies, stark naked, walking in single file with the lightning bolt draped from one shoulder to another like a dead python, following a shaman who plays a flute of light.

  There’s a knife lying on the cutting board in the basement kitchen, and the wan gleams of the setting sun make it glow like lightning, a knife, a magic smile. The other one comes in. First he stares at it, then he seizes it, then he starts jumping around. Bounding up the basement steps he dances out with the knife, slashing at the sky the dawn the forest the town. The flashing edge reflects glints on the horizon and dripping wounds sag in the sky.

  If these planets aren’t real, then how do I know about them?

  An obvious answer isn’t correct simply because it’s obvious.

  What do we mean by ‘the reason’ anyway? What would be ‘the reason’ for my knowing this or not knowing that? I can’t... I can’t seem... I don’t remember what reason means, just now.

  Getting out of the rain, I duck beneath the branches of a tree and find a fountain pen lying on the ground. Actually, it’s set across two raised roots, very deliberately. A white fountain pen. I pick it up and try it out on the back of a take-out menu.

  The magic pen writes “why is it necessary for you to ‘know’ what you are going?”

  That ‘what’ bothers me. Should have been “where.”

  But is this something I could be missing?

  Of course. I can take it for granted I am always missing something.

  I push my way out of the bag groggily and try to take in the room, the tables and chairs. Everything is just the same, except that the light is out. So perhaps there are things here that have changed, but I can’t see that they have.

  Go outside. There’s some commotion, some kind of confused noise, from elsewhere in the camp, but I suddenly feel secretive. My little time-out in the bag has allowed me to slip Chorncendantra’s attention, and I decide this is my opportunity to get a closer look at the artifact.

  It just seems to hang there, like a tidal wave in the middle of the ocean. As I draw nearer to it, I can hear it sighing, as if it were asleep. The sound feels just like silence, but that’s impossible, because silence logically can have no qualities, and this is a viscous, flutelike exhalation that reminds me of the pipe organ wheeze that bronchitis makes. Silence continues until some sound breaks it; it doesn’t swell and subside like this sound does. Still feels just like silence, though.

  No one stops me, or seems to notice me as I approach the base of the artifact. The barracks are all dark. There’s no sign of any night shift.

  I’m there. The sighing drips down like icy smoke, and I study the blank expanse in front of me. Trying to get a sense of the configuration of a ship by walking right up to it in dry dock and studying it from about three feet away might be something like this. The exterior is uniform, like paper. It’s cold. No it isn’t, I touch it and find out, the skin of the artifact is neither hot nor cold, but the air right next to it is cold. It is wind from outer space, that trickled down here and gathered in snowdrifts around this thing, which has more to do with the sky than the ground anyway. The top, far above me, vanishes in the constellations the way the peaks of high mountains vanish in clouds.

  Walking beside it, where the foundations disappear into a dugout, I can’t see any aperture in it, or so much as a protruding bolt or a dangling length of wire. High above me, there are scaffolds and such. How do the Operationals get up there? Do they leap, while the High Rationals play?

  Here’s a spot where the surface elbows out; it’s a hollow in the ground, bordered on one side by a barrier of bamboo rods. The outermost shoot oozes tacky green smoke from a notch about two feet up. The smoke dangles from the opening, the end waves as if its purchase on the air were unsteady, and then dissipates without a trace. The floor of the hollow is a thick layer of dirt over cement, and there’s a grating stuck, apparently haphazardly, into the bamboo, that attracts the wind. Black shreds of something stream from the grating. Strands of what looks like black magnetic tape are pinched in the louvers of the vent.

  “Well, is it still there?” one voice asks furtively.

  “...No,” the other says, evidently after a long look. “But your eyes were always keener than mine.”

  “But you saw it! You’re always seeing it!” the first voice makes these exclamations quietly, only heightening its intonation.

  “Just glimpses,” the second voice says simply.

  “Are there tracks? I’ll look for tracks.”

  Not trusting the grate or the bamboo to hide me for long, I retreat as I hear footsteps approaching the other side of the barrier.

  The tamped dirt tracks between the barracks have a less somnolent mood now, as though the people inside were stirring, cooking, washing clothes. There’s a cabbagey smell. A group of women in blue dresses and kerchiefs goes marching past, maybe about a dozen, and I squat behind some steps to avoid being seen.

  Now there’s a clear patch like a little parade ground, dimly lit by kerosene lanterns on posts. A sparse circle of men, and there’s Guerrero in the midst of them, leaning halfway out of his chair to mana
ge something hidden in the shadows. He moves in such a mechanically precise way, especially just now, settling himself back into exactly the same posture he’d been in before, that it makes me suspicious.

  A mechanical double? That suspicion invests him with prestige—what a privilege, it suddenly seems to me, to be an extension of the ordinator machinery. To be so important that it’s necessary to make a mechanical double of you, to impersonate you. Who would ever impersonate me? There’d be nothing to gain by it. But that thought is unlike me, it’s unlike me to think that thought. Something’s wrong. My hand is in spasms, tugging at my arm. It lunges at the bag, seizing it by the handle, and I am precipitated forward.

  Guerrero notices me and smiles, undisconcerted.

  “You are like the cobra that came to Koluz, my friend...” he calls, without raising his voice. The slightly fussy way he moves his lips when he talks also strikes me as puppetlike.

  “You get around pretty good yourself. How many more are there like you?”

  The enigmatic expression I get back for that one might mean whatever. I notice that the thing he was retrieving from the shadows when I first caught sight of him sits in his lap now, between his hands. It’s a wine bottle, all black, no label.

  The other men are wearing trim outfits that remind me of old-time bathing costumes, and they have not acknowledged me in any way. Guerrero murmurs orders to some of them.

  “The third team will begin work at the bottom of the transverse section, fifteen feet past the newest. No more than half the time in the fire.”

  The ones he’s talking to mutter and shuffle their feet.

  “We got half the last time!” a voice calls.

  “Yeah, two never gets half. You always give them at least... two thirds!” The second voice pauses to calculate that two thirds.

  Guerrero pats the arm of his chair. There’s no appreciable noise, but it gets their attention like a gavel. All the same, they’re beginning to crowd him. Now they’re close enough they could reach right out and snatch him from his chair if they wanted.

  “Half,” he says.

  “Give two half!”

  “Yeah, quit aroundscrewing! Give us two thirds and give two half!”

  Guerrero sighs through his nose.

  “Half.”

  He rolls his chair toward me a little.

  “Have you changed your mind about staying?” he asks me, civilly.

  “I’m still thinking it over,” I say.

  “And about what are you thinking?”

  “I’m about-thinking that I need to know whether or not this is the site I make my delivery to. Is this reasonable of me? What else?”

  “We expect no deliveries,” he says patiently.

  “You hear that?” a voice calls angrily. “They’re not expecting any deliveries, and we were having a discussion here.”

  Guerrero turns his head to one side, addressing the people behind him.

  “There is no discussion,” he says, as if only stating a fact.

  “I think there is,” the voice insists.

  “Look,” I say, thinking now is the right time to needle him, while he’s between me and them, “I didn’t want this responsibility in the first place. You and your Chorncendantrism foisted it on me. You know whether or not this is the site, or you can find out, or you can locate another courier or something.”

  Guerrero shakes his head slowly as I talk.

  “No one compelled you to collect that bag,” he says, pointing. “No one is forcing you to keep it—”

  “You compelled me to get it and keep it!” I shout.

  “We do not do things in that way,” he says, still shaking his head.

  “Don’t give me that serene and serious no-contraction talk! You sent a man after me to make sure I retrieved that bag, and he socked me, to boot!”

  His head goes on shaking levelly. “I’m sorry to hear it, and I certainly had nothing whatever to do with it.”

  “Then who’s that?” I shout, pointing at the owner of the second voice, a voice I’d recognized, who’d said ‘aroundscrewing.’

  The man is surprisingly small, but the bulbs of his shoulders, which are bared by the cut of his outfit, are so big and seamed compared to the rest of him that they seem deformed. He ducks his head and puts his hands behind his back when I call attention to him.

  Guerrero asks me what I’m talking about. He sounds as if he’s taking me seriously.

  “That man. I recognize his voice.”

  Guerrero cocks his finger. The man walks forward nervously, his face already slick with sweat. He wears a toothy grin that’s grotesquely out of keeping with the worry in his eyes. Guerrero turns his chair and points his cast accusingly.

  “Is he telling the truth?”

  The man just looks down, still grinning.

  “Why?” Guerrero barks suddenly.

  The man flinches.

  “I was joking! It was just a joke!”

  Suddenly he turns his attention to me.

  “Look, sir, I’m sorry about it. OK? I apologize, all right?”

  There’s real fear in his eyes; it’s not that intense, but it is real. He at least believes something bad is in store for him.

  “Go to your barracks,” Guerrero says sternly.

  The man turns back to Guerrero, fumbling in the chest pockets of his outfit.

  “Sir, please. I have two tickets to the zoo. I was going to use them tonight...”

  He’s almost in tears, holding out the tickets, like two ivory wafers.

  “I can’t take them back, and they’re only good for tonight!”

  Guerrero shakes his head sadly.

  The man turns and trudges away, hanging his head.

  “Come on!” he cries, turning back again a moment later, still holding the tickets and opening his hands in an imploring gesture. He looks from Guerrero to me and back again, as if I were in a position to release him from his punishment, if this is a punishment, and keeps on looking for a long time. Even with the tears trembling in his eyes, he’s still grinning; apparently he finds a grin suffices to express everything equally well. Or perhaps he just forgets it’s there.

  Finally, when neither Guerrero nor I do anything, he abruptly lets his head drop forward onto his breast and opens his fingers, allowing the ticket he held in each hand to flutter to the ground at his feet, where they rest at an angle to each other, hopelessly. The man turns and trudges away, disappearing down a dim lane. The weird light of the earliest approach of dawn hangs down.

  I look at Guerrero, who reflects my gaze.

  “You’re like the cobra that came to Kaluz, my friend,” he says.

  “So is this something you didn’t know about?”

  Guerrero looks at me with unconcealed disgust. “Of course not!”

  I walk over to where the tickets lie in the dust, and take them.

  *

  The man stands on the back of the truck, the flashing light playing over his face.

  “You’re to be returned to the site,” he growls at me.

  I show him the tickets.

  “I gotta go to the zoo first.”

  “...There’s two tickets there,” he says.

  “You’re not my type.”

  He grimaces, and waves me aboard. I climb in the back and sit on a box; the truck is like a troop transport and the back is covered in canvas I can smell.

  The trip to the zoo takes so little time I ask the driver, who is not the man who stood on the back, whether or not it’s part of the site.

  “Yeah it’s part of the site,” he mimics me snidely, and drives us off muttering something about when he’ll be back.

  The zoo gate looks like a huge white tooth with two narrow slots for gates; entering is like angling through a venetian blind. I have to drop my ticket into a chute to lower the barrier. There is a darkened ticket booth with glass walls on the other side and a woman inside it, applying make up with the help of a compact.

  The night is dark blue.
Bugs patter against the dim lamps in air made gamy with animal zest. Off in the distance, a woman pushes a baby cart with a tiny lamp hanging from it, taking a look at the exotic birds, which are asleep, all standing in a row right against the bars.

  As I start to look around, more crazed children, and their drooping parents. They swarm, in particular, around a group of somber people who cringe at their noise and shrink from their touch. Everyone in this group is carrying a bag more or less like mine.

  One of them, an older Indian man with the bushiest eyebrows I’ve ever seen, happens to glance in my direction, and at once his gaze fastens on me. One by one, they all struggle to notice me, and rivet their eyes to me. There must be half a dozen of them. I have to wade through the children, who are as oblivious of me as water, to get over to them.

  I fall in with them and it is at once awkward and natural. The din the children are making is so loud that I would have to shout to make myself heard, and they seem to notice and understand my disinclination to raise my voice in greeting them, with appreciation. They’ve drawn in almost directly under a huge acrylic globe of bats, which churn silently in a blue-grey shadow.

  The other couriers barely acknowledge me, or it would be more correct to say they acknowledge me so totally that they don’t show it in any way, except by not recoiling from me. There are men and women here, and no obvious type, but they are all sullen and standing like barnacles that have just fastidiously sucked in their feelers.

  We shuffle along somehow, cringing toward each other whenever the children erupt again, quickly redistributing ourselves so none of us touches any of the others. Finally, we are outside, in an elevated section of the zoo which apparently doesn’t interest many children.

  “What are they doing up so late anyway?” someone asks

  “And who brought them, that’s what I’d like to know,” another says. The voice is frayed, perhaps by too much shouting earlier. “How can there be so many children to so few adults? The ratio’s off.”

  I lean against a railing and peer over at a polar bear, sitting morosely on its gigantic bottom with its forepaws between its legs. A crushing homesickness radiates from it.