Strange Wine

by Harlan Ellison

  The crowds contained prongers, coshmen, fagin brats, pleasure pals, dealers, pickpockets, hustlers, waltzers, pseudo-marks, gophers, rowdy-dowdy hijackers, horses, hot slough workers, whores, steerers, blousers of all ages, sheiks, shake artists, kiters, floaters, aliens from three hundred different federations, assassins and, of course, innocent johns, marks, hoosiers, kadodies, and tourists ripe for shucking.

  Following one such tidal flow of crowd life, down an alley identified on a wall as Poke Way, the view would narrow down to a circular doorway in a green one-storey building. The sign would scream THE ELEGANT. Tightening the angle of observation, moving inside, the place could be seen to be a hard-drinking bar.

  At the counter, as the sightline tracked around the murky bar, one could observe two men hunched over their thimbles, drinking steadily and paying attention to nothing but what their credit cards could buy, dumbwaitered up through the counter to their waiting hands. To an experienced visitor to the area, they would be clearly identifiable as “butt’n’ben” prongers: adepts at locating and furnishing to various Knox Shops whatever human parts were currently in demand.

  Tracking further right, into the darkness of the private booths, the view would reveal (in the moments when the revolving overhead globes shone into those black spaces) an extremely attractive, but weary-looking, young woman with gray-blue eyes. Moving in for a tight closeup, the view would hold that breathtaking face for long moments, then move in and in on the eyes…those remarkable eyes.

  All this, all these sights, in the area called WorldsEnd.

  Verna tried to erase the memory with the oblivion of drink. Drugs made her sick to her stomach and never accomplished what they were supposed to do. But chigger, and rum and bowl could do it…if she downed them in sufficient quantities. Thus far, the level had not been even remotely approached. The alien, and what she had had to do to service him, were still fresh in her mind. Right near the surface, like scum. Since she had left the safe house and gone on her own, it had been one disaster after another. And tonight, the slug thing from…

  She could not remember the name of the world it called its home. Where it lived in a pool of liquid, in a state of what passed for grace only to those who raised other life forms for food.

  She punched up another bowl and then some bread, to dip in the thick liquor. Her stomach was sending her messages of pain.

  There had to be a way out. Out of WorldsEnd, out of the trade, out of the poverty and pain that characterized this planet for all but the wealthiest and most powerful. She looked into the bowl and saw it as no one else in The Elegant could have seen it.

  The brown, souplike liquor, thick and dotted with lighter lumps of amber. She saw it as a whirlpool, spinning down to a finite point of silver radiance that spun on its own axis, whirling and whirling: a mad eye. A funnel of living brilliance flickering with chill heat that ran back against the spin, surging toward the top of the bowl and forming a barely visible surface tension of coruscating light, a thousand-colored dome of light.

  She dipped the bread into the funnel and watched it tear apart like the finest lace. She brought it up, soaking, and ripped off a piece with her fine, white, even teeth–thinking of tearing the flesh of her mother. Sydni, her mother, who had gifted her with this curse, these eyes. This terrible curse that prevented her from seeing the world as it was, as it might have been, as it might be; seeing the world through eyes of wonder that had become horror before she turned five years old. Sydni, who had been in the trade before her, and her mother before her; Sydni, who had borne her through the activities of one nameless father after another. And one of them had carried the genes that had produced the eyes. Forever eyes.

  She tried desperately to get drunk, but it wouldn’t happen. More bread, another bowl, another chigger and rum–and nothing happened. But she sat in the booth, determined not to go back into the alleys. The alien might be looking for her, might still demand its credits’ worth of sex and awfulness, might try once again to force her to drink the drink it had called “mooshsquash.” The chill that came over her made her shiver; brain movies with forever eyes were vivid and always fresh, always now, never memories, always happening then.

  She cursed her mother and thought the night would probably never end.

  An old woman, a very old woman, a woman older than anyone born on the day she had been born, nodded her head to her dressers. They began covering her terrible nakedness with expensive fabrics. She had blue hair. She did not speak to them.

  Now that he had overcome the problems of pulse pressure on the association fibers of the posterior lobe of the brain, he was certain the transplanted mutations would be able to mold the unconscious cerebral image of the seen world into the conscious percept. He would make no guarantees for the ability of the recipient to cope with the flux of the external world in all its complexity–infinitely more complicated as “seen” through the mutated transplant eyes–but he knew that his customer would hardly be deterred by a lack of such guarantees. They were standing in line. Once he had said, “The unaided human eye under the best possible viewing conditions can distinguish ten million different color surfaces; with transplants the eye will perceive ten billion different color surfaces; or more,” they were his. They…she…would pay anything. And anything was how much he would demand. Anything to get off this damned planet, away from the rot that was all expansion had left of Earth.

  There was a freehold waiting for him on one of the ease-colonies of Kendo IV. He would take passage and arrive like a prince from a foreign land. He would spin out the remaining years of his life with pleasure and comfort and respect. He would no longer be a Knoxdoctor, forced to accept ghoulish assignments at inflated prices, and then compelled to turn over the credits to the police and the sterngangs that demanded “protection” credit.

  He needed only one more. A fresh pair for that blue-haired old harridan. One more job, and then release from this incarceration of fear and desperation and filth. A pair of gray-blue eyes. Then freedom, in the ease-colony.

  It was cold in Dr. Breame’s Knox Shop. The tiny vats of nutrients demanded drastically lowered temperatures. Even in the insulated coverall he wore, Dr. Breame felt the cold.

  But it was always warm on Kendo IV.

  And there were no prongers like Grebbie and Berne on Kendo IV. No strange men and women and children with eyes that glowed. No still-warm bodies brought in off the alleys, to be hacked and butchered. No vats with cold flesh floating in nutrient. No filth, no disgrace, no payoffs, no fear.

  He listened to the silence of the operating room.

  It seemed to be filled with something other than mere absence of sound. Something deeper. A silence that held within its ordered confines a world of subtle murmurings.

  He turned, staring at the storage vats in the ice cabinet. Through the nearly transparent film of frost on the see-through door he could discern the parts idly floating in their nutrients. The mouths, the filaments of nerve bundles, the hands still clutching for life. There were sounds coming from the vats.

  He had heard them before.

  All the voiceless voices of the dead.

  The toothless mouths calling his name: Breame, come here, Breame, step up to us, look at us, come nearer so we can talk to you, closer so we can touch you, show you the true cold that waits for you.

  He trembled…surely with the cold of the operating room. Here, Breame, come here, we have things to tell you: the dreams you helped end, the wishes unanswered, the lives cut off like these hands. Let us touch you, Dr. Breame.

  He nibbled at his lower lip, willing the voices to silence. And they went quiet, stopped their senseless pleading. Senseless, because very soon Grebbie and Berne would come, and they would surely bring with them a man or a woman or a child with glowing blue-gray eyes, and then he would call the woman with blue hair, and she would come to his Knox Shop, and he would operate, and then take passage.

  It was always warm, and certainly it would always be quiet. On Ken
do IV.

  Extract from the brief of the Plaintiff in the libel suit of 26 Krystabel Parsons v. Liquid Magazine, Liquid Newsfax Publications, LNP Holding Group, and 311 unnamed Doe personages.

  from Liquid Magazine (uncredited profile):

  Her name is 26 Krystabel Parsons. She is twenty-sixth in the line of Directors of Minet. Her wealth is beyond measure, her holdings span three federations, her residences can be found on one hundred and fifty-eight worlds, her subjects numberless, her rule absolute. She is one of the last of the unchallenged tyrants known as power brokers.

  In appearance she initially reminds one of a kindly old grandmother, laugh-wrinkles around the eyes, blue hair uncoiffed, wearing exo-braces to support her withered legs.

  But one hour spent in the company of this woman, this magnetism, this dominance…this force of nature…and all mummery reveals itself as cheap disguise maintained for her own entertainment. All masks are discarded and the Director of Minet shows herself more nakedly than anyone might care to see her.

  Ruthless, totally amoral, jaded beyond belief with every pleasure and distraction the galaxy can provide, 26 Krystabel Parsons intends to live the rest of her life (she is one hundred and ten years old, and the surgeons of O-Pollinoor, the medical planet she caused to have built and staffed, have promised her at least another hundred and fifty, in exchange for endowments whose enormity staggers the powers of mere gossip) hell-bent on one purpose alone: the pursuit of more exotic distractions.

  Liquid Magazine managed to infiltrate the entourage of the Director during her Grand Tour of the Filament recently (consult the handy table in the front of this issue for ready conversion to your planetary approximation). During the time our correspondent spent with the tour, incidents followed horn-on-horn in such profusion that this publication felt it impossible to enumerate them fully in just one issue. From Porte Recoil at one end of the Filament to Earth at the other–a final report not received as of this publication–our correspondent has amassed a wealth of authenticated incident and firsthand observations we will present in an eleven-part series, beginning with this issue.

  As this issue is etched, the Director of Minet and her entourage have reached PIX and have managed to elude the entire newsfax media corps. Liquid Magazine is pleased to report that, barring unforeseen circumstances, this exclusive series and the final report from our correspondent detailing the mysterious reasons for the Director’s first visit to Earth in sixty years will be the only coverage of this extraordinary personality to appear in fax since her ascension and the termination of her predecessor.

  Because of the history of intervention and censorship attendant on all previous attempts to report the affairs of 26 Krystabel Parsons, security measures as extraordinary as the subject herself have been taken to insure no premature leaks of this material will occur.

  Note Curiae: Investigation advises subsequent ten installments of series referred to passim foregoing extract failed to reach publication. Entered as Plaintiff Exhibit 1031.

  They barely had time to slot their credits and follow her. She paid in the darkness between bursts of light from the globes overhead; and when they were able to sneak a look at her, she was already sliding quickly from the booth and rushing for the iris. It was as if she knew she was being pursued. But she could not have known.

  “Berne…”

  “I see her. Let’s go.”

  “You think she knows we’re onto her?”

  Berne didn’t bother to answer. He slotted credits for both of them and started after her. Grebbie lost a moment in confusion and then followed his partner.

  The alley was dark now, but great gouts of blood-red and sea-green light were being hurled into the passageway from a top-mixer joint at the corner. She turned right out of Poke Way and shoved through the jostling crowds lemming toward Yardey’s Battle Circus. They reached the mouth of the alley in time to see her cut across between rickshas, and followed as rapidly as they could manage through the traffic. Under their feet they could feel the throbbing of the machinery that supplied power to WorldsEnd. The rasp of circuitry overloading mixed faintly with the clang and shrieks of Yardey’s sonic come-ons.

  She was moving swiftly now, off the main thoroughfare. In a moment Grebbie was panting, his stubby legs pumping like pistons, his almost-neckless body tilted far forward, as he tried to keep up with lean Berne. Chew Way opened on her left and she moved through a clutch of tourists from Horth, all painted with chevrons, and turned down the alley.

  “Berne…wait up…”

  The lean pronger didn’t even look back. He shoved aside a barker with a net trying to snag him into a free house and disappeared into Chew Way. The barker caught Grebbie.

  “Lady, please…” Grebbie pleaded, but the scintillae in the net had already begun flooding his bloodstream with the desire to bathe and frolic in the free house. The barker was pulling him toward the iris as Berne reappeared from the mouth of Chew Way and punched her in the throat. He pulled the net off Grebbie, who made idle, underwater movements in the direction of the free house. Berne slapped him. “If I didn’t need you to help carry her…”

  He dragged Grebbie into the alley.

  Ahead of them, Verna stopped to catch her breath. In the semidarkness her eyes glowed faintly; first gray, a delicate ash-gray of moth wings and the decay of Egypt; then blue, the fog-blue of mercury light through deep water and the lips of a cadaver. Now that she was out of the crowds, it was easier. For a moment, easier.

  She had no idea where she was going. Eventually, when the special sight of those endless memories had overwhelmed her, when her eyes had become so well adjusted to the flash-lit murkiness of the punchup pub that she was able to see…

  She put that thought from her. Quickly. Reliving, that was almost the worst part of seeing. Almost.

  …when her sight had grown that acute, she had fled the punchup, as she fled any place where she had to deal with people. Which was why she had chosen to become one of the few blousers in the business who would service aliens. As disgusting as it might be, it was infinitely easier with these malleable, moist creatures from far away than with men and women and children whom she could see as they…

  She put that thought from her. Again. Quickly. But she knew it would return; it always returned; it was always there. The worst part of seeing.

  Bless you, Mother Sydni. Bless you and keep you.

  Wherever you are; burning in tandem with my father, whoever he was. It was one of the few hateful thoughts that sustained her.

  She walked slowly. Ignoring the hushed and urgent appeals from the rag mounds that bulked in the darkness of the alley. Doorways that had been melted closed now held the refuse of WorldsEnd humanity that no longer had anything to sell. But they continued needing.

  A hand came out of the black mouth of a sewer trap. Bone fingers touched her ankle; fingers locked around her ankle. “Please…” The voice was torn out by the roots, its last film of moisture evaporating, leaves withering and curling in on themselves like a crippled fist.

  “Shut up! Get away from me!” Verna kicked out and missed the hand. She stumbled, trying to keep her balance, half turned, and came down on the wrist. There was a brittle snap and a soft moan as the broken member was dragged back into the darkness.

  She stood there screaming at nothing, at the dying and useless thing in the sewer trap. “Let me alone! I’ll kill you if you don’t leave me alone!”

  Berne looked up. “That her?”

  Grebbie was himself again. “Might could be.”

  They started off at a trot, down Chew Way. They saw her faintly limned by the reflection of lights off the alley wall. She was stamping her foot and screaming.

  “I think she’s going to be trouble,” Berne said.

  “Crazy, you ask me,” Grebbie muttered. “Let’s cosh her and have done with it. The Doc is waiting. He might have other prongers out looking. We get there too late and we’ve wasted a lot of time we could of spent–”

 
“Shut up. She’s making such a hell of a noise she might’ve already got the police on her.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  Berne grabbed him by the tunic. “What if she’s under bond to a sterngang, you idiot?”

  Grebbie said no more.

  They hung back against the wall, watching as the girl let her passion dissipate. Finally, in tears, she stumbled away down the alley. They followed, pausing only to stare into the shadows as they passed a sewer trap. A brittle, whispering moan came from the depths. Grebbie shivered.

  Verna emerged into the blare of drug sonics from a line of top-mixers that sat horn-on-horn down the length of Courage Avenue. They had very little effect on her; drugs were in no way appealing; they only intensified her seeing, made her stomach hurt, and in no way blocked the visions. Eventually, she knew, she would have to return to her coop; to take another customer. But if the slug alien was waiting…

  A foxmartin in sheath and poncho sidled up. He leaned in, bracing himself with shorter appendages against the metal sidewalk, and murmured something she did not understand. But the message was quite clear. She smiled, hardly caring whether a smile was considered friendly or hostile in the alien’s mind. She said, very clearly, “Fifty credits.” The foxmartin dipped a stunted appendage into the poncho’s roo, and brought up a liquid shot of an Earthwoman and a foxmartin without its shield. Verna looked at the liquid and then away quickly. It wasn’t likely the alien in the shot was the same one before her; this was probably an example of vulpine pornography; she shoved the liquid away from her face. The foxmartin slid it back into the roo. It murmured again, querulous.

  “One hundred and fifty credits,” Verna said, trying hard to look at the alien, but only managing to retain a living memory of appendages and soft brown female flesh.

  The foxmartin’s fetching member slid into the roo again, moved swiftly out of sight, and came up with the credits.