A Dirge for the Temporal Page 5

  He moved through the center on feet of lead. Although their numbers only increased as he went, the âme relinquished him gladly, for he was a bruise to them. The inner city burned like a beacon, hot across windowsills and stoops, singeing the hair of rats, searing the tongues of the prophets. When he entered the park and the walls of the Prism became visible, Lane wished only to take shelter there, like some lighthouse keeper, out of the storm of nothingness.

  There was such an individual, though he’d no optic with which to work, nor ships to guide. A look at his aging face as he rose from the base of the Prism, where he’d been immersed in a sandwich, revealed as much. Lane told him he was looking for a girl. She’d last been seen in a balloon over Germantown. Without realizing he was doing so, his hands pirouetted before his face, describing Leah’s eyes. The man’s amusement drew attention to the fact that the man himself bore no signs, not in his vessels of sight nor anywhere else.

  “But how?” Lane said.

  “I do my duty,” said the man. “I see that the Prism remains functional and unmolested. The city needs me for no other purpose.”

  “Have you seen or heard anything of her?” Lane said.

  The man shook his head.

  “If you were to take me up into the Prism…”

  “That would not be neutral,” said the man.

  “Can you be neutral? Knowing what New Geneva has become?”

  The man took a bite of his sandwich, chewed with an enunciative care and deliberateness. When he swallowed finally, he opened his eyes wide, that there be no mistake as to their naturalness.

  Lane said, “Those may be the eyes you were born with, but what do they see?”

  The Prism keeper sucked his teeth. “I’ll tell you what they see. They see a fella who’d best be on his way. I have lost my patience.”

  Lane was swift in his assault, driving the keeper against the glass wall, where he jolted the man’s head to erase the present. The old man was stout and stood there on powerful legs, dazed, while Lane searched his pockets for the key. Lane found it in short order, clutching the means in his fist as he scanned his surroundings. Some ghosts and some mirrors hovered on the fringes of the park. The language of the former spoke more to amusement than concern, while the latter related in the only way they could, by reflecting. Satisfied, Lane turned to the task at hand.

  The door in the Prism’s base proved small and plain, the monolith having never been a place for tours. The narrowest of passages wound upward through its glass composition. It might have been sculpted out of an iceberg, but for the absence of ice. As he reached the lower miasmal strata, the colors clothed him. The vertical edges of the triangular body, otherwise undetectable, expressed themselves by splitting those colors so that the pigments seemed to flood the visitor’s senses from all sides. The glass trapped heat, which spread through Lane’s own material, writing out a definition of integration. The claustrophobia was less kind, pressing him within a house of mirrors, depriving him of oxygen. His mind, of its own accord, turned to the question of what he had to offer New Geneva. He wasn’t a citizen, but he was a thief, as solid a fixture on the urban set.

  Nevertheless, he rode the stairless spiral up through the invisible roofs of surrounding buildings, imagining melting ice and released oxygen even as the drops of sweat fell from his brow. Perception overtook this retreat, however, as the whole tower turned upside down and he was sliding along its spiral tunnel towards cool water in which to plunge. The colors began to dissolve as speed and altitude and depth became one thing. An effulgence of fire encompassed him. He looked outward and saw a fan of color dispersing from his own person. The fire dissipated into clarity, and clarity reigned. The nimbus roiled below his position as he realized he could breathe again, he could taste with his senses again. He was above the city. He was above the prophets.

  Hands of clear liquid glass, clearer than the substance of the incorporeal âme, took his hands and led him to a terrace. Motion and color disturbed the clarity. As he stepped out into the air, he realized that the disturbance came from beneath his feet. There, in the transparent floor, lay Leah. Her arms moved wildly, her mouth formed infinitudes of expression, her eyes shone ice-clear as she stared up at him through her prison. The noise of air, hot and rushed, sounded above him. He looked up to see the bottom of the wicker basket. The boa dangled from its rim like a temptation out of the Garden of Eden, the serpent in its ultimate allure, with promises of a wonderful something just beyond the mortal grasp.

  ~

  In her silence, Leah’s tears fell from her eyes to become drops of glass on her cheeks. Her arms waved the gift away, she didn’t want it after all, the city could have it if only she could be allowed to go where her sister had gone. The air smelled like smog. The sky looked like nuclear winter. Lane expressed like some prophet out of the dumpster. His hands were smeared with dirt and blood, his eyes had grown the color of girders. Words came out of his mouth, but she couldn’t understand them through the silence. The gift lolled over his back, like a teasing tongue. It didn’t mean anything, the dime store thing. Voices, things…nothing was intrinsic except the fascination. No one belonged within.

  Which was why the tears did not continue to fall as she watched the tulip-purple boa wrap around Lane’s neck, seizing him tightly and drawing him upwards, against his bulging eyes and his rotten tongue. He swung out there in the nothingness filled with sun, and the tears on her face began to melt. She rose up out of the silence, spreading out over the miasma, and she felt, in every molecule of her, the call of New Geneva. She looked down into the swirl, laughing for the pleasure of it, and as she surrendered herself she felt the hands of the âme rise up out of the storm of nothingness to catch her and bring her down gently to the urban beds that had been calling for her in shouts and screams of silence.

  ~

  As Lane stepped out of the Prism into the park, he caught the flash of the old man’s eyes. He stepped over to where the man slumped against the wall, gazing into mirrors that had not been there before. The thought—the old man has betrayed his city and now he can only reflect it—was replaced by the reflection itself. The image of his own eyes. Miasmal, spectral, exhibiting the rainbows through which he had just descended. The shock dissipated into the question, But what….?

  He searched his clothes, his pockets. What had he given in return? What did he own that had such intrinsic value to him? Certainly no material thing, nor even a symbolic thing.

  The question was answered as he emerged from the park to find a solitary âme approaching him, the outlines of her body and face as familiar to him as his own. Her name from his lips sounded every bit as ghostly as her appearance. She seemed to recognize him, seemed to be acting in humor when she crossed her forefingers and placed them over each of her eyes, but the silence surrounding her had crystallized, and there was no breaking it. Not now. Never.

  As he walked back in the direction of the only place that seemed connected in any way to anything, he could almost hear the trumpet calling to him, its voiceless notes reaching across the strange urban surfaces to temper the harrowing stillness.

  The Whole Circus

  The nearer you were to Chaos, the more numerous and glaring its symptoms. It was hard to believe that only a decade ago it was still known as Orlando, entertainment capital of the world. Always State of the Art, the city had been the first to go fully automated. Too late New Orleans, Miami and Las Vegas saw Orlando’s error. They were now suffering the same fate. They would likely never achieve the state of electronic and social bedlam their forerunner had, but they were nonetheless places you would not want to take your children.

  To Shelley, who knew all too well about symptoms, Chaos was home. Even now, as his captor led him along the tubular passage, he experienced that strange sense of connection, that feeling of needing only a
terminal to bring it all into glorious focus. He saw it mirrored in the eyes of the people he passed. The lust for life had been replaced by a shimmering brought on by the phantasmagorial splendor of electrons and currents and information bombardment.

  Surrounding the flow of foot traffic in the tunnel, screens displayed nonsensical, indecipherable, illogical messages. In the ceiling, light panels dimmed and intensified, dimmed and intensified, contributing to the routine surreal quality of the scene. The lower half of a hominoid robot strode by, drawing scarcely a glance as it journeyed to someplace remembered by its legs. Pieces and parts of things, not always inorganic, cluttered the base of the walls. Homing spheres, seeking to deliver certified messages that had long since lost their relevance to anything, hummed by, occasionally colliding with a public access monitor, someone’s head or shoulder, another sphere. A random scream, or peal of laughter, echoed and shuddered along the passage. And all this in an auxiliary tubeway outside city limits.

  As Shelley felt the mysteries deepen around him, reminding him that they were approaching the moving tube, direction Anarchy, he craved his Psycho. Ian, his captor, had promised it to him in periodic, small doses, but he’d yet to see the first drop—except as depicted in the frequent, passing flash ads, whose scare tactics were far more effective when you were on the stuff. In the heart of Chaos you would have to search hard to find such propaganda. Out here on the fringes, it was all you could do to escape the picture of the eager human face, the poised dropper, the single luminous teardrop of Self-replicating Psychedelic Chemical Organism freefalling towards a bloodshot eye. The image itself was actually quite delicious; the footer is what got you: PSYCHO WILL FUCK UP YOUR MIND.

  Shelley knew it had fucked up his. Why else had he allowed himself to turn rat against Silver, Prince of Psycho? On one side of the scale, a life sentence; on the other, a death sentence. He had chosen the latter. Did he despise Silver for what the man represented, what the man commanded? Did he despise himself for being the dependent on Silver’s candy that he was? Was he so repelled by the idea of a foreign organism taking up residence inside his body that he wanted to die? For reasons beyond the grasp of his depleted layman’s gray matter, the duration of the high and the lifespan of the organism did not agree. The high on average lasted some fifteen hours per the standard dose of one cc, while the organism continued to grow indefinitely. There was an antibiotic which, when combined with an electrochemical application of some sort, was said to rid the body of the invitee. But a single treatment ran fifty thousand dollars.

  Shelley had no money, which was why he had been put in this position in the first damn place. Silver, whose labs generated the purest strains of the city’s supply, had dangled Psycho, and Shelley killed three men for him. The job had gone down to the north, in Ocala, where there remained some semblance of law. The three men had been Ocala’s biggest pushers, but they were still three men. Shelley had been an easy arrest. Electronic eyes watched him commit, electronic eyes watched him go into a tube, human hands apprehended. Officer Ian, as the man introduced himself, had not been soft. He had manhandled Shelley, inserting a device into his neck below the base of his cranium. The device was activated by Ian’s voice; when he spoke in anything other than an even tone, pain tore through Shelley’s nervous system. It had been easy to give in to the officer’s demands.

  But the device had not been the reason Shelley had acquiesced. Coercion was as worthless on him as self analysis. And no matter how much of the latter he did, he kept returning to the single most disturbing of possibilities—that he was simply amusing himself. PSYCHO WILL FUCK UP YOUR MIND.

  They arrived at the Lakeland-Orlando Tubeway. Its name was somewhat misleading, as it had actually been diverted outside of Lakeland, same as the tube in Ocala, and Daytona, and wherever the hell else they wanted to cut themselves off from Chaos. Such measures amounted to temporary fixes of course, for nothing could prevent the seeping. As Shelley and his captor stood in the press of bodies, a digit above the portal registered the minutes to window, when a maximum of ten could step aboard. The Orlando-Lakeland, which ran above the Lakeland-Orlando, was accessed via an elevator, which also accepted ten. Odd, Shelley thought as he compared the queues, that as many people seemed to be traveling to Chaos.

  Four minutes they waited. Before the zero had appeared, Shelley was begging of his captor a drop, the merest drop. The bathroom was right there if the officer was concerned about it being a spectacle. Ian shook his head and Shelley was beginning to lose patience.

  As they stepped from the auxiliary into the main tube, he recalled the last time he had lost his patience: a month ago, after an overdose. The doctor had told him that even if he quit now, the damage would go on. “What damage?” Shelley had wanted to know.

  “The damage to your body.”

  “What damage to my body?”

  The doctor’s spiel had been an impressive one, a smattering of three-dollar words alongside the latest platitudes and mannerisms, but Shelley had seen the truth—perhaps the Psycho within him had seen the truth—which was that they didn’t fucking know. He told the doctor just how transparent he found him, but the fact was, the doctor was just doing what he thought best. Shelley was left wondering if this Self-replicating Psychedelic Chemical Organism and its effect on the human body mightn’t prove to be a microcosm of full automation on Orlando. They called the result Chaos, yet what was chaos?

  The craving was chaotic, no doubt there. He envisioned sinking his teeth into Ian’s jugular, his own body twisting in agony as Ian’s choked scream flung to the end of every nerve in him. He’d have his hands on the dropper then, or be broken or dead, the same result that would come of delivering Ian to the Prince of Psycho. What would Ian do anyway? Put up your hands, Silver! Give it all up, Silver! Your labs, your warehouses, your army!

  Yeah, same result either way.

  Another thought occurred to him. Get out of the range of Ian’s voice, where the device, unless the officer had other means, could not be activated. But where would he go? To fucked-up Psycho clown boys with triple homicide notches, that was the mother of existential questions. Not the profound Where did I come from? but the abyssal Where do I go?

  The dropper was in his face suddenly, the officer’s frowning countenance behind it.

  Shelley seized the dropper, pulled back his eyelid and let two, four, five, six—was the jerk going to stop him?—seven teardrops of salvation into his eye. The blood vessels were right there, the nerve trailed the retina like a tentacle, then the brain itself, poised and hungry. Seven drops of sweet agony like homage to the psyche.

  “Do you really enjoy it?” said Ian in a mercifully even tone.

  Shelley considered. “I have a better understanding of what is going on around me when I’m Psycho.”

  “Do you know what is so abhorrent about your Silver?”

  “Not my Silver,” Shelley said.

  “That he exploits chaos—the condition of chaos—itself.”

  “Maybe chaos exploits him.”

  Ian smirked. “Sure. And he systematically sends out his slaves to eliminate the inconveniences in his world.”

  “Who said there’s no system to the circus?” As he spoke Shelley scanned his surroundings with some intensity.

  “What are you looking for?” said Ian, put off.

  “A terminal.”

  A woman standing nearby turned to Shelley. “You are seeking a terminal?”

  She was svelte and beautiful; flawless, he observed, recognizing at once the significance of that fact. As she turned her back to him, raising her blouse to reveal the perfect contour of her back, he remembered her model’s name: Ethereal.

  “If you wish you may use mine,” she said, indicating a standard outlet in her flesh, “but be conscious of time.”
>
  “I didn’t mean…that is, I wasn’t looking for…”

  “Ah,” she said, dropping her blouse. “It’s the other you want.”

  “No…No.” He looked back at Ian, embarrassed.

  He had meant a wall terminal, thinking he might persuade Ian to let him borrow the unit the officer wore on his belt. Already scintillating, Shelley wanted that feeling, that knowledge of being hooked up to the whole crazy circus. A robot was too much though…at least at this early, extremely self-conscious stage…there were people…

  As he scanned for others inspired by his recently attained lack of anonymity, the female hominoid remained tuned to him.

  “Look at this,” she invited. “Behind each of my eyes are two electrodes and a capsule of sodium vapor. Watch.”

  Shelley watched as her eyes began to glow, one yellow, one green.

  “Ian—” he said, confused.

  “I don’t know what you want,” Ian said. “Shall I be Joseph in his Technicolor Dreamcoat?” His tone veered slightly off the even and the sudden riot in Shelley’s nervous system was almost an oasis from the external.

  “I don’t want anything,” Shelley said. “I’ll cool it.”

  He thought he saw, but couldn’t be certain, a look pass between the hominoid and Ian.

  Seven were too many drops. Heightened awareness and hallucination were intermingling. Twenty-seven individuals occupied the section of tube, seventeen men, three women, three certain androids (including the Ethereal model) and four possibles. He hadn’t counted; he simply knew. Psycho was like that. On a really acute trip, you might be able to say which of the lot were married, who had children, who would die first. This was becoming one of those trips and more. That he had confidently picked out three hominoid robots in a field of twenty-seven individuals was testament to the fact. As to the possibles…that’s where the hallucinations came into play. He was seeing beneath the skin of these four bodies to blood vessels, wires, tubes…