The Pure Cold Light

by Gregory Frost

  Between the towers directly above, skywalks formed a dark cross against the gray clouds. Out of the center of the cross, a tube was descending. Lyell, who had never seen such an emergency exit in operation, was as transfixed as the derelicts by the telescoping vertical tube.

  It touched down lightly, with barely a thump. A big, curved door revolved halfway around to one side. On their feet now, the beggars held back. Even the mad ones had fallen silent. Fearfully, they shifted from one foot to the other and twitched and flexed their hands, ready to stampede at the first sign of treachery.

  Four armed guards emerged from the opening.

  The wave of Boxers ebbed. Some wasted no time in deserting the square. Lyell pressed back against the wall as two characters came scurrying around past her. When she looked again, she found that the vast majority were hanging on at a distance, waiting to see how things went.

  The guards set up a perimeter. They nudged the majority of the mob back further but ignored the truly demented, most of whom were left seated and incoherent on their slabs of granite. As the mob backed toward her, Lyell stepped into its midst and slipped through to the front ranks.

  Five more people emerged from the tube, two of them pushing long carts piled high with Happy Burger foods: surimi rolls, Spuddies, burgers and malts. Her stomach, unfed so far this day, reacted to the smell of the hot food, even as her mind reminded her of the risks. The carts were positioned in a semi-circle. The four guards drew aside, effectively leaving the food unguarded. Too hungry not to take a chance, a few of the derelicts edged up to the carts. For a moment, faced with so much choice, they hesitated. Behind the table, men in shiny suits stood smiling. One of the derelicts heisted two burgers, while wary for the slightest response from the guards. No one batted an eye; the man behind the table, wearing dark glasses like the rest, nodded encouragingly. At this sign dozens of people sprang forward, pushing and shoving toward the carts. Lyell let herself be carried along, concentrating on smooth pans back and forth to capture the entire scene. Once he saw this performance, she figured, Nebergall would have to change his mind about the show.

  In front of her, a derelict named Bindlestiff edged along the table, unwrapping and devouring his first burger while he stuffed another, along with bags of Spuddies and cha gio, into every pocket. She recorded it, savoring every detail: the blotchy ruin of a face offering a rapturous expression straight out of a Rubens painting; his eyes rolled back as he stuffed his mouth full of food. Stubby fingers grabbed, wriggling; wrappers rustled like a dozen crackling fires; the black plastic glasses of the guards sealed their eyes in obscurity above their carved smiles. She felt like Nebergall’s still-store machine, capturing one after the other remarkable frozen image in her retinas.

  An advertising jingle danced through her head: “Why worry when you can eat Happy? So eat—Happy Burgers.” A cartoon family devoured the cartoon icon. How many times she’d heard it.

  The mob became entangled in its feeding frenzy. Here and there, minor skirmishes arose. A fight broke out between two men over possession of a cherry soda, the contents of which had already exploded over both yanking contenders. One of the perimeter guards stepped in to intercede, and Lyell sidled in that direction to record the episode. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed a tall figure emerge from the tube and move swiftly around the carts, into the thick of things. The guard stopped and returned to his position, and let the new man handle things.

  He was thin, blond, leonine, with a smile so absolutely genuine and noble of character that she distrusted him instantly. He slid into the center of the fracas, between the two dripping contenders. “Now, now,” he said, “settle down, there’s plenty to go around. Take all you want, take some for your friends. No reason here to fight.” His tone reminded Lyell of a brother who ran St. Anthony’s Hospice—firm but friendly: admonishing. It was the voice of someone who expected something from you. The priest wanted penitence. What the smooth reptile in dark glasses before her wanted remained to be seen, but she had the feeling she was in for a conversion. The two opponents separated, one on either side of the blond man. He led them back to the carts and gave each his own drink.

  Lyell snatched up a chocolate malt and some wrapped foods from the cart, then moved away from the table. She pulled herself up onto a stone block from which she could record everything in the plaza. She disked a few more images of the SC staff, noticing another corporate type, who hung back by the tube. He looked uncomfortable with the proceedings, maybe frightened by his nearness to these unholy creatures. He certainly wasn’t security.

  One of the mad Boxers slid over beside her, and began babbling about something to do with castrating dogs. Lyell offered her one of the Vietnamese spring rolls. The woman snatched it and began immediately to try to peel it apart; it crumbled in her lap. She piled the bits back on her hand, hovering over it, then edged away distrustfully while she gnawed at the mess spilling through her fingers.

  The mob, now they had their food, behaved much as Lyell did, picking spots where they could sit and enjoy it. The security force looked on, unmoved.

  Lyell had made the acquaintance of their like before. These would be the cream of the crop. Most often they guarded the checkpoints between upper and lower cities, where they very rarely had to deal with anything more demanding than an expired work pass. She’d long ago learned how to handle them. To the guards she was an inspector of some kind, which was what the words “truancy officer” on her biocard meant to them: somebody who went after Undercity workers that didn’t show up for their Overcity jobs. Undercity workers were notoriously unreliable, so it was easy to believe that someone had to keep track of them. They figured she fit above them in the chain of command, and that, she knew, was all they had to think in order for her to sail through the checkpoints without a ripple. To those they perceived beneath them in the scheme of things, the guards had developed a certain dismissive attitude. If they hadn’t worn uniforms, their behavior in that regard would have been indistinguishable from the corporate executives they guarded. Like the tall blond crusader. Even from across the plaza, Lyell could tell that smile of his was a fraud.

  He was strolling amongst the feeders now. He sat a time with each little group, speaking to each individual who had enough sense to listen. Whatever he was offering, most of the gnawing, chewing horde nodded emphatically when he finished. He gave each of them a tiny object, gave each one an avuncular pat on the shoulder, and then moved on. In his wake, another man sat down. That man carried a black canvas pouch out of which he pulled a small black atomizer bulb. He was handing out Orbitol. Recording the transaction, Lyell found it difficult not to smile. What could they be doing—testing a new formulation? Something to make the junkies burn up faster?

  As the blond man drew near, she unwrapped and ate a little off the edge of a burger. Intellectually she knew there wasn’t enough chemical in it to affect her behavior even slightly, but she still had to make herself swallow the pulpy bread and meat.

  Finally, the smiling man sat down beside her and made introductions. His name, he said, was Mr. Mingo. He grinned as if the name alone should have made her joyously happy, as if she were his long-lost cousin, a prodigal returned to the family fold.

  Up close he had a nastier face . Not that he wasn’t handsome—no mistake about that—but when he flashed his perfect teeth, the skin of his jaw tautened unnaturally, as though any sense of decency and honesty surrounding the smile had been liposuctioned out. Lyell nodded back. In a soft voice, she told him her name—“Aswad Lobly.” Then, in a thick accent befitting her disguise, she said, “Whatever you’re peddling, you’re wasting it on Orbiters. Unless it’s a better Orbitol in that bag.”

  The smile was put away, like a handkerchief in a breast pocket. Behind his dark glasses, Mingo’s eyebrows arched. “You think so?”

  “Look. Look at them leave. Two hours from now, they be grinning like cats, babbling like monkeys, big red spots on their heads, here.” She touched her temples wh
ere spots of makeup had manufactured old scars. “Maybe when they come down, they remember what you want from them, maybe not. Tends to mix up past, present and future, Orbiting does.”

  “Well, Mr. Lobly, you sound like an expert.”

  “Could be I am. Throw it away how you like. You want everybody to do something for you, that’s for sure. You want me, my price is shoes, not your drug. Don’t want it. Get me a good pair of shoes—the kind to keep your feet warm in the cold. I’ll get more from that one pair of shoes than any of them will, what you’re handing out.”

  Mingo stared at her for a few moments, then broke into a huge, toothy smile. “What size?”

  “Big, that’s all. I don’t know who’s going to wear them before I hear what it is you want.”

  The man with the pouch caught up to them; he had an atomizer in his hand, all ready to go. Mingo pushed it aside and sent him back into the elevator tube with orders to get some shoes.

  That was the point at which Mr. Mingo quite literally promised Aswad Lobly the Moon.

  He revealed what ScumberCorp wanted in return for the free repast. It wasn’t to be a test of new chemicals in the meat. It wasn’t an offer of new, chaotically improved Orbitol. It was a notion that would have had Nebergall falling out of his chair with laughter.

  “We think,” Mingo began seriously, “we believe, that there’s a nest of aliens living in the Undercity.”

  At first Lyell didn’t grasp the whole picture. “From what country?” she asked huskily.

  “No, no.” Mingo smiled, appreciating her confusion. “Aliens from a different planet, a different solar system. From—” he paused to fix her squarely in the black lenses over his eyes “—outer space.”

  “You mean like on Alien News Network? Like ‘Alien City on Mars’ or ‘The A in AIDS Stands for Alien’? Alien, like those shows?”

  Mingo seemed to swell with pride as Lobly recited real ANN titles. “I’m delighted you know the programs we sponsor so well. I didn’t realize you saw much TV in your boxes.” She couldn’t tell if he was really so ill-informed.

  “Oh, sure,” Lyell/Lobly replied, “Watch them round the clock, Orbiters do. If they got a TV.” Then, as if realizing what this implied, she added, “I seen them a few times, too.” She brushed at her coarse black wig, made a nervous smile.

  “Haven’t we all? But, that’s not quite the alien story we’re looking for here. I don’t believe we need to go looking for the brain of Elvis Presley, now do we? These aliens I’m speaking of, they are the real McCoy, real beings from another world. Who knows where?”

  “They’re really here? People from another planet are among us?”

  “We think so. We’ve reason to believe that a group of them has arrived here, and that they’re in hiding someplace in the city.”

  “Hiding, why? What does a Happy Burger got to do with aliens?” she asked, as Poleby might have. She made as if to offer him a bite of her polluted sandwich, but he politely pushed her hand aside.

  “They’re hiding because they’re confused,” Mingo said. “Let me explain. Our parent company—naturally not Happy Burgers itself—was in contact with an alien outpost on the surface of the Moon. That’s right. They were in the process of negotiating a treaty of sorts when some of the aliens became suddenly ill. We’re afraid that we might bear some—how shall I say—responsibility for their illness. We may have contaminated them, you see. We’re hoping that maybe we can help them if we can find them in time.”

  “But why would they come here if they met you on the Moon?” she asked.

  “An incisive question, my friend. We believe they would come here because our corporate headquarters is located here”—and he gestured toward the tall black and gray skyscraper behind him. “What we need is someone we can rely on. Someone who won’t tell people about this. Someone with the connections in the Undercity to locate these aliens and then inform us of that location. Someone, Aswad—may I be so familiar?—who’s looking for that chance of a lifetime to prove himself worthy to exchange the degradation of the Undercity for a new life, a new beginning, totally at our expense. Life in the towers. What do you say to that?”

  She withheld what she wanted to say, but stood up and announced, “I’m your man is what I say.”

  “Oh, I know you are.” He snapped his fingers and the man with the pouch hurried forward, carrying a pair of shiny white-leather walking shoes. Lyell’s eyes watered at the sight of them. She didn’t have to act—the retreads Nebergall got were usually barely glued together.

  She reached for them but Mingo stuck his hand in the way. He was holding something shiny between thumb and forefinger. It was an antique coin, a dime. He placed the dime in her palm. She looked it over. It had a man’s profile on it and the date 1967. Quizzically, she glanced at Mingo.

  “Remember the date, close your eyes until you can see it. The date of your coin is very important—”

  “Nineteen sixty-seven. This a contest?” she asked in Lobly’s voice.

  The corner of Mingo’s mouth twitched the tiniest bit: He didn’t like being interrupted. He said, “You must keep that coin with you all the time. It isn’t like the other coins you’ve got, that you all barter with. This one you must not lose. If you find our friends, I want you to give that to them or else deposit it where you find their camp.”

  Lyell recalled an old expression, long out of vogue, but obviously the little joke Mingo had in mind: He wanted her to drop a dime on the aliens. She almost said it out loud but knew that knowledge would have been way too clever for the likes of Lobly.

  She pocketed the dime, then took the white shoes and got up, but as quickly stopped and sat down again, confusion pinching her features. “But what do these aliens look like?” she asked. “How’m I going to know them?”

  “They look like you or me, Aswad. They’re really very human on the surface. They may look like people you’ve known before. However, they’ll reveal their differences to you quick enough, believe you me. For instance, they won’t care to be around other people. You must be careful not to be taken in by their appearance. They can seem very gentle, even kindly, but they’re powerful creatures when aroused, and they have reason to be aroused, as I’ve said.

  “You leave it to us how to handle them once they’re found. The plaza here will be monitored day and night. All you have to do is run right back here and we’ll come down and get you, and take you up. After that … well.” A broad sweep of his arm promised luxury, a fantasy life in a fantasy world for the one who found the aliens.

  More likely, SC would hand the lucky winner a one-way ticket to an asteroid, where he would work as slave labor till the worn-out suit they gave him ruptured or an accident buried him. Didn’t have to hobble them the way they’d done to some of her ancestors; on the asteroid there was no place to escape to. Not when the company owned the very breath in your lungs.

  Mr. Mingo shook Lyell’s greasy hand and patted her shoulder as he had done to those before her. He told her to make sure and get some more food before she left. Then he continued on his rounds while wiping his hands on a napkin.

  Lyell got up shortly and walked between two towers, far enough that in turning she could get a shot of the entire weedy plaza, the security people, and the skywalk vertical lift.

  Many of the Boxers had already scattered, in a hurry to seek out the indistinguishable aliens or put themselves in Orbit. What a clever exercise, she thought, to sic the underclass upon itself. “They don’t like being around other people.” Really. That only described the population of Box City. There would be countless murders as a result of this idiot game. Innocent people accused of alienness; they might as well accuse them of witchcraft, and there were definitely practitioners of dubious dark arts scattered through the boxes. Even outside the walls. Nebergall had a self-proclaimed “seer” in his building, and there must be a thousand more scattered around the fringes. Desperate people believed desperate lies.

  What would Nebergall think of thi
s now? It had stopped being a story about chemical pacification, but she had no idea what it was becoming.

  Not long after, Mingo departed, followed by his assistants and the nearly empty foodcarts, and then finally by the security soldiers. The door curved around to seal the tube, and the whole of it retreated smoothly back up into the sky. A few clusters of feeding derelicts remained, already discernably less friendly, already contemplating the competition.

  The old bum Bindlestiff shuffled past her on his way out. He was munching toothlessly on two thin hamburgers, one in each hand. “Kinda like the pyramids, there, ain’t it?” he said of the view overhead.

  “Not really,” Lyell answered. “I was thinking, more like a kind of spaceship.”

  Bindlestiff laughed so hard he started to choke. He hacked and spit out a clot of bread. He gestured at the SC towers. “Now wouldn’t it be a hoot if they’s the real aliens?”

  Lyell studied the ornate Deco detailing high up the building and replied, “Frankly, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.”

  Chapter Seven: Horrible Woman

  Amerind Shikker turned and rolled in the semi-darkness of the pit and wakefully dreamed of a strange world. However she lay or covered her eyes, the hallucinatory images assailed her.

  A landscape all crimson, its substance nothing like dirt or grass or anything exactly, unfolded and undulated around her. It made her think of being glued to a cat’s tongue—stuck on something spongy, wet, and budded.

  Things—huge things—roamed about on the rolling surface. Masses of some almost indescribable flesh. She lacked a vocabulary to cope. Her senses were engaged in creating shapes for things that had no shapes. Her mind, her chaotic human mind, had to assemble something concrete or else go mad entirely as the gelid masses came lumbering past.