by John Shirley
“Started the wheelers after us. We figured they wouldn’t be awake yet. He woke ‘em up with a drill or something, if you ask me. No way to prove it. But I bet the little prick did it.”
“Did it just to be an asshole?”
“He probably works for Fiskle.”
Dennis was staring at the gutted wreckage of the oruh’s body, crying.
Between sobs he murmured, “Bloody ‘ell. Bloody ‘ell. Bloody ‘ell.”
“The settlement was here when the first group from Earth arrived a few years back,” Bowler said. He spoke absently, reeling it off as if he weren’t really thinking about it, He stood staring out of the second-story window at the activity in the settlement street. For some reason the Meta depilated the facial hair from their abductees; but the rest of Bowler’s hair had grown shaggy. He wore the same blue jeans and workshirt he’d worn that night in New York. They already looked ragged.
Zero sat across from him in a turquoise wooden chair. He fingered the leather strips that held the chair together and struggled against sinking into the depression opening like a bottomless pit inside him.
Bowler went on. “All the buildings were here. Empty. In one of them was some stored food—local wildlife, vegetation, fruits. And a representative from the High Clans. The High Clans are just another group of forcibly transplanted aliens, but kind of humanoid. Anyway, this guy spoke through one of those shoulder translators and told the Earthers—up to a certain point—what to expect. Told them the food that the McMahons stored here was samples of the stuff that would be safe for our species to eat—but that kind of food, those particular fruits or whatever, was all he could vouch for. People have been poisoned trying some of the other stuff, though some of it turned out to be okay. And there were a few basic tools here: a smelter, a crude machine shop. The Meta give you that much edge. Just that much.” He paused. “Unless you play their game, and go for the Progress Stations. Which means fighting with the other races.”
“What’s at a Progress Station?”
“Progress. Different things. Bits of useful technology. maybe some device we can use for making other devices or refining chemicals—like those crappy guns we’ve got. The plans, the ingredients for those came from a Progress Station. A little gift that gives us just that much more edge. Better chance for survival. The carrot in front of the donkey.”
Zero nodded. Feeling numb, he looked around to try to get a handle on the place. The room was high-ceilinged—too high—and the thick walls were slitted with narrow windows that stretched from close to the floor nearly to the ceiling. The late afternoon light streamed in dusty shafts through the glassless windows, which also admitted a faint drone of voices and the clank and clatter of carts. The room held five beds; each bed was made of leather stretched on a wooden frame, topped with a mattress of the cheesecloth-like stuff they’d learned to make from the bark of a local tree.
A symbol of the Pioneer sect was crudely painted on the wall, in a circle: an ax-blade crossed with a blunderbuss above an hourglass shape. The hourglass represented the only moon in the planet’s sky, a flawless white double-triangle configuration a quarter the size of Earth’s moon. The settlers thought it was artificial, a big space station of some kind, operated by the Meta.
Zero had bathed in cold water, had rinsed off his clothes. He wore shorts of the raspy cheesecloth stuff while he waited for his own clothes to dry. He’d eaten some sort of stewed vegetable that tasted like spinach but looked like cauliflower. He’d met some of the other “settlers” and thought at least half of them were cracked. Now he felt empty and disoriented, and he was still waiting for the seams to show themselves, for the dream to show him its unreality.
Bowler was almost expressionless, but somehow he emanated a deep, profoundly dignified sadness.
Zero felt like biting through one of his own fingers just to see what would happen. He made himself think about something else. “We’re fighting all the time with the other races?”
“With some we maintain a ceasefire. Some we tend to fight with—there are skirmishes here every few months. Most of the fighting is done in the north, in competition for Progress Stations. But it’s obvious that the Meta put us here because they want us to fight. There was a race of something like centaurs, but their hind parts were more like lions than horses. Beautiful to look at. A week ago they were completely exterminated, ambushed, slaughtered by a temporary alliance of the Earthers, the High Clans, and the Geck. I suppose it’s true that they’d attacked one of our exploration parties; they’d attacked the High Clan and the Geck. They were probably like everyone else—half crazy from disorientation. Fierce because they were lost and scared.
“But lots of the killing is calculated. There isn’t room for thirty-one domineering, intelligent, ambitious races here, and they all know it. The so-called ‘Allies’ are waiting for their chance to kill one another when it’s more convenient. It’s ugly, Zero. If we hadn’t been thrown onto a hostile planet in low-tech conditions, we could’ve had friendly relations with most of the aliens. The Meta set us up so we’d kill one another. And they watch. That’s all. They watch. It’s—” He spat at the window.
“But we’re here,” Zero said, trying to accept it. “What do you think we should do?”
In a choked voice, his hands balled with anger at his sides, Bowler said, “Cisco and Angie are out now trying to organize an expedition. They’re so damned stupid. They figured it’s that or do drudge work around here. The Earther Council rewards a successful Progress Station expedition with leisure and goods. They think they’ll have it easy that way. And they think they’ll meet the Meta or something.
“It’s bullshit. It’s fucking bullshit! I think we should move away from the settlement, try to ignore the Meta. Maybe if we abandon their game, they’ll leave us alone. Start our own commune somewhere, learn to use the planet’s resources.”
“We’d be killed, Bowler. The place is crawling with predators. And the Murderers…” He stared at the floor between his feet. It was made of the same bluish, concrete-like stuff as the walls: almost adobe, almost plaster.
“I mean, everything we do here is meaningless, whatever it is. This isn’t where we were intended to be. This is—” He shook his head and added bitterly, “I wanted to be a filmmaker. Can you believe that? Are the Meta going to give us film equipment at one of those Progress Stations? I wonder if they can get me a good cinematograper. Not much variety for urban locations on this planet. Can’t really make a film that’s set in Paris, or East L.A … It might seem petty, but shit, Bowler, that was my life. That was my dream. Here it’s living death, man.”
Bowler’s shoulders sagged. He turned back to the window. “Tell me something, Zero. What did you have in New York, really? Where’s your family, for example? Were you close to them? Close to brothers and sisters, maybe?”
Zero shook his head. “I was an only child. My parents divorced when I was ten, and I lived with my mom. She died when I was fourteen, so I moved in with my dad. He and I—he’s not a bad guy, I guess, but there was always this kind of … this embarrassment between us. Like he felt, ‘Well, you’re my kid, so I got to try to relate to you.’ But it was like a couple of people stuck together on a plane making polite conversation. He was relieved when I moved out. And … I had one girfriend I almost married. But that broke up.”
“So you had nothing on Earth, Zero.”
“But dammit, the potential for everything was there! I’d have found my place somewhere. Or had a chance to. Here—shit. Here there’s only the potential for—for combat. It’s like being drafted.”
“It doesn’t have to be. We could find a way to break away from it and survive. The Meta are the local version of the military-industrial complex. They’re imperialists exploiting us for their own purposes, purposes we don’t understand and probably never will. If we—” He broke off, staring at a thing that had floated in through the window.
It was a small silver sphere about the size of a tenni
s ball. It floated through a shaft of sunlight, glimmering faintly, and then moved purposefully up toward the ceiling. It seemed to hang in place for a few moments, slowly rotating. There was a little red dot on one side, and somehow Zero had the impression that the red dot was like the iris of an eye, that the sphere was watching him.
Looking at it, Zero felt like a frightened child. A child’s uncut anxiety held him taut inside.
The sphere seemed to watch them for a full minute and then lost interest, drifted out the open door, and down the hall. The tension in Zero went with it. He felt drained.
“Jamie says the Meta watch us through those things,” Bowler said. “When there’s a fight, a flock of ‘em show up. Wouldn’t the CIA and the FBI love to have a few of those?”
“Anybody try communicating with them?”
“Sure. The settlers have tried everything to communicate with the Meta. They tried talking to the surveillance spheres, the McMahons. No response. The McMahons—the ones you call Artichoke-Faces—are the Meta’s shop supervisors here. They’re in the Progress Stations sometimes, or they come around to hand out fresh respirators, different kinds of adaptation gear for the aliens who need it. Sometimes the McMahons say things on their own initiative, but they don’t answer questions, and they don’t clue you in on what’s behind the game. They just tell you the basic rules. Trying to communicate with the McMahons and the Meta is like trying to talk to the Sphinx. In the end most of the abductees—settlers, if you like—end up thinking of the Meta as a kind of cryptic but ultimately benevolent employer. Some of them even worship the Meta. But some of them—”
“Some of them hate the Meta,” Zero said, and Bowler nodded.
2
Zero and Bowler walked down a long, echoing hallway. The building had the architectural presence of a monastery. Looking out of place, a striking young woman was walking down the hall toward them. She was strawberry-blond, pale, freckled, and dimpled. Big blue eyes. Voluptous in a torn gingham halter-top and Levi cut-offs. She was barefoot, and she carried a wooden bowl of steaming water. She glanced at them and walked expressionlessly past into a room on the left. “She’s nursing Jamie,” Bowler said.
“Who is she? That face should be on the label for a jar of preserves or something. Sunny Jim’s sister.”
“Who is she?” Bowler repeated dryly as they walked out into the courtyard.
“She’s the torment of every man here. That’s Trish, Jamie’s girlfriend. Her wife, really.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
They paused outside a wooden door. Bowler whispered, “This is the Council room. Listen, you’re not going to believe this. There’s someone here you know. It’s a weird coincidence that they should rake in someone else from the college. Unless maybe … I don’t know.”
“Well, who the hell is it?”
“Fiskle. Harmon Fiskle, Ph.D.”
“Are you putting me on?”
“Uh-uh. Dr. Fiskle. He went to that conference at Oxford, right? Went on a side trip to Wales?”
“And disappeared. Yeah, I heard. God, this is synchronicity with a vengeance. Jamie mentioned him, but I didn’t connect the name … She said she thought he tried to kill her, set the wheelers off.”
“If he can get away with it, he probably did it. Let’s hope it’s not ‘synchronicity with a vengeance.’ He’s got power here, the prick.”
“Oh, great. Just great. And he brought his social theorem with him. Skinner and Social Darwinism.”
“You know it. And he sees this as the ideal place to—”
The door opened. A bearded man looked out at them and said, “Are you going to stand out here whispering, or are you coming in?”
There was something ritualistic in the barrenness of the Council room. Zero thought of a gathering of tribal leaders in an Indian lodge. Bare walls, a slit in one of them for a window. Shaky light from torches oozing a ghost snake of yellow smoke. And the settlers, squatting on the floor against the wall, looking at the floor, the ceiling, staring into space. A few of them talking in low voices but not looking at one another. They were like a videotape Zero had seen of a group therapy session for the chronically depressed.
There were twelve of them. With Jamie and Trish missing, only one of them was female: Anna, a sturdy pop-eyed Puerto Rican woman. Jamie was the mayor, and normally she’d be in charge of the Council meetings. In her absence the chief of food rationing presided. That was Fiskle.
Fiskle’s was the only cheerful face. Zero remembered him as a preppie and a snob. And a hide-bound behaviorist. He’d been a prodigy, a professor at only twenty-six years old. Known for immaculate suits in gray, black, or quiet blue, and for his spotless patent leather shoes. For his anal exactitude in everything, from his manicure to his demands for perfection in student papers.
But after five years he’d trimmed his classroom work to the tenure minimum, and devoted most of his energies to working at the university medical facility, correcting sociopathic behavior through a particularly rigid application of rewards and punishments. Especially punishments.
Now he wore a tunic and rough trousers of leather. His head was shaved—must be painful, shaving here—and somehow he was the only man in the room with clean fingernails. He was lean and sunburned with a sharp nose and hooded gray eyes and lips so red they looked cherry-stained. His expression was supercilious complacency.
He smiled at Zero and Bowler as they sat directly across from him to the right of the door. He was also the only man in the room who didn’t have yellowed teeth. Zero imagined him searching frantically through the local flora till he found some fibrous reed that could be made into a serviceable toothbrush.
“What a pleasure it is to have two former students here. And how very curious it is, too! Perhaps someone was listening when I said—more than once, to be sure—that I wished I had some of my students alone in a foreign country, where I could make my own rules for their improvement.”
“This place don’t run to your rules,” said a strikingly handsome blond-haired young man with a surfer’s tan. He wore no shirt, perhaps to show off his perfect muscle tone.
He glanced at the newcomers. Zero’s gut contracted when he saw that the right side of the man’s face was missing. It looked as if it had been clawed away. There was a thin crust of red over the bone, and claw-stripes of bluish scar tissue, and a crater where his right eye should have been. He grinned lopsidedly at Zero. “Something wrong, man?”
Zero shook his head. “Um. No!”
“My rules are nature’s rules, Warren,” Fiskle told the disfigured blond. “And in time they’ll assert themselves without my help. My only hope is to guide us into step with nature. And then, paradoxically, we’ll overcome nature. Tame it. As we were beginning to do on Earth. It wants us to tame it.”
“Let Jesus guide us!” cried a wispy man with long, dirty brown hair. Zero had assumed the man was wearing a loincloth of some kind, but looking closer he realized there was no loincloth; the man was nude. “Jesus appointed us to this new wilderness. His Eden is here. If we find our way back to innocence, Eden will—”
“Kindly put a sock in it, Smilder, will you?” Fiskle interrupted sweetly. It was venomous sweetness. He beamed at the rest of them. “Now then, the chief business of the day is to vote on the acceptance of the newcomer Martin Wirth, aka ‘Zero.’ Bowler has sponsored him and given us a bit of background on him. So, as we have to get on to the rationing budget, let’s get this out of the way. All in favor…” Zero held his breath.
He needn’t have worried. He was unanimously voted in. “We need everyone we can get, you see,” Fiskle said. “Everyone human and sane. So far, you’re sane. And so far you’re human.”
Zero looked at Bowler. The look said, What does he mean by that? Bowler shrugged. Zero asked, “Fiskle—is there something else here I should know about?”
Warren laughed bitterly. The others shifted slightly, a rustling noise about the room, and glanced up at the wind
ow.
Fiskle looked at the window, too. “We thought it was the Meta doing it, at first,” Fiskle said meditatively. “But now I don’t think so. I think it’s this planet. Something to do with the IAMton fields. I think, though, that the Meta know about it. I think that’s why they picked this planet—to make it more interesing.”
“Shut up, Fiskle,” Anna said, “for god’s sake.”
“They don’t like to talk about it.” Fiskle was talking absently, as if musing aloud. “It’s as if there’s something dirty in being a Twist. I suppose it is obscene. But I suspect it makes a good deal of sense in the long run.”
Bowler said, “If we’re going to keep our sanity here, we’ve got to keep the mysteries to a minimum. Because there are too damned many already.” He looked sharply at Fiskle and snapped, “So what the hell are you talking about?”
“There’s a sort of … an indescribable convection that moves through the landscape, through the atmosphere. A kind of current moving through the fabric of reality. You can see it in the way it—ah, it makes things look different. But after its passed, they’re the same as before. Except when it reaches something that thinks. It changes that something, alters it, gives it a new biology—a new, uh, sense of self. To greater and lesser degrees. You haven’t seen the Current, Bowler, because it comes rarely to this part of the world. Only twice in Earther memory. And the settlers don’t like to talk about it. Things are, as you say, mysterious enough. But you may encounter some of those who’ve been altered. We call them Twists. You’ll know them when you see them. You’ll know the Current when you see it. Steer clear of both.”
Zero and Bowler stepped out into the courtyard and paused to look around.
The Fortress of the Pioneers looked like something out of an old Foreign Legion movie. Baking in the golden afternoon sun, the courtyard could almost have belonged to some nineteenth-century Cairo trader—until you looked up at the mocking green sky.
The fortress was separated from the rest of the settlement by high, thick walls that were seamlessly connected by walkways with the upper floors of the block-shaped, slit-windowed buildings they protected. The whole structure looked to be of a piece, as if it had been made by pouring something into a mold. Pioneer sect guards—eight men and two women, armed with blunderbusses, crossbows, and pikes—patroled the walkway atop the wall, two stories up.