Splendid Chaos (v1.1)

by John Shirley

  But Fiskle was moving. He was getting to his knees, and softly, with a hideous knowingness, he was laughing.

  3

  “He came running at me out of the woods, his face as white as a sheet, his hair standing on end. Eyes like a lunatic.” Fiskle paused in his dreamy recap and smiled absently to himself, as if savoring the memory. “The muscles of his face were jumping around as if he had no control over them at all. There was drool hanging from his mouth. He was giggling. I said, ‘Kelso, what the hell—’ And then he fell on his knees before me and said, ‘Master, I give you my essence.’ “

  There were snorts of disbelief around the Council room. Someone said, “Come onnnnn!”

  Zero was sitting across from Fiskle in the cool, shadowy Council room, his back against the wall, his knees drawn up to his chest. He said, “Don’t sound like the way he talked.”

  “That is what he said. He was in the Current. Anyone might have been speaking through him.”

  “What the ‘ell is ‘e talking about?” Dennis demanded, scowling. When he scowled, his dwarfish face looked like a gnome’s, Zero thought.

  “What happened after that?” Doggo asked in a cop’s flat voice. He sat on one side of Zero, next to Warren. Bowler and Angie and Cisco sat on the other side. They were there as witnesses.

  Fiskle rubbed his chin and turned to gaze at the window. His smile flickered as he said, “Then Kelso fell to his knees and began to slash at his own neck with a knife. Blood everywhere. I was too amazed to interfere. And I was afraid of him. Once he got the job started, he used the strength of his arms and legs—his feet tucked up under his chin”—he paused and looked around the room, as if cueing everyone to disbelieve him—“to tear his own head from his neck.”

  There were five full seconds of silence before the jeering, the snickers began. Not everyone laughed. Warren and Cisco looked like small children at their first horror movie.

  Indifferent to them, Fiskle went on. “He achieved his own decapitation with a single superhuman wrenching. Horrible but impressive. The spine snapped away all at once under the exertions of the arms, and of course, the signal from the brain being cut off, the body went limp.” He shrugged.

  “It isn’t possible,” Doggo said. “Halfway through the process he’d collapse from cutting his jugular vein, or at least from damage to his spinal cord. And he didn’t look that strong. I don’t know anybody who is.”

  “He was insane beyond the insanity we know,” Fiskle replied coolly. “He had not only a madman’s strength, he had the Current’s strength.”

  “You talk as if you’re an insider,” Doggo said, “where the Current’s concerned.”

  Fiskle said softly, “I have made a quiet study of the phenomenon in my spare time.”

  Zero found himself staring at Fiskle. He looked different, in a way Zero couldn’t define. Glossier, and … Zero wasn’t sure.

  “Kelso had his hands on his head all right,” Warren said. “And there wasn’t no blood on Fiskle.”

  Doggo nodded. “Even a guy as … even a clean-freak like Fiskle would’ve got some blood on him if he’d cut off Kelso’s head. He didn’t really have time, either, to decapitate Kelso. He wasn’t out of our sight long.” He pursed his lips. “This is Fool’s Hope, this isn’t Earth. Maybe what Fiskle said happened could’ve happened here. Weird as it sounds, I believe him. So I motion we accept the story and lay the matter of Kelso’s death to rest with the judgment: accidental.”

  Zero looked at Doggo with surprise. He’d had the definite impression that Doggo and Fiskle were on opposite sides of the fence, that Doggo regarded Fiskle as a clear and present danger to the human settlement.

  “The New Humans,” Bowler explained, whispering, as the ayes went around the room. Everyone agreed with Doggo because they wanted to put this behind them, fast. “Fiskle’s new lodge. Too many of them. Doggo doesn’t want a confrontation with them yet—they’re too strong. They got Twists with them.”

  “Now,” Fiskle said, immediately trying to reassert control, “there’s this deplorable matter of the interspecies expedition. I urge that we don’t embarrass ourselves with any more discussion of it than necessary. I motion that we veto it and go on to—”

  “I think it’s a bloody good idea!” Dennis interrupted. “Jamie thinks so, too. She tol’ me this mornin’. You can send someone from the Council to get it from ‘er straight on right now, if you want. She’s for it.”

  “The Meta are against it!” Fiskle said sharply between clenched teeth. He looked around, making eye contact, and then stood up. He raised a hand to quiet Doggo’s predictable question. “How do I know what the Meta want? Common sense. They set us up here to be in competition with the aliens. That is obvious. If we defy them—and we know they’re always watching us—things could get ugly. They might do anything—and I mean anything.”

  There were murmurs of agreement, noises of skepticism. “Sit down, Fiskle, or I’ll have to stand, and then everyone will,” Doggo said.

  His reluctance naked on his face, Fiskle sat.

  Doggo went on. “We have no damned idea what the Meta really want. Just as many people are sure they put us here to find a way to get along with aliens.”

  “Or either one,” Zero put in. “To give us a choice and see what we do.”

  Doggo nodded. “We just don’t know. But supposing you’re right, Fiskle. We’ve got to ask, do we really want to be their sniveling punks?”

  The debate went on; Zero followed only the rough outline of it. There was an element that didn’t want to take a chance on angering the Meta. But there was also a general resentment of the Meta. If Fiskle was right, this was a chance to defy them, to fling the theft of their own lives into the Meta’s face.

  Fear of the Meta was strong. The vote came out half for, half against.

  Deadlock.

  “I vote aye, in favor of the expedition,” someone said. Jamie stood in the doorway, leaning on Trish. She was bone pale; her face sagged, and she was breathing through her open mouth. Even with someone to lean on, she looked as if will power alone kept her upright.

  “That breaks the deadlock,” Doggo said. “The expedition is on.”

  Jamie looked at Fiskle and managed a weary smile. “You think I don’t know what happened out there? It’s not over, Fiskle.”

  Zero realized that by out there she meant on the road, when the wheelers had attacked them. She’d said Fiskle’s crowd had somehow prompted the attack.

  Jamie turned and, Trish’s arm around her, hobbled away. As if her going uncorked a jug of bees, the room buzzed with talk.

  After the meeting, as they went to morning meal, Zero moved up beside Doggo and said, “You believe Fiskle’s story about Kelso? Bowler says everyone’s just trying to avoid a confrontation with him.”

  Doggo glanced around to be sure Fiskle wasn’t near, then told him, “It wasn’t just being careful about confrontations. It was that I believed him. I don’t know why, but I knew he was telling the truth. I guess what he described sounded like the sort of pattern that comes down when the Current happens to people. And it didn’t sound like something Fiskle would make up. But don’t you worry, man. We’ll take care of Fiskle. I’m on that one.”

  Zero had a lot of choices. One was to make crude-cloth out of scumballs.

  You picked the scumball pods sort of like picking cotton except the scumballs stuck to your hands, and if they dried, it hurt to pull them off—and then you dried them, pulverized them, and wound them into a loom. You had to learn how to use the loom, of course.

  You don’t want to do that? You can work with oruhs. Herding, breeding, shoveling their droppings, gathering ground mites for their meals.

  Slaughtering them. Scraping their hides.

  Not appealing? Try crustacean harvesting—all day in the sun, bending over, back aching. Fighting off the jumpskeeters.

  Or there’s sewage tender, which includes water pump maintenance. Every morning you got to unclog the sewage ditch.
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  No? Hard to please. Okay: tater fields. Or you can try to be Army, but there’s a waiting list. Cleaners of all kinds—basically means janitor. Or woodgathering, though gatherers tend to get killed in the Out There.

  Something. You got to show a designated Council monitor what you did during the day to earn food, and usually that means you work for someone, and the job boss reports you were okay … You want to stay in the settlement, you better pick something.

  “Me and Cisco’ve been working with scumballs, making cloth,” Angie said.

  “You can do that. You put some oil on your hands first so the stuff doesn’t stick so much, and you just get used to the … to all this fingerwork. I wanta go into law like Doggo, eventually, but there’s only supposed to be two settlement cops, and of course Fiskle’s the other one. If you don’t count Army. The Army assholes are so fucking lazy.”

  They were squatting in the shade of a cart (the one the mad boy had crouched under, Zero thought, wondering if his being there now was an omen), across from the gates to the human settlement. Angie was wearing a pair of crude-cloth shorts stitched up the sides with leather strings. He could see the edge of her Whorebug-silk underwear, where her shorts rode up on her tanned legs. One of the guardsmen in the Army had given her the Whorebug cloth the night before. She had “a heap of stuff like that in my dorm” from other suitors. She insisted she hadn’t given out anything but verbal thank-yous for the gifts yet, but Zero wasn’t so sure. The thought made him cringe inside and grind his teeth.

  He could smell Angie’s skin, her sweat, and a hint of vaginal secretions. Her smell combined with the scent of the breeze off the plain and became—for Zero anyway—an intriguing, exotic perfume. But they were just two working people resting; polite and friendly but businesslike. She’d shown him the job centers, the settlements’ various social organs, its sheds for drudgery.

  She had been assigned to it. It was her job today, was all. If there were warmth in it, it was because they’d known each other on Earth. “What happened to that naked kid who was out here yesterday?” Zero asked.

  “A bunch of Army caught him, trussed him up, carried him into the country, and let him go. They said they untied his hands but not his legs, so he’d be occupied with all the knots and couldn’t follow them back. Cute. He’s probably dead. The law here…” She shrugged.

  “They don’t hassle things out long. They find Fiskle with a decapitated body and they say, ‘Aw, forget it.’ “

  “There’s too much that happens here. They can’t investigate much of it. And Kelso was a greaseball. A thief, a pimp. If they know somebody killed someone else, though, they come down on them. Well, first they appoint a defense attorney and a prosecuting attorney, and then the Council tries the case itself. People convicted of murder are expelled from the settlement, which usually means they get killed themselves. Unless we decide that the murder was a one-time-only act of temporary insanity. There’s a lot of temporary insanity here. They understand that. If that happens, the killer is restricted and watched a lot, assigned extra work. They get another chance. But if they go completely loco or even act that way a little too often, they get expulsion.”

  “There’s already some wicked Social Darwinism here without Fiskle making it worse.”

  “That’s what Bowler says. He talks about rehab programs.” She shook her head. “It’s hard enough for us to take care of people who’ve got it reasonably together.” She looked at him. “You make up your mind what job you want?”

  “Uh … I don’t like any of them. Don’t they have any clerical jobs?”

  She grinned. “Council members are also scribes, they keep records with squirmer juice and dandruff-willow bark. That’s it. They all work drudge jobs, too.”

  “I’ll probably, um, work in crude-cloth. Then at least I can hang out around you.” He said it as matter-of-factly as he could and tried not to look for her reaction.

  “Okay, well, we better get back and tell ‘em what you want to do—”

  “Actually, uh,” he broke in, stalling, “maybe you could tell me about the Progress Stations. Bowler only told me a little. The Stations are another possibility, right?”

  She shrugged. “It’s like this. There are thirty-one races we know about here, besides the occasional alien Murderer. Each is from a different world. Each is given its own settlement area. The settlements run across the continent in—supposedly—an east-west belt. But anything like map-making and geography is in the infant stage around here. Generally, though, we know the Progress Stations are to the north. The McMahons move them around for the Meta, and when someone’s found one and gotten into it, taken whatever was useful in it, the McMahons take it away and put it down somewhere else—somewhere real dangerous—and you got to find it, and—what’s tougher—you got to get into it. A new one’s been reported up near the wastes, in the Hungry Punkin’ swamp.”

  “What’s in ‘em?”

  “Different things. When you get to one, the McMahons are waiting, and they hand out things that help your settlement progress, you know, technologically. So far they’ve given the human settlements a form of gunpowder, some medicines, and a method for synthesizing a kind of rubber compound. Jamie and the others are still learning to use it.

  “Only a few of the people who were brought here have any mechanical or scientific skills. The Meta stacked it that way, I guess. We can build some stuff on our own, but even something as simple as a generator—how do you make the components? Copper pure enough, machined metal parts. There’s no Radio Shack on Fool’s Hope. You got to make it all from scratch, from the local stock of ore. But that’s taking a long time, a lot of trial and error. We haven’t got a lot of time. Because if you don’t progress fast enough, the other races overtake you, get the advantage—and they wipe you out. This is what we hear happens, anyway—and we found some empty settlements with some crude stuff half built and a lot of bones—well, they were shells in that case—and it looked as if they’d been ambushed by another low technology.”

  “But if we could get the races to stop competing—”

  “We’re working on it. Some are more cooperative than others. Either way, the Progress Stations are important to us.”

  “So I take it there’s a big reward when you come back from a Progress Station with the goods.”

  “You get real light duty for a year. You get some Whorebug cloth, wire, trading stuff. Hey—I see that light in your eye, Zero. Better think twice. Most people who go out to look for Progress Stations don’t make it back. They die. Or if they’re lucky, they end up like Warren.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh. But if you do get to a Progress Station, you got a better chance of being elected to Council. A lot of good comes from it. So I’m still thinking about the interspecies expedition idea. But look at the shadows—it’s almost noon.” She stood up and stretched. He stole a look at her bare legs. “Come on. Let’s report to scumballing.”

  It was just a shed; the heavy, still air in it was held in place by the sour Elmer’s Glue smell of scumballs. There were two long, irregular wooden tables, and baskets of scumball pods against the synthetic wall to the right. Thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk. Like that, over and over again with the wooden mallet. Zero would spread out the heap of pasty yellow-white scumball pods, each one marshmallow-size, and remove the scumball pod-cup, toss it aside, squash a few scumballs together, compress them, then pound them thunk thunk thunk thunk, four times or so, hit them hard with the hammer to flatten them out some, then again a whole lot of times but fast and more lightly, all over, to make them into a kind of matzo wafer. You put that wafer, after you get it flattened enough, onto the stack in the corner of the table, then you grab another pile of pods.

  You stop every couple of wafers to pry scumball gunk from your mallet, which gets too spongy with the stuff.

  Zero’s hands and arms ached, were beginning to stiffen up. Blisters were turning from red to white on his fingers. “You ge
t used to it,” Angie had said. She was at the far side of the room from him, pounding. Four other people he didn’t know were between them.

  How long had it been? They didn’t have any clocks except the dripper—a couple of jars the Pezz had made. The upper one dripped into the lower one through a tiny hole, very slowly. When enough had dripped through, allowing for evaporation, Boris Chubchek, their monitor boss, would tell them it was quitting time.

  There were risks in everything here. He could work his ass off and still get killed. By aliens—or through settlement politics. There were rumors of some kind of coup fermenting.

  The whole planet was high risk. So why not go for a Progress Station?

  Because of sudden death. Because of getting lost and sick and mutilated and enslaved. A gleam of polished silver.

  Zero looked up and saw the small silver sphere of one of the Meta’s watchers floating near the ceiling of the shed, its little red dot turned toward him. The others glanced at it and ignored it. Zero reached down, gathered together a clump of scumball paste, and flipped it underhand at the sphere. It dodged at the last split-second, with no jerkiness, no indication of agitation. It continued to watch.

  Chubchek said, “Zero, don’t waste the pod stuff.”

  Zero sighed and picked up the mallet. Thunk thunk thunk thunk.

  Evening, Swanee thought. Evening in the coral gulley. One part of the world was going to sleep, another was waking up, like on Earth. But there were different players on this stage.

  Swanee was a wide-shouldered man with narrow hips and thick hands that, when he wasn’t using them, hung like dead things on his arms. He had a quiet body reflecting an inner stillness. Not the stillness of a peaceful man—the stillness of a trapped man, conserving his energy. He was black, with nappy hair that was going to Afro now; cocoa-colored skin; brown eyes so light they were almost yellow. He wore a fading Memphis State University T-shirt and surprisingly intact jeans. He’d only been on the planet a month.