by John Shirley
“You’re suffering all the time?”
“Not always. But often. Yes. Are you finished stalling?”
Zero smiled crookedly. “Yeah.” He lifted the box in his hands. It weighed about ten pounds. He pressed the nearest side to his forehead. He closed his eyes. The box moved against him. He jumped back, startled. It fell to the floor and didn’t break. It had altered its shape, become a sort of double mask. The comedy-tragedy mask. He saw nothing inside it. It didn’t look like a device. It looked like a mask and only a mask.
“Proceed to a center of IAMton activity,” the sweet voice said. “Take me with you.”
“Oh, man,” Zero said, picking up the mask, “I got this bad feeling…”
But walking beside Jack and the Pezz, and carrying the mask, Zero waded through the lake and followed a trail between bog-ponds back toward the IAMton wastes.
The light of day was still in its infancy, little more than dawn. it silvered the blue mists rising from the ponds, and when something many-legged and glossy black rippled the surface, it painted the widening circles of ripples with white-gold.
As they walked, Jack talked softly, coaching him. “The IAMton wastes are like a battery or, again, like a computer memory for the planetary Overmind. The Overmind stores things: energies and idea-structures. The Overmind automatically—but not maliciously—tries to coopt everyone into itself. As it did with Zickorian. As it does in a different way with the Twists.
“With Fiskle’s Twists and the Murderers, the Overmind has released the dark aspects of their personalities, making them over according to their perverse obsessions, because that way they lose their free will. They think it’s the opposite, of course, but once you’re doing something compulsively, you’ve lost control of yourself. And then the Overmind has absorbed you, though you may continue to walk about the world as if you were free. What you have become is a living principle, a walking urge, a plaything of the Overmind, and nothing more. Except, perhaps, very dangerous, like a tornado. A tornado is simply a part of the weather system, but it moves about as if it’s independent and is very dangerous indeed.
“The Overmind tries to keep us all in stasis and controlled and absorbable—but not out of any conscious purpose. Not because it chooses to. It does it because it’s in its nature, just as it’s in the nature of air to rush in and fill a vacuum.
“All intelligent beings face the same dilemma, Zero. How to communicate with the world, how to have a relationship with it without losing themselves to it—without losing their free will. Both things are important. To resonate with the universe; to maintain a personal perspective, an identity, a will. That is how you should approach this thing. You will have to do several things at once. You will have to commune with the Overmind through the IAMton-ambient field, and at the same time you wild have to retain your free will, your individuality, without letting it exaggerate your obsessive side, without letting it trick you in that way or any other way. And the way you’ll do that is with self-expression. With art. It’s no accident that so many of those brought here are artists, Zero.”
“Look,” Zero broke in as they reached the verge of the violet-flickering white expanse of the IAMton wastes, “what does this thing do?” He tapped the box in his hands with a thumb. “I mean, how is this thing going to help the settlement?”
“It has a lot of potential, Zero. One thing it does, if I understood the Meta properly—”
“When did you talk to the Meta?” Zero demanded.
“The pyramid-thing that floated to me in the forest. It was a sort of signal beacon for them. They sensed I was … unusual. They enlisted my help.”
“You are working for them!”
“Yes and no. Zero, if you want to understand, use the Progress gift. Use it. With it, you can communicate with the Meta. You’ll understand how when you put it on. It’ll come naturally.”
Zero swallowed. His throat was charred with fear. He looked over his shoulder at the camp, a few hundred yards behind and to the left. He saw Angie and the Pezz watching.
With Angie watching, what else could he do?
He put on the mask. The comedy side was on the left half of his face; the tragedy on the right. He stepped out into bright shimmer of the IAMton wastes. Almost immediately he felt the psychedelic charge of the place.
The electricity of it lighting up his bones, crackling between his teeth. His senses expanding…
The world. The world! It came to him on a tsunami of input, and he fell to his knees with the impact, a twig swept away in the Biblical flood. The vast matrix of it towered over him and threatened him with his own insignificance. He was nothing. He had to be something to survive this.
What?
He looked for something strong and coherent in himself.
He glimpsed it: a star, a larger-than-life media figure of perfect features, ready wit, bristling awards, overarching charisma; a magnet for women, and an influence; a power, a power, a … a Twist.
“Not falling for it,” Zero said aloud. “Got to be another way.” But it had to be quickly. He could feel himself dissolving. He was a speck becoming a microdot becoming a microorganism blown away on the wind. You’re born, you blink, you’re gone, pal. Gone. What’s the point? It’s a pinpoint. Now you see it, now you don’t. Because it’s nothing. You’re nothing.
Desperately, he reached out for something, past the Twist version of himself. There must be something else.
His expanded senses told him that they were there watching, somewhere overhead. The Meta.
Anger boiled up in him. He remembered Dennis. Cisco. Zickorian. Now Yoshio. Yoshio the wistful, the dutifully centered, the intellectually elegant.
Dying.
Himself and Angie ripped from their own lives and pasted like collage figures onto Fool’s Hope.
Tell it, man. Get on your knees and tell it.
He stood up. Sing it.
The first time Zero saw a movie was like the first time a sculptor saw clay, the first time a painter saw a color wheel. He recognized his medium as innately as a newborn turtle knows to crawl into the sea.
Now he recognized it again in another kind of theater, with another dimension added. But it was the same medium. He could feel it crackling at his fingertips. He raised those fingertips and reassigned the energies there, to the sands.
The Meta were watching. They were an audience. And he had something to tell them. Tell them about the anger, man. Tell it.
Obediently, the crust of the IAMton wastes rose up; their sands surged and rearranged and conformed to his vision. The IAMton desert was his canvas, and on it he created a moving painting, a three-dimensional film. It rose up from the colorless sands in colors given to it by his will; it rose up, holographically but touchable and on a gigantic scale, so it could be seen from a long way away, from above. In his mind’s eye, he saw it from above.
From the sky. As the Meta would see it.
Men on Earth. Huddled in the rain, under overhanging branches, stinking and crusted with sores, and shivering.
Men huddled in a hut, suffering from sickness. Women protecting their children as other men entered and began raping and butchering. Protecting the children was no use.
Men enslaved by other men, building monuments. Pyramids rising; their stones cemented together with blood. With pain.
A city choked with the dead; the faces of the dead mottled with blisters, and bloated purple-black. The Black Plague, eating Western civilization alive.
Another civilization murdered by a plague of men from the East. The Aztecs, the Maya, their temples thrown down and their children slaughtered. The American Indian, massacred and massacring.
Four hundred thousand men murdering one another on a European battlefield in World War One, all in a few days—and not twenty feet of ground was gained by either side. Four hundred thousand men wasted.
Children herded into a gas chamber in Auschwitz, into a trench in Poland.
Gas, machine guns.
A thousand faces dying of a thousand diseases. Their prolonged suffering.
A child playing in Hiroshima. The child looks up…
Once Zero saw a videotape made in El Salvador. The face of a dying woman. Now he reproduced her face gigantically, a mile across, in the IAMton wastes, suffering with disbelief, the betrayal of it. While around her the events that had brought her to this were replayed. She was eight months pregnant, walking through a plantain field, when the soldiers came.
American advisers had informed the soldiers that there were anti-government guerrillas hiding in the woman’s village. The woman had never met one of the guerrillas—not knowingly—and no one in the village had joined the uprising. But the soldiers had their information from the CIA, so it was not to be doubted. Everyone in the village, they were told, was a collaborator.
This was good news to the soldiers. This meant they could do anything they wanted to the people of the village and no one would arrest them for it. The first person they came upon was the woman, carrying her basket of plantains. They knocked her down with a gun butt, and then two of them held her while three others—had her. Their CO told them to stop wasting time. Leave her as a message to the ones who escape, he said. So they stuck the bayonet in her swollen belly and opened it like a ripe fruit, exposing the baby, which shrieked when they skewered it and took a while dying itself, lying across her lap, still attached to her by the umbilicus.
The soldiers went on their way, closing in on the village. Half an hour later a group of Italian journalists arrived on the scene and found the woman and filmed her, going in for a close up of her disbelieving face, the camera’s cool objectivity nonchalantly framing the unspeakable magnitude of her suffering.
Zero coalesced the segments of the image so that the image of the woman’s living, real-time, dying face grew and filled his canvas. Close up.
“Look at that!” he told the Meta. He knew, intuited, that they could hear him through the Progress Station device. “Look! You put us here on this world, Meta! You pitted us against one another, indifferent to the suffering you caused except, I guess, for its scientific interest. Or whatever you’re getting out of it. But look again.”
And then he made the image a part of a vast single-frame cinematographic composition, one constructed of ten million million grains of sand, sands in which every pigment existed, if you looked at them individually—and the image depicted the tapestry of suffering on Fool’s Hope. Suffering both human and alien. In its individual parts, the image showed the suffering on Fool’s Hope. But as a whole, it coalesced to recreate the face of the dying Salvadoran woman.
“You’re alien to us. But you’ve studied us. You know what suffering is. You know.”
He sustained the image as long as he could. It was too big to hold. The strain exacted its price. Zero collapsed.
Just before he fell, as consciousness fluttered away like a startled bird, he saw the silver spheres, the Meta’s watchers, forming patterns on the sky.
14
“Zero, you okay?”
“Mm. Yeah.”
“Good,” Angie said, “because there’s something coming down. In both senses of that phrase. You better see this.”
Zero opened his eyes. He saw Angie’s face upside down. He was lying with his head on her lap. He sat up, expecting some sort of hangover pain—and felt only normal. Beside him was the tragedy-comedy mask.
They were at the camp. To one side were smoke trees. Above them was a spaceship.
“Anyway,” he murmured, “I assume it’s a spaceship.”
It was about five hundred feet up, hovering over the IAMton wastes beyond the trees. It was enormous—two football fields of it—and hemispherical. It looked olive green one moment, rosy tinged the next. It was smooth, featureless all over.
Except for a little nubbin on the bottom, which grew and became a pyramid.
Relative to the ship it was a small pyramid, growing out of it and separating like a drop of water from ice, dropping from the underside to hover in the air, apex upward. It was mercuric and yet perfectly pyramidal, slowly rotating as it drew near, floating down toward the expedition.
The pyramid paused just in front and about thirty feet above them. It was ten feet high, seven to a side at the base. It rotated very slowly. At the apex of the pyramid, was an eye. It was more or less of the human sort, but its color was that of the spaceship: mercurial, uncertain. The eye seemed to float in front of the pyramid, in some way connected to it but not part of it physically. Like Jack’s head with his shoulders, Zero thought.
From somewhere inside the pyramid came the sound of a translator box. It said, “Why didn’t you say so before?”
Swanee had to concentrate on each sweep of his wings, one at a time.
Mentally, he maintained a drumbeat to pace each stroke. Otherwise the pain made him falter.
The harness, with Sanchez dangling in it, creaked and swayed. By minute degrees, but steadily, the pain grew.
They were flying through the sunlight, not far over the cloud of dust that choked the plain.
“I’m glad we’re skipping that,” Sanchez said, looking down.
You may be walking through it on the way back, Swanee thought. But said nothing aloud.
Beneath him, Sanchez swore. Swanee glanced down and saw that a little blood had dripped onto Sanchez’s cheek. It had dripped from the shallow groove the harness straps had cut into Swanee’s shoulders, sawed by the constant motion of his wings.
Sanchez said, “For God’s sake, Swanee, put me down! Let’s treat that wound. We could pad it or something.”
“No … time…” Swanee croaked. “I can feel it. No time. Harmony wants to … start a war. With aliens. Every minute brings it closer.”
“There’s no guarantee the thing in the Progress Station will help.”
“I sensed … something … from Fiskle. He’s going to try to get it for himself. Before us. Thing in the Station is something important. Unusual.”
“Look, man, you’re killing yourself!”
To change the subject and to ease a certain emotional pressure, Swanee said, “Sanchez, what if you thought that you were evil … You … hated yourself for it … but … you fell in love with someone, and that made you feel like you … like you weren’t so bad … but when you made love with her, she tried to … tried to kill you … How … would you feel?”
“Lord,” Sanchez said. His voice was almost drowned by the wind. “I don’t know.”
Up ahead, the plain ended in hills that became a ridge. Beyond the ridge, just visible at the horizon, was the edge of a great forest.
“Yes, we knew you were suffering,” the Meta said. “But suffering is the natural state of living creatures. We merely transplanted your suffering from one planet to another and gave it a different character. You have spoken to us in a higher language, in the poetry of vision, and we are compelled to respond. But we have no regrets.”
“But why did you do it at all?” Zero asked. He was standing up now, gazing up at the thing, arms rigid at his side, fists balled. Angie and the others were huddled in a group nearby. “Why did you bring us here from Earth?”
“Why? Because we are like all evolved creatures, in search of spiritual exaltation. This we achieve through artistic creation.
“Every creature that lives is a part of the universe. Subatomically, all things merge into one in the great sea of energy, of which matter is only a particular series of wavelengths. And yet units of this greater body perceive. A creature perceives; therefore the universe, of which it is a part, perceives through it. God manifests Its perception in individual creatures in order to experience Its various parts from a subjective viewpoint. God, the Great Narcissist, is always looking out through our eyes or whatever perceptual organs we use; God is detached from our consciousness but sees through it like a cinematographer looking through a camera. This you should be well suited to understand, Zero.
“If a creature has perceived, then no matter ho
w base the creature, God has perceived through it. God does not control the universe, as you would understand the concept of control, but It stages events in the universe in Its own way. Scientists of your own world have begun to see—in studying turbulence, in what they call Chaos Theory, and ‘self-propagating reactions’—that structure spontaneously develops in any excitable matter/energy medium, as a response to the intrinsic nature of things. Things don’t evolve purely by accident—although accident is part of the formula. They are programmed to evolve, atomically. In this way, and with other subtle influences, God stages dramas on the great stage of Its body, the universe, so as to investigate Itself. This is simply Its nature.
“To be in harmony with God, we aspire to Godlike artistry. We offer up this artistry to God. It is our form of prayer. It is the medium through which we speak to God and aspire to merge with God’s divinity. We exist only to take part in God’s art—and to create art of our own. All that remains aside from this is the process of reproduction and survival. Which is to say, tedium.
The small rewards, the pleasures of mundane life, without art, are ultimately not enough to justify the difficulties of living. Not for a highly evolved being.
“Living only makes sense when it is framed by art, Zero, or composed into art. Interpreted by art. Art elevates perception above the perpetual struggle against entropy—because in the instant the viewer has perceived the art, God has perceived it, and recorded it in Itself, and added it to Its store of order-paradigms. Do you understand?”
“I think so,” Zero said, amazed at the gall of it. “You’re telling me that you kidnapped us because you’re pious. To me, that’s absurd. But I know what you mean about art redefining life. I’ve thought about that sort of thing looking at Picasso’s Guernica, some stuff by Goya, Munch. They painted war, suffering, depression, but, uh, in the context of the composition the suffering becomes a thing of beauty.”
