The New Weird

by Ann VanderMeer; Jeff VanderMeer

  "Into the living room," Jones snarled, flicking the gun. Mayda glanced behind him, slid his shoulders along the wall and backed through a threshold into an expanse of plush parlor with a window overlooking the snowy courtyard of Hanging Gardens. Parr went to tint the window full black.

  "I'll give you money, listen." Mayda began.

  "You do remember me, don't you?" Jones hissed, leveling the gun at the paunchy birther's groin. "You emasculated me, remember that?"

  "I didn't! That was those crazy strikers that got in the Plant that time.that was out of my hands!"

  "So how do you know about it? They told you. It was a big joke, wasn't it?"

  "What do you want? You can have anything!" The union captain's eyes fearfully latched onto Parr as he slipped something odd from his jacket. What looked like three gun barrels were unfolded and spread into a tripod. Atop it, Parr screwed a tiny vidcam. A green light came on, indicating that it had begun filming. Parr remained behind the camera, and Mayda flashed his eyes back to Jones to see what he had to say.

  Jones hesitated. What he had to say was rehearsed, but the lines were a jumble in his head, words exploded to fragments by the silent shot that had killed the blond. He had killed a man.. .for the third time. It came naturally to him, like a brain-dripped skill; it was a primal animal instinct, survival. So why, in its aftermath, should he feel this...disconcertion?

  His eyes darted about the room. He had never been in such a place. Tables fashioned from some green glassy stone. Sofas and chairs of white with a silvery lace of embroidery. A bar, a holotank. On the walls, a modest art collection. Atop several tables, shelves and pedestals, various small Ramon sculptures, all carved from an iridescent white crystal. Animals, and a Ramon warrior rendered in amazing detail considering the medium, from his lionlike head to the lance or halberd he brought to bear in anticipation of attack. Each piece must be worth a fortune. And yet there were men and women camped outside the Plant who were on a hunger strike, emaciated. And those who were emaciated but not by choice. And Jones recalled that woman sitting in her shroud of flame.

  His disconcertion cleared. Jones returned a molten gaze to the terrified birther. The anger in his voice was not some actor's fakery, even if the words were not his own.

  "I'm here to make a record, Mr. Mayda.of the beginning of a rebellion, and the first blow in a war that won't stop until we clones are given the same rights as you natural born."

  It was clever, he had mused earlier; the Plant would be rid of the thorn in their lion's paw, and yet the law and the syndy would not hold the Plant responsible. No, it would be a dangerous escaped culture who killed Ephraim Mayda; a fanatic with grand delusions. Still, Jones had considered, wouldn't this make birther workers at the Plant, unemployed workers outside and a vast majority of the public in general all the more distrusting of cultures, opposed to their widespread use? Wouldn't this hurt the Plant's very existence? And yet, they surely knew what they were doing better than he. After all, he was just a culture...educated by brain drip, by listening to human workers talk and to the radio programs the human workers listened to. Educated on the street since that time. But these men sat at vast glossy tables, making vast decisions. It was beyond his scope. The most he could wrap his thoughts around was payment of five thousand munits.and Parr had given him half of that when he climbed into his hovercar tonight.

  "Hey," Mayda blubbered, "what are you saying...look...please! Listen."

  "We want to live as you do," Jones went on, improvising now as the rest of the words slipped through the fingers of his mind. He thought of his own hellish nest, and of Edgar's tiny black shed of a home. "We want."

  "Hey! Freeze!" he heard Parr yell.

  Jones snapped his head around. What was happening? Had another bodyguard emerged from one of the other rooms? They should have checked all of the rooms first, they should have.

  Parr was pointing the police issue pistol at him, not at some new player, and before Jones could bring his own gun around Parr snapped off five shots in rapid succession. Gas clouds flashed from the muzzle, heat lightning with no thunder, but the lightning struck Jones down. He felt a fireball streak across the side of his throat, deadened somewhat by the scarf wound there. He was kicked by a horse in the collarbone, and three projectiles in a cluster entered the upper left side of his chest. He spun down onto his belly on the white carpet, and saw his blood flecked there like beads of dew, in striking close-up. Beautiful red beads like tiny rubies clinging to the white fibers of the carpet. Even violence was glamorous in this place.

  Mayda scampered closer, kicked his small silvery gun out of his hand. Jones's guts spasmed, but his outer body didn't so much as flinch. He cracked his lids a fraction, through crossed lashes saw Parr moving closer as well. For a moment, he had thought it was another man. Since firing the shots from behind the camera, out of its view, Parr had shed the bogus forcer uniform and changed into street clothes.

  "I thought I heard a strange voice in here, Mr. Mayda!" Parr gushed, out of breath. "I dozed off in the other room.I'm so sorry! Are you all right?"

  "Yes, thank God. He killed Brett!"

  "How'd he get in here?"

  "I don't know.Brett went to answer the door, and the next thing I knew."

  Parr didn't work for the Plant, Jones realized now, poor dumb culture that he was. He cursed himself. He wasn't street smart. He was a child. He was five years old.

  Parr worked for Ephraim Mayda, captain of a union, friend of the syndicate. Mayda, whose trusting followers killed others and themselves to fight for a job, to fight for their bread and shelter, while his job was to exploit their hunger, their anger and fear.

  And the vid. The vid of a murderous clone attacking a hero of the people, stopped just in time by a loyal bodyguard (while another loyal bodyguard, poor Brett, had been sacrificed). One murderous forerunner of a much larger threat, as he had proclaimed. The vid that would unite the public against the cultures, lead to an outcry for the abolition of cloned workers...to their mass incineration.

  He had almost seen this before. He'd let the money dazzle him. The bullets had slapped him fully awake.

  "Call the forcers!" Mayda said for the benefit of the camera, sounding shaken, though he had known all along he was safe.

  Through his lashes, Jones saw Parr stoop to retrieve his silvery handgun.

  Jones's left arm was folded under him. He reached into his coat, and rolling onto his side, tore free a second gun, this one glossy black, a gun Parr hadn't known about, and as Parr lifted his startled head, Jones let loose a volley of shots as fast as he could depress the trigger. Parr sat down hard on his rump comically, and as each shot struck him he bounced like a child on his father's knee. When at last Jones stopped shooting him, his face almost black with blood and holes, Parr slumped forward into his own lap.

  Jones sat up with a nova of agony in his chest, and a nova of hot gas exploded before his eyes as he saw Mayda bolting for the door. The shot hit the birther in the right buttock, and he sprawled onto his face shrieking like a hysterical child frightened by a nightmare.

  As Jones struggled to his feet, staggered and regained his footing,

  Mayda pulled himself toward the door on his belly. Almost casually, Jones walked to him, stood over him, and pointed the small black gun. Mayda rolled over to scream up at him and bullets drove the scream back into his throat. Jones shot out both eyes, and bullets punched in his nose and smashed his teeth, so that the face remaining looked to Jones like Edgar's with its simple black holes for features.

  The gun had clicked empty. He let it drop, stepped over Mayda's body, over Brett's body further on, and then stopped before the door, snuffing his ski hat over the flames of his skull. But before he opened the door, he changed his mind and returned to the plush, vast parlor just for a moment.

  It was an hour to dawn when Magnesium Jones reached the house of Edgar Allan Jones on the Obsidian Street Overpass.

  Edgar croaked in delight to see him, until th
e withered being saw the look on the taller culture's face. It took Jones's arm, and helped him as he stooped to enter the tiny black-painted shack.

  "You're hurt!" Edgar cried, supporting Jones as he lowered himself into a small rickety chair at a table in the center of the room. Aside from shelves, there was little else. No bed. A radio played music like the cries of whales in reverse, and a kettle was steaming on a battery-pack hot plate.

  "I have something for you," Jones said, his voice a wheeze, one of his lungs deflated in the cradle of his ribs. "A Christmas present."

  "I have to get help. I'll go out...stop a car in the street," Edgar went on.

  Jones caught its arm before Edgar could reach the door. He smiled at the creature. "I'd like a cup of tea," he said.

  For several moments Edgar stared at the man, gouged features unreadable. Then, in slow motion, head blurring, it turned and went to the hot plate and steaming kettle.

  While Edgar's back was turned, Jones reached into his long black coat, now soaked heavy with his blood, and from a pouch in its lining withdrew a sculpture carved from opalescent crystal. It was a fierce Ramon warrior, bringing his lance to bear. He placed it on the table quietly, so that the stunted clone would be surprised when it turned back around.

  And while he waited for Edgar to turn around with his tea, Jones stripped off his ski hat and lowered his fiery brow onto one arm on the table. Closed his eyes to rest.

  Yes, he would just rest a little while...until his friend finally turned around.

  The Lizard of Ooze

  JAY LAKE

  IT’S A CITY IN A GREAT, DEEP HOLE, Ooze is, a pit black as any mine. Roads, buildings and towers cling to the walls like children trapped at the bottom of a well. Sunlight leaks in at the top, a little, a few hours a day, and darkness fills the rest, down to the monster-haunted depths.

  I live between the light and darkness. I hunt what doesn't belong on our laddered stairs and narrow, pit-girdling streets. I am a Shadow of the Shadow stirps, a quiet brotherhood no better defined than smoke, no easier caught than steam.

  Ooze is among the darkest of the Dark Towns, those cities hidden within the blank spaces of the map. For all that good Kentucky blue-grass grows far above our heads we may as well be worms in a cave.

  Which suits me fine, pale as I am.

  I was sidling along one of the streets of the Mycotic Level one night, leaning past the outflung beams of the growing trays, when I heard shouting from somewhere above me, perhaps the fifth or sixth lad-derway descending from the Seats of Ease, which are the next higher level.

  Quickly I scuttled up a side-ladder. Shouting is not common in Ooze ― echoes have a way of reaching far into the inky depths and returning in the mouths of strange creatures that then must be Shadow-hunted. Lives can be lost, and the bounties due to my stirps are never cheap.

  The Seats of Ease are great banks of limestone panels set in ells, a high back and a narrower bench, with polished oval voids carved out of them, where the folk of Ooze meet to relieve their bowels and discuss politics, sex, and dancing. There are usually chattering groups there, or young folk with their robes hitched around their waists holding hands and kissing.

  Tonight there was a mob, a group of Fine-Icers and some several folk from smaller stirpes, and even a few limerocks, those sad neutrals who hold no real place in the pageant of our city's life. They were crowded around the base of the fifth ladderway, shouting and shoving. They were mobbing someone to death.

  And to sunlight with that, I thought. If anyone's to be killed here, it's me going to do the killing. I stroked my shadow suit into noctilucence and drew the Blades Sinister and Truth. Roaring with the voice ofwinds all Shadows know, I stormed the crowd from behind. "Stand free, there, or I'll cut you open and charge by the slice!"

  The crowd parted as crowds will at such sound and fury, though I was smaller than almost all of them. I let the Blades dance, my hands spinning, so that the bright blur of my shadow suit would catch their eyes ― and turn their knives ― while the Blades held their fear.

  Their parting pushed back further, making a kind of lane through to a little man, even smaller than I, crouched on the splintered decking of the ladderway's landing. His hands were folded over his head in anticipation of the kicking he had been about to receive and spilled around him was ―

  "Ah," I said.

  No wonder they were ready to kill. This was one of the perverted folk from above, twisted by their sneering little civilization and regimented, line-scarred maps, and he'd brought his food with him.

  Eating in public was a capital offence here in Ooze. The mob was certainly within the bounds of propriety. Our visitor was already dead, though his sentence had not yet been carried out.

  "It's my business now," I announced to the crowd, Blades still dancing. "Get on."

  "I'm fetching the Reliables," someone shouted, safely hidden behind several departing Fine-Icers.

  "Fetch away, friend," I said with a smile in my voice. The Reliables were our police stirps, never interested in extra trouble. "They'll certainly stand aside for a Shadow in this matter."

  Then I crouched beside the dead man, whose cowering head was pointed away from me, and sheathed the Blade Truth. The truth was already known. I steeled my resolve, then sniffed deeply, scenting for his sin.

  Something light and earthy...corn meal, perhaps, baked in a cake. A pungent scent, with undertones of sugars and something sharp...beans, in a rich sauce. And finally the rich smell of protein with salty, sweaty overtones. Fish.

  I poked the dead man with the Blade Sinister, its tip sliding perhaps a quarter inch into his buttock.

  "Hey!" he screeched, jerking his head up from his crouch.

  "Hello, dead man," I said. "What brings you here in your perversions?"

  "I...I...fish. I am a fisheater. You cannot touch me." He looked wildly around, lank, pale hair slapping against his shoulders. Even past the food, I could smell the sour reek of his sweat and the musk of his fear.

  "We have no fisheaters here. You mistake us for the drug-crazed visionaries of Cui-ui." Cui-ui was a Dark Town in distant Nevada whose neutrals assiduously consumed fish, careful to keep the watery reek on their breath at all times for a casual inspection too disgusting to contemplate.

  "Cui-ui," he whispered. "I am of Cui-ui. What is this place?"

  I studied him carefully. Narrow face, dark protuberant eyes glinting in my city's dim shadows. No body hair at all, skin slick as skimmed fat. And he was dressed in lumpy gray robes no more attractive than his person. His breath certainly stank of fish.

  "Perhaps you are of Cui-ui," I said, "but that buys you no right of passage in Ooze. If your story is worthy, I might listen to it, but first you must rid yourself of perversion."

  At Sinister's point, I forced him to clean up the disgusting but strangely alluring food ― the smells tempted me toward his sweet filth ― dumping it back into a little box that had broken open in a tumble he seemed to have taken down the fifth ladderway. When he was done I dimmed my shadow suit's noctilucence, sheathed the Blade Sinister, and nudged my little Cui-ui dead man into motion. We would go talk awhile, in a place where my eventual slitting of his throat would be less work for me or the Blade Sinister.

  He was a pervert ― I would take him to a comestitorium.

  "We were sent to Paducah," said the little dead man huddled on the bench. "Something there was wanted by Silver-scales stirps back in Cui-ui. They chose fisheaters for the journey."

  He shivered, hunched even smaller in the tight, curtained confines of the comestitorium stall. We shared the space, he and I, a tiny hard bench with a little hinged shelf, hung with heavy curtains designed to block both smell and sound.

  Some acts, like eating and murder, are best committed alone.

  "I have been Above," I said, surprising myself with a twinge of sympathy. "The world of the map is.challenging."

  "Inside a little truck alone among ourselves it was not so bad," he admitted, looking
up at me. "Until we stopped to ea ― " He caught his words.

  "You learn fast." An easy lie. He was a fool.

  "Ooze is not unknown in Cui-ui."

  "The rest of the world takes a different view than we do here of certain bodily functions," I said, "but I am of a progressive bent, and traveled besides. You have nothing more to fear for your words."

  "Just my life," the fisheater said, hunching tighter. "A clown attacked us in the parking lot of Denny's, killed two of my fellows, then dropped me down here. As I fell I thought I would die, wondered why I already hadn't. Then I bounced through nets and webbing, which finally stopped my fall. It took a while, but I struggled through that tangled mess to the streets. You know the rest." He paused, then shivered. "I just want to go home."

  No wonder those Fine-Icers wanted to kill him at the Seats of Ease, I thought. His story reeks of their negligence. No one should have escaped the capture nets unobserved. "Tell me more about this clown."

  "He was terrible, pale and fat, and he moved like an eel. Teeth like one, too."

  "Did he say anything?"

  The little dead man actually smiled there, his teeth gleaming slightly in the dark of the booth. "'Aaaarrgh,' mostly. But he said it a lot. Until he threw me down this hole. As he did it, he yelled, 'Tell the Lizard I'm coming.'"

  "Hmm." My left hand drifted to the hilt of the Blade Sinister. This would be the time to kill my visitor, and sluice the resultant mess through the cloaca in the floor of our comestitorial stall.

  But why would a clown threaten our Lizard? The greatest monster of our Stygian depths, within whose jaws we all dwell, the Lizard of Ooze is older than the rocks around it and more terrible than the fires of the sun.

  His story bore further investigation. As a result, it bought him some more life. "We must go to the Gillikins," I announced.

  "Does this mean I live?" Hope crept into the little dead man's voice.

  "Doubtful," I said. "The Gillikins are the stirps charged with propitiating the depths." The same depths in which we Shadows hunted monsters. We of Ooze are ever practical, ready to rely on one solution when another fails.