A Dirge for the Temporal (5 page)

~

  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 mate
rial 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

T
he 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 The lust for life had been replaced by a shimmering brought on by the phantasmagorial splendor of electrons and currents and information bombardment.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 rou
tine 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 sin
gle 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 tes
tament 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…

  He caught one of them looking back at him. The body of the male had over-developed musculature, which was unusual in androids—or anyone else, when those muscles were visible beneath the skin, shimmering along their contours. The male, blinking three distinct times, increased the width of his stance, then stretched out his arms perpendicular to his frame, becoming da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Shelley clearly perceived the circle formed of his perfect proportions, and imagined it wheeling down the tubeway, the figure within it a spoke conceived by a cartoonist.

  The other three of these possibles had become no less fantastic—a life-sized doll, a science prop, a superhero—and every eye among them looking Shelley down. He wondered if perhaps that’s what made them possibles, that they probed him in return. Maybe they too were under the influence of seven drops of Psycho. Maybe he had skin the color of water
and was exposed to them. He looked down at his arms, his legs, becoming
immediately fascinated by the concept that he
was
covered.

  “Hey!”

  His flesh caught fire at this liberal exclamation from his captor’s mouth.

  “Hey, we’re almost there, Shelley. You need to hold it together.” The words evened out as they came, and the fire subsided.

  “Don’t worry,” Shelley said. “I know precisely where he is, and that’s where I will take you.”

  “Keep focused. I will not be pleased if you fail us.”

 
Us?
Shelley saw it again. That look passing between sets of eyes.

  Even as he narrowed in on that word, the doors of his senses were swinging wider, the self-consciousness fading into the howling song-noise of limited particularity. Pleasure, meanwhile, Shelley did not relinquish.
Pleasure was in the participating, in being consumed by the whole beautiful
circus. He was transported momentarily to an Orlando of a dozen years ago, a city of sprawling lights and action, dinner shows, night clubs, roller coasters, machines of all sorts at your whim and desire.
Ah youth
, he thought as he echoed back to the present.