Cosmocopia (16 page)

Lazorg entered the clearing surrounding his rightful home. He came close to the house and bellowed out his challenge.

“Rokesby! Come out and fight!”

The frightened yet hopeful faces of the help appeared around the edges of curtains. From the window of an upper story roared an answer.

“Go away, old man, I’m busy painting! I have to satisfy all your old clients!”

Lazorg let out a wordless howl. He raced to the front door and burst it down. He dashed upstairs, elbows and knees smashing furniture along his path, and into his studio.

There stood the detested Rokesby Marrs, naked also. The man wore a foolish-looking goatee. His hair was long and secured in a ponytail. An earring glimmered in one earlobe.

The studio was filled with Rokesby’s putrid imitations of genuine Lazorg creations—and he was in the process of covering over one of Lazorg’s original canvases with gesso!

“Get out—now!” yelled Lazorg.

“You’re already dead, old man. You should be the one to leave!”

Lazorg wasted no more words, but hurled himself at Rokesby.

The two nude titans grappled like Olympian wrestlers. They staggered around the room, sending easels crashing down, toppling plinths that held statues, smashing their feet and elbows into canvases.

They each lost their balance at the same time and went down, still locked in battle. Writhing and searching for winning holds, their huge muscles straining, they rolled across the floorboards until they slammed against a wall with tremendous force, Rokesby’s body interposed between Lazorg and impact.

Rokesby’s grip necessarily loosened. Lazorg managed to slither away and get to his feet. He picked up Rokesby around the waist in a surprise maneuver, and threw him out a wide window whose twin panes of hinged glass were already opened outward.

Rokesby landed with a muffled thud on the grass, and lay still. Lazorg raced downstairs and outside.

Rokesby Marrs was dead, his neck snapped, his head twisted at an unnatural angle.

Lazorg found himself surrounded by his staff, as well as Nia, Slug and Pirkle. They awaited his victory speech.

Lazorg grinned. “Now we begin to live properly.”

Lazorg lay dying in his bed, somehow older than he had ever been, his body withered, his mind dull and querulous. Nia and Slug stood by him.

Slug was a man now. Nia the witch remained as young as she had always been.

Lazorg’s stature had diminished to normal the very next day after he had vanquished Rokesby Marrs, and subsequent sex with Nia Hemphill did not result in future incidents of gigantism. And there were many such occasions, since Nia moved into Lazorg’s home, and became a wife to Lazorg and a mother to Slug.

Lazorg did not resume painting. He found he had no taste for that artform any longer, especially when limited to shades of grey. The pure power and control he had experienced when creating ideations had spoiled him for the cruder technics of paint on canvas.

He had not in fact pursued any art all these long years in this interstitial land, but been content to live out his daily life in enjoyment of food and drink, the raising of his and Crutchsump’s child, and the company of those few souls around him.

Pirkle died five years after the defeat of Rokesby Marrs. Some unknown bestial opponent assailed the wurzel after darkness one white “night.” Sounds of a tremendous battle, featuring Pirkle’s trademark stridulations, awoke everyone in the house, but no rescue could be attempted for fear of injury to the humans. When silence fell and they finally ventured outside, amidst torn turf and felled saplings only bits and pieces of Pirkle’s carcass could be found.

Slug cried. So did Lazorg.

And then somehow he was aged and at death’s door.

Lazorg gazed through rheumy eyes at his wife. The scene seemed familiar somehow, as if he had encountered her under these circumstances before.

Nia reached down to stroke his parchment brow. Slug held Lazorg’s hand.

Suddenly he recalled what had brought him to this house.

“I—I was searching for the Conceptus. I wanted to confront him, tell him something. But I quit walking, quit traveling, and now it’s too late.”

“No,” said Nia. “It’s not. You’ve been moving toward him all along. Because time and space are equivalent. The sheer passage of all these years has brought you to the origin point of the Cosmocopia. In fact, the Conceptus awaits you right through that door.”

Lazorg painfully turned his head. A door had opened in the wall where formerly there was none.

“Slug, will you take your father to complete his journey?”

“Of course.”

Slug bent down and lifted Lazorg’s frail, wasted body up with ease. Lazorg was reminded of how he had picked up Rokesby Marrs so long ago and flung him to his doom.

“Goodbye,” said Nia. “I loved you for many reasons.”

“I loved you too.”

Slug carried him through the door.

Lazorg had forgotten what color was. He had even lost the words for it. Now all the hues of a rainbow seemed to assail him, as he found himself facing the Conceptus, the demiurge at the heart of the Cosmocopia.

Beneath a dome of lilac sky, against a backdrop of bright green foliage and garish flowers, the Conceptus presented himself now in what might or might not have been his one true guise: in the form of a crimson beetle large as a man:
el escarabajo psicodélico
. The beetle stood improbably upright on two lowermost legs of many, showing his ventral side, plates of bright chitin overlapping.

Slug set his father down and Lazorg was surprised to discover that he could stand up. He looked down at himself and found he was young again, as young as when he first encountered his old home in the nacre. But Slug remained an adult.

The beetle’s face seemed to flow back and forth between its insect appearance and that of an old Indian man, like water over a streambed.

Fulgencio?

“You—you are the Conceptus?”

The beetle spoke out of its pincered mouth with a buzzy voice. Its many legs twitched in cryptic mudras.

“Yes.”

“Then I have to kill you, for what you’ve done to me, and to those I loved.”

“I’ve done nothing except set worlds in motion. You and your kind have done all the rest to yourselves.”

“You could have stopped all the tragedies.”

“What tragedies?”

“My wife’s death, for one.”

“She’s still alive, in all the days she lived. Those days exist eternally.”

“But they came to an end so cruelly.”

“Only if you think so.”

Lazorg tried to rekindle all his old hatreds. But he was too far removed, he found, from the incidents and days that had engendered those puerile grudges.

“What now? What now for me and my son?”

“I am generous. What do you want?”

Lazorg considered. “To go back, I guess. Back to Crutchsump’s world.”

“Very good.”

But then Lazorg considered his debts, and said, “No. Not back to that place. It was never really home. I left behind a mess in my first existence. Maybe I should go settle accounts there. Yes. Send my son to the world of his birth, and send me back to mine, to make redress.”

“As you wish.”

Lazorg turned to Slug and they embraced.

“Poppa.”

“Do good, boy.”

Slug was gone.

Lazorg faced the Conceptus again. “All right, I’m ready.”

“So you say.”

11. Coda

IN FRANK LAZORG’S STUDIO, upon the paint-splattered worktable, the dead woman was stretched out, her naked body covered with pungent red enamel that had dried to a hard insectoid shell. Outside the studio windows, the sun was just coming up. Blood on the floor was just congealing. The gore-clotted cane leaned precariously against a stool.

Suddenly the dead woman’s crushed skull recovered, brains re-gelling, bones re-knitting. She experienced a tremendous galvanic convulsion as life retook her, and all the enamel shattered into a crazy paving that began to flake off her as she writhed.

Her legs splayed open involuntarily as her eyes rolled back and showed their whites.

Her vagina dilated instantly, and the crown of a child’s head showed, although her flat, toned midriff exhibited no signs of pregnancy. It was as if her sex were a mere gateway to the origin of all worlds.

The child plopped effortlessly out amidst womb-blood and amniotic fluids. Afterbirth soon followed.

Velina Malapsina seemed to come to her senses then. She pushed herself up on the worktable with a bewildered expression upon her face, raising her hand up to brush off a few last red flakes, and regarded the squalling infant between her legs.

She reached down tentatively to touch the grey-eyed baby, and, for no good reason she could immediately offer, said:

“Frank?”

Thanks

To Michael Bishop, who coined the title of this novel for his own uses, and then generously passed it on to me.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2008 by Paul Di Filippo

Cover design by Kat Lee

978-1-4976-6467-8

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com

FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA