Aeon Ten Read online

I wobble to a stop at Level 300. My ages-weakened legs shake; the bacterial film of the shaft's floor begins to scorch the soles of my feet, eat its way up my ankles and calves. It is time to feed, and heal. With bleeding fingers I pull the rusted door at this level; it squawks. I wait until the sounds of voices fade, and then look in from behind the door. This was a thriving Zone when I walked its streets. It still is.

  Women parade their wealth, men their strength, children their fantasies, all in tight and shining costumes, with monstrous gene-crafted reptilian pets coiling their arms and necks. The pets smile and gabble with flicking tongues, the people frown and posture at one another. In twelve thousand years, even after the Destruction and the Colonization, so little has changed; then, only the pets were otherwise, crooning in polytonal voices and oozing sweet drugs from their skins.

  But the people who walk past my prison in this age seem strangely plain, uniform. In the days when the Mondracen immured me for my crimes, human bodies flourished in mad variety: the Snin, spidery and six-armed, bone-slab faces pointed at cheeks and chin; the Crasstilizi, shag-haired and clumsy, cawing their poems and stroking their shambling young with pancake fingertips; the Treeminar, miniatures the size of mice scuttling the corridors on motorized hovers, shrieking cries at each other and at the large humans treading too near them; the Shoomtar Jend, great flat eyes the heaviest masses of their sleek, floating, gas-filled bodies, their gray skin-membranes marbled with their family colors; and finally the Mondracen, the dully-normal humans in the body plan I see here now. None survived the Great Death.

  The City itself died then. I hung in the wall for so long after the Great Death that I nearly lost all track of time. Then the human Colonists came, the very image of the Mondracen, and they lighted the City, and they found me. I spoke to them, and they ran, but then they slowly brought machines, and they proclaimed me an ancient work of art, and left me here to perform for them.

  And so I shall now perform what they did not expect.

  This dawn, many revelers return home. A man approaches, alone, and passes; I twist his neck and drag him into the shaft stairway landing-space, shutting the door. In the dimness, his eyes bug with terror. I have severed his spinal nerves. He lives long enough to feel his clothing and then his skin pulled free.

  I feed on him. My so-long-useless digestive system awakens and complains, then settles to its ancient task. As plain honest blood returns to my body, strength comes quickly. When I am done with nourishment, I step carefully into his flayed skin and work my feet and hands down to the ends. I ram my fingernails out underneath his. The skin is a little loose—he was somewhat overweight—but it will do until I reach my maze of rooms, behind the false wall not far from here. I pull the face over my own, clasping the skin at the back where I had split it, adjusting the eyelids and brows and lips.

  My pain abates a little. I dress myself in his suit of clothing, not so tight on me. The suit and the skullcap he wore now serve to hold his skin in place. I hurl what is left of his body down Shaft Arbonel, to dissolve in the City's bottom slime.

  The skin smells sweet and overripe. I emerge from the shaft entrance and walk slowly through an underground morning. The revelers are gone now, and only a few tradespeople and cleaners pass me, their eyes averted. I recover an easy gait, practice a strut, the skin shifting slightly if I move too quickly. I pat the nose back into place, and hitch uncomfortably at my scrotum frying in the host-skin's antibodies.

  A woman with a lush body laughs at me, says something in a musical tongue I do not understand. I raise my chin haughtily and walk on. She reminds me of damned Alayre, now long ages dead.

  In a narrow side way, I find the pseudostone wall I had made. Will it still open under my hands, or in these twelve thousand years has someone broken it, gotten in, collapsed my rooms? No one is nearby. I place my hands on the wall in the two slight depressions I had left, and push eight times in the rhythm of the words in Taranese: Always I find my way back home.

  Watching for prying eyes, I wait, counting. The mechanism waits too, and then I put my left hand in its depression and hold it steady there, pressing hard for sixty heartbeats. A rumble, and the wall shakes, moves to the right, and stops, leaving a gap of darkness just wide enough for me to squeeze through.

  I fumble inside, find the closure mechanism and use it, and trigger the long-stored emergency lights. A chemical glow from a foot-wide circular patch in the ceiling fills the room I am in, my study and resting-space, with dim green radiance.

  Millennial dust coats my hideaway everywhere, beetle trails stitching it with hungry errands. Steel shelves stuffed with permtexts of all sizes and shapes line the bedrock walls. A couch the size of a bed for two sits facing a long low table near the middle of the square room. Two doorways mark opposite corners of the room; next to the one which leads into my lab, I pry open a box on the wall and hesitantly punch three engraved steel buttons.

  A brief whir, and air moves again, and soft white light replaces the green. The aged and hidden links to buried magma powershafts work even now: another miracle for the condemned. My adopted skin smarting and itching, I go to work.

  * * * *

  There. So much better: a tuck here, several darts there, a bath of immunoharmonizers and adhesors, and the skin is mine. The mirrors show me a thin man, his eyes jealous and deep-set with the hunger for life, his muscles wasted to strings from his long immuration, his powerful fingernails hooking out through his new, naked wrapping. I pat my new head of tousled black hair and grin, all iridescent teeth, long thin lips. Handsome demon.

  Always I find my way back home. What will they do when they find the burst-open wall, the missing living statue that once entertained them? By now the craft of minshillindar has been forgotten, that ancient trick of prison bioengineering that embedded me in that wall for all time.

  All time has ended. I am in the apocalyptic now.

  I am the apocalyptic now.

  Once I was one of the Mondracen myself, an ordinary son of exceptionally-gifted parents. Too ordinary for them, I was; they fed me the favored neurotransforms of the wealthy, to amplify my gifts to meet their expectations, hoping for a son who would ascend to City rule. But one gift, well hidden in me, became amplified far beyond all the others: the gift of cruelty. When I learned the deep art of genetic fabrication, I became what they called a monster.

  A sound from the entryway makes me stop moving. I had closed the wall behind me; perhaps one of the nimble rats has followed me home. Concealed by the lab door, I wait.

  A small human figure, wearing cloth tatters of a coverall woven with spangles of colored metal, moves in total silence, stealthy, toward my couch.

  Maybe it would offer me nourishment, maybe its genes could have news for mine. I would merely need to store it in my vats, unwind the skeined knowledge from its cells, and mate its new chemistry to my ancient version.

  Its head is large, covered with plastered slabs of black straight hair. A child. How did it get in? It stops at the table; its bony fingers trail through the dust. It freezes in place. Its hand darts out, seizes a beetle, brings the struggling blue-black creature to its teeth. Three bites, and the beetle is gone, a wiry hind leg kicking one last futile time as it passes the child's lips.

  Something unfamiliar kindles in me, a sense of kinship with this small hunter. Has my imprisonment softened my temperament? I blink twice, and the child's eyes are on me.

  There is no time to lose. I spring, my hands and nails out, ready to grab and subdue. The little creature vanishes like a dream, and I crouch groping in the shadows. This is unexpected. I'm not as fast as I thought, or else this little one is faster than so many I've seen.

  It must be one of the street waifs of this gloriously ugly era. From my long wall station I have seen packs of these children take down fully-armed squads of soldiers and strip them to their bones, in minutes. Many died, caught in the beams and scything metal of the guns, but their survivors feasted on the gunners’ remains. Now I face on
e of them. There may be others.

  I have no food to offer it. “Where are you?” I ask in Taranese. Useless, of course; Taranese, Wendridgian, Farhossch, Meiyandao, all gone with the Great Death eleven thousand years ago. The people since the Colonization speak dialects of Share, the Colonist tongue distorted over centuries by their tribalisms and wars. These children of the understreets rarely speak at all.

  A trinket! In a high cabinet, I find a chain of cerametal jewels, translucent and pearled, set in osmium scribed and inlaid with ruby and sapphire glazes. “For you,” I say in Share, dangling it on a long fingernail, pointing in the direction I thought the little one went.

  Nothing happens, of course. I lay the jewelry on my low table and turn to leave the room. A brief scuttle; I whirl, and the jewel chain is gone. A soft click from the entranceway, and I leap to find it closed.

  I had thought these people a devolution of those from before the Great Death, but this speed impresses me. Perhaps these children are breeding into a new and ghastly race of predators like me.

  Weariness rises around me like dark water. My limbs ache. It is time to begin the regenerative process, but I lack bodily energy to assemble the vats and tanks, and acquire the necessary fluids. I must rest, but the door troubles me: how will I prevent the child from returning and killing me in my sleep?

  There is a way. In the entranceway I find the two great slabs of steel I set aside as bars, for some final confrontation cornered here. I draw them painfully up to the slots flanking the door, and fit them in, then I turn to the couch. For the first time in twelve thousand years, it is time for bed.

  * * * *

  A dream: I am discovered and bound and walled in once more, and this time it is the children who make me prisoner, and I am their size, and weak. I protest, fighting to escape the membrane, and they laugh, stuff stones in my mouth, and leave.

  Dead sweet devil Alayre comes to me then, trailing her floating veils like pale-orange smoke, her breasts articulating themselves with the muscles of her kind, reaching out to tickle my chest with pointed nipples, rounding, narrowing, bulging above; she takes the stones from my mouth, smiles and kisses me, and her sugared brain poison is on my tongue. I want her; I moan and stretch out to hold her, and she is gone.

  The poison works on my dream. I lie broken and paralyzed on the understreet itself, my wall-prison ripped open. The street children gather over me with hissing voices and narrow-bladed knives. Enough, I think, and I fight my way to wakefulness.

  The darkness of my room shrouds my eyes, but it is pregnant with danger. I sit upright, and scutterings make me leap to my feet. I dive for the light controls. Dozens of these children boil through the room and cluster in the laboratory entrance. I scrabble for my blade, under the cushions of the couch, but a high sharp voice calls, “No!” in Share.

  I turn to see a girl not yet a woman aiming a weapon at me. “Don't hurt me,” I say.

  "What are you?” she asks. Her eyes gleam, red-irised and white, pupils black needle-holes. She is thin but supple and strong. Her skin shines a rich tan.

  "I am Jono,” I say. They all gather closer to me, costumed in skins and furs and leaves and skittering fabrics, their stenches brawling in my nostrils, eyes cold and drilling me. A stream of urine issues from a tiny half-dressed one who is clutching one end of a steel bolt and sucking the other end.

  "What is Jono?” The girl persists, her weapon steady as the stone around us.

  What is Jono indeed? Does anyone know what Jono is, or was? My memory stutters, falters, refuses to reach past those dead millennia, backward in time's dark abysm. “I am a man,” I tell her. The accents of this time begin to ride better on my lips and tongue.

  "You are no man. You stole his skin. Are you Zash?” She shifts the tip of her weapon back, forth, the thickness of a fingernail.

  Zash: she must mean the aliens, the Zashinhalh, in that mind-whisper of theirs. “No. I was a man in a wall. I escaped. Now I am a man."

  She places her free hand in that of a boy next to her, his eyesockets filled with dull-gray steel orbs. Her fingers ripple against his palm; he reciprocates, and turns to vanish along the entryway.

  All this coming and going makes danger that I will be found. “This is a secret place. How did you find it?"

  She points at a squat little boy wearing a tight set of armoring body plates made of glued-together layers of colored paper. “Furusi followed you, and told us. We will not tell anyone."

  Why don't they just kill me? They could take this place from me as easily as they followed me. But I have this moment, and I have guile.

  I wave my arm expansively at the room, and a few children duck and mutter. “Of course you can come here. My home is now your home."

  The sarcasm seems to pass unnoticed, but the girl keeps her weapon on me and her eyes lock on me, wide, and she says, “Every place we choose is our home."

  I smile, and think of ways I can change their bodies with my biologicals. They will not move so quickly then, and then I will take back what is mine.

  What is this weapon she holds? It is a gun; I stare at it, and she begins to lower the muzzle of it until it points at my knees. I have won them over.

  She pulls the trigger. Four beams spread from the weapon's muzzle, and my legs are severed. I fall helpless to the floor, my precious new-made blood spurting from sectioned arteries; she approaches and stares down at me. “Nemizanah,” she calls. A tall boy comes beside her. “Fire,” she says, pointing at my stumps, and the boy named Nemizanah lugs a plasma torch from beneath his beetle-shell vestment, and he blast-cauterizes the wounds.

  I do not tell of this pain, for doing so is wearying, and useless, and becomes uninteresting to the jaded, and repels the sensitive. Besides, pain, whether mine or someone else's, is food to me, and none but another like me could fully understand that.

  The bleeding stops. I try to rise onto my hands with arm strength, but the girl pushes me over sideways with her foot, and I lie staring up at her, unable to prevent vast hatred from filling my gaze. She recoils.

  "Yes. Now I see what you are."

  "You can kill me.” I say this so easily, as if the thousands of years of my persistent life are nothing. To live, and hope, and then die helpless at the hands of a vicious child. My resignation surprises me.

  "No.” She waves her weapon. “You may live, for now. We will watch you. If you try to hurt us, then we will kill you."

  My agony blazes through her words. “I understand. But how can I move myself around, now that you have taken my legs?"

  "We will care for you.” From a sack at her side she pours out beside me a heap of dead beetles, the fat dark-blue humpbacked ones that gobble the grease of the street tuber fryers. “Here is food.” She turns to the others, flicks a gesture over her head, then reaches to my light controls and dims them to a midnight umbrance. One tall thin child in a shift of many veils takes one of my severed lower legs under each arm, my blood-tinged ichor leaving a gooey trail, and they are all gone.

  Silence is now. I lie and think. A small rattle beside me; one of the beetles is still alive. I reach out and spear a nail through it.

  It tastes good: fresh, meaty, with that tinge of metallics the beetles always seem to carry. Lying on my side, on the stone floor of my ancient hideaway, I dine, making a neat heap of the beetle shells.

  These children have read me well. I must reach deeper within myself to escape their readings, and arrive where I can continue my little work of time.

  The first thing will be the lab. From it I will make things for them, at first. Then, later, when I can exact payment for my truncated body, I will make for myself.

  The dinner I have eaten drags at me. Warmth creeps from my belly out through my trunk and my limbs, embracing with pleasure even the seared and scorching stumps of my legs.

  Amazing sleep. In all the time of my immuration, I never lost awareness; the ichor they poured into my veins made that a certainty. But now I have blood once more, and wi
th blood, sleep slides warmly in. My eyes weigh shut, and I turn slowly onto my back and breathe once, twice, and then, for the second time, I dream of Alayre.

  "Wake up.” Thin, tough hands rub my cheeks. The girl looks down at me. “We have something for you."

  I have slept for hours. Two boys stand on the other side of my room, a lumpy dark-red object between them. A flowchair, a rounded seat that moves slowly across uneven surfaces on a single broadfooted trunk of a leg. The leg is a slug-like living plastic the people of this era have engineered; I would have preferred a faster means of movement, but the boys seem proud of their present to me.

  I smile. “Can you help me up into it?"

  Six of the larger children come and loft me up and into the waiting seat. My stumps have been dressed with skinseal, and they burn only slightly through its anesthetic.

  The girl comes to stand in front of me, glaring with those red-black eyes. “You will work for us,” she says. Her mouth is a lovely bud of sensuous lips, tightly pursed when she is not speaking. Her nose is barely a ridge, as if some force had pressed it back almost level with her face; her nostrils, almost slits, widen and flatten again, disconcertingly, when she is thinking. She is thinking right now. She gestures toward the lab. “You make things here. Make us the things we want, and we'll let you live."

  "What do you want?"

  "Poison.” She smiles.

  "What kind of poison? What should it do? Kill people?"

  "No. Make them sick. I want them to live that way. It should be something without taste or smell, that they can eat in their food."

  Now I smile. “I can do what you want.” How many times I have already done this thing, I can't remember any more.

  "Good. Start now.” She turns and walks to the entranceway, then looks back at me with a smirk. “You think I am like you, but I'm not. Remember that."

  "I will.” I urge my chair toward the lab door. “Do you have a name?"

  "Mama Jones."

  Her rosebud lips, her smirk, remind me of Alayre.

  * * * *