Demonworld (2 page)

Wodi could never catch a speeding ball and out a thrower, so his only option was to endure. But the temptation for one of the bullies to grab an ally’s ball and make an easy kill was powerful, and soon two bullies killed one another in quick succession. Wodi laughed, and just as he thought that he had a real chance at victory, the gym teacher realized that the children were becoming bored and would soon make trouble, so he blew his whistle and declared everyone a loser. Wodi beamed with pride.

Some of his classmates approached, and one said, “Wodi! Let’s play slaves and raiders.”

But Wodi was tired of the company of others, and wanted only to be alone. “Not now,” said Wodi, his green eyes clear and unyielding. “There’s a sick rat behind the bleachers. I’m going to cut it open and see if anyone ever finds it.”

The children scurried away, shrieking. None considered that Wodi lied in order to make them leave so that he could wander alone in his imagination. In fact, when some looked back and saw him disappearing behind the bleachers, they even felt their grip on reality coming loose.

So it always was with Wodi. One never knew what he would say or do. He was an outsider who could not be understood, both a wonder and a horror.

At the age of twelve, Wodi and the other “gifted” children of the northern laborers’ section were allowed to attend special classes one day out of every week. Theoretically, the children were supposed to be encouraged to pursue independent study and craft-making in a dullard-free environment conducive to creativity. In practice, the special classes were directed by teachers who came from the very same culture of labor, discipline through drudgery, and respect for tedium that the gifted children were meant to be freed from. The teachers were incapable of understanding why the supposedly gifted children showed reluctance to produce extra work when given the opportunity. They struggled with the riddle as if alien to their own species.

But once every year the children were forced to produce some sort of exhibit for the Advanced Studies Project Fair, where slower children and teachers from all across the district could come, see various exhibits concerning science and history and the arts, and try to hide any obvious signs of boredom. So it was that little Wodi’s own presentation stood in between “The Bob-Tailed Jumping Rat: Pest or Pet?” and “How Clouds Get Formed” and across from “Gerrold ‘Champ’ Beauchamp, Ninth Prime Minister of Haven”. Wodi’s exhibit bore a sign that read

Gaze Upon the Demonic Overlords

Who Rule the World!

and even included hideous dioramas sculpted out of colored paper and clay: Winged beasts feeding on human children, horned monstrosities limping about on uneven, non-uniform legs, and one giant humanoid beast hunched over, with tentacles arching up from its back to gingerly accept the sacrifice of a screaming maiden from a gang of half-naked primitives.

He had even drawn a vivid sketch of Haven in flames, with the dead trampled underfoot by demonic forces. Over the picture hung a sign that read, “The City-State of Haven: Celebrating Nearly Six Hundred Years of Demon-Free Living!” Still another sketch showed primitive wastelanders dancing and bowing before devils. A nearby caption read, “Mankind: Is Second Best Good Enough?”

One devoutly religious teacher stared at the piece for a long time, feeling out the nature of his repulsion towards the garish display. He knew, from various historical documents, that the flesh demons of the outside world were capable of communicating with one another over vast distances through a power that, for lack of scientific explanation, was sometimes referred to as telepathy
- and so the teacher wondered, “Could the mind of a child be remotely influenced by psychic domination?” He moved along before the smiling boy could say something carefully calculated to ruin his spiritual well-being.

Another teacher was drawn to the carnival air of Wodi’s display, but could not help but feel that the young mind that could dream up such grotesqueries was itself demented. Not to mention irrelevant: What did it matter if some beasts with the power of reason harassed the inhabitants of the wasteland? If they were outside of Haven, was it not the same as if they did not exist at all?

One teacher felt magnanimous enough to warm-heartedly berate the boy. But Wodi stubbornly clung to his simple reasoning, which was: The flesh demons do not live as they do because we influence them, but we live as we do because they influence us. So it was that the flesh demons ruled the wasteland and took humans as sacrifice; so it was that the most popular idea in the world was the idea that that which stands out and draws attention, also draws risk to the entire tribe, and so it is the duty of the tribe to stifle that which is not the norm; so it was that other city-states in the wasteland hid behind walls and guns and rarely ventured out; so it was that superstition and fear were the prevailing philosophies of the wasteland; so it was that the people of Haven, despite their science and their democracy, never thought to expand beyond their hidden land, and always kept their heads down, and always knew their limits. According to Wodi, the morality and the values of the cultural elite and the naked savage were exactly the same.

By coincidence, Professor Korliss Matri overheard the debate. He alone realized that the exhibit was like a shrine devoted to something long absent from the gray halls of Haven. The colors, the madness, the inspiration! He was not fazed by the macabre nature of the display; what truly inspired him was the inarticulate but honest reasoning of the child, immobile even in the presence of an authority figure.

Professor Korliss Matri did not approach Wodi, but took note of him. Though he was technically a teacher, he really had no legitimate business in being at such a dull, provincial event. He had come because he was intensely interested in the new generation - and he was interested because he knew, for a fact, that one child in Haven had had his fate altered. One child had the book of his life rewritten, and so was not like the others.

And he had dedicated his life to finding that child.

At the age of fifteen, Wodi’s class went on a field trip to a large nutrimilk production facility. It was underground, dark, gray, and filled with vibrating machinery that resonated with a dull grinding OMMM sound, like the birth-cry of a new and sterile world. There were pipes and vats everywhere, all of them gushing with a tide of white nutrimilk. The miraculous foodstuff was incredibly healthy, was offered in a variety of flavors for laborers, and was even used as an ingredient in upper class cuisine.

Wodi’s classmates were bored beyond belief to be there, and either took turns annoying one another or simply lurched forward when their elders demanded. Wodi stood out from the others, and not just from his excitement at the ridiculous field trip. Though he had the plain brown hair common to the northern laborers’ genotype, he was quite a bit smaller than the others, and had finer features, and his green eyes shone with piercing clarity.

Wodi listened as the tour guide rambled on about the scientist who invented nutrimilk and the “bovine plant” which produced it: Didi, head of the Department of Science and founder of the Department of Research. Didi was a strange man, a genius and a polymath afflicted with a host of diseases, a man so eccentric that normal communication with him was considered impossible. He was the so-called “mad monk” of science who, despite his reclusive nature, was somehow a brilliant leader and organizer.

The tour had yet to reach its exciting climax at the nutrimilk-themed gift shop, but the penultimate stop proved to be Wodi’s favorite by far.

“
And here you have it,” said the tour guide, “the amazing
bovine plant
. It -”

The tour guide could barely finish as a gasp went through the students. Some were so disturbed by the thing that only a visit with their local spiritual counselor could allay their fears.

The bovine plant was hideous. It was a huge, round orb of white, ribbed flesh suspended in a large vat of clear fluid. A host of tubes punctured the thing, some carrying a compound of vitamins and minerals mixed with sawdust for the plant’s consumption, others carrying out waste, and still others carrying out the precious nutrimilk which the living plant produced. It was a genetic work of art, a re-engineering of nature in the service of mankind. And there were rows of the giant vats, each filled with a bovine plant, and the rows extended as far as the eye could see.

“
Please, if you’ll be quiet,” said the tour guide, leaving off from his script, “I assure you the plant feels no pain. It doesn’t even have a proper nervous system!”

“
Well I think it’s just awful,” said someone near the back. “It’s all kinds of blasphemous.”

“
We’ll have to have this discussion later,” one of the chaperoning teachers said in an effort to stop the discussion entirely.

To Wodi, the un-living creature was truly a wonder.

Though it was illegal for young children to work, he had been working in his father’s grocery store for a year. He had seen raw meat that was still in the shape of a once-living animal. When he looked up at the ceiling of the nutrimilk production facility, he could imagine row upon row of cows and goats hung on hooks, skinned and hopefully dead, and could imagine the cries of others down below as they were packed in, suffocating against one another, an endless wellspring of misery, a terrible black hole from which no hope could emerge.

And now, because of the bovine plant, nearly all of that suffering was over.

“
Didi created this,” said Wodi, almost to himself.

“
Yes,” said the flustered tour guide. “Yes he did.”

“
Then he is truly a hero.”

“
Hero?” said the tour guide. “I don’t know if I’d go
that
far.”

That night, Wodi lay awake and thought about the obvious analogy of the bovine plant and the vats: The people of Haven also spent time in amniotic vats. And not in some metaphorical sense, either, in which a person’s job or school or neighborhood or family or social circle acted as his protection against a harsh and uncaring world; no, the people of Haven quite literally spent several of their first few months growing in warm, protective glass wombs within the halls of the Makers of Mothers, which was a very old branch of the Department of Science. If they did not, then they ran the risk of contracting a fatal disease commonly called Pharaoh’s Curse.

Some children were planned and conceived artificially, the sperm and egg handled entirely by the Makers of Mothers. Some were conceived naturally, then removed from their mothers and given time with the Makers during those first few critical months. Some children were born straight from the vats. Some children were transported back into their mothers so that they could have a “natural” birth, which was fairly common among religious types.

Pharaoh’s Curse had nearly destroyed the first few generations of Haven. Only Haven’s early scientific pioneers were able to save the people. Only the unnatural
had saved them.

Wodi thought it was strange that the people were used to the idea of growing up in vats themselves, but were quick to feel horror at the sight of the bovine plant in its own warm, comfortable vat.

At the age of seventeen, young Wodi took part in what was called an “act of nerd terrorism,” and would have achieved great notoriety in his homeland if not for the common sense, and fear of shame, of the local representatives.

The Baiame Wiradjuri Festival, held every year in the underground tunnels of the northern laborers section, was a chaotic mix of market fair, religious celebration, costume parade, public “feats of strength” competition, science and invention exhibit, and outsider art fair with a special emphasis on artists suffering from dementia caused by the advanced stages of Neural Carbon Accretion, a dreadful neurological disease. Its attendees were usually laborers from the north, west and even the far south end of the island. Because of the garish nature of the festival, and the class of those who attended it, the festival was usually ridiculed by any outsider that bothered to notice it.

So one day Wodi made a poster advertising a fictional scientist showcasing a newly-created airborne strain of SKAD-V, a sexually transmitted, fatal disease usually referred to as the “Skav virus” among laborers. The poster even showcased a doctored photo of Wodi, with a lab coat and fake beard, as he accepted a prize from some suited official, for his alleged role in the previous year’s festival. “Last year I was able to infect over a dozen individuals with the airborne Skav virus!” the poster advertised. “This year, with your help, we’ll try to infect more!” The poster concluded with the comically ominous statement, “Come and see the exhibit next to the air intake chute which leads to an air conditioning plant which will unknowingly take part in my ‘widespread dispersal’ experiment.”