Future on Fire

by Orson Scott Card

  The instant it vanished, Quinn became troubled by a number of things. How he’d chosen the island as a fortress; how he’d gone straight to the best firing position; how he’d been anticipating Mathis. All this could be chalked up to common sense and good soldiering…yet he had been so assured, so definite. The assurance could be an effect of the ampules; but then Mathis had said the Queen could slip thoughts into your head without you knowing. Until you became attuned to her, that is. Quinn tasted the flavors of his thoughts, searching for evidence of tampering. He knew he was being ridiculous, but panic flared in him nonetheless and he popped an ampule to pull himself together. Okay, he told himself. Let’s see what the hell’s going on.

  For the next half hour he combed the island, prying into thickets, peering at treetops. He found no trace of the Queen, nor did he spot the cat again. But if she could control his mind, she might be guiding him away from her traces. She might be following him, manipulating him like a puppet. He spun around, hoping to catch her unawares. Nothing. Only bushes threaded with mist, trembling in the breeze. He let out a cracked laugh. Christ, he was an idiot! Just because the cat lived on the island didn’t mean the Queen was real; in fact, the cat might be the core of Mathis’ fantasy. It might have inhabited the lakeshore, and when Mathis and his men had arrived, it had fled out here to be shut of them…or maybe even this thought had been slipped into his head. Quinn was amazed by the subtlety of the delusion, at the elusiveness with which it defied both validation and debunking.

  Something crunched in the brush.

  Convinced that the noise signaled an actual presence, he swung his gun to cover the bushes. His trigger-finger tensed, but after a moment he relaxed. It was the isolation, the general weirdness, that was doing him in. Not some bullshit mystery woman. His job was to kill Mathis, and he’d better get to it. And if the Queen were real, well, then she did favor him and he might have help. He popped an ampule and laughed as it kicked in. Oh, yeah! With modern chemistry and the Invisible Woman on his side, he’d go through Mathis like a rat through cheese. Like fire through a slum. The drugs—or perhaps it was the pour of a mind more supple than his own—added a lyric coloration to his thoughts, and he saw himself moving with splendid athleticism into an exotic future wherein he killed the king and wed the shadow and ruled in Hell forever.

  Quinn was low on frags, so he sat down behind the fallen tree trunk and cleaned the upper barrel of his gun: it fired caseless .22 caliber ammunition. Set on automatic, it could chew a man in half; but wanting to conserve bullets, he set it to fire single shots. When the sun had cleared the treeline, he began calling to Mathis on his radio. There was no response at first, but finally a gassed, irascible voice answered, saying, “Where the fuck you at, Quinn Edward?”

  “The island.” Quinn injected a wealth of good cheer into his next words. “Hey, you were right about the Queen!”

  “What you talkin’ ’bout?”

  “She’s beautiful! Most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

  “You seen her?” Mathis sounded anxious. “Bullshit!”

  Quinn thought about the Rousseau print. “She got dark, satiny skin and black hair down to her ass. And the whites of her eyes, it looks like they’re glowin’ they’re so bright. And her tits, man. They ain’t too big, but the way they wobble around”—he let out a lewd cackle—“it makes you wanna get down and frolic with them puppies.”

  “Bullshit!” Mathis repeated, his voice tight.

  “Unh-uh,” said Quinn. “It’s true. See, the Queen’s lonely, man. She thought she was gonna have to settle for one of you lovelies, but now she’s found somebody who’s not so fucked up.”

  Bullets tore through the bushes on his right.

  “Not even close,” said Quinn. More fire; splinters flew from the tree trunk. “Tell me, Mathis.” He supressed a giggle. “How long’s it been since you had any pussy?” Several guns began to chatter, and he caught sight of a muzzle flash; he pinpointed it with his own fire.

  “You son of a bitch!” Mathis screamed.

  “Did I get one?” Quinn asked blithely. “What’s the matter, man? Wasn’t he ripe for the light?”

  A hail of fire swept the island. The cap-pistol sounds, the volley of hits on the trunk, the bullets zipping through the leaves, all this enraged Quinn, touched a spark to the violent potential induced by the drugs. But he restrained himself from returning the fire, wanting to keep his position hidden. And then, partly because it was another way of ragging Mathis, but also because he felt a twinge of alarm, he shouted, “Watch out! You’ll hit the Queen!”

  The firing broke off. “Quinn Edward!” Mathis called.

  Quinn kept silent, examining that twinge of alarm, trying to determine if there had been something un-Quinnlike about it.

  “Quinn Edward!”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “It’s time,” said Mathis, hoarse with anger. “Queen’s tellin’ me it’s time for me to prove myself. I’m comin’ at you, man!”

  Studying the patterns of blue-green scale flecking the tree trunk, Quinn seemed to see the army of his victims—grim, desanguinated men—and he felt a powerful revulsion at what he had become. But when he answered, his mood swung to the opposite pole. “I’m waitin’, asshole!”

  “Y’know,” said Mathis, suddenly breezy. “I got a feelin’ it’s gonna come down to you and me, man. ’Cause that’s how she wants it. And can’t nobody beat me one-on-one in my own backyard.” His breath came as a guttural hiss, and Quinn realized that this sort of breathing was typical of someone who had been overdoing the ampules. “I’m gonna overwhelm you, Quinn Edward,” Mathis went on. “Gonna be like them ol’ Jap movies. Little men with guns actin’ all brave and shit ’til they see somethin’ big and hairy comin’ at ’em, munchin’ treetops and spittin’ fire. Then off they run, yellin’, ‘Tokyo is doomed!’”

  For thirty or forty minutes, Mathis kept up a line of chatter, holding forth on subjects as varied as the Cuban space station and Miami’s chances in the AL East. He launched into a polemic condemning the new statutes protecting the rights of prostitutes (“Part of the kick’s bein’ able to bounce ’em ’round a little, y’know.”), then made a case for Antarctica being the site of the original Garden of Eden, and then proposed the theory that every President of the United States had been a member of a secret homosexual society (“Half them First Ladies wasn’t nothin’ but guys in dresses.”). Quinn didn’t let himself be drawn into conversation, knowing that Mathis was trying to distract him; but he listened because he was beginning to have a sense of Mathis’ character, to understand how he might attack.

  Back in Lardcan, Tennessee or wherever, Mathis had likely been a charismatic figure, glib and expansive, smarter than his friends and willing to lead them from the rear into fights and petty crimes. In some ways he was a lot like the kid Quinn had been, only Quinn’s escapades had been pranks, whereas he believed Mathis had been capable of consequential misdeeds. He could picture him lounging around a gas station, sucking down brews and plotting meanness. The hillbilly con-artist out to sucker the Yankee: that would be how he saw himself in relation to Quinn. Sooner or later he would resort to tricks. That was cool with Quinn; he could handle tricks. But he wasn’t going to underestimate Mathis. No way. Mathis had to have a lot on the ball to survive the jungle for two years, to rule a troop of crazed Green Berets. Quinn just hoped Mathis would underestimate him.

  The sun swelled into an explosive glare that whitened the sky and made the green of the jungle seem a livid, overripe color. Quinn popped ampules and waited. The inside of his head came to feel heavy with violent urges, as if his thoughts were congealing into a lump of mental plastique. Around noon, somebody began to lay down covering fire, spraying bullets back and forth along the bank. Quinn found he could time these sweeps, and after one such had passed him by, he looked out from behind the tree trunk. Four bearded, long-haired men were crossing the lake from different directions. Plunging through the water, lifting their knees
high. Before ducking back, Quinn shot the two on the left. Saw them spun around, their rifles flung away. He timed a second sweep, then picked off the two on the right; he was certain he had killed one, but the other might only have been wounded. The gunfire homed in on him, trimming the bushes overhead. Twigs pinwheeled; cut leaves sailed like paper planes. A centipede had ridden one of the leaves down and was still crawling along its fluted edge. Quinn didn’t like its hairy mandibles, its devil’s face. Didn’t like the fact it had survived while men had not. He let it crawl in front of his gun and blew it up into a fountain of dirt and grass.

  The firing stopped.

  Branches ticking the trunk; water slopping against the bank; drips. Quinn lay motionless, listening. No unnatural noises. But where were those drips coming from? The bullets hadn’t splashed up much water. Apprehensions spidered his backbone. He peeked up over the top of the tree trunk…and cried out in shock. A man was standing in the water about four feet away, blocking the line of fire from the shore. With the mud freckling his cheeks, strands of bottomweed ribboning his dripping hair, he might have been the wild mad king of the lake. Skull-face; staring eyes; survival knife dangling loosely in his hand. He blinked at Quinn. Swayed, righted himself, blinked again. His fatigues were plastered to his ribs, and a big bloodstain mapped the hollow of his stomach. Fresh blood pumped from the hole Quinn had punched. The man’s cheeks bulged: it looked as if he wanted to speak but was afraid more would come out than just words.

  “Jesus…shit,” he said sluggishly. His eyes half-rolled back, his knees buckled. Then he straightened, glancing around as if walking somewhere unfamiliar. He appeared to notice Quinn, frowned and staggered forward, swinging the knife in a lazy arc.

  Quinn got off a round before the man reached him. The bullet seemed to paste a red star under the man’s eye, stamping his features with a rapt expression. He fell atop Quinn, atop the gun, which—jammed to automatic—kept firing. Lengths of wet hair hung across Quinn’s faceplate, striping his view of branches and sky; the body jolted with the bullets tunneling through.

  Two explosions nearby.

  Quinn pushed the body away, belly-crawled into the brush and popped an ampule. He heard a thock followed by a bubbling scream: somebody had tripped a flare. He did a count and came up with nine dead…plus the guy laying down covering fire. Mathis, no doubt. It would be nice if that were all of them, but Quinn knew better. Somebody else was out there. He felt him the way a flower feels the sun—autonomic reactions waking, primitive senses coming alert.

  He inched deeper into the brush. The drugs burned bright inside him; he had the idea they were forming a manlike shape of glittering particles, an inner man of furious principle. Mats of blight-dappled leaves pressed against his faceplate, then slid away with underwater slowness. It seemed he was burrowing through a mosaic of muted colors and coarse textures into which even the concept of separateness had been subsumed, and so it was that he almost failed to notice the boot: a rotting brown boot with vines for laces. Visible behind a spray of leaves about six feet off. The boot shifted, and Quinn saw an olive-drab trouserleg tucked into it.

  His gun was wedged beneath him, and he was certain the man would move before he could ease it out. But apparently the man was playing bird dog, his senses straining for a clue to Quinn’s whereabouts. Quinn lined the barrel up with the man’s calf just above the boottop. Checked to make sure it was set on automatic. Then he fired, swinging the barrel back and forth an inch to both sides of his center mark.

  Blood erupted from the calf, and a hoarse yell was drawn out of Quinn by the terrible hammering of the gun. The man fell screaming. Quinn tracked fire across the ground, and the screams were cut short.

  The boot was still standing behind the spray of leaves, now sprouting a tattered stump and a shard of bone.

  Quinn lowered his head, resting his faceplate in the dirt. It was as if all his rectitude had been spat out through the gun. He lay thoughtless, drained of emotion. Time seemed to collapse around him, burying him beneath a ton of decaying seconds. After a while a beetle crawled onto the faceplate, walking upside-down; it stopped at eye-level, tapped its mandibles on the plastic and froze. Staring at its grotesque underparts, Quinn had a glimpse into the nature of his own monstrosity: a tiny armored creature chemically programmed to a life of stalking and biting, and between violences, lapsing into a stunned torpor.

  “Quinn Edward?” Mathis whispered.

  Quinn lifted his head; the beetle dropped off the faceplate and scurried for cover.

  “You got ’em all, didn’tcha?”

  Quinn wormed out from under the brush, got to his feet and headed back to the fallen tree trunk.

  “Tonight, Quinn Edward. You gonna see my knife flash…and then fare-thee-well.” Mathis laughed softly. “It’s me she wants, man. She just told me so. Told me I can’t lose tonight.”

  Late afternoon, and Quinn went about disposing of the dead. It wasn’t something he would ordinarily have done, yet he felt compelled to be rid of them. He was too weary to puzzle over the compulsion and merely did as it directed, pushing the corpses into the lake. The man who had tripped the flare was lying in some ferns, his face seared down to sinew and lace-works of cartilage; ants were stitching patterns across the blood-slick bone of the skull. Having to touch the body made Quinn’s flesh nettle cold, and bile flooded his throat.

  That finished, he sat in the clearing south of the ceiba and popped an ampule. The rays of sunlight slanting through the canopy were as sharply defined as lasers, showing greenish-gold against the backdrop of leaves. Sitting beneath them, he felt guided by no visionary purpose; he was, however, gaining a clearer impression of the Queen. He couldn’t point to a single thought out of the hundreds that cropped up and say, that one, that’s hers. But as if she were filtering his perceptions, he was coming to know her from everything he experienced. It seemed the island had been steeped in her, its mists and midnights modified by her presence, refined to express her moods; even its overgrown terrain seemed to reflect her nature: shy, secretive, yet full of gentle stirrings. Seductive. He understood now that the process of becoming attuned to her was a process of seduction, one you couldn’t resist because you, too, were being steeped in her. You were forced into a lover’s involvement with her, and she was a woman worth loving. Beautiful…and strong. She’d needed that strength in order to survive, and that was why she couldn’t help him against Mathis. The life she offered was free from the terrors of war, but demanded vigilance and fortitude. Though she favored him—he was sure of that—his strength would have to be proved. Of course Mathis had twisted all this into a bizarre religion…

  Christ!

  Quinn sat up straight. Jesus fucking Christ! He was really losing it. Mooning around like some kid fantasizing about a movie star. He’d better get his ass in gear, because Mathis would be coming soon. Tonight. It was interesting how Mathis—knowing his best hope of taking Quinn would be at night—had used his delusion to overcome his fear of the dark, convincing himself that the Queen had told him he would win…or maybe she had told him.

  Fuck that, Quinn told himself. He wasn’t that far gone.

  A gust of wind roused a chorus of whispery vowels from the leaves. Quinn flipped his visor. It was hot, cloudless, but he could smell rain and the promise of a chill on the wind. He did an ampule. The drugs withdrew the baffles that had been damping the core of his anger. Confidence was a voltage surging through him, keying new increments of strength. He smiled, thinking about the fight to come, and even that smile was an expression of furious strength, a thing of bulked muscle fibers and trembling nerves. He was at the center of strength, in touch with every rustle, his sensitivity fueled by the light-stained brilliance of the leaves. Gazing at the leaves, at their infinite shades of green, he remembered a line of a poem he’d read once: “…green flesh, green hair, and eyes of coldest silver…” Was that how the Queen would be? If she were real? Transformed into a creature of pure poetry by the unearthly radianc
e of Fire Zone Emerald. Were they all acting out a mythic drama distilled from the mundane interactions of love and war, performing it in the flawed heart of an immense green jewel whose reality could only be glimpsed by those blind enough to see beyond the chaos of the leaves into its precise facets and fractures? Quinn chuckled at the wasted profundity of his thought and pictured Mathis dead, himself the king of that dead man’s illusion, robed in ferns and wearing a leafy crown.

  High above, two wild parrots were flying complicated loops and arcs, avoiding the hanging columns of light as if they were solid.

  Just before dusk, a rain squall swept in, lasting only a few minutes but soaking the island. Quinn used it for cover, moving about and rigging more flares. He considered taking a stand on the rocky point at the north end: it commanded a view of both shores, and he might get lucky and spot Mathis as he crossed. But it was risky—Mathis might stop him—and he decided his best bet would be to hide, to outwait Mathis. Waiting wasn’t Mathis’ style. Quinn went back to the ceiba tree and climbed past the crotch to a limb directly beneath an opening in the canopy, shielded by fans of leaves. He switched his gun to its high explosive setting. Popped an ampule. And waited.

  The clouds passed away south, and in the half-light the bushes below seemed to assume topiary shapes. After fifteen minutes, Quinn did another ampule. Violet auras faded in around ferns, pools of shadow quivered, and creepers looked to be slithering like snakes along the branches. A mystic star rose in the west, shining alone above the last pink band of sunset. Quinn stared at it until he thought he understood its sparkling message.

  The night that descended was similar to the one in the Rousseau print, with a yellow globe moon carving geometries of shadow and light from the foliage. A night for tigers, mysterious ladies, and dark designs. Barnacled to his branch, Quinn felt that the moonlight was lacquering his combat gear, giving it the semblance of ebony armor with gilt filigree, enforcing upon him the image of a knight about to do battle for his lady. He supposed it was possible that such might actually be the case. It was true that his perception of the Queen was growing stronger and more particularized; he even thought he could tell where she was hiding: the rocky point. But he doubted he could trust the perception…and besides, the battle itself, not its motive, was the significant thing. To reach that peak moment when perfection drew blood, when you muscled confusion aside and—as large as a constellation with the act, as full of stars and blackness and primitive meaning—you were able to look down onto the world and know you had outperformed the ordinary. Nothing, neither an illusory motive or the illusion of a real motive, could add importance to that.