by John Shirley
Splendid Chaos
An Interplanetary Fantasy
John Shirley
The First Part—Disortientation Orientation
1
He woke into translucent green.
Zero was lying on his back, staring up into—a sky? Yeah. He saw a cloud. It was in the upper left corner of his field of vision. Creamy yellow cloud against a translucent jade sky. He saw something more, high and wide and blue-gray, out of the corners of his eyes. It was a few seconds before he got up the nerve to look directly at it. He turned his head.
“Christ!” The motion stabbed pain through his head. The throbbing subsided, and his eyes focused. He saw walls. Broken-down walls, no ceiling. It was a ruin of some kind.
“Take a deep breath, mite,” someone said in some variant of British accent.
“Deep breath make you fit again, eh? Right! Deep breath—clears away the ‘eadache, tidies up the ‘ead.”
Zero took a deep breath. The throbbing in his head went into fourth gear.
But he took another breath, and another. The inhaling pressed his shoulder blades against the ground, and he felt gravel and something soft, maybe tufts of grass.
The headache passed, seeped away somewhere. He tried to sit up. His stomach clenched, and nausea roiled through him. He began to gag.
A firm hand on his shoulder rolled him over. “Go ahead, mite, ‘eave it out if you want to. ‘appens to all us when we get ‘ere.”
But they were dry heaves. After a few moments the spasm passed. He found he was kneeling, shivering. There was a cold ache in him, deep down in his bones. An undefined yearning.
“It’s adjustment, and maybe a little withdrawal, too. They put you on a drug during the trip.” A woman’s voice this time.
He looked around and saw them standing on his left, a man and a woman.
He looked past them at the squared-off ruin. The ruin was about forty yards across, the walls mostly about twelve feet high, some of them overgrown with a climbing shrub … He was in the shadow of one of the walls. The sun in the green sky was still low, occluded by the wall that had spread its shadow over him. The sunlight outlined the serrated upper edge of the broken wall with a line of white neon. It was warm, about eighty-five degrees.
“Welcome to Fool’s Hope, mite,” the man said. He was short, almost dwarfish, barrel-chested; his head seemed just a shade too big for his body. He grinned, showing crooked teeth. He had a jutting forehead, deepset eyes, a stub of a nose, and a thatch of rusty-brown hair. He wore a threadbare brown plaid shirt, torn, grimy denim pants, and rotting tennis shoes. ” ‘ow’s the boy, eh? Wot’s yer nime? I’m Dennis. This ‘ere’s Jamie.”
Jamie was about five seven, a little too heavy in the hips and too narrow in the shoulders. She wore a short-sleeved blue workshirt, worn Levi pants, and scuffed black workboots. Her black hair was short, parted like a man’s.
Her features were blunt, but her eyes were lively brown and restless with intelligence. She looked affectedly masculine. Probably a dyke.
Uh-huh. Tattoo on her left biceps. A heart with the name Trish in it.
Classic.
“May as well get you on your feet,” Jamie said. “You won’t like it, but…”
Dennis stepped nearer and helped Zero stand. “Right, up you go.”
Zero’s head spun, and he swayed; Dennis held him firmly.
“Come on with us,” Jamie said. “Walk slowly, take deep breaths.”
“Wait a minute.” His voice didn’t work very well. “Uh—” He cleared his throat. “What … I mean—” It was hard to articulate. “I wanna know, uh…”
He looked around again, trying to find some point of orientation.
The dead, enigmatic walls, overgrown with dull blue ivylike stuff. There was no wind—it was preternatually still, quiet, every slight noise an obtrusive echo—but the ivy seemed to rustle, all of it. As if it were adjusting its grip.
There was bluish-gray moss—was it moss?—on the stony ground between the fallen walls. “Where am I?” he managed at last.
“Scotland, “Dennis said.
“Really?” A wash of relief. The vague memories … they were just a dream, then.
“No, don’t bullshit him, Dennis,” Jamie said. “Friend, you’re not in Scotland. You’re in North Dakota.”
“North … what?”
“Come on, Jamie—let’s level with ‘im, eh? Mite,” Dennis went on, deadpan, “you’re in the Arctic circle—that’s why the sky’s that funny color, eh?”
He looked back and forth between them, blinking. “What?”
“Sydney,” Jamie said, as if she were coming clean. “Just outside Sydney, Australia.”
“County Cork,” Dennis said, shaking his head sadly at her duplicity.
“Ireland.”
They’re lunatics, Zero thought. “Go to hell, both of you,” he said, pulling away from Dennis.
Dennis laughed. “All right, all right. Truth is, we don’t know where we are. But the general feelin’, like, is: We’re on another planet. I mean, this ain’t Earth.”
“No joke this time,” Jamie said, nodding.
Zero stared at them for a moment. He shook his head. “No. That’s bullshit.”
“I know how you feel,” Jamie said. “I felt that way. Everyone does. But you get used to it.” Zero shook his head insistently.
“Don’t it feel all wrong to you here?” Dennis asked. ” You know—like the air’s funny, the colors are wrong—gravity’s wrong. A little lighter.”
It did feel that way. But it might be suggestion. Or: “It’s a drug. Somebody slipped me a drug. Hallucinogenic.”
“Those are the first two stages,” Jamie said, shrugging. “First you think people are putting you on. Then you think you’re dreaming or hallucinating from drugs, schizophrenia, whatever. But after you’re here for a while, you accept it.”
“This is bullshit. No one has the technology to—”
“You don’t remember the disco?” Jamie asked. “That’s what they used for you, right?”
Zero stared at her. He remembered.
Remembered a disco. Sure it was a disco. Only … it was in the middle of an intersection, right smack in the middle of the road.
They were walking along, Zero and Bowler and Angie and Cisco, looking for a way out of the sticky-hot Manhattan night and into something sufficiently distracting. Something cheap and something nearby. They’d written their term papers—“the fucking term papers,” Zero had said—and they were trying not to think about them and how they related to grade point averages. So it was a natural, it was a prayer’s answer, when they found the disco that was where it couldn’t possibly be. It was shaped like a circus tent. Almost filled the wide intersection. All lit up along its tent-lines with blinking red and white lights. Or were they blue and yellow? Or what? They seemed to subtly shift their color if you stared right at them.
They knew it was a disco because it was giving out a bang-bump bang-bump bang-bump of disco beat, and because there were light-show flashes coming from inside the open front door, and because there was a doorman standing out front behind a red velvet rope. And there was a sign over the front door that said…
Zero squinted. He couldn’t quite make it out. Highly stylized lettering. After a moment it seemed to squirm, resolved into DAYDREAMS AT NIGHT.
They stopped for a moment to stare at the place. Everyone stopped at the same instant, Zero noticed. “Where’s it getting the electricity?” Bowler wondered, looking around. The rest of the street was dark. The traffic lights over the disco were dead, dark. There weren’t any detour signs around the disco, or police barriers. But there was no traffic—they’d noticed it tor a few blocks. It was as if the traffic had
been rerouted. So the disco had to be there with the permission of the cops, right? Didn’t it?
They were walking toward it again. Zero couldn’t remember deciding to walk toward it. They’d all done it at once.
The multicolored lights sizzling from the disco fanned over the time-smoothed black asphalt of the street, coiled in a manhole cover, snaked up a lamppost.
As they walked closer, the bang-bump bang-bump bang-bump graduated into bang-bump bang-bump bang-bump. They approached the doorman.
Medium height, black hair, regular features, mirror glasses. Like a lot of doormen at discos and rock clubs, he didn’t even look at them. But he seemed to evaluate them somehow, without directly looking. He unhooked the velvet rope, stood to one side, and waved vaguely to tell them they could go in, continuing to look past them at the street. “No cover tonight,” he said in a bizarrely sweet, melodi-ous voice. His lips scarcely moved. The disco light played over his too-glossy skin.
They hesitated just outside the door.
“Open bar, too,” he added.
Open bar?
They went inside.
Go into a crowded disco, impressions come in waves. A wall of sound, a wash of lights: strobes and, higher up, lasers spear and bounce from the background glitter; color splashes, light-spangled walls, mirror balls. Like all discos it was a jewelry box of chintzy light, wired softly together with smoke and dusk.
There was a knot of dancers on the small dance floor—people from this end of town, every race, all economic strata—but most of them were aged between twenty and thirty. Odd how few gays there were for a disco.
Smiling people—who looked giddy drunk, starry-eyed—sat at tables too small to put both your elbows on; a cocktail waitress in tights; a bar across the room. It was a standard disco, so standard it was almost generic. The music was the latest standard dance stuff. But sometimes it would be interrupted, just for a moment, by a radio ad, which would cut off before the ad had quite got going, and another song would start. As if they had recorded it off the dance music radio station. Weird. Maybe to save money on deejays, Zero thought. He saw no deejay booth.
But the music was there, and the drinks swept them like white water into dancing. Angie was dancing around behind Cisco and kicking him, then dancing away. Not kicking him hard: Cisco was laughing. It looked pretty funny. Zero found himself laughing, too. He felt good, weirdly good. Like drugs. He found himself looking at Cisco and Bowler and Angie as if he’d never seen them before. Bowler was tall, serious, black-haired, pale—the would-be ideologue. When he danced, it was usually a way of “relating to the masses.” Only now he danced like he meant it. Not normal for Bowler.
Cisco was short and dark and curly haired, intuitive to Bowler’s rationalist.
Bowler was convinced that religion was one of the world’s great evils; Cisco was convinced that we were in a New Age that would see the vindication of things spiritual. Cisco was endearingly ridiculous, seeing omens and messages from the Other Side, making predictions based on his dreams—and he was always wrong. Willowy Angie, hair auburn, her eyes glittery, scarily intelligent, and icy blue; she was always joking but never about Certain Things. Angie, who wrote papers on feminist literature, kept her sexuality carefully contained—and now she was shaking her hips as she danced … Zero feeling unlike himself. Like he’d done a hit of nitrous. Only it didn’t wear off as quickly as nitrous because twenty minutes later he was still laughing, dancing with Angie now (Huh? He never danced with Angie—she always made fun of his moves), and drinking a pretty decent Manhattan—dry, not too much vermouth, twist of lemon peel—from a plastic glass as he danced, sloshing the stuff on other dancers, but no one seemed to care. (When had he started dancing? He didn’t remember starting to…) It was weird that the waitresses didn’t tell him not to take drinks on the dance floor, but then, everyone out there was drinking, and how come everything was free here? Must be promotional ( bang-bump bang-bump bang-bump), yeah, must be a promotional gimmick for a mobile disco, whole thing got wheels, lifts up, skates off down the street ( bang-bump, bang-bump bang bang bang), strange to be enjoying disco so much, usually he didn’t like—
And then he stopped dancing, because of the entrance to the disco. It was closing. Sliding shut like an elevator door. Only it looked like—it was hard to tell in the shifting lights, but—it looked like it was closing seamlessly.
Zero yelled at Bowler, signaled him; they ran toward the place where the door had been.
The wall four feet to their right opened, and—
A man extruded from the wall.
He came out at them on a sort of metal stalk that extended from the wall—
whirrrr—and was suddenly standing between Zero and the place where the door had been.
The man was naked, but his body was featureless, gray, kind of rubbery looking. He had an artichoke for a face. No, it wasn’t an artichoke, but it looked like one: a gray artichoke as big as a man’s face— instead of a face.
No eyes, no nose, no mouth.
The music stopped. The lights stopped whirling. Now there was just one blue light. A murmur of voices, confused dancers looking around.
Zero stared at the guy with the artichoke face. He was distantly aware of Bowler standing at his elbow. “Bowler?”
“I see it, too, man.”
There was a little white metal box perched on Artichoke-Face’s left shoulder. From the box came a voice that was exactly the same as the voice the doorman had. “Not yet. Sleep now.”
Artichoke-Face touched something on the metal shaft he’d ridden out of the wall.
The tables and chairs suddenly pulled out from under the people sitting at them, and the sitters went sprawling, yelling in astonishment, or giggling, trying to play along. But it looked to Zero as if the chairs had moved by themselves.
“Poltergeists!” Cisco hissed as the white chairs and white tables rose to the ceiling. Seemed to meld with it. Vanished into it.
A man whimpered and then shouted hysterical incoherence.
“Sleep now,” Artichoke-Face repeated.
The floor got soft.
It was softer than putty but not as soft as quicksand. They sank into it—everyone in the club but Artichoke-Face—and everyone stopped trying to fight the sinking after thirty seconds of babbling and crying out because a sweet, seductive sleepiness came over them. They quieted, sighed, and the room was almost silent. Artichoke-Face retracted into the slot in the wall.
The wall closed.
Zero and Cisco and Bowler and Angie and the others sank quickly into sticky white stuff, sank up to their chins. Stopped sinking. The sticky white stuff smelled faintly of something almost like peppermint.
They basked in the warm, firm stickiness around them, unable to move much and no longer trying to, as the room got darker, till there was only the faintest gray light.
They heard a distant whine and then a muted rumbling. Zero felt giddiness deep in his gut. Like being in an elevator dropping too fast.
But his sleepiness deepened till he stopped noticing the falling sensation…
That was then, this is now.
“If this were another planet, we’d all die of the local microorganisms,” Zero said. “We’d have no defenses built up.”
“You’ve been immunized against them,” Jamie said. “They lure you into the ship, observe you for a while, restrain you, sedate you, take off with you, undress you, inoculate you, maintain you, bring you here, dress you again, dump you here and—except for the Progress Stations—you’re on your own.”
When she said, “They dress you,” Zero looked down at himself, frowning.
His clothes were loose on him. He’d lost weight. He wore the same black jeans outfit, but coated, in some places crusted, with dried white stuff. It was on his hands, his face…
He swayed with disorientation. The world, the sky, the whole universe—all of it was spinning like a roulette wheel. Someone had spun the wheel, and he was waiting to see what number
the spin would end on. The wheel spinning, the world spinning around him…
Oh, shit. The disco, the sticky white stuff, the rumbling…
“There it is, ‘e’s gettin’ it!” Dennis crowed. “Rememberin’ the trip, eh? All right, tike it easy.”
Zero bent over to dry heave again.
” ‘ow you feel?” Dennis asked.
“Fucked. Like I’ve got a bad hangover,” Zero said.
“You’ll feel better when you get some food and water into you,” Jamie said, “and get cleaned up. But I warn you: There’s only one free meal here for the new arrivals. After that you earn your own.”
They’d walked along a faint path that led out of the ruins, and now they were skidding down the hillside. Zero asked, “Wasn’t there anyone with me? I mean—”
“They dropped your friends off first,” Jamie said, “Bowler and the others, all at once. They’ve been here almost two weeks. They’re well. A little slow to adjust. The Meta held you back a couple days. Means you were probably infected with something they had to cure.”
“What the hell was that? That they had to—”
“Syphilis, mye-be?” Dennis suggested with a crooked leer.
“No way of telling,” Jamie said. Doesn’t matter; whatever it was, it’s gone.
But don’t think there isn’t disease here. They leave us some flu viruses, some other things. They’ll probably test some nasty microorganism on us sometime.”
Now they paused to look out over the landscape. “We call the planet Fool’s Hope,” Jamie said. “Well, some of the factions don’t like that name. Weisman’s Transcendentalist bunch calls it New Chance. Bunch of cornballs. But most of us call it Fool’s Hope.”
Zero shaded his eyes against the sun. It looked like Earth’s sun but brassier and a fraction bigger. The plain that stretched out around the steep, anomalous hill was mostly flat and almost featureless except for big, randomly scattered craters in the neat expanse of blue vegetation.
They didn’t look like impact craters—almost like cookie-cutter-perfect holes, maybe forty feet across, none closer than fifty yards to another. They made Zero think of ceiling tiles. The plain was silvery-blue in the morning light, reaching into a dead-white curtain of mist that shrouded most of the horizon; through the shroud was a suggestion of something big looming up, far away. Maybe mountains. Nearer, the mist clung to the ground, and here and there, between the craters, some of it seemed almost to have clumped together, entwined to become nearly as cohesive as spun glass’. As he watched, the spectral clumps—clumps? more like thin sheaves of mist—began to rotate, all of them counter-clockwise, performing a slow waltz in the faint breeze—a breeze that smelled something like menthol and something like rotten roses.