by John Shirley
Zero turned in disgust to Bowler and muttered, “Bowler, not only do I have to talk to a fucking melted dwarf on a sawhorse, the melted dwarf on a sawhorse is giving me shit. I can’t handle this place, Bowler.”
“So take a subway home,” Bowler said as they followed Doggo past the Pezz. “What did he mean, Doggo, uh, about the impossible ambition?”
“You’d know better’n I would,” Doggo said. “The Pezz are telepathic, in a biochemical kind of way. They study a race for a while, match up that race’s hormonal secretions—which they have a sense for—with their emotions and attitudes, and they know more or less what you’re up to by the excess chemicals you sweat out. You got big plans?”
Bowler said nothing.
Doggo circled well around the Pezz’s booth-territory—where it traded speckled pots that it had made by combining agates and a kind of cement exuded from its pouch—and they went on, following the writhing lane through yet another turn.
They emerged into a lane edged by a series of booths—a bazaar where the fabric of reality became piebald and patchy; the very air seemed uncertain of itself, crackling with the interaction of bioenergy fields not designed to mesh. A sense, walking down the lane, of passing open doors into other worlds.
There were awnings between the crooked, monolithic stones, and under each one was an alien or two, or one alien that looked like two unless you looked closely (or perhaps was two and yet one, depending on their mood).
Each alien was hawking wares in its own fashion or attempting some variation of missionary work, religious or philosophical conversions. Some of this rhetoric appeared as miniature fireworks from craterlike pores in alien skin, or the waving of intricately interspersed banners.
The place was Hell for a seeker after consonance; the only constants were discord and a certain territorial guardedness; and even those consistencies sometimes broke down.
They passed through an industrial fugue of clamors created by a group of metallic creatures who flung themselves at one another so as to crash their brassy hides, evidently in ritual celebration—living cymbals happily colliding. But they gesticulated in protest when the tendrils of a creature the Earthers called the Jungle hung down into their niche and got in the way of their crashing, frustrating them with mufflings. The Jungle fascinated Zero’s eye, a viny, red-bristled thing of iridescent foliage, stretching from its own booth to overreach several others, pulsing here and there with bladders like the ballooning underchins of frogs, its interior pregnant with shadows, its vines reminding him of those Earthly sea creatures that look like plants but are in fact animals. It was an enormous tangle—a tangle that was somehow symmetrical, almost a patterned weave—of slowly reaching, groping ropiness. It signified intelligence by twisting lengths of itself into geometrical signs, but the translation boxes were nonplussed by it. Its occasional forays into the other niches were probably attempts to communicate, Doggo said, since it consumed only air and minerals.
A scaly cold-blooded snake-eyed thing ripped off one of its own several arms and offered it cheerfully to Zero as they passed. Zero, out of politeness—really trying to adjust, honestly trying—began to reach for the twitching, drippy-stumped limb, but Doggo pushed him away from the niche and said, “Don’t accept, or you’ll have to offer it at least a finger. It’s a cheat—his limbs grow back.”
Zero whimpered softly to himself but held together and went on.
A thing made of ice-cream-cone-shaped layers of blue-mottled flesh approached Zero on a biologically generated magnetic field; it smelled of dirty socks and the smoke from a burned-out electrical socket. It paused and exuded translucent red pears of gel that hardened and hung from it in a group of three, waggling enticingly. “You’re in luck, Zero,” Doggo said. “This is a Poolsh. These guys don’t come around often. Supposed to be an omen of good fortune in the long run when they come up to someone. Try one of the jelly pears.” Doggo plucked a pear and bit into it and smiled, nodded as if agreeing with an imaginary speaker.
Zero looked at Bowler, who nodded gravely as he bit into a pear himself.
Zero made himself reach out and pluck a jelly pear. He took a bite. The consistency was like a “gummy bear,” but its taste was of a delicious iodine—iodine cannot be delicious, but this was. Then he saw a picture, a vivid image of himself spitting copiously on the Poolsh.
He shook the image from his mind and said, “Whoa. I had a disgusting hallucination.”
Doggo said, “It sent you an image. It knows our brain chemistry now because it ate one of our dead—with our permission. It trades the fruit for some enzyme in human saliva it prizes. It deals with us through a chemical in the fruit that carries the message in image form. You should be around when they’re in the mood to make a speech. You get a pineapple-size jelly pear, and if you eat it, you get a headache from all the—wait.”
He broke off, looking to the side, into a niche between two monoliths, where an organism roughly resembling a man-sized koala bear was frantically gesturing, Come here, come here!
“Pay for me, will you, Bowler?” Doggo said, hurrying off to the koala. Bowler nodded and spat on the Poolsh until his mouth was dry. Zero spat on the Poolsh a few times, perhaps inadequately, then left to follow Doggo, hoping he hadn’t cheated anyone.
The koala was splitting open when Zero got there, bifurcating wetly between the legs; the upper head went glassy-eyed and frozen as another face, a pasty face of gills and suckers, showed itself in the new slit, lowering on a prehensile neck. The gills began to ooze phlegm. Doggo turned to Zero, muttered, “This is Hmm, he does some spying for me. But this ain’t a costume. He lives inside this other animal like clothes, but the animal’s alive. They climb inside lower animals and just sort of take them over and make a few changes and walk around in them. Don’t really hurt them. After a while they let go and get another. Like a living fur coat. Okay, he’s got his gills cleared now.”
To Zero’s surprise, the thing spoke raspily in English, with aspiration from its gills, in a voice that was like a sing-song mimicry of Doggo. “Fiskle is talking about extending human control throughout settlement cluster. ‘Humanity uber Alles,’ I heard someone say, but I believe they were using sarcasm. He also wants to restrain the females and force them to breed.”
“Jesus!” Doggo shook his head in disbelief. “What an asshole!”
Zero said weakly, trying not to think about the face between the oozing lips of the suddenly slit koala, “He didn’t say anything about this stuff at the Council meeting.”
“He wouldn’t. This’s something he’s pulling on the sly. This came down at the meeting of his New Humans group,” Doggo said distractedly. “Sort of a lodge he started. I thought they were up to something subversive. Looks like they are.”
He took a coil of copper wire from his pocket and put it in the koala’s insensate hand, closing the koala’s fingers around it. “Thank you,” Hmm said, and drew his head back into the koala. The awareness came back into the koala’s eyes, and it lumbered off into the shadows between stones.
“How come it spoke English?” Zero said.
“Oh, I let it tap into my brain once, as a gesture of friendship. That was an act of trust, let me tell you. Come on. Let’s find your friends so I can get back to work. I got to do something about Fiskle.”
They rejoined Bowler and continued down the lane. Doggo’s lower lip pushed into his upper with worry. Only ten yards on they had to slow to work their way around the edge of a small crowd. About thirty people, mostly human, stood around a seashell-like booth contrived of intricately symmetrical many-hued arrangements of fine silky cloths, gauzes, and filigrees, a kind of enormous peacock’s-tail backdrop for the two creatures who stood upright before it: Whorebugs.
If you were nearsighted and not too close, the Whorebugs looked, at first, like human women. Blink and move closer, and you saw they were human-sized insects. (No, not insects, Zero decided. They had only four limbs, and they didn’t have mandibles. But there was a
n insectlike chiton on them, and insect exoskeletal joints in their limbs.) Their long, graceful legs, their skirted hips, and what at least appeared to be breasts made Zero think of an old Fleischer Brothers cartoon he’d seen in an NYU animation class. In it a community of peoplelike insects had lived in a town made of discarded tin cans and old shoes and the like; the “insect girls” had been sexy mergings of cute bugs and stylized human females—Betty Boops with six limbs and antennae. That was almost how the Whorebugs looked, but glossier, made of hard, interlocking parts of waxy yellow and brown, faceted insect eyes in their shiny bullet-shaped heads.
They wore bright tangerine Whorebug-cloth skirts folded back to expose their crotches, where, from something like a horizontal vagina, weblike strands of silk extruded, streaming out slowly and steadily. The Whorebugs stood with legs well apart, knees bent, hips thrust forward. Their extra-long triple-jointed arms reached between their horn-covered thighs to weave the cloth with hooked fingers in a motion faster than the eye could follow, almost magically producing the cloth piling in glossy ripples between their feet. Now and then they opened their mouths and emitted a glutinous, brightly colored syrup, by turns candy-apple red and ice blue and sun yellow. It dripped on honeyed strands to the raw material extruding from between their legs and was somehow incorporated into it, organized into marvelous patterns—patterns of candy-apple red and ice blue and sun yellow.
They looked whorish indeed, standing there spraddle-legged. Zero might’ve laughed if the sight weren’t making him so queasy.
To one side a male (was it male?) Whorebug squatted cross-legged, its body squarish, its head wrapped in a three-tiered turban. It reached over and examined the cloth, held it up with a flourish for the crowd to see, then folded it, cut it neatly into swatches, and chirped something that Doggo’s translator interpreted as, “The divinatory weave indicates a stage of maudlin forbearance approaching; wail over your condition, seek atonement with your gods, but forgo postures of aggression. Seek out environmental harmony … And friends, how better to seek out environmental harmony than with a few fine yards of [untranslatable] cloth, which can be yours for a pittance in metal or high-grade foodstuffs… “
As they watched, Zero whispered to Doggo, “What you going to do about Fiskle?”
Doggo glanced at him sharply. “Listen—all that was confidential. I told you because you’re with Bowler and he’s with the Live and Let Live faction. Like me. But just—”
“I’m not going to say anything. I don’t trust Fiskle, either.”
“I don’t know what we’re going to do. He’s got a lot of backers. If we kill him in his sleep, they’ll probably know who did it. I’m still thinking about it.”
Doggo, Bowler, and Zero moved past the crowd, down the lane. But one of the crowd had turned to watch them, and now he detached himself to tag along beside Zero. He was a human settler, a shaggy, gaunt, dart-eyed little guy in cracking black leathers. His hands were black with grime, his teeth mossy, but he seemed too alert, and he kept an eye nervously on Doggo, who strode on obliviously up ahead. “Hey, fren’,” the newcomer piped, “you a New Fool, huh? Jus’ got here, huh? I seen the ship come down. You the new one?”
“Yeah. What you want, man?”
“What makes you think I—”
“You’re the same kind of guy on Earth. What you want?”
He grinned. “I’m Johnny Kelso. If it can be got on Fool’s I can get it for ya. And there’s one thing everybody wants after a while, am I right? There’s a girl shortage here, right? Huh? I can arrange something when you’re ready, my man.”
“Christ. You a pimp? You sell some of that sideways Whorebug pussy or what?”
Kelso tittered. “Better’n that.” He lowered his voice and looked around.
They were passing something that looked like a metallic gorilla from the waist down; from the waist up it became an intricacy of chromium tentacles, barbed studs, and what appeared to be a headdress of small glassy radar receivers and green-crystalline hand fans, all of which were turned toward the sun.
As they passed the alien, Zero turned to Bowler and asked, “What was that thing?”
Bowler shrugged. “Ask him. Kelso’s got it all. He said so.”
Kelso gestured expansively. “The man’s right—I got it all! Them was what we call sun-monkeys. Solar-powered animules. Up here you see the High Clansmen … now look, you want some of that, uh, relaxation we talked about?”
“I don’t wanta break any of the local laws till I know what they are,” Zero said as they walked past a group of licorice-black High Clansmen. The Clansmen were squatting around a wooden board gambling, using the skull of a small animal, painted with tiny symbols, as dice.
Kelso said, “Hey, don’t worry about the laws. It ain’t against the law—exactly. It’s—well, see…” He lowered his voice. “It’s a Twist. Lives off by himself.”
” Him self?”
“Whatever,” Kelso said hurriedly. “See, it’s not a he exactly, ‘cause he was altered, he—it—always wanted to be … well, it’s got a pussy and a dick, a real long one so’s it can fuck itself, see? It’s kinda mean, though. It’s got these big crab-claws. Snip off your head. Uh, so—this is the less-than-legal part, see, we hadda tie it up. But its female parts work good, and—”
“Forget it.”
“I got some really primo dried wheeler-brain. I’m trading for anything you brought from Earth. Cigarettes, anything useful the Meta mighta left in your pockets.”
“No, man, I don’t have anything.”
“Hey.” Kelso’s fingers were like pliers on his arm. “Listen. I’m here, okay? You’re gonna need something. And listen: sooner or later, you’re going to want to have a serious talk with Mr. Fiskle, you know? Things are about to change, and you’re going to find yourself in a bad neighborhood all of a sudden unless you—”
Bowler broke in. “What’d he say about Fiskle? Hey, Kelso, what did you—”
Doggo had glanced back and stopped, seeing Kelso. He turned, scowling, pushed past Bowler, and took Kelso by the neck; he began to squeeze his Adam’s apple. “Kelso, get the hell out of here!” He shoved him backward.
Kelso staggered, coughing. “I told you, Kelso, you don’t work the Neutral if you wanta keep your ass on your body, ‘cause I will chop it off and feed it to the Phleg if you—”
Kelso was gone, slipped off into the shifting crowd.
“Sorry about that, friends,” Doggo said, turning to Zero and Bowler. “There’s a lotta sleazebags like him here, tryin’ to get around workin’ to survive.”
“That’s okay, man,” Zero said. “I kinda like it. He made me feel like I was back in New York … Damn!”
The Damn! came when Zero saw two creatures blocking the path, beyond Doggo. Zero pointed. Doggo turned to see what he was pointing at. He sighed and asked the strangers, “Well? What is it now?”
Two aliens, probably of two different worlds. The one on the left looked roughly like a pink, fleshy steamer trunk with a head-size lump in one end.
In the lump was a pulsing membrane on which an image fizzed, a half-coalesced television image somehow organically produced. The creature moved on an underfringe of cilia. At the “front” end, under the lump, were four pouches and slits. It respirated through one of the slits, emitting a flute-toned ki-ips … ki-ips … ki-ips sound with each breath.
Which, Zero supposed, meant this was what the settlers called a Ki-ips.
At its side was a bull-size, effluvia-dripping Arthropod with a gem-festooned snail shell big as a VW bug—and rather resembling one—and a respirator strapped over its breathing tubes just below its gelatinous antennae. Its mouth was a quivery, oozing triangle of slivery flesh that spoke in complex flatulences. The translator box screwed to the immense Arthropod’s shell interpreted, “Doggo! We are in dispute and demand you arbitrate! The Ki-ips has indicated that its booth is unsuitable, and it wishes to move.”
The Ki-ips’s own translator box, screwed int
o the back of its video hump, interpreted the Arthropod’s remarks in terms of the Ki-ips’s own language, which consisted entirely of organically videotaped (and video-animated) imagery: a series of images flashing across the membrane screen. After visually interpreting the Arthropod’s remarks, the Ki-ips’s screen flickered through its reply. Zero saw an animation-enhanced video image of a villainous Arthropod leaping about in an enormous cauldron of slime, splashing the unfortunate, innocent Ki-ips who was attempting to bask in the sun nearby. The gist of the imagery was transmitted from the Ki-ips’s box directly to Doggo’s, and they heard, “I said nothing of the sort! The rascal snail-thing has [untranslatable] and is certainly a boor! The truth is, this repellent hedonist was splashing me with his stench-happy wallowings—”
“Wallowings?” the Arthropod interrupted, aghast. “The dance celebrating the succession of elegant slimes can scarcely be described as ‘wallowings’! I insist you move this low creature—”
Zero turned away, his stomach twisting with disorientation. I’m not going to be able to handle this, he thought. Uh-uh.
He saw a ten-by-five-foot rectangular box standing to one side, twenty feet away. It looked like something of dull metal. As he watched, its facing side slid away, revealing a shimmering interior in which the form of a man took shape—a man Zero knew. Professor Arnold Samuel Garrison, who’d lectured at New York University on the theoretical intricacies of the fourth dimension. Zero knew Garrison as a verbose eccentric. And a clothes horse.
Garrison was wearing one of his Victorian suits, replete with French cuffs and top hat. As his image reified, became solid, he shot his cuffs and adjusted his string tie; his long, saturnine face flickered, then sharpened to clarity. He smiled with polite condescension at Zero. “Well, well, well—young Master Wirth.”
Zero winced.
Garrison winked conspiratorially and hissed, “Come over here, my boy. I want a word with you.”
