Madlands

by K. W. Jeter

  By mutual unspoken agreement, we left the building and went out to the open, where we could breathe without that butcher-shop aroma cloying on our tongues.

  All that blood was making me reconsider my plans, or at least the most immediate of them. Those guys with their faces on the concrete might have already known what I’d been looking to find out, even if it’d been just little pieces of that information, that I would’ve had to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle And look what good it had done still wanted to find out what the scoop was with New Moon, but not at the risk of waking up dead.them. I

  “You taking off?”

  I was heading on a fairly straight line for where I had left the Hudson. My intentions would have been clear to anybody. And why hang around some place with this much bad news attached?

  I nodded. “I got some business to take care of.”

  Keeping pace with me, Eastern processed my face and general aura through her microscope. “Trayne, you are up to something no good.” She shook her head. “You walk like a man trying to deliver a time bomb on his lunch hour.”

  My keys rattled around the Hudson’s door handle. “I don’t have a lot of surplus time, if that’s what you mean.” I pulled the car door open and slid in behind the wheel.

  Eastern leaned on the sill when I rolled the window down. “You wouldn’t have any little, uh, secrets that you’d want to ease off your heart?”

  “It’s my burden.” I hit the ignition. “I wouldn’t want to lay it on you.”

  She stood back from the door. “Trayne—be careful. There’s a lot of ravens up there that’d just love to peck out your eyes.”

  I slipped into gear. “Thanks. I’ll look both ways when I cross the street.”

  Then I drove off.

  TWENTY

  I HAD to get cracking, if I was going to get anything done.

  As the pseudo-L.A. rolled over the horizon toward me, I tried to work out in my mind what I was going to do next. My brain refused to cooperate; suddenly, inside my head there seemed to be vast empty landscapes, as though the dry desert hills had seeped through the curved bone and established themselves in the soft tissue at the center.

  The steering wheel sweated in my hands. I still felt woozy and sick from all the blood out at New Moon’s junkyard work site. Dimly, I wondered if Harrison and the rest of the gang back at the corporate headquarters had heard yet about what had happened. Or when they did, if it would make any changes in their plans. They still had the satellite; screw those guys in the white lab coats . . .

  My thoughts, what there were of them, went along in this descending spiral until I had to pull the car over, open the door, and lean out. My gut heaved until it was empty. I wiped my mouth and spat to get rid of the sour gastric taste.

  I drove on, heading for the last apartment I’d been in. I suddenly felt the need to be inside walls that were at least marginally familiar and safe.

  Part of my feeling sick was due to not knowing just what I was going to do next. I’d been lying to Harrison when I’d told him I had my plans all figured out, that all he had to do was sit back and give me my shot. The truth was, I had had some vague notions about what would be a smart way to go about killing Identrope, doing it in such a way that I was exposed to the least risk and the most chance for living long enough myself to cash in on my slice of the New Moon pie. The trouble with vague plans is that from a distance—when they’re way off in time, out there on the horizon—they look as solid and substantial as well-thought-out ones with all the bolts and screws tightened down. It’s only when they come up close with the earth’s inevitable turning that you see all the holes and pieces stuck on with masking tape.

  I parked the Hudson down the block and walked. A night wind, hot and choking, swirled around me. Now my knees felt wobbly, the bone workings replaced with a loose pudding. I leaned against the door for support as I waggled my key in the lock.

  This was more than just getting the shakes from close-up death observation. Standing in the middle of the apartment’s front room, I looked around at the walls and windows receding from me on waves of nausea. I felt deep cellular dismay, little fires and ice cubes. I laid a hand on my forehead; a sweating fever licked my palm.

  “The flu.” I muttered the words aloud. “Goddamn it.” I had probably picked it up out in the junkyard, if not from this last visit—a little bit too fast an incubation period for that to have been the case—then from the previous time I’d gone out there. Those greasy ’yard rats were all a bunch of germbags, sniffling and sneezing on every centimeter of exposed metal. You can’t hang out there without catching something eventually.

  Lucky for me—as soon as my brain ground around to remembering it—I had the sure cure waiting for me in the bedroom. Lying in the bed there was a nice, uninfected body, the one I had been using before and then had left there when I’d shuffled back into this one. All I had to do was go in there, shuffle back into that one, and I’d be healthy again. Or as healthy as I ever got; at least in operational condition. After that, it might be a good idea to dump the empty body out on the street or something, before it shed too many viruses around my temporary living quarters—it’d be a hassle to swap again if I felt another sniffle coming on.

  I walked into the bedroom, leaving the overhead light switched off. Sometimes it took a little while for the new body’s eyes to adjust, and I hated coming to with a big glare dazzling in my face. I looked down into the blank face I had already worn before, relaxed, and did the thing . . .

  Something was wrong. I was dreaming again, and knew I was, and I didn’t remember that ever happening before when I shuffled bodies. Always before, I was in one, then I’d be in the other, with no perceived gap in time. Now I was in one of those clockless gaps without time at all. The lecturer with one of my faces was there, recycled from my old daydreaming; I was close to him, not sitting up in the banked rows of the audience, and he smiled as he tilted off gravity’s axis. He rapped the pointer on the blackboard beside the podium, only there was no tap-tap sound, just silence. And the blackboard wasn’t a blackboard, but the great dark night sky. Faint laughter sounded, like the bells of invisible churches. I floated past the lecturer—“Mr. Trayne,” he whispered, “are you leaving us so soon? We’ve barely started”—and then through the blackboard’s frame, and then I was above L.A., the real one or the pseudo—I didn’t know. I swam in slow motion, black air in my hands, muffled stars wheeling in their scattered alphabet. I turned and the heat of the sun basted my chest and thighs. But not the sun; it was Identrope’s burning dirigible, big as the sky now, let loose from any tie to the earth. It sailed piratically toward me, the stars flickering in the churning backwash behind. I spread myself wider, and the white flames boiled my palms away, leaving the machinery of bleached bone. I saw Identrope then, leaning over the bow, reaching for what was left of my hand. But already my flesh streamed away in ribbons, the fire unraveling me. My heart and lungs squeezed like party balloons through my rib cage, and danced and bobbed away, trailing red string. Identrope reached for me, but he’d be too late; I knew it as I fell, the dense bone running spineward to earth, no flesh of wind to bear it aloft . . .

  I woke up—or the dreaming stopped, at least—and things were still wrong. I was on the floor, the back of my skull throbbing with each pulse of my blood, instead of lying on the bed’s soft mattress. Wincing, I got my legs under me and stood up.

  The dregs of the night dream filled my head. Night and stars and the burning dirigible, Identrope’s reaching hand. I could have still been in the dream, except for the heaviness that hung anvil-like on my body. I dragged myself into the bathroom. My leaden hand couldn’t raise itself high enough to flick on the light switch, so I leaned on the sink in the semi-dark and fumbled on the cold water.

  The symptoms of the flu, or whatever the hell it was, clotted around this body, too. Nausea and the sweats. My slow brain tried to figure it out. I lowered my face to my cupped hands, splashing the cold water and drinking
the little bit left in the hollows of my palms.

  I looked up to the mirror. Light spilled down the hallway from the apartment’s front room. I looked and saw myself, recognition ticking like a watch squeezed inside a fist. My face . . .

  My spine kicked straight. Close to the glass, my fingers touched the cheekbone and ocular orbit that I looked out from. The skin, through the cold water dripping toward the throat, felt dense, as though woven from soft steel that couldn’t be torn.

  “Shit—” It was the same face that I’d had before. That I’d been wearing when I’d gone into the bedroom to shuffle bodies with the empty one lying there.

  I didn’t feel feverish or nauseous anymore. A quick bolt of fear burned away those sensations. I turned away from the mirror and sprinted for the bedroom, banging my shoulder against the bathroom doorway.

  My brain raced as I looked down at the body on the bed. It was the same one that had been lying there when I’d first come into the room.

  That was why I’d woken up on the floor, with my head whanging from where it had hit. The shuffle hadn’t gone through. I was still in the same body.

  Now my sweat went cold, my skin prickling chill.

  I looked up from the bed, to the window on the opposite wall. A night not even as hospitable as my dreaming lay over the city’s lights.

  Right then, I knew I was in deep, deep shit.

  TWENTY-ONE

  SOMETHING was happening to me, and I didn’t like it.

  I didn’t know what it was, either. That was the scary part. You can sleep with all sorts of boa constrictors and puff adders, as long as you know that’s what they are. It’s the not knowing that eats up your guts.

  Oddly, mine had settled down a bit. The fluish nausea and fever had been somewhat purged; I was able to work my way through most of a pack of saltines, chewing them down dry in a mouth that seemed lined with cotton. After those, I sat at the table in the apartment’s kitchen, drinking bad instant coffee, and tried to figure out what was going on.

  I hadn’t been able to make the shuffle between bodies, to exchange the one I was wearing for the nice empty one I’d left before on the bed. I tried one more time, and nothing at all happened. The complete nada. Not even the stupid dreaming this time. I stood there looking down at the empty body, feeling like a fool. I felt like somebody standing in front of a combination lock that he’s forgotten the numbers to, and he’s pawing through his wallet and all of his pockets looking for the little slip of paper he wrote them down on.

  Another couple hits of the acrid coffee didn’t seem to help much. Whatever the reason for this sudden blockage—beyond the combination lock, constipation metaphors came to mind—it would undoubtedly screw up my plans, vague or otherwise. For the time being, or maybe the rest of my life if I didn’t regain the shuffling capacity, I was stuck in this body, with whatever advantages or disadvantages that entailed.

  I was still set on course to kill Identrope. The New Moon Corporation and I had a contract, and the big paycheck was in their hands, waiting until the moment I pulled it off. That welded my immediate motivator into place.

  In terms of actual operational ability, I at least had the element of surprise on my side. Identrope had gotten the word that Trayne had been kidnaped, and so was somewhere off the scene. Identrope hadn’t had any reason to suspect me of having murderous intentions before, so now he’d be doubly unguarded against my actions. If I could get to him in his headquarters at the end of the web, I shouldn’t have any problems getting close enough for a lethal encounter. But, as Harrison had pointed out—not that I hadn’t thought of it myself, long before that—the surprise bit had its flip side. Working anonymously or under a pseudonym, I didn’t have that golden privileged access to Identrope that I’d had when I was his choreographer walking around in the open.

  This was going to take some doing. I’d have to think about it.

  There were some other things that I definitely didn’t want to think about. Even if I knew I should. Like what this sudden inability to shuffle bodies really meant.

  Maybe it meant that I’d finally hit the wall, reached the limit of my exposure time in the Madlands. All the time I had thought only other people suffered the bad effects of hanging out in this zone too long, and I had complete immunity; all that time, maybe it had just been a matter of relative scale. What they all came down with sooner, I was coming down with later. The big n.

  The memory of finding that squid puddle on the floor of the other apartment . . . the mess with Eddie the Make’s name still attached to it, like the price tag on a wax candle that had been left out in the sun, a label on that from which all form had fled. That was entirely too scary to think about.

  Maybe it wasn’t any flu I’d been feeling. The onset of symptoms, the sense of riot in the tiny cellular bastions—maybe no virus at all, not in the ordinary sense, but something even less filterable and identifiable.

  Was this what Eddie had felt coming on? The slip, the loosening of genetic bonds, the warp and woof of his humanness peeling away from the frame? His future as a jellyfish come dancing down the tracks toward him? No wonder he’d felt grim and doomed. This was the deep dark lottery ticket, the one with the big prize where it cashes you in.

  Or maybe it was just the flu, a twenty-four-hour bug that I’d already worked most of my way onto the upslope. I comforted myself with that notion and the lukewarm dregs in my cup.

  One way or another, the time factor had ratcheted on a few notches more. If I were clean, uninfected by the n-formation disease, I’d better get my ass in gear and do whatever I was going to do about Identrope. After all, I was now walking around again in the face by which quite a few people could recognize me as the supposedly kidnaped Trayne. If I were going to cash in on that element of surprise, I’d better do it before what little anonymous cover I had was blown.

  If, on the other hand, I was in the first stages of n-formation, I had really better get moving. The disease was directly related to exposure to the Madlands—that was one of the few sure things known about it. That didn’t help most people; your usual run of Madlands habitués were so addicted to the pleasurable side of the equation that they no longer gave themselves the option of leaving the zone when they felt themselves coming down with the condition. Either they let themselves go all squamous, with the endorphin centers still romping in whatever was left of their cerebroneural systems, or they checked in with Identrope at the last possible moment, and got salvation and a cessation of their symptoms by being incorporated in the web.

  Neither of those alternatives sounded that good to me. I wanted my soul and brain to stay in the same shape they already were in. That meant I had to finish up my business here in the Madlands—the business of killing Identrope—and get out before any more exposure to the zone left me scrambled as Cuisinart contents.

  How much time that left me exactly, to do my job, I didn’t know. From what I’d observed, the onset and progress of n-formation and the resulting multi-cancer varied from individual to individual. In some, it poked along for years, and all their friends got to watch and comment on their slow devolution. In others, it went on a much steeper ramp, hitting the takeoff slope of a geometrical progression almost overnight. Look at Eddie the Make: one day human, the next he looked like a rubber novelty item.

  The strict dictates of intelligence, of survival smarts, told me that I should just bag the whole notion of killing Identrope, and get the hell out of the Madlands before I went irreversibly down n-formation’s cellular anarchy route.

  What good was collecting a slice of the New Moon Corporation’s gross revenues if I didn’t have a spine or hands to do fun things with the money? I’d have to hire a couple of guys to carry me around in a plastic bucket. They could take me to the movies and drop popcorn into whatever I’d be using for a mouth. That sounded keen.

  No, something beyond mere greed was keeping me from just piling a suitcase of my underwear and socks into the Hudson, and lighting out for the re
al world with my skin and other organs intact. Something nearly as powerful, maybe more so.

  Call it nostalgia. Of the preemptive sort. The homesickness that hits you before you leave.

  This was my home. Turf, territory, stomping grounds. Thin as cardboard, water-soluble, not even real in the first place, and nobody pretended it was. An imitation of an imitation. A photograph of a mirage. The real, long-ago L.A. had been a place whose every street name had been written in the water, and the water itself had to be pumped in from someplace else, someplace real even in its dehydrated death. When the water stopped and the wars started, and after that the sand blew over the asphalt and concrete . . . then the only thing left had been the images, locked down tight in the archives. And in people’s heads, those dreams that came spiraling up from wordless memory.

  It just showed that dreams and images were realer than anything else.

  So that when reality got loose, and the Madlands’ crazy field needed something to pattern itself on . . . then all those false-front buildings and ready-made lives popped right back up, as though they had been mounted on springs buried in the sand. And this silly-ass pseudo-L.A. could roll right into production again, as real as the real thing had ever gotten.

  I’d been making my way through this irreal urban landscape for years now. I’d hate to leave it.

  If nothing else, it seemed shabby to pack up and depart without finally hitting the big number on the board. I owed the place that much, to go off a winner.

  Plus, I wanted the money. The real world outside wasn’t known for its sympathy toward busted types.

  That pretty much settled it. Whatever amount of time the n-formation gave me—if that’s what it was; I wasn’t even sure on that point—I’d use it on nailing Identrope. If I became a rubber squid in the process, those were the breaks.

  I pulled on my jacket and headed out the front door. Night outside, and that suited me fine.