The Pure Cold Light

by Gregory Frost

  Here in the palm of her hand lay the plan he’d had for her. She had only to put the cursed thing to her head and pull the trigger to take her first step toward wherever he had gone. His Other Place, his Eden. That was what he wanted her to do—join him.

  She set the atomizer on top of the cloak. “I’m sorry,” she told him, shaking her head, knowing he couldn’t hear her anymore. “I won’t do it, Glimet. I won’t do it even for you.”

  She began to cry, and she willed herself to stop, but the tears continued, raining thickly. She’d never had cause to cry over any man. No man had ever deserved that much compassion. Men had used her all her life, drunks and abusers—all claiming they just wanted a taste, a fuck, a little nothing she had that they coveted. Glimet hadn’t been like that. He hadn’t even been interested in it. From the very first, he’d shared his space, what little he had, all that he had. Never spoke a word in anger. Hell, even in Box City, most of them had hankered after her digs. Glimet had left his to her. He’d left her everything. She remembered the pride in his voice as he’d announced to others that she was living with him. She squeezed her eyes shut.

  “That’s good,” said the Horrible Woman. “Throw away the drug. Leave it there and we’ll see it disposed of.”

  Amerind wiped hard at her eyes with the cuff of the shirt as she got up. They were all watching her. She strode through their septic midst to Horrible Woman. “You do what you want with the junkie shit. But we gave you food,” she said. “You owe me medicine. That’s our deal, you and me.”

  Behind the fungoid features, something changed. It might have been the face pulled into a scowl or a smile—the features were too distorted to tell which. “We have nostrums,” said the woman. “They haven’t helped us, but they might work for you. Here.” She indicated a large octagonal box on the floor, like an old-fashioned hat box.

  Amerind knelt down. One of the invalids, seated beside the box, watched her with childlike fascination. His skin was hideously burned, charred like wood after a fire. She couldn’t believe he wasn’t screaming. He sat rigidly still; only his eyes moved, following the lid as she lifted it.

  The box was filled halfway with tubes and capsule dispensers. Every sort of drug was represented, a pharmacological heaven, a selection right out of a Geosat or some other manufacturing enclosure. She imagined what she could get in Box City—or better still, in street-level shops in and outside the walls—with this kind of barter. She could buy a tea-house room, set up for life.

  They weren’t going to oblige her that much. They weren’t handing over the box. One-handed, she rooted through the pile, picking out antibiotics and anti-infection creams for herself and slipping everything else that looked promising down the front of her oversized shirt, trapping it against her splinted arm.

  Movement caught her attention. Instinctively she ducked her head—a lifelong reaction, cringing from her father’s vicious backhand: Figuring she’d taken too much, she ducked.

  But the movement belonged to the charred invalid. He had fallen back. His mouth was open. The breath rattled like dice in the well of his throat.

  Quickly, Shikker scooped up what drugs she had in her hand and jumped back from the box. She bumped against Horrible Woman.

  Ignoring her, the monster moved forward and spoke, “Leave, brother, hurry.” Amerind stared at her, at the pulpy face and the black pits of her eyes and finally, against all instinct to the contrary, down at the invalid.

  His body shook. His jaw stretched wider than seemed possible, and Amerind anticipated his shriek. Instead, there emerged a series of snapping sounds, like chicken bones breaking one by one. His jaw slipped off-kilter. His body shook harder, his breaths came in mad gasps. He began vibrating so hard that she couldn’t really see him anymore, every part of him a cracking blur. Then, as quick as that, it ended—in one final, brutal snap.

  The body sagged down, deflated, deliquescing before her eyes. It looked like a human glove from which the hand had been removed. Invisible, a charnel stench billowed through the tent. She choked, her throat knotted against a surge of bile. She pressed her face against her shoulder.

  “He was in time. He’ll be back,” Horrible Woman stated.

  The sides of the tent drew in as though its atmosphere were being sucked away.

  Amerind heard herself say tightly, “I’m leaving now. Don’t try and stop me.” She edged around the grotesque woman and along the central aisle of the tent. “I mean it. Nobody try.”

  Her implied threat was unnecessary. Nobody moved. Clearly, they lacked the energy or the will to stop her.

  She ran back into the darkness, where no one pursued her and where, within five minutes, she became utterly lost.

  Chapter Nine: Isis

  The man named Mingo found a company car waiting for him on level three of ScumberCorp Tower—a bright blue, front-wheel-drive Saracen. Mingo was wearing a black suit with a black silk stock around his throat and a pair of dark glasses.

  The attendant unplugged the car from its curbside jack while Mingo slid open the trunk. A stack of six, long, innocuous tubes lay there, taking up most of the space. The word “Maps” was stenciled in black on each. Mingo smiled. He sought efficiency and, most of the time, because he worked for a corporation, was not rewarded. As he closed the trunk, the attendant came over and handed him a flexible keycard.

  Mingo climbed into the Saracen and slid the card into its slot. The interior lights flashed once to let him know that the car had come on. He would have known, regardless of the built-in safety feature, because the car had over twelve thousand miles on it, and every knob, handle, and screw in the interior began rattling. To Mingo it sounded abominably like a dozen Box City beggars playing songs on silverware for a handout.

  Electric car technology had advanced very quickly, but even at a mere thirty miles an hour God help anyoone who had an accident in one. The campanulate car bodies were made from Knitinel and would flex back into their original bell shape when heated, but the same could not be said for the bits of the driver. So far as impact protection was concerned, one might as well have been surrounded by margarine. Air bags—once standard equipment—had been abandoned as unnecessary in the slower-moving electric vehicles. Very simply, you weren’t supposed to have accidents.

  Mingo prided himself on how expertly he drove. He had never been in an accident yet, not even as a passenger; but, then, he never allowed anyone else to drive when he was in the car.

  He took the skyway loop that carried him over the Free Library and alongside the Rodin enclosure. In the darkness before dawn, the small square building with its fountain and unconnected front wall looked like something out of a Poe story, Mingo thought as he headed north.

  He liked Poe’s stories. They were short.

  Today he felt good. His plan to have the Box City scum do all the work for him had been another stroke of genius, he had to admit. Let them paw through the stinking cesspools for the damned creatures’ lair. If they got too rough, accidentally killed a few, what was it to him? So far as he was concerned, they were all aliens.

  Mingo’s destination wasn’t too far away: the ICS-IV youth-education fortress, referred to colloquially as “Isis-four.”

  The indigo sky looked clear overhead. A scattering of stars was still visible, the sun somewhere below the skyline of the Vine Street wall. Mingo found himself pretending he could smell fresh, clean air instead of the recycled, ion-charged atmosphere that surrounded him. Things were working, falling into place; it was going to be a good meeting; it was going to be a good day. Not for a moment did he conceive that anyone, anyone at all, might have cause to follow him.

  Skyways, laid out as they were in mostly straight stretches, offered few opportunities for eluding pursuit, and none at all if the car you were driving had been left unattended for a few minutes while the valet called to let you know it was ready.

  ***

  ICS-IV had its own entrance off the skyway, a brightly lighted, high-security entrance in ke
eping with the nature of the student body who dwelt as virtual prisoners behind the school’s formidable stone walls. There was a parking lane at the entrance, into which Mingo scooted the blue car. Once out, he stepped up onto the pedestrian walk, from where he could look over the west fortress wall at the starred array of buildings below.

  Seven long arms radiated from the central, lighthouse-like tower, seven narrow buildings like spokes on a wheel. It was an ancient design, one that had caught on in penal systems the world over, but this one, formerly called Eastern State Penitentiary, had been the first, the template all others copied. The high-security blocks on Corson’s Island still used the plan, with ten spokes in the wheel, easy to segregate, one from another. This place, this prison, had been unique in 1829. ESP was the single most-emulated piece of architecture in Philadelphia. For one hundred fifty years, it had operated successfully as a grim hive, row upon row, of solitary cells. Although made over as a medium-security institution of learning, to Mingo’s way of thinking, ESP or, rather, ICS-IV still resembled a medieval stronghold around which a modern city had arisen, and it still provided the same service as before—it exiled a dangerous few for the good of the many.

  The pedestrian walk led to a steep flight of stairs. A blue wire cage barred descent halfway down. Mingo headed toward it, his hand already sliding into his inner jacket pocket for his biocard. The card had been coded to identify him as an ICSS inspector, a position allowing him free access to any part of any school—including the students’ quarters.

  Two guards lounged inside the cage, waiting for him. They wore striped, gray and violet uniforms, and each looked as if one, if not both, of his progenitors had been a tractor.

  The students called them bullgods, making a joke both of their gargantuan proportions and their nearly unchecked dominance. Almost all of the bullgods were veterans of prison isle incarceration. Most had chosen guard duty as an extended vacation away from such hellholes as Corson’s Isle. Survival odds weren’t vastly improved here, but the accommodations and the food—most of the latter donated by Happy Burger and its competitors—were heads above the shingled shit the overpopulated prison isles had to offer.

  All Mingo cared was that the megatherian guards did exactly as he instructed them. He had been here before. By reputation they would know him.

  Reaching the blue cage, he smiled coolly, first at one and then the other juggernaut. With his thumb in place on it, he inserted his biocard into its slot. The door thunked open. The bullgods twitched and, with downcast eyes, edged aside to let him in.

  ***

  A few minutes later, the two guards went lumbering up the stairs to Mingo’s car. As they neared the top of the steep incline, a jogger passed them—not an uncommon sight to the general Overcity populace, but bullgods tended not to get into the Overcity. They drew up as one and admired the jogger’s long legs and wide shoulders. She was a big woman, but that intimidated neither of them, one of whom had carnal acquaintance with bovine life forms twice his own weight. He watched the jogger’s sizable breasts jouncing under her loose clothes and felt a confused sexual heat in his lower abdomen. “Hey, dollin’,” he said, “I got a exercise you can do.” His buddy chortled and added, “Yeah, me too, sugar.”

  The jogger glanced slowly their way. She was dark, smoky, exotic. A little jewel in her nose, catching a first ray of sunlight, seemed to wink invitingly at the guards.

  They watched her go by.

  “Geez, now I got a hard-on,” said the uppermost bull.

  “Geez,” agreed the other.

  They shuffled up the steps to keep the woman in sight as she bounced into the distance. Had they been on their own, allowed to act on their urges, they might have pursued her and exacted their satisfaction. But Mr. Mingo was waiting below, and he would not have been understanding.

  He had told them how to operate the Saracen’s trunk, but it was already open. That had no effect upon the two guards, who wouldn’t have known a discrepancy if it had bored straight through their forebrains. All six red and blue tubes lay where they were supposed to be; one had popped open at the end. The black butt of a little assault pistol was sticking out, and the nearest bullgod unhesitatingly reached down and pulled it the rest of the way out.

  “Yo, loog a’ dis,” he said. “Dis no map.”

  It was a hot little item to be sure, an Ingram Model 30. They, armed with meter-long, metal-headed lathis, would have loved an Ingram. The telescoping sticks were nice, and could easily bash in somebody’s skull, but an Ingram just poking out of a bull’s belt would have kept most of the little toads in line. The two guards slid their hands over the black metal like blind men seeking Braille.

  “Why ya suppose he’s bringing these in, Tackler?” asked the second guard. He picked up another “Map” and shook it to hear the gun rattling inside.

  “Maybe it’s like a secret cache, ya know, case of a riot. Ooh, boy, makes you hope they fuck up soon, don’t it?” He held the gun a moment longer. “Think he’d miss one?”

  “What, like keep it?”

  “Yeah,” Tackler grinned.

  “They’s only six.”

  “So?”

  For a minute they just stood there, unable to choose, with no real sense of what they had blundered into or what consequences could be served up. Then the bull with the gun leaned into the trunk and recapped the tube. “If he don’t say nothing, then I won’t neither.”

  “An’ if he does?”

  “Then I say ‘oh, so sorry, we found dis lying in the trunk, you know, and, bein’ duty officer, I dint wanta leave it there in the open.’”

  “You’ll say it.”

  “I will. I got the gun, so I will.”

  His partner nodded, having now safely distanced himself from any retribution that might occur if the gun’s absence were discovered. Mr. Mingo, although he was physically unimposing, was a spectacularly venomous quantity. It was the glasses, the scarves, the swept-back mane of hair, and the way he’d dispatched an overweening bull on his first visit, using nothing but a ballpoint pen.

  They scooped up the tubes, closed the trunk, and descended the steep stairway toward the open, empty cage. They had forgotten entirely about the runner.

  In the bowels of the school, Mingo had presented a list of names to the guard in charge, and was waiting for his sleepy-eyed guests to be rousted and brought into his commandeered classroom. His program disk was loaded in the podium; displayed on the wall behind him was the LifeMask face he wanted them to recognize. The arsenal was on its way down from the car. He began to hum “The Pirate King’s Song” from The Pirates of Penzance, thinking that it was his song today. Everything was absolutely splendid, everything was really good.

  Chapter Ten: Pirate Air

  “Neeb, are you around?” called Thomasina Lyell.

  The edit suite was deserted, the cubes all dark. She thought of how it would be if he were killed: it would be like this. She retreated to the outer room. His four-room apartment was hardly vast, but there was enough space for Nebergall to get lost among the clutter. So fastidious as an editor, he was anything but tidy personally. The outer room—the one ostensibly for guests—looked as if it had been detonated. Cast-off clothing covered the furniture in layers. Empty soda flasks fought with biodegrading wrappers from fast foods (that Neeb still ate, even knowing what he knew about them), DVDs, loose A/V high-density disks, ancient video tape cartridges, and cables, connectors, and converters of every sort for possession of the floor. On one wall shelf were two plastic commemorative “ANN: 5 Years Watching the Skies” drink cups that had not moved in at least three years. A few footpaths had been cleared through the debris. She checked the bedroom—deep in shadow but otherwise in much the same overwhelmed condition—before being satisfied that he wasn’t home.

  On more than one occasion she had found him passed out after two or three days straight of editing, when a smoke alarm pressed to his ear wouldn’t have roused him. She knew network corsairs—she had lived wi
th one briefly in the beginning. They all behaved much the same as Nebergall. They did not seem likely candidates for long life, nor were they the sorts of people given to trying to accommodate others. They were iconoclasts, dedicated to the precept that the apple cart needed regular upsetting if one was to keep an eye on all the apples. To Nebergall’s way of thinking—and to hers, she admitted—society, thoroughly unaware, needed them. It needed their perspective to maintain its equilibrium. “Harmony,” he had proclaimed more than once, “derives out of conflict.”

  She wondered what he would think of the conflict she was encountering. ScumberCorp was arming ICS guards (she could not conceive of the more dreadful notion that it might be supplying students), while its representative bribed the Box City squatters to hunt down real live aliens, who had supposedly taken refuge in the city. She questioned whether the man, Mingo, actually represented the company’s interests. But of course he did—they were, all of them, mad as hatters.

  ScumberCorp was the largest corporate entity in the world. It’s nearest competitor, Ichiban-Plokazhopski, was barely half its size; next came Bickham Interplanetary, a fresh contender as likely to be absorbed into one of the other two as to survive. There were others, thousands of them—a tower here, an industrial complex there; little companies that had entrenched in a technological niche and managed to ward off the competition for a time. This became more difficult each year. SC’s lobby groups had for decades been guiding Congress through seemingly innocuous legislation that was in fact deleterious to the smaller elements in the business world—specific fetters embedded deep inside impenetrable bills, the means to cut off a targeted company’s legs (or worse) legislated so that there could be no question of legality. There were millions of pages of nearly nonsensical bureaucrababble to wade through each year, and even if you ran across the particular paragraph tailored against you, you probably wouldn’t recognize it unless you could afford to hire someone (at enormous cost) specializing in congressional encryption. Unprotected both financially and legally, companies in one arena after another succumbed to the grinning behemoth.