by John Shirley
Gloria dried her feet, put on her shoes, and stood up. “Let’s go,” she said, and Ben followed her down the trail.
A light rain began to fall, gossamer curtains of mist fading in and out, when Ben and Gloria slid down the muddy bank abutting the gravel road. The road promised easier going toward Astor, but made them more vulnerable.
Ben was expecting the frags. And the frags were late.
He considered taking the gun from Gloria, keeping it ready. But he decided to leave it in her care. She was a better shot than he. “That gun fully loaded?” he asked as they set off down the road, headed due north.
She nodded and patted her zippered leather jacket where the gun bulged like a third breast. “Did you nurse on a gun instead of a breast as an infant, Gloria?” Ben asked absentmindedly, his eyes searching the underbrush beside the road.
Gloria permitted a corner of her mouth to smile. “No, but if I ever have a daughter, she will.”
The rain was heavier. Ben was still dressed in the tight, vertically striped bodysuit. Not much protection against the elements. The clamminess was sinking in, to his bones.
Don’t get stiff, he warned himself. Stay loose, keep the muscles primed. The frags are late. But they’ll be here. Patience.
The afternoon was over its crest, beginning the downhill slide into dusk.
Half an hour later the blue-gray gravel road was looping its interminable stretch up a hillside, the heavy growth of firs to both sides was becoming interspersed with short deciduous trees with shiny purple-green leaves; hummocks of moss encrusted with large lumps of gray fungi like stone gargoyles eroded smooth—the fungi very pale against moss very green against trunks and branches very somber.
The calls of birds ceased.
The insects hushed.
Even the sough of wind and the tinkle of distant creek quieted to whispers. The cloud banks thickened about the sun; the chill and shade fed one another and spread.
A rustle and a scrape and a hiss in the brambles to the left.
Ben didn’t have to warn Gloria. Her eyes were bright, her right hand in her jacket on the handle of the gun.
When they had edged as far as they could to the right without turning their backs to the brambles, Ben shouted: “Up the bank!” Gloria sprang up the muddy incline, Ben close behind. They slid back down, cursing, on the first few tries, but they made the mossy level ground just as the first of the frags scrambled down onto the road behind.
Bubbling growls and liquid shrieks followed them into the bushes. The brambles clutched their clothes and left tracks on their legs and arms. They pushed on until they were stopped by an ancient stone wall, partly tumbled and overgrown with creepers, but high and formidable. Barriers, thought Ben angrily. There was no time to climb over or around.
They turned to face the first of the frags and Gloria’s gun answered his growl with an explosive bark.
It happened so fast the man was hardly more than a hairy blur, an impression of narrowed red eyes and black-caked fingers, before he fell, a bullet hole through his belly. But Ben got a good long look at the man right behind.
The frag leapt and Ben was forced back, half against the wall, a rotting log beneath his hips. Gripping the yapping frag by the wrists, Ben strained to keep the snapping teeth from his throat. Foul spittle fell on his cheek, the reek of carrion made him choke, the weight of the frag crushed him. The man was stumpy, rock-hard, with an immense flaring mane of gray and black hair and beard. The bristling beard was parted for a pug nose and deep, black lines radiating from red-rimmed green eyes. Ben felt his consciousness slipping. He struggled for breath, heard Gloria grunt as she fought with someone, and felt like giving up. He was unused to fighting hand to hand and knew little about it. The frag jabbed with a knee which found Ben’s left thigh. Ben bellowed and, suddenly more furious than afraid, pitched the man off him. The frag was up instantly, coming on while Ben was still struggling to his feet.
But Ben’s right hand had closed around a rough stone from the old wall and he wrenched it loose and brought it up to meet the charging frag. He felt the crackle of breaking jawbones—the frag fell unconscious, face down. Gloria was rising from the naked body of a scarred young man, a red-dripping stiletto in her right hand; the gun tucked in her belt. There were two others dead from gun-shots in the nearby brush. Gloria’s face was white—killing for her, and for everyone else, was easier to accept from a distance.
Tools, even clubs, were alien to the frags. So the gun and knife had driven them back for a few moments.
“Next time they’ll come in the complete group and that’ll be that,” said Ben, huffing. “How—how many bullets left?”
“Two,” she said matter-of-factly, coming to stand beside him.
She looked as if she ached to embrace him. The shutters in her eyes were opened, the light shone from them.
But there was a smoking pistol in her left hand and a bloody knife in her right. Ben took a step backwards, momentarily afraid of her.
“Where’d you get the knife?”
“I’ve had it with me,” she answered, peering at the underbrush. “In my boot. I don’t have to tell you everything, do I?”
They both heard the crackle in the brush behind them, on the other side of the wall.
“Maybe we can scare them off with the gun,” he said, not believing it.
She shrugged and cocked the pistol.
A snarl. They whipped around. A mud-caked mass of hair and muscle perched on top of the wall. Ben had become sensitive to the subtle emanations accompanying the release of hostility. He winced. The frag radiated hostility like the sun radiates heat. It was a female, breasts criss-crossed with scars. She paused only long enough to show her teeth and to cock her head like an infuriated raven—then she leapt. Ben stepped aside, Gloria neatly caught the frag with a knife to the ribs as she fell past. The frag female thrashed where she’d struck the ground, and fertilized infant fungi with her blood.
“The exciter?” Gloria asked, as the others sprang toward them from the yellow brake to their left.
“They’re that way already,” shouted Ben, filling both hands with sharp stones. “Would only make them worse.”
The frags charged. But never reached them. The red-faced female in the lead took a bullet in her right leg and fell, screaming rage. Ben took out the snarling boy behind her with a rock. And the other eight fell to the needler beams that lanced from the bushes by the road.
In seconds, a dozen corpses steamed their energies into misty forest oblivion.
Whooping and dancing, three young women and an old man, all dressed in leather jerkins except the old man who wore only a grass skirt and beads, stepped into the small clearing, their needlers at ready. The remaining frags had fled. The three women and the old man bolstered pistols and slapped palms, snapped fingers, and parodied frag faces, mocking the exaggerated bestiality.
Ben and Gloria stared. Finally Gloria grunted, shook her head, and put her weapons away. Ben dropped his stones.
The four strangers quieted and turned to regard Ben and Gloria “Oh, I see,” said the old man. He tugged a long silver beard and shook his curly white head violently. “I see!” he cried, a grin expanding to fill half his fox face. “It was your guns we heard,” he said, nodding sagely. “So.”
He stepped boldly up to Ben and they shook hands, the old man winking raffishly.
“Well?” he asked. “Well? Ready to go to Astor? Ready or not! Our horses are on the road!”
They weren’t actually horses.
They were horse-sized human-skinned flesh-machines. They were generally in the shape of horses, but without a trace of a head, and without tails, and with four horny, splayed human hands rather than hooves. Hairless and with oversized genitalia, they had tough but smooth pink skin, and saddles of soft cloth were strapped to their hulking backs.
On these unappealing mounts Ben and Gloria rode into Astor, Ben riding behind a husky blonde woman, Gloria behind the old man.
There were no suburbs. They were unfenced wilderness, and then the trees parted to reveal skyscrapers and a bustling city. The skyline was etched in dark hooks like the necks of fighting geese, the whimsical structures swaying slightly in the wind. They watched as one of the buildings, tall and spiral, seemed to shake itself awake and twist like a mutating cocoon, forming a broad bulb at its crown, the column below smoothing out its vanes and bulging until it stabilized into a tower of semi-transparent spheres stacked one atop the other. Gloria didn’t have to ask. Ben had heard her gasp and he explained: “Most of the buildings are made of a flexible, tough, rubbery substance with adjustable frames so the people can change the shape of the building when they get bored with the old shape. The tenants are temporarily evacuated.”
Gloria seemed delighted. The old man winked over his shoulder at her. “I can change the shape of my head, too!” he said. “I’m tired of it in this shape!” And he puffed up his cheeks and crossed his eyes. Gloria laughed.
Like their companions, the crowd walking the streets or riding flesh-machines were dressed either rustically or eccentrically; there were no uniforms, no sign of police, no motor vehicles. Occasionally they heard the whine of the electric subway speeding underground.
In vacant lots were huts of stone, wood, thatching, clay, or composed of scraps of tin and cloth. Here were shops selling pottery and clothing and hand-made jewelry and spicy hot foods. Seeing the devoted attention Gloria paid the food-stalls, the old man chortled and called a halt. He climbed down off the flesh-machine, returned with hot -sandwiches and spicy meat-mash which they ate with enthusiasm.
The old man climbed again on the flesh-machine and they set off for the travelers’ quarters.
The flesh-machine rider directed the mount by light pressure on the shiny purple membranes between the knotted shoulders where there should have been a head. Ben had never seen a flesh-machine mount eat, but he’d heard there was a concealed, slit below the membranes, manually stuffed by its front hands at feeding time.
At last they arrived at the travelers’ quarters, a low brick structure of four wings at the foot of a sheer glossy skyscraper. They dismounted, went inside to register with the pudgy, taciturn keeper. The three women departed without a word, the old man remained long enough to inform them imperiously that he would condescend to guide them through Astor on the morrow. He skipped out of the building, singing to himself. It was well into the night.
Ben and Gloria smiled weakly at one another. They had no sleep the night before. And then the trek and the frags…
They went immediately up to the bunk rooms, empty but for one sleeping black woman, and self-consciously chose bunks well apart. Ben flung himself on the ticking, fully dressed, and fell asleep.
* * *
It was almost noon before they were up, breakfasted, and showered. No one said a word' to them about payment. Hospitality to travelers—those who don’t overstay—was tradition in Astor.
The old man was there when they stepped out onto the street, into the sunlight.
He was pirouetting in his grass skirt and humming. Laughing, Gloria called out to him. He turned to greet them as if they were old friends gone for a decade and just returned, not merely acquaintances of the night before. “Well well well! Well! Back in fine shape! They’ve taken me horse to the municipal stables, so we’ve got to hoof it. I’m relieved, myself, and so is the horse if he’s near a dung-heap, and welcome to Astor the Dirty Jewel! Name’s Trill! I volunteer to be your guide. We’ll work out a scale of payment later. Perhaps a dance or a nose-thumbing. Let’s look at the city and talk over the dire schemes skulking just under the skin of your face!” And with that they permitted themselves to be herded through the bustling crowds, with Trill whistling and spouting rancorous jests and declaiming the glories of the city-state he called the Dirty Jewel.
The streets were unpredictable. They proceeded straight away, seeming at first to be adapted to a grid pattern; then, without the excuse of a hill or a river, they turned or bent in spirals and escaped their own knots with tunnels and overpasses. In the center of a busy main street they might suddenly come upon an immense redwood fir, or a lake noisy with ducks or a playground noisy with children and neither protected by fences or signs. Broad overgrown lots of brambles and succulent flowers could be found in the densest urban clusters. There were no vehicles except bicycles and a few carts pulled by horses or flesh-machines. Most traveling was by foot or subway or cable-driven transpods humming far overhead.
As they walked through a crowd in a courtyard where musicians tootled and strummed and attacked steel drums, a jolly fat man waddled up, polishing his shiny bald head with his left hand while with his right he presented them with a gold ball, just big enough to fit neatly into the palm, artfully inscribed with wavelength patterns. Eight more of these they received from strangers before they passed out of the courtyard, some balls of copper, some of steel, one of rubber. Those presenting them departed immediately after handing them over, with no explanation. Gloria cradled eight of the colorful balls until old Trill turned to her, scowling with mock reproach, and said, “Well, are you going to keep them forever? Pass them around, stingy!” Gloria sighed and handed out the spheres at random. Sometimes she was given another object in return: a small, blue plastic pyramid, a tiny ivory dolphin, a glass swan, a rubber frog that croaked when she squeezed it, and these she also gave away.
“It’s probably something they do for fun,” said Ben. “But I don’t know. They didn’t pull that one on me last time I was here. There’ve been many changes in Astor. There are always changes in the Dirty Jewel, depending on what light it is held in…”
They passed a group of naked teenagers splashing in a mud pit, beside which two men with razor-sharp glass swords dueled; a crowd on one side egged the two men on, gleefully shouting when a finger or ear was lopped, while on the other side dour-faced men and women in three-cornered hats leafleted for non-violence and muttered disapprovingly.
Ben and Gloria were introduced to a drunken old black man with yellow eyes and a toothless grin, urinating beside an ancient oak. Trill gravely assured them that this was the mayor of Astor. Ben stuck out his hand for a shake and the white-haired man bent and licked his palm, then winked at Gloria and bit Ben’s thumb.
As politely as possible, Ben disengaged from the mayor and wiped the spittle from his hand as Trill asked, “Where do you want to go?” They stood beside a rushing stream that crossed a main avenue. There was no bridge. “Left is the Lunar Festival…full moon tonight. To the right the intelligentsia are reading dissertations; straight ahead we can go swimming. Beyond, there’s a house famous for its debauches—”
“How long do you think we’ll be permitted to stay in Astor?”
Trill tilted his head and squinted as if he was appraising an invisible clock. “Lemme see. Depends on if you enter into the initiation rite. Yessir. That’s it. The Lunar Festival. You do that, you’re initiated—providing you don’t bungle the initiatory dances, of course—and then you can stay up to a year. Then you gotta go on the work schedule. You ain’t trained so they’d probably give you a month of border patrol. And—”
“I want to arrange transportation to Detroit, and I want to work out a deal with the Brothers of Proteus. Both projects will take at least two weeks, I expect.”
The old man nodded, and as a parade marched by blowing lively horn music he danced a quick jig—keeping his face somber—then stopped abruptly and turned to Ben. “Yes. Must. Must go to the Lunar Festival rite, or else they ask you to leave in three days. The rite: Tonight. Tonight, the rite, right?”
“Must?” asked Gloria.
“Must,” the old man confirmed. “I’ll set it up. My sister’s on the entertainment committee. It’s a nulgrav rite so hold onto your stomach.”
Nulgrav was new to Astor and the local artists. In the Dirty Jewel, artists were some eighty-five percent of the population. The sculptors were exploiting nulgrav to the fullest.
Ben and Gloria had seen conventional kinetic sculptures in Astor before coming to the Geodesic Stage at the center of the city. They’d seen gleaming, multifaceted monoliths of shiny steel whose parts moved in repeating purposeful patterns as if they were bent on manufacturing some undisclosed product. Yet, they manufactured nothing but motion, the inflexible writhing of machine ecstasy. Sculptures of genetically manipulated flesh-octopal monstrosities of babyskin, human hands reaching from spiked mounds of flesh to grip one another in endless arm wrestling; beams of light interwoven with concealed mirrors to seem to curve impossibly into spirals, rainbow arches, lattices of light. Rattling sculptures of animal bone, sinew, furs, like living aboriginal fetishes…luminous ball bearings rolling on tracks that shunted through intricate inversions, twists, hyperbolas, and, hairpin turns, triggering flywheels, strut-arms, spoked mills, motivating glass rods into unfolding geometrical complexities while lights played through conterminous prisms.
And then there were the nulgrav sculptures, bobbing, unsupported in midair, stationary with breeze-resistant gyros. Among these was a floating model of an atom, scaled up gigantically, its electrons represented by vivid blue neon balls hurrying in orbit around a nucleus of sparking white and black cubes; the protons and neutrons whirling and constantly interchanging positions. Opposite this and on a plane adjacent so that the sculptures were like two wagon wheels, was a model of the solar system, a blindingly bright sphere in its heart showing a shifting gold corona and occasional flares; the planets and asteroids and moons circling in their respective orbits. The planets were scrupulously detailed and exquisitely colored. Below these sculptures, a free-floating gyroscope was fashioned from flowing crystal-blue waters, plashing at the middle to curve precisely and gracefully out and up in defiance of gravity—but in conformity to nulgrav— into concentric circles. It refracted the sun, dashing it into polychromatic scales. Not a drop of the sculpture’s water fell to earth.
