by John Shirley
Calum made an inarticulate sound of suppressed fury.
Jack went on. “There are more human skins—with the heads attached—nailed up here and there around the settlement, with more ‘proclamations’ from Harmony written on them. A spaceship dropped off another forty people from Earth a few weeks ago, and apparently some of them were rebellious. A couple of them were added to his garden. Given to the Phix, like Jamie.” He told them about the Phix.
Angie’s eyes filled. “I can’t believe it … doing that to Jamie … making her…”
“We’ll get her out,” Zero said, squeezing Angie’s arm.
“How many Twists are there?” Calum asked.
“I’m not sure. Perhaps only a hundred, or fewer. Fiskle converts humans into Twists at the rate of only one or two a week, I gather. Perhaps it’s a great effort for him, or perhaps not everyone is a suitable candidate.”
“Today’s a Feast Day,” Jack went on. He had finished his transformation. He paused to rest a moment. During the interval the Pezz arrived, with Sanchez; Sanchez climbed laboriously up from behind, and the Pezz climbed the slope easily, like a mountain goat. It came to stand beside Angie; she patted its back. It wriggled happily, then settled in beside her to listen as Jack went on. “He declares Feast Days every so often. Mostly only the Twists and the Emperor’s sycophants are invited to the feast. In fact, the others are on half-rations. The Earthers outnumber the Twists, but no one rebels because they’re scared of the Phylum Twos—and the aliens.”
“Why are they frightened of aliens?” the Pezz asked. “They have a truce.”
“It’s just barely holding. Harmony has made his intentions clear. The alien races are preparing for war with him. Some of the alien races have been raiding humans who step outside the settlement. It could blow up into war any day now. This is all Harmony’s fault, but the Earthers are afraid of the aliens now. They see him as protection from them.”
“What happens on a Feast Day?” Sanchez asked.
“They feast. They get stoned on wheeler-brain. The Twists have begun eating human flesh: anyone Harmony has designated criminal is publicly tortured or given to one of the creatures in his menagerie—wheelers, slug-lizards, Yellow Vampires, and a couple of alien Twists—Murderers he’s caught. One of them is remarkable: the Widow Window, Harmony calls it. It teleports people into things.”
“Skip the details about that one,” Angie said.
“Did you find Bowler?” Zero asked.
Jack smiled. “I did. I have established psychic rapport with him. I believe I can locate him when I need him. He has a plan you should know about.”
Zero turned to the Pezz. “Any luck?”
“If I understand you correctly, yes. Events transpired usefully. I have spoken to the Groyn and my own people. They are amenable. Perhaps others will come, too.”
Zero nodded. It occurred to him that he had become the leader of their little group, seamlessly and without misgivings. And that their expedition had become something else: a cell of revolutionaries. In a way it was annoying—it was so clearly part of the Meta’s drama. But there was no other way to play it. He shrugged and thought, So be it.
“What was Bowler’s plan, Jack?” he asked.
Bowler was on the verge of telling the others in the cell everything when the Phylum Twos burst into the tanner’s workshed and dragged the rebels out into the street. The morning clouds had burned away, it was a sunny noon, and everything was so starkly, bright lit up, it looked unreal. The crowd looked confused. A frightening number of faces in the crowd looked at the rebels with angry satisfaction, glad they were taken; others looked afraid, uncertain.
The crowd was made up of males except for a couple of women past childbearing age; that morning, the Emperor had sent his thugs to arrest all Earther women. They were taken to detention, where they were to be methodically impregnated—by anyone Harmony designated—in order to produce children as efficiently as possible. What is an Emperor without a population to rule over? One of the women had escaped and run to Bowler, and Bowler had called the meeting to decide how best to help her.
They were brought to the Emperor’s garden. Jamie—her hair gone white, her face aged ten years—crawled in aimless circles on a Phix hummock. Two others Bowler didn’t know were attached to the Phix behind her; dull-eyed puppets. Feverishly overgrown exotic plants curled and towered, the color of bruises and sores. In one palpating, oversize bloom, the shoulders and head of a man were just visible in the folds of blossoms. He was the same mottled purple as the petals, now; it was hard to see him. In the center of the garden a High Clansman, recognizable by his hands, was being turned on a spit over hot coals. His head was gone. On a table was a bowl of wheeler-brain mixed with a fermentation of swamp pods.
Smoke from the barbecue oozed greasily over the various Twists and courtiers in the garden; it assaulted Bowler’s gut with the smell of cooked flesh. The courtiers were tarted up with Whorebug tunics of bright cloth that Harmony had awarded his favorites, and with gaudy makeup—paint, really—that made them look like inexpert drag queens. That turned Bowler’s stomach, too.
Bella, and the two identical Adonis types, and El Chingadero, and the diaphanous vamps, and the junkyard beetlewing man, and the newt, and the dwarf-pig, and the pretty little girl all in white—a gleeful murderess, Bowler had heard—all of them and others, guarded by air-sharks and the overmuscled, naked guards, were gathered around the Emperor, who was sitting on his living throne in the open air.
Bowler and the other members of the cell were hustled up to the Emperor and forced to kneel.
Harmony took a deep breath and sighed, as if enjoying the air. “A backyard barbecue. There’s nothing like it to bring a family together,” he remarked, sounding perfectly serious. He looked at Bowler. “We knew you were there, but we didn’t know quite where. It was your friend the tanner who turned you in. It appears he had an attack of paranoia. He was sure I was reading his mind. Thought he’d wheedle a pardon from me for ratting on you. That’s him over there, feeding my blood-orchids. Fed to them, anyway. Want you to meet someone else. Window!”
From behind the Twists, escorted by two Pragmatics who kept it between them bound in thick crude-iron chains, stepped something that looked to Bowler like a giant tortoise, almost eight feet high, six wide. It stood on three legs at the bottom, like a tripod. Its hooded black eyes were motionless and ancient; its beak-mouth opened, and it chattered something in an alien language. Its flat stomach was composed of black plates folded one over another to make a spiral pattern. “He’s a Twist of some alien tribe,” Harmony said. “Just wait till you see what he can do, Bowler, it’s wonderful. It’s just lucky he can only do it with organic things, living things that have biofield—otherwise he’d teleport his chains, I suppose,” He turned to the Phylum Twos holding the alien. “Let him at them.”
The Phylum Twos paid out some slack on the chain, and the Widow Window stepped forward purposefully. It snatched a Hispanic girl, Carmen, in its stubby, scaly hands and thrust her against its middle—which dilated, opening to reveal a crackling black vastness. A window on noplace. Carmen screamed as it shoved her through. She vanished inside.
“Now, let’s see where he teleported her to!” the Emperor said. He looked around eagerly. “I do hope it’s handy. Ah!” He pointed up at a spot in the sky. The spot grew and became a falling woman, turning end over end. The crowd moved back for her—and she hit the ground just in front of the throne, splashing nicely. Harmony clapped his hands. “Oh, I am sorry that Kelso isn’t here to enjoy this!” The evil little girl went to the shattered corpse and began to toy with it, singing a childish song without words.
Bowler shouted at the courtiers, “We have brought Hitler from Earth! Caligula, de Sade, General Westmoreland, Lieutenant Calley, the Ayatollah Khomeini! It’s as if we carried syphilis here with us! You don’t have to be part of this disease!”
Harmony laughed, and everyone obediently laughed along with him. Sixty
feet overhead, a trio of the Meta’s watching spheres bobbed in the sky.
Bowler gave them the finger.
Carmody was next: the Widow Window sent him halfway into the garden wall. He shrieked and convulsed, melded with stone from the waist down; still, it took him a noisy while to die.
“He’ll make a nice decoration,” Bella said. “We could lacquer him.”
“Let’s do Bowler next,” Harmony told the creature through a translator. “And send him to the sky.”
As a small boy, Bowler had seen a Bela Lugosi movie in which a man was crushed as the walls closed in on him. The man had been reduced to paste between the slabs of rock. The young Bowler had tried to imagine what that would feel like.
The transit through the Widow Window felt like that. Only the crushing happened faster, in just under two seconds. Abruptly, the unspeakable pain was gone, and he was in an infinite vault of green, and he was weightless.
Drifting free, the wind singing in his ears. And then he saw clouds, and the settlement far below, its structures like lines on a blueprint from up there, and he knew he was falling from the sky. He had no air in his lungs to scream with. No audience to shriek defiance to. Nowhere to go but inside himself and down.
And then he felt a jarring, a sharp jerk that clacked his teeth together. The wind stopped whistling. He had stopped falling. Something was holding him up. He could feel it invisibly gripping him around the middle. He was moving again, but parallel to the ground, still far above it. Something was carrying him somewhere—probably somewhere that Harmony didn’t intend.
His first thought was, The Meta.
He was heading out over the Rug … and he found himself descending now, into one of the “holes in the Rug” that sometimes gave off light.
As he descended the shaft, neatly down the middle, he saw faces looking up at him, illuminated by a faint glow from beneath. There was a man wearing a shiny black tragedy-comedy mask. With him was Angie. Yoshio.
Sanchez. Also a Pezz, a Whorebug, a Groyn, an Arthropod with its jeweled shell, a High Clansman, and what appeared to be Jack the Baptist.
The invisible hands lowered him gently to a floor of white crust that shimmered with faint violet overtones. The man with the mask removed it.
“Zero! What the fuck! How’d I get here? What—”
“I brought you here.”
“You? How?”
“IAMton enhancement of telekinetic potential. This thing was in the Progress Station. Helps me control the field. Apparently I’ve got the right visualization talent for it.”
“What field? What’s an IAMton?”
“Later,” Jack said. “What about the explosives?”
“Uh … God, it’s hard to think after all this … Well, by now Harmony must have scared it out of Brindle or one of the others. He’ll have told them where they are. I put a big hunk of blunderbuss powder, some other stuff the sun-monkeys told me about, set it up in the throne room so that if they try to detach it, it blows. I figured Harmony would be in the throne room today.”
He sighed. “But it was ‘such a nice day’ that he took the court out to his ‘garden.’ So much for my plan to get most of them in one swoop.” He looked around. “What the fuck is this place?”
“It is potential,” Zero said. He put the mask back on. “I’ll show you.”
When the throne room blew up, Harmony just stood there, camera lenses dilating, closing, dilating, closing, hands opening and closing, mouth opening and closing. Silently. Staring at the wreck of the old warehouse building and the smoke churning up from the caved-in masonry. Seven Phylum Twos, sent to find the explosives and carry them to a safer place, had gone up with it.
At last Harmony strode to what had once been the dorms and was now his quarters. He climbed the stairs inside and flung open the shutters of a window on the second floor. He glared out at his followers and the human crowd. He pointed into the mass of humans. “Punish them!” he shrieked, his voice falsetto. “Just throw them through the Widow Window till I tell you otherwise! They all must have known!”
The crowd cried out and turned to run, stampeding. Phylum Twos and other Twists grabbed the laggards and began feeding them into the Widow Window. In seconds the air was lacerated with the screams of its victims as it rained bodies over the settlement. “Rains of frogs!” Harmony bellowed.
“Rains of fish! Rains of giant hailstones and UFO crankshafts! Rains of blood! Rains of blood!”
The air-sharks went mad with the smell of blood and began swooping, biting, darting into the crowd, carrying pieces of people away, blood dripping from their jaws.
And then the cry from the guard reached Harmony, barely audible over the pandemonium of the terrified crowd. It was a human guard on the walls, pointing at the countryside. “The Current! The Current is coming!”
“In the daytime?” Harmony muttered. “Never in the daytime! And never in the settlement! Not possible!”
But when he went to the roof he could see it wending eerily across the landscape, making everything it touched look Halloween, discharging violet sparks at its borders.
A hush fell. Or did it? Perhaps it was the silence in Fiskle’s head. Silence as he watched the Current come. He seemed to hear a rising and falling of static sounds, of white noise, and nothing else.
In seconds the Current had borne down on the settlement, had washed over it. And Harmony felt the Other One. He felt Zero, was aware of him immediately, as the Current oozed around him like the ghost of some vast dragon.
Harmony was distantly aware that the Meta’s watching spheres were gathering overhead in unusually great numbers.
Harmony could feel ideas approaching. They were carried on the Current, and they were crystallizing around him.
The Overstructure was appearing. Ornate structures were solidifying out of nothing and forming over the settlement like the Platonic ideal superimposing over the mundane world. They were crystalline and translucent, composed of segments that were bright with primary colors; they were architecturally vast, but formed arches at the base to accommodate people, so no one was trapped in them. No one yet.
They were concepts growing up level on level, each level representing a paradigm, and growing out of each paradigm was a theory. They were like computer models of ideas, but three dimensional and solid. Some of them were clearly of Earth culture derivation, looking like variations of Greek temples, Venetian architecture, Japanese architecture, the Lincoln Memorial, sculptures by Rodin and Michelangelo and Brancusi, and Arp and Calder, all of these incorporated, intertwined, and neatly juxtaposed into one never-completed composition.
Other facets of the structure were alien; the Numinous Nets of the Groyn—mandala-like nets woven to catch Groyn who, in religious ecstasy, throw themselves off the roofs of their temples. The Groyn worship Gravity, the Mother of All Homes, which is the one invisible force that demonstrates its power without cease and not only holds things together but instantly punishes those who don’t abide by its rules. In gravitational meditation the Groyn throw themselves off high places so that, on the way down, they can experience gravity fully, till they’re caught in the net woven with symbols of apology to the Gravitational Mother.
And incorporated into the Overstructure were abstractions of microscopic cellular structure created by the Arthropods, who are believers in maximizing harmony with nature. It materialized bas-reliefs of the scaled-up interior of an Arthropod brain cell; and around this, giant models of DNA molecules twined and writhed up the length of the great tower.
The Whorebugs contributed their philosophical orientation of enlightened materialism, their belief that highly ordered property is the only hedge against mortality, a record of their activities that survived them; their segment of the Overstructure used Whorebug weaving patterns depicting their mansions and acquisitions on their home world.
Jack contributed a section that constantly mutated from one symmetrical geometrical form to the next, representing the primacy of sheer org
anization in the evolving universe, the antientropic forces that organize things into organic structures, expressed in the great Overstructure by a series of sections that constantly mutated from one symmetrical geometric form to another, each a variation of the last.
The High Clans’ shamanism made its imprint of animal-worship imagery on the Overstructure; the Pezz’s fascination with boundaries, with interfaces and interchanges between borders, insinuated itself in marblesque veins and woodgrain patterns.
Yoshio’s native Japanese cultural perspective arranged these alien and human concepts with respect to one another like the deft strokes and eloquent spaces in Japanese painting and gardening. Zero and Angie and Bowler and Sanchez infused the shape with humanistic ideas. Sanchez’s contribution included a monument to Swanee: his image a hundred feet high, and despite his leather wings, he was styled more like an angel than a demon.
The Overstructure rose story on story into the sky, transfiguring the consciousness of all who looked at it—all but Fiskle, the Emperor Harmony, who resisted it with his own assertions.
Harmony plugged into the Current and began to create his own counterstructure, trying to overwhelm Zero and friends with a dark tower that rose up from his roof in counterpoint, spiraling, torquing, attempting to entwine and encompass, to smother the Overstructure. Harmony’s dark growth wriggled with moving friezes, images of animals eating other animals; of people performing the basest acts of self-degradation and self-destruction; of women debased to slaves; the Emperor himself triumphing over Zero and a thousand other enemies; battle scenes dripping with blood and drooling entrails and spilled brains. Out of this Wagnerian display a Fiskle superman arose from a baptism in flames, rising like a Titan above the maggotlike swarming of his enemies, the aliens and the traitor humans: the triumph of the will. Social Darwinism and jingoistic fanaticism coalesced into a kitschy design that might have been the work of Frazetta or Boris Vallejo.
