FERDINAND GOES ON A MISSION

1529 4D

No noise behind me. I slide sideways through Pazzan‘s service burrow to come out on a narrow walkway in near-darkness. A blue lamp sketches a door in the left wall. The walkway bends away to the right. I hope Jeddin isn’t dead already.

This walk takes me out to a door to a major street, but I can’t go that way – the Hounds know these places too well. I joker the lock on the left-wall door and listen. Nothing. I slip it open. Perfect: a utility shaft down and up between levels – I should be able to find the Lady for Jeddin and be vapor before the Hounds can find me.

I close and lock the door again and descend the narrow rungs of the pitch-dark shaft, clinging with toes and fingers until I’ve passed three floors, and I drop into a room lit by tiny status glowlamps: a distribution closet for power, water, and info.

I know this level like the veins in my arm – the Lady has a few of her hideaways here, where she hangs her prey like a spider its flies. But I want to check in the Archives again, just to be sure.

Why do you hesitate, Ferdinand? Jeddin needs you now. My inner nag starts its litany. Shut up, I tell it. This place is so dark, so close it clenches me in a fist of smothering, and the Archives let me breathe. I reach the switchbox for the infoconduits and snuggle my armjack into place, and

I’m there again and my innerspace and the Archive are one. “Talu Tribin?” I call, and my ainon is standing at my side as if she had always been there. “Ferdinand,” she sings in delighted polytones. Her soft skin warms mine and we start our walk among the tall flowers under a sweet sun.

Talu is an ainon of the Archives. When I want information, I go to the Archives, and the ainons help me find it. They’re human, or andro, or both, in their shifting appearances. They are supposed to be just artificial minds, but just as with everything else on Tarnus, the boundaries have been smeared and fudged, and I believe that ainons are more like confined souls and minds. They seem to know how to love and be loved.

Talu is mine, and I’m hers, and she offers up bundles of history and future like candystalks for my hungry mouth, and I don’t know whether to eat them or grab her and play floating up out of the garden into a pale sky, so I do both, the taste of information sugar blazing on my tongue with the lives of the mighty. Flavors of forgotten Byzantium parade my olfactories: Vatatzes, Lascaris, Paleologus, all these and endless more names roll and disintegrate like confections, their wars and plots trailing chewy with salt behind them.

“Good, yes?” Talu teases me. Her hair floats up like dark mist over her golden skin shine, hair and skin all made of tiny threadwriting that shouts and sings and murmurs to me everything at once: how we all got here on Tarnus, the seventy-nine names of the Coll gods, the threnodies of the gene wars in genome scansong, the anciency of Earth. It reaches so deep in me that I become pure sex, fighting against letting everything go, blowing all that is in me away.

Talu knows I want it. She smiles and whispers me whole bibles and recitations in anjive plainsong; my eyes roll up and I give in.

Now Talu wraps herself golden and clothlike around my loins to heat me beyond endurance, and we implode into forgetfulness, and again.

In humans, sex and information have little in common. But I am andro – gene-transformed human – and for me sex is information, and information sex, and my arousal and ecstasy are my learning and revelation.

Bodies united, we become a planefly and go hunting little white moths in the streets of the City, circling the ceiling lamps where the moths gather. Each snap of our jaws is another thrust of elation, the explosions of the moths’ wing-dust serving as ecstatic punctuations of our swerving path. Our four long wings flash and glisten stabs of pleasure as we feed.

A small boy stumbles along the understreet as if he has lost his way. We swoop closer to him, tickling the hairs of his head. He raises a hand, then stops to lean against the wall. His veins are shining.

I would stay to circle him, but another surge of joy from Talu calls to me, and we streak up and away into new ranges of inner space. What is this child, a human, doing in innerspace? But Talu seizes me, and contracts around me, and all thoughts collapse. The universe convulses, and I die in its ending.

And again. I am syrup now, nothing left, and

I fall, the armjack slipping free, onto the floor of the closet, and its blackness is in me and the status lights wink out.

My eyes slam open to the brilliant blare of the status lights in all their spectral glory. Voices blast at me from outside the closet; the air stinks rat, and my skin is filled with insect burrowings. I’m on my feet swiping and clawing madly – finally I remember that the Archives do this when I’ve stayed there too long. Every muscle trembles, nerves afire. I prop against wall, legs spread stiff, and bang my armjack in, painful and hard. My pocket has the metathellin, no-no, better load the KPX first, and I do, and double the hit twice, and that does the job, so I try to add a little style to my fall in the dark and into the dark, narratives detonating in my head the whole way to create a living canal down which pours molten silver of pure awareness, frying my psyche as I scream inside.

I awaken long enough to dump in more KPX, my legs still propping me near-vertical, and then I sleep under a texted sky, where crawling wounded armies drop gouts of powdered languaged blood on me.

I awaken long enough to know I’m going to die if I stay like this, and I want Talu again, but first I have to eat, so I snatch a band of chocolate mercenaries and devour them, their armor rattling tales of their lost children as it goes down into me. Then I sample my little supply of metathellin. I was on my way somewhere, I think. The armor scutters its stories in my belly. More KPX, and then my legs fade, and darkness.