Splendid Chaos (v1.1)

by John Shirley

  They pulled the oruh free—and then Zero’s breath caught in his throat. The hole was a window to another level down. It was a hole in a floor, he saw, and the floor was also a ceiling. He was looking down into a vast chamber given top and bottom by the terraces of the jungle; at least thirty yards below him was another level made of interwoven tree limbs, roots, things he couldn’t be sure of. But that distant level too was broken open in one spot, and he saw void below it.

  “We’re way above the ground,” he said, swallowing. What if the forest decided to move the way it had that first night? It might move out from under them.

  There was much exclaiming. The Pezz claimed to have known it all along and had assumed the Earthers knew what they were doing.

  “Perhaps we should go back down and try to remain on the ground,” Zickorian said. He was clutching at a limb in the curving, irregular wall of tangled wood grown beside him, justifiably afraid that the floor would give way at any minute.

  “Yeah. There’s just enough room to turn the oruh around,” Angie said.

  “Let’s just—” She clapped a hand over her mouth and stared back down the way they’d come. Zero looked, although he was almost afraid to.

  The forest had closed tightly behind them. The only way out was ahead.

  Somewhere above them it had rained. They had heard the rumble and the shushing of water, but none of it had reached the expedition directly.

  But now it came indirectly. Some of it dripped with sulky reluctance from overhead; more of it came down the floor of the branch tunnel. The curved matting of wood became slippery under their feet so that their knees were soon bruised and bloody. The oruh slipped, too, sometimes, bellowing as they went down. Zero was afraid that a bad fall might send the oruh crashing through. In places he could feel the matting give way under his feet a little. It creaked around them.

  But it maintained itself unbroken; stretching ahead into misty brown nullity.

  The rains steaming everything, making the Earthers slippery with sweat.

  Zickorian and Calum climbed with great caution and—it seemed to the Earthers—left most of the work of managing the oruh to the others. The Pezz, with its malleable limbs, had no difficulties. It had volunteered to carry some of the baggage on its back to ease the weight on the oruh. Zero decided he definitely liked the Pezz better than the High Clansmen, despite its being far more physically alien.

  “I really have got to get out of this thing,” Angie said. “I can’t breathe in here, it’s so humid, and … maybe it’s my imagination, but it seems as if this tunnel is one of those Chinese finger traps. Like, the more you go into it, the more it tightens up around you, and—” She shook herself. “God, listen to me.”

  “I feel the same way,” Zero said. “Makes me feel better to hear somebody say it out lou—shit!” He’d slipped, hit his knee on the slippery wooden matting. “I think it’s getting steeper. Christ, what’s with this animal?”

  The oruh had begun straining at its halter, stretching its neck out, snapping at the air. “Roooooooh!” it bellowed. And then it broke free of him and scrabbled frantically up the slippery grade, disappearing into the mist.

  Zero cursed and scrambled after it. The other oruh was straining at its halter.

  Zero plunged into the mist. Up ahead was a shaft of light, projected from below. And there was a pit. Zero stopped short at the rim of the pit, swaying, losing his balance, flailing for something to hold onto. Going to fall in…

  He bent his knees, grabbed a ropy piece of the living floor, and leaned back.

  He took a deep breath, knelt, and looked over the edge into the shining hole the oruh had fallen into. Squinting against the light, instinctively holding his breath, he made out the oruh about thirty feet down, spraddle-legged, head down, ass pointing up at him, looking silly. It was caught in the sticky sides of a funnel of flowers. And these flowers were fleshy pink, striped with blue, shaped like cactus flowers—or suckers. Each was connected to the others by a mesh of dull gray vine, visible only in a few rifts in the floral perspective; each blossom had a glistening dollop of stickiness at its center. Other animals struggled or lay shrunken and inert against the walls of the flower-funnel. Their shapes were blurred by the fringe of petals and the mist. One of those unmoving looked human.

  In the distance the funnel narrowed to a diffused green-golden glow, a light from the lower levels of the forest. The oruh moaned and coughed and moved with a vague swimming motion, but it didn’t seem to be trying to escape. Its movements looked drugged. Zero had to take a breath and immediately felt dizzy. He sagged forward, feeling heavy, as if the funnel of flowers were somehow toying with gravity, drawing him in.

  He wrenched himself back, and the motion sent him rolling down the slope to Yoshio, who was coming to look for him. Yoshio helped him up. “What was that line from King Kong?” Zero asked. Asked himself, really. “Oh yeah.

  ‘It was Beauty that killed the Beast.’ “

  There was just enough room to get around the flower funnel. The remaining oruh struggled the whole way, drugged and enticed by the cloying flowers.

  They only just barely kept it from leaping after its fellow.

  It was growing too dark to go on, when the ascending tunnel ended. They emerged, gasping with relief into clearer, cooler air, a place of blurred, emerald-tinged light. The oruh emerged from the tunnel reluctantly, looking over its shoulder with grotesque longing…

  The level they’d reached was a vast echoing space upheld by the pillars of ancient growths rising, knobbed and veined, through the tiers of interwoven foliage and branches. The matted floor stretched on and on, unbroken except for the gnarled boles and the abstracts. The abstracts—that’s how Zero thought of them—were the iceberg-tips of growths starting on the forest floor many levels below; they were made of irregular segments of blue and silvery white and green. The segments were unified into shapes that might have been solidified ideas, twisting and veering experiments in organism but right-angled from the style of the organic to penetrate—just enough to be haunting—the realm of artificial design.

  “Who created those things?” Yoshio asked breathlessly, staring up at them.

  They were enormous, with the presence of the great rocks studding the coast at Big Sur. “I mean, they look grown, but they look made, too.”

  “Maybe we did,” Zero said, remembering the plant sculptures at the last camp.

  “No,” Yoshio said, gazing breathlessly at the abstracts. “They are very old. Very, very old.”

  “Those forms are not artificial,” the Pezz said. “They are organism. It is something I can sense. But they are not without intelligence and have rearranged themselves in accordance with something like what you call vanity, or ‘self-expression.’ “

  They were on—Zero supposed—the fifth or sixth canopy of the many-leveled forest. The matting rustled with life and steamed with evaporating rain. Tenuous clouds were stretched like spun glass between the boles, just under the ceiling of the next canopy.

  They made camp on a relatively flat place, not far from the tunnel.

  Building a fire on the matting was unthinkable. There was no telling how it might react. So it was a chilly, clammy, uncomfortable night. A night of rumbling bellies; half their provisions had gone into the hungry flower-funnel with the oruh. The matting was painfully irregular under their bedrolls.

  In the morning the other oruh was gone. So was the Pezz. But minutes after they discovered these absences, the Pezz came trotting back from the mouth of the tunnel. “I awoke from dormancy with a sense that something was missing. The animal’s [approximate translation:] territorial expression had been removed. It was gone. I ran after it, but I must apologize and [untranslatable]. I should have aroused you to help me. I was not strong enough to restrain it. It has gone into the throat of flowers.”

  “Shit!” Zero said.

  “Bacterially infested excretions!” the Pezz agreed politely.

  “Well, at least we wo
n’t have to figure out how to get the damned animal down from up here,” Cisco said. “Maybe it’s, like, an act of providence. Like, it’s our karma straightening itself out within—”

  “Shut up, Cisco,” Angie growled.

  They’d removed the rest of their provisions from the oruh the night before, so they carried these on their backs. Zero and Angie had to insist that the Clansmen carry their share.

  “It it not a work of our rank,” Zickorian said.

  “Our rank doesn’t do that kind of work,” Calum chimed in.

  But they sensed Angie’s seething irritation with them and remembered the solecism of the mistaken mating ritual. So they accepted equal loads and trudged across the matting after the Pezz and the Earthers to the north.

  The Pezz seemed to know, through some vibration-sensitive organ in its legs, just how thick the mat was at any given place. It led them safely through the forest-walled gallery and into a zone of broken rainbow light.

  The sheets of polychromatic light were refracted through broad, crystalline leaves on great, man-thick vines that spiraled up around them and over them, stretching through the canopy.

  “Here is the source of our light,” the Pezz said. “There are lens-leaves on the roof of the forest. They magnify light, focus it, send it to lens-leaves at sublevels, which send it to others, which refract it to us.”

  The members of the expedition changed colors as they passed through the splinters of the prismed light; they were bathed green, scarlet, blue, and gold, by turns. They traveled between screens of growth abstracts, thin-walled corridors of the stuff arranged in wave patterns and zig-zags, like loopy room dividers. Close up, the wall’s dense growth made Zero think of a brick of marijuana. But in other places the growths perspired big drops of ginger-fragrant pitch which hung like pendant jewels; and inside the pitch-jewels the living gallery’s prismed shine was restored to a glow of pristine white. Zero found that if he stared at the drops of pitch they began to tremble and then slide into rows, the leaves between them patterning like the frowzy conceits of a Victorian facade.

  The High Clansmen seemed to tighten into themselves, shivering, turning their enigmatic bands of gold to the right and left. “The animus thickens,” Zickorian muttered. “This place is speaking to us in a language I don’t understand. It is crowded with spirits like a gathering of tribes.”

  Hearing that, Cisco looked around at the living emptiness nervously, licking his lips. The animals began to come.

  They came with the sensation in the air; the feel of something unseeable lowering itself about them. A fatigue passed out of the expedition; the ache of carrying their supplies became a distant, benevolent glow in the limbs.

  And the animals began to trot and slither and flap up to them. Small furry things; bulky things with wet palps for eyes, and bouncing things with lizard hides; trap-monkeys and flying lampreys; panthers made of sticky oyster-stuff; a small armored whatsit that rolled itself up, unrolled to look at them with a tongue that also saw, then rolled itself a little closer; petite creatures like Dali-designed jewelry with legs, emerald broaches that scampered, tie-clasps of diamond and blue topaz that scuttled near, trading colors with one another in the promiscuous light.

  The animals approached silently, coming in a crowd, oblivious of their normal rivalries and instinctive fears, and the expedition froze with uncertainty. Should they run? But the animals were coming from both sides.

  From above and below.

  The spontaneous menagerie came within ten meters of the expedition—and stopped. The animals seemed to be waiting for something. Zero looked at Zickorian. “What you think we ought to do?”

  “Go on as if we are unafraid,” Zickorian said. “Move with authority.”

  He and Calum began walking to the North, Zero and the Pezz following, Yoshio and Cisco and Angie coming close behind them. The animals began to move—parallel with them. As if escorting them. Their silence was terrifying.

  “Maybe,” Angle whispered, “they think we’re Noah.”

  “They’re going to be pissed when they find out we haven’t got the boat,” Cisco muttered.

  A cloud of the small valving jellyfish of the air approached with a sort of purposeful Brownian Motion, and Zero worried that the expedition was about to be swarmed over, and drained. But the flying cusps stopped over the parade of animals, and began to parallel the expedition too. Looking at the cloud of cusps, Zero tried to see some pattern in their motion. Was that a whirlpool pattern? Yes, they were moving distinctly in a…

  They were moving that way now. He frowned, and visualized a roughly oval pattern, like race cars chasing one another around a track. The flying cusps moved into that shape. He visualized a diamond shape. The cloud became diamond shaped.

  Dizzy, Zero looked away, feeling a return of the horror of disorientation he’d felt his first day on Fool’s Hope. Maybe this was all hallucination. Things were arranging themselves according to his imagining. Like when you took psychedelic mushrooms and looked at a blank wall, you saw patterns there that shifted according to your thinking.

  What was his inside, here, and what was his outside? What if he lost touch with his borders and melted into things … Maybe the Pezz was right, maybe territory was important, especially in this forest.

  The Pezz. Talk to it. It might help you orient yourself. (But don’t look at it.)

  “Pezz … uh … I’m beginning to feel like I did that night when we ate the fruit…”

  “I, too,” The Pezz said. “It is the IAMtons. They explain the animals’ attentions, and the geometrical formations of the flying things.”

  “You saw that too? Good … You mentioned IAMtons before…”

  Yoshio and Angie trooped up close to listen. Cisco came too, because he was scared to hang back alone.

  Near the forest (the Pezz told them) is what appears to be a great wasteland. It resembles a salt desert, a place of crust-edged craters and crystal-formed pinnacles that rise and reform with the fluctuation of some fickle subatomic mood. These are the IAMton wastes, great deposits of a certain chemical impregnated with the subatomic particle, the IAMton. The IAMton is most commonly found in the organs of perception and cognition of any sentient organism. IAMtons are the essence of awareness.

  The characteristic electromagnetic field generated by the cognitive organ of any sentient organism acts as a kind of net to trap and store some of these IAMtons. The more developed the brain, the stronger the field and the more IAMtons are caught. The particles work in collaboration with the inherent electrochemical actions of the brain to produce a psychically holographic entity, the ‘Self.’ Real awareness is impossible without IAMtons. They are the sentient beings’ link to the universe’s reservoir of collective awareness.

  “The forest itself is impregnated with them—some places more than others—” the Pezz said. “—but not so much as the IAMton wastes. The electromagnetic churn in the wastes is so pronounced that nothing is stable long enough to grow there … We theorize—my people have made a study of IAMtons for many generations—that in sufficient concentrations external IAMtons interpret the electromagnetic noise of our brains telekinetically. Whatever is impregnated with IAMtons—the forest, the animals here—is psychoreactive…”

  “You sure the animals won’t attack us?” Cisco asked, looking at the polymorphous procession accompanying them. Muttering to himself: “If they are animals.”

  “No, I am not certain,” the Pezz said. “But I think it unlikely. They are responding to the complexity of our fields … It seem to put them in some sort of trance of mindless attraction.”

  “Moths to lightbulbs,” Angie said. “Hope they don’t start bouncing off us.”

  “What’s all that stuff?” Cisco wondered aloud, pointing ahead of them. The fence growths curved back for a wide-open area where the matting was thickly covered with curvaceous tendrils of pale blue-green. The tendrils swayed and rippled as if in a dozen conflicting breezes. Symmetrical patterns asserted them
selves in the arrangement of plants and then broke up into other patterns.

  One of the patterns in the field of plants asserted itself repeatedly. It was a mandala parity of lines, right down the middle of the field, like shimmer-vibrations spreading out on a struck cymbal. Down the middle of these lines rode Jack the Baptist, coming toward them with majestic ease, waving cheerfully at them, smiling as the tendrils stretched out past their normal length to affectionately clean away the grime from his face, to groom his hair and clean his teeth. He rode the wave up to them, carried on nothing but the tendrils themselves; they passed him one to the next like a man handed over the tops of spectators at a rock concert. The field passed him to the expedition. He alighted in the open ground as if he were stepping off an escalator. “How is everyone?” he asked, smiling beatifically. “Got anything to eat?”

  Father’s devotees were waiting for him when he returned to the Earther settlement. As arranged, his followers gathered outside the main gate with fronds from feather trees in their arms, waiting to greet him as he rode up on the oruh. He was dressed in white robes that seemed to share the glow of the dawn.

  The crowd laid the fronds down before him as he rode slowly up to the gate, his face a study in wise humility.

  Doggo and Sanchez and Jamie stood on the walkway atop the wall, looking down at Father as he rode into the courtyard. His head wagged slightly from the motion of an overburdened oruh as it clopped up to the wooden stage remaining from the Interspecies Festival.

  Jamie and friends watched Father; someone else watched them all from the roof of the dorm building, crouched in the shadow of a half-fallen wooden shack that the Earthers had erected as a Meta Observatory—long abandoned for lack of observations. Swanee crouched there with his wings folded. He focused his hearing on the Earthers standing on the wall, and extended his senses to overhear them.

  “Look at them,” Jamie muttered. “Like a lot of children waiting in line to see a department-store Santa.”

  “I don’t hear the noise from his bug,” Sanchez commented. “But maybe I can feel it, just a little.”