by John Shirley
He almost laughed when Sanchez said, “Listen, Swanee, I really need a rest. This harness is cutting off my circulation. It’s killing me.”
Grateful for the excuse to set down his burden, Swanee grunted assent and spiraled down toward an enormous treetop nest. Flapping his wings to stay in place, he lowered Sanchez into the nest and then squatted onto the bed of interwoven twigs and grasses, wheezing and coughing, letting the ache flow out of his wing muscles.
” Madre de Dios,” Sanchez said, “I had no idea you were suffering like that. Stupid of me—it must be hard for you, carrying me. Let me help you off with that harness. Hold still, I don’t want to hurt your wings. There.”
Sanchez sat back carefully, taking the harness off; he folded it up, and used it for a pillow.
Swanee furled his wings and leaned back against a branch padded with nest. He could see better than Sanchez in the darkness. Sanchez could see him as a silhouette, maybe a few details from starlight, but he could see Sanchez quite clearly. The little man was squinting at the tangle of bones and hide and hair on the bottom of the nest. They could smell the beast’s battery-acid sharpness, counterpoint to the dull reek of carrion.
“Whatever lives here,” Sanchez said, “eats people. And it might be coming home to roost soon. Maybe we ought to climb down.”
“We’ll need the elevation to take off after we rest. Anyway,” Swanee said hoarsely, “it won’t come back. It’s dead: I killed it. I was flying by here once, and it attacked me in the air. If I hadn’t been the smarter one, it would have added my bones to those.” He yawned. “We’ll rest a few minutes and then we’ll take off again.”
“We’ve been flying for hours. I don’t think we should go on until we both sleep,” Sanchez said.
“The expedition has already reached the Progress Station. If we don’t hurry, we could miss them. Or the Punkin’ will kill them.”
“If you kill yourself first, we won’t get there at all,” Sanchez said. “Don’t squander your resources.”
“Funny. That’s what Harmony—”
“You mean Fiskle. He doesn’t deserve any fucking titles.”
“Yeah. Fiskle. That’s what Fiskle said once. He was going to send me to fly to the Progress Station. But he decided that the Punkin’ would probably kill me, and he’d be squandering his resources, killing his only aerial scout. The air-sharks are too stupid to be of much use as scouts or for anything besides killing. He’s been trying to develop new Twists who can fly, to work up an expedition that could beat the others there. But all he came up with was Sizzle, who’s too crazy to control very well.”
“He should have sent his ground forces. Big mistake. The turtle wins the race because the hare is overconfident. So Fiskle controls the way people are Twisted?”
“Um-hm.” Swanee was drifting off. “Sorta. Influences it with mind ripple … Don’t let me sleep long. We got to go. Get whatever is in the Station. Use it against Fiskle, if it’s the right kind of … thing…” He couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer. Sanchez became a voice out of darkness.
“Maybe it was a mistake to bring me. Maybe you should’ve gone by yourself, brought it back.”
“Told you. Can’t. Can’t come back. Fiskle would regain control of … me … you—” Swanee yawned hugely.
It felt good to let go, to slide into sleep. But then the dream swallowed him up, and in its belly he found Fiskle waiting for him.
“I simply felt that you would not have trusted me enough if you had known I wasn’t of your race. People in the settlement would not have spoken so freely around me. My appearance seems to startle humans more than, say, the High Clansmen or even the Pezz. I wanted you to accept me as one of you. It was for the best.”
The Jack-thing had foamed over again and regrown the form of Jack the Baptist, complete with clothing. Now he sat across from Zero and Angie, his back to a mossy hummock, his knees drawn up, arms locked around his knees, seeming very casual and very human. The completeness of its disguise was unnerving.
“I saw you eat like a human being,” Angie said. “You swallowed everything you ate. Of course, I never saw you, um, eliminate wastes.”
“I did eat. It went down a tube to the speech-slit where it was disintegrated and converted to energy. Nothing is wasted. I had to eat rather often—as you may have noticed—to maintain my disguise. It had to be constantly shored up.”
“You holding anything else back from us?” Zero asked sharply. “Maybe about the Meta?”
“Not exactly. I understand what the Meta are doing, but I think when you get to the Progress Station, you’ll see for yourself. If I try to tell you, it would be confusing.”
“Try.”
“Wait till the morning. If you don’t understand after you use the thing in the Progress Station, I will try to explain. But I will be honest with you and tell you everything about myself. For example: I am not only alien to you, I am what you call a Twist.”
Hearing this, Zero and Angie tensed and looked at one another. Zero looked around for a pike.
Jack shook his head. “You misunderstand. I am not dangerous to you. Not all Twists become … Twisted. I am simply more of what I was before. Mine is an intuitive race. I am, just as I told you, in deep communion with this world, with its Overmind. The Overmind is not a thinking being, like you and I; it cannot articulate words or even ideas. But still it is a mind, and still it communicates. I read in the Overmind that you, Zero, bear the fullest potential to conceivably take the Meta’s game—if you choose to think of it as a game—into the next phase. I wanted to accelerate the coming of that phase. It will improve things. It will leave Fiskle broken. Or it will end our suffering with death.”
“But—was there a human Jack once?” Angie asked.
“Yes. He stumbled into my Hollow of Meditation in the wilderness. He was dying. He laid his head in my lap, thinking me an angel, he said, and I had no heart to contradict him. As he died, his mind unraveled and I watched it decay, and I remembered all that was released in its decay. Hence I speak your language, know your ways. Hence I wrapped myself in some part of Jack’s personality.”
“Do you have a name?” Zero asked.
“A description, used as a name. It translates to something like ‘A Zany, Self-Indulgent Overflight.’ But the translation is too inexact. I think you should call me Jack.”
Calum, who had been lying unconscious nearby, awoke just then, the light flicked on in the dark strip of his ocular organ. He made a miserable chirring sound in his throat as he sat up. “I am … not feeling [approximate translation:] at the top of my form. But I seem … intact.”
“You are all right,” Jack said. “But Yoshio is comatose. His outcome is unforseeable.”
“Where is the beast?” Calum asked.
“It is gone, dead,” Jack said. “You call it a beast. You don’t regard it as a spirit incarnate, as Zickorian would?”
“I suppose it had spirit in it. But Zickorian was very old-fashioned. Don’t tell anyone, but I am a neomaterialist.”
“The young always react in excess,” Jack said. “Well, we had better go to the Progress Station. It will be dawn soon. There is nothing to keep us from claiming the prize now—unless someone beats us to it.”
“We’d better explain about you to Calum,” Zero said, looking squarely at Jack. “There should be no more deception.”
“Of course. When we return. I urge that we hurry. The new phase and the object in the Progress Station are one and the same, Zero. And the new phase is overdue.”
“Am I here?” Swanee asked.
“Yes,” the Emperor said, “you are. Don’t you feel like you’re here? Touch yourself.”
“I feel … strange but … it feels real. I was dreaming, though. This must be part of the dream.”
“Does it feel like a dream?”
“I couldn’t be here! I was in the nest!”
Harmony shrugged imperiously. “I brought you with a snap of my fingers. I can do anythi
ng.”
“You’d like me to believe that. But I don’t think I do.”
They were strolling in a small courtyard behind the palace. The time, Swanee supposed, was somewhere deep in the night, a time too deep to see clearly.
A Phylum Two lumbered along behind them, carrying a torch. An air-shark circled them sleepily.
Harmony had had the paving ripped up here, and the dirt churned into the beginnings of a garden. Rows of exotic plants had been transplanted from the gulley. Haggard human artisans were working by torchlight to glue bones and teeth and hanks of hair and bits of shell to the garden walls, making baroque mosaics in accordance with the Emperor’s sketches.
“Here are two people you might remember, Swanee,” Harmony said. They’d come to a line of five humps, like graves without tombstones. From each sprouted a cluster of translucent tendrils, as fine as fishing line. Some of the tendrils groped through the air blindly, seeking here and there with the tiny filament tufts at their ends. One of the tendrils had found a home in the back of Jamie’s neck. She was wearing rags, was squatting on the hump, patting dirt over something Swanee couldn’t quite make out. Her face was empty of expression except for a certain intentness.
“These are the Phix,” Harmony said proudly. “They’ll be the centerpiece of my garden. They’re really a prize. The bulk of their bodies are underground.
They’re related to the charming creatures that eliminated the little cockney fellow—ah, Dennis, I think his name was. The Phix send out these seeking spines, which, before you know it, latch onto you and sink their filaments into your brain from the little hole at the base of the skull and take control.
Make an obedient little robot of you. To prevent any struggle before they take complete control, they inject their hosts with an enzyme that finds its way into the victim’s pleasure center and stimulates it. Seems to work for most animals. People writhe in ecstasy when the Phix first makes contact. In fact, if you try to release the victim, the victim will fight you tooth and nail.
“Once the filaments are deeply into the brain, the pleasure stops and the work begins. They send the victims out to gather food, so the Phix can be nourished through them; the victim—or host, if you prefer—maintains the ground around the buried body of the Phix, chases away anything that threatens it. It’s marvelous! A classic reward-conditioning system that evolves into a control system. A blueprint for the ideal monarchy, Swanee. I’ve made quite a study of it, as you can tell.”
“You said that there were two people here. I see only one.”
“Jamie is burying the pieces of the other one for later use as food. That one will nourish the Phix. I’m sure she’ll be quite a delicacy.”
Swanee glimpsed a swatch of blond hair in the dirt under Jamie’s knee.
Stomach lurching, he turned away.
“I wouldn’t advise you to turn your back on these creatures. We really shouldn’t be standing so close, in fact,” Harmony said. They moved away.
Swanee thought he’d like to snatch up a chisel that one of the craftsmen was using and drive it through Harmony’s skull.
“I didn’t quite get the details of that,” Harmony said, “but I grasped that you were thinking of killing me. Don’t try. You can’t, since—well, it’s quite hopeless. Trust me.”
“Trust you? I assume you’ve brought me here to give me to your Phix. I notice there are several without hosts.”
“You? No. There are others who’ll grace my garden. Our friend Sanchez, for example. I am prepared to forgive all, Swanee, to welcome you home with open arms, if you’ll tell me where he is. Precisely, I mean. We have only the vaguest idea as to where this nest is that he’s sleeping in.”
“Only the vaguest idea? Then how did you bring me here? You must know where it is if you brought me here from there.”
“Actually, we don’t. We, ah, had the coordinates and lost them after we brought you over.” The Emperor’s voice was colored by irritation. He was too pompous to be a good liar.
Swanee turned to look at him. “I thought I felt strange. Kind of heavy, uncoordinated. I’m asleep, back at the nest. This isn’t my body at all, is it? This must be the shapechanger, shifted to resemble me, acting as a sort of container for me. Yes.” Swanee could sense the shapechanger now. It was a presence squirming like a tormented amoeba, away off in the darkness somewhere. “Yes, there he is. I wonder if I and the Phix and the changer can coexist.”
“Don’t!”
But Swanee turned and threw himself onto the grave beside Jamie, trying to yank the tendrils out of her, to give himself to it. Then he felt a sting at the back of his neck, heard a hum of high-tension wires in high winds, tasted dirt. He knew another one of them had got him … felt his limbs go numb.
A cold, vindictive, hungry presence was all around him. The Phix.
And then he was standing over himself. Over the shapechanger, which was wriggling out of the Swanee shape and into a series of halfway shapes, expressing uncertainty and desperation—and then ecstasy.
Swanee looked down at himself and saw nothing. He heard Harmony whining at the top of his lungs in infantile fury.
And then a black wind picked him up and flung him into the stars … The stars spat him out onto the nest.
He sat bolt upright and stared at Sanchez, who was still snoring a few feet away.
Swanee looked down—and saw himself. He shuddered, and lay back, determined not to sleep again that night. The tree creaked and swayed a little in the breeze.
He needed something to keep sleep at bay. So he thought about Bella, and the pain of it kept him awake.
The faint green light of predawn slowly drew away the veils of shadow, as Zero, Jack, and the Pezz toiled across the hummocks of mud between the ponds. Angie had remained behind with Yoshio and Calum. The Progress Station was a short journey from their camp and, now that the Punkin’ was dead, an uneventful one. But on another level, things happened around them; the miniature world of the local ecology was rearranging itself, shifting from its nocturnal web of relationships to its diurnal configuration.
From a nearby mudbank some thing slipped heavily into the water and cruised with dark grace just under the surface, leaving elliptical ripples.
Other things were waking; a thing of rhinestone scales said Skrank! Skrank! as it flapped from bush to bush; ten-fingered hands sucked themselves into their stems; something else unfurled from a tube hanging over the pond, like the tongue of a yawning dog. Insects rattled and hummed. A concealed animal slurped loudly.
The place smelled wet; of cheerful decay, and morbid life.
The dawn took a deep breath, and another degree of blindness seeped out of the sky. Up ahead a chain of ponds fed streams that pooled into a broad lake. It was shallow, and its surface, between the black outlines of corpses, quivered with reflected silver and green. On the little, almost barren island in the center of the lake, about fifty yards from the bank, was the white hump of something artificial.
“That’s it,” Jack said, when they’d reached the bank. “The Progress Station.”
Between them and the mud island, bodies littered the lake as if the morning had overlooked them. They bobbed slightly in slow, vague vortices.
A few might have been human. One appeared to be a Phylum Two. There was the deflated, torn shape of a Vinyl, and a much-decayed Pezz. Seeing this, the expedition’s own Pezz muttered to itself. “We are all food-scraps for the microscopic.”
“The lake is shallow,” Jack said. “We can simply walk across.”
“You’re certain nothing else guards the station, Jack?” Zero asked.
“We have a saying on my world,” Jack said. ” ‘Nothing is certain in life.’ “
“We have the same saying,” Zero said.
“So do we,” The Pezz said. “It is one truth everyone agrees on.”
Zero sighed. “Let’s do it.”
He stepped into the water, and sloshed toward the island. Jack picked the Pezz up in his arms and
followed.
The water was warm; it soaked through Zero’s pants, and lapped at his thighs. Mud sucked at his shoes. The smells of lake life and carrion curled around him.
The body of a chitonous alien with a head like an overlarge hermit crab spun slowly past, trailing a stink that nearly turned his stomach inside out.
A creature of tawny fur and limp tentacles drifted by; a huge wound in its side was a home for a squirming puddle of alien shrimp. A human skull, still attached to a purple, bloated corpse, looked like a yellow fishing float in the water. The water around the corpse swirled with the sick iridescence of a petroleum slick as the body’s fats exuded decay.
Gagging, Zero sloshed faster, harder, till at last he reached the island’s shore. He fell to his knees in the yielding mud, drinking in the fresher air.
The Progress Station was but a hundred feet away. Its entrance gaped wide, waiting for him.
There were no McMahons in the Progress Station. There was only the glossy black-plastic box, sitting in the center of the blue concrete floor. Zero walked around it and saw that on the far side a miniature translation unit was affixed to the center of that face of the box. On impulse, he knelt beside the translator, and said, “What do I do now?”
A falsely sweet, artificial voice spoke from the translator; the voice the McMahons had used. “Pick up the box and press it to your forehead.”
Zero glanced up at Jack. “Now that,” Zero said, “sounds risky.”
“After all you’ve come through, it’s too risky?” Jack asked him in a tone of disbelief.
“You have a point.” But Zero only stared at the box. He chewed the inside of his lip. He looked up at Jack. The dawn light framed him in the doorway, and for a moment he looked like a Russian saint. “What’s in it for you, Jack? I mean, why not take the thing for yourself? You expect me to believe you did all this for us just because you want to bring on the millennium or something?”
“You’re stalling,” Jack said. “But all right. I’m doing it for a selfish reason. Partly. The selfish reason being my own comfort. As long as Fiskle influences the Overmind, the IAMton fields, the intelligent life on this world—as long as there is false conflict, I’m in pain. It’s a pain that’s induced psychically. It’s my empathic nature. I’ll be healed in the next phase. Or, as I said, I’ll be dead.”