by James Morrow
Tez lifted her lantern. This time her sandals clacked confidently across the nave. Reaching the outside steps, she saw that the drizzly fog had risen, leaving the night dry and starless. Despite the suffocating dark it took her only a minute to plunge down the side of the pyramid, untether Mixtla, and strike out for the Temple of Tolca.
DURING OFF-HOURS public buildings grow haunted and weird. Children feel this when they return by night for pageants in their dark-halled schools. Minus the rush of lanterns and the accustomed clamor of worshipers, the Temple of Tolca seemed to Tez forbiddingly unfamiliar, even though she had walked these passageways five hundred times before. This was the temple’s time to be alone.
Reaching one of the great vaulted decagons, she entered the nearest chapel on tiptoes. The hollow screen awaited, potential with hate. Its face was dead to the touch.
A quick tug and her cranium was off. She nested it behind the fat red cushion, sat down.
Eyes locked on the screen, she stretched her fingers high over her head until they brushed the electrode. She yanked it forward, pressing it deep into her unfeeling cerebrum. The screen began flooding with green haze.
Her eyes closed briefly, then sprang open and grew to their fullest. Her teeth met and crunched. Her thoughts gathered potency.
Inside the screen the haze transmuted. Green became yellow, yellow became orange. Amorphous orange took shape. It was a fire, a flaming pyre.
Consumed, the pyre collapsed and jumped into the background. Huaca Yon rushed on stage. He had no legs. Tez concentrated. He got his legs.
“Is my peccadillo really beyond words?” Huaca said from the screen. “God of the brain, Tez, I loved him too—perhaps as much as you.”
A stray orange swirl lingered before Huaca’s image. She went to work, inventing herself from it. The projected Tez stomped up to her brother, who was still repeating the morning’s speech. Seeing the obsidian scalpel in her hand, he departed sharply from the script.
“But I was on to something, a new…way to…paint pictures of lipoca dung. Just pour the pigment into your nose and sneeze. A masterpiece…” He eyed the knife nervously.
Tez fell upon him, slashing, shredding, making ribbons of his robe, then ripping it from his body entirely. She aimed low, and the blade flew smoothly into Huaca’s unathletic gut. A ghastly mass of entrail popped out. It dripped and vanished.
Vanished? She was losing concentration. This service seemed to her profoundly different from its predecessors. How? She could not decide. Then the obvious became apparent.
She was having a good time.
Like any worshiper, Tez used the pictures to maintain a vivid dreamflow and wring every drop of violence from her pent-up frustrations. But where other Quetzalians would have addressed the screen with humorless, hypnotized attention, Tez addressed it with glee, laughing until her eyes swam.
“Go to it, doctor!”
The intestine returned. As the bogus Tez squeezed it a transformation occurred, and she found herself hauling foot upon foot of masterfully woven rope from Huaca’s abdomen. He tried to escape, but Tez moved faster, dashing in wide, then moderate, then narrow circles around her prisoner, until he was a bundle of rope.
The real Tez kept laughing. Her fantasy wobbled, began to fade. She cursed herself: Pay attention, damn you!
The scene regained its luster. Now she was lifting her bundled brother high into the air. She carried him to the edge of the quarry, tossed him over. Through the magic of thought, Huaca’s projection became a six-foot egg. Screaming hideously, the egg hurtled two hundred meters toward undebatable oblivion.
Tez switched to a subjective viewpoint, grabbing the corners of her cushion as the ground zoomed up. Her stomach went into free fall, and she cackled. Then, at the moment of impact, she spirited herself high above, watching with rapture as her oval brother hit the rocks and splattered himself into a snotty glob of yolk and white and shell. The show was over.
GRADUALLY SHE SOBERED UP. Her laughter became peeps, then smiles. Plucking the electrode out, she blinked toward the screen. Within its walls nothing remained but a broad puddle of gall.
One hand replaced the electrode while the other pushed an adjacent lever. Squeals of friction testified that the device had been little used over the years. Looking behind her, she worked the lever to its apex. Silently the screen glided upward, drawn on strings of magnetism. It coupled with the chapel ceiling.
Stepping forward, she squatted by the silver-black leavings of her latest fantasy. They gurgled and stank and oozed into the floor. In minutes they would be gone forever, random molecules of the communal nightmare.
Tez had never been so close to noctus. The smell was adamant but not sickening. Cautiously she broke the surface with her index finger, brought finger to tongue, tasted the sweetness. Sweetness! Sweet dreams! Sight, sound, smell, touch, taste—she had performed all available tests.
Pain drilled into her tongue and finger where the caustic candy had been. She was ready for it. Patiently she waited while the pain became a pleasantly endurable throb.
Her robe held a jar of salt water, nine-tenths full. She unscrewed the lid and used it as a noctus ladle. Two scoops gave her a ten percent solution. She shook the jar.
In its crisp symmetry the needle looked far crueler than Tez had remembered. Perhaps I should let Francis stick me, she thought. No. This must remain a gift. Find your courage, surgeon.
Setting the solution on the floor, she fed the syringe, then pushed the plunger till it spat away all but three cubic centimeters. Three. The safe, perfect, magic number.
There was, of course, a final hesitation. Tez had expected it. During this time she played at injecting herself, massaging her deltoid, tickling it with the needle. Then, like a timid, chattering swimmer up to her navel in an icy lake, she managed to stop her mind and let her matter take over.
Came the submersion.
The needle was under her skin. The plunger was active, was moving back—no blood—was moving forward, was forcing lurid imaginings into her body.
“For love!”
Tez did not expect instantaneous effects—this was only three cc’s, after all—nor did she get them. She removed the needle, returned it to the green towel. I must cover my tracks, she thought, lowering the screen, recapping her brain.
Came the effects.
They came with a fury. Her digestion was struck first. The bony fingers of ten thousand rat skeletons clawed at the imprisoning walls of her stomach. She toppled, howling. As the moat squirted into her brain, pain dissolved into shivering frivolity. Her face, she could tell, was alternating between contorted grins and grotesque frowns. Her eyeballs spun in their sockets. A psychotic rainbow entered the chapel. It danced around, and when it exploded a hundred octaves of the invisible spectrum were revealed. From the air, shrill, loathsome chimes arose, assumed unnamed geometric shapes, became chimes again. The chapel walls groaned and pulsed like heart muscles.
Tez dreamed that she had reinserted the electrode. No fantasy happened. Instead, a geyser of noctus shot from her brain and began filling the screen. Capacity was reached, surpassed. The screen shattered, but the bile did not gush; it slithered, a dark sheeny monster. Quivering tentacles reached into Tez, and suddenly the thing had her baby. It was a boy.
Her own choked cry woke her. Her body was wound in a tight, pale, pregnant ball. Mercifully, the hallucination stopped.
Came the darkness.
THREE
* * *
The Apostle
21
ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS, through the valley, into the cities, winter ate its way. Life in Tepec became cold to the touch. Citizens fondled their coats, looking for holes to mend. Gardens decayed into formless brown. Chitzals headed for the southern orchards and sustained themselves on frozen, nearly impregnable opos. On the river made of hate, ragged shelves of ice formed and grew toward the middle. Like a healing wound, the moat began to close.
The opoch called Lamux was famou
s for sudden snows. Made of purple vapor, lit by a jade sun, the flakes were the luxurious blue of unoxygenated blood. Twice already they had lightly burst upon Quetzalia like seeds from a farmer’s palm, and both times Iztac had burned them away. But now it was snowing with conviction, in such quantities that the citizens decided to stay by their hearths. If Darwin arrives today, they told themselves, the news will spread soon enough, and, besides, this tea is warm and sweet.
Alone on the wall, Francis paced, shivered, and waited for the overdue ship. Drumrolls poured from the bones of his mouth. Am I crazy to be here?
He was of two minds. If I go home, said the first mind, I’ll start thinking of Tez. I’ll brood and masturbate.
You’re thinking of Tez now, said the second mind. And you’re brooding, too. You’re not masturbating because the weather’s wrong.
Ever since the slap, Tez had been a missing person. Her colleagues at the hospital assumed she was vacationing without notice. Her brother, still shocked by the assault and guilty over its aptness, could offer no theories. Depressed by his inadvertent role in the exploitation of Janet Vij’s notes, Loloc Haz shrugged at Francis’s inquiry and reminded him that Tez was too resourceful, Quetzalia too benign, for her to be in any physical danger. “This isn’t Nearth, you know, although it might be by the time you and Newman get through with it.”
Pained by the emptiness in his bed, Francis took first to sleeping in a guest room, then on a couch, then to not sleeping. He moped: if Tez’s system went another ten hours without a noctus booster, her newfound humanness would devolve into Quetzalian pacifism. But that was not the worst of it.
Nor was the worst of it that she might be lost. As Loloc had suggested, Tez could surely rescue herself.
The worst of it was that she was hiding from him, tacitly rejecting his plans for her emigration. She didn’t really love him.
At twilight the snow began to wane. Like the farmer closing his barn door behind his escaped cows, Francis buttoned up. Following local custom, he had recently fattened his robe with a wool overcoat. His wool cap was shaped like a gourd. The ensemble performed so impressively that on Nearth it would have claimed the undivided attention of a hundred entrepreneurs, who, depending on whether its design might be revised to include some sort of impermanence, could readily shape it into either a dazzling fortune or a handy tax write-off.
Francis studied the Quetzalian side of the wall, trailing his eyes across the heterogeneous geometry—square stones, round stones, smooth stones, chunky stones—until he saw two figures talking solemnly and indecipherably near the base of the nearer drawbridge tower. Today’s gatekeeper was a frisky middle-aged woman whose head appeared taped on by scarves. Her companion, a runner, likewise middle-aged, but male and lethargic with cold, was obviously no casual acquaintance. Once he advanced and kissed her, but she pulled away suddenly like a gull realizing it was on the wrong nest. Good, Francis thought. He’s not for you.
The second mind had won. Go home now, it said, and he approached the steps. A snowflake settled meanly into his eye. Facing the forest, he saw his lipoca tethered to a bush that looked like a large fleshless hand. Carbon dioxide steamed from the animal’s nostrils.
He was about to go down when, unmistakable and insistent, a metallic scream rushed out of the clouds. Like a great actor entering, reducing his audience to an expectant hush, Darwin broke upon the dusk.
Seeing a spaceship for the first time in their lives, the Quetzalians grew agog.
Recovering, the runner shot away. The gatekeeper went for her windlass. Fifty meters from the river, Darwin halted and hovered while the bridge began a raspy descent.
Francis felt like a patient learning that he wasn’t going to die after all. The war had worked! Noctus solution was predictable and tame. The injection could not have harmed her.
Realizing where Burne intended to land, Francis experienced unbounded admiration for his friend’s sense of diplomacy. Darwin was not headed for the desert. Appreciably smaller than the average dune, it would there have been a pathetic answer to all the blood it cost. Nor was Darwin headed beyond the wall. Brimming with circuits, it would there have stood as a palpable affront to the Quetzalian ban on technology.
The moment the windlass was unreeled, Darwin spun toward the gate and settled directly onto the drawbridge.
GROANING UNDER UNACCUSTOMED metric tons, the timbers stayed miraculously whole as Francis crossed the narrow lip of bridge that jutted between ship and moat. He unlooped the key from his neck, then felt his smile collapse as, prepared for nothing less than Burne Newman’s thick figure and shaggy face, he unlocked the hatch and pivoted it away from an empty frame. Rehanging the key, shuddering as its coldness cut through his robe, he entered and raced past the organic-looking oxygen tubes that led to the control deck.
Hearing footfalls, Burne rotated his chair and pulled his face into a grin. “Sorry I wasn’t at the door,” he said weakly, pointing downward. A bandage engulfed his left thigh, the white linen yielding to a gruesome yellow stain.
Francis gasped. He couldn’t stand being around pain, would rather be hurt himself. “We should get you to Dr. Mool.”
“No,” said Burne with a macabre wink. “It’s only as bad as it looks.”
Francis shucked his coat. Good God, the bastard wanted to get wounded. “It happened while you were saving somebody’s life, right?”
Burne concurred with a grunt. He didn’t feel like admitting that his misfortune was wholly unrelated to the war.
Francis shook Burne’s hand hesitantly, as if he thought war wounds could be transmitted like diseases, but he spoke with affection. “I looked up and saw old Darwin and it was the prettiest sight this side of Ollie Cortexclavus.”
“You doubted I’d win?”
“I don’t see survivors.”
Burne explained that the First Army of Aca, dirty and happy, was two days behind him. “They ought to be five days behind, but in my fevered state it took forever to coax a tank’s worth of cesium out of the damn pollucite.”
“Wouldn’t the Quetzalians help you?”
“My lieutenants carried me to the ship, but their bughouse religious convictions kept them on the desert side of the hatchway. They wouldn’t even put their casualties on board.”
“How many casualties?”
“Forty-three Quetzalians are dead. Thirty are wounded.” Burne scratched his thumb on the longbow that rested incongruously by the L-17 terminal.
“And the neurovores?”
This time Burne grinned for real. “What neurovores?” he crowed.
Francis danced. “Dr. N, you’re a miracle.”
BURNE SUGGESTED DINNER. Francis went to the galley, returned carrying two cans of distasteful meatballs. He heated them with kelvinsleeves. And to think—some poor animal had given its life for this stuff.
Francis expected war stories, but Burne was too miserable. They talked idly, of entomology, archeology, time travel, Nearth, with Francis supplying most of the words. Rolling the last meatball into his mouth, he went to the holovision monitor and pushed Power On.
“You did it, Burne. You brought it off. Of all the audacious bastards in the galaxy—”
A sharp groan cut him short. Turning, he saw Burne pitch forward like a buoy. The monitor sang with current.
Francis advanced, hands outstretched, but the hero rallied and refused charity. “Can’t move my damn toes.” Burne spoke through locked teeth. “I won’t say ‘wiggle’ because I never could wiggle the little wart-hogs.”
“Go to the hospital, Burne.” He tried for maximum petulance.
Seizing Francis’s sleeve, Burne reeled him to within whispering distance. “Under no circumstances will I leave this boat.” His voice was somewhere between a faint mumble and a strong thought. “Not if my leg starts to rot. Not if God farts in the air ducts. Understood?”
“Your fever could return.”
“Then you’ll fly the ship.”
Oh sure, Burne. But fo
r some reason Francis smiled. “There’s a rumor around that you want to go home soon.”
“I hate this place, Lostwax. I didn’t think I’d get my leg half cut off, but I did. Before something else goes haywire, you scoot to Olo and find your toothbrush and your beetle and your pretty little fiancée—what’s-her-name, the pacifist—and be back at sunrise.”
“Tez has been missing for two days.”
“There’s one thing my life doesn’t need right now, chum, and that’s complications.”
“Look, Burne, I don’t like to bicker with a wounded man, but if not for me you wouldn’t have even thought about using noctus as a weapon.”
“All right—noon tomorrow, no later.” He placed his mouth over the meat can so the words would echo. “If you’re not here by then, count yourself among the marooned.”
Francis nodded. This is fair, he thought. If she doesn’t show tonight, it will absolutely prove that Quetzalia is the only home she wants. Maybe it’s just as well, Tez. Maybe Nearth is unworthy of you.
Burne was at the control panel. The monitor glowed yellow as the running-lights came on. Outside, a cone-shaped crowd was building. It began at the far end of the gateway and fanned outward toward the forest. The fat ones. Governor Nazra and Mouzon Thu, stood at the apex, swinging their lanterns and catching snow on their tongues.
Burne looked at the scene, snorted. “I don’t want any curious bystanders wandering in here.”
“You owe them a victory speech.” Francis grappled with his coat, orienting it.
“You make it. Lostwax. I’m giving this leg the sleep it needs.” Rising, he grasped the longbow and poled his way uncertainly across the deck.
Francis stepped forward, pushing buttons into buttonholes. He became Burne’s second crutch. Enmeshed, they tottered toward the cabins.
THE SNOW WAS NOT QUITE OVER when Francis moved into Darwin’s wan glow, locked the hatch, and edged to the prow. Meeting the lights, the blue flakes became a storm of green peas. Nazra and Mouzon rushed up greedily. Francis reported the news, fending them off with his woolly arm, and smiles flourished all around.
