Paradise Tales (16 page)

I have been false, thought Alex. Where? I want to write about the future. How is that dishonest?

He had known all along of course. The future could not be sampled. It was not there to be sampled. The future would not be, could not be, a patchwork quilt of things that were past, stale whimsy and other people’s books. The future would be truly new.

He was smiling. The future would be new and clean, thrilling. I don’t want any more screens, any more data banks, he thought. And I don’t want to sit alone anymore, either, trying to dredge up something new from nowhere. Speculating with a few spare ideas like fruit left too long in the bowl. Using surrealism like cinnamon to spice it up. Stealing, lying to myself.

All that’s over now. Transfixed on the pavement, Alex saw a way ahead. The tires still hissed.

He-roch-che marched toward the final battle.

There was a castle on a rock. Ringed round it were the enemy, still some distance away. Tha-in-ge rode him, encased in armour. She was like an armadillo, all in spines. The spines would blow free in flashes of light and powder. They shot out into dusk, seeking life. Drawn to it, the missiles destroyed life from a distance.

Tha-in-ge had a tiny harp and played sweet sad songs of killing for the Unending War.

In the air all around them, came the sound of massed bagpipes, tart, bitter, sweet all at once. And underneath that, somehow low and sad, there was an Indian war chant. Hey ya hey hey, Hey ya hey hey.

They marched through the remains of a park. There were clipped hedges in concentric patterns, around a Stonehenge temple. The grass was pockmarked with humps of earth dug by moles and the hooves of the temple goats and oxen. The two armies advanced.

Anachronism, thought He-roch-che, having no Indian word for it. I fight with giant battle-axe while Tha-in-ge fires intelligent rockets from her back. A sinuous symbolic pattern wound its way through his imagination—a summary of this constructed world and how it came to have its mixed technology.

Lies. He-roch-che felt anger.

Ahead of him were the Army of the Perverse. They wore scarves of translucent fabric, lace as well as metal. Their armour showed genitals, they mocked the more lumpen mass of soldiery that followed the Ambition. The Perverse wanted the world to end in pleasure.

The Ambition wanted to rule it, and He-roch-che shared that Ambition.

Why? Because he had been so constructed. And who had made him, to live a life through him? He-roch-che addressed his audience directly. My life is as real to me as yours is to you.

I could have made me better, thought He-roch-che. I am some blunt, dull idea—big muscles, murderous intent, a crest of hair, a skull earring. I would have made me slimmer, sleeker, faster. I could have created more animals, more birds. I would have made my life with Tha-in-ge more tender. I would have had nothing second hand, nothing stale, nothing second rate.

He-roch-che hated his creator.

Our blood will coat this green field to depth of my ankles, he thought, for you.

Suddenly loudspeakers behind him sputtered. They spoke in false, tinny voices. “Pi-sing!” they cried, a last remaining Kaw word meaning Game. The bagpipes ceased, the Ambition Army charged.

He-roch-che feinted a blow that would have left his midriff exposed, pulled back, and used the hook to grapple and disarm. Then his axeblade came down on the neck, seeking the weak point of his enemy’s armour. He felt Tha-in-ge above him exchange blows. She was not meant for hand-to-hand. In panic, she fired spines in all directions.

His lance was stuck between plates of metal on his enemy’s shoulder. Another cohort of the Perverse came at him, sword drawn. With a wrench, He-roch-che was able to swing his first victim into the path of the blow. Metal rang on metal. Lubricated by blood, his axe slipped free and swung into the face of the second cohort.

Tha-in-ge screeched.

An axe—from where—had buried itself in He-roch-che’s arm. The weight of it was dazing, numbing. The edges of He-roch-che’s torn armour dug into the wound. He brought his own axe up and despatched his third Perverse that day.

Racing, his mind reflected. I am the hero, he thought. I cannot die.

Oh really? In this world, the knowledge of medicine had been driven out by the war. In this world, with a wound like that, he was already dead. It might take time, weeks perhaps, throbbing with infection and fever. But he was already, mathematically at least, dead.

He flipped in closer to the wound, explored its depths. He had been cut to the bone. The bone itself had been cut. Blood welled, like the seasons, unstoppable.

There was nothing to do, but go on fighting. Some part of his constructed mind resolved a problem for itself. Now he knew why people, real people in history, had gone on fighting.

He-roch-che flipped out of the wound, back to battle, he flipped far far back from it, viewed it mistily from far away, the beautiful castle on the rock, the beautiful green garden. Real War Eagle flew.

There was a word from his own language he could use.

Wah-kon-dah, he thought. The word in both his and Tha-in-ge’s language was said to mean God. It actually meant Great Mysterious Spirits.

“Wah-kon-dah!” He-roch-che said, to the people watching, listening, enjoying. Mysterious Spirits, feel this. Feel what it is like to kill someone for sport.

Somewhere through the screen of his virtual reality, beyond the sunset with its orange sun, its blue and purple clouds, its hint of green, there was another world where people watched him die for fun.

He flipped back. It was raining blood from Tha-in-ge’s severed back. With a howl, He-roch-che launched himself at a writhing, mocking wall of the Perverse, and he cut and slashed and cut and slashed, trying to cut his way through the screen of his virtual world. He was trying to cut his way through the fiction.

The tires hissed past. There was a clicking of heels as a woman in fishnet tights and Carmen Miranda hat walked around Alex with a cheerful nod. “Rain’s over,” the woman murmured. She was taking her dog, and enhanced Watchhound, for a walk.

“Have a nice day,” said the dog.

Alex was still riveted by his idea. No sampling. But no staring into nothing, either.

How about a genuine, scientific excavation of the future? Surely the most complex surface turbulence of any system was social interaction. But if there was an N constant, couldn’t it predict the sudden shifts, the irrational responsiveness of the world? Could Chaos predict when the Muslim Alliance might break apart, when the New Age islands could finally cohere into a political system? A fiction that was actually a form of research, with testable hypotheses, building, building a virtual construct of the future, to be tested, refined each month, improved.

And sure, monthly updates on what the model was doing, that would be news in itself.

This surely, he thought, was the future of science fiction.

A shopping Priority Board was at hand, on the panel of the shelter of the bus stop. It was a way of helping people consume. He keyed in his password, coded the service he wanted, Scientific Theory and Modelling, asked for a ballpark estimate of cost, no upper limit but with possible financing alternatives to be displayed. He wanted to build a team of scientists.

He waited as the machine resolved his priorities. There was a stirring of air in his face.

He looked at the Shopping Board, its rounded edges, its high resolution display, the ratta-tat-tat Static music it played. How sweet, he thought, how quaint, how redolent of this decade.

He looked at the street, its brick frontages, the too typical billboards. One of them was very familiar, made famous by an old photograph, a billboard that had a tendency to show up in every construct of the period.

What? Oh. Alex remembered that he was part of a series,
Lives of the Great Artists.
He remembered and then forgot it. Self-conscious constructs helped navigate through a fantasy, but now verisimilitude was all.

Realism had come back into fashion.

It made a nest in his stomach. Humming with its wings, it produced a sensation of continual excitement. He knew he would digest it. The walls of its cells would break down, giving up their burden of genes. He knew they would join with his own. Life here worked in different ways.

He became pregnant. All over his skin, huge pale blisters bubbled up, yearning to be lanced. He clawed at them until they burst, with a satisfying lunging outward of fluid and new life.

He gave birth to things that looked like raw liver. He squeezed them out from under the pale loose skin of the broken blisters, and onto the ground. They pulled themselves up into knots of muscle and stretched themselves out again. In this way, they drew themselves across the ground, dust sticking to each of them like a fine suede coat.

They could speak, with tiny voices. “Home,” they cried. “Home, home, home,” like birds. They wanted to go back to him. They were part of him, they remembered being him, they had no form. They needed his form to act. They clustered around him for warmth at night, mewling for reentry. In the end, he ate them, to restore them. He could not face doing anything else.

Their mother ate them, too. “They will be reborn as hummingbirds,” she told him. She gave birth instead to bouquets of roses and things that looked like small toy trains.

He did not trust her. He knew she was collecting his memories from them. She collected people’s memories. She saw his doubt.

“I am like a book,” she said. “Books are spirits in the world that take an outward form of paper and words. They are the work of everyone, a collection. I am like that. I am communal. So are you.”

Her directness embarrassed him. His doubts were not eased. He walked through the rustling tundra of intelligent grasses. The hairs on the barley heads turned like antennae. The grass was communal too.

When he came back to the woman who was not real, she had grown larger. She lay entwined in the grass and hugged him; she opened up and enveloped him. Warm flesh, salmon pink with blue veins, closed over him moist and sheltering, sizzling like steak and thumping like Beethoven. He lived inside her.

Prying ribbons explored him gently, opened him up. They nestled in his ears, or crept down his nose, insinuated their way past his anus, reached needle thin down the tip of his penis. They untied his belly button, to feed him. Flesh was a smaller sea in which, for a time, he surrendered his independent being.

What conjunction could be more complete than that? When he emerged after some months, he was a different person. He had a different face. It had grown out of him, out of his old one. He looked into her eyes and saw the reflection of his new face. It was a shock. This was the face of a conqueror, a hero, older, like a head on a Roman coin.

Her eyes looked back at him, amused and affectionate. “You will go away now,” she told him. “You have become bored. You should always listen to boredom or disgust. It is telling you that it is time to move.”

On the other world, the world he had come from, there had been a fluorescent sign outside his window.

BUILDING TOMORROW, the sign had read, WITH THE PEOPLE OF TODAY.

It did not seem to him that this was possible.

Rain would pimple the glass of the window, breaking up the red light from the sign, glowing red light drops of blood. And he would listen to the wind outside, or fight his way along the blustery streets under clouds that were the color of pigeons.

Everything was covered over by concrete. There were no trees; the buildings had been cheaply made and were not kept clean. The people were the only things that were soft.