Pollen

by Jeff Noon

  The ride to Alexandra was a ride through a spring garden; tiny shoots were breaking through the tarmac of the roads, and the passing shops and houses were soft-edged with greenery. News was coming from the experts that we were heading for the worst hayfever of all time, even worse than during Fecundity 10. In the park, we found a bulbous sculpture of soil, twisted flowers rising from the earth, a fetid stench. Zombie found and accounted for. That creature had hiked his last car home; a final drop-off in unsanctified ground. A resting place in the petals. His body formed out of dirt, totally transformed.

  Zero was waiting for me there. ‘Know what, Smokey? It saddens me to find the perp like this. Because I had one great urge to put this Zombie down. That would really make Kracker smile. And when the master smiles, I smile. But now the bastard Zombie has gotten himself killed, and I’m left with nothing.’

  ‘You want to put Zombies down? We used to do that to dogs.’

  ‘Save the weeping, Smokey. Zombies aren’t human.’

  ‘They’re partly human.’ I knelt down beside the body.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘My job.’

  ‘We don’t need a fucking Shadow-search, Jones.’

  ‘I’ll decide that.’

  ‘Christ, if you stepped on a cockroach, you’d Shadow-search that, wouldn’t you? The case is closed. Get out of there.’

  ‘Too late, dogcop.’

  I was already dropping down into dead thoughts, with fingers of smoke drifting through to the mind of a Zombie corpse…

  Blackness…no flickerings…no signs of life…half-life…any kind of last life…fruitless…my shadows drifting through the layers of darkness…deeper yet…the darkness growing…so cold…layers of death unfolding…and then enfolding me…the need to pull free…back to life…and then…a sparkle of light in the hidden depths…bursting…the world…bursting the world with greenness…too much colour to be taking…large sucking flowers at my shadow throat…fronds of love…flowers on fire…dancing…dancing…

  Pull out…

  I was fighting back to the everyday life, the living life, needing it so much.

  I expected Zero to at least show some interest, but when I came back to earth, his eyes were full of disgust at my shadowy processes. With total disregard, he twisted the cop feather into his mouth, calling off the Zombie alert. ‘Master Kracker, we found that monster. No more worries.’ Something like that, I guess. He pulled out the feather and then shifted his wet eyes over towards me. ‘One less worry, Smokey,’ he said. ‘Dog-killer down and nullified. Shit! A​a​a​a​a​c​h​h​h​o​o​o​s​s​s​s​h​h​h​h​h!’ He couldn’t stop sneezing. ‘These flowers are getting to me.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘who killed the Zombie?’

  ‘Like who the fuck cares? Jesus-Dog! Zombies don’t count.’

  ‘He was killed by the flowers, Zero. Just like Coyote. I found the same presence in both of their minds. The explosion. It’s some kind of garden.’

  ‘Kracker says that we bury the taxi-dog tomorrow. Kracker wants to announce to the press that the Zombie killed Coyote, and that we took the Zombie out with cop-fire. What do you reckon, Smokey? Is that a good business plan? Would that stop a riot?’

  ‘And Gumbo YaYa will go along with this lie?’

  ‘Gumbo’s not running the force, Smokey.’

  ‘Isn’t he? You been listening to him, lately?’ Zero nodded. ‘You’ll know then that he’s put out an all-points bulletin on some Xcabber called Boadicea. She broke free of the ranks yesterday, some hours after the murder. She was also known as Boda. Ring any doggy-bells, Zero?’

  ‘Canine-Jesus!’ Clegg snarled. ‘What is it with you and this Boda? You got the hots for her?’

  ‘Did you lie to me, Clegg?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Gumbo’s claiming that Boda was caught in the cab-records. She was at Alexandra Park at 6.19 a.m., yesterday morning. The time of Coyote’s murder. Did you know about this before the broadcast?’

  ‘She was his girlfriend, Smokey, that’s all.’

  ‘Did you know?’

  ‘His girlfriend! Jesus-Dog! Maybe they were fucking in the grass. Who knows? So they’re doing the old dance down there in the park, the Zombie climbs out the back of the cab. They think they’ve killed him, right? But you know how hard it can be to kill those half-alivers. They love death, don’t they? It’s a mother to them.’

  ‘Somebody killed the Zombie.’

  ‘Maybe this Boda killed him. Good. One less Zombie. Okay, so the Zombie takes Coyote out. And what else are you going to think about in your last moments, Smokey, the state of the economy? I think not, I reckon the loverboy’s name just might be on your final list. Or maybe you don’t know that much about love?’

  ‘Something’s going on here, Zero.’

  ‘This wouldn’t be one of your Shadow-feelings, Sibyl?’

  ‘I tried to access the Xcab records last night. I wanted to know who was delivering to the Alex Park area Monday morning. I got back Access Denied. I thought the cabs and the cops were working together. Something’s going wrong, Zero, and I’m going to keep on looking, with or without you. Gumbo’s claiming that Boda is somewhere down in Frontier Town South.’

  ‘Well good luck, Smokey. Girl could be down fucking London by now. It’s out of our jurisdiction.’

  ‘Take a look with me, Zero. Limbo South.’

  ‘What you on, Jones? You’re taking the Gumbo too much. You think that pirate knows the truth? You’re not losing your street-smarts, are you? A​a​a​c​c​c​h​h​h​o​o​o​o​s​s​s​h​h​h​h!!!! Shit! Pardon me. Let’s get out of this weed-dump.’

  ‘Help me, Clegg. Kracker needn’t know.’

  ‘Kracker needn’t know?!’

  ‘I’m asking for your help.’

  ‘You’re asking me to go against the boss?’

  ‘One of these days, Zero, you’re going to have to break away.’

  Zero’s eye went dog-bright. ‘You know what, Jones?’ he growled. ‘Sometimes you humans really piss me off.’ Never before had I heard Zero putting humans down. He understood immediately what he had said, and the dog-light clicked off in his eyes.

  Fleshcops were digging at the earth, uncovering the Zombie from his burial mound of flowers. Zero shouted some instructions at them, just to take the heat off himself. The cops were sneezing like maniacs, but I was super-clean, unsuffering. Zero’s big snout was dribbling with snot, as he turned back to me. ‘What’s wrong with you, Jones?’ he said. ‘Don’t you like sneezing? You some kind of mutant these days?’ And then his eyes filled with tears, maybe the tears of pollen, maybe not. ‘I’d like to help you, Jones. I really would…’

  ‘You’d like to?’

  The big dogcop turned away again, striding off through the grass to plague the fleshcops. It was then that I realised that something bad was really happening, something bad with the cops. And Zero was a part of it.

  That canine couldn’t bear to look at me.

  Wednesday

  3 May

  His name is Dove. Thomas Dove. He rides the heads of strangers like a feather. This is what he is: bladed skater’s body, orange hair cut in a wedge, a pair of cop-wings and a bloodstream full of Vurt. The dream-stream. Tom Dove is the Manchester Cops’ best ever Vurt angel, and he’s flying down to Rio de Bobdeniro, with a parcel of tests for the phantasms there. His cop-job is to seek out and destroy illegal dreams; to find the bootleg Vurts. Listen to his prismatic wings flapping, making colours in the smoke of the mind. Boldness. Tom Dove: a clean, human road to fantasy, so good he doesn’t need to take feathers. He is mostly human, of course, except for the thick traces of the Vurt living inside his flesh.

  Rio de Bobdeniro. A rich slice of the mind. A favourite feather of the sad and lonely. It allowed the Vurt traveller to enjoy the collected dreams of Mr Bobdeniro. God knows who he was; some say a psyched-up true-life villain who killed over fifteen people. Others say he wa
s a star of cinema. (Cinema is what people did before Vurt was discovered.) Still others reckon he was a real mother’s boy who couldn’t even leave the family home unless it was through the door of dreams. Whatever, Bobdeniro’s dreams were violent and cathartic. People loved to hook up to his vision, living inside his mind for a spell. Hatred was satisfied. Love was denied. Tom Dove the Vurtcop was flying into the sub-feather called The Deer Hunter, following up on a lead. There were bootleg Bobdeniros on the street, selling at a cut-rate price, spiced up with extra violence, and the estate was getting tearful at the loss of profit. Dove’s other cop-job was to search out and retrieve swapped innocents. Whenever a Vurt creature made an illegal entrance into reality, something else, something random and therefore innocent, had to take its place in the dream. This was known as Hobart’s Law of Exchange, because the two people or objects involved in the swap had to be of the same worth. A little give and take was allowed as long as it stayed within Hobart’s Constant. Hobart was the discoverer of Vurt, and she had added this rule to the mechanism in order to maintain a balance between the dream and the real. Tom was currently searching for five different innocents who had ‘vanished,’ but the most intriguing was nine-year-old Brian Swallow. This was because Swallow had the most Hobartian ‘worth.’ Tom had sensed a heavy Vurt presence in the boy’s deserted bedroom, a reading of 9.98 on Hobart’s Scale. Tom himself came in at 9.99, so obviously something powerful had come through in exchange. These days the doors between the two worlds were slippery, as though the walls were going fluid. It used to be, in the old days, you got one bad exchange every five years or so. These days, it was more like one a month. It seemed that Manchester was a particularly thin membrane between the Vurt and the Real. Maybe this was because Miss Hobart had invented the Vurt feathers here. Whatever, Tom Dove had the nasty feeling that if the Manchester wall should dissolve then the whole country would follow. Dove had his work cut out searching for missing persons, but this Swallow boy was the worst yet. So far, no good clues, just a few feathery hints here and there. So this was another reason why he was seeking out Rio de Bobdeniro; sights of disturbance in the Vurt usually heralded some weak doorway.

  The Deer Hunter Bobdeniro variant was set in the Vietnamese War and Tom has landed in the mind of a Viet Cong officer, urging Bobdeniro and his co-star into a no-win game of Russian Roulette. Bobdeniro has persuaded the Gooks to put three bullets in the gun. Two empty chambers have already clicked; now is the time to strike, to laugh and to grimace, and then to pull the gun away from his own head, on to the brow of the officer, which is Tom Dove, just visiting. Tom was expecting to get blasted apart any second now; the gun was moving, speed of light, according to the script, straight for his brain. But then a fluttering to his left, a green fluttering, a yellow sparkling…

  A​a​a​a​c​h​h​h​o​o​o​o​o​o​o​s​s​s​s​h​h​h​h​h​h​h!

  Bobdeniro sneezes. The shot goes wide. Tom Dove, fuelled by the game, reaches for his own pistol, shoots. Bobdeniro’s head explodes. The other Gooks take out the co-star. The scene is a slow-motion drift of powder and blood. The two bodies of the famous Vurt-players lying in splatters. The Gooks don’t know what to do; this outcome has never taken place before, usually they are dead by now. They feel like vapours, no life to their meanings. Tom Dove, inside the head of the chief Gook, can’t believe what he’s just done; he’s killed Bobdeniro in the world-famous Russian Roulette scene! Vurtual sacrilege. A blow to the system. Tom’s wings feel heavy.

  The Gooks turn their guns on each other, in a mass feeling of redundancy. The purpose has gone from their lives, which was to die by the hand of the stars. Now all they can do is kill each other, trying to make the proper result, sneezing even whilst they fire.

  Tom Dove feels a comrade’s bullet entering his heart, but by now he is already pulling out, making a grab for real life. Safety. Where the rules work. His wings are heavy, heavy, so very heavy; it takes all of his Vurt-knowledge to even get off the ground, out of the closing mind of the Gook. The bullet is killing him. One last push, now…

  Break through. Back down into the Manchester cop station, pulling the Rio de Bobdeniro Vurt from his mind, breathing badly, wheezing, tears in his eyes, back to the flesh.

  Tom feels that the rules have been broken somehow, but not by bootlegs. This was more dangerous. He knows that the sneeze was a viral intruder, something not included in the original game program. And it had come from that green and yellow fluttering he had noticed in the Vurt walls of the game. There was a seepage point there, and Tom would have to investigate that hole. Cops all around him, real-life fleshcops now, they’re sneezing as well, just like in the game. Flowers are growing through tiny cracks in the station’s walls. The cops are spraying the flowers with germs. Tom Dove knows all about the hayfever; about how the experts were predicting a vintage year. He knows that all the traffic cops have been complaining about the flowers breaking through the roads of the city, about all the jams caused by this.

  Dear God, they have hayfever in the Vurt world now. The virus is nesting in there. What hope is left to us?

  And then Tom Dove sneezes again, a real-life sneeze.

  A​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​c​h​h​h​h​h​o​o​o​o​o​s​h​h​h​h​h​h​h!!!

  He must go back into the Rio. He has to find that opening.

  The howling of dogs in a hundred-part harmony. A sneezing, barking orison for a good guy, a canine/human mix. A pack of dogs standing on their hind legs, in rigid lines of tenderness all around the Southern Cemetery. Statues of stone dogs were standing here and there amongst the more usual tombstones.

  The funeral of Coyote. A good day for it. The tombs were sun-bright, wrapped by vines sporting the most wondrous flowers. The pack of mourners was gathered from all over the city’s map, because that outlaw taxi-dog was famous on the streets, dog-level and cab-level.

  We were two days into the Flowers of Evil case. Two bodies on the files; one a half-dog and the other a Zombie. The big cops had effectively shut down the case. But I was Sibyl Jones, the Shadowcop; I could not stop from searching. On top of that, a crazy spiralling pollen count, over 500 grains per cubic metre at the morning’s reckoning. The whole city was sneezing and the papers were demanding a cure.

  Gumbo YaYa was calling the people to arms, against the flowers and the cops. He had turned his secret station into a cop-baiting murder hunt, making a mockery of Kracker’s cheap ruse of the cops killing the Zombie. That pirate had more access than I did, and that maddened me. Despite all this, the case had faded. Kracker had asked Zero to report for a new mission. I had requested a photo of Boda to be downloaded from Columbus; this was met only with refusal. But this Flowers case was plaguing my Shadow. I was getting repeated glimpses of the green explosion gathered from Coyote’s and the Zombie’s minds. And the flowers that were growing over the city? Surely it must tie up? But how? And the Boda clue that the cops kept denying. Boda’s name trapped in the mind of a dying taxi-dog, killed by flowers. Flowers, flowers, flowers. My Shadow was blooming with them. Was something going wrong with the flowers? What did that mean? How can flowers go wrong? I was working alone now, a surprising ally of the Gumbo’s: when the cops are asleep, the people must police themselves. I was here at Coyote’s funeral unofficially.

  And I was scared. Scared of all those ugly runtboys and bitchgirls. Hundreds of them wailing with dignified loss at the young blackcabber’s parting. My Shadow was glowing with the fear, wisps of smoke combing my skin, the dogs were sniffing at the cop-smells and the Shadow-smells with angry snouts. Every combination was there. Not many pure dog or pure human, but hundreds of crazy messed-up mutants in-between. Evil-looking creatures for the most part; bits of dog sprouting from human forms, scraps of humanity glimpsed in a furry face. Even now, from one hundred and sixteen years of distance, I can still feel traces of my distaste, my utter fear of dogs. Especially so many of them. Zero I had grown immune to, but I was suffocating on fur that
funeral day, and my Shadows were sweating panic. I was scared and wishing Z. Clegg was by my side, but that dogcop had told me that the funeral was a dead clue, told me the repeated mantra: case closed.

  Sure, the case was closed, but I had the vague idea in my Shadow that Boda just might turn up at the victim’s funeral. I had given up on the idea of trawling Limbo—Zero had been right on that one—but if this Boda really loved the dogboy, maybe she would turn up at the final send-off. It was by now street-knowledge that Boda’s head was adorned with a map of Manchester Central. Gumbo’s five golden feathers were still up for grabs, and there would be plenty of hunters. I was one of them. Problems: if Boda did come back for the funeral she would have to be in disguise, and possibly driving another vehicle. Or maybe she was dead already, a victim of hungry life out there in Limbo. Five Xcabs were parked at the cemetery gates, so they were working on the theory of her still being around.

  The hot sun burned into my Shadow. The flowers in the graveyard were ripe and overloaded. It seemed like far too much, and way too soon; too early in the year for such abundance. Big fat blooms hung from vines that twisted tight around the stone memorials. I was sick from the perfume, drinking in the smell, lost in it. Tombstones shimmered in the heat waves. The nearest one to me read, Brian Albion…beloved son…not dead…only changing. The word beloved was partly obscured by sticky, fly-mapped dogshit. All around me crossbreeds were sneezing out gobs of snot from their snouts, the sunshining day rained on by dog-mucus. My best black uniform ruined by it.

  Now the undertakers were pushing their way through the dog-crowd, carrying Coyote’s coffin. It was strewn with orchids, and the bearers could not stop from sneezing. To give them credit, that coffin never wavered. Dogs parted like Moses was their trainer; no more barking or howling, just a collective panting from their throats. I saw the train that followed Coyote’s coffin. A young woman and a puppygirl, both of them dressed in mourning.