Member

by Michael Cisco

  It starts to get dark. I’ve blasted through an entire day in what, in subjective time, felt like a couple of hours. A clamor rises on all sides of me and next thing I know I’m charging into a small square lined with cheap cinderblock apartment houses and little shops and restaurants whose customers spill out onto the sidewalks. The place is jammed wall to wall with people and yet my bag seems to extrude a snaking tongue of vacancy into them. I streak through their heat and energy without slowing down. Some of them are noticing me and I guess they don’t like what they see—maybe they think I need taking down a peg or it could be an irritation brought on automatically by the bag, but a few men, all in cool white, since it’s a warm night and they are crowding in together like this, reflexively start forward, showing the whites of their eyes and teeth.

  Challenging them is the last thing I have in mind; my only concern is ploughing on through this square and on to the welcoming emptiness and obscurity of the shaftlike streets on its far side. As I go by, those people, mostly men, susceptible to the influence, are twitched in my direction like fish on lines, but I’m too far from them I think. The impulse to accost me must dissolve as I move out of their vicinity again. But one man—tall, dark tan, with a moustache and blue cheeks, wearing a light tropical shirt open over his white wifebeater—is close enough and he decides to do something about me, although decide is the wrong word for it; he barks a couple of interrogatives in the same instant he becomes aware of me, steps boldly into my path and gives me a good opportunity to relish the smell of his cologne. I’m still going. I don’t even slow down.

  I don’t hit him, or even touch him, but he is knocked clear of my way, as if he’d walked into a slow-rolling train. The next moment I’m clear of the crowd, coming out of it like I might climb out of a swimming pool, with its weight dragging me as I move into a more rareified medium.

  My right arm is starting to shake, although I can’t feel anything in it, and that steeliness around my head is starting to run down my torso and stiffen my legs. It occurs to me to stop a moment, and I do. I drop the bag. The moment the contact is broken, I stagger, and I guess I shout out loud. For a moment there’s no sensation at all, then a sense of suddenly stopping with a great deal of momentum behind me, a sickening lurch, pain in my eyes, a cold lacerated mouth. Bending forward, with my hands on my knees, I struggle for breath. Then nausea, until I have to sit doubled up. Ice water is streaking from my eyes and cold metallic flames play tag with each other all around the inside of a thickly-fractured glass head that unfortunately belongs to me.

  The feeling passes off, leaving just enough of itself behind to give me something to worry about, and I look up and see arches. The railway trestle runs nearly overhead. I’m on a quiet, short street between two long, narrow avenues, all lined with dark houses. No traffic, no pedestrians. I have no watch and no real idea what time it is but my intuition tells me it’s not too far from midnight. The bag is lying in the street. I pick it up and shift it over to the wall. Perhaps it’s merely because I don’t want to believe it, but I push away the suspicion that all I had just gone through was a hallucination, and it still is what only seems to me to be the night before. I get back on my feet.

  I’m crossing the street again when I hear a rolling noise coming up behind me in the quiet. The next moment a man, covered from head to foot in a pelt of very long, shaggy, black hair or fur, steps, almost bounds, out of the shadow between two buildings and waves to me. Though he is only about twenty feet away, he doesn’t speak, only waves, then trots over and stops in front of me.

  “Excuse me,” he says apologetically. “You’re delivering that bag?”

  He points to the bag. I notice he has a thin accent.

  “It looks that way,” I answer, resignedly.

  “And you’ve just started?”

  “Started?” I don’t like the implication that this is an ongoing condition. “Well, I wasn’t doing this yesterday. I’ll tell you that.”

  “Ah, OK,” he says, cocking his head back a little. “And you don’t know to shoot the buildings.”

  After a moment he adds, “No one told you you have to shoot the buildings.”

  I keep looking at him. On his right, he has shouldered an extravagant rifle that looks like a bicycle frame with the inking roll from a printing press sticking out of it. His face is pale and round, not unfriendly, but with lingering traces of craftiness in the expression that I don’t suppose he can ever fully remove. The lips work very slightly; he seems to be figuring out how to frame his explanation.

  “OK,” he says again, gesturing once with his left hand. “When you are making a delivery, you have to shoot. You have to hit, with a Model One, a place on some buildings. They will all be on the pathway you take, so, to find them, you don’t have to go out of your way. Otherwise, if you don’t shoot those... marks, we have to come out and shoot the emitters. I’m getting it out of order.”

  He waves his hand.

  “If you carry the bag past a mark, the circle of each mark, then the emitters get released—”

  He makes a springing motion with his hand.

  “—before they are supposed to, and then we have to come and shoot them. Permutate them manually.”

  When he sees I still have no idea what he’s talking about, he waves his hand at me in a winding gesture.

  “The mark you passed is near here. I can show you. Go back down this street and turn left, then go three blocks and turn right. Keep going until you see it. It will be the only tall building around. I’ll meet you there.”

  I thought he was wearing a gorilla outfit, but on closer inspection his suit is covered with rustling lengths of tape. Now he falls to the ground and curls himself up, and I notice that there’s a wide band of thick, flat, tough-looking material, black and grooved like a tire tread, running down the center of his costume. It comes up over the top of his head, along his chest and abdomen, and up his back, with strips on his extremities as well. As he curls himself up, this band turns into a single hoop and he rolls away whizzing. Even once he gets going, by very deft hand motions, swiftly altering his purchase within the loop of its stock, he always keeps his rifle pointing straight up.

  After a few minutes, I find the building. And now the man slips from a doorway and waves. Once again, he trots over and stands next to me rather than raise his voice.

  “Sorry. Sorry to leave you. I get so accustomed to this way of travelling that I just can’t seem to go any other way.”

  He puts a hand on his hip and gestures at the building with his chin.

  “That’s the place,” he says crisply. “You see that star, there, up at the top right corner?”

  “Yeah, I see it.”

  “That’s the mark you shoot at. It’s always the same. A small metal star up at the top corner of a tall building like that one. You almost never see them on anything else. Sometimes a house or a gas station but usually, nearly always, a building like that.”

  “There are several stars up there. How do I know which corner?”

  Leaning in toward me, he points so I can line up my eye.

  “It’s a little brighter. See?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Give it time, you’ll see it. The buildings with stars are about two miles apart. A little more than two miles. Sometimes the... way the land is? Won’t allow for exact distances apart, but mostly two miles.”

  “And where do I get the gun? Or do I have to get one myself?”

  “No, you should have one already.”

  “I have no gun.”

  “Are you sure? There has to be a One in the bag.”

  “Nope.”

  A One? I think.

  He looks uncertain.

  “May I check?” he asks politely.

  I unsling the bag and hold it out to him.

  “Be my guest.”

  He opens the bag and peers into both sides briefly. Then he smiles.

  “Did you open the hidden compartment?”

&nb
sp; When I shake my head, he sets the bag on the ground, open on one side. Then he squats in front of it and holds out both his hands just above and almost within the open mouth. There are no gloves on his hands but his fingers are all tipped with little strips of black tread that run over the top from one face of the joint to the other, leaving the sides exposed.

  As I watch, his hands change color from pale to a kind of dim lavender, and a musical note sounds three times, faintly; then as his hands are pulled slightly in toward each other as if by a kind of convulsive magnetism they abruptly change color to a greenish hue, a lower note of the same timbre as the first repeats twice and two crescent-shaped segments of grey static appear as the fingers seem magnetically drawn together to clasp them. He fits the two crescents together and, as they vanish, an aperture slouches open in the lining of the bag.

  “You should have a key to this,” he says, rooting in the hidden compartment. “If you don’t, you should put in a request for one as soon as possible. This is it.”

  The pistol he pulls out resembles a smaller version of the rifle he has slung over his right shoulder.

  “Ah, it looks like they gave you a new One,” he sighs, and shows it to me. “This is a tape gun. Have you shot before?”

  “A long time ago. Once.”

  “This is a little different, but not seriously. There’s no recoil.”

  Now he points out the various parts to me. The pistol has a tall loop sight on hinges, with very fine, rigid wires holding a tiny star outline in the center of the space. The grip is twisted like a marksmanship pistol to put the thumb in line with the forearm, and there are many smooth black barrels about the size of cigars, which all seem to work together each time the pistol is fired.

  “The tape goes in here,” he taps a little drum that fits between the top of my hand and the sight. “Don’t waste tape. There’s the shot counter.”

  The shot counter is a clear bead with three digits visible, floating inside it. Zero zero zero.

  “The tape is new,” he says. “The roll should be good for about a hundred and thirty shots. You can tell there’s a roll in there by this. When this is green, there’s a roll in there. Otherwise, it’s dark.”

  The indicator he means is shaped like a ribbon tied in a bow, and fixed to one side of the drum. It may be the catch which opens and closes it.

  “Let’s see,” he muses, and fumbles in the compartment. He brings out a round case of black plastic and opens it; there’s a discolored roll of ragged parchment inside, covered in marks and adhering to the black base on which it rests stickily. The tape gives off a strong, cheesy chemical smell. The man closes the case again.

  “That’s your spare.”

  He thinks for a few minutes.

  “Anyway, the tape is a sort of message you shoot into the stars, so they don’t misinterpret your, your being here. The Model One is provided so you don’t have to keep trying to get into buildings that may be locked, and in consideration of your not having to climb so many flights of stairs. Whennn you don’t shoot the stars, then they misinterpret you, and then they release the emitters too early. Then we are called to come and recode the emitters. With a Model One.”

  He circles his forearm around and points, actually pressing his index finger into it until the first joint is bent back slightly, at the rifle he carries.

  “Is this also a Model One?” I ask, lifting my pistol slightly.

  He nods and smiles. “Model One.”

  I glance at the thing in my hand. There’s an engraved nickel plate riveted to the side: Model One.

  “They don’t like you getting too close to them,” he says, shaking his head.

  “Emitters? They are machines?”

  “They are like machines, but actually they are an information-based life form. They live on information. You won’t like getting close to them either. You are more information to them. More food. They don’t eat you like a lion would eat you, but it’s not fun. It’s happened to me a few times. It’s sort of like being hit by lightning. Like weak lightning. It’s not an electric shock, but it feels terrible. Now this,” he jerks his thumb at his rifle again, “it’s not a weapon. If yooouuu—if you get shot with a Model One, it may hurt you, but it isn’t designed as a weapon. It shoots tape, lengths of tape, that have new spells written on them. We shoot the tape into a port on the side of the emitter. Then they get recoded and... transform into higher quality emitters.”

  “Wouldn’t you want higher-quality?”

  “Yeah yeah, of course we do. High quality emitters are still impossible to produce in plants. They have to be made this way.”

  “So why isn’t this result an improvement?”

  “It is. When this happens, it is an improvement, it’s a great opportunity for us. But it can’t happen all the time, because then there are too many emitters loose and not enough of us, and chorncendantra begins to malfunction.”

  He uses the word so matter-of-factly, it seems as if I should know what it means. Admitting that I don’t might give me away, and my practice does, in one sense, call on me to become a complete imposter in everything I do, including this. This whole situation is exactly what my practice really needed. Whether or not there’s anything to gain by it, keeping up this imposture is a matter of principle and pride in my own work. If you maintain an imposture for a moment, deliberately, then, provided it won’t make matters worse, you are obligated, if only for vanity’s sake, to continue in it.

  “Chorncendantra needs emitters to stay where they are. The rest of the system is electrical, for the most part, but some parts run on bachelorization energy, which is very expensive, and the emitters run on bachelorization energy. There’s one close by here. If you like, I can show you.”

  Once again he folds up and rolls, but slowly enough for me to keep up with him this time. We come to a railed concrete embankment above a dead slope of skeletal trees, overlooking a kind of dry harbor filled with old brick buildings and no signs of life.

  “There’s an emitter,” he says, pointing suddenly. Without another word he levels his rifle, drops into a crouch, and creeps nimbly forward along the top of the rail to its end. Perched there, he aims carefully at something I have trouble making out. It’s a large, solid object that seems to be browsing along the sidewalk in its own special darkness; not a blob of shadow exactly, more like a dead, uninteresting haze of grey smoke that collects around it and projects out of it in a reverse spotlight. In overall shape, it resembles a human liver, all covered in imbricated scales. A felty, transparent caul seems to envelop the entire thing, and ripples out wrinkles and folds to palpate its surroundings, making the emitter seem both solid and liquid at once. At the same time, it is as insubstantial and vague as the shadow of a cloud, and I’m still not sure there’s anything really there.

  “They’re usually too hard to see,” the man says quietly, but in a conversational tone. He has the thing centered in the large steel ring sight, but seems to be waiting to fire the rifle. “Only people who are associated with the High Rationals can see them. And then, only when on official business. It’s to prevent people from interfering with them. But then they don’t ordinarily float in the street. That only happens when a courier doesn’t shoot the building in the middle of their area.”

  It’s a still night. The clouds are moving, but they may only be turning in circles.

  “Ah,” the man murmurs, and his attention becomes more focussed. The rifle barrel is a cylinder of black metal, lightly scored with short scratches. The cylinder maybe shaped like the letter omega turned upside down, folding out into a pair of parallel, smaller cylinders along the top but set apart, at ten and two o’clock. As I watch, these cylinders squeeze smoothly together; when they meet, the gun makes a soft, recoilless clap, like the closing of a camera shutter. At once the man lifts the rifle and stands up, looking pleased.

  “That’s that.”

  The huge, silent bulk of the thing in the street floats in place, immobilized. After a minut
e or two, its outline begins to waver; the membrane is disappearing into the inner surface of the thing, and I can hear the whisper of metal sections gliding along each other. A grid of pale lines appears in the thing, and a few moments later I realize I’m seeing the mortarwork in the brick wall behind it, right through its body. The shadow thins out. The liver shape contracts and erects something like a sail, even as it begins corkscrewing into the ground, intangible as a ghost. And I can hear it sighing or whimpering to itself.

  “Each time this happens about fourteen or fifteen of them... come out.” The man is shaking his arms, stretching them, and the tape that covers him rustles.

  “Where are you from?” he asks shyly, as if I had already told him and he had already forgotten.

  “Honfefs.”

  “Oh. Ah.” He nods. “That may be why this is so unfamiliar to you. We never work in Honfefs yet.”

  Silence seems to be creeping in.

  “You’re an accidental, so you probably have a lot of information you need to get. Hm,” he adds, compressing his upper lip and waving at someone behind me.

  There are two other shaggy men with rifles over on the corner, waving back.

  When I turn back to him, he’s scribbling something hastily on a scrap of paper with a round white pencil. He hands me the scrap.

  “OK,” he offers me his hand quickly with a smile. “Nice meeting you! Bye bye!”

  The other two roll off and he rolls after them, still holding the rifle steadily upright.

  It’s the weight of the bag that carries me along. I fall forward, dragged by its weight at the end of my arm, and my legs keep turning beneath me. The city is stirring again as the sky lightens, and, as I become aware of it, there’s a painful contraction in my center. I want to detach all my sensitive parts from my outer shell and curl them into a crumpled, protected soul jar inside.

  In the street you can’t fully distinguish between the people and the machines, although it’s not as if they are bound together. Their motions however are exactly coordinated, carrying parcels of momentum from here to there, object to object.