by Jeter, K W
He slid slowly backward, the tips of his fingers burning across the rough sidewalk. His fingernails caught in a hairline crack, stopping him momentarily, until the street’s suction built up again as more dead hands clutched at him. Across the width of the sidewalk he could see the bars of Dr. Adder’s black iron gates, impossible to reach, and beyond them his silent motorcycle and the building’s front door. “Please,” he whispered deliriously at the sight, the exhaustion of his strength dimming his eyes with slowly expanding dark circles.
The iron gates parted and began, half real-time, to swing toward him. They stopped only a couple of feet from him. The pull behind him increased hungrily—he could feel the edges of the crack in the sidewalk begin to crumble beneath his clawlike fingers. If I reach for the gate, he thought, and miss, I’ll fall back into the street and die forever.
With his last strength he lunged for the black iron bars. His panic almost overwhelmed him into unconsciousness as he felt himself being dragged back as his hands flew for the gate. One hand caught, the other missing, then catching hold. He tried to pull himself up, but only enough strength remained to cling, gasping, to the bars.
The gates slowly started to swing shut, the half he was clinging to drawing him with it across the sidewalk. Dazed, he could see his lifeless lower body emerging from the grip of the street’s corpses. When his feet were free and out of reach from the street, he dropped from the gate and lay panting on the sidewalk. The denizens of the pseudo-interface stepped over him, zombielike. They had stopped, somehow automatically, for the gates’ motion, and now resumed their dreamlike parade.
Gradually, he felt the life flowing back into his body, his mind too exhausted to think anything. When the sensation had returned to his legs and only his feet remained covered with blood, the puslike substance having melted without a trace from the rest of his body, he sat up on the sidewalk. His shoulders jostled by the passing walkers, he drew out on impulse the plastic radio and switched it on. A last fragment of music faded away.
“And that,” said the voice of KCID cheerfully, “was the first movement of Mahler’s Lied. Playing time of eight minutes, three seconds, in case any of my listeners out there are keeping a clock on their daily activities. Better hurry, too, folks; I’m sure we’ve all got a busy day ahead of us—I know I do!” More music began as Limmit switched off the radio.
He wriggled his now-living toes inside his boots, then stood up shakily. He pushed his way through the crowd and slipped inside the black iron gates.
Upstairs, Adder sat behind his desk in the dimly lit office. As Limmit opened the door and peered in, he could see Adder and a young girl sitting in the chair beside the desk. There was something familiar about the girl; her eyes followed him as he stepped inside the room. It’s Melia, he realized, the image she made for herself.
“I’m sorry about what happened in the street,” said Adder as Limmit approached the desk. “If I had been aware of your presence I could have helped you sooner.”
Limmit pulled another chair in front of the desk and collapsed into it, Adder watching him expressionlessly. He’s not here, thought Limmit, gazing into the cold, distance-filled eyes. Not all of him.
“That’s right,” said Adder, passing a hand slowly across his brow. “What’s behind the desk is only a fraction of me. The ADR activates nearly the entire cerebral capacity, or at least it’s doing so with Mox and myself. Because of relative ego strength you and Melia are only observers in this world created by us.” He paused and turned his head slightly as if listening to some inaudible signal. Then the penetrating gaze settled back onto Limmit.
“Mox,” blurted Limmit. “I recognized him on the TV back in Rattown. He’s Lester Gass. My father.”
Adder received the information impassively. “I was beginning to suspect as much,” he said calmly. “Though it’s best that I know for sure.” He gazed over Limmit’s head toward the window opposite. “So many things have become clear.”
Limmit sensed something happening behind him. He turned in his chair and saw the window expanding and growing nearer, condensing like a telephoto lens the debris-littered space between it and the desk. The window rushed up until Limmit felt himself at the edge of a precipice; Melia, a few feet away, gazed unafraid at the view of the Interface.
“Interface,” said Adder, “between Mox and myself. It’s a parallel of the world we created between us in reality. His force and mine wrestle down there, stasis and action. Only, he can’t make the corpses in the street completely dead, and I can’t make the walkers on either side alive. But the struggle is real —you know that, Limmit, from being down there among them.
“All this,” he continued, pointing his hand at the gaping window, “is either him or me. Only this is already starting to pass away—the ADR is penetrating the layers of our conscious minds, carrying us closer to the animal layers beneath. Look,” he commanded.
Trembling, Limmit peered out the window. Below, the buildings lining the Interface had become indistinct, blurring, changing into mountains of earth and rock-cliff faces. Between two banks on which subhuman figures crawled mechanically, reptilian forms thrashed in a stagnating river of the white fluid.
“Soon that whole metaphor, the one of a physical Interface between us, will go,” said Adder faintly. “The ADR’s depth increases geometrically. Soon we’ll be down right into the cellular level, the struggle between energy and nonenergy. Look at the sky,” he commanded again.
Limmit looked up and saw there was none. Only a vast field of flames overhead, curling and writhing through a dead-black, tangible vacuum. The abstract, moiling battle spread until nothing but the churning flames and extinguishing vacuum could be seen from the window.
“It’s draining me of too much effort,” said Adder, his voice growing distant, “to maintain this image here.” Limmit looked around him and saw the walls and furniture becoming murky, like a pencil drawing fading with erasure. The details of Adder’s face were becoming indistinct, a line drawing showing only the sharp edge of his profile. “I need everything for out there,” the figure continued. “Mox and I are more evenly matched than either of us would have thought.”
“But what about us?” cried Limmit. He could feel alternating blasts of searing heat and cold from behind him—the glass had already disappeared. “What are Melia and I to do?” He glanced at the girl. She sat calmly upon her shadowy chair, the same expression of trust and love that he had seen on her blind face in Rattown.
“I can’t help you,” said the almost completely faded image of Adder. “You do have some control, some power here, though not much. Maybe together you can make some kind of shell, a protection to ride out the storm in. Of course, if Mox wins, it won’t do you much good. You’ll die just seconds after I do.” The last outlines of the image wavered, then winked out. “... luck ...” whispered the air filling the space where he had been.
Around Limmit and the girl the remains of the office started to shrink and run as if melting. The faces in the skin magazines withered and disappeared.
The phone rang. Edgar picked up the extension in the living room, still keeping his eyes on the television screen. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “I’ve been watching it all along. He’s alive. I don’t know—somehow.” Pause. “Yeah, that’s what I was going to do, too. Before it’s all over.” He replaced the receiver and glanced at the churning screen. The sharp, violent images of Dr. Adder had gradually abstracted themselves into this visual inferno. Edgar nodded knowingly at the screen, as if it were reminding him of something, then picked through the cut-glass candy dish for the last remaining amphetamine-analogs. His muscles quivered for a second as the outnumbering blue capsules overpowered the barbiturate, seemingly filling him with energy to the bursting point.
Methodically, he took the ornate cigarette lighter from the coffee table and carried it farther back into the conapt. With it he set fire to the large bed his mother lay unconscious upon. He closed the bedroom door behind him. After
starting other fires in all the rooms, he ended by setting the lighter to the drapes and furniture surrounding the television set. He watched the flames for a moment, then dropped the lighter to the floor and ran out.
He pressed his palms fiat against the outside of the front door, feeling the heat building up inside. Far down the hallway he could see other doors blackening and bursting into flames. He tore himself away convulsively and ran for the elevator, trembling with an excitement greater than that the blue capsules had given him. On the television screen inside, the flames were seemingly being mirrored. The whore on the bed in Rattown watched them intently, over the shoulder of Mr. Endpoint of Orange County, who, his passion spent, had fallen asleep upon her breast. She was hardly aware of his flabby weight—she was listening to the phosphor-dot flames. It was as if they were burning through layer after layer of dreams and visions that had encrusted around her like a pearl, until they reached the small, hard core in the center.
Endpoint didn’t wake up until he felt the fingers at his throat, the nails grown long and sharp with inactivity. If he had been able to hear as the surprisingly strong hands tore open his throat like pulpy fruit, he might have recognized the voice that told him any father would suffice, if not the particular father who had driven his oldest son to the Interface to have his sex changed (as with so many other of the whores on that street), the beginning of a voluntary victim’s long descent. Above the two blood-washed figures on the bed, the flames on the television screen writhed. Milch held his hands a few inches away from the small television set, thinking he could perhaps feel the heat from them. He straightened up from the set sitting on the walkway of the empty warehouse, his rifle slung across his back.
He peeked into the cubicle, nodding in satisfaction at the three unconscious figures bound together at the arms. He didn’t understand, but was willing to go on faith. Outside the cubicle, he stepped over the figures of Azusa and two others, crumpled and bloody in death, their rifles pinned beneath them. I knew, he thought, that I should never have listened to that fucker Azusa. He felt a little ashamed now for the doubts he once had. It was a good thing he and the others who had kept on believing had caught the images on the TV, and been able to track Azusa and his men to this place, after Azusa’s scout hadn’t reported in. Kicking at the short figure’s blood-crusted head, he watched the flames’ small image on the television by the guardrail. Let the others, he thought, celebrate. I’ll wait here until he awakens, comes back to his body. I should have had faith, he brooded fiercely. All things will change again—that’s what the flames mean. He glanced back through the door of the cubicle, in an almost childlike agony of fear and hope.
The female geriatric whimpered and backed away from the fire-wreathed door, one scarred leg dragging behind her, until she reached the window and screamed down at the milling youths, their faces stark-lit by torches and small televisions. Somewhere else, beneath an artificial mountain, the figures of dead whores coupled amidst the fires, their plastic skin melting into unknown genitals. As, to the north, a storage annex burned and collapsed, blocks away from Orange County Broadcast Central, the lips of a short, white-haired mannequin vaporized and revealed a momentary grinning rictus.
Limmit and Melia crouched together in the small shell they had formed around themselves. Like an egg, thought Limmit, in a furnace. “How much longer?” he wondered aloud, feeling on his back the alternating penetrations of heat and cold.
“Things must come to a conclusion,” said the girl evenly. “He explained it to me. The ADR requires a cathartic expenditure of psychic energy before it dissipates out of our bloodstreams.” She looked abstractedly at the shell’s thin skin.
Christ, thought Limmit miserably. We’re going to die right here, fry or be frozen before the battle’s even over. If he wins, only Adder will wake up. And if he doesn’t win.... Limmit shuddered convulsively. “How the fuck can you be so calm,” he shouted at the girl, “when—”
“Quiet,” she ordered, her face taut. “Listen.”
Outside the shell the furious roars and silence of the struggle between Adder and Mox had ceased: there was only a barely audible, tension-filled thrumming, extending from the subsonic through all the pitches between to the hypersonic. “Is it over?” whispered Limmit.
“No,” said the girl, intently listening to something more than the thrumming sound. “He and Mox are deadlocked, their forces equal. I can tell; I’m closer to him than you are.” A section of the shell grew transparent, reminding Limmit of the window in Adder’s vanished office.
The flames and contorted vacuum were frozen, moving imperceptibly if at all. “You mean this is it?” said Limmit, a slow horror growing within him. “We’re never coming out of this? It’ll be like this forever?”
“No,” snapped the girl, turning a suddenly fierce and impassioned face on him. “Don’t you see? A deadlock means Mox will win in just a few moments. Mox’s strength is limitless, he’s part of the computer banks, but Adder’s strength will start to weaken and die eventually, along with his body back in L.A.” She turned back to the shell’s transparent section.
“Don’t open that,” shouted Limmit as he saw what she was doing. “You’ll weaken it!” He dragged her as far away as he could from the section.
“I’m going to him!” she screamed as she pounded on his chest with her small fists. “He needs me, like he did before!” “Don’t be an idiot,” said Limmit, struggling to control her flailing limbs. “You’ll just die out there—what kind of strength like that could you have?”
“More than you, chickenshit!” The shell was instantly covered with a net of hairline fractures, then started splitting apart into fragments.
Limmit released her in sudden panic, feeling himself suspended, helpless, over the abyss. He had one glimpse of her image shooting away in a long, arcing fall, before the fear closed his eyes and squeezed him into a fetal ball. There was no protection for him now, the last lucid portion of his mind realized, even if Melia could help Adder.
The vibration grew louder and more intense, and he felt the first layers of his skin start to peel away.
His blood seeped away into the flames. Not fire, but warmth enveloped him. Blind, he felt himself still alive, immersed in a greater blood that pulsed with electricity.
It's his blood. The thought broke through Limmit’s fear as he hung suspended, motionless. My father's. The same as mine.
Without sight, he felt his father’s blood penetrating to his center, seeking the spark of energy there. A blood tie, thought Limmit. He wants me to join him, be him. Live forever when we win this fight. The comforting warmth narrowed closer to his spine.
This is what you really wanted. A whispering thought that he could barely tell from his own. To become your father.
“No.” Limmit spoke and the blood lapped against his teeth. The hate swelled out of the pit of his stomach, as the warmth around him hissed like steam and drew away. “We’re not the same blood!” He spat out the choking mouthful. “You die—not me.”
He uncoiled himself, his hands ripping through the darkness. The whisper that he’d heard, his father’s voice, screamed with its own hatred and pain at the wound his son tore open.
Then Limmit felt himself outside his father again, no longer held suspended in blood, but falling into flames.
❖
“I came to, eventually, in the warehouse.”
“How did you feel?” asked Mary. She watched Limmit’s profile, turned away from her. Perhaps the conversation could be prolonged. They were sitting in the little room in Rattown they had shared for a little while, she on the bed and he on the chair beside it. He had come to look for something (he had said) and had found her there.
“Like shit,” he said. “Trembling all over. I could barely walk. Adder, though, had come out of the ADR a few minutes before, and was sitting there, calm and steady as possible. Relaxed, even. The girl was dead, her hand still strapped to the TV.” He paused and studied his own hands, won
dering for a second if the tremor would ever go away completely. “There’s a certain unconscious spark, a force of will, that keeps your heart beating and stuff, keeps you alive. It’s what pulled me through after all the rest had been burned away. That’s what she gave him, at the end. It was enough, I guess. Mox was dead even before Broadcast Central went up.” He fell silent, then turned and saw her regarding him with her large, now unsmiling eyes. “What are you going to do now?” he asked.
She looked away, to the room’s grimy window. Through it floated spasmodic and distant sounds. “I might go back,” she said, “rejoin Anna Manfred. If there’s any of the Midwestern Liberation Front left. There’s nothing possible for me to do in L.A. now—I saw some of the things that were on the TV last night, and how the Rattowners reacted to it.”
Another silence stiffened around them for several seconds. “Coming here,” said Limmit, “I ran into Droit. He told me that Mother Endure has started to lead most of her downers into the sewers below. Those that would still go with her. He said he was getting ready to go down into the Sump Line himself. Heading up north—beyond the Visitor. Not that he had ever heard of there being anything up there.” He paused, seemingly unable to extract any more words to drop into the vacuum. He inclined his head at the yellow plastic radio softly humming on the window sill. “Is that the right frequency?”