Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  Most can’t really manage anything harder than soup, between wired jaws and whatever. Every day I go buy soup for them from the hand cart on the corner. It’s beef broth thickened with sorghum flour, and you pick what you want in it. Sick people drink it plain. I get a few gallons in a plastic bucket and haul it back. Carolina handles the feeding and spends the rest of the time on the phone talking ultra high speed coastal dialect. I drift out and smoke in the courtyard next to a drooling banyan tree. Ranulho, the sweep-up man, pops out whenever I do, because he knows I’m too soft to refuse him a smoke. He’s a brown, balding, grey-haired man in dull blue coveralls, small and sturdy, stiff in the legs, with permanent grime beneath his fingernails and teeth that are too white to be real and too irregular to be fake.

  He lights up with a match and then talks to me, smoke pluming from his mouth and nose. The highway is a scam, there’s this or that thing they were supposed to build that they never did, his brother did this and that and this and that. I ask him about the cyclops cars.

  “Xi,” is the laconic reply.

  “Who are they?”

  “They don’t let anybody in or out. They give everybody trouble. My brother ...”

  And so on. Always back to his nameless brother. Ranulho always knows what he wants to tell me about, and every time I ask a question his answer will tack over to that topic with legerdemain too fast for me to follow or interrupt.

  Today he shows me his lottery ticket. Tripi suspended the lottery, because it was fixed by government agents and their extramural buddies, but now I guess it’s back on—no, he’s telling me that it was never suspended here. And something about his brother. He says his brother gave him the numbers.

  “He ever win the lottery himself?” I ask.

  Ranulho waves his hand no.

  “He cannot. He is forbidden to play by the dead.”

  “Huh?”

  Ranulho sits down next to me—something he’s never done before. He tells me, quietly, about his brother and the dead. Actually, it’s not his brother, it’s a man his brother knows. They did their military service together and stayed friends, but then this man, Eme, started dreaming about the dead monks. What dead monks? The dead monks from the monastery. What monastery? Ranulho points to one of the mountains over there; without being able to follow his finger all that well, I know on sight which mountain he means—the dead one. It’s the sharpest, scariest of the mountains over there. The monastery was up there. You had to use an ox-powered elevator to get up to it. Men went away to join the monks and were never seen again. No one ever came down, except those few who went to consult them and returned freaked out. No Bishop ever visited that place. The priest demurred whenever the question of the monastery was brought up; “go and see for yourself” is all he would say. Lightning hits that mountain more than any other, and people believed those monks were there paying penitence for crimes so horrifying that they didn’t have names. Those who did go to see them came back either blustery with brittle denial or stricken in some other way. Some died within a short time of their return, and some prospered and lived a very long time, even if the light of day never quite fully lit them up anymore. One day, the story goes, and this is an old story so it must have been a long time ago, a visitor came back even more messed up than usual, and announced that all the monks were dead. They’d walled themselves up in one big room. A party went up to investigate and confirmed the report; the room was a sunken chamber with only two entrances, both bricked up. At ground level, there was a single aperture, a vent, and, by dint of long peering into the almost perfect darkness within, the seekers could make out the dead monks sitting in concentric circles. They broke open the room and found them all sitting upright in their hoods, hands folded in their laps, and all mummified where they were. Ranulho says they couldn’t have been mummified that quickly and he plainly thinks there’s something unnatural, “spiritual” he calls it, signified in it. The party decided to skip a medical examination of the bodies; they got out of there.

  The sinister reputation of the monastery lingered and grew. According to Ranulho, all the young boys around were daring each other to visit it, but it was very hard going and most were satisfied if they got to a certain rock on the slope below the monastery. Without oxen to power the elevator, the climb took too long. Anyway, there’s supposed to be something carved on the bottom of the rock that is too terrifying for belief, and the test was to go look at it. I guess those who’d seen it themselves could confirm your description. Ranulho’s brother, though, he went all the way, right up to the monastery, even though that meant camping out on the slopes for a night. He said he’d had dreams up there, but would never describe them. Once, though, he’d said that Tripi was in one of the dreams he’d had. Tripi in Etsimen. He got up there all right, and went into the room with all the dead monks. They were all still sitting there, and he said they were praying.

  “’Weren’t they dead?’ I asked him.

  “’Xi,’ he said.”

  “Wait,” I say. “I thought it was his army buddy Eme who went.”

  “Xi,” Ranulho says.

  “You said it was your brother.”

  “No,” he shakes his head.

  So he goes on, and whenever he says “Eme” there’s a little pause, as if to say—you see, like I said. The point is those dead monks told Eme ... that they needed a voice to pray with and that he should let them use his. They didn’t move—Ranulho seems to have asked him a lot of questions about that—they didn’t move at all, and their jaws stayed shut or dangling, however they were, there was nothing to see, no change to see, but just that voice coming from them all at once. He said it was very low, and still, and that it was “carrasguaiao” whatever that means, and they spoke slowly, in unison, and that it was dry, like the sound the wind makes when it blows through a big aperture. He said Eme ... Eme told them he would, and then, when he was telling the story, he opened his mouth and let the sound come out. It sounded like his voice, but it was terrifying. It was quiet, he says, and it made you afraid, it made you think of the monks up there, all sitting still in their hoods, all dead, their skin tight on their skulls, in the dark when night falls, speaking to you with their dead draft. Since then, Eme ... could pick lottery numbers sometimes, he stopped the outsiders from coming in, and once he predicted a freak dust storm. A few people had, just as a precaution, refrained from going out to the desert to pick cactus fruit with some others that day, more using his advice as a pretext to get out of it than believing him, and the storm had come out of nowhere. The pickers barely escaped with their lives, and two of them inhaled so much crud they had to be hospitalized. One of them, Diomethiu, from two blocks over, still wheezes all the time.

  “Yeah yeah,” I say, “Xi Xi, but tell me about the outsiders though.”

  Ranulho says it happened a few years ago. There had been rumors that foreign soldiers were messing around in a little hamlet called Okertu, which lies in the crotch of some foothills between Etsimen and the mountains. If you go to Okertu today, he tells me, you’ll see it’s empty. The people of Okertu didn’t come to Etsimen—they went to San Toribio, all at once.

  “You see,” Ranulho says. “They were taken there, all together, and they dumped them there.”

  “Who dumped them?”

  Ranulho shakes his head and shrugs.

  “No one will say anything. They’re afraid. Still afraid.”

  So Eme ... had this girlfriend once, but, after his visit to the monastery, he’d broken off with her. And she was from Okertu. So when he heard there was something going on out there, Eme ... went to see for himself. That’s how he was—he had to see things with his own eyes. So he went out there and waited in an empty barn until it got dark, then looked for lights. He saw lights there on the ridge across from him. Little lights, like furtive flashlights. You had to stare into the dark to see them, but he says he saw them. There were men in dark uniforms, with guns, and maybe other equipment, maybe communications equipment or somet
hing like that, moving on the ridge line, setting things up, going down into the town, coming back, and so on. Eme ... says he found himself coming out of the barn. He says he didn’t want to, that he was powerless, all of a sudden, to control his body. He felt cold, he says, and dry, all dried out, even his eyes. He went outside to a place in some trees, a clear spot overlooking Okertu and the other ridge. He sat down there on the ground, without wanting to, and he says he sat down just like the monks. He says he began to hear them in the wind, that low “carrasguaiao.” He knew that the monks didn’t approve of those men over there, doing whatever they were doing. He says he could feel the monks sitting behind him. Their voices, all in unison, were pouring dead breath over him from behind, and he didn’t dare look back. He felt his mouth opening, and his tongue moving. He says he didn’t breathe any differently, that he didn’t push breath over his voicebox, that the breath came through the back of his head and into his mouth from behind. He says that, as he began speaking, he could see the outlines of hooded figures sitting motionless around him, and gradually he began to see stiff dead faces there. Then he noticed a different light on the far ridge. The fire was like a golden coin that hollowed itself out and grew, becoming an irregular ring, and a wind from behind him came up out of a night that had not been windy at all and fanned the flames up the opposite slope. Eme ... says that he had no control over his body, that he stood up with his hands out—Ranulho shows me—as if he were lifting something heavy, lifting it up to chest height as the voices kept on calmly, methodically, implacably murmuring their unintelligible prayers, then turns his upraised hands out. The wind grew very strong then. He began to hear men’s voices shouting. Once, he saw two or three figures illuminated by firelight on the slope above the flame, which spread over the entire slope like a great red hand in a few minutes. Now the whole slope was darkly ablaze with red fire. Eme ... saw something square, a white box on a stand, consumed in the flames, and there were other things he couldn’t identify, that the men had brought with them.

  The fire burned away from Okertu, up the slope and down the far side. Eme ... was still there when the morning came, sitting again. Daylight showed a charred slope still smoking in places, the burnt wood of the brushes was making a plucking sound, and he could hear the faint prayers of the monks fading as the sun came up. He says he just got up and went back to Etsimen. That slope is all grown back now, Ranulho says, but there were a few unusual things found up there, twisted metal things, melted plastic things that might have been electronic. A helmet without any insignia on it, but which had been new, was found, too. The town had not been touched. Since then, strangers have been noted in the vicinity a few times, but no soldiers.

  “Mostly gringos,” Ranulho says. “And Urtruvel.”

  He showed up a little after people first got wind of an Uhuyjhn city that just appeared out of nowhere on the coast by Etsimen. When I tell Carolina all this, she says,

  “We’re going.”

  *

  We’re coming in for a landing at last. I see Los Angeles splash, the mountains, the sun, my ocean, the desert. I feel the power in the earth pulling on the plane, fixedly pulling. I feel the power in the earth-wind buffeting us as we lower ourselves into it, coming off the mountains, off the ocean, rebounding off the ground. I feel the power in the plane holding us in place. I feel a complementary ache for the ground, to stand on it, to lie in it. I see the sunflash from each pane of glass as we descend. When we drop low enough, now, the sunlight is orange, everything glows brown.

  The engines are revving. A horizontal pressure replaces the vertical and the plane angles upward away from the ground. We are rising again, turning, going back. We are not descending. Am I ever going to touch ground again?

  *

  Arieto is watching Assiyeh cross the lobby. She and two shield bearers are there pretending to be bodyguards for a group representing the Koskon Kanona Ministry of Science, Industry, and Technology, actually six administrative assistants from the Economics Group lead by a man named Ozmur. They are at the front desk, checking in. The lobby is bustling with people, here to attend the trade conference and a simultaneous symposium on experimental physics. Assiyeh will be presenting tomorrow, and is expected to attend several talks today in addition to a high-profile banquet tonight.

  “It’s set,” Ozmur says, handing her her room key.

  Arieto nods, her eyes on the crowd. She’s noticed something already.

  Three men, all more or less professionally dressed. They might be lawyers or executives, but to the eye that knows how to look, they are obviously hitters and converging inconspicuously on Assiyeh. The suits fit snug on the brawn. The big one moves as smoothly as a leopard despite his size. Watching him, Arieto feels a strong premonitory current hook itself up to her. It’s like the pull of a receding wave, the rushing suction pulls one way while the ground seems to roll the other way beneath the feet, and in the middle, a void of fear. Arieto realizes the hit is on, now.

  “Get the Superintendent,” she tells Ozmur, not taking her eyes off the big one.

  Ozmur peels out behind her in a spin, lifting his arms. His party falls in with him at once in the complicated interlocking figure-eights and elaborate arm movements that will get the Superintendent.

  “Defend,” Arieto tells her two deputies, Mutt and Jeff, still watching the big one.

  “Defend,” they answer back, all affect leaving their eyes, stepping forward at once.

  Arieto closes on the big one while Mutt and Jeff dart around the outside of the crowd to intercept the others.

  Arieto comes up behind the big one and prods him with her forefinger three times hard in the meat of his right shoulder.

  “Poke-poke-poke,” she says.

  He doesn’t react, just keeps making his way toward Assiyeh. Arieto switches to swats.

  Bam bam bam!

  Out of nowhere his left hand appears from under his right arm grabs her wrist and pulls her face first into his right elbow. He didn’t even look back, but then he must have been expecting to finish her that way. But the moment she felt that first tug, she lowered her brow like a ram and took the blow square in the middle of her forehead. It jammed her skull and compressed her neck, but Arieto’s head is hard and she knows it. He has released her wrist, presumably to allow her to fall behind him. She raises her arm under his and traps it in a half nelson, turning him to the right and throwing her leg between his. She almost manages to throw him, but without a sound he switches legs as he comes around on his right, throwing his weight backwards, trying to get her off him. She releases him and he ends up standing, facing her for the first time. Arieto feints her right at his face and he swivels at the waist; then she nails him in the ribs with her left. It’s like punching a tree. She manages to raise a grimace, but that’s all right. He’s wasting time with her now, that’s the point.

  The other hitters are angling in toward Assiyeh but Mutt and Jeff keep shearing them off, driving them into the thickest part of the crowd. Finally one hitter lunges into an opening only to find his way blocked by an elaborately engraved black and gold shield. Weightless, swift, the shield floats before the hitter like an afterimage, deftly maintaining a position between him and his target. After a few futile attempts to get around that shield, he drops to the floor and sweeps the legs out from under it. His path clears and he springs forward after Assiyeh, who is obliviously leaving the lobby, passing between the banks of elevators to the passages, conference and ball rooms in the rear of the hotel. Out of the corner of his eye he can see that black shield floating up alongside him, hastening to get in front of him again, and he races it.

  There’s the other hitter. They close up together and shove through to the elevator banks, trying to use the doorway to shave off the defenders. No sign of the big one. Assiyeh has turned the corner, heading for the western rear hall of doors, checking her schedule. There she is—going into the Paisley Room, last conference room before the big double fire doors. Those fire doors swing open
with a rush of luminous smoke as the two hitters reach the end of the hall, and a gigantic white stag emerges from that smoke in the next instant. A white figure sits astride the stag, armored head to foot in white steel lace skeletons of stained glass cathedral windows. Delicate antlers rise from the bullet-shaped helmet, and translucent gossamer ribbons stream up into the sky. The white faceplate has no openings; the face of the Jack of Hearts is painted on it, turned forward. This is the Superintendent. In his left hand, he holds a white shield completely covered with fine engraving in gold. The right hand holds a tapering white lance, which he levels at the two hitters.

  The stag advances warily.

  The hitters split.

  The lance whips to one side and then the other, flexible and fast as a snake.

  Smoke lifts from rancid industrial carpeting and vanishes, trickling in among the bars of the wallpaper.

  Who sent those men after Assiyeh? On whose intelligence?

  *

  Carolina and I are nearing the coast and there’s very heavy presence here, all along the streets and in the air. We are not going to be able to drive right up and they are not going to pay any attention to press passes.

  “They’re going to blow us off the road without even bothering to check us out. Or scoping us now.”

  “Don’t their cities move?” she asks.

  “They can still keep a moving cordon around it.”

  “What if the city moves too quickly for them?”

  After driving a while a thought occurs to me.

  “They have to be working on a way to predict where the city will go,” I say.

  “If we can do it better, we can get inside,” she says.

  We pull over in a stand of dusty pine trees. There’s a fiberglass and steel tube picnic table and I want to eat my paper-bag flavored sandwich and drink my plastic-bottle-flavored water. Carolina sits opposite me demurely chewing tabs of acid out of a compact.