Splendid Chaos (v1.1)

by John Shirley

  “He would’ve been something more than that to the child,” Sanchez said, quietly simmering with disapproval.

  Jamie shrugged diplomatically. She glanced back toward the back gate. All this talk was just to cover the anxiety of waiting for their other plan to come to fruition. They’d sent a runner to their allies among the other races, asking for help. If he’d got past the Groyn…

  “This is all Fiskle, you know,” Sanchez said.

  Jamie tilted her head to one side and pursed her lips. “Probably.”

  “Not probably. Definitely. What happened to the Groyn child … we shouldn’t be just sitting back letting him hammer at us. First he set up Father’s little lecture series; then he murdered Doggo. Now this.”

  “What do you want her to do?” Trish snapped.

  “Really,” Jamie said, nodding. “I can never find the bastards. We sent a party to try to arrest those big guys he uses, the ones who carried Doggo off. Took them three days to find one, and when they did, he killed two of our people and their oruh. He broke the oruh’s back with his arms. We don’t know how many of those things Fiskle has. Anyway, Fiskle has some sort of … some telepathic thing. He knows when we’re coming. The one we caught was a fluke, and I wish he hadn’t caught him. So what do you suggest?”

  “We’ll have to trick the son of a bitch. How, I don’t know yet. But … Here comes our messenger boy.” He’d spotted Warren trotting up the courtyard.

  The undamaged side of his face, contorted with the pain of exertion, almost matched the other side. He trotted up the steps to the walkway just beneath the defensive wall.

  Puffing, he leaned on the wall and said, “Twists … broke into the Neutral, killed five Whorebugs, set ‘em on fire … The Whorebugs are joining the Groyn. That’s what the Groyn are waiting for—the Whorebug war party.”

  Trish said softly, “It’ll be soon. Things must be coming to a head. Look.”

  She pointed upward. The Meta’s watching spheres were there, a hundred feet overhead, a cluster of little silver spheres turning this way and that, like a group of toy balloons.

  Jamie glared up at them. “Five of them. Plenty of camera angles,” she muttered. “Bastards.”

  Standing on the strip of barren rock between the forest and the Hillserlive Hills, Zero watched the literal rolling of the rolling hills with queasy fascination. A great ripple went through the ground, and then another from the opposite direction; the two nearest hills seemed to roll toward one another. “This, Cisco,” Zero said, “is what the word awesome really means.”

  The ground shook; small cracks in the strip of rock widened and extended just enough to be noticeable.

  The hills were covered with a flat, dusty-blue growth identical to the Rug near the settlement. Zero looked at it nervously. He moved up close to Jack, who stood beside Cisco and the Pezz, watching the grumbling roll of the hills. “Jack, we going to see wheelers here? Under those hill-things, maybe?”

  “No. None. What is under the Rug here are the hills themselves. Living things, relatives of the creek-worm.”

  The hills moved under the covering like a bull’s muscles rolling under its hide. But they were big, so damned big. Zero felt dwarfed and lonely, looking at them. The vastness of them, like the great, storm-driven oceanic swells he’d seen off Oahu, gave him an agoraphobic sense of vulnerability.

  As the nearer hills approached one another, dozens of slits opened in them like lipless mouths, giving out the baritone-choir sound that the expedition had heard earlier. The hills seemed about to collide—but instead they ground loudly against one another, as if they were grindstones working away under their Rug-like covering. And from the point of contact, yard-long spines of what appeared to be polished steel emerged, squeezed out as if manufactured by the junctioning of the hills. The hills stopped moving, and the spines toppled and clanged down into an untidy heap, flashing in the sun. The slits on the hills closed; the hills fell silent.

  Jack pointed across the Hillserlive region toward the horizon. They could see, beyond a few miles of the hills, a shining band of white. “The IAMton wastes,” he said. “We’ll have to cross the hills, and then the wastes. Then we reach the Progress Station.”

  “And if we acquire the goods in the Progress Station,” Zickorian said, “a very doubtful proposition—but if we do, we are expected to split their value with you, Jack?”

  “He’s earned the right to it,” Angie said. “He’s helped us.”

  “I agree!” the Pezz chimed in, rearing on his hind legs for emphasis. “I quite agree. He has demonstrated his value!”

  “He was not part of the original agreement,” Zickorian said. “His motives are suspect.”

  “I’m here because I’m concerned,” Jack said, “because I love intelligent life and don’t like to see it wasted. I have no desire for a share. Now, let us go. I am very hungry. There is food to be had at the swamp on the other side of the wastes. Let’s hurry to it.”

  Zero looked at him. “Your style has changed. You talk more rationally, cooler. You were playing some kind of role before, right? How come?”

  Jack smiled. “We really don’t have time to chat. Are you all willing to make the crossing?” He looked around at them.

  “It can’t be safe to cross those hills, man,” Cisco said, chewing a knuckle.

  “Maybe Zickorian’s right. I mean, anything could sprout up out of those humps. Maybe that Unmasculator thing he was talking about. Some kinda spirits of the ground.”

  “It’s perfectly safe, if you don’t wake the hills,” Jack said casually. He set off across the Rug.

  Angie and Zero looked at one another. If you don’t wake the…? “Looks like we gotta,” she said. “That way’s north, all right.”

  “Yes, yes, this is the way, north, north!” the Pezz said excitedly. “The ones who live beneath the ground here—their territorial emanations are turned downward, toward the inner planet. They commune. Their exudations are foreign to me, but I sense deep planetary rapture and (untranslatable). Let us go quickly before their territorial fields are expressed upward!”

  “It seems inevitable,” Yoshio said resignedly. He hurried after Jack.

  “It’s all hopeless anyway,” Zickorian said. “We die soon, it doesn’t matter where.”

  Calum, crestfallen, muttered, “Die soon. Doesn’t matter. And (subarticulate).” They followed Yoshio.

  Shouldering their packs and pikes, Zero and Angie and Cisco hurried after the clansmen. Hurrying but treading lightly…

  They crossed between the two nearest hills, entered a valley between a row of others, feeling the body heat from the great, anonymous humps beneath them. There was no shade out here, and the sun blazed down on them, sapping their strength, making them bow their heads. Jack led them to the middle of the valley and up to the shining heap of spines. They were long, barbed quills, Zero saw. Jack bent and picked one up.

  “Uh, maybe we shouldn’t disturb them,” Zero said. “Maybe the hills wouldn’t like it.”

  “It’s quite all right,” Jack said. “I advise you to get one each. They’ll be useful.”

  “Just what we need,” Cisco grumbled. “More to carry.”

  “They’re very light.”

  Skeptical of this, Zero bent and picked one up. It was light indeed, like something made out of balsa, and surprisingly cool to the touch, but very hard. They’d each picked one up when Angie said, “Uh-oh.”

  She was looking up at two Meta spheres that arrived overhead, forty feet up. Dolefully she said, “Must be we’re in for a hassle.”

  “Very astute,” Jack said. “Here it comes.” He was watching something approach from the far side of a hill, circling its base to angle sharply toward the expedition.

  Zero saw six clusters of internal organs, it looked like, winding through the air toward them. And then Zero saw the rest of the creatures, the transparent plastic bodies the sun had washed out at first, casting rainbows on the ground as they came, skating over the g
round as effortlessly as expert skiers down a slope, coming right at them with a terrible, drawn-out squeaking sound that set Zero’s teeth on edge.

  And now he saw things whirring in their hands, bolas of some kind, spinning so fast they were just a blur unless you watched closely. Spiked bolas.

  “Start backing up the hill!” Jack shouted. “Get up the slope!”

  Backing away, pulling Angie with him, Zero remembered. He’d heard these creatures described. Vinyls, they were called.

  “We should surrender to show our good will!” Yoshio said. “Then we can convince them we’re not hostile.”

  “This race cannot be negotiated with once it decides you are the enemy!” the Pezz said, rearing up. “They regard all other creatures as sub-beings!”

  “They have been set against us by Fiskle!” Jack shouted. “Talk is no use! Climb the hilll. Up!”

  And then the Vinyls were upon them, streaking around them in a snappy ellipse, roughly human-shaped things, their features just dimples in their transparent heads. One of them zipped in close to Zero and whipped a bola at his face; Zero blocked with his pike and staggered back.

  Another was upon him, but Angie was there, her pike braced against the hillside, catching the Vinyl in its gut. It squealed, and a comet of light flashed from its wound to spiral away into the sky. It collapsed, spurting an interior goo that smelled of industrial waste, but as she jerked the pike free of it, another came. Zero jabbed at it, but Angie had hit the first one just right. Zero’s jab only just deflected the second Vinyl for a moment. It zipped back around as if on a rail, its frictionless feet never leaving the ground, and came at them again. Yoshio stepped in and karate-kicked it off balance so that it went glimmering down the hill, but the others were closing in, slashing at him with the bolas.

  Zero saw Yoshio fall—then he had to swing the pike at another; it ducked and skated around behind him. He caught the edge of a bola on the back of his neck, and fell, tasting the hot iron of terror in his mouth, picturing them closing in on him, their squeaking bodies and horribly faceless faces blocking away the world. “Angie!” he shouted over the furiously squeaking passage of the Vinyls, as he skidded facedown. “Angie, get up the hill with Jack!”

  He looked up in time to see the Pezz, with one rubber-band ssswwwap of its front legs, hit a Vinyl so hard that it flipped over backward, head over heels, and landed in a tangle of broken plastic and steaming liquid.

  The ground was moving beneath him.

  He heard Cisco shout, “They’re coming awake—the hill spirits are waking up!” Panic pealed in his voice.

  And then another Vinyl was looming over Zero, and the bola blurred down at him. Someone—Angie!—was blocking the bola with a pike, deflecting it only partly—

  A hot flash of pain in the right side of his head.

  It was only a minute later when he came to. Someone was dragging him up the slope by his wrists. Through a haze of pain he saw Cisco running wildly, trying to escape the hill, running down slope, and falling off the edge … the edge?

  The hill had broken away from the others, was booming to itself in pain as Jack stabbed one of the pikes into it, bleeding pink glue-stuff from the wound as he drove it away from the Vinyls … leaving, at its edge, a ten-foot cliff that the Vinyls couldn’t climb.

  And the hill had torn the Rug, was carrying a piece away with it, away from Cisco and the Vinyls. Cisco looked up, screaming, as they closed around him. Squeaking. Squeaking.

  Zero closed his eyes.

  Zero was lying atop the hill, which was moving away to the north, shoving rudely between its fellows. An earthquake out for a walk.

  “The Vinyls tried to control one of the other hills the way I did this one,” Jack was telling Yoshio. “It trampled them. It has to be done just so. And I wasn’t even sure I could do it. It was a great risk. Are you quite all right?”

  Yoshio’s voice: “Yes. The bleeding has stopped, I think.”

  Zero sat up and sucked in his breath sharply. Angie, sitting beside him, said, “You better lie down. You might have a concussion.”

  “It hurts, but I don’t think there’s any damage.”

  “Better lie down anyway,” Yoshio said.

  “Please recline, recline!” the Pezz said.

  Zero lay back. He saw Zickorian off to one side with Calum, the two of them muttering out of translation-box range.

  He saw the shining wastes to the north growing closer.

  He saw the emerald ceiling of the sky losing its polish. Dusk.

  He saw Angie smiling down at him, the dust on her face striped with tears.

  “I knew that guy a long time,” Zero said. “Cisco was kind of a jerk, but—”

  “I know,” she said. “Rest. Just accept whatever happens here. Just accept it. Because otherwise…”

  “Yeah. Otherwise.”

  He closed his eyes and let the growing susurration of IAMton energies whisper to him from the north.

  11

  The Groyn only had to charge the gate twice. The second time, it splintered with a despairing groan. The men behind it screamed and were crushed under broken planks as the Groyn plowed through, rearing up on their back sections to slam down on the Earthers caught beneath, jellying them.

  Meanwhile the Whorebugs climbed the outer walls, scrabbling up them without handholds, ascending furiously on sticky clawpads. Some were struck from the top edge of the wall with pikes and blunderbusses; but others whipped lassos of Whorebug exudation over the battlement and noosed the Earthers and used them to pull themselves up and then finished the choking, clamping them with all their limbs at once in the lethal embrace of a preying insect. Glamorous in the light of sunset, jewelry-perfect and nightmare-disgorged, the Whorebugs showed a strength that seemed impossible for their slender limbs, dismembering their victims with methodical intentness.

  The Groyn, though bigger and stronger, crushing men against the walls like ripe fruit, were nevertheless almost Earthly, were like angry, sentient bears or mammoths; they were furious and showed it, as animals from Earth did.

  But the Whorebugs were monsters of inscrutability, with bodies designed by some speed-freak paranoid; they were expressionless and mechanically efficient in everything, making not a sound as they killed, like bored workers in the slaughterhouse dispatching steer after steer.

  Men were later found dangling from the walls, wrapped in the most bright and gorgeous Whorebug silk, intricately patterned and tightly bound, smothered inside it, buried alive in textile excellence. Sarcophagi for the fashion-conscious, Harmony would call them.

  Now there was flame, as fallen torches ignited debris, and leviathans came bellowing, looming tip in the smoke. Leviathan silhouettes resolved into Groyn flailing with their tentacular limbs to tear heads from shoulders and to smash leg bones into flinders, shrieking to their gods as they were impaled on three pikes at once. A child was glimpsed screaming and clawing the air as she was carried away over a wall by a Whorebug …

  Flame wagging out of windows like an angry neighbor … On the ground, red blood puddled with black blood, and both mixed with yellow effluvium.

  Overhead, the Meta’s watching spheres placidly took everything in.

  Jamie and Sanchez and Warren and Trish remained on the wall fighting, shouting encouragement, struggling with panic. They crossed to the roof of the dorms, calling for the other Earthers to fall back.

  At last the Earthers retreated to the main dorm, their numbers halved, knowing the barricade at the door of the dorms would not hold for long; choking on the smoke and the taste of impending probability.

  That was when the Emperor Harmony made his entrance: Swanee carried the shapechanger to the roof of the dorm, where Jamie and the Council were arguing about surrender and the consequence of it. And then Swanee was there, lowering the pink bar of flesh that was already writhing into another shape. Harmony’s face showed on it, grinning, and then the rest of him slowly filled in.

  The pikemen came at Swanee
and Harmony—but paused at Jamie’s order after Swanee shouted, “This is not the Emperor Harmony, but his representative!”

  The “representative,” in psychic rapport with the Emperor, took on the Emperor’s shape and spoke what the Emperor spoke, safe in a far place.

  “They are too furious to stop now, even if you do surrender,” Harmony said.

  “We picked them for that quality: that banzai rage against the enemy. But I know something about the Groyn that I can use—together with the strength of my Phylum Two Pragmatics, who wait outside the settlement—to make them give up the fight and accept a truce. If the Groyn back off, the Whorebugs will, too. All I require for this service is your simple loyalty.

  Your recognition of me as your Emperor.

  “At this point I could take the place anyway, of course. But I want the ritual of coronation, I want your cooperation: it will be best in the long run. Choose. Death or a redefinition of honor.”

  “Fuck off,” Jamie said.

  “Go to hell,” Sanchez said.

  But Jamie and Sanchez were almost alone in their defiance.

  The others stepped forward and voted to accept the new ruler. It was a matter of survival. Among them was Bowler, who perhaps saw an opportunity for revolution in the installation of a proper dictator.

  “Here then, are the first commands of your new Emperor.” The shapechanger boomed. “First—you are all to remain here, while my people dispose of the aliens. Once that is done, We will begin reconstruction—”

  At the back of the crowd, Jamie squeezed Trish’s hand. She looked at Sanchez. He bent near them, whispered, “We have a few minutes…” He tilted his head toward the stairway that led onto the roof from the second floor terrace. Jamie nodded. She and Trish followed Sanchez to the stairway and hurried down it, quietly as possible. When they reached the terrace, Sanchez said, “I don’t think Harmony knows about the back tunnels under the walls. You were smart to keep that under wraps, Jamie. You and Trish’ll hide there, I’ll head for the Neutral, try and drum up some alien support—”