Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95

by Robert Silverberg

  He was able to make out the basic raw material of the landscape, the barren New Mexico or Texas Nowheresville that he had known his entire life. But here on the far side of the barrier the invaders had done some serious screwing around with the look of the land. The jag-edged buttes and blue-green arroyos that Demeris had glimpsed from the other side of the barrier field were no illusions; somebody had taken the trouble to redesign the empty terrain. He saw strange zones of oddly colored soil, occasional ramshackle metal towers, deformed geological formations—twisted cones and spiky spires and uplifted layers—that made his eyes hurt. He saw groves of unknown wire-leafed trees and arroyos crisscrossed by sinister glossy black threads like stitches across a wound. Everything looked solid and real, none of it wiggling and shifting as things did inside the barrier field.

  Wherever he looked, there was evidence of how the conquerors had put their mark on the land. Some of it was actually almost beautiful, he thought; and then he recoiled, astonished at his own reaction.

  They must have been trying to make it look like the place they had originally come from, he told himself. Then the idea of their doing that affronted him, practically nauseated him. Land was something to live on and to use productively, not to turn into a toy.

  He thought of his ranch, the horses, the turkeys, the barns, the ten acres of good soil, the rows of crops ripening in the autumn sun, the fencing that he had made with his own hands running beyond the line of virtually identical fencing his father had made. That was home and family, good clean hard work, sanity itself. This, though, this was lunacy.

  He tore a strip of cloth from one of the shirts in his backpack and tied it around the bite on his arm. Then he started walking east toward the place where he hoped his brother Tom would be, the big settlement midway between the former site of Amarillo and the former site of Lubbock that was known as Spook City.

  He kept alert for alien wildlife, constantly scanning to front and rear, sniffing, watching for tracks. The Spooks had brought a bunch of jungle beasts from their home world and turned them loose in the desert. “It’s like Africa out there,” Bud had said. “You never know what’s going to come up and try to gobble you.” Once a year, Demeris knew, the aliens held a tremendous hunt on the outskirts of Spook City, a huge apocalyptic round-up where they surrounded and killed the strange beasts by the thousands and the streets ran blue and green with rivers of their blood. The rest of the time the animals roamed free in the hinterlands. Some of them occasionally strayed across the border into Free Country. While preparing himself for his journey, Demeris had visited a ranch near Bernalillo where a dozen or so of them were kept on display as a zoo of nightmares, grisly things with red scaly necks and bird beaks and ears like rubber batwings and tentacles on their heads, huge ferocious animals that seemed to have been put together randomly out of a stock of miscellaneous parts. But so far he had encountered nothing more threatening-looking than jackrabbits and lizards. A bird that was not a bird passed overhead—one of the snake-necked things he had seen earlier, and another the size of an eagle with four transparent veined wings like a dragonfly’s but a thick mothlike furry body between them, and a third one with half a dozen writhing prehensile rattails dangling behind it for eight or ten feet, trolling for food, snatching a shrieking bluejay out of the air as though it were a bug.

  When he was about three hours into the Occupied Zone, he came to a cluster of bedraggled little adobe houses at the bottom of a bowl-shaped depression that had the look of a dry lake. A thin fringe of scrubby plant growth surrounded the place, ordinary things, creosote bush and mesquite and yucca. Demeris saw horses standing at a trough, a couple of scrawny black-and-white cows munching on prickly pears, a few half-naked children running circles in the dust. There was nothing alien about them or about the buildings or the wagons and storage bins that were scattered all around. Everyone knew that Spooks were shapeshifters, that they could take on human form when the whim suited them. The advance guard of Spook infiltrators that had first entered the United States to prepare the way for the invasion all wore human guises. But most likely this was a village of genuine humans. Bud had said there were a few towns between the border and Spook City inhabited by the descendants of those who had chosen to remain in the Occupied Zone after the conquest. Most people with any sense had moved out when the invaders came, even though the aliens hadn’t asked anyone to leave. But some had stayed.

  The afternoon was well along and the first chill of evening was beginning to creep into the clear dry air. His arm throbbed and he didn’t want to camp in the open. Perhaps these people would let him crash for the night.

  When he was halfway to the houses, a gnomish leathery-skinned man who looked to be about 90 years old stepped slowly out from behind a gnarled mesquite bush and took up a watchful position in the middle of the path. A moment later, a boy of about 16, short and stocky in torn denim pants and a frayed undershirt, emerged from the same place. The boy was carrying what might have been a gun, which at a gesture from the older man he raised and aimed. It was a shiny tube a foot and a half long with a nozzle at one end and a squeeze bulb at the other. The nozzle pointed squarely at the middle of Demeris’ chest. Demeris stopped short and put his hands in the air.

  The old man said something in a language that was full of grunts and clicks and some whistling snorts. The boy nodded and replied in the same language.

  To Demeris the boy said, “You traveling by yourself?” He was dark-haired, dark-eyed, mostly Indian or Mexican probably. A ragged red scar ran up along his cheek up to his forehead.

  Demeris kept his hands up. “By myself, yes. I’m from the other side.”

  “Well, sure you are. Fool could see that.” The boy’s tone was thick, his accent unfamiliar, the end of each word clipped off in an odd way. Demeris had to work to understand him. “You making your entrada? You’re kind of old for that sort of thing.” Laughter sparkled in the boy’s eyes but not anywhere else on his face.

  “This is my first time across,” Demeris said. “But it isn’t exactly an entrada.”

  “Your first time, that’s an entrada.” The boy spoke again to the old man and got a long reply. Demeris waited patiently. Finally the boy turned back to him and said, “OK. Remigio here says we should make it easy for you. You want to stay here your thirty days, we let you do it. You work as a field hand, that’s all. We even sell you some Spook things you can take back and show off like all you people do. OK?”

  Demeris’ face grew hot. “I told you, this isn’t my entrada. I’m not a kid.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “Trying to find my brother.”

  The boy frowned and spat on the dust, not quite in Demeris’ direction. “You think we got your brother here?”

  “He’s in Spook City, I think.”

  “Spook City. Yeah. I bet that’s where he is. They all go there. For the hunt, they go.” He put his finger to his head and moved it in a circle. “You do that, you got to be a little crazy, you know? Going there for the hunt. Sheesh! What dumb crazy fuckers.” Then he laughed and said, “Well, come on, I’ll show you where you can stay.”

  The place where they put him up was a weather-beaten shack made of wooden slats with big stripes of sky showing through, at the edge of town, 100 yards or so from the nearest building. There was nothing in it but a mildewed bundle of rags tied together for sleeping on. Some of the rags bore faded inscriptions in the curvilinear Spook script. A ditch out back served as a latrine. A stream, hardly more than a rivulet, ran nearby. Demeris crouched over it and washed out his wound, which was still pulsing unpleasantly.

  As darkness fell, the boy reappeared and led Demeris to the eating hall. Fifty or 60 people were sitting at long benches in family groups. There was little conversation, and that was in the local language. Nobody paid any attention to him, but he could feel the force of their hostility, an intangible thing.

  He ate quickly and went back to his shack. For a while there was singing—
chanting, really—coming up from the village. It was harsh and guttural and choppy, a barrage of stiff angular sounds that didn’t follow any musical scale he knew. Listening to it, he felt a powerful sense of the strangeness of these people who had lived under Spook rule for so long. How had they survived? How had they been able to stand it, the changes, the sense of being owned? They had adapted by turning themselves into something beyond his understanding.

  Later, other sounds drifted to him, the night sounds of the desert, hoots and whines and screeches that might have been coming from owls and coyotes, but probably weren’t. He thought he heard noise just outside his shack, people moving, but he was too groggy to get up and see what was going on. He fell at last into a stupor and lay floating in it until dawn. Just before morning he dreamed he was a boy again, with his mother and father still alive and Dave and Bud and the girls just babies and Tom not yet born. He and his dad were out on the plains hunting Spooks, vast swarms of gleaming vaporous Spooks that drifted overhead as thick as mosquitoes, two brave men walking side by side, the big one and the smaller one, killing the thronging aliens with dart guns that popped them like balloons. When they died, they gave off a screeching sound like metal on metal and released a smell like rotting eggs and plummeted to the ground, covering it with a glassy scum that quickly melted away to leave a scorched and flaking surface. It was a satisfying dream. Then a flood of morning light broke through the slats and woke him.

  Emerging from the shack, he discovered a small tent pitched about 20 yards away that hadn’t been there the night before. A huge mottled yellow animal was tethered nearby, grazing on weeds; something that might have been a camel except there weren’t any camels the size of elephants, camels with three shallow humps and great goggling green eyes the size of saucers, or knees on the backs of their legs as well as on the fronts. As he gaped at it, a woman wearing tight khaki slacks and a shirt buttoned up to the collar came out of the tent and said, “Never seen one of those before?”

  “You bet I haven’t. This is my first time across.”

  “Is it, now?” she said. She had an accent too. It wasn’t as strange to Demeris as the village boy’s, but there was some other kind of spin to it, a sound like a tolling bell beneath the patterns of the words themselves.

  She was youngish, slender, not bad-looking: long straight brown hair, high cheekbones, tanned Anglo face. It was hard to guess her age. Somewhere between 25 and 35 was the best he could figure. She had very dark eyes, bright, almost glossy, oddly defiant. It seemed to him that there was a kind of aura around her, a puzzling crackle of simultaneous attraction and repulsion.

  She told him what the camel thing was called. The word was an intricate slurred sound midway between a whistle and a drone, rising sharply at the end. “You do it now,” she said. Demeris looked at her blankly. The sound was impossible to imitate. “Go on. Do it.”

  “I don’t speak Spook.”

  “It’s not all that hard.” She made the sound again. Her eyes flashed with amusement.

  “Never mind. I can’t do it.”

  “You just need some practice.”

  Her gaze was focused right on his, strong, direct, almost aggressive. At home he didn’t know many women who looked at him like that.

  “My name’s Jill,” she said. “I live in Spook City. I’ve been in Texas a few weeks and now I’m on my way back.”

  “Nick Demeris. From Albuquerque. Traveling up that way, too.”

  “What a coincidence.”

  “I suppose,” he said.

  A sudden hot fantasy sprang up within him: that a sexual chemistry had stricken her like a thunderbolt, that she was going to invite him to travel with her, that they’d ride right off into the desert together, that when they made camp that evening she would turn to him with parted lips and shining eyes and beckon him toward her…

  The urgency and intensity of the idea surprised him as much as its adolescent foolishness. Had he really let himself get as horny as that? She looked cool, self-sufficient, self-contained. She wouldn’t have any need for his companionship on her trip home, nor probably for anything else he might have to offer.

  “What brings you over here?” she asked him.

  He told her about his missing brother. Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he spoke. She was studying his face with great care, staring at him as though peering through his skull into his brain.

  “I think I may know him, your brother,” she said calmly after a time.

  He blinked. “You do? Seriously?”

  “Not as tall as you and stockier, right? But otherwise he looks pretty much like you, only younger. Face a lot like yours, broader, but the same cheekbones, the same high forehead, the same color eyes, the same blond hair, but his is longer. The same very serious expression all the time, tight as a drum.”

  “Yes,” Demeris said, with growing wonder. “That’s him. It has to be.”

  “Don, that was his name. No, Tom. Don, Tom, one of those short names.”

  “Tom.”

  “Tom, right.”

  “How do you know him?” he asked.

  “Turned up in Spook City a couple of months back. June, July, somewhere back then. It isn’t such a big place that you don’t notice new people when they come in. Had that Free Country look about him, you know. Kind of big-eyed, rawboned, can’t stop gawking at things. But he seemed a little different from most of the entrada kids. Like this trip wasn’t just a thing he was doing for the hell of it. Peculiar sort of guy, actually.”

  “That was Tom, yes.” One side of Demeris’ face was starting to twitch. “You think he might still be there?”

  “Could be. More likely than not. He was talking about staying quite a while. At least until fall, until hunt time.”

  “And when is that?”

  “It starts late next week.”

  “Maybe I can still find him, then. If I can get there in time.”

  “I’m leaving here this afternoon. You can ride with me to Spook City if you want.”

  “With you?” Demeris said. He was astonished. Instant chemistry after all? His adolescent fantasy coming to life? It seemed too neat, too slick. The world didn’t work like this. And yet…

  “Sure. Plenty of room between those humps. Take you at least a week if you walk there, if you’re a good walker. Maybe longer. Riding, it’ll be just a couple of days.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure, I’d be glad to. If you really mean it.”

  “Why would I say it if I didn’t mean it?”

  Abruptly, the notion came to him that this woman and Tom might have had something going for a while in Spook City. Of course. Of course. Why else would she remember in such detail some unknown kid who had wandered into her town months before? Tom wouldn’t hesitate, even with a woman ten, 15 years older than he was. And so she was offering Demeris this ride now as a courtesy to a member of the family, so to speak. It wasn’t his tremendous masculine appeal, it was mere politeness. Or curiosity about Tom’s older brother.

  Into his long confused silence she said, “The critter here needs a little more time to feed itself up. Then we can take off. Around two o’clock, OK?”

  After breakfast the boy went over to him in the dining hall and said, “You meet the woman who come in during the night?”

  Demeris nodded. “She’s offering me a ride to Spook City.”

  Something that might have been scorn flickered across the boy’s face. “You crazy if you go with her, man.”

  Demeris said, frowning, “Why?”

  The boy put his hand over his mouth and muffled a laugh. “That woman, she a Spook, man. You mean you don’t see that? Only a damn fool go traveling around with a Spook.”

  Demeris was stunned for a moment and then angry. “Don’t play around with me,” he said, irritated.

  “Yeah, man. I’m playing. It’s a joke. Just a joke.” The boy’s voice was flat, chilly, bearing its own built-in contradiction. The contempt in his dark hard eyes was unmistakable now. “L
ook, you go ride with her if you like. Let her do whatever she wants with you once she got you out there in the desert. Isn’t none of my goddamn business. Fucking Free Country guys, you all got shit for brains.”

  Demeris squinted at him, shaken now, not sure what to believe. The kid’s cold-eyed certainty carried tremendous force. But it made no sense to him that this Jill could be an alien. Her voice, her bearing, everything about her, were too convincingly real. The Spooks couldn’t imitate humans that well, could they?

  Had they?

  “You know this thing for a fact?” Demeris asked.

  “For a fact I don’t know shit,” the boy said. “I never see her before, not that I can say. She come around and she wants us to put her up for the night, that’s OK. We put her up. We don’t care what she is if she can pay the price. But anybody with any sense, he can smell Spook. That’s all I tell you. You do whatever you fucking like, man.”

  The boy strolled away.

  Demeris stared after him, shaking his head. He felt bewilderment and shock, as though he had abruptly found himself looking over the edge of an abyss.

  But why would the boy make up something like that? He had no reason for it. And maybe the kid could tell. They wouldn’t need any witch charms to tell them. They had had 150 years to get used to being around Spooks. They’d know the smell of them by now.

  The more Demeris thought about it, the more uneasy he got.

  He needed to talk to Jill again.

  He found her a little way upstream from his shack, rubbing down the shaggy yellow flanks of her elephantine pack animal with a rough sponge. Demeris halted a short distance away and studied her, trying to see her as an alien being, searching for some clue to otherworldly origin, some gleam of Spookness showing through her human appearance.

  He couldn’t see it. Not at all.

  After a moment she noticed him. “You ready to go?” she asked over her shoulder.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What?”

  If she is a Spook, he thought, why would she want to pretend she was human? What would a Spook have to gain by inveigling a human into the desert?