by John Shirley
And then they were in the clouds, in damp silence and muted, pearly light, and it was cooler there. She touched something at her crotch, and her clothing melted away, and he did that thing with his hips, glanced down and saw with relief that his organ was not particularly Twist, it was simply very big, very black, and very hard. She ground her sticky-wet parts against him, and he thought, She smells like a spring in the Okefenokee swamp, the smell of swamp rot mixed with blooms.
His wings kept them climbing, but slowly now, a few inches at a time. He explored her breasts and found them impossibly firm and resilient and magnetically charged, his hands positively charged, so that click—they locked together. The light diffused around them, leaving them in a sweet gray limbo with nothing to distract them from one another. God, the smell of her hair, its gloss, the cloud moisture beading like diamond chips on the exquisite line of her throat, the swell of her hips inviting him in … He tried to enter her, and she said, “No.”
“No?”
“Not till we’re farther up—and then stop flying. Fold your wings. Dive. Do it to me then. When we’re diving.”
“But we’ll—”
“I trust you to pull us up before we hit. Please. Please. I’d come then. I’d come hard for you.”
Too feverish to think twice, he climbed, kept climbing till they’d broken from the cloud. And for a moment they hung in the air at the roof of the cloud with the emerald sky arching above and the soft, light-infused infinite fluff of the cloud’s roof stretching out to either side like their Elysian marriage bed, and she said, “Now!”
He drove himself into her. He moaned and couldn’t have flown then if he’d wanted to. He was too wired with sensation, savoring it, then pumping for more of it, digging deeper. A miner in a delirium of lust when he’s found a millionaire-making vein of gold; dig into the gold, follow it back into the darkness of the world’s secret interior places…
Swanee was not aware that they were falling till they’d broken from the bottom of the cloud and were plunging through a plane of sunlight and she was howling with happiness, urging him on, bucking wildly against him, her eyes lit up with suicidal glee, with kamikaze devotion to some sexual absolute. The wind ripped the breath from his lungs, the sky screamed past him, sucking the moisture from his eyes as they fucked in freefall turning over and over, clouds and sun above, strobing, alternating with the glimmering topography of the bogs down below as they spun, adrenaline shouting through him and mixing with hot Twist semen as she screamed, “I’m coming!”
The ground rushed up at them. From the corner of his eye he saw a spike of glass in her hand and caught her wrist in his taloned fingers.
He shrieked like a man whose wife has metamorphosed into a black widow.
He wrenched free of her, wings flapping desperately for purchase on the air, backing away from her. He saw the long thin glass needle in her hand, like a hatpin but exactly as long as his penis, glimmering in the light as she slashed at him again with it. She missed but screamed with delight, still bucking in orgasm.
Swanee was still falling, but he twisted away from her slash and angled down, then arched his back to ascend, to glide, fighting his momentum, terrified by the rush of the bogs toward him. He fought and found a grip on the air. The approach of the ground slowed, stopping as he raked upward.
He thought, My God, I’ve let her fall.
But she was floating in the air, her arms and legs moving like a frustrated spider dangling on a web-strand. She drifted downward very slowly; she would make the ground safely, he saw. Despite his bitterness, he was pleased.
He heard her think a parting message to him as he flew away from her: “I meant everything and would never have wanted anyone else. But I had to try to kill you anyway. I really tried. And I’m almost glad you got away, darling … Keep fighting … I love you … I’ll kill you if I get the chance … I love you.”
Swanee closed his mind to her and flew faster to put more distance between them. He angled for the Neutral and his cock—dripping, feeling cold now in the open air—drew itself into its sheath, like a frightened turtle into a shell.
Feeling drained, he fluttered down to the Neutral, dropping into the midst of the Pezz’s pavilion.
“Where’s Sanchez?” he asked them wearily. “I want to save his life.”
Zero felt relief here on every level. Relief from heat, from hunger and thirst and the burning in his eyes, relief from exertion and especially from the pressure of alien minds. The prickling anxiety had drained away the moment they’d stepped out of the IAMton wastes.
And it was soothing here among the ghost trees. The ghost trees were living organisms, Jack had assured him, but they were so diffuse—as limpid as steam, etiolated and fine—that they looked like mist, mist carved into the shape of elms seen in the foggy distance on an autumn day. The dramatic upward lift of the trunk, the expressive articulation of branches and leaves, all blurred into fog. But they were in their reproductive phase now: every few minutes they spawned seedlings with meteoric bursts of colored rain, colors of rainbow purity showering miraculously from colorlessness, silting brightness to the ground.
Cooled by a fine spray from the ghost trees, Angie and Zero and Yoshio and Calum sat together against a hummock that rimmed a swamp-pool. They had washed in a clear, cold pool of spring water. They’d eaten crustaceans and something Jack called swamp bulbs; the bulbs looked like onions, growing underwater along the edges of the pools. They tasted like papayas dabbed with catsup.
Stomach full, the Earthers and Calum sat waiting for Jack and the Pezz to return from reconnaissance. They sat contentedly, watching the ghost trees become more solid with the thickening of dusk.
“I suppose we ought to be worried about the jumpskeeters,” Yoshio said.
They could hear those and other creatures buzzing and whirring and splashing behind them.
“The hell with the jumpskeeters,” Angie said listlessly.
“The Hungry Punkin’ is the real problem child around here,” Zero said.
“The hell with the Hungry Punkin’,” Angie murmured, her eyes drooping.
“Perhaps we should seek out the creature,” Calum said, “and kill it. Take the offensive. Lay a trap for it.”
Zero looked at him. “Huh! That sounded like initiative. Like an idea all your own. Not something I would expect from you, the way you parroted Zickorian.”
“Truly,” Calum said, “you don’t know our customs. I repeated what he said because I am underage, and he is my [approximate translation:] Boy Scout troopmaster. And that is our way. Without him, I am a free agent, permitted to express myself independently.”
The Earthers gaped at him. “Christ,” Angie muttered, “I wonder what else we misunderstood about the High Clans. About everyone.”
Calum craned his neck, looking around. “Jack and Yoshio have been gone a long time,” he said.
Zero nodded. He’d been worrying about it. “They could be lost. Maybe we should look for them.”
“Then we’d all be lost,” Yoshio said. “Anyway, you really think Jack is ever lost?”
“No,” Zero admitted. “I guess what really worries me is that we can’t be the only people doing recon for the Progress Station. The Vinyls must be around somewhere. Maybe … I dunno. Others. Or the Punkin’.”
“You mean they could’ve been ambushed.”
“We weren’t,” Jack said, stepping into the little white-sand area that had sprouted the ghost trees. “But we were followed.”
13
“We saw the [untranslatable],” the Pezz said. “From a safe distance.”
“He means the Hungry Punkin’,” Jack said. “The Punkin’ spotted us from a ways off. It followed us, clearly intending to kill us. But I think we lost it.”
“We have found the Progress Station!” the Pezz said, prancing excitedly.
“It’s a sort of bunker,” Jack said, “made of the same stuff the settlement is made of, on a little island in a lake. I’ve
never seen a Progress Station—it wasn’t here before. But I’m pretty sure that’s it. But in the lake…” He hesitated.
“The bodies of the dead,” the Pezz said. “They are floating in the lake. Among them is the creature who spied on us in the woods. It is dead. Also some Vinyls, and some creatures I’ve never seen. They’re badly deteriorated.”
“The creature who spied on us?” Angie said. “That thing with the big golden eyes?”
Jack nodded. “One of Fiskle’s pets. Its head is half torn off, and those big eyes are quite gone.”
“What was the Punkin’ doing when you saw it?” Yoshio asked.
“It was sloshing through the lake—the water’s very shallow—and we saw it kill a marsh weasel, and a flying dog, and a rope worm. It simply likes to kill things. I wonder what it used to look like.”
“Used to?” Zero asked.
“I don’t believe the story about their representing psychotic alien races. I think they’re Twists from the races we know here. I think it’s what happens to most Twists eventually if they haven’t got the right sort of psychological underpinnings. Well, what do we do?”
“Perhaps we should go now,” Yoshio said. “Maybe the darkness would work to our advantage. We could pass the creature with stealth.”
“I suggest we rest the night,” Calum said, “but leave shortly before dawn, before first light. Then perhaps the creature will be dormant. If not, we will see if darkness works to our advantage—and if it doesn’t, it will shortly be day.”
Jack and the Pezz looked at Calum in surprise. Zero and Angie laughed.
The Pezz had taken the first watch. The watch’s job was not only to watch for the Hungry Punkin’, and other hostiles but also to slap away jumpskeeters and spongesuckers with a stick. The Pezz was very good at this, and when Zero awoke to take his watch a few hours before dawn, he found a ring of smashed jumpskeeters around the camp.
As the Pezz went rigid with dormancy, Zero moved around the camp, stretching, taking deep breaths, trying to clear the cobwebs away. He’d been deeply asleep, and coming back from it was an ugly affair.
Starlight limned the ghost trees and made the white sand seem fluorescent. Beyond the rim of the swamp pool, clumps of bulbous bushes alternated with stunted coral trees that hooted and clicked and rattled softly to themselves. The jumpskeeters had done for the night, but other creatures slapped the water of the pool and clattered in the crystalline hoop-grass.
Zero turned to look at Angie; her sleeping face was angelic in the starlight.
Zero’s head snapped up; he froze, listening.
Something large was shouldering through a thatch of blue spindle-shaped growths about forty feet away, just on the other side of the swamp pool.
Zero heard a crackle of electricity and saw a strobe of sparks jump through cracks in the brush.
” I think we lost it,” Jack had said.
“I think it found us again,” Zero muttered.
And then it bounded from cover and splashed into the pool, waking a group of jumpskeeters; it stood there trembling with fury, glaring with every inch of itself.
“Shit!” Zero yelled, bending to fumble for a pike without taking his eyes off the thing. “Yo! We got a visitor!”
The Hungry Punkin’ was fifteen feet tall, with long, lean, corded arms and taloned hands dangling near its double-jointed knees. Its hands looked almost detached; its loose claws were like the mechanical grabber in the arcade game where you operate a crane to pick up the prize. It had a big orange head like a pumpkin—no features, not even eyes on it—and a two-foot-wide mouth that opened in its belly where its navel should have been. The Punkin’, Zero had heard, would stuff anything that had body heat into its belly-mouth. As if to confirm this for him, it grabbed one of the crow-size jumpskeeters and crammed it buzzing, whole, into its maw. The Punkin’ had four organic cables dangling from its neck, spitting out sparks like Fourth of July sparklers—but bigger sparks, deadly ones.
As the Meta’s watching spheres gathered overhead, the others, awakened by Zero, snatched up their crude weapons and stood on either side of him.
The Punkin’ came sloshing toward them, sparking and roaring. Unprepared and disoriented, they babbled suggestions at one another, everyone talking at once, while the Punkin’ climbed over the rim.
“Surround it!” Zero yelled as it came on.
They formed a rough circle around the Punkin’, trying to confuse it, keep it off balance, jabbing at it with their pikes.
Its arm lashed out and grabbed Yoshio’s pike; he wouldn’t let go. The Punkin’ lifted him into the air, so that he dangled from the pike, then whipped him hard across the face with a sparking cable. Yoshio screamed and fell away, rolling—then lay still.
Another swipe with its free talon, and Punkin’ sent Calum flying through the air, falling heavily on his back, coughing and shaking. Then it snapped Yoshio’s metal pike in two and threw the halves contemptuously aside as Jack lunged at it with a pike from one side, Zero and Angie from another.
The Pezz tried to use a pike but could handle the weapon only clumsily.
Zero’s jab glanced from the Murderer’s head, leaving a waxy streak across it; it weaved like a boxer, and Angie missed it entirely. Jack stepped in close and tried to jam the pike down its throat. It closed its jaws on the spear and wrenched it away, at the same time slashing at Jack with its claws—
—and ripping his face away.
The claws had caught Jack’s face at the side of the jaw and neatly sloughed it off his head. And what was underneath made the Murderer stagger back, disoriented. It was a light.
Jack stood there shaking as the skin began to peel away from the rest of his head, as his neck began to crumble into paste that fell in clots at his feet. There was no blood.
What remained was a smooth, glowing bulb shape, a shining head-size light bulb floating over the shoulders, without a neck at all. Upheld by an electric field of some kind, Zero supposed. The rest of Jack’s veneer peeled away in seconds, as if he were coming unraveled. The torso was human-shaped but made of the same shining white stuff. The glowing legs and arms floated near it but weren’t directly attached.
For a moment everyone stared at what had been Jack the Baptist—and in that moment Zero and Angie and the Pezz and the Punkin’ were all members of the same group, sharing their amazement. Zero felt like turning to the Murderer and saying, “Can you beat that? Man, you never know, do you? I mean, Christ, did you know that he was—?”
But what he said was, “Fuck!” as the Punkin’ recovered itself and lashed out at him with a cable. It wound around his pike, and Zero was knocked off his feet with the electrical jolt that came through it. He found himself lying on his back, his hands aching, wondering where the pike was. He sat up and saw that once again Jack had startled the Punkin’.
The glossy surface of the shiny creature who’d been Jack the Baptist was emitting a tan foam that was quickly reshaping itself, hardening, changing color, becoming…
Another Hungry Punkin’. A smaller one ( a female? Zero wondered), that was backing away from the creature. The real Punkin’ took a tentative step toward it. The Jack-Punkin’ picked up one of the hill-spikes they’d taken from the Hillserlive. The real Punkin’ followed, fascinated.
Angie knelt beside Zero and caressed his head, took his hands in hers. “Are you okay? Maybe you better lie down.”
“No, I’m okay. Little spaced out but okay.” He watched the real Punkin’ follow the simulacrum. “Not too bright, is it.”
“Uh uh.”
Jack and the Punkin’ reached the edge of the wastes and stepped into them. He—or it—proffered the hill-spike to the Punkin’, as if offering a gift.
Hesitantly, cables waving in confusion, it took the spike in its claws. The spike began to waver in its uncertain grip—and then, as if propelled by poltergeists, it spun and aligned itself with the Murderer’s pumpkin-head and flew the intervening few inches to spit its brain, skewering
it through.
The Punkin’ fell, twitching, and its sparking ceased, except along the hill-spike. A violet crackling traveled the spike as the Murderer’s essence drained into the IAMton field of the white desert crust.
Zero heard a groan and looked over at Calum. Calum turned over, gasping, muttering. He was alive. Yoshio was breathing, too, but was still unconscious.
“Zero,” Angie said, “he’s coming back. The … the Jack-thing.”
He hugged her as they watched the Jack-Punkin’ begin to change. Bits and pieces of its false exterior curled off from it, as if molting, falling away as it came back to the camp. When it came within twenty feet of them, it paused as if uncertain of itself and was just the glowing lightbulb man again, shining against the darkness.
Zero wanted to do something to help Yoshio and Calum, but he was afraid to take his eyes off the alien they’d called Jack the Baptist. Now that the thing’s secret was exposed, it might do anything.
A voice came from a slit of dimness that appeared in its chest. It was Jack’s voice, but it sounded oddly reverbed now. “I would like to talk to you. I have much to explain.”
“Are you … the Meta?” Angie asked.
“No. But—” It hesitated for a moment. The hesitation hung in the air, vibrating. It was a long, long moment.
Swanee swam through darkness.
That was the way it felt, with his wings so leaden, his chest burning with the effort. The weight of the man hanging from him seemed to increase exponentially with each minute, as if he were a seagull in an oil slick; Kelso’s epithet was a prophecy.
He was carrying Sanchez in a leather harness that the Gatermen had made; Sanchez dangled in his crude seat a couple of feet below him. A small guy, Sanchez, but he was almost too much for Swanee.
Now the sea of darkness had become a sea of pain. His joints creaked, his muscles screamed, his breath threatened to stop coming. He could hear his own heartbeat in his ears. And there was still a long way to go.
