Transcendence (37 page)

“
We’d better abandon ship,” he went on. “I don’t know how hot the pod is, but I’m sure it doesn’t take much to boil off enough chemical ice to turn this cabin into our coffin.” No response.

“
Janus?”

Your cerebral circus has its first visitor.

The Ferris wheel spins behind your 3VRD representation of yourself, its lights whirling a quick swirl of red and orange and neon pink, its organ-music banging away as madfast as you can make it go. An army of mutants and clowns swarms around you in a cloud of gaudy uniforms; they murmur wordless sounds and advance slowly toward the visitor. The fire-eater does his trick, swallowing a blazing sword. You have a flash of genius and change the sword’s shape to that of a phallus.

The visitor turns and breaks into a run.

Anything for revenge. God-damned, piss-assed, murderous revenge. That’s all you have left. Most of the rest was stripped away long ago, so thoroughly that you can’t even remember what’s missing. And now what’s left? Life, even life itself? Fuck no. Tin Jack and Bitch couldn’t follow the simple script. First went the
Bounty
, and then the lifeboat. Now you’re stranded with traitors on a hostile world. What’s left?

Revenge. That’s how you’ve made it this far, by sucking the life out of others, ripping out their souls and devouring them. Human sacrifices to you, for you, given unto you by you. Filthy fucking humans. Tin Jack’s darling little pitiful story had at least one accurate element: Earth is a shithouse. But we’re all in it together, no matter how far we run. Might as well stay alive. Only way to stay alive is through revenge. One or two more sacrifices and you’ll be ready for the flush. But gotta have at least that last one, or you’ll die unavenged, for nothing.

A slick breeze sifts through the folds of your clownsuit, all sheen and silk and gliding across your skin. You are a neon angel, your wings functional yet still works of art. They flutter impatiently behind you, the color of oilslicks, glinting in the afternoon sunshine.

“
Look,” you call out to Pilot Janus Bitch’s retreating back—and what a lovely, sculptured back!—“that’ll do you no good, my dear. The circus only goes as far as the road.”

Slam! She runs up against the edge of the construct and bounces off, onto her sweet ass in the dust. You chuckle lightly and walk toward her.

Oh, how loosely her bra and hip-hugger skirt hang over her milky skin. Oh, yes, this will be sweet fucking revenge. It’s been much, much too long since the last sacrifice. The virtual gods are famished.

“
You piece of shit, Eyes!” she screams, scuffling upright like a lightning-bolt of meat and facing you. “Jack is going to rip you a new asshole.”

“
Luscious image, but I think not, my sweetling,” you say, now close enough to smell the perfume of her sweaty fear. “He’s having a little adventure in his card, and it’ll take him hours before he believes he has drowned. I suppose he’ll die by then. You know, cardiac shock and all that.” You let out a long sigh and look cherubic in your angel costume.

Bitch’s eyes tighten, and you watch a muscle spasm in her neck. My lord, but doesn’t she have a well-designed 3VRD. Of course, your buffers and amps assist her virtual existence, bring her more to life. The postmodern Doktor Frankenstein, a-work in your skull. If only you could have watched her inward journey, the one you induced aboard the missile, you might have been able to produce specific, dramatic symbols from her past.

“
You think you’re master here?” she says, her voice like tiger fur running along your eardrums, soft and sharp.

“
This will be more fun than I’d anticipated,” you tell her.

She produces her Ticco massaccel pistol, the same she carried aboard the
Bounty
. Fine memory for detail. A little unexpected, a little scary. A chill of pleasure dances along your spine like elven fingertips. You hurriedly whip up a personal EM shield and cast it around your body. Can’t let the sacrifice harm the high priest in his own chambers, can we?

Bitch pulls the trigger of her finely reproduced weapon, sweeping it across your entourage, tragically mutilating them. Clowns laugh themselves to death in seeping puddles of blood and red dust, mutants’ already tortured bodies are torn asunder as if by the hand of some insensitive surgeon, experimenting with a cruder tool of his trade. Oh, yes, the surgeons are the worst, aren’t they? Just look at dear old Dad.

“
Damn you,” you mutter through teeth clenched so tightly you wonder if they’ll shatter into sharp bits on your tongue. Do not think of Dad. He’s been gone a long time. He already was a sacrifice. You already ate up his soul. He can’t start haunting you again, back from the grave.

The last of the mutants falls. His hyperdermal ribcage served him well, until the bleached bones finally shattered and let the microscopic pellets find his puttylike thorax.

“
And then there were two,” you say. Her pistol buzzes on. Your forcefield shimmers as the projectiles collide with it and deflect. She put no limit on her magazine. Fine. That’s cheating, but you have the home-turf advantage, anyway. The closer the sacrifice is to your power, the more thrilling the victory.

You take a step toward her, feeling your cock rise from its silken wraps and through; your wings extend full broad behind you like a halo. Light passes through them as through stained glass, casting fuchsia and crimson on her feather-white skin.

A twisted expression of terror contorts Bitch’s face, and the gun drops from her slack hand. Her knees come awkwardly together and her mouth begins to tremble. Quiet words slip between those cushiony lips; you up the volume to catch what she’s saying:

“‘
. . .this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman because she was taken out of Man.’”

You’re not quite sure what to make of that. You look down and see the exposed and shattered skeletons of your henchmen, but she’s looking at you, not them. She does something indecipherable with her hand before those ripe-melon tits and speaks again:

“‘
He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed a cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.’”

Oh, my. You see, you’re no ignorant curr; you’ve read the retrolit. “Bible,” it’s called. How handy that you’ve stumbled upon the symbol of the angel, coming toward her cock-first. The two ought to fit nicely together.

Her voice rises louder by many decibels, stronger:

“‘
Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth; and there were peals of thunder, voices, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake.’”

Lo and behold! The ground beneath your circus begins to tremble, and heavy clouds mount in an electric-blue sky, muddying it up. Sparks of lightning flicker through the muck.

“
Now, now,” you say, “bad girl. This is my circus, and only I am the god of sacrifices. Stop it now!” You shout the last three words with the force of her storm, making the thunder yours.

But she isn’t hearing you. She isn’t here at all anymore. This won’t be any fun if her mind has collapsed in on itself. Never in threescore sacrifices has this happened, a sacrifice destroying him or herself before you even really begin.

“
Damn fucking Bitch. This is not supposed to work this way. Lighten up.”

And then from the sky, rain begins to fall like lava, and you realize the clouds are rising from only one direction: a mushroom cloud, nuclear fallout, radiation . . . she’ll ruin everything, she’ll burn your card this way.

Your shield begins to fail, flickering like a crashing 3VRD. Droplets of golden fire begin to patter Bitch’s skin, letting off a most unpleasant steam. She winces with each drop, and ever so slowly a smile forms across her lips.

Suddenly her eyes rise toward yours, and in there is forever fire. She laughs and two columns of plasma gush out of her head at you.

And ohmygod it burns!

You crash the program and slot the next, but of course she’ll sense the lapse and catch up as fast as you can act. What a contest this one is! What a fucking lively sacrifice.

“
But give me another moment,” you say as a city rises around you, spires of steel like hypodermic needles, sky bright above like a surgeon’s work light, blinding.

“
You’re just a fish flapping on the dry shore of my brain,” you say. “Give me a moment and you’ll learn a bit of humility.”

“
Suck my tit, asshole,” she says, and she laughs at you!

Fine. Now your city is complete. You whip up a legion of winged demons, and your furious laughter becomes their chorus, becomes an omnipresent roar. Aircars blaze through the sky on rockets and fuming ramjets—no clear electrics here—and their roar joins with that of the demons, descending from the white-hot sky like sentient, sinister clouds.

“‘
Let us go now, you and I,’” you tell the woman. Odd that she hasn’t moved or made any counter-arrangements. Perhaps that, in itself, should be warning enough.

The black wings and wet teeth flap and snap low, their wind and sound stirring the concrete dust on the road. Still Bitch doesn’t move.

“
Seize her!” you shout in the antique-show way.

The demons land and advance, long stringy claws extended. Their claws scratch the pavement as they move. Bitch smiles and folds her arms across her chest. But in her eyes you see the truth: Terror holds them tight and hard.

As Pehr shook Janus, she stirred and let out a low moan. In the dark, he felt for the clasp that held her crashbelts in place. He released her and gently lifted her arms, then legs, then torso, feeling along her limbs and sides for blood or broken bones. She felt light in his arms. Somewhere beneath, the hull pinged as loudly as a plucked harp string.

“
Janus?” he asked again, using his commcard and speaking at the same time, as was his manner. “Are you badly hurt?”

She didn’t respond. Not knowing what more he could do for her, Pehr began searching for a way out. In the utter darkness, every step unhindered was a victory. Even the 0.13
g
gravity was odd to work with, feeble compared to Earth’s but somehow more solid than ship’s acceleration “gravity.”

“
Damn,” he muttered. “Where’s the emergency light?”

He felt beneath the couches, probing his hands into compartments he hadn’t studied. He damned himself for not getting to know his ship better. What kind of captain doesn’t know where the flashlights are stowed? What kind of captain doesn’t know how to escape his escape pod? I was never a captain. Just a damned actor, mouthing lousy mannequin lines. I’ve never been anything more than an actor.

As his mind continued condemning Captain Pehr Jackson, EConaut hero, his body began producing chemicals which drove him forward. The more angry he grew at himself, the more determined to save his crew he became. He took deep breaths to calm his thoughts, and his search grew more thorough. At last, he located a flashlight and threw the switch.

A tight beam of white light leaped across the cabin, as if punching a hole through a black soup to a one-meter-diameter circle of smooth inner hull. A flat panel crossed the hull—an ornamental cover for the circular light. Out of a momentary suspicion, Pehr turned the flashlight toward Eyes’ couch. Unconscious, seemingly.

Pehr crossed the cabin toward the bound man. His right eyesocket and cheek were swollen and purplish in the harsh light, the eyelid tightly shut. Only a thin globe of ultraglas protected him from near-vacuum and whatever chemicals now filled the cabin. Pehr made a tight fist and raised it high over his head, ready to strike. His arm and shoulder and chest twitched as he brought the fist down. Still no response from the unconscious man. Pehr stopped the blow before it happened, satisfied that Eyes was innocent of the latest catastrophes—the power-out and Janus’ condition. Pehr felt relieved to know the man was still a prisoner.

He turned and shone the flashlight onto Janus, especially her face. The clear helmet made her head seem to glow as light reflected and reflected within. She stirred, but only as much as a sleeping person might.

“
Janus?” he said, the beam bright on her shadowed eyelids. No response. She had the slack look about her face that he had seen in concussion cases during his service aboard the Earth-orbital battleship, EarthCo
Monitor
.

He shone the light around the cabin, searching for an escape hatch besides the floor hatch through which they had entered. As he did so, he opened his personal comm BW.