VAN ILLUSTRATIONS BY DAUMIER

1563 4D

On the road once more that morning, Jeddin heard the whine of a large van overtaking him, and looked back. A vanload of andro miners approached, on their way to Engrammatic for rest.

The driver, also an andro, looked him over, then trilled in anjive, “Want a ride up to the Puzzle House?” One of Engrammatic‘s other names. The driver chirped back to the rows of people seated behind him, “Hey, it’s Trick Man.”

“Yes. Where do I sit?” Jeddin answered in anjive. He craned his neck, but couldn’t see a space to sit in. Many pairs of eyes stared at him, most in curiosity.

“They’ll move for you. Get on in.”

Jeddin pushed his way in behind the driver’s seat. Two women separated to make him a space. The van lurched. He fell between them, catching himself just before sprawling in their laps. Their hands had risen to cushion his fall. He turned and slid neatly between them.

“Nice recovery, Trick Man,” one said. Her almost pure-white skin shone; red and brown flecks mottled her cheeks, neck and throat. Dark thick hair fell in long ropes from her long, tightly-coiffed head. Her dark eyes narrowed. “What are your tricks. Makeup? Disguise?” She smiled at him and rubbed at his wrist, getting his skin toner on her fingers. Switching to human speech in sarcasm, she said, “Did you pass, whiteboy?”

Jeddin smirked at her, answering the same way, “For a price, I did.” He split his red-stained coverall at the waist to show her the new scar. The woman on the other side of him bent forward and around to look. In anjive, she let out a high “Ooohh,” and reached out to touch the healing wound. As her fingers passed over Jeddin‘s skin, a coolness softened the pain of the leaf juice. He looked at her closely. Her bushy hair, the color of bronze and rust, framed a round pleasant face with eyes light brown and violet-flecked.

“You a nurser, a tender?” he asked, as he refastened his coverall.

“We both are,” the other woman said. “I’m Shuramis, she’s Vellia. She’s better at it now than I am. I’ve only got two more months.” She shrugged and fingered the red blotches on her throat.

“Those malignant?” Jeddin asked her.

“Oh yes. They got past me last summer. Why? Can you…" Shuramis stopped herself and turned her face away, looking out the van window.

“She was in a deep-shaft collapse last year,” Vellia said. “You know, the one in Drevill 1020 Signo, where we lost so many. That’s why she couldn’t do her weekly surgery.”

Jeddin nodded and looked around at the faces of the other riders. Hardly the beautiful andros of the City. One man’s nose had been flattened and displaced sideways, healing into a lump with uneven nostrils; another’s head appeared to have been squeezed too narrow; a woman’s milky tears trickled, viscous and unstoppable, down her face, and she wiped at them; a tall man, the size of Grendel, bore a set of churned scars diagonally across his head, scars that still grew clumps of spiky gray hair like barbs in all directions; two women further back kept up a staccato rhythm of gentle coughing. Jeddin turned back to Vellia. Resting in her lap, her left hand lay: a pair of opposed thumbs, rebuilt, scarred.

Frustration and pain welled up in Jeddin. The ones who lived in the City had immediate care of all their physical needs; these were the discards, damaged, unmaintained and rotting.

He clenched his teeth. He wanted to scream at them, raise his anjive tones to pierce their gentleness and softness, wake them up.

Would they have to die too, before they could be free? Why did innerspace seem to satisfy them, soothe them, addict them like decatrophinyl or triperex? Innerspace for them wasn’t real, no more real than the pseudofamily every andro got from the biomask in the vats, but he himself had died and come to life in innerspace. And he’d found the aliens. He felt confused.

“Shuramis,” he said softly. “What do you know about me?”

She turned back from her long gaze to face him, raising her chin and cocking her head. “Jeddin. Trick Man. The joker who passes for andro. Mister Three Ball Juggler. I don’t know anything about you except that the corps want your corpse.” These last words were said in human tone, and everyone around Jeddin laughed.

“They want all our corpses,” Jeddin said in anjive, forcefully; and the voices in the van went quiet. “I’m just not in a hurry to give mine away.”

“Come skerrish,” Vellia said, “Skerrish with us.”

“Please,” Shuramis said to him, “We want to know you.”

Jeddin glanced around. Eyes, eager and alert, faced him from every direction; he wanted the answer to their question more than they did. He nodded and turned his gaze inward,

and he surfaced from the dark-red pool into a throng of great-winged figures feathered in transparent metal, and he shrugged the waters of the pool into wings and feathers like theirs, and they all bounded upward into black sky singing. His voice rose into an orchestra, storming above their tones, his words carrion-birds roiling in a whirlwind,

“Illusion heaven, dream vapor,

Forget yourselves, surrender,

Hell forgetting, prison hope,

Beauty slaves, freedom chains…"

Repelled by his dissonances, half the figures peeled away into the stratosphere to rise and burst like fireworks, sucked themselves in once more in a time-reversal, became jetting birds of fire, flew away to skim dark soft lands together. In frustration, Jeddin sent song-arrows after them,

"…Dream away to death.

Life walks past you…"

Voices lanced back at him from a huge distance,

“This is home, our joy,

Shelter, healing place,

Why live pain,

In the narrow world?

Let us be.

Soon enough we’ll die.

Let us live here,

Let us die.”

Jeddin tried again,

“Hungry and waiting here,

Waiting to be food…"

The remainder disappeared one by one, some soaring into clouds, others transforming into new shapes, until only a few remained near him. He stopped singing. One last figure hung in the sky nearby: Shuramis. He spun a circle and plummeted, and she followed, shearing off only when he dived into the deep red pool,

and then she opened her eyes next to him in the van. Her face ran with tears. He looked around again. Most of the others still had their eyes closed, dancing somewhere in the innerspace skies. Vellia finally opened her eyes and said, “We can’t help it. In there, we forget everything out here.”

Battered heads and faces surrounded Jeddin. The hisses and rattles of husky, labored breathing asserted themselves over the van‘s complaining motor. “I know,” he said softly, and sat silent for a long time, trying to calm himself, as the van worked its way up a twisting stretch of uneven road.

What made him different? Why did the lure of innerspace fail to consume him, addict him the way it did to the others? He put his arm around Shuramis as she sat with her head bowed, and held her. She leaned against him and fell asleep.