by John Clute
It was just humanfolk out for a stroll.
Nothing to alarm him.
He moved away from the landing deck, past primitive hypno booths and bowers, down a slow spiral walkway that led into an amphitheatre cut into the rock of the world, but roofed by frizzy glass which gave an ornate glow from far above. There were no sigils incising ads into unwary retinas. Trees blossomed, lifelike Human-Earth-style roses, on a long trellis, guided him deeper in. A toon sign implored him, though in blessed silence, to enjoy the show within. A structure loomed above the trees. He turned into a narrow glade, which was lined by a primitive tile frieze bedecked with commedia dell’arte masks whose faces spelled out the name of the theatre:
PATHOS EROTIKON.
At the end of the aisle of roses could be seen an entrance, a proscenium arch from the time when humans swarmed like honey bees across the planet which gave them birth, carved with figures of humans and beasts once deemed obscene, incised with an inscription — ‘Philoneikos gar ho theos’ — in yet another language Freer could not decipher.
—Kirtt?
—‘For the god loves conflict,’ Kirtt said, after the tiniest of pauses.
A hologram translation scrolled through a proscenium arch in Teardrop.
—So?
—It is a homily from Human Earth. It means ‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods’, Stinky, sort of thing.’
‘William Shakespeare, King Lear’ scrolled across the stage. Clearly Kirtt had consorted with the Universal Book that reposed in Glass Island. Text scrolled through Teardrop faster than Freer could read. Players strolled, mouthing deft imprecations. A storm loomed on a heath.
—Cruel world, murmured Freer. —Enough thank you, Book.
Teardrop cleared.
Between him and the emblazoned entrance a clutch of traditional representations of male and female homo sapiens genitalia blocked his way, the vulvas mouthing ads and odours the Sniffer blocked automatically, though a sudden flash of Ferocity Monthly-Niece filled Teardrop.
—Cancel cancel.
Teardrop cleared again.
—Kirtt, you’re giving in to chip, he said. —Keep me clean, please.
He dodged the vulvas, which pouted, walked through the proscenium arch, which debited Tile Dance, and stepped inside, where an ornate chair found him, conveyed him along a curved aisle and into the auditorium, where he asked for privacy. Instantly, he was canopied. There was a smell of blown stamens, horse sweat, garlic, pheromone aftershave, sex: a swirling mix of stinks other species assumed humans hankered after. He asked the chair to turn it down, though not off. Through irises he could view adjacent canopies — some of which were opaque, some transparent — where humans and other flesh sapients presumably sat, smelling their various homes. The harlequin masks of the humans shone in the dark. The humans gazed upon each other’s masks. It crossed Freer’s mind that he might copulate later, and his cache-sex cackled softly, but a jutting stage drew his attention.
The actors below him were clearly not flesh sapients, though they were wearing a parody of homo sapiens configuration: they were ‘dressed’ as motor cortex homunculi, with huge mobile lips and hands and feet and enormous genitals, their thin wispish torsos labouring under the extraordinary exaggeration of the extremities.
Freer smiled.
It was going to be obscene, for sure: the actors were not masked.
The motor cortex homunculi began a risque cabaret routine, featuring face-to-face conversations and even jokes. The frisson generated by this savage invasion of privacy was considerable. Several non-homo sapiens left their boxes in haste.
Obscenely, the actors then looked at the audience, their homunculi faces stark naked.
Freer carefully avoided eye contact at this point, even though they were only actors, not human beings. They soon began to pace through a less interesting parody of homo sapiens fucking, male to male, female to female, female to male indifferently, often switching, after the normal fashion of homo sapiens, penises lifting and distending painfully and penetrating vast smiling catacombsized assholes and vulvas, to the sound of a honky-tonk piano. At the corner of the stage, a lanky ragged-bearded man wearing an archaic interface helmet, which rather resembled a tin pot with landing lights, was pounding away at what seemed to be an archaic upright from before the dawn of digital. From the satchel on his back protruded several archaic rolls of sheet music.
This was all stimulating, in a small way, but not — certainly not after the face-to-face jokes, which had been genuinely threatening ― much of a show.
Onstage, it was beginning to end in tears. Orifices suddenly grew teeth and began to rip phalluses apart, while other phalluses grew greatly long and jousted, clumsily. Gross smacking lips closed over the bits that fell off, and the feast or Agape began. It was a satire. Human sex was nothing but cannibalism. A grim lesson indeed! There was not much variety after this, though blood flowed very copiously, and there was much screaming. It was hard to work out whether the show had been designed for humans, or was rumourmongering.
A pleasant breeze ruffled Freer’s thick dark hair, cooled his lean wiry form, roused his suppressant. There was an odour of roses, and something saline beneath the roses: like salt musk within a bower. The Sniffer snuggled against his cheek, twitching slightly in its preprogrammed slumber. Without its input, the scene seemed almost real.
For an instant, he seemed to fall asleep.
In orbit, the commander of the ark of the Harpe Kith continued with all the vigour that remained to them to prepare for death uneaten, unannealed, heads bowed in shame and grief, tails gummed into a humiliated starvation kowtow.
He was still in no condition to think straight, for his head mix had shorted. His heads dithered, freeing his eyes, his eyes looked the same way thrice. They had minds of their own! They banded together in dread unison, fixated without sideways obeisance to the Meal, without blinking — fatal! fatal! - fixated on the homo sapiens at the heart of the crisis that was to prove fatal to the Harpe, for he was about to bear a lens.
For long minutes the eyes of the commander did not blink into another thought. And then — again fatal! — he fixed on the lens, the rogue battle Mind, the Route-Only, Eolhxir itself.
Nothing joined.
So concentrated was his stare that over an hour had passed — four thousand Heartbeats as the homo sapiens counted time - before the commander realised with a spasm of starts the fatal error his eyes had committed.
He chewed themself back into control over his parts.
By then of course it was much too late.
Opsophagos was light-years distant.
The commander had insufficient stature to cancel the goons; he could not look far enough down into tail-death and find a knife to cut the skein of orders.
Too late too late too late!
But perhaps—
Perhaps he could command a local spasm, kill the homo sapiens while he was immobile.
Nothing ventured . . .
Too late too late too late! murmured, all the same, the shit-drenched tremor of his tales.
It is the end of the Harpe!
The Uncle Sam icon pulsed suddenly, and Kirtt began to rustle like hornets in his head.
—Stinky, said the ship Mind. —Stinky.
―Problem?
—I don’t know, Stinky. We’re chip here, it’s a gobbledegook world. The Uncle Sam lost you just now. Only a second or so, but you were gone, you were blocked. We had no geography on you.
Freer signalled Kirtt for a single channel; the Uncle Sam spider body disappeared.
—The Uncle Sam? he asked.
—Has no explanation. The Uncle Sam recommends instant return to Tile Dance.
—Fiddlesticks. There’s no point. I’m twenty minutes from docking country.
—The problem remains. You were lost for a second.
—So maybe let us find out why? What’s your evaluation of the Uncle Sam in action?
—As before. Loyal unto de
ath. Slicker than greased ice. Very experienced, savvy even in chip. Seasoned. Vast repertory. Bit of a prankster.
—But not about to go Loki.
—Of course not. Kirtt sounded almost miffed on behalf of his fellow Made Mind of ancient lineage. —We’re inside Trencher Law Well.
A sudden itching smallness clawed at the inside of Freer; he brought the Uncle Sam back into Teardrop. The arachnoid fistface seemed to be suffering a learning curve; its legs spasmed violently at the edge of Freer’s vision, menus fluttering; then it stilled.
—Okey—
But then the spider whitened, blinked out.
—Kirtt? The Uncle Sam is gone again.
But inside Freer’s head there was dead silence.
Kirtt was gone too.
The interference soup that moiled the inside of planets did sometimes scramble even Mind links, but Freer’s skin prickled all the same at the sensation of absence, even for a fraction of a second.
—Kirtt! Kirtt!
He was thinking as fast as he could.
His skin continued to prickle at the thought that the vast attentive gaze of Mind that was the very heart of Kirtt — where a totality aspect-model of Freer nestled like a secret twin — could even for a nanosecond or so abandon him, leave him in the rotting darkness of the flesh alone.
It felt as though he had entered an air pocket, and was falling. His ears hurt. He swallowed. There was a cawing in his lungs, eggs of air swelling up the bronchial passages.
—Kirtt?
It sometimes seemed to Freer that Kirtt knew him before he knew himself.
Something was happening for the first time.
Freer shouted for his Sniffer. Was it dead?
But it awoke whuffling, registering as usual at the edges of his sensorium as a very clever, very faithful dog, bright as a button though woofish; instantly it snuffled a complex array of Virtual Reality warnings into his brain, while simultaneously unveiling his eyes, clearing his sensorium of all artifacts and shared-reality compacts.
Freer saw nothing now but what was there.
He calmed himself.
The ensconcing chair he sat in, and the iridescent canopy that had given him his requested privacy, lost their lustre, became standard kit. The jutting stage proved essentially real, though sensurround. But the smell of roses faded right out, and the motor cortex homunculi wavered and dissipated, leaving visible several primitive robots, without a brain among them, which continued to dismantle each other.
On the stage, only the pianist seemed unaltered, though his honky-tonk piano had for some time — seconds? — been a concert grand, and the music he was playing was no longer what had seemed to Freer to be twentieth-century Common Era ragtime dredged out of the well of the past, from somewhere deep in the soil of human life before the long winter locked in on homo sapiens, before the planet-specific conditions necessary for human creative work — as they were for all other flesh sentients yet encountered - began to congest into plaque. The pianist was now - had he changed his tune, or had the Sniffer uncovered what he’d been playing from the first? — deep into something even more archaic, even more profoundly planetary, from a time when music flowed like water through the minds of homo sapiens. It was something Freer recognised — a sonata or toccata, he could not remember, he couldn’t ask Kirtt (his gut fluttered) - but it was music clearly native to a single instrument, music of the sort Kirtt had a habit of breathing through Tile Dance in quiet times.
The pianist glanced around jauntily at his audience.
Freer craned as well, now that he could see in clear, though without any augment, no gloss. As usual inside Trencher, where one was almost never out of sight of another body, numerous presences filled most of the available space, almost all of them homo sapiens, as this was a pink region, many of them in the flesh.
A number of sigilla were also visible, of various sigillum ilk, continuing to transmit the show back to their flesh owners: normal Pinks with their goofy wooden smiles, fronting homo sapiens; a Meccano Blue fronting a cluster of viewers from some stick species; a taller smoother Blue with four visible breasts and voluble mouth parts; another succulent endomorph Blue fronting a bipedal frond; a few Oranges with odd-numbered limbs and insect eyes; but also a cubical Orange with Blue and Pink highlights, marking the presence on Trencher of one of the rare genome packs.
An eidolon or two, glowing darkly, monitored the scene on behalf of some primitive planetbound Made Mind. There were no toon presences powerful enough to wade upstream against the Sniffer.
The air was close, dense with familiar smells; the breeze had been virtual. The real world of homo sapiens coated Freer like grease. He felt something like instant fatigue pain in the small of his back.
There was a flicker of eye contact; he blinked, startled.
The pianist seemed to be staring at him. His peculiar archaic helmet was flickering.
‘Mayday!’ shouted the pianist. ‘Mayday!’
And disappeared.
A ghostly white spider waved its legs within Teardrop, quickly filled in, gained colour, but tremblingly.
Freer’s eyes watered with relief.
—What’s happening? he said, very urgently.
—I was overridden, sirrah, said the Uncle Sam through its loyal fist of service unto death. —Sorry, nix sirrah. Oh shit.
—Kirtt? Kirtt!
—Kirtt is piggyback on me, I have calibre, said the Uncle Sam, —but the line is thin, impossible, assaulted all sides, bad noise—
Freer’s heart pounded.
—Uncle Sam?
Silence again, black snow.
He looked for a real-space exit. The walls were blank, rusty from old water.
The other members of the audience sat, waved cilia, pulsed, hummed, gaped as though nothing was about to happen. Clearly none of them were up to reality.
A knightly spider took shape in the snow.
—Sirrah? Shit.
The Uncle Sam sounded even more shaken.
—What’s happening?
—Massive pressure chin-chin kettle shut. Sorry.
—Re-sort yourself. Don’t panic. Remember you are chip. —Yes, sir.
—Are you functioning now?
—Yes, sir.
—Get us out of here.
—There is no way out.
—I came in a way in.
—Nevertheless, murmured the Uncle Sam, menus sagging. Freer looked around him. There was no way out. Where there had been an entrance was blank plastic.
—Augment.
—I am not linked to augment.
—Burn me out!
—Wait. My line is thickening.
Deep in stage left, a shimmy caught at Freer’s eye, an iris, a gust of wind. He thought for an instant he could see a tin pot flickering.
—It’s Morse code, came suddenly the inside voice of Kirtt. —The device is signalling us.
—God damn fuck where were you? said Freer.
—You were up shit creek, said Kirtt. —And all the sphincters were shut. Thank the Uncle Sam, he punched a line through. It took a while to find you.
—Morse code?
—The device is sending a message in Morse. I translate it as: This way to the egress. I suggest we follow its advice.
—After you, signed Freer.
—Update me, Stinky. What’s that kettle thing?
Freer shrugged.
—No idea, Kirtt.
Time to find out later, maybe.
He could see at the corner of Teardrop the arachnoid Uncle Sam doing some kind of orientation dance.
—This way, signalled the Uncle Sam, unfolding a map on Freer’s retina. —It would have been better had we initiated the other Mind. It is a Sense of Direction.
Freer clambered on to the stage, brushed past a claptrap newish limbless robot with a funnel vulva, paused at the iris, which cast an electric glow and buzzed.
—Hurry, said Kirtt and the Uncle Sam in unison.
He stepped t
hrough.
There was a whump behind him, and the wall sealed shut. The amphitheatre was opaquing. But he was out; he was standing no more than a hop, skip and jump from his waiting floater.
—Safe? he asked.
—I feel dizzy, signalled the Uncle Sam.
—Stay away from the floater, said Kirtt.
Freer ducked behind a waterfall and the floater blew up.
—Neat, said one of his voices.
—Okey dokey, said the other.
There was a woofing sound, almost subliminal. The Sniffer — an extremely expensive early model — was overheating. Freer glanced quickly sideways, and at the edge of his vision field could almost catch a glimpse of the Sniffer’s brown, intensely loyal ghost eyes.
He could smell its doggy breath.
He stood at the edge of the amphitheatre bulge, a vast fluted hairy tulip-shaped extrusion attached by a hundred yards of stem to the ornate arcade he’d debouched into half an hour earlier. There seemed something wrong with the lighting, and the air, which thickened and thinned, faster than seemed possible: as though the mast cells within the lungs of Trencher itself were seizing up.
—Get me out of here, Freer sang, almost audibly, a vocalise some eidolons were capable of reading from his throat as it pulsed: but flick security, he thought. I’m fucking underground.
And the sky is falling.
—You’re making waves, signalled Kirtt. —Try to calm down. The Sniffer is getting seasick.