In Extremis

by John Shirley

  “You shall have your autumn promenade, my dear,” Daniel replied, stuffing his coat pockets with shotgun shells. The gun club provided shells but they were not to his liking. “But first I shall go target shooting. They have a new machine that swings feathered bags, does a capital job. The Colonel’s servants crank them by—always cringing under the shot though it rarely comes near them . . .”

  Wilamina was at the oval, silver-framed hall mirror, adjusting her ivory choker, patting the red-brown hair piled luxuriantly on her head, frowning in the gaslight glow—and Daniel thought that he had seen that prim scowl far too often.

  She’ll soon become irrelevant.

  What a strange thought! It had come suddenly, unbidden, as actual words in his mind—and he rarely thought in words.

  But as he picked up his shotgun, carrying it loose under his arm, he realized he’d had more than one such incident on anomalous thinking, these past few weeks.

  “Seven years of peaceful marriage, and suddenly you’re a man of blood,” Wilamina said suddenly, calling after him as he went to the door, its leaded glass panels bluing the dusty late- afternoon sunlight. Something plaintive, worried in her voice. Her anxiety came out in a rush: “You’re a man of banking—you’re not a hunter. You were always fit, to be sure, but all this running about at dawn of late, huffing and puffing, throwing javelins . . . and now shooting. Pheasant hunting. Is it a consequence of turning thirty? Some men become unsure of themselves . . .”

  “Just a hobby, my darling dear,” he said, hurrying out the door before she should press him on matters he didn’t understand himself.

  Daniel inhaled the spicy scent of leaves fallen from the tall, noble elms lining the cobblestoned road, and felt a rising exhilaration, a buoyant freeness, that seemed to sweep him along the wooden walkway, past the gaunt houses.

  He came to the corner and stopped—uncertain. To the left, after a brisk walk, were the streetcars, drawn by teams of horses, that would take him to the club, and his target shooting. To the right . . .

  It was exactly at that moment that Daniel knew he was not going target shooting at all.

  He was going the opposite way; he was going to the small wood, to the south. He almost knew why. Not quite yet.

  It will come. The game is afoot.

  There, words again, ringing in his mind. Somehow, though, they felt like his own words; his own assertion, coming from some place deep within.

  He broke the double-barreled shotgun open, and thumbed two rounds. Was distantly aware of Old Man Worster watching him disapprovingly from his porch.

  The rising lightness, the giddy exuberance made him want to spin on his heel and fire a shot at Worster’s porch, perhaps shoot out that gaudy, peacock-shaped front door panel. “Sorry, Worster—out hunting fowl, thought it was a peacock, ha ha!” No: he would need his ammunition.

  He stalked off to the right, the 12 gauge now at ready in his hands, hurrying to the end of the road, the path that led into the quarter-mile-wide strip of elms and maples, where children played in the day, and couples sparked at night. Taking a walk here, not long ago, he had seen several tow-headed boys playing “War Between the States”. The sight had struck a chord within him.

  He was not fifty strides into the wood, just within sight of the gray-blue of Jamaica Bay, glimpsed between the trees, when the shot came, hitting a stout maple trunk just in front of him.

  Too soon, as usual, Daniel thought, crouching behind the tree, chuckling. You have given away your position . . .

  As usual? But he’d never been shot at before. And who had fired the shot?

  Adversary .

  He leaned slightly forward, looked up to see the fresh yellow gouge where the bullet had cut the dull-green bark of the young maple, about six feet up. Daniel’s height. The shot had come from the southwest.

  He backed away, stood, spun, and, heart hammering with primal delight, sprinted between the trees to the northeast, trying to flank Adversary.

  To flank . . . whom? Who was . . .

  Adversary. As always . . .

  And then his actual identity returned, erupting in fullness, like a geyser washing through his mind, hissing away the fearful, mealymouthed Daniel Chapham, the minor officer of a minor bank—and now he was the one called Animus. That was the game-name of his true self. And he felt not a qualm, not a sputter of regret at letting Daniel go. He had been so many others, these centuries past; they had always seemed feeble, sketchy compared to his fundamental identity.

  But thoughts of Daniel Chapham were fading, becoming shadows at the back of his mind, cast by light from outside a cave; he was rushing toward that light, and emerging to see Adversary grinning at him, currently a stocky blond man in a white and black sailor’s outfit. He stood about twelve yards away, on the other side of a waist-high, mossy boulder, head cocked to aim along the rifle wedged against his shoulder.

  Animus had just time to think, Ah, that’s the form he’s taken, I’ve seen him scouting me at—

  They fired their weapons almost simultaneously, Adversary was a little faster. Daniel—Animus, now—was forced to fire from his hip, both barrels, and most of the shot went wild, caroming from the outcropping of granite, scoring away moss; but a scattering of pellets struck across Adversary’s white, black-trimmed sailor’s shirt, rocking him a few steps back, and Animus was staggering back himself, as if they were doing a hornpipe together.

  He felt it, then, just under his sternum—the bullet had struck him a moment before, but he’d not felt the pain till this second; the weakness spreading from the wound, the seizing up of his lungs. That was one problem with choosing this planet—these primate bodies were comparatively feeble.

  Animus felt himself sinking to his knees, hot blood gurgling up in his throat to dribble from the corner of his mouth, as he fumbled the empty shells from his shotgun, thumbed in two more slippery rounds—but Adversary was there, striding up to him, cocking the rifle, blood streaming in thin trickles from a spray of small holes in his shirt, his mouth stretched wide in joy as he prepared for the coup de grace.

  Animus was annoyed, realizing that Adversary was giving him a moment to swing the shotgun around, just to make things more interesting. “I don’t need your extra chance . . .” He couldn’t finish, blood choking off the words, and he squeezed the shotgun triggers but Adversary was within reach, cracking Animus across the head with the rifle-barrel, so that the shotgun bellowed harmlessly into the ground, and he fell to his side in a cloud of gun smoke, sighing ruefully as he waited for the bullet in the back of his head, thinking, I know we agreed this would be a Sudden Confrontation but this abruptness hardly seems—

  Animus never completed the thought, as the rifle bullet shattered his skull—and his lightbody was forced out of the cellular mass of his body; freed from the primate shell that people had called Daniel Chapman.

  Still embodied in the blond-haired, mustachioed, lantern-jawed man in the sailor’s shirt, Adversary gazed triumphantly down at the Daniel body: shattered, still twitching though all intelligence had drained from it.

  Almost as an afterthought, the heart stopped beating.

  Then Adversary looked up at Animus—at the lightbody that had departed the shattered primate body . . .

  And Adversary’s own primate-body collapsed, as if its joints had dissolved. No longer occupied, it simply fell; its heart switched off by Adversary on the way out, the way a man switches off a light when he’s leaving a house.

  Adversary’s lightbody shimmered, golden-green, across from Animus’s own, whose colors were more red-purple with flecks of flaring yellow.

  “I knew if I shot at you, early on, from that angle, you’d dart to the left and I could cut you off at that boulder,” Adversary said, emanating glee. He didn’t say it in words, exactly, nothing so simple; it was not a communication that Daniel Chapham would have understood, but that was the general meaning. “You’re starting to be too predictable! And yet you think I’m predictable!”

&nb
sp; “You shot me in almost the same way during the Napoleonic wars, you remember? With that musket!”

  “What a feeble redcoat you made! It was better during the Civil War. But this time . . .”

  “We might have had a bit more tactics before Sudden Confrontation,” Animus interrupted testily. “But the woman I was married to was annoying me. I had to invest so much time in being Chapman . . .”

  There was a pause; a sense of puzzlement in the air. “You were aware enough to be annoyed? Your Fundamental should have been in full dormancy. You’ve got to go back and retrain your Focal Point if this keeps up.”

  “Nonsense! I can get it back to full dormancy on my own. Now—next time, let’s do a broad, tactical conflict.”

  “The primates are creating explosive possibilities in Europe . A little time, and I can spark that one. Perhaps an assassination in the right quarter.”

  “There are new weapons coming. Let’s use them all!”

  “You mean generalships? It’s been a while since we were generals, sending armies against one another. The potential . . . Even a colonel could do much . . . We could use psychic dominance to prod the generals, once we’d gotten close enough . . .”

  “Much preparation would be needed. We shall need to influence key individuals before nesting. I wish we had the technology to enter adult bodies, instead of nesting in fetal forms, waiting till maturity.”

  “That’s forbidden technology. And it’s not much of a wait, really, for us. A few decades at most. We need the rest.”

  A young couple, strolling through the woods in search of privacy, came upon the bloody scene: the two awkwardly sprawled bodies. And they saw the shimmering, vaguely humanoid shapes hovering beside the bodies.

  The lightbodied, Adversary and Animus, became aware of the strolling couple, and flitted upward, into the gathering mists of late afternoon, vanishing into the high upper airs; the pimply young man gaped; the sheep-eyed girl put a pale hand to her heaving bosom . . . and went into a career of spiritism soon after, thinking she had seen ghosts.

  But to Adversary and Animus, her species were so insubstantial, so evanescent—they were the “ghosts”.

  Verdun, France, 1916

  Holdrich Von Stang collapsed the brass telescope and put it in the pocket of his greatcoat, leaving his hand in there with it to warm the knuckles against the drizzly February morning, stamping some feeling into his feet on the planks of the railroad car.

  He shook his head broodingly. One-hundred thousand shells had hammered the fortress of Verdun, and Animus, in full emergence over Von Stang for several weeks now, was worried that perhaps his enemy had been prematurely killed by the bombardment. Of course, many enemies had been killed—but he was concerned for his particular enemy. His enemy who was also his best friend. Adversary.

  But no, Adversary would have appeared to him in lightbody, if he’d been killed.

  A little ways down the flatcar, enlisted men passed crates of supplies along a human chain, to two drays pulled by teams of mules; the animals snorted visibly in the cold air. The Kaiser’s soldiers, gray figures in long coats and broad, dented helmets, weary from poor rest and thin rations, worked slowly but steadily on. Good soldiers. Many would be dead tomorrow. Spent like so many pennies. Sometimes he wondered . . .

  No. Concern for the primates was irrational, mere distraction. Why had it arisen at all?

  He mused on the question only distantly—a warmth was spreading through him, as he considered the battered fortress of Verdun, a quarter-mile away. He could just make out the rising columns of blue smoke, a consequence of the shelling. Reports had come in that the allies were far from destroyed; more than half of them had survived the bombardment, in deep trenches, cellars fortified by the British and French. But of course he had warned Adversary about the shelling, with a temporary mental contact. He and Adversary had been emerged for almost a month.

  Erich von Falkenhayn, the German Chief of Staff, had almost gone along with a plan to push for domination on the Eastern Front. But that was inconvenient for Adversary and Animus, and Adversary had used psychic dominance, a remote telepathic push, to nudge Von Falkenhayn toward another plan—to “bleed France white” at the Western front, beginning with Verdun.

  “Colonel?”

  Von Stang looked down at his pale orderly, shook his head in disapproval. “Your boots are muddy, Corporal Gromin,” he said, in German. He enjoyed playing his part. “You are bivouacked in the officer’s tents. You do not have the excuse of the trenches.”

  “I beg your pardon sir, I thought it best I come directly with the information, and the path across the field . . .”

  “Yes, yes–you’ve come to tell me an enemy patrol has slipped out of the fortress?”

  Gromin looked at him in surprise. “Yes sir! You knew already!”

  “Oh yes . . . I anticipated something of the sort.” He chuckled, feeling the excitement rise in him at the imminence of the final confrontation between Animus and Adversary, for this particular war—finally, this time.

  It had taken longer than usual, though, to fully emerge into his host body. He didn’t quite feel himself, yet. The exhilaration was half-suppressed. This worried Animus. He felt himself oddly over-mingled with Von Stang. Perhaps Adversary had been right, last embodiment, in that New York woods. Perhaps he needed retraining.

  But he must deal with that later, after he or Adversary was “killed”. And that would happen today, in all probability. Till now, they’d sent waves of men against one another—or used psychic dominance, remote telepathic urgings, to urge the generals to order it. But the time had come for face-to-face Confrontation.

  “Gromin—I have made a list of men to accompany us. We will go to meet this foray. They think they have gotten away from the fortress . . . to escape, or to spy on us. We will prove them wrong.”

  Naturally, Von Stang—Animus—had moved troops away from the southwest corner of the fortress, so that Adversary could slip out with his patrol.

  Half an hour later, six men trailed behind Gromin and Von Stang as they tramped down the muddy road, rifles cold and heavy in their hands. The men had been surprised, seeing that Von Stang was going to lead the patrol himself. A colonel leading a patrol, and carrying a rifle, too, as well as a side-arm—unheard of!

  The landscape about Verdun was ideal for their next confrontation; for a glorious battlefield drama. They liked to set up the field of battle carefully but make their confrontational decisions as spontaneously as possible. Perhaps, after all, he might surprise Adversary by holding back, today. This might not be their last confrontation of the war, after all. Von Stang might withdraw at the last moment—and later, might have Falkenhayn assassinated, then use psychic domination to have himself installed as Chief of Staff. They could extend the war for a number of extra years, if they chose.

  Yes. He would have a good skirmish with Adversary here, but choose to withdraw before fatality . . . unless things turned against him too soon.

  He might get caught up in the fight; might not withdraw in time. Still, there would be another battle, if this one was fatal. There was always another battle, in other bodies. They had been doing this for more than two thousand revolutions of this planet around its sun, and there were always more possibilities for warfare. It was an infinitely fruitful world, for Animus and Adversary . . .

  He felt the waves of exhilaration building in him as he trudged toward the approximate area of confrontation. But despite the mounting inner flame of coming combat, at some lower level he still felt obscurely troubled. Just before nesting within the foetus that would become Von Stang, he was caught up in a certain ennui. It was tiresome to be so coupled to embodiment. Yes, the instinct-templates in the primate brain made the combat encounters vastly more intense. Long ago, embodied in twelvelimbed creatures in the undersea canyons of a watery planet under triple suns, Adversary and Animus had engaged in almost operatically grand combat, and it had been deeply satisfying—the combination of reproduct
ive ecstasy and brutal rending, the spurting of many torn limbs, the intricacy of leverage and strategy. But it had lacked the white-hot savagery, the violent inventiveness they’d found in the primates of this world— this “Earth.” These primates seemed a bump-up, an increase of intensity, and Adversary and Animus had continued their competition on this planet—so much more than mere games—for countless embodiments, life after life, recording all in sensory nodes for later analysis. Much later analysis: they were of a race that commonly lived above half a million Earthly years.

  But perhaps they’d remained here too long. Von Stang . . . Animus . . . had felt something drawing him toward empathic overlap with the primate—a repellent overlap, quite unnatural. But a subtle, external nudging pushed him toward it. Psychic dominance? From what quarter?

  “Sir, I see movement in the hedgerows . . .” Gromin said.

  There, to the north, across a field of mown hay, booted feet could be just made out in narrow openings between the bases of shrubs, at the bottom of the farther hedgerow. Adversary and his soldiers. The marchers seemed to be moving toward a gap in the hedgerow in the far corner of the field.

  “Men, listen closely . . .” Animus issued his orders and his followers jogged as quietly as possible up the road to the nearer edge of the hedgerow, while “Colonel Von Stang” and Corporal Gromin hurried into the field, along the closer side of the hedgerow, keeping low as they edged toward the gap. Animus was planning to have his men at the road draw fire from Adversary, then return fire as heavily as possible; Adversary would retreat through the opening in the hedgerow, tumbling through helter-skelter, to run carelessly into fire from Gromin and his Colonel.

  But Adversary’s side took the initiative—they’ flattened down and opened fire through the small breaks in the hedgerow, near the roots, bullets cracking close by “Von Stang”—a round cut into Gromin’s neck, so that he seemed to twist sideways, dropping his weapon, clutching at his gouting throat as he fell onto the sodden turf.

  Too bad, he’d been a useful tool.