The Pure Cold Light Read online

  While the bastard Ripper shrieked and twitched in the final moments of his life, Amerind’s neighbors poked their heads in through the ratty curtain. Their faces seemed swelled up at the sight of her all naked and bloody. The Ripper’s disease had spread to them, she could tell, and Amerind yowled and swiped her knife at the fiends before they could finish cutting her up. They backed off out of sight, but not for long.

  The curtain lunged at her. It tore off its nails, grew hands that reached for her, and two bodies slammed into Amerind and pinned her to her bed. Maybe she stabbed one of them. She couldn’t be sure. The curtain twisted them all up. But they got the knife away from her.

  Their hands swarmed all over her, shredding the curtain with her knife, taking her skirt, her sheets, making bindings and a gag. Ripper’s blood thick upon her hid her own flowing wound. She kicked and writhed and screeched like a banshee, and looked like something equally fantastic.

  They hoisted her up and carried her through the narrow aisles of Box City, up and down the black slate walk, past the Liberty Bell, and into the street. Her flesh in the daylight was sallow where it wasn’t bloody.

  From out of the foamboard and plywood and plastic shacks, people emerged, drawn by the noisy parade. She saw their breaths smoke like fires, their faces stinging pink in the chill morning air.

  A cheering, crazy crowd accreted. She, like a flayed sacrifice, hung up ahead of it all. Appropriately, her black hair glistened with blood.

  By the time they reached 9th and Chestnut Streets, Amerind had recovered her senses and was pleading for her life, but the gag kept her protestations secure, and, besides, the matter of disposing of her had become a festival. She did not hate them for it exactly. She thought this might be God’s fit punishment for the times when she had taken part, when she’d urged other hands to throw other sacrifices into the Snake Pit. That was what they called the unknown depths of Market East Station.

  All kinds of stories existed about what lurked down there, on various levels, in endless tunnels, in dark recesses where no sane citizen—not even derelicts such as themselves—would venture. Graffiti glyphs on the walls shouted spraypaint warnings of the contaminating madness down there.

  If only they’d let her explain herself…but they flung her down the steps as if she were a sack of garbage. She tumbled and rolled, struck her elbow and cried out at the pain, struck her head and lost consciousness.

  To those above, watching, the bluish dark of the Snake Pit swallowed her whole. Everyone cheered.

  ***

  Amerind awoke to hands softly caressing her, as delicate as bat wings. The darkness was so pure that she thought she had been blinded, and in a panic she tried swatting at the hands. Her right arm hardly moved, and that little motion slashed the perfect darkness with lightning bolts of agony. The gentle hands withdrew. A moment later the wick of a lumpish candle flared to life beside her.

  She found herself inside a box hardly larger than the one she’d been thrown out of, except that this one had a funny little barred window and a bench. She was lying beside the bench.

  Holding the candle was a man she at first took to be wearing black livery. Then she realized that she was looking through most of him.

  Seeing her astonishment, he tried to reassure her with a smile, but this was complicated by the absence of most of the left half of his face. “I fixed your arm,” he explained softly, too embarrassed to look at her directly. He took a brown cloak off a hook by the window and wrapped himself inside it; his invisible body took on substance, folds of drapery outlined a spindly torso. It was a kind of magic trick—hey, presto! and now you see him.

  “It’s fractured,” he said, “the ulna, just behind the wrist. Lucky that’s all, the way the topsiders threw you.” She wondered if he’d been watching the whole time. He floated nearer, his one blue eye wide as if with hysteria. “I’ll f-find you some clothes, how would that be? My name’s G-Glimet.” When he moved the candle aside, she saw the ancient scars at his temple and knew that he wasn’t a ghost.

  Glimet was the most decayed Orbiter she’d ever seen.

  He had been reduced to his right arm and shoulder, and the right half of his head and neck. Any sane man would have sought rehabilitation long before that, she thought, most anybody would have turned back when their toes and fingers went, but not Glimet. Clearly, he was forging ahead into uncharted territory.

  She’d been told that final stage Orbiters simply vanished like ghosts, like smoke. Until then, their bodies maintained some tenuous connection to this world. She’d met plenty such in her line of work. Some offered to let her feel their “missing” limbs—she’d only acted on the offer once, the first time. Her fingers, waving through the air, had pressed into something spongy that she couldn’t see, that wasn’t there. Just remembering the sensation made her skin crawl. She’d been scared for a month afterwards that the change was contagious, that any day her body would start to rot out of existence the same way. She’d asked everyone who knew, or pretended to know, all about it. Ex-Orbiters told her tales, like old sea-farers: It was sticking your hands or feet in cold cooking grease; and forever after you had to drag yourself through thick jelly that you could never see or get away from one inch. It slowed them all down, and made some go crazy. But then if you stuck on a sock or a glove, there were the missing toes and fingers again, like out of that magic hat—here and not here.

  The extremities went first. And usually once their toes or fingers began to disappear, they got themselves weaned off the shit in a hurry. She would have. She’d never seen anything like this piece of a man, this floating ghost. How long it must have taken him to end up this way. How many Orbits. Did it ache so good that he couldn’t be without it? There would be visions, wouldn’t there? Christ, how the stupid fuckers all babbled about their visions.

  Without drawing closer, Glimet offered her the hissing candle, placing it carefully on the bench above her. Then, true to his word, he set off in search of clothes. She watched him float in slow lurches, as if walking underwater.

  The moment he was gone Amerind worked her way up to a sitting position, discovering that she had no clothes, nothing to cover her grimy, blood-drenched nakedness but the shreds of cloth she’d come wrapped in. She couldn’t leave if she wanted to.

  Tilting toward the candle, she carefully lifted her wounded breast and found that her savior had pressed a thick piece of batting there to stanch the bleeding. Glimet might be crazy, but at least he wasn’t bad. The gash throbbed but she wasn’t about to peel off the batting. She leaned back, and took stock of her surroundings.

  What place was this long tall box? The walls were rough wood with a few flakes of green paint still attached. There was a narrow shelf below the barred window, and a half dozen cans—most without labels—stacked on it. Outside the bars she couldn’t see anything. The walls showed holes where things had been screwed into them once, but all those things were gone, maybe to make more room. It would be cozy for one person. With all the thermal blankets Glimet had stuffed in here, it was downright warm.

  Amerind found herself trembling with the effort of sitting up. She gathered the covers around her, burrowing down into them, and drew her knees up halfway. The candle threw wavering shadows past her.

  Her trembling grew after awhile to a body-wracking shiver. She couldn’t make it stop. She hugged her knees to her belly; her teeth began clacking together. The world peeled back. Her thoughts fumbled muzzily along, slowing, drifting. The shaking drained from her limbs, left her limp with exhaustion.

  She was nearly asleep when Glimet returned. He set aside the discarded clothes he’d brought her and floated closer to lay his right hand across her shiny forehead. Hot. Sweat had made stripes in the blood on her face.

  He tried to smooth her hair back, but it had stiffened into knotty clumps: she’d bled from her scalp. His fingers tangled, tugged. She winced, but was too exhausted and confused to do more than mutter. He leaned over her.

  She had hig
h cheeks and long lashes beneath full, thick brows. Deep lines around her eyes. More than that he couldn’t tell, except that he found in her face an illusive perfection. He patted her hair lightly so as not to snarl his fingers again.

  Glimet couldn’t remember when he’d last been with a woman. A couple times in the early days while he was orbiting, but that had been years back. His body didn’t seem much interested in the notion now. Sex had no importance on the other side. To get all the way to there—that was all that mattered.

  He fit his palm over his eye and sat back on the blankets and rugs. A crooked smile bent his face. He did not notice as he began to jabber about the Other Place.

  He took his hand away and reconsidered Amerind. “Maybe you’d wanna go with me,” he said. “I–I would take you, sure I would. You’re so beautiful, sure. But you haven’t even started, have you? You’ve never flown, and I’ve almost finished.” He hovered over her, his single eye round with inspiration. “I know what,” he said. He nodded to himself, then blew out the candle. Dreamily, she sensed him lying down against her back.

  He stared into a world that Amerind Shikker had never seen. The deep darkness offered a perfect canvas against which to view it. “Would you like to?” he asked, although she’d said nothing. “Maybe there’s a way,” but she had already fallen asleep.

  Chapter Three: Gansevoort & the Gang of Four

  Everyone was watching him; they just weren’t looking. Emerging from his cubicle, Ton Gansevoort immediately, nervously, scanned the whole office. No one looked up, no one even glanced his way. He had become invisible against the tan dividers, the desks and cabinets and ergonomic furnishings. That was how he knew that they knew that he’d been ordered upstairs.

  “Hold all my calls, Cheryl,” he told his assistant as he swept past her. “Cancel everything.” He didn’t want to see her expression, no matter what it was. He heard the twist of humiliation in his voice. Shame scorched his cheeks.

  One morning during his second-grade year of school, little Ton had shat himself in the middle of class. Unable to conceal the fact—too afraid to raise his hand and excuse himself to the bathroom—he’d locked up, scalded with shame. The sweetly awful stench had permeated the entire classroom. The teacher, a cold, mean-spirited old bitch named Battlecourt, had only to look at him to identify the culprit. In front of everyone she demanded to know if there was something he wanted to share with them, as if shitting in his pants were a part of ‘Show and Tell.’ Everyone had known. Their eyes had stabbed him in the back like a hundred poisoned arrows.

  He had read somewhere that moments of such absolute terror could alter brain chemistry, actually change the path of neurotransmitter flow forever. He was living proof. Second-grade mortification fed the flames of adult terror, as autonomic as his heartbeat, leaping as it did from the pit of his soul.

  He dissembled as best he could by concentrating on his reflection in the brown marble floor tiles; but at the doorway he couldn’t help turning to survey the room.

  Still no one looked up. They must have sensed his radiating shame from the doorway. They needed for him to leave so that, behind his back, they might lift their heads, trade their knowing glances and begin their scheming—forging quick quid pro quo relationships in preparation for any sudden restructuring of the department. He imagined their salivating in anticipation of his decline.

  Beyond his co-workers—beyond the blue-tinted, etched-glass cubicles in which they dwelt—green floor-length curtains separated a broad row of high windows. He looked out upon a familiar view of the tower in which he resided (it was one of his favorite jokes that he could keep an eye on himself from either vantage point). He wished that he were across the plaza now, in his cramped apartment, hiding safely.

  Excommunicated, he walked out into the conveyidor and stepped onto the metal belt. Only one lift serviced the COs’ suite, totally private and set back from the rest of the offices. He watched other faces passing him on the opposite belt, faces he hardly knew. Many of the men sported the new, studded, high ruff collars. Gansevoort was sadly behind the times where fashion was concerned. He never felt quite comfortable in his work clothes. He wished now that he had bought a new wardrobe, if only to look smart before the four officers, as if the right attire might somehow salvage his career. (“We were going to fire you, old man, but now that we’ve seen what a sharp dresser you are, we’ve decided to turn over the reins of the company to you.”)

  Recent rumors abounded that ScumberCorp had been divesting itself of unsatisfactory subsidiaries—Lopango Chemicals and Ars Gratis Entertainments definitely, and maybe a half-dozen other companies whose true ownership couldn’t even be ascertained. Such gossip always hinted at layoffs and personnel cuts. He believed, if there were to be layoffs, they would start in the very core of personnel, in Human Resources itself. What better way to clean house than to dismiss that threadbare local HR Manager, Gansevoort? He was the obvious target—the COs could smell the shit in his pants from all the way up on the top floor, twenty-five years away.

  He rode the conveyer as if it carried him to the guillotine, and spent the time combing through his life, zeroing in on an endless string of mistakes, certain that each one contributed to his doom. He had never felt competent in his job: he had always suspected there were hidden quotas he’d failed to fill, competitors he should have enticed into the company, job duties he’d carelessly overlooked. He didn’t know what he’d done, but he knew he was guilty of something and always had been, since at least the second grade if not from before birth. If he had been on his way into heaven, Ton Gansevoort would have talked himself into hell.

  ***

  The belt delivered him to the main foyer. There he confronted a glass and gold construct of the SC logo into which was built a display case containing four heads—three males and one female—Gotoh, Sherk, Kosinus, and Rajcevich. Extraordinarily realistic LifeMasks of the four COs. Their beautiful eyes followed his approach.

  To his mind the company logo looked like a snake about to eat its own tail.

  The heads began to speak. “Mars Colony,” said the first, the Japanese face.

  “If not today, then tomorrow,” the second, Kosinus added.

  “Sure,” Gansevoort muttered.

  “If not this generation, then the next,” the head of the third man proposed.

  Gansevoort knew the speech; he couldn’t remember a time when they hadn’t been promising to take mankind to glory. He recited along with the head of the woman, Rajcevich: “A new world will open to us and return mankind to greatness. On Mars.”

  She smiled at him, expressing her pride in his knowledge, as if he were her son.

  He passed the logo as the fourth head began a long recitation of the company’s many successes. Without an audience, the speech cut off after a few seconds, and the heads rested again.

  The masks had been in place for over twenty years. Gansevoort couldn’t imagine what the Gang of Four (as nearly everyone called them) looked like now. He would find out, he figured despondently, all too soon.

  A woman named Fulrod ran the officers’ private lift. She was a wizened little gnome really, a fairy-tale troll guarding a bridge; she’d been squatting there in her little blue-glass booth since the Declaration of Independence had been signed. Possibly she wasn’t even real. Her head like a dish antenna tracked his approach. Her severe haircut uncovered her jug ears. He thought he saw them twist like surface-search radar antennae.

  In the voice of his second-grade teacher, she said, “You’re expected, Mr. Gansevoort.” Then she smiled. He almost burst into tears.

  She must have hit a hidden switch, because the deco-crafted door of the lift slid aside on cue.

  Gansevoort passed her, his lips in a paralyzed curl, desperately making a great show of being in control and at ease. It was at times like these that floor tiles buckled to trip you or furniture shifted to snag your trousers or the elevator cable snapped and the car sheared your body in two just as you were stepping
in.

  He took his place in the redwood-paneled car. His knuckles had gone white; if he hadn’t already chewed his nails down, they would have dug into his palms. The door rolled smoothly shut. There was almost no perception of movement, just a single flashing green light in the panel.

  The door opened again, upon a foreign scene—walls of fusuma design, all constructed of pale mounted rice paper, sliding panels enclosing this small room like the chamber in the heart of a maze; shift the panels and change the true path. Black glacé leather cushions lined the wall to his left, separated in the middle by a sunken rock garden full of bulbous, even phallic, cacti. Huge needles. The floor was bare wood.

  At the far end of the room, another man sat with his shoes off, his legs folded. He held a cup and saucer. A red-glazed teapot stood on a small table in front of him. He was wearing a black suit, a high, studded red collar, and a multi-colored silk scarf. He was slender, with a leonine profile accentuated by the straight fall of blond hair off the back of his head. So still was he that he might have been a piece of ornamentation. Gansevoort shuddered.