Authors: Ian McDonald
“Craziest of all: each side is indistinguishable from the other. Petty despotism, Communist and Democrat both. Got to keep the Land of the Great White Eagle strong against Communism, you see. Got to make the workers of the Land of the Morning Star safe from the evils of Democracy. Pathetic. If they didn’t take it so seriously.”
“So, which side is it has kidnapped Jonathon Ammonier?”
“Democrats, I would reckon. Several reasons. First off, to them he’s not a Communist, but he’s not a Democrat either. Duh, they say, what do we do with this? Uh, dunno, but we better be sure the Commie pinko bastards can’t have him. Even though he is of absolutely no value to either side.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Said it would be, didn’t I? This is DeepUnder, sister. Crazy is normal down here.” Xian Man Ray stood up, brushed soily hands on thighs. “Time to be off. Trashie, take point.”
“Why?”
“It’s back into Democrat territory from here on. Booby traps. To us, that is. To the Democrats, it’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Whatever the fug they call it, Trashie’s rejiggered senses can pick it out before we hit it. Or it us.”
The Tinka Tae bearers uncurled to shoulder their poles, leant into their travois harnesses. The long march continued. Over the succeeding hours, while her mind should have been focused on pitfalls, pungi stakes, and poison arrows, Courtney Hall found her attention wandering to form a question. Not any question.
The
Question. The Question was: just why should an Amazing Teleporting Woman and a Man with a Computer Brain (plus power-assisted cat) care what happened to an ex-Elector of Yu, now self-crowned King of Nebraska and his Underground Dominions?
Crouched amidst the root buttresses of a geneform teak with her army of racoons waiting for her battle cry, she still could not find any answer to the Question that satisfied her.
Suddenly Xian Man Ray was there. No shiver of air. No luminous interdimensional gateway. No bamfi of sulfurous flame. Nothing so stereotypically teleportational. One moment she wasn’t there. Next she was.
“I’m starting the diversionary tactics now,” she said. And was gone. No bamf! of sulfurous flame. No luminous interdimensional gateway. No shiver of air.
There had been a briefing. Of sorts. War virgin Courtney Hall had sat converting a pair of pants from the Victorialand wardrobe into shorts while Xian Man Ray assembled a bow from sections in her backpack and explained how one teleporting woman can look like a whole army.
Courtney Hall had not remembered one word of her orders.
The long, shafting sound of an arrow in flight terminated in a solid thunk. Sprouting a cloth-yard of tube steel, a missile-totem teetered and fell. Instant confusion in the camp. To arms, to arms! Running, shouting, standing still. Always one, left standing still. With a roar and a hiss the fire pit was doused. The night was suddenly filled with eyes.
Arrowstorm
. From everywhere at once. Shouts, cries, screams. Courtney Hall saw Xian Man Ray flicker into transient being, loose an arrow from her laser-guided, gyro-stabilized bow, and vanish. Firing as fast as she could teleport: flip flip flip flip flip … The arrowstorm ended. Voices. Replies. Someone somewhere was retching in the dark. Skirmishers edged into the darkness. A Democrat sentry advanced to within centimeters of Courtney Hall’s covert and squatted, arrow nocked to his technologically less advanced but no less deadly bow. The Tinka Tae stirred. Sharpened stropped vegetable knives glittered in the dim night-glow from the ceiling lights. Courtney Hall frantically signaled for stillness. She could not remember the last time she had taken a breath, felt a heartbeat.
Explosions. Mushrooms of orange smoke. Arrows. Screams. A flare was tossed into the Democrat encampment. By its light Courtney Hall saw a man stumble and fall. Blood sprayed from severed arteries. Hair and blood; his scalp was hanging over his eyes. And that dark slither, bounding away into the darkness … a cat? Panic. Enemies here, there, everywhere, nowhere. Dirt was scuffed over the flare, the gas grenades lobbed out into the forest. But not before another arrowstorm sent the defenders reeling for cover. And in the midst of the burning and the blood and the bedlam, Jonathon Ammonier stood up, proud, mad bird, clapping his hands and shouting, “Is this for me? All for me? Oh, how wonderful, how wonderful, how wonderful!”
Forgetful of the present danger, Courtney Hall jumped up and screamed, “Get down, you stupid fugger! Get down!” The crouching sentry fell over backward in surprise. Arrow slipped from bow, bow from fingers. Fingers found knife in belt. There was a flash of lightning. Revealing: the sentry. Blue blade clutched in fingers. A steel vegetable knife straight through his throat. Liquid gurgled and-surged around the blade. All in a flash, in an instant revealed.
The air disappeared. A blast of hot wind howled upward, uprooting totems, tent leather, tearing leaves from trees, breath from lungs. For a second, one second, the whole twenty-kilometer cavern boomed like a temple gong to the miniature typhoon.
“Forward, racoons!” shouted Courtney Hall. The Tinka Tae came pouring out of the floor of the forest. The rains began.
“Rain” does not adequately describe the process of precipitation Angelo Brasil had initiated. The downpour began. The deluge began. Drops hard and sharp as needles. Drenched, combing the hair out of her eyes, Courtney Hall led the bedraggled racoons through the cloudburst.
The bulk of the raiding party were hip-hollerin’ in pursuit of the pervo-devo-freako-pinko Commie bastards, as Xian Man Ray had predicted. The Tinka Tae with their vegetable knives overwhelmed the few dazed guards left around the King of Nebraska.
And suddenly Courtney Hall herself was overwhelmed. Overpowered. Overcome. Flash-flashing steel lightning blades. She had seen someone killed, a life ended, witnessed final moments, heard the liquid sucking of final breath. Killed. Permanently. No return, no refund if dissatisfied. She had seen death, and the face it wore was not the closet-sanitized mask of the Phantom of the Arcologies, knocking at a door here, a door there, polite, almost apologetic—I’m sorry, but it really is time, you know … Death riding the tip of a blade, unmourned, unmarked. Ludicrous that something as slight as the blade she held in her hand could call down death. She tried to throw her knife away from her into the rain, but it remained stuck to her palm like an accusation. On every side, death, summoned, capered; mesmerizing, hypnotizing, dazzling. She fell to her knees in the rain and the mud and the ashes, looking at her hand, her knife.
“Courtney Hall, rouse thee, rouse thee! His Majesty, Bless ’Im!”
Lightning shone from the blood on Jinkajou’s paws.
“Courtney Hall! Courtney Hall! Please!”
She broke free from the death trance and with Jinkajou the Chamberlain leading, found the King of Nebraska reclining numbly on a straw pallet by the smoldering fire pit. There was a stink of nightshade and decomposing flesh. His Majesty, Bless ’Im’s lips were puffed and cracked. His face was a purulence of spots and acne. His hair had fallen out in cancerous patches.
He had been deeply drugged.
“Ahahahaha! Fidelity and the Lady! Comin’ for to carry me home! Jinkajou, burn all my Dashiell Hammett novels and recordings of
Bix Beiderbecke
!” He waved a jaunty sputum-stained handkerchief; then a spasm of coughing shoved him to the straw pallet.
“Courtney Hall, a word in your ear. His Majesty, Bless ’Im, is too sick to walk. What shall we do?”
Decision. Citizens did not make decisions. Citizens had decisions made for them, and always made right.
She opened her mouth and let the first thing in her head walk out.
“Call together the Tinka Tae and build a travois from the tent poles.”
Not bad for a first command.
The retreat through the jungle was an anabasis through the nether regions of nightmare. Slowly, slowly, slowly, so damn
slowly
: that travois dragging, creaking along through the night and the dark and the endless rain, the blinding, streaming rain … Her boost of noradrenaline burned out, Courtney Hall was possessed by a shivering cold dread; the permanent sense that every decision she had made had been wrong, that at any moment she would be cold dead in the leaf litter with a Democrat arrow through her cervical vertebrae. Slowly, slowly, so damn fuggin’
slowly
; that sick madman ranting and hallucinating and arguing loudly with his ghosts and memories while all around the stealthy eyes of SDI rested not, nor blinked, and when she and her racoons were pitted and slitted and noosed and netted and impaled, they would not even cry, not even one tear. Onward, forward, through the dark and the fear and the leaves and the thundering rain and the trees and the doubt (the Question, again, only wickedly asking itself of herself), and coming on behind, the slow, slow, so damn fuggin’
slow
slither slide of the travois. …
Courtney Hall screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed when the lightning shattered the dark into the shape of someone waiting for her.
“Easy, easy,” said Xian Man Ray. She smelt of sweat and smoke and speed and a curious taint of sex. Zebra-striped, she was a figment of the rain forest. Trashcan her cat ran up onto her shoulder and licked its paws. Courtney Hall swallowed several sobs whole before she could speak.
“What about the Democrats?” The cat flexed its razor claws and carefully licked them clean. The small woman grinned.
A streak of light arced above the forest canopy and detonated in a starburst of red and green. Others rose to join it in its momentary glory; suddenly the whole sky was exploding with fireworks. Then, from far to the south, a constellation of starbursts spread themselves against the roof in reply.
“Wow! War rockets! This is it, sister, the big show, the main feature! Armageddon! The Final Conflict! Those sucks of Democrats must have thought the Commies were attacking them with some deadly new weapon and, they’re striking back. I’d love to stick around to see this!” The symbolic bombardment peaked until the exploding fireworks rivaled Angelo Brasil’s artificial lightning. Beneath the heavens gone mad, the Army of Victorialand escaped through rain and mold and dread.
“About half an hour to go from here,” said Xian Man Ray, sniffing around a crossing of forest paths. Suddenly the gentle moon-glow from the ceiling lights flared day-bright and went out. Total darkness clamped down on the Land of the Great White Eagle/Morning Star. Courtney Hall found herself wrestling with a demon named Claustrophobia, which tried to squeeze the breath from her lungs with whispers of the truth that she was a kilometer and a half underground with several million tons of rock poised above her desperately seeking unity with the several quintillion tons of sister rock beneath.
She knew that if she ever found her breath again, she would not be able to stop screaming.
Soft fingers on her neck: a word and a lightning-bolt image of Xian Man Ray. “Softly, softly, sister. Take my hand. Trashie’ll lead us. He’s a cat can see in any darkness.”
“What have they done?”
“Gone mad. M.A.D. Mutually Assured Destruction. Just hope the Communists can’t find the controls to their sluice gates or all bets are off.” She rubbed the corner of her jaw, whispered, “Angelo, get those lights on again.” An angry insect buzzing. The small woman swore. “Those stone axes I told you about. They smashed the computers. Angelo’s lost all environmental control, but he thinks he can lynk into and hold the flood-control computers at the mouth of the river. But this place is bound for Hades in a hatbox: this really is Armageddon, sister. The End of the World.”
The retreat through Sheol continued.
Deafened by rain, blind except for the occasional lightning flicker or, rarer now as the stocks were expended, war rocket, her skin numb with cold rainwater, Courtney Hall slipped subtly into a state of sensory deprivation almost as complete as if she were imprisoned in a West One psycho-engineering tank. Only the warmth and presence of Xian Man Ray’s hand prevented her from submitting totally to the hallucinations and bizarre time-swings that menaced her path. Nevertheless, she could not rid herself of the impression that this long pilgrimage was really through the interstices of her own body to pavilions of life-energy where she found the sixteen-o’clock dream: ornithopter-bicycles, squadrons of them, the sky black with their beating wings, dropping coconuts and cascades of sparks from the roman candles strapped to their mudguards; elsewhere on her interior hegira she met Jonathon Ammonier dancing among the exhibits of his Chaosium, and as he danced, pieces of his body kept falling off: ears, toes, fingers, nose, hands, whole arms and legs—Courtney Hall scampered after him scooping them up, saying, “Excuse me, Your Majesty, but isn’t this yours?” until only a head and a torso remained, with teeth glowing fluorescent green in the night: the TAOS girl, forty stories of social grace, and Courtney Hall waved at her from her cosy little office and the TAOS girl waved back, every time Courtney Hall moved the TAOS girl copied it until she realized that she was the TAOS girl, trapped in forty stories of videowall, and all she could do was smile, pick chip, flip chip, hold, and dissolve, over and over and over and over again. …
“Sister, we’re here, sister.”
Unh?
Water. Chuckling water. And light! Flares, torches, a bonfire. And a raft, moored to the bank; a good raft, a big raft, a good big Huckleberry Finn of a raft with a steering pole and a little cabin woven from twigs and a fire on a slab of river-bed slate. And Angelo Brasil, sitting Lotus-position in the fireglow, eyes rolled up in his head, mouth shaping syllables never intentioned for human lips: the whispered intimacies of the computers. He was holding the sluice gates open with his mynde.
A good raft. Good people. Wonderful raft. Wonderful people. And now it was over. Courtney Hall burst into tears of pure relief as she watched the King of Nebraska manhandled aboard, the Tinka Tae porters finish their loading of food and supplies.
“Ain’t you coming?”
A sniff.
“You coming sister?”
A nod.
A hand reached out and she was pulled aboard. Then the mooring lines were slashed forward and aft, and the current spun the raft out into the great darkness.