by John Shirley
“What the hell are IAMtons?” Yoshio asked.
Zero looked at him in astonishment. He had never heard Yoshio swear.
“They are not in-the-realm-of-metaphysical-punishment,” the Pezz said.
“They are—wait.” It turned to look at the brush. “I cannot explain today. I am undergoing an (untranslatable) experience.”
“Everything is untranslatable if you try too hard to understand it,” Yoshio said. “Detailed analysis is conceptual shit! We must apprehend with—” The rest was spoken in angry Japanese. His eyes were wildly dilated.
He’s stoned, Zero thought. We’re all stoned. What a fucked up place to be stoned in.
He looked at Zickorian, and saw firelight playing on the golden strip of his ocular organ. He imagined that Zickorian was using that golden reflection to communicate with the fire, talking to some spirit innate in fire. And what was fire? Combustion, rapid oxidation accompanied by heat and light given off when the—wait. There’s someone—
Who is that? In the forest?
A face in the foliage. The golden-eyed thing? No. It was Dennis.
A chill made Zero clutch himself. And then Dennis’s face became Bowler’s.
And then it was … his father’s. “I should never have left, son. I know that now.” Practically whimpering. All Zero’s respect for the man vaporized.
His father wasn’t there in the bushes. It was an hallucination.
Zero turned to Angie. She was staring into the dense wall of forest, muttering, “Shut up, Mom, goddammit. All right, all right, all right already, I hear you! Now just shut up.” Zero looked and saw a middle-aged woman with short black hair, her mouth moving rapidly, her face contorted.
It’s not possible, Zero thought, to see someone else’s hallucination.
“Angie—did you see Dennis and Bowler a minute ago?”
She broke off her muttering and turned to him, blinking, her face vibrantly golden in the firelight. Breathlessly she said, “Yeah, I did.” Her eyes looked so big.
“Jesus. Me, too.” He stared at the forest. He heard Cisco and Yoshio talking to one another; Cisco was frightened, Yoshio was trying to calm him down but sounded scared himself, while the forest…
It glowed with internal energies, which somehow didn’t do much to illuminate the shadowy places. It was a blacklight forest, pulsing in places with tongues of ember red and cones of methane combustion; it was a fire without flame, without glare.
And the forest was moving. The vines, the plumage of the bark, the other plants woven into every passage in the living maze, were sliding in erotic lethargy, vine against leaf, branch against bole, small, shiny animals squeezed in and out—unhurt—like beads of sentient sweat.
But the movements weren’t random. They formed shapes, reflecting their thoughts, one image melting into another, forming a bas-relief in the wall of living plants, animals, insects, three-dimensional and yet fluid, brutish but aware.
Zero’s father was there again. His features ran like the face of a wax figure in a burning museum, reshaping, becoming someone else, a face Zero had pushed from his conscious mind for two years.
Gannywick. Hank Gannywick, in a Long Island jail on suspicion of homicide.
Zero had been arrested in an antinuke demonstration at the Long Island nuclear power facility. He was doing a student film on the thing as well as taking part, and when the cops came in to bust the demonstrators for deliberately blocking the access road, he’d filmed one of them beating a coal-black Rastafarian with his nightstick after the guy had already been handcuffed. Then he’d given the film to a friend, who’d driven off with it.
And he’d refused to tell the cops where they could get the film. So they separated him from the cell containing most of the demonstrators and put him in with Gannywick. “There you go, Hank,” the guard had said. “You wanted some company, I told you you’d have to wait till we had one we didn’t give a damn what happened to him. He’s one like that.”
Gannywick was a big-bellied bearded guy with a shaved head. A dent in that head, a small crater. An open bubo on his neck. Shit under his fingernails. “You’re gonna be my girlfriend,” Gannywick had said. “And I wancha give yourself to me zif ya like it.”
Gannywick had alternately tried to seduce and terrify him for the next seven hours before the demonstrators’ lawyer finally arranged Zero’s release.
Gannywick had failed to seduce him but had succeeded in terrifying him, and only the timeliness of the lawyer preempted a rape.
Here on Fool’s Hope, Gannywick was ten feel tall; a shrub had become his beard, a knob on a branch his head, a legless scorpion had become his mouth, his eyes were two glittering onyx bugs—but he was there. “I’m gonna make new holes in you, kid, when I get tired of th’ usual ones,” Gannywick whispered. Rigid with fear, Zero stared—and remembered the mind-echoers. He concentrated and visualized Gannywick exploding.
The Gannywick-bush burst like fireworks. Bits of twigs and foliage rained; a piece of legless scorpion was flung by the explosion, fell snapping to and fro at Zero’s feet like a spastic mouth. Zero kicked it away, and covered his eyes with his hands.
The others, wrapped in their own contemplation of the rippling, shifting forest, scarcely noticed the small explosion, except that Cisco said “Oh, wow.”
Zero tried to think of some alternative, something to keep Gannywick from coming back. Angie. The way she moved with, yes, a little self-consciousness, but never vanity; and always neatly, like a song sung a cappella by a singer with perfect pitch.
Could she move like that in the awkward displays of lovemaking? When people, caught up in the toils of instinct, became as mechanically fixated as frogs mating, or beetles? Would she still be graceful then?
He imagined her shorn of all misgivings about him, free of all inhibitions about herself, opening her arms and legs to him, opening her mouth and eyes with no fear whatsoever, trusting him utterly…
Instantly the stoned electric charge in him focused in his groin, making his cock so engorged it was painful. He fell on his side, hugging his knees to himself, curling up into the fantasy, letting it carry him.
The fruit in the drug was hallucinogenic, but was not a strong stimulant.
Weariness softened the neon-edged fantasy to muted fleshtones and pastels, and then to grainy impressions … and the curtain closed. Zero felt as if his body were divided up into locked rooms and the various parts could only communicate dimly, through the walls. His feet and legs were locked up in the basement; his torso was jailed in the living room; his arms and shoulders were incarcerated in upstairs bedrooms. Grimly, he admitted to himself that it was morning. He forced himself to sit up and move around the campsite, stumbling to the carts, ignoring the others except to walk around them; he swished water from the waterskins into his gummy mouth and spat on the blue dirt. He scowled at the moss-sucker welt on his forearm. He stumbled through everything, giving the Pezz a wide berth as it staggered, squeaking mournfully to itself, as it bumped into the wheels of the cart and the legs of the yawning oruh. Zickorian, squatting with Calum by the dead fire, chewing one of his clods of protein, could not resist saying, “The Higher Instincts of the High Clan have always saved them from such pitfalls. We are fortunate, Calum.”
“Yes,” Calum said. “Fortunate our Higher Instincts save us from these—”
“Oh, fuck off,” Angle snarled, holding her head as she looked for a place to pee. She walked away from the High Clansmen as they puzzled over the translator box’s interpretation of fuck off.
By degrees, Zero’s various parts pushed through their bonds, room joined with room, and his coordination and sense of connectedness began to return. But they brought a gritty muscular ache and a throbbing headache.
So he wasn’t prepared for it when Yoshio touched his arm and pointed at Dennis in the bushes.
He wasn’t in the bushes; he was the bushes. They’d been rearranged like an unusually detailed topiary into his body, his smiling face.
He was made out of twigs, vines, leafy things, and blossoms; the stuff was stippled into an improbably lucid mosaic. They found that if they shifted to one side or the other, they lost the image. It was like a cheap hologram that way. But it was no accident, no hallucination. It was there.
It wasn’t alone. Angie’s mother was there, frozen in shouting. Portions of Gannywick. One of Yoshio’s ancestors, who’d died in the blast at Hiroshima.
Aleister Crowley and Bowler, arm-wrestling. What appeared to be geometrical abstractions arranged around Pezz figures … The stuff was etched into the porous wall of the forest. Mental Polaroids caught in an environmental emulsion.
Zero turned to Angie to show her. He found her staring at something on the other side of the camp. Her mouth was open in tired outrage. It was a plant sculpture. He couldn’t think of it any other way. It was more abstract than the other images but embarrassingly clear. It showed a plant-formed semblance of a nude Zero embracing a semblance of a nude Angie. The figures, looking as if someone had taken bundles of various plants and flowers and pressed them into a mold, were rendered impressionistically.
But there was no doubt as to who they were.
Angie’s semblance was open in cracks along the thighs and belly, giving an effect of semitransparency, showing the plumelike inflorescence of a plant resembling a marsh reed, (the male genitals) thrust into a blossom very like an orchid (obviously the vagina) … and from the tip of the reed grew tiny white flower-filaments like a spurt of semen. The figure of Angie had its legs locked around the Zero’s back, arched in ecstatic surrender…
Angle turned to Zero and her expression said, I’ve been violated.
He wanted to protest, It could’re been you who made it, you know. But they both knew it hadn’t been her.
Angie moved toward the plant sculptures and made as if to kick them apart.
Then, with a hiss of frustration—or perhaps confusion—she turned away and stalked back to the cart.
Zero saw Cisco wander over for a closer look. To forestall any painful remark Cisco might make, Zero stepped between the plant erotica and Cisco and said, “Uh, how we going to go on? Forest’s closed off. Trail’s gone.”
“I dunno, man.” Cisco tried to peer past him.
Yoshio returned from strapping a feedbag of bugs onto the Oruh and said, “Your friend Jack the Anointer seems to have consistently known what he was talking about.”
“He didn’t warn us about the fruit, except to say don’t walk when you’re eating it,” Angle said bitterly.
“True,” Yoshio admitted. “But it was clear he knew about it. I think he felt it was for the best. Because in the night I thought much about what he said. About the forest. And the—the drug, or whatever was in the fruit—it made me … ah, I am having difficulty expressing myself in English today. It gave me a feeling of relationship with the forest. I think I know how to proceed. But I think we will be going much more slowly. And we’ll have to leave the carts.”
“We will have to learn to cooperate with the forest and (untranslatable),” the Pezz said. It was still wobbly but seemed much recovered.
“Exactly,” Yoshio said.
They followed Yoshio’s lead. They detached the oruh from the carts and tied some of their baggage onto the animals’ backs. Some they carried over their own shoulders. Then, Angie and Zickorian each leading an oruh, they followed Yoshio into the underbrush.
The going was hard at first, but by degrees they found that if they avoided damaging the brush, it loosened up and seemed to move aside for them just enough. They found a sort of slow, polite rhythm in their pressings on.
In an hour the trail had widened noticeably in front of them.
Once Yoshio said what they were all thinking: “The pyramid thing might’ve killed Jack. Or … it is impossible to know. I wonder if we’ve abandoned him.”
Zero thought about it. Finally, he shook his head, convinced. “He knew what he was doing. I’m sure of it. And he knows this forest. He’ll be back.”
“Mercury is not here by accident,” the Emperor Harmony told them. “Like all of you, he has a purpose special to me. Some of your purposes I see immediately, some show themselves to me with time and by mysterious degrees.”
The entire colony of Twists was gathered that morning around the Emperor and the once-human called Mercury. Everyone but Bella—who had fallen asleep—was looking raptly at Mercury, a faceless, sexless slab of human flesh in the general outline of a man.
Mercury was lying on its back. If that was its back, it was identical to its front. It was shaking. A shimmy of pink flesh rose into large goosebumps down its middle. The goosebumps became a miniature mountain range of skin, which spread outward, remaking itself into the configurations of a different creature entirely. To Swanee it looked like a painting taking place in fast action, with Mercury’s original form as the blank canvas. First the rough shape of the thing, then the topography of its body, then the fur, the claws, the big golden eyes, the small white teeth.
“What a lovely resemblance,” the Emperor said, crooning the words over the transformed Mercury. “My messenger, you see, takes the form of that which transmits to it. Its mind-ripple reception is so much clearer than my own. It is perhaps possessed by that which transmits to it. That’s a wonderful thing, don’t you think, children?”
They applauded and murmured approval as he went on. “It’s the very essence of art. It is method acting beyond method acting. It demonstrates devotion to my needs down to the last cell of Mercury’s body. Now, that is the way to appreciate one’s Emperor.” He looked down at the furry golden-eyed thing that had been Mercury.
It lay there twitching, staring at the sky as if swept up by a vision. After a moment it spoke in a comical voice somewhere between a cartoon dog’s talking growl and a raccoon’s chirr: “The cross-species expedition continues. It has absorbed IAMtons and seen things with them. It has materialized its mentation with IAMtons in the forest. The expedition is in danger of becoming holy. The one called the Baptist has communicated with an alien that is unknown to me.” As it spoke, its breast opened, as if it were giving birth, producing a pyramid the color of the afterimage of staring at a light bulb; the pyramid rose into the air a few inches and slowly rotated. “The alien appeared in this form.” The pyramid sank back down into Mercury and melted into him. From the fur of his belly rose six figures of transparent plastic, the size of toy army men. You could see tiny organs of cherry red and metallic blue inside them.
They seemed to skate along but never got anyplace. “Here are the Vinyls, who have nearly circled the forest. They are near the Hillserlive. They await the expedition; they plan an ambush to counter the ambush they believe the expedition plans.”
Hearing that, Swanee’s heart seemed to spin in his chest like a grieving dervish. His wings closed down over him, enwrapping him protectively.
“The Vinyls will do their bit of business,” the Emperor said distantly, looking up at the dwarf-pig lowering from a coral branch by a sticky white strand. “But it may perhaps not be enough. This Baptismal with IAMtons—yes, this is the origin of the Baptist’s name, though no one who uses this nickname knows it—this Baptismal could create interference patterns. It could siphon Overmind away from your Emperor.”
“That ith very thad,” lisped the upside-down pig.
Nodding solemnly, the Emperor went on. “And so it is necessary for us to consolidate our power in the settlement, to eliminate all other interference patterns.” He looked down at Mercury. “Good-bye, Goldeneyes. Well done. Continue to watch them. Get me Father on the ‘line,’ Mercury.”
Mercury ran within itself, shivering into a new shape. In perhaps ninety seconds, Father was lying there in place of the anthropomorphic marsupial.
But it wasn’t Father. Father was in the settlement. This was a simulation, his message through Mercury personified. “My essence is yours, Emperor.”
“Father,” the Emperor said thoughtfully, “have you had some su
ccess?”
“With a few of them. I have only just left them. But there was some interference from this fellow Bowler, who, with an ironic aptness, seems to regard you as an imperialist.”
The Emperor chuckled. “Continue to hide yourself by day. Rest, but watch them. Mark those who are to be killed.”
Swanee could bear no more. He turned and flung himself into the air, pulling himself up it almost vertically, like a lizard climbing a wall, his muscles protesting. But the pain was nothing in comparison to the horror of self-realization he had experienced when he’d heard the Emperor say, ” Mark those who are to be killed.”
He flew away but not to warn anyone. Because even when he was gone from the Emperor, the Emperor was not gone from him.
8
It took them almost an hour to realize that they were walking above the ground.
They were deceived by the density of the forest around them, by the increasingly murky atmosphere, and by the interwoven solidity of the surface they trod. The slope had climbed gradually, till it had become almost steep. The forest had gradually closed in around them, literally becoming a tunnel, letting only a little light through in thin green-tinted beams; the ground was covered with woven branches and roots, so that they were walking on living plant matter, in a funnel of foliage angling up a hillside, they’d assumed.
But it wasn’t a hillside, Zero discovered when one of the oruhs stepped through a weak spot in the floor of woven wood. The oruh sank up to its knee and gave out a quavering orooooh of pain. “Shit, I hope it hasn’t broken its leg,” Angie said as they gathered around the oruh to help it from the hole. Zero and Calum the High Clansman bent and grabbed its leg, pulling up, while the others nudged the beast so it leaned on its other limbs. Zero could smell the High Clansman’s body this close. A smell of moldy cinnamon.
