Tesseracts Fourteen: Strange Canadian Stories

by John Robert Colombo

  The two faces looked at each other. While Face One held the door open, Face Two leaned in close to Chad and hauled him to his feet by his shirt. “I get paid to lug bodies around. I get paid to hand out cash. I even, apparently, get paid to mop up puke. I do not get paid to help you, and I do not get paid to give a shit about your problems.”

  Face Two launched Chad through the open door and into a pile of garbage leaning against the opposite wall of the alley. The men disappeared from Chad’s view as the door closed. There was the audible click of a locking mechanism, and Chad sat alone in his pile of garbage.

  Chad bolted to his feet at the sound of a nearby whimper, and immediately regretted the sudden motion. He followed the sound and found the second loser, Mr. Animal Mauling, lying under a bag of refuse. The man’s eyes were open and staring at nothing; he whimpered and trembled, and a sheen of sweat covered his visible skin of his hands, neck and face. Someone had taken his shoes.

  The sight of the wet body reminded Chad of swimming in the ocean — reminded him of falling and splashing, of sinking below the surface.

  Another noise intruded upon the memory of drowning. Chad was surprised to find himself on his knees. He looked toward the new sound to see Max and Rocco at the far end of the alley, walking towards him. Chad climbed to his feet and ran in the opposite direction. The alcohol and the drowning skewed his vision and sense of balance, and he had to push himself off the walls several times to stay upright. He exited the alleyway onto a dim, unoccupied street. At a distant intersection he spotted a red and blue booth and ran for it.

  A viewscreen came alive as he crossed the threshold, and the face of a pretty, blonde woman in a police uniform filled the bright rectangle. “Bowers Corporation New York Police Department, please identify yourself using the station to your right.”

  Chad pressed his thumb onto a small square and stared into a retinal scanner; red lines flashed across his eyes and thumb.

  “Hello, Chad Oliver. You are not a priority customer. Please come back during normal business hours for assistance.”

  “I can’t wait! Someone’s after me, they’re going to kill me!”

  “It is three thirty-five a.m. Only priority customers with an off-hours support contract are eligible for assistance at this time. Please come back during our normal business hours, Monday through Saturday, from eight a.m. until eight p.m.”

  Chad pounded the screen in front of him with a fist. “I said I can’t wait! They’re really going to kill me, I need police now!”

  “If you require immediate assistance and would like to become a priority customer, please choose the contract that best suits your needs, and select the payment option below. Take advantage of our current special; purchase three months of priority service, and receive a fourth month absolutely free.”

  Chad glanced at the payment options, none of which were affordable with a two fifty chip. Tears streamed down Chad’s cheeks. He tasted the salty wetness when one drop reached his lips. The tears tasted like seawater. Chad shook his head before the memory could crush him again. When his eyes opened, the screen had gone black.

  “Need help?”

  Chad yelped and whirled at the unexpected voice, and the sudden motion brought the percussionist back. Max and Rocco blocked the booth’s only exit.

  “C’mon, Chad,” said Max. “Come with us, let’s work something out.”

  Chad thrust out the hand with the credit chip. “Take it, it’s all I have.”

  Rocco took the chip and scanned it. “Two fifty,” he said.

  Max put an arm around Chad’s shoulder and guided him out of the booth. “Well, two fifty is a start. Do you remember how much you owe the boss?”

  “Twenty thousand,” said Chad.

  “Twenty thousand,” Max agreed. “Good stuff, that gun didn’t fry all your brains. And tonight was the last chance to pay it all back. So what can we do about the rest?”

  Chad whimpered. “I have nothing left. The business went under and the bank took everything. I don’t even have a home anymore.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Max. “We’ve got a place where you can spend the night. But word on the street is that your business went under because you got caught cheating with illegal hardware. I know the boss helped hook you up, but getting caught was stupid.”

  “Hardware.” Chad stopped walking. “I can sell the hardware. I’ll go to a doc first thing and have it taken out.”

  “Chad,” Max continued walking, and pulled Chad with him. “You don’t have any money. There’s no doctor around here that’s going to work on you if you can’t pay him.”

  “I know,” said Chad. “I’ll figure something out. I just need time to get back on my feet.”

  Max nodded in agreement. “That sounds reasonable to me,” he said, guiding Chad into an alleyway. “What do you think, Rocco?”

  Rocco grunted and swiped a keycard into the pad of a nearby door.

  “My problem with that, though,” said Max, “is that my boss really isn’t a very reasonable kind of guy.”

  Stars went nova in Chad’s vision as Max drove a knee into his groin. His lungs emptied, his intestines cramped, and Chad cupped himself as he fell to the ground in the fetal position. Chad could only gasp as Max dragged him through the open door and into a small room.

  Max pulled a pressure syringe from the handle of his knife and pressed it against Chad’s neck. There was a hiss of air and a coolness spread from Chad’s neck through his body. He was paralyzed, but could still feel the burning in his insufficient lungs, the fire in his groin, and the invisible fist which clamped his internal organs. Max sat Chad on the floor with his back against a wall.

  “Now,” said Max. “Let’s do some math.”

  Rocco grabbed two chairs from around a small table. He slid one seat over to Max, and fell into the other one.

  “You owe the boss twenty thousand,” Max tapped his right index finger onto his left pinkie, as though going through a grocery list. “You gave me two-fifty tonight, which leaves us with … pretty much twenty thousand.”

  Rocco fished into a pocket for something, but Chad couldn’t turn to see what it was.

  “You have hardware,” continued Max, counting out one more finger. “That can be sold for probably ten or twelve, but you don’t have the cash to pay a doc. Well, this is your lucky night, Chad. Rocco and I have some ideas that will let you pay off your debt.”

  Max lay the point of his knife on the bridge of Chad’s nose. It looked to Chad to be nano-edged. “You see this knife? It’s the sharpest one you’ll ever see. I got into an argument once with a friend who said his knife was sharper, so we pulled them both out. His blade snapped when he dropped it onto the table, almost like it had seen my knife and committed suicide, just out of shame and inferiority. True story!”

  Chad’s mind screamed, and begged for mercy, and ran for the door. His body sat silent, sweating, and still on the floor in front of Max with the knife in front of his eyes.

  “Anyways, back to the issue at hand. I know some basic anatomy, so I’ll do the op for you — pro bono. But the other eight to ten thousand, that’s going to be a problem; the boss doesn’t like to take losses.” Max tossed the knife from hand to hand as he spoke. “We bet you have some other hardware that we can make use of, so we’re going to clean you out. And Rocco had another idea, too.”

  Chad’s vision went dark as a blindfold was placed over his eyes. The tightness of the fabric constricting around his head alleviated the pounding, as though muting the drum.

  “You inspired us tonight, Chad. We bet the arena would pay top dollar for a memory of someone being autopsied, that being the sort of thing that usually only happens after the fact.”

  Chad felt something being slipped between the fabric of the blindfold and his temple, felt his implants warm with ac
tivity as he was being recorded.

  Felt everything as Max got to work.

  Nightward

  John Park

  From a nest in the scaffolding, an avian shrieked and dived through shafts of low golden sun and plunged into the stream. Where it struck, the water leapt like flame. Sparks flew, but the splash was lost under the sounds of construction — the bellows of digging machines, the hammering of riveters. The water continued to churn, and when it rippled smoothly again, the transformation was complete and a black serpentine creature undulated out of sight among ooze and weed.

  The man named Korliss, who had disturbed the creature’s nest, jerked to a stop as his hands crunched the twigs and dried bones. He had been climbing by feel. His eyes were screwed tight but tears had leaked over his cheeks. His jaw was quivering; his body trembled with strain. Convulsively he swept away the nest, felt for the next foothold and climbed again.

  At the top, he groped forward until his foot found empty air. Then he stepped back, straightened his spine, lifted his head, and looked. Before him, the land flowed sunward. The stream wound into a stand of trees, reappeared and then lost itself among dusky scrubland. Cloud shadows slid towards the horizon, to where the earth turned brown, and beyond, to where it began to bake. And there, over a band of iron-gray cloud, floating free of the black-toothed horizon, higher than he had ever seen it, huge, crimson-veined and hypnotic, was the sun.

  Korliss’ eyes filled. His mouth gaped and sobbed. He reached towards the sun, stepped forward, and fell.

  “You’re alive.”

  The sun.

  Heat on the brow, bright red through the eyelids. Look now, look, look. Eyes filled, arms spread wide to embrace, mouth gaping to scream, to swallow down the glory of light.

  “Can you hear me?”

  At last — to let go. To plummet with eyes still full — with light-choked lungs and light-filled eyes, with mouth straining a scream of light — down into an abyss of glory.

  “You all right?” Someone was talking. “Looks like your cloak saved you. That’s a long way to fall.”

  He opened his eyes. His head throbbed; his limbs felt wrenched out of shape. A man’s face swam into focus. Beyond it were thin streaming clouds in a cobalt blue sky, then, as his gaze shifted, the skeletons of new buildings. Lower down were hulking, grimy-yellow machines and the glassy shimmer of cutting beams. A team of centrosaurids with horn-stumps capped in brass hauled a wainload of timber. Their snorting was drowned by the roars of machinery.

  “You all right?” the man repeated. “Know where you are? What’s your name?”

  “Name.” He groped through a mental darkness, and found nothing. Further off, between two of the syncrete shells, the dusty air blazed with long, low beams of sunlight. His hand felt under his cloak, opened an identipak, found a name.

  “Korliss,” he said hoarsely. “Yes, Korliss.” His hands shook and his cheeks were wet.

  “Aye, but do you remember?”

  “I know the name, now I’ve found it.” Korliss pushed himself up on one elbow, then gasped with pain. He clenched his teeth and waited for his head to stop pounding. The centrosaurids were passing through the sunlight. Their leathery hides gleamed; brass fittings blazed. The dust the creatures stirred up might have been the entrance to a heaven or a hell. “What was I doing?”

  “You were up there. They should keep people off. That cloak shocksilk? Don’t see it much these days. But it broke your fall all right.”

  “How did I get here?”

  “Same as the rest of us. You climbed up there to see the sun. You don’t remember that either?”

  “The sun.” Korliss realized he knew about the sun. You could stare at it until you starved, and hardly sense it had moved. For a little time in the history of this world, humans would live in the sunlight, would watch the almost invisibly slow setting draw the shadows out longer and begin to chill the air, until the time came to abandon all they had built, to pull down, move onward. The sun drew all life towards it.

  Behind him lay the city, stretching itself out like a caterpillar after the slow retreating sun. It left its husks behind it, among the shadows, where the air cooled, and the sky dimmed towards the icy mysteries of nightside.

  “See,” said the other, “you’re standing up. I thought you’d be dead when I saw you fall.”

  “Yes. I suppose.” The sun filled his eyes again. For a moment he remembered an ache. Then he turned away. “Can you help me? I don’t know — I still don’t know — who I am, where I belong.”

  “You got an address in there?”

  “Right, of course. Thank you.” Korliss started to reach for his identipak again. “I’m sorry — your name…?”

  “Call me Seth,” the man said with a eager smile.

  As Korliss turned to shake hands, a flicker of gold caught his eye. He broke away. “The river?”

  He ran to the bank, then plunged in to his knees, splashing water over his face, scooping double handfuls up to his mouth. Streaming, he stared at the water flashing beneath the sun. Then he turned upriver, to where the bulk of the city rose up like a bank of solid mist. The river snaked out from it, its source lost beyond the intricacies of towers and bridges, the shadows and mysteries that led nightward.

  “I’ve got to go back.”

  Korliss waded out of the water. Slowly, then more certainly, he began walking along the bank, beside a stand of trees, watching the ripples flow towards him. He heard Seth’s hurrying footsteps on the gravel behind him.

  “Go back to the city,” Seth said. “Yes. They come out here, they see it, they stare at it. And then, then — it just gets so hard to leave. Some try to go on sunward. Bones out there, I’ve heard. But mostly there doesn’t seem to be any reason to go back. So you just stay.”

  “But not many come or stay?” Korliss said, waiting for him to catch up.

  “I suppose not, when you think how many back in the city never feel it. Funny though, sometimes you hear of a sphig or a griff going sun-happy. Seen one or two myself, heading out alone.”

  He broke off and gestured Korliss to keep quiet.

  They were approaching a clearing. A gray stone sculpture stood on a plinth; below it were cages with serrated bars, a cruciform scaffold, and a parked car, its wings gleaming like scythes.

  Korliss approached and looked up at the sculpture. Silhouetted against the sky it threw its shadow across him. It was a gryphon crucified. He felt a chill.

  “Orlando’s cross, the vigilantes call it,” said Seth. “You remember it?” He was standing beside Korliss, talking quickly. Watching Korliss’ expression he went on, “I say leave the shifters be, as long as they’re not hurting—” Suddenly he beckoned Korliss away.

  Voices were approaching.

  Through the trees came a group of men carrying something in a net slung from a pole. Korliss crouched behind a clump of bushes and watched as the men went to the scaffold.

  Out of the net was dragged a gryphon, evidently stunned. A pulley was set up and the gryphon was hauled onto the scaffold. The shadow of its head fell almost at Korliss’ feet. The creature began to struggle, but by then its limbs had been pinioned to the arms of the cross. Its beak opened and a harsh cry belled into the air.

  Suddenly its captors began to shout. The creature was changing, it wings shrinking. One of the men drew a blade and triggered it, adjusting the setting so that the shimmering blue beam was twice his height. Teasingly he brought it to the gryphon’s body. The creature began to shriek, again and again.

  Korliss had seen this before. Where? He had stood and watched, listened and watched, too terrified to intervene—

  He burst from the undergrowth, wrenched the blade from the man’s hand, threw him aside. Shouts rang in his ears. He shortened the blade and slashed, slashed again as the crucifix toppled,
and ended the gryphon’s agony. Then he was running towards the car. Seth was already there, the vigilante’s identipak in his hand. He unlocked the door and flung it open as Korliss reached him.

  “Can you fly this?” Seth yelled. “Then go! They’re coming for us!”

  Korliss’ hands flickered over switchpads and buttons he could not have named, and took manual control. The car lifted and banked out over the river, then fled upstream as projectiles whipped past its wings.

  Out of sight of the clearing, he climbed again. Sunlight streamed over his shoulder and flung his shadow onto the nose of the car. To either side, the horizon was a serrated line of dark mountains. Nearer were fields and pastures speckled with livestock. And ahead, as far as he could see, the city stretched towards the shadowed horizon.

  Below him, towers cast shadows across highways, parks, industrial spheres, squared blocks of commerce. He found a great gray snake like a twisted spine to the whole city. Carts and wains, groundcars, equines and teams of centrosaurids speckled it like parasites. The name suddenly bloomed in his mind. “Heliodos.”

  “Aye,” said Seth, “the Sunroad.”

  “I remember!” Korliss cried. Immediately another memory rose, of riding behind a dappled equine on a cartload of tubers, and squinting in awe at a glimpse of the sun between the white towers. “I remember!”

  “I am required to remind you,” said the car, “that once airborne, I charge full tariff whether or not you specify a destination.”

  He had come here seeking the sun. But from where?

  “I am required to advise you to select a destination.”

  Korliss looked at Seth, who shrugged.

  “Here,” Korliss fed the address from his identipak into the car’s reader.

  The car landed on the flat roof of a building half-shaded by a newer tower, and the two got out.

  The door to apartment seventeen opened and Korliss stepped into a mystery. The rooms were dim and stark. Korliss could see nothing of himself in any of them. Seth had slipped away.

  “Back already? You’ve been there, seen it?” asked a voice in the doorway. A thin, graying man was standing in a stiff half-crouch, his head pivoting back and forth like an avian’s. His eyes were blank white globes. “Of course you’ve seen it,” he said with a faint smile. “Of course. Can tell just by looking at you.”