Tyrannia (14 page)

They were inside the Being. But the Camaro didn’t stop. In fact it seemed to gain an extra level of speed once it was inside the Being. The walking sticks glowed like solar flares or brane-gun bullets from a galactic transmutator. Past the blue and green haze, Parka couldn’t see much—shapes moving around that were vaguely aboriginal in form. The only thing he could see clearly were the local sorcery-powered vehicles that were known as “monster trucks.” They raced toward the Camaro, dozens of free-floating kites strung to their menacing hulls, but they were far too slow to reach the rocketing, black Chevrolet stock car. The inside of the Being smelled like ferrous oxide, phlegm, sinew, and transdimensional energy. Before he was able to formulate the thought to look for Jar at all, the Camaro had burst through the other side of the Being with a roar. More fine, plush incandescent Being fur surrounded them. Then the light grew sharp and bright, and Parka shielded his eyes.

When he moved his pincer away from his face, he saw that the Camaro was sailing in the air above a deep canyon, which the Being was on the edge of.

“I want to warn you,” Sharon said, “that you might want to brace yourself.”

The Camaro seemed to be suspended above the dry riverbed far below for a few seconds, and slowly began to arc down. The other side of the gully seemed impossibly far away. The walking sticks, still glowing, began to thrum.

And then Parka touched the button on the center of the Amulet, the one forbidden thing. The red rays embedded in the metal burst out, and solidified into strands many meters long, following the contours of his arms. Then they ballooned out like wings.

They were wings.

Without really thinking—and it might have been the Amulet thinking for him—he stood up and stretched his arms out. The wings were massive, and the Camaro wobbled but righted itself. As it fell, Parka could hear the Being on the other side of the canyon shrieking, and feel its reverberations around his neck.

Parka leaned forward and the Camaro landed right on the edge of the canyon with a thud. Sharon hit the brakes and the Camaro spun around. The Being was, in fact, in the throes of dying. Eagle-merlins from above were trying to maneuver out of the way, but aquamarine slime burst out of the Being like sulfuric geysers and coated the carpetbombers, which spun around and veered wildly. Parka could hear a high, sonorous call from many miles away—the continental emergency siren from Santa Fey.

Sharon was still. But then he pointed forward.

The Worm-Hare posse was there, gathered around a minivan, each with a brane gun strapped to its arm.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Parka said. He tried to get out of the car, but it was difficult because of his nascent wings. He ended up crawling forward through the glassless windshield and onto the hood. The wings settled around him like a reptilian cape.

“We want our car back,” the prime Worm-Hare said. It was a different prime from the one Parka had defeated in kickboxing. The sliding door of the minivan was open, and Parka could see the original prime in the back of the minivan in a shimmering heal-sac. “To say nothing about the Amulet, one of the key symbols of our people, which you’ve gone on and fucked up as well. You know that your corporation is going to hunt you down for triggering ‘dragon mode,’ right?”

Parka laughed. Dragon mode. “That’s great. Anyway, you seem to forget that I won the car fair and square. I don’t know why you’re so upset about that, considering your current sweet ride.”

“We don’t care,” the prime said, hoisting his gun at Parka, ignoring the jab about the Honda Odyssey. “We just want a souvenir to take back with us off-world.” He indicated the dying Being in the distance. “This planet is a cursed cesspool. There’s nothing here anymore. But nothing would make us happier than to disintigrate your sorry carapace and take this car into orbit with us.”

Parka spread his wide wings—which didn’t hurt at all—because he thought it would scare them. But it didn’t, at all. He sighed. He realized that sometimes the smallest moments could change a creature’s life. He had given the Camaro to a human as a prize, and had thought nothing of it. But here he was, about to die from the Worm-Hares after all, and with weird wings. But all the same, he felt good about his generosity, even if Jar wasn’t there to share it with him.

With that in mind, he wasn’t going to back down.

Sharon was motionless, but then he looked in the backseat and started laughing. It was such a quiet, tinny laugh that it shocked everyone into stillness.

“What?” the prime Worm-Hare said, exasperated. Then there was a red dot on his spiny forehead. Parka stared at it.

“Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” the Worm-Hare said.

Then there was a whooshing sound, and a crossbow bolt hit the Worm-Hare’s forehead where the red dot was. The bolt went through his head, blasting into the front windshield of the mini-van. The prime slumped over.

Parka turned around. There was someone in the back seat.

“Hey,” Jar said, sitting up, slinging a laser crossbow over his shoulder and looking groggy.

“Christ on a—” Parka said, but he stopped, because he didn’t know what to say. Instead, he ran to Jar and wrapped his leathery, demonic wings around his friend in a familial embrace.

“Look at you,” Jar said, still sleepily. “With wings and shit.”

“It’s the Amulet,” Parka said. The remaining Worm-Hares were forgotten, but they had made their pathetic escape in the minivan. “But, anyway, priorities. How the hell did you get there? You weren’t there all along, were you?”

Jar shrugged. “No, not really. I was in the Being and then . . .
um, I don’t remember much about that, but I saw this sweet Camaro cruising through, and then stop in front of me, and I said to myself, hey, maybe I should hop on board, so I did. And I must have picked up this crossbow. I guess I was on a shooting range for a while or something?”

Parka had no recollection of the Camaro slowing down enough for anyone to jump aboard.

He disengaged from Jar. “I’m just glad you’re safe.”

“Well, you came back, friend. That’s the important thing. I’d still be in there without you.”

“The Tree requests your presences,” Sharon said.

“What?” Jar said.

“Ah, the kid, he’s like that,” Parka said. He waved toward Sharon. “Okay, okay, the Tree. But first, we need to get a beer.”

Later that day Jack Nicklaus and Dwight D. Eisenhower and Sharon met for a summit over a few of the local beers.

“How’s things?” Jack said.

“Super,” Dwight said.

“Awesome,” Jack said.

Sharon was silent. They were in a basement tavern somewhere north of Albuquerque, at a circular table. It was the off-season, and likely everyone in a 500 kilometer radius was trying to flee the potential blast zone of the Being, so they had the place to themselves. The beer was warm but the off-worlders didn’t care. Sharon didn’t order anything so Parka had the bartender make him an Arnold Palmer. Toby Keith was playing on the speakers and everything was all right with the universe, at least for a few minutes.

“I’m going to miss Hallows’ Eve with the gang,” Jar said. “But it’s a small price to pay.”

“Yeah, it would have been fun. I’m glad we dressed up anyway.”

“You know, I wonder if Eisenhower would have won the war faster if he had wings like yours.”

“It’s very possible,” Parka said. The Amulet against his chest pulsed like a second heart. The walking sticks swirling around Sharon clicked and skittered.

“What do you want to do after we, er, look at some tree that might very well be imaginary?” Parka said.

“I don’t know,” Jar said, taking a sip of his Budweiser Light. “It’s hard to say. Go back home, maybe. Start over with a new corporation. How about you?”

“Well, maybe I’ll stay here,” Parka said. “I haven’t decided. But I like it here. I still have no idea what the fuck happened.”

“With the Amulet?”

“A little. But mostly with the Camaro. And the Being.”

“Ah, that’s understandable,” Jar said.

Parka leaned forward, which was awkward because of his wing span. “What I want to know is . . . I might not never understand, ever, what’s going on with these walking sticks. But they’re trying to say something, trying to do something. They’re trying to survive on this godforsaken planet we—I mean, not us personally, I mean the mining ventures—fucked up for resource management. And for what? So we can get more fuel for our transmutators to find more planets to fuck over and destroy?”

Parka was melancholic, but not just for geopolitical reasons. He realized that this might be one of the last times of relative normalcy with his good friend.

“Yeah,” Jar said. “You make a good point. Maybe I’ll stay too. And learn how to properly ride a motorcycle and do a wheelie.” He laughed and then downed his beer. “Come on, Sharon,” he said. “Finish your drink.”

They rode for an hour in silence through the empty desert, and could see the Tree from many kilometers away. A towering, shadowy shape. Sooner rather than later—Sharon wasn’t exactly following a speed limit—they could see the enormity of the living structure. Parka stood up in the car, letting his body poke out of the shorn top, letting his wings free.

“Holy shit,” Jar said.

The Tree was as tall as the highest peaks that the Being had dessicated, many kilometers high. And the Tree was on fire. Smokeless fire. The tree pulsated with orange light. The branches were leafless, but they spiraled in gargantuan yet intricate patterns.

About a thousand meters away, Sharon stopped the car. Everyone got out. The walking sticks encompassing Sharon, or perhaps embodying him, were glowing in syncopation with the Tree. Then it became clear that the Tree was made up of billions of the walking sticks.

There were many other abandoned vehicles all around the Tree in a ring.

“Why are the walking sticks doing this?” Jar whispered.

Parka shook his head but didn’t say anything. He had no idea.

Sharon turned to the two of them and said, “We need you two, the Dwight D. Eisenhower and Jack Nicklaus of interpersonal diplomacy, to carry a message back to your people. You will relay terms for peace.” Sharon began walking toward the Tree.

“Wait, Sharon,” Parka said. “What will happen if we do?”

“What will happen if we don’t?” Jar said.

Sharon paused for a second and said, “My name’s not Sharon.” Then he began walking toward the Tree again.

Parka watched him for a little while, and looked at Jar, who shrugged.

“Who the hell knows,” Jar said.

As the general and the golfer followed Sharon to the base of the Tree, Parka swore he heard Sharon, who wasn’t in fact Sharon, humming a tune, one of Toby Keith’s more recent songs about exile on the moon and earthly liberation. Or maybe it was only the sound of the walking sticks and the desolate wind making music together, which wasn’t meant for a stranger like him, wasn’t for him to understand.

The Flowering Ape

I sprinted through the translucent tube with the curfew avatar slithering behind me. I had a date that night with Kathy at the Flowering Ape, and I wasn’t going to be late for him. Even if kissing him never materialized.

I could hear the avatar hiss. The foot traffic was light in the tube, just a few drunken lovers laughing at the mega-cobra as it tried to catch up to me. The previous year, in an effort to curb truancy from the Chartering School for Young Telepaths, they’d switched from a lumbering golem-type creature to a giant cobra for patrolling the tubes between the space stations. They thought it would be “scarier,” instilling fear in our young hearts. Whatever. The avatar was pokey, which was all that mattered to me.

Just as I was losing my breath, I finally saw the friendly confines of the Flowering Ape. I smelled it too. Hot taffy. Surface-distilled vodka. A perfume called Crushed Dreams. My monthly pass grafted to my pinky, I extended it and jumped inside the barrier, the door whisking me through. The cobra reached the door a couple of seconds later. Knowing it would be repulsed, it growled (a flaw in the gene design, I guess) and turned away.

I sighed, looking for Kathy, kind of glad to be there but also a little desultory. Despite its alleged function as an amusement park and semi-illicit hangout, the Flowering Ape wasn’t very amusing. Its glass slides and rafters, curved with transparent spacescapes, were full of centenarians floating to the observation decks, dictating now-memoirs to their off-world agents. A lot of them were alums of the Chartering, where I was learning how to meld with the shepherds. I hadn’t had the privilege of that experience yet. Sometimes it took time, my teachers always told me.

So instead of thinking on all that was troublesome, I instead found an empty pod for two and waited for my lover, Kathy. Or rather, my “lover,” Kathy.

Kathy was late. He was either late or he never arrived at all—and yet which do you think I would rather have had? Waiting, I daydreamed about Kathy kissing my neck in a corner of the Ape. Maybe I’d kiss his neck too, and touch that sensitive spot on his left knee that he was always talking about. Maybe we wouldn’t have gone any further—we weren’t technically a couple after all—but it would have made me happy for a time, being close to someone, especially someone who seemed to like me. Maybe we’d have a drink together if we weren’t too tired afterward, and talk about what telepathy all meant, and what the shepherds meant to him, to me.

Bored, I slid my pod upward, with little poofs of the anti-gravity jets, while the alums jostled their pods, racing them vertically. Shepherds swam in the vacuum above me. I saw their diaphanous edges shift around. The aliens—the reason I was in school in the first place—were powerful hypnotists, even though they really didn’t mean to hypnotize. They (and we, the telepaths) made interstellar travel happen. A shepherd, with a telepath’s guidance, enveloped a spaceship and sent it on its merry way across wherespace to the other planets of the Parameter.

It was a very convenient form of space travel.

I hadn’t been chosen by a shepherd yet, and seventeen years old was kind of late for that kind of choicelessness, but I couldn’t do anything about it happening until it happened. Kathy liked to talk about his shepherd Bazzarella all the time. He treated shepherds like horses, and made up names for them, and called them “boys” and “girls,” though shepherds didn’t have any boy or girl parts.

“Well, they reproduce, don’t they?” I could hear his voice in my head, but it wasn’t really him (the telepathy’s only with shepherds, not with people, after all), but rather a kind of mental image I kept of him. I wasn’t sure if keeping that image in my thoughts made me creepy. I wanted to argue with this Kathy-thought-projection that the shepherds weren’t either boys or girls. How could they be? But then, speak of a devil, Kathy was actually at the base of the windtunnel entrance (he was a senior, and had no curfew. He might have petted the cobra on his way to the Ape). It was really him, pointing up at me, and I really didn’t feel like arguing with my own thoughts anymore.