He drove. Two boys danced out of his path. They wore slippers without socks, extra-baggy drab-colored trousers, dark ill-fitting sweaters with white shirt tails bulging or hanging out from underneath, expensive colorful silk scarves, their short hair fashionably tousled, one boy with a spidery purple “birthmark” covering one cheek. Actually a tattoo or stencil–wine birthmarks were in. Blasting college worms. One in the rear-view monitor made a gesture but Kid left him alive, kept on driving. So many handsome, happy boys, so many lovely, glowing girls. His hatred made him nauseous. He checked out at the security gate.
The hatred rode with him. Hateful memories drove through his head. He saw Noelle, the photo in her hand. He’d left the room; she’d innocently found it in his top desk drawer where he kept other groups of photos he had shown her. He heard her cry out in horror. Rushed in. Saw her. Realized, as her horrified eyes lifted to his…to his face.
The photo was a school portrait of him, age twelve when toys meant more than girls, crew cut, his plaid shirt buttoned neatly to the top button. He was smiling shyly, the smile, even bashfully restrained, cutting back almost to his ears. Noelle had probably never been shocked before by the face of a Choom.
The music chip was inserted, advanced to a particular song. This was from Del Kahn’s last recording, Heroes. The song was titled Rust. The only accompaniment was pre-colonial traditional Choom instruments, and at various points in the background a muted Choom chorus chanted hauntingly in the now little-used native language. The listener found the lyrics, which described a true incident and actual individual, stirring.
“Smooth bore musket
Forged before his birth
A proud family symbol
Before the guns of Earth
The barrel itself four feet long
Longer than the growing boy
Who stared at the black-wood carven stock
And went, inspired, to play with the gun toy
Carved by his father from the black-wood
Until the day his father summoned the boy Fen
And put the musket in his hands
To bind them both as men
The Earthlings came, a tide of machines
Small-mouthed smilers selling magazines
The pale soft village folk gave in to their perfumed bribes
But the Earthers were met with musket balls
When they came to push out the desert tribes
Mooa-ki Fen led his people high
In the jagged rocks to resist or die
For six months they eluded the colonist soldiers
Until finally the siege
At their castle of boulders
Fen resisted capture
Climbed ever higher
Til perched within sight of his clan and his foe
Drank death from the barrel of his father’s musket
As hands reached out to catch him
Pulled the trigger with his toe
The sandy rocks turned sunset red
It dried to a bitter crust
Reverent clan folk scooped the sand into cups
Like hourglasses filled with rust
The Earth tribes moved in
As victors must
Fen was there buried
His pride turned to dust
The captain of the Earth soldiers
Awarded himself the long impressive gun
It went on the wall of his beach house
Not to a Choom chieftain’s son
It had existed before Fen
It outlasted his corroded dust
But taken from the desert air
The gun began to rust.”
At the first few notes of the next song, about a woman who was shot and wounded by a security guard while releasing the dogs and primates from a laboratory at night, Fen shut the chip off. He’d listened once to the entire chip but it was pretty boring. He’d heard the song Rust on the radio and bought the chip for that alone, though on the strength of that one inspiring song Fen thought Del Kahn was a pretty good artist.
“That was different,” said the young woman driving the hovercar, next to whom Fen sat, having played the tune on her system. She had been asking him what kind of music he liked, and he had demonstrated.
“I like Sphitt, Flemm, the Saliva Surfers,” put in Wes Sundry, from the back seat where he sat beside another young woman.
“What’re your names?” asked the driver.
“I’m Fernando Colon.”
“Fernando.” The driver rolled the word on her tongue jokingly. “Can I call you Fern for short?”
“Yeah, but not for long. Fen, they call me.”
“Fen. Oh, like in the song?”
“You got it.” Fen smiled.
“I’m Wes…but you can call me Wes.” Wes grinned at the woman beside him. He had her charmed already. Wes was tall and baby-faced, with eyes that were twinkly squints when he smiled, his apple cheeks bunched up; he had cultivated a light growth of beard to make himself look older, however. His Outback Colony drawl was ingratiating, also. The women were dismissing the odd smell from the tunnel, assuming it was from a factory or something. “Come on, go to the fair with us,” Wes persisted to his riding companion.
“Sorry, we can’t. I wish we could, really.”
Fen twisted around in his seat, looked into Wes’s eyes meaningfully. “We got things to do anyway, Wes. Remember?”
“Yeah, I remember.” Wes folded a wad of chewing tobacco into his mouth. His new friend smiled, smitten.
Man–Wes and his goober charm. Fen wasn’t too jealous, though–he knew that the higher quality females who would appreciate his sophisticated superiority over Wes were naturally fewer in number. He untwisted to face forward. He didn’t seem to be doing too badly, anyway, with the driver, though she wasn’t very pretty and dark hair was boring.
“Can we stop for smokes somewhere?” asked Fen. The girls didn’t smoke. It would save them time at the carnival, tonight, to stock up now.
“You eat breakfast?”
“Doughnuts.”
“We’ll stop somewhere and have some. Alright? You can buy your smokes there.”
“Great,” said Wes, chewing, twinkling at his companion.
“When do you guys wanna get to the fair?” asked the driver.
“Not until night,” said Fen. He and Wes had just wanted to get out of that tunnel and closer to the fair once those giant barnacles began emitting that strange, choking greenish gas. Wes had thought that he’d seen one of them slide a few inches down the wall.
“Oh really? Want to come over our place for awhile? We have to run a few errands first, though.”
“Yeah–love to,” said Wes.
Fen twisted around again. His dark eyes were hot. “Do I have a say in this, mucoid?”
“Sorry.”
Fen faced forward again. This was the comrade he might have to entrust with his life tonight? God forbid Wes should have to choose between saving Fen’s life and flirting like a goober with some pudgy giggling fourteen-year-old near a candyfloss stand.
“Thanks,” said Fen at the invitation. Maybe blasting these two would be a good idea–it would get it out of Wes’s system at least a bit, to keep him purer for tonight. And Fen, of course, was only human, too.
The rides were empty, quiet, still, dormant–a factory waiting to be thrown into crashing, clanking, slithering, spinning, whirring movement by its many bored operators, the conveyor belts and cages bearing along people, however, rather than bottles and boxes, and the final products were excitement, exhilaration, nausea. Del glanced at a few as he strolled past on his usual morning walk. Like a red-light street of the deep city lined with shops and strip joints, ablaze at night with colorful lights and colorful people, the carnival was drab and melancholy at dawn, gray, the brightly painted surfaces showing their blisters and true fadedness. Trash. Dropped prizes proudly won. Shuttered games and concession stands. People came here for awhile to hide from reality inside the noise a
nd lights, and then went back to their lives; but in actuality, it was they who brought that energy here. Without them, this place was as sad and lacking as their realities.
But melancholy can be beautiful, and Del liked the carnival all shut down. It was a fantasy people had, exploring an abandoned carnival, like the fantasy of exploring a shopping mall all alone, or being the last survivor of a war and having a city to yourself, because a carnival was a shopping mall and a city. Del heard the far off radio of one of the crew. The morose drawn-out low of a cow. He could smell the livestock. Birds waddled around, picking through scraps. Up ahead through the shiny plastic horses of the miniature carousel Del saw a ghastly, skeletal bluish hairless dog. A snipe. They could be dangerous, the more so because their minds were a bit more than animal, but they showed a healthy fear toward the carnival people because a number of them had been killed by security. Still, as this one proved, they weren’t totally deterred, and Del almost hesitated, wishing he had his gun, but he seldom wore it. The snipe had seen him also, though, and bolted away out of sight, leaving the trash can it had knocked over. Del continued on. They were pack animals, and being caught alone on a quiet street or subway platform by a pack of snipes was one of the scariest things Del could imagine, but in the day they generally split up as lone scouts or scavengers and were as fleeting and peripheral as ghost hounds. Their blood, when they were wounded or killed, turned instantly to a noxious black gas when it hit the air–superstitious types said this was their souls fleeing. They were not native to Oasis and no one knew where they had come from or how they had gotten here. Mutants, thought Del, glancing sharply over his shoulder as he quickened past the quiet merry go-round. He wondered where their pack nested.
Over the tops of the central cluster of kiddie rides loomed the rides for older kids and adults, towering like abstract sphinxes and idols built of dark metal and bright plastic, blistered and rusty from careless workmanship though plastic, metal, and paint that could survive thousands of years unblemished was available. Oh well, it added to the melancholy, nostalgic character of things, and to the delicious fear that the machinery would come apart and hurl you to your doom. A few times it had. Rearing above some treetops on the edge of the carnival, in the distance, was the Dreidel, not one of the more dangerous rides but last night a murderer. They were gargantuan robots that usually tolerated the foolish swarming humans and other beings but would sometimes, irritated, swat them or ping them away or crush them like insects.
The rides fell behind, mostly; the aisles of games were long and still mostly shuttered. A few people; Del waved or nodded or exchanged a smile and a few words. He kept on. It was a second coffee he was in quest of. Finally, the sprawling central carnival proper behind, ahead lay the many food stands and little trailer and booth shops that sold cheap toys, buttons, clothing, hideous bright paintings on black velvet. A few trailer shop operators were now setting out their wares. Gypsy-like, they either followed Sophi’s carnival when it moved or affixed themselves lamprey-like to another carnival or opened up on the side of a highway or blended into a large flea market.
“Mornin’, Mr. Kahn,” said a skinny old man with leathery, weather-blasted skin and sleeked-back yellowish-white hair, setting out the black velvet paintings painted by his wife and daughter.
“Mornin’, Andy. Always getting an early start.”
“I haven’t gotten up later than six in forty-nine years, Mr. Kahn.” Del had stopped to scan the paintings, hiding his disgust. Sophi, as a joke, had given Del a painting on black velvet by Andy’s daughter for his last birthday. A portrait of himself. It hung in the bedroom, on the wall behind the door they left open. Paintings of tigers, of flowers, oriental dragons, huge-eyed hideously cute children. Several paintings of Lotto-ichi, the Tikkihotto hero Sophi had urged Del to write a song about on Heroes, but he had resisted, wanting to keep to more obscure subjects. Lotti, as they called him, sort of a cross between Elvis and King David, had started his career as a singer and in becoming a political figure had continued to spread his words in song. Naturally, like any good revered figure, he was assassinated. For the birthday before last Sophi had given Del a plastic bust of Lotti, again bought at the carnival, with realistic moving Tikkihotto eye tendrils, which played one of his songs like a music box. Again, hideous. But lovable, in its way. It was on a bureau in the bedroom. “See anything you like, Mr. Kahn?” smiled Andy.
“All of it, Andy.”
“Where’s your better half this mornin’?”
“In my pants.”
“Oh–ah, hah, hah!”
“See you around, Andy.”
Del crossed the dirt boulevard to a canvas-tented stand that sold coffee and pastries to raise money for missionary work on far colonies. The Canon nuns who ran it were here already to set up, their van parked behind. They wore secular clothes so as not to scare people off. A few of them Del found sullen and unpleasant, a few cheery and friendly. He said good morning to them all and bought a large Styrofoam cup of coffee with cream and sugar, and a large cinnamon-sugar doughnut on a napkin. He sat at one of the folding tables under their pavilion, where one of the friendly nuns was writing in a notebook, a tea by her elbow.
“Last day,” smiled the nun, without looking up.
“Mm-hm. I’m relieved, but it’s sad.”
“Yes. Where to now?”
“I’ll just kick back for a while. What about you, sister?”
“I’ll be heading out to Arbor, in the Rothman System.” Sister Brandy looked up now, glowing with enthusiasm. “It’s a beautiful planet, almost one continuous garden…tropical at the equator, more like forest elsewhere. The natives are peaceful beings evolved from plants. They don’t even have a word for ‘war’.”
“That might make it hard for them to understand parts of the Bible.”
Sister Brandy raised a scolding eyebrow but maintained her good humor as always.
“Don’t start.”
“If their life is so beautiful why not leave them be? How are they going to relate to a religion that says man alone is made in God’s image, and all the animals and plants are only things put as his disposal?” Del smiled, sipped his coffee.
“God has many images, Del.”
“Says you, or the Bible? I’ve read most of it, and it seemed less generous than that.”
“The Canon has adapted the old views to address space and dimensional exploration, Del. Also, we can’t leave the Arbor beings alone–Earth industries are instituting lumber operations, other operations, and the Arbor beings are now exposed to humanity. Our presence will be relevant and vital to relations, to an understanding of human values and beliefs.”
“Some humans’ values and beliefs.”
“Well, we could leave them to watch porno movies and drink beer with the lumber crews.”
“Now that sounds better!”
“You are terrible, Mr. Kahn.”
“I’m just trying to ruffle your feathers, sis. My wife would have told me to fuck myself by now.”
“There have been those occasions I was tempted myself, Mr. Kahn.”
Del laughed heartily. “You’re lucky I’m already married, sister.”
“I thank you for the compliment, Del.”
Sister Brandy wasn’t a real beauty but she had a round-faced ingenuous prettiness, a nice figure, and natural red hair–a rarity indeed. Del had never had a redhead, even for all his encounters, and would have loved to press his lips and nose into red hair. But more, he had never had a nun. Sure, it was that fantasy of converting a nun or a lesbian with your irresistible male power, as some women fantasized about enlightening a priest or gay man, but the fantasy was admittedly a potent one. Del would have loved to gently undress Sister Brandy, who would be stimulated but still a bit unsure, torn; kiss her breasts wispily as he tenderly uncovered them for the first time to a man’s eyes, stare deeply into her scared and hungry and confused and yearning eyes as he slowly inserted one finger inside her. If only he had detected a sign
from her, but he never had and didn’t expect to, and he couldn’t possibly make the first move. Bad karma.
He glanced at an older nun behind the counter, who seemed to be glaring at him but flicked her eyes away. A funny feeling. Was she a bit of a telepath or was his guilt simply squirming? Del decided to leave the nun to her work and bear his coffee along elsewhere. He rose and excused himself. “Have a good night tonight, sister. I’ll try to catch you before I leave, but if I don’t, good luck with the salad people.” He shook her hand, gave it a warm squeeze. He really did like her beyond the fantasy.
“You have a good night tonight, too, Mr. Kahn.”
“Del.”
“Del. And thank you and your wife for letting us set up our stand.”
“My pleasure. Hope to see you next year if you’re around.”
“I doubt it, since it’s a four year stint, but…one never knows.”
“Well, tell ya what, maybe we’ll head out that way, if the Arborites prove to be fond of corn dogs and black velvet paintings. God forbid.”
They both laughed, parted, waved.
Del strolled on, aimlessly drawn toward the distant livestock smell, knowing that here there would be more activity to observe, people to talk with as the animals were tended to, their canvas blankets unstrapped, their hay or feed shoveled. But someone behind him, a man, called his name.
Everybody Scream! Page 4