Gojiro (27 page)
Zeber drummed his forefinger into the contract for
Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision
. “Signed, sealed, delivered! Komodo, don’t let him hustle you.”
Stiller’s gleaming eyes never left Komodo. “We are kindred spirits, Mr. Komodo, hungry souls, men of science. We revere Mr. Brooks’s contributions in life. We must be respectful of his death. Let the man rest in peace.”
Komodo thought he was about to hyperventilate. “Mr. Stiller, your argument is quite moving and no doubt bears the ring of Truth. However, there is a problem—”
“Problem? In the pursuit of the sublime there are many problems.”
Zeber pounded the table again. “Come on, Victor, it’s only a movie. Let the American public see the Great Man in action. Let’s bring him back. Let’s
resurrect
him!”
“Resurrect . . .” The word stopped Stiller. “Resurrect . . .” Suddenly the debonair former neutron basher seemed to come unstrung. He cocked his head, stared at Komodo.
“I
do
know you . . . I’m remembering now.”
Komodo braced himself. From across the lawn came the sound of Albert Bullins’s pump gun as he blasted clay targets. Blam, blam, blam. “Nineteen of twenty, Duke. Beat that, beachboy! Your brown ass is grass.” It was Shig’s turn now. He stepped to the line and drew out a small plastic pistol. “What’s that, Duke?” Bullins bellowed. “You can’t shoot skeet with a goddamned watergun, Duke!”
Stiller narrowed his eyes, bored deeper into Komodo’s skull. “Yes, it was long ago. After the blast in Japan . . . my God . . .”
Shig fired. It seemed that he’d instructed Bullins’s gun bearer to send up twenty-five pigeons at once. When they were all in the air, a noiseless yellow streak sprang from the short plastic barrel. The ray pierced the uppermost target, chain-reacting with the rest, igniting a dazzling rainbow of light above the lush lawn.
“My God,” Victor Stiller said again.
* * *
It was a good thing Shig had that laser pistol turned up past “ultra intense.” Anything less wouldn’t have induced the blinding flash that allowed Komodo to slip from the patio and out to the limo where the odd boy was waiting to drive him back to the Traj Taj.
What an upsetting afternoon! Still rattled after returning to the melancholy mansion, Komodo sought to collect his thoughts with a brisk stroll through the Insta-Envir. Besides, he wanted to see Ebi. He’d been worried about her all day.
Ebi would be inside her thinker. She was always in that cellulose sanctum around twilight time, codifying her taxons. Thinker time was an essential part of Ebi’s day, ever since the colossal tulips first appeared in the Insta-Envir. First, it appeared that the twenty-foot-tall flowers might be useful as birdbaths for the Flying Dutchman-following albatrosses that sometimes swarmed out by Past Due Point. But the plants wouldn’t stay upright. The narrow stems bent under the weight of the bulby tops. The flowering cups then attached themselves to the semifirma with an epoxylike seal, thereby creating six-foot round domes that could be entered by peeling back several pseudovinyl petals. Most of the Atoms used the tulip heads for forts—clubhouse kind of stuff. However, they soon grew tired of the photosynthetic cells, trashed them, and went back to hanging out in the rusting Chevy hulks that ringed the shoreline like yesterday’s asteroids. It was only Ebi who possessed the calmness of spirit to take advantage of the plant’s real utility. She withdrew into the flower’s isolation and thought. It pleased Komodo and Gojiro, knowing Ebi was in her sanctuary, apart from the upheaval and pain of Radioactive Island, the pollen gently falling from the inverted stamens, dusting her beautiful black hair like fine gold.
It hadn’t been Komodo’s intention to eavesdrop. He’d never do that. He just meant to pass by the pink flower (it had to be pink if it was Ebi’s). However, the variety of thinker produced by the Traj Taj soil was cramped and thin-petaled; Komodo could hear Ebi’s lissome voice through the anemic flower. Ebi often entertained herself with a singsong recitation of her findings, an endearing habit, both Komodo and Gojiro agreed.
This time, though, Komodo detected an unusual tension in the little girl’s tone, an impatience he’d never heard before. “Please,” Ebi was saying, “you must try again. Concentrate. This is very important. One more time now.” Through the translucent thinker sides, Komodo could see her standing up, holding a long vinelike object in her hand.
Then he felt heat. A match was igniting. “I gotta smoke, okay?” said a whiny voice. “I can’t think right now, I told you that.” Someone else was inside Ebi’s thinker!
“Please.” Ebi seemed anxious, pleading.
“I don’t know. Chicken-wire ivy?”
“Taxonomic title?”
“
Cluckbuckus perdueus
number two?”
“Right! Oh, Ms. Brooks! I knew you would be a fast learner. I knew from the moment we met that you had a feeling for the earth.”
Sheila Brooks in Ebi’s thinker! Komodo could not believe his ears.
“Now we must move on to fungi.”
“Fungi?”
“Yes. Please identify and distinguish between the types I’ve placed on this table.”
“Hey, I don’t know, this is like school—you stick wires to the dead frog legs and watch them jump.”
“Please.”
“Okay. This is the metallic-spore group here. That’s the
Mylarius
. This one makes the lightning in the microwave, the
Tinfoilus reynoldus
.” Sheila Brooks went on like that, making every single identification.
“Wonderful! You have an affinity, I knew you would!” Ebi sounded so pleased.
“Just lucky. Lucky guesses.”
“No. You have an excellent memory.”
“You think so? I think I always had a good memory. Like there was this time, with my dad. We were driving along, the way we did, and we must have stopped at a truck stop or something, because usually it was only us. Anyhow, this man asked me what I did all day. I said I kinda watched the road, counted the telephone poles. The guy must have been a real jerk because he said it was dumb for a little girl to spend all day counting telephone poles. My dad got mad. I remember how his face twisted up. He said, ‘How many telephone poles between here and Tulsa, Sheila?’ I knew. I just had it in my head. ‘Three thousand five hundred and sixty-two, buster,’ I said. Could be they changed it now, but then it was three thousand five hundred and sixty-two. It shut that guy up, anyhow. And my dad, I think he was a little proud of me, especially the ‘buster’ part. I guess I always did have a good memory.”
“Memory is important. Really important! But you’ll need more than that to become a good taxonomist. You have to use the past as a step to the future. That’s what taxonomy is all about, establishing foundations, building on them. On Radioactive Island, the tide is plentiful, the recombinate possibilities infinite. A taxonomist can never rest. Ms. Brooks—should a creeper-vine plasticineus merge with a strand of razorcoilus, what might be the result?”
Sheila thought for a moment. “Let’s see . . . you have to consider the antecedents. Snapping plasticineus are amalgams of
Bullwhipus gatlinburgus
and California lawn
mulcheratorus
first sighted on Cathode Cay . . . so you could call it
Razorcoilus plasticineus
, gatlinburgus mulcherator type, but that’s too long. Consequently, I would say the best designatory tactic would be specify the locality. I’d go with
Razormulchus vineus
, Cathode Cay variety.”
“Oh, Ms. Brooks! You have a gift! It is as if you have been taking samples your entire life.”
“Wow . . . thinking this way—it’s like A’s not for apple anymore, B’s not for boat. Like a whole new world I’ve never seen is inside my head . . . and I
like
it.”
Ebi shut her notebook gleefully. “I feel so much better now! I was worried about the work—that it would not be carried on in the proper way.”
“What do you mean? Why couldn’t you do it?”
“Oh, nothing. I’m just so happy.”
Then they started dancing around. Sheila Brooks was holding Ebi and swinging her. She was far too tall for the thinker, and her head kept hitting the stamen that hung down like a showerhead. It didn’t matter, they kept on dancing.
Komodo stood there, tried to keep his composure. Off in the distance, he could hear some of the other Atoms fighting, issuing harsh threats. Someone was about to get hurt. Komodo knew he should go to them, break up the fight, tend to the wounded. It was his responsibility. But he couldn’t move.
“Would you care for some cake, Ms. Brooks?” Ebi asked.
“I don’t know. I’m on this diet. My biospheres don’t converge harmoniously. I’ve got to hold little bags of pills under my tongue until they burst. Every pellet does something different. It’s all written down, somewhere.”
“I made it myself, from my garden. It’s pharmfresh.”
“Well, I guess that’s okay. Sure. Sounds good.”
Ebi went to a corner of the small thinker and returned with a thickly iced cake. Stuck into the cake, lighting up the semigloom of the thinker, were eleven burning candles.
“Today your birthday? Why didn’t you say so before?”
Ebi giggled. “It’s not exactly my birthday.”
“A not-exactly-your-birthday party, just for the two of us?”
“Sort of like that,” Ebi said, softly. “Like your cake?”
“Great! Totally terrific! Best I ever ate!”
“Ms. Brooks, what’s your mom like?”
“My mom?” Sheila Brooks sounded stricken. “My mom is dead.”
“Mine too.”
“Really? That’s sad.”
“Yes. She died the day I was born.”
A quiver came into Sheila Brooks’s voice. “Mine too.”
“Do you remember her?”
“That’s crazy. How can you remember someone who died the day you were born?”
“I remember my mom,” Ebi said, as sweetly as she ever said anything in her life.
“Come on.”
“I really do. It was in the water. Water was all around, mad and angry. But I could still see her, looking at me, smiling. She liked me, I could tell. Except then, she flew away . . . just went, into that water.” Ebi paused a minute, then went on as cheerfully as ever. “You know, Mr. Komodo once told me that I am the only Atom ever born on Radioactive Island, but it’s not true, not exactly. I was born offshore. I could correct Mr. Komodo when he says that, but I don’t. It’s better that way, I think.”
“But that’s impossible. You must have dreamed it,” Sheila Brooks said, her voice cracking. “How can you remember being born? It can’t be done.”
“Is it that unusual? It has always been so simple for me. I just sit here and
think
about it. I wouldn’t say so if it wasn’t true. If I concentrate hard enough, I can do it right now.”
“Right here?”
“Sure. I’ll do it.”
A moment went by with no sound. Outside the thinker, Komodo thought his heart had stopped. Then, piercing, undeniable: “Waaaa!”
“Ebi! Are you all right?”
“Yes,” came a small voice. “Okay. I’m sorry if I alarmed you, Ms. Brooks. But it makes me so happy—happy and sad—to recall that moment. I bet you could remember too. I
know
you could—
absolutely
. You have such a good memory.”
Sheila Brooks was over by the wall of the thinker, her large, spidery hands pressing against the elastic sides. Komodo could see the bony fingers right above his head. “I think I try to. Sometimes I think it’s all I ever do. But I can’t do it—it doesn’t work. Sometimes I think I’m getting close, and then all this other crap, those stupid movies and the rest, they come in and block everything up . . .”
Komodo could hear Sheila Brooks weeping then. She cried for a minute or so until Ebi said, “I think you’d make a great mom, Ms. Brooks.”
“Me? No way. Bobby—my husband, Mr. Zeber. He’s wanted children for so long. But that’s not for me. I’m a mess. Everyone knows it. I read it in the paper. They say I march to the beat of a different drum machine. I’m lucky they don’t have me shut up somewhere, in a bin. It’s where I belong, you know. Not out here. I don’t fit in. Look at me. I can’t even dress right.”
“But I
like
the way you dress.”
“Get out!”
“I like it and I think you’d be a great mom!”
“I could never be anyone’s mom, it wouldn’t be fair.”
“You could be my mom, if you want.”
Sheila Brooks let out a high-pitched laugh. “But Ebi . . . don’t you think it’s a little late for that?”
“No!”
“You’re sweet.”
Komodo couldn’t see, but he knew Ebi’s face must have been big, open. “I’m serious. What do you think about Mr. Komodo?”
“What about Mr. Komodo?”
“You know, if you and Mr. Komodo could . . . then it would almost be like . . . well, maybe you wouldn’t
really
be my mom, but I could pretend that you were, for a little while.”
Sheila squealed like she was a teenager and this was girl talk. “You think me and Mr. Komodo should . . . that’s crazy.”
It was about then that Komodo fainted, fell onto the petals of the thinker, and pulled the whole thing down around Sheila and Ebi’s heads.
Fieldwork
“F
URBALLS!”
They pounced unexpected from the underbrush, rapacious warmbloods, their red rat eyes beady streaks in the greasy moonlight. Onward they surged, flaring bucky incisors, breath hot and clutchy, closing ground. He ran from them, skittered over the mossmuck on hopelessly stunted appendages.
No chance. Not a prayer. Furballs can’t be outrun. It’s Prewire’s instinctual decree, you could look it up: “When confronted by the sudden presence of superior-sized woodchucks and worse, freeze! Make yourself a pithy twig, a braided root—never run away.” That’s because, as any garden skink knows, furballs eyeball peripheral, crosshair on motion. They work in packs, ply canny angles. Plus, they’ve got the speed. They’ll chase you to a corner, rend your leathers gnash by gnash.
So why was he running? Because Prewire’s impulse told him to! “Haul ass!” it screamed. Prewire . . . wrong? How could that be? When Prewire fails, the system’s junked. Termination, over and out. But what was there to do? Nothing overrides Prewire: It impulses, you obey, there is no next question. So he was running, to what he knew was the deadest of ends.
Then the pain was in him, a million electric ants charging up his spinal column as the malignant chomps serrated through to the bone. Rodents to the left, rodents to the right, there was no escape. It was madness! To die here—eaten by shrews in this unknown place, who knew how many million years from home. But then, from across all time came a familiar voice: “Swing your tail! Clout ’em out! Only shot you got!” He knew that voice, recognized those words. They were his own. Well, not exactly his. Rather, they came from that moldy King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms. He’d said them during a curiously similar situation in
Gojiro vs. the Gigantor Prairie Dogs down the Burrow of No Return
. It always pissed the monster off, the way little snatches of pathetic dialogue from those movies stuck inside the Quadcameral like resistant disk viruses. But here, backed against that primeval wall by Prewire’s bum steer, Gojiro was happy for the cue.
Across a hundred ice ages, the message decoded. A body coiled, a tail lashed: a reflex born. Thud! Thud and thud! Furballs flew through the air, yowling clumps of hair. Vertebrae bent and broke against the bark of new-sprung pines, the swamp echoed with their thrashing death throes. What sweet music those last gasps made!
But it wasn’t over. Still they came, exothermic, viviparous, a horde of hyperbolic metabolism. The swinish New Order: There was no turning back the tide, the tyranny. The Empire of the Saurs was diasporized, vanished from the earth. Those coldbloods who remained—suddenly subalterns within the new, harsh hegemony—would have to adapt, become a different race. Without the reign to roam, they required a reconfigured scheme, an updated operating manual. They’d have to accommodate themselves in cracks, get canny in the crannies, never forget they were living in The Man’s world.
A bittersweet moment: to feel power slip from your kind, to become a refugee in the place you once ruled, yet to know that through change, Life goes on, that’s the way of the Evolloo. For no more than a moment later (or was it a hundred thousand years?) in another forest (on which drifting continent?) that same little lizard was again surrounded by gnawing shrews. Except this time he didn’t need input from a melancholy movie star to make good his escape. Now he didn’t run, didn’t give himself away. He couldn’t. “Play dead,” the Prewire commanded. “Play dead or be dead.” Change had come, instinct imprinting the proper course. Without backtalk or precondition, the zard submitted, made himself colder than any stone, breathed not a single breath. The misdirecting fecal pellet, that was a nice new wrinkle, a little extra something to flummox the vaunted sniffer now standard in mammalian snouts. Soon enough, they gave up and skulked away, off to pilfer the young of their brethren or however furball bastards filled their days at the dawn of primate times.
* * *
A Beam? Could that strange compulsion that overtook Gojiro inside the White Light Chamber truly be a Beam? The very word roused the deepest longings. The reptile tried to wrap his battered mentality around the idea. “It’s like I go where I been but I ain’t been, do what I done but I ain’t done, know what I know but I don’t know. Like the ghost’s inside me and I’m the ghost . . . a schizoid for all seasons.”
It couldn’t be a Beam, could it? Beams sprang from the Eye of the Matrix itself, in them flowed the soul of the Mainstem, the cohering force of Life—why would anything like that suddenly root inside his rueful head? The monster rolled himself into a tight ball. What was happening to him? All he knew was once that bizarre pneumatic force clamped its pirate frequency across the Quadcameral dial, back he’d go, through Time’s netherways, stopping off here and there as if to sample a bit of life and cuisine in every cene—Pleisto, Plio; Eo, too.
It ended in that egg. That confounding egg! “Mom!” Then he’d be digging, upward, through hard black dirt. “Mom!”—a glimpse of her face, that’s all he wanted, a picture to remember, treasure. But there was only searing light and a cry.
That cry!
“Waaaa!”
Bleary from his all-era blue jaunt, the reptile split lids, expecting to see Komodo. Every other time he’d woken up wailing, Komodo had been there to soothe and steady, to say it was morning now and the wild things were away. But now there was only Joseph Prometheus Brooks, eight times over, electronic gray and hoary on those Philcos.
Brooks! Riveted to his spot in the middle of the Valley where the Heater came to life, just as the forbidding Ahab once stood beside the mast where he nailed the Whale’s bounty. Brooks . . . staring out . . . staring out.
* * *
It seemed like the best thing to do at the time: Wipe away all emotionality, declare Brooks an object, a neutral item suitable for study, clinical use. It was only fair, Gojiro decided, recalling the humiliation he’d felt as he pored over those field studies that constantly turned up on Radioactive Island beaches, monographs with titles like
Soma-sensory Pathways in the Medial Lemniscus and Related Structures of the South Sea Varanidae
. How hideous it was to think of those safari-suited bio-boys smugly aggregating scats, pulsing strobes, dropping zards into infernal obstacle courses. Criminals. Who appointed them experts on the ’tilic life? By what license did they suppose their reports to be definitive? Nevertheless, Gojiro couldn’t keep away from those master theses. Bereft of Bunch and Beam, he felt he had no choice but to grab whatever shred of secondhand self-knowledge came his way, even if it came interred within the provincial sapienspeak of Order, Class, and Phylum. Now, however, he resolved to apply the same torpid criteria to Brooks. Joseph Prometheus Brooks: specimen. There was justice to it.
As might be expected, the reptile’s initial inclination was toward the ultra-invasive, the noggin nip, neural removal. And why not? Wasn’t Brooks’s brain legend, totemic? “The most powerful mind in the history of mankind has stopped thinking!”—isn’t that how they hyperbolized in that newsreel of Brooks’s phony funeral? But really, the saga of Brooks’s brain was only beginning, what with all the legal hassles regarding which scholarly institute might be granted access to the scientist’s supposedly defunct mentality, not to mention those tabloid stories about Israeli graverobbers selling cuttings of the vaunted cogitator on the black market. Brooks’s brain could stand a little demystification, the monster decided. An image invited: the mythic mind sitting like a Jell-O mold in the middle of an open, upraised claw and then squeezed tight until it oozed from between every leathery digit, electrostat tests to be made on the runoff.
How the great reptile would have loved to set Brooks down in a T-maze, raising and lowering his thermoregs at irregular intervals, then harshly grading the scientist’s performance in various motor skills. However, owing to the promise he’d made to Komodo barring such hands-on intervention, Gojiro was forced to reject that methodology. He would have to restrict his analysis to mere observation.
Off the surface, there wasn’t much to see. It was amazing how little Brooks did and how standardized those few actions appeared to be. Every morning, two hours before sunrise, the old man would appear in the doorway of that windswept stone house and walk stiff-gaited, as if on wooden legs, to the same place—exactly six feet to the right of the arched gate—where he assumed his singular posture. Then he’d just stare, motionless, his eyes fixed on a single spot, his cranelike neck upright, unwavering. At the start of his investigation, Gojiro could barely stay awake. “Talk about being out in the sun too long, this dude is pickled,” he yawned. But then, as the hours wore on, watching the stationary scientist turned hypnotic, a visual mantra. How he kept
looking
! There was a withering fortitude about it, an indomitable willfulness. The reptile’s conviction of Brooks’s madness began to slip; with gathering uneasiness he allowed the possibility that there
was
something out there—something the worldshatterer wanted to see. The monster labeled the old man’s behavior “the searching position.”
Substructured within this enigmatic trait was the equally puzzling “cradling” mannerism. Gojiro made these notes: “As if performing a sensory exercise in a beginning acting class, the Subject displays open, inclined palms, thereby giving the appearance of cradling an absent, rounded article of indeterminate size. Subject alternately holds this object close to his abdomen and then, with a small careful motion, appears to face it outward, in the general orientation of the previously described searching position. Inquiry into the striking analogy between this self-presentation and the portrait executed by Subject’s deceased wife, Leona Ross Brooks, approximately forty years earlier invites numerous textual interrogatories. Recommend close reading of this apparent coincidence at some later date.”
Gojiro filled several looseleafs in this manner. However, with each scrupulously recorded twitch of Brooks’s prominent Adam’s apple, each cross-referenced foot shuffle and hat rearrangement, the monster grew more impatient with the limitations that the same midshot from those fuzzy Philcos imposed upon his investigation.
“Got to get in tight.”
It wasn’t exactly going against his word, Gojiro rationalized, frantically rummaging through Komodo’s black bags. He’d sworn he wouldn’t leave the White Light Chamber to mash Brooks up. That was the last thing he wanted to do now. This was research, this was for science! Komodo could have no quarrel with that. Still, it was no party pushing that syringe, its needle fatter than Minnesota’s bluetipped cue, through the parietal, coursing that shrink fluid into his system. Dosage was a crap shoot—a drop too much and Alice’s dormouse wouldn’t know him from a swimmy paramecium. Through luck and little else, however, he managed to stabilize himself at approximately fourteen inches, a tolerable dimension.
After a monumental struggle with the passageway door, the miniaturized monster made his way out into the Encrucijada. From the beginning it felt like a mistake. Mutant or no mutant, noontime walkabouts in the desert heat were contraindicated. If his blood boiled over, bubbled from his panting mouth, he would have no refuge, no remedy, no excuse. But when he felt the Valley floor beneath his clawfeet, its sand turned to glass by the Heater’s fury, he knew there could be no turning back.
“
Brooks!
” Fifty feet from the unmoving old man, the shout came out before it could be properly suppressed. It wasn’t his intention to make contact with Brooks. This fieldwork was supposed to be noninterventionist, impersonal. But who was he kidding? How could anything between him and Brooks be impersonal? The two of them went back too far.
“
Brooks. Remember me?
”
“
Brooks! Out of the multitudes, why me?
”
It was useless, pointless. Maybe, amid the chiaroscuro of a rubberized volcano, deep in the fevered fantasies of a half-mad lizard, a man in black with heart-stopping stare could be made to answer for his crimes. But out here, beneath the blaring sun, every accusation desiccated to dust, blew away on the swirling Valley winds. What did Komodo say—that the old man looked
through
him? Now the reptile knew what his friend meant. Brooks’s demeanor did not invite smalltalk; it looked like you could snap a popper ’neath his jutting nose and he’d never raise an eyebrow.
But it was more than that, Gojiro realized as he drew closer. There was a trajectory problem. Given the near-imperceptible tilt of his dark eyes within their deep sockets, there was no way Brooks could see him, or any other object so close to the ground. “Subject’s field of vision assumes an elevated aspect,” the reptile noted. “Will attempt calibration.”
Cursing the lack of instrumentation, Gojiro nevertheless protracted the incline of Brooks’s sightline to be between thirty and forty-five degrees. The scientist appeared to be focusing on a distinct sector of sky that the monster estimated to be between two hundred and eight hundred feet above the Valley floor. “Weird,” he said to himself, peering into the empty blue. “It’s like Brooks is waiting for something to show up in that spot.” Not that the reptile was able to continue this train of thought, for right then he felt that hot breath on his neck.
“Yike!” It was that basset hound! He’d seen the bejowled canine during his earlier surveillance but had paid it little mind, understanding household pets to be a typical sentimentality-cloaked sapien expression of dominion. Even obvious tangentials like Brooks might have a dog; he probably needed the mutt, there didn’t seem to be anybody else around. Now, however, the monster found himself looking up into the dark hollow of the pooch’s yellowtoothed business end. It turned into a pathetic little chase, the stupid dog gaining all the while. Finally, the shrunken leviathan flung himself under the raised house, just beyond the reach of that wet black snout. “Fuck you, Fido! Rat basset!” Cornered by a flabfaced hound who for sure never caught a rabbit, what kind of format was that for the King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms to find himself in? What a day! First furballs from prehistoria—now this! The reptile was disgusted. It seemed like hours before that idiot dog got bored with his scent and he was free to move around again.