Splendid Chaos (v1.1)

by John Shirley

  The carts moved off as fast as they could go, which was about twice as fast as walking.

  “Shit, this’s just what I need when I’m hungry and my ass hurts and my head hurts I need some fucking sunglasses in this sun and then this asshole voice—” A mix of Angie and Zero’s voices.

  A parody of Cisco’s voice: “God, the spirits sound hostile, oh shit, listen spirits, don’t—”

  “Fuck, what if it reads my mind about Angie and then says something—oh God! It’s doing it!”

  Angie glanced at Zero at that one and then looked quickly away. Zero flinched.

  More voices, from elsewhere in the brush, spoke in Zickorian’s languge and the squeaking of the Pezz. Now and then one of the voices said, “Oroooooooooh!”

  The Pezz trotted up beside Zero and said, “I think I know what they are—”

  It broke off as the carts emerged from the area of thicker brush into an extensive clearing. Something bounded from the brush nearby, pacing them.

  It looked like a scorpion, but with a chitin-covered ratlike head, and it was the size of a smallish kangaroo; it moved like a kangaroo, bounding on hind legs. Its segmented tail ended in a sort of spiral scoop that took a right-angle turn halfway down so it was pointed sideways, at the expedition.

  More of them bounded from the brush, eight in all, pacing the carts effortlessly. Unnervingly, the voices came from the creatures’ mouths. Their faces were permanent expressions of mockery; their mouths curved into sneers as they spat back bits and pieces of their thoughts at them. “I’d like to blast one of those little fuckers, but there’s no telling what its buddies might do … God, I want to stop and crap, but I can’t with those things hanging around … What the hell are they doing this for?” Snatches of Japanese. Like turning a dial through radio stations.

  The Pezz said, “They are mind-echoers. My people have encountered them before. They haven’t got much mind of their own.”

  “What the hell are they trying to accomplish?” Zero asked.

  “What do they hope to get from this?” came the mocking summary of his thoughts.

  “We don’t know,” the Pezz said. “Some method for warning others from their territory, no doubt.”

  “You would give it that interpretation,” Zero said.

  “Damn Pezz think everything’s related to—”

  “Shit!”

  “Shit!”

  “How do we—”

  “get rid of” ” the little fuckers?”

  “Form mental images of devouring them alive,” Yoshio suggested. “Picture it strongly!”

  They did just that. They pictured it very strongly. Zero imagined himself dismembering the things and eating them like pieces of soft-shell crab.

  A squeal like feedback burst from the mind-echoers, and they bounded away, flinging, “Good riddance, you little fuckers!” back at them.

  They saw no more of them.

  The carts continued on a track that thinned to a trickle of definition and finally dried up. Navigating with compass and the Pezz’s mind-map, they bore doggedly north. The ground continued to rise. The oruh were showing strain; foam flecked their beaks, and progress slowed so much that the expeditioners found it quicker to climb down from the carts and walk beside them.

  Great, improbably dense clouds moved in from the north, staking out every corner of the sky with a brooding ceiling of blue-black overcast. The weighty cloud cover looked as if it were poised to topple. It admitted light sparsely, so that the shadows multiplied into blue-tinted gloom. The expedition felt the tension of an impending storm, and the strange, unnaturally dense look of the clouds seemed to suggest that a strange, unnatural release was impending.

  When afternoon was fraying into dusk, they topped a rise and found themselves descending into a misty, thickly forested valley. The main body of the forest was below them, with the details of its purple and indigo foliage lost behind silvery veils of mist. As they approached it, the expedition grew quiet. All that was known about this forest was that not much was known about it.

  The clouds rumbled overhead as the expedition zig-zagged down the hillside, guiding the oruh carefully to keep them from slipping. Warm mist deepened around them; it dewed the wrinkly, livid blossoms of a vine that choked the puzzle trees; it bowed the feather trees and pooled in the cupped leaves of more stunted varieties of growth; it rose into steam on the flanks of the weary oruh.

  The slope bottomed out onto the valley floor, and they emerged into a small clearing. The ground was cracked and oddly exposed here. On the far side of the clearing was the apparently impenetrable edge of the forest. In the center of the clearing was a great fallen tree, rotten now, and in the broad cracks of its trunk wriggled thumb-sized roach-things of shiny brown and pasty white. The oruh bellowed happily, and their drivers let them browse to contentment on the things in the rotting trunk. The crunching of the roach-things in their beaks was sickening; to escape it, Angie and Zero took a short walk to the edge of the forest.

  “Maybe we should camp here tonight,” Angie said, looking at the forest, hugging herself.

  “Probably. God knows we should be fresh before plunging in there. It’ll be dark soon.”

  “It’ll be wet before it’s dark,” said someone just inside the forest. Zero could see him—or her—moving in there, but it was hard to make them out clearly. It was like trying to see someone wearing cammies that fit the foliage. The voice sounded familiar, though.

  “Who is it?” Angie called nervously.

  She was no more nervous than Zero. He whispered, “Maybe you should run and get the blunderbuss.”

  There—Zero saw it again. A man-shape, just an outline, shadow in shadow.

  Coming closer. Zero tensed. And then the man stepped out into the clearing: Jack the Baptist. Grinning at them. Filthy. His hair matted with twigs. A worm crawled through his grimy bangs. His face was streaked with sweaty grime and the purple ooze of plant sap. He wore torn buckskin and, still smiling, reached into his shirt and plucked what looked like a gray lump of fungus from it. One end of the thing was sticky with the Baptist’s blood.

  He tossed the thing playfully from hand to hand, then over his shoulder—and kicked it away on his heel.

  “How the hell did you get—” Zero began.

  Angie interrupted, “Are you on foot, or—I mean, how did you—?”

  “I’ve been here all day waiting for you,” Jack the Baptist said. “I came cross-country, and I walk faster than your carts move. I had some things to look into before I could join you.”

  “You were waiting for us?” Zero asked. “How’d you know we’d come exactly this way? There isn’t a trail anymore.”

  “I had word you were coming. I could feel the funneling.” He seemed bored with explanations. He looked past them at Yoshio and Cisco, walking up from the carts. “You’ve lost Dennis, I understand. A sadness. He was one of the nicer people here.”

  “Yeah,” Cisco said, ogling Jack. “He was. You follow us here?”

  “No, I came ahead. Something else followed you.”

  They stared at him. The clouds rumbled.

  He went on placidly, looking at the clouds. “It’s about forty feet behind me.”

  They looked and saw nothing but an intricately patterned wall of foliage, dense with the promise of approaching night.

  “Keep looking,” he said, reaching behind him. His hand closed over the long yellow Pinocchio’s nose of a plant jutting from the wall of undergrowth. He pushed it down as if it were a lever. Just exactly as if it were a lever.

  In one place, the foliage parted as if it were a curtain. Just exactly as if it were a curtain. For one startled second, a being was revealed, a human become marsupial: black-furred, chinless, lank, stretched between two tree limbs, its long, black, pad-tipped fingers grasped the upper limb, its long black toes wrapped around the lower; its enormous perfectly round golden eyes gazed at them in unblinking apprehension. It wore an old U.S. Army belt and the shreds of an army
jacket.

  Then it bared its teeth, hissing, and a virulently orange ruff stood out on its head in warning. It turned and melted into the undergrowth. The curtain of plants closed.

  “That was one of the first Twists,” Jack observed. “It works for Fiskle now.”

  Zero gaped at him. “How did you—I mean, you pulled that almost like a lever. Is this some kind of sham forest? It’s mechanical, or—or what?”

  Angie stepped past Jack and pushed the yellow blossom downward. Nothing happened. She stepped back, brushing yellow pollen off her hands, and looked expectantly at him. “Well?”

  “I have a certain rapport with the natural world,” Jack said, shrugging. The sky rumbled, louder this time. “Maybe that was my stomach,” Jack murmured. “I’m kind of hungry. Got anything to eat?”

  “Yes, please come and join us,” Yoshio said.

  “Wait a minute,” Zero said. “I want to know how you—”

  Suddenly Jack looked sharply at the sky. “Uh-oh,” he said.

  The clouds burst. The deluge came down as if it were all of a piece, one solid thing that fell on them from an enormous aerial trap door, a tidal wave AWOL from the sea.

  They cried out as they were smashed to the ground, flattened facedown by the thundering downpour. They coughed, sputtered for air, drowning; watery hands pushed them down into instant mud. Zero saw blood curl away from his face. The weight of the rain had bloodied his nose against the ground.

  The environment had been transformed in a split-second. It was as if they were instantly underwater. But it wasn’t water or, anyway, not only water.

  It was … glutinous. Transparent but thick. It was like mineral oil, Zero thought, forcing himself to his knees, but a little thicker. Like a liquified slug. It smelled like a living thing. And almost like chicken soup.

  It moved like a living thing, too. It gathered itself into wormlike threads and slid over his limbs, over the ground, back onto his limbs, searching, moving up his sides, against gravity, making tiger stripes on him with its questing.

  It wasn’t quite like being underwater, he found once he had got to his knees. He could breathe a little now.

  But the baritone white noise of its downpour filled all the world. He gasped, looking for Angie, almost blinded by the stuff. He saw her, a gray blur a yard or two away, and he crawled toward her on his hands and knees. The wet hammering on his back made every movement a bone-creaking effort.

  He reached for her, but with one hand lifted he was off balance and the weight of the deluge flattened him again.

  As abruptly as it had begun, the pressure let up. The rain slackened. Some of the murk cleared away, and he made out Yoshio and Jack and Angie pushing up from the sucking mud, squinting at the sky. Zero looked up and, blinking away the last of the rain, saw that the cloud cover was edged with a rippling aurora of light, the Northern Lights imported from Earth, fringing the clouds like ornament on an eiderdown blanket. And then the blanket tore itself into shreds: the cloud cover fragmented and began—not to drift away, but to disintegrate, dissolving into nothingness, evaporating in fast-forward. Cracks of luminous emerald sky shone through and expanded.

  More rain fell, as if released when the clouds disintegrated. But it fell fitfully; it was little more than a drizzle, and less glutinous. It washed away some of the translucent stickiness that coated the Earthers. They stood and staggered to the carts. No one was badly hurt. Two bloody noses, some bruises. Jack the Baptist was sniggering, shaking his head, wagging a finger at the sky. The Pezz had smelled it coming, and had hidden under a cart. The High Clansmen had followed his cue.

  Everything smelled almost of chicken soup. The forest around the clearing was sagging in spots, looking like cooked spinach in purple food dye, badly beaten by the sudden weight of the deluge. Mist rose thickly from it now; the bushes rustled, fussily rearranging themselves. Expanding, unfolding, shaking dry.

  With the clouds’ breaking up, the evening’s darkness retreated a little, giving the illusion of time reversed. Zero thought of a film run backward. It grew lighter for the space of half an hour as they set up their tents, running them between the carts and the tent poles. Jack squatted nearby, not lifting a finger to help them.

  “It was water and amino acids, I think,” Jack was explaining to Yoshio.

  “Building blocks of life. A specialized local variety. The local ecology needs, ah, periodic transfusions of it, like plasma for the wounded.” He beamed at them. “You were baptised in it. It was none of my doing, but I rejoice anyway.”

  The ground steamed. The rainbow-coated puddles shifted and squirmed like amoebas, recombining in a two-dimensional dance, a waltz in Flatland.

  Zickorian and Calum set up their own tents. They were silent, seeming glum and withdrawn. From time to time they stole glances at Jack, and Zero thought perhaps they mistrusted him. Perhaps they were wondering if he was someone else to split the booty with when they reached the Progress Station.

  “You know what?” Cisco said, tying a knot. “I feel good.”

  Zero nodded. “Me, too. Kind of exhilarated.”

  “The amino rains are good for you,” the Baptist said. “Like Flintstone Vitamins or Post Raisin Bran.” He giggled.

  “Oh, no, what the hell?” Angie said, pointing at the ground. “Oh, no. Really. I’ve had enough for today.”

  The ground erupted. They were small eruptions, where the glutinous, transparent puddles had reached out pseudopods of themselves, the rain puddles nosing into the ground, searching, blindly seeking…

  In response, the ground spat mud as something pushed up from beneath, making room for itself. It was a thing like a square peg with four faces, one on each of its four sides. They were slimy ochre toadlike faces with a circular arrangement of transparent-lidded yellow eyes above each twitching muzzle. The peg emerged a few inches from the ground—and split apart, into four identical creatures, each of its four sides going a different way, like a hideous flower opening. More of the things erupted all over the clearing. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Each one made a noise like winding an alarm clock as it split apart. Where seconds before the ground was nearly barren, now life was boiling, spreading itself feverishly; the basin of the clearing was swarming with slimy things crawling away in four directions from each hole, crawling on cilia-coated undersides and making the maddening ratcheting sounds, leaving a complex crisscrossing of slime-lines on the clearing’s floor. They were heading for the brush, on all sides. They moved steadily as the expedition watched, afraid to move, and in minutes the clearing was almost empty of them.

  “It’s the rain, you know,” the Baptist yawned, lying down to sleep by the fire that the High Clansmen had built. “Always happens like this.”

  As darkness fell, the forest came alive with millions of minute awakenings and transformations. A festival of metamorphosis was triggered by the living rain. Sitting by the fire, Zero felt himself open up to the forest’s internal ryhthms. “It’s biological party time,” Zero said, listening to the rising uproar of rattles, ratchetings, shrieks, whistles, pops, hoots, and WHOP s. In the distance something said, “Hey! Hey-hey- hey!”

  The sounds came in a sequence and a rhythm, like a song. Rattle shriek whistle pop whoo!- whop hey-hey-hey! (Begin again.) Rattle shriek whistle pop whoo!-whop hey-hey-hey! (One more time.) Rattle shriek whistle pop whoo!- whop hey-hey-hey!

  Carried on a wave of exhilaration—maybe from the effects of the unearthly aminos, maybe from a need to release some of the accumulated tension of the journey—Zero stood and shuffled into a dance. He moved to the rhythm of the animal sound sequence, singing along. The Earthers laughed. Zero pulled Angie to her feet, and they danced around the fire, laughing, singing, “Rattle shriek (they whistled, popped their cheeks) whoo! (clapped their hands for whop) hey-hey-hey!” Rattle shriek whistle pop whoo!- whop hey-hey-hey!

  The High Clansmen watched respectfully what they assumed was a ritual of animistic communing. The Pezz sensed the fun of it and gamboled
about them like a spring lamb, rising to its hind legs so Zero and Angie could take its front legs in their hands and…

  Large, perfectly round golden eyes watched them from the forest.

  Rattle shriek whistle POP Who! hey-hey-hey! (one more time.) Rattle shriek whistle POP.

  Swanee heard the beating heart of the small warm furry thing. He heard the furry thing before he saw it. Then, spiraling lower in the light of the Frost and the hourglass moon, he spotted the warm furry thing swinging from branch to branch. It was hamster-size (or ham sandwich-size, he thought, for he was hungry), and it had one eye and little whipping tentacles instead of arms and legs. It used them to swing from twig to twig like a tiny spider monkey. He could hear the quick purr of its heart, could smell its warm-blooded essence. His mouth watered, and he dove for it, letting his new instincts take over. His claws moved of their own accord and snatched the thing from its perch. It squeaked once before he drove a talon through its faltering heart, and then he popped it into his mouth. It had a salty-fruity taste, and its life-essence, as it left the body and filtered between his teeth, luxuriating over his tongue, gave the morsel extra savor.

  Swanee’s wings reached for air, and he climbed above the trees. Licking blood from his talons, he prepared for another pass over the little woods, looking for another living sweetmeat.

  “Swanee, my child. Come along.”

  It was Fiskle. No—the Emperor Harmony now. Swanee heard the summons with a mixture of fear and childlike happiness. He banked and angled for the gulley in the land-coral, two miles away.

  He found the Emperor Harmony sitting on a Phylum Two in front of his den, that living hole in the ground. The exaggeratedly muscled Phylum Two was on his hands and knees, a human bench, padded with beefcake, uncomplaining and unwavering. Elbow on his knee and chin on his fist, the Emperor sat in the pose of the Thinker. The Frost was screwed into the glass and metal of his camera-lens eyes, and the moonlight filtered prismatically through the enormous diamond pinky-ring he’d acquired. (From where?) His suit had changed, too. It had become glossy black silk. Or what looked like it. There was a broad red silk ribbon across his chest, such as royalty wore at embassy parties, and an emerald stickpin on his tie (white silk now), shaped like a crown.