Fractal Paisleys

by Paul Di Filippo

  Priscilla Jane’s reply was drenched in a sarcasm she knew would be completely invisible to Felix, but she couldn’t help herself. “Oh, by all means!”

  “On the other hand, I don’t see anything wrong with bringing back selected individuals for temporary stays, using volunteer host bodies. Wouldn’t it be quite useful to resurrect, say, FDR, during a major political crisis? Aren’t there a few modern problems that Socrates or Buddha or Einstein could help us with?

  “Then there’s the obvious medical aspect, which I believe you alluded to earlier. Although a cure like yours is totally reliant on continued wearing of a morphic crystal, I don’t imagine such a burden would be regarded as intolerable by the average patient.”

  “Oh, I imagine not!”

  “There are a host of lesser ways humans could benefit directly from temporary use of morphic fields. Instant experts, for instance. Every skill—intellectual or kinesthetic—is stored in a morphic field. By tapping these, you could become as talented as the person who originally laid down the pattern. Then, there’s enhanced personal memory access. The only reason we forget is that the vibratory pattern of our physical brains changes with age, cutting off the resonance with one memory field or another. There’s really no need to allow this to happen anymore.”

  “Of course not!”

  Felix was just warming up. “I imagine that people might be a little leery at first of occupying instant buildings or of using instant tools or instant machines which owe their very existence to an innocuous-looking crystal. But with appropriate fail-safes in place, and with continuous safety exhibited over a long period, people should come around.”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  “Not to pretend that morphic technology doesn’t present its own peculiar dangers. The potential for biological harm is certainly real. Sports, monsters and chimeras of all sorts could be created by mixing and matching the morphic fields of different species. But the inorganic realm offers scope for mischief too. Turning Hoover Dam or the World Trade Center into matchsticks is quite possible. Extending a mile-wide tunnel down to the magma would be a little trickier. You’d have to take into account the separate morphic fields of every type of matter from the surface on down, and then convert them to vacuum, say, while simultaneously building diamond tunnel walls. But with enough computing power, I could do it.”

  “I don’t doubt it!”

  “There are quite a few applications of deeper complexity which I won’t get into here, mostly involving telelogical chreodes and the cosmological morphic fields. But now we’re talking galaxies, and I believe your question was implicitly limited to Earth.”

  Priscilla Jane was silent for a moment. “Anything else?”

  “Not at the moment, no.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, then. Basically, you, Felix Wren, boy inventor, all on your lonesome, intend to pick up the entire globe by its heels and shake it until the loose change falls out of its pockets.”

  Felix looked hurt, and Priscilla Jane felt bad. But she had to knock some sense into him. Couldn’t he see what he was unleashing? “Such a metaphor, Pee Jay, however colorful, puts the worst possible interpretation on my motives. You know I’ve never been interested in money. I only care about advancing human knowledge.”

  “I wish money was all that motivated you! You’d be a thousand times less dangerous! You’re going to advance the human race right out of resemblance to anything we know!”

  Felix looked sober. “Don’t imagine I haven’t thought of such things, Priscilla Jane. But there’s never been a scientific genie which has ever been rebottled. I’m smart, but I’m not unique. Someone else was bound to discover this sooner or later. Look at how simple it all is. No, the only thing to do now is to try to use the technology purposefully and wisely, for the benefit of everyone. Actually, in conjunction with my near-term goals—which include stabilizing both my existence and yours—I’m hoping to get some advice on how to proceed.”

  “Advice! From who? God?”

  Felix did not smile. “Not precisely.”

  Priscilla Jane was afraid to ask Felix to get more precise.

  The exit for the Southside Wild Animal Farm slid up on them, and they took it.

  Apparently seeking to further mollify his companion, Felix said, “It’s not like morphic fields haven’t always been subject to fluctuations and primitive attempts at control, Pee Jay. Take several phenomena generally considered to be magic. Shapechanging can be seen as instances of a human gaining mental control over his vibratory patterns, and altering them at will. Possession and multiple personality disorders are plainly cases of one’s vibratory patterns changing sufficiently to resonate with other human—or nonhuman—patterns held in the morphic repository. Reincarnation might occur unpredictably, when a growing embryo—usually quite unique and historically unprecedented—chances to lock onto a pattern that’s already existed once. This explains quite neatly why not everyone has memories of other lifetimes. I could continue.…”

  Priscilla Jane’s head felt like someone had it pinned in the grip of a giant nutcracker. “No, thank you. I’ve got quite enough to chew on for now.”

  Ahead of them now, on a busy two-lane secondary road spotted mostly with gaudy, tawdry businesses, loomed a sign for the South- side Wild Animal Farm. They entered, parked, and left the van. Admission was five dollars apiece.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to pay, Pee Jay. There was no money in these clothes I was forced to wear, and naturally Tosh—”

  “Loan you ten dollars and get a new pair of legs? A bargain at twice the price.”

  “I’m glad you’re enjoying them, Priscilla Jane.”

  Inside, Felix ignored the rather seedy cages containing such bedraggled and snaggletoothed specimens as lion, goat and ostrich, and instead made a beeline through the crowd of visitors to the reptiles.

  He stopped at a fence, and Priscilla Jane caught up with him.

  The shoddy waist-high fence—straight and unbarbed—was erected at the very edge of the alligator pit, whose floor was four feet below the watchers. In the pit lazed a single somnolent gator over six feet long.

  “Oh, he’ll do nicely,” said Felix.

  And before anyone could stop him, he had clambered over the fence and dropped into the pit.

  Everyone except Priscilla Jane screamed. She was so mad at Felix for not warning her of what he planned that she was rooting for the gator.

  Opening first its left eye, then its right, the animal spotted Felix. It slithered sinuously toward him, and its jaws began to split open.

  Felix stood his ground unconcernedly. When the beast was nearly atop him, he tossed a cabled bracelet like a quoit into its maw.

  The gator instantly froze.

  Felix tapped a few keys, and the gator began to go through disturbing bodily changes similar to those Peabrain had endured.

  Remembering Priscilla Jane, Felix turned to reassure her.

  “This data should complement nicely what I already have, Pee Jay. I might take the time to explore a few sidechains as long as I’m here.”

  Mass panic reigned immediately around the alligator pit. Guards and keepers were running up; sirens could be heard in the distance.

  “I’d suggest speeding things up, if possible, Felix.”

  A keeper stood beside her. “What’s he doing to Wally? Do you know this guy? Is he crazy, or what?”

  “Or what,” said Priscilla Jane. “Definitely or what.”

  The shapes the gator was exhibiting were becoming more and more primitive and outrageous. People were fainting.

  Then, without warning, a full-sized brontosaurus occupied the cage, its head towering over the suddenly silent crowd, its tail draped atop the adjacent monkey-house.

  Felix held up his computer, to show Priscilla Jane that the tether to the ingested bracelet had pulled away from the laptop’s port. Looking up, Priscilla Jane could see it dangling from the bronto’s jaws like a waterweed.

  “A sli
ght miscalculation,” he admitted sheepishly. “How that extra mass slipped in, I’ll never know. You really shouldn’t have rushed me, Pee Jay.…”

  The crowd melted into frenzied flight, the likes of which Priscilla Jane estimated might not have been seen since the last woolly mammoth stuck its trunk up the caveman’s loincloth.

  Priscilla Jane leaned over the fence and extended a hand. “Come out of there right now, you irresponsible idiot!”

  Felix clambered out with her assistance. “Luckily, I’ve got a spare cable back in the van.”

  Helicopters could be heard in the distance. Someone was shouting over a bullhorn. Priscilla Jane imagined she heard a tank approaching. No, they couldn’t have responded so quickly. But soon.

  “We’ve got to get out of here, Felix. Now!”

  They started jogging toward the admission booth. Her legs remembered how, but it still felt weird.

  “Is Dino ever going to move?” gasped Priscilla Jane as they reached the van. Cars were tangled at the exit, and she realized they were bottled in.

  “I’ve never subjected the electronic components of a bracelet to the effects of gastric acid before. And certainly, if I had thought to do so, I would not necessarily have chosen dinosaur stomach juices. As the suicidal scientist said just before he stuck his head into the accelerator beam, ‘Results are unpredictable.’”

  Priscilla Jane snorted, then said, “Maybe you can get back to the pit and fix it—?”

  “How? One morphic crystal is equal to another. A second one would only muddy the patterns of the first, with chaotic results. No, I suggest that we continue with our quest. How far away from Mount Shasta are we?”

  “Less than an hour.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  “Go? How? Are you going to ping-pong that whole crush and all the people in it?”

  “Of course not! Do you think I’m some kind of monster, Pee Jay? Just drive toward the fence.”

  At the chainlink separating the zoo’s lot from the McDonald’s next door, Felix used a bracelet to dissolve a large section and they drove calmly off.

  “A second exit should alleviate the confusion a bit also.”

  Regaining the highway, they began to make speed north.

  Priscilla Jane glanced in her exterior rearview mirror for a sign of Dino stirring.

  But she saw something worse.

  “Felix, someone’s after us! It’s Detective Stumbo’s car, and he’s driving, but he’s also got—”

  A bullet pinged off the van.

  “Perfidia and that lout, Staggers?”

  “Yes.”

  Felix located his spare cable, dug out a bracelet and began programming it. Shots continued to ring out.

  “I hadn’t wanted to try this. It’s very chancy. But it looks like I’ll be forced to now.”

  Priscilla Jane felt sick. “What? What is it?”

  “The spacetime-continuum’s spatial traits are subject to morphic resonance also. Every location resonates to both its physical configuration and the events that have occurred in it. The reason we’re going to Mount Shasta is that it’s the closest place to us with the particular kind of spatial resonance I’m after. If I can impose Mount Shasta’s special place-field on us and the van—”

  “We should instantly teleport there?”

  “Very good. The nineteen-year-old Priscilla Jane would never have caught on so fast.”

  Felix finished and hung the bracelet from a knob on the dashboard.

  “It’s on a thirty-second delay. We’ve got to be motionless by then, or we’ll plow into who-knows-what at our destination.”

  Priscilla Jane began to slow. “But they’ll catch up with us!”

  “There shouldn’t be any problem. I’ll try to stall them.”

  Slowing, slowing, Priscilla Jane began to pray.

  The Escort pulled up alongside them, on Felix’s side.

  Felix stuck his head out.

  Priscilla Jane watched as, from the rear side window of the Escort, a leering Rowdy aimed, fired, and blew the top off Felix’s skull.

  The highway vanished.

  6.

  In the front passenger seat of Detective Stumbo’s commandeered car, Perfidia Staggers, nee Graboys, also once known as Countess Galina Balyban, turned around and smacked her second-most-recent husband across his jaw with the barrel of Detective Stumbo’s forty-five, enhancing the lurid bruise she had given him just that morning.

  “You fucking fool!”

  Dropping his own pistol in a blind rage, Rowdy lurched toward her, eager hands plainly intent on fastening round her neck.

  Perfidia fired a shot through the roof of the car, nearly deafening them all. Taking the hint, Rowdy subsided back into his seat.

  “Pull over!” Perfidia now ordered Stumbo.

  They stopped in the breakdown lane. No one else seemed to have noticed the fatal gunplay or the vanishing of the van. Or, if they had noticed, they had neglected to report it amid the general confusion now dominating the region. Whatever madness Felix had unveiled at the Southside Wild Animal Farm was using up everyone’s limited attention.

  Rowdy seemed to have regained the modicum of reason he normally possessed. In hurt tones he said, “Jesus, Perf, what the fuck is up? When I woke up, the first words outa your mouth was about how we’re gonna croak Felix. Then, when I do what you said, you lay into me!”

  Perfidia too seemed to be making an effort to master her emotions and think rationally. “We were supposed to try to get him to cooperate first, remember? But it’s too late now, so just forget it. The question we have to answer now is, where did they go?”

  “Speakin personal-like,” said Rowdy, “I wasn’t never really convinced Felix was alive again. Supposin’ he was a spook. He probably just vanished back to spookland and took the girl and van with him.”

  “If that’s the case, then there’s nothing to go after. No, I prefer to believe Felix is—was—really alive. In some crazy way, his actions are too meaningful for any kind of ghost.…”

  Perfidia faced the silent detective, who returned her gaze with his own medusal look. If he had been unnerved by being taken hostage and witnessing a bloody murder, he didn’t show it. One-handed, he fetched and lit a smoke for himself.

  Perfidia gestured at him with the gun. “You. What do you think?”

  Stumbo exhaled. “I think you’re both going down for murder one.

  Rowdy growled. “Fat chance, you stupid dick. Once we get that computer of Felix’s, nothing will stand up against us. Tell ’im, Perf! Say, how are we gonna get it?”

  “Shut up. Tell the truth, Grady, or I’ll take that other arm out of commission. Did Felix mention any destination other than the zoo?”

  Stumbo calculated. He wanted to find Wren and the girl—or rather, Wren’s corpse—as much as these two did. If leading the murderers there was the only way—and so it seemed—then he would have to do it, and hope for some reversal of fortune when they arrived.

  Stumbo took his time grinding out his cigarette before he replied. Might as well make them sweat.

  “Shasta. He said something about Mount Shasta.”

  “That’s where he is then,” exulted Perfidia. “He found some superscience way to get there instantly, and took it. Now the girl is sitting there alone, probably without a clue about how to work Felix’s bag of tricks. We’ve got to get there before she learns— Let’s move!”

  Stumbo merged with the traffic and accelerated.

  From the direction of the zoo, a tremendous bellow resounded like the foghorn of the gods.

  Rowdy laughed. “Don’t that sound just like some kinda dinosaur!”

  * * *

  Once already today, Priscilla Jane had told herself she was finished mourning for that damn Felix. She really, really should have known better.

  Now she tried to convince herself again that her tears were finished.

  The van sat in the middle of a small tree-ringed clearing occupied otherwise only by a
rough-hewn picnic table. At the moment of their transition, they had still been moving at about twenty MPH, but Priscilla Jane had been able to brake in their new location without hitting anything.

  A rutted dirt road led away from the clearing and down the mountainside. Priscilla Jane knew it quite well, as she had been gazing at it intermittently through her tears for over an hour.

  Priscilla Jane sat at the picnic table. Now that her grief had exhausted itself and her, she was trying to nerve herself up to return to the van, where Felix’s shattered body still rested, slumped in its seat.

  She supposed she shouldn’t have indulged herself in the orgy of tears, what with a pack of murderers hunting her. But the clearing had felt so safe, and she really couldn’t hold back her feelings any longer. But now it was time to do something. Only she wasn’t quite sure what.

  All she knew was that it began with going back to the van.

  So she forced herself to walk, her thirty-year-old mind overcoming the shakiness of nineteen-year-old legs.

  Seated in the kitchen chair behind the steering wheel, she steeled herself to look at Felix.

  Luckily, his head was resting on his right shoulder, the damage hidden. If not for the blood, she could almost pretend he was sleeping.…

  Just to hear another voice, she flipped on the radio.

  “—last seen heading south on Route Five. Scientists have so far convinced the National Guard not to fire on the mysterious brontosaurus, but Major Tompkins insists that force is still an option—”

  Priscilla Jane snapped the radio off.

  “Damn you, Felix! Look what you’ve done! I know, I know, it was just a minor glitch in your plans for a Utopia none of us even wants! And now you’re counting on me, aren’t you? I’m supposed to bail you out somehow, just like I always do. Maybe I can go out and tackle a goddamn grizzly bear or walk forty miles to steal a dog, just so I can stick your stupid necklace on it, just so you can come back to life again. Or maybe—”

  Priscilla Jane stopped dead, horrified at the notion that had come to her. “No. I don’t believe it. You don’t actually expect me to— You do! Oh, you wicked, wicked man! Well, I’ve got news for you, buster! I’m not going to fall for it. You’ve caused enough grief for everyone already. Why should I give you a chance to cause more?”