New Worlds 4

by Edited By David Garnett

  They took his cash. They took his cards. They pissed on him and ran off.

  ‘Oh God,’ Johnny whispered. ‘Oh Jesus. Oh God. Oh Jesus I’m going to die.’ He retched, emptily, agonizingly. Ribs grated. He spat blood. A light shone in his eyes. Fingers of pain explored his body. Three fingers.

  ‘Oh fuck, Johnny.’

  ‘Seyamang.’

  ‘Don’t say anything. I’ll get an ambulance.’

  ‘No. No. Seyamang, no, don’t, I can’t go to hospital.’ Hospitals. Forms. Assault charges. Police investigations.

  ‘Johnny, come on ...’

  ‘I can’t tell you why, just believe me I can’t go to a hospital.’

  Shadows poured out of the recesses of his skull. Red-out. Sensory shutdown. His last conscious sensation was of being lifted by strong arms, and a feeling of warmth and security he had known only in childhood.

  ~ * ~

  Seyamang Erreth Huskravidi lived in a glassy, draughty garret flat above a Shi’an provisions store on The Mitre. Exploding from the reservation His Majesty’s government had granted them amongst the tumbled capitalist caryatids of Docklands, the Shi’ an were the latest in a succession of immigrant populations to move into the streets of Poplar and Westferry. First the European Jews, next the Chinese, then the Indo-Pakistani community, now, refugees from sixty light years away. Multiple births among the colonists - a biological modification to secure a self-sustaining genebase in the shortest time (space was large, even foreshortened by relativistic Mach drive: once down at ground zero the settlers were on their own) - sent the population soaring. To Johnny, looking down like a glass god on to the street beneath Seyamang’s light-filled flat, it seemed like a perpetual outdoor kindergarten. Tall, lithe Shi’an children dodged between the fluttering Sorority totems, chased each other around the nose-to-tailed cars, played vigorous football. Their screams and shouts and cries were oddly low-pitched and soft-edged.

  ‘Johnny.’

  He looked around, startled, and Seyamang took his picture.

  ‘Nice one, Johnny.’

  Waitressing for Moe was what she did, what she was was a photographer. And none of your point/squint/shoot/print videostill stuff either. Proper silver bromide, emulsion, developer and fixer photography. In black and white. ‘It’s such a beautiful medium,’ she had told him the second night, when he had gone around the flat inspecting her framed prints. ‘Absolute black, absolute white. Yet out of two irreconcilable opposites, everything can be envisioned. Lost art to us. More’s the pity. It takes us to come to Earth to rediscover it.’

  Shi’an technological society, the xenologists said, was eight thousand years old.

  Seyamang photographed children; her people’s children, caught unawares, spontaneous and candid, pulled out of the streets and closes of Westferry and slapped on to celluloid.

  ‘So?’ she had asked, fishing for compliments.

  ‘I like this one,’ Johnny had said, pointing out a poster-size colour still of the delicate geometry of a Shi’an interstellar ship poised against a starfield. She had wrinkled her nose: an alien moue of disappointment.

  ‘And this?’ Johnny had asked, picking up a piece of sculpture cast from liquid night. However he turned it in his fingers it seemed to flow sensuously into his hand, greedy for his grip.

  Seyamang had swiftly snatched it from him.

  ‘Don’t mess with it, Johnny. It’s dangerous.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Maser,’ Seyamang had said. ‘Microwave laser. The Motherhouse didn’t like the idea of me living all alone without any protection.’

  ‘Christ, Seyamang...’

  ‘I’ll never have to use it, so just forget about it, Johnny.’

  He almost succeeded.

  ‘How are the ribs?’ Seyamang asked. Hers were the strong, secure arms that had lifted him, carried him a mile and four flights of stairs, cleaned him, tended his wounds. Tethba was the name she gave this supernatural strength and endurance: a state of controlled rage the Shi’an could temporarily summon in extreme need. It did not come without price; utterly wasted, Seyamang had lain comatose where she fell on the mattress beside Johnny for a day and night.

  When Johnny winced in reply to her question, she produced a cup of coffee. She had bought it specially for him. Alcohol, most meats, certain perfumes - most notably Chanel - were deleterious to the Shi’an. But the things that took them high: Aspirin, tea, car exhaust, the smell of his best beloved leather jacket.

  ‘You know,’ Seyamang said, curling comfortably on to the window-seat in a way that looked extremely uncomfortable to Johnny, ‘I think we’re both exiles of a kind.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Johnny’s outward innocence masked a sudden ice blue needle of fear. What might he have said while he was unconscious, stammering, drooling, shouting in his sleep?

  ‘Outcasts from our people. Our communities. Our nations. Nothing behind us. No wall of lives. Separate.’

  Winterborn, she called herself, translating the Narha expression. A lost generation of one. She had been borm in the sixth month of the first subjective year of the World Ten Migration. Her mother, an outspace worker on the crew of Interstellar Sixty-Three, had conceived her in the last embers of the autumn sexual cycle before departure. A miscalculation. An oversight. An aberration. While her aberrant daughter rode her plastic tricycle along the gently curving corridors of Interstellar Sixty-Three and pestered the crew to play chasies with her, her father withered and grew old under eighty years of world-time.

  ‘I had no friends my age, no one to grow up alongside. No one to touch, no one to keep close and warm. All alone. Finding out by myself what it meant to be Shi’an. I was six Earth-years - eight of our own - before the Generation One children were born after the landing, by the time they hit puberty - we mature early, Johnny - I was old enough to be rearing a family of my own.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘My years, eighteen. Yours, fourteen.’

  Johnny, his childhood cluttered with siblings and life, tried to imagine Seyamang singing to herself as she steered her tricycle around the ranked and filed stasis coffins in which the settlers slept their five subjective years to World Ten. He could not encompass it.

  Seyamang had never known the pubescent same-sex crushes and attractions that drew Shi’an from their birth Sororities into new bonds and family partnerships. She had been swept by the pheromonal typhoon of the spring and autumn sexual cycles into fearful, half-comprehending couplings with men much older and more experienced than herself. Feeling wrong, feeling different, feeling not Shi’an, but not knowing what else she was, Seyamang withdrew from the Traveller community. Like some closed Soviet city, she was an internal exile; contained within her own people and society yet sealed off from them. Hearing the low soft cries of the children below, Johnny thought that maybe the streets of Shi’an Westferry were not so far from the kitchen-house terraces of Andystown. He had never belonged there, where they painted the kerb stones green, white and gold. A brother internal exile. He and Seyamang had new nationalities now, one that recognized no frontiers. The country of the dispossessed. A nation of sexual searchers. He reached out his two hands to touch hers. Her body was fever-hot, her bones and muscles lay in unfamiliar configurations beneath the terracotta skin. He tried not to think of Orlaith and of course could not. She seemed brutal and bovine, cheaply jerry-built next to this economical, compact, subtle alien. They all did, all the human women.

  He kissed her. Her mouth tasted of things he had only ever dreamed.

  She shook him away from her mouth; a redirection, not a rejection. She lifted her T-shirt, gently steered his mouth towards her nipples. Johnny needed no further urging. She whispered in Narha. The alien syllables were as exciting to Johnny as the taste of her flesh on his tongue.

  ‘I do love you, Seyamang.’

  ‘I always knew you were more than just a frook, Johnny-O. But I don’t know if I love you.’

  He pushed himself away fr
om her flesh, like a swimmer launching into deep water.

  ‘I know Shi’an love, Johnny, but I don’t know human love.’

  That night he brought three six-packs of Coors and a twenty-four carton of soluble aspirin from the last remaining Pakistani grocer in Westferry. He and Seyamang clinked glasses and got loud and joyful. Johnny tried to slip his hand into the waistband of Seyamang’s jeans and was firmly rebuffed.

  ‘I thought you loved me,’ Johnny retorted. A cowardly, man’s accusation.

  ‘This is difficult. Believe me, I want to fuck with you, very much, but I can’t. It’s not the right time. I’m not in season. You understand what that means?’

  Johnny’s head and penis both understood, though differently.

  ‘I try to imagine what it might be like to be you, Johnny; this state of permanent sexuality, but I can’t feel it. I try to extend the passion the ... fire ... of kesh so that it never ends, but I can’t. I can’t imagine how you could live like that all the time. We have love and we have sex. Sex is kesh, love is ... Love is what we feel for our friends, our partners, our Sorority sisters. Love is touching, and being touched.’ Again, that wrinkle of the nose. ‘So they say, Johnny. So they say.’

  Closed cities.

  ‘I want to love and have sex with you,’ said satyric Johnny.

  ‘So do I, Johnny. Believe me. I don’t want to lose you just because of sex,’ Seyamang said, soft-focused from the aspirin, dreamy. ‘Will you wait for me? Will you wait, can you wait, until I come into kesh?’

  ‘I will,’ he said.

  When Seyamang went to Moe’s on her spluttering, clunky moped, Johnny would arrive to work in the bright, airy flat, sketching out a work-plan for a Bible on a new home-anime system between prolonged stints of daytime TV watching. It was there, in a top-of-the-hour bulletin, between an item on French manicure and a phone-in on sexual harassment, that the television news reclaimed its hold on his life. He came back with his fifth decaff of the day to see two men walking down the steps of Paddington Green police station while the BBC’s legal correspondent informed him that two men from Northern Ireland had been released from detention under the Prevention of Terrorism Act without charge. Their names were given as Padraig McKeag from Lurgan and Anthony Woods from West Belfast. One of you is lying, Johnny Considine thought, because I know you are really called Mikey McDonagh. Last seen running from the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Seyamang asked, coming home late to find Johnny sitting in the unlit living room, channel-hopping between news reports on the handset.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m all right. Don’t worry. Go on, go to bed.’ He knew she knew he was lying.

  He asked her if he could stay with her, that night. On the couch, on the floor, it did not matter, just that he did not want to go back to his room.

  ‘Fuck, Johnny,’ Seyamang said, instantly awake at the sound of her name whispered in the four a.m. darkness. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  Johnny knelt penitently beside her mattress.

  ‘Can I move in, Seyamang? Properly?’

  ‘Sure, Johnny. Of course, Johnny. But in the morning, yes?’

  Safe. Mikey would never look for him among the aliens.

  When he went to collect his few possessions from his old flat, the street outside the church was busy with police cars and ambulances but they had come for someone other than Johnny Considine.

  ~ * ~

  Autumn as a sexual season startled Johnny, son of streets where no leaves ever fell, where seasons came and went unmarked in redbrick anonymity. Overnight the streets of Westferry and Poplar filled with a subtle but unmistakable frisson that gave a new and exciting gloss to all the old familiar places, as if he were discovering them for the very first time. From the databases he had accessed on Shi’an physiology, he knew intellectually that human males were susceptible to the mating pheromones, but to actually feel them stir his soul, awaken daylight fantasies and dark night dreams of meat and sweat, was terrible yet liberating. His hindbrain growled. Ancient animal, awake.

  When he woke in the night from his terracotta nightmares it was to the sound of music and voices from the street below. Shi’an males, battle-dancing, scoring complex coup on each other on impromptu dancefloors in highly stylized combats for sexual dominance. He would watch the leaping figures silhouetted against burning naphtha flares, unquiet in himself, feeling that here, in the trashlit street, was life, true life, life in all its fullness and his Johnny Considineness was only a pale projection on a pane of window glass.

  Seyamang, too, changed with the season. Her skin darkened. She took to going about the flat stripped down to a pair of shiny black cycling shorts, asking Johnny how he could stick the heat. Her nipples were permanently erect. She was anxious, irritable, temperamental, forgetful, a whirlwind of impatience and activity, playing her incomprehensible Shi’an music far too loud, far too late, dancing edgily around the living room, smiling spasmodically at her photographs of children. She slept little, ate less. She smelled. It pervaded every corner of the apartment, part musk, part mould, part wild abandon. It lifted the hair along Johnny’s spine. He lived in a permanent state of priapism. Terrified, exhilarated, he watched Seyamang come into kesh. She had never seemed more alien. He had never desired her more.

  On the ninth night of the autumn season he came back from the wee shop, as he called it, to find her swaying entranced to her favourite piece of music playing at slate-dislodging volumes. Her body was patterned with signs and symbols in lip-gloss and fluorescent felt-marker.

  ‘Johnny,’ she shouted over the music, reaching out to press her body against his, ‘dance with me. Please, Johnny.’ She buried her nose in the folds of his leather jacket. ‘Ooooh. Did you wear it just for me?’ Trembling, Johnny ran his hand over her head fur.

  She kissed him, the mouth-kiss of humans and the nipple-kiss of the Shi’an. Her hunger simply overpowered him. His lovemaking with Orlaith, with all the girls whose panties he had fumbled his way into, was no preparation for Seyamang. He was a virgin again. Everything had to be relearned. Her desire was urgent, yet she held back so they might explore each other. The slow engorgement of his penis caused her especial surprise and delight. ‘Always exposed, always vulnerable,’ she said with child-like wonder. Similarly wonderful to him the star-shaped pucker beneath a retractable hood of freckled skin that was her vagina. Higher than a human woman’s, its lips and lining were so sensitive that a breath was enough to send her reeling and moaning in Narha. She marvelled at his pubic hair, twisted it between her fingers; she explored the curves and ridges of his erection. He slipped a moistened finger into her anus. She yelped in surprise, then crooned with pleasure; she coated him from head to toe with sweet-scented saliva. New erogenous geographies were mapped. New orientations established.

  Johnny wanted to weep. Johnny wanted to crow. Sex had broken the bounds of self-consciousness that had always before constrained him. He could lose himself, he could give himself, because they were aliens to each other. He felt inebriated with freedom. Yet in the mating that night, each successive night, he knew he had only entered the shallow waters of Seyamang’s sexual hunger. And a new dread arose. Could he go back to celibacy when the season ended and the kesh energy burned itself out?

  Moe had given Seyamang time off from the diner; enlightened self-interest; in her current hormonal climate she would have converted every male customer into a potential frook. Contained by the glass walls of the flat, she fretted, she fussed. Between bouts of sex she was unapproachable and moody, pressing her hands and face to the tall windows and staring at the figures in the street for hours on end.

  ‘Is it the dancing?’ Johnny asked, resting his hands on her shoulders. Always, the heat. She shrugged: a Shi’an yes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s not you, Johnny. You’re good. You’re great. It’s me. My fucking chemicals. My hormonal destiny. I’m not as free as I like to think I am.’

  ‘Do you
want to go?’

  ‘Would you mind?’

  Yes. ‘No. I don’t mind.’ Liar. ‘You go, if it’ll make you happy.’

  She mouth-kissed him. ‘Thank you, Johnny. Thank you.’

  He watched her ride off on her moped and turn the corner into Newell Street. He raged silently around her flat filled with her smell and her pictures of unsmiling Shi’an children. Whatever was drinkable he drank. He watched the sunset. He watched the lights of aircraft coming in across Docklands on final approach to Heathrow. He listened to the distant drums from the dancefloors. Sick in his heart he went to Moe’s and his old, private, Naugahyde booth and drank until closing time.