Demons

by John Shirley

  “Couldn’t be room for more than twenty at the most.”

  “I counted sixty-three, mostly men, a couple of crones, one young wife, a handful of children.”

  “Sixty-three! In that little building!”

  “Not only that but two horses! The less valuable horses are out back, in improvised shelters. It’s crowded, but more protection than a yurt. They travel in extended families—and no one is to be left without shelter. But that is how I left you! I’m sorry to leave you out here. Those oafs in the truck should have traded places with you while we waited.”

  “It’s all right. I think Marcus has gone to sleep anyway.”

  As he put the Jeep in gear, the window of the truck rolled down, shedding dust, and a bearded face peered out through a wreath of smoke. Nyerza gave a thumbs-up and said something in Russian. The Turkmen spoke a combination of Turkish, Russian, and Azeri; they understood Russian well enough. They nodded, and the truck roared to life. The Jeep led the way, jouncing along the rutted gravel road.

  The road cut straight across the plain for eight miles more, then advanced windingly up the spine of a ridge. The great sea of dust parted before them like the Red Sea before Moses, settling as the wind dropped. Now and then, following the road—or did the road follow them?—there were standing stones. They might once have been sculpted, but windblown sand had removed any traces of man, except for their stubborn, precariously balanced uprightness.

  The two vehicles bounced up the ridge’s spine toward the foothills of Mount Rize. In the distance, where the first sunlight shifted indigo plains to reaches of lifeless blue and outcroppings of stony dun, there were points of unsteady flickering. “What is that—city lights?” she asked.

  “No—you see how it wavers? It’s flame. Those are the new natural gas fields—they’re doing some burn-off. When the gas reserves were discovered, the Russians were sorry they’d let Turkmenistan go. And there are new oil wells, too, south of here.”

  “Oil! When will it be enough? We have hydrogen cars now, and electric cars.”

  “Those are only prevalent in America and Europe, somewhat in Japan. Most of the world still burns gasoline and slowly melts the ice caps. Is there any bottled water left?”

  “Yes, I think Marcus has it. How far to the shrine?”

  “About a hundred and fifty miles, but some of it we will have to go on horseback.”

  She reached under the blanket for the plastic water bottle Marcus held in his arms as he slept and felt a dreadful clamminess on the boy’s wrist, a throbbing heat from his forehead. “Oh, no. Marcus? Are you all right? How do you feel? Marcus!”

  The boy didn’t reply.

  “Marcus?” He remained limp, unresponsive. With trembling hands she fumbled the Mediscan kit from the satchel on the floor, found the general indications scanner, and pressed it to his temple. “Stop the Jeep—I can’t read this with all the bouncing!”

  Nyerza signaled the truck, and the two vehicles lurched to a stop in a plume of dust. She pressed the scanner to the boy’s sweat-beaded forehead, and squinted at its miniature, green-glowing screen.

  “What is it?” Nyerza asked.

  She let out a long, ragged breath. “I can’t wake Marcus. His blood pressure is mortally low. And he has a temperature of a hundred and five.”

  3

  Bald Peak, Northern California

  Stephen was poised on the edge of paradise, or so it seemedto him.

  He stood on a cliff’s edge, on the grassy grounds of the old Bald Peak Observatory, gazing down over Ash Valley. He stood there in the gentle breeze, his hands in the pockets of a heavy black overcoat, ducking his head so that the thin, drizzling rain didn’t slant past his plastic-coated hat brim.

  Three parallel slanting shafts of light transfixed the great green and golden bowl of Ash Valley, sunlight breaking through gaps in the uneasy roof of blue-gray clouds. The beams of light shifted like spotlights over the rolling, piney hills, the winding olive-dun river, clusters of tree-hugged houses, and stubbly cornfields cupped by the Northern California highlands. At the northern end of the valley, the ground dipped to the silvery snail tracks of rice field canals.

  “It’s an experiment,” said a feminine voice just behind him. He turned and saw a short, slightly plump woman in a rust-colored windbreaker, the hood up. Stephen found he was startled by her lively golden-brown eyes, the lustrous brown hair trapped by the hood, churning in curls and framing her face. She smiled, dimpling cheeks red from the wind. He thought about Winderson’s niece, Jonquil, so different from this woman, but it was a bracing difference.

  “Which experiment is that?” Stephen asked. He didn’t yet want to ask her name; he wanted to remain suspended in the delicious uncertainty of the moment there on the edge of a rain-softened abyss.

  “The rice fields. I thought you were looking at them with a kind of what-the-devil-are-those look. That’s wetlands there, at the north end of the valley. It’s stocked with wetlands birds who eat insects and grubs but not rice. The birds are supposed to take care of the rice, while the rice fields provide wetlands for them. And wetlands, of course, protect the rest of the valley from flooding. But since West Wind has bought most of the valley, I’m not sure what they’ll do with that land.”

  He could tell she was trying to keep regret from her voice.

  “You live down there?” he asked.

  “Me? No! I live at the observatory now—of course, it’s not used as an observatory much anymore. I work for West Wind, like you. I’m Glyneth Solomon. You are Stephen Isquerat, aren’t you?”

  “Thank you for pronouncing my name right. It’s refreshing. I hear Isk-rat a lot. I haven’t checked in yet. West Wind already knows I’m here?”

  “Seems so. They sent me out to ask if you needed to know how to get into the building. I guess—” her smile flashed and hid itself again “—they couldn’t figure out why you’d be standing out here looking at the valley.”

  He turned and looked back at Ash Valley. “I just thought it was . . . beautiful. Even in the rain. Even more in the rain, maybe. I don’t know. My mood today—” He broke off, wondering why he was telling her this.

  He looked at her but couldn’t read her expression. It might have been sympathy and it might have been puzzlement. She said, “Did they tell you I was to be your new assistant?”

  He shook his head. “No, but . . . that’s great. I mean, they said I was to have an assistant. Good to meet you.” He cleared his throat. “Well, I’m just getting soaked out here. Can you take me to the coffee?”

  “I sure can. I know right where it is. Then we’ll locate Dickinham—he’ll want to show you around.”

  Portland, Oregon

  Ira had a cat in his lap and a laptop on the worktable in front of him. He was waiting for Melissa to call.

  He was searching online for the name Iskeriat or Isqueriat and all the variations he could come up with, working in the cone of light from a gooseneck lamp, now and then elbowing art supplies out of the way. And he was waiting for Melissa to call.

  Why did she have to take Marcus? he asked himself for the hundredth time. The boy should be in school. He should be here, where he could be safe and live a normal child’s life. He should be here playing, for God’s sake. He thought about Marcus playing with Paymenz’s cats. Getting down on the floor, on his hands and knees, butting heads with a cat, laughing when it flopped on its back, a sign it wanted to play. “How’m I supposed to play that without any claws like you got?” the boy had asked. “You give me some claws, then I’ll play that . . .”

  “Very wise, Marcus,” Paymenz had said. Right then, Marcus was showing off a tumbling move he’d learned, somersaulting into the side of Paymenz’s overloaded desk, jarring it so that papers showered down on him. “It’s rainin’ paper!”

  “Hey, Marcus,” Ira had said, “you could’ve knocked off his expensive laptop.” He had tried to scowl disapproval at the boy, but it was hard. Marcus’s eyes were his mother’s; the boy
’s smile was at once a paragon of innocence and sly humor.

  A week later Marcus had gotten into some trouble in school. A parent-teacher conference was called. Marcus had apparently been singing a song he’d heard on the video channel. “ ‘I’m a sex god from the thirteenth hell, love in my touch but sulfur in my smell—oh, yeah, oh darlin’ yeah.’ ” Singing it, moreover, while dancing around a little girl, Ira was told.

  At the school, Marcus’s pleasant, pretty Vietnamese-American teacher, Nhe, told him earnestly that the boy was guilty of sexual harassment.

  “What’s that?” Marcus had asked.

  Ira shrugged. “They claim you were getting all sexy with the girl or something inappropriate like that.”

  “What girl?”

  “Diane,” Nhe said.

  “When?”

  “When you were dancing and singing that song about sex gods.” Ira sighed—trying not to laugh.

  “I only sang it once. I just like the sound of it. I didn’t notice Diane. Is she that red-haired girl?” No, he was told; she was the girl with long black hair. “Well,” Marcus said, “if I notice her, I won’t sing it around her anymore. But if I don’t notice her, I might sing it on accident.”

  “By accident,” Ira had said automatically.

  Ira told them he would see to it that the boy sang no more inappropriate songs at school.

  They said fine, but Marcus would have to do some detention.

  Marcus had taken it in stride, Ira thought tenderly, never sulking about the extra school time, though he had no enthusiasm for hanging around school unnecessarily. He had only smiled and said, “Okay.”

  In the car with Ira, on the way home, the boy had said, “I wasn’t sexing at anybody.”

  “I know you weren’t.”

  “But they thought I was. They were protecting her.” More to himself, than to Ira.

  Ira looked at the boy in admiration. He understood completely.

  Marcus asked, “What is a sex god anyway?”

  “Hell if I know, son.”

  They’d both laughed at that, the laughter between them like two colors in a painting, Ira thought, blending into one shade, making a single statement of affinity.

  Now that laughing, forgiving boy was traveling with his mother through a desolate wasteland.

  Ira had been trying not to think about it. Again and again doing the inner exercises Yanan had taught him, to stay centered, present, nonidentified. They worked for a while, but then he noticed the digital wall clock. She was supposed to have called through the satellite uplink. Both she and Nyerza had the equipment with them. He had checked with the international cell phone company. No problems there.

  When he accidentally brushed his markers off the table, and they clattered on the floor, he didn’t bend to pick them up. The sleek black cat stirred in his lap and looked into his face.

  “Settle down, Daumal,” Ira told the cat.

  He couldn’t find a meaningful match for his online search. He noticed the clock again and typed in a new search subject. TURKMENISTAN AND HUMAN RIGHTS. He selected a website from the list found by the search engine. He skimmed and scrolled down the page.

  U.S. Department of Foreign Services Security and Human Rights Report: Turkmenistan

  The government’s human rights record remains extremely poor. The government continues to commit serious human rights abuses, and Turkmen authorities severely restrict political and civil liberties. A number of political prisoners have died in custody under suspicious circumstances. Security forces continue to beat and otherwise mistreat suspects and prisoners, and prison conditions remain poor and unsafe. Both the police and the KNB operate with relative impunity and abuse the rights of individuals, as well as enforce the government’s policy of repressing political opposition. Arbitrary arrest and detention, prolonged pretrial detention, unfair trials, and interference with citizens’ privacy remain problems.

  The government completely controls the media, censoring all newspapers and rarely permitting independent criticism of government policy or officials.

  Ira stopped when he came to one comment in particular. He reread it:

  The government imposes restrictions on nonregistered religious groups. The law allows the government to tighten control of religious groups. It is required that all religious organizations include at least 500 Turkmen citizens as members in a given locality in order to be registered legally. This has prevented all but Sunni Muslims and Russian Orthodox Christians from legally establishing themselves.

  Ira found himself squeezing the cat against his belly so hard that it clawed at him to get away. He let Daumal jump to the floor and tried to marshal his thoughts.

  Melissa and Nyerza were going to the Fallen Shrine. Surely what remained of the ancient school at the Fallen Shrine would be regarded as a nonapproved religious group—though they were not actually religious at all, in the usual sense. But a government wouldn’t distinguish between a metaphysical science and a religion.

  He leaned over the laptop, scrolled farther down the page.

  The government imposes some restrictions on freedom to travel abroad. Domestic violence against women is a problem, and women experience societal discrimination. The government generally gives favored treatment to men over women and to ethnic Turkmen over minorities.

  In January, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) opened an office in Ashgabat. In September, Georgei Garayev, a political prisoner and Russian citizen, was found hanged in his cell in the maximum security prison in Turkmenbashy. The government has rejected requests from the Russian government and international human rights organizations for an investigation into the suspicious nature of Garayev’s death (see Sections 1.c. and 1.e.). The 1992 constitution makes torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment illegal. However, there have been widespread credible reports that security officials frequently beat criminal suspects and prisoners and often use force to obtain confessions.

  There have been credible reports that political prisoners are singled out for cruel treatment. Security forces also use denial of medical treatment and food, verbal intimidation, and unsanitary conditions to coerce confessions. Jehovah’s Witnesses reportedly were beaten while in police custody in September (see Section 2.c.). Prisons are unsanitary, overcrowded, and unsafe. Food is poor, and infectious diseases are rampant. Facilities for prisoner rehabilitation and recreation are extremely limited. Some prisoners have died due to overcrowding, untreated illnesses, and lack of adequate protection from the severe summer heat. Women political prisoners are routinely prevented from seeing their children, who are often placed in state custody.

  “Oh, shit,” Ira said.

  Bald Mountain Observatory, Northern California

  It was chilly in the echoing, curved area of the telescope room, as Harold Dickinham gave Stephen and Glyneth the tour. “There’s the telescope, still operational. Mr. Winderson comes and uses it once in a while. But most of us regard this room as wasted space. We could use a lot more lab room, and we’re hoping Mr. Winderson will turn it over to us eventually.”

  Dickinham was a broad-shouldered, balding man with newly transplanted hair cropping out. Below squinting, almost colorless blue eyes, his nose showed broken red veins like those of an alcoholic, but which Stephen also associated with people who worked a great deal around pesticides. You saw them on the faces of exterminators. He associated cancer with that condition also—but more often than not cancer could be cured, nowadays. If you had the insurance coverage.

  Looking around the big, shadowy, windowless dome, Stephen reflected that a converted observatory seemed an odd base of operations for a chemicals company carrying out a field experiment.

  West Wind ostensibly fit the usual corporate paradigm. Like most corporations, they used temps whenever possible so as not to have to pay into retirement funds or insurance plans. They downsized personnel whenever they felt it would help their stocks; they arranged the usual tax loopholes; th
ey maintained the usual corps of lobbyists and campaign-financed politicos; they pushed to be “self-regulating” so they could pollute without constraint.

  But every so often, something peculiar cropped up at West Wind, like that one-patient hospice high in the pyramid building—and like psychonomics. And now this: a refitted observatory. Above Stephen, aimed at the closed hatch, the telescope looked like a giant insect, stymied as it sought to spring into the sky. Stephen wondered briefly what miniature stars and galaxies it could see in the paint-flaking, rusty metal hatches.

  They left the observatory, going into a long curving room that followed the arc of the observatory’s base. It had been retrofitted for use as a chemicals- and animal-testing lab, with long tables of beakers and sealed containers, each sporting its warning label, and cages and microscopes and PC monitors.