The Pure Cold Light (12 page)

What happened next seemed to her to occur in a waking dream.

The smell choked her, the air was gangrenous, as if the tent itself were a rotting skin. They didn’t get up, the dozen or so bodies lying to either side. Only a couple of them made the effort even to look up. At once she dismissed Glimet’s story about these people pouring out to stare at him. They couldn’t have climbed to their feet much less made a mass effort to spook a wayward Orbiter. They suffered from the same disfigurement as Horrible Woman. A few had degenerated to the point that Amerind could no longer identify individual facial features. They had become purplish lumps of tissue. She walked through their midst, and remembered pictures she’d seen of Japanese people who’d been atom-bombed. This was like that. The skin of their distorted faces hung slackly as if all the meat underneath had been sucked away. Some were bloated, the way dead bodies got after awhile. She’d seen some who had died in their boxes and not been found right away. What were these people doing down here?

The tent seemed to draw a breath. The sides flapped in like the sides of a giant lung. Amerind Shikker turned around.

Glimet’s head swayed from side to side. He edged back, stepping on a man, who cried out shrilly. Glimet leapt away, but swung around to see the man’s leg jetting blood where Glimet’s invisible foot had squished it. His one eye rolled like the eye of a horse, and he turned in a circle, whining throatily, seeking a point of escape but trapped in every direction.

Amerind ran over and touched him, trying to calm him. He swung the bag at her, knocking her aside.

One of the disfigured invalids said, “Easy, Glimet.” He whipped around to confront a wet, pulpy horror. “Long time, no see,” the dark-haired horror said with grim humor.

Glimet knew the voice, and enough of the face. It was impossible. The man was gone. Orbitol decay. He was in the Other Place.
Dead
, he admitted, and recognition of that fact tore it.

Glimet bolted. His invisible body knocked Amerind aside. His cloak slapped her face. He hurtled down the aisle between dying, supine figures; the end of the tent—like an open, shrieking mouth—swelled before him. Amerind and Horrible Woman both called for him to stop, but he didn’t hear them above the shrill siren of terror in his head as he sprang through the opening.

Had he been able to hover in the air in this world as he did in the other, it would not have mattered that the ground dropped away outside, he simply would have sailed to the far side. Instead, the bag of cans he carried snatched him, like an anchor, to the bottom.

Shikker watched his cloak flutter from sight. She heard the scrape and crash of his descent, followed by a final splash; and she ran through the tent and out. It took her a moment to spot him among the dark debris. He lay in the wet groove of an open drainage pipe. The smell rising was sulfurous and vaguely excretory, but as fresh as spring air after the confines of the tent.

She climbed down to get him, careful not to fall and tear up her already broken body. The water defined his naked form as if he were a figurine of glass. His forehead had been scraped raw, and blood trickled over his eyelid and down his face, disguising the line between what was left and what had been erased.

Shadows from above shifted across them, and Amerind looked up, her mouth open with amazement, to see Horrible Woman joined by four others at the top, backlit by the glow from the tent. She thought of mourners gathered around a Christ Church Cemetery grave. She’d attended a few funerals.

But how had they gotten up? she wondered. How had those seeping, rotting, dying people gotten to their feet?
 

Glimet groaned, drawing her attention away. She crouched beside him. He was barely conscious; his eyelid fluttered. Light glinted on his eyeball as the shadows retreated.

She looked around, and the five figures were gone. She stood on her tiptoes, climbed onto a mound of dirt, and searched in vain for them.

That was the moment she saw the faintly glittering shape hanging in the deeper darkness far beyond the tent—an enormous, petaled circle, as if the shadows themselves had taken seed and closed together, and sprouted from a concrete wall, folding back, layer upon layer—a bloom, a blossom, a black and shimmering rosette of ice.

Glimet spoke up thickly from where he lay. “Sweetie,” he called. “Got your medicine. But I forget, was it the p-potatoes or the beans that did the trick?” He tried to sit up, but toppled back into the stream.

Chapter Eight: Glimet’s Passing

“What’s happening to you?” Amerind Shikker asked Glimet.

He opened his eye and stared at her, kneeling beside him. He had been humming—not a song, more of a half-conscious utterance of discomfort.

He yawned, and she could see the tent through his mouth as if he were a ghost. “Jesus Christ,” she muttered.

One of the others limped up behind her. “It’s his time. It’s coming now.”

“I—I know you,” said Glimet. “You’re Alcevar, aren’t you? D-damn, I heard your voice and knew it.” He became puzzled, adding, “I thought you’d gone over, way last year.”

The afflicted man nodded. His skin was splitting like a sausage sheath in places on his hands and face. The tissue underneath looked red as lava. “No longer,” he said.

“Oh,” said Glimet.

The sound of the syllable was odd. When Amerind looked back, Glimet’s mouth had disappeared entirely.

The final stage would be a race to the last bit of him, the corpus callosum. He began to thrash inside his cloak. She tried to grab onto him with her one hand, but her fingers plunged straight through to the pad beneath him.

The man called Alcevar brushed her back. “Let him go,” he insisted weakly. “You have to.”

Horrible Woman was sitting down, exhausted. She called to Shikker, “You can’t interfere. No one can this late. The chrysalis unfurls.”

Amerind allowed herself to be walked back a few paces, but pulled loose then. “It ain’t right,” she argued. Her voice tightened. “We came here to help me, not to lose him.”

“
He
came here to die,” one of them said.

This wasn’t fair. How would she survive among all the nests in the underground? She hadn’t even found out where Glimet hid his secret cache of food tins. She forced a sidelong stare his way.
 

A swipe of pink cranium remained now, hovering, shrinking. His huge blue eye faded away as she watched. The others sat rigid in anticipation. “Wait,” she pleaded, and no one paid attention.

Then Glimet began to yowl. The sound emerged from far away, from some other tunnel, from some other level, from inside the pith of the black rose on the wall. She heard her first name shaped within the cry—the first time ever he had said it—and she tore loose from Alcevar. She ran back to the heap of bedding. The cloak lay rumpled and empty. “Glimet!” she wailed, and dropped down. She plunged her hand into the space he had occupied, grasping at anything. Her knee struck something hard beneath the cloak and she fumbled for the buried piece of him—any part with which to draw him back into this world.

She pulled out the atomizer bulb.

Here in the palm of her hand lay the plan he’d had for her. She had only to put the cursed thing to her head and pull the trigger to take her first step toward wherever he had gone. His Other Place, his Eden. That was what he wanted her to do—join him.

She set the atomizer on top of the cloak. “I’m sorry,” she told him, shaking her head, knowing he couldn’t hear her anymore. “I won’t do it, Glimet. I won’t do it even for you.”

She began to cry, and she willed herself to stop, but the tears continued, raining thickly. She’d never had cause to cry over any man. No man had ever deserved that much compassion. Men had used her all her life, drunks and abusers—all claiming they just wanted a taste, a fuck, a little nothing she had that they coveted. Glimet hadn’t been like that. He hadn’t even been interested in it. From the very first, he’d shared his space, what little he had, all that he had. Never spoke a word in anger. Hell, even in Box City, most of them had hankered after her digs. Glimet had left his to her. He’d left her everything. She remembered the pride in his voice as he’d announced to others that she was living with him. She squeezed her eyes shut.

“That’s good,” said the Horrible Woman. “Throw away the drug. Leave it there and we’ll see it disposed of.”
 

Amerind wiped hard at her eyes with the cuff of the shirt as she got up. They were all watching her. She strode through their septic midst to Horrible Woman. “You do what you want with the junkie shit. But we gave you food,” she said. “You owe me medicine. That’s our deal, you and me.”

Behind the fungoid features, something changed. It might have been the face pulled into a scowl or a smile—the features were too distorted to tell which. “We have nostrums,” said the woman. “They haven’t helped us, but they might work for you. Here.” She indicated a large octagonal box on the floor, like an old-fashioned hat box.

Amerind knelt down. One of the invalids, seated beside the box, watched her with childlike fascination. His skin was hideously burned, charred like wood after a fire. She couldn’t believe he wasn’t screaming. He sat rigidly still; only his eyes moved, following the lid as she lifted it.

The box was filled halfway with tubes and capsule dispensers. Every sort of drug was represented, a pharmacological heaven, a selection right out of a Geosat or some other manufacturing enclosure. She imagined what she could get in Box City—or better still, in street-level shops in and outside the walls—with this kind of barter. She could buy a tea-house room, set up for life.
 

They weren’t going to oblige her that much. They weren’t handing over the box. One-handed, she rooted through the pile, picking out antibiotics and anti-infection creams for herself and slipping everything else that looked promising down the front of her oversized shirt, trapping it against her splinted arm.

Movement caught her attention. Instinctively she ducked her head—a lifelong reaction, cringing from her father’s vicious backhand: Figuring she’d taken too much, she ducked.

But the movement belonged to the charred invalid. He had fallen back. His mouth was open. The breath rattled like dice in the well of his throat.

Quickly, Shikker scooped up what drugs she had in her hand and jumped back from the box. She bumped against Horrible Woman.

Ignoring her, the monster moved forward and spoke, “Leave, brother, hurry.” Amerind stared at her, at the pulpy face and the black pits of her eyes and finally, against all instinct to the contrary, down at the invalid.

His body shook. His jaw stretched wider than seemed possible, and Amerind anticipated his shriek. Instead, there emerged a series of snapping sounds, like chicken bones breaking one by one. His jaw slipped off-kilter. His body shook harder, his breaths came in mad gasps. He began vibrating so hard that she couldn’t really see him anymore, every part of him a cracking blur. Then, as quick as that, it ended—in one final, brutal snap.

The body sagged down, deflated, deliquescing before her eyes. It looked like a human glove from which the hand had been removed. Invisible, a charnel stench billowed through the tent. She choked, her throat knotted against a surge of bile. She pressed her face against her shoulder.

“He was in time. He’ll be back,” Horrible Woman stated.

The sides of the tent drew in as though its atmosphere were being sucked away.

Amerind heard herself say tightly, “I’m leaving now. Don’t try and stop me.” She edged around the grotesque woman and along the central aisle of the tent. “I mean it. Nobody try.”
 

Her implied threat was unnecessary. Nobody moved. Clearly, they lacked the energy or the will to stop her.

She ran back into the darkness, where no one pursued her and where, within five minutes, she became utterly lost.

Chapter Nine: Isis

The man named Mingo found a company car waiting for him on level three of ScumberCorp Tower—a bright blue, front-wheel-drive Saracen. Mingo was wearing a black suit with a black silk stock around his throat and a pair of dark glasses.

The attendant unplugged the car from its curbside jack while Mingo slid open the trunk. A stack of six, long, innocuous tubes lay there, taking up most of the space. The word “Maps” was stenciled in black on each. Mingo smiled. He sought efficiency and, most of the time, because he worked for a corporation, was not rewarded. As he closed the trunk, the attendant came over and handed him a flexible keycard.

Mingo climbed into the Saracen and slid the card into its slot. The interior lights flashed once to let him know that the car had come on. He would have known, regardless of the built-in safety feature, because the car had over twelve thousand miles on it, and every knob, handle, and screw in the interior began rattling. To Mingo it sounded abominably like a dozen Box City beggars playing songs on silverware for a handout.

Electric car technology had advanced very quickly, but even at a mere thirty miles an hour God help anyoone who had an accident in one. The campanulate car bodies were made from Knitinel and would flex back into their original bell shape when heated, but the same could not be said for the bits of the driver. So far as impact protection was concerned, one might as well have been surrounded by margarine. Air bags—once standard equipment—had been abandoned as unnecessary in the slower-moving electric vehicles. Very simply, you weren’t supposed to have accidents.

Mingo prided himself on how expertly he drove. He had never been in an accident yet, not even as a passenger; but, then, he never allowed anyone else to drive when he was in the car.

He took the skyway loop that carried him over the Free Library and alongside the Rodin enclosure. In the darkness before dawn, the small square building with its fountain and unconnected front wall looked like something out of a Poe story, Mingo thought as he headed north.

He liked Poe’s stories. They were short.

Today he felt good. His plan to have the Box City scum do all the work for him had been another stroke of genius, he had to admit. Let them paw through the stinking cesspools for the damned creatures’ lair. If they got too rough, accidentally killed a few, what was it to him? So far as he was concerned, they were all aliens.