Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #221

by TTA Press Authors

  So one day our Andong hookup gives us this new shit, said it was going to blow our minds, make us rich, that we could buy an air condo with the cash it would bring. Diego and I wanted to drop it together, but then he said to me, “What if we OD? Or what if we're so fucked up we want to jump out a window? Maybe I'd better do it alone, and you watch me."

  He was always the brave one, the guy who walked fearlessly into shady alleys to make deals with nervous junkies, who dropped heroic hits of xeno, so I agreed. He put on his lucky necklace, a gaudy thing made of cobalt and hematite that he adored. Then, after we downed half a bottle of whiskey, Diego dropped a single tab. For the first thirty minutes, he felt nothing, and we thought we'd been jacked. But then, Diego suddenly said, “Oh. My. God!"

  "Are you all right?"

  "Mikal. Mikal, my friend. We haven't lived! We haven't lived a single moment in our pathetic lives!"

  "So you feel it?"

  "The question is, Mikal, do you feel it?"

  "I didn't drop, Diego."

  "Life, Mikal! Life, it's all around us! I can see it now. It's in everything. It's in you and me and everyone."

  "It's good then?” I said. “We're going to be rich?"

  Diego smiled, off in his own trance of bliss.

  I heard dogs barking and several loud bangs. I glanced out the window and saw six police officers storm the building. Three flyers circled overhead, beaming spotlights into the windows. I ran out into the hall. On the floors below, cops pried open a door, wipes in their hands. They burst into the apartment and exploded out again with drooling squatters in tow. They moved to the next door and the next. I remembered we had a thousand hits of gheebong stashed under the bed. A single tab could land you five years in realtime.

  "Diego! Diego, get the fuck up!” I shouted. “The cops are here! We got to bail!"

  "Oh, Mikal, you don't see."

  "Diego, shut the fuck up! Get your ass up!” I tried to lift him, but he was too heavy.

  "You're my friend, Mikal,” he said. “You always have been. I love you."

  I heard the whine of an ascending discus; the cops would be on this floor in seconds. I couldn't go to prison, couldn't get fullwiped and refocused. I had too much life left to live.

  "I'm sorry, Diego,” I said.

  I climbed out the rear window onto the fire escape; the flyer turned its spotlight in my direction as I leaped across the gap to the next building. I jumped over a couple fucking, hopped a discus to the basement, and snuck out through an old tunnel. I fled Korea Xin a few days later inside the cargo hold of a scramsloop, nearly dying from oxdep.

  Yeah, I wanted to look up my friend, to see if he was safe, but I knew that any nets grep would finger me if he'd been busted, so I tried to forget about Diego and move on with my life. I got clean—eventually—and got a job tending newsents on the freeweb, making sure those nascent AIs didn't eat through decades worth of connections. It wasn't my dream job—the pay was shit—but I made enough to be comfortable, to fall into a kind of sleep, I guess.

  Then one morning, three months ago, I received a flit inviting me out to Gilder Nefan, an ass-backwards planet at the edge of the galaxy, along with a thousand terrans, a shit-ton of money, and a plea for help. Diego, it seemed, had found me.

  * * * *

  I woke up to singing. Outside, in a parapet high above the city, a muezzin chanted prayers as a giant red sun rose behind him. Through the stone walls and hallways I heard echoes of more chanting, as if the entire city sang with him. The food from the night before had been cleared while I slept. For years I'd squatted in apartments where people came in and out like flies to shit and I didn't bat an eye. But now, knowing that someone was here while I slept creeped me the fuck out.

  I found Diego in the next room, sitting by the window, smoking his ass-reeking herb. He nodded to me, but his eyes were far away. I sat down and told him of my plan, how I would wean him off of his habit, and he quietly agreed. It was the same plan I had used to get myself clean.

  For my first task, I had to buy more jisthmus. Diego couldn't quit cold turkey, and his supply was running low. With two hundred terrans of Diego's cash in my pocket, I descended the seventy one flights of stairs, already dreading the return trip, and wandered deep into the city's crooked streets.

  There were no plasmasents to guide my way, no kiosks or netports to plug into. My clothes were different too—the Nefanesh were obsessed with mud browns and greens—it made me feel exposed as I walked. The sun didn't reach this far down between the stone buildings, so the people hung thousands of lamps along the sloping walls and bridges. The lights had been arranged to form stars and birds and trees and hundreds of other shapes, while the air stank of burning oil, jisthmus and dust.

  The women here were beautiful, in a rugged way. No plastica or juve supplements for them. Freegenes, I guessed. And the men, with their dark beards, looked identical as they walked past me. A few spoke Anglai well enough to guide me to Usha Square, a park in the center of the city.

  I found a jisthmus merchant near the park's edge, under a spindly tree and a rusting statue. His pavilion was filled with wooden dishes, pipes, and bizarre tapestries hanging from the flapping walls.

  "How much for a decagram of jisthmus?” I said.

  The merchant looked me over with deep brown eyes. “You from Earth?” he said in awful Anglai.

  "Yes."

  "Come here to get high?"

  "No. I'm here for a friend."

  "Gilder Nefan no place for junkies."

  "How much?” I barked.

  "Nine hundred shekels."

  "Do you take terrans?"

  He scoffed, then said, “One eighty terrans."

  "That's fucking ridiculous,” I said, and started to walk away.

  "No!” he said. “Jisthmus cheaper no place else. Bazaar is two months away. Hard to buy until then. I have best price. You see."

  My stomach rumbled, and I was already exhausted, so I paid the outrageous sum and crept back into the shadowed streets. I ate some foul meat from a vendor, and on the way home passed a squat merchant woman selling cheap jewelry. I bought a cobalt necklace from her, much like the one Diego used to wear. A little gift, I thought, to remind him of the old days. When I reached his building, the people bowed and sang in another fit of prayer. They knelt in the lobby, bobbing their heads like pigeons pecking at crumbs. They leered as I walked past them, and some flicked their fingers oddly at me, I think in some kind of curse.

  An hour later, completely exhausted from the seventy-one-flight climb, I entered Diego's apartment to find him naked on the floor, shivering. A puddle of vomit glimmered in the lamplight next to his head.

  "Diego!” I screamed.

  "No more, Saa!” he whimpered. “Leave me alone! Go away, Saa!"

  He stank like puke and shit. I picked him up and carried him into the washroom, then placed him on a small stool and used my shirt as a sponge to clean his face; there were no towels anywhere. He had shit himself, and for a moment I regretted my new job. But I thought of our future together, roaming the galaxy on one adventure after another. This was only a passing moment. So I took off his pants, cleaned him up, and set him to rest in the main room on a thin mat. Tomorrow, I told myself, I'd buy him some new clothes and some towels.

  Later, as the sun was going down, as the muezzin bellowed for the third time that day, Diego awoke. “Mikal? Mikal!"

  I came to him. He was shivering violently.

  "My pipe!” he said. “Hurry."

  I stuffed his pipe with a small bit of jisthmus. “Just a little,” I said.

  I watched him smoke, smelled the reek of that ass-stinking herb, until a small amount of color filled his cheeks. His shivering subsided as night slowly crept into the room.

  I lit the lamp and said, “What happened before?"

  He shrugged.

  "Who is Saa? Is she the one that cooks your meals?"

  His head snapped in my direction. “I was hallucinating,” he s
aid.

  "You didn't hallucinate the puke."

  He frowned. “Now you see one more reason why I need help.” His voice had become slow and thick.

  I sat and wrapped my hands around my knees. “So this is what you do?” I said. “Just smoke and puke and waste away?"

  He stared out the window. “No. I think."

  "About what?"

  He paused. “Mostly, I think about the numens."

  "The planet-smashers? The gods?"

  "They're not gods, Mikal. Are you a god to a cockroach?"

  "In a way,” I said. “I can crush it whenever I want."

  Diego shivered. “The numens are intelligent creatures, like you and me—"

  "Yeah, that eat planets. What was it? Ecruga, Oxwei, Charlotte's World. All obliterated by numens. And they weren't too far from here either."

  "That was more than twenty years ago. And the numens didn't understand what they were doing. When you see a cockroach scuttling by, you crush it because you were told that they're diseased and swim in shit. But what if you knew that each one had a soul, a conscience? Would you kill it then?"

  "Yeah. They're disgusting little buggers."

  He frowned. “It's all about points of view. People convinced the numens that certain planets were being infested by vermin—humans—and so the numens destroyed them."

  "People?” I said. “How did people convince the numens of anything?"

  "Did you ever own a pet?"

  "I once had a cat."

  "Okay, so you fed your cat, right? Changed its litter box?"

  "I let it shit outside."

  "But you were doing things for your pet, giving it things it wants, like food. And in return, it gives you what you want: affection, a companion. A soft thing to rub when you're lonely and cold."

  "What are you saying? That a human was a pet to one of these numens?"

  "That's exactly what I'm saying. Once these humans were adopted, it was just a matter of simple coercion to convince their numen masters that, in order to be happy, the numen had to destroy a planet."

  "That's fucked up."

  "It's the truth."

  "How do you know this?"

  He took another hit. “I told you, I've had a lot of time to think. The jisthmus helps me reach subtle states of consciousness where the numens roam. You might say I plucked the answers out of the ether."

  "I think you've plucked enough ether for one night,” I said, taking the pipe from his hands. “I'm rationing your jisthmus from now on."

  He nodded solemnly.

  "Oh, I almost forgot,” I said. “I have something for you.” I pulled out the cobalt necklace I had bought earlier. “I remembered your lucky necklace. This looked a lot like it."

  He took it and smiled. “I remember. I lost it when I went to prison."

  We fell silent for a time. Eventually I said, “Why did you come all the way out to this planet, Diego?"

  "Do you remember that drug I took our last night together?"

  I nodded.

  "Our Andong hookup was right; it was like touching the face of God. Then I came down."

  "Did you go to prison?"

  He nodded. “They refocused me. I avoided fullwiping by pretending to have schizophrenia. They thought it might make me worse. But refocusing is just as fucked up."

  "God,” I said. “What was that like?"

  "Like every day is the first day of school. Everything is new and utterly terrifying. I felt like a whole new person, new behaviors, new feelings. The prisons are crowded, you know, so eventually they just let me go. Three years later I was serving drinks at a dinky bar in the Ukraine when some flicky pops me in the head with a bottle ‘cause his meds had run out or something. When I awoke in a puddle of my own blood, I felt like my old self again."

  "What did you do?” I said.

  "I quit my job and just sat in my apartment for weeks. I remembered that night in Seoul, how I'd touched the face of God. I started obsessing about that feeling. I wanted to touch heaven again. But I couldn't go back to Korea Xin, and no one in the Ukraine had ever heard of that drug. But I'd heard stories of a planet, way out on the galactic edge, with people that devoted their lives to godliness, where they smoked an herb which supposedly opened their minds to higher realms. I thought, what better place to seek nirvana again? I had saved enough money for a highliner, found a job as a woodworker, and began, through jisthmus, to search for that feeling I had lost."

  "And did you find it?"

  "Yes. And no."

  "Which is it?"

  He sighed. “The old saying is, ‘The first high is always the best'."

  "That's the truth."

  "Not really. With Jisthmus, there's no first high. The past and future are one continuum. In some ways, I'm still experiencing that night in Seoul. Part of me is still in prison. And another part of me, is in a mental prison."

  "From the refocusing?"

  "No. I touched something out here, Mikal. Something I'm having trouble getting free from.” His face twisted as if he was about to say something, but then he sighed and stared down at his bony fingers.

  My stomach rumbled loudly. “I don't suppose you have any food?"

  "The meal's been ready for over an hour.” He pointed into the next room.

  I turned around and saw a small table set with plates and food. I hopped to my feet to investigate. The apartment was empty, except for us.

  "This is freaking me out,” I said. “Who's preparing the food?"

  "She doesn't like to be seen.” Diego leaned against the window, all skin and bones.

  I shook off my nerves and helped him to the table. “Come,” I said. “You need to eat."

  "Mikal,” he said as he took a sip of soup, “about Seoul, six years ago..."

  "Yeah,” I said, “I've been meaning to talk to you about that."

  "Why, Mikal? Why did you leave me?"

  I had to look away from his probing eyes. “I told you we had to bail, but you wouldn't listen. The cops were coming. And you were so heavy..."

  "But you were my lookout. You were supposed to protect me."

  "I didn't know what to do. I panicked, Diego."

  "How come you never visited me in prison, or found me after?"

  I lost my appetite and put down the fork. “I thought that if I found you, the cops would find me too. I got clean, and I guess I just wanted to start over. Diego, I know this doesn't mean much to you now. But I really am sorry. I don't know what else to say..."

  He stared at me for a long time before sighing deeply. “I've imagined this moment a thousand times, and each time I was unable to forgive you. But I keep thinking that you've traveled all the way out here. For me. I didn't want to forgive you, Mikal, but when I look at your face, my heart says that I do."

  "Eat your soup,” I said. But inside, I smiled.

  * * * *

  I thought I'd be bored without the distraction of virt and vid, of nets and polysents, but I found myself relaxing for the first time in years. The days melded pleasantly together as I got used to the short days of Gilder Nefan. We formed a simple routine: I'd ration out portions of jisthmus for Diego, weaning him off of the drug until he felt the first severe symptoms of withdrawal. Then I'd allow him to smoke a very small amount. While high, he'd entertain me with stories of his intellectual wanderings, and I started to look forward to my daily dose of Cosmic philosophy. I had never truly known how smart my friend was, the strange places his mind was willing to go.

  Our mysterious cook placed meals in the apartment every day. Often, I'd sit in the next room, just out of view, waiting for her. But a watched table never gets set; she never came while I hid. Then, I'd get up to piss or to look out the window, and when I returned, the food was there. Freaky.

  Diego smoked that decagram faster than I'd expected, so before the end of the first week I returned to the vendor in Usha Square to buy more jisthmus.

  "If you smoke the sweet jisthmus without grounding in faith, it wil
l eat your mind,” the vendor said.

  "It's not for me,” I said.

  "You Terrans, you come here and think sweet jisthmus is fun, a game to get high and touch the Ein Sof. Do you know the story of Musa?"

  "Moses?"

  "When Musa went up the mountain of Ilah, he commanded his people to look away. It is—how you say in Anglai?—a metaphor. Musa was pure and could glimpse the endless above the crown. But his people were dirty. If they look on the infinite, it shatter them. You are like the impure who disobey and look upon El Shaddai. Jisthmus will break you unless you purify your soul."

  I thought of Diego and how the drug had destroyed his body. He had no faith that I knew of. “Are you going to sell me the jisthmus or not?"

  He frowned and handed me a cloth bundle wrapped with leather twine. I paid him and turned to leave. “Wait,” he said. “This is for you.” He fetched a small book from under the table: a real hardbound, paper pages and all. “It has Anglai translation."

  "I don't do religion,” I said.

  "This is not religion,” he said. “It save you from the abyss."

  I took the book out of curiosity for its paper pages and its interesting script rather than any words inside of it, and headed back to Diego's apartment. I began to feel a chill, even though the air was desert hot. Perhaps I was getting a fever. And that would be piss on shit if it was true, because I knew these Nefanesh didn't believe in nanomed, that their doctors would probably shove a wooden pole up my ass and call me cured.

  Back in the apartment, Diego sat by the window, wearing the cobalt necklace and some of the new clothes I had bought for him. In the reflected light, his face resembled the one I remembered, with round ears and soft cheekbones. He was beautiful. And I thought, though the change was small, that he had gained a little weight.

  I offered him the bundle of jisthmus.

  He shook his head. “No. I'm going to wait."

  "Really?” I said. “You sure you don't want some?"

  "No."