Splendid Chaos (v1.1)

by John Shirley

  A sigh, a ripple of ahhs when through the small crowd. The Meta approved.

  “Web-maker and false prophet!” came a dissonant shout from the shadows.

  Zero looked and saw an old man crouching at the edge of the light. He seemed agitated, like a frog about to jump. His large black eyes shone. He sucked a strand from his tangled, teased-out white hair into a corner of his mouth. He tilted his head to one side. “The stink of your lies hangs in the air like the flatulence of a corpse!” His voice was as abrasive as the giant’s was assuring. “You are a Twist! And you intend these people nothing but harm!” The little man stood and came into the light. Zero saw then that he wasn’t old, particularly. His hair seemed prematurely white. His sharp, birdlike features were a little sunken, but by privation. His lips and hands trembled with passion as he spoke. “Why is this man dressed as he is? Where does he get these clean clothes, his perfect hair? They grow on him that way, friends, or in any way he pleases, for he is a Twist. Open his shirt if you want to see!”

  “Shut up, lunatic! Let the man talk!” Someone yelled. Someone else muttered, “The old dude is Jack the Baptist.” The nickname was spoken with ripe derision. “Ignore him.”

  But Zero noticed one of Meta’s watchers bobbing overhead, its tiny red dot turned toward them. The giant glanced at the watcher, then at Jack the Baptist with the same expression. Raw hatred for both.

  For Zero, then, the spell, or whatever it was, was broken. That glimpse into the giant’s emotional core had dispersed Zero’s trance, though he still felt the warmth tugging at him—even more insistently than before—as the giant recovered his composure and beamed at the Baptist. “We might even be able to restore this man’s sanity if he’ll let us help him,” the paternal giant said.

  “Open his shirt!” Jack shrieked. Someone aimed a kick at him, and he danced back. “Ask him to—”

  The giant went on, his voice booming like a bass-pitched clarion, drowning him out. “Our elected organizer is Professor Fiskle. If any of you would like to go with me to meet him—”

  Fiskle, Zero thought. He saw Cisco nodding, as if he were about to volunteer to go with the giant to Fiskle. Open his shirt!

  Zero stepped in, feeling as if he were moving upstream against a strong pull that came from somewhere he couldn’t place. He grabbed the giant’s shirtfront and tore it aside. It wouldn’t part far, because it was, as the Baptist had hinted, growing out of his skin. But between the two halves of the shirt, under the tie, fully exposed in the light of the lamp, was the most hideous face Zero had ever looked on. He saw it all in a half-second.

  It was an insect’s face, but wildly overgrown, with something manlike merged into its features, growing from the flesh of the giant’s chest. It was about as big as a cat’s head. Below it was a chitinous hollow, seamlessly part of the giant’s flesh, in which a purplish membrane vibrated, shivering, going quiet, shivering again.

  The membrane was moving in time with the waves of well-being Zero had felt.

  The people standing nearest to the giant made inarticulate sounds of disgust and moved away from him. Zero backed away, too, as the giant stood, his face contorting, his mask of paternal reassurance shorn. The insect face in his chest, exposed, gnashed its mandibles; a liquid like bile dripped from its mouth, and its eye glittered iridescent facets at the Earthers.

  “He’s a Twist,” someone said, incredulous, hurt.

  “Looks like,” Cisco said, nodding, with awe.

  The crowd moved back from the giant. He stood there glowering at them; the thing on its chest gnashed. The giant was an enormous beast now. The features that had been arranged for the maximum in paternal reassurance were now as cold as those of an executioner. The sensation of warmth had stopped.

  “The thing on its chest,” Angie said. Her voice was choked with the ugliness of the realization. “It was humming or something. We couldn’t hear it—”

  “But it affected us,” Cisco said.

  “You fucker!” a young man screamed at the Giant—one of the men the giant had had his arms around.

  The giant moved past them, a furious blur. When he stopped, he was looming over Jack the Baptist—and he had the young man with the straggly hair and the beaded belt, had him by the neck, holding him like an unruly barnyard animal.

  “Put him down and come and get me, Father!” Jack the Baptist yelled hoarsely, laughing up in his face. “What you going to do?”

  “No fucking way!” the boy was wailing, thrashing in the giant’s oversize hands. “I’ll never go with you!”

  “In some ways it’s easier,” Jack said, “isn’t it? Easier than the Open Heart? But in other ways, Twist, it’s going to be much harder.”

  The giant glared at the Baptist—and then turned away from him.

  Absentmindedly, the giant reached down and broke the boy’s neck. Crick-ick. The body spasmed once and went limp. He let it fall.

  He turned to them, closing the flaps of his shirtfront. He looked at Zero.

  “You’re among the ones he wants, or I’d kill you now.” He looked up at the others. “You’re going to wish you’d followed me.”

  He bent, picked up the body of the boy, and slung it over his shoulder.

  Carrying the corpse like a sack of meal, he turned, stalked to the outer wall, and leaped. He grabbed the top, did a pull-up, and then vaulted ponderously onto the wall and over.

  There was a small red puddle on the street where the corpse had been. The blood seeped into cracks in the pavement. They stared at it, and then someone yelled a name and began to weep. They began to talk all at once, a babble of voices. Several of them knew the boy who’d died; they wept for him. Thinking about the cracking sound when the boy’s neck broke, the casual way the Twist had slung the body over his shoulder, Zero’s stomach contracted sharply.

  Angie was looking at Zero, frowning. “What made you do that? Open his shirt?”

  “I don’t know. Felt right. I—it feels more all the time like I want to look past the outsides of things, here.”

  “I knew it would be you,” Jack the Baptist said. He was there at Zero’s elbow, that suddenly. “I could see it in your face, even when he had you. You, my friend, could smell what Father was from the start.”

  Smell what the giant was? Zero could smell the sour of Jack the Baptist when he stood so close. But there was a defiant humor in the man’s eyes, a presence about him. He had the glow of a familiar, drunken friend at a party. “You said something about the Open Heart to him,” Zero said. “What was that about?”

  The Baptist grinned, showing rotting, crooked teeth. “The Open Heart was a cult he created in Southern California before he was brought here. He was its father figure, its charismatic leader. He squeezed his followers dry. Made them paupers.”

  “You seemed crazy at first,” Zero said, thinking aloud. “But you’re not.”

  “Crazy is relative. You’re crazy yourself. You’re going to go on an expedition soon.”

  “You a fortune teller?” Angie said. She was frowning at him. “If you’d kept your mouth shut, maybe that guy would have gone away, maybe he wouldn’t have gotten pissed off. Maybe that kid would be alive. I can’t believe we’re just standing here as if nothing happened, and that kid died just a minute ago. Must have been like, eighteen…”

  “I’m not a fortune teller,” the Baptist said, unruffled. “Not even a mind-reader.” He nodded at Zero. “His personality was on store-window display a few minutes ago. That’s what told me he’d go. Once they’re out of their shell, there’s no stopping them. He’s going on an expedition.”

  “We don’t know if there’s going to be one,” Angie said, snorting.

  But Zero looked at the Baptist and realized he was right.

  The Second Part—Fallout from the Exploded Heart

  4

  A vista of small mirrors, sunk into the soft blue of the land, reflected the jade sky. They ran together in the distance like molten silicon. The bog-ponds mirrored a transl
ucent green sky trimmed with a fine ribwork of silvery clouds. Zero though it was a sort of cloud formation one saw from time to time on Earth, weirdly regular in its configuration, each strip of cloud lined up with the others as neatly as plow-furrowed soil. Each gave out the moisture-dulled light of refraction.

  “How can the clouds be so regular?” Zero asked, looking at Yoshio. They were in the expedition’s leadcart, which rocked and shuddered over the rutted dry-mud track that led sinuously between the ponds. Zero had to be careful how he set his jaws, or a sudden jarring would clack his teeth together. “Winds are turbulent, moving like liquid, just sort of flowing around … I used to wonder about this on Earth, too. So how can the clouds be regular like that?”

  Yoshio shrugged. “I saw the same on Earth and wondered. Unliving things fall into patterns too.”

  “It’s the Meta,” Cisco said. He was riding in the back of the cart, sitting on a leather satchel of supplies, his head nodding with the cart’s motion. “We gotta be careful. It’s some kind of sign or—”

  “Christ, Cisco,” Zero said, “if you imagine you see the Meta everywhere, you’re going to flip out. They’re just clouds. It meant nothing on Earth, it means nothing here,” Zero said, unaccountably irritated. “Sometimes I think you—” He broke off, and they both stared off across the bogs, hearing an animal voice cry, Ha! Ha! Ha-ha! High-pitched and jeering. They’d heard it five or six times that morning without ever seeing the cry’s originator.

  Zero glanced over his shoulder at the other carts. Angie and Dennis were in the next one. Behind them in the last cart was Zickorian, of the High Clans, beside his fellow Clansman, Calum. Calum was smaller and had fewer hoops through his wrists. Zero had the impression that he was some sort of younger relative out for a rite of passage. Not a son, but perhaps a nephew.

  The Pezz trotted along behind the third cart, as he preferred to do for most of the day. Now and then he climbed up into the back of a cart and rode, squeaking listlessly to himself. Or was it itself? Zero could never quite decide.

  The eight travelers were three days into the expedition. They were on their way, they hoped, to the Progress Station that had been reported beyond the bogs; it was said to be past the mocking veldt, on the far side of a great forest, and beyond the IAMton Wastes. The Pezz had absorbed a “map” of biochemically distilled experiences from a fellow Pezz who had been on another expedition that had been turned back by the Hungry Punkin’. Out of nine travelers, that expedition had only two survivors.

  All but the first hour of the first day had been spent trundling through the bogs. The swamp had seemed infinite, stretching ahead and behind and to either side as far as they could see. “It’s as if we’ve slid into yet another world,” Yoshio had said. “Another plane—a continuum of bog-ponds, one after another, like one of those Dali perspective planes of checkered infinity.” He said things like that the way other people said, “Boy, this bog stuff just goes on and on!”

  “I wish Bowler had come,” Zero said, shifting on the driver’s seat. His butt hurt from the jouncing. He eased his foot on the pedal-tack in the oruh’s rump to slow it a little, give his pelvis a rest. The beast grunted and gave out a soft, relieved orooooooooh. “Said he wanted to ‘organize’ the settlement. I keep telling him his politics are irrelevant here.”

  Zero’s back was hurting from hours of sitting up. The sun had burned a spot in the back of his neck that chafed him bitterly whenever he turned his head, and Yoshio was getting on his nerves.

  It’s the monotony, Zero thought. It made him irritable. And fighting off jumpskeeters every half-mile or so, having to keep them off the oruh. And at night, the moss-suckers. They looked harmless, like a short piece of Spanish Moss, dull violet, floating through the air, dried up and harmless.

  But they steered themselves without seeming to and drifted against your bare skin. The sucker’s spongy mesh extruded filaments that drew blood—much more blood than the corkscrews took. They swelled up like sponges, just getting bigger and bigger, taking root if you let them.

  And the sounds of the bog at night made the Earthers light, paranoid sleepers. The sounds were like a sinister orchestra tuning up. The ground was lumpy and moist; a few hours on it, and you woke with aching muscles.

  The nights were almost as wearying as the days.

  “Parasitism is something you’ll see in many forms out there,” Jack the Baptist had told them. He’d stopped them along the road, just outside the settlement, that first morning, to wish them well. “Be wary of its multiplicity of form. There is every kind of abundance on this world: you’ll learn to know the abundance that resonates constructively from the kind that is poisonous to you. The capacity to know it is in you. The outside and inside are interchangeable.”

  “Uh-huh,” Zero had said, nodding just as if he knew what Jack was talking about.

  They’d driven on, and Jack the Baptist had shouted something obscured by the creaking of the carts that might have been, “See you around the hill!”

  Zero had driven the cart that morning in a glow of interior excitement that matched the solar energy flashing from bogs. But then the hours and days had piled up, and tedium had rolled in like an invisible fog—and remained.

  And Angie seemed nervous, distant.

  “This road looks as if it were made by randomly trekking Pioneers,” Yoshio said, interrupting Zero’s train of thought. “But I suspect the Meta may have laid it down. There’s a certain engineering wisdom in its—”

  Zero couldn’t stand any more of it. Maybe now was the time to try getting through to Angie. “Yeah, yeah, uh-huh, you’re probably right. How about you take over driving, Yoshio? I’m gonna drop back and talk to Angie for a while.”

  But by sunset, she’d only said a few words to him. Maybe she was just simply scared, and tired from not sleeping much, and trying not to show it.

  He’d felt that way himself, the first night in camp. He made the mistake of trying to tell her that. “All I could think of that first night,” he said, “was that anything could be out there. But then I thought, it’s probably no more dangerous than Africa. Or parts of the Bronx, for that matter. I mean, we just keep thinking, This is alien, this is alien. And that makes it seem worse than it is. So I decided just to resign myself to anything that—” He broke off, seeing her look.

  She snapped, “You think I need this lecture? The strong male explains things to the dizzy female?”

  “No, no—that’s not what I’m—”

  “Just shut up, okay?”

  He shut up. The luminous orange oblong floating above the horizon turned the mirror bog-ponds into plates of hot copper. The sunset light limned one side of a great hummock up ahead. It was the first break in the monotony, and it brought with it a mixture of fear and an almost feverish curiosity.

  The oruh protested as Yoshio drove the lead cart faster to find out what the thing was.

  It was a small hill, as anomalous as a wart on a baby, rising about forty feet high from the bogs. It rose in a sudden arc in the midst of a clearing of bare, compacted dirt. The hill was pocked with caves, they saw as they came close. The right side of the hill looked molten with sunset light. The left side was purple with shadow. As they drew nearer still, the motion of the carts made the shadows in the caves seem to shift and flutter.

  Dennis, the expedition’s leader, climbed down from his cart and said, “Roit. No one moves till I have a look-see. Yoshio, stay where you are.” Dennis took an oil lamp, lit it with a spark-maker—something that looked like a nutcracker with flints—and carried the lamp up to the caves. In his right hand was a blunderbuss, charged.

  He approached the caves and stopped. Stared. Took a few steps closer.

  Bent to look into the nearest without getting closer than ten feet to it. He grunted and circled the hill slowly, looking into the caves, sniffing. He climbed up onto the hill and looked in each hole—there were about twenty.

  He came back to the carts grinning. “It’s perfect, it is!
Sompin’ used ter live there, but it don’t no more. Caves go back two or three meters, and then it’s blank wall. We got a perfect little shelter for the noit.”

  “It looks sort of like a termite hill,” Angie said, looking around at the bogs as if expecting to see termites coming home. ” Big termites.”

  Yoshio said, “Maybe whatever lived there leaves during the day, comes back at night.”

  “Neee-awwww.” Which was Dennis’s way of saying no contemptuously. “No tracks. Dust undisturbed. Nothin’ been there for years.”

  “I don’t remember this thing from the maps,” Zero said.

  “Those maps are a bloody mess, they are,” Dennis said.

  “This place is not on Pezz maps,” the Pezz said through its translation box.

  It squeaked and capered anxiously. The sack under its melted-dwarf scrotum inflated with a pweeeee sound, and then it announced, “I smell nothing but old smells from this place. They who came from these holes have not been here for a much-long.”

  Zickorian frowned at the hill. “I am not at ease,” the High Clansman said in his taciturn way. The band of gold that replaced his eyes shimmered red in the dying sunlight as he turned his head from side to side, as if looking with his ears.

  “I also am uncertain,” Calum said.

  Zero snorted. They’d learned that Calum echoed whatever Zickorian said.

  “The Pezz know when sompin’s around,” Dennis said. “You can see the caves for yourself. Come onnn, unpack the gear. Let’s mike camp!”

  Weariness made the decision for them. They made camp at the base of the hill. The Pezz foraged through a bog-pond for its dinner; the High Clansmen brought out their own supply sacks, and each took what looked like a lump of rock-hard meat into his mouth and chewed it incessantly for an hour before swallowing. This was their full meal.