Splendid Chaos (v1.1)

by John Shirley

  Hungry and tired to the core, the Earthers ate their rationed provisions quickly and silently. Afterward they sat half-slumped, wrapped in crude-cloth and leather, staring into the flicker of the oil lamp as if it were a miniature campfire. The sky went violet and then purple-black, crystal green at the horizons, like thin-sliced volcanic glass. The stars glowed through, thickened in the sky, jostling each other to get a look at the expedition. By degrees some of the weary irritability seeped from the Earthers. Cisco stretched out and fell asleep on the ground. Dennis and Yoshio looked at their crude map and spoke in low tones on the other side of the circle of lamplight.

  Angie sighed and turned to Zero, whispered, “I’m sorry about what I said. Telling you to shut up. But you were sort of patronizing.”

  “Guess so.”

  “God.” She looked up, craning to take in the sky. “Those stars. One good thing about Fool’s Hope—stars to beat the band. Makes Zales look shut down.”

  “Sort of like the Texas desert. Last time I was in Texas—visiting this friend of mine I used to correspond with—we went to a country music club out on the highway in the desert. Went in a convertible, and we got drunk. And we were looking at the stars. That was the best part. The club was a disappointment. No country music. Turned out it was Disco Night. Had all these country music trappings like a barn but everyone was dancing to Madonna and wearing—what’s the matter? Oh. ‘Don’t talk about Earth.’ “

  “Right. Don’t talk about Earth.”

  “Okay. But just one thing—I’m starting to miss it less. The planet itself is great, but the people have totally fucked it up. Ruined it.” Thinking about the trashed, oil-slicked beaches, the vast dumps, the toxins in everything, the dying sea, the moronic video culture, he could almost make himself believe he was better off here. Almost.

  “I don’t care if you’re talking about Earth negative or positive. Just don’t.”

  He was silent till she said, “I guess you think I’m bitchy. I just feel—cheated all the time. I was going to be a dancer. I studied for two years.”

  He looked at her in open surprise. “I knew you were taking dance, but I didn’t know you wanted to be a—you mean a career?”

  “Yep. I didn’t talk about it because how many people want to be a dancer or an actress or a successful musician, and talk about it, and everyone says, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ but secretly they think, ‘Sure, sure, what are the odds that’ ll happen?’ “

  “I didn’t have the good sense to keep my mouth shut. Went around making big talk about the movies I was going to make. You’re lucky, compared to a lot of us here. I’ll never be able to make those films, but you can dance here. In fact, you can dance for every human on this planet.”

  He fully expected her to tell him that he didn’t understand. But she said, “I never thought of that. That doesn’t make up for everything. But I guess it’s okay…” She said it softly, and he felt good.

  She yawned. “I’m gonna crash. Listen—how about sharing one of those big caves near the ground? I’m—I’d rather not stay in one alone. I mean, I think none of us should be alone, in case something attacks.” Her voice was utterly antisuggestive. Carefully. But he thought, Maybe…

  They got up and went to a cave and laid out their bedrolls. Side by side but not too close.

  The caves were bone dry and smooth; this and the thick coating of dust made them almost comfortable to sleep in, after the bog. As Zero fell asleep, his mind flickered with fantasies like an old-fashioned peep show.

  He imagined both of them waking before dawn, while the others were asleep. She’d reach for him and snuggle against him, and they’d find themselves kissing. And then…

  Well. She had asked him to sleep next to her, hadn’t she?

  Outside, the dissonant orchestra began its hopeless tuning up. Inside, the shallow cave echoed with their snores.

  Swanee watched and tried to remember everything he saw.

  Night in the Earther settlement. Much activity, which was itself unusual here after dark, and there was a constellation of lamps, scattered on every unused horizontal surface. The crowd of human shapes and nonhuman anomalies made Swanee think of a Chinese New Year’s parade, circulating within the benevolent corral of lights. Above the walls the Frost had risen and shone balefully on them through a purple sheen.

  Swanee stayed in the shadows of the settlement. He didn’t want anyone to see him. He wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t his fear of the aliens; Fiskle had forced him to spend time looking at them, getting used to them. “They are our enemies, but they are not bugbears. If we’re afraid of our enemies, our enemies win. Don’t trust them—but learn to observe.”

  No, it wasn’t fear of the aliens that made him stay crouched in the oruh stalls, peering from shadows out through the door, with the oruhs champing and defecating only a few feet behind him. It was horror of being seen by the Earthers. He hadn’t completed his Twist, of course. Not yet. Perhaps there was a little extra glossiness to his skin; a change in its shade, and texture. A certain humping to his back, his eyes changing color.

  But this would go unnoticed by anyone who didn’t know him well. It really wasn’t how he looked physically.

  It was how he felt. He was sure they could sense the changes taking place inside him: the birthing of his Real Self, Fiskle called it.

  So he crouched in shadow and watched. The Pioneers’ courtyard and the street outside was bannered and frilled for the Interspecies Festival.

  Crudely dyed strips of cloth were hung from the walls, the gate, the weapons rack. A banner reading simply FRIENDS! hung over the front door of the Pioneers’ dorm. Swanee had heard the Ki-ips puzzling to Jamie about it: in the language of the Ki-ips the closet analogue to friends was co-conspirator. Which race, they asked, were they planning to conspire with—and against whom?

  Sounding like Abraham Lincoln’s speechwriter, Jamie had said, “We’re conspiring with all races on this planet—against conflict itself.”

  “That almost makes sense,” the Ki-ips had replied.

  Swanee made a mental note of everything so that he could repeat it to Fiskle later. “Because after I arrive,” Fiskle had said, dispatching him on this mission, “things will be different, and much will go into hiding.” It was night out, and so the Poolsh had been unable to come: they were rooted and immobile nocturnally. But the Arthropods were there, and the Ki-ips, the two known sun-monkeys, a few Whorebugs, a few Gator-Men, two or three Pezz, a thing that looked like a big koala, and four upper-rank High Clansmen.

  Jamie and Trish and Doggo and Warren and a Latino named Chester Sanchez had gone in a deputation to the Neutral and had invited each race to send a few envoys to the Festival. Some understood readily that this was a sort of embassy party; others were baffled but complied for their own obscure reasons.

  Swanee spotted Jamie and Trish on the other side of the courtyard. He noticed that Jamie was still moving stiffly and seemed very pale. Swanee attuned himself to them, performing the focusing trick that had come to him with the changes, filtering out all other sound, amplifying, hearing them as if they were standing nearby.

  “The food was a mistake,” Jamie was saying. “We put crustaceans out for the Whorebugs, but the High Clans, it turns out, have some kind of animistic kinship with crustaceans—they’re like some holy animal from their homeworld, and they got mad because we gave them to the bugs to eat right in front of them. Then the Arthropods wouldn’t eat the mashed spinach-taters we set out for them because they have to be prepared in some kind of ritual and the way we did it was ‘septic.’ “

  “Chester warned you about all that.”

  “Yeah, I shoulda listened to Sanchez. He’s smart. After you, he’d be the guy I’d pick to succeed me if this infection kicks my butt.”

  “That,” Swanee muttered to the oruhs, “was a good one. A lucky one to hear.”

  On the left, beside the entrance to the dorms, was an improvised stage of woodblocks, on which four musicians with h
omemade drums sat in a semicircle. The small one, in the middle, was Chester Sanchez, who had irreverent brown eyes outlined by long, thick black eyelashes. The cheekbones of his wide face hinted at some Indian blood. His expression was always relaxed, barstool cool, but his whole body nodded to the drumbeat.

  Someone stepped onto the stage with a wooden washboard, and a sixth man stepped up with a jug. In a moment the salsa/jug band was feeling its way around a rhythm. A few Earthers gathered around the stage and began to dance, rather solemnly at first, but smiling. Some of the aliens seemed to respond. The Gator-Men slapped their corrugated skin and snapped their alligator jaws shut in time; the Pezz pranced, seeming to enjoy it. (But who knew with an alien? Perhaps they were in pain.) The Arthropod began to move in ponderous circles, swaying this way and that, making O’s of silvery slime on the ground. The High Clans seemed puzzled. Swanee heard one of them ask Warren, “Who is having offspring?”

  Warren said, “Nobody I know of. Why?”

  “We make drums only for the birthing time. This really is embarrassing. Perhaps if one of you pretended to have a child…? Just to make things decent.”

  Swanee noticed the one they called Bowler at the far side of the courtyard from the musicians, talking to a group of six human settlers. He seemed so earnest. Perhaps it would be best to listen in. Feeling his ears shift on his head, Swanee performed his trick: focusing, amplifying, winnowing sound.

  The noise of the Festival crowd and the musicians fell into the background, and Bowler’s voice leaped into aural relief. “It’s not so much the way it is as the way it’s going to be if we don’t plan against it. We’ll fall into exploitive capitalism. Already some people have cornered the market on crustaceans; others are dominating oruh skinning.”

  “Only because no one else wants to do it,” Doggo put in.

  Bowler went on. “And the people who have the most to trade are the most influential in the settlement. Eventually some concept of land ownership will develop here, with people working for other people as employees … we bring all those concepts with us from Earth. It was so entrenched on Earth, in the United States, it was almost impossible to consider giving it up. But in a place like this where everything is raw and unshaped well, the capitalism is only inside us, in our assumptions and customs. We can devalue the whole idea of ownership and capitalism and start a society unencumbered by the traps of the old.”

  “Why should we?” Doggo burst in, more assertively this time. “Buying and selling and owning is the natural human way, and you yourself said it held civilization together.”

  “It held it together, but in a viciously competitive way. We can hold it together in a constructive way. Communal decentralism. There were lots of communal Earth societies, even before the Bolsheviks. We were trained to believe capitalism was the natural order of things because it was convenient for the status quo. Listen, Doggo, this planet is a great opportunity, a chance for a new society.”

  “Sure, and whoever organizes it is the big cheese! You’d like that, right, Bowler?”

  “I’d enjoy a leadership role, that’s true. But that doesn’t devalue my leadership or my ideas. And I don’t fancy a dictatorship, if that’s what you’re implying. All I want is to get the thing started.”

  Doggo snorted out another retort. The argument went on.

  Interesting, Swanee thought. This could be a wedge for Fiskle.

  But he heard something else, something that made him shiver. A sound below the other sounds. A deep thrum, announcing the coming of Father—and Fiskle.

  After a few moments, everyone felt it. They turned and looked toward the front gate. Conversation died from lack of attention. Even the musicians stopped playing. Puzzled, the aliens, too, turned to look. Fiskle had come, and he had brought his New Humans Lodge with him.

  They were backlit by something—no, it was some one, Swanee saw. It was Harry “Hulk” Porter, who had been a football player on Earth, a brutish linebacker. He had, on Fool’s Hope, Twisted into a slender, buxom woman.

  She called herself Bella; her Twist was modeled on an early 1960s movie vampiress, a mesh of Vampira and Elvira, a human pop caricature of swelling cleavage in a skin-tight black gown, of spike heels and legs in black mesh stockings and swept-back black hair; the thin, black, arched eyebrows of a Disney villainess, the clinging black gown that Morticia Addams might’ve worn if she’d posed for the first panels of a Playboy spread. Comic-book lurid makeup: dead-white skin and bloodred lips. The “clothing” and “makeup,” Swanee knew, grew from the skin, like fur or scales. She was all this, and she was luminous too; emitting a sickly green glow like those light-absorbing plastic children’s toys shaped like stylized Spooks; toys that glow in the dark. She was quite predatory, of course. She was a sin and a punishment for sin, in one.

  Swanee basked in the sight of her. She glowed like a fluorescent sea creature; she stood there, seductively relaxed and lethally confident, like a minor goddess in the back row of the pantheon. Swanee loved her, loved her deeply, loved her achingly, from afar. She was an artfully crafted apotheosis of one of Swanee’s boyhood fantasies.

  The others, standing just outside the light from the oil lamps, illuminated only by their proximity to Bella, were dim figures, shapes sprung from whimsy, seen mostly in silhouette.

  With Father looming protectively lust behind him, Fiskle stepped into the light. The crowd aspirated together, almost a whimper, seeing his clothing, Swanee stared. He hadn’t seen Fiskle for a day—but he’d changed. So had Kelso, Swanee knew; he saw the dark hump of Kelso, like a jacket hood, hanging from the back of Fiskle’s neck. Most of the crowd couldn’t see Kelso at that angle. They were staring at Fiskle. Fiskle was wearing a new suit.

  Which was impossible. Where would he get a new suit?

  Oh. Where Bella got her skin-tight gown, and Father his raiment.

  Fiskle seemed to be wearing goggles. But with a plummeting sensation, Swanee knew that he wasn’t. They weren’t goggles. They were small camera lenses, like the ones on the security cameras you see in banks. And they were growing from his skull.

  Had the Meta altered him? Cyborged him?

  No. This thing had grown out of him. Swanee knew it, looking at the lenses.

  A shuddery recognition: They had always been part of Fiskle.

  Somehow, inexplicably, they went with the immaculately clean, professionally pressed gray suit and the shiny, spotless black patent leather shoes. (How many of the staring crowd realized that the shoes were not shoes but Fiskle’s feet?) And yes, the camera-lens eyes went with the tapering, four-inch mirror-painted fingernails on his prehensile, boneless fingers.

  And his face. Was frozen. Trapped into one expression: Humorously supercilious, with just a faint undercurrent of cold rage, like a hint of sparks from short-circuiting wires glimpsed through a crack in the walls…

  “I have decided to confront you with the truth of your destiny,” Fiskle said, sounding like a pompous Shakespearean actor, his voice ringing in the frightened silence. Kelso shifted on Fiskle’s back and humped up onto his shoulder, pulling itself up with tiny little black bird-legs; it took its place like a parrot, suddenly in full view of everyone, and flapped its wings. The incongruity brought a sizzle of suddenly sucked-in breaths and mutters from the crowd. One of the Ki-ips made a startled bra-aak sound, and a Pezz squeaked in bafflement.

  Kelso’s face had been stripped away from the skull; only shreds of his hair remained, a stringy fringe on the remaining strip of scalp around the back of the yellow cranium. The fleshy wings were stylized, outsize versions of the wings on Mercury’s helmet; grotesque outgrowths of his ears, flapping uselessly like the flattened arm-stumps of a Thalidomide child. His eyes, sans lids, bulged from the fleshless sockets, sickly pink, and perpetually staring. The rest of the face was the face of a skull. Flecks of flesh stuck to it here and there. The jaws opened, and a long black tongue oozed out, licked off a bit of rotting flesh clinging to the cheekbone, and sucked it into its mou
th with a smack of enjoyment.

  “They’ve gone alien,” someone said. “They’re fucking aliens.”

  Those words sent a sick weakness into Swanee, “No,” he whispered to the oruh. “No way. No.”

  The thrum from Father picked up, and a shiver of quiescence went through them all. “We’re human,” Father rumbled, his voice deeply reassuring.

  “We’re adaptations. Each of us with some speciality, something useful to the great pattern the Meta intend. We have in fact come to rescue you from the aliens.”

  “This is undeniably another world,” Fiskle said, his voice carrying theatrically. “We must not deny its needs. To be human here, we have to change, to become—”

  “It’s a lie!” Jamie said, stepping forward. Doggo, behind her, moved off into the crowd, signaling to the guards on the wall. They stood ready with pikes; others moved to charge their blunderbusses. Jamie yelled, “You aren’t adaptations for this world. You’re Twists! The Current has changed you because it does that to people, and only the Meta know why—but I don’t believe it’s improvement. We’re not going to be intimidated by—by um…” Her voice faltered.

  It was Father’s doing. The thrum had deepened, from the hidden thing on his chest, and ripples of trust and relaxation spread out from him. He said, “We came like this hoping to shock you into accepting us—and your future.”

  Jamie looked uncertain, as if about to give in, as Father went on. “We are your future. Those of you who want to work with the Meta, come with us now. Accept Professor Fiskle’s leadership. Discover your Real Self, the fulfillment that you’ve been aching for. We understand that hollowness, that perpetual doubt you feel.”

  One of the Pezz stepped up to Doggo, who was staring slack-mouthed at Father. He squeaked and his box translated, “You are experiencing [untranslatable] cerebral interference. You are being [approximate translation] manipulated!”

  Doggo stared at the Pezz for a second, then shook himself and yelled, pointing at Father, “The Pezz is right—he’s bullshit!” He signaled to Sanchez, who began drumming with his hands on the crude conga vised between his knees.