by John Shirley
Bella was lolling like a sated panther at the Emperor’s feet. Her sickly glow softly illuminated the Emperor and his charges, tingeing everyone a watery green. And softly the land-coral sang its alien chorale to the Emperor.
Oliver, the self-cloned pop star, naked and fantasy-beautiful, was embracing himself just behind his liege, like an ornate back to Harmony’s throne. The diaphanous vamps, weightless human jellyfish of the air, were dancing six feet off the ground to either side of the Emperor, magic-colored in the starlight, like living curtains to frame his throne. Father stood behind and to one side of the throne, like a eunuch guard. The air-sharks cruised in wide circles around it, moving in opposite directions, passing one another with the monomaniacal grace of beings streamlined for predation. They were the first line of protection for the Emperor. In the Emperor Harmony’s pose, in his theatrical regality, was the message, All of Fool’s Hope is my throne room.
Swanee fluttered down to alight before him, going to one knee, his head bowed, as he knew was expected. “My Emperor, my essence is yours.”
“What do you think?” the Emperor asked mischievously, sitting up straight and gesturing at the array of Twistflesh around him. “Wait till you see the palace I’m going to build. Then you’ll see some self-indulgence. I intend to live every fantasy I denied myself as a boy. I lost my boyhood, you know, raised as I was … Well, that is neither here nor there.”
His eyes whirring, the Emperor reached down to the corpse of a wheeler lying beside his stoic, breathing throne and dipped two fingers into the wheeler’s exposed brain. Then he ate the blue brainstuff straight from his fingers, like a Hawaiian with poi. Climbing up Harmony’s back, Kelso came to rest on the Emperor’s shoulder, gnashing his skull teeth, sniggering, eyes glowing pink-red.
“Disturbing news reaches me,” Harmony said, looking affectionately at Kelso but talking to Swanee. “I am in rapport with Goldeneyes, who informs me that the cross-species expedition, that diplomatic miscegeny, has won past the brain termites. I awoke the termites myself with a ripple and felt them take one of the expedition—the little cockney fellow, Dennis—and I felt sure the others would fall to them, too. But they didn’t. They’re at the edge of the forest, and they have a guide now, this Jack the Baptist creature.”
“That’s a drag, my Emperor,” Swanee conceded. He was looking at Bella, who gazed tauntingly back at him in full knowledge of his hopeless devotion. Swanee hoped he didn’t have bloody fur on his mouth.
“I need to contact someone out there, Swanee dear,” the Emperor was saying languidly. “A group of aliens going after the very same Progress Station. I’d like to tip them off about the Earther competition. They might just do something about that competition. Especially if I tell them that the Earthers plan to do something about them.”
Kelso crooned, “So creative, so, oh soooo creative!”
Pleased, the Emperor paused and turned to Kelso and made kissing noises at him, like an old lady with a parakeet. Kelso snuggled up closer to his Emperor’s nearly changeless face. The Emperor turned to gaze at Swanee now, saying, “My agent, unfortunately, is too deep in the forest to contact. It’s a sentient place, that forest, and its interference is impassable. So I need a sort of communications satellite. You.”
The temperature of Swanee’s blood dropped twenty degrees. “No. If I understand you, Emperor, I cannot—”
“You do. You will. You’ll take to the air, fly partway to the forest. Nearby the forest are the aliens. I’ll send my ripple to you, and you’ll transmit it to the aliens. We’ll tip them off. With any luck—and who is luckier than the living God?—they will kill the infidels. These aliens are a fierce bunch and will probably torture them first. I’d like to see them torture this Zero, and the Baptist … but even I cannot have everything. Not yet.” His voice was sticky with affected humility.
Twenty degrees colder still. “No, my Emperor,” Swanee said haltingly.
“Aliens—to be in mental contact with them—I couldn’t handle it.”
“You’ll merely be a relay. Anyway, it’s not as if you have a choice.”
Suddenly the air-sharks were there, within reach, circling Swanee with sharp sweeping motions, making slicing sounds in the air, clashing their teeth. In their small shark eyes was a compressed infinity of undiluted rapacity.
Swanee shrank within himself.
Bella’s laughter tinkled; Kelso snorted derisively and yammered, “Shark bait, you’re shark bait if ya don’t!”
Deep inside Swanee there was a reason under the reason for not wanting to be the Emperor’s psychic communications satellite. He didn’t want to be the cause of the expedition’s murder. He had known Angie a little, and Yoshio.
Angie was lonely and uncertain of herself, a child really; Yoshio had been kind to him. He didn’t want to murder them. Or anyone at all.
One of the air-sharks ducked its beveled head at him and flashed the ornament of its jaws in the Frost-light.
“My essence is yours, my Emperor,” Swanee said.
7
“We’ll probably get lost in there,” Cisco said, looking at the forest. It was no less ominous in the light of morning. The trees seemed higher today.
“How will we get the carts in?” Zickorian asked.
“Yes,” Calum said, “how can we get the carts in?”
“There is a place,” the Baptist said. “I’ll show you.”
Two hours later they were toiling through a murky corridor of trees along a narrow, claustrophobic trail between dense banks of underbrush that was feverish with renewed life. The forest here was a many-layered thing of purples and shades of violet, of sudden splashes of scarlet and dead-white.
The trees rose in dove-gray shafts, each big enough to dwarf a sequoia, through tiers of foliage canopy. Their branches contained not leaves on stems but a feathering of the bark itself into something like leaves, like a bird with its plumage puffed out. The canopies were made with a profusion of branches and with interlacing parasitic plants and lesser shrubs. Things scampered and slithered and fluttered in the canopy but were rarely seen.
The dull blue light was diffuse. The outlines of things were clear; the details were not. They were blurred not only by shadow but also by the amino-rich mist that hung between the growths and added choking humidity to the dull pressure of heat. Occasionally shafts of sunlight struck through breaks in the canopy, like a spotlight illuminating a circus of dust and spores and minute flying things … The place smelled of damp, of dissolved minerals, of menthol and ergot and fermenting mulch, and faintly of chicken soup.
The expedition trudged beside the oruhs. Zero and Angie were at the lead cart, both of them sticky with sweat and trying not to go back to the waterskins too often. They hiked on either side of their cart’s cranky beast, urging it on when they came to a place where the undergrowth bullied in too close or where the ground was choked with fallen limbs. The oruh seemed reluctant to be in direct physical contact with the forest.
“How is it that the ground is exposed here?” the Pezz asked suddenly as it dropped back from expedition point. It addressed its question to Jack the Baptist, who was walking beside Angie singing softly to himself.
As if humorously unsure that the Pezz would believe it, Jack said, “From other expeditions, perhaps? Or forest animals?”
“No, it is very fresh,” the Pezz said. “It gives the appearance of being recently exposed. As if the forest drew back to make it.”
Zero looked at the Baptist, wondering. Remembering.
The Baptist said, “Perhaps it recognizes the inevitability of your passage and seeks to minimize your damage to it. Your expedition is, after all, an important enzyme action in the unseen organism.”
“He’s starting that stuff again,” Angie muttered. “He says stuff like that and refuses to explain it.”
“I understand it,” Cisco said pompously. “See, he means we’re all One with the cosmos, and—”
“We are certainly not all One,�
� The Baptist said. “We are all Many. There is a One, of course, who rides passively with us and watches through our eyes.”
He’s a classic Paranoid, Zero thought.
But Jack went on, with a madman’s confidence, “You might say we are that One, but then again you might point out that we have our own choices to make which the One does not take part in, and thus we are quite separate. The forest, similarly, is one organism on a certain level; on another it is made up of many very combative and competing parts. It happens that, here, those parts can cooperate when they have to, when it’s useful to them, through the IAMton interconnection. Myself, I tell you that the level on which we are All One will not help you, Cisco.”
Cisco tried to draw him out, but the Baptist would say nothing more. Zero thought how remarkably little they knew of him. He made jokes to sidestep their questions about his life on Earth, his background. He made short forays into the forest at times, melting effortlessly into what appeared impenetrable to others, and returned with armfuls of fruit. At least, Zero assumed it was fruit. It might have been colorful egg’s or … he preferred not to guess. The Baptist had piled the multicolored fruit into the back of the cart and said, “Take note of the type. I bring you those that won’t poison you. They’re nourishing. Even for the Pezz and the Clansmen. Don’t eat any now, though,” he had added, as Cisco reached for a mauve ovoid.
“Might not be wise to eat them when you’re moving.”
The hours dragged. The Earthers’ feet ached, and then their legs ached, and then their feet and legs and backs. Zero’s breath rattled in his throat. He felt chills and wondered if he were coming down with a fever. The angle of the sun-shafts tilted as the day wore on, and were seen less often; the smothering closeness of the woods closed around them. The forest spoke to itself with its ten million denizens, but more quietly now; the chattering and rattling and hooting sometimes inexplicably dropped into silence. In those oases of quiet they’d hear only the faint rustling of things moving, just out of sight.
“This fucking woods is on my nerves,” Angie said out of the blue, her voice shrill with stress. “And the damned trail is getting thinner.” She pulled on the oruh’s halter, urging it on against it will so that it cut through a corner of the underbrush crowding the turn in the trail. The oruh stepped on the bush. The bush’s seeds broke under the oruh’s tread. From up ahead came a rustling. Angie took a pike from the back of the cart and went ahead to use it like a clumsy machete, smashing at the vines and the smaller outthrust branches in their way. Jack the Baptist gaped at her, blinking What’s so surprising? Zero wondered.
More rustling up ahead. They completed the turn in the trail…
Then the trail was gone. Just petered out and ended. They faced a wall of brush.
Jack sighed. “It’s rather stupidly stubborn, you know. If you try to penetrate it like a bulldozer, it closes up and refuses to cooperate. As it has done here. If you try to minimize your damage, it plays along and lets you through. You’d think it would be the other way around.” He shrugged. “But perhaps, as you’re abusive, it wants you to die here so more of your sort don’t come.”
Zero turned to him. “You mean it’s going to—” He broke off, staring at the apparition hovering over the Baptist.
It was a small pyramid, a half-yard to a side, slowly rotating in midair. It was the color of the afterimage that comes from staring at a light bulb. Its artificiality glowed against the riotously organic backdrop like a computer screen in a dark room, and Zero thought it reminded him of something that had been computer animated. That look of having been drawn without lines or conventional shading.
Was it translucent? Zero stared at it, straining to see into its interior—and it split up into two smaller pyramids, as if under the impact of his gaze; as if the process of perceiving it disturbed its shape. “Oh,” Cisco began.
Angie turned to him, snarling, “Don’t you fucking dare say ‘Oh, wow!’ Understand?”
The pyramids merged again into one, which moved off, into the forest. The Baptist murmured something inaudible and followed it, keeping his eyes on it. For the first time his face showed tension—even fear.
The expedition’s sodden amazement broke up into a babble of overlapping exclamations. “Hey, what the fuck—”
“I apprehend no physical exudations from this entity.”
“Where you going—”
“What is this phenomenon?”
“Maybe we oughta follow it. Maybe it wants us along, too.” This last from Cisco, who started to follow Jack into the brush. Acting on instinct, somehow knowing it was the right thing to do, Zero and Yoshio reached out and grabbed Cisco by the collar, hauled him back, and held him protesting till both the pyramid and Jack were gone from sight.
“We camp here, I think,” Zickorian said.
Swanee was crucified on the sunset. He had reached the apogee of his climb, had spread his wings and his arms as if he were asking the sun to burn away his guilt with photon grace, and he was silhouetted spread-eagled against the shimmering bands of tangerine, gold, and jade on the horizon.
And then he plummeted so suddenly, he nearly dove through his own shadow on the clouds. He pierced the cloud with his dive and opened his wings, emerging with a horizontal swoop into the open air, clearing his mind with the breathless exhilaration of the moment, making himself receptive, an antenna, a transmitter.
A hot flash rolled through him and squeezed perspiration from him like water from a crushed sponge as he saw the Emperor Harmony sitting on a small cloud before him. There and not there. The Emperor Harmony: Caparisoned in an ermine robe and a sapphire-studded diadem, his face shining with angelic perfection, a halo spiking bluewhite around his head, a ball of healing golden energy seething in his upturned right hand; a ball of destructive scarlet energy combusting in the palm of his left; the balance, reward and punishment…
This was how the Emperor saw himself, Swanee realized.
And then Swanee saw another place entirely. In it were six creatures alike, aliens, striding along the edge of a forest, circumventing it. They were noble creatures, living prisms, creatures of transparent skin because the sun loved their inner selves, knights of breathing glass who rejected shadowy places like the forest. They remained in the open, so as to remain in communion with the planet’s god, the Star (Swanee realized then that his rapture in the sunlight had come from the aliens’ sun-worship, a precontact psychic glimpse as the Emperor sent the first mind ripple between himself, Swanee, and the aliens), the great hydrogen-fusion warrior in the sky.
Distantly, Swanee was aware—and indifferent to the awareness—that he had begun to spiral down, recklessly descending.
Images of Zero, Angie, and Yoshio. Of a Pezz and two High Clansmen. All these springing from the forest, firing blunderbusses and flinging pikes, ambushing, fouly murdering the noble beings of soft glass.
Gone. The Emperor waved and blinked into nowhere, and Swanee’s contact with the aliens was severed. He found himself diving, falling dangerously near the ground. Trees rushed up at him; the speed was like a furious hammer about to smash him onto a treetop. He banked and clawed at the air, fighting to come out of the dive. But the trees shot toward him like spears.
Then he found the lift-pressure, and the treetops tickled his stomach as he pulled up and streaked above them parallel to the ground. That close.
Heart pounding, Swanee found a perch on a natural obelisk of rock thrusting up from the woods. He settled onto it, panting, fearing a heart attack. But his heartbeat slowed as the planet heaved its horizon over the sun, drawing a soothing darkness over the antic world.
Swanee looked north and thought; They’re there. A long way north. In another forest. The memory of the aliens clung to his mind like a bad aftertaste. There was, in fact, a taste that accompanied it: of vinyl. He knew them then. They were the aliens whom Earthers called Vinyls, creatures of what looked like soft transparent plastic and visible internal organs. Creatures of long, fricti
onless feet, skating over the ground with unnatural ease, moving over grass or dirt like an ice skater over a frozen pond. They were violent things and so utterly alien that he had backed away, biting off a scream, when he’d first seen them in the Neutral.
With a lead weight sinking through his gut, Swanee knew that he had just given them a message, a message they would take to be from their sun god. A counterfeit premonition of ambush. An imperative to do something about it.
“What did he mean, ‘It might not be wise to eat them when you’re moving?’ ” Zero asked, frowning, looking at the core of the third piece of fruit he’d eaten since making camp.
“You trust this Jack too much,” Zickorian said. He’d refused to eat the fruit.
“What do you know about him? He has been referred to by others of your kind as insane. Perhaps he has poisoned you.”
“Yes,” Calum said. “What do you know about him? He might have poisoned you!”
Angie shook her head. “More likely he meant the stuff gives you diarrhea.”
They were sitting around the fire, rather close to it, their backs to the two carts. No one wanted to leave their backs completely exposed to the volatile mystery of the forest.
The Pezz had consumed two pieces of the fruit. “The fruit is nourishing and not poisonous to me. But I cannot truly say that it is harmless. It has (untranslatable) my synapses and has given me waking dreams.”
“I feel … kind of … funny myself,” Zero said. His teeth ached. His skin tingled. He moved back from the fire; it seemed to burn aggressively, threatening to swell to a bonfire.
“Me, too,” Cisco and Angie said almost simultaneously. They broke up into giggles, leaning on one another. Zero himself was smiling idiotically.
“I suspect,” the Pezz said, sitting on its hind legs with unusual rigidity, “that since this forest stands on the edge of the IAMton wastes, its roots and water systems may carry IAMton-rich minerals to its plants. There may be an unusually high concentration of IAMtons in the fruit. Which may account for certain phenomena.”