Authors: Jeff Noon
But then came the successful merging of dog and plastic. A proposal was put forward, passed with alacrity by the Authorities, and the dogtrack was reopened. Every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday the night air was filled with the sound and the smells of robohounds, charging the ground with their Vazzed-up claws, chasing to death some poor Zombie-rabbit. With the discovery of Fecundity 10, even stranger, wilder creatures were born. Some of them too wild, too full of curious genes to be ignored. So they opened the zoo again, filling it with the children of Casanova. Non-viables. Voyeurs dreamed of it, entrepreneurs put money into it. Oh, the thrill of seeing a hideous Zombie up close, safe behind bars. The New Belle Vue Zoo was a big success.
Wednesday, May 3. Night-time. We have placed the moment at 10.12 p.m. The dogs were running wild inside the floodlit stadium, and the zoo was closed for the night. The cages were filled with deep snufflings. Half-alive creatures sleeping. Terrible mixtures of dead women and dogs, and cats, and robos and Vurts. And the Pure. They were called monsters, those creatures, but I know that is a misnomer. I had that same flesh inside me, only my gender had saved me. Maybe one of those poor unfortunates was roused that night. Maybe it was curious about the sounds coming from the nearby flower garden. Now its eyes are adjusting to the gloom, making shapes out of the flowers. The shape of two humans, making themselves into one form, and the petals falling all over them. The floodlights from the dogtrack casting a dull yellow glow over the scene. The noise of the crazed-up robohounds pounding the track. Beneath that another sound: soft whisperings mixed with harsh commands. Maybe that creature had enough human in it to recognise the sound. Maybe it had seen this sight many times over its years in the cage: a prostitute with her client. Maybe it knew enough to realise that these urgent cries were the noises of love, a kind of love, a paid-for love. Or else it was a dumb thing, born brain-dead, living on shadows and flesh only, knowing nothing of what it saw. Maybe it sneezed just then, as the flowers moved around the young couple, and the petals fell like slow blades in the night…
That other figure it must have seen, drifting through the air. The screams it must have heard.
The witness came to us at 10.46 p.m., falling into the Gorton cop station like a leaf herself, her Shadows dancing with fear. It was the local sergeant himself who had called me, knowing that I was involved in the Flowers case. I was still awake by then, unable to sleep. I had been drinking instead, and smoking and thinking; shuffling through case notes, Vurtball tickets, diary entries, gazing at photographs, memories of Belinda’s childhood. Looking in on Jewel in his bedroom. His sneezing and his tears were very bad, and I was fearful for his condition. I did not want to leave him, but my job was not the best one for a mother. It was 11.05 p.m. by the time I got to the Gorton station, pushing the Fiery Comet through thick packs of slobbering dogmen. Zero was already waiting there for me. I turned away from him.
“This is one of yours, Smokey,” he said. And then he adjusted his new pollen mask, close-knit, as he followed me into the interrogation room. “You sure you don’t want a mask, Sibyl?” He kept looking down at his wrist as he spoke. “Jesus-Dog! There’s some heavy snot in here.” He had bought one of the new Pollen Counters, the wristwatch model. “Christ! 785! Sibyl, it’s 785 grains in here. 789… 791… this bitch is rising.”
After my talk with Kracker, I had a ton of questions to ask of Zero, but I was too busy. Too busy taking in the young woman in the room. She was a teenage Shadowpro, shivering and crying between blasts of the most violent sneezing. She was mumbling gibberish between each explosion. The room was cloudy with the scent. “We’ve tried everything,” Zero said. “Can’t make head nor tail, except that she’s called Miasma, and that somebody got killed. Keeps going on about the flowers. Girl’s in shock.” She had a frail Shadow; enough to know what a man desired, but hardly enough to put it into action. There were other cops peering in at the door, all of them masked-up to the gills, so I just slammed the door shut on their sneezings and then sent my smoke out to the sufferer, touching her mind with it. Our Shadows mingled, and she was so grateful for my touch, I was almost crying with her. I didn’t have to demand much; her Shadow opened like a flower, and she told me her story in words of smoke… drifting…
… was lost in the search for money… the search for love and money… money… love… what’s the difference?… a sad and sweet roboboy he was… pleading for love… feed me, he said… feed me shadows… and giving me money for love in return… the garden… feeding him… flowers all over us… smelling so sweet… a good but sad boy… flowers making us come together… would have done it for nothing… little D-Frag… but for the flowers…
“That was his name? D-Frag? His street name?”
… Yes… roboboy… he was trying so hard to be hard, a real Vurt dealer… but D-Frag was too soft for all that… I liked him… and the smell of the flowers… he couldn’t stop sneezing… me the same… and we were laughing then, together… loving the nose job… he called it that, a nose job… I was laughing until his eyes widened and I thought it was myself, my pleasure making his eyes bloom… but feeling the petals on my spine… like the hand of a good lover… I turned to follow his look, seeing the air shimmering, and the Zombies were howling in their cages… a young girl… a beautiful young girl… floating in the air on petals… a flower girl… she had petals…
“Tell me about the girl, Miasma. What did she look like?”
Floating… a child… nine or ten… a kid she was… kissing the both of us with petals… eyes of green petals she had… the scent inside me… my Shadow wilting, and then blooming… young girl kissing roboboy… making him smile until he was… until he was screaming… I ran all the way… I ran…
“Tell me more about the girl. Describe her.”
… She called herself Persephone… her name was floating… like petals, right? Just like petals… the girl was kissing him to death!
Miasma screamed then, along the Shadow, and sneezed at the same time, sending her mucus into my Smoke. Explosions of gold as the particles hit. I could see them dying in fire, even as I managed to pull out.
Riding the cop-car down to the zoo…
The dogtrack was closed up for the night. All was darkness and breath. The Shadowpro led us to the bed of flowers. “I would have done it for nothing,” she kept saying, words coming hard from her lips, eyes streaming with mucus, even with the pollen mask we had given her. “For nothing. All for nothing…”
“Sure thing, kid,” Zero wheezed. “Just take us to the love nest.” He had little use for pros, less for Shadows. This combination had bitten. Miasma was just staring into an overgrown patch of the Belle Vue gardens. “Shadowslut, you best come clean now,” demanded Zero. I was finding his mood hard to bear.
“Zero! She’s scared.”
“She’s scared! Shit, we’re all scared. Seems like the whole of society’s breaking down, running scared. It’s all getting too watery, Smokey.” He was looking all around, breathing heavily through his mask, his furry brow matted with sweat, glancing every so often over to the zoo cages. “Shit! Who the fuck would pay to see such corpses? It’s not natural.”
I wanted to ask him to take a good look at his own furry face and then talk about natural, but how could I? The pro was crying, the flowers seemed to be creeping towards us through the darkness, and all I could hear from the cages was a soft slithering, like dry leaves rubbing against one another.
Zero was screaming by now. He was screaming at Miasma, at the Zombie cages, at the fleshcops, at me, at the whole world that had taken him this far. The dogcop was really suffering. He was reading off numbers from his wrist counter… 799… 801… 802. Miasma could do nothing but sneeze, even with the mask in place, and keep on pointing towards the flowers. Her Shadow was calling to me, telling me to look, to look to the flowers. See the way the flowers are moving. See the patterns…
Zero was raising his paws in the air, protesting, “This is a strike-out, Sibyl. Let’s do this pro for wasting time.”
But I was turning to the flowers now, looking into the spaces between the petals. Seeing shapes there, seeing the body. Miasma had been right; he was indeed a young and lovely roboboy. Fair of face, strong in his plastic bones, soft in his feelings. A fine picture of flesh and info, all wrapped up together in beauty. But none of these elements were left to us. That corpse was just a picture that the petals made, as they drifted in the breeze from the cages, making patterns of colour that corresponded to the information. There was no physical body to examine, only the edges between states. It was the moment of death captured in a floral display. A wreath of memories.
“The body is here, Zero,” I said.
“Can’t see anything, Smokey.”
“You’re not looking, Zero.” He went silent then, as his cloggy eyes caught a glimpse of a body’s shape in a certain combination of petals. “You making a Shadow-search?” he asked, voice shaking.
“There’s nothing much to search.”
But I tried it anyway. Putting my hands into the flowers. They seemed to grip, like desire. And when my mind descended into the Shadow of blooms, all I got back was the old tale of green; old in the sense that I felt by this time that I was keying into some kind of myth. The explosion of flowers I had seen in Coyote’s last thoughts. The Zombie’s. Now the roboboy’s. I had to make a pull-out.
“Smokey?” Zero’s voice came to my ears as I wilted from the greenness. “What’s going on here, Smokey?”
But I really didn’t have time for him, despite the fact that Kracker had now, effectively, made me the dogcop’s boss. Maybe this reversal of power was the source of his evident discomfort? But the way that Zero had lied about the Boda clues previously. How could I trust him? How could I trust Kracker? How could I trust anyone?
That sneezing girl needs help, Zero
. I sent this message over the Shadow straight to his mind, not wanting to break the moment with speech. And may I suggest you start digging up the drifting patch?
“You know I hate it when you do that smoking shit, Sibyl,” Zero barked at me. “Talk to me in words.” But I guess the message got through anyway, because the next second I could hear him screaming at those Gorton cops to bring some lights in, and to get that Shadowpro to hospital, and to start digging. “What the fuck is up with you? Give me that spade! Shit!” He was taking his frustration out on his underlings, the human colleagues. Then he sneezed through his mask, again and again, and I knew this fever was getting bad, and going to get much, much worse. “Jesus-Dog!” Zero’s voice was crackling. “The pollen count has reached 820, Sibyl.”
The Gorton cops found only the plastic parts of D-Frag, buried deep in the soil beneath his floating portrait. Wrapped tight by suckers they were, those plastic parts. The flesh had become flower. I learned that night that a girl of air and grass was out there in the city, name of Persephone. That our real killer was a young girl, a kid; something entirely different again. A new kind of species. I would have to issue a city-wide alert that night.
My eyes were finding dark shapes in the interior of the cages. Those Half-alivers were transformed by the flowers. The young girl… she must have reached in to them, spreading her powers. The Zombies were dancing and blooming around the shit and the dust, flowers sprouting from their tough skins, petals falling from their mouths. It was a fine show of fauna and flora, all mixed into one being.
New species.
I could sense Zero’s fear-ridden Shadow creeping up behind me. A strange blend of dog-smoke it was: fear of the Zombies, for sure, but more than that, a fear of me. A fear of the case. There were pitch-black swirls in his deepest Shadow, where all of his secrets were kept in cages. “What you doing, Jones?” he asked.
“Zombie-watching.”
“One hell of a hobby.” He was trying his best to keep up the old Z. Clegg hard-core persona, but what a strain it was on his dribbling Shadow. “You got anything on the Boda case yet?”
“Maybe.”
“You like to tell me about it?”
“Do you like Vurtball, Clegg?”
“Fucking hate it.”
“That’s a shame. I’m taking you to tomorrow night’s big match.”
“This to do with finding Boda? Shit—” Another sneeze, so loud and violent that the Zombies rushed at the bars, fluttering petal-covered limbs at us.
“Bless you, Clegg.”
“Thank you. I’m sorry for lying to you.”
“You’ve got a real heavy Shadow these days, dogcop.”
“I’m suffering, Sibyl. I really am. So many reasons, I can’t begin to tell you.”
“I know. You’re upset about Kracker giving me the Boda job.”
“Well, yes, that hurts. I was only following orders, Sib. It really killed me when I learnt that she was your daughter. I didn’t know what to do.”
I reached out my hand and stroked at the fur on his arm. Stroked? Like you do to a dog? Well yes, I guess so. But Zero seemed happy with it, for a moment. And then he pulled away from me. His Shadow diminishing as he walked slowly through the jungle of flowers.
Miasma died that night, the first victim of the hayfever. The first victim not to have been killed by the killer, but by the things the killer had left behind: the grains of pollen. I knew then that the fever and the murderer were sisters. Flowers and death. The case turning on that moment…
Everywhere I looked, new species were springing up. Maybe the pundits were right; the world was becoming more fluid.
Later that night, I held Jewel close to me. Non-Viable Lifeform No. 57,261. How I loved him. His sneezing breath, his streaming eyes. The way he looked at me, full of longing. Jewel wanted nothing more than life. It was the one thing that nobody could give him. Not even I, his mother, could grant that. He would be forever on the borderline. Totally illegal. If Kracker ever found out that I was harbouring him, my career would explode. Zombies were not allowed inside the city’s circle. Jewel was my black secret.
But this was my son and I was keeping him. Hadn’t he fought his way through Limbo to get back to me? Didn’t that add up to something? Wasn’t he dying from the fever? Wasn’t he on the list of future victims?