The Best of Michael Moorcock

by Michael Moorcock

  She shrugged.

  At her own insistence she had remained with the claim while he went back to Jackson to buy the land and, when this was finalised, buy a prospecting licence without which they would not be able to file, such were Mississippi’s bureaucratic subtleties; but when he returned to the cypress swamp, she and the pirogue were gone. Only the Stains remained as evidence of their experience. Enquiring frantically in McClellan, he heard of a woman being caught wild and naked in the swamp and becoming the common possession of the brothers Berger and their father, Ox, until they tired of her. It was said she could no longer speak any human language but communicated in barks and grunts like a hog. It was possible that the Bergers had drowned her in the swamp before continuing on up towards Tupelo where they had property.

  7 Valse de Coeur Casser

  Convinced of their kidnapping and assault upon Colinda Dovero, of their responsibility for her insanity and possibly her death, Jack Karaquazian was only an hour behind the Bergers on the Trace when they stopped to rest at the Breed Papoose. The mendala tavern just outside Belgrade in Chickasaw Territory was the last before Mississippi jurisdiction started again. It served refreshments as rough and new as its own timbers.

  A ramshackle, unpainted shed set off the road in a clearing of slender firs and birches, its only colour was its sign, the crude representation of a baby, black on its right side, white on its left, and wearing Indian feathers. Usually Jack Karaquazian avoided such places, for the stakes were either too low or too high, and a game usually ended in some predictable brutality. Dismounting in the misty woods, Mr. Karaquazian took firm control of his fury and slept for a little while before rising and leading his horse to the hitching post. A cold instrument of justice, the Egyptian entered the tavern, a mean, unclean room where even the sawdust on the floor was filthy beyond recognition. His weapon displayed in an obvious threat, he walked slowly up to the mendala-sodden bar and ordered a Fröm.

  The two Bergers and their huge sire were drinking at the bar with every sign of relaxed amiability, like creatures content in the knowledge that they had no natural enemies. They were honestly surprised as Jack Karaquazian spoke to them, his voice hardly raised, yet cutting through the other conversations like a Mason knife.

  “Ladies are not so damned plentiful in this territory we can afford to give offence to one of them,” Mr. Karaquazian had said, his eyes narrowing slightly, his body still as a hawk. “And as for hitting one or cursing one or having occasion to offer harm to one, or even murdering one, well, gentlemen, that looks pretty crazy to me. Or if it isn’t craziness, then it’s dumb cowardice. And there’s nobody in this here tavern thinks a whole lot of a coward, I believe. And even less, I’d guess, of three damned cowards.”

  At this scarcely disguised challenge, the majority of the Breed Papoose’s customers turned into discreet shadows until only Mr. Karaquazian, in his dusty silks and linen, and the Bergers, still in their travelling kaftans, their round Ugandan faces bright with sweat, were left confronting one another along the line of the plank bar. Mr. Karaquazian made no movement until the Bergers fixed upon a variety of impulsive actions.

  The Egyptian did not draw as Japh Berger ran for the darkness of the backdoor convenience, neither did his hand begin to move as Ach Berger flung himself towards the cover of an overturned bench. It was only as Pa Ox, still mildly puzzled, pulled up the huge Vickers 9 on its swivel holster that Mr. Karaquazian’s right hand moved with superhuman speed to draw and level the delicate silver stem of a pre-rip Sony, cauterising the older Berger’s gun-hand and causing his terrible weapon to crash upon stained, warped boards—to slice away the bench around the shivering Ach, who pulled back withering fingers with a yelp, and to send a slender beam of lilac carcinogens to ensure that Japh would never again take quite the same pleasure in his private pursuits. Then the gambler had replaced the Sony in its holster and signalled, with a certain embarrassment, for a drink.

  From the darkness, Ach Berger said: “Can I go now, mister?”

  Without turning, Karaquazian raised his voice a fraction. “I hope in future you’ll pay attention to better advice than your pa’s, boy.” He looked directly into the face of the wounded Ox who turned, holding the already healing stump of his wrist, to make for the door, leaving the Vickers and the four parts of his hand in the sawdust.

  “I never would have thought that Sony was anything but a woman’s weapon,” said the barkeep admiringly.

  “Oh, you can be sure of that.” Jack Karaquazian lifted a glass in cryptic salute.

  8 Les Flemmes d’Enfer

  It had been perhaps a month later, still in the Territory, that Mr. Karaquazian had met a man who had seen the Bergers with the mad woman in Aberdeen a week before Jack Karaquazian had caught up with them.

  The man told Mr. Karaquazian that Ox Berger had paid for the woman’s board at an hotel in Aberdeen. Berger had made sure a doctor was found and a woman hired to look after her “until her folks came looking for her.” The man had spoken, in quiet wonder, of her utter madness, the exquisite beauty of her face, the peculiar cast of her eyes.

  “Ox told me she had looked the same since they’d found her, wading waist-deep in the swamp.” From Aberdeen, he heard, she had been taken back to New Auschwitz by Peabody’s people. In Memphis, Mr. Karaquazian learned she had gone North. He settled in Memphis for a while, perhaps hoping she would return and seek him out.

  He was in a state of profound shock.

  Jack Karaquazian refused to discuss or publicly affirm any religion. His faith in God did not permit it. He believed that when faith became religion it inevitably turned into politics. He was firmly determined to have as little to do with politics as possible. In general conversation he was prepared to admit that politics provided excellent distraction and consolation to those who needed them, but such comfort was usually bought at too high a price. Privately, he held a quiet certainty in the manifest power of Good and Evil. The former he personified simply as the Deity; the latter he called the Old Hunter, and imagined this creature stalking the world in search of souls. He had always congratulated himself on the skill with which he avoided the Old Hunter’s traps and enticements, but now he understood that he had been made to betray himself through what he valued most: his honour. He was disgusted and astonished at how his most treasured virtues had destroyed his self-esteem and robbed him of everything but his uncommon luck at cards.

  She did not write. Eventually, he took the Étoile down to Baton Rouge and from there rode the omnus towards the coast, by way of McComb and Wiggins. It was easy to find Biloxi. The sky was a fury of purple and black for thirty miles around, but above the Fault was a patch of perfect pale blue, there since the destruction began. Even as continua collided and became merely elemental, you could always find the Terminal Café, flickering in and out of a thousand subtly altering realities, pulsing, expanding, contracting, pushing unlikely angles through the after-images of its own shadows, making unique each outline of each ordinary piece of furniture and equipment, and yet never fully affected by that furious vortex above which the solar system bobbed, as it were, like a cork at the centre of the maelstrom. They were not entirely invulnerable to the effects of Chaos, that pit of non-consciousness. There were the hot-spots, the time-shifts, the perceptual problems, the energy drains, the odd geographies. Heavy snow had fallen over the Delta one winter, a general cooling, a coruscation, while the following summer, most agreed, was perfectly normal. And yet there remained always that sense of borrowed time. She had seen the winter as an omen for the future. “We have no right to survive this catastrophe,” she had said. “Yet we must try, surely.” He had recognised a faith as strong as his own.

  Boudreaux Ramsadeen brought in a new band, electrok addicts from somewhere in Tennessee where they had found a hot-spot and brained in until it went dry. They had been famous in those half-remembered years before the Fault, and they played with extraordinary vigour and pleasure, so that Boudreaux’s strange, limping dance
took on increasingly complex figures and his partners, thrilled at the brute’s exquisite grace and gentleness, threw their bodies into rapturous invention, stepping in and out of the zigzagging after-images, sometimes dancing with twin selves, their heads flung back and the colours of hell reflected in their duplicated eyes. And Boudreaux cried with the joy of it, while Jack Karaquazian, on the raised game floor, where the window looked directly out into the Fault, took no notice. Here, at his favourite flat game, his fingers playing a ten-dimensional pseudo-universe like an old familiar deck, the Egyptian still presented his back to that voracious fault. Its colours swirling in a kind of glee, it swallowed galaxies while Mr. Karaquazian gave himself to old habits. But he was never unconscious.

  Mr. Karaquazian remained in the limbo of the Terminal Café. Up in Memphis, he heard, bloody rivalries and broken treaties would inevitably end in the Confederacy’s absolute collapse, unless some sort of alliance was made with the reluctant Free States. Either way, wars must begin. Colinda Dovero’s vision of the future had been clearer than most of the oracles’.

  Mr. Karaquazian had left Egypt because of civil war. Now he refused to move on or even discuss the situation. He kept his back to the Fault because he had come to believe it was the antithesis of God, a manifestation of the Old Hunter. Yet, unlike most of his fellow gamblers, he still hoped for some chance of reconciliation with his Deity. His faith had grown more painful but was not diminished by his constant outrage at his own obscene arrogance, which had led him to ruin innocent men. Yet something of that arrogance remained, and he believed he would not find any reconciliation until he had rid himself of it. He knew of no way to confront and redeem his action. To seek out the Bergers, to offer them his remorse, would merely compound his crime, shift the moral burden and, what was more, further insult them. He remembered the mild astonishment in Ox’s eyes. At last he understood the man’s expression as Ox sought to defend himself against one whom he guessed must be a psychopath blood looking for a coup.

  Sam Oakenhurst wondered, in the words of a new song he had heard, if they were not “killing time for eternity.” Maybe, one by one, they would get bored enough with the game and stroll casually down into the mouth of hell, to suffer whatever punishment, pleasure or annihilation was their fate. But Mr. Karaquazian became impatient with this, and Sam apologised. “I’m growing sentimental, I guess.”

  Mr. Oakenhurst and Brother Ignatius had borrowed two of his systems for the big Texas game. They had acted out of good will, attempting to re-involve him in the things which had once pleased him. Mr. Oakenhurst had told of an illegal acoustic school in New Orleans. Only a few people still had those old cruel skills. “Why don’t you meet me down there, Jack, when I get back from Texas?”

  “They’re treacherous dudes, those machinoix—outlaws or otherwise.”

  “What’s the difference, Jack? It’ll make a change for you.”

  So, after a few more hands and a little more time on the edge of eternity, he had joined Mr. Oakenhurst in New Orleans. Brother Ignatius was gone, taken out in some freak pi-jump on the way home, his horse with him. Mr. Karaquazian discovered the machinoix to be players more interested in remorseful nostalgia and the pain than the game itself. It had been ugly money, but easy, and their fellow players, far from resenting losses, grew steadily more friendly, courting their company between games, offering to display their most intimate scarifications.

  Jack Karaquazian had wondered, chiefly because of the terror he sensed resonating between them, if the machinoix might allow him a means of salvation, if only through some petty martyrdom. He had nothing but a dim notion of conventional theologies, but the machinoix spoke often of journeying into the shadowlands, by which he eventually realised they meant an afterlife. It was one of their fundamental beliefs. Swearing he was not addicted, Sam Oakenhurst was able, amiably, to accept their strangeness and continue to win their guineas, but Mr. Karaquazian became nervous, not finding the dangers in any way stimulating.

  When his luck had turned, Mr. Karaquazian had been secretly relieved. He had remained in the city only to honour his commitment to his partner. He felt it might be time to try the Trace again. He felt she might be calling him.

  9 Louisiana Two-Step

  “The world was always a mysterious dream to me,” she had told him. “But now it is an incomprehensible nightmare. Was it like this for those Jews, do you think?”

  “Which Jews?” He had never had much interest in anthropology.

  She had continued speaking, probably to herself, as she stood on the balcony of the hotel in Gatlinburg and watched the aftershocks of some passing skirmish billow over the horizon: “Those folk, those Anglo-Saxons, had no special comfort in dying. Not for them the zealotry of the Viking or the Moor. They paraded their iron and their horses and they made compacts with those they conquered or who threatened them. They offered a return to a Roman Golden Age, a notion of universal justice. And they gradually prevailed until Chaos was driven into darkness and ancient memory. Even the Normans could not reverse what the Anglo-Saxons achieved. But with that achievement, Jack, also vanished a certain wild vivacity. What the Christians came to call ‘pagan.’” She had sighed and kissed his hands, looking away at the flickering ginger moon. “Do you long for those times, Jack? That pagan dream?”

  Mr. Karaquazian thought it astonishing that anyone had managed to create a kind of order out of ungovernable Chaos. And that, though he would never say so, was his reason for believing in God and also, because logic would have it, the Old Hunter. “Total consciousness must, I suppose, suggest total anticonsciousness—and all that lies between.”

  She told him then of her own belief. If the Fault were manifest Evil, then somewhere there must be an equivalent manifestation of Good. She loved life with a positive relish, which he enjoyed vicariously and which in turn restored to him sensibilities long since atrophied.

  When he left the steamboat at Greenville, Mr. Karaquazian bought himself a sturdy riding horse and made his way steadily up the Trace, determined to admire and relish the beauty of it, as if for the first time. Once again, many of the trees had already dropped their leaves.

  Through their skeletons, a faint pink-gold wash in the pearly sky showed the position of the sun. Against this cold, soft light, the details of the trees were emphasised, giving each twig a character of its own. Jack Karaquazian kept his mind on these wonders and pleasures, moving day by day towards McClellan and the silver cypress swamp, the gold Stains. In the sharp, new air he felt a strength that he had not known, even before his act of infamy. Perhaps it was a hint of redemption. Of his several previous attempts to return, he had no clear recollections; but this time, though he anticipated forgetfulness, as it were, he was more confident of his momentum. In his proud heart, his sinner’s heart, he saw Colinda Dovero as the means of his salvation. She alone would give him a choice which might redeem him in his eyes, if not in God’s. She was still his Luck. She would be back at her Stains, he thought, maybe working her claim, a rich machine-baron herself by now and unsettled by his arrival; but once united, he knew they could be parted only by an act of uncalled-for courage, perhaps something like a martyrdom. He felt she was offering him, at last, a destiny.

  Mr. Karaquazian rode up on the red-gold Trace, between the tall, dense trees of the Mississippi woods, crossing the Broken and New rivers, following the joyfully foaming Pearl for a while until he was in Chocktaw country, where he paid his toll in piles noires to an unsmiling Indian who had not seen, he said, a good horse in a long time. He spoke of an outrage, an automobile which had come by a few days ago, driven by a woman with auburn hair. He pointed. The deep tyre tracks were still visible. Mr. Karaquazian began to follow them, guessing that Colinda Dovero had left them for him. At what enormous cost? It seemed she must already be tapping the Stains. Such power would be worth almost anything when war eventually came. He could feel the disintegration in the air. Soon these people would be mirroring the metaphysical destruction by falling up
on and devouring their fellows. Yet, through their self-betrayal, he thought, Colinda Dovero might survive and even prosper, at least for a while.

  He arrived in McClellan expecting to find change, enrichment from the colour strike. But the town remained the pleasant, unaltered place he had known, her maze of old railroad tracks crossing and recrossing at dozens of intersections, from the pre-Biloxi days when the meat plants had made her rich, her people friendly and easy, her whites respectful yet dignified.

  Jack Karaquazian spent the night at the Henry Clay Hotel and was disappointed to find no one in the tidy little main street (now a far cry from its glory) who had heard of activity out around the Streams. Only a fool, he was told, would go into that cypress swamp at any time of year, least of all during a true season. Consoling himself with the faint hope that she might have kept her workings a secret, Mr. Karaquazian rented himself a pirogue, gave an eager kiddikin a guinea to take care of his horse, and set off into the Streams, needing no map, no memory—merely his will and the unreasoning certainty that she was drawing him to her.

  10 Sugar Bee

  “I had been dying all my life, Jack,” she had said. “I decided I wanted to live. I’m giving it my best shot. If we are here as the result of an accident, let us take advantage of that!”

  The swamp fog obscured all detail. There was the sharp sound of the water as he paddled the pirogue; the rustle of a wing, a muffled rush, a faint shadow moving amongst the trunks. Jack Karaquazian began to wonder if he were not in limbo, moving from one matrix to another. Would those outlines remain the outlines of trees and vines? Would they crystallise, perhaps, or become massive cliffs of basalt and obsidian? There was sometimes a clue in the nature of the echoes. He whistled a snatch of “Grand Mamou.” The old dance tune helped his spirits. He believed he must still be in the same reality.

  “Human love, Jack, is our only weapon against Chaos. And yet, consistently, we reject its responsibilities in favour of some more abstract and therefore less effective notion.”