The Pure Cold Light (31 page)

Soon the ground became uneven again, and he withdrew his hand in order to catch himself if he fell. He smelled sulfurous gases and a sweet cloacal reek for which he knew no name.

Shikker muttered, “Someone dead in here,” and immediately the rebarbative stench of decay burst upon him as if her words had ruptured a membrane. It was worse than anything he had smelled in Box City.

Something rattled just in front of them, and a dim rectangle appeared upon the air. His guide moved as a silhouette upon it, while he automatically blinked, believing it to be an illusion, like the amorphous shapes that manifest before the eyes in total darkness. But it was real enough. He could see her, and the rectangle. He had to step up to go through it, the doorway.

Shortly, they emerged on an old subway platform. Nearby, a defunct escalator stretched two stories into bluish space. Voices and the sounds of clanking metal echoed from above. A flock of birds flittered around the ceiling. Fascinated by them, he tried to walk toward the escalator, but Shikker dragged him inexorably away—through a high turnstile with comblike teeth.

They were going down again, he could tell. Back into unconscious darkness.

From there they wove in and out of pockets of light, like a fever-ridden mind collecting fevered images: a platform strewn with bodies that, at Angel’s approach, erupted into thousands of agitated, feeding flies. Underneath, the true corpses could hardly be recognized but for their general shape. He was prepared for the smell this time, holding his jacket over his nose and mouth. The inexplicability of their deaths in this out of the way place troubled him, but Shikker ignored them, as if blind to the carnage.

With mechanical strides, she tugged him again into utter darkness.

***

The golden tent hung on the crest of a subterranean hill, a curious crown—more like a party hat—upon a rough black skull of earth. Climbing down into a ditch across from it, Shikker and Angel had to jump a wide trench to reach the other side.

He was concentrating on his footing on the precariously loose hillside and didn’t see the contents of the tent until he was almost on top of it. Inside, on the floor, lay more bodies—or what had once been bodies—all in a row.

Nothing like the ghastly scene on the platform, these withered, soft-boned torsos lay neatly aligned, their heads bowed and crumpled, their folded fingers like corkscrewed brown papier-mâché stubs. He recollected mummies he had once seen in catacombs, though he could not remember where or when that could have been. They looked as if they had just been unearthed, and their familiarity shook him as nothing else had.

The Shikker woman stood beside him, her attitude reverential. It was as if she were praying over them. Then she simply let go of his hand. She moved off and sat down on a small rug. She was looking directly at him when her eyelids fluttered shut.

The sides of the long tent fluttered, too. Angel twitched in response and looked from end to end, finding no one else, nothing but heaps of rags, blankets and debris.

He felt it then—a tickle like an insect crawling across his scalp, except that this insect was deep inside the gray matter, a shifting, trickling chemical flow. Neurotransmitters forging new synaptic bonds. A pain stabbed through his right eye as if a splinter were pushing through it from inside his head. He clutched at the lens covering it and, with a groan, doubled over.

The pain stopped.

Someone said, “No, that’s not the way, is it?”

Hunched over, Angel peered at Shikker, but she still had her eyes closed. It hadn’t been her voice in any case—this belonged to a man.

At the far end of the tent, an arm arose, a cobra dancing, inveigling. What he had taken for a rumpled heap of clothes sat up. “Over here.”

Behind him, Amerind Shikker fell over on her side.

“Don’t worry,” said the man, “She’s sleeping.”

He had graying blond hair that was oily and uncombed. It stuck up absurdly. He needed a shave, which reminded Angel emptily of Chikako.

“What is it?” asked the man. “Tell me, what passed through you just now?”

Angel turned inward. He groped for the shape of his feelings and, when he could not find it, chose words that applied, that everyone else used. “Loss,” he said. “Sadness.”

The other shook his head. “You don’t know but a ghost of either of those things. Sadness, loss, joy—they’re all estranged from you.” His voice itself expressed more sadness than Angel felt. This man
knew
.

“That’s so,” he admitted. He sat down across from the man. “I don’t feel anything toward anyone.”

“They’ve taken it away.”

“Who?”

“All of them—the corporation, the government. The great collusion that has never seen light of day but lurks behind the teeth and tongue of those who make promises. Orbitol, by way of example.” He reached into his loose cloak and produced a small plastic atomizer. Its silver head gleamed.

“The drug they all take,” Angel commented.

“And you.”

“Me? No. No,” he repeated, adamantly.

The man held him with a look for a moment, then touched the sides of his own face. “And me. See my scars, here and here?”

“I don’t have any,” Angel argued.

“Under that contraption you do. I’ve seen.”

“When?
 
I don’t know you.” His stomach seemed to be expanding into a vast pit that his heart would fall into.

“On the Moon I did. Before they got their hands on you.”

On the Moon!
This man had known him before the amnesia. “Did I,” he asked in dawning fear, “did I kill all of those people?”

The man said, “The name I have now is Glimet. To answer your question, we must rid you of your artificial limitations.” He leaned forward until his fingers brushed the
crab
. “Then you won’t need to ask.”

“You can do that?”

Glimet nodded. “Only … it will be very unpleasant.”

“I don’t care.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” He stood, stiffly. His head brushed the glowing side of the tent. “I want you to come with me. And to do exactly what I tell you.”

Angel glanced at Shikker. “Did she follow this course?”

A dry chuckle. “No. Light hypnosis is all that was, to enable her to find her way back. Now, please.” He offered his dirty hand to help Angel up. They walked outside the tent.

In the deeper reaches of the huge vault, there was a petaled, shadowy shape. At first it looked like a drawing done in black paint on the far wall. Drawing nearer, Angel saw it sparkle, glistening with something like moonlit quicksilver—droplets that cascaded over the petals but did not fall. The ground beneath was unblemished.

The flower shape moved. Its rounded petals stretched wide, exposing a membranous silver center. The beads, or whatever they were, came from there. He looked questioningly at Glimet.

“This will be hard,” Glimet told him, and the way he said it revealed the deeper truth.

He was going to die.

Glimet put the atomizer gun against Angel’s head. They looked into one another’s eyes, trading fear, and hope, and esteem. Then Glimet squeezed the trigger …

Chapter Twenty-Two: Dead Is My Body

Imagine a place that is no place, has no ground or sky, no solidity to which you can affix your reason. Where a vortex swirls nearby and your thoughts say “
dust
,” the concept of dust being all you have with you. In naming it, you have transformed it, and dust, spit from a whirlwind, scrapes you. It stings, which is odd, since you don’t have a form to be spattered in the first place. But “me” is a tenacious concept, able to give life to form and form to life. You manifest.

You have no memory, nor can you imagine a moment succeeding this. There is only
now
, moment to moment. How you came here, if it hurt, who you were or want to be, and if you are content—these things cannot be addressed in a place such as this.

There are others, too. The autochthonous inhabitants of this non-place. They appear to be strands of raw tissue, muscle and gristle without skin or bone. At the top is a lumpish knot of strands upon which your mind’s subjective grid identifies the features of eye sockets and thin lipless mouths. Toward the bottom, their ropy essence flattens out into a calyx from which dangle more ragged strands, long deformed fingers. These others float and bob, moving as if by force of will alone. But it is your will at the helm. That is how form evolves here—through the exercise of interlopers. The inhabitants themselves don’t require any.

You discover that you have finished taking form yourself, only to find that you’re one of them. You are a floating mass of wet and sticky rope; when you try to move your hands and feet you feel a pseudopodal wriggle beneath the basket of your torso. This is not the shape you have grown used to, but that one doesn’t seem to be an option here.

Just when you’re adjusting to the idea of this physical conformation, you feel yourself begin to compress. Your boneless body squashes down as though the atmospheric pressure is doubling every moment. Boneless or not, the new body cannot compress this way. The other creatures hover near, unaffected by the pressures warping you. You have a mouth but not for screaming. For what then? You’ll never know. It’s unbearable, like drowning while being on fire, having joints and sockets wrenched apart, in all directions at the same moment. Pain, it grows louder than existence.

“This will be hard,” he said. “Hard” doesn’t measure this, is your answer.

You’ve finally figured it out. The hard part hasn’t begun yet.

You still have to go back.

***

Bruised, bloodied, achy, and as tired as he had ever been, Mingo leaned against the Free Quaker Meeting House, Ingram 30 dangling in his hand, and grimly watched the conflagration. It wasn’t particularly satisfying, coming as it did after so many successive failures—more an expression of his frustration than of real anger.

His leg hurt as if the bone had split, his cheek was inflamed, his left eye swelling, and there was a ringing harmonic in his ear that had him worried. On top of that he had once more lost the Angel. They had beaten him—the homeless, thoughtless, malodorous swine. They had beaten him bloody. Well, the last laugh would be his. He would go down in history right next to Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

He maintained a tiny, ridiculous hope that his prey was trapped somewhere in the flames along with the hundreds of others. At least that was what he would tell the damned CEOs. If the truth ever came to light , well, by then it would be old news and he would simply shrug it off. So many charred bodies, so little to work with. If they were lucky, maybe the whole place would ignite, and SC could sweep in and raze it before more squatters moved in.

He had played a complicated game. It should not surprise him that it had failed; and yet he had been so certain. He had considered every variable in advance—or at least every variable he had known in advance. They all looked rock solid.

The company couldn’t have kept Rueda on the Moon. There was nowhere he wouldn’t have been noticed. Employees would have made the connection between him and … other bad business. The story would have leaked—on that point he knew absolutely that he was right. Stories always leaked. Angel Rueda had had to come down to Earth. But they, the asinine quartet, had wanted him alive, as if he were a hostage, an endangered species, a bargaining chip. They actually thought they could trade him for some technological marvel such as a Buckyball opener.

He found his reverie interrupted at that point. A short, squalid man was tugging at his sleeve. The guy had a little tuft of hair on top of his head, like a greasy ski jump.

Mingo decided he needed a vacation. Someplace where ScumberCorp didn’t own the works. New Zealand maybe. The little man tugged again. “What?” he snarled.

“Mr. Mingo, my name’s Mad Bucca.”

“How appealing.”

“I found him, Mr. Mingo.”

“Found whom?”

“The one that got away. Machine Man.”

A bag woman wearing four layers of clothing ran past. Her hair was alight. Mingo thought affectionately of the Statue of Liberty.

He shook his head. He would have liked a nap before his brain dried up. Even the security bozos had gotten to take naps. They didn’t have to maintain their façade of superior intellect. Anyway, in all this screaming chaos, where could he sleep?

“What’s a Machine Man?” he asked, disinterestedly.

“You know—a
alien
.”

Mingo focused on the little man. Yes, he remembered this turnip from the feeding frenzy in the plaza. He dared not hope. Not yet. But energy was seeping back into him, charging him, as he asked, “Where?”

“Down there,” Bucca said. He pointed along the wall behind the meeting house.

“What, he’s down the street?”

“Naw, he went down the rabbit hole. C’mere, I’ll show youse. No, really, come on.” And he led Mingo to an old chained ramp that had once had a semaphore at the top.

“A parking garage for people who live in boxes,” Mingo commented. He paused to listen to the screams, like Dracula immersed in the howling of the wolves. “Or used to. How long ago was it that you saw him?”

“Dunno. Half hour, maybe longer. I couldn’t find ya, and then the fire broke out and I had to go rescue my house.”

“‘House’ overstates the matter somewhat, doesn’t it?”

“You see, mine’s fireproof an—”

“Yes, all right.” He grabbed Bucca by the shirt and stuck the muzzle of the gun under his chin. “You were given a dime. By some miracle of the ages, did you happen to use it?”

Bucca intended to describe his ingenuity but the words tumbled out in a panic. “I slipped it in his pocket at the Liberty Bell, when he wasn’t looking, like you wanted, right? What you said, when we did lunch.”

Liquid was spattering on the little man’s foot. His bladder had given way.

Mustering control over absolute loathing, Mingo released him and stepped away. He holstered the gun. “What was your year?” he asked.

“Nineteen eighty-four.”

“An amusing vintage.” He tilted back his head and to the sky cried, “I’m not undone yet!”

Bucca said very quietly, “I was wondering, Mr. Mingo—”