by John Shirley
The drumbeat broke up the thrum. A shudder ran through every human there as Father’s influence dissipated.
Doggo yelled over the beat, “You think I don’t know about you?” He pointed at Father but turned to Fiskle. “This thing murdered one of our people—fella named Dagstrom, hardly more than a kidl He broke his fucking neck! And you got the nerve to—” He broke off and turned to shout at the walls. “I want the son of a bitch arrested!”
There was a jostle of movement on the walls as the guards headed for the stairways. Fiskle looked around. His camera eyes were whirring; the lenses extruded an inch further, their chrome collars turning, glinting. Kelso looking at the other wall, as if he were a second set of eyes for Fiskle; drool ran down his bony jaw, and his bulging eyes caught the oil-lamp light.
Fiskle barked out something Swanee couldn’t make out, and two enormous Twists stepped from the shadows to flank Father. Two more stood beside Fiskle. They were what Fiskle called Phylum Twos. Eight feet tall, naked, as pink as babies with heads nearly as small as babies’—but monstrously muscled. Utterly under Fiskle’s influence. Their great penises, like elephant’s trunks, hung down past their knees, wagging softly with their movements. Their feet, broad as the blades of shovels, dug toes into the hard pavement as if it were clay.
The crowd backed away. Fear suffused the air like the stink of blood in a slaughterhouse. Sanchez stopped his drum patter.
Jamie put her hand on Doggo’s arm. “Keep the guards back.”
“Even the infinitely stupid have their moments of wisdom,” Fiskle said to her, bowing slightly.
“They’re very stuuuu-pid, very stupid, very very stupid,” Kelso chattered on Fiskle’s shoulder, using its mutated larynx to make a voice somewhere between a parrot and a sneering dirty-minded adolescent street kid. “Every stupid body but baby and me. Baby and me.” It nuzzled affectionately against Fiskle’s cheek.
“My friends here,” Fiskle said, “are very strong. It would be, as this sweet little bulldyke has suggested, unwise to attack Father or myself. The Phylum Two can take walls apart with their hands. Bodies are like soap bubbles to them. And the rest of us, the Phylum One, we have our talents—much that you might find disagreeable.”
“Fine,” Doggo grated. “Then just get the fuck out.”
As always, Fiskle’s expression remained mannequin frozen. But his camera eyes turned and clicked to themselves. Kelso whined, “Try to be friends, and they stink on us. They are not sensitive. They have brain farts. Stink for stink, stink back at them.” It flapped its pathetic wings and spat a fetid oyster of bloody sputum onto the street.
“Perhaps the time has come,” Fiskle began, “to demonstrate—”
Doggo broke in, “We could pike you before your lunks could protect you. We’d get you, at least. Before they got us.”
Fiskle took a deep breath, then nodded curtly. “Another day, then.”
He raised his hand in a florid gesture of farewell and turned. His people parted for him and followed him out the gate.
Swanee’s heart ached as he watched Bella go.
Thrumming, perhaps hoping to draw a few of them along in a psychic slipstream, Father was the last to go. Swanee felt the tug. He fought it. He wanted to stay here, and perhaps if he remained with the humans, his store of humanity would remain with him. He had glimpsed what Fiskle was, and what the others were becoming.
He found himself walking out the door of the oruh stable, pushing through the crowd. He was drawn by the thrum and the will-o’-the-wisp light of Bella, a light retreating like the glow of swamp gas, always just out of reach.
He didn’t go alone. For some, Fool’s Hope was simply too torturously unfamiliar a canvas to contemplate, too foreign a banquet to feast on. Half Twisted already by madness and despair, some twenty settlers followed Father’s Pied-Piper thrum out the gate. Pursuing a light that was darkness.
5
Zero awoke suddenly from a dream of earthquakes. In the watercolor-green light of dawn he saw that Angie was still asleep. She lay with her back to him. Her crude-cloth blanket had fallen away from her; he was sorry she slept with her clothes on. He reached for the blanket to cover her.
The tremors came, a deep rumble from below. The sound translated into motion so that dirt crumbled down on them from the ceiling of the cave.
Still dreaming?
Another tremor. A crack in the wall. A muffled scream from somewhere on the other side of it.
Zero scrambled out of the cave. Braced on a ledge, he turned, grabbed Angie’s arm, and pulled her into the open like a sack of flour. She cursed and got onto her feet, blinking, her face swollen with sleep, leaning against the outer wall of the mound. “For God’s sake—”
One more quick tremor, short but sharp, so that they almost lost their precarious footing, and Angie’s eyes widened. She reached into the cave and scooped up their bedrolls, and they scrambled down the hill.
The others were there, Cisco and Yoshio and the High Clansmen and the Pezz, standing in a confused group by the oruh carts. The oruh champed nervously and shifted on their pads like children waiting to go to the bathroom.
Dennis was missing. “Where’s Dennis?” Zero asked, looking up at the mound. None of the caves seemed to have collapsed.
“I’m round here!” Dennis’s voice came from just out of sight around the curve of the mound. “Come and have a look at this!”
They walked around the curve and saw Dennis about halfway up, his head and shoulders extended from a cave just big enough for his body. He pointed to a much larger cave beside him. “This is going to be hard to believe, but there’s an entrance in there to another place, a beautiful underground world!” He stopped and grinned at them. Foamy spittle at the corners of his mouth ran through the dust on his face, marking it like a handlebar moustache. “I found it last night. I’m in an exit from it now. You must see it—it’s beautiful. I think it’s where the,”—he paused and stared into space, his jaw drooping—“trying to remember. The…” Then the animation came back into his face. “The Meta! That’s where the Meta live! They’ve been waiting for us to find them, and they’ll explain everything! It’s so beautiful! There’s a tribe of women there, and they’re so friendly!” He winked at them idiotically. “Come on in! Look! It has to be this hole over here! You must see it!”
“Wow? Cisco said. “That’s rad, man! I mean, it’s like it was always with us, underneath us, and like, I could feel it spiritually, but I didn’t know what it was!” Impelled by his burst of enthusiasm, he started up the slope.
Zickorian looked at Calum and spoke in their language. The translation box said, “Let’s have a look. Perhaps this is a great discovery imparting [approximate translation] karmic honor!”
Yoshio said, “I think, uh, perhaps you’d better not.”
Zero stared at Dennis. The spittle had become drool. Pink drool, mixed with blood. Dennis twitched.
Zero scrambled up the slope, grabbed Cisco, and pulled him back. Cisco fell on his ass and slid down the slope. “Shit! Goddammit, Zero!”
Zero slid after him and backed away from the mound. “Dennis—what happened to your accent?”
The Pezz said, “I smell something that used to live here … closer now. Also [untranslatable].”
Angie backed away from the mound, one hand going to her mouth. “Oh, God. Oh, Dennis…”
Zero said, “We’d better get the hell out of here.”
Yoshio looked at Zero. In a halting voice he said, “Zero, we can’t leave him.”
Zero took a deep breath and nodded. He trotted back to the carts, reached in, and brought out a pike and a charged blunderbuss. He returned to Yoshio and handed him a pike; they started up the hill, moving cautiously between the caves.
When they reached the ledge just below Dennis’s cave, he drew himself partway into the cave like a startled hermit crab. “Hello, fellows,” Dennis said, his eyes rolling wildly. Sweat made more streaks on his face. A little blood ran from his n
ose. “Hello. Ready to … enter the beautiful paradise … beautiful girls?”
Yoshio grabbed Dennis’s left arm; Zero grabbed his right, and they pulled, hard. Dennis came partway out. Zero and Yoshio dug in their heels and leaned out to enlist the help of gravity. All at once Dennis pulled free of the cave with a squelching sound.
His lower half was gone. It had been chewed away, replaced by what appeared to be a maggot as big as a large dog, whipping itself like a worm on a hot sidewalk. Rubbery bands of pinkish white. Its underside was swollen with the parts of Dennis it was digesting. Its upper half was concealed completely inside Dennis’s torso like a hand hidden in a Puppet.
Some tap-in filament coopting Dennis’s brain. “Beautiful girls, fellows!” the Dennis-shell was yammering. “They give their big breasts to you! Beautiful girls.”
There were shouts from the group at the base of the mound and the shrill orooooooh! of an oruh in fear of its life. But Zero couldn’t take his eyes from the thing that had Dennis. Zero’s stomach writhed to match it. The slugs had been in the mound all the time, behind the backs of the caves, hibernating. The thing flopped and whipped, slapping the ground, inching back toward the cave. “Yoshio”—losing control now—“what do we…”
Yoshio made a high-pitched sound mingling horror and fury—and drove the spike through the middle of the great maggot, piercing it through. Yellow paste of maggot-gut squirted. Dennis screamed.
The maggot crawled backward into the cave, pulling the spasming shell of Dennis with it. Zero watched, feeling the blunderbuss as a great leaden weight in his hands, feeling as if some part of himself were going down a drain, as Dennis’s face drew back into the hole. Maybe there was just a hint of imploring in Dennis’s eyes…
“There might be some part of his brain still alive,” Yoshio said huskily, “experiencing.”
Zero made himself step up to the hole. He shoved the blunderbuss up against Dennis’s forehead. He fired. He glimpsed blood and bone exploding, and then the sky leaped into his eyes as he bent backward, losing the gun, tumbling down the hill, fragmentary images of clouds and dirt and a hole with a hideous pinkish-white face—
He retched painfully on the packed dirt at the base of the mound. His face was warm and wet. Tears. Angie knelt beside him, touching his cheek, but he couldn’t enjoy it.
Yoshio’s voice: “The mound is breaking. It’s opening up. Where’s the oruh for that cart?”
Zero sat up. Clods of dirt came bouncing down the mound to roll against his feet. He looked up and saw pinkish-white skin glistening in broad cracks in the mound.
One of the oruh was missing from its traces. Its black blood smeared the ground in a path that led up to a big hole in the mound. A plaintive oroooh echoed to them.
The cracks in the mound widened.
Zero and the others crowded on the remaining carts, driving the oruh away.
The oruh—barely restrained till now by Cisco and the High Clansmen—had no need to be urged.
“What was that act you performed?” the Pezz asked. “You got out of the cart and [untranslatable]—”
Zero sighed. “That was vomiting. Regurgitation. Brought on by a shock to my nervous system.” Bitterly he mocked the Pezz’s clinical objectivity.
“From seeing my friend half eaten, taken over by the … whatever it was.”
“I understand the shock. Myself, seeing a herd partner in that situation, I would have run in circles for a while. This is my version of the sickness you experienced.”
“Uh-huh,” Zero said. He didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to look at the Pezz, which trotted along beside him. The Pezz was too alien; something profoundly alien had eaten Dennis’s consciousness alive.
Zero was sitting beside Angle, who was driving the oruh. Cisco and Yoshio were in the back; Zickorian and Calum rode in the second cart. They’d abandoned the third cart.
The Pezz’s squeaking merged indistinguishably with the squeaking of the wheels. Zero had to strain to hear the translator box.
The bog was changing. The ponds were fewer and farther apart. The ground between them seemed dryer. The moss-suckers came rarely. A few twisted trees, if that’s what they were, sprouted between the bogs, competing with the glassy hoop-plants. There was less smell of waterbound life—which on Fool’s Hope was very much like the smell of ponds on Earth, with a few dissonant olfactory notes—and more of another smell, brought from ahead of them on a faint breeze, a sort resinous plangency and dry dustiness: a smell of austerely dry places.
“When you first vomited,” the Pezz said, “I thought you were praying and applying holy benediction to the road-territory.” The Pezz went on, guilelessly straining Zero’s patience. “That is what we do, when we vomit. But now I understand and agree: The violation of the inner person is the greatest territorial crime of all. My people will see to it that the mound is exterminated. I left a scent-swatch there impregnated with a warning … I vomited it.”
“Good,” Zero grated, “glad to hear it.”
Translating Zero’s remarks, the box strapped to the Pezz squeaked and trilled. The Pezz said, “The translator box uses the third degree of semi-refined sarcasm in its tonality. I confirm it in [approximate translation:] sorting through the hormonal content of your sweat-vapor. I take this to mean you are annoyed: I understand. I will mention it no further. Except to request an explanation of your attitude toward territoriality. Your people pass in and out of one another’s territorial scopes without [untranslatable] or protective acknowledgment. I would have thought that the territorial instinct is as universal as the survival instinct, with which it must bear some [untranslatable] relationship.”
“We have a sense of personal space and territory,” Zero said, glad of the chance to abstract things away from talk of Dennis. “But I guess it’s simply less extensive than yours. My physical sense of territory—unless you’re talking about my, you know, residence—extends only, urn, maybe twenty inches from me.”
“Mine doesn’t extend from me at all,” the Pezz said.
Zero looked at it, puzzled. Its rubbery, melted-dwarf face, if that was its face, was enigmatic. When it spoke, it was like someone with a charred sheet of rubber over his features; the rubber moved about, but you saw no no mouth at work. The Pezz’s speech sounded like someone trying to talk to you, high-pitched, through mummy wrappings.
Zero frowned. “It sounds like … you are your territory. The part of you the dust from the road is settling on. That’s you, to me. Is there more?”
“That’s my core or reflective self, my [untranslatable] self. My exteriorized self extends to [untranslatable] distance. That self-layer is of course dented when other entities intersect it with their own exteriorized self-layers.”
“Uh, are you talking about some kind of bioelectric field? I read about—”
“No. I speak of a self of environmental interrelationship.”
“This sounds like it’s, sort of, um, entirely psychological, to me.”
The Pezz was stung. “That’s an offensive remark.”
“It was? Sorry. It wouldn’t be for us. Listen, um—you’re like, absorbing people’s vapor exudations and going through them for hormonal traces that tell about their attitudes, and … well, doesn’t that violate our territories?”
“No. We investigate them only after they have emanated from your outermost self.”
“Oh. That’s nice. I guess.” He looked at the bogs. Fewer yet. “Where do they come from?” he wondered aloud. “The bogs. I mean, there’s no stream feeding them like in a swamp. Why don’t they just evaporate?”
“They come from below,” the Pezz said. “I smell a big water table. I don’t know its source.”
“You smell anything else—anything new?”
“Yes. A new ecosystem. A dryer place. For some time now.”
“That much I can smell, too.”
By late afternoon they’d left the bogs behind. They consuited the map, and Zickorian’s crude compas
s, and the Pezz—and set off across the veldt, northeast, following the faint track.
The road, if that was what it was, wasn’t rutted, and the ride was much smoother. Some of the gloom that had come with Dennis’s death lifted from the company. Cisco broke out a water flask and passed it around as they sat up straighter and looked around at the new landscape.
The plain was dotted with man-high, whip-thin, feathery growths, yellow but coated on the windward side with blue dust. The desert reached away to the north; behind them, to the south, were the bogs. To the west, swallowing the horizon, was what might have been a bank of blue fog or the edge of a forest. The veldt stretched away unbroken to the east.
“All that water back there, and then suddenly a desert,” Yoshio said when they stopped for lunch. “That is geologically peculiar. The ground rose a little—but not very much, really.”
“This ground is barren and dusty from stripping and wind exposure,” Zickorian said, “not from lack of water. Water exists under the ground, and it rains here. No, something has kept all but a few growths stripped away. This land is very much like my own, and I have looked at it and known: an animal has done this. Many such.”
They went on. And after a while they were lulled to a stupor by the motion of the cart and the dull pressure of the heat, a stupor broken only by anxiety. The open spaces made them feel exposed, vulnerable. So by unspoken agreement the High Clansmen drove their cart up beside the Earthers’; the two carts trundled on side by side.
Occasionally they saw small patches of hoop-grass and something that looked like a cheap magician’s paper bouquet. And near a patch of the magician’s bouquet was what appeared at first to be great heaps of cow manure, each as big as a car. “Looks and smells like droppings of something,” Angie said. “But…”
“It’d have to be something fuckin’ big,” Cisco said for her. “Like a dinosaur or somethin’.”
