In this unlikely posture, the boy fell asleep. Or, at least, consciousness left him.
When Cory awoke, his ears were buzzing, but the whirlwind had ceased. He pulled his head out of the rough spout in the concrete and found that he could comfortably breathe. He crawled out from behind the old gas water heater. An eerie kind of darkness held the day, but he could see again, as if through blowing smoke or murky water. Parts of the basement ceiling had fallen in, but all the walls were standing, and on them, as dim as the markings on the bottom of a scummy swimming pool, wavered the childish symbols that he had brushed and spray-painted onto the cement. Soot and grime dusted his handiwork, giving a disheartening dinginess to the latex yellow that a while ago—an hour, a day, a millennium—had shouted God’s glory at him. Soot and dust drifted around the dry sump of the basement like airborne chaff in the granary of a farm in western Kansas.
He looked up. The staircase had collapsed, and the door that he had pounded on, well, that door no longer occupied the doorjamb framing an empty portal at the top of the fallen stairs. In fact, the doorjamb was gone. Where it should have stood, a refrigerator slouched, its hind rollers hanging off the edge of the oddly canted floor. How it had wound up in that place, in that position, Cory could not clearly say, but because the walls of the upper portions of the house had evaporated, along with the ceiling, the furniture, and its human occupants, he did not spend much time worrying about the recent adventures of the parboiled refrigerator. High above the ruins of the house, the sky looked like a crazy-quilt marbling of curdled mayonnaise and cold cocoa and dissolving cotton candy and burnt tomato paste. Yucky-weird, all of it.
Just as gut-flopping as the sky, everything stank and distant moans overlay the ticks of scalded metal or occasionally pierced the soft static of down-sifting black snow. Although summer, this snow was slanting out of the nightmare sky. Appropriately, it was nightmare snow, flakes like tarnished-silver cinders, as acrid as gunpowder, each cinder the size of a weightless nickel, quarter, or fifty-cent piece. Right now, the boy was sheltered from their fall by a swag-bellied warp of ceiling, but he had made up his mind to climb out of the basement and to go walking bareheaded through the evil ebony storm.
Bareheaded, barechested, and barefoot.
Before the GrayLanders came.
Which they surely would, now that the grownups, by flattening everything, had made their tunneling task so much the easier. One of the outer basement walls had already begun to crumble. It would be a relaxing breaststroke for the Clay People, Earth Zombies, or Bone Puppets to come weaving their cold molecules through that airy stuff. And they had to be on their way.
Cory got out of the basement. It took a while, but by mounting the staircase rubble and leaping for the edge of the floor near the teetering refrigerator and pulling himself up to chin height and painstakingly boosting one leg over, he was finally able to stand on the tilting floor. Then, propellering his arms to maintain his balance, he watched with astonished sidelong glances as his Aunt Clara’s big Amana toppled from its perch and dropped like a bomb into the staircase ruins below it. A geyser of dust rose to meet the down-whirling cinders.
But he kept from falling, and looked around, and saw that no longer did the tall buildings of Denver, whose tops it had once been easy to see from his aunt and uncle’s neighborhood, command the landscape, which had been horribly transfigured. Debris and charred dead people and blasted trees and melted automobiles lay about the boy in every direction, and the mountains to the west, although still there, were veiled by the photogenic-negative snowfall, polarized phosphor dots of lilting deadliness.
Cory pulled his vision back from the mountains. “Mommy!” he cried. “Mommy!” Because he had no reasonable hope of an answer in this unrecognizable place, he started walking. Some of the burnt lumps in the rubble were probably all that remained of certain people he had known, but he had no wish to kneel beside them to check out this nauseating hunch. Instead, he walked. And it was like walking through a dump the dimensions of…well, of Denver itself. Maybe it was even bigger than that. The ubiquitous black snow and the yucky-weird sky suggested as much.
And then he saw his first GrayLander. The sight made him halt, clench his fists, and let go of a harsh yelping scream that scalded his throat the way that the down-whirling cinders had begun to burn his skin. The GrayLander paid him no mind, and although he wanted to scream again, he could not force his blistered voicebox to do as he bid it. For which reason, frozen to the plane of crazed asphalt over which he had been picking his way, Cory simply gaped.
Well over six feet tall, the GrayLander was almost as naked as he. The boy could not tell if it were Clay Person, Earth Zombie, or Bone Puppet—it seemed to be a little of all three, if not actually a hybrid of other ugly gray-smelling ogres of which he had never even dreamed. The GrayLander’s ungainly head looked like a great boiled cauliflower, or maybe a deflated basketball smeared with some kind of milky paste. If the creature had eyes, Cory could not see them, for its brow, an almost iridescent purple ridge in the surrounding milkiness, overlapped the sockets where most earth-born animals would have eyes. The creature’s heavy lips, each of which reminded Cory of albino versions of the leeches that sometimes attacked people in television horror movies, were moving, ever moving, like greasy toy-tank treads that have slipped off their grooves. Maybe it had heard the boy approach—the huge, stunned creature—for it turned toward him and pushed an alien noise from between its alien lips.
“Haowah meh,” it said. “Haowah men.”
When it turned, the purple-gray skin on its breasts, belly, and thighs slumped like hotel draperies accidentally tilted off their ends. Cory took a careful step back. One of the monster’s arms showed more bone below the elbow than flesh, as did its leg below the knee on the same side. Pale lips still moving, the GrayLander extended its other arm toward the boy, the arm that might almost have been mistaken for a man’s, and opened its blackened paw to reveal a tiny glistening spheroid. The monster shoved this object at Cory, as if urging him either to contemplate it at length or to take it as a memento of their meeting.
Squinting at the object in the unceasing rain of cinders, Cory understood that it was an eyeball. The GrayLander, blind, wanted him to have its eyeball. Just as he had suspected, the GrayLanders whom he had been waiting to come after him were sightless. They had eyes, apparently, but years of living in the dark, ignoring the realms of light just above their heads, had robbed their optical equipment of the ability to see. What, then, could be more useless than the gift of a GrayLander’s eyeball? Cory was outraged. The whirlwind had finally freed this stupid creature—and all its equally ugly relatives wandering like a benumbed zombies across the blasted landscape—from its subterranean darkness, and it was trying to give him something that had never been of the least value to itself or to any of its kind.
“Haoweh meh,” it said again.
The boy’s anger overcame his fear. He jumped forward, snatched the eye from the monster’s paw, and flung it off the hideous body of the GrayLander so that it bounced back at him like the tiny red ball connected to a bolo paddle by a rubber tether.
Then, knowing nothing at all about where he was going or what he would do when he got there, Cory began to run. The dump that Denver and its suburbs had become seemed too big to escape easily, but he had to try, and he had to try in spite of the fact that as he ran many of the yucky GrayLanders loitering bewilderedly in the rubble called to him to stop—to stop and help them, to stop and share both their pain and their bewilderment. Cory would not stop. He was angry with the blind monsters. They were people in disguise, people just like his dead mommy, his dead aunt and uncle, and his dead cousins. He was angry with them because they had fooled him. All along, he had been living among the GrayLanders and they had never once—until now—stepped forward to let him know that, under their skins, they and their human counterparts were absolutely identical.
Fire Zone Emerald
by Lucius Shepard
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Introduction
Lucius Shepard brought the third world to science fiction.
Ever since it began as a publishing category in the United States, American science fiction has been astonishingly chauvinistic. The overwhelming majority of the old pulp space operas had Americans in every good-guy role. Bad humans and bad aliens (good aliens were rare) all acted like Nazis or Communists—and all were certainly foreign.
In the “Golden Age,” dominated by the twin influences of editor John W. Campbell and author Robert A. Heinlein, scientific and technological accuracy replaced sheer adventure as the determinant of what made science fiction valid. But the American sensibility only narrowed. The “competent man” who starred in most Astounding stories (and virtually every story by Robert Heinlein) was invariably the great-grandson of the Connecticut Yankee. He always saw the world through the eyes of a cheerful, skeptical, individualistic New Englander who could make or fix anything once he set his mind to it.
As the authors of the forties and fifties created their collective version of the future, the dominant vision was of an outer space run by Yankees. And when America put its boys into space and onto the moon, they did their best to live up to the image science fiction had created. Of course we had to be first on the moon! Everybody knew Americans belonged there!
That bright-eyed American image was shattered during the New Wave of the 1960s, echoing the attitudes of the American Left during the Vietnam War. Yet still, to an astonishing degree, American writers still peopled even their ugly futures with Yankee heroes. The difference was that now the bad guys were Americans, too.
Even with Bruce Sterling’s call for diamond-hard science fiction that recognized the existence of a wider world, most Cyberpunks still persisted in dealing only with those parts of the third world that had been most Americanized—most technologized, urbanized, skyscrapered, wired, incorporated and bureaucratized.
Lucius Shepard didn’t experience America the way most American writers do. He didn’t begin his fiction career knowing only the landscape of the American popular writer: the mythos of the whitewashed American farmhouse or the reality of Old McDonald’s suburbia. Nor was he limited to the landscape of the American academic-literary writer, whose world generally includes only the university and Manhattan Island. The writers of the American South found a way to diverge from these patterns, only to fall into ruts of their own. Their awareness stopped long before they reached the Rio Grande. Shepard’s didn’t.
Shepard has spent many years of his life living among the poor on an island off the Honduran Coast. He was a journalist, but did not function as most American journalists do, hanging around the cities, clinging to the American amenities that in most third-world countries are found only among the urban rich. He lived among the Honduran people, and lived as they lived, until he became so much a part of their lives that they stopped seeing him as particularly foreign, but rather regarded him as something of a neighbor, even a friend.
He learned to see Americans as others see us. He saw the picture that we present, particularly in Latin America, where we are represented almost exclusively by gawking tourists who don’t speak the language, journalists who clearly despise and avoid the common people, and, most loathsomely, the white men who come there to do business—which invariably means extracting great profit from the poverty of desperately underpaid workers.
Shepard knows that this vision is not accurate—that most of the folk of Latin America would probably not resent, envy, and despise most of the folk of the United States. The trouble is, the common people never get to know each other. And while the view of America that Shepard’s Honduran neighbors have is not accurate, it is true. That is, as long as the U.S. officially treats Latin America as colonies over which we may exercise ultimate authority without any responsibility for the consequences of our self-centered decisions, then the people of those nations are not wrong to regard us as a nation of tourists, who come to stare and be amused; journalists, who come to take pictures of the sort of scenes that Latin Americans are least proud of, in order to shame these proud people before the rest of the world; and businessmen, who come to steal. Since that is what the U.S. sends to them, that is what we truly are to them.
In Central America and the Caribbean, there is one more kind of American they know very well: Soldiers. Marines. To them, behind all the tourists and journalists and businessmen, there is the iron fist that makes sure these banana and sugar and coffee “republics” don’t make too much trouble. Oh, pardon me—my mistake—the soldiers go to help keep these little nations safe from Communism! Or anyway, that’s the latest reason given.
Most Americans have forgotten—or never knew—that our soldiers used to go in at the behest of the United Fruit Company or Texaco or the dictator who guaranteed American interests. When we have sent troops there in the past, it has cost us almost nothing. We hardly noticed. But the citizens of these countries are well aware that American intervention has almost always cost them dearly, both in freedom and in economic wellbeing. They have groaned under the dictators who killed their children with the guns we sold them, who tortured them in prisons built with the few profits we allowed to stay in their country. To us, these things were unnoticeably minor; to them, they were devastating, unforgettable.
Like the American Navy boys who, playing tourist in Havana, pissed at the base of the statue of Marti and climbed up and sat on his head. They were drunk. They were having fun. It never occurred to them that to proud Cubans—which is all Cubans—they were desecrating the honor of the man who was their George Washington, their Patrick Henry, their Thomas Jefferson. The Cuban police were able to protect the sailors so they could get back to their ship without being torn apart by the humiliated, outraged crowd that had witnessed their act. The American ambassador tried to make amends. He laid a wreath at the statue of Marti. To the Cubans, this gesture could only seem offensivly patronizing, for the sailors remained unpunished.
The punishment finally came, vicariously, at the Bay of Pigs.
Lucius Shepard has written many kinds of stories: the delicate fantasy of “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” still my favorite of his works; comedy; horror; and strange stories that fit no category. But the stories that first attracted wide attention, that seared the conscience of his readers, were the tales set in a future Central American war. Most readers responded primarily to the echoes of Vietnam or the implied political statements about Nicaragua and the contras—most read these tales, in other words, as American stories.
But unconsciously, like it or not, we received another message as well. We began to see Hondurans and Salvadorans and Nicaraguans, not as a backdrop, but in the foreground. We began to see them as they see themselves, with the nobility and honor and pride that sustains them; we began to understand them without requiring them to resemble us. Lucius Shepard introduced us to the real aliens—the rest of humanity, which does not speak our language or share our values, which does not respect our naive faith that technological superiority will save us. They are more likely to pray for rescue to a Virgin or saint whose image is but thinly laid over the terrible, powerful gods of the Mayas and Aztecs or of the Guinea coast. Shepard’s stories tell us that their prayers are as likely to be answered as our own.
Shepard’s stories show us what only Cortés among the conquerors clearly understood—that these people are too powerful and beautiful to be converted or destroyed. They will absorb many blows, but each would-be conqueror will either go away, leaving them unchanged, or live among them, until their grandchildren or great-grandchildren are absorbed. We’ve been at the Caribbean conquest business for only a century. It took the Spanish three hundred years to learn their lesson. Maybe we’ll be quicker.
“Ain’t it weird, soldier boy?” said the voice in Quinn’s ear. “There you are, strollin’ along in that little ol’ green suit of armor, feelin’ all cool and killproof…and wham! You’re down and hurtin’ bad. Gotta admit, though, them suits do a job
. Can’t recall nobody steppin’ onna mine and comin’ through it as good as you.”
Quinn shook his head to clear the cobwebs. His helmet rattled, which was not good news. He doubted any of the connections to the computer in his backpack were still intact. But at least he could move his legs, and that was very good news, indeed. The guy talking had a crazed lilt to his voice, and Quinn thought it would be best to take cover. He tried the computer; nothing worked except for map holography. The visor display showed him to be a blinking red dot in the midst of a contoured green glow: eleven miles inside Guatemala from its border with Belize; in the heart of the Peten Rain Forest; on the eastern edge of Fire Zone Emerald.
“Y’hear me, soldier boy?”
Quinn sat up, wincing as pain shot through his legs. He felt no fear, no panic. Though he had just turned twenty-one, this was his second tour in Guatemala, and he was accustomed to being in tight spots. Besides, there were a lot worse places he might have been stranded. Up until two years before, Emerald has been a staging area for Cuban and guerrilla troops; but following the construction of a string of Allied artillery bases to the west, the enemy had moved their encampments north and—except for recon patrols such as Quinn’s—the fire zone had been abandoned.
“No point in playin’ possum, man. Me and the boys’ll be there in ten-fifteen minutes, and you gonna have to talk to us then.”
Ten minutes. Shit! Maybe, Quinn thought, if he talked to the guy, that would slow him down. “Who are you people?” he asked.
Future on Fire Page 11