A zipper appeared under his Adam’s apple. It peeled down to his diaphragm, splitting his sternum and spreading his ribs, exposing his pink wet chest cavity. A tiny Negro in a clown suit was clinging desperately to the top of his heart, fighting to stay aboard as it beat and surged beneath him. As I watched, fascinated, he managed to get to his feet and wedge himself into equilibrium between the lungs. He opened a door in the left lung and showed me something awful inside. I turned away in shame. The stranger was still standing there, but he stood ten meters tall now on rippling rainbow legs. His beard was made of worms. I knew he wanted to see me dance, but there wasn’t enough room on the table and the damned local vertical kept changing and there weren’t enough pens.
A little corner of my mind, way in the back, understood what was happening. I had forgotten that these people could kill with their kiss.
Chen Po Chang’s voice came from the far side of the universe, metallic and atonal. “The first one was just chemical. Call it truth serum. But the second one was a nanobandit.”
I reached for my lap, and it wasn’t where I had left it. Everything I found seemed to bend in the wrong directions; some of it felt wet and some of it was sticky to my questing fingers.
“Absorbed through the palm,” he was saying, “one heartbeat to the brain, another second to crack the blood-brain barrier, then it starts secreting.”
I had to find my lap—that was where I had left my gum! Gum? That wasn’t right. Gub? I couldn’t read my own goddamn handwriting. Where the hell was my fucking p-suit? Mist was closing in from all sides—
I beat at the mist, fought for control of my mind. I knew what I had to do. It was necessary to yell as loud and as clearly as possible, “Help me! I have been drugged and they’re going to take me out of here and kill me.” My old friend the waiter would then come and slap them both to death. My body was made of taffy, but I summoned all my will, directed all my desperate energy to making my mouth and tongue firm enough to function, obedient to my command.
“Productive marbles. Didn’t to bite wonder-log with it, the palaces. Curt! Curt!”
The waiter was back. There were four of him. “I’m very sorry, sir,” they all said slyly. “She had quite a few of those Irish coffees before you arrived. Maybe you’d better take her home. Can I call you a cab?”
“No, thank you,” Kris Kringle said. “We have a car outside. We’ll get her home.”
“Both of you? My.” Four eyebrows arched.
“Gunders,” I said, smiling to show I was in mortal danger. “S’ab.”
“She’s been under a lot of stress lately,” Robert/Po Chang said. His chest was closed up again now, but his face was melting. Never a dull moment with Chen Po Chang. It ran down his chest and formed an oily pool on the table. I tilted my head to see my reflection in it, and suddenly the local gravity changed. The spaceplane was taking evasive action. “Down” was that way. No, that way! No—
Lap dissolve.
Horrid dreams, that went on forever. My body was made of putty, which I twisted into the ugliest shapes I could devise. I butchered an infant, grew an enormous steel penis and raped a child, skinned and ate a living cat, burned a city, strangled a bird, poisoned a planet, masturbated with someone’s severed hand, stepped on a galaxy out of sheer malice, gutted God, gathered everything anywhere that had ever been good or beautiful and defecated on it. My laughter killed flowers, my gaze boiled steel, my touch made the Sun grow cold. I tortured my parents to death, brought them back to life and killed them again, and again, and again. I danced on Grandmother’s face with razor feet for days on end. Throughout all this, horrid little things with leathery wings at the edges of my peripheral vision watched and chittered and cheered me on. A snail kept oozing past, leaving a greasy trail, offering arch aphorisms in a language I could almost understand. My old shrink Alma appeared once, in a hockey uniform, and told me that my trouble was I kept everyone at arm’s length; I needed to open up and let someone love me. I vomited acid on her until she went away, and then cried carbonated tears.
Peace came at last, when the last star in the Universe burned out and the blessed darkness fell all around, like warm black snow in summer.
Chapter Fourteen
A switch was thrown and I was awake. My mind was clear, and my body was its normal shape and consistency. There was an insistent ringing in my ears, but otherwise reality seemed real again. The leather-winged things were gone. I was very glad of that.
I was sitting in a chair. I was naked. My bearded Chinese uncle was looking at me from half a meter away, clinical curiosity on his face. “Can you hear me all right?” he asked.
Lie. “Yes,” I said. Okay, you can’t lie. More of that truth drug shit. Keep trying. Meanwhile, can you move?
“The neuroscrambler should have largely dismantled itself by now. How do you feel?”
Yes, but without precision. So don’t try any more now. “As if I were in free fall. Or wrapped in cotton.” It was true. I felt light as a feather. I seemed to be sitting in a chair, involuntarily I gripped it to keep from drifting away.
“Do you have any questions?”
“Yes.”
“You may ask them.”
“Is there a bomb in me?”
“No. A single detonation was both necessary and sufficient.”
“Why am I still alive?”
“I must know exactly what you know, and what you have done about it. You’ve already told me of the letter you left for your teacher, and I know your security code. But before I send an erasure command after the letter, I want to know exactly what it says.”
I started to recite the letter verbatim; after a few sentences he cut me off. “This will take forever. I have it: ask me any questions you still have about our activities. The gaps in your knowledge will define what you know. And you will have the comfort of dying with no unanswered questions, a rare blessing. It is safe enough: I know you are not wired in any way. What would you like to know?”
I tried prioritizing my questions, but couldn’t make them hold still. All over my body and brain, switches were hanging open, wires were cut. My mental thumb was mashed down on the panic button, but somewhere between there and my adrenal glands a line was down. In fact, the whole limbic system seemed to be down; my emotions were nothing more than opinions, with no power to command my body. My heart wasn’t even pounding particularly hard. I picked a question at random, sent a yapping dog to cut it out of the herd, and stampeded it toward Uncle Santa.
“Are you Chen Hsi-Feng?”
Why do they say, the corners of his mouth turned up? They don’t, you know; they just get farther apart and grow parentheses. “Ah, excellent: you are not certain. Yes, I am Chen Hsi-Feng.”
“Where are we?” Now there was a stupid, irrelevant question. What the hell difference could it make? Pick a better one next time.
“In one of my homes. Near Carmel, if it matters to you.”
I had been in Carmel once, on my way somewhere else. Down the coast from San Francisco. Upper-class stronghold; high fences and killer dogs; Clint Eastwood had once been Sheriff there or something. Estates big enough and private enough to hold a massacre without disturbing the neighbors.