Splendid Chaos (v1.1)

by John Shirley

  Zero slipped an arm around Angie’s waist, and for a few minutes they leaned on one another. Then Jack said, “We’d best go.” Calum nodded and hunkered beside Jack, sharing his hill-spike. Walking like Groucho, they continued on their way.

  When the back pain could no longer be borne and the irritation of the dust in their eyes threatened to blind them, Jack announced, “There, up ahead, see it? The stand of ghost trees?”

  With watering eyes they peered through the haze of dust and saw a thatch of wavery plumes at the horizon. Like filmic superimpositions of trees, Zero thought, but without color. Misty gray.

  “That is the edge of the swamp,” Jack said. “The turf of the Hungry Punkin’. And the place where the Progress Station is supposed to be.”

  12

  “I knew we’d find her,” the Emperor said, turning his camera-lens eyes toward Trish. “Something as sweet and delicate and valuable as this silly creature couldn’t be hidden in the settlement long. I’m deeply annoyed to learn that there were escape tunnels dug under the settlement for her to hide in. I really had no idea they were there. I’m going to have a bit of advice sewn into a sampler: Never have too much faith in your own intelligence service.”

  Swanee was lying on a wooden scaffold on his back, gluing snail shells to the ceiling. They weren’t really snail shells—the creature who’d lived in them was more like a spider—but they looked a lot like them, with their spiral formation and their delicate patterning, and they were perfect for a ceiling mosaic. He was using them to delineate patterns of power radiating from the central figure of the ceiling, the Emperor’s face, which was forty feet across from ear to ear.

  The throne room—which, because it was so fussily tended by the dwarf-pig, Harmony called the Porcine Chapel—was to be decorated wall to wall, ceiling to floor, with murals and mosaics depicting the Ascent of the Emperor, in Harmony’s own fanciful version of the story.

  Swanee shifted a little on the scaffold and grunted with pain. This was very hard on his wings. They were flexible wings, almost rubbery, but they were not unbreakable. Also the smoke from the torches had collected near the ceiling, making him cough. He had run out of shells up there. A good excuse to quit the scaffold for a while and work on the walls.

  Swanee wriggled free of the scaffold and slid down a rope to the floor, giving his wings a few tentative twitches to restore circulation.

  “Watch out with thothe wingth!” the dwarf-pig lisped indignantly. “You almotht knocked over the royal chamberpot!”

  “Thorry—I mean, sorry,” Swanee said, looking over his shoulder. The dwarf-pig was carrying the chamberpot proudly out the front gate, where two Pragmatics stood guard.

  Swanee looked around. It would be a very busy room, in the design sense, when he was finished. But it was not for him to dictate the Emperor’s taste.

  It was high ceilinged, the biggest room in the settlement. It was empty except for the ceiling decorations, the scaffold, the throne at one end, and a red rug of of Groyn hide running from the throne to the door opposite.

  There was a door behind the throne leading to new jail cells and to the Emperor’s quarters.

  The Emperor was humming as he supervised the hanging of various ceiling decorations and of various people, and these two decorating tasks were indistinguishable. He hung two of the textile sarcophagi of the Whorebugs above and to either side of his throne; the windings were cut away in one spot so that the genitals of the men who’d died in them were exposed, dangling like shriveled blue tassels. Others, two men and two women who had resisted his takeover—in fact only one of them had; the others were executed for not completely contradicting the dissenter at once—had been hung by the neck, and then, after Swanee had dutifully painted pretty Art-Decoesque designs on them, were dipped in a lacquer made from oruh hooves to preserve them. Mummified, eyes bulging and tongues protruding under their yellow coating, they were hauled by pulley into place, dangling from the ceiling by their nooses like morbid chandeliers.

  “When we get the electric lighting worked out,” the Emperor said thoughtfully, “I really must have some bulbs put in their mouths, or perhaps in their rumps.”

  Trish was tied hand and foot, lying at the foot of the Emperor’s throne. Her groin was bloodied; the Emperor had let the Phylum Twos use her. He’d watched, absently caressing himself the while.

  “Look at yourself, you animall” Trish had screamed at Harmony as the Phylum Twos dragged her onto the mattress. “Look in a mirror! You call that exalted? Divine? You’re being punished, you dumb backward intellectual slob!”

  Harmony had laughed at her. “Punished? If this is punishment, give me more—because I’m very happy! How could punishment make a man so happy? And do you think I don’t look in the mirror, dear child? I do so, lovingly, every day! Do you imagine that this is some Dorian Gray retribution for me, my transformation? Should I want to look human? But humans are base things. Lower animals. That’s like a human wanting to resemble a chimp! What divine being ever looked really human? No one interesting. Have you seen paintings of Krishna, of Kali, of Shiva? I never liked my former face. This”—he indicated his own face—“now this is an idea made flesh. It is purity, my dear. To me it’s very beautiful.”

  But she hadn’t heard him; she’d been penetrated by the Phylum Two just then and was occupied with screaming.

  The Emperor’s shapechanger had assumed the shape of a throne. A throne of living human flesh, of soft pink skin, veins and sinews and muscles articulating an imitation of an Earthly throne’s marbling and baroque inlays.

  It was outlined in blinking, rolling human eyes, and its cushions were pulsing and warm. The Emperor strode to it and sat down with a sigh of pleasure. Kelso was asleep, eyes staring, glazed over, on the back of the throne. He woke with a snort when the Emperor sat down, flapped his truncated wings; his long tongue unwound as he yawned hugely.

  Swanee watched the throne with sidelong glances, looking up now and then from his palette and his brushwork.

  The Emperor looked down at Trish, and a reflection of a wall torch glimmered in perfect miniature in his camera lens. He spoke aside to the dwarf-pig. “Have the guards bring in the little bird’s new cage.”

  “My ethenth is yourth, Your—”

  “Yes, yes, just do it.”

  The dwarf-pig scrambled to do the Emperor’s bidding. Swanee could feel the Emperor’s gaze shift to him, to his work at the wall mural. It was like hearing a wasp buzz at the back of your head; you were afraid to move, afraid to provoke it into stinging you.

  Swanee was using a crude brush and a palette of crude but vivid paints to fill in the details of a mural depicting the transformation of the Emperor.

  The figure of the Emperor was the center of a pastoral design, and the trees, the undergrowth, the gathering of animals and awed worshippers all seemed to emanate from him in the stroke-emphasis of Swanee’s stylization.

  “Very pretty,” Harmony commented. “But it’s rather … there’s a sort of angry undertone, don’t you think? Rather like Van Gogh in his last phase. Emotional strokes, so vivid as to be hostile. Could this express some inner turmoil on your part, Swanee, hm?”

  “No, my Emperor,” Swanee said as evenly as he could, blanking his mind to discourage letting go a telepathic contradiction. “To be honest, what it expresses is the crudeness of my tools and paint. It just comes out that way with these brushes and this unsubtle goo I’m stuck with.” He tried not to hope that the lie would work. The Emperor might pick up on that hope.

  “I’m dubious. It’s vibrancy is—ah, here’s your new home, Patricia.”

  “Fuck you, scumbag,” Trish said, articulating clearly.

  “The sun-monkeys made this cage for us,” Harmony said conversationally as his entourage entered the throne room. The wrought iron cage was carried in by the newt and snakelegs and the beetlewingface and El Chingaderty—who had a new victim, a teenage boy. “They’re quite good at ironwork, the monkeys,” Harmony went o
n. “…Ironic all this dealing we’re doing with aliens. Considering what we’ve got planned for them. I think it wise we find out which ones are most useful to us. That way, before the extermination, we can select a few for slaves…”

  The cage, with its floral pattern of black metal, was about four and a half feet high, three in diameter. It was shaped like an outscale parakeet’s cage except that inside there were hundreds of tiny barbs.

  They opened the cage door and pushed Trish in. She bit off a scream. They locked the door and reached through the bars to cut her bonds. Running a chain through the iron ring at the top of the cage, they hoisted her twenty feet into the air, just in front and to one side of the throne.

  Trish writhed, and her blood, released by the hundreds of barbs on every interior surface of the cage, began to leak almost immediately through the holes in its floor. Trish hunched herself, trying to avoid the barbs, but could find no place where her weight didn’t bear her down on them.

  “Actually, I borrowed this notion from Elizabeth of Bathory,” Harmony said.

  “We really should have gagged the pretty little lezzie—the noise is … oh, good.” This last as the guards—two scared-looking humans—brought Jamie in and tied her to a ring in the floor, directly beneath the cage.

  “You needed a shower, you dirty little dyke,” the Emperor said.

  Kelso howled with laughter at this. “Yes, stinky dyke needs fuckin’ show-wer!”

  In trickles and drops, Trish’s blood rained down on Jamie. Jamie sobbed and tried to strangle herself on her ropes. The guards prevented her. She convulsed and bent double, clutching her belly. On her thighs, her own blood mixed with Trish’s.

  She’s having a miscarriage, Swanee thought dully. The paintbrush seemed heavy in his hands. He felt numb except for a distant, roiling nausea.

  “I’m hungry I’m hung-reeeee,” Kelso said “I want to eat little furry things like Swanee, Emperor lovey-sir! You said he could take me to get some, you said he could!” Kelso capered on Harmony’s shoulder, nuzzling and begging.

  “Oh, very well. Swanee, take him out and feed him, but don’t dawdle. Bring him back soon and return to work.”

  “My essence is yours,” Swanee said. Despite his disgust at the thought of physical contact with Kelso, he came alive inside knowing he was to be released from this scene. The girl writhing in the cage, the blood raining on her lover. Get away, he told himself, before the Emperor reads you.

  Fortunately, the Emperor was fully involved in enjoying his new toys.

  With Kelso tucked under his arm, Swanee hurried into the sunlight. Even out there he could still hear the screaming.

  Get away. Get gone. Go!

  He leaped into the air and mounted into the sky with laborious heaves of his wings. As he did so he was aware that he’d made a decision. The leap into the air and the decision had come simultaneously.

  He climbed and climbed till the soft green sky cooled him with an amber-tinged cloud and the winds drowned the scream of the young woman in the barbed cage. (All those little holes—how long would it take her to bleed to death?)

  “Where yuh go-in’?!” Kelso yammered. “Whatcha doin’? The woods is the other way, that’s where thuh little animules is!”

  Swanee ignored him. He soared, gliding toward the Neutral. Presently, through a gold-limned break in the clouds, he saw it below, looking as if Stonehenge had multiplied. He dove through the break and spiraled down toward the Neutral, wondering where to begin.

  “You’re gonna get in trouble,” Kelso complained. “I’m gonna call the Emperor!”

  “Oh no, I don’t think so,” Swanee said. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for a while, Kelso.”

  He was still a quarter-mile up when he lifted the living skull over his head and flung it downward. Babbling obscenities, making futile flaps with its Thalidomide wings, the skull turned end over end as it fell—and in a few moments it was a white-flecked red splash on the empty blue road, a few hundred yards from the edge of the Neutral.

  Swanee had felt the ripple of empathic pain go through him—and it bothered him not a whit. He laughed and spiraled lower yet and saw that the road wasn’t quite empty. Bella was there, staring at the splash on the road. Swanee grinned, pleased to see an expression on her face that had nothing to do with her Queen of the Night role.

  Emboldened by her amazement, he fluttered down across from her, the spin-painting that had been Kelso between them.

  She closed her mouth and regained her aplomb. “Your prettiest artwork,” she said, nodding toward the splash. “Very modern. I like it. I could never stand the little snitch.”

  “I feel like I’ve just pulled a tick off my back,” Swanee said.

  “I have to turn you in, you know. And the Emperor will kill you.”

  “No. I’m leaving. And I’m going to see him brought low. He did something today … I just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

  “You don’t really think you can just fly off, do you? He’ll reel you back in, Swanee.” She came around the circle of blood, making motions with her hands as if pulling on an invisible line that brought her closer to him till she was standing body-warmth close, the tips of her breasts just touching his leathery black chest. She tapped Swanee’s forehead. “He’ll reel you in up here.”

  “He’ll try. He succeeded before. But I’ll fight him. This time I’ll win. Something busted open in me back there.” He looked into her eyes, searching for warmth, compassion. He saw only a vibrating void. He shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand.” For a moment he thought he saw it.

  Just a flicker.

  It occurred to him that she might be planning to kill him. To curry favor with Harmony.

  He took a step back and tried to see past the styling of her Twist. Even here in the sunlight she was Queen of the Night. In the darkness she carried light with her, an unhealthy swamp-gas glow. In the daylight she carried a corona of darkness, her own capsule of night, a backdrop that went with her wherever she went.

  He remembered going to the state fair as a boy. There had been a Haunted House—just a big trailer, really, with a facade that unfolded, that showed cartoony ghosts and ghouls wreathed in mist and climbing from mossy graves beneath crooked gravestones. And he’d paid his fifty cents and entered this thing from the bright daylight, and inside it was pitch dark, narrow, zig-zagging corridors lit every so often by a little alcove with a black light and a Day-glo monster mask in it; maybe, here and there, wispy stuff hanging from the ceiling tickled the back of his neck; cold air blew from a hole somewhere in the floor. But for a nine-year-old, they’d successfully created the right atmosphere. The tacky atmosphere of the American Halloween, of Disney movies about witches, of Abbott and Costello movies about ghosts.

  And this superbly tacky rendition of supernatural darkness was something Bella carried with her like a negative aura.

  Combined with Bella’s maddening voluptuousness and her skin-tight black and scarlet costume that was a kind of lingerie to wear in public … it gave Swanee a hard-on.

  He turned away from her and glanced down at himself. The hard-on bulged beneath the skin of his belly. So it was in there. A mental image came to him, a motion of his hips that would unleash the organ, snap it into the open.

  “Take a walk with me, and we’ll talk about it,” she said, coming up behind him, taking his arm.

  Mouth dry, he looked at her. “Talk about, uh, it?”

  She smiled wickedly. “About Harmony, silly.”

  “Oh.”

  They strolled down the road between the bogs, distantly aware of jumpskeeters splashing, the life of wet places carried to them on the smell of the alien breeze. It was hot and humid, and walking along the road beside the swamp was a little like walking through the Deep South countryside, like an afternoon of that summer he’d spent in Georgia.

  Almost.

  “He’ll know Kelso is dead by now,” Swanee said. “He’ll have sensed it. I should go. He’ll send someone a
fter me.” He looked at her. “Perhaps he already did.”

  “Nope. Not me. I was coming back from the Neutral to report to him about Sanchez. He was right: Sanchez is hiding in the Neutral. The Pezz are hiding him.”

  “Is he?” He watched her sidelong. “Still, you said you have to turn me in—and he’d know if you let me go.”

  “I changed my mind. He can’t read me like he can the others. I let him hear what he wants to hear. I’m … telepathically selective.” She stopped and turned him to her. Her hands burned across his pectorals, down his ribs, coming to rest on his hips, where there was just a suggestion of a pull in them. “I know how you feel about me,” she said. “I am not … invulnerable to emotion.” Her voice had gone husky.

  Could he believe her? He wanted to back away. He couldn’t.

  “Swanee…” Her eyes were windows into underground rivers; her voice was thick now with invitation. Her cleavage sang to him. “What you did to Kelso—I mean, defying Harmony—that turns me on. Got me all … you know.”

  He pulled her close and felt her, firm but yielding, a communicative heat against him. (He managed not to think about the fact that she used to be a man, a pro football player.) And they kissed, which was a storm on a midnight sea, and then she raked her lips from his, across his cheek to his ear, and, with her hips grinding softly against his hard-on, one hand caressing his wings (an erogenous zone, he discovered), she whispered, “It’s so hot here on the road—take me up into the sky. Fly with me. Make love to me up there in the clouds, where it’s cool and private.”

  He blinked in surprise. “I don’t think I could. I’m—uh, not strong enough … I mean, it’s not that you’re overweight, but—”

  “My weight is my whim. I can cancel my mass, dear, with a field I don’t really understand. It works for a time, darling, my darkling darling. Take me up, take me up.”

  “I’ll try.”

  He gathered her in his arms, carrying her like a groom toting a new bride across the threshold, and found that she was strangely light. So he ran and leaped, and his wings climbed the air-pressure ladder till they were mounting the sky and she was laughing and kickher feet with happiness. He grinned at her and took her up, took her up.