Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (24 page)

“Oh god,” said Susan.

“You’re scared of the
jets
?” said Naranjo, his thin mouth twitching in a slight smile. “Relax. You already survived the flamethrowers and the bullet through your heart.”

“I have no interest in being all bluff and macho,” said Susan. “And what do
you
know about grief, Naranjo?”

“Long story,” said Naranjo shortly. He patted Susan’s shoulder. “Didn’t mean to harsh on you. You’re right to be scared.”

“I wish—” said Susan, her voice going thin and breaking. “I wish I’d hung onto my tape recorder. It would soothe me to be making some of this into art. Like I’d like to record the rackety thudding of this helicopter.”

“Oh, it’s a classical symphony in here all right,” said Naranjo with a slight smile.

“You can remember the sounds,” Alan told Susan. “Our minds are as good as any tape recorders now. And, if you try, I bet you can sing any sound that you can think. Maybe even by vibrating your skin.”

“What do I care about your ridiculous opinions,” said Susan. “You’re a heartless robot.”

“Right again,” said Naranjo. “He wants us all to be mutant machines like him.”

“We’re on the same team,” insisted Alan.

“In your opinion,” said Naranjo. “Here’s some good news. With this weather, if we fly low, the jets aren’t gonna find us.”

“It’ll all turn lovely in the end,” Alan said in his sunniest tone. “Maybe Ned and Vassar aren’t really dead, Susan. Those shapes we saw above their bodies? Those could have been aethereal information patterns.”

“Ghosts?” asked Naranjo, taking an interest. “I know some dead people I’d like to talk with.”

“We saw their ghosts, yes,” said Susan, happy with the thought. “Even though I can tell that Alan thinks we imagined it, and now he thinks he’s talking down to me, even though I’m a professor too. Did you forget that, Alan?”

“Look here, it’s not certain we saw those patterns,” said Alan, truly wanting to comfort Susan, but remaining stubborn about bending what he considered to be the truth. “Everyone occasionally sees odd little shapes from the corners of their eyes, no? And ever since I became a skugger, these effects have been enhanced. My mind’s clicking at a faster rate. I dream about pale monsters, undersea ghosts, wraiths of the air—”

“I saw Vassar’s soul, goddamit. Just frikkin’ admit it, Alan. I saw Vassar’s soul and that makes me glad. Do you mind?”

“All right, I suppose it’s possible. Perhaps the fact the we’re skuggers makes us more perceptive. And perhaps the fact that Ned and Vassar were themselves skuggers makes what you call their souls be robust, active, and easier to see.”

“So we don’t have a thing to worry about,” said Naranjo sardonically. “We’ve got glowing magic souls. Even if an Air Force fighter blasts us out of the sky. Oh hell, man, I should have stayed home in bed. But even that’s no fun now that my wife left me.”

Flying low, hugging the mountain ranges and the arroyos, Naranjo took them across Texas and into the southeastern corner New Mexico. The foul weather was moving with them, which was a plus, in terms of stealth.

The rain was turning to sleet. Fortunately the chopper had a primitive heater. And Alan found some rags to stop up the bullet holes in the canopy. A couple of hours went by. The engine seemed to be laboring harder than before.

“Ice on the blades,” said Naranjo. “And we’re low on fuel. I know of a crop-duster airport up ahead. We’ll land there and tank up.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t stop yet,” said Susan. “With the jets hunting for us and all.”

“Got to stop,” said Naranjo. “A full tank only carries my whirlybird about four hundred miles. Especially flying flat-out like we’ve been doing.”

“What about the guys working at this airport?” said Susan. “What do we tell them?”

“We skug them,” said Alan.

“Always the same answer,” said Naranjo. “Recruit them to your psycho cause. We’re crazed guerilla missionaries for a cult. So tell me how the skugging bit works, okay? Incase I want to ruin someone like you ruined me.”

As it happened, only one man was on duty at the little airfield, a pimply youngster in mechanics overalls, and he was on the point of locking the hanger. The sleet had given way to snow. An inch of the stuff lay on the ground. Pilot Naranjo shook the mechanic’s hand and skugged him on the spot.

The youth’s name was Earl. Earl, Naranjo, Alan and Susan ate all the candy bars that the airfield had behind the counter in its little store.

“Skuggers aren’t exactly geared for running a store,” remarked Naranjo, as he took half the bills from the till.

“Anarchy,” said Earl, pocketing the rest of the cash. “Anarchy is cool.”

Before leaving, Alan advised Earl about how to deal with the enemies of the skuggers. “It’s vitally important not to be taken alive,” Alan told the mechanic. “The authorities want to seal you in a jar and torment you into being a spy. But for a shapeshifter, there’s generally a way to break free. Or—experience the illusion of death and ascend to the astral plane. Don’t be limited by the old modalities.”

And then the chopper was back on its way, beating northward into the veils of snow. The snow-filtered light was a warm shade, almost pale yellow.

“You said astral plane back there?” said Naranjo, giving Alan a quizzical glance. “Is that for real?”

“I wanted to express myself in a manner congenial to Earl’s predilections,” said Alan. “I teeped that he’s devotee of fantasy tales. And the notion of an astral plane has an illustrious history. For instance—”

“Save it for the monograph, Professor Turing,” said Susan. “Open your eyes and see how lovely this is. Beauty’s all there is between us and death.” The visibility was low enough that they couldn’t see the ground or the clouds. They were centered in an unchanging snow globe of tumbling flakes.

“My own little world,” said Naranjo as they continued to clatter along. “I like it like this. One time I was into a scene like this, and my chopper iced up and crashed.”

“You weren’t hurt?” said Susan.

“Landed in a tree,” said Naranjo. “I’m lucky. That’s a key requirement for being a pilot. And then I bought a new helicopter.”

“But I still think we might ram into something here,” said Susan, staring at the hypnotic dance of the flakes.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” said Naranjo in a level tone. He paused for a beat, then cracked his hard face in one of his slight smiles. “But I have instruments in the dash, Susan. And a map. And I pretty well know where we are. We’re coming into the Pueblo lands.”

“Are there mesas?” fretted Susan. “With sudden vertical walls?”

“This land is like my back yard,” said Naranjo calmly. “My mother’s people live here. Mom met Dad when he was stringing wires for the telephone company. Mom’s brothers were cutting down the wires for the metal. Finally Dad worked something out with them. He gave them a giant spool of wire off the back of his truck. Family stories.”

The storm was temporarily breaking up, with the veils of snow parting to show a brilliant blue sky above, sun twinkling on the crystals.

“My destination is Los Alamos,” said Alan a bit officiously. “I can tell you that now.”

“I already know,” said the pilot. “You haven’t been hiding it real well. Could be those cops saw it too.”

“I’m overwrought,” said Alan. “Are we close?”

“Couple of miles,” said Naranjo, steering his chopper towards a field on the crest of a bluff. “But we’re gonna land right here. No sense pushing our luck with the cloud-cover gone. And it might be smart to hang back from Los Alamos for a day. They saw us leaving Gormly in this general direction.”

“I was depending on you to take us all the way to our destination,” said Alan, sounding tense and prissy again.

“But there’s nothing at all down there,” chimed in Susan, peering out the window. “Just some crappy shacks.”

“It’s my cousin’s spread,” said Naranjo, his voice gone cold. “An Eden, if you can open your eyes. But you can’t. You’re too white.”

In silence, the pilot maneuvered the chopper to a spot beside the ramshackle structures. They touched down in two feet of snow. An Indian man appeared at the cottage door, his eyes crinkling, his smile a white slash in his weathered face.

“I didn’t mean—” began Susan.

“We’re done,” said Naranjo curtly. “Cousin Ricky and I gonna cover up my helicopter so nobody sees it from the air. You go ahead and walk to Los Alamos. Take your chances. I’ll be glad to see you gone.”

So Susan and Alan thanked the stone-faced Naranjo for saving them, and set off, zipping their flimsy coats to their chins. The sun was low in the sky, and the snow was beginning once again to fall. At least their clothes were dry, and they had solid shoes.

In a last-minute gesture of mercy, Naranjo teeped them his memory of the trail. He said they ought to be able to make it to Los Alamos two hours, even with the snow. Los Alamos was on a separate bluff, which meant they faced a climb down to the bottomlands, and a scramble up the other side.

The first part of the walk went well, with Naranjo’s landmarks popping into place. But then it began getting dark. The snow was blowing hard, icing their faces.

“Something’s following us, Alan!” exclaimed Susan. Doggy forms off to their right. “Wolves?”

“I’m hardly a native,” said Alan impatiently. “And—blast and damn—Naranjo’s out of teep range.”

They came to a stop. They could see four toothy animals sitting on their haunches, about twenty feet off, yipping to each other in the dusk.

“Not wolves,” said Alan. “Too small. Aren’t there others kinds of wild dogs in the States? Like foxes or dingoes or jackals or—”

“Coyotes!” exclaimed Susan. “Of course. The fabled tricksters. I think they’re scavengers? So we’re okay until we slip off a sheer hundred-foot cliff and break our legs and have brain damage and bleed to death and freeze up hard as rocks.”

“Maybe we just go back to Naranjo’s cousin Ricky?” said Alan. “We could try again in the morning.”

“Naranjo thought Los Alamos might not even be safe yet,” said Susan. “The cops might be checking all the nearby towns. Are we really going to kill ourselves just because we had a tiny quarrel with Naranjo? But I can’t think straight. You decide. I keep sinking into daydreams about my poor Vassar. You have to understand that he was brilliant. You did have sex with him on the ship, didn’t you?”

“A couple of times, yes. And, as I said, I loved him too.”

“But ever since New Orleans you were so cold to him. Contemptuous, almost. It was ugly of you.”

“Once Vassar learned I was a man, I was cast into the position of being an importuning pervert. And so I withdrew. I meant no insult. Perhaps in Los Alamos, William Burroughs and I can be happily queer together.” At the edge of a puddled shadow, one of the four coyotes moved closer, extending his dim muzzle to savor Alan and Susan’s scent.

“I’m sorry I called you a heartless robot on the plane,” said Susan, utterly whipsawed by her emotions.

“I do have tendencies in that direction,” said Alan. “One of my uncountably many flaws.” He pulled out his handkerchief and dried Susan’s cheeks. “Silly or not, I don’t relish the idea of facing Naranjo just now. What if we do try going a bit further?”

Soon they’d reached the crumbly edge of their bluff. The snow had let up again, and they could see straight across to the lights of Los Alamos on the facing cliff. Down in the bottomlands was an isolated cluster of lights. A heavy truck was driving down there. A military vehicle?

“If the weather’s clearing, I guess we could push on,” said Susan, thinking. “But it would help to shapeshift into coyotes. We’d be covered with fur, and walking on four legs. In synch for this landscape. I’d like to yip and howl, too. I’d like to howl for Vassar.”

“I reckon we’d have to become three coyotes each,” said Alan thinking it over. “To conserve our mass, don’t you know. Giant coyotes wouldn’t work. But, yes, I’m game. I’ll be three coyotes, and so will you.”

“Can we
do
that?” asked Susan, intrigued.

“Your pieces will stay in touch with each other,” said Alan. “Like the nations of the British Empire. My skug says it’s feasible.” He sent a tendril out from his finger and sent it towards the closest of watchful canine forms behind them.

The coyote snarled at Alan’s surprise touch, but he’d already extracted a tissue sample. He reeled in his tendril and passed some of the coyote cells to Susan.

“I use the doggy genes for, like, my flesh-knitting pattern?” said Susan.

“Indeed,” said Alan.

“What if those coyotes attack us as soon as we’re coyotes too?”

“We’ll be ruthless in our self-defense.”

Without any further ado, Alan slumped to the ground and broke himself into three pieces. A bit unsettling, that. Your head and shoulders here, your belly there, and your legs and bottom off to one side. But his skugger teep held his self-image together. Bristling and growling, he became three coyotes.

Susan followed suit. Spooked by the uncanny transformation, the real coyotes melted from view. And now, moving cautiously, the Alan-and-Susan pack of six made their way forward.