Conch did not fear zombies, or even ghosts. He was not superstitious. But sometimes, fancifully, because he had imagination, he half-wondered if those zombies he had seen in his youth were spectral forerunners...a premonition of the men and women that he would kill for money as an adult.
He did not believe the dead could hurt him. But he knew the living could, and would, if he ever let his guard down. Physically. Psychologically. Emotionally.
The only people on the planet Oasis he could be said to love, with his parents and two siblings all living on Earth, were Indigo, Hans and Brass. But even then, he knew he would kill any one of them, even Indigo, if they betrayed or endangered him in any way, and without hesitation. And they had the same understanding in regard to him. This mutual feeling, in a way, only strengthened their dependence on loyalty, and thus strengthened their affection.
In a way, the only person Jasper Conch regretted killing—though on occasion he had seen the sobbing relatives or spouses of his victims on VT—was the frightened little boy he had once been, who only wanted to bury his head in sleep.
Beside him on the bed—now that the soothingly humming screen was in place—covered under his blanket, was a two-handed assault engine that could fire just about every type of destructive beam, gel rounds filled with highly corrosive plasma, and a variety of solid rounds including mini-rockets. A pistol could even be detached from its belly. This was the only bed companion he could always trust. With him also in bed was his palmcomp, and he rang up each of his men in turn on a scrambled frequency. He woke Brass, sleeping like a baby with his war paint scrubbed off for the night, apologized to him, reminded him tomorrow the duel officially began though this reminder was not necessary, and told him to go back to sleep. Hans was awake and shirtless, his Yakuza tattoos showing brightly, polishing a mean-looking Ramon dagger. He had given a similar dagger to Conch as a past birthday gift and Conch often wore it in a boot sheath. Hans saluted him with the dagger. Lastly he checked on Indigo.
“I’m going to stay up reading,” his slender, soft-spoken friend told him, the room around him dark but for a single greenish fluorescent lamp glowing on his pate through the bristles of his closely cropped head. “Tomorrow begins for us at dawn. But for some people, tomorrow begins at midnight.”
“We’re all on our guard,” Conch reassured him. Indigo’s unwillingness to sleep didn’t disturb him. Thanks to a combination of drugs and will power, Indigo rarely slept, in any case.
“Maybe we should sleep in the basement until this is over,” he suggested. The so-called basement was their office, and more like a bunker, and Conch doubted there was a police precinct even in the worst sector of Punktown with a more impressive armory.
“Scattered targets are harder to hit.”
“Still, I get a black vibe from the Devils. Together, our team could sleep in shifts. We could guard each other.”
“We’ll be fine. You don’t sleep, anyway. I’ve got my canopy. Hans’ girl is there with him and she can fight nearly as good as he can. And Brass is living inside that big dead robot outside Forge Park and even if someone suspected it they’d never get in through its armor. Go read your book, Gramma.”
Indigo flickered a small smile, nodded, and signed off. Conch lay the palmcomp down beside him. He then turned on his side, buried his head in his pillow, and covered his face with his arm.
As a boy, he had begged his parents in vain to let him sleep with the light on. Now that he was a man, no one could tell him not to. He left the light on.
* * *
In his dream, the air of his bedroom became suffused with a misty blue-green illumination. It glowed through his closed lids, and oddly it made the veins in his lids stand out vividly black against the phosphorescent flesh. There was a hum in the air, soft but louder than the mother’s lullaby hum of his force screen. The door in his room must have just been opened. The zombies must have begun filing through...
Conch’s lids flashed open. His hand flashed to the assault engine covered like a lover beside him, and he rolled onto his back to see the Vlessi as it swung in a vicious arc a sort of black metal tomahawk with a blade at one end of its head, a cruel spike at the other, the bottom of the handle tapering into another, thinner spike.
The Vlessi’s blow was repelled by the force screen, the blade skittering off to one side as if off a sheet of smooth metal, a bluish static illuminating the surface of the field for one moment. The physical shock rippled through the offworlder’s tall, thin frame. Before he could recover himself for a second blow, or for escape back into the blue-green glow which was fading away behind him, Conch reached his left arm up to his headboard, fingered open the hidden panel, thumbed the control button, and opened fire with the assault engine gripped in his right fist and braced against his knee. If he had fired a moment sooner, before he opened the screen, the ricocheting emerald bolts from one of the beam barrels would have killed him where he lay. Instead, he saw two of the short lances of energy disappear into the Vlessi like crossbow quarrels. One of them was lost inside him, but the other emerged out his back. The Vlessi dropped, still clutching his war hammer, and when Conch leapt to the floor he had to dart back as his enemy swung the axe at his legs. He managed to kick it out of the warrior’s grasp, and then he stomped hard on the being’s twice-punctured chest to keep him still.
Pointing the assault engine down at the pelvis-like face full of empty orifices, Conch demanded, “How did you get in here?” He knew how, vaguely—that misty blue-green light, which had now entirely faded—but he didn’t know what the light had been. The afterglow of some method of teleportation he was unfamiliar with?
The Vlessi stared up at him, his six tiny lidless eyes revealing no pain, and Conch wondered if the Vlessi were indeed capable of feeling pain. Pain was a fluke of evolution, after all. An alarm system to warn one of danger, the touch of fire, it could instead increase the danger through distraction or immobilization. Conch hoped the Vlessi were not more evolved in that sense.
It was the Vlessi with the lime green scarf. Their leader. In his translated voice like that of a dead man speaking underwater, he said, “You were lucky.”
“And you’re lucky I haven’t killed you yet.”
“You intended to when you shot me. And you will, you must, if you are to fulfill your contract with Ziggurat.”
“You’re right. I am going to kill you. But it can go quickly or it could go on for a week. The decision’s yours.” Not taking his aim off the bony head, Conch backed up just a few steps so he could grab his palmcomp off his bed with his left hand and flip it open. Thumbing it to audio command, he told the device to ring up Indigo.
It tried. The two enemies waited. No one answered.
Conch rested the device on the edge of his bureau. “Keep trying,” he ordered it. Then to the Vlessi he snarled, “How did you fuckers do this?” He aimed his engine at the Vlessi’s left leg. “I’ll take you apart a limb at a time, believe it.”
“I am not a coward.”
An emerald streak. There were two thin bones which comprised the bottom half of the Vlessi’s leg. After the bolt of energy had spent itself, only one of these two bones still held the leg together. No blood oozed from the black, cauterized edges of any of the three beam wounds. Did the alleged blood-drinkers even have blood?
“How did you get in here?” Conch repeated. He watched the alien spasm briefly, writhe more slowly, get itself under control again though it maintained a steady vibration. He doubted this trembling was out of fear. So they did feel pain; they were just good at controlling it. The voice remained deep and steady when the Vlessi answered him.
“Wherever you are, I can will myself. Within a certain radius of you. Not much larger than the extent of this room.”
“What do you mean by that?”
The palmcomp beeped, and Indigo was there. He was alive. Despite his relief, Conch didn’t take his eyes off his prisoner to turn toward the screen.
“One of the Vlessi came
to my room,” Indigo said calmly. “It’s dead.”
“How’d it get there? Did you see?”
“I looked up from reading, saw this light, and then it stepped out of the light swinging a hatchet at me.”
“It didn’t live long enough for you to question it, I suppose.”
“No,” said Indigo simply. “It didn’t.”
“Check on Hans and Brass and call me back. I’ve got my Vlessi alive but wounded.”
“All right.” The vidphone feature went silent.
Conch gestured with his bulky weapon. “Tell me more. Are you teleporting yourselves into our apartments?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
The Vlessi hesitated a moment too long. Conch shifted his gun slightly, and a second later black smoke tendrils curled out of a hole just below the knotty knee of the Devil’s other hoofed leg. Again, the being fought briefly to rein in and corral his agony. Again, his voice did not betray the strain of his struggle.
“We make our home on another plane.”
“So you are extradimensionals, then. Are you some kind of alternate versions of the Anul people, like they say?”
“Not just the Anul people.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
A few beats of further hesitation. Conch pointed his gun at an arm and raised his brows meaningfully. The Vlessi replied from his nonexistent mouth, “I can come and go from my plane to this one most readily on Anul, because that is where the broadest and most stable rift exists. Other than that rift, I can not come and go between planes except in the immediate vicinity of one of my doubles.”
“Explain doubles.”
“One of the infinite alternate versions of myself, one in each of the countless realities. My double on this plane could have been an Anul or it could just as easily have been a Choom female or a Tikkihotto infant. I am...we are...all the facets of one great soul, which despite its many eyes can not see its own entirety. We Vlessi have found that we are one of the only races that are aware of these other facets of our souls.”
“So what you’re trying to tell me is...that you are me. And I’m you.”
“Yes. We are each other. And that is how I could will myself close to you. And how my team members could will themselves close to your team members. When Rescue learned that Ziggurat had contracted you four to settle their conflict, we four were contacted and hired as well. We are more alike than you suspect, Mr. Conch. On our plane, we four are friends—and assassins—as you four are. Not all aspects of our lives run in parallel. But you will find that often, the major characteristics follow fairly similar directions. I hoped one day...I knew one day...we four would gather to test ourselves against you other four. I perceive something else you do not. An unfathomable web, a design, that you might dismiss as fate, or destiny.”
Conch lowered his gun muzzles only the most imperceptible degree, unconsciously. “God,” he whispered to himself. To his human self, that is.
“Do you not believe me?”
Now that he was conscious of the truth, he could feel it. Feel their connection quite clearly. As if obscuring cataracts had been removed from his vision. It was as though he recognized at last his own eyes plainly reflected in the Devil’s six asymmetrical eyes.
“Yes,” he muttered. “But how...how could you come here to kill me, knowing that we’re part of the same...the same...”
“Soul? Spirit? Essence? The particular entity you and I share is infinite, as I say, Mr. Conch. Facets of its existence wink into life and blink into death on planets and in dimensions and in far gulfs of time past and future, every fraction of every second.” His voice, though monotonous, nevertheless sounded oddly amused as he educated this less enlightened, inferior version of himself. “You are not some precious and singular soul. You are a mere single cell in a being beyond what your primitive mind can encompass.”
“Then you aren’t much of anything, either,” Conch told the Vlessi, aiming his weapon more pointedly again. “You won’t be missed much, either.”
“Can you do that, Mr. Conch? Can you kill yourself?”
Conch was about to say something, but he wasn’t sure what, when Indigo came back on the palmcomp’s small screen. “Brass is dead,” he said in his flat voice. “So are Hans and his girl. No one saw anything except someone in Hans’ building heard screaming.”
“Fuckers,” Conch hissed, and he kicked the Vlessi hard in his skeletal ribs like those of a wasted, reanimated zombie. “Get over here, Indigo. We have to decide what to do with my captive.”
“Be careful, man, in case the other two materialize there, too.”
“That isn’t possible. Come over and I’ll explain.” Conch addressed the Vlessi again. “How come you haven’t escaped back into your own plane?”
“I would have if I could. I have been trying while we talked. I am too badly injured. I may be dying.”
Conch pumped the slide on his assault engine’s shotgun feature, his lips curling back from his teeth. “Maybe I should put you out of your misery, huh?”
“Why don’t you, Mr. Conch? Do you find it difficult, now that you know we are essentially the very same being?”
“I didn’t say I was convinced.”
“Then kill me. Kill me now. I am most likely dying anyway...”
“Why should I do you the favor, then? Maybe I like to see you shake.”
“Be honest with yourself, Mr. Conch.” The Vlessi made a very unpleasant approximation of a laugh at his own joke. “You are primitive, aren’t you? You with this narrow, limited scope of your own being? This flat mirror you perceive as the only aspect of yourself? You are afraid to kill me now. It is so easy for you to end another’s life. You can not empathize properly with another’s existence. But you can’t help seeing the killing of me as a kind of suicide. As if suicide should be more difficult than homicide. Mr. Conch, you fear the consummation and obliteration of self, of your supposed unique existence. You fear something I do not, because I can perceive the infinite, the eternal. You fear death.”
“You’re one to talk about empathy. You don’t have empathy with me. With this version of me.”
“We find it easier to kill aspects of ourselves rather than those of other souls. In that way, we consider ourselves more advanced than you.”
“That’s some pretty lame moralizing, Jasper.” Why shouldn’t he give the Vlessi that nom de guerre? He hadn’t started out with it, himself. “Don’t lie to yourself.” He chucked the Vlessi’s own joke back at him. “We’re both up to our necks in blood and it doesn’t matter whose it is, in the end.”
* * *
Indigo arrived, and when Conch let him in he already had a black pistol drawn. Conch had his Decimator .220 in one hand but he held it loosely. He led Indigo into the bedroom, where his friend stared down at the Vlessi unfazed. “It’s the leader,” he noted. “When did you kill it?”
“He died right before you came. From the wounds he got when I opened my bed shield.”
“Good thing you had that.”
“Good thing you don’t sleep.”
“Two are dead. Now we need the ones that killed Hans and Brass. I want to skin those wankers alive.”
“They won’t be as dangerous to you and me as they were to Hans and Brass,” Conch mumbled somberly. “They won’t be able to surprise us like our doubles surprised us.”
“Doubles?” A few beats, and then Indigo said, “Doppelgangers?”
Conch would explain. And he didn’t doubt that now with the Vlessi having lost their best weapon, the unexpected, he and Indigo would defeat the two survivors with their affinity for crude weapons pretty easily...
But he did doubt that he would be able to skin their opponents alive when they caught them. He thought he would want to kill them as quickly and mercifully as possible...knowing that, in a way, one of them would be Hans, and the other Brass. Maybe Brass’ double would even prove to be the female Vlessi he had pretended to lust after in the c
lub the night the eight men met, when they had stared across at each other as though into a distorting carnival mirror. Even without his war paint, the one being would be Brass in some mysterious way. The other Hans, even without his tattoos. Where once Conch believed he could have killed his own friends if he thought they might prove a risk to his safety, now he dreaded seeing them both die a second time...in another incarnation.
Who would have thought that he would have learned a lesson in empathy in this way?
Who might have guessed that, in a way, he would learn it from himself?
“We should melt the body,” Indigo said. He nodded at the assault engine on the bed. “Does that have blue plasma rounds in it?” Blue-colored plasma would dissolve only organic matter...wouldn’t eat into the carpeting or floor.
Conch lifted his weapon from the bed and pressed it into his friend’s hands. “You do it,” he said softly, and left the room so he wouldn’t see the obliteration of himself. He was afraid that if he saw it, his childhood terrors would return that night.
And this time the force field around his bed would not function properly. And this time, the walking dead would eat him at last.
THE COLOR SHRAIN
-Three-
Miller couldn’t resist buying the shrain-colored suit when he saw the mannequin wearing it in The Maledrobe, in Punktown’s multi-leveled Canberra Mall. The mannequin was an animatronic Tikkihotto, turning slowly this way and that, smiling at and greeting customers near the store’s entrance. Like a live Tikkihotto, it appeared to be an entirely human male except for the realistically wavering ocular filaments which radiated out from its deep skull sockets, like worms from the eyes of a dead man.
The mannequin no doubt portrayed a Tikkihotto because only the Tikkihottos could accurately see and appreciate the color shrain. This was a much contested fact. Though everyone acknowledged the superior visual sensitivities and abilities of the Tikkihottos, the point was raised that some sort of enhancing spectacles or brain chip should allow non-Tikkihottos to view the color as well. Not only was this not possible, but no scan or graphics program had been developed which could reveal the color to nonTikkihottos as the Tikkihottos claimed it should be seen. Attempts to achieve the desired effect had been dismissed by Tikkihottos. More controversial yet was the fact that the color could not be viewed even from experiencing the perceptions of Tikkihottos through virtual linkup and memory recording. The Tikkihottos countered that it wasn’t about scans or comprograms, chips or VR keyhole peeping...or even about their organs of vision, however complex. It was about how their Tikkihotto brains received, processed and interpreted what their eyes saw.
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