by John Shirley
“Someday I’m going to live here,” said Gloria, looking out through the window of the single-unit transpod. “Because--it makes me want to live.”
The transpod whisked briskly on argent cables through the blown-glass abstraction gardens along the approach to the Geodesic Stage. The late afternoon light glinted through the purpling clouds like a dagger. The light struck the coral-like towers askance, corpuscular rays rebounding with strobe flashes.
Trill pointed out the immense interlocking greenhouses where, every day in the tropical gardens, the Narcissusian Artists painted each other’s portraits, perpetually attempting to achieve a facial permutation that perfectly resembled each of them simultaneously. They’d been at it for three generations. Narcissus
A dispassionate voice from the console recited; “Fourth thruway ahead, junction for all points south.” Trill pressed the buttons on the option panel that would direct the pod to switch routes at the junction. It slowed and hung abruptly left as the cushioned arms of their chairs automatically reached out to hold them in place. The pod descended through skeins of cable, overtaking other pods in singles and chains, skimming down between the spires that were beginning, at dusk, to shine with a phosphorous that night would bring out fully. The racing reflection of their pod undulated across a hundred glassy convexes and concaves, interweaving the gardens of glass, rippling through puddles of shadow.
They leveled out, slowed, came to a rocking halt on the disembarkation platform in the podbay of the Geodesic Stage.
They walked through a glass-walled tubular corridor, cinematics of Astor history replaying as a moving mural behind the glass. The jaunty throngs of Astorians laughed and shouted insolently back and forth, some of them stripping off their clothes which they tossed to the floor or whipped overhead in bright arcs or snapped playfully.
Trill explained: “You want to operate as one of us, you must participate in the rite. It’s simple, nothing to it. It’s a dance and a conjugation. You’ll let the music move you. That’s important. Remember: Let the music move you.”
Ben was startled, realizing what was ahead. “The nulgrav ballet?” He blew out his cheeks. “Oh. That—that’s the Lunar Fest?”
Trill nodded. “They use nulgrav in the rites now, In the Great Pearl all involved in today’s rite will strip and dive into the nulgrav currents. And then die. Psychically die. You must dive into the currents, relax, and let the nulgrave flow direct your movements. It will seem like capitulation to puppetry at first, until you thoroughly relax, until you permit your ego to die and you let the currents in the music take you. And then you’ll understand.”
Ben cleared his throat and bent to Gloria, whispering. “You’d better decide now if you want to do it. We could leave the city—”
“Why shouldn’t I want to go through with it?”
“It involves sex…with your partner. If you’d feel uncomfortable with me—”
“You flatter yourself, Ben Rackey, if you think contact with you would terrify me that much, man. Big deal. I’ll go through with it.”
But there was something in her voice. Apprehension? Her usual indifference and confidence were beginning to fracture. He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. She was trying hard to look indifferent. It didn’t work.
Ben smiled.
Up ahead, the corridor ended in a precipice. People stripped, dropped their clothing into disposals, and leapt unhesitatingly out into space. And down. Out and down to ego-death.
Ben and Gloria reached the edge and stripped. The old man, standing naked, florid and spidery spindly, howled out to the wide misty spaces of the vast chamber—his howl was echoed by others, and by laughter. He turned to Ben and Gloria and said, “If you want to save those clothes, fold them neatly and leave them on that shelf there. You can get them later, no one will touch them. And remember, relax and let the music take you! The death of ego is the birth of love.” And on the word love he did a back-flip over the edge and vanished below the lip, into the mists.
They stood on the verge of the Great Pearl for some minutes, gazing into the clouds.
It was like the hollowed interior of a huge pearl, a pearl with a diameter of eight hundred yards, the inside of a perfect sphere with cool luminosity from the walls and a faint, pervasive, pearly mist making the floating human figures into graceful silhouettes. The room flowed with invisible nulgrav currents, and from somewhere gentle electric music swelled, growing louder, its pace gradually accelerating. The lights diminished, and a deep resonant woman’s voice said, “Rite commences. All enjoin and surrender.”
Gloria took Ben’s hand and leapt off the precipice. He stumbled after. They tumbled into darkness.
They held hands, letting freefall possess them; gentle, tractoring currents took hold of their limbs. The music, affectionate but assertive, filled Ben’s ears. Faint perfumes of autumnal woods and ripe fruit filled his nostrils. The pearly light filled his eyes.
…Somewhere, hidden from them, sitting on one of many stools in a long, curved room was an old man, his face calm and rapturous as he monitored their movements on the screens in the console before him. On either side of him were others at the same task. With silken skeins over the resonation chambers of the instruments that were built into the console panels, they controlled the nulgrav currents that moved the limbs of the dancers. The console musicians made sounds, the sounds directed nulgrav, the currents carried Ben and Gloria…
And Ben knew, in some distant corner of his mind, that the old man must be there, hidden, directing their part in the ballet, just as there was a musician coordinating every- one of the two hundred couples adrift in the vast auditorium spaces. But he didn’t care. He didn’t mind. The old man was tranced, in meditation, and his choreography was impartial, gentle, all-embracing. With a violent twitch of his hand he could compel the nulgrav currents to tear them limb from limb, should he so choose. But he himself was choreographed by a higher intelligence to whom his trance consigned him; and ultimately Ben and Gloria were in the hands of this higher intelligence which was the gestalt of the two hundred couples wafting like fallen leaves surrendered to a wind. Distantly, Ben realized this. But he had little interest in the why of the thing. That was distraction from this instant. This moment…
This moment. Gloria filled his eyes. In space, arms and legs outspread, falling naked through a cloud, her face wondering but unafraid, child-like. Ben reached for her, then realized his mistake. He began to spin to the right, away from her.
In moving conflict with the nulgrav currents he upset his unity with the choreography. A soft voice said in his ear: “Relax.”
For a moment, he resented this intrusion, this command by things external. Who were they to tell him to relax? Then he heard Trill’s voice: “Ben, the death of the ego is the birth of love.”
Ben relaxed.
His spin stabilized, the currents gently directed him back to Gloria where he floated, facing her, a yard distant.
Somewhere in the walls of the auditorium two hundred artists, musicians, sat side by side, playing hollow instruments built into their consoles below flickering screens. Their fingers tripped a hundred silken strands. As each strand was struck the tone emitted merged with the others in symphonic correlation and triggered a specific adjustment in the computer manipulating the nulgrav currents. For each musical tone, note, chord and melody was a correlative and appropriate choreographic reaction in the free-floating dancers. When the musician played a tone that meant in the symbolic language of the music, pirouette, the dancers, surrendering, did pirouettes…
The soft, cloudy atmosphere, the weightless giddiness; the semi-reflective interior walls of the Geodesic Stage which combined with the mist to make the vista seem infinite; the music always in confluence with the movements of the dancers—all combined to erode the last of the dancers’ resistance to surrender. Ben and Gloria surrendered.
As if seen in a crystal ball, they hovered. Poised in the airy spaces, Ben and Gloria were like opp
osing poles, heads pointing in toward one another. Arms and legs straight up and down, rotating along the same axis, he clockwise, she counterclockwise. Navigating the nulgrav currents filling the enclosure, they gradually closed, rotation rate slackening. The music, the currents, nudged them nearer; the ephemeral electric music accelerating its brisk counterpoint. As the rolling bass matched the keening lead so also Gloria mirrored Ben’s movement. They flew close by, moving in opposite directions, pubic mounds less than an inch apart. Ben extended his tongue and delicately brushed Gloria’s abdomen, breasts, and throat in passing and in time to the music’s piping trill. There was the heat of Gloria’s body, in that split-second rendezvous, the singing wind of her passage.
They curved back, approached again, performing slow postures of stylized invitation, closing, then swaying back in an abstract mating dance, no more than twenty inches apart. In the space between them a holographic image of the sun appeared, swelled, grew to a blazing globe, without heat and not blinding, white-yellow. They orbited this sun, approached one another in narrowing orbits, reaching with snaking fingers through the image to brush fingertips. As if the sun were the visual apotheosis of their passion.
Tied together by invisible nulgrav currents, the motions of her limbs elicited complementary reaction in his, his reaction suggesting her next action.
Ben was dimly aware that he was moving only at the insistence of the nulgrav currents, that his own muscular responses were automatic and not consciously willed—he seemed to be observing the movements of his own body from the delicious vantage of an embryo’s dream. Yet the sensations were there, were his alone—the silver light, the silken brush of wind, the tickling of Gloria’s hair as it brushed him in passing. In the distance the other dancers became increasingly visible as holo suns ignited between each couple. The couples were arranged in an aureole pattern alternating between expanding and contracting, a circle like the petals of lilies, adrift, bobbing with the currents of their vast pond. The couples rotated about one another, merged and drew apart, the suns ever between them: people bound by stars.
Moving at close quarters to one another, almost more swiftly than the eye could follow, yet with unerring precision, they demonstrated with artful finality that most of the human body is liquid. Symmetrical, overlapping and parting in unfolding unison: in freefall they were the force of atomic configuration made flesh.
They had capitulated. The music, through the nulgrav currents, carried them. Totally given over to these invisible hands, they relaxed. With utter relaxation came excitement. Even the feel of the air moving over their skin aroused them. The currents moved them through the graceful arcs, glissades, pirouettes, and the ritual attitudes which permitted them to touch only when the choreographer ordained. Touching was ordained more and more frequently.
The music swelled forcibly from the concealed synthesizer. Darting like swallows, they wheeled ’round and ’round. Gloria mouthed silently: Ben.
Their caresses became increasingly intimate. The holographic sun grew brighter between them, like a fiery offspring. When Gloria and Ben drifted near, the brilliance of the sun increased, when they drifted apart it dimmed. . .They cart-wheeled, righted, swam forward, Gloria spreading her legs and arms, the music in dizzying crescendo, the light, the color of moonlight irradiating her taut paleness. Ben slipped forward, to meet her, in effortless union..and in time, the sun expanded, burst into a nova.
Now, Ben and Gloria were citizens of Astor.
***
They were given a cabin on the edge of the city, within a small woods, a hundred yards from the fences ranged by the border-patrol volunteers. They were awarded passes and coupon books for the city’s mass transits and food banks. They acquired new clothes, but Gloria insisted on wearing her leather jacket over her one-piece white jumper, even in hot weather. Ben wore leather sandals, a loincloth, and protective body glaze.
Gloria spent the mornings in the libraries, studying the history of the city and its environs, trying to understand its semi-intuitive system of government. During the afternoons Ben labored over a notebook opened flat on a wooden table, drawing and discarding, conceiving and refining his plans. Evenings, they strolled in the woods, swam in the lazy green Willamette river, and talked little. Very little.
But once, Gloria asked, “I don’t suppose you’d consider staying around here. For good.”
Ben was tempted, but he didn’t admit it. He acted as if the idea was ludicrous. “Out of the question, for me at least. You can do what you please, Gloria. You can stay. I simply can’t. The Barrier must go.”
She didn’t pursue the matter. She knew he was tempted.
“I don’t want to stay here without you,” she said. And that was the nearest she had come to admitting the feelings that had developed between them since the Lunar rite. It was not necessary for her to say more. The rest was articulated in touching, in sticky embraces, lingering penetrations. In the long nights.
Thirty days’ rest.
On the thirty-first day Gloria and Ben sat together on the porch of their wooden cabin. They were seated on the stoop, their bare feet colored uniformly amber by the dust. Ben fidgeted. Someone was coming up the path. He considered going inside for his gun. He’d been apprehensive for days; he felt the skein of events tightening about them. He sensed that Fuller was near.
It was only Trill, who turned the bend of the path and walked up to the porch, his back a trifle bent under the late afternoon heat.
In silence he sat on the wooden step beside Ben. They watched the light playing through the fir boughs. Ben could no longer contain the question: “Did you find out?”
Trill nodded. “There’s an airship for Detroit tomorrow afternoon, trading nulgrav nodes. You should be able to hide in the cargo-hold. They don’t expect stowaways, they won’t be looking for them. It’s the only transportation to Detroit. We’re not on good terms with them, and they won’t let any but the pilots go.”
“And the Brothers of Proteus?”
“They’ll be sending a man around this evening…they are poison, Ben. Don’t get it on your fingers. I, for one, won’t deal with them. And so, to avoid having to look at them, I must leave you soon. So here are directions to the cargo ship. Heed: On the field of yellow wands trend to the silver arches. Pass through the silver arches, and the red-bellied bird at the left of the flock flies to Detroit. At least, that’s the word.”
Old Trill tugged on his beard, winked at Gloria, and trudged away down the path.
“Are you going to tell me what the Brothers of Proteus are, or are you going to be mysterious about that, too?” Gloria asked.
She doesn’t want to leave Astor, Ben thought. .
“Listen…if you want to wait here for me, in a few months I’ll—”
“Don’t gimme that crap. You think I’m a frightened damsel? Fuck off. Your ass’d be grass’d without me, jack. Now out with it. What are they?”
Ben sighed. “The Brothers of Proteus are an elite corps of terrorist mercenaries. They operate on the theory that political attitudes are all a matter of vantage-point. All political activities are valid from a given viewpoint. With this they justify their mercenary flexibility. They consider themselves artists. I suppose they really are—”
“Yeah but what the hell do they do?"
“They terrorize. They undermine, they perform select acts of attrition. They are professional guerillas, terrorists for hire. But the key to the brothers is this: If you pay them they will believe in you. Absolutely inflexibly. That is their art. Thespians unto murder. If you pay them for one year’s services—in advance—they enter a state of mind where they are single-mindedly dedicated to your political standpoint. And for one year they really believe it. They kill to support their new beliefs, if that’s what you pay them to do. Their viewpoints are protean, but once you pay them to enter your viewpoint it becomes theirs. ’Til their scheduled time in your service is up.”
“Artists, huh? Sound like a pack of killer pigs
to me,” Gloria spat. She stood, stretched, and went into the cabin, closed the door behind her.
The afternoon waned. The blonde light became sallow, amber, bruised with red.
A stranger strode up to the cabin. A tall black man in sleeveless green military khakis and wearing a jauntily cocked multi-colored beret. Ben motioned for him to sit beside him on the steps.
But the man stepped to the porch and shook his head, crossed his arms, and waited. His face was squat, his nose flat. His eyes were onyx black and rimmed with red. He was over a foot taller than Ben and massive. Sweat marked out wheels under his arms. He stared.
Ben stood, faced him, and returned the stare. Their eyes locked. “I’m Rackey.”
“I’m Kibo. What advance?”
“None. In Astor. Name your own advance on your arrival in Detroit three weeks from now. You will be paid before you begin work. But I can give you nothing now… Do you know who I am?” Kibo nodded. “Your word is good. Until we arrive in Detroit.”
“How will you travel?”
“We have a vehicle.”
“I see. More than one? Another for hire?”
“No. But you can travel with us.”
Ben shook his head. “No, we’ve got to leave tomorrow. I have to get there well ahead of you, and prepare things for your work. I’ll have to work out some way to get you into the city. Detroit isn’t easy to penetrate. It will take time. We’ll fix a rendezvous point outside the city walls. So I’ll have to find what transportation I can. We’ll get there.” Without removing his eyes from Ben’s, Kibo reached into his shirt pocket and removed a small white disk. “Your hand in agreement.”
Ben offered his hand, Kibo took Ben’s forefinger and thumb and pressed them onto the waxy surface of the disk. The imprint was recorded and Kibo spoke into the grid on the opposite side. “Rackey, Proteus, Vance Square, Detroit, August four. In lieu of advance. Done.” He handed the disk to Ben and Ben spoke into it: “Rackey, Proteus. Done.”
The transaction complete, they shook hands. The big man in green departed, vanished into the fast-darkening woods.
