Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95

by Robert Silverberg

  “Spooks don’t marry. They don’t even have sex, really. What I hear, it’s more like how fish do it, no direct contact.”

  “That sounds terrifically appealing. I’d really love that. And a cute Spook to try it with.” He attempted to keep it light. But she glanced around at him.

  “Still suspicious, Nick?”

  He let that go by. “Listen, you could always take a fling at getting married for a while, couldn’t you?” he said. “If you’re all that curious.”

  “Is that an offer, Nick?”

  “No,” he said. “Hardly. It was just a suggestion.”

  At midday they stopped for lunch in a cottonwood grove that the Spooks had redecorated with huge crystalline mushroom-shaped things. The elephant-camel munched on one and seemed to enjoy it, but Demeris and Jill left them alone. There was a brackish stream running through the trees, and once again she stripped and cleaned herself. Bathing seemed very important to her and she had no self-consciousness about her nudity. He watched her with cool pleasure from the bank.

  Once in a while during the long hours of the ride, she would break the silence with a quirky sort of question: “What do people like to do at night in Free Country?” or “Are men closer friends with men than women are with women?” or “Have you ever wished you were someone else?” He gave the best answers he could. She was a strange, unpredictable kind of woman, but he was fascinated by the quick darting movements of her mind, so different from that of anyone he knew in Albuquerque. Of course he dealt mainly with ranchers and farmers, and she was a mayor’s daughter. And a native of the Occupied Zone besides: no reason why she should be remotely like the people he knew.

  They came to places that had been almost incomprehensibly transformed by the aliens. There was an abandoned one-street town that looked as though it had been turned to glass, everything eerily translucent—buildings, furniture, plumbing fixtures. If there had been any people still living there, you most likely could see right through them, too, Demeris supposed. Then came a sandy tract where a row of decayed rusting automobiles had been arranged in an overlapping series, the front of each humped up on the rear end of the one in front of it, like a string of mating horses. Demeris stared at the automobiles as though they were ghosts ready to return to life. He had never actually seen one in use. The whole technology of internal-combustion devices had dropped away before he was born, at least in his part of Free Country, though he had heard they still had cars of some sort in certain privileged enclaves of California.

  After the row of cars there was a site where old appliances—sinks and toilets and chairs and fragments of things Demeris wasn’t able even to identify—had been fused together to form a dozen perfect pyramids 50 or 60 feet in height. It was like a museum of antiquity. By now Demeris was growing numb to the effects of Spook meddling. It was impossible to sustain anger indefinitely when evidence of the alien presence was such a constant impingement.

  There were more traces now of the aliens’ living presence, too: glows on the horizon, mysterious whizzing sounds far overhead that Jill said were airborne traffic, shining roadways through the desert parallel to the unpaved track they were following. Demeris expected to see Spooks riding by next, but there was no sign of that. He wondered what they were like. “Like ghosts,” Bud had said. “Long, shining ghosts, but solid.” That didn’t help.

  When they camped that night, Demeris entered the tent with Jill without hesitation and waited only a moment or two after lying down to reach for her. Her reaction was noncommittal. But then he heard a sort of purring sound and she turned to him, open and ready. There had been nothing remotely like affection between them all afternoon, but now she generated sudden passion out of nothing at all, pulling it up like water from a well; and he rode with her swiftly and expertly toward sweaty, noisy climaxes. He rested and went back to her a second time, but she said simply, “No. Let’s sleep now,” and turned her back to him. A very strange woman, he thought. He lay awake for awhile, listening to the rhythm of her breathing just to see if she was asleep, thinking he might nuzzle up to her anyway if she was still conscious and seemed at all receptive. He couldn’t tell. She was motionless, limp—for all he knew, dead. Her breathing was virtually imperceptible. After a time Demeris rolled away. He dreamed of a bright sky streaked with crimson fire and of dragons flying in formations out of the south.

  Now they were distinctly nearing Spook City. Instead of following along a dusty unpaved trail, they had moved onto an actual road, perhaps some old United States of America highway that the aliens had jazzed up by giving it an internal glow, a cool throbbing green luminance rising in eddying waves from a point deep underground. Other travelers joined them here, some riding wagons drawn by alien beasts of burden, a few floating along on flatbed vehicles with no apparent means of propulsion. The travelers all seemed to be human.

  “How do Spooks get around?” Demeris asked.

  “Any way they like,” said Jill.

  A corroded highway sign that looked five thousand years old announced that they had reached a town called Dimmitt. There wasn’t any town there, only a sort of checkpoint of light like a benign version of the border barrier: a cheerful shimmering sheen, a dazzling moiré pattern dancing in the air. One by one the wagons and flatbeds and carts passed through it and disappeared. “It’s the hunt perimeter,” Jill explained while they were waiting for their turn to go through. “Like a big pen around Spook City, miles in diameter, to keep the animals in. They won’t cross the line. It scares them.”

  He felt no effect at all as they crossed it. On the other side she told him that she had some formalities to take care of and walked off toward a battered shed 100 feet from the road. Demeris waited for her beside the elephant-camel.

  A grizzled-looking weather-beaten man of about 50 came limping up and grinned at him.

  “Jack Lawson,” he announced. He put out his hand. “On my way back from my daughter’s wedding, Oklahoma City.”

  “Nick Demeris.”

  “Interesting traveling companion you got, Nick. What’s it like, traveling with one of those?”

  “One of what?” Demeris said.

  Lawson winked. “Come on, friend. You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t think I do.”

  “Your pal’s a Spook, friend. Surely you aren’t going to try to make me believe she’s anything else.”

  “Friend, my ass. And she’s as human as you or me.”

  “Right.”

  “Believe me,” Demeris said flatly. “I know. I’ve checked her out at very close range.”

  Lawson’s eyebrows rose a little. “That’s what I figured. I’ve heard there are men who go in for that. Some women, too.”

  “Shit,” Demeris said, feeling himself beginning to heat up. He didn’t have the time or the inclination for a fight, and Lawson looked twice his age. As calmly as he could he said, “You’re fucking wrong. You don’t know shit about her.”

  “I know one when I see one.”

  “And I know an asshole when I see one,” said Demeris.

  “Easy, friend. Easy. I see I’m mistaken, that you simply don’t understand what’s going on. OK. A thousand pardons, friend. Ten thousand.” Lawson gave him a smarmy smile, a courtly bow and started to move away.

  “Wait,” Demeris said. “You really think she’s a Spook?”

  “Bet your ass I do.”

  “Prove it, then.”

  “Don’t have any proof. Just intuition.”

  “Intuition’s not worth much where I come from.”

  “Sometimes you can just tell. There’s something about her. I don’t know. I can’t put it into words.”

  “My father used to say that if you can’t put something into words, that’s on account of you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Lawson laughed. It was that same patronizing I-know-better-than-you laugh that the kid in the village had given him. Anger welled up again in Demeris and it was all he could do to keep from swin
ging at the man.

  But just then Jill returned. She looked human as hell as she came walking up, swinging her hips. Lawson tipped his hat to her with exaggerated courtesy and went sauntering back to his wagon.

  “Ready?” Demeris asked her.

  “All set.” She glanced at him. “You OK, Nick?”

  “Sure.”

  “What was that fellow saying to you?”

  “Telling me about his daughter’s wedding in Oklahoma.”

  He clambered up, taking his position behind the middle hump.

  His anger gradually subsided. They all knew so much, these Occupied Zone people. Or thought they did. Always trying to get one up on the greenhorn from Free Country, giving you their knowledgeable looks, hitting you with their sly insinuations.

  Some rational part of him told him that if two people over here had said the same thing about Jill, it might just be true. A fair chance of it, in fact. Well, fuck it. She looked human, she smelled human, she felt human when he ran his hands over her body. That was good enough for him. He had held his mouth to hers; he had been inside her body; he had given himself to her in the most intimate way. There was no way he could let himself believe that he had been embracing something from another planet.

  And then he felt a sudden stab of wild, almost intoxicating temptation: the paradoxical hope that she was a Spook after all, that by embracing her he had done something extraordinary and outrageous. A true crossing of borders, his youth restored. He was amazed. It was a stunning moment, a glimpse of what it might be like to step outside the prison of his soul. But it passed quickly and he was his old sober self again. She is human, he told himself stolidly. Human.

  A little closer in, he saw one of the pens where the hunt animals were being kept. It was like a sheet of lightning rising from the ground, but lightning that stayed and stayed. Behind it Demeris thought he could make out huge dark moving shapes. Nothing was clear, and after a few moments of staring at that fluid rippling wall of light, he started to feel the way he had felt when he was first pushing through the border barrier.

  “What kind of things do they have in there?” he asked her.

  “Everything,” she said. “Wait and see when they turn them loose.”

  “When is that?”

  “Couple of days from now.” She swung around and pointed. “Look there, Nick. There’s Spook City.”

  In the valley below lay a fair-sized sprawling town, not as big as he had expected, a mongrel place made up in part of little boxy houses and in part of tall, tapering, flickering constructions that didn’t seem to be of material substance at all, ghost-towers, fairy castles, houses fit for Spooks. The sight of them gave him a jolt, the way everything was mixed together, human and non. A low line of the same immaterial stuff ran around the edge of the city like a miniature border, but softer in hue and dancing like little swamp fires.

  “I don’t see any Spooks,” he said to her.

  “You want to see a Spook? There’s a Spook for you.”

  An alien fluttered up into view right then and there, as though she had conjured it out of empty air. Demeris, caught unprepared, muttered a whispered curse and his fingers moved with desperate urgency through the patterns of protection signs that his mother had taught him more than 20 years before and that he had never had occasion to use. The Spook was incorporeal, elegant, almost blindingly beautiful: a sleek cone of translucence, a node of darkness limned by a dancing core of light. He had expected them to be frightening, not beautiful. But this one, at least, was frightening in its beauty. Then a second one appeared, and it was nothing like the first except that it, too, had no solidity. It was flat below and almost formless higher up and drifted above the ground atop a pool of its own luminescence. The first one vanished; the second one revolved and seemed to spawn three more, and then it, too, was gone; the newest three, which had S-shaped curves and shining blue eye-like features at their upper tips, twined themselves together almost coquettishly and coalesced into a single fleshy spheroid crisscrossed by radiant purple lines. The spheroid folded itself across its own equator, taking on a half-moon configuration, and slipped downward into the earth.

  Demeris shivered.

  Spooks, yes. Well named. Dream beings. No wonder there had been no way of defeating them. How could you touch them? How could you injure them in any way when they mutated and melted and vanished while you were looking at them? It wasn’t fair, creatures like that coming to this world and taking a big chunk of it the way they had, simply grabbing, not even bothering to explain why, just moving in, knowing that they were too powerful to be opposed. All his hatred of them sprang into new life. And yet they were beautiful, almost godlike.

  He and Jill rode into town without speaking. There was a sweet tingle when they went through the wall of dancing light, and then they were inside.

  “Here we are,” Jill said. “Spook City. I’ll show you a place where you can stay.”

  The city’s streets were unpaved—the Spooks wouldn’t need sidewalks—and most of the human-style buildings had windows of some kind of semiclear oiled cloth instead of glass. The buildings themselves were set down without much regard for order and logic. Sometimes there was a gap between them from which a tall Spook structure sprouted like nightmare fungus, but mainly the Spook sectors and the human sectors of the city were separate, however it had seemed when he had been looking down from the hill. All manner of flying creatures that had been gathered for the hunt were in busy circulation overhead: the delta-winged herders, the flying snakes, a whole host of weirdities traversing the air with such demonic intensity that it seemed to sizzle as they passed through it.

  Jill conveyed him to a hotel of sorts made out of crudely squared logs held together clumsily by pegs, a gigantic ramshackle three-story cabin that looked as if it had been designed by people who were inventing architecture, and left him at the door. “I’ll see you later,” she told him when he had jumped down. “I’ve got some business to tend to.”

  “Wait,” he said. “How am I going to find you when—”

  Too late. The elephant-camel had already made a massive about-face and was ambling away.

  Demeris stood looking after her, feeling puzzled and a little hurt. But he had begun to grow accustomed to her brusqueness and her arbitrary shifts by now. Very likely she’d turn up again in a day or two, he told himself. Meanwhile, though, he was on his own, just when he had started to count on her help.

  He shrugged and went inside.

  The place had the same jerry-built look within: a long, dark entry hall, exposed rafters, crazily leaning walls. To the left, from behind a tattered curtain of red gauze, came the sounds of barroom chatter and clinking glasses. On the right was a cubicle with a pale, owlish-looking heavyset woman peering out of a lopsided opening.

  “I need a room,” Demeris told her.

  “Got one left. Busy time on account of the hunt. It’s five labor units a night, room and board and a drink or two.”

  “Labor units?”

  “We don’t take Free Country money here, chumbo. An hour cleaning out the shithouse, that’s one labor unit. Two hours swabbing grease in the kitchen, that’s one. Don’t worry, we’ll find things for you to do. You staying thirty days?”

  “I’m not on an entrada,” Demeris said. “I’m here to find my brother.” Then, with a sudden rush of hope: “Maybe you’ve seen him. Looks a lot like me, shorter, around eighteen. Tom Demeris.”

  “Nobody here by that name,” she said and shoved a square metal key toward him. “Second floor, left, one-oh-three.”

  The room was small, squalid, dim. A strangely shaped lamp sat on the crooked table next to the bare cot that would be his bed. It turned on when he touched it and an eerie tapering glow rose from it like a tiny Spook.

  Downstairs, he found four men and a woman in the bar. They gave him only the quickest of glances.

  “Whiskey,” Demeris told the bartender.

  “We got Shagback, Billyhow, Donovan and Threa
d.”

  “Donovan,” he said at random. The stuff was inky dark, vaguely sour-smelling, strong. Demeris felt it hit bottom like a fishhook. The others were looking at him with more interest now. He turned to them.

  “How do you like the whiskey?” the woman asked him.

  “It’s different from what I’m accustomed to. But not bad.” He fought back his anger. “I’m looking for my kid brother. Tom Demeris is his name.”

  “Tom what?” one of the men said.

  “Demeris. We’re from Albuquerque.”

  They began to laugh. “Abblecricky,” the woman said.

  “Dabblecricky,” said another men.

  Demeris looked coldly from one face to another. “Albuquerque,” he said with great precision. “It used to be a big city in New Mexico. My brother was on his entrada, only he didn’t come back. Not quite as tall as I am, heavier set, longer hair than mine.”

  The woman rolled her eyes and shrugged, and one of the men gestured to the bartender for another round.

  “You want one, too?” the bartender asked Demeris.

  “A different kind this time.”

  It wasn’t any better. He sipped it morosely. A few moments later the others began to file out of the room. “Abblekirky,” the woman said as she went past Demeris, and laughed again.

  He spent a troubled night. The room was musty and dank and made him feel claustrophobic. Sounds came from outside, grinding noises, screeches, strange honkings. When he turned the lamp off, the darkness was absolute and ominous, and when he turned it on, the light bothered him. He lay stiffly, waiting watchfully for sleep to take him, and when it failed to arrive, he rose and pulled the oilcloth window cover aside to stare into the night. Attenuated streaks of brightness were floating through the air, ghostly will-o’-the-wisp glowings, and by that faint illumination he saw huge winged things pumping stolidly across the sky, great dragons no more graceful than flying oxen, while in the road below the building, three flickering columns of light that surely were Spooks went past, driving a herd of lean little square-headed monsters as though they were sheep.