The Wine of Violence

by James Morrow

  Francis knew at once that the cocoon served no practical purpose; it existed only to fascinate. Its geometric loveliness recalled his favorite insect masterworks: the wing of the whiskey moth, the web of the gorgathon, the nest of the swamp aphid.

  Am I dreaming?

  Given the feebleness of the luminon, the sculptor was weirdly bright. He pulsated. He bled sheets of mist, as if compounded of dry ice. The atmosphere thickened with a smell like burning hair.

  By the west wall a second materialization occurred. This time it was a red-haired boy, all freckles and spunk, dressed only in white linen trousers. The stick in his hand propelled a wooden hoop. He played madly, blind to all but his amusement. Reaching the magnecar, he passed through it like a bird through fog.

  The scene sprouted details. Beneath the sculptor’s stool a grassy hill grew, ringed by flowers and washed in sun. Where the boy had been, a second artist, a watercolorist, manifested himself.

  Boy in tow, the hoop rolled on, right up to the sculptor. It struck the cocoon squarely, snapping a guyline and bouncing away. Francis heard a froglike gasp.

  The hoop’s surprise turn shocked the boy into reality. He fought against the momentum of his legs. His runaway body fell forward. Briefly the air crackled with a sound like hot popping sap, and the cocoon lay flat, a ruin of splintered wood and tangled wool.

  The sculptor approached, as if to help the boy up. Astonishment and chagrin reddened the boy’s face. His freckles disappeared.

  Francis fully expected the sculptor to be forgiving. Artists naturally distinguish between the careless and the carefree. But the sculptor was not forgiving, and he made no such distinction. Instead, he methodically placed a boot on the boy’s mouth.

  He used the other boot to kick in every one of the boy’s ribs.

  Francis was too stunned to move or cry out. Even on Carlotta such an atrocity seemed impossible.

  As soon as the boy was dead, everything stopped moving. Flowers no longer bent with the breeze, grass ceased to shiver, the painter froze. The sculptor had become a statue of cruelty, its visage baked into a hideous laugh, its foot planted in the boy’s bloody side.

  A grotesque tarnish grew like moss upon the statue. The scene began to melt. Soon a patchwork of black puddles stood in its place—puddles that moved, amoebalike, looking for each other.

  One puddle passed under the magnecar and poured itself into the tunnel. The others managed to collect in the center of the room. They fused like droplets of mercury, becoming a pond. Slowly, the pond that had been a murder oozed through the dirt floor and vanished.

  Much to his surprise, Francis found that he could now sleep.

  6

  THE NEXT MORNING they discovered that Francis’s dream had eaten through the treads of the magnecar.

  “There!” he said, pointing to the raw ends of macroplastic. “This proves I didn’t just imagine it!”

  “I’m afraid it proves nothing of the sort,” Burne replied. He kneeled by the car, saw that the metal underbelly was still in one piece.

  “But it was so real!”

  “My guess is that some moat fluid percolated in here last night and got to the treads. We’re lucky it didn’t get to us.”

  “Better count your toes,” said Luther.

  Burne yanked a shard of tread away. “We’ve lost a dozen at least. Too many to improvise our way around.”

  “Not without a vulcantorch.” Luther crouched next to Burne with droop-mouthed intensity.

  “Looks like a tight seal,” said Burne. He rocked the car but failed to move it even one millimeter. “So whoever was here last night—assuming Dr. Lostwax really did see people, which I doubt profoundly—they sure as hell didn’t enter through the tunnel.”

  Luther rose and drummed the west wall, listening for secret doors. “What do you mean real, son? You mean like a play?”

  “Yes,” said Francis. “Or a kinepic.”

  “Kinepix aren’t real.”

  “This one was.”

  “Why didn’t you wake us?”

  “I don’t know. None of it seemed threatening.”

  “You mean it was like a dream?”

  “No.”

  “Then what was it like?”

  “Like—a hallucination.”

  Luther grew sarcastic. “Let me get this right. Like a kinepic, not like a dream, like a hallucination—”

  Francis saw that his case was weak. “All right, I’ll drop it. What now?”

  “First we admit that our magnecar is at present both a cripple and a burden,” Burne began, puffing up. “Then we leave the thing where it is and proceed on foot.”

  “Proceed where?”

  “We could try digging out with my shovel. But we don’t know how deep the transpervium is set, and there’s no guarantee we won’t find ourselves in an adjoining room. I propose we get back outside before something happens to block our way.”

  “Then what?”

  “Follow the wall.”

  Luther took out his favorite pipe and hung it in his mouth. “I’ve been thinking about that wall. It looked solid—well maintained—so I’d say the civilization that built it is still around.”

  “They don’t like the savages any better than we do,” said Burne. “They never invite them over.”

  “So maybe if we move along it, we’ll spot a repair crew,” said Francis. The plan sounded promising even to him.

  Breakfast was fried Aretian reptile eggs that had evidently been fertilized. Beautifully embryonic turtles and lizards stared plaintively from Francis’s plate. He ate them with his eyes averted. On Nearth, animals were served only in the form of bland, unaccusing components. You never had to swallow life whole.

  Burne ordered an inventory. The men broke up their camps and cleaned out the magnecar. Sleeping bags, pillows, clothes, kelvinsleeves, frying pans, knives, forks, spoons, canteens, canned food, dried food, rock samples, soil-test kits, wistar rods, proximascopes, cameras, compasses, and luminons spread from glass wall to glass wall.

  Two piles were started: Take With, Leave Here. As Burne explained, “The less we carry, the faster we move. The faster we move, the sooner we can put that wall between us and the savages.”

  Approaching the Take With pile, a canteen of fine Kritonian coffee in his hand, Francis had sudden visions of a soup tureen. His cerebrum floated among vegetables. He laid the fine Kritonian coffee on the Leave Here pile.

  A few minutes later, Luther began negotiating with Burne and Francis to get one of his best rock samples—it was small and light—into the Take With pile. He won.

  Certain items were too sacred for either pile. Burne’s yeastgun stayed in his belt, Francis’s insulin kit stayed in his jacket, Luther’s favorite pipe stayed in his mouth. The purpose of each device, Francis realized, was to deliver something to the interior of the human body. He had never seen anyone die from yeastbullets or tobacco smoke, two notorious killers. His son had died from insulin, a life-sustaining miracle.

  Before Francis’s helpless eyes, Burne casually lifted the last item, Ollie’s cage, and placed it atop the Leave Here pile.

  “Done,” said Burne. “Let’s get packed.”

  Francis’s lower lip moved up and down like a guppy’s. “B-B-Burne! You can’t!”

  “Dammit, Lostwax, that cage weighs almost as much as I do.”

  “He’s the first one ever found!”

  “It would take up a third of your pack!”

  “He’ll starve!”

  “Leave it some tunafish. It doesn’t even need a can opener.”

  “We don’t know that we’re ever coming back. I’d sooner let him go.”

  “Let it go.” Burne liked Francis, even liked Cortexclavus, but somebody had to take charge of this ragtag army.

  “This isn’t his planet, Burne. He wouldn’t fit in. He’d die slowly. And besides, goddam it, I deserve that Poelsig Award.”

  Burne tugged his beard until it hurt. Usually decisions came more easily. Logic
said abandon the damn bug, but Francis’s distress was touching. We need a logical reason to take it, he decided.

  “All right, Lostwax, you win. We can’t have you so dithered that you slow us down, and we certainly can’t have you sneaking away in the middle of the night to retrieve the thing.”

  Happiness beamed from Francis’s teeth and eyes. “I’d have done it, too,” he fibbed. “I’d have sneaked off.”

  “One stipulation. The bug travels in my pack. If the savages start chasing us, we throw our packs in the moat and take off. It’s the only way we’ll outrun them.”

  Francis nodded. “And you can’t imagine me throwing Cortexclavus in the moat?”

  “Easier to imagine the savages writing an opera.”

  GETTING THE DAMN MAGNECAR off the hole was appreciably easier than getting it on. It was lighter, the men were rested and full of eggs, and they needed to budge it no more than the broadest pair of shoulders, Burne’s.

  The scientists jostled each other into bulky packs. Luminons were distributed. They hung snugly around necks, clacked dully against Darwin keys. Burne descended the dirt slopes with the oblivious abandon of a ten-year-old entering a swimming hole, Luther with the tight-lipped concentration of a competitive diver making his final attempt to stay in the running, and Francis with the wincing disgust of a captured spy being thrown into a vat of shit.

  I’ve got to distract myself, Francis thought as, grimy hand over grimy hand, he eased his way along the plunging tunnel, forcing his palms deep into its walls lest his legs race uncontrollably. Like a lead plumb his luminon dangled in short precise arcs. At least it was staying lit. At least something was going right.

  He fixed his mind on kinepix. A year ago he had attended a thirty-hour marathon of bawdy historical spectacles. By the seventeenth hour he lay slumped in his chair like a forgotten raincoat. Voluptuous women grinned above a sea of dark, silhouetted heads belonging to connoisseurs of bawdy historical spectacles. Had he struggled to raise himself a few centimeters, he could have seen nipples. It wasn’t worth it.

  The floor stopped falling, but his spirits did not. He knew the riverbed came now, with its unpredictable acid. Yes, it was clearly the moat that had dissolved the magnecar treads. But could ordinary percolation account for its sudden, aggressive appearance?

  Certainly last night’s murder was not a dream. Francis knew dreams. A mirage? Mirages were nebulous. Francis had seen freckles and a crisp white beard.

  The river was passed without mishap, and soon a distant puddle of sunlight beckoned. Choking on apprehension, the men climbed the rising tunnel. When at last Francis broke into the dazzling day, he remembered what it was like to leave the historical-spectacle marathon: for a moment, fantasy and truth had switched places, so that the people on the sunlit streets seemed to be playing out some insipid crowd scene while reality lay abandoned in the dark theater at his back.

  No savages were waiting.

  “If you were a civilization,” asked Burne, “where would you put down roots? At the mouth of your river?”

  “At the source,” said Luther. “Get your goods to market fast.”

  They turned and marched south, against the current. UW Canis Majoris soon had them sweating by the liter. To their left, the vagrant, tread-eating fluid hummed and shimmered and refused to divulge its secrets. Beyond, the wall crept by in a silent procession of stones, not once leaving its guardian moat or spicing its perfection with corner, turret, tower, or gate.

  Pack straps began to chew Francis’s shoulders, and the luminon bounced against his sternum, raising a welt. Sand got everywhere, or seemed to: boots, pants, jacket, hair, fingernails, armpits, earfolds. It got inside the sockets of his eyes.

  For all this, he was feeling better. His romantic bone was singing. He saw himself as a character in one of the bawdy historical spectacles, a swarthy chieftain leading a desert attack. This isn’t so bad, he told himself. Throw yourself into it.

  He looked over his shoulder, saw the comforting right-angle protuberances of Ollie’s cage as it rode up and down in Burne’s pack. Just then, everything seemed right.

  By early afternoon UW Canis Majoris, having parboiled its little planet, now proceeded to cook the thing for real. Francis and Luther went goofy with the heat. They fell in behind Burne, advancing only through mindless mimicry. When Burne paused, the zombies paused. When Burne shifted his pack, the zombies shifted their packs.

  Francis studied the silver-black river, trying to snap himself out of his trance. Talk might help. “There’s something about that thing,” he said, pointing. “I don’t mean the shine or smell or even the unhealthy effect on wistar rods. There’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “The…holiness.”

  Luther did not reply. A long silence settled like night upon the men, and they trudged on.

  FINALLY, AFTER THIRTY KILOMETERS of monotony, Burne saw that, not far ahead, the wall presented its first turn of the day. The river arced gracefully around, passing from view. Did the long-awaited gate lie beyond?

  “Look!”

  Burne had stopped walking. The minute they realized this, Francis and Luther fizzled to a halt. “Salvation,” said Burne, “may be just around the—”

  The thought went no further. Burne’s jaw kept moving, but the words stayed inside. Pulling out his proximascope, he trained it on the wall.

  On the wall was life. Human life, civilized life, life that in all likelihood sprang from the children of the children of Eden Three.

  Francis took the proximascope, saw the life: a man and his son and daughter, all astride a peculiar six-legged animal that looked like a child’s drawing of a horse. The girl was a plucky pre-teen with tawny skin and sensuous black hair. Bedecked in glasses, her younger brother seemed studious, perhaps even a trifle world-weary, like a child prodigy who had composed one too many sonatas. As for the father, he had evidently bequeathed so much amiable enthusiasm to his daughter and so much brooding thoughtfulness to his son that there was little left for him besides a beefy build and a boringly honest face.

  All three citizens disported themselves with the carefree air of a family out for a holiday. It was clear that in riding the wall they had no real goal beyond the trustworthy pleasures of wall riding.

  “Look at their robes!” yelled Francis, handing the proximascope to Luther. “Just like the one in my dream!”

  “Are they the same people?” asked Luther.

  “No. But it’s all one culture, that’s obvious. So it wasn’t a dream!”

  “He doesn’t look like the sort who goes around kicking children’s ribs in.”

  “Neither did that sculptor.”

  THE FATHER SAW the scientists, and the shock nearly unhorsed him. He snatched the reins from his daughter, drawing them tight until the lipoca’s pea-brain made the correct translation: stop.

  The children were more curious than fearful. They had always wanted to see what these mythical Brain Eaters looked like. “Where are their teeth, Father?” asked the boy.

  “Those aren’t neurovores. I don’t know what they are.”

  “I’ll bet they’re from another planet!” said the girl.

  Pasting a huge phony smile on his face, Burne shouted “Peace!” and stretched both his palms up high, as if waiting to catch a trapeze. Francis and Luther, still under exhaustion’s spell, did likewise. The Nearthlings believed themselves the very picture of goodwill.

  To the girl the Nearthlings were the very picture of saphood. “Why do they grin like that?” she whispered. “Are people from other planets ninnies?”

  Her father’s only response was to mutter, “God of the brain, they speak English!” after which he made a megaphone with his hands. “My name is Zamanta!” he cried. “Our planet is Luta, our country Quetzalia! Where do you live?”

  Francis decided to play a role in this historic contact. “Fourth from the sun,” he said triumphantly, but then his stomach sank. Did he get it right? Lapus, Verne, Krit
onia, Nearth, Carlotta (what had Zamanta called it—Luta?), Arete…yes, fourth.

  “They’re human,” Zamanta whispered to his daughter.

  “I’m disappointed,” said the girl, reporting her feelings matter-of-factly. “I was hoping for a tentacle or something.”

  Matter-of-fact was not Zamanta’s mood. Cautiously he broadcast another question into the desert. “What do you eat?”

  “Nothing but vegetables!” said Francis with bizarre conviction.

  “We hate the savages, too!” Luther added.

  Zamanta’s sigh was a fountain of gratitude.

  The scientists’ minds were ticking in unison. Here was a chance to get Darwin back! Burne pictured himself at the head of a vast Quetzalian army, trumpets blaring, banners puffed with Lutan breeze, saddlebags jammed with pollucite ore. The army charges the oasis, obliterating the savages in a matter of hours.

  Francis leaped even further into the future. He could see the Poelsig Award on the mantelpiece in his office—a big office right next to the great amphitheater, where he lectured only if he felt like it, because now his real work was research.

  Francis’s ambitions were interrupted by a sudden shout, its content so jolting that Luther dropped the proximascope.

  “Neurovores!”

  Half a kilometer to the right the sand swirled and boiled. Fifty savages charged over the dunes, the air above their heads abloom with a forest of spearshafts.

  “This way!” Zamanta screamed, his arm erect, his hand extended and palpitating. “Run!” Dismounting, father and children broke for the corner of the wall. The scientists felt no shame in following their panicked example. The Brain Eaters were minutes away.

  Oh, how I hate thee, Planet Luta, Francis thought as he ran. Why don’t you just kill us and get it over with? The sand came up hard against his feet, with thuds that rang grittily inside his head.

  The bend in the river took forever to arrive. Rounding it, the men at last saw their hopes fulfilled by a pair of pyramidal towers that slanted down to within a meter of the moat. Between the towers a massive drawbridge, polished-oak-and-iron-bolt triumph of Quetzalian art, stood poised for rescue. It began to descend, a great clamoring portcullis crawling up behind it like a metal spider.