by Zack Parsons
“Polly,” she said. “Polly. My name is Polly.”
“Ppppp-ooooolly.” Her name sounded bizarre being formed by the quivering bristles on the alien’s back.
“It’s good to meet you,” she said.
And it was.
Wesley Bishop was alive and reconstituted for the hundredth time that day. He climbed over the squirming flesh of naked bodies. Familiar faces beneath his hands, crying for help, begging for death. They baked in the radiation emanating from the heat-fused ruins of San Pedro.
He tore the cowl from his eyes and stared up from the gutted pit of the central pylon. The Pool was open to the sky. Shrieking swarms of black birds flapped out from the liquid, tearing at their own cowls, twisting by the hundreds up into the yellow-black daylight. Massive things were stirring within the liquid depths. They rose on shaky limbs and shook off the gelatin membranes of their birth.
All the types were being born from the Pool in an endless tide. There were men and women from the Undercroft. Forever young starlets and scientists once kept locked in the cannery with all the criminals. They were released into a world they did not comprehend. They pulled themselves over one another, clawing up hills of the living and the dead, working their newly-made bodies up the fractured innards of the birthing pipes, and scaling the rubble into the nightmare that was once the LARC.
Bishop clawed hardest of all. He was always good at finding his way to the top. By any and all means, by gouge and claw and step and kick, he made his way to the top. He stood naked in rubble, howling winds rippling his hair. The newly made duplicates buffeted him as they streamed past. Other creatures were scaling the sundered honeycomb of the Pit, joining their human brothers in the landscape the Mother had created for them.
Looking out across the hills of ruin, Wesley Bishop spied a heap of slag that so resembled a horse, he decided, at last, he did not care for this place anymore. He craved something else. He craved more than ruins. He wanted beautiful skies and narrow, cobbled streets. He yearned for sumptuous dinners and warm nights with pretty girls. He required new lands to lay claim to.
Bishop returned to the Pool’s shores and waded into the hungry liquid. It hissed on contact with his flesh. He began to dissolve and, as he did, imbued the serpent with his desire to escape where Apollyon could not follow.
I inhabit the spaces between, flowing with deep water to all its shores. I rise on human bones and flesh beneath skies consumed in the storms of nebulae. When I am choked by poison or seared by distant suns or freeze atop the airless mountain, I remake myself as new things.
I am the flesh of woven bone. My sky has torn loose, and the earth heaves with liquid fire. I am one of few, sentinel upon the surface, protector of the softer things beneath the crust. I rise and warn of the coming of the deep water. My words are not understood, and I am cast into the fire.
I am the machine-being, one of the engines that endured the long-ago destruction of my creators. I am a component in the millennium work of transforming all a planet’s resources to navigate the stars. Deep mines have found the water. My arrival offends the pulsing crystal stacks of logic cores. I am made to answer for my existence. I do not speak this language, and I am disassembled.
I am warm and still. I process the soil and enrich it with my excretions. I cling to roots of the primeval forest, completing a century’s climb to the surface where I will become a hard-shelled thing and live only for one day. It is my only chance to speak to the trees and warn that their roots will soon touch dangerous waters. I sing with a voice deep within my body, and I do not know if the forest understands my words. The hard-shelled things are simple, and the trees are faceless and silent like all trees. I crumble; my husk will nourish the forest, and I will not know for another century if they have heeded my warning.
I am Casper Cord. A champion of a dead race. Warrior of a lost country. I am reificant. I travel the waters that flow between and emerge in ten thousand distant places with my story fixed inside new flesh. My memories, my prejudices and wars, my cities, my music, jokes, my people and places, my injustice and hunger for more. All my memories remain vivid in the deep water.
When I set foot upon a faraway stone or crawl on segmented belly through the tunnels of a strange ship, I will always love Annie Groves in all the names she took and regret the terrible deeds I have done. I will always have fought in wars and betrayed friends and burned whole cities with bombs. I will transport it all with me when I emerge. I will bring my country wherever I venture.
I will bring the message to all flesh that finds the water.
BEWARE.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the support of my wife, Michelle, and that of my entire family, who put up with me turning into a horrible shit for quite a lot of time. In addition to being a novel, Liminal States was a multimedia collaboration. Friend and longtime collaborator Josh Hass inspired and motivated me with his artwork related to this project. His perspective on the characters influenced my concept of them almost as much as my own ideas. Dan Sollis was ingenious and completely generous with his time and formidable filmmaking talents. His influence on the project manifested in every stage and facet. Robin Stoate’s music (as Conelrad) played constantly during the writing of this novel, and I hope to work with him again. As always, I must thank Rich Kyanka, who gave me my first big break as a writer and continues to support my freedom to write bizarre things for SomethingAwful.com. There is no other Web site quite like it.
And thanks to you, for reading this book all the way to my acknowledgments. Who actually even does that? It’s you, my friend. You. God bless you.
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Copyright © 2012 Zach Parsons
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Library of Congress Control Number: tk
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3551-7