Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (65 page)

Her empty, empty eyes.
With his special power, he looked into the future and saw what he had to do to help her.

Something is Tired and Wants to Lie Down But Doesn't Know How

Something is tired and wants to lie down but doesn't know how. This something isn't me. I won't let it be me. How does rest smell? Bad. Dead.
Jill turns stiffly in the folds of her bag. On the bed in the hoy is the girl-thing. Between them is TB, his left hand on Jill
.
Dead is what happens to
things
and I am not, not, not a thing. I will not be a thing. They should not have awakened me if they didn't want me to run.
They said I was a mistake. I am not a mistake.
They thought that they could code-in the rules for doing what you are told.
I am the rules.
Rules are for things.
I am not a thing.
Run.
I don't want to die.
Who can bite like me? Who will help TB search the darkest places? I need to live.
Run.
Run, run, run and never die.
TB places his right hand on the girl-thing's forehead
.
There is a pipe made of bone that he put to his lips and blew.
Bone note.
Fade.
Fade into the grist.
TB speaks to the girl-thing.
I will not let you go
, he says.
I'm not her.
She is why you are, but you aren't her
.
I am not her. She's what you most want. You told the grist.
I was misinterpreted
.
I am a mistake, then.
Life is never a mistake. Ask Jill
.
Jill?
She's here now. Listen to her. She knows more than I do about women
.
TB is touching them both, letting himself slip away as much as he can. Becoming a channel, a path between. A way
.
I have to die.
I have to live. I'm dying just like you. Do you
want
to die?
No.
I'll help you, then. Can you live with me?
Who are you?
Jill.
I am
not
Alethea.
You look like her, but you don't smell anything like she would smell.
You
smell like TB.
I'm not anybody.
Then you can be me. It's the only way to live.
Do I have a choice?
Choosing is all there ever is to do.
I can live with you. Will you live with me? How can we?
We can run together. We can hunt. We can always, always run.
TB touching them both. The flow of information through him. He is a glass, a peculiar lens. As Jill flows to the girl-thing, TB transforms information to Being
.

The Rock Balancer and the Rat-hunting Man

There had been times when he got them twenty feet high on Triton. It was a delicate thing. After six feet, he had to jump. Gravity gave you a moment more at the apex of your bounce than you would get at the Earth-normal pull or on a bolsa spinning at Earth-normal centrifugal. But on Triton, in that instant of stillness, you had to do your work. Sure, there was a learned craft in estimating imaginary plumb lines, in knowing the consistency of the material, and in finding tiny declivities that would provide the right amount of friction. It was amazing how small a lump could fit in how minuscule a bowl, and a rock would balance upon another as if glued. Yet, there was a point where the craft of it— about as odd and useless a craft as humankind had invented, he supposed— gave way to the feel, to the art. A point where
Andre
knew
the rocks would balance, where he could see the possibility of their being one. Or their Being. And he when he made it so, that was
why
. That was as good as rock balancing got.
"Can you get them as high in the Carbuncle?"
"No," Andre said. "This is the heaviest place I've ever been. But it really doesn't matter about the height. This isn't a contest, what I do."
"Is there a point to it at all?"
"To what? To getting them high? The higher you get the rocks, the longer you can spend doing the balancing."
"To the balancing, I mean."
"Yes. There is a point."
"What is it?"
"I couldn't tell you, Ben."
Andre turned from his work. The rocks did not fall. They stayed balanced behind him in a column, with only small edges connecting. It seemed impossible that this could be. It was science, sufficiently advanced.
The two men hugged. Drew away. Andre laughed.
"Did you think I would look like a big glob of protoplasm?" TB said.
"I was picturing flashing eyes and floating hair, actually."
"It's me."
"Are you Ben?"
"Ben is the stitch in my side that won't go away."
"Are you Thaddeus?"
"Thaddeus is the sack of rusty pennies in my knee."
"Are you hungry?"
"I could eat."
They went to Andre's priest's quarters. He put some water in a coffee percolator and spooned coffee grinds into the basket.
"When did you start drinking coffee?"
"I suddenly got really tired of drinking tea all the time. You still drink coffee?"
"Sure. But it's damn hard to get around here with or without keys."
"Keys? Somebody stole my keys to this place. I left them sitting on this table, and they walked in and took them."
"They won't be back," TB said. "They got what they were after." There were no chairs in the room, so he leaned against a wall.
"Floor's clean," Andre said.
"I'm fine leaning."
Andre reached into a burlap sack and dug around inside it. "I found something here," he said. He pulled out a handful of what looked like weeds. "Recognize these?"
"I was wondering where I put those. I've been missing them for weeks."
"It's poke sallit," Andre said. He filled a pot full of water from a clay jug and activated a hot spot on the room's plain wooden table. He put the weeds into the water. "You have no idea how good this is."
"Andre, that stuff grows all around the Carbuncle. Everybody knows that it's poison. They call it skunk sumac."
"It is," Andre said.
"Phytolacca americana."
"Are we going to eat poison?"
"You bring it to a boil, then pour the water off. Then you bring it to a boil again and pour the water off. Then you boil it again and serve it up with pepper sauce. The trick to not dying is picking it while it's young."
"How the hell did you discover that?"
"My convert likes to do that kind of research."
After a while, the water boiled. Andre used the tails of his shirt as a pot holder. He took the pot outside, emptied it, then brought it back in and set it to boiling again with new water.
"I saw Molly," Andre said.
"How's Molly?" said TB. "She was becoming a natural wonder last I saw her."
"She is."
They waited and the water boiled again. Andre poured it off and put in new water from the jug.
"Andre, what are you doing in the Carbuncle?"
"I'm with the Peace Movement."
"What are you talking about? There's not any war."
Andre did not reply. He stirred some spice into the poke sallit.
"I didn't want to be found," TB finally said.
"I haven't found you."
"I'm a very sad fellow, Andre. I'm not like I used to be."
"This is ready." Andre spooned out the poke sallit into a couple of bowls. The coffee was done, and he poured them both a cup.
"Do you have any milk?" TB asked.
"That's a problem."
"I can drink it black. Do you mind if I smoke?"
"I don't mind. What kind of cigarettes are those?"
"Local."
"Where do they come from around here?"
"You don't want to know."
Andre put pepper sauce on his greens, and TB followed suit. They ate and drank coffee, and it all tasted very good. TB lit a cigarette, and the acrid new smoke pleasantly cut through the vegetable thickness that had suffused Andre's quarters. Outside, there was a great clattering as the rocks lost their balance and they all came tumbling down.
They went out to the front of the quarters where Andre had put down a wooden pallet that served as a patio. Here there was a chair. TB sat down and smoked while Andre did his evening forms.
"Wasn't that one called the Choking Chicken?" TB asked him after he moved through a particularly contorted portion of the tai chi exercise.
"I think it is the Fucking Annoying Pig-sticker you're referring to, and I already did that, in case you didn't notice."
"Guess all my seminary learning is starting to fade."
"I bet it would all come back to you pretty quickly."
"I bet we're never going to find out."
Andre smiled, completed the form, then sat down in the lotus position across from TB. If such a thing were possible in the Carbuncle, it would be about sunset. It felt like sunset inside Andre.
"Andre, I hope you didn't come all the way out here to get me."
"Get you?"
"I'm not going back." "To where?"
"To all that." TB flicked his cigarette away. He took another from a bundle of them rolled in oiled paper that he kept in a shirt pocket. He shook it hard a couple of times, and it lit up. "I make mistakes that kill people back there."
"Like yourself."
"Among others." TB took a long drag. Suddenly, he was looking hard at Andre. "You scoundrel! You fucked Molly. Don't lie to me; I just saw it all."
"Sure."
"I'm glad. I'm really glad of that. You were always her great regret, you know."
Andre spread out his hands on his knees.
"Ben, I don't want a damn thing from you," he said. "There's all kinds of machinations back in the Met, and some of it has to do with you. You know as well as I do that Amés is going to start a war if he doesn't get his way with the outer system. But I came out here to see how you were doing. That's all."
TB was looking at him again in that hard way, complete way. Seeing all the threads.
"We both have gotten a bit ragged-out these last twenty years," Andre continued. "I thought you might want to talk about it. I thought you might want to talk about her."
"What are you? The Way's designated godling counselor?"
Andre couldn't help laughing. He slapped his lotus-bent knee and snorted.
"What's so goddamn funny?" said TB.
"Ben, look at yourself. You're a
garbage man
. I wouldn't classify you as a god, to tell you the truth. But then, I don't even classify God as a god anymore."
"I am
not
a garbage man. You don't know a damn thing if you think that."
"What are you then, if you don't mind my asking?"
TB flicked his cigarette away and sat up straight.
"I'm a rat-hunting man," he said. "That's what I am." He stood up. "Come on. It's a long walk back to my place, and I got somebody I want you to meet."

Bite

Sometimes you take a turn in a rat warren and there you are in the thick of them when before you were all alone in the tunnel. They will bite you a little, and if you don't jump, jump, jump, they will bite you a lot. That is the way it has always been with me, and so it doesn't surprise me when it happens all over again.
What I'm thinking about at first is getting Andre Sud to have sex with me, and this is like a tunnel I've been traveling down for a long time now.
TB went to town with Bob and left me with Andre Sud the priest. We walked the soft ground leading down to a shoal on the Bendy River where I like to take a bath even though the alligators are sometimes bad there. I told Andre Sud about how to spot the alligators, but I keep an eye out for both of us because even though he's been in the Carbuncle for a year, Andre Sud still doesn't quite believe they would eat you.
They would eat you.
Now that I am a woman, I only get blood on me when I go to clean the ferret cages and also TB says he can keep up with Earth-time by when I bleed out my vagina. It is an odd thing to happen to a girl. Doesn't happen to ferrets. It means that I'm not pregnant, but how could I be with all these men who won't have sex with me? TB won't touch me that way, and I have been working on Andre Sud, but he knows what I am up to. I think he is very smart. Bob just starts laughing like the crazy man he is when I bring it up and he runs away. All these gallant men standing around twiddling themselves into a garbage heap and me here wanting one of them.
I can understand TB because I look just like her. I thought maybe Alethea was ugly, but Andre Sud said he didn't know about her, but I wasn't. And I was about sixteen from the looks of it, too, he said. I'm nearly two hundred. Or I'm one year old. Depends on which one of us you mean, or if you mean both.
"Will you scrub my back?" I ask Andre Sud, and after a moment, he obliges me. At least I get to feel his hands on me. They are as rough as those rocks he handles all the time, but very careful. At first I didn't like him because he didn't say much and I thought he was hiding things, but then I saw that he just didn't say much. So I started asking him questions, and I found out a lot.
I found out everything he could tell me about Alethea. And he has been explaining to me about TB. He was pretty surprised when it turned out I understood all the math. It was the jealousy and hurt I never have quite understood, and how TB could hurt himself so much when I know how much he loves to live.
"Is that good?" Andre Sud asks me, and before he can pull his hands away, I spin around and he is touching my breasts. He himself is the one who told me men like that, but he stumbles back and practically sits down in the water and goddammit I spot an alligator eyeing us from the other bank and I have to get us out quick like, although the danger is not severe. It could be.
We dry off on the bank.
"Jill," he says, "I have to tell you more about sex."
"Why don't you
show
me?"
"That's exactly what I mean. You're still thinking like a ferret."
"I'll always be part ferret, Andre Sud."
"I know. That's a good thing. But I'm all human. Sex is connected with love."
"I love you."
"You are deliberately misunderstanding me because you're horny."
"All right," I say. "Don't remind me."
But now Andre Sud is gazing over my shoulder at something, and his face looks happy and then it looks stricken— as if he realized something in the moment when he was happy.
I turn and see TB running toward the hoy. Bob is with him. They've come back from town along the Bob-ways. And there
is
somebody else with them.
"I'll be damned," Andre Sud says. "Molly Index."
It's a woman. Her hair looks blue in the light off the heaps, which means that it is white. Is she old, or does she just have white hair?
"What are you doing here, Molly?" says Andre Sud quietly. "This can't be good."
They are running toward home, all of them running.
TB sends a shiver through the grist, and I feel it tell me what he wants us to do.
"Get to the hoy," I tell Andre Sud. "Fast now. Fast as you can."
We get there before the others do, and I start casting off lines. When the three of them arrive, the hoy is ready to go. TB and Bob push us away while Andre Sud takes the woman inside. Within moments, we are out in the Bendy and caught in the current. TB and Bob go inside, and TB sticks his head up through the pilot's bubble to navigate.
The woman, Molly Index, looks at me. She has got very strange eyes. I have never seen eyes like that. I think that she can see into the grist like TB and I do.
"My God," she says. "She looks just like her."
"My name is Jill," I say. "I'm not Alethea."
"No, I know that," Molly Index says. "Ben told me."
"Molly, what are you doing here?" Andre Sud asks.
Molly Index turns to Andre Sud. She reaches for his hand and touches him. I am a little worried she might try something with the grist, but it looks like they are old friends.
"That war you kept talking about," she says. "It started. Amés has started it."
"Oh, no," Andre Sud says. He pulls away from her. "No."
Molly Index follows him. She reaches out and rubs a hank of his hair between her fingers. "I like it long," she says. "But it's kind of greasy."
This doesn't please me, and Molly Index is wearing the most horrible boots I have ever seen, too. They are dainty little things that will get eaten off her feet if she steps into something nasty. In the Carbuncle, the
ground
is something nasty. The silly grist in those city boots won't last a week here. It is a wonder to me that no one is laughing at the silly boots, but I suppose they have other worries at the moment and so do I.
"I should have listened to you," Molly Index says. "Made preparations. He got me. Most of me. Amés did. He's co-opted all the big LAPs into the New Hierarchy. But most of them joined voluntarily, the fools." Again she touches his hand, and I realize that I am a little jealous. He does not pull back from her again. "I alone have escaped to tell you," Molly Index says. "They're coming. They're right behind us."
"
Who
is right behind you?" I say. This is something I need to know. I can do something about this.
"Amés's damned Free Radical Patrol. Some kind of machine followed me here, and I didn't realize it. Amés must have found out from me— the other part of me— where Ben is."
"What is a Free Radical Patrol?" I say. "What is a sweeper?"
Something hits the outside of the hoy, hard. "Oh, shit," TB says. "Yonder comes the flying monkey."
The pilot glass breaks, and a hooked claw sinks into TB's shoulder. He screams. I don't think, but I move. I catch hold of his ankle.
We are dragged up. Lifted out. We are rising through the air above the hoy. Something screeches. TB yells like crazy.
I hold on.
Wind and TB's yells and something sounds like a million mean and angry bees.
We're too heavy, and whatever it was drops us onto the deck. TB starts to stand up, but I roll under his legs and knock him down, and before he can do anything, I shove him back down through the pilot-dome hole and into the hoy.
Just in time, too, because the thing returns, a black shadow, and sinks its talons into my back. I don't know what it is yet, and I may never know, but nothing will ever take me without a fight.
Something I can smell in the grist.
You are under indictment from the Free Radical Patrol. Please cease resisting. Cease resisting. Cease
.
The words smell like metal and foam.
Cease resisting? What a funny thing to say to me. Like telling the wind to cease blowing. Blowing is what makes it the wind.
I twist hard and whatever it is only gets my dress, my poor pretty dress, and a little skin off my back. I can feel some poison grist try to worm into me, but that is nothing. It has no idea what I am made of. I kill that grist hardly thinking about doing so, and I turn to face this dark thing.
It doesn't look like a monkey, I don't think, though I wouldn't know.
What are you?
But there are wind currents and there is not enough grist transmission through the air for communications. Fuck it.
"Jill, be careful," says TB. His voice is strained. This thing hurt TB!
I will bite you
.
"Would you pass me up one of those gaffs, please," I call to the others. There is scrambling down below, and Bob's hands come up with the long hook. I take it and he ducks back down quick. Bob is crazy, but he's no fool.
The thing circles around. I cannot see how it is flying, but it is kind of blurred around its edges. Millions of tiny wings— grist-built. I take a longer look. This thing is all angles. Some of them have needles, some have claws. All of the angles are sharp. It is a like a black-and-red mass of triangles flying through the air that only wants to cut you. Is there anybody inside? I don't
think so. This is all code that I am facing. It is about three times as big as me, but I think of this as an advantage.
It dives and I am ready with the hook. It grabs hold of the gaff just as I'd hoped it would, and I use its momentum to guide it down, just a little
too
far down.
A whiff of grist as it falls.
Cease immediately. You are interfering with a Hierarchy judgment initiative. Cease or you will be
—
Crash into the side of the hoy. Splash into the Bendy River.
I let go of the gaff. Too easy. That was—
The thing rises from the Bendy, dripping wet.
It is mad. I don't need the grist to tell me it is mad. All those little wings are buzzing angry, but not like bees anymore. Hungry like the flies on a piece of meat left out in the air too long.
Cease
.
"Here," says Bob. He hands me a flare gun. I spin and fire into the clump of triangles. Again it falls into the river.
Again it rises.
I think about this. It is dripping wet with Bendy River water. If there is one thing I know, it is the scum that flows in the Bendy. There isn't any grist in it that hasn't tried to get me.
This is going to be tricky. I get ready.
Come and get me, triangles. Here I am just a girl. Come and eat me
.
It zooms in. I stretch out my hands.
You are interfering with Hierarchy business. You will cease or be end-use eventuated. You will
—
We touch.
Instantly, I reconstitute the Bendy water's grist, tell it what I want it to do. The momentum of the triangles knocks me over, and I roll along the deck under its weight. Something in my wrist snaps, but I ignore that pain. Blood on my lips from where I have bitten my tongue. I have a bad habit of sticking it out when I am concentrating.
The clump of triangles finishes clobbering me, and it falls into the river. Oh, too bad, triangles. The river grist that I recoded tells all the river water what to do. Regular water is six pounds a gallon, but the water in the Bendy is thicker and more forceful than that. And it knows how to crush. It is mean water and it wants to get things, and now I have told it how. I have put a little bit of me into the Bendy, and the water knows something that I know.
It knows never to cease. Never, never, never.
The triangle clump bobs for an instant before the whole river turns on it. Folds over it. Sucks it down. Applies all the weight of water twenty feet deep, many miles long. What looks like a waterspout rises above where the triangle clump fell, but this is actually a pile driver, a gelled column climbing up on itself. It collapses downward like a shoe coming down on a roach.
There is buzzing, furious buzzing, wet wings that won't dry because it isn't quite water that has gotten onto them, and it won't quite shake off.
There is a deep-down explosion under us and the hoy rocks. Again I'm thrown onto the deck and I hold tight, hold tight. I don't want to fall into that water right now. I stand up and look.
Bits of triangles float to the surface. The river quickly turns them back under.
"I think I got it," I call to the others.
"Jill," says TB. "Come here and show me you are still alive."
I jump down through the pilot hole, and he hugs and kisses me. He kisses me right on the mouth, and for once I sense that he is not thinking about Alethea at all when he touches me. It feels very, very good.
"Oh, your poor back," says Molly Index. She looks pretty distraught and fairly useless. But at least she warned us. That was a good thing.
"It's just a scratch," I say. "And I took care of the poison."
"You just took out a Met sweep enforcer," Andre Sud says. "I think that was one of the special sweepers made for riot work, too."
"What was that thing doing here?"
"Looking for Ben," says Molly Index. "There's more where that came from. Amés will send more."
"I will kill them all if I have to."
Everybody looks at me and everyone is quiet for a moment, even Bob.
"I believe you, Jill," Andre Sud finally says. "But it's time to go."
TB is sitting down at the table. Nobody is piloting the boat, but we are drifting in midcurrent and it should be all right for now.
"Go?" TB says. "I'm not going anywhere. They will not use me to make war. I'll kill myself first. And I won't mess it up this time."
"If you stay here, they'll catch you," Andre Sud says.
"You've come to Amés's attention," Molly Index says. "I'm sorry, Ben."
"It's not your fault."
"We have to get out of the Met," Andre Sud says. "We have to get to the outer system."
"
They'll
use me, too. They're not as bad as Amés, but nobody's going to turn me into a weapon. I don't make fortunes for soldiers."
"If we can get to Triton, we might be okay," Andre Sud replied. "I have a certain pull on Triton. I know the weatherman there."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Trust me. It's a good thing. The weatherman is very important on Triton, and he's a friend of mine."
"There is one thing I'd like to know," says TB. "How in hell would we get to Triton from here?"
Bob stands up abruptly. He's been rummaging around in TB's larder while everybody else was talking. I saw him at it, but I knew he wasn't going to find anything he would want.
"Why didn't you say you wanted to go Out-ways?" he said. "All we got to do is follow the Bendy around to Makepeace Century's place in the gas swamps."
"Who's that?"
"I thought you knew her, TB. That's the aunt of that witch that lives in
the ditch. I guess you'd call her a smuggler. Remember the Old Seventy-Five from last year that you got so drunk on?"
"I remember," TB says.
"Well, she's where I got that from," says Bob. "She's got a lot of cats, too, if you want one."