by Ian McDonald
“Courtney Hall, rouse thee, rouse thee! His Majesty, Bless ’Im!”
Lightning shone from the blood on Jinkajou’s paws.
“Courtney Hall! Courtney Hall! Please!”
She broke free from the death trance and with Jinkajou the Chamberlain leading, found the King of Nebraska reclining numbly on a straw pallet by the smoldering fire pit. There was a stink of nightshade and decomposing flesh. His Majesty, Bless ’Im’s lips were puffed and cracked. His face was a purulence of spots and acne. His hair had fallen out in cancerous patches.
He had been deeply drugged.
“Ahahahaha! Fidelity and the Lady! Comin’ for to carry me home! Jinkajou, burn all my Dashiell Hammett novels and recordings of Bix Beiderbecke!” He waved a jaunty sputum-stained handkerchief; then a spasm of coughing shoved him to the straw pallet.
“Courtney Hall, a word in your ear. His Majesty, Bless ’Im, is too sick to walk. What shall we do?”
Decision. Citizens did not make decisions. Citizens had decisions made for them, and always made right.
She opened her mouth and let the first thing in her head walk out.
“Call together the Tinka Tae and build a travois from the tent poles.”
Not bad for a first command.
The retreat through the jungle was an anabasis through the nether regions of nightmare. Slowly, slowly, slowly, so damn slowly: that travois dragging, creaking along through the night and the dark and the endless rain, the blinding, streaming rain … Her boost of noradrenaline burned out, Courtney Hall was possessed by a shivering cold dread; the permanent sense that every decision she had made had been wrong, that at any moment she would be cold dead in the leaf litter with a Democrat arrow through her cervical vertebrae. Slowly, slowly, so damn fuggin’ slowly; that sick madman ranting and hallucinating and arguing loudly with his ghosts and memories while all around the stealthy eyes of SDI rested not, nor blinked, and when she and her racoons were pitted and slitted and noosed and netted and impaled, they would not even cry, not even one tear. Onward, forward, through the dark and the fear and the leaves and the thundering rain and the trees and the doubt (the Question, again, only wickedly asking itself of herself), and coming on behind, the slow, slow, so damn fuggin’ slow slither slide of the travois. …
Courtney Hall screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed when the lightning shattered the dark into the shape of someone waiting for her.
“Easy, easy,” said Xian Man Ray. She smelt of sweat and smoke and speed and a curious taint of sex. Zebra-striped, she was a figment of the rain forest. Trashcan her cat ran up onto her shoulder and licked its paws. Courtney Hall swallowed several sobs whole before she could speak.
“What about the Democrats?” The cat flexed its razor claws and carefully licked them clean. The small woman grinned.
A streak of light arced above the forest canopy and detonated in a starburst of red and green. Others rose to join it in its momentary glory; suddenly the whole sky was exploding with fireworks. Then, from far to the south, a constellation of starbursts spread themselves against the roof in reply.
“Wow! War rockets! This is it, sister, the big show, the main feature! Armageddon! The Final Conflict! Those sucks of Democrats must have thought the Commies were attacking them with some deadly new weapon and, they’re striking back. I’d love to stick around to see this!” The symbolic bombardment peaked until the exploding fireworks rivaled Angelo Brasil’s artificial lightning. Beneath the heavens gone mad, the Army of Victorialand escaped through rain and mold and dread.
“About half an hour to go from here,” said Xian Man Ray, sniffing around a crossing of forest paths. Suddenly the gentle moon-glow from the ceiling lights flared day-bright and went out. Total darkness clamped down on the Land of the Great White Eagle/Morning Star. Courtney Hall found herself wrestling with a demon named Claustrophobia, which tried to squeeze the breath from her lungs with whispers of the truth that she was a kilometer and a half underground with several million tons of rock poised above her desperately seeking unity with the several quintillion tons of sister rock beneath.
She knew that if she ever found her breath again, she would not be able to stop screaming.
Soft fingers on her neck: a word and a lightning-bolt image of Xian Man Ray. “Softly, softly, sister. Take my hand. Trashie’ll lead us. He’s a cat can see in any darkness.”
“What have they done?”
“Gone mad. M.A.D. Mutually Assured Destruction. Just hope the Communists can’t find the controls to their sluice gates or all bets are off.” She rubbed the corner of her jaw, whispered, “Angelo, get those lights on again.” An angry insect buzzing. The small woman swore. “Those stone axes I told you about. They smashed the computers. Angelo’s lost all environmental control, but he thinks he can lynk into and hold the flood-control computers at the mouth of the river. But this place is bound for Hades in a hatbox: this really is Armageddon, sister. The End of the World.”
The retreat through Sheol continued.
Deafened by rain, blind except for the occasional lightning flicker or, rarer now as the stocks were expended, war rocket, her skin numb with cold rainwater, Courtney Hall slipped subtly into a state of sensory deprivation almost as complete as if she were imprisoned in a West One psycho-engineering tank. Only the warmth and presence of Xian Man Ray’s hand prevented her from submitting totally to the hallucinations and bizarre time-swings that menaced her path. Nevertheless, she could not rid herself of the impression that this long pilgrimage was really through the interstices of her own body to pavilions of life-energy where she found the sixteen-o’clock dream: ornithopter-bicycles, squadrons of them, the sky black with their beating wings, dropping coconuts and cascades of sparks from the roman candles strapped to their mudguards; elsewhere on her interior hegira she met Jonathon Ammonier dancing among the exhibits of his Chaosium, and as he danced, pieces of his body kept falling off: ears, toes, fingers, nose, hands, whole arms and legs—Courtney Hall scampered after him scooping them up, saying, “Excuse me, Your Majesty, but isn’t this yours?” until only a head and a torso remained, with teeth glowing fluorescent green in the night: the TAOS girl, forty stories of social grace, and Courtney Hall waved at her from her cosy little office and the TAOS girl waved back, every time Courtney Hall moved the TAOS girl copied it until she realized that she was the TAOS girl, trapped in forty stories of videowall, and all she could do was smile, pick chip, flip chip, hold, and dissolve, over and over and over and over again. …
“Sister, we’re here, sister.”
Unh?
Water. Chuckling water. And light! Flares, torches, a bonfire. And a raft, moored to the bank; a good raft, a big raft, a good big Huckleberry Finn of a raft with a steering pole and a little cabin woven from twigs and a fire on a slab of river-bed slate. And Angelo Brasil, sitting Lotus-position in the fireglow, eyes rolled up in his head, mouth shaping syllables never intentioned for human lips: the whispered intimacies of the computers. He was holding the sluice gates open with his mynde.
A good raft. Good people. Wonderful raft. Wonderful people. And now it was over. Courtney Hall burst into tears of pure relief as she watched the King of Nebraska manhandled aboard, the Tinka Tae porters finish their loading of food and supplies.
“Ain’t you coming?”
A sniff.
“You coming sister?”
A nod.
A hand reached out and she was pulled aboard. Then the mooring lines were slashed forward and aft, and the current spun the raft out into the great darkness.
Byrne
FALLING RAIN.
Excellent rain.
Watch it fall … Sudden. Sweeping courtyards, closes, clear of citizens, drumming on clapper roofs of hunchbacked bridges, drum-drumming on waxed paper umbrellas in Angle Park, drum-drum-drumming on the canopies of sampans moored at Steelyard floating market, hissing over canals and wateralleys and the dolorous chugging of the municipal vaporetti wedged to the gunwales with w
et populace. Huddled under a polythene sheet against the inadequacies of leaking wickerwork, Kansas Byrne weighed the risk of using her marquin on the lumbering water-buses against five centimeters of rainwater slopping round her feet in the scuppers of an onion-vendor’s sampan. The tiny alcohol stove leaked a dismal globe of warmth that only exacerbated the stink of forty kinds of onions that formed the sampan’s other cargo. In the stern, onion-vending Jian John-Chang set face upturned to the rain, evidently enjoying the sting of rainwater in his eyes, the trickle of warm drops down his body.
His body …
His … harlequinade. His motley. His hydridoma. Apocalyptic avatar of a forgotten faith. Four-armed, with twain he did steer and tend the outboard and with twain did he bail rainwater, which, unbaled, would have sent Jian John-Chang Food Corps concessionaire and soulbrother of the Carnal Plenum, his passenger, his forty brands of onion, and his sampan Ribonucleic Revelation to the bottom of Waters of Healing Compassion Canal. With twain did he sail and with twain did he bail, but of legs he had none for the legs of Jian John-Chang were on loan to Sister Chanadya Tree-Morgan. Thus it was of considerable importance to Jian John-Chang of the Carnal Plenum that his Ribonucleic Revelation did not dissolve in the waters of Healing Compassion as, until such time as the Sacred Rota prescribed him a pair of someone else’s legs, the sampan was his only means of mobility.
The Biological Revelation of the Panspermic Life-Force was the pivotal tenet of Carnal Plenum belief. The sacrament of the transplantational. Being is gene-deep: share the flesh, share the being in the double helix. Greater lover hath no person than he/she giveth up his/her arm for his/her soulbrother; be given the legs of his/her soulsister. Today an arm and a leg. Tomorrow eyes, ears, feet, and fingers. Next week: liver, lights, lungs, spleen, kidneys, genitals. Next year: proud bearer of the sacred relics of the Thrice Blessed: Sacred Head Sore Wounded (read amputated), Holy Eyeball, Sanctified Hand, Hallelujahed Thumb, Redeemed Toe, Cosmic Gallbladder. Holy holy holy. And then, some decade, might not Jian John-Chang, onion vendor, become as enlightened as Deevah, the Prophetess, she of the Ten Thousand Transplants?
Deevah the Prophetess.
Well, what can be said about her?
She smells.
That’s gangrene. A vocational hazard among the Soulbrothers of the Carnal Plenum.
She has cancers erupting like new brains all over her body.
Another vocational hazard. Immuno-suppressives.
She is the avatar of Kali: eight-armed, four-legged, she is the amalgam of ten thousand different components, a U-Built-It biokit of the Corporal, the Mortified, and the Transfigured. Lifetimes ago, beyond remembering, she had been an old woman of an unexceptional Soulbrother Order. Then God had called her through his organs in the Ministry of Pain and its psychofiles. Now she is Deevah.
She has two heads.
She had gained her second head, the highest honor of the Carnal Plenum, so long before that she has forgotten which is the head she was born with, which is the head she acquired. They take turns to speak. Day about. One thinks, one speaks.
Deevah is a prophetess. The foremost prophetess of the city of Yu. When she opens her speaking mouth to let the verbs of God flow forth, Yu listens. Because Deevah, unlike every other prophetess and mouthpiece of the divine, is genuine. She has power. That power breaks the boundaries of caste and custom that the Ministry of Pain has so painstakingly erected. But the Ministry of Pain lets her prophesy because she is subject to a higher law. So the word passes out of Three Jump Span into the city, and those with the courage to have their questions truly answered, truly, come to hear the word of the numinous. There are never many of them. Only a very few have the courage to face futures no different from their past, if that be the divine will. But there are always some.
Kansas Byrne is one. She has a question, a dangerous question, a question she could not ask of the municipal shrines and databases. For if they answered, she would have betrayed those on whose behalf she asked. It is a dangerous question even for Deevah the Prophetess but a question that must be asked and answered. So she listened to the whispers that ran with the rats around the sampans and the duckboards of the floating market and sent her own little whisper to run with them until it found someone willing to take her down the wateralleys under hunchbacked bridges to Deevah.
Deevah’s Oraculum was a tatterdemalion amphitheater erected on a corner of land where a dump of discarded garbage abutted a row of collapsed tenements. Planks for seats, illumination from biogas flares blazing in blackened paint tins.
The Carnal Plenum Brother in the waxpaper entrance booth had three arms and three eyes. The third arm, a bloated club of mortifying green flesh, held a syringe. The third eye supposedly looked into the soul.
“Supplicant or spectator?”
“Pardon?” said Kansas Byrne, a Wee Wendy Waif spell-caught by the night, the hum of the expectant crowd, the heat of the biogas flares, the pure theatricality of it all.
“You want to watch, you want to ask a question?”
“Oh. Ask a question.”
“Then we’ll need a specimen.”
“A what?”
Supplicants and spectators were piling up behind her, impatient and increasingly compressed. The odor of wet humans was miserable.
“Blood, cizzen. For the Deevah. All knowledge is genetic. …” The blotched green-and-purple arm waved the hypodermic. Supplicants, spectators, biogas flares, amphitheaters, slender silver demon needles swam.
“Oh, shug … Will it hurt? I’ve got a very low pain threshold rating.”
“A little.”
“Oh, fug.”
The flames seemed to catch on the needle. The figure of 0.3 seemed very important, then she found herself looking into the dreadlock-shrouded face of a Soulbrother of the Brethren of Marcus Garvey Redeemed. His Selassie Eye winked at her.
“You all right?”
“Um. Ah. Yes. Now. Thank you. Thank you. Needles and me … It’s on my psychofile, the only bit of it I believe, as a matter of fact: zero point three.” The Marcus Garveyite accompanied her to one of the back benches and handed her a slip of paper.
“You forgot to take this.”
“What is it?”
“Your number.” Prophecy by number, like buying a half kilo of bean curd or a sack of onions from a Food Corps concessionaire.
The buzz of conversation settled. The biogas flares dwindled in their paint pots to a bare glow. An aura of hushed expectancy filled the amphitheater. Kansas Byrne was astounded at how much like menace it felt. Drizzle drizzled down. Spectators and supplicants alike were oblivious to it: Deevah the Prophetess was entering the arena.
Very slowly she came, very slowly, very painfully, dragging trailing limbs and pendulous wattles of flesh, heaving heavy ox shoulders, eight arms dragging, swinging, slow with the slowness of a thing that knows it can take forever to reach its destination, if need be. Six breasts; withered, dry dugs, two heads, two mouths snapping and spinning ropes of yellow drool. Her fingernails curled up into spirals. Matted hair burst from her multiple armpits and spread a thick shadowy forest about her loins, belly, and thighs.
“They say her skeleton was specially strengthened by the white brothers,” whispered the Marcus Garveyite. “Even so, she has to sleep in a pond of electrically warmed mud because if she lay down to sleep she would smother under the mass of her own transplants.”
The stench of rotting was overpowering.
Kansas Byrne watched horrified and transfixed. Pure awe. Pure theater.
The prophetess raised her arms; a throat mike caught her whispered name and threw it hissing like the rain around the amphitheater: Deevah … The biogas cressets flared into five-meter pillars of flame. Kansas Byrne broke into spontaneous applause. The Marcus Garveyite rested a hand on her arm—hush, be still. The prophetess squatted and settled her bulk to the pounded garbage floor. An acolyte slipped into the circle of fire, a willow-thin girl of sixteen or so dressed only in a very short
frilled skirt. Her only apparent modifications were a set of five nipples arranged down her prominent rib cage like buttons. She had the most wonderful pair of hands Kansas Byrne had ever seen.
“By the grace of the Panspermic Life-Force, Sister Deevah has again been visited with the Quickening, the mystic power all-surrounding, all-pervading, before all things, after all things, within all things, without all things”—her hands, her beautiful mantis-hands, described the dance of the double helix, the mimesis of the DNA molecule—“and her third eye opened to the Universal Biomass, she has reached into the racial past and the racial future of the worldsoul, the planet-mother, and one with the whole life of the earth and all other earths wound in the great double helix of consciousness, she will prophesy. For the life of the world and the life of Deevah are one; soul and cell. Thus supplicants, address your prophetess, you seekers of true life, and be answered. Number one!”
A spiritually shell-shocked yulp stood up, guiltily clutching slip number one. His hands were locked in a spastic nona dolorosa, his question a stammering beseeching for ambition, promotion, and a revolution in lifestyle that Kansas Byrne knew could never be answered positively. The five-nippled acolyte opened a small plastic case and removed a full hypodermic syringe. She paraded it around the perimeter of the arena so that everyone could see the way the flamelight shone through the red yulp blood. Then with a leap and a cry she danced across the ring of fire and plunged the needle into the Deevah’s back.
A cry of sheer dread spun from Kansas Byrne’s lips. A third time the hands of the Marcus Garveyite touched her to peace.