Green Eyes

by Lucius Shepard

  A tower of incendiary wires, intricate as lace, rose around him into the sky, and the geomagnetic field no longer flickered, but was a white road curving from horizon to horizon. It’s cold gleam seemed to embody a unity of object and event, being both a destination and a road. Almost tearful, knowing himself unable to reach it yet reaching anyway, like a child trying to touch a star, he lifted his hands to it. The lowest strands of the tower shot toward him and grafted to his fingertips, and at the same time, the geomagnetic field bulged downward, its center fraying into strands that joined with the tower. A flash whitened the sky, and as the light decayed from the outer edges of the flash, it resolved into a latticework of fire, all of its strands flowing inward and pouring down into his outstretched hands.

  He had not known his body could encompass such a feeling of power. It was like existing on the boiling edges of a cloud - a place where the borders between the material and immaterial were ceaselessly being redefined - and drawing energy from the transformations. A rapturous strength burned in him. For a moment his eyes were dazzled with whiteness, his consciousness drawn into an involvement of which love and joy, all human emotion, were but fractionated ideals.

  Groggy, he blinked and shook his head and looked around.

  He might have been standing inside a knot tied in a black rope, gazing up through the interstices at sections of a pale purple ceiling. But directly above him, perhaps a hundred feet distant and visible between coils of black wood, was a castle turret. He recognized it as the turret of Ghazes, the disciplinary post of the Yoalo high in the brambly growth of Moselantja. Characters testifying to the public desire for self-abnegation were carved in the teeth of the battlements.

  The apparition of the turret was so unexpected, looming over him like a wave about to crash, that he flung out his right hand in a futile attempt to ward it off. His hand was a negative, featureless black; his fingers shimmered, and gouts of iridescent fire lanced from their tips, merging to a single beam and splashing against the turret, halating it with a rainbow brilliance. He tried to jerk back his hand, but it was locked in position; he wrenched and threw himself in all directions until he sagged from exhaustion, literally hanging by his arm. A few yards away, he made out a fanged door opening into one of the stems, the wall inside furred with lichen that shed a fishbelly phosphorescence. The air stank of ozone, and everything was motionless, soundless.

  But then he heard a sound.

  At first he thought it was speech of a sort, for it had the rhythm and sonority of words pronounced by a leathery tongue. He stared back over his shoulder and saw something bob up in silhouette against the sky, sink behind a stem and rise again. Something awkward and long-winged, with the bulbous body of a fly. Another creature appeared, another, and another yet. There were at least a dozen, all flapping lazily toward him through the maze of stems.

  Once more, this time choking with fear, he tried to wrench himself free. Fire still lanced from his fingertips. The radiance about the turret was pulsing, and the turret itself rippled. Then, berating himself for stupidity, he remembered how to disengage the weapon capacity of the suit. He formed his hand into a claw so that the five beams splashed into each other and slowly brought his fingers together until they met.

  The foremost of the beasts cleared the stem beyond his, its face a horror of white-rimmed eyes, an ape’s flat nose, needle teeth, tendrils flapping from its lips. It beat its wings, gaining altitude for a dive, and he caught a whiff of fetor and a glimpse of its scabbed underbelly. He crouched down, but a wing buffeted the side of his head and sent him reeling to the edge of the stem. As he teetered, he saw below a puzzle of purple gleam and shadow and interlocking stems. Falling, he clawed at the air and felt a tension on his fingertips.

  His fall should have been endless. He should have caromed off the infinity of stems beneath, being battered into shapelessness and blood. But he fell only a couple of feet through a burst of white glory and landed on his side. Dazed, he rolled onto his back. Overhead, slung like a sagging hammock, the crescent moon held sway amid the pinprick stars of a Louisiana night.

  The wind shredded Jocundra’s scream. From Donnell’s fingers a stream of numinous energy, the ghost of a beam, lanced towards the top of the cypress tree. He was struggling as if his arm were gripped by a transparent vise, throwing himself backward, panicked. She started crawling down the hill, but the wind knocked her flat. Crumpled wrappers, tin cans, bottles and twigs skittered along the ground, all shining with coronas; the air was full of stinging grit. Something smacked against her cheek, clung for a second with sticky claws, dropped down into her blouse and walked across her breasts. She rolled over, beating at her chest until a half-crushed cricket fell out and flipped away in the wind, leaving a wet smear on her belly. She looked up just as Donnell toppled off the veve, and as the cypress top, surrounded by a halo of ghostly radiance, exploded.

  At least it began as an explosion.

  There was a blast, flames rayed out, a fireball grew. But when it had reached the limit of its expansion, the fireball did not shrink or dissipate into smoke. Instead, it held its shape; then the flames paled and condensed into a cloud of ruby sparks, which themselves settled into the outlines of a mechanism, one of enigmatic complexity. A piece of jeweled clockwork that folded in upon itself and receded into a previously unnoticed distance: a dark tunnel collapsed through the night sky. The last of the wind went with it, giving out a keening cry that set Jocundra’s teeth on edge.

  By the time she had crossed the veve to the spot where Donnell had fallen, he was sitting up and staring at the blasted cypress. Blood streamed from his nostrils. She jumped down beside him, held his head, and pinched his nostrils to staunch the flow. His eyes showed hardly any green. Thinking it might just be the brightness of the floodlights, she shaded them with her hand. A few flickers, vivid, but only a few.

  ‘I feel good,’ he said. ‘My heart’s not as erratic.’ He gazed up at her. ‘My eyes?’

  She nodded, unable to speak, her own eyes brimming. She put her arms around him and rested her head on the back of his neck.

  ‘You’re smothering me,’ he mumbled, but held tightly to her waist.

  A scream rang out from the hilltop. Jocundra looked back to see Otille struggling in the Baron’s grasp. She swung her head back and forth, kicked his legs with her heels. He picked her up and started toward the house; but Otille managed a final scream, and this time it was intelligible. One word.

  ‘Ogoun!’

  Donnell stared at the hilltop long after they had gone, and though his features were calm, Jocundra thought she could detect a mixture of hatred and longing in his expression. ‘What’s wrong with her?’ he asked.

  ‘The wind frightened her,’ she said. ‘And the tree. What did happen with the tree?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he muttered. ‘An accident. Maybe you can figure it but.’ He turned to the cypress. A thin smoke curled from the ruin of its trunk, misting the stars. His voice became resonant, his tone sarcastic, as he said, ‘God knows what all this is going to do to Otille.’

  Within two days Donnell’s eyes were as brilliant as ever, and he went back upon the veve, thereafter returning to it at least once a day. There was no danger of him overdoing it. While the treatment did serve to trim the size of the colony, it also appeared to have stimulated their rate of reproduction, and Jocundra doubted he could last much more than two weeks of abstinence. The Baron continued to film Donnell - he had dug a niche into the side of the hill for shelter against the wind - but Otille remained barricaded in her apartments. One experience with Donnell’s newly augmented powers had apparently been enough. When asked about her, the Baron would grunt and make offhanded comments. ‘Otille just need to sit and watch her forest grow,’ he said once. ‘She gon’ get it back together.’ But he didn’t seem to be convinced.

  Terrified by the wind, which was shredding the jungles of Maravillosa as Donnell’s power increased, growing in force and scope, some of the ‘friends’
left the estate, and those who stayed hid out in the cabins. With the exception of Captain Tomorrow. He was delighted by the wind and had to be shooed away from the veve. Whenever he encountered Jocundra, he spoke to her in a scholarly fashion, informing her once that the physics of fantasy was ‘on the verge of actuation,’ and showing her his design for a thought-powered laser, inspired, he said, by Donnell’s ‘wind trip.’

  As for Jocundra, since the Baron was present to watch over Donnell, she preferred to wait in their room during the treatments. Sometimes she worked on the principles underlying the operation of the veve, but she was not often successful in this. The wind unnerved her. Despite her rational understanding of it, charged ions, vacating air masses, she had the feeling it could carry the paper bearing her explanations off to a realm where explanations were no longer relevant. Mostly she thought about Donnell. He was hiding something from her, she believed, and she did not think it could be anything positive. His attitude toward the veve puzzled her. He had not been at all distressed to learn of his addiction to it; in fact, he had appeared relieved to learn he could use it frequently.

  One evening, eleven days after the completion of the veve, while sitting at their window, listening to branches snap, leaves scuttering across the side of the house, Jocundra noticed the corner of a notebook sticking out from beneath their mattress. On first leafing through it, she thought it to be notes for a new story because of the odd nomenclature of towns and people, its references to the purple sun and the Yoalo. But then she realized it was a journal of Donnell’s walks upon the veve. On the inside foreleaf was a sketch of the veve, every junction numbered, and a list of what seemed to be the ranks of the Yoalo. Inductee, Initiate, Medium, Sub-aspect, Aspect, High Aspect. She had a twinge of foreboding, and as she settled back to read the first entry, she tried to tell herself it was only background for a story written in diary form.

  Sept. 8. Ended up on Junction 14. The sun edging down, a long pale bulge like a continental margin lifting from the horizon, fringed by a corona of vivid purple. Stars ablaze. No moon. Broken, barren hills to my left, and I thought that Moselantja was somewhere behind them. I was atop a cliff which fell away into a forested valley. Massed empurpled trees locked in shadow, the crooked track of a river cutting through, and two-thirds of the way across the valley, at a forking of the river, was a village laid out in a peculiar pattern, one I could not quite discern because of my angle. I tried to shift my field focus forward; it was harder than usual. Instead of snapping into place, it was as if I were pushing through some barrier heavier than distance. Finally I managed a perspective at eye level of the street. A door opened in one of the houses; a man poked his head out, gave a squeal of fright and ducked inside. How the hell had he seen me? I looked down and saw that I was sheathed in black. Shimmering, unfeatured black. Energy suit. I had been on a clifftop, and now was planted smack in the midst of Rumelya (the name springing unbidden to mind). Memories flooded me, among them information about the suit’s capacity for nearly instantaneous travel along line-of-sight distances. The river - the Quinza - was not safe for swimming, though I couldn’t recall why, and the name of the forest was the Mothemelle.

  Bits of litter, black leaves, were drifting across the dusty street. All the buildings were of weathered black wood, and most were of two stories, the topmost overhanging the lower and supported by carven posts. Every inch of the buildings was carved: lintels evolving into gargoyle’s heads, roof peaks into ornate finials. The doorframes flowed with tiny faces intertwined with vines, and stranger faces yet - half flower, half beast -emerged from the walls. The similarity between these embellishments and those of Maravillosa was inescapable. Light issued from shutters pierced by scatters of star-shaped holes so that the appearance was of panels of night sky studded with orange stars. Though many of the details were not of my original invention - the names, for instance - it was the village of my story, complete down to the sign above the inn, an odd image I now recognized for a petro painting. The evilly tenanted forest looming over the roofs; the tense, secretive atmosphere; the cracked shells and litter blowing on the streets; it was all the same. Voices were raised inside the inn, and I had a strong intuition that some important event was soon to occur there.

  As the sun’s corona streamed higher above the forest, striking violet glints from the eddies in the river, I noticed an ideograph laid out in black dust centering the crossroads just ahead. The fitful breeze steadied, formed into a whirlwind over the ideograph, and dissipated it into a particulate haze. I had a memory of an old man wearing a dun-colored robe, bending over an orange glow, talking to me. His voice was hoarse and feeble, the creaking of a gate modulated into speech. ‘The stars are men’s doubles,’ he said. ‘The wind is a soul without a body.’

  Shortly after this, I became afraid I would not be able to leave Rumelya. I had - hadn’t I? - moved from my position on the veve. I walked back and forth, left and right, attempting to fall off as I had the first time. To no avail. Then, just as had happened beneath the turret of Ghazes, I recalled the necessary function of my suit, that it acted to orient me within the geomagnetic field. I reached up and felt the connections in the air. Again, the mystic experience of transition. It was losing its impact, and I remember thinking during transit that such depersonalized ecstasy might grow boring. I found myself back on Junction 14 waving my arms like a man drowning.

  By the time she had finished half the entries, Jocundra’s foreboding had matured into disastrous knowledge. Either the immense electromagnetic forces were unhinging him, fueling fantasies with which to form a surrogate past, or - and this she could not fully disbelieve - he was actually traveling somewhere. No matter what the case, and though she was certain he had not told her to protect her from worry, his secrecy was a barrier between them.

  The last entry in the journal detailed his arrival in a great hall whose walls were ranked to the ceiling with mirrors. Translucent creatures - ‘crystalline imperfections in the air, as quick as hummingbirds’ - flew between the mirrors. Images appeared in their wake. One mirror held a view of golden-edged green scales shifting back and forth, as though the coils of an enormous snake enwrapped the hall; a second showed a gem-studded game board, its counters swathed in cobweb; a third depicted a black-suited Yoalo standing atop one of the turrets of Moselantja, spinning around and around, his arms raised overhead, becoming more and more transparent until only a wind whirled in his place, bearing up dust from the turret floor. Each successive mirror image caused him to recall bits and details: the movements of military forces, names, a sequence of letters and numbers which reminded Jocundra of astronomical coordinates. A final mirror offered him the sight of a woman leaning forward, herself looking into a mirror, her face obscured by a fall of dark hair; she then bent her head and lifted her hair up behind her.

  I was overcome with longing. The shade of her hair was identical to Jocundra’s, dark brown wound through with gold, and her movements were Jocundra’s, the way she held her back perfectly straight while bending. I envisioned the old man once again, his shoulders hunched, holding out something to me: an ivory sphere, one of those conceits carved and hollowed with smaller spheres within. It was cradled in his palm like a pearl in the meat of an oyster. ‘If you lose something,’ he said, ‘you will find it here. And if it truly is yours, it will return to you.’ I knew then that this woman, whether Jocundra by name or some other, was bound to me through worlds and time, and that all I had seen within the mirrors were the elements of days to come.

  Jocundra set down the journal and went to the window. He was, it appeared, thinking about losing her, and now this same thought infected her. Though it was something she had once taken for granted, the prospect had become terrifying, impossible to accept. The house shuddered.

  Branches clawed and scuttered against the outer walls. She wished she had a word with which to shout down the wind, an incantation to still it, because it seemed to her a howling prophecy of loss. But growing stronger, it sang in
the eaves and shaped groaning, inarticulate words from the open windows, mournful sounds, like sad monsters waking with questions on their minds.

  The pale sun, its corona shrunk in a cyanotic rim, showed an arc above the forest of Mothemelle. Donnell stood with an ear pressed in the window of the inn at Rumelya, trying to assure himself that there were no patrons inside. At last, hearing only a tuneless singing, the clatter of crockery, he pushed in the door. A dumpy serving girl threw up an armload of dishes and ran through a curtained doorway, leaving him alone in the common room. Long gray benches and boards; whitewashed walls, one having a curtained niche; floors of packed sand littered with scraps of gristle, bones, and a striped lizard curled around a table leg; a high ceiling crossed by heavy beams and hung with ladles and pans of black iron. He took a seat near the door and waited. The most peculiar thing about the room was the orange light. It had no apparent source; the room was simply filled with it.