by John Shirley
“Apart from Swanee, there is only one other,” Fiskle said, aloud and mentally. “And they are arriving now.”
They, in this case, meant only one. That would be El Chingadero.
Swanee soared lower, to look. He loathed seeing El Chinga, but, like a rubbernecker at a car accident, he had to look. There she was. He was.
They were.
The woman, under, was almost dead. It was a shame she’d gone Twist, with so few women in the settlement. (He chided himself for this disloyal thought.) She was Guatemalan, a dark, handsomely stocky woman, once quite pretty, before the draining had begun.
El Chinga looked, just now, like a naked woman with a naked man on her back. The man, though, was not quite there. He was a thing of transparent blue filminess, an apparition, naked and lean and the perpetual picture of lust. His face like a comic parody of Pan. Clinging to her inextricably.
Fucking her from behind. Endlessly. Day and night without ceasing. She could not shake him—he was as substanceless as a hologram, if you tried to touch him. But he was not really without substance. He grew more substantial every day, as she grew weaker. He drained her, as if his ghostly penis were a vampire’s fang, and after a few days of his presence she was bent, hunchbacked, shriveling, aging. On her face was weary horror and weary disgust and weary despair. But she had grown this thing herself, somehow. Some brutality endured in her past had planted this thing in her, Swanee supposed. The glimmering white thing on her back kept humping, humping, gasping happily … Soon she would be dead. The humping thing would find someone else, and it would not care if they were male or female.
El Chingadero joined the circle of Twists. Swanee could not see how this Twist could be of any use to Fiskle. Except perhaps—judging from Kelso’s caper of delight—as entertainment value.
“Swanee,” Fiskle said, “you will come … We’ll let it go, for a few minutes.”
Swanee circled just fifty feet over Fiskle’s group, spiraling up and down, looking now at Solus.
Solus squirmed at Fiskle’s feet. “Solus’s childish self-indulgence,” Fiskle announced, sounding theatrically pompous and yet ringingly convinced of himself, “has acted in a sort of personality alchemy to change him, to debase him from gold into lead. And here he squirms. Look at what has become of him … what the Meta have made him.”
“It was you. You have … done this to me,” Solus croaked. “Only because I spoke up.” He was so pale, his skin was almost blue; he was naked and shivering, but not from cold. He was a pudgy, round-faced man, more resembling a dog now as he lay on his back, his arms and legs in the air like a submissive beast, his belly exposed, panting, whimpering accusations. “You influenced the Current. Your mind.” His voice was garishly pathetic. As if he wanted them to revile him for his weakness. “You did this to me … because I fought you. Because I spoke with the aliens.” His face contorted as the anguish of transformation lanced through him.
Fiskle droned, “What has happened to you is the judgment of the Current. The Meta brought us for the Splendid Conflict. To decimate the Lower Aliens, to demonstrate our fittingness to survive and blossom in greater and greater Twist Frees. You defied the Meta; your defiance has taken you to Phylum Three: the living communion wafer.”
“Don’t!”
But he didn’t fight Fiskle—couldn’t, somehow—as Fiskle bent over him and placed his hands in the wounds on Solus’s belly.
The wounds had not been cut there. They appeared in his skin on their own.
Each big as a hand, but releasing no blood or intestines, only a slow ooze of pink mucus. Before his fall from grace, when one of the other Twists, at the behest of Solus, had placed his hand in the stigmatic slit, Solus had writhed with a jolt of pleasure—some of which overflowed into the Twist touching him.
But he had changed after his rebellion against Fiskle. Now, crueler wounds had appeared on him, everywhere but his head, and they gave out slow leaks of blood: they gave a powerful pleasure to the toucher but rewarded Solus with deep, sickening hurt.
Father’s soft thrumming grew louder, like a call to mass, and the crowd gathered around Solus, kneeling, looking up at Fiskle, who squatted behind Solus’s head, and like Fiskle they thrust their hands into his wounds, so that he howled and writhed, and they shuddered with pleasure. And more: they were communing with one another through the medium of Solus’s nervous system, using his neural pathways as their psychic telephone system.
Swanee fought a down-draft of temptation. Father’s call was strong; the psychic tantalization from Solus was strong. Bella was there, and Swanee could perhaps commune with her through Solus.
But he held back, almost hovering overhead, clinging to his repugnance.
Watching as Fiskle removed a hand from Solus’s neck and reached instead to touch his victim’s scalp in the center of his cranium. The skin parted like curtains, blood the applause; the skull cracked and shivered apart. (Swanee alighted on the ground. Was drawing near. Fighting it, but drawing nearer, slow step by slow step. The soundless music resonated with the contents of the secret black box he kept locked away in his heart.) Fiskle reached into the other’s brain, between the lobes; Solus began to shake and foam at the mouth. Kelso scampered down Fiskle’s arm, leaped to Solus’s face and perched there, thrusting his tongue into a cleft that appeared in place of an eye. Kelso giggled.
Fiskle spoke as his hand moved lovingly in the exposed brain, as he rocked on his hands and knees, murmuring what began as a dry dissertation and then devolved into a bellowed declaration of messianic destiny:
“The revelation of a global Overmind presence has made a wreckage of my old assumptions. And then allowed me to fuse them into something new. The old principles were true: that people are biological machines to be programmed by reward and punishment; that Social Darwinism is the path to sociological and biological betterment. That here the struggle with the lower aliens is the congruence of that path. But a third truth has been vouchsafed me, children. The third truth is the Overmind, which uses the principles of behavioral programming and Social Darwinism as the cutting tools on its lathe.”
His voice, booming now, charged with feeling, came faster and faster. “And the Overmind’s raw stuff is intuition, and the emotional self—things I denied myself all my life. The realm behind the hidden doors. And lo! The door opens, and I see into the overrealm, the landscape of my own intuition, and I enter and range there, and I permit the wild horse of my emotions to gallop where it will over this landscape. And wherever the wild horse roams, it carries me, and wherever I ride I have, one in each hand, the tools: the scepter of reward and the scythe of punishment. And those who do precisely and absolutely and unquestionably as I direct: those are rewarded. And those who spurn me are punished!”
And so saying he squeezed Solus’s brain in his fingers like a soft fruit. So that everyone communing felt Solus’s death, felt him pass, and glimpsed the demolishing infinity he was sucked into. And—as Fiskle intended—perceived Fiskle as Death’s doorman.
“Do you feel the Overmind running through us?” Fiskle asked them in hushed tones that buzzed with his awakened charisma.
Swanee knelt now beside Bella, whimpering as he fumbled for a gash in the still-spasming body of Solus, probing for what little bioelectricity remained in it for him.
Fiskle shouted, “Can you feel it?”
“Yes!” came the response, as one.
“I look at the horizon,” Fiskle said breathlessly, looking to the east, “and I see the Frost rising in the sky. And at the opposite horizon the hourglass moon of the Meta. And overhead? One of the Meta’s watchers, hovering. Is there any mistaking these signs? These are benedictions. They are beyond argument. They identify me, fully and forever.” When Fiskle looked back at them, he was more than Fiskle as he cried out in a voice that was half bellow and half whinny, “Do you know who I am? I am the Emperor!”
There was no question about it. Swept away by his lunatic charisma; stoned on Solus’s nervous
system; inspired by the cathedral presence of the great shimmering colunms of light around them, a temple of luminosity Fiskle had invoked into being himself; struck by the miraculous witnessing of the Frost and the Meta’s silver sphere—they were convinced. “You are the Emperor!”
“In this great ball of chaos, I am harmony. I am the unifier, the theme, the needle that sews the patchworks into the safe blanket of society. I am the Emperor of of Harmony. I AM EMPEROR HARMONY!”
“YOU ARE THE EMPERORI”
“I am,” Fiskle said softly. “And I will bring Harmony to Fool’s Hope. If I have to kill everyone to do it.”
“You are the Emperor!”
In that moment, Swanee knew that Fiskle, the Emperor Harmony, would lead them into killing and being killed. That their commitment to devotion would lead them into catastrophe; that the consecration of their lives to the Emperor Harmony was a disaster, the signpost of suffering.
But it was a perfect thing in itself; the watching ball above; the columns of light; the circle of Twists; the constellation they called the Frost; the bloody communion through Solus; the contrived symmetry of Fiskle’s child-vivid megalomaniacal symbols; the reveling in Fiskle’s operatic excess: all the elements of their improbable situation had come together into a composition. And the composition was the reason for all of it.
Swanee was sure of it: that the Meta had brought him to this world for this moment, and this moment alone.
6
The dust plain was beginning to change. It had diversified with shrubs and trees, and they saw no more of the ground-stripping heaps of fetid brown.
But there were long, segmented chitinous things that moved sinuously away through the blue brush-tipped grasses on what appeared to be tiny tank treads; there were furry creatures hopping like lame bats and spreading what looked like batwings. But the wings were not for flying, they were sticky blue membranes for catching small flying creatures; the batwings were portable spider webs. Mice with tentacles instead of legs swung from twig to twig in what Zero called puzzle trees. The puzzle trees were grown into shapes that made Zero think of the Find Your Way Through The Maze! puzzles he’d worked in the Sunday papers as a boy.
Still, that sun-baked afternoon, the trees were spaced well apart from one another, and the meager groundcover was no impediment. The carts trundled through grass and over beachball-size fungal pods that burst into dun clouds, breaking with a sound that was a good imitation of a human voice, the husky voice of a drunk middle-aged man going down a child’s slide: “Wheee-eee-eee. Umph.” That was exactly the sound they made when run over, many times a day. “Wheee-eee-eee. Umph. Wheee-eee-eee. Umph.” A minute or two later, “Wheee-eee-eee. Umph.”
Zero rode beside Angie in the lead cart. She slowed the oruh as they came to a patch of rocky ground. The wheels protested as they crunched and clacked over the scree. “Those wheels are going to break soon,” Angie muttered.
“We could ride the oruh if we had to, taking turns maybe,” Zero said.
“They’re already getting weak. We ran out of bugs on the dust plain. Maybe we’ll find a nice patch of bugs to feed ‘em.”
Zero said, “I need a break from this heat. You think you could steer us more into the shade?”
“I’ll try, but there isn’t much of it. I remember when me and my mom and dad were driving through the Mojave Desert and we ran out of gas out there. My mom blamed Dad, Dad blamed Mom. My dad insisted that Mom and I had to crouch in the shade of the car while Dad tried to flag people down. It was so hot and the shade kept getting smaller. Finally Mom got up and kind of took over. She always had to take over for him. Or thought she did. I think that’s why they got divorced—she wouldn’t let him be in charge of things—God, I’m really chattering.”
“Why shouldn’t you?” he said, smiling. “I like to hear you talk. You didn’t say much for the first week out here.”
“I guess it’s all coming out now. I was—I wasn’t adjusted to being on the expedition till, I guess, after Dennis got killed. Then, like you said, even if I hate to admit it, you either have to turn back or resign yourself. If it happens, it happens. It wasn’t all that much different on Earth. It wasn’t usually a matter of life and death, but there was always some bullshit problem springing at you out of, I don’t know, the undergrowth of life. That sounds corny, but—”
“Sounds about right to me.”
“And my morn would say, ‘If you lose, you lose. Just don’t turn your back on it or you’ll end up a scared housewife hiding behind a man.’ “
“Your morn was a feminist, sort of, huh?”
“Not sort of. She wrote papers about the sociology of sexism, sexist conditioning, sexist institutionalism. And my sister had already gone over to the other camp—‘a bovine housewife,’ my mother said. So I had to be the perfect little feminist for my mom.” She looked guiltily at Zero and hastily added, “Not that I wasn’t into it. I was. I am. Women have to struggle. It’s hard to break out of that much—that much history. You do have to kind of be an asshole about it, sometimes, to get free. But my mom—she was never satisfied. I had to be the shining example for Womanhood … And dating, God—she let me wear some makeup and jewelry and date a little, but she made me feel like I had to watchdog everything the guy said and did. And I did—and it discouraged them. And then I had to go see my dad, and he was trying to get me away from my morn, mostly to spite her. He was always pressuring me to cooperate with his lawyer, to testify that she was too strict, that she was driving me crazy.”
“Sounds like a lot of pressure all the time. From both sides.”
“It was. I was scared when I woke up on Fool’s Hope—but there was some relief, too, to be away from all that pressure. Till the settlers started in on me.”
He glanced at her. She was staring grimly at a tree they were slowly passing. Something that looked like a dead, eviscerated six-legged monkey lay on its back on a bough of the tree, wedged in a crotch between two branches. Its belly had been slashed open, and the edges of the torn flesh were beginning to curl with decay.
A creature like a small leathery kite was doing a figure eight in the air over the dead monkey-thing. It had a series of lamprey-mouths on its tubular torso, under the wing membrane. Zero had seen the lamprey kites feeding on other carrion; they were the local scavengers. It made up its mind and settled down over the exposed guts of the monkey-thing—which closed over it with a snap. The monkey’s rib cage snapped shut like a bear trap over the scavenger, crushing it. The monkey-thing sat up and began grooming itself as it digested the scavenger in its fake wound.
“Oh,” Angie said, “that’s it. I wondered why there weren’t any of those spiral bugs on the dead animal.” She went on absently. “I was going to go and get some for the oruhs.” She shook her head ruefully. “I can’t believe I’m actually thinking of scraping bugs off dead animals to feed to another animal. Yuck. Weird, the stuff you get used to.”
Zero glanced in the back of the cart at Yoshio. “Hey, Yoshio—you see that one?”
Yoshio, writing on bark strips with a piece of sharpened, spongy stick dipped in homemade ink, nodded distractedly. “I’m calling it a trap-monkey. Not very imaginative, but thinking of names for animals is exhausting after the first two-thousand.”
They were quiet for a while. The trees, it seemed to Zero, were thickening, and the ground was becoming more uneven, was generally rising.
Not looking at Angie, carefully casual, Zero asked, “What kind of pressure are the settlers here putting on you? You mentioned, uh—”
She snorted. “What do you think? They want sex. And babies. They say it’s babies. They say, ‘Hey, sweetheart, come onnnn—we have to survive here as a species!’ That sort of thing. Just before I left, there was a story going around that the Meta brought us here because there’s going to be a war on Earth and everyone there’ll be killed so this is our chance to preserve our species. But if they did that, why all these other species? Why the High Clans and the othe
rs? They all having World War III, too?”
“Everybody’s”—he began, and then she chimed in and they finished it together—“got a theory.”
He laughed. More soberly, he asked, “Hey, how much pressure they put on you? Anyone try to force the issue?”
“With Jamie prez? No way. Punishment for rape is expulsion. But I’ve been argued with, snubbed, urged, fondled, drooled on, wheedled, lied to, and once, dry-humped. If I want to have a goddamned baby, I’ll decide to do it myself.”
“Yeah. Especially here. No hospitals. No surgeons. One doctor—and he was only a med student—and one nurse. If there are complications—”
“Even if the delivery comes off okay, there’s still the question, do I want to raise a baby on this godforsaken planet?”
“Why a baby when I can’t trust anyone?” The voice was flung at them from the high grass nearby. A cruel parody of Angie’s voice.
Angie’s head jerked toward the brush, and she took her foot off the oruh, which stopped moving and looked questioningly over its shoulder.
The cart behind them stopped. Zickorian shouted. and they dimly heard the translator say, “What is the problem?”
Yoshio was sitting up, looking around. “I heard it, too.”
Another voice from the brush, this time a parody of Yohio’s. “It sounded mocking…” And the rest of the phrase was in Japanese.
“It read my mindl” Yoshio burst out. “That’s what I was thinking!”
Angie said tentatively, “I think I was thinking that the real problem with having a baby is trusting people on Fool’s Hope.” She added under her breath as she looked around, frowning, “There isn’t much social convention keeping people responsible.”
Another voice from the brush, this time mocking Cisco’s. “The spirits of this planet are finally showing up in person!”
Cisco squeaked, “Jesus!”
At the same moment the voice said, “Jesus!”
Another voice, imitating Zero’s, said, “Let’s get out of here!” just as Zero said it himself.
