by John Shirley
Zero glanced around. Doggo and Bowler were distracted, involved in talking to the—the things. Zero shrugged and moved closer to the metal box, stood a yard from Garrison. “The Meta got you too, Professor? What’s with the box? Some kind of prison?”
“The Meta? Prison? Don’t be foolish, my boy. You jump to unwarranted conclusions. You’re living in the ivory tower of your own presumptuousness. ‘Tis you who are the prisoner, sir. I—the one and only Garrison—am here by means of teleportation. I’m just looking around. I’ve built a machine that has mastered space, which you see before you. If you like, you may step inside, and I’ll take you back with me to Earth. Back to America, back to comfort and fast living: fast food and fast cars. Back to sex and drugs and rock and roll. Coming?”
Zero stared. “Seriously? Can you do it? Lemme get my friends—”
“Ah, young Master Wirth, I’m sorry, it cannot be. I can take only one along with me this trip. And I must go now. You have only to step into the box. Hurry! Are you coming, sir?”
“Fuck it!” Zero stepped into the box.
A human arm crooked itself around Zero’s neck and dragged him backward out of the box, just as the box’s outer edges, their metallic hardness instantly becoming impossibly flexible, began to move inward, closing like a sea anemone—clamping on the spot Zero had occupied a moment before.
Zero wrenched loose from the restraining arm, turned and saw Cisco. Angie was with him. Both of them looked dirty and haggard but intact. “You almost got ate, Zero,” Cisco said “Lucky I had an intuition about you.”
“He’s full of shit,” Angie said. “I just happened to spot you and the Boxed Liar between the rocks.”
Behind them, Doggo, having played diplomat, dis-missed the quarreling aliens. They moved off, one sliding away and one oozing.
Zero glared at Cisco, demanding, “What the fuck are you doing? That was Professor Garrison!”
“That,” Angie said, “was an alien. It took the professor from your mind. Used your own subconscious to cook up a lure.”
Doggo, taking the scene in, nodded. “That thing would have eaten you. Plain and simple. Your friends here saved your life.”
Zero pulled irritably away and turned back to the box. It had collapsed inward on itself and was now humping guiltily away, moving like a metallic cater-pillar.
That close, he thought. Just that close. I could be digesting in that thing’s guts right now. Zero felt sick and humiliated. Angie had seen his idiotic blunder. And she was smiling at his embarrassment. He turned away. Cisco and Bowler were talking to him, but he wasn’t listening. The box had almost eaten him. Kelso was warning him. Fiskle was breathing down his neck. He’d almost been killed by the wheelers. Get away, he told himself. Hide. He began to walk. He didn’t care where—he just wanted the hell out of the Neutral.
But first he needed to pee.
Zero ducked into a crowd of traders and turned onto a small path between two high menhirlike rocks. He found a suitable spot, opened his trousers, and urinated on the side of a rock. He found a mild reassurance in the act. He was making a connection with all the other outdoor places he’d peed in, on Earth.
He’d just finished, when he felt the pressure of someone’s gaze. He looked up and saw an eye in the rock. An eye had opened up in it, of solemn brown, like the little eye that seems lost in the side of a whale. It was looking at him reproachfully. He backed hastily away.
From behind came the sound of cheering and applause. Hastily tucking his privates away, he turned and saw Doggo, Yoshio, Warren, Cisco, Angie, and a number of other settlers he didn’t know, standing in a group and applauding, cheering, hooting, laughing.
“Nice goin’, man!” Warren yelled. “You ain’t really here till you’ve peed on one of th’ Looking Rocks! Now you’re a citizen of Fool’s Hope!”
“Would you have thought it was such a bad idea if one of the men had suggested it?” Angie asked. “I know what you think of women. Their place in the ‘genetic scheme.’ “
“It has nothing to do with the originator of the idea,” Fiskle replied. “A bad idea is a bad idea.”
Zero, Bowler, Doggo, Warren, Yoshio, and Cisco were sitting in the shade in front of Doggo’s lean-to. At least shade was shade here. Yoshio was absently caressing a new bolt of Whorebug cloth laid across his lap. They were watching Angie and Fiskle, as if watching a play.
Angie and Fiskle stood facing one another. Fiskle’s posture emanated condescension; Angie’s spoke outrage. She looked uncomfortable in the lavender jumpsuit she’d worn when she was abducted. There was a bloodstain on the inner left thigh. Tampax were not readily available on Fool’s Hope. Her hair was tangled and matted, and there were streaks of dirt on her face. Zero thought she’d never looked lovelier.
Angle stood with her arms crossed over her chest as she said, “It makes sense to try it. I wonder, Fiskle, if you don’t think it’s in your interest to—”
“I’m responsible for the safety of the Pioneers,” Fiskle interrupted, rather hastily. “If you go out on an expedition with hostile aliens, you’re at risk from both them and the wilderness. And the Murderers. That’s an unacceptable level of risk. The Pezz have consistently attacked us—”
Doggo interrupted, “The Pezz have attacked our people only when we’ve wandered into what they consider to be their territory. It’s a big planet. Let them have their territory. They have strict territorial rituals of pass-through—we can learn them. I really think that if we’d learn their little rituals, there’d be no trouble. I think it’d be a good idea. A joint expedition with some of the so-called ‘hostile tribes.’ Like the Soviet-American joint space missions back home.”
“Back on Earth, you mean,” Bowler said rather severely.
Doggo nodded. It was taboo to refer to Earth as home. The Council had ruled that all effort should be made to encourage pyschological adaptation to Fool’s Hope—to consider it home. Any other course led to madness and despair.
“You think it’s a good idea, Doggo?” Fiskle said with heavy irony. “Fine. When you’re elected to head of Council, you can so rule.”
“You preside, you don’t rule over us,” Angie said. “And anyway the presiding is only in Jamie’s absence. Till she heals up. Let’s take it to Jamie. And to a Council vote.”
“Very well,” Fiskle said, looking at her stonily. The sun was setting behind him, a bloodred sunset; its rays bled between the high stones, blacklighting Fiskle, blotting his face. He stood looking invisibly at them, his head spiked in red light, his face in shadow. “But we should be looking for ways to increase our combat efficiency, for methods to undermine our enemies, not to cozy up to them.” He paused and added with melodramatic finality, “If you succeed, you’ll be defeating us all.”
He turned and strode away between the boulders. Doggo squinted into the shattered light. His face was a wash of red, a tint that made Zero think of a car’s taillight glow.
“Sunset. Best get back to the settlement before the Frost rises,” Doggo said, standing. “Let’s go.”
But the Frost rose in the sky while they were still a quarter-mile from the settlement The Frost was a constellation, or many constellations interwoven—a sinister jewelry-chest of them. It was a sickle shape of blazing diamond-light, as brilliant white as the sky was jet black, and hard to look at directly. It was not as bright as the sun but far brighter than Earth’s moon. And as if to sound a clarion announcing the rising of the Frost, the creaks and hooters began singing. Animals or insects? Zero was not quite sure, but the creaks creaked and the hooters hooted, and now and then some other creature sounded a comical bass note like a tuba.
“This idea, that danger comes with the Frost’s rise—this may be superstition,” Yoshio was saying as they trudged up the road out of the bogs. He carried the roll of Whorebug cloth tucked under his left arm, on the side away from Zero. It had taken Yoshio two months to get the ore with which he’d made the tools and two weeks more to make the tools. But the clo
th he’d traded them for would earn him three months of settlement food.
The pike Zero carried was a bar of pain rubbing into his shoulder. He shifted it to the other side as Yoshio went on. “I think we make our own superstitions now. We’re finding this world’s nature spirits. Not spirits, but—” He gestured vaguely, unable to find the words in English.
“But what people think are nature spirits? The patterns in nature?”
“Yes. Patterns. And coincidences. Here people believe that when the Frost rises in the sky, the Murderers come, or other bad things. Only while the Frost is touching the horizon. After the Frost rises above the horizon, then the moon rises. When the moon rises—and the Meta are present in the moon—then all is safe.”
“Superstitions already.” Zero said gloomily. ” Lord of the Flies. We’re gonna regress here. First we get supersitious and then tribal primitive. Sacrifices.
Despotic chiefs.”
“Not if we progress,” Bowler said. “Not if we campaign against superstition and insist on an enlightened political structure.” Said with a politico’s corny conviction, but it was welcome. It was a center of orientation.
Twenty yards ahead, a silhouette in the thickening blue, Fiskle walked alone. “I don’t trust Fiskle,” Zero said, watching him. “I didn’t trust him on Earth.”
Yoshio only nodded.
Zero glanced over his shoulder at Angie, walking beside Cisco, looking for signs that they might be a couple. But she looked as independent as ever, walking along with her hands in her pockets, looking moodily up at the sky.
Zero told himself, Go on, do it. Drop back and talk to her.
But he stayed where he was, thinking how strange it was. There should be less restraining him here, light-years from Earth’s social conventions. Here, where survival was in doubt from minute to minute. But it was as if he were afraid of committing some xenosocial solecism. Social conventions were avenues as much as barriers. He didn’t know how to approach her on Fool’s Hope. There were rules none of them knew yet.
Shit, he told himself. Don’t be such a wirnp, a wuss, a faint-hearted conformist.
But he stayed where he was.
Doggo and Warren brought up the rear. Both of them looked into the bogs.
Doggo looked wary and hefted his pike. It was hard to judge Warren’s expression with half his face gone. But he seemed almost to be challenging the bogs with his macabre grin. Like, Go on, send your worst out after us.
“The Murderers—they’re out in the bogs?” Zero asked.
“Yes, and other places,” Bowler said. “But they’re just as likely to come at you in the daytime.”
“Some reassurance. What are they, exactly?”
“Aliens. Only one each, from particularly vicious races. The Meta drop them among us just to, well, to keep us on our toes, I guess. Unless the Meta are sadistic.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “One of the Murderers did for Warren’s face. And killed his brother.”
“The Hungry Punkin’ is supposed to be the worst,” Cisco said, moving up beside Zero, “the hardest to kill. I think all the Murderers are one race: a race of demons that take on different ugly shapes. Like, on whims. You know? Okay, you guys go ahead and sneer—but the thing you haven’t got yet about this place is, it’s not another planet. It’s a spiritual plane inhabited by spirits trying to teach us! The Meta are highly evolved spirits, see, and higher science is always a form of what we call supernatural.”
He was cut off by groans and ridicule from Angie and Bowler. Zero spoke apologetically to Yoshio. “What you have to understand about Cisco, Yoshio, is that he’s from Los Angeles. The guy carried crystal pendants around to decide his itinerary.”
Yoshio smiled. The smile was a mothlike flutter in the near-darkness. “But he’s accidentally right about something: that it is a mistake to bring anything to Fool’s Hope with us. Anything of what we thought on Earth. To understand this world, we’ll have to clear our brains, empty our minds.”
“My mind’s empty, man. ‘Cause I haven’t got a clue.”
Between the bogs and the settlement, the road curved through a copse of trees. At least, Zero assumed they were trees. They looked like giant coral.
Their upper branches reached gray against the sky, looking stiff, brittle.
Zero and his friends were almost to the edge of the copse. It gave off a smell of ginger and sour wine. The creaks and hoots and the tuba groan grew louder as the little group of humans approached the woods. Zero supposed that the creatures making the sounds were like crickets and small birds.
As he passed near the trees—or animal growths—edging the road, Zero realized that the tips of the twigs were hollow, like tiny horns, and the sounds, the hoots, creaks, and groans, were coming from the twig-tips themselves. He reached up and touched one overhanging the road. It was hard as stone, unyielding. He turned to Yoshio. “There’re animals in the twigs? I mean, they look hollow.”
“No. The land-coral itself is singing. We don’t know why.”
The singing of the land-coral was loud here, almost drowning Yoshio’s voice.
“Oh, God,” Doggo said, trotting up ahead of them. He skidded to a stop and stared at something. Standing rigidly in the road, he was frosted in starlight. The others sensed his alarm and stopped where they were. He pointed. “The Current. The altering vector.”
The land-coral’s singing abruptly stopped, as if someone had switched off a tape deck. The night was silent. And the gingery, sickening smell was gone, replace by the burning smell of a dentist’s drill at work—the odor of metal and bone friction, of burning teeth.
At the curve up ahead, Fiskle was passing out of sight behind a screen of the coral growths. And something was there.
There was no wind, none at all. But Zero felt a shift in the air around him.
Something crackled on his arms. He looked down at himself, and his gut froze. A fringe of violet fire was playing along his forearms. He felt his hair stand on end, his scalp contract. There was a palpable electrical charge in the air. Zero was afraid to move. “The Current. Has it got us?” he asked.
His voice sounded muffled. His lips twitched over the words.
“No,” Yoshio said. “We feel the outside of it, maybe displaced charged particles. But Fiskle—he is in it. Look, now—you can see it.” He pointed, and miniature sunset lightnings played along his arm.
Zero saw it in the stars first; it seemed to swirl them, as in Van Gogh’s Starry Night. And then he saw it in the coral trees. He couldn’t help but think of them as trees. Like heat-wave distortions—but this movement of the trees was no mirage.
The farther trees were really, truly moving in the windless night. The nearest growths were motionless but furred in violent cracklings. St. Elmo’s fire foot-lights for the dance going on behind them. There the land-coral undulated with a flexibility that seemed impossible for anything so large and so formerly stiff-looking. Low, slow-motion silver clouds, faintly luminous, formed in a roiling snake shape over the Current, marking its passage through the land.
Zero wanted to go to Angie, to protect her—as much as she would have resented the gesture—but he could not. He couldn’t move. He was nailed to the spot, rigid and shaking, first by terror and then by an undefinable awe. He had sense that a god-sized power was passing before him with majestic casualness, taking its titanic ease, sliding effortlessly on the very fabric of reality, filling Zero’s head with a quasar output of scintillant white noise.
They all knew when it fell over Fiskle. They felt its impact on him in a kind of psychic backwash, felt Fiskle’s ideas, his clearly defined worldview, wash over them like flotsam on an electric tide. Zero has a brief but lucid mental image of high structures of polychromatic crystal floating by like unnaturally symmetrical ice floes. Fiskle’s assumptions and almost vindictively exacting theories of social planning concretized as iridescent clusters of spines and tetrahedrons; as if, had this been Earth, some great flood had dislodged the architectural mon
strosities built in the 1970s, the severely geometrical churches and art museums, and swept them by. And then they moved on, the massive geometries floated off into the darkness.
Zero heard, perhaps with his ears, Fiskle’s hysterical screaming:
“Externalization blueprinting metastasis of stinking internal organs! Stinking internal organs! Elements of—of glue—ridden hormonal para—para—paralysis synthesized with cataleptic disorganic elegance! Disorganic elegance!” He screamed it so loud you could hear his larynx shredding. The words reeked with his horror. “Fatal assumptions of arbitrarily imposed ontological skeletons sucked of marrow! I said ontological skeletons! I said sucked of marrow, damn you!”
And then a guillotine silence.
Creaks and hoots, again, the tuba groan, as if nothing had happened. The trees were stiff, immobile; the gingery wine smell was nauseatingly strong now.
The great Current had gone, narrowly missing the settlement and passing into the night on its arcane tracks, like an invisible train carrying a freight of inchoate possibilities.
“That was heavy,” Cisco said predictably. He hugged himself. His dark eyes were dilated. His first encounter with nonimaginary psychic phenomena had left him more shaken than the others.
Twenty yards up ahead, Doggo was bending over the two men lying in the road. Yes, two. Fiskle—and the other, Doggo told them with a shout, was Kelso. “What was Kelso doing out in the coral woods?” Bowler wondered aloud.
“His little whorehouse is out there,” Zero said.
“What happened to his head?” Angie asked, her voice carefully controlled.
She was scared.
Zero took a few steps closer to Fiskle and Kelso. And then a few steps more. The bodies were lying head to head at forty-five-degree angles from one another, like “casualties of airport terrorism” in a blurred newspaper photo.
Zero looked closer at Kelso and saw what Angie meant. Kelso’s head was separated from his body. By only a few inches, but clearly separated, and it oozed a puddle that reflected the starlight. Kelso’s hands were gripping his head, clapped over the ears. He lay utterly motionless.