Splendid Chaos (v1.1)

by John Shirley

  The two structures, Zero’s and Fiskle’s, interlinked and grew like competing vines, climbing one another, lofting into the sky. The underpinnings were stationary, but the upper segments showed scenarios restlessly acting themselves out. From the Neutral it looked like an Olympus that was creating itself moment by moment. A Jungian principle, materialized.

  Zero’s part of the structure didn’t buckle under Harmony’s fierce imagistic fecundity but continued to grow. The alien concepts mitigated the human concepts, and vice versa; they fused and synthesized, and as they did so the humans and aliens involved saw one another, began to really understand one another, for the first time. In their mind’s eyes the alien symbols were translated into their own visual-symbolic terms. Their assumptions reeled, and their attitudes staggered for new footing.

  Some more than others. Zero could sense them out there—the men and aliens who were particularly in congruence with his basic sensibility; those who were responsive to an effort at finding points of agreement and areas of commonality and compromise with aliens. Using the comedy-tragedy device, he involved their psychic energies in his creation.

  And found the additional energy he needed. He triumphed over Fiskle.

  Fiskle-Harmony was surrounded like a piece on a Go board by Zero’s final gambit and locked in place. Checkmated. No more room to move. Caught.

  Seeing the Overstructure rising a mile into the sky, the other races came from their various settlements to investigate. They were impressed by its incorporation of diverse themes; its responsiveness, in certain segments, to their own ideas, which they could see played out and recorded in the great fractal intricacy of the thing.

  And they were pleased to see that their enemy, the one who’d called himself Harmony, was trapped in a crystalline cage, permanently entombed there, preserved alive, forever raving mad: a living cautionary sign, a warning about intolerance.

  Onlookers could see into the cage atop what had been the dorm roof; Fiskle could not see out. Inside the cage he was surrounded by mirrors, alternating with panels showing the twisted imagery he contributed to the dark side of the Overstructure. The imagery was infinitely reflected in the mirrors, and Harmony quite lost his mind in it.

  The aliens were further reassured seeing the other human Twists in their own cells. Those, anyway, who were beyond saving. Some few, like Bella, reverted to human in the IAMton adjustment sections of the Overstructure and were freed from Fiskle’s influence.

  The Meta’s watching spheres recorded it all. Then, after a time, they drained away into the sky.

  Zero, Yoshio, Jack, the Pezz, and a few others from the human settlement were gathered in Harmony’s garden. Zero bent and cut Jamie loose from the Phix. She collapsed, twitching. “I’ve killed her!” Zero cried.

  “No,” Jack said. He’d shed his human camouflage and reverted to what Zero thought of as “the lightbulb man.” “She’ll be okay in a few days. Well—she will never be okay, not after what happened to her lover and her child. She will never be a leader again. But she will survive for a while.”

  As the settlement’s amateur doctor laid Jamie onto a stretcher, the Pezz asked Zero, “Who will be the leader of the human colony now?”

  “It’ll be Zero,” Yoshio said.

  Zero shook his head. “I’m going to work on creating some kind of working relationship with the other races. Maybe be a minister of culture of some kind. But Sanchez is going to be the new Prez. He’s suited for it. Anyway, he’ll be Prez of the human settlement, but we’re going to have to form some kind of interspecies nation so the conflict ends for good. Elect a council of Earther reps and reps from the other races.” He said all this distantly, sadly, as he watched the doctor and his assistant carry Jamie out of the garden. “But first,” he added, with more animation, “I think we ought to uproot this fucking garden. Turn it into a handball court or something.

  “The drama has reached its denoument,” the Meta said. “The planet is yours.”

  It was an hour after dusk, the day after the fall of Fiskle. Zero stood on the highest point of the Overstructure, having ascended with IAMton energy. He stood on the parapet with a wisp of cloud trailing past him, gazing up into the eye of the pyramid. He had come here in answer to the Meta’s call.

  “The planet belongs to all the races who live on it,” Zero said.

  “That is your decision,” the Meta said. “So it will be.”

  “Actually,” Zero said, “they can have it. Look, I’m not going to ask for residuals on this film of yours. No points, nothing. Just cab fare, okay? Can you take us home? Me and the Earthers, at least?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “What you have created is a self-perpetuating pattern. To disturb it would be vandalizing a work of art. Never. Besides, the planet you call Fool’s Hope is your home.”

  “We dropped the ‘Fool’s’ part,” Zero said absently. He gazed out over the misty reaches of landscape, out into the green sky. “Yeah, it’s my home. World is world.”

  “Still, we are balancing out the picture a little. We are bringing more females from your world. This will be the last shipment from your planet, or from any other, to this one.”

  “Bringing females. Mars Needs Women, huh?”

  “The reference escapes me.”

  “Never mind.” He patted the translucent railing of the parapet. “What’s this thing made of?”

  “We don’t know. Haven’t analyzed it. The Overmind built it in response to your wishes out of the local agglomeration of molecules. We know that it channels IAMton energies harmlessly—it will prevent any more malicious Currents. It will be a focal point of a harmonious interspecies society that you will be instrumental in organizing, involving all races now living on this world. In time, we project, your race and the others will develop a society that will find its own sociological and even ecological symbiosis. The structure will also provide you with a means to manipulate matter through IAMtons. We predict, therefore, a renaissance in your relationship with the environment.”

  “Oh. But you don’t know what it’s made of?” Zero asked dryly.

  “No. It incorporates much IAMton energy; IAMtons are locked into its molecular structure. It was we who impregnated this world with the compacted IAMton deposits, but we don’t pretend to fully understand the working of that particle. We are still struggling with the question. IAMtons don’t like to be looked at too closely.”

  “You going to just abandon us here, then?”

  “We may look in from time to time. We project that your associate, Bowler, will form a splinter society based on a much more communal, anticompetitive system than your own. It will be interesting to see whether the two Earther systems coexist peacefully.”

  “Great.” Zero laughed. “Just great. We’d better start the diplomacy now.”

  He looked up at the ship, hovering like a thundercloud beyond the pyramid.

  “I should hate you because so many people have died here because of you. But it’s true: There’s suffering everywhere. And Bowler’s right about one thing: This place is a chance to escape the suffering people have locked themselves into on Earth. Where you going to go from here, Meta?”

  “We are moving into a new school of our art. We are going to be impregnating already occupied worlds with IAMtons and then adding some energetic new races. It should be interesting as it involves only worlds that are already quite crowded. Farewell, Zero. We wish you artistic satisfaction.”

  The pyramid merged with the hemisphere, and both were drawn into the green bowl of the sky.

  Zero looked out at the circle of the horizon. He could see infinity and he could see limits. “World is world,” he said.

  Epilogue

  On Earth, in New York City, on a sultry September day, everyone was talking about the announcement that had come that morning on network television. Astronomers and other scientists, using satellite telescopes and a variety of other devices, had confirmed what lay observers
had been able to see for some time.

  There was a second moon in the sky. It was shaped like an hourglass.

  The End