by John Shirley
Swanee was walking along a hollow in the forest of land-coral. The coral was just beginning to wake up and sing to the evening murk, humming here and there, tentatively. He was down in a sort of gulley, his head a few feet below the edge. The evening had made the ground a soft, faintly strobing purple. On Earth wild places, unchanged by man, somehow arranged themselves into their own garden designs; the gardener of struggle and competition and evolution, he’d always supposed, had given some wilderness places their look of having been put together like a Japanese garden. The natural beauty of wilderness could be seen on Fool’s Hope if you were open to it. Only, he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to be open to it.
A con trail of light zagged across his path. It was the trace of a local insect, the streakfly, that outdid the Terran firefly: it left a sulfur-yellow trail in the air behind it, a luminous stroke that lingered for a few minutes.
There: another streak, zigging, crossing the first like an X. He walked through them, careful not to breathe, not knowing what the luminous gas might be made of.
Knots of mossy stuff grew from the walls of the gulley in disturbingly symmetrical patterns; tufts were arranged in diamond shapes with respect to one another. Not exact enough, probably, to have been artificial, but almost.
Another streak of light broke the symmetry. And then luminous red splashed the air as a Washcloth caught one of the streakflies and enveloped it in midflight, crushed it, absorbing some of the energy burst.
The Washcloths were a membranous, patch-shaped creature with terry-clothlike cilia on one side, drifting through the air light as autumn leaves, then angling like Manta Rays after prey … Between the diamond-alignment of moss tufts, dirty-white plants—or perhaps they were animals—shaped like ten-fingered hands would suddenly open, creating a suction that pulled small flying things toward them, with a repeating shhh-fwoop sound that seemed to deliberately punctuate the swelling song of the coral trees.
He wasn’t at all sure he wanted to know the patterns sewn into this world.
He walked on. Now the coral trees grew closer to the edge of the gulley, crowding over him. The coral branches cast a crooked mesh of shadows over the ground; he could feel the shadow net closing over him, tugging him along.
It was damp down here, smelled of minerals and wet living things; the usual smells of the alien world were masked by the damp, so that when he closed his eyes and inhaled, for just a moment it was possible to believe he was on Earth. He imagined it was the woods behind his Uncle Ted’s place in Tennessee, walking along the path with his brother after Sunday school, smelling the pines, kicking the ferns to make the dew flash through the air. As they neared Uncle Ted’s, they smelled the barbecue, the deep, smoky, spicy smell of it, heard his uncle’s booming laughter, imagined his aunt’s cakes. Thinking that after dinner, if Dad wanted to stay late enough, they could watch Have Gun Will Travel on television. Man, that was heaven.
That was—
But then a flying pig asked him his name, and he knew he was on Fool’s Hope.
No, the pig-thing wasn’t flying, he saw. It was hanging by something long and white and sticky that came out of its ass, as if it were a spider on a web-strand. Hanging from a tree branch. But it was a long way from being a spider. It was like a human dwarf crossed with a pig. All pink and bristly, about the size of a seven-year-old kid. Rubbery squashed-looking face, stubby little fingers. Hanging upside down in front of him like that was real comfortable for it as it looked at him and asked him his name again … while it lowered itself another eight inches, its voice an effeminate grunt.
“My name’s Swanee,” he told it. “Am I in the right place?” Stupid question.
“Yuh. Yuh inna right place, thweets. C’mon thish way.” Its glutinous hanging strand parted, and it fell to the ground, landing on its back feet in the soft blue soil, belching with the impact. It did something with a stub of an arm that might have been a “follow me” gesture and waddled off to a shadow under an overhang in the dirt walls of the gulley.
What if it isn’t a Twist? Swanee thought. What if it’s an alien?
But drawn by an invisible strand of his own, he followed the dwarf-pig to the hole, a sort of cave-mouth blocked up with something.
He squinted into the dimness, looking closer, trying to see what the stuff blocking the hole was. It was like soft cloth, shiny, sort of furry. Like velvet. All rumpled but in a pretty way—styled rumpling, like the velvet the pin-up girls in the old calenders were stretched out on. But it looked as if it had more substance than cloth. As if it were flesh underneath. He reached out, touched it, felt it contract a little, reacting to his touch. The dwarf-pig was looking at him, chuckling. “Velvet. Ith nith, huh?” It stroked the rumpled blue-black velvet with its truncated fingers, and the stuff contracted some more, then blossomed out, as if erupting from the hole.
Gushing without wetness.
Swanee stepped back, thinking it was an alien, something he was going to be fed to.
But it was opening to provide access to a dwelling; it was dilating, flowing out to slide over some of the dirt around the entrance, exhaling a scent of gardenias and the ocean. And giving out a glimmer of light.
“C’mon in. Fithskle—he’th inthide,” the dwarf-pig said, waddling into the hole.
Swanee had to bend over to enter. And he had to force himself, because the fear was on him; sweat was beading on his face and neck, running down his back. Inside, moving hunched over, it was like walking on a soft, thick carpet, through a living tunnel. The light slithered and blotched along the folds and rumples of the velvet walls. Looking into the back was like looking into a hole in thick clouds where you see the light coming through.
The light was strong at the back of the tunnel, where the walls narrowed, but somehow it wasn’t a piercing light, it didn’t hurt his eyes. It washed over things without lighting them up too much. That was good: Swanee didn’t want to get a better look at the three sitting with Fiskle, or at the thing at Fiskle’s feet.
He knew what the thing at Fiskle’s feet was, though. It was Kelso’s head.
Supposed to have been buried.
Fiskle stood out for his cleanliness—almost everyone else was a little grimy. And he had a certain intensity, a sense of authoritative preoccupation about him. Now his expression was simply supercilious, a good-natured contempt for everything. His eyes seemed glassy. His fingers—was it Swanee’s imagination?—seemed unusually long, their movement spidery.
I shouldn’t have come here. But the one they called Father had made Swanee promise. Made him promise deep inside himself. You didn’t argue with Father much.
Father wasn’t there, Swanee saw. Instead, sitting beside Fiskle, were three Twists. The dwarf-pig had gone back outside.
The Twists were part of a composition. That was the way it looked to Swanee. Swanee had painted murals in Nashville and sold some paintings to collectors, and he knew composition. It was as if the Twists were almost part of the walls, or worked into them, like the shapes of animals worked into the patterns of wallpaper; more like a Henri Rousseau.
The big one on the left was made of glassy beetlewing skin, his changeless face like a knight’s helmet; the body was made out of hard shell-like sections of random scrapyard things, all tucks and cross-hatchings and vents and pipes, a tumble of hard stuff arranged like a collage to shape a man. But when he moved, shifting position, you could see all the parts working together, pipes over pipes like air compression tubes; everything went click-click into place. Organic, though, not robotic.
On the right was a white-faced little kid with delicate, semitransparent fingers, soft pads at the ends, and suckers under them; attenuated face, round black eyes without any white to them, lids coming from beneath. A newt, Swanee thought. And then a hunched, skinny, sunburned dude—too tall for the cave, sway-backed, looking human except for not having legs: his legs had grown together, gone prehensile. And Fiskle, with the snakelegs and the newt on his left, the shiny-parts guy on his righ
t, looked as if he were holding court, sitting on a hump in the velvet, looking nearly human.
The walls shifted when you didn’t look right at them; they ran with faces, which pinched kaleidoscopically into one another. The light came from some source behind Fiskle, something hidden. A dirty secret made of luminosity.
Fiskle reached down and tousled the matted hair of the staring, severed head at his feet and said, “You look scared. Nothing to be afraid of. We’re just plain folks. This”—he indicated the snakelegs—“is Purdy. My little newt here is Smythe-Wickerson.” He tilted his head toward the shiny-part guy. “This now calls itself Pacific Bell. We’re not aliens, Swanee.”
He had to swallow hard to get his voice back. “I know you’re not.” He did.
He sensed they were human, or had started that way; that they were Earthborn. Even the one made of all those hard pieces of this and that.
“My friends here have simply adjusted a little. The Current made them more themselves than they were before. Brought out hidden qualities in them. They’re human. Everything they’ve become is part of the human world.”
“Why’d you make me come here?”
“I didn’t force you.”
“You did. I didn’t know it till I was in here, but Father”—his voice rose an octave—“he did something to make me come here. It’s a kind of kidnapping. It’s fucked up.”
Purdy coiled himself a little tighter, as if in warning. Smythe-Wickerson said, “Phhht,” softly. Pacific Bell clattered inwardly.
But Fiskle ignored Swanee’s outburst of resentment. He said thoughtfully, “You don’t like aliens. When you see one, you scream.”
Swanee shifted his position. He was not comfortable, bent over in here. He grimaced. “Not always. I don’t scream when I see just any of them. But I feel like it. Some I can pretend are just … are something else. Like this tunnel thing—it’s just some sort of big animal.”
“Yes. Tamed.”
“But the aliens that think and move around, they scare me because you can’t imagine what they might decide to do. So I don’t normally go outside the settlement much. That’s how I know he did something to my mind. To make me come here.”
“You seemed ready, Swanee.”
Swanee felt a deep, deep chill radiate out into his soft parts from the marrow of his bones. “I don’t want to be ready.”
“We’re going to need your support. There are people planning an interracial expedition. Rapproachement with the aliens would be a disastrous weakening for us. We must train ourselves to the maximum survivability, which means optimizing our competitive edge. Don’t you agree? You really must back us up on this.”
“Uh…” Swanee was staring at the severed head. A long, utterly dry, rubbery pink tongue was extruding from its mouth, oozing slowly out to push at the soft floor. It moved with its tongue, like a clam’s single leg, turning itself with agonizing slowness so it could look at Swanee with its unblinking, pasty eyes. Its jaws worked restlessly. Much of the face had been peeled away, exposing bone. Fiskle reached down and absently plucked at the thing’s skin, pulling away another strip—
Swanee gagged and turned away. He started back toward the entrance, thinking that at any moment the tunnel would contract and begin to swallow him toward the things in the back.
“You’ll need a certain fundamental shift in attitude and aptitude to survive here,” Fiskle called after him. “But in essence we’ll always be human, Swanee!”
His back aching from hunching down, Swanee pushed out of the entrance and was surprised that he hadn’t been held back.
But there was a wind out there now, and a strong smell like teeth burning under a dentist’s drill, and a tension in the air. He felt his hair stand up on his head and limbs, saw violet fires flickering over his hands and purple auroras of light outlining the coral trees against the sky. The crooked branches seemed to flex and bend in the eddying Current, their stiffness becoming comically rubbery, swaying in a macabre dance of sarcastic stateliness. He felt the great brooding presence of the Current bearing down on him, nailing him rigid to the ground so that he was a lightning-rod medium between atmosphere and the planet’s soil, electrocuting him with the energies of intracellular transformation.
A great and thunderous sound exactly resembling a single high-amped electric guitar chord boomed keerang! and vibrated through Swanee like a living whiplash, oscillating from broad to narrow wavelengths, concentrating into more intense energies, so that sparks leaped bluewhite between his teeth and fulminated from his eyes.
Oh lord, no.
Zero and Angie walked down the slope from the scumball shed, through warm semidarkness, down narrow streets, and between high walls. On their left was the outer wall of the settlement. Beyond it was wilderness.
There were irregular triangles of light every so often from the oil lamps in windows to the right. The yellow light wavered just a little. Zero could smell the oil burning—it was gathered from a pool of petroleum leakage in the bogs, a place like the La Brea Tar Pits. The smell was a stroke of comfort through him, a reminder of Earth.
Zero and Angie walked stiffly, muscles aching, down streets made of the same stuff as the buildings in the settlement; their footsteps clacked and rang off the walls.
Something small corkscrewed through the air to Zero’s left and then abruptly changed course and zipped itself onto his forearm, began to screw itself in.
“Shit!” he shouted, and slapped at it. The corkscrew dug in deeper—and it hurt.
Angie said, “Hold still.” She grabbed his arm just below the elbow and squeezed it hard, then used the other hand to pump the pressurized blood hard up the arm to the thing. The sudden pressure popped it out of its burrow. It unscrewed from him and whipped away into the air, though more sluggishly now.
“Ow! Shit!” He took a deep breath as the pain ebbed, and he watched the blood ooze; it looked black in the twilight. The laceration was small. He said, “Thanks … I find it hard to believe the Meta inoculated us against every virus and microorganism on this planet. A parasite might be carrying anything.”
“Maybe. Some people do get infections. So far there isn’t much heavy disease, like Fool’s Hope malaria. But the Meta could’ve blown it, of course. There could be some microorganisms they haven’t got covered. This is just an experiment, after all. Experiments will go wrong.”
They had begun to walk again. They could hear voices from up ahead, around the curve in the narrow street, but they were too muffled to make out. Zero said, “You think it’s all an experiment?”
“What else?”
He chuckled. “Everybody’s got a theory.”
“Okay. You think it’s stupid.”
He looked at her. Insecurity? Most of the time she seemed so confident.
Maybe it marked a change in their relationship. He hoped so. “No. It’s not stupid. Not at all. I meant—”
He broke off as they turned the corner and came to a small courtyard, where the slope bottomed out and the street widened. A group of people were standing around a big man who had set a large oil lamp on the bed of a cart. The darkness had thickened; it pooled indigo around the yellow circle of light. The big man was backlit; the others, facing him, caught the light on their faces.
“Jesus,” Angie breathed, as they got closer to the group. “Look at the size of that guy.”
Zero saw a man at least ten feet tall. Maybe more. “An alien?”
“I don’t think so. The way he’s dressed…”
“Yeah.” The giant was wearing baggy pressed slacks, wing-tip shoes, white shirt, dark tie, dark jacket. The tie was loosened. The whole thing looked about twenty years archaic, for Earth.
“Fred MacMurray,” Zero said, thinking aloud. ” My Three Sons. It’s not Fred MacMurray but the general look is the same … except he’s so huge. The clothes are like MacMurray’s or Robert Young’s in…” His voice trailed off as they walked up to the group, and he felt a sensation in his chest. A faint vibrat
ion in his sternum … and spreading out from it was a sense of relaxing, of warmth. It increased as they neared the giant.
He stopped, awed, as he looked up at the giant’s face. There was no giantism disfigurement, no bulging forehead or prognathous jaw. The effect, instead, was of … an adult. They who looked on him were child-size.
His face was middle-aged, lined with care but benevolent. His nose a touch too small, so it looked Irish; his black eyebrows were thick, bristling slightly, salted with white hairs. His short hair was combed neatly back and might have been barbered that day. Streaks of white were at the temples.
His expression was confident, quintessentially paternal.
Zero felt instantly loyal to this man. He knew he could be trusted.
“I guess,” the paternal giant was saying, “I was always out of place on Earth. I feel here I can fulfill myself, find my real function.” His low voice, the way he rolled the syllables, resonated deliciously with the hum of well-being Zero had felt on entering the courtyard. Zero felt himself smiling, nodding. He was aware of Angie and the other settlers around him also sharing in this moment.
“But my work is not here in the settlement,” the giant was saying, “not this settlement. I feel a sort of call to the other one.” His smile was pleasantly mysterious.
“What other one?” someone asked. A familiar voice. Zero looked and spotted Cisco.
“The New Humans’ settlement,” the giant rumbled sweetly. “It’s just beginning. But it’s more enlightened. It’s dedicated to putting the safety of humanity first. To establishing more than a sort of frantic way station. To making a home. It has room for individuality.” There was just a faint tinge of irony in his voice then. “Oh, yes. But we know one thing for sure: a close community is a safe one.”
The crowd had moved nearer to him. The giant reached with his big arms to embrace two of them, pulling them gently close. It was entirely paternal.
One of them was an anemic-looking young man with straggly black hair and large brown eyes, jeans, a workshirt, a beaded leather belt. He had a sort of Santa Cruz look about him: wide-eyed, like a yogic devotee. The other was a smiling Latino with round cheeks. They both smiled like shy children as he went on. “I can’t tell you everything. But I think the Meta will help us. I have reason to believe they approve of what we’re doing.”
