Zen City (13 page)

“Where did you get that?” I said. “I’ve been seeing that crap all over.”

“I love you, Big Man. You gotta believe me. I’ll just bust if you don’t. I come from here. I come down these tubes from the City. I never knew what I was. I wasn’t s’posta. ‘I’M NOT YOU,’ see? That was for
me.
That got put there for
me.

“I’m rememberin’ now. In the City you think with one another’s brains. The food you chew tumbles into a thousand stomachs, and at night you dream the dreams of a thousand souls. You feel scared, maybe, for the guy on your left—that’s what you do for him—and he pisses for you. We’re all inside one another there.

“I’m rememberin’. The City broke me off and sent me out to
fetch you, Big Man. ‘I’M NOT YOU,’ is what a baby cries when it grunts out between its mama’s legs, see, and the mama screams: ‘YOU’RE NOT ME!’ That’s what it’s all about.

“Amitabha, I’m rememberin’ stuff. When I was fresh out of the City and couldn’t think or say a word besides that, I was already thinkin’ and sayin’, ‘I’M NOT YOU!” I scratched it in silt, rock, steamed windows, and styrofoam. Or sometimes it was there for me already: the Catchers said it, or the City dreamed it into somebody else to scrawl somewheres, just for me, to heal me where they broke me off, see, like you stick a sawed-off arm in the fire to seal it.

“So now I’m just me. I swallow my own food and think my own thoughts—till I bring you back with me, Big Man. We’ll be like babies scramblin’ back into Mama. Ain’t that what everybody wants?

“Oh Amitabha, now I remember somethin’ else. It’s like a flood inside. Amitabha, it’s gonna bust me to pieces. I’m rememberin’ with somebody else’s brains,
but she’s me too.
Her name is
Janus.
I’m
Janus,
Big Man, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I love you. I never wanted to leave you. That’s why the City picked me to fetch you in.”

“She’s a hypostat, Big Man,” Tenacity said. “Jello’s a hypostat… and so are you.”

* * *

My mind logjammed. I couldn’t begin to think or talk.

The drip turned into a cataract splashing down the chute, pooling at our feet, filling scallops in the wavy rock. Tenacity didn’t like it. Every so often, out of his pipe butt, he blasted air so hot it boiled the puddles and made a dry spot around him. Where Angela crouched, the water showered over her. She wouldn’t move. She couldn’t stop shaking. She couldn’t stop crying. Pirate put his arm around her.

The two of them.

“I got a lot of stuff the City wants to tell you, Big Man,” she said.

I blurted out, “I’m no hypostat. You’re not Janus. What is all this?”

“It’s true.” Angela’s eyes were a perfect counterfeit of sincerity. “It’s like Tenacity said. The lot of us is just pieces of stuff. Not one of us is a whole thing. The City’s playing all of us like a pipe organ, Big Man, or like them muscles in your arm, muscle against muscle—all for you.”

“That’s the dharma.” Tenacity sizzled on the wet ramp like an overheated radiator. “City’s looking for the right chord. Tells this guy this, that guy that, has us all bumping heads—now I know what for: to get you back in, Big Man. That’s what we’re all about.”

Angela took Pirate’s hand. “Yeah, Pirate, that’s what you’re all about too—even if you’re a piece of a transcat.”

“Damn you, Angela.” Pirate pulled his arm away and stood up too fast—he grimaced when he tried to straighten his back. “That’s my business.”

Tenacity jetted around from one of us to the other. “You one-notes make me laugh. Us whaddayagets are used to being a smorgasbord, but with you it’s a goddam Greek Tragedy. Who cares? Angela’s a stat of Janus. Pirate’s a transcat’s toupée. No Mind…” No Mind just stood there with a blank look on his face. “No Mind?”

“Yuh?”

“Lost your buddha nature?”

“Huh?”

Tenacity roared his laughter. “His Voice is gone. City’s put him on cruise control. Interesting… Your turn, Big Man…” He sidled up to tag me.

I was getting tired of the little show they were putting on for me. Obviously, all they wanted was to screw up my head and get
me out of the picture, so Pirate and Angela, the golden kids, could couple. “I don’t want to hear this, Tenacity.”

“I know you don’t. I know you don’t. That’s all according to schedule, you dumb oaf. The City’s playing you like a hand of canasta. ‘I hate torching my brains over gone shit.’ Do you know your father’s and your mother’s names?” He was tagging me, reading me. It was a low blow—I was so mixed up, I couldn’t keep him away from my mind. “Think about it, whiz kid. How come you don’t got any memories before the Ramp?”

“Stop it.”

“You’re a missing piece of the City, bub, the block that the masons throwed away. TOO MUCH EGO. STEP ASIDE. YOU’RE HOLDING UP THE LINE. Only now they know they need you. Place is rotting for the dead foresquares jammin’ it. They need jissom,
joriki,
and moxie, Big Man. They need Doubt Mass. They need you.”

Angela came close to me. She was like a ghost or an angel, glistening in dim cave light. She put her hands on my chest. “Please. I’m s’posta help get you in, Big Man. The City picked what was left of Janus to stat out, I mean, of me, ’cause you loved me. And I love you. I still do.”

“Then why did you leave me like that…?” I stepped back—her hands reached after me—then fell to her sides. I turned to Pirate. “Good work. You nearly had me, Pirate. Come on, No Mind. Let’s get out onto the karst. Let’s leave this crapola underground. I’m going into the City. What about you?”

I took No Mind’s arm. We walked up the incline. It got brighter and brighter. Angela, Pirate and Tenacity stayed behind for a moment, then came running after us.

“This is great,” Tenacity said. “This is just what I love. See how interesting that meatloaf is? I love his guts. Them hodags is a cow town compared to him. Wait up, pal.”

He was kissing my butt with those baby lips; then, before I knew it, I was sitting on him, on that rusted muffler of a body. He
had scooted between my legs and risen half a foot; I rode him like a horse. Angela kept calling, “Big Man! Big Man!” I didn’t want to slow down. Pirate grumbled and came abreast of us, just as we came in full sight of the cave’s mouth.

The daylight was blinding, but we could hear movement out there, metal clashing, people growling and heaving things around. Someone shouted in a thick accent: “Awake! Awake, you devils! Awake!”

The first-in-line applicant when the screen blew up was a tall woman in a taupe caftan. Fragments of glass mutilated her face. She did not scream. She thought she was being hypodyned. She was in bliss. She thought the billowing smoke was the dissolution of the first skandha of materiality. She thought she was attaining sainthood in the City. She took her sudden blindness to be supra-mundane insight. The pain didn’t matter.

She did not understand the pressure against her shoulders and hips. She did not perceive that people were pushing her out of the way of the spreading fires. The popping and exploding through the hypostat lines struck her as molecular events of which she was now becoming aware in her transcendentally attuned state. The hicks and guards who tried to save her failed. The slender pyramid of a transcatalytic bulb was thrown from its housing, and it pierced the woman’s left eye all the way into the forebrain, killing her.

Four vannies rushed Control, thinking they could sneak into the City. A few Chevelles pulled chairs up from their rusted floor bolts and hurled them at the guards: “‘Not you,’ huh? ‘Not you,’ huh?” More small fires. The guards shook and thumped their radio transmitters. When the smoke got worse, they ran.

Down from the encircling balcony, leaping handrails, parting clumps of applicants as a boning knife cleaves gristle, two supervisors shot through to the turnstile and vaulted over. No one had ever seen them move anything before except their eyes and a pencil.

The enamel on the swinging doors peeled away in a blast of heat from the melting transcatalyzer. The supervisors pushed through. Smoke swelled out. They ducked low. The hypodyne techies in their white jumpsuits were coughing as they crawled toward the exits. One of the supervisors grabbed a technician by
the collar. “What happened? What in hell happened?”

“Communication’s down. Everything just blew—from inside, from the City end. It’s nothing we did. Somebody’s bypassing Control. Fucker’s on the karst. The City’s bristling like a spooked cat.”

“Can we still dyne?”

“Lemme go. We gotta get out of here.”

“Can we still dyne?”

The techy yanked himself away and was swallowed by low, swirling fumes. For all the supervisor could see, he was alone in eddies of blue smoke. The supervisor groped along the floor, navigating by the seams in the floor tiles. He found a wall, then the right wall, then, by their screeching, the crows in their cage the size of a giant redwood. The dyne barrel would be near.

Now he felt it—the long, flexible tube of optical fibers. He grabbed it with one hand and clutched the cage with the other. With beaks and talons the crows tore at him. They were hypostats: forbidden wisdom, enveloping darkness, and—
yaw, yaw,
yaw!—alarm. Never mind the pain. He fixed the barrel’s aim and slid his fingers along the tube until he felt the bump of the console.

In a pinch, there were only four switches to tend—ON, ON, OFF, ON, then wait one second and switch number two to OFF. A bright flash lit the smoke. Then came the sizzle of the residual hypostat, after the birds were jazz—if they were—to place them into the City. Could he hear them now? No. Maybe they had made it through.

Or maybe he was too far gone to hear anything.

* * *

The dyne barrel had been too hot from all the fires to function properly. Only part of the jazz it made of the crows statted down inside the City. Some crow-jazz spilled out into the Saha World.

It condensed like water vapor on dust, when clouds form. Trans cat-like, it seeped backwards in time and began to rain, about twelve hours earlier, during the Full Moon Ceremony at the Cave of the Dharma. It trickled at first, then poured, then flooded. Lost rivers roared through underground chambers.

The suburbers had spread their umbrellas against crows and the cawing of crows, a cloudburst of crows that splashed like rain. Rinzai, running after the monks, had sloshed through the black birds’ music. The beaks and claws and iridescent feathers of crows had tumbled down the chute over Angela, and she was soaked to the marrow with the sly cock of a crow’s head. At the Old On Ramp folks huddled under clammy car-tops while the predatory wisdom of crows smeared their windshields and thundered against rusted metal.

All this was an emergency alarm—Control was burning open. With exquisite subtlety, the City shifted, altering the permeability of its miles of skin. It readied itself for Big Man.

They looked like angels up there in the light. I still couldn’t make them out. I’d been in the night world too long.

Tenacity rocketed out from under me, scorching my thighs as he zoomed into the light. I only dropped a few inches, but I wasn’t ready for it. I stumbled to my knees.

Pirate offered me his hand, but I didn’t take it. I got up on my own and kept walking toward the mouth of the cave. No Mind and Pirate, each for his own reasons, walked right beside me, and Angela was just a little behind. I felt her there without looking. I always felt where she was… just like Janus. Shut up, mind. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

The figures out there began to take shape. The first one I made out was Clara, the vanny bitch, the pretty one, who’d had a shouting match with Angela the night before Pirate and I left the Ramp. As my eyes got used to daylight, I saw her robes, her red hair, her freckles. She had a
rakusu
now, a ceremonial bib like Bobo Shin’s. She was standing tall, holding something shiny in her fist. She raised it high over her head…

…And brought it down on Tenacity. There was a sharp clang. Tenacity uttered half a word and dropped to the hard ground like a busted muffler. He rolled a few times, then lay still. I started to run out to help him, but No Mind blocked the way.

No Mind’s stupor seemed to have passed. He had jumped in front of me to face Pirate, who was still at my side. “Pirate, you bastard,” he said, “you set us up.”

Pirate took a swing at him, but I stepped between them and knocked Pirate’s fist aside with my forearm. Pirate grabbed my arm and pulled me within biting range.

“Tenacity!” Angela ran out onto the karst to help the little guy.

That’s when I saw the rest of them, six or seven mean-looking priest types with knives. I recognized their chief, though he
wasn’t wearing his
rakusu
; it was Bobo Shin Roshi, one of the crystal-set honchos the vannies sucked up to. There was a little boy with them, too, a freckly kid I’d seen hanging around with Angela in the old days. Pirate pushed me away and ran after Angela.

“Right.” No Mind watched Pirate fly at the monks. “He pretends to fight them. He lures you out, Big Man, and then he and his pals get you.”

Pirate’s gang put on a convincing show. While Clara picked up Tenacity to hurl him out of the way, the other thugs made for Angela. Pirate picked up a rock and stepped in. They all started swinging. Pirate kicked and jabbed, outmaneuvering most of them. They outnumbered him, but they were hysterical and fought stupidly, all at once on a single front, so he could pick them off as they got in one another’s way.

Pirate stood between the monks and Angela. He held them off while she bent over Tenacity, cooing and fussing. Clara seemed to be waiting for the little monks to clear the way to Angela. Bobo Shin was a ways back, screaming, “Kill! Kill!” It gave me the chills. At the same time, if it wasn’t a mirage—off by themselves across the karst, I thought I saw the weak, bearded hick I’d kicked out of the Blue Plymouth Hotel and his gristly woman. They were charging toward the City. They kept turning to see if anybody was coming after them—and stumbling over their own feet.

Sometimes, at right angles to everything that’s happening, you get a kind of a thought. It can be a year’s worth of a thought, but you never miss a beat. You think the whole thing between one breath and the next. I thought: