Levels: Fantastic and Macabre Stories

by Nathan Shumate

  Celia watched his face and nodded. She looked beyond him to Farris; Hanover followed her gaze. Farris was curled in the fetal position facing away from them, his breathing slow and regular.

  Slowly Celia crept off her clothes and toward Hanover. He watched her, feeling an anticipation like nothing he could remember. For once, Celia seemed to have greater patience and control than he had; she slid her leg over him and knelt straddling his hips. Her dark skin, coated with dust, held the understated radiance of a dusk that Hanover knew he must have seen somewhere before, somewhere other than here, in a place where the sun actually goes down.

  She inched herself down onto him until suddenly he entered her.

  And there was nothing. Even as she began raising and lowering herself, Hanover could see in her eyes that she felt nothing more than he did. There was no sensation, none of that excruciating friction that built until it bridged the gap between anticipation and pleasure. Just the spark of desire deep in his chest that forced him to drive himself automatically up into her as she gripped his shoulders and forced herself downward.

  For what seemed like eternity they went through the motions, feeling nothing more than the clear, thin ache that made them exert themselves against each other, until particles of sand crept between them where they were joined and began to chafe and cut.

  Breathing heavily, Celia rolled off of him and onto her clothes, staring at the ceiling of the tent. Hanover could still feel it inside, the spark of desire, hard and distinct from whatever filled the rest of him, like the barbed wire coiling up out of the sand.

  He glanced at Celia. She was still staring straight up, her eyes dry.

  ***

  When Hanover awoke Farris was still asleep but Celia was gone. Hanover dressed and left the tent.

  The motionless sun cast shadows in the footprints that headed back in the general direction from which they had come; Hanover could only see them for a few yards before they disappeared under freshly drifted sand. There was no one as far as he could see. She was gone.

  Sand rearranged itself lazily around him. He stood there, watching the nearest footprint as the sand filled it in.

  If he stopped eating the food that Farris found, would he stop being hungry? Or would that sense of appetite, once awakened, keep gnawing at him until it ate him alive? Celia had taken the gamble.

  Farris stumbled out of the tent. He scooped up a handful of sand and let it trickle down onto the crown of his head. Then he shook himself like a wet dog and smiled a lopsided smile at Hanover.

  At least she hadn’t hamstrung them when she left.

  Hanover started taking down the tent. The sun hung in front of them, waiting.

  Party Favors

  IVa.

  I caught a pod to Lowtown that night and lingered in the space between two crumbling buildings, just outside the wire mesh fence that surrounded the platform. I was wearing my dark uni-mold again, and a black body sheet—not a very Lowtown outfit, but I expected it to keep me unnoticed, and therefore out of trouble.

  Distant sounds reached me—barking or shouting, I couldn’t tell. The air was caustic and almost visible with smoke and rot. I hung back in the shadows of the alley, trying not to breathe too deeply. The wildlife was loud, but not immediate; the tamer Lowtowners were presumably trying to bed down for the night, and the wilder ones didn’t like the lights around the platform.

  I kept my ears open as I waited.

  I.

  At the party on Broxton I had immediately been roped into earnest and trivial smalltalk by Allysia. She had recently had her ear redone; it was a graceful scallop-shell shape laid back against the side of her head, with ribs of reinforced ceramic and a lattice of gold thread connecting them like a spider’s web. For all of her Edge affectations, Allysia was the ultimate bore, like a relic of old California that didn’t follow it into the Pacific.

  “But, really, how could they?” she was burbling, swinging her arms for expression as if she had forgotten the drink in her hand. “I’ll allow, the Consortium has its problems, but for anyone to just up and secede, well...” She trailed away in a titter that she probably thought sounded superior; I heh-heh-heh-ed out of politeness and looked for somewhere to go.

  Ronald, the host, sauntered by from the conversation he had just left, looking like he was open for another one. I flicked my eyes toward the door; in response Allysia automatically turned to see who was coming in (very nearly spilling her drink), and I scuttled off to Ronald’s side.

  “Ah, Hale,” said he, as he saw from whom I was scuttling. She had turned back, seen I was gone, and immediately inserted herself into a nearby three-way conversation already in progress. “I see you’ve escaped her clutches.”

  “Just barely. Throb?”

  “Let’s.”

  We made our way through the clots of giggling, dancing, arguing people. As we skirted between hundreds of bodies to the throb table in the middle of the atrium, I watched the great kaleidoscope of the rich and Edge as they separated and rejoined into their many overlapping mini-cliques.

  “Ah,” Ronald said by way of announcement as we reached the table. I picked up a capsule and pressed it against my wrist, felt the slight pop, and then leaned against the table as full synesthesia gripped me for a split second. I could smell the pink light streaming through my head. Everything smelled, tasted, felt, sounded pink. My heartbeat looped back through my ears, reverberating in my sinuses.

  I opened my eyes, not remembering that I’d closed them, and saw the familiar pink border around my vision. The rhythm in my head toned down enough that I could hear the party sounds around me again. The music was throb also, with full subsonics thrumming along with the tone in my head. I dropped the empty capsule into a dish with several others.

  Ronald still had his eyes closed; the vein in his temple was pulsing to the throb. He was a small round man; his face was getting that smooth look, like melted wax, from too many facelifts. There was a thin tattooed line down the straight of his nose. He was wearing a white ruffled shirt of flowered lace, and black net pants through which his red bikini briefs showed clearly, which was apparently the point.

  He opened his eyes, sighed, and looked around. He nodded to me. I nodded back. He looked toward Allysia, who was alighting on group after group like a swallow, slowly making her way to the throb table. Fine strands of gold extended back over the edge of her redone ear and trailed after her. Her titter wafted across the room to us, even over the music in the air and in our veins.

  “Honestly,” said Ronald slowly, trying to hold his words together, “honestly, I don’t know why we keep inviting her.”

  “Who’s we?” I asked. “I thought you ran these parties.”

  “You know...” He flopped a hand all-inclusively at everyone around. “We.” He shook his head in dismay and scratched his groin through his pants. “She tries her hardest to be Edge, but it’s all rancid. Did you know—” and here his voice took on a conspiratorial tone, “—that her father actually worked for a living? I mean, with his hands!”

  “So do I, after a fashion.”

  He jumped a bit at that, then shook his head. “You’re different, Hale. You perform services invaluable to the community. You’re not Edge either, but at least you don’t try to be something you’re not. I mean, look at how you’re dressed.”

  It was true. I was wearing a cool grey uni-molded second skin, so dark it was almost black, that covered everything south of my neck in one seamless piece. Very modern, and marginally trendy, perhaps, but hardly Edge.

  “Do you resent it?” I asked.

  “Not at all. Like I said, you’re a valuable member of the community. You’re like a rock, in counterpoint to all of these silly flowers growing around you.” Again he gestured expansively.

  “How artistic,” said I.

  Allysia’s daughter Heaven came by and swooped up a capsule. She throbbed quicker than anyone I’d ever seen; within ten seconds she had fired it into her bloodstream, arched
her back, opened her eyes dreamily, and pitched the empty capsule over my head into the dish.

  “Ronald. Great party, as usual,” she said with only the faintest trace of slur. Her eyes were half-shut, giving her a very seductive air. She was fashionably bald, with a two-inch sash of red silk looped across the top of her head and over her ears, tied under her chin.

  “And hel-lo to you, Hale,” she said as she traced her finger from my collarbone down the length of my front. Then she went back to the party, moving between people so gracefully she looked like she was swimming.

  “Don’t bother,” said Ronald, guessing my train of thought. “You may be a respected member of the community, but you’d have to be a lot more Edge to have any chance with her.”

  I sighed and leaned back against the table.

  “Aha!” Hands dropped on our shoulders from behind, and we turned to see Allysia, reaching over the table to us. She smirked at her own mischievousness.

  “I can see what’s on your mind, Hale!” she announced, with a wink. “She’s fine bit of flesh, isn’t she? Only the finest sperm went into her to begin with—and it’s been that way ever since, I gather! If I was a man, I’d be wanting to slip it to her myself!”

  She twirled off with a younger man in tow on her arm, and Ronald turned to me. “I don’t suppose... that you’d do me a favor? Encourage her not to come, for the good of the party?”

  “How do you mean, ‘favor’?”

  He spread his hands. “Hale, Hale, are you really that selfish that you’d turn something like this—something you’d benefit from, too—into business?”

  “Like I said, I work with my hands to earn a living—and without money, those hands are tied.”

  Ronald looked over his shoulder to where Allysia had found someone new to bore. “I suppose, with enough people here, I don’t have to put up with her very much—and there’s always throb, to take the edge off her...” His voice trailed off dejectedly as he walked away.

  I remained, enjoying the music radiating outward from my skull, starting to feel the dryness in my throat that always follows throb.

  IVb.

  A screaming woman ran down my alley, blood dripping down her face and shreds of torn clothing trailing behind her. She favored one leg, and the three twelve-year-olds behind her were gaining. I faded back into the shadow of a boarded-up doorway in the wall behind me as they hooted and hollered by, mixing war-cries with descriptions of what they would do to her when they caught her, brandishing their broken-glass knives and kicking up the caked trash on the ground.

  I hoped they wouldn’t catch her—at least, not until she had rounded a corner, out of my field of vision.

  A sparse rain started throwing heavy drops. I pulled up the hood of my body sheet to protect myself and pulled my arms up into my sleeves.

  Across the alley from me, an old man that I had mistaken for part of the drift of garbage twitched as the acidic rain bit into his exposed skin. The small rats that had been nestled against his body scurried away, squeaking, as the old man dug through the trash he had been lying on for something to cover his head.

  II.

  After the next party, which I hadn’t been able to attend, Ronald had vidded me.

  “Hale, something’s got to be done about that woman,” he said. “She has all of the decorum of a Lowtowner.”

  I leaned back in my chair, studying Ronald’s image. On the vid, he looked even smoother-skinned than in person. “Done something horrible, has she?”

  “Yes! Well, no one thing—but you know how the woman is!” He anxiously waited until I nodded my head in agreement, or empathy, or something. “She fussed on about seceding colonies—”

  “She was already onto that last time,” I said.

  “I know! She told everyone what she thought then, and told them all again this time, word for word! Then she went on with how beautiful her flowers are, and how long she works in her garden, as if everyone didn’t already know that she’s as automated as anything. And then,” he poked his screen for emphasis, “she tried to tell Cornice that she was wrong about something to do with Neo-Contemp music—to Cornice! Probably the foremost authority on it on the planet, if not in the Consortium!”

  I nodded placatingly, waiting for him to wind down, which he eventually did.

  “Please,” he said, “please just come to the next party. See for yourself.”

  “Ronald,” I chided, “I’m of a dying breed: a Busy Man. And I—” I couldn’t go any further; the pathos on his face would have melted any human heart.

  “All right,” I said. “Next one.” And I snapped off the vid before he could drown me in declarations of gratitude.

  IVc.

  Something behind me moved. I jumped away from the boarded door as it opened inward and four older Lowtowners—maybe eighteen or so—sauntered out. Their patched-together clothing protected most of their skin from the rain, and their faces were so pocked with skin cancer that acid burns probably would have helped.

  “Yo, kisama! You squat on our step?”

  I backed up smoothly so they couldn’t get behind me. “Just passing through.”

  “Hey, Tetsu!” one cried. “This baka’s a Hightowner!”

  The one he spoke to looked me up and down with a crooked grin. “Hontō da! A real, live one!”

  “Hey, how long you think he be a live one?” said another, pulling out a knife with a genuine metal blade.

  “Long as I want,” I said. “Leave me alone.”

  Tetsu and the rest just chuckled. They all drew knives.

  What the hell, I thought, and pulled my fryer out. At its discharge, the one who had first pulled his knife flew straight back through the air, crunched against the side of the doorway and fell into the darkness. The other three jumped back.

  “He’s dead,” I said. “I have enough charges for you all. Wakatta?”

  “Wakatta’n’da,” Tetsu answered for them all as they backpedaled a few steps, then slunk quickly out the far end of the alley.

  III.

  I was at the next party on Broxton, as were the usual crowd. Or so I thought at first; after some searching, I saw that Cornice wasn’t there, and I kept hearing snatches of conversations recounting that whole episode from the last party.

  Ronald stood by the throb table with drink in hand, wearing a zebra body sheet with transparent stripes. There were so many red dots on his wrist he looked like he’d been popping one every five minutes. He nodded to me, then pointed with his chin to where Allysia was regaling a group of four captive listeners with a story that she obviously found uproarious.

  “What’s she talking about tonight?” I asked as I picked up a capsule.

  “She’s telling the story from last time, about her and Cornice—she is! I’ve already seen two people leave tonight; my parties’ll be ruined.” He groaned like a man in torment.

  I could see his predicament; there were, after all, plenty of parties in Hightown, and each loss to his was a gain to someone else’s. Never mind that Ronald’s Broxton parties had been the standard of comparison for Hightown parties, time out of mind; life was as ruthless and sudden here as it was in Lowtown in its own way.

  “You couldn’t just ask her not to come, or something as simple as that, could you?” I asked, twiddling the throb between my fingers.

  “And have that get out?!” He stared at me as if I’d grown an extra eyeball. “If any sort of rumor even spreads that people get uninvited to my parties, it’s all over!” His eyes pleaded with me.

  I nodded absently, popped the throb, and faded to pink. When I came back, Heaven was standing in front of us, staring at me with an amused expression.

  “If you’re going to throb that hard, Hale, you ought to hold on to something,” she said. Her head was uncovered tonight, but there was a giant blue spider painted on the crown, with legs running down almost to her ears. She reached past me to the throb bowl, lingering close just long enough for me to catch a good nose-full of the pheromo
nal soup she used for perfume. Then she popped the capsule, throbbed as quickly as always, and flicked the empty into the bowl. As she danced away she threw a wink over her shoulder at me.

  “Why does she do that?” Ronald mused as I caught my breath.

  “I don’t know.” Between the throb and the pheromones, I was pretty fuzzy. “Maybe to show she’s different from her mother—she can actually attract people.”

  “Humph. Speaking of her mother, let’s get back to that; why don’t you go and, ah, sample her company a bit?” Ronald nudged me with his elbow to get me going.

  It took some control to keep from following the pheromone trail that I imagined I could still smell, but I managed it. I wended my way through the gyrating, small-talking, throbbing bodies, first to the drink table, and then until I found Allysia, who had moved on to fresh game.

  “—so how could it really be any other way?” She twittered in derision at such people as would think that “it,” whatever it was, could actually be some other way. She saw me join the small circle.

  “Well, here’s Hale!” she cried, throwing her arm around my shoulders. The gold tendrils from her ear tickled mine, and I almost spilled my drink as I jumped. “I was just saying, ‘It’s too bad that Hale wasn’t here for the last party,’ wasn’t I, Joy?” Another woman, more restrained but still Edge, nodded on command.

  “That’s okay. I already heard.”

  “Oh, did you?” She frowned. “Well, I’m sure you didn’t hear it like I’ve been telling it. That Cornice, she can be such a snob, don’t you think she’s such a snob, Hale?”

  I grunted noncommittally and drained my drink. As she went on about how Cornice wouldn’t know a composition from a commode, I saw Joy quietly slip out of the circle and make her way to the door. I stood silently and wished desperately for more throb until Allysia’s story wound down and she looped her arm over some other newcomer.