by John Shirley
The air was rank, partly from the sewage trench in the long shed to the left, which drained into a ditch back of the fortress. The stink of the courtyard had layers, fermenting in the heat, and the sharpest layer came from the oruh pen.
Against the right-hand wall, three oruh shifted and farted in the small wooden pen. A cloud of some of the local pests, diaphanous flying things like tiny jellyfish, hung over the pen, valving in jerky movements over the oruh and their offal. They alighted now and then on an oruh’s rump, clasping like barnacles, sucking, only to zig-zag away when the oruh irritably snapped at them.
A skinny, stringy-haired, tired-eyed woman carrying a six-month-old baby hitched on one hip, used her free hand to open a wooden box strapped to the pen’s fence. There was a leather sack in the box. She untied it, lifted it out, and emptied it into the oruh’s feeding trough, dumping segmented, squirming creatures of shiny ochre. Some variation of roaches, Zero thought. Which the oruh, grunting happily, began to crunch and grind in their sideways beaks.
Looking hastily away, Zero followed Bowler across the courtyard to the weapons rack. Sweat beaded instantly on them when they stepped out onto the courtyard’s hot griddle.
The Pioneers’ sergeant at arms stood behind a rough wooden counter in the shade of the wall, to one side of the wood-post gate. He was an unsmiling black man of about thirty-five, wearing a tunic of blotchy black rawhide, probably from an oruh. Bowler showed him a square of leather stamped with the Pioneers’ symbol. The man nodded and asked, “Where you going?”
“Down to the Neutral,” Bowler said.
“Pikes is all, then, or daggers. Watch out for the Kiss Me Darlings.”
“What the hell are Kiss Me Darlings?”
“Look kinda like overgrown orchids made out of shredded coconut. Five feet high, real pretty. Smell real nice—like daffodils, kinda. Don’t go near ‘em. Don’t listen to nothin’ they say. If you see any kinda Twist, steer way clear.”
He turned to a rack of weapons made in the shops and forges on the far side of the settlement. He selected two of the lighter black metal pikes and passed them over. Each pike was about four feet long with a wicked hook on one end and a spike on the other.
Bowler nodded and took one; Zero took the other. It felt like iron. It was heavy. Holding it in both hands, he followed Bowler past the guard, out the gate.
The road outside was rutted dirt. A few Pioneers squatted outside, wearing rawhide or the rotting clothing they had been abducted in. They were talking and smoking some local herb in wooden pipes. Looking again, Zero saw that one of the men wasn’t a Pioneer, wasn’t even quite human. His skin was black but not Negro black; it had the waxy blackness of licorice.
His eye, or perhaps eyes, was a strip of sparkling white-gold above a nose that looked as if it had been split with a blunt knife and never sewn up. He was nude except for a metal-mesh loincloth, intricate bodypaints in floral abstractions, rather like Louis XIV wallpaper, and tennis shoes—Reebok tennis shoes he’d bartered from someone. Four silvery hoops pierced his right wrist the way earrings pierce an earlobe. A black plastic box on his left shoulder translated for him as he spoke to the others. His hands seemed entirely human, except the fingers were perhaps an inch too long.
“That one of the Twists?” Zero asked, whispering. “Looks like he might’ve been human once.”
Bowler shook his head and murmured, “An alien. High Clan. Their trading rep, Zickorian. Supposedly one of our allies, but, like, no one quite trusts him completely.”
There was a broken-down cart leaning against the wall of the building across the way. A naked teenage boy with feral eyes crouched under the cart like a dog, sniffing the wind. He was gray with dust and streaked with blood. Skinny, skin so taut over his lean muscles you could see every cord and sinew. His nose was running messily. He pissed himself as Zero watched. Zero didn’t need to be told about him: the boy had gone mad.
About twenty-five percent of the Meta’s abductees went mad, someone had said. Zero felt a deep chill, looking at the boy. He forced himself to look away.
The wall above the cart was dark with graffiti written smearily with charcoal:
TRISH WANTS COCK
after which someone, probably Jamie, had written:
BULLSHIT JUST TRY AND GIVE IT TO HER YOU CRETIN
SHE’LL USE YOUR BALLS IN A SALAD
(and someone else had scrawled:)
WE DIED AND GOD SENT US HERE. IT AIN’T HEAVEN.
And there was more, written in a cryptic alien script.
They turned left and walked down the road that led to the Neutral, where the races met to deal and where genuine neutrality was a matter of whim.
The Meta had built the human settlement atop a long, grave-shaped hill.
Between the human settlement and the next one to the west, the Ki-ips settlement, was a packed dirt road that stretched across a boggy lowland.
About two miles ahead, halfway across the bogs, the ground rose into a stony maze of boulders, almost a Stonehenge of crooked monoliths a few acres across, an island of dryness in the sodden valley. Here, Bowler explained, was the Neutral, where goods were bartered, defense alliances forged, conspiracies birthed, feuds resolved, curiosity sated, and contracts for joint expeditions made. Where technologies beyond the Iron Age level—possessed by those who’d made it to the upper Progress Stations—were taboo and never the subject of barter. To give another race a technology it hadn’t earned was to undermine your own race’s playing position in the Meta’s great game.
Bowler and Zero trudged through a cloud of blue dust raised by a group of traders trundling wheelbarrows and creaking handcarts along the road to the Neutral. The road was of packed earth reinforced by logs, stretching through the swamp from hummock to hummock. It had been there when the first Earthers arrived.
There were eight traders. All of them carried skeeter switches, like scraggly brooms, cut from the scratch tree; the switches hung from leather thongs at their belts. Like most of the settlement, the traders were young, humans of every color, and mostly male. Only one of the traders was female. The Meta didn’t want their game complicated by a lot of offspring.
Zero looked around, blinking in the dull jade light reflected from the chains of small bog-ponds around the blue-mossed hummocks. Clusters of translucent blue plants edged the ponds, seemed to have grown out of the water and back down into it, perfect arcs like glassy croquet hoops. The sky was hazed over, looking like tarnished bronze, a fulsome glower in green-gold. The air was humid here, hothouse warm, cloying with the odd perfumes of alien blossoms and lewd with swamp rot. Perspiration stuck Zero’s shirt to his back. He unbuttoned it, but then noticed everyone else was well covered despite the heat. Some were in the rags that remained of their original outfits; some in a kind of sackcloth; some in tunics of the local cheesecloth, some in a fine, glossy, silklike cloth with curious red and yellow lightning-stroke designs woven into it: the weave of the Whorebugs.
The Whorebugs traded for metal goods; few of the settlers were so well clothed.
“Better not open your shirt,” one of the traders told Zero. He was a short, haggard Japanese, maybe forty, with a slight accent; he wore a strawberry-lemon Whorebug tunic that he’d rearranged to look like a Shinto robe. He was carrying a jingling crude-cloth sack of small iron tools, presumably for trading with the Whorebugs. “The more skin you expose to the air, the more likely a jumpskeeter will smell you.” He pointed at a nearby hummock, where something squatted, or a mosquito as big as a crow. Take off the crow-sized mosquito wings, Zero thought, and put proportional grasshopper’s legs on it: jumpskeeter. The skeeter shifted its faceted rose-colored eyes and preened its proboscis. Zero hastily buttoned up his shirt.
Bowler nodded. “Yeah, watch out for those fuckers. One of them jump on you, you’ll lose a pint of blood in less than half a second. Jumps on you, sucks it up zip, just like that, jumps off, all in the blink of an eye. Sometimes seven or eight of ‘em travel together; they
get you all at once, you’re a dead man.” Seeing the look on Zero’s face, he added, “It doesn’t happen very often.”
“Not very often,” Zero said dully. “Just now and then. Good. Great. Lovely.”
“You okay?” Bowler asked him.
“No.” He looked out at the glossy patches of the bogs. He imagined the wheelers, or worse, waiting to meet him out there, something alien crouched behind a hummock of geological wrongness. “It’s all too wrong.”
The sky was wrong. The sun was wrong. The horizon was wrong. The color of the water, the texture of the foliage, the cast of the light, the feel of the dirt—all of it was wrong. And the smells: tantalizingly … almost familiar.
And the almost made them even more wrong than if they had been completely unfamiliar. Go to a foreign country on Earth—the African veldt, the jungles of Thailand—and things are strange and disquieting. But there’s a foundation of some familiarity, at least, in the colors and feel of sky and earth and water and sun. The vista seals the foreign place into your understanding, opens it up to your adaptation. But here…
The Japanese said, “The ground is below and the sky above. Water runs downhill, plants grow upward. It is not our world, but it is world.”
Ashamed of himself for whining but unable to help it, Zero said, “Bowler, I want to go back to the town. I can’t handle it out here. Anything could be out here.”
“It’s not that bad. Look, there’s some fishermen. They seem okay. In harmony with the environment and all that.”
Six men and a woman, muddy and squinting, stood to their thighs in a coppery bog-pond not far off the road. Zero thought of Asians working in rice fields. Four of the fishermen were lined up not far apart in the oblong, thirty-foot pond, bent to make scooping motions in the water, driving crustaceans into the grass-fiber net held by the other two. A jumpskeeter went instantaneously from utter motionlessness to a thirty-foot bound, soaring down over the woman holding half the net. The man beside her saw it coming, whipped his switch around, and caught the skeeter in midair, knocking it to the side. It fell onto the mud of a hummock. The woman turned and used the butt of her own switch to smash the thing to pulp. Its storage pouch burst, squirting stolen blood.
“Learn skills like that one,” Bowler said, “and it won’t be so bad here.”
Zero shook his head. He was hot, uncomfortable, and tired, and he hadn’t had enough to eat. Also, he was on the wrong planet. “I just don’t think I’m ready,” Zero complained, “to go to this Neutral thing. I’ve seen enough aliens, Bowler. And Fiskle will be there. I want to see as little of Fiskle as possible.”
Bowler began, “No one’s allowed to fuck with you in the Neutral—”
The Japanese trader looked over his shoulder and laughed. “Not fuck with you there? That’s a good one. They do what they want. They’re not supposed to mess with you, and most people—or not-people—keep it that way. But sometimes…” He shrugged.
Bowler said, “Yeah, sometimes the Whatevers step out of line. It’s hard to enforce the Neutrality. But it doesn’t close down—everyone needs it. I guess it’s safer than—out there.” He waved vaguely at the southern horizon. Off that way the bogs ended as the ground rose to the ridge that separated the settlement from the Rug. To the north, the bog seemed to go on forever, lost in mists a half-mile on.
They’d walked more than a mile. Zero was hot and thirsty. Blue dust was gumming his nose and throat. It was very quiet, just then, for no good reason at all. No Earthly reason, Zero thought.
A quarter-mile ahead now, Zero could see the stony cluster of vertical black and gray, patchy in spots with color, that was the Neutral. They might find anything there. Zero felt panic creeping up on him, coming at him from all directions. He had strobe-swift images of wheelers snapping at his face; of the mad-eyed boy crouching under the cart; of the jumpskeeter stropping its proboscis.
Bowler looked worriedly at him. “You look as if you’re going to throw up or something.”
Zero muttered, “I don’t know how long I can hold on, Bowler.”
“Everybody goes through this when they first come here. Some snap, some don’t. You won’t. You can’t let yourself. Nothing has prepared us for this. It’s another world, and its foreignness makes Cambodia look like Kansas. And it shakes you up more than anybody figured it would. Does it to everyone. Hold on to that, man, that we all went through it. The panic passes. Yon adapt or you flip out. You got a choice.”
“I don’t have a choice. If I do, I do. ! can’t control—”
“You can,” the Japanese said. “It’s a choice between strength and no strength. Between you making a choice and letting the world make the decision for you.”
Zero looked at him. He nodded slowly and said, “What’s your name?”
“Yoshio.”
“Yoshio. I’m Zero. Thanks, man.” And they shook hands. The Earther custom was reassuring.
Bowler lowered his voice to a whisper. “Zero, you know what happens to people who flip out here? There’re no counselors here. No thorazine, no antipsychotic drugs, no emergency rooms. If you lose mental control, you get expelled from the settlement. That kid back there under the cart—they’ve been having trouble catching him. But they’ll get him. They’ll take him out into the country, chase him off, and leave him out there. And he’ll die. Otherwise he steals food and just … his presence demoralizes people. They can’t afford you if you can’t adjust. So you got to go to the Neutral. Force yourself to face the alienness. You know? Anyway, you want to see Angle and Cisco, right? They’ll be there somewhere. I promised them I’d meet ‘em this afternoon, once you got on your feet.”
“How’s Angie handling it?”
“It was rough at first. But she’s kind of … kind of into it now. I almost think she’s starting to enjoy it here.”
“She, uh, say anything about me?”
Bowler snorted. “You think this is the place you’re going to satisfy your unrequited love?”
Zero shrugged.
The Neutral was a twisting lane between the high boulders; awnings had been strung between boulders, some of Whorebug cloth, some of grass weave, some of leather. Under each awning, or between them, or wandering about, a dozen races were proof of the galaxy’s demented variety.
A grizzly of a man in the tatters of a LAPD uniform pushed aside the crude-cloth flap of his lean-to, stepped out, and looked them over. He still had his badge and a cracked plastic nameplate: LT. DOGGO. Perched crookedly on his stubby nose were dark glasses with one of the lenses missing. He had no shoes, and his horny feet were blue from the dirt. On his right shoulder was a translation box. With him was half-faced Warren, wearing buckskin.
“You’re crazy,” Doggo was telling Warren. “There could be anything in there. Don’t do it.”
“Don’t do what?” Bowler asked. He and Zero stood beside the lean-to, in the shade of one of the monolithic stones. Bowler seemed to have business with Doggo.
“Warren wants to go surfing in the Stinking Bucket.”
“It shouldn’t be called that,” Warren said. “It smells funny, sort of mentholated and sort of like fermented soy sauce. But it’s beautiful. The water’s thick and warm—prob’ly hold you up real good.”
“And holds you down even better, I’ll bet,” Doggo said.
“And the waves on it are gigantic and perfectly shaped. Symmetrical as a mandala. Tubular to perfection. And it’s, like, calling to me. I’m gonna make a board.”
“Have you seen my friends, Doggo?” Bowler asked.
“Yeah. I’ll take you to them. Who’s this?”
“Zero. Friend of mine.”
“Zero,” Doggo said, “I’m the lawkeeper in the Neutral, okay? I’m the law here, humanside. Okay?” Not waiting for an answer, he turned and lumbered off. Bowler and Zero followed him.
They moved down the lane, and almost immediately something four-legged and bizarre capered up to block their way. It looked like a sawhorse with a legless, armless
dwarf perched on one end where the horse’s head would be. The nearly human torso was naked—or possibly it had been coated with a kind of paint that was the equivalent of clothing. Where the genitals would have been was a sort of pouch with something irregular and unlike human genitals outlined in it—like a silk bag containing random parts from a gearbox. The sawhorse part was battleship gray; the torso and head were uniformly gold, even its eyes. Its plastic-glossy legs, of duller gold, looked like two-by-fours, but they moved like things of rubber, showing no joints. Zero thought of Gumby’s horse, Poky.
The alien’s head was like a human’s whose face had been blurred, had somehow been made clay-malleable, as if the Creator’s hand had pressed the features down from top to bottom, smearing eyes into cheekbones, nose into lips.
It moved with impressive flexibility, its sawhorse-legs were springy as it bounced back and forth challengingly in front of them.
Doggo turned apologetically to Zero and Bowler. “This is a Pezz. They’re sorta territorial.”
The Pezz’s mouth moved as if it were chewing something too big for it, and squeaky, off-key violin sounds emerged. The translator box strapped to its shoulder said, “You may not pass, though green is green and yellow is yellow. This is my creche of exquisites, and you have not the three intimacies.”
“Friend Pezz,” Doggo said wearily—he’d said it nine times that day already—“I bear the sigil of passage, and it protects me and those with me. Anyway this is the Neutral—no one’s territory. Stand aside.”
“Doggo,” the Pezz replied, “you have piqued my curiosity. With you is one who, if I’ve sorted and classified your hormonal secretions properly, exudes the purple odor of impossible ambition. The other reeks with the sour blue of disorientation and the red smell of irritation. He is adaptation-incompetent.” This last he said looking at Zero.