Fractal Paisleys

by Paul Di Filippo

  Making a move as if to climb out of the van, Priscilla Jane stopped, then reseated herself.

  “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” she told Felix’s corpse.

  Crying again, trembling, she removed her own bracelet, instantly feeling her cherished legs go dead.

  Leaning toward Felix, she grabbed with both hands the morphic collar around his bloody neck.

  Felix was looking down at his own mutilated corpse. Finally, he had gotten his wish. On reflection, it had been an unwise desire.…

  He realized that his hands—formerly Pee Jay’s, of course—were clutching the dog-collar around the corpse’s neck, and he could feel no matching collar around his own neck.

  Felix was touched. She must really care for him. How had he not seen it all these years…?

  “Thanks, Pee Jay,” he whispered huskily. “I’ll make it up to you real soon now. I promise.”

  Carefully unfastening the collar that permitted his renewed existence, Felix donned it.

  The coverall-clad form in the passenger seat reverted to that of poor Tosh, whose head now illustrated the impact of the slug from Rowdy’s gun. Another casualty of this whole unfortunate escapade.…

  “Well, I can’t waste time wishing I had managed things differently. Besides, the human factor is to blame. In any case, there’s work to be done.”

  So saying, Felix left the van.

  At the picnic table he laid all of his bracelets and necklaces out in a line—save for two, which he reserved in the pocket of the sweat pants Pee Jay had been wearing. He mated each gadget to the next in line, finally closing the loop to form a single circuit roughly six feet in diameter. This hoop of some seven morphic crystals he carried to the edge of the clearing. There, he draped it from some low tree branches so that the circle of links just touched the rocky ground. “Contact with the earth is essential,” Felix informed the air as he cabled his laptop into a convenient port.

  Felix addressed both of his temporarily disembodied companions as he worked the keyboard.

  “Three point five billion years, Tosh. I imagine a dog would have a lot of trouble conceiving of that much time. Not that the average human being would have it much easier, would they, Priscilla Jane? But that’s how long ago life began on this planet, according to best estimates. It’s a lot of time to search through for what I’m after. But the data I got at the zoo really improved my routines. I figure it shouldn’t take much more than an hour to run through the whole Archeozoic. By then, I should be able to detect the first manifestations of Gaia.”

  Felix opened a new window on the screen, and a color image of the Earth as seen from space appeared.

  “Exactly how far I’ll have to go before Gaia’s signature field is fully developed, I can’t really say. Complexity theory was never my strong suit. Maybe all the way into the Cambrian. Why can’t I get Gaia’s reading in the present? Good question, Tosh. Her signature pattern seems to be swamped by all the subpatterns of the higher organisms which she contains. Maybe it’s the fault of my equipment, I don’t know. But I’m counting on the sacred fields of Mount Shasta to help. It’s a place that has resonated to Gaia throughout recorded history.”

  Felix finished his instructions and struck ENTER. The interior space defined by the circle of morphic crystals filled with churning whiteness like curdled milk.

  Detaching his cable, Felix realized what had been constricting him across the chest, and blushed. He took off Priscilla Jane’s shirt and removed her bra.

  “Hope I didn’t stretch your, uh, intimate apparel on you, Pee Jay. You can have it back as soon as you need it. Speaking of which, I may as well prime these last two crystals.…”

  When he was done, Felix lay down on the table, looking skyward with head cradled atop his arms.

  As long as he had his shirt off, he might as well catch some sun.

  Returning to life twice in one day was hard work. He must have dozed off.

  The sound of an approaching car woke him.

  By the time he got to his feet, the car had stopped and its occupants emerged.

  Rowdy gripped and steered Stumbo by the detective’s lone arm. The chauffeur’s pistol was stuck in his waistband. Perfidia had her gun in hand.

  The Widow Wren wore a look of hatred like a mask of maggots.

  “You! How many times do I have to kill you!”

  “Has it ever occurred to you, Perfidia, that violence is not necessary at all?”

  Perfidia made an inarticulate noise of rage. Keeping Felix covered, she moved to the van and glanced inside. She smiled. “The dog finally got his. Good, good. Now—where’s the girl?”

  “Priscilla Jane loaned me her body, Perfidia, in an act of nobility you would probably find impossible to imagine.”

  A look of absolute avarice replaced the mask of hate. “So, that’s it. You can jump from body to body. Even better than I imagined! I’ll be immortal, forever young!”

  Felix clucked his tongue chidingly, and turned to Detective Stumbo. “Did you keep that bracelet I gave you, Detective?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got it right here in my pocket.”

  Felix looked at Priscilla Jane’s watch. “Good, very good.”

  “Shut up! I know a bluff when I hear one. If you know what’s good for you—”

  Perfidia saw the milky oval now. “What’s that? What are you doing?”

  “Just summoning a friend.”

  “Well, stop it right now—”

  Rowdy’s shout made heads turn.

  The pinned right sleeve of Detective Stumbo’s coat had popped its fastening, as the Detective’s missing right arm materialized.

  Before anyone else could react, Stumbo had snatched the pistol from Rowdy’s trousers and fired at Perfidia.

  His shot caught her in the shoulder, while her mis-aimed blast nailed Rowdy in the leg.

  Both of the criminals collapsed howling to the ground.

  “Very good, Detective. I was hoping I could count on your quick comprehension and reflexes. Now, with your permission, I’ll fix our two victims up.”

  Stumbo pointed his gun hesitantly at Felix. “You’re not going to kill them, are you?”

  “What if I said yes?”

  Stumbo regarded his restored arm wonderingly. “Oh, what the hell am I worrying about them for? Go ahead.”

  Felix walked first to where Perfidia lay groaning.

  “It’s not that I hate you, Perfidia. It’s just that I realize I truly love someone else.”

  He placed the bracelet from his left pocket on her wrist. She glared malevolently at him through her pain. Then he walked to Rowdy. The chauffeur’s knee appeared to have been pulverized, and he was drifting into shock.

  “You, sir, are lower than a dog. So I plan to raise you up.”

  The last bracelet was bestowed on Rowdy.

  “Remember our earlier countdown, Detective? Perhaps you’d do the honors.…”

  Stumbo recited, “Ten, nine, eight.…”

  On one, the crystals went to work.

  “Felix…,” said Priscilla Jane. She looked down at herself, dressed in Perfidia’s clothes. “Where, how—?”

  “Woof! Woof! Woof!”

  Tosh was ripping Rowdy’s uniform off with his teeth and claws. In seconds, the big dog was free of all but the jockey shorts, and went bounding joyfully around the clearing, albeit with one crippled leg dangling.

  Stumbo dropped his gun and massaged his brow with both hands. “Holy Christ—”

  Felix went to help Priscilla Jane up. Standing, she hugged him tightly, then winced at the pain in one shoulder.

  A woman’s voice suddenly resonated across the clearing. It was like wind in the trees or water over stones or snow sifting through pines, and carried a mother’s warmth. It stopped even Tosh in his tracks.

  “Who summons me?”

  Felix gently untangled himself from Priscilla Jane and turned toward the circle of crystals.

  A naked woman stood within the links. Wheat-co
lored hair, rose-tinged skin, violet eyes. Felix was reminded of Botticelli’s Primavera.

  The incarnate form of the planetary morphic field.

  Felix coughed nervously. “Ahem, yes, Gaia, it was I. You see, I’d like a little help, if you’d be so kind. I’ve learned how to use morphic fields in a read-only fashion, so to speak. But if you could teach me how to write on them, I’d be able to make a few permanent changes in myself and my friends so we could dispense with these clumsy mechanisms.”

  Gaia stepped forward out of the charmed circle, and Felix gulped. He had theorized that, once born, she would be self-sustaining, which was what he was after himself. But to actually see it—

  Gaia fixed him with a perceptive and not entirely friendly stare. “You are the one responsible for the recent tampering with my creatures that I have felt?”

  “Well, yes—”

  Gaia flung up her arms. The sky darkened, thunder clapped, and a zigzag crack opened in the earth.

  “It is forbidden!” she roared, her voice now an avalanche of sound. “I will not have it!”

  “But Gaia, if the laws of physics and biology permit—”

  “Then I shall change your precious laws!”

  Gaia brought her arms down.

  Felix closed his eyes, ready to die for a third time.

  Nothing happened, and he opened them slowly.

  Gaia was gone. The circle of morphic crystals was dull and dead, impotent as so much costume jewelry.

  But Priscilla Jane and Tosh and he himself still existed. And Detective Stumbo was two-armed.

  Felix removed his collar.

  No change.

  The others doffed theirs, including Tosh, who snapped his with a paw inserted between collar and neck.

  Stability for all.

  Felix remembered to breathe. “Apparently, we did not go back to the status-quo-ante. My best guess is that Gaia’s self-sustaining field touched us and stabilized our own changes, before she shut things down.”

  “For how long?” asked Stumbo.

  “Permanently, I imagine, now that morphic resonance is an inactive discipline.”

  Tentative smiles broke out.

  “So I won’t lose my arm.”

  “And I won’t turn back into Perfidia.”

  “And I won’t turn back into Priscilla Jane. And Tosh, good old Tosh, won’t ever turn back into—”

  “Rowr, rowr, rowrdy!”

  Did everything change for the worse in the ’Seventies? Probably not. Yet the notion proved intriguing enough to me to generate this story, modeled affectionately on Phil Dick’s Eye in the Sky (1957). Rockville, the mostly nondescript town of this story, seems to me to have hidden potential as the setting for other tales, perhaps, with a nod to REM, “Don’t Go Back to Rockville”…?

  Earth Shoes

  l. Elephant Bells

  Charles Upton Fairleigh drove a new car every year, courtesy of his father.

  This year it was a royal blue 1975 Plymouth Sports Fury.

  Kendrick Skye was able to identify the car by a sound nearly hidden beneath the noise of its engine, though the vehicle was still a quarter of a mile distant, having just turned down the long shaded dirt drive that led to Skye’s junkyard home.

  A month ago, Ken had told Chuck that the factory-issued fan belt on the luxury model car was defective, and needed to be replaced. Chuck had laughed that abrasive, abusive laugh of his—reminiscent of the noise one might hear from a mother swine insanely gobbling down her own newborn piglets—and mildly pooh-poohed the idea.

  “What the fuck, Ken? I mean, what the fuck? Are you nuts? Did you burn out a bearing upstairs, or what? This is a fucking American car, not one of those hokey Jap shitboxes. Its fresh off the dealer’s lot. Elmore Flurkey’s. You know what a bitch Flurkey is for details. Look at that belt. I mean, look close. It’s stronger than my fucking dick! Now, I know nobody measures up to your goddamn Saint Reese, but if you’re claiming Elmore is some kind of jerkoff asswipe who couldn’t spot a defective fan-belt—why, I’d be happy to tell him you said so. Maybe he’ll return the compliment by not sending any more business your way.”

  Ken had said nothing, simply closing the hood of the Fury. Nowadays, Ken always said nothing when he had thoughts which he felt would not meet with a completely sympathetic reception from the party or parties doing the listening. He had been that way since returning from ’Nam, when he had learned of Reese’s unfortunate demise, for which he felt himself partly to blame.

  This adopted trait—by now sheer habit—tended to cut down on the number of conversations Ken was able to sustain.

  On the other hand, he never had to argue with anyone.

  Things tended to balance out in the long run, the good equaling the bad. Or so he had found in the course of his twenty-two years of living.

  Today, as Chuck’s car drew closer, Ken could distinctly hear the belt straining, its frayed plys producing a nearly subliminal, yet still recognizable—to Ken—whine. It was going to go any minute.

  But Ken did not plan to make the same mistake twice.

  The Fury wheeled up in a cloud of dust. When the cloud dispersed, Ken could see that the car held two people in addition to its driver.

  Bonita Coney sat in the front seat, close to Chuck.

  Mona J. Bonaventura sat alone in the back.

  Mona J. had the rear door open before Chuck could shut off the engine. In a few seconds, much to the embarrassed mechanic’s consternation, she was squeezing Ken tight.

  “I just got back!” explained Mona J., her arms low around Ken’s waist and her face only a few inches from his. “I didn’t even know you still lived in Rockville! I ran into Chuck and Bonnie in town. You were the first person I asked about! I made them drive me straight out here!”

  Releasing Ken, Mona J. stepped back. Ken was able to see how Mona J. was dressed. Nothing special, really.

  Mona J.’s frizzy mane of auburn hair, parted down the middle, was held in place with a dimestore Indian-beadwork headband. She wore a leather vest over a straining purple acrylic tubetop. Her pants were bellbottoms of elephantine dimensions, completely concealing her feet and sweeping circles in the dust at least fifteen inches in diameter. Beneath these flares, something seemed amiss. Mona J. was definitely tilted somehow—

  The woman’s prominent nose, generous lips and wide-eyed gaze made her resemble, Ken suddenly realized, some plastic surgeon’s synthesis of Carole King and Carly Simon.

  Mona J. put her hands on her hips. “Well, aren’t you going to say you’re glad to see me?”

  “Hell, sure, of course I’m glad. It’s just that I’m a little stunned. I haven’t heard from you in three years—”

  Mona J. waved that trifling matter aside. “You were the one who went away first,” she said, with impeccable accuracy, though indiscernible logic. He had not, after all, been totally out of reach of postal communication.

  In 1972, at the age of nineteen, with the signatures of Rockville High Principal Rebozo and Superintendent Colson still wet on his high school diploma, Ken had joined the Army as a volunteer. The action was an impulsive one, taken after that huge argument with Reese, the one that led to Ken throwing down his tools and storming out of the junkyard, vowing never to return.

  As his recruiter had promised, Ken got to pick his speciality. Naturally, he chose vehicle repair. He ended up in a motor pool outside Da Nang. There he labored happily for two years, even refusing to take his earned R&R. The closest he had ever come to actual fighting during his hitch was once when a stoned private in their barracks—name of Tub Raauflab—let loose a burst from his M-16 at what he thought was a rat but which turned out to be his own vulnerable booted foot poking out from under the bedcovers. Ken’s whole Vietnam experience had been about as traumatic as high school. Less so, in many ways.

  When he returned to civilian life, to Rockville, the only home he knew, he discovered two things.

  Mona J. had left her parents’ house without telling an
yone where she was going, hit the road like a marble out a greased pinball chute.

  And Reese Hawrot had died in a horrible accident, an accident Ken immediately felt he might have been able to prevent, had he been present.

  To complicate his shock and surprise, Ken soon learned that Reese had stipulated in his brief will (scribbled on the back of a FoMoCo invoice, but duly notarized) that the auto-scrapyard-cum-repair-shop where Ken had spent practically all his free hours since he was old enough to tell a lug wrench from a crescent wrench was now the property of one Kendrick Skye.

  Ken wasn’t sure which desertion hurt the worst.

  In the end, he tended to lean toward Reese’s death.

  After all, Mona J. was only a girl.

  But Reese had been a mechanic.

  And not just any mechanic, but the best damned mechanic on the face of the globe. A regular Moses of Mercurys, a Buddha of Buicks, a Christ of Chevys, an Odin of Oldsmobiles.

  Ken had no hesitation in affirming this, though he had not personally surveyed every competitor for the title. There was simply no way that anyone could have possessed skills greater than Reese’s. The elderly, cantankerous man—never seen out of his uniform of acid-burned thermal shirt and oily overalls—had been able to instinctively discern whatever ailed an auto, no matter what the make, model or year. From a cracked rotor to a leak in the manifold, from worn gaskets to faulty brake calipers, he had been able to pinpoint the trouble instantly and fix it with the minimum of effort.

  Reese had been Ken’s hero ever since the day Ken’s father had driven out to the Rockville junkyard with his son to pick up a cheap windshield for their Corvair, and Ken had watched Reese at work.

  And although Ken had learned quite a bit from the reclusive genius, he knew that he had not inherited a fraction of his intuitive skills.…

  Chuck had finally cut his motor and emerged from the car, Bonnie following with alacrity out his door, as if attached to him by a string of short length.