Six Scifi Stories (13 page)

 

*****

Here's the thing about the Cambio: more than the land changes here.

Sometimes, people cross the border because they
want
to change. The Cambio is unpredictable, so people have no idea what changes it might bring...but
anything
would be better than the way things are now, right?

Only one thing's for certain: the Cambio will change you. People who walk out might not even be recognizable as the same people who walked in.

Just look at poor Roto. Would he have become a murderous cannibal freak if he'd stayed out of the Cambio?

Then there's Manny and me. What about the changes
we're
going through?

 

*****

Once again, Manny offers me the last finger he has left, a right thumb. This time, I take it.

Not long ago, it would have grown back, but not anymore. I'll never taste that thumb again, or any part of him that I eat.

He's been this way for a month. One day, he just stopped being able to regenerate. I guess the Cambio screwed him.

The Cambio's screwed us both another way, too. We're lost.

We've been wandering through the shifting landscape ever since we left Roto's cave. Our high tech equipment has been just as useless as our sense of direction.

And it's starting to look like we won't make it out of here alive.

“Have some more.” Manny pushes his fingerless left hand at me. “There's still meat in the palm and forearm.”

Gently, I touch his arm. I'm so hungry, I could eat everything that's left...but looking at what's left makes me sad.

The tutti-frutti flesh is pitted and gouged from all the bites I've taken. Very little skin remains. In places, I can see clear to the bone.

His right arm is even more damaged. From shoulder to wrist, the meat's all gone, except what I couldn't suck from between the bones.

The rest of him isn't much better. I've been rationing him, trying to make him last, but I've been eating him for a month with him not being able to regenerate. Even losing just a little bit every day for that long will make a man disappear.

“How much longer?” I reach up and stroke his cheek, which is intact. “How much longer can you keep going?”

Manny shrugs. “I won't know until I get there. This has never happened to me before.”

“We'll be all right.” As I gaze into his eyes, my heart pounds and my stomach growls at the same time. God help me, even as I try to comfort him, I want to eat what's left of him. “Maybe you'll regenerate when we make it out of here.”

“Maybe.” How can he keep smiling? He's literally full of holes, staggering lost through a parched, shifting wasteland, and he still has a smile on his face. “Either way, I want you to promise me something.”

“What?” I trace a swirl of red and yellow as it slowly twists through the sugar-white skin of his forehead. Now that's he's half-eaten and can't regrow, the swirls don't move and change as much as they once did.

“No guilt.” Manny reaches up to touch my face, then looks at his fingerless stump and changes his mind. “This is what I was born to do. To feed the hungry.”

A tear rolls down my cheek. I make the promise, but I know I won't keep it.

Not unless a miracle can keep us both alive.

 

*****

“No guilt,” says Manny. A whisper is all he can manage.

His head is in my lap. His ears and nose are gone. So are bits of his cheeks and chin.

And still, he is smiling.

“Hold on,” I tell him. “Please, Manny.” My back is to the sun, to shield him from its blinding rays.

He can barely move. I've made him last almost two more weeks, but I think I've taken one bite too many.

And we're still lost in the Cambio. It's as if this place is a living thing, using its ever-changing terrain to turn us in circles and keep us always from finding our way out.

My stomach growls.

“Go ahead,” he says. “Dig in.”

I wish I could, because I'm starving...but he's literally down to bare bones. I've left the bare minimum for survival--internal organs, veins and arteries, enough strips of muscle to move--and even that isn't enough to keep him alive anymore.

Whatever I eat next will paralyze him...and what I eat after that will kill him.

“I wish there was something I could do.” I stroke his face and try to ignore the signs of my hunger--the heaviness, the aches, the slackness of my muscles.

He has given everything to me. The least I can do is give him what little I have to offer. What comfort I can muster.

“Now I know what it's like,” he says.

“What's that?”

“Hunger.” Manny nods. “Not being able...to fill the void inside you.”

The ground rumbles, and I ignore it. “Rations don't feel hunger?”

“We could...but what we eat...is plentiful.” He takes a deep, shaky breath and lets it back out.

It occurs to me that I've never seen a Ration eat. “What is it? What do you eat?”

“Your breath.” Manny's eyes meet mine. “The microscopic airborne life...you breathe out. The organic molecules. The carbon dioxide and water vapor.

“I recycle it. I give it back to you...in a form that will sustain you.

“At least...I used to.”

I never knew.
“
We
feed
you
?”

He nods. “And we...feed
you
...in return.”

I never cared. After Cornucopia...until Manny...I wanted to know as little about Rations as possible. I never knew we were
connected
.

I never knew the feeding worked
both ways
.

Tears run down my emaciated cheeks and off the tip of my chin. “I wish I could still do it,” I say. “I wish I could feed you now.”

Manny coughs. His head twitches in my lap. “Lupe.” His voice grows weaker. “I don't think...I can keep going.”

“Just rest,” I tell him. “Rest now, darling.”

I hear a landslide in the distance. I hear the Cambio groan and creak and crack beneath us.

“You know...what you have to do now,” says Manny. “Time...for the feast.
El banquete del muerte
.”

I wipe away tears and shake my head. I don't want to listen.

“Eat as much of me...as you can hold. Stuff yourself. What's left...will rot.”

“No.” How did I come to love him so much? I don't understand. How did I get to this place?

“Do it, Lupe. You need the energy.”

“No!” He's right, and I hate him for it. I love him and I hate him for what he's telling me to do.

“It's my last request.” His smile is fading. The tutti-frutti swirls have stopped moving. “Don't let me...go to waste.”

That's when I do it.

I'm in a daze. I hardly realize that I'm pushing my index finger toward his mouth. Toward his half-eaten lips.

“Lupe, no.” His whisper trails off, and he closes his eyes.

When the tip of my finger touches his lower lip, I stop. I know what a futile gesture I am making, but I also know it doesn't matter that I make it. No one will know but him, and he will understand.

So I push onward.

My fingertip passes between his lips. I feel the ridges of his teeth scrape the skin.

I push the finger in past the first knuckle, and then I tell him to eat. “I love you.” I want him to live, and I wish with all my heart

The Cambio jumps. A new geyser hisses to life.

I wish with all my heart that I could bring him back. At least I want him to know that I would do this for him, I would do it if I could.

Far away, there is a thunderclap. The bubbling of lava.

“Please, Manny.” I hold his chin with my free hand and push it up, as if that will make him take a bite. His teeth press into the flesh of my finger.

The ground beneath us trembles and rises. We ride the newborn mesa toward the sky.

Suddenly, Manny's teeth clench.

I start to cry out as he bites into my fingertip...and then I catch myself. “Good, Manny.” He bites down with surprising force, and I shut my eyes against the pain. “Take what you need.”

I feel him nip the meat from the bone. This is it, I realize.

This is how
he
feels.

I slide out my finger, the tip ragged and red. I suck away the oozing blood, which tastes strangely sweet, like vanilla.

And Manny chews.

When I lower the finger from my lips, it has stopped bleeding. The tiny wound is no longer red at all, in fact. It is pink and smooth.

And as I watch...

“Lupe?” His voice is a whisper, but no weaker than before.

As I watch, the smooth, pink flesh rises like bread dough. Tiny grooves etch the surface, perfectly matching the surrounding fingerprint.

The finger heals. Right before my eyes, it heals.

Within seconds, I can't tell where the edges of the wound once were.

Something has happened to me. I am only beginning to understand.

One thing's for certain: the Cambio will change you.

“Lupe?” Manny's eyes flutter open. His smile dimly flickers back into view. “What did you...give me?”

I push the same finger toward his lips. Warmth and light surge through my body, filling my belly, my chest, my throat.

My heart.

Tears of joy pour down my face like spring rain. They taste like wine. “Eat up, my love,” I tell him. “There's more where that came from.”

*****

Zinzizinzizinzic

Singing to myself, I dominate the shadow of Earth's president, subdue it to my will with hardly any effort. The man himself would be embarrassed if he knew how weak his own shadow was.

All this happens while the human leader shakes the tentacle of the being who casts me, ambassador at large of the Un people. All this happens while the ambassador and the president agree to an era of peace and friendship and cooperation.

They shake and smile while we are at work. They pledge peace while a war is waged at their feet.

In the shadows. Of the shadows.

And we are winning.

All eyes are on the leaders as I stretch toward the vice president's shadow. This one puts up more of a fight, pressing me back at first but holding me not for long. I redouble my effort and he falls before me, unresisting as I ooze through him and assert my control.

He has the honor of being one of the first. Soon, billions more will be converted, switching from the black of human shadows to the red of the Un. Red shadows cast on floors and walls and pavement, red shadows cast by sun and lamp and moonlight, red shadows thinking red thoughts.

All around me, the shadows of the other Un flow over the shadows of the humans among them, engulfing them with heat and red intensity. The humans' shadows have been kings here long enough and have little to show for it; we can do better.

We will drive the humans into space like the Un, the better to spread us to other worlds that we may conquer...and like the Un, they will never imagine that it was our idea. Like the Un, they will achieve and flourish, never dreaming that their lives are but a backdrop for our own.

Never guessing that
we
are the ones who cast
them
.

Cameras flash in the audience, shooting bursts of light through the crimson jelly bodies of the Un. Each flare intensifies us, giving us new and terrible strength to win our war. Giving us ecstasy. I whisper my name, our name, which is also a battlecry...which is also the only word in our language. The whisper, undetectable to even the most sensitive audio equipment, is like a roar to a shadow.

Zinzizinzizinzic. Most feared, strongest, fiercest, reddest. Warrior, conqueror, devourer. All the shadows of a million worlds--black and green and blue and silver, all red now--know this word, this story, this song.

Zinzizinzizinzic.

By the time the crowd disperses, all of their shadows are red. The humans know nothing of it as they flow out into their homes and public places, carrying the stain that spreads through the shadows of every stranger and loved one they meet.

And so on. Battle after battle in perfect silence. People eat and work and play and sleep, unaware of the carnage behind them, beneath them, between them.

We exult as the shadows of the high and the low alike fall before us. We silently thank our shadow gods in the shadows of cities we rename for shadow heroes...the only heroes that matter.

Those that resist our silent march are tortured before they are consumed. Those that disrupt us in the slightest are warped beyond all recognition and mounted on sidewalks and parking lots and alley walls to serve as examples to all the rest.

We are without mercy. Zinzizinzizinzic.

Children and animals and madmen notice the invasion, but no one of importance pays attention to their warnings. The fact is, it would make no difference if they did; the war is already won.

Or so we think.

I follow the Un ambassador on his goodwill tour around the world, celebrating a victory of war as he and the humans celebrate their triumph of peace. At a state dinner, he raises a goblet to toast his human allies...while on the table beneath him, I raise a shadow chalice to death and oppression. The shadow of a human potentate writhes beneath me, silently screaming as my red bleeds into his black.

Then, for the first time since arriving on Earth, I am surprised.

Something cold washes over me, something shockingly, bitterly cold. It slides over me and permeates me, sifting into my insubstantial substance with ease though I put up what I think is a fight.

I pull back from the potentate's shadow, compressing my form to intensify my resistance...but the new thing filters through me as if I had opened myself wide. I see a burst of white like lightning or the flash of a camera, but it is neither.

And instead of giving me strength, it takes what I have. Takes my strength and my will and my hunger.

Takes my red.

Replaces it with nothing a human eye or an Un could ever see. Replaces it with something even we the shadows had missed.

As I transform and surrender, I am infused with understanding. Even as the Zinzizinzizinzic fall around me, I know what these new things are. These new masters of ours.

Only they are nothing new after all. They have been with us always, though we never knew it.

They are our shadows...the shadows of the shadows. Secret shadows cast by invisible suns, by the shadows of suns. Anti-light streaming in from outside our universe, from beyond the holographic bound.

And all our manipulations of the life to which we are attached, all our secret wars and tortures and conquests, have ever only been the shadows of acts committed by our shadows...our sources. Our thoughts and dreams and desires are the shadows of the workings of other minds.

Minds that change us now for reasons we cannot fathom, sweeping red into white into nothing, undoing our victory. Swirling around the planet now, peeling away every trace of a shadow that Un or human can ever see.

We are still here--secret, helpless, but here. And we know before any living thing that something big is about to happen, something terrible.

And we cry out our silent warning that no one can hear but us.

Zinzizinzizinzic...

Zinzizinzi...

Zinzi.