by John Shirley
“He killed someone,” Doggo said softly, aside to Jamie. “There were witnesses. He’s big, but if I call up the rest of the constabulary, we could take him.”
“That crowd is with him,” Jamie said. “Fiskle’s scumbags are with him, too, outside somewhere. Not too far away.”
Sanchez nodded. “Taking him could provoke more killings. But in the long run it might be smarter.”
“Wait and see,” Jamie said.
She leaned against Doggo and watched as Father climbed off the beast and went to stand on the stage. Someone led the beast away for him.
Everything had been rehearsed. Father looked out at them. How many?
Fifty? He sat down on the edge of the stage with one leg drawn up, his arm on the knee of his cocked leg, smiling faintly but radiantly.
“Sermon on the Mount,” Sanchez muttered bitterly. His eyes were hooded, and he touched the wooden cross on its oruh-leather thong at his throat.
Almost inaudibly he added, “Lower than blasphemy.”
Swanee didn’t need to focus his hearing for Father. Father’s mutated voice carried up there.
“We call it a spaceship,” Father’s voice boomed out, forceful but measured.
“Ezekiel called it a wheel of fire. The Emperor Harmony, whose servant I am, calls it … a miracle.”
(“Holy shit,” Doggo muttered.)
(“Exactly,” Jamie said.)
“How can you simply accept what has happened to you?” Father asked.
“How can you take the attitude that it was just a sort of interplanetary accident, a kidnapping by aliens? Faster-than-light drives are just not possible. Einsteinian physics makes it impossible. So how did we get here? We came here on the wings of grace, brought by a power that transcends the laws of physics—the only power that transcends those laws.”
“Bullshit!” Doggo roared, unable to contain himself.
A few people glanced up at him. Loftily, Father ignored him.
“The only explanation is the intervention of God!” Father declared, managing to sound both humble and inspired at once. “God Himself has brought us here. And whatever happens here is ordained by God. I recall to you Job 38:4, ‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?
… Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon us? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the cornerstone thereof, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?’ “
“God forgive him,” Sanchez hissed between clenched teeth.
“You and I cannot pretend to know why God brought us here!” Father declaimed. “Or why He subjects us to our ordeal here. What is our ordeal to Job’s? But there is one who hears God and speaks for Him. The one you call Fiskle, whom we call the Emperor Harmony.”
“Now Fiskle speaks for God?” Jamie murmured. “When God hears this shit, She’s going to be pissed off.”
Swanee saw the one called Bowler, then, emerging from the crowd, pushing to the front. “Did you say something before about the ‘Emperor’ Harmony?”
Bowler asked loud enough for everyone to hear.
“He is a spiritual Emperor,” Father replied evenly, “sent to guide us—”
“Spiritual Emperor?” Bowler interrupted. “You mean like Caligula?” There was murmuring in the crowd, some supportive of Bowler, much of it hostile to him.
“Cagligula was human,” Father said, unruffled. “The Emperor Harmony is superhuman. He has undergone the Ascent, the spiritual growing that you call Twist, and has come out of it a higher being.”
“How about that thing on your chest?” Bowler demanded. “Is that a higher—”
Bowler was shouted down by Father’s supporters. Father sat up straight, crossed his legs yogilike, and spread his hands in benediction. He radiated paternal tolerance. “I have come here to ask one thing of you: trust. A single morning’s trust, and no more. Come with me to meet the Emperor.”
“He’ll put you in the Current!” Doggo bellowed. “He’s got some kind of control over it.”
“Then why doesn’t he just direct it here?” Sanchez wondered aloud.
“The Current has never come into the settlements,” Doggo said, aside to Sanchez and Jamie. “But Fiskle seems to be able to conjure it up, from what I’ve been able to find out, in certain spots.”
“It is no accident that God brought us to a world where we are in conflict with aliens!” Father boomed out suddenly, standing. “The Emperor has spoken with the angels we call the Meta. They have informed him of what should have been obvious: God has brought us here to hone us, to improve us in combat with all that is diabolical. Do you really believe that the aliens are ‘beings from other planets’?” He chuckled at their naivete. “Truly I say unto you: They are beings from our own world—that part of our world we call Hell; They are demons!”
Thrum. Thrum. Thrum. Thrum thrum. Thrum thrum…
“Then let’s kill the bastards!” someone shouted, and a roar went up from the crowd.
“That’s all?” Doggo shouted, coming down the stairs, signaling for the pikemen. “He’s using his Twist—that thing on his chest! Can’t you idiots hear it?” He reached the courtyard, and two burly, tanned guards with pikes ran up to accompany him to the stage.
Thrum thrum thrum thrum.
Swanee saw the faces of the crowd open up. Secret doors in them were unlocked by Father’s thrum and by their own need for release: release of pent-up fear, the restlessly corralled terror of life on an alien world. Father was offering them escape from that fear; Doggo was threatening that escape. It was as if he were slashing their rubber life rafts in the middle of the North Sea. The crowd roared and surged toward him.
Boom. Smoke and hellfire, as a blunderbuss roared from the stairs just above them. Sanchez had fired it in the air; he dropped it and unslung a second from his back. “Keep back from him! He’s our law here!”
The crowd hesitated. There was a momentary stand-off. Doggo glared at a ring of hostile faces held in check by fear of the blunderbuss and the pikemen. Father pointed at Doggo and said, “There are aliens among us!”
Thrum thrum thrum thrum. “There are demons among US!”
Doggo turned, snatched a pike from one of his men, and all in one smooth motion cocked his arm and flung the spear straight, with every iota of his strength behind the cast. Swanee braced himself as the pike sank deeply into Father’s chest and jutted from his back, darkening his robe with his inky blood, piercing the thing that lived there.
Father fell back, writhing. Swanee, linked to Father as all Earther Twists were linked, bent double with emphatic pain.
The crowd watched, stunned, as Doggo stepped close to Father and, with both hands, ripped the robe away from the shivering metal shaft. He exposed the insect thing, transfixed by the spear, its mandibles foaming, its eyes whirling with hatred.
Father threw back his head and gave out a shriek that came not from the human part of him but from the hideous chitinous thing on his chest. His eyes glazed. The dying thing at his middle spat venom at the crowd, black stuff that sizzled where it fell on exposed flesh, raising screams from the Earthers. Then the light went out of its eyes.
The thrum was gone. Swanee looked at the crowd, expecting them to turn on Doggo, to declare Father a martyr. But all eyes were fixed on the diseased thing that had lived in Father’s chest.
Moving away to another roof edge where he would not be seen, Swanee took to the air. Shameful though it was, he was relieved that Father was dead. But he knew what it meant. Harmony was frustrated. Which meant that he would be profoundly angry. Was angry already. Swanee could feel Harmony’s anger in the air itself, even from far away, could feel it like a sudden radical change in barometric pressure.
Now the killing would begin in earnest.
9
When Jack the Baptist led them onto the roof of the forest, Zero thought for a moment that he had brought them to paradise.
<
br /> They emerged from another long, stifling tunnel through steamy twilight into sunny, clean, wide-open spaces. The feathery blossoms and wind-shivered tops of the taller trees, emerging here and there from the otherwise-flat canopy, only embroidered the soaring vista and seemed caught up in a subtle genuflection to the blue-green sky.
Yoshio breathed, “It’s like a roof garden. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon.”
The roof itself was made up of treetops, and leafy vines. The tufted branches and coiled around broad sections of transparent fronds like crooked skylights—the lenses that sent sunlight down to the lower levels.
There were a few animals here. They’d left their escorting menagerie of wildlife behind on a lower level, when Jack had led them into the up-slanting tunnel to the roof. Jack had spoken a few gentle words to the animals and dispersed them. But here, at intervals that seemed almost garden-planned, little translucent creatures flew and fluttered around outcroppings of topaz blossoms, like spray at a fountain. Yoshio took a step from the tunnel toward the nearest of these.
And fell through the roof. Jack had already started after him; he lunged and caught him just under the armpits. Yoshio had fallen through up to his arms. He clawed for a handhold, hissing Japanese. Jack was lying flat, face down across the roof, stretched out to him from the hardened area around the tunnel mouth.
“Hold still, Yoshio!” Jack said. “I don’t want to drop you.”
Zero wriggled out to help Jack—Cisco and the Pezz held him by the ankles.
In a few minutes they’d pulled Yoshio back up. He was scratched and shaken but unhurt. “How are we going to cross this place?” he asked Jack.
“It must be persuaded to bear our weight,” Jack said. He knelt and reached into the roof, his arm vanishing in the foliage. He felt around invisibly below. He frowned. He drew a trap-monkey from under the foliage, pulled his hand from its stomach, and irritably tossed the squawking creature over his shoulder. It scurried off as he wiped his hand and resumed fishing about beneath them. ,J’
“Ah,” he said at length. He pulled something they couldn’t see—and just in front of the tunnel the roof of the forest drew together with an audible creaking and rustling, knitting itself tightly, becoming a hard road of interwoven wood stretching ahead of them to the north.
The expedition tramped on through the morning and into the afternoon.
Although the spontaneous road on the forest roof was solid, it was lumpy and bruised their feet. By late afternoon Jack called a halt.
Zickorian said, “What gives this Earther the authority to tell us when to stop and go?”
Sitting beside Cisco and Yoshio in the shade of a corkscrew-shaped upthrust of tubular plant-stuff, Zero said, “If he hadn’t done it, I would have. I’ve got to take a load off for a while.”
“A load of what? Off of what?”
“Never mind. Man, I’m thirsty. It’s cooler up here, but that direct sunlight dries me out.”
They’d sat across from an enormous purple bloom, nearly two feet across, made of four great rumpled, outspread petals, fringed with a translucent beard of fine silky strands that sketched the breeze. It was beautiful, so that Yoshio groaned a little when Jack stepped across to it and made it disintegrate.
Jack had pinched a particular section of the stem between his thumb and forefinger and then stroked that section a little—and the plant fell apart, the whole thing, as if Jack had pulled out its molecular underpinnings. It had collapsed into a heap of fragrant, wet ash that quickly melted down to a puddle of perfumed water with a purple slick swirling across it. “You wanted water,” Jack said, bending to drink.
Zero crossed to the puddle and knelt—then straightened up. “Smells like perfume. This stuff isn’t going to make me hallucinate, it it?”
“Not at all.”
“Good.” He thrust his face into it and drank, and an alien fragrance suffused his brain with soft, purple refreshment.
“At least, not much,” Jack amended.
Angie saw the glow first, just after sunset.
The colors of sunset had washed over them and receded, like the glow of their aching limbs, and evening had come with a long, leisurely twilight.
Then they heard the sound; it was foghorn deep, a concord of voices, like an all-baritone choir hitting its lowest note as one. The sound rumbled toward them and faded. And came again, after a while—and faded. Angie said, “It’s coming from the north. And there’s a light there.”
She pointed, and Zero made it out, a white shimmer at the northern horizon. What was it? Some marker set over the Progress Station by the Meta?
It was odd that they had ceased to speculate about the Progress Station, Zero thought, now that they were so close to it. It was as if they’d almost forgotten about the Progress Station itself.
“You’re seeing the glow of the IAMton fields,” Jack said. “It may seem strange, but when you’re on the field itself, there’s very little glow. It seems to be something you can only perceive from a distance.”
“And that sound?” Cisco asked, shivering, as the baritone choir began again.
“The hills, singing,” Jack said. “A related phenomenon. They are discharging their own IAMton excess.”
Not only did Zero hear the sound, when the rumble swelled, he seemed to feel it, or something that accompanied it, rippling through him. And with it came the tingling, the electrical enormity he’d experienced the night Fiskle and Kelso had been caught by the Current.
Cisco said it aloud, his voice breaking, “It’s the Current, man. I can feel it.”
“No,” Jack said. “It’s something much more diluted. It’s not the Current any more than a little St. Elmo’s Fire is a whole lightning storm. But it may have some effect.”
“I do not wish to be [approximate translation:] a Twist,” Zickorian said.
“Have you led us into this deliberately?” He was squatting beside Calum opposite the Earthers and the Pezz. If he’d had an Earther face, Zero would have thought he was glowering. His optical strip shone faintly against the dark backdrop of gathering night.
“I have not led you into danger,” Jack said, “except what you knew would be here. I have led you into a circus of delights. But you have yourselves knowingly agreed to do without a safety net.”
“The translator appears to be confused,” Zickorian said.
“You are in no danger of the Current here,” Jack said. His face was wrapped in the deepening shadow.
“I’m in danger of falling asleep sitting up,” Angie said, looking around. “I just wish this stuff were more comfortable to lie on.”
“I’ll return momentarily,” Jack said. He stood and moved off into the darkness, and somehow the forest knew to hold him up, although he’d strayed off the road. When he returned a few minutes later, he was staggering under an armful of fronds gathered from a droopy stand of treetops they’d seen just before camping. “These will make excellent bedding.” He dumped the thick blue fronds in the midst of the road where the light was strongest and said, “Now, what about some dinner?”
Zero awoke at the apex of the night. He had an uncanny feeling that the stars had nudged him awake. They were crowding the sky; they were all around him, searing and yet pristine.
Feeling noontime-black-coffee awake, he sat up—and found himself staring into Angie’s eyes. “Well?” she said. “What did you want?”
“What?”
She made a small noise of impatience. “I’m sleepy.” She didn’t look at all sleepy. “Don’t waste my time with games. You said you needed help or something. So I came over. You called me.”
“Not unless I was talking in my sleep … I think you dreamed it.”
She stared at him. She opened her mouth to deny it—and then closed it.
After a moment she said, “Maybe so. I feel strange.”
“Me, too, now that you … now that…” He couldn’t get it out. The sensation that had come over him was occupying his every muscle and cell co
mpletely, petrifying him with input. After a moment it ebbed a little, and he was able to move. He exhaled raspily and looked toward the white shimmer at the horizon. It had come from there: the north.
Angie was sitting beside him now, clutching his arm, digging her fingers into it, staring north. “You felt it, too?” he asked.
She nodded. Her sharp intake of breath was the only sound that escaped either of them when the sensation rolled over them again—a feeling of drowning in warmth and sheer sensation, a feeling of profound inner weight, a resonance.
With Angie. He turned to look at her. “I felt you.”
She was shaking. “Help me.”
A trembling in the air threatened apocalypse. “I’m scared, too.” He slid his arm around her, utterly without volition, carried on the wave that was passing through them again; and like two pieces of soft flotsam on a tide, they were washed together. Something hard in him became soft; something soft on him became rigid. They clawed and kicked their clothes away and stretched out on the bed of fronds and groaned when their skin made contact. Angie sobbed and ground herself against him, so that he felt a wet suction against his shaft, a purely organic imploring.
They meshed, and the circuit was completed. The energy flowed through them, and into the world, and back through them again. Zero knew then—the knowledge flowed through him like an inner river—that the psychoreactive tide of the IAMtons had brought them together. The radio emanation of their sexualities had signaled each to each in sleep, and their inhibitions and mistrusts had been overwhelmed in an arousal that transcended the biological. They danced horizontally to the soundless tune, choreographed by a limitlessly arrogant force that was utterly indifferent to their mawkish little individual preferences.
Zero came. But it didn’t have the usual shrinking, depressed aftermath. His orgasm dulled his blade a little but didn’t slow his chopping. He dug deeper into the sensation-core of her, and she clamped her legs around the small of his back and urged him on with a seamless flood of whispered obscenities and romantic endearments—” Fuck me!” and “I love you, love me, love me! “—overlapping and indistinguishable, for many hours. It seemed as if the stars were all around them, and beneath them, too.
