A, B, C

by Samuel R. Delany

  “How come the one he showed us before didn’t hurt him?” Urson wanted to know.

  Iimmi looked up at the imposing housing of WMTH. “Maybe this one’s a lot bigger.”

  “Look,” Geo said to Snake. “You stay here, and if we see anything, we’ll come back and report, all right?”

  “Maybe he can get through it,” Urson said.

  Snake looked up at WMTH, bit his lip, and suddenly started forward, resolutely. After ten steps he put his hands to his head and staggered backward. Geo and Iimmi ran forward to help him. When they got back beyond the effects of WMTH, Snake’s face looked drained and pale.

  “You stay here,” Geo said. “We’ll be back. Don’t worry.”

  “Maybe it stops later on,” Urson said, “and if he ran forward, he could get out the other side. It may just stop after a hundred feet or so.”

  “Why so anxious?” asked Geo.

  “The jewels,” said Urson. “Who’s going to get us out of trouble if we should meet up with anything else?”

  They were silent then. Their shadows over the pavement faded as the yellow tinge of the sky fell before blue. “I guess it’s up to Snake,” Geo said. “Do you think you can make it?”

  Snake paused, then shook his head.

  Geo said to the others: “Come on.”

  A click—and lights flickered all along the edges of the road. Almost a third of the lights still worked and now flared along both sides of the rising ramp, closing with the distance through the twilight.

  “Come on,” Geo said again.

  The lights wheeled double and triple shadows about them on the road as they reached the next turnoff that led to a still higher ramp. Geo looked back. Snake, miniature and dimmed by distance, sat on the railing, his feet on the lower rung, one pair of arms folded, one pair of elbows on his knees above a puddle of shadow.

  “I hope someone is keeping track of where we’re going,” Geo said a few hundred yards on.

  “I can get us back to New Edison,” said Iimmi. “If it’ll do any good,” he added.

  “Just keep track of the turns,” said Geo.

  “I’m keeping,” Iimmi assured him.

  “By the time we get to the top of whatever we’re trying to get to the top of,” rumbled Urson, “we won’t be able to see anything. It’ll be too dark.”

  “Then let’s hurry,” Geo admonished.

  Sunset smeared one side of the towers with copper while blue shadows slipped down the other. Smaller walkways led to the buildings around them. By way of a plastic-hooded stair, they mounted another eighty feet to a broader highway where, stepping out, they could look down on the necklace of light they had just left. New Edison and WMTH still towered behind them. There was an even taller building before them. They had cleared the lower roofs.

  On this road fewer lights were working. There were often five or six dark in a row, so that they moved with only the glow of a neighboring roadway twenty yards to the side to light them. They were just about to enter another of these dark sections when a figure appeared in silhouette at the other end.

  They stopped.

  The figure was gone.

  Deciding it was only their imagination, they started again, peering through the incomplete darkness on either side. A little farther, Geo suddenly halted. “There…”

  Two hundred feet ahead of them, what may have been a naked woman rose from the ground and began to walk backward until she disappeared into the next length of dark road.

  “Do you think she was running away from us?” Iimmi asked.

  Urson touched the jewel on Iimmi’s chest. “I wish we had some more light around here.”

  “Yeah,” Iimmi agreed. They continued.

  The skeleton lay at the beginning of the next stretch of functioning lights. The rib cage marked sharp shadows on the pavement. The hands lay above its head, and one leg twisted over the other in an impossible angle.

  “What the hell is that?” Urson asked. “And how did it get there?”

  “It looks like it’s been there a little while,” said Iimmi.

  “Do we turn back now?” Urson asked.

  “A skeleton can’t hurt you,” Geo said.

  “But what about the live one we saw?” countered Urson.

  “And here she comes now,” Geo whispered.

  In fact, two figures approached them. As Urson, Geo, and Iimmi moved closer, they stopped, one a few steps before the other. Then they dropped. Geo couldn’t tell if they fell or lay down quickly on the roadway.

  “Go on?” asked Urson.

  “Go on.”

  Pause.

  “Go on,” Geo repeated.

  —

  Two skeletons lay on the road where the figures had disappeared a minute before. “They don’t seem dangerous,” Geo said. “But what do they do? Die every time they see us?”

  “Hey,” Iimmi said. “What’s that? Listen.”

  It was a sickly, liquid sound, like mud dropping into itself. Something was falling from the sky. No, not from the sky, but from the roadway that crossed theirs fifty feet overhead. Looking down again, they saw that a blob of something was growing on the pavement ten feet from them.

  “Come on,” Geo said, and they skirted the mess dripping from the road above and continued up the road. They passed four more skeletons. The plopping behind them became a sloshing.

  As they turned, it emerged under the white and flaring lamps. Translucent insides bubble-pocked and quivering, it slipped forward across the road toward the skeletons. Impaling itself on the bones, it flowed around them, covered them, molded to them. A final surge, and its shapelessness contracted into arms, a head, legs. The naked man-thing pushed itself to its knees and then stood, its flesh now opaque. Eye sockets caved into the face. A mouth ripped low on the skull, and the chest began to move. A wet, steamy sound came from the mouth hole in irregular gasps.

  It began to walk toward them, raising its hands from its sides. Then, behind it in the darkness, they saw the others.

  “Damn,” said Urson. “What do they…”

  “One or both of two things,” Geo answered, backing away. “More meat or more bones.”

  “Whoops!” Iimmi said. “Back there—!”

  Behind them seven more stood, while the ones in front advanced. Urson slipped his sword from his belt. The gleam of the streetlight ran down the blade. Suddenly he lunged at the leading figure, hacked at an upraised arm, sprang back. Severed at the elbow, the wound dribbled down the figure’s side.

  The arm splashed on the macadam. Quivering, the gelatinous mud contracted from the bone. As Urson danced back, one of the figures behind the injured one stepped squarely on the blob, which attached itself to its ankle and was absorbed.

  A covered flight of stairs had its entrance here, leading to the next level of highway. They ducked into it and fled up the steps. Geo glanced back once: one of the forms had reached the entrance and had started to climb. They were high enough to get some idea of the city. Outside the transparent covering of the steps, the city spread in a web of lights, rising, looping, descending like roller-coaster tracks. Two glows caught him: beyond the river, a pale red haze flickered behind the jungle and was reflected on the water. The other was within the city, a pale orange nested among the buildings.

  He took all this in during a glance as he ran up the steps. A gurgling became a roar behind them as they reached the top. Geo was only clear of the entrance when he yelled, “Run!”

  They slipped from the doorway and staggered back. A mass of jelly the size of a two-story house flopped against the entrance. They edged by its pulsing sides. The lamplight pierced its translucent sides, where a skull caught in the jelly swirled to the surface, then sank.

  “By Argo…” swore Urson.

  “Don’t try to cut it again, Urson!” Geo said. “It’ll drown us!”

  It sucked from the entrance and shivered ponderously. Something was happening at the front. A half-dozen figures were detaching themselves from th
e parent and preceding it.

  Geo: “They can’t go very fast—”

  “Let’s get the hell out of here!” Urson said.

  They ran up the road, plunging suddenly into a darkened section. There was a glow in front of them. Suddenly Urson yelled, “Watch it!”

  Abruptly the road sheared away. They halted and approached the edge slowly. The surface of the road tore away and the girders, unsupported, sagged toward the ruined stump of the building from which rose the orange glow. One wall of the building still stood, topped by a few girders that spiked the darkness. The glow came from the ruin’s heart.

  “What do you think that is?” asked Geo.

  “I don’t know,” Iimmi said.

  It sloshed along the road behind them. They looked. In the shadow, numberless figures marched toward them. Suddenly the figures fell to the ground, and without a halt in the sound, flesh rolled from bone, congealed, and rose, quivering, into the light.

  “Get going!” Geo ordered.

  Iimmi started out first on the twisted beams that descended to the glowing pit.

  “You’re crazy,” Urson said. It flopped another meter. “Hurry up,” he added. With Urson in the middle, they started along the twenty-inch width of girder. Lit from beneath, most of their bodies were in the shadow of the beam. Only their arms, outstretched for balance, burned with pale orange.

  Before them, legible on the broken wall,

  ATOMIC ENERGY FOR THE BETTERMENT OF MAN

  was flanked by purple trefoils. The beams twisted sideways and then dropped to join others. Iimmi made the turn, dropped to his knees and hands, and then started to let himself down the four feet to the next small section of concrete. Once he saw something, let out a low whistle, but continued to lower himself to the straightened girder. Urson made the turn next. When he saw what Iimmi had seen, his hand shot to Geo’s chest and grabbed the jewel.

  Geo took his wrist. “That won’t help us now,” he said. “What is it?”

  Urson expelled a breath and then continued down slowly, without speaking. Quickly Geo turned to drop—

  The beam structure over which they had just come was coated with trembling thicknesses of the stuff. Globs hung pendulously from the steel shafts, glowing in the light from below, quivering, smoking, dropping off into the darkness. Here and there something half human rose to look around, to pull the collective mass farther on; but then it would fall back, dissolve. Sagging between the girders, noisome, thick, it bulged forward, burning in the pale light, smoking now, bits shriveling, falling away. Geo was about to go on. Then he called, “Wait a minute.”

  It wasn’t making progress. It rolled to a certain point in the sherbet-colored light, sagged, smoked, and dropped away. And smoked. And dropped.

  “It can’t get any farther?” Urson asked.

  “It doesn’t look it,” said Geo.

  A skeleton stood, flesh running in the orange light. It tottered, steaming, and fell with a sucking noise into hundreds of feet of shadow. Geo was holding tightly to the girder in front of him.

  The orange light fell cleanly over his hand, wrist, shadow starting at his elbow.

  What happened made him squeeze until sweat came: the gargantuan mass, which had only extended tentacles till now, pulsed to the jagged edge and flung itself on the metal beams. It careened toward them. They jerked back.

  Then it stopped.

  It boiled, it burned, it writhed. And it sank, smoking, through the naked girder work. It tried to crawl back. Human figures leaped toward the road edge, missed, and plummeted like smoking bullets. It hurled a great pseudopod back toward the safety of the road; it fell short, flopped downward, and the whole mass shook. It slipped free of the beams, tentacles sliding across steel, whipping into air. Then it dropped, breaking into a dozen pieces before they lost sight of it.

  Geo released the girder. “My arm hurts,” he said.

  They climbed back to the road. “What happened?” asked Iimmi.

  “Whatever it was, I’m glad it did,” said Urson.

  Something clattered before them in the darkness.

  “What was that?” asked Urson, stopping.

  “My foot hit something,” Geo said.

  “What was it?” asked Urson.

  “Never mind,” said Geo. “Come on.”

  Fifteen minutes brought them to the stairway to the lower highway. Iimmi’s memory proved good, and for an hour they went quickly, Iimmi making no hesitation at turnings.

  “God,” Geo said, rubbing his forearm. “I must have pulled hell out of my arm back there. It hurts like the devil.”

  Urson looked at his hands and rubbed them together.

  “My hands feel sort of funny,” Iimmi said. “Like they’ve been windburned.”

  “Windburned, nothing,” said Geo. “This hurts.”

  Twenty minutes later, Iimmi said, “Well, this should be about it.”

  “Hey,” said Urson. “There’s Snake!” They ran forward as the boy jumped off the rail. Snake grabbed their shoulders and grinned. Then he began to tug them forward.

  “Lucky little so-and-so,” said Urson. “I wish you’d been with us.”

  “He probably was in spirit, if not in body.” Geo laughed.

  Snake nodded.

  “What are you pulling for?” Urson asked. “Say, if you’re going to get migraines at times like that, you’d better teach us what to do with those beads there.” He pointed to the jewel at Iimmi’s and Geo’s necks.

  But Snake just tugged them on.

  “He wants us to hurry,” Geo said. “We better get going.”

  The fallen floor had made descent through New Edison impossible. But the roadway still continued down, so they followed it along. Twice it cracked widely and they had to clamber along the rail. All the streetlights were out here, but they could see the river, struck with moonlight, through the buildings. Finally the road tore completely away, and four feet below them, over the twisted rail, was the mouth of the street that led to the waterfront. Snake, Iimmi, and then Urson vaulted over. Urson shook his hands painfully when he landed.

  “Give me a hand, will you?” Geo asked. “My arm is really shot.” Urson helped his friend over.

  And almost as though it had been in wait, thick liquid gurgled behind them. A wounded thing, it emerged from behind the broken highway, bulging up into the light, which shone on the wrinkles in its shriveled membrane.

  “Run it!” bawled Urson. They took off down the street. In the moonlight, the ruined piers spread along the waterfront to either side.

  They saw it bloat the entrance of the street, fill it, then pour across the broken flags, slipping across the rubble of the smashed buildings.

  On the edge of the wharf they looked back. Now the thing wavered, spreading tentacles left and right. From one of these a man formed. Standing at the head of the flowing mess, he raised a hand and beckoned to them in the moonlight.

  Geo hit water and was aware of two things immediately as the hands caught him. First, the thong was yanked from around his neck. Second, pain seared his arm as if the nerves and ligaments were suddenly laced by white-hot strands of steel. Every vein and capillary had become part of a web of fire.

  It was a long time before consciousness. Once he was lifted and he opened his mouth, expecting water. But there was only cool air. And when he opened his eyes, the white moon was moving fast above him toward the dark shapes of leaves, then was gone behind them. Was he being carried? And his arm…There was more drowsy half consciousness, and once a great deal of pain. When he opened his mouth to scream, however, darkness flowed in, swathed his tongue, and he swallowed the darkness down into his body and into his head, and called it sleep—

  —

  —a spool of copper wire unrolled over the black tile. Scoop it up quick. Damn, let me get out of here. Run past the black columns, glimpsing the cavernous room and the black statue at the other end, huge, rising into shadows. Men in dark robes walking around. Just don’t feel up to praying
this afternoon. I am before the door; above it, a black disk with three white eyes on it. Through the door, now up the black stone steps. Wonder if anyone will be up there. Just my luck I’ll find the Old Man himself. Another door with a black circle above it. Push it open slowly, cool on my hands. A man is standing inside, looking into a large screen. Figures moving on it. Can’t make them out; he’s in the way. Oh, there’s another one. Jeepers…

  I don’t know whether to call it success or failure, one says.

  The jewels are…safe or lost?

  What do you call it? the first one asks. I don’t know anymore. He sighs. I don’t think I’ve taken my eyes off this thing for more than two hours since they got to the beach. Every mile they’ve come has made my blood run colder.

  What do we report to Hama Incarnate?

  It would be silly to say anything now. We don’t know.

  Well, says the other, at least we can do something with the City of New Hope, since they got rid of that superamoeba.

  Are you sure they really got it?

  After the burning it received over that naked atom pile? It was all it could do to get to the waterfront. It’s just about fried up and blown away already.

  And how safe would you call them? the other asks.

  Right now? I wouldn’t call them anything.

  Something glitters on the table by the door. Yes, there it is. In the pile of junked equipment is a U-shaped scrap of metal. Just what I need. Hot damn, adhesive tape too! Quick, there, before they see. Fine. Now, let the door close, reeeeeal slow. Oops. It clicked. Now come on; look innocent, in case they come out. I hope the Old Man isn’t watching. Guess they’re not coming. And down the stairs again, the black stone walls moving past. Out another door into the garden: dark flowers, purple, deep red, some with blue in them, and big stone urns. Oh, priests coming down the path. Oops again, there’s Dunderhead. He’ll want me inside praying. Duck down behind that urn. Here we go. What’ll I do if he catches me? Really, sir, I have nothing under my choir robe. Peek out.

  Very, very small sigh of relief. Can’t afford to be too loud around here. They’re gone. Let’s examine the loot. The black stone urn has one handle above. It’s about eight feet tall. One, two, three: jump, and…hold…on…and…pull. And try to get to the top….There we go. Cold stone between my toes. And over the edge, where it’s filled with dirt. Pant, pant, pant.