Splendid Chaos (v1.1)

by John Shirley

  “It wasn’t something big that left those things,” Zickorian said. “They are something big themselves.” He reached into the back of the cart, picked up a scrap of leather, and winged it at the big, crusty yellow-brown lump.

  The heap humped itself and began to move away, like a misshapen inchworm, irritably questing for a more private place in the sun. On the way it paused and extended an oily brown pseudopod to a clump of the hoop-grass and magician’s bouquet. It uprooted the whole clump in one easy motion, leaving a naked crater, stuffed the vegetation into some aperture on its underside, and then went humping on to the west.

  The Earthers stared—and then laughed. Laughing felt good, and Cisco, as if to perpetuate a sort of festive sharing, passed the water flask around.

  Zero drank and handed it to Yoshio. “That’s good.” Zero said. “But God I’d like a beer.”

  “Uh-uh,” Angie said, closing her eyes and sighing. ” Diet Pepsi. Or better yet, a Tab.”

  “Okay,” Zero said. “We’ll stop and get you some. Goddamn 7-11s are everywhere.”

  “They don’t have 7-11s here,” Yoshio said. “They have Plaid Pantry.”

  “No, it’s AM/PM here,” Cisco said.

  “No, they have In ‘n’ Out,” Angie put in. “I know because I always send the Ki-ips there to get me my Silvathins.”

  Zickorian tapped the translator box as if trying to restart it. “The translator seems to be broken.”

  As they rolled on, they gradually became aware of a white noise that by degrees refined itself into what Zero could only think of as “a cloud of cheeping,” the incessant cheeping of hundreds of birds.

  Minutes later, as the wind died down and the skirling dust parted, they caught sight of a big tree. It was almost twenty meters high, the tallest thing they’d encountered on the plain. And as they neared it, Zero’s heart swelled with a warmth he knew was foolish. It was a tree, a real tree, and in it, thronging it, were real birds. He had seen many things flapping through the skies of Fool’s Hope. Things soaring, too, and spiraling and hovering and darting. But none had been birds.

  They pulled up about thirty yards from the base of the tree and gazed at it, the Earthers gaping. It looked like an oak tree without leaves. There was a bird on every perching spot on every branch. They were brown birds with rust-colored breasts, varying in size, but all apparently of the same species.

  “I’ve seen starlings do that on Earth,” Zero said. “A huge flock of them just pick a tree, or two together, settle in, and start yelling, go on for hours. For no reason anyone can figure out.” The sight comforted him.

  “They can’t have been there long,” Yoshio shouted over the wall of sound.

  “No guano under the tree.”

  The Pezz was squeaking something. They couldn’t make out the translation over the noise. Zero heard only, “Wrong smell!” Then the Pezz made a dash at the tree, as if attacking or trying to startle the birds. He stopped short, but it was enough. The birds began to flap their wings—in unison. As one. Every bird in the tree flapped in time with every other bird. And the shallowly rooted tree—not a tree at all—lifted off from the ground. Though the birds remained on the branches. Because, Zero saw as the tree took off, the birds were part of the branches. They had no legs, nor even eyes. They were fused to the thing they sat on, and if they could see, it was through the “tree’s” eye, which—golden, big as a dinner plate, and baleful—kept watch on them from between its roots as the tree flew away.

  “I’m sorry I scared it,” the Pezz said. “I was testing a theory. I didn’t think it would go so far.”

  “No birds,” Zero said. “Okay.” He felt numb. “Fine. No birds.”

  “Fuck it,” Cisco said. “Let’s roll.”

  They camped a little early that night, in the partial shelter of an outcropping of rock. After they made sure it really was an outcropping of rock. The sinking sun was just beginning to turn the upper branches of the feather trees into neon fans.

  The outcropping—of basalt, thirty feet high—slanted gray-black from the plain like three tombstones stacked one against another, each a little smaller than the next; the great stone made a dimple in the dust where it thrust through from the bedrock. A few smaller rocks, along the same design, studded the dust in a rough circle curving out from the outcropping.

  Zero and Yoshio sat together, their backs to the stone of the biggest outcropping, gazing out at the decaying sunlight. The row of rocks stretched a picket of shadows long and black on the gray-blue plain. The dust had been swirled into wave-patterns, as if garden-raked that way. Beyond, the horizon compressed pinwheels of dust clouds between the dirty jade sky and the ashen ground.

  “It’s like a Japanese garden, sort of, isn’t it?” Zero said tentatively, glancing at Yoshio. Expecting Yoshio’s refined disdain.

  But Yoshio said, “Yes. The composition has come together.”

  “You know Yoshio, you have an accent—but your English, your sentence structure … actually, it’s better than mine,” Zero said, prying dust from his nose and ears. Angie and Cisco were scraping dust from themselves, too, Cisco wasting water by rinsing his eyes. The Pezz had found nothing to forage and ate pressed vegetable matter from its supply bag. It put a boardlike foot into the bag and drew the wafers out; the matter of its foreleg flowed into a grasping shape so it could thrust the food into the slit above its pouch. The High Clansmen had strolled off into the plain to “exercise mollification of animistic deities,” according to the translator box.

  They had decided that the spirits investing the local animal life were annoyed by the expedition and needed placation.

  “I was born in Japan but, after my seventh year, educated in San Francisco,” Yoshio said. “Still, most of my time out of school was spent with Japanese, speaking Japanese. And every summer we went back to Japan. I lived there for three years after I graduated from college. American universities are now held in low regard in Japan—I couldn’t find work I could bear. So I came back to California to work in my father’s business in Silicon Valley. I was not happy there, either. I like to think about the—the potential of electronics, of computers, but I grew very tired of actually working with them on little—oh, little job puzzles all day. I wanted to make something—something artistically meaningful.”

  “Funny how many people here are artists of some kind,” Zero remarked.

  “Not everyone. But a high percentage. Anyway, what happened after that?”

  “I felt rigid. Trapped. It was as if I’d brought all the strictures of Japan here with me. I wanted to do something different, to meet a different kind of people. So one night I went to San Francisco, thinking maybe I could find a place where artists congregate. Writers, poets—perhaps a coffeehouse of some kind. I saw a sort of—it looked like a circus tent made of something shiny and hard. It was in a lot that had been vacant the week before, near my uncle’s house. They said it was for performance art. So I went in.” He shrugged.

  “I know the rest.”

  “I thought it was performance art right up until I lost consciousness. ‘A very clever performance,’ I thought.”

  Angie stood up and said, “Okay, before the light’s all gone, I’m gonna use the ladies’ room. Thank God for this rock. I’m going on the other side. You guys have fair warning.” She stood up and walked around the rock, out of sight.

  Cisco came to sit by Zero, grunting as he settled back against the rock. “My back hurts. My butt hurts. There’s dust between my teeth. My throat itches from it. My eyes hurt. My—”

  “We all feel that way, Cisco,” Zero broke in.

  “Maybe,” Cisco said, “it’s like Zen or something. The discipline.” He looked at Yoshio. “Right?”

  Yoshio snorted. “I don’t know anything about Zen.”

  “You seem so, uh, philosophical,” Cisco said.

  “There are lots of philosophies. I like to think about things, but I don’t want to be a monk. Not unless the Meta refuse to bring any more
women here.”

  “I’m with you there, man,” Cisco said. “But whatever happens here, we got to find a way to relate to it, you know? I mean, it’s all, like, a message to us, like stuff in dreams.”

  “Don’t you dare!” It was Angie, shrieking in outrage from the other side of the rock.

  Zero was up with a pike in his hand and running before the other two were on their feet. He ran around the outcropping—and stopped dead.

  Seeing Zero, Angie hastily kicked dust over a hole she’d dug in the plain.

  The two High Clansmen were moving in a stiff-legged dance to either side of her. They looked like children imitating kangaroos as they danced toward one another, then smacked their fists together and turned toward her, making humping motions with their hips, dancing closer as she backed toward the rock. Clamped in Zickorian’s mouth was a short blue stick carved with runes.

  “I’m warning you, Zickorian!” she yelled.

  Zero walked up and tapped Zickorian on the shoulder. “An emergency has come up. You have to stop your dance.”

  After the translator box had done its work, Zickorian stopped dancing and signaled Calum. Calum stopped dancing. Zickorian turned to Zero, aggressiveness in the abrupt movement. His vision-strip flashed like a stoplight. He took the stick from his mouth. “What emergency?”

  “A danger of physical conflict between members of the expedition. Angie is about to deck you.” Zero turned to Angie. “What happened?”

  She snapped, “They came up to me and started making those obscene motions, and then Zickorian took a stick out of his satchel and started rubbing it on my crotch!”

  Zickorian replaced the stick in his pouch with one hand; with the other he thrust a finger into a corner of his mouth, which Zero had learned expressed puzzlement and surprise. “You mean her protestations were genuine? They seemed to translate so exactly to the ritual protestations of the matable female.”

  “She means it.”

  “Then why did she signal for a mating ritual? Just as we’d completed our mollification of the animal-invested deities. That is the proper time for the female to squat and emit musk.”

  “But you know perfectly well,” Zero said, his voice whetted to a sharp edge, “that we’re a different race with different customs.”

  “Yes, but some settlement Earthers have studied our customs. I thought she had studied our customs and was offering herself in our customary way as an act of interracial camaraderie, such as your people speak of with such enthusiasm.”

  Was there a note of sarcasm there? “So she squatted and, uh, made water, which you thought was musk, and she did this at the wrong time, and you thought—I see. You really think sex is possible between your race and—?”

  “Zero!” Angie broke in. “Let’s not explore every angle of this too thoroughly, shall we?”

  “No, I don’t think it’s possible,” Zickorian said, “nor desirable. We were making the ritual dance of polite disavowal.”

  “You were”—Zero smiled—“letting her down easy.”

  Angie made a grating sound deep in her throat and stomped back to the camp.

  It was night on Fool’s Hope. Great shafts of bluewhite light arose, quivering faintly, from the perfectly round holes in the Rug. They stood sharply delineated against the purple-black sky, looking like translucent columns of quartz holding up the ceiling of lowering rose-edged clouds. The effect was of some enormous, luminous temple just trembling into being.

  The holes punched in the smooth blue Rug-growth over the rolling plain were perfectly round but randomly distributed, each between thirty and fifty feet across. A gathering of Twists was taking place in the sixty-foot gap between two of the biggest. Swanee wheeled overhead, riding the warm updrafts. He circled the columns of IAMton light, shivering as IAMton energies tingled his bioelectric field, exciting his Twist-grown psychic sensitivity. It was warmer near the columns of shine, but not dangerously hot. He held back from them because he was afraid of the interaction of the IAMton radiation and his own mind, though he had no notion what the fruit of that interaction might be.

  Flying seemed normal and natural. He’d awakened with the wings—and the other changes—only that morning. Almost immediately on waking he’d run and leaped into the air, spread his wings…

  And flown. It was as if he’d been doing it all his life. He had—he was one of those people who dreamed often of flying. The dream and waking life had overlapped.

  From up here, it was possible to pretend the congregation of Twists was a gathering of humanity, Swanee thought.

  In their oddity they had become interchangeable with the aliens.

  Sometimes Swanee wondered: had they become aliens, somehow? Was there a race of creatures like Swanee somewhere?

  Like Swanee: glossy black parodies of a man, with hollow bones and rattling wings borrowed from a pterodactyl (except that those wings were not built on the frame of degenerated arms—he had his arms still, in the same place, but shaped differently now); with a face shaped into a leathery muzzle, nose flattened onto upper jaw; long prehensile fingers, three to a hand; his manhood shrunk to something that emerged from the slit at his groin when he peed and, he supposed, when some unguessable mating ritual with some unguessable mate triggered a more dramatic response. A pared-back man without a gram of fat, with lean muscles and leathery black skin stretched tightly on his light frame; a kite-man.

  There were no others like him, because a Twist buried deep in his own mind had shaped him. He knew that as surely as an angry man knows he wants to hurt someone. He was alone. He was a Twist.

  (And of course there were no aliens who had become Twists here; aliens who’d been Twisted kept to themselves.)

  But three hundred feet above the gathering of Twists, with details blurred by distance, Swanee could pretend for a comforting moment that they were ordinary people down there, wearing costumes. One was costumed as a dwarf crossed with a pig; another as a man whose legs had fused into an enormous snake’s tail, so that he sat Sshaped on it; another was a bar of flesh that flowed into this shape or that with its moods; many were Phylum Two: great eraser-pink men grown to eight and nine feet, their muscles swollen unnaturally, their heads shrunk, absurd caricatures of weightlifters, naked and brutally sexed. There was a woman who was also a venomous reptile; beside her a man with a giant snail’s underside instead of legs, his arms shrunken to pathetic flaps; there were the skate couple, a man and woman shaped like human-flesh Mantas; there was Smarg, who weighed nearly a ton, a human-skinned eight-legged triceratops; there were the diaphanous vamps, like silk scarfs in the shape of women, who were lighter even than Swanee except when they were engorged with stolen blood; there was the inside-out man, whose intestines were also his legs, whose heart beat visibly before you; there were the four air-sharks, held aboveground with their pockets of helium and their constant back-and-forthing, their wide, toothy shark-mouths open, barely restraining themselves from tearing at their fellow Twists. There was Father, looming over most of the others, and there was Sissy, the man who had become an evil little girl in a white lace dress; Oliver, the former pop star, had split into two perfected, Adonis-like versions of himself, each as golden and perfect as the David of Michaelangelo, each perpetually embracing the other, obscenely posing and posingly obscene. There, too, were Pacific Bell, Smythe-Wickerson the Newt, and Solus, who was Fiskle’s prisoner: Solus of the ecstatic wounds.

  And Bella. Light in darkness, every curve a wicked invitation. The pop apotheosis of her Twist came into its own here.

  Swanee ached to paint Bella, to do a hundred portraits of her.

  And the others; all of them needed to be painted. Some heraldic quality about the Twists … As if each was a figure from a card in an otherworldly Tarot deck. Each a living signifier.

  Swanee hung on an updraft, gazing at a watching silver sphere that bobbed ten yards away, fifty feet over the Twists on the ground, studying the convocation. “Why?” he asked it. Encrypted in that syllable w
as more he couldn’t articulate. It was something like, Am I this? Am I a man not yet thirty, a Tennessee black man raised with a cold fury in him, a painter of revolution in angry murals? Or am I a hollow-boned thing with wings and a beak? An aviator, a genius of the uppers air, happiest when diving to snap up some big-eyed tree nester, just another animal preying on the small warm furry fauna of this world? I don’t feel like Swanee Jackson. I feel like the flying thing, the aerial elegance. Was the young artist from Tennessee a dream? Is there a place called Tennessee?

  As always, the watching ball gave no response, unless the swivel of its red dot was a reply.

  The Twists were standing in a circle now, facing inward to Fiskle. The shivering columns of IAMton light looming beside them threw their shadows, twisted and uneasy, onto Fiskle, like an ecliptic benediction. From up here Kelso, sitting on Fiskle’s shoulder, looked like a second head. But he was a living skull. Now Kelso saw Swanee looking at him; he looked up and croaked in his puerile jeer, “Swanee, big black bug, come down and play for the boss, he’s calling you, and if you don’t come, you stink like a seagull, one o’ them seagulls in tar, yuh dirty dirty thing!”

  “Yes, for the sake of your Consummation, Swanee,” Fiskle said in his rolling, Shakespearean tones, “do come down.”

  No.

  Swanee saw Fiskle’s face catch the light as he looked upward. The metal of his camera-lens eyes gleamed dully; the glass of those lenses glinted sharply.

  There was no change of expression on Fiskle’s mannequin face; there never was. But Fiskle was summoning Swanee. Who felt the tugging. Swanee held back, back-peddling in mid-air a few meters to diminish the tugging.

  Remaining aloof…

  Swanee knew that as the kite-man he could stay out of reach, safe from most of the aliens and everyone else. Safer, he had reasoned on some cellular level, than a turtle. He could stand back and paint—mentally, if not physically. Artfully distancing, as he had always done.

  “Join us.”

  Swanee shook his head and thought, No.

  Joining Fiskle’s congregation meant conscription into war.