The Year's Best Horror Stories 22

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  Starship City was alive with another launch carnival. Colors galore bobbed in balloon- and umbrella-shapes above the crazy harlequinade. The pygmy figure, tufted with a red-tinseled goatee beard and garbed in mock-gladiatorial fashion, threaded his way between the drugged bodies and over-brimming cafes, heading for the launch-pad at the city’s edge. Suddenly, he was halted by a somber procession of hooded figures carrying a human coffin upon their shoulders. He guessed this was a jokey ritual, some sick fancy-dress rag-stunt. But, no—a genuine priest swung a steaming censer in the same rhythm as his stride, at the head of the chanting group. The pygmy knew that the priest was pukka since he wore an insignia of faith, a golden ‘V’ tattooed on his brow. But suddenly the pygmy was struck from behind by the careless butterfly-switch of Captain Bintiff. The recipient looked down at his knurled feet, as if penitent. Beneath his soles, he felt the insidious throb of the underground machine domes which fed the launchpad with energy and he remembered the times that he had been enslaved in the oil room, funneling great tubes of black sludge into the moving parts of the metal maze hidden away beneath the scurrilous lanes of the gaslit city, whence he had escaped a terrible doom by becoming a spy for Bintiff.

  “Salustrade!” boomed Bintiff, giving his subject a further stinging slap. “That, my dear overgrown black turd, is the funeral ceremony of the late Elizabeth Lakeminster—but I wish it were you that were bloody dead!” Bintiff bent at the bones in time with the alternate pitch of his voice. As he continued, the distant rocket which was Starship City’s second attempt to send a man to outer space, roared into the blue sky. “And that, my dear overnourished toad’s afterbirth, is one reason why I am sending you back to the oil rooms—you were supposed to sabotage the bleeding rocketship, as you did before—look, this one is whooshing up like a dream! Whoosh, bloody, whoosh!”

  Salustrade horned a long note with his curled hands and pursed lips, like a living conch shell, in resonance with the rocket’s bone-rattling roar and the answering sky. And, on board this second rocket, the nameless astronaut lay dead, snuffed from life by a proxy hijack poison in his tea. Beside his fresh corpse, gradually leaning away from each other like a fresh “V,” were the astral projections of two souls. These thin balloon-shapes which were filled as if with soft delicate putty pulled back together at the top until all was eventually whole, all was eventually peace and sexual nirvana. The rocketship took them forever, farever. Meanwhile, scullion Salustrade worked his buttocks off in the oil rooms.

  Starship City sat at the foot of the New Hills which rose like steps eastward from the Argumentative Oceans. On the other side of the vast gaslit metropolis, lay the mighty land fissure which still creaked and groaned on certain days of the year. As one approached from the south along the carriageways, one could hear the mammoth rasping of Nature (“Surely, it will crack the world in two, one day!”) and see the looming rocketship monument to all those who had died cosmic deaths. The monument was indeed the first sign of the city that the stranger saw: a tall tapering cone-pinnacle or narrow pyramid, curiously like a church spire ready for launch. Soon, it was obvious that this marked the outer limits of the city suburbs—countless ranks of decrepit terraced two-up-two-downs in faded black and white checkerboard, items of washing hanging across the narrow byways and shadowing the queues of gossipers and scandalmongers.

  “You don’t want to stay long in these parts, for the oilmen’s wives live here,” said one do-gooding ne’erdowell.

  “What oilmen?” asked the stranger. “I thought the city’s industry was spaceflight.”

  “Well, the city is really lost in time—that’s the only way to explain it to outsiders. The buildings, as you near the one-way system at the center, were made piecemeal from the Victorian ruins but, like all transplants, the old and new sit ill together. And, to cap it all, elfkin cattle roam at all hours between the gaslights and office blocks. Under the ground, there are the murky machine-rooms which feed melted energy to the launchpads on the city outskirts. All moving parts, moving against each other, like lovers ...”

  “But what oilmen?”

  “Didn’t I say? Well, they’re the men who live most their lives underground feeding black sludge to the metal joints—miscegenates mostly and convicts and bents and cripples and others ...”

  “There is one in particular I’m after ...”

  “Eeeny meeny myny mo, catch a bugger by his toe—it’s Salustrade you’re after, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, that’s his name—if he’s what you call an oilman, so much the better—he’ll be pleased to quit the city’s entrails and work for me.”

  “He used to sabotage the rocketships before liftoff—some crazy conspiracies to undermine the system—or to rescue political prisoners in the Memorial Halls—that’s why he lives and works down there—a fitting punishment—never comes up for air, dear sir.” The city slicker gave a strange shrug and left the stranger. In fact, the stranger was two strangers, one inside the other, but both with the same head.

  A solitary jogger appeared at the end of the street, its body bouncing along like a shiny black balloon—almost obscene. The stranger who was Siamese twins, Tristan and Clovis, still walked toward the center of the gaslit city in an area of mainly secondhand bookshops. As they were nearly knocked over by the careless jogger, they stumbled away from each other but, now being joined at the base of the two spines by the mutant gum of misbirth, they kept upright and continued their skewed way.

  “Watch where you’re going!” they shouted at the vanishing shadow.

  A rocket burst into flame from some other quarter of the city—another abortive launch creating a temporary firework display, outshining the feeble flickering of the night’s natural costume jewelry. As the jogger ran toward the outskirts, a mighty sword materialized in its grasp which was, in truth, a broken railing from the Lakeminster Memorial Hall.

  Tristan and Clovis sat on their hips, scornful of ever finding the main entrance to the underground oilroom. They were at the foot of a spluttering fountain in one of those city squares where, during daylight, office workers munched their ill-spread sandwiches and listened obliviously to the mumbling machinery beneath their itchy feet.

  Salustrade, the jogger in disguise, lately escaped from the damning darkness of the interconnecting subcity hells, careered through the last-ditch lanes of Starship City, wheeling the sword above his head. He had oiled his body over with pure black grease, kneading it into every pore of his skin and underskin. He had become a silky dark balloon and, letting out the breath from his lungs in one vigorous gasp, had spirited through a lock-and-key system from a flaw in the drainage valves (where the grill had been shattered by rogue rocket-shrapnel). He had sped through the city—at the time when the streets were empty—except for that damn two-voiced rhinocerosman who had stumbled in his way. The night had kept from Salustrade the secret of this obstacle’s identity, although he suspected it of being the matured afterbirth of a certain Ma and Pa Bintiff.

  “You never found Salustrade, then?” asked another ne’erdowell.

  “I never even found the oilrooms!” Clovis and Tristan answered with one voice, but two tongues.

  “But you’re in the oilrooms now! Can’t you see the eccentric wheels churning fast up there on the lowest ceiling? A rocket’s about to launch from the out-city fields, beyond the back of the terraced houses, and you’ve work to do. They keep the do-gooders, ne’erdowells, and cripples down here, like the likes of you. Got a use for them all. Keep the moving parts moving—take up the vats of Flowing grease and pour. The flywheels will mesh and clog, clockwork ill-marrying clockwork, otherwise. And the rocket’s just got to go. Whoosh, bloody, whoosh! Space is our only destiny and hope.”

  A listener from the days of Dan Williams and the first Captain Bintiff would have been bewildered at how times had changed and how undercover conspiracies were now the Golden Mean.

  Salustrade stood beside the mighty fissure in the Earth, Long-Spike raised against the whining ye
llows of the dawn. A mere croak—then grinding screech—girder eroding girder—cracking, groaning double-backbones of Earth heaving against each other—sick unto the core. And from the fissure, the greatest rocket that ever left land raised its ugly hammer-head toward the breaking heavens. All the good and healthy people were on board, now gone for good, quitting the dark abandonable Earth. Salustrade shrugged and jogged back the way he had come, to release the oilers and the benders and his other stricken pals.

  The gigantic rocket, of course, exploded soon after launch, creating a blinding Queen-Catherine-Wheel over Starship City, while Tristan and Clovis lay on their side and awaited inevitable rescue from a pygmy Savior who, they now prayed, would come and to whom they had given the provisional name of Salustrade. They themselves had fates to forge, destines to unspring, like greyhounds after the hare.

  “If time goes backward, to poison someone you must first poison his shit.” The voice echoed in the darkness, interrupting a second voice with which it held converse of sorts.

  “You know, in Heaven where God is supposed to sit on His throne, there are apprentice angels, one or two of whom are trained to slop out the public conveniences up there.”

  The room was clammily, oilily dark, if room it were, and the voices tried to wriggle away from each other—but being joined now at all points on their surfaces, this was more than impossible. Clovis and Tristan had only been tenuously connected in their mutual mother’s womb. From that point onward, their jointure had grown gradually thicker, sturdier, integrally tentacled, until they felt (and, some said, looked) like an alien creature. They had originally come to Starship City, seeking Salustrade. Commissioned by one of the Bintiffs who thought that the pygmy had information worth its salt-mine, they had since discovered that he was a scullion who used to work down here in the subterranean workings of the spaceport (a spaceport which stood above at the edge of the metropolis like a township of finger-stalls). The Bintiff had not told them everything, evidently testing their communal intelligence for future, perhaps more important, missions. In any event, Salustrade had escaped from the oil rooms which were instrumental in cranking and churning the machines which in turn drove the spaceship rockets to the upper levels of both the tenable and untenable universes. But, Salustrade, in his instinctive knowledge of all possibilities and probabilities and certainties and their opposites, had seen fit not to spring those trapped in the lowest layers of the machine rooms who were thus mouldering away in the rusted metal corridors of darkness. Such were Tristan and Clovis, who kept up a desultory overlapping conversation to while away as much of the future as they could.

  “If God knew we’re here, He’d surely spare a few of his apprentice angels to come and kiss us better.”

  “And to clear away the excrement.”

  Each time one of the voices moved, the other had to struggle to keep clear of the squelching rats that ran from his mouth to his bottom, and vice versa, and vice versa again, in a self-supplementing, if depleting, food chain. But, thankfully, the darkness hid the rats’ damning eyes.

  “They say the last rocket that went up exploded above the city—and all the good and healthy and rich people on Earth-out were destroyed and rained down like living sparks upon the whole city in which they had once drunk and danced.”

  “And others say it was one of those ruffians who used to work down here who tripped the switch which turned the rocketship inside out, so that all its complicated workings hung free like shameful parts—it could have done nothing else but explode in the circumstances.”

  “Why did we come here, Tristan?”

  “Why indeed, Clovis?”

  “Because we were told to ...”

  “... capture Salustrade before ...”

  “... he tripped the switch which only he knew about ...”

  “... and which would put paid to all civilization’s possibilities ...”

  “... and the destruction of all those with Victorian values who were supposed to seed the stars ...”

  “... which we used to gaze at in the night skies of our childhood ...”

  “... and what will there be now ...”

  “... nothing but faggots, cripples, half-castes and aidsters, colonizing their own world ...”

  “... most of whom work down here in these (god) forsaken machine rooms ...”

  “... before Big Bang lets them out ...”

  “Ptcha! Ptchoo! You’re nought but the bottomings of my loo!” Suddenly the last voice was not Tristan or Clovis at all. It was a whisper, another’s voice, which was the first they had heard for several years. They could not quite appreciate its meaning, but the words themselves continued to be quite clear. “I’ve crawled on all fours through pipes of congealed oil, unlocked my bones to ravel a passage through the twisted machine parts, shrunk my skull to the size of a rat’s head to nose forward across the blade ends of boosters, transfixers and turbines—and I’ve double-talked unsprung clockworks to let me through, entered among the triggers of unmarried cogs on feather-hair trellises, forged relationships with unfulfilled piston-shafts—and all this just to rescue those whom I was told must be rescued ...”

  “The angel has arrived, Tristan!”

  “To take us back to Heaven, Clovis!”

  “Don’t give me that donkey’s doings!” returned the whisper. “I’m Salustrade, and I did not squeeze through this awful sewer just for you to give me this God-shit!”

  “Salustrade?” The voices spoke together, recalling a time when the name had actually meant something to them.

  “I’m that black balloon which tripped you up when you first came to Starship City, all those years and years ago. I had covered myself in the glory of black oil that used to make the machine parts down here love each other, and I had slipped through the slightest grill, to tip the wink to all the others in the know. I’ve since met up with bookish Padgett Weggs, who knows more than those actually in the know. He knows more than is good for anybody, I can tell you. He says we’re to make room for Great Old Ones who (altogether he feared them himself once) have more complex metal parts than the inventors of all this little lot of a machine maze I’ve come through just now had hot dinners ...”

  Tristan and Clovis stared at the darkness whence the whisper came. They were still convinced that this was a visitation from an apprentice angel. But Salustrade continued: “Even now, monstrous Irreducibles and living Dirigibles crank in from the stars, Black Gods, Old Gods, even Older Gods, Great Gods, heaving, churning, clucking Ancient Ones, Old Heads on even Older Shoulders, with Big Wings far too Big for their own Bodies, their Bones, their Old Old Elder Bones tougher than Earth’s toughest metal, and all conjoined like a trillion Siamese Monster-Twins!”

  Tristan felt the light kiss of a metabolic rat and its almost human snarl “Ptch! Ptchoo!” which it uttered when passing his ears on the return journey. But Salustrade’s whisper droned on, if whisper it still was: “I’m come in for cover, I admit—all my crippled and mindless pals must want me to seek the advice of the Machine-Oracle that they thought must still lurk down here—the question is, what can be done about it? All the clever ones (with clean knickers and ambitions to match) parted company with their bodies sky-side, when I flicked that springy hair across the wrong terminals on the wrong day ... O Machine-Oracle, tell me!”

  Tristan and Clovis shrugged together and raised themselves on all four legs, scuttled like a dying spider, bouncing off the corroded walls like a squash-fly. It was as if possessed. “Go back to your Padgett Weggs!” it shrieked like a banshee in heat. “Bring him and teach him how to shovel shit! See how he likes being apprenticed to the Devil!”

  “He’ll be dead by now,” came the voice of the one who called itself Salustrade. “He was a simple bookish man. In fact, they’ll all be dead, except me.”

  “Then, go back and tell them the Oracle can do nothing but hope, against all the sensible possibilities, yes, hope—that Time has character enough to have second thoughts.”

 
; “I know not the way back—I left my memory upon a powerful magnet near an oil-belly below the piston rooms—it sumped me good and proper.”

  With that, the rust-clogged parts shuddered, as if about to move in some semblance of togetherness. The churning from distant regions of the submachines was faint at first, much like Earth-start must have been in the earliest days. Then, with increasing uproars and slow, but powerful, outbursts, the lights flashed on and off, on and off, and vise versa, revealing great shiny moving parts of new-forged steel shafts, hot pistons and eccentric wheels flying together like long-lost lovers. And so, Tristan and Clovis were sprung like rats from a trap by irresistible exifugal forces into the interface of the serrating top edges of Starship City and the down-burgeoning metal-god systems of the Great Old Ones. There, with much unconfessed relief, they saw the rejigged hob-madonna rocket hover back down to Earth—since the firework-man had originally forgotten to light its fuse. These good and healthy people once in an infinity of little bits were returning, blending back together again, as they would always maintain, to save the world from things even worse than themselves. Tristan and Clovis bounded off, embarrassed but determined to rejoin the guerilla armies who were even now feeling their own bodies to see if there were any signs of the dislocations, mortal wounds, decapitations, and downright smithereens which they once thought the good and healthy people had suffered. And now they had Old Gods to fight, too.

  “Cancher blinking move?”