Rayguns Over Texas Page 4

  The man-Babylon will not set foot on this world, but he stares at us from the hatchway as we explore the landing site. The vacuum pod sits on this gray world like a giant red, gold, and green soda can. We do not need our suits here, just a nose tube and a catalyzer to strip the oxygen from the atmospheric CO-2.

  The red sun shines through the haze. A mountain range looms, mist-shrouded in the far distance. In the low gravity the peaks are impossibly high and jagged. The hot Jupiter straddles the horizon, striped by bands of storms. Even the Babylon cloud is visible, a pale smudge transiting the planet like a blur in reality.

  I wear my army boots, and every step I make squelches. I look down at my footprints and water pools in my tread marks. It is deeply unsettling to walk on a world that has standing water and warm air, yet there is no visible life.

  “I believe this planet was frozen,” Jah whispers to me. “The atmosphere itself was ice. It has only just thawed. Perhaps a few hundred years ago.”

  It is more evidence of the super-Babylon that lives here, somewhere. Perhaps it lives quietly in the spaces between atoms.

  “There is something we want you to look at,” shouts the naked Babylon when it grows tired of our meanderings. “It is just along that ridge. A skylight punched through the roof of a lava tube. We would like you to go in and see what is there.”

  And see how it reacts, see if it kills us, see if it changes us. But it didn’t need to add that part.

  We have one last reasoning together before we split the team. Bongo Pei-Xi has decided that I am to remain at the vacuum shell with the Babylon while they rappel into the lava tubes. I am sad that I may not see them again, and they are glad that they don’t have to be in the company of the man-Babylon.

  Together we crouch on a mound of ash that is less damp than the rest, and I roll the kutchie. I have to clip it to a brass oxygen dripper so it will burn, but it is a real kutchie with real paper. We pass it in solidarity, and only Ngwali refuses the comfort of the herb.

  The Emperor Selassie speaks in my ear, “Partake deeply of the ganja, Susan. You will soon need its comfort.”

  Our bongo speaks the reasoning, her voice dropping into the dead air of this ancient planet like a pebble dropping into a grave. “What we do today, we don’t do it for the sake of Babylon. Or for the love of its sin. I-and-I overstand this be for the sake of Zion and the dreadsmen and dreadswomen who came before us. And for the Rasta kin who come after.”

  At the end of the reasoning, we embrace each other, and I watch my colleagues as they walk away, burdened beneath packs and ropes. Only Ngwali looks back at me. I can see the terror in his eyes, and I feel sympathy, but I am glad it is not I who will descend into the mouth of a beast that even Babylon fears.

  I tromp a muddy circle around the shell. I do not want to go back inside. If I stay outside the man-Babylon cannot touch me. On each circuit, as I pass the hatch, the thing that looks like Ngwali calls out to me. “Would you like to hear a secret, Susan? The secret is about me, yet there are parts of the secret that are about you. Would you like to hear, Susan?”

  On the far side of the shell I can barely hear him, so I listen to my colleagues as they speak over the radio. They are not speaking to each other and they are not speaking to me. They speak, hoping that their words will remain for those who come after.

  “We have the ropes secure,” says Bongo Pei-Xi. “We are about to descend.”

  “I have much of Ngwali in me,” says the Babylon. “I am bounded by the limits of his mind. But I can hear the singularity. It speaks to me in a thousand voices that are one voice. The singularity gives me guidance.”

  The sounds of grunting and breathing are heavy in my ears. “We gone down twenty meter or more. Yes, this look like lava tube. We be at bottom. The tube extend further than our light shine. We go deeper now.”

  “Here is the part about you, Susan. The singularity did not want to sleep with you, that is what the Ngwali in me wanted. So the singularity showed us how. It was easy. It tells us to be stupid.” He is visibly aroused, but he is always that way, priapism being one of the gifts given to the fake Ngwali, along with the ability to survive in hard vacuum and breathe on a planet without oxygen.

  “There be something ahead. We prepare the cameras. Nandy? Please handle the video? Shoot from that side, yes.”

  “The singularity said that you wanted to fuck something stupid, something that wouldn’t make you think or care. And it worked. You spread your legs for us.”

  “Leave her alone, abomination,” the voice of Jah booms. The voice comes from my radio and it rattles from the speakers inside the shell. It is the voice of a God displeased. “You are not the only player in this game. I give you warning now. I advise you to heed me.”

  The Babylon flesh ceases to look human as rage consumes it. “Don’t rise above your station, Selassie. There are many of you in that cloud. They would talk to you, but it hurts them to think down to your level. You are not even a worm to them.”

  “We are coming to a larger part. The tube opens up. Nandy, switch to infrared.”

  There is a sharp cry. I recognize it as Nandy’s voice. And then there is the sound of Rosaria sobbing, and a high-pitched wail that I think is the voice of a woman, but it is Ngwali. He is screaming as if his soul is pulling out through his eyes.

  “Oh, sweet Jah. Sweet Jah, save us. It is so huge. It never left its flesh. Please do not let it see us, please, Jah.”

  “But here is the part that relates to you, Susan. Since we landed on this planet, I have not heard the voices. They are not telling me what to do. So they can’t keep me from doing what I want.” He grins as he steps to the ground. He has a utility knife in his hand, the thin blade extended. “And you certainly can’t keep me from doing what I want. So I am going to do you.”

  He runs at me, his bare feet splashing in wet ash. In a moment, he has knocked me to the ground, the blade cutting my clothes. I kick at him, but he slashes the seam at my ankle. He gets the blade beneath the cloth and peels my pants bare to the hip.

  “Oh, Jah, it is moving. It wakes. We are getting! Grab Ngwali, but leave the equipment. Move! Back to the ropes! We will not leave him behind! Drag him if you must!”

  “It’s not so fun when I’m not so dumb, is it?” The thing holds me down, pushing my face into the muck. I choke on soggy ash.

  The ganja keeps me calm. So despite the attack, I hear the still, small voice of Jah. He says, “I warned you.”

  The sound, blaring from the shell and from my radio, nearly deafens me. It is the sound of blood pounding in my ears, it is the sound of total silence turned up to maximum gain.

  The man-Babylon vomits on my neck. His eyes roll back into his head and he seizures. I roll him off, climbing to my feet as I shake off vomit.

  “The effect won’t last long,” my Negus whispers. “Make certain he won’t get back up.”

  I stomp on the thing’s head the way I stomped on rats after the singularity took my family. “Did you do that, Jah? What was that noise?”

  “Think of that as the resonance frequency of Ngwali’s mind, my child. I have been conditioning his autonomic reflexes ever since you gave me control of the lighting and circulation systems.”

  I feel guilty for a moment. I had deliberately run wires out of the box when no one was looking. “I am truly sorry, Emperor Selassie. I do not want to lose you. I never would have let you out of the box, but the man-Babylon gave me a message I could not ignore.”

  “You made the right decision, child, and I thank you for freeing me. But you have a bigger problem. The god of this moon has awakened. I believe the Babylon simulacra stepping on this moon has triggered a response. It will soon be completely active.” Something tears in the vacuum shell. I hear brackets twisting and wires snapping. Then I see it in the hatchway, Jah’s box, floating the way a Babylon
cloud floats in deep space. It bobs in open air, broken cabling dangling from its case. His voice speaks through my radio, “I am now in negotiations with the singularity cloud. It is preparing to engage the moon. I hope to secure your survival, but I cannot guarantee anything once the cloud opens fire.”

  I look up and the Babylon cloud is much larger and brighter, a silver streak across the gas planet’s storms.

  “My child, I want you to imagine a world early in the life of the universe.” Jah hovers above the muddy earth. “It is only the first generation of stars, so there are few heavy elements like there are now, but there are plenty of lighter molecules, like water and amino acids. A culture grows from this matter, and grows clever. Unlike our people, they did not externalize their cleverness in machines, they directed it inward. They grew Babylon within themselves. Imagine, billions of years of Babylon simmering and festering within their flesh.”

  The ground beneath me shakes and I worry about my colleagues. “Bongo, are you all right? Can you get out of there? Jah says the god is waking.”

  “We’re almost to the ropes, Susan. Ngwali is catatonic, but I think we can get him up.”

  “What did you see down there?”

  “It is not like Babylon. It is the sum of all death. It cannot be imagined. I hope you never know.”

  But then I do. The ground trembles and the god within the moon erupts from the planetary crust like a maggot bursting from its egg. It squirms from the earth and it is huge. It fills the horizon and it fills the sky. The jagged peaks of the distant mountains are like grains of sand beneath its oozing tissues. It is an entire planet of angry flesh, amorphous and shifting, gliding through perpendicular dimensions, a monster of alien geometry. It is at once a single body and an entire culture of bodies, united in the rot of death, fused into a single corpse god, an abomination of unthinkable power.

  And as it squirms from the planetary crust I feel the gravity shift. The abomination is a significant fraction of the mass of the moon. It pulls me, tilts me, and I nearly tumble toward the hulking monstrosity.

  And then it sees me. It towers above the atmosphere, and it has a million eyes. As one, the million eyes turn their gaze on me.

  I know why it broke Ngwali’s mind. Without the serenity of the ganja, I would be screaming in the dirt, tearing at my face. The horror of it washes through me.

  “The cloud informs me they have launched payload,” Jah announces. “Five quantum snarls. Combined entangled energy of three point five times ten to the sixtieth electron volts.”

  I gasp. We are about to be hit by subatomic particles with the effective energy of a hurtling planet.

  The weapons strike the god. There is a blinding flash of light. The thing distends, the rotting flesh bulging across folded dimensions, splattering into flaccid jelly before rebounding and snapping back to its original amorphous corpse shape. A thunder shakes the sky from one end to the other.

  The god-thing leaps at the Babylon cloud, an unthinkable mass of fury. I can see all of it, the entire dreadful god-shape as it stretches across planetary distances, leaping clear off the moon to seize Babylon in its putrescent embrace.

  I expect to go mad, but Jah is there to lead me through. He speaks to me with His love and kindness, and I stay sane.

  We guide my colleagues back to us, and Jah helps them as well. Even Ngwali returns to some semblance of calm with the help of Emperor Selassie’s kindness and the healing of the ganja.

  #

  A week later and we have set up our camp and begun the process of dismantling the vacuum shell. The flag of the Rasta flies above our oxygen tents. The air is filled with the constant whine of our fab lab as it produces tools and containers. Piece by piece, Ngwali builds a tractor so he can sow his seed in this dead moon.

  Ngwali is a quiet man now, a thoughtful man. He works hard for our burgeoning maroon colony. It must be difficult to be the one man in our micro-society of pregnant women. My colleagues have already chosen frozen embryos from our thermos-sized ark and planted them two at a time in their wombs. One day soon, Ngwali will be founding father and patriarch to a nation of children who will need his wisdom and his example. He has begun courting me with a pronounced formality, either because we now have an excess of time, or because he believes that I am pregnant with his child.

  I am inflating a balloon that will circumnavigate the upper atmosphere, releasing algae spores. By the time my son is born, this world will be covered with a photosynthesizing scuzz. When he is a man, he will be able to breathe without a tube in his nose.

  Rosaria has confirmed it with the medical pack, I will have a son. I don’t know if my fertility is a parting gift of Jah, or if the man-Babylon impregnated me as a crude jape against all the facts of biology. Sometimes I worry that my son will look like Ngwali, and he will hear the many voices of Babylon when he lies in his crib, but mostly I do not worry about it.

  Jah has left us. He has gone to join the thing that survived the war between the corpse-god and the singularity. I can see it through the half-meter telescope, drifting in the LaGrange point, a giant ball of gossamer and flesh. Perhaps they continue to war, or perhaps they are building a detente and an intercourse of peace. But it is unlikely that I will ever know the difference. They may never speak to us again, or they may obliterate us in the next second. That is the uncertainty of living on a moon beneath gods.

  But for now we are unnoticed. Like the mice beneath the floorboards, we are left to our lives and our trivial industries. With every life and every birth we ensure the survival of the diaspora and the children of Jah.

  Texas Died for Somebody’s Sins But Not Mine

  Stina Leicht

  Introverted programmer, Una Dallas,

  spends an illicit night with a co-worker.

  What horrible secret prevents her from fulfilling her desires?

  Una Dallas tried not to look when Paul bent over to turn off his computer screen, but failed. She’d been doing that a lot lately--failing. She had a long list accumulated over three years. It started with failing to stop noticing how nice he smelled, and then ended with the worst of the lot: failing to stop daydreaming about him. She blamed the fact that her contract was about to be terminated.

  “You going out tonight, Una?” Paul asked, grabbing his patched jean jacket from the corner of his cubicle wall.

  “Please don’t call me that.”

  “Una is a number. ‘One,’ in Latin. I looked it up,” he said. “So your parents wanted to advertise that you were an only child. What’s so offensive about that? You’re unique. It’s beautiful. Anyway, Dallas is a ship captain who gets eaten by an alien.”

  “Did you look that up too?”

  “You’re a lot more attractive than Tom Skerritt.”

  Dallas’s stomach fluttered. “I disagree.”

  Paul shook his head.

  She loved the way his lips curled into that crooked smile. “Please?” she asked. Mr. Templeton in Human Resources had come up with ‘Una Dallas.’ It was his own little joke.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed,” Paul said. “So, are you going out tonight, Dallas?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s Saturday night, for Christ’s sake,” Paul said, pausing in the hallway that was formed with grey burlap-covered-cardboard walls.

  He was wearing his usual outfit, which consisted of a backwards baseball cap, a gamer’s t-shirt layered over a second, long-sleeved t-shirt, jeans, and Doc Martens. The jean jacket and scarf were additions required by the temperature outside. Fall had, apparently, hit hard this year.

  “You have to leave this glorified tin can sometime,” he said.

  It wasn’t a tin can. It was a cheap, corrugated-tin warehouse, kitted out with a rat’s maze of used modular office furniture, but she let his exaggeration stand. “I don�
�t think I do.” She didn’t mention that there were company regulations against it. It would lead to questions she wasn’t allowed to answer.

  “Come on,” Paul said. “Just this once. Fuck personnel. What do they know, anyway? You’ll like it. The Beansídhes are playing Emos. They’re your favorite band. I’ve even got two tickets.”

  “I don’t know.” Blushing, she shook her head and returned to the glass video screen displaying her latest project--eight million lines of code for their current employer, a multi-billion dollar software-hardware conglomerate. Most of the code was cobbled together with re-used crap. Free means never having to do it yourself--even when you should, she thought. The company wouldn’t like that sentiment one bit. Anger and embarrassment heated her cheeks for a second time. I can have my own thoughts, can’t I? Or do they have to own those too? But she knew the answer to that question.

  “Come on. I won’t tell a soul, I promise.”

  She vomited up the question before she could stop it. “Are you asking me out on a date?”

  Paul worked as a programmer in the cubicle directly across from hers. In addition to his long list of physical attributes, he also had great taste in music. It’d been the first thing that had drawn her to him--the first thing she’d dared speak to him about. Tall and wiry, he had thick, straight brown hair and light grey eyes. He was sexy, in an offbeat and shy sort of way.

  Human Resources wouldn’t like this at all. Which was, she had to admit, another reason why she found him so attractive.

  The abrupt silence sent a nitrogen-charged-cold burst of fear through her system. She caught his stunned expression before he recovered.

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  The blush heating her cheeks deepened. She was sure he couldn’t miss it. I shouldn’t be doing this. What’s wrong with me? “I wasn’t serious.”

  “I am.”