The Pure Cold Light

by Gregory Frost

  Maybe she dozed a little. Some time later, when she tried to stand again, her legs wobbled a bit but the knees didn’t hurt so much. Buoyed by this good sign, she headed painstakingly across the platform and ascended the first stairs she came to.

  She found herself in another tunnel, one with a wheel-variety turnstile that she eased past. On the far side was a concrete ramp. The light spilling in was bright; she could smell the air. She turned a corner and was confronted with yet another flight of stairs. The sight of them made her sigh. She felt as though she had scaled a mountain of steps. Well, this one last wouldn’t kill her. Bent like a crone, she grabbed hold of the rail and dragged herself up a couple of stairs before pausing to see what lay ahead at the top. It was a metal grid, the kind that unrolled off a big cylinder and wouldn’t stay closed unless you locked it. This one appeared to be welded.

  Shikker’s eyes welled with tears. She slid down the wall and sat limply, a broken puppet. “All this way,” she moaned, and beat her fist against her thigh.

  ***

  When the tears stopped, she stood up matter-of-factly and marched back down the concrete ramp, back through the turnstile, down the stairs to the platform, and into the rail pit again.

  She would not be conquered. She had medicine, she could treat herself, and she would find food somewhere. No matter what else, she would not die in this maze.

  Blackness led her into blackness. She moved from tunnel to tunnel without concern, letting randomness direct her. Without landmarks, signposts, anything, it was all she could hope to do. She came upon black walls covered in white writing lit by sidewalk grates high overhead. The glyphs made no sense to her and she quickly walked away.

  A noise finally stopped her, a sound from far ahead, shrill, like a baby’s wailing. She took her bearings from that eerie cry and switched tunnels, patting the air ahead of her, thus adroitly avoiding another encounter with a girder. She located a branching tunnel out of which the wail definitely emanated, and she switched again, driven by an urgency born of fear—that the noise might cease before she reached it.

  It rose and fell, louder each time it sounded. She was very near now, close enough to tell that no human child was responsible.

  A murky white and blue platform came into view. Using the trick she had already learned, Shikker located stairs up to the ledge and followed that to the platform area. A sign dangling from one hook said “30th Street,” and pointed at an ancient staircase that led to a bricked-over exit.

  She waited, listening. The mewling came, and she sprang toward it, running stiffly along a narrow, twisting corridor. The light diminished till she was feeling her way along, too overwrought to be sensible and go slowly.

  The corridor ended in a small doorway. Through it, as she approached, she could see the long, makeshift tent, glowing with its golden light, whose source she’d never figured out. Beyond it would be the trench where Glimet had fallen. She’d come back to her starting point.

  The weird wail rose through the vast cavern. It sent shivers creeping up her back, the more so because she could tell from where it came. It came from beyond the tent, in the deep dark behind the golden light—from the black carnation. Or whatever the thing on the wall was.

  She crept out, but realized there was no point in such sneaky behavior with Horrible Woman, and strode the rest of the way forward in the open. She approached the tent obliquely, in order to see down the length of it. Initially, it appeared to be empty, just a long triangular chute with heaps of empty bedding. Coming closer, she saw that it was not quite empty.

  An individual remained, lying upon a ragged piece of bedding.

  At first she thought the woman was merely sleeping—the gross distortion of Horrible Woman’s features disguised the further distortion that had taken place. Then Shikker noticed the woman’s hands. How flattened they were. She reached down and pulled back the bedding. The whole body had deflated, as though the bones had melted away. It was the same as with the man she’d watched.

  Where have they all gone? What is wrong with these people?

  She was looking down the length of the tent when she realized that the wailing had ceased. An ominous silence had settled upon the tent like Death hovering overhead. Shikker remembered the first time she had seen the tent, the way the shadows had shifted inside it.

  They can see me.

  She backed away from the body, to the edge of the tent. All the while she watched the other end. The material billowed slightly. Out beyond the light where she could not see, something was moving about.

  She turned and took one step. That was the moment he appeared from beside the tent, lit ghoulishly by the fabric, naked and whole; enormous, it seemed to her. But, then, she had never seen his body. “Jesus,” she said, her voice gone dry.

  “Back again,” responded Glimet.

  Amerind Shikker fainted dead away.

  ***

  “Wake up, goddam you!” bellowed the instructor.

  Angel blinked at him.

  Tall and stocky but with rather spindly legs, the instructor clung to the podium as if in support against rough seas. Underneath his LifeMask (Angel suspected) he would look like one of the other derelicts in the room.

  “Good,” the instructor said. “Now, as yuz can see, the mask does not quite conform to a normal face. That it’s a projection squeezing your head will be obvious to your class, but they don’t give a shit so don’t you be worrying about it either. They know you’re disguised and they know they’re the reason why you’re disguised. It’s a little treaty we have between us—what you call your tacit agreement. They leave the masks alone and we don’t tear their fucking arms off.” He smiled. It was clear to Angel that the instructor didn’t mind the prospect of dismemberment.

  Angel sat in a small room at a student’s desk. There were eighteen more desks in the room, but only seven other people. Five, seated in the front row, looked exhausted already, as though they had endured hours of interrogation prior to this. Like machinery with too many broken parts, they listened and observed; but their slack expressions lagged behind the content of the instructor’s lecture. The other two—a man and woman, a couple—seemed like him to be coherent and unaddicted, just down on their luck. He wondered what crimes they might have committed, and whether they found themselves here courtesy of ScumberCorp.

  The instructor continued, “The LifeMask operates when you lock the collar. You don’t lock the collar, it looks like you’re wearing a bag over your head.” He switched his off for a second. It did indeed look like a gray bag—like a sieve hugging the contours. How did he see through it? wondered Angel. Before he could figure that out, the artificial face reappeared. It expressed fatherly concern. In fact, he thought, the collar did make the instructor look rather like a priest.

  “Do not enter a classroom without your LifeMask on. Do not remove it in the presence of students. Not all of the little darlings are confined to the premises, and if they know you by sight they might be persuaded to take care of you on the streets, where nobody’s gonna help you. Enough ‘accidents’ have occurred for us to know what we’re talking about when we say this.

  “Also, don’t concern yourselves with how you look to everybody else, okay? When you smile, it smiles. You’re going to look so happy they can’t stand it. Plus, you get mad, it tones things down. It’s interactive. That way, if you’re scared shitless, you’re protected. Maybe you look a little confused, a little annoyed. They won’t know you’re ready to bolt and run. Remember that. It could save your life.” He was staring at Angel and the other two; they were the ones who might actually heed his warnings. The rest were grist for the mill—lumps of raw nerves without the sense not to panic.

  “Now we come to the lectures themselves. Hey, you’re no geniuses, but that’s been taken care of. Among all the other things, the LifeMask is a hyped-up BAM circuit that overrides certain parts of your brain and lets in the prepared information we have on whatever subject you’re going to be teaching. I
n fact—” now he zeroed in on the derelicts—“the less gray matter you have left, the better it is for our program. Most of you are gonna make real great fucking teachers.”

  “What’s a BAM?” asked one of them.

  “What do you care? All you got to know is that you’ll know everything you need to know. Some smartass kid asks you some question he dug up to show off, the mask’ll have the answer. You just let it do the talking.”

  He pushed away from the podium. On the floor behind him squatted a brown, recycled box. His heels kicked it and, for an instant, he wobbled like a slowing top. The maskface remained bland, unconcerned. Maybe, Angel thought, he was giving them a demonstration of the mask’s immutability in the face of fear.

  “Now’s the time we try out the system for each of you,” he said calmly. “I’m going to ask you, one at a time, to come up here and receive your mask. I’ll show you how to program it, and we’ll run a test lecture so you can get used to the feel of it. Your faces are changed every day, so don’t expect to see the same people twice after this. Nobody is gonna know nobody. Safer that way all around.” He nodded as if deciding that he’d covered some salient point. He opened the box, took out a gray lump that looked for all the world like a dead octopus. “Okay,” he said, “Who’s first?”

  The entire front row leaned away from him as one.

  Chapter Twelve: Chikako Peat

  Thomasina Lyell had an escort through the hallowed halls of ICS-IV. A big, gray-skinned bullgod led her down the steps. He had hands bigger than her head. Riding in his wake, she breathed his brewery scent and watched his undershirt pop into view like mattress ticking where the seams at his shoulders had burst. She pegged him as Circus-fodder—genetically manipulated for use in one of the combat games. The games were broadcast on so-called private channels, frequencies owned and operated by the rich; but as no channel was truly private, plenty of bootlegged disks existed—sold in the black markets of the Undercity, where the brutish fighters had come from in the first place.

  Combats were events of gross cruelty and mutilation, death served up like popcorn. Nebergall owned illegal copies of two. She’d watched one long enough to appreciate the ugly magnetism of the event and to feel cheapened by her own immediate reaction to it. The hulking bullgod beside her resembled too closely the composite image she carried around in her head—of a near-rectangular face, the cheeks gashed, the lips swollen and empurpled with blood, the teeth smeared with it. For some reason she had zeroed in on the teeth.

  The other bullgods leered at her as she went through their checkpoint. Packed together in a group, they seemed grotesque, like the semi-intelligent offspring of another species. Polyphemus and Ymir, Gog and Magog.

  She recorded their thick faces against the peeling paint, the cracked plaster and concrete, the barred shadows and the rot.

  Her red-haired escort might have been one of the two who’d watched her jogging, but she could see that he didn’t recognize her any more than she did him. She looked from guard to guard for the armaments Mingo had smuggled in. There were no guns. No one appeared to be armed with anything other than the standard-issue metal-tipped lathis.

  Students mingled in the long hallways, behind gates. She saw no teachers. From research she knew that the teachers had their own access corridors into the classrooms. Interaction with students outside controlled environments was regarded as certain suicide.

  Knowing that, she was surprised when one of the gates opened up and the bull led her into a hall full of them. Some of the students paused to appraise her, and their leer was no different than that of the guards. No doubt given time they would become their keepers.

  Another generation of compost, she thought. Many of them had severe scars, burn marks, or bruises. One couldn’t open her left eye; another didn’t have a left eye to open. A few had their arms in slings, their fingers taped to splints. At her approach, they stopped talking and jostling. None dared cross her path. The clusters parted for the guard; the students moved back out of reach of his riot-stick. Occasionally someone said something to him or to Lyell, mostly in languages or euphemism she didn’t know, but sleazy by inference. One kid called her “Cô Cát” along with which the others made meowing noises. These followed her along the hall for some distance. Hands reached out and brushed her arm, her hips as she passed. She would never have run this gauntlet alone.

  Eventually the crowd was left behind. She and her escort passed through another checkpoint. The guards’ ogling hardly bothered her at all.

  ***

  Lyell tried to locate herself in the complex. She had studied a map of ESP but the ramp they entered after passing that second gate had not shown on it. As nearly as she could determine, the bull was leading her underground.

  The ground floor consisted entirely of classrooms. Living quarters for students classified as permanent residents lay on a second floor abovethe classrooms—converted cells that could easily be sealed off in case of a riot. Each of the separate arms could be contained as well, isolated in minutes. There were gates everywhere. From her protected lair, wherever it lay, the administrator could accomplish everything from gassing any individual room in the complex to calling in an air strike.

  The bullgod led Lyell through a narrow door and into a room off which half a dozen similar doors opened. He crossed the room and entered one of them. Inside was a curving wall that rose up into total darkness. It might have led to one of the corner bartizans or the central rotunda. Metal steps led up the side of it, but the bull walked past them, to a door that unlatched electronically just as he reached it.

  They stood in a small entryway, a room that clearly could be sealed off. The bull halted before the armored door on the other side of the enclosure. The door stood ajar. “Dis the twitchers’ lounge,” he said sharply. “I don’t go in. Principal’s on other side—you’ll be met.”

  Lyell nodded.

  The bullgod stepped back to let her pass. As she did, he observed, “You look strong.”

  She turned on him, exasperated by this last comment after walking the gauntlet. Then she saw his scarred face was flushed, and his eyes cast down. He was embarrassed. He was shy and flustered. She wondered if he had ever spoken to a woman up close before. There must have been some who would have given him the opportunity.

  “I’m not so strong as you,” she said. “Thank you for the escort.” Before he could get any ideas from that, she pushed her way into the so-called lounge.

  ***

  It was not a large room. Seated around cheap folding tables, a dozen people in softly glowing LifeMasks looked up at her. She thought of pictures of apostles that had adorned the Sunday school classrooms of her childhood. The same smiles, the same generous earmarks of divinity.

  One of them, at a desk beside the door, got up and bowed smartly. He reached for her hand and shook it. “My name is Mr. Ong,” he said, and chuckled. “I’m in charge of these goats. You’re to go right on through and no bother.” Ong’s mask was grinning delightedly. His hand was hard and calloused.

  At the other end of the room, the second security door hung ajar. There was a third metal door in the wall on her right, closed.

  Lyell passed among the happy artificial heads. One of them could easily have been Rueda. How would she ever spot him among the artificial idiot smiles?

  For all of the faces at peace, some of the bodies, the hands at least, were trembling. A few had missing fingertips. One arm was absent altogether but invisibly filled out its sleeve from the beyond.

  Their hands were rough, hard. Some of the nails were broken, some hands scabrous. She tried to recall what Rueda’s hands had looked like. She’d been so absorbed with the face, but she had checked his hands, his wrists. She didn’t think they matched any she saw here. How many twitchers would already be in their classrooms? How many lounges might be strewn through the complex? Her map hadn’t indicated any of them.

  She passed through the second door, and heard it shut heavily behind her. The sou
nd reverberated as if through many tunnels.

  She stood at the head of a conduit between two rows of partitioned cubicles. The air was smoky, misty. The overhead lights barely fired. A few fluorescent tubes flickered here and there in an erratic pattern, but most, apparently, had burned out and never been replaced.

  Lyell walked between the cubicles. Shadowy clerks turned to face her, poised like animals caught in the light of desk lamps and terminal screens. The equipment looked a good twenty years out of date, with big monitors as bulky as dictionaries. She thought that if she were to make a sudden move, the figures would all dive out of sight.

  The fluorescents ahead flared briefly, revealing scratches in the mottled black stone at her feet. The sound of her footsteps ricocheted like bullets off it. A dozen invisible people seemed to be walking ahead of and behind her. Weird, crisscrossing echoes.

  Like a freighter’s prow bearing down upon her out of the fog, the principal’s desk loomed into sight. On each side of it stood high folding screens covered in Japanese brush paintings of waterfalls and brightly plumed birds. The frames were black lacquer, as was the triangular desk. The arrangement appeared to be an origami construct spotlighted under recessed fixtures and magnified to seem larger than it was.

  The screens must have disguised an air-filtering system; the moment Lyell stepped between them, the smoky atmosphere vanished and the air smelled as clean and moist as a rain forest.

  The ICS-IV principal, Chikako Peat, reclined behind the desk. She rested her stockinged feet on the top, and she was smoking an aromatic cigarette from a holder as long as her forearm. A bank of thin monitors dangled immediately above the desk, their shifting images like rainwater reflected upon the woman’s face. She glanced from the monitors without turning, giving Lyell a stare out of the corners of her heavy-lidded, almond-shaped eyes. It made her seem both mischievous and haughty. The irises of both eyes looked violet, but that might have been a result of the monitors. She had rounded cheeks, a flat nose, and full, painted lips. Her face was as perfect and smooth as a mask, but she, unlike her teachers, did not wear one.