by John Shirley
“Look, if we run,” Trish said, “it’ll look like we’re his Enemies for sure. He’ll hunt us down. Maybe we can play along, then organize an underground…”
Jamie shook her head. “We are his Enemies, right now, and he knows it—”
She broke off, startled by the crunching sound from below. The Groyn were breaking through the barricade. Jamie looked at Trish. “If we stay here, he’ll kill us. That’s what he’s like. He’ll weed out anyone he thinks would cause him trouble. We have to hide in the building—when the coast is clear we’ll run.”
Another crunch from downstairs. And then a scream.
The Pragmatics—Phylum Twos—charged from three directions into the herd of Groyn at the front door of the dorms. Fifteen of them, at Harmony’s command, using crude iron axes, leaped astride the Groyn and hacked their tentacles away, sunk pitted iron blades into their broad skulls, axed Whorebugs into twitching segments. The aliens fell back before this onslaught as yet another Twist kited in over the wall: this was Sizzle, a new member of Harmony’s troop. His head was human, and his hands and feet, but between them he was a membraneous thing that glided through the air like a flying squirrel. The thin pink-and-blue membranes were stretched between his flattened pitted torso and limbs; his expression was imbecilic. He was shaped, overall, like a slightly concave disk—the convex side upward—and clapped down over his prey from above. Now, protected by the phalanx of Phylum Twos, Sizzle dropped down over a Groyn and enclosed its head and upper parts in his cuplike membrane, closing over them like an octopus over a fish—and exuding powerful acids from his underside. The Groyn shrieked as the acids melted into it, breaking it down into living mush, crumbling bone and melting muscle, pressure-cooking it in seconds so that a bubbling organic soup cooked from the Groyn’s flesh bubbled out from around Sizzle’s edges and spattered the ground. The Groyn collapsed to a shapeless white lump of anonymous stuff. And then Sizzle sprang into the air like a mongoose and came down on two Whorebugs, closed around them, tittering like a lunatic squirrel as they melted beneath him, held helpless by the paralytics in the acids.
Three Phlyum Twos surrounded a great, shaggy female Groyn who’d stayed in the background bellowing commands, who had not entered the settlement till the Earthers retreated to the dorm. The Pragmatics dragged her away from her consorts. On seeing this the other Groyn froze where they were and waited.
Swanee, carrying a translation box, appeared in an upper window and said, “People of the Groyn! We have your Chief Mother, and we advise you to accept a cessation of hostilities. You have many times over avenged the death of one of your own. Let it rest here, and your Chief Mother will go free, unhurt. We require your Soul Boulder agreement on this.”
The Groyn gave out a moan of defeat, hearing the invocation of the eternally binding Soul Boulder. But they consented, and the Chief Mother was set free. They filed out of the settlement; the Whorebugs accepted the peace as equably as they had accepted the war.
And the Emperor Harmony arrived and toured the settlement so as to choose a proper site for his throne room.
“We should have gone with Sanchez,” Trish said. “There’s food at the Neutral.”
Jamie sighed. “Yeah. We got 20-20 hindsight. But we can’t make it now with Fiskle’s guards on the walls, watching everything outside … I’ll be back in ten minutes.” Jamie kissed Trish, deeply and languidly. They hugged, and then Jamie turned and crawled out through the tunnel, into the torchlight.
She had come out near the scum-pod worksheds at the back of the settlement, and there was no one around. She froze, hearing the roar of some great beast of the night, a beast with a hundred throats—No. It was a crowd, chanting something: the “Emperor” was holding a rally; the noise was coming to her from the distance, distorted by the crooked streets. Or maybe, she thought as she ran up the road, going for the food stored in her dorm room, Maybe it wasn’t distortion. Maybe it was the truth behind it.
The roar of an animal.
She saw one of the animals, then. She turned the corner and there it was, looming over her, pink and contentedly bestial. It was ten feet away but she could smell it: the rotting essence of male. Its muscles rippled as it moved toward her; its ropy penis stirred.
She tried to circle it, to walk past, hoping the Phylum Two would ignore her.
Maybe it didn’t know who she was…
But it knew. She tried to run when its fingers went around her neck—easily encircling her neck with its one hand—and it jerked her from her feet, snarled at her. It lifted her by the neck so that she hung struggling and kicking over the ground. It carried her like a spitting, ill-tempered cat, almost choking her. Dangling her feet over the ground, it struck off down the street. She was to be a gift, given to the Emperor of all the world.
They stood on the edge of the IAMton wastes, their backs to its teeming expanse of emptiness, and watched the hill roll away like a disenfranchised wave rumbling back to rejoin the sea. “Now the spirits abandon us,” Zickorian said.
“He’s leaving because he’s fed up with us,” Jack replied. “Wouldn’t bear us an inch farther. Well.” He turned and looked at the IAMton wastes.
Angie said, “Looks like Death Valley. Sort of.”
” Death Valley would be a misnomer here,” Jack said. “Let’s camp, so that Yoshio and Zero can rest. They’re not badly hurt, but let’s not take chances when we haven’t got a doctor. And”—he brightened and rubbed his hands together—“I suggest we eat the last of our provisions all up completely, like pigs. There’s food a few hours’ march from here, across the wastes.”
“Look like the salt flats to me,” Yoshio said as they laid out their packs.
Yoshio grimaced from the pain of his wounds, bandaged in crude-cloth.
“Except for those clinker-type things. Those crooked little towers and that violet stuff.” He meant the small violet lightnings that crackled intermittently over the ground. Just overgrown sparks. “Will we get a shock from those discharges?”
“No,” Jack said, opening the provisions pack and frowning as he inspected the interior. “We’ll be appropriately grounded. It’s not actually electricity, as you mean it. What have we here? A little dried crustacean left. Some dried fruit of a disappointingly nonhallucinogenic variety.”
Zero sat down on his bedroll with a sigh. His own bruises ached, fussed at him when he moved. His ears still rang, and his head throbbed from the blow to his skull.
They ate what remained of their stores (“Nothing matters now,” Zickorian said. “Therefore, why not?”) and prepared for a night’s rest.
Zero expected more of the psychic intrusion from the IAMton field that he’d felt on other nights. “It won’t come as powerfully as that here,” Jack said.
“You are on the edge of the field now. It’s like being in the eye of the hurricane. But there may be some effects. It knows we’re here.”
The expedition settled in, and full darkness closed in on them. Its way prepared, the hourglass moon rose in the sky. The violet glow of the IAMton field was faint, ghostly, haunting. The stars crowded around to outshine it, the Frost rose like a white-hot interstellar battle flag, and the expedition, each in his or her own way, retreated from the fearsome surveillance of these energies, from the sense of being spied on by the perpetually burning gods.
Zero and Angie lay on their sides together, fitting like spoons, Zero with his arm around her. But within their own heads they detached from one another for a while and went away into the private places of the mind.
One astronomical pulse away from dawn.
A strange taste in Zero’s mouth awoke him. It was a sharp metallic taste. A smell accompanied it, of electrical burning. And a sensation on the skin, as if he had a sunburn under his clothing.
He sat up, looked around, and saw that, restless in sleep, Angie had rolled away from him in the night. She was ten feet away, making abortive inchworm motions in her sleep. He saw another movement from the corner of his eye,
turned his head to look—and froze. A chandelier was hanging in midair. No, it was more like a man-of-war jellyfish, as big as a condor, translucent violet and fluorescent, training long, scintillating streamers from its underside. It tinkled softly to itself, chiming like wind chimes as it drifted above the sleeping camp and came to rest over Yoshio. A second one drifted in from the IAMton wastes … and Zero saw a third emerging from the violet shimmer of the ground itself, like a bubble appearing on the surface of a pond, growing out of it. The chiming thing—clearly something alive and aware—mounted buoyantly into the sky, where it was almost lost against the stars. But he could make out its outline, smearing the stars with violet; it drifted twenty feet up, coming closer, angling now, floating toward—
“Angie!” But it was too late. The limp violet streamers of the thing had already insinuated around her head, crackling out blue fulminations, and he knew without needing proof that it was changing her. He was up, shouting, waving at the thing, and it backed off.
He turned to Angie and found her sitting up, reaching for the empty provisions sack lying beside her. Hands trembling with urgency, she tore it along a seam and drew it over her head like a hood so it locked her face into shadow.
In the faint light from the eastern horizon he saw Yoshio sit up and look around at the expedition as if he’d awakened to find himself among strangers.
The third jellyfish floated toward Zero. He made a dash at it, throwing one of the light metal spikes produced by the living hills. Halfway to the thing, the metal spike started turning end over end, and fell through it from above—and the diaphonous creature vanished in a fireworks of glitter.
“Don’t do that,” Jack said, coming up behind him.
“They did something to Angie!” Zero knelt beside her, reached toward her.
“Angie … hey, you okay?”
She drew back from his hand and spoke in a deadened voice, a monotone:
“Don’t touch me.” And then something more in nonsense syllables. Zero stared at her in shock.
Jack laid a hand on his shoulder. “Leave her alone for now.”
“But she’s—shit! What happened? I mean she—”
“Leave her alone. It’s what’s safest for her, for the moment.”
Reluctantly, his mouth dry, Zero stood and took a step back from her, staring. She just sat there, face concealed, hands clasped in her lap, a little hunched over.
Zero heard a clacking sound, looked up, and saw that it was Yoshio piling large flat rocks from the edge of the wastes onto one another. He moved stiffly, but the Vinyls hadn’t hurt him badly.
The formation he’d constructed, a low, precarious wall of rocks, described a crude spiral about eight feet across. Yoshio knelt beside it, laid his hands on it, and said, “I am descending to the Higher; I am de-escalating to the Upper. I am debasing to the Tower. I begin again in each minute that arrives.” And then more in Japanese—and in another language Zero had never heard before.
“Oh, dear,” Jack said, staring at Yoshio, “I fear he is going to be violent.”
The Pezz bounced up to pose springily beside Jack and said, “Yes, completely and with verification: yes. I have heard that chant in translation before, just prior to the skirmishes of [untranslatable term for the speaker’s own people] and the Mack Nary.”
“I agree, a Mack Nary declaration-of-evil construct. The descending spiral.”
Zero turned fiercely toward them. “Are you going to explain, or—?”
“It’s not the same thing that has Angie,” Jack said. “I believe she’s a Solips now. Yoshio, judging from the way he’s now rubbing sand in his face and generally debasing himself, is working his way up to a ritualistic Mack Nary killing frenzy. There was a Mack Nary on the planet for a while, a Murderer as Earthers call them. It was killed by the Whorebugs. Its consciousness was, I suppose, drawn into the IAMton fields and now has been transferred into our Yoshio.” His voice was distracted. But he went on. “The Mack Nary are the monks of a race of beings who are by nature utterly benevolent, almost unnaturally sweet of disposition. In contrast to most beings, which are instinctively aggressive around competing races. This nearly caused the decimation of their race, and they came to believe it was a serious imbalance in their relationship to the universe. They believe that the great object is to merge with the base clay of the universe, the most primitive forms of life. They believe that these forms are closer to God than the complex organisms because most of the universe is made up of raw material, of primitive stuff. They attempt to redress this imbalance and to achieve oneness with the lower forms by forcing baseness on themselves—especially by doing pointless evil. They overcompensate, you see. They see that the lower animals are predatory and that unevolved races are sadistic and cruel—they aspire toward this, and constantly struggle against their own natural predilection for saintliness.”
Zickorian and Calum had joined them. “The spirits have taken two more, I see,” Zickorian said.
“Two more are gone, we see!” Calum intoned.
“Shut up,” Zero snapped, bending to try to see Angie’s face. “She hasn’t gone anywhere.” He looked up at Jack. “You say she’s possessed?”
“In a sense. I suspect her to have become—psychically—an alien we call the Solips. When they’re around others, they don hoods and behave with the maximum characterlessness. Try to become ciphers. They are strong individualists and live in fear of being ‘eaten’ by society, of being pressured into conformity. So they live in solitude, except in childbearing. They simply don’t want their personalities subsumed in others, so they communicate in this safe, distancing mode, which refuses all commitment.”
“Great. Fine. Now, how do we get her out of it?”
“Don’t shout, Zero, you’ll provoke the Mack—uh-oh.”
Suddenly Jack lunged for Zero, tackling him about the middle, knocking him flat. A pike flashed through the air where Zero had stood a moment before.
Jack had saved his life.
Zero and Jack were up in time to see Yoshio—with the Mack Nary controlling him—reach for another pike, his face contorted in self-hatred, eyes filling with tears. “I am sorry about this,” the Mack Nary said. “It is so distasteful. But I really must impale the lot of you and let you die slowly on the spear. Twist it in your guts, that sort of thing. I do hope you understand.” The voice—it was not Yoshio’s voice—was unctuous with sincere apology.
The Pezz danced toward Yoshio and danced back, snagging his attention.
Yoshio jabbed awkwardly at the Pezz with the spear, missing by a good margin and muttering, “Drat. I feel so odd. Hard to control this body.”
Something in Japanese, and then the alien language. And then in English, as he made another fruitless stab at the Pezz, “I really wish this wasn’t necessary, but I’m sure you understand—must get back to basics, you know.”
Jack stepped into the wastes and circled stealthily around behind Yoshio.
Zero couldn’t hold himself back any longer. He squatted beside Angie and put his hands on her shoulders, shook her. “Angie, fight the damn thing!”
“This physical contact is embarrassing, disgusting, imperialistic, and tasteless,” she said in a monotone. “Please withdraw.” Not waiting for him to obey, she drew away from him and turned her back.
Zero heard a shout, turned, and saw Jack straddling Yoshio, who was making feeble struggling motions facedown in the dirt. Jack drew a piece of line from inside his tangle of clothing and tied Yoshio’s wrists together with it. The Pezz took a turn sitting on Yoshio as Jack returned to Zero.
“More of the spirits have arrived,” Zickorian said, pointing. Zero looked and saw three more of the fluorescent aerial jellyfish drifting toward them. One of them was on a trajectory that would take it to Angie.
“Just what she needs,” Zero muttered.
Zero snatched up another of the metal spikes and took aim at the delicate being daintily approaching Angie.
“This wrestling is g
etting very tiresome,” Jack said. “But…” He clamped his arm around Zero from behind. “Mustn’t interfere, Zero,” he said.
Zero struggled and found that Jack was impossibly strong. He felt like an infant gripped by an adult in Jack’s arms.
The jellyfish approached Angie from behind. She sensed it, turned, tried to back away—and tripped. She fell heavily, and the thing was upon her. She froze into paralysis as the tendrils shot sparks into her skull. “Zickorian!”
Zero cried, anguished. “Stop the fucking thing!”
“I don’t believe it is having sex with her,” Zickorian said. “And it would be wrong to interfere with the spirits.”
“Now!” Jack said, suddenly releasing him. “Chase it away now—but don’t hurt it!”
Zero ran toward the thing, yelling, waving the spike. It drew hastily back and returned to the IAMton wastes.
Angie sobbed and clutched her head. Zero knelt and put his arms around her. Relief cascaded through him as she returned his hug. “God, my head hurts,” she said.
“The second visitation drove out the first,” Jack said. “And we drove the second off before it could possess her. They are not spirits; they are plasma vessels generated by the IAMton field, carrying records of psychic imprints that—” He broke off, staring at the Pezz. Another of the things was drifting toward the Pezz and Yoshio. “Friend Pezz! Back off, my friend—let it get at Yoshio for a moment! Let his second visitor drive out his first. And then we shall see.”
An hour later they were standing on the edge of the IAMton desert, squinting against the reflection of early morning sunlight off the white expanse. “Still looks like the salt flats,” Yoshio said dully. He winced.
Saying even that much had hurt his head.
“It feels exactly like a real, real bad hangover,” Angie whispered to him.
“Doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said as softly as he could and still be heard.
“We shouldn’t make them march when they’re feeling like this,” Zero said.
“We are out of food,” Jack said.