At night Alex dreamed of letters on a screen. All the curves, if you looked carefully enough, moved up in steps, and in his dreams people were being carried up them, helplessly, as on escalators. They couldn’t get off. They were waving to him. Their arms, their fingers were escalators and on those as well, little people were…
Two weeks later Alex took an electric carving knife and sawed off his own penis. He had a tiny little hole through which he peed, just over his swelling testicles. They made him a new penis out of a section of his leg. It worked, and was bigger and more sexually satisfying than his first one had been. He burned off his corneas and replaced them with better ones. He became a star of The British Journal of Plastic Surgery.
Alex was becoming a legend. But not for his books.
In the heat of the battle, He-roch-che moved with the deliberation of a machine, hanging back from the blow. He wore armour; each careful step had a metallic ring to it. The muscles on his arms were round like melons. The ache in them, bearing up the lance, felt good. The lance had a hook at the bottom, spearhead at the top, axehead just below that.
He-roch-che fought piggyback style, a partner on his back. His name meant Real War Eagle. His partner was called Tha-in-ge and her name, in a different language, meant Persimmon. Tha-in-ge was a child template and she rode him, firing tiny arrows. The tiny arrows hissed, trailing smoke. They were chemical weapons. In the middle distance, enemies swelled and burst like fruit. All across the horizon, there were fires.
Tha-in-ge fought long and middle distance. He-roch-che defended at close quarters. Another piggyback couple faced them, two of the Perverse, all lace and souvenir bones. He-roch-che circled the carrier. He-roch-che’s smile was a snarl. He loved this. He loved bashing enemies into eternity with the cheerfulness of a schoolboy. He had never grown up. He had a dim idea that he was as complicated as an animated cartoon.
The Perverse lunged. He-roch-che grinned and dodged, his earrings swinging, the crest of his glossy orange hair whipping about his head, and he parried and whipped up the hooked base of the lance. It caught, he pulled, and God’s richness spilled, purple-veined and glossy, intestines and organs. They gushed out of his enemy. The enemy, surprised, fell to his knees. He-roch-che still backed away from him. His feet slipped slightly under him. Blood.
He-roch-che was intelligent enough to know he was Virtual, a tangle of samples that could think, feel, smell. He knew he could not die. He knew thousands of people watched him, somewhere. He played up to it, tossing his head like a wild horse.
“Ah!” said Tha-in-ge, pointing. Someone else to kill.
He-roch-che reared up and jogged toward them. Another piggyback Perverse, but these two were exhausted, slow. Tha-in-ge kicked He-roch-che with her spurs, drawing blood.
Knockers sat on the beautifully clean, folded corner of Alex’s hospital bed. It was very embarrassing having Knockers there. Knockers was altogether too old for his particular schtick.
Knockers was a middle-aged man who had had a Mole job—molecular level genetic tampering. Mole jobs were extravagant, unpredictable, dangerous. Alex always saw a mole tunneling through you like a little gentleman in a brown waistcoat. They stripped your DNA and gave you a sample of someone else’s.
Knockers had grown huge breasts, which he proudly displayed, attached to each other with chains. He had had cosmetic surgery on his name as well, to match them. When he wasn’t stoned, Knockers could still be a very professional agent. Right now his eyes were crossed and his speech was slurred. The woman in the next bed had drawn curtains between them.
“Zuh book’ssh late, Alexssh. It’ssh too fuckin late, man.”
Alex lay on his bed in a private ward, recovering. He had bought himself a better heart. It had double chambers, beat twice as fast, producing a smoother flow of blood. His enhanced heart fluttered in his chest like birds. His cheeks felt hot. All his skin was bright pink and the top of his head felt like a metal hat that was about to pop off. He could feel oxygen sizzle through his cortex like champagne.
“Tell them to cut out some of the sampling,” said Alex. Knockers seemed to float as if underwater, his smile, his eyes, unfocused. It was if he were so stoned that he had managed to derange the very light around him. Had Knockers understood?
“Knock, knock. Anybody home?” Alex asked. “I said, they can cut out some of the geo sampling. I told you, the place is Scotland. Same rocks, same ground cover, same hills, same little bays, just lift it as it is—or was—and stick it onto a continent instead of England and find a way for the land crabs to survive.”
“It’ssh late. They really asshed…” Knockers burped and farted at the same time. How could an intelligent man allow himself to become quite so uncouth? “You know how long it took to find some Early Lithuanian Music?”
Alex grinned. He had thought it might take a while. “I also knew,” he said, “that there was no existing lexicon for the Kaw Indians.”
Knockers guffawed. “We got Indians wearing kilts in Schcotland, only it’s attached to France and has some land crabs.” He liked the idea. “How we gone have the Indians talk?”
“I’ll tell them for an extra twenty thou,” said Alex and grinned. He had smart teeth. He could use them for credit.
Why should he make it easy for them?
Why was he so bored?
He-roch-che watched land crab soaking in a dead man’s helmet. The flesh of the crabs was black and had to be soaked for a week in salt water before it was eatable. Otherwise it tasted of burnt rubber. Scum floated on the surface of the water in thick, gray bubbles. Gray clouds, mingled mist, and smoke were reflected on them.
He-roch-che was sitting on a beach. Somewhere behind him was the comforting hush of surf. Sand in the air stung his naked arms, tufts of long gray grass stirred in the same wind that moved He-roch-che’s kilt.
By flipping, He-roch-che could access the structure of the grass blades. He could flip his vision in degrees until he saw the grass as a giant quilt of cells. He could access its composition, the structure of cellulose, the movement of protein and sugars. At the same time the systems of high and low pressure that made the wind, made the clouds, isobarred through his constructed mind.
I’m a boat, he thought. People ride me, navigating by charts or by whim.
Tha-in-ge hunted. She crouched, keeping still. The light caught her lycra suit like sunlight on sea seen from miles above.
Tha-in-ge had tied together two thigh bones with tanned gut, and there was a net of gut all around a hump in the seashore sand. She prodded the hump with He-roch-che’s lance.
Suddenly there was a belching of dust, and sand hissed, spilling in slithery currents. Giant claws were unveiled. Tha-in-ge pulled on the criss-crossing of gut. The net tightened. With a lurch, something huge and leathery tried to lunge toward her. One free claw came for her. She threw the two thigh bones. With a whirling sound they spun around each other, caught the claw, entangled it.
Tha-in-ge used the lance to pole vault onto the crab’s back. It was the size of the shell of a sea turtle. She pulled the reins tighter.
She had harnesses ready. Her people trained the crabs and rode on their backs.
“Zetanzaw,” said He-roch-che. It was one of the few words remaining from the speech of the Kaw Indians. It meant big. He meant big crab. He-roch-Che thought in English but could only speak in the few surviving words of the Kaw.
“Tuh” said Tha-in-ge, and tossed black hair out of her eyes. She despised He-roch-che’s people. She spoke another language of the Sioux, with a full lexicon. She was a person of the Heaven and the Earth. He was one of the People of the Wind.
He-roch-che accessed memories of home. He saw in his mind domes of earth, houses on which horses grazed. The doorways had to point toward the stars of particular gods. The houses were from the wrong tribe, but close enough. You had to sample from somewhere. Even He-roch-che’s thick hands, with their veins and sleek, yellow-brown skin were samples. Whose hands were they really?
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br /> Pulling on the reins, Tha-in-ge made the crab scuttle forward. Her people trained them as carriers. She started to sing in a throaty voice that had once belonged to a Turkish popular singer.
Bus tires still made that delicious, squishing noise on wet roads. You could hear the tread pushing water out of the way, channelling it out, leaving a track behind.
Alex stood in the rain looking at tire tracks. Funny the things you held on to. The main effect of his new heart was that he couldn’t stop thinking. His data bills were enormous, he kept thinking of things to access. Government, astrophysics, oral literature. A Niagara of information. All he wanted now was silence.
He looked up into the sky. It was low and gray, mist and mingled smoke.
What he really wanted, what he would really like, would be to know, really know, what the future would be. He could write about it then, even if he didn’t know how it all came about, even if he couldn’t explain it. And one hundred years later, people would say, he got it RIGHT, how did he KNOW that? Jeez, reproduction by multicellular division, human beings just splitting in half, who would EVER have thought that would happen? How did he KNOW?
Unless, of course, it turned out that he made it happen by imagining it.
Or prevented it happening by imagining it.
The trouble with intelligent, enhanced humanity, Alex thought, is that we are just a little too far from the primaeval swamp. We have drives, drives toward ends that no longer exist.
I want, thought Alex, I want something so badly it tastes in my mouth like oranges accidentally soaked in garlic. I want it so badly that my eyes have swollen with it and are now wilting like leaking balloons after a party. I want, I need, and I don’t know what it is.
A drink? A woman? A poodle that I can shave into strange poodle shapes?
That’s why I keep cutting my body.
I could sample myself. Sample myself, yeah, and take the sample to one of those Chaos guys. I could find out what I want. They could use the N constant to predict the surface turbulence. The surface turbulence of the self, the Fluid Dynamics of my emotions. Find out my needs, predict their ends. Maybe I would end up being a fractal of everyone else. I would be an image of the pain in these dark streets and in those dark, hissing, crowded cars. The people in them were shadows.
He felt lighter hearted. So simple. They have an answer for everything these days. There was even one of those Chaos joints just around the corner. What was it called?
CRUNCH YOUR NUMBERS said the sign.
Alex got a butterfly graph of his soul.
“You need,” said the Chaos Man, “to think of something new. You are bored with your work.”
“Thanks a lot,” said Alex. For this he had cashed in a smart tooth?
“You are bored,” the Chaos Man continued, “because you lack integrity.”
It had the ring of truth.
Outside, it had stopped raining, and the sun seemed to swell orange in the puddles, huge, overripe. The sky was misted over with dusk, streaked with blue and purple cloud that rolled back to pinkish grey. There was a hint of green in the sky, somewhere.
I have been false, thought Alex. Where? I want to write about the future. How is that dishonest?
He had known all along of course. The future could not be sampled. It was not there to be sampled. The future would not be, could not be, a patchwork quilt of things that were past, stale whimsy and other people’s books. The future would be truly new.
He was smiling. The future would be new and clean, thrilling. I don’t want any more screens, any more data banks, he thought. And I don’t want to sit alone anymore, either, trying to dredge up something new from nowhere. Speculating with a few spare ideas like fruit left too long in the bowl. Using surrealism like cinnamon to spice it up. Stealing, lying to myself.
All that’s over now. Transfixed on the pavement, Alex saw a way ahead. The tires still hissed.
He-roch-che marched toward the final battle.
There was a castle on a rock. Ringed round it were the enemy, still some distance away. Tha-in-ge rode him, encased in armour. She was like an armadillo, all in spines. The spines would blow free in flashes of light and powder. They shot out into dusk, seeking life. Drawn to it, the missiles destroyed life from a distance.
Tha-in-ge had a tiny harp and played sweet sad songs of killing for the Unending War.
In the air all around them, came the sound of massed bagpipes, tart, bitter, sweet all at once. And underneath that, somehow low and sad, there was an Indian war chant. Hey ya hey hey, Hey ya hey hey.
They marched through the remains of a park. There were clipped hedges in concentric patterns, around a Stonehenge temple. The grass was pockmarked with humps of earth dug by moles and the hooves of the temple goats and oxen. The two armies advanced.
Anachronism, thought He-roch-che, having no Indian word for it. I fight with giant battle-axe while Tha-in-ge fires intelligent rockets from her back. A sinuous symbolic pattern wound its way through his imagination—a summary of this constructed world and how it came to have its mixed technology.
Lies. He-roch-che felt anger.
Ahead of him were the Army of the Perverse. They wore scarves of translucent fabric, lace as well as metal. Their armour showed genitals, they mocked the more lumpen mass of soldiery that followed the Ambition. The Perverse wanted the world to end in pleasure.
The Ambition wanted to rule it, and He-roch-che shared that Ambition.
Why? Because he had been so constructed. And who had made him, to live a life through him? He-roch-che addressed his audience directly. My life is as real to me as yours is to you.
I could have made me better, thought He-roch-che. I am some blunt, dull idea—big muscles, murderous intent, a crest of hair, a skull earring. I would have made me slimmer, sleeker, faster. I could have created more animals, more birds. I would have made my life with Tha-in-ge more tender. I would have had nothing second hand, nothing stale, nothing second rate.
He-roch-che hated his creator.
Our blood will coat this green field to depth of my ankles, he thought, for you.
Suddenly loudspeakers behind him sputtered. They spoke in false, tinny voices. “Pi-sing!” they cried, a last remaining Kaw word meaning Game. The bagpipes ceased, the Ambition Army charged.
He-roch-che feinted a blow that would have left his midriff exposed, pulled back, and used the hook to grapple and disarm. Then his axeblade came down on the neck, seeking the weak point of his enemy’s armour. He felt Tha-in-ge above him exchange blows. She was not meant for hand-to-hand. In panic, she fired spines in all directions.
His lance was stuck between plates of metal on his enemy’s shoulder. Another cohort of the Perverse came at him, sword drawn. With a wrench, He-roch-che was able to swing his first victim into the path of the blow. Metal rang on metal. Lubricated by blood, his axe slipped free and swung into the face of the second cohort.
Tha-in-ge screeched.
An axe—from where—had buried itself in He-roch-che’s arm. The weight of it was dazing, numbing. The edges of He-roch-che’s torn armour dug into the wound. He brought his own axe up and despatched his third Perverse that day.
Racing, his mind reflected. I am the hero, he thought. I cannot die.
Oh really? In this world, the knowledge of medicine had been driven out by the war. In this world, with a wound like that, he was already dead. It might take time, weeks perhaps, throbbing with infection and fever. But he was already, mathematically at least, dead.
He flipped in closer to the wound, explored its depths. He had been cut to the bone. The bone itself had been cut. Blood welled, like the seasons, unstoppable.
There was nothing to do, but go on fighting. Some part of his constructed mind resolved a problem for itself. Now he knew why people, real people in history, had gone on fighting.
He-roch-che flipped out of the wound, back to battle, he flipped far far back from it, viewed it mistily from far away, the beautiful castle on t
he rock, the beautiful green garden. Real War Eagle flew.
There was a word from his own language he could use.
Wah-kon-dah, he thought. The word in both his and Tha-in-ge’s language was said to mean God. It actually meant Great Mysterious Spirits.
“Wah-kon-dah!” He-roch-che said, to the people watching, listening, enjoying. Mysterious Spirits, feel this. Feel what it is like to kill someone for sport.
Somewhere through the screen of his virtual reality, beyond the sunset with its orange sun, its blue and purple clouds, its hint of green, there was another world where people watched him die for fun.
He flipped back. It was raining blood from Tha-in-ge’s severed back. With a howl, He-roch-che launched himself at a writhing, mocking wall of the Perverse, and he cut and slashed and cut and slashed, trying to cut his way through the screen of his virtual world. He was trying to cut his way through the fiction.
The tires hissed past. There was a clicking of heels as a woman in fishnet tights and Carmen Miranda hat walked around Alex with a cheerful nod. “Rain’s over,” the woman murmured. She was taking her dog, and enhanced Watchhound, for a walk.
“Have a nice day,” said the dog.
Alex was still riveted by his idea. No sampling. But no staring into nothing, either.
How about a genuine, scientific excavation of the future? Surely the most complex surface turbulence of any system was social interaction. But if there was an N constant, couldn’t it predict the sudden shifts, the irrational responsiveness of the world? Could Chaos predict when the Muslim Alliance might break apart, when the New Age islands could finally cohere into a political system? A fiction that was actually a form of research, with testable hypotheses, building, building a virtual construct of the future, to be tested, refined each month, improved.
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