Splendid Chaos (v1.1)

by John Shirley

  “Food is a big priority with you apparently,” Zero said brusquely.

  “Yes. It has to be.”

  “We could go without for a day.”

  “I urge that we don’t wait here any longer,” Jack said.

  “The hell with it,” Angie said, wincing. “Let’s go. He’s been right about everything else. We’re just scared to go into this thing. Making excuses. The hell with it. Come on.”

  She started off across the wastes, and reluctantly, carrying their packs and the metal spikes, the others followed.

  The boy screamed and writhed, and foam flecked his lips.

  “You’re fortunate I’m here to deal with this matter,” the Emperor said. “The wounded are fortunate, too. They need someone who’s not squeamish to rescue them from their suffering. Do this one now, Bella.”

  Making a kissy-face and batting her eyes at the teenage boy, Bella knelt and lovingly cut his throat with a ragged-edged machete cadged from a dead Groyn. The boy’s screaming became a gurgle, then silence.

  Sadly, Swanee realized that this was the boy guard from the night they’d taken Doggo. The boy he’d frightened off, trying to save his life. Well, his lower half was crushed; he’d have died anyway. And now the screaming was stopped. But did Bella have to enjoy herself so much?

  Bella, Swanee, two Phylum Twos, Jamie, Kelso, and two air-sharks accompanied the Emperor Harmony on his continuing inspection of his new residence. The air-sharks circled the group restlessly in opposite directions, one a little higher than the other; they were waiting for another chance to feed, eyeing the cadaver of the boy, champing their beveled jaws.

  Jamie stood grimly rigid in the enormous hands of a Phylum Two, who imprisoned her effortlessly, clamping her arms to her sides. Now and then he nudged his semitumescent penis against her rump, and she ground her teeth in bottled-up fury. Swanee could see it in her eyes: she was imagining just how she would kill this creature once she had the opportunity.

  The room had once been a large workroom in the back of one of the open-air shops and was now a repository of broken crockery, shattered pots, overturned furniture, and a heap of gravel where one wall had collapsed.

  “There’s another over there, there is!” Kelso cawed out, hopping from foot to foot on Harmony’s shoulder. His stunted wings flapped his excitement; drool leaped from his skull’s mouth; and his lidless eyes dilated and pinpointed and dilated and pinpointed.

  Swanee had to suppress an imprecation. He had hoped that the Emperor wouldn’t see the scarred fellow, just a boy himself. Warren. He was lying on his back, half covered with debris, mostly hidden by a wooden table lying on its side.

  Harmony turned to look. The camera lenses occupying his eye sockets whirred, focusing; the mechanical iris inside them opening as he looked into the dark corner of the room.

  Bella threw the table aside. Jamie sucked in her breath audibly. “Warren!”

  Warren grinned lopsidedly at her. It was a weak grin. His side was stoved in; blood glued gravel to the floor.

  Then Jamie glanced guiltily at the Emperor, who had turned his changeless features toward her. “He’s a friend of yours.”

  “I know everyone here,” she said, shrugging. “I even used to know you when you were human.”

  “Is that supposed to be an insult? If it is, you’re an ignorant girl. A silly airhead, like all females.” He snorted with pleasure. “I see you don’t like that remark. That’s nice. Listen: I’m going to let the air-sharks play with your friend here. Unless perhaps you’d like to tell me where Sanchez and your little lesbian whorefriend are hiding?”

  She was fighting tears. “I really, honestly don’t know.”

  “I could Twist you, and then I could read your mind. But I don’t think I want to see what you’d become, and anyway the process takes too long. Well. The sharks.”

  “Look, leave Warren alone. He could be useful to you,” she said desperately, a catch in her voice. “He might live. He’s a good fighter.”

  “That’s what worries me. But he’d die anyway. The wounded are all impossible to care for on Fool’s Hope. Stupid to try to save them unless their wounds are minor. No, he’ll die. But if I give him to the sharks, it’ll be … well, they like to play with their food.”

  “Look, I’ll help you any way I can. You’re in power, so putting this moron on me is unnecessary. But I don’t know where Sanchez and Trish are.”

  He snorted. “As if the whore would so much as go for a tinkle without telling you where she was doing it and how much came out.”

  “Hey, Jamie.” Warren’s voice was a rasp. “Forget it. I’m goin’ anyway. I like the idea … the sharks. Always knew sharks’d get me. A surfer way to go. One of the risks of living freestyle.”

  “You think you’d like the idea, but you won’t,” Harmony said nonchalantly.

  “You won’t like it you won’t like it you won’t!” Kelso sniggered.

  Harmony gestured, and the two air-sharks dove. One of them clamped Warren’s head in its jaws—not hard enough to kill him—and pulled him from the debris. He choked off a scream. It carried him about the room, dangling him awkwardly from its jaws, as the other worried at his thighs.

  Swanee shouted, “Shit!” He stepped in and slashed out Warren’s throat with his talons as the shark swept by. He turned instantly to Harmony, fell to his knees, and bowed his head. “Forgive me. I couldn’t bear it: I am weak. But I am loyal. Kill me now. My essence is yours.”

  Harmony said nothing for a moment. The only sound was the crunching, sucking noises as the two air-sharks fought over Warren’s remains. Jamie was alternately sobbing and cursing.

  Swanee couldn’t bring himself to look up at the Emperor.

  Finally, Harmony said, “You could have been my favorite. But I have always perceived this—this simpering indecision in you.”

  “He has misgivings,” Bella said. As always, her voice was a velvety tease.

  “But he does what is required. He can fly: he is useful, my Emperor. One who serves even in the face of his doubts is finally more devoted than one who serves unthinking. The unthinking servant might one day think and turn. This one has shown that he is yours no matter what occurs to him.”

  Swanee was staring at her in surprise. She looked at him languidly, with cool objectivity. There was no hint of affection or regard in her gaze. But she had spoken up for him. Which meant that she was willing to take a risk for him.

  “Still, he has defied me just now,” Harmony said. “He knew I meant for the little asshole to suffer. Oh, very well. But go from my sight, Swanee. Quickly. Make yourself useful restoring my throne room. Go!”

  Bowing his head to conceal his relief at being allowed to leave, Swanee backed away, out the door, and then leaped into the air. He climbed the sky and, feeling strangely giddy, circled the settlement, looking down at the restoration activity, wondering about Bella. Wondering how he could care about so cruel a creature, and how so cruel a creature could care about him.

  Below, workmen under the watchful eye of various Twists were loading wreckage onto oruh carts and shoring up the gates against hypothetical attacks. Others had begun work converting the warehouse into Harmony’s throne room. “Save the skulls,” Harmony had told them. “Keep the skulls of all the dead. The old era has expired; the skulls will symbolize the death of the past. The new age is here: the new age of Harmony.”

  Oh yes, Swanee thought. The new age.

  The sunlight glanced off the clinker tower of crystal up ahead and speared into Zero’s eyes. He squinted against the reflection and the glare of the pitted white plain. Abruptly, the forty-foot tower collapsed into itself, crackling and thudding. Section by rough-faceted section shunted jerkily into the desert surface as if it were being pulled into a tube from underground. And as if in response, another rose off to the left, rising shakily from the plain with a chuck-chuck-chuck sound, an irregular construct like a precarious pile of badly worn children’s blocks just waiting for someone to pu
sh it over. In the distance, against the horizon, yet another tower built itself out of nothing, while a third tower deconstructed.

  “That a reaction to us?” Zero asked Jack. The Earthers were together; Angie, Jack and Yoshio were walking abreast. The Pezz trotted up ahead, very nervously indeed, muttering to itself. Zickorian and Calum followed disconsolately behind.

  “The towers? A reaction to us?” Jack seemed distant and less animated than usual. “No. It happens all the time out here. Some electrochemical activity I don’t pretend to understand.”

  “It’s funny, the things you do understand, Jack,” Zero said, watching him, “and the thing you profess not to. You seem to know what you need to know when the time comes for it.”

  “Very good,” Jack said wearily. “I have traveled many times farther on Fool’s Hope than anyone else who was kidnapped to this world. I entered its wilderness alone in order to make its acquaintance. Its Gaea, its Overmind, its ecological network—it is there to talk to you if you learn its language. It tells me what I need to know.”

  Zero kept watching him. It seemed to him that Jack was a bit more frayed around the edges than usual. Not his clothing or the dirt on him, not the depredations of travel; no, instead, Zero thought, it was the total picture, the gestalt of him. There was something … something…

  “God, I’m hungry,” Angie said suddenly, bitterly, “and thirsty. No more water. I hope to God you’re right about that swamp. It seems so dry here.”

  “We encountered that phenomenon before. From dry to wet, just like that,” Yoshio said.

  “And my head is killing me,” she went on, scowling. “I’d kill for an aspirin. Okay. I wouldn’t kill for one. But I’d maim for one. Or maybe a couple of Tylenol. No, make it Advil. Three Advil washed down with a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Chilled.”

  Orange juice, Zero thought. Grapefruit juice, apple juice, strawberry-banana milkshakes: never again. Change the subject, quick. He said, “The thing that happened to you this morning—the alien, um, borrowing your body, sort of.” He didn’t want to say possessed. “You really don’t remember any of it?”

  Angie shrugged glumly. “Not anything that happened. Just a feeling. Like an aftertaste. Fear. Like, a fear I was going to be eaten. Wanting to escape, find isolation. Just a general sort of feeling.”

  “Same here,” Yoshio said. “All I can remember about the alien is a mood. A sense of regret and being angry at the regret.”

  Zero understood. He felt a sharp, empathic sense of what they were describing. Too sharp. The IAMton field was enhancing his intuition, leaking bits of telepathic signals to him. And it was growing more intense.

  For a while the only sound was their footsteps crunching across the acrid crust of the IAMton wastes. The dust they raised stung their eyes and made their mouths dry and puffy; it burned in Zero’s split lip and worked its way under the bandages to Yoshio’s wounds.

  All at once the Pezz froze in its tracks. Then it began to back toward them and turned, very slowly, as if struggling with a mysterious inertia. Zero had been around it long enough to know this was an indication of real fear.

  “I cannot continue,” it said.

  “It isn’t much farther,” Jack said. “I can smell the water, the grass. We could carry you if—”

  “No, no, I am not weary. I am … there are too many others here. Invisible ones. The territorial impingement is great. I violate them; they violate me. We are [untranslatable].”

  “I sense them, too,” Zickorian said, moving up from behind. “The beast-ancestors of this place give us our final warnings.”

  Zero felt a prickle of sourceless anxiety himself, had been feeling it for a while. The sunlight seemed intrusively bright. He closed his eyes for a moment to rest them.

  And then it washed over him: a vision, styled cinematically. Pan over a cavern of verdigris, artificially lit from within artfully arranged wall-niches.

  The big cavern’s gold and green-streaked walls are honeycombed with elegantly carved-out holes, cave-mouths tastefully bearded with something like sparkling macrame made of cotton candy. Truck in on one filigree-trimmed cave in particular. Someone looks out of one of the holes.

  It exudes a tangerine mist that clings to it, obscuring its inner form. But he knows what this person is like under the clothing-smoke: like a leathery vacuum cleaner hose articulated with animate hairs and pincers. Zzzz, but it is good to see her! A warmth rolls through him at the sight of his sweet mother.

  “Zero!” Jack’s voice, from somewhere. “Clasp it! Close your hands over it!”

  Zero felt something cold in his hands. The cold was like the cold pang of separation from a loved one: he’d lost his mother. Reeling from the loss, he opened his eyes and saw himself surrounded by strangers. Aliens. “Zzzz?”

  “Oh, God,” Angie said. “Zero!”

  He looked at her, and a filter was withdrawn from his mental camera. Her features shifted from alien to familiar. “Angie…” He felt spaced out and his head ached, but the vision and the strangeness had gone. He opened his arms to embrace her. She melted against him. He closed his eyes to savor her—and then snapped them open. He’d seen pictures against the darkness behind his eyelids. A city of interlocked glass toroids; a red sky thronged with flying creatures moving in strict ritualistic formations.

  “Don’t close your eyes except to blink,” he told the others over Angie’s shoulder. “You’ll see things.”

  “You see how it is?” the Pezz said, turning to Jack. “They are everywhere, here.”

  “It’s not them, actually,” Jack said. “It’s a sort of record of them, impregnated into the ambient IAMton field. But I see your problem. You feel you are transgressing?”

  “Yes,” the Pezz said. “I am unclean and in danger of becoming absurd.”

  “Talk about closing the barn door after the horse is gone,” Angie muttered.

  Zero turned to the Pezz. “Don’t you have some kind of—some sort of official diplomatic apology you can make for, uh, transgressing? Maybe something traditional among your people?”

  “Yes, the Traveler’s Obsequy. It would not be enough.”

  “It might be,” Jack said, “combined with this.” He bent and unwrapped the metal hill-spikes he’d been carrying wrapped in cloth. “These can be dangerous. I didn’t want to break them out till they were really needed.” He gave one to each of the travelers. “Now, be careful how you hold them. They will act as lightning rods of a sort for the psychoreactive energies. They are to be used with a firm grip, held just so.” He held his own shining metal spike out to the side like a canoe paddle, its lower end touching the dirt. “It must drag in the dust. It will be uncomfortable, hunched over like this, but we haven’t got far to go, and you can take frequent rests.”

  “Why do you say ‘Keep a good grip on them’?” Yoshio asked, sounding worried.

  “Because when they pick up an IAMton surge, they might react by turning in your hands and attracting to your center of psychic polarity. That is, if you don’t hold them firmly, they’ll whip about and sink themselves into your skull. They’re attracted to your brain like a pin to a magnet, you see.”

  Zero’s knuckles immediately whitened on the spike.

  “I refuse,” Zickorian said, casting his spike down. It clanged onto the salt crust and trembled as violet sparks shivered up and down its length. “It is wrong to defy the spirits. If they desire to enter us, it is for good reason. We should commune with them.”

  For a moment Zero found himself wondering if Zickorian were right. He shook his head. He didn’t want to go back to that verdigris cavern.

  “Do as you prefer, Zickorian,” Jack said. “And I wish you farewell.”

  Zickorian turned a rather human expression of accusation at Calum, who reluctantly dropped his own hill-spike beside Zickorian’s.

  The expedition set off once more to the north, toward the Hungry Punkin’ swamp and the Progress Station. The Earthers and the Pezz were moving
clumsily, having to drag the “lightning rods.” Zickorian stepped out well ahead of the others; as if setting himself apart from them and challenging “the spirits” to take him. Calum hung back. Zero noticed that he walked between Angie and Yoshio, close between their hill-spikes, as if hoping their close proximity would protect him. Apparently it did.

  For he was untouched when, minutes later, Zickorian gave a shout and went rigid, his arms stretched overhead, reaching for the jade sky. And then he bent double, clawing at himself. Zero and Jack ran up to help him, but it was too late. Zickorian had drawn a knife from his boot and was using it to slash himself. The alien within the alien, the alien mind that had taken over Zickorian, had seen hideous things sunken into his underside—what the Earthers called legs—disgusting growths trying, perhaps, to eat him alive.

  Zero gathered something of the sort from the few fragments of Zickorian’s babbling that the translator-box could manage. And then it translated Zickorian’s death-scream as “[Untranslatable].”

  Before Jack and Zero could wrest the knife away, Zickorian’s random slashing found a vital organ.

  Silently, Calum buried Zickorian and inscribed the appropriate runes in the dust over the shallow grave.

  The Earthers stood gloomily by while this was done. There had been much friction with Zickorian. But he had traveled with them a long way, had undergone the same privations and confusion. They had come to identify with him, to think of him, like every member of the expedition, as an extension of themselves. He had been part of their island of familiarity in a sea of the alien. Piece by piece their island had been swamped by the sea: Dennis, Cisco, now Zickorian. Losing Zickorian made them feel small and lost and sorry they hadn’t tried harder to understand him.

  Zero’s own sense of loss was complicated by the aftertaste of the alien consciousness he’d shared for a few moments: the alien’s sense of loss for its mother.

  The horror of that intrusion, the longing for the embrace of that thing, nagged at the back of his mind. Don’t think about that, Zero told himself.

  Bury it. But he wondered how much longer he could keep burying his shocks and stay sane.