Authors: Ian McDonald
F
ALLING RAIN.
Excellent rain.
Watch it fall … Sudden. Sweeping courtyards, closes, clear of citizens, drumming on clapper roofs of hunchbacked bridges, drum-drumming on waxed paper umbrellas in Angle Park, drum-drum-drumming on the canopies of sampans moored at Steelyard floating market, hissing over canals and wateralleys and the dolorous chugging of the municipal
vaporetti
wedged to the gunwales with wet populace. Huddled under a polythene sheet against the inadequacies of leaking wickerwork, Kansas Byrne weighed the risk of using her marquin on the lumbering water-buses against five centimeters of rainwater slopping round her feet in the scuppers of an onion-vendor’s sampan. The tiny alcohol stove leaked a dismal globe of warmth that only exacerbated the stink of forty kinds of onions that formed the sampan’s other cargo. In the stern, onion-vending Jian John-Chang set face upturned to the rain, evidently enjoying the sting of rainwater in his eyes, the trickle of warm drops down his body.
His body …
His … harlequinade. His motley. His hydridoma. Apocalyptic avatar of a forgotten faith. Four-armed, with twain he did steer and tend the outboard and with twain did he bail rainwater, which, unbaled, would have sent Jian John-Chang Food Corps concessionaire and soulbrother of the Carnal Plenum, his passenger, his forty brands of onion, and his sampan
Ribonucleic Revelation
to the bottom of Waters of Healing Compassion Canal. With twain did he sail and with twain did he bail, but of legs he had none for the legs of Jian John-Chang were on loan to Sister Chanadya Tree-Morgan. Thus it was of considerable importance to Jian John-Chang of the Carnal Plenum that his
Ribonucleic Revelation
did not dissolve in the waters of Healing Compassion as, until such time as the Sacred Rota prescribed him a pair of someone else’s legs, the sampan was his only means of mobility.
The Biological Revelation of the Panspermic Life-Force was the pivotal tenet of Carnal Plenum belief. The sacrament of the transplantational. Being is gene-deep: share the flesh, share the being in the double helix. Greater lover hath no person than he/she giveth up his/her arm for his/her soulbrother; be given the legs of his/her soulsister. Today an arm and a leg. Tomorrow eyes, ears, feet, and fingers. Next week: liver, lights, lungs, spleen, kidneys, genitals. Next
year
: proud bearer of the sacred relics of the Thrice Blessed: Sacred Head Sore Wounded (read
amputated
), Holy Eyeball, Sanctified Hand, Hallelujahed Thumb, Redeemed Toe, Cosmic Gallbladder. Holy holy holy. And then, some decade, might not Jian John-Chang, onion vendor, become as enlightened as Deevah, the Prophetess, she of the Ten Thousand Transplants?
Deevah the Prophetess.
Well, what can be said about her?
She smells.
That’s gangrene. A vocational hazard among the Soulbrothers of the Carnal Plenum.
She has cancers erupting like new brains all over her body.
Another vocational hazard. Immuno-suppressives.
She is the avatar of Kali: eight-armed, four-legged, she is the amalgam of ten thousand different components, a U-Built-It biokit of the Corporal, the Mortified, and the Transfigured. Lifetimes ago, beyond remembering, she had been an old woman of an unexceptional Soulbrother Order. Then God had called her through his organs in the Ministry of Pain and its psychofiles. Now she is Deevah.
She has two heads.
She had gained her second head, the highest honor of the Carnal Plenum, so long before that she has forgotten which is the head she was born with, which is the head she acquired. They take turns to speak. Day about. One thinks, one speaks.
Deevah is a prophetess. The foremost prophetess of the city of Yu. When she opens her speaking mouth to let the verbs of God flow forth, Yu listens. Because Deevah, unlike every other prophetess and mouthpiece of the divine, is genuine. She has power. That power breaks the boundaries of caste and custom that the Ministry of Pain has so painstakingly erected. But the Ministry of Pain lets her prophesy because she is subject to a higher law. So the word passes out of Three Jump Span into the city, and those with the courage to have their questions truly answered,
truly
, come to hear the word of the numinous. There are never many of them. Only a very few have the courage to face futures no different from their past, if that be the divine will. But there are always some.
Kansas Byrne is one. She has a question, a dangerous question, a question she could not ask of the municipal shrines and databases. For if they answered, she would have betrayed those on whose behalf she asked. It is a dangerous question even for Deevah the Prophetess but a question that must be asked and answered. So she listened to the whispers that ran with the rats around the sampans and the duckboards of the floating market and sent her own little whisper to run with them until it found someone willing to take her down the wateralleys under hunchbacked bridges to Deevah.
Deevah’s Oraculum was a tatterdemalion amphitheater erected on a corner of land where a dump of discarded garbage abutted a row of collapsed tenements. Planks for seats, illumination from biogas flares blazing in blackened paint tins.
The Carnal Plenum Brother in the waxpaper entrance booth had three arms and three eyes. The third arm, a bloated club of mortifying green flesh, held a syringe. The third eye supposedly looked into the soul.
“Supplicant or spectator?”
“Pardon?” said Kansas Byrne, a Wee Wendy Waif spell-caught by the night, the hum of the expectant crowd, the heat of the biogas flares, the pure theatricality of it all.
“You want to watch, you want to ask a question?”
“Oh. Ask a question.”
“Then we’ll need a specimen.”
“A what?”
Supplicants and spectators were piling up behind her, impatient and increasingly compressed. The odor of wet humans was miserable.
“Blood, cizzen. For the Deevah. All knowledge is genetic. …” The blotched green-and-purple arm waved the hypodermic. Supplicants, spectators, biogas flares, amphitheaters, slender silver demon needles swam.
“Oh, shug … Will it hurt? I’ve got a very low pain threshold rating.”
“A little.”
“Oh, fug.”
The flames seemed to catch on the needle. The figure of 0.3 seemed very important, then she found herself looking into the dreadlock-shrouded face of a Soulbrother of the Brethren of Marcus Garvey Redeemed. His Selassie Eye winked at her.
“You all right?”
“Um. Ah. Yes. Now. Thank you. Thank you. Needles and me … It’s on my psychofile, the only bit of it I believe, as a matter of fact: zero point three.” The Marcus Garveyite accompanied her to one of the back benches and handed her a slip of paper.
“You forgot to take this.”
“What is it?”
“Your number.” Prophecy by number, like buying a half kilo of bean curd or a sack of onions from a Food Corps concessionaire.
The buzz of conversation settled. The biogas flares dwindled in their paint pots to a bare glow. An aura of hushed expectancy filled the amphitheater. Kansas Byrne was astounded at how much like
menace
it felt. Drizzle drizzled down. Spectators and supplicants alike were oblivious to it: Deevah the Prophetess was entering the arena.
Very slowly she came, very slowly, very painfully, dragging trailing limbs and pendulous wattles of flesh, heaving heavy ox shoulders, eight arms dragging, swinging, slow with the slowness of a thing that knows it can take forever to reach its destination, if need be. Six breasts; withered, dry dugs, two heads, two mouths snapping and spinning ropes of yellow drool. Her fingernails curled up into spirals. Matted hair burst from her multiple armpits and spread a thick shadowy forest about her loins, belly, and thighs.
“They say her skeleton was specially strengthened by the white brothers,” whispered the Marcus Garveyite. “Even so, she has to sleep in a pond of electrically warmed mud because if she lay down to sleep she would smother under the mass of her own transplants.”
The stench of rotting was overpowering.
Kansas Byrne watched horrified and transfixed. Pure awe. Pure theater.
The prophetess raised her arms; a throat mike caught her whispered name and threw it hissing like the rain around the amphitheater:
Deevah
… The biogas cressets flared into five-meter pillars of flame. Kansas Byrne broke into spontaneous applause. The Marcus Garveyite rested a hand on her arm—hush, be still. The prophetess squatted and settled her bulk to the pounded garbage floor. An acolyte slipped into the circle of fire, a willow-thin girl of sixteen or so dressed only in a very short frilled skirt. Her only apparent modifications were a set of five nipples arranged down her prominent rib cage like buttons. She had the most wonderful pair of hands Kansas Byrne had ever seen.
“By the grace of the Panspermic Life-Force, Sister Deevah has again been visited with the Quickening, the mystic power all-surrounding, all-pervading, before all things, after all things, within all things, without all things”—her hands, her beautiful mantis-hands, described the dance of the double helix, the mimesis of the DNA molecule—“and her third eye opened to the Universal Biomass, she has reached into the racial past and the racial future of the worldsoul, the planet-mother, and one with the whole life of the earth and all other earths wound in the great double helix of consciousness, she will prophesy. For the life of the world and the life of Deevah are one; soul and cell. Thus supplicants, address your prophetess, you seekers of true life, and be answered. Number one!”
A spiritually shell-shocked yulp stood up, guiltily clutching slip number one. His hands were locked in a spastic
nona dolorosa
, his question a stammering beseeching for ambition, promotion, and a revolution in lifestyle that Kansas Byrne knew could never be answered positively. The five-nippled acolyte opened a small plastic case and removed a full hypodermic syringe. She paraded it around the perimeter of the arena so that everyone could see the way the flamelight shone through the red yulp blood. Then with a leap and a cry she danced across the ring of fire and plunged the needle into the Deevah’s back.
A cry of sheer dread spun from Kansas Byrne’s lips. A third time the hands of the Marcus Garveyite touched her to peace.
Down where the gas flares blazed, eyes of ecstasy, eyes of idiot insight. Heads lolled, eyeballs rolled, beholding the apocalypse engraved on the inside of the cranium. A tongue, warty and scaly as some long-extinct parasitic worm, uncoiled from the open mouth of the thinking-head. The mouth of the speaking head sprayed creamy foam pinkened with blood.
Deevah the Prophetess spoke. From her speaking mouth came clickings and scrapings, as if she were reaching into the racial memory to the tongues of insects. Then came harsh barkings and bayings never designed for human vocal cords to shape. The prophetess voiced them. Then came an incoherent glossolalia of human languages past, present, and to come. And then all jerkings and twitchings, all spasmings and shiverings, ceased. Her eyes rolled down from reading the writings in the skull to fix her questioner. She spoke, and the voice in which she spoke was the most terrible voice of all, for she spoke in the dry, quantified tones of the Computer Standard Voice.
“Are you not a yulp?” spake the prophetess. “Are you not a digit of the Compassionate Society? How then can there be any future for you outside what is currently your present? You will not become a project director in an arts commune. You cannot. You will remain an advertising adviser second-class, and you will die one, too.” The prophecy was given. Kansas Byrne treated herself to a shiver of pure superstition, and it was a wonderful feeling because superstition was dead, rationalized away by the Ministry of Pain and the computerized deities of the Polytheon.
“Number two!” cried the whipcord acolyte. The biogas flares dipped and swayed. The needling rain, heavier now, pierced to the bone, but the mystery was stronger than any discomfort. Hypotheses, theorems flocked into Kansas Byrne’s imagination: possession by the Lares and Penates, the lowest order of the Polytheon and the most intimate with man; neural linkage to the dataweb; transmission through the bones of the skull; racial memories; the wisdom of ancestors stored on biochip, as the Electors were reputed to be; could all knowledge truly be genetic, was God a double helix of consciousness? She rejected them all with a shake of her mind. She did not want rationalizations, explanations, hypotheses. She wanted magic, she wanted mystery, and as the bright silver needle plunged into Deevah’s hump, she gave herself to the firelight and the sacrament and the Theater of Being that transcends all art. Then time ceased to flow in its ordained bed and burst out into a flood of barking voices, and the chittering, chitinous cries of the People in the Sea from whom all humanity was descended, and the astonishing hands of the acolyte girl that held the glittering needle, and the flames shining through the red red blood.
“Number nineteen!” Shining with pride, Sister Needle paced pantherwise back and forth between the shadowplay of the biogas flares.
“She is her daughter,” whispered the Marcus Garveyite.
“Deevah’s?” asked Kansas Byrne.
“No. Deevah is her daughter.”
Somehow it made the craziness perfect.
“Number nineteen!”
In the mystery she had forgotten that was her number.
The question had been carefully formulated to be the safest possible dangerous question with two hundred famulus eyes watching, monitoring.
“Is it possible for me to find my brother and his friends?”
Safe dangerous question, and a perfect test of prophetic power. Deevah’s hump was a martyrdom of empty hypodermics. Again the energy crackled up, again primeval tongues gibbered and croaked, and out of the babel of human tongues the Computer Standard Voice spoke one word.
“Yes.”
It was all the answer she needed. At the first alert that the pantycars were circling above, they had split into their prearranged escape routines (as much a piece of performance as any other, she regretted missing it) and recongregated out in the frantic industrial wasteworlds heaped around Tamazooma, the capital of the TAOS Consortium. Where better to hide the Compassionate Society’s most unrepentant PainCriminals than under the hand of one of its Seven Servants?